Schmarsow was a highly innovative art historian. He was the first to consider the spaces in buildings as an architectural elements. His description of buildings uses biological metaphors, making them appear as if they had psychological intent. Although he attacked Wölfflin and Gottfried Semper (q.v.) as reducing architecture to the "act of dressing," his methodology employs much of Semper's theory of architectural space through the inhabitor's use and axial orientation, extending them to painting and sculpture (Mallgrave). Schmarsow assigned the concept "painterly" (malerisch) to architecture as a way to explain the exuberances of the Baroque, a period of which he was one of the earliest to write about. Gombrich assessed Schmarsow as not a lucid thinker but one aware of theoretical problems. Like the classicist Hermann Usener (1834–1905) and cultural historian Karl Lamprecht (q.v.), he liked to speculate about origins. Strongly evolutionist in his thinking, he used the analogy for his 1907 paper on esthetics. According to him, the primary artistic impulses were mimicry (gesture) and sculpture, followed by architecture and music.