'(Un)richtige Aufnahme': Renaissance sculpture and the visual historiography of art history by Johnson, GA

“…For instance, Wölfflin's highly influential pairs of formalist terms for analysing works of art published in 1915 in his Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe may well have emerged from his close consideration of photographs of sculpture, a suggestion that will be discussed in greater detail below.3 This essay follows Wölfflin's lead in using the visual reproduction of Italian Renaissance sculpture by canonical figures such as Donatello, Michelangelo and their contemporaries to explore the implications of one of the central features of art history: while art historians ostensibly study things, in practice, they often look at images of things more than at the things themselves. …”