HERMENEUTICS OF PERCEPTION : THE PROBLEM OF INTERPRETATION OF VISUAL TEXT IN THE INTERPRETATIVE PROCEDURE OF HANS SEDLMAYR

Theoretical and methodological conceptions as well as the scientific activity within the framework of an orientation known in the theory of art as the Vienna School of Art History, distinguish Hans Sedlmayr as one of the most important historians and theoreticians of art of the 20th century. The basic characteristics of his deliberations in art theory originate from the traditions of the Vienna School, but they are also co-defined by the influences of hermeneutics, structuralism and gestalt-psychology, which finally brought about the formation of a peculiar paradigmatic mode of art-theory thinking and the formation of notional and terminological vocabulary, in which that mode is reflected. Sedlmayr re-evaluated and introduced into the analysis of the work of art the principle of the hermeneutic circle, attempting to eliminate the danger of falling into formalist reductivism on the one hand, or subjectivism of the classicist and romantic connoisseur approach on the other. Considering that Max Dvork in his "history of art as history of spirit"had not succeeded in harmonizing these extremes despite being on the right path, Sedlmayr thought that the work of art was a result of the influence of the entire habitus of an epoch and not, as Dvork, only its crystallized and rationalised forms, as a text inscribed in the visual medium, following the implicit rules which comprise what we call style and that, therefore, it was necessary to be acquainted with those rules in order to ascertain the extent to which a work, in an unconscious aspiration of the artist for the fulfillment of the ideal proposed by the style, reaches a final form of its perceptual character, which is judged by the application of the four criteria: completeness, originality, formness and condensation. Sedlmayr notices that the relationship of form and content in every work of art can be connected in four different patterns of meaning: repulsive, dialectical, ironic and diabolic, thus revealing the influence which the method of medieval exegesis had on the formation of its own methodology, as well as the limitations and weak points of that approach, manifested in their application to the contemporary works of art.