ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Andrea Pinotti aims to reconstruct the major trends of the debate raised around the relationship between the history of styles and the history of perceptual modes. The starting point is the so-called Kunstwissenschaft tradition, in which authors like Heinrich Wölfflin and Alois Riegl described stylistic evolution in terms of a movement from a tactile to an optical perception. They nevertheless remained ambiguous about how to interpret the idea of a history of vision. Their readers split into two opposing parties. The ‘natural’ party, represented by Panofsky, claimed that vision is not historical but physiological. Historicity, for these thinkers, is to be exclusively referred to artistic figuration. The ‘historical’ party, represented by Walter Benjamin, maintained on the contrary that both artistic representation and vision are intrinsically historical. Pinotti then follows developments of this debate into the second half of the twentieth century, especially focussing on the notions of ‘period eye’ (Michael Baxandall), of ‘scopic regime’ (Christian Metz, Martin Jay), of historical epistemology (Marx Wartofsky) and of the plasticity of perception (Arthur Danto, Noël Carroll, Bence Nanay). The paper brings together the history of art, the history of the senses and the philosophy of history, in a relationship considered through the lens of the concept of style.
