The Elasticity of Art Historical Discourse: Heinrich Wölfflin’s Visual Perceptive Semiotics

Abstract

Aim. This article examines the phenomenon of ‘elasticity’ within Heinrich Wölfflin’s methodological framework and its significance for contemporary art-historical discourse. It analyses the interplay between visual-perceptual categories and abstract semiotic structures in Wölfflin’s writings, exploring how his formal analysis can function as a flexible system of image interpretation that combines a rigorous morphology of art with historically variable modes of perception. Particular attention is paid to the capacity of Wölfflin’s ‘fundamental concepts’ to be adapted to the analysis of visual texts from different periods. The article approaches the Swiss art historian’s theoretical legacy through the concept of the ‘elasticity of art-historical discourse’ and from the perspectives of pictorial, abstract, and verbal-pictorial semiotics.

Methods. The study combines conceptual, semiotic, and textual analysis. It draws on linguo-aesthetic and semiotic approaches to art-historical theories and methodologies, focusing particularly on Wölfflin’s idea of ‘pure visuality’, which treated form as an autonomous artistic phenomenon and articulated it through semiotic and linguistic categories.

Results. The analysis of Wölfflin’s writings identifies elements of a proto-semiotic system possessing the characteristics of an abstract metalanguage through which the theoretical foundations of Wölfflinian art history are conceptualised. The article argues that Wölfflin’s understanding of artistic form may be interpreted in relation to the Peircean model of artistic semiosis and its application to art-historical analysis, in which visual-pictorial codes are necessarily articulated in verbal language. Wölfflin’s oppositional pairs, developed through his study of Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque art, may accordingly be understood as an ensemble of implicit semiotic structures, each involving a dual interpretation of formal characteristics. The pictorial-indexical and rhetorical functions embedded in Wölfflin’s art-historical discourse reveal the principles of its internal organisation and transform it into a self-describing conceptual system. Concepts of form thereby acquire a transitive and transformative character.

The article advances the hypothesis that a conceptual system intended to describe and interpret formal structures in art may be organised as a semiotic model of interpretation. It argues that Wölfflin’s theoretical legacy retains considerable potential for post-semiotic and supra-semiotic research. Particular attention is devoted to his analysis of Dürer’s drawings, published shortly before Principles of Art History (1915). This case demonstrates a synthesis of object-specific interpretation and a broader formalist approach, as well as the emergence of style as a central analytical category.

Conclusions. The study demonstrates the relevance and effectiveness of applying general semiotic and linguo-aesthetic methods to the analysis and interpretation of twentieth-century paradigms of art history and art theory, particularly those founded upon the formal structures of visual language and their verbal articulation.