44 | CHAPTER 2
This catalytic role of art, architectural history, and archaeolog y in the
“slow transformations” of the late antique world cannot be exaggerated. Ap-
preciation of late Antiquity as a distinct period emerged in the second half of
the nineteenth century in tandem with the rise of archaeolog y. The most
powerful analysis of the Islamic world’s continuation of late antique develop-
ments came from an art historian, Riegl. And just two years after The world of
late Antiquity, Oleg Grabar published The formation of Islamic art, which
stimulated the growth of Islamic art history in North America, and stirred
interest in how Umayyad and early Abbasid buildings created “a monumen-
tal setting for the new culture, that is, a consistent body of forms different
from other contemporary ones while utilizing in large part the same
elements.”^104 Abandoning the earlier “intercultural” view of Umayyad art as
outsiders’ imitation of ill- assimilated elements from Iran and Rome, Grabar
and his pupils emphasized the first Islamic dynasty’s “intracultural” and self-
assured playing around with and development of vocabularies they and other
inhabitants of Arabia had known even before the rise of Islam.^105
Oddly, art and architecture play no part in the (nonetheless powerful)
rationale advanced by the editor of volume 1 of the New Cambridge history of
Islam for setting the rise of Islam against its Iranian and Roman as well as
Arabian background.^106 At the same time, it is from historians deeply con-
cerned with material culture that pressure has come, over the past decade and
a half, for a reassessment of Peter Brown’s wide- angle, culturally oriented and
progressive, optimistic view of late Antiquity. Although in 1999 Jean- Michel
Carrié could still observe with relief that late Antiquity was no longer seen as
an era of decadence,^107 there had already in 1996 been an outburst of an-
guished neo- Rostovtzeffian rhetoric from Florence, with Aldo Schiavone
demanding to know, “Why did the historical course of the West contain
within itself the greatest catastrophe ever experienced in the history of civili-
zation—a rupture of incalculable proportions... ?” For Schiavone, late An-
tiquity was “an entirely new universe” rather than an age of gradual transfor-
pre- Islamic and Umayyad materials: Introduzione allo studio dell’ archeologia islamica: Le origini e il peri-
odo omayyade, written in the early 1940s, published posthumously in 1966, immediately destroyed in the
Florence floods, reprinted in Venice in 1968.
104 O. Grabar, The formation of Islamic art (New Haven 1973; revised and enlarged edition 1987)
200; more differentiated in revised edition, 208.
105 N. Rabbat, “Umayyad architecture: A spectacular intra- cultural synthesis in Bilad al- Sham,” in
K. Bartl and A. al- R. Moaz (eds), Residences, castles and settlements: Transformation processes from late
Antiquity to early Islam in Bilad al- Sham (Rahden 2008) 13–18; cf. Fowden, Qusayr ʿAmra [1:32].
106 C. F. Robinson, “Introduction,” in The new Cambridge history of Islam (Cambridge 2010)
1.1–15.
107 Carrié, in Carrié and Rousselle, Empire romain en mutation [1:26] 20: “l’intérêt pour
l’Antiquité tardive, aujourd’hui, ne relève plus d’un goût “décadentiste.””