Heinrich Wolfflin - Principles of Art History

All five pairs of concepts can be interpreted both in the decorative and in the imitative sense. There is a beauty of the tectonic and a truth of the tectonic, a beauty of the painterly and a definite content of the world which is manifested in the painterly, and only in the painterly, style, and so on. But we will not forget that our categories are only formsforms of apprehension and representationand that they can therefore have no expressional content in themselves. Here it is only a question of the schema within which a definite beauty can manifest itself and only of the vessel in which impressions of nature can be caught and retained. If the apprehensional form of an epoch is tectonic in type, as in the sixteenth century, that is by no means sufficient to explain the tectonic strength of the picture and figures of a Michelangelo and a Fra Bartolommeo. There is a bony feeling which must first have poured its marrow into the schema. That of which we speak was in its (relative) expressionlessness a matter of course for mankind. When Raphael sketched his compositions for the Villa Farnesina there was no other possibility of thought than that the figures in closed form had to fill the surfaces, and when Rubens designed the procession of children with the wreath of fruit the open formthe figures set in space without filling itwas just as much the only possibility, although in both cases the same theme of grace and joy was to be treated.

False judgments enter art history if we judge from the impression which pictures of different epochs, placed side by side, make on us. We must not interpret their various types of expression merely in terms of stimmung. They speak a different language. Thus it is false to attempt an immediate comparison of a Bramante with a Bernini in architecture from the point of view of stimmung. Bramante does not only incorporate a different ideal: his mode of thought is from the outset differently organised from Berninis. Classic architecture appeared to the seventeenth century as no longer quite living. That is not to be attributed to the repose and clarity of the atmosphere but to the way in which it is expressed. Contemporaries of baroque were also able to dwell in the same spheres of feeling and yet be modern, as we can see from French buildings of the seventeenth century.

Every form of beholding and representation will of its very nature incline to one side, to a certain beauty, to a certain type of presentment of nature (we are about to speak of this), and in so far it again appears false to call the categories expressionless. Yet it should not be difficult to eliminate the misunderstanding. What is meant is the form in which the living is seen, without this life being already determined by its more specific content.

Whether a picture or a building, a figure or an ornament, is at issue, the impression of the living has its roots, independently of a special tone of feeling, in a different schema in the two cases. But the readjustment of seeing cannot quite be detached from a different orientation of interest. Even when no definite content of feeling is in question, the value and meaning of being is sought in a different sphere. For classic contemplation the essence lies in the solid, enduring figure which is delineated with the greatest definiteness and all-round distinctness; for painterly contemplation the interest and warrant of life lies in movement. The sixteenth century, of course, did not quite abandon the motive of movement, and a drawing by Michelangelo must in this point have seemed unsurpassable, yet only the seeing which aimed at mere appearance, painterly seeing, gave representation the means of producing the impression of movement in the sense of change. That is the decisive contrast between classic and baroque art. Classic ornament has its meaning in the form as it is, baroque ornament changes under the spectators eyes. Classic colouring is a given harmony of separate colours, baroque colouring is always a movement of colour and is bound up with the impression of becoming. In another sense than of the classic portrait we should have to say of baroque that not the eye but the look was its content, and not the lips but the breath. The body breathes. The whole picture space is filled with movement.