Idealism and naturalism in Gothic art

About this book

"In his essay on Idealism and naturalism in Gothic sculpture and painting, art is no longer an autonomous phenomenon, but the expression of a ‘world view’. The history of art is no longer seen as an unbroken chain of development, but rather as a dialectic process impelled by the ‘contrast between the ideational and the material’ (Gegensatz zwischen Geist und Materie). Now Dvořák assigned equal importance to naturalism and to its opposite, the fundamentally idealistic character of Gothic art, which he had still vehemently denied in 1904."