In the visual arts, style is a "distinctive manner which permits the grouping of works into related categories"Fernie, Eric. Art History and its Methods: A critical anthology. London: Phaidon, 1995, p. 361. or "any distinctive, and therefore recognizable, way in which an act is performed or an artifact made or ought to be performed and made".Gombrich, 150 It refers to the visual appearance of a work of art that relates it to other works by the same artist or one from the same period, training, location, "school", art movement or archaeological culture: "The notion of style has long been the art historian's principal mode of classifying works of art. By style he selects and shapes the history of art".George Kubler summarizing the view of Meyer Schapiro (with whom he disagrees), quoted by Alpers in Lang, 138
Style is often 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. Divisions within both types of styles are often made, such as between "early", "middle" or "late".Elkins, s. 1 In some artists, such as Picasso for example, these divisions may be marked and easy to see; in others, they are more subtle. 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. Style often develops in a series of jumps, with relatively sudden changes followed by periods of slower development.
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.Elkins, s. 2; Kubler in Lang, 163–164; Alpers in Lang, 137–138; 161
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,George Kubler goes further "No human acts escape style", Kubler in Lang, 167; II, 3 in his list; Elkins, s. 2 and conversely natural objects or sights cannot be said to have a style, as style only results from choices made by a maker.Lang, 177–178 Whether the artist makes a conscious choice of style, or can identify his own style, hardly matters. 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".Elsner, 106–107, 107 quoted
Most stylistic periods are identified and defined later by art historians, but artists may choose to define and name their own style. The names of most older styles are the invention of art historians and would not have been understood by the practitioners of those styles. Some originated as terms of derision, including Gothic, Baroque, and Rococo.Gombrich, 131; Honour & Fleming, 13–14; Elkins, s. 2 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.
Western art, like that of some other cultures, most notably Chinese art, has a marked tendency to revive at intervals "classic" styles from the past.Honour & Fleming, 13 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".Elsner, 107–108, 108 quoted
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,Classical authors did leave a considerable and subtle body of analysis of style in literature, especially rhetoric; see Gombrich, 130–131 and though Renaissance and Baroque writers on art are greatly concerned with what modern scholars 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]. 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. Vasari, too, attributes the strangeness and, in his view the deficiencies, of earlier art to lack of technological know-how and cultural sophistication.Nagel and Wood, 92
Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) set out a hugely influential but much-questioned account of the development of style in Italian painting (mainly) from Giotto to his own Mannerist period. He stressed the development of a Florentine style based on or line-based drawing, rather than on Venetian colour. With other Renaissance theorists like Leon Battista Alberti he continued classical debates over the best balance in art between the realistic depiction of nature and idealization of it; this debate would continue until the 19th century and the advent of Modernism.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
The theorist of Neoclassicism, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, analysed the stylistic changes in Greek classical art in 1764, comparing them closely to the changes in Renaissance art, and "Georg Hegel codified the notion that each historical period will have a typical style", casting a very long shadow over the study of style.Elkins, s. 2; Preziosi, 115–117; Gombrich, 136 Hegel is often attributed with the invention of the German word Zeitgeist, but he never actually used the word, although in Lectures on the Philosophy of History, he uses the phrase der Geist seiner Zeit (the spirit of his time), writing that "no man can surpass his own time, for the spirit of his time is also his own spirit."
Constructing schemes of the period styles of historic art and architecture became 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.Elkins, s. 2, 3; Rawson, 24 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. This type of art history is also known as formalism, or the study of forms or shapes in art.Rawson, 24
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. 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 general culture.Gombrich, 129; Elsner, 104
In architecture, stylistic change often follows, and is made possible by, the discovery or adoption of new techniques or materials, such as the Gothic rib vault or modern construction with metal and reinforced concrete. 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 whether new developments have their own impetus to develop (the of Riegl), or to change 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.Gombrich, 131–136; Elkins, s. 2; Rawson, 24–25
Although style was well-established as a central component of the historical analysis of art, 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 started to develop,Kubler in Lang, 163 and a reaction against the emphasis on style arose; for Svetlana Alpers, "the normal invocation of style in art history is a depressing affair indeed".Alpers in Lang, 137 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".Elkins, s. 2 (quoted); see also Gombrich, 135–136 Meyer Schapiro, James Ackerman, Ernst Gombrich and George Kubler (The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, 1962) have made notable contributions to the debate, which has also drawn on wider developments in critical theory.Elkins, s. 2; analysed by Kubler in Lang, 164–165 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",Elsner, 98 though his article explores ways in which "style art history" remains alive, and his comment would hardly apply to archaeology.
The use of terms such as Counter-Maniera appears to be in decline, as impatience with such "style labels" grows among art historians. In 2000 Marcia B. 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.Murphy, 324
A rare recent attempt to create a theory to explain the process driving changes in artistic style, rather than just theories of how to describe and categorize them, comes from the behavioural psychologist Colin Martindale, who has proposed an evolutionary theory based on Darwinian principles.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 However, this cannot be said to have gained much support among art historians.
Individual style
Traditional art history has also placed great emphasis on the individual style, sometimes called the signature style, 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".Elsner, 103 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. The identification of individual style in works is "essentially assigned to a group of specialists in the field known as connoisseurs",Alpers in Lang, 139, a situation she sees as problematic a group who centre in the art trade and museums, often with tensions between them and the community of academic art historians.Exemplified in grumbling by Grosvenor; Crane, 214–216