Heinrich wölfflin principles of art history summary
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Indeed, the possibility of full occlusion of the past stands as a continual threat or—better—promise within Wölfflin’s system. At once systematic and subjective, and remarkable for its compelling descriptions of works of art, Wölfflin’s text has endured as an accessible yet rigorous approach to the study of style. For Wölfflin, when one optical stratum is uncovered, other lower strata are partially or fully occluded.
But why and how and on what basis should we “always assume” that? As Wittgenstein put it (rather poetically) in Culture and Value, “The light shed by works [in the past] is a beautiful light, but it only shines with real beauty if it is illuminated by yet another light [in the present].”1 In other words, for the past to bear meaning, or to bear full meaning, requires an act of engagement in the present to bring that past to life.
We can begin to see already that the Principles of Art History might better be described as the Principles of Visual Culture, where the historian’s task is the excavation of certain buried modes of seeing the world, a mode of seeing that is inscribed in any and everything produced by a culture at a moment in time, art being simply a localized instance of a much larger perceptual modality.
Introductory essays provide a historical and critical framework, referencing debates engendered by Principles in the twentieth century for a renewed reading of the text in the twenty-first.
Wölfflin and the Promise of Anonymity
From a certain perspective, it is unclear why art history needs a new translation of Heinrich Wölfflin’s The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Early Modern Art.
There are a range of other foundational documents of the discipline that have yet to receive even a first hearing. No doubt that is true, but to what end? What causes our entirely different reactions to precisely the same painting or to the same painter?
In this now-classic treatise, published originally in Germany in the early 1920s, Professor Wölfflin provides an objective set of criteria to answer these and related questions.
Although Wölfflin applied his analysis to objects of early modern European art, Principles of Art History has been a fixture in the theoretical and methodological debates of the discipline of art history and has found a global audience.
With translations in twenty-four languages and many reprints, Wölfflin’s work may be the most widely read and translated book of art history ever.
Is there a pattern underlying the seemingly helter-skelter development of art in different cultures and at different times? Moreover, the M. D. Hottinger translation of the text is in print and widely available, and retains much of the elegance, if not the letter, of Wölfflin’s prose. While the art historian has to try and reconstruct how works of art were intended to be seen, Wölfflin finds his contemporaries all too inclined to see everything in a painterly way because they are imbued with impressionism” (56).
According to Wölfflin, “although the model was the same, and each of these . As Wölfflin observed early on, a mode of seeing—a Gothic one, for instance—can appear in a shoe just as well as in a cathedral, perhaps even more clearly in a shoe, a point that underlines his commitment to both “schemata” and, more broadly, an “art history without names.”
Nothing is more basic to Wölfflin’s project than the loosely Kantian, loosely Hegelian articulation of historical modes of seeing.
“Good intentions alone are not enough” (124). G. H. Von Wright with Heikki Nyman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 26.
Todd Cronan
Associate Professor, Art History, Emory University
Wölfflin makes this point a few sentences later when he reflects that even though these artists see strong differences between them, “to us those three Tivoli landscapes would probably seem quite alike at first, namely Nazarene” (83, original emphasis).
Over the course of the introduction, Wölfflin takes us through an ever-widening lens of stylistic categories, from individual style to school, to country, to the style of the race or nation, and ultimately to period style.