080100 UE Course: Alois Riegl’s "Baroque" in the Context of German-Speaking Art Historiography (2024W)

Alois Riegl (1858-1905) is one of the most well-known representatives of the ‘Vienna School’, and he belongs to those art historians whose scholarly work had a long-lasting influence on the developments of the art-historical discipline. He wrote influential works on historical-artistic periods which had until then been marginalized or ignored, as in the case of the Late Antiquity and the Baroque, as well as on neglected historical-artistic genres like the applied arts, which Art Historiography had considered hierarchically subordinate.
Riegl's methodological approach can be considered one of his work's most important aspects. A compelling synthesis of ‘theory and practice’ (Hans Tietze 1935) characterizes Riegl's oeuvre. The most important contributions of the next generations of art historians, from Oskar Pollak (1883-1915) and Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) to Rudolf Wittkower (1901-1971), bear the stamp of Riegl's methodological pluralism, which arises with particular evidence from some of his works, like his contribution to Baroque art.

The course aims to grasp the significance of Alois Riegl's contribution to Baroque studies through the analysis of his work and its contextualization within the pioneering phase of German-language Baroque historiography. While the long-lasting process of the reconsideration of the "Baroque" as a cultural-historical phenomenon with its value had begun with Jacob Burckhardt's "Der Cicerone" (1855, 1st vol.), this process only came full circle during the second half of the twentieth century. Rudolf Wittkower's influential book "Art and Architecture in Italy 1600-1750", published in 1958, played a fundamental role in this. The aim of the course is not only to acquire knowledge of the rising Baroque debate at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, with Alois Riegl's methodological response taking center stage but also to provide analytical tools for a critical approach to art-historiographical texts.

After an overview of the most representative works of the German-speaking Baroque historiography, we will focus on Riegl's concept of Baroque and its positioning within this context. The course includes collective reading and analysis of selected passages from historiographical texts as well as the assignment of research tasks and other particularly significant passages, which will be presented in short papers/group presentations and discussed together. At the end of the course, a short written paper on selected topics (up to 10,000 characters in total) is planned.