Sammendrag
The concept »style« is fundamental in traditional art history, and the ability to distinguish between artistic styles plays a decisive role in university courses and textbooks. In current art historical scholarship, however, traditional style analysis seems to be of lesser interest than only one generation ago. Although the concept »style« is in frequent use, it is more often employed for other ends than traditional stylistic classification and attribution. In this article, the author aims to categorise the ways in which the concept »style« is used in recent art historical publications and to discuss why traditional style analysis has ceased to interest modern art historians. She points to the theoretical challenges traditional art history has met during the last decades and gives an account for methodological problems inherent in the idea of stylistic evolution and in the practice of style analysis. Art historians who renounce the positivist ambitions of traditional style analysis but still recognise its efficiency as a classificatory method, demonstrate fruitful ways to make use of it in order to study works of art in a broader hermeneutical understanding of the past.
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