The verbal and visual In Winckelmann's analysis of style

Abstract

Abstract Style as a concept has played a leading role in the historical and theoretical study of the visual arts, much more so than it has done in literary studies. At the most straightforward level, this is because of the distinctive preoccupation of art history with the taxonomic classification of works of art by place and date of origin and by artist. But it has also been important for the more intellectually ambitious forms of art historical analysis that aim to provide a cultural history of art. Style in this broader sense is envisaged as a visual language, or a mode of representation, within which the art of a culture had to operate.1 It is when used in this stronger sense that the idea of a visual style is inflected by literary and linguistic analysis, as the very term ‘language of art’ demonstrates. Models used in the study of language have been so important2 for the simple reason that style in this stronger sense does not just have to do with the formal visual aspects of a representation, but als...