Similar to visual studies, and defined in relation to art history, Bildwissenschaft (approximately, "image-science") refers to a number of different approaches to images, their interpretation and their social significance.
In the contemporary period, significant theorists and practitioners of Bildwissenschaft have included Klaus Sachs-Hombach [de], Gottfried Boehm, Hans Belting, Horst Bredekamp and Lambert Wiesing, each of whom have developed distinct orientations toward their subject matter.
[1] Nevertheless, Wissenschaft is more restrictive than the English "studies", as it indicates the systematic ordering of knowledge, that attention be paid to questions of method, and that a discipline aspire to a comprehensive treatment of its subject.
[6] Significant differences between Bildwissenschaft and Anglophone cultural and visual studies include the former's examination of images dating from the early modern period, and its emphasis on continuities over breaks with the past.
[8] Charlotte Klonk has argued that Bildwissenschaft is ontological rather than historical, concerned with fundamental questions "of what images are able to achieve in general and what distinguishes them from other vehicles of knowledge.
[10] Rampley suggests that while the discipline's development can be situated as part of a wider process in Anglophone scholarship, as well as in France, Spain and Italy, such an account is accurate "only in the most general sense of a shift away from art history as the master discourse governing interpretation and analysis of the image.
[4] Understood in this way, Sachs-Hombach argued that Bildwissenschaft should integrate and systematise insights from these various bodies of knowledge, analyse and define a set of common basic concepts, and develop strategies for interdisciplinary co-operation.
[4] Gottfried Boehm's account of the concept drew on aesthetics and the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Arthur Danto, Meyer Schapiro, Kurt Bauch and Max Imdahl.
[19] Belting argues that art history as a disciplinary formation is outmoded and potentially obsolete,[23] and that a universal Bildwissenschaft, the exact scope and methods of which remain uncertain, should be sought.