ABSTRACT
History was often viewed as closelyaligned to the (visual) arts but, in the course of the trend towards its establishment as a science, tried to emancipate itself from these unwanted ties. This chapter explores how this close but fraught relationship was constantly negotiated and modified during the nineteenth century, and which roles and functions were ascribed to art within the newly emerging practice of history during this transformative period, when it emerged as an academic discipline. All other historiography, insofar as it is legitimate, is art. As this chapter recounts, the relationship between art and history was conceived in various ways over the course of shifts from historicist to posthistoricist theories of history: art was to depict history, to perform or to shape it, to help understand it. Droysen’s apodeixis provides a brief, unrealised glimpse of an inspiring concept of historical representation that is closer to practices in contemporary art than to those of his own time.
