La storia dell’arte nello specchio dei Visual Studies e delle Digital Humanities

This paper addresses some relevant transformations that have occurred in the last decades in the field of art-historical methodologies. Firstly, it focusses on the various «visual» or «iconic» or «pictorial» turns, which have opened up the traditional areas of «high» art-historical research towards the domain of «low» and extra-artistic images. Secondly, it considers some significant switches from the qualitative to the quantitative, namely in the direction of experimental methods in «neuroarthistory» and of distant viewing in «digital art history». At the same time, adopting a perspective anchored in the history of ideas, it strives to exhibit the historical roots of such contemporary methodological trends in the background of the 19th and 20th century art-historical and aesthetic approaches.