Historic Preservation and the Image of the Middle Ages.Conceptual Paradigms and Image Production in the Context of Medieval Ecclesiastical Architecture in Germany and France

我们对中世纪神圣建筑的印象在很大程度上受到历史保护领域不断变化的概念范式的影响，这些概念范式根据其对中世纪过去的看法和理解塑造了这些建筑。拟议的研究项目集中在对20世纪展开的“图像生产”过程进行系统和比较调查。随着对现代时期的关注，这项研究开辟了新的领域。自1900年以来，随着历史主义和“创造性保护”的实践的转变，历史保护这门学科已经越来越多地将自己理解为一门客观科学，一门致力于研究和保护现存文物的科学。这项研究对这种理解提出了挑战，它表明，20世纪修复的正式目标实际上代表了一种延续——尽管是以另一种形式，而且很少明确或自觉地——塑造过去的形象。因此，尽管该领域公开致力于科学客观性的现代教义，但中世纪神圣建筑的变化和各种形象仍在继续产生。该研究项目旨在重建法国和德国不同的概念范式，这两个国家在制度化保护方面有着较长的历史，并且在20世纪的大部分时间里在国际保护话语中占据主导地位。在第一步中，将分析来自每个国家的纪念碑样本，以进行不同的修复运动和这些似乎体现的图像制作过程。第二步，将调查这些修复实践与当时公认的历史保护原则以及具有代表性的流行摄影模式（如明信片、旅行或建筑指南）之间的关系。最后，将进行比较，以澄清在20世纪的很长一段时间里，法国和德国如何以及为什么追求明显不同的中世纪形象。这项研究所采取的广阔视角将把我们对中世纪在现代性中的接受的认识相应地置于更广阔的基础上。此外，通过其在当代理论辩论和流行印刷媒体不断变化的想象中对修复运动的一致和适当的背景化，该项目将对思想史做出重要贡献：与将历史保护作为客观科学的普遍自我概念相反，该学科将始终如一地呈现为历史决定的文化技术。这是一种有望为目前发现自己处于概念危机中的领域提供新的推动力的方法。

The image that we have of medieval sacred architecture is to a large extent coloured by changing conceptual paradigms in the field of historic preservation, which has shaped these buildings according to its vision and understanding of the medieval past. The proposed research project centres on a systematic and comparative investigation of this process of "image production" as it unfolded during the 20th century. With this concentration on the Modern period, the study breaks new ground. Since 1900, with the move away from Historicism and the practice of "creative conservation", the discipline of historic preservation has come to understand itself increasingly as an objective science, one dedicated to studying and preserving artefacts as they exist. This study challenges this understanding by suggesting that the formal goals of 20th-century restorations in fact represent a continuation - albeit in another form, and rarely explicitly or self-consciously - of the practice of shaping the image of the past. As a result, changing and varied images of medieval sacred architecture continue to be produced by the field, despite its overt commitment to a modern doctrine of scientific objectivity.The research project aims at reconstructing the different conceptual paradigms in operation in France and Germany, two countries with comparatively long histories of institutionalized preservation as well as dominant roles in the international preservation discourse during much of the 20th century. In a first step, a sample of monuments from each country will be analyzed with respect to the different restoration campaigns carried out and the processes of image production that these seem to embody. In a second step, the relationship of these restoration practices both to the accepted tenets of historic preservation at the time and to representative modes of popular photography, such as postcards and travel or architectural guidebooks, will be investigated. Finally, a comparison will be undertaken to clarify how and why markedly different images of the Middle Ages were pursued in France and Germany over extended periods during the 20th century.The broad perspective taken by the study will place our knowledge of the reception of the Middle Ages in modernity on a correspondingly broader basis. Moreover, through its consistent and appropriate contextualization of the restoration campaigns within both contemporary theoretical debates and the changing imaginary of popular print media, the project will make an important contribution to intellectual history: in contrast to the prevailing self-conception of historic preservation as an objective science, the discipline will be consistently presented as historically-determined cultural technique. It is an approach that promises to offer new impulses to a field that currently finds itself in conceptual crisis.