Art history is awash in ‘theory’ but has no matrix to debate questions. At a moment when art history has searched for a healthier model of balanced theoretical reflection and empirical practice, emblematised by the recent translation of Erwin Panofsky’s early works, the second Vienna School emerges as an exemplar with impressive theoretical writings and incisive historical studies. This book has sought to contextualise this school and connect its theoretical commitments to currents of Gestalt theory, in order to better understand its scope and ambitions. Brought under the same umbrella, the New Vienna School is engaged in a dual challenge for the human sciences: to combine natural scientific rigour with hermeneutic understanding.

The New Vienna School exercised what I have called ‘analytic holism’, a naturalistic view of the interaction of forms – parts, wholes – in a relational manner amenable to analysis. By transferring the work of art history to the visual, the school emphasised the refinement of tools related to visual analysis. Gestalt theory showed how those tools could be rigorous. Indeed, by being thoroughly sensory, they were the prerequisite for any formalisation of a theory of symbolism or style in art history.

This book has tried to stress the reflexive awareness of the tasks of art history by the new Viennese group, a reflexive awareness that it recognised in, and adopted from, Gestalt theory. The balance of theory and practice in the writings of Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt is not accidental, as each saw the positioning of the discipline to be just as important as the work that could be undertaken within it. As I explained, they understood that there were many problematic notions facing a rigorous art history, beginning with the meaning of individual forms and their possible connections. Style history and iconography presented two interpretive practices that ran into methodological difficulties; namely, what parts or works can be compared fruitfully, and what parts or works can we attach ideas to?

The final chapter on Otto Demus moved problems of visuality beyond the Latin west, and indeed there are many more directions in which Viennese theory can lead us.