30 | CHAPTER 2
The Orient and Islam: Views from Vienna
Reviewing Orient oder Rom, Ainalov observed that “the whole direction of
[Strzygowski’s] thinking, with the addition of much more to which he has
not yet paid adequate attention, is already contained in extenso in Russian
scholarship.”^41 Whatever the truth of this as regards the Christian East, Ain-
alov had no more to say about Islamic art than, at this stage, Strzygowski did;
and of the two men, it was to be Strzygowski who turned out to be more
open- minded in this direction, however ambiguously or inconclusively.
Strzygowski’s intellectual progress is in fact so paradigmatic of the shift east-
ward and beyond late Antiquity for which I am arguing, that it is worth fol-
lowing it in more detail, both before and after Orient oder Rom. In the matter
of Islam, there is more to be said about Riegl too.
When in his mid- twenties Strzygowski conventionally enough went to
pursue further study in Rome, there were already some hints of his future
orientation. His projects, on Cimabue and the illustrated Calendar of 354
produced in Rome, reflected a sensitivity to the East derived from study of
post- Greco- Roman art in Berlin with Eduard Dobbert, who had strong
Saint Petersburg connections. In Rome he encountered Nadina Schakows-
koy, wife of the assistant director of the German Archaeological Institute,
Wolfgang Helbig. In 1887 the Helbigs rented the stunningly elegant Renais-
sance Villa Lante on the Janiculum—now the Institutum Romanum Fin-
landiae. Strzygowski, mid- twenties and ambitious, enjoyed the villa’s artistic
society, acquiring a social polish (as he freely admitted) and helping “la prin-
cipessa” with her pet project, to translate Kondakov’s Histoire de l’art byzan-
tin (Paris 1886–91).^42 Beyond the Villa Lante’s view across the Tiber and the
Eternal City, there now opened up a far wider Oriental prospect, a new Byz-
antine horizon still largely uncharted by Western Europeans.^43
Then in 1888, taking advantage of growing ease of travel by sea and rail,
and the improving security of the Balkans and the Ottoman Levant, Strzy-
gowski embarked on a thoroughly Kondakovian journey into the Byzantine
dem Ursprung der christlichen Kunst,” in S. Heid (ed.), Giuseppe Wilpert, archeologo cristiano (Vatican
2009) 231–46.
41 Vizantijskij vremennik 9 (1902) 138–52, quoted by Mango in his Preface to Ainalov, Hellenistic
origins [2:33] x (and cp. 4).
42 J. Strzygowski, Aufgang des Nordens: Lebenskampf eines Kunstforschers um ein deutsches Weltbild
(Leipzig 1936) 11; cf. U. von Wilamowitz- Moellendorff, Erinnerungen, 1848–1914 (Leipzig 1928)
142–43; L. Pollak, Römische Memoiren (Rome 1994) 89–91.
43 On the wider tension between “Romandom and Germandom” at this time, and German schol-
ars’ and artists’ feeling that Rome was no longer exotic enough, see S. L. Marchand, Down from Olympus
(Princeton 1996) 178.