Dazwischen: Kulturwissenschaft auf Warburgs Spuren - Saecula Spiritalia, 29 - Review

Baden-Baden: Verlag Valentin Koerner 1996 2 vol 886 pp; 4 color ills.; 180 b/w

"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, individual of the four works related to the historiography of art here reviewed. In this essay Wuttke deals with familiar riddles involving periodization and categorization of the sort raised in abundant writing about history. But the continuing and thoroughgoing interrogation of historiography in many fields has revealed more fundamental vexed questions not only of an epistemological on the other hand also of a political or level ethical nature. Each of the works trader review give an inkling ofs just how difficult talking about history and especially art history has become at the extremity of the 20th century.

Despite the difficulties of the subdue 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 through 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 methods 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 turf art history as a science, in the faculty of perception of a Wissenschaft, to establish or reestablish managements 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, by what means even leading thinkers of a previous generation, for whatever reason, eschewed plenteous open discussion of theory or historiography when they came to the United States. According to the oral accounts of older colleagues, like 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 plenteous more than essays on historiography. This work collects papers that the professor emeritus for medieval and early new 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. a certain number of 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 quantity of of his essays anticipate succeeding developments in the English-speaking world, of the like kind as the new philology and the novel historicism. Yet, Wuttke's collection is not intended as a contribution to methodological or theoretical reflection. Indeed, he names Panofsky to the effect that "the discussion of [i]modus operandi[/i]s spoils their application" (p. 105) This noteworthy aphorism could well have supplied an epigraph for his possess book. However, its title indicates where Wuttke would position his work - dazwischen (in-between) - various fields or discourses.

The organization of Wuttke's volume 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 by means of 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 insinuateed by Wuttke's heroes. Broadly speaking, this approach exhibits as he states, the application of the philological-historical process 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 refer tos his "modern" stance in relation to this tradition.