TIME TRAVELING, ART HISTORIAN

Time Traveling, Art Historian

Time Traveling, Art Historian

The soonest surviving composing on art that can be classified as art annals are the passages in Pliny the Elder's Natural History (c. AD 77-79), in relation to the development of Greek sculpture and painting. From them it is possible to find the concepts of Xenokrates of Sicyon (c. 280 BC), a Greek sculptor who was possibly the first art historian. Pliny's work, while mainly an encyclopaedia of the sciences, has therefore been influential from the Renaissance onwards. (Passages about methods utilised by the painter Apellesc. (332-329 BC), have been especially well-known.) Similar, though unaligned, developments appeared in the 6th century ceramic, where a canon of worthy creative persons was established by writers in the scholar-official class. These writers, being necessarily proficient in calligraphy, were artists themselves. The creative persons are recounted in the Six Principles of Painting formulated by Xie He.

Scholars such as Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768), admonished Vasari's "cult" of creative personality, and they contended that the genuine emphasis in the study of art should be the outlooks of the learned beholder and not the exclusive viewpoint of the charismatic artist. Winckelmann's writings therefore were the beginnings of art criticism. Winckelmann critiqued the artistic excesses of Baroque and Rococo forms, and was instrumental in restructuring flavour in favor of the more sober Neoclassicism. Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), one of the founders of art history, documented that Winckelmann was 'the first to differentiate between the time span of very old art and to link the history of method="color: Red;">method with world history'. From Winckelmann until the mid-20th century, the field of art history was overridden by German-speaking academics. Winckelmann's work therefore assessed the entry of art annals into the high-philosophical discourse of German culture.

Winckelmann was read avidly by Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller, both of who started to compose on the history of art, and his account of the Laocoon occasioned a response by Lessing. The emergence of art as a foremost subject of philosophical conjecture was solidified by the appearance of Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment in 1790, and was furthered by Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics. Hegel's beliefs served as the direct inspiration for Karl Schnaase's work. Schnaase's Niederländische Briefe established the theoretical foundations for art history as an autonomous control and respect, and his Geschichte der bildenden Künste, one of the first chronicled surveys of the annals of art from antiquity to the Renaissance, facilitated the educating of art annals in German-speaking universities. Schnaase's survey was published contemporaneously with a alike work by Franz Theodor Kugler.

Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who revised under Burckhardt in Basel, is the dad" of up to date art history. Wölfflin educated at the universities of Berlin, Basel, Munich, and Zurich. Anumber of scholars went on to distinguished vocations in art annals, encompassing Jakob Rosenberg and Frida Schottmuller. He presented a technical approach to the annals of art, focusing on three concepts. Firstly, he tried to study art using psychology, particularly by applying the work of ...