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List of illustrations

  • A Woman in Bed
  • Woman at her Toilet
  • Coup de Lance
  • Amiens Cathedral, Ambulatory interior
  • Amiens Cathedral, Ambulatory exterior
  • King Kephron
  • Apollo
  • Antwerp Cathedral
  • Santa Costanza, interior
  • San Vitale, interior
  • Seaton Delaval House, Main Front, detail
  • Seaton Delaval House, Garden Front, detail
  • Lion Hunt
  • Carrying the Cross
  • Hegiso Monument
  • Relief from sarcophagus of Ankhnesneferibre
  • Roman sarcophagus
  • Arch of Constantine, detail
  • Pantheon, interior
  • Temple of Minerva Medica
  • Santa Costanza, interior
  • Old St Peters
  • Militia Company, central panel
  • Militia Company
  • Officers and Other Shooters from District III in Amsterdam Led by Captain Allaert Cloeck and Lieutenant Lucas Jacobsz Rotgans
  • The osteology lesson of Dr. Sebastian Egbertsz.
  • The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp
  • The Night Watch
  • The Wardens of the Amsterdam Clothiers' Guild, Known as The Steel Masters
  • Palazzo Farnese, courtyard
  • Courtyard of the Palazzo della Cancelleria
  • Santa Maria Novella, façade
  • Santa Maria della Pace, exterior view
  • Triumphal Arch
  • The Arch of Titus
  • Baptism of Christ
  • Baptism of Christ
  • Drawing for the Alba Madonna
  • Study of Diana
  • Head of Saskia
  • Adam and Eve
  • Madonna and Child with St John
  • Crucifixion
  • Christ Carrying the Cross
  • Deposition
  • Deposition
  • Resurrection of Lazarus
  • Raising of Lazarus
  • Capital, Santo Spirito
  • Santo Spirito, interior
  • Santo Spirito, columns seen from the aisle
  • Verification of the Stigmata of Saint Francis
  • Verification of the Stigmata of Saint Francis
  • St. Peter's Interior, detail
  • Zwinger, Pavilion façade
  • Residenz, Spiegelkabinett
  • Majestà
  • Primavera
  • Detail of the Planet Venus from the first edition of the so-called Baldini Calendar
  • Detail from the second edition of the so-called Baldini Calendar
  • Florentine Picture Chronicle, Paris and Helen
  • Portinari Altarpiece, wing showing portrait of donor and Saints Anthony and Matthew
  • Confirmation of the Rule of the Franciscan Order, detail
  • Month of April
  • Venus and Psyche
  • Melencolia I
  • An Allegory ("Vision of a Knight")
  • Apollo and Diana
  • Small Woodcut Passion: Resurrection
  • Sol Iustitia
  • The Annunciation
  • Laon Cathedral, interior
  • Rheims Cathedral, interior
  • Amiens Cathedral, West Front
  • Rheims Cathedral, West Front
Free
Description: The Critical Historians of Art
TWO INTERESTS prompted the writing of this book: firstly, the attraction of a literature which made a serious attempt to say things about the visual arts that would register the energy and complexity of the arts themselves; secondly, the sense that this literature continued to exert an influence largely through shadowy reminiscence, the texts themselves having slipped from view. …
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.001
Free
Description: The Critical Historians of Art
Table of Contents
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.002
Description: The Critical Historians of Art
The present book examines a central tradition within the literature of the visual arts. The foundation of that tradition lay in German philosophical aesthetics of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and it stretches from roughly 1827 to 1927, from the writing of Hegel and Rumohr to that of Riegl, Wölfflin, Warburg and Panofsky. …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.xv-xxvi
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.003

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
Goethe's remark may be given narrower and more extensive meanings. It may be taken to assume some underlying norm for art in a restrictive academic way, or to be intimating that our perceptiveness with regard to a particular work involves our reflection upon art in general and its role within the mind’s education. There is no reason to believe that Goethe was here concerned to distinguish the two. But it is a distinction which becomes crucial for the critical historians, for it involves the …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.1-16
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.004

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
The text of Hegel’s Aesthetics was put together from his own lecture notes and those of some of the listeners. The series was given for the last time in 1828, three years before his death. Throughout his career, the arts had constituted a recurrent focus for his thought, and throughout his Aesthetics the main currents of his general philosophy—from his logic to his philosophy of history—make themselves felt. But the Aesthetics is distinct in its focus and irreducible to his …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.17-30
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.005

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
KARL SCHNAASE had attended Hegel’s lectures in the early 1820s in Berlin as a student. Unable to afford the life of a private scholar, he became a lawyer. But throughout his life he wrote on the visual arts, his most extensive work being the eight volume Geschichte der bildenden Künste, of which five volumes are devoted to the art of the Middle Ages. It is a work richly documented and is quite unlike his first book, Niederländische Briefe published in 1834. But it is this early …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.31-43
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.006

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
GOTTFRIED SEMPER is conventionally seen as representing the opposition in the mid-nineteenth century to the tradition of Hegel and Schnaase. In 1834, when Semper was beginning his career as an architect, he joined in an archaeological controversy; he argued for a much more extensive degree of polychromy on the surface of classical architecture and sculpture than had at the time been recognised. The other view widely attributed to him is that architecture is the product of material, technique and …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.44-58
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.007

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
FOR THE critical historians of the next generation, writing at the end of the nineteenth and in the first quarter of the twentieth century, there was a change both in their attitude to past art and to the connection of art and the mind’s freedom. The shift was in part the result of the inheritance from the earlier writers. …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.61-70
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.008

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
ALOIS RIEGL began his career as an art historian by working in the Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna. His early papers included work on oriental carpets and early mediaeval manuscripts. His concern with pattern and applied art took on wider resonances by virtue of two other elements in his education. He was taught philosophical psychology by the Herbartian Robert Zimmermann and history by Max Büdiger, who envisaged a general system of world history. The Herbartian element was the more important …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.71-97
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.009

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
OF THE critical writing discussed in this book, that of Heinrich Wölfflin is by far the most widely read. There have been repeated attempts by art historians to belittle or dissociate themselves from Wölfflin’s general position while following the procedures of his detailed critical analyses. No great discernment has been needed to recognise that Wölfflin’s formalism is seriously limited, that there is something strained about the way he yokes architecture and painting, and that his cyclic view …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.98-116
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.010

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
AFTER WRITING Classic Art, Wölfflin saw that he had an unresolved problem. What he did was to decline its challenge and attempt to consider the performance of artists simply from the point of view of the cultivation of the eye. In this, his real interest lay in an extremely refined visual analysis of painting. It developed out of two models: on the one hand, Hildebrand’s Das Problem der Form, and on the other, the sense of the way architecture transforms and re-presents the forms …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.117-151
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.011

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
THE HISTORIANS whose writings were examined in the previous chapters—Riegl and Wölfflin—were explicitly concerned with the construction of critical systems. This chapter is about two historians who were not. Anton Springer and Aby Warburg represent a continuation of the tradition of Rumohr, both in their concern with philological detail and their integration of the study of art within the complexities of social life. …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.152-177
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.012

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
PANOFSKY’s first published book, which developed out of his doctoral thesis, was on Dürer’s theory of art. It was concerned in part with the relation between formalised artistic theory and the artist’s imaginative performance. Toward the end he quoted Goethe: ‘The highest thing would be so to grasp things that everything factual was already theory.’ This quotation may serve as a motto for two convergent themes in Panofsky’s work: the fusion of the subjective life of the mind with external …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.178-208
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.013

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
THE SYSTEMATIC historians like Riegl and Semper have been criticised on the grounds that the particularity of the individual work and the detailed study of its historical context was sacrificed to another objective, to treating particular works as exemplifying their interpretative concepts—as instances of a stylistic phase or category. …
PublisherYale University Press
Related print edition pages: pp.209-217
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.014

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
THE FIRST section lists the main primary works discussed in the book and the second section the main general writing about them. References to further literature and bibliographies on particular authors are given in the notes. …
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.015

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Description: The Critical Historians of Art
Index
PublisherYale University Press
https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00131.016
The Critical Historians of Art
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