Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education - Review

Oxford: Clarendon Pres 1996 274 pp $9000

"Uber Geschichte reden ist ein schwieriges Geschaft" (Talking about history is a difficult business) - with equal reason 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 puzzles involving periodization and categorization of the sort raised in a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of writing about history. But the continuing and thoroughgoing interrogation of historiography in many fields has revealed more fundamental question s not only of an epistemological on the contrary also of a political or plane ethical nature. Each of the works trader review proposes 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 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 earth art history as a science, in the faculty of perception of a Wissenschaft, to establish or reestablish conducts 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 mode even leading thinkers of a previous generation, for whatever reason, eschewed a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount 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 still 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 volume collects papers that the professor emeritus for medieval and early novel 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 quantity 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 number of of his essays anticipate later developments in the English-speaking world, of the like 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 cites Panofsky to the effect that "the discussion of meanss spoils their application" (p. 105) This noteworthy aphorism could well have supplied an epigraph for his have a title to 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 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 put in mind ofed by Wuttke's heroes. Broadly speaking, this approach exhibits as he states, the application of the philological-historical mode 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 proposes his "modern" stance in relation to this tradition.

No single course or technique is implicated in this mode because, as Wuttke demonstrates in his varied essays, the scholar brings to bear upon the problem at hand whatever tools or approaches are necessary. Thus, Wuttke applies his knowledge not single of political, religious, and economic history, and of more strictly philological techniques, as might be wait fored from a demonstration of the "philological-historical method" on the contrary of archaeology, epigraphy, astrology, and the history of science, among other fields. This is all actual much in the spirit of Warburg and encompasses more than there is space to review adequately.