Delineating the history of art literature by genre: Julius von Schlosser revisited

Abstract

Julius von Schlosser’s Die Kunstliteratur (1924) is a monumental handbook that has been used by generations of art historians. The present paper provides the first systematic analysis of its genesis alongside Schlosser’s biography from 1891 on – his objectives, his path and his doubts. Schlosser redefined the study of written sources in art history by shifting the focus to literary texts. He distanced himself from the study of archival documents (which tended to serve the histories of individual artworks) and instead sought to gain broader knowledge of the ‘spirit’ of each epoch. Around 1922 he envisioned a more modern ‘theory and history of art historiography’, although nothing ever came of it. The second part of the paper shows that, even before 1924, there were attempts to write histories of art literature with sources organised by literary genres and not, as with Schlosser, according to epochs. It argues that the following categories had a major impact on the artistic discourse in early modern Europe: treatises on the arts, artist biographies, histories of artistic monuments, monographs on single artworks, poetry about artworks, topographical works, collection and exhibition catalogues, and art criticism.