Research Expertise and Interest
art, architecture, literature, afterlife of antiquity, middle ages & Renaissance / early modern age, Giotto, Donatello, Mantegna, Botticelli, Raphael, 19th/20th cent. historiography, Aby Warburg, total solar eclipses, theology, creativity and interdisciplinarity
Research Description
Henrike Christiane Lange, Ph.D. Yale University 2015, is a historian of art, architecture, and literature. Professor Lange’s interests focus on the late middle ages and the Renaissance, the afterlife of Greek and Roman antiquity, and the historiography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Lange’s monograph with Cambridge University Press, Giotto's Arena Chapel and the Triumph of Humility (2023), has received the American Association of Publishers (AAP) 2024 PROSE award in the category Art History and Criticism as well as the AAP 2024 PROSE award in Humanities.
Other research projects and forthcoming publications center upon Botticelli, Dante, relief in sculpture and painting as well as the historiography of relief, art and animals, art and creativity, the liberal arts, academic exiles (such as Renaissance musicologist Alfred Einstein), the history of UC Berkeley throughout the twentieth century, and Aby Warburg’s life and legacies in Hamburg, Florence, Rome, London, and Berkeley.
After studying History of Art and Romance Studies (Italian Language and Literature, Linguistics) at Universität Hamburg and Universität Wien (2000-2008), Henrike Lange finished her German Magister degree with exams in Italian on poetry, the history of ekphrasis, and narrative theory. Her Magister thesis in art history, Pisanello’s Perspective: Space and Narrative in his Mural Paintings, deals with questions of textuality and visual narrative. At Yale, Lange completed a doctoral dissertation on Giotto’s Cappella degli Scrovegni, Relief Effects: Giotto’s Triumph, which argues that Giotto drew from specific ancient Roman sources in the context of the Jubilee of 1300. Lange situates Giotto’s work and its reception in the textual tradition around Augustine, Dante, and Petrarch, and Trecento/Quattrocento mysticism.
At Berkeley, Lange introduced a new Italian Renaissance art survey 1300-1600 (since 2015), a new series of Dante lectures for the Department of Italian Studies (From Hell to Hope), and a series of courses on Aby Warburg with innovative perspectives on medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque art. Professor Lange regularly offers courses on word and image, visuality, visual narrative in mural painting, psychologies of art, art and animals, art and science, Dante, the Divine Comedy, and on the cultural history of triumphs in art, architecture, and literature. Lange's teaching includes works by Giotto, Cimabue, Masaccio, Uccello, Fra Angelico, Donatello, Ghirlandaio, Botticelli, Mantegna, Benozzo Gozzoli, Signorelli, the Bellini, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo da Vinci, Artemisia Gentileschi, Dürer, the Limbourg brothers, Van Eyck, Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Bruegel, Rubens, and Velázquez in their respective historical context as well as in relation to her students' experience and questions.
Henrike Lange is the recipient of the 2020 Prytanean Faculty Award. Through a competitive process, the winner is chosen by the Prytanean Honor Society Alumnae Association for her record as a distinguished teacher, her demonstrated scholarly achievement, and her success as a role model for students at the University of California, Berkeley. Lange is also an honorary member of the Prytanean Honor Society (founded in 1901) and has developed interdisciplinary initiatives to connect emerging scholars in the arts and humanities with the natural sciences and introduce young scientists to the arts and humanities.
Dr. Lange's longstanding interdisciplinary science-humanities collaboration with Tom McLeish FRS on total solar eclipses (since 2017) resulted in an edited volume, published with Oxford University Press in February 2024: Eclipse and Revelation: Total Solar Eclipses in Science, History, Literature, and the Arts.
Latest and upcoming:
Art Sense podcast with Craig Gould available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and on all major podcast platforms.
Giotto book chat with Whitney Davis hosted by Director Stephen Best available on the Townsend Center’s website and on youtube.
New book: Eclipse & Revelation (McLeish/Lange eds.), Oxford University Press 2024, at Oxford UP here, Lange’s “York Festival of Ideas” event for Tom McLeish here, our Berkeley book launch exhibition and research guide here, and further information about the TSE at NASA here.