Winckelmann - Scientific approach to art history

[LCT_m_a_d]

I came across Johann Winckelmann (known as the founder of scientific art history).
Some literature on his contributions to the development of art history revealed an interesting observation.
John Onian referenced the following
'after repeated contemplation', "first make 'them perfectly familiar to his memory' and only then 'read all the ancient authors'."

So for me I've never approached art history from a name, date, location inventory. (I'm assuming this mentally expensive requirement for academic purposes imposes on the desire to express and absorb freely). Instead, I've focused on a few historical pieces I instinctively enjoyed looking at for some organic reason. (Many deviating my style or medium). I would spend so much time looking and thinking and thinking about the piece picking up everything I can before I explored the metadata such as time period, movement, historical impact etc.. (although I do this eventually to compare my assumption and lead me to other places). This wasn't so much a technique as much as an absence of technique.

I'm also not the biggest variety kind of guy. I have a few in-depth diversified hobbies and activities, but some people prefer to explore hundreds of pieces in a similar style at once, some just want the highlights of each era (influenced by the metadata), some are only focused on current stuff, some maybe follow a specific artist.

What's your relationship with art history? Is it similar to your other cultural tastes?

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

My interest in art history leans heavily into the history and cultural story of the supplies, actually. Tell me about a specific painter or sculptor, or their work, and, yeah, I'm interested...

... but I get obsessive about the history of the paint they used. Talk to me about the history of ultramarine blue. Or how there just wasn't very much good white paint except for lead for... most of human history. Or how the Victorians loved arsenic green... even though they knew it was toxic. (So. Many. Historical colors. Were TOXIC. Truly we live in a golden age of paint.) Or how there's still debate over how the Hebrews made a sacred blue dye-- and how it was related to the legendary purple dye of the Roman emperors. Give me excerpts of Cennino Cennini's directions for how to prepare Renaissance-era paint. I love it. It fascinates me.

[LCT_m_a_d]

That's actually really cool! I've never heard of that before! I primarily work in pencil which is historically more ephemeral or study.

[Scarlet_Cryptid]

If you want a really good read on the subject, pick up Color, a Natural History of the Palette, by Victoria Finlay. It's a little on the older side (published in 2000), but still a wonderful book. It's broken into chapters based on colors (white, red, green, etc), and you don't need to read them in order if you don't want. So, so interesting.

Edit: In the chapter about black, there's a whole segment about graphite and the invention of pencils, actually! As a pencil artist, you might get a kick out of it.

[LCT_m_a_d]

Thanks for the suggestion. I much prefer older literature on art. I've read something (seemingly) similar on acrylics in art school that I enjoyed. Curious about the pencils

[rajillustration]

For me, my approach is to learn more about the era before I absorb the art. There's a lot of peices, especially in modern art, that are hard to appreciate, unless you put yourselves in the shoes of people who hadn't seen something like that hung in a gallery before. Unless you think about the wars that were occurring, the technology they had, and the other societal circumstances that lead that art to be what it was.

Then, I tend to look at how the art was made, and try to break it down into technique. there's a lot to be learned by trying to predict what the older masters may have done when composing or painting a scene.

[LCT_m_a_d]

Fundamentals and imagination have been far more effective for me than many tutorials personally so it brings a joyful tear to my eye to hear people focus on the old masters!