Mapping Art History in the Digital Era

Just as for the rest of the humanities, a roadmap for the discipline of art history in the past few decades would show a tangle of unexpected turns. Art history has undergone the linguistic turn, the material turn, the pictorial turn, the global turn, and, of course, the spatial turn, to name a few; what is more, there is the discipline’s recent convergence with digital technologies. Already in 2004, while reviewing two recent contributions to the field, Larry Silver could assert in The Art Bulletin that “art is created as much in place as in time, making some self-aware form of artistic geography essential to the future of the discipline.”1 Much more recently, Paul Jaskot hailed spatial analysis as “the most productive point of intersection [of art history] with digital methods.”2 Such claims attest to an important change in the discipline of art history, countering its long-standing lack of attention to the use of geographical tools. Our traditional hesitation to adopt such instruments is often supported by Fernand Braudel’s famous assertion about the preference for museum catalogs over artistic atlases.3 Could Google Earth’s satellite views, while jumping from one location on the globe to another, ever be put to a rigorous art historical use? Are digital maps really causing a turn in our practices? Or will they be just one more step in that long tradition of neglect, precisely at a time when this kind of electronic information is ubiquitous in ordinary life and for many other scientific disciplines? What follows is an attempt to raise these and some other useful questions; while not all of them will be answered, we can gain some leads from the available experiences.