NOTES
- Le Corbusier, Oeuvre Complète, 1929–34, Zurich: Girsberg, 1964, p 24.
- S Giedion, Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1941, p 529. H Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1966.
- Described by M Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity: Art, Architecture, and History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. I have also relied on M Jarzombek, “De-Scribing the Language of Looking: Wolfflin and the History of Aesthetic Experientialism”, Assemblage, no 23, 1994.
- Parallel to my own reading of Wölfflin in translation I have relied on the secondary sources: J Goldhammer Hart, Heinrich Wölfflin: An Intellectual Biography, PhD Dissertation, UC Berkeley, 1981; Jarzombek, “De-Scribing the Language of Looking” and The Psychologizing of Modernity (Op.cit); and FJ Schwartz, “Cathedrals and Shoes: Concepts of Style in Wölfflin and Adorno” New German Critique 1999, No 76, 1999, pp 3–48.
- Although my main example of the locomotive subject's movement concerns the British picturesque, this did have some consideration in Wölfflin's milieu. Mark Jarzombek has informed me that Wölfflin's student Ludwig Volkmann considers the movement of the subject in his “Das Bewegfungsproblem in Der Bildenden Kunst” (The Problem of Movement in the Arts) in Führer Zur Kunst, Esslingen: Paul Neff Verlag, 1908. See Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity, p 112.
- H Wölfflin, “Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture,” in Empathy, Form and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics 1873–1893, HF Mallgrave and E Ikonomou, Santa Monica: Getty Center for the Arts and Humanities, 1994. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque.
- See Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form and Space, “Introduction” pp 1–88.
- Scholars including Rykwert have argued that anthropomorphism in the sense of a relation to the exterior form of the body ends in the eighteenth century. J Rykwert, The First Moderns: The Architects of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1980. However, it is possible to argue that this issue continues in a general question of the body, whether that is conceived as biological functions, or psychical form, and this is particularly the case with the kinesthetic aspects of German empathy theory.
- “Of great interest is the relation of the proportions to the rate of breathing. It cannot be doubted that very narrow proportions produce the impression of an almost breathless and hurried upward striving. Naturally we immediately associate them with the idea of tightness, which makes it impossible to continue to breathe deeply with the necessary lateral expansion. Thus Gothic proportions are oppressive…”: Wölfflin, “Prolegomena”, p 169.
- Wölfflin does not discuss human motion, nor actual subject position at all in Renaissance and Baroque. He does so very occasionally twenty seven years later in Principles first published in 1915. (Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, trans. MD Hottinger, New York: Dover, 1950). The contrasting closed-ness and open-ness of forms described in Renaissance and Baroque is extended by Wölfflin's claim that Renaissance architecture was indifferent lo view point, while Baroque architecture “restricts the space at the spectator's disposal so that it may the more certainly achieve the effects it has at its heart.”: Principles, p 64. This very small concession to specificity might well be related to an increased understanding of the picturesque (marked by the introduction of the term “picturesque movement-effect” which I discuss later in this paper).
- G Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H Tomlinson and B Habberjam, New York: Zone, 1988. G Deleuze, Cinema I: The Movement Image, trans. H Tomlinson and B Habberjam, London: Athlone Press, 1986. G Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, trans. H Tomlinson and R Galeta, London: Athlone, 1989. I also rely on a commentary on Deleuze's work on cinema; DN Rodowick Gilles Deleuze's Time Machine, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1997. According to Rodowick, Deleuze takes the general frame of his inquiry into cinema from Wölfflin's idea of that art history was a history of “imaginative beholding”. Deleuze's Time Machine, p 5, referring to Wölfflin, Principles, p vi. It is also the case that Deleuze's understanding of Baroque architecture is largely from Wölfflin. Thanks to Anthony Vidler, for pointing this out to me. G Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans, forward and trans. T Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press, 1993.
- According to Deleuze, Cinema I, p 66.
- The picturesque as I am obliged to simplify it here, is largely based on my readings of U Price, Essays on the Picturesque: As Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful and, on the Use of Studying Pictures for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape, 3 vols., London: J. Mawman, 1810. Price, although he is not the most original nor philosophically adept theorist of the picturesque, is its central figure, setting the terms of the later debate which always returns to this book.
- U Price, “Essay on Architecture and Building”, Essays on the Picturesque, vol 2. pp 171–370. There is much in common between Wölfflin and John Ruskin's attempts to define a higher from a lower picturesque. “The Higher picturesque” might be an alternative translation of Das malerische Sch while being less etymologically accurate, it better shows the intellectual history. See my J Macarthur, “The Heartlessness of the Picturesque: Sympathy and Disgust in Ruskin's Aesthetics,” Assemblage: A Critical Journal of Architecture and Design Culture, no. 32, 1997, pp 127–141.
- Linear and painterly is the master opposition which had developed in Renaissance and Baroque and Classic Art and is developed in Principles. In the intervening period Wölfflin had become much more idealist, successful, and less reliant on giving his psychology of art the authority of science. Mark Jarzombek argues that empathy theory had by then lost all currency in the new science of psychology, and begun its second life as the purely cultural concept of aesthetic experientialism. Jarzombek, The Psychologizing of Modernity.
- Although I am examining here the relation of the painterly to the earlier picturesque it is also related to an earlier opposition between Poussinistes (line) and the Rubenistes (colour). Shearer West, Bloomsbury Guide to Art, New York: Prentice Hall, 1996.
- Wölfflin, Principles, pp 23–27.
- Here I have referred to the German edition with the assistance and advice of Mark Jarzombek. H Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Gründbegriffe: Das Probleme der Stilentwicklung in Der Neueren Kunst, München: Bruckmann, c1915.
- Wölfflin, Principles, pp 23–27 and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, pp 39–42.
- Here and on the next page Wöfflin means people moving in the scene and not the moving observer.
- Wölfflin, Principles, p 23–24.
- If we see this through the position of Bergson then Wölfflin's apparent prevarication on this point shows the limits of the dualism of the subject and object. If we see this issue through the cultural practices of the picturesque we could say that the triumph of philosophical aesthetic subjectivism leaves a problem of what the actual art object is, a problem which reverberates in modernism. See my J Macarthur, “The Look of the Object,” Assemblage: a Critical Journal of Architcture and Design Culture, no. 41, 2001, p 48.
- Wölfflin, Principles, p 25.
- That Benjamin was there I have learned from Thomas Levin. TY Levin, “Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History: An Introduction to “Rigorous Study of Art History””, October, no. 47, 1988, pp 77–83. That Wölfflin was lecturing from the text of Principles is established by Martin Warnke: M Warnke, “On Heinrich Wölfflin,” Representations 27, 1989, pp 172–187.
- In a letter to Belmore quoted by Levin “Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History”.
- According to J McCole, Walter Benjamin and the Antimonies of Tradition, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993, p 127, fn 11.
- Letters to Fritz Radt November 21, December 4, 1915 quoted in Levin “Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History” p 79.
- Benjamin inx Levin, “Walter Benjamin and the Theory of Art History”, p 79.
- W Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Mechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations, H Arendt (ed), New York: Schocken Books, 1955, pp 211–44, p 216.
- The works of Alois Riegl, and his contrast of the hapitc and the optic are an important source for Wölfflin's opposition to the linear and the painterly, and for Benjamin's opposition of the optical to the tactile in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations, H Arendt (Ed), New York: Schocken Books, 1968. See A Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, trans. R Winkes, Roma: Giorgio Bretschneider Editore, 1985 (first published 1901), and Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, Wien: A Schroll, 1903.
- Wölfflin, Principles, p 21.
- W Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty”, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p 333.
- See S Weber Nicholsen, “Aesthetic Theory's Mimesis of Walter Benjamin,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, T and L Huhne, Zuidervaart (eds), Cambridge, Mass. and London: Massachusetts Institute of Technolgy Press, 1997.
- Imitation is another issue linking Wölfflin and the picturesque. Reynolds and following him, Price, explicitly state that the value of architecture to the theory of art is that it limits and complicates the role of imitation in art. The example is Vanburgh's buildings which were held to imitate movement despite their lack of sensuous motion.
- Sir Joshua Reynolds, “Discourse XIII” in Discourses on Art, RR Wark (ed), New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1975, pp 229–244.
- Reynolds, “Discourse XIII”, p 244.
- Reynolds, “Discourse XIII”, p 243.
- Reynolds does not mention Adam by name.
- R Adam, Works in Architecture of Robert and James Adam, London, 1773, p v quoted in D Watkin, The English Vision: The Picturesque in Architecture, Landscape, and Garden Design, London: John Murray, 1982, p 97.
- In this section I draw on a seminar on Benjamin's concept of interruption by Samuel Weber at Queensland University of Technology, in May 1997.
- Benjamin, “What Is Epic Theatre?”, in Illuminations, p 145.
- Benjamin, “What is Epic Theatre?”, p 148.
- W Benjamin, “The Author as Producer”, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiogrpahical Writings, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p 236.
- Keith Broadfoot has reminded me of the etymology of aura in the Greek word for breath.