Beyond the Vienna School

“A work that expresses something terrible is understood better by those whose limbs are pervaded by terror … he who is struck with terror does not speak of a frisson nouveau, does not cry out bravo!, and does not congratulate the artist for his originality.” ¹ Only terror is capable of recognizing the terrible, to the extent that, as Goethe observed, only the connection of like-to-like engenders knowledge. Sedlmayr quoted these words in his introduction to Die Revolution der modernen Kunst (1955, The Revolution of Modern Art) to warn once more – and even more dramatically than in Verlust der Mitte (1948; Art in Crisis, 1958) – of a great danger, a threat of which he had slowly become aware between 1930 and 1939, and hence between the first and the second editions of his book Die Architektur Borrominis (The Architecture of Borromini). In this tormented decade Sedlmayr defined the object that would occupy his research in the following years and specified those tools most adequate to its pursuit, all while examining in depth the cultural inheritance of the great historiographical school in Vienna to which he belonged.