According to Michael Podro, Heinrich Wölfflin was ‘explicitly concerned with the construction of critical systems’ . His reception in England, however, was anything but systematic and, as I shall suggest, was characterized far more by the role of individual historians and critics, and by small groups, than by institutions. The coterie, the ‘invisible college’ has always mattered in the English intellectual and critical tradition and with it the conversation of friends and allies. Indeed, English reception of Heinrich Wölfflin’s work started in earnest with the critic, artist and art guru from one such coterie, the Bloomsbury group, Roger Fry (1866-1934) (Fig. 1). In the December 1903 number of The Athenaeum, Fry had reviewed Wölfflin’s Die klassische Kunst (1899), there retitled for English readers as The Art of the Italian Renaissance and more generally known by the title Classic Art . Fry’s main concern in this review was more the canon than method: to him, Wölfflin was rehabilitating the art of the seicento, sight of which had been lost since Burckhardt. The quattrocento had abandoned the grand style, the Sublime, for the sweet, rational, middle style: but then Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo restored ‘greatness’, religious idealism, the power of ‘condensation’ or concentration of effect. In effect, from an English perspective, Fry spotted in Wölfflin a rehabilitation of the grand manner of Reynolds
