ABSTRACT
In spite of the pervasive influence of Alois Riegl's and Heinrich Wölfflin’s writings on the study of Italian baroque architecture throughout the twentieth century, a fine-grained analysis of their deeply interrelated texts has not been undertaken. 1 Wölfflin first came to the subject in Renaissance und Barock of 1888 and Riegl responded fully to this text and to sections on the baroque in Wölfflin’s Die klassische Kunst (1899; Classic Art, 1980) in the second and the third versions of his lecture course on the baroque on which the posthumous publication of 1908, Die Enstehung der Barockkunst in Rom (The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome, 2010), was based. 2 It is primarily in these lectures that we see that within their largely shared language for the baroque there are significant differences in their points of view: of how the baroque relates to modernity, of its political significance, of the role of artists versus patrons, amongst others. When Wölfflin returned to the baroque in the Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (1915; Principles of Art History, 2015) he did so with full knowledge of Riegl's writings on the subject, including the latter’s book-length essay Das holländische Gruppenporträt (1902; The Group Portraiture of Holland, 1999) and the lectures on Italian baroque art, which he reviewed in 1908. 3 Over a quarter of a century later, and influenced by Lebensphilosophie, Wölfflin’s attitude towards the baroque became more positive, and we find numerous points of engagement and sympathy with Riegl's analyses. 4 Here their responses to each other’s work will be analysed with an eye to how their principal conceptual and political differences belie their formal analyses, and the consequences for the role assigned to architecture.
