Heinrich Wölfflin (; 21 June 1864 – 19 July 1945) was a Swiss art historian, esthetician and educator, whose objective classifying principles ("painterly" vs. "linear" and the like) were influential in the development of formal analysis in art history in the early 20th century. He taught at Basel, Berlin and Munich in the generation that raised German art history to pre-eminence. His three great books, still consulted, are Renaissance und Barock (1888), Die Klassische Kunst (1898, "Classic Art"), and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915, "Principles of Art History"). Wölfflin taught at Berlin University, from 1901 to 1912; Munich University, from 1912 to 1924; and Zurich University, from 1924 until his retirement. Origins and career Wölfflin was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, and is buried in Basel. His father, Eduard Wölfflin, was a professor of classical philology who taught at Munich University and helped found and organize the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. Wölfflin studied art history and history with Jakob Burckhardt at the University of Basel, philosophy with Wilhelm Dilthey at Berlin University, and art history and philosophy at Munich University where his father had taught. He received his degree from Munich University in 1886 in philosophy, although he was already on a course to study the newly minted discipline of art history. Wölfflin's principal philosophy mentor at the University of Munich, where Wölfflin got his doctoral degree, was the renowned professor of archaeology Heinrich Brunn. Greatly influenced by his mentors, particularly neo-Kantian Johannes Volkelt (Der Symbolbegriff) and Heinrich Brunn, his dissertation, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur (1886), already showed the approach that he was later to develop and perfect: an analysis of form based on a psychological interpretation of the creative process. It is considered now to be one of the founding texts of the emerging discipline of art history, although it was barely noted when it was published. After graduating in 1886, Wölfflin published the result of a years' travel and study in Italy, as his Renaissance und Barock (1888), already showed the approach that he was later to develop and perfect, he pursued his method in books on the Renaissance and Baroque periods. For Wölfflin, the 16th-century art now described as "Mannerist" was part of the Baroque aesthetic, one that Burckhardt before him as well as most French and English-speaking scholars for a generation after him dismissed as degenerate. On the death of Jacob Burckhardt in 1897 Wöllflin succeeded him in