Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance [Paperback]

Heinrich Wolfflin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1994 | ISBN-10: 0714829749 | ISBN-13: 978-0714829746 | Edition: 5 Sub

Heinrich Wolfflin was a pioneering critic who introduced new and rigorous methods of formal analysis into the study of art. Classic Art, first published in 1899, is itself a classic that has exercised a profound influence on the way people have looked at and thought about art. As an appraisal of the great artists of the Renaissance it can hardly be surpassed. Once again available in its elegant original format, it is an indispensable addition to every library of art books.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

In this pioneering volume, first published in 1899, Wolfflin dissects the formal characteristics of Italian painting. His methods influenced the way painting has been studied ever since.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German

Product Details

• Paperback: 294 pages
• Publisher: Phaidon Press; 5 Sub edition (January 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0714829749
• ISBN-13: 978-0714829746
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #533,906 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Classical Book about Classic Art, November 10, 2000

By 

Jun Chen "Kopus" (Worcester, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (Paperback)

Although this book mainly focus only in Italian Renaissance, it contains enough issues must be addressed for this fascinating art reflorishing period as a whole. The analysis method used in this book is full of sparkling, with a perfect combination of technical points as well as passion. I began to love the classical art because of this book. And, believe me, when now I'm interested in photography, still I can find my viewpoint be influenced by this book, say, which combination of light and construction of the picture will render a BEAUTIFUL feeling. Any top art book should combine ration and passion. And here is a perfect example.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Biased Opinions, September 3, 2004

By 

Etoile Chou - See all my reviews

This review is from: Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (Paperback)

This is wonderfully written and easy to read for anyone familiar with art history and its lexicon. However, I would not recommend this book to a beginning art history student not familiar with the problems associated with earlier art historians (even modern art historians should be considered carefully). Wofflin is rather biased on the part of the High Renaissance artists and he does not look upon other artists immediately before or after very fairly. Wofflin does very successfully capture the High Renaissance and its style in this book. Read carefully, this is a must read for any student of art history.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Heinrich Wölfflin - Treasure of art knowledge., July 31, 2011

By 

Anna Shlimovich (Boston, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Classic Art: An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (Paperback)

I came across this book in our Boston library, in a typically mysterious way of discovering something extraordinary - just took a book from the shelf, opened it wherever it opens and started sliding across the page, as I always do with an unknown author. Yet from the very first sentences my mind was captured by a very powerful and educated writing - it became obvious immediately that this book was not from some contemporary semi-educated popularizer of art. The words summed into knowledge-charged paragraphs, written in a confident yet easy style, reminiscent of another great art historian, Kenneth Clark, and contrary to the style of some scholars, for example, a musicologist Richard Taruskin, who seem to chose writing in a deliberately intricate manner. A page went after a page, and I was totally immersed into perfectly logical, lucid and extremely erudite discourse of the author. Curious, I stopped to see who the author was, and to my amazement, he turned out to be a founder (!!!) of the formal art history as science. No wonder I was struck by the mighty power of his word from the first letter.

In fact, Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945) was so enormously successful with his innovative concept of the formal approach to art study that he was accepted as a member to Prussian Academy of Science in 1901. The Art History has now attained the status of an academic formal science, with its formal methods and principals; Wölfflin invented exactly five principals, which became a foundation of his school. Wölfflin's innovative approach was not born out of nowhere; his teaching was a continuation of Giorgio Vasari postulates, while obviously Wölfflin sough to expand Vasari's ideas, confined to renaissance, to explain the evolvement of style over time in art. He applied this method to Trecento, Quattrocento and Cinquecento art in Classic Art (1899), then developed it further in his other opus The Principles of Art History (1915).

This particular book is a treasure for Renaissance and mannerist art lovers for many reasons, but two main ones are these:

1). It makes a very clear chronological path and analysis of art development from Giotto to Andrea del Sarto. As the author guides the reader through decades and centuries, he elaborates on each artist, his artistic environment, his contemporaries; Wölfflin outlines the artists' strengths and weaknesses (as he sees them), and what is marvelous that the text is written in a perfect manner - not too verbose, and not too breve. Wölfflin's overview of Masaccio, Donatello, Verrocchio to Filippo Lippi and Leonardo puts these artists and their work in an art-history perspective. His reviews of The Last Supper, Mona Lisa, The Last Judgement, to name a few, are full of insight and precious observations, simultaneously restrained from excessive exultations.

I like that Wölfflin is a very rational writer, a positivist, avoiding at all cost any metaphysical calls and endless flows of conscience, so characteristic of many art reviewers, as for example, of Michel Foucault. Certainly Wölfflin lived in a world where the ideas of deconstruction have not taken hold yet; on the contrary, his mission seems to be not to muddy the waters to look different at all cost, but to lay down a working framework to study art in its evolution. Thus his style is robust, purposeful yet detailed. He had become a professor at the age of twenty-four, and it is not very surprising, given the very structural thinking and mental prowess that he demonstrates.

2). Wölfflin lived in a time when calling things its names was appropriate, and expressing opinions without looking over one's shoulder for political correctness was not considered the highest virtue. In addition, he had not witnessed times when Andy Warhol's and Robert Rauschenberg's creations would dis-grace museum walls and call art. I am not sure how he would classify these modern atrocities, since he is very critical of old masters - he says things that a contemporary person is not very likely to hear today regarding universally recognised and admired masterpieces. For example, he finds that in Sandro di Mariano's "Primavera" the dancing female figures are emaciated and full of melancholy; that Michelangelo broke the proportional unity in his Sistine Chapel ceiling by painting figures in different scenes with different sizes - the central famous God and Adam, with its celebrated hands, are much larger than in his early frescoes "The Flood" or "Noah and his family making a sacrifice". Wölfflin finds Ghirlandaio's style heavy and the artist's mind simplistic; he severely criticises Filippino Lippi's work in Santa Maria Novella - frescoes that today are considered some of the finest of High Renaissance.

The book is full of such unexpected turns on every page; it is amazing to read art critics from so long ago for exactly these tremendous differences in views between now and then; Stendhal is even more astonishing in his calls, but of course, his mind is more peculiar and chaotic that Wölfflin's, and he was, after all, a dilettante. For me, however, one of the greatest values of these books from past times is exactly those unknown views; they allow to look at well-familiar works at a different angle and see them with new eyes.

Reading Wölfflin is as being with the most desirable interlocutor - very knowledgeable and erudite, but at the same time not without disagreeable opinions - for example, he expresses a belief that Renaissance was a purely Italian phenomenon, art movement that has nothing to do with antiquities, that it was borne in the "open field". This view is highly contestable, moreover, mistaken - the very artists whom Wölfflin so admires clearly expressed their desire to achieve and perhaps outperform the mastery of antique painters and sculptors, such as Lysippos (Hercules Farnese), Phidias (works in Athenian Acropolis and Parthenon), Polydoros (Laocoön) and other great sculptors of antiquity. This goal was not reached during Renaissance indeed - only Baroque Bernini could finally compare with the incomparable art of the ancients.

Thus Renaissance was a natural continuation and building upon the treasure of the antique aesthetical idea, just as Wölfflin's teaching itself is an evolvement of Vasari. Art is a continuous Die Brücke, even these days it is true, while modern artists after Duchamp clearly struggling to create as a meaningful phenomenon as their predecessors did. It would be interesting to discuss this and other art dilemmas with Wölfflin, but even reading his views is already very thought-provoking.

I find that I like this restrained passion with which Swiss authors write; their style is disciplined in reason but fiery in sentiment. Somehow Wölfflin's taste reminds of some of his contemporary French, especially of Huysmans, whose "À rebours" has long been my favorite. Hesse poems, laid to music by Strauss (who did not receive a handshake from Hesse after the war - composer's hand remained outstretched), and of course, those who ended up living in Switzerland, like Nabokov (who incidentally understood nothing in art at all).

There must be something in the Alpian Lakeside air the promotes such clear critical thinking, rebellious and yet rational, that is particularly appealing. Sometimes this approach is backfiring, like with Carl Jung, who went as far as to diagnose Picasso, although this is the case of a typical shrink-charlatan - incidentally, Nabokov was unsurpassed in mocking this whole profession at a minimum as utterly useless to very harmful. Luckily, in Wolflinn one would not find much "mind reading" - his interpretations are based on reason, objectivity and truth - at least as he had esteemed these values.

The book is better read with the Internet access at all times - it refers to innumerable number of pictures, the author's mind flying freely from one artist to another, comparing their works, and I learned of so many great pictures and frescoes; some of these images I will try to upload to this title, in its image gallery.

Highly recommended to art lovers, and to those of them who trod to Firenze and Toscana art cities I urge - don't go without this book!!!