Renaissance und Barock

With his habilitation thesis Renaissance and Baroque. Eine Untersuchung über Wesen und Entstehung des Barockstils in Italien (1888), Heinrich Wölfflin took up the re-evaluation of the Baroque style. During the fashion for neo-baroque, a number of art historians set out to re-explore and re-evaluate the architectural style of the 16th and 17th centuries, and attempted to define a "baroque style" in antiquity as well. These three repetitions should allow one to recognise a regularity in the course of history. Wölfflin declared such an insight into the "interior of art" to be the actual goal of art history.
Among the numerous attempts to define a Baroque style, Wölfflin's writing has retained its high rank through the quality of its method. This is characterised by descriptive analysis and comparative contrasting of Renaissance and Baroque styles, by the attempt to explain the reasons for the change in style, and finally by the verification of the analysis on selected sacred and profane buildings in Rome. With the differentiating comparison between Renaissance and Baroque, Wölfflin created the basis for a critique of the Baroque that stands far above the earlier disdain.
In the introduction, Oskar Bätschmann analyses the genesis, historical preconditions, method and reception of the work. The edition is accompanied by a critical commentary by Noemi Bearth and Karolina Zgraja.