The historian Leopold von Ranke, following Giambattista Vico and Johann Gottfried Herder, and rejecting Hegel, formulated the ne plus ultra of relativism in 1854, clarifying the ethical stakes of historical study. Ranke conceded that progress was not evenly distributed across all epochs. “Art,” for example, “flourished most in the fifteenth century and in the first half of the sixteenth century; in contrast, it declined most at the end of the seventeenth century and in the first three quarters of the eighteenth century.” But it is unjust, Ranke asserted, to assess each generation only in relation to the preceding or succeeding generation. Nor should earlier generations be valued only for their success in anticipating the most recent. Instead,
each epoch is immediate to God, and its value is not at all based on what emanates from it. On the contrary, its value emanates from its own existence and its own identity … necessitating the consideration of each epoch as something valid in itself and extremely worthy of scrutiny.
To express his disapproval of historiography, Ranke introduces the metaphor of a divine point of view:
I conceive the deity in such a manner that, since no time lies ahead of it, it surveys the entire history of mankind in its totality and finds equal value everywhere. The idea of the education of the human race admittedly has something true in itself; but the generations of mankind appear before God with equal rights, which is also how the historian must regard the matter.
This passage resonates with Herder’s image of the plant flourishing in its own context in the divine order, as well as with Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “History” (1841), so important for Nietzsche. Ranke, however, more sober-minded than they, associates the divine point of view with the impersonal perspective of the empiricist. To neutralize the biases of the historian, scholarship externalizes knowledge. The researcher extracts facts from archives or objects and translates them into more accessible formats, gathering knowledge into such compendia as encyclopedias, dictionaries, manuals, and guidebooks, hedges against the wasteful repetition of scholarly labor. An early landmark was the Manual of Iconography (1855) by Anton Springer, the first art historian to be appointed ordinarius or full professor of art history (at the University of Bonn in 1860). In 1858 G. K. Nagler published the first of five volumes of a dictionary of artists known only by symbols, initials, or abbreviations, The Monogrammists, eventually running to 15,000 monograms by 12,000 artists.
Empiricism is a collective project, drawing on the experience of others. Samuel Johnson defined empiricism as “dependence on experience without knowledge or art; quackery.” In the eighteenth century the word “empiric” referred to the medical charlatan who relied on his own observations and practice treating patients rather than on theory, that is, the treatises of Galen and Vesalius. Today, it is fair to say, a physician is more likely to trust experience than theory, but—and this is all the difference—not exclusively her own experience but the accumulated experiences of many other physicians, recorded, compiled, and published. As Leon Battista Alberti, precociously skeptical of theory, said in his treatise The Art of Building (c. 1450), “Medicine, they say, was developed by a million people over a thousand years; sailing, too, as almost every other art, advanced by minute steps.” Historical scholarship is equally dependent on diachronically shared knowledge.
The pragmatic approach is also the modern approach to architecture. Because buildings are functional, the form of their cladding can be chosen from a catalogue or from the exhibits at an exhibition, such as the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the Crystal Palace in London. The treatise of Owen Jones, Grammar of Ornament (1856), an album or sample book, displaces easel painting from its cosmic, orienting role in society. The Enlightened discrediting of mindless adherence to tradition, and the Romantic repudiation of normative authority, had invited, perhaps even obliged, nineteenth-century architects to choose from a worldwide menu of forms. For a building had to be built in some style. This was not quite true of painters, for a painter can always retreat from style altogether by turning back to nature.
In 1852 the Germanisches Nationalmuseum was established in Nuremberg, a new kind of museum that pries medieval paintings away from the category of art and reclassifies them, together with furniture, costumes, weapons, and vessels as the objects of new fields of study: ethnography, folk art, domestic arts. The South Kensington Museum, later the Victoria and Albert Museum, dedicated to the mechanical and applied arts, opened in 1858.
Knowledge about art was once handed down from artist to artist, shared perhaps with privileged patrons who eavesdropped by collecting drawings or reading anecdotes or letters. Now anyone could buy a pocket-sized descriptive guide to central Italy or Belgium and Holland published by John Murray or Karl Baedeker. Baedeker’s 1832 guide to a Rhine journey launched the concept. Murray soon followed, introducing the term “handbook” and distinctive red covers. Baedeker also adopted the red binding in 1854; his guidebooks were translated into English beginning in 1861. Murray later became the Blue Guides. The guidebooks described public monuments, churches, and picture galleries, secularizing the manuals that had steered the medieval pilgrims. They reinforced the clichés of cultural geography and the fading memories of European history learned at school. They channelled the esoteric knowledge collected by scholars back into the exoteric sphere, in effect restoring knowledge about art to oral circulation patterns, linking the generations by the old mechanisms of showing and telling: for there was always one in the group who best recalled what she had read in the guidebook on the train and so was able to recite and point in the presence of the altarpiece. The guidebooks in this period reached many more people than did the university lecturers.
In modernity the venerable city is the surface of an art history, the image of a process. The construction of the façade of the Duomo of Florence had stalled in the late Middle Ages, half-finished. In 1587 Grand Duke Ferdinand I had it removed in preparation for a new façade in an up-to-date neoclassical style. Five architects submitted proposals, all of them involving classical orders, pediments, niches, and windows. Nothing happened. Another competition was held in the seventeenth century, and again the menu was classical, although one of the entries, responding to concerns that the façade would clash with the building’s Gothic body, introduced slender octagonal side towers, an understated allusion to Giotto’s Campanile. Again nothing was built. Finally in the 1860s they tried again; ninety-two projects were submitted. The successful entry, constructed between 1875 and 1887, was in the neo-Gothic style, blending with the existing fabric. The process is disguised. The guidebooks reveal this secret, but it is not clear how many visitors to Florence even care, typologists that they are.
The conservation of artworks in the mid-nineteenth century went far beyond the discreet wiping off of specks of dust imagined by Hegel in his prose poem about the loss of historical art. In 1852 or shortly thereafter the painter Gaetano Bianchi invented the figure of Saint Louis more or less out of whole cloth for the Bardi Chapel in S. Croce in Florence. In the 1860s Giuseppe Molteni gave a portrait by Lorenzo Lotto in the National Gallery in London an entirely new face, more in line with the style of the sixteenth century.
Baedeker’s guidebooks reached almost as many people as did the writings of the polymath and barely secular preacher, John Ruskin (1819–1900), an unavoidable figure, a Christian moralist whose medium was art history and art criticism. Ruskin was a champion of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the English successors to the Nazarenes. In his Modern Painters (1843–1860) he promoted modern art generally but especially the landscapes and seascapes of J. M. W. Turner. Ruskin depreciated the Old Masters, especially the “false” landscapists of the seventeenth century, Claude Lorrain and Gaspard Dughet, who must not be confused with the earlier “historical” painters Leonardo and Michelangelo. Stones of Venice (1852) is not a history but a moralized analysis of Italian Gothic architecture: the materials, the parts, the building types. Ruskin hoped that modern architecture would recover the grace of the non-instrumental relation to nature that urbanized modern society had lost. Beyond its practical functions medieval architecture was also called upon to speak, to record, to narrate, and all with graceful and pleasing expression, or “loveliness.” Walls and arches and roofs are like living organisms, means responding to ends. But the decorative is not to be disparaged: “All noble ornamentation is the expression of man’s delight in God’s work.” Northern buildings are grotesque, Italian buildings charming.
Later, Ruskin notes that his own comment on noble ornamentation implies that there is an ignoble ornamentation, the expression of man’s delight in his own work. “There is such a school, chiefly degraded classic and Renaissance, in which the ornament is composed of imitations of things made by man.” The function of modern architecture is to repair our broken ties with nature, “to possess us with memories of her qualities; to be solemn and full of tenderness, like her, and rich in portraiture of her.” He prizes a lovable “mystery and unity” in the convolutions of Byzantine style, and the “strange disquietude” of the Gothic spirit.
Ruskin finds in Gothic exactly what man is supposedly always seeking in the world around him, a balance between love of “facts” as perceived by the eye and mind and love of “design,” or the power to arrange lines and colors nobly. He recommends obedience and reverence, rejoicing in sacrifice. He praises “healthy, proper, and ennobling” labor in contrast to manufacturing. Ruskin is an attentive student of historical form, but his approach is not historicist. “Gothic” for Ruskin is a universal quality that was most perfectly realized in the thirteenth century.
Ruskin invents a completely new fable of form, an inversion of the academic canon. Bad form is now good form. Ruskin uses the language of nobility, but the coordination of this concept with social class has now changed. With William Morris, the poet, designer, and socialist ideologue, he shared the idea that the life of the people, the collectivity, is the matrix of art. For Morris, too, the years 1160 to 1300 were the high point.
The best nineteenth-century scholarship on historical art, with few exceptions, was non-academic or even leisured scholarship. Landmarks in the study of historical sources were the translation of Cennino Cennini’s Treatise on Painting (1844) and the edition and translation of Original Treatises on the Arts of Painting (1849) by the polymath Mary P. Merrifield. This latter collection, nearly 900 pages long, made available the texts of Latin, Italian, and French painters’ handbooks or recipes over several medieval centuries. Merrifield found the manuscripts mainly in northern Italian libraries. She supplemented her editions with accounts of her conversations in Verona and Venice with Signori A, B, C, D, and E, elderly painters and restorers whose memories of the old painting techniques, passed down by word of mouth, seemed to reach back to the Renaissance itself. Merrifield was told, for example, “that Titian began by painting in the flesh in chiaroscuro with a mixed tint, formed of biadetto [azurite], biacca [white lead], and a very little terra rossa [red ochre]. He then painted the lights with flesh color, and laid by the picture to dry. After five or six months he glazed the flesh with terra rossa and let it dry.” Charles C. Perkins (1823–1886), meanwhile, a wealthy Bostonian who had studied painting in Paris and art history in Leipzig, published Tuscan Sculpture (1864). Perkins edited for publication writings by the English painter Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865), president of the Royal Academy, first director of the National Gallery, and champion of the Italian and northern primitives. Eastlake had translated Goethe’s Treatise on Color and written Materials for a History of Oil Painting (1847). Elizabeth (Rigby), Lady Eastlake, translated Passavant, Waagen, and Kugler. Her own anti-Ruskinian essays on Italian Renaissance artists were collected and published in 1883.
Ruskin himself was not an architect. Two major theorists who were, Gottfried Semper and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, looked to historical knowledge to point the way out of the modern predicament of freedom of stylistic choice.
The German architect Semper (1803–1879), in exile after the revolutions of 1848, was looking for work. He designed several national pavilions at the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace. In London Semper came face to face with the full chaos of eclectic historicism. He found a politicized scene; an engagement with the questions posed by technology and industry; the dubious enterprise of colonization. In this period he wrote a short treatise proposing solutions to the conundrum of historicism, Science, Industry, and Art: Proposals for the Development of a National Taste in Art at the Closing of the London Industrial Exhibition (1852). Semper saw the “Babylonian confusion” of styles on display at the “world market” as an opportunity to radically rethink building. The exhibition inspired him to propose a new way of ordering the arts, with architecture as the base. All the arts, he argues, derive from “the elements of the domestic settlement: hearth, wall, terrace, and roof.” Embracing these elements is a fifth, “high art.” All objects and forms descend from these “primordial motives (Urmotiven).” But today, he says, these simple principles are obscured by the mechanical inventions that have alienated us from necessity and from the properties of materials. Our own modern handmade Gothic now suddenly appears eccentric, affected, devoid of meaning or idea: “Have not the new Houses of Parliament in London been made unbearable by the machine?” “The recognized triumphs at the Exhibition [of 1851] of the half-barbaric nations, especially the Indians with their magnificent industries of art … show us that we with our science have until now accomplished very little.”
A new doctrine of style will call upon on art history to show us how the primordial motives govern the later development of forms. The divisioning and ornamentation of walls, for example, the coloring, all the arts in contact with the walls, all follow from the original spatial dividers, the mat and its successors, the woven or embroidered carpet.
Semper’s thought is complex, twisting. He notes that an unintended consequence of the proliferation of citational ornament on modern buildings is a disintegration of the traditional building types. This, he says, is our opportunity.
In 1853 Semper was given a major commission in Zurich, the Polytechnikum, today’s Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule. He thrived from this point on, building the Opera in Dresden and the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Burgtheater in Vienna. These mighty buildings occupy space, dominate, swell, assert themselves, symbolize the gravity and permanence of institutions and communities. They do not seem revolutionary; in fact they are historicist, riveted together out of modules of classical form. Their style is best described as neo-Renaissance or neo-Baroque. Yet Semper’s writings reveal a mind uncowed by the authority of tradition, a mind moving at liberty between cosmic and practical thought. In 1860–1863 he published the two volumes of Style, his magnum opus, an amplification of the ideas in the 1852 essay. Again Semper refuses to choose between the anthropological and the symbolic interpretations of the primordial motives, or between historicist freedom of choice and technological reason. The elements of building precede social organization and so exist outside of history. “Style theory is not art history.” Semper reveals genetic, not real, sequences. The hearth calls upon the basic technical arts to protect the flame, symbol of society: textiles (cladding), ceramics (enclosing), tectonics or carpentry (or covering), and stereotomy or masonry (protecting). The development of form is driven by the pursuit of eurythmy, or pleasure in nature. After hundreds of pages of analysis of the survival and recombinations of the basic forms established in prehistory by the textile arts, the Greek monuments so admired by Semper’s readers can only appear belated, composite, secondary. It is true that the Greeks were able to apprehend the forms as symbols of form, lending them a higher sense. Yet Semper is ready to consign the fine arts to a protected zone of irrelevancy. In Science, Art, and Industry he said that the fine arts have no role in the modern marketplace because they must be autonomous. The plastic arts were once rooted in public functions but are no longer. In his sketch of world art history in Style, he assigns painting a minor role. The significance of Semper’s account is that he ignores the high points and thresholds that had once seemed significant: Greek art, Gothic art, Renaissance art. He discusses the tectonic arts of Polynesia, China, and India. But in the end we are made to feel that the real story is the advent of machine technology in the nineteenth century, completely altering our perspective on the past. Technology, which cannot be ignored, allows us the opportunity to halt the decline into dislocation and stultification that all prior art histories had narrated.
A less ambiguous thinker than Semper, and equally fundamental, was the French architect, historian, and theorist Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (1814–1879). He was the nephew of Étienne-Jean Delécluze, the painter and biographer of Jacques-Louis David. Viollet-le-Duc’s many restorations at the invitation of Prosper Mérimée were and remain controversial, for they involved creative additions; they are not reconstructions but fantasies on the theme of Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle, Saint-Denis, and most notoriously the walled city of Carcassonne. But Viollet-le-Duc was no vandal. On the basis of his notes and drawings, he published a ten-volume Dictionnaire raisonné de l’architecture française du XIe au XVIe siècle (1854–1868), not a history but an encyclopedia of medieval architecture. Viollet-le-Duc was appointed professor of art history at the École des Beaux-Arts in 1863. Among his many publications the most significant was the Entretiens sur l’architecture (two vols., 1863–1872), a total theory of architecture, already translated into English by 1875.
Despite his immersion in medieval and neo-medieval building practices, and unlike Ruskin, Viollet-le-Duc is free of any nostalgia for bygone ways of life. He considers the medieval worldviews no longer real or living. With his admiration for the rational, lay spirit of the cathedral builders, he would seem to have little patience for liturgy and theology, though he would not have dared to say it.
Viollet-le-Duc deplores “the current anarchy in the matter of art” and wonders whether the nineteenth century is condemned to end without ever possessing an architecture of its own. Our education is nothing but an “undigested jumble of old traditions that no one believes in any more”; we must stop living as if Charles Le Brun were still surintendant des Beaux-arts. This is hardly preferable to the submission to tradition, enforced by theocracy, characteristic of ancient Egypt and the Near East, involving the typological imitation of inveterate building materials. Europe is supposed to have given up typology when the Greeks introduced the critical spirit.
Like Semper, Viollet-le-Duc had a strong sense of a break with the preindustrial world. This allowed him to reject the three centuries preceding his own. From his point of view, the eclectic nineteenth century, “abounding in reminiscences,” had already begun by 1500. And yet Viollet-le-Duc was unwilling to jettison the past. “If it is difficult for man to learn, it is even more difficult for him to forget.” In fact, he said, it is impossible to invent a new architecture; one can only analyze, recombine, appropriate.
Viollet-le-Duc sees medieval architecture as “progress” over the ancients because it put the “idea” above doctrine and tradition and, against the egoism of antiquity, resituated man in nature. Viollet-le-Duc admires the rational Gothic cathedrals. At the same time he is a relativist: “It is the nature and not the degree of civilization which produces the epochs of art.” As a disciple of Mérimée, he is able to cast a sympathetic eye even on the ungainly buildings of the late antique or early Christian period and develops a new apology. The passive imagination of the primitive peoples is imperfect. They saw antiquity as in a dream, exaggerated and distorted. The poetic active imagination of civilized man “seizes” the passive imagination of the primitive, and the crude forms lose their savage traits. Civilization needs the barbaric; it provides contrasts, dissimilitudes, moral fermentation, the cross-fertilization of ideas, movement, struggle, obstacles.
Compare Ruskin on “The Nature of Gothic,” in Stones of Venice (1852):
Go forth to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no characters, no charities can secure; but which it must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children.
Ugliness is redeemed by freedom. Gothic form emerges directly out of the lifeworld of the craftsman, his direct and intuitive experience of life.
Unexpectedly, Viollet-le-Duc sees in Greek and Roman society a harmony among the génie du peuple, the moeurs, and the institutions (even if for Greeks everything is subordinated to a rational form, and for Romans everything is subordinated to a public reason). Whereas, in the Christian Middle Ages there was contradiction between the genius of the people and the institutions—and for this reason, he says, the Middle Ages are worth studying! Presumably because his own century shared this problem.
Viollet-le-Duc recommends not the revival of past forms but knowledge of the principles of past architecture. Architecture would finally be scientific. In architecture “we are only now at the point where the West in science was at the time of Galileo.” The superiority of the lay or critical spirit to tradition is what the cathedral builders of thirteenth-century France had established. Gothic architecture, the “triumph of intelligence,” defies tradition. Gothic form corresponds to structure—a necessity, just as in an animal or vegetal organism.
Ruskin’s sanctimonious Christian aesthetic—at once invigorative and neurasthenic—is insufferable, but at least he is seeking a language to account for the appeal to the senses of Gothic architecture, or any architecture. Semper and Viollet-le-Duc give up on this—their approach is unpoetic. Their functionalism opens the modern fracture between art history and architectural history.
In practice, Viollet-le-Duc’s rationalism, translated from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, meant iron vaulting. Semper and Viollet-le-Duc are partially betrayed by the buildings they built, or by the buildings inspired by their teachings, for the symbolic associations of neo-Baroque and neo-Gothic forms will press through. Like Semper, Viollet-le-Duc was unable to envision the future architecture that would be founded on his principles.
The sophisticated tourist carried, if not Ruskin’s Stones of Venice or Mornings in Florence, then the companionable handbook to Italian painting by the Swiss scholar Jacob Burckhardt (1818–1897), Der Cicerone: eine Anleitung zum Genuss der Kunstwerke Italiens (1855), already translated into English as The Cicerone: A Guide to the Enjoyment of the Artworks of Italy by 1873. Here Burckhardt retailed his observations on schools and artists from antiquity to the seventeenth century, culminating in two French painters, Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Precise but judgmental, rarely enthusiastic, he discusses attributions, subjects, styles, compositions, coloring. He offers miniature essays on Giotto’s narrative style, for example, or Raphael’s School of Athens. Burckhardt developed the first post-idealist and affirmative account of what came to be called—because of Burckhardt—Renaissance art. His Renaissance is not the academic treasure house of authorized form, nor is it the cradle of an innocent sentiment that could relaunch modern art, nor is it the merely imitative and incomplete classicism derided by Winckelmann.
The youthful Burckhardt, under the spell of the historians Ranke and Johann Gustav Droysen, still believed in the providential shape of history. But already by 1842 he speaks in a letter of the breach between his own era and the ancien régime, striking a pessimistic note that would only deepen with age. In the early 1840s Burckhardt also studied art history, with Kugler in Berlin. He came to insist on seeing things for himself; he mistrusted concepts. Burckhardt believed that philosophy subordinates, while history coordinates. Burckhardt was nothing if not an anti-Hegelian, which is why he is idolized by so many historians to this very day. The seven-volume biography by Werner Kaegi, published between 1947 and 1982, is by a considerable margin the longest biography ever dedicated to a scholar whose life beyond the study, the library, and the lecture hall was no more eventful than yours or mine, dear reader. Burckhardt’s later books and lectures paint a flat, dry picture of history; in his letters he expresses a bitter fatalism.
Burckhardt’s Die Cultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860), a title mistranslated by S. G. C. Middlemore in 1878 as The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, is a reanimation of primary textual sources, organized thematically. There is no historical arc: The Culture of the Renaissance in Italy is a portrait of an epoch, Italy between the mid-fourteenth and the early sixteenth centuries.
The first writer to describe the regeneration of painting, sculpture, and architecture in Italy as a rebirth (rinascita) after centuries of neglect had been none other than Vasari (although the architect Filarete had said that he himself felt “reborn” when he saw the new Florentine structures built in the ancient manner [mi pare rinascere a vedere questi cosi degni edifici]). But Burckhardt in his book did not explain the vitality of fifteenth-century Florence as a reactivation of ancient energies. He was uninterested in reconstructing the genealogy of modern scholarship and so downplayed the philological and archeological achievement of the Renaissance. Burckhardt took his cue from Jules Michelet’s Histoire de France, whose seventh volume was entitled Renaissance (1855) and covered the period from the Italian War of 1494 through the reign of François I. Michelet began by noting that the word “Renaissance” means something concrete for aesthetes, scholars, and jurists. The “revolution” of the sixteenth century was profounder even than this, for like no era before it the Renaissance discovered the world and discovered man. Michelet meant exploration and astronomy; and he meant the penetration into the “moral mystery” of man in Protestant theology, in jurisprudence, and in literature. For Michelet, as for Burckhardt, the Renaissance appears to emerge out of nothing, willing itself into existence. And just as for Michelet, the “spirit of renewal” for Burckhardt permeates all aspects of life. The signatures of Burckhardt’s Italian Renaissance are spectacle, power, possession, conquest, and personality. Christianity plays a minor part. Burckhardt’s protagonists are pragmatic, lucid, ruthless, and yet virtuous businessmen, statesmen, warriors, though also scholars. Burckhardt celebrates the creative energy, the flow of life, that united potentate, merchant, and poet. The modernity of the era is its dynamic responsiveness to evolving economic and social conditions and its commitment to civic virtue and political action. Burckhardt’s Florentines were driven by curiosity, a will to heroism, and a bold and skeptical spirit.
Michelet’s earlier book, Le Peuple (1846), an impassioned, sentimental, anti-authoritarian, and anticlerical tract, had closed with a denunciation of the Romantic cult of the Middle Ages, that Middle Ages “where I have spent my life, whose affecting, futile aspiration I have reproduced in my histories, I have had to say to it: ‘Stand back! ’ now that impure hands rip it from its tomb and place this stone before us trying to make us stumble on the path to the future.” Burckhardt would surely have concurred. Is it then fair to say that with Burckhardt finally the Middle Ages is murdered, for the second time; that Burckhardt completes the project of the Enlightenment? Yes and no, for Burckhardt also creates modern medieval studies—negatively. The first principle of medieval studies, a principle that no historian or art historian of the European Middle Ages contests, is that Burckhardt was wrong.
As noted, the concept of a festive, affirmative Renaissance had been established in France in the 1830s. The term referred almost exclusively to the French sixteenth century and to a modern style of furniture that imitated Renaissance forms. Burckhardt was the first to transfer the word from France to Italy. He enshrined the word, untranslated, in his title. His use of the French word established “Renaissance” as the unquestioned period label both in German and in English. Italian art historians, overtaken by Burckhardt, had to activate an old word, rinascimento—rinascita and rinascenza seemed too limited—to translate his title (that translation appeared in 1876) and his concept. Rinascimento, echoing Risorgimento, immediately became the Italian term for the Renaissance.
The advent of the Renaissance as the overall designation of an historical period, and more importantly as a concept, marks the end of Europe’s reconciliation with its own Middle Ages, the reconciliation dramatized by Goethe. For the positive valuation of the Middle Ages of course persists in the twentieth century and beyond, sometimes as a cover for varieties of anti-modernism.
The materialist, even Epicurean or Lucretian, tradition of thought that Burckhardt identified with and the libertinism of the free-thinking and sensualist princes are allied with realism and the defiance of conventions, academic and other. Burckhardt is a bridge between Goethe (see the essay on Florentine history that he appended to his translation of the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini, 1803) and Nietzsche.
A close reader of Burckhardt was the French historian Hippolyte Taine, whose Lectures on Art (1867) proposed an invigorated contextualism, a calibration of art to the realities of race, milieu, moment. Taine’s writings were immediately translated into English. In La Philosophie de l’art en Italie (1867), Taine recreated the milieu of mysticism of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and then the milieu of paganism of c. 1500. He laid out the “intellectual conditions” or “conditions of existence” of Italian painting, aiming at “a complete explanation of the Fine Arts, and of art in general.” Our philosophy of the fine arts or aesthetic system, Taine asserts, “is modern, and differs from the ancients, inasmuch as it is historic, and not dogmatic; this is to say, it imposes no precepts, but ascertains and verifies laws.” “My sole duty is to offer you facts, and show you how these facts are produced.” Science “neither pardons nor proscribes; it verifies and explains. It does not say to you despise Dutch art because it is vulgar, and prize only Italian art; nor does it say to you despise Gothic art because it is morbid, and prize only Greek art. It leaves everyone free to follow their own predilections, to prefer that which is germane only to one’s own temperament.” “Science has sympathies for all the forms of art, and for all schools.” Like Herder, he turns to a vegetal metaphor: “It is analogous to botany, which studies the orange, the laurel, the pine, and the birch, with equal interest.” Even Henri Focillon, who deplored Taine’s unpoetic spirit, would praise his evenhanded generosity of spirit: Taine no longer uses time as a scythe to destroy, he pointed out, but instead offers a plenitude of culture, almost mythological.
One of the features of Burckhardt’s Renaissance was the easy interaction between elites and common people. Taine, too, had spoken of the animated beauty of sixteenth-century sculpture not as a mere ornament but as a force emerging from a layer of appetite below the surface of social life. Burckhardt puts great store in the festivals, religious and profane. He must have read the novel by his countryman Gottfried Keller, Der Grüne Heinrich (1855), which describes the hero’s experience of the festivities and procession staged by the artists’ association in Munich in 1840 (here translated to Nuremberg):
The best opportunity to cheer oneself through the conjured-up splendor of earlier German magnificence was the coming together of the whole richly styled band of artists to depict the lost imperial grandeur; and it was a real production, not with canvas, brush, stone, and hammer, but rather with their own persons used as raw material; and, joining forces in a hundred ways, each was a vital part of the whole, and the life of the whole pulsed in each, beamed from eye to eye, and a short night dreamed itself into reality.
Old Nuremberg was to be resuscitated, at least insofar as it could represent itself in moving human figures; and how it was in those times when the “Last Knight,” Emperor Maximilian I, celebrated feast-days there and decked with honors and coats-of-arms the city’s greatest son, Albrecht Dürer.
(In fact, Keller himself arrived in Munich in spring 1840, two months too late to have witnessed either the carnival festival on an “Old German” theme in Munich, or the Dürer festival in Nuremberg of that year.) Historical art is an occasion for national or ethnic pride. Remnants of popular festival culture merge with modern art-historical knowledge. In the next decades other artists completed Keller’s transfer of the “renaissance” concept to Germany. The last act of Richard Wagner’s Meistersinger von Nürnberg (1868) recreated a competition at the Johannisfest. The “German Renaissance” was libidinal, Falstaffian, and profane, a post-1848 picture of harmony among the social classes, a celebration of crafts and trades.
But the festivals are repetitions of repetitions, soon empty of content. Keller himself is perplexed:
Strange times, when people who wish to joyously rise up must don the garment of the past simply to appear respectable! And certainly it is a thrilling sensation to know that posterity will adopt our contemporary dress only when they wish to go about in a mocking manner, the way we do now with the garb of that eighteenth century which felt so good about itself. … When will a time come again when we will turn on our own axis and be satisfied with our own present tense?
There is a second unfamiliar word in Burckhardt’s title: Cultur (or Kultur). Early in the century the word had often meant “heritage,” the patriotic or even tribal patrimony, the traditional ways. The Schlesische Gesellschaft für vaterländische Cultur was founded in 1809; the Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden in 1819. Kultur had been associated by Herder with the people, and by mid-century the word had come to denote the object of a kind of history-writing dedicated to society as a whole, high and low, and to the life of the people, as opposed to great men and notable events. Immediately preceding Burckhardt were the books by Wilhelm Wachsmuth, Allgemeine Kulturgeschichte (1850–1852) and Gustav Klemm, Allgemeine Culturwissenschaft (1854–1855). Burckhardt, retaining Herder’s holism, used the word to mean a way of life, mentality, the sum of the ways that a community represented reality to itself.
For Burckhardt Cultur meant the exact opposite of tradition. Culture was the zone of spontaneity. In his university lectures on the theory of history, published posthumously as Weltgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (1905), Burckhardt described the “constants” of history as three Potenzen or powers: state, religion, culture. Culture comprises social exchanges, technologies, arts, literature. Culture is a natural state, emergent and creative, which state and religion try to suppress:
Culture may be defined as the sum total of those mental developments which take place spontaneously and lay no claim to universal or compulsive authority. Its action on the two constants [i.e., State and Religion] is one of perpetual modification and disintegration.
Burckhardt believed that modernity lacked culture:
The man of culture who earns his living would gladly pick up as much learning and pleasure as he can, but must regretfully leave the best for others: others must be cultivated for him, just as others prayed and sang for the great lords of the middle ages.
The accelerated pace of modern life and the competition for goods was accompanied by an increased desire for knowledge and taste, for culture:
Admittedly a good number of these are the American men of culture, who for the most part have renounced history, that is, spiritual continuity, and wish only to go on sharing in the enjoyment of art and poetry as forms of luxury.
Burckhardt was not a nationalist but a European chauvinist. Both Henry Adams and Henry James internalized the refined European’s contempt for America. Adams (1838–1918) embarked for Europe after his studies at Harvard. He soon realized that he could not match his experiences on the Continent to any respectable behavioral model. The proliferation of guidebooks and the swelling tide of middle-class travelers, especially to Italy, were already a target of mockery. Adams saw himself neither as a dandyish flâneur in search of sensation nor as an earnest Goethean in search of Bildung. The episode is recounted in his autobiography, written in the third person, The Education of Henry Adams (1907):
Henry Adams … chose the path most admired by the best judges, and followed it till he found it led nowhere. Nothing had been further from his mind when he started in November, 1858, than to become a tourist, but a mere tourist, and nothing else, he had become in April, 1860, when he joined his sister in Florence. His father had been in the right. The young man felt a little sore about it. Supposing his father asked him, on his return, what equivalent he had brought back for the time and money put into his experiment! The only possible answer would be: “Sir, I am a tourist!”
The word “tourist” was introduced into the language in the late eighteenth century and had from the start a pejorative connotation. The tourist profanated not sacred precincts but the shrines of art. Ambivalence about tourism persists to this day. Tourism has become a major element of many people’s aspirations, emblematic of an expansion of internal horizons.
In the late 1850s the James family sojourned in Europe, principally Paris. Later Henry wrote of his adolescent encounter with the pictures of the Louvre: “The beginning in short was with Géricault and David, but it went on and on and slowly spread … as so many explorations of the house of life, so many circlings and hoverings round the image of the world.” The boy looked at pictures and pictures, at Veronese, Murillo, Leonardo’s “unholy dame with the folded hands,” looked
at France and looked at Europe, looked even at America as Europe itself might be conceived so to look, looked at history as a still-felt past and a complacently personal future, at society, manners, types, characters, possibilities and prodigies and mysteries of fifty sorts.
This was Henry’s version of the Dürer Festival in Nuremberg: “The house of life and the palace of art became mixed and interchangeable.”
Burckhardt assigns an ambiguous role to historical consciousness. He says that historical memory staves off the self-indulgent fancy that culture can simply be acquired and consumed (the American version of culture, according to Burckhardt). And yet the society that really is a culture, like the Italian Renaissance, was vital because it freed itself from history.
The open secret of Burckhardt’s book is that it does not deal with the visual arts. In the first part Burckhardt describes the State as a “Work of Art.” He often quotes and discusses poetry and drama. But he seldom mentions the fine arts, painting and sculpture. In fact, he frequently says that art tends to lag behind poetry and other cultivated practices (Bildung). In this way Burckhardt protects art, shields it from the cultural historian’s expectation that the arts naturally “picture” history. It is as if he were taking his cue from Charles Baudelaire, who wrote in L’art philosophique (published in 1868 but already conceived in 1855):
What is pure art according to the modern concept? It is the creation of a suggestive magic containing at once the object and the subject, the world external to the artist and the artist himself.
What is philosophical art according to the concept of Chenevard and the German school? It is a form of visual art which purports to replace the book, that is, to compete with the printing press in the teaching of history, morals, and philosophy.
“Philosophical art,” which Baudelaire associates with the French painter Paul Chenavard and with the “German school”—Hegelians, basically—is art “destined to paint the historical archives of a people and its religions and beliefs.” Such was the art of the past. But modern art is not easily coordinated with anything else—that is its nature:
For several centuries now in the history of art there has been an ever more marked separation of powers: there are subjects that belong to painting, others to music, and still others to literature.
Baudelaire is saying more or less what Burckhardt had said: that art in the Renaissance—and since the Renaissance—is out of sync with the rest of culture.
The artwork once served as a monument. A society displays its own heroic history in images; these are intentional monuments, like the Egyptian pyramids. Later, a society becomes interested in monuments created by other societies: Herodotus writes about the pyramids. Eventually someone realizes that even non-monuments, exactly because they are not intentional and therefore more reliable, can serve as witnesses to the past, as “the abstract and brief chronicles of the time.” Archeologists and antiquarians gather and collate such non-monuments. The credo of the modern historian is that any relic can be read as a trace of a past reality.
Pictures, however, like poems or folk tales, are already stylized and so camouflage their own potential usefulness as traces, or evidence. To read them as evidence is to read them against themselves. An artwork is simply an image that acquiesces in the dreamwork carried out by any image. The artwork does not just deliver but generates meaning. The implication, spelled out by Baudelaire, is that the modern artist, who has no will to counteract the intrinsic fictionality of the image, will fail to archive his own present, even if he wishes to. The modern artist mistrusts the image as evidence because the image arrests, suspends, mortifies; it condenses and reduces; it is unstable in time. The image is always already an artwork: opaque, enigmatic, self-contradictory, allegorical, anarchic even when it appears most composed. Qua art, the image reveals truths unknown even to the one who made the image. The image “knows better”; what kind of evidence is this? The recognition of the image leads to the recognition that premodern art was also art.
Art history in England, France, and Italy was less academic than in the German-speaking societies. Access to libraries was not yet the decisive factor it would later become. The gentleman or lady scholar with leisure and taste made real contributions. Art criticism flourished in mid-century France. Théophile Thoré-Bürger (1807–1869) wrote several books on Dutch painting and is especially remembered for having rediscovered Jan Vermeer, a painter held dear today but completely forgotten in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The pedagogue and scholar Charles Blanc was the first editor of the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, a magazine pragmatic, materialist, and elitist, oriented to collectors, amateurs, and artists. Its run extended from 1859 to 2002. Théophile Gautier, Baudelaire, Champfleury; the reviews of the annual salons—the future president of the Republic Adolphe Thiers wrote about the Salon of 1822: this was the matrix of artistic modernism. An impatience with the past and with memory, a low tolerance for Romantic historicism, a nonphilosophical, anecdotal, subjective, sensation-oriented spirit of contradiction, an ease with the events of the day, all of this descended from Diderot.
The brothers Edmond and Jules Goncourt, novelists, wrote a series of monographs on eighteenth-century painters that appeared in periodicals between 1856 and 1875 and were collected later as Art du XVIII siècle. Their tone is conversational, a salon tone, easy on erudition, espousing a contextualism that does not go far beyond the idea of the painters “expressing, personifying, embodying” “an airy moment of history.” The history of art plays no greater role than it played for the artists themselves. One of Watteau’s figures is described as “posed as if by a pen-stroke of Parmigianino.” The Goncourts are doing more or less what the historians are doing, except with more grace. They do not go very deeply into form, but not because they do not see form. There is still no special language to describe pictorial form, so they draw on literary language, a parallel language. They believe in the person behind the artwork: the artist is the reality, the plenitude. This is the conviction behind the flourishing of the genre of the artist’s monograph in the nineteenth century.
The Goncourts took an interest in Rococo in order to ignore realist tendencies in contemporary art. Anti-moderns (and anti-Semites), they reassert the element of fantasy, planting seeds that will grow later in the century, in the Symbolist milieu. Subject matter is irrelevant for them. Christianity in the Renaissance had already accepted a leveling with paganism, a leveling of the subjects of art on the basis of the idea of fiction. Romantic medievalism had countered this, reasserting the primacy of subject matter. The Goncourts represent not so much a decadent royalist fantasy as a non-pious response to Romantic and ironic historicism. This is related to the enthusiasm for the forms of world art: one can like it all, because it is all just so many myths.
The canon of European art was virtually closed by this point, out of inertia. There were no Goncourts writing about sixteenth- or seventeenth-century art. With few exceptions, the artists most admired by Vasari are still the ones most admired even today. The assessments of post-Vasarian painters have been more labile, mutable: the reputation of Guido Reni has declined since the nineteenth century, while that of Orazio Gentileschi has increased. The nineteenth century learned how to look at the Dutch painters. It is striking how few tasks the nineteenth century left us. Already in his “Notes on Leonardo da Vinci” (1869), the English essayist Walter Pater said that we know all there is to know about the artist: “Antiquarianism has no more to do.” Erich Auerbach in his late book Literary Language and Its Public (1958) discussed the attempt by the historian Konrad Burdach, around 1900, to identify a humanistic proto-Renaissance at the court of Emperor Charles IV in Prague in the fourteenth century, an episode, in Burdach’s view, that would stand as a counterpart and rival to Burckhardt’s Florentine Renaissance. But such an attempt was doomed, Auerbach wrote, because “great intellectual centers and literary works capable of molding a national language cannot very well be so thoroughly forgotten that they have to be rediscovered by so late a scholar; their full significance would have been recognized at the very latest by nineteenth-century historicism.”