THE HISTORY OF ART HISTORY: INTRODUCTION
"Doing
is by and large more important than theorizing about what is being
done. But there are times when even the most spontaneous or
instinctive cultural pursuits need to be examined in the light of the
purposes they serve and the goals they seek." Theodore S.
Hamerow, Reflections
on History and Historians,
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987, p. xii.
Art
historians are peculiar people. For a long time they practiced their
craft discreetly, almost clandestinely, content to remain in the
shadows as the stream of images poured forth from their slide
projectors. In the darkened lecture hall the verbal commentary
seemed to come not from the art historian, who was almost invisible,
but directly from the images themselves. In this "coy science,"
to purloin the expression coined by Donald Preziosi, method was superfluous and the art historian was unimportant--the
main thing was to get on with doing art history.i
One almost had the impression that if one paused to reflect on how
the task was being done it would no longer be possible to do it.
Admirable
as it may have been as a commitment to professional modesty, this
"stealth strategy" is no longer viable. Foregrounding of
method and personnel is inescapable, for the humanities are in
ferment, responding to challenges of all kinds.ii
In the field of mainstream history, for example, one scholar has
placed the ideal of objectivity under the microscope so as to direct
critical attention to the foundations of that discipline, while
another has sought to link the achievements of medievalists to
personality characteristics and foibles.iii
As these two studies show, assumptions that are not always made
explicit or examined sufficiently have helped to shape inquiry in the
humanities, which is conducted by real people, with their
preferences, penchants, and blind spots.
Some observers have detected political
biases. Literary scholars have asked whether
their discipline might not have been entertaining ideological
subtexts without being aware of them, and whether these may have
shaped the "canon" of accepted texts studied in
universities.iv
The now familiar airing of the conflict over "political
correctness" has brought the ferment in the humanities to the
attention of the general public, albeit in a partial and distorted
form.v
Setting
aside, if we can, the sensational and transitory aspects of these
disputes, we can detect at the core an eminently reasonable
aspiration: a desire that each branch of the humanities come to know
itself. Art history has arrived a little tardily at the assizes of
self-scrutiny, but it has arrived all the same.
But
what is art history as we have come to know it? Today the expression
art history is the accepted designation for a discipline, practiced
mainly in colleges and museums, that seeks to study works of art in a
systematic way.vi
In its concern with aesthetic objects it parallels musicology and
literary studies. Like these disciplines art history employs words,
with writing being still the preferred medium of communication. Video recordings, including those on Youtube,
have come into some use as an educational tool, but advances in
research are still usually conveyed in written form, accompanied by
visual images, or "evidence," in the form of
reproductions. Nowadays of course many of these papers are available on the Internet.
Words
may be directed to art works in various ways. A few kinds of images,
such as the emblems of baroque printed books, organically incorporate
their own explanation; the image and the words are like Siamese
twins, forever inseparable.vii
Some late medieval paintings incorporate explanatory captions. As a rule, though, words consort with art works less intimately,
with the result that we are free to access the verbal complement when
we wish, or to disregard it. Although we cannot seem to stop talking
and writing about works of art, we do not all say the same things.
Experience has shown that there is no single authoritative
interpretation, so that a painting by, say, Piero della Francesca or Johannes Vermeer will elicit varied, perhaps even contradictory explanations.
It is
useful to distinguish between art history in the broad sense as a
discipline, and art history as a chronological narrative--the
restricted sense. Many kinds of serious discussion of artworks do
not qualify as art history in this latter, narrower sense. A
description of the brushwork of a Rubens painting, a report on the
radiocarbon dating of a medieval sculpture, a study of the
conservation of the Bonampak frescoes are not in themselves art historical,
though they may contribute to generating a historical narrative that
includes the works they study.viii
The
word narrative is important. This book addresses the different types
of verbal narratives that have arisen in an effort to explain the
fact that works of art have come into being in a meaningful
sequence.ix
Strolling through any large modern museum we are aware that the
objects look different in many ways, not simply because of medium and
subject matter, but also because of their chronological positioning,
their "period" in short. Some objects, we feel, look as
they do because they are "early" examples of some
particular trend, others seem to rank as "developed" or
"mature" pieces, and still others qualify as "late."
We can reach such conclusions in perusing the Egyptian wing or the
eighteenth-century painting wing, or in any other part of the museum.
The
main task of this book is a dual one. First, the following chapters
seek to disclose the many attempts that have been made to understand
the sequentiality of art, to construct art history in the strict
sense. Second, such constructions do not arise out of thin air, but
are devised by real people. It seems almost tautological to assert
that art history was developed by art historians. These individuals,
with their particulars of background, training, character,
nationality, politics--even their sexuality--are an integral part of
the story. For example, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) was a
German Protestant turned Catholic, a literary scholar who remolded
himself as an archaeologist and art historian, and a member of high
society who was also a closeted homosexual.
To understand this dual
theme--art history and art historians--other contexts are needed as
well, such as the history of aesthetics and the history of taste--as
in the rise of the romantic movement at the end of the eighteenth
century. But the central theme of the book is the double one of the
shaping of art history by art historians.
The
word history stems from the Greeks.x
To the Greeks we also owe certain basic schemes or templates for
understanding the pattern of historical development. There are three
elementary forms: ascent (or progress); descent (or decline); and
cycle. Combining the first two options yields a fourth, mixed form: the bell
curve in which an ascending movement finds its complement in a
descending one. The different effects of these schematic models of
conceiving cultural developments can be illustrated by their
contrasting placements of the Golden Age. For the ascending model
the Golden Age can only lie in what is to come, the future. For the
descending model it occurs at the start, for everything that comes
after must by definition be inferior. In the cyclical model Golden
Ages come into existence over and over again. Finally, in the mixed
scheme the Golden Age stands at the middle of the development, as the
bell curve attains its height.
These models lend themselves to
metaphorical expressions, some quite vivid. The ascending model is
easily visualized as an inclined ramp--or perhaps as the side of a
mountain, on which humanity is arduously but tenaciously climbing.
The descending model may assume the guise of a slide or chute.
Etymologically (and metaphorically) the cycle is a circle or a wheel.
Finally, the mixed scheme, the bell curve, has lent itself to the
most inventive metaphors, such as human life, with its development
from infancy and youth to maturity and then descent into old age, or
the path of the sun as it rises, reaches its zenith, and then
declines to its setting.
All
these schemes recognize differences, which are plotted in symbolic
space as higher or lower. One may ask what is it that ascends and
descends. Varying criteria have been assumed, including technical
proficiency, complexity, beauty, and illusion. A way of avoiding
such judgments is suggested by another model, that of the
statification disclosed by modern archaeological digging. At Troy
(Ilion), for example, there are nine levels, the uppermost being the
city of the Greco-Roman period. The separations between the strata
generally result from some catastrophe or change in populations.
Although we may be particularly interested in one layer or
another--in this case, probably the layer corresponding to the Troy
of Homer's Iliad--there is no reason in principle why one layer
should be qualitatively better than another. Another point of
interest in this model is the fact that logistically we encounter the
latest layer first, because it is the one that is uppermost; in the
process of digging down, the layer that is earliest chronologically
comes last. This reversal of sequence is a useful reminder that in
considering the historical developments we often start with the most
recent past and work back gradually.
In art
history, development can be tracked at a number of different scales,
from what might be called microdevelopment--as seen in the
conception, elaboration, and completion of a single work--to the
grand sweep of whole styles and civilizations. Thus we can establish
the history of the erection of the mortuary temple of Queen
Hatshepsut (ruled 1403-1382 B.C.) at Deir el Bahri near Luxor in
Upper Egypt or we can survey the entire course of ancient Egyptian art over three
thousand years from the beginning of dynastic times to the Late
Period. These tracings of varying duration may employ similar or
different patterns, according to what seems appropriate.
An old
idea holds that there are but three canonical branches of the fine
arts: architecture, painting, and sculpture. In this view other
modes of expression belong at best to the minor arts. At various
points in time this restrictive definition of media has been
challenged, and ceramics, glass, furniture, and many other crafts
have been incorporated into the sphere of the fine arts. Some
aesthetic levelers have even maintained that the study of art should
embrace the entire range of human artifacts, including even embossed
cocktail napkins and bus transfers. For most of us, this
hyperinclusivity would go too far. The matter of drawing such
boundaries is not easily resolved, but the debate lends itself to
historical examination. There is a history of concepts of art genres
and this forms part of the history of art history in as much as the
parameters of "what is fine art" have shaped the repertoire of
objects that form the substance of the historiography of art.
Vastness
and Limits of the Kingdoms of Art History.
The
beginning of this Introduction alluded to a recent shift in art
history in which the reticent phase that prevailed in the United
States since the establishment of the discipline here in the early
twentieth century (the "coy science") yielded to the
contemporary self-examining one, sometimes termed the New Art
History.xi
Interesting as it is to compare these two phases, such an analysis
would be inadequate, for art history has gone through many more
historical permutations than most observers imagine.
In fact
this book challenges the widely held assumption that art history is a
recent arrival among the humanities. To be sure, American
universities have fostered systematic pursuit of art history only
since the second decade of the present century, when departments were
authorized at Harvard and Princeton universities. Yet the body of
this book shows that the discipline enjoys a continuous pedigree that
reaches back to the early Renaissance, so that it is older than, say,
musicology or the study of English literature which do not start
until the eighteenth century.
Discarding
the recent-origin hypothesis, one might be tempted to go to the other
extreme, maintaining that some kind of organized writing about art
has occurred since the beginning of literate society. Yet this
assumption of pervasiveness is also mistaken, for careful examination
of the record contradicts the notion that art writing figures as the
natural and constant handmaiden of art production itself. The
disjunction is shown by the fact that several important literate
cultures, such as those of the pre-Columbian Maya and of the
medieval Hindus, distinguished as they were by superlative
achievements in the visual arts, did not give rise to significant
traditions of their own of writing about the visual arts. This
absence is not necessarily a defect. Some cultural pessimists have
held that the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk, as the "Alexandrian"
phase of scholarship succeeds the classical age of creativity. In
this view happy cultures are those that do not need to justify their
art with elaborate written apologias. The problem with this
conclusion is that it seems to idealize a "state of nature"
in which the absence of certain types of consciousness equates with
bliss.
At the
other extreme, some Western observers, particularly those of earlier
generations, have held that such cultures as the Maya and the Hindu
not only lack art history but art itself. The languages of these
peoples do not seem to contain terms corresponding to our word art;
moreover, the objects they produced that resemble our art objects
were created for religious, political, or practical purposes. In
this now problematic Western view, these products do not belong to
the history of art, which is restricted to the achievements of
peoples who have knowingly created art
in the Occidental understanding of the term--preeminently the ancient
Greeks and Europeans since the Renaissance.
These
last objections evoke two responses. The first consideration, which
argues that the absence of a term proves the absence of a concept
reflects a theory called Social Construction, which holds that we
have only the capacities that our social situation allows. But this
view seems false, for many human capacities have been enjoyed from
time immemorial, long before their existence was recognized through
the appropriate verbal analysis. For example, absolute pitch, the
capacity of gifted musicians to identify any note without reference
to musical scores, was discovered in the nineteenth century. Yet
this does not mean that before the discovery no one had the gene for
absolute pitch. The capacity was a reality, even though it was not
conceptualized as such.xii
In their everyday existence some individuals in all human groups
seem impelled to create art of some sort or another regardless of
their ability to conceptualize what they are doing in ways that we
would recognize. Second, the fact that an object functions in one
way does not prevent it from also functioning in another. Modern
automobiles are means of transportation, but they may also be (as
manufacturers cannily recognize) things of beauty. Scholars and the
public have long recognized the outstanding aesthetic qualities of
the altarpieces of the Italian Renaissance. The ritual function,
which they had to fulfill in order to be accepted by the patrons who
commissioned them, does not preclude them from also being aesthetic
objects worthy to be included in our histories of art.
Why
then does art history arise? In an important study, Joseph Alsop has
pointed to a nexus between collecting and art history.xiii
The collector acquires objects essentially for their "pastness,"
their capacity to transmit something of the sensibility of a bygone
era. The accumulation of collections in turn calls for a body of
writing to explain the objects acquired. In the course of this book
we shall have occasion to see that collecting and art history do
often run in parallel tracks.
At all
events, the West has inherited a vast, disparate array of such
writings, from multivolume histories to mundane contracts, from
highly subjective biographies to matter-of-fact guidebooks and
technical treatises. This richness notwithstanding, the
resulting amalgam of writings must always be viewed as a special
creation--coming into being and justifying itself over and over again
on different grounds. If the impulse to create art is a cultural
universal, perhaps even a necessity for human survival, writing about
art seems to be something supplemental, belonging to a second order.xiv
Yet once the "art-writing machine" gets started it seems
unstoppable.
As
a scholarly and intellectual enterprise, art history arose from the
confluence of a number of tributary streams, including personal
accounts by artists themselves, biographies, lists of great masters
drawn up by collectors and amateurs,
technical treatises, legal records (including contracts), and
narratives enshrining local patriotism (sometimes termed
"boosterism"). Art history emerged tentatively as an
autonomous discipline with the ancient Greek Xenocrates of Sicyon and
with the Chinese literati, and then definitively with Lorenzo
Ghiberti (1378-1455) and Giorgio Vasari (1511-1568). With this
definitive birth (or rebirth) in the Renaissance art history
stabilized a sense of its own purpose, without completely blending
the external and partial motives that had characterized the
tributary streams. These last, together with the overall
ideological currents of each era, must be analyzed, while preserving
a sense of the cumulative evolution of the discipline.
A major
task lies ahead, which will be the work of many scholars, to record
the lives and achievements of individual art historians. To attempt
such a harvest at this stage of research would be premature.
Instead, this book groups the material under the headings of
significant historical phases and themes, corresponding in large
measure to the emergence of successive paradigms of the discipline,
without attempting to present every detail in the intervening stages.
The aim is to present a clear narrative so that crucial issues and
contrasts will stand forth. To this end, many significant art
historians of the past must be omitted or scarcely mentioned. Living
persons appear but rarely, and when all is said and done some of
those excluded may prove to be more important than those mentioned.
The reason for this selectivity is that ideas rather than persons
shape the guiding lines of the book. To be sure, ideas inhabit
persons, and biographical episodes in the lives of the art historians
who have the ideas oftentimes rank as deciding factors in their
intellectual formation. Art history is ongoing and many new "growing
points" of research are appearing. For obvious reasons only a
selection of these can be reviewed in the last chapters of the book.
Disciplinary
Boundaries.
For
some time the scholarly world has resounded with paeans to
interdisciplinary study. Transgressing disciplinary boundaries has
long since ceased to be taboo, and has become a positive virtue.
Indeed should boundary lines be honored at all? Now may be the time,
as some urge, to "explode the categories," declining to
acknowledge interdisciplinary barriers of any sort. However
desirable such an outcome may be, the posited effacement of lines of
separation has not been achieved, and is not likely soon to be so, in
part because knowledge itself is constantly increasing in volume so
that it becomes ever harder to keep up with one's own field, let
alone to accept a friendly invitation to poach on someone else's
turf. Moreover, the position we start from is one of inherited
disciplinary distinctions. In order to orient ourselves, we need to
form some sense of how the disciplines have grown up in their proud
states of autonomy and self-assertion, and also, from these bases,
how they have negotiated interaction and sharing of responsibilities.
Mention
was made above of the parallel between art history and its objects of
study, on the one hand, and musicology and literary study and their
objects of study, on the other. Some have felt that the "sister
arts" (as the group has been collectively termed) have evolved
in harmony--that their histories are essentially similar.xv
In fact, cultural historians seek to study them in connection with
the history of thought and intellectual endeavor, and this approach
will require attention from time to time in the chapters of this
book.xvi
Apart
from these alliances with neighboring disciplines, art history must
share its own house, so to speak, with several related overlapping
disciplines. Art history has evolved in close contact with, but also
in distinction from two particular fields: art criticism and
archaeology. The term criticism (which is also well entrenched
in literary study) implies a developed sense of intuitive
understanding--especially with respect to new, or relatively new
works.xvii
When the practice emerged in the eighteenth century the public
expected the art critic to advise the audience which objects to
choose (critic
deriving from ancient Greek krino,
"to choose."), singling out those works which are
intrinsically, so the critic believes, worthy of attention, due to
their outstanding aesthetic qualities. It would seem that one
who would make such choices must necessarily rely upon subjective
criteria, asserting a claim to enjoy a keener sense of quality than
other mortals so as to judge which objects are worthy and which are
to be ignored. In practice critics guard against arbitrariness by
frequently conferring with artists and fellow critics. Moreover,
while the objects that engage the critic's attention are new and ever
changing, the field of criticism has its own distinctive history,
providing a sense of balance.
Contrasting
with the emphasis on innovation that marks art criticism, archaeology
originally meant the study of things that are old (the first element
of the word stems from the Greek adjective archaios,
"old").xviii
Traditionally the field has embraced preliterate cultures as well as
such civilizations as those of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Greece,
and Rome. Recently, though, with the appearance of "industrial
archaeology" remains from the nineteenth and the early twentieth
century have come into the purview of the field. Most archaeologists
would agree that their concern is with the total culture, of which
art as such is only a small part. The discipline considers
itself an objective science, relying heavily on technology (such as
radiocarbon dating), whereas art history sees itself and is seen as
situated within the academic grouping termed the humanities. And
whereas archaeology ideally attempts to recover and describe the
totality of a past culture, art history seeks only a partial
recovery, in a particular area.
Archaeology
reconstructs a culture from the objects it leaves behind, and hence
is linked to physical anthropology. In a sense, archaeology is
more ambitious than art history. It attempts to be
non-discriminatory, whereas art history is selective. In practical
terms, archaeology is a field discipline, involving on-site digging
and visual inspection of the context in which an object is found,
while art history is developed in the comfort of the museum, the
library, the archive, and the study.
Looking
at all three disciplines, we may situate art history as the
intermediary between archaeology and art criticism. In its
middle position art history is more concerned with striving for
objectivity than criticism but it is not as objective as
archaeology. Nonetheless, close bonds link the trio. All three
direct their attention to material objects, in contrast to musicology
or literary study which address creations that are not material.
Mention
of music and literature calls to mind an approach that aims to
embrace the whole field of human creativity: aesthetics.xix
That is perhaps best regarded as a subdiscipline of philosophy.
Perhaps because of its very ambitiousness aesthetics tends to suffer
from a lack of concreteness. In any event, as will be seen, art
history is older and has been able to function largely without the
assistance of aesthetics, though some art historians have also
contributed to that field.
Art-Historical
Language.
Encountering
the art world today, laypeople and newcomers typically complain of
the inaccessibility of the writings that come their way. Articles in
the glossy art magazines, which address mainly modern and
contemporary art, seem enveloped in dense clouds of arcane jargon.
One senses that important things are being said, but the way in which
they are expressed seems almost to constitute a private language
designed to strengthen the bonds of elite circles of initiates while
repelling outsiders. Sometimes the obscurity is linked to current
ideological fashions. An article may urge that adoption of
progressive political views is essential; however, the appeal is all
too often couched in such obscure polysyllables that even sympathetic
readers find it hard to assimilate. In this way the article
effectively endorses the elitism that its writer claims to oppose.
Professional
journals such as the Art
Bulletin
and Zeitschrift
für Kunstgeschichte
are off-putting in a different way. These prestigious organs of the
art-historical community seem austerely technical, dourly forbidding
any effusions of enthusiasm or advocacy of the objects they discuss.
Here too, just as in the otherwise livelier magazines of contemporary
art, appeals to old-fashioned virtues like grace and beauty are
taboo.
To some
extent, these obstacles may be inevitable and even justified.
Art-world magazines contain pieces in which critics are struggling to
formulate, for the first time, a vocabulary to describe new work.xx
Thirty years hence the descriptive strategies will be enriched and
clarified, but the work will no longer be new. In its iconoclastic
search for innovation contemporary art always seems to outrun efforts
to capture it in words.
A
different problem arises with the art of the past. As the body of
this book shows, systematic study of art did not begin yesteryear.
Art scholarship is a complex and specialized field and requires terms
and usages of its own. The vocabulary and explanatory strategies
deployed to analyze art in words reflect a considerable
sophistication that has grown over time. The product--today's art
history language--is a complex amalgam of the deposit of many
cultures and centuries of development within cultures. To start from
scratch and invent a new, simpler language would probably produce a
more "user friendly" result, but it would go against the
grain of art's interpretive community, which is constituted in large
measure by the efforts it has made to master the traditions of
narrative and explanation that have been bequeathed to it. In any
event there would remain the adjustments and obscurities that
inevitably accrue from the effort to translate experiences in a
visual realm to a verbal one.
A few episodes in the
development of art-historical vocabulary will illustrate the stock of
inheritance that is an essential part of our story. The Greeks, who
invented the western tradition of art history, began to inscribe
their art vocabulary on a tabula rasa; they declined to borrow art
terms from their predecessors in the ancient Near East. Indeed when
the Greeks sought to describe two major aspects of Egyptian art they
used their own words: obelisk ("little spit") and
hieroglyph ( "sacred sign"}. Greek vocabulary came from
two sources: workshop usage and the discourse of the learned.
Contrast skiagraphia
(shadow painting) and ropos
(mixture of colors) with mimesis
(imitation) and prepon
(appropriateness).xxi
The Greeks also invented some specific genres of writing about art,
including periegesis (the guide book literature) and ecphrasis (vivid
descriptions of works of art, whether real or imaginary).
The
Romans found themselves in a more complex position, having to enrich
the rather primitive Latin vocabulary so that it could convey all the
nuances of the Greek. They used two procedures: forming new terms
from native materials on the foreign model (what linguists term
"calque" or loan translation) and direct borrowing. Thus
qualitas
was formed on the basis of Greek poiotes,
while philosophia
was simply purloined. As the text of Vitruvius (the creator of the
standard Roman architectural treatise) shows, too much borrowing
could lead to obscurity and misunderstanding. The meaning of some
Latin terms changed over time. Amusingly, the word fornicatio
("vaulting"), which has a purely architectural meaning in
Vitruvius, took on a totally different significance in Christian
Latin.
Medieval
ecclesiastical Latin supplied terms for liturgical objects such as
aquamanilium
(vessel for water) and ostensorium
(monstrance).xxii
There were also more general expressions, referring to techniques
and styles, such as opus
Saracenorum
(Saracen work, Islamic art) and opus
interrasile
(a metalwork technique). Medieval masons developed an elaborate
vernacular vocabulary comprising such terms as liernes
and voussoirs.
The
shop talk used by Renaissance artisans continued that of the medieval
botteghe
(workshops). But the new professional class of humanists, largely
supplanting the medieval scholastics, created a new rhetoric for the
description and praise of works of art.xxiii
State
support in France, coupled with the complementary adversary tradition
that made that country for long the cynosure of the avant-garde,
helped to generate terms that were then exported to other tongues.xxiv
However, just as the Romans had plundered the Greek vocabulary, the
French took from the Italian, often by simple modification, as
fresque
from affresco
and torse
from torso.
In borrowing from abroad, sometimes the two donor languages offer a
choice: in English contrast Italian-derived studio
with French-derived atelier.
In our language such terms as impressionism and fauvism, vernissage
and cloisonné are of course of purely French derivation.
If the
French contributed many terms which were adopted into other
languages, Germans pioneered a new mode of art historical narrative.
This nineteenth-century achievement was governed above all by
historical consciousness, the sense that each phase of art occupied a
place of its own in a continuous march of progress. Passionate
judgmentalism was out, detached explanation was in. The German
writers were also influenced by the tone of work in the natural
sciences, a status to which they wished art history to aspire.
In
addition to borrowing terms from one language to another, the art
vocabulary grows by comparison of effects received in one sense with
another, as when we speak of colors as "loud" (hearing to
sight) or "soft" (touch to sight).xxv
These comparisons are sometimes said to be grounded in synesthesia,
an ability (which seems to be relatively rare) to experience
sensations normally received in one sense through another. These
"synaesthetic" comparisons probably occur more frequently
in some periods of art discourse than in others. One would expect
them to be more common in the seventeenth century (the baroque) than
in the fifteenth (the early Renaissance); this matter deserves
further investigation. Synaesthetic comparisons also help to foster
the idea of the "sister arts," that painting, sculpture,
architecture, poetry, and music are all kin. Else why would they
borrow terms from each other with such ease?
As long
as they are new, labels of styles such as cubism and futurism can
serve as rallying points. This capacity for attracting converts has
a more general application, as when in contemporary America the
spread of the labels hippy, yuppy and guppy served as a multiplier
effect, vastly increasing the numbers of people who could be
classified by them. In the course of the eighteenth century the
diffuse term romantic
was gaining more and more acceptance.xxvi
When Friedrich Schlegel defined it in 1798 and others followed, the
prescription served as an incentive to the creation of contemporary
"romantic" poetry (and not long thereafter of "romantic"
painting). An antonym is often implied, as in the classic-romantic
contrast. Even as many are attracted by the new slogan, others are
repelled, as was Goethe who condemned romanticism as sickness.
Connotations can sometimes be imposed on words. In the course of
World War I some xenophobic French critics tried to make cubism a
word of opprobrium, even spelling it Kubisme, so as to suggest that
the style had come from the hated other side of the Rhine.xxvii
Terms
launched by means of manifestos, as symbolism (1886) and futurism
(1909), function as talismans, attracting followers. In keeping with
the idea that art is a religion, sometimes the aim seems to be to
create a conversion experience.
Almost
as if they were themselves alive, terms in vogue can engender other
terms. Realism gave rise to surrealism (a term coined in 1917 by
Guillaume Apollinaire, but with a different meaning from the one it
assumed a little later). In 1911 impressionism generated
postimpressionism and expressionism. In turn, postimpressionism
(with some help from postindustrialism) generated postmodernism.
By the
early twentieth century a chasm had become evident separating popular
writing for the middle classes (who sought a palatable version of the
culture formerly restricted to the elite) from the increasingly
technical writing for art professionals. The latter trend has
fostered the multifootnoted display of erudition and the Olympian,
impersonal tone that became the common currency of today's art
history cadres.
Recently
this tone has been called into question, by those who claim that it
does not assure detachment and exemption from political parti pris,
but has been coopted into the legions of the many forces affirming
the status quo. Scholars in the field of communications have
examined the content and rhetorical strategies of many fields of
current discourse, from politics to medicine and literary study. As
yet, however, no in-depth studies of this kind have been published
for art historical writing.xxviii
Until this kind of examination is done, we will not have the
empirical data needed to arbitrate the linguistic aspects of the
dispute between the defenders of traditional, ostensibly value-free
art-historical presentations and advocates of the new confrontational
modes, who include feminists, Marxists, and semioticians.
Problems
of Language Interpretation.
Understanding
various strains of language, especially those in use in earlier
centuries, also poses a special problem for the material treated in
this book. Not only did Vasari, for example, write in Italian, but
his use of the language reflected a state of the tongue radically
different in many ways from the one found now. Care must be taken to
avoid "false friends"--that is words that appear similar to
their English cognates but in fact have different meanings (e.g.
Italian cornice,
which means frame rather than cornice, and French roman,
meaning romanesque rather than Roman, which is romain)
but also to avoid anachronism in English words themselves. Thus when
Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) remarked: "All things are
artificial, for nature is the art of God." (Religio
Medici,
16), he was using the word artificial in a different sense from the
one now usual. To capture Browne's meaning we might rather say
"artifactual."
From
what has been said one might conclude that we encounter an unending
profusion of states of languages and an unending profusion of
languages. Or do we? In art history not all languages are equal.
From the founding of our own art historical tradition in the
fifteenth-century Renaissance to about 1800 the Italian tradition was
dominant. The exceptions prove the rule, for even when historians
like Carel van Mander and Joachim von Sandrart wrote in Dutch and
German respectively, their ideas reflected the Italian tradition that
culminated in Giorgio Vasari. After 1800 the power, as it were,
crossed the Alps, and German-speaking art historians assumed
dominance. On reflection, the first, Italian-dominated phase seems
understandable, for Italy was the homeland of Renaissance art itself.
It seems fitting that the proud creators of this art should take
first place in explaining it. But German art, for all its merits,
has not--since at least the Ottonian period--been in the lead. The
explanation for Kunstgeschichte's
flowering lies in part in the excellence of the German university
system, but there are other reasons for German preeminence, and these
must be explored in due course.
Some
anthropologists, notably Benjamin Lee Whorf and Edward Sapir, have
held that language shapes thought decisively--to the point that we
cannot even think thoughts that the structure of our language
excludes. Most would reject this extreme linguistic determinism
today, but there seems little doubt that language conventions help to
guide research.
The
Sociology of Knowledge.
It has
been suggested that the development of art history can be clarified
by examining it in the light of the sociology of knowledge.
This approach arose in Germany with Max Scheler and especially Karl
Mannheim, who helped to spread it in English-speaking countries.
The ultimate germ stems from Marx's idea of socioeconomic
determinants of ideological superstructure.
Setting
aside art history for the moment, an example may help to
clarify the approach. As Robert K. Merton and others have
shown, seventeenth-century England saw a remarkable flowering of
natural science.xxix
Gilbert's work on magnetism (1600), Bacon's attempt to reorganize
all of knowledge (1605), and Harvey's discovery of the circulation of
the blood (1628) are but three major landmarks. This energetic
activity led to the foundation of the Royal Academy in 1660.
These advances are all the more remarkable because England had
been scientifically undistinguished in previous centuries. Why
this explosion of knowledge? Protestantism is the answer that
springs to mind. But Protestant Germany and Sweden registered
no such advances at this time. Hence the search has narrowed to
a particular form of Protestantism endemic to England, Puritanism.
This step was taken by Merton in his germinal study of 1938. Yet
some have wondered whether this parallel is more than a coincidence.
In rebuttal it is said that Puritanism promotes the goals of
antiauthoritarianism, optimism about social transformation,
methodological empiricism, and experience. Recent research has
suggested that this link is real, though other factors contributed
also.
Among
the other factors are fascination with trade and its
respectability among Englishmen, in contrast to other countries. As a
rule professional historians tend to be wary of monocausal
explanations, in which phenomenon A is derived simply from cause X.
Instead they prefer polythematic explanations. Thus, the French
Revolution came about as a result of agitation by intellectuals (the
philosophes),
growing secularism and anticlericalism, the incompetence of the royal
government, and so forth--not by any one of these alone.
To
return to Robert K. Merton, he introduced the important distinction
between internal and external approaches. Before his work students
of science had generally viewed the subject as one of progress from
(relative) darkness to (relative) light, with individual scientists
being graded on the "correctness" or "incorrectness"
of their views, based on later knowledge. There are obvious
difficulties with this view, for scientific progress does not
necessarily proceed in a straight line; some approaches, judged
marginal at their inception, prove fruitful, while others, which seem
mainstream, turn out to be sterile. Nonetheless, there is a place
for such internalist studies for they reflect important realities:
scientific knowledge is cumulative, and each person who wishes to
make an advance must inform him- or herself fully of the state of the
question before setting out. However, Merton showed that this method
needs to be supplemented by its complement. Only the externalist
approach, roughly equatable with the sociology of knowledge, could
explain delays of discoveries or their rapid succession and could
explain why the propensity for discoveries tends to "bunch"
among particular groups and nations.
Can
this approach of the sociology of knowledge be applied to art
writing? In Vasari the predominant role of fame seems to be
grounded in the competing world of the Renaissance states and in the
this-worldly emphases of humanism. During the nineteenth century the
enormous prestige of natural science led to the formulation of the
ideal of a "scientific art history." The
identification of such factors can sometimes be reductive, as when
Martin Bernal claimed that Winckelmann's emphasis on Greek art was a
simple product of growing European chauvinism and imperialism.xxx
To anticipate, we shall expect that elements such as these play
important roles, but art history has its own inner dynamic, which
means that it is not simply a reflection of such external factors.
Today art history is well established. Yet one should ask what it
takes to get a discipline started, for the circumstances of origin
must inevitably have left their stamp. For a discipline to emerge a
generally favorable climate is required. Yet there seems to be
a more specific condition: networking. Recently this phenomenon
has been investigated under the old seventeenth-century rubric of the
"invisible college," an informal collective of closely
interacting researchers, who agree to keep each other abreast of
continuing progress along particular lines of investigation.xxxi
Typically, members of an invisible college are geographically
dispersed, and communicate through letter, telephone, and (nowadays)
modem and fax, gathering for face-to-face encounters only rarely. In
this way a new field of study can be "jump-started" with
little initial academic recognition in the form of departments and
grants; these are added later.
The
Question of Interested Parties.
The
last two decades have seen a sustained critique of the earlier
confidence in the disinterestedness of knowledge. One approach to
this problem is the sociology of knowledge discussed above. However,
the new critiques claim to be more radical. Some Marxists assert
that all theories are simply ideological in the sense that they
advance the interests of dominant economic groups, both by affirming
contingent developments as natural and inevitable and by defining
problems in such a way that oppressed minorities are denied a voice.
Some art history has been, one must grant, affected by such
considerations. An example is the Tuscan bias of Vasari, designed to
favor a particular region. Moreover, when Vasari's tradition was
"de-Tuscanized," this broadening served to make it the
instrument of the European aristocracy as a whole during the Age of
Absolutism. Such assertions are valid--but do not take us very far.
For scholars often affirm, though sometimes in a guarded way, truths
opposed to dominant interests. Thus Winckelmann, writing from the
very heart of the Age of Absolutism (and in the Papal capital, no
less), concluded that Greek art had flourished under democracy, and
had withered under tyranny (i.e. absolutism). The possibility of an
oppositional stance itself refutes the claim that ideologies are
all-enveloping. Still they often exercise pressures of which the
writers are themselves unaware.
A more
radical solution has been proffered by poststructuralism or
deconstruction.xxxii
The deconstructors propose to abolish the old idea that truth
involves a progressive improvement of "fit" between what is
explained and the language we use to explain it. This is commonly
termed the Correspondence Theory of truth. But Derrida has
proclaimed that "Il n'y a pas de dehors," that is that
there is nothing outside of our linguistic webs. His followers have
hastened to assert that Derrida was only asserting that the
relationship between language and reality is always problematic.
Relativism is not a new current in Western thought, but here it must
be asserted that in its strong form it is an obstacle to
understanding the history of a discipline--in this case the history
of art.
Then
there is the matter of more particular interests. Until recently
there have been relatively few biographies of historians of art. In
part this dearth reflects modesty: most art historians have accepted
that the biographies of artists were of infinitely greater interest
than those of their interpreters. But the reticence has perhaps
served to promote the myth of a totally objective "scientific"
history exempt from the personalities of its creators.
Each
personality is different, but there are also commonalities. Some,
like Xenocrates and Vasari, who excel in art history have also been
artists; others never practiced art. Both conditions have been a
source of some embarrassment, for the artists who have taken up art
history have either abandoned the practice of it, or have had to
sustain criticism that they are artists of the second rank. "Those
who can do, those who can't teach." The suggestion of creative
impotence holds even more strongly for those who have never practiced
art. Yet recent reconsiderations have broken down the dichotomy
between creation and criticism. Writing and speaking are also arts.
Perhaps
the best counsel is to reject premature conclusions about the
interests of art historians. The discipline of art history has its
own dynamic (as the "internalist perspective" suggests) and
this has presented a series of problems that individual art
historians, whatever their background and prejudices, have found
irresistible.
Earlier
Attempts at Writing the Historiography of Art History.
The
founder of the modern historiography of art history was a patient and
resourceful Viennese scholar, Julius von Schlosser (1866-1938). As a
young man Schlosser had made contributions to the "hunt for
sources" that formed the basis for the series started by Rudolf
von Eitelberg, the Quellenschriften,
or primary texts in art history. Accordingly, he compiled gatherings
of excerpts from original sources devoted to the Carolingian era
(1892) and to the Western Middle Ages as a whole (1896). A different
sort of contribution was Schlosser's exemplary critical edition of
Lorenzo Ghiberti's Commentarii
(1912) in which, with great acumen, he reconstructed the formative
elements of the writing of that artist turned historian. He did this
so thoroughly that the reader feels privileged to enter Ghiberti's
study, peering over his shoulder so as to witness the actual process
of creation. Such endeavors are rarely conducted in a vacuum.
Schlosser was in contact with his contemporary Wolfgang Kallab whose
posthumously published Vasaristudien
(1908) explored the sources of Vasari's Lives
with great critical acumen. The confluence of these interests led to
a work of extraordinary erudition, Die
Kunstliteratur
(1924).xxxiii
This book, best known in the enlarged Italian edition, is both more
and less than a history of art history: more, because it includes
writings on art theory and aesthetics, as well as histories of art,
and less because it stops at 1800. Towards the end of his life,
Schlosser published an essay that constituted one building block
towards the construction of the subsequent historiography: an account
of a hundred years of the Vienna school of art historians, which is,
as one would expect, partly personal.xxxiv
In these inquiries the Viennese scholar was sustained by the
optimistic belief, derived from the Neapolitan philosopher Benedetto
Croce, that we can make meaningful contact across the centuries with earlier
minds, recreating their mental universe in our own thoughts.
A
parallel study appeared in Germany. A student of the intellectual
historian Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Waetzoldt (1880-1945) sought to
delineate the achievement of German art history in a series of vivid
capsule biographies published in two volumes.xxxv
He began with some early forerunners, culminating in Joachim von
Sandrart (1606-1688). However, his main account started with
Winckelmann and concluded with Carl Justi, who died in 1912. The
Austrians and Viennese were not included.
The
first history of art history to survey its entire sweep from the
Greeks and Romans to the present emanated from Lionello Venturi
(1885-1961). The son of the great historian of Italian art Adolfo
Venturi, Lionello set himself apart from his father by his studies of
modern art. In 1926 he published the first synthetic study of the
"taste for the primitives," the interest in pre-Renaissance
Italian and Flemish painting that constituted a subversive element
within the Western exaltation of classical aesthetic norms from the
time of Vasari onwards. In 1931 Venturi, then a professor at the
University of Turin, refused to take the required oath of loyalty to
the fascist regime, and went into exile, first in France and then in
the United States. It was in this country that his History
of Art Criticism
first appeared in 1936.xxxvi
Like that of Schlosser, this work too was sustained by the
idealistic philosophy of Benedetto Croce. Although it includes
aesthetics and criticism, the main emphasis--the title
notwithstanding--is on the historiography of art. Although his book
may seem overschematic and is now dated, Venturi carries the story up
to the early twentieth century. It is thus the first organic history
of art (though it does leave out, not surprisingly for its time,
non-European art).
World
War II halted art-historical research. Publications, generally of
texts prepared before the war, were reduced to a trickle. After the
end of the war and after essential steps had been taken to rebuild
European cities and relocate stolen works of art, primary research
got started again. Much of this new research was accomplished by, or
under the inspiration of, scholars of the "transatlantic
migration," distinguished European exiles who had settled mainly
in the United States, with a few going to Britain. Although many of
these scholars had been formed during the 1920s, a phase of intensive
theory building, they preferred to put this speculation past them,
concentrating on their own primary researches which had been delayed
by the disruptions of immigration and the war.
In 1947
Elizabeth Holt, who had been trained in Germany, brought out a
selection of sources, generally short excerpts culled from a variety
of sources.xxxvii
The ultimate inspiration for this useful publication was the much
bigger collection of material gathered by the Austrian
Quellenschriften;
unlike these publications, the sources appeared only in English
translation. She later supplemented the collection to cover much of
the nineteenth century.xxxviii
Then H. W. Janson organized a multivolume series, the Sources
and Documents in the History of Art,
edited by various scholars and made widely available in paperback by
Prentice-Hall. The series included volumes by such leading scholars
as J. J. Pollitt (Greek and Roman art), Cyril Mango (Byzantine Art),
Wolfgang Stechow (northern Renaissance art), and Linda Nochlin
(nineteenth-century art). These volumes were not casebooks,
comprising examples of modern scholarship, but gatherings of primary sources
contemporaneous with the art works they described. Initially these
publications elicited unrealistic hopes: it was thought that they
could supplant undergraduate textbooks. Some even idealized the
sources in almost mystical fashion, attributing to them the singular
virtue of affording direct access to the mentality that had produced
the art. In retrospect this assumption, implying the unity of source
and art work, seems a naive manifestation of Hegelian cultural
history, with its conviction of the invincible "spirit of the
age." In fact, the sources supplied were quite diverse and, in the absence of a proper commentary. These
excerpts did not bond together to form a history of art, and their
presentation in isolation occluded the vital contributions that had been
produced by art historians over several generations. Thus these
source collections, despite their considerable intrinsic value, unintentionally served to delay recognition of the desirability of a
critical examination of the historiography of art.
Only
somewhat later did the need become evident to resume contact with the
earlier traditions of art historiography, so as to restore links that
had been essentially severed in 1933. In 1958 the Hungarian-born art
historian Arnold Hauser, who was teaching at Brandeis University,
published a book containing his personal views on art-historical
methodology with extensive treatment of Wölfflin and the Viennese
art historians.xxxix
He did not attempt a systematic account of the evolution of the
discipline. That task was undertaken by Udo Kultermann in his
handbook of 1966; this genial, but largely anecdotal work was
premature, in as much as the author did not probe deeply into the
theoretical concerns that guided the individual figures.xl
Luigi Grassi's three-volume survey, produced during the 1970s,
offered some treatment of art history but mainly focused on critical
and aesthetic theories; since coverage did not extend beyond the
eighteenth century, his study was essentially an up-dating and
summary (not always accurate) of Schlosser's magnum opus.xli
Most recently, Germaine Bazin, a curator at the Louvre and
professor at several universities, produced a sprawling, personal
volume.xlii
New
efforts, limited in scope, but more deeply probing, occurred in the
1970s and 1980s, when deconstruction and other new intellectual
trends fostered efforts to reassess the foundations of disciplines.
Radicals assumed that the foundations of all disciplines would be
found wanting; others thought that they could be defended, but only
by examining their own principles. Some art historians began to
speak of a "crisis" in their discipline, without specifying
exactly what this meant or how it could be overcome.xliii
At the same time, others were quietly working to generate new
information. Joan Hart and Michael Ann Holly, to cite but two names,
have made impressive studies of two notable art historians: Heinrich
Wölfflin and Erwin Panofsky.
During
the 1980s the Art
Bulletin,
the "official" organ of American art history, published a
series of state-of-the-question articles on various fields, such as
medieval art, seventeenth-century Italian art, nineteenth-century
art, and so forth. Since the task was an imposing one, the authors
generally concentrated on the scholarly production of the last two
decades or so, unintentionally conveying an impression of the special
value of that which is recent, and neglecting the long history of
interpretation of these subjects.
The G.
K. Hall firm of Boston has brought out a score of comprehensive
bibliographies, mainly on medieval themes. The French Romanesque
volume, which lists virtually all publications in the field up until
the time of publication, is a representative example.xliv
Since the arrangement of this book is partly chronological, patient
study reveals the main outlines of the history of the subject.
The
problem of integrating the older and newer scholarship was recognized
in the case studies of David Carrier.xlv
After considerable deliberation, he offered reflections on a range
of critical discourse about such artists as Piero della Francesca,
Caravaggio, and Manet, but disregarding the historical grounding that
lies behind the successive strata of interpretration.
Moshe
Barash has undertaken an ambitious history of art theory as developed
by artists, aestheticians, and critics, but with relatively little
emphasis on art history.xlvi
The problem of integrating the history of art theory with art
history has not really been addressed.
Germany
and Austria have witnessed more extensive efforts, directed at
reestablishing contact with art history as an achievement of earlier
German humanism. At the University of Hamburg a massive project has
been launched to document some four hundred German and Austrian art
historians who had gone into exile from the Hitler regime. Once
these individual biographies are assembled, it will be possible to
make generalizations about overall trends and about the way the
refugee scholars adapted to their new homes. Symposium volumes in
Germany allowed one to compare groups of art historians, while the
Austrians concentrated on recovering individual figures. Heinrich
Dilly essayed a sociological approach concentrating on the emergence
of art history as a profession and the institutional framework that
grew up along with it.xlvii
A somewhat different focus appears in the pithy reflections of Hans
Belting.xlviii
Thus
far recent American and German scholars have generally refrained from offering
an overview of the historiography of art history. It has been left
for the Englishman Michael Podro to offer at least a partial
synthesis. Seeking to isolate the main conceptual sources, rather
that to trace biographies or institutional roots, his Critical
Historians of Art
treats the German traditions of historicism and perceptualism from
Hegel to Panofsky.xlix
For a very large set of biographies of art historians online, see also the Dictionary of Art Historians: http://www.dictionaryofarthistorians.org.
Summary
and Prospect.
The
above discussion has yielded some basic observations that will help
to guide further inquiry. Art history, which overlaps with art
criticism and archaeology, has a long and varied pedigree. The views
of art historians reached the public through various forms of
language and rhetorical strategies. Not uniformly distributeed, the
discipline of art history developed selectively and in particular
places; the sociology of knowledge aids us to understand these
rhythms, though an indispensible element of individual talent
highlights the contributions of researchers in the field of art.
The
ensuing chapters trace the separate founding of traditions in art
history in Greco-Roman society and in imperial China. After a hiatus
in the Middle Ages, the Greco-Roman tradition of art history
triumphantly reasserted itself in Renaissance Italy, laying the
groundwork for subsequent developments in the field. Stricken by the
faltering of Chinese civilization, a process that became evident by
about 1500 CE, the impact of Chinese art history was essentially
limited to Korea and Japan. Eventually all three countries adopted
concepts derived from the West.
The
models developed by Italian art history dominated Western Europe
until about 1760. At that time Winckelmann forged a new paradigm
based on a fresh study of ancient Greek art. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century this version of art history was challenged by the
rising force of romanticism with its aesthetic pluralism that
fostered a new appreciation of medieval, Egyptian and eventually many
other art traditions. In Germany strict new methods of historical
investigation lent rigor to all types of art historical research.
Towards the end of the century Heinrich Wölfflin in Switzerland and
Germany, working in concert with a cohort of Viennese savants, forged
a synthesis that relied in large measure on the psychology of vision.
This approach found its complement in an interest in subject matter
(iconography) promoted by Emile Mâle, Aby Warburg, and Erwin
Panofsky.
As
professional art historians had neglected modern art, it was left to
critics, dealers, and independent scholars to champion this field.
Other scholars turned their attention to non-European art, especially
the great traditions of Asia: China, Japan, India, and Islam. The
formal interests of avant-garde artists helped to promote study of
the tribal arts of Africa and Oceania.
Impressive
as this heritage was, more remained to be done. The late twentieth
century saw a growing sense that the boundaries of art study needed
to be enlarged so as to include psychological, semiotic, economic,
and gender issues.
i
Donald Preziosi, Rethinking
Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989.
ii
For one aspect of this ferment, see Quentin Skinner, ed., The
Return of Grand Theory in the Human Sciences,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985. The impact of
deconstruction, feminism, semiotics, gender studies and other recent
trends is discussed in Chapter Eighteen, below.
iii
Peter Novick, That
Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American
Historical Profession,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988; Norman Cantor, Inventing
the Middle Ages: The Lives, Works and Ideas of the Great
Medievalists of the Twentieth Century,
New York: William Morrow, 1991.
iv
See, e.g., Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, eds., "The
Politics of Liberal Education," special number of The
South Atlantic Quarterly,
89:1 (Winter 1990).
v
Much has been written on this issue. An early intervention was Paul Berman, ed., Debating
P.C.: The Controversy Over Political Correctness on College
Campuses,
New York: Dell\Laurel, 1992.
vi
To be sure, the term "works of art" begs a question. Some
have argued that every human artifact is actually a work of art,
while others would restrict the definition to works that are deemed
to have aesthetic merit. Each art historian must choose for him or
herself the kinds of works to be studied.
vii
The quarterly Word
and Image,
founded in 1984, is devoted to all sorts of interactive
relationships between verbal and visual expression.
viii
Some would say that investigations of the three kinds cited are
already art history. This may be true if the discipline is defined
broadly, but in this study we are concerned primarily with the
narrative core, with art history in the strict sense.
ix
There is an extensive recent literature on the concept of narrative;
see, e.g., Wallace Martin, Recent
Theories of Narrative,
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986; and Philip J. M.
Sturgess, Narrativity:
Theory and Practice,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. For narrative in art works, see
Richard Brilliant, Visual
Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art,
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984; and Herbert L. Kessler
and Marianna Shreves Simpson, eds., Pictorial
Narrative in Antiquity and the Middle Ages,
Washington: National Gallery of Art, 1985 (Studies in the History of
Art, 16).
x
Gerald A. Press, "History and the Development of the Idea of
History in Antiquity," History
and Theory,
16 (1977), 280-96; Arnaldo Momigliano, "The Origins of
Universal History," On
Pagans, Jews, and Christians,
Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1986, pp. 33-57.
xi
This term is more common in Britain than in North America. See A.
L. Rees and Frances Borzello, eds., The
New Art History,
Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1988.
xii
For a similar argument see Edward Stein, in Stein, ed., Forms
of Desire: Sexual Orientation and the Social Construction
Controversy,
New York: Garland, 1990, p. 346ff.
xiii
Joseph Alsop, The
Rare Art Traditions: The History of Art Collecting and Its Linked
Phenomena,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
xiv
Some recent theorists, such as the late Roland Barthes, have sought to place
critical writing on the same plane as "original"
creations. One may well be persuaded by this, and still concede
that, historically speaking, writing about art has not enjoyed the
same universality as the making of art.
xv
Elaborate parallels, not always convincing, have been traced by
Wylie Sypher, Four
Stages of Renaissance Style: Transformations in Art and Literature
1400-1700,
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday (Anchor Books), 1955; and idem, Rococo
to Cubism in Art and Literature,
New York: Random House, 1960. The concept of the sister arts has
been traced back ultimately to the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos (ca.
556-468 BCE), who held that painting is mute poetry, poetry a
speaking picture.
xvi
For an account of recent vicissitudes in this realm, see Robert
Darnton, "Intellectual and Cultural History," in Michael
Kammen, ed., The
Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United
States,
Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980, pp. 327-54. Hegelian
sources are stressed (and deplored) by E. H. Gombrich, In
Search of Cultural History,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969.
xvii
There is no up-to-date history of art criticism. Lionello Venturi's
now antiquated History
of Art Criticism
(2nd ed., New York: Dutton, 1964) swamps criticism proper in a study
of other matters, while Joseph Darracott's Art
Criticism: A User's Guide
(London: Bellew, 1991) is too brief and diffuse. For the founding
traditions, see Anita Brookner, The
Genius of the Future: Studies in French Art Criticism: Diderot,
Stendhal, Baudelaire, Zola, The Brothers Goncourt, Huysmans,
New York: Phaidon, 1971; and Moshe Barasch, Modern
Theories of Art, 1: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire,
New
York: New York University Press, 1990. Literary criticism basks in
the light of a truly monumental survey: René Wellek, A
History of Modern Criticism, 1750-1950,
8 vols., New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955-92.
xviii
For the foundations of the discipline in Mediterranean lands, see
Ulrich Hausmann, ed., Allgemeine
Grundlagen der Archäologie
Munich: Beck, 1969 (Handbuch der Archäologie). For the Northern
traditions, see Stuart Piggott, Ancient
Britons and the Antiquarian Imagination: Ideas from the Renaissance
to the Regency,
London: Thames and Hudson, 1989; and Glyn Daniel, The
Origins and Growth of Archaeology,
London: Penguin Books, 1967. Recent trends are surveyed from a
somewhat Marxian standpoint by Bruce G. Trigger, A
History of Archaeological Thought,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
xix
Monroe C. Beardsley, Aesthetics
from Classical Greece to the Present: A Short History,
New York: Macmillan, 1966.
xx
A recent, somewhat tongue-in-cheek lexicon is Robert Atkins,
Artspeak:
A Guide to Contemporary Ideas, Movements, and Buzzwords,
New York: Abbeville Press, 1990. More formidable and useful is Robert W. Nelson and Richard Shiff, eds., Critical Terms for Art History, 2nd ed., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003 (in-depth studies of 22 key terms; marred by some postmodern jargon).
xxi
For these and other examples, see Jerome J. Pollitt, The
Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974.
xxii
Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art, Kirchengeräte,
Kreuze und Reliquiare der christlichen Kirchen,
3d ed., Munich: K. G. Saur, 1992.
xxiii
Michael Baxandall, Giotto
and the Orators: Humanist Observers of Painting in Italy and the
Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 1350-1450,
Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971.
xxiv
For a roster of French art terms, but without etymological analysis,
see Louis Réau, Dictionnaire
polyglotte des termes d'art et d'archéologie,
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953.
xxv
Walter Ullmann, Language
and Style,
Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964, pp. 85-88; Ludwig Schrader, Sinn
und Sinnesverknüpfungen,
Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1969.
xxvi
Hans Eichner, ed., 'Romantic'
and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word,
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972.
xxvii
Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit
de Corps: The Art of the Parisian Avant-Garde and the First World
War, 1914-1925,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
xxviii
A characteristically disappointing, but perhaps faithful reflection
of this dearth of analysis is Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, eds.,
The
Language of Art History,
New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
xxix
Robert K. Merton, Science, "Technology and Society in
Seventeenth Century England," Osiris,
4 (1938), 360-632. See I. Bernard Cohen, ed., Puritanism
and the Rise of Modern Science: The Merton Thesis,
New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990. On Merton's
work as a whole, see Piotr Sztompka, Robert
K. Merton: An Intellectual Profile,
New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986; and
Charles
Crothers, Robert
K. Mertin,
New York: Tavistock, 1987.
xxx
Martin Bernal, Black
Athena,
vol. 1, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987, pp. 212-15.
xxxi
See Derek J. de Solla Price, Little
Science, Big Science,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1963 (rev. ed., 1986); Diana
Crane, Invisible
Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities,
Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972; and Daryl E. Chubin,
Sociology
of Sciences: An Annotated Biblography on Invisible Colleges,
New York: Garland, 1983.
xxxii
See Chapter Eighteen, below.
xxxiii
Julius von Schlosser, Die
Kunstliteratur,
Vienna: Schroll, 1924; Julius Schlosser Magnino, La
Letteratura artistica: manuale delle fonti della storia dell'arte
moderna,
trans. by Filippo Rossi, edited by Otto Kurz, 3d ed., Florence: La
Nuova Italia, 1964.
xxxiv
Julius von Schlosser, "Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte:
Rückblick auf ein Säkulum deutscher Gelehrtenarbeit in
Österreich," Mitteilungen
des Österreichischen Instituts für Geschichtsforschung
(Ergänzungsband), 13:2 (1934), 145-210.
xxxv
Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche
Kunsthistoriker,
2 vols., Leipzig: Seemann, 1924. The reprint (Berlin: Volker
Spiess, 1986) contains a short memoir by the author's son Stephan
(1, pp. 1-4). See also Peter Betthausen, Peter H. Feist, and Christiane Fork, eds, Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon, Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999; and Karen Michaels, Transplantierte Kunstwissenschaft: Deutschsprachige Kunstgeschichte im Amerikanischen Exil, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999. Ten autobiographical accounts appear in Martina Sitt, ed., Kunsthistoriker in eigener Sache: Zehn autobiographische Skizzen, Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990. For one particular country, see the very inclusive compilation of Gonzalo M. Borrás Gualis and Ana Reyes Pacios Lozano, eds., Diccionario de historiadores españoles del arte, Madrid: Cátedra, 2006.
xxxvi
Lionello Venturi, History
of Art Criticism,
trans. by Charles Marriott, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936; enlarged
ed. 1964.
xxxvii
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., Literary
Sources of Art History: An Anthology of Texts from Theophilus to
Goethe,
Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947. Some changes and
additions appear in the paperback version: A
Documentary History of Art,
2 vols., New York: Doubleday (Anchor Books), 1957-58.
xxxviii
Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed., From
the Classicists to the Impressionists: A Documentary History of Art
and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century,
Doubleday (Anchor Books), 1966; idem, ed., The
Art of All Nations: 1850-1873: The Emerging Role of Exhibitions and
Critics,
New York: Doubleday (Anchor Books), 1981; idem, ed., The
Expanding World of Art 1874-1902: Volume 1: Universal Expositions
and State-Sponsored Arts Exhibitions,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. For the late nineteenth and
first half of the twentieth century, see Herschel B. Chipp, ed.,
Theories
of Modern Art: A Sourcebook by Artists and Critics,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968.
xxxix
Arnold Hauser, The
Philosophy of Art History,
New York: Knopf, 1959 (first published in German as Philosophie
der Kunstgeschichte,
Munich: Beck, 1958).
xl
Udo Kultermann, Geschichte
der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft,
Vienna: Econ Verlag, 1966 (trans. as The
History of Art History: Art History through World War II,
Pleasantville, N.Y.: Abaris Books, 1993). The shortcomings of this
work reflect the obscurity of the theme at the time it was
conceived, for the enterprising author was plowing a lonely furrow.
xli
Luigi Grassi, Teorici
e storia della critica d'arte,
3 vols., Rome: Multigrafica, 1970-79.
xlii
Germaine Bazin, Histoire
de l'histoire de l'art de Vasari à nos jours,
Paris: Albin Michel, 1986. In addition to self-imposed limitations
("Ce livre ne concerne que l'art occidental, tel qu'il s'est
développé en Europe, puis projeté sur le continent Américain, à
l'exclusion de l'Antiquité et Byzance."), this book has a
rather subjective character governed by the author's own interests
and is often inexact with regard to detail. Another disappointment (too brief and present-minded) is Vernon Hyde Minor, Art History's History, New York: Prentice-Hall, 1994.
xliii
See the papers in Art
Journal,
42:4 (Winter 1982), edited by Henri Zerner. For criticism of the
crisis notion, see Donald Preziosi, Rethinking
Art History,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989, pp. 1-20.
xliv
Thomas Lyman and Daniel Smartt, French
Romanesque Sculpture: An Annotated Bibliography,
Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
xlv
David Carrier, Principles
of Art Writing,
University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
xlvi
Moshe Barash, Theories
of Art: From Plato to Winckelmann,
New York: New York University Press, 1985; idem, Modern
Theories of Art, 1: From Winckelmann to Baudelaire,
New York: New York University Press, 1990; and Theories of Art: From Impressionism to Kandinsky, New York: Routledge, 1998.
xlvii
Heinrich Dilly, Kunstgeschichte
als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Disziplin,
Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1979.
xlviii
Hans Belting, The
End of the History of Art?
trans. Christopher S. Wood, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987.
xlix
Michael Podro, The
Critical Historians of Art,
New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. See, however, the useful anthology of Donald Preziosi, The Art of Art History, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Two similar collections are W. Eugene Kleinbauer, ed.,
Modern Perspectives in Western Art History; an Anthology of 20th-century Writings on the Visual Arts, New York, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971; and Eric Fernie, Art History and its Methods, London: Phaidon, 1995.
