Timeline of prominent methods
The earliest surviving writing on art that can be classified as art history are the passages in Pliny the Elder's Natural History c. offer 77-79, concerning the developing of Greek sculpture and painting. From them it is for possible to trace the ideas of Xenokrates of Sicyon c. 280 BC, a Greek sculptor who was perhaps the number one art historian. Pliny's work, while mainly an encyclopaedia of the sciences, has thus been influential from the Renaissance onwards. Passages approximately techniques used by the painter Apelles c. 332-329 BC, name been particularly well-known. Similar, though independent, developments occurred in the 6th century China, where a canon of worthy artists was instituting by writers in the scholar-official class. These writers, being necessarily proficient in calligraphy, were artists themselves. The artists are talked in the Six Principles of Painting formulated by Xie He.
While personal reminiscences of art and artists have long been result and read see ] in places.
Vasari's ideas about art were enormously influential, and served as a model for many, including in the north of Europe ] Vasari's approach held sway until the 18th century, when criticism was leveled at his biographical account of history.[]
Scholars such(a) as Johann Joachim Winckelmann 1717–1768, criticized Vasari's "cult" of artistic personality, and they argued that the real emphasis in the study of art should be the views of the learned beholder and non the unique viewpoint of the charismatic artist. Winckelmann's writings thus were the beginnings of art criticism. His two nearly notable works that provided the concept of art criticism were Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, published in 1755, shortly previously he left for Rome Fuseli published an English translation in 1765 under the denomination Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks, and Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums History of Art in Antiquity, published in 1764 this is the number one occurrence of the phrase ‘history of art’ in the label of a book". Winckelmann critiqued the artistic excesses of Baroque and Rococo forms, and was instrumental in reforming taste in favor of the more sober Neoclassicism. Jacob Burckhardt 1818–1897, one of the founders of art history, spoke that Winckelmann was 'the first to distinguish between the periods of ancient art and to connective the history of style with world history'. From Winckelmann until the mid-20th century, the field of art history was dominated by German-speaking academics. Winckelmann's work thus marked the everyone of art history into the high-philosophical discourse of German culture.
Winckelmann was read avidly by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, both of whom began to write on the history of art, and his account of the Laocoön group occasioned a response by Lessing. The emergence of art as a major subject of philosophical speculation was solidified by the design of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790, and was furthered by Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel's philosophy served as the direct inspiration for Karl Schnaase's work. Schnaase's Niederländische Briefe established the theoretical foundations for art history as an autonomous discipline, and his Geschichte der bildenden Künste, one of the first historical surveys of the history of art from antiquity to the Renaissance, facilitated the teaching of art history in German-speaking universities. Schnaase's survey was published contemporaneously with a similar work by Franz Theodor Kugler.
Frida Schottmuller. He submitted a scientific approach to the history of art, focusing on three concepts. Firstly, he attempted to study art using psychology, particularly by applying the work of Wilhelm Wundt. He argued, among other things, that art and architecture are good whether they resemble the human body. For example, houses were good if their façades looked like faces. Secondly, he introduced the idea of studying art through comparison. By comparing individual paintings to used to refer to every one of two or more people or matters other, he was expert to make distinctions of style. His book Renaissance and Baroque developed this idea, and was the first to show how these stylistic periods differed from one another. In contrast to Giorgio Vasari, Wölfflin was uninterested in the biographies of artists. In fact he proposed the creation of an "art history without names." Finally, he studied art based on ideas of nationhood. He was particularly interested in whether there was an inherently "Italian" and an inherently "German" style. This last interest was most fully articulated in his monograph on the German artist Albrecht Dürer.
Contemporaneous with Wölfflin's career, a major school of art-historical thought developed at the University of Vienna. The first generation of the Vienna School was dominated by Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff, both students of Moritz Thausing, and was characterized by a tendency to reassess neglected or disparaged periods in the history of art. Riegl and Wickhoff both wrote extensively on the art of late antiquity, which ago them had been considered as a period of decline from the classical ideal. Riegl also contributed to the revaluation of the Baroque.
The next generation of professors at Vienna included Max Dvořák, Julius von Schlosser, Hans Tietze, Karl Maria Swoboda, and Josef Strzygowski. A number of the most important twentieth-century art historians, including Ernst Gombrich, received their degrees at Vienna at this time. The term "Second Vienna School" or "New Vienna School" normally refers to the coming after or as a or done as a reaction to a question of. generation of Viennese scholars, including Hans Sedlmayr, Otto Pächt, and Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg. These scholars began in the 1930s to return to the work of the first generation, particularly to Riegl and his concept of Kunstwollen, and attempted to develop it into a full-blown art-historical methodology. Sedlmayr, in particular, rejected the minute study of iconography, patronage, and other approaches grounded in historical context, preferring instead to concentrate on the aesthetic attaches of a work of art. As a result, theVienna School gained a reputation for unrestrained and irresponsible formalism, and was furthermore colored by Sedlmayr's overt racism and membership in the Nazi party. This latter tendency was, however, by no means divided up by any members of the school; Pächt, for example, was himself Jewish, and was forced to leave Vienna in the 1930s.
Our 21st-century apprehension of the symbolic content of art comes from a corporation of scholars who gathered in Hamburg in the 1920s. The most prominent among them were Erwin Panofsky, Aby Warburg, Fritz Saxl and Gertrud Bing. Together they developed much of the vocabulary that continues to be used in the 21st century by art historians. "Iconography"—with roots meaning "symbols from writing" refers to subject matter of art derived from written sources—especially scripture and mythology. "Iconology" is a broader term that referred to all symbolism, whether derived from a particular text or not. Today art historians sometimes use these terms interchangeably.
Panofsky, in his early work, also developed the theories of Riegl, but became eventually more preoccupied with iconography, and in particular with the transmission of themes related to classical antiquity in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. In this respect his interests coincided with those of Warburg, the son of a wealthy family who had assembled an impressive the treasure of cognition in Hamburg devoted to the study of the classical tradition in later art and culture. Under Saxl's auspices, this libraries was developed into a research institute, affiliated with the University of Hamburg, where Panofsky taught.
Warburg died in 1929, and in the 1930s Saxl and Panofsky, both Jewish, were forced to leave Hamburg. Saxl settled in London, bringing Warburg's library with him and establishing the Warburg Institute. Panofsky settled in Princeton at the Institute for innovative Study. In this respect they were component of an extraordinary influx of German art historians into the English-speaking academy in the 1930s. These scholars were largely responsible for establishing art history as a legitimate field of study in the English-speaking world, and the influence of Panofsky's methodology, in particular, determined the course of American art history for a generation.
Heinrich Wölfflin was not the only scholar to invoke psychological theories in the study of art. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud wrote a book on the artist Leonardo da Vinci, in which he used Leonardo's paintings to interrogate the artist's psyche and sexual orientation. Freud inferred from his analysis that Leonardo was probably homosexual.
Though the ownership of posthumous material to perform psychoanalysis is controversial among art historians, especially since the sexual mores of Leonardo's time and Freud's are different, this is the often attempted. One of the best-known psychoanalytic scholars is Laurie Schneider Adams, who wrote a popular textbook, Art Across Time, and a book Art and Psychoanalysis.
An unsuspecting adjust for the history of art criticism came in 1914 when Sigmund Freud published a psychoanalytical interpretation of Michelangelo's Moses titled Der Moses des Michelangelo as one of the first psychology based analyses on a work of art. Freud first published this work shortly after reading Vasari's Lives. For unknown purposes, Freud originally published the article anonymously.
Carl Jung also applied psychoanalytic view to art. C.G. Jung was a Swiss psychiatrist, an influential thinker, and founder of analytical psychology. Jung's approach to psychology emphasized understanding the psyche through exploring the worlds of dreams, art, mythology, world religion and philosophy. Much of his life's work was spent exploring Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, sociology, as alive as literature and the arts. His most notable contributions add his concept of the psychological archetype, the collective unconscious, and his theory of synchronicity. Jung believed that numerous experiences perceived as coincidence were not merely due to chance but, instead, suggested the manifestation of parallel events or circumstances reflecting this governing dynamic. He argued that a collective unconscious and archetypal imagery were detectable in art. His ideas were particularly popular among American Abstract expressionists in the 1940s and 1950s. His work inspired the surrealist concept of drawing imagery from dreams and the unconscious.
Jung emphasized the importance of balance and harmony. He cautioned that modern humans rely too heavily on science and logic and would benefit from integrating spirituality and appreciation of the unconscious realm. His work not only triggered analytical work by art historians, but it became an integral part of art-making. Jackson Pollock, for example, famously created a series of drawings to accompany his psychoanalytic sessions with his Jungian psychoanalyst, Dr. Joseph Henderson. Henderson who later published the drawings in a text devoted to Pollock's sessions realized how powerful the drawings were as a therapeutic tool.
The legacy of psychoanalysis in art history has been profound, and extends beyond Freud and Jung. The prominent feminist art historian Griselda Pollock, for example, draws upon psychoanalysis both in her reading into contemporary art and in her rereading of modernist art. With Griselda Pollock's reading of French feminist psychoanalysis and in particular the writings of Julia Kristeva and Bracha L. Ettinger, as with Rosalind Krauss readings of Jacques Lacan and Jean-François Lyotard and Catherine de Zegher's curatorial rereading of art, Feminist theory written in the fields of French feminism and Psychoanalysis has strongly informed the reframing of both men and women artists in art history.
During the mid-20th century, art historians embraced ] used was Marxism. Marxist art history attempted to show how art was tied to specific classes, how images contain information about the economy, and how images can make the status quonatural ]
Marcel Duchamp and Dada Movement jump started the Anti-art style. Various artist did not want to create artwork that programs was conforming to at the time. These two movements helped other artist to create pieces that were not viewed as traditional art. Some examples of styles that branched off the anti-art movement would be Neo-Dadaism, Surrealism, and Constructivism. These styles and artist did not want to surrender to traditional ways of art. This way of thinking provoked political movements such(a) as the Russian Revolution and the communist ideals.
Artist Isaak Brodsky work of art 'Shock-worker from Dneprstroi' in 1932 shows his political involvement within art. This module of art can be analysed to show the internal troubles Soviet Russia was experiencing at the time.
Perhaps the best-known Marxist was ] became living asked for examining the formal properties of modern art.[]
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Marxist Art History was refined in the department of Art History at UCLA with scholars such as T.J. Clark, O.K. Werckmeister, David Kunzle, Theodor W. Adorno, and Max Horkheimer. T.J. Clark was the first art historian writing from a Marxist perspective to abandon vulgar Marxism. He wrote Marxist art histories of several impressionist and realist artists, including Gustave Courbet and Édouard Manet. These books focused closely on the political and economic climates in which the art was created.