The Shaping of Art History
Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art

A study of the formation of art history in the nineteenth-century German academy.

Kathryn Brush (Author)

9780521147620, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 24 June 2010

280 pages
25.4 x 17.8 x 1.5 cm, 0.491 kg

Review of the hardback: 'Dr Brush's study should be welcomed as a remind that it was not on the study of the Italian Renaissance alone that the discipline of art history was built. The Art Newspaper

The Shaping of Art History examines art history's formation in the German academy in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the work of Wilhelm Vöge and Adolph Goldschmidt, two influential scholars of medieval art, Kathryn Brush analyses their methods and particularly those scholarly projects that were critical to the development of their approaches. Her work combines intellectual and institutional history with the study of artistic monuments and biography. It considers how the study of the pioneering scholarship in the field of medieval art is critical to an understanding of the formulation of art historical method as a whole.

Part I. Mentalitiés: 1. Art history and cultural history during the 1880s: the discursive range
Part II. Monumental Styles in Medieval Art History: 2. Wilhelm Vöge and the beginnings of the Monumental style in the Middle Ages (1894)
3. Thematic and methodological range in the scholarship of Goldschmidt and Vöge to c. 1905
Part III. Resonances: 4. German and international responses at the turn of the century
5. Implications for later discourse in medieval art history.

Subject Areas: History of art: Byzantine & Medieval art c 500 CE to c 1400 [ACK]