A History of Art History

1890–1900

No art historian other than Vasari has written texts with a longer lifespan than Alois Riegl (1858–1905). Riegl’s first post was at the Österreichisches Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna, founded in 1863 on the model of the South Kensington (later Victoria and Albert) Museum in London. Here he was responsible for oriental textiles. The carpets became Riegl’s textbook of form. His Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Questions of Style: Foundations of a History of Ornament) (1893), narrates the development of ornament, based entirely on the acanthus leaf, from ancient Egypt to the arts of Islam, as a continuous unfolding of form independent of function, materials, symbolism, or representational content. By focusing on patterns woven in textiles or painted on vases, void of subject matter, Riegl opened a direct vista onto form. Riegl saw that the representational art that had dominated European art for centuries had the power to govern its own interpretation—too much power. In the premodern “applied” arts, paradoxically, he found the absolute abstraction that had not quite yet been invented, in 1893, on the stretched canvas.

Riegl was a careful observer, trained in the Morellian method, but he left questions of authenticity or dating in the background. Riegl’s vases and carpets were authorless, so there was no interference from imputations of psychological states. His own prose is dry and factual.

Riegl explained the evolution of form neither as approach to or retreat from nature, nor as a symbolic response to the physical conditions of dwelling, as Gottfried Semper had done, but rather as an internal development, work to work, as the form-making mind altered the already-shaped forms it encountered in prior art, leaving reality long behind. The impulse to create forms is most directly registered in the free play of vegetal ornament.

Riegl’s assertion of the autarky of form opened a path back to a certain classicism, classicism understood as the state of not having to choose. The classicism of pure form was guided by nature, not external nature but form itself as a second nature. Riegl contrasted the organic development of the tendril in ancient art to the deliberate selections, “unimaginative transcriptions of nature,” of the modern Arts and Crafts movement. Scholarly attempts to explain “new” ornamental motifs in ancient art by identifying actual plants as their sources are the “pure product of the most modern artistic sensibility, even in part the modern perplexity about art.” The classicism of form had the potential to awaken the late nineteenth century from the double nightmare of an excess of choice (in architecture and design) and not enough choice (in painting, now more and more acquiescent in the meaningless task of verisimilitude, oppressed by all the reality waiting to be pictured).

Riegl’s book signals the arrival of art history’s culminating moment, the years when the project of art history most perfectly realized its possibilities. Riegl’s art history was impersonal and erudite, as scholarship must be, and yet was responding to pressures from outside scholarship, in particular the development of a quasi-philosophical discourse of form. Riegl develops the art history that responds to Konrad Fiedler, whose text of 1878 on architecture we encountered in the last section. In his essay “Moderner Naturalismus und künstlerische Wahrheit” (Modern Naturalism and Artistic Truth) (1881), Fiedler had contested the assumption of painting’s naturalist destiny. It was the doomed competition with photography that had led painting to lose its way in the mindless transcription of reality. Admittedly the scorn for realism had been a traditional theme of premodern art theory, often mapped onto a geographic distinction. The direct imitation of reality was the northern European weakness, a limitation to be countered by an idealism cultivated in the Mediterranean realm. But Fiedler was not just reproducing that debate, as if to complain that the northern mode had prevailed. Fiedler’s main aims, like Riegl’s, were to safeguard autonomy, to justify the fictive quality of art’s propositions, and to protect art from functionalist thinking.

Fiedler argued that the role of art in modernity was to restage the mental and physiological processes that construct reality: “The truly artistically gifted nature … brings forth in itself so to speak that process, now arrived at a new freedom, in which reality is generated for man.” Fiedler was recovering the epistemology of Kant, who latterly had been overshadowed by Hegel and Hegel’s antagonists, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Kant’s critical philosophy licensed Fiedler to credit the true artist or poet not with reproducing the world but with creating a world. The sufficient content of modern paintings is therefore vision itself. Fiedler represents a transitional phase between the intuitions of artistic autonomy of the mid-nineteenth century (Baudelaire) and the philosophies of autonomy of the twentieth century, those of Benedetto Croce, Suzanne Langer, Gaston Bachelard, and Theodor W. Adorno.

The short treatise on relief sculpture by the artist and theorist Adolf von Hildebrand, entitled Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (The Problem of Form in the Visual Arts) (1893), had immediate influence. Like his friend Fiedler, Hildebrand could not see where realism or naturalism was heading. Hildebrand did not accept the idea of representation as the mechanical reproduction of the results of perception, a fallacy only encouraged by the realist tendencies of modern painting. Hildebrand defined artistic vision instead as the apprehension of an idea of form (Formvorstellung) abstracted from the shifting phenomena perceived by the eyes. The work of art, he argued, offers the “form of existence” (Daseinsform) as a pure visual effect.

Hildebrand asserted that we apprehend objects in the world either by moving around them and assessing their plastic form, or by gazing straight at them from a fixed distance. Artists work with these two approaches: the painter delivers a flat view of the world that nevertheless tries to reproduce plastic form and even movement, while the sculptor delivers a plastic form that nevertheless resolves into satisfying picture-like views. The artist clarifies nature by comparing it to imaginary pictures and sculptures. The resulting artwork is an independent entity that stands beside nature, liberated from mutability and accident. The ideal was the relief sculpture of ancient Greece, which alone “places us as observers in a secure relationship with nature.” Therefore relief is “a way of viewing things that in all times has been the mark of artistic sensibility and the expression of its unchanging laws.”

Hildebrand challenges his own theory by asking: If the artwork is a pure product of the artist’s mind, how can we explain the illusionistic power of paintings? The answer is that each of us, not only the artist, assesses nature by comparing imaginary moving and stable views, or pictures. Perception is always already artistic. It is no surprise then that the painted landscape resembles the landscapes we see outdoors. Real existence reemerges inside the artwork as pure effect. The mind of the ordinary viewer dominates nature, but the artist dominates that viewer. Hildebrand tells the artist: your destiny is in your hands, you are free, art is a present-tense problem involving your own mind and body. The critic, meanwhile, is one who oversees perception and its reenactments, and who corrects the history of art.

Because he perpetuates the cult of ancient Greece, and because he offers the Greek relief as a recipe for the ailments of modern art, Hildebrand is today less serviceable than Fiedler. Still, the aim of his text was the same, as was its grounding in Kantian critical philosophy. Fiedler and Hildebrand created a new language for analyzing form, so revealing the impoverishment of nineteenth-century historical scholarship. Without this language, art history remains stretched between the ingratiating narratives of the historians (Taine) and the pathos of the critical word-poets (Pater). Taine has little to say about artworks that is not plainly visible to any sentient person. Pater has plenty to say, but his graceful sentences, relaying reverberations of the soul of the artist, sometimes obstruct the view onto form.

Fiedler and Hildebrand, paradoxically, recovered form in order to give the art of their time a renewed sense of its own meaning in history. The very idea that art might evolve seemed threatened by realism, a style unlike all other styles because it cedes authority to the motif in reality. Fiedler and Hildebrand’s redefinition of vision as the content of art guarantees that the content of art is always other art, because art and only art delivers a picture of vision that can serve as a starting point for new art.

Fiedler and Hildebrand’s focus on form entailed no relativism; they were in effect trying to maintain Gian Pietro Bellori’s high standards. Fiedler wrote about medieval architecture, but by 1878 that was hardly controversial. They were not much interested in anything but masterpieces. The recentering of art history on form does not invite an egalitarian approach to cultural artifacts. And yet the principle of autonomy allows for a canon of art more open or more closed as the historian sees fit, for it allows the historian to extract applied art from its original functions and settings and to treat it as art. This is exactly what Riegl did in his books on carpets and the acanthus ornament. Formalism prepares a recognition of a larger population of artifacts as art: the third-century brooch or the ancient Chinese bronze vessel alongside the oil paintings lauded by Bellori. This is the principle of the modern encyclopedic art museum.

The theory of pure visibility, however, also protects a not fully acknowledged normativity. In the Problem of Form, Hildebrand speaks of the unchanging laws of art. As a modern, Hildebrand invokes no metaphysical authority. Yet his idea of form is not neutral, but ennobling. The contingent forms of nature, according to Hildebrand, must become form, that is, complete form. In the way of seeing expressed in relief

the visual sense, stimulated in a thousand ways, finds its center of gravity, its stable relations, and its clarity. The method is essential for all artistic forms, whether a landscape or a portrait; everywhere it orders perception, combines it, and stabilizes it.

It is fair to ask whether artistic freedom secretly oriented to even a postmetaphysical idealism is freedom at all. A closer reading of Fiedler reveals a similar hidden idealism. In his essay on architecture of 1878, Fiedler had written, “Creation of form must be imagined as a thought process in which the architectural forms themselves are the content.” Form is already the content of the artist’s form-producing (gestaltende) thought. The artist thinks about form while he is transforming bad or contingent form into good or artistically lasting form. The given forms—the forms of existing buildings—are unsatisfying because they are trapped in their materiality: Greek architecture was the effort “to free form from its earlier dependence on the requirements of construction and material, so that ‘when we look upon the work of art, the means and the materials are forgotten and it is satisfying in itself as form.’ ” Fiedler is actually quoting Semper, exposed here as an idealist. Fiedler’s recruitment of Semper is an indication of how difficult it was for nineteenth-century thinkers to escape teleological thinking. The form of the building, “which is a thing of the mind, develops an increasingly autonomous existence (selbständigeren Dasein).”

At some point the process ends: “Only when the building has become a pure expression of form is the intellectual work of the creation of form complete.”

The late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century adherents of form as beautiful order assigned form two prestigious positions within narratives of artistic creation. “Forms,” in this view, are packages of sensible reality that perception, drawn to beauty, picks out of the totality of what there is to be perceived. The artist then assembles the forms into a new package, creating beauty at a higher level of organization. Form, therefore, is both the starting point and the endpoint of the artwork.

A residual idealism reaches into the thought of Fiedler and Hildebrand. And yet it proved possible to look through this idealism: Riegl’s studies, which we will pursue into the next section, took up this challenge.

The power of the mind over reality was expressed in a different way by Oscar Wilde, who called Pater’s Studies in the Renaissance his “golden book” and yet did not himself write poetic art criticism. Wilde is deceptive: his gifts for paradox and aphorism and the absence of philosophical reference points mask the radicality of his thought. Wilde identified the destination of Fiedler’s and Hildebrand’s doctrines, for once art is no longer evaluated by comparison to nature, there are no limits to the critic’s power to shape the evolution of art. In Wilde’s dialogue of 1890, “The True Function and Value of Criticism,” the straight man Ernest contends that “the Greeks had no art-critics”: “By the Ilyssus, my dear Gilbert, there were no silly art congresses, bringing provincialism to the provinces and teaching the mediocrity how to mouth. By the Ilyssus there were no tedious magazines about art, in which the industrious prattle of what they do not understand.” The ironist Gilbert, who speaks for Wilde, contradicts him:

I assure you, my dear Ernest, that the Greeks chattered about painters quite as much as people do now-adays, and had their private views, and shilling exhibitions, and Arts and Crafts guilds, and Pre-Raphaelite movements, and movements towards realism, and lectured about art, and wrote essays on art, and produced their art-historians, and their archæologists, and all the rest of it.

According to Gilbert, the Greeks were in fact “a nation of art-critics.” The critic is the one who filters art and literature through a sensibility and a prose style. The critic, for Gilbert and Wilde (and Pater), is anything but a parasite on art. The critic only completes the work of repetition and combination begun by the artist: “I would call criticism a creation within a creation. For just as the great artists, from Homer and Æschylus, down to Shakespeare and Keats, did not go directly to life for their subject-matter, but sought for it in myth, and legend, and ancient tale, so the critic deals with materials that others have, as it were, purified for him, and to which imaginative form and colour have been already added.” Art is secondary from the start. The artist is a critic, for does he not also dominate nature with his subjectivity, which has itself already been shaped by art? “The very landscape that Corot looked at was, as he said himself, but a mood of his own mind.”

This was Wilde’s way of closing the gap between art and life. In Europe art had been stripped of its central role in religious ritual and public life. Most nineteenth-century churches were outfitted with nineteenth-century paintings. But the best nineteenth-century painters had no interest in painting for churches. The modern painter was on his own. The illusions of art were exposed to the pitiless reasonings of commerce and engineering. The artist, dependent on the historians and critics, the authors of immortality, could only hope that his works would find refuge, one day, in the museum. Wilde understands that it is the writers who patrol the frontier between art and life. He strikes back against modern naturalism or realism by arguing that reality itself is generated by a combinatory artistic creativity. Art colonizes life. If life itself is already a work of art, then the artist will never find himself on the outside of life.

Fiedler posited a radical incompatibility of art and life. Life was like art only in the sense that perception was already creative; through this channel alone did life reach into art. The English writers Ruskin, Pater, and Wilde saw life itself as a work of art in a more complete sense, as a project, collective or individual, potentially free, self-realizing, and imagining. Art, in their view, only needed to catch up with life.

In mocking the modern business of art, including historical scholarship, Wilde was striking back, as Nietzsche had done almost thirty years earlier, against the great accumulated pile of writing that loaded the burden of the past on the back of the present. The weight of learning in 1890 seems light when one struggles today, deep in the stacks of an art-history library housing half a million volumes, to part the mobile shelves creaking on their runners. Wilde’s solution was economical. Both the judgment of value in the present and the shaping of a narrative of the past would be entrusted to the critic. Historiography is reborn inside the critic’s project, and so redeemed:

To realise the nineteenth century, one must realise every century that has preceded it and that has contributed to its making. To know anything about oneself, one must know all about others. There must be no mood with which one cannot sympathise, no dead mode of life that one cannot make alive.

Can the academic discipline of art history be measured against Wilde’s criterion of sympathy? The most innovative art-historical books published in Germany and Austria in the 1890s pushed relativism into new territory. In his Anfänge des monumentalischen Stils im Mittelalter (1894), Wilhelm Vöge, professor at Freiburg, defends the French cathedral sculpture of the twelfth century. It is hard to imagine today that the sculptures of the portals of Chartres ever wanted defending. But with their taut robes and vacant expressions they had played only a marginal role in the imagination of the nineteenth century. Vöge quotes the approving comments of Prosper Mérimée in 1836 on the portal of the cathedral of Angers. Vöge addresses directly the supposed problem of the sculptures’ ugliness, their “peculiar, eccentric, or degenerated” style.

Vöge was an opiniated but scrupulous scholar, attentive to detail both in the archival record and to the stones. He addressed the Christian subject matter of the works, the worldviews of the patrons, materials and technique, the evolution of styles, and modern restorations. Vöge did not believe that iconography, or the recovery of the lost code that permits us to read medieval art like a book, could help the scholar grasp medieval art as art. The study of medieval Christian iconography had been inaugurated by the French historian Alphonse Didron in his Iconographie chrétienne: Histoire de Dieu (1843–1844) and would culminate in the treatise L’art religieux du XIIIe siècle en France (1898) by Émile Mâle, which in effect reproduces the theological manual guiding the construction of the cathedrals, a manual that did not in fact exist. Vöge’s inspiration was instead Mérimée’s accomplice Viollet-le-Duc, whose “incomparable contribution” it was to have “translated archeology into aesthetics,” so rediscovering “artistic instincts and ideas.” “What would history be, if we were unable to greet the living spirit among the remains of past centuries!” Most remarkable is Vöge’s readiness, and by extension the readiness of empiricist art-historical scholarship, to peer into what he called “the hidden process of style-formation.” He wants to track art back to its source in the artist. At this deepest and most hidden level, any form can be compared to any other form. From the crypt, he says, all cathedrals look alike. In these shadowy places one has a chance of understanding the “singular beauty” of the early Gothic sculptures.

Vöge’s attempts to identify creative individual masters embarrass later art history, perhaps because they prevent medieval art from fitting snugly back into its niche in medieval life, the very niche in life that modernist art renounced. One might describe the contract struck between the nineteenth-century historian and the nineteenth-century art historian as follows: the historian constructs a picture of twelfth-century life with an art-sized gap in it. The art historian is invited to fill that gap. Vöge accepts but emends the contract because he is no longer sure that art will fit tightly into that gap. He detects some quality of art—a quality shared by the severe schematic sculpture of the twelfth century and, say, the sleek wraith-like figures of Puvis de Chavannes—that escapes its historical moment.

The flexibility of this new contract between historical scholarship and aesthetic evaluation recommended it for export. The United States, whose patrician elite were all too aware of their youthful nation’s lack of a worthy artistic past, had kept open channels to German, French, and English learning and criticism. American colleges and universities had been offering instruction in the theory and history of art for decades. The New York Free Academy, later City College, held lectures on aesthetics and art history from 1856. The first advanced degree in art history awarded in the United States was given to Elizabeth R. P. Coffin of Vassar College in 1876, for her master’s thesis on ancient art. Specialization came quickly: by 1903 the University of Chicago offered a graduate seminar on Botticelli. Multilingualism, or at least reading knowledge of German, was expected of students. The curriculum at the School of Fine Arts at Yale University for 1894–1895 included texts by Hegel, Schnaase, and Kugler as well as Winckelmann, Lessing, Lanzi, Ruskin, Charles Blanc, and John Addington Symonds.

Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), a Bostonian who had lived in Europe and cultivated friendly relations with Ruskin and other luminaries, and a translator of Dante, was appointed professor of art history at Harvard in 1875, the first professorship of art history outside a German-speaking country. Norton published Historical Studies of Church-Building in the Middle Ages in 1880. His Ruskinian teachings made an impact on the student Bernard Berenson (1865–1959). With his aptitude and taste Berenson won the patronage of the collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and he set off for Italy with the aim of writing a monograph on the sixteenth-century Venetian painter Lorenzo Lotto, today admired but in the late 1880s not very much. The book was published in 1895.

Berenson evokes in his preface the word “connoisseurship,” the eighteenth-century term for lay expertise on art, the knowledge of one who neither makes art nor theorizes about it. With its quaint, partially French spelling the word preserved a link to the ancien régime, to the world of Pierre-Jean Mariette. In 1895 the word “connoisseurship” cast a spell of amnesia, a forgetting of the learned nineteenth century with its seminars, journals, and congresses.

The connoisseur, Berenson says, “pounces upon” the trivial recurring details in a painting—ears, hands, ringlets of hair, bits of landscape, awkwardnesses of attitude—because here the painter relies on learned habit. The details will reveal the master’s training, his antecedents, the riddle of his novitiate—for we cannot trust the written sources on matters like this, they are worth little more than gossip. Even Vasari, who knew Lotto’s works and a few stories about his life, is untrustworthy. The ostensible aim of Berenson’s book is to disprove, on the basis of observation alone, Vasari’s statement that Lotto was the pupil of Giovanni Bellini. This he does by deriving Lotto’s treatment of ears, hands, and hair from Alvise Vivarini.

Then the real project of the book begins. Berenson’s aim is not to trace artistic genealogies but to sympathize with the artist, to know his mind. One begins by bracketing out not only those acquired habits of execution, precisely mindless, but also habits of attention, habits of “visualization,” habits of thought, in fact all habits—anything that Lotto acquired not only from his teacher but from his contemporaries, from society, from books. “All of them the spectator must be able to deduct before he is approximately sure of having before him an idea of the master.” Art is the direct confrontation between an irreducible individual soul, unreachable by society, and the facts of nature and human nature. The critic, not the connoisseur, reconstructs this confrontation.

Berenson is uninterested in the original functions of Lotto’s paintings—the role of altarpieces in ritual, for example, or the role of portraits in family politics. He is uninterested in the worldviews of Lotto’s patrons. He in uninterested in materials and techniques. He is interested only in psychology. He revels in the revelations of a lucid portrait of a young married couple. He finds in a family portrait a “trace of the ‘bitterness of things,’ ” comparing it to Tolstoy’s novel Katia, or Family Happiness (1859).

Berenson savors the neurotic gestures of the characters in the Recanati Annunciation: the angel “filled with the awe of his own message,” the leaping cat, and flustered Mary, hand raised, wheeling as if to appeal to the viewer. “As execution, this is one of Lotto’s best works [as usual Berenson does not tell us why], and as interpretation—well, nowhere else has a painter of this subject ventured to portray the woman in the Virgin.” It is a chain of high-strung temperaments communicating one with another: Lotto the psychologist finds what he is seeking in the inner life of his contemporaries, of his models; Berenson clambers among the chapels and sacristies of the Marches in search of the then-obscure artist Lotto; Berenson makes his appreciation, which can only be a sincere “confession,” in his book. There is a woman at the beginning of the chain, and no doubt at the end as well, as reader. Women played a greater role in Berenson’s world than in academia, where gender was a formidable, in fact in the 1890s still an impenetrable, barrier. Among the aesthetes and connoisseurs, by contrast, class was a greater obstacle than gender.

Lotto, once free of his teacher’s influence—just as Berenson was free of the university—proved an improviser, an eccentric, an individualist. He was “endowed with an exquisite sense for decoration, not of the architectonic, monumental sort, but … of the more personal, Gothic, or Japanese kind.” “Gothic” or “Japanese” in the 1890s are code words for indifference to classical proportions and to the mainstream tradition of academic form rooted in the idealized nude body. “Decoration” is a code word for the taste for fragments of form and color detached from illustration or content. Berenson associates Lotto with the anti-academic painters Edgar Degas and Édouard Manet. In his attentiveness to deviation from the norm, Berenson resembles a medical pathologist, a forensic scientist, or a detective. But his aims are the reverse. Since art is not life—at least not until we are all living in a world designed by Oscar Wilde—non-observance of the norm can be treasured rather than corrected.

“The perfect masterpiece … must give us the attitude of a typical human being toward the universe. The perfect criticism should give us the measure of the acceptability at a given time of the work of art in question.” By “a given time” Berenson means the critic’s own time. For Berenson, as for Wilde, art inhabits two time frames only: eternity, or the present. What lies between—the historical lives of the artwork, the work in its original settings and in its multiple receptions across time—they leave to the academic scholar.

Beyond the Lotto monograph Berenson was basically an attributionist. His main project and source of income was identifying the authors of early Italian paintings and drawings. In 1890 he met Giovanni Morelli, who gave him letters of introduction that gave him access to the more remote Lotto paintings. He began work on his magnum opus, the Drawings of the Florentine Painters (1903), a three-volume catalogue consisting entirely of descriptions, attributions, and concise but evocative phrases. It is highly opinionated, a mesh of deep familiarity. Berenson’s connoisseurship is unmediated and practical, a kind of craftsman’s knowledge raised to the second degree. The knowledge of the connoisseur was not so much parasitical on the painter’s knowledge as a successor to it, for connoisseurship emerges just as in painting the process of de-skilling sets in. Connoisseurship is fetishistic, private, inalienable, and evasive of custom. Berenson was learned, but his approach to pictures was “pre-alphabetical,” a kind of somatic thinking. He intuits, he thinks by seeing. He sees family resemblances, for he is a familiar of the artist. He mistrusts ideas, systems, narratives, and rules. Connoisseurial writing tends in two directions: either toward mutism or toward poeticizing singularity. Berenson points and gestures, just as Mariette had; as if he were simply indicating to the collector which work to bid on. It is a binary gesture of approval or disapproval; criticism (krinein = to separate) in its purest form. But Berenson, a disciple of Walter Pater—“the greatest writer,” he says in his Lotto book—is a prose poet. He marks his own prose as neurotic, singular; Lotto-like, with weird quasi-neologisms like “embogged” or “pronest.” He is anyway never professorial.

The idea that knowledge about art is a personal, bodily knowledge would seem to align with a humble conception of craft. In fact, connoisseurship reassociates art-historical scholarship with social privilege. The museums offered art to the people. The publications of the academic scholars with their increasingly effective illustrations were just that, a “making public.” Connoisseurship stresses the limits of teachability. Ability to judge is intuitive and not easily acquired. Even given aptitude, one requires access. An American at that point could not become a connoisseur of European art without spending long years in Europe in constant contact with works. “Vicarious” experience, as Berenson says, will not suffice.

Collectors, eager to connect through works of art to other distinctive individuals, to artists, to a natural aristocracy, were happy to hear this. Collectors also know that works of art are good investments, attractive furnishings, status symbols. Art historians, too, know that works of art function this way but prefer to think of this as something that happened mostly in the past. This is the subject matter of the study of artistic patronage. Historians of premodern artistic patronage like to think of anti-academic modern artists as liberated from patronage. But this was only a half-truth, as Berenson knew. Degas and Manet were nearly as dependent on their patrons as Lotto had been. Still, the modern Maecenas is on the defensive and craves a redemptive account of what art was and is. Berenson could be found at the heart of this paradox, as both the generator of the redemptive story and as the beneficiary of the free market of art, through commissions on sales where he had provided counsel. Berenson was much admired by many academic art historians, Heinrich Wölfflin for example, for his good judgment. But the prospect of a commission (as much as 25 percent with the dealer Joseph Duveen, who sold pictures to Isabella Stewart Gardner!) could not but exert a magnetic pull on an attribution.

A great reader of both Pater and Berenson, and a rival as stylist and as poetic historian of art, was Violet Paget (1856–1935), who published among many other books and essays Renaissance Fancies and Studies (1895), a sequel to her collection of essays entitled Euphorion: Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the Renaissance (1884). Like Giovanni Morelli, she wrote behind an authorial mask, a pseudonym that hid her gender: Vernon Lee. In “The Imaginative Art of the Renaissance,” one of the essays in Renaissance Fancies and Studies, Lee divides art into two broad categories. There is the art “which, beyond or independent of the charm of visible beauty, possesses a charm that acts directly upon the imagination” through the impressions and thoughts it summons. It is created by an “imagination which delights the mind by holding before it some charming or uncommon object, and conjuring up therewith a whole train of feeling and fancy; the school, we might call it, of intellectual decoration, of arabesques formed not of lines and colours, but of associations and suggestions.” Lee was also a theorist of art who introduced to English readers the teachings of Robert Vischer and other German psychologists and aestheticians on empathy, or sense-based identification, as the source of pleasure in art.

But there is also a narrative art that imagines “how an event would have looked; the power of understanding and showing how an action would have taken place, and how that action would have affected the bystanders; a sort of second-sight, occasionally rising to the point of revealing, not merely the material aspect of things and people, but the emotional value of the event in the eyes of the painter.” Lee’s aim is to turn conventional taste inside out by developing a new basis for the appreciation of the frescoes of Giotto and of his fourteenth-century followers, neglected by Burckhardt and Pater.

To the first category of imaginative art, she assigns Fra Angelico, Benozzo Gozzoli, Botticelli, and the Venetians. Her emphasis on the associative qualities of the depicted objects, rather than on the style, allows her to connect these artists, with some condescension, to a wider world of art:

This is one of the peculiarities of rudimentary art—of the art of the early Renaissance as well as of that of Persia and India, of Constantinople, of every peasant potter all through the world: that, not knowing very well its own aims, it fills its imperfect work with suggestion of all manner of things which it loves, and tries to gain in general pleasurableness what it loses in actual achievement; and lays hold of us, like fragments of verse, by suggestiveness, quite as much as by pictorial realisation.

Such judgments, however, cannot be disentangled from Lee’s free-thinking dismissals of the beloved treasures of the Florentine Quattrocento, for example the many anodyne Annunciations, a “crowd of unimpressive, nay brainless, representations of one of the grandest and sweetest of all stories”:

It never seems to have occurred to any one that the Virgin and the Archangel might be displayed otherwise than each in one corner of the picture. Such a composition as that of Rossetti’s Ancilla Domini, where the Virgin cowers on her bed as the angel floats in with flames round his feet; such a suggestion as that of the unfinished lily on the embroidery frame, was reserved for our sceptical and irreverent, but imaginative times.

The Quattrocento painters are impoverished as narrators, in comparison to the Pre-Raphaelites like Dante Gabriel Rossetti, because the monumental paintings of Giotto and his followers left them nothing to do. The Giottesques narrate so well that “to describe the picture, it almost suffices to narrate the story, no arrangements of different planes and of light and shade, no peculiarities of form, foreshortening, colour, or texture requiring to be seen in order to be fully understood.”

This narrative gift is also the art sought after by the crowd: “the recognised commodity: artistic imagination, as bought and sold in the market, whether of good quality or bad.” The Quattrocento painters will instead develop the other, lesser gift. Vernon Lee writes a refined art criticism that is also a sketch of a never-written history of Renaissance art.