Julius von Schlosser’s First Bibliography of Kunstliteratur: “Register (zugleich Gesamtbibliographie)”, in: Julius Schlosser, Die Kunstliteratur. Ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte (Wien 1924) (FONTES 32)

FONTES presents sources and documents for the early modern history of art, together with commentaries and illustrations. Included are not only the kinds of texts contained in Julius von Schlosser’s classic Die Kunstliteratur, but also other categories of texts such as antiquarian literature, manuscript texts from archives and libraries, poetry, excerpts from lexica and encylopedic works, as well as commentaries and volumes of prints illustrating collections, pattern books, didactic works for art instruction, and other similar material. Thus FONTES will attempt to expand Schlosser’s canon of sources which has constituted the universe of the historical literature of art and to map comprehensively, and in a pan-European perspective, the complexity and the diversity of the theoretical and practical consideration of the artistic process. The Kunstliteratur of Schlosser (Vienna 1924) set itself, first of all, the task of comprehensively exploring the literary sources of the history of art, aiming then at least to describe and to report them bibliographically.Thus Schlosser produced the first modern tendentially complete bibliography of Kunstliteratur. About the index to his Kunstliteratur (“Register”) he wrote: “As a general bibliography (Gesamtbibliographie), the Register (Index) is intended to represent a synopsis of the source literature of the history of art.“. This Register is the subject of the present study. It provides a synoptic overview of Schlosser’s corpus of the historic literature of art, a corpus which constitutes and remains the point of departure for futher attempts to register, index, and expand this body of literature.