Do Styles Have a Body? : A History of Images and a History of Perception

This paper tries to shed light upon the complex and problematic connection between the history of visual art (and more generally of images) and the history of the body as a sensorimotor entity. This will allow not only to reconstruct the major trends of the debate raised around this relationship, but also to point to the questions that remain open within the framework of an ‘aesthesiological’ approach to visual culture, namely of an approach that puts aisthesis (our sensible experience) at the core of our interaction with images. The paper addresses notions such as ‘history of vision’ or of ‘perception’, ‘history of the gaze’, ‘period eye’, ‘scopic regimes’ and ‘noticing’, as the key-terms of this controversial topic. The foundations of these debates can be found in the second half of the eighteenth century (thus at the same time as the birth of aesthetics as an autonomous philosophical discipline). The issues have troubled many thinkers throughout the twentieth century and have not ceased to puzzle into the new millennium. This contribution will thus bring into focus writings from the history of art, the history of the senses and the philosophy of history through the lens of the concept of style. I will claim that such consideration necessarily impacts on our understanding of the very notion of perception itself.