Artistic style

1. Historical background

The concept of style in the arts was first elaborated in Ancient Greek and Roman treatises on rhetoric – the art of public speaking. The ancients distinguished style from invention (subject matter) and organization (the arrangement of subject matter into parts). Style is diction, or word use, and composition, or the way in which words are combined into sentences. It is form rather than content: not what you say, but how you say it. Good style consists in correctness, clarity, ornamentation and decorum (appropriateness). However, since all good speech should be grammatically correct and clear, what chiefly makes the difference between one style and another is the use of ornamentation or rhetorical ‘figures’ and tropes. The principle of decorum stipulates that the style of a speech be appropriate to the total situation in which it is delivered, including who the speaker is, what they are talking about and what audience they are addressing. The ancients distinguished three kinds of style – plain, middle and grand – and each was appropriate to different occasions and purposes. It was very important to know how to adapt your style so as to secure the desired intellectual and emotional effect in your audience. Finally, style is sometimes thought of as an image of the speaker: Cicero’s style to some extent reflects Cicero himself.

The rhetorical concept of style endured largely unaltered through the Enlightenment, and extended its area of application to music and the visual arts. The same ‘subject’, such as a portico or a representation of the Crucifixion, could be presented in different styles to achieve different effects. Different styles were individuated and organized into hierarchies. Decorum remained important: just as the epic poem demanded a more elevated style than the lyric, so in painting the grand style was suited to history painting as opposed to still life. Critics such as John Dryden took issue with Shakespeare because he mixed the grandstyle of tragedy with the low style of comedy in such works as Hamlet and King Lear, and the music theorist Johann Joseph Fux insisted that the styles of church music should not be confused with those of theatre and dance.

The advent of Romanticism and German Idealism radically altered the way in which style was conceived. The Romantics rejected the hierarchy of genres and the idea that a particular subject demanded a particular appropriate style. They argued that style and subject are not independent and that style cannot be defined in terms of a list of rhetorical ornaments. Coleridge, for example, celebrates the poem as a living, organic whole in which style and content are fused. To the Romantics a work of art was an emotional expression by an artist with a unique sensibility, whose emotional responses to a subject were embodied in both the style and content of their work. Individual style was the expression of all the peculiarities of the artist’s qualities of mind and feeling.

On an altogether more grand scale, Hegel argued that different period styles are expressions of culture in general. For Hegel, art is a sensuous manifestation of Spirit, and the successive phases of art correspond to the inevitable movement of Spirit towards self-realization (see Hegel, G.W.F. §8). Each phase corresponds to a style – the Symbolic, the Classical and the Romantic (post-Classical or Christian) – and each is expressive of a different culture – the Ancient Egyptian, Ancient Greek and modern. Shorn of some of their metaphysical underpinnings, these ideas re-emerge in the theories of period style and style change developed by the great nineteenth-century German art historians, Heinrich Wölfflin, Alois Riegl, Paul Frankl and others. For example, Wölfflin identified five contrasting style qualities – the most famous being ‘linear’ versus ‘painterly’ – through which he defined the contrast between the art of the High Renaissance and that of the Baroque period. He argued that there was a necessary evolution from the first set of qualities to the second, that this pattern of development recurred in most historical periods, and that it was due to principles internal to the history of art.