Review: Dan Karlholm and Keith Moxey (eds) Time in the History of Art: Temporality, Chronology and Anachrony

Abstract

Art historians have long reflected on space – how does an image fit into a book or altarpiece from which it’s been detached? But time has also not been neglected. Heinrich Wölfflin (1941), for example, argued it was incorrect to imagine Renaissance sculptures reflecting a single moment in time. Indeed, the reconstruction of space and time would be standard dual aims of historicist art history. Nevertheless, a ‘temporal turn’ has been advocated within art history in order to bring time and its theoretical conflicts (anachronism, heterochronism) to the fore. The edited book under review reflects this trend, which is closely related to the ‘materialist’ turn of affective, networked reality as a model for understanding art historiographic scholarship in the contemporary moment.