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176 Reviews Brush, Kathryn, The Shaping of Art History: Wilhelm Voge, Adolph Goldschmidt, and the Study of Medieval Art, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996; pp. xiii, 263; 28 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. AUS105.00. Brush's handsomely illustrated monograph (154 pages with extensive notes) examines the development of the discipline of art history in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century. She focuses on scholars w h o studied medieval art, because 'the majority of recent chroniclers of art history have regarded scholarship on the Renaissance.... as the primary intellectual barometer of the growth and development of the discipline' (pp. 1-2). Voge and Goldschmidt are less well-known than Alois Riegl and Heinrich Wolfflin, but both were pioneers whose intellectual contributions have value a century later. Moreover they were friends, leaving a substantial personal and professional correspondence which Brush uses very effectively. The investigation grapples with two related issues which were of vital importance to the art historians of the 1880s and 1890s—the assessment of the role of the artist and the artistic process, and the extent to which 'medieval artistic monuments [can] be read as historical documents recording the mentality and cultural behavior (sic) of a period?' (p. 11). Chapter One, 'Art History and Cultural History during the 1880s: The Discursive Range' covers the intellectual and institutional background of German universities after German unification. Medieval artworks could be studied within the new discipline of art history, or within 'Christian archaeology', where scholars, many of w h o m were clerics, examined artefacts from the Middle Ages as evidence for the Age of Faith. Central to both Voge's and Goldschmidt's intellectual development was Anton Springer, professor of Art History at Reviews 111 Leipzig, with w h o m both commenced studying in 1886. Springer, a historian, held that subjective appreciations of the aesthetic qualities of works of art compromised the objectivity of the historical inquiry. With his belief in the scientific method, Springer exemplified the spirit of the age. Goldschmidt completed his thesis under Springer in 1889, but Voge transferred to Bonn in 1887. There were only four students of art history there, one of w h o m was A b y Warburg, w h o became Voge's close friend. The Italian Renaissance was the focus of art historical teaching at Bonn, and its relation to the art of antiquity became Warburg's lifelong subject. Voge studied with Karl Lamprecht, whose special interest was medieval illuminated manuscripts, and completed a dissertation on an important collection of Ottonian manuscripts today associated with the Reichenau scriptorium. Chapters Two and Three discuss the scholarly output of Voge and Goldschmidt. Voge's second book Die Anfange des monumentalen Stiles im Mittelalter (Strasbourg 1894) shifted his attention from manuscripts to French Gothic sculpture. In sharp contradistinction to Springer, Voge depicted medieval sculptors as vibrant, creative individuals whose mental processes and manual skills combined in the production of forms. H e researched French sculpture between 1892 and 1894, and formulated the hypothesis s t i l l familiar to students of art history that the monumental style of the Chartres sculptures w a s 'determined by an intimate interaction between architecture and sculpture, in which architecture was the dominant partner' (p. 63). Voge also refuted the popular hypothesis that the roots of the French style lay in Byzantium, asserting a Provencal origin. H e did this by rigid stylistic analysis. However his portraits of the artists owed much to Romantic notions, Hegelian spiritual history, and also to the 178 Reviews writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Therefore he oscillated between Apollonian precision of description and cataloguing of forms, and Dionysian rhapsodies concerning the creative process. Brush argues very persuasively that the power of Voge's arguments depended substantially on the skill of his rhetoric, that he was conscious 'of the power of words to evoke the expressive substance of the visual arts' (p. 85). Goldschmidt's researches during the 1890s were more eclectic: Norman architecture in Sicily, illuminated manuscripts, German monumental sculpture, Michelangelo, and Dutch and Flemish painting. While his students emphasised his strong artistic sensibility, Goldschmidt was unlike Voge in that he drew a strong division between...

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