Gerhard Lutz

Gerhard Lutz joined the Cleveland Museum of Art in May 2020. As the Robert P. Bergman Curator of Medieval Art, he is responsible for the museum’s collection of European art from the late 3rd through the 15th century, as well as the collection of European arms and armor that dates to the 16th and 17th centuries. Consisting of approximately 1,600 objects, the collection of western Medieval and Renaissance decorative arts, sculpture, illuminated manuscripts, and paintings is among the finest in the United States and is renowned for its importance and artistic quality.

Beginning in 2002, Lutz served as a curator at the Dommuseum Hildesheim, Germany, one of the most exceptional treasuries to survive from the Middle Ages; in 2016, he was promoted to associate director. At the Dommuseum, Lutz curated numerous exhibitions, including Turn of Eras 1400: Hildesheim as a European Center (2019); Triumph and Death: Early Crucifixes (2017); and Picture and Beast: Hildesheim Bronzes from the Staufer Period (2008). In 2013, Lutz curated Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim, a major exhibition presented at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Previously, Lutz was employed at the Roemer- und Pelizaeus-Museum in Hildesheim and worked on a variety of exhibition projects with the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

Lutz also has extensive teaching experience. He has served as a lecturer at the University of Bern, Switzerland; the Technical University Dresden, Germany; and the Institute of Conservation at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hildesheim, Germany. He was also a visiting professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 2013.

Lutz received his PhD and MA from the Technical University Berlin, after having studied medieval art history, history, and archaeology at the universities of Bamberg, Vienna, and Freiburg.

Lutz has published extensively in German. Recent publications in English include coediting with Shirin A. Fozi Christ on the Cross: The Boston Crucifix and the Rise of Monumental Wood Sculpture, 970–1200 (2020). Together with Peter Barnet and Michael Brandt, Lutz coedited the exhibition catalogue Medieval Treasures from Hildesheim (2013). Other publications include “The Drop of Blood: Image and Piety in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” in Preternature: Critical and Historical Studies on the Preternatural, vol. 4, no. 1 (2015); “Late Medieval Sacred Spaces and the Eucharist,” in A Companion to the Eucharist in the Middle Ages (2012); and “The Choir Screen at Mainz and the ‘Master of Naumburg,’” in British Archaeological Association Conference Transactions, Medieval Art and Architecture at Mainz (2007).

Contact the Curator at: MedievalArt@clevelandart.org