Discipline Of Art History Research Articles

Introduction

Introduction Reiko Tomii (bio) Founded in 2003 by Miwako Tezuka and myself, PoNJA-GenKon is a scholarly listserv for a wide range of people interested in postwar Japanese art history, from graduate students to scholars, from collectors to museum and other art professionals, with English as our shared language. The acronym is taken from Post-Nineteen forty-five Japanese Art History Discussion Group / Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (現代美術懇談会). Over the past decade, as an active forum for exchanging ideas and information, PoNJA-GenKon (ポンジャ現懇 in Japanese) has grown to more than 200 registered members (www.ponja-genkon.net). In essence a virtual presence on the Internet, we have however, made a conscious effort to embrace and encourage new research in a more concrete and physical form by organizing and co-organizing panels, symposiums, and conferences. This effort has resulted in six such programs (see Table), followed by the most recent symposium that celebrated our tenth anniversary in September 2014. It is gratifying to report that "Ponja" today signifies shorthand for both the group itself and our field of study in reflection of our continuing presence and contribution to the disciplines of art history and museology. The 10th anniversary symposium embraced the traditions that had begun with our very first program in 2005. We have collaborated with other academic and museological institutions to create a forum for discussion; we have collaborated with specialists outside the field (mainly as discussants), in order to expand our communicative reaches; we have incorporated artist-practitioners in our programing (often through video/film screenings and live performance presentations) in recognition that the foundation of our study has been built upon these artists' creativity; and we have presented a wide range of topics, perspectives, and methodologies offered by both graduate students and professionals (see Program Summary and Abstracts). The tenth anniversary has offered us a rare moment of reflection. Looking back, we can see two momentums that propelled the evolution of Ponja in the English-speaking [End Page 248] sphere. The first centers on Alexandra Munroe's landmark exhibition in 1994, Japanese Art After 1945: Scream Against the Sky, and especially its English-language publication (published by Abrams), which has come to serve as a textbook for the subject. This publication was a substantial expansion of the initial English-Japanese bilingual exhibition catalogue issued by the Yokohama Art Museum, which originated with the exhibition before it traveled to the United States. I myself was immensely inspired by this publication (for which I served as a de facto editor as well as a contributor), as were more than a handful of graduate students, who would later tell me the impact the book and the exhibition had on their work. Munroe's work forms the basis for what I call the first wave of Ponja scholarship, along with my subsequent work on 1960s art in Japan (including my contribution to the 1999 and 2001 exhibitions Global Conceptualism and Century City), and the work of early colleagues such as Bert Winther-Tamaki (including his 2001 book, Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years). The second momentum of Ponja scholarship surrounds the expansion of the field by the scholars and graduate students inspired by the first wave. The early signs of vitality were observed with Midori Yoshimoto's 2005 book, Into Performance: Japanese Women Artists in New York. By the early 2010s, the second wave surged, with a series of exhibitions and publications: Ming Tiampo's 2011 book Gutai: Decentering Modernism, Mika Yoshitake's 2012 exhibition and catalogue Requiem for the Sun: The Art of Mono-ha, and Tiampo and Munroe's 2013 exhibition and catalogue Gutai: Splendid Playground. This understanding of Ponja's development has informed the title of the tenth anniversary symposium: "For a New Wave to Come: Post-1945 Japanese Art History Now." In order to create a new momentum for continuing expansion of the field, we have sought to identify developing research and ideas. In curating the program, we have emphasized two aspects of postwar Japanese art history, and by casting a wide net, we have endeavored to expand on the hitherto understudied period of the...

Arkitektur som forskningsfelt

<p>This article gives a brief overview of research on architecture by art historians at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, and addresses some challenges for research on buildings within the discipline of Art history generally, and in the northernmost parts of Scandinavia particularly. Art history’s history of monuments has during the last four to five decades been expanded by new theoretical and aesthetic perspectives on architecture, and is questioned by a more comprehensive and socially distinguished research on the built environment. Researchers on architecture in the northern areas experience these tensions more directly, which thus provides an opportunity to question methods of writing architectural history. </p>

Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas

Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas

Whither Art History in the Non-Western World: Exploring the Other('s) Art Histories

The discipline of art history in the Philippines is a postcolonial American construct, its roots going back to the 1950s. This young field journeyed across the Pacific in the mid-twentieth century ...

The mapping of power in Renaissance Italy: painted cartographic cycles in social and intellectual context

How did maps of the distant reaches of the world communicate to the public in an era when exploration of those territories was still ongoing and knowledge about them remained incomplete? And why did Renaissance rulers frequently commission large-scale painted maps of those territories when they knew that they would soon be proven obsolete by newer, more accurate information? The Mapping of Power in Renaissance Italy addresses these questions by bridging the disciplines of art history and the histories of science, cartography, and geography to closely examine surviving Italian painted maps that were commissioned during a period better known for its printed maps and atlases. Challenging the belief that maps are strictly neutral or technical markers of geographic progress, this well-illustrated study investigates the symbolic and propagandistic dimensions of these painted maps as products of the competitive and ambitious European court culture that produced them.

The traveling artist in the Italian Renaissance: geography, mobility, and style

This important and innovative book examines artists' mobility as a critical aspect of Italian Renaissance art. It is well known that many eminent artists such as Cimabue, Giotto, Donatello, Lotto, Michelangelo, Raphael, and Titian traveled. This book is the first to consider the sixteenth-century literary descriptions of their journeys in relation to the larger Renaissance discourse concerning mobility, geography, the act of creation, and selfhood. David Young Kim carefully explores relevant themes in Giorgio Vasari's monumental Lives of the Artists, in particular how style was understood to register an artist's encounter with place. Through new readings of critical ideas, long-standing regional prejudices, and entire biographies, The Traveling Artist in the Italian Renaissance provides a groundbreaking case for the significance of mobility in the interpretation of art and the wider discipline of art history.

The Re-Birth of Venus

This paper examines the place of the Aphrodite Kallipygos statue in European aesthetics in the early modern period (ca. 1300–1800) and traces the impact it may have had on dress in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. The study contextualizes the sculpture within the discipline of art history and the field of dress studies. It focuses on the unfitted tunic dress cinched below the bust, and on how some chemise dresses came to be worn in a new way in the 1790s. At this time new embodiment practices emerged in French fashion. A new columnar silhouette was on the rise that paid homage to the “natural body” seen in statuary, and cinching below the bust enhanced the delineation of individual breasts. Subsequently we witness the progressive lessening or elimination of voluminous underpinnings, allowing the controversial delineation of the lower body through clothes to take place, and the rise of a new erogenous zone, the buttocks, which were hallmarks of the Aphrodite Kallipygos. Through this article, the authors aim to demonstrate with visual and written sources that this statue was sufficiently known, admired, and copied to have had an effect on late-eighteenth-century dress behaviors.

The Art and Politics of Artists' Personas: The Case of Yayoi Kusama

This essay presents persona as a trajectory of contemporary art in the post- industrial art world, in which artists’ “work” increasingly includes non-art activities such as networking and media publicity. After discussing pressing issues in art scholarship in regards to the disciplinary tradition and persona studies, I analyse the image of the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929) who has been operating in the Western-dominated international art world since the 1960s. Arriving in the U.S. in 1957, Kusama quickly became one of the most prolific and notorious artists in New York. However, by the early 1970s she returned to Japan and has since been living voluntarily in a psychiatric hospital. Art historical assessments of Kusama’s work have generally been confined within the Western theoretical parameters of feminism and psychoanalysis. Here, I draw attention to her persona: a “non-art” topic that has largely been ignored within the modernist discipline of Art History, which insists on an object-based formalist methodology. I critique this tendency by demonstrating how an artist’s persona can become a medium of art and politics, and how an artist’s artworks can become by-products of the artist’s larger-than-life public persona. I trace Kusama’s effort at persona cultivation from New York in the early 1960s, and particularly explore her satirical and ironic use of the cultural, racial, and gendered stereotypes about Japanese women. Based on archival research and aesthetics analysis, I argue that Kusama exploited the commercial value of her Japanese body and identity at a time when escalating Cold War national pride and xenophobia jeopardised her career in New York. By discussing how she pursued self-promotion and commercial success, this paper also portrays the commercialization of art and artists during the 1960s.

Introduction

This special issue of Visual Resources brings together studies of some of the principal journals and themes related to the history of the international art press in the twentieth century. Journals have played a crucial role in the art world and in the study of art history: often the site of new scholarship or interpretation, they also illuminate the role of the art critic and art criticism and the relationship of these to artistic practice. Moreover, periodicals often reveal the complexities of the wider art world, including the art market and art funding; they can also be examined as works of art in their own right. This special issue explores these and other themes, demonstrating the rich diversity embedded in this nascent field of scholarly research and underscoring the significance of journals within the sphere of art publishing. The collection focuses on the twentieth century, which witnessed the emergence of the modern specialist art magazine. It concludes before the digital revolution in publishing in the early twenty-first century, which has already prompted dramatic changes in the periodicals landscape. Through case studies drawn from across Europe and the United States, this special issue aims to present a significant contribution to a growing body of research and literature within the discipline of art history.

Faith in Facsimile? The Invention of Photography and the Reproduction of Spanish Art

This paper considers the relationship between traditional prints, painted copies, and photography in the reproduction of art, including the development of photomechanical processes in book illustration, from the point of view of the historiography of art. Its aim is to examine the impact of these on the methodology of the emerging discipline of art history and the establishment of a canon of Spanish art during the nineteenth century. Focusing principally on the Scottish writer Sir William Stirling Maxwell (1818-1878), and including comparison and contrast with another pioneer in the historiography of Golden Age art in Spain, the German art historian Carl Justi (1832-1912), it explores some of the concerns they expressed around the reliability of both new and established methods of reproduction of art, including notions of facsimile and translation of meaning, and ponders the continuing relevance of such concerns in today's digital age.1

Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400 by Jeehee Hong

Reviewed by: Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400 by Jeehee Hong Phillip E. Bloom (bio) Jeehee Hong. Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2016. ix, 234 pp. Hardcover $59.00, isbn 978-0-8248-5537-6. Tomb mania has swept the field of Chinese art history in the United States. At the time of the writing of this review, major exhibitions on Qin- and Handynasty tombs are being held concurrently at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the China Institute Gallery in New York. This burgeoning subfield now sees the frequent publication of articles and dissertations, as well as the occasional monograph. Given archaeologists' focus on the excavation of early materials, it is perhaps inevitable that the lion's share of English-language scholarly attention has been devoted to tombs of the Tang and before. Separating itself from this tendency, Jeehee Hong's Theater of the Dead: A Social Turn in [End Page 193] Chinese Funerary Art, 1000–1400 represents an important foray into later tomb spaces. Moreover, Hong's concise volume constitutes an admirable attempt to bring tomb history into dialogue with a wide range of theoretical frameworks for engaging the visual arts, particularly perspectives informed by social history, theater studies, and semiotics. It is a tome that speaks compellingly to Chinese art history's potential to make significant contributions both to multiple subfields of Chinese studies and to the broader discipline of art history. Building on Hong's dissertation (completed at the University of Chicago in 2008) and her extensive series of publications in the intervening years, Theater of the Dead investigates the curious emergence of a new form of visual culture in northern Chinese tombs of the Song through Yuan dynasties—namely, depictions of actors and of theatrical culture more generally. As is well known, it was precisely in this "middle period" that theater rose to society-wide popularity, being performed on street corners, in commercial theaters, temple stages, and private households, and attracting audiences ranging from the imperial family to paupers and monks. Divided into four chapters, a prelude, and a postlude, the book treats a series of chronologically arranged case studies of tombs in Henan and Shanxi Provinces; each exemplifies a different aspect of the theatrical obsessions of tomb-makers and -dwellers during the middle period. An appendix listing all known theatrical images excavated from middle period tombs completes the main text of the tome. Given the unprecedented popularity of theater in the world of the living, as well as its strikingly frequent appearance in the spaces of the dead, Hong argues that a "distinctive mode of visual theatricality mediated [these] disparate realms" (p. 3). Informed by the social experiences of the living, the visual theatricality that structured middle period tombs "subsumed the idea of the afterworld within the frame of living society" (p. 140). Hong's prelude uses a striking Northern Song brick relief of a named actress to launch her inquiry into the postmortem appeal of depictions of contemporaneous theater culture. Defining the scope of the volume's inquiry, the prelude notes that the tombs under examination were all sponsored by members of what Hong, drawing on Dieter Kuhn's scholarship, terms the "local elite"—wealthy, but not office-holding, members of society who had the means and interest to visually represent their cultural passions. Arguably unconstrained by Confucian injunctions against lavish burials or by the precedents of earlier periods, such elites seem to have felt free to develop their own heterodox funerary rites and tomb designs; in both, they drew particularly on their enthusiasm for contemporary theater. Hong also provides a useful survey of depictions of entertainment and performance in earlier tombs and suggests that middle period tomb designers developed new modes of representing such themes—one narrative, the other "theatrical" (in terms of "modality" rather than mere content) (p. 15). [End Page 194] Chapter 1 investigates the narrative mode through a close analysis of Zhu Sanweng's 1096 sarcophagus, excavated in Xingyang, Henan. The two sides...

Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity: The Petrified Gaze by Johannes Siapkas and Lena Sjögren

390 PHOENIX make up the subject of the book, but also for understanding the importance of the myths displayed so prominently in so many ancient Roman homes and tombs. By approaching the interpretation of the reliefs on the sarcophagi through the eyes of the beholder, Zanker makes it impossible ever again to discuss these images solely as decoration or as a window to the afterlife. The new volume, from the series Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation, is beautifully produced and illustrated with photos, many in color, of the sarcophagi. Despite its expense, it is a necessary addition to every library collection of books on Roman art. The College of New Jersey Lee Ann Riccardi Displaying the Ideals of Antiquity: The Petrified Gaze. By Johannes Siapkas and Lena SjÈ ogren. New York and London: Routledge. 2014. Pp. xii, 242. Museum exhibits of ancient artefacts are one of the most common ways people, whether members of the public or specialists, encounter the physical remains of antiquity . However, current displays in museums are rarely considered when discussing the development of the discipline of classical art history and archaeology. This book breaks new ground by including museum exhibits as an important element in the historiography of ancient sculpture. The book is organized into four sections. Part I introduces the aims of the book: to examine how academic debates about ancient sculpture, first begun in eighteenthand nineteenth-century scholarship and reformulated in current research, are reflected in contemporary museum displays and the popular perception of ancient art. Part II, “Discursive Settings,” begins with a historiographical consideration of the early development of the closely intertwined disciplines of classical archaeology (Chapter One) and art history (Chapter Two). An excellent overview of several centuries of studies in ancient sculpture follows (Chapter Three), highlighting influential issues in scholarship ranging from Winkelmann’s1 foundational work in the eighteenth century to that of key twentyfirst -century scholars. Chapter Four concludes this section by focusing on the re-use and re-evaluation of these historic ideas in current scholarship through an examination of individual cases: the Parthenon sculptures, archaic korai, and the contextualization of Roman art. While the overview of sculptural studies is handled with assurance, combining key developments with sweeping fashions influenced by contemporary social, political, and scholarly issues, the treatment of current scholarship is less comprehensive. One important omission is the influence of the modern afterlife and collection history of ancient sculpture on the discipline.2 The omission is curious, since this approach closely relates to both the early development of the discipline and to the museum displays that form the focus of Part III. 1 J. J. Winkelmann, Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (Dresden 1764). 2 For example, V. Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 (Oxford 2009; included in the bibliography); I. Bignamini and C. Hornsby, Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome (New Haven 2010); and C. Bilsel, Antiquity on Display: Regimes of the Authentic in Berlin’s Pergamon Museum (Oxford 2012). BOOK REVIEWS/COMPTES RENDUS 391 This final section, Part III, entitled “Museological Frictions,” examines current permanent displays of ancient sculpture in several international museums and considers how they reflect the debates explored in the published scholarship. After a brief introduction to museum concerns, there is an overview of the evolution of museums and of displays of antiquities (Chapter Five, “Genealogies”). This progresses from the earliest stages of private collections of curiosities to the public museums of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and includes discussion of the use of plaster casts. It is contextualized within the development of the disciplines of art history and classical archaeology already introduced in the opening chapters. The next three chapters use individual examples of museum display as illustrations of the three broad approaches to the study of ancient sculpture already identified. Chapter Six, “Masterpieces,” examines how the concerns of Meisterforschungen and Kopienkritik are carried into exhibits by giving key sculptures preferential treatment (through position, lighting, etc.) as expressions of artistic genius, while divorcing them from other narratives about ancient sculpture. The chapter concludes by considering the popularization of ancient sculpture, exemplified by the Venus de Milo and Nike of Samothrace, which have...

Arts

For historians of medieval Iberian art and architecture, María Rosa Menocal's most important legacy lies in her work's normalization of a culturally decentralized, multidisciplinary frame through which medieval visual objects became part of a broadly shared network of cultural production that was unrestricted by firm boundaries between particular polities or “faith groups.” While Menocal was not the first to advance such an approach, her persuasive promotion of it in works such as The Ornament of the World and the co-authored The Arts of Intimacy dovetailed closely with concurrent trends within the discipline of art history: new attentiveness to the variability of the Iberian cultural economy; a renewed concern with questions of reception and meaning; revived emphasis on close, contextual readings; and an openness to extra-disciplinary methodologies. The conceptual and disciplinary flexibility that Menocal's work encouraged now lies at the very heart of current work on Iberian visual culture.

“The Worthless Stories of Pilgrims”? The Art Historical Imagination of Fifteenth-Century Travelers to Jerusalem

This study analyzes what fifteenth century pilgrims from northern Europe wrote about the art and architecture they encountered while on pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Although these pilgrims did not have the discipline of art history, they nonetheless had a strong art historical imagination that conditioned their reception of old art and architecture. Their attempts at dating objects demonstrate a pre-modern periodization in which important rulers or dynasties matter most, and the terms medieval and Renaissance are unknown. They expected striking objects to have significant histories, studied those objects appearance for clues to those histories, and read a city’s buildings as a trustworthy barometer of its vitality. Lacking our hierarchy of fine and applied arts, they were open to appreciate a wide range of objects, which they frequently praise in terms of their workmanship.

Thoughts on the Digital Future of the Humanities and Art History

The director of a major international art historical think tank shares his thoughts on the implications and opportunities for the discipline of art history in the digital age.

Spatial (Digital) History: A Total Art History?—The Artl@s Project

Historians trying to write a global or a social art history face the same question: how does one treat multiplicity and complexity in a comprehensive framework? Artl@s is a multidisciplinary project that promotes spatialization as a method of investigation and the anchor of an innovative, analytical approach. Its goal is to contribute to what the French Annales School referred to as a “total” art history: writing a serial, transnational, geographical, and multiscale art history that would also address social issues. Artl@s relies on the spatial (digital) method to identify new sites of investigation, uncover unseen patterns of artistic circulation and distribution, open up different dialogues with artwork, dissolve the boundaries between art history and other disciplines, and rethink scholarship through a focus on learning by sharing. As such, it participates in the redefinition of the discipline of art history by embracing the theories and methods of the spatial, global, and digital turns that have challenged humanities over the past decades.

Introduction

The authors introduce this special issue of Visual Resources dedicated to the state of digital art history and provide a framework for the articles therein by establishing an overview of the field of digital humanities, organized in broad categories or phases and made relevant to the discipline of art history.

MAGALI M. CARRERA: Traveling from New Spain to Mexico: Mapping Practices of Nineteenth-Century Mexico. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011.

In an 1835 publication, Mexican statesman and historian Carlos María de Bustamante asked three critical questions of his still formative nation, floundering in the aftermath of Spanish colonization: “¿Quienes somos? ¿de donde venimos? ¿para donde caminamos?” In her important contribution to both cartographic scholarship and to the discipline of art history, Magali Carrera finds the most significant answers to these ponderous queries in the form of the 1885 Átlas pintoresco é histórico de los Estados Unidos Mexicanos by Antonio García Cubas, a multi-talented governmental agent in the Ministry of Development.

‘Blessed Is He, Who Has Seen’: The Power of Ritual Viewing and Ritual Framing in Eleusis

[TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Horn. Hymn. Cer. 480-2 [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Pindar, fr. 121 Bowra [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] Sophocles, fr. 837 Pearson-Radt Blessed is he, who has seen these, among the mortal men who live on earth; but he who is not initiated in the sacred rites, who has had no share in them, he does not have a lot of similar things when he is dead under the vast darkness, says the author of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. These lines have traditionally been interpreted as referring to the spectacles offered to the initiates in the course of the secret initiation of the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of Eleusis, often referred to as [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE INASCII] by our sources. (1) Analogous emphasis on the visual aspect of the spectacle is also given by several other sources, which are conventionally taken to refer to the secret initiation ceremony of the Greater Mysteries of Eleusis: Sophocles, fr. 837 Pearson-Radt (Thrice-blessed among the mortals are those who having seen these sacred rites enter Hades: for them alone there is life, but for the others all is evil); and Pindar, fr. 121 Bowra (Blessed is he who having seen these things has gone under the earth; he knows the end of life; but he also knows the god-given beginning). (2) None of these or any other of our sources gives us a detailed and reliable account of what the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] saw or, as a matter of fact, how the things seen conferred this sense of blessedness, and in what ways this blessedness eased the pain (or was it the fear?) of entering the chambers of Hades, and made the after-death existence endurable. Scholarly speculation on the nature of the things seen (and undoubtedly heard too) by the initiates is abundant. (3) A collage of textual evidence (consisting primarily of testimonies from late Christian and, therefore biased, authors) and iconographical evidence (not necessarily any less ambiguous) has been constructed and reconstructed in almost every possible way; and yet no account can be privileged without the essential leap of faith. Although a summary of some of the most learned reconstructions will be given here, the primary focus of the present essay is not so much on the nature of the things seen, as on the possible ways they were perceived by the initiates and the culturally defined scopic regimes that informed that perception. (4) Vision, Visuality, and Ritually-Centred Visuality A particular focus of this paper will be to introduce, and test the efficacy of, some recent and some more or less well-established developments in the disciplines of art history and visual culture in the study of the mysteric cults in general, and the study of the initiatory process ([TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]) in the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] of Eleusis in particular. Effectively, I argue that, when studying the sources that speak of the process of mystic initiation in Eleusis, more may be gained if we shift our focus from the idea of unqualified and unmediated visual experience (vision) onto the cultural construct that mediates between the eye of the beholder and the things seen (visuality). The point of this exercise is to show that even if we could actually look at what happened within the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], it is quite unlikely that we would be able to see what the initiates saw, as it is extremely difficult to reconstruct with any certainty the complex nexus of sociopolitical and cultural discourses that shaped their gaze, their ways of viewing. Furthermore, I examine Jas Eisner's notion of ritual-centred visuality, not as a possible conceptual framework for understanding the gaze of the pilgrim in the Imperial era, but for considering how ritual framing allows the [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] in the Eleusinian [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] to see sacred visions beyond the constraints of secular visuality. …

Prilog širenju teorijske domene u povijesnom prostoru povijesti umjetnosti

U europskoj kulturnoj tradiciji druge polovine IX. stoljeća, svojim je jasno definiranim predmetnim, prostornim i vremenskim granicama istraživanja zadan okvir discipline povijesti umjetnosti. Međutim, tada se postuliran znanstveni obrazac nije više mogao primijeniti na proučavanje i vrednovanje mnogih umjetničkih praksi XX. stoljeća, temeljenih na istraživanju kulturâ kao diskurzivnih i ideoloških sistema. Zaokret interesa, usmjerio se od kronologijskog proučavanja razvoja umjetničkih stilova, škola i pokreta tijekom europske povijesti umjetnosti, prema kontekstualnom proučavanju istih sadržaja u prostorno vremenskim okvirima niza diskontinuiranih revolucija u nazorima na svijet. Potresnu promjenu unutar discipline izazvala je epohalna promjena paradigme, posrednim utjecajem na znanstvene procese, diktirajući što ćemo istraživati, koja ćemo pitanja postaviti i kako ih strukturirati, te kako ćemo interpretirati rezultate istraživanja. Nevolje s primjenom tradicionalne znanstvene aparature na nove predloške, preslikale su se i na polje estetike koju je dijelom zamijenila interdisciplinarno shvaćena teorija umjetnosti. Naš se interes u tom kontekstu usmjerio na razumijevanje teorijskog područja koje se definira kao povijest povijesti umjetnosti, opisujući put jedne znanosti, u istoimenoj knjizi Uda Kultermanna. Komparirajući sadržaj izabranog poglavlja iz Kultermannove knjige koji se odnosi na razdoblje antike, s analizama istog perioda od strane nekoliko istaknutih teoretičara umjetnosti, priklonili smo se argumentima potonjih koji su dali prednost sadržajnim normama baštinjenih spisa razlučujući time invarijantnu paradigmu vremena iz šture historiografske osnove.