Baroque out of Focus: The Question of Mediation in Wölfflin

Zeynep Çelik Alexander

The baroque, it has been noted many times, hovers precariously between exis-tence and nonexistence.1 An invention of Enlightenment aesthetics, the term was used retroactively—but not consistently—to describe a variety of classiciz-ing art in Europe and abroad. The elusive baroque has perhaps become most intelligible in comparison: over against neoclassicism, rococo, and, most famously in the writings of the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945), the Renaissance. Yet even in Wölfflin’s work, where the baroque gains some clar-ity from being situated in a system of contrasts—the painterly versus the lin-ear, open versus closed form, recession versus planarity, and so forth—a haze of obscurity hovers over the concept.2 First, the connotations of the baroque changed subtly in Wölfflin’s writings over his career. Second, Wölfflin found the baroque in a surprisingly eclectic array of things: Michelangelo’s work as well as Richard Wagner’s; late ancient art as well as impressionism; painting,

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1. The temporal peculiarity of the baroque has been noted by, among others, Scheffler, Verwand­lungen des Barocks; Imorde, “Barock und Moderne”; and Hills, “Introduction.” All translations in this essay are mine unless otherwise indicated. I have sometimes also altered passages translated by others.

2. Wölfflin made the comparison between Renaissance and baroque first in Renaissance und Barock (1888); continued the comparative logic into Die klassische Kunst (1899); transformed the opposing pairs generated by the primary opposition into “principles of art history” in Kunstge schicht­liche Grundbegriffe (1915); and reworked the opposition through a nationalistic lens in Italien und das deutsche Formgefühl (1931).

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sculpture, and architecture as well as photography. If anything is clear, it is this: for Wölfflin the baroque was not only a moment in the history of Western art, a phase in the development of a particular style, or even a set of formal qualities but a condition transcending any historical or formal particularity.

I propose in this article that one way to make sense of the nebulous baroque in Wölfflin’s writings is to consider it a surrogate for immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit). Seen from this perspective, the conceptual fecundity of the baroque at the end of the nineteenth century may be attributed to the multiple valences of the question of mediation at the very same moment. I suggest that in a context in which Hegelian philosophy had fallen into disrepute, neo-Kantian-ism had begun to gain momentum, and epistemology (Erkenntnistheorie) had emerged as a distinct field of inquiry, the baroque allowed Wölfflin to speculate not only on the philosophical problem of mediation (Vermittlung) inherited from German idealism but also increasingly on that of medium (Mittel).3 The latter appeared in various guises in his work: most predictably, medium as the formal means (line, plane, or color) in painting, sculpture, or architecture but also as sensorial channel (sight or the other senses), mode of art-historical reproduction (engraving or photography), and, as I stress, pedagogical method (slide lecture or illustrated book). I argue that his negotiation of the different meanings of these terms caused Wölfflin to abandon his early enthusiasm for the presumed immediacy of the baroque and assume a more critical—and, one might cautiously add, Hegelian—position about the possibility of immediacy in his mature work. In this sense, Wölfflin’s dilemmas about mediation might be considered a dress rehearsal for Walter Benjamin’s famous artwork essay as well as the Frankfurt School’s famous critique of mass media.

Wölfflin’s preoccupation with the question of mediation is worth examin-ing, then, not merely because it might provide a new perspective on his work, which, given its foundational importance for the discipline of art history, has already been analyzed from countless angles.4 Understanding Wölfflin’s engagement with mediation and its cognates is also important, I argue, because this late nineteenth-century episode might help bridge a gap between two gene-alogies of the concept. On the one hand, “mediation” (Vermittlung) has been a central concept of Western thinking at least since the beginning of the nine-

3. Köhnke, Rise of Neo­Kantianism.4. In English, e.g., see Levy, “Political Project of Wölfflin’s Early Formalism”; Payne, “Portable

Ruins”; Adler, “Painterly Politics”; Schwartz, “Cathedrals and Shoes”; Holly, “Imagining the Baroque”; Holly, “Wölfflin and the Imagining of the Baroque”; Warnke, “On Heinrich Wölfflin”; Brown, “Classic Is the Baroque”; Hart, “Reinterpreting Wölfflin”; and Iversen, “Politics and the Historiography of Art History.”

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teenth century, when it became a key term describing how Hegelian philosophy was to proceed from the contingency of the world to the necessity of God. It was as central in the work of the Marxian and Frankfurt School thinkers that followed Hegel’s dialectical logic as was immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit) in the phenomenological tradition. On the other hand, cognates of mediation—especially medium, media, and mediality—have more recently become central to the proliferating field of media studies, which considers mediation deter-mined primarily by technologies such as photography and film, starting in the nineteenth century. I want to stress Wölfflin’s case because it demonstrates that the philosophical question of mediation (Vermittlung) and the technical one of medium (Mittel) were inextricably intertwined in late nineteenth-century dis-courses.5 This is not to argue, as one scholar recently has, that “the concept of a medium of communication was absent but wanted” in philosophical discourses before the rise of those technologies that we now call technical media.6 Rather, I hope to expand the significance of this constellation of terms by offering Wölfflin’s baroque as a historical point of contact between philosophical and technical meanings of the vexed concept of mediation.

The Immediacy of the BaroqueA subtle yet significant change of heart about the baroque is evident in Wölff-lin’s early writings. At first glance, his 1886 dissertation, “Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur” (“Prolegomena to a Psychology of Archi-tecture”), is only marginally concerned with the baroque. The text revolves around the question of the human capacity for expression (Ausdruck): how is it possible, Wölfflin asks, that architectonic forms could be the expression of something psychic, of a disposition (Stimmung)?7 “Powerful columns energet-ically stimulate us; our respiration harmonizes with the expansive or narrow nature of the space,” Wölfflin observes, while architectonic irregularity feels as if it disrupts blood circulation and asymmetry is as painful as amputation.8 “When Goethe once remarked that we ought to sense the effect of a beautiful room, even if we were led through it blindfolded, he was expressing the very same idea: that the architectural impression, far from being some kind of ‘reckoning by the eye’ [Zählen des Auges], is essentially based on a direct bodily feeling [unmittelbares körperliches Gefühl].”9

5. See Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory.”6. Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” 321. Some have suggested that a Hegelian position

might still be inherent in today’s “media theology.” See Weber, Benjamin’s ­abilities, 37–38.7. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 13–47. I rely on the English translation but modify it as needed.8. Ibid., 18.9. Ibid. Emphasis mine.

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As anyone familiar with nineteenth-century epistemological debates would recognize, this argument about the immediacy of form and affect was in fact the theoretical heart of “Prolegomena.” “Expression is not, so to speak, a banner that is hung out in order to show what is going on inside,” Wölfflin asserted; “it is not something that could just as well be absent.”10 Wölfflin was thus arguing against the so-called sign theory of perception: the human body’s ability to find its equivalents in architectonic bodies was due not to intellectual mediation between the mind and the body, whereby the former arbitrated cues from the latter with the aid of “signs” or “sense-data.” Rather, it was thanks to unmediated bodily feeling that impressions (Eindrücke) stamped themselves directly on the body’s surfaces as expressions (Ausdrücke).11 The body, and breathing in particular, was the “most direct [unmittelbar] organ of expres-sion.”12 This was why a zigzag caused one to think of a burning red, whereas a soft blue was associated with a gentle wavy line.13 The young Wölfflin was enthusiastic about the possibilities of such unmediated effects, especially those of architecture, which, he observed optimistically, moved the educated and the layperson alike.14 The dissertation was written as an earnest call for a “psy-chology of architecture” that would simultaneously describe (beschreiben) and explain (erklären) these effects.15

Yet when Wölfflin revisited his dissertation, he not only handwrote “nonsense” next to his comments about the zigzag and the wavy line but also added the word baroque in the margin next to his argument about immediate bodily feeling.16 This skepticism would fully surface in his Habilitations­schrift Renaissance und Barock, published two years after the dissertation. The book was written to “observe the symptoms of decline” in the transition between the two styles and to identify the laws in what Wölfflin now described as baroque’s “wildness and arbitrariness” (Verwilderung und Willkür).17 More

10. Ibid.11. By the “sign-theory” of perception, I am referring to the physiologist Hermann von Helm-

holtz’s influential comparison of nervous transmission to telegraphic communication in “Recent Progress of the Theory of Vision,” 150.

12. Wölfflin, “Prolegomena,” 19.13. Ibid., 21.14. Ibid., 13.15. Ibid.16. The marginal notes can be found in Wölfflin’s copy at the Getty Research Institute, Special

Collections, Heinrich Wölfflin Miscellaneous Papers, 1910–1919, n.d. See also Hopkins, “Heinrich Wölfflin’s Own Annotated Books.”

17. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, v. I use my own translations of this text.

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relevant here, immediate corporeal experience, for which Wölfflin had expressed enthusiasm in his dissertation, was now presented as one pole in a series of oppositions defined by the master opposition between the Renais-sance and the baroque. Furthermore, the two categories were no longer only styles but also stood for competing modes of experience. Whereas Renais-sance, the “art of calm, beautiful being,” demanded a calm and visual experi-ence directed inward, the baroque had a “pathological effect” that manifested itself in violent, viscerally felt experience:18

[The baroque] wants to seize us with the force of affect in an immediate and overwhelming fashion [mit der Gewalt des Affects, unmittelbar, überwälti­gend]. What it gives us is not uniform vitality, but rather excitement [Aufre­gung], ecstasy [Ekstase], intoxication [Berauschung]. Its impact on us is intended to be only momentary, while that of the Renaissance is slower and quieter, but also more enduring. One wants to linger forever in its presence. In the baroque we experience a powerful effect momentarily, but it soon leaves us with a certain sense of desolation. It does not convey a state of happy being but rather a feeling of becoming; not of satisfaction but of dis-satisfaction and restlessness. We have no sense of release but rather of having been drawn into the tension of a passionate state.19

However nebulous its definition may have been, the baroque had become a legit-imate object of scholarship by the end of the nineteenth century.20 The term was invented during the heyday of neoclassicism as a negative stylistic category, associated with excessive sentimentality and ornamental frivolity. Winckel-mann’s dismissal of baroque taste, especially of Bernini, set the tone for under-standing the afterlife of the Renaissance throughout the nineteenth century.21 The “noble simplicity and serene grandeur” of ancient Greece, as Winckelmann famously formulated it, was understood to be making a political statement at the end of the eighteenth century by criticizing courtly baroque culture.22 However, the negative associations of the so-called Zopfstil (as the baroque was some-times known) remained after scholars started writing about it in seemingly

18. Ibid., 22, 36.19. Ibid., 23.20. Before Wölfflin, we find Gurlitt, Geschichte des Barockstiles; Zahn, “Barock, Rococo und

Zopf”; Dohme, “Studien zur Architekturgeschichte”; Ebe, Die Spät­Renaissance; and Ricci, Storia dell’architettura in Italia. After Wölfflin’s Habilitationsschrift, a host of publications by such prom-inent art historians as Riegl and Schmarsow appeared.

21. Winckelmann, Gedanken; Winckelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums.22. Marchand, Down from Olympus.

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neutral terms. The stigma was detectible even in the work of those usually cred-ited with redeeming the baroque as a style in its own right. Wölfflin’s mentor Jacob Burckhardt, for example, famously described baroque architecture as speaking “the same language as the Renaissance but in a dialect that has gone wild [ein verwilderter Dialekt].”23 At the same time that Wölfflin made the baroque into an object worthy of art history’s attention, he continued the long-standing tradition of denigrating it by describing it in subtly negative terms.

Wölfflin offered a physiological explanation for the pathological effect of the baroque. The crucial difference between the Renaissance and the baroque was how each kind of architecture made the beholder’s eyes move in space. While the linear style of Renaissance architecture “confidently guided the eye” by offering it a clearly delineated track to follow, the painterly baroque with its gradations of light and shadows ignored all rules of regularity and caused the eye to move back and forth in free space in disorderly fashion.24 Renaissance und Barock, in fact, was saturated with specialized terminology borrowed from psychology—especially the experimental kind practiced at universities in German-speaking countries from the 1870s onward. Furthermore, many of Wölfflin’s psychological terms—including Aufregung, Erregung, and Anstren­gung as well as Eindruck, Empfindung, and Reiz—were used to denote sensa-tions received but not processed by the conscious mind.25 Erregung, a state of excitation that Wölfflin recognized in baroque art, for example, was defined in the American psychologist James M. Baldwin’s multilingual dictionary as “the vital change set up by the action of a stimulus” but before that change was apperceived by the mind.26 Likewise, Anstrengung referred to “the intensifica-tion of mental activity which arises on the occurrence of any sort of obstruc-tion,” a force exerted but not yet received by consciousness.27

To put it differently, the baroque appeared in Wölfflin’s writings as a psychic state whose effects failed to progress to the stage of apperception, a deeply divisive concept in psychological circles at the end of the nineteenth century. According to Wilhelm Wundt, who presided over arguably the first and certainly the most influential experimental psychology laboratory in the

23. Burckhardt, Der Cicerone, 368.24. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 17–21, 46, 50.25. For a history of psychological knowledge in Germany in the nineteenth century, see the some-

what dated but still useful Boring, History of Experimental Psychology; Danziger, Constructing the Subject; and Danziger, Naming the Mind.

26. Baldwin, “Excitation,” in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology, 356.27. Baldwin, “Effort, Mental (Consciousness of),” in Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology,

311–12.

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world, apperception was a process by which the subject used his or her capac-ity for attention to bring the raw sense-data of the world from the darker outer rings of perception (Blickfeld) into the illuminated center of consciousness (Blickpunkt). Apperception was not only crucial to the formation of this sub-ject. It shared the same structure with it:

We tend to include under the term “self” the whole circle of effects which have their causes in former experiences. The “self” is regarded as a total force. . . . And since the principal effect of the preconditions of consciousness is the determination of the appearance and degree of clearness of ideas, we further bring the “self” into the very closest connection with the process of apperception.28

The selfhood that Wundt thus described had a very particular architectonic: a core nucleus of consciousness surrounded by rings of increasingly less conscious—but emphatically not unconscious—sensations.29 This was funda-mentally a knowing subject, and apperception was essential to the subject’s acquisition of knowledge. In this model, experience could not be just any impression stamping itself as an expression without the mediation of the mind, as Wölfflin had proposed in his dissertation; it was what was vetted through the Kantian a priori categories of time, space, and causality. By insisting on the centrality of apperception, Wundt was defending a model of selfhood that had been at the heart of nineteenth-century, post-Kantian conceptions of Bil­dung, that uniquely German concept signifying both institutional training and personal growth.30 Since the early nineteenth century, when Prussian educa-tional institutions were restructured, the elite Gymnasien and universities had indoctrinated their students with a neohumanistic curriculum of history, liter-ature, and classical languages whose abstract rules were supposed to teach students to have control over their will.31 If this subject was capable of the calm, contemplative aesthetic experience that Wölfflin associated with the Renaissance, it was thanks to having been trained with the linear style of clas-sicism. Contrast this educated (gebildet) subject with the one that Wölfflin described as he discussed the baroque:

28. Wundt, Lectures, 250–51.29. I am indebted for my understanding of the history of selfhood to Goldstein, Post­revolution­

ary Self; and Daston and Galison, Objectivity.30. Marchand, Down from Olympus; Ringer, “Bildung and Its Implications.”31. “Psychology succeeded in becoming a science in large part because of its defense of a theo-

logical conception of human nature typically associated with liberal Protestant theology” (Reed, From Soul to Mind, 7).

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How characteristic is the transformation of Michelangelo’s Sistine Slaves into those of Carracci in the Galleria Farnese. What restlessness, what con-tortions! Any arbitrary movement becomes arduous and cumbersome and requires great expenditure of energy. Although the individual members do not operate independently and freely, the rest of the body is partially drawn into the movement. The emotion [Affekt], heightened to the point of extreme ecstasy and wild rapture, cannot be expressed uniformly by the body. The sensation [Empfindung] breaks out with violence in individual organs, while the rest of the body remains subject only to gravity. However, this enor-mous expenditure of energy is by no means a sign of a more powerful cor-poreality. On the contrary, the action of the voluntary organs of movement is deficient; the mental impulses cannot master the body. The two instances, the body [Körper] and the will [Wille], have parted company. It is as if these persons are no longer masters of their own body [Leib]; they can no longer permeate them with their will. Uniform enlivenment and forma-tion fail.32

In the aftermath of the Kulturkampf, the anti-Catholic campaign undertaken by the Prussian government after the unification, such submission to immedi-ate feeling was also read as Catholic—that is to say, according to Protestant commentators, as uneducated, backward, effeminate, sentimental, and thus inherently susceptible to political manipulation.33 If, as historians have pointed out, anti-Catholicism was an important force in Germany’s nation-building endeavor after the unification, the suggestible self forged in the Protestant imagination in the mold of Catholic stereotypes was a necessary foil to the unitary model of selfhood promoted by the Prussian state since the beginning of the century.34 Like Georg Simmel’s metropolis dweller overwhelmed by “the intensification of nervous stimulation,” the baroque’s subject was one whose sensorium was under attack.35 By this logic it could be argued that modernity itself was baroque: like impressionism or Wagner, Wölfflin imag-ined it as a sensorial attack that threatened the operations of the conscious, will-centered mind. From a psychological perspective, then, the baroque was the state of pure immediacy, a state that might be experienced as ecstasy but was in fact accompanied by a host of cognitive hazards.

32. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 59.33. Forberger, Der Einfluß des Katholizismus und Protestantismus, 53; Gross, War against

Catholicism.34. Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict, 235.35. Simmel, “Die Großstädte und das Geistesleben.”

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Mediating Threads of History WritingParallel to the problem of the immediacy of experience appears the problem of the immediacy of explanation in Renaissance und Barock. How to account for the change between the two styles? At a moment when idealism and positivism seemed equally unpalatable to German-speaking intellectuals, neither the cul-tural-historical method that reduced every artwork to a direct expression of its time nor a theory of formal evolution according to which one form directly followed another could satisfactorily explain, as Wölfflin famously put it, “the path that [led] from the cell of the scholar to architect’s shed.”36 Missing from both methods were the “mediating threads” (vermittelnde Fäden) that con-nected historical facts with architectural forms.37 The virtue of the concept of style was that it provided a partial solution to this dilemma by capturing the “generality of form-feeling” as opposed to the experiments of individual art-ists.38 In fact, the only possible solution, Wölfflin noted in a footnote to Renais­sance und Barock, would be one that no one wanted to try at the end of the nineteenth century: a Hegelian one. This would entail explaining change as the mediation between opposing pairs, but how to do so without doing vio-lence to historical facts—that is, by forcing the universal on each particular?39

Like many of his contemporaries in a similar quandary, Wölfflin appealed to psychology, which occupied a unique position among the disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century.40 “The historian of humanity has to be a psy-chologist,” he noted in his journal from 1888; “he shows the forms of human-ity, its astonishing richness.”41 Whereas in the dissertation Wölfflin had opti-mistically promised a psychology of art that would both “describe [beschrei ben] and explain [erklären],” in Renaissance und Barock he expressed doubts about art history’s capacity to provide systematic explanation. Explaining and describing as methods unique to different fields of knowledge had become central terms in debates in German-speaking countries about the organization

36. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 56.37. Ibid., 55.38. Ibid., 52.39. Ibid., 54n2.40. In 1886–87 Wölfflin wrote in his journal that the task of the day was to bring together the

fields of knowledge that had been separated from each other into an organic whole and that psychol-ogy would play a central role in this project. He noted that Donato Bramante had a similar goal in architecture and Wilhelm Dilthey’s philosophy would be the starting point for this disciplinary uni-fication. See Nachlass Heinrich Wölfflin, University of Basel (hereafter cited as NHW), Tgb. 14, 136, 1886–87.

41. NHW, Tgb. 15, 29r, 1887–88.

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of the disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century.42 Among the most important theorists of this distinction was the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey. First in 1883 in Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Sciences) and a decade later in 1895 in the influential essay “Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie” (“Ideas for a Descriptive and Analytic Psychology”), Dilthey pitted the possibility of a “descriptive” psy-chology anticipating phenomenology over against the experimental psycholog-ical practices that he called “explanatory” and “constructive.”43 Others who speculated on the question also proposed psychology as paradigmatic: as a sci-ence straddling the notoriously difficult line between the mind and the body and the physical and the psychical, psychology was considered by many a pro-paedeutic science (Vorwissenschaft) and a test case for the demarcation of the natural sciences (Naturwissenschaften) from the human sciences (Geisteswis­senschaften). While the history of these disciplinary debates could be traced to theological battles from the previous century, at the heart of the matter was the question of causality, the very question that bedeviled Wölfflin, too: could the framework of cause and effect, a form of justification that seemed to work in the natural sciences, be applied to the human sciences?

It is in this intellectual milieu that the centrality of debates about Kunst­wissenschaft at the end of the nineteenth century should be understood. Wölff-lin’s search for the ground (Grund) of the change from the Renaissance to the baroque was not only an attempt to formulate a disciplinary agenda for art his-tory per se; it was also an ambitious attempt to formulate a disciplinary project for a propaedeutic human science. As he wrote in his diary in October 1894, following Dilthey’s lead, he was aspiring to a “descriptive aesthetics,” which would “seek out and describe psychological phenomena, without explanation (descriptive psychology).”44 The epistemological structure of an explanation in art history did not resemble that of an explanation in the natural sciences: “To explain [erklären] a style can mean nothing,” Wölfflin wrote in Renaissance und Barock, “other than to place it in its general historical time and to verify that it says nothing different from the other organs of its age.”45 The nineteenth-

42. For a good summary of this debate, see Anderson, “Debate over the Geisteswissenschaften”; and Feest, Historical Perspectives.

43. Dilthey, Einleitung; Dilthey, “Ideen.”44. NHW, Tgb. 34, 15r, October 1894; emphasis mine. There are other references in Wölfflin’s

diaries to describing versus explaining, for instance, “Art as the general organ of expression. The task of the university instructor is not to explain individual pictures but rather to convey an ideal of the significance of ‘educated seeing’” (NHW, Tgb. 51, 51r, December 8, 1912; emphasis mine).

45. Wölfflin, Renaissance und Barock, 64.

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century scientist worked with cause and effect; by contrast, as Marshall Brown points out, Wölfflin aspired to work like a morphologist: that is, like a natural philosopher who, in the manner of Goethe, placed specimens on the same plane to describe and classify them before distilling them into ideal types.46 Wölfflin’s journals abound with references to such a science of typology, a science that reasoned not with cause and effect but with analogies.47

It was thus that the comparative method emerged in Wölfflin’s work as a privileged technique of analysis suitable for art history’s ratiocination through analogy. Although architecture no longer occupied as central a position as it had in Wölfflin’s early writings, the comparative logic of Renaissance und Barock formed the backbone of Die klassische Kunst (1899), in which he not only read the High Renaissance of the Cinquecento against the background of the art of the Quattrocento but also juxtaposed strikingly similar images on the facing pages of the book to draw the reader’s attention to the formal similarities and differences between artworks (fig. 1).48 Furthermore, by 1915 the pair of oppositions that Wölfflin had used earlier to distinguish a linear from a paint-erly style had transformed into the general “principles of art history.”49 In the widely influential Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Wölfflin argued that since the mode of representation (Darstellungsart) was the most important question for art history, the art historian had to proceed by “comparing type with type, the finished with the finished,” so that contrasts would speak to each other.50 The entire history of art could then be understood to be unfolding in dialectical fashion through the master opposition between the linear and the painterly and a series of secondary oppositions that stemmed from it: linear versus painterly, planarity (flächenhaft) versus depth (tiefenhaft), closed form (geschlossene Form) versus open form (offene Form), multiplicity (vielheitlich) versus unity (einheitlich), and absolute versus relative clarity (Klarheit) (fig. 2).51

Although the strategy of juxtaposing images for rhetorical effect was an old trick, comparativism acquired new epistemological valency at the end of the nineteenth century. A new kind of picture book emerged at this moment in

46. Brown, “Classic Is the Baroque,” 380–81. See also Helmholtz’s comparison of Newton to Goethe in “Üeber Goethes naturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten.”

47. “Scientific thinking is to relate the individual case to the underlying general. Great literature also finds what is typical in the individual.” NHW, Tgb. 42, 76r, February 23, 1904.

48. Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst.49. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe. I rely on the English translation but modify it as

needed.50. Ibid., 11, 15.51. Ibid., vi.

Figure 1. Heinrich Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst: Eine Einführung in die italienische

Renaissance (Munich: Bruckmann, 1899), 44–45

Figure 2. Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Munich: Bruckmann, 1915),

64–65

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German-speaking countries. In the Kulturarbeiten series published by the cul-tural critic Paul Schultze-Naumburg, for example, carefully chosen photo-graphs were juxtaposed as “examples” and “counterexamples” with a pedagog-ical goal in mind.52 Schultze-Naumburg’s series was written not for the “educated” but for the “commoners, farmers, workers” who might not be versed in “language-thinking” or “logical thinking” but understood an alternative form of reasoning carried out analogically.53 Others followed suit: by the 1920s the comparative method had become an avant-gardist trope used by the likes of Sigfried Giedion and Le Corbusier. When Giedion sent a copy of his book Bauen in Frankreich, Eisen, Eisenbeton (Building in France, Iron, Reinforced Concrete, 1928) to his former adviser, Wölfflin, under whom he had written a dissertation on the late baroque, the latter wrote back: “Don’t you think that secret lines lead from [Renaissance und Barock] to [Bauen in Frankreich]?”54

The particular kind of comparativism deployed by Wölfflin, then, was an anti-Hegelian move that looked precariously Hegelian in its account of the history of art as unfolding between two opposites. Raymond Williams, who found in the concept of mediation an antidote to reflection, might have read Wölfflin’s conclusion to Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe as an adamant rejection of the latter.55 Wölfflin concluded the book by arguing that instead of relying on the metaphor of art mirroring nature, the art historian was to medi-ate between the external and internal histories of art—what he would later call the outer form, “the immediate-expressive [Unmittelbar­Ausdrucksvolle], the particular beauty, the specific character” and the inner form, “the medium [Medium] in which this beauty, this character materialized.”56 Or, as he would put it in an essay from 1921, while it seemed that artworks possessed a self-ev-ident message (Mitteilung) that appealed to the human capacity for expression, art was not an immediate instrument of expression (Ausdrucksinstrument).57 Neither was it merely the reflection of its time (Zeitspiegel).58 Art history could never provide the kind of deep causal explanation available from, say, geology, but it did offer “explanation of form” (Formerklärung), a peculiar kind of jus-tification situated between explanation and description in that it accounted not for origins but for family resemblances.59

52. The multivolume series was published in several editions between 1901 and 1917.53. Schultze-Naumburg, Kulturarbeiten, vol. 1, n.p.54. Giedion, Architektur und Gemeinschaft, 137, as quoted in Georgiadis, Introduction, 77n184.55. Williams, Marxism and Literature, 99.56. Wölfflin, Gedanken, 7. See also Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 241.57. Wölfflin, Das Erklären von Kunstwerken, 3, 14.58. Ibid., 13.59. Ibid., 12, 4.

92 Baroque out of Focus

The Baroque in the Age of Mechanical ReproducibilityKunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe is haunted by yet another kind of media-tion: not the world-historical kind of becoming the other in order to become the same but a more mundane mediation. In the untranslated foreword to the first edition, after mentioning the impossibility of reproducing colored images, Wölfflin wrote the following puzzling statement: “One can photograph a clas-sical painting, and although it will not be in accordance with the original, it will not contradict it either. For baroque paintings, by contrast, photography is almost always a misrepresentation of fact.”60 The opposition between Sein and Schein that characterized Wölfflin’s Renaissance and baroque pair was thus transferred to the medium of reproduction. Even as photographic technologies were being incorporated into art history departments throughout German- speaking countries in the nineteenth century, many Wilhelmine intellectuals remained skeptical of the virtues of photographic reproduction.61 The problem was almost always formulated as the passivity inherent in the mechanical objectivity of photography: it was argued that since the camera lacked the syn-thetic apperceptive faculty of the human mind and captured the visual accu-rately but arbitrarily, it was much more likely to deceive the eye.62 In a famous defense of engraving, for example, the art historian Moritz Thausing contrasted the “cold sleekness” of the mechanical and chemical technique of photography with the older technique, which provided “an unmediated relationship [unmit­telbare Zusammenhang] with the feeling hand of the artist . . . the trace of warm life.”63 Photographic reproduction destroyed proportional relationships in an artwork by replacing pure form with painterly (malerisch) effects and a false naturalism.64 If photography was already an epistemologically unreliable medium, photography reproducing the baroque seemed doubly suspect.

The linear and the painterly style in Wölfflin’s writings, then, not only stood for different historical styles, modes of aesthetic experience, and models of selfhood but also corresponded to competing modes of art-historical repro-duction—specifically, engraving versus photography. Wölfflin’s predilection for the linear style—evident, above all, in the clear structure of his arguments—translated into a preference for the graphic clarity of engravings and distrust of

60. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vii.61. The question of using photographs for art-historical instruction came up during the 1873

congress of art historians, but the issue was more comprehensively debated at the 1893 meeting in Nuremberg. See Offizieller Bericht über die Verhandlungen des Kunsthistorischen Kongresses.

62. Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 115–90.63. Thausing, “Kupferstich und Photographie.”64. Ibid., 289–90.

Zeynep Çelik Alexander 93

the grainy, blurry, painterly, formless, and, ultimately, “baroque” effects of pho-tographs. Comparing an engraving of Raphael’s School of Athens to photo-graphs of the fresco in Die klassische Kunst, Wölfflin wrote that the entirely new manner in which Raphael had conceived human figures’ relationship to pictorial space was better captured by even the most superficial engraving than by a photograph.65 Just as the eye could not find a place to rest in baroque churches, the painterly, out-of-focus medium of photography made it impossible for the eye of the modern beholder to apprehend the work coherently. By this logic, the elusive concept of form was precisely what could be captured only by the discerning eye of humans as opposed to the camera’s mechanical lens.

In a series of essays titled “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll” (“How One Should Photograph Sculpture”), Wölfflin repeated such anxieties but also cast the debate in a specifically psychological mold.66 Juxtaposing formally similar images—most notably two reproductions of Apollo Belvedere—he argued that the experience of an engraving was always superior to that of a photograph (fig. 3).67 Despite the modern proliferation of images, Wölfflin com-plained, it was nearly impossible to find images of sculptures taken from the correct angle.68 Sculpture was meant to be viewed from one and one point only, but only the educated eye (das gebildete Auge) knew how to move around the sculpture and find the correct viewpoint where it could then peacefully rest. Wölfflin’s alibi in this matter was the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand. In his influ-ential “Problem der Form” (“Problem of Form”), Hildebrand had argued that since the modern viewer could not be trusted to assimilate the sequence of images produced by the kinesthetic perception of three-dimensional space into a coherent whole, it was necessary to impress the correct viewpoint on his sen-sorium.69 This amounted to a kind of agoraphobia: Hildebrand urged sculptors to avoid sculpture in the round so that the body and the eyes of the modern beholder would be confined to the safety of shallow space.

65. Wölfflin, Die klassische Kunst, 96–97.66. Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” pts. 1–3. See also Wölfflin, “Über das Rechts

und Links im Bilde”; and Wölfflin, “Das Problem der Umkehrung in Raffaels Teppichkartons.”67. Wölfflin was also planning a Raphael exhibition that would allow him to compare photo-

graphs and engravings of the artist’s work. Such an exhibition would “force the beholder to see, to compare, and study himself.” See NHW, letters to parents, Basel, February 16, 1895, and June 1895. In his journals he elaborated on the exhibition and discussed the engraving as the medium farthest removed from the public’s taste. See NHW, Tgb. 33, 80v, August 1893–September 1894. The exhibi-tion was not realized.

68. For a fascinating study of the historical relationship between malerisch and relief sculpture, see Payne, “Portable Ruins.”

69. Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form.

94 Baroque out of Focus

Wölfflin’s anxieties about reproduction technologies, however, had little to do with the question of originality. In fact, under modern circumstances it was not as if the original artwork itself always guaranteed a better experience: in the case of Apollo Belvedere, an irritable Wölfflin observed, it was just as hard to find the correct viewpoint in the uncomfortably narrow galleries of the Vatican as it was to come across a correctly taken photograph of the figure.70 Paradoxically, the most satisfactory experience of the sculpture was offered in an engraving by Marcantonio Raimondi. Of all the available ways of behold-ing, then, the best was neither encountering the original face-to-face nor view-ing photographs but contemplating a two-dimensional image, in which the three-dimensional sculptural figure was depicted in the two-dimensional lin-ear style of the Renaissance.71 Even the fact that the engraving made it impos-

70. Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” pt. 2, 295.71. Wölfflin’s preference for the linear style of engravings seems similar to Goethe’s idealized

Urpflanze represented in a line drawing as described by Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 55–114.

Figure 3. Comparison between (left) photograph of the Apollo Belvedere, ca. 117–138, Vatican

Palace, and (right) engraving of the Apollo Belvedere by Marcantonio Raimondi, 1530–34.

Heinrich Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” pt. 2, Zeitschrift für bildende

Kunst, n.s., 8 (1897): 295

Zeynep Çelik Alexander 95

72. Wölfflin, “Wie man Skulpturen aufnehmen soll,” pt. 1, 224.73. Ibid., pt. 1, 224, and pt. 2, 294.74. Lange, Das Kino, 52. Lange is quoting the psychologist Robert Gaupp.

sible to tell if the reproduced figure was bronze or marble did not seem to matter to Wölfflin, who was as attentive to the medium of the reproduction as he was indifferent to the medium of the artwork reproduced.

Although Wölfflin did not mention the baroque in his essays on photog-raphy, he described photographs of sculptures taken from what he considered incorrect viewpoints with the very same adjectives that he had previously reserved for baroque architecture—most notably, “painterly” (malerisch). “The untamed eye [das verwilderte Auge] of today’s man,” he wrote, “enjoys the most unfavorable obscurities and unclarities.”72 As in baroque architecture, the absence of clearly delineated forms in photography caused the eye to move back and forth aimlessly in free space.73 Burckhardt had described baroque architecture as “verwilderter Dialekt,” a dialect that had gone wild; Wölfflin himself had discussed the wildness and arbitrariness (Verwilderung und Willkür) of the baroque in Renaissance und Barock. In the sculpture essays Wölfflin now found photography guilty of aggravating the savageness of mod-ern vision. Photography thus produced an effect similar to what many mem-bers of the educated middle classes in the early twentieth century thought was troublesome in film:

When a child goes to the cinema once or twice or three times a week, he will be psychically destroyed by the manner in which images are presented, regardless of the film’s content. Even though the cinema may be a respectable one, showing a well-censored program, being habituated to the scurrying, twitching, dithering pictures on the flickering screen slowly and surely disin-tegrates his mental and his moral solidity. First of all, one gets used to abruptly jumping from one image to another; one loses the slow steadiness of sequen-tial presentation [Vorstellung] or the ability of cohesion, which is the prereq-uisite of all sound judgment. Second, one gets used to pursuing the arbitrary grouping of images and to following them submissively [willenlos]; one can no longer follow the logical sequence of a continuous thought, which binds individual presentations together. . . . Third, as a result of the fast scurrying of images, one becomes accustomed to taking in an approximation of an impres-sion; the images in their singularity are not made clear and conscious.74

This account of the cognitive hazards of film was typical of the so-called Kino­reformbewegung (film reform movement), spearheaded by a group of educa-tors, bureaucrats, and professors who advocated for censorship laws in the early years of the century in hopes of counteracting the devastating impact of

96 Baroque out of Focus

75. Kilchenstein, Frühe Filmzensur in Deutschland; Maase and Kaschuba, Schund und Schön­heit, 62–91.

76. Hellwig, Schundfilms, 139.77. Hellwig, Die Filmzensur.78. Le Bon, Crowd, 2–15.79. Ibid.80. Nordau, Degeneration.81. Ibid., 27.82. Wölfflin, “Über kunsthistorische Verbildung,” 572.

film on the uneducated public’s morals.75 These laws exercised a formalism that was no less adamant than that of contemporaneous art history. Film cen-sors made a legal distinction between the censorship of content (Inhaltszensur) and the censorship of effect (Wirkungszensur) to identify those films that, even in the absence of questionable subject matter, had the power to affect the psy-che of the spectators through an inherently disjointed medium.76 Indeed, advo-cates of the film censorship movement argued that the kinesthetic experience of film was so immediate that even a film with censored subject matter could prompt the cinema spectator to commit murder, suicide, adultery, and a host of other crimes on leaving the theater.77 Similar anxieties had been aired by the likes of Gustave Le Bon, who, in his widely read theorization of the crowd, argued that the distinguishing mark of the modern masses was sensorial vul-nerability and contagious suggestibility.78 Once in a crowd, individuals could no longer think; they only reacted to stimuli.79 Likewise, Max Nordau, a phy-sician and cultural critic, called this characteristically modern loss of will, failure to focus one’s attention, and inability to grasp, order, and convert sense impressions into apperception “degeneration” (Entartung) and associated it with erratic movements of the eye.80 Perceiving phenomena without a firm outline, Nordau asserted with scientific authority, distinguished the “degener-ate artist who suffer[ed] from nystagmus, or trembling of the eyeball.”81

I should point out again, lest his skepticism about photography be con-strued as a call for experiential immediacy, that the presumed immediacy of a bodily encounter with the artwork was no less alarming to Wölfflin. In “Über kunsthistorische Verbildung” (“On Art-Historical Miseducation,” 1909), he described “the ambitiousness of the modern ‘educated’ tourist” as “a psycho-logical monstrosity.”82 With an aversion to crowds rivaling Le Bon’s, Wölfflin complained that throngs of tourists went through churches and museums in Italy confident that, having consulted their Baedeker guides, they could now claim art-historical knowledge, but this kind of firsthand experience with orig-inal artworks failed to produce in them the deep, immediate impression about which he had been so enthusiastic in his dissertation. The public’s dilettantism

Zeynep Çelik Alexander 97

83. Ibid.84. Compare Wölfflin’s titles to Schmarsow’s Barock und Rokoko and Grundbegriffe der Kunst­

wissenschaft.85. Schmarsow, Das Wesen der architektonischen Schöpfung.86. Schmarsow attacked Wölfflin by arguing that architecture was more about a conception of

space (Raum) than about architectural masses (Körper) (“Üeber den Werth der Dimensionen im men-schlichen Raumgebilde”). Historians have yet to explore the Protestant subtext of this debate.

87. Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, 16.

only eroded the attention and weakened the will further. Unable to focus on a single thing, the public flitted among many things. In this modern age of “col-lecting, inventorying, and registering,” Wölfflin observed, overlooking the question of cost, the public preferred to buy a “trashy” book containing photo-graphic reproductions of all of Rubens’s paintings rather than one authentic, well-executed Rubens engraving.83

This is not to say that Wölfflin’s view on immediacy was uncontested in the field of art history. Take the prolonged debate between Wölfflin and his lifelong rival August Schmarsow. On the surface the two art historians dis-agreed about the moments of stylistic breaks or what “painterly” might mean, but ultimately such disagreements almost always concerned the question of immediacy.84 During his career Wölfflin developed a tendency to counter immediacy with mediation: the baroque effects of modernity were to be tamed by the linear clarity of the Renaissance. By contrast, Schmarsow, who dedi-cated much energy to founding a research institute in situ in Florence, main-tained that an artwork revealed itself to the beholder exclusively through its immediate presence. It was necessary to “bracket the world” and “heighten the exchange with a work from all sides” until one gained an “insightful experi-ence” and grasped the work’s “valuable kernel.”85 According to Schmarsow, the moment of insight (Einsicht; a phenomenological term preferred by Edmund Husserl) came instantaneously in a flash—similar to a religious revelation—in the very presence of the work. If for Wölfflin the sensorial immediacy of the third dimension was suspect and needed to be reproduced in two dimensions in an engraving, for Schmarsow the kinesthetic experience of space received through the whole body was irreducible.86 It is fitting, then, that when Alois Riegl discussed the work of both men, he observed that Wölfflin argued with the linear clarity of the Renaissance, while Schmarsow’s convoluted sentences were out of focus, like the baroque.87

Mediation in the ClassroomIf Schmarsow’s phenomenological bracketing effectively muffled the noise of technical media, for Wölfflin those media turned out to be not only the

98 Baroque out of Focus

88. Waetzoldt, “Der Cicerone.”89. Nietzsche, On the Future of Our Educational Institutions, 125–26.90. Wölfflin, “Pen Club Rede.”91. Ringer, Decline of the German Mandarins, 58.

problem but, curiously, also the solution. Consider how Wilhelm Waetzoldt, one of Wölfflin’s many students, described his teacher with the same phrases that the art historian himself had used to describe the forms of the Renaissance:

When Wölfflin stood in the darkened old Barackenauditorium of Kasta-nienwäldchen, beside his listeners with pointer in hand, and talked with slow diction about a slide, every sentence hit, each sparingly formulated epithet fused with sensuous Anschauung into an unforgettable experience. Careful to keep clear of superlatives, averse to pathos and emotion, but also full of restrained inwardness, Wölfflin’s own style coincided with the clear, orderly, and distinguished style of the classical. Through his research he himself has become classical. That is surely the explanation for Wölfflin’s effect: he is what he teaches, he teaches what he is. His knowledge, his form of life, matter and person, form a unity. It is the closed form of Wölfflin’s persona [Geschlossenheit der Gestalt Wölfflins] that has made him into an exem-plary academic teacher.88

By the time he had published Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe in 1915, Wölfflin had transformed his courses at the university by making himself one of the most successful practitioners of a new pedagogical technique: the art-his-torical slide lecture. A direct descendant of the magic lantern show and a not-so-distant relative of film, the slide lecture fundamentally changed the sensorial order of art-historical instruction. The nineteenth-century student was con-nected to the university “by the ear, as a hearer,” to use Friedrich Nietzsche’s formulation, “one speaking mouth, with many ears, and half as many writing hands.”89 This arrangement stayed intact until the end of the nineteenth century, even when the subject matter was art. Burckhardt, according to Wölfflin’s recounting, lectured while pointing to a single print, which was then passed around, with the result that he had moved on to other things by the time the image reached the second or third row.90 By most accounts, the situation was exacerbated after the purported invasion of “the sanctuaries of higher learn-ing” by the masses.91 The problem, according to the academic elites, was not only increasing numbers of students from the lower middle classes but the fact that many of them lacked the requisite neohumanistic education offered at the

Zeynep Çelik Alexander 99

92. This was more perception than reality: although enrollment at German universities increased dramatically after 1871—from twenty-three thousand in 1875 to seventy-two thousand in 1912—this still constituted a minuscule percentage of the population. In 1910, almost four decades after the universities had begun expanding, no more than 1.3 percent of Germany had access to university education. Berghahn, Imperial Germany, 85–86.

93. For the debate between the Realisten and the Humanisten, see Daum, Wissenschaftspopu­larisierung im 19. Jahrhundert, 51–64; and Phillips, “Epistemological Distinctions and Cultural Politics.”

94. It was not Grimm but Bruno Meyer, professor of art history at the polytechnic school in Karls-ruhe, who first promoted the use of the technology within art-historical circles in German-speaking countries, albeit with little success. See Meyer, “Die Photographie im Dienste der Kunstwissenschaft und des Kunstunterrichts.”

95. Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen.” See also Grimm, “Ist die moderne Kunstgeschichte eine auf solider Grundlage ruhende Wissenschaft?”; and Grimm, “Werth der neueren Kunstgeschichte.”

96. More recently Dilly has published a photograph from Schmarsow’s classroom where the sci-opticon was set in the front of the classroom. Dilly, “Weder Grimm, noch Schmarsow, geschweige denn Wölfflin.”

97. Grimm, “Die Umgestaltung der Universitätsvorlesungen,” 344.

Gymnasien.92 Whereas the university had been designed as the natural exten-sion of the Gymnasium education, by the end of the century almost half of the university students came from nonclassical secondary schools, the Realgym­nasien or the Oberrealschulen, where the curriculum focused more on mod-ern languages and the natural sciences.93

The art-historical slide lecture came to the art historian’s rescue at this precise moment. Among the first practitioners was Wölfflin’s predecessor at the University of Berlin, Hermann Grimm.94 Although the natural sciences had already adopted the slide lecture, when Grimm tried in the 1890s to con-vince his skeptical colleagues that the sciopticon, the precursor of the slide projector, had many pedagogical virtues, he still felt compelled to stay clear of the technology’s associations with entertainment.95 The incorporation of the slide lecture into art-historical instruction therefore took place slowly: accord-ing to the records of the Congress of Art Historians, until the early twentieth century, slides were still shown at the end of class, and in most cases the stu-dents were forced to turn around to see the images on the classroom’s back wall.96 Such technical nuisances notwithstanding, the technology caught on. Grimm, for one, accepted that the slide lecture was a technology necessitated by the circumstances of the modern university. It not only made it easier to lecture to hundreds at a time (thus allowing the professor to collect more Hörergeld); it also remedied the blatant gaps in the neohumanistic training of the expanded student population.97 Moreover, the darkened lecture hall sharp-ened the attention of the otherwise distracted crowd by directing it to the only

100 Baroque out of Focus

98. Ibid., 315.99. NHW, IV 459a, Grimm to Wölfflin, January 1894. Grimm expresses his pleasure that Wölff-

lin has used the sciopticon with success. According to the Congress of Art Historians, the use of the sciopticon at art history departments at German-speaking universities was widespread by 1896. See Schmid, “Das Sciopticon im kunsthistorischen Unterricht,” 46.

light source in the room, and the simultaneity of word and image facilitated learning. Grimm had been careful to avoid the magic tricks of the sciopticon, but he could not help but notice that when Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin was projected on the wall, the effect was breathtaking:

The lecture hall becomes dark, and the work appears on the wall, larger than it is in reality, presented to the listeners—even those in the back rows—as it would appear to an observer who stood very close to the original in the Brera Gallery in Milan. The view that we find here far surpasses the effect [Wirkung] of the engraving even though the glass plate used was produced from an engraving. A feeling [Gefühl] of the living present of a great artwork overcomes us. . . . Isolated by the darkness, every listener receives—individ-ually, in a completely undisturbed fashion—the explanation of the works from the works themselves. . . . The listener feels that it is in these works, which force their way into him with violence [mit Gewalt in ihn eindringt], as it were, that Raphael’s artistic career began.98

By Grimm’s account, the effects of the projected image were immediate, over-whelming, even violent—Wölfflin might have called them baroque. The pro-jected image’s purported forcefulness foreshadowed anxieties about film spec-tatorship, but Grimm’s crowd was quite unlike Le Bon’s or the film censors’. Grimm reported that once an image was projected, the students in the lecture hall were no longer a distracted and irritable mass. Instead, their collective presence created a sensus communis that sharpened the attention and solidi-fied apperception instead of weakening it. This was neither the silent, concen-trated, and contemplative beholding that German neohumanistic education aspired to cultivate nor the distracted, savage looking that Grimm’s contempo-raries associated with modern crowds under the spell of technical media. In the hands of the art historian, the slide lecture seemed to tame the savage eye of the modern beholder.

The correspondence between Wölfflin and Grimm indicates that the for-mer was already using the sciopticon in 1893, but it may be that he did not adopt his celebrated lecturing style until he started facing large crowds in Berlin in 1901.99 Wölfflin, who had been advocating for drawing classes at the university and Anschauungsstunden at secondary schools, where he wanted a mandatory

Zeynep Çelik Alexander 101

100. Wölfflin, “Über kunsthistorische Verbildung,” 576.101. He wrote, “A book in lecture format,” in NHW, Tgb. 35, 32r, April 21, 1896.102. NHW, Tgb. 50, 54r, July 20, 1911; NHW, Tgb. 50, 67, September 24, 1911.103. Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, vii.104. Ibid.105. According to Dilly, the art historian Adolph Goldschmidt, not Wölfflin, was the inventor of

the double-slide lecture (“Weder Grimm, noch Schmarsow, geschweige denn Wölfflin,” 104–5). Although Wölfflin did not invent the technique, his students’ lecture notes make it clear that by 1911 he was using double-slide projection. See Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Wölfflin referred repeatedly to “comparative art history” in his journals but rarely discussed the double-slide lecture. See, e.g., NHW, Tgb. 61, 15r, March 20, 1920.

106. In a letter he wrote: “When I climb up to the university in the afternoon to project silhouettes of works of art on the wall, it frequently seems to me that I am actually already completely alienated from this job. I should have been looking around for another profession” (NHW, Wölfflin to Ulrich Christoffel, Zürich, undated [1933]).

Bilderbuch (picture book) to accompany the more customary Lesebuch (read-ing book), transformed art history classes at the university into Anschau­ungsstunden in their own right.100 As early as the mid-1890s Wölfflin expressed his desire to write a book in lecture format.101 In his notebooks he alluded to the affinities between the book format—its “fundamentals of visibility” and “reduction of images to the most instructive”—and the lecture auditorium, full of “young people who ought to know what is good and what is bad.”102 This ambition began to be realized in the 1890s, with anschauliche comparative lay-outs in his books, but it was finally in Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe that the slide lecture and the book coalesced into one hybrid medium.

“This book was actually meant to be something else,” begins Kunstge­schichtliche Grundbegriffe.103 The plan had been to publish an illustrated volume (Bilderheft), an adult picture book outlining an “art history without names” and following “the emergence of modern seeing step by step, an art history that not only discuss[ed] individual artists but show[ed] in a progres-sion without any breaks how a painterly style came out of a linear one, an atectonic style out of a tectonic one, etc.”104 However, Wölfflin lamented, no publishing house would print such a lavishly illustrated book in the midst of a war. He had therefore been forced to make do with fewer images, systemati-cally juxtaposed throughout the book to facilitate visual comparison—exactly as he had arranged the Renaissance and baroque pairings in his previous writ-ings and as he taught his double-slide lectures at the university.105 Yet while Wölfflin still seemed guarded about photographic modes of image reproduc-tion in his writings, in the lecture hall he embraced—though, according to his own account, not without a feeling of alienation—the baroque effects of the sciopticon:106

102 Baroque out of Focus

107. Landsberger, Heinrich Wölfflin, 93–94, 96–97.108. Theodor Levin, quoted in the discussion following “Vortrag des Herrn Professor Dr. M.

Schmid-Aachen über Lichtbilder-Apparate im kunsthistorischen Unterricht,” Offizieller Bericht 1894, 91.

Wölfflin, the master of improvised speaking, places himself in the dark, with his side turned to his students and his eyes, like theirs, directed at the image. He coalesces with them into a unity and represents the ideal beholder, his words condensing the experience common to all. For a while Wölfflin lets the work produce its effect, draws near to it—following Schopenhauer’s advice—as one draws near a prince, waiting until the work speaks to him. Then slowly come out the sentences, almost hesitatingly. When some of his students mimic these pauses in his speech, they not only mimic an external mannerism but do so because they feel that this viscosity hides something positive. Wölfflin’s speaking never creates the impression of something pre-pared in advance and then projected onto the artwork but rather seems pro-duced on the spot by the image. The artwork maintains its dominant position throughout. His words do not drown the artwork but display it like pearls. . . . This tall, sinewy man, who confronts the artwork with a firm, upright posture, reverential toward the work. He is moved internally but does not submit to this inner movement. Rather, he faces it with a clear and productive under-standing [Verstehen] [fig. 4].107

This was a peculiar reversal of the intellectual transformation that Wölff-lin had been undergoing since the beginning of his career. Wölfflin may have lost the enthusiasm that he had felt early in his career for the baroque effects of architecture, but here in the lecture hall he was delivering those very effects through a technology that he had found so dangerous before. By the time Wölfflin lectured to crowds, significant changes had made the art-historical slide lecture much more fluid: the slides were no longer a novelty shown at the end of the class but were integrated into the lectures; the sciopticon was placed in the back of the hall so that students would not have to turn around; and it became common to use not one but two slides projected from a sciopticon with double projectors. It was after these technical adjustments that Wölfflin’s body, inserted in the dark and supplemented by the descriptive sound track of formal analysis, could pass as the medium through which the students per-ceived the images on the screen.

As one art historian put it in a meeting of the Congress of Art Historians, the act of projecting slides was uncannily similar to Christ’s Transfiguration: the more radiant and immaterial the image, the more material and present it appeared.108 The same paradox was the ingenuity of Wölfflin’s intellectual

Figure 4. Drawing of Heinrich Wölfflin lecturing by his student, Dr. Bayer, ca. 1920–36. Ink

and pencil on paper, 14 × 22 cm. Nachlass Heinrich Wölfflin, Öffentliche Bibliothek der

Universität Basel. NL 95, VI A 36

104 Baroque out of Focus

109. Wölfflin, “Über das Rechts und Links im Bilde.”110. See also Born, “Heinrich Woelfflin zum siebzigsten Geburtstag.”

project. Immersed in the dark and spellbound by the image projected by the sciopticon, no one seemed to notice the notorious heat, noise, and smell of the projector, the awkward discontinuities between word and image, or the occa-sional inverted slide. (Tellingly, Wölfflin theorized on that last problem in 1928 [fig. 5].)109 It was reported that when Wölfflin spoke in the darkened lec-ture hall, he became so invisible that his disembodied voice created the illu-sion that the artwork itself was speaking immediately through him.110 His eye became the eye of all. Here in the lecture hall the philosophical and technical meanings of mediation merged into one. For all his misgivings about immedi-acy and technical media, Wölfflin proved exceptionally successful at erasing the traces of his own modes of mediation. It remains a paradox that the formal language of art history acquired its claims of immediacy with the help of none other than technical media.

Figure 5. Heinrich Wölfflin, “Über das Rechts und Links im Bilde,” Münchner Jahrbuch der

bildenden Kunst, n.s., 5 (1928): 214–15

Zeynep Çelik Alexander 105

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