26 | CHAPTER 2
riot on the evidence of little else than jewellery, enamels, ivories, textiles,
painting, and carving.” For Rivoira only architecture counted—the manly
buildings of the Romans. He rubbed in this antipathy to the Orient by pub-
lishing in 1914 an abusive treatise on Architettura musulmana, sue origini e
suo sviluppo (likewise translated with alacrity into English: Moslem architec-
ture: Its origins and development). Rivoira had no serious interest in Muslim
architecture—he merely wanted to remove any possible competitors with
Rome. But he saw Islamic civilization could not be ignored.^24
A considerably diluted version of Rivoira’s Romanocentrism was pro-
moted, in a theoretically sophisticated framework, by the Austrian art histo-
rian and—from 1895—professor of art history at Vienna, Alois Riegl (d.
1905). Significantly for the subsequent development of his ideas, Riegl
started out cataloguing Eg yptian textiles and Oriental carpets in Viennese
collections, in other words analyzing mainly ornament rather than images,
and on anonymous everyday objects. He argued, though, that even the car-
pets’ characteristic motifs could be traced back to “international Hellenistic-
Roman art.”^25 It was in Riegl’s two early books on Eg yptian textiles and Ori-
ental carpets that occurred the usages of the term “late Antiquity” (“die
spätantike Zeit,” “die späte Antike,” defined by him as the fourth to seventh
centuries)^26 which are usually, inaccurately, quoted as the earliest.^27
For the purposes of the present exposition, Riegl’s next book, the Stilfra-
gen of 1893, is best held over for slightly later discussion. In any case his fame
today rests principally on his Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie, published in
Vienna in 1901 (and translated into English as Late Roman art industry).
Here, Riegl addresses himself to artistic production in a spectrum of media,
architecture, sculpture, and painting, but also the decorative arts derided by
Rivoira, even belt buckles, brooches, and other items of personal adornment
archaeologists had been discovering in abundance throughout the Austro-
Hungarian Empire. From these neglected products of the era whose aesthetic
Burckhardt had forthrightly dismissed, Riegl spun an analysis of a distinctive
and original “artistic will” (“Kunstwollen”) that demands to be understood
for its own sake, rather than as decline from an earlier, ideal state. Kunstwol-
len, although rather nebulous, has endlessly fertilized subsequent theoretical
24 Cf. A. J. Wharton, Refiguring the post classical city (Cambridge 1995) 3–12, comparing Rivoira
with Josef Strzygowski (see below). The quotation is from Architettura musulmana 70–71 (tr. 69). Riv-
oira’s attitudes endured under fascism, galvanized by patriotic revulsion against Strzygowski’s Orient oder
Rom: M. Bernabò, Ossessioni bizantine e cultura artistica in Italia (Naples 2003) 82–83, 96–107.
25 A. Riegl, Altorientalische Teppiche (Leipzig 1891) 146.
26 A. Riegl, Die äg yptischen Textilfunde (Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Museums für Kunst und
Industrie 2) (Vienna 1889) XV–XVI, XIX–XX, XXIII; id., Altorientalische Teppiche [2:25], e.g., 122,
123, 149.
27 E.g., M. Ghilardi, “Alle origini del dibattito sulla nascita dell’arte tardoantico,” Mediterraneo an-
tico 5 (2002) 119–20, 126 n. 54; E. James, “The rise and function of the concept “late Antiquity,” ” JLA 1
(2008) 20–21.