Page - 262 - in Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, Volume LIX

Evonne Levy262 By zantine system, being irrational, was capable of a life of six centuries. This is palmistry or nu- merology, not science.79 I have repeated here these oft quoted passages in Schapiro’s review essay for Sedlmayr’s letters now endow them with concreteness and vividness. Schapiro warned art historians off of the young Viennese scholars without name-calling although it would have been clear to his contemporaries exactly what he meant when he invoked myth and race. Sedlmayr’s anti-Semitism was ugly and offensive. It also exposed his vulnerability to unreason, to his blind spot in his historical un- derstanding. It showed Schapiro that Sedlmayr in some fundamental way was irrational. This is why Schapiro’s critique was not personal but was based on their scientific differences. Shapiro did not believe that science could come out of Na- tional Socialist thinking. Sedlmayr never addressed Schapiro’s cri- tique of his Justinian essay directly80 although he seems to do so indirectly in the extended post- script to Verlust der Mitte (which did not appear in the first edition of 194881). There he outlines four methods of criticism: the first “judges the timeless presence of the work of art as a micro- cosm” – a reference to his writings of the early 1930s – which he does not endeavour to do in Verlust der Mitte. The second method treats art as past, as the “outcome of a past event,” and is historical. Here he does not propose a model of history that might have responded to Schapiro’s critique, arguing rather, that most art arises from (conflict with) other works of art and that this internal history is one basis for art history’s dis- ciplinary independence. Sedlmayr has not yet decided what event it was that took place, he believes, in England in the mid-eighteenth cen- tury that holds the key to the decline of human- ity (as he notes the French Revolution would for Burckhardt). But the view of the work of art as a past event will, he says, need a supplement in intellectual-historical criticism: for the “great task of the history of the intellect is to establish the personal credo of every work of art and of every artist (not his private article of faith, but that proclaimed through his art), and to relate what is established to the cognate creeds in lit- erature, philosophy, religion, etc.” – this is a ges- ture towards his micrological method but on a completely different, religious, basis. If the first method considered the work of art as eternally present, and the second as a past event, the third method understands art and artist as a harbin- ger of the future, as expressing that which has not yet reached consciousness. To assess a work fully all three methods must be present. But it is the fourth method he deploys in Verlust der Mitte, and which “transcends” the previous three through the introduction of an absolute stand- ard of values. Here works of art are understood as “symptoms of a disturbance in the condition of man,” the notion of disturbance presuppos- ing a norm: “This book diagnoses that the dis- rupted relationship with God is at the heart of the disturbance.” When Sedlmayr says that “It is no untruth that the severest break with God can turn to salvation,” one wonders whether he speaks as much about works of art, artists and their personal credos, as he does about himself. Is Verlust der Mitte to be read as Sedlmayr’s per- sonal chronicle? “Mit dieser Betrachtungsweise scheint der Boden der Wissenschaft verlassen. In Wahrheit ist er aber überhöht, nicht verlassen.”82 That is to say, yes, Sedlmayr’s criticism is mysti- 79 Schapiro, The New Viennese School (cit. n. 11), p. 259. 80 In the 1959 republication of the Justinian essay reviewed by Schapiro several reviews of the article are noted but not Schapiro’s. I have yet to find Schapiro cited in Sedlmayr’s work. H. Sedlmayr, Das erste mittelalterliche Architek- tursystem (Epochen und Werke. Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunstgeschichte) vol. 1, Vienna/Munich 1959. p. 359. 81 Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte, 4th ed. (1950). 82 Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte (cit. n. 32), p. 58.