Christopher S. Wood Livres

Chart the rise and legacy of the Pre-Raphaelites and see how this most admired British art movement was born. Dozens of reproductions attest to these painters' scrupulous attention to natural details: more than 40 artists are represented, including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Arthur Hughes, Edward Burne-Jones, John William Waterhouse, and Ford Maddox Brown.

An examination of the sixteenth century German landscapist and the tradition of landscape painting in Renaissance Germany.

The centenary of Burne-Jones' death falls in 1998, and here the career of the greatest of all English romantic painters is reassesed. Throughout his lifelong association with William Morris and the Pre-Raphelites, Burne-Jones became one of the major figure in the late 19th-century art world. Here, for the first time in a quater of a century, his work and legacy will be restored to their rightful position as a major European artist.

Today we often identify artifacts with the period when they were made. In more traditional cultures, however, such objects as pictures, effigies, and buildings were valued not as much for their chronological age as for their perceived links to the remote origins of religions, nations, monasteries, and families. As a result, Christopher Wood argues, premodern Germans tended not to distinguish between older buildings and their newer replacements, or between ancient icons and more recent forgeries.             But Wood shows that over the course of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, emerging replication technologies—such as woodcut, copper engraving, and movable type—altered the relationship between artifacts and time.  Mechanization highlighted the artifice, materials, and individual authorship necessary to create an object, calling into question the replica’s ability to represent a history that was not its own. Meanwhile, print catalyzed the new discipline of archaeological scholarship, which began to draw sharp distinctions between true and false claims about the past. Ultimately, as forged replicas lost their value as historical evidence, they found a new identity as the intentionally fictional image-making we have come to understand as art.

This volume introduces to an English-language audience the writings of the so-called new Vienna School of art history. In the 1930s, Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt undertook an ambitious extension of the art historical project of Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905). Sedlmayr and Pächt began with an aestheticist conception of the autonomy and irreducibility of the artistic process. At the same time, they believed they could read entire cultures and worldviews in the work of art. The key to this contextualist alchemy was the concept of “structure,” a kind of deep formal property that the work of art shared with the world. Sedlmayr and Pächt’s project immediately caught the attention of thinkers like Walter Benjamin who were similarly impatient with traditional, cautious empiricist scholarship. But the creativity of the new art history had its dark side. Sedlmayr used his art history as a vehicle for a sweeping critique of modernity that soon escalated into nationalist and outright fascist polemic. Sedlmayr, and by extension the whole scholarly project of Strukturanalyse, were sharply repudiated by Meyer Schapiro and later Ernst Gombrich. The idea of this volume is to bring the drama of this methodological and political encounter to the attention of English-speaking art historians and reveal the analogies between the Vienna School project and the anti-empiricist cultural histories of our own time.

An authoritative history of art history from its medieval origins to its modern predicamentsIn this wide-ranging and authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original and accessible account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline.The book shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance--Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari--measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however--Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich--struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline.Combining erudition with clarity, this book makes a landmark contribution to the understanding of art history.-- "Apollo Magazine"

This study explores the evolution and significance of portraiture during the early Renaissance, examining how artists captured individuality and emotion in their subjects. It delves into the cultural and historical contexts that influenced these artworks, highlighting key figures and techniques that defined the era. Through detailed analysis, the book reveals the impact of these portraits on the development of art and society, offering fresh insights into the relationship between the artist, the sitter, and the viewer.