The Shaping of Art History

The Shaping of Art History examines art history's formation in the German academy in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the work of Wilhelm Vge and Adolph Goldschmidt, two influential scholars of medieval art, Kathryn Brush analyses their methods and particularly those scholarly projects that were critical to the development of their approaches. Her work combines intellectual and institutional history with the study of artistic monuments and biography. It considers how the study of the pioneering scholarship in the field of medieval art is critical to an understanding of the formulation of art historical method as a whole.