„Restaureerimispatud“: Muinsuskaitseliste mõistete ja hoiakute ajalugu baltisaksa–eesti teljel, 1880–1940
‘Conservation Sins’: The History of Concepts and Attitudes in Baltic German and Estonian Monument Protection, 1880–1940

Summary/Abstract: The history of art history, much like the histories of other humanities disciplines, has largely been a story of the constant reevaluation of historical assessments. One focal point of the article deals with conceptual history. How were topics of cultural monuments defined around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in what is now Estonia, and which terms were used? How and to what extent was art historical terminology intentionally developed? One can find early attempts to write about art and architecture in Estonian earlier, but it was mostly in the 1920s that the specialist vocabulary was invented. How much of it was directly borrowed from German? The second focal point of this article is the reception history of architectural renovations. Can one say that these different contexts led to strong statements, immediately affecting the comparison of the heritage of different nations? Or were the questions of heritage protection and conservation so imbued with specialist discussions that there was less space for that kind of positionality? Whether the restorations under scrutiny were contemporary or conducted a century earlier, it seems that incomprehension, but also needlessly uncritical attitudes, occurred in the case of Baltic German and Estonian authors alike.

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