Editing Style (visual arts) (section)

==History of the concept==
[[File:Ivory Egypt Louvre OA2753.jpg|thumb|left|14th-century [[Islamic art|Islamic]] ornament in ivory, centred on a [[palmette]]; [[Alois Riegl]]'s ''[[Stilfragen]]'' (1893) traced the evolution and transmission of such motifs.]]
Classical art criticism and the relatively few medieval writings on [[aesthetics]] did not greatly develop a concept of style in art, or analysis of it,<ref>classical authors did leave a considerable and subtle body of analysis of style in literature, especially [[rhetoric]]; see Gombrich, 130–131</ref> and though [[Renaissance]] and Baroque writers on art are greatly concerned with what we would call style, they did not develop a coherent theory of it, at least outside architecture:

<blockquote>Artistic styles shift with cultural conditions; a self-evident truth to any modern art historian, but an extraordinary idea in this period [Early Renaissance and earlier]. Nor is it clear that any such idea was articulated in antiquity{{nbsp}}... [[Pliny the Elder|Pliny]] was attentive to changes in ways of art-making, but he presented such changes as driven by technology and wealth.  Vasari, too, attributes the strangeness and, in his view the deficiencies, of earlier art to lack of technological know-how and cultural sophistication.<ref>Nagel and Wood, 92</ref></blockquote>

[[Giorgio Vasari]] set out a hugely influential but much-questioned account of the development of style in Italian painting (mainly) from [[Giotto]] to his own [[Mannerist]] period.  He stressed the development of a [[Florence|Florentine]] style based on ''disegno'' or line-based drawing, rather than [[Venice|Venetian]] colour.  With other Renaissance theorists like [[Leon Battista Alberti]] he continued classical debates over the best balance in art between the [[Realism (visual arts)|realistic]] depiction of nature and idealization of it; this debate was to continue until the 19th century and the advent of [[Modernism]].<ref>See Blunt throughout, with in particular pp. 14–22 on Alberti, 28–34 on Leonardo, 61–64 on Michelangelo, 89–95 and 98–100 on Vasari</ref>

The theorist of [[Neoclassicism]], [[Johann Joachim Winckelmann]], analysed the stylistic changes in Greek classical art in 1764, comparing them closely to the changes in [[Renaissance art]], and "[[Georg Hegel]] codified the notion that each historical period will have a typical style", casting a very long shadow over the study of style.<ref>Elkins, s. 2; Preziosi, 115–117; Gombrich, 136</ref>  Hegel is often attributed with the invention of the [[German language|German]] word ''[[Zeitgeist]]'', but he never actually used the word, although in ''[[Lectures on the Philosophy of History]]'', he uses the phrase ''der Geist seiner Zeit'' (the spirit of his time), writing that "no man can surpass his own time, for the spirit of his time is also his own spirit."<ref>{{citation |chapter-url=https://books.google.com/books?id=khvwPJMzNzMC&pg=PA262 |page=262 |title=The Hegel Dictionary |author=Glenn Alexander Magee |publisher=Continuum International Publishing Group |year=2011 |isbn=9781847065919 |chapter=Zeitgeist}}</ref>

Constructing schemes of the period styles of historic art and architecture was a major concern of 19th century scholars in the new and initially mostly German-speaking field of [[art history]], with important writers on the broad theory of style including [[Carl Friedrich von Rumohr]], [[Gottfried Semper]], and [[Alois Riegl]] in his ''[[Stilfragen]]'' of 1893, with [[Heinrich Wölfflin]] and [[Paul Frankl]] continuing the debate in the 20th century.<ref>Elkins, s. 2, 3; Rawson, 24</ref> [[Paul Jacobsthal]] and [[Josef Strzygowski]] are among the art historians who followed Riegl in proposing grand schemes tracing the transmission of elements of styles across great ranges in time and space. This type of art history is also known as [[Formalism (art)|formalism]], or the study of forms or shapes in art.<ref>Rawson, 24</ref>

Semper, Wölfflin, and Frankl, and later Ackerman, had backgrounds in the history of architecture, and like many other terms for period styles, "Romanesque" and "Gothic" were initially coined to describe [[architectural style]]s, where major changes between styles can be clearer and more easy to define, not least because style in architecture is easier to replicate by following a set of rules than style in figurative art such as painting.  Terms originated to describe architectural periods were often subsequently applied to other areas of the visual arts, and then more widely still to music, literature and the general culture.<ref>Gombrich, 129; Elsner, 104</ref>

In architecture stylistic change often follows, and is made possible by, the discovery of new techniques or materials, from the Gothic [[rib vault]] to modern metal and [[reinforced concrete]] construction.  A major area of debate in both art history and archaeology has been the extent to which stylistic change in other fields like painting or pottery is also a response to new technical possibilities, or has its own impetus to develop (the ''kunstwollen'' of Riegl), or changes in response to social and economic factors affecting patronage and the conditions of the artist, as current thinking tends to emphasize, using less rigid versions of [[Marxist]] art history.<ref>Gombrich, 131–136; Elkins, s. 2; Rawson, 24–25</ref>

Although style was well-established as a central component of art historical analysis, seeing it as the over-riding factor in art history had fallen out of fashion by World War II, as other ways of looking at art were developing,<ref>Kubler in Lang, 163</ref> as well as a reaction against the emphasis on style; for [[Svetlana Alpers]], "the normal invocation of style in art history is a depressing affair indeed".<ref>Alpers in Lang, 137</ref> According to [[James Elkins (art historian)|James Elkins]] "In the later 20th century criticisms of style were aimed at further reducing the Hegelian elements of the concept while retaining it in a form that could be more easily controlled".<ref>Elkins, s. 2 (quoted); see also Gombrich, 135–136</ref> [[Meyer Schapiro]], [[James S. Ackerman|James Ackerman]], [[Ernst Gombrich]] and [[George Kubler]] (''[[The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things]]'', 1962) have made notable contributions to the debate, which has also drawn on wider developments in [[critical theory]].<ref>Elkins, s. 2; analysed by Kubler in Lang, 164–165</ref> In 2010 [[Jas Elsner]] put it more strongly: "For nearly the whole of the 20th century, style art history has been the indisputable king of the discipline, but since the revolutions of the seventies and eighties the king has been dead",<ref>Elsner, 98</ref> though his article explores ways in which "style art history" remains alive, and his comment would hardly be applicable to archaeology.

The use of terms such as [[Counter-Maniera|Counter-''Maniera'']] appears to be in decline, as impatience with such "style labels" grows among art historians.  In 2000 [[Marcia B. Hall]], a leading art historian of 16th-century Italian painting and mentee of [[Sydney Joseph Freedberg]] (1914–1997), who invented the term, was criticised by a reviewer of her ''After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century'' for her "fundamental flaw" in continuing to use this and other terms, despite an apologetic "Note on style labels" at the beginning of the book and a promise to keep their use to a minimum.<ref>Murphy, 324</ref> 
[[Image:Georges Seurat, 1889-90, Le Chahut, Kröller-Müller Museum.jpg|thumb|260px|[[Georges Seurat]]'s very individual technique and style, ''[[Le Chahut]]'', 1889–90]]

A rare recent attempt to create a theory to explain the process driving changes in artistic style, rather than just theories of how to describe and categorize them, is by the [[behavioural psychologist]] [[Colin Martindale]], who has proposed an evolutionary theory based on [[Darwinian]] principles.<ref>Summarized in his article "Evolution of Ancient Art: Trends in the Style of Greek Vases and Egyptian Painting", ''Visual Arts Research'', Vol. 16, No. 1(31) (Spring 1990), pp. 31–47, University of Illinois Press, [https://www.jstor.org/stable/20715715 JSTOR] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160920080440/http://www.jstor.org/stable/20715715 |date=2016-09-20 }}</ref>  However this cannot be said to have gained much support among art historians.