ART CRITICISM. — Art criticism is exercised whenever an artwork is defined, qualified, or evaluated as such. It is clear that, once the intrinsic identity of the phenomenon of art in all its manifestations is admitted (v. ART), the criticism that has, for example, painting as its object will be substantially the same as that which has poetry as its object. However, when the expression art criticism is used in a general sense, it usually refers to the criticism of the visual arts, i.e., painting, sculpture, architecture, and the minor arts analogous to them; and this distinction, when its empirical value is recognized, is justified by certain extrinsic factors such as, for instance, the particular technical preparation required of the art critic. Consequently, historically too, art criticism presents a homogeneous line of development distinct from that of other forms of criticism, which justifies a separate treatment.
OUTLINE:
I. Origin
II. Art criticism and aesthetics
III. Means and end of art criticism
IV. Aesthetic judgment as synthesis
V. History of art and history of taste
VI. History of art criticism.I. ORIGIN
Art criticism is essentially a modern discipline; certainly, interest in art and artists has never been lacking, but in the past it was mostly concentrated in descriptions, practical teachings on artistic technique, theoretical dissertations, and artists' biographies. Often, in this copious artistic literature, one finds acute and highly valid critical propositions, but art criticism as an explicit and systematic science in its own right arose, one might say, in the eighteenth century, in connection with the emergence of aesthetics as an autonomous science, when the need was felt to bring abstract speculation into line with the concrete practice of judgment. Thus, as with other historical disciplines, the methodology of art criticism came into being.II. ART CRITICISM AND AESTHETICS
The judgment of art, like any judgment that aims to transcend arbitrariness and the merely occasional, presents itself as an enunciation of truth and, by that very fact, tends toward universality. This implies a theoretical foundation, i.e., an aesthetic concept, in turn of universal value, and therefore at least an embryonic philosophical system. But the critic's interest does not, of course, coincide with that of the philosopher; for while the latter investigates what art is, the former must learn and judge individual works of art. Hence, even though they share a common foundation and sometimes enjoy mutual and fruitful relations, the history of criticism and the history of aesthetics do not coincide.III. MEANS AND END OF ART CRITICISM
The critic must first of all possess knowledge of the work; to achieve this, all information concerning the artwork will be useful: dates, biographical elements, concomitant facts; and the analytical study of the work itself. Equally useful to the critic will be knowledge of the taste that the artist encounters as a given, both in the environment that surrounds him and within himself, in his own preferences, from which he cannot entirely detach himself even if, at the moment of creation, he shapes it into a new synthesis.But this important preparatory study must not be confused, as it sometimes has been, with art criticism itself; for true knowledge of the artwork consists precisely in understanding the manner in which the artist has expressed himself, his style, in which his entire logical and affective world, his human content, is embedded. The end of art criticism is to study not the artist as a man, his feelings, his passions (historical personality), but only the form that he has impressed upon these (artistic personality); nor should the critic judge art according to technical perfection, or resemblance to nature; nor according to a predefined canon of beauty or a particular style declared perfect (v. ART).
The knowledge of art is historical knowledge, but any history that studies art as a pure symbol or manifestation of something else, or as determined by political and social, or economic and technical conditions, denies the autonomy of art. And, on the other hand, any treatment that claims to disregard the artist and study forms in themselves, as pure visual elements or as classifiable elements (e.g., styles), will produce a history of abstract schemes, divorced from spiritual reality and thus false and incomprehensible, in which artworks can never be framed, because they are infinitely varied and incomparable to one another.
Certainly, to arrive at full historical knowledge of the artwork, the critic may avail himself of schemes, whether they be of content-based qualification or formalistic characterization; provided that he keeps in mind that these must serve as an approach to the artwork, but must then be transcended as far as possible (inasmuch as language, which necessarily proceeds by generalization and approximation, allows) in order to arrive at the well-defined determination of each individual work.
IV. AESTHETIC JUDGMENT AS SYNTHESIS
Historical knowledge provides all the elements for aesthetic judgment, but it is not yet that judgment; as has been said, this requires, in addition, a concept of art; without it, one may indeed describe, for example, an artist's manner of painting and its characteristics, but one cannot say whether his works are artworks or not. In practice, the two processes are not rigidly distinct, and it is difficult to establish to what extent the critic qualifies the artwork historically and to what extent he qualifies it as such.In reality, critical synthesis is not achieved through a rigorous process of cause and effect. The critic may say, for example, that a painting is beautiful because its colors are vibrant and its lines harmonious, but the same characteristics may be found in a painting he judges to be ugly. Every qualification will allow him to approach the artwork ever more closely, to investigate it more deeply; yet the critical synthesis will always represent a discontinuity in this process, i.e., a new act that has something original and alogical about it, inasmuch as it expresses the critic's personality. For this reason, it is rightly said that the critic needs not only knowledge of history and philosophy, but also a special aesthetic sensibility and taste. An excess of confidence in or use of such particular sensibility may lead the critic to superimpose his own interpretation upon the artist's work, in a sense creating another artwork. Yet this re-embodying of the artist's emotion in other forms does not always harm the correct interpretation of the work; indeed, it can be a didactic means, a helpful aid to arouse others' sensibility and bring it into contact with the artwork. Because of this difference between art and criticism, the objection sometimes raised against the critic's work—that only the artist can judge art because he practices it and therefore "understands it"—also falls away; for even the artist, when judging his own or another's work, ceases to be an artist and becomes a critic.
Indeed, it is unlikely that an artist, in the act of judging, can entirely divest himself of his creative bent and his own taste.
V. HISTORY OF ART AND HISTORY OF TASTE
A pure history of art as such, meaning only of what criticism recognizes as fully achieved art, is not possible; this approach would lead to a history of art that touches only the peaks, i.e., a few works by a few artists, or sometimes only fragments of them, while discarding or ignoring the rest. Instead, one cannot ignore everything that tends toward art even if it does not fully achieve it, for it constitutes an expression of formal taste and can legitimately be considered a link between the various moments of pure creation, allowing these to be understood historically. Indeed, recent studies have legitimized, alongside the history of art, the history of taste, which ultimately fits into the broader history of culture or civilization.
VI. HISTORY OF ART CRITICISM
The judgments on individual works of art reflect, through the critic’s personality, the prevailing taste of the time in which the judgment was made. Consequently, weaving the history of these judgments—endeavoring to resolve contradictions or discern what remains constant in their evolution—holds undeniable historical and theoretical interest, particularly for a more precise determination of the factors and methods of art criticism.
A true and proper art criticism did not exist in the ancient world. Judgments on art were never expressed in isolation; rather, critical documents are intertwined with moral and other kinds of judgments. Nevertheless, it is reasonable to believe that judgments on art resolved into a didactic approach aimed at establishing canons of beauty based either on numerical laws and thus abstract (e.g., the Canon of Polyclitus) or on works of artists taken as models (e.g., Xenocrates of Sicyon, 4th–3rd century BCE).
In Roman circles, interest in art was lively among "connoisseurs," who adhered to the principles of traditional aesthetics but often judged with refined taste; Cicero and Quintilian are well-known examples. For them, the pinnacle of perfection was Phidias, not the artists of the 4th century BCE. An encyclopedia of artistic knowledge of the time is found in Books XXXIV–XXXVI of Pliny’s *Naturalis historia* (1st century CE). Among the Romans, there was also a flourishing of treatises, particularly on architecture, in which they excelled; the most famous is Vitruvius’s treatise (1st century BCE), which undoubtedly drew on older models. In it, technical precepts are interwoven with general ideas about the essence of architecture, its origins and laws, as well as rules on the form and proportions of orders and buildings. Critical propositions on art are also scattered throughout periegetic literature (notably Pausanias’s "guide," 2nd century CE), literary descriptions of works of art by poets and writers (e.g., Statius and Lucian), and observations by thinkers (Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Plutarch, Seneca, Dio Chrysostom, Philostratus, Pseudo-Longinus).
In the early Middle Ages, intellectual interest in art was very limited; no more aesthetic or historical constructions were attempted (philosophers spoke of the beautiful, not of art). Artistic literature consisted of encyclopedias (v. SIVIGLIA) and technical treatises, inventories (including the *Libri Pontificales*), and itineraries, alongside which the *Mirabilia Urbis Romae* should be mentioned.
The main theoretical works include the treatise *De coloribus et artibus Romanorum* attributed to the so-called Heraclius (10th century, at least in part), Theophilus’s *Schedula* (12th century), Witelo’s treatise on optics (13th century), Villard de Honnecourt’s *Livre de portraiture* (13th century), and finally the *Book of the Painters of Mount Athos*, known through a much later redaction but containing elements of medieval tradition.
In the 14th century, especially in Italy, art acquired a more autonomous value and aroused more complex interests. Already in Dante, there are testimonies to the importance of the artist and an embryonic evaluation of Giotto and his relationship with Cimabue. While in Europe other artists were still praised for their modernity, Boccaccio, influenced by his taste, especially admired Simone Martini; yet he recognized Giotto’s greatness and exalted him as the best painter, not inferior to the ancients. He noted that Giotto’s good painting was understood only by learned men, not by engineers—a sign that by this time, works of art were already being evaluated in intellectual terms.
In the same cultural milieu, F. Villani, in his *Vite di uomini illustri*, devoted a chapter to painters. And as an epigone of recipe books but already infused with a new spirit—hence of great importance—is Cennino Cennini’s *Libro dell’arte* (late 14th century).
In Humanism, interest in art manifested itself deliberately in well-defined forms. The historical need to know the artist intensified, as exceptional human qualities were recognized in him. Biographies flourished; among the earliest and most notable are those in Lorenzo Ghiberti’s *Commentarii* (1378–1455). He presents artists as such, through genuine judgments on style; however, the historical connection between the various artists is framed by the idea of progress, from Giotto’s innovative work up to his own time. Among other biographies of the period, noteworthy is that of Filippo Brunelleschi, allegedly written by Antonio Manetti, apologetic in tone but rich in acute stylistic and historiographical observations.
Humanist mentality, however, found its most genuine expression in theoretical treatises on art. Among these, the richest and most profound is undoubtedly Leon Battista Alberti (c. 1404–1472), author of treatises on painting, architecture, and sculpture, where, alongside admiration for antiquity and repetition of classical aesthetic motifs, there is a clear awareness of the originality of the new art and new ideas. While Ghiberti, in his third and final *Commentario*, sought to ground art in physical (optical) foundations, others—such as Francesco di Giorgio Martini (author of an architectural treatise), Piero della Francesca, and Luca Pacioli, authors respectively of *De prospectiva pingendi* and *De corporibus*, and *De divina proportione*—based their theories on a strictly mathematical plane. Leonardo, in his fragmentary *Trattato della pittura*, addressed the problems of art in an original and fertile manner, with ideas destined for further development: the scientific value of sensory experience, and thus the supreme importance of painting, which is the mistress of the sensible, and its superiority over other arts. Similarly important are his precepts, no longer merely technical but formal, concerning light and shadow, color, movement, anatomy, and expression.
In 16th-century treatises (Varchi, Borghini, P. Gaurico, P. Pino, F. Doni, L. Dolce, G. Lomazzo), the scientific-mathematical foundation was abandoned in favor of more general considerations about the nature of the arts, their properties (design, invention, coloring, etc.), their utility, the precedence of one over another, the value of color or design, the decorum of subjects represented, and the different dignity of pictorial genres (historical, poetic, landscape, portrait, etc.). These were essentially assertions of taste, claiming to be grounded in theory and appealing to ancient canons and prejudices, which were now increasingly declared infallible and unsurpassable. The academies of art (v. ACCADEMIE), which flourished in that century, contributed significantly to this attitude.
Some writings that seek to combat lascivious and unbecoming works belong to the moralistic climate of the Catholic Reformation (v. 30); for example, the Lettera di contrizione of the elderly Ammannati; and the Dialoghi of Father Gillo, who interprets decorum as what is regulated by the Church both in iconography (for instance, the representation of the Trinity in three forms is considered unbecoming) and in expression (notable is the consideration, in the fullness of the 16th century, that the art of the early centuries, though crude, is more devout). To these are linked the Saggio of Cardinal G. Paleotti on sacred and profane images, and later in the 17th century the book De pictura sacra of Cardinal F. Borromeo (who inveighs against paintings unbecoming in their nudity); the treatise on painting and sculpture by Father Ottonelli in collaboration with the painter P. da Cortona (who proposes a subtle casuistry to partly save profane art) and, finally, even stricter treatises in Spain and Germany.
A separate place in 16th-century theory is occupied by writings on architecture; the principal ones are the treatises of Serlio, Vignola, Palladio, and Scamozzi, in which, following the Vitruvian schema, they teach above all the proportions of the orders, the forms of type-buildings, and the laws of symmetry, propriety, decorum, etc., with numerous examples from Roman and modern architecture.
Outside Italy, in the north, the only theoretical work that remained without followers is that of Dürer (1471–1528), which is linked to the Italian tradition, especially the Lombard-Venetian one, and in Portugal the work of Francisco de Holanda, an admirer of Michelangelo and a slavish follower of classical theories.
But from the 16th to the 18th century, historical interest in the artist becomes ever more pronounced. It is to be noted that now all previous art, including that of the 15th century, appears surpassed and inferior to the present; Michelangelo is generally considered perfection (Doni), but already in Dolce the comparison between him and Raphael begins; the Accademia dei Carracci then teaches to take the best from Michelangelo, Raphael, Titian, and Correggio. It is precisely in historiography that the principal work of the Renaissance on art is found: the Vite of Vasari (after those of Billi, Gelli, Gioia, etc.), which deal with painters, sculptors, and architects from 1300 up to his own time (1st ed. 1550; 2nd, much more extensive but less organic, 1568). The theoretical principles of Vasari are those of his time, but accepted uncritically and often contradicted in the face of individual works of art: imitation of nature and antiquity, expression, invention (especially of stories), drawing. Great importance is given to this last element by Vasari; finally, he rigidly codifies the classical prejudice of progress in art, which reaches its inviolable limit in the divine Michelangelo. This schema and the aim of praising Michelangelo above all suggest to Vasari the inclusion of anecdotal biographical data. In this way, alongside what is properly called art history, there arises a taste for biography, which will flourish especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, in step with the growth of philological-erudite interest and the taste for antiquarian collections.
In the collections of artists by Baglione (artists working in Rome from Gregory XIII to Urban VIII), Passeri, and Pascoli, the interest in the historical personality of the artist predominates. In Florence, at the end of the 17th century, the Notizie dei professori del disegno by Baldinucci appears, a universal rather than local or Italian history of art, with a more learned and elevated character, and with the manifest intention of correcting the defects of Vasari (note the substitution of the term “Notizie” for “Vite” and the appellation of “professori” given to artists). The erudite biographies of Mancini are also noteworthy, as he devoted lively attention to medieval art. Among analogous works, critical interest is offered by the Carta del navigator pittoresco by Boschini, which, though presented as a simple guide to Venice, extols Venetian coloristic painting and that of Velázquez and Rubens.
The principal historian and theorist of the 17th century is G. Pietro Bellori, an archaeologist and scholar who lived at the center of the artistic milieu of his entire time (1615–96). In his principal work (Vite dei pittori, scultori, architetti moderni) he maintains that art must conform no longer to nature, always imperfect, but to ideal types assumed as models for each individual art. No longer, as with Vasari, does the ideal incarnate itself in a single artist, but proceeds from a theoretical abstraction; nature must therefore be corrected, the ugly and the deformed rejected; among the genres of painting, the highest is “history,” which shows man as he ought to be; consequently, the ideal is no longer Michelangelo but Raphael, and not only are the primitives condemned but so too is all Baroque taste. It is precisely in the 17th century that the rupture between art history and contemporary art begins, along with mutual incomprehension.
These theories and this taste inform the French artistic milieu, which is distinctly academic (it unified the arts precisely under the category of beauty: beaux-arts), from Poussin to Dufresnoy, Le Brun, Félibien, and De Piles.
The 18th century accentuates the aforementioned tendencies, sanctioning the triumph of rationalism and neoclassicism. Antiquity is now the unquestionable and unsurpassable model, and antiquity itself is no longer Rome but Greece. Especially notable is the rationalist theory of architecture codified by F. Blondel in polemic with C. Perrault and by De Cordemoy.
In Italy too the tradition of architectural treatises continues. In 1693 a treatise consonant with the times appears: the Prospettiva dei pittori e degli architetti by the Jesuit A. Pozzo. In the 18th century, rationalist ideas find a brilliant assertion in Father Lodoli, a Franciscan, the philosopher-architect, who maintains that the “function” of a building must be clearly expressed in its representation; he is followed in this by Algortati.
The principal codifiers of neoclassicism are Lessing, Sulzer, Mengs, and Winckelmann. Of even greater importance than the concepts that inform it is the work of Winckelmann (1717–68) on Greek art, the first history of art as the history of forms and no longer as the biography of artists; he wishes to look at works in and for themselves; he seeks in them ideal beauty, and on this basis constructs a history with the usual schema of progress, acme, and decline; often, however, despite this schematism, his observations and stylistic qualifications are critically valid. Winckelmann’s history of art exerted great influence and had many continuators, among them Seroux d’Agincourt, Cicognara, and Lanzi, whose Storia pittorica, though adhering to a different historical schema—the history, namely, of the various artistic schools (Florentine, Venetian, etc.)—was also very important; this schema had already been indicated by Bellori and by Domenico, and enjoyed immense and long-lasting success.
In England, academicism had more limited importance: its principal representatives were Webb and Reynolds. But against rationalism there rather asserted itself an aesthetics of feeling and imagination and a taste for the fanciful and picturesque (Gerard, Hogarth, Burke, Price, and above all Shaftesbury). Thus begins the reevaluation of Gothic architecture (Batty Langley) and of works of art outside the scope of classicism (Richardson), as well as the taste for exotic things (chinoiseries). This, moreover, occurred also in France, especially on the part of critics of the Salons (art exhibitions): first among these was Diderot, who likewise asserted the importance of feeling and caprice in art.
Romanticism (v.), in polemic with rationalist classicism, affirms the primacy of fantasy, feeling, expressive immediacy—that is, of
Individualism, beyond canonical and abstract ideals. The first exponent in the field of so-called figurative criticism can be considered Wackenroder (1773-98); in his *Herzensergiessungen* he affirms, with naïveté but with an entirely new sensibility, the spontaneity and rationality of the artistic creature, and thus admires Dürer and the primitives; to him can be linked his friend J. L. Tieck and F. Schlegel.
Medieval art, in opposition to that judged as pagan classicism, becomes the model for some Romantic artists, who saw in it the purity of feeling and divine inspiration; thus arose “artistic schools that could revive the art of the primitives.” This proves how criticism was now tending toward connective criteria. The schools of the “Nazarenes” and “Purists” in Italy, the “Primitives” in France, and the “Pre-Raphaelites” in England (the most important artistically) provoked countless controversies; the Nazarenes were defended especially by Schlegel, the Pre-Raphaelites by Ruskin, a notable critic endowed with great sensitivity even toward medieval art. Alongside Ruskin, medieval art was studied with love by Rio in his work *L'art chrétien*.
Without considering here the philosophical systems on art of the 18th and 19th centuries (Vico, Herder, Schelling, Hegel, Schleiermacher, Herbart; V. ETICA), one notes the great importance that Romantic criticism had in France on contemporary art. Often it was the artists themselves who engaged in polemics, e.g., Delacroix against Ingres; but above all important were the critics of the Salons: Thiers, Planche, Thoré, Champfleury, etc., and, sharper than all, Baudelaire, who affirmed the absolute freedom of the creative act and the value of form. Even Impressionism found its defenders against the condemnation of the academy: Zola, Duret, Duranty, etc.; and from the pictorial achievements of the new art, Fromentin drew the premises for a keen study on 17th-century Flemish painting, thus rehabilitating it against the condemnation of classicism.
The end of the 19th century saw an extraordinary flourishing of historical and philological studies even in the field of art history. Among the archaeologists one cites Lanzi and Furtwängler, among Christian archaeologists De Rossi and Wilpert, among document researchers Mimesi; among authors of broader historical syntheses, first is Cavalcaselle (who can be called the father of modern art history, for the richness and depth of his investigations and the rare acuteness of his attributions), followed by A. Venturi (also well-deserving in the history of Italian art for his vast work rich in sensitivity and intuition), by Van Marle, by Toesca, etc.
What philology and scientism could not provide—namely, an explanation of the phenomenon of art—was often sought either in psychological-literary description (Walter Pater) or in the history of costume and society (Taine, Müntz, Thode, Burckhardt) or in the history of technique and economic conditions (Semper and the architectural historians Choisy, Viollet-le-Duc).
To content-based criticism, whether philological, literary, or sociological, the formalist criticism reacted, which found its most typical theoretical formation in the doctrine of “pure visibility” (Fiedler, Hildebrand, van Marées): for it, the principle of art is neither beauty nor the concept of feeling, but visibility; hence art history will become the history of purely visual elements, such as form, color, space, etc., abstracting from the subject represented and the artist’s feeling; and forms will be considered as living with a life of their own, developing according to their own laws and grouping into styles or formal families (Focillon). Connected with pure visibility are other tendencies that might be called formalist psychology, which interpret forms as symbols of psychological situations and as stimuli for reproducing them in the observer (Berenson speaks of the tactile sense aroused in us by Giotto’s art, of the sense of breathing caused by Perugino’s spatiality; according to Geoffrey Scott, for a proper critical appreciation of architecture one must recognize in the forms “the image of our functions”); and thus the development of styles corresponds to philosophical cycles (Dvořák) or more generally historical ones (Wickhoff, Riegl, Wölfflin, belonging to the so-called Vienna School). All the critics now named have made substantial contributions to individual problems in art history, arriving at them either independently of their theoretical frameworks or through them but surpassing them (Wölfflin’s five famous schemata, for example, served to better characterize the Baroque).
The most modern figurative criticism owes its theoretical foundations to the aesthetics of B. Croce and his consequent methodology (v. ETICA; FILOSOFIA DELLO SPIRITO). By affirming the autonomy of art, it excludes an art history as an abstract physical fact or in relation to the pleasure it provides or to the moral precepts it embodies or to the conceptual knowledge it conveys or even to natural beauty and truth; by affirming the identity of content and form, it excludes both conceptual art history (psychological, biographical, literary, sociological) and art history as pure form; by asserting the identity of intuition and expression, it denies any value to any history that makes art dependent on technical knowledge and builds upon it a process of progress or decline; by affirming the unity of art, it reduces to mere empirical divisions the distinctions between the various arts as well as the divisions of literary or artistic genres; finally, by recognizing the spontaneity and originality of artistic creation, it denies that art can be taught and that criticism has a didactic or corrective function. Figurative criticism coincides with art history and consists in affirming that “at a given moment, an art work arose, inserting itself into the series of events, which is a work of art, or it is not, and thus belongs to another moment in the life of the spirit: conceptual knowledge, practical or moral act”; and then in characterizing the work with the help of empirical and content-based concepts.
Even when it does not accept all its principles and consequences, modern criticism cannot disregard the clarifying and systematizing work of Croce’s aesthetics; indeed, it owes to it the fact that studies in art history (like those in literary criticism) in Italy are conducted with a methodological rigor and coherence far greater than elsewhere. Among the critics of this approach today (without forgetting that each of them has been influenced by other currents besides Croce’s and above all by that of pure visibility) are R. Longhi, L. Venturi, M. Marangoni (for medieval and modern art), and R. Bianchi Bandinelli (for ancient art).
BIBL.:
Croce, *Estetica*, Bari 1902; id., *La poesia*, Bari 1936; id., *Breviario di estetica*, Bari 1913; id., *Conversazioni critiche*, 4 voll., Bari 1918-30; id., *Nuove conversazioni critiche*, Bari 1931; id., *Ultimissime*, Bari 1940; id., *Poesia e non poesia*, Bari 1945; id., *La storia come pensiero e come azione*, Bari 1938; Wackenroder, *Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders*, ed. cit.; Tieck, *Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen*, ed. cit.; Schlegel, *Gesammelte Schriften*, ed. cit.; Rio, *L'art chrétien*, Paris 1861; Ruskin, *The Stones of Venice*, London 1851-53; id., *Modern Painters*, London 1843-60; id., *The Seven Lamps of Architecture*, London 1849; id., *Praeterita*, London 1885-89; Cavalcaselle, *Storia della pittura in Italia*, ed. cit.; Venturi, *Storia dell'arte italiana*, Milano 1901-40; Van Marle, *The Development of the Italian Schools of Painting*, The Hague 1923-38; Toesca, *Storia dell'arte italiana*, Torino 1927; Wickhoff, *Die Wiener Genesis*, Wien 1895; Riegl, *Spätrömische Kunstindustrie*, Wien 1901; Wölfflin, *Renaissance und Barock*, München 1888; id., *Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe*, München 1915; Fiedler, *Über den Ursprung der künstlerischen Tätigkeit*, München 1887; Hildebrand, *Das Problem der Form*, Stuttgart 1893; Berenson, *The Italian Painters of the Renaissance*, London 1930; id., *The Drawings of the Florentine Painters*, Chicago 1938; Focillon, *Vie des formes*, Paris 1934; Dvořák, *Idealismus und Naturalismus in der gotischen Skulptur*, Wien 1918; id., *Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte*, München 1924; Wickhoff, *Die Wiener Genesis*, Wien 1895; Riegl, *Spätrömische Kunstindustrie*, Wien 1901; Wölfflin, *Renaissance und Barock*, München 1888; id., *Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe*, München 1915.