Visions of Art History

Whitney Davis is George C. and Helen N. Pardee Distinguished Professor Emeritus of History & Theory of Ancient & Modern Art at the University of California at Berkeley and 2024–29 Distinguished Scientist and Scholar of the NOMIS Foundation, Zürich. He is the author of Visuality and Virtuality: Images and Pictures from Prehistory to the Present (Princeton University Press, 2017), A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton University Press, 2011), and five previous books on prehistoric, ancient, and modern arts and on the history and theory of sexuality.

• PrefaceSources and AcknowledgementsList of Illustrations Introduction: Organisation, Origins and AutobiographyThe Organisation of This BookGenealogical Connections and Underlying ThemesAn Intellectual AutobiographyPart One—Ancient Art and Modern ThoughtChapter 1: Hegel and the ‘Symbolic Art’ of Ancient Egypt‘Symbolic Art’ in Ancient EgyptThe Cognitive Structure of the SymbolTheriomorphic Symbols in Ancient EgyptThe Anthropomorphic CriterionSymbolic Art and Cosmological PerspectivismChapter 2: Walter Pater and the Classical Ideal in ArtNachahmung: The Dialectic of the Delicate PauseRhythmos: The Configuration of the Pregnant TypeThe Temporal Disparity of Pause and TypeChapter 3: How Modernism Redefined ClassicismThe Breakdown of Modern Neoclassical TechniqueNaturalism in Classical Greek ArtClassical Greek Naturalism and Pure Abstraction in ArtPart Two—Art and PsychologyChapter 4: Heinrich Wölfflin and the History of VisionThe Double Root of Style—Histories and MetaphorsThe ‘Wölfflinian Method’Formalism and FormalisticismThe Root of the Double Root of StyleThe Effect of Picture on PicturePost-Wölfflinian Vision HistoricismNeuroaesthetics and Vision HistoricismChapter 5: ‘Self-Analysis’ and Freud’s Picture of RomeThree Comparisons for the PsycheFreud’s Graphic Representations of Psychic HistoryRepresentations of the Archaeology of RomeComposite FormationsComposite Formations and the UnconsciousChapter 6: Schema and Correction: The Origins of Gombrich’s Psychology of Pictorial RepresentationBackgrounds and OverviewsThe ‘Egyptian Methods’Löwy’s ‘Memory Pictures’Erwin Panofsky on ‘Egyptian Methods’, Schäfer and Löwy‘Phenomenal Regression to the Real Object’The Origins of ‘Schema’: F. C. Bartlett’s Remembering and the ‘Effort After Meaning’Refinements of ‘Schema’, and the Final FormulaMany Metaphors of Mind: ‘Mental Sets’, ‘Models’ and ‘Maps’Ethological Perspectives: Substitutes, Classes and Innate Releasing MechanismsPart Three—Problems of the SymbolChapter 7: Franz Boas’s Theory of the Beholder’s SharePrimitive Art and Boasian AnthropologyBoasian Iconographic Disjunction—The Case of the Chilkat BlanketExplaining Contradiction: Formalism, Memory and TranslationWhat Is ‘Reading-In’?Reading-In as a Theory of ProjectionAspective Obligatoriness in Seeing and in Natural LanguageBoasian Structuralism?Chapter 8: ‘Perspective as “Symbolic Form”’: The Dialogues between Ernst Cassirer, Martin Heidegger and Erwin PanofskyPictorial Perspective and the Symbolic Forms of SpaceCassirer, Heidegger, and Hegel’s LadderTranscendental Imagination and Sensuous ReasonThe Successions and Recursions of PerspectiveChapter 9: Erwin Panofsky’s Art History and the ‘Tyranny of Humanism’Art History and ‘The Humanities’The ‘Two Cultures’‘Art History as a Humanistic Discipline’Philosophy of HumanismArt History and the Tyranny of the HumanitiesPart Four—Philosophy and Anthropology of ArtChapter 10: Arthur Danto on the Birth of ArtNatural Pictorial Competence and Natural Artistic CapacityArt in the Narrow Sense: Vorkunsten and TransfigurationArt in the Larger Sense: Ausderkunstweltkunstleren and Pre-Historical ArtChapter 11: Analogue and Digital Pictures in the Age of New Media (Homage to Nelson Goodman)Analogue and Digital in Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art‘The Sketch’: Pictorial Symbol SchemesPictorial Schemes as Analogue‘Continuous Correlation’ in Analogue Symbol SchemesThe De-Differentiation of Analogue and DigitalCo-Mingling Analogue and Digital in New Media ArtMaking Analogies DigitallyDigital Analogy to the Digital World—or to the Analogue?Chapter 12: Abducting the Agency of Art: Alfred Gell’s Anthropology of ArtAbducting and IndexingGellograms and Art HistoryThe Phenomenology of the Art-Index and its AgencyIndecipherability, Plurality, Regress and Opacity in the Abduction of AgencyPart Five—Visual Culture Studies and World Art StudiesChapter 13: Michael Baxandall and Art-Historical ReconstructionThe Triangle of Reenactment and the Idiographic StancePopper, Gombrich, and Baxandall on ‘Historism’Reenactment in Panofsky’s IconologyReenactment in Collingwood’s Philosophy of HistoryBaxandall and the Reenactment of Thought in ArtNo Re-Thinking in Art HistoryThe Parameters of Art-Historical Reconstruction‘Good Pictures’ and Visual CulturesIdiography and Nomology in Art HistoryFrom Cosmology to ConnoisseurshipChapter 14: The Analytics of Visual Culture StudiesArt History and Visual Culture Studies‘Visuality’: Visual Culture Studies and Visual StudiesCultural Studies and AestheticsAnalytics of Visual Culture: ‘Look’ and ‘Likeness’Chapter 15: Radical WAS: Art, History and World Art StudiesWAS and the Diversity of World ArtsWAS and GlobalisationThe Historical Order of World Art: Form-Classes and the Rule of SeriesThe Historical Order of World Art: Conjunction and DevolutionThe Ontology and the (Pre-)Historicality of Art in WASChapter 16: ‘Abstraction to the Notional’: David Summers’s Principle of World Art HistorySummers’s Post-FormalismAbstractionAbstraction to the NotionalThe Evolutionary Paleoanthropology of Abstraction to the NotionalPotential and Resistance in Becoming-FormAbstraction from Size and the Matter of Sizing in Metric NaturalismAbstractions of PlanarityGombrich and Summers on Western ModernismThe Qua-Operator in FacturePart Six—Art, Eye, and BrainChapter 17: John Onians’s NeuroarthistoryJohn Onians’s ‘Neuroarthistory’The Fundamental Propositions of NeuroarthistoryJasper Johns’s No (1961)Melville Herskovits’s Anthropology of Visual PerceptionGombrich’s ‘Schemas’ and NeuroarthistoryBaxandall’s ‘Period Eye’ and NeuroarthistoryBildwissenschaft and NeuroarthistoryPsychoanalysis and NeuroarthistoryPositive Plasticity and Destructive Plasticity‘Neuro’ and ‘Evo-Devo’Evolution and Speciation of the Visual BrainNeuroarthistory as FormalismRecursions and RegressChapter 18: The Mondrian StimulusDesigning a Colour Mondrian Stimulus‘Binding’ Unbound?The Mondrian Stimulus Bottom-Up and Top-DownA Real Mondrian in Different VisualitiesWill the Real Mondrian Please Stand Up?Forms of Likeness: The Afterlives of the StimuliWhat Makes the Difference?Why Mondrian?Afterword: Afterwards, by Sarah Betzer“But I am an art historian…” by Aron Vinegar