• [18]

  Semper, Wölfflin, and Frankl, and later Ackerman, had backgrounds in the history of architecture, and like many other terms for period styles, “Romanesque” and “Gothic” were initially coined to describe architectural styles, where major changes between styles can be clearer and more easy to define, not least because style in architecture is easier to replicate by following a set of rules than style in figurative art such as painting.

• A major area of debate in both art history and archaeology has been the extent to which stylistic change in other fields like painting or pottery is also a response to new technical possibilities, or has its own impetus to develop (the kunstwollen of Riegl), or changes in response to social and economic factors affecting patronage and the conditions of the artist, as current thinking tends to emphasize, using less rigid versions of Marxist art history.

• When used it is often in the context of imitations of the individual style of an artist, and it is one of the hierarchy of discreet or diplomatic terms used in the art trade for the relationship between a work for sale and that of a well-known artist, with “Manner of Rembrandt” suggesting a distanced relationship between the style of the work and Rembrandt’s own style.

• [5]
  Overview
  Any piece of art is in theory capable of being analysed in terms of style; neither periods nor artists can avoid having a style, except by complete incompetence,[6] and conversely natural objects or sights cannot be said to have a style, as style only results from choices made by a maker.

• [11]
  History of the concept
  Classical art criticism and the relatively few medieval writings on aesthetics did not greatly develop a concept of style in art, or analysis of it,[12] and though Renaissance and Baroque writers on art are greatly concerned with what we would call style, they did not develop a coherent theory of it, at least outside architecture:

  Artistic styles shift with cultural conditions; a self-evident truth to any modern art historian, but an extraordinary idea in this period [Early Renaissance and earlier].

• Individual style
  Traditional art history has also placed great emphasis on the individual style, sometimes called the signature style,[28] of an artist: “the notion of personal style—that individuality can be uniquely expressed not only in the way an artist draws, but also in the stylistic quirks of an author’s writing (for instance)— is perhaps an axiom of Western notions of identity”.

• [38] While many elements of period style can be reduced to characteristic forms or shapes, that can adequately be represented in simple line-drawn diagrams, “manner” is more often used to mean the overall style and atmosphere of a work, especially complex works such as paintings, that cannot so easily be subject to precise analysis.

• [29] The identification of individual styles is especially important in the attribution of works to artists, which is a dominant factor in their valuation for the art market, above all for works in the Western tradition since the Renaissance.

• [20]

  Although style was well-established as a central component of art historical analysis, seeing it as the over-riding factor in art history had fallen out of fashion by World War II, as other ways of looking at art were developing,[21] as well as a reaction against the emphasis on style; for Svetlana Alpers, “the normal invocation of style in art history is a depressing affair indeed”.

• After dominating academic discussion in art history in the 19th and early 20th centuries, so-called “style art history” has come under increasing attack in recent decades, and many art historians now prefer to avoid stylistic classifications where they can.

• [2] Style refers to the visual appearance of a work of art that relates to other works with similar aesthetic roots, by the same artist, or from the same period, training, location, “school”, art movement or archaeological culture: “The notion of style has long been historian’s principal mode of classifying works of art”.

• Style in archaeology
  In archaeology, despite modern techniques like radiocarbon dating, period or cultural style remains a crucial tool in the identification and dating not only of works of art but all classes of archaeological artefact, including purely functional ones (ignoring the question of whether purely functional artefacts exist).

• Even in art that is in general attempting mimesis or “realism”, a degree of stylization is very often found in details, and especially figures or other features at a small scale, such as people or trees etc.

• Terms originated to describe architectural periods were often subsequently applied to other areas of the visual arts, and then more widely still to music, literature and the general culture.

• “Stylized” may mean the adoption of any style in any context, and in American English is often used for the typographic style of names, as in “AT&T is also stylized as ATT and at&t”: this is a specific usage that seems to have escaped dictionaries, although it is a small extension of existing other senses of the word.

• Style is seen as usually dynamic, in most periods always changing by a gradual process, though the speed of this varies greatly, from the very slow development in style typical of prehistoric art or Ancient Egyptian art to the rapid changes in Modern art styles.

• [10] In critical analysis of the visual arts, the style of a work of art is typically treated as distinct from its iconography, which covers the subject and the content of the work, though for Jas Elsner this distinction is “not, of course, true in any actual example; but it has proved rhetorically extremely useful”.

• [40] The identification of individual styles of artists or artisans has also been proposed in some cases even for remote periods such as the Ice Age art of the European Upper Paleolithic.

• Chinese painting also allowed for the expression of political and social views by the artist a good deal earlier than is normally detected in the West.

• In the visual arts, style is a “… distinctive manner which permits the grouping of works into related categories”[1] or “… any distinctive, and therefore recognizable, way in which an act is performed or an artifact made or ought to be performed and made”.

• [22] According to James Elkins “In the later 20th century criticisms of style were aimed at further reducing the Hegelian elements of the concept while retaining it in a form that could be more easily controlled”.

• [33]
  However the idea of personal style is certainly not limited to the Western tradition.

• [35] Calligraphy, also regarded as a fine art in the Islamic world and East Asia, brings a new area within the ambit of personal style; the ideal of Western calligraphy tends to be to suppress individual style, while graphology, which relies upon it, regards itself as a science.

• [17] Paul Jacobsthal and Josef Strzygowski are among the art historians who followed Riegl in proposing grand schemes tracing the transmission of elements of styles across great ranges in time and space.

• [24] In 2010 Jas Elsner put it more strongly: “For nearly the whole of the 20th century, style art history has been the indisputable king of the discipline, but since the revolutions of the seventies and eighties the king has been dead”,[25] though his article explores ways in which “style art history” remains alive, and his comment would hardly be applicable to archaeology.

• [8]

  Most stylistic periods are identified and defined later by art historians, but artists may choose to define and name their own style.

• Artists in recent developed societies tend to be highly conscious of their own style, arguably over-conscious, whereas for earlier artists stylistic choices were probably “largely unselfconscious”.

• The identification of individual style in works is “essentially assigned to a group of specialists in the field known as connoisseurs”,[30] a group who centre in the art trade and museums, often with tensions between them and the community of academic art historians.

• [36] Examples of strongly individual styles include: the Cubist art of Pablo Picasso, the Pop Art style[37] of Andy Warhol, Impressionist style of Vincent Van Gogh, Drip Painting by Jackson Pollock
  Manner
  “Manner” is a related term, often used for what is in effect a sub-division of a style, perhaps focused on particular points of style or technique.

• This is used to construct typologies for different types of artefacts, and by the technique of seriation a relative dating based on style for a site or group of sites is achieved where scientific absolute dating techniques cannot be used, in particular where only stone, ceramic or metal artefacts or remains are available, which is often the case.

• [50][51] With the development of sophisticated text-to-image AI art software[broken anchor], using specifiable art styles has become a widespread tool in the 2020s.

• This type of art history is also known as formalism, or the study of forms or shapes in art.

• [3]

  Style can be divided into the general style of a period, country or cultural group, group of artists or art movement, and the individual style of the artist within that group style.

• [9] Cubism on the other hand was a conscious identification made by a few artists; the word itself seems to have originated with critics rather than painters, but was rapidly accepted by the artists.

• The use of terms such as Counter-Maniera appears to be in decline, as impatience with such “style labels” grows among art historians.

• [citation needed]
  Computer identification and recreation
  In a 2012 experiment at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan, a computer analysed approximately 1,000 paintings from 34 well-known artists using a specially developed algorithm and placed them in similar style categories to human art historians.

• Hall, a leading art historian of 16th-century Italian painting and mentee of Sydney Joseph Freedberg (1914–1997), who invented the term, was criticised by a reviewer of her After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century for her “fundamental flaw” in continuing to use this and other terms, despite an apologetic “Note on style labels” at the beginning of the book and a promise to keep their use to a minimum.

• In Chinese art it is just as deeply held, but traditionally regarded as a factor in the appreciation of some types of art, above all calligraphy and literati painting, but not others, such as Chinese porcelain;[34] a distinction also often seen in the so-called decorative arts in the West.

• Nor is it clear that any such idea was articulated in antiquity … Pliny was attentive to changes in ways of art-making, but he presented such changes as driven by technology and wealth.

• [19]

  In architecture stylistic change often follows, and is made possible by, the discovery of new techniques or materials, from the Gothic rib vault to modern metal and reinforced concrete construction.

• “[16]

  Constructing schemes of the period styles of historic art and architecture was a major concern of 19th century scholars in the new and initially mostly German-speaking field of art history, with important writers on the broad theory of style including Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, Gottfried Semper, and Alois Riegl in his Stilfragen of 1893, with Heinrich Wölfflin and Paul Frankl continuing the debate in the 20th century.

• A few gallery items found here.

 

Works Cited

[‘1. Fernie, Eric. Art History and its Methods: A critical anthology. London: Phaidon, 1995, p. 361. ISBN 978-0-7148-2991-3
2. ^ Gombrich, 150
3. ^ George Kubler summarizing the view of Meyer Schapiro (with whom he disagrees), quoted by Alpers in Lang, 138
4. ^ Elkins, s. 1
5. ^ Elkins, s. 2; Kubler in Lang, 163–164; Alpers in Lang, 137–138; 161
6. ^ George Kubler goes further “No human acts escape style”, Kubler in Lang, 167; II, 3 in his list; Elkins, s. 2
7. ^ Lang, 177–178
8. ^ Elsner, 106–107, 107 quoted
9. ^ Gombrich, 131; Honour & Fleming, 13–14; Elkins, s. 2
10. ^ Honour & Fleming, 13
11. ^ Elsner, 107–108, 108 quoted
12. ^ classical authors did leave a considerable and subtle body of analysis of style in literature, especially rhetoric; see Gombrich, 130–131
13. ^ Nagel and Wood, 92
14. ^ See Blunt throughout, with in particular pp. 14–22 on Alberti, 28–34 on Leonardo, 61–64 on Michelangelo, 89–95 and 98–100 on Vasari
15. ^ Elkins, s. 2; Preziosi, 115–117; Gombrich, 136
16. ^ Glenn Alexander Magee (2011), “Zeitgeist”, The Hegel Dictionary, Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 262, ISBN 9781847065919
17. ^ Elkins, s. 2, 3; Rawson, 24
18. ^ Rawson, 24
19. ^ Gombrich, 129; Elsner, 104
20. ^ Gombrich, 131–136; Elkins, s. 2; Rawson, 24–25
21. ^ Kubler in Lang, 163
22. ^ Alpers in Lang, 137
23. ^ Elkins, s. 2 (quoted); see also Gombrich, 135–136
24. ^ Elkins, s. 2; analysed by Kubler in Lang, 164–165
25. ^ Elsner, 98
26. ^ Murphy, 324
27. ^ Summarized in his article “Evolution of Ancient Art: Trends in the Style of Greek Vases and Egyptian Painting”, Visual Arts Research, Vol. 16, No. 1(31) (Spring 1990), pp. 31–47, University of Illinois Press, JSTOR Archived 2016-09-20 at the Wayback Machine
28. ^ Suffern, Erika (2013). “Review of The Signature Style of Frans Hals: Painting, Subjectivity, and the Market in Early Modernity”. Renaissance Quarterly. 66 (1): 212–214. doi:10.1086/670435. ISSN 0034-4338. JSTOR 10.1086/670435. S2CID 163333589.
29. ^ Elsner, 103
30. ^ Alpers in Lang, 139, a situation she sees as problematic
31. ^ Exemplified in grumbling by Grosvenor; Crane, 214–216
32. ^ Elsner, 103; Dictionary of Art Historians: “Giovanni Morelli” Archived 2018-11-06 at the Wayback Machine
33. ^ Gotlieb, throughout; 469–475 on Vasari and van Eyck; 469 on Seurat.
34. ^ Rawson, 92–102; 111–119
35. ^ Rawson, 27
36. ^ “Gainsborough’s signature style” (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2021-10-27.
37. ^ “Pop art | Characteristics, Definition, Style, Movement, Types, Artists, Paintings, Prints, Examples, Lichtenstein, & Facts”. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2021-10-13.
38. ^ “What Is Poetry?”, “Petronius Arbiter”, The Art World, Vol. 3, No. 6 (Mar., 1918), pp. 506–511, JSTOR Archived 2018-12-15 at the Wayback Machine
39. ^ Christie’s “Explanation of Cataloguing Practice” (after lot listings) Archived 2016-03-05 at the Wayback Machine. “Style” is not used for paintings etc., but for European porcelain they give the example:”A plate in the Worcester style” means “In our opinion, a copy or imitation of pieces made in the named factory, place or region”. For examples, this painting, sold by Bonhams in 2011 Archived 2013-05-22 at the Wayback Machine as “Manner of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn”, is now attributed in their notes to “an anonymous eighteenth-century follower of Rembrandt”. This example sold by Christie’s Archived 2013-05-25 at the Wayback Machine fetched only £750 in 2010.
40. ^ Kubler, George (1962). The Shape of Time : Remarks on the History of Things. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.Kubler, p. 14: “human products always incorporate both utility and art in varying mixtures, and no object is conceivable without the admixture of both”; see also Alpers in Lang, 140
41. ^ Bahn & Vertut, 89
42. ^ Thermoluminescence dating can be used for much ceramic material, and the developing method of Rehydroxylation dating may become widely used.
43. ^ Review by Mary Ann Levine of The Uses of Style in Archaeology, edited by Margaret Conkey and Christine Hastorf (see further reading), pp. 779–780, American Antiquity, Vol. 58, No. 4 (Oct., 1993), Society for American Archaeology, JSTOR Archived 2016-09-20 at the Wayback Machine
44. ^ “Stylization” in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 1979, online at The Free Dictionary Archived 2013-06-07 at the Wayback Machine
45. ^ Clark, Willene B., A Medieval Book of Beasts: The Second-Family Bestiary, Commentary, Art, Text And Translation, p. 54, 2006, Boydell Press, ISBN 0851156827, 9780851156828, google books
46. ^ See Elsner, 107 on Picasso as the paradigm of “the supremely self-conscious poseur in any style you like”.
47. ^ Holloway, John, The Slumber of Apollo: Reflections on Recent Art, Literature, Language and the Individual Consciousness, p. 30, 1983, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0521248043, 9780521248044, google books
48. ^ Jump up to:a b Suzanne Tracy (ed.), “Computers Match Humans in Understanding Art”, Scientific Computing, retrieved November 2, 2012 A summary of: Lior Shamir, Jane A. Tarakhovsky, “Computer analysis of art”, Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH) 5.2 (2012)
49. ^ See also Gombrich, 140, commenting in 1968 that no such analysis was feasible at that time.
50. ^ “A.I. photo filters use neural networks to make photos look like Picassos”. Digital Trends. 18 November 2019. Retrieved 9 November 2022.
51. ^ Biersdorfer, J. D. (4 December 2019). “From Camera Roll to Canvas: Make Art From Your Photos”. The New York Times. Retrieved 9 November 2022.
52. ^ Gal, Rinon; Alaluf, Yuval; Atzmon, Yuval; Patashnik, Or; Bermano, Amit H.; Chechik, Gal; Cohen-Or, Daniel (2 August 2022). “An Image is Worth One Word: Personalizing Text-to-Image Generation using Textual Inversion”. arXiv:2208.01618 [cs.CV].
53. ^ Vincent, James (5 September 2022). “DALL-E can now help you imagine what’s outside the frame of famous paintings”. The Verge. Retrieved 9 November 2022.
54. ^ Edwards, Benj (6 September 2022). “With Stable Diffusion, you may never believe what you see online again”. Ars Technica. Retrieved 9 November 2022.
55. ^ James, Dave (27 October 2022). “I thrashed the RTX 4090 for 8 hours straight training Stable Diffusion to paint like my uncle Hermann”. PC Gamer. Retrieved 9 November 2022.
56. ^ Ford, Paul (Nov 3, 2022). “Dear Artists: Do Not Fear AI Image Generators”. Wired. Retrieved 9 November 2022.
57. ^ Metz, Rachel (21 October 2022). “These artists found out their work was used to train AI. Now they’re furious”. CNN Business. Retrieved 9 November 2022.
58. “Alpers in Lang”: Alpers, Svetlana, “Style is What You Make It”, in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel Lang, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 137–162, google books.
59. Bahn, Paul G. and Vertut, Jean, Journey Through the Ice Age, University of California Press, 1997, ISBN 0520213068, 9780520213067, google books
60. Blunt Anthony, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450–1600, 1940 (refs to 1985 edn), OUP, ISBN 0198810504
61. Crane, Susan A. ed, Museums and Memory, Cultural Sitings, 2000, Stanford University Press, ISBN 0804735646, 9780804735643, google books
62. Elkins, James, “Style” in Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, Oxford University Press, accessed March 6, 2013, subscriber link
63. Elsner, Jas, “Style” in Critical Terms for Art History, Nelson, Robert S. and Shiff, Richard, 2nd Edn. 2010, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 0226571696, 9780226571690, google books
64. Gombrich, E. “Style” (1968), orig. International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed. D. L. Sills, xv (New York, 1968), reprinted in Preziosi, D. (ed.) The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (see below), whose page numbers are used.
65. Gotlieb, Marc, “The Painter’s Secret: Invention and Rivalry from Vasari to Balzac”, The Art Bulletin, Vol. 84, No. 3 (Sep., 2002), pp. 469–490, JSTOR
66. Grosvenor, Bendor, “On connoisseurship”, article in Fine Art Connoisseur, 2011?, now on “art History News” website
67. Honour, Hugh & John Fleming. A World History of Art. 7th edition. London: Laurence King Publishing, 2009, ISBN 9781856695848
68. “Kubler in Lang”: Kubler, George, Towards a Reductive Theory of Style, in Lang
69. Lang, Berel (ed.), The Concept of Style, 1987, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, ISBN 0801494397, 9780801494390, google books; includes essays by Alpers and Kubler
70. Murphy, Caroline P., Review of: After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century by Marcia B. Hall, The Catholic Historical Review, Vol. 86, No. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 323–324, Catholic University of America Press, JSTOR
71. Nagel, Alexander, and Wood, Christopher S., Anachronic Renaissance, 2020, Zone Books, MIT Press, ISBN 9781942130345, google books
72. Preziosi, D. (ed.) The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, ISBN 9780714829913
73. Rawson, Jessica, Chinese Ornament: The lotus and the dragon, 1984, British Museum Publications, ISBN 0714114316
74. Conkey, Margaret W., Hastorf, Christine Anne (eds.), The Uses of Style in Archaeology, 1990, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Review by Clemency Chase Coggins in Journal of Field Archaeology,1992), from JSTOR
75. Davis, W. Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. (Chapter on “Style and History in Art History”, pp. 171–198.) ISBN 0-271-01524-1
76. Panofsky, Erwin. Three Essays on Style. Cambridge, Mass. The MIT Press, 1995. ISBN 0-262-16151-6
77. Schapiro, Meyer, “Style”, in Theory and Philosophy of Art: Style, Artist, and Society, New York: Georg Braziller, 1995), 51–102
78. Sher, Yakov A.; “On the Sources of the Scythic Animal Style”, Arctic Anthropology, Vol. 25, No. 2 (1988), pp. 47–60; University of Wisconsin Press, JSTOR; pp. 50–51 discuss the difficulty of capturing style in words.
79. Siefkes, Martin, Arielli, Emanuele, The Aesthetics and Multimodality of Style, 2018, New York, Peter Lang, ISBN 9783631739426
80. Watson, William, Style in the Arts of China, 1974, Penguin, ISBN 0140218637
81. Wölfflin, Heinrich, Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, Translated from 7th German Edition (1929) into English by M D Hottinger, Dover Publications New York, 1950 and many reprints
82. See also the lists at Elsner, 108–109 and Elkins
Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ginnerobot/4520577328/ ‘]