In 1971 on the 50th anniversary of the death of Max Dvořák, outstanding Czech medievalist Albert Kutal expressed the opinion that Dvořák’s work was not only highly relevant for its conception of art history as the history of ideas but also for its early formal evolutionary approach. Three years later on the centenary of Max Dvořák’s birth, Vienna professor Otto Pächt emphasized the relevancy of Dvořák’s article ‘Über die dringendsten Methodischen Erfordernisse der Erziehung zur kunstgeschichtlichen Forschung’ (1913–1914), which spanned the formal evolutionary and history of ideas approaches. For Pächt the ‘relevance and strategic significance’ of Dvořák’s article to the 1970s lay in the fact that it represented a counter weight to ´the danger that iconology might monopolise interpretations of works of art’. Kutal’s and Pächt’s critique of iconology was motivated not only by their attempt to relativise iconology’s claim to hegemony but also by their efforts to defend the indispensability of the evolutionary genealogical method. Pächt openly pronounced his views on the iconology method in 1956 in his review of Panofsky’s Early Netherlandish Painting. In 1964, at the 21st World congress of art history in Bonn his argument against iconology sought to overturn the premise that every work of art was also iconographically innovative. Pächt summarised his thinking on this topic in his 1970/71 university lectures, ‘Methodisches zur kunsthistorischen Praxis’. His criticism of iconology focused on its neglect of the non-discursive nature of visual art and its total intellectualisation. Albert Kutal shared Pächt’s conviction that it is vision and not the word that is of primary importance for the history of art. The reservations the two well-known art historians had towards iconology found support in a conviction they shared with Jacob Burckhardt: that works of art were non-discursive and conceptually indefinable. Hence, they both considered the evolutionary genealogical method to be most appropriate in approaching the history of art. By projecting a modernist conception of works of art onto medieval art, they significantly contributed to our knowledge of art in the Middle Ages.