The theses of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) on the meaning of art in world history have exerted a magnetic pull on the project of art history for nearly two centuries. Hegel offered lecture courses on aesthetics at the University of Berlin four times over the course of the 1820s. The art historian H. G. Hotho synthesized Hegel’s lecture notes as well as notes taken by students, including Hotho’s own notes. He published the text in 1835 as part of the posthumous edition of Hegel’s works; an improved version appeared in 1842. Although there has been much dispute about Hotho’s fidelity to Hegel’s original words, his version of the lectures has furnished an unavoidable framework for all subsequent art-historical scholarship. They were translated into French beginning in 1840 and into English beginning in 1879. By the late nineteenth century Hegel’s narration of art’s registrations of the emergence of spirit (Geist) or ideality into history was familiar to all German-speaking art historians, even if only in broad outline. In the twentieth and present centuries Hegel’s thesis that “art in its highest vocation has become a thing of the past” and can only be contemplated indirectly, through historical scholarship, has vexed art historians because it gives them a project and at the same time licenses them to disparage the art of their own time.
Hegel’s knowledge of the history of art was uneven but far from superficial. He was close to the Boisserée brothers and visited their collection in Heidelberg at least twice. He imparts insights of astonishing penetration into styles and works. Hegel’s innovation is to have expounded his philosophy of art in the form of an historical fable. The first part, some three hundred pages, is a systematic investigation into artistic or ideal beauty as opposed to natural beauty. For earlier idealists up to and including Immanuel Kant, natural beauty was the place where one was mostly likely to glimpse the ideal. The second part narrates the history of western or Mediterranean art from the Egyptian kingdoms to the present, with asides on Indian and Chinese art, as the “development of the ideal into the particular forms of art.” The third part reframes the argument through analyses of the individual art forms, namely, architecture, sculpture, painting, music, and poetry.
Hegel’s basic thesis in the Lectures on Aesthetics is that art began by failing to recognize the ideal and ended by recognizing that it was unable to make the ideal manifest. The ideal or spirit for Hegel is similar to the Absolute of Friedrich Schelling, or the irreducible and unconditional essence of reality. Hegel, Schelling, and the poet Friedrich Hölderlin had been roommates at the Protestant seminary at Tübingen in the late 1780s and early 1790s. They held that the material world as we know it through our senses is finite and alienated from spirit. In its early phases, when it was still tied to myth and authority, art made no effort to reconcile matter with spirit. The Egyptian pyramids are Hegel’s example. This mode of art Hegel calls symbolic because it is the result of religion forcing animals and other natural objects to symbolize the gods, an approach that fails because the gods end up looking grotesque. In art’s “classic” phase, exemplified by Greek sculpture of the fourth century, the gods are symbolized by beautiful human bodies, so placing matter and spirit in equilibrium. This is Hegel’s explanation for why the art of this period is felt to represent the high point of world art. Christianity, however, upset the balance by excessively valuing spirit. In the Christian era, art is stripped of the role it played in pagan culture, because the “content of romantic [i.e., Christian] art is already present explicitly to mind and feeling outside the sphere of art,” that is, in religion. Painting, a material medium, is eventually felt under Christianity (read: Protestantism) to be incapable of providing full access to spirit. From that point on painting is asked only to represent spirit negatively, as it were, by representing withdrawal from the external world. The external or contingent world “is regarded as an indifferent element in which spirit has no final trust or persistence.” Therefore,
the mode of actual configuration in romantic art, in respect of external appearance, does not essentially get beyond ordinary reality proper, and it is by no means averse from harbouring this real existence in its finite deficiency and determinacy.
Because romantic art has such a low opinion of art, it does not mind hosting reality, so losing its privileged relation to the ideal:
This means the disappearance of that ideal beauty which lifts the contemplation of the external away above time and the traces of evanescence in order to give to existence the bloom of beauty instead of its otherwise stunted appearance.
The romantic art of the Christian era, in Hegel’s view, reached to his own day. The lofty style initiated by Raphael, for Hegel, was not an approach to the absolute but rather an extension of the mixed, contaminated, but poetic painting of the late Middle Ages. This is an innovative argument. It reproduces the position of the Nazarenes but with the values reversed. In short, Hegel was not persuaded by the claims of the academic idealist theorists of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, for they had misrecognized the limits of painting in the modern world. In Hegel’s schema the Middle Ages had never ended. The romantic art of this long Middle Ages would in the end be constrained by its own principles to abandon the visual arts in favor first of music and then of poetry. In the end, poetry too would give way to spirit’s unobstructed reflection on itself in the form of philosophy. Art’s role in history is diminishing.
How did the visual arts, which trade in illusion, ever contribute to the unveiling of spirit? Hegel defends art by saying that it gives us at least a glimpse of the truth, a glimpse that neither reality itself nor what he calls historiography, or direct writing about reality, offers:
If the mode in which artistic forms appear is called a deception in comparison with philosophical thinking and with religious and moral principles, of course the form of appearance acquired by a topic in the sphere of thinking is the truest reality; but in comparison with the appearance of immediate existence and of historiography, the pure appearance of art has the advantage that it points through and beyond itself, and itself hints at something spiritual of which it is to give us an idea.
And yet it is the limits of art that will dominate his account:
It is on the other hand just as necessary to remember that neither in content nor in form is art the highest and absolute mode of bringing to our minds the true interests of the spirit.
The pagan statuary of the fifth and fourth centuries BC is supreme because the gods of the Greeks were at home in the realm of the senses. The Greek gods, in effect, walked straight into art:
In order to be a genuine content for art, such truth must in virtue of its own specific character be able to go forth into [the sphere of] sense and remain adequate to itself there. This is the case, for example, with the gods of Greece.
But that was not enough for Christians, whose incarnated god was never really at home among humankind. And for Hegel, to be Christian is to be modern:
There is a deeper comprehension of truth which is no longer so akin and friendly to sense as to be capable of appropriate adoption and expression in this medium. The Christian view of truth is of this kind, and, above all, the spirit of our world today, or, more particularly, of our religion and the development of our reason, appears as beyond the stage at which art is the supreme mode of our knowledge of the Absolute. The peculiar nature of artistic production and of works of art no longer fills our highest need. We have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them. The impression they make is of a more reflective kind, and what they arouse in us needs a higher touchstone and a different test. Thought and reflection have spread their wings above fine art.
But Hegel is mistaken, misled by his Protestant instincts. The older religions did not worship images, they worshipped gods. If anything, it is the moderns, since Vasari, who worship pictures. Hegel’s narrative resembles the history of art proposed by the Reformers of the sixteenth century. John Calvin as well as some radical followers of Martin Luther had argued that sculpted and painted representations of the human figure distracted worshippers from Christian teachings, if not from God himself. Reformed congregations removed the offending depictions from their places of worship. The Reformers did not insist on the destruction of every last painting. Even Calvin conceded that art in the private sphere brought pleasure. The Reformers assigned art a supplementary, optional role in modern life. This rhymes with Hegel’s dicta on the end of art:
Art no longer affords that satisfaction of spiritual needs which earlier ages and nations sought in it, and found in it alone. … The beautiful days of Greek art, like the golden age of the later Middle Ages, are gone.
Of course, the Protestant Reformers did not condescend to pagan art by admiring its cult images as art.
The inexorable destiny of art, according to Hegel, is dematerialization. One may respond to this thesis, as did many Christian artists in the European communities that ignored the Protestant Reformation, by piling on sensuality in the confidence that beauty and the stimulation of affective identifications would only enhance the worshipper’s apprehension of the mysteries, which Hegel conceded was art’s special faculty. Or one may acquiesce in Hegel’s program, as did many artists of the twentieth century, by denying art its rhetoric of delectation and instead summoning a concept to shine through a reduced material scaffolding. Today art is often understood not as a special category of object fashioned by a special class of people (artists) but rather as a system of initiatives and actions, orchestrated by artists, in which non-art objects and non-artist people take part. The end of art is often envisioned by avant-garde artists not as a disaster but as an ecstatic fusion of art and life in which the meaning and promise of life is finally revealed through art; an “apocalypse,” literally.
It is not clear what Hegel meant by “art” because although architecture, sculpture, and painting provided the basic scheme of his narrative, he also assigned key roles for music and poetry. Yet historians of music or poetry have been much less enthralled by Hegel’s account of the history of the arts than have art historians. Composers, musicians, poets, and novelists, as well as historians of music and literature, are less likely in modernity to allow their work to be shaped by an intuition of an imminent musical or literary apocalypse.
Many modern readers have dismissed the idealism of Hegel and Schelling as a regression to the metaphysical dogma of the ancien régime, the very target of Kant’s critical philosophy. At the same time, there is an important difference between Schelling and Hegel. Hegel had been persuaded by Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Schlegel to think historically about art. He breaks with idealist aesthetics and in fact with all prior theories of art, from Plato and Aristotle to Diderot, Kant, and Schelling, in that he vindicates his theory of art by a history of art. In this respect Hegel’s approach is complementary to Vasari’s. If Hegel was a theorist who supported his theory with history, Vasari was an historian who supported his narrative of the rebirth of the arts in Tuscany with a theory of art, namely as disegno, or a ratio between reality and artistic form. Both Vasari and Hegel wrote biographies of their ideal modes of art.
The obsolescence of all prior theories of art, according to Hegel, opened up a space in modern life for the historiography of art:
Art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place.
Art is kept alive as a project in modernity through its absorption into the more meaningful project of thought. Art is now understood as a ratio not of reality to form but of content to form, in other words, as a local and relative quantity:
What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just immediate enjoyment but our judgement also, since we subject to our intellectual consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another.
There are two ways to go about this “consideration,” he argues: on the one hand, the assemblage of individual works of art into groups and patterns on the basis of historical scholarship, so framing an inquiry into the nature of art; and on the other, an abstract philosophy of the beautiful, detached from actual works of art. These are the inductive and deductive methods, basically. The purpose of the first method, art history, is to grasp what art is, and that method requires
a precise acquaintance with the immeasurable realm of individual works of art, ancient and modern, some of which (α) have already perished in reality, or (β) belong to distant lands or continents and which the unkindness of fate has withdrawn from our own inspection.
This is where scholarship is called for:
Every work of art belongs to its own time, its own people, its own environment, and depends on particular historical and other ideas and purposes; consequently, scholarship in the field of art demands a vast wealth of historical, and indeed very detailed, facts, since the individual nature of the work of art is related to something individual and necessarily requires detailed knowledge for its understanding and explanation.
Hegel sees that art once served different purposes, and our knowledge of those purposes must bear on any assessments of a work. He opens a new topic for art history: the study of the historical functions of art within public and private life, what one might call the anthropology of art. Theorists of art, neglectful of the history of art, all go astray. Hegel had no kind words for any premodern philosophers of art, neither Aristotle, nor Horace, nor Longinus, nor any of the post-Renaissance idealist theorists:
The prescriptions which these art-doctors wrote to cure art were even less reliable than those of ordinary doctors for restoring human health.
Possibly Hegel, a reverent reader of Goethe, recalled the passage in the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795), where the protagonist, a standin for the youthful author, casts a skeptical eye on the shelves of his own library, well supplied with books on art, poetry, and criticism. Wilhelm remarks drily that the pages of the “theoretical” books remain “mostly still uncut.”
Hegel is a messianic thinker, his vision of world history teleological, that is, governed by a conviction that historical events point to their own destiny. Teleology is the study of final causes, or the goals toward which not only human beings but, according to Aristotle, nature itself strives. Modern scientific thought since Bacon does not recognize final causes in nature. Hegel’s philosophy of history from the point of view of Bacon or any empiricist is simply a rationalized form of mythic thinking.
Yet Hegel himself grasps the threat to abstract theorizing posed by empirical scholarship. His error is to have considered his own philosophy to be a philosophy not like any other and therefore exempt from empiricism’s corrective. A true relativism is incompatible with such progressive fables as Hegel’s. As a result his Lectures on Aesthetics supports two different kinds of historicism, and both have thrived in modernity. On the one hand, historicism is defined as the faith that one day history will all add up and make sense. On the other hand, historicism is defined as the will to understand every society, every event, every work of art on its own terms, without prejudice; what Erich Auerbach called the “largeness of our [modern, historicist] aesthetic horizon.” From the point of view of an historicism of the second sort, the first sort leads to the fabrication of a necessary past, a betrayal of the dead. From the point of view of an historicism of the first sort, the second sort neglects the demands of the present and the promise of the future, and so betrays the unborn.
The crack in Hegel’s golden bowl is impossible to ignore. The same faultline, between emancipatory aspirations and empiricist compunctions, runs right through the discipline of art history today.
In his willingness to look steadily at “tangible examples,” Hegel musters sympathy for the humble art forms of the centuries after the collapse of Rome, and even partial sympathy for Indian and Chinese art. He goes well beyond the demands of evenhandedness, for he does not merely accept but also tries to explain the ugliness of medieval Christian art. Romantic—i.e., medieval—art “intertwines its inner being with the contingency of the external world and gives unfettered play to the bold lines of the ugly.”
In moving beyond a neutral or antiquarian open-mindedness about unfamiliar forms and remote forms of life, and instead seeking to enter them imaginatively, Hegel is not so far from the Nazarenes. The Nazarenes were drawn to the art of the late Middle Ages because they sensed that the idealist theorists of art since the sixteenth century had misidentified the location of spirit in art.
In the decades following Hegel’s death, art history was installed in the German universities. The first person to receive a PhD in art history was Franz Kugler, in Berlin in 1831, with a dissertation on the illuminations of an eleventh-century manuscript. He was criticized by his examiners, who were of course not professional art historians, for giving too much description and not displaying enough knowledge beyond his topic. Kugler, needing to satisfy his fact-minded colleagues, was an empiricist and anti-Hegelian. His Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (1842), translated early into English, was a panorama of world art history. Kugler drew on the pioneering Essay on the Architecture of the Hindus by the Indian civil servant Rám Ráz, published posthumously in 1834. Rám Ráz’s treatise revealed to readers of English the principles, based on sacred texts, of Indian architecture. The global perspective was popular in the nineteenth century, dovetailing with research in etymology, philology, comparative religion, ethnology, so-called Völkerpsychologie or psychology of peoples, and the study of ornament. There is some similarity to the present moment, though in that comparative-minded century there was more tolerance for broadly limned patterns and less disapproval of national, ethnic, and racial bias.
On the whole the first academic art historians were happy with the framework Hegel had offered. Hegel had cleared out conceptual space for a new discipline, encouraging art historians, who would have to fight for their ground over the next several generations alongside the long-established professoriates in history and philology, not to mention archeology, the most immediate threat because so unimpeachably empirical.
H. G. Hotho, Hegel’s editor and now professor in Berlin, published in 1842–1843 a History of German and Flemish Art. This was no rudimentary sketch but a dense narrative that already closely resembled the stabilized accounts of northern art produced in the twentieth century, raising the specter of a scholarship of diminishing returns. Hotho had sufficient perspective, for example, to discuss the decline of the reputation of Jan van Eyck in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, and its resurrection in the early nineteenth, as a historical phenomenon. Karl Schnaase, not a professor but a jurist, was the most thoughtfully Hegelian of the early art historians, with a poetical-spiritual sensibility and a reach to the Orient. He published his impressions of northern painting in the Niederländische Briefe (1834) and, in eight volumes, the Ge schichte der bildenden Künste (1843–1864), a survey of world art.
The philosophical riposte to Hegel’s historical approach to art was delivered by his antagonist and one-time colleague Arthur Schopenhauer. In his magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (1818, revised 1844), Schopenhauer described a clash between historical scholarship founded on scientific or empirical principles and the idea of the work of art as an exception to those principles. His articulation of the event-like character of art countered the systematic study of art as recently established in the universities, with its allegiance to historical thinking and its bias toward the material artifact. Science, Schopenhauer wrote, proceeds “according to the principle of sufficient reason in its different forms, and its theme remains the phenomenon, its laws, connections, and the resulting relations.” His metaphor for history is a constant flow of causes and effects. He then recognized an alternative mode of apprehending reality:
What kind of knowledge is it that considers what continues to exist outside and independently of all relations, but which alone is really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no change, and is therefore known with equal truth for all time, in a word, the Ideas that are the immediate and adequate objectivity of the thing-in-itself, the will? It is art, the work of genius. It repeats the eternal Ideas apprehended through pure contemplation, the essential and abiding in all the phenomena of the world.
The historical, or scientific, method is incomplete. At the very least it must acknowledge its other:
The method of consideration that follows the principle of sufficient reason is the rational method, and it alone is valid and useful in practical life and in science. The method of consideration that looks away from the content of this principle is the method of genius, which is valid and useful in art alone. … The first is like the mighty storm, rushing along without beginning or aim, bending, agitating, and carrying away everything with it; the second is like the silent sunbeam, cutting through the path of the storm, and quite unmoved by it.
The tumultous rush of a tempest is Schopenhauer’s metaphor for the chain of causes and effects. The historian, in his view, describes the storm well. But historical method, which is a practical way of thinking, reads everything as a trace or an effect and so cannot grasp the sunbeam, a pure event, an exception to the total environment created by the storm, and an anti-monument. The sunbeam for Schopenhauer was a metaphor for a glimpse of the ideal. This metaphor is hard to sustain. But his model, in which the storm is unable to deflect the sunbeam, has the merit of suggesting the limits of historical reason and the superiority of the mind to reality. Schopenhauer reminds the art historian not to let art history devolve into a history of things. His metaphorical combination invites the conclusion that art is the event that proposes a reorientation, and the response to that proposal, and the response to the response, and so on. Art is an ongoing cascade of events whose disciplining by writing is always incomplete.
By 1830 Europe was already prepared, like a specimen, for art-historical scholarship: an archive of works was on display in galleries and museums and churches, as well as the works of architecture under the open sky. Art history contributed to the social mnemonics of projects like Heinrich Hübsch’s rebuilding of Speyer cathedral or the completion of the cathedral of Cologne. Begun in 1248, Cologne was destined to be one of the loftiest Gothic cathedrals. Construction stalled in 1473, leaving a westwork and an apse but nothing in between. Not until 1846 was the project revived, guided by the original design; the last stone was laid in 1880. Restorations in this period were aggressive, as we saw with Valadier at Rome. Vincenzo Camuccini invented the entire center of the Bacchic mosaic at the round church of Santa Costanza in Rome (1834–1840). By now there is a feedback effect whereby art history helps conservators craft the material for future art histories.
Art-historical knowledge reverberated in social life. In 1840 the people of both Munich and Nuremberg mounted festivals on “Old German” themes, collective costumed celebrations of the vitality of urban life, self-government, and the self-assertion of the trades and crafts, the emergence out of the feudal night, all revolving around the folk hero Albrecht Dürer.
At this point no one was speaking of Dürer’s moment as a Renaissance. That word and concept was introduced in the 1830s by French writers who had experienced the Revolution and its repercussions. The Romantic generation saw the age of Louis XIV and Classicism as a long episode of repression and so identified the sixteenth century, the moment of Pierre Ronsard and François Rabelais, as a moment of élan, free expression, the flouting of rules, a polymorphic liberation of the drives, abundance and fertility, love and war, an interlude between scholasticism and absolutism. This was the Renaissance admired by the writers Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve (Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française et du théâtre français au XVIe siècle, 1828) and Théophile Gautier (Les grotesques, 1844). The pen of Gérard de Nerval, in his masterpiece Sylvie (1854), detached the word from its historical referent and limned the 1830s in France as a period “of activity, of hesitation and laziness, of brilliant utopias, of philosophical or religious aspirations, of vague enthusiasms, mixed with certain renaissance instincts.” The
Renaissance invented by the French writers contested the picture painted by the German Romantics, who also thought of the period around 1500 in terms of rebirth, but stressed the innocence and vulnerability of the infant; weakness read as spirituality; the antithesis of Rabelais’s Gargantua. From the Nazarene point of view, the secularized sixteenth century was a decline into vulgar health.
By now the principles of classical archeology, a discipline launched in the sixteenth century—one could even say in the fifteenth century with the measurements of the ruins of Rome by Donatello, Brunelleschi, and Alberti—were well established. The keys were good record-keeping of excavations and conscientious publication of findings. Excavations and publications imposed a linear sense of time on monuments that had been constructed under different principles. Archeology was also a discipline prone to sensationalism, then as now, and nineteenth-century archeological expeditions were too often little more than quasi-criminal treasure hunts. East Asia was off limits to European diggers, but not the Near East or Central Asia. A well-crafted published account of an expedition, supplemented by good illustrations, could catalyze an entire field of study. Such was the case with John Lloyd Stephens and Frederick Catherwood’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatán (London, 1841), a description of Maya sites and monuments.
The limits on archeology were not only imposed by political reality but also self-imposed, by the framing questions. Archeologists were mostly looking for temples and palaces, the art of royal and priestly power. It is as if the archeologists were venturing beyond Europe not to understand something alien, but rather to find imaginary surrogates for the European paragons of civilization, whose symbolic resources seemed exhausted. From Tangiers the painter Eugène Delacroix wrote, in a letter of June 4, 1832, “The Romans and the Greeks are there at my door. … If the painting school persists in setting the fledglings to paint the Muses or the family of Priam or Atreus, I am convinced they would be infinitely better off sent as ship’s boys on the first boat to the Barbary Coast than to spend any more time working the classic lands of Rome. Rome is no longer Rome.” In the event, Delacroix never went to Rome.
In antiquity the emperors had shipped statuary and splendid columns from Greece and Egypt to Rome. In the nineteenth century the form that spoliation took was the citation of architectural styles. Cities became heterogenous outdoor museums of world architecture. Assyrian, Egyptian, “Moorish,” and above all Byzantine forms proliferated on churches and all manner of public and private buildings. Anachronic architecture had always existed, but now the cross-referencing is stalked by doubt. Not until recently have we been able to see eclecticism not only as a waking nightmare of a pile-up of history but also as a modern style with its own content, namely, the shape of form in time.
The Gothic style more than held its own. The Old Palace of Westminster in London burned down in 1834. The competition to build a new quarters for Parliament was won by Charles Barry, proposing a synthesis of Perpendicular and Tudor Gothic. Barry enlisted the architect Augustus Welby Pugin, who already had credentials in this field. The construction stretched from 1835 to 1868 and involved not only the fabulous exteriors but elaborate polychrome interiors. The development of the Gothic Revival style was so advanced in England that Pugin could include as one of the engraved plates in his polemical tract of 1836, Contrasts, or, A parallel between the noble edifices of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and similar buildings of the present day, a mock advertisement for industrially made Gothic architecture.
The new parti-color cityscape was reproduced inside the museums. Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria, who on visiting Rome in 1821 engaged Carl Friedrich von Rumohr as his cicerone, had for decades been planning a museum for ancient sculpture in Munich; that opened finally in 1830 as the Glyptothek. Ludwig bought the works himself and was involved in every aspect of planning and construction. His architect Leo von Klenze designed a square structure with the façade of a temple. Two rooms were decorated with frescoes of scenes from mythology by Peter Cornelius, whom Ludwig had met in Rome in 1818. In 1826 Ludwig had begun construction of the Alte Pinakothek or “Old Picture Gallery”; it was completed in 1836. The oldest work it housed was a painting by Giotto purchased by Ludwig in Rome in 1805.
Ludwig’s projects were sustained by patriotic sentiment and piety for the past. The Austrian historian Joseph von Hormayr, who advised Ludwig, articulated in 1830 the double goal of the Bavarian museums: first, art translates the knowledge of the past into terms that everyone can grasp; second, art selects what is valuable from the past:
Art—and only art—transplants history out of the memory and into the heart, out of the scholar’s study and into the minds of women, youth, and the people. Art winnows the old from the antiquated. It clarifies, refines, quickens.
Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia also opened a museum in 1830, the Kunstmuseum, now the Altes Museum, in the Hofgarten in Berlin. The architect was Karl Friedrich Schinkel; Peter Cornelius also painted frescoes for this museum. The first floor housed 451 sculptures, the second floor nearly 2000 paintings, mostly of the Italian schools. There was a debate between those who wanted the displays to depict art history as a continuous span, even if the gaps had to be filled by mere reproductions or plaster casts (the archeologist Alois Hirt), and those who saw artistic excellence alone as the criterion of selection (Schinkel, Waagen, and Rumohr).
There was one important sense in which art-historical scholarship was out of rhythm with the museums. The museums and galleries were well stocked with late Renaissance and Baroque paintings, the products of the age of academies. And yet the scholars of the early and mid-nineteenth century were not writing the art history of these eras. Rumohr, for instance, stopped with Raphael. There were few nineteenth-century monographs on any artist later than Raphael. It was as if the canon as established by the academies were history enough. More in tune perhaps with scholarship was the National Gallery in London, which had opened in 1824. A Committee on Arts and the Connection with Manufacture reported in 1836 that pictures acquired for the national collections should date from the period before Raphael, “such works being of a purer and more elevated style than the eminent works of the Caracci [sic].”
One did write on celebrated recent artists, however, especially those identified as neoclassicists. Leopoldo Cicognara wrote a monograph on his friend Antonio Canova (1823); Karl Ludwig Fernow wrote on the painter Asmus Jacob Carstens (1806). Just Mathias Thiele launched a multi-volume biography and catalogue of Bertel Thorvaldsen in 1831. In 1838 Thorvaldsen returned from Rome to Copenhagen; the city created a museum whose exterior walls depict the return of the sculptor with his works as an epic event. The neoclassical artists were already classic in their lifetimes. In 1848 modern German artists demanded a museum for modern art. In Munich the Neue Pinakothek, dedicated to the recent schools of southern Germany and the first public museum of modern art, opened in 1853.
Few critics, however, and even fewer academic art historians, held the Nazarenes in high regard. This despite the vogue for anachronism. Schnaase remarked of Schnorr’s Barbarossa-Saal in the Residence at Munich that the costumes were all wrong (1840). Kugler dismissed the Nazarenes as aristocrats alienated from life (1843). The art historian Anton Springer said that the Nazarenes, obsessed as they were with tedious synods and coronations, had botched the medieval content (1845). The art historian Anna Jameson in her Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad (1834) expressed admiration for the early German painters—she saw the Boisserée pictures at Schleissheim—but wondered whether it was wise for modern painters to imitate them: the results are a “hardness of manner” and a “tendency to violent colour and high glazy finish, which interfere too often with the beauty, feeling, and effect of their compositions.” “ ‘You English have no school of art,’ was often said to me; I could have replied—if it had not been a solecism in grammar—‘You Germans have too much school.’ ”
Hegel had already inveighed against anachronism:
The modern artist, it is true, may associate himself with the classical age and with still more ancient times; to be a follower of Homer, even if the last one, is fine, and productions reflecting the medieval veering to romantic art will have their merits, too; but the universal validity, depth, and special idiom of some material is one thing, its mode of treatment another. No Homer, Sophocles, etc., no Dante, Ariosto, or Shakespeare can appear in our day.
Content can persist, but an artificially adjusted style is an error. This is more or less what Philip Sidney had said about the “Ballad of Chevy Chase.” But even content was not infinitely translatable. What was expressed has been expressed. “Only the present is fresh, the rest is paler and paler.” For Hegel, “all materials, whatever they be and from whatever period and nation they come, acquire their artistic truth only when imbued with living and contemporary interest.” “Artistic truth” must “provide [man] his own mirror-image.” In calling for a synchronization of form and content Hegel is only asking European modernity to match what he sees as the internal consistency of the great civilizations of the past.
Hegel was unable to draw the obvious conclusion from this, namely, that modern art should represent modern life directly. He admired seventeenth-century Dutch art for its realism, but he believed his own age had fallen into the merely prosaic. Hegel saw the modern subject striving for freedom but mired in the “prose of the world”: finitude and mutability, entanglement in the relative, the pressure of necessity. This subject lacks opportunity for ideality and independence. The modern prosaic mentality is wrapped up in the parsing of means and ends, instrumentality and function. Here Hegel proves himself the child of Winckelmann, who would have agreed that an unmediated image of a prosaic world could serve as the basis only of a prosaic art.
The Nazarenes, in the mocking account of the writer Friedrich Theodor Vischer, did deliver that contemporary fallen reality, but inadvertently and so ridiculously. Of the Madonnas of the Nazarenes, Vischer said: “One sees in them a time in which there are scrapbooks, mirrors, fashion magazines, and frontispiece engravings of paperback books. … They have read in the ‘Hours of Devotion,’ they grew up in a pension, in a boarding school.”
Heinrich Heine wrote of the end of what he called the Kunstperiode, the “period of art”; or the age of the “art idea” (Kunstidee), in short, the age of Goethe. Art and literature used to give us the “beautiful objective world.” This trust in art seemed to Heine an irretrievable artifact of the ancien régime. Now art is under pressure from modernization and politics and at the same time cultivates inwardness. Art will have to invent a new set of symbols to match a new world. Yet neither Heine nor anyone else in 1832 could quite envision a modern art of the real. The unhesitating embrace of imperfect reality was not yet an option for European artists, and no theorist was calling for it, unless we include a fictional art critic, the eponymous protagonist of the fragmentary story by Georg Büchner, Lenz (1836), a character based on the unstable and unrealized eighteenth-century writer J. M. R. Lenz. In discussion with another character, Kaufmann, the fictional Lenz expounds his anti-idealist aesthetics. By “idealism” he means Schiller. The artist, for Lenz, is nothing more than an historian recording reality, undistorted, not improving on or transfiguring it:
Let us for once try and sink ourselves into the life of the most humble people and then reproduce it. … They are the most prosaic people under the sun; and yet the pulse of feeling is in almost everyone the same, only the shell that it has to pass through differs in thickness. You only need eyes and ears.
What does Büchner mean? He is saying that humanity conceals itself beneath defensive layers of ineloquence. Civilization produces ready-made subjects for great art. But the uncivilized are human, too, just as medieval art is art:
Yesterday as I walked up the valley I saw two girls sitting on a stone: one was tying up her hair, the other was helping her; and her golden hair hanging down, and a pale serious face, and yet so young, and her black dress, and the other one so attentively occupied. Even the most beautiful and fervent paintings of the old German school give hardly any sense of all this.
The Flemish painters of the fifteenth century, van Eyck and van der Weyden and their followers—that is what Lenz meant by the “old German school”—humble and truthful as they are, come close to grasping this. The homely and the unprepossessing are the proper objects of the notyet-realized art of a common humanity:
You have to love mankind in order to arrive at the particular being of every person; no one is too lowly, no one too ugly, only then can you understand them; the most insignificant face makes a deeper impression than the mere sensation of beauty.
The artistic supplement to reality needs to be reduced to the minimum:
I prefer those writers and artists who give me nature as it really is, so that their creations make me feel something; everything else upsets me. I prefer the Dutch painters to the Italians, they are also the only ones who make sense to me.
Büchner writes just prior to the invention of the representational technology that would overturn the entire edifice of European art theory, removing the burden of the accumulated tradition of painting and so changing the meaning of art-historical knowledge; namely, photography.