Historical grammar of the visual arts

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"Alois Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the greatest modern art historians. The most important member of the so-called "Vienna School," Riegl developed a highly refined technique of visual or formal analysis, as opposed to the iconological method with its emphasis on decoding motifs through recourse to texts. Riegl also pioneered understanding of the changing role of the viewer, the significance of non-high art objects or what would now be called visual or material culture, and theories of art and art history, including his much-debated neologism Kunstwollen (the will of art). At last, his Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts, which brings together the diverse threads of his thought, is available to an English-language audience, in a superlative translation by Jacqueline E