Stile a priori. Estetica trascendentale e storia del'arte nella cultura tedesca tra Ottocento e Novecento

Heinrich Wölfflin wrote that research in art history should always also include a concern with aesthetics. The present study takes such contention literally, since it argues that the most representative and influential historical-theoretical models in art history which were developed within the context of German culture between the second half of the 19th and the first decades of the 20th century (i.e. the "Stilllehre" proposed by Gottfried Semper, Alois Riegl and Wölfflin himself), are grounded in an aesthetic perspective. The term "aesthetic" here does not refer to a philosophy of art or of the beautiful, but rather to the original meaning of the word, to the theory of "aisthesis". By radically historicising Kant's transcendental aesthetics in light of the "reine Sichtbarkeit" and the "Einfühlungstheorie", the history of art emerges as history of aesthetics, as the history of the conditions that make sense experiences possible. The meaning of the famous "Kunstgeschichte ohne Namen" can therefore be understood not solely by invoking the superpersonal forces of Hegel's philosophy of art history (as has often been attempted), but rather by reference to the anonymous praxis of the hand and the eye, of gestures and bodies. The history of styles thus becomes the history of perception and of the living body. The present study focusses on the development of this approach, showing both how it is rooted in a typological tradition that can be traced back to Goethe, and also how it has influenced 20th century French thought 8e.g. Maldiney, Dufrenne, Deleuze) in its effort to conceptualize art history as the history of sensations.