'(Un)richtige Aufnahme': Renaissance sculpture and the visual historiography of art history

Journal article

Extract
‘How should one photograph sculpture?’ asked Heinrich Wölfflin in the titles of three ground-breaking articles on the subject published in 1896–97 and 1915 (plate 1).1 Few art historians have seriously considered the question, not just in regard to photographing Italian Renaissance sculpture, which was Wölfflin's main concern in these publications, but works of art in general.2 Examining both how and why art works have been photographed and otherwise reproduced, however, can tell us a great deal about what one might call the ‘visual historiography’ of art history as a discipline. For instance, Wölfflin's highly influential pairs of formalist terms for analysing works of art published in 1915 in his Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe may well have emerged from his close consideration of photographs of sculpture, a suggestion that will be discussed in greater detail below.3 This essay follows Wölfflin's lead in using the visual reproduction of Italian Renaissance sculpture by canonical figures such as Donatello, Michelangelo and their contemporaries to explore the implications of one of the central features of art history: while art historians ostensibly study things, in practice, they often look at images of things more than at the things themselves. The result is that art history has been, almost since its inception as an academic discipline in the mid-nineteenth century, a ‘history of that which can be photographed’, as André Malraux famously stated – albeit a ‘history’ that has also always simultaneously contested its reliance on photography.4

Authors: Johnson, GA

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Art History
• Volume: 36
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 12–51
• Publication date: 2012-07-26
• DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2012.00917.x
• EISSN: 1467-8365
• ISSN: 0141-6790
• Language: English