Baroque out of Focus: The Question of Mediation in Wölfflin

This essay contributes to an expanding literature around the terms medium, media, and mediation by offering a historical point of contact between the philosophical and technical genealogies of this constellation of terms. In his theory of the baroque, Heinrich Wölfflin (1864–1945) drew on the philosophical tradition of idealism as well as the questions raised by technical media at the end of the nineteenth century. The baroque appeared in Wölfflin’s writings not only as a stylistic category to be contrasted with the Renaissance but also as a surrogate for the psychological state of immediacy that he recognized as a mark of modernity. While Wölfflin believed that such technologies as photography and film exacerbated this condition, he ultimately resorted to them as he developed pedagogical techniques that remain central to the discipline of art history.