Ralf van Bühren

Ralf van Bühren (born 3 February 1962) is a German art historian, architectural historian, church historian, and theologian. He is professor of art history at the School of Church Communications at the Pontifical University of Santa Croce in Rome, and also lecturing at the Pontificia Università Gregoriana. His courses on Sacred Art and Architecture in Rome are open to students of US universities with campus in Rome. His research and teaching specialize on the History of Christian Art and Architecture in general, as well as on Visual Studies, biblical iconography, on the rhetorics and visual communication of sacred art, on the liturgical space after the Second Council of Nicaea (787), the Council of Trent (1545‒1563) and the Vatican Council II (1962‒1965), on Religious Tourism, and on the pastoral concern for contemporary artists in particular. Ralf van Bühren was born in Bad Kreuznach. At the Max-Planck-Gymnasium in Trier, he finished his secondary school education in 1982. Between 1984 and 1991 van Bühren studied Art history at the University of Trier and the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. In Munich in 1988 he converted to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1994 he received the PhD in Art history at the University of Cologne. His dissertation was published in 1998 as The works of mercy in art from the 12th to the 18th centuries. Iconographic changes caused by the early modern reception of rhetorics. The study explores art theory and rhetorics as driving forces for the persuasive mode in early modern art. Between 1992 and 1995 van Bühren worked as pedagogical assistant in the Museumsdienst Köln at the Wallraf-Richartz Museum and Museum Ludwig in Cologne, in the data processing service of the Bildarchiv Foto Marburg, and as freelance collaborator in the Domforum Köln at the Cologne Cathedral and the romanesque churches of Cologne. From 1996 to 1998 he was chief copy Editor at the German publishing house Verlag Schnell & Steiner in Regensburg, whose founders (Hugo Schnell, Johannes Steiner) in 1934 invented the small-sized type of art guidebooks ("Kleine Kunstführer"), which today are produced million times.