‘Towards an “exakte Kunstwissenschaft”(?). Part II: The new German art history in the nineteenth century: a summary of some problems'

Abstract

This article is based on what has been outlined in ‘Part I’ and on additional references to other new German work, as well as to articles by two of the protagonists of the 1870s and 1880s, Anton Springer and Moritz Thausing. The central issue is the nineteenth century’s desire for a Verwissenschaftlichung of the subject, to render the subject ‘purely scientific’. Principally this concerns the way in which older kinds of connoisseurship were juxtaposed to the new claims of a strictly ‘historical’ approach. Much shorter sections touch on aspects of style, iconography and form, as well as on the history of the provision of illustrations.

Keywords

• German nineteenth century art history writing
• Rumohr
• Kugler
• Schnaase
• Burckhardt
• Springer
• Justi
• Schelling’s
• Hegel’s philosophy of art
• Empiricism
• connoisseurship
• biographical approaches
• iconography
• formalism