FROM STILUS TO STYLE: REFLECTIONS ON THE FATE OF A NOTION*

WILLIBALD SAUERLANDER

'This IS a characteristic work of the soft stvle and you may well have observed, that It IS soft all over ' This truly illuminating remark, made years ago bv a professor teachmg art history, may in the first moment sound merely funn\ or phony But taken seriously, it takes us straight into the center of that vicious circle, where all the tantalizing hermeneutical difficulties linked with our problem arise. 'Art history and the problem of style', or, as another phrasing of the program announces 'The problem of style and its interpretation ' These titles, imposed on the present speaker in the course of the planning of our symposium, are such that by their sheer abysmal vagueness thev could - and probably should deter any speaker wise and in his right senses So it is not without reservations and reluctance that I approach my subject, choosing the

path of historical anamnesis which perhaps will lead us at least to a better

understanding of the historical premises of the problem of stvl*" in art historv Twenty years ago the German philosopher Hans Georg Gadamer, one of the founding fathers of modern hermeneutics, could still write without hesitation 'The notion of style is one of the undiscussed, self-evident concepts upon which our historical consciousness is based '' It is probably because many of us feel that they could no longer subscribe to that affirmation without serious reservations and doubts that 'the problem of style and its interpretation' has been included in a symposium which promises a 'critical assessment of current methodology in the History of Art ' With Gombnch's Art and Illusion, structuralism and semiotics, critical philosophy and Neo-marxism, but also with Pop Art and New Reahsm, to name only a few of the scholarly and aesthetic earthquakes of the last two decades, many of us have become sceptical of traditional methods pretending to open the doors to truth - and even to the wholeness of truth - by sheer phenomenological insight But as soon as one tries to discuss, to analyze and to dismantle the 'concept of style,' which Gadamer could still call 'one of the undiscussed, self-evident concepts' of our historical understanding, one discovers that one might have to trespass upon many a topic reserved here - and reserved with good reason - for separate treatment For instance: How could one imagine any conception of style in art history which
Art History Vol. 6 No. 3 September 1983

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FROM STILUS TO SIYLE

would not be dependent on some kind of'psychology of perception,' nor invoke some kind of 'ideology''' Such provoking and irritating questions can only go unrecognized as long as we keep within the vicious circle of style as 'the undiscussed self-evident concept' and as long as our thirst for knowledge is quenched by the phenomenological revelation that the products of the soft style are soft But as soon as we jump out of the circle, we lose this devout innocence Style ceases to be Gadamer's 'undiscussed self-evident concept' and presents Itself as a highly conditioned and ambivalent hermeneutical 'construct,' worked out at a distinct moment in social and intellectual historv and corresponding to a very peculiar and alienated attitude towards the arts of the past as the aesthetic mirror of bygone civilization Stvle is the mirror which makes all the buildings, the statues, the images of the past accessible to aesthetic histoncism, for its dreams and for its files. It detaches from these buildings, statues and images what may have been their original message and function and above all their inherent conflicts, the stamp of superstition and cruelty, the token of suffering or the signs of revolt, reducing them to patterns, samples, to the aesthetic irreaht\ of the labelled mirror image But let us turn to the historical anamnesis of this concept of style and recall first some well known facts Stilus, we recall from our Latin dictionaries, meant originally simply the pen as the tool for writing In the letters of the younger Pliny we find 'erant in proximo stilus et pugillares,' 'nearby were the pen and the tablets ' A citation from Saint Jerome reads 'coepent puella tremendi manu stilum in cera ducere,' 'with a trembling hand the girl began to draw the pen through the wax '^ Soon however, in fact as early as with the rhetorical wntings of Cicero above all with the Orator and De Oratore the term sti came to be used in a figurative sense, much as we speak in English of a fluent or an elegant pen. And it is here in the doctrines of ancient rhetoric, that our

conception of style in art history has its first roots In order to substantiate such

an affirmation let us listen to some well known citations In De Oratore Cicero praises the 'stilus optimus et praestaritissimus dicendi,' the 'best and most excellent style of elocution '^ In the Orator he insists 'Stilus exercitatus efficiet facile hanc viam,' 'a practised style might easily master this way' (of composition) '^ He speaks however also of the description of crimes in an impure style and so brmgs up the problem of the interrelation between certam styles and specific topics, the problem of 'Modes' as the modern art historian might say. 'Conscribere scaelera lmpuro stilo,' 'to wnte about crimes in an impure style '^ Stilus dicendi then must be based on the exercise and finally the mastery of rhetorical composition and expression 'Style' in this sense cannot he forged without respecting and obeying rules and norms. Style asks for discipline, control and polish. And stilus is not only a normative, it is also a value-charged and even an elitist concept. Behind the stilus optimus el praestantissimus and the stilus exercitatus threaten such more or less reprehensible vanations of style as - I quote from Cicero and Quintilian - the stilus artifex, tardus, rudts et confusus. to name only a few of them.^ Now, I hope it is clear, that I do not recall these commonplace citations in order to dissolve the problem of style in art hist()r\ into empty etymological digressions. But without having these rhetorical origins in mind, without remembering that the concept of style took shape first in the
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framework of a system of classification, dominated by norms, rules, prescripts and even interdictions, we will never be able to understand the anamnesis of the modern art historical use of the same term The question we have to pose in the light of our etymological digression is as follows 'What happened to this traditional concept of style when it was transplanted from rhetoric and literature to other fields of human activity and when it was finally integrated into the modern system of ideas, based no longer on rules and norms, but on originality and individuality^' The ambivalent part of the art historical concept of style, to which I referred above, stems from the fact that aesthetic historicism of the eighteenth, nmeteenth and twentieth centunes, which tried hard to do away with rules and norms and to put peculiarities over generalities, chose the concept of style with all its traditional ingredients of rule and norm as one of its basic hermeneutical instruments It was the figurative and the normative use of the term 'stilus' as formulated in Cicero's wntings on rhetoric, which predominated up to the middle of the eighteenth century As far as I know there is no comprehensive history of all the different applications and changing meanings of the words stilus, style, stile, estilo, Stil During the middle-ages stilus or in French style means sometimes - as it does occasionally still today - simply habits, manners in a social context, svnonvmous with coutumes.^ Gadamer recalls that we find 'style' in the field of law, where it means in French simply manure de proceder ^ Mainly however the term stilus, style, remained attached to literary composition and expression be it in elocution, in poetry or even in charters and it was from rhetoric and poetrv that stilus, style, as a term of normative classification was finally transplanted to the sister-arts, to music and to pamting, sculpture and architecture This process of transferral was a slow one. It affects the history of artistic theory in Italy from the cinquecento and in France from the seventeenth century It would be far

beyond our competence and it would not serve the main argument of tbis paper
to describe this process of transferral in all its details What matters for us is that we focus on that fateful moment in the second half of the eighteenth century when the concept of 'style' was transformed into a category of aesthetic historicism and so could later establish itself as one of the basic notions of art history If we open a German encyclopedia of the mid-eighteenth century, Zedler's well known Unwersallexikon, we find under 'style' not a single entry for architecture or the fine arts but no less than nearly fifty entries for different hterary styles' stylus aequivocus, frigidus, satyricus, tumidus and many others, among them the stylus cacozelus, the manner which uses the citations of good authors but neither for the right things nor in the right places nor at the right time ^ It is certainly mterestmg to note how intricate and pedantic the classification system for literary styles had become in Germany by the time of Gottsched. A subdivision such as the stylus cacozelus may even remind us of some of the art historical efforts to define the characteristics of mannerism as a distinct style ' But what is really interesting for our topic is the observation that all these fifty entries on literary styles m Zedler's encyclopedia are exclusively based on general criteria of literary composition and expression. They are never ascribed to an mdividual creative force, be this a literary school or a period m the history
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of literature. From the stylus aequalis to the stylus tumidus Zedler's categones oi literary styles remain strictly normative They are prescriptive, much hke formulas for polite letter writing and as such they are not comparable to the historical and art historical use of the term 'style' as it began to be used soon after the middle of the eighteenth centur^ If Zedler has nothing to say about architecture or the fine arts, he has a rather lengthy entry on style in music and this entry is much more interesting for our topic than all his fifty subdivisions for hterary styles Certainly it needs no particular acuteness to recognize that the organization and even the content of Zedler's entry on style in music bear the hallmark of the rhetorical tradition Much as the rhetorical treatises used to describe and classify the different genera dicendi and the emotional effects provoked by them, Zedler describes and classifies the impressions produced by the various styles of music The Stilo Dramatico rouses strong passions, the Stilo Madrigalesco feelings of tenderness, love and commiseration, the Stilo Hyporchemalico raises joy and stimulates to dancing If this sounds rather traditional, we find nght at the beginning of Zedler's entry on music a sentence explaining the causes of style in a way which draws the attention of the modern historian I quote in English- 'Style in music IS understood as the kind and the manner, which each person has for himself in composing, executing and performing, and all this vanes according to the genius, of the author, to the country and to the people ' " Here then 'style' is no longer understood as a sheer norm, a prescript or a recipe which can be applied h\ everyone at any time and in every place, whenever it is thought convenient to speak, to write or to perform in a certain way. On the contrary, style is here presented as something specific and particular relating to the performing person, the performing region or the performing nation, so that Zedler's definition in this case foreshadows the much later art historical notion of personal, regional and national styles Needless to say Zedler's encyclopedia is no primary source, but only a comfortable one summing up a stock of ideas which had been developed since the sixteenth century and not only, as we shall see, for the theory of music By the middle of the eighteenth century, so we learn from the last sentence cited above from Zedler's encyclopedia, style had long ceased to be understood

as a mere recipe, and had begun to be understood as ruled originality or

originality tamed by rules. Even Buffon's often quoted Discours sur le style. delivered before the French Academy in 1753, might be cited as a testimony for this fundamental reshaping of the notion of style in the age of the Enlightenment. Although, as is often forgotten, Buffon's Discours largely follows the line of a discussion on style which French writers had followed ever since the days of Boileau, he rings a new bell with his famous sentence 'These things (knowledge, facts, discoveries) are outside man, the style is the man himself.''^ Henceforth, one might say, style began to show a double face. The more the modern idea of the freedom and originality of individual expression progressed, the more the use of the notion of style had to keep account of the particular, the peculiar and above all the innovative But at the same time the notion of style remained nevertheless bound to its traditional background of rule, norm and prescript It was this double-faced conception of style which later was taken up by aesthetic
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historicism and finally by art history Dealing with stvle in the historv of art meant always tracing the norm, the law and the rule m the particular, the original, in the individual creation or - to come back to our first quotation discovering the softness of the soft stvle It is not merelv fortuitous that until recently German art histonans spoke of Stilgesetze '^ The difficulties, contradictions, confusions of the art historical quarrels about stvles, about the borderlines between different styles and, last but not least, all the famous auxiliarv constructions produced dunng these sometimes sectarian battles, are nothing but the consequences of this ambiguitv The art histoncal notion of stvle had to be nominalistic and universahstic at the same time, it had to dojusuce to anv possible variation of artistic onginahtv and to function as a coherent svstem of classification There is one fundamental point where Zedler's explanation for the differences between various stvles in music differs totallv from the later art histoncal understanding of the same phenomenon Zedler, as we have seen, explains stvlistic differences via differences of persons, regions, nations He never speaks howev er of time and periods The great hermeneutical turningpoint, the fusion between the old rhetorical concept of style and the modern idea of historicism and evolution lies still in the future It was onlv via this combination that the notion of style in art historv became imaginable at all Zedler's encyclopedia appeared, we remembered, in 1744 It would be no more than two decades before the fusion between stvle and aesthetic historicism was achieved - curiously enough in the same little electorate of Saxony - m Wmckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, which appeared in 1764 in Dresden But before we turn to this cntical landmark in the evolution of the art histoncal interpretation of style, v\e must at least briefiv and superficialiv recall how and when the old rhetorical notion of style came to be applied to the fine arts If we would trace the story of the application of the notion 'st^vle' to painting and sculpture from its very beginnings, this would bring us back again to Latin rhetoric. As is well known, it was Quintihan who in book XII of his Instituttones Oratoriae brings up quite surpnsingly the names and works of painters and sculptors as comparative examples in a discussion on the different stvles of

elocution. Quintilian even hints at the idea of stylistic evolution when he tells us
that the statues of Hegesias and Callon were coarse, those of Calamis already less stiff and those of Myron, presenting the next step of the general evolution, already mellow '* This passage reads like an anticipation of our concept of earlv and late phases of style and even resounds with those semi-biological and semimoralistic undertones which accompany the evolutionary pattern of earlv and late styles up to this day As important as this prelude in ancient rhetoric may be, the modern use of the word 'style' as referring to the fine arts seems not to be traceable - at least in our present state of knowledge - before the cinquecento It was among others Castighone who records in his // Cortegiano a sentence proving that in Italy the word stile as refernng to painters was, by 1530, currently used in conversation. 'Consider that in painting Leonardo da Vinci, Mantegna. Raphael, Michelangelo, and Giorgio da Gastelfranco are most excellent, and yet they are all
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unlike one another in their work so that in his own manner no one of them appears to lack anything, since we recognize each to be perfect in his own style ''^ Here then each of the excellent painters mentioned in the beginning of the sentence is said to be most perfect in his style. Style is, so we must conclude, understood by Castiglione as the particular expression of the personal genius of the single artist With such an understanding Castiglione's phrase proposes a highly personalized notion of style which, as is well known, was taken up h\ Italian and French art theory during the seicento and which is still echoed in Buffon's famous dictum cited before 'These things are outside man, the style is the man himself The main representative of this understanding of style in the seicento was Giovan Pietro Bellon If we read through his Vite de' Pitton, Scultori e Architett Modernt, which appeared in 1672, we find the term stile frequently used For Bellon stile is not, as it is for art historv since the nineteenth century, a label of neutral scientific classification Among the numerous adjectives which Bellon combines with stile is not a single negative one Stile is a notion of qualification and evaluation, which goes with such adjectives as magnifico, ottimo,perfetto, eroic puro, bello e raro And slile is always the quality of an individual artist or of a single work of art. 'Michelangelo ha dato l'esempio dello stile grande ' 'Michelangelo has given the model of the grand style ' Of Annibale Carracci we read 'II suo proprio stile fu unire insieme Tidea e la natura ' 'His own style was to unite the idea and nature ' The Deposition by Fedengo Barocci is 'un opera ridotta in perfetto stile ' In the famous notes on painting by Nicolas Poussin which Bellon includes in his Vite and which cannot be far from his own views, stile is distinguished from materia, concetto, struttura and defined as follows 'Lo stile e una maniera particolare ed industria di dipingere e di disegnare nata dal particolare genio di ciascuno neH'applicazione e nell'uso dell'idee.' 'Style is a particular manner and eagerness to paint and to draw, which is born out of the genius of (the single artist) in the application and in the use of the ideas ''^ For Bellon style then has nothing to do with regions, nations, or schools It is barely a term of classification at all It is, as Panofsky observed long ago, a complement to maniera and means something close to character, personal character '^ So Bellon, following the cinquecento tradition mentioned above, represents a very peculiar understanding of 'style' as a term used for the fine arts. His understanding of style as character leads us not to the main stream of forthcoming art history, but it was taken up and preserved in aesthetics and in border areas of art history right into our own century Goethe expressed view s on a similar line in a short but well-known text of 1788 on Stil, einfache Nachahmung der Natur, Mamer, which was a strong influence on German aesthetics

up to Hegel. "* But we must once more cite the central sentence of the Bellon-Poussm notes
'Style is a particular manner born out of the genius of the single artist ' PreciseK in this sense Benedetto Croce and Julius von Schlosser, not the most influential but perhaps the wisest representative of the Viennese school of art histon, proposed to reserve the term 'style' for the incomparable work of genius alone. The average history of art with its schools, its grammar of forms, its comparisons and its rather mechanical ideas of development, should then be treated ^^ a
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mere history of language, a proposal surprisingly close to what structuralism and semiotics have put forward in our days '^ In art historv the proposals of Croce and Schlosser have found relativelv little follov\mg and I think rightlv so Bv a one-sided decision, which seems charactenstic for the first half of our century with its fascination for innovations, artistic revolutions and the idea of the avant-garde, Groce and Schlosser tried to do awav with the double-faced structure of the modern notion of stvle Thev proclaimed a historv of stvle concentrating exclusivelv on onginahtv and ongmal expression, dismissing the normative side of the matter as sheer linguaggio generate One certainlv sympathizes with Schlosser's cutting criticism of the so-called laws of st\listic development, the Stilgesetze as they are ponderously and pompously called in German ^" No doubt, where such laws are once established, the course of development is regulated for good and the all-devouring patterns of stvle extinguished the individual and pecuhar features of the work of art, if thev happen not to fit "' But if the word style is on the other hand reserved for ongmahtv and original expression and nothing else - as it is with Croce and Schlosser - one is in the reverse danger of forgetting that stvle is, and in the rhetorical tradition had long been, a means of social communication Onlv bv bemg stvhzed, onlv by adapting the original and the particular to certain preestablished rules, can anv work of art become the bearer of a social message and a social fact at all Even the most extreme forms of ongmahtv can onlv function as long as thev have the norms and conventions of style to define them So we do not so easily get nd of the double-faced structure of the modern concept of style, with Its antithetical principles of rule and onginahtv Castighone, Bellon or Bellon/Poussin with their notion oi stile as una maniera particolare represent onlv one facet of our story In order to show how the rhetorical concept of style was svstematically applied to the fine arts we would have to turn to French art theorv and especially to Roger de Piles But it is time to turn from style as a means of classification to style as a means of penodization and this step leads us to the already mentioned writings of Wmckelmann In the introduction to his Geschichte der Kunsl des Altertums Wmckelmann explains his project in a well-known sentence which may seem a familiar or ev en exhausted formula to the present reader, but which in 1764 was of daring novelty 'The history of art is intended to show the origin, progress, change, and downfall of art, together with the different styles of nations, penods and artists, and to prove the whole as far as it is possible, from the ancient monuments now in existence '^^ Now it is not our task to discuss the complex problems of the program and the achievement of Wmckelmann and its controversial place in eighteenth-century archaeology ^^ For us it is sufficient to recall one basic fact It seems that it was Wmckelmann who for the first time applied the idea and the perspective of rising historicism - Voltaire's pioneering Essay sur les moeurs et ! esprit des nations had appeared only a few years earlier to the treatment and the discussion of the fine arts '^* In order to achieve this, Wmckelmann had to transform the traditional normative concept of style into an hermeneutical instrument flexible enough to serve the new historical interpretation of varying aesthetic experiences. Style became now the keyword for the bridge leading from Visual perception to historical insight This was what Wmckelmann himself in a 259

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letter in July 1764 called 'so to speak a new discovery, of which one had previously dreamt nothing '^^ Let me illustrate this point by a few examples from Winckelmann's text Of the earliest style of the Egyptians it is said- 'The general and pnncipal characteristic of the drawing of the nude figure in this style is that of forming the contour of it by straight or nearly straight lines ' And then he goes on 'This stvle IS also found in their (the Egyptians') architecture and ornament.'^''' The second style of the Etruscans, Winckelmann wntes, is characterized by a sensitive treatment of the figure and constrained postures and actions ^' But it is above all in the treatment of Greek art, that the new combination of a sensitive characterization of style with the idea of histoncal development becomes salient throughout Winckelmann's text The early style of the Greeks was characterized by harsh drawing, forceful but without grace, the succeeding high stvle tempered this earlier harshness, gave its figures more fluent contours and more civilized and polished postures, the next penod. the penod of the beautiful stvle did away with anything angular, preferred waving lines and grace, the last phase, which saw the decline of Greek art, showed a petty stvle with soft, but dull forms, an eclectic use of motifs and mean naturahstic details 'So one can define in the art of the Greeks, especially in sculpture, four stages of stvle. namely the straight and hard, the monumental and cubic, the beautiful and flowing, and the style of the imitators '^^ In Winckelmann's Geschtchte der Kunst des Altertums the histoncism of the Enlightenment, the histoncism of Montesquieu and Voltaire became 'aestheticized' and the rhetorical and aesthetic concept of style became 'historical.' This was a moment so fateful for the historv of our theme that we must devote further thought to it. Perhaps it may be wi&e to begin with a restrictive statement just to av oid misunderstandings and the impression of over-interpretation Winckelmann was not an art historian in the late nineteenth-century sense, with a completclv relativistic outlook on the history of styles, and a vast amount of material assembled by a scientific style-classification neatly cleaned of any prescientific notion of value or at least confidentially and naively thought and wished to he so But It also would be misleading to claim that Winckelmann's outlook on the problems of style was, despite a strong dose of early histoncism, fundamentallv still a normative one.^^ I would rather have it that Winckelmann's system of Greek art was one of the 'eighteenth-century Elysiums,' that Winckelmann is comparable to Rousseau. The Greeks and their statues afforded him just such a dream of lost, unspoilt felicity in a faraway past as the primitives did for Rousseau.^'^ The fundamental difference remains, naturally, that Rousseau's interest was focused on social problems, while Winckelmann's dream of the past had to do with beauty and aesthetics We will return to this point of difference, which is not as irrelevant for our topic as it may seem. For the moment we must go back to Winckelmann's text Let us repeat. Winckelmann divided the development of Greek art into four succeeding periods of style, proceeding from harsh and stiff beginnings to a hie;h style which is the climax of this evolutionary system, then mellowing down and finally declining in a phase of eclectic and petty style. Now Winckelmann tried to link these four phases of artistic style with corresponding phases of pohtical
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and cultural climate So the mellowed and waving style is said to be the style of a period when idleness and diversion dominated Greek public hfe ^' The petty and eclectic stvle w ent along with the political downfall of the Greek pohs and the erosion of its free institutions 'Art, which had, as it were, taken life from freedom, therefore had necessarily, through the loss of the same, to decline and fall in that place where it had chiefiy flourished '^^ I must insist, that these suggestions are rather scattered through Wmckelmann's text and integrated in a larger and more complex framework of ideas Nevertheless Wmckelmann forges here with seducing ingenuity a chain of associations which leads to one of the great fascinations, promises but also illusions of art history to the notion of bygone styles as the mirror of history and the art historian as the initiated exegete of the past And it was this 'holistic' understanding of stvle, as it is first foreshadowed in Wmckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, which put art history for a certain time in a key position among the humanities and which seems still to be echoed m Gadamer's sentence cited at the beginning of this lecture 'The notion of stvle is one of the undiscussed self-evident concepts upon which our histoncal consciousness is based '^^ But with Wmckelmann things are not as simple as that In several crucial passages of his book it becomes emphatically evident that behind his idea of an inherent analogy between style in the art of a period and the political climate of the same period lurks more than just the neutral interest and curiosity of the latter-day historian and archaeologist Over and over again Wmckelmann comes back to his cherished idea, that regarding the constitution and the government of Greece freedom was the principal reason for the country's excellence in the arts 'In view of the constitution and government of Greece, freedom is the most important cause of the excellence of art Only then, in times of complete enhghtenment and liberty, did the evolution of the arts reach Its chmax and develop into the high style 'Finally, at the time when Greece attained its highest degree of refinement and freedom, art also became more unfettered and lofty '^^ Or 'From this entire history, it becomes clear that it was freedom which elevated art '^^ The anti-feudal and anti-absolutist undertones of these statements on the development of Greek art and the interconnections between political freedom and the high style have often been stressed, it is only too evident that such a vision of freedom embodied in the greatest works of ancient art compensated Wmckelmann for the social circumstances of his personal life and environment ^^ It was, characteristically enough, this aspect of Wmckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums which impressed the greatest art critic of the French Enlightenment, Diderot He praised Wmckelmann's book because it demonstrated that the basis of the art of Glycon and Phidias was 'the feeling of liberty, which lifts up the soul, and inspires it with great things '^^ It would be mteresting to dwell on these reactions of Diderot on Wmckelmann's text m order to analyse the fundamental differences in the attitude towards the arts of the past between the French Enlightenment and early German idealism Diderot's mterests would in the light of such a comparison seem mainly practical, social and pedagogical, using the model of the past in order to better the future Winckelmann on the other hand looks nostalgically back on great art

as the mirror of a lost felicity and in doing so he 'aestheticizes' one of the central 261

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political ideas of the European Enhghtenment freedom In the mirror of stvle not only the work of art but even penods of history - stvle in art being their visible symbol - could be looked at nostalgically as aesthetic scenery In such a view the notion of style could function as the instrument of alienation, detaching form from history and its disturbing and conflicting reality This is, to the present, the greatest temptation of an understanding of style which pretends to afford an insight into the totality of art history or even historv It is a nostalgic mechanism, which Flaubert castigated with sarcastic irony In the latest of his novels, Bouvard et Pecuchet, he records of his two grotesque heroes 'In admiring an old piece of furniture, they would regret not having lived in the penod m which It was used, although they were entirely ignorant of the epoch '^^ But with this citation we have jumped from the eighteenth centurv to the year 1881 It would be far beyond the scope of this brief paper to discuss the endless ramifications of the discussions of style in the history of architecture and of the fine arts which took place during the nineteenth century The panorama of styles was now unfolded not only in books and lectures, but also in museums and exhibitions and above all in contemporary architecture with its 'Babylonian confusion of styles,' to quote Gottfried Semper and its 'battle of styles,' to quote Gilbert Scott *" Certainly the notion of style remained an instrument of classification The classification of styles however was now subordinated to the omnipresent idea of evolution, which dominates the filing of the remnants of the human past no less systematically than it had dominated the assembling of the selected survivals of natural history in Darwin's The Origin of Species. 'If one studies the monuments from the Romanesque penod to the Renaissance, the history of each architectural style will be the same, as if their growth and decline were governed by a general law. Simple at the first, the buildings gradually grow more ornate, at the same time they have acquired every elegance the period reaches the perfection of this style its fullest development ' 'But taste declines, and all the more quickly as it has fastened itself on minutiae Then soon one is weary and seeks elsewhere more powerful and certain effects' 'Thus, from the decline of one architectural style is born another ' So wrote Prosper Menmee as early as 1838 *' Now in this new system of classification the element of norm, which had been so basic to the concept of style in rhetoric and hterary criticism, bv no means altogether disappeared It was only subordinated to the primary interest of the nmeteenth-century historian, that is to periodization and distinction Consequently the historian of art recommends norms no longer, but tells of different characteristics and marks of identification which, as he can demonstrate, change according to various periods, regions and schools In no other domain was this system of classification, which functions by singling out chronological or local peculiarities, more fully developed and more subdivided than in the study of architectural history. But characteristically enough it was in this field that the inherent contradictions of the modern concept of style - a concept which cannot function without norms but is focused on peculiarities reappeared. I will give one of many examples, one which is of a charmmg scholarly naivete. When the great French architectural historian Comte Robert

De Lasteyrie had to deal with the Romanesque architecture of his country he 262

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observed with helpless perplexity, that De Caumont had distinguished seven schools, Viollet-de-Duc eleven, Anthyme Saint-Paul fifteen and Quicherat still more Grievously he exclaimed 'None of these systems is fully satisfactorv' and then opted himself for 'eight principal schools '*" Style IS in the nineteenth-century idea of histoncal evolution a 'species,' which IS worked out at a certain moment in history and which appears at a certain place The histonan acts like the botanist, he has to single out the marks of identification of the different species and to file them m a svstem of classification, which is sufficiently distinct *^ It is moreover a useful svstem because all these different species of stvles of the past and stvles of regions become the heritage and the property of an enlightened and liberal public, which for the first time in the evolution of mankind can dispose of all these treasures and have its free choice among them This is the situation that the young Nietzsche descnbed ironically in 1874 'We moderns have nothing of our own, only inasmuch as we fill and overfill ourselves with remote times, foreign customs, arts, philosophies, religions, and knowledge do we become something worthy of notice, namely walking encyclopedias '^^ The histonan of stvle had become a very important man who served modern hfe Certainlv he had ceased to recommend timeless norms and restricted himself to the descnption of relative peculiarities By a cunous feedback however, just these relative peculiarities became the selling catalogue of eclectic and pluralistic norms for the industrialized production of" architecture, furniture, objects of decorative art and fashion. It was only when this exchange between the scholarlv filing of past styles and retrospective styling of modern life was condemned to death at the end of the nineteenth century, it was only at this fateful moment, that the concept of style underwent its last and most radical change It now became the main hermeneutical instrument of art historv, of a discipline which had finallv been detached from all practical aims and become an end in itself This autonomous art history looked now on stvle for stvle's sake I shall be brief on this last phase of the art-histoncal interpretation of style as I have dealt with it elsewhere*^ It may however be useful to recall some histoncal facts The classification of past styles as chronological or regional peculiarities had been a European affair The new way of interpretation, which understood style as a generating pnnciple embracing all the arts and ev entually even all other cultural phenomena of a given penod or at a certain place, had a more specific intellectual origin and remained alwavs more parochial 'Style for style's sake' is an hermeneutical engine which was constructed in the laboratories of German and Austrian universitv-thinking between the late 1880s and the 1920s. Panofsky, who had been Voge's but also Wolfflm's student when this formidable instrument was in the making and who became around 1920 one of Its most fervent apologists and one of the most eloquent spokesmen of its exegesis, in the hght of this development could still, in 1953 call German 'the native tongue' of art history '**' We are probably no longer sure if a broader understanding of all the different sources of the manifold methods and efforts composing art history, and especially if an understanding which transcends the borderlines of the strictly a'ademic sphere would in 1980 confirm such a statement without serious
263

FROM STILUS TO STYLE

reservations. But no doubt in the German-speaking countnes the concept oj 'style for stvle's sake' made art history around 1900 an excitingly modern discipline, because it seemed to achieve a sort of positivistic miracle in successfullv using the results of one branch of the sciences, namely psychologv as the rational instrument and the magic wand for a new form of historical insight In 1886 the young Heinnch Wolfflin proclaimed this program quite outspokenly in his dissertation, which had the significant title Prolegomena zu enter Psychologie der Architektur He wrote 'One can only work with precision when it is possible to gather the stream of appearances into clearly defined, stable forms The science of mechanics, for example, supplies such clearly defined and stable forms to physics The disciplines concerned with intellectual history still lack these foundations, they can only be sought in psychology This would also allow art history to trace back the specific to the general, to laws '^' The nineteenth century had replaced the old rhetorical notion of style as a timeless norm by an understanding of styles as marks of identification for periods and schools The new outlook of 'stvle for stvle's sake' renounced these handy marks o( identification, which enabled the historian to recognize styles in the same manner as the botanist identifies plants. In the same moment when German artists like August Endell proclaimed, 'that we stand not only at the beginning of a new penod style, but at the same time at the beginning of an entirely new art an art with forms which mean nothing, represent nothing, and evoke nothing, the notion of style in art history was detached from such marks of identification as specific motifs of architecture or specific vocabularies of form in the mimetic arts.'^*' And it was just this detachment which lent this new concept of'style for style's sake' an enormous stimulating force, opening the doors towards a much broader understanding of all kinds of visual material Wolffin's well known theory of'die allgemeinsten Darstellungsformen' as the basic patterns underlv-

ing all artistic creations of a certam period and still more so Alois Riegl's no less
famous definition of the work of art as 'Umriss und Farbe in Ebene oder Raum' established and furnished criteria which were so abstract and general that the\ could serve as stereotypes for the stylistic analysis of buildings and of tapestries and for the stylistic interpretation of any imaginable form of art, which had ever appeared in the course of human history *^ Under two aspects this apparent neutrality of observation assured an immediate success to the new outlook of 'style for style's sake' and proved to be extremely fruitful First, it corresponded to the modern cunosity for all forms of art, even the most unclassical and the most decadent ones, and permitted thus a positive response even to the productions of periods of primitivism and decline The reevaluation of late antique art by Wickhoff and Riegl offers a famous example. The double-face structure of the modern concept of style seemed now nearly forgotten. Style without norm became a licence for an unlimited number of particulars. Nineteenth-century historicism had looked back into the past to find possible models of identification; a conservative picking Gothic, a liberal Renaissance ^ The new outlook on style for style's sake, which took shape m the formative years of modern architecture and abstract painting, was no longer in the service of such needs of identification. So it could be proud to have overcome all traditional preferences of taste and look back on all the remnants of the past
264

FROM STILUS I'O ST\'LE

With the same impartial interest of the neutral and detached observer of styles and their unlimited variations But let us come to the second reason for the great success which the new understanding of style as the generating principle of all art production found between 1900 and the 1920s In 1901 Juhus von Schlosser proclaimed in an article 'Zur Genesis der mittelalterlichen Kunstanschauung' 'We begin to approach the problems of an historical aesthetic, and the insight dawns on us that the vanous arts, differentiated one from another through their technical and material conditions, are only so many facets of one and the same essence, and that their histoncal development runs in parallel lines because the same Demiurge is active in them all '^' This statement shows that style was now seen as a generating principle underlying all artefacts from buildings down to pottery. This was a vision in profound sympathy with the aims of the aesthetic movement around 1900, which stylized everything from fashion to architecture and tried to reform life by style ^ ~ For art history this aspect of the new approach to style offered the illusion of a nearly magic insight into history and of an immediate and total access to that greatest topic of nineteenth-century histoncism evolution If it could really be shown that decorative arts, paintmgs, sculptures and even architecture were all merely forms and colours on a plane or in a space and as such were all expressions and revelations of the same inner creative force and obeyed all the same stylistic laws, then art history had come closer to the arcana of history than any other branch of the humanities Other disciplines could only try to understand historical processes, art history alone could see evolution With the new concept of style as an all-embracing generating principle art history presented a glittering mirror which seemed to reflect history hke an image or scenery What wonder that this approach, which seemd to make visual illusion a

method for understanding history, had enchanting effects and a tremendous

popular but also scholarly success^ Perhaps it may be useful to recall that this approach to art history via style was more deeply rooted in the history of ideas of the late nineteenth century than IS often thought In one of the numberless aphorisms jotted down in the 1880s and later published under the title Der Wille zur Macht, Nietzsche had criticized Darwinism for overestimating the role of exterior circumstances in the process of life and had insisted: 'The essential feature of the hfe process is precisely the tremendous shaping force which creates the form from within and which makes use of, indeed exploits, the outward circumstances '^^ In the introduction to his book Stilfragen Alois Riegl had, precisely on the same grounds, denounced Semper's explication of style as a result of material and technique as 'The transfer of Darwinism to the field of intellectual hfe '^* And exactly as Nietzsche opposed to Darwinism his vision of a life process galvanized by an inner formative force, Riegl opposed to Semper his well-known vision of the process of art history as generated by a 'sovereign will-to-form ' But here we must stop and enter mto some final considerations of a more general kind Stilus as a tool, style as a norm, style as a mark of identification and finally style as the last generating principle, in all these stages of the evolution of our notion 'style' had been used as an instrument for understanding, for analysis
265

FROM STILUS TO STYLE

by discovering elements of order, law, rule, structure in a given art object or in a group of art objects. Once the modern concept of style had been linked with originality, style developed into an instrument ever more subtle and more flexible, which allowed a sensitive response to an ever growing number of particular originalities It is the great achievement of art history around 1900 that It brought this evolution to its climax But let us once more recall: there is one fateful turning-point in this long process, the moment when in the age of Enlightenment style was linked with the idea of periodization, evolution, progress. Needless to repeat it was only then that the notion of style was changed from an instrument for art appreciation or better art theory into a tool for art history Art history could never have come to life without this fateful interconnection of Stilus and Chronos. The whole system of our discipline has been erected on this crossroad of style and time by an ever growing accumulation of comparative matenal And yet it is just in this fateful encounter with time that the notion of style is only too easily transformed from an instrument of descnption, classification, and rational understanding into a medium of revelation, that it can become a kind of spirit, which acts before the fascinated regard of the art-historical public on the stage of history All happens with the change of a few harmless words As long as the art historian speaks of styles in a period, in a region, in a town, etc , he uses our notion for rational identification and accepts that the forms of artifacts are just one thing in a complex social constellation If the art historian begins however to speak of the style of a. period, region, town, etc, he is in danger of understanding style as the visual expression of a social constellation, which is no longer seen as complex and contradictory, but dreamt of as symbolically unified. The temptation to choose the second use of language is great. In the first case the art historian remains a specialist concerned with one aspect of history In the second case he grows into a kind of exegete who has access to total truth, to doors which remain closed for other more rationally working disciplines He becomes the magician of historic aestheticism, who sees the inner forces of evolution at work By now I must have definitely disappointed my readers by speaking almost exclusively of the history of understanding and the interpretation of style and not of the application of this term m art history today. I have done so because it seems to me that our present difficulties and uneasiness with the traditional concept of style can only be understood and overcome if we remember the place and the growth of this notion in the history of ideas. Only then shall we see that the crisis in the history of style cannot be overcome by quantitative compensation, that is by paying more attention to function, techniques or iconography Such reservations were put forward already in 1912 by Ahy Warburg and numberless other voices have followed him since ^^ We should rather expose ourselves to some more radical questions and ask why the history of style with all its aesthetic alienation from the complexity and the contradictions oi real history had such an enormous success? Did it eventually offer art as 'style for style's sake' as a kind oi aesthetic substitute for other less pleasant and therefore repressed aspects of history? Only by starting with such questions could a discussion on the ideological implications of a pure history of style lead to meaningful results. The attitude of Bouvard and Pecuchet bef re
266

FROM STILUS TO STYLE

their piece of old furniture seems a very telling example in this context As long as the art historian states that a gothic cathedral shows the marks of identification of the gothic style in architecture he is on relatively safe ground But when he suggests that this same cathedral is a creation of the gothic style or even an emanation of the gothic spirit and that this creation came to life in an age of the gothic cathedral, he sells style as the substitute for history He creates the illusion that history could be looked at like a sunset - all in harmony Out of sheer social responsibility towards history we should ask ourselves if this kind of aesthetic histoncism with all its ideological implications can still be accepted in our days All too easily this kind of history of art has allowed us to pass over the problems of art in history But even when the notion of style is used in a proper and adequate context, for the description and the classification of the formal aspects of artifacts, uneasy questions cannot be avoided Even in its modern transformation style remains a stamping formula Rules, norms and above all structural uniformity go by definition with it. Stilus exercitatus, as Cicero had it. Stvle is a concept of order and as such It IS always somewhat forbidding There are works of art, which by their declared intention correspond to the idea of style as the perfect norm But we modern art histonans, we were trained to look for stvle and to discover style in all kinds of artifacts The pedagogical blessings of this training need not be demonstrated But I am afraid that this unlimited extension of the stamp of style has had uniforming affects which do not always enrich but sometimes also impoverish our appreciation of certain groups of artifacts and produce quite a lot of simply boring art historical writing Already Baudelaire mocked 'the false devotees of style,' 'who have raised the commonplace to the dignity of style.'^'^ Baudelaire naturally meant academic pamters lacking imagination and originality. But the art historian who labels his objects only as samples of the style A, B, or C IS also a 'devotee of the commonplace ' As such he becomes blind to the crude and awkward sides of his objects, to their contradictions, their imperfections. Often he becomes blind even to the sheer information which these objects offer to an observer who looks not primarily for style and is not mentally prestylized Whatever reservations traditionalist art histonans may have about our renewed interest in subcultures, popular art, mass media and even kitsch, this mterest has at least opened our eyes to the fact that style can easily become the vehicle of aesthetic domestication and sterilization It had made us aware that many objects we deal with are not as uniform, not as patterned, briefly not as stylized, as our notions of style would like to have them But let me finally conclude. I have already been too long The great period of art history as the history of style is probably long over The pure history of style was an aesthetic Utopia of the beginning of our century Stylistic analysis will nevertheless continue to serve as one of the many methods m art history and as long as Its use is limited to the description and the classification of the formal aspects of artifacts and as long as this analysis is handled with rational control it Will continue to serve as a properly effective tool. But for all the other pretentions linked with the notion of style, for Gadamer's 'one of the undiscussed selfevident concepts on which our historical consciousness is based,' I can only cite some telling words of Roland Barthes, who noted in his Mythologies 'Style
267

FRO.M STILUS TO SI YLE

excuses all, dispenses entirely and especially with histoncal reflection, it imprisons the viewer in the servitude of a pure formalism so that revolutions of style themselves seem nothing more than formal '^^ Wilhbald Sauerlander
Zentralinstitut fur Kunstgeschichte Munich

NOTES
Notes are limited to references and, 1 ha\e to confess often to references to dictionaries and to recent littratiirt not to original texts O\erburdened with administratne work I onh had the choice of proceeding in this unscholarK manner or of renouncing the publication of this paper To the understandable mortification of the reader 1 opted for the first alternativ e Paper delivered at a symposium -Art and Scholarund zu lnformiren hat, und all dieses lst sehr ship A Critical Assessment of Current Methounterschieden, nach MaBgebung des Genii der dolog\ in the Historv of Art" McMaster L niverVerfasser, des Landes und des \ olckts, nachd(ni sit\, Hamilton/Ontario September 1980 I thank die Materien, der Ort, die Zeit, die Subjecte du Professor Havden B J \faginnis, who kindK Ausdruckungen und so welter, es erfordern" made the necessarv changes to improve the 12 Buffon, Dtscours sur le style, [Ed Bibliotheque d c imperfect English of the original version meiUeurs auteurs anciens et modernes). Pans, 1893, 12 "Ces choses (les connaissances, les fans 1 Hans GeorgGadamer, W ahrhett und Methode, 2nd et les decouvertes) sont hors de I'homme le stvk ed , Tubingen 1965, 466 -Der BegrilTdes Stils lst est I'homme meme" eine der undiskutierten Stlbstverstandlichkeiten, 13 See for instance Josef Gramm tormbauund von denen das historische BewuBtsein lebt" Stil^esetz, Frankfurt, 1931 2 See for these citations Heinnch Georges, 14 The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian with an Ausfuhrhches Lateimsch-Deutsches Handworterbuch. English translation bv H E Butler vol IV Basel 1959 vol II, col 2800 London, 1922,452 3 Karl Ernst Georges, Ausfuhrtirhes Lateimsch15 "Eccovi che nella pittura sono eccellentissimi Deutsches Handworterbuch. Basel 1959, vol I, col Leonardo Vincio, il Mantegna, Rafaello, Michel 2343 Angelo, Giorgio da Castel Franco nientedimeno 4 Reinhold Klotz, Handworterbuch der lateimschen tutti son tra se nel far dissimili, di modo che ad Vracfe, 1879, vol 11,1422/23 alcun di loro non par che manchi cosa alcuna in 5 Klotz, Handworterbuch der tateimschen Sprache, vol quella maniera, perche si conosce ciascun nel su(i II 1422/23 For the modes see Jan Bialostocki, stile essere perfettissimo" See for this quotation "Das Modusproblem m den bildenden Kunsten", Charles Dempsev, Annibale Carracci and the Stit und Ikonographie Studien zur Kunstwissenschaft, beginnings of baroque style, Gluckstadt, 1977, Dresden, 1965,9-25 102f, note 157 English translation from 6 Klotz, Handworterbuch der lateimschen Sprache, vol Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, C S II, 1422/23 Singelton, trans , New York, 1959 I thank Prof 7 See, among others, Du Cange, Glossanum mediae et Dempsey, who drew my attention to these infmae latintatis. Pans, 1846, vol VI, 374 cinquecento sources m a conversation during thr 8 Gadamer, Wahrheit und .Methode, 466 colloquium 9 J H Zedler, Grofies vollstandtges Imversallexikon, 16 Giovan Pietro Bellon, Le vtte de'pittort, sculton e Leipzig/Halle, 1744, vol 40, col 1471-1476 archttettt modemi A cura di Evelina Bosea Turin 10 See for such definitions "Recent concepts of 1976, Indice dei Concetti, 661 For the mannerism", The Renaissance anad Mannerism, "Osservazioni di Nicolo Pussino sopra la pittura Studies m Western Art, (Acts of the twentieth ibid 4780" international congress of the History of Art), 17 Erwm Panofsky, Idea Ein Beitrag zur Pnnceton, 1963, vol 11, 163fr Bergnffsgeschichte der alteren Kunsttheorte, 2nd ed 11 Zedler, Grofies votlstandiges Umversallexikon, vol Berlin, 1960,114, note 244 40, col 1469-1471 "%/ai, ltalienisch 5<i/o, 18 Geothe, "Stil, einfache Nachahmung der Natui franzosisch Stile wird m der Music von der Art Manier", Goethes samtliche Werke (Cotta'sche und Weise verstanden, welche emejede Person Bibliothek der Weltliteratur), Stuttgart, s d v. il besonders vor sich zu componiren, zu executiren X X X , 145 *

268

TROM STILUS TO S n L E
1') Cf especiallvjulius von Schlosser, 5(!/McA;cAte undSprachgeschichte der bildenden Kunst Em Ruckhluk {Sitzungsbenchte der B a v e n s c h e n Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1935, no I ) , M u n c h e n 1935 20 von Schlosser, Sttlgeichichte und Sprachgeschichte der bildenden Kunst Em Ruckbhck, 23 11 See for these problems also J a m e s A c k e r m a n , ' ^ r t historv and the problem of criticism" The Visual Arts Today, Weslevan University Press, 1960 257fr 22 ' Kunst soil den U r s p r u n g , d a s W a c h s t u m , die V e r a n d e r u n g u n d den Fall derselben, nebst d e m verschiedenen Stile der Volker, Zeiten u n d Kunstler lehren u n d dieses aus den u b n g gebliebenen W erken des \ltertums so v lel moghch lst beweisen" W lnckelmann, GMfAifAfe der Kunst des Altertums (Ed Wissenschafthche Buchgesellschaft), D a r m s t a d t , 1972, 9 23 The basic m o n o g r a p h on W m c k e l m a n n remains C a r l j u s t i , Wmckelmann m Deutschland Mit Skizzen zur Kurut- und Gelehrtengeschichte des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts Leipzig, 1866, a n d C a r l j u s t i , H mckelmann m Itatien Mit Sktzzen zur Kunst- und Gelehrtengeschichte dei achtzehnten Jahrhunderts Leipzig, 1872, vol I and I I 24 See for these p r o b l e m s F n e d n c h Meinecke, Die Entstehungdes Historismus, 2nd ed , M u n c h e n 1946, Griechenland lst die Freiheit die vornehmste U r s a c h e des Vorzugs der K u n s t " Winckelmann Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 130 "Endlich d a die Zeiten der volligen Erleuchtung und Freiheit in Griechenland erschienen, wurde auch die K u n s t freier und e r h a b e n e r " W mckelmann Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums 216 "Aus dieser ganzen Geschichte erhellt dafi es die Freiheit gewtsen, durch welche die K u n s t emporgebracht w u r d e ' W i n c k e l m a n n dewhichte der Kunst des A Itertum t 295 See alread\ G J u s t i , HincAc/mann i/(a/!fn \ol II 195iT "le sentiment de la hberte qui cle\e l a m e et lui inspire des grandes choses" Cited b \ C Justi Winckelmann mltahen,\o\ I I I 250 "En a d m i r a n t un vieux meuble, ils regrettaient de n'avoir pas vecu a 1 epoque ou ll servait bien qu'ils lgnorassent absolument cette epoque-la' G YXaiUhtTt. Bouvardet Pecuchet {^d Garnier) P a n s , s d , 12 Gottfried Semper, " U b e r Baustile" Kleine 5cAn//n, Berlin/Suttgart 1884,395-426 For Scott's dictum see K l a u s D o h m e r In welchem Style sollen wir bauen A rchitekturtheorie zwischen Klassizismus undjugendstil.\l\inchen 1976 27 "Si l'on etudie les m o n u m e n t s eleves depuis I'ere r o m a i n e j u s q u ' a la renaissance, l'histoire de c h a q u e st\ le d architecture sera la meme, comme SI ses progres et sa decadence etaient soumis a une loi gencrale Simples d'abord les edifices s ornent peu a peu lorsqu'ils ont acquis toute I'elegance l'epoque est venue de la perfection de ce stvle de son plus grand dev e l o p p e m e n t ' " M a i s le gout se lasse et d autant plus \ ltc qu'il s'est attache a des minuties O n se fatique done bientot et Ton cherche iilleurs des efTets plus puissants et plus surs" "Ainsi de la decadence d ' u n e architecture nait une autre architecture' Prosper Merimee, "Essai sur I'architecture rehgieuse du moven age particulierement en F r a n c e " , P Merimee, Etudes rar les arts du moven a^f. P a n s , 1967, 9f

35

36

37 38

39

40

74fr
25 C a r l j u s t i , Wmckelmann m I taken, \o\ 11, 109 "gleichsam eine neue E n t d e c k u n g wovon m a n sich vorher m c h t s t r a u m e n liess" 26 Vimckelmann, Ceschichte der Kunst des Altertums 51 27 Winckelmann, Gesckichte der Kunst des Altertums, 115 28 'So wird m a n in der K u n s t der Griechen, sonderlich in d e r Bildhauerei, vier Stufen des Stils setzen, namlich den g e r a d e n und h a r t e n , den groBen u n d eckigen, d e n schonen u n d llieBenden und den Stil der N a c h a h m e r " I contract statements, which are scattered through W m c k e l m a n n ' s text See however mainlv W m c k e l m a n n , Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums

41

207, 236
29 This IS the opinion of F n e d n c h Meinecke, Entstehung des Histonsmus, 313fr 30 For W m c k e l m a n n and Rousseau see also Nikolaus H i m m e l m a n n - W i l d s c h u t z , Utopische Vergangenheit, Bevhn, 1976, 18fr 31 W m c k e l m a n n , Geschtchte der Kunst des Altertums

322
32 "Die K u n s t , welche von d e r Freiheit gleichsam das Leben erhalten h a t t e , muBte also notwendig durch den Verlust derselben an d e m O r t e , wo dieselbe v o r n e h m h c h gebluht, sinken u n d fallen" Winckelmann, Geschtchte der Kunst des Altertums, 322, 336 33 GidameT, Wahrhett und Methode, i66 H a n s

Sedlmayr, Kunst und WahrheU, Hamburg, 1958,

199, cues Ernst Heidrich, who spoke of "Der Traum der Kunstgeschichte als (sic) der Fuhrerm der modernen Geisteswissenschaften" J4 "In Absicht der Verfassung und Regierung von

42 R de L a s t e v n e , L 'architecture reltgieuse en France a l'epoque romane. P a n s , 1929, 406fr 43 S e e G Semper, Kleine Schnften, 2m "Der Kunstjunger durchlauft die W'elt, stopft sein H e r b a r i u m voll mit vvohl aufgeklebten Durchzeichnungen aller A r t " 44 " d e n n aus uns haben w r M o d e r n e n gar nichts, n u r d a d u r c h , dafi wir uns mit fremden Zeiten, Sitten, K u n s t e n , Philosphen, Rehgionen, Erkenntmssen anluUen und uberfiiUen, werden wir zu etwas Beachtenswertem, namlich zu w a n d e l n d e n Enzyklopadien" F n e d n c h Nietzsche, " V o m Nutzen und Nachtheil der Historic" (in Studimausgabe ed by H a n s Heinz Holz), F r a n k f u n , 1968, vol I, 208 45 See W Sauerlander, "Alois Riegl und die E n t s t e h u n g der a u t o n o m e n Kunstgeschichte am Fin de siecle". Fin de stecle Zu Literatur und Kunst

269

FROM STILUS TO STYLE

derjahrhundertwende (Studien zu Philosophie und 52 Literaturdes 19 Jahrhunderts, 35), Frankfurt/ Main 1977, 125-139 46 Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts, Garden Citv, 1955, 322 47 'Man kann erst da exakt arbeiten, wo es moglich 1st, den Strom der Erschemungen in festen Formen aufzufangen Diese festen Formen hefert der Phvsik zum Beispiel die Mechanik Die 53 Geisteswissenschaften entbehren noch dieser Grundlage, sie kann allein in der Psychologie gesucht werden Diese wurde auch der Kunstgeschichte erlauben, das einzelne auf ein allgemeines, auf Gesetze zuruckzufuhren" Heinnch Wolfflin, Kleine Schriften, Basel, 1946, 54 45f 48 "daB wir nicht nur am Anfang einer neuen Stilperiode, sondern zugleich lm Beginn einer 55 ganz neuen Kunst stehen, der Kunst mit Formen, die nichts bedeuten und nichts darstellen und an nichts erinnern" For the quotation from Endell see W Sauerlander, Fin de siecle Zu Literatur und Kurtst derjahrhundertwende, 133 56 49 For the "allgememste Darstellungsformen" see Heinnch Wolfflin, Kunstgeschichthche Grundbegnffe, 13th ed , Basel/Stuttgart, 1963, 26 For Riegl's definition see A Riegl, Spatromische Kunst57 lndustne, 2nd ed , Wien, 1927, 6 50 See Michael Bnx, Monika Steinhauser, "Geschichte lm Dienste der Baukunst Zur historistischen Architekturdiskussion in Deutschland", Geschichte alletn tst zettgemaf 58 Histortsmus in Deutschland, GieBen, 1978, 199-327 51 Julius von Schlosser, "Zur Genesis der mittelalterlichen Kunstanschauung", Praludien Vortrage und Aufsatze, Berlm, 1927, 180-212, especially 200 Peter Behrens wrote in the vear 1900 the follov\lng sentence "Der Stil lst ein Symbol des Gesamtempfindens, der ganzen Lebensaulfassung einer Zeit und zeigt sich nur lm Universum aller Kunste" See Peter Behrens (1868-1940) Gedenkschnft aus AnlaB der Ausstellung in Kaiserslautern, Hagen, Berlin, Darmstadt, W ini l%6/67, 31 "Das Wesentliche am LebensprozeB lst gerade die ungeheure gestaltende, von mnen her formenschalTende Gewalt, welche die 'auBeren Umstande' ausnutzt, ausbeutet" Friednch Nietzsche, Der H'llle zur Macht, (Ed Kroner) Stuttgart, 1930, 435 "die Ubertragung des Darwinismus auf ein Gebiet des Geistesleben" Alois Riegl, Stilfragen 2nded , Berlin 1923, Vllf "Oberstes KunstwoUen" Alois Riegl, Das hollandische Gruppenportrat, Wien, 1931, 261 This text had first appeared in "Jahrbuch der Kunstsammlungen des Allerhochsten Kaiserhauses", 1902 Aby Warburg, Italienische Kunst und Internationale Astrologie lm Palazzo Schifanoja zu Ferrara", Gesammelte Schnften, Leipzig/Berlin, 1932, vol II,461fr, especialH 478f "Les faux amateurs du svtle", "qui ont eleve le poncif aux honneurs du style" Charles Baudelaire, "Curiosites esthetiques", Ch Baudelaire, Oeuvres (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade), 780 "Le style excuse tout, dispense de tout et notatnment de la reflexion historique, ll enferme le spectateur dans la servitude d'un pur formahsme en sorte que les revolutions de style ne soient plus elles-memes que formelles" Roland Barthes, Mythologies (Edition du Seuil), Pans, 1970, 110

270