Alois Riegl, known as a pioneer of formal analysis, regarded the relationship to the beholder not as the formal means, but as the ethical purpose of art, and defended the beholder's participation against the charge of "theatricality." Riegl's "formal" theory, was not hermetic, but responsive to the same intellectual challenge as the theory of beholding.
Riegl was conscious of the consequences of the historian's acknowledgement of the beholder. In private notes of the mid-1890's, he identified the relationship between the beholder and the work of art as the central issue of art history, relegating the analysis of the work of art in itself to aesthetics. Aesthetics, he wrote, "is the relation of parts to the whole. The relation of the parts among themselves. It has not taken the relation to the beholder into consideration. The relation to the beholder constitutes art history. Its general principles make up historical aesthetics." 9 If concern for the beholder distinguished history from philosophy, then Riegl himself was an aesthetician, not an art historian.
Riegl's studies of Dutch art appear to confront this problem directly. His first attempt to practice "art history," that is, to trace a development in the relationship between art and its beholder.
Examples:
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| 1 Dirck Jacobsz., Civic Guards, 1529. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum-Stichting. |
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| 2 Rembrandt van Rijn, Syndics of the Drapers Guild, 1662. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum-Stichting |
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| 3 Jacob van Ruisdael, Village in the Forest Valley.West Berlin, Staatliche MuseenP reussischerK ulturbesitz |
In Riegl's argument, the gaze was a vehicle for a condition he termed "external coherence" (iupere Einheit) or unification of the work of art with the beholder. On the levels both of composition and of the "pictorial conception" (Auffassung), this unity demanded "internal coherence" (innere Einheit) among the figures, without loss of individual identity.