The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918

Introduction

inTroducTion This book is a study of the practice of art history in Vienna and Austria-Hungary between 1847, when Rudolf von Eitelberger was appointed the first dozent (junior lecturer) in the subject, and 1918, the year the Habsburg Empire collapsed. It traces the emergence of art history, the establishment of norms of scholarly inquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates over the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. It is the product of an extended period of reflection on art history in Habsburg central Europe. One of my first published articles was on Alois Riegl,1 with whom I had first become acquainted as a graduate teaching assistant at the University of St. Andrews in the early 1990s, when he formed part of a course in historiography that I taught. Since that time the scholarly landscape on the Vienna School of art history has undergone enormous transformations; twenty years ago the literature on the subject was modest, and that available in English was even more limited.2 Access to primary sources was a significant problem. Aside from a few reeditions in the 1960s and 1970s, the writings by the major representatives of the Vienna School were out of print and difficult to obtain.3 This was doubly the case with editions in English, which consisted of Riegl’s “Late Roman or Oriental?” (a critical essay on Josef Strzygowski’s Orient oder Rom), Late Roman Art Industry (a questionable translation of Riegl’s Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie), and an edition of Max Dvořák’s History of Art as the History of Ideas. The situation has since changed dramatically ; a turning point, perhaps, was marked by the publication in 1992 of Margaret Olin’s monograph on Riegl, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, and of an English translation of Riegl’s Stilfragen (Problems of Style). The importance of Riegl was confirmed the following year, when Margaret Iversen’s monograph on him appeared. The translation of Stilfragen was the first of a number of important English editions of works by Riegl and other Viennese art historians, and new translations continue to appear.4 This has paralleled renewed efforts in Austria to publish new critical editions of work by Vienna School scholars.5 The advent of online digital libraries and archives, providing access to historic primary texts, has increased still further the availability of primary materials.6 The renewed publication of works associated with the Vienna School has been accompanied by an exponential increase in the volume of scholarly research on the subject. At the time of writing, the library of the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich, which has arguably the most extensive holdings, listed 2 The Vienna School of arT hiSTory sixty-seven items on Riegl alone published since 2000, in languages as diverse as Croatian , German, French, Italian, Slovak, and English. Despite the appearance of such a volume of commentary and analysis, the literature on the Vienna School remains curiously partial and incomplete. It is partial inasmuch as by far the greatest degree of critical attention has been devoted to Alois Riegl, with other figures, not least the “founder” of the Vienna School, Rudolf von Eitelberger, languishing in relative obscurity.7 In many respects this situation is easily explicable; given his contributions to scholarship on textiles, ornament, the applied arts of late antiquity, monument protection policy and theory, folk art, Baroque art and architecture, together with his methodological innovations, Riegl was by far the most consistently original art historian working in Vienna between the mid–nineteenth and mid–twentieth centuries. At the same time, however, the heightened interest in Riegl—which can at times come close to a fetishism of the author figure—produces a restricted vision of the discursive dynamics of Viennese art history. A prominent example of this phenomenon can be seen in the treatment of Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl’s conflict with Josef Strzygowski over the origins of early medieval art. This dispute has largely been viewed in terms of the political differences between the individuals concerned, but this view underplays the fact that they were reprising a decades-long debate over European identity and the place of Austria-Hungary in Europe, a debate that continued long after the personal antagonism between these authors had been forgotten.8 This book therefore gives less prominence to Riegl than usual in accounts of the Vienna School. My intention is not so much to rehabilitate neglected art historians, such...