TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 29Published in 1901, while Strzygowski was still a professor at Graz (he
moved to Vienna in 1909), Orient oder Rom: Beiträge zur Geschichte der
spätantiken und frühchristlichen Kunst (The Orient or Rome: Contributions to
the history of late antique and early Christian art) was designed to annoy, and
not only Catholics or supporters of the Habsburg Empire. Strzygowski was
aware of the confused loyalties and desires Rome inspired, even if he knew
nothing of Sigmund Freud’s love- hate dreams about the city described in The
interpretation of dreams (1900 [1899]), of his identification with the Semite
Hannibal who vanquished Rome but never saw it, or of the Viennese psy-
choanalyst’s long postponed visit there in the very year Orient oder Rom ap-
peared.^36 Where Riegl’s Kunstindustrie addressed late Roman art, Strzy-
gowski’s subtitle makes clear that the subject is late Antiquity, downgrading
Rome from the very outset.^37 Where Riegl conceded that much of what was
most creative in Roman art came from Greece and the Orient, Strzygowski
pushes the argument further. Presenting a series of detailed studies of indi-
vidual objects in a manner no less empirical than Riegl’s, he demonstrates the
impact Hellenistic, Coptic, Alexandrian, Syrian, Mesopotamian, and even
Iranian visual culture made on the emergence of Christian iconography and,
by extension, European art. In Strzygowski’s view it was from origins in many
Oriental centers rather than a single, “ultramontane” Western center—i.e.,
Rome—that late antique art drew its distinctive symmetricality, frontality,
and so forth.^38 The idea that artistic inspiration all ran from imperial Rome
to the provinces no longer held, and Strzygowski asserted the East’s claim to
be considered the source of major developments in what was known—rather
undiscriminatingly, Strzygowski thought—as “Roman imperial art.”^39 With
Ainalov and Strzygowski the Mediterranean paradigm that had hitherto
dominated art history took a decisive eastward shift^40 —a geographical
theme I shall develop further in chapter 4.
Personenlexikon zur christlichen Archäologie (Regensburg 2012) 1200–1205. My thanks to Ebba Koch
and Suzanne Marchand for help with Strzygowski.
36 S. Timpanaro, La “fobia romana” e altri scritti su Freud e Meringer (Pisa 1992) 23–86.
37 On the bitterly combative relations between Riegl and Strzygowski see Ghilardi, Mediterraneo
antico 5 (2002) [2:27] 125–27; Elsner, Art history 25 (2002) [2:29] 358–79; G. Vasold, “Riegl, Strzy-
gowski and the development of art,” in Towards a science of art history: J. J. Tikkanen and art historical
scholarship in Europe (Helsinki 2009) 103–16.
38 J. Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom (Leipzig 1901) 8, 22–23 (Iran), 24; id., Hellas in des Orients
Umarmung (Munich 1902) 5 (“ultramontane”). Both works are helpfully analyzed by Schödl, Josef Strzy-
gowski [2:35] 186–248. E. Kitzinger, Byzantine art in the making (London 1977) 9–10, points out that
the Oriental artistic traditions so influential in the late antique Roman world had already absorbed—and
adapted—the Greco- Roman “koine” in earlier centuries.
39 Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom [2:38] 1–2, 8, 53.
40 Despite vigorous resistance from such ultramontanes as Joseph Wilpert, student of Roman cata-
combs and sarcophagi: see his Erlebnisse und Ergebnisse im Dienste der christlichen Archäologie (Freiburg
1930), e.g., 186, 191–92, 204–6 (brought to my attention by Peter Brown); cf. C. Jäggi, “Die Frage nach