Riegl's reputation as an innovative art historian, however, was established by his second book, Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Problems of style: foundations for a history of ornament) (1893).

In this work Riegl sought to refute the materialist account of the origins of decorative motifs from, for example, the weaving of textiles, a theory that was associated with the followers of Gottfried Semper.

In 1894, on the basis of the Stilfragen, Riegl was awarded an extraordinarius position at the University of Vienna, where he began to lecture on Baroque art, a period that was at the time considered merely as the decadent end of the Renaissance.

In the meantime he became increasingly preoccupied with the relationship between stylistic development and cultural history, a concern that may indicate the growing influence of Karl Schnaase's work on his thought.

This concern is particularly evident in two manuscripts that he prepared during this time, but were published only after his death as the Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Historical grammar of the visual arts).

The Kunstindustrie followed the lead of an earlier work by Riegl's colleague Franz Wickhoff, Die Wiener Genesis (1895), a study of late antique manuscript painting.

[1] Indeed, one of Riegl's clearer definitions of the concept appears in the final chapter of the Kunstindustrie: All human will is directed toward a satisfactory shaping of man's relationship to the world, within and beyond the individual.

Riegl's final completed monograph, Das holländische Gruppenporträt (The group portraiture of Holland) (1902), focused on the Dutch baroque, and represented yet another shift in method.

Rank follows the development of art, which he believes contributes more than religion, in the humanization and concretization of the soul belief as classically displayed in nature and then man himself as the god.

Clemena Antonova writes, "Worringer sides with Riegl in that relativist approach to art and maintains that, "what appears from our standpoint the greatest distortion, must have been, at the time, for its creator the highest beauty and expression of his artistic volition.

Swoboda, ed., Gesammelte Aufsätze (Augsburg, 1929), xxxv-xxxix; Collected Essays (Riverside, 2023), 43-66; and E.M. Kain and D. Britt, tr., The Group Portraiture of Holland (Los Angeles, 1989), 384-92.