Huizinga’s contribution to the understanding of late medieval artistic cultures can be productively compared with the treatise Idealismus und Naturalismus in der Gotischen Skulptur und Malerei, published in 1918 by the famous Viennese art historian Max Dvořák. The author ś paper will focus on the polarity between naturalism/realism vs. idealism/symbolism clearly present in both texts. His comparison will focus on the following questions: 1. What was the exact meaning of the concepts? 2. How had they been rooted in various philosophical traditions? 3. How do they appear in the light of recent criticism?
For decades, thinking about structures within the Viennese School of Art history has continued without comprehensively embracing and rethinking Wickhoff ’s reflections on pictorial narrative and time. Sedlmayr’s notion of structure was associated with the author’s authoritarian emphasis on abandoning “vulgar time” and achieving a connection with timelessness, which limited his ability to understand the historical formalism established by Riegl. Otto Pächt shifted the focus of his thinking to the problem of visual language and its historical contexts. Creatively developing ideas of Viennese thinkers, Wolfgang Kemp elaborated notion of narrative structures, whose historical anchoring in the analysis of systems of reasoning and representation makes it possible to productively describe the hermeneutic paradoxes associated with developing a visual grammar of pictorial narrative.
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