What is Architectural History

34 What is Architectural History?

Architecture within the art and cultural sciences

Burckhardt regarded his century as ‘better equipped than any
other’ to study the past. ‘As regards the material advantages’,
he wrote,

travelling, the learning of languages and the great develop-

ment of philology have opened up all literatures to our

modern world; records have become available, travel and

reproduction, especially photography, have brought monu-

ments within the reach of everybody, while we have at our

disposal the vast publication of documents by governments

and learned societies, which are certainly more open-minded

and more bent on pure history than was the case with the

Congregation of St. Maur or Muratori.^41

History’s new ability to treat the past rationally, as ‘pure
history’, was analogous with the nineteenth-century command
of science over nature. ‘These two branches of learning are
alone capable of a detached, disinterested participation in the
life of things’, Burckhardt observed.^42 It is telling that his
most infl uential considerations of Italian art and culture
appear at the same moment as Charles Darwin’s On the
Origin of Species (1859) and Gottfried Semper’s Der Stil
(1860).^43 Along with Burckhardt’s Die Kultur der Renais-
sance in Italien, these two books attempt theories of phe-
nomena on a monumental scale: Darwin’s of life; Semper’s
of making; and Burckhardt’s of culture. As Burckhardt wisely
observed, none would have been possible were it not for
advanced cultures of collection and collocation, new repro-
graphic techniques and unprecedented access to parts of the
earth once closed or unknown to Europeans and Britons. As
for natural science, so too for Kulturwissenschaft.^44
In the later decades of the nineteenth century the academic
study of art history, Kunstwissenschaft, began to acquire
chairs in universities throughout central Europe. Burckhardt
himself famously occupied the art history chair in Basel from

1886. The new discipline emerged as a specialization of Kul-
      turwissenschaft, a ‘scientifi c’ approach to art in distinction
      from biography and connoisseurship. Art history also owed
      to the cultural sciences its fi rst generation of academic art
      historians. In this intellectual setting, architecture was a