Horst Bredekamp received his PhD in art history at the University of Marburg (1974). After working at the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt am Main as a curator (1974-1976) he became Assistant Professor at the University of Hamburg, where he tenured as Professor of Art History in 1982. Since 1993 he is Professor of Art History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In addition he has been a permanent fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study/Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (2003-2012). From 2012-2018 he was co-director of the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung, Humboldt University of Berlin (with Wolfgang Schäffner), and since 2019 he is co-director of the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity. He was a member of the steering committee of the Humboldt Forum, Berlin from 2015-2018. He is member of several academies, among them the German National Academy of Science Leopoldina, Halle (since 2004) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 2016). He has received numerous awards, among them the Sigmund Freud Award (2001) and the Max Planck Award (2006) and became a member of the Ordre pour le mérite in 2014. He published 29 books and more than 600 articles. His research foci are Iconoclasm, sculpture of the Romanesque, art of the Renaissance and Mannerism, political iconology, art and technology with Galileo, Hobbes and Leibniz, history of collecting, history of gardening, history of soccer and new media.