As The Spiritual History Of Art History - Both Spiritual Metaphor

Art serves as a key to the understanding of human society. We can not expect art works to fully demonstrate age-related complex and kaleidoscopic picture of history; however, by some representative artists and their works of a specific age or society, we can sometimes appreciate the characteristics of the social concept and spiritual life style. Conversely, from the perspective of art history, comprehending the social and cultural spirit of a certain age enables us to profoundly understand its artists and their artistic creations. That is one of the important traits of art history research by Max Dvorak, a Vienna art historian.In the early 20th century, Dvorak witnessed the endangered position of naturalism in arts and was greatly influenced by the surge of Vienna Separatists, symbolism and the German expressionism, which motivated him to reconsider his focus and method of art history research. A unique art history ideology: art history as the history of ideas inspired him to regard the art history of ages as reflection of the history of ideas, which exerted great influence on the following development of the western modern art history. In recent years, research papers about Dvorak's art history ideology have been published from home and abroad. Foreign scholars'research shows an effort to reconstruct the relevance between Dvorak's idea and the modern artistic creation and academic context in German-speaking countries in the turn of 19th and 20th century. While Chinese scholars focus on the introduction of Dvorak's art history methodology and the classification of relevant documents. This paper firstly emphasizes on the analysis and elaboration of the origin and significance of Dvorak's art history ideology: art history as the history of ideas. Then on the basis of Dvorak's two major works: Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte and Art In Renaissance Italy, combined by Dvorak's description and analysis of artistic creation by those benchmarking artists in art history, this paper analyzes the methods and traits of Dvorak's research, clarifies the relevance and distinction between his art history ideology and other art historians in German-speaking countries of the same age, and give an explanation to the cultural significance of anti-modernization thinking in his art history ideology.