art history and the politics of empire: rethinking the vienna school

Art History and the Politics of Empire: Rethinking the Vienna SchoolAuthor(s): Matthew RampleySource: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 91, No. 4 (December 2009), pp. 446-462Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27801640 .

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Art History and the Politics of Empire: Rethinking the Vienna School

Matthew Rampley

The Vienna school of art history has long been recognized as

having played a crucial role in the development of the disci

pline. Although there have been varying interpretations of its nature and significance, one can also speak of a widely ac

cepted account of the Vienna school that runs as follows: in

the second half of the nineteenth century, after the founding of the Institut f?r Osterreichische Geschichtsforschung (In stitute for Austrian Historical Research) in 1854, Vienna established itself as a leading site of art historical scholar

ship.1 Through the work of the first generation of art histo rians associated with the school, Rudolf von Eitelberger (1817-1885) and Moriz Thausing (1838-1884), it distin

guished itself in fostering a close relation to museum prac

tice; the careers of many of its key figures began in the museums of Vienna. It also distanced itself from the lingering antiquarianism and dilettantism of the early nineteenth cen

tury, emphasizing the need for the rigorous study of histori cal sources while excluding questions of taste and aesthetic

preference from art historical judgment. With the second

generation of scholars such as Franz Wickhoff (1853-1909) and Alois Riegl (1858-1905)?the figures usually associated with the idea of the Vienna school?the transformation of art

history into a rigorous and "scientific" activity was intensified

through the introduction of systematic methods of analysis. In the case of Riegl, this was accomplished through the construction of formal taxonomies based on theories of per

ception; in the work of Wickhoff, it could be seen in the

attempt at a systematic theory of narrative, or reliance on the

positivist connoisseurial methods of Giovanni Morelli (1816

1891).2 The exclusion of aesthetic preference became axiom

atic, a stance that was evident in the espousal of "inferior" and

neglected periods of art, such as late antiquity or the Ba

roque, and in the attention to marginalized practices, such as

textiles, rugs, and other applied arts. Riegl and Wickhoff were also noted for their sympathies for contemporary art, signi

fying an open-mindedness infrequently encountered in art

historians.

This narrative is best known from the essay by Julius von Schlosser (1866-1938) on the history of the Vienna school

published in 1934, but it has recurred in numerous accounts

since.5 It includes clear value judgments about the different

authors associated with the school. In particular, Riegl, Wick

hoff, and Max Dvor?k (1874-1921) have come to be re

garded as cosmopolitan, progressive, and aesthetically liberal.

As one recent commentator has remarked, Riegl "was, in

effect, on all fronts a genuine intellectual hero, whose atti

tudes are so dangerously close to the kinds we might wish to

emulate as to make him worryingly appropriable as 'our

contemporary.' . . . "4 In terms of methodology, too, Riegl has

been singled out as "our contemporary," and his interest in

the applied arts has led some to read him as a precursor of

visual studies.5 Likewise Dvof?k "viewed the expressive

achievements of Northern art as a function of a cosmopolitan artistic consciousness transcending the mimetic tradition, but

also reaching beyond Germanic sources" and thereby stood

in conscious opposition to German nationalist historiogra

phy.6 This image of the Vienna school has been balanced by attention to its "dark side," most visible, perhaps, in the

reactionary racism of Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), who,

although appointed to the chair of art history in Vienna in

1909, was so alienated from the values of his colleagues that

he founded his own institute.7

That the writings of these Viennese art historians were

inflected by the cultural and political complexities that af fected Austria-Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth

century has not escaped notice. As Margaret Olin has indi

cated, their work can be regarded as an "imperial" art history that was intimately linked to wider political and social de bates. Thus the recurrent interest in the late Roman Empire was motivated by an attitude that there were parallels with the

Hapsburg Empire of the late nineteenth century; discussion over the nature of late Roman and Early Christian art was

consequently a debate, by proxy, over the identity and future of Austria-Hungary.8

These connections bear investigation in greater detail.

Those art historians whose careers were mostly, or entirely, concluded before the dissolution of the empire, particularly Eitelberger, Riegl, Wickhoff, Schlosser, and Strzygowski, cast the most light on this aspect of the Vienna school. Although the latter two outlived Austria-Hungary, their professional and intellectual development was shaped within the context

of the Hapsburg Monarchy. Other important figures, such as

Thaus?ng, Hans Tietze, or Dvof?k, do not address the cul tural politics of empire as directly or as extensively. Thus,

although Dvorak, for example, had personal experience of the ethnic tensions within the empire, in terms of the preju dices he encountered in Vienna as a Czech, little of his

writing is directly concerned with questions of national and cultural identity or

origins.9 A central element contributing to the political and social

turmoil of Austria-Hungary in the nineteenth century was the

failed attempt to address the aspirations of nationalist groups

that destabilized the multiethnic state. Recent studies of

Hapsburg Europe have explored the extent to which the

empire's relation to its various subordinated minorities can

be compared to the colonial adventures of Britain, France, or

Germany.10 The high-handed policies of the monarchy to

ward its non-German subjects have been likened to a kind of

"internal colonialism [Binnenkolonialismus]," and it can be

demonstrated that the works of Viennese art historians man

ifested an imperial outlook comparable to contemporary

attitudes toward Indian or Middle Eastern cultures elsewhere

in Western Europe.11



RETHINKING THE VIENNA SCHOOL 447

The Vienna World Exhibition of 1873 In 1873 Vienna staged the fifth World Exhibition. Opening on May 1, it continued for six months until it formally closed on November 2. It was the first such event to be held in a

German-speaking country, and the exhibition coincided with

the twenty-fifth anniversary of the reign of Emperor Franz

Josef.12 It came at a difficult time in the history of the empire, however; the monarchy had succeeded in regaining power after the 1848 revolutions in Vienna and Budapest, but the

intervening decades had witnessed a gradual erosion of its

authority. In 1859 it had seen the loss of Lombardy to the new

unitary Italian state, while military defeat at the hands of Prussia at the Battle of K?niggr?tz in northern Bohemia in

1866 and the formation of the German Reich in January 1871 had compelled it, first, to renounce its claim to being the

leading German state and, later, to having any role in direct

ing the affairs of Germany. Subsequent rapprochement between the Hapsburg Empire and Wilhelmine Germany only underlined the now junior position of the monarchy within the new political dynamic of central Europe. The loss of power and prestige following K?niggr?tz had borne fur ther consequences for the internal constitution of the state;

emboldened by the weakness of central authority, the Hun

garian Parliament had successfully negotiated near inde

pendence within the empire, in the so-called Ausgleich (Com

promise) of February 1867, in which imperial authority was

restricted to the common ministries of foreign affairs, fi

nance, and the military. The autonomy achieved by Hungary raised the question of

the political and civil status of the other groups within the

empire, and throughout the following decades the political life of the monarchy was shaped by its attempts to deal with

the increasing demands for recognition on the part of its minorities. In Hungary, this challenge was met by a policy of enforced Magyarization. In the Austrian half, the govern

ment maintained the fiction of a supranational state, but the

use of German as the official language confirmed the cultural

and social hegemony of the Austro-German minority.13 The exhibition of 1873 aimed to bolster the empire's status

as a great power and to challenge the growing perception externally of Austria-Hungary as paralyzed by its internal

fractures. The exhibition centered on a massive Hall of In

dustry, some 2,953 feet long, larger even than Joseph Pax ton's Crystal Palace of 1851 for London's Great Exhibition,

organized around a central rotunda some 284 feet in height and with a diameter of 440 feet. The overall director of

architecture, Karl Freiherr von Hasenauer, had played a

prominent part in the rebuilding of the Ringstrasse in Vienna in the 1860s, and his involvement in the exhibition likewise

signaled that it was planned as a means of promoting the

newly developed capital as a modern metropolis.

Major aims were to showcase the progress of the empire in

technological and industrial development and to provide models that would inspire further improvement in the quality and competitiveness of the empire's industries. The role of

the world exhibitions in promoting industrial design and

national competitiveness within the emerging consumer cul

ture of the nineteenth century has been well documented.14

The Vienna exhibition was no exception; Eitelberger, who

had agitated for design reform throughout the 1850s and

1860s, had been involved in the organization of the design, and design was the object of substantial contemporary com

mentary.15 The exhibition was modeled on the Great Exhi

bition of 1851; it was acknowledged that the latter had had a clear beneficial effect in this respect in Britain. Jakob Falke, cofounder with Eitelberger of the Museum f?r Kunst und Industrie (Museum of Art and Industry) in Vienna, noted, for

example, that before 1851 there had been an enormous

qualitative gap between French and British industrial design. Such was the impact of the exhibition, however, that Britain had very quickly improved its position: "those who have fol lowed recent changes in this area know best how very much

has changed in the reputation of English design, which,

twenty years ago was aesthetically negligible."16 It was hoped that the 1873 exhibition would reap similar rewards in

Austria-Hungary. Indeed, the museum Falke and Eitelberger were instrumental in establishing had itself been set up in 1864 in emulation of the South Kensington Museum in Lon

don, the most lasting legacy of the Great Exhibition.17 In addition to celebrating current technological and indus

trial achievements, the Vienna exhibition, departing from its

predecessors, adopted the theme of "Culture and Educa

tion," aiming "to enhance contemporary cultural life. . . ."18

Significant innovations included exhibitions on women, ed

ucation, and labor. For the first time in a World Exhibition there were also pavilions from Japan, China, and the Otto

man Empire; these proved to be highly successful attractions

and, in the case of Japan, helped cement growing diplomatic, economic, and cultural links that had been initiated the

previous year with the appointment of Heinrich Ritter von

Calice as the ambassador to Japan. The exhibition also

sparked off a fashion in Vienna for Japanese craft, art, and

design; as Falke observed: "from one World Exhibition to

another the estimation of the Orient has risen, and where it

was first admired just as a curiosity, it is now active in the

artistic reshaping of the domain of carpets, curtains, blankets

and the like, and reforming our taste in colors."19

One major theme of the exhibition was "Wohnkultur" (the culture of dwelling) ; this was organized into separate displays of bourgeois and peasant housing. The exhibition on bour

geois housing ("Das b?rgerliche Wohnhaus") attracted little

interest outside of Austria-Hungary; only England, the Neth

erlands, Tunis, China, and Japan submitted exhibits, and these were small in scope. The exhibition on peasant housing

drew a similarly modest level of interest from exhibitors; it was intended to be international, but aside from Austria

Hungary only England, Sweden, Norway, China, Japan, and

Russia offered exhibits under this theme.20 Nonetheless, one

aspect proved popular with visitors: the construction of a

rustic village of typical peasant housing from different parts of the empire, situated in a separate part of the exhibition site by the Danube. Some of these houses were inhabited for

the duration of the exhibition by farmers and peasants,

whose daily activities demonstrated the rural culture of the

regions represented. The village showcased houses from

Michelsberg, a Saxon village in Transylvania, a farmhouse

from the German enclave in Geidel in Upper Hungary (now

Gajdel in northwest Slovakia), an Alpine hut from Upper Austria and one from Vorarlberg, a Hungarian house from

Transylvania, a Romanian house from the Banat (modern



448 ART BULLETIN DECEMBER 2009 VOLUME XCI NUMBER 4

1 The Galician cottage at the 1873 Vienna World Exhibition (photograph provided by the Vienna Historical Museum)

day Romania), a house from Galicia, and one from Croatia.21 Due to the paucity of examples from elsewhere?even a large Russian house in the village was being exhibited under a different category?the display ended up in effect an exhibi tion of the empire in which viewers were invited to compare the dwellings from the different lands of the monarchy.22 The intention was to indicate a harmonious kaleidoscope of

cultures, but it was their differences that stood out. Foreign observers, such as the Times correspondent, noted the prim itive nature of the peasant culture on display; a clear distinc tion could be seen between the "prosperous" and "orderly" cottages from the German province of Vorarlberg or the Saxon village of Transylvania and the exhibit from Polish

Galicia, for example, while the Hungarian exhibits also con firmed the correspondent's prejudices about the "orientar' basis of Hungarian culture.23

The differences between the cultures represented in the

village seemed to confirm a hierarchy of the ethnic groups. Although cottages from German-speaking provinces of the

empire figured in the exhibition, the village encouraged the

impression of a divide between the picturesque but backward cultures of the Slavs and the Romanians and the forward

striving aspirations of the empire, exemplified in the main Hall of Industry. This was noted by a number of observers; the Polish historian Agaton Giller, for one, took exception to the poor state of the Galician cottage (Fig. 1), because it

presented Polish culture as backward.24 At the same time, the

cottage provided Austro-Germans an opportunity to utter

disparaging comments about the Poles. As the satirical news

paper Der Floh (The Flea) commented:

The tongue of culture, which licks the entire world, is a

long way from becoming fully active in Poland; there are

still stretches of land there where the inhabitants could, in terms of their primitive conditions and aversion to clean

liness, be placed alongside the Mongols or the Tungus. In

many a hut air and light come into the same opening that smoke and haze come out of. By many a fireplace human,

sheep, cow and pig share, like brothers, the warmth do nated by wood or cow dung. Thus, what we see presented as a Polish peasant house in the Prater. ..

already repre sents for the land of Poland a kind of luxury dwelling.25

The backward aspect of the Polish house was also noticed by the Times correspondent, who commented, "Among the arti

cles of kitchen furniture is a primitive corn mill. . . . the way of securing the door, too, indicates a highly primitive state of

society_"26 The comparison of peasant life in different regions of the

empire gave the village a marked ethnographic character, and this reflected other developments. Three years earlier the Anthropological Society had been established in Vienna, and ethnography had begun to emerge as a significant field of interest. This would achieve concrete institutional form when the Austrian Museum of Ethnography was founded in Vienna in 1895.27 Indeed, the ethnographic character of the

display in the 1873 exhibition has led some to make compar isons with the later colonial exhibitions held in France and

Britain; under the rubric of "unity in diversity," the monarchy presented itself as exercising a beneficent, supranational, and

impartial rule, an image comparable to the legitimation strat

egies of British or French imperialism that emphasized the benevolent nature of colonial power.28 The village made visible long-standing assumptions of a cultural hierarchy among the various groups of the empire. In the second half of the nineteenth century certain regions, in particular the




so-called edge regions (Randbezirke) such as Bukovina (now in Romania and western Ukraine), Galicia (now in southern

Poland and western Ukraine), Dalmatia, Croatia, Upper

Hungary (modern-day Slovakia), and Transylvania, became

the object, for example, of an apparatus of ethnographic

study comparable to imperial French and British attitudes toward the Islamic Middle East.29

The 1873 exhibition was thus a flawed enterprise, but it was one of many projects devised to enhance the image of the state, and the monarchy in particular, in the eyes of its

inhabitants. Recent research has centered on the role played

by other public festivals and events, such as imperial tours by the emperor, public commemorative events, or jubilee cele

brations of his rule, in legitimizing the rule of the monarch and lending ideological support to the imperial vision of a

multinational state.30 Another expression of this impulse was

the appearance of the multivolume publication Die ?sterreich

isch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (The Austro-Hun

garian Monarchy in Word and Image) initiated by Crown Prince Rudolf. This project?often referred to as the Kron

prinzenwerk?published in separate German and Hungarian editions between 1886 and 1902, consisted of twenty-four lavishly illustrated volumes devoted to the topography, his

tory, culture, and economy of the empire. Each volume was

devoted to a specific province or region, from Vienna (1886) to Moravia and Silesia (1897) or Bukovina (1899), and its aim

was to present the varying cultures and peoples of the em

pire. As Crown Prince Rudolf stated in the introduction to the first volume, "The study of the peoples living within the borders of the Empire is a field of activity of high importance not only for scholars; it is also of practical value in promoting general love for the fatherland [Vaterlandsliebe]."31

Many of the depictions of the empire's varying cultures were remarkable for their sensitivity to their subject, but the

publication glossed over interethnic conflict, such as that between the Czechs and Germans of Bohemia or between the

Italian and Slavic inhabitants of Dalmatia.32 Indeed, its ex

plicit aim was to reduce such conflict. In concluding the first

introductory volume Rudolf asserted, "Let the peoples of

these lands love, respect and support each other as they come

to learn about each other through this work; let them con

sider how they may loyally serve the throne and the father land."33 It also stressed the benefits of Hapsburg rule. The

volume on Bosnia and Herzogovina, for example, pointed out the marked increases in agricultural productivity since 1882 (four years after the province fell under Austro-Hun

garian administration in 1878).34 It also highlighted projects supported by the empire, such as the building of the new

Sarajevo Town Hall (now the National Library), and com

pared the poor state of the transport infrastructure of the

province under the Ottoman Empire with the investment in of modern roads, bridges, and railways since 1878.35

A considerable amount of space in each volume of the

Kronprinzenwerk was devoted to the art and architecture of the

province in question. Examples ranged from the historical

"high" arts of painting and sculpture to contemporary folk

art, including ceramics, wood carving, or costume, and archi

tectural examples ranged from the official state and religious structures to vernacular peasant buildings. Some chapters offered ethnographic studies of folk culture, others were

orthodox art historical texts. Their appearance within the

publication indicated official recognition that the visual arts and writing on art could play a role in supporting the legit imizing ideology of the empire and pointed toward the inti

mate connection between art historical writing and wider

cultural policy within the empire.

Eitelberger, Dalmatia, and the South Slav Question in Art

History Consideration of the 1873 exhibition, along with projects such as the Kronprinzenwerk, official jubilees, or the rise of

ethnography, helps establish a context for understanding the

ideological function of art history in the later Hapsburg Empire. The state had a heavy hand in the establishment of art history as a discipline; the first art historians were located within the Institute for Austrian Historical Research, which had been set up with the express purpose of supporting Hapsburg rule through the provision of historical precedents and traditions. What official festivals, celebrations, and mon

uments were intended to achieve in the wider public domain,

historical and, later, art historical research was envisaged as

undertaking, albeit in less spectacular form, in the realm of

scholarship; it provided a sense of Austro-Hungarian identity

through the construction of an artistic tradition rooted in a

continuous shared history. It was thus conceived as address

ing wider social and political agendas. As J?n Bakos has

argued, "Austrian art historical institutions established after

1848 can be regarded as materialisations of a post-revolution

ary compromise between aristocracy and bourgeoisie. . . . be

tween the aristocratic culture of faith and theatre on the one

hand and the middle class culture of science and learning on the other."36 The emphasis on art history as an objective

science, which was central to the self-description of the Vi

enna school, both legitimized the new discipline as an aca

demic undertaking and enabled it to align the ethos of art historical research, as an impartial, neutral undertaking, with

the assumed role of the monarchy. This connection between art history and the political and

social objectives of the state is evident from the fact that the first international congress of art history took place within

the framework of the exhibition from September 1 to 4. The

congress, organized by Eitelberger, was attended by scholars from across the German-speaking world as well as scholars

from abroad and was widely reported in the press.37 Karl von

Stremayr, the minister for Education and Culture, opened it,

and Crown Prince Rudolf visited it, indicating clearly the

recognition of art history as part of the official apparatus of the state.38 The congress did not directly address the question of national identity, but the relation between art history and state cultural and educational policies, including the place of the discipline within school and university education and the nature and level of state support for museums, was a promi nent topic of discussion.

The career and activities of Rudolf von Eitelberger furnish an important index of the status and function of art history in the empire; he had first worked in Vienna as a P?vatdozent

(junior lecturer) in 1847, a post he combined with the role of editor of the Wiener Zeitung. In the latter position he had aroused the suspicion of the authorities with his enthusiastic

support for a federal state with full equality for all ethnic




groups.39 It may be for this reason that it was only following a second petition by Count Leo Thun-Hohenstein, minister

of Education and Religion from 1849 to 1860, that he was

appointed as the first professor of art history in 1852.40 While the work of the Vienna school is most often seen as contrib

uting to methodological and normative issues within art his

tory, much of Eitelberger's writing concerned wider issues of

governmental policy, ranging from art education to the im

pact of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 on the industrial

design of the empire.41 Perhaps the most powerful visible marker of his close relations with governmental figures was

the success of his campaign to set up the Museum of Art and

Industry, followed by the School of Design in 1868.42

Although reference to national conflict, or to the complex ethnic makeup of Austria-Hungary, is absent in most of Ei

telberger's politically informed writings, they appear in a very

explicit way in one work, a study of the medieval monuments of Dalmatia, first published in 1862 and reprinted in 1884.43 The study was an example of Kunsttopographie, an important

genre of art historical literature that emerged during the mid-nineteenth century and consisted of the careful docu

mentation of all notable artistic monuments of a particular

region or area. This represented one of the key ways in which

art historical scholarship attempted to place its inquiries on a scientific footing, through the production of systematic in ventories of its object domain. Such publications also served

the interests of the state by identifying the built heritage that could underpin the construction of national identity. Eitel

berger's text offers a description of the principal monuments

of key historical sites on the Dalmatian coast, namely, Arbe

(latter-day Rab), Zara (now Zadar), Sebenico (Sibenik),

Spalato (Split), Trau (Trogir), Ragusa (Dubrovnik), and Nona (Nin).

The choice of Dalmatia was not without significance. It was

acquired by the Hapsburg Empire in 1815, but the eastern coast of the Adriatic was characterized by its Venetian cultural

inheritance, as before then it had been subject to the rule of Venice since 1402. Before considering Eitelberger's text

more closely, it is worth taking note of the status of Dalmatia

in the second half of the nineteenth century. Historically part of the medieval Kingdom of Croatia, Dalmatia had subse

quently been separated from the rest of Croatia by Venetian rule. Although all Croatian territories had become subject to

Hapsburg rule from the late eighteenth century, this division was maintained and confirmed by the 1867 Ausgleich; inland Croatia became part of Hungary, while Dalmatia became part of Cisleithania, the Austrian half of the empire.44

The cultural identity of Dalmatia presented a complex array of issues, as Italians made up the cultural and social elite

of the population, but Serbs and Croats formed the majority. It had been a matter of concern to Venice that Dalmatia

could not be entirely secured against the intrusion of Otto

man and Balkan cultural and political influences, and in the

1830s and 1840s Dalmatia served as the inspiration behind the first South Slavic nationalist ideology, the Illyrian move

ment sponsored by the Croatian journalist and politician Ljudevit Gaj (1809-1872).45 Although Illyrianism as a move ment petered out by the late 1840s, Slavic nationalism within the Balkans achieved a renewed impetus in 1878 following the establishment of an independent Serbia. Eitelberger thus

chose to document a potentially problematic territory; it was contested both internally?on numerous occasions it was

shaken by agitation to unify it with Croatia?and externally, for it was always vulnerable to calls for a wider South Slavic union.

Eitelberger published his account after a tour of Dalmatia in

1859, but the second edition of 1884, which included an addi tional general introduction and other important textual

changes, is of greater interest here. The twenty-five or so years

separating the two editions had witnessed the rise of Slavic nationalism in the Balkans; indeed, "the idea that all Slavs, not

only in the Balkan Peninsula, but in the entire Austrian mon

archy, could follow the spiritual and political leadership of the Russian was already preoccupying statesmen in the time of the

Emperor Franz" (Eitelberger, 1884, 16). At that time it seemed a distant prospect, but the situation had changed dramatically. Eitelberger himself observes that in the intervening two decades since his first visit, the question of cultural identity and alle

giance had become a major political issue:

When I visited Dalmatia in 1859 General Mamula was the

governor. I could clearly see that the population, who, with

the exception of a small minority, are Serbo-Croat, viewed

positively their governor, whose racial origins were related to

their own. However, if it is the case nowadays that the land is

so politically agitated, this is due not merely to influential

personalities or to the system of government in Vienna, but

to political necessities and a historical process that is unfold

ing before our eyes in the whole of Eastern Europe and in

particular on the Balkan Peninsula. . . . thus it can be no

surprise that now Dalmatia resembles a sea in turmoil while

in 1859 Dalmatia presented the image of a quiet and peace ful land. (Eitelberger, 1884, 3)

This situation frames Eitelberger's entire discussion; ostensi

bly a record of medieval monuments, it intervenes in con

temporary debates concerning the governance and the social

and cultural identity of Dalmatia. He argued for the need to introduce economic, social, and educational policies that

would incline the population to accept Austrian rule more

readily and counter the appeal of Serbia and Montenegro (Eitelberger, 1884, 25). He supported the Hapsburg admin istration of Ottoman Bosnia-Herzegovina since 1878 on the

grounds that it provided Dalmatia with an economic hinter

land, thereby improving the general state of the province. One also gains a sense of the internal tensions within Austria

Hungary, in that he blamed the Hungarian policy of Mag yarization for alienating the Croats.46 This he compared with the "enlightened" policy of the Austrian half of the empire that desisted from enforced Germanization, and he congrat

ulated Hapsburg rule for granting freedom of religious wor

ship and language use, in contrast to the Ottoman Empire; the benefits of Hapsburg rule extended to preventing Italian domination of the Dalmatian Croats and Serbs.47

In these views Eitelberger diverged from mainstream lib

eral opinion in Vienna; the most influential liberal daily newspaper at the time, the Neue Freie Presse, was dismissive of

Slavic aspirations and supported what it held to be the reso

lute response of the Hungarian authorities toward Serb and

Croat agitation.48 Yet despite his sympathy for the needs of

minorities, and of the Dalmatians in particular, Eitelberger's



RETHINKING THE VIENNA SCHOOL 45!

2 Illustration of a fifteenth-century silver figure of Saint Blaise with a detail of a plan of Dubrovnik

(Ragusa), from Rudolf von

Eitelberger, Die mittelalterlichen Kunstdenkmale Dalmatiens, Vienna,

1884, pl. 24 (artwork in the public domain)

concern was always to ensure their loyalty to the empire. In other respects, his attitudes displayed a markedly imperial and colonial character. This is seen in his sharp criticism of Pan-Slavism and of the growing cultural influence of Russia within the empire. First, he pointed out the discrepancy between the ideology of Pan-Slavism?claiming to offer the basis for greater social justice?and a reality in which Poles

oppressed Ruthenians, Croats and Serbs maintained hostile attitudes toward one another, the Czechs marginalized the German population of Bohemia and Moravia, and the Rus sians annihilated the inhabitants of Cherkassia, or compelled the Letts, Lithuanians, or Poles to speak Russian (Eitelberger, 1884, 10). Second, drawing on the History of Slavic Literature, a recendy published study by the Russian authors Alexander

Pypin and Vladimir Spasovic, he emphasised the debt of Slavic to European culture as a whole:

The deeper source of the entire Slavic Renaissance is

European Bildung [humanistic education]. At the conclu sion of his foreword Pypin expresses the desire that his book might contribute to the clarification of the internal connections between Slavs and to the conciliatory resolu tion of external national hostility by means of the higher ideals of Bildung, and political and social justice. This is a

desire that every German and German-Austrian will share. At present there is litde hope that this desire will be

fulfilled; Russian policy has not embarked on the path of such a peaceable Slavic Renaissance, but rather in the direction of what Pypin and Spasovic tellingly call "militant

pan-Slavism," which characterizes everything that does not

promote its own warlike ideas as an historical injustice. (Eitelberger, 1884, 9)

This seems distant from the domain of art historical research, but for Eitelberger the two were intimately connected. He

blames, for instance, the poor state of preservation of many

of the monuments on the degeneracy of the local clergy and the backward educational system in Dalmatia, which, until the reforms introduced by Leo Thun, did little more than offer basic Brotstudien, that is, practical life skills devoid of any

higher academic content (Eitelberger, 1884, 305). More gen

erally, documenting the medieval architecture of the prov ince raised questions as to its identity and heritage. Eitelberg er's response was to stress its ethnically and culturally mixed character. In contrast to the landlocked regions of the Bal

kans, he argued, the Dalmatian littoral was always bound to the culture of central and western Europe, which made Ro

man, Italian, and Hungarian cultural influences paramount.

This slant can be seen, too, in his choice of sites, such as

Zadar, Sibenik, or Dubrovnik (Fig. 2). The first two had been

important Roman settlements while the latter, although nom

inally independent, retained important cultural and com mercial links with Venice; his analysis consequently focuses on the presence?including the recycling?of Roman mon uments in subsequent rebuilding. A significant example is his treatment of the church of St. Donatus in Zadar (Fig. 3), dedicated to the ninth-century bishop of the city who repre sented the region at the court of Charlemagne and was also

member of a faction that combated the religious and cultural influence of Byzantium.

This may seem a minor historical detail, except that Eitel

berger adds that the contemporary Greek orthodox church should be regarded as an extended arm of Russian foreign policy, and it is notable that although Roman and Italian monuments?most important, Diocletian's palace at Split or

the Rector's Palace in Dubrovnik?are documented in detail,

Byzantine influences and remains are passed over in silence or disputed. Hence, he contends that the apparendy Byzan tine paintings in the churches of Dubrovnik are in fact the work of artists from Ancona, Naples, or Apulia or of native




artists trained in Italy. Eitelberger compares Dubrovnik with Venice not only in terms of the enormous cultural exchange between the two but also because the two "belong to the

past... both towns lie outside of the main currents of mod

ern culture" (Eitelberger, 1884, 315). Indeed, the most strik

ing aspect of Dubrovnik is the contrast between its rich Venetian heritage and the poverty of its contemporary cul ture:

Whoever wanders up and down the corso of Ragusa?the so-called Stradun ... has the immediate impression of be

ing in an Italian city and has no inkling that the kernel of this husk belongs to a Slavic race. Here one can see quite clearly the propagandistic power of visual art, and how well suited it is to give peoples at a low level of culture with no artistic development of their own the appearance of

being another nation by means of its works of architec ture. (Eitelberg, 1884, 314)

Elsewhere, too, Eitelberger reiterates the view that the Croat and Serb inhabitants of the Adriatic coast have made no

independent contribution to its architectural and artistic her

itage. He acknowledges that there were some local artists and architects of note, such as "Master Guvina" (Andrija Buvina),

"Twerdoj of Split" (Nikola Tvrdoj), or "Matthaeus of Trau"

(Matej Gojkovic).49 In general, though, "the artistic monu ments of Dalmatia during the time of the ascendancy of local Slavic princes and the Hungarian kings moved entirely within the limits of Romanesque and Gothic architecture, which was the common artistic language of all Catholic peoples of Cen tral and Western Europe... ." (Eitelberger, 1884, 53).

It is interesting to compare Eitelberger's account with a

later article on art and architecture in the volume of the

Kronpr?nzenwerk on Dalmatia, published in 1891. This con

tained a slighdy different version. Here the author, Alois

Hauser, a state conservator based in Split, recognized the

presence of important Byzantine archaeological ruins and




4 Stanislaw Witkiewicz, house ^^^S?^fS^^r^^^^W^^^^^^^^^^^^Bt ? ' ^^-, -??- Jjy^$v^4"V ?m?P^H^^I designed for Zygmunt Gnatowski, e?tffiBU??uL^fe^ Zakopane, Poland, 1S94, from Walery

Eljasz Radzikowski, Styl Zakopia?ski, W???I^??????????????????^ Krak?w, 1901 (photograph in the ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^HH|HfeH9HH

also acknowledged the existence of a local Dalmatian inflec tion of wider European artistic currents. The emphasis of his

account, however, was again primarily on its Roman and Venetian heritage, and the overall account in the volume on Dalmatia contrasts its impressive historical legacy with its current poor cultural, social, and economic condition.50

Eitelberger's contention that the Slavs of Dubrovnik have "no artistic development of their own" and Hauser's almost exclusive focus on Dalmatia's ancient ruins conform to the

widespread tendency in the empire to view the Slavs, in

particular those of the Balkans, as the "primitives" of central

Europe. As Maria Todorova has remarked, the Balkans were

frequendy seen as an intermediate zone between Europe and

the Islamic Middle East and, consequendy, were cast as the frontier region of Europe. It was, in fact, because of the

putatively exotic nature of the Balkans that Dalmatia became a tourist destination, serving both as the Austrian Riviera and as a zone of contact with an

altogether wilder culture.51

Folk Art in the Late Hapsburg Empire Eitelberger's survey of medieval Dalmatia was a direct inter vention into the wider field of cultural politics; his attempt to

uphold Hapsburg rule was guided by the strategy of dimin

ishing the value of local Slav cultures in order to stress the benefit of belonging to a larger cultural and political unit. Yet

by the 1880s such an approach had already become some what problematic. On the one hand, the idea that the Slavic

peoples of the empire had no high culture of their own was contradicted by the rapid growth of cities such as Prague, Krakow, Lemberg, and Zagreb as major cultural centers that

challenged the traditional dominance of Vienna. On the

other, the idea that the Slavic societies were socially and

economically underdeveloped came to be appropriated pos itively in the 1880s and 1890s by Polish, Czech, Slovak, and other writers and artists as an indication of the continuance of premodern, "authentic" forms of social and cultural life.

An important formative role in this regard was played by the ideas of William Morris, which came to exercise increasing influence in central Europe; in many parts of the Hapsburg

Empire, vernacular culture and, in particular, folk art came

to be seen as the locus of national identity.52 Notable exam

ples of this latter development included the artists' colony in the town of G?d?ll just north of Budapest or the work of the Slovak architect Dusan Jurkovic based in Brno, Moravia.53 Indeed, Jurkovic designed a model village in the Czechoslavic

Ethnographic Exhibition of 1895 in Prague, in which the folk cultures of the Czechs and the Slovaks were put on display as

part of an affirmation of their Slavic identity.54 Perhaps the best-known instance was the invention of the Zakopane style by Stanislaw Witkiewicz (1851-1915).55 The Zakopane style? the term was based on the name of a small resort town?drew

on the vernacular building of the highland villages in the Tatra Mountains of southern Galicia (Fig. 4), and Witkiewicz

gained prominence not only as an architect but also as a

prolific critic, who frequendy proselytized on behalf of the

Zakopane style and Polish peasant art in general.56 Eitelberger did not address this development in depth, but

in the short article "Folk Art and House Industry," written in

response to the German design exhibition staged in Munich in 1876, he reiterated the common view that the marginal regions of the empire were culturally and economically back

ward.57 Thus, he argued that cotton weaving in Bukovina,

Croatia, or Dalmatia, Ruthenian wood carving in Galicia, or

ceramic production in Banat (the region of southern Hun

gary straddling the border with Serbia) were carried out in

primitive circumstances that "afford us a rather clear picture of that ancient, traditional house industry, the origins of which are lost in the mists of time and must in general be as old as mankind itself."58 The term "house industry" (Haus Industrk) denoted small-scale production that was still lo cated within the home, rather than in the workshop or

factory, and was an important term used by economic histo




rians in the late nineteenth century. It represented a stage of

economic development preceding the rise of large-scale in

dustrial production. In theory, it was distinguished from Hausarbeit ("domestic work"), which denoted the production of artifacts solely for personal use, regarded as the most

primitive stage of manufacture; however, Eitelberger recog nized that in practice the two were not so easily separated. The most important point was that they both constituted

premodern stages of economic development and also formed

the basis for the production of folk art. Crucially:

House industry is divided up by tribe [ Volksstamm] and in

consequence has a tribal [volksthumlich] character; it has

nothing to do with the political concept of nation. In this ancient house industry lie the bases for the formal lan

guage of the people of the Indo-Germanic race, and they have remained its common possession up to the present.

For us nothing was more instructive than the perception

that the hand-weaving of women peasants in India and of

women peasants in Bukovina use the same patterns. . . ,59

It is notable that he drew on the notion, in wide circulation at the time, of a common Indo-Germanic or Indo-European

inheritance, and his aim is evident: the questioning of na

tionalistic readings of folk art. It also challenges the appro

priation of folk art in the service of contemporary cultural

practices, for it unambiguously views house industry as the

relic of a superseded past.

Although Eitelberger's essay was a fairly brief intervention into the cultural politics of folk art, his views were echoed by

Alois Riegl, who engaged in a much more extended analysis of this topic. Eitelberger did not directly influence Riegl, but

his views had an impact on the work of the Croatian art

historian Izidor Krsnjavi (1845-1927), who in turn informed

Riegl's early thinking on the subject. Krsnjavi was a great admirer of Eitelberger, and he replicated many of the latter's

views in his own writings on the folk art of the South Slavs.

Like Eitelberger, Krsnjavi emphasized the similarities be

tween South Slavic and German, Hungarian, Norwegian, and

"Oriental" ornament.60 Unlike the Austrian, Krsnjavi saw this

as revealing their shared origins in classical art, the last

common European culture; although stopping short of spec

ulation on distant Indo-Germanic roots, he nevertheless re

iterated Eitelberger's idea of the dependence of Slavic and

Near Eastern folk art on classical models. In this he helped

shaped the thinking of Riegl on the subject.

Riegl had personal acquaintance with the "marginal" re

gions of the empire; he had grown up in Stanislau (now

Ivano-Frankivsk) and Kolomea (now Kolomyya) in eastern

Galicia, where his Bohemian-born father was posted on im

perial service, and the cultural diversity of the empire re

mained an object of recurrent interest and concern. In this

context most attention has focused on his last substantial

work, Sp?tr?mische Kunstindustrie (Late Roman Art Industry), in

which Riegl saw parallels between the culturally heteroge neous late Roman Empire and the Hapsburg state.61 A con

cern with the present, though, is evident at a much earlier

stage of his career; a crucial theme was the status and mean

ing of folk art. His numerous writings on Near Eastern tex

tiles were predicated on the notion that in each case he was

dealing with the folk or vernacular art of the period, and in these essays he addressed the question of cultural and na

tional identity.62 There are echoes of Eitelberger; he opens one early article published in the first volume of the journal of the Society of Anthropology with the following statement:

The common people [Volk] ... is not the people in the

political sense; neither the tiers-?tat of the feudal era nor

the fourth class of the contemporary social order; it is not

even the folk in the strict ethnographic sense, which en

compasses all the members of one and the same tribe,

without reference to social differences. . . . the "peo

ple." . . . our Society [of Anthropology] has set up as the

object of study. . . includes all those whose lifestyle rests

on mere tradition. . . ,63

Volk for him is thus a transnational category, although Riegl does not resort to notions of a common Indo-Germanic

heritage. Here the opposition between the citizens of an

urbanized modernity and those who remain in the tradition

oriented countryside is far more significant than that of

national difference.

Riegl's programmatic statement about how anthropology

should define its object and the contrast he makes between

urbanized modernity and agrarian tradition sound themes

explored at greater length in his extended essay on folk art

and house industry published in 1894.64 Ostensibly, this is a

discussion of the socioeconomic conditions of art and their

role in structuring its historical evolution. The starting point is folk art: "Since folk art is evidently one of the lowest links

in the chain of artistic development it follows that if we are

judging folk art from an economic point of view we have to

examine domestic labour [Hausfleiss], the lowest stage of

economic development" (Riegl, 1894, 8). Like Eitelberger,

Riegl identified numerous stages of social and economic

organization, each of which facilitates a certain mode of

artistic activity, from the individualistic production of "prim itive" societies, crafting objects for personal aesthetic, utilitar

ian, and other uses, to the complex market-driven art and

design of contemporary Western European societies. As

Georg Vasold argues, it is a strikingly different Riegl that comes across in the pages of this text; where, in Stilfragen (Problems of Style), published in the previous year, he had

emphasized the internally generated nature of the formal

evolution of decorative motifs, he here adopted a determinist

and materialist theory of artistic production, mobilizing the

vocabulary of contemporary economic discourse.65 The con

dition of the current house industry and the situation of

workers in the traditional cottage industries of the empire were the subjects of widespread debate, and Riegl's essay was

addressing issues that fell outside the sphere of traditional

academic art history. The precedent, however, had already

been established by the numerous interventions into the

spheres of education, design, and economic and social policy

by Eitelberger and Falke; Riegl was therefore continuing a

tradition in Vienna of art historians becoming active partici

pants in wider public debates.66

Of particular interest is Riegl's treatment of folk art at a

time when the latter had become a topic of nationalist sen

timent. Riegl, like Eitelberger before him, considered folk art




a fossil; tied to an earlier stage of socioeconomic develop ment, it constituted the expression of an outmoded historical

era. Consequently, the decline of folk art during the eigh teenth and nineteenth centuries, though in certain respects

regrettable, is to be seen as "a quite essential and decisive

progression in the development of art and with it of human cultural development" (Riegl, 1894, 32). Linking folk art to notions of social and cultural progress inevitably raises the

prickly issue of how to interpret the persistence of folk art in the "Eastern" parts of the empire; these are never properly

defined, although it later emerges that Riegl has in mind areas such as Galicia, Transylvania, Bukovina, and the Bal

kans. Within his historicist schema, the folk art of the "East"

has been superseded; its only remaining role is to be able "to

provide something in passing to fashion" (Riegl, 1894, 72). In an earlier essay Riegl had already made pointed criticisms of the contemporary fashion in Vienna for folk art from the

Balkans, which, he judged, was driven by a "need to flee from the world . . . from the nerve-draining confusion of the town

dweller's professional life. . . ,"67 The growing taste for folk

art thus struck him as a form of modern escapism, a conse

quence of modern urbanization. In this later text he intro

duces further criticisms: folk art is the result of an intrinsic

tendency to conservatism on the part of rural cultures that

remain isolated from the main currents of civilization. Riegl's

opinion of such conservatism becomes clear from his com

ments on ancient Egypt. The society and its art declined because "in the course of time it had lost the ability to establish productive contacts and connections with foreign

peoples" (Riegl, 1894, 36). It cut itself off from the "sap that

kept it constantly fresh and rejuvenated [stets frische Verj?n gungs?fte]," a situation he contrasts with classical Rome. As a

multiethnic and multicultural polity, Rome produced a "uni

versal" art that stood in contrast to the introverted, local art

of Egypt; Roman art was also "the antithesis of folk art"

(Riegl, 1894, 38).

Riegl's critique seems primarily oriented around allusion

to historical precedents, but he also makes direct reference to

the cultural politics of the present; folk art is associated

primarily with the Slavs, and this because the Slavs, particu

larly those of the Balkans, are a people without history. Unlike the Germans, "the bearers of culture," the Slavs lead

an "ahistorical existence like the Scythians" (Riegl, 1894, 41). In this essay it is apparent how much Riegl has assimilated

imperial attitudes toward the fringe regions of the empire; perhaps the most potent expression of such attitudes is found in his account of a trip to Bukovina on the eastern limits of the empire (now western Ukraine). With a highly mixed population of Romanians, Ukrainians,

Jews, Hutsuls, and Germans, Bukovina was, on the one hand,

a microcosm of the empire as a whole. On the other, it was

held to be a quintessentially backward peripheral region. The

regional capital, Czernowitz, where the German population was concentrated, had been consciously developed?includ

ing the establishment of a university in 1875?as a means of

modernizing the province. The contrast between the capital, with its German-speaking social elite, and the agrarian cul

ture of the non-German population as a whole had helped to

confirm prejudices about the supposedly backward nature of

the Slavs and Romanians.68 Riegl did little to challenge ex

isting cultural stereotypes in relating a visit he made in 1891

to the house of a peasant woman in a Romanian village, Nowosselitza (Novoselytsia), some twenty miles east of Czer

nowitz, who was renowned for her large collection of hand

made shirts and rugs. Riegl and his guide first attempt to

persuade her to sell some, which she refuses. They then ask

her if they can borrow a shirt, a request she also turns down, even after being offered a hundred-guilder note. On the one

hand, her response evokes admiration on the part of Riegl,

yet on the other it demonstrates for him the fact that the

capitalist economy has not yet penetrated the region. Sympa thetic to his subject, he is also convinced of her backward

ness; his ambivalence is captured in his concluding com

ments on the episode:

That is true domestic labor, which is not acquainted with

capital, but values work for its own sake. As I left the hut I

stopped being angry with the perverse stubbornness of the

peasant woman, and instead paid tribute to her in full admiration. I confess that at that time I gained a most

illuminating insight into the creativity and customs of

people in the "golden age." (Riegl, 1894, 53)

This encounter is staged in terms of the difference between the modern metropolitan scholar and the inhabitant of the backward periphery; Riegl's attitude permeates his under

standing of the role of the empire in relation to its "Eastern"

subjects in general. It also shapes his conception of research.

As a "watchtower at the gates of the Orient [Hochwacht an der

Pforte des Orients]," it falls to Austria-Hungary to undertake the

task of systematically collecting and preserving these relics of an earlier stage of historical social evolution (Riegl, 1894, 76).

It is well known that for Riegl the past presented numerous

parallels with the present. His distinction between the "uni

versal art" of the late Roman Empire and the "folk art of the Orient" (Riegl, 1894, 38) resonated clearly in the present, and it appeared again in his subsequent study of the late Roman Empire. Adherence to this ideology colored Riegl's art historical judgments in a number of ways; a notable instance can be seen in his response to the issue of Coptic art.

As he began his professional career as curator in the Museum

of Art and Industry, many of his early writings were devoted to its collections of Near Eastern textiles. Problems of Style,

which traced the debt of Islamic ornament to the heritage of

Hellenistic art, was the culmination of a number of publica tions on the ornamental art and design of the region, and the

topic had been the subject of his first major publication: a

catalog of the Egyptian textiles in the museum's collection.69

His interest coincided with a growing number of discoveries, from 1880 onward, of ancient textiles in Egypt from the late

antique and Early Christian period.70 A key issue was how to

define and categorize Coptic art; early pioneers in the field such as Albert Gayet or Robert Forrer emphasized its char

acter as a distinctly local kind of folk art.71 Riegl, in contrast,

focused on its place within a cross-cultural circuit, viewing its

forms as an amalgam of motifs from Persia, Rome, and

Byzantium; expressed at its strongest, this amounted to a

denial of the specificity of Coptic art and an insistence on its

dependence on the larger imperial cultures of the region. In

an article on Coptic art published in 1893, the same year as




Problems of Style, Riegl addressed this issue directly. "We can be

justified in concluding," he asserted, that "one cannot speak here of a completely and fundamentally new art."72 More

over, the syncretism of Coptic art is not even interpreted as the creative appropriation of several artistic languages;

rather, it is the result of the attempt by Egyptians to hold onto older artistic traditions in the face of the victorious spread of Classical Greek art:

Egyptian art offered more stubborn resistance to the all

powerful storm of Hellenism far more tenaciously than

any other art of the ancient Orient. In the Ptolemaic

period, while Greek life and culture may have ruled in the

towns, in the open countryside, in contrast, the population lived with their old religious ideas and traditional artistic

symbols and mythology. . . . Yet eventually Hellenism was

the stronger element; in time it penetrated even the lower

social classes. . . . However, the temples and colossi built

by the ancients to last forever still stood upright. . . . This is the reason for the occasional reminiscence of ancient

Egyptian art in works of the imperial Roman age. There

are, however, no grounds to see in them anything other

than mere antiquarian reminiscence.73

As the folk art of Egypt, Coptic art demonstrates the conser

vatism that is characteristic of folk art everywhere. Like all

provincial artistic forms, it constitutes a debased version of

the art of the metropolitan center; its significance, for Riegl, lies in its role as a gauge of the fate of "East Roman art

[ostr?mische Kunst]" once it was transplanted to Egypt and then developed into Islamic or "Saracen [sarazenische]" art.

Given the opposition of Riegl and Eitelberger to the more

chauvinistic forms of nationalism that were emerging in late

nineteenth-century central Europe, commentators have

tended to view their cosmopolitan attitudes in a sympathetic light. An instructive example is the debate between Riegl and the German nationalist art historian Georg Dehio that took

place in 1905 regarding the purpose of monument protec tion. Dehio claimed that "we do not conserve a monument

because we find it beautiful, but because it is a part of our

national existence," and the aim of monument protection should be to serve the promotion and maintenance of na

tional identity.74 For Riegl, in contrast, the aim of monument

protection within a multiethnic state was to preserve a heri

tage that would serve the "common good."75 To interpret

Riegl as an advocate of multiculturalism avant la lettre, how

ever, runs the risk of seriously misreading the significance of

his interventions. For if he was opposed to German nation

alism, he was equally resistant to the aspirations for national

recognition by the Slav minorities of the monarchy. His

work?and that of Eitelberger?was imbued with the official

outlook of the Hapsburg Empire. I noted earlier that an important development in Haps

burg studies has been exploration of the extent to which the

cultural politics of Austria-Hungary can be viewed through

the lens of postcolonial theory; the imperial attitudes of Riegl and Eitelberger appear to be obvious candidates for such an

analysis. Their approach to the Slavic cultures of the empire,

which they regarded as socially and economically backward and dependent

on the artistic traditions of western Europe,

can be compared to the well-documented imperialistic atti

tudes of scholars in France and Britain toward the cultures of

the Middle East and India. The latter have been the target of considerable critical analysis. It has been pointed out that in

Britain, for example, even sympathetic historians of Indian

art and architecture such as James Fergusson placed it in a

clear hierarchy with European culture at its apex.76 What is remarkable is the extent to which Riegl and Eitelberger have been free of a similar kind of scrutiny. Such a sympathetic view of Riegl has also colored accounts of the major ideolog ical split within the Vienna school over the origins of Byzan tine and early medieval art.

Rome or the Orient

A major divide that opened up within the Vienna school centered on the question of the origins of Early Christian art.

This acrimonious dispute first began with the publication, in

1901, of Orient or Rome, by Josef Strzygowski.77 Strzygowski's book, written while he was still professor at the University of

Graz, put forward a powerful argument for the eastern Med

iterranean origins of Early Christian and medieval European art. Focusing primarily on the transmission of architectural

typologies, Strzygowski made a case for the crucial role of

Syria and regions further east in providing the template for

much subsequent Christian architecture in Europe. For all its

importance for the history of postclassical European art,

Byzantium, in this view, was thus not the source of any

significant innovation but rather a cultural mediator between

Europe and the pre-Islamic Near East. In later writings Str

zygowski was to achieve a certain fame?and also notori

ety?in placing the origins of Christian architecture in Arme

nia.78 Strzygowski's thesis in Rome or the Orient attracted

attention not only on account of its startling claims?whether

defensible or not?but also because he prefaced his book with a detailed critique of Franz Wickhoff s essay accompa

nying the publication of a fourth-century Genesis manuscript in the National Library in Vienna.79 Wickhoff s long inter

pretative essay?later republished as a separate mono

graph?saw the peculiarities of Early Christian illumination, in particular, its narrative style, as an organic development of

pagan Roman art.80 Hence, the roots of Christian art were to

be located in Rome.

Riegl subsequently wrote an extended defense of Wickhoff,

partly out of loyalty to his colleague, but also partly because his own work was in question, too; in Problems of Style he had

proposed the Hellenic origins of Islamic ornamentation.81

The argument was carried forward into other fields as well;

contradicting Riegl's emphasis on the dependence of the

Christian art of Egypt on Roman, Byzantine, and Persian

models, Strzygowski, who explicitly referred to it as Coptic, underlined its roots in Syrian and native Egyptian traditions, albeit with a Hellenizing vocabulary of themes.82 This debate has been well documented and analyzed.83 The differences

between the main protagonists have generally been cast as a

clash between the multiculturalismi of Wickhoff and Riegl and the strident intolerant nationalism of Strzygowski. The

tone of Strzygowski's criticism won him few friends, and

judgments on this particular episode have tended to be in

formed by awareness of Strzygowski's frequent anti-Semitic




comments, his increasingly shrill racism, and his later en dorsement of Hit?er and Nazism.84

Considerable personal antipathies had been at work since

Riegl published a critical review of an early work by Strzy gowski on Cimabue.85 Later, when Strzygowski was appointed professor at the Institute of Art History, Vienna, in 1909,

professional relations between him and other staff there were at such a low ebb that a separate Institute of Art History was created to accommodate him. It was also an ideological de

bate, but something other was at stake than a straightforward conflict between nationalism and cosmopolitanism. For the

target of Strzygowski's complaints were the Eurocentric atti tudes of his Viennese colleagues. On the one hand, as Su zanne Marchand has pointed out, Strzygowski's writings em bodied disaffection with classical humanism that was common in reactionary circles and that bore comparison with the cultural pessimism articulated at great length in Oswald Spengler's later Decline of the West.86 On the other, however, Strzygowski had identified an important aspect of the work of Riegl, Wickhoff, and others that merited further critical scrutiny.

There is no doubt that Strzygowski's critique of humanism was linked to a racist advocacy of German and Aryan identity; nonetheless, he championed cultures that had traditionally stood at the margins of art historical interest. In Asia Minor, a New Territory for Art History he contested the traditional

tendency to view classical Anatolia and Syria as dependencies of Hellenic culture, highlighting instead the high quality of the indigenous art and culture that had undergone its own

independent evolution.87 He was also a pioneer of the study of Islamic art; as Robert Hillenbrand has recently com

mented, "everything Strzygowski wrote on Islamic art is worth

reading, and the list is formidably long."88 Finally, Strzy gowski also devoted considerable effort to the study of the art of the Slavs. In Early Slavic Art, a collection of later essays on

prehistoric and early medieval Slavic art published in the

1920s, he made a pointed criticism of attitudes toward east ern Europe: "It is a remarkable fact that when we art histori ans think of Europe, we only ever have Western Europe in our sights, and believe we can completely ignore the East."89

Such a view of Strzygowski has to be tempered by acknowl

edgment of his violent anti-Semitism, and although he was not consistent in this regard, his "Orient" was equated with

Aryan Persia, to the conscious exclusion of the Semitic cul tures. He also held an eccentric view of the Slavs as Aryans.

Although he was well disposed to Nazi ideology and wrote in

explicitly racial terms, his understanding of "Aryan" was not

strictly reducible to the nationalistic politics of Nazism. This

may explain why he had a sympathetic reception among nationalist art historians in central and eastern Europe; the work of Coriolan Petranu (1893-1945), for example, one of the leading art historians in Romania in the 1920s and 1930s,

was directly modeled on Strzygowski, under whom he had studied.90 In the same period, Strzygowski was also seen as an

inspiration by the nationalist Czech art critic and historian Florian Zapletal (1884-1969), who drew on him in his attacks on the Vienna school-trained art historical establishment of Czechoslovakia.91 The importance of Strzygowski's work was

acknowledged by Polish art historians as well, and he was even offered a chair at the Department of Art History at the

5 Illustration of a Chu Kingdom vessel, from Franz Wickhoff, Abhandlungen, Vortr?ge und Aufs?tze, Berlin, 1912 (artwork in the public domain)

University of Lw?w in the newly formed Polish state in 1921.92 While his politics were deeply problematic and caused a

damaging schism within Viennese art history, the uncomfort able fact has to be faced that Strzygowski found a receptive audience among a constituency of scholars who resented the attitudes of many Vienna school art historians.

To what extent were Strzygowski's criticisms borne out? I have already highlighted the repeated pattern in Riegl's work of positing a Western point of origin for Coptic or Early Christian art, and this can be seen paralleled elsewhere. A remarkable essay published in 1898 by Wickhoff entitled "On the Historical Unity of the Entire Development of Art" dem onstrates this tendency not only in Riegl but also in his Viennese contemporaries.93 Here, Wickhoff is concerned with the origins of the meander motif in Chinese pottery and, in particular, with the curious parallel development of the

meander in Chinese and Classical Greek vase decoration

(Fig. 5). The explanation, for Wickhoff, lies in positing a Greek origin for the Chinese meander, and Wickhoff regards the most likely point of contact between the two as the




dissemination of Greek artistic forms following Alexander the

Great's conquest of the Persian Empire and subsequent ex

pansion into central Asia. For they are "ornaments, borrowed

from an alien culture, none of which can count as genuinely

Chinese; they are purely Greek ornament, which only give the impression of being Chinese through the novel way in

which they have combined." Remarkably, even Chinese paint

ing owes its origins to the Greeks, "a people destined for art."94

Wickhoff s account is as eccentric as Strzygowski's later

attempts to trace some of the designs of Leonardo da Vinci

back to the types of early medieval Armenian architecture.

Still attached to the idea of a universal history of art, Wickhoff viewed that history as revolving around artistic forms and

innovations stemming from Europe. A similar idea informs

Wickhoff s essay on the wall paintings of Qusayr ?Amra.95 The

essay was part of a larger volume on the eighth-century bathhouse complex in Jordan discovered by the Czech ar

chaeologist Alois Musil (1868-1944), and the publication was overseen by Riegl, although he died before it was com

pleted.96 The palace has occupied an important place in the

historiography of Islamic art primarily because of the striking subject matter of the paintings: scenes of hunting, female nude dancers, and six non-Muslim rulers placed in a position of obeisance. It has raised important questions as to the

formative influences on Islamic art, for in place of the canon

ical decorative ornamentation usually associated with the art

of the Islamic Middle East, the viewer is faced by a range of

figurative depictions that appear to lean heavily on classical

precursors. Oleg Grabar has suggested it is best understood

as a symbolic appropriation of Byzantine art, intended to

signify the self-assertion of the new culture.97 However, what

is of greater interest here is the fact that Riegl and Wickhoff saw in it continuity with the classical world. Wickhoff identi fies the three artistic traditions that emerged out of classical art as Romanesque, Byzantine, and Islamic, and he interprets the frescoes of Qusayr ?Amra as visible evidence of the con

tinuing evolution of classical art in the Middle East. Indeed, he links the frescoes, and the history they allow one to

construct, with the developmental sequence of motifs out

lined in Riegl's Problems of Style, which also stresses the deri vation of Islamic forms from classical models, albeit in the

domain of ornament rather than figurative representation. That there existed an intimate connection between early

Islamic art and that of the classical world is in one sense not

in question; through their contact with the Byzantine Empire and the Hellenized Near East the Arabs were presented with a rich visual lexicon that they appropriated and adapted to serve the new requirements of their own culture. What war

rants inquiry is the way in which this relation is described,

namely, as one of dependence. Wickhoff wrote:

There are two types of art, an art of artworks, and an art of

documents. The first leads us to periods where, by con

stantly expanding the range of problems prompted by the return to the observation of nature, each work of art

makes a contribution to the evolution of art. In contrast,

what I wish to term the art of documents merely illustrates

the application of problems that have already been solved; it leads us to periods that use forms belonging to develop

ments that have already reached their conclusion. They

may be taken up again and disseminated, but the renewed

study of nature is no longer felt necessary. . . . The paint

ings of the palace of ?Amra are such a derivative art. . . ,98

A similar argument is developed by Riegl in Problems of Style. This is particularly evident in his comments on the ara

besque. Acknowledging that the arabesque constitutes a par

ticularly original adaptation of motifs inherited from Greek and Roman art, he nevertheless holds to a clear cultural

hierarchy that ranks classical culture more highly than Islam:

The goal, of providing the work with decorative forms that

corresponded to the external factors governing its origin and function, but which also stood in harmony with its inner being, of achieving a structural distinction between

its material ground and decorative ornament, or a balance

between frame and infill, a goal which was already a notion

in the ornament of the ancient Orient, was achieved for

the first and only time by the Greeks. It seems that this

distinguishes the entire artistic development of the Medi terranean peoples from the vast cultural world of East Asia

at a fundamental level.99

The art of the postclassical world and, in particular, Islamic

ornament, is thus conceived of as a postscript to Greek art.

Given Riegl's reputation as a critic of normative art history and especially his advocacy of the art historical value of noncanonical artistic practices and periods, such attitudes

are striking. Yet they were commonplace among writers on

Islamic, Indian, or other non-Western art at the time, whose

championing of its aesthetic value was undercut by a frequent

lapse into Eurocentric hierarchies. Riegl's Problems of Style reiterates other familiar tropes of Orientalist discourse, evi

dent in his other writings from the 1890s. His attention to a

"minor" art form has often been taken as a sign of his

determination to combat the hierarchical values of art his

tory. In certain respects, though, his early studies of Near

Eastern textiles and carpets had an entirely pragmatic moti

vation, for they were driven by the exigencies of his position as a museum curator. Furthermore, in the late nineteenth

century the applied arts were far from being a marginal subject; as his essay of 1894 on folk art and textiles in Austria

Hungary indicates, they were central to debates about the

economic well-being of many parts of the empire. Further

more, tapestries and carpets from the Islamic world were

objects d'art par excellence for collectors, and Riegl's method of approach, repudiating the utilitarian materialism of architect and theorist Gottfried Semper, subjects them to

the aestheticizing interpretative framework that has so often

been critiqued in other instances of the appropriation of Islamic and Middle Eastern cultures.100 In his study of folk art

Riegl stressed the necessity of analyzing artistic production as a function of its social and economic framework, but Problems

of Style, published only the year before, offers no such con

nections to the wider culture of the early Islamic world. An

attempt to place the formation of Islamic art within a broader

cultural and social context was not undertaken until 1910 by Ernst Herzfeld (1879-1948). Specifically, Herzfeld identified two factors that gave rise to the distinctiveness of Islamic art:



RETHINKING THE VIENNA SCHOOL 45g

the need to adapt traditional artistic forms to new

liturgical

practices and the migration of craftsmen across the newly established Islamic realm, which led to a coalescing of previ ously disparate local traditions.101

The point here is not, of course, to censure Riegl; his attitudes were expressive of wider assumptions of the time. Rather, my aim is to highlight the extent to which his work is suffused with the Orientalist values that framed discussion of the art of the

Near East in the late nineteenth century. In this he was matched

by his Viennese colleague Wickhoff, and a further example can be seen in the work of Julius von Schlosser. Due to his longevity, Schlosser is most often seen as representative of the Vienna

school as it developed in the postwar era. It is true that Schlosser

played an important role in the 1920s and 1930s, being ap pointed chair of art history following the death in 1921 of Dvorak. Nonetheless, his earliest writings date from the 1890s, the same decade in which Riegl was establishing his reputation as a scholar of Near Eastern textiles and applied art. An essay of

particular relevance here is Schlosser's "The Genesis of the

Medieval View of Art," first published in 1896.102 In this essay he deals with that central theme of Viennese art history: the rise of

postclassical art. In common with most art historians at the time,

Schlosser understood this as involving a transition from classical

naturalism to the idealized and stereotypical forms of the early medieval period. According to Schlosser, this shift should be understood as a process of Orientalizing ( Or?entalisierung). Ori

ental influence was already evident, he noted, when, in the early fourth century, Diocletian introduced court ceremony from the

empires of the Near East, and when Roman coinage gradually came to adopt motifs that originated in the imperial iconogra phy of Sassanian and Persian emperors.

Schlosser insists that this development should not be seen in terms of "decline," yet the general tone of his account

undercuts this assertion. For "the achievements of classical

art were . . . limited to the narrow region of the central Medi

terranean. ... all around this Greco-Italian tribal homeland

[Stammlandi were encamped the barbarian masses of the

North, West, East and South."103 When the Roman Empire

collapsed, the consequence within art was "the transforma

tion of realistic human and animal forms into ornament," for

the future of art lay with "the barbarians of the North and the Arabian Desert."104 Schlosser 's Orientalizing attitudes toward

the cultures of the Middle East focus here on Persia, the Sassanid Empire, and the Arabs, but they extend elsewhere to

the Jews. In 1898 he coedited a fifteenth-century Haggadah manuscript in the Landesmuseum of Bosnia-Herzegovina in

Sarajevo.105 Schlosser 's commentary on the manuscript em

phasized the derivative character of Jewish art. For Schlosser,

Jewish culture had a talent primarily for emulation: "instead

of original creation, it was predisposed to reproducing; no

where did it succeed in developing an independent formal

language and it never went beyond skilled imitation."106

In ascribing the rise of postclassical art to the influx of barbarian currents?in particular, those from the "Orient"?

Schlosser's account parallels the work of a number of other

scholars, including the Russian Byzantinist Dmitri Ainalov

and, more remarkably, Strzygowski.107 All three authors share

an understanding whereby the roots of early medieval art in

Europe are to be sought in the cultures of the Near East. At this point, however, their accounts diverge. For Strzygowski

and Ainalov, aesthetic impulses from the eastern Mediterra

nean introduced a welcome challenge to the hegemony of classical art?"the art of European power [Europas Macht

kunst]" as Strzygowski described it.108 Schlosser, in contrast,

characterized the rise of medieval European art as the result

of an uncomprehending encounter with the forms of classical

culture on the part of the barbarians from regions around

the Roman Empire. The Vienna school of art history developed at a crucial

time in the history of the Hapsburg Empire; the modernity that gave rise to the professionalization of the study of art also

prompted the fundamental social, political, and cultural ten

sions that eventually contributed to the downfall of the em

pire. The writings of key figures within the Vienna school are

deeply inflected by many of the ideological values and dis courses that arose in the nineteenth century, in part as an

attempt to shore up the legitimacy of Austria-Hungary as a

political entity. Such influences are evident not only in con

tingent judgments about individual art historical phenomena but also in the basic intellectual orientation of the Vienna school. This did not, as is occasionally imagined, encompass some benign multiculturalism; rather, it was based on an

imperial outlook that shaped the attitudes of Viennese art historians toward national minorities within the empire, in

particular, those of the Balkan region. The Slavic peoples of the Balkan Peninsula were seen as occupying a threshold, or

liminal zone, between Europe and the Islamic East, and the

often patronizing attitudes of Vienna school scholars toward

their culture belonged to a larger complex of Eurocentric values that informed their views of the art and architecture of the Near East. As such, the approach of the Vienna school bears comparison with attitudes toward subaltern cultures in

other imperial centers elsewhere in Europe; as I have sug

gested, parallels can be drawn with the accounts of Indian art

and architecture held by nineteenth-century British luminar

ies such as Birdwood or Fergusson.

Viewing the Vienna school this way suggests an alternative

image of its traditional b?te noire: Josef Strzygowski. His strident racism is undeniable, and the shrill voice he adopted in critiquing his Viennese colleagues many found repugnant,

yet notwithstanding these major issues, he articulated points of legitimate critique. Significantly, he also became an impor tant figure for art historians in some of the subordinate

regions of the empire, attempting to construct a discourse

that could counter the dominant vision of Riegl and others. In the division within the Vienna school, often portrayed as a

straightforward opposition between reactionary nationalism

and progressive cosmopolitanism, can be seen a reflection of

some of the wider political tensions within the empire. It also

highlights the extent to which an understanding of the Vi enna school and its place within central European art histor

ical discourse has to be formulated alongside consideration

of those other voices that contested its narrative of art history.

Matthew Rampley is professor of visual culture at the University of Teesside. His publications include Nietzsche, Aesthetics and Mo

dernity (2000); In Remembrance of Things Past: Aby M.

Warburg and Walter Benjamin (2000), and Exploring Visual Culture (2005). He is currently researching cultural policy and




institutions in Hapsburg central Europe [School of Arts and Media, University of Teesside, Borough Road, Middlesbrough, U.K. TS13BA, m.

rampley @tees. ac. uk].

Notes Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine.

1. On the history of the Institute for Austrian Historical Research, see

Alphons Lhotsky, "Geschichte des Instituts f?r ?sterreichische Ge

schichtsforschung 1854-1954," suppl. to Mitteilungen des Instituts f?r ?sterreichische Geschichtsforschung!! (1954).

2. On the "scientific" nature of the Vienna school, see Martin Seiler, "Empiristische Motive im Denken und Forschen der Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte," in Kunst, Kunsttheorie und Kunstforschung im wis

senschaftliche Diskurs, ed. Seiler and Friedrich Stadler (Vienna: ?ster reichischer Bundesverlag, 2000), 49-86.

3. Julius von Schlosser, "Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte: R?ck blick auf ein S?kulum deutscher; Gelehrtenarbeit in ?sterreich," suppl. to Mitteilungen des ?sterreichischen Instituts f?r Geschichtsforschung 13 (1934): 10-66. See, too, Michael Ann Holly, "Spirits and Ghosts in the Historiography of Art," in The Subjects of Art History: Historical Ob

jects in Contemporary Perspective, ed. Mark Cheetham, Holly, and Keith

Moxey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 52-71; Christo

pher Wood, introduction to The Vienna School Reader (Cambridge, Mass.: Zone Books, 1999), 9-72; and Edwin Lachnit, Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte und die Kunst ihrer Zeit (Vienna: Boehlau, 2005).

4. Jas Eisner, "The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in

1901," Art History 25, no. 3 (2002): 360-61. There have been dissent

ing voices; Ernst Gombrich, for example, has argued that Riegl's ref erence to the collective Kunstwollen (art drive) "weakens resistance to totalitarian habits of mind"; Gombrich, Art and Illusion, 5th ed. (Ox ford: Phaidon, 1977), 17.

5. Riegl's name is mentioned in this connection by several of the con tributors to the October "visual questionnaire" of the mid-1990s. See Svetlana Alpers et al., "Visual Culture Questionnaire," October 77

(1996): 25-70.

6. Mitchell Schwarzer, "Cosmopolitan Difference in Max Dvof?k's Art

Historiography," Art Bulletin 74 (1992): 669.

7. In his review of Hans Sedlmayr and Otto P?cht, usually held to be the heirs of Riegl, Meyer Schapiro pointed out the extent to which their work also had reactionary consequences, particularly in their use of Gestalt psychology. See Schapiro, "The New Viennese School," in Art Bulletin 18 (1936): 258-66.

8. Margaret Olin, "Alois Riegl: The Late Roman Empire in the Late

Habsburg Empire," Austrian Studies 5 (1994): 107-20; and idem, "Art

History and Ideology: Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski," in Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture, ed. Penny Schine Gold and Ben

jamin Sax (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000), 151-70.

9. The exceptions to this are his doctoral thesis on fourteenth-century Bohemian manuscript illumination, Max Dvof?k, "Die Illuminatoren des Johann von Neumarkt," Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerh?chsten Kaiserhauses 22 (1901): 35-127. In opposition to Czech nationalist art historians, who saw this as an efflorescence of native Czech culture, Dvof?k traced its multiple connections with artistic traditions in Italy and Avignon. Dvof?k also wrote an outline history of nineteenth-century Czech art, "Von M?nes zu Svabinsky," Graphische K?nste 6 (1904): 29-52, which was received much more positively by Czech commentators.

10. Wolfgang Muller-Funk, Clemens Ruthner, and Peter Plener, Kakanien Revisited: Das Eigene und das Fremde (in) der ?sterreichisch-ungarischen Monarchie (Bern: Francke, 2002).

11. The notion of "internal colonialism" was first articulated by Katherine

Verdery, "Internal Colonialism in Austria-Hungary," Ethnic and Racial Studies 2 (1979): 378-99.

12. For a detailed account of the exhibition, see Jutta Pemsel, Die Wiener

Weltausstellung von 1873: Das gr?nderzeitliche Wien am Wendepunkt (Vi enna: Boehlau, 1989).

13. On nationalism and nationalist struggles within the empire, see Pieter

Judson and Marsha Rozenblit, eds., Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2004); and Nancy Wingfield, ed., Creating the "Other": Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central

Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2003). Mark Cornwall, ed., The Last Years of Austria-Hungary: A Multi-National Experiment in Early Twentieth

Century Europe (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1990), deals with ethnic conflict in the later decades of the nineteenth century leading up to the dissolution of the empire.

14. See, for example, Paul Greenhalgh, Ephemeral Vistas: A History of the

Expositions Universelles, Great Exhibitions and World's Exhibitions, 1851 1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).

15. See, for example, Julius Lessing, Das Kunstgewerbe auf der Wiener

Weltausstellung 1873 (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1874); and Carl von L?t zow, ed., Kunst und Kunstgewerbe auf der Wiener Weltausstellung 1873

(Leipzig: Seeman, 1875).

16. Jakob Falke, Die Kunstindustrie auf der Wiener Weltausstellung 1873 (Vi enna: Gerold, 1873), 135 ff.

17. See Rudolf Eitelberger, "Die Gr?ndung des ?sterreischen Museums," in Gesammelte Kunsthistorische Schriften, 4 vols. (Vienna: Braum?ller, 1879-84), vol. 2, 81-117.

18. Karlheinz Roschitz, Wiener Weltausstellung 1873 (Vienna: J und V

1989), 125.

19. Falke, Die Kunstindustrie auf der Wiener Weltausstellung, 25.

20. See the catalog of the exhibition: Welt-Ausstellung 1873 in Wien: Offi cieller General-Catalog (Vienna: Presse, 1873).

21. A detailed account of the village was provided by Carl Julius Schr?er, Ein Haus und seine Bewohner aus Geidel (Gajd?i) in der Neitraere Gespan schaft Ungarns (Pressburg: n.p., 1873).

22. See Edward Kaufman, "The Architectural Museum from World's Exhi bition to Restoration Village," Assemblage 9 (1989): 20-39.

23. "Peasants and Farmers at Vienna," Times, August 28, 1873.

24. Agaton Giller, Polska na Wystawa Powszechna w Wiedniu [Poland at the Universal Exhibition in Vienna] (Lemberg: Dobrzanski & Groman, 1873). This is cited in David Crowley, "The Uses of Peasant Design in

Austria-Hungary in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centu

ries," Studies in the Decorative Arts 2, no. 2 (1995): 2-28.

25. "Das polnische Bauernhaus," in Weltausstellungs-Zeitung des Floh, suppl. to Der Floh 48 (July 26, 1873).

26. "Peasants and Farmers at Vienna."

27. On the rise of ethnography in Austria-Hungary, see Justin Stagi and Britta Rupp-Eisenreich, eds., Kulturwissenschaften im Vielv?lkerstaat: Zur Geschichte der Ethnologie und verwandter Gebiete in ?sterreich ca. 1780 bis 1918 (Vienna: Boehlau, 1994).

28. See, for example, Peter Plener, "Sehns?chte einer Weltausstellung: Wien 1873," Kakanien Revisited, January 10, 2001, www.kakanien.ac.at/

beitr/fallstudie/PPlenerl.pdf (accessed March 20, 2008).

29. Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmond sworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1978).

30. See Maria Bucur and Nancy Wingfield, Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2000); and Daniel Unowsky, The Pomp and Politics of Patriotism: Imperial Celebrations in Habsburg Aus tria 1848-1916 (West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2005).

31. Crown Prince Rudolf, introduction to Die ?sterreichisch-ungarische Mon archie in Wort und Bild, vol. 1 (Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1886), 5.

32. For an outline account of the project, see Christiane Zintzen, fore word to Die ?sterreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild: Aus dem

Kronprinzenwerk des Erzherzog Rudolf (Vienna: Boehlau, 1999), 9-20.

33. Crown Prince Rudolf, afterword to Die ?sterreichisch-ungarische Monar chie in Wort und Bild, vol. 1, 295.

34. Die ?sterreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild, vol. 14, Bosnien und Hercegovina (Vienna, 1901), 457 ff.

35. Richard Thurnwald and Josef Kalmann, "Gewerbe, Handel und

Verkehr," in Die ?sterreichisch-ungarische Monarchie, vol. 14, Bosnien und

Hercegovina, 487-507.

36. See J?n Bakos, "From Universalism to Nationalism: Transformations of Vienna School Ideas in Central Europe," in Die Kunsthistoriographien in Ostmitteleuropa und der nationale Diskurs, ed. Robert Born, Alena

Janatkov?, and Adam Labuda (Berlin: Mann, 2004), 80.

37. On the congress, including the list of those who took part, see Ger hard Schmidt, "Die internationalen Kongresse f?r Kunstgeschichte," Wiener Jahrbuch f?r Kunstgeschichte 36 (1983): 7-23.

38. Daily reports on the proceedings were provided by the Neue Freie

Presse, the Deutsche Zeitung, the Neues Fremden-Blatt, and the Wiener

Zeitung. 39. In an editorial in the evening edition of the Wiener Zeitung, Eitel

berger wrote: "Freedom demands the denationalization [Entnationali

sirung] of the state and its secularization [Entkirchlichung]; the state as such is neither German nor Czech, neither Ruthenian nor Walla

chian, neither Catholic nor Jewish?rather, a free state is ordered such that the Czech and the German, the Ruthenian and the Pole, the Christian and the Jew, can exist freely alongside each other with out hindrance." Eitelberger, Wiener Zeitung, October 13, 1848, 720.



RETHINKING THE VIENNA SCHOOL 4?1

40. On Eitelberger's relation with the count, see Taras von Borodaj kewycz, "Aus der Fr?hzeit der Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte: Rudolf Eitelberger und Leo Thun," Festschrift f?r Hans Sedlmayr, ed. Giulio Carlo Argan (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1962), 321-48.

41. Eitelberger's most important writings on art education were his early invective of 1848 "Ueber den Unterricht an Kunst-Akademien," in Ge sammelte Kunsthistorische Schriften, vol. 2, 20-52; and his later text of 1873, "Die Aufgaben der Zeichenunterrichts," in ibid., vol. 3, 1-27. For his account of the Franco-Prussian War, see "Der Deutsch-franz? sische Krieg und sein Einfluss auf die Kunstindustrie Oesterreichs," in ibid., 316-43.

42. Eitelberger's accounts of the setting up of these two institutions were

published as "Die Gr?ndung des Oestereichischen Museums" (1879) and "Die Gr?ndung der Kunstgewerbeschule des Oesterreischen Mu seums" (1879), in Gesammelte Kunsthistorische Schriften, vol. 3, 81-117, 118-54.

43. Eitelberger, "Die mittelalterlichen Kunstdenkmale Dalmatiens," pub lished as the fourth volume of the Gesammelte Kunsthistorische Schriften (Vienna, 1884), subsequently referred to as Eitelberger, 1884.

44. A useful outline history of Dalmatia within the wider context of Croa tian history can be found in Marcus Tanner, Croatia: A Nation Forged in War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

45. On this issue, see Larry Wolff, Venice and the Slavs: The Discovery of Dal matia in the Age of Enlightenment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

46. "It is accepted that in the years 1848 and 1849 the national intoler ance of the Magyars contributed to the revolt of the Croats. Today a

Magyarization of the Croats is out of the question because Slav na tional consciousness has increased everywhere and the Magyar tribe is in a decisive minority in comparison with the Slavs in the whole do

main of the crown of St. Stephen." Eitelberger, 1884, 11.

47. "Dalmatia is a region in need of governing, and in particular the

great mass of the Slavic inhabitants need government through the

organs of the state in order to protect them against the Italian sei

gniory." Eitelberger, 1884, 34.

48. The attitudes of the Neue Freie Presse have been analyzed by Robin

Okey, "The Neue Freie Presse and the South Slavs of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1867-1914," South Eastern European Review 85, no. 1 (2007): 79-104.

49. I am grateful to Libuse Jirs?k for providing the correct forms of their names.

50. Alois Hauser, "Architektur, Plastik und Malerei in Dalmatien," in Die

?sterreichisch-ungarische Monarchie, vol. 14, Dalmatien, 253-94. Hauser was an architectural historian whose most substantial work was his Styl Lehre der architektonischen Formen des Alterthums (Vienna: Alfred Holder, 1877); and Styl-Lehre der architektonischen Formen des Mittelalters (Vienna:

Alfred Holder, 1884).

51. Maria Todorova, Imaging the Balkans (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

52. On this, see, for example, Elizabeth Clegg, "New Voices: Disruption and Innovation in the 1900s," in Art, Architecture and Design in Central

Europe 1890-1920 (London: Yale University Press, 2006), 101-44.

53. On the G?d?ll artists' colony, see Katalin Keser , "The Workshops of G?d?ll : Transformations of a Morrisian Theme," Journal of Design History 1, no. 1 (1988): 1-23.

54. The exhibition was documented in a commemorative volume: N?rodo

pisn? vystava Ceskoslovansk? (Prague: J. Otto, 1895).

55. On nationalism in Polish art and design, see David Crowley, National

Style and Nation State: Design in Poland from the Vernacular Revival to the Industrial Age (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992).

56. See in particular Stanislaw Witkiewicz's essay "Styl Zakopianski" (1891) in Sztuka i Krytyka u Nas 1884-1898 (Lwow: W. L. Anczyca, 1899), 619-67.

57. Rudolf von Eitelberger, "Die Volkskunst und die Hausindustrie," in

Eitelberger, Gesammelte Kunsthistorische Schriften, vol. 2, 267-75.

58. Ibid., 269-70.

59. Ibid., 271.

60. Libuse Jirs?k, "Die Rezeption der Wiener Schule in der kroatischen

Kunstgeschichte: Izidor Krsnjavi, der erste kroatische Kunstgeschichte professor und seine T?tigkeit 1870-1890" (PhD diss., University of

Vienna, 2007). See in particular Krsnjavi, "Ueber den Ursprung der s?dslawischen Ornamentmotive," Mittheilungen des k. k. oesterreichischen

Museums f?r Kunst und Industrie 69 (1891): 462-69.

61. Alois Riegl, Sp?tr?mische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in ?sterreich

Ungarn dargestellt (Vienna: . Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1901). On these parallels, see Olin, "Alois Riegl: The Late Roman Empire."

62. Alois Riegl, Die ?gyptischen Textilfunde im k. k. ?sterreichischen Museum (Vienna: Waldheim, 1889); and idem, Altorientalische Teppiche (Leipzig:

T. O. Weigel, 1891).

63. Alois Riegl, "Das Volksm?ssige und die Gegenwart," Zeitschrift f?r ?ster reichische Volkskunde 1 (1896): 4.

64. Alois Riegl, Volkskunst, Hausfleiss und Hausindustrie (Berlin: Haber landt, 1894), subsequently referred to as Riegl, 1894. This essay has become the object of an increasing literature. See, for example, Ste fan Muthesius, "Alois Riegl, Volkskunst, Hausfleiss und Hausindustrie,

"

in Framing Formalism: Riegl's Work, ed. Richard Woodfield (Amsterdam: G & B, 2001), 135-50; and Georg Vasold, Alois Riegl und die Kunstge schichte als Kulturgeschichte (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 2004).

65. Vasold, Alois Riegl und die Kunstgeschichte, 110-15; and Alois Riegl, Stil

fragen (Berlin: G. Siemens, 1893), trans. Evelyn Kain as Problems of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

66. As Vasold, Alois Riegl und die Kunstgeschichte als Kulturegeschichte, notes,

Riegl's essay failed to elicit any response, and his own work took a different direction, presumably due to the fact that the topic of eco nomic reform lay completely outside the sphere of interest of the art historical community.

67. Riegl, "Das Volksm?ssige und die Gegenwart," 5.

68. On the image of Czernowitz, see Andrei Corbea-Hoisie, "Czernowitz: Der imaginierte 'Western im Osten,'" in Transnationale Ged?chtnisorte in Zentraleuropa, ed. Moritz Cs?ky, Jacques Le Rider, and Monika Som

mer (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2002), 79-98.

69. Riegl, Die ?gyptischen Textilfunde. 70. The early development of the historiographie literature on Coptic art

is sketched out in Thelma Thomas, "Coptic and Byzantine Textiles found in Egypt: Corpora, Collections and Scholarly Perspectives," Egypt in the Byzantine World, 300-700, ed. Roger Bagnali (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 137-62.

71. See Albert Gayet, Les monuments coptes du Mus?e de Boulaq: M?moires

publi?s par les membres de la mission arch?ologique fran?aise au Caire, sous la direction de M. Masp?ro (Paris: Leroux, 1889); and Robert Forrer,

R?mische und byzantinische Seiden-Textilien aus dem Gr?berfelde von

Achmim-Panopolis (Strassburg: E. Birkh?user, 1891).

72. Alois Riegl, "Koptische Kunst," Byzantinische Zeitschrift 2 (1893): 118.

73. Ibid., 120.

74. Georg Dehio, "Denkmalschutz und Denkmalpflege im Neunzehnten

Jahrhundert," in Kunsthistorische Aufs?tze (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1914), 268.

75. Alois Riegl, "Das Denkmalschutzgesetz," Neue Freie Presse, February 27, 1905, 6-8. For a critical account of this exchange, see Michael Falser, "Zum 100. Todesjahr von Alois Riegl: Der Alterswert als Beitrag zur

Konstruktion staatsnationaler Identit?t in der Habsburg-Monarchie um 1900 und seine Relevanz heute," ?sterreichische Zeitschrift f?r Kunst und Denkmalpflege 59, nos. 3-4 (2005): 298-311.

76. See Tapati Guha-Thakurta, "Tales of the Barhut Stupa: Archaeology in the Colonial and Nationalist Imagination," in Paradigms of Indian

Architecture, ed. Giles Tillotson (London: Routledge, 1998), 26-58.

See, too, Colin Cunningham, "James Fergusson's History of Indian

Architecture," in Views of Difference: Different Views of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with the Open University, London, 1999), 42-65. Fergusson's key work was History of Indian and Far East ern Architecture (London: John Murray, 1876).

77. Josef Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom: Beitr?ge zur Geschichte der Sp?tantiken und Fr?hchristlichen Kunst (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs'sche Buchhandlung, 1901).

78. Josef Strzygowski, Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa (Vienna: Anton

Schroll, 1918).

79. See in particular the introductory text "Einleitung: Die Entwicklung der Kunst in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten n. Chr.," in Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom, 1-10. The Genesis manuscript was published as Franz

Wickhoff and Wilhelm Ritter von H?rtel, "Die Wiener Genesis," pts. 1 and 2, Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerh?chsten Kaiser hauses 15, 16 (1895).

80. Wickhoff s text appeared in English as Roman Art, trans. S. Arthur

Strong (New York: William Heinemann, 1900). It was reprinted in German as R?mische Kunst (Berlin: Meyers und Jessen, 1912).

81. Alois Riegl, "Sp?tr?misch oder orientalisch?" M?nchner Allgemeine Zei

tung, suppl., 23 (April 24, 1902), trans, by Peter Wortsman as "Late Roman or Oriental?" in Gert Schiff, ed., German Essays on Art History (New York: Continuum, 1988), 173-90.

82. Josef Strzygowski, "Einleitung: Die Koptische Kunst," in Catalogue g?n ?ral des antiquit?s ?gyptiennes du Mus?e du Caire (Vienna: Holzhausen, 1907), xvi.

83. See, for example, Eisner, "The Birth of Late Antiquity."




84. Strzygowski's first extended anti-Semitic tirade was his article "Hellas in des Orients Umarmung," Beilage zur M?nchener Allgemeinen Zeitung, 40-41 (1902): 314-15. Later stridently nationalistic and Nazi works include Aufgang des Nordens: Lebenskampf eines Kunstforschers um ein deutsches Weltbild (Leipzig: Schwarzh?upter-Verlag, 1936); Die deutsche

Nordseele: Das Bekenntnis eines Kunstforschers (Leipzig: A. Luser, 1940); and Europas Machtkunst im Rahmen des Erdkreises (Vienna: Wiener Ver

lag, 1941).

85. Alois Riegl, "Review of Josef Strzygowski, Cimabue und Rom," Kunst chronik2S (1888): 317-18.

86. Suzanne Marchand, "The Rhetoric of Artefacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski," in History and

Theory 33, no. 4 (1994): 106-30.

87. Josef Strzygowski, Kleinasien: Ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1903).

88. Robert Hillenbrand, "Cresswell and Contemporary Central European Scholarship," Muqarnas 8 (1991): 27.

89. Josef Strzygowski, "Osteuropa in der Bildenden Kunst," in Altslawische Kunst (Augsburg: Benno Filser, 1929), 1.

90. Coriolan Petranu published Inhaltsprobleme und Kunstgeschichte: Einlei tende Studien (Vienna: Halm und Goldmann, 1921) under the auspices of Strzygowski's institute. He later wrote two pioneering volumes on the wooden architecture of western Transylvania, Bisericile de Lemn din

Judetul Arad (Sibiu, Romania: Drottleff, 1927), and Monumentele Istorice ale Judetului Bihor: I Bisericile de Lemn (Sibiu, Romania: Krafft & Drot

tleff, 1931).

91. Florian Zapletal documented the wooden churches of eastern Slova kia in a portfolio of photographs published as Holzkirchen in den Kar

paten (Vienna: Braum?ller, 1982). He was also author of "Z?pad nebo

vychod?" Umelecky List, 1, nos. 4-5 (1919): 111-13, in which he criti cized the Vienna school-trained chair of art history in Prague, Vojt?ch Birnbaum, for his excessively "German" outlook. See Marta

Filipov?, "The Construction of a National Identity in Czech Art His

tory," CentropaS, no. 3 (2008): 257-71.

92. On the invitation to Strzygowski to take up the chair in Lwow, see Adam Malkiewicz, Dziej?w Polskiej Historii Sztuki: Studia i Szkice

(Krakow: Universitas, 2005), 45ff.

93. Franz Wickhoff, "?ber die historische Einheit der gesamten Kunst

entwicklung," in Abhandlungen, Vortr?ge und Aufs?tze (Berlin: Meyer und Jessen, 1912), 81-91.

94. Ibid., 87, 89.

95. Franz Wickhoff, "Der Stil der Malereien," in Kusejr ?Amra, 2 vols. (Vi enna: . Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, 1907), vol. 1, 203-7.

96. An account of the publication and of Riegl's involvement can be found in Garth Fowden, "Musil's Fairy-tale Castle," in Qusayr ?Antra: Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 1-30. Riegl's report on the materials sub mitted by Musil is cited at length by David M?ller in his foreword to Musil, Kusejr ?Amra, vol. 1, ii-iii.

97. "The significance of the fresco does not lie in its artistic merit. . . . What matters is that it indicates one of the aims of representation in

early Islamic times, that of illustrating the new culture's awareness of and sense of belonging to the family of traditional rulers on earth"; Oleg Grabar, The Formation of Islamic Art, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 1987), 46.

98. Wickhoff, "Der Stil der Malereien," 203.

99. Riegl, Problems of Style, trans. Kain, 105.

100. Gottfried Semper, Der Stil in den technischen und tektonischen K?nsten

(Munich: Bruckmann, 1878-79).

101. Ernst Herzfeld, "Die Genesis der islamischen Kunst und das Mshatta Problem," in Der Islam 1 (1910): 23-67, 115-44. On the work of Herz feld, see Ann Clyburn Gunter, ed., Ernst Herzfeld and the Development of Near Eastern Studies, 1900-1950 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

102. Julius von Schlosser, "Die Genesis der mittelalterlichen Kunst

anschauung," in Pr?ludien (1896; Leipzig: Bard, 1927), 180-212.

103. Ibid., 195.

104. Ibid., 197.

105. Heinrich M?ller and Julius von Schlosser, eds., Die Haggadah von Sara

jevo: Eine spanisch-j?dische Bilderhandschrift des Mittelalters (Vienna: Al fred Holder, 1898).

106. Julius von Schlosser, "Der Bilderschmuck der Haggadah," in M?ller and Schlosser, Die Haggadah von Sarajevo, 241. For a critical discussion of this edition, see Eva Frojmovic, "Buber in Basel, Schlosser in Sara

jevo, Wischnitzer in Weimar: The Politics of Writing about Medieval

Jewish Art," in Imagining the Self, Imagining the Other: Visual Representa tion and Jewish-Christian Dynamics in the Middle Ages and Early Modern

Period (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 1-32.

107. Dimitri Ainalov, Ellenisticheskiia osnovy vizantiiskago iskusstva (St. Peters

burg, 1900), trans. Elizabeth Sobolevitch and Serge Sobolevitch (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1961).

108. Josef Strzygowski, Europas Machtkunst im Rahmen des Erdkreises.



art history and the politics of empire: rethinking the vienna school

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