Kubler George The Shape of Time Remarks On The History of Things PDF
Kubler George The Shape of Time Remarks On The History of Things PDF
Kubler George The Shape of Time Remarks On The History of Things PDF
GEORGE KUBLER
GEORGE KUBLER
PRBAMDLE
Symbol, Form, and Duration vii
CONCLUSION 123
Finite Invention: The purist reduction ofknowledge. Wid-
ening the gate. The finite world 123
The Equivalence of Form and Expre.tsion: Iconological di-
minutions. The deficiencies of style. The plural present 127
INDEX I3I
1. The History of Things
J. I owe my first concern with the problems set forth here to the works and
person of the late A. L. Kroeber. Our correspondence began in 1938 soon after I
read his remarkable study (with A. H. Gayton) on the Nazca pottery of southern
coastal Peru, "The Uhle Pottery Collections from Nasca," University of Cali-
fornia Publications in Amf'rican ArchaeoiPgy and Ethnology, 24 (1927). It is a statistical
analysis based upon the assumption that undated items belonging to d1e same
form-class can be arranged in correct chronological order by shape-design cor-
relations on the postulate that in one form-class simple formulatiom are replaced
by complex ones. See also A. L. Kroeber, ''Toward Defutition of the Nal!'ca Style,"
ibid., 43 (I9.S6), and my review in American Antrquity, 22 (1957), 319-:W. Pro-
fessor Kroeber's later volume entitled Col!.figurations rJf C.dture Growth (Derkeley,
1944) explored more general historic patterns, especially the clustered bursts of
achievement marking the history of all civilizations. These the!Jles continued as
KroebL"T's principal interest in the book oflectures entitled Style t111d Civilizatiot/s
(Ithaca, 19 S6).
In an arresting review G. E. Hutchinson, the biologist, compared Kroeber's
Configurations to internal or free oscillations in animal populatiom by subjecting
Kroeber's work to mathematical expressiotlS like those used in population studies.
THE HISTORY OF THINGS 3
The review is reprinted in The Itinerant Ivory Tower (New Haven, 1953), pp.
74.--JJ?, from which I quote: "The great man, born to the period where dN/ dt is
maxitru~l [where N is the degree of pattern saturation] can do much. His precursors
have provided the initial technical inspiration; much still remains to be done.
If he were born to the tradition later he would, with the same native ability, ap-
pear less remarkable, for there is less to do. Earlier the work would have been
harder; he would perhaps be highly esteemed by a small body of highly educated
critics, but would never attain the same popular following as if he had worked
at the time of maximum growth of the tradition. The rising and falling that we
see in retrospect is thus to be regarded as a movement to and fcom a maximum
in a derived curve. The integral curve giving the total amount of material pro-
duced seems to depend little on individual achievement, being additive, and there-
fore is less easily appreciated. We are less likely to think of r6r6 as the date by
which most Elizabethan drama has been written than as the date of Shakespeare's
death."
4 THE HISTORY OF THINGS
:z. Meyer Schapiro, "Style," Anthropology Today (Chicago, 1953), pp. 287-312,
reviews the principal current theories about style, concluding dispiritedly that
"A theory of style adequate to the psychological and historical problems has
still to be created."
LIMITATIONS Ofl BIOGRAPHY 5
middle life are fully formed; and the last leaves it puts forth are
small agait1 but intricately shaped. All are sustained by one un-
changing principle of organization common to all members of
that species, with variants of race occurring in different environ-
ments. By the biological metaphor of art and history, style is the
species, and historical styles are its taxonomic varieties. -As an
approximation, nevertheless, this metaphor recognized the re-
currence of certain kinds of events, and it offered at least a pro-
visional explanation of them, instead of treating each event as an
unprecedented, never-to-be-repeated unicum.
The biological model was not the most appropriate one for a
history of things. Perhaps a system of metaphors drawn from
physical science would have clothed the situation of art more
adequately than the prevailing biological metaphors: especially
if we are dealing in art with the transmission of some kind of
energy; with impulses, generating centers, and relay points; with
increments and losses in transit; with resistances and transformers
in the circuit. In short, the language of electrodynamics might
have suited us better than the language of botany; and Michael
Faraday might have been a better mentor than Linnaeus for the
study of material culture.
Our choice of the "history of things" is more than a euphe-
mism to replace the bristling ugliness of "material culture." This
term is used by anthropologists to distit1guish ideas, or "mental
culture," from artifacts. But the "history of things" is intended
to reunite ideas and objects under the rubric of visual forms: the
term includes both artifacts and works of art, both replicas and
unique examples, both tools and expressions-in short all ma-
terials worked by human hands under tl1e guidance of connected
ideas developed in temporal sequence. From all these things a
shape in time emerges. A visible portrait of the collective identity,
whether tribe, class, or nation, comes into being. This self-image
reflected in things is a guide and a pomt of reference to the group
for the future, and it eventually becomes the portrait given to
posterity.
IO THE HISTORY OF THINGS
Although both the history of art and the history .of science
have the same recent origins in the eighteenth-century learning
of the European Enlightenment, our inherited habit of separating
art from science goes back to the ancient division between liberal
and mechanical arts. The separation has had most regrettable
consequences, A principal one is our long reluctance to view the
processes common to both art and science in the same historical
perspective.
Scientists and artists, Today it is often remarked that two
painters who belong to different schools not only have nothing
to learn from each other but are incapable of any generous com.
munication with one another about their work. The same thing
is said to be true of chemists or biologists with different specialties.
If such a measure of reciprocal occlusion prevails between mem-
bers of the same profession, how shall we conceive of communi-
cation between a painter and a physicist? Of course very little
occurs. The value of any rapprochement between the history of
art and the history of science is to display the common traits of
invention, change, and obsolescence that the material works of
artists and scientists both share in time. The most obvious ex-
amples in the history of energy, such as steam, electricity, and
internal combustion et1gines, point to rhythms of production and
desuetude with which students of the history of art also are
familiar. Science and art both deal with needs satisfied by the
mind and the hands in the manufacture of things. Tools and in-
struments, symbols and expressions all correspond to needs, and
all must pass through design into matter.
Early experimental science had intimate connections with the
studios and workshops of the Renaissance, although artists then
aspired to equal status with the princes and prelates whose tastes
they shaped. Today it is again apparent that the artist is an
artisan, that he belongs to a distinct human grouping as homo
faber, whose calling is to evoke a perpetual renewal of form in
matter, and that scientists and artists are more like one another as
artisans than they are like anyone else. For our purposes of dis-
LfMITA:TIONS OF BIOGRAPHY II
art. The last cupboards and closets of the history of art have now
been tumed out and catalogued by government ministries of
Education and Tourism.
Seen in this perspective of approaching completion, the annals
of the craft of the history of art, though brief, contain recurrent
situations. At one extreme the practitioners feel oppressed by the
fullness of the record. At the other extreme we have works of
rhapsodical expression like those dissected by Plato in the
Socratic dialogue with Ion. When Ion, the vain rhapsodist,
parades his boredom with all poets other than Homer, Socrates
says, " ... your auditor is the last link of that chain which I have
described as held together by the power of the magnet. You
rhapsodists and actors are the middle links, of which the poet it
the first." s
If the fullness of history is forever indigestible, the beauty of
art is ordinarily incomtmmicable. The rhapsodist can suggest a
few clues to the experience of a work of art, if he himself has
indeed experienced it. He may hope that these hints will assist
the hearer to reproduce his own sensations and mental processes.
He can communicate nothing to persons not ready to travel the
same path with him, nor can he obey any field of attraction be-
yond his own direct experience. But historians are not middle
links, and their mission lies in another quarter.
time to time the whole pattern shakes and quivers, settling into
new shapes and figures. These processes of change are all mys,
terious uncharted regions where the traveler soon loses directio11
and stumbles in darkness. The clues to guide us are very few in,
deed: perhaps the jottings and sketches of architects and artists,
put down in the heat of imagining a form, or the manuscript
brouillons of poets and musicians, crisscrossed with erasures and
corrections, are the hazy coast lines of this dark continent of the
"now," where the impress of the future is received by the past.
To other animals who live more by instinct than do humans,
the instant of actuality must seem far less brie£ The rule ofinstinct
is automatic, offering fewer choices than intelligence, with cil'-
cuits that dose and open unselectively. In this duration choice h
so rarely present that the trajectory from past to future describes
a straight line rather than the infinitely bifurcating system of
human experience. The ruminant or the insect must live time
more as an extended present which endures as long as the in-
dividual life, while for us, the single life contains an infmity of
present instants, each with its innumerable open choices in vo.
lition and in action.
Why should actuality forever escape our grasp? The universe
has a finite velocity which limits not only the spread of its events,
but also the speed of our perceptions. The moment of actuality
slips too fast by the slow, coarse net of our senses. The galaxy
whose light I see now may have ceased to exist millennia ago, and
by the same token men cannot fully sense any event until after
it has happened, until it is history, until it is the dust and ash of
that cosmic storm which we call the present, and which per·
petually rages throughout creation.
In my own present, a thousand concerns of active business lie
unattended while I write these words. The instant admits only
one action while the rest of possibility lies unrealized. Actuality
is the eye of the storm: it is a diamond with an infinitesimal per·
foration through which the ingots and billets of present possibility
are drawn into past events. The emptiness of actuality can be es·
THB NATURE OF ACTUALITY 19
and so they are exaggerated. One relay may wish for reasons of
temperament to stress the traditional aspects of the signal; another
will emphasize their novelty. Even the historian subjects his evi,
dence to these strains, although he strives to recover the pristine
signal.
Bach relay willingly or unwittingly deforms the signal ac~
cording to his own historical position. The relay transmits a
composite signal, composed only in part of the message as it was
received, and in part of impulses contributed by the relay itself.
Historical recall never can be complete nor can it be even entirely
correct, because of the successive relays that deform the message.
The conditions of transmission nevertheless are not so defective
that historical knowledge is impossible. Actual events always
excite strong feelings, which the initial message usually records.
A series of relays may result in the gradual disappearance of the
animus excited by the event. The most hated despot is the live
despot: the ancient despot is only a case history. In addition,
many objective residues or tools of the historian's activity, such
as chronological tables of events, cannot easily be deformed.
Other examples are the persistence of certain religious expressions
through long periods and under great deforming pressures. The
rejuvenation of myths is a case in point: when an ancient version
becomes unintelligibly obsolete a new version, recast in contem-
porary terms, performs the same old explanatory purposes,9
The essential condition of historical knowledge is that the
event should be within range, that some signal should prove past
existence. Ancient time contains vast durations without signals
of any kind that we can now receive. Even the events of the past
few hours are sparsely documented, when we consider the ratio
of events to their documentation. Prior to 3000 B.c. the texture
outside it, and not inside it.13 We are no longer borne by it~
in a current upon the sea: it is visible to us from a distance and-
perspective only as a major part of the topography of history
By the same token we cannot clearly descry the contours oft%
great currents of our own time: we are too much inside tl1:
streams of contemporary happening to chart their flow and voj,
ume. We are confronted with inner and outer historical surfactl
(p. 54). Of these only the outer surfaces of the completed paa
are accessible to historical knowledge.
13. E. Panofsky, Renaissat~ce and Renascences (Stockholm, x!)(io), has commen~t:
at some length on the end of the modern age in the present century.
2. The Classing of Things
FORMAL SEQUENCES
1 j )(
l / '\. /
1
/ directed graph or network. Such a gmph consists of a number
of points or vertices or stages. Some of these are connected by
~
a directed line, an edge or a step. At each stage there is there-
+ fore a number of alternative edges which may be followed, and
/ also a number of incoming edges from which dtis stage could
/ have resulted. The actual development corresponds to a
J \.. (directed) path in the graph and it is only ooe among many
f' possible ones.
"One may ask whether the gmpbs we should like to consider al'e of a special
type among the many directed graphs which can be constructed. There seems
to be one essential restriction, dtat dte graphs shall be acyclic, that is, there exists
no cyclic directed path returning to its original stage. This essentially cortesponds
to dte observation about human progress that it never returns to the previous
conditions."
FORMAL SEQUENCES 35
shel£ The two masses are alike yet different. They are on good
evidence assigned to different periods. They correspond either to
different ages of the same sequence or to its different regional
varieties.
We shall revert to these questions at more length in the next
chapter; here it is important to bring out once more the elusive
nature of prime objects. Signatures and dates inscribed upon
works of art by their authors in no way assure us that they are
prime. Most works of art, moreover, are anonymous, and they
fall naturally into large groups. Under most circumstances tl1c
prime objects have disappeared into the mass of replicas, where
their discovery is most difficult and problematic, akin to the
greater difficulty of discovering the first recognizable examples
of the biological species. In reality our knowledge of sequences
is for the most part based upon replicas.
Our distinction between prime objects and replicas also illus-
trates a capital difference between European and non-European
arts. With European objects we often can approach closer to the
hot moment of invention than in non-European ones, where
our knowledge is so often based only upon replicas of uniform
or debased quality. A long tradition of collecting and connoisseur-
ship appears only among Chinese, Japanese, and European
peoples; elsewhere in the world the continual accumulation of
things was never systematically ordered by the efforts of col-
lectors and critics, so that the prime objects virtually all have
been lost from view.
No formal sequence is ever really closed out by the exhaustion
of all its possibilities in a connected series of solutions. The re-
validation of old problems in new circumstances is always pos-
sible and sometimes actual, like the renewal of stained-glass
technique as the gemmeau glass newly invented in France since
the war. s The use of fracture to modulate the light rather than
9· R. West, The Strange Necessity (New York, I928), esp. "The Long Chain of
Ctiticism."
IO. W. K. Wimsatt, Jr. and M. C. Beardsley, "The Intentional Fallacy," The
Sewanee Review, .S4 (I946), 468-88.
THB C:LASSING OF THINGS
xs. D. Klein, St. Lukas a]s Maler der Maria (Berlin, 1933).
PRIMB OBJI!CTS AND REPLICATIONS .51
.: 16. H. R. HahnlosCl', Villard de Hom1ecourt (Vienna, 1935), pl. 19 and pp. 49-
i so. "J'al este en m[u]lt de tleres, si co[m] p[osJ pores trover en cest liv[rJe; e11 mwm
• /!11, onq[ue]s tel tor ne vi co[mJ est cell de Loo[n]."
· 17. G. Vasari, Lives, trall.'l. G. de Vere (London, 1910-12), 2, 131-40: "per-
'!pcttive ..• kept him ever poor and depressed up to his death" [1475].
18. Gertrude Berthold, Cezanne und die altetl Mdster (Stuttgart, 1958).
TUB CLASSING OP THI~G!
side the events in question. From the inside, most classes look like
open sequences; from outside they seem to be closed series. In
order to reconcile both positions, let us say that the conception of
the formal sequence outlined in the preceding section allows us tQ
assemble the ideas of things, with their first realizations and with
the consequent mass of replicas, as events into connected finite
series.
The rule of series. Every succession may be stated in the fol.
lowing propositions: (1) in the course of an irreversible finite
series the use of any position reduces the number of remaining
positions; (2) each position in a series affords only a limited
number of possibilities of action; (3) the choice of an action
commits the corresponding position; (4) taking a position both
defines and reduces the range of possibilities in the succeeding
position.
Stated differently: every new form limits the succeeding inno-
vations in the same series. Every such form is itself one of a
fmite number of possibilities open in any temporal situation.
Hence every innovation reduces the duration of its class. The
boundaries of a class are fixed by the presence of a problem re-
quiring linked solutions: classes may be small or large: we are
here concerned only with their internal relationships and not
with their dimensions or magnitudes.
One more proposition allows us to qualify the mode of dura-
tion. Each series, originating in its own class of forms, has its
own minimal duration for each position, depending upon the
effort required. Small problems require small effort; large ones
demand more effort and so consume more time. Any effort to
shortcut the circuit leads to failure. The rule of series requires
each position to be occupied for its corresponding period before
the next position can be taken. In purely technological domains
this is self-evident: the steam engine was invented before the
locomotive, but the mise au point of a locomotive required many
more parts, each consuming its portion in the economy of the
time sequence, than a steam engine alone. In works of art the
SBRIAL POSITION, AGB, AND CHANGE 55
The need was dear to all the European colonists: the spidtu~
conquest of the Mexican Indian required fme large dlUrches and
convent-schools. The continuing problem presented by tins need
was to train and supervise Indian labor in European habits of
work. The series embraced Mendicant churches with the host
of subordinate classes therein involved. From the Indian view,
everything statted as if from zero; the quarrymen had to be
taught the use of metal tools; the masons had to be taught the
principles and the technique of building arches and domes; the
sculptors had to be taught Christian iconography and the painters
had to learn the principles of European one-point perspective
construction as well as the rendering of forms in graduated color
to simulate their appearances h1 light and shade. Any Indian
sense of need or problem surviving from pre-Conquest life was
driven underground or out of existence. At the same time every
evidence shows the Indian craftsmen eagerly turning to lean1
the superior tcclmiques and representational habits of their Euro.
pean teachers.
Thus the Christian transformation of Mexican architecture
contains at least three major patterns of change. Indian life mani.
fests two of them: one is the abrupt abandonment of native
habits and traditions, and the other is the gradual acquisition of
the new European modes of production. The discards and the
replacements happened at different speeds. The third pattern
governs the European colonists themselves. The conquistadors
were men of a generation already accustomed to eclectic variety
in Spain: the architecture of their day was preponderantly late
medieval: Renaissance inuovations from Italy still were rare. The
leading fashion of the years rsoo-rs2o was the early mode of
that harsh and energetic ornament later to be designated 3$
Plateresque, winch the men of the time in Spain thought of as
a lo romano. By 1550 a new architecture based upon the art of
Vignola began to displace Plateresque ornament. The Escorial
is its principal expression, but contemporary with the Escorial
and near it at Segovia, work continued on the late medieval rib-
S.J!RIAL l'OSlTION~ AGB~ AND CHANGE 59
invention is open to everyone all the time. One result is that in-.
ventio11 is misunderstood in two ways: both as a dangerous de-.
parture from routine, or as an unconsidered lapse into the
unknown. For most persons inventive behavior is a lapse of
propriety surrounded by the frightening aura of a violation of
the sanctity of routine. They are so carefully schooled to COil·
vention that it is nearly impossible for them to fall even by
accident into the unknown.
Many societies have accordingly proscribed all recognition of
inventive behavior, preferring to reward ritual repetition, rather
than to permit inventive variations. On the other hand no fonu
of society ever can be devised to allow each person the liberty to
vary his actions indefinitely. Every society functions like a gyro-
scope to hold .the course despite the random private forces of
deflection. In the absence of society and instinct, existence would
float as if unbound by gravitation in a world without friction
from precedent, without the attraction of example, and without
the channeled pathways of tradition. Every act would be a free
invention.
Thus the human situation admits invention only as a very
difficult tour de force. Even in industrial societies which depend
upon constant renewal by novelty, the very act of invention is
distasteful to the majority. The rarity of invention in modern
life corresponds to fear of change. The spread of literacy today
is manifested not by a happy attention to new actions and new
thoughts, but by stereotypes drawn from political propaganda
or from commercial advertisements.
Both in science and in art the inventive behavior rejected by
the mass of people has become more and more the prerogative
of a handful who live at the crumbling edge of convention. Only
exceptionally can any of these have an entrance allowing him
to wander very far. A few in each generation arrive at new posi·
tions requiring the gradual revision of older opinions. The great
mathematicians and artists, who stray farthest from usual notions,
lead the procession. The chains of other inventors are measured
JNVBNTION AND VARIATION
REPLICATION
This age dedicated to change for its own sake has also dis-
covered the simple hierarchy of the replicas that fill the world.
We shall merely mention the staggering replication present in
energy with only thirty some particles, or in matter which con-
sists of about a hundred atomic weights, or in the genetic trans-
mission of life, which since the beginning now comprises only
about two million described species of animals.
The replication that fills history actually prolongs the stability
of many past moments, allowing sense and pattern to emerge
for us wherever we look. This stability, however, is imperfect.
Every man-made replica varies from its model by minute, un-
plaruled divergences, of which the accumulated effects are like
a slow drift away from the archetype.
The term "replication" is a respectable old-fashioned word
long in disuse, and we revive it here not only to avoid the
negative judgment that adheres to the idea of "copying" but
also to include by definition that essential trait of repeating
events which is trivial variation. Since sustained repetition of any
sort is impossible without the drift occasioned by tiny unwanted
variations, this slow historical motion engages our main interest
here.
Permanence and change. Let us imagine a duration without any
regular pattern. Nothing in it would ever be recognizable, for
nothing would ever recur. It would be a duration without
measures of any sort, without entities, without properties, with-
out events-a void duration, a timeless chaos.
Our actual perception of time depends upon regularly recur-
72 THB PROPAGATION OF THINGS
Urban life alone is not enough. The provinces all have cities,
but the tedium of provincial city life is proverbial. It is tedious
because the provincial city is like an organ that usually can only
receive and relay messages from the higher nervous centers: it
cannot issue many messages of its own, other than of pain or
discomfort; and its active elements perennially emigrate to tbe
true centers of happening, where the central decisions of the
whole group are made, and where the concentration of power
draws together a class of patrons for the inventions and designs
of the artist. These are true metropolitan conditions. They are
the only necessary and adequate conditions for the appearance of
the rapid historical pace that has always marked life in the chief
cities of man.
Thus we have four societal phases to consider in this discussion
of the velocity of artistic events: (r) tribal life, face-to-face with
nature and unable to afford artisans; (2) provincial towns and
cities with their derivative arts, including those capital cities
which specialize only in government; (3) tribal societies that in-
clude professional craftsmen with originating powers; (4) cities
or courts which issue the invisible yet ultimate orders. The tabu-
lation pertains to Greco-Roman civilization, to Chinese dy-
nastic society, and to the modern world since r8oo with its politi-
cal division by ruling states and colonial empires, and by capital
cities drawing to themselves the flower of provincial talent. It
is valid also for the urban civilizations of ancient America. The
ranking of provincial cities as less favorable environments than
tribal societies which have their own craft traditions may seem
arbitrary, but it is justified in regard to the conditions of original
artistic activity: an Ashanti bronzeworker in mid-nineteenth-
century Africa was perhaps more favorably situated as an artist
than his contemporary colleagues in Chicago or Mosul, who
were limited to the making of provincial replicas and useful
stereotypes.
In medieval Europe before I.j.OO a different scheme is needed.
The feudal courts, the abbeys, and the cathedrals were the
fAST AND SLOW HAPPENING 95
revival in this century after long disuse, first with Gaudi and in
later ferro-concrete studies of ribbed structure.
Such intermittent classes are easily recognized as being com-
posed of impulses so separate that distinct groups of inventions
are really present. Yet the new group would be impossible with-
out the tradition and the accomplishments of the earlier group
buried deep in its past. The old class conditions its new con-
tinuation more pervasively than the living generation usually
cares to remember.
The history of transcultural diffusion in turn contains several
kinds of motion. Under pre-industrial conditions of travel, great
distances as between Imperial Rome and Han-dynasty China
were traversed at first only by the most useful inventions. Sys-
tematic missionary efforts to transform the entire symbolic
structure of Chinese civilization, by Buddhists from India after
the sixth century, and by Christians in the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries were temporarily successful, but they could
never have been begun without the ample prior tradition of
useful learning carried to China by commerce. Occasionally, as
in the sixteenth-century Spanish conquest of Mexico and Pem,
abrupt military action replaced these motions of commercial and
missionary penetration. Conquest was followed at once by mas-
sive European substitutions of useful and symbolic behavior for
native traditions. Only the useful items new and necessary to
Europeans survived the wholesale destruction of the native
American civilizations (potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, etc.).
Very few native art forms have so far survived this wreck.u
The village art of Mexico has a few muted or commercial recalls
of Indian antiquity. The principal figures of twentieth-century
I I. 1'he eschatology of civili2ations is a subject still undisturbed by deep thought.
See W.H.R. Rivers, "The disappearance of useful arts,'' Festskrift ti/ll.'gnad Edvard
Westermarck (Helsingfors, 1912), pp. 109-30; or my essay entitled "On the Colonial
Extinction of the Motifs of Pre-Columbian Art,'' Essays in Pre-Columbian Art
and Archaeology for S. K. Lothrop (Cambtidge, Mass., 1961); and A. L. Kroeber's
remarks on "The Question of Cultural Death" in Col!figuratlon.s of Cultural Growth
(Berkeley, 1944), pp. 818-25.
108 SOME KINDS OF DURATIOto!
was less complex, and partly because old history comes into long
perspective more easily than the close view of recent happening.
The older the events are, the more are we likely to disregard
differences of systematic age. The Parthenon is a retarded example
of the peripteral temple. This class was already very old when
lctinos was born. The fact of systematic age, however, is rarely
if ever mentioned in classical studies. Classical scholars have to
rely upon approximate dates for large groups of things, and with-
in series of things they rarely can fix dates exact to the year. The
idea is mor~ developed in studies of Gothic medieval sculpture,
as when E. Panofsky sought to distinguish the hands of old and
yotmg masters at Reims Cathedral in the same decade of the
thirteenth century. In the cotmoisseurship of Renaissance paint~
ing, apparent inconsistencies of dating and authorship have often
been resolved with an implicit invocation of systematic age, by
saying that the master persisted in the use of an old-fashioned
idiom. long after his contemporaries had abandoned it. In studies
of contemporary art, finally, there are no problems of dating,
but the need to sort the schools, traditions, and innovations im-
plies the idea of systematic age.
Different configurations vary this fundamental structure of the
present without ever obscuring it completely. One of the uses
of history is that the past contains much clearer lessons than the
present. Often the present situation is merely a complicated in-
stance of conditions for which an ideally clear example can be
fow1d in the remote past.
Athenian vase painting in the closing decades of the sixth cen-
tury n.c. offers a lucid instance of simultaneous form-classes at
a small scale and under completely intelligible conditions. The
black-figured style of bodies silhouetted like black paper cutouts
upon light grounds had prevailed for some generations, and it
allowed an entire series of advances in the technique of repre-
sentation, favoring always the decorative integration of figure
and ground by harmonious and interesting void shapes. But this
manner limited the painter's expressive resources. The solid dark
T.flB SHAPES OP TIMB II9
FINITE INVENTION
pupils. Which is now valid: the isolated work in its total physical
presence, or the chain of works marking the known range of its
positionr Style pertains to the consideration of static groups of
entities. It vanishes once these entities are restored to the flow
of time.
Not biography nor the idea of style nor again the analysis of
meaning confronts the whole issue now raised by the historical
study of things. Our principal objective has been to suggest other
ways of aligning d1e main events. In place of the idea of style,
which embraces too many associations, these pages have outlined
the idea of a linked succession of prime works with replications,
all being distributed in time as recognizably early and late ver-
sions of the same kind of action.'
Index
Let us suppose that the idea of art can be expanded to embrace the
whole range of man-made things, including all tools and wrrting in
addition to the useless, beautiful, and poetic thmgs of the world. By
this view the universe of man-made things simply coincides with the
history of art. lJ then becomes an urgent requirement to devise beller
ways of considering everything man has made.
Arising from the study of art history, this book presents a radically
new approach to the problem of historical change. George Kubler
draws upon new insights in fields such as anthropology and lmguis-
tics and replaces the notion of style with the idea of a linked succes-
sion of works distributed in time as recognizably early and late
versions of the same action. The result is a view of histoncal sequence
aligned on continuous change more than upon the static concept of
style-the usual basis for conventional histories of art.
"A carefully reasoned and brilliantly suggestive essay in defense of
the view that the history of art can be the study of formal relation-
ships, as against the view that it should concentrate on ideas of sym-
bols or biography."-Harpers
"It is a most important achievement, and I am sure that it will be
studied for many years in many fields. I hope the book upsets people
and makes them reformulate."-James Ackerman
ISBN 0-300-00144-4
Q
I
78030