Plainmetric Compositions

Symposium:
The 100th Anniversary of Wölfflin’s Principles of Art

History
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Bence Nanay
Two-Dimensional Versus Three-Dimensional
Pictorial Organization
i Painterly: “the primary element of the impres-

sion is things seen as patches”6
There are many ways of depicting a three-
dimensional scene in two dimensions. Some of
these will look odd or ugly, some others may b. Planimetric versus Recessive:
look better. The problem of arranging a three- Planimetric: “reduces the parts of a total form
dimensional scene on a two-dimensional surface to a sequence of planes”7
is the problem of pictorial organization.1 There Recessive: “emphasises depth”8
are many reasons why we should pay more atten-
tion to Heinrich Wölfflin’s work on the centenary
c. Tectonic versus A-tectonic (or, closed versus
of the publication of his seminal work, Principles
open form):
of Art History (or, in a more accurate translation,
Tectonic: “the picture is dominated in all its
The Fundamental Concepts of Art History), but
parts by the opposition of vertical
what I take to be the most important of these is
and horizontal” and “pictorial ele-
that no one did more than Wölfflin for allowing
ments are grouped round a central
us to talk sensibly about pictorial organization—a
axis or, if this does not exist, so as
topic strangely missing from contemporary ana-
to produce a perfect balance of the
lytic aesthetics.2
two halves of the picture”9
Wölfflin famously gave us five pairs of concepts,
A-tectonic: “aversion from stabilisation about
which he called the fundamental concepts of art
a middle axis”10
history, to make it easier to talk about pictorial
organization: Linear versus Painterly, Plane ver-
sus Recession, Closed versus Open form, Multi- d. Multiplicity versus Unity:
plicity versus Unity, and Absolute versus Relative Multiplicity: “the single parts, however
clarity.3 Here is a brief characterization of these firmly they may be rooted in
pairs of concepts:4 the whole, maintain certain
independence”11
a. Linear versus Painterly: Unity: “abolishes the uniform indepen-
Linear: “the sense and beauty of things is dence of the parts in favour of a
first sought in the outline”5 more unified total motive”12
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 73:2 Spring 2015
C 2015 The American Society for Aesthetics
150 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
e. Absolute versus Relative clarity(or, clearness The most charitable interpretation of Wölfflin’s
versus unclearness): categories from the point of view of understand-
Absolute clarity: “exhaustive revelation of ing pictorial organization, which is my project
form”13 here, is to interpret the “fundamental cate-
Relative clarity: “pictorial appearance no gories” to be genuinely fundamental, that is, ap-
longer coincides with the plicable to all art-historical eras, including the
maximum of objective clear- “primitives.”18 But this way of resolving the ambi-
ness, but evades it”14 guity of Wölfflin’s account opens it up to yet an-
other important worry, namely, that he projected
This conceptual apparatus, and Wölfflin’s oeuvre late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century for-
mal categories back to much earlier periods—

in general, has been heavily criticized in the last
hundred years.15 My aim here is not to defend concepts that sixteenth- or seventeenth-century
Wölfflin from these critical remarks but rather to artists and observers were not aware of. In this
expand the conceptual apparatus he offers us for sense, Wölfflin’s analysis is anachronistic.19
understanding pictorial organization in a way that It has also been questioned how the five pairs of
is hopefully less problematic than his original five concepts overlap: while Wölfflin’s official account
pairs of concepts. is that linear, closed form, plane, absolute clar-
ity, and multiplicity are aligned, it is possible that
they come apart. For example, a painting can be
ii both tectonic and painterly.20 It is not clear to me
whether this is a problematic aspect of Wölfflin’s
Probably the most widespread reason for mistrust- account—definitely not if we think of these con-
ing Wölfflin’s “fundamental concepts” is the way cepts as applicable to any picture of any period.21
Wölfflin applied these concepts to the differences Another often-voiced worry is that these con-
between sixteenth- and seventeenth-century style. cepts are too abstract: they had no chance of
Wölfflin’s aim was to elucidate the differences be- capturing the differences between sixteenth- and
tween the way pictures are composed in the six- seventeenth-century style because they are too
teenth and seventeenth centuries, say, Dürer’s and coarse-grained. If we want to talk about the pic-
Rembrandt’s paintings. He does this by describ- torial organization of a particular style, let alone
ing sixteenth-century pictures as linear, planimet- of particular artworks, we would need much more
ric, tectonic, and characterized by multiplicity and fine-grained categories.
absolute clarity. Seventeenth-century pictures, in Finally, one may wonder why there are five (and
contrast, are painterly, recessive, and a-tectonic not four or six) pairs of concepts. In fact, it has
and exhibit unity and relative clarity. been argued that the fourth and the fifth pair
Wölfflin seems to have two goals with this (Multiplicity versus Unity and Absolute versus
conceptual apparatus: first, to provide an abstract Relative clarity) are redundant and the real work
characterization of pictorial organization that is done by the first three pairs of concepts.22 More
could, in principle, be applied to all pictures, made generally, one may want to know more about what
anywhere and in any historical period.16 But he makes just these five pairs of concepts the “fun-
also wanted to give an abstract account of the dif- damental” concepts of art history.
ference between the pictures of the sixteenth and These last two worries need to be addressed
seventeenth centuries. These two goals are not al- if we want to use Wölfflin’s account as a start-
ways easy to reconcile, as evidenced by Wölfflin’s ing point for thinking about pictorial organization.
suspiciously frequently repeated warning that His fundamental concepts are too coarse-grained
what he is doing is to give abstract categories, and they are singled out in a somewhat unmoti-
not a description of two specific art historic eras. vated manner. The aim of this article is not to de-
This ambiguity is especially salient in Wölfflin’s fend Wölfflin but to use the original Wölfflinian
treatment of fifteenth-century art (or, the “prim- insights to give an account of not just five pairs
itives,” as he calls it), which he often describes of categories but an entire hierarchy of categories
as not falling under any of his “fundamental for talking about pictorial organization. This may
concepts,” which, of course, makes one wonder not be as radical a departure from Wölfflin’s
how “fundamental” these concepts really are.17 original project as it seems: Wölfflin himself
Symposium The 100th Anniversary of Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History 151
emphasized repeatedly that what he calls iii

“painterly” or “tectonic” are not to be considered
to be monolithic categories: “painterly” in the I want to differentiate between two very different
Low Countries is very different from “painterly” ways of organizing pictorial elements at a very
in Italy, for example. He was also quick to ac- abstract level:
knowledge that even in different decades of the
seventeenth century, “painterly” underwent very (2D) two-dimensionally: pictorial elements are orga-
significant changes. So it could be argued that nized and grouped according to their outline shape on
Wölfflin himself was keen to set up a hierarchy of the picture surface; and
concepts for each of his ten fundamental concepts:
early Italian painterly and late Dutch painterly, for

(3D) three-dimensionally: pictorial elements are orga-
example, are very different.
nized and grouped according to their position in the
Nothing is particularly radical so far—we
depicted space.
need to contextualize the general and abstract
Wölfflinian categories in order to put them to
good use. The radical move comes now. I argue It is important that both two-dimensional
that we should extend Wölfflin’s conceptual appa- and three-dimensional pictorial organization are
ratus not only toward the more fine-grained direc- about arranging a three-dimensional scene on the
tion but also toward the more coarse-grained one. two-dimensional surface. The difference between
In other words, while we clearly need to add nar- them concerns how the three-dimensional ele-
rower and more contextualized categories to the ments are organized to give us a two-dimensional
original ones, we also need to add broader, even composition. So the distinction has nothing to do
more abstract and even more general categories. with the invention of linear perspective. A picture
Given that one main worry about Wölfflin’s ac- can use linear perspective and still be composed
count is that his concepts are too abstract, adding in a two-dimensional manner—in fact, this is true
categories that are even more abstract may seem for most late-fifteenth-century Italian paintings.24
crazy. But I argue that this move can help us to Suppose you need to depict seven identical
deal with worries about the perceived randomness spheres. On the most general level, there are
of Wölfflin’s original categories and with the un- two ways of doing this: You can arrange the
resolved issues about the relation between them. seven spheres in space and then choose a van-
Even this move may not be entirely against the tage point in this space from which you want to
spirit of Wölfflin’s project: he talks about the five depict them. Or you can arrange seven circles
pairs of fundamental concepts as “different roots (the outline shapes of the seven spheres) on the
of one plant and as “one and the same thing, but two-dimensional surface of the picture. The for-
seen from a different standpoint.”23 My aim is to mer method is an instance of three-dimensional
explicate what this “one plant” is. pictorial organization, whereas the latter one is
So I propose a hierarchy of concepts— an instance of two-dimensional pictorial organi-
Wölfflin’s original concepts focused on one level zation.
of this hierarchy only (and a fairly abstract and One can completely ignore the two-
general level). We should extend it both down- dimensional pictorial organization of the picture
ward and, more surprisingly, upward. I suspect and focus entirely on the three-dimensional
that some will find this way of coming up with one—this is the way most of us take snapshots at
even more fundamental concepts of art history parties. Or one can ignore the three-dimensional
than Wölfflin himself too ambitious. But as long as pictorial organization and focus entirely on the
we have such a hierarchy of concepts in place, one two-dimensional one—children’s drawings often
can, according to one’s theoretical preferences, have this kind of pictorial organization.
use whichever level in this hierarchy seems the But most often one pays attention to both—
most useful for particular pictorial analysis. The in fact, when taking a snapshot at a party,
aim of this article is to describe this more general we often try to fit everyone into the frame and
pair of concepts, which I call two-dimensional and we also often try not to have someone’s face com-
three-dimensional pictorial organization. pletely occluded by someone else’s hair. What
makes the distinction between two-dimensional painterly or a-tectonic styles are among these.
and three-dimensional pictorial organization es- As Wölfflin says, the five pairs of fundamental
pecially interesting is that even in those cases concepts are “different roots of one plant,” and
where both of these ways of composing a picture they are really “one and the same thing, but seen
are taken into consideration, as is most often the from a different standpoint.”25 Linear, tectonic,
case, one tends to dominate—in case there is a and planilinear are the roots of the plant of (2D)
conflict between the two-dimensional and three- pictorial organization then. And, to stretch this
dimensional pictorial organization, one of them metaphor even further, the plant can stand even
tends to win out systematically. if some of its roots are missing. In other words,
An oversimplified way of applying this distinc- (2D) pictorial organization does make linear, tec-
tion to the history of pictures in Western Europe tonic, or planilinear styles more likely, but it does

would be to say that while (2D) was dominant not necessitate any of them. Let us go through
until the sixteenth century, from the sixteenth cen- the five pairs of original Wölfflinian concepts and
tury onward, the challenge was how to combine examine how they are related to the distinction
(2D) and (3D). Interestingly, this transition hap- between (2D) and (3D) pictorial organization.26
pened much later in non-Western European art— One of Wölfflin’s most informative character-
in Mughal paintings, Russian icons, or Japanese izations of the tectonic versus a-tectonic style al-
prints. ready points in the direction of the (2D) versus
It is important to emphasize that I am not en- (3D) distinction: “In the tectonic style, the content
dorsing the claim that the differences in the style of is made to fit into the already given space, in the
the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries could a-tectonic the relationship between space and fill-
be described, even partially, as the difference ing is apparently adventitious.”27 While Wölfflin
between two-dimensional and three-dimensional does not make it explicit what kind of space it is
pictorial organization. Rather, the sixteenth cen- that content is made to fit into, it should be clear
tury tended to resolve conflicts between (2D) and that it is the two-dimensional space of the picture
(3D) in favor of (2D), whereas the seventeenth surface from the following quote: “It was natural
century tended to resolve conflicts between (2D) to [the tectonic style] to take its direction, in filling
and (3D) in favor of (3D). But even this is a very its picture, from the given surface.”28 This sounds
vague approximation—I do not think that the dif- very much like the defining feature of (2D) pic-
ferences between the pictorial organization of the torial organization. More generally, the verticals,
sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries can be the horizontals, and the central axis, which are the
fully accounted for in these terms. main compositional ingredients of tectonic style,
are features of the picture surface. To organize a
picture according to its verticals and horizontals
iv or to organize it around a (real or implied) central
axis is to compose it in a (2D) manner.
I outlined two concepts that could be considered In the discussion of the last pair of concepts,
to be the “even more fundamental concepts of art of Absolute and Relative clarity, Wölfflin says
history”: two-dimensional and three-dimensional that “life does not arrange its scenes in such
pictorial organization. They are supposed to a way that we can see everything and that the
provide a higher-level pair of concepts in the hi- content of what is happening determines the
erarchy of the Wölfflinian conceptual apparatus. grouping.”29 The implication is that pictures that
But then the question arises: What is the relation are composed in a way that maximizes abso-
between Wölfflin’s actual categories and the lute clarity (that is, sixteenth-century pictures)
new categories I introduced? Does the painterly do arrange their scenes in such a way that we
or the a-tectonic logically imply or necessitate can see everything. Wölfflin’s memorable exam-
three-dimensional pictorial organization? Does ple is the depiction of hands in sixteenth-century
three-dimensional pictorial organization imply or and seventeenth-century pictures: in Leonardo’s
necessitate painterly or a-tectonic style? Last Supper, Wölfflin’s main example for
I want to argue that there is no logical entail- sixteenth-century pictorial organization, twenty-
ment either way. There are many ways of achiev- six out of the twenty-six hands of the thirteen de-
ing three-dimensional pictorial organization, and picted characters are visible. In the Staalmeesters
by Rembrandt, again, Wölfflin’s main represen- them as fully general, a similar reinterpretation
tative for seventeenth-century pictorial organiza- of the original Wölfflinian categories may be
tion, only five out of the twelve hands of the six needed in order to fully align the (2D) versus
depicted characters are visible. But showing all the (3D) distinction with the Wölfflinian categories.
hands of all the depicted characters is something To sum up the argument in this section, the
that only makes sense if we follow (2D) picto- Wölfflinian categories are various different ways
rial organization: to make sure that all twenty- of achieving (2D) and (3D) pictorial organization,
six hands fit into the frame and are not occluded which could be labeled as the “even more fun-
by something else (see the next section for more damental concepts of art history.” And the five
on occlusion). Absolute clarity makes much more Wölfflinian categories achieve (2D) and (3D) pic-
sense in a (2D) than in a (3D) framework. torial organization in very different ways. But this

The same goes for the other three pairs of cat- leaves open the question about whether there are
egories: lines are primarily elements that belong others ways of achieving (2D) and (3D) pictorial
to the two-dimensional surface, whereas areas of organization. And I do not see why there could
light and darkness could be, at least under some not be. I devote the next section to another way
interpretation, more naturally thought of as ele- of doing so, which would give rise to another pair
ments of the three-dimensional depicted space.30 of concepts that could be added to the Wölfflinian
Planimetric compositions are defined by a se- toolkit.
quence of planes that are parallel to the picture
surface—again, a stereotypically (2D) way of or-
ganizing the picture’s content (but, again, the or-
ganized content is very much three-dimensional). v
And, finally, holistic unity, which is contrasted with
multiplicity, is very difficult to achieve if one sticks I argued for a hierarchy of concepts to supplement
to (2D) pictorial organization. And multiplicity is Wölfflin’s five pairs of “fundamental categories”:
probably even more difficult to maintain if one We should extend these categories downward, to-
follows a (3D) pictorial organization. ward the more fine-grained direction. And we
I cannot give full justice to the interesting should also extend them upward, toward the more
conceptual connections between Wölfflin’s abstract direction. But if we accept that there is an
categories and the (2D) versus (3D) pictorial even higher level of describing the five pairs of
organization distinction. And this connection is Wölfflinian categories in terms of (2D) and (3D)
further complicated by the fact that, as we have pictorial organization, then nothing should stop us
seen above, it is not clear whether Wölfflin’s cat- from adding different ways in which the (2D) and
egories are supposed to capture the sixteenth and (3D) pictorial organization could be achieved.
seventeenth-century pictorial styles or something This should not strike anyone as a sacrilege:
more general. In my framework, both (2D) and In Renaissance and Baroque, published in 1888,
(3D) pictorial organization are present in both twenty-seven years before the Principles of Art
the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, and the History, Wölfflin gave only three characteris-
challenge is to reconcile these two very different tic features of the baroque era: “areas of light
ways of composing pictures. And the difference and shade,” “the dissolution of the regular,” and
between the sixteenth and the seventeenth cen- “elusiveness.”31 These three features are the pre-
turies is the way these two different methods of decessors of the five pairs of fundamental cate-
pictorial organization are reconciled or combined: gories in the later work. A very general gloss about
the sixteenth century subjugates (3D) to (2D), the relation between the three aspects in 1888 and
whereas the seventeenth century reverses this the five categories in 1915 is that “areas of light
order. But it is important to emphasize that (2D) and shade” became “painterly,” “elusiveness” be-
pictorial organization is not to be equated with the came “relative clarity,” and “the dissolution of the
sixteenth century and (3D) pictorial organization regular” was split in the other three concepts: re-
is not to be equated with the seventeenth century. cession, open form, and unity (as Wölfflin talks
Given that Wölfflin oscillates between thinking about all three in Renaissance and Baroque under
of concepts like linear, tectonic, or planimetric the heading of “the dissolution of the regular”).32
as typical of sixteenth century and as thinking of If we can add even more categories, this would
give us an even richer hierarchy of the fundamen- At the bottom of the picture, two child angels repre-
tal concepts of art history. sent ordinary nature, as a foil to the superhuman. Has it
My aim in this section is to add a sixth pair been observed that the larger of them has but one wing?
of “fundamental categories” to the existing five (a Raphael avoided the overlapping of a second wing for he
pair that has its roots in Wölfflin’s earlier writings). did not want too massive an effect at the base, a license
It is occlusion versus no occlusion. which is all of a piece with others of the classic style.36
In the case of three-dimensional pictorial or-
ganization, we should expect lots of occlusion: if In Renaissance and Baroque, Wölfflin considered
pictorial elements are organized and grouped ac- occlusion to be so important that he took it to be
cording to their position in the depicted space, the mark of one of three key features of painterly
nothing should prevent some of these pictorial el- style, namely, “elusiveness.” So we would need to

ements occluding one another. In the case of two- find more on occlusion in the discussion of Abso-
dimensional pictorial organization, in contrast, we lute versus Relative clarity in the Principles, but
should expect the relative lack of occlusion: if there is hardly more than a sentence in passing.37
pictorial elements are organized and grouped ac- An interesting question is why Wölfflin aban-
cording to their outline shape on the picture sur- doned the lack of occlusion as an important fea-
face, the possibility of occlusion is something that ture of the seventeenth century and a defining
an artist needs to explicitly consider—and this, feature of Relative clarity, especially as the rela-
at least in the history of Western painting (es- tion to how occlusion is treated clearly changed
pecially up until the sixteenth century), mostly around the end of the sixteenth century—exactly
meant something the artist explicitly wanted to when Absolute clarity was supposed to give way to
avoid.33 Relative clarity in Wölfflin’s system. One nice il-
Wölfflin himself took occlusion to mark a very lustration of this is the comparison between differ-
important distinction between the art of the six- ent versions of the same composition of Bruegel’s
teenth and the seventeenth centuries in his first The Census at Bethlehem, one painted in 1566 by
book, the 1888 Renaissance and Baroque, where Pieter the Elder and the other painted in 1610
he writes: by Pieter the Younger. There are very few dif-
ferences between the two paintings (which hang
side by side in the museum in Brussels), but all of
It is characteristic of ‘painterly disorder’ that individ- them seem to be dictated by a move toward more
ual objects should be not fully and clearly represented, occlusion.
but partially hidden. The overlapping of one object by My explanation for why Wölfflin abandoned
another is one of the most important devices for the the occlusion versus lack of occlusion distinction
achievement of painterliness, for it is recognized that in the Principles is that this pair of concepts makes
the eye quickly tires of anything in a painting that can the ambiguity in Wölfflin’s general project, noted
be fully grasped at first glance. But if some parts of the at the very beginning of this article, more salient
composition remain hidden and one object overlaps an- than the other categories. Remember, Wölfflin
other, the beholder is stimulated to imagine what he pursues a double goal: to describe the fundamen-
cannot see. The objects that are partly hidden seem as if tal categories of pictorial organization without
they might at any moment emerge; the picture becomes specific reference to historical eras and to provide
alive.34 a close characterization of the differences between
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century style. While,
as we have seen with the Bruegel example, the
He contrasts this use of occlusion with the ear- emphasis on occlusion and the lack thereof could
lier style, where, while occlusion could not al- help us to keep apart the sixteenth and the seven-
ways be avoided, special effort was made to make teenth centuries, it behaves very differently when
sure that “all the essential features stood out applied outside this range. Importantly, the lack
clearly.”35 And even in Classic Art, published in of occlusion is especially prevalent in the fifteenth
1899, Wölfflin took occlusion to be something century. So the emphasis on occlusion and the lack
the sixteenth century was trying to minimize. thereof fits much better with the big picture view
When analyzing Raphael’s Sistine Madonna, he of art history Wölfflin offers in Renaissance and
writes: Baroque, where there is a continuity between the
fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries; whereas in And the usefulness of this new, sixth dis-
the Principles, the fifteenth-century style is consid- tinction can also be seen when applied outside
ered to be very different from, and at places even the scope of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
inferior to, sixteenth-century style. If the lack of turies. Corot avoids occlusion. So does Canaletto,
occlusion is the most typical of the fifteenth cen- but not Guardi. The use of occlusion also very
tury, then it could not be considered to be the much depends on genre and even on context—
defining feature of one of the major concepts that Bosch’s hells have significantly more occlusion
characterizes the sixteenth century. than his heavens, for example. This distinction,
It is important to emphasize that, like the five like Wölfflin’s five original ones, is also applica-
original Wölfflinian categories, occlusion and ble to photography and film—some contemporary
the lack thereof are not necessitated by (2D) film directors, for example, go out of their way to

and (3D) pictorial organization either. Some avoid occlusion.38
fifteenth-century Flemish painters started playing
with occlusion long before we can talk about the
primacy of three-dimensional pictorial organi-
zation. Nothing about two-dimensional pictorial vi
organization necessitates the lack of occlusion—
after all, one can make a point of arranging outline I argued that as long as we make a distinction
shapes on a surface in a way that they occlude between (2D) and (3D) pictorial organization, we
one another. But (2D) pictorial organization can add further pairs of categories to Wölfflin’s
implies only that occlusion is something that an five. I illustrated this with the occlusion versus
artist needs to explicitly consider, which does lack of occlusion category, but I do not mean to
not necessarily mean avoiding it. When Van der suggest that this is the only one.
Weyden in his The Seven Sacraments (Leuven) Here is another possible candidate, which also
depicts only the nose and chin of a face, with the has its roots in Wölfflin’s own writings: avoiding
rest of the face occluded behind a wall, he very or seeking out empty regions on the canvas. One
much composes in two dimensions, but he does important aspect of (2D) pictorial organization is
so not by explicitly avoiding occlusion, but by that one needs to pay attention to whether there
explicitly using it. The same goes for the depiction are empty regions on the canvas. This, at least
of crowd scenes where pre-sixteenth-century in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries typically
painters routinely used occlusion to indicate a meant seeing to it that no largish regions of the
crowd of nondescript people. canvas are left empty—painters went out of their
But if we use the general way of applying way to fill empty spaces with various decorative
the distinction between (2D) and (3D) picto- items. Wölfflin himself observes this very briefly
rial organization in the context of sixteenth- and (and, somewhat surprisingly, in the discussion of
seventeenth-century pictures, we can make sense the planilinear category, which, strictly speaking,
of the role of occlusion in the sixteenth century it is independent of).39
in a more interesting and informative manner. As Is it a good idea to multiply the “fundamen-
we have seen, the sixteenth century did not use ex- tal concepts” of art history? I think it is. One
clusively (2D) pictorial organization: it combined could think of the five original Wölfflinian pairs
(2D) and (3D) methods in a way that gave prior- of fundamental concepts as mapping out a five-
ity to (2D) pictorial organization. And a similar dimensional space, where the dimensions would
big-picture art-historical narrative could be given correspond to the five pairs of “fundamental con-
about occlusion and the lack thereof. In the fif- cepts” and where we can understand something
teenth century (especially in the first half), occlu- important about each picture in the light of where
sion was avoided at (almost) all costs. But as the it is placed in this five-dimensional space. If we add
sixteenth century was trying to combine (2D) pic- further “fundamental concepts,” we get a six- or
torial organization (characterized by the lack of seven-dimensional space, and thus we can learn
occlusion) and (3D) pictorial organization (char- even more about these pictures, and, again, not
acterized by occlusion), the lack of occlusion is just pictures made in Wölfflin’s preferred period
much less salient here. But it is still much more of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but any
salient than in the seventeenth century. pictures made anywhere, anytime.40
bence nanay the nineteenth century, at least not in the sense Wölfflin uses
Centre for Philosophical Psychology it; and Jeroen Stumpel, “On Grounds and Backgrounds:
Some Remarks about Composition in Renaissance Paint-
University of Antwerp Antwerp, Belgium and
ing,” Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art
Peterhouse University of Cambridge 18 (1988): 219–243, which sets out to replace Wölfflin’s
Cambridge, United Kingdom ahistorical formal concepts with historically grounded
ones.
internet: bence.nanay@ua.ac.be OR bn206@cam.ac.uk 20. See Michael Newall, “Painterly and Planar:
Wölfflinian Analysis Beyond Classical and Baroque” (this
issue).
1. I leave aside the question of the pictorial organiza- 21. See Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Cul-
tion of abstract pictures, where there is no three-dimensional ture (Princeton University Press, 2011), and “Succession and
Recursion in Heinrich Wölfflin’s Principles of Art History”

scene to arrange. It should become clear in Section IV how
the pictorial organization of abstract pictures fits into my (this issue).
account. 22. See Meinold Lurz, Heinrich Wölfflin: Biogra-
2. The most important exception is Richard Wollheim, phie einer Kunsttheories (Worms: Wernersche Verlagsge-
On Pictorial Organization (University of Kansas Press, sellschaft, 1981); and Andreas Eckl, “Zum Problem der
2002). kategorialen Funktion von Wölfflins ‘Kunstgeschichtlichen
3. All quotes are from Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Grundbegriffen,’” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine
Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Kunstwissenschaft 38 (1993): 29–52. Gaiger approves of this
Later Art, 7th edition [1923], trans. M. D. Hottinger (New way of thinking about Wölfflin’s categories in Gaiger, “The
York: Dover, 1950). I follow the terminology of Hottinger’s Analysis of Pictorial Style.”
translation in spite of its somewhat old-fashioned phrases. I 23. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 109.
correct his translation only where necessary (that is, where 24. What I call three-dimensional pictorial organization
his translation is misleading or just plain wrong). should not be confused with Berenson’s concept of “space
4. Wölfflin applied these categories in the case of paint- composition” either. Berenson defines space composition
ings, sculptures, and architecture. Given the present article’s as the “sense of space not as a void, as something merely
topic, I will only consider these categories as applied to pic- negative, such as we customarily have, but on the contrary,
tures. as something very positive and definite able to confirm our
5. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 18. consciousness of being, to heighten our feeling of vitality”;
6. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 18. Bernhard Berenson, Italian Painters of the Renaissance
7. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 15. (London: Phaidon, 1968), p. 88, and goes on to argue that
8. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 15. it is intimately tied to religious experience (pp. 89–90)—not
9. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. 126, 125. exactly a very Wölfflinian angle. A closer approximation for
10. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 125. (2D) is the way Alois Riegl described—rightly or wrongly—
11. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 15. the pictorial organization of ancient art; see Alois Riegl, The
12. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 159. Late Roman Art Industry (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider
13. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 196. Editore, 1985), esp. p. 24.
14. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 196. 25. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 109.
15. For various reasons: for his formalism, for his politi- 26. Is it possible for a picture to have (2D) pictorial
cal outlook, for his Hegelian vision of art history, for ignoring organization and yet to be painterly, a-tectonic, recessive,
mannerism, for his “vision itself has a history” claim, and so and have unity and absolute clarity? I very much doubt
on. Some of these points of criticism are undoubtedly valid. it. I said that (2D) pictorial organization can be achieved
16. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 26, where he without one or another of the five corresponding Wölfflinian
says he seeks to identify the “most general forms of repre- categories. But it is very unlikely to be achieved without all
sentation.” of them. To stretch Wölfflin’s root analogy even further, the
17. For example, Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, tree needs at least some roots to stand.
p. 30. 27. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 131. The first
18. This way of thinking about the fundamental cate- half of the sentence is my own translation, different from the
gories is closer to Wölfflin’s vision of art history in his Re- published English translation. The German original is “Im
naissance and Baroque, trans. K. Simon (London: Collins, tektonischen Stil nimmt die Füllung Bezug auf den gegebe-
1964), where there is more continuity between the “primi- nen Raum.”
tives” and the art of the sixteenth century. This is also the 28. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 125.
interpretation of Wölfflin’s categories in Lambert Wiesing, 29. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 208; I changed
Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997), and the translation, which got the second half of the sentence
in Jason Gaiger, “The Analysis of Pictorial Style,” British wrong.
Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 20–36. 30. See Paul Klee, Pedagogisches Skitzenbuch (Munich:
19. See, for example, Paul Taylor’s various writings (for Langen, 1925) for an interesting take on this relationship.
example, “Composition in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art 31. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, p. 32.
Theory,” in Pictorial Composition from Medieval to Modern 32. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, pp. 32–33. Note
Art, eds. Paul Taylor and François Quiviger [London and that this makes any attempt to reduce the fourth and fifth
Turin: Warburg Institute, 2000], pp. 146–171), where he ar- Wölfflinian pairs of categories to the first three (see note
gues that the concept of composition was not used before 16) extremely suspicious.
33. One may wonder whether applying this pair of con- both art-historical positivism and neo-idealist in-
cepts would be anachronistic (in the same way as Wölfflin’s tuitionist aesthetics.2
categories are often accused of being anachronistic). The
Wölfflin’s own version of this art history in the
short answer is that I do not think so. Take one of the
most crucial concepts in seventeenth-century Dutch art writ- Principles and elsewhere has many problems and
ing, that of ‘houding.’ Willem Goeree writes in 1668 that limits. Can we reconstruct a post-Wölfflinian vi-
‘houding’ means “placing each thing, without confusion, sion historicism that avoids or at least mitigates
separate and well apart from the objects which are next them? Wölfflin’s art history also has unresolved
to and around it”; Inleyding tot d’Algemeene Teykenkonst
(Middelburg, 1668), p. 129—this sounds very much like the
tensions that remain suggestive and productive
avoidance of occlusion. See also Paul Taylor, “The Concept today. Can we specify them closely enough to be
of Houding in Dutch Art Theory,” Journal of the Warburg useful to art history now?
and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 210–232. Ideally, a post-Wölfflinian vision historicism

34. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, p. 33.
would be analytically robust and flexible. It
35. Wölfflin, Renaissance and Baroque, p. 33.
36. Heinrich Wölfflin, Classic Art: An Introduction to would be open to “histories of vision” written in
the Renaissance, trans. Peter and Linda Murray (London: physiological (invariantist), in naturalistic (evo-
Phaidon Press, 1952), p. 135. lutionary), in sociocultural, and in specifically
37. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 206. art-historical terms, for none of these approaches
There is also some (brief) discussion of occlusion
in the plane versus recession chapter (understandably
is not historical. And from my perspective
as recession is sometimes difficult to achieve without as an art historian, ideally it would identify
occlusion). picture-making not only as a historical feature
38. See David Bordwell, “Wölfflin and Film Style: of but also as a causal factor in human visual
Some Thoughts on a Poetics of Pictures,” this issue, on how
perception, constituting the history of visual art as
the same directors (for example, Wes Anderson) also tend
to use planimentric style, which is another mark of (2D) an “elementary datum” of that broader inquiry. In
pictorial organization. other words, it would fulfill Wölfflin’s conviction,
39. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 90. stated in the last sentence of the Principles, that
40. I am grateful for comments by Dan Cavedon- “the history of art as the doctrine of the ways of
Taylor, Hans-Christian Hönes, Jeremy Melius, Sam Rose,
Maarten Steenhagen, and Paul Taylor. I gave talks based on
seeing [Sehformen] can claim to be, not simply
this material at the University of Kent, University of Bu- a dispensable companion among the historical
dapest, and University of Tübingen, and I am grateful for disciplines, but as necessary as sight.”3
the comments I received from the audience. As I try to show, the crucial move of a viable
post-Wölfflinian vision historicism, once some ob-
stacles have been cleared, would be to shift gears
from Wölfflin’s preferred account of the role of
Sehformen in style, which I call “successionist”
Whitney Davis because it stressed necessary developments from
Succession and Recursion in Heinrich Wölfflin’s one stratum of the general forms of representa-
Principles of Art History tion to another, to a more “recursivist” model
(suggested by some aspects of Wölfflin’s Princi-
ples) emphasizing the feedback of pictorial style
In this article I focus on what I will call Heinrich on Sehformen-in-development. As Wölfflin him-
Wölfflin’s “vision historicism” in the Principles self wrote at the end of his great book, “only a
of Art History of 1915—his famous account of a spiral movement would fit the facts.”4
“history of seeing” that can be written in terms
of the “optical strata” of different “ways of see-
i. the double root of style—histories and
ing,” “modes of seeing,” or “modes of perception” metaphors
analyzed in terms of “general forms of represen-
tation” or “forms and categories of beholding.”1 Building on the writings of earlier theorists, no-
This history—the role of the general forms of rep- tably Hippolyte Taine, Wölfflin identified one root
resentation in seeing and especially in the seeing of architectural and pictorial styles in four kinds
that transpires in the making of pictures—would of “expression”—namely, expression of artistic
be, Wölfflin said, the “elementary datum of art temperament, of artistic school, of country, and
history,” or at any rate the elementary datum of of race. A fifth expression might be identified
a scientific art history capable of moving beyond in “cultural epoch” and its “period style”—in
Kulturepoch or Zeitcharakter and of Zeitstil, in the “apprehensional form of an epoch,” though

turn opening toward the possibility, seemingly strictly speaking any pictorial style is always “in
counter to the main thrust of the Principles, that transition” (Stilwandel). It has been much de-
a “new Zeitgeist [can] enforce a new form.”5 bated whether the five successions—from linear to
(I return to this below.) More parsimoniously, painterly, from plane to recession, from closed to
Wölfflin identified the three concerns of an “art open, from multiplicity to unity, and from absolute
history which conceives style primarily as expres- clarity to relative clarity in architectural and pic-
sion” as individual style, national style, and period torial forms—could be combined and reduced, or,
style.6 This elimination of expression of “school,” alternately, whether more successions might be
however, has problematic consequences, for it discovered. Regardless, the succession from lin-
is specifically in artistic schools that one of the ear to painterly—for example, and to take the

most determinative histories in pictorial style will first comparisons of painters and paintings given
unfold. in the Principles, the development from Sandro
I will not linger on the complexities in the ac- Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi in the sixteenth
count of the first root of style.7 It was the sec- century to Gerard ter Borch and Gabriel Metsu
ond root of style that chiefly concerned Wölfflin in the seventeenth century or from “Renaissance”
in the Principles—namely, the “most general rep- to “Baroque”—was effectively Wölfflin’s master
resentational forms,” universal and a priori and succession, “comprehending all the rest,” and it is
“having no expressional content in themselves” hard to imagine anyone today working with paint-
(“expressionlessness”; Ausdruckslosigkeit), at any ing as an art who can do without it.13
rate in terms of “specific content.”8 Transforma- To be sure, the five successions of forms of rep-
tion in these ways of seeing (Sehformen)—the el- resentation are sometimes treated as five pairs
ementary data of histories of Stilentwickelung— of distinctions. As Wölfflin wrote, we make the
occur as an “inward visual development” (innere “distinctions at a fruitful point, and then let
optische Entwicklung), an “inward necessity.”9 them speak as contrasts,” often in the famil-
The general forms of representation are active iar Wölfflinian pedagogy of compare-and-contrast
as “forms of beholding” (Anschauungsformen), “double projection.”14 But it is crucial to keep the
and “beholding is not just a mirror which always temporal dynamism of the forms of representa-
remains the same, but a living power of appre- tion, their inherent Entwickelung, firmly in view,
hension which has its own inward history and has although ultimately Wölfflin did not fully resolve
passed through many stages.”10 whether it confers historicity on pictorial art or
As Wölfflin emphasized, the forms of repre- instead is given historicity by pictorial art.
sentation should not be confused with Kant’s cat- The second root of style harbors another dif-
egories; “to a Kantian mentality they would look ferentiation as well. All five successions—all five
merely adventitious.”11 Still, they are represen- pairs—occur in both the “imitative” and the “dec-
tations of the primal representational activity of orative” functions of pictorial representation, as it
mind (Vorstellung), a “representation of a repre- were two branches of the root (of the forms of rep-
sentation,” as David Summers has well put it— resentation as one of the two roots of style) or two
“a second representation [that] is crucial for the roots of the branch (of a particular succession in
whole formalist enterprise.”12 While the human one of the five forms of Stilentwickelung). But this
world is constituted in the fixed architecture of the is not a succession. Wölfflin held that “the history
mind, the secondary representations produce its of art is not secondarily but absolutely primarily a
transformation—for the forms of representation history of decoration.”15 This could imply that suc-
are inherently undergoing (partly) autonomous cessions of greater and lesser mimetic values in de-
succession. Or so the data of art history might piction and its “observation of nature” are driven
suggest, providing a visible external evidence of by changes in the “forms in which the observa-
the inevitable internal history. Wölfflin worked tion took place” (considered primarily as form), as
wholly within this grand tautology with great cre- visibly “decorative”—that is, with reduced refer-
ativity. But we might seek to spiral out of it. ence to mimetic “truth.” Here the inward succes-
Wölfflin identified five—and only five— sions of forms of representation would seem to
successions of forms of representation, each of intersect with (even to be conditioned by) the par-
the two poles of which can be identified as tially external activity of privileging the decorative
dimension in making a picture—even as the forms “scientific.”19 ) In this regard Wölfflin used the
of representation condition this very form of ob- trenchant metaphor of a stone rolling down a hill:
servation. Evidently, then, a recursion (seeing to it is constrained by gravity to roll downhill. But this
making to seeing) operates in the successions in- metaphor was self-serving. Stones can be rolled
sofar as they manifest the primary decorative or uphill.
“formal” interest. In fact, in one major art-historical respect
In the Principles, Wölfflin employed several dy- Wölfflin did not, and could not, obey his own the-
namic metaphors for the successions. All of them sis. Behind the scenes, one of his principal objects
imply a history—the possibility of Sehgeschichte. of concern was a nonpainterly—more exactly a
They include the architectural, archaeological, post-painterly—“recommencement” or “new be-
and/or geological image of successive “optical

ginning” (Neu-Anfang) in the pictorial art of
strata” (optische Schichten), for the painterly the north, namely, the new linear style of the
artists of the seventeenth century, whether in the Nazarenes around 1800, a style in which we sup-
south or in the north, had to build their works posedly find “the reversion [der Umkehr] from
on the existing sediment (plainly visible to them the painterly to the plastic.” Because in inner-
in their visual world but viewed by them by way developmental terms this style would indeed ap-
of their own epochal Sehformen) of linear works pear to be an “unnatural” case of stones rolling
of the sixteenth century in both the south and uphill, Wölfflin allowed an “outer” determination
the north; mathematical, physical, and/or optical of the style—namely, a supposed “total revalua-
analogies between the two poles as “longer and tion of being in all spheres,” a “process of total
shorter wavelengths” and of the five successions as regeneration” in European culture unique to this
having different “development curves” (Entwick- historical moment.20
lungskurven) and “visual denominators” (optische Indeed, at the end of the introduction to the
Nenner); biological, evolutionary, and/or physi- Principles, Wölfflin asserted that “nobody is go-
ological metaphors of succession as eine beson- ing to maintain that the ‘eye’ passes through de-
dere Akkomodation des Auges, “a special accom- velopments on its own account; conditioned and
modation” or adaptation of the eye, a “habitua- conditioning, it always impinges on other spiritual
tion of seeing” (Umgewöhnung des Sehens); and spheres,” and, it would seem, other spheres can
others, notably an image of emergent pictorial impinge on it.21 Here Wölfflin opened the door,
style as a “new form of crystallization [Kristalli- albeit risking self-contradiction, to a recursion we
sationsform] in which a new side of the content of might need. It could be stated generally (it had
the world [eine neue Seite des Weltinhalts] comes been by Aloı̈s Riegl and others): Weltanschauung,
to light.”16 an “ideal of life experienced in a certain way,”
Although all these metaphors imply transfor- conditions the forms of representation.22 But this
mation, some of them—wavelengths, develop- claim is not typically associated with the core of
ment curves, accommodations—do not entail that specifically Wölfflinian formalism, and it is per-
the successions are one-way and irreversible or haps too loose to be interesting. Still, the “outer”
even that they are necessary and inevitable. They determination can be identified more narrowly as
can allow for oscillations and reversions. Others, well, and, as we will see, any neo-Wölfflinian for-
however, provide vivid terms for Wölfflin’s the- malism probably needs it.
sis that “not everything is possible at all times”—
that there was, for example, “no other possibil- ii. the root of the double root of style
ity of thought” (keine andere Denkmöglichkeit)
for Raphael in Italy in the late fifteenth century At this point, then, I need to address certain limits
but the closed form characteristic of a “classic within Wölfflin’s formalism.
art.”17 The “natural logic” of succession in forms There are many historical ecologies of pictorial
of representation “could not be reversed”—a “law art, not to speak of pictures that are not art and
[Gesetz] that remains operative throughout all art that is not pictorial. How far does Wölfflinian
change,” all peregrinations of style (Stilwandel).18 formal analysis apply, if at all, beyond the six-
(For Wölfflin, analytic attention and descrip- teenth and seventeenth centuries in the Western
tive adherence to this law of the second root Europe to which Wölfflin chiefly attended in
of style unequivocally defined his art history as 1915? Wölfflin himself considered that he was
dealing with certain “permanent developments it: “national differences of the eye” (nationale
. . . in the architectonic styles of the occident,” Verschiedenheiten des Auges) are permanent, a
a “history of the development of occidental matter of “national types” such as a “definite type
seeing.”23 And the very concept of “occidental of Italian or German imagination which asserts
seeing” might be thought to preclude formal anal- itself, always the same in all centuries.”27 Taken
ysis of the vast bulk of world art—a foreclosure at face value, as many commentators have noted,
that post-Wölfflinian vision historicism presum- this seems to entail that ultimately Wölfflin’s
ably would want to avoid. Sehgeschichte is a history of the national and racial
In practice, however, this question has been an- conditions of permanent “differences of the eye”
swered since the publication of the first edition between peoples, whatever contexts and causes
of the Principles. In a history of occidental see- might be invoked: the double root of style is, as it

ing, Wölfflin could already envisage extensions of were, the branching of the one great root of the
his formal analysis to medieval styles and to an- permanent visuality of a Volk.28
cient (classical) styles. By the time the sixth edi- It is worth noting instabilities in Wölfflin’s pre-
tion was published in 1922, he could write that his sentation of this thesis; certain considerations in
model had “proved applicable even as far as the his own system militated against it. Some part of
domains of Japanese and old Nordic art,” though the history of the successions of forms of represen-
by the latter he might simply have meant the high tation involves “an inclination for foreign models
and late Gothic architectural styles of medieval in form.”29 These might be viewed and revised
Europe.24 Since then, Wölfflinian formal analysis by a “national eye,” but the inclination as such
(of greater or lesser orthodoxy) has been applied implies an international or an extra-national eye,
by historians to many arts outside the Western perhaps characteristic of artists in particular. In
tradition. fact, Wölfflin situated classic art and the linear
In at least one case, these investigations have Sehform, taken up in the north as a partly for-
led to major revisions in the received account of eign model in form, as partly extra-national (“the
“occidental seeing” itself, that is, of the history of occidental schools all passed through the plastic
the Western pictorial tradition. Summers’s anal- zone”): it was, he said, in the “further develop-
ysis of “planarity” and emergent “virtuality” (the ment into the painterly [that] national limits were
construction of virtual depth) in ancient Egyptian set from the beginning.”30 It might seem, then,
depiction has enabled him to redate the origins that the painterly northern eye has more völkisch
of what he calls “Western metric naturalism” definiteness specifically in its capacity historically
from Classical Greece and Renaissance Italy to to succeed to developed form—not an appealing
a northeast African culture several millennia conclusion.
before.25 (Summers expressly declares himself A post-Wölfflinian vision historicism must re-
to be a “post-formalist.” But his overall account ject this entire line of thinking. But, paradoxically,
of the “development of planarity into the virtual this might imply that it could be more Wölfflinian
dimension” partly adopts and refines the second even than Wölfflin. The expressions of nation and
Wölfflinian succession.26 ) Probably this is simply race belong to the first root of style. If we ex-
to overturn the very notion of occidental seeing. cise them—the first root becomes the expressions
But it also suggests the feasibility and interest of of artistic temperament and school—then the five
a post-Wölfflinian world art history. successions, the second root, need not be limited
In turn, this may allow us to clear away what by them, and they need not be (re)imposed as a
has long been taken to be the gravest defect of parameter of forms of representation as such.
Wölfflin’s vision historicism in the Principles and
elsewhere. Wölfflin transferred the expressions of iii. the effect of picture on picture
nationality and race from the expressional regis-
ter, where they are already dubious enough, to As art history, Wölfflin’s formal analysis tracks
the general forms of representation. A “national the law of the formative imagination (at least in
psychology of form” was inserted into the model the visual domain) in two registers. One is strictly
of inexorable succession (“modes of vision are re- internal—the necessity of the five successions (al-
fracted by nationality” [die Schemata des Sehens beit in interaction with the expressions), the “form
national gebrochen erscheinen]), and as a limit on in which the living is seen.”31 As noted, however,
“nobody is going to maintain that the ‘eye’ passes to the late Gothic style, characterized as clas-
through developments on its own account.”32 In sic and baroque respectively. He articulated a
the cases that concern art historians, the “eye” is principle that applies elsewhere in the Principles
looking at things that it has made to be seen— (and notionally throughout), namely, that the
pictorial artworks and other artifacts. “outer” development of forms of represent-
In the second register, then, formalism moves ation—the successions in their realization—has
from the putative fact that “in the forms nature what might be called a kind of “stutter,” an in-
is seen” to the corollary that “in these forms art herent lag in reflection as artists produce pic-
manifests its contents”—contents both imitative tures (or in this case buildings) to be inspected
and decorative that mirror the forms of repre- by themselves and other beholders. The stone
sentation back to the imagination in, or as, the might be rolling downhill, but it weaves and in-

Anschauungsformen, forms of beholding. As deed pauses on the way.37 In order for a visibly
Summers puts it, Wölfflin seems to “mean that baroque style to have emerged in a history of
‘forms of representation’ are also the means by form working itself out inwardly (eine innerlich
which the world is made by artists to appear weiterarbeitende Formengeschichte), the imagina-
to others in one way or another.”33 The crucial tion engaged in production must have “occupied
point for Wölfflin (or at any rate a Wölfflinian itself with form actively enough to make it yield
vision historicism) is that the mirror is not im- up its baroque possibilities” (die Phantasie lebhaft
mutable, self-identical throughout history. It is genug sich mit den Formen beschäftig hat, um die
precisely because the forms of representation barocken Möglichkeiten herauszulocken).38 This
pass through their self-reflection and variation in must be active, shared work on buildings, high-
picture-making and -beholding that they are “a into-late Gothic form as it were “passing from
living power of apprehension [eine lebendige Auf- hand to hand” and “every style call[ing] to a new
fassungskraft] which has its own inward history.”34 one.”39
More exactly, it is an inner history that accommo- Succession is inevitable; form is not a constant,
dates to its outer manifestations—successions that like a Kantian category. But it is not “automatic”
pass through the recursion of realizing and be- or more exactly autonomous: it is impelled by
holding their form in pictures in the visible world. its engagement with its products.40 This feedback
In the Principles, the place of this recursion— takes time, it requires work, and presumably it
the kind of shape and scope Wölfflin wanted (and can fail (insofar as a product does not satisfy for-
was willing) to give it—is most visible in the con- mal imagination and its envisionings). In this sense
cluding chapter. In his final remarks on Titian, Wölfflinian seeing has just that history which is the
for example, Wölfflin implied that Titian arrived formal effect of pictures on imagination—the “in-
at the “new feeling” of his late style specifically ner” visuality (as it might be called today) feeling
as a painter and in the work of painting, “going and accommodating the pressure of itself in visi-
over the ground which contained the necessary bly working in the “outer” world. “Only a spiral
preliminary stages.”35 This was not only a matter movement would fit the facts.”41
of the forms of representation in the imagination At this point, the overall psychological and
but also a matter of beholding the pictures being historical structure of the “double root of
made, realizing—and self-reflectively adjusting— style” comes into focus. In recursively passing
the forms of representation visibly emergent in through their reflection and stuttering refrac-
picture after picture and indeed crystallizing in tion in pictures, propelling the inward succes-
“the effect of picture on picture” (die Wirkung sions in Stilentwicklung from picture to picture
von Bild auf Bild).36 Taken to refer to the most and form to form, the five successions of forms of
“outer” face of the succession and recursion of representation continuously interact with the ex-
forms of representation, the production of pic- pressions (here let us grant the excision of völkisch
tures, “the effect of picture on picture” belongs to expression)—for it is in making pictures specifi-
the developmental history of art. Taken to refer to cally that expression by definition takes place in
the more “inner” face of image-making, it belongs the consolidation and differentiation of style. In
to the developmental history of seeing. this sense, then, the recursive dimension of the
Wölfflin remarked a similar temporality in Principles lies not only in Wölfflin’s acknowledg-
briefly describing the development from the high ment of the effect of visible pictures on formative
imagination—a recursion within the second root in its own way—can be taken as read, and in 2015
of style. It also lies in the implied model of the one can ask whether Sehgeschichte, if Wölfflinian
mutual conditioning of the two roots—type of ex- at all, might be rebalanced.
pression feeding into representation and form of Aside from clearing the obstacles and making
representation feeding into expression by way of the adjustments suggested in Section II, at the
the pictures and pictorial styles that reflect and level of theory and analysis a post-Wölfflinian vi-
refract them. sion historicism would likely differ from Wölfflin
This takes us to the heart of the difficulty the in several ways, at least insofar as it remains inter-
working art historian must face in describing pic- ested in any way in the resources of formal anal-
tures along Wölfflinian-formalist lines. Can one ysis, of close looking, and of critical ekphrasis in
both disentangle and interrelate the four expres- art history. (It might not, but the ordinary practice

sions (one root) and the five successions (the other and pedagogy of most art historians today suggests
root) sufficiently perspicuously as to unfold any that probably it will.)
particular work in question and/or any kind of First, it likely will abandon the sequence of
pictorial style under scrutiny? Can one specify the Wölfflinian successions even if it continues to
to what extent it is a function of successions and find the characterizations of the formal constel-
to what extent of recursions? The variables are lations to be useful for description. (As already
so complex that it might seem that any given art suggested, they have mostly proved their worth.)
historian’s formal analysis of a work or a style Succession is succession, and ad hoc allowances
of art in Wölfflinian terms will be sui generis. So for supposedly impossible sequences that should
be it. After all, a Wölfflinian Sehgeschichte ad- have been “unthinkable” for artists of a given
dresses an “infinity of events”—the continuum epoch—Nazarene linearity supposedly emerged
of seeing, the continuous production of pictures outside the inward sequence—simply show that
and refractions of style—by way of a “few re- the sequences are not single swings of a pendulum
sults” and principles.42 But which results and what from an “A” to a “Z.” Complex repetitions and
principles? inversions are to be expected, especially in light
of histories in which “anachronic” and multiple
temporalities are fully recognized.
iv. post-wölfflinian vision historicism Second, it likely will question the segregation
of the successions. Wölfflin accepted that they are
In the Principles, Wölfflin largely wrote Seh- reciprocally involved.44 But he did not consider
geschichte from inner to outer, the direction of that linear not only might develop into painterly
description in which the necessity of succession but also might develop into planar. Summers’s
and in particular the irreversible sequences of revision, mentioned above, pursues just such a
the forms of representation are tracked by the possibility.
formalist art historian. Compared to some of his Third, it might posit formal constellations and
followers and to later art historians who claimed successions that Wölfflin did not identify. (“I could
to abjure formalism, he was less interested in the not discover them,” he said.45 ) Here the verdict is
complementary history from outer to inner or mixed: many such proposals ventured by other art
more exactly in the continuous loopings outlined historians can readily be translated into the famil-
in the previous section. If we set aside ideological iar Wölfflinian terms. For example, the succession
and professional motivations for his species from “multidirectional” to “verticalized” config-
of formalism (explored by several scholars), uration identified by Max Raphael and Sigfried
his rationale was straightforward: relative to the Giedion in prehistoric and ancient arts proba-
“disastrously one-sided” prevalence of expression bly can be redescribed in terms of Wölfflinian
theories of style, he privileged what was most openness, and so on, though in a different sequen-
distinctive by far in his art history, his psychology tial order.46
of the second root of style—an almost wholly new Fourth, and more important, it will likely work
vocabulary of art-historical epistemology that has as much—or far more—from outer to inner than
been and remains immensely influential, albeit from inner to outer, although within formal-
sometimes only in the negative.43 After Wölfflin, ist terms. It might place emphasis, for exam-
however, this dramatic intervention—one-sided ple, on “rules” of succession and sequence that
are strictly external to the activity of the forma- whitney davis

tive imagination—constraints, say, on the “for- Department of History of Art
mal motions” allowed to making given its “serial University of California at Berkeley
position” in a “form class” of artifacts, to use Berkeley, California 94720–6020
the terms of the stochastic formalism developed
internet: wmdavis@berkeley.edu
by George Kubler, or on the formal “feints” and
“gambits” of artists securing places in an artworld,
to use metaphors adopted in the social history of 1. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbe-
griffe (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1915); Principles of Art His-
art.47
tory: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later
Fifth, it might seek to treat the Anschauungs- Art, 7th edition [1923], trans. M. D. Hottinger (London:
formen—the effects of pictures on human visual

Bell, 1932). Page references are to this translation, which
imagination, apprehension, and feeling—not so I have occasionally modified. The present essay ties into
much as a black box, as Wölfflin was largely related publications of mine: see Whitney Davis, “Neuro-
visuality,” nonsite 5 (2011): 1–53 (http://nonsite.org/issue-
constrained to do, but as a psychological and 5-agency-and-experience), and “What Is Post-Formalism?
anthropological hypothesis to be investigated or, Das Sehen an sich hat seine Kunstgeschichte,” nonsite 7
empirically. Such studies have ranged from the (2013): http://nonsite.org/issue-7.
“carpentered world hypothesis” explored by 2. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 11.
3. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 237.
Melville J. Herskovits and his collaborators to
present-day “neuroaesthetics,” though the latter 5. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 9.
species of inquiry often barely conceptualizes the 6. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 10.
pictorial recursion.48 7. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. 1–13.
Sixth, it might consider the effects of outer vari- 8. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. 13–16,
227–228.
ables of visual experience not limited to the effects 9. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 12.
of pictures on human visual imagination engaged 10. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 226.
in picturing—variables such as climate and envi- 11. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 227.
ronment. Such inquiries need not deny the cre- 12. David Summers, “Art History Reviewed II:
Heinrich Wölfflin’s ‘Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe,’
ativity and even the partial autonomy of visual
1915,” Burlington Magazine 151 (2009): 476–479, at p. 478.
imagination, but they will examine the formal re- Summers’s account of the Principles is superbly lucid and I
flexes of evolutionary adaptations and environ- have depended heavily on it.
mental habituations—that is, natural as well as 13. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 229.
sociocultural histories of pictorial style.49 14. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 14.
At a certain threshold, these post-Wölfflinian 16. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. 232, 13, 233,
histories of seeing and making (seeing-in-making, 228, 231; cf. p. 226. On this last, see Summers’s explica-
making-in-seeing), though shaped by Wölfflin’s tion of Wölfflin’s interest in crystal structures (“Art History
formalism and its legacies, might have little or Reviewed,” p. 479). As Summers suggests, crystals and crys-
tal growth served well as a metaphor for the deep struc-
nothing definably Wölfflinian left about them.
ture of Western pictorial art, given its typical formats—a
For example, I have suggested elsewhere that the point pursued in his own accounts of “planarity” and “vir-
study of visual culture is not, or it is not only, a mat- tuality” in Real Spaces: World Art History and the Rise
ter of “how things look,” though it involves that of Western Modernism (New York and London: Phaidon,
question. It is also a matter of “what things are 2003).
like”—how they make visual sense in networks of 18. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 17.
“forms of likeness,” of visible and invisible analo- 19. Oddly, in the English rendition in 1932 “wis-
gies for them, that emerge in the historical context senschaftliche” was not translated at the crucial juncture
of a “form of life.” Here inner forms of represen- in the text, thereby obscuring one of Wölfflin’s basic self-
definitions.
tation recede in significance relative to social uses
20. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. 233–234.
of visible things, and a psychology of a priori forms 21. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 17.
of representation would be replaced by a psychol- 22. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 230, cf.
ogy of the interaction of formal, stylistic, picto- p. 9.
rial, and iconographic successions and recursions 23. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 231.
24. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. viii, 231.
that are subject to no inner developmental neces- 25. Summers, Real Spaces, esp. pp. 445–448, and see
sities beyond the inevitability and interminability also “Art History Reviewed,” p. 479.
of succession and recursion themselves.50 26. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 15.
27. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. 9, 235, 237, allgemeinsten Darstellungsformen), or what
235. Heinrich Wölfflin also terms “the mode of repre-
28. See Daniel Adler, “Painterly Politics: Wölfflin, For-
sentation as such” (die Darstellungsart als solche),
malism and German Academic Culture, 1885–1915,” Art
History 27 (2004): 431–477, and Claire J. Farago, “‘Vision is a sufficiently ambitious undertaking for a book
Itself Has a History’: Race, Nation, and Renaissance Art that is primarily concerned with the history of art.1
History,” in Reframing the Renaissance: Visual Culture in However, it is a striking feature of the Fundamen-
Europe and Latin America, 1450–1650, ed. Claire J. Farago tal Concepts of Art History that Wölfflin also con-
(Yale University Press, 1995), pp. 67–88. I am restricting my-
self here to Wölfflin’s statements in the Principles of 1915,
ceives his project as a contribution to the history
not encompassing the lengthy prefaces in later editions that of vision. Throughout the text, he maintains that
partly led to the writing of Italien und deutsche Formgefühl the five pairs of concepts not only serve to charac-
(Munich: Bruckmann, 1931). terize “forms of representation” but also “forms

29. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 233; cf. p.
of beholding”: “in these forms nature is seen,
235.
30. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 237. and in these forms art manifests its contents.”2 Is
31. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 227. this simply an equivocation, a failure properly to
32. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 17. distinguish two discrete areas of inquiry, one con-
33. Summers, “Art History Reviewed,” p. 477. cerned with the nature of perception and the other
with the nature of depiction? Or is there another,
36. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 230. more productive way of understanding his project
37. In the preface to the seventh edition, Wölfflin wrote that allows us to see why the connection is impor-
that “the course of development is . . . ‘virtually’ given, but tant for the analysis of style in the visual arts?
in the actuality of history as lived, it is interrupted, checked,
There is nothing particularly problematic, of
refracted in all kinds of ways”; Wölfflin, Principles of Art
History, p. vii. course, about the attempt to establish a close link
38. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 232. between perception and depiction. The central
39. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 232, 230. thought behind perceptualist accounts of picto-
40. See Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 230. rial representation is that, in recognizing the con-
tents of pictures, we draw on the same resources
43. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 17. that are used in ordinary perception. According
44. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 227. to John Hyman, for example, “a viewer’s ability
45. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 227. to perceive the content of a picture depends on
46. Max Raphael, Prehistoric Cave Painting, trans. Nor-
her knowledge of the appearances of the objects
bert Guterman (New York: Pantheon, 1949), and Sigfried
Giedion, The Eternal Present, vol. I, The Beginnings of Art, it depicts.”3 More recently, Dominic Gregory has
and vol. II, The Beginnings of Architecture (New York: Pan- sought to demarcate a class of “distinctively sen-
theon, 1962 and 1964). sory representations” that includes both mental
47. George Kubler, The Shape of Time: Remarks on images and pictures (as well as other nonvisual
the History of Things (Yale University Press, 1962), and
see Whitney Davis, “World Series: The Unruly Orders of
types of representation).4 Where Wölfflin departs
World Art History,” Third Text 25 (2011): 493–501, at p. from this intuitively plausible—but not, of course,
493. unchallenged—approach to understanding picto-
48. For further comments on these matters, see Davis, rial representation is his contention that vision is a
“Neurovisuality.”
historical phenomenon whose changes over time
49. See John Onians, Neuroarthistory: From Aristotle
and Pliny to Baxandall and Zeki (Yale University Press, run parallel to and perhaps even subtend changes
2006), and Whitney Davis, “Climatic Variability and Picto- in the formal organization of artworks. It is this
rial Oscillation,” Res 63/64 (2013): 20–38. contention that lies behind his much cited and, as
50. Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture I hope to show, much misunderstood declaration:
(Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 277–340.
“Every artist finds certain visual possibilities be-
fore him, to which he is bound. Not everything is
Jason Gaiger possible at all times. Vision itself [Das Sehen an
Intuition and Representation: Wölfflin’s Funda- sich] has its history, and the revelation of these vi-
mental Concepts of Art History sual strata [optische Schichten] must be regarded
as the primary task of art history.”5
In the preface to the first edition of the book,
It might be thought that the task of identifying published in Munich in 1915, Wölfflin observed
“the most general representational forms” (die that research into the basic organizing categories
of art-historical enquiry had not kept pace with re- the fundamental concepts virtually interchange-
cent advances in empirical research, and he called ably as “forms of beholding” and as “forms of
for a history of art that would “trace the emer- representation”—is to recognize that his account
gence of modern seeing step by step.”6 This would is informed by a broadly neo-Kantian conception
encompass not only changes in the formal or- of the mind according to which objects of expe-
ganization of artworks (Bildgestaltung) but also rience are not simply “given” to us but taken up
changes in the way in which form is perceived or and transformed by the active or “spontaneous”
represented in the mind (Bildvorstellung).7 contribution of the cognitive faculties. The ori-
Wölfflin was later forced to concede that the gins of this conception are to be found in Kant’s
theme of “a universal history of vision and rep- first Critique, which starts out from the observa-
resentation (a history of form)” had ramified in tion that “although all our cognition commences

different directions and that he was unable to give with experience, yet it does not on that account
it definitive shape.8 In light of these difficulties, all arise from experience.”10 In the more radi-
and the admittedly rather vague and generalized cal version developed by the philosopher Konrad
character of his claims about the history of vision, Fiedler, with whose work Wölfflin was undoubt-
it seems reasonable to cut the knot and to sepa- edly familiar, it is not only the faculty of under-
rate out his analysis of pictorial composition from standing but also the faculty of sensibility that is
the broader historical framework within which it capable of fulfilling a generative function. Once
is embedded. This is the strategy that I adopted in the faculty of sensibility is identified as “sponta-
an earlier article, in which I drew on the critical re- neous” rather than merely receptive, it is possible
construction of the fundamental concepts carried to argue that there are different ways of appre-
out by German scholars such as Andreas Eckl and hending the world through the senses and—with
Lambert Wiesing.9 I am still convinced of the mer- a characteristically neo-Kantian twist—that this is
its of this approach, especially insofar as it helps to something that can change or develop over time.
bring Wölfflin’s views into dialogue with contem- For Fiedler, the creative activity of the artist is
porary positions in philosophical aesthetics. How- to be understood as a further development of the
ever, in this article I adopt an alternative strategy “process of seeing”: works of visual art give ma-
by investigating whether certain features of his ac- terial, and hence enduring, form to an ordering
count that are left out or excluded by the so-called of sensible experience that takes place primarily
“formal-logical” reconstruction of the fundamen- at the level of intuition rather than through the
tal concepts turn out to have a crucial role to play imposition of concepts. In place of the conven-
in explaining stylistic change. In particular, I want tional model of art as imitation, Fielder proposes
to examine more closely the nature of the con- a productive model in which artists can succeed in
straints that supposedly restrict the “visual possi- disclosing innovative ways of seeing the world.11
bilities” available to artists at different historical Wölfflin’s neo-Kantian commitments are given
periods. Once understood aright, the identifica- their most explicit formulation in the Conclusion
tion of such constraints does not carry any par- to the Fundamental Concepts. In a direct chal-
ticularly demanding philosophical commitments, lenge to the realist assumptions that underpin the
even though Wölfflin couches his argument in metaphor of art as a “mirror of life,” he con-
terms that—in the original German—are clearly tends that even at the level of everyday experi-
indebted to recent developments in neo-Kantian ence “beholding [Anschauung] is not just a mirror
philosophy. I begin by addressing this issue before which always remains the same, but a living power
offering my own interpretation in the second part of apprehension [eine lebendige Auffassungskraft]
of the article. which has its own inward history and has passed
through many stages.”12 He goes on to explain
that what he has sought to describe through the
i. a neo-kantian interpretation contrast between the classical and the baroque
is precisely a “change in the form of beholding”
One way of making sense of Wölfflin’s refusal (Wechsel der Anschauungsform): “It is not the art
to observe a firm distinction between the way of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries which
in which things are seen and the way in which was to be analysed—that is something richer and
things are depicted—his willingness to treat more living—only the schema and the visual and
creative possibilities [nur das Schema, die Seh- Entwicklung. Es gibt Stufen der Vorstellung, mit denen
und Gestaltungsmöglichkeiten] within which art der Kunsthistoriker zu rechnen hat.17
remained in both cases.”13
I have put the German terms in brackets since The key term here is Vorstellung, or rather Vorstel-
Wölfflin’s use of neo-Kantian vocabulary is not lungsformen, which Wölfflin distinguishes from
always visible in M. D. Hottinger’s idiomatic Sehformen through the use of italics. The transla-
and highly readable English translation.14 In tion is arguably misleading insofar as it introduces
particular, it is noteworthy that Wölfflin places a distinction between “vision” and “imagination.”
considerable emphasis on the term Anschauung, The standard Kantian translation of Vorstellung
rendered by Hottinger as “beholding,” but which is “representation,” again following Kant’s use
in a Kantian context is standardly translated as of the term Vorstellung for the Latin repraesen-

“intuition,” guided by Kant’s use of the term tatio. The underlying Kantian framework—if in-
for the Latin intuitus.15 In the original German, deed this is the scaffolding on which Wölfflin is
Wölfflin’s reference to Anschauungsformen or constructing his argument—is obscured by Hot-
“forms of intuition” is of unmistakably Kantian tinger’s decision to translate Vorstellung as “imag-
provenance, and the informed reader is surely ination” and anschauchliche Vorstellung as “form
intended to recognize the allusion to the transcen- of imaginative process.” Kant, of course, reserves
dental aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason. a separate term for the faculty of imagination
It is worth pausing to examine Wölfflin’s termi- (Einbildung), which in the first Critique fulfills a
nology more closely. Consider, for example, the mediating function between sensibility and under-
following extended passage, which I shall quote standing.
first in Hottinger’s translation and then in the orig- On the neo-Kantian reading, Wölfflin is using
inal German: the term Vorstellungformen to draw attention to
the productive or generative contribution of the
It is greatly to the interest of the historian of style first mind to objective experience and thus to em-
and foremost to recognise what mode of imaginative phasize the continuity between the creative ac-
process he has before him in each individual case. (It is tivity of the artist and the formative character
preferable to speak of modes of imagination rather than of our powers of apprehension. Where Wölfflin
modes of vision.) It goes without saying that the mode of overtly departs from Kant is in the historicization
imaginative beholding is no outward thing, but is also of of the constituent elements of this account. The
decisive importance for the content of the imagination, conditions of the possibility of experience are no
and so far the history of these concepts also belongs longer treated as universal and a priori but as dy-
to the history of mind. / The mode of vision, or let us namic and as both culturally and historically spe-
say, of imaginative beholding, is not from the outset and cific. Here Wölfflin is on common ground with
everywhere the same, but, like every manifestation of other neo-Kantian philosophers, of whom Ernst
life, has its development. The historian has to reckon Cassirer is probably best known in the English-
with stages of the imagination.16 speaking world.18 The “stages” to which Wölfflin
refers in the final sentence are not “stages of the
Here is Wölfflin: imagination”—in the sense of different imagina-
tive possibilities that can be entertained at will—
[Die Stilcharakteristik] hat das größte Interesse, but rather different ways of organizing and giving
zunächst einmal die Form der Vorstellungsbildung zu form to experience itself.
kennen, der sie im einzelnen Fall gegenübersteht. Further support for this neo-Kantian inter-
(Man spricht besser von Vorstellungsformen als von pretation is provided by the direct comparison
Sehformen). Selbstverständlich ist die Form der an- that Wölfflin draws between his analysis of the
schaulichen Vorstellung nicht etwas Äußerliches, son- five pairs of fundamental concepts and Kant’s
dern von bestimmender Wichtigkeit auch für den Inhalt deduction of the categories in the Critique of
der Vorstellung, und insofern ist die Geschichte dieser Pure Reason: “We can call them categories of
Anschauungsbegriffe bereits auch Geistesgeschichte. beholding [Kategorien der Anschauung] without
/ Die Art des Sehens oder sagen wir also des an- danger of confusion with Kant’s categories
schaulichen Vorstellens ist nicht von Anfang an und [Kategorien]. Although they clearly run in one
überall dieselbe, sondern hat, wie alles Lebendige, ihre direction, they are still not derived from one
principle. (To a Kantian mentality they would terms. Although each of the concepts can be char-
look merely adventitious).”19 acterized as identifying a specific modality of “vi-
Wölfflin’s main concern here is to empha- sual attention,” this risks severing the connection
size that he has arrived at the fundamental con- between “forms of beholding” and “forms of rep-
cepts empirically, that is to say, through the close resentation” that we are trying to explain.
analysis of a selection of different artworks rather
than through a process of philosophical deduction.
This is why, from a Kantian standpoint, they will ii. a new feeling for beauty
appear to be adventitious or merely “thrown to-
gether” (als bloß “aufgerafft” erscheinen). How- Consider, first, the distinction between the linear
ever, anyone who is familiar with the first and the painterly. Whatever we make of Wölfflin’s

Critique will also be puzzled at the reference to contention that this pair of concepts can be used
“Kategorien der Anschauung” with its strange slip- to capture a far-reaching transformation that took
page between the “forms of intuition” (space and place in European art over the course of the six-
time) and the “categories of the understanding.” teenth and seventeenth centuries, there does not
Is Wölfflin suggesting that he has identified other seem to be anything in the distinction itself that
categories—distinct from causality, unity, plural- would warrant his claim that this transformation
ity, and so on—that are operative at the level of required “a decisive readjustment of eye” (eine
sensibility or has he failed to mark an important einschneidende Umgewöhnung des Auges).21
distinction between the different components of I take Wölfflin’s deployment of the distinction
Kant’s account? to characterize differences in what have come to
It is at this point, I believe, that we should rec- be termed the “design features” of artworks to be
ognize the limits of the neo-Kantian interpreta- uncontroversial. In relation to two-dimensional
tion of the Fundamental Concepts. Rather than works of representational art, the distinction ar-
attempting to give further precision to distinctions ticulates different kinds of transition between the
that seem to have been quite loosely formulated, marks out of which the picture is made. In the lin-
it is more fruitful to acknowledge that although ear style the marks tend toward being distinct and
Wölfflin appears to be indebted to the Kantian individually identifiable, whereas in the painterly
account of the mind’s “productive” and “transfor- style they tend to be fluid and merging. Whereas
mative” powers that had been taken up and de- the former permits clearly discernible outlines or
veloped by philosophers such as Fiedler, he takes contours, the latter makes it hard to determine
these claims for granted rather than providing in- the boundaries that distinguish one object or part
dependent arguments in their support. While it of an object from another: the dominant order-
is certainly possible to seek to make good this ing device is the deployment of light and shade
omission—a project that would find plentiful re- or what Wölfflin terms a grouping into “patches”
sources in the work of recent Kant scholarship (Flecken). However, in keeping with his claim that
that has reassessed the role of sensibility in the the fundamental concepts are both “forms of be-
first Critique—in the compass of this short essay holding” and “forms of representation,” he also
I want to meet a less demanding challenge.20 By presents the distinction as means of distinguish-
examining the role played in Wölfflin’s account ing two different ways in which one and the same
by the concept of visual pleasure, or what he also object or groups of objects can be seen: “linear vi-
terms the “feeling for beauty,” I argue that there is sion sharply distinguishes form from form, while
a simpler means of understanding the connection the painterly eye on the other hand aims at that
that he draws between vision and artistic represen- movement which passes over the sum of things.”22
tation. This has the additional benefit of showing Wölfflin elucidates both elements of the distinc-
why the fundamental concepts extend to include tion with reference to two paintings of elaborately
nondepictive art forms such as architecture and costumed figures by Bronzino and Velázquez.
the decorative arts rather than being restricted to Whereas Bronzino’s Portrait of Eleanora of
the representational arts of painting and sculpture. Toledo (c. 1544, Uffizi Gallery, Florence) is
Finally, and most importantly, it provides grounds characteristic of the linear style in the “metallic
for resisting the temptation to recast the five pairs distinctness of lines and surfaces,” Velázquez’s
of concepts exclusively in attentional or aspectual Portrait of the Infanta Margarita (1656,
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna) does is bound” nonsensical, for there does not seem to
not render the exact shape of the embroidered be any impediment, historical or otherwise, that
patterns on the Infanta’s dress but rather the could have prevented artists from alternating be-
“shimmering image of the whole.”23 In a telling tween unified and nonunified forms of seeing. As
aside, Wölfflin further draws out the contrast Arthur Danto and Noël Carroll have pointed out,
between the two styles: the human visual processing system evolved over
time, but it does not have a “history” in the sense
Not for a moment does the artist depart from the ab- required here.27 Even if, as Bence Nanay has ar-
solute distinctness of the object. It is as if, in the rep- gued, this claim needs to be modified in light of
resentation of a bookcase, an artist were to attempt to recent research into the “neural plasticity” of the
brain and its impact on perceptual processes, the

paint book by book, each equally clearly outlined, while
an eye attuned to appearance only grasps the shimmer switching of visual attention between the isolation
playing over the whole in which, in varying degrees, the of parts and taking in the whole has good claim to
separate form is submerged.24 be a basic human capacity rather than a historical
achievement whose origins can be identified in a
Wölfflin recognizes that a strongly linear depic- particular period of recent European history.28
tion, in which each element is represented with To find a way out of this impasse, we need to
the same degree of clarity, does not correspond to give proper weight to Wölfflin’s variant formula-
how anyone actually sees the world, for it is not tion that “the great contrast between linear and
possible to view a plurality of spatially distributed painterly style corresponds to radically different
objects with the same level of attention all at once. interests in the world.”29 The appeal to the concept
Nonetheless, this example suggests that what lies of “interest” (Interesse) initially appears to pro-
at the basis of the distinction between the linear vide a rather weak basis for developing an alter-
and the painterly is a distinction between two dif- native account, but its importance becomes clear
ferent kinds of visual attention.25 when Wölfflin goes on to note that “from differ-
Bronzino and Velázquez, as representatives of ently orientated interests in the world, each time a
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries respec- new beauty comes forth.”30 Elsewhere, he writes
tively, may have elected to organize the design fea- of the specific “attraction” or “appeal” (Reiz) of
tures of their work in identifiably different ways, the painterly, observing that the transition away
but it seems implausible to suggest that artists from the firm, clear outlines of the linear style “is
throughout this extended period were not able determined by a new sense of beauty, by the feel-
to shift their attention at will from a focus on ing for the beauty of that all-pervading mysterious
the details of the individual constituents of, say, movement which, for the new generation, at the
a bookcase, to an encompassing apprehension of same time meant life.”31 The opposition between
the bookcase as a whole. The attention-directed what is felt to be “living” and the ebbing away of
character of the human visual system allows us to vitality that accompanies the loss of conviction in
move with relative facility between the isolation established forms of visual organization runs like
of individual objects and a more unified view in a golden thread throughout his discussion of all
which the parts “fuse” into a whole, and there is five pairs of concepts.
no reason to believe that this capacity was unavail- The term that Wölfflin uses most frequently to
able or impeded at an earlier historical period. capture this dimension of the fundamental con-
How, then, are we to make sense of Wölfflin’s cepts is ‘decorative,’ a term which he deploys
insistence that the linear and the painterly style in opposition to the concept of ‘imitation.’ One
represent two “radically different modes of vi- of the goals of the Fundamental Concepts is to
sion” (von Grund aus verschiedenen Arten des undermine the Vasarian assumption that the his-
Sehens) and that this distinction can be used to torical “development” of art can adequately be
identify constitutive differences between the art understood in terms of an increasing mastery of
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?26 Un- the means of representation or progress in the
less other factors are operative, the recasting of imitation of nature. Wölfflin seeks to show that
the fundamental concepts as forms of visual at- the linear and painterly styles provide different
tention renders the claim that “every artist finds but equally effective means of meeting this de-
certain visual possibilities before him, to which he mand: they are “two conceptions of the world,
differently orientated in taste and in their inter- properly secured. Vertical and horizontal do not
est in the world, and yet each capable of giving grip each other.”37 Nonetheless, he describes the
a perfect picture of visible things.”32 The appeal transition to open form in the seventeenth century
to the concept of the decorative is thus intended as an intentional destabilization of the emphasis
to provide an alternative explanation for stylistic on visible order and structure that had come to
change. Although Wölfflin acknowledges that the predominate in the High Renaissance: closed form
five pairs of concepts can be used to identify both begins to seem artificial or, at least, too strongly
decorative and imitative features, the decorative willed, too calculated in its relation to the viewer,
is given primacy in accounting for the historical leading artists to look for ways in which their
development from one style to another. Indeed, work could be organized without giving the im-
Wölfflin contends that “the history of art is not pression that it had been deliberately made for

secondarily but absolutely primarily a history of contemplation.
decoration.”33 Wölfflin acknowledges that the placing of the
The exact meaning of the “decorative” is diffi- primary motif in the center of the picture to es-
cult to pin down, but in its broadest sense it refers tablish a strongly symmetrical composition as, for
to a satisfying or visually pleasing organization of example, in Leonardo’s Last Supper or Raphael’s
the design features of an artwork that can be var- The School of Athens represents a “specially se-
ied independently of depicted content. Although vere tectonic type.”38 However, he emphasizes
it is sometimes used in a narrower sense to refer to that the “only important point for us is that the
pattern or ornament, the more expansive meaning arrangement was once possible at all, while later
is still to be found, for example, in Matisse’s use of it was no longer possible.”39 Even where Rem-
the term in his “Notes of a Painter.”34 It can also brandt seeks to exploit the “monumental effect”
be carried over unproblematically to character- of closed form in his Supper at Emmaus (1648,
ize nonrepresentational art forms, or, more accu- Louvre, Paris) by placing the figure of Christ cen-
rately, it has its original application in this domain trally in front of a niche, the effect is destabilized
and it is used in an extended sense to encompass by allowing the figure to be “swamped in the ex-
the representational arts. It is noteworthy that the aggerated space.”40
distinction between the linear and the painterly What, then, is the nature of the “impossibil-
was first formulated by Wölfflin to characterize ity” of tectonic pictorial organization that Wölfflin
differences between Renaissance and baroque ar- seeks to characterize here? It does not seem to
chitecture; the redeployment of the distinction as be a legal or practical impossibility, since Wölfflin
a means of analyzing painting and sculpture was a makes no reference to the circumstances of a com-
later development.35 mission or to constraints imposed by the church.
The crucial point for our discussion here lies Nor, as we have seen, are there grounds for assum-
in Wölfflin’s contention that “only where decora- ing that artists in the seventeenth century some-
tive feeling has changed can we expect a transfor- how lacked the basic human capacity to direct
mation of the mode of representation.”36 This is their visual attention. Even if we bracket out the
best approached by considering another of the five reference to the internal ordering of the artwork
pairs of concepts: the opposition between closed that seems to play such a crucial role in this pair
(tectonic) and open (a-tectonic) forms. The ba- of concepts, it seems implausible to suggest that
sic distinction here is between a kind of ordering Rembrandt was somehow unable to attend to the
that makes itself readily apparent to the viewer, appearance of regular pattern or order, whether
for example, through an emphasis on vertical and in the natural or the man-made world.
horizontal structures or a regular distribution of Once the question is formulated in this way, the
accents, and a kind of ordering that deliberately only plausible answer is that the “impossibility”
weakens the sense of lawfulness through the use of lies in the perceived limitations of strict tectonic
a freer rhythm and the avoidance of symmetry. It ordering as a satisfactory or desirable way of orga-
is important to recognize that for Wölfflin closed nizing the materials at the artist’s disposal. By the
form is itself a historical achievement. In compar- mid-seventeenth century, the use of closed form
ison to Leonardo or Raphael, when we look at the would have appeared rigid and artificial or, to
work of a fifteenth-century artist such as Martin use Wölfflin’s favored term, lacking in vitality. In
Schongauer, “we have the feeling that nothing is short, certain options ceased to be available not as
an abstract possibility but as an effective means of 18th edition (Basel: Schwabe, 1991), p. 26 and p. 24; Prin-
giving expression to the interest in drama, spatial ciples of Art History: The Problem of the Development of
Style in Later Art, 7th edition [1923], trans. M. D. Hottinger
energy, and movement that characterizes baroque
(New York: Dover, 1950), p. 13 and p. 11.
art. Once this process was underway, a reversion to 2. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 29;
the geometrical regularity of the older style would Principles, p. 16.
have looked archaic and thus carried a different 3. John Hyman, The Objective Eye: Color, Form, and
range of meanings from its original deployment in Reality in the Theory of Art (University of Chicago Press,
2006), p. 161.
the High Renaissance. 4. See Dominic Gregory, Showing, Sensing and Seem-
Understood correctly, Wölfflin’s claim that “ev- ing: Distinctively Sensory Representations and Their Con-
ery artist finds certain visual possibilities before tents (Oxford University Press, 2013).
him, to which he is bound” need not carry any 5. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 24;

Principles, p. 11.
controversial commitments concerning historical
6. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Vorwort,” Kunstgeschichtliche
changes in the human visual processing system. Grundbegriffe, 1st edition (Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1915),
Rather, it rests on the well-attested connections pp. v–viii. This preface was omitted from later editions of
through which the work of one artist can be seen the book.
as responding to and developing the work of an- 7. Wölfflin, “Vorwort,” p. v.
8. This observation is made in the preface to the 8th
other. The identification of the decorative as a key edition, published in 1943. It is reprinted in Wölfflin, Kun-
factor in the explanation of stylistic change allows stgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 7.
us to see that there are developments internal to 9. See Jason Gaiger, “The Analysis of Pictorial Style,”
the history of art that cannot fully be accounted British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 20–36. I further
develop this approach, and introduce some qualifications,
for through reference to other factors.
in Aesthetics and Painting (New York: Continuum, 2008),
We are now in a position to appreciate the sig- pp. 99–115.
nificance of the rider that Wölfflin attaches to 10. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and
the claim with which I began. Having observed trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge Univer-
that the fundamental concepts “can be treated as sity Press, 1998), p. 136. The quotation is from the Introduc-
tion to the second edition, of 1787 [B1].
forms of representation or as forms of behold- 11. Konrad Fiedler, Über den Ursprung der künstl-
ing,” he adds that “it is dangerous to speak only erischen Tätigkeit (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1887); repr. in Fiedler,
of certain ‘states of the eye’ [Zustände des Auges] Schriften zur Kunst, vol. 1, ed. Gottfried Boehm (Munich:
by which conception is determined: every artistic Wilhelm Fink, 1991), pp. 111–220. The reference to the “pro-
cess of seeing” is at p. 176.
conception is, of its very nature, organised accord-
12. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 263;
ing to certain notions of pleasure [Gefallen].”41 Principles, p. 226.
Although Wölfflin appears to be committed to 13. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 263;
a neo-Kantian conception of art as a form of Principles, p. 226.
“worldmaking”—according to which “the ways 14. Hottinger’s translation was originally published in
1932. A new translation by Jonathan Blower has been com-
of seeing and picturing are many and various”— missioned by the Getty Research Institute for its Texts &
this account is rooted in a historical conception of Documents series. I would like to record my thanks to
stylistic change that imposes constraints on what Jonathan Barnabas for discussing the translation with me
is “possible” at any given time.42 That these con- and for his advice on some of the issues discussed in this
article.
straints are grounded in a specific “feeling for
15. See, Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A319–20/
beauty” rather than a more demanding account B376–7, pp. 398–399.
of the plasticity of vision makes them no less ef- 16. Wölfflin, Principles, p. vii.
fective as determinants of artistic style. 17. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 5.
18. See Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of Symbolic
jason gaiger Forms, trans. Ralph Mannheim (Yale University Press,
1953–1957).
The Ruskin School of Art
19. Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 264; Princi-
University of Oxford ples, p. 227.
Oxford OX1 4BG, United Kingdom 20. Compare, for example, Robert Hanna’s observa-
tion that “Kant’s explicatively useful contrast between the
internet: jason.gaiger@rsa.ox.ac.uk spontaneous conceptual functions of the understanding and
the receptive perceptual functions of sensibility has one
quite misleading apparent implication. . . . It seems to sug-
1. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegr- gest that sensibility is wholly passive or non-generative
iffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst, and non-productive. But sensory receptivity is in no way a
representational inertness”; Hanna, Kant and the Founda- 41. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 29;
tions of Analytic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, Principles, p. 16.
2001), p. 36. 42. See Nelson Goodman, “The Way the World Is,”
21. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 33; Review of Metaphysics 14 (1960): 48–56, at p. 53. In Ways of
Principles, p. 18. Worldmaking (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1978), Goodman
22. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 34; acknowledges that the theme of the multiplicity of worlds is
Principles, p. 19. already to be found in the work of Ernst Cassirer.
Principles, p. 46
24. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, pp.
64–65; Principles, p. 46.
Michael Newall
25. For a presentation of this view, see Bence Nanay,
“The Macro and the Micro: Andreas Gursky’s Aesthet- Painterly and Planar: Wölfflinian Analysis Beyond

ics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70 (2012): Classical and Baroque
91–100.
Principles, p. 18.
27. See Arthur C. Danto, “Seeing and Showing,” The In the early editions of Principles of Art History,
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 1–9; and Wölfflin included the following passage in the
Noël Carroll, “Modernity and the Plasticity of Percep- preface.
tion,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001):
11–17. These two essays form part of a symposium on “The
Historicity of the Eye.” Nothing marks so clearly the opposition between the art
28. See Bence Nanay, “The History of Vision,” The of the past and the art of today as the unity of visual
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, forthcoming; pre- forms then and the multiplicity of visual forms now. In
sented at the workshop “Theories of Vision,” University of a manner unprecedented in the history of art, the most
Oxford, June 2013.
29. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 43; contradictory [tendencies] seem to be compatible with
Principles, p. 27. each other. . . . But the loss of vitality compared to the
30. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 43; one-sided strength of earlier epochs is immeasurable.1
Principles, p. 27 (translation modified).
31. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, pp.
43–44; Principles, p. 28.
By the unity of visual forms, I take it that Wölfflin
32. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 33; means, or at least includes, the coincidence of
Principles, p. 18. those general representational forms, or concepts
33. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 268; as he more often called them, which he found
Principles, p. 231. In the German original the claim is even
typical of sixteenth-century Renaissance “classi-
more specific: “Darum ist die Geschichte der Malerei nicht
nur nebenbei, sondern ganz wesentlich auch eine Geschichte cal” art and of those he found typical of baroque
der Dekoration.” seventeenth-century art.2 By contrast, the art of
34. “The entire arrangement of my picture is expres- his time (he was perhaps thinking of the eclecti-
sive: the place occupied by the figures, the empty spaces cism of Salon art at least as much as early mod-
around them, the proportions, everything has its share. Com-
position is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the
ernism) combines in a “confusing jumble” the
diverse elements at the painter’s command to express his- classical and baroque concepts.3
feelings”; Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter” (1908), in Art Wölfflin’s remarks raise two questions that
in Theory: 1900–2000, eds. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, this article addresses. First, what links the con-
trans. J. D. Flam (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), pp. 69–75,
cepts into classical and baroque groupings, be-
at p. 70.
35. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock: yond their historical coincidence? Second, what
Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barock- happens when classical and baroque combina-
stils in Italien (Munich: Theodor Ackermann, 1888), espe- tions of concepts appear together—and in what
cially chap. 1, “Der Malerische Stil,” pp. 15–23. sense, if any, are they contradictory? Wölfflin does
Principles, p. 28.
not write of these at all, since from his point
37. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 172; of view they obscure rather than illuminate the
Principles, p. 146. grand movement between classical and baroque,
38. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p.148; which he saw as central to art history. Reading
Principles, p. 125.
Principles of Art History, one might have the
Principles, p. 134. impression that they do not exist; but they do,
40. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, p. 156; having a presence throughout post-Renaissance
Principles, p. 134. European art. Moreover, we shall see that
applying Wölfflin’s concepts to these works illu- “linear style sees in lines, painterly in masses.”7
minates them in significant and unexpected ways. He goes on:
This analysis will also give a new approach to
understanding Wölfflin’s concepts and provide
Linear vision . . . means that the sense and beauty of
the resources for understanding the classical and
things is first sought in the outline . . . while seeing in
baroque groupings of the concepts.
masses takes place where attention withdraws from the
Before starting, there are two points to note
edges, where the outline has become more or less indif-
about the scope of my project. First, Wölfflin ap-
ferent to the eye as the path of vision, and the primary
plied his concepts to architecture and sculpture as
element of the impression is things seen as patches.8
well as the pictorial arts—I will be concerned only
with the pictorial arts. Second, Wölfflin describes

five pairs of concepts. The first of each pair he A concern about this approach is that in explain-
associated with the classical and the second with ing variations of style in terms of variations in
the baroque: linear and painterly, plane and re- visual experience, one would be committed to an
cession, closed and open, multiplicity and unity implausible account of vision that would require
(of depicted parts, rather than representational visual experience to vary in substantial ways be-
forms), and absolute and relative clarity.4 Jason tween individuals and periods. My approach is one
Gaiger’s reconstruction, drawing on the work of way of making it clear that a Wölfflinian account is
Lambert Wiesing and others, eliminates the last not committed to this idea (and it is worth noting
two pairs, showing that they are implied by the that it is not the only way).9
first three.5 For reasons of space, I discuss only on I propose that these picture-makers working in
the first two pairs: linear and painterly and plane linear and painterly styles bring different kinds
and recession. A longer analysis would draw in of attention to their subject matter. That is, they
closed and open. attend to different features of their subject
Sections I and II examine linear and painterly matter—either outline or mass, to use Wölfflin’s
and plane and recession, developing an account way of putting it. These differences in attention
of them in terms of visual attention. In Section III are typically registered in the resultant pictures.
this is used to make an analysis of pictures that (This is not necessarily the case of course, but bear
combines classical and baroque concepts. This will in mind that a picture usually only depicts those
depend on using visual attention to forge connec- features of the subject matter the picture-maker
tions to a quality that Wölfflin held to be outside attends to.) In turn, pictures shape viewers’ expe-
“pure” vision: expression. Section IV explains the riences. In attending carefully to what the picture-
“unity” of the classical and baroque concepts, and maker has depicted, a viewer is bound to re-create
Section V identifies a limit to applications of my something of the visual attention of the painter.10
approach. Wölfflin also describes how this attention
moves. He observes that with the linear style the
focus of attention moves along lines: “the eye is
i. linear and painterly led along the boundaries and induced to feel along
the edges.”11 That suggests the following condition
Linear style—as seen in sixteenth-century for linear visual experience.12 Visual experience is
painters such as Dürer, Raphael, and Holbein, to linear if it involves visual attention directed along
take some of Wölfflin’s favorite examples—tends outlines of objects.
to delineate the outlines of bodies, whether using Movement also figures in the painterly style:
actual lines or through unambiguous discontinu- “Then it is as if at all points everything was en-
ities of color and tone between figure and ground. livened by a mysterious movement. . . . Whether
Painterly style, as seen in Rembrandt, Hals, and the movement be leaping and vehement, or only a
Rubens, treats outlines in a relatively indistinct gentle quiver and flicker, it remains for the spec-
way, instead focusing attention on the body or tator inexhaustible.”13 Here there is no mention
mass. Wölfflin founds this distinction, as he does of attention moving, but I think it is a reasonable
his other concepts, in terms of vision.6 The linear inference to make. For if the subject matter is not
and painterly styles register and communicate depicted as moving, what else can possibly be in
corresponding kinds of vision. As he puts it, motion, aside from the viewer’s eyes and visual
attention? Indeed it seems very natural to speak Renaissance painters had full mastery of these
of one’s vision “leaping” between spotlighted ele- methods, but chose to use them sparingly.17
ments in a Rembrandt, and “quivering and flick- For Wölfflin this distinction is also to be illu-
ering” across the textured surfaces of the faces, minated in terms of vision. Here too attention
hands, and bodies, or even brushwork itself.14 This can be understood to play an important role. For
presents a number of elements one could draw on Wölfflin, planar and recessional vision is more
in defining painterliness. The definition I give here than a matter of the view one has of an ob-
elucidates the idea of “seeing in masses” in terms ject. In the case of recession, Wölfflin also holds
of this second kind of movement. Rather than at- that it involves movement. Viewing a recessional
tention following outlines, it is guided over the form does not alone suffice to achieve the qual-
bodies of forms, often following its contours via ity Wölfflin intends: “Every picture has recession,

the grain of depicted textures or the actual tex- but the recession has a very different effect ac-
tural marks of the paint. So, I give this account cording to whether the space organises itself into
of painterliness: Visual experience is painterly if it planes or is experienced as a homogenous reces-
involves visual attention directed over the bodies of sional movement.”18
forms, rather than along outlines. Again, since nothing else can possibly be mov-
Wölfflin’s remarks also suggest this kind of at- ing when one is looking at a static picture, I
tention could be diffused—“it is as if at all points take it that recessional movement is a matter of
everything was enlivened.” That is, that it is no the movement of visual attention as it follows
longer focused but distributed over an area.15 That forms receding into deep space (or, alternatively,
need not be the case on my account, which allows out of deep space toward the viewer). In a pla-
for focused attention tracing lines across forms; nar composition, visual attention presumably also
but so far as distributed attention involves a kind moves, but it is typically more gently guided along
of palpitating movement over a surface, it could these planes—Wölfflin speaks of the “repose” of
be consistent with my account. planar compositions compared to the more dy-
A question remains about why Renaissance namic movement into deep space of a recessional
painters have one kind of attention and baroque composition.19
painters another, but we shall see that it also arises So, guided by these points, I account for the
in the next section, so I shall delaying addressing distinction between planar and recessional as fol-
it until then. lows: Visual experience is planar if it involves visual
attention guided along planes appearing to face the
viewer. Visual experience is recessional if it involves
ii. plane and recession visual attention guided away from or toward the
viewer along forms appearing to recede from the
Wölfflin introduces plane and recession in this viewer.20
way: “Classic art reduces the parts of a to- Let me return to the question of why the vi-
tal form to a sequence of planes [whereas] the sion of Renaissance painters should have certain
baroque emphasises depth. . . . [T]he eye relates attributes (linearity and planarity) and baroque
objects essentially in the direction of forwards and painters should have others (painterliness and re-
backwards.”16 cession). I understand these different kinds of see-
So, a planar picture will arrange its subject mat- ing not as products of an autonomous history of
ter in a series of planes, parallel to the picture vision, as critics of Wölfflin sometimes understand
plane, so they appear to face the viewer and over- him, but as patterns of interest, which are the prod-
lap another. A recessional picture would arrange uct of cultural influence.21 There is nothing espe-
the same subject matter so that the depicted forms cially mysterious about this. For the most part,
appear angled away from the viewer, receding of- these patterns of interest are propagated through
ten into a deep pictorial space. One might think pictorial traditions. The attention painters give
that this is the product of the discovery of methods their subject matter is conditioned by the tradi-
of perspective: that is, that Renaissance art tends tions they are part of, ensuring the relative con-
to depict depth less effectively than does the art sistencies in style that Wölfflin draws attention
of the seventeenth century. Wölfflin is careful to to. I will have more to say about why traditions
quash this thought, pointing out, rightly, that High may be drawn in one direction or another below.
Change to these patterns of attention will also be expression.”24 My examples are an illustration of
explained through changes in culture. A complex this. But I have another reason for including ex-
story can be told around this, but it is enough to pression, because I am concerned with the value
note that Wölfflin himself allowed that quite mun- that the concepts can have in art. Without expres-
dane forces might have a role here, acknowledging sion the concepts are only a matter of movement
“the theory of the palling of interest and a conse- of visual attention—and that alone is not enough
quent necessity of a stimulation of interest.”22 to sustain artistic interest. Understanding the ex-
pressive use to which the concepts are put, in the
examples above and those to follow, is critical
iii. wölfflin’s “compatible contradictions” to understanding and accounting for their artis-

tic value. Second, there is the question of how it
I now turn to pictures that combine classical and is that the movement of visual attention through
baroque concepts. Let me start with paintings that depicted space plays a role in generating expres-
are both linear and recessional. Many pictures fit sive effects. Answering that question is beyond the
this description, using a linear style, but includ- scope of this article, and accordingly I put it aside.
ing vertiginous, recessional perspectives. Exam- It will be enough for my arguments that these ef-
ples in modern painting include Munch’s versions fects do arise and that the movement of visual
of The Scream (the lithograph version shows the attention does have a part in producing them.
linearity of his style well), de Chirico’s Mystery and Turning now to planar and painterly pictures,
Melancholy of a Street, and, less well known, many we can distinguish two kinds by the different ex-
paintings by U.S. surrealist Kay Sage. There are pressive effects they achieve. The first is exempli-
also examples in earlier painting, in particular fied by intimist paintings such as Vuillard’s The
mannerism. We see it in Parmigianino’s Madonna Yellow Curtain and Bonnard’s The Table. In these
of the Long Neck. To the left of the Madonna, a paintings, visual attention is restricted to a series
crowded group of angels appears pressed up al- of plane-like surfaces—a bed and yellow curtain
most to the picture plane. To the right, in what and a tabletop set with plates and bowls are orga-
must be a conscious contrast, the composition nized into planes facing the viewer in shallow rep-
dives away into a distant (and unfinished) per- resented spaces. But the edges of those depicted
spectival view of receding columns. surfaces appear indistinct, and the viewer’s atten-
In each of these a distinctive effect is achieved, tion, encouraged also by the surfaces’ textures and
quite foreign to the classical and baroque styles. patterns, is guided across these surfaces. Other ex-
One’s attention is guided more or less slowly along amples of twentieth-century painting have some-
the outlines of the subject matter in the fore- thing of this character, such as many of the works
ground, before being plunged down into a vertigi- Matisse painted at Nice.
nous perspective. As one’s gaze moves toward the This type of painting merits the label
vanishing point, it remains bound to the outlines intimism—not simply in its tendency to depict “in-
of diminishing subject matter. Arising from this is timate” interiors and domestic subjects, but in the
an expressive effect. It has a somewhat different way it depicts them. The depicted surfaces appear
character in each of my examples, but it is, broadly as close and tactilely available—a feature that de-
speaking, a disturbing effect, which in the modern pends on the planarity of their compositions, and
pictures at least can be described as expressive of the viewer’s attention is encouraged to wander
anxiety. freely, in a relaxed way across the forms—a fea-
Let me add two points about expression here. ture that depends on painterliness. These paint-
First, my inclusion of expression contrasts with ings also have a distinctive expressive effect: the
Wölfflin, who endeavored to exclude expression expression of a mood appropriate to the subjects
from his account of the concepts. Gaiger discusses depicted, but beyond that difficult to describe. As
and criticizes Wölfflin’s efforts to keep them sepa- André Gide put it, “Vuillard always speaks in a
rate, citing various critics of Wölfflin, from Erwin whisper,” and much the same may be said of the
Panofsky to Michael Podro.23 As Gaiger puts it, other works I have mentioned here.25 They pro-
“[u]nder closer examination, the idea of a com- duce a distinctively intimist effect that is depen-
pletely neutral and ‘colourless’ organization col- dent in part on a style that is both planar and
lapses, for it can never be kept wholly distinct from painterly.
An objection could be raised that this effect and the same thing, but seen from a different
depends only on the associations prompted by standpoint.”27 The significance of such comments
the subject matter, not the formal qualities. The is difficult to pin down, but a helpful way to un-
best response to this would come in the form of a derstand him is to take his view as holding that
Wölfflinian double projection, showing an intimist these pairs of concepts are aspects of a single kind
painting on one side—say Bonnard’s The Table— of vision, a “classical” vision and a “baroque” vi-
and on the other, a painting of similar subject mat- sion. The examples of the previous section make
ter in another style, such as a seventeenth-century it abundantly clear that there is no necessary rea-
Dutch still life. However enticing or homely the son why linear must accompany planar and why
subject matter of the Dutch painting is, it lacks painterliness must accompany recession either in
the distinctive effect of an intimist still life, thus style or in vision. Still, Wölfflin must have been

demonstrating the contribution of painterliness aware of the kinds of examples I discussed in the
and planarity to expressive effect. previous section, even if he gave them little weight.
The second kind of planar and painterly pic- So it is reasonable to understand him as claiming
ture has a quite different effect. Titian’s late paint- that it is vision instead that binds these concepts
ing The Flaying of Marsyas is an outstanding ex- together. This view can be articulated as follows:
ample of this type. The composition is as stri- (i) that pictures can combine linear and recessional
dently planar as that of a classical frieze. At the and painterly and planar, but (ii) there is no kind of
same time, the work is an exemplar of painter- vision that corresponds with these combinations.
liness. The edges of the forms appear lost in That is to say, he understood human vision to ex-
murk, and the eye is guided across the depicted ist on a continuum between classical and baroque,
forms by the flickering brushmarks of Titian’s and these pictures do not occupy a place on that
late style. Despite sharing features of classical and continuum. To be clear again about my own posi-
baroque styles, the expressive effect it achieves is tion, while I accept (i), I reject (ii). My rejection
like neither of them. It is an example of Titian’s of the view I attribute to Wölfflin leaves me to
terribilita. Its supernatural subject matter has a find another account of the affinity of linear and
threatening and frightening quality that gains planar and painterliness and recession. We have
from its apparent claustrophobic proximity to the seen that these combinations are not the only ways
viewer (achieved in virtue of the composition’s of composing a successful painting, but they do
planarity) and its indistinct and obscure appear- seem to be effective ones. Why is that? Let me
ance (which depends on its painterliness). sketch a response to that question.
So here too we have expressive properties— If there is such a connection between the con-
an expression of threatening and frightening cepts, it must have a basis in their phenom-
power—in part dependent on the planar and enology—since they are properly understood in
painterly style. Again one might ask whether the terms of experience. On my account that will mean
painting in fact draws its impact solely from its finding a connection between the kinds of move-
subject matter, and again the answer is found in ment of visual attention that I have described as
comparing a depiction of the same subject mat- characterizing the concepts. This can be done as
ter in a different style. Thus Ribera’s Apollo and follows:
Marsyas, to take a rather harrowing baroque de-
piction of the same subject, does not inspire the In both linear and planar experience, attention is con-
dreadful awe of Titian’s painting.26 strained in space—constrained to the edges of bodies, and
constrained to planes that appear to face the viewer.
iv. wölfflin’s “unity of visual forms” In both painterly and recessional experience, attention is
(by comparison) unconstrained—it roves across bodies
I now come back to the question of why it is that and moves back and forth, in and out of deep space.
linear and planar and painterliness and reces-
sion go together for Wölfflin. In what sense do So, linear and planar involve the constraint of
they form a “unity of visual forms”? Wölfflin vision while painterliness and recession do not.
calls linear and planar and painterliness and re- Let me make the now familiar move of introduc-
cession “different roots of one plant,” and “one ing expression to my analysis. Although it would
have especially dismayed Wölfflin in this case, it that thematization happens when a painter “ab-
seems to me unavoidable. The terms in which I stracts some unconsidered . . . aspect of what he
have made my analysis are not artistically signifi- is doing or what he is working on, and makes the
cant: I can see no reason why painters or viewers thought of this feature guide his future activity.”32
would have cared whether visual attention is ei- Wölfflin’s concepts can be regarded as thema-
ther consistently free or consistently constrained. tized in this sense. The experiences of linearity,
As with the other combinations I have examined, painterliness, plane, and recession will all have
it is in supporting expressive qualities that they some presence, or at least exist as possibilities, in a
can find significance. Constrained, visual atten- naturalistic painting tradition. We have seen how
tion proceeds in a slow, measured way. That kind certain painters and traditions fastened onto these
of movement is apt to express some of the qual- experiences, making the thought of these features

ities we associate with classicism: calm, care, and guide the painter’s future activity. That is to say,
meditativeness. Indeed, despite his desire to keep they sought these concepts out, making them a
classical and baroque separated from expression feature of their paintings. Wollheim also says,
in his analysis, Wölfflin habitually describes the “thematization is always for an end . . . the acqui-
concepts of the classical style in terms like this, sition of content or meaning.”33 The immediate
speaking of planarity as “sobered down,” as hav- end of the thematization of Wölfflin’s concepts, I
ing “repose,” and Raphael’s linear style as having have urged, is expression—since it is hard to un-
a “great noble gait.”28 Unconstrained, visual at- derstand how the concepts, as visual experiences,
tention can still linger but tends to move over bod- could have artistic value in themselves.
ies and through space. That is apt to express some I introduce the idea of thematization because
of the qualities we associate with the baroque: dy- it allows us to understand how the concepts can
namism, energy, and vigor. In this way linear and be universally applicable to pictorial art, without
planar, and painterliness and recession do have being universally relevant to understanding it. In
a natural affinity. Each on its own has an abil- pictures where these concepts are not thematized
ity to express certain qualities, and together they in an expressive sense, they may be present only
reinforce each other’s capacity to do this. It is out adventitiously—the fact that our attention tends
of this kind of consistency of vision and expres- to move in one way or another over a subject
sion that the “unity of visual form” and “one-sided may not be meaningful. There are a great many
strength” of the classical and baroque styles that pictures likely to fall into this category, includ-
Wölfflin admired comes forth. ing much painting outside the European tradition
and early and pre-Renaissance European painting
(which, in fairness to Wölfflin, he excluded from
v. the limits of wölfflinian analysis his analysis), works by naive painters and outsider
artists, and many photographs (including both art
It will be apparent from my account of the con- and nonart).
cepts that they are universally applicable. That is Wollheim describes deletion in this way: “When
a feature of Gaiger’s and Wiesing’s accounts too. deletion operates . . . an agent thematizes some
As Gaiger puts it, the concepts “allow the pos- feature of the work and then goes on to ensure
sibility of talking about style in general terms,” that this feature of the work does not show up
or to use Wiesing’s phrase (which Gaiger quotes), on the surface or shows up in only an attenuated
they remain “universally valid.”29 This is also close fashion.”34 Deletion too has its end, the avoidance
to what Wölfflin thought, although he allowed of certain kinds of content. Thus, artists working
that his formulation of the concepts would rein the baroque style delete the linear and pla-
quire “modification” when applied to different nar, avoiding the expressive qualities of classicism.
periods.30 This is a feature of Wölfflinian analy- Deletion here necessarily accompanies themati-
sis that makes critics uneasy. Edgar Wind, for in- zation: for one cannot have the baroque concepts
stance, called it “grandiose.”31 So I want to finish and their expressive effects without rejecting the
by adding a qualification to my account to defuse classical concepts and expression.35
this worry. There is also at least one instance in the
My analysis here draws on Wollheim’s concepts European tradition where painters have deleted
of thematization and deletion. Wollheim tells us a pair of concepts. The impressionists, for
example, abandoned the systematic pursuit of re- History, p. vii, original italics). The account I develop is an
cession or plane, rejecting neoclassical planarity account in terms of vision rather than imagination.
as well as the “neobaroque” recessional compo-
8. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. 18–19.
sitions of a painter such as Delacroix. Instead, 9. See Gaiger, “The Analysis of Pictorial Style,” and
they took on a probably photographically influ- Wiesing, Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes. They present accounts
enced, “naturalistic” approach to composition. that do not draw on differences in vision, instead basing
Their paintings of the 1860s and 1870s still con- them on differences in the features of the depicted sub-
ject matter or in the marks on the picture surface. So the
tain planar and recessional elements—but they distinction between linear and painterly, Gaiger proposes,
are not pursued in any systematic way. There is “describes different types of transition between the marks
a sense that their subject matter is pointedly unar- on the picture surface. . . . [P]ainterly transitions are merg-
ranged; planar and recessional elements mixed up, ing and fluid, such that it is impossible to determine exactly

where one thing stops and another begins, [and] linear tran-
as one often finds in a photograph. And indeed it
sitions are distinct, with each of the parts clearly isolated”
would be wrong to ascribe the kinds of expressive (Gaiger, “The Analysis of Pictorial Style,” pp. 32–33). Such
effects I have described to the great majority of im- an account is potentially consistent with my own, since the
pressionist compositions—they are quite foreign kind of experiences I describe typically are occasioned by
to the impressionist aesthetic.36 Thus plane and the kinds of marks Gaiger describes.
10. Broadly speaking, the kind of attention on which
recession have both been deleted in this style. my account relies—object- and feature-focused, aligns with
So while I have argued that Wölfflin’s concepts sophisticated spotlight theories (for example, Gordon D.
yield a significant understanding of art, there is Logan, “The CODE Theory of Visual Attention: An In-
also an important limit on their application. The tegration of Space-Based and Object-Based Attention,”
Psychological Review 103 [1996]: 603–649). Note that move-
universality of the concepts must be tempered
ment of visual attention is different from, although related
with an awareness that their application will not to, eye movement, so I avoid speaking of “the eye’s move-
always help us in understanding artworks. While ment” or “the eye being guided.” For an account of how
they are universally applicable, they are not uni- vision is affected by changes in attention yet remains cogni-
versally relevant.37 tively impenetrable in important ways, see Zenon Pylyshyn,
“Is Vision Continuous With Cognition? The Case for Cogni-
tive Impenetrability of Visual Perception,” Behavioral and
michael newall Brain Sciences 22 (1999): 341–365.
School of Arts 11. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 18.
University of Kent 12. The accounts I give of the concepts take the form of
sufficient conditions. I leave open the question of whether
Canterbury CT2 7UG, United Kingdom
there are other ways of achieving the concepts (as some of
internet: m.b.newall@kent.ac.uk Wölfflin’s remarks may be taken to suggest).
14. There is another candidate for movement: the
1. Quoted in Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical movement of the brushstrokes, or, more precisely, the traces
Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany of their movement, legible on the picture surface. If one were
(Yale University Press, 2005), p. 20. Schwartz quotes from to accept that our attention must in turn follow these move-
Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das ments to have the effects Wölfflin describes, it would bring
Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich: this proposal close to mine, except that attention would then
F. Bruckmann, 1915), pp. ix–x. be on the paint rather than the subject matter. I think this
2. This must be distinguished from a pair of Wölfflin’s kind of experience is an important part of our experience
concepts: multiplicity and unity of parts. I follow Schwartz of pictures, but it is clearly not the experience Wölfflin is
in this interpretation of Wölfflin. concerned with in formulating this concept, since it is an
3. Quoted in Schwartz, Blind Spots, p. 21. experience of medium, and he excludes that from his con-
4. Heinrich Wölfflin, Principles of Art History: The ception of form.
Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art 7th edition 15. The distinction between focused and distributed at-
[1923], trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, 1950), pp. tention comes from psychology and is discussed by Bence
14–16. Nanay, Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception (Oxford
5. Jason Gaiger, “The Analysis of Pictorial Style,” University Press, 2015), esp. chap. 2.
British Journal of Aesthetics 42 (2002): 20–36; Lambert 16. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 15.
Wiesing, Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes: Geschichte und Per- 17. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 73.
spektiven der formalen Ästhetik(Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1997). 18. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 82.
6. Although Wölfflin refers to vision throughout Prin- 19. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 73.
ciples of Art History, in the preface to the sixth edition he 20. Another way of putting these would be to replace
observed: “It is preferable to speak of modes of imagination, the relation of subject matter to the viewer with the relation
rather than of modes of vision” (Wölfflin, Principles of Art of the subject matter to the picture plane (see Gaiger, “The
Analysis of Pictorial Style,” p. 33). This would make planar David Bordwell
and recessional experience picture-specific. Wölfflin and Film Style: Some Thoughts on
21. For criticism of Wölfflin on this line, see Edgar
a Poetics of Pictures
Wind, “Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaft and Its
Meaning for Aesthetics,” in Edgar Wind, The Eloquence
of Symbols: Studies in Humanist Art, revised edition,
ed. Jaynie Anderson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), By both training and inclination, I find it hard to
pp. 21–36.
22. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 230. Wölfflin
defend many of the philosophical presuppositions
alludes to Adolf Göller, “What Is the Cause of Perpet- Heinrich Wölfflin brings to bear on the history
ual Style Change in Architecture?” in Empathy, Form, and of the visual arts. He seeks laws governing the
Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873–1893, eds. and course of art history. Because these laws transcend
trans. Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou

the concrete choices made by individual artists, he
(Santa Monica, CA: Getty Center for the History of Art
and the Humanities, 1994), pp. 193–225. seeks large-scale causes propelling them. Among
23. Gaiger, “The Analysis of Pictorial Style,” pp. 26–27. these causes is national character, or “race,” a con-
24. Gaiger, “The Analysis of Pictorial Style,” p. 27. cept he invokes in charting differences between
25. Quoted by A. R., “Edouard Vuillard Retrospec- German and Italian art.1
tive Exhibition,” Calendar of the Art Institute of Chicago 66
(1972): 1–3, at p. 2. A. R. quotes from La Gazette des Beaux-
These and other of his claims seem to me im-
Arts, December 1, 1905. Gide was clear that the effect was plausible. Yet like many art historians, Wölfflin
a matter of expression: “[H]is brush never breaks free of leaves a legacy of middle-level concepts that can
the emotion which guides it; the outer world, for Vuillard, is help us notice important features of painting,
always a pretext, an adjustable means of expression.”
sculpture, and architecture. Some of these con-
26. Let me add a more surprising example of pictures
in a painterly and planar style: some of the late work of cepts fall under the rubric of “art theory”: the
abstract painter Rothko, especially the Seagram Murals. So craft skills taught in schools, the best practices
far as one sees them as showing floating, proximate blurs passed down from masters, the “rules” for paint-
of light indicating a supernatural presence, they suggest a ing attached shadows or designing pediments. By
similar analysis.
studying these rules we can better grasp what art-
28. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. 106, 73, and works in particular times and places are designed
12. to do.
29. Gaiger, “The Analysis of Pictorial Style,” pp. 36 Other concepts, developed by researchers
and 32. Gaiger quotes Wiesing,Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes,
rather than practitioners, aim to subsume artis-
p. 66.
30. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. viii. tic traditions to broader principles. Aristotle’s Po-
31. Wind, “Warburg’s Concept of Kulturwissenschaft,” etics stands as the most famous example of this
p. 23. tendency. So let us call the “poetics” approach an
32. Richard Wollheim, Painting as an Art (London: effort to systematize the conventions of a tradi-
Thames and Hudson, 1987), p. 20.
33. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 22 (original italics).
tion, a genre, or a period’s characteristic artworks.
34. Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 23. Some of these conventions will be articulated in
35. Wollheim makes an analysis of baroque art art theory, while others are wholly tacit and are
along much these lines, drawing on Wölfflin in his brought to light by the researcher.
characterization of the baroque and applying deletion
In the role of a pictorial poetician, Wölfflin of-
(p. 26). It is also worth noting that Wollheim was effusive in
his praise of Wölfflin (Wollheim, Painting as an Art, p. 359, fers a great deal to the student of the visual arts.
n. 23). In particular, we film researchers have long been
36. This was not to last long—artists such as Cézanne curious about continuity and change in cinematic
and Seurat were again to thematize planarity in painting in style across history. In the first section of this es-
the 1880s. There is an important exception in Manet (if he is
counted as an impressionist), who retained a preference for
say, I trace the dominant model of that history.
planar composition through his career. Once we have a sense of the standard consensus
37. I am grateful to the members of the Anglo-German about cinema’s stylistic development, we are in
Picture Workshop, especially Lambert Wiesing and Jason a better position to see how a cinematic poetics,
Gaiger, who gave generous and helpful advice on a forerun-
drawing in part on Wölfflin’s concepts, can cre-
ner of this article at the workshop’s 2014 meeting, and also
to Bence Nanay and an anonymous reader for this journal, ate a richer and more refined account of historical
whose comments have helped to improve and focus it. change.
i. stylistic history of silent cinema allowed the entire visible world, from a flower to
a turning doorknob, to become part of the drama.
The earliest historians of cinema almost com- What made most of these creative options pos-
pletely ignored the tradition of visual analysis in sible was the technique of editing. By cutting from
German-language art history. Even Erwin Panof- a distant shot to a nearer view, the filmmaker could
sky and Rudolf Arnheim, when they wrote about enlarge a face, a pair of hands, or a knife on the ta-
film, did not find it fruitful to apply concepts from ble. By cutting from place to place, the filmmaker
the work of Hildebrand, Wyckhoff, Riegl, and could expand the arena of the drama and inten-
their successors. Why? sify suspense, as D. W. Griffith did in crosscut-
For one thing, writers had no access to films for ting between innocents in danger and the rescuers
close scrutiny. Historians of painting and sculp- hastening to the scene. By inserting images pre-

ture could study the original works at leisure by senting dream or memory or simply by cutting to
visiting museums and other repositories. But dur- optical point-of-view shots, the filmmaker could
ing the first decades of film history, there were expose the inner life of the characters. Cutting
no archives accessible to researchers. Film copies also made time malleable. The filmmaker could
were virtually unobtainable, and machines for skip over hours or years or even, as Griffith did
viewing them were rare and costly. Moreover, in Intolerance (1916), intercut different epochs to
while art historians like Wölfflin could publish il- create historical parallels. As early as 1915, Hugo
lustrations of original works, film historians had Münsterberg pointed out that these capacities of
access only to photographs made during produc- cinema made it as fluid and wide-ranging as the
tion, which usually did not replicate the images human mental processes of attention, memory,
on-screen. and reflective thought.
Film historians of the 1920s and 1930s were By the end of the silent era, editing-based tech-
forced to sacrifice close analysis to generalizations nique was the lingua franca of commercial fic-
about continuity and change. The most influen- tional cinema and a good deal of documentary as
tial account relied upon medium specificity and well. In Wölfflin’s terms, there emerged a broad
a teleological plan. Panofsky put it well: “After group style that was not tied to particular nations
1905, then, we can witness the fascinating specta- or even individuals. Panofsky’s reference to the
cle of a new artistic medium gradually becoming medium’s “becoming conscious” of its resources
conscious of its legitimate—that is, exclusive— was not simply shorthand. To an important ex-
possibilities and limitations.”2 tent, early historians of cinema held that in the
“Legitimate” and “exclusive” possibilities here silent era specific artists became important chiefly
denote artistic resources that distinguish cinema because they disclosed, in fairly clear-cut stages,
from other art forms. A particular movie does film’s unique artistic resources and carried it away
not necessarily exploit the aesthetic resources spe- from theatrical modes.
cific to the medium. Accordingly, the aesthetic There was Georges Méliès with his “artifi-
history of that art form will be, in a somewhat cially arranged scenes.”3 Despite being stage-like
Hegelian fashion, the unfolding manifestation of tableaus, these single-shot scenes could tell a story
the medium’s possibilities. when they were linked by cuts, as in A Trip to the
Those distinct possibilities were, at bottom, Moon (1902). There was Edwin S. Porter, who
anti-theatrical. Cinema’s development, its advo- in The Great Train Robbery (1903) used editing
cates claimed, gradually emancipated the art from to present a story with several strands of action.
that of the stage. Cinema’s freedom in space and Above all there was Griffith, who was said to
time gave this nonverbal medium the range and have discovered the basic resources of film editing
fluidity of the novel. Cinematic acting became between 1908 and 1916. Griffith’s achievement,
more naturalistic than stage performance, but also purportedly crystallized in The Birth of a Nation
stylized in a different way: not mere theatrical (1915), was foundational for the Soviet montage
pantomime but something subtler and more or- filmmakers of the 1920s, who developed the rhyth-
ganic. The close-up, a technique not feasible on mic, dramatic, and conceptual possibilities of edit-
the stage, not only enhanced the performance but ing to their highest pitch. Eisenstein’s Battleship
made the enlarged and mobile human face a new Potemkin (1925) was usually considered the prime
object of aesthetic apprehension. Close-ups also example.
In adopting the model of the medium’s These filmmakers minimized editing to an un-
progress, film historians were not exactly in syn- usual degree. Entire scenes might be played in
chronization with academic art history. Of course one shot. Camera movement did duty for cutting,
art historians had long granted certain masters with panning or tracking taking us across spaces
the status of innovators, as in accounts of linear and into scenes. Even without camera movement,
perspective. But many historians were inclined to the static frame could create dramatic tension be-
relativize the quality of artists’ accomplishments. tween right and left, foreground and background.
Wölfflin, for instance, was at pains to indicate that What Bazin called profondeur de champ, usually
the baroque should not be considered a step to- translated as “deep focus,” was central to the new
ward greater imitative power or an absolute idea style. The Rules of the Game (1939), Citizen Kane
of beauty. No one epoch’s style was inherently su- (1941), and The Little Foxes (1941) showed that

perior to another. Giotto did not paint shadows, staging in depth, supplemented by an extended
but this was not crudity; he did not need them shot duration, could be shaped to provide effects
to achieve what he sought.4 By contrast, the film as pointed and powerful as anything yielded by
writers of the 1920s had only scorn for the “the- the “inherently cinematic” technique of editing.
atrical” cinema of the early 1900s. It was not a These films were, in effect, returning to “primi-
mode of filmmaking with its own aesthetic pur- tive” technique but investing it with a significance
poses but rather a primitive phase that had to be it had not had.
surpassed if cinema was to become an art in its own For Bazin, this was no mere technical develop-
right. ment. Just as earlier historians had praised Grif-
fith, the Russians, and the rest for disclosing the
true nature of cinema, now Bazin did the same
ii. the sound film synthesis and the rise of a for his emblematic directors. They were intuitively
new style making art from cinema’s real essence, the record-
ing of movement in uninterrupted time. Renoir,
The standard story was nuanced by the postwar for instance, looked “back beyond the resources
French critic André Bazin. He argued that provided by montage and so uncovered the secret
the arrival of sound had made many valorized of a film form that would permit everything to
techniques of the silent film dépassé. Sound films be said without chopping the world up into little
presented a story’s situations lucidly and with fragments.”7
little overt intervention. Editing persisted, but it The standard story had provided little basis
was more discreet than Griffith’s crosscutting or for stylistic criticism, apart from noting privi-
Eisenstein’s intellectual montage. Close-ups were leged techniques like crosscutting or close-ups.8
minimized, and shots were allowed to run long By introducing an alternative period style, that
with no fear of “theatricality.” A style blending of 1940s–1950s deep-focus long takes, Bazin en-
unaggressive editing, camera movement, and couraged the sort of comparative method that
transparent staging came to dominate world Wölfflin had developed in his art-historical work.
filmmaking during the 1930s. As Bazin put it, Critics could contrast the editing-driven handling
filmmakers around the world had decided to with staging-driven ones, sometimes by using ac-
respect the spatiotemporal continuity of reality.5 tual examples, sometimes by imagining how the
Bazin in effect proposed that up to 1939 film his- same scene could be presented in alternative
tory had three period styles: the primitive record- ways. Bazin did this famously with the single-
ing of theatrical performances, the hyperbolic shot kitchen scene in The Magnificent Ambersons
editing of the late 1910s through the 1920s, and the (1942), pointing out that a cut-in close-up of Aunt
balanced synthesis of international sound cinema. Fanny at the climactic moment would have dam-
But no sooner had this last style become normal aged Welles’s purpose. The extended long shot
than it was challenged by a style that constituted concentrates our attention on her nephew George
another phase of progress, a “dialectical step for- wolfing down his food, so her tearful outburst
ward in film language.”6 Like his predecessors, comes with exceptional force (Figure 1).
Bazin traced this revelation to the work of inno- Bazin was confronted, however, with the same
vative filmmakers: Jean Renoir, Orson Welles, and problem that arose with editing-based accounts at
William Wyler. the close of the silent era. Once directors had dis-
gan work in the 1970s, early cinema studies be-

came one of the most mature domains of cinema
studies.
Nonetheless, film historians have been surpris-
ingly reluctant to draw upon art-historical models
for analytical models and principles that might
illuminate stylistic traditions. Yet an approach
grounded in poetics seems to me fruitful, and
Wölfflin offers some important pointers in en-
abling us to grasp the creative options available

to the filmmaker. To illustrate, I want to show that
the formidable contrast launched in Principles of
Art History between planimetric composition and
figure 1. The Magnificent Ambersons (Orson Welles, 1942).
recessional composition can lead us to recognize
aspects of film style that were missed, or miscon-
strued, by earlier historians.9
covered cinema’s true vocation, there would be no First, though, some caution. Wölfflin was ex-
new group style. Some directors would persist in plicit that his famous dualities were somewhat
the sound-film synthesis, and some would follow idealized, and that one could always find mix-
the lead of Welles, Renoir, and Wyler. Individ- tures and intermediate examples.10 He was aware
ual styles could emerge, as with Max Ophuls’s re- that his exposition through pairwise compari-
liance on tracking shots or Hitchcock’s reversion son, born of a pedagogy using dual lantern
to silent-film devices for the sake of suspense, but slides, could exaggerate contrasts between the
large-scale stylistic change seemed to have ended. images.11 Application to cinema is even more
Mostly, Bazin foresaw cinematic change taking complicated, since a film may include shots mix-
place in the realm of genre, technology (color, ing compositional principles. If we are to make
widescreen), and subject matter. What remained use of the plane/recession polarity, we should
was the connoisseurship of auteur criticism, recognize that our initial soundings would be
identifying finer-grained differences within estab- fairly rough and need further research to gain
lished traditions. precision.
iii. wölfflin and revisionist film history iv. film history as art history: the tableau
tradition
Even today, most popular accounts of film his-
tory embrace some variant of the standard story Planimetric composition, Wölfflin claims, is char-
and the Bazinian revision. What has not fully acteristic of Italian and German art of the 1500s.
registered in the wider culture is that in the Here the major figures and action are arranged in
1970s, researchers began profoundly rethink- a row, with the viewpoint typically at right angles
ing cinema’s stylistic history. Archives opened to the rear plane. If there is depth, the more distant
their doors to scholars, universities launched ad- layers are also presented as bands or strips. But
vanced programs in film research, and publish- the visual array is not a “primitive” construction
ers began welcoming books treating film’s artistic of figures simply lined up and facing us. Classic
traditions. planimetric composition has mastered foreshort-
Of greatest importance was the widening of ening, so that while the important figures tend to
the canon. When scholars could see a sampling be set on the same plane, the bodies and faces
of films beyond the official classics, they began may be angled in a variety of ways. The prototype
to realize that the standard story, which Bazin re- is Leonardo’s Last Supper of 1495–1498.
cast but did not repudiate, simplified the record. By contrast, recessional composition is char-
Most crucially, researchers had to face the as- acteristic of baroque art of the 1600s. Here
tonishing variety of filmmaking in the 1900s and significant action is spread into depth, usually
1910s. Thanks to the efforts of scholars who be- with sharply felt contrasts of scale. A vivid

figure 2. The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941). figure 3. Rescued by Rover (Cecil Hepworth, 1905).
instance is Rubens’s Lamentation of 1614, in

which the dead Christ’s body angles steeply back
from the picture plane, and the mourners are
arranged in diagonals around him.
Although Bazin makes no reference to Prin-
ciples of Art History, his account of Welles
and Wyler comfortably fits a notion of reces-
sional style.12 Many American films of the 1940s
build diagonal compositions throughout, with fig-
ures ranged along sharply focused planes. Most
vivid is what Wölfflin called “the exaggerated
foreground,” which in baroque art “increased
the suddenness of perspective reduction.”13 (See
Figure 2.) Other features highlighted by Wölfflin figure 4. Rescued by Rover (1905).
are settings that favor depth such as corridors,
dark foregrounds, and frames within the frame.
All of these techniques can be found as well in to run ten minutes or more, directors extended
1940s Hollywood, and they lend support to our their scenes and developed more elaborate in-
tendency to label such films “baroque.” door sets and more complicated staging. They
We can, though, go back further. Wölfflin’s con- seldom cut within the scene, but within the ex-
cept of recession alerts us to another tendency tended shot directors explored a great many ways
that was not apparent to film historians until re- to compose shots that would guide the viewer’s
cently. Silent-film historians had decried most pre- attention.
Griffith cinema as essentially theatrical, and to a Sometimes the tableau was decidedly planar,
great extent the Bazinian revision held the same with figures stacked in parallel rows. The direc-
view.14 But we can detect sophisticated pictorial tor might highlight one action through movement
strategies in European and some American film- or a peekaboo tactic, letting an important face
making of the entire period 1906–1920. This is the or object be glimpsed in a cranny of the lateral
era of “tableau” filmmaking, with the term signi- plane (Figure 5). But the tableau style hosted
fying at once painting-like design and a kinship to many explorations of recessional shot design as
the stage “pictures” of the period.15 well. A very early and influential example is The
Early film staging displays both recessional and Assassination of the Duke de Guise (1908). It was
planimetric qualities. A film commonly presented advertised as the height of spectacular theater, but
rather shallow interiors and fairly diagonal ac- its compositions display a dynamic play between
tion outdoors (Figures 3 and 4). Once films began foreground and background. A rather crowded

figure 5. The Revolutionary (Evgenii Bauer, 1917).
figure 7. Fantômas (Louis Feuillade, 1913).
figure 6. L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (Charles Le Bargy

and André Calmettes, 1908). figure 8. Le Diamant noir (Alfred Machin, 1913).
scene makes much use of Wölfflin’s “baroque playing space of cinema did not replicate that of
coulisses and encadrements” (Figure 6).16 the stage.
In the recessional style of the 1910s, sometimes The proscenium tradition makes theatrical
the frame is spacious and the depth is marked by playing space wide and shallow. Staging the ac-
figures with plenty of area in between (Figure 7). tion horizontally allows viewers all over the au-
At other times the frame is tightly packed, and fig- ditorium to grasp the action. By contrast, a film’s
ures open and fill gaps in the course of the scene playing space is created by the optical properties
(Figures 8 and 9). The images direct our attention of the lens. Although we seem to be looking into
to important action through various cues: light- a theatrical box, the area captured by the camera
ing, centrality of figures in the format, frontality is actually a pyramid tipped at a right angle and
of figures, advance to the foreground, and speed of tapering at the lens surface. The playing area is
movement. Figures closer to the camera can mask narrow but deep. As a result, filmic action must
or reveal figures further away, and this choreog- be staged for the only important sightline: that
raphy became quite complex in the course of the of the camera. Many of the shots illustrated here
1910s (Figures 10 and 11). could not be played on a stage; major areas of
At first glance, these manipulations of space action would not be visible from some seats in the
within the frame might seem no different from auditorium.
what one would see on the theater stage. But film- The distinctive playing space of cinema made
makers of the period were quite aware that the the rich spatial manipulations of the tableau style

figure 9. Le Diamant noir (1913).
figure 11. Ingeborg Holm (1913).
figure 10. Ingeborg Holm (Victor Sjöström, 1913). figure 12. Nerven (Robert Reinert, 1920).
possible. Ironically, this perspectival capture of We might consider the tableau approach a pe-
moving bodies is as “cinematically specific” as riod style, since it was almost completely replaced
editing was held to be. when the editing-oriented style, developing at the
Far from being sheer recording of theater, same time, took over world cinema around 1920.
then, the tableau approach constitutes a distinct Yet the recessional strategies that were made
group style. Individual filmmakers explored it in prominent in the tableau era were amplified in
various ways, but they were working with the the shot designs of some 1920s and 1930s films,
same broad schemas of staging. Many filmmak- notably Russian ones. And the period’s choreo-
ers presented the style in rather pure form, with graphic options became permanent resources of
single-take scenes interrupted only by intertitles. filmmaking. They emerged with particular promi-
Other filmmakers coordinated the tableau with nence in long-take cinema from the 1960s onward.
editing choices—typically, axial cut-ins that en-
larged a section of the tableau space. This “scene- v. film history and art history: the planimetric
insert” approach was characteristic of the style style
in the later 1910s. Sometimes too we encounter
filmmakers who press tableau premises to the Cinema displays a history of planimetric com-
limit by striving for very close foregrounds. A position as well. We find it in marked form in
scene in Robert Reinert’s Nerven (1920) is akin the first decade or so of fictional filmmaking
to the big heads we see in Welles and Wyler (Figure 13) and in more sophisticated form in the
(Figure 12).17 tableau era, as we have seen. A milder sort of

figure 15. The Most Dangerous Game (1932).
figure 13. The Passion Play of Oberammergau (Henry C.
Vincent, 1898).
figure 16. The Most Dangerous Game (1932).
figure 14. The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel and

Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1932).
achieve in color and widescreen filmmaking, some
filmmakers found ways to get it (Figure 17).
plane-based composition was the default for most What was unexpected was the emergence of a
dramatic encounters in the classic silent film and more severe planimetric look from the 1960s
the 1930s cinema. Figures face one another on the onward.
same plane, in profile or with their heads swiveled Directors began setting up the camera perpen-
a little to yield three-quarter views (Figure 14). dicular to the background surface. Figures stood in
Shot/reverse-shot editing transposes this face-off distinct rows facing the viewer or turned ninety de-
into a series of shots. Now each actor, seen singly, grees (Figures 18 and 19). The whole array was lit
is presented in three-quarter view, and the answer- flatly, to downplay depth. Just as the other stylistic
ing shot provides an echoing image of the other trends surfaced in many countries, this faux-naı̈f
actor (Figures 15 and 16). But both are usually planimetric look became in ensuing decades one
felt to be on the same plane, especially if the back- option of international cinema. It could be used
ground surfaces are perpendicular to the camera. for groups or for individual confrontations (Fig-
The more baroque recessional compositions ures 20 and 21). In the 1990s, Takeshi Kitano made
that became popular in the 1940s and 1950s were, it central to his films (Figure 22), and by 2014 Wes
across international cinema, the major alterna- Anderson had established a variant of it as his
tive to mild planimetric layouts. And although the signature style (Figures 23 and 24).
depth of field necessary for the big foregrounds Wölfflin argued that the sophisticated plani-
of Welles, Wyler, and others was difficult to metric style of the Cinquecento differed from
figure 17. Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955).

figure 20. The Suspended Step of the Stork (Theo An-
gelopoulos, 1991).
changes in cinematic representation. But how to

explain them? We need not mobilize some expla-
nations that Wölfflin would find congenial, such as
the appeal to national character. Nor need we em-
brace his other major causal mechanism, the idea
that “vision itself has a history.”18 The point is not
quite as stark as it appears: he indicates that a bet-
ter term than “modes of vision” would be “modes
figure 18. Katzelmacher (Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1969). of imagination.”19 Yet given the coexistence of so
many film styles across just a few decades, this
epochal concept is not a plausible option for film
research.
More plausible explanatory frameworks have
been proposed by another pictorial poetician,
E. H. Gombrich. While Wölfflin leans toward
methodological holism, Gombrich posits for-
mal development as explicable largely through
methodological individualism. “The artist is al-
ways faced with the problem: ‘What is there for
me to do?’”20 Further, Gombrich endows the con-
figure 19. Raising Arizona (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1987).
cept of artistic schemas with a more tangible ex-
istence than Wölfflin does. They exist less in the
artists’ heads than in the pattern books and tra-
the “primitive” variant because it had mastered ditional pictorial solutions that novices encounter
the technical innovations of foreshortening. Like- during their training. Most vigorously, Gombrich
wise, cinema’s new planimetric look could suc- resists national character and “race” as causal fac-
ceed only after editing permitted what I have tors, focusing instead on fashion, competition, and
called compass-point cutting: 180-degree reversals the social functions of art within a given artistic
that showed what the characters were looking at community.21
(usually other characters facing the camera). (See I find a framework conceived in terms of prob-
Figures 23 and 24.) lem and solution and schema and revision more
suggestive when studying an art dependent on a
mass market, a tightly knit community of cre-
vi. explanations ators, and well-established norms of sound, image,
and storytelling. Accordingly, I think we should
Wölfflin’s frame of reference, then, facilitates look to causes of a Gombrichian sort: produc-
our discovering and describing some important tion conditions, influences, fashion, competition,
figure 21. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994).

figure 24. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014).
pushed filmmakers to use long lenses, which in

turn yielded images with fewer depth cues. The
“flattening” of the image, along with the new
widescreen ratios, encouraged some filmmakers,
figure 22. Sonatine (Takeshi Kitano, 1993). especially those inclined to long takes, to stage
action frontally and laterally. There was an ex-
pressive advantage as well. The schema could fur-
ther the “dedramatization” characteristic of art
cinema, and it presented a sharp alternative to the
brash dynamism of Hollywood.
Yet we should remember Wölfflin’s suggestion
that these schemas are primarily decorative in na-
ture, without inherent expressive qualities. The
tableau style was just as suited to comedy as to
melodrama, and the faux-naı̈f planimetric look
was recruited for both low-affect comedy and high
drama in mainstream American entertainments.
In all, Wölfflin has left us a legacy of midrange
concepts that help specify and analyze pictorial
traditions in moviemaking. Yet his work also re-
figure 23. The Grand Budapest Hotel (Wes Anderson, minds us just how complex a phenomenon visual
2014).
style is, and how stubbornly it resists explanations.
and the urge to distinguish one’s work. For ex- david bordwell
ample, the complex staging of the tableau style Department of Communication Arts
may have begun from theatrical and pictorial mod- University of Wisconsin–Madison
els, but they were transformed through trial and Madison, Wisconsin 53706
error into something that fitted the optical per- internet: bordwell@wisc.edu
spective of the camera. Filmmakers could borrow
pictorial schemas from perspective painting and
shape them to the constraints of movement and 1. The purported contrasts between German and Ital-
camera position. ian national character are developed in detail in Heinrich
Wölfflin, The Sense of Form in Art: A Comparative Psycho-
In later years, the rise of extreme planimetric logical Study, trans. Alice Muehsam and Norma A. Shetan
imagery arose, I believe, from a chain of factors. (New York: Chelsea House, 1958). A typical remark is that
A new reliance on location shooting in the 1960s the painterly tendency (as opposed to the linear one) “runs
in the veins of the Germanic race.” Principles of Art History: in Early Cinema: Space Frame Narrative, ed. Thomas El-
The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, 7th saesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990), pp. 45–55;
edition [1923], trans. M. D. Hottinger (New York: Dover, Yuri Tsivian, “Portraits, Mirrors, Death: Death: On Some
1950), p. 67. Decadent Clichés in Early Russian Films,” Iris 14–15 (1992):
2. Erwin Panofsky, “Style and Medium in the Motion 70–78; Tom Gunning, “Notes and Queries about the Year
Pictures,” in Three Essays on Style, ed. Irving Lavin (MIT 1913 and Film Style: National Styles and Deep Staging,”
Press, 1995), pp. 91–125, at p. 108. 1895, special issue: “L’année l9l3 en France” (1993): 195–
3. See John Frazer, Artificially Arranged Scenes: The 204; Ben Brewster and Lea Jacobs, Theatre to Cinema (Ox-
Films of George Méliès (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979). ford University Press, 1997), pp. 164–187. The account of the
4. Heinrich Wolfflin, Classic Art: An Introduction to the tableau style and planimetric staging that follows is drawn
Italian Renaissance, trans. Peter and Linda Murray (London: from Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, pp. 158–207,
Phaidon, 1952), p. 5. and David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On Cinematic
5. The argument is set out most fully in André Bazin, Staging (University of California Press, 2005). See also en-

“The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” in What Is tries on my website, www.davidbordwell.net.
Cinema? vol. I, ed. and trans. Hugh Gray (University of 16. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 86.
California Press, 1967), pp. 23–40. 17. For more on Reinert, see my essay “Taking Things
6. Bazin, “Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” to Extremes: Hallucinations Courtesy of Robert Rein-
p. 35. ert,” in Poetics of Cinema (New York: Routledge, 2008),
7. Bazin, “Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” pp. 281–326.
p. 38. 18. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 11.
8. Examples are Lewis Jacobs’s analyses of crosscutting 19. Foreword to the sixth edition, Principles of Art His-
in sequences of Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Intolerance in tory, p. vii. It seems clear that “modes of vision” are not
The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (Columbia purely optical phenomena. Wölfflin explains that the artist
University Teachers College Press, 1968), pp. 180–198. internalizes “what choice of formal possibilities the epoch
9. The relevant argument is found in Wölfflin, Princi- had at its disposal.” This fits the famous claim that immedi-
ples of Art History, chap. II. ately precedes the statement about vision’s history: “Ev-
10. See Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. viii, 14, ery artist finds certain visual possibilities before him, to
233; and Heinrich Wölfflin, “‘Kunstgeschichtliche Grund- which he is bound. Not everything is possible at all times”
begriffe’: eine Revision,” in Gedanken zur Kunstgeshichte (Principles of Art History, p. 11). In the 1933 essay “‘Kunst-
(Basel: Schwabe, 1941), pp. 18–24, at p. 23. geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’: eine Revision,” Wölfflin ex-
11. Wölfflin, The Sense of Form in Art, p. 4. plains that he used the term “mode of vision” in a sense
12. Principles appeared in French translation in 1952, analogous to speaking of “the artist’s ‘eye’ and his ‘vision,’
some years after Bazin’s initial discussions of deep focus. It by which we mean the manner in which objects take form in
is likely that Bazin was sensitized to the new style by 1940s an internal representation” (Gedanken zur Kunstgeshichte,
press material signed by Wyler, Welles, and cinematogra- pp. 19–20).
pher Gregg Toland. See David Bordwell, On the History of 20. Quoted in Ernst Gombrich and Didier Eribon,
Film Style (Harvard University Press, 1997), pp. 56–57. Looking for Answers: Conversations on Art and Science
13. Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, p. 84. (New York: Abrams, 1993), p. 168.
14. True, Bazin claimed to find a “primitive” pro- 21. This duality is not quite as sharp as I am making it
fondeur de champ in early cinema, but his example, an out. Wölfflin, for instance, suggests that one major source
undated image from the Onésime series, is striking ex- of the artist’s “mode of beholding” is prior art, “the effect
actly because of its similarity to the aggressive foregrounds of picture upon picture”—a tenet of Gombrich’s thinking
of Welles. See Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, as well. See Wölfflin, Principles of Art History, pp. 229–230;
pp. 62–63. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychol-
15. Major investigations of tableau cinema are Ben ogy of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press,
Brewster, “Deep Staging in French Films 1900–1914,” 1969), pp. 63–90.

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Symposium:

The 100th Anniversary of Wölfflin’s Principles of Art

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i Painterly: “the primary element of the impres-

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emphasized repeatedly that what he calls iii

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Kulturepoch or Zeitcharakter and of Zeitstil, in the “apprehensional form of an epoch,” though

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are strictly external to the activity of the forma- whitney davis

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gan work in the 1970s, early cinema studies be-

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instance is Rubens’s Lamentation of 1614, in

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figure 6. L’Assassinat du Duc de Guise (Charles Le Bargy

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figure 16. The Most Dangerous Game (1932).

figure 14. The Most Dangerous Game (Irving Pichel and

figure 17. Rebel Without a Cause (Nicholas Ray, 1955).

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changes in cinematic representation. But how to

figure 21. Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino, 1994).

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pushed filmmakers to use long lenses, which in

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