discipline but also marked a fundamental change in terms of the field’s aims and research methods. Prior to 1914 archaeology had endeavored to give new significance to the study of antique monuments, to keep looking for Winckelmann’s aesthetic successions, and to find new criteria with which to judge and classify antique art. Now archaeology began to look for a connection to the contemporary science of art; it treated the question of form in antique art as theoretical, and it demanded structural research. Contrary to Winckelmann’s development of stylistic analyses, structural research concentrated on the search for the principle of the inner organization of form as Guido Kaschnitz von Weinberg (1890–1958) defined it—Struktur (structure). This recognized forms as unchangeable, nonindividual, everlasting, with considerable factors that are bound to concrete cultures, to search for their descent, and to separate from those factors and traces in the work of art, which originates in the individuality of the artist. The result of this method was that historical aspects of the judgment of antique works of art were thrust into the background. It became possible, for the first time, to look afresh at the peculiarities and values of the different periods of antique art, especially Roman art, and to do that without the restrictions caused by a developmental approach based on the theory of inherent laws of form, detached from historical context. This far-reaching theoretical explanation of the science of art influenced the study of archaeology, which tends to an abstract schematism, and was opposed to irrational-mystical ideas concerning the interpretation of hardly understandable artistic forms. The subjective impression of the individual scholar, as a personality, was allowed.

The endeavors of Ernst Buschor (1886– 1961) and his spontaneous experience of antique art removed from its historicity must be viewed in that context. This scholar, endowed with an extraordinary ability to recognize artistic forms, cultivated a refined scientific prose of a late-expressionistic type. He judged his own interpretation of antique art an almost congenial artistic achievement, transformed into an adequate language. It was a highly individual, most effective view of things, claiming that the development of Greek sculpture was an evolution, the life history of an individual, and that the history of ancient art was a sequence of different attitudes toward the reality of the visible world. In this sense he talked about the Ahnungswelt (presentimental world) of the geometric period, the Wirklichkeitswelt (world of reality) of the Archaic period, the hohe Schicksalswelt (world of grand fate) of the classical time, the Bild- un Scheinwelt (world of pictures and appearance) of the Hellenistic period, the Kunstwelt (artificial world) of the first century b.c. to the third century a.d., and the Zeichenwelt (world of signs) of late Antiquity.

The scientific achievements of German classical archaeology in the 1920s and 1930s reflected the problems experienced at that time by the discipline of archaeology as a whole. There were reservations regarding the discussion of theoretical questions, which went along with a preference for factual research, such as fieldwork-based interpretations with exemplary, careful publications of extensive complexes of monuments.

Recent publications have been concerned with understanding antique monuments more as historical sources than as works of art, with estimating their cultural-historical and intellectual-historic. These publications have also examined minor monuments, in their historic context, and considered the social and economic conditions under which both customers and artists’ workshops interacted. This methodical approach argued that the inclusion of the material culture of Antiquity and its social, economic, and political context (i.e., the inclusion of circumstances independent of art) in the analyses of works of art would lead to new knowledge and even to changes in form and in the history of style. This more recent approach, however, has run the risk that “nonartistic” factors can easily be transformed into determinative ones. Consequently, monuments, interpreted for a certain reason, are only used to illustrate knowledge, already gained by other sources. Solid results can only be achieved when monuments are examined both from the viewpoint of the science of art and from a historical