‘Hans Tietze and art history as Geisteswissenschaft in early twentieth-century Vienna’ translated by Clarice Zdanski with an introduction by Riccardo Marchi, originally published as Riccardo Marchi, ‘Hans Tietze e la storia dell’arte come scienza dello spirito nella Vienna del primo Novecento’, Arte Lombarda, 110/111, 1994, 55–66

• Main Author: Riccardo Marchi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Department of Art History, University of Birmingham 2011-12-01
• Series: Journal of Art Historiography
• Subjects: Hans Tietze; Aloïs Riegl; Franz Wickhoff; Heinrich Wölfflin; Max Dvořák; August Schmarsow; Giovanni Morelli; Wilhelm Dilthey; Ernst Mach; Benedetto Croce; Oskar Kokoschka; Vienna school of art history; art historiography; art history – methodology; expressionism
• Online Access: http://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/marchi.pdf
• ISSN: 2042-4752

This article analyzes the Methode der Kunstgeschichte, published in 1913 by Hans Tietze (1880-1954), an important but often neglected figure of the Vienna school of art history, who had been a student of Franz Wickhoff and Aloïs Riegl and was one of Ernst H. Gombrich’s teachers. In the Methode Tietze developed a bold and innovative idea of art history out of a confrontation with momentous intellectual and artistic challenges. These were (1) the discussion about the object and method of the Geisteswissenschaften (human and cultural sciences) in German philosophy, (2) Riegl’s and Wölfflin’s formalism, which Tietze critiqued as insufficient, also in response to the emergence of expressionism, which he courageously and precociously supported, and (3) epistemological debates that questioned notions of ‘objective’ knowledge.