Design language

Form language (also form vocabulary ) is a synonym commonly used in the visual arts for the stylistic elements of a work of art, a building, an artist or an era. The term has been familiar since the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin used the concept of form .

The transfer of the linguistic terms language or vocabulary to the visual is based on the idea that shapes are fundamentally a means of understanding and finding identity. Wölfflin was close to folk psychology , according to which collective psychological properties are expressed in artistic styles : “What a people has to say, it speaks in any case and if we observe its formal language where it speaks casually and we find it afterwards in the big one Art, in architecture, the same forms again [...]. "

More recently, attempts have been made to apply linguistic criteria to the optical using pattern recognition methods (see formal language ), from which key words such as visual grammar or image grammar have resulted.

literature

Christoph Wetzel : Reclams Sachlexikon der Kunst . Reclam, Stuttgart 2007, ISBN 978-3-15-010601-3 , p. 153.
Klaus Sachs-Hombach , Klaus Rehkämper (Ed.): Bildgrammatik. Interdisciplinary research on the syntax of pictorial forms of representation (Bildwissenschaft series; Vol. 1). Scriptum-Verlag, Magdeburg 1999, ISBN 3-933046-24-6 .

Individual evidence

^ Heinrich Wölfflin : "Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture". 1886 . In: Thomas Friedrich, Jörg H. Gleiter (Ed.): Empathy and phenomenological reduction. Basic texts on architecture (aesthetics and cultural philosophy; vol. 5). Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2007, p. 104. ISBN 978-3-8258-9366-8 .

[1] Heinrich Wölfflin : "Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture". 1886 . In: Thomas Friedrich, Jörg H. Gleiter (Ed.): Empathy and phenomenological reduction. Basic texts on architecture (aesthetics and cultural philosophy; vol. 5). Lit-Verlag, Berlin 2007, p. 104. ISBN 978-3-8258-9366-8 .