5
Formalism
A number of principles delineating the study of visual art cluster together under the rubric Formalism. These precepts focus on such immediately accessible aspects of objects and images as material, color, line, and shape, elements that construct appearance and function as expressive agents. They are the features that set works regarded as art apart from other forms of creativity and, for Formalists, are the critical determinants of any work’s significance. As the key components of the process called formal analysis, these aspects of a work figure in the initial stages of art historical study; they are not commensurable however with the more extensive agenda of inquiry that is encompassed by the term Formalism.1
The question of workmanship – the distinct manner in which an object’s maker handles materials and configures pattern – constitutes Formalism’s central concern. Single-minded pursuit of this issue comprises a sub-set of Formalist practice familiarly termed Connoisseurship. What is at stake in this work is characterization of an artist’s manner of representation along with an assertion of its independence from cultural influences. Formalists consider the social, political, and religious circumstances in which art is produced to lie outside of the object and reject empiricist inquiries into such issues as being extrinsic to it. Instead, Formalists subscribe to the notion of art’s self-sufficiency, in terms of both a work’s individuality and its maker’s autonomy.
Yet awareness that art has a history and that it changes over time is very much a part of Formalism’s brief; from the earliest years of scholarship, the mysteries of style’s continuities and disruptions have remained one of Formalism’s most vexing issues. The first scholars whom we now consider to have been Formalists examined the part played by the artist in transforming the properties of a given medium in an effort to define constant elements in works of art; at the same time, they sought to articulate the relationship of art to the material and spiritual conditions of its particular moment and its specific place of production.
Formalism is more a way of thinking about the nature of art than a comprehensive methodology; it is not subject, consequently, to simple description.2 Nor is Formalism a term restricted to art historical practice in the way that Connoisseurship, which operates with certain closely related concerns, can be considered to be; neither is it as single-minded in its goal. The term Formalism originally identified a prominent literary movement closely tied to the study of language and the branch of philosophical inquiry called aesthetics. Yet even before Formalism received its name, at the time of World War I, issues central to its definition were being championed by German and Austrian scholars of art in an effort to formulate a new and systematic study of the visual arts.
Accordingly, the account of Formalism that I present here begins with the emergence of the term in Russia in 1915 in conjunction with a revolutionary literary movement, and moves temporally forward to the United States. There, in the aftermath of World War II, Formalism became a preoccupation of modernist critics as the legitimate basis for proper valuation of non-representational painting; at the same time, it made a profound impression on the practice of art historians working in other fields. I then return to Europe to examine Formalism’s importance in German-speaking areas of the Continent during the foundational moment of medieval art history’s development in the 1890s. At that instant, coincidental with the emergence of expressionism in art, scholarship on previously scorned non-classical imagery, such as that offered by Gothic art, provided the fertile ground for novel critical attention. The non-naturalistic forms of late medieval art served as superior instructional exemplars for new theories being developed about the nature of art.
The final portion of this chapter examines the writings of the distinguished medievalist Meyer Schapiro, whose essays on Romanesque art have been extensively analyzed in relation to the predominantly Marxist political interests that characterized the intellectual circles in which he was known to move in the 1930s. I shall argue here that Schapiro’s early formation, which took place during the preceding decade, allies him more properly with the interests and practices of the Formalists, whose papers he read as a young man and whose profoundly philosophical inquiries remained his highest priority throughout the six decades of his innovative scholarship.
The appellation Formalism emerged during World War I as a term of ridicule for the pronouncements of a reform literary movement in Moscow that sought to define its critical practice by differentiating the object of its interest – literature – from the spoken and written communication of ordinary life. The young Russian scholars who came to be known as the Moscow Linguistic Circle challenged then popular Symbolist emphasis on the importance of words and sounds and decried their argument in behalf of literature’s mystic nature and higher reality. They stressed instead the centrality of language to writing and regarded its structures and forms as determinative of content. In their view, literature as opposed to other kinds of texts possessed, first and foremost, a special organization of language, one that departed from ordinary usage in its formal or structural devices and did not in any way reflect reality. Whether its content comprised fact or fiction, philosophical inquiry, authorial biography, or current events, literature, from their perspective, was not distinguished by being “a vehicle for ideas, a reflection of social reality, [or] the incarnation of some transcendent truth.”3 Its fundamental character and importance lay elsewhere.
Attention to visual material held a reduced presence in the Moscow Circle’s interests, but writings of a few members enunciated engagement with art’s distinctive constructive qualities. For these individuals, visual art, like poetry, was defined as a special way of thinking and knowing by means of images. They paid attention to its intrinsic properties by examining these aspects apart from any relationship to either subject matter or to an artist. One of the group’s members, Victor Shklovsky, recommended examination of a given work not in terms of its content but as a “complex of devices.” This, he argued, would impede perception through a process of defamiliarization or estrangement, divorcing the object from authorial biography and literary description and facilitating a critical approach that imitated scientific inquiry in its self-consciousness.4 Arguing on behalf of seeing in place of focusing on the seen, the Russian Formalists rejected dependence upon fact-based empirical evidence regarding place of production and dating in their studies.5
The Moscow Linguistic Circle’s reformational activities engaged issues that bear on an understanding of Formalism’s significance for the study of visual images; in some instances, these challenge aspects of inquiry into medieval art that have, for long, gone without sufficient scrutiny. Critical among these is the distinction the Russian Formalists made between the high art of literature, with its carefully structured forms, and the low – even non-art – status of other kinds of writing. Distinction between high and low has long informed display practices in museums where objects are frequently grouped according to their materials; painted objects receive pride of place in this system, even when they were not the most valued objects in their own time. Formalism’s espousal of a hierarchical differentiation among works of art facilitated the elevation of manuscript painting and ecclesiastical architecture as fields of study over and above engagement with metalworking and weaving or embroidery, pursuits which were considered to be craft rather than art because of the “applied” or functional nature of their products.
In scholarship on medieval art, the narrative miniatures of Romanesque and Gothic illumination and the carving of tympana have usually garnered attention as the most elite kinds of artistic production at the expense of adjacent imagery. For decades, they have been seen as more worthy of study than border ornamentation in the margins of books, or voussoirs on arches and corbels on the cornices of churches.6 These subordinate elements failed to engage the attention of Emile Mâle in his researches into twelfth- and thirteenth-century art because of their invariably secular subjects.7 Following Formalist principles, they may also have escaped the need for serious study because of their lack of imposingly structured composition.8
Formalist acceptance of the autonomy of artistic creativity, belief in the independence of artists from constraints on their inventiveness, presents a particular challenge for medievalists. Scholars like Mâle subscribed to ideas of Church dominance in the sphere of medieval art because almost all known work was either produced in, on, or for places within the ecclesiastical compound – the church, the cloister, the scriptorium. A medieval artist’s freedom to create spontaneously was unimaginable so long as he was in the service of sovereign and authoritative Christian authority. Meyer Schapiro, the foremost American medievalist of the twentieth century, took up the apparent contradiction posed by the Formalist notion of artistic freedom in Church art in an effort to develop an art historical practice that participated in wide-ranging art historical debates. Schapiro’s singular contributions embraced what appeared to others to be incompatible if not irreconcilable matters; these included a masterful examination of a carved relief at the church of Souillac that did not adhere to the norms expected of high art, as well as an unprecedented explanation of some seemingly secular music-making figures on the pier reliefs at Silos. These works, which have reverberated throughout medieval scholarship, are touched on in the final section of this chapter.
The principles that Formalism’s literary adherents promulgated served to reinforce distinctions and decisions at play in diverse humanistic pursuits, at a time when several forms of intellectual inquiry had not yet secured a place as fully independent academic disciplines. The way in which the Russian Formalists’ grounding of the study of literature in systematic analysis of a text’s structure professionalized its practice helped to secure for it an existence as a distinct discipline. Their efforts paralleled those that had been made by German-speaking scholars of art a decade or two earlier in a comparable effort to establish a rigorous mode of argument for their own practice, one that would be distinct from archaeological and philological methodology on the one hand, and amateurish, romantic description on the other. Scrupulous definition of the intrinsic qualities of visual material and elaboration of the utility of such definitions in the analysis of individual works facilitated the establishment of art history as a rigorous branch of knowledge, one that was separate and distinct from classical literature, intellectual history, and belles-lettres.9
Formalist principles as established by both the early German and Russian scholars imply acceptance of a viewer’s direct sensorial involvement with a painting, object, or monument. The results of such eyewitness encounters provide the grounds for analysis of a work’s structure and defining characteristics, thereby enabling determinations regarding stylistic affiliations and value. In the hands of scholars eager to assert the intellectual rigor and scientific nature of the study of art, observations gleaned in this manner have frequently been put forth as objective data and used to categorize works in a definitive manner in regard to date and place of production. But in so far as these sorts of judgments are based on observations that result from subjective experience, they risk opening up Formalism to claims of relativity. Formalist scholarship, which has at times overlooked this implication, has attended to it more recently through the theorization of spectatorship, arguing for a process by which viewers achieve their insights into a work through interaction with the work’s structures.10
The ideas of the Moscow Circle did not immediately penetrate the thinking of European intellectuals, and their critical writings remained for the most part unknown, silenced by the inaccessibility of the language in which they had been written. More significantly, constraints on speech and artistic practice put in place in Russia immediately after World War I marginalized the precepts of the Formalists in their homeland. Art’s content rather than its formal properties was Communism’s politically preferred choice, and Formalism did not sufficiently concern itself with historical considerations from the government’s point of view. After World War II, however, as the result of a number of migrations from Eastern bloc countries, a group of young multi-national scholars of literature and anthropology working in Paris under the leadership of Lévi-Strauss saw links between their own interests in linguistic theory and aspect of Russian Formalism.11
Their rigorous and systematic mode of analysis endorsed principles earlier espoused by the Moscow Circle and, in recognition of this affiliation, they initiated translations of the group’s papers. In this way, a critical movement once undervalued as “the child of the revolutionary period,” and silenced for decades by Stalinist propaganda, came to be appreciated in the West for its distinctive contributions to intellectual thought.12 Recovered from the dustbin to which its ideas had been relegated, Russian Formalism was newly perceived as “a central trend of a broad critical movement” in literary and artistic theory in the early twentieth century.13 The term of scorn by which it had originally been designated has since come to serve as the umbrella under which approaches to art and literature that prize structural and sensorial properties over and above other historical and thematic elements hold center stage.
During the decade of the 1940s, Formalism was introduced into American art criticism by Clement Greenberg as a brief in favor of abstract painting. This art, which he termed “avant-garde,” was valid, he wrote, “solely on its own terms… independent of meanings.” In it, “content is to be dissolved so completely into form that the work of art or literature cannot be reduced in whole or in part to anything not itself.”14 Greenberg thus rejected any ascription of significance to incidents that lay outside the frame of the physical object. He was committed instead to the centrality of the irreducible material elements that artists employ in their conceptualization and realization of individual works and which they do, he wrote, “in search of the absolute.” In the early 1960s, Michael Fried amplified Greenberg’s argument and popularized it through his championship of the work of an emerging group of young non-representational painters.15
The spare and focused terms in which this criticism is presented are directly indebted to the writing of the English critic and curator Roger Fry, one of the earliest champions of post-Impressionist painting and, seen in retrospect, one of the first Formalists.16 Fry, who was introduced to the work of Cézanne at an exhibition in London in 1906, was immediately captivated by the “insistence on the decorative value” that he found in one of the artist’s still lifes, both in the use of opposing local colors and “a quite extraordinary feeling for light.” He sensed that the artists whose works he brought together in an exhibition in 1912 “do not seek to imitate form but to create form, not to imitate life, but to find an equivalent for life.” Fry was stimulated by the conflicted reception their painting received to continue work on an aesthetic theory, “attacking poetry to understand painting. I want to find out what the function of content is, and am developing a theory… that it is merely directive of form and that all the essential aesthetic quality has to do with pure form,” he wrote to a friend. Fry’s belief in artistic experience as detached from real life, his attention to such design components as color, plane, and rhythmic line, his appreciation of their connection with “essential conditions of our physical existence” and thus their capacity to elicit emotional response, all ally him with positions the Russian Formalists were simultaneously espousing.17
In the 1960s, American scholars working on the art of earlier periods were growing weary of the data-driven erudition of text-based iconographic study that was being produced by newly emigrated German academics. Their approach required linguistic skills and intellectual assumptions that were no longer a part of educational preparation on these shores. Some objected as well to the limitations inherently imposed by this work on the notion of artistic creativity and excellence. Such scholars found support for a reinvigorated practice of visual analysis in the descriptive language of contemporary Formalism. This alternative approach was particularly apt for discussion of the distorted, seemingly nonmimetic figural imagery of early medieval and Romanesque work.
Thus, in the most widely used survey book of the second half of the twentieth century, a miniature of the Gospel writer St Mark, made in northern France in the early eleventh century, is described in terms of the “twisting and turning movement of the lines which pervades not only the figure of the Evangelist but the winged lion, the scroll, and the curtain” (fig. 5-1). The author continues, praising the miniature’s “firmly drawn contours filled in with bright solid colors, so that the three-dimensional aspects of the picture are reduced to an overlapping of flat planes.” As a result of this “abstract clarity and precision,” the text informs the reader, the “representational, the symbolic and the decorative elements of the design are knit together into a single, unified structure.”18
This language, which approximates an account of modernist painting, succeeds so well in drawing our attention to the geometric patterns of figure and drapery that we easily overlook the absence of anything more than the most minimal passing reference to other recognizable aspects of the miniature. The spiral columns, capped with acanthus leaf designs, that frame the seated figure go unmentioned, and the description likewise avoids discussion of the contested position of the central element in the design: the scroll to which both St Mark and the somersaulting lion hold fast. Textual silence discourages us from inquiring into the fusion of elements that culminates in, or emanates from, the intense stare that locks the animal and the man’s eyes on the object they both grasp. While we likely sense the way in which the glance functions as the generative element in the miniature, providing the fulcrum from which stable and chaotic forms emerge, the text, as written, provides no opening for further consideration of this relationship.
FIGURE 5-1 St Mark from a Gospel Book produced at Corbie, c.1025–50. Amiens: Municipal Library. Photo: Bridgeman-Giraudon/Art Resource, NY.
Formal analysis is here restricted to a description of surface pattern and the miniaturist’s handling of color. It is a helpful technique for elucidating the composition or construction of an object or image so that other questions may be asked of it. Such analysis can help relate an object or image to a larger body of works – a workshop or regional school – by disclosing patterns of organization that the work shares with other works and which help to classify all of them according to specific characteristics. Formal analysis in this way provides grist for Connoisseurship, the skill of discriminating distinct artistic handwriting and then attributing specific works to artists living at a given moment in a certain place. Such procedures of attribution are fundamental to the cataloguing of works of art, but too readily they obscure aspects of an image or object that escape encapsulation in a characterization of arrangements of shapes, lines, and colors. While the procedures of Connoissseurship invariably celebrate the individual skill of the artist, a principle that Formalism endorses, they trample on other issues that a Formalist agenda holds forth as critical to the study and definition of art.
In the case at hand, formal analysis assumes art’s dependence upon the things of the world as a “given.” We scarcely notice in the description of the miniature the affirmation it implicitly lends to the existence, in the unknown artist’s imagination, of a real figure, one that is independent of and prior to the one rendered here. Earlier European proponents of a Formalist approach to art, at work even before the name of the movement had been put into place, had explicitly eschewed such notions, arguing that the artist’s interaction with material alone generates form. The implication that the artist has a pre-existent idea in mind to which he gives visible form is one that was rejected insofar as it relegated the work of art to a second tier role.
This had been the concern of one of the nineteenth-century German writers on art, Konrad Fiedler, who emphasized the distinction between art and ordinary life and our perceptions of each. For him, the interactive relation between an artist’s ideas and the material through which he explored them and ultimately gave form to them, was a central, non-negotiable issue. The notion that the artist had something in mind that he then “copied” into his work fell prey to the mechanization of society, he argued, and did not succeed in adequately engaging either the active potentialities of the material with which the artist was working or the moral underpinnings of the artistic enterprise itself.19
In the case of the Northern French miniature, such an assumption disregards the capacity of artistic energy, expressed through the explosive pattern of pen lines and colored washes, to create a previously unseen and unknown creature who, in turn, functions as the generative center of unbounded activity. The design conjures up before the viewer the linear tangle in which both the seated figure and the gyrating animal participate; this coursing energy also produces the inspired Gospel text found on successive folia. Content is transmitted directly via the language of visual imagery and occurs without the intervention of an independent, pre-existent source.
Both form and meaning are made at the moment of creative invention; they are then seized by the viewer in a process of realization that emerges through engagement with the image and scrupulous apprehension of its design. The latter does not have identity prior to or outside of artistic activity. Especially when figurative imagery is at issue, the artist’s creation should not be seen as imitative of something that has a reality elsewhere and which it is attempting to simulate. Forms in nature are to be taken neither as standards of representation nor as models for it. Artworks themselves provide guidance for insight into their makers’ practices and offer clues as well to their own expressive purposes.
Accordingly, if images are sites of creativity in their own right, then artists are not merely technicians who execute the ideas of others even when they are following prescriptions set down by programmers, the church officials and learned men of their time.20 Scholarly recourse to theological or literary texts to articulate the content of images should not assume that religious images exclusively illustrate knowledge that has already been articulated in verbal form, or are without meaning if, like grotesques or decorative arabesques, they fail to do so. Certainly images may act as substitute texts for the illiterate; they may be artistically uninteresting and Formalists may question whether, in their judgment, they constitute “art” at all. But extrapolating from precepts laid down by literary Formalists, man-made visual imagery ineluctably sets out distinguishing features that differentiate it from things of the natural world, even those that it may appear ostensibly most closely to imitate. It follows then that to depict something is different from either description of the thing or the thing itself; it needs to be examined according to a different set of rules.
Rather than a methodology, Formalism is an epistemology; it questions our ways of thinking about representation and perception, and examines assumptions about the relationship between art and nature. Mere description of how images look as conveyed through formal analysis, no matter how detailed, is an inadequate exercise in Formalism’s name and distracts from engagement with the larger issues involved in the making and study of art.
Concern for fundamental issues regarding the nature of artistic creativity was one of the hallmarks of Wilhelm Vöge’s ground-breaking scholarship on Romanesque and Gothic sculpture during the early decades of its developing practice more than a century ago. In his magisterial book on the emergence of Gothic style, Vöge established systematic terms for a descriptive analysis of medieval sculpture as part of an inquiry into the sources and nature of artistic creativity. Vöge brilliantly orchestrated a combination of concerns in his work on sculpture at Chartres, bringing together sensitive characterization of previously unanalyzed figurative carving and compelling identification of individual style – evidence of distinct hands at work on different portals. Limned in the richness of Vöge’s written language, Chartres’ Headmaster could stand alongside the most modern one.21
Vöge’s orderly observations, though based on nascent Formalist principles, in effect provided the foundation for the efficient categorization and definition of large bodies of sculpture in a practice that served the needs of archaeologists sorting through the detritus of Europe’s wars as well as museum curators organizing their national collections.22 The importance of establishing categories for material that, in some cases, had never been studied in a systematic way before, as well as of constructing regional lines of affiliation for groups of work – manuscripts and sculpture especially – that were dispersed across the landscape, proved to be the pressing requirement for a generation of scholars eager to enhance claims to the scientific grounds and rigorous possibilities of their practice.23
In the wake of Vöge’s debut study, the anonymous makers of elongated, geometrically distorted Romanesque sculpture concretized in the minds of scholars as individual personalities whose technique was marked by distinct manners of workmanship. Study of a particular monument did not encourage inquiry into the articulation of more general principles, however. Instead, in the immediate aftermath of Vöge’s achievement, admiring successors transformed his approach into a tool for the well-regulated and more limited exposition of relationships between sculpture and architecture and for prescriptive description of the treatment of body and drapery.
Scholars who succeeded Vöge after the turn of the century spun off the descriptive aspects of his practice into a self-sufficient form of investigation into local characteristics of art. This style criticism, or stylistic analysis, provided the basis for decades of writing about Romanesque as well as Gothic Art on both sides of the Atlantic. The work of the next generation of scholars comes to mind here, in particular that of Arthur Kingsley Porter and Henri Focillon.24
In Porter’s work on art of the Pilgrimage Roads, characterization and categorization of regional styles replaced dating as his narrowly defined goal, although chronology still played a role in his investigations.25 Study of style as an end in itself failed to acknowledge the roots of its authority, avoiding indication of why it was doing what it was doing or indicating towards what end, loftier or otherwise, it was doing it.
In the early 1950s, when contemporary artists were concentrating almost exclusively on issues of form in their work, and Structuralists were rediscovering the writings of the Russian Formalists, Louis Grodecki, a Polish immigrant who had taken up residence in Paris after World War II, reintroduced Vöge’s work to a new audience of medieval scholars as a model of diligent description, one that kept larger issues of artistic creativity in mind. Grodecki re-engaged with the careful procedures of scrupulous analysis that Vöge had inaugurated in his own work on French sculpture in an effort to further enhance our knowledge of the emergence of new forms of architectural production at the turn of the first millennium; he urged others to do the same.26
After Vöge’s death in 1952, just two years after Emile Mâle’s demise, Erwin Panofsky, Vöge’s most celebrated student, dedicated his study of Netherlandish painting to the teacher under whom he had studied in Freiburg and for whom he had written his doctoral dissertation on Albrecht Dürer. Panofsky then contributed a stirring appreciation of Vöge’s life and work to a collection of the latter’s essays, published in Germany in 1959. In it, Panofsky stressed for the reader the significance of Vöge’s two-year stay in France in preparation for the writing of his book on early Gothic sculpture. Visits to the great cathedrals had provided Vöge with first-hand encounters with twelfth-century sculpture, Panofsky noted, and these enabled the perceptions out of which Vöge’s thinking about the development of early Gothic statuary emerged. Panofsky was here presenting Vöge to the reader as a Formalist before the fact.
Russian Formalism was critiqued within a decade of its promulgation for concentrating on the formal organization of art and failing to consider its role within social communication. Although this was not a fair statement, the matter was one of considerable urgency in post-Revolutionary Russia and, for a long time, concern over this issue succeeded in removing Formalist works from view and silencing their claims. In an effort to address the situation without abandoning the achievement of the Moscow Group, two Russian scholars, P. N. Medvedev and Mikhail Bakhtin, co-authored a book in 1925 in which they defended Formalism’s practices while advancing the claim for close ties between literature and society.
The authors recognized that Formalism was not a precise methodology or tidy regime of practices, arguing that it needed to be viewed as encompassing diverse lines of inquiry.27 They drew on intimate knowledge of recent German scholarship to establish the relationship between Russian Formalism and a widespread pan-European movement in art scholarship, and demonstrated that there was no fundamental hostility between form and content in the logic of Formalist thinking. The basic positions of Formalism in Western art scholarship, they wrote, “give no grounds whatsoever for the denial of content in art.”28
Medvedev and Bakhtin did not see evidence of any direct relationship between recent Russian and German scholarship, but argued that they were connected through shared changes in their “ideological horizon.” They associated Russian Formalism with Kunstwissenschaft, the rigorous practice of art-science (or artknowledge) that German-speaking scholars had begun to develop in the closing decades of the nineteenth century in opposition to traditional Kunstgeschichte or art history, an unexacting practice that they regarded as excessively absorbed with documentary and biographical matters. In the eyes of the German scholars and their Russian sympathizers as well, the shortcomings of Kunstgeschichte cast a shadow over the intellectual validity of the study of art, thereby tarnishing the reputation of its practitioners.
Medvedev and Bakhtin identified the “constructive aims of art” as the nucleus of recent Western art scholarship; these, in their view, regarded the work of art as a closed-off unity but one that is part of real space. They saw nothing exclusionary in this definition. “Realistic art is just as constructivist as constructivist art,” they wrote, indicating that content need not be excluded from Formalist works or Formalist practice. And they emphasized the deep ideological meaning that German scholars attributed to form in contrast to the “simplistic realist view” of form as an “embellishment of content… a decorative accessory lacking ideological meaning of its own,” that was held by supporters of contemporary Russian figurative painting. In summarizing the central tenets of what they called European Formalism, Medvedev and Bakhtin recognized Fiedler as one of the first theoreticians of the movement.
Responsibility for the 1925 book is now attributed primarily to Bakhtin, who came to be recognized as a major literary theorist in the last third of the twentieth century. One of the German writers whose work he cited in the co-authored publication is Wilhelm Worringer, whose pioneering studies on the dynamic relationship between abstraction and naturalism in art and the psychology of Gothic style had been published a decade and a half before and reissued in numerous printings in response to public demand.29
In the first work, originally published in 1908, Worringer differentiated between art that imitated things in nature (classicism) and art that alienated itself from them (abstraction), identifying these as the two basic, divergent poles of artistic experience that emerge from instinctive feelings about the world and express themselves in artistic impulse. This “latent inner demand,” he observed, which he credits Aloïs Riegl for introducing, is the primary factor in all artistic creativity. Its expression collapses distinctions between form and content by linking inner urges of the art to outward appearances. In his next work, which he described as a sequel to the first, Worringer applies the questions raised in the earlier publication to that “complex of abstract art which is closest to us, namely Gothic.” He calls Gothic architecture the perfect expression of an unimpeded impulse toward abstraction, since no organic or natural model opposed itself to it.
The notion of internal mechanisms by which art changes was instrumental to the work of the Viennese art historian, Aloïs Riegl, a successor to Fiedler and forerunner of Worringer, whose theories developed over more than a decade of significant publication at the turn of the century and whose writings were central to the European Formalist enterprise. His ideas were seminal to the art historians who were educated in Germany and Austria around the time of World War I, and who then came to prominence on the American intellectual landscape in the decades after World War II. Riegl’s complex theorizing about art was fully absorbed into the work of scholars like Panofsky and Gombrich, each of whom pursued questions, in their own distinct ways, about the self-sufficient nature of art that Riegl had put into play.30
Meanwhile, Riegl’s work, written in a dense German, disappeared behind English language representations of it, particularly in relation to questions concerning artistic style – its definition and development. At the same time, the work of Bernard Berenson, formulated at the identical turn-of-the-century moment as Riegl’s and eminently more accessible in its straightforward pronouncements, came into prominence as the native authority in matters of Connoisseurship and style, aspects of the larger Formalist enterprise.
Riegl’s ideas were further elided during these decades by the differently framed claims of American Formalism; these, as we have seen, followed a more narrowly defined line of inquiry earlier articulated by Roger Fry and developed by Clive Bell. In the last decade, scholars whose interests have shifted away from the examination of the relationship between art and society have rediscovered Riegl; that issue, we recall, was one that Formalism, at its inception, rejected. Riegl’s relevance for a new generation lies in his study of visual perception, the changing nature of how we see – a concern that is bound up with representation and with issues of form. His works, now in translation, dominate current interests in visuality and reception theory, as well as historiography – art history’s selfreflective engagement with its own past.31
Riegl argued that art is a transformation not an imitation of nature, and that it continues to be transformed from within in “a search for interconnectedness, variation, and symmetry.”32 Individual artistic performance, he believed, is controlled by an inner need for pattern, order, and symmetry and is not generated by outside elements – historical, cultural, or otherwise. In order to account for change in art, Riegl introduced the idea of Kunstwollen, artistic volition or will. In one form or another, this notion of art’s inner drive has remained his most enduring and challenging contribution to art scholarship; we have just considered its importance for Worringer. Riegl saw this internal dynamic, which produces change as it develops through history, as part of a given society’s world-view; he employed it to define the changing qualities in particular kinds of art over a period of time. Riegl’s suggestion that it accounts for national characteristics in art came close to endorsing racial stereotypes, which followers like Strzygowski went on to do and for which he was criticized, by Schapiro as well as Gombrich. Yet his theories were egalitarian in other important ways: they accommodated both high art as well as lesser applied or decorative forms in their argument at a time when Formalists espoused a hierarchical ordering that restricted the designation art to certain types of creation. And, although Riegl’s ideas changed over the course of a decade, his engagement with meticulous observation of the details of individual works and his concern for the historic trajectory of artistic production never wavered.
Otto Pächt, who was initially trained by Riegl’s successors in Vienna, and who identified in his later years with Riegl’s sweeping project for art history, pursued diverse aspects of Riegl’s theories, more as policy guides than as theoretical inquiries. He remained committed to detailed structural or stylistic analysis in his work; supported the notion of regional or national characteristics in art; and he stayed skeptical of the idea that styles change through the impact of external influences. Upon his return to Vienna late in his career, after more than two decades at work in England, Pächt wrote in praise of Riegl’s close engagement with individual objects, saying: “I know of few more instructive things than to watch Riegl in his efforts to learn from the works of art the questions which they want to be asked and elicit from them the answers. Perhaps the most helpful thing in art history is this kind of dialogue with the object and not the monologues of the most brilliant art critics.”33 In his numerous studies of Romanesque and Gothic manuscript, fresco, and panel painting, Pächt, following Riegl, persisted in the belief that regional or national schools display distinct characteristics in their art through the activity of the Kunstwollen. Such belief assisted him in a career largely devoted to the production of manuscript catalogues, a task to which he had turned out of necessity upon exile from Germany in 1938.34
Meyer Schapiro staked out a different position from Pächt and Riegl in regard to the relationship between ethnicity and art, contesting, on several occasions, arguments in support of the existence of national characteristics in style. But he resembles Riegl more than he does any other scholar of art in the way in which he wrestled with the issue of artistic creativity and change throughout his career. He displayed enormous and unusual sympathy for the vast range of his predecessor’s work and its intellectual seriousness in one of his papers, calling him “the most constructive and imaginative of the historians who have tried to embrace the whole of artistic development as a single continuous process.”35 Numerous aspects of Riegl’s theories endure as significant issues in Schapiro’s own writings, especially those inquiring into artistic creativity.
Schapiro’s graduate studies at Columbia University had not brought him under the direct tutelage of scholars of medieval sculpture, since they were in short supply on this side of the Atlantic at the time; art history itself was just emerging as an independent field of study at the fringes of work in Classical philology.36 During a lengthy study trip through Europe in 1926 and 1927, Schapiro endeavored to make contact with scholars at work on medieval material in each country he visited: Gomez Moreno and Walter Whitehill in Spain, Hamann in Germany, Deschamps in Paris, Berenson in Italy. Through them, he developed contacts with like-minded others. In this way, he entered into a lengthy correspondence with Kingsley Porter, with whom he exchanged letters filled with concerns and ideas about the dating of southern French and Spanish sculpture, among other matters.
In one of his early communications to Porter, Schapiro wrote that he had heard of the senior scholar’s lectures on monastic centers and the diffusion of medieval art, and confessed: “I regret all the more that I am not at Harvard, for there is no one occupied with medieval art, and no one sufficiently bold to speculate on the interrelations of fields so vast as east Christian and Romanesque art.”37 Porter clearly invited him to come to Cambridge because Schapiro wrote a few months later declining the offer: “I regret exceedingly that I will be unable to study at Harvard next year. My duties as a teacher will make it impossible for me to visit Cambridge except during vacation periods.”38
Schapiro made his debut as an art historian in the late 1920s as a scrupulous observer and impeccable historian of Romanesque sculpture. He remarked later in life that he was drawn to Romanesque by its vigor and inventiveness, its interplay between folk art and high art, and the starkness of its simple forms.39 His dissertation, completed in 1929 and published, in part, in the Art Bulletin two years later, was a study of the extensive carvings at the southern French abbey of Moissac (fig. 5-2).40 Its published portion remains a model of visual analysis in the tradition of turn-of-the-century German scholars more than of French ones. In the notes, Schapiro cites Vöge’s book on Chartres along with numerous references to both French and German texts of a more archaeological nature and slightly later date. However, he identifies, in the opening pages, a work on early Greek art as the exacting model for his own investigation, observing that he is following Emmanuel Löwy in the use of the term “archaic” “as a designation of a formal character in early arts.”41
FIGURE 5-2 Capital with Daniel at the lion’s den, cloister at the Abbey of St Pierre at Moissac, West Gallery, c.1100. Photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY.
Schapiro’s introductory summary of his aims and achievements in the study of the sculpture demonstrates his interest in systematically understanding, instead of dismissing, the disproportional, non-mimetic figurative imagery that populates the capitals of the abbey’s cloister and the walls of its church entry. “In the present work,” he writes, “the postures, costumes, expressions, space, perspective and grouping of the figures have been described… to demonstrate that their departures from natural shapes have a common character which is intimately bound up with the harmonious formal structure of the works.”
The most comparable scholarly undertaking that comes to mind in reading Schapiro’s text is Riegl’s study of ornament. Both texts are equally comprehensive in theoretical scope, similarly detailed in their performance of close analysis, and both take as their subject an equivalently overlooked body of visual material. Although Schapiro does not cite Riegl, since his work did not substantively touch on the sculpture at Moissac, late in life Schapiro explained what he recognized to be the importance of Riegl’s contributions:
He described a perceptual world in the visual arts that was dynamic, and he tried to show how the broad development of art has been between these two poles…. Starting from that conception, Riegl analyszed in careful details the structure of forms in succeeding styles which enabled one to see how things changed and moved, what the structure was in each period.42
Moissac’s sculpture offered an unusually extensive, carved figural corpus, one that is situated at the beginning of a development that moves quickly toward more faithful natural depiction. It was thus ripe for the kind of foundational study that a dissertation in the tradition of German scholarship, as represented by the work of both Vöge and Riegl, demanded. Schapiro’s dissertation on Moissac should be regarded as an English-language chapter in the ambitious and ground-breaking project of Formalist study that had begun in Vienna more than half a century earlier and which is now being re-engaged in art history’s ongoing self-evaluation of its interests and methods.
Schapiro had also read the essays of Roger Fry on post-Impressionism as a student and saw parallels between the inventiveness and simple forms of Romanesque sculpture and the achievements of twentieth-century art. These he observed closely as a teacher to and friend of artists, and as a practitioner in his own right. Direct engagement with the gestures of art-making and the independent decisions of art-makers, along with close analysis of discrete works of art – all precepts of Formalist criticism – consistently drove his argument even when the goal of his inquiry was artistic change, not the characterization of what was constant in a monument or series of objects.
His studies of Romanesque art at Souillac and at Silos are dominated by pages of scrupulous and insightful analysis of sculpted relief and miniature painting in an effort to examine reasons for stylistic change at these abbeys: in the one case this involves deviation from related work at Moissac, and, in the other, the co-existence in a single place, and for a brief moment, of two different visual languages of expression. To aver that Schapiro’s project in these path-breaking articles is “a comprehensive sociological explanation of Romanesque style,” as Werckmeister has done, while not incorrect, elides the critical process by which Schapiro constructs analyses, dissolving an appreciation of his means into a celebration of apparent ends.43
As Schapiro’s career progressed, he devoted more and more time to the analysis of contemporary painting. In the 1940s, he grew “increasingly disturbed by Greenberg’s dogmatic formalism, by his refusal to grant artistic intention or social context, much less iconography, any place in analysis.”44 His own efforts to study this art in relationship to its social bases galvanized a politicized public and, in time, overshadowed the efforts he continued to make to engage art on Formalist grounds. Yet he never wavered in those interests and they persisted, long after his engagement with Marxist analysis in art historical study had dissipated. His important paper of the late 1960s on image-signs explores nonmimetic elements of artistic composition, some of which might be characterized as “sub-formal” in nature, and makes implicit reference to Romanesque and Gothic imagery. It was published with a note that some of the observations had been presented in his classes at Columbia thirty years before.45
In one of Schapiro’s most celebrated papers, “On the Aesthetic Attitude in Romanesque Art,” Formalism trumps historic functionalism in a playful tour de force of observation and citation. Published in 1947, the paper was written for a volume of studies that honored Schapiro’s friend, the mystical philosopher and curator of Indian art Ananda Coomaraswamy.46 In it, Schapiro cites numerous medieval texts that display, as he notes, “keen observation of the work itself, the effort to read the forms and colors and to weigh their effects.” One text quoted at length is a description of the textile wrappings around St Cuthbert’s relics at the time of their translation to the new cathedral of Durham, an event that had occurred in 1104 and was recounted 70 years later by the monk Reginald – either through eye-witness testimony or his own privileged access to the tomb. Reginald noted the unusual and fresh reddish-purple tone of the saint’s garments which “when handled make a kind of crackling sound because of the solidity and compactness of the fine skilful weaving.” Reginald also remarked on the charming variation provided by scattered spots of yellow which seem “to have been laid down drop by drop” and which contrasted with the purple, conferring on the background greater vigor and brilliance.
This twelfth-century description sounds suspiciously similar to comments one might read about mid-twentieth-century work written by Greenberg, one of the points Schapiro was making in an effort to expand the grounds on which medieval art could be appreciated. His evocation of Formalist concerns challenges the persistent focus on religious content in Romanesque art on the part of European scholars, in particular Emile Mâle. Reference to craft work rather than high art, such as the textile wrappings around Cuthbert’s relics, makes a subtle nod in Riegl’s direction since the latter’s book on ornament, Stilfragen, had been based on his experiences as curator of carpets and textiles in Vienna.
At the same time, Schapiro’s paper toys with materialist preoccupations with luxury goods and elite patronage and ignores issues of functionality.47 Schapiro once told me of the circumstances surrounding his decision to write the paper. These involved a private joke between the two men concerning their divergent approaches to the study of art and are not irrelevant to the matter at hand. Coomaraswamy, with whom Schapiro had been corresponding since the early 1930s, had often called the younger man a “materialist” and chided him for the turn his work had taken in the preceding decade with the publication of papers exploring the changing material conditions in which a particular object or monument had been produced. Schapiro recounted with glee his decision to counter Coomaraswamy’s expectations by transforming a study of the displaced material wealth of the Church into an examination of perception and taste. His own appreciation of the physical properties of medieval objects is here embedded in analysis of design, color, contrast, and artistic imagination, and he hoped it would appeal to the refined interests of his friend. Sadly, Coomaraswamy died before reading it.
Close looking, the fruits of visual engagement with an image or object, whether for the purposes of attribution or for understanding expressive meaning and stylistic change, constitutes the fundamental obligation of Formalist inquiry and provides the irreducible basis for any appreciation of visual art’s unique achievement. The closing lines of Schapiro’s paper evoke St Augustine’s support for an aesthetic conception of art as an object for the eye, not just for the mind, and provide a terse yet appropriate epigram for both Formalism’s and Schapiro’s legacies: “For when you have looked at a picture, you have seen it all and have praised it.”
1 These aspects were set out and formalized into something approaching a method in a student handbook that has been reprinted countless times (Taylor, Learning to Look, pp. v, vi).
2 Michael Podro succinctly remarked that the early Formalists regarded their concepts as “necessary but not exhaustive”: The Critical Historians of Art, p. 209. For Whitney Davis’s differentiation of these interests into aesthetic, stylistic, and psychological Formalism, see “Formalism: Formalism in Art History.”
3 Eagleton, Literary Theory, An Introduction, p. 2; Bennett, Formalism and Marxism, pp. 18–25.
4 See the seminal text written by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917, “Art as Technique or Art as Device,” in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, pp. 277–81.
5 Bowlt, “Russian Formalism.”
6 [On the marginal, see chapter 13 by Kendrick in this volume (ed.).]
7 L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France.
8 More recent scholarship understands art as a socially rather than qualitatively constructed category and is interested not in drawing distinctions between high and low forms of image-making, but in inquiring how the visual as a category is articulated. Tom Gretton summarizes this thinking based on the work of Pierre Bourdieu in his paper “New Lamps for Old.”
9 Kathryn Brush provides an account of this material in her book, The Shaping of Art History.
10 Davis and Womack, Formalist Criticism. See also Preziosi’s discussion of relevant aspects of Raymond Williams’s work in Rethinking Art History, pp. 81–2). [On reception theory, see chapter 3 by Caviness in this volume (ed.).]
11 See Jameson, The Prison-House of Language, pp. 43–4, 101; Bennett, Formalism and Marxism, pp. 26–7, where he remarks on the publication of Tzvetan Todorov’s Textes des formalistes russes in 1965.
12 See Stephen Bann’s introductory remarks to the collection of texts he assembled with John E. Bowlt; I repeat here Bann’s citation of Victor Erlich’s remark in the latter’s ground-breaking study of 1955 (Russian Formalism, 1).
13 Lubomír Dolezal, “Narrative Composition: A Link between German and Russian poetics,” in Russian Formalism, 73. The article was written for the publication of Bann and Bowlt’s collection. [On narrative, see chapter 4 by Lewis in this volume (ed.).]
14 “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” vol. 4, p. 8.
15 Formalist work of the 1950s and’60s was generally distinguished by the term “criticism” to set it off from the work of either “art history or scholarship” by its central advocate, Clement Greenberg. He further defined the distinctions as concern with “art as art, and not as a ‘subject’ or ‘field.’” This explanation is set out in his review of a book on Andrea del Sarto, the Renaissance painter, by S. J. Freedberg (Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4, p. 198). Fried presented his views most cogently in the essay he wrote for an exhibition catalogue, Three American Painters). See also excerpts from Fried’s work and commentary on it in Harrison and Wood, Art in Theory, 1900–2000.
16 For thumbnail sketches of the work of both Fry and Greenberg, and of the relationship between them, see Hyde Minor, Art History’s History, pp. 133–9.
17 Woolf, Roger Fry, pp. 111–12, 177, 183. The citations come from “autobiographical fragments” as well as letters made available to Mrs Woolf by the family.
18 Janson, History of Art, p. 226.
19 For the pioneering work in English on Fiedler see Podro, The Manifold in Perception and the expansion of his inquiry to include the next generation of German scholars, with remarks on Fiedler’s contribution to the later work (The Critical Historians, pp. 69–70 and 110–11). Daniel Adler discusses the moral implications of the early Formalists’ desire to reconcile neo-Kantian (i.e., intuitive and speculative) goals with Positivist esteem for measurable data in an effort to systematize art historical scholarship (“Painterly Politics”).
20 [On sculptural programs, see chapter 26 by Boerner in this volume (ed.).]
21 Vöge, Die Anfänge.
22 [On the modern medieval museum, see chapter 30 by Brown in this volume (ed.).]
23 [On Romanesque and Gothic manuscript illumination, see chapters 17 and 20 by Cohen and Hedeman, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
24 Porter’s most relevant publication, in which he cited Vöge’s work, is Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads. See the discussion of Porter’s relationship to German modes of scholarship by Brush in The Shaping of Art History, pp. 145–8. A book by one of Focillon’s students constitutes the foremost example of the application of Formalist compositional analysis to medieval architectural sculpture, although its relationship to German scholarship is not at all clear. See Baltrusaitis, La Stylistique Ornementale and the probing review of its method published in German the following year by Meyer Schapiro. This essay appeared in translation 40 years later (“On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art”)
25 [On pilgrimage art, see chapter 28 by Gerson in this volume (ed.).]
26 [On Romanesque and Gothic architecture, see chapters 14 and 18 by Fernie and Murray, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
27 The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, p. xxvi.
28 For what follows, see ibid., chap. 3, “The formal method in European Art Scholarship,” pp. 41–53.
29 I have used here Abstraction and Empathy and Form Problems of the Gothic.
30 For Panofsky, see Podro, The Critical Historians, pp. 178–208, and Iverson, Aloïs Riegl, pp. 154–66. Gombrich’s engagement with Riegl’s challenging work and a critique thereof are central to the premises of his own influential book, Art and Illusion; see the introduction, especially pp. 16–22.
31 See especially in this regard, Olin, Forms of Representation.
32 For discussion of Riegl’s complex ideas, see Podro, The Critical Historians, pp. 71–97; Iverson, Aloïs Riegl and Framing Formalism. The citation in the text is from Podro, The Critical Historians, p. 71.
33 Art historical lineage may be traced through historiographical commentary. See Pächt’s evaluation of Riegl (“Art Historians and Art Critics”) and Jonathan Alexander’s obituary for his teacher, “Otto Pächt.”
34 Alexander describes Pächt’s peregrinations in search of work in the memorial note referred to above. Pächt’s own appreciation of Riegl, quoted above, appeared in the year in which he left the Bodleian Library at Oxford to take up the chair in Art History at Vienna, the post Riegl had himself once held. This marked, in a sense, the return of the “New Vienna School,” with whose work he had been intimately identified thirty years before. See Christopher Wood’s characterization of these relationships in his introduction to The Vienna School Reader, pp. 9–81.
35 Schapiro critiques the use of racial characteristics in discussions of artistic style in more than one place. His essay, “Style,” is the most relevant to the issues under consideration here; in it he separates his laudatory characterization of Riegl’s contributions to the study of style from his critique of racial categorization.
36 [On Romanesque and Gothic Sculpture, see chapters 15, 16, and 19 by Hourihane, Maxwell, and Büchsel, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
37 Schapiro’s letters to Porter are preserved in the collection of Porter’s Papers in the Harvard University Archives and are cited here with the archivist’s permission. The quotation here is taken from a letter of November 10, 1927 at the beginning of their correspondence (HUG 1706.102, box 10). [On the relation between East and West, see chapters 23 and 24 by Folda and Papacostas, respectively, in this volume (ed.).]
38 Letter of April 4, 1928 (HUG 1706. 102, box 12).
39 Epstein, “Meyer Schapiro,” p. 79.
40 The unpublished portion of the dissertation examines in historical detail the iconography of each sculpture. The published portion has been reprinted, along with Schapiro’s other major studies of Romanesque art, in Selected Papers. Romanesque Art.
41 “The Romanesque Sculpture of Moissac,” in Romanesque Art, pp. 131–3.
42 “A Passion to Know and Make Known,” p. 78.
43 Werckmeister, Review of Schapiro’s Romanesque Art, p. 214.
44 Schapiro et al., “A Series of Interviews,” p. 162.
45 “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art”; the sparsely illustrated paper includes photos of the trumeau at Souillac, the Psalter of St Louis, and the earlier Symbol of Matthew in the Echternach Gospels. The note referencing class lectures he had given long before appears in the initial publication of the paper which had been presented as a talk at the Second International Colloquium on Semiotics in Poland in 1966 (Semiotica I, 3 (1969), pp. 223–4).
46 Schapiro chose this paper to introduce the volume on Romanesque (Romanesque Art, pp. 1–27). The citations in what follows come from pp. 13 and 12.
47 [On patronage, see chapter 9 by Caskey in this volume (ed.).]
Daniel Adler, “Painterly Politics: Wölfflin, Formalism and German Academic Culture, 1885–1915),” Art History 27:3 (June 2004), pp. 431–56.
Jonathan Alexander, “Otto Pächt,” Proceedings of the British Academy 80 (1991), pp. 453–72.
Jurgis Baltrusaitis, La Stylistique Ornementale dans la Sculpture Romane (Paris, 1931).
Tony Bennett, Formalism and Marxism (London, 1979).
John E. Bowlt, “Russian Formalism and the Visual Arts,” in Stephen Bann and John E. Bowlt, eds., Russian Formalism. A Collection of Articles and Texts in Translation (Edinburgh, 1973), pp. 131–8.
Kathryn Brush, The Shaping of Art History, Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art (New York, 1996).
Todd E. Davis and Kenneth Womack, Formalist Criticism and Reader Response Theory (New York, 2002).
Whitney Davis, “Formalism: Formalism in Art History,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics (New York, 1998).
Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory, An Introduction (Minneapolis, 1983).
Helen Epstein, “Meyer Schapiro: A Passion to Know and Make Known,” Art News 82 (May 1983), pp. 60–85.
Michael Fried, Three American Painters: Kenneth Noland, Jules Olitski, Frank Stella (Cambridge, Mass.: 1965).
Ernst Gombrich, Art and Illusion; A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation. Bollingen Series XXXV.5 (Princeton, NJ, 1960).
Clement Greenberg, “Avant-Garde and Kitsch,” in John O’Brian, ed., Clement Greenberg. The Collected Essays and Criticism, 4 vols. (Chicago, 1986).
Tom Gretton, “New Lamps for Old,” in A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello, eds., The New Art History (Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1988), pp. 63–74.
Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory 1900–2000 (Malden, Mass., 2004).
Vernon Hyde Minor, ed., Art History’s History, 2nd edn. (Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2001).
Margaret Iverson, Aloïs Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1993).
——, Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work. Critical Voices in Art, Theory and Culture, ed. Saul Ostrow (Amsterdam, 2001).
Frederic Jameson, The Prison-House of Language. A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton, 1972).
H. W. Janson, History of Art. A Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day (New York and Englewood, NJ, 1962).
Emile Mâle, L’Art religieux du XIIe siècle en France. Etude sur l’origine de l’iconographie du Moyen Age (Paris, 1922).
——, L’Art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France. Etude sur l’iconographie du Moyen Age et sur ses sources d’inspiration (Paris, 1919).
P. N. Medvedev and Mikhail Bakhtin, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship; A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, trans. Albert J. Wehrle (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).
Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Aloïs Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park, Penn., 1992).
Otto Pächt, “Art Historians and Art Critics – vi. Aloïs Riegl,” The Burlington Magazine 105 (May 1963), pp. 188–93.
Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven and London, 1982).
——, The Manifold in Perception; Theories of Art from Kant to Hildebrand (Oxford, 1972).
Arthur Kingsley Porter, Romanesque Sculpture of the Pilgrimage Roads, 10 vols. (Boston, 1923).
Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science (New Haven and London, 1989).
Meyer Schapiro, “On Geometrical Schematism in Romanesque Art,” Selected Papers. Romanesque Art (New York, 1977), pp. 265–84.
——, “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” Theory and Philosophy of Style, Artist, and Society. Selected Papers, 4 (New York, 1984), pp. 1–32.
——, Selected Papers. Romanesque Art (New York, 1977).
——, “Style,” in A. L. Kroeber, ed., Anthropology Today. An Encyclopedic Inventory (Chicago, 1953), pp. 79, 85–9.
Meyer Schapiro and Lillian Milgram Schapiro with David Craven, “A Series of Interviews (July 15, 1992–January 22, 1995),” Res 31 (Spring 1997), pp. 159–68.
Joshua Taylor, Learning to Look. A Handbook for the Visual Arts (Chicago, 1957).
Wilhelm Vöge, Die Anfänge des monumentalen Stiles im Mittelalter. Eine Untersuchung über die erste Blütezeit der französischen Plastik (Strasbourg, 1894).
O. K. Werckmeister, “Review of Schapiro’s Romanesque Art,” Art Quarterly II:2 (1979), pp. 211–18.
Christopher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York, 2000).
Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry. A Biography (London, 1940).
Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy. A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Trans. Michael Bullock, intro. Hilton Kramer (Chicago, 1997).
——, Form Problems of the Gothic (New York, 1918).