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Past Looking: Historical Imagination and the Rhetoric of the Image - Review
Art Bulletin, The, Sept, 1998 by Thomas Dacosta Kaufmann
Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996. 214 pp.; 60 b/w ills. $39.95, $15.95 paper
"Uber Geschichte reden ist ein schwieriges Geschaft" (Talking about history is a difficult business) - so begins Dieter Wuttke's "Renaissance-Humanismus und Naturwissenschaft in Deutschland." These are the initial words in the second volume of Wuttke's collected essays, one of the four works related to the historiography of art here reviewed. In this essay Wuttke deals with familiar problems involving periodization and categorization of the sort raised in much writing about history. But the continuing and thoroughgoing interrogation of historiography in many fields has revealed more fundamental problems, not only of an epistemological but also of a political or even ethical nature. Each of the works trader review suggests just how difficult talking about history and especially art history has become at the end of the 20th century.
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Despite the difficulties of the subject, these books demonstrate that the healthy theoretical and methodological consciousness that has grown within art history during the past quarter-century can now claim a broader interest.(1) Literature related to the historiography of art participates in a more general rethinking of the humanities. As evidenced by his presence in two of the books art historians examined here, the efforts of Michel Foucault, among others, to investigate the archaeology of the human sciences - the origins and metamorphoses of scholarship as manifestations of modes of thinking and "discourse" in past ages - has stimulated this process in part. Beyond Foucault, this revival can also be regarded as a reckoning with or reexamination of premises that might ground art history as a science, in the sense of a Wissenschaft, to establish or reestablish procedures and practices of the discipline. In this regard the self-consciousness of art historians is salutary, because this attention was long overdue, especially in the United States. It is remarkable, for instance, how even leading thinkers of a previous generation, for whatever reason, eschewed much open discussion of theory or historiography when they came to the United States. According to the oral accounts of older colleagues, such discussions were absent, for example, in Erwin Panofsky's teaching at Princeton from the 1940s. Yet, even though scholars in other fields have taken up the discussion of historiography - while Soussloff and Holly were trained as art historians, Wuttke and Morrison are primarily scholars of literature - these books nevertheless suggest that writing about the historiography of art history has become increasingly problematic.
Strictly speaking, Dieter Wuttke's Dazwischen: Kulturwissenschaft auf Warburgs Spuren contains much more than essays on historiography. This book collects papers that the professor emeritus for medieval and early modern literature at the University of Bamberg had produced during a span of thirty years on a wide variety of topics. It contains important contributions to German humanism and its relation to the visual arts and to the so-called sciences. Some of these, especially Wuttke's essay on Conrad Celtis and Albrecht Durer, have served later historians' work on topics such as German artists' self-portraits. Moreover, as Wuttke himself says in his introduction, some of his essays anticipate subsequent developments in the English-speaking world, such as the new philology and the new historicism. Yet, Wuttke's collection is not intended as a contribution to methodological or theoretical reflection. Indeed, he quotes Panofsky to the effect that "the discussion of methods spoils their application" (p. 105). This noteworthy aphorism could well have supplied an epigraph for his own book. However, its title indicates where Wuttke would position his work - dazwischen (in-between) - various fields or discourses.
The organization of Wuttke's book, his subtitle, and explicit remarks that he makes in a number of places indicate quite clearly, however, the direction of his research and its relation to a specific historiographic tradition. Wuttke sees his work as inspired by and in the tradition of Aby Warburg, as well as that of two other scholars whom he particularly honors, Panofsky and Ernst Robert Curtius. Employing the topos of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants, Curtius uses the rubric ". . . auf deren Schultern wir stehen" (. . . on whose shoulders we stand) to organize the second section of his essays, largely of a panegyric and descriptive nature, on Panofsky, Curtius, Warburg, and his library. The first section consists of Falle (cases) that exemplify the approach suggested by Wuttke's heroes. Broadly speaking, this approach represents, as he states, the application of the philological-historical method of the 19th century that he says Warburg applied to art and more generally to cultural history. His image of dwarfs on the shoulders of giants suggests his "modern" stance in relation to this tradition.
