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PROD U C T ION, REP ROD U C T ION, AND R E C E P T ION
refer to RiegPs book Die spatl'omische Kunst-Industrie (The Late Roman Art Industry], particularly since this work demonstrates in exemplary fashion the fact that sober and simultaneously undaunted research never misses the vital concerns of its time. l J The reader who reads RiegPs major work today, recalling that it was written at almost the same time as the work by Wolfflin cited in the opening paragraph, will recognize retrospectively how forces that are already stirring subterraneously in Die spatromische Kunst-Industrie will surface a decade later in expressionism. Thus, one can assume that sooner or later contemporaneity will catch up with the studies by Pacht and Linfert as welL There are some methodological reservations, however, regarding the advisability of the move that Sedlmayr attempts in his introductory essay, juxtaposing the rigorous study of art as a "secondary" field of study against a primary (that is, positivist) study of art. The kind of research undertaken in this volume is so dependent upon auxiliary fields of study-painting technique and painting media, the history of motifs, iconography-that it can be confusing to constitute these as a somehow separate "primary study of art." Sedlmayr's essay also demonstrates how difficult it is for a particular course of research (such as the one represented here) to establish purely methodological definitions without reference to any concrete examples whatsoever. This is difficult; but is it necessary? Is it appropriate to place this new aspiration [Wollen] so assiduously under the patronage of phenomenology and Gestalt theory? It could easily be that, in the process, one loses nearly as much as one gains. Admittedly, the references to "levels of meaning" in the works, to their "physiognomic charactel;" to their "sense of orientation", can be useful in the polemic against positivist art chatter and even in the polemic against formalist analysis. But they are of little help to the self-definition of the new type of research. This type of study stands to gain from the insight that the more crucial the works are, the more inconspicuously and intimately their meaning-content [Bedeutungsgehalt] is bound up with their material content [Sachgehalt]. It is concerned with the correlation that gives rise to reciprocal illumination between, on the one hand, the historical process and radical change and, on the other hand, the accidental, external, and even strange aspects of the artwork. For if the most meaningful works prove to be precisely those whose life is most deeply embedded in their material contents-one thinks of Giehlow's interpretation of Durer's Melancolia12-then over the course of their historical duration these material contents present themselves to the researcher all the more clearly the more they have disappeared from the world.