We sometimes say that certain works of art capture the ‘essence’ of their time. Either because of their innovative technique, or because of a certain theme or story, these works are said to ‘resonate’ with the world outside, as if they are an expression or crystallization of social forces in an historical epoch. But what exactly does it mean to say that? What is the relation between the work of art and the age it is supposed to ‘express’, and how does such a relation come about? Can we even think of a ‘time’ apart from all the cultural expressions constituting it?

Questions such as these arose during the nineteenth century, when philosophers began to concern themselves with the differences between specific epochs, peoples, and cultures, and began to regard works of art as symbols or symptoms of those epochs, peoples, and cultures. Herder argued, for instance, that through art we are able to gain knowledge of the ‘spirit of the age’, of the way a culture (either ancient or contemporary) looks at itself and the world. Likewise, Hegel claimed in his Lectures on Aesthetics that the fine arts are an important source for our understanding of the wisdom and religion of earlier peoples, and hence of the developmental history of ‘spirit’. According to the nineteenth-century French critic Hippolyte Taine, it would be possible to ‘map’ seventeenth-century France by drawing parallels and analogies ‘between a hedge at Versailles, a philosophical and theological argument of Malebranche, a prosodic rule prescribed by Boileau, a law of Colbert on mortgages, a compliment in the waiting room of the king at Marly, a statement of Bossuet about the kingship of God.’ Art, according to these thinkers, resonates with the dominant cultural, ideological and religious beliefs of a certain age, and hence provides the key to understanding a culture.

One of the most influential paradigms of cultural analysis has been Marxism.