Beyond Dvořákʼs ‘The Last Renaissance’: on the beginnings of Slovenian scientific art history inspired by modern art

Abstract

One of the characteristics of the Vienna School of Art History, as Hans Tietze writes in The Method of Art History, is the conviction that ‘living art is the key to dead art’. The article draws connections between the lively art debates in Vienna in the first decade of the twentieth century, the breakthrough of Plečnik’s and Meštrović’s art, and the art historians who, at the beginning of their careers, were just beginning to explore the relationship between the formulation of method and the object of research, and places them in the broader historical context of the situation of small nations just before the dissolution of the monarchy. After the 1914–1918 war, central questions in art and science were reopened at the fringes of the former monarchy. Collaboration between scholars and artists was crucial not only for the development of the professions, but also for the formation of a modern cultural identity and sovereignty in the new multi-ethnic state.