What is the History of Art?

'Art for art's sake' – but not for many historians. The fine and decorative arts, their styles and iconography, have been mined for insight into the politics, religion and social obsessions of the past. Placing key images alongside the views of six contributors we continue the search.

Alex Potts

A history of the visual arts, defined simply as a chronological description of the various objects we now classify as art, would be a pretty marginal affair, probably of less general interest than a history of machinery, or a history of clothing. It would certainly be a history that remained on the fringes of what most people recognise as the central concerns of life. A history of art begins to look a little more interesting where it claims that art has a symbolic value, and that visual artefacts reflect important attitudes and 'realities' of the society in which they were produced.

Such claims were first advanced explicitly during the Enlightenment, most notably in Winckelmann's famous History of the Art of Antiquity, published in 1764. With Winckelmann, art was conceived, not just as a category of visual representations that provoked pleasurable responses, but as a medium for defining ourselves and our engagement with the material world – in Hegel's words, Winckelmann, in characterising art in the way he did, invented a 'new organ of the human spirit'. At the same time, artefacts of the past were interpreted as eloquent signs of the general character of the society that had produced them. In the words of another contemporary, the Comte de Caylus, a collection of antiquities, classified according to place and date of origin, would provide a 'picture of all the centuries'. Similar preoccupations are still active in the study of the history of art, but cast in a much more negative mould.

Ideas of art and the aesthetic have at no time attracted such intense scholarly scrutiny as now; yet arguments for their actual significance rarely ring true. The more convincing studies are concerned with the ideological interests which lie behind traditional mythologies of art, or with questions about why art might have mattered in the past. Similarly, the idea that the meanings of art are anchored in social and political life, that art history should be conceived as an integral part of general history, has rarely been so widely accepted; yet attempts to ascribe definite social and political meanings to visual images usually meet with scepticism. The fruitful art historical analyses, rather than explaining the exact meaning of an image, demonstrate how futile it is to try and fix the varied and often ill-defined meanings it could have for different audiences in different contexts. Interpreted as bits of historical evidence illustrating what a past society was like, visual artefacts tend to function as intriguing images onto which we are all free to project whatever historical fantasies we wish. The central concerns of art historical study have not always been so intensely problematic. But the paradoxes involved can be traced back to the formation of a modern conception of the history of art in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Jacob Burckhardt's definition of the Renaissance as a distinct phase in the history of Western European culture obviously owes a lot to his study of Italian Renaissance art. Yet when he came to write his Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, published in 1860, he did not discuss the visual arts, and defined his conception of Italian Renaissance culture entirely from written sources. The Renaissance is still represented most vividly for many people by Italian Renaissance art, just as Modernism seems most clearly exemplified in modern art. But it is only at a highly symbolic level that an abstract painting, say, can be interpreted as symptomatic of tendencies within modern culture as a whole. If the history of art has encouraged a division of general history into phases or periods, specialised studies of art seem to offer few concrete insights into the larger social and political factors, or the prevailing day-to-day attitudes and ways of life, that might characterise such periods.

Yet interest in the past is to a considerable extent formed by responses to visual artefacts, and the study of the visual arts is not as marginal as its ostensible function serving the art market and tourist industry would seem to imply. Art continues to be a focus of debate about definitions of culture – though what matters much more in practical terms is the use of visual imagery in the media and film, even for the minority ' of the rich and powerful who make the art scene their hobby.

Winckelmann's history of Greek and Roman art, the publication that effectively put the modern study of the history of art on the map, was based on artefacts that featured in the day-to-day life of only a tiny circle of antiquarians and collectors of antique sculpture in eighteenth-century Rome. Yet the book seemed to break the bounds of the interests of this exclusive and peripheral social group, largely by virtue of claims about the value of art and its history that seem highly suspect, yet gripping, today.