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STYLE

Term used for a coherence of qualities in periods or people. This is a provisional definition for one of the most difficult concepts in the lexicon of , and one of the chief areas of debate in and . Each of the component terms of has been disputed, and style itself has been rejected on various grounds; yet it remains inseparable from working concepts of art and its history. Its difficulty is easily demonstrated by comparing definitions. The ‘provisional definition’ above may be beside others: ‘the constant form—and sometimes the constant elements, qualities, and expression—in the art of an individual or a group’ (Schapiro, 1953, p. 137); ‘any distinctive … way in which an act is performed’ (Gombrich, 1968, p. 352b); ‘the happy convergence of forms to … a sort of harmonic center’ (Bazin, 1976, p. 9); ‘nondurational, synchronous situations composed of related events’ (Kubler, 1979, p. 127); ‘a distinctive manner or mode’ (Prown, 1980, p. 197; see also LK). In literary studies the definitions have been even more wide-ranging: the famous aphorism of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, that ‘style is the man’; style is ‘nothing other than thought’ (Alphonse de Chateaubriand); ‘the most undefinable of all the faculties of the soul’ (Alphonse-Marie-Louis Prat de Lamartine); or ‘the form of the beautiful’ (Victor Hugo). The further the concept of style is investigated, the more it appears as an inherently partly incoherent concept, opaque to analysis. This conclusion and its implications are discussed after considering the uses of style and its historiography.

1. Usages and problems.

Following the provisional definition of style as ‘a coherence of qualities in periods or people’, styles of periods may be distinguished from those of people. This dichotomy was formulated by Heinrich Wölfflin (1913), who called it the ‘double root of style’. (1979, pp. 129–30) called the same distinction general style and individual style; and within general style he recognized universal style (, naturalism), historical or period style (, Neo-classicism) and school style. This leaves open the question whether different rules govern personal and period style. It is sometimes remarked that personal style is synchronic (pertaining to a moment) while period style is diachronic (taking place through time), but in fact both kinds of style have both elements. Both concern coherence within a day’s or a season’s work, a year or larger portion of a lifetime, or the ‘life’ of a school, period or era (i.e. Classical, medieval, Renaissance, modern). There are conventional ways of disagreeing on the divisions of periods (Panofsky, 1972, p. 3), but period style can be applied indifferently to any such division, including the span of a lifetime (as in such terms as the ‘age of Michelangelo’). Whatever coherence is perceived may be unitary or else may be divided into two, three or more phases. The following arrangements emerge:

(i) Monads.

When a style is considered to be indivisible (as when a historian speaks of the ‘style of Les Primitifs’ without distinguishing individual artists), it has a tendency to appear incomplete and to take its place in a diadic or triadic sequence (Les Primitifs were part of the Neo-classical revival c. 1800, which in turn followed the , etc). In this fundamental sense no style is purely synchronic.

(ii) Diads.

A style may be divided into an early and late phase or else more specifically into such characterizing terms as ‘archaic’ and ‘Classical’, ‘geometrical’ and ‘naturalistic’, ‘prehistoric’ and ‘historic’, ‘Renaissance’ and ‘’. Lionello Venturi (1926; see Venturi, (2)) proposed an alternation of creation, declivity and new

1 creation. Such diads may be easily inverted, so that the second term comes first (Elkins, 1988, p. 369), or may be fused into monadic styles (Brown, 1982). For this reason no style is purely diachronic.

(iii) Triads.

The most common tripartite division is the sequence early, middle and late style. Normally this is imagined as an abstraction from the course of a human life (so that the parts become youth, maturity and senescence), or else a plant’s life (budding, flowering or fruiting, and decay; see also Decadence and decline). The historical names that are attached to the triad are typically ‘archaic’, ‘classic’ and ‘baroque’, though they can also be ‘classic’, ‘mannerist’ and ‘baroque’. The exemplary insertion of a middle term into a diad is the 20th-century art historians’ elaboration of a phase of ‘’ between Renaissance and Baroque (Ivanoff, 1957); any such splitting is conceptually unstable and prone to revision. Triads may be compressed into diads (Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque) or expanded into four- and five-part sequences (Panofsky, 1955, rev. 1982, p. 216).

(iv) Tetrad etc.

When there are more than three divisions they tend to be modelled on texts such as Lucius Annaeus Florus’ Epitome rerum romanorum, in which a lifetime is broken into four parts: infantia, adolescentia, maturitas and senectus. For the most part, sequences with four or more parts tend to split up into diads or triads, or are experienced as collections of two or more mutally independent style sequences.

Each arrangement of phases has met with objections, typically for four reasons: that they involve the inappropriate use of human and botanical tropes for historical events; that they force a set sequence of steps on material where there may be many or none; that they involve valuations even when they masquerade as equivalent stages; and that they imply that styles evolve in hothouse isolation from society. German scholars such as Robert Schukale (1989, p. 244), Helga Möbius (1989, p. 262) and others have called for alternative models based on more abstract concepts such as acceleration, fixation, differentiation and innovation. But the old allegories retain a powerful imaginative hold, and they tend to make the reader understand the more abstract terms as allusions to the old organic schemata.

The commonest phase sequence, the triad early, middle and late style, gives rise nonetheless to several recurring problems, especially regarding the nature of the synthetic accomplishment that is recognized as a ‘late style’. The first of these occurs when it is possible to doubt whether a ‘late style’ has been established at all. Jackson Pollock showed signs of returning to a figurative mode but did not live long enough to develop that into a consistent practice. Are his figurative works signs of an incipient late style? Artists such as Jean- Auguste-Dominique Ingres and John Constable who continued to develop into their old age may not be seen as possessing unequivocal late styles; a true late style seems to require a stasis commensurate with the two preceding phases. Secondly, some late styles do not seem to achieve sufficient syntheses of what went before or else synthesize in an uninspiring direction. It also happens that a late style might extend over so much of a lifetime that it outweighs the other two phases. Samuel Palmer’s early ‘Shoreham period’ style was visionary and idiosyncratic, but he spent the bulk of his life more conventional landscapes. In each of these instances, historians may prefer to speak of ‘last styles’, breaking the triad into an unfinished sequence a, b, c…. Thirdly, an artist may be seen to ‘oscillate’. Thus Panofsky (1971) proposed that Albrecht Dürer had no triadic sequence of style phases and no late style but ‘oscillated’ between Northern (Germanic) and Southern (Italian) influences without being able to synthesize the two. His ‘late style’ would therefore be a ‘last’ or ‘latest’ style. This is the clearest alternate theory to the triadic sequence, and its limited applicability demonstrates the pervasive power of the concept of triadic personal style.

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Other problems in style analysis pertain to styles that do not seem to fit with one another, either diachronically or synchronically. Occasionally an artist’s career will embrace styles so different that they seem incompatible (or, in the terms of the provisional definition above, incoherent). Jacques-Louis David’s late work has raised this problem, as have Edvard Munch’s last works. André Derain, Gino Severini and other modern artists had double, triple or quadruple ‘careers’ as they moved between incommensurate styles. It is difficult to see Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s harsh Expressionist works as the work of the same artist who later made sweet Picassoid fantasies. In such cases historians tend to treat the artist’s life as a concatenation of separate style sequences, each coherent in itself. Alternately, an artist may practise several disparate styles simultaneously; Picasso’s late and contemporaneous neo-classicism are the most prominent example. In such cases each style within the artist’s ‘conglomerate’ style is again understood separately, and divided when it seems appropriate into early, middle and late phases. All these possibilities—simultaneous styles, lifetimes subdivided into ‘separate’ oeuvres, sequences dividing and fusing—are not fundamental problems within style, but conventional components of the concept, and they have been discovered and rediscovered over the last five centuries.

2. Development of the concept.

Style has a complex etymology, which has been pressed into use for various purposes. Its use in modern European languages derives principally from Latin stilus, originally denoting the needle used to write on wax- coated tablets. (The sharpness and intrusiveness of the stilus has been used by Jacques Derrida to explore style’s masculine qualities; 1979a, p. 35; 1979b.) The term itself was first applied to writing in the 1st century AD by Horace and Virgil (Sauerländer, 1983). Another Latin usage, largely disregarded today, is Vitruvius’ use of the Greek stylos (column) to denote the proportional differences between the orders of . This Greek term, which influenced the English spelling of the term in the 18th century, has been proposed as a complementary etymology in an attempt to give style a double origin in spatial (stylos) and temporal (stilus) forms (Kubler, 1979, p. 121).

Another complication in describing the history of the term’s usage is that understandings of it have diverged: it may be taken to mean ‘ideal’ (Olin, 1992, p. 52), ‘exemplary’ moment or work, ‘concept’ or ‘phenomenon’ (Weisbach, 1957). Style has sometimes been assumed to mean ‘ancient style’, ‘decadent style’ or ‘academic style’ (Ivanoff, 1957, pp. 148–9), or ‘stylish’ (Gombrich, 1968, p. 352), and it has been conflated with mere mannerism or quirk (Honour, 1991, p. 14b). Style has also been conceived as a process (LK, p. 692b), a ‘tool’, a

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‘norm’, a ‘mark of identification’ and a ‘generating principle’ of historical change (Sauerländer, 1983), and in discussions of post- there is an ongoing dialogue on the relation between style, 16th-century ‘manner’ (maniera) and 17th-century ‘mode’. A full history of style would have to show how these concepts are related.

The use of style in the visual has a simpler history. It developed chiefly from Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (1764), which applies the term to ancient Greek art. Winckelmann made a step-by-step parallel between Greek art and the Renaissance, paving the way for similar analyses of other periods. The fact that Winckelmann was concerned with ancient Greece is not incidental to the concept of style itself, because style periods subsequently have been characterized either by their dependence on or deviation from a Classical norm, and the ultimate referent of that norm has remained ancient Greek art. ‘Rococo’, for example, was coined by Jacques-Louis David’s pupils ‘for the meretricious of the age of Pompadour’, but David himself participated in one of several Neo-classical revivals, the agendas of which were derived from Greek art (Gombrich, 1968, p. 354). It is often remarked that many style periods were coined as pejorative terms. This is a reminder that style periods can never be neutral, and they always carry hints of their negative origins as part of their meaning. For these reasons Hellenic art is still exemplary, and Winckelmann’s text remains central in the historiography of style (Bernal, 1987, p. 212).

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel codified the notion that each historical period will have a typical style. All forms of a culture, he thought, will be harmonious expressions of its spirit (). One style will succeed another according to inexorable law. Authors influenced by Hegel have tended to search for the laws of style (Stilgesetze) and its development (Stilwandel). It follows that the Zeitgeist can be deduced from any time, and from any object: Baroque chairs, chariots and churches will all share certain forms, and each will express a commensurate spirit. In terms of style, this disallows the accidental and bends everything to a unified law. Style, to Hegel, ‘is the concept for the negation of the contingent’. Even though Hegel’s theory has been widely criticized (e.g. Sauerländer, 1983) and is routinely eschewed by working historians, it continues to exert an inescapable hold over historical practice (Elkins, 1988). It has proved difficult to overturn for two reasons. First, there are undoubtedly moments in history when it is impossible not to perceive that different cultural artefacts express a single spirit. More fundamentally, the expressive coherence of periods is part of history as we understand that concept. Most historians prescribe caution and circumspection in the sleuthing of the Zeitgeist, although it remains easy to subscribe to Hegel’s formulae either intentionally (Piel, 1963) or naively and uncritically (Prown, 1980). Studies of non-Western art have successfully refuted the Hegelian sequence of styles, but not the echoes of the normative Western style periods themselves (Elkins, 1988; Pasztory, 1989).

Winckelmann’s idealistic sense of style, in which the medium would ideally pose no obstacle to the transmutation from ‘idea’ to , proved too anaemic for later generations. In the 19th century Carl Friedrich von Rumohr supported a more practical, technical use of the word ‘style’ by connecting it to the Latin stilus (Olin, 1992, p. 204, n. 38). Gottfried Semper’s work can also be seen in this tradition, since he used ‘style’ to denote symbolic forms ideally suited to a given medium or material (Semper, 1860; Olin, 1992, p. 52), and these reactions against Winckelmann can be traced to the first decades of the 20th century. In ’s earlier writing, style is treated as ‘the mechanical result of raw material and technique’, and each medium has its ‘stylistic limits’ (Stilgrenze) that can only be surpassed by the most skilled craftsmen (Olin, 1992, pp. 54–5). ‘Style’ here means ‘freedom from nature’, since the craftsman must obey inner laws of style rather than nature, fantasy or invention (Olin, 1992, p. 81). In Riegl’s thinking, ‘style’ denotes rather than the idealistic naturalism envisioned by Winckelmann.

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The more idealistic strains of criticism are epitomized in Heinrich Wölfflin’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), which posits a two-step progression from Renaissance to Baroque style. Works of art of any period are to be analysed with the help of five polar categories of form, the first term in each pair being the ‘Renaissance’ moment and the second the ‘Baroque’: (1) linear versus painterly, (2) forms parallel to the picture plane versus those receding into distance, (3) closed versus open, (4) multiplicity versus unity and (5) clarity versus unclarity. The central place that Wölfflin continues to occupy in the study of art history (as opposed, say, to Riegl or Frankl) cannot be adequately explained by the supposedly utilitarian nature of his categories, since they are not used even at the student level. But his book contains exceptionally eloquent closely observed descriptions, curiously offset by a problematic and often Hegelian framing text; its ongoing popularity probably also stems from the sense it gives that if art history were to have a solid foundation, a clear governing doctrine, then this would be it. Wölfflin’s vacillations between the holistic style of a period and the expressive style elements of individual works is common in various kinds of style analysis. It is echoed, for example, in the exchanges within over style as a uniform, repetitive behaviour (the ‘social interaction’ theory) and style as an expressive and informational tool (the ‘ exchange’ theory; Braun and Plog, 1982; Duff, Clark and Chadderdon, 1992, p. 215).

A major revision of Wölfflin’s programme was undertaken by his student Paul Frankl. His System der Kunstwissenschaft (1938) divides the triad preclassic, classic and postclassic between two modes, which he calls ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ (the Seinsstil and Werdensstil). His project may be understood as an attempt at a fundamental abstraction from the contingencies of actual history, and his catalogues of irreducible elements have more than passing similarity to contemporary Semiotics (Frankl, 1988). His five irreducible ‘logical styles’ have echoes of Wölfflin’s, though they are determinedly general: a figural style, which calls for compositions

5 of pure series of identical marks; a ‘neighbouring’ style (vizinale Stil ), allowing for various relationships including the ‘destruction’ of neighbourly order (as in the sequence ‘redness, elephant, moon, Alexander the Great’); an ordinal style, enjoining some logical or formal sequencing; an individual style, where the figure might lose all relation to the composition; and a harmonious style, mixing aspects of the previous four.

In the later 20th century criticisms of style were aimed at further reducing the Hegelian elements of the concept while retaining it in a form that could be more easily controlled. Meyer Schapiro (1953) is often seen as beginning this tendency, with his emphasis on contingencies and exceptions as against confident holistic statements about periods and their spirits (Kubler, 1979, p. 120). James Ackerman (1962, p. 233) criticized the fixed sequences of ‘evolution’ of style and called for a return to an interdisciplinary consideration of individual objects as opposed to cultural essences. To dismantle the Hegelian idea of stylistic ‘evolution’ towards some future ideal, he imagined change as flight from a preceding problem, and style as the solution at any given moment. In his trope, a style is a ‘great canvas’ on which successive generations paint, some defacing what had existed even while they add their own sketches, and none able to foresee the future (pp. 232, 236).

Ernst Gombrich (1968, p. 352) sought to relieve the concept of its burden of Hegelian essentialism by distinguishing between normative and descriptive usages of style. The former is the conventional sense, according to which style can refer to a tendency in culture as a whole. Following the literary critic Stephen Ullmann and the empiricist lead of Karl Popper, Gombrich proposed that style only be applied in a descriptive sense, when ‘the speaker or the writer has the possibility of choosing beween alternate forms of expression’ (Ullmann, 1957, p. 6; Gombrich, 1968, p. 353). But this and similar restrictions prove to be less than useful, since the word ‘style’ is reached for most often precisely in cases where there is no conceivable alternate practice. Must the word ‘style’ be avoided when describing a Gothic , simply because the sculptor did not conceive the idea of stylistic choice? Purely in terms of logic, this is correct (the idea of the possibility of choosing styles came into practice in the 15th century), but it does not answer to the common experience of style as an object of study.

George Kubler described his 1979 essay on style as a ‘further reduction’ of the term, following on from Schapiro, Ackerman and Gombrich. It relates style to the Greek stylos, denoting the proportions of the orders of architecture. Kubler suggests that style should be analysed according to six components: craft, format (‘size, shape, and composition’), signage (‘any complex of structured symbols, which can be subjected to iconographic or iconologic analysis’), modus (mode, as in the architectural orders), period and sequence. The last two are taken from mathematics rather than cultural studies, and they denote cyclical behaviour and an ‘open-ended, ordered class such as the positive integers’. The purpose here is to avoid assumptions about a style’s ‘life history’ in favour of theoretically quantifiable forms (pp. 124–7). Kubler’s ‘reductive theory’ results in a ‘purified residue’ of style components; like Gombrich, he shows a clear-headed sense of the places where rational thought and empirical evidence might be brought to bear to correct the ahistorical excesses of older style theory. The problem in both cases is that the adjustments prove unhelpful because they have limited application or depend on alien terminology. Essays like Kubler’s, Ackerman’s and Gombrich’s ultimately serve to underline the deep attachment historians continue to feel for unquantifiable, unfalsifiable style analysis, since they show how powerfully art-historical practice resists rational trimming. Nevertheless, style came to be largely omitted from the roster of subjects actively investigated by art historians and aestheticians in the later 20th century. Even writers accepting style’s conceptual mobility seek to delimit that mobility: , in an exceptionally alert inquiry into its nomadic nature, noting that it cuts across ‘form and content’, ‘what and how’, ‘trinsic and extrinsic’, ended by distinguishing it from ‘historical, biographical, psychological, and sociological factors’ (1975, pp. 806, 809). Style has been regarded with suspicion because of its association with the prescriptive, unduly broad dicta of Hegelian history, or with the late 19th-century

6 tradition of connoisseurship that regarded works of art as objects best understood by silent appreciation, empathy, the mysteriously skilled ‘eye’ and unquantifiable experience. Style analysis came to be linked by many with a kind of art history that was analytically coy, avoiding the wider study of independent cultural facts and connections with society. From the mid-20th century onwards, style analysis has been opposed to the study of meaning. (In fact, the that ‘anyone seeking to understand stylistic developments in art must also be aware of the social and political factors affecting contemporary society’ is what lay behind the scope and organization of this Dictionary, as outlined in its promotional literature.) In that way iconology and the study of cultural significance have come to be seen as a complement to style analysis, as if a work of art were a composite object made of a perfect balance of non-verbal style and verbal meaning. Scholars rejecting this view have also tended to be wary of style analysis, trying to avoid using it in their teaching and writing (Alpers, 1979, pp. 95, 114). In addition, many writers try not to use the style periods that are still helpful in introductory surveys of art and in dictionaries.

3. Towards an understanding of style.

Despite the wish of some scholars to avoid the term, style remains indispensable for the act of interpretation, and inseparable from ostensibly different endeavours such as psychoanalytic or social art history. It is primarily style analysis that permits the post-modern that art is not progressing in a unified way but is an ongoing, overlapping succession of schools, with none better or more advanced than any other. It may be suggested that the chief reason for the problematic nature of style is that it so closely follows the inchoate ways in which people conceive of personality. Definitions of style may indeed collapse into metaphors of personality. Gombrich (1968, p. 353) distinguished styles defined in terms of psychological states (‘a passionate style’, ‘a humorous style’) from those relying on ‘intrasensory’ or ‘synaesthesic’ descriptions (‘a sparking style’, ‘a drab style’). But the latter is a case of the former, since synaesthesic terms are used in these descriptions as ways of describing moods. Theories that propose that style is a reflection of society may seem to constitute an exception, but they are constrained to schematic examples with little resonance for the detailed (Hegel, 1835; Fischer, 1961, p. 81). Schapiro (1953, rev. 1980, p. 140) observed thatAlthough some writers conceive of style as a kind of syntax or compositional pattern, which can be analysed mathematically, in practice one has been unable to do without the vague language of qualities in describing styles. Certain features of light and color in painting are most conveniently specified in qualitative terms and even in tertiary (intersensory) or physiognomic qualities, like cool and warm, gay and sad.

When it is suggested that personal style is innate and cannot be entirely altered even by concerted study, the assumption is that style consists of personality and not only reflects and expresses it but also helps generate it.

The provisional definition of style as ‘a coherence of qualities in periods or personalities’ opens up two principal ways in which style depends on personality: first, the qualities of style can be defined directly or indirectly as a psychological state, as described above; and secondly, the coherence of style can be drawn from common notions of the unity of a single person. These notions of unity comprise personality, physiognomy and life history:

(i) Personality.

As a person talks, listeners constantly revise their concepts of that person, always relying on a provisional sense of the person’s unity. If a listener hears an outlandish comment from a familiar person, he must revise his opinion of her to encompass both her previous self and her wild utterance within a unified personality;

7 otherwise he would be forced to think of her as temporarily divided or schizophrenic. Such a way of thinking about the unity of personality is also at work in common concepts of the unity of styles. When certain parts of works, or of oeuvres, or of periods, do not seem to match one another, then the works are seen as internally divided. Schapiro (1953, rev. 1980, pp. 144–5) instances an African sculpture in which an ‘exceedingly naturalistic, smoothly carved head rises from a rough, almost shapeless body’. Such works (and oeuvres and periods) have to be seen as composites, as if they were the results of two separate personalities. It may be possible to say with some conviction that the African sculpture was made by one person, but the speaker’s conception of that person will remain double: that is, he will continue to apprehend that person as if he were comprised of two individually comprehensible personalities. The coherence of a personality is the ultimate model for the coherence of the work, and anything beyond its bounds will be comprehended as a collage. Pastiche may be defined as the misapprehension that a style can be copied by copying its details, and that itself is more evidence that strong coherence is essential to style (Viollet-le-Duc, 1964, p. 169).

(ii) Physiognomy.

Another unity mingles with this one, and that is the way in which people’s faces and bodies are apprehended as expressions of a single . When someone has cosmetic surgery, her acquaintances need to reconcile the expressive value of her newly acquired forms with the remaining features that they recognize. If they fail, they will be forced to apprehend her face or body as a composite, with each part expressing a different personality. Schapiro also mentions the ‘conglomerate cathedral of Chartres’, where different parts may be seen as expressions of different spirits (see fig.). There is the same difficulty seeing it as a whole as there is in seeing a partly reconstructed face as the expression of a single personality. Unlike a whole face, Chartres seems inexorably divided against itself—a multiple personality, or in stylistic terms, a ‘conglomerate’. Schapiro noted that in the past there was no awareness of this disparity, suggesting ‘that some styles, by virtue of their open, irregular forms, can tolerate the unfinished and heterogeneous better than others’ (1953, rev. 1980, p. 146). But this defence of the medieval mentality shows only how trapped the 20th-century viewer might be in his own way of seeing, since it does not help him see beyond his conviction that Chartres is conglomerate.

(iii) Life history.

Examples have already been given of the allegorical programmes that are brought to bear when styles are compared to life-cycles. The historiographic literature is usually concerned with the appropriateness of these parallels (Gombrich, 1968, p. 356b). But in a more abstract sense, what is problematic is the idea of the unity of a life-span itself. As long as the sequence of works can be understood as having an analogous degree of coherence as a human life, then it can be understood as a style—but what would a coherent style be if there were no understanding of what a coherent life might be?

In practice, all three sources merge in the common understanding of what an individual is. In Gombrich’s words, ‘the way a person speaks, writes, dresses and looks merges for us into the image of his personality’ (1968, p. 358a), and viewers assume—as Hegel did when thinking of historical periods—that a person’s speaking, writing, dressing and appearance all express the same personality. It is true that that assumption is usually unwarranted or ‘hazardous’ (Gombrich calls it the ‘physiognomic fallacy’), but what is at stake here is not so much the tenuousness of such ; it is rather the fact that people employ these physiognomic and psychological criteria without realizing that they do so. In that way an initial incoherence is further weakened by an oblivious and inappropriate application.

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It does not follow from this, however, that rigorous interrogation is the best future for the study of style. Style depends on the fact that it is not thought through. The viewer sees a group of historical artefacts and senses that they belong together in a style, but unless he is engaged in writing a theoretical account of style, he does not stop to interrogate what notion of coherence has led him to feel that he is in the presence of a single style. As Roland Barthes has said, ‘style excuses all [and] dispenses … with historical reflection’—creating a pampering silence that those who engage with the term are often loath to interrupt (in Sauerländer, 1983, pp. 267–8). In part the reason for that automatic recalcitrance is their knowledge that style could not withstand an analytic critique, and in some measure they draw back because of the thought of the infelicities in the few attempts that have been made. But a more powerful reason is the sense that notions of coherence and unity are so deeply inbuilt in common understanding in any given instance that no analytic debunking of them could convince others they were wrong. Individuals ‘know’ what a single human life-span can be like, just as they ‘know’ how a face or a body can cohere, or a person can express herself. To enquire too persistently into a that some group of artefacts possesses a single style is not so much to invite pessimism, trackless revisionism or unhelpful aporia as it is to enter the dangerous realm in which individuals may begin to question themselves and ask how they know themselves to be unified, coherent personalities. The deeper critique of style is therefore not only misguided but also treacherous. Conversely, the perennial search for styles in all historical settings may be interpreted as an ongoing need to cushion and exemplify shared senses of coherence. Each period or personal style that historians find is taken as a historical fact or a plausible construction, and the pleasure that gives is directly related to the support it lends to the historians’ sense of themselves. Hence, at the most profound level, style may be understood as a moment in the ongoing dialogue between the constructing of history and the constructing of the self, a moment that is sustained by not pressing the illogic of the argument of style on towards its crippling conclusions.

James Elkins

Bibliography

J. J. Winckelmann: Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden, 1764/R 1966) C. F. von Rumohr: Italienische Forschungen, ed. J. Schlosser (Frankfurt am Main, 1827/R 1920) G. W. F. Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik (Berlin, 1835, rev. 1842); Eng. trans. as Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on , 2 vols (Oxford, 1975) G. Semper: Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Künsten, oder praktische Aesthetik, i (Frankfurt am Main, 1860); ii (Munich, 1863; rev. 2/1878–9) A. Riegl: , Grundlagen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin, 1893/R 1923) H. Wölfflin: ‘Das Problem des Stils in der bildenden Kunst’, Sber. Preuss. Akad. Wiss., xxi (1912), pp. 572–8 H. Wölfflin: Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stil-Entwicklung in der neueren Kunst (Munich, 1913); Eng. trans. by M. D. Hottinger as Principles of Art History (New York, 1932) L. Venturi: Il gusto dei primitivi (Bologna, 1926) H. Wölfflin: Die Kunst der Renaissance: Italien und das deutsche Formgefühl (Munich, 1931) P. Frankl: Das System der Kunstwissenschaft (Brünn and Leipzig, 1938) M. Schapiro: ‘Style’, Anthropology Today, ed. S. Tax (Chicago, 1953), also in Aesthetics Today, ed. M. Philipson and P. J. Gudel (New York, 1961, rev. 1980) E. Panofsky: ‘The First Page of ’s “Libro”’, Meaning in the (Chicago, 1955, rev. 1982) T. Munroe: ‘Style in the Arts’, Toward Science in Aesthetics (New York, 1956) N. Ivanoff: ‘Stile e maniera’, Saggi & Mem. Stor. A., 1 (1957), pp. 107–64 S. Ullmann: Style in the French Novel (Cambridge, 1957) W. Weisbach: Stilbegriffe und Stilphänomene, vier Aufsätze (Vienna and Munich, 1957)

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J. L. Fischer: ‘Art Styles as Cultural Cognitive Maps’, Amer. Anthropologist, lxiii (1961), pp. 79–93 J. S. Ackerman: ‘A Theory of Style’, J. Aesth. & A. Crit., xx (1962), pp. 227–37 F. Piel: ‘Stilbegriff und die Geschichtlichkeit der Kunst’, Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie im 19. Jahrhundert, Prob. Kstwiss., i (Berlin, 1963); review by E. H. Gombrich in A. Bull., 46 (1964), pp. 418–20 E. E. Viollet-le-Duc: L’Architecture raisonée, ed. H. Damisch (Paris, 1964) E. H. Gombrich: ‘Style’, International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. D. L. Sills, xv (New York, 1968) E. Panofsky: The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer (Princeton, 1971) E. Panofsky: Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art (New York, 1972) N. Goodman: ‘The Status of Style’, Crit. Inq., 1 (1975), pp. 799–811 G. Bazin: Le Langage des styles (Paris, 1976) S. Alpers: ‘Style Is What you Make It: The Visual Arts Once Again’, The Concept of Style, ed. B. Lang (Philadelphia, 1979), pp. 95–117 J. Derrida: ‘Illustrer, dit-il …’, Ateliers aujourd’hui: François Loubrieu, Jacques Derrida (exh. cat., Paris, Pompidou, 1979) J. Derrida: Spurs: Nietzsche’s Styles, Eng. trans. by B. Harlow (Chicago and London, 1979) G. Kubler: ‘Towards a Reductive Theory of Visual Style’, The Concept of Style, ed. B. Lang (Philadelphia, 1979) K. Walton: ‘Style and the Products and Processes of Art’, The Concept of Style, ed. B. Lang (Philadelphia, 1979) R. Wollheim: ‘Pictorial Style: Two Views’, The Concept of Style, ed. B. Lang (Philadelphia, 1979) J. D. Prown: ‘Style as Evidence’, Winterthur Port., xv/3 (1980), pp. 197–210 J. Bialostocki: Stil und Ikonographie (Cologne, 1981) D. P. Braun and S. Plog: ‘Evolution of “Tribal” Social Networks: Theory and Prehistoric North American Evidence’, Amer. Ant., xxxxii (1982), pp. 504–25 M. Brown: ‘The Renaissance Is the Baroque: On the Principle of Wölfflin’s Art History’, Crit. Inq., 9 (1982), pp. 379–404 ‘Style’, Grand Dictionnaire universel du XIXe siècle, xiv (Geneva and Paris, 1982) W. Sauerländer: ‘From Stilus to Style: Reflections on the Fate of a Notion’, A. Hist., vi (1983) M. Bernal: The Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785–1985, i of Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New Brunswick, 1987) J. Elkins: ‘Art History Without Theory’, Crit. Inq., 14 (1988), pp. 354–78 P. Frankl: Die Fragen des Stils (Weinheim, 1988) E. Panofsky: ‘Das Problem des Stils in der Kunstgeschichte’, Aufsätze zu Grundfragen der Kunstwissenschaft, ed. H. Oberer and E. Verheyen (Berlin, 1988) H. Möbius and H. Olbrich: ‘Zur Problematik der Begriffe “Früh” und “Spät” im kunsthistorischen Prozess’, Stil und Epoche, ed. F. Möbius and H. Sciurie (Dresden, 1989) E. Pasztory: ‘Identity and Difference: The Uses and Meanings of Ethnic Styles’, Cultural Differentiation and Cultural Identity in the Visual Arts, ed. S. J. Barnes and W. S. Melion (Washington, DC, 1989), pp. 15–38 R. Schukale: ‘Die Unbrauchbarkeit der gängigen Stilbegriffe und Entwicklungsvorstellungen’, Stil und Epoche, ed. F. Möbius and H. Sciurie (Dresden, 1989) H. Honour and J. Fleming: The Visual Arts: A History (New York, 1991) A. I. Duff, G. A. Clark and T. J. Chadderdon: ‘ in the Early : A Conceptual Odyssey’, Cambridge Archaeol. J., ii (1992), pp. 211–29 M. Olin: Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s (University Park, PA, 1992)

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