The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Vöge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art by Kathryn Brush (review)

176 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 medieval textiles allows John Munro to conjure up a world of trading and technological advance. All ofthis, and much else, is fresh and inviting, and where we seek more, the guidance is superb. The treatment of literature and its gerues starts with the volume's longest essay. Jan Ziolkowski offers an eloquent conspectus of the limits and possibilities of moving 'Towards a History of Medieval Latin Literature .' He threads deftly between the Scylla of towering challenges (linguistic, editorial, and interpretive) and the Charybdis of pat solutions. We see the looming coast, the forest, the trees, and even a few Englishlanguage beasts made to show their medieval spots: for instance, our word 'glamour,' a Scottish derivative of the mystique-laden grammar (grammatica ) of medieval schoolmen; or 'modern,' a term coined at the dawn of the Middle Ages and eventuallyused to distinguish the medieval 'today' (modo hodiernus) from classicalantiquity. Judicious examples indicate the riclmess, rewards, and importance to us of the medieval Latin legacy. The ar~ay of methods suggestedby the sources, their authors, and their audiences charts a course for navigating uneven textual editions and often contradictory, though well-informed, scholarly opinion. 'What [is] described [or rather, prescribed] is a philologically grounded eclecticism,' the hallmark of medieval studies at their best. Ziolkowski's essay is a fine and thought-provoking start to the genrebased survey of literature. The editors have gone beyond the usual categories to include 'new' literary types, such as pastoral handbooks, and even an entire section on translations into medieval Latin. Translation and innovation are a proof positive of linguistic vitality. This book eloquently introduces what was lived, achieved, and still lingers from the lively millennium of medieval Latin. (MICHAEL L ALLEN) Kathryn Brush. The Shaping ofArt History: Wilhelm Voge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study ofMedieval Art Cambridge University Press. xiii, 264. us $65.00 The Shaping ofArt History by Kathryn Brush illuminates a significant phase in the development of the discipline, the 1880s and 18905. It focuses on Wilhelm Voge (1868-1952) and Adolph Goldschmidt (1863-1944), whose pioneering studies exerted a profound influence in Europe and America and energized the young field of art history. In contrast with their now more Widely read contemporaries Heinrich W6lfflin and Aby Warburg, Voge and Goldschmidt wrote primarily about medieval sculpture and illuminated manuscripts. They define a moment when the discipline's inventiveness did not spring exclusively from the study of Renaissance works by artists of 'genius/ but also from the newer field of medieval art and issues pertaining to it. HUMANITIES 177 This handsomely designed book contains a scholarly apparatus of endnotes, index, and bibliography. After an eloquent introduction, Brush establishes the intellectual contexts in which Goldschmidt and Voge came of age; their predecessors and the advisors who guided them in their formative years are the subject of the first section. Next she evaluates the early writings of Voge and Goldschmidt in light of biographical information and contemporary methodological debates. She concludes with an analysis of the impact of their writings on their own and later generations ofscholars. Attention to twokey issues in late nineteenth-century discourse helps knit the book together: first, how artistic creativity and stylistic change can be evaluated, and their relationship determined or defined; and second, the validity and weight of art ashistorical evidence relative to other forms of cultural expression. These questions of method came to the fore following the involved formalist exercises of Anton Springer (d 1891) and the sweeping syntheses of Jacob Burckhardt (d 1897) and Karl Lamprecht (d 1915). Brush's historiographical study is not anchored solely in published works. She supplements her attentive readings of seminal texts with archival findings, such as the personal and professional papers of Voge, Goldsclunidt, their teachers, and their students. Thepapers, including those of Lamprecht and Warburg (d 1929), shed light on art history's evolution by recounting private conversations,lecture contents, and other unprinted exchanges in which methodological debates were explicit and intense. In thelate nineteenthcentury, when theinstitutionalizahon ofarthistory was newly underway in parts ofEurope, discussions of the field's direction centred on concerns familiar to students of art history today. Brush examines such issues as the desire to...