The Idea of Cultural Heritage and the Canon of Art

This contribution aims at a basic re-evaluation of the idea of a national cultural heritage in contrast to the concept of world heritage: a corpus of artefacts said to belong not to one nation but to humanity as a whole. Starting from the premise that the history of art is often motivated by the feeling of loss or deprivation, I will proceed to demonstrate how historians contribute to compensate for this loss, attempting to intellectually and ideologically regain, appropriate and even consecrate works of art as national monuments. My argument is that such appropriation is connected to ranking these national monuments within a larger body of works of art deemed to be important for all of humanity. Developing my argument systematically as well as historically, I will discuss the points of view and the choices of topics and objects of some German and one Swiss author with regard to their specific understandings of heritage and their conceptions of national identity.