tore nordenstam explanation and understanding in the history of art

we get socialised into other forms of life, by training and learning, by being corrected, by
getting experienced. What this involves has been well formulated by Kjell S.
Johannessen, from whom the following quotation stems:
The surroundings will in general be more important than the individual aesthetic
concepts. We would have to form a general picture of the place of art in the culture in
question by investigating the conditions under which works of art are produced and
received. We would have to describe the treatment of artists and the prestige of
connaisseurship. We would have to try to determine the function of art in society by
describing its relation to religion, economics and politics. We would have to determine
the perceptual skills of the connaisseurs and the general public by describing their
education and its relation to the economical basis and the technology of the society.
Norms and values of different kinds as well as their particular interrelations in the
prevailing world view would also have to be included in the description. 111
We would have to do this not merely because we happen to be interested in say the
relations between art and society. We would have to do so for conceptual reasons:
because works of art are part of the conceptual fabric of actions, intentions, practices,
skills and institutions.
Finally, an ambiguity in the phrase “familiarizing oneself with an aesthetic practice”
remains to be cleared up. To familiarize oneself with an earlier aesthetic practice may be
taken to mean the same as “trying to re-enact the aesthetic experiences which people had
e.g. at the time when the works of art in question were produced.” Understanding is then
taken to mean a kind of empathy or Einfühlung. This was the aim of the first generations
of hermeneutically minded historians in the 19th century (for instance Ranke and
Droysen). But, as Wilhelm Dilthey emphasized a hundred years ago, this is an impossible
111 K. S. Johannessen, ”Art and Aesthetic Praxis”, in Contemporary Aesthetics in Scandinavia, p. 93.
Gunnar Danbolt’s work on the Codex Egberti draws the art-historical implications of this (cf. note 106
above). Cf. also M. Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy (Oxford University
Press 1972, paperback edition 1974), who approaches his material in a similar way without explicitly
formulating the presupposed philosophical platform.