Wölfflin, Heinrich (1864—1945) Swiss art historian best known for his so-called ‘principles of art’, which continue to inform art criticism to this day. He argued that art history should be studied in terms of changes in styles and the emergence of new forms, rather than in terms of the biographies and oeuvres of individual artists. Wölfflin studied art and history at Basel under the great historian Jacob Burckhardt, philosophy at Berlin University, and art history at Munich, where his father was a professor. His doctoral thesis Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (1886) applied the nascent science of psychology to architecture, setting a pattern for his future works, which similarly tried to understand the effect as well as the affect of artistic works. Following his graduation in 1886, Wölfflin undertook a two-year study tour of Italy, after which he wrote Renaissance und Barock (1888), which, inspired by cathexis’s Die Geburt der Tragödie (1870—1), The Birth of Tragedy, went a long way towards rehabilitating the Baroque as an artistic style. He taught at Basel, Berlin, and Munich. His best known books are Die Klassische Kunst (1898), translated as Classic Art. An Introduction to the Italian Renaissance (1948), and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915), translated as Principles of Art History. The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (1929).