Picturing Art History

The Rise of the Illustrated History of Art in the Eighteenth Century

Ingrid Vermeulen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781040784860
• Topic: Art

Books on art history are nearly always lavishly illustrated with quality colour reproductions of famous masterpieces. Yet this has not always been the case: it was only in the eighteenth century that art books came to be illustrated with beautiful images. Picturing Art History shows how the fundamentally new notion of the history of art as a visual history was responsible for this development. In the age before photography, paper collections of prints and drawings offered the only way to picture the artistic past. For the first time, illustrations became indispensable toolsas the new belief grew that art works rather than artists were the measure of the artistic past. Internationally renowned art scholars such as Bottari (1689-1775), Winckelmann (1717-1768) and d'Agincourt (1730-1814) collected reproductions in the form of prints and drawings, triggering discussions of the nature of illustrations as representations of art, classification of reproductions to demonstrate trends in art history, and the relationship between image and text in the art literature. With the help of illustrations, art history became an extraordinary visual experience, vital to the understanding of the history of art.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Unfulfilled Projects to Illustrate Vasari: Bottari, Corsini's Print Collection and the Rise of Art-historical Illustration
• 2 The Artistic Past at a Glance: Winckelmann, Cavaceppi's Drawing Collection and the Short Life of Drawn Art Histories
• 3 The ‘Histoire de l'Art par les Monumens’: D'Agincourt, his Reproduction Collection and the Birth of the Illustrated Survey
• Conclusion
• Appendices
• Archival Material
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Illustration Credits