THE HISTORY OF ART HISTORY: HISTORICISM AND THE ART HISTORIAN

Today every university worthy of the name boasts a large and flourishing department of history. And in fact the tasks fielded by these departments are increasing. Responsibilities are expanding in two areas: in method--with women's studies, ethnic studies, and gender studies now offered; and in geographical reach--with Asia and the Pacific, Africa and Latin America growing in importance.

It may seem surprising that as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an era marked by such momentous events as the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the English Revolution, the discipline of history enjoyed only a tenuous hold in European universities.ⁱ History was taught mainly by professors of rhetoric (who inclined towards writings with literary quality, especially those of antiquity) and professors of theology (who were in the habit injecting church controversies).

Towards the middle of the eighteenth century this marginal status began to improve, particularly in Germany. With its international connections, the University of Göttingen stood in the vanguard.ⁱⁱ This institution produced universal histories (by Johann Christoph Gatterer and August Ludwig Schlözer), together with histories of trade (Johann Gottfried Eichhorn), luxury (Christoph Meiners), diet (Schlözer again), literature (Eichhorn again), and Women (Meiners again). Enterprising as they were, these lively works were not informed by deep theoretical reflection, and hence did not effect a fundamental change in outlook.

Origins of Historicism.

A landmark study by one of the most thoughtful of modern German historians, Friedrich Meinecke, demonstrated that the real breakthrough took place "off campus."ⁱⁱⁱ Meinecke highlighted the achievement of a triumvirate of writers, Möser, Herder, and Goethe. Except for his college training at Göttingen, Justus Möser (1720-1794) spent all his days in his north German hometown of Osnabrück, where he served as an official. In fact his chief work is a History of Osnabrück, published in 1768. He paid close attention to the customs of the people, which he held must be evaluated in terms of "local reason" rather than the generalities of the Enlightenment. As Meinecke remarks, "The person who interests him is not an abstract and generalized man, who is the same at all times, whose actions can be judged according to the universal standards of reason, but the concrete, historically conditioned man with his particular joys and sorrows, who must be understood as the specific person."^iv Möser's method relied very much on contemplation and intuition, not excluding the powers of the unconscious.

In contrast to Möser's slowly maturing, harmonious nature, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), was a manic-depressive who never established any firm profession or settled residence.^v His own stormy nature, however, inclined him to introspection. For the understanding of phenomena through the intuitive powers of the mind he coined a new term Einfühlung--empathy--which was later to enjoy popularity both among psychologists and art historians. During his Riga period Herder observed the folk customs of the Latvians, which instilled in him a deep respect for the common people, their language, poetry, and songs, which he felt preserved an immemorial wisdom. In this enthusiasm Herder anticipated primitivism with its attraction to precivilized life as a kind of golden age. For the life of a people considered as a single organic entity, Herder employed the term Volksgeist, the spirit of the people.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was the most all-rounded of German writers--as well as one of the most productive--and his achievement is not easily summarized.^vi With the press of all his other activities it may seem that Goethe was only marginally a historian, and indeed sometimes he expressed hostility to historiography. However, a number of personal qualities enabled him to contribute significantly to the emergence of the new outlook. Throughout his life he had a pronounced antiquarian interest, as seen in his observations on Strasbourg Cathedral (embodied in his essay of 1772),  and on the sculptures and other monuments he saw in Italy. He sought to grasp these objects not simply as curiosities but as symbols of larger truths. In view of his immense role as the praeceptor Germaniae, his sensitive response to works of art has had a continuing subterranean influence over art historians brought up in the German language.
His studies in natural science gave Goethe a strong sense of organic growth which he applied in all his studies, including those directed to historical remains. Finally, Goethe had a strong sense of the importance and at the same time the mystery of the specific and the individual; one of his favorite sayings was "Individuum est ineffabile." Thus it was the polarity between his sense of the interconnectedness of things and his awareness of the autonomy of each individual entity that perhaps constituted his most powerful legacy to the emerging outlook of historicism.

If Meinecke is correct, these three figures established the conditions for the emergence of the distinctive climate of historicism, with its sense of the organic wholeness and unique specificity of each era.^vii The new approach that emerged in these writers opened the way for a decisive break with the two hitherto dominant historiographical principles. The first of these was a confident moral stance. Fortified by a belief in the absolute value of Natural Law, these convictions generated a pervasive judgmentalism that called for grading each past era by its performance on a good-to-bad scale. Secondly, earlier thought adhered to a corollary notion of universal values for assigning the evaluations; these values, supposedly accessible to any sensitive observer, stemmed from the debatable notion that human nature has always been the same. The new outlook of historicism questioned both these hallowed precepts. In reality past eras were radically different from our own, and any attempt to assess them must start by acknowledging this divergence. As for human nature, whether it is ultimately the same or not is not the issue; in the real world it has manifested itself over the centuries in very different forms.
The more fervent historicists claimed that past eras were incommensurable, either with one another or with our own age. Each era adhered to its own center of being which determined its distinctive climate or Zeitgeist (spirit of the age). These writers created a nascent sense of cultural pluralism in which each age or people must be judged according to its own inner criteria instead of being made to hew to values imposed from the outside. This concept of ethical neutrality has had enormous importance in our quest to understand cultures other than our own.

The contribution of the pathfinding authors was, however, only the first stage of the revolution in historiography. As transitional figures, they themselves still had a foot in the old camp, and in any event their readers would probably not have been prepared for a complete break with older attitudes.

The second stage saw the institutionalization of historicism, with the new university of Berlin (founded in 1810) at the head. The audience for the university historians was not simply the educated public, although this still mattered, but peers-- professors in other fields, increasingly influenced by the objective ideals of the natural sciences. These connections strengthened the idea of value neutrality already resident in historicism itself. In this endeavor a delicate balance was maintained so as not to slip over the boundary to cynical relativism.

Why did this change occur in Germany? History, in the sense of great events and their effects, resonated there because of the Reformation, still for many a living reality, and the contemporary stresses stemming from the French Revolution, Napoleon, and the ensuing wars of liberation. The revival of learning was thus linked with the throwing off of the French yoke and the striving for political unification that was not achieved until 1871. In this way the ideal value neutrality of historicism became somewhat tempered by patriotism and nationalism. The circumstances in which the new outlook triumphed also entailed a primary concern with politics among mainstream academic historians--though not the cultural historians influenced by them.

Unlike the mainstream historians, art historians at first had little success gaining a foothold in German universities. An exception is Johann Dominicus Fiorillo, who at the age of sixty-five secured a professorship at the University of Göttingen in 1813.^viii In fact, he had previously taught drawing there, with some art history thrown in on the side. Of necessity, Fiorillo's lectures were rather elementary. He had bolstered his standing with a five-volume Geschichte der zeichnenden Künste von ihrer Wiederauflebung bis auf die neuesten Zeiten (1798ff.); this is, however, a derivative work, its expository strategy deriving from Luigi Lanzi's system of "schools" of artists. Both before and after the 1813 appointment, the university authorities viewed Fiorillo's instruction as merely a part of an ancillary effort to provide "finishing school" touches for the students; his course offerings did not betoken any general commitment to a systematic treatment of the arts. Of course Winckelmann's teachings were held in high honor at Göttingen, but classical philologists and archaeologists took charge of professing and extending them. This gap between the older, better established field of classical archaeology and the upstart discipline of art history was never to be entirely effaced in German universities. In any event, after Fiorillo's death in 1821 no one else was appointed to fill the vacancy. From 1834 to 1843 Franz Kugler lectured as a Privatdozent at Berlin, but only in 1852 did Rudolf Eitelberg von Edelberg secure the first truly regular professorship in art history--at the University of Vienna.^ix

Required either to have a private income or to earn their living by other means, art historians nonetheless paid close attention to the ideas and accomplishments of the major university historians, whom they emulated at first in their creative work and then in carving out niches for themselves in academia.

University Historians.

Since art historians looked to them for guidance, the prestigious university historians deserve closer attention.^x The matter is complicated by a dichotomy among them that produced tension, sometimes adversarial and sometimes fruitful. The historical profession harbored both a particularist trend, stressing the recuperation of facts and close analysis of the evidence, and a universalist trend, which appealed to idealist philosophy to discern major themes.

Both trends sought to break from the old exemplar theory, which held that history, as magistra vitae or mistress of life, had to foreground signal instances of good and evil conduct in the past as a guide to conduct. By contrast, the new history was to be strictly objective. But what methodology was best suited to achieve this end?  Many found the answer in particularism, which stressed careful and critical attention to the sources so as to arrive at a truer picture of the past by excluding fantasy, rumor, and gossip.

The first major figure in the particularist trend was Barthold Georg Niehbuhr (1776-1831), the son of the noted explorer Carsten Niehbuhr.^xi For many years he pursued an official career, climaxed by his appointment as Prussian ambassador to the Vatican, where he made important discoveries in the libraries. He then retired to teach at the University of Bonn. His own political experience gave him insights into the nature of power relationships which he then applied to his work in the study and the lecture hall. In his Römische Geschichte (1811-12; revised ed. 1827-32), he applied critical methods to the study of the Roman Republic, discrediting the work of Livy. In the Preface to the first edition of his work, Niehbuhr remarked: "We must try to eliminate fiction and forgery and to strain our vision in order to recognize the features of truth beneath all these accretions."^xii It is not enough, he held, to strip away the deadwood of error; one must try to erect a convincing new structure. This new structure, in its turn, can only stand if it is validated by the consensus of other competent scholars. In keeping with the fascination with origins prevalent in his day, Niehbuhr concentrated on the "heroic age" of the Roman Republic in the fourth century BCE when the civic virtues of the free peasantry were at their height.

Niehbuhr's ponderous style and his preoccupation with technical questions of ancient history restricted his audience. No such barriers impeded the progress of Leopold von Ranke (1795-1886), by common consent the prince of nineteenth-century historians.^xiii His Geschichte der romanischen und germanischen Völker von 1494 bis 1533 (1824), an immediate success, gained him an appointment as professor at the University of Berlin. In this work he maintained that Europe derived its character from a mingling of the Latin and Germanic peoples (whose realm extended as far as New York and Lima), held together by the spirit of Christianity. The preface to this book contains the famous remark: "To history has been assigned the office of judging the past, of instructing the present for the benefit of future ages. To such high offices this work does not aspire. It wants only to show what actually happened (wie es eigentlich gewesen)."^xiv In the first sentence quoted he abjured the aims of the old exemplar theory of history, settling for a seemingly more modest goal of presenting things as they really were. It is probable that Ranke understood more by this than the mere accumulation of facts, and that he understood "eigentlich" in a deeper sense--meaning perhaps "essentially." He wrote frequently of the "hand of God," yet this intervention is mysterious and can only be detected, if at all, through careful work and insight. Ranke suggested, however, that the effects of divine providence transpire in periodization, a subject of great interest at the time.

The great historian held that history was both a science and an art. He was impressed by the gripping historical novels of Sir Walter Scott; while deploring their factual inaccuracies, he strove to emulate them by making his prose as readable as possible. Although not basically concerned with the arts, he occasionally unbent to supply a word portrait of certain paintings and buildings.

Still, Ranke regarded political history as central. He saw the essence of Europe as dependent on the balance of power, and therefore he emphasized diplomacy and political striving. In order to capture the truer image of history Ranke laid great stress on the critical examination of documents in archives.

His epigones reduced his program to mere fact gathering in pursuit of a relentless "objectivity."^xv As we have seen, this was not the case: Ranke sought something more, an insight into reality itself. Apart from general inspiration, it would seem that he had little to offer art historians for his interests were primarily political. However, his emphasis on primary documents as controls for the assertions that accumulated in books was salutary, and some were reminded that art works themselves are documents.

Ranke had little use for idealist histories of Hegelian stamp, which he found arbitrary and schematic--alien in their very essence to the historian's craft. "There are really only two ways of acquiring knowledge about human affairs: through the perception of the particular, or through abstraction; the latter is the method of philosophy, the former of history."^xvi But Ranke's separation principle could not prevent philosophical histories from being written. And these too had an impact on the practice of art history. Still, it will be convenient to postpone the discussion of this rival school until after the art historical consequences of the Niehbuhr-Ranke trend have been examined.

The Particularist Trend in Art History.

The leading exponent of the particularist tendency in art history was the somewhat improbable figure of Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785-1843).^xvii A north German baron with private means deriving from his extensive estates, Rumohr was a kind of "sub-Renaissance man"--a dilettante in the best sense. Among his writings are a novel in four volumes, a collection of short stories, a cookbook, a manual on good manners, translations, and art-historical investigations--above all his Italienische Forschungen (1827-32). Rumohr never married, remarking that as he felt himself to be a woman, a wife would have been of no use to him. He seems to have shared Winckelmann's homoerotic orientation, with all the pressures for concealment that proclivity entailed in the era in which he lived. Initially attracted to the medieval history of his own land, Rumohr shifted his attention to Italy, still the prime object of German noblemen undertaking the grand tour. His means allowed him to make many trips, forming deep first-hand impressions of works of art. As a byproduct of these ramblings he conceived the idea of translating Vasari into German, but eventually gave it up because that source had too many flaws. In his view, from Vasari's time onwards a stock of unreliable information had accumulated, but no critical attempt had been made to correct it through confrontation with the sources. This confrontation, he found, revealed many inconsistencies, fables, and downright lies. If knowledge was to progress, this underbrush must be cleared away, and he had two instruments to do it with: scrutiny of sources and very careful observation of the works themselves ("autopsy"). In Rumohr's time Italian archives were often disordered and difficult of access, so that he was not able to gather as much material as he had hoped. In any event the task was too great for one person to attempt, and so Rumohr bequeathed a huge task to his nineteenth-century successors. To this necessarily incomplete program of archival study is to be attributed the fact that in the case of many artists Rumohr's particular judgments have been found jejune. But he pointed the way.

In his first art publication, an article on an antique Castor and Pollux group (1812), he dared to take issue with the great Winckelmann. In Rome he benefited from the advice of Barthold Niehbuhr, who encouraged his inclinations towards criticism based on archival study. He had, of course, the leisure to immerse himself in the archives and to contemplate the art objects that his method required. 

From 1820 to 1826 Rumohr published a number of preparatory studies for his masterpiece in the periodical Kunst-Blatt. In 1827 he at last brought out the first two volumes of the Italienische Forschungen with the publisher Nicolai in Berlin. In these austere pages Rumohr left behind all aspersions of dilettantism. He concentrated on the earlier Italian schools before the time of Raphael as he felt that here his method could contribute the most.

It is worth examining in some detail Chapter IX, concerning Giotto, now available in an English rendering.^xviii Vasari's biography, vague and ill-informed as it was, had served to establish the Florentine Giotto di Bondone as the genius who gave art a wholly new stamp, setting in motion the forces that were to lead to the emergence of Renaissance painting. Rumohr began his essay by quoting from a document, a Latin inscription placed inside Florence Cathedral about the middle of the fifteenth century: "I am the man through whom the extinct art of painting came back to life ..." This view, he noted, had come into common acceptance not long after Giotto's death in 1337. Those who innovate, as Giotto undoubtedly did, will receive more credit than those who perfect a manner previously introduced. Moreover, Giotto had many pupils who had a special interest in promoting his renown.

The German art historian resolved to go back to the pre-Vasarian sources. Rumohr lay particular stress on the testimony of Lorenzo Ghiberti (he appears to have been the first to make critical use of the writings of the sculptor), who said that Giotto broke with the Byzantine manner and introduced "naturalness and grace, without going too far." Ghiberti's contemporary Cennino Cennini concurred with this view. Rumohr stated that he could confirm the break with the Byzantines by his own observations ("autopsies") of paintings of the period, which show that Giotto abandoned the viscous binding medium of the Byzantines to return to an older medium, more fluid and less darkening, which he perfected. Thus the paint medium itself set the work of Giotto and his followers apart from their immediate predecessors.

Rumohr then went on to discuss a number of anecdotes, which though they not be true in detail, give a picture of Giotto's personality, which was worldly, ruthless, and driving rather than sentimental and pious.

In view of the many doubtful attributions that have accumulated around Giotto's name how might we begin to form an idea of his authentic style? We must work from the known to the unknown. Unfortunately, according to Rumohr, there survives only one work that is signed, a polyptych in the Baroncelli Chapel of the church of Santa Croce in Florence. Once we have ascertained the stylistic features of this work, we can--making cautious use also of the statements of Ghiberti--the most reliable witness, proceed to identify other works.

We will also find that works that have been commonly given to Giotto are, on this showing, not by him. In particular Rumohr was far ahead of his time in doubting Giotto's authorship of the St. Francis cycle in the upper church of Assisi, which has remained a bone of contention until the present day.

Behind his mask of affable dilettantism, Rumohr was deadly serious. His work in Italy convinced him that others had not done their homework; the documents were there, and if they were utilized the field could at last be placed on a sound basis. With a firm founda­tion resting on empirical investigation of writings and archives, the scholar must scrutinize the works anew, pitilessly weeding out misattributions and forgeries. The distinguishing of sheep and goats in art, as it were, is the essential foundation of what came to be known as the tradition of connoisseurship, as later practiced so incisively by Giovanni Morelli, Wilhelm von Bode, and Bernard Berenson. To be sure, this task of cleansing the record must need incur the wrath of collectors and other interested parties, but it is an essential duty. Only in this way can we obtain a true canon of authentic works; without this canon no one can be truly said to "know" Giotto or any other artist whose works are in dispute. 

The value of Rumohr's program was endorsed by a younger contemporary, Johann David Passavant (1787-1861).^xix Stemming from a commercial family of Frankfurt am Main, Passavant went to Paris to learn the profession of banking. However, he found himself spending more and more time at the Musée Napoléon, which displayed a dazzling array of first-class works that had been requisitioned from the various dependencies of Napoleon's empire. The young Passavant found himself especially attracted to the paintings of Raphael. After taking part on the German side in the war that finally toppled Napoleon in 1815, he returned to Paris to study painting under several neo-classic masters. In 1817 he joined the Nazarenes, a group of German artists resident in Rome who especially revered Raphael. In Italy he made contact with Rumohr, who proved a somewhat querulous master.

Although Passavant produced a number of creditable canvases in the Nazarene style, he began to realize that his gifts lay more in scholarship. In 1829 he began ten years of travel that were to result in his major monograph on Raphael. He believed that not only was it necessary to gather and sift all the documentary evidence for the artist and his family, but also to see all the originals with his own eyes. (Rumohr, who disliked traveling to remote sites, did not always consistently honor this cherished principle of autopsy.)

Passavant's monograph Rafael von Urbino und sein Vater Giovanni appeared in two parts with an album of plates in 1839; a supplementary volume came out nine years later. Finally, the material was reissued in a unified French edition in 1860. Passavant's work stood out in its time for its devotion to its subject--Raphael worship was then at its peak--and for its accuracy and thoroughness. He long pondered the works ascribed to Raphael for their authenticity. Once accepted into his roster of authentic works, each painting received a description that was as thorough as possible. In this way Passavant created the first adequate model of the catalogue raisonné, a systematic list of the whole canon of works of an artist that the writer regards as authentic.^xx

Passavant was almost fanatical in his insistence on studying the works in the original, visiting key paintings several times. In the later stages of the work, however, he was assisted by two separate sets of photographic images. These were for study only, for at this time techniques for introducing photographs into art books themselves had not been developed, so that his monograph was still illustrated with engravings prepared for the purpose. Still it is noteworthy that he stood at the threshold of the photographic era.

Passavant also lived in a era of incipient institutionalization. In 1840 he became director of the major gallery of his native Frankfurt, the Staedel-Institut, participating vigorously in its programs of acquisition, cataloguing, and public education.

While Passavant consolidated the Rumohr legacy for a single pivotal Italian artist, Gustav Friedrich Waagen (1794-1868) opened up the study of northern painting, paralleling Rumohr's work for Italy.^xxi Born in Hamburg as the son of an impoverished painter, Waagen's interest in early panel paintings was awakened by a visit to the famous medieval collection of Sulpiz Boisserée in Cologne. He then moved to Berlin, where he joined a growing art historical community. As director of the Gemäldegalerie in the Prussian capital, Waagen was able to acquire the remarkable collection of the banker Solly for his institution. He began a tireless series of study trips to the Netherlands and Italy, France and Spain, Russia and England, which he recorded in thick volumes. Connoisseurship, he realized, depends for its success not only on native talent, which he abundantly possessed, but on a memory filled to the brim with the gleanings of many encounters with original works of art.

Waagen's gifts were announced in his precocious 1822 monograph on the brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck.^xxii He perspicaciously noted that the immediate background of the art of the two Flemish painters lay in the field of manuscript painting--a suggestion that was not fully developed until a century later. He also emphasized the artists' roots in the flourishing commercial and intellectual life of Flanders in the fifteenth century. Like his contemporary Rumohr, Waagen combined close study of the original works (where he naturally addressed the special effects made possible by the oil painting techniques) with the documents. The assignment of the Van Eyck oeuvre remains one of the thorniest problems that faces art history, and later scholars have reached different conclusions. But Waagen's book was the first to set forth the dimensions of the problem and to indicate the paths that a solution must follow.

Passavant and Waagen had brilliantly demonstrated the possibilities disclosed by the method Rumohr had inaugurated. It rested, to say it once again, on the twin pillars of visual examination or autopsy and the scrutiny of documents. In the following generations many new documents came to light, correcting false and inadequate information about artists of the past.  However, like many discovers, Rumohr and his colleagues exaggerated the merits of their method.  Its flaw lay in scientism, the belief that one could, in a humanistic field, create a methodology that was absolutely objective.  The operations that these art historians conducted required taste and discrimina­tion.  Still, it does not seem that documents + connoisseur­ship exhaust the art historian's task, though both are immensely valuable. More is needed.

The Philosophical Trend stemming from Hegel.

Over against the deliberately circumscribed program set forth by Carl Friedrich von Rumohr stood an ambitious philosophical trend.  Alexander Gottfried Baumgarten (1714-1762) had legitimized the interest of philosophers in aesthetic questions, but in an abstract context that preceded the new interest in history. As a rule, philosophers before Hegel's time had been more interested in connections with natural science rather than art. An exception was Denis Diderot, though whether he had been a philosopher in the strict sense of the term is debatable. Immanuel Kant had been privately interested in the visual arts, but in his writings he confined himself--perhaps wisely, given his lack of knowledge of actual works--to general themes in aesthetics.

During the era of romanticism and historicism, this reticence on the part of philosophers came to an end. At the head of the new trend stood the formidable figure of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), who has never been dislodged from his eminence as a thinker, despite the controversies he has engendered.^xxiii Personal inclination as well as the universalist aspirations of an inveterate system builder drew him to the arts. Yet the rather general remarks found in his Phenomenology of the Spirit (1806) and Encyclopedia (1817) constitute little more than a set of promissory notes. Then, in Berlin during the 1820s, he gave on four occasions a complete course on the arts, their interrelationships, and place within his overall system. He never published these lectures. His disciple Heinrich Gustav Hotho compared and augmented the manuscript with his own notes, publishing the result as Lectures on Aesthetics; they are generally accepted as faithful renderings of Hegel's mature thought on the matter--if not always his actual words.^xxiv

Although he had seen Dutch paintings during a holiday in the Netherlands, Hegel possessed only a skimpy knowledge of actual works of art. His reading of Rumohr impressed him with the need for connoisseurship based on extensive study of the originals, but the lack of such experience did not prevent him from purveying assumptions based mainly on correlations with other features of the system of thought which had been worked out earlier. Since many scholars afterwards have found his ideas inspiring, even though the details need modification, he seems to have been justified in this apparently arbitrary procedure.

Hegel placed a high value on art which he regarded as no mere ornament of human life, but the vehicle of transcendent values. He believed that art, though produced by individuals, conveyed the essence of collective experience--of an age, a nation, a spirit. Hence, the artist is a kind of shaman or medium through which these world-historical currents flow. Moreover, it is of the essence of art, like every other cultural expression, that it is always caught up in a process of change. Yet these changes are no arbitrary sequence but reflect a dialectical pattern, a pattern which we can monitor by reflecting on its own inner logic and by recalling parallels with the pattern disclosed by philosophy in other realms.

What was the nature of this pattern of development? In essence, Hegel believed that visual art passes through three great epochs:

(1) In the symbolic stage the greatest manifestation is architecture, as seen in the Egyptian pyramids.  The Egyptian pyramids are the quintessential form of the symbolic era and cannot be improved upon. They encapsulate many concepts of Egyptian thought (immortality; the solar principle; the four directions, and so forth) but do not proclaim them in an open or manifest form. This is the nature of the symbolic; the observer must bring knowledge gained from other spheres to the interpretation.  This parallels the hieroglyphic script itself: at first the pictures seem straightforward, but only by applying the code, which one has previously learned, can one interpret them.  One might ask, did the Egyptians not also excel in sculpture? True, but in examining their statues we find that the figure is almost always still attached to the stone block out of which it is formed, so that sculpture, too, tends to the condition of architecture. Still the creators of these symbolic works feel an obscure urge to go beyond the limitations of their mode. This striving to go beyond leads to the second great epoch.

(2) The classical stage comes to the fore in ancient Greece, and its greatest accomplishments lie in the medium of sculpture.  In contrast to Egypt, Greek temples have a clearly graspable form so that they, too, assimilate to the condition of sculpture.  Painting is unimportant.  In classical art we assimilate the meaning easily because it is clearly stated.  The unriddling process that was required by symbolic art is not necessary.

(3) The romantic stage (Hegel uses the term in its broadest sense) starts in the Middle Ages--whose rehabilitation he endorsed --and its characteristic vehicle is pain­ting.  Romantic art is, one is not surprised to learn, a synthesis of the other two. It retains the evocative qualities of the symbolic but encases them in comprehensible forms.  This stage stretches to our own day.  Or at least to yesterday; Hegel was not fond of the art that he saw being produced, and even spoke darkly of the possible "death of art."  But there is always the consolation of philosophy, with its capacity to rethink the major stages of human experience.  "The owl of Minerva flies at dusk," but what a splendid flight!

Even in this bare outline several important features emerge.  The overall sweep of the history of art is, according to Hegel, a meaningful sequence.  Instead of simply explaining the trajectory of Greek art, as Winckelmann did, or Italian Renaissance art, as Vasari did, Hegel aspired to embrace the whole sweep of human creativity since the beginning of (Western) civiliza­tion in the ancient Near East.

The changes in the basic principles determining each epoch correspond to evolving stages of human consciousness.  At the center of this consciousness stands a somewhat mysterious entity that Hegel called Geist or spirit.  Through the guidance of this central principle all departments of human culture—art and literature, but also law and science—evolve in step.  We are not justified in decrying any particular stage of this process.  Replete as they undoubtedly were with injustices, the Middle Ages were an indispen­sable precursor of what we are and aspire to.  Thus Hegel placed a new emphasis on the organic relationship of all ages of human art and culture—there are no dead spots.  By implication he set the task of offering a more detailed explanation of the reasons for change over time.  He emphasized the inherent dignity of each epoch, justifying the dedication of scholars to investigating eras that were previously considered minor or even deplorable.  Finally, Hegel rescued the concept of aesthetic pluralism from the anarchic consequences that had threatened, in the view of many, to engulf it.  Yes, there are different styles and all are valuable, but there is also an overarching pattern to the universal history of art that gives it meaning as part of the grand march of the human spirit.

Admittedly, Hegel's treatment of earlier epochs is often sketchy or simply wrong because of his inadequate data base and the intervention of other themes which seemed relevant to him, but not always to his readers.  He had never been to Egypt or Italy, trips that a Rumohr would judge essential before offering any comment on the art of those countries.  But Hegel had a vision that was to guide later art historians with more information at their disposal.  In all of this, Hegel found an inspiring evolutionary principle, the growth of freedom (classical Greece advancing over Egypt, for example).  The process realized an increasing liberation of human potential. It was a logically unfolding, organic process, a progressive revelation in which the potential of human beings gradually unfolded in ever greater splendor. It need scarcely be added that the appeal of Hegel's developmental emphasis was enhanced by the spread, after the middle of the century, of Charles Darwin's concept of Evolution.

In English-speaking countries Hegel's general reputation faded towards the end of the nineteenth century. The Idealist school retreated in the face of pragmatism and later of analytic philosophy.  Marxists, however (notably Georg Lukácz), continued to honor him as the immediate predecessor of Karl Marx.  Somewhat one-sidedly, Sir Karl Popper and Sir Ernst Gombrich attacked him for his supposed contribution to right-wing totalitarianism.  Today a more balanced view is required.  Historically, Hegel has been vastly important for his stimulus to the humanities and the social sciences.  However, the very enormity of his ambitions precluded success in all areas.  In order to achieve the coverage that he was seeking he sometimes resorts to what can only be called humbug: forced arguments and inappropriate or even erroneous examples.  More than for most thinkers, enthusiasm for Hegel must always be tempered by awareness of his errors and absurdities.

As it happened, Berlin was a fortunate place for Hegel to launch his aesthetic ideas, for the Prussian capital hosted a growing circle of individuals seriously concerned with evaluating the arts and with raising aesthetic awareness.

Karl Schnaase (1798-1875) came from an old Danzig family. During his student years he was most impressed by two teachers, Hegel, and the legal historian Karl Friedrich von Savigny (1779-1861), who interpreted law as the organic expression of the spirit of a people. Like many contemporaries, Schnaase was not able to earn his living as an art historian, but after fulfilling his

duties as an official of the Prussian state, he devoted every available hour to this passion. An active member of the Lutheran church, Schnaase was convinced that art was closely linked to religion. Not surprisingly, he joined in the then-current enthusiasm for the Middle Ages. The leading idea of his handbook of the universal history of art, which began to appear in 1843, is that of the Volksgeist, the spirit of a people or a race, which governs the individual manifestations, which are also modified by the successive avatars of the Zeitgeist or spirit of the age. Schnaase recognized the need to ground his interpretations in careful examination of individual works, but he did not always escape the danger of overschematizing, a danger that is inherent in any allegiance to Hegelianism.

This was an age of handbooks, and Schnaase's Berlin friend Franz Kugler (1808-1858) produced one also. Kugler's Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte first appeared in Stuttgart in 1842.  His scope embraced such topics as prehistoric and Aztec art, so that he strove to break completely with Europocen­tric bias.  The updated manuals by other hands that eventually drove his book off the market tended to adopt a narrower focus.  In this ambition he was probably inspired by his older contempo­rary, the geographer Alexander von Humboldt, who, after many travels, offered to the public a vast portrayal of the whole history of the earth in his Kosmos (1845-62).  Kugler altered the sequence bequeathed by Hegel by inserting an ad­ditional stage, the Germanic, between the Classical and the Romantic.  Although this addition seems somewhat nationalistic, it showed that once one broke with Hegel's favorite triad scheme, it was possible to create a more supple design, but one which still showed how each stage flowed logically from the preceding one.  Kugler is also remembered as the teacher and friend of the great Jacob Burck­hardt, who was to depart more decisively from Hegelian tutelage. 

Despite their rival projects, Schnaase and Kugler remained close friends. They both strove to make art available to a large public through their handbooks. Schnaase, was more attracted to general theories, while Kugler had a gift for capturing the essence of individual works. In their homes, in Düsseldorf and Berlin respectively, they maintained salons that were attended by a wide variety of cultivated people. This social networking also helped to advance the standing of art history among the "movers and shakers" of the Germany of their day, preparing the way for its full entry into the university.

Turning Points and the Consolidation of German Preeminence.

In retrospect, two turning points stand out in art history's advance to full disciplinary status in the German-speaking countries: the 1840s and the 1870s.

During the 1840s the tradition of travel reports inaugurated by Passavant and Waagen to make less accessible works known to specialists was well advanced. Reaching a broader cultivated public the epochal handbooks of Kugler and Schnaase had begun to appear in 1842 and 1843, respectively. And in 1845 Friedrich Faber began an ambitious multivolume encyclopedia of art history, the Conversations-Lexicon für bildende Kunst, left incomplete at his death in 1856.

In 1873 a group of local scholars organized the first international art historical Congress to coincide with the Vienna World's Fair.^xxv Holding such congresses was by then a well-established way of consolidating a field. In 1853 statisticians held their first international congress, chemists in 1860, botanists in 1860, and physicians in 1867. The Vienna art-history Congress attracted sixty-four participants from various cities of Europe, but mainly from German-speaking countries. The following goals were stated: 1) the promotion of art history in the arrangement, cataloguing, and administration of museums; 2) the conservation of works of art; 3) the advancement of art-historical instruction in colleges and high schools; 4) the founding of an art historical periodical of record; and 5) the reproduction of art works and their distribution. After three days of discussion, the attendees agreed to meet again two years later in Berlin.

By this time there were six full professorships of art history in German-speaking universities: Berlin, Bonn, Giessen, Königsberg, Leipzig, and Vienna. Apart from these flagship chairs, other qualified scholars held less substantial posts at universities or taught at technical colleges. At last art history was claiming its "place in the sun"--as it shone on the elite campuses of Central Europe.

In the preceding pages we have only presented the highlights of the extraordinary flowering of art history during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century. It should be evident, however, that the main theater of the development lay overwhelming in the German-speaking countries. Why was this so?

Sociologically, with advancing industrialization there was considerable growth of the middle class.  More than in other countries the German bourgeois­ie was devoted to Bildung or self-cultivation.  Realization of this ideal meant proficiency in foreign languages, especially French and English—to add to the Greek and Latin that ideally one had learned in the "Gymnasium," the characteristic classically-oriented high school of the elite.  Bildung also meant travel, and the appear­ance of grand trunk railways greatly facilitated this.  Of course travelers of other nations, particularly the English, could be seen consulting their guidebooks religiously before the famous monuments of Florence and Rome.  But when one returned to England one could not study art history in English universities--indeed it was not commonly offered there until after 1945. 

German universities were well renowned. Until the 1870s they held, for example, almost a monopoly on Americans seeking graduate training. As Henry Adams (1838-1915) described the experience in The Education of Henry Adams, circumstances were not always ideal, for classrooms could be stuffy and crowded. But the quality of the instruction and the deep learning of the professors made up for these drawbacks. In German universities studies were conduc­ted not only in accord with the demands for verbal precision inculcated by classical philology, but also according to the new spirit of the natural sciences, which leapt forward in the middle third of the century.  Infil­trating the humanities at first through personal contact in the academic setting, the scientific spirit was eventually applied to human affairs in a more system­atic way.  A major landmark in this development occurred in 1879, when the psychologist Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920) established at Leipzig the first laboratory for the experimental study of sensation, memory, and learning.  The discoveries made by psychologists soon had a great impact on the study of art, and this is continuing even today.  It was not simply that art history was taught in German universities; the point was that the field engaged in a fruitful interac­tion with other flourishing discip­lines. Where appropriate, it was exposed to the harsh criticism of scholars in other fields at the top of their form. 

These German academic achievements raise significant questions for the sociology of knowledge.^xxvi  Clearly there were external conditions, reflecting the overall development of society, and internal ones, indigenous to the universities themselves.  The complexity of the problem forbids any straightforward assessment of the favorable "ecology" afforded by German society overall.^xxvii Yet the special context fostering the success of German academia can be stated with some ease.  The enviable vigor of nineteenth-century universities in Central Europe owed much to decentralization. During the eighteenth century they had functioned under the umbrella of a host of independent principalities. As Germany grew together, local pride ensured the continuing autonomy of universities. This polycentrism meant competition, so that a variety of ideas circulated in each field, rather than a single set of models decreed from the top--as has long been the case, for example, with French universities. In France a "dinosaur" ensconced in Paris could continue to impose his outdated doc­trines on the lesser faculties in the provinces for decades.  In Germany competition was the rule, so that no one school of thought could gain a monopoly.  Of course, a foolish or outdated doctrine could still flourish at one particular school. The danger of a student's being permanently beguiled by such teaching was offset by another custom. After a year or so at one university, the students would commonly move to a second, completing his education, perhaps, at a third. In England, by contrast, if you were a student at, say, Wadham College at Oxford, that is where you remained.  But a German student could begin at Munich, continue at Göttingen, and finish at Berlin, tempering the instruction characteristic of each school with the others and comparing notes with other students who had experienced yet other universities. (Unfortunately, this mobility no longer prevails in Germany.)

After the end of the Franco-Prussian War (1870-71) there was a general economic advance, promoted by the unification of the German Empire.  Many of the great industrialists who enriched themselves during this period patronized scholarship.  Publishers, in particular, undertook ambitious projects (often appearing in elephant folios) to summarize what was known about various fields in the history of art, accompanying the text with sumptuous plate volumes.  The older tradition of Germany as the nation of "Denker and Dichter" (thinkers and poets) persisted, while merging with economic power.  To be sure, the intervention of the newly rich industrialists sometimes led to vulgar display and excesses of nationalism, but on the whole it was positive in its support of scholarship.  The new might of Germany was less fortunate in its effects on the arts themselves, and in the 1890s many artists, who felt stifled by the official system of patronage, rallied to the various "Secession" movements, which were in open revolt.

Jacob Burckhardt.

A major figure active as both an historian and an art historian was Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), a highborn Swiss closely identified with his native Basel.^xxviii Something of a radical in his student days in Germany (where he also underwent the influence of Ranke), Burckhardt reacted with horror to the political unrest of the 1840s and turned conservative.^xxix In 1858 he became professor of history in his home town.

A cultural pessimist, Burckhardt had an intense dislike for the commercial and industrial changes that were overtaking his world ("this wretched age"). His early interests in medieval and northern art yielded to a concern with Renaissance Italy, whose monuments he came to know intimately. Although not blind to the dark side of the Renaissance, with its turbulence, betrayals, and egotism, he nonetheless seems to have viewed that era as an ideal world compared to the present. As a proud resident of the city-state of Basel, he was naturally attracted to the city-state culture of Renaissance Italy--and of ancient Greece. If there is an element of escapism in Burckhardt's concern with earlier times, his response to the sensual qualities of events and works of art was vivid and direct. Rejecting the master narrative of Hegelianism, he preferred to create diachronic presentations of a slice of history. He was always concerned with the particular and concrete. The belief that airy talk about the "nature of art" could reveal the essence of any particular work of art he rejected as "a ridiculous piece of pretentiousness."
In his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Burckhardt adopted a many-faceted strategy, treating each aspect separately.^xxx At the same time he had a underlying unified approach based on a concept of the intervention of creative individuals in human affairs. As noted in a previous chapter, Burckhardt took up the idea of the Renaissance that had evolved in France in the first half of the nineteenth century and endowed it with a deep reflectiveness, embodied in vigorous prose, that has captivated readers to the present day.

Curiously, this justly celebrated book did not treat art, which he reserved for a second volume, never completed. Almost insouciantly, he gave the rough manuscript of the architectural part to a friend in 1864. His lecture schedule shows that he continued to be concerned with aesthetic matters during the 1860s.^xxxi Only when he retired from his exhausting round of lectures in Basel did Burckhardt return in earnest to his art-historical project. His efforts to explain works of art to attentive, but not artistically sophisticated burgers had evidently convinced him that the formal approach must be preferred for didactic reasons.

Three fragments published after his death--on altarpieces, portraiture, and collecting--show the method that was to characterize the unrealized volume.^xxxii Surprisingly, he eschewed the approach of cultural contextualization employed in Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, in favor of a concentration on the art objects themselves. In this way he unintentionally confirmed a tendency that has tended to prevail in Renaissance art history as a whole, that of isolating the paintings and sculptures as individual masterpieces rather than as products of historical circumstances. His account of altarpieces shows that in addition to careful style analyses of the works, he did try to group them according to "tasks" (Aufgaben), that is to say, configurational types based on the purposes stipulated by the donors. However, Burckhardt made no attempt to situate these task patterns in the context of social history. Nor did he show any interest in the theological background (after all these works are religious!). It may be that the formal and classificatory approach he chose reflects the experience of a Protestant coming to grips with Catholic art. In adopting this somewhat detached way of presenting the material, Burckhardt concurred with the increasing secularism of the age, but by the same token he did not seem fair to the total iconology that the works require. The spiritual and intellectual climate in which the masterworks arose, so different from that of the nineteenth century, was an essential prerequisite to their coming into being.
His final three essays were anticipated by the above-mentioned volume on Renaissance architecture, which Heinrich Lübke published as part of a series in 1867.^xxxiii More a compilation than a synthesis, the book is devoid of stylistic polish or narrative appeal so that it reached only scholars. Still patient reading can detect a contrast between "organic style" and "spatial style," a bipolar contrast that anticipates a favorite discursive mode of the succeeding generation of art historians. His tendency to overemphasize the secular character of Renaissance buildings, carried further by later commentators, was usefully corrected by Rudolf Wittkower.^xxxiv

As time wore on Burckhardt was increasingly attracted to the baroque period. His Recollections of Rubens appeared posthumously in 1898.  Breaking decisively with the contemporary anecdotal emphasis in artist bi­ographies, the book's various themes converge to form a multifaceted image of the personality of the artist.  Yet like many contemporaries the Swiss historian was primar­ily interested in Italian art, and he wrote a perceptive, highly personal guide to the art there, Der Cicerone (1855), which bore the subtitle "An Introduction to the Enjoyment of the Art Works of Italy." This avowal that art works were there to be enjoyed was to become unfashionable in the all-too-earnest climate of much later professional art history. 

Burckhardt has been rightly revered for his commitment to his professional task and for his intellectual integrity. Yet that very integrity caused him to adhere in practice to two highly diverse methodologies. The first, that of the cultural historian, appeared in Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. The other mode of procedure, found in his essays on works of arts and the types to which he attributed them, showed an almost exclusive formalism. This dichotomy, which in a lesser personality might almost be regarded as schizophrenic, runs through succeeding phases of art history. Most practitioners opted for one approach or the other. Even today, few have managed to generate accounts that reconcile the individual intensities of actual works of art (which must ultimately be the foundation of our interest) with an understanding of the historical and cultural matrix that formed the indispensable prerequisite for their coming into being in the first place.

Conclusion.

As an external phenomenon the history that has been recounted above is one of a gradual shift in what might be called the "ideal type" of the art historian. The type changed from the loner represented by Rumohr, to individuals like Schnaase and Kugler who were seeking a place in academia but still kept largely outside its precincts, to the tenured-professor figure, functioning in concert with other established disciplines, who set the tone for the period after 1870. Apart from the great value of his writings, Burckhardt is interesting for his being located somewhat along, rather than at either end of this trajectory.

Connections with other disciplines were inevitable. As the term art history itself indicates, links were closest with history itself, which in its new elevated guise offered ideals of close attention to particulars and documents, avoidance of anachronism, and concern with periodization. Gradually, many came to see art history only as separate from the political history that had been dominant; perhaps it might take its place as part of a larger assemblage: cultural history.

Relations with classical archaeology were more tense than with history, and marked by a de facto division of labor in which art historians largely yielded the study of Greek and Roman art to their classical confrères. Still archaeology bequeathed several useful lessons. Ranging ever more into periods that were not documented by written records, the discipline had to devise schemes to organize material in which the names of artists were not known. Making a virtue of necessity, this overtly non-biographical approach was useful not only for the study of medieval art, which offers relatively few named artists, but for later eras as well. Then too, advancing techniques of stratification--as Heinrich Schliemann and others identified various layers (and therefore epochs) at Troy and elsewhere--focused attention on the question of periodization: could the art historian also identify such clear sequences? Study of particular eras, such as the baroque, could lead to their rehabilitation, a topic which occupies an ensuing chapter.

Looming like a colossus over all branches of research was the growing prestige of the natural sciences. Advances in biology led to a new emphasis on clear description and differentiation of types. The Darwinian concept of evolution reinforced the concern with development and progress in the arts. Finally, the new field of psychology, with its interest in perception, focused attention on the physiology of vision.

i Ulrich Muhlack, Geschichtswissenschaft im Humanismus and in der Aufklärung, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1991, p.33ff. This lucid volume offers an invaluable synthesis of European historiographical traditions preceding the phase discussed in this chapter.

ii Luigi Marino, I Maestri della Germania: Göttingen 1770-1820, Turin: Einaudi, 1975.

iii Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook, trans. J. F. Anderson, 1972. The original German text first appeared in 1936.

iv Historism, p. 262.

v On Herder's thought there is a brilliant sketch by Sir Isaiah Berlin, "Herder and the Enlightenment," Vico and Herder: Two Studies in the History of Ideas, London: Hogarth Press, 1976, pp. 143-215, See also Robert T. Clark, Herder: His Life and Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955; F. M. Barnard, Between Enlightenment and Political Romanticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964; and Wulf Koepke, Johann Gottfried Herder, Boston; Twayne, 1987.

vi See now the major biography in progress by Nicholas Boyle, Goethe: the Poet and the Age, Vol. 1: The Poetry of Desire, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991; and volume 2, Revolution and Renunciation, 1790-1803, published in the year 2000.

vii Some confusion has been introduced by the use of the label historicism by F. A. Hayek and Sir Karl Popper to condemn a prophetic tendency found in Hegel and Marx and their followers, a tendency that might perhaps better termed "historiosophy." For efforts to clarify the terminology see Dwight E. Lee and Robert N. Beck, "The Meaning of 'Historicism,'" American Historical Review, 59 (1953-54), 568-77; and Calvin G. Rand, "Two Meanings of Historicism in the Writings of Dilthey, Troelsch, and Meinecke," Journal of the History of Ideas, 25 (1964), 503-18.

viii Wilhelm Vogt, "Fiorillos Kampf um die Professur," Beiträge zu Göttinger Bibliotheks- und Gelehrtengeschichte, Göttingen, 1928, pp. 91-107.

ix Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 174.

x Georg G. Iggers, The German Conception of History, 2nd ed., Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1983.

xi For a recent estimate see Karl Christ, Von Gibbon bis Rostovtzeff: Leben und Werk führender Althistoriker der Neuzeit, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1972, pp. 26-49.

xii Cited after the translation in Fritz Stern, ed., The Varieties of History: From Voltaire to the Present, Cleveland: World, 1956, p. 44.

xiii See now the two collections published to mark the centenary of the historian's death: Wolfgang J. Mommsen, ed., Leopold von Ranke und die moderne Geschichtswissenschaft, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1988; and Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell, eds., Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1990; as well as Felix Gilbert, History: Politics or Culture? Reflections on Ranke and Burckhardt, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990.

xiv Stern, Varieties, p. 57.

xv Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, pp. 26-30, 140-41.

xvi Stern, Varieties, pp. 58-59.

xvii Still fundamental is Antonie Tarrach, "Studien über die Bedeutung von Carl Friedrich von Rumohr für Geschichte und Methode der Kunstwissenschaft," Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft, 1 (1921), 97-138. See also Julius von Schlosser's introduction to the reprint of Italienische Forschungen, Frankfurt: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1920, pp. vii-xxxviii; and Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, Leipzig: Seemann, vol. I, 1921, 292-314. For Rumohr's aesthetic theories and relations with contemporary artists, see now Pia Müler-Tamm, Rumohrs "Haushalt der Kunst": Zu einem kunsttheoretischen Werk der Goethezeit, Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1991.

xviii Gert Schiff, ed., German Essays on Art History, New York: Continuum, 1988, pp. 73-94 (trans. Peter Wortsman).

xix Elisabeth Schröter, "Raphael-Kult and Raphael-Forschung: Johann David Passavant und seine Raphael-Monographie im Kontext der Kunst und Kunstgeschichte seiner Zeit," Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, 26 (1990), 302-397.

xx The term catalogue raisonné had been used by the English dealer John Smith in a number of publications (e.g. A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch, Flemish and French Painters, London: Smith, 1829-42). However, Smith did not provide the wealth of carefully sifted information that Passavant rightly regarded as essential.

xxi Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker, II, pp. 29-45.

xxii Gabriele Bickendorf, Der Beginn der Kunstgeschichtsschreibung unter dem Paradigma "Geschichte": Gustav Friedrich Waagen's Frühschrift "Ueber Hubert und Johann van Eyck," Worms: Werner'sche Verlagsgesellschaft, 1985.

xxiii The secondary literature on Hegel is enormous. For a readable recent biography, which also evaluates his thought, see Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. A useful selective bibliography appears in Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, pp. 314-27. On Hegel as an art historian, see the penetrating remarks of Ernst H. Gombrich, "'The Father of Art History: A Reading of the Lectures on Aesthetics of G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831)," in his Tributes: Interpreters of Our Cultural Tradition, Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984, pp. 50-69.

xxiv Hegel's arguments in the Lectures are usefully retraced by Stephen Bungay, Beauty and Truth: A Study of Hegel's Aesthetics, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. A more general appreciation appears in Jack Kaminsky, Hegel on Art, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1962. On Hotho, see now Elisabeth Ziemer, Heinrich Gustav Hotho, 1802-1873: Ein Berliner Kunsthistoriker, Kunstkritiker und Philosoph, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1994.

xxv Dilly, Kunstgeschichte, pp. 161-65.

xxvi Lenore O'Boyle, "Learning for Its Own Sake: The German University as Nineteenth-Century Model," Comparative Studies in Society and History, 25 (1983), 3-25.

xxvii For a detailed, up-to-date account, see James J. Sheehan, German History, 1770-1866, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

xxviii See the vast biography of Werner Kaegi, Jakob Burckhard: eine Biographie, 7 vols., Basel: Schwabe, 1947-82. More particularly, see Lionel Gossman, "Jacob Burckhardt as Art Historian," Oxford Art Journal, 11 (1988), 25-32.

xxix Felix Gilbert, "Jakob Burckhardt's Student Years," Journal of the History of Ideas, 47 (1986), 249-74: idem, History, cit. See also Wilhelm Schlink, Jacob Burckhardt und die Kunsterwartung im Vormärz, Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1982. For a comparative perspective, see Alan Kahan, Aristocratic Liberalism: The Social and Political Thought of Jacob Burckhardt, John Stuart Mill, and Alexis de Tocqueville, New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

xxx William Kerrigan and Gordon Braden, The Idea of the Renaissance, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989.

xxxi See the analysis of an unpublished aesthetics manuscript by Martina Sitt, Kriterien der Kunstkritik: Jacob Burckhardts unveröffentlichte Ästhetik als Schlüssel seines Rangsystems, Vienna: Böhlau, 1992.

xxxii The altarpiece essay has been translated into English with a stimulating essay by Peter Humphrey: Jacob Burckhardt, The Altarpiece in Renaissance Italy, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

xxxiii See the English-language version, Burckhardt, The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance, trans. James Palmes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985, with informative introduction by Peter Murray, pp. xv-xviii.

xxxiv Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, London: Warburg Institute, 1949 (and later editions).