Book contents
- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction Making and Unmaking Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Part I Surface Effects: Color, Luster, and Animation
- Part II Sculptural Bodies: Created, Destroyed, and Re-Enchanted
- Part III Sculptural Norms, Made and Unmade
- Chapter 7 The Body, Space, and Narrative in Central and Northern Italian Sculpture
- Chapter 8 Rethinking Style in Fifteenth-Century Italian Sculpture
- Chapter 9 Bellano’s Invention at the Santo
- Part IV Sculpture as Performance
- Part V Sculpture in the Expanded Field
- Part VI Sculpture and History
- Index
- References
Chapter 8 - Rethinking Style in Fifteenth-Century Italian Sculpture
The Curious Case of Filarete
from Part III - Sculptural Norms, Made and Unmade
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 February 2020
- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Contributors
- Introduction Making and Unmaking Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy
- Part I Surface Effects: Color, Luster, and Animation
- Part II Sculptural Bodies: Created, Destroyed, and Re-Enchanted
- Part III Sculptural Norms, Made and Unmade
- Chapter 7 The Body, Space, and Narrative in Central and Northern Italian Sculpture
- Chapter 8 Rethinking Style in Fifteenth-Century Italian Sculpture
- Chapter 9 Bellano’s Invention at the Santo
- Part IV Sculpture as Performance
- Part V Sculpture in the Expanded Field
- Part VI Sculpture and History
- Index
- References
Summary
Ackerman and Kubler, in the opening statements of their essays on style, seem to provide contradictory assessments of the importance of formalism in art history in the early 1960s. From today’s vantage point, however, it is easy to recognize the validity of both views at the time. Ackerman refers to a venerable tradition that still carried considerable weight. Style was the primary method by which art and architecture were analyzed at least since Giorgio Vasari published the first edition of his seminal Lives of the Artists in 1550. Kubler instead emphasizes the recent challenges posed to this tradition by German scholars. During the interwar period, Ernst Cassirer, Aby Warburg, and Erwin Panofsky had pioneered a new approach that located the meaning of art in its relationship to culture rather than aesthetics.3 Kubler’s concern about the threat this posed to formalism proved prescient. While the objectives and practice of iconology, as Warburg and Panofsky called their method, have evolved over the last half a century, the key principle, cultural contextualization, remains dominant in art history. Kubler’s provocative text notwithstanding, formalism alone is no longer considered serious scholarship.
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- The Art of Sculpture in Fifteenth-Century Italy , pp. 185 - 202Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020