Diana Reynolds-Cordileone's book on the Austrian art historian Alois Riegl (1858–1905) presents an intellectual history of the traditional kind: it is neither a biography, as the personal element is rather restricted, nor is it the kind of hermetic exercise on the basis of Riegl's texts that characterizes much of the recent “Riegl industry.” Instead of arguing how Riegl anticipated recent trends in art history, Reynolds-Cordileone demonstrates how his ideas were rooted in the cultural, political, and intellectual climate of late-nineteenth-century Vienna.

A more consequential proposition is that Riegl was inspired throughout his life by concepts he took from Nietzsche. By focusing on this specific influence, Reynolds-Cordileone opens up an entirely new perspective, as it makes clear that there existed no Hegelian substratum uniting all his writings—which explains the inconsistencies in the concept Kunstwollen, Riegl's most conspicuous (and problematic) contribution to art-historical thinking. The basis for this claim is Riegl's active membership, between 1875 and 1878, in the Leseverein der deutschen Studenten Wiens, a reading society where German-speaking students debated about recent philosophical literature and discussed their position as a German-speaking minority in a multicultural nation after the unification of Germany in 1871. They read Schopenhauer and especially the early Nietzsche. Based on such texts, some members of the Leseverein engaged with antirational elements, which they then used to challenge the positivistic approach to science that prevailed in the early decades of the German Reich (29–40). She goes on to trace, in chronological order, Nietzschean concepts such as the relation of history to life in Riegl's own publications, and also how the adaptation of these ideas led him to confrontations with superiors at the Museum für Kunst und Industrie in Vienna, resulting in his subsequent transfer to the university. With regard to this latter issue, our idea of Riegl quietly accepting his move from museum to academia, even if he regretted it, is revised into an image of exile, given that Riegl tried at least once to return to the museum—which he eventually did, as its new director with a mission to reform it (248–56).

Yet, there are no explicit references to Nietzsche in Riegl's work, so the main approach taken in this book is that of deduction. A complicating factor is that the Nietzsche reception in fields ranging from literature to sociology is difficult to grasp. According to Bruno Hillebrand, around 1900 Nietzsche's literary qualities were admired while his philosophical intentions were simplified or misunderstood (Nietzsche und die deutsche Literatur, Bd. 1, Tübingen, 1978: 18–19). In 1895, Caesar Flaischlen even predicted that his writing was appreciated only instinctively, and that it would take decades before the meaning of his works would be understood (“Zur modernen Dichtung: Ein Rückblick,” Pan 4, no. 1 [1895]: 240). We are even less informed about the impact of Nietzschean thinking on art history; generic discussions habitually circumvent this subject, as do most biographical studies. Exceptions to this rule are Jacob Burckhardt—whom Nietzsche admired and who exchanged letters with him in the 1870s—and Aby Warburg, who dedicated a seminar in the 1920s to the comparison between Burckhardt and Nietzsche, but who, as Ernst Gombrich believed, was not a Nietzschean thinker (Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, Oxford, 1986: 254–59). Yet, Reynolds-Cordileone is able to make a convincing case for Riegl's adoption of Nietzschean ideas.

The biographical focus of this book, however, does make one wonder about the broader contextualization—Reynolds-Cordileone on the one hand assumes that no other German art historian of his generation approached his discipline with Nietzschean tools (286), while on the other she suggests that Gombrich's “Hegelian assumption” (4), ruling out the influence of other philosophers on art historians around 1900, is open for revision. The fact that Riegl's main opponent, the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, remained fascinated by Nietzsche throughout his life (Heinrich Wölfflin 1864–1945: Autobiographie Tagebücher und Briefe, Basel/Stuttgart, 1984: 214–18, 320, 386) suggests a hitherto insufficiently recognized impact of the philosopher on the discipline of art history. Just as Matthew Rampley's recent book The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918 argued for a geographically nuanced and inclusive view of the Vienna School, Reynolds-Cordileone's convincing study on Riegl should be taken as a more general call for meticulous research on the philosophical substratum of art history as a discipline, acknowledging positivism, idealist philosophy, and philosophical irrationality as influences on Austrian—and German—thinking about the history of art.