Das verirrte Kunstwerk

From time immemorial, works of art have been moved in space and time to locations that are significantly different from the places they are thought to originate from. But how do such translocations come about? What are the consequences for the appearance, semantics, and function of the artefacts? And how are they categorized or manipulated by contemporaries and researchers?

These questions are addressed by the publication’s contributions which, in particular, analyze the ideological and power-political dimensions of such migrations. The case studies cover stolen god statues in antiquity through to borrowed motifs in the early modern age, misunderstood works of supposedly "primitive" art through to "rescued" architecture fragments at the present time.