A History of Art History

1810–1830

On the last page of his monumental survey of the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque Kunstliteratur or “literature of art” (1924)—the corpus of treatises, handbooks, academic theory, and art histories—the Viennese art historian Julius von Schlosser called upon an unlikely figure to speak the envoi: the German artist Philipp Otto Runge (1777–1810). Runge produced few works and his career was brief, but his concept of art as a direct cognition of nature was much admired in the early twentieth century. Runge studied at the art academy in Copenhagen with neoclassical masters and met with little success. After periods in Dresden and Hamburg, he retreated to his family home in the far north, on the Baltic coast. Except for a treatise on color, which earned the admiration of Goethe, Runge formulated his ideas on art mostly in long letters to his brother, published in 1840.

For Schlosser, Runge was an authentic witness of the closing of a tradition of writing on art because, unlike some superficial enthusiasts of his generation—Wackenroder and Tieck, principally—and unlike the art theorists and the professors, Runge wrote from the “secure terrain of his métier.” Runge believed that the crucible of art was not the study of Raphael and other paragons of the high style but rather the study of nature by means of introspection. The creative mind, for Runge, must shelter itself from history by participating in nature. This artist rejects tradition, looking beyond temporal “becoming and passing (vergehen),” even as he concedes that art is only a sample of the “eternally marvelous of all times” and perishes like a flower. Runge wrote that “the permanent rhythm within the temporal event is the alpha and the omega.” To grasp this rhythm the artist must take a completely new approach to historical works of art. When such an artist, “with the deep sensibility animated, in a state of rapture, by the inner configuration of the spirit,” stands before a work of art,

the inner connection of the work with nature will dawn on him; he will as it were reproduce the work within himself, and all the splendor of the design will appear to him as a means for expressing himself more purely and comprehensively in that very connection which he inwardly and outwardly perceives.

Runge’s words persuaded Schlosser that there is no vantage point on the history of art outside the creation of art. Only an artist who sees the most beautiful artworks of the past as “products of nature raised to a higher power” can grasp the meaning of art history. The rest of us are watching a puppet show.

Schlosser’s history was infiltrated by his own increasing loss of confidence in the capacity of modern writers on art to say anything significant about art. Throughout his account he depreciated his own book’s protagonists—Leon Battista Alberti, Giorgio Vasari, Gian Pietro Bellori—as text-bound, dogmatic pedants who had forgotten what it meant to make art, if they ever knew. They were good for nothing but writing books. Runge takes the stage at the close of Schlosser’s pessimistic history, briefly, as if to bid adieu to the long tradition of academic art and at the same time to deliver an ironic greeting to the emergent discipline of scholarly art history, the succession of university instructors that a century later yielded Schlosser himself; a tribe who can only be more alienated from art, not less, than their ancien régime predecessors. In invoking Runge, Schlosser was indulging a kind of academic death wish.

Runge fled the academy in favor of the kitchen table, recovering a childlike state of receptivity. At home in Wolgast he cultivated together with his sisters the domestic art of cutting paper silhouettes. Although Runge’s drawn lines, schooled in the manner of John Flaxman, remember forms handed down from classical art, the repetition is deceptive. In fact, Runge was trying to begin art history over again by identifying the essential lines of nature and by tracing new, unseen subjects. His drawings might be compared to the engravings accompanying Edward Moor’s Hindu Pantheon (1810; see p. 191). Runge’s “Morning,” an emblematic composition, recalls Plutarch’s description, in the Oracles at Delphi, of an Egyptian image of dawn: a baby perched on a lotus flower; as if to note that only the Egyptians, who felt the full burden of the past, had invented an adequate symbol for the forgetting of history.

In Paris voices had asked why the Academy should survive the Revolution. In Germany there were many local academies, none with the weight and power of the French Academy. Young painters began in the 1790s to rebel against their teachers. Some headed for Rome, the source, as if the problem were not Rome itself but the repetitions of Rome, the diaspora of good form. They wanted to see the works of Raphael as they really were, unfiltered by the layers of copies, reproductive engravings, and citations.

The artists of the day who most flamboyantly acted out the recovery of innocence, making a mark where Runge had not, were a band of six painters, led by Johann Friedrich Overbeck and Franz Pforr. They called themselves the Brothers of St. Luke (Luke was the patron saint of painting), quit the Academy in Vienna in 1810, and moved to Rome. They occupied some buildings at a secularized Franciscan monastery on the Pincian hill and adopted an archaizing, long-haired mode of dressing that earned them the sobriquet “Nazarenes,” or men of Nazareth, a term referring to Christians generally already in Acts 24:5 and later, in the fourth century, the name of a Christian sect. They were the first band of artists to withdraw from an academy. But their radicalism was limited, for they only replaced one discipline with another, drawing not after ancient statuary but medieval mural and panel painting, up to and including Raphael. They were joined in 1812 by Peter Cornelius, in 1813 by Wilhelm Schadow, and later Philip Veit, Ferdinand Olivier, and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.

The Nazarenes painted figural compositions with religious content, in legible and nubile outline and in soft, bright colors. In the sacred stories they discovered a bashful eroticism. Overbeck’s Finding of Moses (1822–1824), a panel painting, is more subdued, less joyous and agitated, than its model, Raphael’s fresco of the same subject in the Vatican Loggia. The painting knows too much. Every gesture is burdened with meaningfulness.

The Nazarenes received two substantial commissions in Rome: a series of murals illustrating the story of Joseph in the Casa Bartholdy, and murals illustrating scenes from Dante, Ariosto, and Tasso in the Casa Massimo. They oriented their art to the suave, disingenuous style of the early Raphael as well as of his teacher Perugino. But they were also steeped, as was Raphael himself, in the style of Albrecht Dürer. From the torrent of Wackenroder’s Herzensergiessungen they drew their sentimentality. The generation of Goethe had brooded over the dichotomy between Gothic and classical style. The Nazarenes tuned their work to the binarism of Raphael and Dürer—Italia and Germania, south and north—which was in fact no binarism at all. For Dürer and Raphael had in a similar fashion, and the Nazarenes were the first to see this, recalibrated the relation of painting to the body. The figures of Dürer and Raphael were rooted in attentiveness to simple attitudes and gestures, and this is why their art seemed to anti-academic artists not fully to belong to the historical succession of painting manners.

The engagement of the Nazarenes with historical art was ardent. In 1829 Johann Friedrich Overbeck painted a mural on the façade of the Porziuncola, the ancient, diminutive Franciscan chapel englobed since the sixteenth century by the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a couple of miles from the church of St. Francis at Assisi. This was the third church repaired by Francis. The mural, depicting the legendary granting of the Porziuncola Plenary Indulgence to Francis, echoes the styles of Giotto, Fra Angelico, and Raphael. Here Overbeck is the colleague of the architect and theorist Heinrich Hübsch, his near-contemporary, who would rebuild the west end of Speyer cathedral in the 1850s. Their approach extended the typological attitude to the past that had for so long dominated European art, whereby buildings and images were permitted to live in time, retaining their identity through sanctioned interventions, substitutions, and revisions. It was also continuous with the practice of conservation, now in the new century increasingly scientific. The conservators, who adapted to the practical sphere the neutral, value-free mentality of the bookish antiquarians, protected whatever was old, without strong prejudices for or against one style or another. Between 1818 and 1824 the architects Raffaelle Stern and Giuseppe Valadier restored the first-century Arch of Titus in Rome. To replace missing material they cut new blocks in the ancient Roman manner. Until then, buildings had been repaired along practical lines, or in a modern style, and no one worried about the formal integrity of the structure. The modern conservator who matched his additions to the existing fabric perpetrated a forgery supported by archeological knowledge. The writer Stendhal, for one, registered a complaint, describing the Arch of Titus in 1828 as the “most elegant of the triumphal arches until the fatal epoch when it was redone by M. Valadier.”

The landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich, who like Runge hailed from the far north and never visited Italy, recommended the study of nature over the emulation of other artists. The Nazarenes’ path to the state of innocence, by contrast, led through the art-historical past. The art of the Nazarenes, paradoxically, proved completely compatible with the academic mentality. In the 1820s Peter Cornelius took over the directorship of the academy at Düsseldorf and later of the academy at Munich. The Nazarenes’ reversion to the academy, their spurious radicality, might have made it clear that citational painting was a dangerous vortex. But not all contemporaries, including for example the exponents of the French style troubadour and many Victorian painters, steered clear.

Friedrich Schlegel remained unconvinced that one could simply escape history. In 1804 he suggests that a modern painter might indeed be capable of creating completely original works, “hieroglyphs” or divine symbols, out of his feeling for nature; but maybe not, maybe tradition is after all the best source. In 1823, preparing the edition of his collected works, Schlegel added a footnote on Philipp Otto Runge, whom he had met in Dresden in 1802. He adduces Runge’s “allegorical” drawings as an example of how badly it can go when even a talented artist turns his back on tradition. Runge’s art was to Schlegel a warning that a modern art unmoored would be as directionless as the new society projected by the French Revolution. The modern hieroglyphs of nature are in the end empty; symbols should be based on old symbols, “consecrated by tradition.” For the artist, “tradition is the solid mother earth which he can never abandon without peril and without irreparable damage to himself.”

Schlegel converted to Catholicism in 1808 and drifted towards conservatism. By 1812 he was certain that there was no new beginning for art. “The best theory of art is its history.” he wrote. “In art, just as in other areas of human activity, a sudden tearing of the threads of tradition, the discarding of the rich capital of the work of past epochs, and the desire to create a new art as if out of nothing never go unpunished.”

Julius von Schlosser made few comments, in print at least, on the art of his own day. Yet he must have recognized that Runge’s desire to tune his art to the “permanent rhythm within the temporal event” prophesied the ideas of Wassily Kandinsky and Piet Mondrian, artists of Schlosser’s generation.

The university professor of art history did not yet exist when Runge died in 1810. At that point scholarship was practiced by gentleman amateurs, librarians, conservators, and instructors in academies of art. Or artists: one of the few admirers of medieval art was the French painter Jacques-Nicolas Paillot de Montabert, who praised in his Dissertation sur les peintures du moyen âge (1812) the magnificent simplicity of the Italian paintings of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The early Italians, he believed, invented oil painting—before van Eyck, of course—but immediately and wisely rejected it. After Raphael, according to Paillot, painting fell into arid academicism.

One of the favored modern formats was the monograph, or the account of the life and works of a single artist. Vasari’s history had been a sequence of monographs, of varying length. To write a single such text was to extract the artist from a narrative of the progress of the arts and recreate him as a paragon of self-sufficiency. The favored subjects of the monographs of the early nineteenth century were the artists of the early Renaissance, the pioneers who broke with the Middle Ages but were not yet enlisted in an academic program. The polymath Carlo Amoretti published a monograph on Leonardo da Vinci in 1804. Luigi Pungileoni wrote the life of Correggio (1817–1821). Gustav Friedrich Waagen, later director of the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, published a monograph on Hubert and Jan van Eyck in 1822. In the same year the writer Johanna Schopenhauer, acknowledging the influence of Goethe and his circle as well as of Schlegel and the brothers Sulpiz and Melchior Boisserée, collectors of fifteenth-century northern painting, and with an epigram from Wackenroder, published Johann van Eyck und seine Nachfolger, a history of northern art from the beginning through the end of the sixteenth century. More than one woman writer of distinction took up the form of the monograph. Maria (Dundas) Graham (Lady Callcott) published Memoirs of the Life of Nicholas Poussin in 1820, translated into French the following year. The Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan) published the Life and Times of Salvator Rosa in 1824, more life and times than art despite the author’s conviction that by the late seventeenth century the “long list of illustrious masters … was closed for ever, and terminated” in Salvator Rosa himself, “well worthy of the splendid but melancholy preeminence.”

Joseph Heller’s Life and Work of Albrecht Dürer (1827) was the first catalogue raisonné of his works. Johann David Passavant, a painter who had spent several years in Rome with the Nazarenes, now curator of the Städelsches Kunstinstitut in Frankfurt, published a monograph on Raphael (1839). Already in the first three decades of the century twenty books had been written on Raphael.

The monograph combined the work catalogue with the biography, diagramming a continuity between art and life. The life-and-work model solved the dilemma of historicism: the life provided a shelter for the art, as if the art—once bottled up inside the life—could finally be exempted from history. The artwork is shifted out of general history and into the special history of a life, so preserving its art quality.

Biographical or monographic art history often downplays the historical functions of art, the framing institutions, and the pressures of politics. The monograph was designed to bring out everything that managed to resist those constraints, that is, art as such. The monograph is best suited to painters and sculptors, where the concept of authorship is manifest. The authorship of prints, which often involve several individuals—designer, engraver, publisher—is more complicated. Prints can be treated like paintings if the designer is a strong artist, and especially if the designer also prepares the plate. Adam von Bartsch, the curator of the graphic collection of the Court Library in Vienna and advisor to Duke Albert von Sachsen-Teschen, invented the concept of the peintregraveur or painter-engraver, a peremptory elevation of some but not all printmakers to the status of artists. His twenty-one-volume catalogue (1803–1821) created a lasting order within the vast corpus of European prints but also a lasting problem, a split within the inventory, since most printmakers were not like Rembrandt.

Few of the earliest monographists had any connection with a university. One who did was Johann Dominik Fiorillo (1748–1810), an Italian painter, born in Germany, who held a professorship in philosophy at Göttingen but also taught drawing and art history (he was the teacher of Wackenroder). Fiorillo’s edition of the poem on painting by Salvator Rosa (1785) was prefaced by a life of the artist. He published a Geschichte der zeichnenden Künste in nine volumes (1798–1821), a history of European art from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century. Fiorillo mostly compiled the findings of Italian scholars such as Leopoldo Cicognara. This was art history with a low intellectual profile, basically a collection of facts based on primary sources or communicated by earlier authorities such as Vasari, and observations on works laced with critical judgments. Fiorillo and most other art historians of the early nineteenth century have faded from view and, in truth, are not very interesting to read.

Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785–1843), however, a polymath much admired by his contemporaries, enjoys even today a secret cult. Rumohr’s scope exceeded art history. He wrote a travel book on northern Italy with many notes on agriculture; he wrote a philosophical cookbook; he anthologized the Italian novelle of the late Middle Ages and himself wrote prose fiction; he was an accomplished draughtsman. His main contribution to art history was the three volumes of Italienische Forschungen: Zur Theorie und Geschichte neuerer Kunstbestrebungen (1827–1831), a history of Italian art from the early Middle Ages through the fifteenth century, crowned by a monograph of Raphael. Rumohr studied with Fiorillo at Göttingen and at the art academy in Munich. He was welcomed into the progressive circles of Ludwig Tieck and the brothers Riepenhausen, of Runge and Friedrich Perthes. In 1808 Rumohr travelled with Achim von Arnim and the Brentanos. He saw the Boisserée collection in Heidelberg and published his first study of medieval art in Schlegel’s Deutsches Museum. In 1816 Rumohr settled in Italy, where he found companionship among the Nazarenes. In the 1820s he was involved in sorting out, with Waagen, the art collections of the Prussian state.

Rumohr’s art-historical writing is characterized by a mistrust of the literary tradition, including Vasari. Instead he sought out documents. Rumohr’s account of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Tuscan art is built on documents about the guilds or artistic commissions found in the archives. He admired the Sienese master Duccio’s “lovely expression of goodness and mildness.” But generally Rumohr’s remarks on style are spare. Breaking the religious mood conjured by the Nazarenes, he describes Giotto as a secularizer. Rumohr will not join the chorus of praise for Giotto, finding Friedrich Schlegel’s admiration overblown. He himself considers Giotto merely a “lucid, judicious, hard-working master” (der klare, besonnene, werktätige Meister). Giotto may have “steered art toward the lively and the active,” but he also “encouraged that … alienation from the ideas of Christian antiquity which marks and distinguishes the Florentine school all the way to Leonardo and Raphael … though one might except Fra Angelico and Masaccio.”

The other cause of the decline was the excessive power of the guilds, who enforced a democratic “levelling of masters,” “dangerous for the arts.” Too many lesser artists were involved in decisions; aristocratic principles were suppressed in favor of the common good.

In 1844, a year after his death, an eighty-three-page biography of Rumohr was published by his acolyte Heinrich Wilhelm Schulz: a monograph not on an artist but on an art historian. Art history doubles back upon itself almost as soon as it begins. The peculiar self-regard of this discipline has its psychological origins in fear: fear that modern scholarship is alienated from art and fear that modern art is alienated from power. Schlosser will admire Rumohr, identifying him as the first interesting art historian who was not himself an artist, just as he identified himself as the last academic art historian who was still intimate with art. Carl Friedrich Rumohr is the library-bound art historian’s own better image of himself, namely as a gentleman with a discerning eye and an empiricist with no tolerance for Schwärmerei or mystical nonsense, a man of the world, perhaps an amateur draughtsman, an ideal combination of empirical and critical sensibilities. He is the doppelgänger of the free artist depicted by the early nineteenth-century monographs. He figures even today in a patrician fantasy of the discipline.

Even more isolated than the Nazarenes in his own day, and much more admired than they are in ours, was William Blake (1757–1827). Blake was trained as an antiquarian engraver. As an apprentice he made drawings and prints after the tombs in Westminster Abbey. He brought the linear style of Flaxman to his tasks, but, like Piranesi, spurned all that was Greek. Like Runge, Blake was a reader of the Baroque mystic Jacob Böhme, whose cosmological diagrams purified his line and reintroduced him to symmetry. Blake allied himself with James Barry, John Hamilton Mortimer, and Henry Fuseli against Joshua Reynolds and the Royal Academy. He sought savage and rude but also lithe and fluid forms. Blake found in Edmund Burke’s theory of the sublime as well as in older eccentric accounts of world architecture sustenance for his belief that everything of value had been invented by the ancient Jewish tribes. He believed that the Greeks had cribbed their architectural orders and their sculptural manner from the Temple of Solomon. His early engraving of Joseph of Arimathea among the Rocks of Albion (1773, reworked in the 1810s), based on a figure in Michelangelo’s Pauline Chapel, known to Blake through a print, bears the inscription: “This is One of the Gothic Artists who Built the Cathedrals in what we call the Dark Ages.” Blake saw and copied fifteenth-century paintings in English collections. In his late works he introduced Indian and Asian motifs, including the child perched on a lotus leaf.

Blake despised the Royal Academy and the margins of his copy of Reynolds’s Discourses, which had brought the academic gospel to Great Britain, are crammed with expressions of acid outrage. Reacting to Reynolds’s condescension to Dürer in Discourse III (1770), Blake scribbled: “What does this mean, ‘would have been one of the first painters of his Age?’ Albert Dürer Is not would have been. Besides, let them look at Gothic figures & Gothic Buildings & not talk of Dark Ages or of any Age. Ages are all equal. But Genius is Always Above the Age.” We encountered already in the sixteenth century the thought experiment of imagining how wonderful an artist Dürer would have been had he received a proper artistic education. André Félibien extended the topos when he said that Dürer, “closed in his own knowledge and not seeing anything around himself which would give him more noble and elevated ideas, did not notice that in painting there is an infinite number of other faculties [beyond skillful imitation of nature] that he must know in order to achieve perfection.” Roger de Piles said much the same thing; Winckel-mann opined that Dürer and Holbein had talent and that if they had been exposed to the ancient works they might have surpassed the Italians. Blake was protesting the conventional wisdom of centuries.

Blake was a skilled, in fact radically inventive, engraver. The project of conservation, with its desire to publish findings—there was affinity with antiquarianism—was tied to reproductive technologies. For three centuries the task of the reproduction of Renaissance and Baroque paintings, with their infinite gradations of shade and color, had taxed the capacities of the print media: engraving and etching, later mezzotint and now aquatint, reproducing analogue tones. The preferred medium for the reproduction of pre-Renaissance paintings, however, was the simple line drawing, both to clarify the unfamiliar forms and to symbolize an innocent nondependence of their purity on the blandishments of color. Karl Joseph Ignaz Mosler had already made line drawings after paintings in the Boisserée collection before 1808, but they were never published. Fifteenth-century works, not to speak of older works, were rarely featured in the great anthologies of engravings after historical paintings published in these years. Jean-Baptiste Seroux d’Agincourt, whose attitude was antiquarian, reproduced medieval works in outline in his Histoire de l’art par les monumens, depuis sa décadence au IVe siècle jusqu’à son renouvellement au XVIe (1810–1823), the first illustrated history of art. The outline drawings reported on composition and iconography but not much more. Seroux d’Agincourt was obliged to illustrate the invention of oil painting with line drawings of a group of figures from van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece, a portrait of van Eyck, and the Dead Christ by Antonello da Messina. At this point lithography became available, a medium, like woodcut, well suited to line drawing. The lithograph sent the artists in search of suitable works to copy. From 1821 Johann Nepomuk Strixner made lithographs after works in the Boisserée collection and after Maximilian I’s Prayer Book, the emperor’s personal copy of a printed Book of Hours whose margins were hand-decorated with drawings by Dürer, Altdorfer, Baldung, Cranach, and Burgkmair.

Goethe, in an article of 1816, says that the readers should be given at least reproductions of outline drawings of the paintings discussed, “otherwise it is mere rhetoric and versifying (Rederei und Verselei), requiring neither nature nor an artistic object.” This was not the norm, and in this respect the European tradition lagged well behind the Chinese and Japanese tradition, which for centuries had accompanied art-historical and critical texts with woodcut illustrations.

The painter William Young Ottley, as we noted, was in Italy in the 1790s making drawings after medieval paintings. In 1826 he published a volume of engraved plates after drawings by himself and by Humbert de Superville, dedicated to Flaxman and to the hope that viewers would share his admiration for the “beauties dispersed” among the works by the “Most Eminent Masters of the Early Florentine School.” These specimens attest to the “intrinsic and peculiar excellence” of that school before the corruption of style that set in after Raphael. Something about the early masters, Ottley muses, made them “safe teachers,” unlike Raphael and his generation, whose perfection only led to ruin. He praised the early painters and sculptors, including Cimabue, Giunta Pisano, and Nicola Pisano, but above all Giotto, whose “ingenious distribution of the figures” develops subjects “with a degree of perspicuity seldom equalled, and perhaps never surpassed, by painters of later times.” These paintings are “almost ever exempt from affectation of manner.”

For all the gloomy eloquence of Paillot de Montabert and the enthusiasms of Ottley, most observers at the start of the nineteenth century either deplored or patronized paintings more than three hundred years old. The portraits of the Virgin Mary, Christ, and the saints were considered documents of obscurantism. The efforts of the northern painters in the wake of van Eyck to describe the world as they saw it were reminders of the poverty of depiction unsustained by an ideal. There was as yet little taste for realism. In The World as Will and Representation (1818/1844), the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, son of the novelist and art historian Johanna Schopenhauer, dismissed the idea that the description of nature could ever generate beauty: “We see how far the old German [read: Netherlandish] painters arrived at beauty by imitating nature. Let us consider their naked figures. No knowledge of the beautiful is at all possible purely a posteriori and from mere experience.” No one had any language yet to justify the ugly, the deformed.

Relativism, or the redescription of the universe as an infinity of local and incommensurable truths, already proposed as an intellectual ideal by Herder, proved difficult to realize. Art historians of the early nineteenth century took almost no interest in the functions of images, in rituals, in the performance of sacraments and vows, in the political agency of images, in the meaning of images to collectivities, and generally in the existential investments that once animated past or distant images. Art history bought its relativism at the price of a diminishment of the idea of art. Stylistic eclecticism betokens a loss of confidence in art, because it signals acceptance of a split between form and content. Relativism on the level of style is relatively easy; relativism on the level of custom, ritual, and belief is hard to achieve. Eclecticism exposes an incomplete relativism.

The desideratum of relativism, because so difficult to realize, paradoxically encouraged the extraction of works from their historical and local contexts. It was easier to admire the flowers of Indian art when those flowers were removed from their ritual beds and transposed to the printed page or, ultimately, to the museum. Wackenroder, we saw, embraced medieval and Indian art on the same page. Protestant eyes rested benignly on the very images, Popish or Hindu—once they were translated into black lines on paper—that had not so long before been abominated as props for superstitious cults.

The European desire to protect, in the name of Enlightenment, the freedom of aesthetic judgment from the pressures of custom, ritual, and politics, swaps one misreading for another: disapproval of the alien belief-system gives way to a universal aestheticism. The translation of the Indian artwork into an alien language of art revealed aspects about the work not seen before, but also aspects that were not really there. It is not clear which attitude to prefer: the generous but superficial curiosity manifested in Edward Moor’s compendium of Hindu iconography, or G. W. F. Hegel’s exclusion of Indian art from the narrative of the progress of spirit, on the basis of its lack of historical sense:

The Indians have proved themselves incapable of an historical interpretation of persons and events, because an historical treatment requires sang-froid in taking up and understanding the past on its own account in its actual shape with its empirical links, grounds, aims, and causes.

Hegel is ready to concede that the European’s perspectival view of history, which aims for objectivity, is cold-blooded. The European historian’s “prosaic circumspection”

is at variance with the Indian pressure to refer each and everything back to the sheerly Absolute and Divine, and to contemplate in the commonest and most sensuous things a fancifully created presence and actuality of the gods.

The Indians cannot keep poetry and prose, infinite and finite, apart, and so

fall, despite all their exuberance and magnificent boldness of conception, into a monstrous extravagance of the fantastic which runs over from what is inmost and deepest into the most commonplace present in order to turn one extreme directly into the other and confuse them.

Hegel’s tone is censorious, and his understanding of Indian art distorted by his historical philosophy of art, his own nonconfused partition of the finite and the infinite, which will be discussed in the next section.

In 1808 Schlegel recommended to Goethe Karl Mosler’s drawings after the early Netherlandish and German panel paintings of the Boisserée collection. In his long essay of 1816 entitled Kunst und Altertum am Rhein und Mayn, Goethe discussed the Boisserée collection (in that same year, by the way, Sulpiz Boisserée discovered or rediscovered the tomb of Erwin von Steinbach that the youthful Goethe could not find). This text contains one of the earliest sketches of a true contextual history of art, an art history that suspends present-tense observances and instead tries to grasp unfamiliar forms on their own terms. We must not, Goethe warns, mistake early northern panel painters for rustic naifs and so exclude them from our study of art. Instead we must understand the world that produced them. He begins by outlining a complete history of Christian art in five pages. Goethe gives historical reasons for the emergence of the Rhineland as a cradle of art: the Roman garrisons and the arrival of the saints, which provides local myths. For a long time, though, painting is imprisoned in the stiff “Byzantine” style. Only in the fifteenth century does it break free, shrugging off conventions—symmetry, the gold ground—and instead learning simply to observe the world around it. The painters develop a free and natural style. This is a compact alternative to Vasari’s narrative of the rise of the new art in Tuscany. Goethe says that it is otiose to attempt constantly to explain where the artistic way of seeing came from, for the original artist finds it all around him:

The man who emerges from childhood and raises his eyes does not find nature, as it were, pure and naked around him, for the divine strength of his forebears has created a second world within the world. He is so enclosed within imposed acclimatizations, conventional usages, favourite customs, venerable traditions, treasured monuments, beneficial laws, and so many splendid products of art that he never learns to distinguish what is original (ursprünglich) and what is derived. He helps himself to the world and has a perfect right to do so.

Goethe is saying that fifteenth-century Netherlandish art is valuable not because it transforms the world, nor because it invents a new world, but because it successfully reproduces the craftsman’s experience of a world that has already been shaped. The value of the painting is its continuity, guaranteed by the craftsman’s integrity and freedom from the interference of aesthetic ideas, with a world shaped to human needs. The beauty of the painting is the beauty of a social world collectively constructed over time.

According to Goethe, even the artist’s most original creations are fabricated out of preformed materials: “One may call that artist original (original) who treats the objects around him in an individual, national, and above all traditional way, and shapes them into a well-knit whole.” The world is itself already such a well-knit or well-established whole. This is the basis for the idea of context. Goethe’s conceit is that northern art is a felicitous parody of academicism. For he does not say—as Schopenhauer and many others would—that they simply copied what was before their eyes. Rather, he says they copied an already artificial world, a fabricated environment sedimented with life, experience, and craft. Art is best, Goethe knows, when it copies art. And yet this is very far from academicism. The academy by nature establishes criteria for education other than the naïve transmission of skills. Goethe trusts, or pretends to trust, in such transmission. It is a weak concept of art, for in Goethe’s account the work of art only repackages the social world, which is not a “first world,” a ground, but only a “second world.” Art adds nothing to that world but a frame.

Goethe, ironist and illusionist, incompletely occupies his own words. His strategy here is in part to discredit the religious or neo-Christian or Romantic interpretation of these works, in particular the recent Schlegel. He stresses the secular dimension as the key to the works’ liberation into the aesthetic sphere. He tacitly breaks with the theses of his own colleague J. H. Meyer expressed in the publication on Winckelmann of 1805. The angels in the painting of St. Veronica holding the sudarium attest to a local “feeling for nature” developed since the thirteenth century. The Medusa-like head of Christ on Veronica’s veil is a universal, no longer Christian, symbol of the horror of death and the misery of the human condition.

Goethe’s other witness is Jan van Eyck’s Adoration of the Magi triptych from the church of St. Columba in Cologne, which the Boisserées had purchased in 1808 (the picture is now in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich, the attribution corrected to Rogier van der Weyden). The picture leads him to the thesis that every community has an essential character that is expressed in a great individual or artist. He wishes upon every province or city the patriotism it is entitled to. Relativism has often served as a cover for chauvinism, for it sanctions nonstandard perspectives. Goethe’s counterchauvinism is a way of unmasking what he saw as the chauvinism of the influential art historian Cicognara, who had said in 1808 that Italians and Greeks have the bello ideale, whereas the foreign schools can only be rescued by the concept of a bello relativo. The opposite of aesthetic absolutism, in 1816, is localism. The rootedness of Netherlandish painting supplies Goethe with a general model of what art should be. The provinciality of Netherlandish art is a virtue because it allows for more authentic self-expression. This argument upends the values of civilization in the name of the essential project of modernity, namely, to assert the right of the living to express themselves without worrying about whether they measure up to the past. Modernity protects the freedom of the present to sink into temporal provinciality.

Goethe is not proposing that modern painters imitate early Netherlandish art. He is saying, first, that their art expresses its own lifeworld, and to bring this out is the task of an art history; and second, that expression of the familiar world is not such a bad recipe for art today. Artists would do well to take up their own experiences as subjects and not attempt to select their preferred forms and subjects from the past, as the neoclassicists and the Nazarenes had been doing. The aim of a modern art is to offer itself, as early Netherlandish painting had done, as the ready-made object of a contextual art history.

A paradox looms. Goethe assigns art history an infinity of tasks. It must show how all styles in all times have reflected their respective worlds. This is a supposedly nonevaluative task. It will soon emerge, however, that some styles reflect their worlds more effectively than others, and these styles are to be praised precisely for their humility, lack of aesthetic pretensions, and readiness to be drafted into a contextual history of art. This is the basis for the admiration for fifteenth-century Flemish and seventeenth-century Dutch art by modern beholders, pious, bourgeois, rational, and urban, who see in this art the prehistory of their own mentality. Herder had offered a glimpse of a deep relativism that would relativize art itself. This relativism yielded a concept of art as no more than an unusually eloquent form of expression. Goethe’s exposition of Netherlandish art seems in tune with this teaching. But realism is also an artistic style, even if no one could quite see this before the middle decades of the nineteenth century. The art historian Lionello Venturi has gone so far as to propose that the historicist project itself—defined as the encompassing within historical study of “all phases of human activities from heroic deeds to the minutiae of everyday life”—actually created pictorial realism. The emerging openness to the ordinary registers a deep political shift that can be summarized as skepticism about authority. It permits Protestants like Goethe to greet pre-Reformation cult images with the same patronizing generosity that they display toward African or Indian works. The original ritual functions are forgotten and the depictions can be met on another plane. Iconoclasm, the original Protestant riposte to icons, will eventually be condemned, even by Protestants, as meaningless vandalism.

In a traditional society images are expected to deliver real pictures of the cosmos or of history. Styles might change from one decade to another, but content remains stable, for reality itself is stable. In a traditional society, art is much more than style. Vasari and the academicism that came in his wake reversed this formula. For Vasari, the content of art was its style. But that is not because style was now disengaged from reality. For Vasari, an accomplished and beautiful style reproduced ideal and eternal forms. He took for granted the ideality of the content of both Christian and mythological art and had in fact invested in style only because he was confident of the ideality of the contents chosen by his preferred painters. Manifestation of the ideal style was the project of civilization and the proper occupation of the ruler and the ruling class. Vasari combines the craftsman’s annalistic conception of success with the courtier’s flattery of power, offering little sense of what the content of art should be. Sacred and profane subjects, if treated with a beautiful style, are equally praiseworthy. The so-called Mannerist styles were unacceptable because their dissonant forms seeped into the level of content.

The sermo humilis of the Romantic medievalists, their cultivation of a pious homeliness, can be understood as a rejection of both aristocratic consonance (the classic style) and aristocratic dissonance (Mannerism). One response to this challenge, the challenge of the Nazarenes but also that of the many unrealized counteracademic impulses, was the futuristic cosmic spiritualism of Philipp Otto Runge. But no one would heed his call until the early twentieth century. Another response was the aesthetics of the ugly and the everyday, and Goethe does provide some preliminary language for this. But Goethe is complex: he has high regard for the early Netherlanders for non-pious reasons, and yet he is still drawn to the grand. He delivers Strasbourg cathedral but later switches his allegiances to the classical and the balanced.

Less ambivalent, no less untimely, are the poet Heinrich Heine’s critical remarks on the Nazarenes. In his Reise von München nach Genua (1828) Heine unfavorably compares the ex-rebel and now academician Peter Cornelius to the seventeenth-century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. To the affectation of the Nazarenes, Heine prefers a “Hellenist” sensualism and a Saint-Simonian materialism. Perhaps Heine, if not Karl Marx, would also have appreciated the project of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, had it been realized. In the section “Orgie de Musée, ou l’omnigamie mixte en ordre composé et harmonique” in his unpublished tract Le nouveau monde amoureux (1816), Fourier proposed a completely new kind of museum. Instead of painted and sculpted simulacra of admirable human forms, the stock-in-trade of the Louvre, he suggested staging exhibitions of live people exposing their best and most beautiful body parts—“simple nature” instead of art. This was the museum of the society already envisioned by Diderot, who wondered whether modern man would go on wearing clothes. This would have been a museum liberated once and for all from history, a museum that removes objects from time, as a collection should, rather than inducting them into the constructed time of art history.