comparison and contrast

AESTHETIC COMPARISON AND CONTRAST
Although Worringer’s ideas were highly generalised and subsequently
fell out of fashion, his thesis had attempted to account for stylistic
difference and contrast. Among the art historians who is generally
regarded as having made the most significant and durable contribution
to the discipline’s methodology was Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1944).
In his major work, Principles of Art History (1915) Wölfflin
expounded a basis for comparative visual analysis which followed
art theories and art histories 23
the opposition of the linear and the painterly. From this he set out
five pairs of concepts which are as follows:
• linear versus painterly
• plane versus recession
• closed form versus open form
• multiplicity versus unity
• absolute clarity versus clarity.
Although these terms were devised to characterise successive
periods of High Renaissance and Baroque art, they have since become
widely used in the description and comparison of art outside
Wölfflin’s original formulation. For instance, we might describe
Jacques-Louis David’s (1748–1825) painting Oath of the Horatii,
1784 (Figure 12, p. 63) as highly linear because the entire composition
is so clearly dominated by the use of outline and the picking out of
individual objects or detail, rather than the use of painterly and
tonal effect which is largely limited to the female figures on the
right margin. By contrast, we might describe Sargent’s portrait
(Figure 21, p. 145) as painterly for the opposite reason. Or to take
the third descriptive pair, the painting by Agnolo Bronzino
(1503–72) (Figure 15, p. 91) is an example of an open form in which
the arrangement and gestures of the figure grouping deliberately
point out to us and beyond the picture frame. By contrast, David’s
painting is framed around the central figure grouping which is the
principal focus of our gaze.
Such comparisons and orderings only make sense in relation
to each other. Although these opposing pairs have a general
descriptive value, they were established for a distinct tradition of
mimetic or naturalistic art – Renaissance and Baroque. Similarly,
they follow particular assumptions about the extent to which
artistic and cultural styles evolve in disaffinity or contrast with
what went before. Wölfflin emphasised the importance of actually
looking at specifics rather than mapping out highly generalised
schemas like Worringer, and to a lesser extent Riegl. His comparative
model and a belief in an empirically based art history which
necessitated wide-ranging, interdisciplinary knowledge set the
benchmark for European art history in the first half of the twentieth
century.