The New Vienna School of Art History: Fulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism 1474489761, 9781474489768

Table of contents :
Contents
Figures
Series Editor’s Preface
Preface
Acknowledgments
Glossary of Terms
Introduction: ‘In the Beginning was the Eye, not the Word’
Part I Theory and Methodology
1. The Crisis of the Sciences, Art History and the Vienna School
2. The Basics of Strukturforschung
3. Struktur, History and Determinism
Part II Case Studies
4. Hans Sedlmayr’s Borromini
5. Otto Pächt and ‘National’ Constants in Late Gothic Painting
6. Johannes Wilde on Michelangelo: The Image in Space
7. Otto Demus, Byzantine Art and the Spatial Icon
Conclusion: The Vienna School Today
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

The New Vienna School of Art History

Refractions At the borders of art history and philosophy Series editor: Kamini Vellodi, University of Edinburgh Poised at the threshold of art history and philosophy, Refractions offers a space for intellectually adventurous work that engages the theorisation of art and image as a persistent provocation for our times. The series captures the character of inquiry as refractive, forging resonances and oblique intersections between diverse zones of thought, while fostering breakaway strands of thinking. Editorial Board Andrew Benjamin, Kingston University Adi Efal, University of Lille 3 Jae Emerling, University of North Carolina Vlad Ionescu, University of Hasselt Sjoerd Van Tuinen, Erasmus University Sugata Ray, UC Berkeley Aron Vinegar, University of Oslo Hanneke Grootenboer, Radboud University Books available Mieke Bal, Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis Bart Verschaffel, What Artistry Can Do: Essays on Art and Beauty Ian Verstegen, The New Vienna School of Art History: Fulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism Books forthcoming Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar (eds), Grey on Grey: On the Threshold of Philosophy and Art Charlotte de Mille, Bergson in Britain: Philosophy and Modernist Painting, c. 1890–1914 Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, Ravaisson’s Method: Edification as Therapy Visit the series website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-refractions

The New Vienna School of Art History Fulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism Ian Verstegen

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Ian Verstegen, 2023 Grateful acknowledgement is made to the sources listed in the List of Illustrations for permission to reproduce material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Constantia by Biblichor Ltd, Scotland, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 4744 8976 8 (hardback) ISBN  978 1 4744 8978 2 (webready PDF) ISBN  978 1 4744 8979 9 (epub) The right of Ian Verstegen to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Contents List of Figures Series Editor’s Preface Preface by Richard Woodfield Acknowledgements Glossary of Terms Introduction:  ‘In the Beginning was the Eye, not the Word’ The Challenge and the Pay-off The Players The Corpus

ix xii xv xxvi xxix 1 5 12 14

Gestalt Theory: Basis of the Viennese Method Doing Vienna School Art History Plan for the Book

16 19 22

Part I:  Theory and Methodology

25

1. The Crisis of the Sciences, Art History and the Vienna School Gestalt Psychology Holism and Politics Sedlmayr’s Turn Towards Iconology 

27 30 35 38

2. The Basics of Strukturforschung Hamburg Iconology Two Sciences of Art  Mental Set (Einstellung)  Embedded Behaviour  Reflexivity and Progress 

47 51 53 59 63 68

3. Struktur, History and Determinism  Genius  Social Gestalten – Alfred Vierkandt Historical Chains  Historical Compulsion 

76 79 84 90 96

Part II:  Case Studies

105

4. Hans Sedlmayr’s Borromini  The Book Sedlmayr’s Method  Gebilde – Borromini’s Works 

107 109 112 115

Architektur – Borromini’s Theory  Dokument – Borromini’s Character 

120 123

5. Otto Pächt and ‘National’ Constants in Late Gothic Painting  Design Principles: Technical and Aesthetic Space Design Principles: Surface and Pattern The Netherlandish Design Principle The Dutch Design Principle The French Design Principle Schapiro’s Critique  Reconstituting Art Historical Constants Whither Zeitgeist? 

135 138 143 146 147 148 150 157 160

6. Johannes Wilde on Michelangelo: The Image in Space Wilde and his Historical Method  Function, Parts and Wholes  An Erudite Chapel?  Gestalt, Parts and Wholes 

167 169 172 178 182

7. Otto Demus, Byzantine Art and the Spatial Icon Towards Byzantine Mosaic Decoration  The Icon in Space Beyond Byzantine Mosaic Decoration?  Non-Western Art and Gestalt Restructuring

186 188 190 195 202

Conclusion:  The Vienna School Today

206

Notes References Index

213 282 325

Figures 0.1 Michelangelo, Asa-Josaphat-Joram lunette, Sistine Chapel (photo: Scala/ Art Resource, NY) 2.1 Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, National Gallery, London (photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY) 2.2 Symbol of St. Matthew, Echternach Gospel, MS. lat. 9389, Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris (photo: gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France) 2.3 Christ on the Road to Emmaus, St Albans Psalter. Dombibliothek Hildesheim, HS St.God. 1 (photo: Basilica of St. Godehard, Hildesheim), p. 69 3.1 Rembrandt, Supper at Emmaus 1628, Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André (photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) ix

3.2 Alfred Vierkandt, Professor of Sociology, University of Berlin (photo: Bundesarchiv Bild) 3.3 Plate from Max Dvořák, Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van Eyck, 267 3.4 Wolfgang Metzger in the 1960s (photo: Klaus Franck, Münster University Archive) 4.1 Francesco Borromini, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome (photo: author) 4.2 Sedlmayr’s idea of the plan of San Carlo, after Arnheim (‘Objective Percepts, Objective Values’) (photo: author) 4.3 Sedlmayr’s diagram of the alternate wall groupings (photo: Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis, 1930, figures 4 and 5) 4.4 Sedlmayr’s diagram of the derivation of San Carlo’s façade from Sant’Andrea delle Fratte (photo: Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis, 1930, figures 11 and 13) 5.1 Hugo van der Goes, Portinari Altarpiece, Uffizi, Florence (photo: Scala/ Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY) 5.2 Jean Fouquet, Judicial Court of Charles VII, Munich, Bayerische Staats­ bibliothek, cod. gall. 6 (photo: Wikimedia, free use) 5.3 Jean Fouquet, Gonella, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (photo: Wikimedia, free use) 6.1 Interior of the Sistine Chapel (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY) 6.2 ‘The spectator’s viewpoint’, after Wilde, 1958, figure 3 (photo: by permission of the British Academy) 6.3 Michelangelo, Deluge, Sistine Chapel, Vatican (photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) 6.4 Max Wertheimer, ‘necessary’ and ‘arbitrary’ parts, from Wertheimer (1934) diagram (photo: Zeitschrift für Psychology) 7.1 Apostles, twelfth century, Cathedral, Torcello (photo: © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0) x

7.2 Annunciation, c. 1000, Church of Dormition, Daphni (photo: author) 7.3 Filippo Lippi, chancel corner, 1452–1465, Duomo, Prato (photo: Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0) 7.4 Digital image (after Michelangelo), Moses, 1513–1545, seen from worm’s eye view, from the front (angle after Rosenthal, 1964, figure 6) 7.5 Apparatus of Metzger’s 1935 experiment from the original publication (photo: Psychologische Forschung)

xi

Series Editor’s Preface Kamini Vellodi What is a critical historiography, and under what imperatives and compulsions does it emerge? Ian Verstegen’s book poses the questions that all serious art historical work must address: what must we learn from the past writings of art history? What methods, theories, aporias and problematics insist to challenge our contemporary disciplinary habits, resistances and inertias? In reassessing the theoretical and methodological innovations, still littlestudied in English speaking scholarship, of key members of the second or xii

‘new’ Vienna School of art history – Hans Sedlmayr, Otto Pächt, Johannes Wilde and Otto Demus – Verstegen invites us to consider the contemporary urgencies of their provocations. Attending to their integration of formalist analysis with contemporary psychology, their methods of Struckturforschung [structural analysis], their bringing together of disciplinary reflections with close visual and material attention to works of art, Verstegen presents us with these thinkers’ ‘living approach’ to art history. Their goal ‘to make science human’ in an increasingly technological world, the insight that the object of art history is not identical with the physical presence of the artwork, the rethinking of form in terms of the ‘constellation of thought, the social and political ideas that the work indexes’, and the practice of an ‘expansive thinking’ for the humanities that embraces social science approaches – all these are issues with relevance for our age of multimedia practices, digital platforms and globalised horizons. Verstegen’s book is one that, moreover, courageously reminds us that the confrontation with the apparently discounted, and even questionable aspects of past scholarship, remains a necessary part of any critical study. He exposes the intensive refractions of concepts such as race, Gestalt and Zeitgeist, addressing controversies within this early twentieth-century historiography: Otto Pacht’s approach to national constants; Hans Sedlmayr’s appeal to physiognomic analysis. He demonstrates how critical historiography must undertake such granular reconstructions if it is not to proceed on the basis of tacit assumptions and retreat into common-sense empiricism (or worse still, dogmatism). In its continual negotiation of the theoretical and the empirical, the work of these pioneers of the New Vienna School is a prompt for how we might today approach the epistemology of art history. Verstegen raises a compelling point in stating that today, ‘Art history is awash in theory’, but has ‘no matrix xiii

to debate questions’. Reminding ourselves of the philosophical systems of past art history offers the armatures by which we can pose and re-pose fundamental questions, like the classification and viewing of images, the potentials of formalism for art historical writing, and sensitivity to different modes of visuality – including those beyond the Latin West. Refracting the problems given outline by past scholarship into the medium of the present, Verstegen’s book is a timely invitation for us to reflect on the fluid dimensions and coordinates of past art historical writings, challenging us to retain the glimmer of those insights and blind spots that continue to provoke and inspire us in the construction of our contemporary armatures.

xiv

Preface Richard Woodfield Ernst Gombrich must have had a share in creating the cloud that hangs over Hans Sedlmayr and the members of the ‘New Vienna School of Art History’. In his Introduction to Art and Illusion (1960) he declared: I have discussed elsewhere why this reliance of art history on mythological explanations seems dangerous to me. By inculcating the habit of talking in terms of collectives, of ‘mankind,’ xv

‘races,’ or ‘ages,’ it weakens resistance to totalitarian habits of mind. I do not make these accusations lightly. Indeed I can quote chapter and verse by enumerating the lessons which Hans Sedlmayr wanted the reader to draw from reading Riegl’s essays.1 Perhaps those were the lessons that Sedlmayr wanted to draw from Riegl. However, his attentive reader will discover that, rejecting Riegl, he explicitly ruled out such explanations as deeply unsatisfactory: . . . it is impossible to posit certain timeless, psychological, or structural types as the possible vehicles of Kunstwollen . . . People, conceived in racial terms, figure just as little as bearers of the Kunstwollen. The distribution of styles and their limits does not coincide with the distribution and boundaries of populations. Finally, it is also quite impossible to posit the ‘time’ or ‘spirit of the age’ as vehicles of the Kunstwollen. For if one took these vague explanations literally, all works of art of the same year, of the same era, would display the same style.2 1  E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (London: Phaidon, 1960), 16–17, was referring to Sedlmayr’s ‘Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’ (1929). 2  Hans Sedlmayr, ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’, trans. Matthew Rampley, in Richard Woodfield, ed., Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International 2001), 15–16. xvi

Readers of his ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’ (1931),3 so roundly condemned by Meyer Schapiro in 1936,4 will discover that Sedlmayr described his own notorious distinction between ‘first’ and ‘second’ art histories as ‘theoretically incorrect and admissible only as a hypothetical construct’.5 He did not need that to be pointed out by anybody else. Following the lead of Gombrich and Schapiro, subsequent commentators have seen Sedlmayr’s two essays as manifestations of Nazi ideology. While it is certainly true that Sedlmayr had illegally joined the Nazi Party for a year in 1930–1932 and was an active member from 1938 to the end of the war, the time has come for his work to be re-assessed. In conversation with Gombrich in March 1988, I discovered that: He [Sedlmayr] was an architect by training, and he taught originally on his return from Russia, so they say, he was rather, very, left wing if not communist Marxist. And he taught at the Technische Hochschule in Vienna in the history of architecture. And he got into this circle of the successors of the Kritische [Berichte], of this review journal, which had been re-founded by Otto Pächt, and him, and a man called Bruno Fürst, who gave them money because he was married to quite a wealthy lady. And they 3  Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art (1931)’, in Christopher S. Wood, The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books 2000), 133–179. 4  Wood, Vienna School Reader, 453–485. 5  Ibid., 134. xvii

represented, as I say, they wanted to continue this rationalist, no nonsense attitude to the history of art against both expressionism, and you know, but in contact with more modern movements in, or trends in science. Particularly Sedlmayr was anxious to do that and he was certainly very much interested in gestalt psychology and in characterology and in things of that kind. And . . . a man of many interests. A good writer . . . A very personable person. Energetic. And . . . good lecturer. And his book on Borromini was quite a sort of, how should I say, a manifesto of a new kind of art history, you know. He had this idea which in a way is nonsensical but has often been expressed in one form or another. There are two things, one is gathering of facts and the other is the interpreting the facts which in a way is true except that you can’t gather facts [laughter] unless you know what you are using them for. So it is basically a false start, you know, but he had this idea that first ‘erste’ Kunstwissenschaft, the ‘zweite’ Kunstwissenschaft, the first art history is just chronicling facts, the second then comes to interpret them in a scientific way . . . And I think I told you that he invited me to his house, didn’t I? Yes and so on . . . But [Ernst] Kris was a bit sceptical about him. And . . . altogether . . . He xviii

was at that time not a Nazi. He was one of those cases . . . he died recently . . . he was one of those cases who was particularly frightened for not having been a Nazi. So when the Nazis came he sported a big swastika and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’ etc because he was worried what would happen to him, he had so many Jewish friends, you know. [laughter] Not a very endearing attitude, [laughter] but I think that was what it was you see. Not only was ‘his book on Borromini . . . a manifesto of a new kind of art history’, it provided Gombrich with the inspiration to write his doctoral dissertation ‘Giulio Roman als Architekt’ (1932):6 I certainly would not want to deny the influence that Sedlmayr’s attitude had on me. Without it, I would hardly have decided to write my thesis on the architecture of Giulio Romano and to add to my analysis a psychological interpretation, which admittedly deviates at some points from Sedlmayr’s position.7 6  His dissertation was published as ‘Zum Werke Giulio Romanos: 1. Der Palazzo del Te’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, N.F. 8, 1934, 79–104 and ‘Zum Werke Giulio Romanos: 2, Versuch einer Deutung’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, N.F. 9, 1935, 121–150. The second article contains the critique of Sedlmayr’s theory of expression. The two articles appeared in Italian translation: Ernst H. Gombrich: Giulio Romano: Il Palazzo del Te (Mantova: Tre Luni, 1999). Gombrich went to Sedlmayr’s house on the evening of his doctoral viva to tell him of his critique. 7  E. H. Gombrich, ‘Art History and Psychology in Vienna Fifty Years Ago’, Art Journal 44 (1984): 162–164, 163. xix

By the time that Gombrich entered university there was a feeling that Riegl’s Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (1901) and Max Dvořák’s Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (1924), although landmarks in the development of art history, were both open to damaging criticism.8 They were severely criticised by Julius von Schlosser, doctoral supervisor to both Sedlmayr and Gombrich, who put his opinions into print in 1934: One is reminded of a statement that Wickhoff made about his beloved and revered pupil, as once recalled by Wilhelm Köhler: ‘it is a shame that Dvořák did not become a cultural historian instead of an art historian’, which reveals as much about Wickhoff as it does of Dvořák. The question arises whether the history of art and its language does not run the risk of being mediatized. In fact, [Guido] Kaschnitz-Weinberg has already made this point clearly and forcefully in his aforementioned review of Riegl. The work of art is placed in the opposite spot from that of those strict formalists who would degrade it to a pure document of style and nothing else, allowing it to appear abstractly objectified, but still closer to its primal phenomenon, its creation. The danger of replacing aestheticism with a logicism (or in the 8  Walter Passarge, Die Philosophie der Kunstgeschichte in der Gegenwart (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1930) is worth reading in this context. xx

case of Riegl a psychologism) and pressed into service of a priori formulations of theories of the world, the autonomous character of the discipline would be lost on the basis of a very insecure interpretation of written sources.9 Gombrich felt that he had arrived at a better solution to the problem of style than Sedlmayr. They had both chosen distinctive architects whose styles rubbed against the grain: Borromini and Romano. In their analysis of ‘expression’, Sedlmayr combined Gestalt psychology and physiognomic analysis for Borromini and Gombrich combined the Sprachtheorie of Karl Bühler 10 with a spot of ‘analysis’ from Ernst Kris.11 As Schlosser, following Benedetto Croce, had been a strong advocate of the study of Kunstsprache,12 Gombrich appealed to his interest by using Bühler’s analysis of expression in language in Ausdruckstheorie.13 By raising the topic of Kundgabe he directly   9  ‘Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte’, Mitteilungen des österreichischen Institut für Geschichtsforschung Ergänzungs-Band 13, Heft 2 (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1934) (trans. Karl Johns: Julius von Schlosser, ‘The Vienna School of the History of Art (1934)’, Journal of Art Historiography 1 (December 2009): 42). He commented that Riegl’s use of the concept of Kunstwollen ‘urges toward a definition in overly mythological terms as “national character” or even as a very dubious “racial” psyche’ (32). 10  Gombrich had attended Karl Bühler’s lectures, participated in his seminars and read his books. 11  Gombrich worked with both Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, his close friend, on Die Legende vom Künstler: Ein historischer Versuch (1934). Gombrich was more sympathetic than Kurz to Kris’s psychoanalysis. 12  J. von Schlosser, ‘ “Stilgeschichte” und “Sprachgeschichte” der bildenden Kunst: Ein Rückblick’ (Munich, 1935), Sitzungsberichte der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften Philosophisch-­ historische Abteilung Jahrgang 1935, Heft 1. Vorgelegt von K. Voßler am 12 January 1935. 13  Karl Buhler, Ausdruckstheorie; das system an der geschichte aufgezeigt, Jena: Fischer 1933. Cited on p. 143 of ‘Versuch einer Deutung’ (1935). For a very useful introduction to Bühler see xxi

addressed the problem that Schlosser raised with Riegl’s Kunstwollen and Dvořák’s Geistesgeschichte, that of mediation. In his Bodonyi Review, written at the same time as his dissertation, he made the observation: It is taken for granted that the spiritual and social function of art constitutes a unity within diverse intellectual and cultural circles and constellations, with art defined primarily as manifestation [‘Kundgabe’] in the sense of Karl Bühler, an essentially ahistorical form of aestheticism, which might yield experience but hardly insight. We experience a fallacy here which is common in our everyday life when we interpret physiognomical data pathologically, that is when we believe to be able to appraise the general structure of expression in terms of an individual expression.14 His own thesis was a riposte to Sedlmayr’s. Instead of a formal analysis, he offered an analysis of ‘effects’;15 instead of characterology he used Bühler’s sematology, supporting it with source material – the Mantuan archives and Semiotics: An Introductory Anthology, edited with introductions by Robert E. Innis, Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1985. 14  ‘J. Bodonyi, Entstehung und Bedeutung des Goldgrundes in der spätantiken Bildkomposition (Archaeologiai Ertesitë, 46, 79.32/3)’. Kritische Berichte zür Kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur, 5, 1932/33 (published in 1935) (65–75), 72. I am indebted to Karl Johns for this translation. 15  A sample can be read in the English edition of FMR, March/April 1987, No. 25, ‘Mantuan Caprice’, 25–64, which is beautifully illustrated. xxii

Serlio’s Regole generali di architettura (Venezia, 1537) – thus satisfying the requirements of Schlosser’s seminar.16 Gombrich’s friendship with Ernst Kris continued up to his death in 1957. By the time that Art and Illusion was published in 1960, with its polemic against Sedlmayr’s Riegl, he had redrafted the text of his first Mellon lecture on the psychology of representation and used Bühler’s ‘relational model’ to explain the workings of Constable’s Wivenhoe Park, Essex. Karl Bühler had died forgotten in Los Angeles in 1963,17 and the importance of Bühler’s Sprachtheorie was unacknowledged until 1984.18 As for Sedlmayr’s being a Nazi, Gombrich gave an interesting insight in a radio discussion with Peter Burke in 1973: GOMBRICH: I would not deny that mentality is a useful term, but I think it is also true that people change their mentalities. I’m rather attracted by the sociological concept of role-playing in this respect. If you get into another group, you may 16  Schlosser excluded dilettantes from his seminar, insisting on evidence of archival study combined with attendance at courses in palaeography and diplomatics. Gombrich later qualified his ‘psychological’ interpretation of Romano’s work in ‘Architecture and Rhetoric in Giulio Romano’s Palazzo del Te’ (reprinted in New Light on Old Masters, Oxford: Phaidon 1986) emphasising, instead, a rhetorical approach thus conforming, once more, to Bühler’s Sprachtheorie. 17  See Adrian Brock, ‘Whatever happened to Karl Bühler?’, Canadian Psychology/Psychologie canadienne, 35(3), 1994, 319–329. For Bühler’s influence in Vienna see William Warren Bartley III, Wittgenstein, London: Quartet Books 1974, 104–109. There is a current revival of interest in his work. 18  Karl Bühler, ‘Symbolic Fields in Non-Linguistic Representative Implements’, Sprachtheorie. Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache, Jena 1934. For a general view of Gombrich’s approach to Kunstsprache see my paper ‘Ernst Gombrich: Iconology and the “linguistics of the image” ’, Journal of Art Historiography, No. 5, December 2011. xxiii

feel that your mentality is changing: let us say, as an extreme example, the Army, or another group where everybody seems to act and to think and to speak in a different way, and this reacts back on your own responses to a rather surprising degree. Language is the best guide to mentality in this way. I don’t know if you know the very interesting results of Liam Hudson with schoolboys. In his book Frames of Mind he has shown that boys who consider themselves to be on the science side give dry matter-of-fact answers, which seems to prove that they are quite unimaginative. But if you tell them, ‘Imagine that you are a poet and now answer’, they suddenly become very imaginative. The role is not the person, and we are all many persons. Years ago I took part in experiments about the interpretation of facial expressions in news photographs. This turned out to be almost impossible unless you were also given the context: but there was an exception. You easily recognised the expression which was ‘put on’ to proclaim a public role – as when a Nazi storm-trooper modelled his bearing on his Führer. Membership of such a movement stamps a man much more than, say, membership of a ping-pong club.19 19  ‘Ernst Gombrich discusses the concept of cultural history with Peter Burke’, The Listener, Vol. 90, 27 December 1973, 881–883. xxiv

Gombrich did have something to say about group psychology, after all: ‘The role is not the person, and we are all many persons.’ Who wouldn’t have been worried about the gangs of Nazi students wandering about the university’s corridors? There is an English expression, originally applied to Catholic converts: ‘being more Catholic than the pope’. There’s nothing like fear to change a person’s mindset. Sedlmayr had good cause to be worried.

xxv

Acknowledgments When I was an undergraduate, the elderly Rudolf Arnheim told me to read Alois Riegl. My imagination was captured by a forgotten theory of art history that held untold promise. I still remember standing in Kinko’s for what seemed like hours to photocopy Rolf Winkes’s translation of the Late Roman Art Industry, more or less new at the time. As my career progressed, the Vienna School kept returning, first when I tried to follow up the idea that Hans Sedlmayr had somehow ‘worked with’ (Arnheim) Max Wertheimer, and then through Otto Pächt’s incisive critique of both Panofsky and Gombrich. This book is the culmination of that early fascination with that school of art historians. xxvi

Riegl has received his share of attention but he is generally regarded as a thinker of the past, one to historicise. My interest in the ‘new’ Vienna School is still fired by picking up a text by Otto Pächt and appreciating how visually acute and historically sensitive it is. In other words, the text is living. If it is of the past it is a past that is recognisable and one from which a bridge can be built to the present. Along with a questioning of criticality in art history in general, it is clear to me that appreciating the contributions of a school of art history is not naïve but acknowledging of its success in doing its job, knowing at the same time that progress is always imperfect and partial. I must confess that I have been uneasy with interpretations of Sedlmayr and Pächt for a long time. Coming from experimental psychology and the history of psychology the meaning of certain psychological concepts has always been clear to me and I believe that one cannot write productively about two people who were so absolutely immersed in Gestalt psychology without leaving the comfortable home of art history. In a related vein, I think that general political history has come to terms with the 1930s more successfully than has art history. In bringing these ideas to maturity, I think back to Arnheim and how many more questions I would have liked to have asked him – questions, for instance, around Pächt’s influence. It has been rewarding to have exchanges with Jonathan Alexander, Dan Adler, Jan Bakoš, Agnes Blaha, Ivan Drpic, Andrew Hopkins, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Martin Dönike, Mitchell Frank, Julian Gardner, Herbert Kessler, Cindy Persinger, Dominique Raynaud, Artur Rosenauer, Frederic Schwartz and Celine Trautmann-Waller. Branko Mitrovic, Cindy Persinger and Friedrich Polleross shared archival material and Karl Johns offered his considerable translation abilities. Vlad Ionescu served as reviewer for this book and his comments helped improve it. Kamini Vellodi went above and beyond the call xxvii

of duty as series editor and went through the whole book, for which I am eternally grateful. I am happy to acknowledge a few people in particular. For two decades, Mitchell Ash has been a tolerant mentor from a distance, and I have always appreciated his input and ideas on different ideas, which he has patiently relayed to me. Richard Woodfield has been an eager and judicious interlocutor on issues relating to art historiography and the Vienna School and I am grateful for his ready mind. Branko Mitrovic has been a sceptical discussant, whose respect (if not acceptance) of my arguments I seek. Karl Johns has reminded me that these art historians are people. Finally, Sheila Barker has shown me every day that the best art historical theory is common sense. Some of the material in this book has been developed from previously published material and I am grateful to Ashgate Press, the Journal of Art Historiography and the Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte for permission to use it. The Botstiber Foundation provided a generous grant that allowed me to research in the Pächt Archiv in Vienna. Philadelphia 2021

Glossary of Terms Analytic holism A pairing of emergent holism and explanatory reduction. The whole has irreducible qualities but the parts maintain their identity insofar as their contribution can be reduced via explanation of their interactions. See also Gestalt Formalism An orientation towards artistic works that stresses the importance or even predominance of formal factors in what constitutes their aesthetic interest. In the Vienna School, formal factors are the qualities on which stylistic and iconographic meaning supervene. Gestalt In German, an articulated form; in psychology, the basis of experience; not an interdependent whole (Ganz) but individual sub-wholes, Gestalten. xxix

Gestalt psychology was opposed to both Ganzheit psychology and element­ arism and espoused ‘intelligibilist holism’. Holism (German: Ganzheit) A system of thought presuming the organic interdependency of Nature or experience. In German psychology, Ganzheit psychology of the Leipzig school regarded experience as a temporal, tightly embedded whole of feeling and will. Sedlmayr’s later point of view tended to this extreme. Iconology The system of thought developed from the work of Aby Warburg by Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind and E. H. Gombrich. In general, it sought the symbolic meanings of figures and compositions. Eventually, both Panofsky and Gombrich abandoned the deep, historicist stratum of meaning connected to the Weltanschauung. Intuitionism A form of knowing that is non-racionative, direct and unmediated. Some forms of formalism found the knowledge of artistic works on intuition. The Vienna School denied pure intuitionism, though it believed that aesthetic perception was in dialectic with analysis. See also Analytic holism Kunstwollen The ‘aesthetic urge’ posited by Alois Riegl to explain the compulsion to create an art that suited a culture’s needs. Mereology The study of parts and wholes in formal ontology; studied in Gestalt psychology in terms of perceptual organisation and experience. Naturalism The theoretical commitment that philosophical problems are amenable to explanatory procedures inspired by, but not necessarily reducible to, the natural sciences. Phenomenology The historical school of philosophy founded by Edmund Husserl devoted to the description and classification of mental and material phenomena. In Gestalt theory, it is the propadeutic to psychological research. xxx

Strukturforschung A loose description of the method of the ‘new’ Vienna School, based on the tracing of relevant structural features of historical schools of art. Weltanschauung (English: ‘worldview’) In art history, the unique worldview of a group or people responsible for the unique characteristics of their art. In Viennese art historiography, the unconscious and unarticulated position of a worldview was accepted, a form of historicism. Zeitgeist The spirit of an age; a temporal rendering of a similar content of the Weltanschauung.

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Introduction: ‘In the Beginning was the Eye, not the Word’ The cleaning of the Sistine ceiling in the 1980s brought unexpected insights into Michelangelo’s approach to painting. The dirty surface had contributed to the idea that the artist was not much interested in colour and was more obsessed with forms and especially the form of the human nude. Nevertheless, the cleaning revealed what appeared to be unusual colour combinations. In addition to modelling with single hues, from light to saturated, Michelangelo also used different colours for shadows and highlights. The lunettes, however, presented interesting challenges. There, one found especially contrasting 1

Figure 0.1  Michelangelo, Asa-Josaphat-Joram lunette (fourth lunette, left wall facing altar), Sistine Chapel (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY)

colours. The Asa-Josaphat-Joram lunette, for example, features the Asa figure on the left with a cloak modelled from apple green to deep orange and red. In the symposium dedicated to the unveiling of the restored frescoes, costume historian Edward Maeder interpreted these colours in the lunettes as ‘shot-silk’ – in Italian, cangianti, a kind of silk woven with contrasting colours that appear iridescent when seen in the light.1 According to Maeder, who had singled out the figures of the ancestors in his arguments, colour 2

changes are used to make these Eastern ancestors of Christ more exotic. While it is true that colour changes have been used to represent shot-silk in Italian painting, Maeder went on to suggest that since this fabric was most commonly available from the Near East, it would carry Oriental associations and therefore serve ideally for the ancestors. Maeder constructed his argument in a typical art historical way: we see figures that evoke associative meanings. But he was challenged strongly by the English art historian, John Shearman. Shearman had written a dissertation on the colour of Tuscan painters like Michelangelo and emphasised the great artist’s dependence on his teacher, Ghirlandaio, an artist who had practised the Tuscan tradition of ‘isochromatic colour composition’ in the ceiling. This system, according to which broad, flat fields of colour are decoratively balanced along the picture surface, is frankly medieval in origin.2 According to Shearman, decorative fresco was required to create surface unities to aid visibility even more than making possible narrative associations. Years later, Shearman prominently titled his contribution to the postrestoration volume on the Sistine ceiling, ‘The Functions of Michelangelo’s Colour’, explaining how the high-key colours were in large part a response to the conditions of visibility, illumination and decoration that Michelangelo was facing. In general, Shearman pointed out, one cannot use black in fresco, so one has to choose apparently non-naturalistic colour combinations to keep the brightness of the fresco uniformly high. Thus, in late medieval and early Renaissance frescoes we tend to see yellows darkened a bit towards ochre and some of the darker pigments lightened. As for cangianti, Shearman made the bold claim that the range of colour changes is to be understood purely functionally, writing ‘there is no fundamental difference between [Michelangelo’s] intentions in a polychrome sequence . . . and that of a single-colour saturation change’.3 Half of the seers 3

are coloured in colour-changes, the other half not. Do we imagine half are dressed in silks? Jonah emerges from the mouth of the whale with colour changes. Is he dressed in pretty silks? Shearman further pointed out that the most apparently unusual colour combinations are in the lunettes precisely because they surround windows and fight for their visibility, contre jour. In this view, the high illumination photos taken at close-up suggested an anomaly that in practice does not really exist. One should merely look at the figures from the floor and appreciate the way in which Michelangelo sought to unify the whole ensemble. The suggestion of exotic associations was far from his mind. This is a strong argument that situates the function and meaning of Michelangelo’s chosen colours on the side of practical design. It is not necessary to accept Shearman’s argument wholesale to see the methodological problems that he has thrown up. Where previously we unproblematically assumed we could perceive a figure and read its clothing for its associations, Shearman challenged our very notion of when a figure and its colours should be seen as a sign, suggesting ulterior associations. It became challenging to discuss either Michelangelo’s style or his iconography in an unproblematic way. These challenges to the status quo were not accidental. Shearman had been trained at the Courtauld by an important exponent of the Vienna School of Art History, Johannes Wilde. Shearman’s dissertation and outlook came out of a training that obsessed over formal organisation, visual hierarchies, observation points. The point of view was not just formal, because those questions were posed as theoretically and methodologically primary – one cannot understand a monument’s style or iconography until one has understood it as a functioning whole first. In the words of Wilde’s colleague in Vienna, ‘in the beginning was the eye, not the word!’4 That is the challenge of Vienna School art history to the discipline, and that is the challenge that this book explains. 4

The Challenge and the Pay-off There is by now a long-standing critique of iconology. Some of the most damaging critiques were produced by Vienna School thinkers and will be reviewed in this book. Others were launched from a retrospective point of view.5 By far, the most famous critique current today is that made by Georges Didi-Huberman, who bypasses Erwin Panofsky to return to Warburg and focus on afterlives of meaning.6 In general, critics agree that the iconological approach – mostly as practised by Panofsky – can be circular, selective, and flattens the complexity of works of art. As I shall explain throughout this book, the problem essentially boils down to what is even a unit of meaning? As can be seen in the debate above, for Shearman only a functional understanding of the Sistine ceiling allows one to understand what can potentially evoke an association. If a potentially important visual element does not phenomenally stand out, does not enter into consciousness, it becomes relatively meaningless to assign it a special significance. Shearman’s viewpoint is of course a species of ‘formalism’. Riegl (and Wölfflin) had shown how to bracket style and meaning to concentrate on the work of art’s specific visuality, reflecting an approach not unlike the phenomenology of their contemporary, Husserl. Visuality can require culture and society for its existence, but it nevertheless has an autonomy that cannot be reduced to psychology or causal factors. The formal exploration and categorisation of visuality becomes the task of one, fundamental, kind of art history. The humanities has recently questioned the relentless project of criticality and investigated the benefits of affirmative projects that produce new, positive knowledge rather than endlessly critique the shortcomings of prior knowledge.7 This book is such an affirmative project, investigating the ‘second’ or ‘New’ 5

Vienna School not as a recuperation of unconscious logics of cultural assumptions but as the core of a very special interpretive practice.8 I see it as a fruitful school that produced pivotal contributions that are emphasised here not as an ideological undertow of the present (although they are that as well) but more as a living approach. After so much attention has been given to Alois Riegl, the founder of the original Vienna School, it is time to look at what he inspired.9 Why the second school? Why so-called Strukturforschung? What is so exciting to me is the confluence of sensitive formalist analysis pioneered by Riegl and Max Dvořák with contemporary psychological theory, particularly of the Gestalt school. Its birth is marked by the publication of Max Wertheimer’s paper on illusory movement. Gestalt psychology marked a strong break from previous psychology by rejecting the constancy of stimuli in experience and accepting emergent percepts sui generis. It changed the problem of psychological explan­ ation to understanding the structure and features of present experiences, rather than positing their genesis. Although committed to a methodology crucially pioneered by Hans Sedlmayr, this book does not attempt a rehabilitation of Sedlmayr (although many will perhaps confuse it for such).10 Rather, it uses Sedlmayr’s early theoretical work as the basis for a refined formal theory of art history. In this, indeed, Otto Pächt is just as important. What struck me when discovering the remarkable works of Pächt were his citations in the 1960s of Wolfgang Metzger and his interesting acknowledgement of Sedlmayr’s theoretical writings, even though the two had ended their friendship decades earlier. Pächt’s reasonable voice, marginalised by his iconologically oriented peers in Britain, was what spoke to me with such immediacy. This project is about taking the most representative theoretical exposition and formal work from within the later Viennese tradition and articulating it 6

thoroughly. Therefore, I spend equal time reflecting on theoretical matters and equal time presenting case studies from history. Sedlmayr, unfortunately, is an 800-pound gorilla that no one can get around. Basing myself on historical contextualisation, I make the strong claim that Sedlmayr’s early work is fundamentally different from his later work. At first, he is an analytic and historical formalist. In 1934 with the paper on Brueghel’s Macchia he changes and never looks back. Confusing matters is that he doesn’t cease to be an intelligent commentator on art, and even uses the name Strukturforschung later. And making matters even more vexed is that when the New Viennese school was at the height of its ferment and intellectual exchange, Sedlmayr himself was already a member of the Austrian Nazi party. For this reason, I conducted a separate study of Sedlmayr’s Nazism, not to defend him, but to give the subject the attention it needs.11 Fortunately, a monographic study of Sedlmayr is now available, relieving this book of the distraction of biography.12 This allows us to recognise that his article on Riegl and then his ‘Toward a Rigorous Art History’ are minor masterpieces. The best I can say is that Sedlmayr could play along with the intellectual, often-Jewish, cosmopolitan circles around him, but an ambitious and persecuted streak was ready to be released. When he had his chance, he took it. And the result was not pretty. The real star of this book is Otto Pächt, even if it may not immediately be discerned. Sedlmayr only articulated better what he and Pächt both believed, and when Pächt came to write his own tract on methodology it too was a masterpiece. Together, and with their collaborators, they produced a very powerful approach that my work seeks to clarify and put to work. My job has been to explain in better detail why exactly the school was so interesting, so productive, why its history in short was so good. ‘Strukturforschung’ is the shorthand name I will use to refer to the formalising work of the New Vienna School, which separates it from the 7

preceding formalistic interests of Riegl and Dvořák. The term is better connected to the related archeological school of Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg and Friederich Matz, and one might even argue with Jas Elsner that the very new idea of a ‘new school’ was unthinkable without Kaschnitz von Weinberg’s emphasis on Struktur.13 Nevertheless, ‘structure’ is heavily connected to the Gestalt psychological work Sedlmayr and Pächt relied upon, and the terms ‘Strukturanalyse’ and ‘Strukturforschung’ occur in works by each quite early.14 The promise of Vienna School formalism in the largest sense is that it can help us understand the real kernel – the signature meaning – of the work of art, some class of art or some epoch – Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Flemish panel painting, the Sistine Chapel, or a Byzantine dome. For example, Kaschnitz von Weinberg considered the switch from Neolithic to Bronze Age arts, and the introduction of orthogonality as a major decisive shift between the hand-held idol to the fixed statuette upon a base.15 This is a significant idea, and with it we feel that we have attained to some significant sense of the passage to a new sense of civilisation. There might be a fear that Viennese structuralism is intuitive, merely subjective. There could even be the suspicion that its use of Gestalt psychology takes the school precisely away from history and towards the timeless. But even in Gestalt theory, the common discussion of ‘good’ form always implies an implicit scope or application – good for what?16 The same is true for historical forms. There is always an implicit genre or iconography that a work fulfils – Pächt called it the ‘formal opportunity’. The confirmation is visible, but it is a fulfilment of a transcendent notion. Therefore, the ‘formalism’ of Strukturforschung is resolutely historical. In regard to the related structural school in archaeology, Whitney Davis has explained that: ‘historical formalists in the Vienna School of Strukturforschung 8

produced lasting forensic and interpretive studies of ancient Egyptian and many other ancient and non-Western traditions’ and they ‘could escape the strongest strictures on formalist subjectivism because it required the historian to produce objective evidence for the constitutive historical subjectivity of formality – not simply to use his or her own eyes to see it’.17 I believe that something similar is true of Sedlmayr and Pächt. If the Vienna group followed Riegl in dispassionately documenting visual difference, and understood that complexes of viewing and purpose determine elements of visuality, were they hopelessly relativistic? Pächt, an art historian who worked on the cusp of the medieval and modern world, had thought of this quite a bit. The answer was that conceptual relativism can only obtain when two terms with the same truth conditions do not agree: If . . . there is no absolute norm of taste or beauty then there can be no absolute norm of skill either. Thus it would be equally meaningless to ask whether the Master of the Lindisfarne Gospels could have drawn and even could have wanted to draw a natural likeness, or whether Pollaiuolo could have designed or invented one of the carpet pages of the Book of Kells. Either lacked the skills to do the other’s work. The faculties required in each case were mutually exclusive.18 Such a viewpoint, neatly reconciling singularity and universality, is badly needed today as we wonder over the fate of the western tradition in the midst of globalisation. 9

When we examine Sedlmayr’s Borromini, or Pächt’s French, Flemish and Dutch schools, or Johannes Wilde’s treatment of the Sistine Chapel, or Demus’s discussion of the apse of Torcello Cathedral, what we have are a series of social scientific insights to characterise different works and schools of art. They represent a kernel idea, an exposed Gestaltungs- or Strukturprinzip, a thatness underlying the work of art.19 If our authors do not hesitate to use a term like ‘essence’ (Wesen), its Austrian heritage – through Brentano and Bolzano – derives from Aristotle for whom essence is simply that which makes something be what it is and not something else. As Roman Ingarden wrote, the essence is ‘that without which the object would not be itself and would not be that which it really is’.20 Deeply ingrained empiricist habits will regard these as speculative flights of fancy and attribute them to a latent Hegelian impulse. Some scholars have resisted the analytic charms of the New Vienna School in favour of a liberal humanism.21 But I challenge such a reading to weigh the evidence I adduce and reconsider some of the easy condemnations of speculation inherited from the Cold War.22 The New Vienna School then meets the purpose of art history, to seek the most explicit positive statements about objects and monuments to reflect their reality without exceeding its granularity. One outcome of my presentation will be the ability to see where both Gombrich and Sedlmayr have common ‘Austrian’ elements to their theory. It will then be clear how ironic it was for Gombrich to make Sedlmayr into a ‘Germanic’ counterpart to his atomistic Austrian thinking. That is unfortunate. The gesture in this book can show how both are on a continuum, Schlosser and Gombrich closer to the Anglo-Saxon interests of a Meinong, for example, and Sedlmayr closer to more phenomenological ideas of Brentano and Husserl. But both in a sense reflect what Mark Blum has called, following 10

Adalbert Stifter (and contrary to Hegel’s ‘Prussian’ teleology), the ‘soft law’ (sanfte Gesetz) of Austrian historical logic.23 One thing that must be stressed repeatedly: the ‘gestalt’ call to find the true artistic percept is not a form of Idealism. R. G. Collingwood, following Benedetto Croce, famously argued that history had to be lived history. This seems to be what is called for by the young Sedlmayr and mature Pächt. But there is an important distinction. For Croce and Collingwood, all history is lived history, whereas for Sedlmayr and Pächt, only works of art are ‘lived’ in a sense. The historian, in their account, takes the place of the artist and the various elements of the painting or building must make sense. But the act of bringing to life only takes place for a historian who can potentially take the place of an artist. Obviously, this is impossible for a whole epoch. Like all history, one must avoid the retrospective fallacy of filling in details about Sedlmayr’s early theory with knowledge of his later theory.24 In fact, this can be used as a marker to separate out good from distorted models of Viennese thinking. Sedlmayr’s later, less cautious works follow realist phenomenology and the belief that one can intuit the essence of an epoch. His early work, however, makes it clear that one is correct in expecting this only from a work of art. In fact, the Sedlmayr-Pächt position is no different from that expressed in a semiotic context by Donald Preziosi: ‘A semiotic analysis of a built environment eschews the piecemeal examination of portions of environments typical of “architectural history” with its stress upon impressionistically noteworthy “milestones” in diachronic development’.25 This is exactly what both Sedlmayr and Pächt understood to be the mere ‘first’ science of art history.

11

The Players The ‘new’, ‘second’ or ‘jüngeren Wiener Schule’, which is first mentioned in the early to mid-1930s, is the creation of Sedlmayr and Pächt. There were interesting and important negotiations of identity undertaken for the mantle of the Vienna School. Both Sedlmayr and Pächt each had direct contact with Dvořák but each finished their dissertations with Dvořák’s successor, Julius von Schlosser, who in many respects did not toe a doctrinaire line. A whole slew of students of Wickhoff, Riegl and Dvořák – Richard Offner (1879–1965), Hans Tietze (1880–1954), Wilhelm Koehler (1884–1959), Ludwig Münz (1889– 1957), Fritz Saxl (1890–1948) and Otto Benesch (1896–1964) – had direct exposure to some or all of the founders of the school.26 By the 1920s, most of them were fully formed and practised a not-strident form of Viennese methodology exemplified by Tietze’s Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte (1913).27 Clearly, the passage of time and historical distance were essential to the emergence of the new school. Sedlmayr and Pächt’s gambit was to reach back to Dvořák’s early work and Riegl himself to reclaim an ‘authentic’ Viennese voice and thereby also distinguish themselves from their colleagues. Slightly older than Sedlmayr (and much older than Pächt), Karl Maria Swoboda (1889–1977) and Johannes Wilde (1891–1970), were important links for legitimating continuity with the old and new Vienna Schools, even if their taste for theory and orthodox methodology did not reflect their younger peers. Both Wilde and Swoboda edited Dvořák’s papers.28 Dagobert Frey (1883–1962), who will be mentioned in a moment, also connected himself (if somewhat critically) to Dvořák, which throws into relief the direct and contrasting identification of the new group with Riegl.29 Wilde was relatively conventional in method, but Swoboda was present in the New Vienna School, even if he did not contribute much. He became the 12

de facto custodian of Riegl’s legacy. Swoboda edited Riegl’s Gesammelte Aufsätze, to which Sedlmayr provided the introduction and for which Wilde seems to have selected the essays (Swoboda, with Münz, also edited the reissue of the Holländische Gruppenporträt in 1931, writing a short foreword).30 Meanwhile, Pächt had provided the appendix (Anhang) to the reissue of Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie in 1927.31 Later, on his return to Vienna after his Nazi-era exile, Pächt edited with Swoboda Riegl’s Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste.32 Indeed, after the early phase of Struk­ turforschung, the consolidation of Swoboda, Pächt and Otto Demus in Vienna reinforced the unity of the school and I draw on their students in some cases. In this book, I discuss Johannes Wilde at the Courtauld as a kind of parallel movement to Pächt’s mature career. He did not subscribe overtly to the Strukturforschung doctrine as elaborated by Sedlmayr and Pächt but he did produce work that was sympathetic to its tenants and convergent in its results. Similarly, Otto Demus was trained in Strzygowski’s institute at Vienna but through personal interactions with Sedlmayr (University of Vienna, 1936–1939), came to be absorbed into the Rieglian tradition. Winding through the chapters is the figure of Meyer Schapiro, who had an attraction and repulsion to the Vienna School, as well as Gestalt psychology. While Swoboda not only co-participated in the resurrection of Riegl and contributed to Pächt’s and Sedlmayr’s journal, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen (Wilde apparently had been invited), the scholars seemed to have studied Dagobert Frey at a distance but with interest. He had the requisite historical training and theoretical insight to be of interest. But having worked on architecture (both Italian and Austrian Baroque!) and being a fully formed scholar, having published the impressive Gotik und Renaissance (1929), he may have been a little too much competition, particularly for Sedlmayr.33 He was someone to read closely but not to work too closely with. 13

It is not clear the degree to which the archeologists Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg (1890–1958), Friedrich Matz (1890–1974) and Bernhard Schweitzer (1892–1966), should be counted in this genealogy. Clearly, Kaschnitz responded positively to Riegl and published in the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen.34 All embraced the methodology of Strukturforschung. What might separate them is that these scholars never sought out – in a manner similar to Frey – psychology as a supplement to their work.35 Kaschnitz and Matz could use objective evidence but this evidence itself was not part of a naturalistic explanation. In the works of the core Vienna group on the other hand, we see the use of Gestalt principles of figure and ground, plane and recession, and spatial relation to an object, as rational counterparts to explaining fundamental regimes of visuality. Perhaps if both Kaschnitz and Metz as well as the Vienna group are Strukturanalyse, we might call the former a ‘phenomenological’ variety of Struktur and the latter an analytic, ‘Gestalt’ variety. For this reason, I do not count them (saying nothing about the fruitfulness of their work), pointing the reader to Whitney Davis’s excellent discussion to suggest further comparisons. I hope my book can return new questions back to their work. The Corpus Sedlmayr is the great methodologist, maybe a better theorist than historian. But he and Pächt really developed Strukturforschung together, from the ashes of Dvořák’s method and amidst friends and competitors like Dagobert Frey and Karl Maria Swoboda. The two writers worked in lock step for several productive years. As noted, Sedlmayr wrote the Introduction to the collected essays of Riegl while Pächt organised the bibliography. They traded essays in Kritische Berichte and Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, acknowledging each other’s works. In the following, I am arguing for a block of theoretically 14

consistent texts written in the late 1920s and early 1930s as foundational to this method. In addition, I will count Pächt’s continuing approach and that of his students in Vienna and allied approaches at the Courtauld. I feel a great deal of justification giving serious study to Sedlmayr’s two early theoretical texts because Pächt still acknowledged them circa 1970 when lecturing on art historical methodology in the text that would become Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis (hereafter, The Practice of Art History). He says Sedlmayr, ‘has probably contributed more to the methodology of our subject than anyone in our time’ and goes on to add, Sedlmayr’s lasting achievement, in my view, is that he has made us aware that the true object of art history is not identical with the physical presence of the work of art: it is something to be extracted from the material substrate through an act of seeing that is at the same time a re-creation.36 Pächt then goes on to note Sedlmayr’s ‘controversial theses’ on ‘a number of topics’, but only criticises the separation of the science of art history into two. In his view, Sedlmayr’s ideas are not perfect but pioneering. By the 1970s what was useful in them was clear and that is what I focus on. But Pächt was a methodologist too. Those texts on Riegl and The Practice of Art History are minor masterpieces that carry on what was vital in Sedlmayr’s early theoretical pieces.37 These are both rooted in the Viennese tradition, with the stamp of Riegl and Dvořák but they are also modern and are articulated from within a field – medieval art – that was particularly overwhelmed by the competing iconographic point of view. Pächt’s work 15

quietly and compellingly makes its case as a more visually grounded point of departure. Empirically, the works we can consult by Sedlmayr are the monographs Fischer von Erlach der Ältere (1925), Osterreichische Barockarchitektur (1930) and especially Die Architektur Borrominis (1930), his manifesto of the method of Strukturforschung.38 From Pächt we can look to his early monograph, Österreichische Tafelmalerei of 1929, and two major studies, ‘Die historische Aufgabe Michael Pachers’ (1931) and ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien der westlichen Malerei des 15. Jahrhunderts’ (1933).39 For reasons that I will make clear, I regard Sedlmayr’s ‘Die ‘Macchia’ Bruegels’ (1934) as already opening a new path of hermeneutic interpretation and I only discuss it briefly. Sedlmayr wrote a number of potentially interesting studies in the subsequent years but I will not consider them because – as explained later – they completely repudiate the earlier Viennese example. Other examples of Pächt’s later work are ‘Zur deutschen Bildauffassung der Spätgotik und Renaissance’ (1952) and ‘Künstlerische Originalität und ikonographische Erneuerung’ (1967).40 These, and his lectures published as monographs on book illumination and Flemish, Italian and Baroque painting, will be mentioned in passing. Gestalt Theory: Basis of the Viennese Method Gestalt psychology was founded in a context of intense methodological reflection by three individuals, Max Wertheimer, Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. After the publication of Wertheimer’s paper on illusory movement, each of the three committed themselves to the study of perception, thinking, development and comparative psychology. Later, at the Univeristy of Berlin where Wertheimer and Köhler taught, Kurt Lewin became allied with the Gestalt group, producing pioneering studies of action and methodological reflections. 16

Each upheld the belief that psychology was a ‘young’ science, that it had a great deal of theoretical underlabouring to do before attempting to explain behaviour.41 Consequently, it felt that a number of epistemological issues – in particular the phenomenal givenness of percepts (phenomenal realism) – had to be meaningfully clarified before productive work could take place. The idea that art history had to attend to the basics strongly motivated Sedlmayr and Pächt. The New Vienna School as investigated here has some core commitments. Its Strukturforschung methodology leads to a series of expanding insights. •  Emphasis on the single work of art. A commitment, common to much Austrian philosophy and deriving from Franz Brentano, insists that an object must be known before it can be understood genetically. 42 This is shared by Austrian philosophers and its offshoot in Gestalt theory, and is the basis of art historical method in Sedlmayr and Pächt. Consequently, Sedlmayr and Pächt insist that one understand a single work of architecture or painting before inferring any larger stylistic or iconographic trends. •  Artistic emphasis on nested structures and object-viewing complexes. A part of Brentano’s descriptive psychology is ‘mereology’, the ontology of parts and wholes.43 In art historical method, this is most obviously seen in Riegl, but a commitment to the ‘whole situation’ (Gestalt) insists on conditions of viewing, and this is implicit in Sedlmayr’s study of Borromini and more explicitly seen in the work of Pächt, Wilde and Demus. •  Historical emphasis on immediately antecedent causes. The materialistic idea of moment-by-moment causation, which was amenable to Austrian anti-idealist philosophising, runs from Riegl, Dvořák through 17

to Sedlmayr and Pächt. The result is a healthy resistance to the retro­ spective fallacy. Medieval works, for example, are treated by Pächt and Demus as medieval works, without bias for what came later. These shared commitments amount to a kind of programmatic formalism, whereby emphasis is given to the basic configuration of the work of art, before inferences about style or meaning. The way that this procedure avoids a vulgar or manifest formalism lies in the fact that it is resolutely historical, always basing its formal hypothese on empirical data. Formal impulses do not exist sui generis but come from the producers of art works and images. Much of this book considers the way in which spatial settings determine forms. So, we are able to move from a cultural pattern of activity all the way to the forms in the actual works. Not only do these moves provide for better interpretations. Proceeding in this manner, art history acquires a sense of self-reflexivity, knowing what to do and when. In a sense, it was the methodological state or stage of art history in the 1920s that required it to embrace psychology, becoming for a time more Kunstwissenschaft than Kunstgeschichte. But based on the very notion of reflexiveness accepted by Sedlmayr and Pächt, such methodological clarification would yield to empirical study. This study is conducted in the spirit of the New Vienna School, with that very school as its historical object. In this spirit, one wants to understand the core of theoretical commitments and methodological practices as a whole before one can make sense and create genealogies and assign meanings. I argue in a manner very close to the New Vienna School that some work on these very figures has been premature because some of its core values have not yet been properly understood.

18

Doing Vienna School Art History If Vienna School theorising is so reflexive, it ought to know what it can’t do. At its best, it balanced documentary, stylistic and iconographic investigation with a search for structure. Formalism, backed up with a self-reflexive method, is inherently democratic because it has a general method of wide application. ‘Disintegrative formalism’, Sedlmayr’s Zersehen (‘seeing to pieces’), suggests a method that does not reinforce cultural categories. This is the art historical counterpart to Husserl’s call for Zurück zu den Sachen selbst (‘Back to the things themselves’) in an unbiased phenomenological openness to the world. Riegl is well known for resurrecting the late antique period and he directly inspired Sedlmayr’s investigations of the Baroque, Pächt’s work on humble German and Austrian art, and Demus’s on Byzantine mosaics. The span represented from Demus’s twelfth-century Byzantine mosaics to Sedlmayr’s seventeenth-century Roman churches, is impressive. This becomes even more inclusive if we reintroduce the archaeological branch of Strukturforschung of Kaschnitz von Weinberg, Matz and Schweitzer, and even some extensions to non-western cultures. 44 Yet one could still charge that its premises are western and therefore Eurocentrist. Certainly Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941) regarded his Vienna peers as overly gradualist and too complicit to accept the authority of Rome or other metropolitan centers like Vienna to ground histories. 45 More to the point, in considering the single work of art a closed world, it might seem that Strukturforschung aestheticises whatever it analyses. Does this close off the method from popular art and ornament in a way that Riegl did not? I don’t think so, because the way we approach a single work of art, as hinted above, is a question of granularity. The work of art has 19

to be understood at that level suggested by its structure and function. Indeed, if one surveys either Sedlmayr’s early emphasis on architecture or Pächt’s emphasis on the picture plane and the decorative demands of medieval art, one can see that art is ornamental first and expressive in a post-Enlightenment sense second. The connection to Gestalt theory can only strengthen this fact if we consider, for example, Arnheim’s The Power of the Center. There, Arnheim considers the simple and orderly to be primary and all further elaborations to be later specialisations.46 If this is granted, the path of Sedlmayr and Pächt just as convincingly as that of Gombrich points to von Schlosser’s Kunstsprache, or a general ‘linguistics of the image’.47 Christopher Wood importantly notes that Pächt’s formalism and relativism was so strong that it ‘entailed an almost systematic disinterestedness towards the real and the political’.48 Of course, Sedlmayr’s pre- and post-war excesses were exactly the warning to many that the formal method was dangerous. But there is a possibility, connected to allied work in Russian and Czech formalism, that Strukturforschung ‘prepared the artwork for social and political analysis’ even if ‘Pächt himself never performed such analysis’. 49 Here, we would arrive at something like the compatibility of Prague struc­ turalism with Marxism.50 However, the great point of Strukturforschung is that there is a lot of preliminary work required before insights can be gained from works of art. They cannot be instrumentalised immediately. A lesson here is Kurt Lewin’s committed socialism.51 By understanding the real workings of individuals relative to groups, he could make the maximally effective intervention in politics. Similarly, Strukturforschung could defer its findings in favour of more concerted intervention. The slow work of understanding functional and formal demands cannot be substituted. Art, ultimately, is semi-autonomous from many concerns, even if it ultimately must interlock with them. 20

Contemporary art history is emerging from a two-decade period of complicity between empiricism and postmodernism and their mutually reinforcing suspicion of grand narratives. It was possible for a time to feel mildly radical by dismissing various ‘Hegelianisms’.52 But what happened in actuality was a de-skilling, a loss of familiarity with important systems in art history. Hegel, after all, did not develop his philosophical history of art to be so much arcana. Sedlmayr and Pächt’s goal to make science human is still worthy because the alternative – fashionable until recently – was simply to ignore science, write it off as a product of sociological conditions or another rhetorical discourse. This will not do in an increasingly complex and tech­ nological world. To dismiss twentieth-century historiography as ‘modernist’ means little, for ‘modernism’ has become a mere trigger word. For after all is not the art historical endeavour itself modern? As if the cause of a discovery somehow disqualifies its validity, it is assumed that the modernity of the art historian proves that, alas, they have not reached the Archimedean point. However, the Viennese school beginning with Riegl understood that modernity provides the extra term allowing the historian to triangulate history and gain traction on its discoveries. Riegl is self-conscious of what Impressionism allows him to see in late Roman art, as Pächt is aware of the insight that motion pictures give him towards understanding medieval pictorial narrative. This book is therefore an attempt to characterise this healthy theoretical and methodological wisdom that seemed to provide a positive model for art history to follow, one which knew what tasks to take up at the proper time, understanding where present efforts would fit into a larger development, leading to new tasks.

21

Plan for the Book The book is formed of three theoretical essays – Chapters 1, 2 and 3 – and four case studies based on the work of four Viennese art historians (Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7). The first chapter covers the nested crises experienced in the early twentieth century within the sciences, art history, and the Vienna School itself. The model of the Berlin school of Gestalt Psychology provides the model to resolve the dilemmas in formal knowledge. Contrary to popular accounts, ‘Gestalt’ cannot be reduced to holism that might seem to undergird totalitarianism. At the same time, we have to take seriously the fact that Sedlmayr’s later work is best understood as a variety of Iconology rather than a Viennese formal approach any longer. In Chapter 2, the basics of the new art historical science of Strukturforschung, a method rooted in the formal properties of visual images, are outlined. It is contrasted with the Hamburg school of Iconology begun by Aby Warburg and associated with Karl Tolnai and Erwin Panofsky. In Sedlmayr’s exposition, the basic phenomenological idea of a separation of physical and phenomenal objects is reviewed in his positing of two sciences of art. The goal of art history is to recover the ‘mental set’ (Einstellung) of the makers of an artefact. These sets can be recovered by embedding art-making behaviour into a cultural context. Such a view allows for a unique reflexivity about the tasks of art history and how it may progress. Chapter 3 follows the New Vienna School’s structures through time, connecting with Alois Riegl’s notion of the Kunstwollen. First, a major split in the Vienna School is addressed, the Rieglian avoidance of individual genius, followed by Sedlmayr and Pächt, and the contrary view of Schlosser and Gombrich. Next, the idea of social ontology is discussed, through not only the Berlin group but allied figures like Alfred Vierkandt, and others. This 22

anti-reductivism of the group is then connected to the Viennese idea found in Riegl of historical chains, which connect events together through momentto-moment causation. Compulsion, as in Riegl’s Kunstwollen, is introduced through the necessity created by historical complexes. Turning to the case studies, Chapter 4 introduces the most significant, early text in Strukturforschung, Sedlmayr’s Die Architektur Borrominis. After explaining the structure of the book, Sedlmayr’s method is outlined as discovering phenomenally salient aspects of Borromini’s designs, and ignoring merely geometric and apparently meaningful elements. The rest of the chapter explains Sedlmayr’s focus on Borromini’s works (Gebilde), his architectural theory (Architektur) and passes on to the notorious characterological analysis of Borromini’s personality via his works. I conclude by emphasising the minor role of this aspect of his theory and the overall pioneering nature of the book. Chapter 5 passes on to the closely allied work of Otto Pächt, the essay on ‘national’ constants in Late Gothic painting. Similar to Sedlmayr, Pächt distinguishes between technical and aesthetic space, only the latter being relevant. Artists of different schools relate the surface and depth in different ways, finding a means to organise space in a consistent space. After reviewing Pächt’s incisive observations on the characteristics of the Netherlandish, Dutch and French schools, I consider various challenges to the theory, most importantly its accusation of nationalistic thinking. Noting Pächt’s distinction between historical groups and national groups, the disassociation of ethnicity from formative principle (Gestaltungsprinzip) is stressed. The next two chapters turn to friends and colleagues of Sedlmayr and Pächt who were less theoretically inclined than them but whose work fits comfortably in their paradigm. Chapter 6 treats the work of Johannes Wilde. Wilde expressed a strong structuralist streak with his interest in historical reconstruction. When turned to the Sistine Chapel, Wilde expressed his 23

historical goals in terms highly compatible with Gestalt theory: function, parts and wholes. Wilde’s personal contribution can best be brought out in comparison to highly iconological readings, like that of Edgar Wind, which expound on details. Wilde’s analysis of the conditions of visibility of the chapel proscribe what can serve as meaningful feature and what not. Finally, in Chapter 7, Otto Demus’s work on Byzantine mural decoration is treated. Trained like Wilde in Vienna, Demus articulated a concentrated of the basic layout of Middle Byzantine churches, a Gestaltungsprinzip that can be allied to Pächt’s. Seeing that the mosaics did not describe virtual spaces but treated the whole church as a space creating icons in real space, this observation can be used against approaches like that of Panofsky that treat the mural’s space as more or less an easel picture. Indeed, examples of older spatial practices surviving into the Renaissance can be found. The restructuring of the figure with a picture into a picture within a church space suggests that other Gestalt switches in other historical traditions can be found, suggesting greater extension of the Viennese methodology.

24

Part I Theory and Methodology

1. The Crisis of the Sciences, Art History and the Vienna School At this time in close collaboration with Hans Sedlmayr, who inspired by the ideas and results of Gestalt Psychology, he took the initiative for a reorientation of the Vienna School of Art History. Otto Pächt, curriculum vitae1 In 1925, a young, ambitious art historian, Hans Sedlmayr, published an article on Francesco Borromini called ‘Formed Seeing’ (‘Gestaltetes Sehen’). The article could be called a manifesto, as it self-consciously declared a new theoretical and methodological point of view. Against previous attempts to understand 27

Francesco Borromini based on theological and geometric premises, Sedlmayr wishes to press the question of rigour (die Strenge) and challenge art historians to develop interpretations that were founded in the visual material itself. Through the understanding of artistic organisation, inspired by the then emerging findings of Gestalt psychology, the art historian could go beyond intuitionist style history or iconographic symbol hunting. Sedlmayr was joined immediately by a small group of scholars – in particular Otto Pächt – and they anxiously promoted their ‘new’ Vienna School with Riegl as their idol. The new platform of Strukturforschung was born in a self-conscious understanding of intellectual movements in the larger sciences and had a clear idea of how one discipline had addressed the ongoing ‘crisis of the sciences’ (Krisis der Wissenschaften): Gestalt theory. With the disruption of the First World War and social upheaval in both the newly founded Weimar Germany and the First Austrian Republic, there was widespread fear that the riches of the modern technological state were not in alignment with the traditional needs of social life. The meaning of modern science was everywhere debated, and many sought a reconciliation between subjective knowledge and natural science. Gestalt theory began to be articulated in the second decade of the twentieth century and provided one important response to this crisis. The solution was a monistic approach to mental life that, in the traditional of Naturalphilosophie, sought the forms of thoughts in natural configurations. The original Gestaltists – Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka – balanced life on the razor’s edge of a phenomenal and scientific realism. Almost uniquely among Weimar theories, Gestalt theory refused to confirm its place either on the side of experience or science. The crisis of psychology was felt directly in Vienna when Karl Bühler (1879–1963) published his Die Krise der Psychologie.2 Bühler was critical of the 28

Berlin psychologists – Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka – and also, to a degree, of the Vienna circle of logical positivists, both of whom he regarded as too beholden to the physical sciences and the aim of reductivism. Bühler, not surprisingly, pioneered work in language and semiotics, and was interested in the layer of cognitive meaning mediating between thought and the world. The Viennese art historians Sedlmayr and Pächt were just as disinterested in Bühler as he was disinterested in the Berliners. When a young Ernst Gombrich eagerly attended Bühler’s lectures, a future conflict was set. Art history was a well-established research subject in Vienna, unlike some other German-speaking universities. Nevertheless, the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918 deeply shook the Viennese. Georg Vasold notes that the war ‘plunged almost all the exponents of the Vienna School into a state of despair and self-doubt’.3 The mature scholars Hans Tietze, Max Dvořák, Julius von Schlosser, Josef Strzygowski saw their traditional regions of expertise – Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, Hungary or Slavonia of the wider Austro-Hungarian Empire – transferred to new states. Scholars from those lands – some of the Vienna School’s most famous exponents were from Prague (Dvořák, Oskar Pollak, Swoboda) or Budapest (Arnold Hauser, Johannes Wilde, Karl Tolnai) – were now less likely to study in Vienna. The future of the state was uncertain; so too were the universities and job prospects. Much research has clarified the inclusive cosmopolitanism of the AustroHungarian state. It was ethnically diverse and celebrated its plural character. Apologists contrasted its internationalism and progressivism with the chauvinism of the Prussian state.4 To be sure, the state was an Empire and therefore its pluralistic pride and impatience with nationalism was a backhanded way of supporting the imperial status quo. Nevertheless, the cultural and linguistic variety of the Empire was impressive and seemed to feed into the diverse interests of the Vienna School writers in general. 29

Into the uncertainty of the First Austrian Republic, the New Vienna School sought to solve the crisis of art history by looking over at the crisis of psychology. The way that the Berlin group had addressed the problems of natural science and human intuition would become their guide. Furthermore, Berlin reflections on scientific method – including now Kurt Lewin – would be applied to art history, as the field became self-conscious of its aims and its first priorities and what was required at the present stage of its development. Gestalt Psychology In its early history, perceptual psychology was devoted to varying physical stimuli and recording reactions, or cognitively measuring the creation of associational bonds. In 1890, Austrian philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels had dealt with a problem created by the ‘psychophysical’ approach, qualities of one-ness not covered by an elementarist account. In the transposition of a melody, for example, he noted that the ‘Gestalt quality’ (Gestaltqualität) was maintained even when notes of different pitch were used. The intellectualist method of sensation plus judgement seemed inadequate when Max Wertheimer published his study of perceived motion in 1912, and the year later his friend Wolfgang Köhler applied a critique to the ‘constancy hypothesis’ (Konstanzannahme), which assumed that unnoticed sensations are the bedrock of perception.5 Wertheimer, Köhler and Koffka wished to wipe the slate clean. The psychologist’s job is not to use the physicist’s methods and modify them towards her task. Rather one had to take experience as it is and create explanations based on that. The psychologists had not taken experience itself as the explanandum of the science. Of course, such an outlook was unthinkable without 30

Husserl and phenomenology, but both Köhler and Husserl had been students of Carl Stumpf and were imbued with Brentano’s descriptive psychology. The difference is that the Gestaltists were committed to the natural science – naturalistic – worldview and wished to connect the descriptive or phenom­ enological method to a parallel – actually isomorphic – hypothesis about underlying brain events causing experience.6 Much fruitful work on Alois Riegl has taken account of the peculiarly ‘Austrian’ background of his theory. Schlosser linked Riegl to the Graz school of Meinong or that of Ehrenfels in Prague. Indeed, the Gestaltists whom Sedlmayr and Pächt admired were trained by Carl Stumpf, who had been a student of Franz Brentano, who taught at the University of Vienna from 1874– 1895. The most influential of the Gestalt group – Max Wertheimer – was himself a subject of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, having studied at the German University in Prague briefly under von Ehrenfels (he taught there from 1896 to 1929). Therefore, when Sedlmayr and Pächt showed interest in the Berlin group, they were following threads already woven together by Riegl. The two young art historians read the works issuing from Berlin and their journal Psychologische Forschung in real time.7 As noted, they were not interested at all in the psychology on offer in Vienna, which means Karl Bühler. Significantly, both Gombrich and his friend Karl Popper took courses with Bühler, and Popper even took his degree with him. Somehow, Sedlmayr and Pächt sensed the consonance of the orthodox Berlin theory and their Vienna School concerns and remained strong partisan followers.8 The most impressive thing that struck Sedlmayr and Pächt about the Berlin theory was its disavowal of geometrical, physicalist thinking. By specifying psychologically real phenomena – Gestalten – of experience, they provided a powerful model for art history. When we see a percept, we must 31

first recognise the object before it can arouse memories. Organisation takes precedence before associations. The Gestaltists showed that decades of psychological research with nonsense syllables and the improper objects of study were almost useless; Sedlmayr and Pächt felt the same way about much art historical research. ‘Gestalt’ is a ‘super-summative’ concept; the whole is different from the sum or addition of the parts. However, it has become customary to react very negatively to notions of ‘holism’ in socio-cultural history. To the casual student, these are ideas most often held by Nazis and fascists. But there is a difference between affirmed holism and anti-reductiveness; ‘analytic’ holism is a mode of analysis that determines the parts of a whole in a way that respects and maintains the whole. Indeed, mainstream history has successfully contextualised holism such that it needs to be taken seriously, even in a cosmopolitan, mainstream context. Here, Gestalt theory was anything but obscurantist. When Sedlmayr and Pächt were reacting to it with such interest, it was placing them in the centre – not the periphery – of forward, rational thinking. To the degree that Gestalt psychology is ‘Austrian’, it has some similar commitments that are at the basis of Sedlmayr’s and Pächt’s interest. The virtue of this approach is that it avoids understanding the Vienna School as Hegelian speculation and affirms its relationship to a certain tradition. This ‘Austrian’ tradition is empiricist, pluralist and contingent (anti-­necessitarian). Sedlmayr precociously begun using Gestalt theory in his essay of 1925, ‘Gestaltetes Sehen’. It was in 1929 that he reached out to the founder of the Berlin theory, Max Wertheimer, then in Berlin but shortly to take an appointment in Frankfurt. He wrote, Dear Professor! Please allow me to express my sincere congratulations on the occasion of your 32

calling to Frankfurt. Maybe you remembered my name because here in Vienna, we a (provisional?) small group of humanities scholars have followed the success inaugurated by your scientific direction with keen interest. We hope to prove the fertility of this approach soon to our field. In the meantime, please accept the evidence of our genuine sympathy and my special veneration in this form. Yours very truly, Hans Sedlmayr.9 The wording of the letter suggests that Sedlmayr had been in touch with Wertheimer previously. Gustav Johannes Allesch: An Austrian Link Apart from Sedlmayr’s letter of 1929 to Max Wertheimer we still do not know of Sedlmayr’s and Pächt’s early acquaintance with Gestalt ideas. Pächt actually studied in Berlin for one semester in 1923, attending the lectures of Adolf Goldschmidt and Max Weber, but there is no evidence that Pächt had direct contact with any of the Berlin figures, although that is not to say that he could have attended a couple of lectures and gotten excited by what he heard.10 A link connecting Vienna to Berlin must be Gustav Johannes Allesch (1882– 1967). Originally from Graz, he was not only trained with the Berlin group under Stumpf but was also interested in historical and aesthetic matters. Allesch’s ‘Die aesthetische Erscheinungsweise der Farben’ was central to the Vienna group. His prescient reviews of art historical matters from a Gestalt point of view must have seemed an invitation to push further, not to mention his interest in Tyrolian art and especially Michael Pacher, which Allesch 33

shared with Pächt and the others.11 True, Sedlmayr and Allesch would participate in the editorial board of the pro-German but non-doctrinnaire journal devoted to Goethe’s morphology, Die Gestalt. Abhandlungen zu einer allgemeinen Morphologie, but that was well into 1939.12 What remains a mystery is Sedlymayr’s early period. In the same sense, Pächt would have known that the novelist Robert Musil (1880–1942) was trained in Berlin with the Gestalt group under Stumpf and was a good friend of Allesch. But his arrival in Vienna and protection by Pächt and Bruno Fürst in 1934 must be seen as a confirmation of the coincidence of ideas and not formative in any way.13 Daniela Bohde has shown that Allesch in fact – being both psychologist and art historian – conducted a remarkably prescient analysis of Brueghel in his 1921 aesthetic manual, Wege zur Kunstbetrachtung, which Sedlmayr did not cite in his own ‘Die “Macchia” Bruegels’ essay.14 In the following I will consider a couple of cases in which the Berlin psychologists perhaps tread too closely to the Vienna group – Arnheim’s film criticism and dissertation on the psychology of expression – in addition to Allesch’s work.15 But in the main, Sedlmayr and Pächt were ardent supporters of the Berlin theory. In addition to the essays and books littered with references to Wertheimer, Koffka and Köhler, we also find Sedlmayr referring in his corresponse to the latest Gestalt-related works with enthusiasm.16 The title of Sedlmayr and Pächt’s journal Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen was an homage to the journal of the Berlin group, Psychologische Forschung. Sedlmayr, for example, was in touch with the medieval art historian Wilhelm Koehler, brother of one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, Wolfgang.17 Even more remarkable is the fact that Pächt continued to read works of Gestalt theory (in the same sense that Sedlmayr was a closed book) well into the 1960s. He owned Kurt Koffka’s magnum opus Principles of Gestalt Psychology (1935), published after the two volumes of Kunstwissenschaftlichen 34

Forschungen. In his essay on Riegl and his long methods essay, Pacht refers to Wolfgang Metzger’s Gesetze des Sehens (1953), the most important document of post-war German Gestalt theory, as well as Metzger’s Schöpferische Freiheit (1962).18 In the first case, Metzger provided an up-to-date approach to perception and, in the second, a challenging approach to the problem of free will and determinism, which Pächt in turn used as a lever against Popper’s and Gombrich’s libertarianism. A constantly updated Gestalt theory opens up the method to naturalism, a concrete causal chain representing its results.19 The existence of this chain allows for consultation and testing and flies directly in the face of hermeneutic intuitionism. Scholars have objected to the Viennese approach because it is intuitive yet any method with naturalised procedures like Strukturforschung is preferable to any other method operating with more or less tacit methods. Holism and Politics As ‘Gestalt’ became the model of psychological and aesthetic experience, this brought with it associations of wholeness and integrality to the work of art and the act of aesthetic perception. Although there has been a rich contextualisation of such ideas in general history with respect to Weimar society, holistic notions in art history are still interpreted as irrationalist, facist and even racist. For example, Daniele Bohde’s work on physiognomic perception, which was a feature in many perceptual theories of the 1920s, is interpreted as basically racialising in any of its possible guises.20 However, it is anachronistic to read Weimar history from a post-Nazi perspective and at that time many scientists were forming theories of human liberation within the context of holistic-inspired paradigms.21 Michael Ermarth points out how Berlin thinking, 35

had little or no connection with the speculatively free-wheeling (or ideologically and politically inflected) deployment of gestalt thinking as a kind of gnostic nimbus by writers such as Spengler, Jünger, Steiner, Carus, and Rosenberg, for whom gestalt became synonymous not merely with ‘frame’ or ‘constellation’ but with ‘destiny’ and ‘fate’ as a whole; that is, the recapitulation of the telos of grand historicism or even ‘cosmicism’ under another name.22 Therefore, holism cannot be interpreted retrospectively as leading inevitably to the uses that it was put by the National Socialists. Even then, however, the thinking of the 1920s and early 1930s differentiated between varying kinds of holism. There were varieties of strictly holist thinking – in psychology there was Ganzheitspsychologie – and other forms of syncretic unity between nature and humans bound by the paranormal, esoterism and the occult. But ‘Gestalt’ is not of a piece with this thinking. It reflects a kind of organised whole, but not a totality. The original Gestaltists (Wertheimer, Koffka, Köhler) privileged immediate perception but did not make it a mysterious faculty of direct intuition. They believed in the unity of the senses but did not believe that the senses are linked organically as a single mode of sense. We can call the outlook of the Berlin school of Gestaltists ‘intelligible holism’. It is a ‘moderate analytic holism’, ‘meso-gestalt’, that is ontologically defensible.23 These Gestalten are islands of mutual dependence. The ‘gestalt’ is an example of emergently rich reality that is still capable of analysis. With its idea of ‘intelligible holism’, Gestalt theory served to span divisions 36

stemming from a persistent epistemological crisis in German-speaking political and intellectual circles. It was seen as an intellectual movement capable of providing a third way to the deep divisions separating life in the 1920s.24 It promoted holism without the obscurantist and romantic associations of reactionary uses, while at the same time maintaining scientific rigour. The Gestalt became a metaphor for social organisation in Weimar Germany. The balance between atomism and holism provided a model that is neither the atomism of laissez-faire liberalism or the romantic whole of volkisch politics. Gestalt theory, therefore, had both a moderate and reconciliatory role to play in Weimar-era intellectual circles. Indeed, its founders – especially Max Wertheimer – were politically progressive. As Simone Schnall writes of Karl Duncker, whose parents were prominent Marxists: ‘At no other institute were as many leftist and antifascist researchers as at the Berlin Institute. For example, Lewin was a socialist, Gottschaldt was associated with the communist party and von Lauenstein was close to the Social Democrat Party’.25 Interestingly, Bühler had a more ‘spiritual’ approach to the mind, and this was shared by critics of Berlin Gestalt psychology who found its materialistic and monistic findings as lacking in Geist, thus the products of mere Kultur. Gestalt theory – like psychoanalysis – was furthermore known for its ‘Jewish’ identity, since two of its founders were Jewish (Wertheimer) or halfJewish (Koffka). Its inspiration in a Spinozistic worldview was well known, and its commitment to principles of truth and justice were an important part of especially Wertheimer’s teaching. The followers of Ganzheit psychology – Felix Krueger, Friedrich Sander – rehearsed the critiques of Gestaltism that aligned it with Jewish thinking.26 Gombrich surprisingly hypothesised that Sedlmayr joined the Nazi Party before the Anschluss – eventually causing him to be regarded as an ‘illegaler’, and therefore losing his chair – because of his 37

associations with Jewish art historians, like Pächt. As Gombrich recounted, ‘When the Nazis came, he sported a big swastika and shouted Heil Hitler, etc., because he was worried what would happen to him, he had so many Jewish friends. Not a very endearing attitude. But I think that’s what it was’.27 In any case, this ontological and epistemological model was irresistible for Sedlmayr and Pächt. It had the worldly cosmopolitanism of the traditional Vienna School, the hard-nosed approach of the natural sciences with the human face of phenomenology and intuitionist psychology. Art history could learn much from this approach. Sedlmayr’s Turn Towards Iconology Another reason that art historians do not give much credit to the research programme of the New Vienna School is that Sedlmayr’s work changed rapidly, presenting difficulties in determining what represents a true approach of Strukturforschung. Perhaps more pressing is Sedlmayr’s early member­ ship of the Nazi Party in Austria from 1930–1932, the height of his Gestalt-inspired production.28 There is some confusion about this, so it is worth clearing up the dates. Somehow, the years 1932–1933 have been repeated as the dates of his membership, suggesting both attachment to the party before Hitler’s election as chancellor and also continuity throughout the Austrofascist period, when Nazism was banned.29 Furthermore, it is often wrongly stated that the Nazi Party was banned at the time of Sedlmayr’s first inscription in the party.30 The effect is a long-term, unbroken, indeed ‘fanatical’ (Binstock), affiliation with Nazism when instead Sedlmayr’s early connection can be better described as a hopeful trial. This is indeed a paradox and I have tried to resolve it elsewhere, by seeing Sedlmayr’s interests as broadly leftist and conforming to his cosmopolitan, 38

progressive research platform by aligning him to ‘National Bolshevism’.31 Whatever his beliefs, Sedlmayr did not find them inconsistent with his scholarship in this period. It is precisely the conflation of the later Sedlmayr – who of course became a Nazi again just before the Anschluss of Austria, thereby improving his political chances when the Germans arrived – with a structural approach that I resist and therefore I leave this problem out of my narrative. A I will show, Sedlmayr’s very methodology fundamentally shifts and therefore his two careers cannot be treated as one unified entity. Around 1934, Sedlmayr turned towards what can best be called Iconology. A number of scholars have noted this change, with slightly different results, but it will be important for clarifying the strict, ‘Gestalt’ version of structural­ ism produced by Sedlmayr before then and his later production (as I argue Pächt continued to work in this vein the rest of his career). In 1958, Sedlmayr reprinted his major essays in the volume Kunst und Wahrheit. In the introductory chapter, ‘Kunstwissenschaft als Wissenschaft’, he indicates that at around 1950 art history entered a new phase.32 Whereas the earlier phase in which his Strukturforschung had participated dealt with the individual work of art, more recently it was possible to begin a new synthesis. I suggest that we take Sedlmayr at his word; he understood that he had begun a new kind of interpretation that built upon but also departed from earlier work. It was an addition to his earlier theory, which critically damaged it, but one which could also be removed to preserve the original theory. Dittmann and others had affirmed that Sedlmayr’s new approach emerges in the mid-1930s. We know that he was working on both Verlust der Mitte as well as the Entstehung der Kathedrale during the war. But as noted by Hans Aurenhammer, Sedlmayr’s work seems to have changed even earlier, which the Schapiro correspondence confirms. In a letter from late 1931 to Meyer Schapiro, Sedlmayr hints at the limitations of Gestalt theory. He both affirms 39

that it is more than a psychology, and applicable for example to physics, but also has limitations: As you would like it, I am working toward extending the theoretical foundations by incorporating experiences from other fields, from as wide a number of fields as possible. This should remove the appearance of one-sidedness from the approach of ‘gestalt theory’. In spite of this and for this reason, I cannot agree with you completely on this point, since the Gestalt theory will continue to assume a particular importance because ‘whatever our theoretical attitude might be, art is indeed an activity of creating forms [Kunst ist eben Gestaltung]’. The limits in the importance of Gestalt theory are reached when instead of the creation of forms [Gestaltung] we begin to study questions of ‘meaning’ for instance. Yet the term Gestalt psychology is misleading since it does not deal with specifically psychological facts, but also with others which we can also observe in intellectual life (as well as in physics).33 Thus, questions of meaning are out of the purview of the Rieglian approach based on formal relations. When Sedlmayr’s open anti-Semitism is revealed in 1934, he discloses his evolving ideas on methodology. 40

The fact that I’m not a loner influenced my scientific endeavours now in that I – as you suspect correctly – I am not satisfied with a pure formal analysis in the long run. I would consider a trial of a consistent politicalsociological history of art as important as anything else – even if it fails on one side. Only I do not see any signs of this, nowhere. But I have my own explanation. Of our present state, the function of art is not quite understandable. It is incomprehensible as magic, religion, or as the farmer – the one misunderstands also either as a small landowners or industrialists. – But this leads to far.34 There is in the Sedlmayr of the early 1930s a desire to say something more aggressive about the work of art, to read it symptomatically of the larger world, to engage that larger world. Brueghel’s Macchia In this context, I want to take a closer look at Sedlmayr’s paper on Pieter Brueghel, ‘Brueghel’s Macchia’, published in 1934 and incorrectly, in my opinion, treated as a paradigm of Strukturforschung.35 In it, Sedlmayr observes that Brueghel has rendered the peasants of his paintings with no recognisable features, mere blobs. For Sedlmayr, Brueghel has summarily described his figures, which are detached from one another, and bear a resemblance to ordinary objects in the pictures. Rather than thinking of these formally, as contributing to the structural formation of the individual work, he relents to 41

his desire to incorporate symptomatic criticism within his writing, drawing a lesson for European civilisation as a whole from Brueghel’s painting. He sees in Brueghel’s patches (macchie) a kind of inhumanity; a substitution of irrational blobs for the intelligibly human. The first thing we must say about this essay is the striking absence of any reference to Otto Pächt’s discussion of ‘national constants’, and in particular his understanding of the ‘design principles’ of southern Netherlandish painting.36 Pächt had posed a structural problem: what are the principles according to which national schools build up their pictures? But Sedlmayr forced a hermeneutic question: what did the forms mean? Some further evidence that this usage of the idea of Strukturanalyse moves beyond Gestalt ideas may be found again in Bohde’s analysis, in which she shows Sedlmayr’s debt to the Gestalt psychologist Johannes Allesch’s analysis of Brueghel.37 Where Sedlmayr finds signs of alienation, Allesch sees within these works an impression of ‘freshness, simplicity and liveliness’; for Allesch: ‘the whole thing is like a merry, vigorously blooming meadow’.38 Here then we have to take seriously when Frederic Schwartz says, that Sedlmayr, ‘dropped the potentially very promising gestaltist approach to the work of art’.39 Ever the opportunist, was Sedlmayr here kow-towing to Schlosser in seeking his job? Schlosser, we recall, was not beholden to Riegl, as Dvořák was. Sedlmayr followed Schlosser’s lead to Croce. Croce’s idealism was amenable to his turn to symptomatic criticism. It is ironic that Walter ­Benjamin’s criticism of the first volume of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen may have led, in Schwartz’s words, away from the ‘deductive use of gestalt principles’. This is not just a rejection of psychology but an embrace of potential Messianism. This is an example of a left-right confluence of politics, which explains how Sedlmayr’s left-wing politics was shaped to populism. 42

Consequently, if Sedlmayr uses ‘gestalt’ ideas, he expands them considerably. As I have pointed out elsewhere, he moves from orthodox Berlin theory (and the highly complementary approach of Heinz Werner) to more holistic, impressionistic varieties of Ganzheitstheorie, for example the Leipzig school of Sander and Krueger or the Gestaltanalyse of Ferdinand Weinhandl. Further proof may be found in especially in ‘Der Sturz der Blinden’, begun during, but published after, the war. 40 Not citing psychological authorities, he expounds on a fanciful experiment concerning ‘microgenesis’ (Aktualgenese) of a work of Brueghel without acknowledging that microgenesis – the dynamic temporal existence of percepts – was denied by the Berliner Gestalt psychol­ ogists. 41 It is clear that Sedlmayr was closely reading the Leipzig authors Friedrich Krueger and Friedrich Sander, although he never acknowledges them. As noted, Krueger and Sander are the ‘Germanic’ counterparts to the ‘Austrian’ thinking of Gestalt theory and phenomenology. Consequently, Sedlmayr’s scale changes. Where before his ‘disintegrative formalism’ allowed him to see a work of art to pieces, now he reads works of art as wholes, whose lack of wholeness can point to the disintegration of society (Brueghel). He continues to discuss parts and wholes, but it is clear that the works that he valorises have an irreducible fullness that does not require analysis. Only those lacking it ask for analysis, of the larger social context.42 This change was noted by Sedlmayr’s contemporaries. In his The Practice of Art History, Sedlmayr’s former colleague and collaborator Otto Pächt called the former in the context of his paper on Vermeer a ‘convert to iconology’ and Martin Gosebruch mildly calls this work an example of ‘Sedlmayrs Ikonologie’. 43 Sedlmayr’s own student, Hermann Bauer, felt that Sedlmayr belonged with Dvořák in describing his later method within his manual of methodology, a form of ‘Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte’. 44 43

Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the subtitle of Die Verlust der Mitte, ‘the visual arts of the 19th and 20th centuries as a symbol of their time’. A former proponent (and developer) of Strukturforschung, Sedlmayr had disfigured his ‘rigorous’ project and, in some interpretations, betrayed it. It was this to which Kurt Badt was perhaps reacting when he published a booklength Streitschrift against Sedlmayr in his Modell und Maler von Jan Vermeer. 45 Sedlmayr’s Symptomatology What this means is that not only had Sedlmayr appeared to have left formalism, he himself understood this as such. Indeed, Sedlmayr began to rely increasingly on what can best be called a ‘physiognomic’ approach to inter­ pretation, in which characteristics of the whole are divined by traces of its appearance. 46 While this method grew out of formalism, it is important to mention its grafting upon the ‘iconological’, exegetic model.47 Basic Christian interpretive principles in concert with visual interpretive faculties allow one to intuit the state of civilisation. While the first paper definitely stretches the limits of Strukturforschung, the second does so positively. It is subtitled ‘Paradigma einer Strukturanalyse’, yet introduced the very ‘Ikonologie’ mentioned above, for there Sedlmayr lays out the exegetical model presumed in his analysis of Vermeer. In spite of this ambiguity, Sedlmayr’s own ‘Ruhm der Malkunst’ was not reprinted in Kunst und Wahreit as a structural analysis but instead is presented simply, as would befit an iconological study, under the heading of ‘Zwei Beispiele zur Interpretation’. 48 Although they discuss formal properties of the paintings and buildings under discussion, these analyses do not engage in careful structural analysis. Put another way, their analysis has lost its naturalistic basis, the building-up of meaning from fundaments. 44

Interestingly, when Otto Pächt reviews Vermeer’s painting, he stresses the affinities between Sedlmayr and Panofsky. Instead of viewing the painting as a studio piece, Sedlmayr builds it into a ‘consistently worked-out allegory of painting itself ’. In this, Pächt objects to the way in which Sedlmayr would have the artist’s intentions, just as Panofsky, ‘deliberately and consciously secreted in the work’ and goes on to invert the early Riegl-inspired Panofsky against Sedlmayr, by citing from the former’s 1920 paper on Kunstwollen. 49 Panofsky becomes the Vienna formalist and Sedlmayr the Hamburg iconologist! Indeed, Sedlmayr remarkably cites Gombrich – whom Pächt in 1963 would deride for resisting Riegl’s historicism – calling his ‘Icones Symbolicae’ ‘excellent’ (vorzüglichen).50 I believe that we need to take the preceding arguments into account when noticing Sedlmayr’s new method. Thus, the intoxicating ‘trickery’ which Baxandall wanted to imitate but with ‘honesty’, and the notion that Sedlmayr was an ‘evil twin’ of Panofsky (Wood) or ‘Riegl’s Lucifer (or Judas)’ (Binstock), has a definite originary context in a new kind of enterprise moving beyond Strukturforschung. The New Vienna School emerged as an art historical movement addressing an already articulated issue in experimental psychology. The Gestaltists inserted themselves into the crisis of the sciences to provide a rigorous natural scientific approach that was still recognisable to human concerns. The Gestalt idea that psychology was a ‘young’ science resonated with Sedlmayr and Pächt, and they saw a unique way to address the similar impasse in art history. In order to tell this story, we need to recognise that Sedlmayr’s later work abandons the Gestalt-theoretic platform. I propose that there are basically two Sedlmayr’s, a short-lived, cosmopolitan Sedlmayr, and a later, diagnostic and hermeneutic Sedlmayr. He held beliefs in the first phase that he thought might give later fruit but ultimately found them incompatible. Strukturforschung 45

was poised to spread as Pächt was called to Heidelberg in 1932. However, the rise of Nazism did not allow him to assume his professorship. Jewish students in general in Vienna never had good prospects for work and this continued under Austrofascism, which began officially in 1934. As Sedlmayr’s thought drifted away from Gestalt theory and he obtained the art history chair in Vienna in 1936, art historians – both Jewish and gentile – emigrated. Pächt, after visits to England, emigrated there in 1938. Johannes Wilde and Otto Demus both moved to England in 1939.

46

2. The Basics of Strukturforschung The antitheoretical scholar who views the consideration of these problems as fruitless ‘theorizing’ overlooks the fact that he too theorizes implicitly and, moreover, that his material ‘results’ depend on his unarticulated theory. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’1 The main task that challenged Sedlmayr and Pächt in the late 1920s to early 1930s was acknowledging the integrity of the work of art. From Gestalt theory they inherited the concern that one must first understand the basic structure and nature of a work of art before attempting to understand its history. They 47

saw many of their contemporaries as failing in this task and therefore incapable of making meaningful progress in art history. The discipline was full of tacit assumptions about the work of art, the nature of representation and symbolisation, and historical influence that needed to be made explicit and openly theorised. The place to begin was with the single work itself. In his 1930 book on Borromini, Sedlmayr argued that one would have to have an understanding of the basic structural principles constituting the architect’s style before understanding the Baroque. It was literally impossible, in Sedlmayr’s view, for one to understand the genealogy of Baroque architecture without first having an explicit account of Borromini. Similarly, when Pächt addressed the problem of regional styles in Netherlandish painting in his 1933 study of ‘Design Principles’, he argued that it is hopeless to argue which artists were influenced by which traditions without articulating accounts of just what those regional styles entailed, their inner form or Gestalungsprinzip. Sedlmayr and Pächt felt that the tools to move beyond an informal formalism could be found in Gestalt psychology, which offered the means to characterise the structure of visual perception that could be applied to individual works of art and architecture. Gestalt psychology had even broached the problem of development and identity of structure in time. The theory developed by the early Sedlmayr and mature Pächt presents a compact set of commitments, stressing spatial complexes in relation to viewers, the causes of which are contiguous, immediately antecedent events. With the view that the New Vienna School is devoted to a kind of ‘structural evolutionism’, I will devote this chapter to structure and the next to evolution.2 The basic approach to the structural understanding of works of art can be reconstructed first in the 1930s in Seldmayr’s ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’ (‘Zu einer strenge Kunstwissenschaft’, and Pächt’s ‘The End of Image 48

Theory’ (‘Das Ende der Bildtheorie’), both of 1931) and Pächt’s later (c. 1970) The Practice of Art History. Together, a surprisingly sophisticated theory emerges that is to be distinguished from a common formalism.3 This Sedlmayr-Pächt system goes some distance towards answering a common criticism of the school – that it is indistinguishable from intuitionism. Schwartz argued that one could not separate Sedlmayr’s ‘most advanced work in the human sciences’ from his ‘charlatanry’, his ‘phenomenology’ from ‘farce’. 4 For him, the project was unsuccessful because it was actually impossible; there is no way to do expressive art history because expression itself is suspect. The consequence of this is that the frequent disappointments with and even condemnation of Strukturforschung are regarded as inevitable. In this chapter, I will address such charges by emphasising the connections of the new Viennese art historical method to Gestalt precedents. Indeed, a welcome outcome of this chapter is to clarify obscure meanings by explaining the resonance of Gestalt ideas in Sedlmayr’s and Pächt’s works. In the first part of this chapter, I will present Hamburg Iconology as the most conspicuous interpretive school during the emergence of the New Vienna School. The second part of this chapter offers an overview of the two sciences of art history as Sedlmayr imagined them in ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’. I then move on to clarify what Sedlmayr and Pächt meant by ‘mental set’ (Einstellung) by discussing what I call ‘embedded practices’. I will argue that expanding our understanding of the psychological shows that their psychological orientation is not merely perceptual but engaged with all of behaviour. I conclude by pushing beyond Sedlmayr’s remarkable attempt to foreground the psychology of the researcher and make art historical progress self-reflexive according to its stage of development. By making their early theory more openly materialistic, it more fully materialises as a viable theoretical model. 49

Figure 2.1  Jan van Eyck, Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, National Gallery, London (photo: © National Gallery, London/Art Resource, NY) 50

Hamburg Iconology The novelty of the new Viennese approach as exemplified by Sedlmayr and Pächt can be best appreciated by comparing it to one of the dominant methodologies present in the early twentieth century, Iconology. Iconology was a traditional method of applying learned knowledge of artistic subjects to their interpretation. Under the inspiration of Aby Warburg, the method became more formalised with the works of Fritz Saxl and Erwin Panofsky. The comparison of Panofsky and Sedlmayr – the latter writing in direct response to the formal programme of the former – was first put forward by Christopher Wood and reiterated by Frederic Schwartz and is a natural point of departure. Nevertheless, the first intimation of a critique of iconology ‘avant la lettre’, is Sedlmayr’s review of his classmate Karl Tolnai’s Die Zeichnungen Pieter Bruegels of 1925.5 Leaving aside the rivalry and competition for the legacy of Dvořák – Tolnai perhaps connecting more to his teacher’s late work – Sedlmayr clearly staked out his position. Tolnai had sought to connect Breugel’s drawings (and paintings) to the philosophical and theological milieu of his times but was content to hold them in parallel. As a result, Sedlmayr felt that Tolnai had merely stated what Bruegel wanted to say, without showing how the drawings said it. As a result, the images became mere ‘Ideogramme’.6 The conventions of Renaissance representation and Bruegel’s own representational language had not, Sedlymayr felt, been investigated sufficiently to demonstrate what exactly it would mean for a picture to signify a worldview. Not surprisingly, Sedlmayr argued from the position of the natural sciences, pointing out the way in which Tolnai’s intuitionist approach was undertheorised. This lament that form and content had not been coordinated was common to both Sedlmayr and Pächt and is brought out no better than 51

who would become the main antagonist of Vienna School thinking: Erwin Panofsky. Panofsky’s Iconology Although in his early period Panofsky was very sympathetic to Riegl, his mature practice pursued the exhaustive and erudite illumination of works of art according to the iconological significance of symbols. Most famous from this contemporary period would be his analysis of Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Wedding Portrait (c. 1434, National Gallery, London) (Figure 2.1).7 In his celebrated article, after enumerating the meaning of numerous apparently natural details in the painting – the faithful dog, the un-shod couple, signalling their participation in a sacred ritual – Panofsky argued that the painting served as a kind of witness, even a visual contract, to their wedding. But the analysis begged many questions. Which symbols were significant? What determined which elements motivated the meaning of the painting? As some critics have charged the method is circular: a form is significant because it is a symbol, a symbol is significant because it is a form.8 The contrast with the Vienna approach can be seen in Panofsky’s much discussed model of hermeneutic interpretation, derived from sociologist Karl Mannheim, involving a man removing a hat as he walks down the street.9 According to Panofsky, we may distinguish three levels of meaning in such an act: the pre-iconographic, iconographic, and iconological. The first refers to the physical description of the event, the second its conventional meaning and the third its deep cultural meaning.10 Thus pre-iconographically the act is its naïve description (‘a man removes his headgear’), iconographically we have categorised the act according to cultural convention (‘this is a sign of politeness’) and iconologically it functions as a ritualised and highly differentiated social act (‘a remnant of civility within the late-capitalist world-view’). 52

The problem, of course, is that the raising of the hat is already segmented from the behavioural field as meaningful. The physical, unproblematic description (‘a man removes his headgear’) is conflated with the culturally meaningful one (‘this is a sign of politeness’). But as Gestalt theory taught, such meanings were parts of larger wholes and the parts – the individual acts – only make sense within them. The psychological and social are blended such that intentional actions are embedded in a form of life, and they cannot be extracted in the way Panofsky expects. As has been pointed out, Panofsky’s simplification of Mannheim’s scheme defangs iconology, because the last level is not so much a revelation of the Weltanschauung but simply an even deeper level of iconography. With the her­ meneutic ambitions of art history thus reduced a further problem is that there is an artificial separation of form and content, dramatising the sepa­ ration between inert forms and cultural insight that animates them. This favours a discursive model. As we shall see, Sedlmayr, Pächt and those of a like mind favoured the act of creation first, which had various levels of built-in intelligibility constituting it. In this way, culture served the act of creation rather than the other way around. These theories gave Sedlmayr’s and Pächt’s essays and books the possibility of moving beyond not only traditional icon­ ography, but also the empiricist psychologies of Riegl and Wölfflin, and providing a legitimating flavour of rigour to their method.11 Two Sciences of Art Sedlmayr’s begins his discussion in ‘Toward a Rigorous Science of Art’ with a distinction between two sciences of art. There is a first science devoted to documentation, physical description, cataloguing and iconography. A second science is given over to creative judgement and developing an ‘understanding’ 53

of these objects.12 The first science is, in Sedlmayr’s reckoning, already well developed, while the second is in its infancy, but the second is ultimately more important and it is to this phase that Kunstwissenschaft must devote itself. Pächt expressed reservations about this division yet, as we shall see momentarily, he took it for granted in a closely related form. Furthermore, any suspicion about its legitimacy is dispelled by Sedlmayr by noting that the separation between the two is only a ‘hypothetical construct’ (Fiktion) and further that ‘a complete science of art cannot restrict itself to one of these two components but must connect and combine both’.13 The second science is superior because it offers understanding, it gains us access to the work, and makes all of its features significant without unduly ignoring or selectively treating its features. Johannes Wilde’s pupil John Shearman provides a personal endorsement of this position in regard to Donatello’s David, when he rejects a few premature interpretations and pauses to force us to ask ‘What, in realistic, narrative, functional, or behavioural terms, is supposed to be going on?’14 Although Sedlmayr and Pächt do not make the connection, the separation would evoke Wolfgang Köhler’s foundational critique of the ‘constancy hypothesis’ (Konstanzannahme).15 Köhler argued against nineteenth-century empiricistic psychology that the stimuli of perception cannot be identified with the phenomenal experience of them, if they even correlate at all. Psychologists had been conducting psychophysical experiments, connecting intensities to judgements without any notion that the phenomenal object might be constant at all. This kind of naïve and impoverished methodology was instructive for the Viennese thinkers. Sedlmayr affirms paradoxically that ‘some of the attributions made by the greatest representatives of the second art history are contradicted by doc­ umentary evidence’.16 Indeed he indicates in his Borromini monograph that 54

he himself has had intuitions that he could only later verify.17 As an example of the ‘second science’ Sedlmayr mentions the reconstruction of the Nördlingen altar by Wilhelm Pinder.18 By intuiting the structure of the incomplete altar, he was able to imagine what was missing and this led in fact to its discovery. It is interesting to compare these early comments with influential reconstructive projects that have a Viennese pedigree, such as those of Johannes Wilde – which Sedlmayr could just as easily have cited, discussed in Chapter 6.19 Sedlmayr’s distinction spells out immediately his technical complaint with positivism and its empiricism (as well as his distancing from the Vienna group of logical positivists). The first science is empiricist in that it only can deal with what is known: a document, a drawing. When it makes inferences, it may rely on the doctrine of ‘thought economy’ (ökonomisches Denken), Ernst Mach’s inference to the simplest explanation. The second science (closer in orientation to the critically realist formulations of Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann, Max Planck and the Gestaltists) admits hypothetical assumptions into its system and understands that it is an impoverished picture of the past that ignores what may have been and (due to inference), what probably was and (with the right documentation) what will turn out to be the case. It instead is relying on a correspondence theory of truth. This is an interesting anticipation of other discursive systems based on various forms of visual description (transdiction) and inference (abduction, retroduction).20 All art historians are aware of the dialectic of these two kinds of data. In fact, hypotheses can be taken as fact – becoming aspects of the first science – and then used for further hypotheses. A remarkable footnote by Sedlmayr mentions, ‘physical and chemical means of reconstructing the original condition of objects’, thereby opening his purview even further to unobservable facts about works of art.21 This is a form of ontological realism, an affirmation 55

of an unknown, external world that is not transparently available to experience. This realist basis puts the New Vienna School at odds with classic positivism and empiricism in its refusal to hypothesise beyond known documented facts. Behaviour, Not Mere Perception Physics and chemistry, as indeed the movement of imagination beyond the confines of the immediately perceptible, should counsel us in the way we regard Sedlmayr’s and Pächt’s appropriation of Gestalt psychology. For it is clear that the meaning of ‘psychology’ as used here is quite expansive and should not be confused with mere passive perception. Sedlmayr and Pächt are interested in psychology as an elementary science of behaviour, which involves actions in addition to perceptions.22 Indeed, this is the meaning of their constant guide, Kurt Koffka, who in his Grundlagen der psychischen Entwicklung of 1921 called psychology ‘the scientific study of living creatures in their contact with the outer world’.23 This distance between behaviour and phenomenal experience marks the difference between the phenomenological starting point of psychology and the same discipline as a science. It has often been noted of German-language formalism that it emerges from the standpoint of the practising artist, as when Wilhelm Waetzoldt wrote that, ‘Wölfflin’s lecture rooms had a feeling of the artist’s workshop about them’.24 Sedlmayr formalised this (expansively) formalistic idea so that artistic solutions are arrived at by practitioners with basic human skills in determinate situations. Obviously, the correct solutions will only be determined by the historian who has all of the physical knowledge and constants as did the original artist; hence, the importance once again of the first science. What do we mean by ‘psychology’ in this context? It is nothing other than the science of behaviour – human powers and abilities relevant to thinking and acting – in spite of cultural difference. Such analytic demarcation is 56

currently out of fashion according to latent relativistic commitments of postmodernism, the abeyance of ontological distinction in favour of non-­committal ‘genealogies’, but it is required of the facts because the conflation that ensues is unsupportable and defeats the emancipatory aim of postmodern politics.25 Indeed, numerous contemporary thinkers, including feminists, have embraced a human capabilities model of emancipation.26 The findings of Gestalt psychology provided an enticing model for historical inference. Take a series of figures from Max Wertheimer’s ground-breaking essay on Gestalt perception from 1923. (A) is seen as a series of three pairs of dots. (B) is seen as a line. If, however, one first sees (a) and next sees (B) there is a tendency to still see three pairs, now adjacent: (a) o o o o o o (b) o o o o o o Geometrically, the dots in group (b) are all equidistant, yet phenomenally we see pairs. We see here that antecedent experience has altered just what is a unit, and how it persists through time. Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) extended such ideas to behaviour when he asked how a behaviour or behaviour stream might be understood in comparison to another.27 Sedlmayr indeed cites this very idea of Lewin. Lewin differentiates between the ‘conditional-genetic’ genotype of behaviour and its phenotype.28 Phenotypical behaviour can appear similar but have no genetic (historical) relationship. Lewin even uses the term ‘internally’ in a metaphoric sense, which was not lost on Sedlmayr, who wrote later in the essay that ‘the study of art cannot always limit itself to establishing the phenomenal characteristics of objects but must advance to the investigation of conditional genetic relat­ ionships’.29 Thus Sedlmayr’s apparently vague meaning can be defin­itively 57

reinterpreted as referring to the artistic function they serve, or the related artistic practices that bring them about, when he is discussing the ‘internal’ difference. Sedlmayr and Pächt expressed the difference between geometrical and phenomenal identity (and thereby reinforced the distinction between the two sciences) by noting what is ‘outer’ and what is ‘inner’. Departing directly from Lewin, Sedlmayr discussed artistic objects which have identical ‘external similarities’ (ausserlich Gleichheit; classifiable as identical by the methods of the first science) but a quite different ‘internal similarity’ (innere Gleichheit), disclosed by the second science. Sedlmayr asks us to ascertain an object’s ‘internal’ properties to judge whether or not these correspond to external similarities. These ‘internal’ properties, as they are used by the Gestalt psychologists, in fact, only refer to divisions that respect the sensible structure of the object. This is often available to inspection, and therefore to visual sensations alone, but that is not always the case: the ontological and generally philosophical preoccupation of the Gestaltists (carried over by Sedlmayr) should not confuse what seem to be mere reports about imminent perceptions. Similarly, art works may have identical geometrical forms, but we do not know from that fact alone whether they mean the same thing. Or, we may have historically adjacent works of art but we do not know if they had any real causal connection with each other. A successful answer to these questions is disclosed in such simple experiments. As an example, Pächt notes a crescent moon-like shape in a work by Pisanello.30 It looks like what we know to be a symbol of the Immaculate Conception in a work by the Limbourg brothers. However, in this case, while there is a genetic link (Pisanello saw this shape in another work), it is corrupted. The shape does not mean the same thing in both cases and although there is basic historical connection, it is not a real, active one. Style and iconography cannot discover this on their own. 58

Mental Set (Einstellung) Sedlmayr characterises the objectivity of the work of art in a way that is recog­ nisable to Gestalt theorists and phenomenologists: ‘each work of art is itself, in its totality, an objective reality, a separate object world that can be examined and accepted like any other concrete reality and that can be penetrated through contemplation or conceptualization’.31 Here he asks us to revise our categories of objective and subjective, but the problem still sits with us. In other words, in the naturalistic view of the world, supported by various kinds of logical positivism, empiricism and scientific realist philosophies of science – the premises of which are often presumed and inverted in postmodern discourse – it is hard to persuade many of the objective character of perceptual presentations.32 But newer waves of philosophising, especially ‘neuro-’, ‘naturalised’ or ‘analytic’ phenomenology, are increasingly providing us with the proper notion of ‘objectivity’ to understand what people like Sedlmayr meant.33 We gain access to the work of art by adopting its ‘mental set’ (Einstellung).34 Only then can we attain what Pächt called ‘unfamiliar habits of looking’.35 I choose to interpret ‘Einstellung’ as ‘mental set’ to move beyond mere attitudes and reconnect the term with psychological discourse.36 The purpose of using the term – following phenomenology and Gestalt theory – is to (quoting Husserl) ‘recast . . . intuitions into rational form’.37 One does not merely want to obtain the ‘mental set’ of the work of art, but the ‘original’ (ursprünglichen), historical, or ‘correct’ (richtige) or ‘adequate’ (ädequate) Einstellung.38 There is an idea that one must recover the formal mode of apprehension. It is not a stated, or documentary, intention, but it is a kind of intentionality nonetheless. Indeed, Pächt is quite clear that formal indications in a work can contradict authorial intention but he would agree with E. D. Hirsch that the intentional meaning located in the time of production and consumption is superior to later cases of significance. 59

But how does one arrive at proper intuitions? How do we know that Seldmayr or anyone else using Strukturanalyse is correct? Many commentators have been disappointed with Sedlmayr precisely because his attempt to supersede intuition resulted in just that.39 The convincing grounding of a mental set is a difficult but not fatal problem. The idea that perceptions are not transparently imminent is already suggested by the strong emphasis upon material examples common to Riegl and the Viennese study of art. Because Sedlmayr’s project is informed by psychological science, it means that no matter how vague and unjustified his intuitions, the intention is that such intuitions be subject to naturalisation.40 This does not mean in a technical sense that they must be reduced to psychological facts. However, naturalism does suggest that explanatory reduction – for example via psychological laws – is possible. And indeed some philosophers believe that the idea of emergence (or ‘supervenience’) can never suggest perfect non-reducibility.41 Therefore, the issue becomes the proper application of perceptual psychology or, once it is employed, how it is redressed. If Sedlmayr or the Strukturforscher is on the right track, what comes next? Intuitions must be checked. Only a positivist for whom explanation and prediction are symmetrical (as in Vienna School logical positivism) would be disappointed with a Gestalt psychologist who could not take a stimulus and predict the seen outcome. These are instead to be studied and varied, to find the structural points of ‘good’ organisations, between which are the unstable or less-preferred solutions. The phenomenological method of variation is very important here because it looks at different solutions and the tolerance for different forms. Critical realism presumes a reality/appearance distinction; the way Gestalt psychology was grounded in a realist yet fallibilistic philosophy of science suggests that its very procedure is the careful confirmation of hypotheses ad hoc.42 60

Artistic Practice ‘Set’, then, must have a strong basis about it that allows for robust verification. Here I can amplify my discussion of psychology as a science of behaviour and an enlarged understanding of how attitudes can come about. ‘Set’ as it exists in Gestalt theory has a variety of manifestations, from the relatively stimulus-driven to more a function of attitude, correlated roughly to time span. For example, in Max Wertheimer’s already cited paper on perceptual organisation he notes a factor of precedence on organisation: when six equally spaced dots are seen (b) after first seeing three groups of two dots (a), the latter arrangement will tend to be seen also as three pairs. He called this ‘objective set’ (objektive Einstellung).43 We used the example already to understand the difference between geometrical and phenomenal identity. But here we can see that it is already a behaviourally organising factor for how to obtain the Einstellung based on recency. Other effects arise due to perceptual adaptation or in problemsolving, functional fixedness. There are a number of kinds of set – perceptual, cognitive – but all, however, are relationally determined in an objective manner. One cannot simply will oneself to see a certain way. One has to undergo the phenomenal experience where it becomes the natural outcome. Pächt later confirmed this point that Einstellungen are not voluntarily adopted but more or less determined by contexts. 44 As we shall see shortly, the implications for the arts are immediate. Movement patterns in a city, traffic patterns within a church, the spatial layout of a work of art, all affect our perceptions. When we recover them, our basic organisational abilities of perception move us towards the ‘originary mental set’. This is a strong statement of what in the Marxist tradition is called the ‘primacy of practice’. To see art historical analysis as adopting a mental set might seem hopelessly modernist. For example, Wood notes that Sedlmayr ‘converted every work, in effect, into a modernist work’ and Schwartz calls Sedlmayr’s method 61

‘art histor­iography as modernism’.45 But it is the historical desire to know the past that is modern, not the means. Historical knowledge requires recreated form. Each work is activated on the spot by the viewer who is aware of how its parts hang together as a complex whole that is loaded with intentional, expressive properties. The emphasis on structure is a means to speed the historian towards the salient elements of the work. It is this reason that the bare ‘structural skeleton’ of a work of art (to borrow Rudolf Arnheim’s phrase) lends itself to non-­representational forms – modern art or, as Sedlmayr’s specialty attests, architecture. The apparent contradiction of Sedlmayr’s desire to adopt the attitude of, first, the artist when the work was originally formed and, better, an attitude in which ‘previously unexplained aspects of the permanent, objective condition of the work’ is best explained as dictated by the historical project. In terms of priorities of interpretation, Sedlmayr clearly opts for the ‘formalist’ reading, one which is proscribed by the work itself, often in contradiction of the author’s or artist’s intentions. But it is clear from his own historical enterprise that he regards the best explanation to be closer to general historical accuracy, compared to a potentially quixotic personal meaning. For example, in a discussion of a couple of other approaches to finding the proper attitude – basically, an attitude that restores sense to an object relative to a series, and to its fit within a culture – Sedlmayr notes how ‘a specifically European attitude toward an African sculpture is spurious and incorrect because it is incompatible with other established knowledge about the primitive mentality (primitive Geistesart)’.46 Sedlmayr’s reconstitution of the work of art is modernist but the real question is whether it is unduly expressionist. As one interested in naturalising the study of art, he accepts the fact that a modern mode of analysis is a genuine advance over prior methods. We have to assume that the improved 62

understanding of perception has relevance for the understanding of the way that those in the past, living in much different conditions and with different notions of time and experience, lived. In this he is securely operating in the ‘unfinished project of modernity’. 47 History itself is an instrument of modernity and accepting its validity is the acceptance of the premises on which our own world, even in its postmodern guises, is built. It is only when practitioners agree on a description and then a criterion of inclusion within a history that we can encompass the more elementary insights along its development, offering converging approximations to reality. 48 Historical research, indeed, entails a form of explanatory critique, as when Sedlmayr affirms that ‘far-sighted reflection on one’s own activity will not hinder but rather will promote “life”, even as scholarship’. 49 Regardless of Sedlmayr’s politics or later penchant for Fascism, this is actually a sentiment closest to Marxism and contemporary socialism.50 In this light, Sedlmayr’s position is correct but glaringly in conflict with his later longing for pre-modern Catholicism. Embedded Behaviour To continue to materialise the notion of the ‘mental set’ we need to say more about how this is just one form of what can be called embedded behaviour. This behaviour in fact is fed directly by the first science of art, which provides all sorts of information about the historical contextualisation of the monuments and artefacts, the physical state of monuments and artefacts, and our historical understanding of cult, ritual and liturgy that activate spaces themselves. That Sedlmayr is still talking about psychology is suggested by how restrained he is with regard to the idea of culture as a whole, especially pertaining to his later totalising vision of culture. Sedlmayr 63

does remark that ‘a culture . . . is a unified organic whole with a determinable structure and organization’; but he quickly goes on to qualify that our ideas about the structure of highly complex constructs, such as a historical course of events or a ‘culture’, are generally far too imprecise, because our conception of the organization of such constructs are often too simplistic, and because, in concrete cases, we still know far too little about the things in question.51 Indeed, when looking at the Borromini book or even his article on Bruegel, his method stops short with psychology – characterology for Borromini (schizotheme) and abnormal psychology for Bruegel (alienation) – and Sedlmayr admirably does not tie his personalities to the spirit of the age. Sedlmayr’s reticence has been born out in contemporary theory. Margaret Archer has noted that the early twentieth-century anthropological search for traces of a culture was only possible because culture was presumed to be coherent.52 She distinguishes between what she calls ‘Cultural System Integration’, the logical consistency of ideas in a culture, and ‘Socio-­Cultural Integration’, the causal cohesion of a society. The ideas in a culture can be contradictory and fragmented whereas the society can be largely cohesive and homogeneous. But it is clear that Sedlmayr can get at these meanings without leaving the realm of psychology. Even ‘ritual-centred visuality’, as investigated by Jas Elsner, David Freedberg and others, need not be seen as a radical ‘sociologisation’ of experience.53 As Archer has pointed out, there exists a fact of real relationality between individuals that is prior to sociology.54 64

Therefore, there are a multitude of ways to move well beyond simple, restrained perception towards embedded, ‘absorbed coping’ behaviour – in short, ecology – to borrow Merleau-Ponty’s term. These ways include the human-­ environment interaction, the yielding of natural or formed affordances to human usage, and the real relationality that exists between individuals co­ existing in some environment. At the level of real relationality, the Strukturforscher finds a number of importantly revealing aspects of the historical material rather than Panofsky’s culturally inert pre-iconographic presentation.

Figure 2.2  Symbol of St. Matthew, Ech­ternach Gospel, MS. lat. 9389, Bibliotèque Nationale, Paris (photo: gallica.bnf.fr/Bibliothèque nationale de France) 65

Real relationality goes some way towards addressing the worry of Gombrich that Riegl-style ‘historicism’ essentially believes that Sedlmayr challenged the ‘unity and immutability of human nature and human reason’.55 Sedlmayr had written that – following Riegl – ‘in these various transformations, the mind has undergone real changes, changes in its very make-up’.56 Gombrich fears that essential difference is posited between different people and Sedlmayr is not too clearly arguing for variability in visual cultures. The difference can be seen in Gombrich’s approach to medieval art, which

Figure 2.3  Christ on the Road to Emmaus, St Albans Psalter. Dombibliothek Hilde­sheim, HS St.God. 1 (photo: Basilica of St. Godehard, Hildesheim), p. 69 66

maintains a singular normative, interpretive model – that of the Renaissance – that fails in its sensitivity to the different aims and methods of the medieval painter. In his review of Ernst Garger’s article, Gombrich had denied that the ineptitude of Medieval art could be ascribed to a cultural intention of transcendence, that is, to a physiognomic supplementation of its formal shortcomings with knowledge of the ‘spirituality’ of the age.57 Deprived of the of a later period in which ‘inspiration’ could mark a discrepancy between reality and intention intentionality, medieval art would have to fall under judgement. Looking at the St. Matthew page of the Echternach Gospel (Figure 2.2), Gombrich conceded that it was ‘so ingenious as to arouse our admiration’ but could not give it much more praise.58 A complete response to Gombrich would be owed to Otto Pächt, who realised Riegl’s ambitions in medieval art. When discussing medieval illumination, Pächt could sound like Gombrich, referencing its ‘pictographic’ approach. But he resisted the idea that it was an art of stasis, endlessly repeated schemata from a stock of stable iconographic models. An example is provided by Pächt’s work on the St. Albans Psalter (Figure 2.3).59 Considering the role of liturgical dramas, Pächt believed that there was a strong literalism in the pictorial approach to the psalter, called since Anton Springer, ‘word-illustration’.60 In Christ on the Road to Emmaus, the artist had literally illustrated the pilgrim pointing to the sun as is found in Peregrinus dramas, ‘Abide with us. Look at the sun, it is toward the evening’ (Mane nobiscum. Aspice solem quoniam advesperascit). Luke’s (24:29) traditional gospel merely states, ‘Abide with us for it is toward evening and the day is spent’ (Mane nobiscum, quoniam advesperascit, et inclinata est jam dies). However, contrary to Gombrich, this approach is not just ‘ingenious’, ‘creative’ or ‘surprising’ like the Echternach Gospels. Because that would 67

presume that the artist is actually seeking to portray the world. The point of Pächt’s analysis instead is to show that the artist is portraying the text. Its visuality is fundamentally different than that found in a post-Renaissance picture that would invite detached looking at a scene. The fact that AngloSaxon visual culture illustrated texts and not the scenes they describe is precisely a significant part of its ‘documentary’ meaning. In saying this, I would like to stress a corollary to Archer’s discussion of the lack of coherence of culture. Individuals shift between different sub-cultures – work, home, linguistic communities – through this process of absorbed coping. More naturalistically, their perceptual, cognitive and neural plasticity all underlie a remarkable ability to search after meaning regardless of changing circumstances.61 Today, by immersion in different contexts and their associated Einstellungen, we have the ability to conform our thought and perception to that of others.62 Reflexivity and Progress Sedlmayr’s essay ends with a call for a new methodological self-reflexiveness (neue Schätzung des Bewussten). It is aware of what art history needs, the state of the field, and the corrective, and indeed when its corrective is no longer necessary. But Sedlmayr wishes us to recognise some broad ideas: art history must find the means to describe individual works of art before it can write their histories and it must recognise that only the second science – the understanding of works of art – represents true progress. The English language and its study of art have no equivalent of the idea to which Sedlmayr’s essay is dedicated: Kunstwissenschaft. No doubt the growth of this field of study was fuelled by anxiety over the subjectivity of idealist, Romantic aesthetics.63 But it does encompass a ground-discipline that has only recently 68

been recognised as necessary. What Sedlmayr is attempting is not theoretical art history, in the sense of ‘philosophical’ interpretations of works of art, but rather the working out of the necessary principles for a rigorous study of art. Riegl had already proposed his project in an extremely self-conscious way, noting that scholarship itself could not go beyond the ‘artistic taste’ (Kunstbegehren) of his contemporaries.64 In his 1929 Introduction to Riegl’s Gesammelte Aufsätze, Sedlmayr presented the founder of the Vienna School as a Newtonian figure, foundational for all subsequent developments that would take place.65 Instead of casting aside theorists of every generation, his elevation of Riegl was intended to show how art history could be cumulative and progressive. Riegl’s achievement was in outlining the historical necessity that confronted the artist as he worked. Richard Woodfield has already pointed out that Gombrich’s criticism of this essay is undeserved because Sedlmayr repeatedly rejects the Zeitgeist of racial and timeless types.66 The tendency to read into this essay continues, as Katharina Lorenz and Jas Elsner recently called Sedlmayr the ‘real apostle of a Nazi version of Kunstwollen’.67 This may be true in later works but certainly not in this essay. No doubt the authors are responding to Sedlmayr’s endorsement of Alfred Vierkandt’s ‘supra-individual spirit’. This is a sociological notion, not more aggressive than Marx’s teleology, and Vierkandt’s appearance in the text – as explained in the next chapter – is not as foreboding and ideological as Vierkandt (who was dismissed by the Nazis in 1934), who worked closely with the Berlin Gestalt psychologists and was no doubt recommended to Sedlmayr.68 Sedlmayr sought to place the study of art on an ever-evolving and improving track, so that even if his generation might not know everything there would be a future contribution of knowledge that would ensure the maturity of the discipline. Indeed, Sedlmayr repeatedly makes reference to the ‘stage of development’ of art history, to the necessity of addressing the phenomenology 69

of the individual work of art and to resisting the urge to read into such a work as a mere trace of larger developments, because events are too complex to understand as of yet.69 Sedlmayr boldly calls for a ‘deferral of genuinely art historical work’ until more is understood about works of art themselves. And this what we see in the following case studies of the historical works of Sedlmayr and Pächt themselves, as well as Johanes Wilde and Otto Demus, time after time. At the time of his writing, Sedlmayr could startlingly compare the dominant iconographical approach to that of stylistic history, as both improperly tuned in their goals. Both operated on the level of the first science, dealing (in much different ways) with superficial aspects of the work of art, viewing them in both cases as members of a larger class (individual iconographic or style category). While stylistic history, so strongly associated with Wölfflin, was subsequently discredited, the iconographic approach definitively carried the day throughout much of the twentieth century, such that in 1979 Margaret Iversen could state that, ‘It is astonishing that in this century of an art so self-conscious of its media and the values of non-mimetic elements, our two major art historians, Panofsky and Gombrich, should have finally turned to areas which have no bearing on these problems.’70 In his review of Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting and later in his essay, ‘Künstlerische Originalität und ikonographische Erneuerung’, Pächt uses Sedlmayr’s language of the internal and external division of tasks related to art history and notes that iconology as practised had never really developed criteria with which to speak of the adoption and propagation of symbols, why and how they would be used in the first place. One has to first crack the task of understanding how an idea can become pictorial or artistic.71 Sedlmayr and Pächt viewed the study of art broadly (recall that they were addressing Kunstwissenschaft, not strictly speaking art history) and situated 70

it within a comparative discussion of all knowledge, derived primarily from Kurt Lewin. When I stress that they are talking about Kunstwissenschaft I mean to say that they are worried about cases of visual art and their peculiarities for both description and understanding, cases which invariably implicate history but are problems no different from other historically directed sciences. This is to clarify that we are not dealing with a pure case of an incompatibility of nomothetic and idiographic disciplines in the sense developed by Wilhelm Windelband, or the distinction between Erklärung and Verstehen as advanced by Wilhelm Dilthey.72 Sedlmayr’s and Pächt’s ideas and those on which they based their arguments are intended to overcome these distinctions. Sedlmayr, indeed, cites at length from the works of Lewin, who is known as the most methodologically astute member of the Berlin school, specifically stating that ‘the requirements that Kurt Lewin has developed for the methods of comparative epistemology (the study of fields of study) may be applied point for point to the new phase of the study of art’.73 Lewin carried on a sophisticated comparative study of the sciences, inspired by his (and Husserl’s) teacher, Carl Stumpf, and Husserl himself, who had pioneered the idea of ‘regional’ ontologies.74 It is Lewin’s discussion of sciences that describes successive states of systems – physics, biology and human development – in which the nomothetic and idiographic distinction is smashed. From this source, Sedlmayr arrived at the understanding that description, in whichever discipline, must precede history. Here, we come upon methodological prescriptions appropriate for an immature discipline, as in Köhler’s chapter from his 1929 Gestalt Psychology, ‘psychology as a young science’.75 What I want to draw from this remarkable self-reflexivity is a new way to talk about progress in art historical investigation. This kind of analysis helps us understand better where Sedlmayr did not take 71

his own advice but also extends his thinking by playing out its consequences into contemporary art history. For Sedlmayr (and to a degree Wölfflin and Riegl before him) anticipated the psychology of historical discovery that should complement any discussion of the development of the discipline. The endlessly complex nature of cultural objects encourages any number of new assays into understanding them, and thereby frustrates a sense of cumulative accomplishment. Consequently, the question raised by David Carrier, about whether or not art history progresses, is difficult to answer in the positive.76 According to Carrier’s reckoning, art history does not progress because art historical writing must be understood as texts that are impossible to accord with facts without proper knowledge of the interpretations of artists. To a degree, we can counter this understanding of cultural history if we say that we will never be able to summarise the overall qualities of great works of art better than the pioneers. For example, we know a great deal more about Borromini than when Sedlmayr was writing, but we have largely normalised him with our scholarship, whereas Sedlmayr sought a way to capture the contradictory impulses in Borromini’s work, its strangeness. Too often while we assess (and then write) history with thought for the sequence into which we are placing some new interpretation or portrayal of the historical facts, we do not consider the obsolescence of our own argument. But if we did so, we would not only forestall a great deal of relativism that otherwise seemed inevitable about art history, but we would also have a much more fruitful relationship with our subjects, to play out a postmodern concern for self-reflexivity in a productive direction. According to Gestalt theory, we learn through a differentiation of our understanding from global to more refined characteristics.77 Just as in psychology, where ‘laws’ were being formulated without a real understanding of the individual faculties under investigation, broad interpretations of history 72

were being written without an understanding of the individual constituents. Both iconography and stylistic history – approaches of the first science of art – had built up global ideas of different periods of art but reached a sort of inner limit. Wölfflins’s Baroque, for example, had a compact functionality in an abstract sense. This is where Sedlmayr situated his project, to understand individual monuments and works of art since the overarching concepts risked becoming empty. At that stage we could expect a predictable refinement of concepts like ‘Renaissance’, ‘Mannerist’ or ‘Baroque’. Indeed, Sedlmayr’s image of Borromini had to qualify what we might understand about the Baroque of which he was a part, whereas in ‘Brueghel’s Macchia’, Sedlmayr specifically quotes Pinder to the effect that the study of Mannerism is still immature.78 We have seen that due to the hegemony of iconology the structural approach was forestalled. But today we can see that we have precisely reached a point where stylistic categories are being rebuilt, now mainly according to rhetorical methodologies, rather than to morphological criteria.79 Given that Sedlmayr was sketching out only a global picture of artists that had not been known before, except through sentimental approaches inherited from the nineteenth century, he ought to have understood that his picture would have required improvement through continued investigation. Indeed, as is well known, his intuitions were aggressively played out in a complete and not provisional sketch of Borromini. But Sedlmayr could have anticipated his premature closure on Borromini based on a pioneering but only preliminary analysis of the architect’s characterology. Today, we are at the point that we have dismantled larger stylistic categories; however, according to a prevailing, latent nominalism we are only slowly rebuilding them into more meaningful structures. We continue to write more about Caravaggio than his contemporaries, although we understand that he may not be properly called Baroque at all. We understand that Michelangelo was not a Mannerist artist, 73

even if he contributed to conventions that would become hallmarks of the Maniera style. What is missing in art history – and which has not been solved by two decades of postmodernist critique – is a way of successfully communicating the fallibilism of one’s conclusions without framing it as an undecidable aporia or dogmatic assertion. We can make best guesses based on the state of knowledge and our knowledge of what we ought to be attending to, based on the prior history of the field. But fallibilism, ironically, also presumes realism and the sane admission that a transcendent object is out there to which our efforts can slowly, if imperfectly, bring us closer. A caricature of immanent understanding is partly presented by Sedlmayr, which is reminiscent of the totalising visions of science of Vienna School positivism. Our goals have to be loftier and yet much more modest. Sedlmayr ultimately subverted the very kind of progressive, cumulative form of art historical research he espoused. In this chapter I have defended Sedlmayr’s and Pächt’s use of Gestalt principles, as these were theoretical, philosophical and sometimes psychological. Looking around at contemporary practice, whether atheoretical, stylistic or iconological they saw that the historical study of the image was undertheorised. In Gestalt theory they saw a parallelism with the task of the art historian, where stimuli were like documents and raw works of art, which were clothed in phenomenal experience. Occupying the viewpoint of the historical viewer was a kind of ‘mental set’ (Einstellung), and it was the way in which acts of perception are embedded in behaviour that Sedlmayr and Pächt had the hope that they could gain purchase on the recalcitrant image. By focusing historical research in a psychological vein, they were in a unique position to judge their own research acts in a reflexive way. They tried – on Riegl’s example – to see where their perception of the state of research led to 74

the selection of topics, and in this way they prioritised their own research problems, which they deemed urgent for the current time. The next chapter, following the distinction between two sciences of art, shows how one can put objects properly into historical sequence.

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3. Struktur, History and Determinism Evolutionism is dead. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion.1 Freedom and compulsion . . . turn out not to be incompatibles. Otto Pächt, ‘Alois Riegl’.2 If Strukturforschung was devoted to the integrity of the work of art it also had a theory of history that, in a sense, was committed to the integrity of history. Jan Bakoš calls this a ‘structural evolutionary conception of art history’.3 One could say that in this conception the structure of the work of

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art interlocked also with those that preceded it and succeeded it. It was this interlocking that moved real history beyond mere ‘genetic’ links of the ‘first’ task of art history. This evolutionism ultimately comes to terms with Riegl’s mysterious notion of the Kunstwollen, which both Sedlmayr and Pächt embrace with qualifications. In a very provocative way, Sedlmayr ended his essay on Riegl asking us to accept the theoretical premises that his forbear had established for contemporary art history: The notion that art is not an autonomous, irreducible, and irreplaceable expressive possibility of the human mind, but rather an epiphenomenon. The view that regards individuals as primary and the only real entities, and sees groups as merely a sum or the epitome of such individuals, and for which, therefore, the collective intellectual formations grounded in these groups do not constitute real entities, but instead mere nominal fictions. Quite specifically, the idea of the unity and immutability of human nature and reason . . . The view that the artist is either imitating or stylizing an unchanging nature . . . The thesis that the entire movement of history is only the result of individual forces working blindly together, a network of individual causal threads.4

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The argument – made on empirical grounds – is that contemporary theory has validated Riegl. The result of course was an apparent holistic form of determinism, with obvious ominous tones when seen in retrospect. Of course, both Riegl’s Kunstwollen and the Vienna approach to Struk­ turforschung hit a major brick wall in Gombrich’s influential critique of both in Art and Illusion. Gombrich was deeply suspicious of the founder of his own Viennese school, Riegl, whom he assimilated to ‘Hegelian’ theorising. Gombrich rejected Riegl’s highly abstract approach, which he highlighted in the following quote from the Late Roman Art Industry (Spätromische Kunstindustrie) of 1901: The transformation of the late antique worldview was a necessary transitional phase for the human spirit in order to arrive from the idea of a (in the narrower sense) purely mechanical, serial, connection of objects projected on to a plane to that of an omnipresent chemical, space pervading connection. Whoever wants to regard this late antique development as a decline arrogates to himself the authority to prescribe today to the human spirit the road it should have taken to come from the ancient to the modern conception of nature.5 Gombrich in good, adopted Anglo-Saxon style read Riegl very literally and could only interpret his statements as ridiculous. That Riegl could find cultural continuity in both the philosophy of Plotinus as well as a late Roman fibula, Gombrich found to be ‘portentous nonsense’.6 78

Figure 3.1  Rembrandt, Supper at Emmaus 1628, Paris, Musée Jacquemart-André (photo: Erich Lessing/­ Art Resource, NY)

Genius More than in the discussion of the work of art, that of the image in history addresses a perennial Viennese concern: the suspicion of the cult of genius. This cult nicely bundled together censured qualities of nineteenth-century art history, including an anecdotal emphasis and sentimentality that expressed the contribution of the artist through his biography. As a consequence, stylistic choices and religious meanings were bound up with individualistic factors relatively independent from historical context. 79

Of course, Riegl set the great example against this approach, with his radical embedding of artistic innovations within a gradualistic account of historical evolution. The great documented modern personalities he treated – Rembrandt principally – fell in line within his account of the general situation of the age. In general, the idea is that while there are great personalities in art history, they fashion their artistic solutions from tools available to them. While not trying to push the point too strongly, this point of view is not too different from the historical materialism of Georgi Plekhanov, who wrote that ‘talented people . . . can change only individual features of events, but not the general trend’.7 Riegl believed that one could only understand Rembrandt’s contributions by placing him in his time. But it is not so much that Rembrandt realised a personal ambition amidst a general background. Rather, it is Rembrandt better than anyone else who can understand and potentially resolve the challenges brought forward by his time. In Riegl’s formulation, ‘Rembrandt exploited subordination in a painting as a means of coordinating the figures among themselves (on a psychological level) and with their surrounding space (in a physical sense). Subordination for him was exclusively a source of dramatic opposition.’8 Dvořák continued Riegl’s commitments, while Wickhoff ’s student, Julius von Schlosser – bolstered by a friendship with Benedetto Croce – promoted quite different priorities. For Schlosser and Croce, the unique genius stands above the crowd, and is worthy of historical study (akin to literary ‘Stil­ geschichte’) as opposed to the mere study of visual images (a literary ‘Sprach­geschichte’).9 Of course, Gombrich – the pupil of Schlosser – carries on this polemic with Dvořák’s heirs, Sedlmayr and Pächt. Gombrich wishes the great work to ‘match’ reality after ‘making’ it, or breaking out of conventionalised gesture.10 When discussing Rembrandt, 80

however, Pächt found that every apparent innovation on the part of the artist – the radical silhouette of Christ in the Jacquemart-André Supper at Emmaus (Figure 3.1) – was not attributable to Rembrandt but merely energised by him from other sources. Against radical originality, Rembrandt had sources – in this case Hendrik Goudt’s print after Elsheimer, Jupiter in the House of Philemon and Baucis (1612). But rather than closing the case, it is precisely in altering slightly an overdetermined artistic culture that Rembrandt finds his novelty. Kunstwollen Gombrich’s harsh criticism of ‘portentious nonsense’ extends to Riegl’s notion of ‘Kunstwollen’. The notion of Kunstwollen has been interpreted in a number of ways, as ‘artistic volition’, ‘artistic intention’, ‘will-to-form’, ‘will of art’, ‘what art wants to do’, but Otto Pächt finally settled on ‘aesthetic urge’.11 In all these interpretations, one can see a questionable invocation of unintended, directed action and this hijacking of the human psyche was what was bristling to Gombrich and other more empiricist and less speculative thinkers. Although this term has the most active, deterministic connotations of them all, the reader will see how its sense can be defended. Fortunately, thanks to the scholarly efforts of Margaret Olin, Margaret Iverson, Diana Reynolds and most recently Mike Gubser, we are increasingly able to context­ ualise Riegl’s – and therefore also Sedlmayr’s and Pächt’s – thought into the Austrian milieu in which he wrote.12 Reynolds in particular has argued for a recontextualisation of Riegl that includes attention on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and the Brentanist philosophical tradition best known in Austria. Perhaps the most revealing of exposition of Kunstwollen is given in the conclusion to the Late Roman Art Industry. Riegl wrote that, 81

All human will is directed toward a satisfactory shaping of man’s relationship to the world, within and beyond the individual. The plastic Kunstwollen regulates man’s relationship to the sensibly perceptible appearance of things. Art expresses the way man wants to see things shaped or colored, just as the poetic Kunstwollen expresses the way man wants to imagine them. Man is not only a passive, sensory recipient, but also a desiring, active being who wishes to interpret the world in such a way (varying from one people, region, or epoch to another) that it most clearly and obligingly meets his desires. The character of this will is contained in what we call the worldview (again in the broadest sense): in religion, philosophy, science, even statecraft and law.13 Riegl is gesturing towards ways of facing the world of which we are not directly aware. The idea of mastery meeting desire at a juncture of history is the crux of the Kunstwollen. Vlad Ionescu has described this as ‘the way in which artists in a certain age want to see things’.14 Pächt argued convincingly that Kunstwollen is less abundant in the Dutch Group Portrait not because Riegl had superseded it but because this later period had more documented personalities: the generic Roman Kunstwollen becomes that of a definable artist.15 Consequently, it is clear that the Kunstwollen is not a monolithic concept but formed of the specificity of group life. As Jeffrey Tanner notes, Riegl observed the coexistence of different 82

Kunstwollen in the late Roman world (between the elites and plebeians) and also in sixteenth and seventeenth Low Countries (between Catholic and Protestants). Nevertheless, Riegl does make use of a concept of Volk. How much this is a totalising concept, however, is open to interpretation. Both Tanner and Viktor Schwartz have questioned Gombrich’s imputation of racial thinking to Riegl.16 The approach to art history and particularly the mysterious Kunstwollen needs to be contextualised historically, which allows a sympathetic understanding of the concept in general social scientific terms. In particular, the Kunstwollen must be seen as an evolving concept, which is how Dvořák, Mannheim, Sedlmayr and Pächt regarded it. By understanding it as an evolving concept aiming for empirical application, and also tracking the social scientific interests of thinkers like Mannheim, Vierkandt, Lewin or Metzger, it is possible to see that the Kunstwollen is nothing other than a concept of cultural explanation emphasising art as an institution, with deterministic factors that, however, are rigorous in that they depend on point-by-point tendencies and not teleologies. Gombrich addressed the conclusions of Sedlmayr’s ‘Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’ as a retrospective exemplar of a totalitarian thinking, and he countered the holistic and developmental commitments mentioned at the outset of this chapter, point by point. Sedlmayr’s essay was indeed a youthful and aggressive exercise in self-fashioning of the new Viennese theoretical platform; naturally, it is easy to misunderstand. But the double negative expression of its theses does not deny the individual, integrity of human nature, or causal analysis, but argues that there is something more. What we find is that Sedlmayr and Pächt continuously searched among contemporary philosophers and sociologists to find a defensible way to portray some of the interests that Riegl put forward, and by isolating individual 83

problems we can see how they broke down the intangible problem of the Kunstwollen. Social Gestalten – Alfred Vierkandt As noted, the first fiction that Sedlmayr asked us to reject on the example of Riegl’s scholarship was one that sees ‘individuals as primary and the only real entities, and sees groups as merely a sum or the epitome of such individuals, and for which, therefore, the collective intellectual formations grounded in these groups do not constitute real entities, but instead mere nominal fictions’.17 Here, he clearly gestures towards some kind of social collectivism and these have been interpreted almost unanimously in an ominous way. At the time when Sedlmayr wrote his essay (1929), there was no substantial work on social ontology by the Gestalt group directly, although the language adapted in the quote – ‘merely a sum’ – comes directly from Wertheimer. Seeking to find the super-individual element of social life, which could also account for social compulsion (Kunstwollen), they saw the natural discussion of social evolution – as did Mannheim – in the sociology of knowledge (Wissensoziologie), a move that had already been made by Max Adler, the Viennese socialist philosopher who interposed mind between social structure and consciousness. Sedlmayr and Pächt each had recourse to the figure of sociologist Alfred Vierkandt (Figure 3.2), which I will show to be simply a way to model Kunstwollen as sociology of knowledge.18 Indeed, today Vierkandt is remembered as a phenomenologically oriented sociologist along with Max Scheler; one, however, with a Berlin connection. And this is also how Sedlmayr and others regarded him circa 1930. Vierkandt was like Mannheim, who had also explored ‘objective mind’. But he was more theoretically consistent because of his ties to the Berlin Gestalt group. 84

Figure 3.2  Alfred Vierkandt, Professor of Sociology, University of Berlin (photo: Bundesarchiv Bild)

Vierkandt is cited by Sedlmayr in the ‘Quintessenz’ essay and Die Architektur Borrominis, and by Pächt in ‘The End of the Image Theory’. In the former, Vierkandt is a contemporary authority vindicating Riegl: ‘modern sociology has subsequently produced the nonatomistic theory of “objective spirit”, and in this theoretical context there appears the concept of an “objective collective will”, which matches perfectly the concept introduced by Riegl’.19 The following year, in explaining Borromini’s worldview, Sedlmayr stated plainly, ‘The world view is a reality transcending individuality.’20 85

Vierkandt has become a contested figure.21 Hochstim, in the only extended discussion of Vierkandt, affirms that the super-individual affirmations in his theory prepared the way for Nazi Volksgemeinschaft.22 Similarly, Sedlmayr’s pupil, Lorenz Dittmann, questioned the use of Vierkandt in the strongest terms. Reacting to Vierkandt’s ethnographic placement of the social over the individual, and psychological mechanism of ‘instinct to submission’ (Instinkt der Unterordnung), he rejected any such social theory that seeks to undermine freedom, self-determination and self-responsibility.23 More recently, seemingly with Vierkandt in mind, Jonathan Petropoulos mentions Sedlmayr’s adherence to ‘collective psychology’ while Katharina Lorenz and Jas Elsner call Sedlmayr the ‘real apostle of a Nazi version of Kunstwollen’.24 What was so objectionable? Let us turn to Sedlmayr’s ‘Quintessenz’ essay where he specifically quotes Vierkandt from the Gesellschaftslehre, although reference is also made to the 1928 reissue. [M]odern sociology has subsequently produced the nonatomistic theory of ‘objective spirit’ (objektiven geist), and in this theoretical context there appears the concept of an ‘objective collective will’ (objektiven Gesamtwillens), which matches perfectly the concept introduced by Riegl. ‘The facts of human culture reveal the sway of a supra-individual spirit to an extraordinary degree’.25 Behind them stands a supra-individual will that the individual person encounters as a normative force. What is being talked about here is an objective will, or even specifically of an objective collective will (Wille von überindividueller 86

Art), and this refers to a force that is rightly conceived of by the individual as an objective power. Clearly this is precisely what Riegl means. Just like the objective spirit this supra-individual will is borne by groups of people. And although it is neither a ‘substance that hovers mysteriously between specific individuals’, nor some phenom­ enon, in other words, something detectable in the conscious mental life of a single person such as, for example, individual intentions, it is, like ‘spirit’ (Geist), something real and, further, an actual force (Kraft).26 Vierkandt’s subquotation might seem startling in the context of Sedlmayr’s text. Without the knowledge that Vierkandt is seemingly a Gestalt or phen­ omenological figure, it seems to be a moment of ideological violence, when Sedlmayr’s conservative tendencies bubble to the surface. This is certainly how Dittmann, Hochstim and now Lorenz and Elsner read them. Nevertheless, Vierkandt would have seemed an at least partially naturalised ‘Gestalt’ figure to Sedlmayr. He taught with Wertheimer, Köhler and Lewin at the University of Berlin. Because he worked in a field adjacent to psychology there were many opportunities to collaborate, if only for practical reasons, like serving on dissertation committees. For example, Walther Schering had Wertheimer and Köhler on the committee for his 1925 dissertation overseen by Vierkandt: ‘Ganzes und Teil bei der sozialen Gesellschaft’.27 Vierkandt and Köhler were also on Aron Gurwitsch’s Habilitation committee, and both expressed approval of his text – Die mitmenschlichen Begegnungen in der Milieuwelt – unfortunately unpublished because of the rise of Nazism.28 87

More importantly, Sedlmayr and Pächt would have read among Vierkandt’s pages citations of both Lewin and Köhler in the second edition of the Gesellschaftslehre, which implied that his was a ‘Gestalt’ sociology. Vierkandt repeatedly discusses the gestalt category and hardly Ganzheit at all. In spite of the fact that his overall approach to sociology is ‘formal’, this affinity to Ganzheit is more to do with the old-fashioned nature of his theory, rooted in nineteenth-century categories, than in content. Vierkandt liked the Gestalt work of his colleagues, but his paradigm hardly allowed him to express it. In short, the decision to cite Vierkandt – independent of the cited content, which will be discussed now – is perfectly understandable. ‘Objective spirit’ (Objektiven Geistes) is the subject of section 36 of the Gesellschaftslehre: ‘Die Bedeutung des objective Geistes’. This concept is obviously of Hegelian origin and means ‘objective spirit’ or ‘objective mind’. As such, it might appear compromised as an abstract instrument of the development of spirit. Nevertheless, it was naturalised as a sociological concept by Wilhelm Dilthey, Georg Simmel and Eduard Spranger, phenomenologists like Max Scheler and Nicolai Hartmann, cultural historians like Hans Freyer, and most importantly Mannheim himself, to refer to the super-individual thought or content of Weltanschauung.29 There is in addition a Marxist strand leading from Hegelian Marxists like Lukacs to Adorno and Habermas, who writes of, ‘symbolically stored collective knowledge’ or just ‘objectified culture’.30 The inoffensiveness of the term can be shown, horribile dictu, by Karl Popper’s discussions of the ‘objective mind’ and ‘World III’.31 True, the ‘objective spirit/ mind’ is the basis of related theories of the ‘group mind’, but the slipperiness of the term simply refers to external ‘objective’ facts. It is compatible with collective subjectivity of the group, but not with executive consciousness. The main question behind all forms of legitimate collectivism is whether we need to reflect in theory (1) the fact that entities (like numbers) do not 88

exist solely in the mind (psychologism) and (2) the fact that we do not merely act on the social and that sometimes it acts upon us (the duality of structure). As we have seen, the way to avoid individualism was through invocation of the successors of Hegel’s Geist. In other words, to explain social phenomena like class exploitation, we need collectivism. According to a contemporary formulation of Levine, Sober and Wright, collectivism is needed to discuss capitalism as a generic (‘type’) concept, although singular discussions of capitalism at any historical moment in a particular country (‘token’) might make reference to individualistic data.32 For this reason, Nicos Hadjinicolaou found it fit to discuss Sedlmayr’s account of the Kunstwollen in his Marxist Art History and Class Struggle.33 The ontological status of the group was not clearly delineated by Vierkandt. He strove to outline the extra-individual character of culture, yet the result was so formalised and impersonal as to be hardly distinguishable from Durkheim’s system. A breakthrough was achieved by Kurt Lewin upon arriving in America; to regard the reality of a group not in a substantive way but upon the causal criterion of existence: something must be real if it has effects. This does not reify the group and anchors culture in individuals, by pointing to the causal efficacy of groups to effect change in society.34 They exhibit emergent properties that make their effects different from individual behaviour, as recognised also by Lewin in noting the ‘whole is different from the sum of its parts’. Furthermore, Vierkandt was not phenomenological enough, ignoring important literature on the nature of group sympathy in the Husserl school. Collectives live in many ways – through their spokespersons, through the interaction of their members – but the idea of collective subjectivity goes to the very way in which group members identify with each other (and against others). This is the subjective side of the life of groups. Groups do have a 89

mental or ‘spiritual’ link. As with social structure, however, this must only reside at the meso level where the consciousness of individuals can fuse on a norm into a single subjectivity. Thus, Vierkandt could have made reference to Max Scheler’s Gesamtperson, Edith Stein’s überindividuelle Personlichkeit and Husserl’s Personen der hoherer Ordnung.35 They clarify that collective subjectivity does not mean a consciousness that is shared by many individ­ uals; it is not a stand-aside substantial consciousness in its own right but a mutual, one-sidedly dependent participation in a common intentionality and subjectivity. Thus, each theorist does not speak of personhood but only personality. The personality therefore does not have a stream of consciousness. Its participants share a stream of experience.36 Historical Chains The third fiction that Sedlmayr asked us to dismiss related to history was ‘only the result of individual forces working blindly together’.37 In its place, he promoted Riegl’s idea of ‘genuine historical entities’. Gombrich criticised this severely as ‘historicism’, but once again it is not exactly clear how to interpret Sedlmayr’s words. The image of history inherited from Riegl is of a large ship, turning incrementally with no possible revolutionary change . Positively, the influence of gradualism meant that periods of so-called decline were seen to necessarily relate to antecedent periods. If we judge them according to this adjacency then that is historicism. But if we judge them as causally related, that is another matter. Riegl was influenced by nineteenth-century materialism, which was surprisingly independent of Hegelian thinking. For the Viennese, however, the result was more important: strong gradualism was a way of giving due credit to the social and representational structures that influence any act of art making. 90

Writing in 1929, Sedlmayr was clearly thinking both of the necessity of history and its driver. In regard to the former, he is clearly reflecting a long line of thinking in Vienna that regards history as a stepwise movement, with each phase dependent on the former. This Viennese idea is updated with the work of Kurt Lewin, such that the ‘gen-identity’ of a phenomenon can be traced scientifically through time. He recommended viewing the development of even physical and biological systems not as a continuous, teleological process but one in which the outcome is ‘being-such-as-to-have-come-forthfrom’ (existentiellen Auseinanderhervorgegangenseins).38 Such is the scientific updating of Riegl. A key to understanding Sedlmayr is through Riegl’s larger idea of historical progress. A term that he uses, and which is repeated by Dvořák, is that of the ‘chain of development’ (Entwicklungskette), according to which intermediate works of art in series represent a transition phase (Durchgangsphase). Riegl already uses it in the Stilfragen and it is a guiding metaphor in the Moderne Denkmalkultus. When Riegl mentions that ‘everything that once existed constitutes an irreplaceable and irremovable link in a chain of development’ he is echoing positivist Henry Buckle: ‘Every event is linked to its antecedent by an inevitable connexion, [every] such antecedent is connected with a preceding fact . . . thus the whole world forms a necessary chain.’39 In other words, each successive step is determined by the first and could not have happened as it did had any of the earlier links not preceded it. Indeed, this methodological commonality can be confirmed through influence.40 It is necessary to pursue this line of enquiry, because Kunstwollen is hopelessly vague without this materialistic and positivist background. The idea that is taken for granted is that society is composed of tightly interlocking pieces. If that is the case, changes in one synchronic element will affect those in another synchronic element and likewise in the diachronic dimension. 91

Part of Gombrich’s critique of Riegl as a putative Hegelian can be found in the use of cultural details as symptoms of a larger whole. Yet, the contemporary of Buckle – Hippolyte Taine – wrote, Just as in an animal, the instincts, teeth, limbs, bones, and muscular apparatus are bound together in such a way that a variation in the others, and out of which a skilful natural, with a few bits, imagines and reconstructs an almost complete body, so, in a civilization, do religion, philosophy, the family scheme, literature and the arts form a system in which each local change involves a general change, so that an experienced historian, who studies one portion apart from the others, sees beforehand and partially predicts the characteristics of the rest.41 It is because a culture forms a tight whole that symptoms are accurate as predictors; they are actively formed by their neighbouring practices. To criticise such a model one must not attack its Hegelian assumptions but rather the very idea that societies form a coherent whole. One must move away from the imagery of a Hegelian ‘Geist’ imbuing a period (part of the rhetoric of ridicule) and make an ontological argument about the relative play of contingency and agency that upsets such closed wholes. Similarly, in the diachronic sphere, it is important to note that such co-­ related systems are not teleological. Nineteenth-century examples of theories that posited causal, coexisting factors and are not prescribing any pattern of development are those of Adolphe Quetelet, Henry Buckle and Hippolite 92

Taine. Buckle and Taine, while influenced strongly by the positivism and naturalism of Comte, nevertheless erased teleological elements from their theories in favour of a thoroughgoing determinism. 42 Any worthwhile theory of history has to be functional and not teleological in this way. Indeed, philosophers of science insist on forming explanations of successive processes as abstractive moments with tendencies and no ad hoc or ceteris paribus laws.43 Interestingly, while Sedlmayr was anxious to defend Riegl, he was not so anxious to use this historical concept in his own work. Karl Maria Swoboda used such ideas. 44 It is also found strongly in the work of Otto Pächt, who inherits it – like Swoboda – from Dvořák. In his methodological manual Practice of Art History Pächt explains historical chains in a whole section – ‘The Work of Art as a Link in a Historical Chain’ – and in his historical work he constantly explains stylistic successions in terms of chains: the Dijon Nether­ landers made possible Eyckian realism, Adam Elsheimer made Rembrandt’s Caravaggism possible. The chain becomes a kind of cognitive fit, creating the conditions for what any generation can accommodate. This rules out unreas­ onable stylistic connections by asking for a legitimate connection linking two phenomena and thus making stylistic influence possible. Working as he did in medieval art, the ‘historical chain’ for Pächt was vividly present in Dvořák’s famous discussion of the ‘mystery’ (Rätsel) of the sudden appearance of the art of the Van Eyck brothers in Das Rätsel der Kunst der Bruder Van Eyck of 1904 – Johannes Wilde and Karl Maria Swoboda thank the young Pächt for help in reading the manuscript of the 1925 reprint.45 This early work inherits from Riegl the idea that distinct historical artistic forms must pass through intermediate stages. Dvořák of course sought to dispel that mystery by embedding the Van Eycks firmly into the evolutionary sequence of which they were a part. Artists like Claus Sluter or Melchior Broederlam (Figure 3.3) become the proximal causes of only apparent radical change. 93

Echoing Riegl, Dvořák wrote that ‘Every historical formulation is a link in a specific historical chain of evolution and is conditioned by previous form­ ulations of the same material. This is the premise and the justification of modern exact scholarship; without this, it would be a farce.’46 This is precisely the quote that Pächt chose to incorporate into his discussion in his Practice of Art History. Famously, Dvořák gave up evolutionary formalism in favour of Art History as History of the Spirit (Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte). History had previously been (as it was for Riegl) a self-modifying whole. As

Figure 3.3  Plate from Max Dvořák, Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van Eyck, 267 94

that young student helping Wilde and Swoboda, Pächt clearly resonated with the early work of Dvořák rather than his later work. ~ In his article, ‘Die historische Aufgabe Michael Pachers’, Otto Pächt suggested that the incoherent facts that had led Dvořák to abandon his Rieglian monism were not fatal, and he set out to identify exactly where Dvořák had erred. This was in assuming that connected historical items had to have some outward similarity.47 As we have already seen, following Lewin, one could have outward similarities in works of art that expressed no inner similarity (innere Gleichheit). In effect, Pächt was saying that Dvořák’s concessions to outside forces were not necessary because his test of connectedness was incorrect. If that was adjusted, true causal links between works of art could still serve as the criteria of natural historical groupings. When Pächt returned to the question of the sudden emergence of the Ars nova of Jan van Eyck in his university lectures, he actually used a sociological explanation: the Netherlandish painters under a new wave of Burgundian patronage had allowed this latent visuality to emerge.48 The conditions were there, allowing evolutionary links to a new content. We can see how this resolved a tension in Riegl’s thinking between a closed system, which would be teleological, and an apparently closed system. It was possible for Pächt to believe that history has a temporal pattern-like structure because he denies the symmetry of prediction and explanation. He clearly distinguishes between prediction, inevitability or determinism as a closed system, and retrospective causal determinism, endorsing Wind’s comment of ‘retrospective prophecy’. 49 This phrase, adopted by Wind from T. H. Huxley’s popular discussions of Darwin, refers to the ability to explain events retrospectively even as one incorporates contingency (‘chance’ mutation).50 This distinction echoes post-positivist reforms to covering-law 95

models in logical positivist philosophy of science, which viewed explanation and prediction as differing only in the arrow of time attached to them.51 Historical Compulsion An extension of the idea that history is more than ‘only the result of individual forces working blindly together’ is Sedlmayr’s further and final comment that history ‘has its own movement which, though delayed, checked, accelerated, distorted, or broken by the real events and constellations of history, but which is neither produced by them nor touched by them in its inner nature’.52 Again, this is not an altogether clear formulation. It reflects both the supposition of a unity in history and its inexorability, even more than the interlocking chains of development. At issue is the ‘urge’ (Wollen) that seems to impel history. The idea of this deterministic urge behind history is the most extreme of Viennese commitments and the one that has been reacted to most negatively, by Gombrich and others. For Sedlmayr and Pächt, there is a necessity that can be observed when studying the history of art that goes beyond mere convention. Viewing Dürer’s two portraits of his father, one of 1490 and another in 1497, is enough to tell us that ‘the two portraits of his father represent a stylistic evolution in Albrecht Dürer himself from A to B’. Although the notion of a Kunstwollen excited the likes of Walter Benjamin and Karl Mannheim, most effort has not been spent on putting it to use but rather contextualising and historicising it. When Otto Pächt treated the concept in his celebrated article on Alois Riegl in 1962, he saw it less as a hermeneutic concept awaiting interpretation than as a social scientific construct that helped solve historical problems surrounding art. In the same way that Pächt looked past Riegl’s changing terminology to the ideas of purpose and function, I want to do the same for him (and Sedlmayr). 96

Switching to Kunstwollen as a social scientific idea and limiting its historical reference makes understanding it more tractable. Considering what Sedlmayr meant in 1929, when he published his Introduction to Riegl’s collected essays, or Pächt in 1962, is easier than Riegl in 1902. While written only a little more than twenty years after Riegl’s death, Sedlmayr’s idiom is closer to our own. If Riegl’s Kunstwollen begs for deep historicisation, Seldmayr’s and Pächt’s version instead calls for common sense informed by categories of thought. In fact, in the following I will read these essays through the lens of Gestalttheoretical ideas. Sedlmayr and Pächt cite these but tacit significance rather than technical meaning has been attached to their writing. What new understanding is possible after taking Gestaltism into consideration? Sedlmayr and Pächt learned about the notion of Kunstwollen from Dvořák. We saw that as Dvořák’s career progressed he loosened the grips of the Rieglian monism and began to allow the direct influence of different social formations. Sedlmayr and Pächt were clearly attracted to Riegl’s more powerful formulation. The compulsion behind Riegl’s Kunstwollen refers not only to the fact that we are determined to do some particular thing (generic determinism) but are compelled at that moment to do that particular thing. It therefore occurs at the agent level, that is, the level of individual psychology, but via the attunement to the first-person plural ‘we’ of the collective subjectivity of the greater group. Here, while this idea of the collective will suggests ideas of mindless, crowd behaviour, the way in which groups of like-minded people are united in activism, labour or human rights struggles is explained as well. Let us see why. Erwin Panofsky, who contributed to the debate on the interpretation of the Kunstwollen53 reinterpreted Riegl on broadly neo-Kantian lines. In response, as early as 1929, Sedlmayr – in light of the anti-idealist commitments of Austrian philosophy – had stated that all such attempts to 97

link Riegl and Kant were like combining ‘chalk and cheese’.54 Subsequent commentators have agreed; it is clear that Panofsky sought to change all that was interesting in Riegl based on his own, different critical prerogatives. As Jeremy Tanner notes, Panofsky was unhappy that Riegl had (1) invoked artistic intention, (2) utilised collectivist concepts and (3) made the Kunstwollen subjective. Panofsky turned to a Kantian approach to reverse these trends, but it had the tendency of making Riegl unrecognisable.55 Panofsky’s later theory relied, partly, on Mannheim’s ‘On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung’, but he never engaged with Mannheim’s later writings, which developed Riegl’s ideas much further.56 Indeed, Mannheim returned to Riegl repeatedly and multiplied a number of ‘urges’ (Wollen) throughout his work, now no longer restricted to the artistic sphere. What Mannheim recognised about the Kunstwollen is the way in which artistic, and by extension political, actions constitute attempts to cognitively represent (and by extension, master) the world. They are ‘active volitions of subjects who had grasped or constituted the works from specific standpoints and with specific aspirations or commitments which shaped the character of their representation of the world’.57 Mannheim was also attractive because he had answered Dvořák’s problem of development and determinism. In his Soziologie des Geistes (c. 1933), unpublished then but reflecting other themes in his work, Mannheim argued that ‘we need not apply teleological hypotheses to history to realise the structural character of change’.58 In spite of Mannheim’s potential shortcomings, Dvořák’s efforts and Mann­ heim’s reinterpetation of him hastened a return to Riegl and accomplished two things. First, the discussion was effectively transferred from art theory to sociology. Indeed, Pächt would later continue to cite Mannheim. Second, Riegl’s monistic determinism was qualified as a weaker Gestalt process that still maintained mutual accommodation and, in concert with current debates 98

in the natural and social sciences, was reinterpreted as a question of an agent’s motivation. We have already seen how Sedlmayr and Pächt used Max Scheler and Alfred Vierkandt, as phenomenological sociologists amenable to their Gestalt analysis. As Sedlmayr had recommended all of sections 38–40 of Vierkandt’s Gesellschaftslehre to his readers (pp. 342–366), this quote could be seen as a chronological reading of his text. Indeed, Sedlmayr sees the ‘objective collect­ ive will’ (objektiven Gesamtwillens) as a subset of the Geist, the compulsion

Figure 3.4  Wolfgang Metzger in the 1960s (photo: Klaus Franck, Münster University Archive) 99

that is a result of it. This will, like the spirit, is super-individual (überindividuelle). There is really nothing objectionable about this and Pächt in his later lectures continued to refer to the ‘supra-individual’ nature of the Kunstwollen.59 The real question is whether or not this is an example of radical, indefensible holism, or merely institutionalism (or, alternatively, anti-­reductionism). If, for Durkheim, ‘collective representations’ suggest an organic group mind, they may still for Vierkandt legitimately suggest super-individuality and collective subjectivity. The name of Vierkandt does not appear again in the literature of Strukturforschung, which means principally in the work of Pächt. Instead, we find Pächt turning back to Mannheim or Simmel, but also, interestingly, looking to the Gestalt psychologist, Wolfgang Metzger (1899–1979) (Figure 3.4). He does so in both his article on Riegl and also his Practice of Art History of about 1970. Metzger provided Pächt with a theory of the idea of compulsion in history in the idea of ‘creative freedom’ (schöpferisches Freiheit). This allowed Pächt to continue along the path of naturalising social science and reaffirm the notion of continuous evolution. Metzger was a pupil of the original Gestalt theorists that Sedlmayr (and Pächt) had cited a generation earlier. His book of 1962 had incorporated Gestalt thinking about situational determination in social life. Wolfgang Köhler had written of ‘requiredness’ (Gefordertheit) as a fit between an environment and an action, demanding a certain action. Further, Max Wertheimer had explained how obtaining insight in problem solving is a goal-driven process.60 Like Köhler and Wertheimer, Metzger strove to emphasise the objective quality of situational determinism, when one state of affairs impresses a choice on us, rather than another. Clearly, this was an effective way for Pächt to make contact once again with Mannheim and ultimately Riegl, through a new way to fashion the idea of Wollen. This 100

phenomenological idea fit well with Pächt’s formulation that an ‘An evolutionary tendency is an impulse.’61 This is where Pächt directly cites Metzger’s theory of ‘schöpferisches Freiheit’.62 Pächt explains his paradoxical notion of freedom in this way: ‘It is not the freedom to do as you please but the freedom to do the right thing, the one and only thing that makes sense is the context of a specific task. In other words it is tied to freedom.’63 But the relativistic fears of those critics of Riegl, such as Gombrich, should be dismissed, because this is not an irrational kind of determinism but a kind of ‘immanent structuralism’.64 It can be found precisely in the meeting point of the artist’s intellect and the site-specific and task-specific demands placed upon him. Whereas Gombrich stressed choice, Pächt understood that ‘good’ can come of determinism. In articulating his viewpoint, Pächt openly disputed with Gombrich’s position in Art and Illusion and elsewhere.65 Now, Popper’s original problem with ‘historicism’ was that it absolved personal responsibility and this is was also the charge levelled by Gombrich against the Romantic writing found in Sedlmayr’s Festschrift, which ‘absolve the individual of personal responsibility’, making those with such texts ‘enemies of reason’.66 We can follow Maurice Mandelbaum’s critique of Popper to see that there are two different problems here: first, ‘whether, in a given situation, a person can do what he wants to do’ and, second, ‘why, in a given situation, a person chooses as he does’.67 The first can be related to Wölfflin’s claim that ‘not everything is possible at all times’.68 For the Viennese art historian like the early Sedlmayr or Pächt, art and its reception is a relative or, as I would prefer to say, relational affair. Pächt notes that, ‘a work of the past or of another culture is based on premises that are not our own’, which he assigns to Riegl. There is an echo of Marx in the Eighteenth Brumaire here: ‘Men make their own history, but not of their own 101

free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen but under the given and inherited circumstances with which they are directly confronted.’69 Pächt explains determinism in unique ways in the spirit of such ideas above, as digested by Metzger. The question posed by Riegl, Dvořák, Sedlmayr and Pächt is the second: why did a person choose as he or she did? Most people regard ‘freedom’ in terms of a lack of constraint placed by the past. With this Mandelbaum’s philosophical analysis would agree. Such determinism (or lack of freedom) is in fact not successive (‘a’ causes ‘b’) but contemporaneous (‘a’ co-causes ‘b’). In other words, we are determined by what we apprehend at any given moment. Mandelbaum explains: ‘our ability to respond to alternatives in terms of their own natures must be instilled in us by our past. We must be trained, and sometimes brutally trained, by natural causation or by the actions of others, to become capable of a choice based not on the past but on the alternatives themselves.’70 Because we are trained by trial and error to lead our lives in a productive and safe way, our ‘determined’ choices do not seem to be that. Relativism is avoided. Against fears of historicism, it should be remembered that the whole platform of Strukturforschung was centred on the single work of art and superseded stylistic history. The point was not to deduce grand schemes of history. Everything about Sedlmayr and Pächt’s method is synchronic; signs are of interest not, as they had been for Riegl, for their diachronic unfolding but for their synchronic individuality. The whole point of the Strukturforschung platform is to banish explanation of an individual work via an understanding of the whole. Once individual works of art are taken under examination, we have to construct explanations for how they have come about and because there are no developmental laws that can explain them sui generis we must explain them as the intersection of a number of different causal factors. 102

Let us take stock. Around 1970, Pächt has followed Sedlmayr in his 1929 ‘Quintessenz’ essay to reinterpret Kunstwollen as a social scientific concept. Not following Vierkandt, Pächt nevertheless accepts that art history can solve the problem of artistic production relative to different periods by reference to sociology and psychology. This he does through the theory of Metzger. Such a theory is relational, emphasising differential artistic responses at different times, causal in stressing that artistic choices are active compulsions responding to determinate states of affairs, and evolutionary or demonstrating the power of continuously evolving tradition over individual choice. Pächt hints at but does not directly solve some conundrums; for example, how continuous evolution adheres when history is not a closed system, the exact constitution of a group, and so forth. As for the first issue, he clearly states it as a methodological maxim that situational and tradition-bound (evolutionary) explanations are to be preferred over those that first invoke the individual artistic agent. In the end, Pächt’s contribution to the debate about Kunstwollen is one of maximising the return of social science for Wölfflin’s question, why art has a history. Rather than err on the side of caution, as the Popper and Gombrich group did, he takes the tailor’s defence instead, and believes that if he cuts the cloth a little more generously he will be more assured of ending up with the proper garment in the end. Perhaps the best monument to Pächt is to continue reinterpreting Kunstwollen in light of new insights from empirical social science. The previous two chapters represent an interpretation and theoretical defence of the method of Strukturforschung; that is, its basic interpretive principles and idea of the structure of history. Together they form a compact theory of the nature of the artist’s relation to his or her materials, which can be reconstructed by the historian approaching a given period. This 103

‘embededness’ is curiously materialistic and leads to a historical model of successive building of artistic possibilities. To the degree that it is cumulative and not teleological, it embodies the Austrian conception of history following Adalbert Stifter’s ‘soft law’. At this point, it has to be seen in action, and both Sedlmayr and Pächt contributed historical studies to illustrate the theory.

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Part II Case Studies

4. Hans Sedlmayr’s Borromini [O]ur essays in describing individual images do not provide a guide for a penetration into them but are the result of such a penetration – and this is equally true of our later description of the architectural ‘world’ of Borromini. A pedagogical introduction to the study of this architecture would be a completely different task.1 The work that announced the methodology of the New Vienna School was Hans Sedlmayr’s Die Architektur Borrominis of 1930.2 A brilliant and difficult book, it has had scattered influence but, like all of Sedlmayr’s work, is tainted 107

by its author’s name. Martin Raspe, who attempted a similar syncretic view of the architect to move beyond the standard catalogue was at pains to distance himself from Sedlmayr’s example, which loomed so large in his own German-language tradition.3 Indeed, language has been a barrier to fairly assessing Sedlmayr, as was his own notorious characterological interpretation of Borromini. But the book advances a remarkable analysis of Borromini’s work, which is worth the effort to understand. The model of Sedlmayr’s self-reflexivity that I have sketched in the last two chapters can be confirmed in the book on Borromini. Indeed, if the author gets ahead of himself with his later speculations on Borromini’s personality, the overall aim of the book is reasonable – to give a phenomenological account of Borromini’s architecture. This is the propadeutic use of phenomenology as a basis for any critical discipline, in line with the appropriation of Kurt Lewin’s idea of a proper vergleichende Wissenschaftstheorie. 4 If Sedlmayr’s approach is self-conscious about its own contribution, then we have to regard it not only according to its stated aim but the discipline of architectural history at the time. With his lens of Gestalt psychology, Sedlmayr achieves a remarkable deal of self-reflexivity in his discussion of Borromini. After expanding the idea of Sedlmayr’s method, I will pass on to a full exposition of his analysis. Next, I undertake a full discussion of Sedlmayr’s notorious use of characterology – the use of the morphology of the body to infer into a person’s personality – as a means to make conclusions about Borromini’s own personality. While I fault Sedlmayr’s reliance on Ernst Kretschmer’s ideas, I also clarify how many things thought to be true about the theory are in fact inaccurate. Indeed, I find Die Architektur Borrominis to be a victim of failed hermeneutic charity, because readers have not sought a meaning that would impart coherence to its content. By placing the book into a cultural context, it can be shown to be overly ambitious but not unfounded 108

as a method of analysis. Then, I introduce those critics who have used Sed­l­ mayr’s ideas on Borromini fruitfully. By viewing Sedlmayr’s sympathetic interpreters, who were able to take advantage of later advances and discoveries in seventeenth-century Italian architectural history, we get a more accurate view of what such a model of interpretation can afford. In the end, the aim is to return the book to the genealogy of art historical formal structuralism and highlight its role as a founding analysis of the ‘new’ Vienna School.5 The Book Sedlmayr’s book was brilliant but breathlessly pioneering. Aside from the sympathetic commentators discussed below, there has not been much attention to its central analysis. If authors do discuss it, they often simply pass on to the salacious chapters on characterology.6 First, however, it is important to focus on the brief first two chapters containing the core of its insights. These insights, while attempted in a rigorous form are, as Schwartz has written, often not fully substantiated, relying partly on intuition. The content is inseparable from the historical moment with which Sedlmayr and Pächt identified themselves. Max Dvořák had died (1921), the last of the speculative generation. The more recent members of the Vienna School like Oskar Pollak had turned to documentation. As Sedlmayr refreshed art history’s contact with psychology, he simultaneously returned to Dvořák and Riegl. Of course, Riegl had helped rehabilitate the Baroque. Borromini, like Riegl’s late antique, would have been a good subject for a-normative analysis. In a footnote to his well-known Space, Time and Architecture, Siegfried Giedion seems to accept that Borromini was an ideal Viennese topic, writing ‘the systematic study of Borromini was first undertaken by the “Vienna School” after 1900’. 109

The idea of analysing the anti-classical Borromini must have pleased Sedlmayr and it was crucial that in an early work Dvořák had discussed Borromini briefly.7 But Sedlmayr’s personal ambition fuelled his efforts too. Just as the older Dagobert Frey brought his ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der römischen Barockarchitektur’ to press, Sedlmayr rushed ‘Gestaltetes Sehen’ to publication.8 In this way, he was not responding to Frey but actually competing with him. Andrew Hopkins had noted how Frey was a Dvořák ‘profiteer’, and this perhaps drove Sedlmayr and Pächt further back to Riegl in their reissue of his works rather than Dvořák’s.9 Sedlmayr’s 1925 monograph, Fischer von Erlach der Ältere, was relatively atheoretical. The article of the same year, ‘Gestaltetes Sehen’, on the other hand, established his structural method through the example of Borromini. This method relies on stable knowledge already gained by the discipline. Looking at Sedlmayr’s early books, like Fischer von Erlach der Ältere, Öster­ reichische Barockarchitektur 1690–1740 (1930) and indeed Die Architektur Borrominis, one can see that Sedlmayr does not generally do original archival research.10 He reuses well-known images, prints and plans already published. In the case of the Borromini book, although Sedlmayr did make use of the Albertina, he largely relied on Eberhard Hempel’s book as a ‘first science’, with which to build his ‘second science’ interpretation.11 Leo Steinberg perspicaciously noted that the drawings and diagrams that Sedlmayr published in 1926 were not reproduced in the 1930 monograph.12 Against Frey’s immediately preceding Dvořákian contextualism, Sedlmayr rhetorically offers a return to a Rieglian deep synthesis. It is important to construct an overview of Sedlmayr’s whole book. Because Sedlmayr was quite methodical about his presentation of Borro­mini, he assigns specific tasks to the individual sections of the book. Part I, for example, is concerned with ‘structures’ (Gebilde) and is largely given over to 110

‘descriptions’ (Beschreibungen) of general principles. In part II, Sedlmayr passes to Borromini’s architecture proper, and constructs a theory of Borro­ mini’s architecture. It is only in part III that Sedlmayr passes to the treatment of Borromini’s architecture as a ‘document’ (Dokument). Here, treating Borro­ mini’s work from a wider viewpoint, Sedlmayr proceeds to the notorious discussion of Borromini’s psychology (using Kretschmer’s constitutional characterology) and the Borrominian ‘worldview’ (Weltbild).

Figure 4.1  Francesco Borromini, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome (photo: author) 111

As Sedlmayr develops his interpretation of Borromini, he provides further crucial signposts to the reader that are consistent with his realist philosophy of art history. His task is to enlighten a single artistic figure, Borromini, and elucide his theory of art. This is useful to keep in mind when moving on to his interpretation of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane (Figure 4.1), because the church is only chosen as a representation of Borromini’s broader architectural commitments. Sedlmayr actually tries to make it clear he is not writing a standard monograph. Sedlmayr’s Method Sedlmayr begins his book with some methodological questions. How do we decide what the correct reading of a work of art is? Anticipating Michael Baxandall by five decades, he argues that an interpretation will always presume a preliminary description. Furthermore, a description presupposes a particular point of view, for which each other description (and hence interpretation) will be different. In respect to the goal of research, Sedlmayr does not so much seek Borromini’s intention as the way in which the work is configured (gestaltet). This is a crucial distinction, because such a conception of gestalten presumes not just a discursive or stated intention, but a kind of embodying of the solution; gestaltet is formed material, not immanent form. As I have argued in Chapter 2, this is good methodology and probably superior to anything in the offering at the time. Sedlmayr anticipates his formal argument in ‘Zu einer strenge Kunstwiss­ enschaft’, where he distinguished between a first and a second science of art history.13 He notes that a science of art history cannot be a history of single, exterior facts. That would be mere ‘style history’ (Stilgeschichte). The absurdity would be the same as writing a history of automobiles that does not understand either their function or construction. 112

It is here that Sedlmayr introduces the idea of deep structural knowledge, borrowed from Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka. The quote he uses had opened his 1925 article on Borromini, and had just appeared in 1923.14 There, in a very early document in the Gestalt movement, Koffka had explored the notion of understanding and used the example of seeing an internal combustion motor for the first time. One would only see it meaningfully if one had a full understanding of its mechanical functions. Sedlmayr wanted to see buildings in this way. It is quite striking that the engine is precisely the imagery used by the Russian formalist Viktor Shklovsky in his metaphor of formal analysis as mechanics’ work.15 In a text of 1928, Shklovsky had written, The understanding man scrutinizes the car serenely and comprehends ‘what is for what’: why it has so many cylinders and why it has big wheels, where its transmission is situated, and why its rear is cut in an acute angle and its radiator unpolished. This is the way one should read.16 Sedlmayr believes that by finding the historical problem that Borromini faced, a product of the first science of art history, he can achieve the correct mind-set (Einstellung) to intuit the underlying formative factor that motivated the architect. In typical Gestalt psychological form, Sedlmayr then seeks the explanation that best captures the ‘central characteristics’ of an artistic form. As with all discussions of ‘inference to the best explanation’ (as opposed to mere empiricism), there is the possibility of error, and Sedlmayr recognises this.17 However, as in the case of ordinary perception, the richer the stimulus is – or the more facts available to the art historian – the more the likely 113

explanation will be the correct explanation. Therefore, Sedlmayr sees the earlier works of A. E. Brinckmann and Cornelius Gurlitt as tentative solutions to reading the forms of Borromini, which although limited are based on legitimate insights. Furthermore, he argues, it is not so much that each did not obtain the correct interpretation but that there will be a number of sub-­interpretations, each based on different relationships of forms in the architecture. Here we must agree with Schwartz in applauding Sedlmayr’s ‘self-awareness and scrupulousness with which the argument is pursued’.18

Figure 4.2  Sedlmayr’s idea of the plan of San Carlo, after Arnheim (‘Objective Percepts, Objective Values’) (photo: author) 114

Gebilde – Borromini’s Works Sedlmayr notes that upon entering the church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, one does not receive any definite impression, and although one can resolve the forms into a definite percept, one cannot discover the hidden articulation of the forms, which has ‘not been discovered or described correctly’. The space, he says, Is a prism of rectangular base with rounded angles, the sides of which are vaulted with arches [Figure 4.2]. Along the primary axis the arches are semi-circular and are ‘thrown’ on the vaulted niches (apses) whose plan is also semicircular. The arches over the minor axes are oval segments and are vaulted with lowered vaults whose plan is an oval segment. The arches hold up a masonry oval cupola that rests, on spherical, trapezoidal spandrels, on the ‘rounded angles’ of the prism of rectangular base. On the elevation, three distinct zones are developed: that with the architectural orders, that of the cupola, and in between an intermediate zone formed of arches, portions of vaults and pendentives. The fourth is represented by the sole lantern.19 Criticising the previous work of Brinckmann,20 Sedlmayr argues that in the analyses published, no significant progress has been made in uncovering the 115

basic structure of Borromini’s design. Sedlmayr does approximate the floor plan, but he is talking about impressions, not the draftsman’s geometry. Sedlmayr argues that in trying to discover the essential form of the church, one runs into the distinction between phenomenal and geometric qualities. What is decisive in Borromini’s design is not a series of shapes or dimensions, but a phenomenal value. For example, one cannot analyse the two stories of the façade separately, but in ‘reciprocal relationship’. The upper storey is a ‘development’ of the lower storey, and the concaves are in relationship with the convexes. Adapting Kurt Koffka’s ‘formative vision’ (gestaltenden Sehen), Sedlmayr wants to find the tolerance for the basic Gestalt, which survives metric change and adjustment.21

Figure 4.3  Sedlmayr’s diagram of the alternate wall groupings (photo: Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis, 1930, figures 4 and 5) 116

Just as someone knowledgeable about motors could describe the inner workings of one, Sedlmayr believes that in the internal space of the church the four niches are different (in depth and shape) but express the same basic form (Gestalt).22 He sees the perimeter of the deepest niche, N1, folded, rolled or better like a compressed spring. Between the niches, the rounded corners look like mere dead zones between the active forms. These varied niche forms in black (N) are, following Edgar Rubin, ‘figure’ to the blank interstices (the ‘ground’) (Figure 4.3). So far, Sedlmayr’s approach is orthodox in its adherence to Gestalt theory and it must be admitted that he is essentially exploring figure-ground in three dimensions in 1930, forty-five years before Rudolf Arnheim would do so in his Dynamics of Architectural Form.23 As with all figure-ground phenomena, an alternative perceptual aspect is possible when the dead areas are seen as the positive pier that serves as the springing of the vaulting. Here, instead we see the door and niche of the central section dominating and surrounded by the concavity of the niches. Now, as in the former case, we derive a set of related but different architectural units, which appear as variations of one another, but this time the flat depths of the niches are now the ‘dead’ zone. A Gestalt switch has occurred. Sedlmayr, however, sees this new form as related to the façade, because it duplicates its form more or less with a central bowing element and two concavities. Against any objection, he notes that the altar duplicates the form of the façade in miniature, and therefore reinforces the transition from the exterior to the interior, and the second Gestalt. After making observations on the lower two zones of the interior of the church, Sedlmayr asks what the relationship can be to the cupola, which is in contrast relatively rigid and self-enclosed. He acknowledges that the relationship is not so well pronounced as in later Borromini buildings but finds a key in the basement. There, the wedges that are formed by the closure 117

of the vaulting leading to the ceiling provide a continuity to the forms all the way up in the cupola carrying on, if only weakly, a functional relationship that is much clearer in the Propaganda Fide.24 After making comments on Borromini’s choice of columns over pilasters, and the aesthetic consequences, Sedlmayr summarises his argument. 1. At bottom, Borromini’s forms are based on a unity of relief structures in various relationships.

Figure 4.4  Sedlmayr’s diagram of the derivation of San Carlo’s façade from Sant’Andrea delle Fratte (photo: Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis, 1930, figures 11 and 13) 118

2. The unity is not rigid but dynamic and flexible. The alterations already proposed bear the unity in alteration, not as single unalterable forms. 3. The structure thus has a dual character (Doppelstruktur), dynamic and alternating. Sedlmayr’s argument is reinforced in Chapter 2, which discusses Borromini from a ‘genetic’ point of view. Following Kurt Lewin, he distinguished between phenotypical similarities and genotypical similarities. Style history can only group phenotypes and does not understand function. This is ironic because Sedlmayr is assumed to rely on a physiognomic approach that is intuitive and immediate. In the first sense, he wants to ‘provide a key’ to understand his works structurally; in the second, the ‘forces’ that were active on the work at the moment of the birth of its forms. It is crucial that genetic description comes second because he has outlined that it is impossible to connect works of art by influence if one does not have an initial understanding of them. Otherwise, there are tacit assumptions packed into such judgements. This constitutes his and Pächt’s critique of style history (Stilgeschichte). Among the genetic analyses that Sedlmayr gives is one related to San Carlo, and it can be summarised to further the author’s points. Sedlmayr derives the façade of San Carlo from the tiburium of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte (Figure 4.4), specifically seeing it as the isolation of one face of the centralised structure. In this way, Sedlmayr actually shies away from the modernist tendency to see Borromini’s forms as undulating.

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Architektur – Borromini’s Theory In part II, Sedlmayr passes beyond the individual work of architecture to Borromini’s ‘theory’, or underlying systems of ideas. Just as the parts of a building add up to a ‘good’ whole and cannot be understood in isolation, the buildings themselves can’t be completely understood alone. Sedlmayr sees Borromini’s central ideas evolving, and only emerging fully in his later works. Such a synoptic view leads Sedlmayr to begin to speculate on Borromini’s personality, leading to the next section. ~ Sedlmayr immediately turns to the idea of the dynamic in Borromini’s works. Far from being a characteristic of the Baroque, Sedlmayr only sees this quality of movement (beweglich) in Borromini, and then only in the late works. This latent quality began with the reuse of antique forms in a multitude of combinations. Sedlmayr insists that for Borromini, forms had a non-thingish (nicht Dinglich) quality. Parts are purely additive, and this makes them strictly piecemeal, allowing their fluidification. The dissolution of the forms allowed for a new dynamic quality. A method of using antique forms slowly became a new aesthetic. For Sedlmayr, Borromini works with identical items distinguished by their relief. It is the outer surface, then, that is most of interest to Borromini. The result is a solid compactness to such relief elements; as a result, ‘single elements cannot be exhibited independently because otherwise the unity of the theme is compromised’. The importance of relief extends to the columns, without which the expressive character of the building, including its ‘mobility’, would disappear. Sedlmayr reflects on Borromini’s preference for the orthogonal plan, in contrast to Bernini’s use of perspective drawings. He sees the orthogonal 120

drawing underscoring Borromini’s ‘non-thingish’ tendency, because forms remain open to numerous possibilities. It is here that Sedlmayr inches towards a characterological idea of Borromini, because the art historian finds that the incessant drawings out of proportion to be typical of ‘schizothemic’ artists. For this reason, Sedlmayr resists seeing drawings of a window to be typical alternative proposals, as they might be for another architect; rather, they are possible permutations of the same forms already tried out. The distance from reality that Sedlmayr finds in Borromini’s drawings demonstrates the architect’s abstract thought. Here we see the importance of mathematics for Borromini, creating shapes intended to be seen in a ‘diffuse, homogeneous and schematic’ light. Sedlmayr insists that Borromini is not interested in dramatic light effects. Similarly, Sedlmayr insists that the undulating quality of his façades is achieved in complete independence from the material and therefore is not a victory over them. Returning to the topic of dynamics, Sedlmayr calls it an illusion. Sounding like a Gestalt psychologist, he says ‘Borromini’s figures appear “alive” when the figures of the “superior” geometry . . . possess an effect of greater “vitality” than the elementary forms’; the ‘gestalt’ of movement emerges.25 The movement is just the possibility of variation of abstract, formal complexes. The material, however, is dead and inert. For Sedlmayr this is another consequence of Borromini’s ‘distance from reality’. According to Sedlmayr, Borromini thinks in pure forms, more or less indifferent to typology and function. Practical uses, like the ability to enter a portal, are occasions and limits to realising forms, and not determiners. Sedlmayr refers to a famous experiment on memory by Friedrich Wulf from the Berlin Gestalt Institute to make his point.26 Some percepts are remembered for their intrinsic qualities and some with reference to the world. One can see an angularly undulating line as a ‘zigzag’ or as steps. Similarly, for Borromini, window forms take 121

on a life of their own, only barely tethered to their original function. As an extension of this idea, Sedlmayr believes that Borromini’s buildings do not seem to acknowledge at all their surroundings but seem ‘dropped from the sky’. Sedlmayr ends this chapter with a reflection on physiognomy. He thinks of physiognomy as the initial impression we have of, say, someone’s pedantry. To explain this impression of Borromini’s architecture, he takes over Heinz Werner’s distinction between ‘geometric-technical’ and ‘expressive’ speech.27 Although ‘physiognomic’ perception invokes Johann Caspar Lavater and later, more sinister, traditions, it is used in Berlin Gestalt theory and the allied personalistic Hamburg psychology of Heinz Werner (both cited by Sedlmayr) as a mode of expressive seeing. Indeed, it continues to be used in this way to the present day in experimental psychology, apparently with no misunderstanding or stigma attached.28 In regard to spontaneity, Sedlmayr confirms opposing impressions, of Borromini’s ‘cold’ mathematical sense along with his organic ‘warmth’. The impressions coexist, leading to a paradoxical ‘icy fire’ or ‘dead life’. It should be pointed out that this ‘immediate’ impression is Sedlmayr’s cultivated perception, which nevertheless is spontaneous. Regardless of our knowledge, expressive impressions are still spontaneous. Learning more about a building or an architect, we might cultivate our impression and the expressive quality might change. The spontaneous impression is of the collective Gebilde, not an isolated building seen by an uninitiated viewer.29 For Sedlmayr, the physiognomy is different between the early and late works, underscoring the rarity of the ‘dynamic’ of the Baroque. The early works, including the San Carlo (but not the façade) are clear, precise, ‘scientific’. Somewhere in the mid-fifties, the same forms shift slightly and begin to give rise to a more mysterious impression. The examples he gives are the tombs in S. Giovanni in Laterano. 122

This version of physiognomy is not suspect. It is part of Sedlmayr’s critical project in Die Architektur Borrominis. He took documentary evidence to build up his picture of Borromini that was based on the psychological literature available to him. Here, we have to keep aside what Sedlmayr did later with intuition and rely on his 1930 text and its theoretical apparatus. Sedlmayr believes the unsettling quality he has isolated in Borromini’s late works can only be explained in psychological terms. The logic of forms, we might say, has run out, and the necessity of the design cannot any longer be explained. More is called for. While a chapter on Borromini and Guarini follows, it feels like a short interlude. Instead, the ground is cleared for reflecting on Borromini’s personality. Dokument – Borromini’s Character In Anglo-American art history, Sedlmayr’s analysis of Borromini’s personality has been completely dismissed and indeed has been associated with his adoption of Nazism. Rudolf Wittkower’s common-sense account and critique – that Borromini adapted at a certain time a public persona and style of the bizarre to mark his place in a hostile and crowded Roman architectural scene – sealed this unfortunate theory so that save a few like Werner Oechslin, no one has even bothered to mention this aspect of Sedlmayr’s work on Borromini.30 But this ignorance indicates a retrospective misreading of German-language academic discourse on the body and the intuitively and immediately given. By reviewing this ignorance, Sedlmayr’s admittedly overambitious efforts can be put into context and even reconsidered. ~ The introduction of Borromini’s personality was intended by Sedlmayr to close the circle of interpretation and create, as it were, a complete portrayal 123

of the man and his architecture. This discussion takes place in the third section of the book called ‘Borromini’s Architecture as Document’, meaning its use as symptomatic of other things. In reality, it only takes up 13 per cent of the book, much less than its notorious content has warranted in print. Nevertheless, because Sedlmayr saw it as the logical conclusion of his efforts, it cannot simply be excised from his larger interpretation of Borromini. Following the work of Kretschmer, according to whom enduring personality traits have their origins in the differential structure of the human body, Borromini is deduced to be a ‘Cartesian’ with typical ‘schizothymic’ personality traits. Schizothymia, in its turn, is meant to reflect the normal character distribution of those inclined to become schizophrenia (psychosis). This diagnosis in turn is supposed to make his larger formative impulses more understandable. Sedlmayr summarises Kretschmer’s typical schizothemic, in preparation for discussing Borromini: 1. Tendency to recast given forms in an unconventional way (arbitrariness). 2. Search for the most extreme expressive effect. 3. Tendency to unify heterogeneous elements within the same work and connect them in a peculiar and unmotivated way. 4. Rigid constructive structure in combination with original and richly varied detail. 5. Prolific production disproportionate to actual commissions. Compulsive labour. 6. Combination of abstract-analytical, systematizing thought with dream­ like fantasy.31 It is this intuited, physiognomic leap from Borromini’s works to his alleged schizothymic personality that has been singled out by Wittkower and other 124

authors as unfounded.32 Frederic Schwartz saw it as a leap into quackery. It is clear that this all-in-one strategy is extremely ambitious, is not expressed in the spirit of fallible interpretation and is rather cavalier about the explanatory pay-off that the psychology of his time can deliver. But I affirm, once more, that we are too ready to read too much into this procedure when it really represented an interesting, if difficult to defend, critical practice. There are essentially two basic issues with Sedlmayr’s use of characterology that must be separated. First, is the aggressive attempt to glean from the signs of Borromini’s art and life a fully formed psychological ‘profile’ of the artist and follow it through to its interpretive end. Second, is the very use of characterology in the first place. Since the second hinges on the first, I want to say something about expression itself. The cosmopolitan and completely non-racist theories of Gestalt theory embraced concepts such as physiognomic perception and were at least sympathetic to Kretschmer’s theories of characterology.33 Unfortunately, there is even misunderstanding here in regard to basic concepts. Most scholars are incredulous that Kretschmer could even have been taken seriously at all, a position that is summarised in his notorious photographs and diagrams of body types. This is not surprising. With the disasters of Nazism, any discussion of the body and disposition is held in deep suspicion. Yet Kretschmer did not build up his system from subjective judgements but from rigorous description based on anatomical function available at the time, speculating how metabolism and the endocrine system could contribute to individual differences among humans.34 The theory has been superseded but temperament has not.35 Thus, Kretschmer was hardly a ‘physiognomist’. To wonder how Kretschmer could have been taken seriously is anachronistic and exactly the wrong way to put it. Kretschmer was a respected clinical psychiatrist and was 125

(and still is) interesting for his discussions of the etiology of various psychoses.36 Sedlmayr wanted to understand personality and Kretschmer was a perfectly respectable guide. This also explains how Kretschmer fits into Sedlmayr’s Gestalt worldview. When Sedlmayr found a way to work in a Gestalt psychologist, he did.37 Because Gestalt theory had no real theory of abnormal and differential psychology, it would be natural to turn to a mainstream writer like Kretschmer if one were trying to engage with aspects of personality.38 To be sure, there were speculative elements in Kretschmer’s (and William Sheldon’s) works that revealed racial biases – and any theory of physical differences of temperament in psychology or race in anthropology has the potential to be put to racist uses – yet the basis of the theories was not motivated by racist goals. Indeed, it should be stressed that Kretschmer saw the body types as within the span or normalcy and only used their extreme forms as a possible explanation of abnormal behaviour. Indeed, Kretschmer’s theories were actually counter to racism.39 Michael Hau writes, In contrast to eugenicists such as Fritz Lenz, who equated talent with the social position of the upper and educated classes, and who therefore favored the endogamous reproduction of these classes, Kretschmer argued that it was the transgression of class barriers that ultimately led to the creation of exceptionally talented human beings.40 Indeed, in a paper called, ‘The Breeding of the Mental Endowments of Genius’, Kretschmer specifically opposed what would be the Nazi viewpoint: ‘Uncrossed 126

tribes and races which have been inbred for long periods are strikingly poor in genius, although exhibiting otherwise quite excellent properties; examples are the relatively pure Nordics in certain districts of Northwestern Germany.’41 This is the old notion from animal husbandry of ‘hybrid vigour’, which tells against racial purity. This is Kretschmer writing in 1930. Bohde notes of Sedlmayr that, the basis for his diagnosis is the architecture itself and a list of typical features of schizothymic art, which he claims was developed by Kretschmer. But it is actually difficult to identify these features with anything in Kretschmer’s writings. Unfortunately, Sedlmayr refrained from indicating a specific text or page. 42 This is true in regard to pages, but Kretschmer had made reference to the schizoid personality in the arts, its jerky and tenacious quality, and their ‘baroque quality’. 43 Sedlmayr cites the seventh edition of 1928, which, as Arnheim has pointed out, has an additional chapter – ‘Experimentelle Typenpsychologie’ – that makes reference to aesthetic behaviour.44 I have resisted citing Sedlmayr’s later works but find it necessary to do so here. We have to be cautious in judging Sedlmayr’s later statements about his theory in 1939 written for the second edition, but their tone is quite restrained and his words are credible. He first clarifies that he never meant that Borromini was pathological (schizothemia is not schizophrenia). Next, he stresses that race is transversal (quer) to temperament. Mentioning Eugen von Eickstadt without citation – for he would have been the most authoritative 127

Nazi-sanctioned physical anthropologist at the time – Sedlmayr says that he agrees with him that race and temperament do not intersect.45 This brings to mind Jewish anthropologist Franz Weidenreich’s contemporary idea that racial types are actually closer to temperaments because races are often accidental variations and some forms valorised as ‘Nordic’ might actually be simple human variation. 46 Sedlmayr telegraphs his tone by referring to Kretschmer’s idea on genius, which as we have seen would have disassociated purity from accomplishment.47 Sedlmayr’s comments are very unusual due to the direction that characterology had taken not only in German art history but his own Viennese school. Both his colleagues Karl Maria Swoboda and Dagobert Frey had pushed Kretschmer towards a racialist synthesis, which Sedlmayr above clearly resists.48 Indeed, in 1939 a year after the Anschluss we would expect precisely the opposite so that Sedlmayr’s comments are doubly resistant, not joining in the pan-German discussion of the mid-thirties in Austria or the post-Anschluss. In this, Sedlmayr might be compared to his colleague in Gestalt psychology, Kurt Gottschaldt. Largely regarded as having passed the Nazi period in German academe without excessively compromising his scholarship, more recently it has been shown that his experiments with twins were only made possible by racialist science funded by the Nazi state. Even so, while Nazi racism was the departure for his research, his work is more quantitative, less subjective, and he did not refer to the dominant race literature.49 Sedlmayr has passed from individual buildings to Borromini’s oeuvre, his theory and personality to arrive at his place in history, treated in a final ‘sketch of a part IV’ (not a chapter). This section is useful in sketching out principles of Mannerism, Early Baroque, Mature Baroque and Late Baroque, into which Borromini can be related. One important discussion treats the role of the viewer in architecture, which overcomes some of the apparent 128

absence of such concerns elsewhere in the book. For Sedlmayr, the Mature Baroque is not interested in real relationships but in projective relationships; the viewer is implied. Felix Thürlemann has suggested that, for this reason, it is not surprising that in the age of photography Borromini and the Baroque were rediscovered. Sedlmayr would undoubtedly agree, in line with Riegl’s reflexiveness.50 This is Sedlmayr’s argument in 1930. It is impossible to read it as a contemporary text. All we can hope to do is recover some basic insights and recall the overall approach to anticipate some following of its ideas. What is most striking about the exposition so far is that, contrary to almost all interpretations, the text is not strongly interpretational. It stays true to its aim after description, to intuit the overall approach (Gestaltungsprinzip) behind Borromini’s architecture. Part of the problem begins when it is read according to the genre of strict art history. It is very general, does not nominate causes, and rather seeks to render the real sense of Borromini himself. Although much of Sedlmayr’s research on Borromini fell flat, particularly on Anglo-Saxon ears, he did have a series of sympathetic interpreters who accepted it as an interpretive model closer to Kunstwissenschaft and took his analysis as a fruitful point of departure for their own research. They are important not only for understanding further details of what Sedlmayr was trying to do, but also for carrying it forward. Naturally, any book of 1930 will remain dated, and it is important to distinguish the spirit and the letter of any historical interpretation. If art history is to be cumulative and all of its efforts not judged by the same standard, then this is a necessary concession. ~ It is perhaps significant that when Otto Pächt came to reflect on art histor­ ical methodology in his 1970/1971 lectures at the University of Vienna, he 129

acknowledged the importance of his estranged colleague’s work. In particular, he believed that the way in which wall elements could be parts of both convex and concave triads at the same time could be generalised to other Italian examples.51 Pächt’s brief discussion is the most general but also the most important endorsement, because it is Pächt’s credibility that sustains the structural project whether or not we forgive Sedlmayr for his political life. Many writers acknowledged that Sedlmayr’s approach was important for having intuited the basic qualities of Borromini’s space, and thereby his major achievement. One of the biggest followings the Austrian art historian had was in Italy. There, writers like Luigi Moretti and Cesare Brandi read Die Architektur Borrominis carefully.52 In addition, in his Baroque Architecture and elsewhere Christian Norberg-Schulz expresses enthusiasm for Sedlmayr’s method and interpretations.53 He believed that Sedlmayr had helped scholars see how Borromini had broken from the Renaissance system of relating plastic members in favour of the manipulation of space. Norberg-Schulz carries forward Borromini’s gift for uniting inside and outside, up and down, into a holistically controlled unit. Finally, and less surprisingly, there are strong echoes of Sedlmayr in his students such as Hermann Bauer or Erich Hubala and a few contemporary art historians such as Werner Oechslin, Felix Thürlemann and somewhat grudgingly Wolfgang Kemp.54 Interestingly, when Rudolf Arnheim comes to discuss San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, he does not even mention Sedlmayr’s book.55 Instead, as he often did in his American work, Arnheim cited traditional art historical approaches, in this case Leo Steinberg’s analysis, to complement his own perceptual approach.56 For Arnheim, Steinberg’s work had the advantage of being a seemingly conclusive demonstration of the derivation of Borromini’s plan from the three shapes – the oval, the cross and the octagon. To this discursive discovery, Arnheim could add his own perceptual elaboration, 130

which was useful for his stated purpose of showing how scholars can come to consensus.57 Here, Sedlmayr’s self-censoring is instructive. While in his 1926 article he mentioned a drawing and derived a diagram from it, it only suggested but did not guarantee the veracity of the octagonal form of the church, which instead came from experience. Even then, he only outlined forms based on ‘simple geometric relationships’ (einfache geometrische Beziehungen), nothing esoteric.58 Steinberg indeed notes that in omitting the drawing the geometric idea seems to be ‘intuited from the structure itself’. Instead, I would suggest that Sedlmayr did not want to be mistaken for writing a certain kind of history. Drawings containing source geometry were not failsafe keys to understanding but instead merely more elements leading to a proper interpretation. Yet in the present context it is extremely interesting to think of Steinberg as standing in the line of Panofsky and Gombrich. Although Steinberg in his work on Michelangelo or Borromini uses visual lines and shapes, the structure of the argument is similar to the classic Panofskyan form except that Steinberg does not discover texts but rather formal coincidences. These forms function like the typical Ur-text that is used as the basis of an interpretation. Although Steinberg has strongly idiosyncratic and avant-garde qualifications, his approach here is traditional in the sense outlined by Sedlmayr and Pächt in their theoretical writings. Foremost, it is problematic in relation to the built and experienced forms. Second, the geometrical derivation creates only a ‘genetic’, but not necessarily a true, evolutionary sequence. For both Sedlmayr and Pächt, then, what is problematic is that the ‘source’ document (text or in this case design) is not translated into an architectural meaning, although it is potential ground for that. Kemp intuits this when he notes that there is with Sedlmayr’s book no search for an ‘Überfigur’ in a traditional iconographic sense but, rather, consistent with ‘Gestalt seeing’ the 131

generative principle organising the work.59 The hidden symbolism that Borromini kept to himself is uncomfortably close to Panofsky’s hidden meanings within Netherlandish painting. But what is most damning is that there is no intelligible relationship between the geometric (not phenomenal) system in the drawings and the final church as built. For Sedlmayr, San Carlo was above all a fused perceptual unit, which would not be adequately portrayed through geometry. One is reminded of Pächt’s comments on Hans Kauffmann’s work on Rembrandt, a sort of secret pictorial ornament, gladly imagined as a figure (such as a star or rosette) characterized by a certain geometrical regularity or especially suggestive form, which is then usually assigned a specific symbolic meaning. The interpreter thus believes he has uncovered the deeper symbolic significance of the work of art, inconspicuously woven, by means of these ornamental figures, into the external representational meaning.60 On the other hand, there is a strange affinity between Sedlmayr and Steinberg. Steinberg obviously cited Sedlmayr’s work but does not seem to give credit to the multi-stability of its internal reading, or Sedlmayr’s own commitment to see the work as a ‘tiny world’.61 Perhaps Steinberg assimilated it in a way unusual for an Anglo-Saxon writer, due to his German fluency. Steinberg’s careful observation of the building, and desire to first ‘show what the work is’ of course is quite close to how I have described Sedlmayr’s aims, while – negatively – like Sedlmayr he was uninterested in issues of patronage and 132

logistics.62 (Indeed, this kinship may have led Arnheim to believe that Steinberg was the logical development of Sedlmayr’s ideas.) Nevertheless, I believe that the formal and traditional iconological elements coexist uneasily in his system. Our natural tendency would be to assume that Sedlmayr engages in profligate theorising in regard to personality and expression and we would assume his reading of San Carlo to be modernist in extravagant identifications of its dynamic character. Yet as we saw, he was quite restrained in those statements, if highly specific. Fabio Barry has coined the ‘dynamic fallacy’ what modernist architectural historians bring to Baroque monuments.63 Citing their empathic theories that stressed psycho-motoric responses to buildings, we instead have seen how Sedlmayr explained – among his contemporaries (Nikolaus Pevsner, Wittkower) – how this very fallacy could arise. The foregoing interpretive survey of Sedlmayr’s book has shown that it has rarely been read and has been consistently misinterpreted in intent. As Marco Pogacnik has already pointed out, what is really strange about the book is its genre. Sedlmayr’s book would have fared much better as a distillation of the essence of an architect by a senior scholar. Instead, it was the manifesto of an anxious young man, whose compressed logic and accelerated conclusions have not helped its interpretation. The real value of Die Architektur Borrominis is its modelling of an art historical method that supersedes hidden geometric systems and obscure iconological meaning in favour of simple, perceptual factors that can be demonstrated. The way Sedlmayr did this was by exploring the structure of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, to discover its formal, non-discursive organisational order. To be sure, Sedlmayr packed too much into his slim volume, ranging well beyond Borromini’s individual works and styles. But the most notorious parts of the book dealing with characterology have been 133

misunderstood and, in any case, they did not occupy most of his study. The book succeeded in directing scholars to deep structures of psychological similarity rather than superficial similarities, leading to a more rigorous characterisation of Borromini’s architecture.

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5. Otto Pächt and ‘National’ Constants in Late Gothic Painting Anyone who takes an unlabelled work of art and defines it as Italian, German or Byzantine is implicitly accepting the existence of constants. Otto Pächt, The Practice of Art History1 If Hans Sedlmayr’s monograph on Borromini stated the outlines of the method of Strukturforschung,2 its next most impressive articulation came in Otto Pächt’s extensive discussion of the formative principles found in Late Gothic painting in Northern Europe in his ‘Design Principles of FifteenthCentury Northern Painting’, published in the second and last volume of 135

Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen.3 This lengthy study is just as influential as Sedlmayr’s, and indeed more rigorous and imitable in many ways. It is furthermore methodologically self-aware and usefully stakes out a scholarly way of proceeding that is aware of its competitors, namely Panofsky’s Iconology. The most interesting and controversial element developed by Pächt was the fruitfulness of using concepts of ‘national’ constants in investigating art history. Pächt argued that in examining the variety of Late Medieval painting in western Europe, he could define distinct ‘constants’ that involved the relationship of figural content to ground. For example, he found that Netherlandish (not Flemish) is characterised by a flat surface, in which figure and ground interlock on the surface. As we shall see, in understanding such a concept everything hangs on what ‘national’ means. Pächt utilised this theory throughout his long career and it found echoes in his students’ work. Like Sedlmayr’s characterological analysis of Borromini, his method has a speculative and potentially suspicious element attached to it. Pächt was criticised quickly by Meyer Schapiro and while many agree that Pächt practised the method scrupulously, its findings were immediately tarnished (as Pächt himself saw) – a confirmation of the instability of such concepts for those more critical like Schapiro – by the recklessness of those engaged in Kunstgeographie and especially Ostforschung.4 Always less objectionable in studies of anonymous ancient art (in the same volume of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, Kaschnitz-Weinberg’s paper on Egyptian art appeared), the idea of stylistic constants continues to have its adherents, sometime inflected with semiotic theory (which perhaps assures the reader it is entirely ‘conventional’), but for the most part is considered a dead proposition.5 Through an overdetermined combination of traditional empiricism and postmodern critique, contemporary nominalism 136

generally considers a stylistic constant a vestigial nineteenth-century notion. One author flatly calls Pächt’s a ‘nationalist art history’.6 In a more sympathetic vein, Erik Inglis gives Pächt a hearing but can only conclude that in his theory schools are ‘distinct, preordained, and constant’.7 However, this vastly underestimates the subtlety and methodological reflexiveness with which Pächt frames the problem. For example, in the same article in which Schapiro criticises Pächt, he himself relies on regional and even ethnicising principles when he states that ‘we’ (Americans) ‘lack their (Germans’) taste for theoretical discussion, their concern with the formation of adequate concepts even in the seemingly empirical work of pure description, their constant search for new formal aspects of art, and their readiness to absorb the findings of contemporary scientific philosophy and psychology’.8 Here, Sedlmayr and Pächt would argue, Schapiro is relying on the same kinds of tacit notions that they are specifically seeking to bring out in to the open for a more rigorous formulation. A dismissal of constants also does not acknowledge that for Pächt and Sedlmayr, regional styles were a first problem of art history nagging to be dealt with and solved. I will argue that a careful reading of the theory of national constants reveals that it is not about nations at all, but rather best characterised as ‘historical’ constants. It is descriptive, and clearly based on a posteriori determined truths about works of art, to a degree behaviours, but certainly not individuals and groups. Following developments in archaeological and ethnological theory, I will be arguing that a failure to deal with this issue limits understanding of the forensic use of style, the understanding of abstraction and indeed ethnicity itself. To reassess Pächt’s idea of a stylistic constant I will reinforce Pächt’s connection to major theoretical and methodological commitments, weaving insights from Gestalt psychology from which he drew inspiration, particularly the works of Rudolf Arnheim. I 137

first lay out some cultural background, next exploring Pächt’s ideas of space, and surface and pattern. Then, I expound his ideas of the ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’ of the various European schools – the French, Netherlandish and Dutch. Next, I move on to discuss national constants directly, clarifying meanings and especially Schapiro’s criticisms. Finally, I address the confusing status of the Zeitgeist or other totalising concepts. Such a discussion cuts to the heart of the very purpose of historical investigation and I argue that this relation has to be specified by any critical approach to art history. By avoiding such a topic, it does not make it disappear as a problem. Design Principles: Technical and Aesthetic Space Pächt’s study opens the way for an expansion of the idea of Strukturforschung, as Sedlmayr’s interests soon diverged sharply and Pächt remained the true standard bearer of the structural method. That is, the paper becomes a point of continuity in the influence of the method in the 1930s and 1940s. Cindy Persinger has noted the continuing correspondence between Pächt and Meyer Schapiro, and the way in which the latter’s ‘Sculptures of Souillac’ became in the former’s words ‘the first “Strukturanalyse” of an [sic] high medieval work of art’.9 Furthermore, as Pächt escaped the Anschluss in Austria and found refuge in London, he could joke with his friend about the Warburgians, describing their method as ‘the crossword puzzle game of the Warburg symbolism’.10 Schapiro and Pächt felt a certain kinship in methods that sought to ground artistic meaning within relational systems of signification. It was this very kinship that threw relief on their actual difference in regard to national constants. Later, Schapiro also had a friendship with Rudolf Arnheim, and what is significant with this nexus of art history and psychology is a 138

commitment to naturalistic explanation and the grounding of intuitions in actual processes of perception. What is equally interesting in light of Pächt’s continued interest in real, empirical theories of psychology is Schapiro’s similar interest. We know that Schapiro was well aware of Gestalt psychology at the time. The young Richard Held, distinguished psychologist who began as a student of Schapiro’s at Columbia, recalls how it was Schapiro who sent him on board a navy ship in 1944 with Köhler and Wallach’s ‘Figural Aftereffects’, and later introduced him to Köhler, with whom he took a master’s degree.11 This may prove interesting for further discussion of Schapiro’s thought. For now, it is astounding to see Pächt so effectively absorbing Gestalt theory that his formulations sound remarkably like those of Rudolf Arnheim. This opens up the possibility that Pächt had seen Arnheim’s Film als Kunst, published in late 1932, and that conversely Arnheim may have turned to Pächt’s essay before the publication of his 1947 article, ‘Perceptual Abstraction and Art’. In addition, it is particularly fascinating to see the young Pächt presciently critiquing Panofsky’s just-published article on the history of perspective. As I will argue, Pächt accepts the modernist idea that a work of art builds up its own message through forms of differentiation such that the spatial pattern he identifies in late medieval painting is based solely on antecedents, not what painting would later achieve. Panofsky’s error, then, becomes interjecting geometry too stridently into the discussion, a classic case of anachronism or the ‘retrospective fallacy’. At the risk of a speculative analogy, Pächt respects what he would also admire in the work of his friend, Robert Musil, the side-shadowing of reality such that chronological or narrative contingency is preserved. As he quotes the aphorism that is apparently directly from the novelist’s mouth: ‘Der Dichter weiss was er meint erst nachdem er es geschrieben hat.’12 139

Pächt’s argument was put forward in his Habilitationschrift published in 1933. Pächt was not only presenting personal insights but also contributing to the new platform of the New Vienna School, built upon Riegl’s insights in his s Dutch Group Portrait. Riegl had already compared Holland and Flanders, and their respective Kunstwollen.13 Equally importantly, Riegl had reflected deeply on the relation of solid object and the space around them, recognising the positive contribution of negative space itself. At the end of his study, Pächt ties his argument specifically with that of Riegl, a second edition of which was just reissued in 1931, edited by Swoboda.14 Pächt had already characterised the various Austrian schools in his Österreichische Tafelmalerei of 1929.15 We hear of the new study already in 1931. Sedlmayr had written excitedly to Meyer Schapiro about the research, noting that ‘on June 15th a study colleague, Dr. Pächt, had here a presentation on “the Illusion-types of late Medieval Painting”, which in a very large effort he was able to show national constants (nationale Konstanten)’.16 No doubt Pächt’s work on the book of Austrian panel painters and his 1931 study of Michael Pacher led to this epiphany.17 Pächt’s ‘Design Principle’ would already cite Panofsky’s ‘Perspektive als “symbolische Form” ’, and is the background to Pächt’s justly celebrated article length review of the former’s Early Netherlandish Painting. Therefore, Pächt’s work, even more so than Sedlmayr’s, stakes out the methodological lines with Panofs­ kyian iconology. Pächt points out in his mature The Practice of Art History that because ‘the subject matter of Christian art consists entirely of miracles’, medieval art had to ‘create a pictorial world of its own, with a visual logic independent of what we call the laws of Nature’.18 Pächt, like Riegl, was ready to extend the idea of an independent visual logic to the rest of the history of art, beyond the Middle Ages. This is just what Panofsky and Gombrich did not do. Therefore, his article of 1933 starts out quite self-consciously to state the problem at hand. 140

Pächt begins ‘Design Principles of Fifteenth-Century Northern Painting’ with a quote by Friedrich Winkler that states the importance of the aesthetic fact of the rise of ‘the conquest of the third dimension’ for understanding naturalistic art. Opposing technical and aesthetic solutions in a manner reminiscent of Sedlmayr in the previous Chapter 4, Pächt argues instead that technical inability did not stand in the way of the adoption of perspective, but instead the pressure ‘to project three-dimensional space onto the surface in such a way as to yield an aesthetically relevant order’. This idea would be echoed decades later by Rudolf Arnheim who wrote that, ‘During the centuries following the introduction of central perspective into the pictorial practice of the West, the rules were not applied literally. Artists modified them to suit their own visual judgment . . . helping the geometrical construction look more convincing.’19 Here, Pächt chooses a remarkable phrase, ‘positive compulsion’ (positiver Zwang), to capture what the painters were really doing. That is, instead of reading history backward, from achieved technical refinement, he wants to read the work contemporaneously from the point of view of the artist. Here, he only presumes what had been known to that point, namely medieval precedent in addition to its perspectival experimentation. For this alternative reading, Pächt freely acknowledges Theodor Hetzer’s contribution to understand the surface element of the work of art. When Hetzer had written in Das deutsche Element in der italienische Malerei, ‘the sixteenth century loves to create forms that, while conveying an appearance of nature, nonetheless are at the same time ornamental surface constructions of an autonomous character’, he (and Pächt) were anticipating doubts about perspective that were voiced fairly recently by James Elkins.20 This ‘poetic’ alternative, however, lacks Pächt’s specification of the visual rule that determines when geometric space and when ‘poetry’ come into play. 141

Pacht’s opposition of ‘technical’ and ‘aesthetic’ follows the distinction between the ‘first’ and ‘second’ sciences of Kunstwissenschaft that Sedlmayr had laid out two years earlier in the introduction to the first volume of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen. There, we recall, he was echoing Lewin’s ‘comparative theory of science’ (vergleichende Wissenschaftstheorie) which had opposed ‘conditional-genetic’ genotype of behaviour and its phenotype.21 In ‘Design Principles of Fifteenth-Century Northern Painting’, Pächt not only criticises the technical perspective involved in space, which would be a part of the ‘first science’, but also ‘historical derivations from earlier styles’ as insufficient to decide the issue.22 Indeed, Pächt mentions in a footnote that, lest he be misunderstood, he wants to provide a paired ‘developmentalhistorical part of this study, which will appear later’.23 This would have made the parallelism to Sedlmayr’s Die Architektur Borrominis even stronger. However, his inability to assume his post in Heidelberg obstructed this. Finally, Pächt believes – in conformity with Gestalt psychology – that once one is exposed to his two-part understanding of the picture, it results in a ‘better’ description and the basis of understanding. Of course this parallels Sedlmayr’s discussion of the proper attitude to attain before a work of art (Einstellung) and Pächt makes reference to the article by the Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka that had set Sedlmayr on his Gestalt path, ‘Zur Theorie des Erlebniswahrnehmung’. There we recall Koffka had talked about describing a motor with and without knowledge of mechanical principles; only the former penetrated the core of understanding.24 Although modern psychology confirms the theory, and therefore is a modern insight, the belief is that it retrospectively enlightens the behaviours of the past.

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Design Principles: Surface and Pattern In overcoming the bias towards looking at early Netherlandish pictures in terms of their fulfilment or frustration of perspective space, Pächt argues that we need to differentiate the surface pattern of forms on the picture surface and the space suggested in the picture: ‘Every element belongs simultaneously to two different systems of reference’. Pächt rejects overly literal usages of surface pattern, as for instance that of Hans Kauffmann. There is no hidden shape to discover; rather, surface and space must be understood in an ‘intimate, mutual penetration’.25 Nevertheless, surface pattern has clear precedence over space and Pächt formulates the rule that the ‘appearance of the three-dimensional physical world is reworked into a two-dimensional construction, a whole emerges from the segment or part’.26 This is what he calls the ‘double nature of projective forms’ (Doppelwertigkeit der projektiven Form). In a sense, this is nothing other than a strong distinction between outside reality and depicted reality. A part of the unbounded world always (necessarily) becomes its own artistic whole. Following Arnheim, this might be called avoiding the ‘axiom of realism’.27 Pächt notes that ‘the term “figure” is used here in the sense in which Gestalt theory speaks of figure as opposed to ground’ and his formulation is so similar to Arnheim’s in Film als Kunst (1932) that it raises the question of potential influence or extremely allied thought processes.28 In either case, Pächt’s importance as co-creator of the New Vienna School is strongly confirmed. In the early part of the book, Arnheim reviews principles of visual perception, noting that ‘The effect of film is neither absolutely two-­ dimensional nor absolutely three-dimensional, but something between. Film pictures are at once plane and solid.’29 Of course, as a photographic medium, film automatically guarantees that images are projections, which is assured by the photo-sensitive plate, but Arnheim’s numerous analyses show both the 143

perceptual and, importantly, expressive consequences of surface pattern. For example, he uses the example of Chaplin’s The Immigrant (1917), in which Charlie Chaplin is shown from behind, leaning over a ship, apparently sick.30 Later, he pulls up a cane and has hooked a fish. For Arnheim, here, the limited projection, blocking out ‘narrator’s omniscience’, allows for a comical effect.31 For the reason that depictions are compromises between surface patterns and projective depth images, Pächt is not falling victim to ‘manifest formalism’; that is, the theory that the forms that contain the essence of painting are observable across its surface.32 If anything Pächt is closer to what Wollheim calls a ‘latent’ formalism, a variety of the ‘grammar’ approach to form, which further indicates that his formalism is not of a simplistic variety but something akin to semiotics or structuralism.33 This allows Pächt to treat the painting without reference to optics and Cartesian space and avoid Panofsky’s anachronisms. It might be argued that Pächt’s approach is still ‘optical’ in recognising the idea of projection at all, even though it criticises the technical basis of perspective as an avenue to understanding Netherlandish painting. But this is an analytic category useful for analysis. Projections are just objects, which at the same time are patterns. More importantly, as we shall see, objects don’t create the patterns; all visibilia can serve as pattern. It is precisely the signature relationship between the surface and depth image, a consistent pattern that Pächt finds defines each regional school, and consequently articulates some kind of ‘constant’. In all three variants [Netherlandish, Dutch, French], each form must be observed both in its physical, spatial significance and in its surface pattern; and in all three, the pictorial structure is determined 144

by the double relation between the grouping if the physical objects and the pictorial pattern.34 In short, Pächt finds that the way that different artistic traditions conceive of objects relative to the plane reveals their specific ‘design principle’.

Figure 5.1  Hugo van der Goes, Portinari Altarpiece, Uffizi, Florence (photo: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali/Art Resource, NY) 145

The Netherlandish Design Principle For Pacht, the Netherlandish pictorial system is marked by a series of surface patterns distributed on the pictorial surface and in tension. The artist is not so much interested in how things happen to appear as creating an overall distributed pattern of figure and ground, which together form a satisfying aesthetic whole. Artists will tend to emphasise verticals and horizontals at the picture’s edge and will invent ‘filler motifs’ to play out the pictorial reality. In the end, human figures are incidental and are merely compositional entities that interlock together with other forms. Given this state of affairs, there is ‘pressure to align the neighbouring outlines’, which are dependent on the ‘shape of the silhouette’.35 Figures are chosen that are upright and parallel to the frontal place; when they deviate from it, they will be stretched. Pächt’s example is the table in the Merode Altarpiece. Another example is given in the Portinari altarpiece (Figure 5.1) by Hugo van der Goes, where the group of angels and shepherd creates forms against the negative space, creating a mutual accommodation that with one exception is rigorously respected between the two groupings. As Pächt says elsewhere, ‘this kind of all-encompassing, continuous surface cohesiveness cannot be the accidental outcome of the projection process’.36 The result is a ‘system of balanced tensions that organize the surface so thoroughly that the pictorial pattern as a whole comes to rest’, a ‘wavering equilibrium’, which he called the ‘antagonism of pictoral surface and depth’ in his 1972 lectures, which became Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting.37 Figures on ground cannot be understood simply; different forms can become grounds; in effect, the artist has intuitively found ways to create satisfying tensions all over the picture surface, both overall and ­partially. This system is the opposite of geometrical. A ‘relatively relaxed 146

rule system’, with a ‘minimum of instructions’, the idea is simply to create equilibrium. Before turning to the Dutch system, Pächt notes that, ‘the elements of design that we have attempted to elucidate with southern Netherlandish (Flemish) examples are certainly not specimens of that art alone. Indeed the most basic among them characterize pictorial invention in general.’38 Here I find it opportune to juxtapose the Van der Goes with a contemporary painting, Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (Florence, Galleria degli Uffizi), which for me (independently of Pächt) so well illustrated Arnheimian ideas of the predominance of surface pattern over proper projection. The space between Venus and the personification of one of the Hours on the right creates its own figural space. Note that they never touch, and the shoreline even has the decorum not to be occluded by Venus’s body. The Dutch Design Principle Turning to works produced by Dutch painters, Pächt finds a much different tendency. Whereas the Flemish artist is interested in a pleasing and interlocking surface arrangement, the Dutch artist instead conceives of his picture with empty parts of the surface and hence deep space: ‘open space has become worthy of form’. The openness of a surface becomes a ‘positive value’. The prime example of this spatial type that Pächt nominates is Dieric Bouts. Pächt and his students were able to elaborate on the Haarlem school in later works to cover Geertgen tot Sint Jans as well as Bosch.39 In addition to open space, one finds that figures even lose their pattern characteristics. Silhouettes are blurry, even ‘rough patches of colour’. This tendency to conceive of forms as forms, and not as numerically distinct figures, leads to the lessening of importance of the individual actor in favour 147

of the pictorial group. These groups are ‘phenomenologically prior’ to individual components; it is as if the artist sees a motif to copy in a southern Netherlandish composition (which was quite common) but in copying it translates distinct figures in the original into his own kind of independent groups, in which individuals lose autonomy. In such a work, there is a lack of pictorial unity, which is compensated for in different ways. An intermediary rhetorical figure, a ‘kind of speaker’ is introduced, who addresses the viewer. The interpolation that results between viewer and incomplete painting allows us to ‘complete the figures’ cohesion into scenic unity’. Of course, this reminds us of the general trait that Riegl had seen active in later group portraits. This is not so much a contradiction as two competing Wollen, that is, a native tendency to conceive of the picture helps accelerate, we might say, the general historical trajectory. The French Design Principle Pächt finished his ‘Grundprinzipien’ article with the French and reinforced some of its points not too long afterwards in publications like ‘Jean Fouquet: A Study of His Style’. 40 For the French-trained artist, all paintings become an abstract, ornamental scheme. In Pächt’s memorable phrase, ‘pattern is firmly fixed prior to each scenic invention: that is to say, it is a predetermined pictorial plan’ and further ‘projections of objects are then poured into these individual fields so that they must conform and adapt to the preconceived schema of the pictorial field’s division’. 41 This means that the artist translates objects into previously organised forms. Therefore, Pächt sees the picture plane with criss-crossing diagonals, in a ‘tightly woven network’. In fact, the physical world, more or less, is ‘trapped’ in this ‘rhomboid network’ (Figure 5.2). 148

Figure 5.2  Jean Fouquet, Judicial Court of Charles VII, Munich, Bayerische Staats­bibliothek, cod. gall. 6 (photo: Wikimedia, free use)

Pächt uses the Limbourg brothers, Fouquet and even Callot. Central to the analysis is Fouquet especially, in which the Austrian art historian sees this ‘pre-stabilized harmony’. This will be an important point to discuss, but suffice it to say here that Pächt does flirt in speculative territory by citing Max Scheler, for whom for the French ‘the world is created in such a way that it can enter into human understanding easily and completely’.42 But what needs to be emphasised is the way in which Pächt in both the ‘Grundprinzipien’ and ‘Jean Fouquet’ notes that such a pictorial attitude ‘often makes it impossible to 149

accommodate the individual illustrative requirements’ and ‘a pictorial form of this kind is not equally suitable to every subject’.43 Indeed, ‘Fouquet’s works are most effective when he depicts a world which is in itself mannered and stylized’.44 Therefore, as observed by Joseph Koerner, the elective resonances of forms once again are not deterministic but lend themselves to different situations.45 That does not mean that the unfavourable situations are eliminated; artistic work continues. But in some cases, there is particular resonance. Schapiro’s Critique The theory of historical constants was an important feature of Pächt’s article on the Gestaltungsprinzipien, a true discovery, as Sedlmayr wrote to Meyer Schapiro. Pächt returned to it again and again. One of the most significant examples in which the theory of historical constants showed its value was Pächt’s attribution of the Gonella portrait in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna to Jean Fouquet (Figure 5.3), based on what he deemed its ‘French’ constructive aspects.46 As noted by J. J. G. Alexander, it is there indeed that Pächt’s method shows its heuristic of forensic value because the attribution was later supported. 47 And yet in other cases Pächt’s attributions have not met with perfect acceptance, for example in regard to the identity of the illuminator of Le Livre du Coeur d’Amour Epris (1457, Austrian National Library) as René himself.48 The theory of constants is not a theory of connoisseurship; a theory does not rise and fall based on judgements that the author has admirably framed as fallible, and subject to the appearance of new information. Clearly, in cases of anonymous art some principles are necessary, and their methodological stakes must be laid out. How, then, can a theory of constants be put to work responsibly? Like Sedlmayr’s usage of Kretschmer, however, Pächt’s use of 150

‘national’ constants has not sat well with historians who have believed it impossible to separate a theory of historical constants from an essentialisation of national cultures. These issues were brought to light most clearly in Pächt’s debate about constants with Meyer Schapiro, who, however, regarded it as too close to racial theorising to be useful. Schapiro’s suspicions, needless to say, seemed to be born out as the 1930s progressed. There is no question that the issue of nationality is fraught with dangers. The birth of art history took place with the birth of modern nationalism and the seemingly neutral figures of important achievement – Jan van Eyck,

Figure 5.3  Jean Fouquet, Gonella, Kunst­histor­isches Museum, Vienna (photo: Wikimedia, free use) 151

Rogier van der Weyden – became highly charged and his­torians sought to appropriate them for a national tradition. The choice of how to call a tradition, ‘Flemish’ or ‘Nether­landish’, was political and continues to be so to this day.49 Where Pächt and Schapiro differed was in their response to this conundrum, through it or around it. We do not have the letter in which Schapiro raised his concerns, only Schapiro’s review of Pächt’s chapter of Kunstwissenschafliche Forschungen in The Art Bulletin.50 Schapiro complemented Pächt’s approach and sympathetically reviewed it. But he ultimately criticised Pächt for using principles that are ‘self-determined, independent of concrete conditions inside, or tangent to, the arts’ and found his notion of a ‘constant’ incoherent. He found the evidence for each of Pächt’s constants to be thin and paradoxical in some cases, as when the Limbourg brothers are given to the ‘French’ system. As I will argue, Schapiro has been overhasty in most of his negative judgements and evinces in this instance a peculiar empiricism that is excessively constrictive of the theorisation of collective phenomena. As in the previous chapter, I want here not only to elucidate the theory of historical constants but also show why our suspicion of it is based on faulty and inhibiting presumptions. Once again, these are empiricist ideas that we have elevated as being politically progressive but are actually evasive. We have become quite allergic to ideas even adjacent to race and nationality, yet it is important to understand exactly how these terms were used and what their reference was intended to be. As we have already noted in Chapter 4, an inability to work through complex social scientific terms can cause the deskilling of historical discourse, because they are originally intended to cover certain areas of discussion. But this is not strong enough. There still remains the problem of ‘the ways in which’, in Alexander’s felicitous phrase, ‘social belongingness is made visible’.51 152

Pächt’s approach to constants should be seen within the larger theoretical commitments of Strukturforschung. Sedlmayr, for example, in Österreichische Barockarchitektur, had already noted that Tyrolean Baroque architecture has few tendencies of Austrian architecture, although certainly a part of the administrative unit of ‘Austria’.52 The concept was introduced as a part of the relational approach to culture. Pächt was already laudably reflexive about the extension of his concepts. In a note, he states that: for the fifteenth century, I am employing the designation ‘southern Netherlandish’ and not ‘Flemish’ because artists of Walloon background also belong to this school (among them one of the most important, Rogier van der Weyden). One can only speak of ‘Flemish’ painting in the strict sense after Antwerp took over as the prime location of artistic development (after 1500), allowing the hegemony gradually to be transferred from the French to the Flemish portion of present-day Belgium.53 This is an explicit decoupling of ethnicity and style and mirrors a Habsburg, cosmopolitan decoupling of nationhood and statehood.54 The various schools he has elucidated are not ‘racial’, or even ethnic, that is, language based. Following my earlier chapter on structure, these are best conceived as practice-based communities and Pächt never says anything to suggest ­otherwise. When Pächt outlines the ‘constant’ that exists for the southern Nether­ landish (or any other) artists he merely states that, ‘the relationship between 153

the pictorial pattern and the whole of the picture remains constant’.55 In other words, he is stating that there is a constant in the way in which surface and space is related. He clearly states that his observation is formed ex post facto. ‘Constant’ is in fact hardly mentioned as is any reference to a ‘nation’. Although Schapiro thinks of a ‘constant’ apparently in physical terms it is no surprise that Pächt would think of it in psychological terms, as the ‘personal constant’ that might be derived from reaction time studies, an abstracted construct, not an a priori value like the speed of light.56 Rather, Pächt never even mentions individuals. Normally, he is talking about the pictures he is observing, or the pictorial system (Gestaltungsprinzip) he notes. His language in these randomly chosen examples shows this clearly: • ‘The Netherlanders work with a system . . .’. (87/272) • . . . important innovation in early Netherlandish painting . . .’. (88/273) • ‘the Netherlandish pictorial pattern’ (89/278) • ‘in French pictorial conceptions’ (97/303) Occasionally, Pächt does somewhat lazily speak of simply a group, for example, ‘the Netherlanders’ (89/275), or says ‘For the French’ (99/313), but the context makes it clear that Pächt is talking about the style, and indeed the reference to a ‘national’ (as opposed to a ‘historical’) constant has only clouded things. It is only with this in mind that we can understand Pächt’s reply of late 1934 to Schapiro’s lost letter in which he pleaded that his approach actually was ‘a radical critique of the current nationalism as well as a critique of conservatism’.57 Recall that Pächt had already been unable to take up his position at the University of Heidelberg because of the Nazi civil service law of 1933. He had already suffered racial persecution. He truly felt that artists 154

need not be ethnically related in order to belong to a specific line of art historical development. Pächt tried to be clear that the formative impulses were not ethnic or racial. ‘Rather one must imagine that it is a kind of common ideal that the artists have in vague forms in their minds. This ideal more or less consciously guides the formation process.’58 Clearly, this vague formulation did not convince Schapiro, who wrote his review after this correspondence. Yet Pächt’s overall defence is convincing. Later, in his teaching Pächt seems to have used the example of Giambologna to show how a style did not assume biological identity. Giambologna, ethnically Flemish, perfectly adopted the Italian style of Florence. For this reason, Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann concluded that proof was given that such ideas could be used ‘without subscribing to racialist explanations for them’.59 Interestingly, just as Pächt wrote to Schapiro after he was prevented from taking his chair in Heidelberg, he wrote one last word – one could almost think of it as a rebuttal to Schapiro’s well-known review of the second volume of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen in Art Bulletin in 1936 – while already in exile in London.60 His review of G. A. S. Snijder’s Romeinsche Kunstgeschiedenis is signed in Kritische Berichte December 1936, and was published in 1937.61 One is tempted to think of the review as a pretext for his own ‘Exkurs’ at the end, where he makes a last plea. Otherwise, it is the only review that Pächt included in his Practice of Art History. The question of a Roman style is of course what attracted Pächt to the book. In his ‘Exkurs’, he seems to invoke Schapiro when he writes of ‘emotion-laden sympathies’ (affektgetrübte Anteilnahme) against regional constants, going to affirm his earlier points that national style and race and ethnicity are not connected.62 Noting that in the Roman era most known artists are named as Greeks, Pächt concludes that, ‘People (Völker) of different ethnic and racial composition (rassischen Zugehörigkeit) were the creators of an inner, coherent culture and 155

unified artistic tradition (innerlich zusammenhängenden Kultur und einheit­ lichen künstlerichen Tradition).’ 63 One way to judge Pächt’s system is to ask whether it could be put to use by the Nazis to ‘repatriate’ works without authorship, as Frey and others did in the lead-up to the war.64 Frey intervened in a border, disputed area – Polish Cracow and Warsaw – and utilised his notions of a national style to license the taking of ‘German’ art out of these lands. There was a clear link for them between style and ethnicity, if not to say race, that made their projects contribute to the larger political annexation of these lands. Pächt’s system could not do this because as with Giambologna, one cannot tie ethnicity to style. One could discover works made according to the ‘French’ system, but they could have been made by Dutch speakers from Nijmegan, and therefore such works could only be repossessed wilfully. It is here that Pächt’s approach is a ‘radical critique’. Pächt’s dynamic idea of historical constants was made possible by a natural science idea that conceived the constant in a literal scientific way, as the purified formative principle beneath the actual cases. Some rapprochement between Pächt and Schapiro occurred precisely through the latter’s increasing familiarity with Gestalt psychology, made possible by his friendship with the exiled Rudolf Arnheim in New York. Indeed, one can recognise the movement Schapiro makes by his ‘Style’ essay of 1953.65 As Cindy Persinger has shown, Schapiro greatly expanded the way in which wholeness is distinct from totality.66 Indeed, if one reads ‘Style’, one can see many hints of Arnheim’s influence, as for instance when Schapiro talks about, Just as the single work may possess parts that we would judge to belong to different styles, if we found them in separate contexts, so an 156

individual may produce during the same short period works in what are regarded as two styles. This is a clear and simple example of a Gestalt ontological analysis of parts and wholes. Yet there is something still disappointing in Schapiro’s analysis. He tends to reduce to absurdity the various positions he otherwise carefully documents. He generally holds up extreme totality as the only way in which to understand any kind of style concept and doesn’t accept gradations of meaning. For example, in his discussion of Riegl he resorts to typical criticisms of Hegel to describe how whole cultures ‘play their role and retire’. This is not entirely fair to Riegl. In this sense, one can somewhat agree with W. J. T. Mitchell’s critique of Schapiro’s ‘resistance to theory’.67 Against his much-touted Marxism we can see that he would hold, by today’s standards, a very ‘analytic’ variety.68 Mitchell was making reference to Schapiro’s famous essay on Van Gogh and still life, but I intend the same sentiment to refer to social movements and their reality, surely a concern for typical Marxists. The result is a confinement to the plane of experience, which is the very definition of naïve empiricism. Pächt sought something that was not just common sense, or could be observed first hand, but which required imagination. Reconstituting Art Historical Constants Pächt’s historical constant survives scrutiny. It is a genuine way of tackling the problem of historical abstraction and historical and regional styles. Although one can see how style and ethnicity might be confused in Pächt’s account, especially with respect to France, it is more difficult to see how Schapiro read race into the theory. If one cannot avoid talking about something 157

like constants, then one must imitate Pächt’s care in approaching the problem. What more, then, can we say about constants to help clarify their meaning and make them less controversial? The most important thing we can do is to clarify the social ontology that is presumed here. First, as noted, Pächt tends to talk about the schools of painting and not the painters. Nevertheless, most critics assume that when he assumes some kind of constant he is referring to their makers. But let us look how that might actually play out. Any social group with distinctive properties has to be an assemblage of people organised into some norm circle, which they share as an interest and enforce. Painters certainly fit into this category. But because painters do not make up the entire population, the charge of a Weltanschaaung attributed across the board cannot be sustained. Instead, we can only look at the artists who, by virtue of their training and hence correlation with some particular norm, produce works of a certain style. The painters and their relation together create a school that exercises its causal powers.69 This is the minimal definition of a group but in the case of one of the schools Pächt discusses would have to encompass prior facts of social stratification, materials available, and the formal opportunities that their local culture affords. In the end, we are simply trying to talk about the habits of visualisation that can often be predictably detected in examination of works of art. Ultimately, we arrive at a notion of a relational concept, a fallible sort of ‘ideal type’, used for heuristic purposes.70 It is improper presented with such a concept to ‘falsify’ it, as it is not proposed for predictive purposes (positivism) but true explanation (mechanisms). Empiricists falsify; realists instead gain more understanding of a mechanism, including ‘exceptions to the rule’. Furthermore, as pointed out by Sedlmayr, exhaustive phenomenological analysis is a necessary propadeutic to further historical explanation. This 158

brings up an important point hinted at by Inglis. Pächt offers a descriptive system, not an explanation. He is laying out the ‘constants’ for the purposes of eventual explanation, by some theory of the internalisation of artistic norms via training, some theory of the habitus. Thus, we can use works of art to build up concepts of historical constants but they themselves have no explanatory purchase. Maurice Mandelbaum made the related point that, ‘without denying the fact that there are “national characteristics” we can point out that they do not of themselves explain the historical process’, and ‘the national character is not something that can be appealed to as an explanatory historical principle in concrete cases; it is, rather, something which not only demands concrete explanation, but which demands constant reinterpretation in the light of actual events’.71 Clearly, properly utilised, Pächt’s method can indeed be useful for understanding anonymous works, although such judgement can never claim ultimate authority. In addition, there is nothing to say that the group aspect or ‘ethnicity’ that is being discussed is not self-conscious nor self-defined.72 Indeed, rigorous research on national characteristics has shown within-group agreement about descriptive characteristics, once evaluative terms are un-conflated.73 An ethnic identity can be preserved when a group reinforces features that others may have noticed about them. Avars called ‘long haired Barbarians’ by Byzantines could cause them to reinforce this practice in their society. Similarly, contrary to Giambologna, a Fleming in the face of Italian invention in Italy might hold proudly to his native tradition for the qualities associated with it. In both cases, one is self-conscious about the way in which one reinforces an individual or collective identity. We do no justice to the history of art by trying to avoid talk of groups and traditions. Talking about Pächt’s construct and emphasising its relationality, 159

we come very close to a work not cited by the Vienna group, Kurt Lewin’s seminal essay on the Galilean and Aristotelian modes of thinking in the sciences.74 Pächt and Lewin do not ever refer to the essential properties of a substance (Aristotelian) but rather the relational qualities of causal complexes (Galileo). If the theory is clearly relational and the interpreter insists on substance-essential thinking, then it is the interpreter who is Aristotelian, not the original theory.75 More nefariously, Florin Curta notes that because of the 1913 German law that equated German citizenship by descent, ‘the idea that a person buried in “Germanic” dress may not necessarily be of “Germanic” descent has rarely, if ever, been questioned’ by archaeologists.76 That Pächt could have associated the Limbourgs – born in Nijmegan – with the French category by training is just the kind of practice of undermining such assumptions. Is it that when faced with Pächt’s categories, art historians don’t trust themselves based on their own essentialist presuppositions? Whither Zeitgeist? If I am correct that the inability to comprehend Pächt’s point about historical constants is based on some fundamentally mistaken, spontaneous ideas within the humanities and cannot countenance his social scientific approach, then it is likely that the whole point of Pächt’s Strukturforschliche project will be lost. For example, must we accept the fact that Pächt – even in his later ‘Anglo-Saxon’ phase while writing in England, is practising a kind of ‘idealist’ art history? Christopher Wood writes that, ‘in the rhomboid surface patterns of the Limbourg Brothers or Jean Fouquet, Pächt believed he could read the French taste for ceremony, ritual, judicial assemblies, in general “life encompassed by social conventions” ’.77 However, it doesn’t appear that Pächt actually makes the short circuit from form to mentality, in spite of his near 160

essentialisation of Frenchness. His quote is rather about the way in which ‘figural themes’ are ‘favourite themes’, partly as he explains later because they are amenable to surface ordering (unlike single figures). Even the holy legends are made into ‘images of life encompassed by social convention’. For this reason, I think it is important to distinguish Pächt’s method here from Sedlmayr’s ‘Macchia’ essay of the following year (1934). Although, as pointed out by Joseph Koerner, they both deal with social groups and festivities, Sedlmayr is much more speculative in his analysis, charting indeed a radically new direction.78 At root here is, again, the issue of abstraction and (depth) metaphoric language reaching beyond the literal register of the empirical. But also import­ant is the role of an actor’s knowledge in his or her actions. Much of the issue separating a ‘theoretical’ art historian like Pächt from a common-sense historian is the issue of how a work of art bears traces of its age. For many, simply to assume it in some way is a Hegelian heresy. As I have argued, however, it is necessary to clarify for meaningful progress in art history. Recall that for Riegl, the world is a conserved whole and therefore, in a functionalist vein, its parts do condition each other. Pächt does assume something like this, as for instance at the beginning of his essay in The Master of Mary of Burgundy: The artists lived in a world which, at least in the higher strata of society, ardently endeavoured to conform to certain ideal standards. The courtly life portrayed by the Flemish miniaturists was in itself a reality already cast into firm shape. Here fiction and reality had become one. Actions modelled on a code of chivalry and honour, human behaviour regulated by social 161

etiquette, human feeling canalized in conventional forms, in short ‘formalized nature’, this was the object the artists took as their model. The extravagant fashions of the time are only the most conspicuous and tangible effect of a very complex and systematic transformation affecting every side of human life. All the typical features of Burgundian fashion, the outsize trains and the spire-like headgear (hennin) of the ladies, the narrow tights and sharply pointed (‘spike’-) shoes of the men, are designed to recast the human figure in accordance with an ideal of Gothic linear elegance and one-sided refinement. And as a styled costume to some extent dictates and shapes the character of gestures and the manners of the persons clad in it, in a similar way the transformed human appearance seems to have suggested and inspired the artistic form that could adequately portray it. Of course, at the root there lay the same aesthetic feeling penetrating and shaping life and art. But it was, at the same time, more than a mere parallelism. The formalized life of Burgundian society had in a certain sense prefigured the ‘style of the long line’, a style at first seemingly highly subjective and mannered, yet containing all the ingredients of descriptive naturalism which 162

characterize the great tradition of Flemish painting.79 This is an apparently strongly Hegelian approach to cultural history, with strong echoes of Riegl, which would surely make E. H. Gombrich blush. It even contains the much-ridiculed statement by Wölfflin regarding pointy shoes expressing the same Gothic attitude as the cathedrals.80 In other words, for the empiricistminded art historian it is perhaps one of Pächt’s most ‘idealist’ passages. Yet the latest scepticism regarding Wölfflin’s admittedly youthful remark can be questioned. This story was deconstructed by Frederic Schwartz, who went back to Wölfflin’s own source in the work of the costume historian Hermann Weiss.81 The shoe Weiss had noted, but Wölfflin had failed to disclose, ‘emerged at the end of the twelfth century, and disappeared almost as quickly’.82 Weiss had written this, but only of a particular kind of extralong fashion. Indeed, as Wölfflin and Pächt knew, this fashion persisted until the end of the fifteenth century.83 By dismissing this point and ascribing it to ‘idealism’ fails to think about the way that society motivates form; after all, cathedrals and shoes are luxury items patronised and consumed by the same people. Reinterpreted in terms of self-conscious choices (and here Pächt parts company with Wölfflin), there is no single, indwelling ‘gothic’ spirit common to both the cathedral and shoes. Recall the earlier points about Fouquet and his style’s relationship to his culture. Some parts of his style lent themselves to portraying aspects of the culture and the Master of Mary of Burgundy, likewise, works the same way. The issues that frankly have to be taken up refer to the relationship of similarity and allegory, of likeness and contiguity. The latter two are the favoured methods of historical research. But Pächt is interested – as he writes in his review of Panofsky – in ‘the philosophy embodied by, and implicit in, 163

the visual form’. Pächt ends up talking about isomorphisms, relations of affinity and prefiguration, that are not predetermined but self-selected within a culture to become sorts of self-fulfilling prophecies. But this is not the hermeneutic circle nor the chicken and the egg but the mutual reinforcement of ideas and practices, which is the aim of social science that cuts ice. It is extremely important that in his polemic with Panofsky, Pächt specifically opposes Panofsky’s voluntarist approach to symbolism, which makes symbolism a conscious feature of art production. It is not that he is opting instead for unconscious Zeitgeist thinking, but properly framing a socialised idea of ideology appropriate to an interesting art history. Quoting Mannheim, who had quoted Dilthey to the effect that Weltanschauungen ‘are not produced by thinking’, Pächt forcefully returns the discussion back to the 1920s when the debate over Riegl’s legacy raged. To press Mannheim’s Rieglian point is to insist that the historicity of systems of thought is what is interesting for history rather than individual agency.84 This does not mean that Pächt believes that thought seeps into thinking irrationally but rather that any truly historical approach to art history has to deal with the issue of how culture is extra-personal and reproduced. Pächt and Panofsky come closer together in regard to Panofsky’s Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, which contains stronger echoes of Rieglian methodology.85 Of course, here we are with the notion of ‘habitus’, which was admired by Pierre Bourdieu and Michael Baxandall.86 None of these thinkers has provided a link that will convincingly span material practice and mentality according to common-sense categories. Yet they are a beginning. What Pächt has done is outlined the explanandum. Without prejudice of stereotypes of Flemish or French art, he has looked to the pictures themselves for what is to be explained, and also its generative (replicative) nature as Gestaltung. 164

The necessary materialisation of Pächt’s theory in practices, which would round out his revisionist notion of a historical constant, would look further at studies of spaces, tasks and materials, and more narrowly artistic training and guilds. 87 Then the kind of bottom-up and top-down exchange that Pächt appreciated in Schapiro’s iconographical approach, above all in the ‘Muscipula Diaboli’ article, could be attained.88 Panofsky’s voluntarism in Early Netherlandish Painting and determinism in Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism would be balanced out, and the tensions between them could even be made into engines of historical change. Indeed, although I have not emphasised it, nowhere in his works does Pächt shy away from change, because change is what reveals the constant. In spite of altered conditions, traditions adapt to continue to create works of art in the way comfortable to them. Cindy Persinder notes that Schapiro’s work is part of a turn towards iconology, of exploring its limits, in a move away from racialised art history. In part it is what Pächt called later a ‘reassessment of the mutual relationship of iconographic and stylistic approach and for a synchronization of their methods’.89 As we have seen, Pächt and Schapiro had more in common than not in this endeavour. It is very difficult to quibble with Schapiro over Pächt in regard to national constants; he would appear to be the more reasonable example of Strukturforschung, perhaps urging it to merge into semiotics in the way that Schapiro’s own work developed. This is all fine until we examine the larger aims of Strukturforschung. The structural approach aims, we recall, at undertaking the correct scholarship at the right time. Thus, Schapiro’s more restrained variety, while yielding important results, concedes too much to iconology in neglecting a resolution to a very large methodological problem. In the same way in the last chapter that Sedlmayr saw the exploration of a single documented personality 165

(Borromini) as essential before historical epochs could be discussed, Pächt understood the same kind of exploration with anonymous personalities. In other words, Pächt had to address the problem directly to make meaningful progress. Rather than seeing Pächt’s article on historical constants as vestigial of nineteenth-century thinking, as is most often done, it should be understood as a highly self-conscious statement of the burning question facing art history: abstraction. Sometimes the evidence is slim. We cannot accept the constants with the same certainty that he did. Rather, they are useful heuristics. Pächt intuited the path art history has to take and the answers he gave were quite compelling. If we ignore it, we must be vigilant that we are not just falling back on common-sense, empiricist habits.

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6. Johannes Wilde on Michelangelo: The Image in Space . . . There is, however, one aspect which my imaginary visitor might miss because he would have found little encouragement for it in his reading, and that is to look at these three works [wall frescoes, ceiling and altar wall] in their relation to each other as parts of the overall decoration of the same interior. Johannes Wilde, ‘The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel’.

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It is difficult to find another historical study of the Vienna group of the calibre of ‘Borromini’s architecture’ or ‘the design principles of Late Gothic painting’. To be sure, Bruno Fürst, who we saw to be a close friend of Pächt, produced a study of Austrian sculpture that in many ways extends Pächt’s categories of Gestaltungsprinzipien to three dimensions.1 Swoboda, so close to the group, did not produce anything characteristically structure-oriented apart from works continuing Pächt’s ideas on national constants.2 I will argue that Swoboda’s co-editor of Dvořák’s work, Johannes Wilde (1891–1970), deserves this attention.3 As we will see in a moment, Wilde – who was born in Budapest but took his PhD in Vienna with Dvořák – was considered integral to the University Strukturforschung group from his perch at the Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna. Instead of exploring studies produced by Wilde in Vienna in the late 1920s or early 1930s, however, I will focus – paralleling my previous discussion of Pächt’s works – on his work done in England. I will argue that Wilde used his English experience to filter his initially quite rich and varied philosophical background – derived from Dvořák and based loosely on what can be called ‘hermeneutic’ philosophy – to obtain a simplified functional approach to interpretation. 4 This method has a lot in common with the method of Sedlmayr and Pächt, but with only direct influence and more of a common evolution, a homologous method you might say.5 Wilde, like Sedlmayr and Pächt, was extremely sensitive to artistic form and its organisation. Whereas Sedlmayr had analysed the internal structure of Borromini’s San Carlo, Wilde was interested in the way in which frescoes were related to the space external to them. In this his interests might be likened to those of Pächt exploring the relationship of the miniature to the manuscript page. Wilde will be discussed here as solving important problems of Struktur related to works and their environment, the image in space. His 168

great contribution was seeing the painting or fresco as fitting into a larger assemblage and explaining how a functional approach helped decide proper reconstruction and meaning. Only after understanding how the various parts fit together could one make meaningful decisions about meaning and style. In this, Wilde occupied an extremely close position to Pächt in post-war England, representing a formalist viewpoint but on a monumental scale as compared to Pächt’s miniature scale. This problem is obviously a clear extension of the Gestalt preoccupations of Sedlmayr and Pächt. They had investigated the hierarchical structure of a single work or the formative principle underlying a number of works of art. Wilde, in a sense, put the work of art into a ‘field’, studying the larger gestalt structure surrounding the work itself. After defining what I take to be Wilde’s fundamental approach to art history, I move on to the task of imaginative reconstruction of monuments, as shown in Wilde’s work on the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. I then contrast Wilde’s approach to the contemporary iconology of Tolnai (now Tolnay) and Edgar Wind. Finally, I draw out the Gestalt problematic in Wilde’s work in the clarification of organisational dynamics of parts within wholes. Wilde and his Historical Method Johannes Wilde’s Vienna School credentials were outstanding, since he was old enough to have been trained by Riegl’s direct student, Dvořák. In fact, he and Karl Maria Swoboda published Dvořák’s most important work, the posthumous Art History as a History of the Spirit (Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte), as well as other volumes.6 This work is most often interpreted as a close following of Riegl in deterministically locating art production in the developmental state of civilisation. Wilde, however, also 169

participated in the development of Viennese methodology and as noted in the Introduction the creation of the second or ‘new’ school more often associated with Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt. As plans continued for the republication of works by Viennese masters, a reassessment of them took place, reaching a head in the 1929 edition of Riegl’s Gesammelte Aufsätze, in which Sedlmayr sought to capture the wide ramifications of the founding father’s approach.7 Interestingly, Sedlmayr thanks Wilde for the formulation of the central points in the book.8 In a summary of art historical events happening in Vienna, Maria Hirsch (who had contributed an essay to the first volume of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen9) wrote for the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte about lectures by Sedlmayr, Bruno Fürst, Karl Maria Swoboda, and two by Wilde (on ‘Michelangelo and Antiquity’, at the Österreichisches Museum, and ‘Giorgione’s “Three Philosophers” ’, at the Urania).10 Thus, it is not surprising that in 1931 Sedlmayr was expecting a contribution from Wilde for volume 2 of the new journal Kunsthistorische Forschungen.11 While Wilde was certainly not a central member of the coterie of theorists, remaining a slightly older and respected practitioner, he clearly did have sympathetic aims.12 Later in England, Pächt and Wilde were respectful colleagues, occasionally consulting on research problems, and Pächt contributed to Wilde’s Festschrift.13 I noted earlier that when Sedlmayr discussed imaginative discussion in his foundational ‘Toward a Rigorous Art History’, and used Pinder’s reconstruction of the Nördlingen altar as a demonstration of intuition, he just as easily could have used Wilde’s of the San Cassiano altarpiece by Antonello da Messina.14 Reconstruction, indeed, was a central concern of Viennese art historians. Wilde himself was everywhere on the lookout for the way in which details of incomplete or improperly restored works could offer clues as to their original condition. He offered an early, important reconstruction of Michelangelo’s 170

Julius tomb project.15 Most famously, in his essay ‘The Hall of the Great Council of Florence’, Wilde reconstructed the approximate size and format of the lost frescoes by Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci for the Sala di Gran Consiglio in the Palazzo Vecchio, undertaken during the Republican phase of government.16 In his unpublished lectures on Venetian art, he noted how in Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice Titian’s Assunta was framed by the chancel screen, and the Pesaro altarpiece is designed for oblique viewing, arguments

Figure 6.1  Interior of the Sistine Chapel (photo: Scala/Art Resource, NY) 171

developed more fully by Thomas Puttfarken and David Rosand.17 Finally, Wilde’s student John White indicates that Wilde lectured on the Upper Church of Assisi and had intuited that the iconographic programme was to be seen from a single viewing position for each of the entire bays and individual scenes.18 Wilde instilled in his students the importance of establishing preferred points of view and deriving principles for reconstruction, resulting in the important works of Shearman on Masaccio’s Pisa Altarpiece, which carried on Wilde’s investigations into the rise of the sacra conversazione, White’s on Duccio’s Maestà and Donatello’s High Altar at the Santo in Padua, Shearman and White’s joint work on the placement of Raphael’s tapestries in the Sistine Chapel, and Juergen Schulz’s various reconstructions of Venetian soffit ensembles.19 For the purposes of this chapter, I want to focus on another classic analysis made by Wilde, of the decoration of the Sistine Chapel, his lecture of 1958 to the British Academy, ‘The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel’ (Figure 6.1). Wilde’s sensible analysis shows eminently how important it is to understand the interrelationship of the various parts prior to profligate iconographic interpretation. The visual evidence of hierarchy and subordination is important for the message of the individual parts. Wilde’s account reinforces the image in space and in particular the aesthetic problem of the relation of the part to the whole – a central Gestalt concern. Function, Parts and Wholes The way that Wilde treated the image in space was by attending in his analyses of monumental works to function or what Pächt called the ‘formal opportunity’ afforded by a work of art: its spatial placement and function that is presumed by artists as they set about their tasks. It can be argued that Wilde’s impressive 172

output (and that of his students), is motivated by a special sensitivity as to what such monuments were intended to do in the first place. Once this is known, questions of iconography take on a new meaning, because the range of meanings is constrained by physical and formal realities according to which only certain iconographic values will make sense. This point really has a much stronger theoretical import because it suggests that formal analysis must be presumed by good iconographic analysis and is the basis of the classic Viennese antipathy to Warbugian iconology in general and the work of Panofsky and Gombrich in particular.20 As we shall see, in Wilde’s case, he engaged mostly with Edgar Wind’s work on Michelangelo. Wilde’s problem was to understand the way in which the various parts of the chapel’s decoration fit together, to better understand how Michelangelo in particular responded in two phases to add and replace frescoes for the ceiling (Genesis, 1508–1512) and then the altar wall (Last Judgement, 1539– 1541). He therefore had to ‘look at the . . . works in their relation to each other as parts of the overall decoration of the same interior’.21 Wilde began his whole enquiry by noting the overall unity to the design, the conscious attempts to maintain unity throughout the various decoration campaigns. This unity created constraints on the later intervention by Michelangelo. Although Wilde was a talented cataloguer – with Arthur Popham he had produced The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle and produced singly the Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Michelangelo and His Studio – he notes that his analysis was not predicated on any new discoveries.22 This approach is consistent with Sedlmayr’s outlining of the traditional fact and evidence gathering in the ‘first’ science of art history. In Wilde’s case, this meant all the documentary evidence about the construction of the Sistine chapel, the dedication and ritual function, the evidence of the 173

various popes and their artists. Indeed, Wilde’s study is curiously like Sedlmayr’s analysis of Borromini because it relied on generally well-known information but constituted an intelligent reconsideration of the significance of all the data, giving it integrative sense. Here, the imagining function is close to Sedlmayr as outlined in his ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’.23 As we have seen, Sedlmayr therein distinguished between a first science of art history based on fact collecting and a second science of imaginative intuition. In the second, it was possible to account for ‘previously unexplained aspects of the permanent, objective condition of the work’. After compiling all the data, Wilde had to motivate his observations in another direction. He thought about the new context as an artist. How would an artist fill the space? How would he respond to the prevailing lighting? How would he respond to the prior decoration and its overall tonality, brightness and hue? Rather than begin with the personality of Michelangelo, he stressed the continuity in liturgy, function and therefore decoration. Therefore, he turned to history: the Sistine Chapel was built by Sixtus IV in the 1470s, both as a chapel and as a bastion to defend the papal palace as a refuge. The interior was smooth, awaiting painted decoration and the only articulation was the chancel screen marking the separation of the presbytery and space for the laity, which was marked also raised by a step. The benches in the presbytery were one step higher as well, as was the altar, and that whole side of the chapel received light from two windows, later covered by Michelangelo’s Last Judgement, privileging it over the whole chapel. Wilde first noted that the original decoration – consisting in a fictive tapestry on the first level, the parallel narratives or Moses and Christ on the next, and then a series of popes between the windows. The windows, with their lunettes above them, create an interruption in the vault, relieved by a spandrel, and the springing of the vaulting between each window makes a 174

natural division that was indeed taken advantage of by Sixtus IV’s artists who sent fictive piers down the height of the wall. Wilde observes that moving upward from the fictive tapestries to the shallow narratives to the popes in illusionistic niches, the chapel’s ‘real and suggested plasticity increases’.24 The reader can already anticipate how Michelangelo would take this cue and simply expand this plasticity. The value of Wilde’s observations creates a sense of already formed ‘visual order’. For example, even though each scene has its own centred perspective, they are all bathed in consistent lighting issuing from the altar wall. In addition, Wilde notes the subtle way in which the artists have centred on each wall two sets of three bays each, more or less separated by the chancel screen. The centre of each bay has on the lower level a tapestry of pale gold and white, surrounded on each side by one that is dark gold and deep red. In addition, the narratives at the centre of each of these ‘interior façades’ has a field anchored by a substantial architectural element. This creates two sub-wholes along each nave wall. Passing on to Sixtus’s nephew, Julius II, we enter the phase of Michelang­ elo’s first campaign of decoration. We have seen that when Michelangelo began to paint, he found a largely complete set of decoration that required him to adapt a ceiling scheme to a pre-existing series of friezes. This he did as ‘a kind of attic storey added to the chapel walls’.25 In spite of the irresistible power of Michelangelo’s forms – and the historiographic hearsay about his personality – Wilde finds that there are a number of ways in which the artist has maintained continuities with his predecessors, thus maintaining the persistent function of the space. First, Wilde notes that the fictive cornice that Michelangelo painted in order to frame the narrative scenes from Genesis on the vault aligns with the windows. As one looks at the ceiling along the axis of the chapel, then, the ceiling appears anchored to the scheme of the walls. According to Wilde, 175

Michelangelo also understood that the viewpoint of each of the original scenes stood opposite each on the ground. As one stood at the stone benches lining the side of the chapel, one could best see each story and it made perfect sense for that same viewer simply to look up to see the ceiling frescoes.26 Accordingly, Michelangelo adjusted the thrones of the prophets and seers to meet the viewer’s gaze at the same right angle (Figure 6.2). In terms of lighting as well, the quattrocento artists had used the light from the two altar wall windows as the real source to model their figures illusionistically. This Michelangelo did too, when painting his ancestors, prophets and seers, and narratives. The result is a great ‘consistency of

Figure 6.2  ‘The spectator’s viewpoint’, after Wilde, 1958, figure 3 (photo: by permission of the British Academy) 176

lighting’, which helps ‘the eye in moving from one section to the next within the system’; but Wilde adds that ‘it is, at the same time, the most effective factor in harmonizing the two systems’.27 Finally, Wilde noted how Michelangelo’s depiction of the Creation scenes fit the existing structure of the chapel, with the presbytery separated into two spaces by a chancel screen (still existing but having been moved since then). If Wilde makes a good case for the continuity of the ceiling in terms of the rest of the chapel, it would appear a much more difficult task for the Last Judgement. Not only does the Last Judgement actually efface the earlier decoration – the tapestries, the narrative, the popes and Michelangelo’s own two lunettes – it exchanges the faux architectural scheme for one uniform, otherworldy blue background. When Wilde delivered his lecture, Tolnay was preparing to argue for a strong break in the iconography from a ‘resurrection’ to a ‘judgement of souls’.28 In short, the commission seemed to bend to Michelangelo’s powerful will. Nevertheless, Wilde in a brief but telling account of the Last Judgement, stressed continuity over rupture, and the consistent extension of earlier ideas rather than any bold new departure. Indeed, Wilde suspected an early conception for the Last Judgement, which was later upheld by his student Shearman, implying it was always intended for the space.29 Wilde made the following formal arguments that argued for continuity. For one, according to his reconstruction of the lost altar wall, Michelangelo’s Christ coincided spatially with the earlier quattrocento Christ. The unified field of the Last Judgement further loosely lines up with the bands of decoration the side walls; earth and the damned correspond to the tapestries, those being resurrected or damned appear on the second (with the histories), the saints and Christ coincide with the popes, and the instruments of the passion are concentrated within the lunettes. 177

Wilde’s analysis of how both Michelangelo’s Genesis scenes and Last Judgement were accommodated to an essentially quattrocento scheme cannot be passed over lightly. While we may appreciate his attempt to place iconographic interpretation within bounds, one might also argue that he is guilty of a ‘modernist’ outlook in implying an organic, ‘whole system’ (not without some irony, as he worked so hard to overcome the typical sin of his peers of treating parts of an ensemble as an easel picture).30 Yet as we have seen, Wilde was painfully aware of this problem of the historicity of a unified view and had found instances of a unified approach to interior decoration in the Upper Church of Assisi, and elsewhere. We have a right to be suspicious of arguments for aesthetic unity with the church – for usually such concerns turn out to be anachronistic. Nevertheless, Wilde’s argument are not based on romantic notions of organic wholeness but rather basic perceptual features of unitisation and subordination. An Erudite Chapel? As the primary chapel of the popes, many formed of theological study, it is natural to try to find universal and partisan (for example, Franciscan) meanings therein. Due to the fact that the Sistine Chapel is a unicum, it is difficult to judge the decorative choices made within it, as the chapel has few peers with which to compare it and the conventions used to decorate it. There is no question that the chapel is invested with layers of significance for the patient viewer. The real question is what did the average sixteenth-century visitor – by which we mean the curia – need to know to understand its basic function? As Wilde makes clear we must understand the basic orientation of the ceiling frescoes as representing the word ante legam, following the Creation and Fall of Mankind, awaiting the period depicted on the side walls sub lege – under 178

Moses – and then sub gratia – under Christ. As we have seen, formally the frescoes already respect fundamental breaks marked by the entry into the sanctuary. Furthermore, viewers would have understood the parallel between Noah and Adam, another ‘first man’, as they would have understood Noah as a type for Christ and the Flood as a kind of baptism, preparing a new epoch. Wilde’s contemporaries, about whom he is relatively quiet, were interested instead in hidden and abstruse symbolism. Arthur Popham, Wilde’s future collaborator, had already responded to Tolnay’s early iconological works on Northern Renaissance art – Bosch and Bruegel – with a common-sense

Figure 6.3  Michelangelo, Deluge, Sistine Chapel, Vatican (photo: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY) 179

sensibility.31 When Wilde arrived in England, the two shared a common negative reaction to Tolnay’s new works on the multi-series books on Michelangelo.32 Tolnay had heavily interpreted the frescoes in terms of Neoplatonic philosophy, finding a deeper significance. This represented a cousin of Panofskyan iconology, dependent on the Zeitgeist. Even Otto Kurz – perhaps reflecting similar views of Gombrich – thought Tolnay had gone too far. Something similar could be said for the less speculative but more minute interpretations of Edgar Wind. Although Wind never produced a major work on the religious symbolism of Michelangelo,33 which his peers were expecting, in a number of articles he presented dense arguments about the Sistine ceiling, which Ben Thomas calls, a ‘magnificent concordance resonating with multiple, mystical meanings’.34 For example, of the Ark of Noah, Wind picks out references – Medea, Hercules and Antaeus – and reflects on the representation of non-despairing souls who are excluded from the ark.35 Wind dutifully sent reprints of this article to his colleagues, Wilde among them. He thanked Wind and complimented him on the article, yet asked, ‘how many of the connotations you are able to point out were actually thought of by the artist, how many only by his theological advisors, and how many, perhaps, by neither’. Wilde ended by recommending ‘following the logic of their form as well’.36 These words are very similar to those from Wilde’s lectures, which were published by his students as Michelangelo: Six Lectures. Wilde calls the materials collected by Wind and Frederick Hartt ‘overwhelming, in its cumulative effect perhaps somewhat bewildering’. Admitting it has some bearing on the ceiling, and not denying that Michelangelo could have been helped by ‘some learned theologian’, and yet, he says, the question remains: ‘how much of what may have been present in the mind of Michelangelo’s scholarly helper did actually find its way into the work; and how far was that transformed by the artist?’37 180

I have focused on the Deluge because it has been confirmed to have been the first scene painted, and generally supposed to have left Michelangelo somewhat unhappy such that he ceased painting with deep, perspectival space and in the subsequent Sacrifice of Noah and Drunkenness of Noah adopted a more relief-like solution.38 The details of the Deluge are consequently extremely difficult to make out from the floor, and even with the larger format the deep space commits Michelangelo to painting extremely small figures. It is not so much a question of whether there was an iconographic plan, then, as to its significance. This is the old problem of the intentional fallacy.39 Just because an artist intended that meanings be found in a work, does not mean that they actually are to be found. Put another way, one could affix conventional meanings to each element of a work but there would require an artistic decision to give thematic prominence to that element. It is interesting that Wilde uses the term ‘connotations’, as it implies a secondary importance. In hermeneutic theory, the art historian would be interested in the meaning, while such connotations would merely be added significance given to the work. 40 ‘Connotations’ and additional ‘significance’ are important but not the primary story. They enrich the meaning on repeated encounters but do not define the primary encounter. Looking at the Deluge, our knowledge of these elements would not enrich what we see as they would be true of any representation of the Deluge. The image ends up being quite generic. The tiny ark – even if it resembles the Sistine chapel itself – is difficult to see. The groups – resigned or panicking – are hard to make out. What has Michelangelo stressed? He has stressed the inevitable necessity of the end of the world, awaiting a new beginning with Moses’s law. There is nothing particularly specific about how Michelangelo has depicted this narrative beyond the cleansing water, and the indication of death. 181

Thinking along these lines presumes an important methodological assumption: that the contemporary historian can rely on her judgement to assess artistic decisions. Without this presumption, the floating work is an indeterminate object. When size, materials and handling are not taken into account anything is possible. Any iconography can become plausible given a compelling textual source. The Wilde take is different. The physicality or embodiment of the work dictates certain possibilities for its own execution and meaning. As I will suggest, the artist must activate phenomenally a mere geometric possibility. This can be illustrated with further emphasis on parts and wholes in visual experience. Gestalt, Parts and Wholes Although parts and wholes were an important part of Sedlmayr’s analysis of Borromini’s San Carlo, the method clearly is central to Wilde’s analysis of the Sistine Chapel. Repeatedly, he notes how sections are articulated individually and then regroup into larger ensembles; within the ‘whole system’, images are linked, ‘larger units’ are formed. He concludes by discussing ‘factors in the visual order which create harmony between the parts and the whole’. The visual order is obviously the visual sense. No invocation of Gestalt psychology but an acceptance of its phenomenological method of analysis. Wilde was heavily influenced by the proponents of the Geisteswissen­ schaften  – Dilthey, Rickert and Windelband; he owned the 1922 edition of Dilthey’s famous Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften (Introduction to the Human Sciences)41 in which Dilthey had spoken of the person as a psycho­ physical whole, and in his important essay of 1894 Dilthey had proposed a descriptive psychology that was opposed to an analytic psychology, that began with the whole before abstracting to its constituent parts. 42 This 182

proto-phenomenological position was acknowledged both by Husserl and the Gestaltists, who recognised in Dilthey’s philosophy an important antireductivist predecessor.43 As noted, the ontology of parts and wholes – mereology – was a mainstay of both Austrian philosophy and Gestalt theory. The analysis of special wholes (Gestalten) and dependent parts (Gestaltqualitäten) led also to parts as parts. In 1934, Max Wertheimer had published a short article in which he distinguished between the ‘arbitrary component’ (Einzelinhalt) and the ‘necessary part’ (Teil).44 In 1954, in his Art and Visual Perception, Arnheim had called the latter ‘genuine parts’. The analysis was central to the Gestalt approach to what can be called the normativity of perception, where certain things ‘belong’ to each other or are ‘required’, a notion developed also by Merleau-Ponty. As part of the Gestalt critique of physicalist analyses of perception, it is not possible to argue that mere physical adjacency or geometric similarity have phenomenal import. Wertheimer used the figure below to explain a necessary part (Figure 6.4). The line ‘D’ in the second figure repeats the angle

II.

I.

A

D

C B Fig. 167

Fig. 168

Figure 6.4 Max Wertheimer, ‘necessary’ and ‘arbitrary’ parts, from Wertheimer (1934) diagram (photo: Zeitschrift für Psychology) 183

of the vertex ‘A’, ‘B’ in the first figure. In addition, if we were to connect the end of ‘D’ across the open space to meet line ‘A’, we would close a parallelogram. Nevertheless, ‘D’ looks out of place, arbitrary. Its geometric credentials do not distinguish itself phenomenologically. In the order of experience, such ‘distal’ properties are meaningless. In pictorial perception the same is true. The mere adjacency of two figures, or the fact that two have a gaze that in terms of inclination might suggest that they are looking at each other, does not mean that phenomenally they are perceived as such. Because two scenes are seen together – think of the narratives next to each other meeting at the Sistine Chapel’s chancel screen, The Calling of the First Apostles and The Sermon on the Mount – does not mean that they are not grouped more properly into the ‘interior façades’ that Wilde outlined. Thematic connections that are made phenomenally can over­ride iconographic connections, which like geometric links, need to be activated phenomenally. Or, more properly, iconographic links need to be expressed phenomenally. Hence, Wilde’s argument that ideas must be ‘transformed by the artist’. As we saw in our analysis, the links that Wind had proposed were simply intellectual – the equivalent of ‘distal’ energy in perception. Their existence in physical space is no guarantee that they become perceptually salient. The artist has to seek to link visually two elements. For example, the association of Hercules and Antaeus in the Deluge would need to be thematised more and the parallel of antique to Christian meaning to be remarked upon. The salvific water is known to be related to baptism but not shown to be related in any way. The wood of the Ark is similarly known to represent the sacrifice of death but is not likened to Christ’s death in any significant way. These meanings are latent and not directly thematised. Wilde’s critique of iconology does not reject it outright, like the Gestaltists critique of traditional psychophysics does not entail no respect for the 184

stimulus. The problem is that if we begin an analysis on physicalist presumptions – for example, assuming that a raw symbol in a picture must by necessity be active – then we have seriously underestimated perception and symbol­ ism. True to Gestalt theory’s treatment of phenomenology as a propadeutic to psychological science, no doubt Wilde would hold that a proper stage of preliminary Strukturforschung would be necessary for any proper iconographic analysis. It has been the aim of this chapter to demonstrate the essentially structural orientation of Johannes Wilde’s art historiography, due to his training in Vienna and loosely allied aims with the Sedlmayr-Pächt group. Wilde’s main production, however, occurred later in England where he made seminal contributions to reconstructing the decoration of the Sistine Chapel using an inferential method sketched by Sedlmayr. In his analysis of the space of the Sistine Chapel, he showed the way in which basic divisions and groupings constrained meaning, and which affected Michelangelo substantially in his first foray painting the ceiling (1508–1512) and then again when he painted the Last Judgement (1539–1542). The overall structure of the chapter suggested basic ways of continuing the prior decorative scheme and Wilde thereby demonstrated a strong gradualist case for Michelangelo’s decoration fitting into the prior decoration quite harmoniously. Wilde differed from Sedlmayr in explaining how the image relates to its environment, the Image in Space. The latent problem of mereology discussed by Sedlmayr became a major preoccupation with the Sistine chapel, as its various elements and their groupings was considered by Wilde, creating the necessary framework for deeper symbolism.

185

7. Otto Demus, Byzantine Art and the Spatial Icon The images of mid-Byzantine church decoration are related to each other and formed into a unified whole, not by theological and iconographical concepts only, but also by formal means which create an all-embracing optical unity. Otto Demus, ‘The Methods of the Byzantine Artist’. When attention began to turn towards the second or New Vienna School, scholars grouped researchers together in an inclusive approach. Thus, Fritz Novotny’s work on Cezanne was included in Christopher Wood’s Vienna 186

School Reader, even though Novotny had been a product of Strzygowski’s Institute and not (the descendent of) Riegl’s.1 Subsequently, his membership in the second Vienna School has been questioned.2 The same issue faces another student of Stzrygowsky: Otto Demus. Nevertheless, in the following I will emphasise Demus’s academic socialisation after completing his university training, whereupon he actually did teach at the University of Vienna with Pächt. By the 1960s, the ‘two Ottos’ of course would become famous for having offered one of the most formidable medieval art programmes in the world. As I will argue, Demus’s work fits quite well with the second Viennese school to the degree that his work is focused on an understanding of the work of art or monument as a functional whole. Parts and their relationship are understood, or in the case of a lost work, intuited by way of reconstruction. In addition, technical knowledge is used in order to judge initial states of objects so that the universal working of perception will be accurate based on these same givens. I propose to explain Demus’s methodology through his most famous contribution: an exegesis of the structure and function of Byzantine mosaics. I will show that his approach, which has been linked to Riegl in a casual way, can be aligned in a more rigorous way. After reviewing Demus’s career, I will pass on to his important interpretation of Byzantine mosaic decoration in terms of negative perspective and the icon in space. These considerations challenge traditional notions of the self-sufficient image and mark the passage of the image as space. If Wilde had placed the image into its relational context, Demus instead marked the movement of figure and ground into new spatial configurations. In this, Demus shows perhaps most compellingly of all the Viennese art historians related to Strukturforschung that notions of ‘image’ and ‘picture’ cannot be taken for granted and it is a perceptual-cognitive notion of organising space that makes artistic meaning and style possible. 187

Towards Byzantine Mosaic Decoration Demus, like Wilde, wrote methodologically sophisticated history, but was not himself like Pächt or Sedlmayr a theorist. He does not even seem to have been as reflective in his reading as was Wilde. Part of this is compounded by the fact that while Demus trained in Vienna he was not in Schlosser’s Institute, the home of Dvořák and Riegl. Of course, one can argue that he would have been quite aware of what was going on there, but this cannot explain his eventual theoretical position. Indeed, one can note that during the preparation of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, neither Novotny nor Demus was asked to contribute to the journal.3 Nevertheless, although he was Strzygowski’s student and the two institutes were relatively discrete, it is quite easy to link many of Demus’s guiding themes to an approach derived from Riegl and issues of spectatorship.4 It appears that there was a thaw between the two institutes once Strzygowski retired in 1933. For in 1935 we see that Demus was in contact with Karl Maria Swoboda and examining Dvořák’s Nachlass, which he studied for opinions on San Marco and Byzantine art.5 In that early work, Die Mosaiken von San Marko, there is one very tantalising bit of evidence, a citation of the art theorist Gustaf Britsch, who is interesting in that he would come to be regarded as a pioneer in the psychology of art by Rudolf Arnheim. Shortly thereafter, Demus actually taught alongside Sedlmayr at the University of Vienna after serving in the provincial monuments service from 1930–1936. At this time, as we have seen, Sedlmayr had been drifting away from his early experience but clearly Demus would have been able to see in person one version of Strukturforschung.6 Appropriately, at this time Demus and Novotny have reviews that appear in the final number of the Kritische Berichte.7 Blaha pointed out how Novotny was influenced in his work on Cezanne by the 188

surface-depth account of space that Pächt provided in his paper on ‘Gestalt­ ungsprinzipien’. It is tempting that Demus was similarly influenced by Pächt, however, in his work on Michael Pacher and the idea of the ‘vollräumliches Gebilde’. The synthesis of Byzantine mosaic decoration then becomes a kind of Byzantine Gestaltungsprinzipien. Contrary to some accounts, Demus did actually work into the postAnschluss era for the Federal Monuments Office, forced to help confiscate the property of Jews for the state.8 However, he left the country in 1939. In some senses, he is the opposite of Sedlmayr because, while both were gentiles, Demus definitively washed his hands of Nazism. Under the ruse of visiting the Byzantine conference in Sicily in 1939, Demus emigrated and moved to London, where he worked within the Warburg Library, lecturing at the Courtauld. There, he met or was reacquainted with Johannes Wilde. In the spring of 1940, all German men living in Great Britain were placed in a camp in Canada, and there Wilde and Demus definitively shared perspectives. In particular, Demus shared his ideas on optical correction in Byzantine mosaic decoration with Wilde, who exchanged his own knowledge of the evidence of the survival of such tactics in Venetian Renaissance painting.9 We know this because in Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, Demus notes drawings by the Venetian painter, Sebastiano del Piombo, that show corrections for proper viewing in a cupola, brought to his attention by Wilde.10 What is important to point out, and already evident of course by his book’s publication date of 1948, is that Demus hardly obtained some new perspective upon joining Pächt in Vienna in 1963. To someone aware of Wilde’s emerging work on Michelangelo (and Sedlmayr’s discussions of Borromini and Pächt’s of Pacher, or the schools of Late Gothic painting), it is clear that Demus is responding to the same idea of dependence of spatial parts upon a whole context, a sense of the spatial whole in which he sees the artist responding. 189

However, there is a big difference that can be discerned by studying the platform that Demus develops in Byzantine Mosaic Decoration. The Icon in Space Demus’s achievement is outlining a fundamental mode of visuality typical of Middle Byzantine decoration. To the degree that he was dealing with a general approach his approach was something like Pächt’s for late medieval painting. One could call Demus’s principles of mural decoration the Gestaltungsprinzip of the Middle Byzantine church. However, if Demus’s colleague Johannes Wilde explained the image in space, Demus showed how the image could function as space itself. In turning to Byzantine art, he usefully showed how the sensitivity to the functional and formal arrangement of artistic elements in a monument could disclose a fundamentally different visuality. The previous three chapters have investigated the relational and Gestalt character of the work’s internal structure, the effect of its juxtaposition with other works, and its placement in space. Demus’s move is more radical but still within the bounds of Gestalt restructuring. When the image detaches from the wall and begins to inhabit our space, we see a species of anamorphosis where the new spatial percept is simpler than our traditional immured image. As we will see, such extreme restructurings are ideal for considering art beyond the west. First, it is worth reflecting on what especially Otto Pächt and others brought to the study of Late Gothic painting. They were uniquely able, on Riegl’s precedent, to understand the art in a non-anachronistic way, avoiding any retrospective fallacy. Riegl had argued that Byzantine art was a necessary weigh-station (Durchgangsphase) on the way to modernity. What would it mean to take a late medieval point of view, with its emphasis on pictorial 190

surface pattern (rather than the so-called Albertian window), and move it even earlier? This would require moving back from linear to proto-perspective to a kind of what Demus would call negative or preventive perspective, using corrections. This is Demus’s answer to the long-standing question over ‘inverted’ perspective.11 What all of these approaches have in common is the belief that these early forms of art have the ability to induce depth without consistent geometry.12 Demus took for granted the immanence theory, according to which divinity resides in the Byzantine image. Even if many scholars have questioned whether there is magical emanation from the prototype to the image, the crucial element for Demus was that these elements bear similarity. The situation that the Byzantine viewer is faced with is maintaining an unbroken relationship with the cult image. As Demus showed, the artists were quite sophisticated in responding to this feature – another element of Viennese theorising. They used optical or empirical means to ‘correct’ images. In the words of Alberto Perez-Gomez and Louise Pelletier, ‘undistorted presence had ontological priority over any sort of distorted appearance, regardless of medium or diverse artistic objectives’.13 The type of optical correction investigated by Demus is a form of empirical perspective no different from the skenographia or scaenographia used in antiquity from Philon (third century BCE), to Vitruvius (first century BCE) and Proclus (fifth century CE) to make high-up sculptures, stage scenery and architectural elements appear correct from a distance.14 For Proclus, scaenografia is ‘showing how objects can be represented by images that will not seem disproportionate or shapeless when seen at a distance or on an elevation’.15 In a Byzantine context, after the iconoclastic controversy, a predominantly sculptural discourse was shifted to painting and mosaic. There is no record of this practice; however, an echo of this discourse is given in 191

John Tzetzes’s twelfth-century text recounting the sculptural competition of Pheidias and Alkamenes (well over a milleneum after the fact!), where he notes Pheidias’s successful optical corrections, which on the ground looked grotesque but when seen upon an elevated column were perfect.16 One of Demus’s examples is the twelfth-century apse mosaic in Torcello Cathedral (Figure 7.1).17 All the figures appear the same from the nave of the church but when examined from within the apse itself it can be seen that the lateral figures are extremely wide so as to subtend the same visual angle from the nave.

Figure 7.1  Apostles, twelfth century, Cathedral, Torcello (photo: © José Luiz Bernardes Ribeiro, CC BY-SA 4.0) 192

This observation serves Demus’s larger conclusion about mosaic deco­ ration that figures occupy real, not illusionistic, space. They are ‘spatial’ icons (Raum-Ikonen).18 They address the viewer as if appearing in the apse dome and can interact from pendentive to pendentive. There is not space within the picture; the church itself is a kind of ‘picture space’ (Bildraum). Demus’s example here is the Annunciation scene from Daphne (Figure 7.2). There, the announcing angel Gabriel speaks across physical space to the next pendentive to the Virgin Mary. This emphasis on presence reflects Byzantine theology, but it also satisfied a naïve approach to picturing, according to which the image is manipulated to improve its spatial efficacy. Demus contrasts the west­ern artist with the Byzantine artist: The western artist . . . subjected his figures to the laws of perspective . . . He created an illusion of space whereas the Byzantine artist aimed at eliminating the optical accidents of space. Western practice leads to a picture of reality, Byzantine practice to preserving the reality of the image.19 But it must be recognised that a particular task creates this kind of special space. One first must desire to keep the depicted objects and personages life-sized, with human presence, for them to remain ecologically salient. Then, it is relatively easy for the artists to imagine how to preventatively alter the figures to preserve their presence. The figures, we might say, are ‘unbounded’, and this is the primary difference between these mural figures and those panel paintings and miniatures that Pächt (and White) studied.20 193

How has Demus’s thesis fared? Demus peppers his text with numerous illustrations, but other examples have been observed and noted by other scholars. For example, of spatial icons, one can note the Life of Peter (midtwelfth century) in the Cappella Palatina, Palermo, or later the Last Judgement in the Chora Paraklession (1321 CE).21 In Palermo, saints occupy space across architectural units and in the Chora the whole interior becomes a grand symphony of activity. Of optical correction, one can note the ­Crucifixion in the Tokali kilise (tenth century), where the arms of the

Figure 7.2  Annunciation, c. 1000, Church of Dormition, Daphni (photo: author) 194

crucifixion are manipulated to appear correct against the curvature of the vault.22 This system, to repeat, operates on direct lines of sight that are not pictorialised. Figures speak to figures. Figures are stretched or curved to appear straight. This is all possible with the empirical observer. It is not geometry of the drafting table but ad hoc, of sight lines in situ. Many subsequent authors have further stressed the transitive relationship between mosaics and viewers, light, colour, sound, and the bodily communication with the image, but the simple optical connection remains decisive for understanding such images.23 Beyond Byzantine Mosaic Decoration? If Demus’s account of Middle Byzantine mosaic decoration has been happily assimilated into the discipline, if enriched with more sense-modalities and broader ideas of communion, this does not mean he has not had his detractors. For example, his usage of Italian examples has been challenged, because he too easily assumed that such works were made by Greek craftsmen and therefore inherently ‘Byzantine’ in some way.24 Demus’s inability to keep up with the times might fall under what Robert Nelson calls Demus’s ‘modernist concern for form’.25 In addition to this potential blindness to provinces, other laments one might wish to express with Demus have to do with recent emphases on the way in which Byzantine and Italian Byzantine-style decoration was evolving in directions traditionally ascribed to western art. For example, Hans Bloemsma shows how the very mosaics discussed by Demus in his beloved San Marco already display an emphasis on affective spirituality.26 In a similar way, Bloemsma shows how already in Byzantine art there was a movement 195

occurring from the idea of an icon as ‘sign’ to a narrative as ‘symbol’. Thomas Dale seconds this with the idea that these scenes move away from the ‘spatial icon’ towards an icon in space, that is, a traditional western notion of pictorial space.27 In spite of such criticisms, we can see the fundamental benefit provided by Demus, which is to rethink the mode of pictorial visuality we utilise. Not only does this help us to appreciate Demus’s contribution, it helps us to contrast him with his contemporaries. The claim of the school of Strukturforschung was that without sufficiently developed formal tools it would be impossible to connect works together either stylistically or iconographically. Panofsky has also come in for criticism and we can extend this criticism but in this case in the direction of style rather than (as with Pächt) iconography. Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form has attracted no shortage of attention and criticism.28 It is a teleological account of the slow conquering of pictorial space and explains the way in which modern images relay an artificial sense of symbolism unknown to the ancients. The post-antique world inherited the notion of seeing the world in a picture, as if through a window. To that was added the idea of rational space and a fixed viewer. Paradoxically, this achievement moved the viewer away from natural seeing, yet it thereby achieved modernity. Panofsky has been noted to assume an a priori understanding of the very category of work of art; what we can add here is some specificity as to what kind of image he not only presumed, but also neglected. For Demus, to understand the Byzantine image one had to suspend the Latin notion of the bounded image. As he discusses Byzantine images, however, Panofsky never shows in any way that he can think beyond the frame of the painting or mosaic in question. ‘Byzantine art could not decide’, he explains, ‘to form the world in a completely linear rather than a painterly 196

fashion’.29 For Panofsky, the Byzantine artist is fatally caught in the heritage of antiquity, which it cannot escape entirely; it uses its tools but does not understand their import. Byzantine space, as a result, ‘never ceased somehow to suggest space, even if they no longer encompassed space’.30 Space is ‘held in readiness’ for the Renaissance. Of course, Panofsky presumed the model of antiquity – the joining of form and iconographic content – that caused medieval art to be deficient on many counts in his ‘principle of disjunction’, and we see this applied to space as well.31 But in the case of Demus’s icon in space, it causes Panofsky to fundamentally underestimate the Byzantine inheritance even in the Renaissance. Recall that Demus’s discussions with Wilde suggested that optically corrective workshop techniques survived in Italy.32 Scaenographia had existed since antiquity and continues today with any form of building where a viewer cannot move to obtain a clearer view of an artistic object. Sight lines are extremely simple features found in urban design, when one seeks to make an element of a city visible in another space. Recalling the citation that Demus makes of Wilde’s observations on Venetian dome painting, we can understand quite easily that the problem of the negative perspective never really goes away. More importantly, we might follow Demus and also say that in murals, the real presence of the icon in space never loses its relevance. Here, I am not talking about the common existence of sculpture groups (for example, medieval Depositions) that involved spectators. Nor am I talking about the typical thematic relation between frescoes that we see in spaces of Italian chapels, refectories and other spaces. Rather, I am talking about the expectation that a painted figure breaks out into space. This means that instead of looking at the morphing of Byzantinising practice into a Giottesque practice, we should seek out the older formal operations in the newer art, alongside those that are newer. 197

As an example, we have Filippo Lippi’s interesting practice of continuing the composition of the stories of the martyrdom of John the Baptist and St Stephen across space in the choir of Prato Cathedral (Figure 7.3). Lippi is understood as a consolidator of perspective and the unified format of the tavola quadrata.33 Yet in Prato, he had joined two images at an angle: to the left the executioner holding a stone and to the right Stephen, kneeling awaiting his death. The practice could be chalked up to ingenuity or a search for everimmersive illusion.34 In any case, it is treated as unique and such a practice has

Figure 7.3  Filippo Lippi, chancel corner, 1452–1465, Duomo, Prato (photo: Sailko, CC BY-SA 3.0) 198

never been integrated into standard accounts of fifteenth-century perspective. Nevertheless, the pictorial practice does have a history and is seen earlier in Avignon in the fourteenth century, in the frescoes by Matteo Giovanetti in the Chambre du Cerf and Chartreuse.35 But it is also seen before that in Palermo, and obviously a species of the icon in space outlined by Demus. If Renaissance space included optical correction for in situ murals, and even the image in space, then Panofsky’s notion of Renaissance perspective should have looked beyond the frame of the picture. In other words, Panofsky has misunderstood even the nature of mature perspective and naturalism because he did not understand the Byzantine inheritance of negative perspective and the image in space. The very historicity of the concept of ‘image’ was fluid and would have to be appreciated before one could meaningfully speak of any development of space. Pächt’s understanding of the patterned image occurring before the conquest of space is radicalised to include the very idea of ground or support. If the previous example of a latent image in space conditioned later practices, the same is true of Demus’s negative perspective. I have already drawn attention to the fact that Johannes Wilde had pointed out to Demus how the practice of accommodation of distortion continued in Venetian vault painting in the sixteenth century. What is significant here is the disastrous consequence of failing to appreciate the consequences of viewpoint for iconographic interpretation. For Demus, the icon in space is itself iconographic because one must feel oneself in the midst of a holy community to appreciate the significance of the individual images. Even in the case of negative perspective, however, one would have to occupy the privileged position lest one misinterpret a detail incorrectly. For example, the elongated hands of a Pantokrator – stretched to subtend more of a visual angle from down the apse – would have no iconographic significance at all. 199

Of the mosaics of San Vitale in Ravenna (sixth century CE), Panofsky had written that ‘here we can observe quite plainly the disintegration of the perspectival idea’ (p. 48). He illustrated the mosaic of Abraham Receiving the Angel (The Hospitality of Abraham) and The Sacrifice of Isaac to illustrate that the space is no longer unlimited and also that the altar table is rendered incorrectly, becoming larger towards us (‘reverse perspective’). Yet psychologists have demonstrated that such non-parallel forms can appear parallel from an

Figure 7.4  Digital image (after Michelangelo), Moses, 1513–1545, seen from worm’s eye view, from the front (angle after Rosenthal, 1964, figure 6) 200

oblique angle, and that is exactly what one sees when one approaches the apse of San Vitale. Perhaps it is a novel form of ‘perspective’ (more akin to optics), but it is only appreciated away from the picture’s frontal plane.36 A perspectival analogue to Filippo Lippi’s frescoes might be Michelangelo’s early projects for the Julius tomb, also studied by Wilde (Figure 7.4). As pointed out by Earl Rosenthal, Anton Springer first argued that the statue of Moses, installed by Michelangelo himself in San Pietro in Montorio after significantly limiting the scope of the tomb project, should be viewed from a lower angle as the artist intended it originally to be displayed on a second story.37 Even Springer only reproduced the statue from the line of Moses’s foot, and few scholars took seriously the consequences of such a change of viewpoint. For Rosenthal, the incorrect view had contributed to a view of Moses full of ‘tension and anger’. Consequently, commentators had sought out icon­og­ raphies – that is, biblical stories – that could support such a view. One such story was the return of Moses from Mount Sinai when he saw the Israelites dancing around the Golden Calf, arousing his anger. Panofsky attributed this to gossipy Baroque authors and acknowledged the importance of viewpoint writing in Studies in Iconology that such ‘an interpretation . . . would never have been invented had not the statue been banished from its predestined place’.38 Rosenthal notes that Panofsky’s own account of Moses, ‘petrified’ by a Neoplatonic ecstasy that ‘almost kills the body while it enraptures the soul’ also seems to derive from an incorrect view.39 Panofsky and other authors seemed to be responding to perspective distortions that Michelangelo had introduced to resolve the image of Moses correctly at the proper height, contributing to the feeling of intensity or anger that necessitated either an agitated or transformed state of mind. The patriarch’s gaze is extremely intense, owing to the angle created by the forehead. Moses seems to be leaning back and the pose is indeed agitated, 201

the cause of the idea that his pose was unstable, a transitional state preceding some precipitous action. The angle of regard is easy to deduce from the drawings and reconstructions associated with the so-called 1513 tomb project, yet it took until Rosenthal photographed a plaster cast from various positions that he was able to ‘test’ Springer’s hypothesis. From below, indeed, the figure appears much more natural, and the elongations introduced for a low viewer – akin to generations of late medieval and Renaissance Italian sculpture on churches, façades and towers – are absent. In Rosenthal’s words, Moses now appears ‘firmly seated’, and the impression is one of ‘composure, dignity and majesty’. 40 The head shape, gaze, beard all now look more normal. Previous authors, lacking the appropriate viewpoint, invested Michelangelo with Mannerist extravagance, philosophical erudition or anecdotal detail. Losing sight of the convention of viewing and the conventions of making sculpture, they misunderstood the ‘formal occasion’ (Pächt) of the sculpture. If in the previous example of the Filippo Lippi, Panofsky might have misjudged what the image is – judging only the space and perspective within the bounds of the painting – in this case of Moses and the Julius tomb he misjudged where the image lies. In either case, the a priori understanding of just what an image is, and how an image is viewed – both questions left open by Demus and the Vienna School – leads to unfortunate historical consequences where the image is either judged inadequate (Byzantine painting) or overinterpreted (Michelangelo’s Moses). Non-Western Art and Gestalt Restructuring Moving beyond the frame of the image challenges a post-medieval, western mode of vision. But it is one for which vision is flexible. Although Demus did not reference Gestalt theory directly, it is clear that ideas that were in the 202

air – and discussed by Sedlmayr and Pächt – could easily explain what he was observing in the Middle Byzantine church. Effectively, when the Byzantine worshipper entered the church, there was a shift of scale of reference as to what to attend to, figure and ground. As in a traditional figure of a painting against the ground of a wall, the believer did not (solely) pass to a wall and adore the personage depicted therein but expected their whole church to be a ‘ground’ on which to experience the holy ‘figures’. The church has become the living ground. Such shifts were illustrated by Wilde in the Sistine Chapel, as when one saw a bay group into a larger unit, forming a larger figure upon a larger ground. But these were voluntary shifts, induced by a shift of attention. Demus instead was trying to illustrate a western bias for perceiving images as figure and induce a shift or organisation to include a number of images as figure, consequently shifting the ground from the wall to the whole church. Perhaps an analogy may be permitted from the experience of the Gestalt psychologist Rudolf Arnheim in Japan. Arnheim noted that the American is culturally trained on individual bathtubs in which one cleaned oneself, and swimming pools where (presumably) already clean individuals swam. Cleaning is linked to an individual tub. What he realised, he noted, is that the American perceived the group bathtub incorrectly as a large Americanstyle bathtub, in which numerous people were simultaneously cleaning themselves. Instead, it is more akin to a swimming pool.41 In each case, figure and ground is shifted culturally, leading to different results. More readily demonstrable than such ‘gestalt switches’ are cases of spontaneously changing percepts. There are ready examples of such restructurings – changes of order of experience – in perception. For example, Wolfgang Metzger – whose Gesetze des Sehens Pächt studied – published experiments in 1935 on what we would today call the ‘kinetic depth effect’ or 203

more generally ‘shape (or structure) from motion’.42 He placed dowels on a rotating disk that was only visible through a rectangular aperture. When he made the disk rotate, subjects had very impoverished stimuli. Nevertheless, they were able to intuit the full structural configuration. What should have been flat stimuli were seen accurately – through the complexity of the rates of movement – as disks in space.

Figure 7.5  Apparatus of Metzger’s 1935 experiment from the original publication (photo: Psychol­ ogische Forschung)

On first inspection, it was ‘simpler’ to see a configuration of vertical lines. Movement, however, introduced a new degree of complexity that resolved the percept into a new, simpler percept – one of movement. It is useful to consider the movement through the church as sufficient to introduce such changes in an ecologically rich – that is, real – spatial environment. In that case, looking at the stationary dowels would be like looking at a mosaic in a plate in a book. Without access to the mobile view, one would move on to stylistically examining what one saw, or to making inferences about symbolic or iconographic meanings. But the view would only be partial and would falsify the true source of the movement. Closer to the church example, we might think of the famous Ames room. The Ames room uses distortion – like Demus’s ‘negative’ perception – to make 204

something appear other than it is. There is an interesting possibility that a Gestalt psychologist – Fritz Heider – influenced their maker, Adelbert Ames. But his belief that the perception is caused by past experience and custom was challenged by Gestalt psychologists who instead argued that we simply saw what was simpler. The same goes for the Byzantine church. The artist configures it to be simpler to see as an interactive space with figures communicating across it, rather than another way. Perhaps Demus’s example is the most devastating for Iconology and radicalises the critique that Sedlmayr and Pächt had begun. They complained that without a structural research programme we would not know how to attach common symbols to one another, which is borne out by Demus. It is not that we have to learn the convention of the church’s space – that would make Demus’s observations yet another discovery of Iconology. Rather, the per­ ceptual adherence of different patterns of meaning precisely made the convention possible. This last case study on Otto Demus has marked the logical extension of both the image into its environment (Sedlmayr, Wilde) and a class of general images characterised according to a unique Gestaltungsprinzip (Pächt). Specifically, Demus’s account of the Middle Byzantine church interior shows how the image not only changes within a bigger context but can become the space. Such a figure-ground transformation or shift is an ideal way to end as it suggests modes of visuality that are not common sense or tacitly western. Demus’s sensitivity to the very unit of analysis is a lesson for the way in which a formal sense can lead one to intuit and document the contours – the Struktur – of another mode of visuality.

205

Conclusion: The Vienna School Today Art history is awash in ‘theory’ but has no matrix to debate questions. At a moment when art history has searched for a healthier model of balanced theoretical reflection and empirical practice, emblematised by the recent translation of Erwin Panofsky’s early works,1 the second Vienna School emerges as an exemplar with impressive theoretical writings and incisive historical studies. This book has sought to contextualise this school and connect its theoretical commitments to currents of Gestalt theory, in order to better understand its scope and ambitions. Brought under the same umbrella, the New Vienna School is engaged in a dual challenge for the human sciences: to combine natural scientific rigour with hermeneutic understanding. 206

The New Vienna School exercised what I have called ‘analytic holism’, a naturalistic view of the interaction of forms – parts, wholes – in a relational manner amenable to analysis. By transferring the work of art history to the visual, the school emphasised the refinement of tools related to visual analysis. Gestalt theory showed how those tools could be rigorous. Indeed, by being thoroughly sensory, they were the prerequisite for any formalisation of a theory of symbolism or style in art history. This book has tried to stress the reflexive awareness of the tasks of art history by the new Viennese group, a reflexive awareness that it recognised in, and adopted from, Gestalt theory. The balance of theory and practice in the writings of Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt is not accidental, as each saw the positioning of the discipline to be just as important as the work that could be undertaken within it. As I explained, they understood that there were many problematic notions facing a rigorous art history, beginning with the meaning of individual forms and their possible connections. Style history and iconography presented two interpretive practices that ran into methodological difficulties; namely, what parts or works can be compared fruitfully, and what parts or works can we attach ideas to? The final chapter on Otto Demus moved problems of visuality beyond the Latin west, and indeed there are many more directions in which Viennese theory can lead us. Indeed, this school with its obsession with viewing complexes – discovered phenomenologically according to their internal logic – has opened up prospects for all historical schools and even contemporary art. The tendency of art since Robert Rauschenberg, to ‘let the world in’, led to the dissolution of the pictorial surface into the gallery installation space. Important work has sought to connect artists to scholarly efforts in the creation of a neo-Byzantine style.2 But less important than who read Vienn­ ese theory is what is the model of visuality presented in their writings. 207

In his installation at the Detroit Institute of Arts of 1987, The Women of Algiers, Patrick Ireland (Brian O’Doherty) created a series of geometric forms on the walls and a central, virtual ‘box’ structure made up of light ropes suspended with invisible fishing line.3 As one walked around, the shape of the geometry of the trapezoidal ‘portals’ of the cube-like forms morphed and, on both axes of the room, aligned with the wall forms. His installation was recorded in Joel Silvers’s film, The Future of Memory, and it is remarkable that Ireland stood on a ladder and organised the forms on site, joking that ‘Descartes goes out the door’.4 His ad hoc approach is similar to the Byzantine mosaic artist, not by influence, but by purpose. One could argue that these trends, however, are in some profound sense anti-visual. How could that be handled, if at all? To be sure, contemporary art has no shortage of formal elements, but it is true that many of these formal factors facing outward anchor more important, associative content. The prototype of this trend would be Andy Warhol’s attractively striking iconic images, which however are precisely not the point of his work. All one can say is that the formed – gestaltet – element is perhaps beyond the visibly available part of the work and instead to be found in the constellation of thought, the social and political ideas that the work indexes.5 Adopting the naïve attitude of the phenomenologist, the goal of the New Vienna School practitioners is to work through the visuality presumed by some object or artefact, in order to understand how it demands to be used. While the art historian will naturally be biased as to her native cultural and acquired understanding of visual traditions, the logic of practice can override such bias to reveal a configuration or Struktur that is intuitively meaningful. In that sense, there are no limits to Viennese thinking. Thus, the New Vienna School is more than a series of theoretical statements and interpretations. It is a normative approach to the discipline of art 208

history. Built into its procedures is a basic belief about the reflexive aims of art history. The subjects selected are not meant to demonstrate form, Gestalten or Strukturen. Rather, the attentiveness to these elements reveals what is fundamental for preliminary knowledge. Knowing that stylistic periods presume tacit interpretations of individual artists and architects, one has to have a workable definition of a canonical practitioner before writing that history. This was Sedlmayr’s aim in his book on Borromini. Doing justice to phenomena requires leaving the comfort of empiricist theory. This was most evident in Pächt’s discussion of national constants. It is too easy to dismiss his theory as racialist or nationalist. When examined carefully, Pächt has outlined what is necessary to make generalisations about distinct historical traditions. Like definitions about a temporal concept – the ‘Baroque’ – national concepts require articulation, otherwise they remain tacit assumptions that haunt art history. Generally speaking, the notion of wholeness and the irreducible (but analysable) Gestalt begs for phenomenal investigation and cannot in any case be likened to a physical form. The affirmation of a form of organisation is only controversial as long as phenomenal experience is suspected and investigators rely on empiricist methods. Using the spatial and temporal tools of Gestalt theory to disassociate geometric from phenomenal form, Sedlmayr and Pächt were able to affirm that similar forms are only those forms with perceived similarities (Köhler). Likewise, viewing the evolution of forms over time and their mutual interactions cannot be based on geometric identity, but rather phenomenal identity (Lewin). This is the propadeutic for art history, the groundwork necessary before being able to move forward. The result was a phenomenal realism of the work of art grounded in a material realism of the foundations of art – the materials, documents and knowledge about those works. The phenomenal realism extended into history, 209

as a genuinely understood stylistic trait (not mere visual similarity) could affect other works. The result was an apparent determinism, which was not so much that as a series of demonstrated real connections between works solving similar problems. Both Sedlmayr and Pächt used methodological self-awareness to develop their research paradigms. Sedlmayr sought to understand the single personality – Borromini – before being able to speak meaningfully about Baroque architecture. Pächt sought to illuminate the tacitly accepted but never theorised national constants visible in the works of late medieval painters. Each sought some organisational or formative factors (Gestaltungprinzipien) underlying the works they were investigating. Without addressing this factor, unarticulated assumptions would creep into any art history, cloaking intentions and hindering useful results. Johannes Wilde and Otto Demus both knew Sedlmayr and Pächt and worked alongside them at different times. They did not affirm the theoretical basis of the (early) Sedlmayr-Pächt method, but their works fit into the mould of a formal, evolutionary approach to the image. Indeed, each addressed artistic problems closely related to spectatorship and the formal description of the artistic field surrounding the spectator: Wilde analysing salient monuments in Italy, and Demus a classic system of church decoration in Byzantium. Crucially, the students of Wilde and Demus continued a practice that persists to the present day, in the work of important Vienna art historians Konrad Oberhuber and Artur Rosenauer, or the pupils of Johannes Wilde (John White, John Shearman), Demus and others.6 The final hope of this book is to have sufficiently articulated a theoretical and methodological position that allows one to appraise art historical writing according to a set of commitments in order to discover hidden affinities, and opportunities for articulation and clarification, with other approaches sympathetic to form. 210

Too often, traditions of art history are treated as peculiarities that are studied as we wait for the inevitable critical demolition under the gaze of us contemporary eclectics. But we who know too much have too few convictions, and the political consequences of this are not positive since our methods avoid error without generating new knowledge. Art history has to be about something, rather than reactionary narrative or endless criticality. The New Vienna School showed a way to undertake a historical enterprise that was methodologically self-aware. It knew the strengths and shortcomings of the insights it was making, a valuable model for us today.

211

Notes

Introduction: ‘In the Beginning was the Eye, not the Word’ 1. Edward Maeder, ‘The Costumes Worn by the Ancestors of Christ’, in Carlo Pietrangeli, ed., The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994). 2. John Shearman, Developments in the Use of Colour in Tuscan Painting of the Early Sixteenth Century, PhD dissertation, Courtauld Institute, 1957; cf., ‘Isochromatic Colour Composition’, in Marcia Hall, ed., Colour and Technique in Renaissance Painting (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1987), 151–160. 213

3. John Shearman, ‘The Function of Michelangelo’s Colour’, in Carlo Pietrangeli, ed., The Sistine Chapel: A Glorious Restoration (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1994), 86. 4. Otto Pächt, Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis (Munich: Prestel, 1977), 9: ‘Am Anfang war das Auge, nicht das Wort!’ 5. See, for example, Oskar Bätschmann, ‘Logos in der Geschichte. Erwin Panofsky Ikonologie’, in Lorenz Dittmann, ed., Kategorien und Methoden der deutschen Kunstgeschichte 1900–1930 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985), 89–112. 6. Georges Didi-Huberman, Confronting Images: Questioning the Ends of a Certain History of Art, trans. John Goodman (University Park: Penn State University Press, [1990] 2005). 7. On this trend, see the essays collected in Pamela Fraser and Roger Rothman, eds, Beyond Critique: Contemporary Art in Theory, Practice, and Instruction (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). 8. The classic overview of the New Vienna School came in Meyer Schapiro’s review, ‘The New Viennese School’, Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 258–262. Christopher Wood’s volume, with an Introduction, brought new scrutiny to the school: The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books, 2000). Important subsequent discussions have been given by Frederic Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005), 146–178; Evonne Levy, ‘Sedlmayr and Schapiro Correspond, 1930–1935’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 59 (2010): 235–263; Baroque and the Political Language of Formalism (1845–1945): Burckhardt, Wölfflin, Gurlitt, Brinckmann, Sedlmayr (Basel: Schwabe Verlag, 2015), 302–349; Jan Bakoš, Discourses and Strategies: The Role of the Vienna School in Shaping European Approaches to Art History and Related Discourses (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), 11–55; and Branko Mitrovic, Rage and Denials: Collectivist Philosophy, Politics and Art Historiography (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2015). 214

9. See Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (Univers­ ity Park: Penn State University Press, 1992); Margaret Iverson, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993); Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface – Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2006) and Diana Reynolds, Alois Riegl in Vienna, 1875–1905: An Institutional Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2013); Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013). 10. Mine is not an ‘earnest attempt to resuscitate Sedlmayr’s work’ but first and foremost an attempt to understand merely its first phase properly. When talk of ‘essence’ about Borromini – against a large mass of German writing on phenom­ enology – is taken ‘as if the DNA of the work, its artistic essence, generated the form according to some inevitable expressive force’, much work remains to be done; Evonne Levy, ‘Sedlmayr and Wittkower (1931–1932): More than a Skirmish’, Selva Journal 2 (2020): 51–59. 11. Ian Verstegen, ‘Obscene History: The Two Sedlmayrs’, Studia Austriaca 24 (2016): 79–93. 12. Maria Männig, Hans Sedlmayrs Kunstgeschichte: Eine kritische Studie (Böhlau Verlag, 2017). The author was able to access much private material, via the Nachlass preserved by Sedlmayr’s daughter. 13. Martin Schwarz and Jas Elsner, ‘The Genesis of Struktur: Kaschnitz-Weinberg’s Review of Riegl and the New Viennese School’, Art History 39 (2016): 84–97. 14. In Sedlmayr’s Borromini he already mentions ‘Strukturanalysen’, and in ‘Michelangelo’ of 1931 he mentions ‘Strukturanalyse’. 15. Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg, ‘Von der zweifachen Wurzel der statuarischen Form um Altertum’, in Erich Fidder, ed., Neue Beiträge deutscher Forschung. Wilhelm Worringer zum 60. Geburtstag (Königsberg: Kanter-Verlag, 1943); and the 215

discussion by Friedrich Teja-Bach, ‘The Modality of Spatial Categories’, in James Elkins, ed., Is Art History Global? (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 73–78. 16. Ian Verstegen, ‘Prägnanz als Singularität von Zeichen: am Beispiel Tizians’, Zeitschrift für Semiotik 31 (2009): 31–45. 17. Whitney Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 70, 71. 18. Otto Pächt, ‘Art Historians and Art Critics: Alois Riegl’, Burlington Magazine 105 (1963): 188–193, 193. 19. Both terms are used in the early Strukturforschung literature. 20. Roman Ingarden, Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, vol. II/1: Formalontologie (Tüb­ ingen: Niemeyer, 1965), 401: ‘Das Wesen des Gegenstandes bildet somit wirklich dasjenige, ohne das der Gegenstand nicht er selbt wäre oder nicht das wäre, was er wirklich ist.’ 21. This is most thoroughly defended in Mitrovic, Rage and Denials. The following work is intended to qualify the ‘collectivist’ nature of the New Vienna School writing. 22. For a discussion of how the Cold War precipitated a nominalism still felt in art history, see my A Realist Theory of Art History (London: Routledge, 2013); ‘Crying Hegel in Art History’, Journal of Critical Realism 15 (2016): 107–121; and ‘Otto Pächt “Hegelian” Exile in Cold-War England’, Konsthistorisk tidskrift 88 (2019): 113–133. 23. Mark Blum, ‘The “Soft Law” of Austrian Historical Logic since the Enlightenment in the Arts and Sciences’, in Wolfgang Huemer and Marc-Oliver Schuster, eds, Writing the Austrian Traditions: Relations between Philosophy and Literature (Edmonton, Alberta: Wirth-Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies, 2003), 131–142; citing Adalbert Stifter, Bunte Stein (1852). 24. I therefore cannot agree with the editor of the Italian edition of Sedlmayr’s Architektur Borrominis, when he retroactively cites Croce as a source for this theoretical 216

position; Marco Pogacnik, L’architettura di Borromini (Mondadori Electa, 1996), 75, note 3. 25. Donald Preziosi, Architecture, Language and Meaning (The Hague: Mouton, 1979), 59. 26. Friedrich Antal (1887–1954) and Arnold Hauser (1892–1978) each incorporated Marx­ ism into their work, while Ernst Kris (1900–1957) was a practising psycho­analyst. 27. Hans Tietze, Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte: Ein Versuch (Leipzig: Seemann, 1913); and the excellent summary in Riccardo Marchi, ‘Hans Tietze and art history as Geisteswissenschaft in early twentieth-century Vienna’, Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011): 14–46. 28. Max Dvořák, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte. Studien zur abendländischen Kunstentwicklung, 2 vols, edited by Karl M. Swoboda and Johannes Wilde (Munich: Piper, 1924); Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van Eyck (Munich: Piper, 1925); Geschichte der italienischen Kunst im zeitalter der Renaissance (Munich: Piper, 1927). 29. Andrew Hopkins calls Frey ‘something of a Nachlass profiteer’; ‘Riegl Renaissances’, in Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte, eds, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), 65. 30. Alois Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, ed. K. Maria Swoboda (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1931). Münz was also planning to publish from Riegl’s Nachlass a still unpublished manuscript, ‘Das holländische Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts’, 440-page typescript, Institutsarchiv, Universität Wien. 31. Alois Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdrückerei, 1927). 32. Alois Riegl, Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste, eds K. Maria Swoboda and Otto Pächt (Graz: Böhlau, 1966). 33. Dagobert Frey, Gotik und Renaissance als Grundlagen der modernen Weltanschauung (Augsberg: B. Filser, 1929). 34. Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg, ‘Bemerkungen zur Struktur der ägyptischen Plastik’, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 2 (1933): 7–24; ‘Remarks on the Structure 217

of Egyptian Sculpture’, in Christopher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 198–241. 35. Eva Frodl-Kraft charts the emergence of the New Vienna School with Frey in step with Sedlmayr/Pächt but does note that his interests ran to biology whereas his younger colleagues instead were inspired by the common inspiration of Gestalt theory, physics; Eva Frodl-Kraft, ‘Hans Sedlmayr, 1896–1984’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 44 (1991): 7–46. 36. Otto Pächt, The Practice of Art History: Reflections on Method, translated by David Britt (New York: Harvey Miller, 1999), 67–68; Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis (Munich: Prestel, 1977), 232. 37. Pächt, ‘Art Historians and Art Critics: Alois Riegl’. 38. Hans Sedlmayr, Fischer von Erlach der Ältere (Munich: Piper, 1925); Österreichische Barockarchitektur1690–1740 (Wien: Filser EA, 1930). 39. Otto Pächt, Österreichische Tafelmalerei der Gotik (Augsburg: Filser, 1929), 50. See Christopher Wood, ‘Die nicht mehr schönen Künste’, in Michael Pächt and Artur Rosenauer, eds, Otto Pächt: Symposion anlässlich seines 100. Geburtstages (Munich: Michael Pächt, 2006). 40. Otto Pächt, ‘Zur deutschen Bildauffassung der Spatgotik und Renaissance’ (1952) and ‘Künstlerische Originalität und ikonographische Erneuerung’ (1967), both reprinted in Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis, 107–120 and 153–164. 41. This is expressed in Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology (New York: Liveright, 1929). 42. Franz Brentano, Descriptive Psychology, trans. and ed. B. Müller (New York: Routledge, [1887] 1995). 43. Mereology is the theory of parthood relations – of wholes to parts and part to parts. Parts can be extensive or non-extensive. The aim is to describe their relations in things in order to describe their unique mode of being. 44. See, for example, Wen Fong, ‘Toward a Structural Analysis of Chinese Landscape Painting’, Art Journal 28 (1969): 388–397. 218

45. On Strzygowski, see Georg Vasold, ‘Riegl, Strzygowski and the Development of Art’, in Johanna Vakkari,ed., Towards a Science of Art History: J. J. Tikkanen and Art Historical Scholarship in Europe (Helsinki: Society of Art History, 2009), 102–116; Suzanne Marchand, ‘Appreciating the Art of Others: Joseph Strzygowski and the Austrian Origins of Non-Western Art History’, in Magdalena Dglosz and Pieter O. Scholz, eds, Von Biala nach Wien: Josef Strzygowski und die Kulturwissenschaften (Vienna, 2015). 46. Rudolf Arnheim, The Power of the Center (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1988); and see Arnheim’s Review of E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study of the Psychology of Decorative Art, The New Republic, 10 March 1979, 36–38. See also Arnheim’s Review of Riegl Problems of Style, British Journal of Aesthetics 35 (1995): 402–403. 47. E. H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Represen­ tation (London: Phaidon, 1960), 7–8; c.f. Richard Woodfield, ‘Ernst Gombrich: Iconology and the “linguistics of the image” ’, Journal of Art Historiography 5, December 2011. Except in this case it would not draw on linguistics as a model but be a ‘naïve graphics’; Ian Verstegen, Cognitive Iconology: When and How Psychology Explains Images (Amsterdam: Rodopi), 59. 48. Wood, ‘Die nicht mehr schönen Künste’. 49. Wood, ‘Die nicht mehr schönen Künste’. 50. See the discussion of F. W. Galan, Historic Structures: The Prague School Project, 1928–1946 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985). 51. See Ian Verstegen, ‘Introduction’, in Maurice Mandelbaum and American Critical Realism (London: Routledge, 2010). 52. Ian Verstegen, ‘Crying Hegel in Art History’, Journal of Critical Realism 15 (2016): 107–121.

219

1. The Crisis of the Sciences, Art History and the Vienna School 1. Otto Pächt, curriculum vitae, c. 1970, Pächt Archiv, University of Vienna: ‘In dieser Zeit enge Zusammenarbeit mit Hans Sedlmayr, der, inspiriert durch die Ideen und Ergebnisse der Gestaltpsychologie, die Initiative zu einer Neuorientierung der Wiener kunsthistorischen Schule ergriffen hatte.’ 2. Karl Bühler, ‘Die “Neue Psychologie” Koffkas’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie 99 (1926): 145–159; Die Krise der Psychologie (Jena: G. Fischer, 1927). On the enmity between Bühler and the Berliners, see Fiorenza Toccafondi, ‘Receptions, Readings and Interpretations of Gestaltpsychologie’, Gestalt Theory 3 (2002): 199–215. 3. Georg Vasold, ‘ “Im Chaos wandeln”. The Vienna School of Art History and the First World War’, Austrian Studies 21 (2013): 163–181. 4. Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875–1905; Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History, both passim. 5. Max Wertheimer, ‘Experimentelle Studien über das Sehen von Bewegung’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie 61 (1912): 161–265, Eng. trans., ‘Experimental Studies on Seeing Motion’, in On Perceived Motion and Figural Organization, ed. Lothar Spillmann (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), 1–92; Wolfgang Köhler, ‘Über unbemerkte Empfindungen und Urteilstäuschungen’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie 66 (1913): 51–80, Eng. trans., ‘On Unnoticed Sensations and Errors of Judgement’, in The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Köhler, ed. Mary Henle (New York: Liveright, 1971), 13–39. 6. For the relationship between Gestalt theory and Austrian philosophy, see Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1994). An early coordination of Husserl and phenomenology was Aron Gurwitsch, ‘Phanomenologie der Thematik und des reinen Ich’, Psychologische Forschung 12 (1929): 279–381; Eng. trans., ‘Phenomenology of Thematics and the Pure Ego’, in Studies in Phenomenology and Psychology (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1966). 220

7. The comprehensive overview of Gestalt psychology is Mitchell Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 1890–1967: Holism and the Quest for Objectivity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 8. Hans Sedlmayr to Max Wertheimer, 13 April 1929, New York Public Library: ‘Sehr verehrter Herr Professor! Erlauben Sie mir bitte, Ihnen anlässlich Ihrer Berufung nach Frankfurt meine aufrichtigsten Glückwünsche auszusprechen. Vielleicht erinnert Sie mein Name daran, dass hier in Wien eine (vorläufig?) kleine Gruppe von Geisteswissenschaftlern die Erfolge der von Ihnen inaugurierten wissenschaftlichen Richtung mit brennendem Interesse verfolgt. Wir hoffen die Fruchtbarkeit dieser Betrachtungsweise bald auch auf unserem Feld zu beweisen. Inzwischen empfangen Sie bitte die Beweise unserer echten Sympathie und meiner besondern Verehrung in dieser Form. Ihr sehr ergebener.’ First partially published in Ian Verstegen, ‘Gestalt, Art History, and Nazism’, Gestalt Theory 24:2 (2004): 134–150. 9. Martina Sitt, ‘Am Anfang war das Auge’, in Martina Sitt, ed., Kunsthistoriker in eigener Sache (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1990), 32. 10. G. J. Allesch, ‘Die aesthetische Erscheinungsweise der Farben’, Psychologische Forschung 6 (1925): 1–91, 215–281; Hans Sedlmayr, Kritische Berichte zur Kunsthistorischen Forschung 3/4 (1930/1932), 214–224. Pächt cites Allesch twice in ‘Die historische Aufgabe Michael Pachers’ and in his review of Snijders. In a student notebook, Pächt had copied out eleven pages of quotations from Allesch’s Pacher book (Pächt Archiv; Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Vienna). 11. Around this time, Allesch showed a good familiarity of Sedlmayr’s and Pächt’s works in G. Johannes Allesch, ‘Das Raumerlebnis in der deutschen und italienischen Malerei’, in Deutschland – Italien. Beiträge zu den Kulturbeziehungen zwischen Norden und Süden. Festschrift für Wilhelm Waetzoldt (Berlin, 1941). Allesch paid Sedlmayr a compliment by calling him ‘ein genauer Kenner der einschlägigen psychologischcn Literatur’. 221

12. For similarities between Musil’s writing and Pächt’s historical project, see Karl Corino, ‘Otto Pächt and Robert Musil’, in Michael Pächt and Artur Rosenauer, eds, Otto Pächt: Symposion anlässlich seines 100. Geburtstages (Munich: Michael Pächt, 2006), 32. 13. Daniela Bohde, ‘Pieter Bruegels Macchia und Hans Sedlmayrs physiognomisches Sehen – Psychologische Interpretationsmodelle von Hans Sedlmayr’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 57 (2008): 239–262, esp. 242–244; citing G. Johannes Allesch, Wege zur Kunstbetrachtung (Dresden, 1921). 14. Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Experimentell-psychologische Untersuchungen zum Ausdrucksproblem’, Psychologische Forschung 11 (1928): 2–132; Film als Kunst (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932). 15. Hans Sedlmayr to Meyer Schapiro, 13 November 1931, Columbia University Library, New York, referring to Aron Gurwitsch’s ‘Phanomenologie der Thematik und des reinen Ich’/‘Phenomenology of Thematics and the Pure Ego’. 16. Too much should not be made of this but Koehler (as he came to spell his last name in America) had been a student of Wickhoff, wrote an obituary of Dvořák and was considered for Schlosser’s job. His work does not reflect Gestalt psychology but it created a symbolic link to the Berlin theory. On Koehler, see David Wright, ‘Wilhelm Koehler and the Original Plan for Research at Dumbarton Oaks’, in Pioneers of Byzantine Studies in America, ed. John W. Barker (Amsterdam: Hakkert, 2002), 134–175. 17. Wolfgang Metzger, Gesetze des Sehens, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1953); Schöpferische Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Kramer, 1962). An English translation exists for Metzger’s first, 1936 edition: Wolfgang Metzger, Laws of Seeing, trans. Lothar Spillman, Steven Lehar, Mimsey Stromeyer and Michael Wertheimer (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006). 18. I have surveyed the status of the Berlin theory in two books: Arnheim, Gestalt and Art: A Psychological Theory (Vienna: Springer, 2005); and Cognitive Iconology: When and How Psychology Explains Images (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2014). 222

19. Daniela Bohde, Kunstgeschichte als physiognomische Wissenschaft: Kritik einer Denkfigur der 1920er bis 1940er Jahre (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012). 20. See Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture; Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science. Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Lawrence C. Weisz, ed., Greater than the Parts: Holism in Biomedicine, 1920–1950 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 21. Michael Ermarth, ‘Maurice Mandelbaum on History, Historicism, and Critical Reason’, in Ian Verstegen, ed., Maurice Mandelbaum and American Critical Realism (London: Routledge, 2010). Ermarth sees Mandelbaum’s early philosophy of his­tory as a response to Weimar. 22. The first characterisation is due to Ermarth, ‘Maurice Mandelbaum on History, Historicism, and Critical Reason’, 32; the second to Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1994), 326. 23. See Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 294. 24. Simone Schnall, ‘Life as the Problem: Karl Duncker’s Context’, in Jaan Valsiner, ed., Thinking in Psychological Science: Ideas and their Makers (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2007); citing Ulfried Geuter, ‘ “Gleichschaltung” von oben? Universitatspolitische Strategien und Verhaltensweisen in der Psychologie wahrend des Nationalsozialismus’, Pyschologische Rundschau 35 (1984): 198–213. 25. Harrington, Reenchanted Science, 123–128. 26. E. H. Gombrich, interview with Richard Woodfield, 1 January 1990. 27. Hans Aurenhammer, ‘Hans Sedlmayr und die Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Wien: 1938–1945’, in J. Held and M. Papenbrock, eds, Kunstgeschichte an den Universitäten im Nationalsozialismus, Kunst und Politik, Jahrbuch der Guernica-­Gesellschaft 5 (2003): 139–172; Albert Ottenbacher, ‘Kunstgeschichte in ihrer Zeit: Hans Sedlmayr’ (http://www.albert-ottenbacher.de/sedlmayr/); citing Univers­ itätsarchiv Wien, Philosophische Fakultät, Personalakt Hans Sedlmayr, Kopie im Institut für Zeitgeschichte, München. 223

28. See Christopher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books, 2000); Anthony Vidler, ‘The Ledoux Effect: Emil Kaufmann and the Claims of Kantian Autonomy’, Perspecta 33 (2002): 16–29, 22: ‘[Sedlmayr], who had joined the National Socialist party in 1932, then to become a loyal supporter throughout the occupation and War’; Richard Kimball, ‘Introduction’, in Hans Sedlmayr, Art in Crisis: The Lost Center (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2006), xiv; ‘Hans Sedlmayr’ (https://arthistorians.info/sedlmayrh); ‘In 1932 Sedlmayr joined the Nazi party in Austria (when it was still illegal to do so) and well before other art historians felt pressured to do so in order to retain their teaching positions.’ Kimball furthermore forgets that Sedlmayr was in fascist Austria, not Nazi Germany, and Jews did not lose their jobs; in Pächt’s case, he was not allowed to take it up in Germany. 29. Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), calling Sedlmayr an illegaler (169); and the website above. 30. Verstegen, ‘Obscene History’. 31. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Kunstgeschichte als Wissenschaft’, in Kunst und Wahrheit: Zur Theorie und Methode der Kunstgeschichte (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1958). 32. Hans Sedlmayr to Meyer Schapiro, 13 November 1931, Meyer Schapiro Papers, Columbia University; quoted in Levy, ‘Sedlmayr and Schapiro Correspond’, 240: ‘Ich arbeite in dem Sinn, wie Sie es sich wünschen, an einer Verbreiterung des theoretischen Unterbaus durch Erfahrungen aus anderen und möglichst vielen Kreisen. Das wird der scheinbaren einseitigen Orientierung an der “Gestaltstheorie” ihr Übergewicht nehmen. Trotzdem – und deshalb kann ich Ihnen in diesem Punkt nicht ganz zustimmen – wird die Gestalttheorie auch dann eine besondere Stellung behaupten, den “Kunst ist eben, wo man auch theoretisch stehen mag, Gestaltung”. Die Wichtigkeit der Gestalttheorie hört auf, wo man statt der Gestaltung zum Beispiel die Probleme der “Bedeutung” untersucht. (Abgesehen 224

davon, dass der terminus Gestaltpsychologie irreführt, den es handelt sich nicht um psychologische Sachverhalte im engeren Sinn, sondern um solche, die auch im geistigen (wie anderseits im physischen Bereich) wiederkehren.’ Karl Johns kindly translated this, for which I am grateful. 33. Hans Sedlmayr to Meyer Schapiro, 7 October 1934, Meyer Schapiro Papers, Columbia University; quoted in Levy, ‘Sedlmayr and Schapiro Correspond’, 249: ‘Dass ich kein Einzelgänger bin beeinflusst meine wissenschaftlichen Versuche nun insofern als ich – wie Sie richtig vermuten – mit einer puren Formalanalyse auf die Dauer nicht zufrieden bin. Ich würde einen Versuch einer konsequent politisch-­ soziologischen Kunstgeschichte für so wichtig halten, wie nichts anderes – selbst wenn er einseitig ausfällt. Nur sehe ich gar keine Ansätze dazu, nirgends. Dafür habe ich meine eigene Erklärung. Von unserem heutigen Zustand ist die Funktion der Kunst nicht mehr recht verständlich. Sie ist unverständlich wie Magie, Religion oder wie der Bauer – den man auch entweder als einen kleinen Grossgrundbesitzer oder Industriellen missversteht. – Aber das führt zu weit.’ 34. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Die “Macchia” Bruegels’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Samm­ lungen in Wien 8 (1934): 137–159, Eng. trans., ‘Brueghel’s Macchia’, in Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader, 322–376. 35. Otto Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien der westlichen Malerie des 15. Jahrhunderts’, in Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 2 (1933): 75–100; ‘Design Principles of Fifteenth-Century Northern Painting’, in Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader, 243–321. This work is fully discussed in Chapter 5. 36. Daniela Bohde, ‘Pieter Bruegels Macchia und Hans Sedlmayrs physiognomisches Sehen – Psychologische Interpretationsmodelle von Hans Sedlmayr’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 57 (2008): 239–262, esp. 242–244. 37. Allesch, Wege zur Kunstbetrachtung, 91: ‘das Ganze ist wie einelustig und kräftig blühende Wiese’. This same acceptance of a common method but opposite moral reading is replayed in Fritz Novotny, Die Monatsbilder Pieter Bruegels des 225

Älteren (Vienna, 1948), as pointed out by Agnes Blaha, ‘Fritz Novotny and the New Vienna School of Art History – An Ambiguous Relationship’, Journal of Art Histori­ ography 1 (2009). 38. Schwartz, Blind Spots, 163. 39. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Pieter Bruegel: Der Sturz der Blinden, Paradigma einer Strukturanalyse’, Hefte des kunsthistorischen seminars der Universität München 2 (1957): 1–49. 40. Sedlmayr was clearly reading works like F. Sander, ‘Experimentelle Ergebnisse der Gestaltpsychologie’, Berichte über den 10. Kongress fur Experimentelle Psychologie (Jena, 1928), 23–88. For a discussion of Sedlmayr’s ‘experiments’, see Schwartz, Blind Spots, 173–175; and Bohde, ‘Pieter Bruegels Macchia’. As Bohde points out, Sedlmayr made later reference to Klaus Conrad, whose work is experiencing a revival; Peter Uhlhaas and Aaron Mishara, ‘Perceptual Anomalies in Schizophrenia: Integrating Phenomenology and Cognitive Neuroscience’, Schizophrenia Bulletin 33 (2007): 142–156. I do not criticise microgenesis per se (recent work has greatly expanded this question beyond where the Gestaltists left it). What is objectionable is the way in which Sander and Krueger forced the issue at this stage of psychology’s development. By focusing on such details, they reveal that – like Sedlmayr during this period – they were more interested in romantic developmental analogies than the basic facts of perception. 41. Luca Vargiu, Incroci ermeneutici: Betti, Sedlmayr e l’interpretazione dell’opera d’arte (Palermo: Centro Internazionale Studi di Estetica, 2008). 42. Pächt, The Practice of Art History, 71; Martin Gosebruch, Methoden der Kunst- und Musikwissenschaft (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1970), 57. See, further, Arisawa Yoko [‘Studien zur Strukturanalyse von Prof. Sedlmayr’ (in Japanese), Japanese Journal for Aesthetics 13 (1962): 23–27], who calls his post-1948 period ‘Synthetisch’: ‘Formales Verstehen+Bedeutung (Ikonologie_unter der Epochenbetrachtung’ (from the abstract), and more recently Josef Vojvokik, ‘The Concept of Structure 226

and the Work of Art in the Structuralist Art History of Hans Sedlmayr in Comparison with the Structural Aesthetics of Jan Mukařovský’, Art in Translation 5 (2013): 321–378. 43. Hermann Bauer, Kunsthistorik. Eine kritische Einführung in das Studium der Kunstgeschichte (Munich: Beck, 1976). 44. Kurt Badt, Modell und Maler von Jan Vermeer: Probleme der Interpretation, Eine Streitschrift gegen Hans Sedlmayr (Cologne: du Mont, 1961). 45. Daniela Bohde, ‘The Physiognomics of Architecture Heinrich Wölfflin, Hans Sedlmayr and Paul Schultze-Naumburg’, in Frank Mitchell and Dan Adler, eds, German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012); c.f. G. Gurisatti, Dizionario fisiognomico. Il volto, le forme, l’espressione (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2006), 364–367. 46. For iconological (as opposed to stylistic) divination, see Georges Didi-Huberman, ‘Dialektik des Monstrums: Aby Warburg and the Symptom Paradigm’, Art History 24 (2003): 621–645. 47. In addition to the Vermeer essay is another, ‘Die Schauseite der Karlskirche in Wien’. Interestingly, Bauer (Kunsthistorik) underscores this iconological reading by stressing the polysemous nature of both works of art. 48. Pächt, The Practice of Art History, 76–77; citing Erwin Panofsky, ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920): 321–329; ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 17–33. 49. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Analogie, Kunstgeschichte und Kunst’, Studium Generale 8 (1955): 697–703, 698; citing E. H. Gombrich, ‘Icones Symbolicae. The Visual Image in Neo-Platonic Thought’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 11 (1948): 163–192.

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2. The Basics of Strukturforschung 1. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 133; ‘Zu einer strengen Kunst­ wissenschaft’, 7: ‘Der Antitheoretiker, dem di Beschäftigung mit ihnen als fruchtloses “Theoretisieren” erscheint, übersieht, dass auch er, in unartikulierter Weise, theoretisiert, und dass von seiner unausgesprochenen Theorie auch noch die matierellen “Ergebnisse” abhängen, zu denen er gelangt.’ 2. Jan Bakoš, ‘Otto Pächt and Albert Kutal: Methodological Parallels’, Umeni 62 (2014): 406–422. 3. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschung 1 (1930/31): 7–32; Eng. trans., ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, in Christopher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader (New York: Zone Books, 2000); Pächt, ‘Das Ende der Abbildtheorie’, Kritische Berichte 3–4 (1930/1931): 1–9; ‘The End of Image Theory’, in Christopher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader. 4. Schwartz, Blind Spots, 162. 5. Hans Sedlmayr, review of Karl Tolnai, Die Zeichnungen Pieter Bruegels (Munich: Piper & Co., 1925), Kritische Berichte 1 (1927/28): 24–32; for a discussion see Craig Harbison, ‘Iconography and Iconology’, in Early Netherlandish Paintings: Rediscovery, Reception and Research, eds Bernhard Ridderbos, Henk Th. van Veen and Anne van Buren (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005), and Bertram Kaschek, ‘Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion: A Historiographical Introduction’, in Bertram Kaschek, Jürgen Bertram and Jessica Buskirk, eds, Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Religion (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 1–34. 6. Sedlmayr, Review of Karl Tolnai, Die Zeichnungen Pieter Bruegels, 30. 7. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait’, Burlington Magazine 64 (1934): 117–127. 8. David Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing (University Park: Penn State Univers­ ity Press, 1991); for a methodological critique of its application in the interpretation 228

of one painting, see Robert Gaston, ‘Love’s Sweet Poison, A New Reading of Bronzino’s London Allegory’, I Tatti Studies 4 (1991): 249–288. 9. This model appears in Karl Mannheim, ‘Beitrage zur Theorie der Weltanschauungs-­ Interpretation’, Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte 1 (1921–1922): 236–274; ‘On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung’, in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., From Karl Mannheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). On Panofsky’s adoption of the model, see Joan Hart, ‘Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A Dialogue on Interpretation’, Critical Inquiry 19 (1993): 534–566; and Jeremy Tanner, ‘Karl Mannheim and Alois Riegl: From Art History to the Sociology of Culture’, Art History 32 (2009): 755–784. 10. Erwin Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939), 3. 11. For the psychological (and general scientific) grounding of Wölfflin’s, Riegl’s and others’ theories, see the chapters by Hart and Olin in Frank Mitchell and Dan Adler, eds, German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism ­(Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 12. This bears strong resemblance to Julius von Schlosser’s view put forward in the Kunstliterature ein Handbuch zur Quellenkunde der neueren Kunstgeschichte (Vienna: Schroll, 1924). In Schlosser’s account the historian literally reanimates the historical material whereas Sedlmayr’s idea of understanding is merely the precondition for knowing the object. Two sciences are also found in Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg, ‘Einleitung’, Mittelmeerische Kunst: Eine Darstellung ihre Struktur, vol. III, Ausgewahlte Schriften, ed. Peter von Blankenhagen (Berlin: Gebruder Mann, 1965). 13. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 134, 140; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 8, 11. 14. John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 22; c.f. Alessandro Nova, 229

‘Percezione e ricezione negli scritti di John Shearman’, Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana 35 (2003/2004): 17–22. 15. Wolfgang Köhler, ‘Über unbemerkte Empfindungen und Urteilstäuschungen’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie 66 (1913): 51–80, Eng. trans., ‘On Unnoticed Sensations and Errors of Judgement’, in The Selected Papers of Wolfgang Köhler, ed. Mary Henle (New York: Liveright, 1971), 13–39. 16. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 143; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 13. 17. In light of the appearance of this statement at the end of the book, after the schizo­ themic interpretation of Borromini, this is justifiably pilloried by Gombrich (‘Art History and Psychology in Vienna Fifty Years Ago, Art Journal 44 (1984): 162–164) and called a ‘ridiculous platitude’ by Schwartz (Blind Spots, 160), yet I would argue that if the justification is incorrect, the phenomenon of intuition  – and indeed potential discoveries made by Sedlmayr – are legitimate. See Chapter 4 on Borromini. 18. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 140; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 11. Although he does not cite him explicitly, he is referring to Wilhelm Pinder, Die deutsche Plastik vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zum Ende der Renaissance (Potsdam, Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1929), vol. II, 358. For the altar as interpreted today, see Rainer Kahsnitz, Carved Splendor: Late Gothic Altarpieces in Southern Germany, Austria and South Tirol, trans. Russell Stockman (Los Angeles: Getty, 2006). 19. See Wilde, ‘Die “Pala di San Cassiano” von Antonello da Messina’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 3 (1929): 57–72; ‘The Hall of the Great Council of Florence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 65–81. 20. On visual abduction, see David Gooding, ‘Visualization, Inference and Explanation in the Sciences’, in G. Malcolm, ed., Multidisciplinary Approaches to Visual Repre­ sentations and Interpretations (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2004), 1–26, and Lorenzo Magnani, ‘An Abductive Theory of Scientific Reasoning’, Semiotica 153 (2005): 230

261–286. For a pioneering application in archeology, see Cameron Shelley, ‘Visual Abductive Reasoning in Archaeology’, Philosophy of Science 63 (1996): 278–301. Abduction, transduction and transdiction are all related forms of inference that have found a fertile field in Critical Realism; see Bhaskar, Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom (London: Verso, 1993). 21. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 177; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 13. 22. Thus, we have to reject Wolfgang Kemp’s characterisation of Gestalt theory as körperlose Auge. 23. Kurt Koffka, The Growth of the Mind, trans. R. M. Ogden (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1924), 4; Grundlagen der psychischen Entwicklung: Eine Einfuhrung in die Kinderpsychologie (Osterwieck a/H: Zickfeldt, 1921), 3: ‘studiert wissenschaftlich das Verhalten von Lebewesen in ihrer Beruhrung mit der Umwelt’. Three years after Sedlmayr’s essay, Koffka wrote, ‘Although psychology was reared as the science of consciousness or mind, we shall choose behaviour as our keystone. This does not mean that I regard the old definitions as completely wrong – it would be strange indeed if a science had developed on entirely wrong assumptions – but it means that if we start with behaviour it is easier to find a place for consciousness and mind than it is to find a place for behaviour if we start with mind or consciousness’ (Principles of Gestalt Psychology, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 25. 24. Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Deutsche Kunsthistoriker (Berlin: Bruno Hessling, 1965), as quoted in Udo Kultermann, The History of Art History (New York: Abaris, 1993), 179. 25. The locus classicus of anti-conflation is Margaret Archer, Realist Social Theory: The Morphogenetic Approach (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). For an application to visual theory, see my Cognitive Iconology: When and How Psychology Explains Images (New York: Rodopi, 2014). 26. See Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), and for a critical discussion see 231

Ruth Groff, Ontology Revisited: Metaphysics in Social and Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2013), chapter 6. 27. See Lewin’s papers with his students Dembo, Rickers-Ovsiankina and Zeigarnik, conveniently translated and collected together in Joseph de Rivera, ed., Field Theory as Human Science: Contributions of Lewin’s Berlin Group (New York: Halsted Press, 1976). 28. Kurt Lewin, ‘Gesetz und Experiment in der Psychologie’, Symposion 1 (1927): 375–421; Eng. trans. ‘Law and Experiment in Psychology’, Science in Context 5 (1992): 385–416. This is the basis of the twin chapters in Sedlmayr’s Architektur Borrominis: (1) ‘Strukturelle Beschreibungen’ and (2) ‘Genetische Beschreibungen’. 29. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 164; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 25. 30. Otto Pächt, ‘The Limbourgs and Pisanello’, Gazette des Beaux Arts 62 (1963): 109–122. This is one of the few texts where Pächt’s uses the technical term ‘genetic’. 31. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 145; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 14. I don’t need to repeat that for Ingarden, as also for Wolfgang Iser (and even Gombrich, with his ‘beholder’s share’), the way in which the reader or viewer ‘completes’ a work of art is not arbitrary but dictated by the work itself. However, Gombrich’s citation in Art and Illusion (p. 402) of his Vienna colleague, Hubert Rohracher for Einstellung (Einführung in die Psychologie, Vienna, 1946, p. 336), is positively evasive of the Berlin tradition. 32. For the history of the eclipse of the phenomenal, see Gary Hatfield, ‘Representation and Constraints: The Inverse Problem and the Structure of Visual Space’, Acta Psychologica 114 (2003), 355–378. For contemporary positions that accept the phenomenal, see Dan Zahavi, Self-Awareness and Alterity: A Phenomenological Investigation (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1999) and Uriah Kriegel, Subjective Consciousness: A Self-Representational Theory (Oxford: Oxford Univers­ ity Press, 2009). 232

33. See Jean Petitot, Francisco Varela, B. Pachoud and Jean-Michel Roy, eds, Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in Contemporary Phenmenology and Cognitive Science (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), and the special issue of Erkenntnis 48 (1998), and the works of Kriegel and Zahavi cited above. 34. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft/‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’; Pächt, ‘Das Ende der Abbildtheorie’, Kritische Berichte 3/4 (1930/1931): 1–9; ‘The End of Image Theory’, in Christopher Wood, ed., Vienna School Reader. 35. Otto Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); The Practice of Art History, 86. 36. For a classic Gestalt discussion of Einstellung that would have been known to Sedlmayr and Pächt, see Koffka, ‘Zur Theorie der Erlebnis-Wahrnehmung’, Annalen der Philosophie 3 (1923): 375–399. Using the phrase ‘mental set’ not only returns the term back to mainstream psychology but also brings to light surprising affinities with Gombrich, who, however, emphasises (following his different theory of perception) expectations in a probabilistic way, as well as Roman Jakobson’s structural linguistics. 37. Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis, 12; cited in Schwartz, Blind Spots, 153. 38. Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis (for ‘ursprüngliche’); Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’ (for ‘richtige’). 39. Schwartz, Blind Spots, 160. 40. One should not be confused by Sedlmayr’s discussion of naturalism (167). He defines naturalism as studying art as a thing. I am using the word to encompass the belief – with which Sedlmayr was sympathetic – that the methods of cultural history were not fundamentally different from the natural sciences. 41. Douglas Dempster, ‘Renaturalizing Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art ­Criticism 51 (1993): 351–361. 42. Fallibilism, in this context, is the epistemological doctrine that without explan­ atory power or instrumentalisation (through technology, for example) claims of 233

knowledge about the world are provisional, merely reasonable beliefs. Fallibilism preserves realism while resisting scientism (that is, reality is what science says it is) and avoids foundationalism (epistemic truth is not ontic truth). 43. Max Wertheimer, ‘Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt II’, Psychologische Forschung 4 (1923): 301–350; an important example of such research contested the role of expectation in ‘New Look’ psychology: William Epstein and Irvin Rock, ‘Perceptual Set as an Artifact of Recency’, American Journal of Psychology 73 (1960), 314–328. For a discussion, see Ian Verstegen, ‘Is William Epstein a Gestalt Psychol­ ogist?’ Gestalt Theory 34 (2012): 179–190. 44. Pächt, The Practice of Art History, 68. 45. Wood, ‘Introduction’, The Vienna School Reader; Schwartz, Blind Spots. 46. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 16; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 149. 47. The term derives of course from Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987); see also Christopher Norris, Deconstruction and the ‘Unfinished Project of Enlightenment’ (New York: Routledge, 2000). 48. This is much clearer in realist accounts of physical science than in the social sciences and humanities. Nevertheless, something like it must be true once the differences between such domains are clear. 49. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 32; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 176. 50. Explanatory critique is a central part of Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy; see Andrew Collier, Critical Realism: An Introduction to Roy Bhaskar’s Philosophy (London: Verso, 1994). 51. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 17; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 149. 52. Margaret Archer, Culture and Agency: The Place of Culture in Social Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), chapter 1. 234

53. Jas Elsner, ‘Between Mimesis and Divine Power: Visuality in the Graeco-Roman world’, in Robert Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989). 54. Margaret Archer, ‘After Mandelbaum: from Societal Facts to Emergent Properties’, in Ian Verstegen, ed., Maurice Mandelbaum and American Critical Realism (London: Routledge, 2010), 142–162: ‘As “intelligibles”, all artefacts have the dispositional ability to be understood and we do so by (gradually) accommodating ourselves to their in-built affordances and restraints. In short, artefacts possess causal powers, ones that often require activation by us (as with all gadgets). Although their provenance is indubitably human, mastery is neither achieved by social contact with the minds of their makers (often impossible) nor by guidance from “society’s conversation” because all interlocutors may be stumped. This was the case, for example, with the Rosetta Stone and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which retained their intelligibility incommunicado for centuries but could, after discovery and decoding, eventually exercise their causal powers (as translation manuals). There are also a whole range of practical activities, such as acquiring a “feel for (tools)”, “a nose for (wine)” or an “ear for (music)” or “a sense of (reverence)” – all forms of “knowing how” as opposed to “knowing that”. These skills are independent of “society’s conversation” because they simply cannot be communicated discursively (except through metaphor, which are usually irreducible metaphors), but are only acquired through a social practice between subject and object.’ 55. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 20. 56. Sedlmayr, ‘Quintessenz’, xxxi; ‘Quintessence’, 27. 57. Ernst Gombrich, ‘Wertprobleme und mittelalterliche Kunst’, Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literature 6 (1937): 109–116; Eng. trans., ‘Achievement in Medieval Art’, Meditations on a Hobby Horse (London: Phaidon, 1963). 235

58. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 77. In The Story of Art, Gombrich does admit ‘skill’ and ‘technique’ in regard to the Lindisfarne Gospel but uses other adjectives like ‘rigid mask’, ‘stiff and quaint’ while the figures in the Bayeaux Tapestry look like ‘strange little manikins’ (124). On the Echternach Gospel, a viewpoint close to Pächt’s is that of Meyer Schapiro, The Language of Forms: Lectures on Insular Manuscript Art (New York: The Morgan Library and Museum, 2005), originating in lectures from 1968. 59. Otto Pächt, C. R. Dowell and Francis Wormald, St. Albans Psalter (London, 1960); Pächt, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative in Twelfth Century England. 60. Anton Springer, Psalter-Illustrationen im frühen Mittelalter: mit besonder Rücksicht auf den Utrechtpsalter. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Miniaturmalerei (Leipzig, 1883). On word illustration, see Pächt, Rise of Pictorial Narrative; Book Illumination in the Middle Ages (London: Harvey Miller Publishers, 1987); Koert van der Horst, William Noel and Wilhelmina Wüstefeld, eds, The Utrecht Psalter in Medieval Art, Picturing the Psalms of David (Westrenen: Hes, 1996); Jeffrey Hamburger, ‘Visible Speech: Imagining Scripture in the Prayer Book of Ursula Begerin and the Medieval Tradition of Word Illustration’, in Stephen Mossman and Nigel F. Palmer, eds, Schreiben und Lesen in der Stadt: Literaturbetrieb im spätmittelalterlichen Straßburg (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 105–154. 61. For a work that would have been known to Sedlmayr and Pächt, see Kurt Goldstein, ‘Über die Plastizität des Organismus’, in A. Bethe et al., eds, Handbuch der normalen und pathologischen Physiologie (Berlin: Springer, 1931), pp. 1132–1174; and by a student of Köhler, Richard Held, ‘Plasticity in Sensory-motor Systems’, Scientific American 213 (1965): 84–94. 62. For an approach to behaviour close to the Gestalt tradition, using ‘physical-behavioural units’, see Roger Barker, Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behaviour (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1968). 63. For the emergence of Kunstwissenschaft in the German academic economy at the turn of the twentieth century, see Richard Woodfield, ‘Kunstwissenschaft versus 236

Ästhetik: The Historians’ Revolt against Aesthetics’, in Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor, eds, Re-Discovering Aesthetics, Stanford, CA: Stanford Univers­ ity Press, 2008, and Christian Fuhrmeister, ‘Reine Wissenschaft: art history in Germany and the notions of “pure science” and “objective scholarship”, 1920–1950’, in Frank Mitchell and Dan Adler, eds, German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 64. Alois Riegl, Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach der Funden in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staatsdrückeri, 1901), 6. 65. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’, in Alois Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze (Vienna: Filser, 1929); Eng. trans., ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’, in Richard Woodfield, ed., Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 2001), 11–31. 66. Richard Woodfield, Review of Christopher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader; www.caareviews.org, 28 August 2003: ‘Gombrich’s objection to the theses of “Quintessenz” in the context of referring to collectivist notions of “mankind”, “races” or “ages” would appear to have been misplaced’. 67. Katharina Lorenz and Jas Elsner, ‘Translators’ Introduction’, Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 35; 37, note 9. 68. Pächt, too, refers to Vierkandt’s work; ‘Das Ende der Abbildtheorie’, Kritische Berichte 3/4 (1930/1931): 1–9; ‘The End of Image Theory’, in Wood, ed., Vienna School Reader, 193, note 1. 69. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 158; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 22. 70. Margaret Iversen, ‘Style as Structure: Alois Riegl’s Historiography’, Art History 2 (1979): 62–71, 64. 71. Otto Pächt, ‘Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting’, The Burlington Magazine 98 (1956): 110–116; ‘Künstlerische Originalität und ikonographische Erneuerung’, in Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis; and the excellent discussion in Bakoš, 237

‘Otto Pächt and Albert Kutal’. This, incidentally, was Arnheim’s task, too, to clarify the specificity of the medium that changed an artistic message in its act of translation. 72. On this methodological and theoretical debate in Sedlmayr’s time, see Fritz Ringer, Max Weber’s Methodology: the Unification of the Cultural and Social Sciences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). For more on the ideographic-­ nomothetic distinction, and the suggestion that Wölfflin (like Weber) resisted it, see Joan Hart, ‘Heuristic Constructs and Ideal Types: The Wölfflin/Weber Connection’, in Frank Mitchell and Dan Adler, eds, German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). The strongest recent statement for the naturalisation of the social sciences is Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 2nd edn (London: Routledge, 1998). Bhaskar notes that the biggest difference between the physical and social sciences is the fact that the sciences can artificially create closed systems and therefore isolate mechanisms whereas the social sciences cannot. They, therefore, rely on a narrative explanation that traces a number of causes rather than one. Peter Manicas’s distinction between ‘explanation’ and ‘understanding’ follows Bhaskar here but reverses the typical hermeneutical protest. They are the sciences that actually understand and the social sciences that explain! 73. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’, 160; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’, 23. 74. Sedlmayr cites above all from Kurt Lewin, ‘Idee und Aufgabe der vergleichenden Wissenschaftslehre’, Symposion 1 (1925): 61–94. See also Lewin’s Der Begriff der Genese in Physik, Biologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte. Eine Untersuchung zur vergleichenden Wissenschaftslehre (Berlin: Borntraeger, 1922). By Carl Stumpf, see ‘Zur Einteilung der Wissenschaften’, in Abhandlungen der Königlich-Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Philosophish-historische Classe) (Berlin: Verlag der Königliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1907), 1–94; and by Husserl, see Ideas 238

Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book: General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Nijhoff, [1913] 1982). 75. Wolfgang Köhler, Gestalt Psychology (New York: Liveright, 1929). The book was published first in English and then in expanded form in German. 76. Carrier, Principles of Art History Writing, esp. pp. 49–79. For a critique of Carrier, and his portrayal of the idea of progress, see Jonathan Gilmore, ‘David Carrier’s Art History’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53 (1995): 39–47. 77. Koffka, The Growth of the Mind; Heinz Werner, Einführung in die Entwicklungspsychologie (Leipzig: Barth, 1926); see Verstegen, Arnheim, Gestalt and Art, chapter 9, which critically examines comparative concepts and reconstructs their viability. For a contemporary account of theories of perceptual learning, see Robert Goldstone, ‘Perceptual Learning’, Annual Review of Psychology 48 (1998): 585–612. One of the few papers to address perceptual learning in art history – connoisseurship in particular – is Hayden Maginnis, ‘The Role of Perceptual Learning in Connoisseurship: Morelli, Berenson, and Beyond’, Art History 13 (1990): esp. 113–116. 78. Sedlmayr, ‘Die “Macchia” Bruegels’, 149; ‘Brueghel’s Macchia’, in Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader, 353. 79. For rhetorical descriptions of the Baroque and Mannerist styles, respectively, see Charles Dempsey, Annibale Carracci and the Beginnings of the Baroque Style (Fiesole: Cadmo, 2000); Marcia Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

3. Struktur, History and Determinism 1. Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 66. 2. Otto Pächt, ‘Alois Riegl’, 193. 3. Jan Bakoš, ‘Otto Pächt and Albert Kutal: Methodological Parallels’, Umeni 62 (2014): 408. 239

4. Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’, in Alois Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze (Vienna: Filser, 1929), xxxi–xxxii; Eng. trans., ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’, in Richard Woodfield, ed., Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work (Amsterdam: G + B Arts International, 2001), 26–27. 5. Alois Riegl, Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach der Funden in Österreich-Ungarn (Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staatsdrückerei, 1901), 216–217: ‘Der Wandel in der spätantiken Weltanschauung war eine notwendige Durchgangsphase des menschlichen Geistes, um von der Vorstellung eines (in engerem Sinne) rein mechanischen, reihenweise, gleichsam in die Ebene projizierten Zusammenhanges der Dinge zu derjenigen eines allverbreiteten chemischen, gleichsam den Raum nach allen Richtungen durchmessenden Zusammenhanges zu gelangen. Wer in jener spätantiken Wendung einen Verfall erblicken möchte, vermisst sich, dem menschlichen Geiste heute den Weg vorzuschreiben, den er hätte nehmen sollen, um von der antiken zur modernen Naturauffassung zu gelangen.’ 6. E. H. Gombrich, ‘Response from E. H. Gombrich’, in Richard Woodfield, ed., Gombrich on Art and Psychology (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 258–261. 7. Georgi Plekhanov, ‘The Role of the Individual in History’, in G. Plekhanov, ed., Fundamental Problems of Marxism (New York: International Publishers, 1969). 8. Alois Riegl, Group Portraiture of Holland, eds Evelyn Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty, 1999), 290. 9. Julius von Schlosser, ‘ “Stilgeschichte” und “Sprachgeschichte” der bildenden Kunst’, Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Abteilung der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1935): 3–39. 10. Gombrich, Art and Illusion; ‘Ritualized Gesture and Expression in Art’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 251 (1966): 393–401. 11. For ‘artistic volition’, see Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder in Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’); for ‘artistic intention’, see Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 95; for ‘will-to-form’ 240

see Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 15; for ‘what art wants to do’, see Joseph Masheck, ‘The Vital Skin: Riegl, the Maori, and Loos’, in Richard Woodfield, ed., Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work (Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, 2001). 12. Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park: Pennsylvannia State University Press, 1992); Margaret Iverson, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993); Diana Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875–1905: An Institutional Biography (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013); Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface – Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in fin-de-siècle Vienna (Detroit, MI: Wayne State Univers­ity Press, 2006), esp. 61–75; c.f. Daniel Arasse, ‘Note sur Aloïs Riegl et la notion de volonté d’art’, Scolies 2 (1972): 123–132; Gian Luca Tusini, Il fronte della forma: percorsi nel Kunstwollen assieme a Riegl, Wolfflin, Panofsky, Worringer (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2005). 13. Alois Riegl, ‘The Main Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen’, in Christopher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 94–95; Die Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, 215: ‘alles Wollen des Menschen ist auf die befriedigende Gestaltung seines Verhältnisses zu der Welt (Im umfassendsten Sinne des Wortes, inner- und ausserhalb des Menschen) gerichtet. Das bildende Kunstwollen regelt das Verhältnis des Menschen zur sinnlich wahrnehmbaren Erscheinung der Dinge: es gelangt darin die Art und Weise zum Ausdruck, wie der Mensch jeweilig die Dinge gestaltet oder gefarbt sehen will . . . (ähnlich wie im poetischen Kunstwollen die Art und Weise, wie er die Dinge anschaulich vorgestellt haben will). Der Mensch is aber nicht allein ein mit Sinnen aufnehmendes (passives), sonder nauch ein begebrendes (actives) Wesen, das daher die Welt so ausdeuten will, wie sies ich seinem (nach Volk, Ort und Zeit wechselnden) Begehren am offensten und willfährigsten erweist. Der Charakter dieses Wollens ist beschlossen in demjenigen was wir die jeweilige Weltanschauung (abermals im weitesten Sinne des Wortes) nennen: in Religion, 241

Philosophie, Wissenschaft, auch Staat und Recht, – wobei in der Regel eine der genannten Ausdrucksformen über alle anderen zu überwiegen pflegt.’ 14. Vlad Ionescu, ‘The Rigorous and the Vague: Aesthetics and Art History in Riegl, Wölfflin and Worringer’, Journal of Art Historiography 8 (2013): 16. 15. See Riegl, Group Portraiture of Holland. 16. Jeremy Tanner, ‘Karl Mannheim and Alois Riegl: From Art History to the Sociology of Culture’, Art History 32 (2009): 755–784; Viktor Michael Schwarz, ‘What is Style for?’ Ars 39 (2006), 21–32: ‘It should be mentioned that Ginzburg’s interpretation of Riegl’s idea of style as based on the category of race is misleading. Whereas Ginzburg translates that, according to Riegl, late-antique Christians and pagans belonged to the same “razza” (race) and thus used the same style, Riegl says that they belonged “zu denselben Volksstämmen” (to the same tribes). In this way, he stresses that style was independent of faith but he also states that it was independent of belonging to a specific “tribe” as well’. Such a clarification of terminology is also extremely important for the 1930s, when some non-­ biological versions of ‘race’ circulated; see Bernhard Radloff, Heidegger and the Question of National Socialism: Gestalt and Disclosure (Toronto: University of Toronto, 2007), 135. 17. Sedlmayr, ‘Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’, xxxi; ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’, 26. 18. By Vierkandt, see most importantly his Gesellschaftslehre: Hauptprobleme der philosophischen Soziologie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1923); new edition (1928). Sedlmayr refers to a 1926 edition but in Kunst und Wahrheit he correctly cites the 1923 edition. A sympathetic interpretation is given by his (Jewish) student, Dora Peyser, who was forced to flee Nazi Germany: ‘The Sociological Outlook of Vierkandt’, Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy 15 (1937): 118–136. See also Raymond Aron, German Sociology, trans. Mary Bottomore and Thomas Bottomore (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1957), 19–28. 242

19. Sedlmayr, ‘Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’; ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’. For Pächt, see ‘The End of Image Theory’, p. 193, note 1. Vierkandt is not cited in ‘Zu einer strenge’, presumably because Sedlmayr is not writing about Kunstwollen. 20. Hans Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis (Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1930), 127; ‘The Architecture of Borromini’, trans. Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historio­ graphy (2016): 78. 21. As Sedlmayr’s correspondence with Meyer Schapiro deteriorated, Sedlmayr contended that ‘I don’t care about Vierkandt at all’, suggesting some defensiveness; Sedlmayr to Schapiro, 4 December 1934, Columbia University Library, New York: ‘ich schätze Vierkandt gar nicht;’ cited in Evonne Levy, ‘Sedlmayr and Schapiro Correspond, 1930–1935’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 59 (2010): 235–263. Later, Schapiro would justify what he thought to be a strange juxtaposition of ‘idealist’ (Vierkandt, Scheler) and ‘materialistic’ (Reichenbach, Carnap) thinkers in Sedlmayr’s system, as if to suggest he is having his cake and eating it too; Meyer Schapiro, ‘The New Viennese School’, Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 258–262. Interestingly, however, apart from the use of the Gestaltist Lewin, Sedlmayr does not actually use Carnap and Reichenbach in that essay. Schapiro must have supplemented from his own memory in meeting Sedlmayr – he had mentioned in correspondence to Schapiro that he was interested in contributing to the Inter­national Library of Psychology, Philosophy and Scientific Method. Sedlmayr to Schapiro, 19 April 1932, cited in Levy, ‘Sedlmayr and Schapiro Correspond’. In fact, Reichenbach is only cited in Die Architektur Borrominis, appropriately, to refer to a probabilistic explan­ation. It should be remembered some of the cited articles appeared in Symposion, edited by the gestalt psychologist Wilhelm Benary. Schwartz (Blind Spots) raises similar concerns over Pächt’s citation of Moritz Schlick, which he sees in Sedlmayr to be a logistical positivist defense of con­ firmationism. Schlick, although he later leaned towards positivism, was in the cited Allgemeine Erkenntnistheorie a critical realist (like the Gestaltists) and had 243

been a student of Max Planck with Köhler. See Fiorenza Toccafondi, ‘Receptions, Readings and Interpretations of Gestalt­psychologie’, Gestalt Theory 3 (2002): 199– 215, and Uljana Feest, ‘Science and Experience – Science of Experience: Gestalt Psychology and the Anti-Metaphysical Project of the Aufbau’, Perspectives on Science 15 (2007): 1–25. 22. Paul Hochstim, Alfred Vierkandt: A Sociological Critique (New York: Exposition Press, 1966). 23. Lorenz Dittmann, Stil – Symbol – Struktur (Munich, 1967), 145. 24. Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 169; Katharina Lorenz and Jas Elsner, ‘Translators’ Introduction’, Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 37, note 9. 25. Vierkandt, Gesellschaftslehre, 343: ‘Im großartigsten Maße zeigt sich das Walten eines überindividuellen Geistes in den Tatsachen der menschlichen Kultur.’ 26. Sedlmayr, ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’, 16; ‘Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’, xviii: ‘Denn inzwischen hat die modern nicht-atomistische Soziologie die Lehre von dem “objektiven Geist” begründet, und in dem Zusammenhang dieser Lehren tritt nun auch der Begriff eines “objektiven Gesamtwillens” auf, der sich mit dem von Riegl engeführten Begriff vollkommen deckt [Viekrandt’s quote in the preceding note] Dieser ‚überindividuelle Wille’ ist ebenso wie der ‚objektive Geist’ getragen von einer Gruppe von Menschen. Und obwohl er weder eine “in mystischer Weise zwischen den Individuen schwebende Substanz” noch etwas Phänomenales, das heißt in dem bewußten Seelenleben der einzelnen Individuen Aufweisbares ist, wie zum Beispiel die individuellen Vornahmehandlungen, ist er wie der “Geist” etwas Reales, und zwar eine reale Kraft.’ 27. Christian Sehested von Gyldenfeldt, Von Alfred Vierkandt zu Carl v. Clausewitz: Walther Malmsten Schering und die Quellen gemeinschaftlichen Handelns in Frieden und Krieg (Munster: LIT Verlag, 2002), 12. See Schering’s ‘Gestalttheorie und Soziologie’ in Ethos. Vierteljahrsschrift für Soziologie Geschichts- und Kulturphilosophie 244

11 (1926/7): 81–100. Schering would go on to become an expert on the war strategist von Claussewitz and wrote Nazi-friendly tracts. 28. Aron Gurwitsch, Die mitmenschlichen Begegnungen in der Milieuwelt (Habilitation thesis of 1931), ed. Alexandre Métraux (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1977). 29. Wilhelm Dilthey, Der Aufbau der geschichtlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften, ed. M. Riedel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1981); Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1900); Eduard Spranger, Psychologie des Jugendalters (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1927); Max Scheler, Versuche zu einer Soziologie des Wissens (Munich and Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1924), p. 11; Nicolai Hartmann, Das Problem des geistigen Seins (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1933); Hans Freyer, Theorie des objektiven Geistes. Eine Einleitung in die Kulturphilosophie, 2nd edn (Leipzig, 1928); On Dilthey, see Austin Harrington, ‘Dilthey, Empathy and Verstehen: A Contemporary Reappraisal’, European Journal of Social Theory 4 (2001): 311–329. 30. Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics (1920), trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971); Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (1970), trans. R. Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997); Jurgen Habermas, Reason and the Rationalization of Society (1981), vol. I, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1984). 31. Karl Popper, ‘On the Theory of the Objective Mind’, in Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972); Karl Popper, and John Eccles, The Self and its Brain (Berlin: Springer Verlag, 1977). 32. Erik Olin Wright, Andrew Levine and Elliot Sober, ‘Marxism and Methodological Individualism’, in Reconstructing Marxism: Essays on Explanation and the Theory of History (London: Verso, 1992), 107–127. 33. Nicos Hadjinicolaou, Art History and Class Struggle (London: Pluto, 1978), 64. Arnold Hauser properly notes the equal ontological stakes of recognising ‘style’ and ‘capitalism’, both important but difficult abstractions. 245

34. Kurt Lewin, Principles of Topological Psychology (New York: McGraw Hill Book Co., 1936), 19: ‘What is real is what has effects’; c.f., Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A Philosophical Critique of the Contemporary Human Sciences, 3rd edn (London and New York: Routledge, 1998). 35. Max Scheler, ‘Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik’, Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 1 (1913/1916); Edith Stein, ‘Beiträge zur philosophischen Begründung der Psychologie und der Geisteswissenschaften’, in Edmund Husserl, ed., Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung 5 (1922): 158–175; Edmund Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität. Texte aus dem Nachlass (1921–1928), in Husserliana, vol. XIV (The Hague: M. Nijhoff, 1973). 36. Frederic Vandenberghe, ‘Avatars of the Collective: A Realist Theory of Collective Subjectivities’, Sociological Theory 25 (2007): 295–324; Emanuele Caminada, ‘Higher Order Persons: An Ontological Challenge’, Phenomenology and Mind. The On Line Journal of the Centre in Phenomenology and Sciences of the Person 1 (2011): 152–157. 37. Sedlmayr, ‘Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’, xxxi; ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’, 27. 38. Kurt Lewin, Der Begriff der Genese in Physik, Biologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte. Eine Untersuchung zur vergleichenden Wissenschaftslehre (Berlin: Borntraeger, 1922). Sedlmayr cites this work extensively as seen in the previous chapter. 39. Alois Riegl, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin: George Siemens, 1893), 344; Moderne Denkmalkultus: sein Wesen und seine Entstehung (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1903), 2, 4, 6; Henry Buckle, History of Civil­ization in England (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1857), vol. I, 9. 40. Reynolds, Alois Riegl and the Politics of Art History; cited by Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface, 106. 41. Hippolite Taine, History of English Literature (New York: Colonial Press, 1900), 22; Histoire de la litterature anglaise (Paris: Hachette, 1911), vol. I, xl: ‘De même que 246

dans un animal les instincts, les dents, les membres, la charpente osseuse, l’appareil musculaire, sont liés entre eux, de telle façon qu’une variation de l’un d’entre eux détermine dans chacun des autres une variation correspondante, et qu’un naturaliste habile peut sur quelques fragments reconstruire par le raisonnement le corps presque tout entier; de même dans une civilisation la religion, la philosophie, la forme de famille, la littérature, les arts composent un système où tout changement local entraîne un changement général, en sorte qu’un historien expérimenté qui en étudie quelque portion restreinte aperçoit d’avance et prédit à demi les caractères du reste.’ 42. Adolphe Quetelet, Physique sociale (Brussels: C. Murquardt, 1869); Buckle, History of Civilization in England; Hippolyte Taine, Lectures on Art, trans. John Durand, 2 vols (New York: AMS, 1971); c.f. Maurice Mandelbaum, Purpose and Necessity in Social Theory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 79–82. 43. Maurice Mandelbaum, ‘Societal Laws’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Sciences 8 (1957): 211–224; James Woodward, ‘Developmental Explanations’, Synthese 44 (1980): 443–466. 44. Karl Maria Swoboda, ‘Über die Stilkontinuität vom 4. zum 11. Jahrhundert’, in Neue Beiträge zur Kunstgeschichte des ersten Jahrtausends (Forschungen zur Kunstgeschichte und christlichen Archäologie) (Baden-Baden, 1952), 21–30. 45. Max Dvořák, Das rätsel der kunst der brüder van Eyck (Munich: Piper, 1925), xi. 46. Max Dvořák, Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van Eyck, p. 167: ‘Jede geschichtliche Bildung ist en Glied einer bestimmten geschichtlichen Entwicklungskette und bedingt durch die vorangehenden Bildungen derselben Materie’; cited in Pächt, Practice of Art History, 108. 47. Otto Pächt, ‘Die historische Aufgabe Michael Pachers’, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 1 (1931), 95–132; and the discussion in Jan Bakoš, ‘Otto Pächt and Albert Kutal: Methodological Parallels’, Umeni 62 (2014): 406–422. 48. Otto Pächt, Van Eyck. Die Begründer der altniederländischen Malerei (Munich: Prestel, 247

1989); Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting (London: Harvey Miller, 1994), 31. 49. Edgar Wind, ‘Zur Systematik der künstlerischen Probleme’, Zeitschrift fur Asthetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1924–1925): 438–486. 50. T. H. Huxley, ‘On the Method of Zadig: Retrospective Prophecy as a Function of Science’, in Science and Culture, and Other Essays (London: Macmillan, 1881). 51. See Roy Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Science, 2nd edn (London: Verso, 1997); Peter Manicas, A Realist Philosophy of Social Science: Explanation and Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 52. Sedlmayr, ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’, 27; ‘Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’, xxxii: ‘daB es echte historische Geschehensganzheiten und sinnvolle Eigenbewegungen des Geistes gibt, die durch die Ereignisse und Konstellationen der Realgeechichte zwar verzögert, oder gehemmt, beschleunigt, verzerrt oder gebrochen, aber nicht hervorgebracht oder in ihrem Wesen tangiert werden können.’ 53. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920): 321–329; ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’, trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder, Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 17–33. 54. Sedlmayr, ‘Quintessence’, 27. 55. Tanner, ‘Karl Mannheim and Alois Riegl’. There is of course much more to say of Panofsky, especially the way in which Mannheim shaped his interpretive model (Tanner, Hart) and the way in which Elsner claims that Sedlmayr actually contributed to his mature approach; c.f., ‘From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen’, Critical Inquiry 32 (2006), 741–766. 56. Karl Mannheim, ‘Beitrage zur Theorie der Weltanschauungs-Interpretation’, Jahrbuch fur Kunstgeschichte 1 (1921–1922): 236–274 [appeared 1923]; ‘On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung’, in Kurt H. Wolff, ed., From Karl Mannheim (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). 248

57. Tanner, ‘Karl Mannheim and Alois Riegl’, 761. 58. Karl Mannheim, Essays on the Sociology of Culture (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), 72; ‘Towards the Sociology of the Mind’, in Essays on the Sociology of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1952), 72. Mannheim’s development of Riegl’s thought is extremely compelling, capturing as it does the motivation of behaviour. Nevertheless, his extreme relationism does have its drawbacks, namely that his ontological relationism was carried also to an epistemological relationism; the relativity of being becomes the relativity of knowing. More concretely, if our viewpoint is always relative, how can we step out of that viewpoint to obtain objective knowledge? Mannheim notoriously addressed this by exempting the natural sciences from his analysis, something that is not too far from Bourdieu’s own treatment today. This weakness was mercilessly attacked by Gombrich’s friends Popper and von Hayek in London, where Mannheim was ostracised and marginalised. This is the substance of Maurice Mandelbaum’s critique of Mannheim, The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism (New York: Liveright, 1938); and also Vandenberghe’s of Bourdieu, ‘ “The Real is Relational”: An Epistemological Analysis of Pierre Bourdieu’s Generative Structuralism’, Sociological Theory 17 (1999): 32–67. For post-war cultural politics see Verstegen, ‘Otto Pächt “Hegelian” Exile’. 59. Pächt, The Practice of Art History, 131. 60. Max Wertheimer, Productive Thinking (New York: Harper, 1945); German trans. W. Metzger, Produktives Denken (Frankfurt: Frankfurt 1957). 61. Here, I would soften an earlier pronouncement that this phrase ‘historische Dynamik’ has to refer to a speculative history: Verstegen, ‘Gestalt, Art History, and Nazism’, Gestalt Theory 24:2 (2004): 134–150. It is now clear to me that Sedlmayr is referring merely to what we would call the ‘trajectory’ of history, rather than the teleology of history; c.f., Wright, Levine and Sober, Reconstructing Marxism, and Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke, 1995), 108. 249

62. Wolfgang Metzger, ‘Zur Frage der Bildbarkeit schöpferischer Kräfte’, Arbeit und Betrieb 12 (1941): 60–70; Die Grundlagen der Erziehung zu schöpferischer Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main, 1949; 2nd edn (1962)). 63. Pächt, Practice of Art History, 132. See further Pächt, ‘Art Historians and Art ­Critics: Alois Riegl’, Burlington Magazine 105 (1963): 188–193. 64. Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture. 65. In ‘Art Historians and Art Critics: Alois Riegl’, Pächt mentions E. H. Gombrich, Art and Scholarship (London, 1957) and Art and Illusion. 66. E. H. Gombrich, Review of Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie im 19. Jahrhundert (Probleme der Kunstwissenschaft (Berlin, 1963); Art Bulletin 46 (1964): 418–420. 67. Maurice Mandelbaum, ‘Determinism and Moral Responsibility’, Ethics 70 (1960): 204–219. 68. Heinrich Wolfflin, The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art (New York: Dover, 1950), ix. 69. Pächt, Practice of Art History, 128; Karl Marx, ‘Eighteenth Brumaire’, in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), vol. II, 146. 70. Mandelbaum, ‘Determinism and Moral Responsibility’, 217.

4. Hans Sedlmayr’s Borromini 1. Hans Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis (Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1930), 24: ‘die versuchten Beschreibungen einzelner Gebilde – und ganz ebenso die später folgende Beschreibung der architektonischen ‘Welt’ Borrominis – gibt nicht eine Anleitung zum Eindringen in diese Gebilde, sondern Ergebnisse eines solchen Eindringens. Eine padagogisch verfahrende Einführung in die Betrachtung dieser Architektur ware eine Aufgabe ganz anderer Art’; ‘The Architecture of Borromini’, trans. Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historiography (2016), 13. 250

2. Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis. For a good introduction to the text, see Marco Pogacnik, ‘Introduzione’, in Hans Sedlmayr, L’architettura di Borromini (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 1996), 7–22; Eng. trans., ‘Beyond the Vienna School: Sedlmayr and Borromini’, in Andrew Leach, John Macarthur and Maarten Delbeke, eds, The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880–1980 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 97–108. 3. Martin Raspe, Das Architektursystem Borrominis (Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1994). 4. Lewin, ‘Idee und Aufgabe der vergleichenden Wissenschaftslehre’, Symposion 1 (1925): 61–94. 5. Wolfgang Kemp, ‘Strukturalismus’, Kunsthistorische Arbeitsblätter 12 (2008): 1–10. 6. Even Frederic Schwartz, who calls the book ‘quite compelling’ spends the majority of his time on characterology. Frederic Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005, 158; c.f. my review, ‘Persistence of Vision – Blind Spots after Ten Years’, Journal of Art Historiography 11 (2014): 1–11. 7. Max Dvořák, ‘Francesco Borromini als Restaurator’, Kunstgeschichtliches Jahrbuch der K. K. Zentral-Kommission; reprinted in Max Dvořák, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte, ed. J. Wilde and K. M. Swoboda (Munich: R. Piper & Co., 1929), 271–278; Eng. trans. by Jonathan Blower, ‘Francesco Borromini as Restorator’, The Monument Question in Late Habsburg Austria, 238–244, PhD dissertation, Univers­ ity of Edinburgh, 2012. 8. Dagobert Frey, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der römischen Barockarchitektur’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 17 (1924): 5–113; and the popularising Architettura barocca (Rome and Milan, 1926); Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Gestaltetes Sehen’, Belvedere 8 (1925): 65–73; ‘Zum Gestalteten Sehen’, Belvedere 9/10 (1926): 57–62. 9. Andrew Hopkins, ‘Riegl Renaissances’, in Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte, eds, The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2010), 65. 251

10. Hans Sedlmayr, Fischer von Erlach der Ältere (Munich: Piper, 1925); Österreichische Barockarchitektur 1690–1740 (Wien, Filser EA, 1930). 11. Eberhard Hempel, Francesco Borromini (Vienna: Schroll, 1924). 12. Leo Steinberg, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism (New York: Garland, 1977), 31. Sedlmayr had published Albertina 175 in his 1926 article. 13. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’. 14. Kurt Koffka, ‘Zur Theorie der Erlebnis-Wahrnehmung’, Annalen der Philosophie 3 (1923): 375–399. 15. For a discussion, see Peter Steiner, Russian Formalism: A Metapoetics (Lausanne: sdvig press, 2014), 39–59. 16. Viktor Shklovsky, Technika pisatel’ skogo remesla (Moscow, 1928); cited in Steiner, Russian Formalism, 40. 17. For a discussion of abduction, see Chapter 2. 18. Schwartz, Blind Spots, 158. 19. Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis, 24: ‘Der Raum mist ein rechteckiges Prisma mit abgestumpften Ecken, dessen Seiten sich mit Bogen überspannt öffnen. Die Bogen in der langen Achse sind Halbkreise und öffnen sich auf gewolbte Nischen (Apsiden), deren Grundrisse Hälften von Kreisen sind. Die Bogen in der kurzen Achse sind Teile von Ovalen und öffnen sich auf flache Apsiden, deren Grundrisse Teile von Ovalen sind. Die Bogen tragen eine massive Ovalkuppel, die mit sphärischen Trapez-Zwickeln auf den “abgestumpften Ecken” des Rechteckprismas ruht. Senkrecht liegen dabei drei scharf getrennte Zonen übereinander: Zone der Säulenordnungen, Kuppelzone, dazwischen eine vermittelnde Zone zusammengesetzt aus Bogen, Partialwölbungen und Zwickeln. Als vierte die ganz selbständige Laterne.’ 20. A. E. Brinckmann, Baukunst des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts in den romanischen Ländern (Berlin: Neubabelsberger Athenaion, 1915). 252

21. Citing Max Wertheimer. Shortly after this was published, Wertheimer’s student in Frankfurt, Erich Goldmeier, would publish extensive experiments on phenomenal similarity, illustrating precisely this point; ‘Über Ähnlichkeit bei gesehenen Figuren’, Psychologische Forschung 4 (1937): 146–208, Eng. trans. ‘Similarity in Visually Perceived Forms’, Psychological Issues 8 (1973): 1–136. 22. Pächt would go on to use this example in ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien der westlichen Malerei des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 2 (1933): 75–100; Eng. trans. by Jacqueline Jung, ‘Design Principles of Fifteenth-Century Northern Painting’, in Christopher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 243–321. For a discuss­ ion, see the next chapter. 23. Rudolf Arnheim, Dynamics of Architectural Form (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977), 69–75. 24. Sedlmayr references Albertina inv. 236 here, which seems to be an error, as he further cites Hempel, Francesco Borromini, who himself mentions Albertina inv. 171 and 223. The drawings associated with the basement are inv. 223 and 180. 25. Here his logic is following that of Max Wertheimer in ‘Untersuchungen zur Lehre von der Gestalt II’, Psychologische Forschung 4 (1923): 301–350. 26. Freidrich Wulf, ‘Über die Veränderung von Vorstellungen (Gedächtnis und Gestalt)’, Psychologische Forschung 1 (1922): 333–373; Eng. trans., ‘Tendencies in Figural Variation’, in W. Ellis, ed., A Source Book of Gestalt Psychology (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1939), 136–148. The experiments are discussed by Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye, New Version (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 66–67. 27. Heinz Werner, ‘Über Sprachphysiognomik als einer neuen Methode der verg­ leichenden Sprachbetrachtung’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie 109 (1928): 337–363. 28. Joseph Glicksohn and Tal Yafe, ‘Physiognomic Perception and Metaphoric Thinking in Young Children’, Metaphor and Symbol 13 (1998): 179–204; Martin Lindauer, 253

The Expressiveness of Perceptual Experience: Physiognomy Reconsidered (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2013), and Giulia Parovel, Le qualità espressive: Fenomenologia sperimentale e percezione visiva (Milan: Mimesis, 2012); Michele Sinico, Expressive Design. Human Factors e teoria delle qualità terziarie per il disegno industriale (Milan: Mimesis, 2012). Daniela Bohde states that, ‘Sedlmayr’s theory, then, is that the essence of the work of art can be grasped just by looking at it’, and also that there was an increasing conflation of ‘physiognomy, character and essence’; Daniela Bohde, ‘The Physiognomics of Architecture: Heinrich Wölfflin, Hans Sedlmayr and Paul Schultze-Naumberg’, in Frank Mitchell and Dan Adler, eds, German Art History and Scientific Thought (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 131. Bohde argues both for the immediacy of the physiognomic impression and also its connection to classical physiognomy. With regard to the second point, Werner and the Gestalt psychologists were quite conscious of the traditional meaning of ‘physiognomy’ and resurrected its use quite consciously as a legitimate concession to the expressiveness of perception. Contrary to Bohde, when Arnheim or his teacher Max Wertheimer demonstrated physiognomic correlations, they never argued that one gained an insight into the character of a person from their appearance. See Fritz Heider, The Life of a Psychologist – An Autobiography (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1983), 44–45; cited by Daniela Bohde, Kunstgeschichte als physio­ gnomische Wissenschaft: Kritik einer Denkfigur der 1920er bis 1940er Jahre (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2012), 164. What Wertheimer and Arnheim affirm about personality is that its manifestations may be correlated but its content may not be divined. For example, Wertheimer’s famous classroom exercise of improvising on the piano and asking students to identify who is intended is not physiognomic. There is a correlation sideways from music to person, not vertically from person to content. A slow walking person and a slow plodding melody don’t really say anything about the person, although we can identify to whom the music refers. The same goes for Wertheimer’s famous radix, the common core to an individual’s expressive 254

behaviour. These manifestations can correlate with one another without any affirmation about their content. Put another way, the outward form of behaviour does not give insights into permanent dispositions. 29. We might quote Jean-Paul Sartre, who said in reference to Kretschmer, ‘the character of the Other, in fact, is immediately given to intuition as a synthetic ensemble. This does not mean that we can immediately describe it. It would take time to make the differentiated structures appear, to make explicit certain givens which we have immediately apprehended effectively, to transform the global indistinction which is the Other’s body into organized form’; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology, trans. Hazel Barnes (New York: Philos­ ophical Library, 1956), 350. 30. Rudolf Wittkower, ‘Francesco Borromini: Personality and Destiny’, in Studies in the Italian Baroque (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975); Werner Oechslin, ‘ “Folie borrominienne”, “esprit cartésien”, “schizothyme” ’, in Fabrice Douar (ed.), Borromini en perspective (Paris: Louvre, 2003), 46–71. 31. Here I follow Schwartz’s translation, with the exception of one word; Blind Spots, 159. 32. Interestingly, Gombrich is not so harsh in his memoir, ‘Art History and Psychology in Vienna Fifty Years Ago’, Art Journal 44 (1984): 162–164. 33. Wolfgang Köhler, Review Ernst Kretschmer, Körperbau und Charakter (Berlin: Springer, 1921); Ernst Kretschmer, Physique and Character, trans. W. J. H. Sprott (London: Kegan Paul, 1925). As already pointed out by Daniela Bohde, Kunstgeschichte als physiognomischen Wissenschaft, 167. 34. Jerome Kagan, Galen’s Prophecy: Temperament in Human Nature (New York: Basic Books, 1994). 35. Raymond Montemayor, ‘Men and Their Bodies: The Relationship between Body Type and Behaviour’, Journal of Social Issues 34 (1978): 48–64. 36. For one contemporary use of Kretschmer, see Louis Sass, ‘Affectivity in Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Perspective’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (2004): 127–147. 255

37. This is the reference to Friedrich Wulf, already discussed, and also Dmitrii Usnadze, ‘Zum Problem der Bedeutungserfassung’, in VIII International Congress of Psychologie (1926) (Groningen: Noordhoff, 1927), 440–442. 38. See for example Heinrich Schulte’s references to Kretschmer’s ‘meticulous investigation’ in one of the few contributions to psychopathology in the early Gestalt literature: Heinrich Schulte, ‘Versuch einer Theorie der paranoischen Eigenbeziehung und Wahnbildung’, Psychologische Forschung 5 (1924): 1–23; Eng. trans., ‘An Attempt at a Theory of the Paranoid Ideas of Reference and Delusion Formation’, Gestalt Theory 8 (1986): 231–248. Max Wertheimer later revealed to Erwin Levy, his assistant in Frankfurt and later a therapist in New York City, that he had written the paper for Schulte. See further Wolfgang Köhler, Review Ernst Kretschmer, Körperbau und Charakter (Berlin: Springer, 1921); Psychologische Forschung 1 (1922): 156–158, and less reliably J. F. Brown, The Psychodynamics of Abnormal Behaviour (New York: McGraw Hill, 1940), 262–265. 39. Ernst Kretschmer, Geniale Menschen (Berlin: Springer, 1929); The Psychology of Men of Genius (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1931), 89. 40. Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany. A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 168; c.f. Michael Hau and Mitchell Ash: ‘Der normale Körper – seelisch erblickt’, in Sander Gilman and Claudia Schmölders, eds, Gesichter der Weimarer Republik. Eine physiognomische Kulturgeschichte (Cologne: Dumont, 2000), 12–31. 41. Ernst Kretschmer, ‘The Breeding of the Mental Endowments of Genius’, Psychiatric Quarterly 4 (1930): 78. 42. Bohde, ‘The Physiognomics of Architecture’, 131. 43. Kretschmer, Körperbau und Charakter, 150; Physique and Character, 209. 44. Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception, New Version (1974), 478. 45. I state ‘physical anthropologist’ on purpose. Eickstedt was trained, unlike Günther, whom Sedlmayr does not cite. Eickstedt did not believe that the Germans were a 256

race, although he felt that the ‘Nordic’ race was predominant among Germans; Christopher Hutton, Race and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 149; Egbert Klautke, ‘German “Race Psychology” and Its Implementation in Central Europe: Egon von Eickstedt and Rudolf Hippius’, in Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling, eds, Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe 1900–1940 (Budapest: CEU Press, 2007). 46. Franz Weidenreich, Rasse und Körperbau (Berlin: Springer, 1927). 47. Kretschmer, Geniale Menschen; The Psychology of Men of Genius. 48. Karl Maria Swoboda, Kunst und Nation (1936) and Zum deutschen Anteil an der Kunst der Sudetenländer (Rohrer Verlag, 1938), and Dagobert Frey, Englisches Wesen im Spiegel seiner Kunst (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1942); for discussion see Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), and Jan Bakoš, Discourses and Strategies: The Role of the Vienna School in Shaping European Approaches to Art History and Related Discourses (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2013), 23–28. 49. G. R. Mastroianni, ‘Kurt Gottschaldt’s Ambiguous Relationship with National Socialism’, History of Psychology 9 (2006): 38–54. 50. Felix Thürlemann, ‘Vedere Borromini: il rapporto tra storia dell’architettura e storia della rappresentazione’, in Christoph Frommel and E. Sladek, eds, Francesco Borromini. Atti del convegno internazionale (Milan: Electa, 2000), 425–428. 51. Pächt, The Practice of Art History, 59. 52. See, for example, Luigi Moretti, ‘Le serie di strutture generalizzate di Borromini’, Accademia Nazionale di San Luca, 1967 (Rome: DeLuca, 1969); Eng. trans., ‘The Series of Generalized Structures in Borromini’s Work’, Oase. Journal for Architecture (2001): 48–55; c.f. Federico Bucci and Marco Mulazzani, Luigi Moretti: Works and Writings (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002); and Cesare Brandi, ‘Borromini’, Struttura e architettura (Turin: Einaudi, 1967). Paolo Porto­ ghesi gave general respect to Sedlmayr’s work: Borromini nella cultura europea (Rome and Bari: Laterza, 1982), 127–128. 257

53. Christian Norberg-Schulz, Baroque Architecture (New York: Rizzoli, 1985). 54. Erich Hubala, Baroque and Rococo (New York: Universe Books, 1976), 50–51. 55. Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Objective Percepts, Objective Values’, in New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 297–326. 56. Leo Steinberg, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane: A Study in Multiple Form and Architectural Symbolism (New York: Garland, 1977). 57. Michael Hill has recently named Steinberg’s interpretation of San Carlo a ‘complete exegesis’, aside from minor details. Steinberg had argued that Borromini developed the plan from two triangles, from which he elaborated his tri-form design. Therefore, there was a Trinitarian content built into the very design. In particular, Steinberg was able to bring to the table new drawings – ironically from the Albertina collection that Sedlmayr knew well – particularly Albertina 171. The subsequent discussion of Steinberg’s work has been about the chronology of the drawings and whether or not the geometrical schemes he finds in them are generative or ex post facto rationalisations, perhaps intended for their publication later in Borromini’s life. Michael Hill, ‘Practical and Symbolic Geometry in Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane’, Journal of the Society of Architectural History 72 (2013): 555–583. For Albertina 171, see Steinberg, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, chapter 2; Christof Frommel and R. Bösel, eds, Borromini e l’universo barocco (Milan: Electa, 2000), VI.15, 335. On the subsequent discussion, see Joseph Connors, Review of Leo Steinberg, Borromini’s San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38 (1979): 283–285; Francesco Borromini, Opus Architectonicum, ed. Joseph Connors (Milan: Il Polifilo, 1998); Hill, ‘Practical and Symbolic Geometry’. 58. Sedlmayr, ‘Zum Gestalteten Sehen’, 57. 59. Kemp, ‘Strukturalismus’, 8–9. 60. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’; ‘Design Principles’, citing Hans Kauffmann, Rembrandts Bildgestaltung: Ein Beitrag zur Analyse seines Stils (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1922). 258

61. Michael Hill, ‘Steinberg’s Complexity’, in Andrew Leach, John Macarthur and Maarten Delbeke, eds, The Baroque in Architectural Culture, 1880–1980 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), 211–221, traces Steinberg’s use of ‘double structure’ back to Witt­ kower, yet Wittkower clearly indicates the paternity of the idea in Panofsky and none other than Sedlmayr; Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Michelangelo’s Biblioteca Laurenz­ iana’, Art Bulletin 16 (1934), 214. 62. Hill, ‘Steinberg’s Complexity’, 219; quoting Leo Steinberg and Richard Candida Smith, ‘The Gestural Trace’, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, 2001, 106. 63. Fabio Barry, ‘Bernini’s S. Andrea al Quirinale and Early Modern Architectural Representation’, Italian Academy Fellows’ Seminar Working Papers 2012: http://hdl. handle.net/10022/AC:P:19535 (accessed 8 January 2014).

5. Otto Pächt and ‘National’ Constants in Late Gothic Painting 1. Otto Pächt, The Practice of Art History: Reflections on Method, trans. David Britt (New York: Harvey Miller, 1999). 2. Hans Sedlmayr, Die Architektur Borrominis (Berlin: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt, 1930). 3. Otto Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien der westlichen Malerei des 15. Jahrhunderts’, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 2 (1933): 75–100; English trans. by Jacqueline Jung, ‘Design Principles of Fifteenth-Century Northern Painting’, in Christopher Wood (ed.) The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 243–321. The best recent discussion of this article is Artur Rosenauer, ‘Otto Pächt – Bemerkungen zu seinen frühen Schriften’, in Michael Pächt and Artur Rosenauer, eds, Otto Pächt: Symposion anlässlich seines 100. Geburtstages (Munich: Michael Pächt, 2006). 4. See Lars Olaf Larsson, ‘Nationalstil und Nationalismus in der Kunstgeschichte der zwanziger und dreissiger Jahre’, in Lorenz Dittmann, ed., Kategorien und Methoden 259

der deutschen Kunstgeschichte 1900–1930 (Stuttgart, 1985), pp. 169–185; DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art. 5. See Whitney Davis, The Canonical Tradition in Ancient Egyptian Art (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Donald Preziosi, Minoan Architectural Design: Formation and Signification (Berlin: Mouton, 1983); Tonio Hölscher, The Language of Images in Roman Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004). For Kaschnitz-Weinberg’s essay, see ‘Bemerkungen zur Struktur der ägyptischen Plastik’, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 2 (1933): 7–24; ‘Remarks on the ­Structure of Egyptian Sculpture’, in Vienna School Reader, ed. Christopher Wood, 198–241. 6. Emily J. Levine, Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 171. 7. Erik Inglis, Jean Fouquet and the Invention of France (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 208. 8. Meyere Schapiro, ‘The New Viennese School’, Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 260. 9. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Sculptures of Souillac’, in W. R. W. Koehler, ed., Mediaeval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1939). Otto Pächt to Meyer Schapiro, 3 June 1939, Columbia University Library, New York; quoted in Cindy Persinger, ‘Reconsidering Meyer Schapiro and the Vienna School’, Journal of Art Historiography 3 (2010): 1–17. 10. Otto Pächt to Meyer Schapiro. 3 June 1939, Columbia University Library, New York. 11. Wolfgang Köhler and Hans Wallach, ‘Figural aftereffects: An investigation of visual processes’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 88 (1944): 269–357. 12. Otto Pächt, ‘Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting’, Burlington Magazine 98 (1956): 276. On side-shadowing, see Michael Andre Bernstein, Foregone Conclusions: Against Apocalyptic History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). 13. See Alois Riegl, ‘Das holländische Gruppenporträt’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammulungen des allerhochsten Kaiserhauses 23 (1902): 71–278; Group Portraiture of Holland. 260

14. Alois Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, ed. K. Maria Swoboda (Vienna: Österreichische Staatsdruckerei, 1931). 15. Otto Pächt, Österreichische Tafelmalerei der Gotik (Augsburg: Filser, 1929), 50. See Christopher Wood, ‘Die nicht mehr schönen Künste’, in Michael Pächt and Artur Rosenauer, eds, Otto Pächt: Symposion anlässlich seines 100. Geburtstages(Munich: Michael Pächt, 2006). 16. Sedlmayr to Schapiro, 2 May 1931; Columbia University Library, New York. I am grateful to Branko Mitrovic for providing me with digital copies of the entire Schapiro-Sedlmayr correspondence. 17. Otto Pächt, ‘Die historische Aufgabe Michael Pachers’, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 1 (1931): 95–132. Wood (‘Die nicht mehr schönen’) notes that Pächt’s reflections on German and Austrian art show him at his most democratic and Rieglian. 18. Otto Pächt, The Practice of Art History, 45. 19. Rudolf Arnheim, ‘Inverted Perspective and the Axiom of Realism’, in New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986), 178. 20. Theodor Hetzer, Das deutsche Element in der italienische Malerei des 16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1929). 21. Kurt Lewin, ‘Gesetz und Experiment in der Psychologie’, Symposion 1 (1927): 375–421; Eng. trans., ‘Law and Experiment in Psychology’, Science in Context 5 (1992): 385–416. This is the basis of the twin chapters in Sedlmayr’s Architektur Borrominis: (1) ‘Strukturelle Beschreibungen’ and (2) ‘Genetische Beschreibungen’. 22. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 76; ‘Design Principles’, 246. 23. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 81; ‘Design Principles’, 317. Artur Rosenauer notes that this text may be found in the Pächt-Archiv in Vienna; ‘Otto Pächt – Bemerkungen zu seinen frühen Schriften’, 58. 24. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 78; ‘Design Principles’, 247; Koffka, ‘Zur Theorie der Erlebnis-Wahrnehmung’. 261

25. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 77; ‘Design Principles, 246. 26. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 79; ‘Design Principles’, 249. 27. Arnheim, ‘Inverted Perspective and the Axiom of Realism’. 28. Suzanne Lewis finds important relationships between Pächt’s later narrative theory (for example, The Rise of Pictorial Narrative, 1962) and film theory: ‘Narrat­ ive’, in Conrad Rudolph, ed., A Companion to Medieval Art: Romanesque and Gothic in Northern Europe (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008), 86–105. My survey suggests that perhaps Pächt was seeking to portray medieval narrative much earlier. 29. Rudolf Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957), 12; Film als Kunst, 27: ‘Film wirkt weder als reines Raumbild noch als reines Flächenbild, sondern als ein Ineinander von beidem’. 30. Arnheim, Film as Art, 36; Film als Kunst, 57–58. 31. Maybe this near miss between Pächt and Arnheim is another case of mutual interest or the ‘anxiety of influence’. But it becomes stranger since the possibility is opened up that maybe Arnheim was also reading the Vienna group. Pächt’s emphasis on the pictorial surface led him to formulate that, ‘The Netherlandish painters were well aware that . . . those aspects had to be translated into a particular artistic medium (the medium of the painted surface). And so they made it their task to find the perceptible surface equivalents for an abundance of phenomena from the visible world’ (Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 84; ‘Design Principles’, 262). Later, Arnheim would turn this concept of ‘equivalence’ into a full theory of abstraction, of ‘representational concepts’. Here is his later formulation in a paper, ‘Perceptual Abstraction and Art’, which he published in the journal Psychological Review in 1947, based on wartime research: ‘Representation consists in creating, with the means of a particular medium, an equivalent of a perceptual concept’; Arnheim, ‘Perceptual Abstraction and Art’, Psychological Review 54 (1947): 72; See further

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Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1954), 162. This passage was refined and moved earlier in the book in the 1974 ‘new version’, p. 98: ‘image-making, artistic or otherwise, does not simply derive from the optical projection of the object represented, but is an equivalent, rendered with the properties of a particular medium, of what is observed in the object’. As another example of the intriguing gemellaggio between the two men’s thought, consider Pächt’s comment in The Master of the Mary of Burgundy, that ‘the conquest of the third dimension was a dubious gain’ (The Master of Mary of Burgundy, London: Faber and Faber, 1948, 19) and Arnheim’s later comment about the addition of motion to the still image was ‘a risky step to take’; ‘Art Today and the Film’, Art Journal 25 (1966): 243. For both Pächt and Arnheim, the geometric projection is not so important as how it can be symbolised in the medium of painting. 32. Richard Wollheim, ‘On Formalism and Pictorial Representation’, Journal of Aes­ thetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 127–138, 129; Davis, A General Theory of Visual Culture, 54–64. 33. For discussions of the Strukturforschung-structuralism connection, first posited by Sheldon Nodelman, see Chistopher Wood, ‘Une perspective oblique: Hubert Damisch, la grammaire du tableau et la Strukturanalyse viennoise’, Cahiers du Musée national d’art modern 55 (Winter 1996): 107–129; and Josef Vojvodik, ‘The Concept of Structure and the Work of Art in the Structuralist Art History of Hans Sedlmayr in Comparison with the Structural Aesthetics of Jan Mukařovský’, Art in Translation 5 (2013): 321–377. 34. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 90; ‘Design Principles’, 279. 35. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 82; ‘Design Principles’, 255. For more on Netherlandish formation principles, see Pächt’s later Van Eyck. Die Begründer der altnie­der­ländischen Malerei, 56–60; Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish

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Painting, from his 1972 lectures; and Altniederländische Malerei. Von Rogier van der Weyden bis Gerard David (Munich: Prestel, 1994); Early Netherlandish Painting from Rogier van der Weyden to Gerard David (New York: Harvey Miller, 1997), from his 1965–1966 lectures. 36. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 81; ‘Design Principles’, 253. 37. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 87; ‘Design Principles’, 272; Van Eyck and the Founders of Early Netherlandish Painting, 57–58; Van Eyck. Die Begründer der altniederländischen Malerei, 56–60: ‘Antagonismus von Bildfläche und Tiefenraum’. 38. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 90; ‘Design Principles’, 279. 39. Compare again Pächt’s later Altniederländische Malerei and Early Netherlandish Painting. For Bosch, see Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, Hieronymus Bosch: Eine historische Interpretation seiner Gestaltungsprinzipien (Theorie und Geschichte der Literatur und der schönen Künste, LVIII) (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1981). 40. Otto Pächt, ‘Jean Fouquet: A Study of His Style’, The Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 4 (1940–1941): 89–90. 41. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 97; ‘Design Principles’, 303. 42. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 98; ‘Design Principles’, 310; citing Max Scheler, Die Ursachen des Deutschenhasses, 2nd edn (Leipzig: Wolff, 1917), 105. 43. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 98; ‘Design Principles’, 311; ‘Jean Fouquet’, 96. 44. Pächt, ‘Jean Fouquet’, 98. 45. Joseph Koerner, ‘Albrecht Dürer’s Pleasures of the World and the Limits of Festival’, Poetik und Hermeneutik, 14, Das Fest, eds Rainer Warning and Walter Haug (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1989), 180–216, 194–195. I should mention in passing that Evonne Levy’s identification of Koerner’s article as ‘devastating reading’ does not seem quite right in light of his generally admiring comments; Evonne Levy, ‘Sedlmayr and Schapiro Correspond, 1930–1935’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 59 (2010): 236.

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46. Otto Pächt, ‘Die Autorschaft des Gonella-Bildnisses’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 70 (1974): 39–88. 47. Jonathan J. G. Alexander, ‘Medieval Art and Modern Nationalism’, in G. R. OwenCrocker and T. Graham, eds, Medieval Art: Recent Perspectives: A Memorial Tribute to C.R. Dodwell (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 206–223; see further Jonathan J. G. Alexander, ‘Otto Pächt 1902–1988’, Proceedings of the British Academy 80 (1991): 453–472. For the confirmation of his hunch, see Detlev Kreidl, ‘Le portrait de Gonella: Le dessin sous-jacent dans le tableau de Gonella’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 97 (1981): 5–8. 48. Otto Pächt, ‘René d’Anjou Studien I’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 69 (1973): 85–126; ‘Réne d’Anjou Studien, II’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 73 (1977): 7–106. 49. For discussion of these issues, see Lisa Deam, ‘Flemish versus Netherlandish: A Discourse of Nationalism’, Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 1–33; and Gregory T. Clark, ‘What’s in a Name? “Flanders”, Language and the Historiography of Late Medieval Art in Belgium since Federalization’, in Elizabeth Mansfield, ed., Making Art History: A Changing Discipline and its Institutions (London: Routledge, 2007), 67–78. 50. Meyer Schapiro, ‘The New Viennese School’, Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 258–266; c.f., ‘Race, Nationality and Art’, Art Front (March 1936): 10–12. 51. Alexander, ‘Medieval Art and Modern Nationalism’, 207. 52. Hans Sedlmayr, Österreichische Barockarchitektur (Vienna: Filser, 1930), 22–23. 53. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 90; ‘Design Principles’, 319. 54. Matthew Rampley’s recent work emphasises the imperial lens of Austrian cosmopolitanism. Although progressive narratives of Austrian cosmopolitanism are not possible in a naïve form, they still make multi-ethnicity possible in a way impossible in the Prussian state.

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55. Pächt, ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’, 86; ‘Design Principles’, 270. 56. For studies very much in the spirit of Pächt’s propositions, see Rudolf Arnheim, ‘A Gestalt Theory of Style’, and ‘Objective Percepts, Objective Values’, both in New Essays on the Psychology of Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). 57. Pächt to Schapiro, 4 October 1934, Schapiro Collection, Columbia University, New York; cited in Cindy Persinger, ‘Reconsidering Meyer Schapiro in the New Vienna School’, Journal of Art Historiography 3 (2010), 6, ‘eine radikale Kritik des land­l äufigen Nationalismus als auch Konservatisumus möglich ist’. For more on Schapiro, see Karl Johns, ‘Austrian Art-Historical Method in the United States: Meyer Schapiro and Emil Kaufmann’, in Waldemar Zacharasiewicz and Christoph Irmscher, eds, Ideas Crossing the Atlantic: Theories, Normative Conceptions, and Cultural Images (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2019), 385–412. 58. Pächt to Schapiro, 4 October 1934, ‘Man muss sich vielmehr vorstellen, dass es eine Art gemeinsamen Ideals ist, das den Künstlern in vagen Formen vorschwebt, den Gestaltungsprozess mehr oder weniger bewusst leitet’; cited in Persinger, ‘Reconsidering Meyer Schapiro’, 6. 59. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 82. 60. Meyer Schapiro, ‘The New Viennese School’, [review of Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, II] Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 258, 262–265. It is not likely that Pächt had seen Schapiro’s paper in Art Front. 61. Otto Pächt, Review of G. A. S.Snijder: Romeinsche Kunstgeschiedenis (P. Noordhoff, 1925), Kritische Berichte 6 (1937): 3–15; reprinted in Methodisches zur Kunstges­ chichten Praxis, 129–140. 62. Pächt acknowledges Karl Maria Swoboda, ‘Kunst und Nation’, Nation und Staat [Deutsche Zeitschrift für das europäische Minoritätenproblem] 9 (1936): 439–462. 266

63. Pächt, Review of G. A. S. Snijder, Kritische Berichte, 15; Methodisches zur Kunstgeschichten Praxis, 140. 64. Karl Maria Swoboda, Zum deutschen Anteil an der Kunst der Sudetenländer (Rohrer Verlag, 1938) and Dagobert Frey, ‘Die Entwicklung nationaler Stile in der mittelalterlichen Kunst des Abendlandes’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 16 (1938): 1–74; Englisches Wesen im Spiegel seiner Kunst (Stuttgart: W Kohlhammer, 1942). 65. Meyer Schapiro, ‘Style’, in A. Kroeber, ed., Anthropology Today (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1953), 287–312. 66. Cindy Persinger, The Politics of Style: Meyer Schapiro and the Crisis of Meaning in Art History, PhD dissertation, University of Pittsburgh, 2007. 67. W. J. T. Mitchell, ‘Schapiro’s Legacy’, Art in America 83 (April 1995): 29–31. That Mitchell’s critique does not hold water wholesale is carefully laid out by Persinger, The Politics of Style. 68. To the degree that he seems to deny methodological institutionalism and historical trajectories, he would appear to be close to thinkers like Roemer and Elster in the 1970s and 1980s who used aspects of methodological individualist ontology, positivist outlook and rational choice methodology, to make ‘Marxism’ more legitimate. In particular, G. A. Cohen seems to have misunderstood Marx to be both a holist and teleologist. If this is removed, the need to rescue him is erased. The analogy to Pächt is instructive. 69. See Dave Elder-Vass, The Causal Power of Social Structures: Emergence, Structure and Agency (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 2010). Frederic Vandenberghe, ‘Avatars of the Collective: A Realist Theory of Collective Subjectivities’, Sociological Theory 25 (2007): 295–324, 301: collectives are ‘not given as finished entities, but as social products that are always socially and locally constructed in concrete situations of action; [they] are not things, but processes; not reifications, but realizations and concretizations of abstract categories’. 267

70. See Joan Hart, ‘Heuristic Constructs and Ideal Types: The Wölfflin/Weber Connect­ ion’, in Frank Mitchell and Dan Adler, eds, German Art History and Scientific Thought: Beyond Formalism (Ashgate, 2012). 71. Maurice Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism (New York: Liveright, 1938), 284, 286. For a reconstruction of a group’s style, see Ian Verstegen’s recent Federico Barocci and the Oratorians: Corporate Patronage in the Counter-Reformation (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2015), ‘Introduction’. 72. See Florin Curta, ‘Some Remarks on Ethnicity in Medieval Archaeology’, Early Medieval Europe 15 (2007): 159–185, and Sian Jones, The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and the Present (London: Routledge, 1997). 73. Dean Peabody, National Characteristics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 74. Kurt Lewin, ‘Der Übergang von der aristotelischen zur galileischen Denkweise in Biologie und Psychologie’, Erkenntnis 1 (1930): 421–466. 75. Really, however, the problem is that determinism is misunderstood as closed and inevitable. 76. Curta, ‘Some Remarks on Ethnicity in Medieval Archaeology’, 161. 77. Christopher Wood, ‘Introduction’, in Pächt, The Practice of Art History, 10. 78. Koerner, ‘Albrecht Dürer’s Pleasures of the World’, 195. 79. Pächt, The Master of Mary of Burgundy. 80. Heinrich Wölfflin, ‘Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur’ (1886), in J. Gantner, ed., Wölfflin, H., Kleine Schriften (Basel: Schwabe, 1946), 45; citing Hermann Weiss, Kostümkunde (Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1864). 81. Frederic Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory and the History of Art in Twentieth-­ Century Germany (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005). 82. Schwartz, Blind Spots, 257. 83. See, for example, Alice Zrebiec, ‘With Bells on His Toes’, Metropolitan Museum Journal 24 (1989): 161–171. 268

84. Significantly, this quote was used prominently by Karl Mannheim, in his ‘Beiträge zur Theorie der Weltanschauungsinterpretation’, Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschchte 1 (Vienna, 1923), 236–274; which figured in the appreciation of Riegl and his methods. 85. Erwin Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism. An Inquiry into the Analogy of the Arts, Philosophy and Religion in the Middle Ages (New York: Meridian, [1951] 1976). 86. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Outline of a Sociological Theory of Art Perception’, International Social Science Journal 20 (1968): 589–612; Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). For a discussion, see Jeremy Tanner, ‘Michael Baxandall and the Sociological Interpretation of Art’, Cultural Sociology 4 (2010): 231–256. 87. For example, Mary W. Ainsworth, ‘Workshop Practice in Early Netherlandish Painting: An Inside View’, in M. W. Ainsworth and K. Christiansen, eds, From Van Eyck to Bruegel: Early Netherlandish Painting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998), 205–211. 88. Meyer Schapiro, ‘ “Muscipula Diaboli”, the Symbolism of the Merode Altarpiece’, Art Bulletin 27 (1945): 182–187; Pächt, ‘Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting’, 275. 89. Pächt, ‘Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting’, 276.

6. Johannes Wilde on Michelangelo: The Image in Space 1. Bruno Fürst, Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der österreichischen Plastik in der 1. Hälfte des 15. Jahrhunderts (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1931). This study is cited by Pächt in ‘Gestaltungsprinzipien’/‘Design Principles’ (1933). 2. The essays in Swoboda’s collected essays come closest: Neue Aufgaben der Kunstgeschichte (Brno, Prague, Leipzig, Vienna: Rohrer, 1935); c.f. ‘Zur Salzburger 269

Muchmalerei des 11. Jahrhunderts’, in Arte del primo millenio (Atti del Convegno di Pavia) (Turin, 1950), 381–382, which discusses ‘constants’. 3. On Wilde, see John Shearman, ‘Johannes Wilde (1891–1970)’, in Leopold Ettlinger, ed., Akten des XXV. Internationalen Kongresses für Kunstgeschichte (1983) (Vienna: Böhlau, 1984), 91–98; Ingrid Ciulisová, ‘Dvořák’s Pupil Johannes Wilde (1891–1970)’, Umění 60 (2012): 101–108; Csilla Markója, ‘János (Johannes) Wilde and Max Dvořák, or Can we Speak of a Budapest School of Art History?’ Journal of Art Historiography (2017): 1–21: https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/markoja.pdf (accessed 5 November 2018). 4. Shearman, ‘Johannes Wilde (1891–1970)’, 92. 5. Wilde read the classic literature on history: Dilthey, Troeltsch and Rickert. As a young man, he had translated Hildebrand’s Problem der Form into Hungarian: A forma problémája a képzőművészetben (Budapest, 1910). 6. Max Dvořák, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte. Studien zur abendländischen Kunstentwicklung, 2 vols, eds Karl M. Swoboda and Johannes Wilde (Munich: Piper, 1924); c.f. Max Dvořák, Geschichte der italienischer Kunst im Zeitalter der Renaissance, 2 vols., eds. Johannes Wilde and Karl Maria Swoboda (Munich, Piper, 1927). 7. See the previous chapter. 8. Sedlmayr, ‘Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’, xxxiii: ‘Dee Idee und der im wesent­ lichen eingehaltene Plan zu dieser Veroffendlichung stamen von Dr. Johannes Wilde in Wien. Ihm sind die Herausfebber in mehr al seiner Hinsicht zu grossem Dank verpflichtet.’ Hans Jantzen acknowledges that the plan for the volume is due to Wilde in his review for Kritische Berichte (3 and 4, 1930/1931 and 1931/1932, 65). Wilde and Swoboda also thank Sedlmayr in their Introduction to Dvořák’s Geschichte der italienischer Kunst. 9. Maria Hirsch, ‘Das Figurenalphabet des Meisters E. S.’, Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen 2 (1933): 101–112; ‘The Personified-Alphabet by the Master ES’, trans.

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Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historiography 13 (2015): 1720. In hi–s introduction to the translation, Johns points to the affinity Hirsch’s work has to Pächt’s. 10. Maria Hirsch, ‘Notizien und Nachrichten’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 1 (1932): 167–187; ‘Notices and News’, trans. Karl Johns, Journal of Art Historiography 13 (2015): 17–20. 11. See Levy, ‘Sedlmayr and Schapiro Correspond’, 239. 12. It is perhaps worth noting that Wilde owned Sedlmayr’s early books, Fischer von Erlach, Borromini, as well as the Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, all now deposited in the Special Collections of the Courtauld Institute. 13. According to Jonathan Alexander, the two had corresponded on the problem of Jacometto Veneziano. Pächt contributed ‘The Tower of Barbara and the Tower of Babel’ to Wilde’s private Festschrift in 1951, although it seems not to have been included; Essays presented to Professor Johannes Wilde on his Sixtieth birthday by the staff and past and present students of the Courtauld Institute of Art (London, typescript, 1951). A letter in the Pächt archive (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Univers­ ity of Vienna) is from Wilde to Pächt, acknowledging a copy of Riegl’s Historische Grammatik that Pächt had recently edited (Karton 28, 14 July 1966, Johannes Wilde to Otto Pächt). 14. Johannes Wilde, ‘Die “Pala di San Cassiano” von Antonello da Messina’, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 3 (1929): 57–72. 15. Johannes Wilde, ‘Due modelli di Michelangelo ricomposti’, Dedalo 8 (1928): 653–666; ‘Zwei Modelle Michelangelos für das Julius-Grab’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien 2 (1928): 199–218. 16. Johannes Wilde, ‘The Hall of the Great Council of Florence’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 7 (1944): 65–81. See the discussion in Bruce Edelstein, ‘Johannes Wilde e la Sala Grande. Le origini di una ricostruzione esemplare eseguita in esilio’, La Sala Grande di Palazzo Vecchio e la Battaglia di Anghiari di

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Leonardo da Vinci. Dalla configurazione architettonica all’apparato decorativo, eds R. Barsanti, G. Belli, E. Ferretti and C. Frosinini (Biblioteca leonardiana: Studi e documenti, 8) (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2019), 29–43. 17. Johannes Wilde, Venetian Art from Bellini to Titian (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 133–137; Thomas Puttfarken, Masstabsfragen: Über die Unterschiede zwischen grossen und kleinen Bildern, PhD dissertation, Hamburg, 1971; David Rosand, ‘Titian in the Frari’, Art Bulletin 53 (1971): 196–213. 18. John White, Art and Architecture in Italy. 1250–1400 (New Haven, CT: Yale Univers­ ity Press, 1966), 58–59. On Assisi, see John White, The Birth and Rebirth of Pictorial Space (London: Faber and Faber, 1967), 40, note 37. 19. John White, ‘Measurement, Design and Carpentry in Duccio’s Maestà, Part I & II’, The Art Bulletin 55 (1973): 334–366, 547–569; ‘Donatello’s High Altar in the Santo at Padua Part Two: The Reconstruction’, The Art Bulletin 51 (1969): 119–141; John White and John Shearman, ‘Raphael’s Tapestries and their Cartoons, I & II’, The Art Bulletin 40 (1958): 193–221, 299–323; Juergen Schulz, Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969). It is perhaps worth pointing out also Otto Demus’s efforts in this direction; c.f. ‘Studien zu Michael Pachers Salzburger Hochaltar’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 16 (1954): 87–119. 20. As we saw, Panofsky is already criticised in Sedlmayr, ‘Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls’; ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’. As we saw in Chapter 5, Pächt strongly criticised the iconological approach in his famous review, ‘Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting’, The Burlington Magazine, 98 (1956): 110–116; and in his methodological lectures published as The Practice of Art History. 21. Wilde, ‘The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel’, Proceedings of the British Academy (1958), 61. 22. Arthur Popham and Johannes Wilde, The Italian Drawings of the XV and XVI Centuries in the Collection of His Majesty the King at Windsor Castle (London: 272

Phaidon, 1949); Johannes Wilde, Italian Drawings in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. Michelangelo and His Studio (London: British Museum, 1953). 23. Sedlmayr, ‘Zu einer strengen Kunstwissenschaft’; ‘Toward a Rigorous Study of Art’. 24. Wilde, ‘The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel’, 67. 25. Wilde, ‘The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel’, 73. 26. Wilde, ‘The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel’, 76. 27. Wilde, ‘The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel’, 77. 28. Charles de Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 5, The Final Period (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1960). 29. John Shearman, ‘Una nota sul progetto di Papa Giulio’, in Michelangelo la Capella Sistina: Documentazione e interpretazioni, 3 vols, eds G. Colalucci et al. (Novara, Italia: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 1994), 27–36. In addition, Marcia Hall  – sympathetic to Wilde’s viewpoint – interpreted ‘resurrectione’ as resurrection of the souls, therefore, not a change in iconography at all. 30. Thomas Puttfarken, The Discovery of Pictorial Composition: Theories of Visual Order in Painting 1400–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). For an allied indictment of such pictorialisation inspired by Arnheim (one of Puttfarken’s modernists), see Robert Sowers, ‘Pictorializing the Visual Arts’, in Rethinking the Forms of Visual Expression (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), 73–90. 31. A. E. Popham, Review of Charles de Tolnay, Pierre Bruegel l’ancien, Burlington Magazine 68 (1936): 248–249; Review of Charles de Tolnay, Le Maitre de Flémalle et les Frères van Eyck, Burlington Magazine 75 (1939): 85–86. 32. Karoly Kokai, ‘Der Budapester Sonntagskreis und die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte’, in C. Trautmann-Waller, ed., L’école viennoise d’histoire de l’art, Austriaca Nr 72 (Mont-Saint-Aignan, 2011). 273

33. For the closest thing to this, see Edgar Wind, The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 34. Ben Thomas, ‘Edgar Wind: A Short Biography’, Stan Rzeczy 8 (2015): 131. 35. Edgar Wind, ‘The Ark of Noah: A Study in the Symbolism of Michelangelo’, Measure 1950. 36. Johannes Wilde to Edgar Wind, Elizabeth Sears, ‘Edgar Wind on Michelangelo’, in Wind, The Religious Symbolism of Michelangelo, xxxvi. 37. Wilde, Michelangelo: Six Lectures (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 58. 38. For the restoration, confirming it was painted first  – and with assistants  – see Fabrizio Mancinelli, ‘Michelangelo at Work’, in The Sistine Chapel, The Art, The History, and the Restoration (New York: Harmony, 1986) 218–259; for the abandonment of deep space, see Marcia Hall, After Raphael: Painting in Central Italy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 39. William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, reprinted in Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1954). 40. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1967). 41. Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaften: Versuch einer Grundlegung für das Studium der Gesellschaft und der Geschichte (Leipzig: Teubner, [1883] 1922); Eng. trans., Introduction to the Human Sciences, vol. I, Selected Works, eds R. A Makkrel and F. Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 42. Wilhelm Dilthey, ‘Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie’, Sitzungsberichte der Königlich-Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 2 (1894): 1309–1407; Eng. trans., ‘Ideas concerning a descriptive and analytic psychology’, in Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding, eds R. M. Zaner and K. L. Heiges (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977), 23–120. 43. See the discussion in Ash, Gestalt Psychology in German Culture, 72–74. 274

44. Max Wertheimer, ‘Zu dem Problem der Unterscheidung von Einzelinhalt und Teil’, Zeitschrift für Psychologie 129 (1933): 353–357; translated by Michael Wertheimer as ‘On the Problem of the Distinction between Arbitrary Component and Necess­ary Parts’, in Productive Thinking (New York: Harper, 1959), 260–265; c.f. Wolfgang Köhler, Die physischen Gestalten in Ruhe und im stationären Zustand (Braunschweig: Friedr. Viewig & Sohn, 1920); Barry Smith and Kevin Mulligan, ‘Pieces of a Theory’, in Barry Smith, ed., Parts and Moments: Studies in Logic and Formal Ontology (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1982), pp. 15–109; Barry Smith, ‘Gestalt Theory: An Essay in Philosophy’, in Barry Smith, ed., Foundations of Gestalt Theory (München: Philosophia Verlag, 1988).

7. Otto Demus, Byzantine Art and the Spatial Icon 1. Fritz Novotny, ‘Passages from Cézanne and the End of Scientific Perspective’, in Christopher Wood, ed., The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York: Zone Books, 2000), 379–433. 2. Agnes Blaha, ‘Fritz Novotny and the New Vienna School of Art History – An Ambiguous Relationship’, Journal of Art Historiography 1 (2009): 1–13. www.arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/media_139126_en.pdf 3. The issue of ideas passing between the two institutes is also treated by Agnes Blaha in her discussion of Otto Pächt’s apparent influence on Fritz Novotny, ‘Fritz Novotny and the New Vienna School of Art History’. 4. This connection is made by Robert Nelson, ‘To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium’, in R. Nelson, ed., Visuality Before and Beyond the Renaissance: Seeing as Others Saw (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 157–158. 5. Otto Demus, Die Mosaiken von San Marko in Venedig, 1100–1300 (Vienna: Rohrer, 1935), 13, citing Gustaf Britsch, Theorie der bildenden Kunst (Munich, 1928). 275

6. Sabine Arend, Studien zur deutschen kunsthistorischen ‘ostforschung’ im Nationalsozialismus, PhD dissertation, Humboldt University, Berlin, 2010, p. 81. 7. See Otto Demus, Review of Victor Lasareff: The Mosaics of Cefalù, Kritische Ber­ichte (1937); Fritz Novotny, Review of Gerstle Mack, Paul Cezanne, Kritische Berichte (1937). 8. See Jonathan Petropoulos, ‘Declaration and Expert Report’: https:​/​​/​artstolenfromfritzgrunbaum.files.wordpress.com​/​2 008​/​0 3​/​dbm​- ​0 05862​- ​5 966​- ​p etropoulos​ -​expert​-​report​- ​03​-​25​-​20082.pdf (consulted 5 February 2015). 9. Thomas Rosenmeyer, ‘Am I a Comparist?’ Building a Profession: Autobiographical Perspectives on the Beginnings of Comparative Literature in the United States, eds Lionel Gossman and Mihai Spariosu (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 52. 10. Otto Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration: Aspects of Monumental Art in Byzantium (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1948); ‘The Methods of the Byzantine Artist’, The Mint (1948): 64–77. 11. For the scholarly tradition on ‘inverted’ perspective at the time that Demus was writing, see Clemena Antonova, Space, Time and Presence in the Icon: Seeing with the Eyes of God (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). 12. David Topper and W. Simpson, ‘Depth Perception in Linear and Inverse Perspective Pictures’, Perception 10 (1981): 305–312; Arnheim, ‘Inverted Perspective and the Axiom of Realism’. 13. Alberto Perez-Gomez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 102. 14. Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 43; c.f. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood (New York: Verso, 1991), 97–100; Robert Munman, Optical Corrections in the Sculpture of Donatello (Philadelphia, PA: American Philosophical Society, 1985), 3–4; Lothar Haselberger, ‘Old Issues, New Research, Latest Discoveries’, in Lothar Hasselberger, ed., Appearance and Essence: Refinements of Classical Architecture  – Curvature (Philadelphia: University of 276

Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 1–68; J. J. Pollitt, The Ancient View of Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 236–240; Perez-Gomez and Pelletier, Architectural Represenation and the Perspective Hinge, 97–105. 15. Proclus, A Commentary on the First Book of Euclid’s Elements, trans. G. Morrow (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), I.12, p. 33. 16. John Tzetzes, Historiarum Variarum Chiliades; cited in Joseph Rykwert, The Dancing Column: On Order in Architecture (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 222–224. Robert Ousterhout has kindly confirmed for me that the technical term from Greek antiquity for optical correction, alexemata, is not found in Byzantine criticism. 17. For other examples, see Washing of Feet, Hosios Loukas, Katholikon, eleventh century (Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 32) and Pantokrator, Monreale, after 1180 (Demus, Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 65). 18. To my knowledge, Demus does not use the German terms Raum-Ikonen (or Bildraum, below). These are Hans Belting’s renderings probably confirmed in discussion with Demus himself. However, I cite them to return them to their German-language context. 19. Demus, ‘The Methods of the Byzantine Artist’. 20. Puttfarken, Discovery of Pictorial Composition; Verstegen, Cognitive Iconology. 21. Robert Ousterhout, ‘Collaboration and Innovation in the Arts of Byzantine Constantinople’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 21(1997): 93–112. 22. Ann Wharton Epstein, Tokali Kilise: Tenth-Century Metropolitan Art in Byzantine Cappadocia (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1986), 24. 23. For similar view expressed today, see Charles Barber, Figure and Likeness: On the Limits of Representation in Byzantine Iconoclasm (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univers­ ity Press, 2002); Bissera Pentcheva, The Sensual Icon (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2010); Liz James, Light and Colour in Byzantine Art (Oxford: 277

Clarendon Press, 1996); Glenn Peers, Sacred Shock: Framing Visual Experience in Byzantium (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2004); Rico Franses, ‘When all that is Gold Does Not Glitter: On the Strange History of Looking at Byzantine Art’, in Antony Eastmond and Liz James, eds, Icon and Word. The Power of Images in Byzantium (Farnham: Ashgate, 2003), 13–24. 24. Antony Eastmond, ‘The Limits of Byzantine Art’, in Liz James, ed., A Companion to Byzantium (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 318. 25. Nelson, ‘To Say and to See: Ekphrasis and Vision in Byzantium’. 26. Hans Bloemsma, ‘Venetian Crossroads. East and West and the Origins of Modernity in Twelfth-Century Mosaics in San Marco’, Journal of Intercultural Studies 31 (2010): 299–312; ‘Byzantine Art and Early Italian Painting’, in A. Lymberopoulou and R. Duits, eds, Byzantine Art and Renaissance Europe (London: Ashgate, 2013), 37–60. 27. Thomas Dale, ‘From “Icons in Space” to Space in Icons: Pictorial Models for Public and Private Ritual in the Thirteenth-century Mosaics of San Marco in Venice’, in Alexei Lidov, ed., Hierotopy. The Creation of Sacred Space in Byzantium and Medi­ eval Russia (Moscow: Progress-Traditsiia, 2006), 1–18. 28. Erwin Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans. Christopher Wood (New York: Verso, 1991). 29. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, 50. 30. Ibid. 31. Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western art (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1960), 105. 32. Thomas Dale, Relics, Prayer, and Politics in Medieval Venetia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 65. 33. On Filippo’s perspective, see Shearman, Only Connect, 70–78; on the tavola quadrata, see Puttfarken, Discovery of Pictorial Composition, 98–99; Megan Holmes, Fra

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Filippo Lippi: The Carmelite Painter (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999), 122–128. 34. Holmes, Fra Filippo Lippi, 159. 35. Marilyn Lavin, The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431–1600 (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), 85–89; Oliver Grau, Virtual Art: From Illusion to Immersion (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003), 33–37. 36. J. B. Deregowski, D. M. Parker, M. Massironi, ‘The Perception of Spatial Structure with Oblique Viewing: An Explanation for Byzantine Perspective?’, Perception 23 (1994): 5–13. 37. Anton Springer, Raffael und Michelangelo (Leipzig: Verlag von E. A. Seemann, 1878), 241; cited in Earl Rosenthal, ‘Michelangelo’s Moses, dal di sotto in su’, Art Bulletin 46 (1964): 544–550. 38. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology, 193. 39. Rosenthal, ‘Michelangelo’s Moses, dal di sotto in su’, 545; quoting Studies in Iconology, 193. 40. Rosenthal, ‘Michelangelo’s Moses, dal di sotto in su’, 545; quoting Studies in Iconology, 193. 41. Rudolf Arnheim, diary entry of 9 August 1960; reprinted in Parables of Sunlight (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1989), 22. 42. Wolfgang Metzger, ‘Tiefenerscheinungen in optischen Bewegungsfeldern’, Psychologische Forschung 20 (1935): 195–260; c.f. Koffka, Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 301–303.

Conclusion:  The Vienna School Today 1. Erwin Panofsky, ‘Reflections on Historical Time’, Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 691–701; ‘On the Relationship of Art History and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a Science of Art’, trans. Katharina Lorenz and

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Jas’ Elsner, Critical Inquiry 35 (2008): 43–71; ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual Arts’, trans. Katharina Lorenz and Jas’ Elsner, Critical Inquiry 38 (2012): 467–482. 2. Glenn Peers, ‘Utopia and Heterotopia: Byzantine Modernisms in America’, in K. Fugelso, ed., Defining Neomedievalism(s), Studies in Medievalism, vol. 19 (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010), 77–113. 3. See Jan van der March, Reconnecting: Recent Work by Jennifer Bartlett/Mel Bochner/ Nancy Graves/Patrick Ireland/Lucio Possio, exh. cat. (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1987). 4. Nancy Jones and Joel Silvers, The Future of Memory (Detroit, MI: Detroit Institute of Arts and Joel Silvers Films, 1994). 5. For a personal formulation along these lines, see Ian Verstegen, ‘A Functional Theory of Post-Modern Art’, Art and Philosophy/Sztuka i Filozofia 44 (2014): 46–54. 6. For an interesting convergence between two art historians trained by the heroic generation, see the work of Artur Rosenauer and John Shearman on Donatello: Rosenauer, Studien zum frühen Donatello – Skulptur im projektiven Raum der Neuzeit (Vienna: Wiener Kunstgeschichtliche Forschungen, 1975), 111–113; ‘Bermer­ kungen zur Grabplatte des Pietra Cacciafuochi in San Francesco in Prato’, in Donatello-Studien. Italienische Forschungen (Munich, 1989); and John Shearman, Only Connect . . . Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 13–14. A full amplification of Shearman’s position has been given by Geraldine Johnson, ‘Activating the Effigy: Donatello’s Pecci Tomb in Siena Cathedral’, Art Bulletin 77 (1995): 445–459.

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322

Index Adler, M., 84

Antonello da Messina, 170

Adorno, T., 88

Archer, M., 64

Aktualgenese (microgenesis), 43

Arnheim, R., 20, 34, 62, 130, 137, 138,

Alexander, J., 152

141, 143, 183, 188, 203

Alkamenes, 192

Art and Visual Perception, 183

Allesch, G. J. von, 33, 34, 42

Dynamics of Architectural Form, 117

“Die aesthetische Erscheinungsweise der Farben”, 33 Wege zur Kunstbetrachtung, 34 Ames room (Adelberg Ames), 204

Film als Kunst, 139, 143 The Power of the Center, 20 Aurenhammer, H., 39 Austrian Republic, 28, 30 323

“Austrian” Theory, 32

Brandi, C., 130

Austro-Hungarian Empire, 29

Brentano, F., 10, 17, 31, 81 Brinckmann, A. E., 114, 115

Badt, K., 44 Modell und Maler von Jan Vermeer, 44

Britsch, G., 188 Broederlam, M., 93 Bronze Age art, 8

Bakos, J., 76

Brueghel, P., 34, 41-4, 51, 64

Barry, F., 133

Buckle, H., 91, 92

Baroque, 19

Bühler, K., 28-9, 31, 37

Bauer, H., 43, 130

Die Krise der Psychologie, 28

Baxandall, M., 45, 164 Benesch, O., 12

Callot, J., 149

Benjamin, W., 42

Cangianti, 2, 3

Berlin, University of, 16

Caravaggio, M., 73, 93

Binstock, B., 38, 45

Carrier, D., 72

Blaha, A., 188

Carus, C. G., 36

Bloemsma, H., 195

Cezanne, P., 188

Blum, M., 10

Chains, Historical, 90-5, 190

Bohde, D., 34, 35, 42, 127

Chaplin, C., 144

Boltzmann, L. E., 55

Cold War, 10

Bolzano, B., 10

Collingwood, R. G., 11

Borromini, F., 10, 17, 27-8, 48, 64, 72-3,

Comte, A., 93

165, 189 San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, 8, 112, 115, 122, 168, 182

(Konstanzannahme), 30, 54 Cosmopolitanism, 7, 38

Bosch, H., 147

Courtauld Institute, 15

Botticelli, S., 147

“Creative freedom” (schöpferisches

Bourdieu, P., 164 324

Constancy hypothesis

Freiheit), 100

Critical Realism, 60 Croce, B., 11, 42, 80

Einstellung (mental set), 22, 49, 59-63, 68, 74, 113

Curta, F., 159

Elkins, J., 141

Czech formalism, 20

Elsheimer, A., 81, 93 Elsner, J., 8, 64, 69, 86, 87

Daphne, 193

Ermarth, M., 35

Darwin, C., 95

Eurocentrism, 19

Davis, W., 8, 14

van Eyck, J., 52, 93, 95, 151

Demus, O., 10, 13, 24, 46, 186-205,

Arnolfini Wedding Portrait, 52

210 Byzantine Mosaic Decoration, 189-95 Didi-Huberman, G., 5 Dilthey, W., 71, 88, 164, 182

‘First’ science, 11 Formalism, 5, 18, 20, 49 Programmatic, 18

Dittmann, L., 39, 86, 87

Fouquet, J., 148, 160, 163

Donatello, 54, 172

Freedberg, D., 64

David, 54 Duccio, 172

Frey, D., 12, 13, 14, 110, 128 Gotik und Renaissance, 13

Duncker, K., 37

Freyer, H., 88

Dürer, A., 96

Functional Whole, 4, 24, 187

Durkheim, E., 89, 100

Fürst, B., 34, 168

Dvořák, M., 6, 12, 15, 29, 42, 43, 51, 83, 91, 93, 94, 97, 98, 102, 109, 168,

Ganzheitspsychologie, 36, 37, 43

169, 188

Garger, E., 67 Genius, 79-81

Echternach Gospel, 67

Gestalt (Gestalten), 36, 182, 209

Egyptian art, 9, 136

Die Gestalt. Abhandlungen zu einer

von Ehrenfels, C., 30, 31 von Eickstadt, E., 127

allgemeinen Morphologie, 34 Gestalt quality (Gestaltqualität), 30, 182 325

Gestalt theory, 6, 20, 22, 24, 28, 37, 40, 137, 142, 156, 184, 207 Gestaltungsprinzipien (Pächt), 42, 168, 190, 205, 210

Hempel, E., 110 Hetzer, T., 141 Hirsch, E. D., 59 Hirsch, M., 170

Ghirlandaio, D., 3

Hochstim, P., 86, 87

Giambologna, 154, 159

Holism, 32, 35-8

Giedion, S., 109 Giovanetti, M., 199

Analytic (see also intelligible holism), 32, 36

van der Goes, H., 146, 147

Hopkins, A., 110

Goldschmidt, A., 33

Hubala, E., 130

Gombrich, E. H., 10, 29, 35, 37-8, 45,

Husserl, E., 5, 10, 19, 31, 71, 89,

66, 67, 80, 81, 96, 101, 103, 131, 140, 162, 173 Art and Illusion, 76, 78, 101 Gosebruch, M., 43

182 Zurück zu den Sachen selbst, 19 Huxley, T. H., 95

Gottschaldt., K., 37, 128 Goudt, H., 81

Iconography, 4, 58

Gurlitt, C., 114

Iconology, 39, 49, 51-3, 136, 173, 184,

Gurwitsch, A., 87

205 Impressionism, 21

Habermas, J., 88

Ingarden, R., 10

Hadjinicolaou, N., 89

Inglis, E., 137, 158

Hartmann, N., 88

Ionescu, V., 82

Hau, M., 126

Ireland, P. (Brian O’Doherty), 208

Hauser, A., 29

Iversen, M., 70, 81

Hegel, G. W. F., 11, 21, 90, 92

326

Heider, F., 205

“Jewish” science, 37

Held, R., 139

Jünger, E., 36

Kaschnitz von Weinberg, G., 9, 14, 19, 136

Limbourg Brothers, 58, 93, 156, 160 Lippi, F., 198, 201, 202

Kauffmann, H., 132

Logical Positivism, 74

Kaufman, T. D., 155

Lorenz, K., 69, 86, 87

Kemp, W., 130, 131

Lukacs, G., 88

Koehler (Köhler), W., 12, 34 Koerner, J., 160

Mach, E., 55

Koffka, K., 28, 29, 30, 34, 36, 37, 56,

Maeder, E., 2

113, 116, 142, 56, 113, 116, 142 Grundlagen der psychichen Entwicklung, 56 Principles of Gestalt Psychology, 34 Köhler, W., 16, 28, 31, 34, 54, 87, 100, 139, 209 Gestalt Psychology, 71

Mandelbaum, M., 101, 102, 158 Mannheim, K., 52-3, 83, 84, 88, 98, 100, 164 Marx, K., 69, 101 Eighteenth Brumaire, 101 Marxism, 20, 37, 61, 63, 88, 157 Masaccio, 172

Kretschmer, E., 124-7

Matz, F., 9, 14, 19

Kritische Berichte, 14, 155, 188

Meinong, A., 10

Krueger, F., 37, 43

Mereology (Parts and Wholes), 17, 53,

Kunstwissenschaftliche Forschungen, 13, 14, 34, 42, 136, 170, 188

182-4 Merleau-Ponty, M., 65, 183 Metzger, W., 6, 35, 83, 100, 102, 203

von Lauenstein, O., 37

Gesetze des Sehens, 35, 203

Lavater, J. C., 122

Schöpferische Freiheit, 35, 100, 101

Leonardo da Vinci, 171 Levine, A., 89 Lewin, K., 16, 20, 30, 57, 71, 87, 89, 91, 108, 119, 142, 159, 209 Liberal humanism, 10

Michelangelo (Buonarotti), 1, 3, 4, 131, 171, 172-82, 201-2 Mitchell, W. J. T., 157 Moretti, L., 130 Motion pictures, 21 327

Münz, L., 12, 13 Musil, R., 34, 139

“Die historische Aufgabe Michael Pachers,” 16, 95 “Künstlerische Originalität und

National Bolshevism, 39

ikonographische Erneuerung,”

Nazis (National Socialists), 32, 36,

16, 70

86 Nelson, R., 195

Master of Mary of Burgundy, 161-2 Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen

Neolithic art, 8

Praxis (Practice of Art History), 15,

Nietzsche, F., 81

43, 49, 93, 94, 100, 140, 155

Norberg-Schulz, C., 130

“National” constants, 42

Novotny, F., 186-7, 188

Österreichische Tafelmalerei, 16 Van Eyck: Die Begründer der

Oberhuber, K., 210 “Objective Mind/Spirit,” 84, 88, 92

altniederländischen Malerei, 146 Panofsky, E., 5, 22, 45, 51, 52-3, 65, 97,

Oechslin, W., 123, 130

131, 136, 139, 140, 144, 163, 173, 196,

Offner, R., 12

197, 199, 201-2, 206

Olin, M., 81

Early Netherlandish Painting, 70, 140, 164

Pacher, M., 33, 189 Pächt, O., 16, 23 “Zur deutschen Bildauffassung der Spätgotik und Renaissance,” 16 “Das Ende der Abbildtheorie,” 48-9, 85 “Gestaltungsprinzipien der

328

Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism, 164 “Perspektive als ‘symbolische Form,’” 140, 196 Pelletier, L., 191 Perez-Gomez, A., 191 Persinger, C., 156, 165

westlichen Malerei des 15.

Pevsner, N., 133

Jahrhunderts,” 16, 23, 48, 135-66,

Pheidias, 192

189

Phenomenology, 11, 14, 158

Pinder, W., 55 Pisanello, 58 Planck, M., 55 Plekhanov, G., 80

Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste, 13 Höllandische Gruppenporträt, 13, 82, 140

Pogacnik, M., 133

Moderne Denkmalkutus, 91

Pollak, O., 29

Spätromsiche Kunstindustrie, 13, 78,

Popham, A., 173 Popper, K., 35, 88, 101, 103

81-2 Stilfragen, 91

Prato Cathedral, 198

Roman art, 21, 82

Preziosi, D., 11

Rosand, D., 172

Proclus, 191

Rosenauer, A., 210

Prussia, 29

Rosenberg, A., 36

Psychologische Forschung, 31, 34

Rosenthal, E., 201

Puttfarken, T., 172

Rubin, E., 117 Russian formalism, 20

Quetelet, A., 92 Sander, F., 37, 43 Rauschenberg, R., 207

San Vitale, Ravenna, 200

Rembrandt van Rijn, 80-1, 93

Saxl, F., 12, 51

Reynolds, D., 81

Scaenographia/Skenographia, 191, 197

Rickert, H., 182

Schapiro, M., 13, 39, 136, 137, 138, 140,

Riegl, A., 5, 6, 9, 12, 15, 17, 19, 21, 28, 31,

151-2, 155, 156-7, 165

35, 53, 66, 69, 74, 90, 94, 96, 100,

Scheler, M., 84, 88, 90, 99, 149

101, 102, 187, 188

Schering, W., 87

Kunstwollen, 22, 23, 45, 69, 77, 81-4, 91, 96-102, 140

von Schlosser, J., 12, 20, 29, 31, 42, 80, 188

Works:

Schnall, S., 37

Gesammelte Aufsätze, 13, 170

Schopenhauer, A., 81 329

Schulz, J., 172

Shearman, J., 3, 4, 54, 172, 210

Schwartz, F., 42, 51, 61, 114, 125, 163

Shklovsky, V., 113

Schwartz, V., 83

Silvers, J. 208

Schweitzer, B., 14, 19

Simmel, G., 88

Sebastiano del Piombo, 189

tot Sint Jans, G., 147

Sedlmayr, H., 16

Sistine Ceiling (Michelangelo), 1, 3, 5

Anti-Semitism, 40

Sistine Chapel, 23, 169

Die Architektur Borrominis, 16, 23,

Sluter, C., 93

48, 54, 85, 107-34, 142 Entstehung der Kathedrale, 39

Sober, E., 89

Fischer von Erlach der Ältere, 16,

Socialism, 20, 37, 63, 84

110

‘Soft Law’ (sanfte Gesetz), 11, 104

“Gestaltetes Sehen,” 32, 110

Spatial Icon (Demus), 193-4

Kunst und Wahrheit, 39

Spengler, O., 36

“Die ‘Macchia’ Bruegels,” 7, 16, 34,

Spranger, E., 88

41-4, 73, 160

Springer, A., 67, 201-2

Nazism, 38

Stein, E., 90

Osterreichische Barockarchitektur,

Steinberg, L., 110, 130-1

16, 110 “Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls,” 83, 85, 86, 103

Steiner, R., 36 St. Albans Psalter, 67 Stifter, A., 11, 104

“Sturz der Blinden,” 43

Strukturanalyse, 8, 60

Verkust der Mitte, 39

Strukturforschung, 6, 8, 16, 17, 19, 20,

“Zu einer strenge Kunstwissenschaft,” 7, 47, 48, 49, 53, 112, 170, 174

330

Snijder, G. A. S., 155

22, 23, 28, 35, 38, 45, 76, 135, 152, 160, 165, 184, 187, 196 Strzygowski, J., 13, 19, 29, 187, 188

Self-reflexivity, 18

Stumpf, C., 31, 34, 71

Semiotics, 11, 136

Style, 4, 58, 112, 119

Swoboda, K. M., 12, 13, 14, 29, 93, 95, 128, 140, 169, 170, 188

Weidenreich, F., 128 Weimar Germany, 28, 35 Weinhandl, F., 43

Taine, H., 92, 93

Weiss, H., 163

Tanner, J., 82, 98

Werner, H., 43, 122

Thürlemann, F., 129, 130

Wertheimer, M., 6, 16, 28, 30, 32, 34,

Tietze, H., 12, 29 Die Methode der Kunstgeschichte, 12 Titian, 171 Tolnai (De Tolney), K., 22, 29, 51, 169 Die Zeichnungen Pieter Bruegels, 51 Torcello Cathedral, 10, 192-3 Tzetzes, J., 192

57, 84, 87, 100, 182-3 White, J., 172, 193, 210 Wickhoff, F., 12, 80 Wilde, J., 4, 10, 12, 13, 23, 29, 46, 54, 55, 93, 95, 167-85, 189, 190, 197, 199, 203, 210 “The Decoration of the Sistine Chapel,” 172-8 “The Hall of the Great Council of

van der Weyden, R., 151, 153

Florence,” 171

Van Gogh, V., 157

Wind, E., 24, 95, 169, 173

Vasold, G., 29

Windelband, W., 71, 182

Vermeer, J., 44-5

Winkler, F., 141

Vierkandt, A., 22, 69, 83, 84-90, 99

Wissensoziologie (sociology of

Gesellschaftslehre, 86, 99 Vitruvius, 191

knowledge), 84 Wittkower, R., 123, 133 Wölfflin, H., 5, 53, 56, 103, 162-3

Wallach, H., 139

Wood, C., 20, 51, 61, 160, 186

Warburg, A., 22, 51

Woodfield, R., 69

Warhol, A., 208

Wright, E., 89

Weber, M., 33

Wulf, F., 121

331