History of Art

Discussion about art and art history arose extremely late in Greece , and until then major Greek thinkers had scant respect for artists themselves. Surviving texts show that well into the fifth century and later the artist was simply considered a banausos - literally, an artisan, a man whose work was much admired but who himself stood far below the philosopher, orator, or tragedian in social rank - on a level, in fact, with barbers, cooks, and smiths.

Given these circumstances, how could the study of art history develop, much less thrive? Presumably any such tendency would have proved abortive, unworthy of consideration - and yet there did exist at least a small body of literature on the history of art. Though the bulk of it is lost to us or survives only in the distorted versions of Pliny and other Romans, what remains points toward one clearly major figure, Xenocrates of Athens ( 396-314 b.c.). Xenocrates, a sculptor who studied with a pupil of Lysippus, was called by Bernhard Schweitzer - probably stretching the point - "the father of art history." However sweeping that claim might sound, it is true that Xenocrates stood at the dawn of art-historical inquiry" and that his lost writings announced an entirely new category of thought about art. Drawing on the historical schemas of Democritus and his school, Xenocrates focused his interest on realism in art of his own day.

Raffaello Sanzio, called Raphael ( 1483-1520) was a more thorough student of art of the past than Leonardo. While continuing Bramante's work for Pope Leo X, Raphael drew up the first master plan for the restoration of ancient Rome, a project that archaeologists would be able to accomplish only centuries later. As Jakob Burckhardt pointed out: 'With uncanny vision Raphael lay the groundwork for comparative art history, conceived as surveying work, and valid to this day: for each ruin in question he required a plan, an elevation, and a separate section drawing." Art historiography and archaeology did not begin in an idle age, but at a peak of creativity. Nothing less than artistic genius can renew our perception of the past.

Like the latter half of the eighteenth century, the sixteenth century was a decisive period in the historiography of art. If the range of the concerns of art history began to be mapped around 1550, then those concerns were given full historical coherence in the second phase starting around 1750; each of these phases was guided by artists. Giorgio Vasari has rightly been called the father of the artist's biography, and sometimes - if less legitimately - the father of art history. But it is important to remember that his work did not spring from a vacuum. Many writers before him had compiled similar collections of biographies.

The Trattato was a recapitulation of sixteenth-century attitudes on art history and theory. The Idea, which, in Panofsky's words, made Lomazzo the "chief representative of a Neoplatonic metaphysics of art," presented his conceptual system in the guise of a temple. Brilliant in its style and organization, the work divided the realm of art into seven spheres, functioning like the seven planets, thus harmonizing with the universal order. Each "planet" was also assigned a tutelary artist: Michelangelo for Saturn, Gaudenzio Ferrari for Jupiter, Polidoro Caldara for Mars, Leonardo for the sun, Raphael for Venus, Mantegna for Mercury, and Titian for the moon. In its sublimation of all visual experience into a world of suprasensual coherence, this astrological conceit was the perfect correlative for its author's blindness.