German Art History and Scientific Thought

A fresh contribution to the ongoing debate between Kunstwissenschaft (scientific study of art) and Kunstgeschichte (art history) this essay collection explores how German-speaking art historians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century self-consciously generated a field of study. Prominent North American and European scholars provide new insights into how a mixing of diverse methodologies took place in order to gain a more subtle and comprehensive understanding of how art history became institutionalized and legitimized in Germany. One common assumption about early art-historical writing in Germany is that it depended upon a simplistic and narrowly-defined formalism. This book helps to correct this stereotype by demonstrating the complexity of discussion surrounding formalist concerns and by examining how German-speaking art historians borrowed incorporated stole and made analogies with concepts from the sciences in formulating their methods. In focusing on the work of some of the well-known 'fathers' of the discipline - such as Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wölfflin - as well as on lesser-known figures the essays in this volume provide illuminating and sometimes surprising treatments of art history's prior and understudied interactions with a wide range of scientific orientations from psychology sociology and physiognomics to evolutionism and comparative anatomy.