Heinrich Wölfflin (1864 — 1945) was one of the founding fathers of art history. His ideas, however, go far beyond the current boundaries of this discipline. His fundamental principles of art history became classics as soon as they were published in 1915. Wölfflin defends the revolutionary idea that the visual language of visual arts has its own history, the meaning of which is irreducible to any attempt at biographical or cultural contextualisation.
Rather than questions of attribution and dating, his main interest lies in stylistic transformations, which he studies by crossing historical classifications and aesthetic categories. As a result, he is a pioneer of some of the most promising developments in contemporary human sciences, particularly in the field of visual studies.