History and Art History

Looking Past Disciplines

Nicholas Chare, Mitchell B. Frank, Nicholas Chare, Mitchell B. Frank

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000226355
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunsttheorie & -kritik

Through a series of cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary interventions, leading international scholars of history and art history explore ways in which the study of images enhances knowledge of the past and informs our understanding of the present.

Spanning a diverse range of time periods and places, the contributions cumulatively showcase ways in which ongoing dialogue between history and art history raises important aesthetic, ethical and political questions for the disciplines. The volume fosters a methodological awareness that enriches exchanges across these distinct fields of knowledge.

This innovative book will be of interest to scholars in art history, cultural studies, history, visual culture and historiography.

1
Why History and Art History?

Nicholas Chare and Mitchell B. Frank

Beginnings

How to begin? ‘You can see the problem is endless, just as it is in beginning to write about a painting: with this brushmark or with a look of the whole thing if you stand back a few meters and see it within the context of the “social history of art”; or with these two brushmarks, which is a totally different beginning.’¹ By titling this volume History and Art History, thus starting with ‘history’, we seem to give ‘art history’ the appearance of a secondary concern, a supplement. The origins of history as a discipline are usually located earlier than art history. History as a conscious practice of chronicling past events as narrative can be traced to Classical Greece where Herodotus of Halicarnassus produced his Histories in 440 BCE. Etymologically, history derives from the Greek word historía (ἱστορία), which refers to the seeking of knowledge. Alternatively, the emergence of history is sometimes linked to the Zuo zhuan [The Commentary of Zhuo] which narrates major military and political events in China from 722 to 468 BCE, drawing on multiple sources including oral ones which may derive from songs composed by women at court.² These songs describe court intrigues, offering a kind of history. If oral, rather than written, stories of the past are considered when suggesting origins for narrative history then many cultures and traditions provide potential starting points.

The beginnings of art history are frequently linked to the publication of Giorgio Vasari’s Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori, e architettori [The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects], first published in 1550, or to Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums [History of the Art of Antiquity], published in 1764. Patricia Rubin has examined Vasari’s Lives as a work of history (rather than art history), suggesting that through writing the Lives, Vasari displayed his erudition at a time when history was a literary art, a rhetorical exercise with rules of decorum intended to demonstrate eloquence of argument.³ In this volume, Rubin (Chapter 8) revisits Vasari, exploring the implications of the composite nature of the Lives, the many hands behind the history. Winckelmann’s work, as the title evinces, provides one of the first uses of the term ‘history of art’. Arnaldo Momigliano links Winckelmann with eighteenth-century efforts to develop a scientific method for examining iconography.⁴ Alex Potts, however, shows that Winckelmann idealized both history and art.⁵

Based on these histories of the two disciplines, placing history before art history could therefore be justified on chronological grounds: history begat art history. At the same time, art historical writing has its own distinct lineage, which can be traced back to ancient Greek and Roman sources in the West and to Tang (618–907) and Pre-Tang texts in China. And from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, Western art history was at great pains to establish itself as an autonomous discipline due to what was considered the unique nature of its object of study. As issues of representation, visual and verbal, have come to the fore in history and art history, it has become more difficult to separate practitioners of the two fields. Current discussions of ‘visual history’ and the recent revisiting of the genre of history painting also question such boundaries.⁶ Disciplinary divisions continue to be the modus operandi of the university, but as Adrian Rifkin puts it in this volume (Chapter 15), ‘art history and history have never been an issue for me’. In other words, the very frame of this project, history and art history, provides an imaginary, if powerful, construct through which our contributors raise common concerns, such as the relation of word to image, the anachronistic to the euchronistic, and Indigenous to settler temporalities, to name just a few. In what follows, we will set the frame for the volume first through an exploration of how ideas relating to historiography and the philosophy of history have influenced art historical methods and approaches. We will then consider the importance of images and of ideas about visual representation in historians’ practices.

Art History and History

It has often been remarked that art history is composed of two terms, which make strange bedfellows.⁷ In 1963, when James Ackerman wrote of ‘the dual existence of the work of art as a document of the past and as an object in the present’, he articulated a problem, which art historians, before and after him, have recognized either as central to their enterprise or as one of the practice’s ‘principal epistemological impediments’, to quote Georges Didi-Huberman.⁸ For Ackerman, the art historian is like any other historian in discovering ‘past situations’ but is also singular in using historical knowledge ‘to supplement a direct experience of the artifact’.⁹ Writing over half a century later, Christopher Wood similarly conceives of the art historical process as twofold: ‘the art historian dispels one layer of mystery – the historical distance – only to reveal a second and more intractable mystery’.¹⁰ For both Wood and Ackerman, the work of the art historian is historical and critical, but they come to very different conclusions about the nature of the inquiry. In a humanist tradition, Ackerman understood interpretation as requiring reconciliation, a ‘fusion’ of the historian’s objectivity and the critic’s subjectivity. He also believed in order: both the artist and art historian use style to establish patterns and orderly relationships as a ‘protection against chaos’.¹¹ Wood, writing in a post-humanist age, does not see the possibility of such protection, for he believes that ultimately interpretation is never resolved: ‘This is just the appeal of historical art: any interpretation is staggered, dilated. The historical decoding prepares an aesthetic decoding which, in the event, is never completed’.¹²

Art history is a discipline that respects its past in the sense of a willingness to continue to engage with earlier practitioners, whether it be Aby Warburg, Alois Riegl, Helen Rosenau, Erwin Panofsky, or, more recently, Michael Baxandall. In this tradition, we will look at selected pieces of writing that reflect on how art historians approach history. Two central concerns here are subjectivity/objectivity and aesthetic object/historical document. These binaries have been central to how art writers, whether they advocate art history, art criticism, the new art history, or global art history, have positioned themselves in terms of art and history, presence and absence, proximity and distance. Since the 1970s, there have been challenges to these very oppositions and significant changes in language (for example, art history, history of images, material culture, visual culture). Robert Nelson suggests that most of the assumptions behind romantic and modernist visual strategies have been questioned. ‘All is now contingent’, he writes, including the socio-political and aesthetic status of the work of art, the site of its display, its historical context, and the writers on art themselves.¹³ But contingency is not a position that can be claimed only by postmodernists. The denial of contingency by earlier writers is as much its acceptance. The recurrence and displacement of specific issues in discussions of art history and history thus constitute an organizing principle in what follows.

The parameters for the debates about art history and history, the dual nature of the enterprise and the relation of the historian to the past, were well articulated in Erwin Panofsky’s often cited ‘The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline’ (1938). For Panofsky, works of art are historical records, part of the ‘cosmos of culture’, which need to be located in their specific time and place.¹⁴ But they also demand, whether or not they serve a function, ‘to be experienced aesthetically’. Due to this bifurcation of the work of art into historical and aesthetic object, the art historian, Panofsky maintains, requires a dual form of analysis consisting of archaeological research and ‘intuitive aesthetic recreation’. These two processes are interconnected (he calls it an ‘organic situation’): ‘both mutually qualify and rectify one another’.¹⁵

In the postwar period, Panofsky’s equilibrium between intuitive reconstruction and detached historical research was often replaced with an emphasis on empirical work, on tracking formal or stylistic developments over time. ‘Today’, W. Eugene Kleinbauer claimed in 1971, ‘art history is, on the whole, empirical and specific rather than speculative and sweeping’.¹⁶ Kleinbauer himself used the language of a disengaged surveyor of the field to bring order to art historical methods through a clean division of Western art history into intrinsic and extrinsic perspectives. For Kleinbauer, the central questions of art history, like those Heinrich Wölfflin had asked, were about the ‘problem of historical or stylistic change’.¹⁷ To approach such questions, art historians, unlike art critics with their descriptive and evaluative methods, avoid a commitment ‘to a code of ethics’ and ‘indulging in moral pronouncements’. If the art historian incorporates ethical criteria into the ‘assessmen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Author/Editor Biographies
• 1 Why History and Art History?
• Part I Visualizing History
• Part II Visions of the Past
• Part III Writing about the Past
• Index