A History of Art History

1930–1940

Already in 1931 Paul and Felix Warburg, who had been living in New York for decades, were seeking a new home for the private library and research center established in Hamburg by their brother Aby, who had died in 1929. They foresaw, under a National Socialist regime, repression and eventually closure. That would be exactly the fate of the Bauhaus, the art school founded by Walter Gropius in Weimar in 1919. Erwin Panofsky, who was teaching as a visiting professor at New York University in the fall and winter of 1931–1932, was involved in the conversation and in the efforts to bring the Hamburg institution to the attention of possible American sponsors. In a letter to Panofsky of January 5, 1932, Fritz Saxl speaks of moving the Warburg library to Rome, possibly to the American Academy; or to an American university such as Johns Hopkins, Harvard, or Princeton. In April 1933, again teaching in New York, Panofsky received a telegram informing him that he had been stripped of his professorship in Hamburg. At that moment he was, along with Adolph Goldschmidt and Paul Frankl, one of three Jewish Ordinarien or full professors of art history in the German-speaking nations.

In Germany and Austria in 1933, about one thousand individuals held professorships or lectureships in art history or curatorial positions in museums. A quarter of them were Jews, or were identified as such by the Nazis. They lost their positions and over the course of the 1930s left their countries, ending up in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere. Those who went to France were forced to move on. Among the exiled art historians there were fourteen non-Jews, some of whom were married to Jewish women. Non-Jewish academics deemed unsuitable for political reasons were also dismissed. By 1939, 45 percent of all university posts in Germany had been reassigned.

It is perhaps an accident or a paradox, or perhaps neither, that several of the most original art-historical thinkers of this period were sympathetic to the National Socialists. They took advantage of the illiberal climate to amplify the chauvinistic, racist, or primitivist aspects of their projects, often winning large readerships. The most widely read art historian in Germany in these years, and unfortunately also one of the most incisive and original, was the vitriolic reactionary Wilhelm Pinder. Remembering, or more likely forgetting, the last page of Schlosser’s Kunstliteratur, Pinder closed his own Deutsche Kunst der Dürerzeit with a hymn to the pure landscapes of Albrecht Altdorfer, “one of the few who survived [the end of the Dürerzeit] unscathed. While the others cooled off, he remained warm. He did so, because he was a devoted man. Three hundred years later Philipp Otto Runge saw in landscape the last possibility of the European. Altdorfer was the first to conquer it.”

In 1931 all Italian university professors were obliged to take an oath of fealty to Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime. Among some 1200 professors only twelve refused and were forced to resign, among them the art historian Lionello Venturi. Venturi, who was not Jewish, moved to Paris where in 1936 he published the first catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s work. He moved on to New York where he published History of Art Criticism, in effect a history of art history, in 1936. Venturi’s book Il Gusto dei primitivi (The Taste for the Primitives, 1926), was the first study of the eighteenth-century rediscovery of Italian medieval painting.

After his dismissal Panofsky returned to Germany; returned to New York the following winter; returned once more to Germany; and in the summer of 1934 emigrated, via England, to the United States, first taking a position that had been created for him at New York University and a year later moving to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Not all of the exiled art historians found permanent posts abroad, and many of those who did found themselves teaching in outposts where art history had never been recognized as a subject of study, at state universities or liberal-arts colleges far from major research libraries and art museums. With his curiosity and his shrewd eye Panofsky, whose correspondence has been published in five volumes, is an informative guide to these dismal times.

The German and Austrian emigrés had an immediate impact on the American and British scenes. American art history in 1933 was provincial and anti-intellectual; in England knowledge about art was bound up with class and collecting and had little foothold in the universities. The emigrés built the libraries, trained the students, gave lectures. Americans were quick learners. The winter public lecture program at the Philadelphia (then Pennsylvania) Museum of Art in 1935 offered a lineup of seven speakers: Dewitt Parker, John Dewey, Alfred North Whitehead, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, Ananda Coomaraswamy, and Gustav Pauli. Pauli, a pupil of Jacob Burckhardt and a friend of Aby Warburg; a contributor alongside Kandinsky, Marc, and Worringer to the pamphlet Im Kampf um die Kunst (1911); and the longtime director of the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, dismissed in 1933 for his sponsorship of modern art, must have been surprised to find himself, in an American lecture series, one of the least distinguished speakers. Parker, an aesthetician, is admittedly now forgotten. Whitehead, the British logician and metaphysician whose wide-ranging thought reverberates again today, was enjoying a brilliant second career since his appointment at Harvard in 1924 at the age of sixty-three. Dewey, the most eminent American philosopher, had published in 1934 his Art and Experience, which presents art as an edifying form of social conversation. Dewey was a mentor to the chemist Albert C. Barnes, whose collection of French modernist painting, located in the suburbs of Philadelphia and opened to the public as a study center in 1922, promoted the Deweyan idea of art. Coomaraswamy, the key mediator of Indian art and its philosophy in the West, had arrived in the United States in 1917 to take up the post of curator of Indian art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Schapiro, finally, only thirty-one years old, had already made a mark with his bold dissertation on Romanesque sculpture and his engagement with Marxist and Freudian thought.

Such ambitious public lecture programs, ministering to Dewey and Barnes’s vision of art integrated into society, did not acknowledge a tension between study of the art of the past and criticism of the art of modernity. Modern art, which Dewey understood as converging on reality, the way things really are, as well as a therapy, was the framework. Dewey saw the study of historical art as at most an auxiliary to the aims of pedagogy and art appreciation. Coomaraswamy espoused the “perennial philosophy” of the sages. Whitehead was not interested in history at all. Pauli was a champion of modernist painting. Schapiro, whose studies of medieval art ran in parallel with his critical writings on modern painting, had updated the study of Romanesque sculpture by proposing his own present-day concerns—profane, popular, psychological—as the framework of interpretation. Schapiro’s writing on Romanesque art arrived at one of the vanishing points of relativism: the unlovely forms now finally recognized as prophecies of modernist truth.

In such company a historicist scholar such as Panofsky might well have been inclined to underrate the irreversibility of the avant-garde mutiny. In the 1933 article “Classical Mythology in Medieval Art,” Panofsky and his colleague and friend from Hamburg, Fritz Saxl, at that point attempting to reestablish the Warburg Library and research institute in London, wrote that “we can understand why … down to the crisis of our own days, which, among other phenomena, has given rise to the classicism of Picasso, almost every artistic and cultural crisis has been overcome by that recourse to antiquity which we know as classicism.” This seems very far from Warburg, not to mention Schapiro. In a long footnote to his essay on perspective of 1927, Panofsky had corrected the supposed error of El Lissitzky, the Russian suprematist and constructivist artist, who in an essay of 1925 had asserted that his artworks involving mechanically rotating bodies introduced art to a non-Euclidean, “imaginary” geometry. Panofsky, by pointing out that even modernist art was still rational, and so not necessarily in conflict with perspective, was trying to stitch art history back together again before it was too late.

Historicism was the mid-century creed. Erich Auerbach, in his classic Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (1946), paraphrased Friedrich Meinecke’s recent study of the eighteenth-century origins of historicist thought, Die Entstehung des Historismus (1936): to think historically is “to realize that epochs and societies are not to be judged in terms of a pattern concept of what is desirable absolutely speaking, but rather in every case in terms of their own premises”; “to reckon among such premises not only natural factors like climate and soil but also the intellectual and historical factors”; “to develop a sense of … the incomparability of historical phenomena and of their constant inner mobility”; “to accept … that the meaning of events cannot be grasped in abstract and general forms of cognition and that the material needed to understand [the epoch] must not be sought exclusively in the upper strata of society and in major political events but in the depths of the workaday world and its men and women, because it is only there that one can grasp what is unique, what is animated by inner forces, and what is universally valid.” For historicists, the precepts of Meinecke and Auerbach are the perennial philosophy, incontrovertible. From this point of view, the momentum of reality is too powerful and avant-gardism can never be more than a symbolic gesture of protest.

Warburg’s own writings registered modernity at best indirectly, and yet Carl Einstein and Walter Benjamin both responded to the innovative dynamic of the projects generated by his research center. Einstein wrote to Fritz Saxl in 1929 in hopes of entering into an alliance with the scholars around Warburg. He was rebuffed. Panofsky’s response, which does not survive, to Benjamin’s Habilitation on German Baroque drama (submitted in 1925, published 1928), which dealt in part with a topic close to Panofsky, melancholy, was described by Benjamin as “cool and resentment-laden.” Einstein wrote to Panofsky in January 1933, apparently in response to a letter from Panofsky that has not survived, expressing his sympathy for his project, which he understood as an antidote to what he called the “Wölfflin-hype” (wölfflinrummel):

Form as the beyond, and with its own “proper motion,” gratis, the bleak remains of the dead metaphysics, always disgusted me. We always found the broad-brimmed aesthetes, who blather about triangles and quadrangles and so on and who are still trapped in the dualisms of form and content, rather repugnant. It is not so simple, you can’t obtain the autonomy of the artwork just by a thorough chemical cleansing.

Panofsky’s response was somewhat formal and noncommittal.

Benjamin had attended, and later professed not to have been impressed by, Wölfflin’s university lectures in Berlin. In 1933 he wrote a largely favorable review of the first volume of Otto Pächt and Hans Sedlmayr’s journal Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen. Here Pächt had repudiated writing that sought to render the aesthetic qualities of works of art in prose, while Sedlmayr had distinguished between a first, empirical art history that need not recognize the artifact as an aesthetic construct, attending instead to attribution, dating, iconography, patronage, function, and the social context. The second, interpretative art history adopted the attitude or point of view (Einstellung) toward the work of art that would reveal its aesthetic nature, what he called not Kunstwollen, as Riegl had, but Struktur. Sedlmayr, whose political views were conservative if not reactionary, in a letter of January 12, 1933, to Meyer Schapiro listed Benjamin as someone he hoped to recruit to write for the journal Kritische Berichte. Sedlmayr tried in these years to cultivate a relation with Schapiro, who reviewed the second volume of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen perceptively but critically; the correspondence later broke off in acrimonious misunderstanding.

Not until the 1970s would Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger figure among the tutelary deities of art history, that is, the small group of modern philosophers and theorists to whom historical scholars turn for orientation. Yet in their writings of the 1930s, both Benjamin and Heidegger articulated, more incisively than any art historian of the time, the problem of the historical treatment of art. Both turned to the metaphor of the origin, Ursprung in German, meaning literally “primal leap.” To speak of an artwork as an Ursprung is to assert its autopoetic character, that is, its quality of having self-started, set itself into being. The primal leap is unconditional; it is not produced by a chain of events or any past at all but instead commences something. The title of Heidegger’s text on this topic, delivered as a lecture in the mid-1930s though not published until 1950, embraces the two meanings, the wrong and the right: Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes (The Origin of the Work of Art). At first it sounds as if he will speak about where the artwork comes from. By the end we learn that the sense of the title is that the artwork is itself an origin. He calls this “founding” quality of art “historical”: “Art is historical, and as historical it is the creative preserving of truth in the work. Art happens as poetry. Poetry is founding in the triple sense of bestowing, grounding, and beginning. Art, as founding, is essentially historical.” By this he means that the place where art sets truth into being is ordinary human existence in bounded, historical time. Here art makes truth available to us. He is not saying that an artwork has a life of its own or that it is subject to the ravages of time, for that is true about any artifact or fabricated thing: “This means not only that art has a history in the external sense that in the course of time it, too, appears along with many other things, and in the process changes and passes away and offers changing aspects for historiology [Historie, his disparaging term for what commonplace or positivist historians write]. Art is history in the essential sense that it grounds history.” This ability to “ground history” does distinguish artworks from tools and other useful artifacts:

Art lets truth originate (entspringen). Art, founding preserving, is the spring that leaps to the truth of what is, in the work. To originate something by a leap, to bring something into being from out of the source of its nature in a founding leap—this is what the word origin means.

The origin of the work of art—that is, the origin of both the creators and the preservers, which is to say of a people’s historical existence, is art. This is because art is by nature an origin: a distinctive way in which truth comes into being, that is, becomes historical.

Here Heidegger strikes a dissonant note that reveals his political investments beyond the task of the definition of art: he speaks of those who make the artwork and those who receive it as “the people,” das Volk. This was gratuitous: the origin-quality of art could well have been established without further specification of its social “address.” But it is more than a slip. Heidegger explains:

Whenever art happens—that is, whenever there is a beginning—a thrust enters history, history either begins or starts over again. History means here not a sequence in time of events of whatever sort, however important. History is the transporting of a people into its appointed task as entrance into that people’s endowment.

In a later, wartime text, much less well known, Heidegger makes explicit his doubts that conventional scholarship can place art properly in history. Like Nietzsche, he thought little of the cult of monuments, dead witnesses to a dead past, sustained by the historical sciences. He was interested instead in a past that was still active and that might well include a “remembered” artwork. He invoked this artwork near the beginning of his long manuscript Besinnung (Mindfulness), written in 1938–1939 but not published until 1997. Here Heidegger extends the basic argument of Being and Time of 1927, namely that the task of philosophy is at once to reveal the finitude and historical boundedness of human existence and to guide human beings toward some acquaintance with Being itself, a given that precedes and exceeds mankind. In Mindfulness, he says: “Insofar as in this art, too, being of beings takes shape, one can initially interpret what being-historically sways in art from out of the historical remembrance, whereby this interpretation already no longer thinks metaphysically, but being-historically.” Heidegger’s writings from the war years verge on unintelligibility. He seems to be saying that historical art—the art of the Renaissance and the succeeding centuries—was still metaphysical, that is, still organized as an encounter between a subject and an object and mistakenly trusting in representation to mediate between the two (this is exactly what Panofsky’s perspective essay maintains). And yet even this incomplete historical art, according to Heidegger, points toward its modern and future vocation, its real identity, as a site of revelation of Being. In this way the art of the past, produced by people facing quite different challenges than our own, can yield truth.

Heidegger doubts the academic discipline of art history will guide us to the encounter with past art because art historians are not really interested in art, but only in embellishing man’s image of himself and securing his autonomy and comfort in an increasingly technological, pragmatic world. Here he harmonizes with the note that Worringer had already struck in 1908. “The explicit regard for art,” Heidegger wrote, “and the preoccupation with art (all the way to the industry called art-history) are animated by entirely different ‘categories’ of thinking, namely those that are required by the pre-eminence of man as subject. … ‘Art’ counts as an ‘expression’ of ‘life’ and is valued to the extent that it succeeds in being such an expression.” With these contemptuous phrases Heidegger is saying that the whole enterprise of art history, which he derides as a mindless “industry,” depends on an artificial distinction between the forms generated by the creative imagination and the bed of experience or life out of which they supposedly emerge. It is convenient for art history to keep those separate, so that it can celebrate art as a sublimation of mere life—as what Panofsky’s mentor Ernst Cassirer would call “culture.”

Heidegger—and Sedlmayr would have concurred—dismissed the relativistic approach to art as a missed appointment with art and a reduction of art to the status of mere expression of something else more fundamental. He describes a discipline that cultivates a principled relativism and yet inconsistently allows that relativism to stand alongside and not interfere with a covert aestheticism. This is what he means when he asserts that

there is a “historical” continuation of the “art-industry” of the nineteenth century which is now assessed in terms of cultural politics, but remains unreal and only indicates the historicism that shimmers in all its possible colors. Besides, parallel or lingering next to this historicism there is a cultivation and an enjoyment of the “historical” traditions of Occidental art that are aesthetically sure of their taste and mostly supported and guided by the educationally motivated dissemination of historical research into art.

Heidegger’s Kunst-Industrie stretches a malign bridge between Semper and Riegl’s term and Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s “culture industry,” a coinage of their book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). It would be hard to formulate a more devastating judgment than Heidegger’s on the modern project of art history.

As noted, Heidegger lists art history among the practices that prop up a metaphysical conception of art, that is, an idea of art as a processing of objects by subjects that permits the subject finally to surpass a merely straightforward engagement with things, with life. This supposed movement from matter to spirit is achieved by a series of substitutions that go by the name of “representation” or “symbolization,” involving the exchange of lower for higher, concrete for abstract. These operations and the transcendence they bring about permit, finally, a set of value judgments that sit alongside, even if they logically clash with, the foundational relativism of the discipline. He is basically describing Cassirer and Panofsky’s project. In pointing to the cohabitation of relativist and transcendentalist tendencies within modern scholarship, Heidegger seeks to force us to recognize that historicism hesitates before the problem of origins, the double enigma of the artwork’s source in the collectivity and in individual creativity.

Remember that Auerbach, following Meinecke, said that to understand an epoch we must descend to the level of ordinary experience. “The depths of the workaday world and its men and women” is where the new and the unique is forged; from here the authentic products of imagination and artifice emerge to form eventually a society. Only on this level will we discover what about the period is “universally valid.” Hidden in the relativist research program is a universalist aspiration.

Many societies have not looked downward to common bodily experience as the starting point, but upward or outward to some better reality beyond human life: the gods, or the ideal, or nature. Traditionally art has been understood as an overcoming of the everyday. The distance between ordinary experience and art has seemed to count most. It is in fact difficult to track a path backward from a work of art, or a poem, into experience. An artwork wanders away from its site of origin, from the matrix of circumstance and intention that brought it forth.

Heidegger is saying that the modern study of art proceeds as if it already knew in advance what art was and what it was good for. He suggests that modern elites value art, long after it has lost its complicity with state, church, and other mythically sustained potencies, because it gives us a sample of an involvement with reality that is not merely pragmatic and material; an involvement all the more precious in technical modernity.

Walter Benjamin’s approach was to locate the origin within the artwork itself. This places him not so far from Freud and Warburg. Benjamin said that in the historical study of art, the origin of an artform, its Ursprung—the very primal leap that Heidegger invoked when describing the artwork—must be conceived not as a new beginning but as a kind of midstream event like a whirlpool that devours and so eliminates the traces of its own preconditions. In his Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928), Benjamin writes:

Origin (Ursprung), although an entirely historical category, has nevertheless nothing to do with genesis (Entstehung). Origin means not the becoming of what has sprung up, but rather the becoming and the vanishing of what is springing up. Origin stands in the flow of becoming as in a whirlpool, pulling into its rhythm the materials of its genesis.

Benjamin made this claim just after having argued that Benedetto Croce’s definition of art as intuition prevented Croce from discerning the compatibility of an idealist account of the modes of art (Ideenlehre von den Kunstarten) with reflection on history. The key to a properly historical treatment of art, according to Benjamin, is the concept of Ursprung, a concept that contains both the aspect of innovation and the aspect of incompleteness:

The original is never revealed in the naked and manifest existence of the factual; its rhythm is apparent only to a dual insight. On the one hand it will be recognized as a restoration, as re-production, and on the other hand, precisely because of this, as incomplete, unfinished.

Benjamin is saying that history is not exterior to art. The artwork alone is capable of revealing its own historicity. This spells the end of the container-contained model of the relation between history and art. Art can no longer be coordinated with a fixed time scheme. Benjamin’s theory of the origin also foretells the breaking of the pact between art history and liberal politics, which depends on objective and linear time. From this point on, the only politics that art can connect to is a fabulous, unrealistic politics.

Benjamin and Heidegger’s mystified theories of the historicity of art are responses to art’s gradual estrangement from power since the Renaissance. This special European anxiety helps explain the limitations of European art history’s capacity to articulate the art-quality of art beyond Europe, where the relations of art to real power have been differently calibrated. The obstacles to a universal art history were masked by the relativist historian’s complacent relish in the exotic, which Heidegger rightly mocked. Only a nonrelativist like Carl Einstein had a chance with African art.

Relativism, the enlightened fairness, the reluctance to favor one perspective over another, had been sustained but also suspended by the inquiry into form. The concept of art as a hypothesis about vision forestalled a final relativization of values. No one really wanted absolute relativity, not Heidegger, not Benjamin.

Only in art history is the relativity of values—where it appears in diminished form as a relativity of taste—pursued. The last great apostle of pure visibility, and the last most eloquent defender of the stark, simple art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was the French scholar Henri Focillon (1881–1943), whose aphorisms on the incommensurability of art with the rest of life were quoted in the opening pages of the present book. Focillon wrote on a wide range of topics, including Buddhist art, Japanese art, and the engravings of Piranesi. He came late to medieval art and architecture, succeeding the iconographer Émile Mâle at the Sorbonne in 1924. In his short treatise on art, Vie des formes (1934), he stressed the independence of art from social time: “We have no right to confuse the state of the life of forms with the state of social life.” “The artist inhabits a country in time that is by no means necessarily the history of his own time.” Focillon is always crafting poetic definitions of art and at the same time clearing away fallacious theories and misguided art histories. He dismisses Hippolyte Taine, the nineteenth-century contextualizer of Renaissance art, because he considered art “a masterpiece of external convergence.” “Taine’s merit lies in having been, as it were, a kind of interior decorator of time: that is, he disregarded it as a force in and of itself, even though time, like space, is nothing unless it has been really lived.” Focillon was a reader of the philosopher Henri Bergson.

Art history as it was organized in the previous century could not grasp that nothing external to art explains art. Even architecture, which seems so tightly bound to environment and history, is free: “The architect engenders new conditions for historical, social and moral life. No one can predict what environments architecture will create. It satisfies old needs and begets new ones. It invents a world all its own.” Focillon rejects any interpretation—typological, iconographic, or Warburgian—that revisits an originary scene: “Sometimes form … will not only survive long after the death of its content, but will even and unexpectedly richly renew itself.” He rejects all realisms: a form can “create a picture of the world that has nothing in common with the world.” Focillon’s concept of art as event is compatible with Heidegger and Benjamin’s theories of art as origin as well as with Einstein and Brenner’s concepts of art as miracle (Focillon: If an artwork is put to practical use its ancient “privilege of working miracles is revoked”).

Focillon is apt to stretch a point: “Nothing could have determined the astonishing height of the naves of those cathedrals save the activity of the life of forms: the insistent theorem of an articulated structure, the need to create new space.” Neither Riegl nor Wölfflin resorted to such exaggeration, nor did they attempt to define art, even negatively. By 1934 the biography of form had become an improbable project. Even the art of the day no longer seemed to be adding to the story of form.

Architecture told a different story. The most original art-historical thesis of the decade was the short tract Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier (From Ledoux to Le Corbusier) (1933) by Emil Kaufmann (1891–1953), a Viennese-Jewish student of Dvořák, Schlosser, Tietze, and Strzygowski who later emigrated to the United States and enjoyed little more than a succès d’estime on either continent. In his book Kaufmann set off the architecture of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux against the foil of a “heteronomous” Baroque architecture whose only content was the maintenance of the social hierarchy. Even before the French Revolution Ledoux conceived of a riposte to this established architecture enthralled by tradition and by rules, which according to Kaufmann are always foreign to the nature of building. Ledoux’s autonomous architecture, true to elementary geometry and at the same time true to materials, predicted the projects of the twentieth-century form-givers. Even more insightful is Kaufmann’s apology for the eclectic “art historical” architecture of the nineteenth century: the buildings of the Ringstrasse in Vienna, supposedly representational and so heteronomous, stand in fact in “absolute isolation” from one another, indifferent to the overall effect, engrossed in their respective pasts, and as such already rehearsing an aestheticist autonomy.

The faith in pictorial form retreated to unlikely garrisons: the great corpuses of premodern prints and paintings, for example, pictures described, attributed, and dated, the archives of the accumulated achievements of connoisseurship. Many such corpuses were completed or initiated in the 1930s. Encrypted within these most positivistic projects was a conviction, as robust as Focillon’s, of the independence of form. In the accompanying essay to his catalogue raisonné of Cézanne’s paintings (1936), Lionello Venturi asserts his artist’s absolute freedom, from both tradition and nature: “No one was more aware than he that art and nature must travel in parallel tracks.” Cézanne created a second nature, purified of “all elements foreign to art.” He was a pure painter, comparable to Giotto, Titian, and Rembrandt, even if today the “harmony” of his art is misunderstood or misused.

Less obvious is the claim for the art status of the early northern European engravings implicit in Max Lehrs’s Geschichte und kritischer Katalog des deutschen, niederländischen und französischen Kupferstiches des 15. Jhs. (History and Critical Catalogue of the German, Netherlandish, and French Engravings of the Fifteenth Century) (10 vols., 1908–1934), the basis of all modern scholarship on these not always winsome objects. Lehrs’s descriptions are spare, as are Max J. Friedländer’s attribution notes in his Altniederländische Malerei (Early Netherlandish Painting) (14 vols., 1924–1937), the corpus of fifteenth-century Dutch and Flemish panel paintings. But Friedländer accompanied his lists with poetic but precise essays on his artists, many of them anonymous. In 1930 Richard Offner, born in Vienna but raised in New York, with a doctoral degree from Vienna under Max Dvořák, and later professor at New York University, launched his Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting.

A new genre of the 1930s, perhaps influenced by Friedländer’s prose and certainly by that of Berenson, whose Drawings of the Florentine Painters and lists of the Florentine, Venetian, central Italian, and north Italian paintings had set the mark, was the minimalist monograph, cautious and at the same time eloquent, striving to translate perceptions into language. A good example is the monograph on the fifteenth-century Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo by the youthful John Pope-Hennessy (1937). Like his model Herbert Horne, Pope-Hennessy assembled an oeuvre and a chronology on the basis of documented facts and observation of the works, adding a layer of vivid, judgmental commentary. He achieves an opiniated intimacy with art and artist that recalls the felicitous years in Florence at the end of the previous century. The monograph is by definition structured by an artist’s life. It is easy to forget that the real protagonist of Pope-Hennessy’s study is form itself: “In a vain search for forcible expression the later Sienese Trecento, while it adhered to primitive mediums and iconography, had abandoned the primitive ideal of contour which was expressive because it was unbroken. Simone in his last Passion scenes had prepared the way for this renunciation. The decision—it was general, voluntary and unconscious—was disastrous.” Horne would never have struck this epic tone. Horne had not yet read Wölfflin, presumably. In Pope-Hennessy’s narration of the struggle between the artist’s will and the logics of form, there is little room for the subject matters or the functions of Giovanni di Paolo’s sacred painting. Unshakeable is the conviction of the unity of life and work. The author chose his subject, surely, as Berenson chose Lorenzo Lotto, for his nervous susceptibility: “Giovanni di Paolo’s visual pecularities seem to have been directly dependent on and indeed to have acted in the ratio of the emotional impact on his mind of the episode he portrayed.” He was an expressionist avant la lettre. But “emotional stress was not uncommon at the time.” Religious mysticism drove the painter beyond “aesthetic dictates” (read: the Academy, which of course did not exist in Giovanni di Paolo’s time) toward a purely personal art, a “style heated to receive the impress of a vital and candescent personality.”

Non-or even antiphilosophical, the connoisseurs believed in artistic intention. Focillon did not. His skepticism of all reductive explanations led him to reject even the authority of the author: “A work of art is not the outline or the graph of art as an activity; it is art itself. … Art is made up, not of the artists’ intentions, but of works of art.”

The most insightful of the Italian historians was Roberto Longhi (1890–1970), a critic and academic, author of monographs on Piero della Francesca and Caravaggio as well as several unorthodox works such as a book-length commentary on an exhibition of Ferrarese painting of the Renaissance, the Officina ferrarese (1934). The atmosphere of intimacy—in a “workshop” now, not a salon—is all the more intense because in the borderlands and early stages of Renaissance art real data is scarce. Psychobiography takes on a speculative quality, an irrealism that reads as an acknowledgment of the antinomian nature of art itself, or as a secret sign to the reader, a guarantee, like the stranger passages in Wölfflin. Longhi, like many other connoisseurs, clothed his genial perceptions in idiosyncratic prose. In a long essay of 1940 on the relation between the early fifteenth-century Florentine painters Masolino and Masaccio, Longhi actually invents comic dialogue to illustrate his theory of the genesis of the fresco of St. Peter healing the cripple and raising Tabitha in the Brancacci Chapel, a “truth which has, in fact, been arrived at by measuring everything to the millimeter.”

Behind the material evidence of the more gifted younger painter’s interventions and corrections, Longhi hears an improbable psychodrama:

Think first of Masolino’s untrammeled happiness in the 1423 Madonna, and again of how that bliss returns in the frescoes of 1435 in the Baptistery at Castiglione. One is immediately prompted to say that the period of Masaccesque terror had ended for him. … During the time he was painting the two deeds of Saint Peter, however, that terror was at its height.

This is because Masolino had decided to depict two separate events in a single urban space unified by linear perspective. On the left, St. Peter, accompanied by St. John, heals a lame man seated before the Temple in Jerusalem (Acts 3:1–8). On the right, the same St. Peter, rotated 180 degrees, raises the good woman Tabitha from the dead (Acts 9:36–42); this actually happened in Jaffa. Masolino is still thinking like a medieval painter, and according to Longhi he must have dreaded Masaccio’s censure:

Masaccio, like Christ, was waiting for him at the shore, and was not about to grant him a moment’s peace: “Don’t you think that if you made the space more definite, you’d be able to join the two episodes, but keep them distinct at the same time? Or would you really rather ‘tell’ all your stories in a single breath, like Hail Marys on a rosary, and have Peter following Peter?”

And so forth. Perhaps Longhi had read Paul Valéry, who in his essay Degas Danse Dessin (1936) called for a more biographical art history. Valéry chided modern historians for their lack of curiosity about the relations between the young and the old: “admiration, envy, incomprehension, encounters; precepts and procedures handed on, disdained; reciprocal judgments; negations that respond to one another, contempt, returns”; the transmission of secrets; all the aspects of what Valéry calls “the Comedy of the Intellect” that must not be passed over in silence.

The French root of “connoisseurship,” connaître, holds the sense of personal knowledge as opposed to the impersonal knowledge of savoir, cognate with science. Connaître, kennen, gnosis are ripostes to science and Wissenschaft. The connoisseur knows art that, if it knows anything, knows no more than what a person knows. The aim of Lionello Venturi’s catalogue raisonné had been simply to show how “Cézanne’s way of feeling is realized in painting.”

The connoisseurs, inhabitants of an endless nineteenth century, were still drawn to the “primitives,” the shade-like masters of the early Renaissance. This was still the pastoral fable. Focillon, like Schapiro, went all the way back to the Romanesque, absorbing the shock of its rough forms in the soft bed of his aphoristic prose. Riegl had embraced the late Roman and barbarian styles and the ungracious pragmatic style of the Dutch group portraitists. Wölfflin, for his part, abandoned the pastoral fable. He saw that once there was consensus that art could be found in any time or place, once Vasari’s annalistic and noble theory of art was overcome, then one is liberated again to focus on the art of the Renaissance and Baroque.