46 What is Architectural History?
comparative method of visual analysis, observing that styles
followed a cyclical path from nascent, to classic, to baroque
states. The nascent state held the promise of the classic, just
as the baroque traced its deterioration. The question embed-
ded in the introduction of Renaissance und Barock follows
this logic: how did we go from Raphael and Michelangelo
to Maderno and Borromini in a few short decades? For
Wölffl in, ‘baroque’ is a stylistic epithet coloured by its
derogatory heritage, denoting that which is overwrought
and super-exuberant, just as ‘Renaissance’ takes on the cel-
ebratory tone given it by Burckhardt – the rebirth of an
ancient model, sure of its principles and close to a beautiful
ideal.
Wölffl in’s Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe goes much
further than this judgement by codifying the methods for the
kind of formalist analysis on which his own histories rest.^15
He lays out a set of now well-known dichotomies to explain
the differences between classical and baroque buildings,
paintings and sculpture: linear versus painterly, plane versus
recession, closed versus open form, multiplicity versus unity,
and clearness versus unclearness. Wölffl in’s own lectures
at the universities of Basel, Berlin and Zurich followed this
comparative technique. He would show two slides at once
in order to describe and explain the differences between
one building and another, and hence between one stylistic
category and another. Until the advent of digital projection,
the paired display of slides was a common tool for teaching
the history of art and architecture. It was initially bound
to the formalist, rather than iconological, teaching of
architectural history, but was later widely adopted by many
teachers who paid little heed to its original methodological
connotations.
For Wölffl in, style concerns deep structure as well as
appearance. It is the device by which we can tell one architect
or writer apart from others, but also families and generations
of buildings. Just as in speech, writing and dress, we can with
variable levels of confi dence tell the difference between prod-
ucts of the seventeenth century and those of the nineteenth,
between those of the twelfth and of the fi fteenth. It is this
concept of style of which Peter Gay wrote in 1974 (of styles
of history-writing):