Plymouth University researcher Dr Péter Bokody was a speaker at the 34th World Congress of Art History hosted jointly by Peking University, Central Academy of Fine Arts and Palace Museum in Beijing. The congress was organized by the Comité International d’Histoire de l’Art (CIHA), the largest international organization for the study of art history. The Beijing congress was the first which took place outside Europe
since the foundation of CIHA in 1930, and it marked a strong attempt towards the creation of a transcultural – “global” – art history.
Art and cultural historians from a vast cross-section of disciplines and fields of professional interest were called upon to discuss together ways of seeing, describing, analyzing and classifying art works. The aim was to question the words, the definitions, the very concepts used to study art by different scientific traditions: how can the methodology of the discipline be enriched by being conscious of the diversity of terms and approaches to art?
Péter, whose research focus is early Renaissance meta-painting, was participant of “Session 5 – Self-Awareness and Self-Affirmation” chaired by Prof. Alessandro Nova (Kunsthistoriches Institut, Florence). The session evaluated the forms of self-awareness and artistic autonomy in a number of historical periods and cultural contexts.