It is difficult to find another historical study of the Vienna group of the calibre of ‘Borromini’s architecture’ or ‘the design principles of Late Gothic painting’. To be sure, Bruno Fürst, who we saw to be a close friend of Pächt, produced a study of Austrian sculpture that in many ways extends Pächt’s categories of Gestaltungsprinzipien to three dimensions. Swoboda, so close to the group, did not produce anything characteristically structure-oriented apart from works continuing Pächt’s ideas on national constants. I will argue that Swoboda’s co-editor of Dvořák’s work, Johannes Wilde (1891–1970), deserves this attention. As we will see in a moment, Wilde – who was born in Budapest but took his PhD in Vienna with Dvořák – was considered integral to the University Strukturforschung group from his perch at the Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum of Vienna.

Instead of exploring studies produced by Wilde in Vienna in the late 1920s or early 1930s, however, I will focus – paralleling my previous discussion of Pächt’s works – on his work done in England. I will argue that Wilde used his English experience to filter his initially quite rich and varied philosophical background – derived from Dvořák and based loosely on what can be called ‘hermeneutic’ philosophy – to obtain a simplified functional approach to interpretation. This method has a lot in common with the method of Sedlmayr and Pächt, but with only direct influence and more of a common evolution, a homologous method you might say.

Wilde, like Sedlmayr and Pächt, was extremely sensitive to artistic form and its organisation. Whereas Sedlmayr had analysed the internal structure of Borromini’s San Carlo, Wilde was interested in the way in which frescoes were related to the space external to them. In this his interests might be likened to those of Pächt exploring the relationship of the miniature to the manuscript page.