Vojtěch Birnbaum's Concept and Method of Art History, 2017

ISBN 978-80-905744-7-2

9 788090 574472

Tomáš Murár (1990) je historik umění, věnuje se historiografii a teorii Tato publikace byla vydána jakou součást výstavy Vojtěch dějin umění. Vedle svého zájmu o vídeňskou školu dějin umění se Birnbaum: Princip umění, kterou uspořádal Archiv výtvarného zabývá evropským a americkým uměním 19. a 20. století a interpretací umění v Centru současného umění DOX v Praze v roce 2017 obrazu z perspektivy intermediality. u příležitosti 140. výročí narození předního českého historika umění Vojtěcha Birnbauma (1877–1934), zakladatele vědeckého Tomáš Murár (1990) is an art historian who specialises in the zkoumání výtvarného umění u nás. Přehledně shrnuje aspekty historiography and theory of art history. He is particularly interested in Birnbaumovy teorie „principu“ a „zákonitosti“ umění, jak je the Vienna School of Art History, 19th- and 20th-century European and sledoval a rozpracoval zejména ve 20. a 30. letech 20. století. American art, and the interpretation of images from the perspective of Zároveň sleduje zakořenění Birnbaumovy teoretické práce intermediality. v širších kruzích dobového evropského uměleckohistorického i filozofického myšlení a dopad jeho formulace uměleckého „vývoje“ na další generace historiků umění.

This book was published to coincide with an exhibition titled Vojtěch Birnbaum: The Principle of Art organised by the Archive of Fine Arts at the Centre for Contemporary Art DOX in Prague in 2017, commemorating the 140th anniversary of the birth of art historian Vojtěch Birnbaum (1877–1934), a pioneering figure in the scholarly study of art in the Czech lands. It explores Birnbaum’s concepts of a ‘principle’ and ‘pattern’ in art, which he developed and wrote about in the 1920s and 1930s. The book also traces the roots of Birnbaum’s theoretical work within the broader context of European art-historical and philosophical thinking and describes the impact his concept of ‘development’ in art had on the next generation of art historians, who became formative figures in the evolution of this field.

Tomáš Murár Umění jako princip a zákonitost. K dějinám a metodologii umění Umění princip a zákonitost. K dějinám Birnbauma jako a metodologii umění Vojtěcha and Method Birnbaum’s Concept Art as Art of a Principle and Vojtěch Pattern. History Vojtěcha Birnbauma Art as a Principle and Pattern. Vojtěch Birnbaum’s Concept

Tomáš Murár Tomáš and Method of Art History Henri Focillon

Zákonitost stanovuje establishes Baroka baroque pattern Max Dvořák Růžena Vacková

Princip Henri Bergson renesance renaissance principle Oldřich Stefan Zákonitý BAROKO určuje narušuje iniciuje konec Vojtěch Birnbaum Baroque determines disrupts initiates baroka Heinrich Wölfflin End of Baroque Princip transgrese Václav Richter principle of transgression Hans Sedlmayr Alois Riegl Princip baroka Antonín Engel baroque principle iniciuje initiates Antonín Matějček

Zdeněk Wirth 1 Tento výstup vznikl v rámci zastřešujícího projektu Krize racionality a moderní myšlení, projektu č. FF/VG/2017/28 s názvem Vojtěch Birnbaum a jeho škola. Výzkum počátků českých moderních dějin a teorie umění 20. století, řešeného na Filozofické fakultě Univerzity Karlovy z prostředků Specifického vysokoškolského výzkumu na rok 2017.

This book is the outcome of work on a project titled Rationality Crisis and Modern Thought as subproject no. FF/VG/2017/28 titled Vojtěch Birnbaum and his School. Research of the Beginnings of Czech Modern Art History and Theory in the 20th Century, conducted at the Faculty of Arts of Charles University with the financial support of Specific Academic Research Projects funding in 2017.

Text © Tomáš Murár, student Filozofické fakulty Univerzity Karlovy / student at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, 2017; Michael Gubser Photo © Masarykův ústav a Archiv AV ČR, v. v. i.; Archiv výtvarného umění, z. s. Design Carton Clan Archiv výtvarného umění, z. s., Kostelec nad Černými lesy, 2017 Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND ISBN 978-80-905744-7-2

2 Umění jako princip a zákonitost. K dějinám a metodologii umění Vojtěcha Birnbauma Art as a Principle and Pattern. Vojtěch Birnbaum’s Concept and Method of Art History

Tomáš Murár

3 4 Obsah / Contents

Poděkování 7 Předmluva 9 Michael Gubser

Úvod 13 Vojtěch Birnbaum mezi Vídní, Římem a Prahou 15 Barokní princip v dějinách architektury 17 Románská renesance koncem středověku 23 Doplněk k vývojovým zákonům? 27 Princip a zákonitost jako východiska uměleckého stylu 29 Závěr 43 Poznámky 55

Obrazová příloha / Illustrations 68

Acknowledgements 79 Foreword 81 Michael Gubser

Introduction 85 Vojtěch Birnbaum in Vienna, Rome, and Prague 87 The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture 89 The Romanesque Renaissance at the End of the Middle Ages 95 A Supplement to the Developmental Laws? 99 The Principle and Pattern of Art as the Concept of a Style 101 Conclusion 117 Notes 129

Výběrová bibliografie / Selected Bibliography 144 Seznam vyobrazení / List of Figures 147

5 Acknowledgements

This study was written to accompany an exhibition titled Vojtěch Birnbaum: The Principle of Art held in the Small Tower in the Centre for Contemporary Art DOX in Prague in early 2017, organised to commemorate the 140 anniversary of the birth of art historian Vojtěch Birnbaum (7 January 1877). The idea behind the exhibition was to examine Birnbaum’s ‘principle’ and ‘patterns’ in art, the two concepts explored in this study. Here I would like to thank The Fine Art Archive (Archiv výtvarného umění) for organising and supporting this project, and especially Irena Lehkoživová and Barbora Špičáková, without whose initiative, assistance, and support neither the exhibition nor this study could have come about. I would also like to thank Lubomír Konečný and Josef Vojvodík for their valuable advice which uniquely contributed to the advance of work on this topic. I am very grateful to Jaroslav Horáček and Lucie Rohanová for their careful reading of this study. I would also like to thank Mike Gubser for his kind recommenda- tions and congenial approach to this project. My thanks go also to Lucie Krausová for her readiness to help and her great patience, especially at times when I was talking about nothing else but Vojtěch Birnbaum. Finally, I wish also to thank a number of institutions, in particular the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Masarykův ústav a Archiv AV ČR, v. v. i.) for provid- ing me with archive materials and for their smooth and pleasant cooperation, and Carton Clan for the book’s graphic design, and, last but not least, the Czech National Fund for Culture (Státní fond kultury ČR) and Faculty of Arts of Charles University (Filozofická fakulta Univerzity Karlovy), with whose kind support the publication of this book has been made possible.

79 80 Foreword Michael Gubser

The art historian Vojtěch Birnbaum is virtually unknown outside the Czech Re- public. Yet he stands at the head of a Czech art historical lineage that helped to spread the ideas of the Vienna School of Art History beyond the German-speaking world. At the turn of the century, Birnbaum attended classes with Alois Riegl, the Vienna School’s premier representative, and carried his insights back to Prague, where he was appointed full professor of art history in 1927. In that position – and despite a premature death, another trait he shared with Riegl – Birnbaum exercised considerable influence on art history in Bohemia. Tomáš Murár’s small book explains this genealogy to an international audience. He reviews not only Birnbaum’s work, but also that of important disciples such as Růžena Vacková, Oldřich Stefan, and Václav Richter, who endured political persecution in their efforts to preserve a native art historical tradition. Murár does more than simply chronicle a little-known academic lineage. By connecting Birnbaum’s writing with ideas that still stand at the base of Western art historical scholarship, he contributes to the ongoing project of merging the intellectual histories of a continent divided and showing how East European thinkers cultivated and elaborated important schools of thought known only in their West European versions. The Vienna School founded by Riegl, Franz Wickhoff, and Rudolf von Eitelberger was instrumental in establishing art history as a distinct discipline, separate from both history and archaeology, its nearest disciplinary parents. It did so by breaking with the preoccupations of earlier art historians, especially the Winckelmannian emphasis on the aesthetic evalua tion of artworks according to classical criteria. The hallmark of Vienna School art history was an insistence that artworks should be analysed in the context of their own age, according to criteria of form and style that changed historically and were therefore unique to each era. The quintessential expression of this commitment was Riegl’s notion of the ‘Kunstwollen’, often translated as ‘the artistic will’. A hermetic concept, it suggested a drive or intentionality internal to art itself – and distinct from an artist’s intention or a culture’s values. In any

81 given artwork, the ‘Kunstwollen’ realised earlier artistic tendencies and pointed toward new formal and visual sensibilities. Art, then, had a temporality of its own, one that drew the artist along with it as a vehicle for the exploration of contemporary visual prospects. It is in this framework that one can understand Birnbaum’s signal contribu- tion to art historiography, the baroque principle, which he advanced in the context of his research on Czech architectural history. As Murár shows, Birnbaum did not treat ‘the baroque’ as simply the denominator of one artistic era – name- ly, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Instead, the baroque propensity for the bizarre, the ornate, and the supererogatory was a tendency found in all artistic styles, a phase in the development of a school of art when the creative urges it unleashed outstripped the expressive grammar and formal laws it espoused. As Murár puts it: ‘Birnbaum understood the baroque as a phenomenon that recurs in art history, manifesting itself in the unique conditions of each different style of art when artists, with a full grasp of the style that they are working in, transition from a rational, tectonic (in painting and sculpture “realistic”) conception of art to recast it in imaginative new forms, as tectonic (realistic) laws yield to the effects of the artist’s creative imagination. Play and a certain effort to amaze and optically impress the viewer are central tendencies in this stage.’ (p. 92) The baroque, then, is that stage in the developmental logic of an artistic style when creative ecstasy and abundance transcends formal structure, when creative illogic – to put it coyly – overtakes stylistic logic. This conceptualisation draws directly on Vienna School themes. A baroque artwork, per Birnbaum, must not be judged against historically fixed characteristics, but according to the tendencies and trajectories of its own artistic style and era. Only by placing the interpretation of a work in the presence of its appropria- te history can form and style be properly interpreted. Murár, too, provides us with a starting point for historical interpretation. By introducing us to Birnbaum and explaining his historical and conceptual significance, his essay provides an excellent foundation for future research.

82 83 84 Introduction

Art as a Principle and Pattern. Vojtěch Birnbaum’s Concept and Method of Art History is an attempt to interpret a theoretical approach to art in the work of the important Czech art historian Vojtěch Birnbaum (1877–1934). He occupies a position of great prominence in the field of Czech art history, a reputation earned on the basis of his work as a researcher, in heritage conservation and as a teacher, and last but not least, in the field of art theory. In the latter area, Birnbaum, as one of the few Czech art historians in the first half of the twentieth century, developed an art theory concerning the principles that govern the evolution of every style of art, and he attempted to apply this theory to Czech art. This study seeks to examine this theory and its underlying basis. Birnbaum’s ideas on the theory of art and research methods in art history are largely outlined in three theoretical texts in which he formulated his theory about the retrograde principles and patterns of art styles, a theory he based on a close study and in-depth interpretations and descriptions of the essential nature of different styles of art and ‘how they work’. Birnbaum approached art as a whole, exploring it in his writings through the aspect of its immanent intentionality, wherein he tried to identify what patterns or rules govern the creative process and the transformation of art over time. His essential writings were published in the 1920s and 1930s1 and include, most notably, The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture (Barokní princip v dějinách architektury) from 1924,2 his most refined work of theory and, for this reason, the one to which the most space is devoted below. While The Baroque Principle merits attention in its own right as a work of theory, it is also important for the historical role it played in the rehabilitation and study of baroque art in the Czech lands. Two other studies by Birnbaum, The Romanesque Renaissance at the End of the Middle Ages (Románská renesance koncem středověku), which also dates from 1924,3 and a short article A Supplement to the Developmental Laws? (Doplněk k vývojovým zákonům?), from 1932, are,4 as I shall attempt to show, works that in a sense supplement or round out The Baroque Principle, addressing some of the blank spots that can be overlooked in any inquiry into ‘how art works’ and when exploring art history through the lens of the ‘baroque principle’.

85 86 Vojtěch Birnbaum in Vienna, Rome, and Prague

Vojtěch Birnbaum’s interest in art history grew substantially after he transferred in 1897 from Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, where he had been a student of Otakar Hostinský (1847–1910), to Vienna University,5 where he attended lectures by prominent figures of the ‘Vienna School of Art History’,6 most notably Franz Wickhoff (1853–1909) and Alois Riegl (1858–1905).7 Inspired by Wickhoff, Birnbaum wrote his dissertation on early European architecture, examining the links between early Christian church architecture and Roman architecture (Der altchristliche Kirchenbau und sein Verhältnis zur römischen Baukunst). He defended his dissertation in 19048 and in 1905 went to Rome, where he spent several years studying his subject first hand. He wrote a number of groundbreaking studies on early Christian architecture during his time in Rome that were published in the years that followed.9 Birnbaum returned from Rome in 1910, but the very next year he set off on his second trip to Italy. His intention was to devote more attention to studying the architecture of Ravenna, but he also continued to research early Roman architecture and especially structures from the early period of the Roman Empire.10 Observations from his research on Italian architecture of antiquity were first published in Czech as articles in the architectural journal Style (Styl) (‘Surveys of the Architecture of Antiquity’ / ‘Rozhledy po antické architektuře’ in 1911; ‘On the Architecture of Early Christianity’ / ‘O architektuře doby starokřesťanské’ in 1912; and a short article titled ‘Ravenna’ in 1913). The most important outcome of his research on early Christian architecture was the publication of a two-volume monograph titled The Architecture of Ravenna (Ravennská architektura), the first volume of which, exploring the origins and inspirations for early Christian architecture in Ravenna, was published in 1916;11 the second volume was not published until 1921.12 In 1911 Birnbaum returned from Rome for the second time. He was then involved in preparing a compendium on Czech mediaeval art13 edited by Zdeněk Wirth (1878–1961) and Václav Vilém Štech (1885–1974) featuring contributions

87 from such figures as Antonín Matějček (1889–1950), Josef Cibulka (1886–1968), and Jaromír Pečírka (1864–1966). Birnbaum contributed writings on Czech Ro- manesque and Gothic architecture to this publication.14 In the winter semester of 1919 Birnbaum habilitated in art history at Charles University in Prague. In 1922 he was appointed an adjunct professor there and in 1927 a full professor in art history.15 With his assumption of this post the two paths that the Institute of Art History at Prague University would evolve along began to mark themselves out.16 On one side was Karel Chytil (1857–1934), the head of the institute, who had been at the university since 189717 and taught the cultural-historical method of art history; and on the other side was Birnbaum, who introduced Czech art history to the principles of the Vienna School of Art History.18 Birnbaum brought to the university a broader perspective on art history along with fresh new topics – for example, in his lectures on classical and mediaeval architecture. After Chytil retired in 1927, Birnbaum became the head of the Depart- ment of Art History in Prague, and remained so until his untimely death in 1934.19

88 The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture

Vojtěch Birnbaum’s The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture was published in 1924, but he must have been thinking about the basic tenets of his theory much earlier than that.20 In this work Birnbaum presented a number of ideas that he had formulated in the course of his research in art history and in which he sought to identify an evolutionary tendency by which every style of art is affected. This study placed him in the company of other theorists who applied a twofold approach to the study of the baroque, distinguishing and interpreting the baroque on one hand from a historical perspective, chiefly concerned with a particular form of art from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and on the other from a theoretical perspective, focused on characteristically baroque features that can be identified in certain works of art regardless of their form or when and where they originated.21 Czech art history has been discussing baroque as a concept ever since the nineteenth century. In the early part of that century it was wholly in the sway of the National Revival, which was striving to establish a place for Czech culture on the same level as the German culture that was being asserted across the Habsburg Monarchy. Early work in cultural studies (art history was established as an academic discipline in the Czech lands with the founding of the Depart- ment of Archaeology and Art History at Charles University’s Faculty of Arts in 1850) focused chiefly on the Czech mediaeval period and especially the age of Charles IV, which was considered the high point in Czech culture.22 An instrumental figure in the initial development of research in art history was Jan Quirin Jahn (1736–1802), who together with František Lothar Ehemant (1748–1782) studied the work of Master Theodoric.23 A key figure in terms of his pioneering work in Czech art history and in laying the foundations of research on the Czech Mid- dle Ages was Jan Erazim Vocel (1802–1871).24 In nineteenth-century Czech art history the age of the baroque was interpreted in relation to the Counter-Reformation and to the ‘oppression’ that Czechs were subject to from the Habsburgs, as the ruling Catholic dynasty, and from the Jesuit Order, which was reasserting the Catholic faith over Protestantism in

89 the Czech lands. National Revivalists were unwilling to delve into the actual substance of baroque spirituality, regarding it as deceptive and false and as a tool for the suppression of Czech national identity. These opinions were related to the refusal of the Counter-Reformation, connected with the sense that the Czech nation was being subjected to Germanising efforts and that baroque art was an instrument for reinforcing Catholic and Habsburg power. There was a general familiarity with baroque artists and the heritage of the baroque age, but this knowledge existed primarily in reference to emphasis on the Czech nationality of certain artists.25 The baroque came to be pejoratively la- belled ‘the style of wigs and braids’26 and Czech gothic architecture in particular was exalted over the ‘fanciness’ of the baroque.27 As to scholarly inquiry into the historical baroque age, this was put off until the first few decades of the twentieth century, when the period began to be the subject of scholarly historical interest. The first signs of a favourable view of the baroque coincided with the development of the theory and practice of heritage conservation that reached the Czech lands from Vienna and were most notably deployed in the arguments levelled against the ‘Prague redevelopment programme’ in 1893–1915.28 These new theories, developed by Alois Riegl29 and Max Dvořák,30 and advanced in Czech art history mainly by Zdeněk Wirth31 and Vojtěch Birnbaum,32 pushed the conservation of cultural heritage as a whole into the foreground. The result of this was that efforts emerged to preserve baroque Prague as well as mediaeval Prague as an essential part of the city. Karel Boromejský Mádl (1859–1932),33 the most notable art historian and critic in his day, began exploring questions on the baroque in the late nineteenth century and his interest in this period grew substantially during the 1920s.34 In 1915 critic Arne Novák (1880–1939) wrote an article titled Baroque Prague (Praha barokní), in which he commented on the Czech nature of baroque art.35 In 1908 Zdeněk Wirth’s seminal paper on the baroque-gothic aspects of the architecture of J. B. Santini-Aichel was published.36 Interest in the baroque was also fostered by the exhibitions of Karel Škréta (1910), Petr Brandl (1911), Václav Vavřinec Reiner, and Jan Kupecký (1913).37 In the late 1890s and the early twentieth century there was even a stream of art being produced, in secessionist sculpture in particular, that claimed and embraced the baroque tradition as its own, work that art historian Petr Wittlich calls ‘neo-baroque’.38

90 It was into this same stream of thought or direction of interest that Birnbaum fit with his study of the baroque. He was the first to take a more systematic approach to the study of baroque art and he participated in the debate under way across Europe on the essential nature of baroque art in general. In this way he broke free from the nationalistic undertones that had hitherto characterised Czech art history and brought it into and identified its place in the context of Europe as a whole. And he had all the prerequisites for doing this. His two visits to Italy in the early twentieth century had brought him into direct contact with baroque Rome, and even though he was primarily interested in late Roman classical architecture there was no way he could not have noticed and appreciated Rome’s baroque heritage during his visit, a heritage that largely originated in the seventeenth century. The second prerequisite was that he had participated in the debate over ‘Orient oder Rom?’39 and was thus one of the few Czech art historians to become involved in an important debate that was raging in European art history at that time. Last but not least, having studied at Vienna University he had ab- sorbed all the values of the Vienna School of Art History, including its rejection of the notion of certain styles being representative of artistic decline. It was out of this background that Birnbaum entered Czech academia in 1919 and began teaching at the university in Prague, where research was only slowly recovering from its national-political lethargy. Together with Vincenc Kramář (1877–1960) and Antonín Matějček, Birnbaum introduced Czech scholars to new perspectives on art history,40 which up to that point had remained in the sway of the cultural-historical approach to research largely promoted by Karel Chytil.41 Birnbaum did not accept the theory that the years after the Battle of White Mountain represented a period of artistic decline and he quickly recognised the quality of work by artists from those years, most notably Kryštof and Kilián Ignác Dientzenhofer, whose names he incorporated into his work on the baroque principle in the history of architecture. That itself can be regarded as a key turn in early Czech art-historical research, which had hitherto focused mainly on the legacy of the Middle Ages and showed only an occasional interest in the baroque, usually when some patriotic need arose to exalt important Czech artists over German or Austrian ones. In The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture, Birnbaum, drawing on his own theory, set Czech baroque art within a European context and at the same time sought to free the term ‘baroque’ from its negative connotations.

91 Birnbaum understood the baroque as a phenomenon that recurs in art history, manifesting itself in the unique conditions of each different style of art when artists, with a full grasp of the style that they are working in, transition from a rational tectonic (in painting and sculpture ‘realistic’) conception of art to recast it in imaginative new forms, as tectonic (realistic) laws yield to the effects of the artist’s creative imagination. Play and a certain effort to amaze and optically impress the viewer are central tendencies in this stage. Like most of Birnbaum’s theoretical writings, The Baroque Principle is divided into two parts. In the first part Birnbaum looks at the definitions of the baroque style that predominated in the early twentieth century. These definitions retained the rhetoric of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, as is evident, for example, from an entry in the Dictionary of Fine Art (Dizinario delle belle Arti) published in 1797: ‘Baroque is the superlative of bizarre, the excess of ridiculous. Borromini went delirious, but Guarini, Pozzo, Marchione went baroque.’42 Birnbaum deemed such descriptions inadequate and incomplete as they ignored the essential nature and what is intrinsic to the baroque itself in an objective sense.43 Birnbaum therefore sought to ascertain the essential nature or substance of the baroque in order on that basis to determine what is intrinsically characteristic of the baroque and what characterises manifestations of the baroque in other historical periods. On this basis he differentiated between the ‘temporal baroque’ (the baroque of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and the ‘directional baroque’.44 In his reassessment of the baroque style Birnbaum came to divide (temporal) baroque architecture into three main streams: ‘monumental’ baroque, ‘classical’ baroque and ‘perspective’ baroque.45 From an analysis of these three streams of baroque architecture he proceeded to mark out what they all have in common and what is characteristic of the baroque as such and encapsulates it in its entirety: ‘Baroque architecture is a category that is a purely creative art in terms of its character and origin, that takes precedence over structures of tectonic form and origin; these tectonic structures are thus merely a medium for the expression of artistic qualities that arise independently of such structures out of the individual’s creative imagination; the subject of baroque architectural creativity is thus the subjective realities of the human spirit, not the objective realities of natural forces and tectonic laws.’46 This definition served Birnbaum as the starting point for the ensuing theoretical sections of his study and it essentially sums up the essence of his ‘baroque

92 principle’, wherein he sought to apply ‘directional baroque’ outside the frame of the ‘temporal baroque’: ‘…these [baroque] tendencies and efforts are not limited to the relatively short period of the baroque itself from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries,47 they are found even before that time, indeed they recur at certain times in a regular pattern, and are the direct necessary result of the evolutionary laws that govern all artistic acts.’48 Birnbaum applied this sense of a ‘directional baroque’ that can be found outside the frame of the temporal baroque to the late gothic baroque, and he presented Peter Parler and his work on St Vitus Cathedral in Prague (1356–1399) as a key example of this.49 He pointed to the design of the window walls of the triforium, which form a kind of ‘wave’, an element that Birnbaum deemed a product of Parler’s artistic imagination. He also drew attention to the triforium columns between the windows, which form new and wholly artistic segments in relation to the rest of the architecture. He concluded his theory with the explanation that the ‘baroque principle’ ‘is nothing other than the final triumph of the principle of creative artistry over actual reality’.50 He added some thoughts on the possibility of individual ‘directional baroques’ emerging within one geographical region, and in this respect he was particularly intrigued by the advanced form of the baroque that existed in the Czech lands in the early fifteenth century and in the eighteenth century. Birn- baum argued that examples of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century baroque outside Italy represented ‘the Indian summer of the late gothic baroque’ and ‘the second baroque of the north’.51 Birnbaum thus sought the reconsideration of baroque art, especially in the Czech region, by drawing a link between the gothic style of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the baroque of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,52 and he did this based on a theory of style and of the transformation of style under the influence of the ‘baroque principle’.53

93 94 The Romanesque Renaissance at the End of the Middle Ages

The Romanesque Renaissance at the End of Middle Ages was published, like The Ba- roque Principle in the History of Architecture, in 1924, and The Romanesque Renais- sance was actually published before The Baroque Principle.54 In The Baroque Princi- ple Birnbaum makes reference to The Romanesque Renaissance.55 Birnbaum presented his concept of the ‘romanesque renaissance’ in 1921 to the Group for the Cultivation of Art History (Kruh pro pěstování dějin umění), whose participants included architect Kamil Hilbert (1869–1933) and art historians Zdeněk Wirth and Karel Chytil. This was Birnbaum’s first theoretical paper and can be considered also an early reflection on the ‘principle of art’, which he then elaborated on to encompass the ‘baroque principle’. Birnbaum described the ‘romanesque renaissance’ as an ‘episode’ that warranted attention for its characteristic function in the evolution and transformation of a style of art.56 Birnbaum’s study illustrated the ‘romanesque renaissance’ through real examples of architectural elements and paintings and presented it as a phenomenon that resembled the fifteenth-century Italian renaissance of Greco-Roman antiquity. The difference is that instead of the Gre- co-Roman ideal, the ‘aim’, as it were, was a return to the romanesque style of the twelfth century. According to Birnbaum, a ‘romanesque renaissance’ occurred in the late fifteenth century and lasted almost throughout the sixteenth century. By that time, Birnbaum claimed, gothic art had exhausted its stock of formal devices in some of the major centres of art and there was a search for a new approach in the creation of art. Based on his observations Birnbaum traced the centre of this phenomenon as lying in the Transalpine region of Europe and especially in Austrian Salzburg, Bohemia, and Bavaria, along with several locations on the other side of the Alps; for example, he identified features of the romanesque renaissance in the Church of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice and in churches in Milan and in Florence.

95 In the study Birnbaum presented examples in which romanesque architectural elements figured as integral parts of architectural structures and most of the examples cited by him dated from the sixteenth century. In a formal stylistic analysis he ruled out the possibility that these elements could have been from an earlier period and on the contrary claimed they were contemporaneous with the building’s construction. He identified, for example, a romanesque-style twisted column with a cubic capital that is, however, marked with the date 1579,57 and noted the phenomenon of ‘romanesque’ towers built next to late-gothic village churches in the Tyrol.58 Equally he traced several examples of the ‘romanesque renaissance’ in selected structures in the Czech lands (for example, some columns in the castle and in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Jindřichův Hradec).59 He then also identified a similar phenomenon in painting, in which he observed a difference between Italian and Transalpine painting. He observed a different perception of the past in Italy, where, as well as the romanesque style, the tradition and architecture of antiquity were also very important.60 Besides the romanesque renaissance, another attempt to escape from the ex- haustion of the gothic style was identified by Birnbaum in examples where the late-gothic repertoire of architectural forms was abandoned altogether.61 He referred to these examples as ‘flights from the gothic’: There‘ is but one interpretation for these phenomena: gothic fatigue, a recognition or sense that everything the style had to offer had been exhausted, that it was impossible to derive any new forms from it. Hence what I venture to call the flight from the gothic.’62 For Birnbaum the ‘flight from the gothic’ was manifested in surface features, but the problem of ‘gothic fatigue’, the barrenness of the gothic style and its exhausted repertoire of forms, actually resided in the underlying creative principle: ‘...the gothic was barren both on the level of the composition as a whole and on the level of its details, and since it was a problem to replace this whole with something new it was left unaffected by experi- ments that involved only the details.’63 Consequently, for Birnbaum, ‘flights from the gothic’ represented a dead end in the development of a style, unlike the ‘renaissance principle’, which sought the restoration or revitalisation of a style in the very act or principle of creativity itself, and not by means of the introduction of elements drawn from an earlier period or, conversely, by the omission of such elements altogether. Birnbaum claimed that there was no architecture created in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries that

96 was ever wholly romanesque, as the further development of the ‘romanesque renaissance’ was rendered impossible by the onset of the Italian Classical Renais- sance.64 Birnbaum found elements in the romanesque renaissance that he deemed similar to those in the Classical Renaissance, pointing to them as a particular approach to the restoration or revival of a cultural heritage or memory. He rejected the view that the Classical Renaissance had ‘stifled’ the distinctive style of the romanesque renaissance and on the contrary saw them as parallel phenomena; however, the Classical Renaissance, underpinned by humanism and its adulation of Classical culture, overcame and gained ascendancy over the romanesque style and its strong religious overtones.65 He also pointed out that the welcome that met the Classical Renaissance was inevitable given that the countries north of the Alps were in the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth centuries reaching the height of their artistic strength, and the Classical Renaissance offered new creative possibilities that were then pursued in eighteenth-century baroque architecture. Describing the romanesque renaissance in Italy, Birnbaum showed that even there it was quickly supplanted by the Classical Renaissance, not owing to a revival of the culture and artistic principles of antiquity, but, on the contrary, as the result of a sheer need for a renaissance given that the style and principles of the gothic had been exhausted and become unproductive: ‘Efforts towards a renaissance were initially centred on the romanesque style, and only after that, once it was already at hand, once it was already under way, did they turn to Classical antiquity; this development can at most be ascribed to humanism, but it was not evoked by this movement, nor was it brought about with the aid of antiquity. These conclusions can be summed up as a kind of paradox, in that it was not antiquity that produced the renaissance, but it was the renaissance that produced antiquity, that is, it was the contemporary need for a renaissance that led to the resurrection of antiquity.’66 In Birnbaum’s view, the ‘renaissance principle’, that is, the essential nature of this stage of evolution, was thus what produced both the ‘romanesque’ renaissance and, later, the Classical Renaissance. At the end of this study Birnbaum then proceeded to explain what he called the ‘baroque principle’, which he had already described in The Romanesque Renaissance as the ‘final stage in every evolution’ of a style, and presented an example of the ‘artistic principle’ of the baroque as it occurred in the late gothic style,67 which he called ‘gothic baroque’.

97 According to Birnbaum, the gothic style entered a ‘baroque stage’ in its development in countries north of the Alps during the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth century and thus reached its natural conclusion, and it was this that prompted the need for something new. The ‘romanesque renaissance’ was one such attempt at a new style.68

98 A Supplement to the Developmental Laws?

In 1932 Birnbaum published his last theoretical paper, and though much shorter it still had much to do with the two previous studies.69 In it he wrote about the ‘law of transgression’, which he understood to mean the logical and natural progression of a style of art: ‘...a particular art or a particular style develops to a certain level in one land, among the people it originated with and where it first began to develop; at some point it no longer evolves in that milieu, stagnation sets in, and it goes on to evolve further somewhere else, in a different land or among a different people.’70 Birnbaum observed the evolution of artistic styles in different regions. In his account, in the beginning an artistic style has a tendency to be formulaic and its forms have an aspect of plasticity. It then evolves more towards naturalism and then towards its most extreme (artistic) form – illusionism.71 He examined, for example, the early stages of Greek art, which in Birnbaum’s opinion reached its zenith in the art of ancient Rome, to which the power of the Greek style of art had been transposed. Birnbaum similarly traced the trajectory of gothic painting from its beginnings in France as it proceeded through Flemish art into the work of the van Eyck brothers, whose work Birnbaum deemed to be the height of mediaeval painting owing to its strong naturalist and illusionist qualities. He dealt in a similar vein with gothic architecture, which from its origins in Paris reached its greatest heights mainly in the Czech lands. Subsequently he also discussed baroque architecture, which originated in Rome but moved through northern Italy to reach its high point in Austria, the Czech lands, and southern Germany.72 Birnbaum referred to this phenomenon as a kind of ‘universal law’, which he claimed operates outside the effect of any external influences and is on the contrary a fixed rule of artistic creation: The‘ effect of [this law] manifests itself as a natural consequence of objectively given factors and forces, not as the circumstantial effect of random human fates; as a result it is equally possible to assess such episodes with objective detachment, without stirring up misleading sensitivities.’73 According to Birnbaum, the first premise of the ‘law of transgression’ is the fact that no nation has such power or capacity that a unique style of art can be

99 born among its people and in its geographical region and then also go on to reach its high point and culminating stage within that same region: ‘…the creative force of any nation, even the most brilliant, is not without its limits. Every nation possesses only so much, and after a time, after a lasting period of intense use, it will be depleted’.74 Birnbaum described the second premise as the inherent tendency of every style of art to evolve towards a culmination point irrespective of the ‘intellectual ability of the nation that conceived it’.75 Birnbaum argued that every artistic style evolves towards such a culmination point (‘it is inherent to every evolutionary process to progress, to realise all of its possibilities and potential in full’),76 which in turn has an effect on the ‘law of transgression’, according to which, once the energy in one artistic centre has been depleted, stylistic ideas that were never brought to fruition are ‘transferred’ to a new site with fresh energy so that the style is able to run its full course. This ‘transfer’ may even occur multiple times, until the style finds the nation that is able to carry the style into its final stage: ‘[The style]may even make this move several times, until all of the potential it has to offer has been fully exhausted.’77 In this respect, this tendency for a style to continue until everything it has to offer has been exhausted, regardless of where the style originated, is what results in the unfulfilled ideas of a style being transferred from one place to another. The necessity that a style reach its culmination point is what sets it in motion; in other words, a kind of ‘transfer principle’ leads it to move from one region of creativity to another, and this transfer is induced by the ‘baroque principle’ of style, that is, the fact that every style must necessarily develop until it reaches its culmination stage. In conclusion Birnbaum adds that this universal law required yet further research and ought to be considered merely an addendum to the general laws of development. His hesitancy in formulating this ‘law’ is underscored by the question mark he included in the title of the article and by the fact that at the end of the article he named the phenomenon in only rough terms, referring to it as ‘the law of transfer or transgression’.78

100 The Principle and Pattern of Art as the Concept of a Style

In the three papers discussed above Birnbaum formulated a concept of style that offers art history a meaningful way of reading the changes different artistic forms go through in certain periods and a way of interpreting and dating them. As Mey- er Schapiro (1904–1996) pointed out in his study on style: ‘By style is meant the constant form – and sometimes the constant elements, qualities, and expression – in the art of an individual or a group. The term is also applied to the whole activity of an individual or society, as in speaking of a “life-style” or the style of a civilization.’79 Style thus becomes an auxiliary tool with which to understand artistic expression in a given period, and many scholars have assumed that there are some inherent laws to style that underpin the artistic expression of a given period and all its variations in forms. In most cases style is studied and interpreted on the basis of a formal analysis of art-historical material, and it is often taken as the basis for an interpretation of the history of forms as a whole. Stylistic formal analysis has for this reason been a key method of art-historical research and was so especially in the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.80 Birnbaum interpreted style through the lens of the ‘baroque stage’ that he claimed occurs in every artistic period. This means that every style of artistic expression in any period reaches a baroque stage in its development, a stage of ‘high artistry’. After that the style exhausts itself and new impulses must be sought, again setting in train a process of evolution in the direction to the baroque. Birnbaum’s baroque style can thus be seen as recurring in art history, but not in a cyclical sense; rather as a temporal precondition for then progressing to a stage where stylistic creation proceeds through the personality of the artist who through his own creative imagination violates the laws of the given style. In this case ‘laws’ may seem a misleading term. We understand laws as something fixed, something that necessarily occurs in every instance.81 However, Birn- baum’s theory of style, as he described it in his three studies, refutes this notion at its very foundation, and it does so primarily on the basis of the ‘baroque principle’,

101 which is understood as the culmination point of every style of art and the point at which the ‘laws’ of a given style (in architecture tectonic laws, in painting and sculpture the laws of nature) are violated and negated by the creative act of the individual artist. It is therefore necessary to differentiate between the ‘baroque pattern’ and the ‘baroque principle’ when speaking of ‘baroque style’. The ‘baroque pattern’ deems that every style must necessarily be able to run its course (as Birnbaum said, ‘a style that has not reached its baroque stage has not yet been heard from for the last time’).82 The ‘baroque principle’, however, defies this pattern through the creative act of the individual artist. From the perspective of this interpretation of style in art, which is characterised by a ‘baroque pattern’ that in turn unleashes the ‘baroque principle’, there are several different situations that can arise. Birnbaum’s ideal notion of style is when a style has the opportunity to develop fully through to its natural conclusion, that is, when it is allowed to reach its baroque stage. However, in The Roman- esque Renaissance Birnbaum showed that even the ‘baroque principle’ has its limits and after a period of time the formal repertoire of any style will exhaust itself. In this case it is possible to speak of the ‘end of the baroque’, which, like the onset of the ‘baroque stage’ of a style, occurs by force of necessity. However, Birnbaum did not think in terms of the ‘decline’ of a style, but rather of its transformation. In this perspective, art is looked on not as a succession of distinct styles, but as the transformation of forms over time as the elements of expression change. The ‘end of the baroque’ thus necessarily prompts a new stock of expressive forms to emerge, and at this point one of two things may occur. In one scenario, at the end of a style’s baroque stage it adopts the ready-made style of another artistic region, which the ‘baroque pattern’ then transforms. In this sense a role is played by the ‘principle of transgression’, which, like the baroque principle, is not a pattern but a creative possibility.83 In conformity with the principle of transgression, every style of art will under the ‘baroque pattern’ try to live out to its natural conclusion regardless of where that culmination point ultimately takes place. Artistic ideas that were never realised may be ‘transferred’ from one artistic centre to another. According to Birnbaum, this transfer continues until the style reaches the point where the ‘baroque principle’ comes into play. The second possibility is that an attempt is made to resurrect the ‘baroque pattern’ by returning to the style’s initial formal elements. This ‘renaissance’, as

102 a way out of ‘the end of the baroque’, can become an attempt to restore its creative strength. However, in The Romanesque Renaissance at the End of the Middle Ages Birnbaum notes that even a ‘renaissance’ is not a pattern that need necessarily apply in every case, as here it is only about ‘escaping’ or finding a way out from a style that has exhausted itself. Instead of a ‘pattern’, there must be a renaissance ‘principle’, that is, a creative work with forms from the past that leads to the initi- ation of the ‘baroque pattern’ and hence the ‘baroque principle’. Using the example of the Classical Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy Birnbaum showed that the culture of antiquity did not make its way into the fifteenth-century repertoire of forms on the basis of its artistic strengths, but was resuscitated by the ‘renaissance principle’, which recast it as a new artistic style.84 It is clear from this how Birnbaum’s concept of artistic style ‘worked’. A style must pass through the whole process of development up to its conclusion in order for all its artistic potential to be fulfilled. After a style reaches the stage of the ‘baroque principle’ as a result of the ‘baroque pattern’ of style, it will have exhausted itself and will seek new impulses. It may find these either in stylistic expressions evolving in other areas, adopted by means of the ‘principle of transgression’ from an artistic centre where the style has reached a dead end, and will try to carry formal elements already introduced by the adopted style to the point where the ‘baroque principle’ takes effect. The style that is adopted may be one from the past that has been transformed by the ‘renaissance principle’ and guid- ed by the ‘baroque pattern’ towards expressions of the unique ‘baroque principle’ of the style that serves as the first step. It may also happen that a style never reaches its baroque stage, in most cases owing to the simultaneous existence of another style that in the given artistic field possesses greater creative potential.85 The ‘baroque principle’ may thus be considered the very constitution of art, the artistic constitution of style, as it is towards this principle that all forms of artistic expression progress. The ‘renaissance principle’ and the ‘principle of transgression’ are supporting creative elements that are governed by the ‘baroque pattern’ in its definitive course towards the creative stage, that is, the stage of the ‘baroque principle’. Birnbaum’s theory of style as the inevitable evolution towards the baroque – that is, towards an artistic principle that by its nature transgresses the pattern of the given style and leads to the emergence of the ‘renaissance principle’, as

103 a return to a tradition that is at the same time violated by this return and is altered to become a new artistic style, and to the ‘principle of transgression’, as the transfer of artistic ideas within the European space – may seem altogether unique within the Czech art-historical and art-theoretical scene. Nevertheless, in the context of Europe as a whole Birnbaum’s thinking may reflect a wider intellectual foundation than has hitherto been acknowledged in his work. Birnbaum may have formulated the basis for his ideas under the influence of two of his professors at Vienna University: Franz Wickhoff, who worked with find- ings from late nineteenth-century impressionism to interpret a mediaeval manuscript,86 and, especially, Alois Riegl, who work with the theory of ‘Kunstwollen’. Riegl introduced his concept of Kunstwollen, or ‘the will to art’, as it is often translated, in three books published in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.87 Although Riegl worked with the term as a theoretical perspective on art-historical material, in his books he never actually discussed how to define the term. On the one hand, this makes it harder to methodologically sit- uate Riegl’s early twentieth-century reflections within a wider philosophical and theoretical context, and on the other hand, it allowed Riegl’s students and succes- sors to work freely with his theory and interpret it in different ways88 – and as we shall see, this included Vojtěch Birnbaum and his theory of the ‘principle of art’. The term ‘Kunstwollen’, as Christopher S. Wood notes,89 can be substituted with the term ‘style’ where Riegl sought to more deeply fathom the nature of the ‘principle’ of style.90 Riegl himself said of ‘Kunstwollen’: ‘Some of us are convinced that the mission of our discipline is not simply to find the things in the art of the past that appeal to modern taste, but to delve into the artistic volition [Kunstwollen] behind works of art and to discover why they are the way they are, and why they could not have been otherwise.’91 Riegl’s concept was partly based on the interpretation of art put forth by nineteenth-century architect and theorist Gottfried Semper (1803–1879). Semper looked at evolution and change in art through changes and innovations in material, function, and technique.92 Contrary to this interpretation, Riegl introduced his own concept, in which the evolution of art and artefacts was transported from the level of formal qualities to the intellectual sphere, where style and the artistic object were shaped by the intellectual and cultural temper of a particular artistic period.93 Michael Gubser notes: ‘Kunstwollen designated the autonomous creative

104 impulse expressed in all artworks. The development of new art forms, Riegl claimed, should not be attributed primarily to extra-artistic influences such as new materials, improved techniques, or changing social circumstances. ... Riegl argued that the impulse to create art was anthropologically prior to technique.’94 He also noted that the term ‘Kunstwollen’ can be divided into two main elements, which can be referred to as ‘historical Kunstwollen’ and ‘temporal Kunstwollen’, or ‘objective’ and ‘subjective Kunstwollen’: ‘An artwork retained an irreducible objectivity regardless of the subjective interpretations that would inevitably help to determine its meaning. Objectivity and subjectivity, artist and viewer coexisted in the work. Riegl’s notion of Kunstwollen encompassed the interpenetrating subject/object duality in art as a historically conditioned, formal relationship. This duality was immanent within the work of art.’95 These ‘Kunstwollens’ constitute the impulse for the creation of a work of art: on the one hand, there is the artist’s impulse to engage with the material for the purpose of working it into a work of art (‘temporal’ or ‘subjective’ Kunstwollen from the artist’s perspective, ‘historical’ Kunstwollen from the viewer’s perspective); on the other hand, there is the impulse of viewer/expert to engage with the work of art for the purpose of understanding it (‘temporal’ and at the same time ‘objective’ Kunstwollen). These ‘spiritual impulses’ that exist within different periods – at the time the work of art is created, on the one hand, and at the time the object is examined or observed, on the other – form the substance of Riegl’s ‘Kunstwollen’ as the primary causes of the internal and external interest in the work of art and in art itself.96 ‘Kunstwollen’ does not, therefore, exist external to the work of art but is in- nate to it and its artistic potential; it can be understood as the substance of the work of art that lies outside the materiality of the work, in the essentially un- changing spiritual subjective-objective nature of self-creation and subsequent existence and perception (in the eyes of others). Nevertheless, it is in the materiality of the work, in all the aspects and limits of the materiality, that ‘Kunstwollen’ is embedded and determined.97 In this sense the artistic object contains within itself the very reason for its existence (as a creation by the artist) and conservation (the interest of the viewer/expert). Birnbaum in all likelihood was familiar with Riegl’s concept of ‘Kunstwollen’ and he drew on and elaborated it in his own concept of style. If ‘Kunstwollen’

105 is understood to be the essential natural component of every work of art, comprising ‘historical Kuntwollen’ and ‘temporal Kunstwollen’, as the reason for the creation of the work of art and relatedly the exploration or contemplation of the work, then, as we shall see, the ‘baroque principle’ may appear to be the very aim of ‘Kunstwollen’. In the ‘baroque principle’ the primary role is played by the creative genius of the individual artist who transgresses the ‘patterns’ that were established by a style as it developed over time. The artist approaches a style as something that is ready and complete which the artist then disrupts. The artist engages in this transgression, however, not in the destructive sense of the word, but, on the contrary, to create new formal possibilities that by their very nature negate what the style has established on the basis of tectonics and reality. The artist must necessarily first understand the patterns of the style in order to then be capable of creatively recasting them and taking them to an artistic height, to the ‘baroque’ form of the style. In Birnbaum’s concept, the artist approaches the style first from the position of an expert, as one who must understand everything about it in order to be able then to transgress its patterns. After transforming the style through the ‘artistic principle’ of the baroque, the ‘expert’ then becomes the ‘creator’ of the style. The ‘baroque principle’, as enacted through the creative genius of the individual artist, may then be seen as encompassing ‘historical Kunstwollen’ and ‘temporal Kunstwollen’, the two basic elements of Riegl’s ‘Kunstwollen’, its objective and subjective components. The artist becomes familiar with the style and learns its rules in order to be able to transgress them and create the ‘baroque principle’ of the style (objective knowledge leads to subjective interpretation). A similar process is also manifested in how the recipient/expert relates to the work of art, having first to learn about and know the work in order to be able then to interpret it (again there is a move from objective knowledge to subjective interpretation).98 This way of relating to the work of art is touched on in The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture, which Birnbaum equally conceived as a practical guide on the approach to art history. There is thus a parallel to be drawn between Birn- baum’s ‘baroque pattern’ and Riegl’s ‘Kunstwollen’, as a style has a certain ‘will’, which is on the one hand the desire to be understood, and on the other hand, on the basis of this understanding, the desire to be transformed and brought to its culminating point, to the stage where the ‘baroque principle’ comes into play.

106 Birnbaum’s ‘baroque principle’ can thus be thought of in a sense as the purpose of Riegl’s ‘Kunstwollen’, which Birnbaum took as a possible guideline and inspiration for the formulation of his own perspective on how style ‘works’. Birnbaum was able to elaborate Riegl’s concept beyond the limits of the artistic potency (‘Kunstwollen’) of an individual work of art into a theoretical concept of artistic style that through ‘Kunstwollen’ proceeds towards the enactment of the ‘baroque principle’ and thereby its own ‘high artistic form’.99 As well as to Riegl’s ‘Kunstwollen’ Birnbaum’s concept can also be compared to another important art theory from the early twentieth century – Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s (1864–1945) Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe.100 As Jindřich Vybíral has suggested elsewhere,101 Birnbaum was in all likelihood familiar with Wölfflin’s work, even though he did not directly mention it in his writings. Vybíral sees Birnbaum’s Baroque Principle as a reformulation of Wölfflin’s Grundbegriffe and refers to it as a ‘derivation’ from Wölfflin’s work, where Birnbaum found confirmation of his own ideas.102 Vybíral’s explains Birnbaum’s not mentioning the source of inspiration he drew on as the result of the anti-German mood that prevailed in the newly independent Czechoslovak Republic, where there was no reaction from Czech journals at all to the publication of Wölfflin’s book in 1915 (even though previous works by him had been reviewed). Birnbaum’s Viennese education was moreover something already being held against him.103 There are indeed signs of inspiration from Wölfflin in Birnbaum’s work, most notably in his attempt to provide a more general characterisation of the baroque style. Wölfflin, like Birnbaum later on, sought to describe a certain transhistori- cal phenomenon recurring in art and not limited to a single period, something that could be identified in multiple periods across the history of art. To this end he established a dichotomy between ‘classicism’ and ‘baroque’, defining five con- trasting attributes for each,104 which he was able to identify even outside the renaissance (as an expression of ‘classicism’) and the ‘baroque’.105 On the basis of this comparison Wölfflin founded a tradition of interpreting the baroque as a distinct style, and he understood ‘malerisch’, his principal term, as the primary characteristic of baroque artistic expression.106 He described baroque expression, again in a similar sense to Birnbaum, as the high point of artistic undertaking, claiming that in every artistic period the classical stage is followed by the baroque.107

107 Unlike Wölfflin, however, Birnbaum took style as his concept and sought to trace how style works or functions in different periods. Wölfflin put together a theoretical apparatus with which to evaluate the ‘results’ of artistic work. Birnbaum, by contrast, focused on a creative principle whose enactment is steered by the individual artist. It is more than likely that Birnbaum worked with Wölfflin’s theory, but only as a source of inspiration to formulate his own thoughts about how style works within the overall frame of art history, as Vybíral also noted. In his theory Birnbaum thus combined Wölfflin’s pair of terms for describing classical and baroque art and incorporated them as formal characteristics that, nevertheless, yield to the artist’s subjective articulation of them as he or she proceeds towards the ‘baroque principle’. Wölfflin’s categories may have been useful for Birnbaum in describing the ‘Kunstwollen’ of the object, but they, like Riegl’s theory, did not provide him with a framework adequate for a comprehensive understanding of style and how it changes in art history. Vybíral notes: ‘Birn- baum followed in the footsteps of his own master, rather than in Wölfflin’s. The principle of formal transformation that he detected would be worthless to him if it did not allow for a proper generalization in the form of a universal causal law. … this universal law did not consist in the alternation of a “haptic” and an “optic” mode, or a “linear” and a “pictorial” mode, but rather in the emancipation of creative subjectivity, the “achieving of creative thought’s complete control over reality”, whereby an “objective architectonical fact turns into a subjective illusory impression” – a process which, as Birnbaum sees it, passes through cyclical reruns in the course of history.’108 Next to Riegl’s and Wölfflin’s theories, Birnbaum’s concept of style in art gives an impression of style as an organic structure, and a structure that can be observed and its ‘development’ predicted, but only within a certain frame and with no way of completely determining how it might be transformed in the future. Birnbaum’s is a theory of the ‘life of style’ as a whole in which there are patterns and principles behind the creation that can be identified but are not themselves prescriptive. This point may call to mind the theory of French art historian Henri Focillon (1881–1943). In his Vie des formes109 he discussed the transformation of forms in art. Focillon did not contemplate art history as a succession of styles (gothic–renaissance–baroque),110 but as individual types of expression that evolve simultane- ously side by side, but at various tempos, so that at a certain time one may prevail over the others, before merging again with the next.111

108 For Focillon ‘forms’ are on the one hand characteristic of a certain period, but at the same time they are capable of transcending the boundaries of their particular historical definition. Focillon thus formulated the ‘baroque’, like Wölf- flin or Birnbaum, as a supra-stylistic concept. He described it as the high points of individual styles coming together, characterised above all by ‘movement’, and that is what creates the ‘life’ of the forms.112 It is a question whether Birnbaum would have known this work, as the first edition was published in 1934 and its Czech translation came out two years later.113 Given this uncertainty about Focillon’s influence on Birnbaum, where there are overlapping points in their formulations we might rather consider that they emerged from the same foundation – from Wölfflin’s theory, and above all from the ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941).114 Bergson was one of the most influential philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.115 He was one of the ‘philosophers of life’ who offered metaphysical explorations of the realities of life as lived and experienced.116 Contrary to late nineteenth-century rationalism,117 Bergson ascribed paramount importance to ‘intuition’ and ‘lived reality’ in the process of understanding reality: ‘For Bergson life is not a product of physical-chemical reactions or a random selection of animals and plants, but is rather a creative evolution sustained from within, smoothly and seamlessly.’118 Bergson, much like Focillon, observed ‘forms’ (Bergson the forms of reality within the unity of life, which are constantly changing under the effect of ‘élan vital’;119 Focillon forms in art as vital entities) in the constant and never-ending process of creation and with an interest in the individual transmutations of an organism. The most important study in this respect is Bergson’s L’evolution créatrice published in 1907,120 which ultimately became one of his most read works. It was translated into Czech in 1919 and it is feasible that in the early twentieth century, five years before publication of his own theoretical writings, Birnbaum could have had knowledge of it.121 In this lengthy book Bergson describes the creative principle of life with a view to the inner development of the individual and the effect of external influences on the constitution of the individual’s existence, with special emphasis on freedom of (theoretical) thought. As noted above, a primary place in Bergson’s philosophy of life is occupied by ‘intuition’ that reacts with thought processes to the stimuli

109 of lived reality.122 Therefore he studied certain ‘forms’ that change their shape in the conditions of creative development: ‘In order to view the self in its original purity, psychology ought to eliminate or correct certain forms which bear the obvious mark of the external world.’123 Bergson saw the most direct relationship between the self and reality in art and the work of art that transforms objective reality into a subjective impression on the basis of the perceptions of the artistic self. The subjective reality created by the artist then comes across as a ‘different’ reality to a different ‘self’ and disrupts their perception of objective reality. The work of art thus has the opportunity to awaken in the individual both a deeper understanding of the inner (subjective) self and a different perception of external (objective) reality: Could‘ reality come into direct contact with sense and consciousness, could we enter into immediate communion with things and with ourselves, probably art would be useless, or rather we should all be artists, for then our soul would continually vibrate in perfect accord with nature.’124 Bergson’s view of the artist was of an individual capable of seeing ‘beyond’ reality and of breaching the boundaries set by reason between the world and the individual. One of the aims of the philosophy of life could be considered to be attaining the same in the lived moment as what artists are capable of when creating a work of art; thereby breaching the division between the objective and subjective spheres for the purpose of connecting them and experiencing ‘inner reality’ based on ‘external stimuli’, and in this way draw the creative aspect of life out of every stimulus and every instant. As Bergson notes: ‘In fact we do indeed feel that not one of the categories of our thought – unity, multiplicity, mechanical causality, intel- ligent finality, etc. – applies exactly to the things of life: who can say where individuality begins and ends, whether the living being is one of many, whether it is the cells which associate themselves into the organism or the organism which dissociates itself into cells? In vain we force the living into this or that one of our molds. All the molds crack. They are too narrow, above all too rigid, for what we try to put into them.’125 In Bergson’s thinking ‘common sense’ only reinforces and simplifies these moulds by making it impossible to perceive the singularity of reality through the one individual.126 In contrast to speech, which Bergson considers the foundation of ‘healthy reason’, that is, the simplification of the perception of reality, he posits such ‘forms’ and ‘ideas’ that do not submit to ‘reason’ but to ‘intuition’ and ‘creativity’.127

110 For Bergson these ‘forms’ and ‘ideas’ are ‘inner qualities’ that represent the central element of his ‘creative principle’. Their main attribute can be identified as ‘duration’ (durée) in time, another important concept of Bergson’s, where the inner qualities of life, which in Bergson’s thinking are above all ‘memory’ and ‘feelings’, endure in real time and are subject to evolution, during which they transform: ‘My mental state, as it advances on the road of time, is continually swelling with the duration which it accumulates: it goes on increasing – rolling upon itself, as a snowball on the snow. Still more is this the case with states more deeply internal, such as sensations, feelings, desires, etc., which do not correspond, like a simple visual perception, to an unvarying external object. ... The truth is that we change without ceasing, and that the state itself is nothing but change.’128 The ‘duration’ of a state and a form in time is an ‘impression’ that endures but does not remain in its original form but changes in response to internal and external stimuli to create new realities. These are transformed by the ‘duration’ of memory and the accumulation of these ‘forms’ over time. These ‘forms’ that are subject to constant transformation can be understood as the memories that exist in one’s memory, but in a ‘creative’ not a ‘permanent’ state: ‘Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. And as the past grows without ceasing, so also there is no limit to its preservation. Memory … is not a faculty of putting away recollections in a drawer, or of inscribing them in a register.’129 For Bergson, therefore, ‘duration’ is a constant stage that transforms in terms of its expression but endures in its metaphysical form. On the concept of ‘duration’ in Bergson’s theory, Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) noted: ‘It is a case of a “transition”, of a “change”, a becoming, but it is a becoming that endures, a change that is substance itself. ... Pure duration offers us a succession that is purely internal, without exteriority; space, an exteriority without succession (in effect this is the memory of the past; the recollection of what has happened in space would already imply a mind that endures). The two combine, and into this combination space introduces the forms of its extrinsic distinctions or of its homogeneous and discontinuous “sections”, while duration contributes an internal succession that is both heterogeneous and continuous. We are thus able to “preserve” the instantaneous states of space and to juxtapose them in a sort of “auxiliary space”: But we also introduce extrinsic distinctions into our duration, we decompose it into external parts and align it in a sort of homogeneous time.’130

111 Is it possible to observe similar ‘creative principles’ in Birnbaum’s concept of style in art? Bergson suggests in his philosophy that living organisms are in a process of constant development, the aspects of which can be surmised but not foreseen, ‘[f]or to foresee consists of projecting into the future what has been perceived in the past, or of imaging for a later time a new grouping, in a new order, of elements already perceived. But that which has never been perceived, and which is at the same time simple, is necessarily unforeseeable.’131 The stimuli or impulses endure, but at the same time they are also in an unending process of transformation. Accord- ing to Bergson new forms are generated by this ‘duration’ in time, forms that are ‘a new arrangement of old elements’.132 The new is created by the endurance of the old: ‘The elementary causes, which in their totality have determined this relationship, are themselves old causes repeated in a new order.’133 This ‘new arrangement’ demands its own duration in time, whereby it recog- nises elements of itself that can later be transformed. Bergson writes: ‘Now, the more we fix our attention on the continuity of life, the more we see that organic evolution resembles the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past presses against the present and causes the upspringing of a new form of consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedents.’134 This ‘new form’ needs to endure for a period of time in order for it to come into being: ‘And it is evident that even the sudden “mutations” which we now hear of are possible only if a period of incubation, or rather of maturing, is going on throughout a series of generations that do not seem to change. In this sense it might be said of life, as of consciousness, that at every moment it is creating something.’135 Birnbaum’s ‘principle of art’ seems to work with similar concepts of the development and transformation of style. According to Birnbaum, style endures un- ceasingly in time, but transforms over time and yields to certain laws governing its existence, like an organism. As it endures in time it preserves in itself the past (formal) elements of its existence, where these elements are ‘ostensibly unchang- ing’ but proceed nonetheless towards ‘a new arrangement of old elements’. This reconfiguration to arrive at a ‘new arrangement’, the realisation of the ‘baroque principle’, is not brought about by erasing the past but by its ‘accumulation’, and by creating something new out of the old. While style is governed by a ‘baroque pattern’ that leads the style’s forms towards ‘maturing’ into a subjective expression of objective laws, the ‘baroque principle’ itself, in its subjectivity and in its work with form, is irreproducible. Bergson notes: ‘Thus our personality

112 shoots, grows and ripens without ceasing. Each of its moments is something new added to what was before.’136 The ‘baroque principle’ of style is inevitable in its eventuality, but the way it manifests itself is distinct for every individual style. In this respect Bergson speaks of the ‘survival’ of the past into the present where the past is reshaped and a ‘subjective’ interpretation of the ‘objective’ past is created (here again we can think of the two elements of Riegl’s ‘Kunstwollen’ mentioned above): ‘From this survival of the past it follows that consciousness cannot go through the same state twice. The circumstances may still be the same, but they will act no longer on the same person, since they find him at a new moment of his history.’137 Personality and consciousness can be exchanged for style and the forms of a style as conceived in Birnbaum’s theory. Forms yield to their own ‘creative principle’, the ‘artistic principle’ (as it applies), occurring in time where the forms endure and transform until they reach maturity and are no longer able to create any new forms composed of elementary elements from the past. Birnbaum offers a concrete example of this in The Baroque Principle, where he describes its action upon an architectural aedicula and transforms the basic elements of it: ‘The motif is of classical origin ... and was picked up by the renaissance and the baroque; the latter however made an ostensibly negligible but in reality far-reaching change to it that provides a marvellous illustration of the style’s basic tendencies. ... The change referred to is only that the entablature over the columns is no longer a uniform lintel ... but rather its central section is indented towards the face of the wall the aedicula stands before, so that only narrow sections, an overhanging entablature, are all that remain of it on top of the columns ... by this seemingly simple intervention the thing as a whole acquires an un- expectedly new physiognomy.’138 As an architectural element the aedicula remains the same, there is no change to the singular nature of the thing, all that changes is its structure and form. A style’s duration in time can thus be equated with the ‘pattern of the baroque’ and the style’s progression towards the realisation of the ‘baroque principle’. The underlying precondition for this is the continuous creative process that is the very essence of the existence of a style of art. Its evolution through its duration in time therefore depends on other creative principles that are governed by the course of progression towards the baroque stage. According to Birnbaum’s concept, these are the principles of ‘renaissance’ and ‘transgression’.

113 The ‘renaissance principle’, as Birnbaum describes it in The Romanesque Re- naissance at the End of the Middle Ages, does not depend on formal elements from the past, but, through its own duration and by returning to the past (a kind of memory is at play here), it tries to create something out of forms that already exist but have not had a chance to reach their baroque stage. Birnbaum therefore spoke of the need for a ‘renaissance’ in search of form, which it sought first in the romanesque style and later in classical art. There were formal elements that existed stored in the style’s ‘memory’ as the style continued to both evolve and endure at the same time.139 As soon as this style reached ‘maturity’, in its ceaseless creative development it sought new forms and found them in its past, romanesque form. This was, however, then concluded by another style, the classical style, as it offered more opportunities for creating, which is the central purpose of a style. Bergson also gives thought to returning to the past within the frame of duration: ‘Our personality, which is being built up each instant with its accumulated experience, changes without ceasing. By changing, it prevents any state, although superficially identical with another, from ever repeating it in its very depth. That is why our duration is irreversible. We could not live over again a single moment, for we should have to be- gin by effacing the memory of all that had followed.’140 The Romanesque Renaissance speaks similarly of ‘superficial’ attempts at the additive introduction of romanesque architectural elements to structures from a later date. Birnbaum sees this as one of the reasons why the concept of the Classical Renaissance was accepted as it offered an opportunity to create new forms in their duration, unlike the ‘romanesque renaissance’. The ‘principle of transgression’ may then be Birnbaum’s own search for the bases of the ‘creative principle’ influenced by Bergson. In this last theoretical work Birnbaum inquired into the possibilities of style through to the point where a style is driven by a need to ‘create’ and ‘mature’ into its high artistry in the form of the ‘baroque principle’. For Birnbaum, the duration of a style in time is not de- pendent on its place of origin; this idea may also stem from Bergson’s reflections on unceasing duration and creation: ‘In vain does reason prove to us that the more we get away from the objects cut out and the systems isolated by common sense and by science and the deeper we dig beneath them, the more we have to do with a reality which changes as a whole in its inmost states, as if an accumulative memory of the past made it impossible to go back again.’141 Birnbaum made his own addition to his Supplement

114 to the Developmental Laws with his concept of a trans-epochal interpretation of how the principle of artistic style works with all its individual transformations of form (in individual styles of art) that exist in time, in their continuous duration (in the immanent development of a style of art), where the main principle is the principle of creation (the baroque principle). In this respect we can also consider the similarities between Bergson’s ‘élan vital’ and Birnbaum’s ‘baroque principle’. Both principles exist in ‘duration’ as a certain potentiality of creative evolution, which is possible and desired, but is never taken for granted. Their existence, as Deleuze noted on Bergson’s philosophy, can be described as ‘virtual’, as realising in the present instance the possibilities contained within the style’s current development based on its past (memories). ‘Élan vital’, and thus the ‘baroque principle’ as well, exists in the possibility of its being realised through the pattern of evolution; that is, it necessarily exists outside ‘reality’, while the transition to ‘objective’ existence is conditional upon the principle of ‘creative development’ (and thus also the ‘pattern of the baroque’). As Deleuze noted in this respect, when ‘élan vital’ can be substituted with the ‘baroque principle’ and ‘life’ with ‘style’: ‘What does Bergson mean when he talks about élan vital? It is always a case of virtuality in the process of being actu- alized, a simplicity in the process of differentiating, a totality in the process of dividing up: Proceeding by “dissociation and division”, by “dichotomy”, is the essence of life. ... It is as if Life were merged into the very movement of differentiation, in ramified series. Movement is undoubtedly explained by the insertion of duration into matter: Duration is differentiated according to the obstacles it meets in matter, according to the materiality through which it passes, according to the kind of extension that it contracts. ... Duration is differentiated within itself through an internal explosive force; it is only affirmed and prolonged, it only advances, in branching or ramified series.’142 On this point Bergson’s thought intersects with Riegl’s notion of ‘Kunstwol- len’. What ‘endures’ in matter is determined by its materiality, in which it is however ‘ramified’ into a dichotomy of subjective and objective coming to know and be familiar with a thing on one hand and creating on the other; it is therefore not altogether defined by its own matter. Birnbaum’s concept may thus also be grasped as embracing both Riegl’s conception of the ‘Kunstwollen’ of an artistic style, which ‘endures’ in the artistic object, with Bergson’s conception, thus Kunstwollen exists in the virtuality of style, which emerges out of the ‘baroque

115 principle’, the end that is sought through the ‘baroque pattern’. That pattern, as indicated above, is characterised by its ‘creative evolution’ which is influenced by the ‘renaissance principle’ and the ‘principle of transgression’. Birnbaum’s ‘principle of art’, like Bergson’s ‘creative evolution’, may therefore be understood as a ceaselessly existing form in constant transformation pro- pelled by the effect of objective/subjective impressions, or that is, by the ‘patterns of art’. These patterns transform the apparatus of form while the style goes on in duration as an expression of artistic creation.

116 Conclusion

In the early twentieth century Vojtěch Birnbaum formulated a concept of style that he expounded on in his theoretical writings on phenomena that can be observed in the course of the development of art. His desire to provide art-historical research with theoretical grounding was stimulated by his experience of having studied at Vienna University under Franz Wickhoff and Alois Riegl, who instilled in him not just the need to work directly with artistic material but also certain principles of interpreting art on the basis of theoretical ideas. Besides the Vienna School of Art History other influences that shaped early art history as a discipline can be traced in Birnbaum’s work, most notably the ideas of Heinrich Wölfflin and French philosopher Henri Bergson, which had an enormous intellectual impact in Europe during the early part of the century. On these foundations Birnbaum formulated an integrative perspective on the history of art, the premise of which formed the basis from which he then approached actual art itself. He understood art as an integrated organism in an immanent process of development. According to Birnbaum, that process could be observed through certain patterns and principles of work in the present (artistic) moment, with gradual transformations in the style’s repertoire of forms that ultimately peaked in the original creative artistry of the individual artist. This element of the ‘singular’ in art on the basis of fixed factors that are not inevitable is the central premise of Birnbaum’s concept of the ‘principle of art’. In Birnbaum’s interpretation, art expresses itself through changing forms that become categorised as individual styles. This allows us to speak of a ‘principle’ of art, one with its own necessary starting points, individual periods (styles), and types of creative expression (the ‘baroque principle’ of individual artistic periods). Typical stylistic labels such as ‘gothic’, ‘renaissance’, and ‘baroque’ did not hold much significance for Birnbaum. He worked with them as with an already existing stock of scholarly tools and so as to ensure the clarity of (his) references to individual forms of artistic expression.143 Birnbaum was more interested in describing the artistic potential that lies within an individual artistic style’s formal

117 expression, that is, in the potential of a style of art to reach the ‘baroque principle’. This principle, according to Birnbaum, recurs in history, as all creative existence proceeds in the direction of its own individual artistic expression: ‘Every style that is denied the possibility to run its full course of development always ends in the baroque stage. ... it is entirely natural and obvious that this is the state that is striven for by every creative will in art that believes in itself and at the same time is in pursuit of specific stylistic objectives whatever they may be.’144 The ‘baroque principle’, as the meaning of artistic creation, is thus a condi- tion of creative work in every style of art. Consequently, when a style reaches its baroque stage and exhausts itself, the ‘creative evolution’ of the style does not then cease but goes in search of new possibilities. Birnbaum described these possibilities as ‘renaissance’ and ‘transgression’, which, like ‘baroque’, exist as a creative potential, and are there for the purpose of attaining the ‘baroque principle’, that is, a purely artistic form. For Birnbaum, style was therefore just an aid with which to denote individual types of expression in the history of art which he viewed as possibly the spiritual component or aspect of lived reality. This ‘artistic reality’ provided various historical art forms with an expressive freedom manifested through the ‘baroque principle’, as, according to Birnbaum, art yields solely to its own ‘patterns’. As Birnbaum conceived it, the significance of these patterns resides in the refutation of them through the act of artistic creation. A fundamental principle of Birnbaum’s interpretation of art is thus the free creative power within any formal apparatus. To understand and experience this, a thorough formal analysis of the material itself must be made, as the real essence of any style of art is found in the work of art itself, or in the intersection of subjective/temporal and objective/historical ‘Kunstwollen’. Art, as Birnbaum notes in several places in his writings, lives a life of its own and is in the sway of its own creative principles. It thus has a certain ‘spiritual’ life of its own that exists in its ceaseless duration, in the course of which its forms undergo various transformations, but it never itself ceases to exist. Art and the creative principle of art that resides and transforms in its duration may therefore for Birnbaum have been the equivalent of what Henri Bergson conceived of as ‘creative evolution’. In both concepts there is a constant forward movement that is never erased, but in its very nature preserves the past, which transforms the present and to a certain degree influences future forms as well. The purpose of

118 its existence is then the work of creating, culminating, as Birnbaum saw it, in artistic expression and in the negation of ‘objective’ reality through its ‘subjective’ articulation. This interpretation of Birnbaum’s ideas may provide some idea of the intellectual foundations of his thinking on art and may offer a different way of looking at his work in art history and some insight into his work in other areas such as heritage conservation. Reflections of Birnbaum’s theoretical thinking can be traced in the work of some of his students. Birnbaum’s writings in art history typically engage in a detailed description of the material he is studying, in most cases architecture.145 It is evident from docu- ments among his papers that he photographed almost every single block of stone in order to create a thorough picture of the formal and structural features of his object of research. This can clearly be seen in his theoretical works, particularly in The Baroque Principle and The Romanesque Renaissance. Both of these works could be divided into two parts, with the first part comprising a detailed description and interpretation of his subject, on which basis he then formulated his theory. This approach to art history very likely came from his having studied at the Vienna School, but could it also have derived from the way he himself understood art? If Birnbaum saw art as the unceasing spiritual facet of lived reality and the work of art as a materialisation and expression of the ‘artistic principle’ of style, complete and thorough knowledge of the work of art may for him have meant also obtain- ing a grasp of these creative principles. He may thus have sought to understand the ‘Kunstwollen’ of a work of art that resides in its material and from the nature of this materiality grasp the work in the context of its creative evolution. In a similar light we can examine Birnbaum’s work in the field of heritage conservation, where he adopted a conservative stance. Often adding his voice to the most widely discussed conservation cases of the early twentieth century,146 he almost always commented in favour of preserving an object in its original state and against new realisations, instead defending the context and authenticity of the work. He was again significantly influenced in the formation of these opinions by his time in Vienna and especially by the ideas of Riegl and later Dvořák. But it may also be that for Birnbaum heritage represented the context of a work and a time and that for him may have signified observing the ‘principle of art’ in its stylistic transformations in one place. Might he have seen the conservation of

119 monuments as a way of sustaining the ceaseless ‘creative evolution’ of art, that is, as a way of preserving artistic expression as evidence of the ‘spiritual’ existence of reality and the ‘principle of art’ in perpetuity? A similar question was raised in 1996 by Ivo Hlobil: ‘Nevertheless, in parallel to the response to the detrimental effects of post-modernist relativism, we may extol Birnbaum’s unwavering adherence to principles, especially in heritage conservation. The question now is whether Birnbaum’s adherence to principles can be detached from his metaphysics.’147 The influence of Birnbaum’s thought is also apparent in the work of his students, and it is possible in this respect to speak of a ‘Birnbaum school’,148 with his footsteps being followed by many later Czech art historians. Those who were influenced by or revised Birnbaum’s theoretical ideas included most notably Růžena Vacková (1901–1982), Oldřich Stefan (1900–1969) and Václav Richter (1900–1970). The most faithful successor to Birnbaum’s theoretical thinking was Růžena Vacková.149 Alongside art history she also specialised in classical archaeology, but historical events prevented the spread of her progressive ideas. At the end of the Second World War she was sentenced to death, the sentence was not carried out, and she then spent the years 1952–1967 in a communist prison.150 Vacková interpreted Birnbaum’s theory about the patterns of evolution in art as the starting point for her own ideas, which were published in 1993 as The Sci- ence of Style (Věda o slohu).151 In this work Vacková draws on the ideas of the Vien- na School of Art History as Birnbaum formulated them and applies them to the religious spiritualism of Catholic universalism that Vacková embraced at the end of the war.152 Vacková worked with the system of artistic style Birnbaum outlined in his studies and lectures. And she added to his concept of style in art the perspective of the individual’s experience or knowledge of reality as it is expressed in works of art and in artistic style. She distinguished in her theory five developmental stages of style: ‘archaism’, ‘the classical stage’, ‘the stage of the baroque principle’, ‘the stage of historicism’, and ‘the stage of artism (mannerism)’. She described the individual stages as follows: ‘In the first stage, which we customarily refer to as archaism, the leading group of artists with a shared worldview, whether active or passive, ... concentrated on articulating a current conceptual problem through form and through form found all the ways of resolving the problem. ... In the second stage, the classical

120 stage, an interpretation of being and the world is formulated from a certain perspective, given shape through a generally intelligible and generally communicable form, and therefore “classical” in the original sense. ... In the third stage of a style, which was identified by Vojtěch Birnbaum and called the stage of the baroque principle, form is classical, recognised, and consequently its value also acknowledged, but there arises a crisis in the visual field recognised by the style in that the value that has been grasped and verified does not seem to be the sole and key value of a positive recognition of the world and life. ... In the style’s fourth stage, the stage of historicism, the community defends itself against the doubts and uncertainties about the values, as evoked by the crisis of the baroque principle. It seeks to memorialise itself in the forms of the past stages – and the past styles – of the value. ... This often simplifying retrograde perspective cannot, however, overcome the consciousness of an insufficiency, incompleteness, a recognition in the past, and the current uncertainty about the values’ worth creates a climate of doubt about the values overall. ... There follows the last stage of development, artism or mannerism, as the last and fifth stage in the style’s development.’153 Vacková thus adopted Birnbaum’s system of style and expanded it to include the spiritual element of the individual and the role of the individual in recognition the world through form. As Jarmila Vacková notes, Růžena ‘worked with Birnbaum’s concepts of the baroque principle, the law of transgression, the migration of epicentre, centre, and periphery, and Riegl’s “Kunstwollen”, and she thereby brought the development of the Czech branch of the Vienna School to an end – albeit with a fateful delay (which also had positive sides to it).’154 In this respect in Růžena Vacková’s own writing we read: ‘Every style has its own essential nature. It derives from a philosophical relationship to reality. “Reality”, however, is extremely vast. Reality is spiritual and sensory. It is the reality of our widest perception, it is also the reality of our essential consciousness, which we refer to as our inner life. It is the reality of objective being, which is primarily what recognising involves. ... Every style then focuses its “Kunstwollen” recognising activity each time on a new segment of the “world” – of reality. Because the previous recognition becomes the consciousness and cognisance and foundation of today, the development of the thinking and recognition, their progress even, is unquestionable – both in terms of the depth and scope of the goals attained and in terms of the breadth of new human groups. It is a case then of evolution. ... According to Riegl, Wickhoff, and other offspring of the Viennese-Czech school – Birnbaum foremost of course – an evolution takes place in the sense of the ever more powerful conquest of matter by spirit.’155

121 It is possible to surmise that Birnbaum’s theory, influenced by the Vienna School of Art History and Alois Riegl in particular and by Henri Bergson’s philosophical concept of ‘creative evolution’, allowed Vacková to elaborate her thoughts on style in the direction of Catholic spirituality. This may be a variation on what Birnbaum pursued under Bergson’s influence, that is, a certain ‘élan vital’ in the style in the form of its ‘baroque principle’. In The Science of Style Vacková explored the ‘spiritualisation’ of art and the ‘recognition’ of reality through form or in other words through art. Another of Birnbaum’s students who drew on his ideas in his own works was Oldřich Stefan.156 Stefan was an architect by education, and later he taught architecture at the Czech Technical University in Prague. He was interested in theories about architecture and art and, like Vacková, elaborated on the ‘principle of art’ outlined by Birnbaum. However, he was prevented from expanding further on his thoughts because, like Vacková, he was imprisoned by the communists on the grounds of his scientific turn of mind and thus his rejection of the base of the communist regime.157 Stefan followed Birnbaum’s example in focusing on baroque architecture, and he was one of the main initiators and creators of the monumental exhibition Ba- roque in Bohemia (Baroko v Čechách) in 1938.158 In his writings he tried to capture the stylistic significance and the substance of baroque artistic expression in architecture,159 and he was especially interested in the question of the relationship between material and space in architecture.160 In 1928, for example, he published at his own expense a study about the ‘stylistic substance’ of the key buildings of Kilián Ignác Dientzenhofer, which he dedicated to his teacher, Vojtěch Birnbaum.161 In this study Stefan explored the creative principle in Czech, Austrian, and Italian architecture and traced artistic innovations in individual structures. Following the footsteps of his teacher he made thorough analyses of baroque structures and on the basis of this research sought to identify their common denominator by tracing a similar creative departure point as in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture. Drawing on the theory of the ‘baroque principle’ of style and in particular the way it violates old forms and creates new ones, he attempted to identify the authors of some architectural works.162 Stefan returned to Birnbaum’s ideas in the late 1950s to mark twenty-five years since Birnbaum’s death and thirty-five years since the publication ofThe Baroque

122 Principle. In 1959 he published The Principle of Plasticity in Czech Baroque Architec- ture in the Early 18th Century (Plastický princip v české architektuře barokní na počátku 18. věku)163 and several months later The Baroque Principle in 17th- and 18th-Century Czech Architecture (Barokní princip v české architektuře 17. a 18. století).164 In both articles he dealt with the subject of the nature of the ‘baroque’ with equally meticu- lous attention to detail and to the clarity of the material studied, like in his study from 1928. In The Principle of Plasticity Stefan inquired into the feature of baroque art that is behind its expression as a uniform art, that is, the fusion of architecture, sculpture, and painting into one ‘baroque’ artistic expression. He posited the ‘principle of plasticity’ as the main feature of the new architecture and characterised the principle as a ‘plastic’ way of working with an architectural lexicon that imbues architecture with symbolic meaning.165 On this Stefan writes: ‘A characteristic feature of that period in this country and the countries around it is the insertion of new meaning in art overall, especially religious meaning, and the more intense involvement of religion in it. It is meaning that we now find in the foreground of all decisions about the need for works of art, and meaning is also clearly directing and shaping form.’166 It is clear from the article that Stefan based his ‘principle of plasticity’ on arguments that are similar to the ones that Birnbaum used to describe the ‘baroque principle’: ‘The gradual disintegration of the formal laws of the Renaissance manifested itself in a horizontal and vertical sense of composition. We are aware of this as a series of deformations of Renaissance forms and as a growing number of new forms whose development is supported by manneristic and then directly also by baroque subjectivism.’167 Following the example of his teacher he also reflected on the creative genius of the individual artist, who has the possibility to create freely within the frame of the old style’s formal repertoire which the artist disrupts in an effort to arrive at a new type of artistic expression: ‘The developmental progress, however, depends on the strength of ingenuity and the courage of the architect to work uncompromisingly. ... It is significant how often even a minute form will radiate a dynamism that comes from the architect’s intuitive sensibility for plasticity. A new artistic reality is what this is.’168 Stefan thus took Birnbaum’s observations about the ‘baroque principle’ of artistic style further and to a deeper level by focusing on the creative principle in its most expressive form, that is, in the form of the ‘historical’ baroque itself. It seems that for Stefan the primary objective of baroque artistic expression was to achieve

123 the peak of an artist’s artistic work and the artist’s subjective ability to violate the ‘objective’ norms of the style, within the frame of certain ‘creative possibilities’, and in symbolic (and spiritual) form. He pursued the same aspect in the second article, where he openly espoused Birnbaum’s Baroque Principle and attempted to apply his theory and method to Czech seventeenth- and eighteenth-century architecture. In reference to baroque architecture, Stefan wrote: ‘In other words these are the basic principles underpinning the work of architects and how architects relate to them in different structural realisations within specific and particular historical conditions. – The problem of time manifests itself most in the principles: there inheres in them a tendency, the propensity and inclination of the architects living and working in a particular place and time, and often then a conscious intent, deliberateness, presumed of course among persons of the highest order. Just as the principle itself depends on history, so too does the relationship between the principle and the individual architect who comes into contact with and in a unique way seizes hold of and expresses himself through it.’169 The early studies of Václav Richter can also be considered to have been influenced by Birnbaum’s teachings. Richter was probably the best known of Birn- baum’s students and the one most successful in the field. In the late 1920s he became an assistant to Birnbaum who sought to put his talented student to work.170 He therefore arranged for him an opportunity to work in the Museum of Applied Arts in Brno, where Richter ultimately remained for several years, after which he first joined the university in Olomouc and then in 1955 moved to the university in Brno.171 There, he and Albert Kutal (1904–1976) together ushered in another dynamic era in Czech art history, which is now known as the ‘Brno School of Art History’.172 At that time, in the second half of the 1950s, Richter turned from Birn- baum’s thought and embraced the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (1859– 1938) and especially his student Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). In addition to practising Kutal’s methods of formal analysis Richter adopted a theoretical-philosophical approach to art. He concerned himself with the interpretation of art and tried to delve into the existential-aesthetic nature of it.173 The theoretical grounding from which he set out, however, was the Vienna School of Art History as Birnbaum introduced it in Prague. Like Stefan, Richter was drawn by Birn- baum to the phenomenon of baroque architecture, and even in his early writings

124 Richter began subjecting the ostensibly simple premise of the ‘baroque principle’ to further inquiry.174 In 1944 he published what was probably his most thorough revision of Birnbaum’s baroque style,175 which Richter set within the context of theories by other European researchers and added the concept of architectural space to it. Richter, like Birnbaum, distinguished between the baroque as a historical style of art and the baroque as a certain principle of art, that is, ‘the baroque as action’.176 He ranked Birnbaum’s theory in the stream of formal art history and in contrast to ideas about the ‘spiritual’ experience of art, the main proponent of which he considered to be Max Dvořák. Richter wrote: ‘According to Birnbaum the baroque is the next stage in the development of the renaissance and the one in which the artist acquires greater freedom from all formally established aesthetic laws, from all strict rules established on a level outside the individual artist. Birnbaum probably regarded architecture from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as a late stylistic study of a subjective nature belonging to the objective renaissance. It is clear from what he goes on to show that all later periods of other styles are formally governed by the same formal principles as the baroque.’177 Richter developed his thinking about style in a different direction than Birn- baum, primarily by observing how the space of baroque architecture is created. Birnbaum did not consider the space of architecture, he always grasped it solely in terms of its ‘mass’: ‘...for me the form of an architectural interior is always the form of the mass that surrounds the room, never the form of the space that fills the room. Archi- tectural form, as something that my senses need, can only have a relationship to and be a part of something that is discernible to the senses, and this is true of mass not material, which I cannot see and only my mind can appreciate.’178 Richter, by contrast, studied baroque architecture through its treatment of space: ‘There is no question that the architecture of Borromini is certainly baroque, and that whole direction of Italian baroque that Birnbaum referred to as perspective baroque. This whole stream of baroque architecture was directed at an idea of infinite, boundless space.’179 Richter, possibly under Birnbaum’s influence, traced the role of the artist and the artist’s ‘spiritual’ investment in the process of creating artistic form: ‘The psy- chological side of baroque architecture expresses the subconscious irrational part of the subject, the architect’s creative work in the objectification process is aimed at expressing the inner experiences of human spirituality. This does not mean, however, that the spirit

125 of the artist, i.e. the conscious intellectual side of the personality, remains dormant. ... However, if spirit, that is, the rational side of being, was foregrounded in the renaissance, in the baroque it is subordinate to and assists in the expression of the irrational soul, whose stirrings are in the here and now.’180 Although Richter’s text still has echoes of Birnbaum’s thought, Richter drift- ed away from his teacher’s style of thinking and later he went on to embrace phenomenology. For this, however, he had to have a strong theoretical grounding and a relationship to art that understands art as the enduring creative and spiritual experience of a single individual, and all this he acquired from his background as a student of the ‘Birnbaum school’. These three students of Birnbaum, Vacková, Stefan and Richter, influenced by their teacher, focused on a ‘creative’ principle that exists in art and shapes the formal nature of a style. Their ideas share in common an attempt to identify the principles and foundations behind the creation of a work of art, an attempt that does not limit itself just to formal interpretations of art-historical material, but also seeks to grasp the essence of artistic creation, which is then also the essence of the actual ‘spiritual’ experience of artistic work and of how it is perceived. We can look at a ‘different’ stream of modern Czech art history in a similar light, one founded on an anthropological way of thinking about and experiencing a work of art aimed at identifying the spiritual bases of artistic creation conceived as enduring and free. Owing to its underlying tenets of intellectual freedom and experimentation and idea of essentially ‘experiencing’ art and individual works of art, this perspective on art and art history was pushed aside, and this was especially true after 1948 which it was spurned by the communist regime, which instead asserted a formal-analytical approach to describing material without delving into the spiritual aspects of works of art.181 A comparison can also be made with the work of other students of the Vienna School of Art History, such as Max Dvořák, with whom Birnbaum was friends,182 or Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984), who in the 1930s developed a new approach to art based on Riegl’s ‘Kunstwollen’ and drawing on the ideas of formal psychology.183 Dvořák did not formulate a single methodology of art history, but his writings suggest a ‘spiritual’ approach to art, where, following the ideas of Riegl, Wickhoff, and others, who focused mainly on the work of art, we are presented with the artist who creates the given work of art based on his spiritual impulses. It was from

126 this perspective that Dvořák explored changes in mediaeval and baroque art, but he was primarily interested in manifestations of mannerism, as the style that followed the renaissance in art and was built on a transformation in the spiritual perception of the surrounding world by the artist, which also had the effect of transforming artistic expression.184 In Birnbaum’s theory the individual behind the work of art also had an important role, but it was still more in the sense of the creator of a style of art who yields to its patterns and principles rather than moulding the style with his own creative powers. In Birnbaum’s concept the artist is the conclusion of a style, the one who creates its ‘baroque principle’, and is thus an autonomously acting individual, but is nonetheless rooted in the ‘objective’ stylistic patterns of art. Howev- er, it is possible to observe in his thoughts the beginnings of a turn in art history, that is, a shift in interest away from the formal study of works of art towards the artists themselves and a selective approach to art. Another similarity between Birnbaum’s and Dvořák’s way of thinking may be a phenomenon explored by them, where younger artists adopt the artistic frame of their predecessors and reshape it through their own interpretations based on the artist’s inner life. In this way, Dvořák, for example, formulated the principles of mannerism, as the starting point of the high Italian Renaissance, recasting the most of what they had to offer: Things‘ spiritual and material in the work of Pontormo no longer form the ideal of unity but rather of contrast, above natural observation the emphasis is on spiritual abstraction, a work of art that is based on more the internal ideas than on observed reality.’185 Birnbaum similarly articulated the basic premise of the ‘baroque principle’, the violation of ‘natural’ laws as ‘creative-artistic’ expression.186 Birnbaum writes that ‘I am only trying to show in brief to how strong a degree, how demonstratively here natural tectonic forms are fearlessly and unabashedly subordinate to a fermenting artistic idea, which we recognised for the baroque as thoroughly typical’.187 Dvořák thought similarly about the origin of baroque art: ‘...the objective material perspectives were subordinate to the spiritual subjective one that emerges from inner life.’188 In the 1930s Hans Sedlmayr, together with another student of the Vienna School of Art History, Otto Pächt (1902–1988), developed a new method based primarily on the ideas of Alois Riegl. He focused on individual works of art from which he was later able to derive more general conclusions.189 He elaborated on

127 Riegl’s concept of ‘Kunstwollen’ and created a new way of approaching art that was built on the exploration of the material in several steps: ‘Works of art ... must be re-created each time through a real process of reproduction out of the “external” data of the artifact that stands before us. This thing only possesses artistic properties when it is approached with an “artistic” attitude, and it only possesses specific artistic properties when it is seen in accordance with a specific attitude. If one alters one’s attitude or approach, the properties of the work of art are altered as well, even though the object itself remains unchanged; thus we construct the same object as a different work of art.’190 Birnbaum could have worked with Riegl’s principle of ‘Kunstwollen’ in the same way, only instead of transforming the principle of ‘Kunstwollen’ towards structural studies of individual works of art he attempted to generalise it to formulate the patterns and principles of artistic style as such. Even Sedlmayr’s thought reveals echoes of Riegl’s dichotomy of the ‘Kunstwollen’ of an artistic object in a manner that Birnbaum could have worked with in his distinction between ‘subjective Kunstwollen’ and ‘objective Kunstwollen’.191 Sedlmayr notes: ‘It would be a mistake to conclude from all of this that aesthetic products are entirely “subjective” entities. On the contrary: just as works of art are repeatedly re-created and formed anew by viewing subjects, each work of art is itself, in its totality, an objective reality, a separate object world that can be examined and accepted like any other concrete reality and that can be penetrated through contemplation or conceptualization.’192 All these and other observations that may arise from an interpretation of Birnbaum’s theory, that is, from an interpretation of his ‘principles’ and ‘patterns’ of art, would require further, separate study. The main question here remains whether the ideas Birnbaum developed during the early stages of Czech art history can shed light on an as yet unexplored and overlooked concept for understanding and researching art based on progressive theoretical and philosophical ideas from the early twentieth century. This approach to understanding and researching art did not just shape Birnbaum’s theoretical work, it also influenced his expert work in the field and in conservation and had an impact on his students working in the 1940s and the 1950s, who carried their teacher’s legacy further. Exploring Birnbaum’s reflections on art as a principle and pattern can therefore provide insight into a chapter of Czech art history that has yet to be given the attention it deserves.

128 Notes

1 There are a number of scholars who have devoted attention to Birnbaum’s theoretical writings, which are unique in early Czech art history, and the circumstances under which they were formulated, their underlying principles, and their influence on selected work by some of Birbaum’s students. In most cases, however, the subject has been dealt with only cursorily or as part of a larger compendium devoted to Czech art history as a whole. Birnbaum received the most attention from researchers in the late 1980s: in 1987 a short biography of Birnbaum was published, alongside profiles of other major figures in Czech art history, in a book titled Chapters from Czech Art History (Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění), in which Jiřina Hořejší wrote about Birnbaum’s life and the subjects he explored in his studies and university lectures. Also in 1987 an anthology of writings by Birnbaum was published with a lengthy foreword by Ivo Hlobil, who expanded on Hořejší’s observations. The first comprehensive publication of Birnbaum’s works, however, appeared in 1947 and was published in Czech as Pages from Art History (Listy z dějin umění) by Birnbaum’s former student and later his wife Alžběta Birnbaumová (1898–1967), who wrote a kind of memoir-like essay to accompany the collection. Since the early 1990s Birnbaum’s work has received rather more modest attention in research, given the view that this chapter of Czech art history is closed. Birnbaum more recently became the subject of renewed interest in a study by Petra Hečková in which she examines his relationship to one of his teachers, Franz Wickhoff (1853–1909), and his interest in the architecture of antiquity. In 2015, as part of celebrations marking one hundred years since the publication of Heinrich Wölfflin’s (1864–1945) ground-breaking art-historical study Kunstgeschitliche Grundbergriffe, Birnbaum’s The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture (Barokní princip v dějinách architektury) was the subject of an article written by Jindřich Vybíral. Several studies on Birnbaum’s theory of art history have been written by the author of this study. See Jiřina Hořejší, ‘Vojtěch Birnbaum’, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění II, Prague 1987, pp. 101–117. – Ivo Hlobil, ‘Vojtěch Birnbaum – Život a dílo v dobových souvislostech’, in: Vojtěch Birnbaum, Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Prague 1987, pp. 379–411. – Alžběta Birnbaumová, ‘Doslov’, in: Vojtěch Birnbaum, Listy z dějin umění, Prague 1947, pp. 339–341. – Jiřina Hořejší, ‘Birnbaum Vojtěch’, in: Anděla Horová (ed.) et al., Nová encyklopedie českého výtvarného umění I (A-M), Prague 1995, p. 72. – Petra Hečková, ‘Od Pantheonu k Vladislavskému sálu… Historiografická poznámka k vývoji konceptu pozdních slohových fází u Vojtěcha Birnbauma’, in: Klára Benešovská et al., Artem ad Vitam. Kniha k poctě Ivo Hlobila, Prague 2012, pp. 525–532. – Petra Hečková, Vojtěch Birnbaum a jeho stanovisko ve vědeckém sporu Orient oder Rom. Příspěvek k výzkumu pozdně antické architektury po roce 1900 (dissertation), Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, Palacký University, Olomouc 2009. – Jindřich Vybíral, ‘Birnbaum’s “Baroque Principle” and the Czech Reception of Heinrich Wölfflin’, Journal of Art Historiography, no. 13, December 2015. – Tomáš Murár, ‘“Kunstwollen”: The Transfer and Precarious Survival of An Artistic-Theoretical Concept in Czech Art History of the 20th Century’, Slovo a smysl. Časopis pro mezioborová bohemistická studia XII, no. 24, 2015, pp. 42–49. – Tomáš Murár, ‘Memoria et Monumentum: „Barokní princip“ Vojtěcha Birnbauma a „Podstata monumentality“ Antonína Engela’, Opuscula Historiae Artium LXIV, no. 2, 2015, pp. 108–121. 2 Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Barokní princip v dějinách architektury’, Styl V, 1924, pp. 71–85. – Idem, Idem, Prague 1924. – Idem, Idem, Prague 1941. – Idem, Idem, in: Listy z dějin umění, Prague 1947, pp. 209–237. – Idem, Idem, in: Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Prague 1987, pp. 24–46. 3 Vojtěch Birnbaum, Románská renesance koncem středověku, Prague 1924. – Idem, Idem, in: Listy z dějin umění, Prague 1947, pp. 191–208. – Idem, Idem, in: Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Prague 1987, pp. 9–23. 4 Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Doplněk k vývojovým zákonům?’, Památky archeologické II, 1932, pp. 1–2. – Idem, Idem, in: Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Prague 1987, pp. 47–50.

129 5 Jiřina Hořejší, ‘Vojtěch Birnbaum’, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění II, Prague 1987, pp. 101–117, cit. p. 102. 6 The ‘Vienna School of Art History’ established art history as an autonomous academic discipline in the late nineteenth century and was the defining voice in shaping the field’s direction and its methods until at least the middle of the twentieth century. The basic principles of the Vienna School of Art History included embracing art in its entirety and without issuing aesthetic judgements based on the parameters of contemporary taste deeming one or another artistic period as a period of decline, and, relatedly, requiring art historians to obtain a deeper understanding of the time (spirit) of whatever artistic period they were studying and to approach an object of art from the perspective of the period in which it originated. Another principle of this methodological school was for the researcher to work directly with the material; most members of the Vienna School of Art History were indeed employed in museums or archives. The ‘Vienna School’ also called for art historians to take a personal approach to research and demanded that art historians be able to ground their interpretations in the theory on which they based their research. Major figures from the Vienna School of Art History include Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg (1852–1885), Franz Wickhoff (1853–1909), Alois Riegl (1858–1905), Julius von Schlosser (1866–1938), Max Dvořák (1874–1921), Otto Pächt (1902–1988), Hans Seldmayr (1896–1984), and Ernst Hans Gombrich (1909–2001). See, e.g., Leopold D. Ettlinger, Wien und die Entwicklung der kunsthistorischen Methode, Wien 1984. – Edwin Lachnit, Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte und die Kunst ihrer Zeit: zum Verhältnis von Methode und Forschungsgegenstand am Beginn der Moderne, Wien 2005. – Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918, University Park, PA 2013. 7 See, e.g., Artur Rosenauer, ‘Giovanni Morelli und Franz Wickhoff’, Giovanni Morelli e la Cultura dei Conoscitori 2, 1993, pp. 359–370. – Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory, Cambridge 1993. 8 Ivo Hlobil, ‘Vojtěch Birnbaum – Život a dílo v dobových souvislostech’, in: Vojtěch Birnbaum, Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Prague 1987, pp. 379–411, cit. p. 383. 9 These studies touched on, among other issues, a question that was much discussed in Birnbaum’s day and in the literature was referred to as ‘Orient oder Rom?’, a debate sparked by a publication of the same title by Josef Strzygowski (1862–1941) from 1900. Strzygowski studied East European architecture and rejected Franz Wickhoff’s theory, published in 1895, that the influence of Roman art from the time of Augustus had proceeded through major eastern cities (Alexandria, Antioch, Byzantium) and from there back to early Christian art in Western Europe. At the heart of this debate was the question of the origin of the art, which appeared in Ravenna in the fifth and sixth century, in the culture of Western Christianity. Strzygowski saw its origin in the East, while Wickhoff – and Birnbaum slightly later on through his theory of the ‘baroque principle’ in architecture – defended its Roman origin. See, e.g., Josef Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom? Beiträge zur geschichte der Spätantiken und frühchristlichen Kunst, Leipzig 1900. – Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Západ nebo východ?’, Zprávy Volných směrů, 1919, pp. 49–53. 10 Vojtěch Birnbaum, Dům zvaný Livie na Palatině, Prague 1922. 11 Vojtěch Birnbaum, Ravennská architektura I/1. Její původ a vzory, Prague 1916. With this work he re-entered the debate over ‘Orient oder Rom?’ and concluding in favour of ‘Roman influence’ sought to bring it to an end. 12 Vojtěch Birnbaum, Ravennská architektura I/2. Její původ a vzory, Prague 1921. A third volume was planned, but was never published. Parts of the study have survived in Birnbaum’s papers. 13 Zdeněk Wirth et al., Dějepis výtvarného umění v Čechách, Prague 1931. 14 Other studies by Birnbaum on mediaeval architecture include Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Stavební povaha nejstarších českých bazilik’, Časopis přátel starožitností českých XXVII, 1919, pp. 1–22. – Idem, ‘Kostel sv. Kosmy a Damiána ve Staré Boleslavi’, Památky archeologické XXXII, 1920–1921, pp. 244–250. – Idem, ‘Románská Praha’, Ročenka Kruhu pro pěstování dějin umění za rok 1923, Prague 1924, pp. 1–24.

130 15 In the epilogue to Listy z dějin umění, Alžběta Birnbaumová comments that it was with reluctance that Birnbaum embarked on an academic career and that he did so primarily owing to financial difficulty. Ivo Hlobil, however, refutes this in the foreword he wrote to the second and expanded edition of a collection of Birnbaum’s writings, which includes a citation of a letter from Birnbaum to Josef Šusta, who began offering Birnbaum a career as a university professor in 1910. Birnbaum confided: ‘an academic career has never struck me as unappealing’. See Hlobil (note 8), pp. 385, 390–392. 16 Karel Srp, ‘Situace českého dějepisu umění ve dvacátých letech’, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění II, Prague 1987, pp. 71–100, cit. p. 71. 17 Josef Krása, ‘Karel Chytil’, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění I, Praha 1986, pp. 172–180, cit. p. 173. 18 Max Dvořák also studied in Vienna, but after several unsuccessful attempts to get a teaching position at the university in Prague he remained at Vienna University. Another student of the early Vienna School of Art History was Vincenc Kramář (1877–1960), who, however, never sought to teach but instead worked in galleries and devoted himself to theory and after the First World War developed his own method of art history. See, e.g., Jaroslav Pečírka, ‘Max Dvořák’, in: Max Dvořák, Umění jako projev ducha, Prague 1936, pp. 7–92. – Josef Krása, ‘Vincenc Kramář’, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění II, Prague 1987, pp. 118–125. 19 Birnbaum maintained long friendships with a number of prominent academics and especially with historian Jaroslav Goll (1846–1929), who was also his godfather, and who together with Birnbaum’s uncle, sculptor Bohuslav Schnirch (1845–1901), had a profound influence on Birnbaum’s professional career. Birnbaum was also a friend of historian and writer Josef Šusta (1874–1945) and was a fellow student of Vincenc Kramář in Vienna. He was also friends with Max Dvořák, who was an assistant professor at Vienna University when Birnbaum was studying there. After the First World War Birnbaum was also in touch with other prominent Czech art historians, either personally, or indirectly through their published work, including such figures as Antonín Matějček (whom Birnbaum worked with from 1927 at the university in Prague), Jaromír Pečírka, Josef Cibulka (under whose direction the Department of Christian Archaeology was founded, at Birnbaum’s initiative, in 1928), Václav Vilém Štech, and others. For more on the life and work of Vojtěch Birnbaum, see Hořejší (note 5) and Hlobil (note 8). 20 Comments from F. X. Šalda on his visit to Rome, where Birnbaum was his guide, suggest that this is the case. See the excerpts from F. X. Šalda’s essays from 1911: ‘Hadrian a starořímský barok’ and ‘Kouzlo Říma’. See Hlobil (note 8), p. 387. 21 The term ‘theoretical baroque’ can be applied to formal or conceptual elements or features of a work of art that are similar to those found in works embraced by the historical ‘baroque’ label. In this sense ‘baroque’ can be taken, for instance, to be an extent of expression manifested in a work of art or the visual representation of certain ideas behind spiritual elements within the work. This shifts what is defined as ‘baroque’ onto a theoretical level as something distinct from artistic period centred on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This distinction is the source of a theoretical problem that has been discussed in art-historical literature from the late nineteenth century up to the present day. See, e.g., Jan Białostocki, ‘“Barok”: styl, epoka, postawa’, in: Idem, Piec wiekow mysli o sztuce, Warsaw 1976, pp. 220–248. – Richard Biegel, ‘Barokní přelud v zrcadle věčného klasicismu. Diskuse o pojmu baroka ve francouzském dějepise umění’, Umění LV, 2007, pp. 109–110. – Helen Hills, ‘The Baroque: The Grit in the Oyster of Art History’, in: Eadem (ed.) et al., Rethinking the Baroque, Burlington 2011, pp. 11–38. – René Wellek, ‘Concept of Baroque in Literary Scholarship’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism V, no. 2, December 1946, pp. 77–109. – Angela Ndalianis, Neo-baroque Aesthetics and Contemporary Entertainment, Cambridge 2004.

131 22 Petr Wittlich, Literatura k dějinám umění. Vývojový přehled, Prague 2008, p. 100. 23 Vlasta Dvořáková, ‘Osvícenci a romantikové’, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění I, Prague 1986, pp. 42–43. 24 Klement Benda, ‘Jan Erazim Vocel’, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění I, Prague 1987, pp. 87–103. 25 Encyclopaedic or ‘who’s who’ type works were the most common, such as the works by Mikuláš Adaukt Voigt (1733–1787), František Martin Pelcl (1734–1801), and Jan Bohumír Dlabač (1758–1820). Mikuláš Adaukt Voigt and František Martin Pelcl both belonged to the first wave of the National Revival and between 1773 and 1777 they prepared and published a collection of historical biographies of 116 Czech scholars and artists: Effigies virorum eroditorum atque artificium Bohemiae et Moraviae( Portraits of Scholars and Artists in Bohemia and Moravia), to which prominent Czech nineteenth-century artists contributed as illustrators – for example, J. Q. Jahn and J. J. Balzer. The form of the publication was modelled on the type of biographic portraits first conceived by Giorgio Vasari (Giorgio Vasari, Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects; first published in Florence in 1550). Karel van Mander did something similar in northern Europe (see, e.g. Petr Wittlich, note 22). – Jiří Kroupa, Školy dějin umění. Metodologie dějin umění I, Brno 2007). Effigies mentions such artists as Škréta, Brandl, Hollar, Reiner, and Dientzenhofer. Such work was intended as a gesture of patriotism in the face of Germany and Austria, and prominent Czech artists were mentioned even if they belonged to what was considered the ‘dark age’, i.e. the years after the Battle of White Mountain, and the emphasis was placed on the significance of the body of artistic work they had left behind. In the course of twenty-eight years Jan Bohumír Dlabač collected information on Czech visual artists, writers and musicians published in a three-volume encyclopaedic dictionary written in German titled Allgemenies historisches Künstler-Lexikon für Böhmen and zum Theile auch für Mähren und Schleisen. See Dvořáková (note 23), pp. 35–74. 26 Jiří Rak and Vít Vlnas, ‘Druhý život baroka v Čechách’, in: Vít Vlnas (ed.) et al., Sláva barokní Čechie. Stati o umění, kultuře a společnosti 17. a 18. století, Prague 2001, p. 26. 27 For this reason the highest expression of the ‘neo-baroque’ in late nineteenth-century architecture was witnessed in cities with a German-speaking population – for example, Karlovy Vary. See Zdeněk Roubínek and Dana Roubínková, Historismus v architektuře Karlových Varů, Karlovy Vary 1996. 28 See, e.g., Jiří Hrůza, Pražská asanace. K 100. výročí vydání asanačního zákona pro Prahu, Prague 1993. 29 Alois Riegl, Der moderne Denkmalkultus. Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung, Wien – Leipzig 1903. 30 Max Dvořák, Katechismus der Denkmalpflege, Wien 1916. 31 See Jiří Roháček and Kristina Uhlíková (eds.), Zdeněk Wirth. Pohledem dnešní doby, Prague 2010. 32 See, e.g., Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Úprava pod Emauzy’, Česká kultura II, 1914, pp. 256–257 – Idem, ‘Památkářská idea’, Za starou Prahu. Věstník pro ochranu památek XIV, nos. 5–6, 1931, pp. 33–34. 33 See Lubomír Konečný, ‘Karel Boromejský Mádl’, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění I, Prague 1987, pp. 181–185. 34 Karel Boromejský Mádl, ‘Fresky u sv. Mikuláše na Malé Straně v Praze’, Památky archeologické a místopisné XVII, 1896–1897, pp. 17–24. – Idem, ‘Dílo Ferd. M. Brokofa’, Umění I, 1918–1921, pp. 24–54. – Idem, ‘Reinerovy fresky’, Umění I, 1918–1921, pp. 169–201. – Idem, ‘Dientzenhoferovský motiv’, Památky archeologické XXXII, 1920–1921, pp. 105–110. – Idem, ‘Socha Mat. B. Brauna’, Umění II, 1929, pp. 199– 207. 35 Rak and Vlnas (note 26), p. 30. 36 Zdeněk Wirth, ‘Barokní gotika v Čechách v XVIII. a I. polovici XIX. století’, Památky archeologické a místopisné XXIII, 1908–1909, pp. 121–155, 201–219.

132 37 Rak and Vlnas (note 26), p. 32. 38 Petr Wittlich, Sochařství české secese, Prague 2000. 39 See, e.g. Petra Hečková, Vojtěch Birnbaum a jeho stanovisko ve vědeckém sporu Orient oder Rom. Příspěvek k výzkumu pozdně antické architektury po roce 1900 (dissertation), Department of Art History, Faculty of Arts, Palacký University, Olomouc 2009. 40 See Luboš Hlaváček, ‘Antonín Matějček’, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění II, Prague 1987, pp. 152–160. 41 See Krása (note 17). 42 Francesco Milizia, Dizionario delle belle arti del disegno estratto in gran parte dalla Enciclopedia metodica, Bassano 1797, quoted from: Helen Hills, ‘The Baroque: The Grit in the Oyster of Art History’, in: Eadem (ed.) et al., Rethinking the Baroque, Burlington 2011, pp. 11–38, cit. p. 14. 43 Birnbaum was influenced by Riegl’s notion of the impartial and objective outlook of the art historian, who only explains and does not evaluate. Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Barokní princip v dějinách architektury’, in: Idem, Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Prague 1987, pp. 24–46, cit. p. 24: ‘Today, however, we are too steeped in historical sensibility and understanding and in a sense of historical justice and a certain evolutionary optimism to be able to admit that for almost three centuries humanity was lost and had no understanding of what real art is, or was evenly consciously cultivating a kind of pseudo-art.’ 44 The terms ‘temporal baroque’ and ‘directional baroque’ were coined by the Society of Friends of the Baroque (Společnost přátel baroka) that was part of Umělecká beseda in Prague, which themselves had Birnbaum’s Baroque Principle published through Vyšehrad Publishers in 1941. 45 For each of these types of ‘baroque’ he cited a typical example. For monumental baroque he chose Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) and understood monumental baroque as the earliest and founding example of baroque expression in Italy. For classical baroque he selected Andrea Palladio (1508–1580), whose ‘baroque’ aspect Birnbaum identified as lying in the way Palladio violated the rules of classical architecture that he had started out from. For perspective baroque, Birnbaum saw Francesco Borromini (1599–1667) as its chief representative; Birnbaum understood even the ‘directional baroque’ of the Italian baroque to be perspective baroque. 46 Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Barokní princip v dějinách architektury’, in: Idem, Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Prague 1987, pp. 24–46, cit. p. 37. 47 Birnbaum was not yet working with Max Dvořák’s concept of ‘mannerism’ to refer to sixteenth-century art. 48 Birnbaum (note 46), p. 38. 49 See Jan Royt and Jiří Kuthan, Katedrála svatého Víta, Václava a Vojtěcha. Svatyně českých patronů a králů, Prague 2011. Birnbaum himself disputed the year in which Peter Parler was supposed to have begun work on St Vitus Cathedral; see Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Kdy přišel Petr Parléř do Prahy?’, Umění II, 1929, pp. 51–56. 50 Birnbaum (note 46), p. 44. 51 Ibidem, p. 46. 52 Birnbaum used the most compelling argument in support of the rehabilitation of baroque art, which in the early twentieth century was Czech gothic art. By referring to the Czech late gothic as ‘baroque’ Birnbaum attempted to show that it is possible to observe principles that are similar to those in eighteenth-century art in art that dates from around three centuries earlier, so there is no justification for setting one artistic expression above another one. Birnbaum’s thinking on this was significantly influenced by his education in Vienna, both on a theoretical level in the notion rejecting the decline of styles of art, and on the level of the protection and conservation of artistic heritage. See Ivo Hlobil, Na základech konzervativní teorie české památkové péče, Prague 2008.

133 53 Birnbaum’s rehabilitation of the baroque is demonstrated in the more widespread interest in this period among later researchers. For example, in 1926 Eugen Dostál (1889–1943) wrote a study about baroque architecture in Prague that was published in Paris, London, New York, and Berlin (L’architecture baroque de Prague, 1926). Antonín Matějček, in his History of Art (Dějepis umění), published between 1922 and 1936, accepted Birnbaum’s theory in the section of this work devoted to baroque art, even though some residual negative evaluations of certain artists persisted. In 1934 an exhibition was organised on Albrecht von Wallenstein and his era, and in 1938 a large exhibition was organised in Prague titled Prague Baroque (Pražské baroko), one of the organisers of which was Alžběta Birnbaumová. In 1939 the Association of Friends of the Baroque for the Study of Baroque and Sacred Art (Sdružení přátel baroka pro studium barokního a církevního umění) was established as part of Umělecká beseda and was headed by Birnbaum’s student Oldřich Stefan (1900–1969). These and other figures laid the foundations of Czech post-war research on the baroque, which went on to produce valuable research especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Research on Czech baroque continued in the 1990s and the interest in baroque art has survived into the new millennium. See, e.g., Oldřich Stefan, ‘Příspěvky k dějinám české barokní architektury I–II’, Památky archeologické XXXV, 1926–1927, p. 79. – Oldřich Jakub Blažíček, Sochařství baroka v Čechách, Praha 1958. – Jaromír Neumann, Český barok, Prague 1974. – Pavel Preiss, Boje s dvouhlavou saní. František Antonín Špork a barokní kultura v Čechách, Praha 1981. – Jiří Kroupa, Alchymie štěstí. Pozdní osvícenství a moravská společnost 1770–1810, Kroměříž – Brno 1987. – Oldřich Jakub Blažíček et al., Dějiny českého výtvarného umění II/1+2. Prague 1989. – Ivo Krsek et al., Umění baroka na Moravě a ve Slezsku, Praha 1996. – Mojmír Horyna, Dientzenhoferové, Prague 1998. – Richard Biegel, Mezi barokem a klasicismem. Proměny architektury v Čechách a Evropě druhé poloviny 18. století, Prague 2013. – Pavel Preiss, Václav Vavřinec Reiner, Prague 2013. – Richard Biegel, Petr Macek and Jakub Bachtík (eds.) et al., Barokní architektura v Čechách, Prague 2015. 54 Vojtěch Birnbaum, Románská renesance koncem středověku, Prague 1924. 55 Vojtěch Birnbaum, Barokní princip v dějinách architektury, Prague 1941, p. 19. 56 Birnbaum (note 54), p. 5. 57 Ibidem, p. 6. 58 Ibidem. 59 Ibidem, pp. 13–16. 60 Birnbaum examines depictions of romanesque architecture in late-gothic and renaissance painting as attempts to depict historical events. According to Birnbaum, for sixteenth-century painters romanesque architecture became a marker of the historical depiction of an event that had taken place in the ‘distant’ past, where romanesque architecture was found. Birnbaum writes (note 54, pp. 28–30): ‘There is no question that these painters also believed in what they were painting, that they genuinely imagined structures from the past, from every era and every country, as built in a style that today we call romanesque … In this perspective it was a kind of universal style common to all people used from the very origin of humanity up until a time not too long past, when it was replaced by a new, contemporary style that today we call gothic.’ His interest was large focused on paintings of architecture, which in place of contemporaneous gothic or renaissance forms bore the features of romanesque structures. He illustrated this in the example of The Lord’s Offering by Netherlandish artist Rogier van der Weyden (circa 1455, as part of the Saint Columba Altarpiece), noting the wholly romanesque architectural interior in the right panel. In a painting by Pieter Bruegel the Younger, The Tower of Babel (1563), he interpreted the barrel vaults as representative of the romanesque style. He observed similar elements also in the work of Albrecht Dürer, Hans Holbein the Elder and Giotto.

134 61 For example, he points to the forms of the drying branches in the oratory of St Vitus Cathedral in Prague, or the complete omission of gothic forms, something that in Birnbaum’s view, was represented by the use of diamond vaults (for example, in the Church of the Assumption of Mary in Bechyně). 62 Birnbaum (note 54), p. 34. 63 Ibidem. 64 Birnbaum explained the Classical Renaissance’s interruption of the romanesque renaissance on the basis of the complete and comprehensive nature of the Italian Renaissance, with its rich and diverse array of decorative elements, along with the culture of humanism and its admiration of antiquity that emerged in the south. He notes also that otherwise it would have been possible to witness a ‘domestic’ renaissance, which would have attained the same results as the central European baroque. Birnbaum also drew attention to the revival of the romanesque renaissance in the nineteenth century, when it is possible to observe purely ‘neo- romanesque’ structures such as the Church of Ss Cyril and Methodius in Prague (1854–1863). Birnbaum (note 54), p. 36. 65 Birnbaum in this way explains the ‘Italian romanesque renaissance’, especially in the fourteenth century. In Birnbaum’s view, a big role was played in Italian art and architecture by Classical and early Christian art as well as the romanesque style. In the fourteenth century, when religious thought was still stronger than humanism, the romanesque style was, in Birnbaum’s view, ‘the style of the past’. However, it was soon replaced by the Classical Renaissance, in which humanism occupied a central place, and when architecture turned its attention to secular structures. An interesting work on this issue of the ‘renaissance’ is the much later study by Erwin Panofsky. See Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renascences in Western Art, New York 1960. The renaissance was first studied as a phenomenon with implications for society as a whole by Jacob Burckhardt. See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, London 2010. 66 Birnbaum (note 54), p. 44. 67 Ibidem. 68 Birnbaum argued that countries north of the Alps were already experiencing their first baroque periods in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, unlike in Italy, which first reached its baroque period in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, at which time the northern countries were also experiencing their ‘second baroque’ period. The Italian baroque consequently did draw from the gothic style, the way countries north of the Alps did in the late fifteenth and in the sixteenth century, but from the Classical renaissance in the fifteenth century that was caused by the ‘need for a renaissance’ and was initiated by the ‘romanesque renaissance’ in the fourteenth century. For Birnbaum, the ‘romanesque renaissance’ in the late Middle Ages was one of the starting points and stimuli of the baroque principle. 69 Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Doplněk k vývojovým zákonům?’, Památky archeologické II, 1932, 1–2. 70 Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Doplněk k vývojovým zákonům?’, in: Idem, Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Prague 1987, pp. 47–50, cit. p. 47. Birnbaum cites ‘temporally historical art’ as an exception, Egyptian, Mesopotamian, and Aegean art, which Birnbaum claimed each originated and developed within on geographical region. Birnbaum’s explanation for this is that the art of these ‘early historical nations’ was not yet complex enough in its development for it to be able to occur in one geographical region. According to Birnbaum, however, this phenomenon could not occur in the artistic development of later styles because of the complex transformation of forms from schematic to illusionistic. The very formulation of a ‘nation’ and its art is itself problematic, and is a much discussed issue in reference to Birnbaum’s theories. It is true that this question plays an important role in the ‘law of transgression’, but its influence on Birnbaum’s theory in its entirety is small, though not negligible. It is therefore necessary to bear in mind that this is a historical theory and opinion, with all the accompanying limitations.

135 71 Alois Riegl proposed a similar concept of the development of artistic form in 1893. See Alois Riegl, Stilfragen. Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik, Berlin 1893. 72 This view of the ‘development’ of baroque architecture has survived essentially to the present day. See, e.g., Rolf Toman et al., Baroque. Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, Berlin 2013. In reference to one artistic centre’s ‘loss of a style’ for another centre, Birnbaum could not refrain from commenting on ‘emotional’ assessments of these changes, and rejected interpretations based on external factors, such as political or economic factors. See Birnbaum (note 70), p. 48. He does not reject ‘emotion’ altogether in his research, but he does not regard it as crucial for the evaluation of art, which he claimed is subject to its own objective laws. 73 Birnbaum (note 70), p. 50. The matter of ‘emotion’ in the work of art history introduces a new element in this text that is not present in Birnbaum’s theoretical writings in 1924. This may be due to the influence of Alžběta Birnbaumová, as the question of ‘emotion’ in the work of art history was a frequent topic of discussion for them, as is apparent from letters among Birnbauam’s papers, which are now in the Masaryk Institute and the Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague. In the study this issue is articulated in the same way as it is in Birnbaum’s letters to Alžběta. For example, in A Supplement to the Developmental Laws? (Doplněk k vývojovým zákonům?) we can read (Birnbaum, note 70, pp. 48–49): ‘By this I am not claiming that emotion would or should be excluded from scientific work. I am on the contrary convinced that scientific work, like any other creative activity, has its deepest roots in the emotional foundation of human nature. This fact however manifests itself or should do so only in elementary relations, in the relation to the material and the choice of material, in the joy of work, and in the effort to achieve the goal that is the struggle for true knowledge. ... The performance of my profession once I have set out in pursuit of my scientific objectives is a different matter. Emotional leanings have no place there whatsoever and can only be damaging, as they muddy the waters of exact learning and distort the objective observation of reality that I have been called to perform by that basic human sensibility for truth.’ A similar pedagogical tone can be observed in his letters; for example, in a letter from 1924, where Birnbaum reproached Alžběta for her negative appraisal of gothic architecture and her disgruntled mood during a trip to Paris (a letter from Vojtěch to Alžběta, 10 August 1924, collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box IIa, Personal correspondence, Birnbaumová, Alžběta, Masaryk Institute and the Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague): ‘Since when does one travel to historical cultural lands to criticise and compile impressions? You, my dear girl, are too self-important. Do you think that you can take on and argue with a nation so great and brilliant – the most brilliant since antiquity, do not forget – that influenced the work of so many generations. ... So, no judging, no evaluations based on what it subjectively seems like to me. ... Be more humble, my dear girl, admit that you simply do not have a right to your own impressions, your own feelings, in short, your own subjectivity, in the face of something so grand, and try rather to understand and make sense of it.’ For Alžběta this struggle between the ‘emotional’ side and ‘objective’ reason intensified in the late 1920s and especially in the 1930s. In one letter she describes herself as an ‘emotional being’ compared to Vojtěch and his rational nature (a letter from Alžběta to Vojtěch, 15 July 1928, collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box IIa, Personal correspondence, Birnbaumová, Alžběta, Masaryk Institute and the Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague ): ‘I am intellectually weaker than you are, than are many people around me. Conversely, my emotional, observational, perceptive powers are so strong that I could not in good conscious entirely quash or suppress them. It would certainly be well within my strength to do so. But – what would then remain of me, whom you know as a happy, sensitive, playful, spirited being always marvelling at things, what would then remain of me if I were to force a scientific rigour of ascetic strictness on myself? Nothing. Because my intellect is not the fundamental component of my being, as it is with you, you who draw from that part of you, from your rational mind, from your very self, without any external assistance, everything that those of us around you so admire and by which you establish your position for today and tomorrow.’

136 74 Birnbaum (note 70), p. 49. 75 Ibidem. 76 Ibidem. 77 Ibidem, p. 50. 78 Ibidem. 79 Meyer Schapiro, ‘Style’, in: Alfred L. Kroeber (ed.), Anthropology Today. An Encyclopaedic Inventory, Chicago 1953, p. 287. 80 See e.g., Ernst Hans Gombrich, ‘Style’, in: David L. Sills (ed.), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, vol. 15, New York 1968, pp. 353–361. – James S. Ackerman, ‘A Theory of Style’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism XX, no. 3, Spring 1962, pp. 227–237. 81 For a deeper understanding and a formulation of what a ‘law’ is, see, e.g., Scott Shapiro, Legality, Cambridge 2011. 82 Birnbaum (note 46), p. 32. 83 Birnbaum himself was uncertain about calling it a law of transgression. 84 Birnbaum speaks of the ‘baroque of the renaissance’, by which he means a stage that is today referred to as mannerism. Birnbaum (note 46), p. 44. 85 Birnbaum illustrates this through the example of the twelfth-century romanesque style, which was interrupted by the gothic style before reaching its own stage of the ‘baroque principle’. This too could be understood as what motivated the ‘renaissance’ of the romanesque style at the end of the fifteenth century, as the twelfth- century romanesque style was never able to fulfil all its expressive artistic potential. However, as suggested, this attempt at a romanesque baroque was unsuccessful, which was owing to the focus on the Classical Renaissance instead of the romanesque renaissance. 86 See Franz Wickhoff, Die Wiener Genesis, Wien 1895. 87 Alois Riegl, Stilfragen. Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik, Berlin 1893. – Idem, Spätromische Kunstindustrie, Wien 1901. – Idem, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, Wien 1931. 88 For example, Riegl’s theory of ‘Kunstwollen’ was interpreted, on one hand, by Hans Sedlmayr (1896–1984) as the departure point for a structural-formal interpretation of a work of art in the early 1930s, while in the same period Erwin Panofsky (1892–1968) saw in this term a springboard for his own research in iconography. See Hans Sedlmayr, Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls und Bibliographie der Schriften Alois Riegls, Wien 1929, pp. xviii–xx. – Erwin Panofsky, Der Begriff des Kunstwollens, Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 1920, pp. 321–339. See also Richard Woodfield (ed.) et al., Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, Amsterdam 2001. 89 Christopher S. Wood, ‘Introduction’, in: Idem (ed.): The Vienna School Reader, New York 2000, p. 10. 90 Ibidem. 91 Alois Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, Wien 1931, p. 4. Here cited from: Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, Los Angeles 1999, p. 63. 92 See Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen Kunsten oder praktische Asthetik: Ein Handbuch fur Techniker, Kunstler und Kunstfreunde, München 1879. – Harry Francis Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper. Architect of the Nineteenth Century: A Personal and Intellectual Biography, New Haven 1996. 93 See, e.g., Alois Riegl, ‘Naturwerk und Kunstwerk’, in: Idem, Gesammelte Aufsätze, Wien 1996, pp. 9–62. See also Margaret Iversen, ‘Riegl gegen Semper’, Daidalos, no. 29, 1988, pp. 46–49. The conception of art history as the history of the spirit reached its notional climax in the work of Riegl’s student at Vienna University, Max Dvořák. See Max Dvořák, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte, München 1928. 94 Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface. Alois Riegl and the Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de- siécle Vienna, Detroit 2006, p. 154.

137 95 Ibidem, p. 158. 96 This interpretation of ‘Kunstwollen’ can also explain the interest of different periods in various other artistic stages, such as the rediscovery of mannerism in the early twentieth century. 97 In this context one could speculate that ‘Kunstwollen’ also influenced the values of heritage and conservation formulated by Riegl. See Riegl (note 29). 98 Birbaum’s Vienna training, where every interpretation should be grounded in theory, is in evidence here. In this respect it is interesting to compare Birnbaum’s ideas from the 1920s and 1930s with the ideas of the ‘Younger Vienna School of Art History’ and its foremost representative Hans Sedlmayr from the same period. See Wood (note 89). 99 In relation to Riegl’s ‘Kunstwollen’ and Birnbaum’s ‘baroque principle’, see Tomáš Murár, ‘“Kunstwollen”: The Transfer and Precarious Survival of an Artistic-Theoretical Concept in Czech Art History of the 20th Century’, Slovo a smysl. Časopis pro mezioborová bohemistická studia XII, no. 24, 2015, pp. 42–49. 100 Heinrich Wölfflin, Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst, München 1915. 101 Jindřich Vybíral, ‘Birnbaum’s “Baroque Principle” and the Czech Reception of Heinrich Wölfflin’,Journal of Art Historiography, no. 13, December 2015, pp. 1–13 (online). 102 Ibidem, p. 9. 103 Ibidem, pp. 7, 9–11. 104 The markers of classicism Wölfflin defined are: ‘linear’ and ‘planar’ qualities, ‘multiplicity’, ‘closed form’, and ‘clarity’. He contrasted these with the markers of baroque: ‘painterly’ and ‘recessional’ quality, ‘unity’, ‘open form’, and a comparative ‘lack of clarity’. 105 In this respect Wölfflin’s work was an inspiration even beyond the confines of art history. See, e.g., Wellek (note 21). 106 H. Wölfflin can be considered one of the founding figures of new research on the baroque, which was studied alongside and after him also by Wylie Sypher (interpreting baroque art according to its strong haptic quality), Walter Friedlaender (who believed that gothic, renaissance, and baroque were too broad terms and that it is impossible to embrace in a single term an entire stage, which changes significantly with approximately every two generations), Luigi Grassi (distinguishing between ‘baroque’ as a noun and ‘baroque’ as an adjective, each of which refers to a different form of expression in art), and others. 107 Wölfflin worked with the at that time influential ‘theory of empathy’ (Wölfflin was probably most influenced by the theory of Robert Vischer), a subject he dealt with in his dissertation. This theory could be described as the projection of an internal physical state into an inanimate object which then determines the interpretation of the object (architecture, painting, sculpture). This means interpreting artistic objects on the basis of the feelings these objects evoke in the observer. See Heinrich Wölfflin, Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur, Munich 1886. – Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New York 1983. 108 Vybíral (note 101), pp. 11–12. 109 Henri Focillon, Vie des Formes, Paris 1934. 110 As art history was described, for example, by the ‘Berlin School’ of art history. See, e.g., Franz Kugler, Handuch der Kunstgeschichte, Stuttgart 1842. 111 Henri Focillon, The Life of Forms in Art, Cambridge 1996, p. 140. 112 Ibidem, p. 130. 113 Henri Focillon, Život tvarů, Prague 1936. 114 Henri Bergson’s influence on the thought of Henri Focillon was researched by Walter Cahn or Willibald Sauerländer. See Walter Cahn, ‘Schapiro and Focillon‘, Gesta XLI, no. 2, 2002, pp. 129–136. – Willibald

138 Sauerländer, ‘En face des Barbares et à l’ecart des devots: L’humanisme medieval d’Henri Focillon’, in: Idem, Romanesque Art: Problems and Monuments II, 2004, pp. 850–867, 890. 115 See, e.g., Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde, Princeton 1993. 116 For an interpretation of Bergson’s philosophy, see, e.g., Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonisms, New York 1991. 117 See, e.g., Robert C. Grogin, The Bergsonian Controversy in France 1900–1914, Calgary 1988. 118 Tomáš Chudý, ‘Myšlenkový svět “Dvou zdrojů”’, in: Henri Bergson, Dva zdroje morálky a náboženství, Prague 2007, p. 237. 119 ‘Élan vital’, one of Bergson’s basic concepts, can be interpreted as ‘the principle of life as a metaphysical phenomenon’. Chudý (note 118), p. 237. 120 Henri Bergson, L’evolution creatrice, Paris 1907. 121 Despite the great influence Henri Bergson’s philosophy had at the start of the twentieth century, Birnbaum’s ideas were never examined in relation to Bergson’s thought, with the exception of one note by Karel Srp in 1987. It is also interesting that Birnbaum presented his theory of the ‘baroque principle’ for the first time in 1919 in the Circle of Friends of Art (Kruh přátel umění) in Prague, when the Czech translation of Bergson’s L’évolution créatrice was published. It is also important to note that the ideas of Henri Bergson explored in this study are drawn from translated works that Vojtěch Birnbaum could thus have been familiar with. On the basis of archive research it is possible to surmise that, while fluent in German and Italian, Birnbaum did not have a mastery of French. See Srp (note 16), p. 78, note 33. See also Vybíral (note 101), p. 9. – Henri Bergson, Komika charakteru, Prague 1916. – Henri Bergson, Vývoj tvořivý, Prague 1919. – Henri Bergson, Duše a tělo, Prague 1927. 122 Bergson was already looking at the relationship between the external (objective) and the internal (subjective) in his earliest writings. 123 Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, London 2001, p. 224. 124 Henri Bergson, Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic, London 2003. Online (http://intersci.ss.uci. edu/wiki/eBooks/BOOKS/Bergson/Laughter%20Bergson.pdf), retrieved 18 January 2017. 125 Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution, New York 2008, p. x. Online (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/26163/26163- h/26163-h.htm#Page_1), retrieved 2 January 2017. 126 Ferdinand Pelikán, ‘Henry Bergson, jeho život a dílo’, in: Henry Bergson, Vývoj tvořivý, Prague 1919, p. XII: ‘...“common sense” (bon sens) is a point of view that we usually follow in practical activities, it reveals our inner life to us from an entirely different, practical perspective. ... This simple, superficial, and rather confused faith in naïve realism and common sense forces us to understand things in only a cursory point of view and the result is that the individual nature of the thing usually escapes our notice.’ 127 He addresses this in more detail in his later work Matter and Memory. See Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, London 1911. 128 Bergson (note 125), p. 2. 129 Ibidem, p. 5. 130 Deleuze (note 116), p. 94. 131 Bergson (note 125), p. 6. 132 Ibidem, p. 31. 133 Ibidem, p. 30. 134 Ibidem, p. 27. 135 Ibidem, pp. 28-29. 136 Ibidem, p. 6. 137 Ibidem.

139 138 Birnbaum (note 46), p. 27. 139 See Bergson (note 127). For more on the relationship between ‘memory’ and Birnbaum’s ‘baroque principle’, see Tomáš Murár, ‘Memoria et Monumentum: „Barokní princip“ Vojtěcha Birnbauma a „Podstata monumentality“ Antonína Engela’, Opuscula Historiae Artium LXIV, no. 2, 2015, pp. 108–121. 140 Bergson (note 125), p. 6. 141 Ibidem, p. 17. 142 Deleuze (note 116), p. 94. 143 Birnbaum did so even though he did not subscribe to these definitions, deeming them inadequate, especially in the case of the term ‘baroque’. He commented for instance (Birnbaum, note 46, p. 44): ‘It is in the first place clear that if the historical character of baroque as I have proposed it is correct, then to limit this term and concept to just art from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, thus to just one of the baroques, does not reflect the true state of things. That baroque should be referred to as the renaissance baroque, alongside which there are also the gothic, Roman-Hellenic, and early Christian baroques, and perhaps others as well. The very name baroque, with its pejorative flavour, in no way corresponds to the true nature of this shade of style, which, on the contrary, would deserve an altogether different name, one that rings with acknowledgement and outright admiration. I say this not so that I should propose something new and overturn conventions that are too well established, but rather to better illustrate my concept with this detail.’ 144 Ibidem. 145 See, e.g., Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Kostel sv. Kosmy a Damiána ve Staré Boleslavi’, Památky archeologické XXXII, 1920–1921, pp. 224–250. – Idem, ‘Z minulosti Tyršova domu’, Sokolský věstník XXV, 1923, pp. 710–712. – Idem, ‘Původní průčelí kostela P. Marie Vítězné na Malé Straně’, Památky archeologické XXXIV, 1924–1925, pp. 219–221, etc. 146 See, e.g., Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Moderní péče o památky a dostavění chrámu svatovítského’, Národní listy LXIV, no. 27 (27 January 1924), p. 9 and no. 33 (2 February 1924), p. 11. – Idem, ‘Umístění statní galerie na Kampě’, Lidové noviny XXXV, no. 333 (3 July 1927), p. 14. – Idem, ‘Má být Karlův most osazen novým sousoším?’ (survey), Literární noviny V, no. 4, 1931, pp. 1–2 (response from V. Birnbaum), etc. 147 Ivo Hlobil, ‘Poznámky k osobnímu a názorovému vztahu Vojtěcha Birnbauma a Růženy Vackové’, Zprávy Klubu Za starou Prahu, no. 1, 1997, pp. 64–67, cit. p. 66. 148 See, e.g., Jarmila Vacková, ‘Škola Vojtěcha Birnbauma’, Zprávy Klubu Za starou Prahu, no. 1, 1997, pp. 68–72. On the concept of a ‘Birnbaum school’, Pavel Preiss wrote: ‘In the true sense of the word there were very few students. The core of them was formed by just three – Oldřich Stefan, who has already received his deserved attention as a successor to Birnbaum, Václav Richter, who has been almost lionised with attention that also assessed his link to Birnbaum, and Růžena Vacková, who by her capacity to carry Birnbaum’s theories to the most extreme realisation of their theologisation was unquestionably his truest and most authentic student.’ See Pavel Preiss, ‘Doctissima a Birnbaumova škola’, Zprávy Klubu Za starou Prahu, no. 1, 1997, pp. 76–79, cit. pp. 76–77. 149 In addition to the closeness of Birnbaum’s and Vacková’s ideas, mention is also made of the close emotional relationship, which came to an abrupt end in 1924. As Ivo Hlobil notes (note 147, p. 64): ‘As is known, an intimate relationship formed between the two. In early 1924 it was suddenly terminated. It is said that the reason was V. Birnbaum’s later wife, allegedly very adept and financially well off, Alžběta Breindlová. Although the initiative in this clearly came from R. Vacková.’ Pavel Preiss mentions Vacková and Birnbaum in his memoirs: ‘It is no secret that she was Vojtěch Birnbaum’s favourite student and he loved her very much. Various memoirs and essays prepared for events of the Club for Old Prague (Klub Za starou Prahu) contain recollections that suggest that Birnbaum could not marry her primarily because there was a great age difference between them.’ See Pavel Preiss, Na co si ještě vzpomenu, Prague 2012, p. 41.

140 150 On this subject, see, e.g., Věra Ptáčková, ‘Drama života a díla Růženy Vackové’, Časopis o divadle I, 1986– 1989, pp. 306–321. – Josef Zvěřina, ‘Zadlužený život’, in: Růžena Vacková, Věda o slohu, Prague 1993, pp. 151–154. – Josef Vojvodík, ‘Zastoupení a odpovědnost: „Absolutní passion“ Růženy Vackové’, in: Josef Vojvodík and Marie Langerová, Patos v českém umění, poezii a umělecko-estetickém myšlení čtyřicátých let 20. století, Prague 2014, pp. 80–115. On the life and work of Růžena Vacková, see, e.g., Růžena Vacková, Římské historické reliéfy, Prague 1936. – Eadem, Výtvarný projev v dramatickém umění, Prague 1948. – Eadem, Věda o slohu, Prague 1993. – Eadem, Ticho s ozvěnami: dopisy z vězení 1952–1967, Prague 1994. – Eadem, Vězeňské přednášky, Prague 1999. 151 Růžena Vacková, Věda o slohu, Prague 1993. 152 J. Vacková (note 148), p. 71. 153 R. Vacková (note 151), pp. 81–82. 154 J. Vacková (note 148), pp. 71–72. 155 R. Vacková (note 151), pp. 20–21. 156 See, e.g., Milan Pavlík, Prof. Ing. arch. Dr. Oldřich Stefan, Věstník Klubu Za starou Prahu XXX, 2000, http:// stary-web.zastarouprahu.cz/ruzne/stefan.htm, retrieved 17 August 2016. 157 His imprisonment under communism exhausted his strength. See Pavlík (note 156). 158 In 1938 a catalogue to the exhibition was published, the introduction to which was written by Oldřich Stefan. See Oldřich Stefan et al., Pražské baroko 1600–1800, Prague 1938. 159 See, e.g., Oldřich Stefan, ‘Příspěvky k dějinám české barokní architektury I–II’, Památky archeologické XXXV, 1926–1927, p. 468. 160 See, e.g., Oldřich Stefan, Sloh a architektura, Prague 1940. 161 Oldřich Stefan, O slohové podstatě centrálních staveb u Kil. Ign. Dienzenhofera, Prague 1928. 162 Ibidem, pp. 503–504. 163 Oldřich Stefan, ‘Plastický princip v české architektuře barokní na počátku 18. věku’, Umění VII, 1959, pp. 1–17. 164 Oldřich Stefan, ‘Barokní princip v české architektuře 17. a 18. století’, Umění VII, 1959, pp. 305–330. 165 Stefan observes for example the way cornices in Italian architecture are shaped, comparing the renaissance and baroque forms. He gets as far as Czech and Austrian architecture, to the high points of the ‘plastic principle’, thanks to which he assigns the most remarkable Czech baroque structures to Santini-Aichel (for example, the chapel in Smiřice, or the Church of St Margaret in Břevnov in Prague. Both structures are today attributed to Kryštof Dientzenhofer). He identifies the climax of the ‘plastic principle’ in the work of Kilián Ignác Dientzenhofer. 166 Stefan (note 163), pp. 7–8. 167 Ibidem, pp. 9–11. 168 Ibidem, pp. 10–11. 169 Stefan (note 164), p. 306. 170 This is apparent from the letters found among Birnbaum’s papers; a letter from Václav Richter to Vojtěch Birnbaum, 9 June 1927, collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box IIb, Personal correspondence, M–Ř, Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences: ‘Illustrious professor, allow me first to thank you warmly for your willingness to hire me for the post of assistant. As regards to my plans, they are not altogether clear. If, however, the post in Brno were to become available, I think that I should take it. In part because I am expected there, and also because if at some time I am to enter the museum it would be better for me if I were to be there earlier, because there is no doubt that initially the work there will not be particularly interesting, and finally because the conditions in Brno are such that finally something could be done there consistent

141 with your school of thought, Professor Birnbaum. However, if such a decision could cause even the slightest conflict, please be so kind, Professor Birnbaum, and tell me, as I am not entirely set on the position in Brno. I nonetheless have justified fears that I shall cause you only further trouble with my plans and I ask you to kindly forgive me for them. I can only apologise by saying that matters did not develop as I had originally hoped.’ 171 J. Vacková (note 148), p. 71. 172 See, e.g., Jiří Kroupa and Lubomír Slavíček et al., Almanach 1927–1997: Sedmdesát let Semináře dějin umění Masarykovy univerzity v Brně, Brno 1997. – Jiří Kroupa, Metody dějin umění: Metodologie dějin umění II, Brno 2010. 173 See, e.g., Václav Richter, Umění a svět, Prague 2001. 174 Václav Richter, ‘Vývojové principy v dějinách výtvarného umění’, Akord, no. 7, 1934, pp. 6–7. – Václav Richter, ‘Barokní prvky v pozdně románské architektuře’, Akord, no. 1, 1935, pp. 4–8. 175 Václav Richter, O pojem baroka v architektuře, Olomouc 1944. 176 Ibidem, p. 5. 177 Ibidem, p. 15. 178 Vojtěch Birnbaum, ‘Prostor v architektuře’, in: Idem, Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Prague 1987, pp. 66–67, cit. p. 66. 179 Richter (note 175), p. 20. 180 Ibidem, p. 22. 181 An exception may be the work of Václav Richter, who later devoted thought to similar problems in a phenomenological sense. However, he did this only in his seminars and for political reasons never published his philosophical reflections. 182 As indicated from their correspondence, located in the Masaryk Institute and the Archive of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Birnbaum and Dvořák got to know each other while they were students in Vienna, where at the university Max Dvořák worked as the assistant professor. 183 He worked in particular with the theories of Max Wertheimer (1880–1943). See, e.g., Max Wertheimer, Über gestalttheorie, Erlagen 1925. – Brett King, Max Wertheimer and Gestalt Theory, New Brunswick 2005. 184 See Max Dvořák, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte, München 1928. – Idem, Geschichte der italienischen Kunst im Zeitalter der Renaissance, München 1927–1929. 185 Max Dvořák, Umění jako projev ducha, Prague 1936, p. 168. 186 It is of course possible to consider, akin to the comparison of Birnbaum’s and Focillon’s theories through their common foundation in the thought of Henri Bergson, that Dvořák’s and Birnbaum’s thoughts could also have a common origin in the thought of their teacher, Alois Riegl. 187 Birnbaum (note 46), p. 41. 188 Dvořák (note 185), p. 170. 189 See, e.g., Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Die „Macchia“ Brueghels’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien / Kunsthistorische Sammlungen des Allerhochsten Kaiserhauses Wien, 1934, pp. 137–160. – Otto Pächt, ‘Das Ende der Abbildtheorie’, Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur, 1930–1931, pp. 1–9. 190 Hans Sedlmayr, ‘Towards a Rigorous Study of Art’, in: Wood (note 89), p. 144. 191 The figure of Hans Sedlmayr is himself problematic, as in 1930–1932 and 1938–1942 he was a member of the National Socialist Party. See, e.g., Friedrich Stadler, ‘The Emigration and Exile of Austrian Intellectuals’, in: Friedrich Standler and Peter Weibel (eds.), The Cultural Exodus from Austria, New York 1995, pp. 14–26. – Jonathan Petropoulos, The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany, New York, 2000. 192 Sedlmayr (note 190), p. 145.

142 143 Výběrová bibliografie / Selected Bibliography

Knihy a články Vojtěcha Birnbauma / Books and Articles by Vojtěch Birnbaum

De templo Nazianzeno a Gregorio Theologo descripto, Eos XIII, 1907, s. / pp. 30–39 Rozhledy po antické architektuře, Styl III, 1911, s. / pp. 217–249 O architektuře doby starokřesťanské, Styl IV, 1912, s. / pp. 235–265 Románský sloh v Itálii a Německu, Styl V, 1913, s. / pp. 243–277 Vitruvius und die griechische Architektur, Wien 1914 Filiální kostel sv. Jakuba ve sv. Jakubě, in: Umělecké poklady Čech II, 1915, s. / pp. 28–29 Ravennská architektura I/1. Její původ a vzory, Praha 1916 Západ nebo Východ?, Zprávy Volných směrů, 1919, s. / pp. 49–53 O malebnosti v architektuře, Styl I, 1920, s. / pp. 47–54 Ravennská architektura I/2. Její původ a vzory, Praha 1921 K diskuzi o barevnou architekturu, Styl II, 1922, s. / p. 6 Dům zvaný Livie na Palatině, Praha 1923 Románská renesance koncem středověku, Praha 1924 Barokní princip v dějinách architektury, Styl V, 1924, s. / pp. 71–85 Moderní péče o památky a dostavění chrámu svatovítského, Národní listy LXIV, 1924, č. / no. 27, s. / p. 9; č. / no. 33, s. / p. 11 Původní průčelí kostela P. Marie Vítězné na Malé Straně, Památky archeologické XXXIV, 1925, s. / pp. 219–221 Architektura románská a gotická, in: Československé umění, Praha 1926, s. / pp. 5–10 Umístění státní galerie na Kampě, Lidové noviny XXXV, 1927, č. / no. 333, s. / p. 14 Anketa proti zbourání řady domů v Praze I, Ovocný trh, pro novostavbu české banky Union, Za starou Prahu. Věstník pro ochranu památek XII, 1928, s. / pp. 2–4 Kdy přišel Petr Parléř do Prahy?, Umění II, 1929, s. / pp. 51–56 K datování portrétní galerie v triforiu chrámu svatovítského, in: Od pravěku k dnešku. Sborník prací z dějin československých k šedesátým narozeninám Josefa Pekaře, Praha 1930, s. / pp. 233–253 Památkářská idea, Za starou Prahu. Věstník pro ochranu památek XIV, 1931, č. /nos. 5–6, s. / pp. 33–34 Doplněk k vývojovým zákonům?, Památky archeologické II, 1932, s. / pp. 1–2 Tyrš jako teoretik umění, in: Tyršův sborník XIV, 1932, s. / pp. 5–14 Budova a pomník. K umístění Smetanova pomníku u Národního divadla, České slovo XXV, 1933, č. / no. 252, s. / p. 7

Literatura o Vojtěchu Birnbaumovi / Literature on Vojtěch Birnbaum Alžběta Birnbaumová, Doslov, in: Vojtěch Birnbaum, Listy z dějin umění, Praha 1947, s. / pp. 339–341 Ivo Hlobil, Vojtěch Birnbaum – Život a dílo v dobových souvislostech, in: Vojtěch Birnbaum, Vývojové zákonitosti v umění, Praha 1987, s. / pp. 379–411 Jiřina Hořejší, Vojtěch Birnbaum, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění II, Praha 1987, s. / pp. 101–117

144 Jiřina Hořejší, Birnbaum Vojtěch, in: Anděla Horová (ed.) et al., Nová encyklopedie českého výtvarného umění I (A- M), Praha 1995, s. / p. 72 Ivo Hlobil, Poznámky k osobnímu a názorovému vztahu Vojtěcha Birnbauma a Růženy Vackové, Zprávy Klubu Za starou Prahu, č. / no. 1, 1997, s. / pp. 64–67 Dobroslav Líbal: Vojtěch Birnbaum – umělecký historik a památkář, Zprávy Klubu Za starou Prahu, č. / no. 1, 1997, s. / pp. 57–63 Pavel Preiss, Doctissima a Birnbaumova škola, Zprávy Klubu Za starou Prahu, č. / no. 1, 1997, s. / pp. 76–79 Jarmila Vacková, Škola Vojtěcha Birnbauma, Zprávy Klubu Za starou Prahu, č. / no. 1, 1997, s. / pp. 68–72 Petra Hečková, Vojtěch Birnbaum a jeho stanovisko ve vědeckém sporu Orient oder Rom. Příspěvek k výzkumu pozdně antické architektury po roce 1900 (disertační práce / dissertation), Katedra dějin umění FF UP, Olomouc 2009 Petra Hečková, Od Pantheonu k Vladislavskému sálu… Historiografická poznámka k vývoji konceptu pozdních slohových fází u Vojtěcha Birnbauma, in: Klára Benešovská et al., Artem ad Vitam. Kniha k poctě Ivo Hlobila, Praha 2012, s. / pp. 525–532 Petra Hečková: Římská antika ve studiích Miroslava Tyrše a Vojtěcha Birnbauma, in: Naše Itálie. Stará i mladá Itálie v české kultuře 19. století, Praha 2012, s. / pp. 419–432 Tomáš Murár, Memoria et Monumentum: „Barokní princip“ Vojtěcha Birnbauma a „Podstata monumentality“ Antonína Engela, Opuscula Historiae Artium LXIV, č. / no. 2, 2015, s. / pp. 108–121 Tomáš Murár, „Kunstwollen“: The Transfer and Precarious Survival of An Artistic-Theoretical Concept in Czech Art History of the 20th Century, Slovo a smysl. Časopis pro mezioborová bohemistická studia XII, č. / no. 24, 2015, s. / pp. 42–49 Jindřich Vybíral, Birnbaum’s “Baroque Principle” and the Czech Reception of Heinrich Wölfflin,Journal of Art Historiography, č. / no. 13, December 2015 (online)

Další literatura k tématu / Selected Literature on the Topic Heinrich Wölfflin,Prolegomena zu einer Psychologie der Architektur, Munich 1886 Alois Riegl, Stilfragen. Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik, Berlin 1893 Franz Wickhoff,Die Wiener Genesis, Wien 1895 Josef Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom? Beiträge zur geschichte der Spätantiken und frühchristlichen Kunst, Leipzig 1900 Alois Riegl, Spätromische Kunstindustrie, Wien 1901 Heinrich Wölfflin,Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Das Problem der Stilentwicklung in der neueren Kunst, München 1915 Henri Bergson, Vývoj tvořivý, Praha 1919 [Henri Bergson, L’evolution creatrice, Paris 1907] Erwin Panofsky, Der Begriff des Kunstwollens,Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 1920, s. / pp. 321–339 Hans Sedlmayr, Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls und Bibliographie der Schriften Alois Riegls, Wien 1929, s. / pp. xviii–xx Alois Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, Wien 1931 Max Dvořák, Umění jako projev ducha, Praha 1936 [Max Dvořák, Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte, München 1928] Henri Focillon, Život tvarů, Praha 1936 [Henri Focillon, Vie des Formes, Paris 1934] Václav Richter, O pojem baroka v architektuře, Olomouc 1944 Oldřich Stefan, Plastický princip v české architektuře barokní na počátku 18. věku, Umění VII, 1959, s. / pp. 1–17 Jan Białostocki, „Barok“: styl, epoka, postawa, in: Idem, Piec wiekow mysli o sztuce, Warszawa 1976, s. / pp. 220–248 Michael Podro, The Critical Historians of Art, New York 1983 Leopold D. Ettlinger, Wien und die Entwicklung der kunsthistorischen Methode, Wien 1984 Karel Srp, Situace českého dějepisu umění ve dvacátých letech, in: Rudolf Chadraba (ed.) et al., Kapitoly z českého dějepisu umění II, Praha 1987, s. / pp. 71–100

145 Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory, Cambridge 1993 Artur Rosenauer, Giovanni Morelli und Franz Wickhoff,Giovanni Morelli e la Cultura dei Conoscitori 2, 1993, s. / pp. 359–370 Růžena Vacková, Věda o slohu, Praha 1993 Richard Woodfield (ed.) et al.,Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, Amsterdam, 2001 Edwin Lachnit, Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte und die Kunst ihrer Zeit: zum Verhältnis von Methode und Forschungsgegenstand am Beginn der Moderne, Wien 2005 Michael Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface. Alois Riegl and the Dicsourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-siécle, Detroit 2006 Milena Bartlová, Continuity and Discontinuity in the Czech Legacy of the Vienna School of Art History, Journal of Art Historiography, č. / no. 8, June 2013 (online) Marta Filipová, Between East and West: The Vienna School and the Idea of Czechoslovak Art, Journal of Art Historiography, č. / no. 8, June 2013 (online) Matthew Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918, University Park, PA 2013 Jan Bakoš, Discourses and Strategies: The Role of the Vienna School in Shaping Central European Approaches to Art History and Related Discourses, Frankfurt 2014

146 Seznam vyobrazení / List of Figures

1. Vojtěch Birnbaum v pracovně, leden 1927, foto B. Vavroušek / Vojtěch Birnbaum in his study, January 1927, photo: B. Vavroušek MÚA AV ČR, AAV, fond Vojtěch Birnbaum, karton 20, foto č. 43 / collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box 20, photo no. 43 2. Vojtěch Birnbaum v Římě, 1907 / Vojtěch Birnbaum in Rome, 1907 MÚA AV ČR, AAV, fond Vojtěch Birnbaum, karton 20, foto č. 21 / collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box 20, photo no. 21 3. Vojtěch Birnbaum v době po publikování Barokního principu v dějinách architektury, 12. 1. 1926 / Vojtěch Birnbaum after The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture was published, 12 January 1926 MÚA AV ČR, AAV, fond Vojtěch Birnbaum, karton 20, foto č. 38 / collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box 20, photo no. 38 4. Vojtěch Birnbaum na rodinném setkání, 1926 / Vojtěch Birnbaum at a family gathering, 1926 MÚA AV ČR, AAV, fond Vojtěch Birnbaum, karton 20, foto č. 116 / collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box 20, photo no. 116 5. Svatební fotografie Vojtěcha Birnbauma a Alžběty Breindlové, 1926 / Wedding photograph of Vojtěch Birnbaum and Alžběta Breindlová, 1926 MÚA AV ČR, AAV, fond Vojtěch Birnbaum, karton 20, foto č. 119 / collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box 20, photo no. 119 6. Vojtěch Birnbaum s kolegy a žáky, 23. 6. 1923 / Vojtěch Birnbaum with his colleagues and students, 23 June 1923 MÚA AV ČR, AAV, fond Vojtěch Birnbaum, karton 20, foto č. 132 / collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box 20, photo no. 132 7. Vojtěch Birnbaum na exkurzi s žáky, kolem roku 1925 / Vojtěch Birnbaum on a field trip with his students, circa 1925 MÚA AV ČR, AAV, fond Vojtěch Birnbaum, karton 20, foto č. 135 / collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box 20, photo no. 135 8. Vojtěch Birnbaum na exkurzi s žáky, kolem roku 1925 / Vojtěch Birnbaum on a field trip with his students, circa 1925 MÚA AV ČR, AAV, fond Vojtěch Birnbaum, karton 20, foto č. 126 / collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box 20, photo no. 126 9. Barokní princip v dějinách architektury, rukopis, 1922–1923 / The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture, manuscript, 1922–1923 MÚA AV ČR, AAV, fond Vojtěch Birnbaum, karton 14, složka 2 / collection Vojtěch Birnbaum, box 14, file 2 10. Barokní princip v dějinách architektury, obálka knižního vydání z roku 1941 / The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture, cover of the book published in 1941 11. Románská renesance koncem středověku, obálka, 1924 / The Romanesque Renaissance at the End of the Middle Ages, cover, 1924 12. Ravennská architektura, 1916 / The Architecture of Ravenna, 1916 13. Sloupky v průjezdu vnitřní brány na zámku v Jindřichově Hradci (zdroj: Románská renesance koncem středověku, 1924) / Columns in the passage of the gate inside the castle in Jindřichův Hradec (source: The Romanesque Renaissance at the End of the Middle Ages, 1924) 14. Michelangelo, okno apsidy chrámu sv. Petra, Vatikán (zdroj: Barokní princip v dějinách architektury, 1941) / Michelangelo, window of the apse of St. Peter’s Basilica, Vatican City (source: The Baroque Principle in the History of Architecture, 1941)

147 Umění jako princip a zákonitost. K dějinám a metodologii umění Vojtěcha Birnbauma Art as a Principle and Pattern. Vojtěch Birnbaum’s Concept and Method of Art History Tomáš Murár

Předmluva / Foreword: Michael Gubser Odborný recenzent / Reviewer: Lubomír Konečný Výtvarné řešení schémat / Diagrams designed by: Lucie Krausová Redakce / Editor: Irena Lehkoživová Jazyková korektura / Proofreading : Lucie Rohanová Překlad / Translation: Robin Cassling Fotografické podklady / Photographs courtesy of: Masarykův ústav a Archiv AV ČR, v. v. i., a / and Archiv výtvarného umění, z. s. Grafická úprava / Graphic design: Carton Clan Tisk / Printed by: Janova dílna, Třebestovice Vydal / Published by Archiv výtvarného umění, z. s., Kostelec nad Černými lesy, 2017 Vydání první / First edition ISBN 978-80-905744-7-2