Fuori dalle solite rotte già tracciate. Emanuel Löwy dopo il 1915

In 1889 the Viennese archaeologist Emanuel Löwy was awarded a post as Professor at Rome. He was a student of Alexander Conze, Otto Benndorf and Heinrich Brunn and therefore an exponent of the German school of Classical Archaeology. In the years from 1900 to 1914 he published important, and at that time, also well-known studies dealing with the iconography and aspects of the psychology of perception in archaic art. After his appointment as full professor, because of the declaration of war against Austria-Hungary Löwy had to leave Italy in 1915. It was only after three years of precariousness that Löwy became associate professor at the University of Vienna in 1918. During the following decades, he published many papers and essays dealing with problems of chronology and theory in ancient art. However, it is obvious that Löwy’s work in the ’20s and ’30s was not so well received as his earlier publications. The reasons for this lie above all in the transformations of German Classical Archaeology during the years after 1914. Löwy and his theoretical background were anchored to the science of the late 19th century and the turn of the century. After the war, a generation of ambitious German archaeologists rejected such older concepts, advocating a return to the concepts of Idealism and Hegel’s philosophy of history.