Journal of Art Historiography (Jun 2020)
The scope and ambition of Izidor Cankar’s “systematics of style
Abstract
Izidor Cankar (1886–1958), student of Max Dvořák at Vienna and the key figure in founding in 1919–20 the discipline of art history at University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, set himself a great task: to complete those researches [of Riegl, Wickhoff, and Wölfflin], to sum up the marks of style into a system regardless of the historical evolution, to create in nuce some sort of a grammar of art formation . In his Introduction into Comprehending of the Visual Art. The Systematics of Style (1926) – which functions as the theoretical underpinning of even greater and unfortunately unfinished project of The History of Visual Art in Western Europe. The Evolution of Style (1927–51) – he thus offered three fundamental categories for close examination of works of art as visual organisms : the two extremes of the idealistic and naturalistic worldviews and the planar and painterly styles respectively, and their reconciliation, the intermediary position of realistic worldview and the plastic style. What exactly do these categories comprise, how are they to be used and what is the relation of this theoretical edifice to the art-historical work of the named Cankar's predecessors, is the topic of the present contribution.
