Heinrich Wölfflin (1864 – July 19, 1945) was a famous Swiss art critic, whose objective classifying principles ("painterly" vs. "linear" and the like) were influential in the development of formal analysis in the History of art during the 20th century. He taught at Basel, Berlin and Munich in the generation that raised German art history to pre-eminence. Swiss redirects here; for other uses of that term, see Swiss (disambiguation) The Swiss Confederation or Switzerland is a landlocked federal state in Europe, with neighbours Germany, France, Italy, Austria and Liechtenstein. ... An art critic is normally a person who have a speciality in giving reviews mainly of the types of fine art you will find on display. Typically the art critic will go to an art exhibition where works of art are displayed in the traditional way in localities especially made... Art history usually refers to the history of the visual arts. ... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the...

His three great books, still consulted, are Renaissance und Barock (1888), Die Klassische Kunst (1898, "Classic Art"), and above all Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915, "Principles of Art History").

Wölfflin's family in Winterthur, Switzerland, was wealthy and cultured. His father, Eduard Wölfflin (1831-1903) was a classicist, who helped found and organize the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Wölfflin studied art history and philosophy under Jakob Burckhardt at the University of Basel. After graduating in 1886, he published the result of two years' travel and study in Italy, as his Renaissance und Barock (1888), the book that introduced "Baroque" as a stylistic category and a serious area of study. For Wölfflin, the 16th-century art now described as "Mannerist" was part of the Baroque esthetic, one that Burckhardt before him as well as most French and English-speaking scholars for a generation after him dismissed as degenerate. Jakob Burckhardt (May 25, 1818 - August 8, 1897) was a Swiss historian of art and culture. ... The University of Basel (German: Universität Basel) is located at Basel, Switzerland. ... Adoration, by Peter Paul Rubens: dynamic figures spiral down around a void: draperies blow: a whirl of movement lit in a shaft of light, rendered in a free bravura handling of paint The Baroque was a style in art that used exaggerated motion and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce... Mannerism is the usual English term for an approach to all the arts, particularly painting but not exclusive to it, a reaction to the High Renaissance, emerging after the Sack of Rome in 1527 shook Renaissance confidence, humanism and rationality to their foundations, and even Religion had split apart. ...

External links

• Heinrich Wölfflin (http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/wolfflin.htm)
• Brief page (http://www.littlebluelight.com/lblphp/infl.php?inkey=64)