Glasgow Colloquium Abstracts for Viennese Art Historiography Colloquium in Glasgow 2nd and 3rd October 2009 Location: Department of the History of Art, The University of Glasgow Contact:
[email protected] Max Dvořák, Wilhelm Worringer and the History of Medieval Art Hans Aurenhammer (Frankfurt) The intellectual development of Max Dvořák (1874-1921), one of the chief protagonists of the so- called ‘Vienna School of Art History’, was characterized by a constant process of methodological revision, self-criticism and adaptation to the current tendencies of modern art. With regard to the study of medieval art this process is known above all by his two main published texts on this subject: The Enigma of the Art of the Van Eyck Brothers (1904), strongly influenced by the evolutionist thinking of Wickhoff and Riegl and by an ‘impressionistic’ view of modernity, and Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Sculpture and Painting (1918), one of the most important essays of Dvořák’s late, ‘expressionistic’, period. Knowing only these two texts, the decisive turn undertaken by Dvořák around 1920 could be interpreted as a sudden change of paradigm. This view has to be corrected, however, after having read and analyzed Dvořák’s lectures on Western European Art in the Middle Ages which were held at the University of Vienna four times from 1906 to 1918. In my paper I will present Dvořák’s changing views on Medieval Art contained in the ca. 4400 pages of these hitherto unpublished manuscripts. Their topic is not Late Gothic art as in the above mentioned published texts but the long transition from Late Antique to Early Medieval Art and the prehistory of the Gothic architectural system from the 9th to the early 12th centuries.