'An appendix of manageable proportions': Heinrich Wölfflin and Hans Rose between Baroque Studies and National-Socialism

The text by Hans Rose translated here stems from the 1926 version of Heinrich Wölfflin’s Renaissance and Baroque, and was published as an appendix to the fourth edition of the original book. This 'Commentary' by Rose provides an insight into the slowly widening gap between the master's work and the progress made by younger students – amongst which his own pupils – in the study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italian architecture. Rose's addition was ignored by later
students of seventeenth-century Italian art, however. Especially the private life of its author became an issue as Rose was arrested for homosexual behaviour in 1937, sacked from his position of professor and deprived of his academic title.1 He died during the last days of the Second World War, when Russian forces liberated Berlin.2 He could never request rehabilitation and as a result his art historical publications have never been reconsidered – and also this complex episode between
master and pupil in 1926 has not yet been dealt with. In this introduction to the translation, both the personal relations between Wölfflin and Rose will be discussed in the light of contemporary politics, and the impact of especially Rose's intellectual trajectory on his art-historical views will be reconsidered, showing how a victim of the Fascist regime had actually been one of its early academic supporters. This transpires in many of his publications, including the Commentary to Wölfflin's Renaissance und Barock.