Kaleidoscope – Art History as a Science, a fairly young and fairly German science

Curious about the history of art?

Wherever you look, it always starts with the history of art history .

Confusing, but logical – art history is a science, and science accompanies us for a shorter time overall than we are usually aware of:

• Homo sapiens, or Homo, has existed for approximately 200,000 years and occupies a special position as a human being (the justification of which has become increasingly controversial in recent times, but that is a separate topic).
• Since around 3000 BC, we speak of the “beginnings of science” in the ancient high cultures of the Near East (Sumer in Mesopotamia, Egypt, Indus Valley Civilization)
• The “age of science” has therefore only lasted a fraction of human history, around 2.5% to date…
• That's about 5,000 years to date, and since the first records also come from the "ancient Orientals", this is where the writing of history begins.
• The entire historical library of mankind is therefore only 5,000 years old; it's quite astonishing what can be produced in just a few years in terms of written material.

For a good part of these 5,000 years of recorded history, famous men reported on everything imaginable from their time, including art – but never only on art.

It sounds as if art history itself doesn't have a very long history, and that's exactly the case:

It was only about 500 years ago, during the Renaissance of the 15th and 16th centuries, that famous men first wrote “only about art.” The impetus for this exclusive focus on art came from artists: Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci made sketches based on a book by the Roman Vitruvius , who had written about architecture and art in 33/22 BC.

Leonardo Da Vinci drew his “Vitruvian Man” according to the proportions established by Vitruvius; Leonardo Da Vinci's mastery and his reference to Vitruvius, who had worked long before him, inspired the first art historian to write the first art historical treatise a little later.

You're familiar with the work that "gave impetus to art history": the "Vitruvian Man" is the figure of a man in a circle and square, the one discussed when talking about the "Golden Ratio." A truly astonishing work in which Leonardo da Vinci (almost) casually squared the circle..

The first art historian was named Giorgio Vasari , who lived in Italy from 1511 to 1574 and was court painter to the Medici.

His first, and thus the first, history of art was published in 1550. He describes the famous Italian artists of his time, from the Early Renaissance (around 1250) until his death in 1574. He compiles a list of nearly 100 artists, some of whom (Fra Angelico, Sandro Botticelli, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Filippo Brunelleschi, Giotto, Paolo Uccello, Raphael, Titian, Leonardo da Vinci) are still known to every child today, at least by one of their names.

In these early works, Vasari also coined the terms Gothic, Mannerism and Renaissance , which are now part of everyday language.

"Gothic" in a nice way – that's what the follower of ancient art called the medieval art style because he perceived it as "gotico," Italian for strange, barbaric, chaotic (and this influence is still felt today; the Gothics named their culture exactly the same way out of similarly dark and eerie feelings).

The history of art history now took a geographical turn; Vasari was followed by others, until the first German art historian, Johann Joachim Winckelmann , “The History of Art of Antiquity in 2 Volumes,” in 1764 .

Winckelmann was by then in Rome and in 1763 had been appointed overseer of Roman antiquities by Pope Clement XIII, but art history remained in Germany: Here, on the threshold of the 19th century, lies the birth of art history as an independent scientific discipline, when the first professorship for art history was established in Göttingen in 1799.

Until 1933, art history remained dominated by German-speaking scholars and German-speaking universities; there was a Berlin School and a Vienna School , a Munich School and a Hamburg School , with famous scholars whose names and works are still known to every art historian today.

During the Nazi era, many important art historians were lost in Germany , whose work abroad led to the creation of several important centers of art historical research: in Great Britain the Warburg Institute, Courtauld Institute and Oxford, and in the United States at the universities of Princeton, Columbia, Berkeley and Stanford.

Of course, there has been and still is extraordinarily successful and interesting scholarly work in art history in the rest of the world, but we are the masters of state-funded art history scholarship:

There are still a few state-run art history research institutions outside of Germany compared to the abundance of public art history centers in Germany. There are five German research institutions for art history and a remarkable 36 university institutes. Anyone who wants to explore the past of art, rather than create it, is definitely in the right place in Germany.

one fifth of the most internationally successful artists – listed on www.artfacts.net, the world-renowned “gallery guide for modern, contemporary and emerging art”

For those who fear that too much tax money is being spent on art and culture, here are some comparative figures:

In 2013, we had a federal budget of 310 billion, of which 1.2 billion or 0.38% went to arts and culture funding, but that is only around 13%, because arts and culture are primarily the responsibility of the states and municipalities; extrapolated, we arrive at around 9.25 billion in state spending on arts and culture (source: bundesregierung.de) .

This contrasts with approximately one trillion euros that, according to the European Parliament, are lost annually through tax fraud, tax evasion, tax avoidance and aggressive tax planning = tax flight as a business model ( www.blaetter.de/ ) .

For Germany, this amounts to roughly 35 billion euros, almost a tenth of our budget and nearly four times the total amount Germany spends on art and culture. Incidentally, this also equates to 2,000 euros per EU citizen, for every EU citizen, entirely without considering private tax evasion, which is supposed to amount to only a twentieth of what companies contribute to us by not taxing losses.

The fear of a shortage of public funds therefore has less to do with waste on art (or other purposes) and more to do with the active misappropriation of these funds. Many of us actively contribute to this by buying from companies that are headquartered elsewhere and pay their taxes elsewhere, if at all.

Every consumer can actively generate tax revenue by buying from smaller companies that cannot afford to have a business location on beautiful, distant islands and therefore pay their taxes here; this applies on the internet as well as in real life.

Whether with or without government funding: art and art history can be quite entertaining, as seen in the following kaleidoscopes, which initially offer some glimpses into art history.