Die Einheit der Kunst und die Vielfalt der Bilder

Abstract

The distinction made by Hans Belting between a history of artworks and a history of images opened up a range of new perspectives to the field of image research in the early 1990s. And yet, his distinction had a crucial disadvantage. Belting’s attempt to think this difference in historical terms and to project it upon a general sequence of styles and epochs led him to the conclusion that the Middle Ages were, what he called, an era of image production. Belting sharply delimited this era from early modern and modern times which he believed to be dominated by artistic theory. With his theses, Belting led medieval studies in early Christian imagery wings, while, on the other hand, Belting’s two eras have proved to be a burden that since than weighed heavily upon modern image research. As this article shows, the dominance of academic art doctrines over modern image production was by no means all-embracing. It is, nonetheless, true that the academic system of arts was largely responsible for driving out the majority of images from a general aesthetic discourse. It is the purpose of this article to point at the conclusions that are to be drawn from these details for a new science of images.