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When Max Dvořák's (1874-1921) art history is considered,1 Franz Wickhoff's (1853-1909) and Alois Riegl's (1858-1905) influence is always mentioned in the foreground of the historiographical research.2 However, a question that, in my opinion, has yet to be adequately addressed is in what sense and to what extent Dvořák's method of art history was directly formed by his personal relationships with Riegl and especially Wickhoff. This article therefore seeks to show the ways in which Wickhoff and Riegl may have had an influence on Max Dvořák's thinking on art history through their private relationships, which can be reconstructed based on a newly found archival materials, in order to fill in a gap in the historiographic research on the Vienna School of Art History.

While Riegl, Dvořák, Sedlmayr and Pächt have each of them aroused widespread enthusiasm at one point or another, the same cannot be said of Julius Schlosser (1866-1938). To speak in general terms about his intellectual trajectory and its significance, one meets two questions, the first rather obvious, and the other quite opaque. Although he wrote and lectured in a style that was difficult, his arguments were consistent and perhaps predictable – a continuation of Wickhoff’s approach, and the principles upheld by the Institut für Geschichtsforschung, as well as something later called structure and system, which is most apparent today in his thoughts about what he called the language and grammar of art, but also in his study from 1889 of the original architectural layout of western European abbeys which is a very early example of a functional analysis. In the last decade or two of his life he seems by contrast to have made some generalizations apparently difficult to reconcile with his earlier devotion to the particularity of historical sources.

When the Slovenian University of Ljubljana was established in 1919 - a most meaningful culturally-political gesture within the newly founded Kingdom of Serbians, Croatians and Slovenians - Izidor Cankar, by then already a well known personality in Slovenian cultural life, accepted the task to establish its department of art history. Cankar was therefore the first professor of art history, the founder of art-historical discipline in Slovenia, not only in terms of the organisation of studies but also - just as importantly, if not even more - in terms of their theoretical and methodological foundations. In 1926 his Uvod v umevanje likovne umetnosti. Sistematika stila (Introduction into Comprehending of the Visual Art. The Systematics of Style)2 and in 1927 the first instalment of the first volume of the concomitant survey of European art, Zgodovina likovne umetnosti v Zahodni Evropi. Razvoj stila (The History of Visual Art in Western Europe. The Evolution of Style),3 were published, originating of course in the very immediate, local needs for the professional terminology in Slovenian language,4 but also in Cankars own much wider, more global ambition, regarding the international art-historical context.

Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History is the first book in over seventy-five years to study in depth and in context the practices of art history from 1847, the year the first teaching position in the discipline was created, to 1918, the collapse of Austria-Hungary. It traces the emergence of art history as a discipline, the establishment of norms of scholarly enquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. While Rampley also examines the formation of art history elsewhere in Austria-Hungary, the so-called Vienna School plays the central role in the study. Located in the Habsburg imperial capital, Vienna art historians frequently became entangled in debates that were of importance to art historians elsewhere in the Empire, and the book pays particular attention to these areas of overlapping interest. The Vienna School was well known for its methodological innovations and this book analyzes its contributions in this area. Rampley focuses most fully, however, on the larger political and ideological context of the practice of art history, in particular the way in which art historical debates served as proxies for wider arguments over the political, social, and cultural life of the Habsburg Empire.

Art historians question two fundamental objects: firstly, history as narrative, and secondly, the image as a form of representation. While most art historians are implicit philosophers of history and the visual, very few are so explicit about their philosophical background as Georges Didi-Huberman. After all, his intellectual acumen is well known. The question that this essay addresses concerns a concrete episode in Georges Didi-Huberman's reflection on images, namely the frequent elaborations on butterflies and moths as objects of visuality.1 What do these images of fragile insects add to our understanding of images and to art historiography? My hypothesis is that they question the status of the image in the modern art historical discourse. The seemingly chaotic movements of butterflies and moths denote the fact that images are apparitions whose potentiality is unravelled when seen and thought of in broader relations to other images. To think the potential of images means to 'weave' them in wider constellations. Moreover, these constellations of images modify the temporality implicit in any history of art. Instead of thinking temporality as a diachronic narrative (the chronological story of artefacts), an alternative would be to conceive it as the anachronistic montage of heterogeneous images. With Didi Huberman, the mode of writing history is that of the atlas of images and its significance consists in the ability to distil remerging visual forces. The visual has in Georges-Didi Huberman an anthropological and hermeneutic value as it pictures how humanity represents itself throughout history. In order to see this, we need to integrate his conception of art history into the broader context to which it directly or indirectly relates.

Wickhoff, ‘a man of great refined artistic taste who refused to be bound by period theories and who was open to all truly artistic impressions’, is remembered in this obituary, written by his former student of Czech origin, Vincenc Kramář (1877-1960), an eminent art historian and art collector. Published in 1909, the text overviews the theoretical and methodological approaches that Wickhoff as well as Riegl used and thus outlines, for the first time, the main traits of the Vienna School of art history, such as genetic links and universal development of art and the objective study of the works of art, that have been associated with it until today.

Matthew Rampley’s The Vienna School of Art History examines the early era of the famed group of art historians, curators and art functionaries against the Habsburg Empire that framed their enterprise. It takes into account the centrifugal forces of identity, nationalism and Imperial ideologies that informed their ideas and preferences. A desideratum is the project of relating formal analyses by the thinkers he studies to the ideological allegiances that he uncovers in their thought.

This article analyzes the Methode der Kunstgeschichte, published in 1913 by Hans Tietze (1880-1954), an important but often neglected figure of the Vienna school of art history, who had been a student of Franz Wickhoff and Aloïs Riegl and was one of Ernst H. Gombrich's teachers. In the Methode Tietze developed a bold and innovative idea of art history out of a confrontation with momentous intellectual and artistic challenges. These were (1) the discussion about the object and method of the Geisteswissenschaften (human and cultural sciences) in German philosophy, (2) Riegl's and Wölfflin's formalism, which Tietze critiqued as insufficient, also in response to the emergence of expressionism, which he courageously and precociously supported, and (3) epistemological debates that questioned notions of 'objective' knowledge. (Author abstract)