Heinrich Wölfflin

Heinrich Wölfflin (born June 21, 1864, Basel, Switz.—died July 19, 1945, Basel) writer on aesthetics and the most important art historian of his period writing in German.

Wölfflin was educated at the universities of Basel, Berlin, and Munich. His doctoral thesis, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (1886), already showed the approach that he was later to develop and perfect: an analysis of form based on a psychological interpretation of the creative process. He pursued this method in books on the Renaissance and Baroque periods and on Albrecht Dürer: Renaissance und Barock (1888); Die klassische Kunst (1899; The Art of the Italian Renaissance; also titled Classic Art); and Die Kunst Albrecht Dürers (1905). His chief work was Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915; Principles of Art History), which synthesized his ideas into a complete aesthetic system that was to become of great importance in art criticism.

In contrast to the anecdotal approaches that had proved popular in the 19th century, Wölfflin emphasized the formal stylistic analysis of drawing, composition, light, colour, subject matter, and other pictorial elements as they were handled similarly by the painters of a particular period or national school. With this system of comparative stylistic analysis he hoped to establish a set of objective criteria for understanding and evaluating individual works of art. Thanks to Wölfflin, the term Baroque entered the language of cultural history to describe not only a distinctive style (or styles) of architecture but also an entire period and the artistic impulse that prevailed in it. Wölfflin’s distinction between Renaissance and Baroque is often seen as the most successful application of Hegel’s conception of art as an expression of the Zeitgeist, or spirit of the time. Though his approach is no longer widely endorsed, it had great influence on subsequent art historians and helped establish art history as an intellectually rigorous discipline of modern scholarship.

Wölfflin’s work as a professor at the universities of Basel (1893–1901), Berlin (1901–12), Munich (1912–24), and Zürich (1924–34) contributed greatly to the spread of his ideas.