Schraube und Eidos: Versuch eines <i>close reading</i> des Begriffs »Kunstwollen« bei Riegl und Panofsky

Abstract For Alois Riegl, Kunstwollen at its very heart was a sort of impulse stimulating a continuous search for ways of representing the world as better than it actually was. This continuous process would ‘turn into’ historical time like a screw, ‘coiling’ the notions of successive worldviews and their corresponding means of artistic expression around its core, which resulted in artworks that were expressions of successive styles. By contrast, Erwin Panofsky understood Kunstwollen as the immanent sense ( Sinn ) of a work of art, meaning that what he searched for was the essence, not a process. This enabled him to juxtapose the essence of art produced in a given period with contemporaneous philosophical or psychological concepts, since all of them were sensible entities.