Em Busca do Stimmung: sobre um conceito fundamental na obra de Alois Riegl

Abstract

The book Der moderne Denkmalkultus, sein Wesen und seine Entsehung (The Modern Cult of Monuments: its essence and its genesis), by art historian Alois Riegl (1858-1905), from 1903, became a classic of Conservation and Restoration Theory, with an extremely original approach to heritage, which attributes to the subject its appreciation through different values, internally coherent and identifiable and with its own history of transformation. From the list of values that he recognizes, the value of antiquity (Alterswert) would be the ascendant, characteristic of modern sensibility, anchored in a feeling which he called “mood” (Stimmung). This concept becomes more transparent only when considering Riegl's work as a whole, composed mainly of Art History books, where it appears as the most recent state of a millenary process that can be described as a transition from the objective to the subjective, from tactile to optical mode of vision, and from the succession of forms of struggle with nature and the harmony of man in the world. And that reveals itself, finally, in the nuances of the cult of ruins, and in the transformations of historiography and the of art history.