Art History

ISSN 0141-6790

Vol. 25

No. 3

June 2002 pp. 358379

The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901

Jas Elsner

Introduction 1901 saw the publication of two ground-breaking books which between them established the history of late antique art as an academic discipline. They were Alois Riegl's fundamental contribution to art history, Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, or Late Roman Art Industry (perhaps better translated as Late Roman Arts and Crafts) and Josef Strzygowski's Orient oder Rom. Together, these books set up the categories and methods by which the development of Roman art and the rise of medieval art would be studied for almost the rest of the century. Indeed, Riegl has been credited as having introduced the term Spa tantike (`late antique') into archaeological studies.1 The two books together and the fierce polemic between their authors in the years that followed were effectively the springboard for the modern discipline of late-antique art history.2 One might say, however, that despite its influence, Riegl's book especially resembles Chekhov's play The Cherry Orchard. This was the first great masterpiece of twentiethcentury theatre, but it is really the work of a nineteenth-century thinker, whose most important book for our purposes happens to have strayed across the line past 1900. 2001 saw the death of Ernst Gombrich (b. 1909), the greatest surviving representative of pre-World War II Austro-German Kunstgeschichte, a man who (like Riegl) really belonged to the century before that in which he died. Gombrich was born after Riegl's death in 1905, but his work was profoundly informed by the need to negotiate the aftermath of the art-historical contributions of 1901 not just the specific importance of late-antique art,3 but also the methodological problems of Riegl's theoretical concept of Kunstwollen.4 Indeed, one of Gombrich's first seminars as a student in Vienna turned into an attack on Riegl's first book, Stilfragen,5 while some of his first published work cut his critical teeth against Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie and its followers inaugurating what would be a life-long and yet partly affectionate battle with the legacy of Riegl.6 Like others with whom I shall be concerned (notably Ernst Kitzinger), Gombrich himself, Riegl and Strzygowski were all natives of Vienna or practised their art history there. If this paper is a genuflection to a significant 358
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centenary for late antiquity, it is equally a salute to the passing of the most magisterial, indeed dominant, art-historical voice of the third quarter of the twentieth century. In weighing down my introduction with so venerable a series of anniversaries and Great Names, I want to emphasize something about art history as a whole which this cluster of Viennese still has to offer. Theirs is, in every case, a committed empiricism acutely centred on the discussion of objects, but always directed beyond the small questions. The minor issues of specific patronage, execution, significance or interpretation in any one object or group of objects, while not neglected or ignored, are always (rightly in my view) subordinate to much larger problems about the cultural meaning of art itself, grounded in and directed by a (more or less) rigorously worked-out philosophical thesis. It is the idealism but also the dangers in the conviction that the analysis of objects can lead us to large-scale cultural understandings of a non-trivial kind that is a quality well worth remembering today. Riegl and Strzygowski Comparing Riegl and Strzygowski is difficult, not least because the former (now much studied in his own right) is in every sense an art-historical hero,7 while the latter has been condemned beyond simply a judgement of his scholarship to that grim circle of the Inferno inhabited by outspoken adherents of the 1000 Year Reich. Riegl's hero status in art history rests on several foundations.8 First he was (and remains) an early and magisterial champion of the decorative arts as a major historical field within art history.9 His works on Oriental carpets10 (of which he was for twelve years the curator in the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, the Hapsburg equivalent of the V&A) engaged with the Arts and Crafts Movement and with the seminal contributions (both in Germany and briefly in England) of Gottfried Semper, with whom Riegl regularly disagreed in print.11 These publications attempted to tie the ornamentation of textiles to a great continuous tradition descended from Graeco-Roman antiquity.12 His Stilfragen, or Problems of Style, published in 1893, was a fundamental development and restatement of this theme demonstrating the continuity of traditions of ornament throughout antiquity and the middle ages (going back to Ancient Egyptian lotus motifs) and providing a model for diachronic ornamental transformation. Secondly, in addition to his championship of late-antique and early medieval art against the general view of decline (to which we shall come later), Riegl formulated initially in Stilfragen but most maturely and influentially in Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie13 what would become one of the most important and controversial concepts in twentieth-century German art history, namely the idea of Kunstwollen. This term has been frequently translated, frequently discussed and frequently criticized. Otto Pa cht, in an acute and sympathetic discussion of Riegl (who was, with Franz Wickhoff, one of the twin founders of the great Vienna School of stylistic art history,14 from which Pa cht was himself banished by the Nazis in 1933 and to which he returned from England a rare emigre reinstated, in 1963) tries the following: `Shall we say artistic will, form Association of Art Historians 2002

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will, or as Gombrich suggests ``will-to-form''?' He himself prefers `that which wills art' and calls it `the cipher for the generating and controlling factor in artistic creation . . . applied by Riegl equally to an individual work of art, to an individual artist, to an historical period, to an ethnic group or to a nation'.15 Otto Brendel, another (though non-Jewish) mid-century exile from German art history,16 in his Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art, which constitutes the major critical discussion in English of Riegl's specific contribution to lateantique art history, rejected `the literal translation, ``artistic volition'' ' and preferred `stylistic intent'.17 Edgar Wind, a third refugee of the same period, offered `autonomous formal impulse'.18 Indeed, by the 1920s there were NeoKantian and Neo-Hegelian interpretations of Kunstwollen. The former (espoused, for instance, by Panofsky and Wind) saw it as an immanent meaning whereby each work of art invokes the whole culture from which it comes through its style; the latter (expressed, for instance, by Hans Sedlmayr) believed it to be a central and informing principle of creativity, a kind of `deep structure'.19 As these attempts show, Riegl's art history has always been both difficult and controversial. It certainly stood at the determinist end of historical evolutionism, and was implicated in what later became called Geistesgeschichte universal history of the human spirit. It is precisely to this and to the fact that no one could provide an adequate (non-mystical ) account of Kunstwollen that Gombrich objected when he attacked Riegl and his legacy in Art and Illusion.20 The explicit teleology of Riegl's historicism has caused problems, particularly for those wedded to a Gombrichian making-and-matching kind of art history (itself indebted to Popper's philosophy of scientific experimentation).21 At the same time Riegl's consistent devotion to a cultural (rather than a social) context for the production of art, as opposed to notions of artistic genius or incompetence, seems strikingly modern. Riegl argued that: `Since the work of art is not made with our taste in mind, we can extract its true content only by reference to the premises on which it was made.'22 He was effectively a pioneer not only of the study of the viewing of art,23 but also in the relativism of reception in different periods and in the specific differentiation of our own responses as art historians and viewers from those of an object's intended or likely audience. In its Viennese cultural context, this was an attempt to write an objective art history which could nonetheless incorporate the problem of subjectivity a scientific approach parallel with contemporary work in the same city by the likes of Husserl and Freud.24 Thirdly, in his roles as editor of the journal of the Central Commission for the Research and Preservation of Austrian Monuments (from 1902) and as Conservator General of Austrian Monuments (from 1903),25 Riegl became a pioneer in issues of conservation and the preservation of condemned buildings.26 Moreover, all this activity (in which he was in the vanguard for his time) was tied to a genuinely multicultural politics in the context of late Hapsburg imperialism, which set him firmly apart from the pan-German nationalism and ethnically purist art history which developed rapidly at precisely this time and would so soon descend into Nazism.27 He was, in effect, on all fronts a genuine intellectual hero,28 whose attitudes are so dangerously close to the kinds we might wish to 360
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emulate as to make him worryingly appropriable as `our contemporary' (to use Jan Kott's famous phrase about Shakespeare).29 This makes his work difficult to assess for precisely the opposite reasons to those that give us problems with Strzygowski (18621941). The latter's art history is patently racist and tainted by his sympathy with what we would now see as a despicable regime. It might be said, however, that nothing in Strzygowski's experience, up to his death in 1941, would remotely have given him the hint that he was on what is so obviously to us the wrong side of every ethical debate to affect the humanities. Strzygowski's career, as an outsider to traditional AustroGerman academic life both on account of his origins on the outer reaches of the Austrian empire in mainly Polish Silesia and as a cloth manufacturer's son is a classic case of making one's name by assaulting the establishment.30 Possessed in addition to his flair for `knocking copy' with what Suzanne Marchand describes as an `odious personality',31 nonetheless in part on account of his wide travels in the east, remarkable first-hand knowledge of objects and extraordinarily prolific publications Strzygowski made it, first to the Chair at Graz and finally, in 1909, to Wickhoff's Chair at the centre of the establishment in Vienna where the personal patronage of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand (who also held panGermanic views) seems to have prevailed against significant opposition.32 Before we move specifically to the debate with Riegl, it is worth stressing Strzygowski's long-term contributions to art history, since he has frequently been excluded from histories of art-historical thought,33 presumably not only on account of his politics but also his personal character.34 Strzygowski attacked the largely philological Classical humanist establishment on several fronts. First he made great play of the Oriental origins of late-antique and medieval art, which he ultimately located in Iran and linked to Aryan and Nordic tendencies, as opposed to those of the Mediterranean.35 Stripped of its proto-Nazi politics, the influence of this approach has been fundamental to the establishment of the history of Islamic art, to the study of image production on the eastern peripheries of the Roman empire, with a view to resisting Romano-centrism; and, most ironically, to the study of Jewish art, in which Strzygowski has been hailed as a pioneer.36 Moreover, his insistence on World Art as the proper field for art history (rather than European art) has numerous modern ramifications in the discipline's recent turn in that direction.37 Methodologically, and anticipating a debate still current in art history, Strzygowksi attacked the literary domination of Classical art history by emphasizing a vast and specialized knowledge of artefacts.38 In effect, he is a precursor of the highly laudable attempt to let the object speak for itself against the textual bias of the historian, to fight the battle of the image against the word. Despite his dire political views, if we uphold any aspects of these intellectual positions, we remain Strzygowski's children. Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie and Riegl's late Roman method The Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie opens by putting all the most radical and revisionist cards in Riegl's hand firmly on the table.39 He begins by stating that the volume before the reader (the first part of what he there says would be a two-part
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project, although this had already been distilled down from a collaborative fivepart enterprise)40 will address `the function of the fine arts during the five and a half centuries between Constantine the Great and Charlemagne' by discovering `the connecting threads which lead back to past antiquity' (p. 3). This is already innovative as he explicitly proceeds by looking back (teleologically) rather than pretending to write a chronological history, as is more normal. He states with some exaggeration (but also some justification) that the `fine arts of the end of the Roman empire' are `a completely unresearched field' (p. 6). Within four pages of the Introduction, he is attacking not only the `unbridgeable gap between late Roman art and the art of preceding Classical antiquity', which had generally been taken for granted, but also the assumption of decline, stating that `everyone agrees that late Roman art did not constitute progress but merely decay.' (p. 8) He announces that `to destroy this prejudice is the principal object of all the studies contained in this book.' (p. 8) To do this he invokes his own earlier Stilfragen and the demonstration there of a continuity between the ornamental tendril decoration of the Byzantines and Saracens and that of Classical antiquity (p. 9). After a brief attack on Semper as representing a mechanistic and scientific theory of art which overstressed the importance of materials, he launches the notion of Kunstwollen (as first invoked in the Stilfragen) on the unsuspecting reader. Kunstwollen is defined as follows: A teleological approach according to which I saw in the work of art the result of a specific and consciously purposeful artistic will (Kunstwollen) that comes through in a battle against function, raw material and technique. In this theory, the latter three factors no longer have the positive creative role that the so-called Semperian theory gave them, but rather a limiting, negative one. They constitute, as it were, the co-efficients of friction within the whole. (p. 9) Crucial to Riegl's attempt to deny decline was the work of his fellow student and then academic colleague, Franz Wickhoff (18531909). Drawing his own inspiration from Riegl's Stilfragen (published in 1893), Wickhoff had argued in a book published in 1895 on the Vienna Genesis (a great illuminated manuscript now dated to the sixth century, but then thought to be from the fourth or fifth)41 that late-antique forms were far from a decline but rather developed a new opticality within the traditions of Roman art.42 Wickhoff suggested that aspects of Roman imperial, including late-antique, art resembled the work of seventeenthcentury painters, such as Velazquez or Rembrandt, and the contemporary Impressionists.43 Riegl disagreed with such transhistoricism, arguing that it robbed late Roman art of a definition special and specific to it, and reflected simply the subjectivity of modern taste (pp. 1011, cf. 701). But what he borrowed from Wickhoff was the positive evaluation of Roman and late-antique art and the notion of its continuity with (although its transformation from) the image-making of the preceding era (an idea Wickhoff had in turn extrapolated from Stilfragen and turned to use in late-antique studies).44 Riegl now proposed to subject the totality of the arts and crafts in his chosen period including architecture, sculpture, painting, mosaics and all the minor and 362
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decorative arts to a rigorous stylistic analysis in order to extrapolate their collective Kunstwollen.45 He thus presupposed a shared and essential urge to creativity within the period; indeed, it is on the basis of this assumption that the period could be defined as an historically meaningful era. Methodologically, it is interesting that he regarded the materials of his analysis (what he called the `function, raw material and technique' of objects) as not significant in themselves. That is, the object of Riegl's formal analysis was style itself,46 while the raw materials (such as wood and stone), the functions of objects (for instance, use as a fibula, holder of remains and so forth) and the technique of their working (carving, casting, weaving etc) were just the `co-efficient of friction' to be written out of the equation. It was the style that existed independently of the ways that objects were worked that could reveal the nature of the `Late Roman Kunstwollen' as a whole (which is the title of his concluding chapter, pp. 223 34). What is ambiguous is whether stylistic analysis is to be employed in its own right, or for such mundane matters as dating and the identification of artists; or whether its true purpose lies in aid of the much grander project of pinpointing the traces of an historically identifiable and definable collective subjectivity (as implied in the last chapter of Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie). In part, it is the grandeur and ambition of this vision of art history as a whole which has won Riegl so many admirers, though the palpable impossibility of the project has equally attracted numerous critics. It is impossible, in a short space, to do justice to the wonderful individual analyses of objects, carefully described in a model of stylistic art-historical writing to lead incrementally to the definition of the late Roman Kunstwollen.47 The specific nature of Riegl's definitions are perhaps less important today, over a century after their formulation, than the fact that they effectively created the formalistic language that would later come to define late-antique art (I am thinking of issues like symmetry, frontality, rigidity, opticality, symbolization and so forth). But a brief list of the range of what Riegl saw as the relevant empirical materials is perhaps in order. He moves from architecture (comparing buildings like the Pantheon and Sta Costanza, or the oblong hall of the Baths of Caracalla and the Basilica of Maxentius) to its particular constituents such as the capitals of Diocletian's Mausoleum at Split and those of San Vitale in Ravenna. In sculpture he assesses pagan and Christian sarcophagi from Ravenna and Rome, state reliefs in the city of Rome, portraits and ivories, as well as some Coptic reliefs. Under painting he explores the early mosaics of Rome and those of Ravenna and the late-antique manuscripts (pagan and Christian); in the minor and decorative arts, all manner of brooches, fibulae, gems and glass vessels. What this list reveals is remarkable catholicism about the range of objects to be included (though one wonders what happened to silver plate) but equally a profoundly narrow focus around the productions and remains of late Roman Italy (with the exception of the decorative arts, many of which were archaeological finds from within the Austro-Hungarian empire). While Riegl was, remarkably for his time, never racial in his ascription of Kunstwollen (unlike some of his successors, like Sedlmayr) the Roman focus was from the perspective of late Hapsburg Vienna very much a project on the origins and development of Holy Rome.48
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29 The Arch of Constantine, north face, AD 3125. Rome. Photo: German Archaeological Institute in Rome

To take one example, we could do worse than look at the Arch of Constantine (constructed 3125) with which Riegl opens his account of sculpture (chap. 2) and to which his text regularly returns (plate 29).49 This is a key monument because, since the Renaissance, its pointed juxtaposition of late-antique and secondcentury sculpted reliefs had occasioned polemical disparagement of the Constantinian work. Raphael, c. 1519, in a letter composed by Castiglione and sent to the Pope, had written of the fourth-century carvings on the arch as `very feeble and destitute of all art and good design' by contrast with the Trajanic, Hadrianic and Antonine work which he called `extremely fine and done in perfect style'. Vasari agreed. In the programmatic preface to his Lives 5 (1568), he mourned the decline of the arts exemplified by the Arch of Constantine using words like `rude', `crude' and `poor' to describe the fourth-century friezes.50 No one had contested these judgements, and indeed referring briefly to the Constantinian sculptures on the Arch of Constantine in his earlier work Riegl too had called them `crude and awkward' and `weak'.51 In Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie all this changed. Riegl subjected the so-called largitio or congiarium relief on the north face of the Arch of Constantine, showing the emperor distributing largesse to the populace of Rome (plates 30 and 31), to the most rigorous analysis it had yet received (pp. 524). Here, for the sake of sampling Riegl's style of argument close-at-hand is a substantial segment of his discussion. 364
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30 Largitio relief from the Arch of Constantine, north face, AD 3125. Photo: After Riegl, Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, figure 7.

A brief look at the relief shows that the artist saw his responsiblity to be the making of an individual unit with a centralized composition on the plane; here we have still an ancient plane composition and not a modern space composition. The symmetrical centralization, which can only be achieved on the plane, appears here brought to its peak. The enthroned figure of the emperor in the centre attracts the view immediately; indeed, the first superficial impression, prior to all detailed analysis shows convincingly that the entire composition was painstakingly designed to bring the beholder's attention to the centre. The emperor who appears here enthroned on a high socle and turned en face to the beholder, assumes thus the most favoured position for a symmetrical view of the whole human body; his torso (and probably also the head, unfortunately cut off), remains in a perpendicular position, . . . arms and feet diverging slightly to the outside. This strictly symmetrical composition presents the central figure as an image of rigid unchangeable mobility. The domineering position is furthermore emphasized through the fact that it occupies the entire height of the relief thanks to the imposing figure of the emperor and the high socle under the throne, while the other figures are distributed over two levels in symmetrical correspondence. Differing from the central figure (with the exception of some figures standing at a distance on the right-hand side), all the other figures are about to make definite movements towards the centre by turning the head as well as the raised arm in acclamation to the emperor while the artist was at least able to add some variety to the uniform gestures. A certain exception is found in the two groups of four figures each, which are in the upper register near the corners; they do not take part in the acclamation and constitute in themselves a symmetrical composition. They are, however, at the same time standing in strict correspondence with one another and thus, again, brought into dependence on the all-domineering central figure of the emperor. While the entity appears to be projected on one plane with painstaking precision, the individual figures strive towards spatial isolation from the common plane. The outlines of the figures are all deeply undercut so that they appear nowhere visibly connected with the ground. In the upper rank there are two rows of figures arranged behind one another and isolated
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31

Page 46 of Riegl, Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie.

from one another at least as sharply. This is a decisive point wherein the Constantinian differ from ancient Oriental and Classical reliefs; during the earlier Empire it was still an inviable law for any relief to maintain an obvious tactile connection, whether directly or through intermediate figures. The common plane consequently now loses its formal tactile connection and falls apart into a series of light figures and dark spatial shadows in between them, which all together evoke a colouristic impression through their irregular change. Yet the impression continues to be one of a symmetrically designed plane; but now it is no longer a tactile plane, which is either entirely interrupted or just slightly obscured through half shadows, but rather an optical plane like the one where all objects appear to our eye from the long view. Between the visible foreground plane of the figures and 366
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the ground is a free sphere of space, so to say, a niche, inserted just deep enough to let the figures appear in it. They are space-filling and surrounded by space and, for that reason, still close to the plane. Exactly the same relation as between the entire relief and the figure is sought to exist between a whole figure and its parts (this can be the extremities or also the drapery). Yet a strict centralization was possible just for the central figure; in all the other figures it would come close and was expressed as much as possible with simple, straight, inarticulated and unrhythmic hence harsh yet clear outlines of figures spread broadly on the plane. However, the individual parts of the figures are separated from one another through grooves casting deep shadows, which is very obvious in the treatment of hair and drapery. As the figures to the whole, so also the extremities and the draperies do not have a tactile connection with the figures, but are optically isolated from one another . . . The analysis of the Constantinian reliefs represents consequently full proof that relief sculpture at the beginning of the late Roman period followed exactly the same leading law as we established for the development of contemporary architecture. Among the other reliefs from the triumphal arch under discussion the representation of Constantine addressing the people comes closest; the subject of the other reliefs (mostly war scenes) demanded that the figures move in one way; a strict centralization, as we have observed it, was not possible here. Therefore, symmetry was in such cases predominantly sought through a series, even though one cannot fail to recognize also a tendency toward a centralized condensation into the symmetry of the contrast. (pp. 524) From a modern perspective, one might worry about how much work one poor segment of Roman stone was being asked to do in this ruthless analysis. In an early example of modern art-historical method, Riegl published his account with the image inserted into the text (plate 31) and indeed prefaced his description with an apology of how the photograph from which he was writing slightly abbreviated the actual relief (p. 52). Like other kinds of programmatic descriptions of art (I am thinking, for instance, of Foucault's Las Meninas or Lacan's Ambassadors),52 Riegl's discussion is effectively a transmutation of the object into his own code and a metamorphosis of it towards the specific ends he has in mind. In his case, empirical observation is translated through description into a pervasive formalism (which was, in fact, to establish all the major stylistic criteria for late-antique art such as centralized composition on the plane; symmetry, `here . . . brought to its peak'; imperial elevation; frontality; the deep undercutting of figures). But the key methodological point is unstated and only enacted. This one relief will stand for all the others (a point which the wriggling of the last paragraph quoted above is intended to enforce), and `exactly the same relation as between the entire relief and the figures is sought to exist between a whole figure and its parts.' It is on the basis that one can make the jumps necessary to grasp this `deep structure', that Riegl can then smoothly argue that relief sculpture `followed exactly the same leading law' as he had established for architecture. This principle, that there is a single volition expressed through style
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and form which is the same, whatever is being analysed, not just within a work of art but within all the works of art in a given epoch, is an unproven and unprovable axiom on which rests both the grandeur and the folly of Rieglian Kunstwollen. But what matters here is that we can see it at work in the very small scale of Riegl's individual discussions (and here Kunstwollen as an abstract concept has not been named) as well as in his grand conclusions. At this point in the argument, before he had actually come to make generalizations about the Constantinian Kunstwollen but it had already effectively been postulated as the a priori basis of the argument, Riegl turned to decline. The aesthetic evaluation of the Constantinian relief was generally not disputed, because it was universally agreed that these reliefs were a prime witness for the deepest decline of art. Among the most lenient apologies were that the Arch of Constantine had been built in great haste as evident by the re-use of particular reliefs from earlier monuments. The main proponents of this opinion [i.e. the adherents of decline] will be surprised to see that in different works very particular and positive principles of style, as just demonstrated, are followed meticulously. Yet these principles of style are not the ones of Classical art; and because until now the reliefs have been assessed by the yardstick of classical antiquity, they have been found wanting . . . The Constantinian reliefs have always been considered to lack precisely what was essential to the Classical reliefs. That is, beautiful animation. The figures seemed ugly on the one hand, and clumsy and motionless on the other. It seemed justifiable to declare them if not the very handiwork of barbarians then at least the products of barbarized craftsmen. As far as beauty goes, we do indeed miss the proportions which compare every part according to size and motion with other parts and with the whole; but in its place, we have found another form of beauty which is expressed in the strictest symmetrical conception and which we might call crystalline because it constitutes the first and eternal principal form for the inanimated raw material and because it comes comparatively closest to absolute beauty (material individuality). This however can only be imagined. Barbarians would have represented the proportional principle of the beauty coming down from Classical art with misunderstood and cruder expressions. The creators of the Constantinian reliefs have replaced it through another and have thus demonstrated independent Kunstwollen . . . (pp. 545). Quite apart from the attack on decline, and the discursive choice to raise this to the highest level with all the talk of beauty, eternal principles, even absolute beauty, Riegl chose precisely this sforzando of rhetorical effusion to introduce Kunstwollen. It appears here as the independent Constantinian product of the analytically observed qualities of the largitio relief, something both historically true in its own time and analytically true of Riegl's own objectivizing formalistic description. But as we have seen, Kunstwollen was also the methodological premise for getting to where we have arrived. It is perhaps best seen as a kind of aesthetic homology, whereby the qualities of the relations of the parts to each 368
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other reflect those of the part to the whole and of the whole to all the other art of the period. It may be that we can always replace the term Kunstwollen in Riegl with style, Christopher Wood suggests,53 but this would be to deprive it of the aesthetic, instinctive, perceptual and pre-conceptual qualities with which Riegl wants to imbue it. By the time Riegl had reached the end of Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, he was in a position (effectively a rhetorical position, dependent on all the discussion that had gone before) to generalize about the characteristics of the late Roman Kunstwollen as if they had an independent and objective existence outside his discussion: aesthetic homologies, practised on the minute scale within monuments and on the larger scale across monuments, could result in a generalization whose truth-value lay in its revealing history. Effectively, objects analysed purely from a formal point of view and compared could be made to render history as effectively as documentary sources. The invocation of textual sources the Neoplatonists and especially St Augustine in the last chapter of the book (entitled, `The Main Characteristics of the Late Roman Kunstwollen') is Riegl's way of signalling this feat. Having established his independent Constantinian Kunstwollen, Riegl gave birth to the independence of late antiquity as a specific period of historical study. Two key questions remained. First, in terms of the Arch of Constantine, how could works of art derived from different Kunstwollens (namely second- and fourth-century) be juxtaposed? In part because of his conviction that one was the natural development of the other (though radically different from it), this question was not a problem for Riegl; indeed the very existence of the Arch of Constantine was empirical proof that there was not a problem here (pp. 101102). Second, in a key question which would remain a resounding challenge to the whole of German Classical art history for the next two generations, Riegl asked: `How was this change made possible? Does any bridge lead back from Constantine to Classical art?' (p. 57) Riegl's attempt to sketch an answer (pp. 5783) extending back through Egyptian and Greek art concluded that a `necessary precondition' was an `exact insight' into the arts of the `middle Empire' (p. 78). He himself made only a few stabs at discussing late Antonine and Severan images, but commented that `whoever has the opportunity to look at an almost complete series of Roman imperial portraits in marble will have gained the impression that Marcus Aurelius constitutes a deep division.' (p. 79) This was to be prophetic or perhaps, more in keeping with Rieglian teleology it was to sketch the outlines of what Riegl's successors would colour in as a detailed image of late Antonine art, which was specifically given the role of anticipating the Arch of Constantine.54 Large parts of the careers of some of Riegl's major successors in the north German tradition especially Max Wegner and Gerhart Rodenwaldt were to be devoted to describing the `late Antonine Stilwandel' (or transformation of styles).55 Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli (himself a major student of this great German tradition) described late Antonine art as `the beginning of a wholly new concept, something destined to culminate in a genuine break with tradition . . . the origins of the so-called Spa tantike, the art of late antiquity in its pre-medieval phase'.56 Indeed, the race to find the origins of late antiquity led a series of great art historians on an ever earlier hunt for the key transformative monument (an evolutionary missing link). By mid-century, Karl
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Lehmann had proposed the Column of Trajan,57 Rodenwaldt the circus relief from Ostia,58 Charles Rufus Morey the Arch of Titus.59 This brief sketch of the reception of Riegl's work demonstrates its success in establishing the independence of late-antique (as opposed to specifically Christian) art within the German art-historical tradition. Moreover, by directing scholarly attention to the internal development of Roman art, Riegl implied that it was unnecessary to look elsewhere for instance, outside the Roman world for a causal explanation of change. Rather there was one dynamic process within the tradition of changing Roman imperial Kunstwollen (at war with the limitations of materials within any given cultural context) that produced specific arts of specific styles. Here his influence was fundamental and appears not only in the German school of Wegner and Rodenwaldt (as well as Lehmann) but equally in major scholars from diverse other educational contexts such as Bianchi Bandinelli (Italian), Hans Peter L'Orange (Norwegian) and Morey (American). Where Riegl lost specifically among those that might be called his own disciples was in his positive and polemical stand for late antiquity as a progressive art against the prophets of decline. The new spirit of the Spa tantike was rapidly subsumed back into the Renaissance language of decadence. So, for instance, Bernard Berenson's famous assault on the Arch of Constantine, which contains several laudatory references to Riegl and is, in fact, thoroughly in Riegl's debt in seeing the arch within a Romano-centric process of artistic production, nonetheless reverses Riegl's notion of progress and replaces it with Raphael's and Vasari's polemic against decline.60 Likewise Bianchi Bandinelli, in one of the more over-the-top paragraphs of Rome: The Centre of Power writes of lateantique art as the congruence of `formal abstraction, decomposition of organic forms, and an irrational reliance on metaphysical solutions for the world's problems'.61 Secondly, what Riegl had envisaged as the broad multicultural melting pot of imperial Rome (itself an idealizing multicultural, and hence in its contemporary context a political, image of the Holy Roman empire of his own time) could equally be more narrowly defined as Roman or Italic in a racial sense. In the Introduction to Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, Riegl had explicitly written: In selecting the word `Roman' instead of `antique' I had in mind the entire Roman empire but not as I wish to emphasize strongly from the outset the city of Rome or the Italic people or the nations of the western half of the empire. (p. 14) Yet rapidly this was turned into a national problem, especially in the German rather than Austro-Hungarian reception of Riegl.62 For German art history, with its fundamentally philhellenic prejudices (reaching back to Winckelmann), the Italian nature of Roman art was an aid to the theorists of decline, since it represented southern decadence by contrast with the Nordic spirit. As nationalism (as well as overt racism) began to permeate scholarship in the 1920s and 1930s, figures such as Johannes Sieveking and Carl Weickert tried ever more precisely to define the Italic elements in Roman art and to identify a national spirit in Roman production which was at the same time a cause for the disintegration of Greek forms.63 370
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The Oriental thesis and some reverberations Meanwhile, in the same year that Riegl published Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, Strzygowski produced Orient oder Rom. Using an entirely different body of visual material from Riegl (and arguably a more adventurous one) Palmyrene paintings (e.g. plate 32) and sculptures, the sarcophagi of Asia Minor, early Christian ivories from Egypt and Coptic textiles Strzygowski mounted an argument for the origins of Christian and late-antique art which was polemically directed against Wickhoff's Vienna Genesis book. The persistent attack on Wickhoff, beginning in the first paragraph of the `Einleitung' on page 1, dominates the entire introduction (pp. 110) and informs the shape of the book. Strzygowski claimed that the

32 Fresco from the House of the Three Brothers, Palmyra. Perhaps AD 3rd century. Photo: After Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom, page 16, figure 3.
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changes in late-antique art and the rise of Christian art were not a Roman development but rather the pervasive and malicious influence of the East, risen again from its slumbers after centuries of Greek dominance to destroy the Hellenic tradition.64 Denying any coherent or unitary `individual culture' or `national art' to the `colourless mass-culture of the Roman empire' (p. 8 an antithetic position from that of Riegl), Strzygowski argued for multiple centres of artistic production and influence and for the weakness of the Graeco-Roman tradition falling prey to the East. Evoking a famous image in Winckelmann,65 Strzygowski was to present Hellas as a beautiful maiden who sold herself to an `Old Semite' to be kept as the jewel of his harem, surrounded by the `Semitic pack' teaming with silk and gold and gems. Riegl's attempt (in Stilfragen) to see the continuity of Byzantium and Islam with Greece was a fundamental misconstruction of the `tenacious racial art of the Orient', whose move from Mesopotamia to Constantinople implied the wresting of the New Rome from the arms of the Greeks into Oriental decadence. The tenacity of this Orien33 Mural painting of a male figure, from the west wall of the Synagogue of Dura Europos, c. tal race is exemplified by the figure of the Wandering Jew.66 It is not difficult AD 240. Syria. Photo: courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery, Dura Europos Collection to see where all this was leading. Strzygowski's influence among those who specifically claimed to be Romanists (or who sought to uphold the tradition of Wickhoff and Riegl) was relatively small. Otto Brendel, in his own highly slanted narrative of the historiography of Roman art, dismisses the `Orient oder Rom' controversy as having little immediate influence . . . It failed to open new avenues where they were most needed, with regard to the monuments of Italy and especially Rome herself. The strict denial of a Roman art after Wickhoff and Riegl ran counter to common experience . . . The search for the proper characteristics of Roman art was felt to be the pressing task after 1901.67 But this is a highly partisan commentary, seriously underestimating the impact of Strzygowski's work on scholars of early Christian art and of Jewish art. So, by 372
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34 Mural painting showing Elijah reviving the Widow's Child, from the west wall of the Synagogue of Dura Europos, c. AD 240. Syria. Photo: courtesy of Yale University Art Gallery, Dura Europos Collection

contrast, Charles Rufus Morey in 1942 wrote that Strzygowski's contribution `opening up perspectives of East Christian art unsuspected by the earlier Romacentric view, exerted a powerful influence on the literature in this field of the present century'.68 Strzygowski's sway within the field was significantly enhanced by the single most important art-historical discovery of the 1920s and 1930s in the Roman East: namely, the Synagogue of Dura Europos in Syria. Discovered in the excavation campaign of 1932,69 the Dura Synagogue (plates 33 and 34) appeared like an empirical measurement in the hard sciences which would prove an hitherto speculative hypothesis. Where actual astronomical observations could confirm Einstein's Theory of Relativity (for instance), so a major monument of Jewish art from the East was seized upon by many as the proof of Jewish (and hence Oriental) influence in the genesis of Christian and lateantique art. In the historiography of early Christian art, the Dura Synagogue (more than all the other remains of Dura put together) whose date of discovery is so extraordinarily close to the rise of the most traumatic of all periods in Jewish history is a remarkable case of the spectacular impact of a chance monumental survival.70 Strzygowski's use of Palmyrene tomb frescoes from what is now known as the tomb of the Three Brothers (plate 32) seemed brilliantly to have presaged the stylistically related wall paintings of nearby Dura (plates 33 and 34).71 One might point, in comparing plates 32 and 33, to the similar frontal flattening of figures against the background, the reluctance to use naturalistic techniques of visual illusionism, the square framing of heads. Likewise, quite apart from the similar iconographic focus on women and children in plates 32 and 34, there is a parallel almost faux-naf use of painted architectural features (the dados,
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painted to resemble marble panelling but not so as to effect a trompe l'oeil, the column in plate 32). The style of these kinds of images, dismissed as `mediocre' at best and the work of `local artists of very moderate ability . . . dependent ultimately on the hybridized traditions of the hellenized Orient on the western edge of Parthia' with its frontality and static symmetry was grist to the mill of Strzygowskian Orientalism.72 Mikhail Roztovtzeff (1938) specifically wrote of `a return to the principles of Oriental art, a return to a simpler, more elementary and . . . a more barbaric form of art'.73 Charles Rufus Morey, writing of Dura just around the time of Strzygowski's death, commented: `This frontier town is an almost perfect illustration of the process whereby Hellenism sank `into the Orient's embrace'', to use Strzygowski's phrase.'74 The Biblical subject matter, no less than the style, led naturally towards that of Christian art.75 In the work of Kurt Weitzmann, for example, Dura held a dominant place as the key to examining the rise of early Christian pictorial narrative.76 Empiricism, idealism and the problems of the big answers For others, not least Andre Grabar and Ernst Kitzinger, the Oriental thesis of Strzygowski led down the path of positing a `sub-antique' or `third-world' culture of image production within the Roman empire and on its margins which could be employed as part of the causal explanation for the transformation of forms in late antiquity.77 Kitzinger in particular another exile from Vienna and one torn between the conflicting Rieglian and Strzygowskian strands in his own cultural heritage shows the continuing legacy of this intellectual schism as late as the 1970s. His Byzantine Art in the Making, a series of lectures delivered in Cambridge in 1974 and published in 1977, is an entirely stylistic attempt to explore what he calls the `crises', `conflicts' and `syntheses' in the styles of lateantique image-making in terms which effectively attempt to bring together the Rieglian and Strzygowskian apparatuses. Kitzinger wants his period (from Constantine to Justinian) to be `a bridge between Antiquity and the Middle Ages' (pp. 23), not a `simple progression' but an `organic development' in which `the period as a whole does have an internal development of its own.' (p. 3) He even entertains (as late as 1977) the Hegelian extension of Riegl's Kunstwollen by accepting the notion of Zeitgeist for the interpretation of form in its cultural context (p. 17). But Kitzinger also accepts the significance of what he describes as `regional factors' (p. 4) the multiple regional schools and styles (Alexandrian, Asiatic and so forth) which he ascribes to Charles Rufus Morey, but which Morey borrowed directly from Orient oder Rom (pp. 34).78 Kitzinger's chapter on `Ancient Art in Crisis' explicitly cites both Riegl (for the move towards optical effects, p. 15, n. 23) and his followers who advocated the late Antonine Stilwandel (Rodenwaldt p. 11, n. 13 and p. 18, n. 27: Wegner 14, nn.2021). However, his text itself mentions Strzygowski more than once (p. 9, by name, and p. 11, through quotation). Kitzinger uses Strzygowski to formulate his own notion of the `sub-antique' (pp. 1113) as a grouping of regional stylistic tendencies, founded upon Strzygowsi's form of Orientalism. All this is conducted in an extraordinarily careful discourse, full of caveats and ambivalent about every proposition even as it 374
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is put forward.79 Kitzinger uses the trick of naming scholars to avoid himself being directly responsible for the positions which they represent but which he upholds. Thus at page 9, for instance, Kitzinger distances himself from `Decline' by using Berenson as its advocate, but nonetheless he condemns the Arch of Constantine in Berensonian terms as the `collapse of the Classical Greek canon of forms', a `breakdown' of `jerky, overemphatic and uncoordinated' images (p. 7), with no alternative Rieglian Kunstwollen summoned to the rescue. I myself feel as uncomfortable about Kitzinger's book as he clearly did about the remarkably conflictive and creative tradition of Viennese-style art history which he was attempting to synthesize. Modern responses to Kitzinger amount largely to silence, but the discomfort lies especially on the level of formalism. It is founded on the conviction pretty well as universally held now as formalist art history was universally dominant half a century ago that stylistic analysis alone tells us precious little beyond the prejudices of its interpreters. Yet Kitzinger, working within the formalist tradition of which Riegl was perhaps the most significant founder and Strzygowski one of the most brilliant exponents, reveals that the two protagonists of this paper had more in common methodologically than their polemic and political differences might imply. The tremendous strength of the Vienna School lies in its empiricism (to which Riegl and Strzygowski were both wedded), tied to a brilliant visual acuity in the stylistic description of material. Although such a method has often been accused of reductivism, this is not true in either the case of Riegl or that of Strzygowski. Rather, in both cases, there was a rich stylistic generation of valuable art-historical data. The problem with plentiful data is that it is never easy to weld it into an overarching theory (you might say that this was the credo of cautious British empiricism), but it is the wonderful ambition of Viennese art history (shared not only by Riegl and Strzygowski but also, especially, by Gombrich) precisely to combine the narrow focus of empiricism with a grand thesis. The big answers, apparently inductions from the evidence, turn out to be axiomatic assumptions about evolutionary progress and change in a multi-cultural empire (in Riegl), or the scientific and experimental roots of artistic genius in anti-collectivist individualism (in Gombrich) or proto-Nazi Aryanism (in Strzygowski). Interestingly, these are all quite specific political responses to contemporary themes entirely outside the specific art-historical periods discussed by any of these scholars. What is most strikingly shared by Riegl and Strzygowski especially by contrast with Kitzinger is an empirical formalism embedded in profound idealism. The minute stylistic evidence only matters in its relevance and support for a set of very grand philosophical, cultural and historical propositions in the great tradition of idealist Austrian and German humanism. After the horror of what this tradition could lead to in the 1930s and 1940s (and the permanent taint on the names of some of Germany's major non-Jewish art historians, including Strzygowski, but also Sedlmayr and Rodenwaldt among those mentioned here), formalism's most committed adherents, like Kitzinger were left with a stylistic method but no idealist theory to which to tie it. This, I think, helps to explain the extraordinary caution of Byzantine Art in the Making, which could be described as style art history without conviction. Gombrich, who was, of course, an unusual (Warburgian) Viennese in never being wedded to style, is in this sense the last of
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the great pre-war art historians. For his art history is empirically supported, allinclusive and strains towards a universally valid philosophical thesis grounded in the work of Viennese thinkers like Popper and Hayek (both explicitly credited in Art and Illusion),80 who happened, like him, to have been exiled to London.81 But what is interesting in the eclipse of art-historical formalism in the quarter century since Byzantine Art in the Making is that once scholars lost their faith in generalizing from stylistic observations to major historical conclusions (a loss of faith based more on the negative example of Strzygowski and others than on the still inspiring and genuinely educational paradigm of Riegl), then the stylistic method itself was doomed. Despite the empirical justifications for style in close looking and careful description, what has always really mattered is the great idealist desire for a set of big answers which such close looking has been imagined to offer. Jas Elsner Corpus Christi College, Oxford Notes
My thanks are due to Natalie Boymel Kampen and Margaret Olin for their comments on an earlier draft, to Paul Crosley for his enthusiasm, to Sorcha Carey and Viccy Coltman for commissioning the first sketch of this paper for the `Who's Who in Classical Art History' day at the Courtauld Institute in 2000, and to Salvatore Settis and Francesco de Angelis for inviting me to give a later version at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. I am grateful, too, to Dana Arnold and the anonymous referee for their critique. 1 So at least argues R. Bianchi Bandinelli, `Spaetantike' Enciclopedia dell' Arte Antica, vol. 7, Rome, 1966, pp. 4267. 2 Strzygowski's book was written as an attack on F. Wickhoff's Wiener Genesis, Vienna, 1895. He subsequently attacked Riegl's Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie in `Hellas und des Orients Umarmung', Beilage zur Mu nchener Allgemeinen Zeitung, 18 February 1902, p. 313 and in his review in BZ 11 (1902) pp. 2636. Riegl responded with `Spa tro misch oder Orientalisch?' Beilage zur Mu nchener Allgemeinen Zeitung 934 (23 April 1902) translated as `Late Roman or Oriental?' in G. Schiff (ed.) German Essays on Art History, New York, 1988, pp. 17390. See also J. Strzygowski, `Die Schicksale des Hellenismus in der Bildenden Kunst', Neue Jahrbu cher fu r das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur 8 (1905) pp. 1933. 3 Late-antique art matters to Gombrich as being archetypally not that `incorporation in the image of all the features that serve us in real life for the discovery and testing of meaning' which belong to `the special tricks of naturalism' and `which enabled the artist to do with fewer and fewer conventions' (The Image and the Eye, Oxford, 1981, p. 297): see for instance Art and Illusion, London, 1960, pp. 1245. 4 See Gombrich, 1960, op. cit. (note 3), p. 16 for Kunstwollen as `a ghost in the machine' and (with the help of a quotation from Meyer Shapiro) `vague and often fantastic'. Cf Meditations on a Hobby Horse, Oxford, 1963, p. 114: `Now I do not want to give you the impression that Riegl was a fool. He was not. But he too fell victim to . . . the fetishism of the single cause.' Gombrich is much more nuanced in The Sense of Order, London, 1984, viii and pp. 18097. 5 See J. Bakos, `The Vienna School's 168th Graduate: The Vienna School's Ideas Revised by E.H. Gombrich', in R. Woodfield (ed.), Gombrich on Art and Psychology, Manchester, 1996, pp. 23457, esp. 237. 6 See E. Gombrich, review of J. Badonyi, Entstehung und Bedeutung des Goldgrundes in der spa tantiken Bildkomposition, Kritische Berichte zur Kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur 5 (1932/3) pp. 6575, with R. Woodfield, `Introduction' to Woodfield, 1996, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 126, esp. 23. On the lifelong battle see Bakos, 1996, op. cit. (note 5), pp. 23942, with Gombrich's response (wonderfully impassioned in its denial of such a battle!) at pp. 25861, esp. 25960. 7 For Bianchi Bandinelli's thoughts on Riegl, see his entry in the Enciclopedia dell' Arte Antica, vol. 6, Rome, 1965, pp. 6836. For a contextualized historical introduction, see D. G.
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RIEGL AND STRZYGOWSKI IN 1901 Reynolds, `Alois Riegl and the Politics of Art History: Intellectual Traditions and Austrian cle Vienna', PhD Identity in Fin de Sie dissertation, University of California at San Diego, 1997: Ann Arbor (UMI), 1997. On Riegl's role in helping to create an autonomous discipline of art history, see W. Sauerla nder, `Alois Reigl und die Entstehung der autonomen Kustgeschichte am Fin de Sie cle' in cle, Frankfurt, 1977, R. Bauer (et al), Fin de Sie pp. 12539. O. Pa cht, `Art Historians and Art Critics VI: Alois Riegl', Burlington Magazine vol. 105 (1963) p. 189 calls him the first to treat the minor arts as `a major theme of history'. Cf. Gombrich, 1984, op. cit. (note 4), p. 182 who calls Stilfragen `the one great book ever written about the history of ornament'. Especially Altorientalische Teppiche, Leipzig, 1891. See for example, R. Winkes, `Foreword' to A. Riegl, Late Roman Art Industry, Rome, 1985, xixxiv, esp. xvixix. M. Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl's Theory of Art, University Park, 1992, pp. 545. ibid., pp. 712. On the Vienna School, see the useful introduction and bibliography by C. Wood in C. Wood (ed.), The Vienna School Reader, New York, 2000, pp. 981. Pa cht, 1963, op. cit. (note 9), pp. 1901. See also Olin, 1992, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 14853; M. Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory, Cambridge, Mass, 1993, pp. 318, 14966; M.A. Holly, Panofsky and the Foundations of Art History, Ithaca, 1984, pp. 6996; S. Alpers, `Style is What You make It: The Visual Arts Once Again', in B. Lang (ed.), The Concept of Style, Philadelphia, 1979, pp. 95117, esp. 98105. See N. B. Kampen, `Democracy and Debate: Otto Brendel's ``Prolegomena to a Book on Roman Art'' ', TAPA 127 (1997), pp. 3818, esp. 381, n.1. O. Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art, New Haven, 1979, p. 31. E. Wind, The Eloquence of Symbols, Oxford, 1993, p. 23. See H. Zerner, `Alois Riegl: Art, Value and Historicism', Daedalus 105 (1976), pp. 17788, esp. 1802 and C. Wood, `Introduction' to E. Panofsky, Perspective as Symbolic Form, New York, 1991, pp. 716. The two key texts here are E. Panofsky `Der begriffe des Kunstwollens', sthetik und Allgemeine Zeitschrift fu r A Kunstwissenschaft 14 (1920), pp. 32139 (translated as `The Concept of Artistic Volition' Critical Inquity 8 [1981] pp. 1734) and H. Sedlmayr, `Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls', in Kunst und Wahrheit, Mittenwald, 1978, pp. 32 48 (originally published in 1929). See Gombrich, 1960, op. cit. (note 3), pp. 1425, with the comments of Pa cht, 1963, op. cit. (note 9), p. 192. 21 See for example, N. Bryson, Vision and Painting, London, 1983, pp. 1835. 22 A. Riegl, `Naturwerk und Kunstwerk I' in Gesammelte Aufsa tze, Augsburg and Vienna, 1929, pp. 5164, p. 56. 23 On viewing, see M. Olin, `Forms of Respect: Alois Riegl's Concept of Attentiveness' Art Bulletin 71 (1989), pp. 28599; Olin, 1992, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 15569; Iversen, 1993, op. cit. (note 15), pp. 12447. 24 See Olin, 1992, op. cit. (note 12), xviiixx, pp. 1807. 25 ibid., p. 175. 26 On Riegl and conservation, see S. Scarrocchia, Alois Riegl: Teoria e Pravi della Conservazione dei Monumenti, Bologna, 1995. 27 See M. Olin, `Alois Riegl: The Late Roman Empire in the Late Hapsburg Empire', Austrian Studies 5 (1994), pp. 107120. This paper, in somewhat different form, appears also as M. Olin, `Art History and Ideology: Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski' in P. S. Gold and B.C. Bax (eds.), Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 15170. See also Reynolds, 1997, op. cit. (note 7), pp. 25260. 28 For a hagiographic version of his life and work, see M. Dvora k, `Alois Riegl' in Gesammelte Aufsa tze zur Kunstgeschichte, eds J. Wilde and K. Swoboda, Munich, 1929, 27999. 29 So the kinds of anti-Hegelianism, commitment to abstraction (non-mimetic elements) and even proto-structuralism identified by M. Iversen, `Style as Structure: Alois Riegl's Historiography' Art History vol. 2 (1979), pp. 6272, esp. 627. On Riegl and Walter Benjamin, see Iversen, 1993, op. cit. (note 15), pp. 1416. 30 On Strzygowksi, see E. Frodl-Kraft, `Eine Aporie und der Versuch ihrer Deutung: Josef Strzygowski und Julius v. Schlosser', Wiener Jahrbuch fu r Kunstgeschichte 42 (1989), pp. 752 and S. Marchand, `The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski' History and Theory: Theme Issue 33 (1994), pp. 10630. 31 Marchand, ibid, p. 116. 32 ibid., p. 120. 33 Witness for example his very minor role in his colleague Julius von Schlosser's Die Wiener Schule de Kunstgeschichte, Innsbruck, 1934, where Strzygowski figures only briefly in the account of Max Dvorak, pp. 11415. 34 Cf Marchand, 1994, op. cit. (note 30), p. 121. 35 On the racism of Strzygowski's East as effectively a dislocated Aryan West, see A. Wharton, Refiguring the Post Classical City, Cambridge, 1996, pp. 1011. 36 See especially M. Olin, ` ``Early Christian Synagogues'' and ``Jewish Art Historians'': The Discovery of the Synagogue of Dura-Europos' Marburger Jahrbuch fu r Kunstwissenschaft 27 (2000), pp. 728, esp. 201. 37 On Strzygowski and World Art, see U.

10 11 12 13 14

15

16 17 18 19

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RIEGL AND STRZYGOWSKI IN 1901 Kultermann, The History of Art History, New York, 1993, p. 166; on World Art in its modern incarnation, see e.g. I. Lavin (ed.), World Art: Themes of Unity in Diversity: Acts of the XXVIth International Congress of the History of Art, University Park, Pa, 1989; R. Nelson, `The Map of Art History' Art Bulletin 79 (1997) pp. 2840. Particularly well discussed by Marchand, 1994, op. cit. (note 30). For some general comments and bibliography on Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, see S. Scarrocchia, Studi su Alois Riegl, Bologna, 1986, pp. 758. Olin, 1992, op. cit. (note 12), p. 129. F. Wickhoff, Roman Art, London, 1900, p. 7 went for the fifth century. The preamble to the Vienna Genesis book was translated into English by Mrs Strong as Roman Art, London, 1900. Wickhoff, 1900, for example pp. 178, 557, 76 9. In this he anticipated Clive Bell and Roger Fry. On Wickhoff's defence of modernist art practice (in the form of Klimt), see M.A. Holly `Spirits and Ghosts in the Historiography of Art' in M. Cheetham, M. Holly and K. Moxey (eds), The Subject of Art History, Cambridge, 1998, pp. 5271. See Brendel, 1979, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 2537 for an excellent analysis of the relations between Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie and Wiener Genesis, and the way Riegl developed and expanded Wickhoff's insights. On Riegl's `Austrian formalism' and its particular expression in Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie, see W. Kemp, `Introduction' to Alois Riegl, The Group Portraiture of Holland, Los Angeles, 1999, pp. 157, esp. 69. On Riegl and style, see I. Frank, `Alois Riegl (18581905) et l'analyse du style des arts rature 105 (1997) pp. 6677. plastiques' Litte See the discussions in G. Kaschnitz-Weinberg, `Alois Riegl: Spa tro mische Kunstindustrie' Gnomon 5 (1929) pp. 195213; Brendel, 1979, op. cit. (note 17), pp. 2937; Olin, 1992, op. cit. (note 12), pp. 12953; Iversen, 1993, op. cit. (note 15), pp. 7091. Olin, 1994, op. cit. (note 27), 11213. Riegl, 1985, op. cit (note 11), pp. 527, 67, 768, 90, 91, 92, 93, 945, 99, 101, 103. See F. Haskell, History and Its Images, New Haven, 1993, pp. 11823. Olin, 1992, op. cit. (note 12), p. 130, with references. For Foucault's discussion of Velazquez's Las Meninas, see M. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Scinces, London, 1970, pp. 316; for Lacan's use of Holbein's The Ambassadors, see J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London, 1977, pp. 859. Wood, 2000, op. cit. (note 14), p. 10. On this, in general, see my `Frontality in the Column of Marcus Aurelius' in J. Scheid and V. lienne, Huet (eds), Autour de la colonne Aure Tournhout, 2000, pp. 25164. For example, M. Wegner, Die kunsgeschichtliche Stellung der Markussa ule, Jarhbuch des deutschen Archa ologischen Instituts 46 (1931) ber der Stilwandel pp. 61174 ; G. Rodenwaldt, U in der Antoninischen Kunst, Abhandlungen der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, no. 3, Berlin, 1935; M. Pallottino, `L'orientamento stilistico della cultura Aureliana' Le Arti 1 (1938), pp. 326; G. Rodenwaldt, `Zur Begrenzung und Gliederung der Spa tantike', Jarhbuch des deutschen Archa ologischen Instituts 59/60 (1944/ 45) pp. 817. R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Centre of Power, London, 1970, p. 314. K. Lehmann-Hartleben, Die Trajansa ule: ein ro tantike, misches Kunstwerk zu Beginn der Spa Berlin and Leipzig, 1926, esp. pp. 1524. G. Rodenwaldt, `Ro mische Reliefs; Vorstufen zur Spa tantike', Jahrbuch des deutschen Archa ologischen Instituts 55 (1940) pp. 1243, esp. 1222. C.R. Morey, Early Christian Art, Princeton, 1942, pp. 501. It might be said, by the way, that Berenson's reasons for espousing decline lay not simply in solidarity with the Renaissance tradition, but also in the particular historical moment when he sat down to write, namely 1941. See J. Elsner, `Berenson's Decline, or his Arch of Constantine Reconsidered'. Apollo vol. 148, no. 437, July 1998, pp. 202. R. Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Centre of Power, London, 1970, pp. 3212. It remains a real concern of Brendel's throughout his Prolegomena. See esp. Brendel, 1979. op. cit. (note 17), pp. 311 (his introduction) on the `Roman problem'. Even in modern Classical archaeology, the problem lingers see T. Ho lscher, Ro mische Bildsprache als semantisches System, Heidelberg, 1987, pp. 1113; S. Settis, `Un' arte plurale. L'impero romanao, i Greci e i posteri' in E. Gabba and A. Schiavone (eds.), Storia di Roma IV: Caracteri e morfologie, Turin, 1989, pp. 82778. See Brendel, 1979, op. cit. (note 17), 4768. On Strzygowski's position, see ibid., pp. 3847 and Wharton, 1996, op. cit. (note 35), pp. 312. From the very end of Winckelmann's The History of the Art of Antiquity, see A. Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History, New Haven, 1994, pp. 4850. For this, see Olin, 1994, op. cit. (note 27), pp. 1145, with references. See Brendel, 1979, op. cit. (note 17), p. 47 Morey, 1942, op. cit. (note 59), p. 203, n. 69. See C.H. Kraeling, The Synagogue (Dura Europos Final Report VIII.2), New Haven, 1956, pp. 46.

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RIEGL AND STRZYGOWSKI IN 1901 70 For an excellent discussion see Olin, 2000, op. cit. (note 36). 71 On the tomb of the Three Brothers, see J. Strzygowski, Orient Oder Rom, Leipzig, 1901, pp. 1132; M. Colledge, The Art of Palmyra, London, 1976, pp. 847. On the Palmyra-Dura parallels in stylistic matters, see for example ibid p. 87 and A. Perkins, The Art of Dura-Europos Oxford, 1973, pp. 1245. 72 For mediocrity, see M. I. Rostovtzeff, DuraEuropos and Its Art, Oxford, 1938, pp. 78 and 85: `archaic clumsy, static, nave and primitive'. For a more detailed stylistic account broadly in line with this judgement, see Perkins, 1973, op. cit. (note 71), pp. 11417. For incompetent artists, see E. Gombrich, The Story of Art, New York, 1972, p. 89 and R. Brilliant, `Painting at Dura-Europos and Roman Art' in J. Gutmann (ed.), The Dura Synagogue, Missoula, Mo., 1973, pp. 2330, esp. p. 28 (whence the quote). 73 Rostovtzeff, 1938, 86. My quotation excludes his apology for this description `if one likes to apply to it what is to my mind an inadequate term' (namely `barbaric'). However this does not prevent Rostovtzeff specifically choosing to apply the term! 74 Morey, 1942, op. cit. (note 59), p. 28. 75 See esp. K. Weitzmann and H. Kessler, The Frescoes of the Dura Synagogue and Christian Art, Washington DC, 1990 and A. Grabar's three `recherches sur les sources juives de l'art pale ochre tien' (from the 1960s) reprinted in l'art et du moyen age, vol. 2, de la fin de l'antiquite Paris, 1968, pp. 74194. 76 See Weitzmann and Kessler, ibid. pp. 34 for the place of Dura in Weitzmann's work in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Weitzmann's characteristic method of tracing sources of existing work in all media to lost manuscript prototypes is itself indebted to Strzygowski, who (for example) posited the origins of Trajan's Column in a book scroll (1901, op. cit. [note 71], p. 4). It is worth noting that all the great advocates in the battle over late-antique art cut their teeth in manuscript studies. Both Riegl and Strzygowski sparred initially in their work on the Codex-Calendar of 354, with the latter going on to publish numerous late-antique manuscripts, while Wickhoff's whole theory of Roman art was founded on the explication of the Vienna Genesis. Esp. A. Grabar, `Le tiers monde de l'Antiquite a l'e cole de l'art classique et son ro le dans la formation de l'art du Moyen Age', Revue de l'art 18 (1972), pp. 926 [=study I in L'art ochetien et l'art byzantin, London, 1979]; E. pale Kitzinger, Early Medieval Art, London, 1940, pp. 89; E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making, London, 1977, pp. 915. Apart from the general structure of Morey's account, his choice of frontispiece a Christian sarcophagus fragment from Asia Minor in Berlin speaks volumes. This piece, which Morey described as `a symbol of [his book's] scope and purpose', had formed the main focus of chapter 2 of Strzygowski's Orient oder Rom, pp. 4861, and may be described as a visual talisman of the Strzygowskian tradition. A similar point was made of Kitzinger's collected essays (The Art of Byzantium and the Medieval West, edited by E. Kleinbauer, Bloomington Indiana, 1976) in a waspish but acute review by Cyril Mango: `the complexity of Kitzinger's argumentation is further aggravated by his tendency to qualify nearly every general statement he makes', in `Artifacts in the Abstract', TLS 25 March, 1977, p. 381. References to Popper: Art and Illusion, 1977 (5th edn), ix, pp. 17, 234; reference to Hayek: ibid., 24. Is it too fanciful to see England in the fading twilight of empire as particularly attractive to the Austro-Hungarian emigre tradition (London as Vienna on the Thames), by contrast with America the new world superpower and its attraction for the German refugees?

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