The Mediterranean Foundations of Ancient Art

"The School of Structural Analysis, or Strukturforschung, dominated the 1920s in Vienna. Of the many essays laying out the premises of Structural Analysis, Guido Kaschnitz's Introduction to his posthumously-published Mediterranean Art: An Account of its Structure presents the clearest overview of the background, procedure, and objectives of this approach. Structural Analysis, he says, in not another, more rigorous form of formal analysis, but a hermeneutic that goes beyond the external appearances of individual works of art to uncover culturally-determined habits of conceiving and forming spaces and images. Structural Analysis is concerned with what goes on before the work takes on its external appearance, before it gets its "style." Kaschnitz's Structural Analysis is not a closed theory or system; it includes the study of the whole culture in which the works of art are embedded. He proposes that all sources that shed light on that culture illuminate the structure of its art: studies of its society, economics, religion, psychology, and literature"