Visual History: The Past in Pictures

References (78)

1. Edgar Wind, ''The Revolution in History Painting,'' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 2, no. 2 (1938): 116-27; see also Mark Salber Phillips, ''His- tory Painting Redistanced: From Benjamin West to David Wilkie,'' Modern Intel- lectual History 11, no. 3 (November 2014): 611-29. Other scholars have remarked on the connections between time and space; in relation to the visu- alization of history in particular, see Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton, Cartographies of Time (New York, 2010).
2. Precedents of a nonclassicizing approach to history painting include the dozen large canvases produced by artists including Diego Velázquez and Francisco de Zurbarán in the mid-1630s for Philip IV's Sal ón de los Reinos. See Richard L. Kagan, ''Pictures, Politics, and Pictorialized History at the Court of Philip IV of Spain: Re-Thinking the Hall of Realms,'' in Historiographie an Europa ¨ischen Ho ¨fen (16.-18. Jahrhundert): Studien Zum Hof Als Produktionsort von Geschichtsschreibung Und Historischer Repra ¨sentation (Berlin, 2009), 231-46.
3. Rosenberg and Grafton, Cartographies of Time.
4. Methodologies for using visual materials as historical sources are discussed in Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca, NY, 2001);
5. Ludmilla Jordanova, The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice (Cambridge, 2012);
6. Theodore K. Rabb, Why Does Michelangelo Matter? A Historian's Questions About the Visual Arts (Palo Alto, CA, 2018).
7. Horst Bredekamp, Image Acts: A Systematic Approach to Visual Agency, ed. and trans. Elizabeth Clegg (Berlin/Boston, 2018), 283.
8. Horst Bredekamp, ''A Neglected Tradition? Art History as Bildwissenschaft,'' Critical Inquiry 29, no. 3 (2003): 418-28.
9. W. J. T. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?: The Lives and Loves of Images (Chicago, 2005), xv.
10. See, for instance, David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago, 1989);
11. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Icono- clash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art (Cambridge, MA, 2002);
12. Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 2004).
13. For other examples, see Catherine E. Clark, ''Capturing the Moment, Picturing History: Photographs of the Liberation of Paris,'' American Historical Review 121, no. 3 (June 1, 2016): 824-60; Jason E. Hill and Vanessa R. Schwartz, Getting the Picture: The Visual Culture of the News (London, 2015).
14. Much of our scholarship has investigated images as forms of evidence, knowl- edge, and communication as they circulate across space and time. See, for instance, Daniela Bleichmar, Visible Empire: Botanical Expeditions and Visual Cul- ture in the Hispanic Enlightenment (Chicago, 2012);
15. Daniela Bleichmar, Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (New Haven, 2017);
16. Daniela Bleichmar, ''The Imperial Visual Archive: Images, Evidence, and Knowledge in the Early Modern Hispanic World,'' Colonial Latin American Review 24, no. 2 (2015): 236-66;
17. Daniela Bleichmar, ''History in Pictures: Trans- lating the Codex Mendoza,'' Art History 38, no. 4 (September 2015): 682-701;
18. Lynn Hunt and Vanessa R. Schwartz, ''Capturing the Moment: Images and Eyewitnessing in History,'' in ''The History Issue,'' special issue, Journal of Visual Culture 9, no. 3 (December 2010): 259-71; Vanessa R. Schwartz, ''Film and History,'' in The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies, ed. James Donald and Michael Renov (London, 2008), 199-215; Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture; Vanessa Schwartz, Jet Age Aesthetics: The Glamour of Media in Motion (forthcoming).
19. Arnaldo Momigliano, ''Ancient History and the Antiquarian,'' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 13 (1950): 285-315. See also Peter N. Miller, ed., Momigliano and Antiquarianism: Foundations of the Modern Cultural Sciences (Toronto, 2007);
20. Peter N. Miller, History and Its Objects: Antiquarianism and Material Culture Since 1500 (Ithaca, NY, 2017).
21. Peter Burke, introduction to Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (New York, 1990), 1-14; Jo ¨rn Ru ¨sen, ''Jacob Burckhardt: Political Standpoint and Historical Insight on the Border of Post- Modernism,'' History and Theory 24, no. 3 (1985): 235-46; Hayden White, Meta- history: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe, 40th anniversary ed. (Baltimore, 2014), chap. 6.
22. Burke, introduction to Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy; Ru ¨sen, ''Jacob Burckhardt''; White, Metahistory, chap. 6.
23. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 19.
24. See Bredekamp, ''A Neglected Tradition?''; Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winck- elmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, 1994).
25. Aby Warburg, cited in Bredekamp, ''A Neglected Tradition?,'' 423.
26. The reasons why Warburg's method was not picked up by the next generation are only now coming to light; see Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science (Chicago, 2018). See also W. J. T. Mitchell, ''Method, Madness, Montage: Aby Warburg to John Nash,'' June 14, 2016, The Warburg Institute, London, YouTube video, 42:25, https://www.youtube.com/watch? v¼1eQzaENZoHo.
27. William Mills Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA, 1969).
28. As those who have worked on the recent past or use oral testimonies or who have tried to parse the differences between history and memory have shown, such distinctions are themselves historical and institutional and have served particular ends. We insist on not making the metacritical and institutional critique the purpose of our inquiry and believe that we can still engage in historical work and maintain a metahistorical consciousness. See, for instance, Joyce Oldham Appleby, Lynn Avery Hunt, and Margaret C. Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York, 1994);
29. Lynn Hunt, History: Why It Matters (Cam- bridge, 2018);
30. Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York, 1996);
31. Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ''Objectivity Question'' and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988).
32. Hayden White, ''Historiography and Historiophoty,'' American Historical Review 93, no. 5 (1988): 1193-99.
33. Freedberg, The Power of Images; Louis Marin, Des pouvoirs de l'image (Paris, 1993);
34. Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford, 1998);
35. Brede- kamp, Image Acts.
36. This is the case with museums, tourism, and memorials; see, among others, Stephen Bann, The Clothing of Clio: A Study of the Representation of History in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France (Cambridge, 1984); Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (New York, 1995); Billie Melman, The Culture of History: English Uses of the Past, 1800-1953 (Oxford, 2006);
37. Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt (Cambridge, 1988); Nora, Realms of Memory; Vanessa R. Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Sie `cle Paris (Berkeley, 1998).
38. See, for instance, Rolena Adorno, ''The Discursive Encounter of Spain and America: The Authority of Eyewitness Testimony in the Writing of History,'' William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 2 (April 1992): 210-28; Bleichmar, Visual Voyages; Michael Gaudio, Engraving the Savage: The New World and Techniques of Civilization (Minneapolis, 2008);
39. Anthony Pagden, ''Ius et Factum: Text and Experience in the Writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas,'' Representations 33 (Winter 1991): 147-62; Stephanie Leitch, Mapping Ethnography in Early Modern Germany: New Worlds in Print Culture (New York, 2010); Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton, 1985).
40. Jeffrey Andrew Barash, Collective Memory and the Historical Past (Chicago, 2016); Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture.
41. On the standardization of knowledge via print, see Ivins, Prints and Visual Communication; Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1979). The idea of print as fixed and unchanging has been critiqued; see Anthony Grafton, Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, and Adrian Johns, ''AHR Forum: How Revolutionary Was the Print Revolution?,'' American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (2002): 84-128. On mobility, see among others Daniel Roche, Humeurs Vagabondes (Paris, 2003).
42. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford, 1972).
43. We distinguish our approach, which suggests that all periods have specific intermedial landscapes, from a more evolutionary approach that flattens the distinctions between media in favor of ''convergence culture.'' See Henry Jen- kins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York, 2006).
44. Ulrich Keller, ''Photography, History, (Dis)Belief,'' Visual Resources 26, no. 2 (June 1, 2010): 102.
45. On historicity and temporality, see, among others, Franc ¸ois Hartog, Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and Experiences of Time, trans. Saskia Brown (New York, 2015);
46. Siegfried Kracauer, History, the Last Things before the Last (New York, 2014);
47. Mark Salber Phillips, On Historical Distance (New Haven, 2013).
48. The essay was delivered in 1965 as Koselleck's inaugural professorial lecture at the University of Heidelberg, published in German three years later, and then included in the collection Reinhart Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft: zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten (Frankfurt, 1979). It appeared in English initially as Reinhart Koselleck, ''Modernity and the Planes of Historicity,'' Economy and Society 10, no. 2 (1981): 166-83; and then as the first chapter in Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA, 1985). It has received considerable scholarly attention; see, in particular, Peter Geimer, ''Photography as a 'Space of Experience': On the Retrospective Legibility of Historic Photographs,'' Getty Research Journal 7 (2015): 97-108;
49. Peter Dent, ''Time and the Image: Art at an Epochal Threshold,'' in Medieval or Early Modern: The Value of a Traditional Historical Division, ed. Ronald Hutton (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2015), 146-74. On Koselleck more generally, see Niklas Olsen, History in the Plural: An Introduction to the Work of Reinhart Koselleck (Oxford, 2012). For scholarly responses to Koselleck's theory of temporality and period- ization, see Dent, ''Time and the Image: Art at an Epochal Threshold,'' 153n25.
50. Koselleck, Futures Past, 4. On Altdorfer see Christopher S. Wood, Albrecht Altdorfer and the Origins of Landscape (Chicago, 1993), esp. 19-22, on this paint- ing and Friedrich Schlegel's reaction to it. It is worth noting that Wood discusses this painting as part of his investigation of the invention of landscape painting; this suggests that the work combines approaches to time and to place, spatializ- ing history as did Benjamin West's The Death of General Wolfe.
51. Friedrich von Schlegel, cited in Koselleck, Futures Past, 4.
52. Koselleck, Futures Past, 5. We have taken great care to differentiate Koselleck's ideas about Schlegel's interpretation of the painting and understanding of the past from Schlegel's own. Although readers of Koselleck's complex essay rou- tinely misinterpret the position as coming from Schlegel rather than from Koselleck, a misunderstanding that the text promotes (at least in its English translation), a careful parsing of the text reveals that these ideas are Koselleck's. Schlegel's 1804 letter describing his viewing of the painting at the Louvre is not visibly concerned with temporality or historicity. In the letter, Schlegel describes Altdorfer's depiction of the battle as both ''chivalry'' and ''a little Iliad on canvas,'' apparently feeling no discomfort at all in the chronological swerve implied in connecting such temporally disparate references. See Friedrich von Schlegel, The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Fredrick Von Schlegel, trans. E. J. Millington (London, 1860), 113-14.
53. The painting also blurs the lines between genres: ''I scarcely know,'' Schlegel noted, ''whether to call it a landscape, a historical painting, or a battle-piece,-it is indeed all these combined, and much more''; Schlegel, The Aesthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Fredrick Von Schlegel, 113.
54. See, for instance, Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York, 1983);
55. Renato Rosaldo, Ilongot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History (Stanford, 1980);
56. Marshall D. Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom (Ann Arbor, 1981).
57. Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance (New York, 2010), 13.
58. See for instance Alexander Nagel, Medieval Modern: Art out of Time (New York, 2012);
59. Amy Knight Powell, Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (Cambridge, MA, 2012);
60. Christopher S. Wood, Forgery, Replica, Fiction: Temporalities of German Renaissance Art (Chicago, 2008).
61. Nagel and Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, 9.
62. The latter phrase is the opening line of L. P. Hartley's 1953 novel The Go-Between: ''The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.'' It inspired, among others, David Lowenthal, The Past Is a Foreign Country (Cambridge, 1985).
63. Keith P. F. Moxey, Visual Time: The Image in History (Durham, 2013). See also Keith Moxey, ''Material Time, Images and Art History,'' in Theorizing Images, ed. Z ˇarko Paic ´and Kres ˇimir Purgar (Newcastle upon Tyne, 2016), 35-58; Keith Moxey, ''What Time Is It in the History of Art,'' in Time in the History of Art: Temporality, Chronology and Anachrony, ed. Dan Karlholm and Keith Moxey (New York, 2018).
64. Mark Mazower, ''Fizz and Crackle,'' New York Review of Books, March 22, 2018.
65. Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Convolute N11,4 and Convolute N2,6, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 476 and 461.
66. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York, 1986), 257-58.
67. Kracauer, History, the Last Things Before the Last, 155. See Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York, 1986), 189.
68. Kracauer, History, the Last Things Before the Last, 5. On Kracauer, see Johannes von Moltke, The Curious Humanist: Siegfried Kracauer in America (Berkeley, 2016).
69. ''Calendric time,'' Kracauer concluded, ''is an empty vessel''; Kracauer, History, the Last Things before the Last, 149.
70. Didi-Huberman's writings on Warburg are vast and to summarize them would be beyond the scope of this essay. He believes Warburg has been misunderstood because his vision was far too radical. Georges Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image. Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (University Park, PA, 2017).
71. Marie Anne Lescourret, Aby Warburg ou la tentation du regard (Paris, 2014), our translation.
72. Paula Amad, Counter-Archive: Film, the Everyday, and Albert Kahn's Archives de La Plane `te (New York, 2010).
73. Mason Jackson, The Pictorial Press: Its Origin and Progress (London, 1855), 361.
74. Keller, ''Photography, History, (Dis)Belief''; Ulrich Keller, ''Photojournalism Around 1900: The Institutionalization of a Mass Medium,'' in Shadow and Sub- stance: Essays in the History of Photography in Honor of Heinz K. Henisch, ed. Kath- leen Collins (Bloomfield Hills, MI, 1990), 283-303. See also Zeynep Gursel, Image Brokers: Visualizing World News in the Age of Digital Circulation (Berkeley, 2016), and Jonathan Dentler, ''Wire Service Photography and the Globalization of the Spectator, 1920-1955'' (PhD diss., University of Southern California, Los Angeles, forthcoming 2020).
75. See Hill and Schwartz, Getting the Picture. For the way publications engaged readers in matters of visual literacy in particular, see Jason E. Hill, The Artist as Reporter: Weegee, Ad Reinhardt, and the PM News Picture (Berkeley, 2018).
76. ''In Next Week's Life,'' Life, June 8, 1953, 118.
77. Both letters from Life, July 6, 1953, 4.
78. Erwin Panofsky, ''The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline,'' in Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City, NY, 1955), 24.