In 1925, a young, ambitious art historian, Hans Sedlmayr, published an article on Francesco Borromini called ‘Formed Seeing’ (‘Gestaltetes Sehen’). The article could be called a manifesto, as it self-consciously declared a new theoretical and methodological point of view. Against previous attempts to understand Francesco Borromini based on theological and geometric premises, Sedlmayr wishes to press the question of rigour (die Strenge) and challenge art historians to develop interpretations that were founded in the visual material itself. Through the understanding of artistic organisation, inspired by the then emerging findings of Gestalt psychology, the art historian could go beyond intuitionist style history or iconographic symbol hunting. Sedlmayr was joined immediately by a small group of scholars – in particular Otto Pächt – and they anxiously promoted their ‘new’ Vienna School with Riegl as their idol.

The new platform of Strukturforschung was born in a self-conscious understanding of intellectual movements in the larger sciences and had a clear idea of how one discipline had addressed the ongoing ‘crisis of the sciences’ (Krisis der Wissenschaften): Gestalt theory. With the disruption of the First World War and social upheaval in both the newly founded Weimar Germany and the First Austrian Republic, there was widespread fear that the riches of the modern technological state were not in alignment with the traditional needs of social life. The meaning of modern science was everywhere debated, and many sought a reconciliation between subjective knowledge and natural science.

Gestalt theory began to be articulated in the second decade of the twentieth century and provided one important response to this crisis. The solution was a monistic approach to mental life that, in the traditional of Naturalphilosophie, sought the forms of thoughts in natural configurations. The original Gestaltists – Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka – balanced life on the razor’s edge of a phenomenal and scientific realism. Almost uniquely among Weimar theories, Gestalt theory refused to confirm its place either on the side of experience or science.