Eric Fernie, ed.
Phaidon Press, 1995

Antiquity - Beauty = perfection in the form of naturalism, ideal beauty, refinement.

Renaissance - Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Painters [1511-74]: Quality = naturalism or illusion attained in the representation. Beauty = artist’s success in selecting and combining the most beautiful parts of nature. Connoisseurship = sensitivity to form and close examination. Styles of artists, schools, periods, influences. Cycle of ages: biological concept of rise, maturity, and decay. Great work = tradition, but individual genius.

18th C - Johann Winckleman: History of art as opposed to history of artists. Culture is the organizing principle, not individual artist. Careful examination, technical progress, connoisseurship.

19th C - Giovanni Morelli: Empiricism - highly concentrated analysis, collection of documentary information, minute analysis, scientific inquiry. Function, material, technique. Idealism: GWF Hegel: works of art are manifestations of the spirit of the age, rather than individual actions or social forces. Alois Riegl: works carry the spiritual hallmarks of their time - art embodies the ‘will to form’ or aesthetic urge of the period. Jacob Burckhardt: cultural history [empiricism + idealism]: art is a player on a vast ethnographic map which embraces both material and spiritual spheres.

Early 20th - Cyclical theory abandoned. Modernist revolution = break w/ past, yet rooted in it. [Friedrich Nietzsche “tradition and innovation”]. Iconographical analysis to explore meaning, often w/ an added psychological dimension, biography of the artist important.

Middle 20th C - Erwin Panofsky: Pragmatic metaphysics - style and iconography Meyer Shapiro: social history of art - anthropology of art. Arnold Hauser: Marxist thesis that economic base conditions cultural superstructure thus styles vary according to the character of the dominant class.

Late 20th C - New art historians - away from art objects to focus on social context, ideology [structures of social power, and from there to politics, feminism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory].
Semiotics = the study of signs [oppositional pairings such as male/female, light/dark, nude/clothed, etc.].

Current - Study of art = a multiplicity of aims. Art = a register of broad economic, social, ideological, and psychological forces. Yet need to keep the art object in mind at the same time.