Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

TIME: BEyOND LATE ANTIQUITy | 43

ing new analogies and combinations,^99 there is also an undeniable congru-
ence of historical analysis in the passage just quoted; and it is worth asking
how this arose. Again, a crucial link is provided by a pupil of Kondakov, and
the fertile Russian tradition of interest in the material culture of the East.
Brown has described how at the age of sixteen he first encountered Mikhail
Rostovtzeff ’s “heavy, olive- green volume,” The social and economic history of
the Roman Empire (1926), in the library of the Royal Dublin Society.^100 Es-
pecially its “superb illustrations”—chronologically and thematically ar-
ranged, incorporated in the text, and each accompanied by an extensive leg-
end—introduced him to the material evidence for Roman civilization; and if
Rostovtzeff ’s account of Rome did not reach beyond the catastrophic third
century, his melancholic judgment on its aftermath caught the attention of a
young man bent on studying medieval history. Was not Brown too a member
of a “beleaguered elite” like that of late Rome, or prerevolutionary Russia?
Through Rostovtzeff, Brown and many others drank from the same Rus-
sian spring that had also nourished Strzygowski, who translated Rostovtzeff ’s
beloved teacher Kondakov and like Rostovtzeff counted as one of his closest
friends another Kondakov pupil, yakov Smirnov, who starved to death in the
winter of 1918.^101 Rostovtzeff in turn excavated the Euphrates trading town
of Dura Europus, whose frescoes triumphantly vindicated Strzygowski’s in-
sistence on an independent and fertilizing artistic tradition in the eastern
provinces.^102 But Brown’s debt to the Vienna School, not just Strzygowski but
also Riegl, is in fact still more direct. He himself concedes that, in writing The
world of late Antiquity,

art historians, for whom the concept of Spätantike had already achieved

a definite profile, could teach me more about the pace and logic of the

slow transformations of certain aspects of the classical tradition [Riegl]

and about the rise of exotic forms [Strzygowski] than did the brisk,

imperial narratives of a Rostovtzeff or a Piganiol.^103

99 Compare the assessments of Brown by P. Rousseau, SODebate 53, or L. Cracco Ruggini,
“All’ombra di Momigliano,” Rivista storica italiana 100 (1988) 767; and of Strzygowski quoted by S. L.
Marchand, “The rhetoric of artifacts and the decline of classical humanism: The case of Josef Strzygowski,”
History and theory, theme issue 33 (1994) 120. Also Brown himself on his “dogged guerilla,” SODebate
9–10.
100 Brown, SODebate 5–7. On Rostovtzeff and Kondakov, see M. A. Wes, Michael Rostovtzeff,
historian in exile (Stuttgart 1990) XIII, 3, 6–7, 73.
101 Strzygowski, Aufgang [2:42] 5; Wes, Michael Rostovtzeff [2:100] XIII n. 1.
102 As pointed out in G. Millet’s “Introduction” to R. du Mesnil du Buisson, Les peintures de la
synagogue de Doura- Europus (Rome 1939) VII, XVI; cf. Wharton, Refiguring [2:24] 15–23.
103 Brown, SODebate 17. But on Strzygowski’s antipathy to “art history” and ahistorical, formalis-
tic approach, unconcerned with either texts or contexts, see O. Pancaroǧlu, “Formalism and the academic
foundation of Turkish art in the early twentieth century,” Muqarnas 24 (2007) 68–72. Brown also ac-
knowledges (“The field of late Antiquity,” in D. Hernández della Fuente [ed.], New perspectives on late
Antiquity [Newcastle upon Tyne 2011] 11) Ugo Monneret de Villard’s probing of continuities between