In defence of Baroque : the Wolfflin-Frankl-Giedion tradition

Abstract

If there was a style which took long to be academically and stylistically respected, it was the Baroque. The text which made it worth intellectual appreciation is Renaissance und Barock, translated into English as Renaissance and Baroque, by Heinrich Wölfflin. This publication, issued in 1888, had rendered Baroque an acceptable theme for scholarship. Until then, it “had been considered too pathological to be worthy of serious study”. Wölfflin had established a tradition of systematic, comparative, empirico-analytical research which was developed further from teacher to student. He, who in 1893 was appointed professor of art history at the University of Basel to succeed his teacher Jacob Burckhardt, the lead authority in the historiography of art and culture at the time, had taught the Czech scholars Paul Frankl and Sigfried Giedion. The former, later Wölfflin’s assistant, had critically challenged and developed his master’s ideas in his publication Die Entwicklungsphasen der neueren Baukunst, translated as Principles of Architectural History: The Four Phases of Architectural Style, 1420– 1900, hereafter shortened to Principles of Architectural History. This text was instrumental ‘to induce his reluctant contemporaries to approach Baroque architecture sympathetically’.4 It was published in 1914, a year earlier than Wölfflin’s publication Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe, translated as Principles of Art History.5 Unlike his teacher, Frankl was ‘reluctant to use this term [Baroque], which was then still so charged with negative overtones’.6 As James Sloss Ackerman observed, this Wölfflin-Frankl tradition was continued by Sigfried Giedion through his publication Space, Time and Architecture: The Growth of a New Tradition.7 This paper aims to outline the contributions of the main protagonists of this tradition through their respective above-mentioned text, in defence of Baroque.