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History of Art, Reason 93this history was henceforth recounted in accordance with a legitimationprocedure that tallied no longer with the social world of theacademies, much less with that of the princely courts, but rather withthat of the university. The first decisive book in this context was withoutdoubt that by K. F. von Rumohr, whose Italianische Forschungenreconsidered the concept of Renaissance through the critique of primarysources, the methodical comparison of works of art, and thestudy of patterns of influence. 21 By making itself a legitimate academicdiscourse, the history of art seemed to accede to the status of a reallydisinterested and objective knowledge: no longer objective only in thegrammatical sense of the genitive contained in the expression ‘‘historyof art,’’ but ‘‘objective,’’ too, in the theoretical sense of a veritableepistemology. The word ‘‘epistemology’’ is misplaced, however, forit did not yet belong to the theoretical vocabulary of the sciences inthe Germany of the nineteenth century. What must we say, then? Wemust say: a critical philosophy of knowledge.It is understandable, in these conditions, that an academic disciplineanxious to constitute itself as knowledge, and not as normative judgment,should have turned to the Kantism of pure reason rather thanto that of the faculty of aesthetic taste. The Kantian tone generallyadopted by the history of art perhaps originates in the simple fact thatThe Critique of Pure Reason can seem—notably in the eyes of thosewho need not tackle it from beginning to end—like a large templedevoted to the profession of a gospel that is the foundation of alltrue knowledge. When art historians were conscious that their workpertained exclusively to the faculty of knowledge, and not to the facultyof judgment, when they decided to produce a discourse of objectiveuniversality (objective Allgemeinheit, in Kant’s words) and no longera discourse of subjective norms, then the Kantism of pure reason becamea necessary way station for all those who sought to regroundtheir discipline, and to redefine ‘‘art’’ as an ‘‘object’’ of knowledgerather than as a subject of academic squabbles.Let’s not lose sight of the fact that this ‘‘all’’ initially consisted, evenin Germany, of only a minority of exacting minds. If a large part ofthe history of art practiced today has spontaneously adopted this neo-