This volume introduces to an English-language audience the writings of the so-called "new Vienna School" of art history. In the 1930s Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pacht undertook an ambitious extension of the art historical project of Alois Riegl (1858-1905). Sedlmayr and Pacht began with an aestheticist conception of the autonomy and irreducibility of the artistic process. At the same time, they believed they could read entire cultures and worldviews in the work of art. The key to this contextualist alchemy was the concept of "structure," a kind of deep formal property that the work of art shared with the world.

The idea of this volume is to bring the drama of this methodological and political encounter to the attention of Anglo-American art historians.