Abstract
Chapter 5, The Theory and History of Art, deals with the thinking about lines in Western histories and theories of art from antiquity to the 1960s. Although this thinking is wide-ranging and irreducibly heterogeneous, it can nevertheless be related to specific practices and paradigms. As long as the graphic or drawn line is prevalent, for instance, the line is regularly thought of as a contour circumscribing forms and producing figures or images. Since the 18th century, however, it is more often closely associated with movement than with the definition of form. It may now even be detached from any surface, becoming a ‘line in space’ (think of struts or threads). Yet this is in no way a ‘linear’ history. The chapter refers to lines in ancient anecdotes and philosophy (Aristotle, Pliny the Elder), to lines in medieval image theology and drawing (Theodor Studites, Villard de Honnecourt), to perspective and grid in the Renaissance (Alberti, Dürer), to lineamenta, disegno, trait (Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Vasari, Testelin), to moving lines in the 16th and 17th centuries (Leonardo da Vinci, Dürer, Vasari, Lomazzo, Bosse), to the emphasis on the line in the 18th and early 19th centuries (Hogarth, Winckelmann, Lavater, Blake), to the devaluation of contour and the rise of forces (Delacroix, Ruskin), to physiologies and psychologies of the line around 1900 (Wölfflin, Endell, Lipps, van de Velde, Worringer), and to new concepts of the line since ca. 1920 (Mondrian, Kandinsky, Gabo/Pevsner, Rodchenko, Klee, Lygia Clark, Michael Fried, Gertrud Goldschmidt).
