TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 35infinite unbroken extension of designs thus generated, in any direction—
what Riegl calls the arabesque’s “infinite rapport.”^62
This continuum Riegl posited between Roman and Islamic art was anath-
ema to Strzygowski, who in the aftermath of Orient oder Rom increasingly
saw Muslim style as an outflow from Iran.^63 When Kaiser Wilhelm II first
saw photos of the Mushattā facade, he observed that their carving resembled
Sasanian textiles.^64 Since scholars had thought of Mushattā as Iranian ever
since its discovery in 1872,^65 the idea may not have been the Kaiser’s own;
but it certainly became the perpetual Leitmotif of Strzygowski’s involvement
with Mushattā, even before it arrived in Berlin in 1903. Since those who
maintained it was Umayyad had already carried the day by 1910,^66 we can see
that in matters Islamic Strzygowski got himself on the wrong track from the
very outset—and he was not one to retract. On the contrary, he dug himself
in ever deeper, and in the twenties and thirties proclaimed Mushattā “Par-
thian” to any who would listen.^67
This is not the place to pursue Strzygowski’s subsequent contribution to
Islamic art history, except to note that it was dominated by pursuit of Iranian
and denial of Mediterranean roots, an attitude more appropriate to Turkish-
Mongolian than to Umayyad and Abbasid Islam.^68 It is rewarding, though,
to glance at a couple of recent statements on the field once dominated by
Riegl and Strzygowski, to see how their influence now stands. On the ques-
tion of ornament, Terry Allen offers the following general conclusion:
Islamic art is an extension of, not a radical change of course from, the
aesthetic trends of Late Antiquity (the fourth through sixth centuries
A.D.).... Early Islamic art, while it naturally grows away from its
sources, is still a branch of the art of Late Antiquity, coordinate in its
aesthetic logic with Byzantine art and with Western medieval art from
the Merovingians to the Gothic age.... Byzantine art, and Western
medieval art too, had the same potential as Islamic art but took differ-
ent courses. A parallel assimilation of vegetation to geometry hap-62 Riegl, Stilfragen [2:54] 308 (273); cf. C. Vanderheyde, “Motifs et compositions géométriques
des sculptures architecturales byzantines,” Ktèma 35 (2010) 273–84, noting the reciprocal influence of
geometrized Kufic decoration on Middle Byzantine architecture.
63 J. Strzygowski, Die Stellung des Islam zum geistigen Aufbau Europas (Acta Academiae Aboensis,
Humaniora 3:3 [Åbo 1922]) 16.
64 W. von Bode, Mein Leben (Berlin 1930) 2.155–56.
65 Enderlein and Meinecke, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen 34 (1992) [2:22] 146; also A. Gayet,
L’art persan (Paris 1895) 113; G. Bell, http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk, letter 22.3.1900.
66 E. Herzfeld, “Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst und das Mshatta-Problem,” Der Islam 1 (1910)
27–63, 105–44.
67 Strzygowski, Stellung des Islam [2:63] 25; id., Aufgang [2:42] 18.
68 Reisenauer, Josef Strzygowski [2:53]. For a sympathetic and entertaining judgment, see R. Hill-
enbrand, “Creswell and contemporary Central European scholarship,” Muqarnas 8 (1991) 27–28.