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Journal of the History of Ideas, Volume 66, Number 3, July 2005, pp.
451-474 (Article)

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DOI: 10.1353/jhi.2005.0044

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 Time and History in Alois Riegl’s
Theory of Perception

Michael Gubser

In an early essay, the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905), a

pioneer of the modern discipline of art history, linked the creation of the
zodiac images in calendar art to the designation of constellations in the heav-
ens.1 Ancient calendar artists observed the motion of stars across the night sky
and attempted to map them into recognizable patterns representing specific
temporal periods. Their efforts inscribed the cyclical temporality of the heav-
ens into the images of the ancient calendar. This inherent temporality came to
characterize all art forms in Riegl’s work; his choice of calendar art as his
earliest research topic heralded a career-long interest in the connection be-
tween temporality and artistic form. Art objects, he believed, were temporal
as well as spatial. Just as the light from constellations reflected a deep history,
artworks illuminated the passage of time by visually re-presenting the percep-
tual world of past eras.
Riegl’s work has garnered attention in recent decades among art histori-
ans and non–art historians alike. This interest is due in part to the renewed
concern for disciplinary origins that art history, like other fields, has experi-
enced in the wake of poststructuralist critiques. Scholars outside of art history
have taken note of his work because of its broad scope and relevance for the
study of historiography and perception; Riegl’s work provides models for
linking the analysis of specific artworks with a history of perception, explor-
ing the relationship between monuments and memory, and analyzing the na-
ture of visual modernity. Interest in Riegl also stems from his acknowledged
impact on such preeminent philosophers and historical theorists as Erwin Pa-
nofsky, Paul Feyerabend, Gilles Deleuze, Fèlix Guattari, and above all Walter

1
Alois Riegl, ‘‘Die Holzkalendar des Mittelalters und der Renaissance,’’ Mittheilungen
des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, IX (1888), 82–103; ‘‘Die mittelalterliche
Kalendarillustration,’’ Mittheilungen des Instituts für österreichische Geschichtsforschung, X
(1889), 1–74.

451
Copyright 2005 by Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc.
452 Michael Gubser
Benjamin.2 Figures as varied as Georg Lukács, Karl Mannheim, Walter Grop-
ius, and Mikhail Bakhtin have cited his work favorably.3 Riegl is perhaps best
known for his attempts to dismantle the hierarchy of high and low art, his
attack on the preeminence of classical aesthetic ideals, and his effort to con-
struct a universal history of style. The combination of these commitments led
him to consider European and non-European craft genres that fell outside
conventional definitions of art. In books such as Problems of Style, Late
Roman Art Industry, and The Group Portraiture of Holland, Riegl examined
the high arts, decorative arts, and manufactured artifacts alike, gleaning in-
sights into the structure of an era’s perception from close descriptive analyses
of its artwork.4 In Problems of Style, Riegl traced the development of ancient
vegetal decorative motifs toward their fulfillment in the naturalized tendrils
and acanthus leaves of Greek ornament. A single, universal development en-
compassed seemingly distinct motivic forms, and creative innovation was
driven by an inner formal logic. Similarly, Late Roman Art Industry, the

2
See Erwin Panofsky, esp. ‘‘Der Begriff des Kunstwollens’’ (Aufsätze zu Grundfragen
der Kunstwissenschaft [Berlin, 1964], 33–47.) Paul Feyerabend credits Riegl’s Late Roman
Art Industry with breaking the ‘‘crude progressivism’’ of prior art historical accounts and rec-
ognizing that art had various purposes, intentions, and ideals of truth and beauty. (See Feyera-
bend, Conquest of Abundance: A Tale of Abstraction versus the Richness of Being [Chicago,
1999], 93–94; Farewell to Reason [New York, 1987], 294.) Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari
use Riegl’s distinction between haptic and optic art to elucidate their own distinction between
the nomadic space of thought and the striated, or mapped and gridded space of state power.
(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, tr. Brian Massumi
[Minneapolis, 1987], 492–93.)
Benjamin’s complex and multifaceted reception of Riegl is discussed in Wolfgang Kemp,
‘‘Benjamin’s Beziehungen zur Wiener Schule’’ in Kritische Berichte 1, 1973; Kemp, ‘‘Benja-
min und die Kunstwissenschaft,’’ Links hatte noch alles sich zu enträtseln . . . : Walter Benja-
min in Kontext, ed. Burckhardt Lindner (Frankfurt, 1978); Thomas Y. Levin, ‘‘Walter Benjamin
and the Theory of Art History’’ in October 47 (Winter 1988); Giles Peaker, ‘‘Works that Have
Lasted . . . : Walter Benjamin Reading Alois Riegl,’’ Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, ed.
Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam, 2001), 291–309.
3
On Lukács, Gropius, and Bakhtin, see Christopher S. Wood (ed.), The Vienna School
Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s (New York, 2000), 14–15. On Mann-
heim, see Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University
Park, Pa., 1992), 190n10. Hans Sedlmayr asserts that Oswald Spengler took many of his ideas
from Riegl. See the translation of Sedlmayr, ‘‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought,’’ in Wood-
field, Framing Formalism, 26.
4
Though I use the English titles of Riegl’s work throughout this paper, my translations
come from the German originals in consultation with English translations. See Stilfragen:
Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Berlin, 1923) (originally published
1893); Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Darmstadt, 1973) (originally published 1901); Das hol-
ländische Gruppenporträt (Vienna, 1931)(originally published 1902). For the translations, see
Problems of Style: Foundations for a History of Ornament, tr. Evelyn Kain (Princeton, 1992);
Late Roman Art Industry, tr. Rolf Winkes (Rome, 1985); The Group Portraiture of Holland,
tr. Evelyn Kain and David Britt (Los Angeles, 1999). A translation of Riegl’s Historische
Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Graz, 1966), entitled Historical Grammar of the Visual Arts,
tr. Jacqueline E. Jung, was published by Zone Books in September, 2004.
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 453
epoch-making work that Walter Benjamin described as a revolution in art
historical method,5 traced the gradual development of space as an object of
artistic concern in the late Roman Empire. In this volume, Riegl explored his
controversial notion of the Kunstwollen, or artistic will, which asserted art’s
autonomy on the basis of a formal creative volition internal to artworks.6
Finally, The Group Portraiture of Holland documented the emergence and
decline of a ‘‘typically Hollandish painting’’ emphasizing space and atten-
tion.7
Riegl scholars have frequently attempted to situate his art history within
a variety of philosophical traditions, an effort complicated by Riegl’s limited
citation of sources. Several scholars have linked Riegl’s historical vision with
the embattled tradition of Hegelian philosophy. Riegl’s teleology; his stress
on the unified, internal, and purposive development of art; his notion of art as
mind overcoming material; and even his emphasis on the role of the viewer
in art all have a distinctly Hegelian resonance. Wolfgang Kemp fits Riegl
squarely within a late-nineteenth-century Hegelian revival,8 Michael Podro
incorporates him within a Hegelian critical tradition of art history that
spanned the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,9 and Michael Ann Holly
posits a clear trajectory, linking Kant and Hegel with Riegl and Panofsky.10
Others, however, just as firmly reject this influence, arguing that Hegel
enjoyed scant support in Austria. Franz Brentano’s and Robert Zimmer-
mann’s forceful attacks on Hegel’s thought lend credence this claim, espe-
cially given the preponderant influence of these philosophers at the University
of Vienna. A recent commentator, Diana Graham Reynolds, discounts Heg-
el’s impact on Riegl and instead connects him with Schopenhauer’s and
Nietzsche’s philosophies of will. Early exposure to Nietzsche and Schopen-
hauer may have provided Riegl with a framework for considering questions
of history in terms of will, becoming, and time. In pointing out his involve-
ment with the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, Reynolds demon-
strates his exposure to the early Nietzsche reception in Austria that William
McGrath chronicled.11 Indeed, Riegl’s attacks on nineteenth-century historical
scholarship may reflect the influence of Nietzsche’s famous essay, ‘‘The Use
and Abuse of History,’’ which members of the Leseverein read. Lambert

5
Walter Benjamin, ‘‘Bücher die lebendig gewesen sei,’’ Gesammelte Schriften III (Frank-
furt, 1972), 169–71.
6
For lack of space, I cannot examine the important concept of Kunstwollen or the substan-
tial literature surrounding it in this paper.
7
Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, 64, 307, 363.
8
Kemp, ‘‘Introduction’’ to The Group Portraiture of Holland, 12–13.
9
See Podro, Critical Historians of Art, 71–97.
10
See Holly, Panofsky.
11
Reynolds, Alois Riegl, 24–46; William McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in
Vienna (New Haven, Conn., 1974).
454 Michael Gubser
Wiesing and Francesco dal Co also connect Riegl with Schopenhauer when
they describe his Kunstwollen as an art historical will-to-form.12
There was yet a third philosophical tradition whose influence on nine-
teenth-century Austrian culture has been well documented. Leibniz’s vision
of a stable and harmonious universe of self-sufficient monads is often con-
nected with an anti-idealist, empirical tradition that inspired a host of thinkers
in Austria.13 Riegl was almost certainly exposed to Leibniz through his teacher
Robert Zimmermann, one of the seventeenth-century philosopher’s most pro-
lific nineteenth-century publicists.14 Nevertheless, the historiographical and
temporal implications of Leibniz’s thought were by no means straightfor-
ward.15 On one hand, Leibniz’s monadology seemed to construct a formal
system of ideal synchronic harmony, immutable and timeless. The early nine-
teenth-century Austrian philosopher, Bernard Bolzano, however, who
influenced Brentano and Zimmermann, revised the Leibnizian system to in-
corporate development and progress as crucial aspects of the divine creation.16
The sense of an artwork as a monad or self-sufficient creation, the rendering
of preestablished harmony in terms of developmental formalism, and a stress
on empiricism were all components of Riegl’s thought that can be traced back
to a vibrant Leibnizian tradition in Austria.
Finally, Riegl’s art history needs to be set against the backdrop of nine-
teenth-century developments in aesthetics.17 Following the philosopher Alex-
ander Baumgarten, whose 1750 volume Aesthetica reclaimed sensation and
perception for philosophical inquiry, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment
reoriented the study of aesthetics away from theories of absolute beauty and
toward a stress on perception as a relationship between artworks and a com-
munity of judging observers.18 These theories laid the groundwork for the

12
Wiesing, Die Sichtborkeit des Bildes, 72–76; Francesco Dal Co, Figures of Architecture
and Thought: German Architecture Culture 1880–1920 (New York, 1990), 83–169.
13
See, for example, Roger Bauer, La Réalité, Royaume de Dieu: Études sur l’originalité
du théâtre viennois dans le premiére moitié du XIXe siécle (Munich, 1965). William Johnston,
in The Austrian Mind, echoes this theme.
14
See, e.g., Robert Zimmermann, Leibnitz’ Monadologie (Vienna, 1847); and Zimmer-
mann, Leibnitz und Herbart: Eine Vergleichung ihrer Monadologien (Vienna, 1849).
15
See Albert Heinekamp (ed.), Leibniz als Geschichtsforscher (Wiesbaden, 1982) for a
twentieth-century discussion of these issues.
16
Roger Bauer, Der Idealismus und seine Gegner in Österreich (Heidelberg, 1966),
55–57.
17
For a recent histories of nineteenth-century formalist aesthetics and perceptual theory,
see Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou (eds.), Empathy, Form, and Space:
Problems in German Aesthetics 1873–1893 (Santa Monica, 1994) and Jonathan Crary, Tech-
niques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge,
Mass., 1990). See also Michael Podro, The Manifold of Perception: Theories of Art from Kant
to Hildebrand (Oxford, 1972) and Critical Historians of Art.
18
On Baumgarten, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Cambridge, 1990),
13–17. On Kant’s aesthetics, see Eagleton; Martin Jay, ‘‘‘The Aesthetic Ideology’ as Ideology:
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 455
dominant trends of nineteenth-century aesthetics—Schopenhauer’s theory of
will and perception; art history’s rejection of absolute aesthetics in favor of
historically changeable notions of beauty; and empiricist aesthetics, which
sought to uncover the psychological and physiological rules of formal beauty.
The philosopher Johann Friedrich Herbart also developed a theory of human
consciousness that influenced formalist aesthetics in the German-speaking
world.19 In his Psychologie als Wissenschaft, he proposed a model of the mind
as continuously interacting ideas that confronted the world through the senses.
Past experiences were stored as presentations in the mind, often below the
threshold of awareness yet available for recovery when a new sensation either
intensified or muted existing ideas. Mental life became intelligible through an
association of past and present experiences, a fusion of new and old forms.
Herbart’s stimulus-response psychology prompted scientists such as Hermann
Helmholtz, Gustav Fechner, Hermann Lotze, and Wilhelm Wundt to seek
the physiological and psychological rules that governed mental activity and
aesthetic perception. Robert Zimmermann, one of Riegl’s teachers, expanded
these ideas into a full-blown science of aesthetics that was to provide a frame-
work for later empirical investigations. His Aesthetik presented a comprehen-
sive account of the history of aesthetic thought and a detailed organon
describing the formalist properties of aesthetic types.20 Zimmermann’s work
encouraged numerous scholars, including Adolf Hildebrand, Conrad Fiedler,
Heinrich Wölfflin, and Robert Vischer, to examine the precise relationship
between aesthetics and perception.21 Riegl’s histories drew on this tradition as
well.
This essay examines the connection between art, time, and history in
Riegl’s thought, a theme few commentators have noted in their discussions of
his work. Recent studies of fin-de-siècle Vienna, such as those of Carl Schor-
ske, Allan Janik, Stephen Toulmin, and William Johnston, characterize Aus-
trian modernist thought as anti-historical in its approach to social and cultural
questions.22 Faced with political and social turmoil and a nineteenth-century
history of decline, so the argument runs, the Austrian cultural elite turned
away from history and sought out aesthetic, empiricist, or psychological fields
of inquiry that might explain contemporary problems, suggest redemptive

or What Does It Mean to Aestheticize Politics?’’ in Force Fields: Between Intellectual History
and Cultural Critique (New York, 1993), 79–80; S. Körner, Kant (Bristol, 1955).
19
Herbart has been the subject of only very limited scholarship in English. See Michael
Podro, Manifold of Perception, 61–79; Mallgrave and Eleftherios Empathy, Form, and Space,
10–14; and Crary Techniques of the Observer, 100–102.
20
On Zimmermann, see Wiesing, Die Sichtbarkeit des Bildes, 27–54.
21
See Mallgrave and Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space.
22
See Carl Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981); Allan
Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (New York, 1973); William M. Johnston,
The Austrian Mind (Berkeley, 1972).
456 Michael Gubser
solutions, and provide escapes from the social world. This essay challenges
that argument, at least with regard to Riegl, whose defense of contemporary
artists such as Gustav Klimt was predicated on a historical understanding of
art.23 The literature on Riegl tends to focus on his theories of representation
as they are revealed in histories of visual form and perceptual culture.24 In-
deed, Riegl devoted much of his writing to the analysis of this or that artifact
in terms of its representational tactics, cultural significance, and historical
influence. Nevertheless, an emphasis on formal representation should not
crowd out other questions that were equally fundamental to his thought.
Though Riegl rarely engaged in overt historiographical theorizing, he embed-
ded his analyses of artworks within a concept of history based on continuous
and progressive time. To investigate art, he believed, was to explore man-
kind’s evolving perceptual relationship with the external world, a relationship
that was temporally and historically constituted. Time was not simply one
topic among the many that held Riegl’s attention; his oeuvre can be read as a
sustained investigation of the concept of history itself, a steady effort to grasp
history and time in artistic form—to treat art as time’s visible surface.

Monuments and History

Rarely did Riegl address the topics of time and history as explicitly as in
his 1903 essay ‘‘The Modern Cult of Monuments,’’ written when he was the
editor of a government commission journal for the research and preservation

23
On the Klimt controversy involving Riegl’s colleague Franz Wickhoff, see Schorske,
Fin-de-Siècle vienna, 208–78; Hermann Bahr, Gegen Klimt (Vienna, 1903); Margaret Iverson,
Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, Mass., 1993), 35–37.
24
Riegl scholarship in the past several decades has produced several books and many
essays. Recent English monographs include Olin, Forms of Representation; Margaret Iverson,
Alois Riegl; and Diana Reynolds, Alois Riegl and the Politics of Art History (diss., University
of California, San Diego, 1997). Christopher S. Wood and Richard Woodfield have edited
volumes that help to contextualize Riegl’s work in twentieth-century aesthetic discourses and
examine his recent resurgent intellectual influence. See also Michael Podro, The Critical Histo-
rians of Art (New Haven, Conn., 1982) and Michael Ann Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations
of Art History (Ithaca, N.Y., 1984) for discussions of Riegl’s impact.
In German, essays on Riegl are also numerous, although, surprisingly, no monographs
devoted exclusively to his work have, to my knowledge, appeared. Lambert Wiesing, Die
Sichtbarkeit des Bildes: Geschichte und Perspektiven der formalen Ästhetik (Reinbek bei
Hamburg, 1997); Thomas Zaunschirm, Distanz-Dialektik in der modernen Kunst: Bausteine
einer Paragone-Philosophie (Vienna, 1983); Wolfgang Kemp, ‘‘Fernbilder: Benjamin und die
Kunstwissenschaft,’’ in Burckhardt Lindner (ed.), ‘‘Links hatte noch alles sich zu
enträtseln . . .’’ all contain significant discussions of Riegl’s work. One study exists in Italian:
Sandro Scarrocchia, Studi su Alois Riegl (Emilia-Romagna, 1986). For an overview of the
history of Riegl scholarship through the early 1980s, see Dietrich von Loh, Alois Riegl und die
Hegelsche Geschichtsforschung (diss., University of Vienna), 83–128.
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 457
of artistic and historical monuments.25 He drafted the article as a theoretical
analysis of the social and aesthetic implications entailed in the commission’s
preservation work.26 Instead of taking an overtly polemical stand in the heated
debates over architectural restoration, Riegl’s essay offered an elaborate the-
ory of the various historical suppositions that determined the relationship be-
tween monuments and observers. Monuments, Riegl contended, registered
traces of time and decay; their historicity extended beyond the monument
builder’s original intent to encompass the signs of age and ruin. This sense of
a monument’s historical significance indicated the broad scope of Riegl’s
modernist vision of history.

We call historical everything that once was and today is no more; in

modern conceptions we add to this the further idea that what once
was can never be again, and everything that once existed constitutes
an irreplaceable and irremovable link in a chain of development. In
other words, that each successive step is determined by the first and
could not have happened as it did had any of the earlier links not
preceded it. The central point of every modern conception of history
is the idea of development. In these modern terms, every human activ-
ity and every human fate of which we have evidence or testimony can
without exception claim historical value: every historical event is in
principle irreplaceable.27

The modern historical worldview, according to Riegl, subsumed human

events and products within a developmental framework. Idealists, materialists,
and positivists alike shared this perspective, accepting some form of evolu-
tionary history in their systems; they understood the past in terms of a contin-
uous, causal process linking cultural phenomena to their predecessors and
successors. The modern idea of history provided meaning by conferring on
each event or artifact a significance based on its position in the developmental
chain. This historical structure was not, Riegl believed, inherent in the mate-
rial evidence from the past, but was instead a historically specific conceptual
framework for organizing our perception of the social and cultural world. ‘‘It
took several centuries before [historical awareness] gradually acquired the
modern shape we see today’’ he noted. Modern historicism nurtured

25
Riegl, ‘‘Der moderne Denkmalkultus: sein Wesen und seine Entstehung,’’ in Gesam-
melte Aufsätze (Augsburg, 1928), 144–93. Translated in English as ‘‘The Modern Cult of Mon-
uments,’’ tr. Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo, Oppositions, 25 (Fall 1982), 21–51.
26
For writings by and about Riegl on the subject of monument preservation, see Ernst
Bacher (ed.), Kunstwerk oder Denkmal?: Alois Riegls Schriften zur Denkmalpflege (Vienna,
1995).
27
Riegl, ‘‘Der moderne Denkmalkultus,’’ 145.
458 Michael Gubser
an interest in everything, including the smallest facts and events of
even the most remote peoples set apart from our own nation by insur-
mountable differences in character; and an interest in the history of
mankind overall, in which every individual allows us to glimpse a
piece of ourselves.28

By identifying the developmental worldview as a modern conceptual para-

digm, Riegl at once affirmed the premises and insights of nineteenth-century
historical scholarship, and acknowledged that its emphases on universality,
equality, and evolution grew out of a specific cultural and intellectual era. His
regular attacks on the tendency to evaluate historical artworks according to
modern standards, therefore, did not imply that he had found a neutral histori-
cal position. Aware of the historicity of his own scholarly enterprise, Riegl
sought to devise an art historical approach that remained true to its own rela-
tivist cultural implications, yet at the same time retained a conviction that
certain phenomena could be studied objectively and scientifically, that they
might be allowed to ‘‘speak’’ in their own terms and reflect their own time.
In ‘‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’’ Riegl set out to historicize contem-
porary notions of history and aesthetics by examining the temporal and histor-
ical constitution of perception. Since there was no absolute vantage point from
which to judge an artwork, the historian had to reflect on the temporal dynam-
ics inherent in the act of judging itself; he had to examine the historical rela-
tionship between artistic forms and cultural perception. The historicization of
historical awareness enabled Riegl to identify two distinct notions of time:
time as a historical construct, and time as a phenomenon embedded in arti-
facts. The latter at once escaped his era’s historical comprehension and under-
pinned it. By examining historical perception in the study of art, Riegl hoped
to suggest ways that a contemporary art historian, conditioned by his own
historicity, could make sense of forms of time that were not his own by per-
ceiving the material signs of alternate temporalities in artworks, the ‘‘objec-
tive’’ traces of time ‘‘written’’ across the surface of a work. By analyzing the
relationships among modern historical perception, the artifacts it attempted to
organize, and the alternate constructions of temporality they envisioned, Riegl
identified a new project for art history: to understand the interaction of differ-
ent modes of temporality.
Riegl organized ‘‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’’ as a typological study
of various modes of historical and artistic valuation. His first task in the essay
was to distinguish between artistic and historical monuments. Riegl’s defini-
tion of each was remarkably expansive.

28
Ibid., 153.
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 459
Every artistic monument is at once and without exception a historical
monument in that it represents a specific step in the development of
the visual arts, for which, strictly speaking, no real equivalent can
ever be found. Conversely, every historical monument is also an artis-
tic monument; even a literary example as insignificant as a short,
inconsequential note on torn-off scrap paper contains (in addition to
historical information about the manufacture of paper, the script, writ-
ing materials, etc.) a series of artistic elements: the external form of
the paper, the form of the letters, and the ways in which they were put
together.29

A historical outlook considered all objects unique and significant in the devel-
opment of history, and thus was not restricted to a particular type of object.
Riegl rejected distinctions between historically significant and inconsequen-
tial artifacts. Every human event or artifact had value as a historical monu-
ment, he argued, although sheer quantity required historians to focus their
energies on those objects that exemplified cultural attributes or transforma-
tions most clearly. Artistic value was also broadly construed, and it over-
lapped significantly with historical value. It is important to recognize that
Riegl rejected not only the distinction between high and low art, but also
conventional distinctions between art and non-art. In his view, art did not
designate a distinct class of objects, but rather the formal and decorative as-
pects of all human production; it described the products of a noninstrumental
creative drive that negotiated between human perception and the objective
world. All objects had artistic value, in that all objects possessed formal attri-
butes that did not directly serve a practical function. Moreover, all artifacts
had historical value as well. A mere scrap of paper, Riegl remarked, could
become an indispensable artifact from both a historical and artistic point of
view. It formed a potentially irreplaceable link in ‘‘der Entwicklungskette der
Kunstgeschichte’’; indeed, it might be one of the few artifacts available from
a particular era. Artistic forms were themselves historically significant in that
they exemplified the formal, perceptual tendencies from the past; artistic value
was therefore a historical category. ‘‘The division between ’artistic and histor-
ical monuments’ is unfounded,’’ Riegl wrote, ‘‘because the former is at once
contained and absorbed within the latter.’’30
It needs to be stressed that historical value and art value, though interre-
lated, were not synonymous. Whereas historical value designated the clues to
the past offered by an artifact, art value concerned its ‘‘spezifisch künstleri-
schen’’ qualities of concept, form, and color insofar as they possessed intrinsic

29
Ibid.
30
Ibid., 145–46.
460 Michael Gubser
artistry as well as historical worth. It was entirely possible to appreciate form
and color without regard for the historical information they provided. For
the art historian, however, mere aesthetic appreciation was insufficient, for it
ignored the historically determinant character of artworks.
In ‘‘The Modern Cult of Monuments,’’ Riegl used language evocative of
generational social conflict to characterize artworks according to historical,
perceptual, and temporal attributes, not aesthetic criteria of beauty or ugliness.
Monuments occasioned a struggle over meaning among social groups com-
mitted to distinct visual constructions of time. One way of characterizing the
historicity of artworks was to cite their status as evidence about life in the
past, evidence that could be classified chronologically. The indexical qualities
of an artwork—the traces of its time and place of origin—legitimized its
historical status in the eyes of a modern viewer; an artifact had historical
value if it elucidated the past. But Riegl identified a second, more fundamental
form of historicity, which he dubbed ‘‘age value’’ (Alterswert). A monument
could possess age value even if it offered no clues about a specific historical
era.

The ruins of a castle, for instance, whose decayed walls display little
of their original form, technique, floor plan, etc., to gratify an art or
art historical interest, and to which moreover no chronicled memories
attach, offer no simple historical-value that can explain their clear and
evident interest to the modern observer. When regarding an old
church belfry, we also have to distinguish between the more or less
localized historical memories of various forms which are awakened
in us when we observe it, and the general, non-localized presentation
of time, which the belfry has ‘‘joined in’’ [‘‘mitgemacht’’] and which
it reveals in its clearly evident traces of age [Alterspuren].31

Advocates of age-value admired monuments not for their ability to elucidate

this or that period of history, but because they revealed ‘‘the past alone and
as such.’’32 Artifacts—written, visual, or architectural—represented the pas-
sage of time in traces of decay accumulated over the course of their existence.
This representation was not a function of either the artifact or viewer alone,
but something they both ‘‘joined in’’ or ‘‘made with’’ [‘‘mitgemacht’’] each
other, literally a re-presentation of time emerging within the visual dialogue
between an artifact and a viewer. Why should age value captivate modern
viewers? What was revealed in the re-presentation of time in artifacts? Ac-
cording to Riegl, age value

31
Ibid., 149.
32
Ibid., 172.
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 461
brought forth in its observer the sense [Stimmungswirken], which
among modern men generates an awareness of the regularized cycle
of becoming and passing, of the emergence of the particular from the
whole and its gradual but necessary dissolution back into the whole.33

The dilapidated ruins of an old castle, for example, reminded observers of

fate, passage, and the cyclical impermanence of life. Whereas nineteenth-
century viewers privileged historical value, Riegl believed that the twentieth
century would come to accept fully the necessary implications of the ‘‘histori-
schen Entwicklungsgedanken’’; the new century would celebrate age value,
recognizing the relativity of even its own valuations and appreciating works
of the past more for their traces of age than for their original intent.34

It is much more the pure, regular cycle of becoming and passing

according to natural laws whose unclouded perception modern men
from the beginning of the twentieth century enjoy. Every human arti-
fact is hereby conceived as a natural organism, in whose development
no one should interfere. . . . Modern man glimpses in a monument a
piece of his own life, and he finds all interference in its development
as disturbing as interference with his own organic growth.35

Evoking an anthropological sense of time or passage, age value recalled the

temporal experience of each viewer by presenting it back to him in traces of
age and decay. Thus artworks and artifacts could be described as historical in
two ways: they marked time chronologically, recalling a work’s original state;
and they re-presented time ‘‘rhythmically,’’36 recording the passage of mo-
ments as ‘‘Spuren des Alters.’’37 The historicity of an artifact was therefore
based not only on its chronological content, but on the fact that time traced
its movements across the very face of the object. Art historical monuments
gratified the modern observer by illuminating the distant past and by linking
an artwork and viewer in a common temporal experience.
Although ‘‘The Modern Cult of Monuments’’ was Riegl’s fullest exposi-
tion of the value attached to age and decay, it was not the first time he argued
in favor of letting time effect its wear. In Volkskunst, Hausfleiß, und Hausin-

33
Ibid., 150.
34
Ibid., 156.
35
Ibid., 162. Riegl’s designation of age-value as a modern aesthetic-cum-religious cult
prefigured Benjamin’s discussion of the cult value of art in his well-known essay ‘‘The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.’’
36
Max Dvorák uses the term rhythm in discussing Riegl’s art history. See Dvorák, ‘‘Alois
Riegl,’’ in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte (Munich, 1929), 294. I will consider its
relevance later in this essay.
37
Riegl, ‘‘Der moderne Denkmalkultus,’’ 150.
462 Michael Gubser
dustrie, Riegl criticized those devotees of the handicrafts who promoted rural
folk art by marketing its products as consumer goods. With the best of inten-
tions, these admirers sought to preserve folk arts and crafts by making them
competitive in a modern industrial marketplace. Commodification and mass-
production, however, were modern economic processes that actually sped up
the disappearance of authentic rural art by transforming it into something it
was not. The best one could hope to do was study, classify, and appreciate
folk art before it gradually vanished in the face of modern industrial life.
Although we may enjoy and learn from art of bygone cultures in their arti-
facts, we cannot reproduce their works or their modes of temporality.38
When it concerned the preservation of monuments, historical value and
age value sometimes conflicted. Whereas a historian might call for renovating
a monument to its original state, an advocate of age value insisted on leaving
the monument to its natural process of decay. This dispute was complicated
by the antagonism between age value and its social and artistic antithesis:
newness value. Foretokening the twentieth-century cult of novelty, many peo-
ple in the late nineteenth century celebrated newness for its own sake, priori-
tizing youth over age, innovation over tradition. ‘‘Only the new and the whole
appear beautiful in the eyes of the majority,’’ Riegl wrote. ‘‘[T]he old, frag-
mented, and discolored are ugly.’’39 Nonetheless, both the cult of newness
value and the cult of age value reflected a modern obsession with time and
history. ‘‘On the one hand we see an appreciation of the old for its own sake
which rejects on principle all renovation; on the other hand, the appreciation
of the new in itself, which seeks to remove all traces of age as obtrusive and
displeasing.’’40 Historical value, age value, and newness value coexisted in the
complex perceptual matrix of monuments. History registered temporal pas-
sage visually for admirers of age value; it established a measurable relation-
ship between past and present for historians; and it was dismissed as worthless
by advocates of newness value.
It is important to note that in these competing frameworks, the Rankean
historicist invocation to extinguish the self during research disappeared alto-

38
Volkskunst, Hausfleiß, und Hausindustrie (Mittenwald, 1978). This was also a message
found at the end of Riegl’s Altorientalische Teppiche (Mittenwald, 1979). For a further exami-
nation of the changing nature of craft production in history, see the notes of Riegl’s lecture
entitled ‘‘Die Zukunft des Handwerks,’’ delivered in Prague on January 27, 1895. (‘‘Die Zu-
kunft des Handwerks,’’ unpublished notes in folder marked ‘‘Frühennotizen,’’ Riegl Nachlaß,
Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Wien.) The most thorough treatment of Volkskunst,
Hausfleiß, und Hausindustrie that I have found is in chapt. 5 of Diana Graham Reynolds’s
dissertation on Riegl. See Reynolds, Alois Riege, 129–80. She shows how Riegl’s concern for
folk arts and crafts grew out of his employment at the Museum für Kunst und Industrie in the
late 1880s and connects his early work to the political, institutional, and artistic currents of
contemporary Vienna.
39
Riegl, ‘‘Der moderne Denkmalkultus,’’ 179.
40
Ibid., 180.
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 463
gether. Even Riegl’s historian did not abolish the present in order to illuminate
the past. Instead, he preserved the historical value of an artifact by placing it
in a meaningful visual relationship with the present—a present that conferred
significance on the objects of the past. ‘‘Whereas age value appreciates the
past for its own sake, historical value has the tendency to single out a moment
in the historical development of the past and set it clearly before our eyes as
if it belonged to the present.’’41 In order to treat art as indexical and time as
chronological, Riegl’s historian recognized the present as a critical point of
reference and perspective.
Artistic and historical monuments embodied yet a fourth form of tempo-
rality inscribed in them by the monument builders themselves. Because me-
morials were created in order to preserve memory, the act of constructing a
monument was in Riegl’s view a claim to stop time, to fix or monumentalize
the moment of an event. Like historians, monument builders believed that
certain moments in chronological time (the origin, the date) were irreplace-
able and should be immortalized. However, like the advocates of newness
value who celebrated the eternity of the now, monument builders asserted the
permanence of a memorialized moment by attempting to remove it from the
temporal passage that both age value and historical value celebrated in differ-
ent ways. Riegl summarized the relationship among these temporal valuations
in the following terms:

Whereas age value is based exclusively on passage, historical value,

though its existence would lack justification without the passage of
time to the present, nevertheless wishes to suspend the whole passage
of time from today onward; intentional commemorative value simply
makes a claim to immortality, to an eternal present, an unceasing state
of becoming [Werdezustand].42

Reminiscent of Nietzsche’s paradox of the eternal return, this curious model

of commemorative value describes a continuous temporal development coin-
ciding with a succession of static eternal moments. It set up a seemingly
paradoxical relationship between an ‘‘eternal present’’ and an ‘‘unceasing state
of becoming’’ in artworks.
Riegl distinguished between intentional monuments (those constructed as
memorials by their creators) and unintentional monuments (those objects that
gained historical value with age.) The former had a commemorative value
inscribed at the time of their completion, whereas the latter had historical and
age value attached by subsequent observers.43 The distinction is crucial be-

41
Ibid., 172.
42
Ibid., 173.
43
Ibid., 149.
464 Michael Gubser
cause each type of monument embodied a specific form of temporality. Inten-
tional monuments possessed historical worth because they withstood decay;
they memorialized an incident for all time and thus in some sense escaped
from time’s grasp. Unintentional monuments, by contrast, had historical value
as a result of their ability to register the passage of time, to show the visible
traces of origin and age. Whereas intentional monuments staked a claim to
eternity, the value of unintentional monuments resided in their ‘‘mortality’’
and appreciated with age. Most monuments, of course, had both intentional
and unintentional qualities. An artwork’s original meaning competed with its
history of reception up to the present day in determining its significance; the
viewer and the work engaged in a kind of negotiation over meaning. An art-
work’s significance was both objective (it had an identifiable era of origin, an
original meaning, and an irreducible materiality) and subjective (it changed
with each successive present and needed the viewer to complete its meaning.)
Thus the viewer-artwork relationship in Riegl’s analysis established an ex-
plicitly temporal matrix. The art historian Henri Zerner calls this relationship
art historical ‘‘data’’ and describes Riegl’s strategy as an attempt ‘‘to ‘formal-
ize’ meaning.’’44 By reading historical significance into the formal aspects of
artworks, Riegl attempted to trace historical continuity perceptually in visible
data. Art in other words expressed Zeit as well as Zeitgeist.
In ‘‘The Modern Cult of Monuments,’’ the temporal nature of visual per-
ception shaped the relationship between the modern historical worldview and
art of the past. Riegl noted that contemporary patrons of art often preferred
historical art that only partly shared their own artistic sensibilities over mod-
ern art from their own time and culture. Given the tendencies of the age
toward aesthetic relativism, Riegl wondered on what basis these preferences
could be held. How could modern viewers judge art of the past, or even
contemporary art, without a fixed standard? Riegl’s answer to this question
reiterated what we have seen above: that artworks existed as temporal fields
characterized by tension and conflict.

Certain old art works correspond, if not completely, at least in part,

to the modern artistic will. It is precisely this apparent correspon-
dence of certain aspects when set against conflicting aspects in the
same historical work that exert such a powerful effect on us modern
viewers. A modern art work, which necessarily lacks this contrast,
can never offer such an effect.45

Modern viewers perceived a historical artwork as a force field made up of

some elements that were compatible with their sensibilities and others that

44
Henri Zerner, ‘‘Alois Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism,’’ Daedalus (Winter 1976),
183.
45
Riegl, ‘‘Der moderne Denkmalkultus,’’ 147.
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 465
were not. The combination of familiarity and foreignness created lively view-
ing for modern observers. Historical paintings with modernist resonances
revealed contrasting artistic sensibilities within a single work, a pleasing ten-
sion, and thereby offered immanent criteria for comparison, criticism, and
evaluation. Neither purely modern art nor utterly foreign historical works
could provide this stimulation; the former obliterated critical distance whereas
the latter offered no opening for evaluation. Yet even modern art, Riegl wrote
in The Group Portraiture of Holland, preserved a ‘‘tension [Auseinanderset-
zung] between a subject, on the one hand, and things (i.e. extension, space),
on the other, never a complete merging of the object in the subject, which
would ultimately signal the end of the visual arts.’’46
This evaluative discrepancy between past and present aesthetic judg-
ments, embodied formally in a tension between the congruous and incongru-
ous elements of an artwork, became Riegl’s main focus or ‘‘data’’ of analysis.
It emerged in the space between successive presentist readings, between
viewer and object, between a contemporary observer and an objectified vision
of a past made present in artistic form. This tension, Riegl believed, was not
exclusively in the eyes of the beholder. Although the designation of congru-
ous and incongruous elements in the art of the past was partially a subjective
and cultural construction, historical artworks presented themselves to the
modern viewer as an objective tension—a tension among formal elements in
a work. Relating past to present through a visual medium, this tension had a
profoundly temporal character; it allowed the discerning art historian to trace
change in formal, visual juxtapositions. It stood as the basis of Riegl’s formal-
ist notion of temporality.

Rhythm, Time, Perception

‘‘All art,’’ Riegl famously asserted, ‘‘is inextricably tied to nature. Every
artistic form is based on a form of nature.’’47 In the opening pages of Problems
of Style, Riegl designated the fundamental laws of art as ‘‘Symmetrie’’ and
‘‘Rhythmus.’’ These basic principles corresponded to rudimentary natural
forms.

The same laws of symmetry and rhythm are indeed those that nature
uses in the formation of its phenomena (man, animals, plants, crys-
tals), and it does not require a great insight in order to notice the basic
planimetric forms and configurations latent within natural things.48

46
Riegl, Das holländische Gruppenporträt, 189.
47
Riegl, Stilfragen, 1.
48
Ibid., 3.
466 Michael Gubser
Riegl noted that ‘‘geometric art forms behave with regard to other forms of
art just as the laws of mathematics do in relation to living natural laws.’’49
Thus, the earliest, geometric art forms expressed the basic patterns that came
to govern naturalistic and figural art as well, just as mathematical relationships
characterized even the most intricate forms of life and nature. In the second
half of this essay, I will examine Riegl’s concepts of artistic form and histori-
cal continuity more closely by analyzing its fundamental regulatory principle
of rhythm. In Problems of Style, Riegl used the term rhythm with a loose and
offhand frequency, but its very prevalence underscored its importance to his
thinking. Rhythm governed both regularities and irregularities in nature, as
well as fundamental artistic laws;50 it defined formally the earliest Geometric
Style of decoration;51 determined the decorative placement of animals in the
ancient Egyptian and Assyrian Carpet Style;52 designated the coherent filling
of decorative space in Egyptian art; generated new decorative forms such as
the spiral or the guilloche in Near Eastern art;53 excluded certain common but
arhythmic forms, such as the tree, from the decorative catalogue of Mesopota-
mian art;54 defined tectonic harmony in Greek times; described the undulating
movements of the Greek tendril motif that culminated the ancient decorative
progression;55 and organized the coherent filling of surfaces, flat or otherwise,
which was the ‘‘endpoint and goal of the whole development.’’56 Such a
widely applicable principle—rhythm—received little clarification in Prob-
lems of Style. The clearest exposition of its meaning emerged in a concluding
discussion of the Byzantine and early Islamic notion of infinite rapport, con-
veyed by the endless decorative loops of the arabesque.57 Near Eastern artists
succeeded in developing Egyptian and Greek vegetal motifs to the point where
they expressed infinity not as an empty space or void, but in the harmonious
rhythm and symmetry of endless tendril loops—the negation of absolute emp-
tiness.58 The gradual emergence of space as an object of perception during
imperial Roman times and its rhythmic organization against the flat plane led
to the Near Eastern perception of infinity as endless, full, and articulated.
Rhythm visually organized an otherwise undifferentiated and seemingly
empty space (bounded or infinite) in terms of line, pattern, and fullness.
What is most relevant for our purposes is the metaphorical connection

49
Ibid.
50
Ibid., 11, 3.
51
Ibid., 39.
52
Ibid., 40.
53
Ibid., 89–90.
54
Ibid., 99.
55
Ibid., chap. III, pt. B.
56
Ibid., 197.
57
Ibid., 259–346.
58
Ibid., 73–80.
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 467
between Riegl’s rendering of space as a rhythmic form—full, perceptible, and
demarcated, not empty or contourless—and his conception of time and his-
tory. History, like artistic form, had rhythmic structure. The role of rhythm in
establishing a relationship between sensory experience and temporal continu-
ity is most clearly expressed in the concluding section of Late Roman Art
Industry.59 As in Problems of Style, Riegl insisted that formal qualities defined
the unique and specifically artistic aspects of an artwork; form reflected an
epoch’s artistic will, its perceptual relationship with the world. But in Late
Roman Art Industry, he defined form in the ancient world even more explicitly
as rhythmic articulation. ‘‘Like all of antiquity, the essential artistic medium
which late Roman art used to fulfill its stated artistic intentions,’’ declared
Riegl, ‘‘was rhythm.’’

By means of rhythm, that is, the sequential repetition of like appear-

ances, the coherence of the respective parts [jeweiligen Teile] of an
individual whole [Einheitsganzen] is made absolutely clear and con-
vincing to the viewer; and where several individual elements were
brought together, there it was once again rhythm that was able to give
shape to a higher unity. . . . Like all of ancient art, late Roman art
strove to represent individual unified forms through rhythmic compo-
sition on the plane.60

Rhythmic composition demarcated an otherwise undifferentiated material; it

allowed late Roman artists to establish pictorial unity while still preserving
the individuality of each separate part. Light and darkness, space and figure,
mass and depth, each became features of an emerging late Roman artistic
sensibility organized according to a rhythmic balance between individual
parts and the collective whole. Rhythm expressed an orderly regulation of
visual material, allowing for the simultaneous articulation and unification of
shapes. As such, it was a basic principle of form that characterized more than
simply one artistic era; rhythmic depiction changed over time, incorporating
new representational capacities. It was at once the basis of artistic order, and
subject to art’s fundamental condition of historical change.
In Riegl’s analysis, late Roman art served as the transition between a form
of rhythmic composition suited to two-dimensional, planar depiction and one
that could organize objects in three-dimensional space. As late Roman artists
struggled with the three-dimensional implications of the emancipation of
space, ancient rhythmic composition adjusted itself to new artistic require-
ments.

59
The section is entitled ‘‘The leading characteristics of the late Roman Kunstwollen.’’
Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, 389–405.
60
Ibid., 389–90.
468 Michael Gubser
The isolation of form has also exerted its influence on the rhythmic
modes of expression in that rhythm no longer had to concern itself
only with articulation and change, which always have unifying ef-
fects, but also with simplification and the construction of mass [Kom-
massierung]. While classical rhythm was concerned with contrasts
(contrapposto, triangular composition), late Roman rhythm became
one of uniform series (quadrangular composition).61

Even as it came to organize three-dimensional artworks, however, rhythmic

composition retained the traces of its original two-dimensionality. Riegl
claimed that art history formally began with the creative transposition of
three-dimensional nature onto two-dimensional surfaces.62 Ancient rhythmic
composition regulated the depiction of objects on the plane not in space; it
separated elements beside and above, not behind one another. The emancipa-
tion of bounded space in late Roman times signaled a move toward three-
dimensionality that culminated in the expression of the infinite space of Byz-
antine arabesques. In this process, rhythm came to govern three-dimensional
articulation—‘‘interval, ground, and space’’—as it had the planar and linear
art of classical antiquity.63 But rhythmic composition still regulated space and
depth in terms of line and measure; it translated dimensionality into linearity
for the purposes of visual representation. Infinite rapport, with its implications
of boundless three-dimensional space, found its typical representation in two-
dimensional arabesques. This representation of three-dimensional objects in
two-dimensional forms expresses one of the central characteristics of rhyth-
mic composition. Indeed, many architects and sculptors plan their works on
two-dimensional blueprints; photographers and cinematographers cast three-
dimensional images onto two-dimensional screens. In Riegl’s art history, it
was the inherent, two-dimensional linearity of rhythm that made it such an
apt metaphor for temporality. Just as rhythm organized artistic form in two-
dimensional models, so rhythmic temporality organized multidimensional and
semiautonomous art histories in terms of linear continuity.
Riegl turned to St. Augustine’s aesthetic writings to support his character-
ization of the late Roman artistic sensibility. Augustine realized, according to
Riegl, that ‘‘the principal goal of all artistic creation [was] unity (isolated
perception of singular forms) and rhythm.’’64 In De Ordine and De Musica,
Augustine defined rhythm, or numerical order, as the very basis of reason in
the sensible world. ‘‘We must therefore acknowledge,’’ Augustine wrote, ‘‘that

61
Ibid., 391.
62
See Riegl, Stilfragen, chap. 1 for a description of this process.
63
Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, 398.
64
Ibid., 394–95. Augustine cited the lunettes, the perforated windows in Roman halls, as
architectural exemplars of rhythmic composition (ibid., 396–97).
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 469
in the pleasure of the senses, what pertains to reason is that in which there is a
certain rhythmic measure.’’65 ‘‘[T]he supreme eternal presidency of numerical
rhythm’’ governed musical and visible forms alike.66 In rhythm, Augustine
saw more than simply the ordering principle of sensory experience, although
this was one of its roles. Rhythm was the very ‘‘Law of God,’’67 the rational
and beautiful essence of all temporal human activity, sensible form, and di-
vine structure. For the human mind, however, rhythm, even spatial rhythm,
could only be perceived ‘‘in time [as a] silent movement.’’68 This temporally
constituted rhythm of the senses, if properly contemplated, evoked the divine
balance of eternal design. ‘‘So earthly things are subject to heavenly things,
seeming to associate the cycles of their own durations in rhythmic succession
with the song of the great whole, universitatis.’’69 In human terms, divine
rhythm found expression in demarcated time.
Riegl adopted Augustine’s temporalized notion of form as rhythm. In-
deed, rhythm held priority as Riegl’s fundamental regulating principle of vi-
sual form.

Symmetry and proportion are only special forms of appearance of a

higher universal medium of the visual arts: rhythm. The medium
through which unity—that is, the individual, self-contained form of
natural objects in art works—achieves its evident expression is also
called rhythm (numerus) by Augustine. . . . All other aspects of beauty
in works of visual art (to symmetry and proportion, already men-
tioned, we can add a third aspect, order [Ordnung]) are simply partic-
ular modes of the expression of rhythm.70

Rhythm preserved the unity of the self-contained form even as it established a

relationship among individual forms; it thus became the very agent of formal
coherence and articulation. ‘‘Consummate harmony’’ was achieved by prop-
erly balancing visual and historical ‘‘intervals.’’71 Just as rhythm regulated
intervals of space in Roman art, so it governed intervals in the temporalized
space of history as well. Art history comprised a rhythmic progression en-
compassing all eras and artworks in a continuous historical whole. Thus Au-
gustine provided Riegl with a Christian version of both artistic formalism and

65
Augustine, De Ordine, selection reprinted in Philosophies of Art and Beauty: Selected
Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, ed. Albert Hofstadter and Richard Kuhns
(Chicago, 1964), 175.
66
Augustine, De Musica in ibid., 191, 201.
67
Ibid., 202.
68
Ibid., 201.
69
Ibid., 186.
70
Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, 396.
71
Ibid., 398–99.
470 Michael Gubser
art historical ecumenism, demonstrating the thematic relevance of rhythm and
form for man’s spatial and temporal relationships with the world around him.
But Riegl did not apply rhythm to temporal experience in a merely meta-
phorical sense. In visual form, rhythm was experienced temporally, as a
movement of the eyes from point to point, as a series of successive observa-
tions; rhythm emerged as the basis of artistic form in the temporal succession
of instantaneous perceptions. Riegl’s application of rhythm as a visual ana-
lytic inscribed the temporality of viewing into the artwork itself. Rhythm
linked the formal articulation of the work with the temporal character of its
perception, a connection easily masked by the apparent synchrony of the com-
pleted work ‘‘gazing’’ steadily out at the viewer. The viewer’s perception was
actually a composite of instantaneous glances, a temporal series, open to cul-
tural and historical influences. Art depicted the rhythmic intervals of this for-
mal temporality, and the viewer organized these intervals into rhythmic visual
and historical continua.
How did rhythm create continuity from instantaneous perceptions and
individual objects? Riegl’s answer to this question emerges in an earlier sec-
tion of the volume on late Roman art, in the passage where he first outlined
his now well-known distinctions among modes of visuality: haptisch and op-
tisch, nah-sichtig, normalsichtig, and fern-sichtig.72 More important for our
purposes than these modes of visuality is Riegl’s discussion of the ancient
perceptual constitution of objects, which, he argued, organized the world into
bounded individual entities in order to tame an otherwise chaotic external
reality. ‘‘Fine art of the whole ancient world sought as its ultimate goal to
represent external things in their clear, material individuality.’’73 Because it is
so critical to the culminating point of this essay, I will quote at length Riegl’s
description of the evolving relationship between perception and objects in
ancient times.

First one tried to comprehend the individual unity of things by way

of pure sensory perception, excluding as much as possible all notions
derived from experience [Erfahrung]. As long as the assumption pre-
vailed that external things were actually objects independent from us,
all help from subjective consciousness had to be instinctively avoided
as a factor disturbing the unity of the particular object. The sense
organ which we use most frequently to take notice of external things
is the eye. This organ shows us things merely as colored surfaces but
never as impenetrable, material individual entities; it is precisely this
optical perception which presents the external world to us as a chaotic

72
Ibid., 23–36.
73
Ibid., 26.
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 471
mix. We possess certain knowledge about the bounded individual
unity of single objects only through the sense of touch. Through touch
alone we gain awareness of the impenetrable borders which enclose
individual material objects. These borders are the tactile surfaces of
things. Yet what we touch immediately are not extended surfaces, but
only individual points. Only in the perception of single individual
points following each other in quick succession, repeated beside each
other on one and the same material thing, do we arrive at the concep-
tion of an extended surface with its two dimensions of height and
width. The conception is not gained through an immediate perception
of touch but through the combination of several such perceptions
which necessarily presupposes the intervention of the subjective
thought process. It follows, therefore, that the notion of tactile impen-
etrability as an essential condition of material individuality was
achieved not merely on the basis of sense perception but also with the
supplementary aid of the thought process. In ancient artistic produc-
tion, there must have existed from the very beginning a latent inner
opposition; in spite of the fundamentally intended objective concep-
tion of things, from the beginning a subjective admixture could not
be avoided. In this latent opposition lay the seed of all later develop-
ment.74

The human perceptual relationship with the objective world, Riegl believed,
was a production of the eye, the touch, and the mind. This relationship passed
through historical phases, oscillating between an emphasis on vision and
touch, subjective constitution and objective presentation. Haptic, or tactile,
periods (emphasizing touch, linearity, and shape) alternated with optic periods
(emphasizing vision, color, light, and shadow); the modes of visuality in art
history shifted between nah-sichtig (stressing a close optical view of objects
that deemphasized depth and space in favor of impenetrable material objectiv-
ity), fern-sichtig (stressing a distant, subjectively constituted optical focus that
muted tactile objects by combining them into a whole), and normal-sichtig
(incorporating both tactile and optical qualities, balanced between nah- and
fern-sichtig). Both touch and vision enlisted the collaboration of the mind in
transforming sense perceptions from isolated experiential units into a sus-
tained awareness of the continuous contours and borders of objects. The fin-
gers could transmit impenetrable points; the eye could convey isolated color
stimulants. But only the mind could combine these immediate sense percep-
tions into an awareness of physical continuity and depth. Pure perceptual ex-
perience was pointillist; only subjective thought translated percepts into a

74
Ibid., 27–28.
472 Michael Gubser
unified, dimensional individual object, the immediate sense of contiguity into
the perception of continuity. This operation was so basic to the act of percep-
tion that it passed nearly unnoticed.75
In Riegl’s historical account, the visual aspects of perception gradually
came to mask tactile and mental contributions, a tendency that led to misun-
derstandings about the nature of empirical perception and the ‘‘unity’’ and
‘‘continuity’’ it affirmed.

The sense of touch is indeed indispensable in order to confirm for us

the impenetrability of external things, but not in order to teach us
about extension. Regarding this, it is far surpassed by the abilities of
the visual sense. Yet the eye transmits only color stimulants, which,
like the sense of impenetrability, are expressed in points. And we
arrive at the notion of colored surfaces as multiplied points through
the same process of thought used for tactile surfaces. But the eye
executes the operation of multiplying singular perceptions far quicker
than the sense of touch, and therefore it is mainly the eye to which
we owe our notion of the height and width of things. As a result,
the thinking observer arrives at a new combination of perceptions in
consciousness: where the eye recognizes a coherent colored plane in
one unified perception, there arises the notion of an enclosed material
individuality, based partly on the experience of a tactile impenetrable
surface. In such a way, very early on it could happen that optical
perception alone was considered sufficient to produce certainty about
the material unity of external things, without need of the immediate
testimony from the sense of touch.76

The apparent preeminence of vision belied the actual collaboration of sight,

touch, and thought in the perception of physical unity.
Because time and space were perceptual categories produced in the tem-
poral relationship between subject and object, they were themselves affected
by historical change. Art historical continuity emerged through a perceptual
process similar to that which Riegl used to describe the awareness of physical
continuity. Individual artworks were apprehended in singular perceptions or
moments; these were combined into a chronological succession of contiguous
works, then transformed into the perception of historical continuity through
the subjective involvement of the art historian/viewer. Historical continuity

75
In New Theory of Vision (1709), George Berkeley prefigured Riegl’s analysis by arguing
that our knowledge of space came from the sense of touch and corporeal movement, and that
it was only our mind that fused isolated sensations into coherent perceptual wholes. See Ernst
Gombrich, Art and Illusion (Princeton, 1960), 15, 297.
76
Riegl, Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, 28–29.
Time and History in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Perception 473
thereby became an act of perceptual composition, a presentation in form, a
work produced. History as a concept was itself an inherently historical form; it
both organized relationships among artworks and possessed its own temporal
constitution. It was this insight into the temporal nature of artistic and histori-
cal form that provided the basis for Riegl’s history of ancient perception in
Late Roman Art Industry.77 Throughout antiquity, cultures had different ex-
planations for the perceived connections among things. Whereas earliest an-
tiquity believed that arbitrary and omnipotent religious forces determined the
order of things, classical antiquity sought necessary, regular connections
among objects and thereby developed such mechanistic and atomistic notions
as force, impact, and sequence—in a word, cause. Late antiquity, in turn,
emphasized magic as the medium linking objects. This worldview was not, in
Riegl’s view, a mark of intellectual decline; instead, it affirmed the fundamen-
tal gap between subject and object, between perception and experience, which
the classical world had overlooked. Late antiquity unwittingly acknowledged
the subjective aspect of perception by noting the seemingly illusory constitu-
tion of objectivity, continuity, and time.
In Riegl’s analysis, perception entailed a continuous process of rhythmic
negotiation between subject and object, back and forth, constituted by the
viewer but anchored in a succession of contiguous, objective sensations.
Riegl’s art history acknowledged both creative subjectivity and empirical ma-
terialism as equiprimordial in the perception of form. They defined two funda-
mental poles of a perceptual experience that was organized by the rhythmic
balances of time. Riegl thus depicted human temporality neither as a Kantian
mental category nor a noumenal reality, neither chronological fixity nor pure
undifferentiated flux, but instead as a perceptual relationship in constant pro-
duction. Temporality constituted the productive space between objectivity and
subjectivity, the historical interaction between observer and observed. The
immanent temporality of the artwork was always transformed in the act of
viewing, as Riegl demonstrated in his consideration of monuments. Physical
and temporal continuity, according to Riegl, were human perceptual produc-
tions that art realized in visible form. Artworks became the sites of a ceaseless
reenactment of contig/nuity, the visible markers of an ever-ongoing percep-
tual negotiation between subject and object, man and the world. Art thus
provided a privileged locus for witnessing man’s temporally and historically
constituted perceptual relationship with the world.
And so, finally, what about the historian? If the form and meaning of
artworks were constituted in temporal acts of perception, then the historian
had a crucial role to play. The artwork mediated between past and present, its
meaning irreducible to either. Art was, to use Margaret Olin’s term, a ‘‘dia-

77
Ibid, pp. 402–3
474 Michael Gubser
logue’’ between subjective present and objective past about the conferral of
meaning through time.78 By holding both subject and object, present and past,
in a dialogic relationship, artworks allowed viewers in the present to grasp
past constructions of temporality that were different from their own—grasp
them not as utterly foreign, but as at once familiar and yet distinct. While
each viewer played an active role in this dialogue, the historian, as an analyst
and spokesman for bygone cultures, had an especially prominent voice. His
subjective sense did not vanish before the objective evidence of the past, but
he did attempt to read as judiciously as possible the original forms of percep-
tion and temporality exhibited in an artwork or artifact. He did not stand
transfixed before the object ‘‘as it really was,’’ but instead attentively engaged
with it in the attempt to discern its empirical tensions, reanimate its temporal
forms, and discover its fundamental historicity. Like a stargazer seeking con-
stellations in the heavens, the art historian both witnessed and shaped the past.

James Madison University.

Olin, Forms of Representation, 171–87.

78

A revised version of this article will appear in Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl and the
Discourse on History and Temporality in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (Detroit: Wayne State Univer-
sity Press, 2006).