ABSTRACT
August Hannibal Schmarsow is now best known for his approach to the interpretation of architecture. In all his pedagogical and scholarly endeavors, Schmarsow sought an art historical practice that included the new human sciences then flourishing at the University of Leipzig, i.e. experimental psychology and experimental pedagogy. During the decades of Schmarsow's tenure at the University of Leipzig, the rapidly increasing divergence of the rising natural sciences and the disoriented humanities led to an intense search for scientific methodology and for laws or principles among the latter. Schmarsow's skepticism toward his fellow art historians who on his account "hallucinated" developmental art history at their desks brought upon him sharp criticism by the Vienna School of Art History. Throughout the essays of 1910, Schmarsow presents his stories as a psychological, not a historical, grounding of the origins of ornament, and refuses to name any specific ritual contexts or locations.
