Central Europe at the Turn of the 19th and 20th Centuries

Fifth session of the 2025-2026 CEFRES Francophone
Interdisciplinary Seminar “Dépaysements”: Clues and Trajectories.

Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1
Date: Friday, March 20, 2026, 10 am
Language: French

Speaker: Paul BAUER (Eur’ORBEM, Sorbonne University / CNRS)
Discussant: Taťána PETRASOVÁ (Institute of Art History, Czech Academy of Sciences ÚDU AV ČR)

Abstract

Drawing on recent historiography devoted to imperial imagery and through the study of landscape iconography in the encyclopedia “L’Autriche-Hongrie en mot et image “, published in Vienna and Budapest between 1886 and 1902, I wish to open the way for reflection on how landscape images are rooted in the artistic and scientific practices of Austrian imperialism. Convinced that images “create the world” and do not merely “reflect” it, as philosopher Nelson Goodman asserted, I question how images of landscapes, whether picturesque, panoramic, cartographic, or topographic, were associated, at the end of the 19th century, with the emergence of a visual culture of representing nature based on various and sometimes controversial epistemological questions that linked, from the 18th to the early 20th century, the natural and ethnographic sciences to the aesthetic vision of nature.

See the complete program of the 2025-2026 seminar here.