Ingrid Vermeulen - Böcker

Schools of art represent one of the building blocks of art history. The notion of a school of art emerged in artistic discourse and disseminated across various countries in Europe during the early modern period. Whilst a school of art essentially denotes a group of artists or artworks, it came to be configured in multiple ways, encompassing different meanings of learning, origin, style, or nation, and mediated in various forms via academies, literature, collections, markets and galleries. Moreover, it contributed to competitive debate around the hierarchy of art and artists in Europe. The ensuing fundamental instability of the notion of a school of art helped to create a pluriform panorama of both distinct and interconnected artistic traditions within the European art world. This edited collection brings together 20 articles devoted to selected case studies from the Italian peninsula, the Low Countries, France, Spain, England, the German Empire, and Russia.

Books on art history are nearly always lavishly illustrated with quality colour reproductions of famous masterpieces. Yet this has not always been the case: it was only in the eighteenth century that art books came to be illustrated with beautiful images. Picturing Art History shows how the fundamentally new notion of the history of art as a visual history was responsible for this development. In the age before photography, paper collections of prints and drawings offered the only way to picture the artistic past. For the first time, illustrations became indispensable toolsas the new belief grew that art works rather than artists were the measure of the artistic past. Internationally renowned art scholars such as Bottari (1689-1775), Winckelmann (1717-1768) and d’Agincourt (1730-1814) collected reproductions in the form of prints and drawings, triggering discussions of the nature of illustrations as representations of art, classification of reproductions to demonstrate trends in art history, and the relationship between image and text in the art literature. With the help of illustrations, art history became an extraordinary visual experience, vital to the understanding of the history of art.