Who Is Afraid of Wölfflin’s Schemas? The Impact of Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe on Italian Art Historiography and Aesthetics

This paper focuses on the Italian reception of Heinrich Wölfflin's "Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe". It deals with Benedetto Croce’s critical discussion of the so-called reine Sichtbarkeit (von Marées, Hildebrand, Fiedler) and of Wölfflin’s formalism. Croce’s aesthetical doctrine offered the theoretical background to a generation of influential Italian art historians including Lionello Venturi, Roberto Longhi, and Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti. His approach to the German-speaking formalistic Kunstwissenschaft constituted a sort of filter through which Wölfflin’s ideas were received and debated. I will then take into consideration a group of Italian art historians (such as Matteo Marangoni, Giulio Carlo Argan, Cesare Brandi) who, adopting for different reasons a critical stance towards Croce’s idealism, addressed Wölfflin’s formalism in their works. Finally, I will try to map the presence of Wölfflin’s Grundbegriffe in more recent trends in art historiography and art theory, including the semiological (Omar Calabrese) and aesthetological (Renato Barilli) approaches.