Three Returns to Rumohr

Abstract

This article makes a fundamental contribution to the understanding of the development of art history as a discipline. Kroupa shows the genesis of the first “historics” of art by Carl Friedrich von Rumohr (1785-1843) and his influence on later, major figures in art history: first, Gottfried Semper and Moritz Thausing; second, Julius von Schlosser, Vincenc Kramář, and Václav Richter; and finally Michael Baxandall. Their return to Rumohr signals an interest in the authority of the pictorial, visually received order in works of art and the surrounding historical, social, and cultural circumstances. While Schlosser’s and Richter’s interest was motivated by a perceived crisis in historicism, contemporary thinking seeks to revise historicism via Enlightenment (and therefore pre-historicist) concepts.