Aloïs Riegl, o Barroco e o conceito de kunstwollen: algumas considerações em História da Arte

The Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl, despite its importance to the Baroque’s research field, remains little known among Brazilian scholars, researchers and students, largely due to the lack of translations of his work for the Portuguese. For Riegl, kunstwollen opens the possibility of formal affinities arise between individuals of the same era, covering all cultural areas. The Baroque art, for him, constituted a peculiar and extraordinary form of expression, just because it contains a contradiction which was intrinsically on the sublimation of the flesh by the spirit, seeming as something unreal, taking the observer in a disturbance which deserved be investigate, in opposition to the appeal of passive and harmonious admiration raised by Antiquity and Renaissance Art. Riegl was motivated to understand this strangeness, and dedicated himself to lead three lectures on Baroque Art at the Vienna University between 1894 and 1902, trying to challenge the dominant canon of “good taste”, which he considered as a boring litany that pervaded the curriculum of academic Art History and represented nothing less than a predilection for monumental approach that he abhorred. This paper is specifically intended to give an briefly introduction to the emergence of these Riegl’s ideas and his influence in the field of study of Baroque art.