Late Middle Ages and Renaissance: the forgotten contribution of Max Dvořák

Abstract

Max Dvořák, one of the pilasters of the Viennese school of art history, is nowadays widely known for the works of his final years as well as for writings on monument conservation. Through a reconstruction of the historical and academic context and a brief presentation of Dvořák’s studies on the transition period from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, the author aims to show that the Bohemian scholar made an important contribution to the art historical debate of the time, for which he is hardly appreciated today.

This article examines a selection of Dvořák’s early writings from the first decade of the twenthieth century. In particular, the habilitation thesis Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder van Eyck (The Enigma of the Art of the Van Eyck Brothers, 1903) is consulted. While many scholars claim that there is a wide gap between his older works and those from the last years of his life, as stated by his former students Karl M. Swoboda and Johannes Wilde in the preface to Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte (1924), it is argued here that Dvořák’s point of view already presents the basic elements of his more mature conclusions at the beginning of his academic career. Likewise, it is reflected on the fact that Dvořák made a remarkable contribution to a new consideration of the transitional period between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, among other workd, with his Enigma, but that this is today attributed not to him but to the cultural historian Johan Huizinga and his work Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919).