The main task that challenged Sedlmayr and Pächt in the late 1920s to early 1930s was acknowledging the integrity of the work of art. From Gestalt theory they inherited the concern that one must first understand the basic structure and nature of a work of art before attempting to understand its history. They saw many of their contemporaries as failing in this task and therefore incapable of making meaningful progress in art history. The discipline was full of tacit assumptions about the work of art, the nature of representation and symbolisation, and historical influence that needed to be made explicit and openly theorised. The place to begin was with the single work itself.

In his 1930 book on Borromini, Sedlmayr argued that one would have to have an understanding of the basic structural principles constituting the architect’s style before understanding the Baroque. It was literally impossible, in Sedlmayr’s view, for one to understand the genealogy of Baroque architecture without first having an explicit account of Borromini. Similarly, when Pächt addressed the problem of regional styles in Netherlandish painting in his 1933 study of ‘Design Principles’, he argued that it is hopeless to argue which artists were influenced by which traditions without articulating accounts of just what those regional styles entailed, their inner form or Gestalungsprinzip.

Sedlmayr and Pächt felt that the tools to move beyond an informal formalism could be found in Gestalt psychology, which offered the means to characterise the structure of visual perception that could be applied to individual works of art and architecture. Gestalt psychology had even broached the problem of development and identity of structure in time. The theory developed by the early Sedlmayr and mature Pächt presents a compact set of commitments, stressing spatial complexes in relation to viewers, the causes of which are contiguous, immediately antecedent events. With the view that the New Vienna School is devoted to a kind of ‘structural evolutionism’, I will devote this chapter to structure and the next to evolution.