2006 ELSNER From Empirical Evidence To The Big Picture - Some Reflections On Riegl S Concept

From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of
Kunstwollen
Author(s): Jas’ Elsner
Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Summer 2006), pp. 741-766
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture:
Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of
Kunstwollen
Jas’ Elsner
Archaeology and the history of art share one intimate aspect of method
about which we tend to be less explicit than we should be. Whenever we
make an argument on the basis of visual or material evidence we take some-
thing extremely specific, of which the discussion is inevitably a precise and
detailed contextual or formal description, and we use this as a step to gen-
erate a large generalization. Whether our art history is interested in artists,
patrons, or viewers, in sociological context and conditions of production,
in strict morphological connections or in high semiotic theory, our gen-
eralizations inevitably leap beyond what is strictly provable by the precise
analysis of something so particular as a specific object or set of objects.
Besides this very direct issue of method is the related problem of how we
write the bigger story within which our objects of material culture will fig-
ure. What governs or justifies the kind of story we decide to tell? Of course,
there is a real question as to whether the idealized empiricism by which I
have characterized this process is correct. We might say that we begin with
assumptions that entail our generalizations (this is always more obvious in
previous generations—for instance, with Marxist art history or with the art
history whose instant reflex is activated by poststructuralist theory), and we
find our examples to prove our model. The empirical data turn out to be
illustrations of the bigger picture rather than its building blocks, and the
A much shorter version of this paper was given at a conference in Vienna in 2005 marking the
centenary of Riegl’s death. My thanks are due to Artur Rosenauer and Georg Vasold for their kind
invitation and to the participants for discussion. I am particularly grateful to a number of friends
for surviving the infliction of an early draft and for punishing me with useful critiques as a
result—especially Milette Gaifman, Margaret Olin, Joel Snyder, and Jeremy Tanner. I am grateful,
too, to the editors of Critical Inquiry for their comments and suggestions.
Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006)

䉷 2006 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/06/3204-0003$10.00. All rights reserved.
741
742 Jas’ Elsner / Reflections on Kunstwollen
foundations of the bigger picture lie in a socially sanctioned and currently
popular model for how to interpret historical and visual material in aca-
demic terms. This way may be the swiftest path to long-term oblivion, but
it may also be a quick means to publication. However, my interest here is
in the problem of the method itself—that is, the use of visual material (al-
ways a special case, always standing for more than itself) in the construction
of a larger argument and the history of that process within the discipline of
art history.
This complexity of the relations between the particular and the general,
between the material exemplar and the great philosophical or historicalthe-
ory, is a special mark of Alois Riegl’s work in art history and, indeed, is one
of his greatest legacies. For not only was Riegl one of art history’s most
pronounced empiricists, a formalist, and a style art historian of the first
order,1 but his interventions—especially in late antique art—have come to
be seen as fundamental to modern notions of the history of the period.2 The
fact that his oeuvre is relatively incomplete and fragmentary has meant that
he has been seen as making particular historical contributions to specific
moments in the history of art—late antiquity and the Dutch group portrait,
for instance. But this disguises the fact that his greater project was the grand
attempt to tie formal empiricism and its positivist entailments to a much
bigger, general (dare we call it Hegelian?) picture of the development of
forms (in the Stilfragen),3 culminating finally in the development of cultures
1. On Riegl’s empiricism and its entailment in positivism, see Margaret Olin, Forms of
Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park, Penn., 1992), pp. xviii, 4–7, 103–11,
136–37, and Diana Graham Reynolds, “Alois Reigl and the Politics of Art History: Intellectual
Traditions and Austrian Identity in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna” (Ph.D. diss., University of California,
San Diego, 1997), pp. 46–99.
2. See Andrea Giardina, “Esplosione di tardoantico,” Studi Storici 40 (1999): 157–80, esp. pp.
157, 164–65, and Wolf Liebeschuetz, “The Birth of Late Antiquity,” Antiquité Tardive 12 (Jan. 2004):
253–61, esp. pp. 254–55.
3. See Riegl, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin, 1893); trans.
Evelyn Kain, under the title Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, ed. David
Castriota (Princeton, N.J., 1992). On its span from Egyptian ornament via Greece and Rome to
Byzantium and Islam, see E. H. Gombrich, The Sense of Order: A Study in the Psychology of
Decorative Art, 2d ed. (1979; London, 1984), pp. 180–94; Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois
Riegl’s Theory of Art, pp. 60–89; Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge,
Mass., 1993), pp. 49–63; Paul Crowther, “More Than Ornament: The Significance of Riegl,” Art
History 17, no. 3 (1994): 482–94; and Joaquı́n Lorda, “Problems of Style: Riegl’s Problematic
Foundations,” in Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam, 2001), pp.
J a s ’ E l s n e r is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in classical archaeology

at Corpus Christi College, Oxford and visiting professor of art history at the
University of Chicago. His book Roman Eyes: Visuality and Subjectivity in Art and
Text is forthcoming.
Critical Inquiry / Summer 2006 743
and cultural change (in the original program for Spätrömische Kunstindus-
trie 4 and in the unfinished but hugely ambitious Historical Grammar of the
Visual Arts).5
1. Spätrömische Kunstindustrie: Individual Objects and Grand

Narratives
Riegl’s method of close formal analysis of individual objects leading to
stylistic generalization might be described as a bravura tour de force of close
looking, almost to the point of being obsessive. Take as an example culled
almost at random this passage from Spätrömische Kunstindustrie:
The best material on which to research the development of reliefs dur-
ing the middle Empire is the corpus of Roman sarcophagi, among
which in order to avoid controversy, we will look first at just pagan ex-
amples. These belong almost exclusively to the second half of the sec-
ond century, the third century and the beginning of the fourth. . . .
A sarcophagus representing Achilles and Penthesilea in the Vati-
can[fig. 1]. The figures overlap partially in several rows, presuming the
existence of various levels of depth. Yet this does not mean a spatial
composition in the modern sense, as is demonstrated on three counts:
first the level ground from which the highest figures are separated—
even though the level ground does not reach the entire height as it does
in the Arch of Titus; second, the placement of figures above one another
as opposed to behind each other; third the unequal size of the figures,
with some of the smallest occupying the foreground. In spite of being
107–33. On Gombrich’s debt to Stilfragen, see Gombrich, A Lifelong Interest: Conversations on Art
and Science with Didier Eribon (London, 1991), pp. 129–31.
4. See Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Vienna, 1901); trans. Rolf Winkes, under the title Late
Roman Art Industry (Rome, 1985); hereafter abbreviated LRAI. For discussions, see Otto J.
Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (New Haven, Conn., 1979), pp. 29–37; Olin, Forms
of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, pp. 129–53; Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 71–90;
Woodfield, “Reading Riegl’s Kunst-industrie” and Andrew Ballantyne, “Space, Grace, and Stylistic
Conformity: Spätrömische Kunstindustrie and Architecture,” in Framing Formalism, pp. 49–81, 83–
106; and Jas’ Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History 25,
no. 3 (2002): 358–79, esp. pp. 361–70.
5. See Riegl, Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (1897–99; Graz, 1966); trans.
Jacqueline Jung, under the title Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts (New York, 2004); hereafter
abbreviated HGVA. For discussions, see Matthew Rampley, “Spectatorship and the Historicity of
Art: Re-Reading Alois Riegl’s Historical Grammar of the Fine Arts,” Word and Image 12, no. 2
(1996): 209–17, and Benjamin Binstock, “Foreword: Aloı̈s Riegl, Monumental Ruin: Why We Still
Need to Read Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts,” in HGVA, pp. 11–36.
Amazingly, given the fundamental importance of Riegl’s work for the history of the decorative
arts, and despite chapter 2 being devoted to “touching and seeing” (Riegl’s famous haptic and
optic), it receives no mention—not even a footnote—in David Brett, Rethinking Decoration:
Pleasure and Ideology in the Visual Arts (Cambridge, 2005).
placed behind one another frequently, the figures are so compressed
into a crowd that they remain as close as possible to the level ground
and demonstrate their connection with it. Consequently the principal
artistic element is composition on the plane, which is centralized as well
as being in contrapposto. The figure in the center is dominant, and one
might say the other figures seem to rotate about it. All the figures are in
movement, and because they overlap, they create an impression of col-
orful confusion and lack of clarity. A solution is reached by inserting
four figures of medium size that are distributed at regular distances
from the dominant figure in the center and the mass of small figures
filling the plane. This principle of composition denies the spatial unity
of modern art, with its mixing of figures of different sizes on one and
the same plane, but is exactly repeated on a particular type of Persian
rug where the figures are replaced with stylistic vegetative motifs of dif-
ferent sizes. The linear composition in particular is still based on the tri-
angular system, which was created during the classical period; but the
extremely sharp angles of the legs of the individual triangles, which stun
the beholder, lead visibly to the perpendicular triangular system of the
Constantinian reliefs. [LRAI, pp. 82–83; trans. mod.]6
f i g u r e 1. “Sarcophagus representing Achilles and Penthesilea” (Vatican, Cortile del

Belvedere).
6. The object described here is Vatican, Cortile del Belvedere, no. 933. For recent discussion
with date (c. 230–40 ad) and bibliography, see Dagmar Grassinger, “Achill bis Amazonen,” in
Achill, Adonis, Aeneas, vol. 12 of Die Mythologischen Sarkophage, ed. Bernard Andreae and
Guntram Koch (Berlin, 1999), pp. 250–51. Grassinger’s bibliography, although it goes back to Carl
Robert’s work of 1890, fails to cite Riegl. Unforgivably, given Riegl’s descriptive precision, Winkes
illustrates the wrong sarcophagus.
Note the pure formalism of this analysis—almost entirely without ref-
erence to iconography, subject matter, or function after the initial identi-
fication of the topic depicted. Note also Riegl’s willingness to spring
(without methodological justification) to remarkably distant points of
comparison—“spatial composition in the modern sense,” “the spatial unity
of modern art,” the “particular type of Persian rug where the figures are
replaced with stylistic vegetative motifs of different sizes.” Only the refer-
ence to the reliefs of the Arch of Titus would seem warranted by contem-
porary standards of historically justifiable comparability. The reduction of
all the potential contextual meanings of the object—its funerary functions
and subject matter, the likelihood that the central protagonists are portraits
of a husband and wife, the mythological content referring not only to the
Amazons but also to a tradition of Amazon battles in relief sculpture reach-
ing back to the metopes of the Parthenon and the Bassae frieze—to pure
and precise formal description both strips the image of historical specificity
and allows it a transhistorical comparability with the public art of nearly
two centuries before (in the Arch of Titus), the nature of modern compo-
sition and spatial conventions some 1600 years later, and the decorative mo-
tifs of Persian carpets (this last, of course, a subject of Riegl’s particular
expertise).7 Yet this account—an extraordinarily detailed and narrowly fo-
cused formal intervention (which frankly must be applauded as rather a
good description of the object)—is governed by a chronological determin-
ism (in the dates cited by Riegl, by the flow of his text, and by the range of
comparanda adduced) so that the sarcophagus can be said to “lead visibly
to the perpendicular triangular system of the Constantinian reliefs.”
The justification for the leap from a Severan sarcophagus of the 230s AD
to the early fourth-century reliefs of the Arch of Constantine is never given.
In place of methodological justification, Riegl introduces a range of further
examples whose equally precise stylistic descriptions are made to lead, by a
kind of overwhelmingness of narrow morphology, step by step to the reliefs
of the Arch of Constantine (see LRAI, pp. 83–95). This is a case of blinding
us with science—adopting a “scientific” method, empirical formalism, and
trusting its positivist adumbration to lead to a predetermined historical re-
sult. Already, in a case like this, we can see the strain between the bigger
picture and the material objects that are meant to sustain it. But at least we
are here within a relatively narrow band of dates and in the face of a broadly
7. See Riegl, Altorientalische Teppiche (1892; Mittenwald, 1979). This is still untranslated and is
one of the few areas of Riegl’s output that the vast modern Riegl industry has not yet mined; see
Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, pp. 55–59. Riegl’s interest in carpets
follows his catalogue of Coptic textiles in Vienna; see Riegl, Die Ägyptische Textilfunde im K.K.
Österreichisches Museum (Vienna, 1889).
accepted problematic—the transformation (most of Riegl’s antecedents,
contemporaries, and successors called it decline) of art from Graeco-
Roman naturalism to something more like abstraction, at the turning point
between antiquity and the Middle Ages. What Riegl does to establish this,
his grand historical claim, is to raise a further series of objects (admittedly
related ones, in that they too are Roman mythological sarcophagi), trans-
muted into similarly precise and detailed formal descriptions that purport
to paint the transformation of forms to the reliefs of the Arch of Constantine
step by step. In each case we move progressively closer, with the Constan-
tinian material repeatedly cited in a rhetorical confirmation of the teleo-
logical end of the process. So the “so-called sarcophagus of Severus
Alexander and Julia Mammea” in the Capitoline (fig. 2) turns out to ex-
emplify “the struggle towards the perfect spatial isolation of the figures as
we see it reached in the Constantinian reliefs. . . . The end result of this
process we consider to be the Constantinian reliefs. The next two steps can
be detected on the fronts of the two sarcophagi to be discussed as follows”
(LRAI, pp. 83–84; trans. mod.).8
These are a Meleager sarcophagus from the Palazzo dei Conservatori (fig.
3)9 (dated to the first decade of the fourth century) and a sarcophagus of
Adonis from the Lateran (fig. 4)10 now in the Museo Gregoriano Profano,
Vatican, of which we are told “as far as artistic execution goes, we are here
very close to Constantinian art” (LRAI, pp. 86; trans. mod.). And so on. At
no point is the methodology justified or explained, but rather its painstak-
ingly focused analysis combined with the plethora of examples is meant to
stand by itself as self-evidently right.
Scholarly concentration on Spätrömische Kunstindustrie has allowed
much to be forgiven in Riegl’s method, since the text in its final (but not its
originally envisaged) form focuses on a specific period and a specific set of
acknowledged formal problems. The Historical Grammar, by contrast, ad-
mittedly from Riegl’s point of view an unpublished (and perhaps unpub-
lishable) sketch, reveals some remarkable general and transhistorical
aspirations stretching across all of Western art history from antiquity and
the Middle Ages, via the Renaissance and Reformation, to modernity (see
HGVA, pp. 55–56).11 In this text he is concerned with the notion of “‘hu-
8. This is, in fact, an Attic sarcophagus found in Rome, with the story of Achilles around its
four sides. See Sabine Rogge, “Achill und Hippolytos,” Die Attischen Sarkophage, ed. Andreae and
Koch (Berlin, 1995), pp. 44–45, 136–38, where it is dated to c. 350 AD.
9. See Meleager, vol. 6 of Die Mythologischen Sarkophage, ed. Koch (Berlin, 1975), pp. 24–25,
102–3, where it is dated to the turn of the third and fourth centuries.
10. See Grassinger, “Achill bis Amazonen,” p. 220.
11. This point is exemplified at greater length in HGVA, pp. 57–105. For a discussion of the
ambition of the Historical Grammar compared with Spätrömische Kunstindustrie and Das
man worldview’” (Menschliche Weltanschauung) (HGVA, p. 55)—the quo-
tation marks are Riegl’s own—as embodied in forms, in different periods,
each with its rise, peak of perfection, decline, and eventual collapse, as well
as its continued reverberation over centuries “in outer forms” (HGVA, p.
56). While Riegl makes plenty of references to specific works of art and to
particular features of art in general at different periods (such as linear per-
spective, light and shadow, aerial perspective) the manuscript has little em-
pirical basis in the kind of close description so characteristic of Spätrömische
Kunstindustrie (see HGVA, pp. 216–31). Of course, it is always unfair to judge
an incomplete and abandoned project as if it were a finished one. At times
Riegl seems committed to trying to create a historical grammar for art on
the model of language (see HGVA, pp. 292–302); at times he seems to be
explicating changing worldviews as adumbrated in three specific (to mod-
ern conceptions, perhaps rather arbitrary) periods (see HGVA, pp. 303–40).
My point here is that in the Historical Grammar we see a much less
morphologically or stylistically obsessed Riegl than in Spätrömische Kunst-
industrie ; his concern here is to sketch the big picture in terms of deep cul-
tural meanings. We are presented with Greek art as the improvement of
nature through physical beauty rooted in infinite polytheism, with Chris-
tian art as the improvement of nature through spiritual beauty rooted in
monotheism, and finally art as the reproduction of transitory nature rooted
in the natural-scientific worldview. This kind of grand scheme prefigures
the moves that Riegl’s student and successor, Max Dvořák, would later make
quite explicitly towards art history as Geistesgeschichte.12 And it identifies
the two fundamental tendencies in tension within Riegl’s vision of art his-
tory: the museum curator’s instinct to classify and describe objects in their
empirical minutiae (in Stilfragen and Spätrömische Kunstindustrie) and the
university professor’s desire to formulate a grand theory that could accom-
modate sweeping historical generalizations (in the Historical Grammar).
We are back where we started: at the profoundly problematic point of how
one can get the objects to tell a story—the big story, indeed, any story—
and of how empirical observation may compellingly lead to adequate and
Holländische Gruppenporträt ([1902; Vienna, 1931]; trans. Evelyn Kain, under the title The Group
Portraiture of Holland [Los Angeles, 1999]), see Rampley, “Spectatorship and the Historicity of
Art,” p. 209.
12. I am thinking of Max Dvořák, The History of Art as the History of Ideas, trans. John Hardy
(London, 1984), along with Rampley, “Max Dvořák: Art History and the Crisis of Modernity,” Art
History 26, no. 2 (2003): 214–37. On Kulturgeschichte, see Georg Vasold, Alois Riegl und die
Kunstgeschichte als Kulturgeschichte: Überlegungen zum Frühwerk des Wiener Gelehrten (Freiburg,
2004), pp. 83–134.
convincing induction. Riegl’s greatness as an art historian lies in his abso-
lutely acute awareness of this problem and his own sense of being pulled in
both directions—towards the satisfyingly described single object and at the
same time the fully elaborated historical picture. However much we may now
reject the specific foundations and assumptions of Riegl’s various arguments,
we remain—as practitioners of both art history and archaeology—at the
same impasse and before the same methodological conundrum.
2. Kunstwollen as a Methodological Solution

It is only in relation to this tension that we can understand Riegl’s famous
formulation of Kunstwollen. His invention of this concept, for all its appar-
ent obscurity (an obscurity probably increased by the quantity of discussion
and explication it has generated among some of the most distinguished art
historians in the more than one hundred years since it was invented), is
designed as a solution to the double impasse of generalizing from the spe-
f i g u r e 2. “Sarcophagus of Severus Alexander and Julia Mammea” (Rome, Museo

Capitolino).
f i g u r e 3. “Meleager sarcophagus with representation of the Calydonian boar hunt” (Rome,
Palazzo dei Conservatori).
f i g u r e 4. “Sarcophagus with the representation of the farewell, departure, and wounding of

Adonis” (Vatican, Museo Gregoriano Profano).
cific empirical example and making the mute material object speak.13
Among the numerous complications in dealing with Riegl’s own version of
Kunstwollen—in addition to having to skirt the pitfalls of the many post-
Rieglian interpretations—is the fact that it was an evolving concept in his
work and therefore that all his references to it do not necessarily imply the
same thing.14
But from the time it appeared in Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, Kunstwol-
len—which Riegl was to describe in 1901 as “the only certain given of a new
positivist historiography of art”15 and as an original idea16—had become
the key mechanism in which his entire theory of art was grounded.17 Its
genius lies precisely in bridging the aesthetic, cultural, and structural char-
acteristics of any given object (not only high art but any form of craft) from
any time with the broader cultural aesthetics of its time. That is, Kunstwol-
len—in the hands of Riegl’s relentlessly acute formalist analysis—couldtake
one from any given object or set of objects (such as the sarcophagi discussed
earlier) to the big historical picture. On one level, Kunstwollen is narrowly
encapsulated by the struggle between the artist and limitations imposed
upon him in the material he works on and his own technical capacities. The
work of art here shows “the result of a specific and consciously purposeful
artistic will that comes through in a battle against function, raw material,
and technique” (LRAI, p. 9; trans. mod.). This definition appears to apply
equally to any given individual work of art (as in all the specific examples
Riegl adduces so painstakingly throughout Spätrömische Kunstindustrie)
but also to the work of art in general (or art as a general proposition) and
to the generality of works of art in any given period as well. Methodologi-
cally, this solves a fundamental problem in art history and archaeology,
which is that every case we argue can be seen as a special case. Kunstwollen—
by reflecting a fundamental structure as true to the special case as to typical
examples—cuts through the problems of arguing from selective instances.
This definition enables Riegl, even as early as the programmatic intro-
duction to Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, to propose the notion of a positive
late Roman Kunstwollen—as opposed to the decline or “‘barbarization’” of
13. For a recent discussion, see Andrea Reichenberger, Riegls “Kunstwollen”: Versuch einer
Neubetrachtung (Saint Augustine, Germany, 2003), pp. 17–28.
14. See Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, pp. 71–72.
15. Riegl, “Naturwerk und Kunstwerk I,” Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Hans Sedlmayr (Vienna,
1929), p. 60. See also Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, p. 71.
16. “I advocated in Stilfragen, and as far as I know I was the first to do so, a teleological view
according to which I saw in the work of art the result of a specific and consciously purposeful
Kunstwollen” (LRAI, p. 9; trans. mod.).
17. For Kunstwollen in Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, see Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois
Riegl’s Theory of Art, pp. 148–53.
Franz Wickhoff ’s reading (LRAI, p. 10)—and to argue that the late Roman
Kunstwollen, by contrast with that of the Flavians and Trajan, “constitutes
progress and nothing other than progress. Judged by the limited criteria of
modern criticism, it appears to be a decay that historically did not exist; but
modern art with all its advantages would never have been possible if late
Roman art with its unclassical tendencies had not led the way” (LRAI, p. 11;
trans. mod.). This implies not only period-specific Kunstwollens but their
evolutionary relationship with each other so that one can be analyzed as
transmuting into another, rather like the evolution of biological species.
Such Kunstwollens can, moreover, be compared—something Riegl briefly
attempts to do (still in his programmatic introduction) when he contrasts
“our modern Kunstwollen” with the late Roman one (LRAI, p. 12).
Spätrömische Kunstindustrie is the book in Riegl’s corpus in which Kunst-
wollen has its longest and most detailed treatment—to such an extent that
the book might be seen as more a methodological and philosophical jus-
tification of the concept of Kunstwollen through the specific materials of late
antique art than as a book on Roman art.18 The entire volume culminates
in a conclusion detailing the main characteristics of the late Roman Kunst-
wollen (see LRAI, pp. 221–34).19 Here, after summarizing the aesthetics of
the late Roman Kunstwollen in terms of rhythmic composition and its con-
trasts with the Kunstwollen of earlier periods—coloristic versus linear
rhythm, compositional contrast and contrapposto against uniformity of
composition, and so forth—Riegl “tests” his results by turning to the “lit-
erary expressions of the late Romans on the character of their Kunstwollen
and artistic practice” (“MC,” p. 89). Implicitly the Kunstwollen of a period
includes all its products (or “expressions”), not just those in material or
artistic form. From this, Riegl rises to a crescendo that is no longer about
Roman art as such but about the Kunstwollen itself, that has so far appeared
to serve as the means for his account of late antique art but is now revealed
to be the main topic of Spätrömische Kunstindustrie:
In every period there is only one orientation of the Kunstwollen govern-
ing all four types of plastic art in the same measure, turning to its own
ends every conceivable practical purpose and raw material, and always
18. That said, the concept of Kunstwollen is adduced programmatically at the opening of Das
Holländische Gruppenporträt, p. 4, and towards the end with Rembrandt’s last group portrait
representing the move towards modern Kunstwollen “almost more than any other painting of its
time” (Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, p. 345; trans. mod.).
19. A much better translation of this section exists as Riegl, “The Main Characteristics of the
Late Roman Kunstwollen” (1901), in The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method
in the 1930s, trans. and ed. Christopher Wood (New York, 2000), pp. 87–103; hereafter abbreviated
“MC”.
and of its own accord selecting the most appropriate technique for the
intended work of art. Our conviction of the correctness of the image of
late antique art gained in this way is only strengthened when we realize
that the Kunstwollen of antiquity and in particular of its closing phase is
completely identical with the other main forms of expression of the hu-
man will in the same period.
All human will is directed toward a satisfactory shaping of man’s re-
lationship to the world, within and beyond the individual. The plastic
Kunstwollen regulates man’s relationship to the sensibly perceptible ap-
pearance 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 recipi-
ent, 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 broad-
est sense): in religion, philosophy, science, even statecraft and law.
[“MC,” pp. 94–95]
Among the entailments of Kunstwollen implied in this passage one might
include the implication that Riegl sees Kunstwollen as suprapersonal and
autonomous—“governing . . . the plastic arts,” “turning to its own ends
every conceivable practical purpose and raw material,” “always and of its
own accord selecting the most appropriate technique.” It might even be said
to be determinist in that it controls the ways things appear at any given time.
Built into the concept is the notion of desire—so that the human will of
which Kunstwollen is the expression, appearing equally in all products or
expressions of a given culture, is about the way we “want to see things
shaped or colored,” “the way man wants to imagine them.” The objective
and the subjective are thus rolled together in a dialectic where each may be
said to shape the other.20 Finally, Kunstwollen gives rise to Weltanschauung—
the concept of worldview that was fundamental to the logic of the Historical
Grammar and that can now be grounded on an empirical basis.21
Before turning to the critiques of this set of propositions, it is worth not-
20. For this interpretation, see Erwin Panofsky, “Der Begriffe des Kunstwollens” (1920), in
Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2 vols. (Berlin, 1998), 2:1030 n. 16; trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel
Snyder, under the title “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” Critical Inquiry 8 (Autumn 1981): 29 n.
15. Here, Panofsky attributes the development of subjectivism and objectivism in Riegl to The
Group Portraiture of Holland. For Riegl’s awareness of the subjectivism of the art historian looking
back at a distant world from a differently configured set of presuppositions, see Barbara Harlow,
“Realignment: Alois Riegl’s Image of Late Roman Art Industry,” Glyph, no. 3 (1978): 118–21, 127–30.
21. See Reichenberger, Riegls “Kunstwollen,” pp. 97–99.
ing their masterliness. Faced with what I still take to be the fundamental
methodological issue for all material-cultural disciplines (not only art his-
tory by any means)—namely, the way a single object or group of objects
may be made to speak, to tell a story within a larger historical or philo-
sophical picture—Riegl confronts the problem head on. He sees it clearly
and (unlike the long list of those who have fudged it) he tackles it gloriously.
What Riegl proposes is frankly, in terms of a technical methodological so-
lution, probably the most skillful solution ever suggested, perhaps because
Riegl saw the problem more starkly than others. Kunstwollen does indeed
allow us to transition from objects to big stories.22 Moreover, it frees us from
aesthetic hierarchies of objects, since in principle all the arts, all archaeo-
logical data, all craft and ornament can serve the same historical purpose
in revealing a Kunstwollen, etched by the maker’s will (itself reflecting a col-
lective, historically contextualized will) into the resistance of the material
stuff on which he or she works. Furthermore, the localized bigger picture
of a particular Kunstwollen true for a particular age (and Riegl made serious
attempts to adumbrate that of both late antiquity and the era of the Dutch
group portrait, as well as leaving notes that would be posthumously edited
into a book on baroque art in Rome)23 could be compared with other
Kunstwollens to allow for a universal history of the kind to which the His-
torical Grammar aspires. Within this scheme, a number of other factors are
made to work with some panache, notably the interrelations between sub-
jectivity (whether artistic volition, social desire, or larger collective forms
of subjective investment, such as perception and attention)24 and the ob-
jectively analyzable work of art.25
22. As Otto Pächt, a Viennese student of Riegl’s and one deeply sympathetic to his project, put
it: “The term Kunstwollen, this cipher for the generating and controlling factor in artistic creation,
is applied by Riegl equally to an individual work of art, to an individual artist, to an historical
period, to an ethnical group or to a nation” (Otto Pächt, “Art Historians and Art Critics—VI:
Alois Riegl,” Burlington Magazine 105 [May 1963]: 190–91; hereafter abbreviated “AH”).
23. See Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, ed. Arthur Burda and Dvořák (Vienna,
1908).
24. On perception and attention, see Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art,
pp. 129–69, and Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 93–147. In relation to subjectivity, Pächt writes of “the
seemingly conflicting notions of active volition and passive compulsion which are so ingeniously
combined in the double meaning of Riegl’s Kunstwollen” (“AH,” p. 193). It might be added that
Pächt, a Jewish refugee of the 1930s, is surprisingly affectionate about this “ingenious
combination” given that the mix would have disastrous consequences in the ways the German-
speaking peoples responded to the more appalling agendas of the reprehensible government that
took control (to great popular acclaim) in both Germany and Austria less than thirty years after
Riegl’s death and some thirty years before Pächt published these comments.
25. The long last note to the last sentence of Spätrömische Kunstindustrie constitutes a
meditation on issues of the subjective and objective in relation to the arts. See “MC,” pp. 102–3.
3. Intellectual Contexts
One important move in the recent “Riegl-industrie” has been to see
Riegl’s contributions (beyond the specific art history of the Vienna school)26
within their historical context as examples of the political and cultural con-
cerns of late Hapsburg Vienna, of the multicultural and Roman Catholic
Austro-Hungarian Empire in its last stages.27 This is actually a very Rieglian
form of historicism, since Riegl himself would have had to concede that his
own work was the expression of a Kunstwollen particular to his time that
was expressed equally in a series of other local cultural products, from the
writings of Freud to the paintings of Klimt.28 One form of inquiry along
these lines is to examine Riegl’s interest in the subjective in relation to the
innovative philosophical interventions in psychology by Franz Brentano
(teaching in Vienna 1874–95) and by Brentano’s student Edmund Husserl
(in Vienna 1884–86).29 Certainly the willingness to confront fundamental
intellectual problems with radical boldness—something common to Bren-
tano, Husserl, and Riegl—was part of the intellectual zeitgeist of Viennese
academia in the late nineteenth century30 and arguably an aspect of Vienna’s
inheritance to its children of later generations, such as Wittgenstein.31 But
26. On which, see Julius von Schlosser, Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte (Innsbruck, 1934);
Arthur Rosenauer, “L’Ecole de Vienne,” in Dix-huitième et dix-neuvième siècles, vol. 2 of Histoire
de l’histoire de l’art, ed. Edouard Pommier (Paris, 1997), pp. 415–41; and Wood, introduction, The
Vienna School Reader, pp. 9–72.
27. Outstanding are Olin, “Alois Riegl: The Late Roman Empire in the Late Habsburg Empire,”
Austrian Studies, no. 5 (1994): 107–20, and Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and
the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Detroit, 2006); but see also
Willibald Sauerländer, “Alois Riegl und die Entstehung der autonomen Kunstgeschichte am Fin-
de-Siècle,” in Fin-de-Siècle: Zu Literatur und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende, ed. Roger Bauer et al.
(Frankfurt, 1977), pp. 125–30; Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 21–47; Reynolds, “Alois Reigl and the Politics
of Art History”; Ballantyne, “Space, Grace, and Stylistic Conformity,” pp. 83–106, esp. pp. 98–103;
and also Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity,” pp. 360–61, 370.
28. See Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, pp. 85–86, 126–27, 148–49,
and Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 35–37. On Klimt and Wickhoff (Riegl’s fellow professor and ally at the
art institute in Vienna), see Michael Ann Holly, “Spirits and Ghosts in the Historiography of Art,”
in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Objects in Contemporary Perspectives, ed. Holly, Mark A.
Cheetham, and Keith Moxey (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 52–71.
29. On Brentano, see The Cambridge Companion to Brentano, ed. Dale Jacquette (Cambridge,
2004); on his influence, see Barry Smith, Austrian Philosophy: The Legacy of Franz Brentano
(Chicago, 1994), and The School of Franz Brentano, ed. Liliana Albertazzi, Massimo Libardi, and
Roberto Poli (Dordrecht, 1996). On the development of Husserl’s phenomenology in relation to
the influence of Brentano, see Robin D. Rollinger, Husserl’s Position in the School of Brentano
(Dordrecht, 1999).
30. For more on Riegl and Brentano, with whom Riegl studied in 1875, see Gubser, Time’s
Visible Surface, pp. 53, 61–75.
31. See, for example, Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York, 1973);
Janik, Wittgenstein’s Vienna Revisited (New Brunswick, N.J., 2001); and esp. Ernst Gellner,
Language and Solitude: Wittgenstein, Malinowski, and the Habsburg Dilemma (Cambridge, 1998),
with an acute critique of Janik and Toulmin at pp. 85–95.
here, rather than pursue this cultural-historical line of local Viennese con-
textualization, it may be worth placing Riegl’s project within a more intel-
lectual-historical frame, as one of a series of grand narratives—progressivist
(even evolutionary), empirical, methodologically self-aware—within late
imperial European positivism.32 Quite apart from the various other late
nineteenth- and early twentieth-century commitments to formalism, sty-
listic analysis, and connoisseurship in art history—one thinks especially of
Wölfflin and Morelli, but also Beazley and Berenson—Riegl’s specificsearch
for an essential formal mechanism, an axiomatic base by which to explain
the totality of an entire system, has interesting parallels in other equally
optimistic and totalizing projects in the first decade of the twentiethcentury.
Throughout that decade, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead
were concerned with establishing the philosophical foundations of math-
ematics—both the concepts behind all mathematical expression (or con-
struction) and the fundamental axioms from which it can be deduced.33 The
culmination of this process was their Principia Mathematica, of which the
first volume was published in 1910, but on which their preface asserts they
were already at work in 1900.34 Its aim was to “analyse existing mathematics,
with a view to discovering what premisses are employed, whether these
premisses are mutually consistent, and whether they are capable of reduc-
tion to more fundamental premisses.”35 The parallels with Riegl are intrigu-
ing—including a close and systematic analysis of a large body of given data
in aid of a search for a fundamental and essential explanatory program on
which the foundations of the big picture can be firmly established—a kind
of Kunstwollen in all its optimistic positivism. Just as the philosophical pro-
32. My model for this kind of approach is the classic paper by Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud,
and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and the Scientific Method,” in The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes,
Peirce, ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (Bloomington, Ind., 1983), pp. 81–118.
33. The fundamental texts are Alfred North Whitehead, A Treatise on Universal Algebra, with
Applications (Cambridge, 1898), and Bertrand Russell, The Principles of Mathematics (Cambridge,
1903). For discussion, see Francisco Rodriguez-Consuegra, The Mathematical Philosophy of
Bertrand Russell: Origins and Development (Basel, 1991), pp. 44–49.
34. See Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1910–13). On the
systematization of logic in Principia Mathematica and its affinities with formalism, see Rudolf
Carnap, “The Logicist Foundations of Mathematics,” in Bertrand Russell: A Collection of Critical
Essays, trans. Erna Putnam and Gerald J. Massey, ed. D. F. Pears (New York, 1972), pp. 175–91, esp.
pp. 176, 191. For a critique of the inadequacy of Whitehead and Russell’s formalism, see Kurt
Gödel, “Russell’s Mathematical Logic,” in The Philosophy of Bertand Russell, ed. Paul Arthur
Schilpp (Evanston, Ill., 1946), pp. 123–53, esp. p. 126. Generally, on the writing and structure of
Principia Mathematica, see Victor Lowe, Alfred North Whitehead: The Man and His Work, 2 vols.
(Baltimore, 1985), 1:231–94, and I. Grattan-Guinness, The Search for Mathematical Roots, 1870–1940
(Princeton, N.J., 2000), pp. 269–410 and “Mathematics in and behind Russell’s Logicism and Its
Reception,” in The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell, ed. Nicholas Griffin (Cambridge,
2003), pp. 51–83, esp. pp. 61–73.
35. Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica, 1:vi.
gram of Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (to establish Kunstwollen) is initially
less explicit than the book’s apparent topic of analyzing late Roman art, so
the philosophical project of Principia Mathematica in relation to the pure
workings of logic is less explicit than its claims about mathematics as such.36
Just as Riegl’s program in Spätrömische Kunstindustrie is established by ex-
ample after example of close formal analysis across genres of art (architec-
ture, sculpture, painting, the “art industry,” including buckles, fibulae, and
so forth), building to the effect of a dazzling and incontrovertible empiri-
cism, so only the first eighty-eight pages of volume 1 of Principia Mathe-
matica consist of prose readable by (if not wholly comprehensible to) the
layman; the rest consists largely of symbolic annotations and mathematical
equations extending for well over one thousand pages in three volumes—
again, a dazzling empirical performance of the method in practice. Even in
relation to the difficulties of finding a coherent and all-embracing theory
that takes into account subjectivity as well as objectivism, there are parallel
self-awarenesses in Spätrömische Kunstindustrie and Principia Mathematica,
though Principia Mathematica was (unlike Spätrömische Kunstindustrie) an
unbridled attempt to establish a wholly objective edifice.37 Just as Riegl’s
Kunstwollen would prove a fundamental problem for subsequent art his-
tory (eliciting specific interpretative interventions in the 1920s from giants
of the generation following Riegl, such as Panofsky, Mannheim, Wind,
Kaschnitz-Weinberg, and Sedlmayr),38 so Principia Mathematica was to be
the fundamental statement of mathematics for the ensuing decades and the
key text to which Kurt Gödel would react in formulating his famous the-
36. Whitehead and Russell claim their aim is “the greatest possible analysis of the ideas with
which [mathematical logic] deals and of the processes by which it conducts demonstrations, and
at diminishing to the utmost the number of undefined ideas and undemonstrated propositions . . .
from which it starts” (Whitehead and Russell, Principia Mathematica, 1:1). Writing much later, in
the introduction to the second edition of The Principles of Mathematics, Russell is more explicit:
“mathematics and logic are identical” (Russell, The Principles of Mathematics, 2d ed. [London,
1937], p. v). “The primary aim of Principia Mathematica was to show that all pure mathematics
follows from purely logical premisses and uses only concepts definable in logical terms” (Russell,
My Philosophical Development [London, 1959], p. 57).
37. See Rodriguez-Consuegra, The Mathematical Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, pp. 219–23.
38. In addition to Panofsky, “Der Begriffe des Kunstwollens,” see Karl Mannheim, Beiträge zur
Theorie der Weltanschauungsinterpretation (Vienna, 1923), trans. Paul Kecskemeti, under the title
“On the Interpretation of Weltanschauung,” From Karl Mannheim, ed. Kurt H. Wolff (New York,
1971), pp. 8–58, hereafter abbreviated “OIW”; Edgar Wind, “Zur Systematik der künstlerischen
Probleme,” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 18 (1925): 438–86; Sedlmayr,
“Kunstgeschichte als Stilgeschichte,” Kunst und Wahrheit (1929; Mittelwald, 1978), pp. 32–48 and
“Die Quintessenz des Lehren Riegls,” in Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, pp. xviii-xx, trans. Woodfield,
under the title “The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought,” in Framing Formalism, pp. 11–32; and
Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg, “Spätrömische Kunstindustrie,” Gnomon 5 (1929): 195–213, for a review
of the second edition of Riegl’s text published in 1927.
orem that the axioms from which any mathematical system is derived can
be neither proved nor disproved within that system.39
While later work has confronted the positivistic certainties of both
Kunstwollen and Principia Mathematica and found them wanting, a third,
early twentieth-century search for the essential minute items that underpin
and explain the big picture is still ongoing. Only in 1900 were Gregor Men-
del’s genetic experiments of the 1850s and 1860s rediscovered. But in the
hands of the likes of William Bateson, the study of genes would be developed
as a solution to the fundamental evolutionary problems of inheritance and
variation to which Darwin had no answer.40 In the conclusion to his in-
augural lecture as Professor of Biology at Cambridge, Bateson wrote, “The
facts of Heredity and Variation are the materials out of which all theories
of Evolution are constructed. At last by genetic methods we are beginning
to obtain such facts of unimpeachable quality, and free from the flaws that
were inevitable in older collections. . . . The time for discussion of Evolution
as a problem at large is closed. We face that problem now as one soluble by
minute, critical analysis.”41 In the opening to the 1913 publication of his 1907
Silliman Memorial Lectures at Yale, Bateson wrote, “It can be declared with
confidence and certainty that we have now the means of beginning an anal-
ysis of living organisms, and distinguishing many of the units or factors
which essentially determine and cause the development of their several at-
tributes.”42
The parallels with Riegl are again striking. Bateson finds in genes a fun-
damental axiom of analysis by which the sum of minute, individual ex-
amples can render not merely a big picture but a historical one, whose
expression is essentially determined by them. The problems of the grand
Darwinian story of evolution can be solved through genetics that, like
Kunstwollen, provides a methodological mechanism to move between the
particular specimen and the grand narrative. Genetics in its Edwardian
form sketched the possibility of an essentialist and empirically verifiable
39. See Gödel, On Formally Undecidable Propositions of “Principia Mathematica” and Related
Systems, trans. B. Meltzer (1931; New York, 1992).
40. Among Bateson’s essays, see particularly “An Address on Mendelian Heredity and Its
Application to Man” (1906), “Heredity and Variation in Modern Lights” (1909), and “The
Methods and Scope of Genetics” (1908), William Bateson, F. R. S., Naturalist: His Essays and
Addresses, ed. Beatrice Bateson (Cambridge, 1928) and also The Problems of Genetics (1913; New
Haven, Conn., 1979). For a general account of this period in genetics, see Colin Tudge, In Mendel’s
Footnotes: An Introduction to the Science and Technologies of Genes and Genetics from the Nineteenth
Century to the Twenty-Second (London, 2000), pp. 75–160.
41. Bateson, “The Method and Scope of Genetics,” William Bateson, F. R. S., Naturalist, pp.
332–33.
42. Bateson, The Problems of Genetics, p. 3.
model of specific “axiomatic” items on which the big story of life in general
could be founded.43
In the premolecular era, much of the method of genetics—as, for in-
stance, in Bateson’s Problems of Genetics—consisted of detailed analytic
examination and description of specimens—often with the aid of diagrams
and photographs—and the comparison of these with other examples in the
same species. The aim of this process was to establish both variation as such
between closely related examples as well as particular relations within vari-
ation, such as inheritance, adaptation, and mutation, all of which may be
expressed as a historical narrative of change between descendants and an-
cestors. Thus, the method of genetics is strikingly close to the systematic
morphological analysis of empirical examples by means of description and
photography in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art history,not
only in Riegl.
4. Critiques of Kunstwollen
What I have claimed was Riegl’s methodological solution to one problem
raised a hornets’ nest of other problems. First, we may ask what sort of story
the theory of Kunstwollen was meant to sanction for its practitioners. What
kind of art-historical narrative was on offer? It is around this question that
the great debates of the 1920s were clustered, with the “Vienna school,” a
group of scholars that included Sedlmayr, Kaschnitz-Weinberg, and Pächt,
offering what has been characterized as a neo-Hegelian line on Kunstwollen
as a creative principle enshrined in the structure of art. Meanwhile a group
of north German scholars (influenced by Cassirer and Warburg)—most
notably Panofsky and Wind—advanced what has been described as a neo-
Kantian line that was designed to shift art history away from formalism and
issues of artistic creativity towards questions of meaning.44 The problem
however is less about Kant and Hegel than about what one wants art history
to be. At stake in the debate about Kunstwollen in the 1920s was the very
course and direction, as well as the discourse and method, of the entire
discipline. So it is of no surprise that the participants would turn out to be
among the field’s most distinguished (if sometimes controversial) expo-
43. It may be worth remarking on the Austro-Hungarian investment in each of the fields, all
forms of formalist positivism, that I am sketching briefly here; Mendel was a Moravian priest,
while Gödel was Viennese.
44. The key critiques are those by Panofsky, Mannheim, and Wind, while the key defenses are
by Sedlmayr and Kaschnitz-Weinberg, all in the 1920s. For the neo-Kantians and neo-Hegelians,
see Henri Zerner, “Alois Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism,” Daedalus 105 (Winter 1976): 177–88,
esp. p. 180. For Sedlmayr’s insistence that Riegl’s work could not be read in a Kantian way, see
“The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought,” pp. 26–27. On the move to meaning, see esp. Svetlana
Alpers, “Style Is What You Make It: The Visual Arts Once Again,” in The Concept of Style, ed. Berel
Lang (Ithaca, N.Y., 1979), pp. 137–62, esp. p. 148.
nents, as well as one of the most significant sociologists of the mid-twentieth
century, Karl Mannheim.45
Panofsky’s response to Kunstwollen, on which much has been written
(particularly “Der Begriffe des Kunstwollens”),46 effectively constitutes not
only some of his most incisive critical thinking in his German phase but
also the genesis of his arguments for emphasizing the meanings of works of
art over their forms and styles, a theorization that culminated in the ico-
nology of his American period. It was the first great critical riposte to
Kunstwollen, from which the work of both Mannheim and Wind explicitly
drew,47 and was the most aggressive of the three. Indeed, Mannheim, com-
ing from a sociological interest in how to “determine the global outlook of
an epoch in an objective, scientific fashion” (“OIW,” p. 9), is extremely posi-
tive about Riegl—calling the project of Spätrömische Kunstindustrie “meth-
odologically still challenging today” (“OIW,” p. 51) and even “heroic”
(“OIW,” p. 54). Yet, despite citing all three critiques, Sedlmayr’s defense of
Riegl in 1929 perhaps rightly focussed primarily on responding to Panofsky
as his key opponent.
Panofsky saw clearly that Kunstwollen, as a formulation for the structural
embodiment of a web of psychological drives both within the artist and in
45. The secondary literature on Mannheim, who has a strong claim to being the founder of the
modern sociology of knowledge and culture, is at least as large as that on Riegl himself. It is
impressively blind about the Beiträge, perhaps because its art-historical interests today seem
removed from the main thrust of Mannheim’s achievement. This is a pity since in many ways it is
a foundation text for his later works. See Colin Loader, The Intellectual Development of Karl
Mannheim: Culture, Politics, and Planning (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 44–49, who notes at p. 217 n. 71
the continuity of the term Wollen (borrowed from Kunstwollen) in Mannheim’s work. Along these
lines, see also Dirk Hoeges, Kontroverse am Abgrund: Ernst Robert Curtius und Karl Mannheim
(Frankfurt, 1994), pp. 18–19. For the place of Mannheim’s paper within art history and especially
its influence on Panofsky’s iconology, see Joan Hart, “Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim: A
Dialogue on Interpretation,” Critical Inquiry 19 (Spring 1993): 534–66; for more on Panofsky’s debt
to Mannheim, see also Jeremy Tanner, The Sociology of Art: A Reader (London, 2003), pp. 10–12.
For the afterlife of Panofsky’s intervention in sociology (born in his and Mannheim’s responses to
Kunstwollen), see Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scholastique, trans. Pierre Bourdieu
(Paris, 1967). In particular, in the afterword Bourdieu upholds Panofsky as a paradigm for the
rejection of positivism and praises him for introducing the concept of habitus; see pp. 135–65.
46. Especially useful discussions include Alpers, “Style Is What You Make It”; Michael Podro,
The Critical Historians of Art (New Haven, Conn., 1982), pp. 179–85; Holly, Panofsky and the
Foundations of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984), pp. 69–96; Georges Didi-Huberman, Devant
l’image: Question posée aux fins d’une histoire de l’art (Paris, 1990), pp. 119–34; Wood, introduction,
The Vienna School Reader; Wood, Introduction, Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, trans.
Wood (New York, 1991), pp. 7–24, esp. pp. 8–14; and Iversen, Alois Riegl, pp. 152–56.
47. See “OIW,” p. 33 n. 1, and Wind, “Zur Systematik der künstlerischen Probleme,” pp. 445,
447 n. 1, 448 n. 2, 481 n. 1, 483 n. 3. It may be worth noting that Panofsky’s later work in the 1920s
and 1930s on meaning (Sinn) in art history, which developed into his theory of iconology, is
explicitly indebted to Mannheim’s Beiträge of 1923. See Panofsky, “Über das Verhältnis der
Kunstgeschichte zur Kunsttheorie” (1924), Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2:1035–63, esp. p. 1058 n. 28
and “Zum Problem der Beschreibung und Inhaltsdeutung von Werken der bildenden Kunst,”
Deutschsprachige Aufsätze, 2:1064–67, esp. p. 1074 n. 13.
the wider cultural context, was untenable in the face of any kind of reductive
analytic logic or at least liable to “confused interpretation.”48 Indeed he re-
duced the scope of Kunstwollen—the scope of what was valid and interesting
in art-historical inquiry—to the complexities of meaning residing in a work
of art. In art history after World War II, and especially in the sort so pow-
erfully influenced by Panofsky in America, this led to what Svetlana Alpers
rightly characterized as a fundamental change in the basic issues: “What
Riegl called questions of style are pre-empted by, absorbed into, questions
of meaning.”49 The Vienna school, partly in response to the challenge of
Panofsky’s reading of Kunstwollen and delving ever deeper into the kinds of
formalist description presaged by the model of the empirical examples laid
out so systematically in Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, created a method of
Strukturanalyse or structural analysis. In Sedlmayr’s version, presented as a
reply to Panofsky that takes account of the latter’s worries about the mean-
ing (Sinn) of Kunstwollen,50 the need was to go beneath the external ap-
pearance of art to its governing structural principles: “Style is a variable,
dependent on inner structural principles.”51 Riegl’s achievement had been
to show the way (through Kunstwollen) to these “central formative princi-
ples” (or “higher structural principles”) that underlie surface appearance
and in an essential way expose the cognitive structure of a group of indi-
viduals.52 From the forms of particular objects, Sedlmayr develops the nexus
of ideas in Kunstwollen to take us to their deep structures, which in turn
reveal cognitive structures not only in the individual people who made or
used such objects but also in collectives and groups of people. This kind of
deep structuralism is suprapersonal;53 “an intransitive and yet purposive
48. Iversen, Alois Riegl, p. 153.

49. Alpers, “Style Is What You Make It,” p. 148. Mannheim effectively supports Panofsky’s turn
to meaning in an interesting passage:
[Riegl] seeks to characterize Weltanschauung as a global entity by ascertaining certain common
features. . . . All such attempts, however, fail to go beyond abstract, formal analysis. They can
only succeed in bringing to light the categories and forms of experience and expression
pertaining to a given period before they become fully differentiated in objectifications—in
other words: all they can establish is a typology of “initial,” “germinal” patterns of mental life.
Such understandings are neither futile nor hopeless. But it will never be possible to derive the
wealth of meanings embodied in the actual works from these germinal patterns. This is the
weakness common to Riegl’s method. . . . Complex meanings cannot be adequately grasped or
interpreted in terms of elementary concepts. [“OIW,” p. 54]
50. Sinn is the key term not only for Panofsky but also for Mannheim; see “OIW,” pp. 18–38.
51. Sedlmayr, “The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought,” p. 17.
52. For all this, see ibid., pp. 16–18, and Sedlmayr’s manifesto “Kunstgeschichte als
Kunstgeschichte” (1931), Kunst und Wahrheit, pp. 49–80; trans. Wood, under the title “Towards a
Rigorous Study of Art,” in The Vienna School Reader, pp. 133–79.
53. Pächt uses the term supraindividual (überindividuallem) (Pächt, The Practice of Art History:
Reflections on Method, trans. David Britt, ed. Michael Pächt [London, 1999], p. 131).
movement. The Kunstwollen of an individual, school or region evolves it-
self,”54 as Pächt, Sedlmayr’s great collaborator of the 1920s and 1930s, put it
in the 1970s. This approach preserved a rigorous—even ascetic—attention
to forms as the raw material that could then be used for the writing of his-
tory. At the same time, on the basis of this model, Kunstwollen was set apart
from historical conditions and was itself a vehicle for what, already in the
1930s, Meyer Schapiro called “a mysterious racial and animistic language in
the name of a higher science of art.”55
Yet the irony is that Sedlmayr’s response to Panofsky in proposing
Kunstwollen as the collective and suprapersonal deep structure underlying
the specific forms of works of art was to prove fundamentally influential on
Panofsky’s own developed formulation of iconology. In the introductory
chapter to Studies in Iconology, first published in 1939 but self-confessedly
dependent on an article originally published in German in 1932, Panofsky
proposes three levels of analysis: (1) the “factual” or “expressional” “iden-
tification of primary or natural subject matter,” including form; (2) “the
secondary or conventional subject matter” or “iconographical analysis in a
wider sense,” including the identification of subject matter as opposed to
form; and (3) “the intrinsic meaning or content,” otherwise “iconograph-
ical analysis in a deeper sense,”56 which in the republication of this chapter
as “Iconography and Iconology” in 1955 was reformulated as Panofsky’sown
catchword, “iconology.”57 Sedlmayr’s two levels of structural analysis are
now transmuted into two levels of iconographical analysis, themselves
founded on a primary tier of formal analysis. Needless to say, Panofsky
never acknowledged a debt to Sedlmayr, but the parallels cannot be denied,
and it is clear that Sedlmayr devised his Strukturanalyse first, specifically in
response to Panofsky’s early worries about Kunstwollen.58 The move in his
1955 revision to “iconology as opposed to iconography” in place of “icon-
ographical analysis in a deeper sense” is interesting and worrying. Panofsky
apologizes at length in two paragraphs inserted in 1955 and printed in brack-
ets, where he argues that he conceives of “iconology as an iconography
turned interpretative” (whatever that means) but admits a danger that may
54. Ibid., p. 119.
55. Meyer Schapiro, “The New Viennese School” (1936), in The Vienna School Reader, p. 460.
56. Panofsky, Studies in Iconology: Humanistic Themes in the Art of the Renaissance (New York,
1939), pp. 5–8. For the indebtedness of this passage (and its key theoretical ideas) to Mannheim’s
Beiträge, unacknowledged here by Panofsky, see Hart, “Erwin Panofsky and Karl Mannheim.”
57. See Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology: An Introduction to the Study of Renaissance
Art,” Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1955), pp. 30–33, with significant rewriting of Studies
in Iconology at pp. 31–33.
58. Effectively I am suggesting that both of the key (unacknowledged) sources of the final
formulation of iconology—Mannheim’s Beiträge and Sedlmayr’s “Die Quintessenz des Lehren
Riegls”—are responses to Riegl’s Kunstwollen and to Panofsky’s response to Kunstwollen.
also have been a desire. The fear is “that iconology will behave, not as eth-
nology as opposed to ethnography [i.e. as an interpretative science in re-
lation to empirical data] but like astrology as opposed to astrography [in
other words as the exegetical higher nonsense in relation to empirical
data].”59 Where Panofsky’s 1920 paper had deliberately and very effectively
deflated the excess of potential meaning tending to virtually mystical res-
onance that had made Kunstwollen so attractive, it is hard not to see his 1955
reworking of “Iconography and Iconology” as designed precisely to inflate
iconology with all the mystical baggage he had once resisted.60 In any case,
though now upon radically different analytic terrain, Panofsky’s iconology
might be seen as a direct descendant of Kunstwollen by reaction, antithesis,
and, ultimately, emulation.
We might say that there were two main phases of polemic around
Kunstwollen—that of the 1920s and that of the 1960s. In both cases, German-
or Austrian-born, German- or Austrian-trained, and German-speaking art
historians attacked or at least modified Kunstwollen, only to be answered by
the advocates of the Vienna school in the role of keepers of the sacred flame,
although the Riegl of Sedlmayr’s Strukturanalyse can be argued to be as un-
like the original as that of Panofsky. In the twenties the papers of Sedlmayr
and Kaschnitz-Weinberg responded to those of Panofsky, Mannheim, and
Wind. In the sixties Otto Pächt (a Viennese and Viennese-trained exile liv-
ing in England) felt compelled to respond to the attack on Riegl by his fellow
Viennese and Viennese-trained exile, Ernst Gombrich. These were very dif-
ferent debates. What underlies the discussions of the twenties remains a
series of art-historical arguments about fundamental issues of form, mean-
ing, and subjectivity, as well as the methods and discursive context for their
explication. What motivates Gombrich’s assault on Riegl is something
much more fundamental. In many ways the whole of Art and Illusion is a
sustained Popperian attack on all the implications of evolutionism, histor-
icism, collectivism, and determinism that Gombrich saw lurking in the
“myth-making” and “mythological explanations” in which “the Kunstwol-
len becomes a ghost in the machine, driving the wheels of artistic devel-
opments according to ‘inexorable laws.’”61 Gombrich is rejecting in its
59. Panofsky, “Iconography and Iconology,” p. 32.
60. For a radical attack on the almost startling tidiness with which everything seemed to fit
together in Panofsky’s hands, targeting his work on Suger—notably, his translation of Abbot
Suger, On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures, trans. and ed. Panofsky (Princeton,
N.J., 1946) and Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (London, 1951)—see Peter Kidson, “Panofsky,
Suger, and St. Denis,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, no. 50 (1987): 1–17. The core
issue is whether Panofsky’s iconology creates of Suger “a credible historical figure or an art-
historical fiction” in which “everything turns on a subtle hermeneutic exercise” (ibid., pp. 3, 5).
61. Gombrich, Art and Illusion (1960; Princeton, N.J., 1984), p. 16; hereafter abbreviated AI. See
also Gombrich, “Kunstwissenschaft,” Das Atlantisbuch der Kunst: Eine Enzyklopädie der bildenden
art-historical form all the ideological potential for determinism and collec-
tivism implicit in Kunstwollen and explicit in its Sedlmayrian reading (see AI,
p. 19). Just as Kunstwollen had always been a cipher for more than any concept
can reasonably be expected to be (hence its methodological uses when not
pressed too vigorously), so Riegl himself (despite his “touch of genius” [AI,
p. 19]) became in Gombrich’s account a cipher for all the worst aspects of the
Viennese tradition in which Gombrich was himself trained. Here, clearly,
World War II and the Holocaust cannot be wholly separated from Gom-
brich’s thinking, and it is this context (the hindsight of what Sedlmayr’s art
history, not to speak of his Nazi politics, could and did lead to) that makes
the sixties debate so differently pressing from that of the twenties.62
Pächt responded to Gombrich by commenting that “what astonishes me
most in all this is the categorical assertion that historicism and kindred
views have been finally refuted and are now a thing of the past” (“AH,” p.
192). This is right, but also beside the point (although the implication that
Gombrich on Riegl is a bit of a rant frankly remains hard to deny). For
Gombrich’s real attack is on unreason as such,63 which he saw dangerously
embodied by Sedlmayr. This opinion is made clear in his polemical review
of the essays published in honor of Sedlmayr’s sixty-fifth birthday, which
he concluded with this passionate statement: “failure to speak out against
the enemies of reason has caused enough disasters to justify this breach of
Academic etiquette.”64 In Art and Illusion, Riegl is his target as the foun-
tainhead of the tradition that led from formalism to Geistesgeschichte, in-
Kunste (Zurich, 1952), pp. 653–64, esp. p. 658, and his inaugural lecture in the Durning-Lawrence
Chair at University College London in 1957, Art and Scholarship (London, 1957), p. 14. Pächt’s
response is found in “AH,” p. 192, restated at greater length in Pächt, The Practice of Art History,
pp. 118–20. The last part of this latter text might be described as a remarkable attempt to
rehabilitate Riegl’s Kunstwollen; see pp. 268–300.
62. For the simultaneous interest of Panofsky and Sedlmayr in the question of the nature of
gothic immediately after the war, see Suger, On the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and Its Art Treasures;
Panofsky, Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism (Latrobe, Penn., 1951); and Sedlmayr, “Nachwort
als Einführung (1976),” Die Entstehung der Kathedrale, 2d ed. (1950; Graz, 1988), pp. 585–614,
which overtly opposed Sedlmayrian “spiritual structure” against Panofsky’s multilayered
iconology (Bourdieu, postface to Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scholastique, p. 135).
What Bourdieu fails to note is that the significance of German gothic (the towers of Nuremberg,
and so on) to Nazi aesthetics can be considered the underlying and tacit key to these interventions.
The general obsession with gothic among German émigré scholars in the aftermath of the war is
not pure happenstance; see Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral: Origins of Gothic Architecture
and the Medieval Concept of Order (New York, 1956), and Paul Frankl, The Gothic: Literary Sources
and Interpretations through Eight Centuries (Princeton, N.J., 1960).
63. Here he was anticipated by Mannheim, who had already worried about the conflict of
Rationalismus und Irrationalismus in the notion of Weltanschauung; see Mannheim, Beitrage zur
Theorie der Weltanschauungsinterpretation, pp. 9–13.
64. Gombrich, “Review of Kunstgeschichte und Kunsttheorie im 19 Jahrhundert,” Art Bulletin 46
(Sept. 1964): 420.
vested style with the essential qualities of an age or race, and “by talking in
terms of collectives . . . weakens resistance to totalitarian habits of mind”
(AI, p. 20).65 Interestingly, Pächt read Gombrich as taking Kunstwollen to
be a “form of words to which nothing corresponds in reality,” “an abstract
concept put on legs, and then, by a distinctly animistic procedure, endowed
with a growth” (“AH,” p. 192). I think this is a fundamental misreading,
though it is a view that Pächt (rightly) attributes to the influence of Gom-
brich’s own teacher, Julius von Schlosser,66 and that, intriguingly, Sedlmayr
played with and then rejected in his discussion of Panofsky’s account of
Kunstwollen.67 Far from being empty, for Gombrich, Kunstwollen was a con-
cept unsusceptible to properly rational analysis with implications that were
little short of evil.
5. Epilogue: Coming Clean

If art history has a soul, then the polemical debate of the 1920s was about
what that soul was and on what grounds it should be located. At stake were
huge disciplinary agendas underlying the divide between Viennese for-
malism and Warburgian meaning, between style art history and icono-
graphical analysis. The polemic of the 1960s was about something even
deeper, what might be called the ethical basis of art history’s soul. With a
hindsight informed by Hitler’s rise and fall, the positions of the twenties
could be staked out as a politics in which Sedlmayr’s structure effectively
stood for Nazism (for Gombrich). Pächt, on the other hand, the Sedlmayr-
ian formalist who was a Jewish refugee, struggled to find a way out of this
impasse. These debates, framing the most fundamental of moral and cul-
tural crises of the twentieth century, have a sharper edge than even the post-
structuralist polemics of the 1980s, which may be seen at least in part as an
attack on the (heavily ideological) claim from Gombrich to be offering a
non- (even anti-) ideological art history. Likewise, the revival of interest not
only in Riegl but also in the Vienna school in art-historical circles since the
1990s may be seen as a corrective to the downgrading of form that followed
in the wake of the Warburgian ascendancy of the likes of Panofsky, Gom-
brich, and Wind within the discipline in the three decades after the war.
Strikingly, one area of art history has remained largely untouched by
Warburgianism (or iconology), even in its American incarnation. This is
65. For more on Gombrich and Riegl, see Woodfield, “Reading Riegl’s Kunst-Industrie,” pp.
71–76.
66. In 1934, von Schlosser had written of Kunstwollen, the “well-known idea (for there is no
question of it being a concept)”—the parenthetical comment surely pace Panofsky and also
Sedlmayr—as a “glib catch phrase” (Julius von Schlosser, “Aloı̈s Riegl [1934],” in Framing
Formalism, p. 36; see also p. 42 for explicit reproof of Sedlmayr).
67. See Sedlmayr, “Die Quintessenz des Lehren Riegls,” p. xvi.
the branch of the discipline closest to Riegl’s own training, namely, classical
archaeology. It has been insufficiently noticed that Panofsky, who knew pre-
cisely the strengths of his enemy, chooses in his 1920 Kunstwollen article to
attack the work of Gerhardt Rodenwaldt,68 who would become the greatest
classical archaeologist in the interwar years, hugely influential both on Ger-
man classical art history and on such key figures outside Germany as Ran-
uccio Bianchi Bandinelli and Otto Brendel (who went to America in the
1940s). Rodenwaldt’s work throughout the twenties, thirties, and forties
constituted in large part an attempt to explain the moves in Kunstwollen
from early Roman art to the Arch of Constantine in direct response to the
specific challenge articulated by Riegl in Spätrömische Kunstindustrie.69 We
may observe in the more thoughtful formalisms of classical archaeology
something of the Rieglian care and Seydlmayrian program to use the em-
pirical weapons of stylistic analysis and formal comparison as something
more than the mere basis of a “deeper” iconographical and iconological
inquiry.70
If I had to come clean about my own position, I think I am more nom-
inalist (even, dare one say it now, poststructuralist) about the arbitrariness
of meaning in relation to form than any side in these debates. There is much
value in treating art-historical discourse in general (whether formalist,
iconological, connoisseurial, or any other kind) as ekphrasis. This is to say,
it is rhetorical, with the aim of persuading an audience of a point or an
argument; it is directed not towards some final positivist truth but towards
a goal situated (consciously or unconsciously) in the art historian’s desire,
whether ideological, psychological, even just tendentious. One benefit of
the notion of ekphrasis is that it specifically enables the reentry of subjec-
tivism as an unavoidable factor (whether as appreciation or interpretation)
in understanding works of art. The rhetorical nature of ekphrasis might also
68. See Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” pp. 22 n. 5, 23 n. 10.

69. On these issues at greater length, see Elsner, “Frontality in the Column of Marcus Aurelius,”
in Autour de la colonne Aurélienne: Geste et image sur la colonne de Marc Aurèle à Rome, ed. John
Scheid and Valérie Huet (Tournhout, Belgium, 2000), pp. 251–64, esp. pp. 260–61. For the explicit
nature of Rodenwaldt’s debt to Riegl, see Gerhart Rodenwaldt, “Zur Begrenzung und Gliederung
der Spätantike,” Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, nos. 59–60 (1944–45): 81–87, esp.
pp. 81–82.
70. See, for instance, Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art; Salvatore Settis, “Un’arte
al plurale: L’impero romano, i Greci e i posteri,” in Caratteri e morfologie, vol. 4 of Storia di Roma,
ed. Emilio Gabba and Aldo Schiavone (Turin, 1989), pp. 827–78; and Tonio Hölscher, The
Language of Images in Roman Art (Cambridge, 2004). On the latter in relation to many of the
issues raised here, see my foreword in ibid., esp. pp. xxvi-vii, on questions of the potential intrinsic
or essential meaning embedded in forms versus purely conventional meaning attributed to them,
a deeply Rieglian and Seydlmayrian theme about which German art history remains inarticulate if
not ambiguous.
be said to effect a parallelism between the discourses we use about art and
those of art itself, since, in whatever contexts images are employed, they too
are rhetorical. The fundamental grounds of meaning in art or collective
Kunstwollen—whether essential or merely historically contextual (and what
a crime it is to pair these notions!)—are not, in my view, finally attainable.
But the desire to attain them—to make a lasting contribution—is funda-
mental to art history, if only in spurring such committed and serious con-
tributions as the great, flawed works we have been examining here.

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From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of

Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer 2006)

J a s ’ E l s n e r is Humfry Payne Senior Research Fellow in classical archaeology

1. Spätrömische Kunstindustrie: Individual Objects and Grand

f i g u r e 1. “Sarcophagus representing Achilles and Penthesilea” (Vatican, Cortile del

2. Kunstwollen as a Methodological Solution

f i g u r e 2. “Sarcophagus of Severus Alexander and Julia Mammea” (Rome, Museo

f i g u r e 4. “Sarcophagus with the representation of the farewell, departure, and wounding of

48. Iversen, Alois Riegl, p. 153.

5. Epilogue: Coming Clean

68. See Panofsky, “The Concept of Artistic Volition,” pp. 22 n. 5, 23 n. 10.

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