University of Malta. International Institute for Baroque Studies
Abstract
If there was a style which took long to be academically and
stylistically respected, it was the Baroque. The text which made it
worth intellectual appreciation is Renaissance und Barock, translated
into English as Renaissance and Baroque, by Heinrich Wölfflin. This
publication, issued in 1888, had rendered Baroque an acceptable theme
for scholarship. Until then, it “had been considered too pathological
to be worthy of serious study”. Wölfflin had established a tradition
of systematic, comparative, empirico-analytical research which was
developed further from teacher to student. He, who in 1893 was
appointed professor of art history at the University of Basel to succeed
his teacher Jacob Burckhardt, the lead authority in the historiography
of art and culture at the time, had taught the Czech scholars Paul Frankl and Sigfried Giedion. The former, later Wölfflin’s assistant, had
critically challenged and developed his master’s ideas in his publication
Die Entwicklungsphasen der neueren Baukunst, translated as Principles
of Architectural History: The Four Phases of Architectural Style, 1420–
1900, hereafter shortened to Principles of Architectural History. This
text was instrumental ‘to induce his reluctant contemporaries to approach
Baroque architecture sympathetically’.4 It was published in 1914, a year
earlier than Wölfflin’s publication Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe,
translated as Principles of Art History.5 Unlike his teacher, Frankl was
‘reluctant to use this term [Baroque], which was then still so charged
with negative overtones’.6 As James Sloss Ackerman observed, this
Wölfflin-Frankl tradition was continued by Sigfried Giedion through
his publication Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New
Tradition.7 This paper aims to outline the contributions of the main
protagonists of this tradition through their respective above-mentioned
text, in defence of Baroque.peer-reviewe
