Lisa Eberhardt

• B4: The Aesthetics of Combinatorics: Personifications and Allegories in Medieval Art and Literature

Scholarships:

• 2019/20: Erasmusstipendium für ein Auslandssemester an der Universität Stockholm, August 2019 bis Januar 2020
• 2024: Stipendium des Corpus Vitrearum International zur Teilnahme am Internationalen Kolloquium & Forum 2024 („Sichtbarkeit. Formen des Sehens und Strategien der Sichtbarmachung“, 15.–19.07.2024 in Erfurt)

Medieval and early modern town hall glazing in south-west Germany

From the late 15^th century onward, town halls in cities in southwestern Germany increasingly became sites of municipal self-representation. The furnishings of these town halls included heraldic stained-glass panels, often donations. These panels not only served an aesthetic purpose in council chambers but were also prestigious and representative objects for both the city and the donors, demonstrating and visualising political as well as personal relationships between the city and its benefactors. These ambitious stained-glassed windows (usually bearing the donor’s coat of arms) have received little public and scholarly attention, partly because town hall buildings remain in continuous administrative use, partly because these stained-glass windows are seldom preserved within their original contexts.

The project focuses on documenting the surviving stained-glass panels in town halls across present-day Baden-Württemberg. It examines questions related to the historical and social background of these donations and the iconographic programs they present. “Combinatorial” strategies can be observed not only in the conception of individual panels but also in the compilation and arrangement into larger pictorial cycles within the council chambers. The study aims at making these largely unexplored heraldic stained-glass panels more visible and at highlighting their political functions within the respective urban community.

Starting in May 2025, the project will be funded by the Academy of Sciences and Literature in Mainz and, within this framework, integrated into the German Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi.