13 slide presentations, Dornach, Oct. 8, 1916 – Oct. 29, 1917 (CW 292)

"I am going to show you a series of reproductions, of slides, from a period in art history
to which the human mind will probably always return to contemplate and consider; for,
if we consider history as a reflection of inner spiritual impulses, it is precisely in this
evolutionary moment that we see certain human circumstances, ones that are among
the deepest and most decisive for the outer course of human history, expressed
through a relationship to art." —Rudolf Steiner

Rudolf Steiner understood that the history of art is
a field in which the evolution of consciousness is
symptomatically and transparently revealed. This
informal sequence of thirteen lectures was given
during the darkest hours of World War I. It was a
moment when the negative consequences of what
he called the age of the consciousness soul, which
began around 1417, were made most terribly
apparent. In these lectures he sought to provide
an antidote to pessimism. After describing the
movement of consciousness from Greece into Rome,
coupled with influences from the Orthodox East, he
showed how these influences transformed as the
Middle Ages became the Renaissance.

The process begins with Cimabue and Giotto develops, then deepens and becomes more conscious in
the great Renaissance masters Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael. This movement then continues
with the Northern masters, Dürer and Holbein, as well as the German tradition. One entire lecture is
devoted to Rembrandt, followed by one on Dutch and Flemish paintings. Themes are woven together
to show how past epochs of consciousness and art live again in our consciousness-soul period. 

Replete with interesting information and more than 600 color and black-and-white images, these
lectures are rich and dense with ideas, enabling us to understand both the art of the Renaissance
and the transformation of consciousness it announced. These lectures demonstrate (to paraphrase Shelley) that artists truly are the unacknowledged legislators of the age.

Art History as a Reflection of Inner Spiritual Impulses is a translation from German
of Kunstgeschichte als Abbild innerer geistiger Impulse
(GA 292, Rudolf Steiner Verlag, 2000).