 Herder’s new historicist approach to interpreting and evaluating literature and art led to enormous progress in the actual interpretation and critical evaluation of both. For example, it enabled the Schlegel brothers to achieve a much deeper understanding of ancient tragedy than had been achieved before, an (anti-Aristotelian) understanding of it on which all serious classical scholarship concerned with it has rested since. And it not only enabled Friedrich Schlegel (in his work on paintings in the Louvre and on cathedral architecture) to develop a similar approach to visual art, but also (in part thereby) made possible the highly sophisticated twentieth-century art history of Erwin Panofsky and Ernst Gombrich, which transcended previous art historians’ (Kant-influenced) overemphasis on style in visual art to include a scrupulously historicist attention to the role of meaning and genre in it as well.