TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 31East.^44 Thessalonica and Mount Athos were his first stops, and then Athens,
where he threw himself into collecting the fragments of the Christian Acrop-
olis at a time when Byzantine studies were beginning to take shape and ef-
forts were being made by the newly established Christian Archaeological
Society to set up a museum. Then on to Constantinople itself, and into Asia
Minor, where our scholar might still find himself able to travel, even between
such relatively familiar places as Bursa and Iznik, only as a guest of local brig-
ands. Strzygowski now made his first contact with Armenia, an ancient
Christian civilization, but also a land closely linked to Iran and destined one
day to fertilize wide- ranging theories in the Austrian’s mind about contacts
and compatibilities between Aryan and Germanic culture.^45 Thence it was
but a step to Moscow in 1890, where Strzygowski plunged headlong into the
discovery of the icon by publishing two encaustic images recently brought
from Sinai and now among the star specimens of early icon art. Co- editor of
the Byzantinische Zeitschrift in Munich from its outset in 1892, Strzygowski
had become every inch the Byzantinist. yet six months in Eg ypt in 1894–95
opened his eyes—as Armenia had not—to a whole Oriental world at heart
not Roman either Old or New. With his extraordinary talent for being in at
beginnings, Strzygowski witnessed the early days of Coptic archaeolog y and
the excavation, in large quantities, of papyri and textiles. (Here his raw mate-
rials intersect Riegl’s exactly.) Henceforth the reevaluation of Eastern art,
against conventional Romanocentrism and Mediterraneanism, was to be
Strzygowski’s vocation—or one of them, considering the literally planetary
breadth of his interests and teaching once he moved to Vienna.
This extraordinary intellectual reach is implied in the words Strzygowski
himself later chose to describe Eg ypt’s effect on him. “From Eg ypt the road
opened up, which led behind the coastal lands of the Eastern Mediterranean,
into Inner Asia.”^46 A similar course was being set by Strzygowski’s friend with
whom he had once “rummaged around” in the Vatican Library, Richard
Reitzen stein (d. 1931). Both abandoned the classical canon in favor of previ-
ously neglected Oriental, especially Eg yptian and Iranian currents of creativ-
ity. Reitzenstein became an eminent representative of the religious- historical
school, and exhumed Hermes Trismegistus from his post- Casaubon neglect
(Poimandres, 1904).^47
44 Strzygowski, Aufgang [2:42] 11–14, 16–17; G. Fowden, “The Parthenon between Antiquity,
barbarism and Europe” (review of A. Kaldellis, The Christian Parthenon [Cambridge 2009]), Journal of
Roman archaeolog y 23 (2010) 806–7.
45 C. Maranci, “Locating Armenia,” Medieval encounters 17 (2011) 147–66; ead., “Armenian ar-
chitecture and Josef Strzygowski”, in Zäh, Römische Quartalschrift 107 (2012) [2:35] 289–92.
46 Strzygowski, Aufgang [2:42] 14.
47 Strzygowski, Aufgang [2:42] 11; Mazza, Tra Roma e Costantinopoli [2:19] 25–30; Marchand,
German Orientalism [2:19] 282–84, 287.