Georg Simmel (1858–1918) is best known today as the author of several groundbreaking studies in modern European social criticism and philos- ophy. Many readers will know him for works such as The Philosophy of Money (1900) or Sociology: Inquiries into the Construction of Social Forms (1908), and for essays such as “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” “The Stranger,” and “The Concept and Tragedy of Culture.” Yet less well ap- preciated are many highly original writings by Simmel on movements and personalities of the arts in European cultural history from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century. These include book-length studies of Goethe and Rembrandt, as well as a plethora of essays on figures from Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci to Auguste Rodin, on forms and media of art, on philosophies of the arts after Kant and Schopenhauer, and on sociological circumstances of the arts in modern culture and economy.
Scholars of Simmel’s writings have long recognized the importance of art and aesthetics to Simmel’s vision of modern forms of society. Com- mentators have long emphasized that artistic and aesthetic images of the world form at once an object of Simmel’s concerns and a medium— perhaps even the medium—of his entire style and practice of investiga- tion. Constantly, Simmel writes in a way that elaborates symbols, meta- phors, tropes, and analogies as experimental clues to an illumination of the deep structures of mind and behavior that preoccupy him. Yet the distinctively plastic, relational, even in some respects “diffuse,” character of his writing, combined with the highly dispersed fate of his publications after his death, has meant that for many years, the significance of art and aesthetics in his oeuvre has been difficult to determine in the overview.