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.
Max Dvorák: art history and the crisis of modernity
The work of Max Dvořak has seldom enjoyed the acclaim accorded to that of his Viennese colleague Alois Riegl, or contemporaries such as Aby Warburg and Heinrich Wolfflin. This paper argues for a reconsideration of his work, in which his ‘art history as the history of ideas’ is seen both as a lens through which Dvořak conducted a sustained commentary on the present, and also as a critique of modernity comparable to the social and economic theories of Ernst Troeltsch, Ferdinand Tonnies, Georg Simmel or Ernst Mach. The article argues that Dvořak's work offers an important example of the numerous intellectual and political tensions at work in the final years of the Habsburg monarchy. As such, the article aims to question the institutional frame within which much art-historical writing is often analysed.
Ekphrasis and Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari's Lives
The major part of Vasari's Lives is made up of descriptions of paintings, but these have been largely ignored in the critical literature. Instead, writers have concentrated on the aesthetic theories and attitudes stated in the introductions to the three parts of the Lives and on the use of certain terms such as disegno, maniera and grazia in the work as a whole. The assumption seems to be that Vasari is a forerunner of classical theory, as Kallab suggests,' or, as Schlosser says, a mannerist theorist.2 Schlosser, however, prefaces his presentation of Vasari as a man of ideas by admitting that Vasari works not from general principles as a theorist does, but rather from the observation of particulars. Kallab, who was the originator of this position, and incidentally of the whole study of Vasari as a viewer and thinker as well as a collector of information, felt that it was precisely in the variety and conflict of observations and judgments that the special value of Vasari's outlook lay. Unfortunately Kallab died before he himself could deal with this variety. It was Schlosser who reduced his more complex ideas to the simple and common notion of Vasari as an unsystematic thinker who can yet be systematically expounded if one sticks to the prefaces and the terminology.3 I am not suggesting that Vasari's descriptions of paintings hold the key to the Lives, nor that we can better our understanding of him simply by adding a study of the descriptions to the view just outlined. Rather, a certain concept of Vasari has determined the selective way in which the Lives have been read. Conversely, a consideration of the descriptions brings up new questions about Vasari's attitude to painting and suggests a context in which to speak of his achievement.4 If one views Vasari, as Schlosser does, as a theorist, his main ideas seem to concern the growth of art from Giotto to the perfection of Michelangelo. Perfection is judged according to the famous perfetta regola dell'arte, which covers regola, ordine, misura, disegno and maniera.5 How can we