Style (visual arts)
[13]Giorgio Vasari set out a hugely influential but much-questioned account of the development of style in Italian painting (mainly) from Giotto to his own Mannerist period.
"[16] Constructing schemes of the period styles of historic art and architecture was a major concern of 19th century scholars in the new and initially mostly German-speaking field of art history, with important writers on the broad theory of style including Carl Friedrich von Rumohr, Gottfried Semper, and Alois Riegl in his Stilfragen of 1893, with Heinrich Wölfflin and Paul Frankl continuing the debate in the 20th century.
[17] Paul Jacobsthal and Josef Strzygowski are among the art historians who followed Riegl in proposing grand schemes tracing the transmission of elements of styles across great ranges in time and space.
Terms originated to describe architectural periods were often subsequently applied to other areas of the visual arts, and then more widely still to music, literature and the general culture.
[19] In architecture stylistic change often follows, and is made possible by, the discovery of new techniques or materials, from the Gothic rib vault to modern metal and reinforced concrete construction.
A major area of debate in both art history and archaeology has been the extent to which stylistic change in other fields like painting or pottery is also a response to new technical possibilities, or has its own impetus to develop (the kunstwollen of Riegl), or changes in response to social and economic factors affecting patronage and the conditions of the artist, as current thinking tends to emphasize, using less rigid versions of Marxist art history.
[22] According to James Elkins "In the later 20th century criticisms of style were aimed at further reducing the Hegelian elements of the concept while retaining it in a form that could be more easily controlled".
[23] Meyer Schapiro, James Ackerman, Ernst Gombrich and George Kubler (The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things, 1962) have made notable contributions to the debate, which has also drawn on wider developments in critical theory.
Giovanni Morelli (1816 – 1891) pioneered the systematic study of the scrutiny of diagnostic minor details that revealed artists' scarcely conscious shorthand and conventions for portraying, for example, ears or hands, in Western old master paintings.
His techniques were adopted by Bernard Berenson and others, and have been applied to sculpture and many other types of art, for example by Sir John Beazley to Attic vase painting.
Though artists' training was before Modernism essentially imitative, relying on taught technical methods, whether learnt as an apprentice in a workshop or later as a student in an academy, there was always room for personal variation.
Chinese painting also allowed for the expression of political and social views by the artist a good deal earlier than is normally detected in the West.
[40] The identification of individual styles of artists or artisans has also been proposed in some cases even for remote periods such as the Ice Age art of the European Upper Paleolithic.
Even in art that is in general attempting mimesis or "realism", a degree of stylization is very often found in details, and especially figures or other features at a small scale, such as people or trees etc.
[citation needed] In a 2012 experiment at Lawrence Technological University in Michigan, a computer analysed approximately 1,000 paintings from 34 well-known artists using a specially developed algorithm and placed them in similar style categories to human art historians.
[48][49] Apps such as Deep Art Effects can turn photos into art-like images claimed to be in the style of painters such as Van Gogh.
