This school was not actually a dogmatically unified group, but rather an intellectual evolution extending over a number of generations, in which a series of outstanding scholars each built upon the achievements of their forerunners, while contributing their own unique perspectives.
Essential elements of this evolution became fundamental for modern art history, even if the individual methods can today no longer claim absolute validity.
Nearly all of the important representatives of the Vienna School combined academic careers as university teachers with curatorial activity in museums or with the preservation of monuments.
Riegl in particular, as an avowed disciple of positivism, focused on the purely formal qualities of the work of art, and rejected all arguments about content as metaphysical speculation.
Dvořák, in part influenced by the contemporary expressionist movement in German painting, developed a deep appreciation for the unclassical formal qualities of Mannerism.
He was a close friend of the Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce and of Karl Vossler, a Munich-based professor of the Romance languages, under whose influence he developed an art-historical method based on philological models.
In opposition to the standard view of history, which was centered on ancient Greece and Rome, Strzygowski turned his attention towards the Orient, where he thought he had discovered the traces of an original "Nordic" character, which was superior to the "Mediterranean."
As he held such a single-minded point of view, he found himself in irreconcilable opposition to the "orthodox" branch of the Vienna School, in particular to the "arch-humanist" Schlosser, who on his side condemned Strzygowski as the "Attila of art history."
In 1946, Karl Maria Swoboda assumed leadership of the Insitut, where he constructed a synthesis of the previously irreconcilable schools of Schlosser and Strzygowski, now drained of their ideological intransigence.