Matthew Rampley's book examines the practice of art history in Austria-Hungary between 1847 and 1918, an era whose major figures comprise what is commonly called the Vienna School of Art History. It is a historiographical study with a difference. Rather than understanding nineteenth-century art history as the methodological precursor to current practices, Rampley elucidates the involvement of art historians in “wider debates over the cultural and political identity of the monarchy” (1). Unlike much recent writing about art history's history, Rampley avoids heroicizing individual scholars in favor of emphasizing the ideological and institutional factors that shaped their thinking. Furthermore, he balances the widespread scholarly emphasis on Vienna by examining art historical activity in Prague, Cracow, Budapest, and Zagreb, among other places. What emerges is a richly textured history of a discipline at a formative moment in its history.

The book begins with a discussion of the beginnings of academic art history in Vormärz Vienna and a treatment of methodological questions, notably whether art history should be a positivistic enterprise or one concerned with aesthetic matters. Chapter three treats the relationship between Viennese art history and that practiced in the monarchy's regional capitals. Rampley notes correctly that this relationship is not best described as one of ethnic minorities resisting centralization, but rather as ambivalent and layered. The book's central chapters traverse a series of themes. One is the question of whether there could even be an art history of Austria-Hungary, which Rampley analyzes through a close reading of the Kronprinzenwerk, a multivolume catalogue of the monarchy's art published between 1886 and 1902. Another chapter treats baroque art and architecture, only recently the focus of scholarly interest; following it are chapters devoted to modern art, to folk art, to debates about East versus West, and to the burgeoning field of heritage preservation. Scholarly disagreements concerning how to write about these subjects reveal competing visions of nation, individual, ethnicity, and political allegiance in the empire. To demonstrate this, Rampley offers analyses of scholars (Eitelberger, Wickhoff, Ilg, Thausing, Sokołowski, among many) whose ideas remain poorly understood among English-language readers. By placing them in dialogue, and seeing them in relation to broader institutional, sociopolitical, and ethnic concerns, their ideas assume new clarity.

The book is filled with examples of this, but here I shall describe just one. Alois Riegl is by far the most studied and lionized scholar from this era, a name familiar to all art history graduate students. Josef Strzygowski, on the other hand, has been underappreciated because of his propensity for speculation and later enthusiasm for Nazi ideology. But on the question of Eastern influences in Central European art, Rampley reveals Strzygowski to be the more nuanced thinker. Strzygowski identified the existence of two valid heritages from the ancient world, one classical and Western, the other Byzantine and Eastern, and described both as contributing to Central Europe's artistic culture. In writing about the same subject, Riegl comes across as limited and defensive, associating Byzantine, Islamic, and even Balkan societies with an “oriental” mentality and a stagnant social structure that hindered artistic greatness, which he opposes to a normative Greco-Roman classicism. It is a vision of the East that Edward Said would have recognized all too well. Rampley then shows that such questions were by no means uniquely art-historical, but rather resonated with broader insecurities about the cultural identity of Austria-Hungary and its place in Europe. Art history therefore becomes an intellectual practice in which contemporary cultural concerns are worked through symbolically via writing histories of images and objects. Rampley states this most directly on page 75, when he observes that much Vienna School writing carries “oblique and coded references to the Habsburg state.”

This is the most commendable art-historical text to come my way in a long time, a major intellectual achievement on all fronts. Very much to his credit, Rampley writes in gracefully lucid language, something that cannot be said about many scholars attracted to this material. He avoids describing the Vienna School as a matchless incubator for art-historical insight. It did indeed produce a sophisticated canon of scholarship, but Rampley demonstrates how deeply embedded it was in social, economic, and political conditions. For some readers, that will take the shine off of these texts. But in my opinion, it reveals something fascinating—namely the situational motivations that drive scholarly practice. In unraveling this “situational logic,” as he calls it, Rampley has done art history and those who care about it a terrific service.