PAINTERLY POLITICS: WÖLFFLIN, FORMALISM AND GERMAN ACADEMIC CULTURE, 1885–1915
At the turn of the twentieth century, Heinrich Wolfflin, August Schmarzow and other formalist art historians contributed greatly to the formation of their field's institutional identity. Art history, they believed, was falling prey to a ‘spiritless’ (geistlos) condition that supposedly existed among the student population and which was associated with rapid industrialization and the mechanization of society. Expressing themselves in pedagogical treatises – which have largely been unnoticed by historiographers of art history – formalists focused on the ability of the ‘painterly’ (malerische) aesthetic to convey ‘germanic’ moral and spiritual values to a student population that was being wrongly influenced by an ‘elitist’, traditional art history overly preoccupied with philological and contextual research.
Developing the Picture: Wölfflin's Performance Art
Abstract Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) is credited for having first made use of double projection of lantern slides in lectures on art history in the early 1900s. While this bit of information is often mentioned, if at all, as of anecdotal value, it has arguably gained more weight in our own image-saturated culture. Wölfflin's lecture hall achievement is not only to virtually inaugurate for art history a systematic descriptive system based on photography, but also to perform pictures of art for the audience to understand art in artistic or visual rather than art historical terms. In order to explain and highlight the element of art in art, art is insufficient. The art-less facsimile of black-and-white photography is better suited for this purpose, by transforming the nuanced and materially captivating art object into a flat binary system of formal contrasts. This article reflects upon Wölfflin's pursuit of the aesthetic or “artistic” element in art by considering his very material and embodied laboratory teaching practice. I suggest that rather than treat Wölfflin as a hardcore formalist, he is better understood as a meta-artist, with the ultimate aim of developing the picture of art from pictures of art for all to see.
A bifunctional Cr/Yb/Tm:Ca3Ga2Ge3O12 phosphor with near-infrared long-lasting phosphorescence and upconversion luminescence.
Currently, upconversion nanocrystals and long-lasting phosphorescent particles have attracted extensive research interest for their possible applications as bioimaging probes. However, there are few reports concerning the achievement of both upconversion luminescence of lanthanide ions and long-lasting phosphorescence of transition metal ions in a sole host so far. Herein, we demonstrate a novel calcium gallium germanium garnet (Ca3Ga2Ge3O12) host where lanthanide ions such as Tm(3+)/Yb(3+) and transition metal ions such as Cr(3+) can be easily incorporated through substituting the Ca(2+) and Ga(3+) respectively. This Cr/Yb/Tm:Ca3Ga2Ge3O12 phosphor exhibits both broadband near-infrared long-lasting phosphorescence of Cr(3+) with an afterglow time of more than 7000 s and near-infrared to near-infrared upconversion luminescence of Tm(3+). Impressively, it is evidenced that the addition of Yb(3+)/Tm(3+) into Cr:Ca3Ga2Ge3O12 not only results in Tm(3+) upconversion luminescence but also greatly increases Cr(3+) afterglow time. Based on excitation/emission, three-dimensional thermoluminescence, and time-resolved luminescence spectra, the related long-lasting phosphorescence and upconversion luminescent mechanisms are systematically discussed as well.