Aesthetics Debate- ish

My good ol' buddy P.E. "Patrick" Lawrence and I are gonna attempt a cross-blog dialogue (hey, that rhymes!) about Stuff that we find interesting. Here is the lecture which we're using as a starting point to our first 'debate':

Universal Theory of Aesthetics

And here are some of my notes, but not all of them, as I may need some fodder to return fire with later! I'll try not to tread on the toes of the points Patrick has/ will raise and just stick to my original interpretations and responses to what was said in the lecture.
Lecturer first introduces the German-based study of images known as 'Bildwissenschaft' - wissenschaft referring almost literally to science and Bild meaning any kind of image (racial stereotypes of brutal German-ness aside, the categorising of 'pictures' seems an interesting facet to add to the 'What is art?' debate).
Heinrich Wolfflin wanted to introduce a study of art history based on visual roots, as opposed to social or cultural influences. This means that ideally he would create an art history 'without names', which removed an individual artist and instead focussed on transformations in the mode of representation: "Vision itself has it's history".
Wollflin opposed the history of art in terms of progress, versimilitude, and imitations of nature, such as the trend for a more and more accurate mimetic approach throughout the Renaissance. It's worth noting that in both the lecture and in Wolfflin's work, the 'art' used as examples is largely from directly before or after the Renaissance, within a fairly limited time period (this is where my arguments already begin to fray at the edges).
However, Wolfflin was interested in emphasising a theory that avoided looking at art in historic progressional terms. He defined five pairs of 'fundamental concepts' with which to analyse the modes of representation possible in images (the lecture chooses to look only at the first three, so I'm putting the last two in but not saying anything about them):
1. Linear and painterly - a linear style would show lines, planes, edges, and detail not normally absorbed by the human eye. This meant that there was a certain 'textural' or tactile approach, a plastic style in which details are rendered. By contrast the painterly involves an 'impressionistic' approach (without yet involving Impressionism), according to Wolfflin worked in light and shade and by 'grouping into patches' the subject matter. This creates an overall impression of the subject without necessarily delineating particluar parts of the image: more visual semblances similar to our actual experience of vision, where we just get an overall impression of a scene.
2. Planimetric and recessional - put simply, the way the subject matter of the image is ordered in relation to the 'picture plane', the front of the image through which we perceive it, I guess (pull me up on these explanations at any point, Patrick). Thus a pre-Renaissance image might show a group of people all "flatly" adjacent to one another, creating a feeling of static tranquility, arranged stability, and order. Recessional painting focusses instead on how the elements are ordered, creating a directional flow for the eye and more energy and movement.
3. Closed form and open form - similarly to this, how the subject matter relates to the frame of the image. Pre-and-during-Renaissance would generally have a self-contained and static image with a 'stable equilibrium of parts' regulated by the boundary, and open form would again invovle a sense of movement, not dictated by the placing of the frame, and perhaps obscured or only half-visible parts of the subject matter.
4. Composite unity and fused unity.
5. Absolute clarity and relative clarity.

Wolfflin felt that history takes these modes in a necessary repeating process from linear to painterly and back again... Then Wiesing came along...
I'll move onto Wiesing soon, but let's see what Patrick has to say, if anything (let me know if you want me to put the Wiesing stuff up before you respond, dude :P).