Sauerländer
As you read, you
should make notes in answer to the following questions:
1. What does Sauerländer
see as the fundamental difference between ancient and modern uses of the term
‘style’?
2. Why is this
difference a source of tension?
3. How was the concept
of style transformed during the eighteenth century?
4. What does Sauerländer
find problematic about the consequences of this transformation for the
subsequent practice of art history?
Point
of vocabulary: anamnesis
[an-am-nee-sis]
Spell Syllables
·
Word
Origin
noun, plural anamneses
1.
the recollection or remembrance of the past; reminiscence.
2.
Platonism. recollection of the Ideas, which the soul had known in aprevious existence, especially by means of reasoning.
3.
the medical history of a patient.
4.
Immunology. a prompt immune response to a previously encounteredantigen, characterized by more rapid onset and greater effectivenessof antibody and T cell reaction than during the first encounter, asafter a booster shot in a previously immunized person.
5.
(often initial capital letter) a prayer in a Eucharistic service, recallingthe Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of Christ.
My definition
of contextual use: In Sauerlȁnder, the process of remembering involved in
tracing past uses of a word back to its root, and accounting for them by
narration of its progressive meanings as it develops from those roots.
Answers to
exercise
i
Although
deriving from the term for a ‘pen’, it becomes a means of categorizing style
attached to ancient scholastic traditions – which were to travel through the
Middle Ages – of Grammar and Rhetoric and was, as are these disciplines
rule-bound (or become so in an enduring form, such that S calls it a ‘figurative
and normative@ - a ‘means of normative classification’. However, from the 18th
century it becomes attached to an opposing meaning – that which defies ‘norms’
and is singular to persons (truly individual). In fact both meanings come
together uneasily in some uses. Hence the difference is between hard categories
of temporal stasis in art AND an infinite multiplicity of styles that each
speak a different person and to whom a sensitive approach is required.
ii
It
is tense because the meanings are binary opposites almost – the first claiming
objective reality, the latter requiring subjective judgement & care. Other
important binaries are rule-bound v. free, methodical v. intuitive, stasis v.
change & trans-historical pertinence (a kind of essentialism) against
meaning determined only situationally. How then can we talk about style in a
building, or painting without invoking contradictions which undermine each
other’s authority?
iii
S.
sees Winckelmann at the cusp of a movement from style as an expression of
Rousseau’s individualistic Romanticism to the hermeneutic philosophy of H.G.
Gadamer. The issue becomes from the 18th century a focal ‘hermeneutic
difficulty’ in explicating the role of stasis and change in histories of art.
However, one strategy that may help reconcile them in part is the development
of an evolutionary paradigm for art history which makes art history speak as an
oracle of historical changes as a whole.
iv
The
use of rule- bounded sequential history is set against change inspired from
within the conflict of unlimited variabilities with each other in an
evolutionary form of survival of the fittest style. Interpretation cannot
reconcile the objective and subjective tools it uses in each – and hence the
role of hermeneutic philosophy. Hence ‘style’ seems a necessary component of
art historical accounts (Gadamer) but, at the same time based in an a-contextual
formalism (Barthes).
