Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image - Review

Ithaca: Cornell University Pres 1996 214 pp; 60 b/w ills. $3995 $1595 paper

"Uber Geschichte reden ist ein schwieriges Geschaft" (Talking about history is a difficult business) - in the way that begins Dieter Wuttke's "Renaissance-Humanismus und Naturwissenschaft in Deutschland." These are the initial words in the next to the first volume of Wuttke's collected essays, single of the four works related to the historiography of art here reviewed. In this essay Wuttke deals with familiar point in disputes involving periodization and categorization of the sort raised in a great deal of writing about history. But the continuing and thoroughgoing interrogation of historiography in many fields has revealed more fundamental moot points not only of an epistemological on the other hand also of a political or flat ethical nature. Each of the works trader review refer tos just how difficult talking about history and especially art history has become at the extreme point of the 20th century.

Despite the difficulties of the make submissive these books demonstrate that the healthy theoretical and methodological consciousness that has grown within art history during the past quarter-century can now claim a broader interest.(1) Literature related to the historiography of art participates in a more general rethinking of the humanities. As evidenced by means of his presence in two of the volumes art historians examined here, the efforts of Michel Foucault, among others, to investigate the archaeology of the human sciences - the origins and metamorphoses of scholarship as manifestations of way s of thinking and "discourse" in past ages - has stimulated this proces in part. Beyond Foucault, this revival can also be regarded as a reckoning with or reexamination of premises that might loam art history as a science, in the faculty of perception of a Wissenschaft, to establish or reestablish processs and practices of the discipline. In this regard the self-consciousness of art historians is salutary, because this attention was lengthy overdue, especially in the United States. It is remarkable, for instance, in what manner even leading thinkers of a previous generation, for whatever reason, eschewed a great deal of open discussion of theory or historiography when they came to the United States. According to the oral accounts of older colleagues, similar discussions were absent, for example, in Erwin Panofsky's teaching at Princeton from the 1940 notwithstanding even though scholars in other fields have taken up the discussion of historiography - while Soussloff and Holly were trained as art historians, Wuttke and Morrison are primarily scholars of literature - these works nevertheless suggest that writing about the historiography of art history has become increasingly problematic.

Strictly speaking, Dieter Wuttke's Dazwischen: Kulturwissenschaft auf Warburgs Spuren contains abundant more than essays on historiography. This work collects papers that the professor emeritus for medieval and early late literature at the University of Bamberg had produc during a span of thirty years upon a wide variety of topics. It contains important contributions to German humanism and its relation to the visual arts and to the so-called sciences. more [i]or[/i] less of these, especially Wuttke's essay upon Conrad Celtis and Albrecht Durer have serv later historians' work upon topics such as German artists' self-portraits. Moreover, as Wuttke himself says in his introduction, a certain number of of his essays anticipate succeeding developments in the English-speaking world, of that kind as the new philology and the of recent origin historicism. Yet, Wuttke's collection is not intended as a contribution to methodological or theoretical reflection. Indeed, he repeats Panofsky to the effect that "the discussion of modes spoils their application" (p. 105) This noteworthy aphorism could well have supplied an epigraph for his have book. However, its title indicates where Wuttke would position his work - dazwischen (in-between) - various fields or discourses.

The organization of Wuttke's work his subtitle, and explicit remarks that he makes in a number of places indicate quite clearly, however, the direction of his research and its relation to a specific historiographic tradition. Wuttke dioceses his work as inspired through and in the tradition of Aby Warburg, as well as that of sum of two units other scholars whom he particularly honors, Panofsky and Ernst Robert Curtius. Employing the topos of dwarfs standing upon the shoulders of giants, Curtius uses the rubric " . auf deren Schultern wir stehen" ( . on whose shoulders we stand) to organize the next to the first section of his essays, largely of a panegyric and descriptive nature, upon Panofsky, Curtius, Warburg, and his library. The first section consists of Falle (cases) that exemplify the approach proposeed by Wuttke's heroes. Broadly speaking, this approach shows as he states, the application of the philological-historical course of the 19th century that he says Warburg applied to art and more generally to cultural history. His image of dwarfs upon the shoulders of giants intimates his "modern" stance in relation to this tradition.