“Style” and Worldview

“Style” originated as a problematic metaphor in ancient rhetoric, before its meaning was extended to works of art and the question how their appearance was owed to a particular skill set of its maker. That was during the Italian Renaissance. In the eighteenth century, art history adopted “style” as a central category, as did, slightly later, literary criticism. But “style” did not remain restrained to such disciplinary associations. In 1915, Heinrich Wölfflin’s book Principles of Art History shifted the discourse again, arguing that the “style” of an artwork expressed not only the historical, geographical, cultural, and racial differences that had helped shaping it, but also much more universal “forms of vision” that enabled such differences in the first place. Thus, “style” became a corollary of what Wölfflin named “Weltanschauung”, or worldview. Professor Endres’ paper will explore the paradigmatic shift triggered by Wölfflin’s book, turning “style” into something it had never been.

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