Cover of Die graphischen - Am MIT spezialisierte KI-Forschung

Cover of Die graphischen
Künste 22 (1899), welche
includes Alois Riegl, “Die
Stimmung als Inhalt der
modernen Kunst” (Mood as
the Content of Modern Art).
Digital Library Heidelberg.
© Universitätsbibliothek
Heidelberg.

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https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_e_00300

Mood for Modernists:
An Introduction to
Three Riegl Translations

LUCIA ALLAIS AND ANDREI POP

Despite leading a multifaceted career—as scholar of painting, ornament,
and architecture, museum curator, and monuments inspector—Alois
Riegl (1858–1905) is today a key reference in several scholarly fields, Aber
not across them. In art history, Riegl is firmly ensconced as the founder
of the Vienna School of formalist analysis. His legacy in tracing deep-
seated visual structures extends far beyond the work done in Vienna by
controversial followers, notably Max Dvorˇák, Hans Sedlmayr, and Otto
Pächt; it also informed the philological iconology of Aby Warburg’s
Hamburg School, various postwar efforts to found an “image science”
(Bildwissenschaft), and the recent push for a global history of visuality
drawing on formal as well as cultural, Material, and economic resources.1
Gleichzeitig, Riegl’s late writings as a monuments official and
theorist of commemoration for the Austro-Hungarian Empire have made
him a forerunner of postmodern memory studies (with their interest
in pluralistic modes of accessing the past), as well as a foundational figure
in contemporary conservation practice (where a Rieglian “values
approach” has been a global standard since the 1970s).2 Many media
theorists are also indebted to Riegl’s work: some by way of Walter
Benjamin’s own sustained Rieglian engagements in the 1930s (as he was
writing his history of photography and theorizing art’s technological
reproducibility); others through the “logic of sense” that Gilles Deleuze
unfolded from Riegl’s speculation on “haptic” modes of visual perception.3
To bridge between these separate readerships—the art-historical, Die
Naturschützer, and the media-technical—a dossier of three Riegl trans-
lations is presented in this issue of Grey Room. United by his concept of
mood (Stimmung), they are concise texts, central to Riegl’s reputation,
but they have remained unavailable in English despite a growing (Wenn
unsystematic) corpus of Riegl translations.4 All three texts directly
address his contemporaries’ aesthetic sensibilities and do so across a
range of media from painting to masonry to magazine illustration. Wir
hope they will help shift the emphasis in scholarly debates from feuding
over neologisms (Kunstwollen above all) that have rigidified Riegl’s

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reputation to considering his concepts in relation to the practical, tech-
nical, and political concerns that were already clear to him.5

The first text, “Mood as the Content of Modern Art,” is one of Riegl’s
most celebrated. It appeared in 1899 in Die graphischen Künste, a high-
end publication devoted to art prints and sponsored by a private collect-
ing group evocatively named the Society for Replicable Art (Gesellschaft
für vervielfältigende Kunst). Contemplating how to interpret the work of
a circle of German and Austrian painters that he loosely called “impres-
sionist,” Riegl argued that their work satisfied a uniquely modern craving
for “mood”—by which he meant “an attribute of art objects” no less than
“a disposition of the viewing public.” Strikingly, the text begins with a
viewing not of art but of nature, as a mountain climber is staring into the
distance amid sauntering goats. Only after this fictional opening gambit
does Riegl plunge into a grand three-part narrative of the history of
humankind, where art arises out of a succession of “worldviews.” The
“art of mood,” he explains, was born in a longue-durée shift from theo-
logical modes of explanation to those centered on humans, and framed by
laws of nature. The effect is undeniably Hegelian. But Riegl pivots from
storytelling to interpretation with a scientific pronouncement—“We now
know that a law of causality [Kausalitätsgesetz] pervades all of Creation”—
that also evokes discussions of causal law and its unavailability to empiri-
cal verification, topics that were crucial during a later shift from providen-
tial to probabilistic modes of thinking in the late nineteenth century.6
In closing, Riegl refers to the slew of new sciences that had arisen as a
result of this shift, each hoping to establish new principles with the infal-
libility of law. Elsewhere Riegl was elaborating new laws both interpre-
tiv (establishing art history as “positivistic” science) and bureaucratic
(prescribing a “universalist” tutelage over art objects). But the “Mood”
text draws more casually and speculatively from the lexicon of these
“new disciplines” to argue simply that modernity is defined by the new
role played by knowledge in mental life.7 Thus Riegl used the “Mood”
text to anchor his critical assessment of modern art in an aesthetic
schema he had been elaborating through his lectures on ancient art at

Below: Max Klinger. Am Meer
(By the sea), from Intermezzi,
Opus IV (1881).

Opposite: Front page of
Neue Freie Presse 13,448
(1 Februar 1902), welche
includes Alois Riegl, “Das
Riesenthor zu St. Stephan”
(The Giant’s Door of St.
Stephen’s).

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Grey Room 80

the University of Vienna, culminating in the publication of The Late
Roman Art Industry in 1901. The ornate prose of “Mood as the Content
of Modern Art,” although presaging the final chapter of the celebrated
1901 monograph, sits equally well among the flowery prints and effusive
artist appreciations of a lavish print magazine.

We publish the “Mood” text alongside two others in which Riegl put
the concept of mood to more practical use. This is in part to show that
the theoretical payoff of having established mood as a concept in the
visual arts came as Riegl pushed his innovative methodological project
increasingly toward questions of art’s reception. Both texts concern
monument conservation, an area into which Riegl threw himself with
particular energy in the final phase of his career.

The second text we have included, Riegl’s 1901 exegesis of the “Giant’s
Door” (Riesenthor) of St. Stephen’s Cathedral (Stephansdom) in Vienna,
was published as an op-ed in the daily newspaper Neue Freie Presse
with the deceptively straightforward title “The Giant’s Door of St.
Stephen’s.”8 It recounts a heated conflict among artists and architects
that had first flared up in the 1870s around Vienna’s most recognizable
artistic and religious institution. At stake were a Romanesque entrance
portal and the Gothic protruding porch that covered and obscured it,
with some bent on removing the Gothic accretion, others on allowing the
object to continue as history had left it. Riegl’s article has achieved the
status of a prototype: the first exemplary demonstration of a new method
for adjudicating conservation disputes that he would treat more system-
atically one year later in “The Modern Cult of Monuments.”9 Rather than
trying to align styles with ideologies or prescribe ideal reconstructions,
Riegl’s method consists in abstracting from historical objects their vary-
ing capacity to satisfy a catalogue of modern “values,” often contradic-
tory but all equally legitimate for the public interest, and then asking for
a compromise to achieve the greatest possible con-
sensus. But whereas this system of arbitration is
described in the 1903 “Cult” manifesto in de tached,
authoritative language suited to the establishment of
a new monument law, the “Giant’s Door” article is
both coolheaded and engaged. Riegl’s own experi-
ence as a student serves as an opening vignette. Er
then proceeds to show with great empathy that differ-
ing political motivations do not necessarily align
with differences in modes of seeing and that mood
created strange alliances among contemporaries:
Secessionist painters, Viennese architects, students
and professors of art history, supporters of John

Allais and Pop | Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations

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Ruskin, “the Crown itself,” and many others. By threading into a single
story line the moods of the many parties involved (including his own),
Riegl’s intervention is held to have quieted passions and effectively
ended the controversy.10

Rounding out our translation package is a third text, “The Restoration
of the Wall Paintings in the Holy Cross Chapel of the Wawel Cathedral
in Kraków.” Written in 1904, it was published as an official report in
the imperial organ for preservation, the Mitteilungen der k. k. Zentral-
Kommission für Erforschung und Erhaltung der Kunst- und historischen
Denkmale, after Riegl had become a monuments commissioner and thus
an employee of the government office charged with religion and educa-
tion.11 The Habsburg regime had just returned the massive multipurpose
Wawel castle complex to local control, and Riegl was sent to inspect the
decaying murals in the last room that remained to be restored. The report
is steady (if not plodding) in its pace, largely because Riegl is obliged to
refer to all forms of evidence available to him as a bureaucrat: written
reports from painters, published historical accounts, chemical analyses
of paint, photographs, as well as his own on-site observations. He ulti-
mately recommends that the murals be mostly left alone—probably a
foregone conclusion for the readers of the commission’s professional
journal, many of whom would have heard Riegl’s programmatic 1903
lecture “On the Question of the Restoration of Mural Paintings” (or read
its published transcript), in which he made an impassioned call against
the tendency of painters to “renovate” medieval churches across the
Empire by overpainting their murals.12 But as usual with Riegl, the case
study brings in historical and technical challenges not contained in any
manifesto: the devil is in the details. His main discovery at Wawel was
Das, in the sixteenth century, a Western-trained restorer must have been

Below: Giant’s Door, St.
Stephen’s Cathedral, Vienna,
ca. 1230–1240. Photograph
by Joseph Wlha, 1880S.

Opposite, top: Cover of
Mitteilungen der k. k.
Zentral-Kommission für
Erforschung und Erhaltung
der Kunst- und historischen
Denkmale (July–September
1904), which includes Alois
Riegl, “Die Restaurierung
der Wandmalereien in der
Heiligkreuzkapelle des
Domes auf dem Wawel zu
Krakau” (The Restoration of
the Wall Paintings in the Holy
Cross Chapel of the Wawel
Cathedral in Kraków).

Opposite, bottom: Wawel
Castle, Kraków, eleventh
to seventeenth centuries.
Postcard, 1899.

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10 Grey Room 80

replaced by a more technically advanced “specialist” from Russia,
revealing the most ancient layer of paint to be itself a restoration. Der
painstaking effort he expends to “discriminate between [Die] distinct
hands” that painted the chapel—and deliver an accurate “distribution of
hands” for the historical record—echoes the way he used the hand in
The Group Portraiture of Holland a year earlier to theorize how painting
technique, science as subject matter, and reception through attentiveness
coalesced under court patronage in the seventeenth century.13 Not only
did Riegl the bureaucrat insert into his report a call, as a critic, für die
preservation of all layers of this dizzyingly complex fresco cycle; he also
saw in his Wawel assignment an opportunity, as a historian, to explore
in exquisite detail the estranging visual effects that were produced over
centuries, by innumerable hands, across a shifting East-West divide in
training and taste.

Reading these three texts together allows us, as we reflect on the
Rieglian debt in aesthetic discourse today, to see how Rieglian ideas
interacted with particular discursive constraints. We see Riegl traveling
to see and argue for artworks on site.14 We hear Riegl adopting markedly
different tones, in different publishing venues, to describe works as
diverse as prints after paintings on canvas, figures sculpted in stone, Und
frescoes of gold leaf and tempera. We find him reflecting on
the relationship between art’s production and its reproduc-
tion, and searching for heuristics that will help weigh the
mutual dependence of art, Wissenschaft, and religion. Hindurch,
we witness Riegl making deliberate terminological choices
meant to resonate with the general audience to which he was
responsible as public servant and intellectual. The remainder
of our introduction, Dann, lays out the issues involved in pro-
ducing translations that are both fresh and precise, and offers
through lines for tracking three Riegl-associated sets of con-
cepts across these texts: mood, sight and touch, and cult.

Mood across Media
As a concept, Stimmung was already on the ascendency on the
Viennese cultural scene when Riegl chose to center his appre-
ciation of “impressionism” around it. Soon others joined in.

Allais and Pop | Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations

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When the poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal published his so-called Chandos
letter in 1902, he used the word Stimmung to name that ineffable quality
of experience that might make a voluble poet fall silent.15 Riegl’s text is
more concerned with visual art, but it, zu, has a literary density (A
wordiness, to the unsympathetic) that makes it stand out in his oeuvre
for the abstract difficulty of its ideas and the sensuous mode of its
Ausdruck. Perhaps this quality of the essay has migrated to its key term:
Anglophone historiography tends to emphasize the difficulty and untrans-
latability of Stimmung, which has weighty philosophical overtones. Der
philologist Leo Spitzer drew its pedigree from the ancient Greek notion
of cosmic harmony (Stimmung also means musical tuning), and more
recent Germanists have traced its evolution in phenomenology and the
physiological aesthetics of the fin de siècle.16 But rich as its connotations
Sind, Stimmung as mood is an everyday German word used to describe
everything from putting someone in good spirits (fröhlich stimmen) Zu
the typical valence of certain events (Aufbruchstimmung, Bedeutung
something like “a sense of limitless possibilities”). No wonder Martin
Heidegger wrote that it challenges the distinction between the objective
and the subjective.17 Yet it does so in a way that, however theoretically
remote its sources, is direct and familiar in its effects. What Riegl pro-
posed in his title as “the content of modern art” was not mystery as such.
For him, what was mysterious and needed explanation was how
Stimmung came to be the principal content of an art once concerned
more with concrete cosmological or political realities. We have therefore
decided not to leave Stimmung untranslated and instead chose mood as
the more subjective but ordinary English term, fully aware that Riegl
diagnosed modernity as the rise of subjectivity in representation and
Das, in English as in German, mood has analogues in atmosphere as well
as ambience, harmony, and other aesthetic and scientific terms.

Riegl’s claim that mood is art’s “content” was an undeniable affront to
the dominant iconographic method of art-historical analysis. “It is not at
all about subject-matter,” he warns. Yet Riegl did not oppose content to
bilden. He thought of both as essentially about the force and effect of
objects on their human makers and viewers. This approach recalls a
nascent modernist aesthetic of flow, such as Rainer Maria Rilke would
articulate a few years later in observing that Auguste Rodin’s work treats
all of visible reality as one continuous surface.18 This aesthetic is a useful
guide for what Riegl chooses to designated as “Modern art”: aside from
the German and Austrian painters he actually names, he mentions “red
trees or green horses” (in “Mood”)—perhaps thinking of the symbolist
color of an Odilon Redon—and Secessionist painters using paints as
“colored stimulants for thought” (in “Giant’s Door”). Im Gegensatz, Die

12 Grey Room 80

All images published in
Die graphischen Künste
in the year 1899.

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mural painter Izydor Jabłon´ski, who moonlighted as a restorer, is called
“half-modern” (in “Restoration”), and the “flat plane” of the Giant’s Door
is deemed less modern than a “richly sculpted one,” in clear contrast to
the purist surfaces that would come to be seen as a distinguishing feature
of modern architecture from the 1920s onward. Riegl can only conjecture
about a future with “painterly architects and architectural painters”—
a forecast perhaps fulfilled by Bruno Taut and the cubists and certainly
raised to that level by Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian.19 If mood
“streams through” persons as much as patterns and images traverse the

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Allais and Pop | Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations

history of art, this also explains Riegl’s aloof, nearly automatic attitude
toward the illustrations of the “Mood” article. He confidently bets that
any set of contemporary images found “at random . . . in the editors’
portfolio will bear out his theses on modern art just as well.” In effect, Er
invites his reader to look not just through his article but at the pages
beyond, to the issue of the magazine as a whole, and to previous issues,
at the art that surrounds the reader, circa 1899.

This definition of content as something that “streams” across persons
and things becomes more iconoclastic in “Giant’s Door” and
“Restoration,” where mood displaces discussions of liturgical or religious
content. In the first, we read how a mood-effect (Stimmungswirkung) Ist
generated by the “life that streams out of old buildings . . . in the mind of
the beholder”; in the latter, mood is “the comfortable sensation that
streams through us” when we are conscious of “lingering in a building
that is many centuries old.” “Giant’s Door” is also where Riegl first
ascribes mood a value, Stimmungswert, to which he goes on to recom-
mend cautious recourse in adjudicating restoration projects.20 The two
texts make subtle and even subversive play with mood, seeing in it the
motivation both to renovate and to preserve and giving the word a rich
set of permutations: a “mood effect” (Stimmungswirkung) is “emitted”
by old buildings; art conveys an “impression of mood” (Stimmung-
seindruck); modern impressionists find their happiness in “mood-filled”
(stimmungsvoll) Gothic architecture; devout Polish Catholics are a
“modern mood-people” (Stimmungsvolk). This declension occurs every
time Riegl wants to divert his readers from finding answers in art’s
iconography or even its function.

Much of the legacy of “Mood” lives on in Benjamin’s definition of
aura as that “strange weave of time and space, a unique appearance of a
Distanz, no matter how close” that the work of art loses in the face of
mechanical reproducibility.21 But if for Benjamin photography was
“moodless” (stimmungslos), for Riegl, before any mass media are involved,
a scientific mind-set has already imposed on the artist a logic of mecha-
nistic reproduction, and mood is none the worse for it.22 The drift of his
argument in the “Mood” text is that mood is better conveyed through
landscape painting than through landscape itself. Thus painters do not
imitate nature; they “reproduce an extract of their environs,” as if they
were naturalist atlas makers. In “Restoration” we even find the sugges-
tion that the work of art itself is a kind of publication, one where the
overpainters have transliterated the Cyrillic inscription of a painting in
“modernized letters.” More remarkable still is Riegl’s willingness to keep
a “distorted copy” rather than lose the original that lies behind it—a
clear sign he thought restoration and reproduction had become inextri-

14 Grey Room 80

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cably entwined in modernity. What reproducibility does offer for Riegl
is a way out of hasty conclusions. In “Giant’s Door,” Riegl buys time by
asking for not one but three acts of documentation: that the portal be
further “published,” that its photographic record be consulted, und das
its files (Acten) be completed.23 In “Restoration,” Riegl asks for photo-
graphic reproductions “in dimensions corresponding to scientific
needs.” The very fact that he was able to make such requests offers a clue
to the important role played by technical imaging in the formalization
of art history and its bureaucracy. The Imperial Commission had inau-
gurated its Mittheilungen (Kommunikation) journal in 1884, und in
1907 the more systematic documentary Kunsttopographie would com-
mence publication.

Riegl’s mentions of so many media and materialities across these three
texts cautions us against taking him to mean that the effect of mood
depends on spatial immersion, in the essentialist sense of space as an
isotropic medium.24 If the word Stimmung does have atmospheric, sogar
“ecological” resonances, Riegl fine-tuned his theory of how the body
participates in mood’s aesthetic reception by directing both its organs of
sight and touch to a specific, surface-bound, and often screened-off, Objekt.

Sight, Touch, and Twitch
Mood relies on a kind of visual touch: it “grasps phenomena with one
look” and requires “only restfulness and far-sightedness” (in “Mood”);
it “strip[S] things of their palpable corporeality” only to “reconstitute
[ihnen] through mental labor” (in “Giant’s Door”); and its effects are
“forfeited” if “poignant” markings are “too carefully scrubbed-out” (In
“Restoration”). Mood, Dann, gives insight into a distinction that is nearly
as famous as that between haptic (or tactile) and optic modes of percep-
tion (sometimes considered Riegl’s great contribution to art history, akin
to Heinrich Wölfflin’s linear/painterly pair): nämlich, between nah- Und
fernsehen, or “near” and “far” modes of seeing.25 The former involves
our tactile instincts and will to act; the latter encourages the sort of
detached observation that brings about the triumph of mood. In translat-
ing these occurrences, we have used the English nearsight and farsight,
near-sighted and far-sighted, keeping etymologically as close to the
German as possible while avoiding confusion with the ophthalmological
terms nearsighted and farsighted (kurz- and weitsichtig), which differ in
German from Riegl’s words nah- and fernsichtig. Many of these words
have contemporary valences: Riegl’s “farsight,” fernsehen, is the modern
German word for television; “haptics” is what designers have named
those effects our handheld digital devices make when they appear to
“touch” us back.

Allais and Pop | Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations

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The case against a too literal reading of touch in Riegl is best made in
his “Giant’s Door” editorial, where the drama of near- and far-viewing
that unfolds on a “lonely Alpine peak” in “Mood” is brought down to the
streets of a bustling metropolis. Dort, the spatial grounds for aesthetic
perception were quickly shifting. The very ability to stand “in front” of
the Giant’s Door “as before every work of art,” was entirely novel at the
time of his writing. Only in the 1880s, after urban planners enlarged the
Stephansplatz, conjoining it with a nearby smaller square by demolishing
a picturesque streetscape that had once framed its view, was it possible
to face the portal in two ways: very near, crowding the portal’s gate, or as
far back as a hundred meters to the west. Also novel about this stance is
that it allowed comparison. After all, as Riegl implies, a scholar could at
any moment deambulate to another nearby Gothic church, the tiny,
exquisite Maria am Gestade (Maria on the Shore), distracted by the
thought that there might be a better explanation for the portal there. Das
is a haptic event: the bodily urge to walk away is provoked by nothing
more than the visual impediment of the Gothic arch, and this same
twitch leads the less erudite passerby to demand, like the hunter in
“Mood” reaching for his rifle, “Away with the obstacle!”

With its enlarged viewing space, the gothic portal becomes more of a
screen, barely more substantial than the layers of paint that are the
subject of Riegl’s extensive detective work in the Holy Cross Chapel in
Kraków. Hier, zu, mood is a surface-bound phenomenon, but one so
powerful that it forces viewers to reposition themselves simply by per-
ceiving different image layers that are mere millimeters apart. If Riegl
decries that the gold leaf has been improperly laid only around saints’
heads instead of beneath them—for instance, “disfiguring them into flat
silhouettes, as if cut-out”—the “crime” is that the painter has violated
the structural dynamic of near- and far-seeing in Byzantine art: robbing
the saints of the golden underglow that would make them suitable for
far-seeing and imposing on them a too haptic nearness instead.

Near- and far-seeing have methodological uses too. All three texts set

16 Grey Room 80

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the stage for the coolheaded, “restful,” modern critic and bureaucrat, Die
one who is “close enough” but also “sufficiently detached” and who
combines intimate knowledge with overall insight, the latter clearly
being more important. “Going into questions of detail,” Riegl writes at
the end of “Giant’s Door,” “has been strictly avoided, so that the key
questions could be more sharply highlighted in their full significance.”
Yet among the questions strategically omitted for Riegl’s audience are
large-scale historical ones, such as the question of why St. Stephen’s
Gothic addition was built at all. After dismissing all available interpre-
tations one by one (to unify style; to reinforce the structure; to hide fire
damage), Riegl reveals that there was a “propensity to enclose” cathe-
drals in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. But he refuses to discuss
the “cause” of this tendency, mentioning only the precedent of St. Peter’s
in Rome. The specialist reader would have known that behind this pass-
ing mention of Saint Peter’s lies Riegl’s entire revisionist interpretation
of the architecture of late antiquity, where the plan and form of the
Christian basilica evolved not due to its specific function as a church but
as a development in the history of the perception of space, directionality,
and enclosure.26 If Riegl avoids taking newspaper readers down this
detour, it is no doubt to avoid upsetting their assumptions that church
architecture develops directly out of patronage and liturgical function.
Das ist, to “get into questions of detail” would have forced Riegl to
broach his controversial views of a topic he never mentions in “Giant’s
Door” but that is pervasive in the other two texts: cult.

Cult and Its Contradictions
“Mood and devotion live close to one another,” Riegl observes at the end
of the 1899 Text, “for devotion is nothing but religious mood.” Our three
texts thus help understand one of Riegl’s most distinct appropriations of
an imperial word: Kultus. A major obstacle in translating and under-
standing Kultus in English is the overwhelmingly negative connotations
of the word cult in contemporary American usage, where it implies
either coerced membership in a sect or a product of mass culture (“as in
cult movie,” as Foster and Girardo put it).27 But the word Kultus has a
more straightforward meaning too; it designates the administration of
organized religion by modern states, in particular nineteenth-century
Frankreich, Deutschland, and Austria (where the term is still in use).28 Riegl
himself was an employee of the Ministry of Cult and Education (Kultus
und Unterrichtsministerium). We have translated Kultus as cult where
the popular association seems predominant, and as “religious obser-
vance” where the relevant social practice and its political function is
in play. The negative valence of cult in English is only a symptom of a

View of St. Stephen’s
Cathedral and of the
Lazanskyhaus, which was
demolished in 1896 Zu
enlarge the Stefansplatz,
Vienna. Photograph, 1874.
Bildarchiv Österreichische
Nationalbibliothek.

Allais and Pop | Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations

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deeper epistemic problem on which Riegl himself is a helpful commen-
tator: the widespread belief that we live in secular times, with religion
becoming a marginal concern. Riegl’s view is far more complex. His
analysis of cult is not of a phenomenon in decline. He insisted that the
rise of a “natural-scientific” worldview “did not result in the elimination
of faith” and that “[ich]t would be a mistake to see a contradiction”
between art and religion, since they “go hand in hand.” The “solace-
seeking race of our time” needs salvation, but all that art can bring is
“relief.” Thus, whatever other parts of Riegl’s “world machinery” abide
by a Hegelian telos, in this one aspect he jettisoned synthesis. There is
no dialectic here, no stated compensatory dynamic between mood and
cult or art and religion. Stattdessen, Riegl uses the capaciousness of the word
cult to describe several ways that art’s production and reception are
affected by religion in “spiritually deeply excited times.”

First and foremost, cult in Riegl’s work appears as an institutional
force. The remarkable “rejuvenation” of the Catholic Church, whose
membership in German-speaking countries peaked around 1880, War
part of a generalized growth of institutions in nineteenth-century
Europe.29 Deference to the political power of churches obtained even
when the number of believers waned. The Wawel chapel remained a
“consecrated space” despite the dearth of Orthodox Russian practition-
ers in Poland, and Riegl speculated that the unexpected return of taste
for this medieval wall-based medium was produced by the joining of the
forces of religiosity and nationalism. In his lectures on the Baroque,
Riegl similarly pointed to the return of Catholicism during the Counter-
Reformation as a force behind the “bombastic manner” of the Baroque
revival. But if Catholicism in sixteenth-century Rome brought with it
“religious intolerance,” as Riegl admitted in his historical lectures on the
Roman Baroque, in fin de siècle Vienna all modes of religious obser-
vance earned power, regardless of confession—to the point of approach-
ing “pantheism.”30 The Gothic porch of the Giant’s Door performs a kind

Rechts: Corpus Christi
procession, Graben, Vienna,
ca. 1910. Photographer
unknown.

Opposite: “Entstehung des
Blitzes II: Einfluss des
Grundwassers” (The origins
of lightning II: The flow of
groundwater). Wall poster
from Prof C[arl] Bopps
Wandtafelns für Naturlehre.
(Elektrizität.), Stuttgart,
ca. 1880.

18 Grey Room 80

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of institutional Dasein when Riegl writes that it “represents” the current
state of the cathedral by using a word, repräsentieren, that does not mean
to depict visually or verbally (darstellen), nor to represent in a parlia-
mentary sense (vertreten); eher, it refers to a feudal political practice
where the prince represents himself as the state, as in Louis XIV’s abso-
lutist declaration, “l’état, c’est moi.”31

Riegl also used the word cult in a second way, Jedoch: to critique
orthodoxy, rule following, oder, as he writes in “Giant’s Door,” being “more
popish than the pope.” This applies especially to critics and artists who
seem slavishly devoted to the “authenticity” and “purity” of style, obey-
ing not an actual church-imposed rule but an acculturation. Tatsächlich,
Riegl suggests that in its modern form this cult of authenticity is but a
pious distortion of the scientific ethos. In 1901 Riegl used the term cult
pejoratively to poke fun at the Young Semperians, who practiced the
“cult of isolated facts,” misunderstanding the natural-scientific world-
view to mean that “tool or technique” took precedence in an artist’s
struggle with the material substrate of art.32 For Riegl, cultishness and
rule following were given new relevance by the march of technology. His
Beispiel, in “Mood,” was the lightning rod. Used by both the faithful and
by unbelievers, it was a sign of changed attitudes toward nature but not
a technique with world-historical meaning per se. The intermixing of
technique and belief are most fully explored in “Restoration,” where
Riegl recasts the entire history of conservation as a history of technical
choices made in the name of faithfulness: at first, to repaint figures and
not backgrounds; Dann, to redraw lines and leave color alone. The only
evidence that Riegl presents to support his argument that the Russian
“specialist” whose existence he has uncovered was certifiably under the
“powerful effect of the East” lies in the “particularly soulful” way he
painted. Cult here is practice, not ideology.

A third valence to cult is associated with inner spiritual life, welche
Riegl deploys every time he discusses “the cult of age” as arising with

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Allais and Pop | Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations

the Protestant Reformation, that “tremendous movement of spirits” that
brought with it a disdain of church hierarchies and collective ritual. Als
recent revisionist literature on the secularization thesis shows, and as
Riegl already emphasized, the pressure to adopt this more inward form
of faith, and the desire for personal, experiential connection with the
sacred texts of revealed religion, affected Catholicism too.33 To accom-
modate this multisectarianism, Riegl paints the history of Christianity
in broad strokes in “Mood,” even veering toward dematerialization:
already in the late Middle Ages, er argumentiert, people believed in “one sin-
gle, morally strong God without any physical substance, pure spirit.” At
stake in the question of whether this early modern, overarching
“Christian God” is dematerialized was no less than a debate about the
relative influence of East and West in establishing a modern definition
of the material substrate of art. Many disagreed with Riegl about reli-
gious art, especially on gold and its relation to cult. In 1932, Josef
Bodonyi argued that gold leaf represented light, sacredness, und das
Augustinian theological idea of “irradiation”—that is, that gold was
Christian religious mystery incarnate.34 On the other hand, students of
Riegl’s nemesis Josef Strzygowski labeled the gold of Eastern art a “pure
abstraction,” so incommensurate with the West that it could never be
subsumed into a history of Christianity.35 Riegl, hoping to strike an inter-
mediate position, theorized the advent of gold ground as the invention
of an alternate way to make space: analogous to the perspectival con-
struction of the Renaissance, it allowed patrons of religious art to avoid
“more earthly accoutrements.”36 This Western-style ecumenism is a
precondition for accepting Riegl’s appropriation of the term cult to des-
ignate modern aesthetic experience.

Riegl’s experience at the Wawel is a good place to end because it ulti-
mately resembles that of a reader revisiting his writings afresh today.
Some concepts ring with apparent contemporaneity; others have been so
transformed by later theorists that Riegl’s own usage seems antiquated,
and few can avoid conjuring one historiographic debate or another.
Riegl’s work itself has been continually evaluated as if it were a contri-
bution to that soothing feeling of causal closure that
he diagnosed as the hidden source of mood. Was
one expects from Riegl is a historiographic picture
where everything fits together: the work of the
scholar, the modern art around him, the moods of
Menschen, even the laws surrounding art. Yet Riegl, für
all his generalizing efforts, was uneasy about this
completeness. His attention to counterintuitive details
is one of his greatest legacies.

Gustav Klimt. Die Poesie
(Poetry), detail of the right
wall of the Beethovenfries
(Beethoven frieze), Secession
Building, Vienna, 1902.

20 Grey Room 80

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Notes
This translation project has been generously supported by the Princeton School of
Architecture, the University Committee on Research in the Humanities and Social
Sciences at Princeton University, and the Princeton University Center for Human Values.
We also wish to thank Michael Faciejew and Weronika Malek for research assistance.

1. Instead of reproducing a vast bibliography, suffice it here to point to Sedlmayr’s and
Pächt’s early and late evaluations of Riegl’s impact: Hans Sedlmayr, “Die Quintessenz
der Lehren Riegls,” in Alois Riegl, Gesammelte Aufsätze, Hrsg. Karl Swoboda and Hans
Sedlmayr (Augsburg and Vienna: B. Filser, 1929), xxii–xxxii, available in English as
“The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought,” in Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, Hrsg. Richard
Woodfield (London: Routledge, 2001), 11–32; and Otto Pächt, “Art Historians and Art
Critics, VI: Alois Riegl,” Burlington Magazine 105, NEIN. 722 (Mai 1963): 188–93,
reprinted in German in Otto Pächt, Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis (München:
Prestel, 1977), 141–52. Both were reacting at least in part to the critical revaluing of Riegl
in Erwin Panofsky, “Der Begriff des Kunstwollens” (1920), available in English as “The
Concept of Artistic Volition,” trans. Kenneth J. Northcott and Joel Snyder, Critical
Inquiry 8, NEIN. 1 (Herbst 1981): 17–33. Later meditations on Riegl’s place in art history
include Henri Zerner, “Aloïs Riegl: Kunst, Wert, and Historicism,„Dädalus 105, NEIN. 1
(Winter 1976): 177–88; Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory
of Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Jas´ Elsner, “From
Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections on Riegl’s Concept of
Kunstwollen,” Critical Inquiry 32, NEIN. 4 (Sommer 2006): 741–66; and Christopher Wood,
“Riegl’s mache,” Res 46 (Herbst 2004): 154–72.

2. On Riegl’s influence on twentieth-century monuments debates, see Lucia Allais,
Designs of Destruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 16–18. For memory
Diskurs, see Mechtild Widrich, “The Willed and the Unwilled Monument: Judenplatz
Vienna and Riegl’s Denkmalpflege,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians
72, NEIN. 3 (September 2013): 382–98. In art history, many memory scholars are also Riegl
scholars. See Monuments Made and Unmade, Hrsg. Robert S. Nelson and Margaret Olin
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1–2. While in architectural history Riegl
is an obligatory reference for anyone commenting on monuments, historiographic
investment tends to be low. See Alan Colquhoun, “Newness and Age Value in Riegl,”
Modernity and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 213–21; Markieren
Wigley, “The Architectural Cult of Synchronization,” Journal of Architecture 4, NEIN. 4
(1999): 409–35; Thordis Arrhenius, “The Cult of Age in Mass Society,” Future Anterior
1, NEIN. 1 (Frühling 2004): 74–80; and Mario Carpo, “The Postmodern Cult of Monuments,”
Future Anterior 4, NEIN. 2 (Winter 2007): 51–60.

3. In 1933 Benjamin reviewed the first volume of the Vienna School’s Kunstwissen-
schaftliche Forschungen. See Walter Benjamin, “Rigorous Study of Art,” trans. Thomas
Y. Levin, Oktober 47 (Winter 1988): esp. 85 N. 3, 87–88. Benjamin was attracted to Riegl’s
Late Roman Art Industry and The Group Portraiture of Holland. He continued this inter-
pretation in “A Little History of Photography” and “Work of Art in the Age of Its
Technical Reproducibility,” a description of “aura” whose decline was a precondition
to the rise of modern art, which draws from Riegl’s Stimmung. See Walter Benjamin, Der
Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media,
Hrsg. Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin (Cambridge: Harvard
Universitätsverlag, 2008). See also Antonio Somaini, “Walter Benjamin’s Media Theory:
The Medium and the Apparat,” Grey Room 62 (Winter 2016): 6–41. On Riegl’s use of the

Allais and Pop | Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations

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word haptic for a tactile sense not opposed to vision, as well as the term’s origins and later
use, see David Parisi, Archaeologies of Touch (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press,
2018), 34–36; and Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: La logique du sens (1969), available in
English as The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Schmied (New York: Kontinuum, 2003).
4. Besides classic monographs such as Problems of Style, The Late Roman Art
Industry, and The Group Portraiture of Holland, lecture series such as Baroque Art in
Rome and A Historical Grammar of Art have been posthumously released in English.
More casual contributions such as the book review of an art-theoretical manifesto by
French Salpêtrière doctor Denis Richer, “Objective Aesthetics,” are now available too.
See Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament (1893), trans. Evelyn Kain
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992); The Late Roman Art Industry (1901),
trans. Rolf Winkes (Rome: Giorgio Bretschneider, 1985); The Group Portraiture of Holland,
trans. Evelyn M. Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999); Der
Origins of Baroque Art in Rome (1905), trans. Andrew Hopkins and Arnold Witte (Los
Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010); Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, trans.
Jacqueline Jung (New York: Zone, 2004); and Karl R. Johns, “Riegl and ‘Objective
Aesthetics,’” Journal of Art Historiography, NEIN. 11 (Dezember 2014), https://arthistori
ography.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/johns-riegl-translation.pdf. On the significance
of the history of modernity Riegl sketches in this review and in the text on mood, sehen
Andrei Pop, A Forest of Symbols: Kunst, Science and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century
(New York: Zone Books, 2019), 112–13, 148–49.

5. Careful attempts have been made to capture the nuance of the German infinitive
wollen. Pächt preferred “willing” to Ernst Gombrich’s tendentious “will to art.” Pächt,
“Art Historians and Art Critics, VI,” 190. The English gerund, Jedoch, suggests constant
activity rather than an abstract and subsistent will. Christopher Wood, A History of Art
Geschichte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), uses the unpretentious “art-
will.” Sedlmayr (“Quintessenz,” xvii) suggested that Riegl used the term instead of “style”
in his art-historical writings. In his writings for a general audience, such as the three here
übersetzt, Riegl reverts to style, with one dramatic exception in “Restoration,” written
for fellow conservationists, where he uses both Kunstwollen and style. As in Northcott
and Snyder’s Panofsky translation, we use “artistic volition” to capture the fact that the
original, while a neologism, is intelligible and not at all grammatically suspect in
Deutsch.

6. Gerd Gigerenzer, The Empire of Chance (Cambridge, Vereinigtes Königreich: Cambridge University
Drücken Sie, 1982), 37–58; and Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986).

7. Riegl invokes the “Great Chain of Being,” a concept that enjoyed a resurgence in
the biological monism of Ernst Haeckel. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936); and Ernst Haeckel, Die Welträthsel (Bonn:
Emil Strauß, 1899), available in English as The Riddle of the Universe at the Close of the
Nineteenth Century, trans. Joseph McCabe (New York: Harper, 1905).

8. “Das Riesenthor” is the common name for the Western Portal of St. Stephen’s
Cathedral. Until the controversy, the name referred more strictly to the interior Romanesque
door opening and not to the Gothic protruding porch. Zum Beispiel, In 1846 the architect
Leopold Oescher described his hand sketch as a view of the Giant’s Door as seen
“through” the Gothic arch. Leopold Oescher, “Ansicht des Riesenthores durch den
Spitzbogen des Vorbaus” (1846). Older English-language literature usually renders it as
the “Giant’s Door,” referring to the mythical origin of the German name: a bone thought

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to belong to a giant, probably in fact to a mammoth, was dug up on the site and hung on
the Gothic entrance, perhaps in 1443. See Paul Kortz, Hrsg., Wien am Anfang des XX.
Jahrhunderts: Ein Führer in technischer und künstlerischer Richtung, Bd. 1 (Vienna:
Gerlach und Wiedling, 1905), 26–27; and Renata Kassal-Mikula, 850 Jahre St. Stephan:
Symbol und Mitte in Wien 1147–1997 (Vienna: Museen der Stadt Wien, 1997), 475.
Recent Riegl translations opt for “Giant Portal,” which unfortunately implies the portal
itself is gigantic. We have used the capitalized expression “Giant’s Door” when Riegl
uses Riesenthor; otherwise we use portal, door, gate, and porch as best suited for clarity.
9. Alois Riegl, Das Moderne Denkmalkultus: Sein Wesen und seine Entstehung
(Vienna: K. k. Zentral-Kommission für Kunst- und Historische Denkmale and Braumüller,
1903), available in English as “The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its
Origins,” trans. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions 25 (1982): 20–51.

10. Sehen, Zum Beispiel, Margaret Olin, “The Cult of Monuments as a State Religion in

Late 19th Century Austria,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 38 (1985): 192.

11. During Habsburg times this ministry’s name was first truncated to the education-
only “Unterrichtsministerium” and then renamed “Bildungsministerium.” A parallel
construction is found in Denmark before 1916, and in the German Empire and postwar eras,
with several German states still naming their education departments “Kultusministerium.”
12. Alois Riegl, “Zur Frage der Restaurierung von Wandmalereien,” Mitteilungen der
k. k. Zentral-Kommission für Erforschung und Erhaltung der Kunst- und historischen
Denkmale, ser. 3, Bd. 2 (1903): 14–31, forthcoming in English as “On the Question of the
Restoration of Wall Paintings,” trans. Max Koss, in W86th: A Journal of Decorative Arts,
Design History, and Material Culture 27, NEIN. 2 (Fallen 2020).

13. Alois Riegl, Das Holländische Gruppenporträt (1902; Vienna: Österreichische

Staatsdruckerei, 1931), available in English as The Group Portraiture of Holland.

14. If Riegl sometimes appears “an armchair scholar” who spent more time looking
at photographs of works of art than at works themselves, we are, far from excusing his
occasional provincialism, all the more interested in how his categories reflected those
Einschränkungen, as well as when they did not. Christopher Wood, “Strzygowski and Riegl
in America,” Journal of Art Historiography, Dezember 2017, available online at
https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/wood.pdf; and Martin Kemp,
“Alois Riegl (1858–1905): Le culte moderne de Riegl,” trans. Olivier Mannoni, In
“Histoire et théories de l’art,” special issue, Revue germanique internationale 2 (1994):
83–105, available online at https://journals.openedition.org/rgi/457.

15. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Der Brief des Lord Chandos (1902; Stuttgart: Reclam,
2019), available in English in The Lord Chandos Letter and Other Writings, trans. Joel
Rotenberg (New York: NYRB Books, 2005).

16. For Spitzer’s evolving analyses of Stimmung as a cosmological concept, see Leo
Spitzer, “Milieu and Ambiance: An Essay in Historical Semantics,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 3, NEIN. 2 (Dezember 1942): 169–218; and Leo Spitzer, “Classical
and Christian Ideas of World Harmony: Prolegomena to an Interpretation of the Word
‘Stimmung’” (Teile 1 Und 2), Traditio 2 (1944): 409–64, and Traditio 3 (1945): 307–64.
A revision of the latter was posthumously published as Leo Spitzer, Classical and
Christian Ideas of World Harmony (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1963).
See also Rebecca Pohl’s recent translation of a sweeping review essay by David Wellbery,
“Stimmung,” new formations 93 (Februar 2017): 6–45. For an innovative treatment of
Stimmung and related terms from physiological and environmental perspectives, sehen
Margareta Ingrid Christian, “Aer, Aurae, Venti: Philology and Physiology in Aby Warburg’s

Allais and Pop | Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations

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Dissertation on Botticelli,” PMLA 129, NEIN. 3 (2014): 399–416.

17. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (1927; Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2006), 134–40,
Sek. 29, available in English translation as Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und
Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 126–31.
Though he does not say so explicitly, Spitzer’s interpretation stands in marked contrast
to Heidegger’s pathos-laden conception with its connection to Furcht (dread).

18. Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin (Berlin: Marquardt, 1907), 73–116, verfügbar
in English in Rodin and Other Prose Pieces, trans. G. Craig Houston (London: Quartet
Books, 1986), 44–69. The text of Rilke’s Rodin lecture was not reprinted in the 1946 Grau
Walls edition of Rilke’s Rodin, cited by Rosalind Krauss and other anglophone Rodin
scholars. Diana Reynolds Cordileone also sees in Riegl an affiliation with Arthur
Schopenhauer, then enjoying the height of his reputation in German and Austrian
aesthetic theory, in Alois Riegl in Vienna 1875–1905: An Institutional Biography
(London: Routledge, 2016), ch. 1.

19. Riegl engaged in more explicit prognostication as well, notably in an unpublished
lecture delivered in Prague on 27 Januar 1897 on the “Future of Artistic Skill.” See “Die
Zukunft des Kunsthandwerkes,” in Riegl 14, Box XI, Institutsarchiv des Instituts für
Kunstgeschichte, Vienna.

20. Riegl mentions Stimmungswert in the seldom-discussed “Bestimmungen zur
Durchführung des Denkmalschutzgesetzes” (Provisions for the implementation of the
monument protection law) that accompanied the cult essay, itself published as an intro-
duction to the new proposed law. The cult essay contains several mentions of “mood”:
“mood-effect” (Stimmungswirkung); “a pure mood of age-value” (eine reine Stimmung
des Alterswertes); the “modern mood-filled” (modernen Stimmungsmenschen); a “desire
for mood” (Stimmungsbegehren); and “mood-filled” or “atmospheric” (stimmungsvoll). Sehen
Riegl, Das Moderne Denkmalkultus. The cult essay, proposed law, and “Bestimmungen”
(the latter two the result of a collaboration with Max Bauer) were published without the
authors’ names in the same year as Das Moderne Denkmalkultus, as Entwurf einer
gesetzlichen Organisation der Denkmalpflege in Österreich (Vienna: Verlag der Zentral-
Kommission für Kunst- und historische Denkmale, 1903). They have been republished
as Kunstwerk oder Denkmal? Alois Riegls Schriften zur Denkmalpflege, Hrsg. Ernst Bacher
(Vienna: Böhlau, 1995), 122–44. See Bacher’s introduction, 13–48; and Martha Fingernagel-
Grüll, Zur Geschichte der österreichischen Denkmalpflege: Die Ära Helfert, Teil II: 1892
bis 1910, Hrsg. Bundesdenkmalamt Wien, Bd. 25, NEIN. 2 of Studien zu Denkmalschutz und
Denkmalpflege (Vienna: Böhlau, 2020), 70–80 and 561–74.

21. Benjamin, The Work of Art, 23.
22. Walter Benjamin, “Little History of Photography” (1931), trans. Edmund Jephcott

and Kingsley Shorter, in The Work of Art, 274–98.

23. On Riegl’s own use of photography in argumentation, see Jesse Lockard, “Seeing
through a Roman Lens: Formalism, Photography, and the Lost Visual Rhetoric of Riegl’s
Late Roman Art Industry,” History of Photography 40, NEIN. 3 (August 2016): 301–29.

24. Two years after “Mood,” Riegl differentiated his critique of iconography from that
of the sculptor Adolf Hildebrand, for whom the “content” of all art was ultimately “archi-
tectonic.” Nor did Riegl equip his pluralistic system with a “space value” [Raumwert?],
something he could easily have done had he thought it salient, despite using the terms
Raumgrund (spatial ground) and Raumvorstellung (spatial idea) in his histories of paint-
ing and architecture. Alois Riegl, “Naturwerk und Kunstwerk, II,” Allgemeine Zeitung
(München), Beilage 48 (1901), reprinted in Gesammelte Aufsätze, 65–70. On space, sehen
Margaret Olin, “Forms of Respect: Alois Riegl’s Concept of Attentiveness,” Art Bulletin

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71, NEIN. 2 (Juni 1989): 285–99; and Hans-Georg van Arburg, “Ein sonderbares Gespinst
von Raum und Zeit: Zur theoretischen Konstitution und Funktion von ‘Stimmung’ um
1900 bei Alois Riegl und Hugo von Hofmannsthal,” in Stimmung: Ästhetische Kategorie
und künstlerische Praxis, Hrsg. Kerstin Thomas (München: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2010),
13–30. For the ecological thesis, see Ingrid Christian’s work; and Deborah Coen, “Seeing
Planetary Change, Down to the Smallest Wildflower,” in Climates: Architecture and the
Planetary Imaginary (Zurich: Lars Mueller, 2018), 34–39.

25. On the tactile as opposed to the optic surface, see Historical Grammar, 396–98.
Riegl uses tactile for the literal sense of touch and haptic for touch sensations associated
with vision (though the term does not occur in the Historical Grammar lectures). Der
term Haptik was coined in Max Dessoir’s monograph “on the skin-sense,” “Über den
Hautsinn,” Archiv für Anatomie und Physiologie, Physiologische Abtheilung, 1892, 242.
Dessoir had in mind a general science of touch on the lines of optics and acoustics, mit
many subfields.

26. See Historical Grammar, 278–82.
27. See “The Modern Cult of Monuments,” 51n.
28. For a cogent commentary, see Olin, “The Cult of Monuments,” 177–98.
29. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the
Catholic Revival in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Historical Journal 38, NEIN. 3 (September
1995): 647–70.

30. Alois Riegl, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, Hrsg. Arthur Burda and Max
Dvorˇák (Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1908), 79–88, 100. In the English translation, Origins,
152–59.

31. Usually rendered in English as “The state, it is I.” Jürgen Habermas has empha-
sized this “representative publicness” in The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989).

32. Commenting on the afterlife of Semper’s “practical aesthetics,” Riegl wrote that
“true scientificity was slain by a supposed scientificity. The inevitable result was a vague
sense of the inner falsehood of this cult of the isolated fact.” See Alois Riegl, “Naturwerk
und Kunstwerk: ICH,” Allgemeine Zeitung (München), Beilage 13 (1901), reprinted in
Gesammelte Aufsätze, 51–64.

33. Charles Taylor, “The Future of the Religious Past,” in Religion: Beyond a Concept

(New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 178.

34. Josef Bodonyi, Entstehung und Bedeutung des Goldgrundes in der Spätantiken
Bildkomposition (Ph.D. diss., University of Vienna, 1932), esp. 1–16. Bodonyi was
prompted to write his text in refutation of a single footnote in Riegl. When Gombrich
reviewed the book, he took Bodonyi’s side, contra Riegl. See Ernst Gombrich, “J. Bodonyi,
Entstehung und Bedeutung des Goldgrundes in der spätantiken Bildkomposition,”
Kritische Berichte zur Kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur 5, NEIN. 3 (1935): 65–75.

35. See Hans Besler, Das Raumproblem in der altchristlichen Malerei (Bonn:
Schroeder, 1920), 52, where the author denies gold ground any “spatial function” and
calls any golden surface a “purely abstract, decorative wall in and of itself” (rein abs-
trakte, dekorative Wand an sich). See also Wood, “Strzygowski and Riegl in America”;
and Jas´ Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History
25, NEIN. 3 (Juni 2002): 358–79.

36. In Historical Grammar, 262, Riegl explains the laying of gold ground as a tech-
nique that allows a surface to be “conceived as space.” Merely by beginning to lay this
luxuriant, glowing material on a flat plane, the artist produces “a remote and blissful
space” and therefore reduces the need for reliance on “further earthly accoutrements.”

Allais and Pop | Mood for Modernists: An Introduction to Three Riegl Translations

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