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Vita activa

I have been an art historian in (un)retirement since 2023. From 2006 to 2017 I was head of the Digital Belvedere in the Research Center of the Austrian Gallery Belvedere in Vienna (from 2017 to 2021 head of the Digital Collections there, from 2021 to 2023 of the Digital Annotation). I studied art history, classical archaeology and German antiquity and folklore at the University of Hamburg. In 1997 I received my doctorate with a thesis on the high altar retable in the former Hamburg Cathedral (The Vagabonding Altar, Berlin: Gebr. Mann 2004).

Professional activities, first as an artisan in historical ship model making, then as an employee in Hamburg museums and art auction houses, as well as in the state media center (Landesmedienzentrum) there. Curator of exhibitions on 19th century sculpture. From 2001 to 2005 research assistant at the Institute of Art History at the University of Leipzig.

Research and teaching on Political Iconography of the Middle Ages and Modernism, on the visual character of airports, Digital Art History and Tactile Vision in the Digital Museum. Since 2013 I have been a member of a number of advisory boards and committees in the context of Digital Humanities, such as the German Society of Semiotics (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Semiotik e.V.) (Section Digital Humanities), the Working Group on Digital Art History (Arbeitskreis Digitale Kunstgeschichte) and a founding member of DArtHist Austria – Network for Digital Art History in Austria.

Portfolio

The reconstruction of the world

Model making, diorama, microcarving

While we are facing the portal of a final digital age with artificial intelligence, the analogue reconstruction of the world is experiencing a new blossoming. People are meeting each other who, with calmness and humor, are developing small, symbolic models of how we live together.

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Digital Museum

Digital strolling, tactile vision

It was only through the flaneur that the Digital Museum gave birth to something new: the visitor curator. Digital strolling can be interpreted as a longing for the haptic in the digital, an 'inner touch' that goes far beyond clicking with the mouse.

Digital art history

Digital Humanities, Digital Semiotics

Despite all technological advances and artificial intelligence, a critical Digital Art History in particular can only rely on what we see. The core business of future Digital Image Studies is therefore the verbalization of our perceptions and thoughts.

Zoological Gardens

Menagerie, zoo architecture, fauna

The ancient concept of given nature as a manifestation of eternal (divine) order gave way in modern times to the idea of nature that must be subjugated (Lothar Schäfer 1997). Today, nature is something that must be saved and the zoo is probably its most figurative cultural-historical vehicle.

Airport architecture

Guidance system, air travel, art at architecture

Airports convey 'world views' in a strikingly concentrated form, which are particularly evident in the elaborate terminals. Very different iconographic patterns can be observed, which only seem to be able to be staged anywhere in the world, more or less independently of the respective cultures.

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Image captioning

Thesaurus, Iconclass, Logoklasmus

The new moralization surrounding museums has now also reached art historical annotation. At the same time, a new kind of humanism is emerging in the digital world. This raises the question of whether these are parallel developments, two sides of the same coin, or antipodes.

The Hamburg Cathedral High Altar, Retable Art in the Hanseatic Region

Hamburg, Dom, Immaculate Conception

In the context of the laying down of the Hamburg Cathedral (1804–1806), its high altarpiece also 'wandered' on winding paths across Europe. The panel paintings of the 'Sunday View', with one of the largest late medieval Marian cycles, are now in the National Museum in Warsaw and were shown five hundred years after they were created in the 'Millennium Exhibition' at the Hamburg Kunsthalle.

Sculpture on the threshold of classical modernism

Aloys Denoth, Constantin Meunier

With youthful, playful lightness and joy, Aloys Denoth (1851–1893) developed an extremely harmonious relationship for example between jewelry and device. It corresponds to the ideas of the Hamburg Association for Art and Science (Verein für Kunst und Wissenschaft, Hamburg), a client who was striving for this very symbiosis. The aneroid barometer (1888) is thus the result of individual artistic freedom – in a word: modern.

Maritime handicrafts

Rolf Knickmeier (family), historical ship model building

My father, the businessman Rolf Knickmeier (1930–2018), began building historical ship models as an autodidact in 1975 and founded the business 'M. Knickmeier' for this purpose in 1980. One of his main works, the Coat of Arms of Hamburg III (1981), was produced with the help of his family based on the original shipyard model in the Museum for Hamburg History and is now in the treasury of the International Maritime Museum Hamburg.

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Belvederchen

Roof garden, Japanese garden

Vita contemplativa __ Gardening in my own 'Belvederchen'. The term is common in Frankfurt am Main and refers to a green roof garden.