The Architecture of Art History

A Historiography

Mark Crinson, Richard J. Williams

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781350020924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

What is the place of architecture in the history of art? Why has it been at times central to the discipline, and at other times seemingly so marginal? What is its place now? Many disciplines have a stake in the history of architecture – sociology, anthropology, human geography, to name a few. This book deals with perhaps the most influential tradition of all – art history – examining how the relation between the disciplines of art history and architectural history has waxed and waned over the last one hundred and fifty years. In this highly original study, Mark Crinson and Richard J. Williams point to a decline in the importance attributed to the role of architecture in art history over the last century – which has happened without crisis or self-reflection. The book explores the problem in relation to key art historical approaches, from formalism, to feminism, to the social history of art, and in key institutions from the Museum of Modern Art, to the journal October. Among the key thinkers explored are Banham, Baxandall, Giedion, Panofsky, Pevsner, Pollock, Riegl, Rowe, Steinberg, Wittkower and Wölfflin. The book will provoke debate on the historiography and present state of the discipline of art history, and it makes a powerful case for the reconsideration of architecture.

1

The German tradition

There are few title pages like it in art history (Figure 1.1). Grundbegriffe announced the first German edition. The English word ‘principles’ lacks the kettle-drum cadence of the German (‘ground rules’ might be better if it did not have the air of diplomatic negotiation about it). And ‘art history’, too, scarcely has the compound majesty of ‘Kunstgeschichtliche’. So, like some sober treatise, ‘Principles of Art History’ it would become titled when first translated in 1932. The ‘problem’ of its subtitle, ‘The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art’, would clearly be done away with under the authority of these principles. Finally, there was the author’s name – Heinrich Wölfflin – reassuringly balanced and symmetrical around the page’s centre line. Facing these titles in that first translation, there was in addition an almost equally declaratory frontispiece, the clincher: a black-and-white photograph of one of Tiepolo’s frescoed walls in the Palazzo Labia, Venice, turned on its side so it faces back to the title page more than out to the reader. In itself the fresco is an extraordinary series of painted architectural compartments framing a narrative event.¹ The point surely behind the choice of this image – reinforced by the push-and-pull of structure and opening, and the flickerings of ornament, draperies, and bodies – is that architecture and art are inextricably bound together. Their combination is powerfully dynamic, yet reassuring – complex, yet delicately nuanced.

Wölfflin’s Principles is the summation of that convergence of the historical study of art and architecture that occurred in German, Austro-Hungarian, and Swiss universities in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. The convergence was an integral part of what has been called the ‘critical history of art’, or Kunstwissenschaft (literally, the science of art). It marked a new and more ambitious corpus of ways of practising art history (including formalism and iconography), that was distinct from older traditions of connoisseurship and empiricism, and that was based on reference to a range of media across a range of historical periods.² The new practitioners included Alois Riegl, Wölfflin himself, and Erwin Panofsky, who, together with their immediate followers – Nikolaus Pevsner, Hans Sedlmayr, Rudolf Wittkower, and Sigfried Giedion – all worked as if their major arguments were relevant to the discipline as a whole, and often beyond it. Such was the ambition of their work.³

FIGURE 1.1 Frontispiece and title page of Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History (first English edition, 1932). Photograph by Mark Crinson.

In the critical history of art the link between art and architecture also had a phenomenological, philosophical, and moral basis. The experience of both art forms was related. They were both bound up in Hegel’s idea that art gave form to the idea or ‘absolute spirit’ – with architecture as the first stage in the shaping of nature so it could become ‘cognate with mind’⁴ – and in the Kantian sense of aesthetics as a theory of sensible knowledge, the materialization of experience through the nexus. The means of analysis could therefore be shared, so that together these arts were understood as expressing something important about society, history, and human capacities. To write, as August Schmarsow did in 1893, that ‘the history of architecture is the history of the sense of space’ was not only to make a claim familiar in today’s architectural schools, it was also to say something easily paired with an equally Kantian claim, that the history of painting is the history of the sense of vision or, in Schmarsow’s view, the history of ‘extensiveness’.⁵ Whether present-day architects or art historians would go on to say, as Schmarsow did (following Hegel), that study of the arts ‘is a basic constituent in the history of world views’ is unlikely, but again this idea was essential to German art historians.⁶ Other traditions – often called antiquarian or connoisseurial – also related art and architecture but they lacked both the overarching historical claims and the underpinning theoretical schema of the critical art historians. This chapter investigates and compares the claims made in this tradition – essentially academic, but highly influential on artists and architects – for the interrelation of media that we have called the art-architecture nexus, and assesses the descriptive and analytical methods that accompanied it.

Whatever the other differences between these art historians, the concepts of form and style were crucial to their work. Form always related to something internal to the object, something non-mimetic or non-literal. The apparent paradox of form as both an external phenomenon and an extract is sometimes explained by the English language having only the term ‘form’, whereas German uses both Gestalt and Form.⁷ As expressed in Adolf Hildebrand’s influential The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts (1893), form was the essence apprehensible beyond the surface phenomena of impressions, a mediation between the self and the three-dimensional world of appearances, and a shaping of matter that positioned the artwork at one remove from that reality. Form came to be deployed, as Warburg and Panofsky saw it, as an ‘anti-chaotic function’, a reassuring structuring, and an enduring evidence of sensibility.⁸ The organization of form in distinctive ways, whether by one artist, a movement, or a whole period, was known as style, and while style could be found in any cultural product, and many German art historians worked across the objects of material culture, its most distinct manifestations were in the fine arts and architecture, especially as their distinction was challenged by the industrial products of mass culture.⁹ As forms and as styles, art and architecture might be understood as autonomous or immanent expressions, tied to certain overarching concepts: the Geist, the Zeitgeist, Kunstwollen, Gestalt. A closed circuit operated between form and such concepts, one that to varying degrees took in material, social, or other forms of explanation.

The range of objects encompassed by style and form was, for some of the German art historians, potentially limitless. Alois Riegl’s idea of the Kunstwollen, for instance, denoted the drive or impulse to create that was the connecting thread between the object and its world: in Riegl’s words, ‘[the Kunstwollen] regulates man’s relationship to the sensorily perceptible appearance of things’, it governs the plastic arts and links them to other ways of expressing the world view of a particular period. Julius von Schlosser had written about musical instruments and ivory saddles as much as medieval art, and more famously Wölfflin had gestured at how the Lebensgefühl (the attitude to life) could be as well expressed by the Gothic shoe as the Gothic cathedral.¹⁰ These are the expressive shapes of their time, and therefore of the collective human mind or will, finding material form through shared style. For these ends, it seems that any cultural object was a valid object of study – a drinking cup or brooch as much as a Rembrandt group portrait – so, it might sometimes seem, architecture had no special partnership with art as prime objects of aesthetic value; art and architecture were simply part of an environment created around the world view of a particular place and time.

As with other art histories based primarily on form, and then divining generalities about period or nation, the theory was vulnerable to those cultural simplifications (orientalism, racism, the Volk, primitivism) that were to become increasingly suspect to art and architectural historians during the twentieth century. But, as the next chapter will show, this was only one of several reasons why the tradition came unstuck.¹¹

Wölfflin’s formalism

Crucial to the success of German art history was the promise it held of relating the formal qualities of the art object to its historical moment. The motto for this might be the title of Max Dvořák’s book Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (1924), or Art History as the History of the Spirit. The art historian who held these ambitions before his readers and who brought methodology to the forefront of his practice instead of the ‘subjective chaos’ of such predecessors as his teacher Jacob Burckhardt, was Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945).¹² Wölfflin’s most influential works were Renaissance und Barock (1888), Die klassische Kunst (1899, translated as Classic Art), and the Principles of Art History (1915), and his influence was also conveyed through his PhD students and his teaching positions first as successor to Burckhardt’s chair at the University of Basel and then at the apex of German academic art history as chair at Berlin University. One initial example from the Principles demonstrates how crucial the nexus was to Wölfflin’s desired art history, even before we come to the theoretical system itself. This is a short descriptive passage on Dutch art, early in the book, where we move from the foliage of trees in landscapes to the wickerwork of a basket, to the ‘network of whitened joints on a brick wall, the pattern of neatly set flagstones’, to the apparent lightness of stone in Amsterdam’s Rathaus, all of which are said to provide indices of Dutch national feeling in the seventeenth century.¹³

Wölfflin’s three key books refine upon each other, but also build alternately on their twinned media and twinned periods. The first book is largely on architecture of both periods, the second on art of the High Renaissance, and the third on both art and architecture in the Baroque. As a whole, this represents an overarching diachrony or cyclic movement and, within this, equally importantly, a synchrony across media. Architecture is the generator here, while Renaissance and the newly credentialized Baroque operate as the twin poles and dialectical components in the schema. (Unknown to Wölfflin at the time, a third term – Mannerism – would open up a transitional period between them, another area for neophyte Wölfflinians to develop.) The project is as confident of its big historical statements as it is aloof from any immersion in the workings of extra-art historical material. From one point of view, the body and, eventually, opticality come to stand in for that absent other. From another, the social and the political are always displaced by the search for reconciliation within the aesthetic.¹⁴

While Renaissance might signify all that is rational and lucid, and Baroque all that is chaotic and excessive, Wölfflin’s fascination with the latter went well beyond its oppositional status. Baroque art historiography, especially of Wölfflin’s kind, was given impetus by the installation of the reassembled ancient Greek Pergamon altar in Berlin in 1879. This provided a spectacular instance not merely of a literal art-architecture nexus but, equally significantly, of the necessity to read across the art forms.¹⁵ As well as the Baroque-like qualities of the reliefs, the altar was isolated in the stark spaces of the museum so that it could leave its original purposes behind in entering the institution of art. In much the same way, Wölfflin’s arguments depended on the isolation that operated within his reproductions. Much has been made of Wölfflin’s use of two lantern slide projectors in his teaching, a device which was hugely influential in lodging a binocular comparative method into the pedagogic DNA of the discipline.¹⁶ One aspect of this has been less considered – the way that here, as much as in the images in his books, the non-formal context of architecture was discarded in favour of the isolated form of the building itself. This became one of the characteristic things that art historians did with architecture, even when they seemed to have long discarded Wölfflin’s formalism. And there was another aspect to his approach that continued to privilege architecture. Art history as it developed over the next half-century would extend Wölfflin’s Baroque fascination; indeed, the reaction against the nexus might in part be understood as a reaction against Baroque’s special position in representing intermedial diffuseness, its cross-disciplinary generosity.¹⁷

Wölfflin’s founding premise, developed in his 1886 PhD thesis, was that architecture, psychology, and the human body were interrelated.¹⁸ Key here was the theory of Einfühlung or empathy, deriving from recent debates among psychologists and philosophers. Buildings are organized like bodies: they express like we express, they are like us in their function and structure, their windows are like eyes, their walls are like clothes or even skin, and our very breathing is felt in the inhalations of voids and the exhalations of solids. In sum, as Wölfflin wrote in Renaissance und Barock, ‘we judge every object by analogy with our own bodies’.¹⁹ The impulse of transferred form found in architecture’s body-feeling, which already allied it to scul...