ABSTRACT
The very existence of a fact as literary depends on its differential quality, that is, on its inter-relationships with both literary and extraliterary orders. Thus, its existence depends on its function. Art history is an arena in which "scientific analysis" and "artistic activity" tend to rub up against each other with few enduring boundaries separating the two endeavors. On the second of October 1896, in Budapest, the art historian Max Schmid read a paper before the Fourth International Congress on the History of Art. His subject was the slide projector's use in the teaching of Kunstgeschichte. Schmid touted slides as a way to "scientize" the connoisseurship of Raphael and Michelangelo, comparing the new device to a microscope. One might argue that in Weberian terms the later nineteenth-century slide lecture became one means to re-sacralize the increasingly autonomous art object.
