The concentric critique. Schlosser’s Kunstliteratur and the paradigm of style in Croce and Vossler

Abstract

The essay analyzes the philosophical and methodological premises of Julius von Schlosser’s most important contribution in the field of art historiography: Die Kunstliteratur, published in Vienna in 1924. It examines Schlosser’s adoption of paradigms drawn from Croce’s aesthetics and Vossler’s linguistics in order to understand his radical shift from a positivistic method of research to an idealistic conception of the critique as a verbal (repeatable) evocation of the visual (unrepeatable) experience of art. According to Schlosser, works of art, given their relation to intuition, should not be considered potential objects of knowledge, but more appropriately vehicles for an inner, spiritual transformation. Since the “purest essence” of art cannot be reached beyond the “unique moment” of aesthetic experience, Schlosser’s critique no longer tries to analyze the “real centre” of a work of art – namely its “artistic” values – but limits itself to the description of the material conditions closely related to its creation. By means of a “concentric” approach, Schlosser thus investigates any element that belongs to the “historical grammar” of a “language”, giving up any conscious attempt to determine the real “centre” of a work of art, i.e. the untranslatable beauty of its “style”.