34 | CHAPTER 2
The understanding of art history Riegl purveyed in Stilfragen was, in other
words, both “universalhistorisch”^56 and optimistic. “There is no regression or
pause, but... constant progress,” Riegl himself claimed;^57 “the history of the
acanthus scroll is turned into an epic of vast dimensions,” as Ernst Gombrich
put it.^58 No echo here of Burckhardt’s late Antiquity as an era of decay, de-
spite the sincere homage Riegl pays the Swiss historian in his Introduction.
In fact, Stilfragen went to the opposite extreme. It now seems an overly mech-
anistic marshalling of scientifically catalogued phenomena into a narrative of
inevitable linear evolution, though within a geographically rather circum-
scribed region, namely the Mediterranean and the Levant, whose monu-
ments were more familiar to Europeans than those of—say—Iran. No space
was left for parallel or divergent developments; everything was made to tend
toward the same goal. Note too that it was—and remains—much easier to
write epic history through objects than texts. What was more, by Riegl’s day
Semitic studies had become an independent field distinct from both theol-
og y (patristics) and classics. Philologists no longer expected to master all the
relevant languages. Even if they had, that would not have made them histori-
ans. The compartmentalization and specialization of scholarship was making
it too easy to write epic based on only one type of evidence.
Nevertheless, Riegl deserves great credit not only for having insisted, in
Stilfragen, on taking late Antiquity on its own terms, indeed highlighting it,
but also for making the Islamic world part of an organic yet at the same time
highly creative continuum with the earlier phases of Antiquity. “The differ-
ence between late antique and Islamic ornament seems,” he stated, “to be
merely a matter of degree rather than some deep- seated distinction.”^59 If not
already by the ninth century, when the Abbasids were building their vast,
repetitively decorated palaces at Sāmarrāʾ north of Baghdad, then certainly
by the time of the Mamluks, Timurids, Ottomans, and Safavids, in other
words from roughly the early thirteenth century onward, the Islamic world
evolved—it is true—distinctive art styles of its own, whose relationship to
Antiquity does not leap out at one.^60 But even so, many of the conventions of
earlier Islamic art can be grasped in terms of the progressive geometrization
of naturalistic Greco- Roman forms already under way in the nets of finely
carved acanthus spread over capitals, pilasters, and so forth in Justinian’s
Hagia Sophia (and soon imitated in the eastern provinces^61 ), along with the
56 J. von Schlosser, “Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte,” Mitteilungen des Österreichichen In-
stituts für Geschichtsforschung, Ergänzungsband 13(2) (1934) 183.
57 Riegl, Kunstindustrie [2:30] 18 (15).
58 E. H. Gombrich, The sense of order (London 1984^2 ) viii.
59 Riegl, Stilfragen [2:54] XVI–XVIII (11–12), 306 (271).
60 Riegl, Stilfragen [2:54] 326 (288).
61 Museum für Byzantinische Kunst, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, nr. 6159: Bawit (?), sixth
c entur y.