Alois Riegl (1858-1905) was one of the premier art historians at the turn of the century and a founder of the Viennese School of art history. He and two of his colleagues, the Swiss Heinrich Wölfflin and the German Aby Warburg, forged the three main methodological avenues of twentieth-century art-historical scholarship. By and large, the research programs of Wölfflin and Warburg are already familiar to the English-reading world: beginning in the 1930s, Wölfflin’s main works became available in translation and Warburg’s renowned library was transplanted to London. For decades, these two great scholars, their works, and their disciples commanded wide attention.

Riegl has not been so fortunate. He has been viewed as an idiosyncratic scholar whose rarefied if encyclopedic interests and peculiar literary style were intelligible only to the most devoted students of the spicy Zeitgeist of fin-de-siècle Vienna. For many years, the only English translation of his work was an odd snippet from his lengthy study of Dutch group portraiture. Finally, in the mid-1980s, there appeared an English version of Riegl’s magnum opus, the Late Roman Art Industry. But the slipshod translation and inept editing were and remain an unsightly blemish upon Riegl’s genuine scholarly achievement.

Now Riegl’s first major book, the Stilfragen of 1893, is at last available in an English-language edition. But Problems of Style, as this edition has been titled, seems yet another missed opportunity. Its weaknesses are largely institutional in origin: that is, they are evident only where collective effort