The courses offered as part of this Chair are dedicated to the study of the social, political and institutional constellations that, since the eighteenth century, have helped shape the production, circulation and consumption of art in a connected Europe. The course has three objectives. It sheds light on the interactions - always subject to historical contingency - between the artistic act itself and the institutions that foster its emergence, welcome it or disseminate it: academies, museums, the art market, etc. It analyzes the issues of appropriation and circulation of art. It analyzes the intellectual and material appropriation issues raised by works of art in times of peace and war: scholarship, the history of taste, political instrumentalization, heritage translocation and spoliation. It establishes a close connection between the history of art and objects, on the one hand, and research into cultural transfers, on the other, paying particular attention to exchanges between the Germanic, Italian and French spaces in their links with the rest of continental Europe and the world.

The research projects associated with the Chair are mainly carried out at the Institute of Art History at the Technical University of Berlin, in cooperation with several European partners. These include the question of Nazi art spoliation during the Second World War, as part of the "Répertoire des acteurs du marché de l'art en France sous l'Occupation" project, run jointly by the Technical University (Berlin), the Institut national d'histoire de l'art and the Centre allemand d'histoire de l'art (Paris); the formation of African collections in several major European museums, as part of the "The Restitution of Knowledge: Artefacts as Archives in the (Post)Colonial Museum, 1850-1939" in partnership with Oxford University (Pitt Rivers Museum) and, more generally, the question of heritage translocations since antiquity as part of the "Translocations. Historical Enquiries into the Displacement of Cultural Assets" project.