Michele Di Monte
National Gallery of Old Art Palazzo Barberini, Rome, Italy
The paper aims at critically assessing two main connected topics. On the one hand, the theoretical, philosophical and epistemological underpinnings of the concept of historical otherness that is an essential condition for the construction of the “Renaissance” as an epoch-making, aesthetic and artistic category. On the other hand, the enduring resurfacing, in recent scholarship, of the very concept of otherness, indebted to the philosophical background of Panofsky and his forerunners, a debt often overlooked even within those projects — Visual Studies, Visual Anthropology and similia — fashioning themselves as breaking with traditional art history.