Translated from the German by Max Marmor

(Translator's note: The following essay first appeared in the original German exactly forty years ago as the chapter on "Kunstliteratur" in the admirable Atlantisbuch der Kunst: eine Enzyklopädie der bildenden Künste (Zurich: Atlantis Verlag, 1952), pp. 665-679. It remains our most succinct historical survey of "the literature of art," and while the author modestly regards it as "pre-historic," informed students know it rather as a classic. The present translation, produced for the use of new students at the Institute of Fine Arts, has been revised by Professor Gombrich (while on summer holiday in the Austrian Alps!) and appears here with his generous consent. No attempt has been made to bring the story--which ends with André Malraux at mid-century- -down to the present; but at the author's request, a selective list of sources available in English translation has been substituted for the summary bibliography that accompanied the original version of this essay. That bibliography appears as a separate document on this home page.

Note: This translation was first published in Art Documentation, vol. 11 no. 1, Spring 1992.

By the literature of art we mean, on the one hand, the older body of writings on art, that is, technical textbooks for artists, handbooks and guidebooks for connoisseurs, biographies of artists and the philosophy of art prior to the evolution of the scholarly and scientific study of art [Kunstwissenschaft] as an independent discipline; and, on the other hand, more recent art literature insofar as it makes no claim to scholarly or scientific status.

All branches of the literature of art were cultivated in antiquity although, of course, only a fragment of this body of writing has survived. The technical textbook on architecture is Vitruvius' Ten Books on Architecture (De Architectura Libri X), from the age of Augustus. In them posterity found not only instructions concerning the classical orders, city planning and temple forms, theater acoustics and the construction of engines of war, but above all the advocacy of a profound theoretical education of the architect, combined with elevated claims to social standing. Though based in many ways upon Greek sources (which he occasionally cites), Vitruvius' is the independent book of a Roman, as his disparaging judgement of the decorative "grotesques" of his day, for example, shows. His influence upon posterity, especially upon Renaissance art literature, cannnot be estimated too highly. The biography of artists, which seems ultimately to derive from the Greek writer Duris of Samos (4th cent. B.C.), survives almost exclusively in excerpts incorporated by Pliny the Elder (d. 79 A.D.) in his Natural History. Books 35 and 36 provide a survey of sculptors, silversmiths and painters in connection with a treatment of stones, metals and earths. Many of the anecdotes that Pliny relates have become famous--for example, about the contest of Zeuxis and Parrhasios or about Apelles (whence the phrase "stick to your last"). But more important is the fact that Pliny describes the history of painting and sculpture as the story of a steady progression to a time of maturity and subsequent decline. In so doing, he set the example for nearly all subsequent art historical writing. Altogether, the influence of these brief chapters upon Renaissance painting was scarcely slighter than that of Vitruvius upon architecture: the critical judgements which he hands down were applied and transferred again and again to other artists.

Genuinely philosophical writings on art may have been known in antiquity (Xenocrates, 3rd cent. B.C.), but none has survived. We are reliant upon the pertinent passages in the philosophers, among whom Plato, of course, dismissed the visual arts as sensory deception while Aristotle held them in low esteem because of their character as crafts. In this connection, it is important to clarify that our concept of art was foreign to antiquity and that the word usually so rendered--techne, i.e. ars--really means any manner of skill.

More instructive are the comparisons which orators such as Quintilian drew between rhetoric and painting. Here we find already the roots of the notion of "style" in the visual arts.

A classical guidebook is Pausanias' (2nd cent. A.D.) guide to Greece. He offers not only many local legends but also detailed descriptions of such sights as, for example, the Olympian Zeus of Phidias or the frescoes of Polygnotos at Delphi. The value of these accounts to archaeologists is obvious.

As the final genre of classical art literature there remains to be considered the poetic or theoretical description of (real or fictive) works of art, the so-called "ekphrasis." The numerous epigrams about classical works of art in the Greek Anthology, the descriptions of paintings in the Eikones (Imagines) of the younger Philostratos (3rd cent. A.D.) and in numerous dialogues by Lucian (2nd cent. A.D.) kindled the imagination of the Renaissance to reconstruct the lost works, and still enthralled Goethe.

These poetic descriptions of pictures constitute an essential component of medieval art literature both in the Greek East and in the Latin West. Noteworthy examples are Paulos Silentiarios' (6th cent.) descriptions of the Hagia Sophia or Baudre de Bourgeuil's (beginning of the 12th cent.) rendering of a pictorial tapestry, which recalls the Bayeux Tapestry. For the rest, medieval art literature knew above all technical instructions for the use of artists, first of all collections of directions for the mixing of colors and alloys. In addition to the didactic poem of Heraclius from the 10th century (?), Theophilus' early 12th-century Essay on the Various Arts (Schedula diversarum artium) is important. The so-called Painter's Manual of Mount Athos, a recipe book of the Greek East that also contains precise prescriptions for the illustration of sacred history and legends, survives only in an 18th century version. For French Gothic, Villard de Honnecourt's (13th cent.) sketchbook should be mentioned, in which the master hopes to pass on to his successors the practical experiences of his life as an artist. On the threshold of the Renaissance stands the treatise (Libro dell'arte) of Cennino Cennini (ca. 1400), who quite consciously commits to paper the workshop tradition of the Florentine school of painting of Giotto and his followers. Alongside these practical aids, the Middle Ages also knew travel guides for pilgrims to the Holy Land and to Rome, the so- called Mirabilia, in which the works of art of antiquity, draped in legend like the Horsetamers of the Quirinal, are discussed. Most informative, however, are the accounts and biographies of the great master builders, above all the memoir of Abbot Suger from the 12th century on the renovation of the abbey church of St. Denis, the first monument of the Gothic. Though scarcely belonging to the literature of art in the genuine sense, this kind of source offers the best insight into medieval views of the essence and tasks of art. Of the biography of artists or the philosophy of art the Middle Ages knew nothing.

Renaissance. The beginnings of modern art literature must be sought in 15th-centuryFlorence, that is in the milieu in which the new artistic concept of scientific naturalism pressed for a theoretical foundation. It is, above all, the humanist and architect Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) whose contributions to the literature of art remained exemplary for centuries. His writing On Painting (De pictura), written ca. 1435 in Latin and in its Italian version dedicated to the pioneer of Renaissance architecture and perspective, Filippo Brunelleschi, is expressly envisioned as the programmatic text of a new generation. The flourishing of art in his native city--we read in the dedication--has persuaded Alberti that great accomplishments are just as possible now as in admired antiquity. For Alberti the new painting is a science; it rests upon the laws of optics and geometry. A picture is basically a "section through the visual pyramid," the frame a "window." Alberti dismisses the motley, multi- figured pictures of the Gothic with their expenditure of gold and jewels in favor of a classical artistic ideal of dignity ("decorum") and significance ("invenzione"). The whole tendency of his text is to distinguish art from craft, to make of it an aspect of culture.

Alberti's text on architecture (De re aedificatoria, ca. 1450), divided into ten books in close accordance with Vitruvius, attempts to place architecture, too, upon a theoretical, even philosophical foundation. Thus, for example, his view that the temple of God (as Alberti calls churches) requires the most perfect form, the circle, has its roots in platonism. It found its application in Bramante's St. Peter, even as much of Alberti's art theory came to full realization only in the High Renaissance.

The manuscripts (Commentarii) of the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti were only published in the 20th century, though they were known to the Renaissance. Ghiberti, too, is above all concerned with the theoretical foundations of art, seeking help from Vitruvius, Pliny and from the Arabic and medieval writers on optics. But for us the principal value of his drafts lies in the few pages in which he speaks of the art of his predecessors and of his own life's work--the first stirrings of autobiography in the arts and of a critically evaluative art history, drawing on firsthand experience.

In the case of the writings of Antonio Averlino, called Filarete (ca. 1460), the master of the bronze doors of St. Peter, we have to do with an architectural treatise in the form of a utopian city plan, which throws much light upon the aspirations and strivings of the period. Among the theorizing artists of the Quattrocento, Piero della Francesca with his purely geometrical treatise on perspective (De prospectiva pingendi) and Francesco di Giorgio's manuscript on architecture (ca. 1480) are outstanding. Luca Pacioli's characteristic book On Divine Proportion, i.e. the Golden Section (De divina proportione, 1509)--a theme dear to the heart of the neoplatonic mysticism of the Renaissance-- is once again applied geometry. Another side of classical erudition, physiognomics, gains currency in the strange treatise on sculpture by the North Italian Pomponius Gauricus (De sculptura, 1504).

These artists' writings lead to the imposing figure of Leonardo da Vinci, whose contributions to the literature of art already belong, for the most part, to the early 16th century. Leonardo's writings and notes, too, long remained in manuscript. To be sure, already shortly after his death an industrious compiler brought together those passages from his posthumous papers dealing with painting and combined them into a Treatise on Painting (Trattato della pittura); but this important manuscript, which also preserves much that is no longer to be found in Leonardo's own notes, was only edited and published in the 17th century in France. For Leonardo, too, painting is a science and indeed--as he sought to prove in his Paragone or Competition- -the mother of all sciences and arts. He sees in the artist the creator of a "microcosm" which must rest upon the same laws as the universe. Thus for Leonardo the study of the laws of nature is inseparably bound up with creative art, and at bottom his writings on anatomy, embryology, geology and optics belong to the literature of art as much as does his more specific advice for the praticing artist. Repeated attempts to play off Leonardo the artist against Leonardo the scientist depend upon a misunderstanding.

Contemporary with Leonardo--and perhaps not uninfluenced by his endeavors-- appeared the first artists' writings of the Northern Renaissance, Albrecht Dürer's Manual of Measurement (Unterweysung der Messung, 1515) and Four Books on Human Proportion (Vier Bücher von menschlicher Proportion, 1528). Dürer is concerned with the fundamental problem of the age, the establishment of a scientific theory of art. In this he shared his contemporaries' confidence that it must be possible to harness the geometrical construction of the accurate visual image in perspective with a theory of the beautiful human image that could be taught mathematically. Dürer's struggle with these problems is most evident in his manuscript drafts, which again and again revolve around the sentence: "What beauty is I know not."

It is precisely these philosophical speculations that lend the art treatises of the Renaissance their special character. From the outset it was a matter of circumscribing the activity of the artist and furnishing a philosophical basis for his claim to social recognition. In the course of the 16th century we find not only artists but also literary figures occupied with working out this new concept of "art." We stand on the threshold of academic art theory. The word "academic" itself points to the roots of these efforts. It designates the school of Plato and in fact Plato is now made, as it were, into a patron saint of painters, despite his dismissal of the visual arts (see above). The neoplatonic theory of divine "ecstasy," in which the oracle, poet and lover is by grace given to behold the heavenly primordial images, is transferred to the artist. He, too, boasts divine inspiration and the capacity to behold with the eyes of the spirit the Idea of Beauty. The concept of "fine arts," to be strictly distinguished from the applied arts, stems from the milieu of this platonizing art theory; it is to be sought above all in the Florence of mid-century, in which scholars such as Benedetto Varchi, who pronounced the eulogy for Michelangelo at the latter's funeral, consciously set about "elevating" art, whereby they helped assure the victory of so- called "Mannerism." The characteristic monuments of "mannerist" art theory, though, are the writings of the Milanese painter Paolo Lomazzo, blind at an early age, his Treatise on Painting (Trattato dell'arte della pittura, 1584) and Idea of the Temple of Painting (Idea del tempio della pittura, 1590). Here we find the academic theory of the great "exemplary" masters and schools (above all Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael and Titian) and an interest in learned themes of painting, suited to this milieu. The mirage (stemming from antiquity) of a "perfect" work of art, uniting the merits of all schools, is also treated at length.

Linked to this esteem for the "learned" artist and his gift for invention is the fact that handbooks on mythology and allegory, originally intended primarily for writers, were drawn increasingly into the orbit of the literature of art. To be sure, the Middle Ages already knew the so- called "Albricus" (13th cent.), a brief list of descriptions of the classical gods and how they should be depicted, but only the age of Mannerism witnessed the success of Vincenzo Cartari's handbook on the depiction of the classical deities, full of allegorical mystery-mongering (Le imagini colla sposizione degli dei degli antichi, 1556). The popularity of the so-called hieroglyphs, upon which a philosophical secret sense was imposed in an apocryphal late antique writing by Horapollo (printed 1505) and which even enthralled Dürer, belongs here too. The humanist Piero Valeriano devoted to them the most comprehensive book (Hieroglyphica, 1556), which for its own part influenced late Renaissance symbolism. The handbook destined for the greatest diffusion, Cesare Ripa's Iconologia of 1593, leads into our next section.

The growing emphasis in the literature of art upon classical learning can also be traced in architectural theory, which was already given a philosophical coloring by Alberti (see above). Now for the first time the "five orders" and their proportions achieve canonical status. Here the architectural and model books of Serlio (after 1537), Vignola (1562), Palladio (1570) and Scamozzi (1615) are most significant. They contributed significantly to the spreading awareness of Italian Renaissance forms throughout Europe. Above all, the influence of Palladio's book in the Protestant North, especially in England, is well-known.

From the 16th century onward, a series of smaller writings and dialogues on art, which often provide valuable testimony to the taste of the age, accompanies these authoritative works. Thus Francesco de Hollanda's four Portuguese dialogues on painting (1548), in which Michelangelo appears as a discussant, which of course does not mean that these are transcripts of real conversations. More valuable as a source, perhaps, is Lodovico Dolce's dialogue Aretino (1557), in which the unscrupulous journalist and friend of Titian appears in the role of the critic, who plays off Venetian color against the drawing of the Roman school and, above all, Michelangelo- - a theme that was to retain its currency for a long time.

The increasing flood of guidebooks for art lovers in the Italian Renaissance testifies to the same public participation in questions of taste. At the outset we find Albertini's guidebooks to Florence and Rome (both 1510) with their important lists of art works. Next come such writings as Sansovino's book on the sights of Venice (Delle cose notabile in Venetia, 1556) and Bocchi's on the beauties of Florence (Bellezze de Fiorenza, 1581). Leandro Alberti's guide to the whole of Italy (Descrittione di tutta Italia) appeared in 1550. Even more important than these printed works are the notes of a North Italian amateur, the so- called Anonimo Morelliano, who may be presumed to be the Venetian nobleman Marcantonio Michiel. These are notes from the third and fourth decades of the 16th century on the works of art in the churches and palaces of Padua and Venice. Here a genuinely cultivated connoisseur writes on the basis of firsthand experience. We owe to him, among other things, the few reliable reports of the work of Giorgione.

The biography of artists in the Renaissance is only intelligible against this background. Ultimately, of course, it is rooted in the longing for fame which, nourished by classical antiquity, is characteristic of the entire age. In Dante's Divina Commedia, the fading of Cimabue's fame vis- à- vis Giotto's appears as a moral exemplum of the vanity of earthly fame, but already in the 14th century commentators on Dante append to this passage a colorful anecdotal account of the relationship of the the two "patriarchs" of Florentine art. In Boccaccio's Decameron (ca. 1350), too, Giotto appears as "one of the lights of Florentine fame," and soon the novella availed itself of the figure of the artist as a stock character. The first indication of the artist emerging alongside the scholar and the statesman in his claim to fame is found in the short work of Filippo Villani on famous Florentines (prior to 1400), in which the writer, to be sure, still believes himself called upon to justify allotting Giotto, Gaddi and others a place despite the fact that many do not recognize painting as a "liberal art." Still more interesting is the work of the humanist Bartolommeo Fazio (d. 1457) on famous men of his time (De viris illustribus), composed in Naples shortly after mid- century, for it includes not only such Italian artists as Gentile da Fabriano and Pisanello but also Netherlandish artists, above all Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden- - long before such personal honors became possible in their own country. Similar in character are the early 16th- century eulogies of Bishop Giovio, in which the art of Leonardo, Raphael and Michelangelo is characterized in the economical but suggestive style of the humanists.

But only in Florence did a solid tradition of the biography of artists evolve, closely entwined with the local patriotism of the city on the Arno. Thus the humanist Cristoforo Landino, who prefaces his 1481 printed edition of Dante with an "Apology for Florence," offers a survey of the artists of Florence as one of his native city's claims to fame. Here already is manifest the notion that "art" owes its "rebirth" to the Florentines Cimabue and Giotto and that its further flourishing also followed in Florence. At about the same time, the first extensive biography of a single artist appeared, the Vita of Brunelleschi attributed to Manetti (1423- 1491), which despite its polemical stance (especially against Ghiberti) yet places its hero in a broad historical perspective: it is Brunelleschi who resurrected the architecture of the ancients, destroyed by the "Goths." In the 16th century, more local Florentine patriots seem intent upon recording still- living traditions about the artists of their ancestral city. One manuscript of this type is the so- called Libro di Antonio Billi, another the Anonymus Magliabecchianus. They are valuable to us because they show the milieu out of which the most important work of Renaissance biography of artists grew: Vasari's Lives (Le vite de' piu eccelenti architetti, pittori et scultori etc.).

Vasari's book- - which first appeared in 1550 and in a second, much expanded edition in 1568- - is perhaps the most famous, and even today the most- read work of the older literature of art. His portrayals of his characters and his art of pragmatically linking individual episodes are still influential. It has not been difficult for critical documentary scholarship to demonstrate that Vasari is a highly unreliable witness, especially for the early Renaissance, that he often invents freely, and that, even when he writes on the basis of firsthand experience, he is subject to amazing confusions. And yet praise and blame of the work are too often directed at specifics, overlooking the achievement of its construction of history, in which, of course, previous generations also had a part. Vasari expressly protests (in the introduction to Part Two) against being judged as a mere chronicler. He was concerned with deriving instruction from history, with showing young painters how application and talent bring success, and above all with accounting for the flourishing of art after Cimabue. He expressly places Michelangelo, as the only living figure, at the end and, simultaneously, at the summit of his first edition, for to him the history of art is a story of progress from modest beginnings, through the worthy but somewhat dry masters of the "second manner" (of the Quattrocento), to the triumph of the third and perfect artistic manner, introduced by Leonardo.

As early as Vasari one notes a faint fear (perhaps another link with Pliny) that from such a summit only decline can follow (preface to Part Three). Vasari writes as a Medici court artist from the milieu of the first academicians (see above). His prejudices, his hope of currying favor with the ruling house, his superficialities are obvious enough. And yet even today art history remains under his spell. The very chapter divisions of our handbooks go back, for the most part, to his example. He owes this success not merely to his genuinely Tuscan energy as a storyteler, but above all to his capacity for seeing the evolution of three centuries as a whole.

Perhaps only Benvenuto Cellini's (1500- 1572) autobiography (first printed 1728), which in Goethe's translation has become a part of German literature, measures up to Vasari in popularity. As a portrait of an age and a personality of the declining Renaissance, it is unsurpassed, though it is dangerous to generalize from the conditions depicted there. Much inferior in literary worth, but of greater interest due to its subject, is Ascanio Condivi's Life of Michelangelo of 1553, which appeared during the master's lifetime and was probably directly inspired by him, perhaps with the intention of suppressing the richly imaginative biography in Vasari's first edition. Vasari then reciprocated by consigning Condivi to oblivion in his second edition.

The art literature of the Baroque and Classicism, i.e. of the 17th and 18th centuries, stands entirely under the spell of previous Italian literature. To draw a line of demarcation between the Renaissance and the following period is difficult, yet in general it may be said that art lovers and amateurs, together with the officially sponsored academies, fundamentally determined the character of art literature during these centuries. In Italy the platonizing theory of art achieved, as it were, canonical status. It found its ultimate formulation in Giovanni Pietro Bellori's (1615- 1696) famous academic lecture concerning the Idea of painting, sculpture and architecture (delivered 1664). The friend of Poussin and admirer of Raphael here sets down the articles of faith made famous by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Emilia Galotti (dialogue with the painter Conti): "Art must paint as creative Nature- - if there is one- - conceived the picture: without the defects which the refractory matter unavoidably causes; without the corruption with which time wages war upon it." A second leitmotiv of Italian art literature in this period is the Counter- Reformation, which after the Council of Trent watched over the artist's activity to see that nothing immoral or harmful to the faith invaded art. Cardinal Paleotti's book on sacred and profane painting (Discorso intorno le imagini sacre e profane, 1582) and the treatise on painting and sculpture by Ottonelli and Pietro da Cortona (Trattato della pittura e scultura, 1652) provide interesting information about the spirit of ecclesiastical art in this period and its sharp reaction to the carefree attitude of the Renaissance regarding such matters. In the biography of artists, the 17th century brings a whole series of continuations of Vasari, in which a polemic against the great model is rarely wanting. Baglione treats the artists active in Rome from 1572- 1642 (Le vite de' pittori, scultori ed architetti etc.); on a higher plane, Bellori (see above) treats the lives of the most important artists of his time (Le vite de' pittori, scultori ed architetti moderni, 1672), describing artists of the "academic" tendency- - the Carracci, Domenichino, Poussin- - with special affection, but also doing justice to such naturalists as Caravaggio and Rubens. The Lives of Passeri, only published later from manuscripts (Le vite de' pittori, scultori ed architetti etc.), are presented as a continuation of Baglione and treat artists active in Rome 1641- 1673. Most significant as a historian is Filippo Baldinucci who, important also as an investigator of documents and a collector, was the first in Italy to describe Rembrandt's prints. His accounts of the masters of the art of drawing, too (Notizie de' professori del disegno da Cimabue in qua etc.), were published in part posthumously, 1681- 1728. His biography of Bernini (1682) is the most important source on this dominant master of the age of the Baroque.

In conscious opposition to Vasari, whom they accuse of Florentine bias, stand several Italian local historians. For Venice, Carlo Ridolfi's Wonders of Art (Maraviglie dell'arte, 1648) should be mentioned. Malvasia (Felsina Pittrice, 1678) took Bologna's part and did not shrink from falsification in order to underscore the greatness of the art of his native city in comparison with others. Most vexing in this respect is the Neapolitan B. de' Domenici, who in his biographical work (Vite de' pittori etc., 1742), did not hesitate to invent artists in order to promote his city's fame. That local literature and guidebooks for connoisseurs multiplied by leaps and bounds under these circumstances goes without saying. To recite them individually is impossible; as a curiosity Boschini's rhyming Picturesque Sea- Chart of Venice (Carta del navegar pitoresco, 1660), composed in the Venetian dialect, may be mentioned.

Outside Italy the 17th century is, above all, the period of the reception of Italian art theory. Italian authors, especially Vasari but also Lomazzo (see above) and the architectural theorists, are translated and incorporated into other works. Thus the art literature of the North almost everywhere reflects one- sidedly the standpoint of the classical tradition. Interest in art literature first takes hold in the Belgian Netherlands. The most important witness for the early period is Karel van Mander's comprehensive text, The Painter's Book (Het Schilderboek, 1604), which consists of an extensive didactic poem and three books of artists' biographies. The first is borrowed from Pliny, the second from Vasari, while the third is a most valuable source for the Netherlandish masters- - the first such, if we disregard the brief lists in Guicciardini's description of the Netherlands (Descrittione di tutti i Paesi Bassi, 1567) and the conventional encomia which accompany the 1572 portrait series of Lampsonius. Van Mander appends to his book a survey of classical mythology based on Ovid, "the Bible of poets." To Rembrandt's generation in Holland belongs S. van Hoegstraeten's Introduction to the High School of the Art of Painting (Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der Schilderkonst, 1641), which despite all its Baroque bombast offers richly informative reports. The masters of Holland's Golden Age found their "Vasari" at last in Houbraken, whose Great Theater (Groote Schouburgh, 1718), to be sure, scarcely bears comparison with its Italian model. Gerard de Lairesse's Great Book of Painting (Het Groot Schilderboek, 1707) is entirely committed to the academic theoretical edifice.

In Germany- - aside from Neudörfer's short text, Reports of Nuremberg Artists and Masters (Nachrichten von Nürnberger Künstlern und Werkmeister, 1547) and such brief textbooks as Scheffer's Graphice of 1669- - only Joachim von Sandrart's German Academy of the Noble Arts of Architecture, Sculpture and Painting (Teutsche Academie der Edlen Bau-, Bild-und Mahlerey- Künste, 1675) is worthy of mention. Even this folio volume is a compendium of earlier art literature; Vasari, van Mander, Palladio and others are eagerly utilized. The most valuable part consists of the accounts of German artists and of those artists whom Sandrart himself encountered on his many travels. Among the former belongs the account of "Mathäus Grünewald," which apparently rests upon a confusion with Mathis Gotthart Nithart and which deprived this master of his proper name. Among the latter belong several lively portraits from the German artists' colony in Rome, where Sandrart was also in touch with Claude Lorrain and Elsheimer.

Of Spanish art literature--in addition to Guevara, the 16th-century editor of Pliny who also attests to Hieronymus Bosch's fame in Spain- -Francisco Pacheco's Art of Painting (Arte de la pintura, 1649) should, above all, be mentioned; in it, besides the common property of European art theory, we also find an account of Velazquez, the author's son- in-law. Palomino's Museum of Painting (El museo pictorico, 1715) already belongs to the18th century.

16th-century England is represented only by a fragmentary Lomazzo translation and Nicholas Hillyard's manuscript on the technique of miniature painting (both 1598). The 17th century, too, has little original to offer, Aglionby's Painting Illustrated (1685) being based primarily on Vasari. By contrast, France in the 17th century developed a comprehensive art literature intimately connected to the newly-founded Academy. Roland Fréart de Chambray breathes the spirit of Cartesian rationalism in his work on the idea of perfection in painting as demonstrated by the principles of art (Idée de la perfection de la peinture demonstrée par ses principes etc., 1662). Equally characteristic are the academic lectures of Félibien (Conférences; delivered 1667), whose collected writings on art embrace six volumes. Though a convinced classicist, Félibien yet seeks to do justice to the works of the French Middle Ages. One of the most-read summaries of the teachings of academic classicism is Dufresnoy's didactic poem on painting (De arte graphica, 1667), often translated and published with commentaries. Among artists' writings from this milieu, Le Brun's lecture on the portrayal of the affects (1667) is noteworthy. It again treats human passions and their characteristic facial expressions in Cartesian terms and typifies the principles of academic history painting. Le Brun also studied physiognomics, with its comparison between human beings and animals.

The first opposition to academic dogmas arose during the same period. In the battle between Poussinistes and Rubenistes, the writer on art Roger de Piles stood by the latter. In his dialogue on color (Dialogue sur le coloris, 1699), he takes sides with the Venetians against the Roman school, as Dolce had previously done (see above). His interest in Dutch artists and in the genre of landscape, so little esteemed by the academicians, marks him as the prophet of a new age. For in the 18th century it is above all the collectors who determine the shape of art literature, and their standards of value are less rigorous than those of the philosophers of art. The influence of empiricist philosophy, with its opposition to platonic Idealism, also makes itself felt, especially in England. Among French rationalists and skeptics, the Abbé del Bos, who subjected the ideals of the Academy to a sharp critique, is preeminent; also Denis Diderot, whose famous accounts of the Paris Salons 1765- 67 (printed in 1798) introduce the age of journalistic art criticism. His advocacy of the bourgeois-moralistic paintings of a Greuze show him as a pioneer and champion of the ideals of the middle class. The sculptor Falconet even took it upon himself to criticize famous antiquities; Goethe, in his youthful work "Von Falconet und Über Falconet," followed consciously in his footsteps.

Of still greater significance on a theoretical level is the art literature of 18th-century England. To be sure, the popular writings of Jonathan Richardson (father and son) still show the influence of academic art theory, albeit softened by the tolerance of the traveler and collector. But in Hogarth's writing on art, The Analysis of Beauty (1753), a position of opposition to the academic tradition is openly assumed. Although Hogarth borrowed his theory of a "line of beauty" from Lomazzo (see above), his position is yet, in spite of its naïvété, entirely psychologico-empirical. Reynolds, too, whose academic lectures (Discourses, 1771) pay tribute to inherited art theory, makes many observations that transcend this position. But above all, the magnum opus of anti-metaphysical aesthetics must be mentioned here, Edmund Burke's A Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756), which also stimulated Kant.

The English aesthetic, based on a purely sensual, indeed associationist foundation, culminated in the debates on the essence of the "picturesque," especially in garden design, in which Richard Payne Knight represented the standpoint that the "picturesque" is that which reminds us of paintings previously seen. Perhaps only in the context of this conscious opposition to dogma can we understand how, precisely in England, the autonomous validity of the Gothic and even the Chinese style was first recognized. Pioneer and champion of the former was the antiquary Horace Walpole (1717- 1797), the author of the first romance of chivalry and ghost story; the popularizer of the latter, especially Chinese garden design, was William Chambers (1726- 1796).

In German art literature the heritage of academic classicism is more powerfully in evidence. To be sure, a Hagedorn may assume a relaxed position vis-à- vis dogma comparable to that of Richardson in England; but soon German art literature stood under the spell of the towering figure of Winckelmann, whose Roman circle took the art theories of Bellori (see above) even more seriously, perhaps, than the 17th century had done. Anton Raphael Mengs' Thoughts on Beauty and Taste in Painting (Gedanken über die Schönheit und den Geschmack in der Mahlerey, 1762) represent a rigorously academic standpoint. With Lessing's Laoköon (1766), motifs from English art literature, above all the rational investigation of art as semiotics [Zeichengebung] find their way into German art criticism, subsequently to be reshaped by Herder and the young Goethe into the sentimentalism of the "Sturm und Drang." The age of sentiment also finds expression in Salomon Gessner's Letter on Landscape Painting (Brief über die Landschafts-Mahlerey, 1770), which found an echo in England especially.

The many reference works and dictionaries of the 18th century were intended for the use of amateurs; their predecessors may be found in the outstanding alphabetical glossaries of artistic expressions by Baldinucci (1681) and Félibien (1689). Sulzer's General Theory of Fine Arts (Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste, 1777), sharply criticized by Goethe, and the dictionary of Watelet and Levesque, are characteristic products of this milieu. Johann Rudolf Füssli's Universal Dictionary of Artists (Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, 1763)--the first of its kind--and Milizia's Dictionary of Fine Arts (Dizionario delle belle arti del disegno, 1797) also belong here.

With this we have reached the period in which the genuinely scholarly and scientific study of art [Kunstwissenschaft] takes root. It is adumbrated by the great compendia and historical surveys of the late 18th century. Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art (Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, 1764) forms the great example of a historical view of art. There follow Lanzi's History of Italian Painting (Storia pittorica d'Italia, 1789), Leopoldo Cicognara's History of Italian Sculpture (Storia della scultura italiana, 1813-1818), J.D. Fiorillo's History of Graphic Arts in Germany and the Netherlands (Geschichte der zeichnenden Künste in Deutschland und den Niederlanden, 1815-1820) and d'Agincourt's History of Art by Monuments of the 4-16th Centuries (Histoire de l'art par les monuments, 1811-1823). Simultaneously, there appear catalogues such as Bartsch's Le Peintre-Graveur (1803f.). These are books which possess practical as well as historical interest.

Since the 19th century we must distinguish between writings on art addressed to contemporary issues and scholarly literature. The former remain bound up with the various tendencies in contemporary art and group themselves accordingly. Thus Wilhelm Wackenroder's Sentimental Effusions of an Art- Loving Monk (Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders, 1797) represents the enthusiastic standpoint of the Nazarenes, against which Goethe's friend Heinrich Meyer hurled the Weimar circle's ban of excommunication with his essay Neo-German religious-patriotic Art (Neu-Deutsche religiös-patriotische Kunst, 1817). While the works of the Romantic Philip Otto Runge remained still unpublished, Caspar David Friedrich's views won literary form in C.G. Carus' Letters on Landscape Painting (Briefe über die Landschaftsmalerei, printed 1830).

In England the Romantic enthusiasm for the Middle Ages was first expressed in neo-Gothic architecture, defended in the works of the architect A. Pugin (1812- 1852). The most eloquent and influential champion and pioneer of this movement arose in John Ruskin, friend of the Pre-Raphaelites and passionate critic of the machine age, who spoke up for a return of art to loving craftsmanship and piety. The revival of "applied art" by William Morris, which still influenced the principles of the German Werkbund and Bauhaus, would be unthinkable without Ruskin. The fundamental ideas of German Idealism, of Hans von Marées and Adolf Hildebrand, should be sought in the works of Konrad Fiedler on the philosophy of art.

Meanwhile the Idealist interpretation of art faced a stronger opponent in France. While Baudelaire seeks in his essays to do justice to the artistic temperament of a Delacroix and the contemporary art of a Daumier or a Constantin Guys, this revaluation of all values reveals itself also in the judgement of the past: writers such as Eduard Koloff, W. Burger-Thoré and Eugène Fromentin promote the "realistic" masters, above all Rembrandt and Vermeer, Frans Hals and Velazquez, while the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt rehabilitate the 18th century, contemptuously dismissed by the classicists, and prepare the theoretical basis for Impressionism. This artistic tendency finds its spokesman in Emile Zola, who champions Manet and his friend Cézanne in his writings on the Salon (1866), and in J.K. Huysmans, who prepares the way for the younger generation in L'art moderne (1883).

The battle over modern art which began around the turn of the century released a flood of art literature pro and con. The architects addressed the public on their own behalf, pleading not only for a new style of architecture but also for a new style of life. Thus Otto Wagner's Modern Architecture (Moderne Architektur, 1896); H.P. Berlage's Thoughts on Style in Architecture (Gedanken über den Stil in der Baukunst, 1905); Henry van de Velde's On the new Style (Vom neuen Stil, 1907); the writings of Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier (Jeanneret). Painters, too, took up the pen. J.M. Whistler's work The Gentle Art of making Enemies (1890) struck the note of paradoxical and consciously provocative epigram, variously imitated. Among German writings on art those of Max Liebermann stand at the forefront. Wasily Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art (Über das Geistige in der Kunst, 1912) advocates non- objective artistic expression.

The Symbolist movement at the turn of the century stressed the unity of all arts and thus brought poets into contact with visual artists. Thus Paul Valéry wrote on Leonardo and Degas, André Gide on Poussin, and Rilke on his Worpswede friends and on Rodin. With Guillaume Apollinaire's The Cubist Painters (Les Peintres Cubistes, 1913), Hermann Bahr's Expressionism (Expressionismus, 1916), Theodore Däubler's At War for Modern Art (Im Kampf um die moderne Kunst, 1919) and André Breton's Surrealism and Painting (Le Surréalisme et la peinture, 1928), the poet becomes wholly the spokesman for the painter in a common battle.

Among art historians who stood up for "progress," we may mention Richard Muther, Julius Meier-Graefe, Hugo von Tschudi, Karl Scheffler, Hans Tietze and Wilhelm Worringer in Germany, while in England Roger Fry and Herbert Read took the side of modern art. By contrast, Bernard Berenson subjected this development to a sharp critique from the standpoint of a "humanistic" theory of art and values in Aesthetics and History (1950). And in The Lost Center (Verlust der Mitte, 1948), Hans Sedlmayr sought to interpret and dismiss the visual arts of the present day as a "symbol" or "symptom" from the viewpoint of a "geistesgeschichtliche Kunstwissenschaft" of a Hegelian stamp. To what extent in the 20th century all questions of art become political, and how in the process the unqualified press to participate in the literature of art, requires no commentary.

By contrast, one realm of art literature must be touched upon which only came to full flowering in this century: writings on art education. In Germany it is above all Alfred Lichtwark who, in Hamburg, tirelessly propagated the ideas of the English applied artists, especially those of William Morris, and who bestowed a wholly new attention upon the "art" of the untrained and of children. The catch-phrase "art for the people" could be realized as cheaper reproductive techniques and larger editions assured the wider distribution of illustrated works.

The revolutionary and levelling influence of new reproduction techniques with their enlargements, details, comparisons and lighting affects was perceived above all by André Malraux. In the three volumes of his Psychology of Art (Psychologie de l'art; from 1949), he sought to trace the consequences of this revaluation of our artistic heritage for artists, critics and historians.