Jas elsner biography of martin

ANCIENT VlEWING AND MODERN ART HlSTORY

Let me begin with a famous beginning. That classic manual of formalist art- historical analysis, The Principles of Art History- subtitled The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art - published in 1915 by the great Swiss art historian, Heinrich Wôlfflin (1864-1945), opens like this':

«Ludwig Richter [the Dresden painter and iliustrator who lived from 1803 to 1884], relates in his réminiscences how once, when he was in Tivoli as a young man, he and three friends set out to paint part of the landscape, ail four firmly resolved not to deviate from nature by one hair's-breadth; and although the subject was the same, and each quite creditably produced what his eyes had seen, the resuit was four totally différent pictures, as différent from each other as the personalities of the four painters».

Richter and Wôlfflin would certainly agrée with the greatest of ail connoisseurs of antique art, Sir John Beazley, the master-scholar of Attic vases, when he wrote2

«I was brought up to think of 'style' as a sacred thing, as the man himself».

This notion - that individual artists, or the period in which they worked, or the particular place and context of that work, can somehow be inferred from looking with acute détail at the spécifie stylistic features of a painting or a

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sculpture - is the foundation of style art history. However, turning to avant- garde images produced at the very time when Wolfflin was composing his Principles of Art History, one wonders how easy it really is (even for a very well-trained eye) to tell the Cubist Picasso from the Cubist Braque, even when they were not sharing similar subject-matter, like Richter and his friends at Tivoli. Had Wolfflin looked with any care at the art of his time rather than back towards the great tradition flowing up to and through Ludwig Richter, perhaps he would not hâve written his masterpiece.

Given the dominance of style art history over the various

Part of the Book at Lunchtime series

The Book at Lunchtime series looks at Professor Lyndal Roper's new book 'Martin Luther - Renegade and Prophet' . When Martin Luther nailed a sheet of paper to the church door of a small university town on 31 October 1517, he set off a process that changed the Western world for ever. Luther's ideas spread like wildfire. In this historical biography, the author reveals the often contradictory psychological forces that drove Luther forward. Professor Roper is joined by Professor Laura Marcus (Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford), Dr Simeon Zahl (Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology, University of Nottingham), and Professor Jas' Elsner (Fellow and Tutor in Classics, Corpus Christi College; Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in Classical Archaeology and Art, Faculty of Classics; Professor of Late Antique Art, Faculty of Classics). Chaired by Professor Almut Suerbaum (Associate Professor in German, University of Oxford).