Ulrich Pfisterer has been teaching art history at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich since 2006. He received his PhD from the University of Göttingen (1997) and undertook his Habilitation at the University of Hamburg (2006). He has held fellowships at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the Getty Research Center in LA, and CASVA at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. His interests encompass the fields of early modern art in Europe and beyond, as well as the methodology and historiography of art history. In 2012, he co-organized an exhibition on “Ideals and Idols,” which thematized the reception of non-European religious artifacts in fifteenth- to eighteenth-century European books and book illustrations up to the publications of Montfaucon, Picart and Lafitau. He is currently directing two research projects, one on the “episteme of lines” and drawing books from c. 1525–1925 and the other on concepts and images of the ruler’s body in early modern Europe. Prof. Pfisterer’s publications includes books on Donatello, art literature and theory in the Italian Renaissance, the social uses of Renaissance medals in Italy, the Sistine Chapel, Leone Leoni's “failed” statue of Charles V, on mandrakes and nature as artist, and on “birthing art,” which deals with the relation of concepts of erotic and biological procreativity and artistic creativity in early modern Europe. He is also the general editor of the collected writings of Aby Warburg, for which he has co-edited the volume on Fragmente zur Ausdruckskunde (2015). Currently he is preparing a collected volume of global artistic exchange and contact zones c. 1300–1650.
