TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 27debate. Its interest in the present context, though, is that it was created spe-
cifically in order to deal with the apparent paradox of late Antiquity, which
so markedly departed from earlier Roman canons of taste, yet whose artistic
vigor and productivity implied that it possessed some rationale of its own,
beyond simple failure to measure up to past achievements. After all, how
could Constantine have commissioned such debased sculptures for his Arch
in Rome, and placed them alongside other reliefs borrowed from the best age
of Roman imperial art, the second century, if the former were such self-
evidently inept^28 imitations of the latter? Riegl defined the new rationale, or
“will,” by minutely analyzing the conventions of the Arch of Constantine,
among many other artifacts, in terms of symmetricality, frontality, rigidity,
refusal of illusionism, schematization, and symbolization—in other words,
all the formalist terminolog y that is now our main tool for describing the
distinctive late antique aesthetic.^29
Riegl’s Kunstindustrie has acquired enormous importance in attempts to
define late Antiquity; and “die späte Antike” is a concept that crops up here
and there in the book, especially in its last pages.^30 Nevertheless, in the title
and throughout the book Riegl prefers to speak of “late Roman” art, and ex-
plains that this is because his subject is not just the city of Rome but the
whole Roman Empire, in which the most creative artists continued to be the
Greeks and Orientals.^31 What is more, in the second volume—never pub-
lished because he died so young—Riegl planned to take the story up where
he had left off, with Justinian, and pursue it as far as Charlemagne. Plainly the
focus would have been on what we call early medieval Europe. The Orient,
whether East Roman or Muslim, was to have been excluded. As we shall see,
this is a major contrast with Riegl’s earlier Stilfragen of 1893, and even with
his Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Historical grammar of
the visual arts) of 1897–99.^32 That makes Stilfragen of great interest in the
context of the present argument; but it is Kunstindustrie that has enjoyed
most of the attention. That speaks volumes about the majority view of late
Antiquity.
Our other two publications from the first two years of the twentieth cen-
tury represent the Oriental side of the debate, but are concerned with Chris-
tian art, not Islamic. The first is the Russian scholar Dmitrii Ainalov’s (d.
28 “... sciocchissime, senza arte o disegno alcuno buono”: Raffaello Sanzio (ed. E. Camesasca),
Tutti gli scritti (Milan 1956) 55 (“A Papa Leone X”). My thanks to Luca Giuliani for this.
29 On Kunstwollen see J. Elsner, “The birth of late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art
history 25 (2002) 361–70, esp. 363 and 367 on terminolog y.
30 A. Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in Österreich- Ungarn (Vienna 1901,
19272 [with different pagination, used here]; tr. R. Winkes, Late Roman art industry [Rome 1985]) 2 (6),
16 (14), 400–405 (230–33).
31 Riegl, Kunstindustrie [2:30] 16–18 (13–15).
32 A. Riegl (ed. K. M. Swoboda and O. Pächt), Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste (Graz
1966) 33–37, 181–85.