Alois riegl wiki

He earned a certificate from the Institute for Austrian Historical Research, needed for civil service positions in Austrian archives. In Riegl wrote his dissertation on the Romanesque Church of St. Jacob, Regensburg manuscript lost. In he alois riegl wiki curatorial training in the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, succeeding another Thausing student, Franz Wickhoffin working for the next ten years as curator of textiles at the Austrian museum.

Even in these first books, his interest in theory as well as an interdisciplinary view of art history was evident. Stilfragen gained Riegl an extraordinarius position at the University of Vienna in He continued his interest in common art objects—what were then considered minor arts—in his next book, Volkskunst, Hausfleiss und Hausindustrie, which employed economic theory in constructing their history.

In and he began lecturing on baroque art, a period still largely viewed as decadent, ushering in together with the work of Cornelius Gurlitt a new evaluation of the stylistic period. At Vienna, he and Wickhoff formed what came to be known as the first Vienna school of art historical method. Both scholars approached art empirically, denying the pervasive view that particular periods or media of art in their cases, late Roman and early medieval experienced a degeneration of style.

Their treatment of this period elevated it by examining underappreciated genres carpets and tapestries and by applying new criteria for its appreciation and analysis. His death at age 47 is one of the tragedies of discipline. His influence was far greater than the students he taught directly, among whom included Hans Tietze. His work on baroque architecture, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Romwas published posthumously in and his annotated translation of the life of Bernini by Filippo Baldinucci published in Riegl is one of the seminal theorists in art history.

His methodology was diverse and appeared to adumbrate various directions adopted by art historians in the later twentieth century, including formalism, structuralism, post structuralism and reception theory. His earliest writing demonstrated how carpet artisans of the middle east reinvented the forms of late antiquity into new content that could be immediately understood.

In his book StilfragenRiegl used the key notion of surface ornamentation to show artists representing the world through naturalistic or scientific technique. His theory that artistic representation was not of reality, but a representation of the wished for, made much of this neglected art readable. Riegl had a robust following in Vienna, and certain of his students the so-called Second Vienna School attempted to develop his theories into a comprehensive art-historical method.

In certain cases, such as that of the controversial Hans Sedlmayrthis led to unrestrained formalism. As a result, Riegl's stock declined, particularly in the American academy, and iconography was seen as a more responsible method. Riegl's Stilfragen remained influential throughout the twentieth century. Its terminology was introduced to English-language scholarship in particular by Paul Jacobsthal 's work on Celtic art.

Ernst Gombrich drew heavily on the Stilfragenwhich he called "the one great book ever written about the history of ornament", [ 3 ] in his own study of The sense of order. At the turn of the twentieth century, Riegl had a significant impact on Otto Rank 's seminal work, Art and Artist. Rank recognized the will-to-art as parallel to an idea he had been developing on creative urge and personality development.

Riegl's work allowed Rank to apply the general problem of will to artistic expression across cultures where Rank found consistency for the individual will in a social ideology. Primitive, "ornamental" art, for example, uniquely represents a social belief in the abstract soul, and does not represent a lack of naturalism; it is an accurate presentation of the abstract in concrete form.

Rank follows the development of art, which he believes contributes more than religion, in the humanization and concretization of the soul belief as classically displayed in nature and alois riegl wiki man himself as the god. It is Riegl's emphasis on the historical context that initially inspires Rank to equally consider all forms of expression as a will-to-art.

Wilhelm Worringer likewise mentions his debt to Riegl in terms of art theory, and what Worringer calls, "the urge to abstraction. Clemena Antonova writes, "Worringer sides with Riegl in that relativist approach to art and maintains that, "what appears from our standpoint the greatest distortion, must have been, at the time, for its creator the highest beauty and expression of his artistic volition.

In the late twentieth century, the entirety of Riegl's work was revisited by scholars of diverse methodological persuasions, including post-structuralism and reception aesthetics. In retrospect a number of tendencies of Riegl's work seem to have foreshadowed the concerns of contemporary art history: his insistence that aesthetics be treated in historical context, and not in relation to an ideal standard; his interest in the "minor" arts; and his attention to the relationship between viewers and objects.

The most complete bibliographies of Riegl's work are found in K. Swoboda, ed. Kain and D. Britt, tr. The following list includes only monographs, book-length works, and collections, arranged by date of publication. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Here Riegl argues that motifs such as the lotus floweralthough they may originally have been endowed by the Egyptians with symbolic significance, were adopted by other cultures that "no longer understood their hieratic meaning," [ 9 ] and thereby became purely decorative.

In the most famous section of this chapter, Riegl argued that acanthus ornament was not derived from the acanthus plantas had been believed since the time of Vitruviusbut was rather a sculptural adaptation of the palmette motif. It was therefore "a product of pure artistic invention," [ 10 ] and not of "a simple compulsion to make direct copies of living organisms.

The fourth chapter, "The Arabesque ," continues the development of the previous chapter through late antique and early Byzantine and into Islamic art. The arabesque is understood here as a geometricized version of earlier systems of tendril ornament, thereby establishing a "genetic relationship between the ornamental Islamic tendril and its direct predecessor, the tendril ornament of antiquity.

The final two chapters are therefore presented as a continuous history of vegetal ornament from ancient Egypt through to Ottoman Turkey, in which individual motifs develop according to purely artistic criteria, and not through the intervention of technical or mimetic concerns.

Alois riegl wiki

In the introduction it is suggested that this development could be continued to Riegl's own time, and that "ornament experiences the same continuous, coherent development that prevails in the art of all periods. The Stilfragen remains a fundamental work in the history of ornament, and has heavily influenced the work of Paul Jacobsthal and Ernst Gombrichamong others who have addressed the same themes.

Within Riegl's work as a whole, the Stilfragen constitutes his earliest general statement of principles, although his "theoretical thinking had not by any means reached maturity. In the picture that Riegl draws of the development the changes of style are meaningful in a specific way; continuity is not merely carrying on; every stylistic phase creates its own problems which are solved in the succeeding one, only to create new conflicts for which new answers have to be found.

Thus the styles change of necessity, or to put it differently: in a kind of 'retrospective prophecy' the art historian shows that artistic development was compelled to move in the direction in which in fact it did. A view with most serious implications. One of them was that if one viewed art history in this way, absolute aesthetic norms became obsolete and had to be dropped.

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