La escultura y la erudición histórica de los críticos españoles de la segunda mitad del siglo XIX

Abstract

When spanish art critics comment on sculptures that are showed in the national exhibitions of Fine Arts, they quote names of great artists (as Phidias, Michelangelo or Berruguete) and glorious epochs (Classical Greece or ltalian Renaissance, specially). This historical knowledge serves to judge contemporary works: Art History becomes Art Theory. This article focuses on differents functions that erudition has, in order to appreciate the taste for the past in Spain during the second half of the Nineteenth-Century.