Ulrich Pfisterer (art historian)
Ulrich Pfisterer (born December 30, 1968 in Kirchheim unter Teck) is a German art historian whose scholarship focuses on the art of Renaissance Italy. He is currently a professor of art history at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and the director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte. Life. Ulrich Pfisterer studied art history, classical archaeology, and philosophy at the University of Freiburg and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In 1997, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Göttingen with a dissertation on “Donatello and the Discovery of Style, 1430-1445” (Donatello und die Entdeckung der  Stile, 1430–1445). He was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence with a lectureship at the University of Göttingen. From 1999 to 2002, he was an assistant professor and from 2002 to 2006 a junior professor at the Kunstgeschichtliches Seminar at the University of Hamburg. In 2006, he completed his Habilitation in Hamburg with a book on “Lysippus and his Friends: Gifts and Memory in Renaissance Rome – or, the First Century of Medallions” (Lysippus und seine Freunde. Liebesgaben und Gedächtnis im Rom der Renaissance – oder: Das erste Jahrhundert der Medaille). Ulrich Pfisterer has had fellowships at  the Bibliotheca Hertziana – Max Planck Institute for Art History in Rome, the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel, the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts CASVA/The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He was invited Director of Studies at the École pratique des hautes études/Sorbonne University in Paris and a Fellow at the research group “BildEvidenz. History and Aesthetics” at the Free University of Berlin. Since October 2006, he has been Professor of Art History at the Institut für Kunstgeschichte at the Ludwig  Maximilian University of Munich (chaired since 2008). In June 2015, he was named Director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte (2015–2017 together with Wolf Tegethoff). Since 2018 he is sole director of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte.