The Shaping of Art History

The Shaping of Art History examines art history's formation in the German academy in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the work of Wilhelm Voge and Adolph Goldschmidt, two influential scholars of medieval art, Kathryn Brush analyzes their methods and particularly those scholarly projects that were critical to the development of their approaches. Her work combines intellectual and institutional history with the study of artistic monuments and biography. It is the first to consider how the study of the pioneering scholarship in the field of medieval art is critical to an understanding of the formulation of art historical method as a whole. Drawing on a range of published and unpublished sources, this study also demonstrates how a variety of factors, such as nationalism, scientific paradigms and personality, helped to shape the discipline, and how many of the investigative procedures developed in turn-of-the-century Germany were only selectively understood when later transmitted to Europe and America.