Creative Appropration
Creative appropriation is also a specific form of transformation. In this thematic context, however, the prints do not so much reflect a material, structural change in the building over the centuries as they visually transform the antiquities into something new. The creative potential of the artistic reception is decisive here, as the antique objects are by no means merely imitated. On the one hand, their historical authority is used and re-semanticised, i.e. a new, contemporary meaning is attributed or inscribed to them. On the other hand, the creative appropriation not only concerns an aesthetic approach to antiquity, but also a complex practice of artistic engagement with the present. Pictures thus refer to other pictures, enter into dialogue with each other and are able to amalgamate different layers of time into a single, homogeneous pictorial formula. The ‘old’ is thereby innovatively reshaped in the sense of an active, conscious change and is thus made new.
