Style in the Art Theory of Early Modern Italy

Style is one of the oldest and most powerful analytic tools available to art writers. Through style, they have made attributions and dated paintings, classified works of art into artistic periods or schools, and verbally captured the visual essence of paintings. Despite the importance of style as an artistic, literary, and historiographic practice, the study of it as a concept has been intermittent, perhaps, as Philip Sohm argues, because style has resisted neat definition since the very origins of art history as a discipline. In this study, Sohm examines discussions of style from Vasari to Baldinucci, showing how the linguistic dimension of visual perception, the means through which painters styles have been described, and how concepts of language have shaped ideas of style. His analysis of the language that painters and their literate public used to characterize painters and paintings will enrich our understanding about the concept of style.