Abstract

«I do not know whether at that time the people looked with different eyes, but the sky was crossed by another sun that made all colours appear different». In a letter written in 1896 to his pupil Heinrich Wölfflin, Jacob Burckhardt addressed with these cautious words the very intricate question of a possible relationship between the history of styles on one side, and the history of perceptual modes on the other side. My paper aims at reconstructing the major trends of the debate raised around this relationship: firstly in the so called "Kunstwissenschaft" (the «science of art» in the German speaking countries between the second half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century), secondly in the domain of the visual culture studies (mainly referring to the notion of «scopic regime»), and finally in the discussion on the historical epistemology and the plasticity of perception more recently developed in the field of analytic philosophy.