Karl Schnaase
Encyclopedia
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
art historian and jurist
Jurist
A jurist or jurisconsult is a professional who studies, develops, applies, or otherwise deals with the law. The term is widely used in American English, but in the United Kingdom and many Commonwealth countries it has only historical and specialist usage...
. He was one of the founders of modern art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
, and the author of one of the first surveys of the history of art.
Life
Schnaase was born in Danzig (Gdańsk)Gdansk
Gdańsk is a Polish city on the Baltic coast, at the centre of the country's fourth-largest metropolitan area.The city lies on the southern edge of Gdańsk Bay , in a conurbation with the city of Gdynia, spa town of Sopot, and suburban communities, which together form a metropolitan area called the...
in West Prussia
West Prussia
West Prussia was a province of the Kingdom of Prussia from 1773–1824 and 1878–1919/20 which was created out of the earlier Polish province of Royal Prussia...
. As a law student at the University of Heidelberg, Schnaase attended the lectures of Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher, one of the creators of German Idealism. His historicist and idealist account of reality as a whole revolutionized European philosophy and was an important precursor to Continental philosophy and Marxism.Hegel developed a comprehensive...
on philosophy in the spring of 1817. In the fall of 1818 he followed Hegel to the University of Berlin, where he attended the lectures that would become the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences is a systematic work by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in which an abbreviated version of his earlier Science of Logic was followed by the articulation of the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical...
. However, his philosophical studies were cut short when he passed his first juristic exam in July 1819, and received a position in the municipal court of Danzig. Before returning to Danzing, Schnaase travelled to Dresden
Dresden
Dresden is the capital city of the Free State of Saxony in Germany. It is situated in a valley on the River Elbe, near the Czech border. The Dresden conurbation is part of the Saxon Triangle metropolitan area....
, and was deeply impressed by the art collections of that city.
For much of the 1820s Schnaase was employed as an assessor in Königsberg
Königsberg
Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945 as well as the northernmost and easternmost German city with 286,666 inhabitants . Due to the multicultural society in and around the city, there are several local names for it...
, while maintaining his interest in art. From 1826 through 1827 he embarked on a year-long journey through Italy
Italy
Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
, visiting Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, Naples
Naples
Naples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
, Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
, and Milan
Milan
Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...
, among other cities. At the end of his journey he hiked through the Tyrol
County of Tyrol
The County of Tyrol, Princely County from 1504, was a State of the Holy Roman Empire, from 1814 a province of the Austrian Empire and from 1867 a Cisleithanian crown land of Austria-Hungary...
and the Bavarian Alps to Munich
Munich
Munich The city's motto is "" . Before 2006, it was "Weltstadt mit Herz" . Its native name, , is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning "by the monks' place". The city's name derives from the monks of the Benedictine order who founded the city; hence the monk depicted on the city's coat...
, where he became ill.
Settled once again in Königsberg, Schnaase began to plan a book based on his Italian journey, which was however never completed. In 1828 his legal career took him to Marienwerder (Kwidzyn)
Kwidzyn
Kwidzyn is a town in northern Poland on the Liwa river, with 40,008 inhabitants . It has been a part of the Pomeranian Voivodeship since 1999, and was previously in the Elbląg Voivodeship . It is the capital of Kwidzyn County.-History:...
, and in 1829 south again to Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf
Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and centre of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region.Düsseldorf is an important international business and financial centre and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. Located centrally within the European Megalopolis, the...
, whence he was able to acquaint himself with the medieval monuments of the Rhineland
Rhineland
Historically, the Rhinelands refers to a loosely-defined region embracing the land on either bank of the River Rhine in central Europe....
. He also found in the Rhineland a more congenial society in which to pursue his interest in art history, and in particular developed a friendship with Gottfried Kinkel
Gottfried Kinkel
Johann Gottfried Kinkel was a German poet also noted for his revolutionary activities and his escape from a Prussian prison in Spandau with the help of his friend Carl Schurz.-Early life:...
.
In summer 1830 Schnaase travelled through the Low Countries
Low Countries
The Low Countries are the historical lands around the low-lying delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse rivers, including the modern countries of Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and parts of northern France and western Germany....
; his examination of the monuments there led to his first major publication, the Niederländische Briefe (Dutch letters), which appeared in 1834. Although written in the form of a conventional travel narrative, the Briefe constituted in fact a major contribution to the theoretical literature on art history. As Michael Podro has written, Schnaase's first book
is the principal transposition of Hegel's thought into the general discussion of the development of art.... In his Niederländische Briefe Schnaase responded to two difficulties in Hegel's AestheticsAestheticsAesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...
; the assumption that past works of art were definitively understood from the point of view of the present, and that art was representative of its culture than contributing to it. The way in which he did this dominated one critical tradition for the next hundred years.
In brief, Schnaase argued that the various periods of art history were interconnected, and indeed mutually illuminating. Thus the modern historian can most fully understand a given monument through consideration of what had come before and what would follow. He wrote
I begin to feel in each section of the past its present together with its future. In this way clear and exact historical consideration leads to higher aesthetic realisation... which feels in the beauty of each individual period its connection with the others.
The contemporary viewer is further benefited by his ability to view an artwork, not as an object with a particular function, but as material for purely aesthetic contemplation. The contemplation of art as detached from its function allows the historian to view art as autonomous from, or indeed constitutive of, cultural developments.
The Niederländische Briefe therefore provided the intellectual justification for art history as an autonomous discipline, and indeed Schnaase's next major project was the composition of his monumental Geschichte der bildenden Künste (History of the fine arts). He was able to pursue this project despite his continuing employment as a jurist. As he neared completion of the first volume, however, Schnaase was surprised by the appearance of a Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte (Handbook of art history) (1841) by Franz Theodor Kugler. Kugler's work, which he claimed to be "the first comprehensive survey of art" seemed to duplicate Schnaase's project. Schnaase became convinced, however, that if Kugler was his better in technical matters, he could still offer a unique, general viewpoint of the development of art. The first two volumes, on ancient near eastern and on classical art, respectively, were published in 1843, and dedicated to Kugler.
Schnaase's work was distinguished from Kugler's by its "Hegelian desire to write a history of art as a history of the mentality of the human race, an endeavor specifically disavowed by Kugler." The first volume of his Geschichte began with a lengthy treatise on aesthetics, indicating a philosophical inclination that was criticized in reviews by both Kugler and Gustav Friedrich Waagen
Gustav Friedrich Waagen
Gustav Friedrich Waagen was a German art historian.Waagen was born in Hamburg, the son of a painter and nephew of the poet Ludwig Tieck. Having passed through the college of Hirschberg, he volunteered for service in the Napoleonic campaign of 1813-1814, and on his return attended the lectures at...
.
Despite this critical skepticism, and a new appointment to the court of appeals in Berlin in 1848, Schnaase continued to produce new volumes of his Geschichte. A volume on early Christian and Islamic art appeared in 1844; one on "the actual middle ages" in 1850; the Gothic in 1856; the late Middle Ages in 1861; and medieval Italian art in 1864. At this point, instead of continuing his survey into the Renaissance, Schnaase began work on a second edition of the existing work. He was aided in the revision by a number of prominent art historians. It has been suggested that Schnaase stopped where he did "because of the appearance of Jacob Burckhardt
Jacob Burckhardt
Carl Jacob Christoph Burckhardt was a historian of art and culture, and an influential figure in the historiography of each field. He is known as one of the major progenitors of cultural history, albeit in a form very different from how cultural history is conceived and studied in academia today...
's equally contextual works on the Renaissance as well as... the areligious attitudes of the modern era."
Schnaase retired from his legal commitments in 1857, and received a series of awards in honor of his art-historical achievements, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Bonn
University of Bonn
The University of Bonn is a public research university located in Bonn, Germany. Founded in its present form in 1818, as the linear successor of earlier academic institutions, the University of Bonn is today one of the leading universities in Germany. The University of Bonn offers a large number...
and the Order of Maximilian from the King of Bavaria
King of Bavaria
King of Bavaria was a title held by the hereditary Wittelsbach rulers of Bavaria in the state known as the Kingdom of Bavaria from 1805 until 1918, when the kingdom was abolished...
.
Later in life Schnaase became increasingly preoccupied by the relationship between art and religion. He was among the founders of the Verein für religiöse Kunst in der evangelischen Kirche (Society for Religious Art in the Lutheran Church) and a co-editor of the Christliche Kunstblatt (Journal for Christian Art). Two of his lectures on this subject were published: Über das Verhältniss der Kunst zum Christenthum (On the relationship of art to Christianity) (1852) and Bildung und Christenthum (Education and Christianity) (1861).
Schnaase continued to travel across Europe until the end of his life, despite his increasingly poor health. He died in Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
in 1875.
Legacy
Schnaase's work was of tremendous importance for the development of art history as an autonomous discipline. His Geschichte facilitated the teaching of art in German-speaking countries, and his theoretical concerns and formulations influenced a number of later art historians. Among these, Alois RieglAlois Riegl
Alois Riegl was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History...
may have been the most influenced by Schnaase's thought; Riegl's theory of the Kunstwollen was deeply indebted to Schnaase's Niederländische Briefe.
Sources
- W. Lübke, "Carl Schnaase, biographische Skizze," in C. Schnaase, Geschichte der bildenden Künste im 15. Jahrhundert, ed. W. Lübke (Stuttgart, 1879), xv-lxxxiv. Available online.
- M. Podro, The critical historians of art (New Haven, 1982), 31-43.
- M. Schwarzer, "Origins of the art history survey text," Art Journal 54 (1995), 24-29. Available online.