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 inquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. The so-called Vienna School plays the central role in the study, but Rampley also examines the formation of art history elsewhere in Austria-Hungary. 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 Rampley pays particular attention to these areas of overlapping interest. He also analyzes the methodological innovations for which the Vienna School was well known. Rampley focuses most fully, however, on the larger political and ideological context of the practice of art history—particularly the way in which art-historical debates served as proxies for wider arguments over the political, social, and cultural life of the Habsburg Empire.

The key to this contextualist alchemy was the concept of "structure," a kind of deep formal property that the work of art shared with the world." "The idea of this volume is to bring the drama of this methodological and political encounter to the attention of Anglo-American art historians."--BOOK JACKET.

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 inquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. The so-called Vienna School plays the central role in the study, but Rampley also examines the formation of art history elsewhere in Austria-Hungary. 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 Rampley pays particular attention to these areas of overlapping interest. He also analyzes the methodological innovations for which the Vienna School was well known. Rampley focuses most fully, however, on the larger political and ideological context of the practice of art history—particularly the way in which art-historical debates served as proxies for wider arguments over the political, social, and cultural life of the Habsburg Empire.

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 inquiry, and the involvement of art historians in wider debates about the cultural and political identity of the monarchy. The so-called Vienna School plays the central role in the study, but Rampley also examines the formation of art history elsewhere in Austria-Hungary. 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 Rampley pays particular attention to these areas of overlapping interest. He also analyzes the methodological innovations for which the Vienna School was well known. Rampley focuses most fully, however, on the larger political and ideological context of the practice of art history—particularly the way in which art-historical debates served as proxies for wider arguments over the political, social, and cultural life of the Habsburg Empire.

"In this authoritative book, the first of its kind in English, Christopher Wood tracks the evolution of the historical study of art from the late middle ages through the rise of the modern scholarly discipline of art history. Synthesizing and assessing a vast array of writings, episodes, and personalities, this original and accessible account of the development of art-historical thinking will appeal to readers both inside and outside the discipline. The book shows that the pioneering chroniclers of the Italian Renaissance--Lorenzo Ghiberti and Giorgio Vasari--measured every epoch against fixed standards of quality. Only in the Romantic era did art historians discover the virtues of medieval art, anticipating the relativism of the later nineteenth century, when art history learned to admire the art of all societies and to value every work as an index of its times. The major art historians of the modern era, however--Jacob Burckhardt, Aby Warburg, Heinrich Wölfflin, Erwin Panofsky, Meyer Schapiro, and Ernst Gombrich--struggled to adapt their work to the rupture of artistic modernism, leading to the current predicaments of the discipline. Combining erudition with clarity, this book makes a landmark contribution to the understanding of art history."--from book jacket

A to is Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the greatest modern art historians. The most important member of the so-called "Vienna School," Riegl developed a highly refined technique of visual or formal analysis, as opposed to the iconological method with its emphasis on decoding motifs through recourse to texts. Riegl also pioneered understanding of the changing role of the viewer, the significance of non-high art objects or what would now be called visual or material culture, and theories of art and art history, including his much-debated neologism Kunstwollen (the will of art). At last, his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, which brings together the diverse threads of his thought, is available to an English-language audience, in a superlative translation by Jacqueline E. Jung. In one of the earliest and perhaps the most brilliant of all art historical "surveys," Riegl addresses the different visual arts within a sweeping conception of the history of culture. His account derives, from Hegelian models but decisively opens onto alternative pathways that continue to complicate attempts to reduce art merely to the artist's intentions or its social and historical functions. Book jacket.

An anthology of writings by and about the formalist New Vienna School of art history.

Alois Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the founding fathers of modern formalist criticism. As a member of the Vienna School of Art Historians, he shared their range of interests in the decorative arts, art in transition, conservation and monuments. This collection of critical essays examines various facets of Riegl's work and opens with a new translation of Hans Sedlmayr's famous, and notorious,Die Quintessenze der Lehren Riegls. Included is Julius von Schlosser's assessment of Riegl's contribution to the Vienna School of Art Historians as well as essays by a team of international scholars. This book offers a re-engagement with the ideas of one of the most important and neglected art historians of the 20th century.

Examines the work of artists trained at the Viennese Women's Academy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Explores generational struggles and diverging artistic philosophies on art, craft, and design.