Art History in Nineteenth-Century Estonia?
Art History in Nineteenth-Century Estonia?

Summary/Abstract: Looking at the professionalisation of art history in the Baltic provinces and particularly what is now Estonia, the paper seeks to analyse the relationship between ‘amateur’ and professional art historians, the disciplinary boundaries between history and art history, and the interrelations between academia and learned societies. At the University of Tartu, several institutional steps were taken, but how did these affect scholarly research on the local heritage of architecture that was born outside the university? I aim to discuss the criteria of scholarly art history, equivalent steps in German art history and the Baltic German authors’ awareness of these, for which the first monographs on the history of Baltic architecture, published beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, serve as case studies. Particular attention is focused on the figure of Wilhelm Neumann, deemed the first professional art historian.

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