Josef Strzygowski
Encyclopedia
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
known for his theory on the influence of Early Christian Armenian architecture
Armenian architecture
Armenian architecture is an architectural style developed over the last 4,500 years of human habitation in the Armenian Highland and used principally by the Armenian people.- Common characteristics of Armenian architecture:...
on the early Medieval architecture of Europe, outlined in his book, Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa. He is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History
Vienna School of Art History
The Vienna School of Art History is a collective term used to describe the development of fundamental art-historical methods at the University of Vienna...
.
Life
Strzygowski was born in "Austrian SilesiaAustrian Silesia
Austrian Silesia , officially the Duchy of Upper and Lower Silesia was an autonomous region of the Kingdom of Bohemia and the Austrian Empire, from 1867 a Cisleithanian crown land of Austria-Hungary...
," in a city that is today part of Poland
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
. His father was a cloth manufacturer, and Strzygowski initially intended to pursue the same trade, beginning an apprenticeship in a weaving plant in 1880. In 1882, however, he abandoned this career and enrolled at the University of Vienna
University of Vienna
The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...
. He soon transferred to the University of Munich
Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich
The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich , commonly known as the University of Munich or LMU, is a university in Munich, Germany...
, where he studied art history
Art history
Art history has historically been understood as the academic study of objects of art in their historical development and stylistic contexts, i.e. genre, design, format, and style...
and completed a dissertation on the iconography
Iconography
Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images. The word iconography literally means "image writing", and comes from the Greek "image" and "to write". A secondary meaning is the painting of icons in the...
of the Baptism of Christ, published in 1885 as Ikonographie der Taufe Christi.
For the next three years Strzygowski lived in Rome
Rome
Rome is the capital of Italy and the country's largest and most populated city and comune, with over 2.7 million residents in . The city is located in the central-western portion of the Italian Peninsula, on the Tiber River within the Lazio region of Italy.Rome's history spans two and a half...
, where he completed a study of Cimabue und Rom (1887) (Cimabue
Cimabue
Cimabue , also known as Bencivieni di Pepo or in modern Italian, Benvenuto di Giuseppe, was an Italian painter and creator of mosaics from Florence....
and Rome), which emphasized the Byzantine
Byzantine art
Byzantine art is the term commonly used to describe the artistic products of the Byzantine Empire from about the 5th century until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453....
sources of the Italian painter's work. Late in life he stated that this work led to the question which would define all of his subsequent scholarship: "What is Rome, what, in reality, is Italian and European art?"
Following his Roman sojourn, Strzygowski travelled to Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki
Thessaloniki , historically also known as Thessalonica, Salonika or Salonica, is the second-largest city in Greece and the capital of the region of Central Macedonia as well as the capital of the Decentralized Administration of Macedonia and Thrace...
, Mount Athos
Mount Athos
Mount Athos is a mountain and peninsula in Macedonia, Greece. A World Heritage Site, it is home to 20 Eastern Orthodox monasteries and forms a self-governed monastic state within the sovereignty of the Hellenic Republic. Spiritually, Mount Athos comes under the direct jurisdiction of the...
, Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
, and Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
, thus developing a greater acquaintance with Byzantine and Russian art. In 1892 he was appointed to the faculty of the University of Graz
University of Graz
The University of Graz , a university located in Graz, Austria, is the second-largest and second-oldest university in Austria....
, but in 1894 and 1895, he lived in Cairo
Cairo
Cairo , is the capital of Egypt and the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, and the 16th largest metropolitan area in the world. Nicknamed "The City of a Thousand Minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture, Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life...
, where he studied the early Byzantine and Islamic art
Islamic art
Islamic art encompasses the visual arts produced from the 7th century onwards by people who lived within the territory that was inhabited by or ruled by culturally Islamic populations...
of Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
, and compiled a catalog of the Coptic art
Coptic art
Coptic art is a term used either for the art of Egypt produced in the early Christian era or for the art produced by the Coptic Christians themselves. Coptic art is most well known for its wall-paintings, textiles, illuminated manuscripts, and metalwork, much of which survives in monasteries and...
in the Cairo Museum. Upon his return he entered a period of intense scholarly activity, publishing numerous articles on Byzantine and Islamic art, fields in which he considered himself to be the pioneer.
It was in the midst of this activity that Strzygowski published his first frankly polemical work, Orient oder Rom: Beiträge zur Geschichte der spätantiken und früchristlichen Kunst (1901) (The Orient or Rome: contributions to the history of late antique and early Christian art). Drawing on such diverse materials as Palmyrene art
Palmyra
Palmyra was an ancient city in Syria. In the age of antiquity, it was an important city of central Syria, located in an oasis 215 km northeast of Damascus and 180 km southwest of the Euphrates at Deir ez-Zor. It had long been a vital caravan city for travellers crossing the Syrian desert...
and sculpture, Anatolian sarcophagi, late antique ivories from Egypt, and Coptic textiles, Strzygowski argued, in overtly racial and often racist terms, that style change in late antiquity was the product of an overwhelming "Oriental" or "Semitic" influence. In one modern characterization of both the argument and its rhetorical tone, "Strzygowski [presented] Hellas as a beautiful maiden who sold herself to an 'Old Semite' to be kept as the jewel of his harem."
Orient oder Rom was explicitly framed as an attack on Die Wiener Genesis (1895), by the Viennese art historian Franz Wickhoff
Franz Wickhoff
Franz Wickhoff was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History. Wickhoff studied at the University of Vienna under Alexander Conze and Moritz Thausing. In 1879 he received a position at the k.k...
, which had posited a Roman origin for the late antique
Late Antiquity
Late Antiquity is a periodization used by historians to describe the time of transition from Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages, in both mainland Europe and the Mediterranean world. Precise boundaries for the period are a matter of debate, but noted historian of the period Peter Brown proposed...
style, a thesis that was pursued further by Alois Riegl
Alois Riegl
Alois Riegl was an Austrian art historian, and is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History...
in his Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, which also appeared in 1901. The ensuing controversy continued for decades and, if it resulted in no clear resolution, significantly raised the prominence of late antique art as an academic field of study.
In 1909, however, upon Wickhoff's death, Strzygowski was appointed as his successor at the University of Vienna, partly as a result of the breadth of his research, and partly as a result of intricate academic politics and (possibly) the advocacy of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. His appointment resulted in an enduring schism among Viennese art historians, pitting Strzygowski against Max Dvorak
Max Dvorák
Max Dvořák was a Czech-born Austrian art historian...
and Julius von Schlosser, which was exacerbated when Strzygowski established his own research institute within the university (the Wiener Institut or Erstes kunsthistorisches Institut).
In Vienna Strzygowski continued to publish on a variety of topics, maintaining a certain focus on the arts of Byzantium and Islam, but also treating Armenia
Armenia
Armenia , officially the Republic of Armenia , is a landlocked mountainous country in the Caucasus region of Eurasia...
n, Norse
Norse art
Norse art is a blanket term for the artistic styles in Scandinavia during the Germanic Iron Age, the Viking Age , and sometimes even used when describing objects from the Nordic Bronze Age...
, and Slavic
Slavic peoples
The Slavic people are an Indo-European panethnicity living in Eastern Europe, Southeast Europe, North Asia and Central Asia. The term Slavic represents a broad ethno-linguistic group of people, who speak languages belonging to the Slavic language family and share, to varying degrees, certain...
subjects, among others. He also gave frequent and well-attended public lectures to audiences "consisting partly, but not solely, of radical pan-German
German nationalism in Austria
German nationalism is a political ideology and a current in Austrian politics. It has its origins in the German National Movement of the 19th century, a nationalist movement of the German-speaking population in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and had striven for a closer connection of the...
students and sycophants." Strzygowski's own radical pan-Germanism had already become clear in his popular Die bildende Kunst der Gegenwart (1907) (The visual art of the future), in which he praised the painting of Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin
Arnold Böcklin was a Swiss symbolist painter.-Life and art:He was born at Basel. His father, Christian Frederick Böcklin , was descended from an old family of Schaffhausen, and engaged in the silk trade. His mother, Ursula Lippe, was a native of the same city...
and called for a new German artist-hero to reject the heritage of classical antiquity and the Renaissance.
It would not be possible to summarize all of the theses advanced by Strzygowski in the course of his career. Brief mention may be made of his controversy with Ernst Herzfeld
Ernst Herzfeld
Ernst Emil Herzfeld was a German archaeologist and Iranologist.-Life:Herzfeld was born in Celle, Province of Hanover...
over the origins of the Mshatta facade
Mshatta facade
The Mshatta Facade is the decorated part of the facade of the 8th century Umayyad residential palace of Qasr Mshatta, one of the Desert Castles in Jordan, which is currently installed in the south wing of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany...
, in which Herzfeld's position was eventually proven to be correct; and his two-volume Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa (1918) (The architecture of the Armenians and Europe), in which he claimed to have traced the origins of Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture
Gothic architecture is a style of architecture that flourished during the high and late medieval period. It evolved from Romanesque architecture and was succeeded by Renaissance architecture....
to Armenia.
Strzygowski retired from the University of Vienna in 1933, but in 1934 founded the Gesellschaft für vergleichende Kunstforschung (Society for comparative art history) to serve as a platform for his theories. He died in 1941.
Legacy
In general Strzygowski's work was characterized by a total reliance on formal comparisons, at the expense of historical context, and by a pervasive exaltation of the peoples of the "North" and "East," with an attendant disdain for "Mediterranean" culture. This latter tendency led him to embrace the racist ideology of the Nazis and to support Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler
Adolf Hitler was an Austrian-born German politician and the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party , commonly referred to as the Nazi Party). He was Chancellor of Germany from 1933 to 1945, and head of state from 1934 to 1945...
.
If Strzygowski's erratic methodology and racial prejudices have largely discredited his own scholarship, his breadth of geographical interest helped to establish Islamic art and (ironically, given his own anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
, something which, incidentally, Ernst Gombrich denied in his conversations with Didier Eribon), Jewish art
Secular Jewish culture
Secular Jewish culture embraces several related phenomena; above all, it is the international culture of secular communities of Jewish people, but it can also include the cultural contributions of individuals who identify as secular Jews...
as legitimate fields of study. Certain of his students (most notably Otto Demus
Otto Demus
Otto Demus was an Austrian art historian and Byzantinist. He is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History....
, Fritz Novotny
Fritz Novotny
Fritz Novotny , was an Austrian art historian. He is considered a member of the Vienna School of Art History.- Biography :...
, and Ernst Diez) were successfully able to pursue these interests without subscribing to their teacher's ideology.