32 | CHAPTER 2
There is something unexpectedly Gibbonian (though more than excur-
sive) about Strzygowski’s gradual progress from Rome toward the Orient.
Just as the historian of Rome’s decline had used East Rome mainly to access
fateful evolutions in the East, so Strzygowski treated it as an escape hatch
from what he derisively called “Mittelmeerglauben”—while I have politely
referred to it as the Mediterranean paradigm—and as his “Durchgang-
spunkt” or point of transition to the Orient and eventually to Iran, Inner
Asia, and even China, all linked by the Silk Road.^48 Although these latter
regions figure very little in Orient oder Rom, Strzygowski saw this book as the
beginning of his “struggle” to prove Iran’s insemination of early Teutonic cul-
ture along the northern Eurasian arc, bypassing the decadent “hot- house”
cultures of the Mediterranean and Levant.^49 This theory became an obses-
sion that partly (along with his fanatical hostility to Rome) explains the dis-
repute and even oblivion in which Strzygowski still languishes,^50 compared
at least to Riegl, the patron saint of formalist reaction to the Warburg School’s
pursuit of meaning.^51 But it left, as we shall see, a legacy.
Between the Mediterranean world, which Strzygowski abandoned, and
Iran, which he adopted—or, in the terms he himself came to prefer, between
the Teutonic and Iranian halves of the Aryan world—lay what he called the
48 Strzygowski, Aufgang [2:42] 13–14, 65–66. On China see id., “Seidenstoffe aus Āg ypten,” Jahr-
buch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 24 (1903) 147–78.
49 J. Strzygowski, Altai- Iran und Völkerwanderung (Leipzig 1917) IX. Discussion of archaeologi-
cal evidence for cultural transmission along the northern Euroasiatic arc in terms of ethnicity has recently
revived after a quiet period post- 1945: see, e.g., V. Bierbrauer, Ethnos und Mobilität im 5. Jahrhundert aus
archäologischer Sicht: Vom Kaukasus bis Niederösterreich (Munich 2008), esp. 5–8.
50 On Strzygowski’s reputation, see P. O. Scholz, “Wanderer zwischen den Welten,” in W. Höflech-
ner and G. Pochat (eds), 100 Jahre Kunstgeschichte an der Universität Graz (Graz 1992) 243–65.
C. Wood, “Strzygowski und Riegl in den Vereinigten Staaten,” Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 53
(2004) 217–33, contrasts Strzygowski’s striking but transient success in the 1920s United States with
Riegl’s long wait for recognition. On the extreme opinions espoused by Strzygowski in old age, see
E. Frodl- Kraft, “Eine Aporie und der Versuch ihrer Deutung : Josef Strzygowski—Julius v. Schlosser,”
Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 42 (1989) 37–38. I prefer to treat his scholarly views in context and
on their merits, rather than in light of the political and racial ideas he expressed most forcibly at the end
of his long life. For the kind of attitudinizing that passes for scholarship on Strzygowski, see Vasold, in
Towards a science of art history [2:37] 112: “[I]s there any real justification to view Strzygowski in a posi-
tive light, to describe him as a pioneer of global art history, and to make a distinction between the ‘early,’
supposedly interesting Strzygowski, and the ‘later,’ openly racist scholar? In every respect the answer is
emphatically ‘no!’ Strzygowski was a scholar who, despite his many innovative approaches, had a life- long
attachment to his prejudices. A deep- seated anti- Semitism, coupled with an irrational fear of mixed, hy-
bridized cultural forms, hindered his serious engagement with the complex unfolding of European and
non- European culture.” During and after Strzygowski’s lifetime, the nature (and our understanding ) of
“anti- Semitism” underwent precisely such a “complex unfolding.” The conference on “Josef Strzygowski
and the sciences of art” at Bielsko- Biala in 2012 showed that a more balanced approach to Strzygowski is
now possible: http://strzygowski.umcs.lublin.pl/konferencja_en.html; cf. also Zäh, Römische Quar-
talschrift 107 (2012) [2.35] 249–92.
51 Cf. J. Elsner, “Alois Riegl and classical archaeolog y,” in P. Noever and others (eds), Alois Riegl
revisited (Vienna 2010) 45–57.