Two Picasso prints were stolen by three armed robbers from a museum in São Paulo, Brazil, on Thursday, The Associated Press reported. Along with the Picasso prints, “Minotaur, Drinker and Women” from 1933 and “The Painter and the Model” from 1963, the thieves took paintings by two Brazilian artists — “Couple” by Lasar Segall and “Women in the Window,” above, by Emiliano Di Cavalcanti — from the Pinacoteca do Estado museum. The works were estimated to be worth a combined $612,000. The robbers paid the museum’s entrance fee of $2.45 and then overpowered guards to take the framed works. In December another Picasso, “Portrait of Suzanne Boch,” and a painting by the Brazilian artist Candido Portinari were stolen from the São Paulo Museum of Art after men used a crowbar and car jack to force open the museum’s doors. The paintings from that robbery were later found leaning against a house on the outskirts of the city.

Most acknowledge Heinrich Wölfflin (1864-1945), who studied under Burckhardt in Basel, as the father of modern art history. Wölfflin certainly made the first formal analysis of the field. He introduced a scientific approach to the history of art, turning on three concepts.

Firstly, he attempted to study art using psychology, particularly the work of Wilhelm Wundt, one of the founders of scientific psychology. A principal, if strained, scientific conception was that of the artistic ideal of corporeal correspondence; i.e. that art and architecture are good if they resemble the human body. For example, houses were good if their façades looked like faces. Secondly, he introduced the idea of studying art through comparison. Hence by comparing individual paintings to each other, one were able to make distinctions of style. His book Renaissance and Baroque developed this idea, and was the first to show how these stylistic periods differed from one another. In contrast to Giorgio Vasari, Wölfflin was uninterested in the biographies of artists. In fact he proposed the creation of an “art history without names.” Finally, he studied art based on ideas of nationhood. He was particularly interested in whether there was an inherently “Italian” and an inherently “German” style. This last interest was most fully articulated in his monograph on the German artist Albrecht Dürer.

He used a comparison - contrast type of analysis, and believed that both Renaissance and Baroque architecture “spoke” the same language - that of classical Greek and Rome - though with different dialects.

Wölfflin taught at the universities of Berlin, Basel, Munich, and Zurich. A number of students went on to distinguished careers in art history, including Jakob Rosenberg and Frida Schottmuller.