"Fading, fading...": Loss, resurrection and history of art as palingenesis. On Max Dvořák's thinking about art history through the phenomenology of his times
Abstract
Max Dvořák was one of the main representatives of the Vienna School of Art History, his most important publication being on the concept of art history as a history of ideas (Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte). November 1918 Dvořák introduced his last and unfinished lecture cycle, devoted to the history of Italian Renaissance art, with a short meditation which can be read as a melancholy musing on disappearing.
However, in Dvořák's argument, the awareness of collapse, exhaustion and ending paradoxically turns into a source of power. Dvořák's melancholy awareness of the end, disappearance and loss finds a noteworthy expression in his interpretation of the Medici Chapels, in particular of the tombs of Giuliano and Lorenzo de'Medici.
The analysis is remarkable already due to the fact that Michelangelo's singular, resignedly melancholy shaping of Giuliano and Lorenzo de'Medici is read by Dvořák as linked to the antinomies not only of the allegorical figures of princes but to the entire artistic concept of the Medici Chapels.