Alois Riegl Art History and The Beginning of Late Antique Studies As A Discipline

The New
Late Antiquity
A Gallery
of Intellectual Portraits
(c) 2021 Universitätsverlag WINTER Heidelberg / AUTHOR'S COPY - FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY / created July 2021
Edited by
clifford ando
marco formisano
Universitätsverlag
winter
Heidelberg
Contents
Clifford Ando and Marco Formisano

Preface..........................................................................................................1
Philippe Blaudeau
Henri Irénée Marrou (1904-1977): Antiquité tardive et Cité de Dieu ..........7
Jan Bremmer
Harnack and Late Antiquity .......................................................................27
Luigi Capogrossi Colognesi
Edoardo Volterra ........................................................................................55
Jean-Michel Carrié
Lellia Cracco Ruggini ................................................................................77
Giovanni Cecconi
Edward A. Thompson ..............................................................................111
Lellia Cracco Ruggini and Rita Lizzi Testa
Alan Cameron ..........................................................................................131
Mark Edwards
Henry Chadwick.......................................................................................151
Jaś Elsner
Alois Riegl: Art History and the Beginning of Late Antique Studies as
a Discipline ..............................................................................................167
Andrea Giardina
“Tutto il vigore è negli occhi.” Peter Brown e la nascita della New
Late Antiquity ..........................................................................................183
Hervé Inglebert
Noël Duval et l’archéologie de l’Antiquité tardive ..................................237
Michael Kulikowski
Andreas Alföldi and Late Antiquity .........................................................257
Noel Lenski
Santo Mazzarino: Revolutions in Society and Economy in Late
Antiquity ..................................................................................................273
VI Contents
Hartmut Leppin
Ern(e)st Stein: Christentum, Nationalitätenkonflikt und Reichszerfall ....297
Christina Maranci
Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) ................................................................317
Arnaldo Marcone
Mommsen e la Tarda Antichità ................................................................333
Richard Payne
Nina Pigulevskaya: Late Antiquity in Leningrad .....................................353

Aaron Pelttari
Unity and diversity in Jacques Fontaine’s late antiquity ..........................365
James Porter
Disfigurations: Erich Auerbach’s Theory of Figura .................................387
Danny Praet
Franz Cumont: Late Antiquity and the dialectics of progress on Franz
Cumont .....................................................................................................421
Stefan Rebenich
Otto Seeck und die Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt............451
Michael Roberts
Reinhart Herzog and Late Latin Poetry ....................................................471
Siri Sande
Hans Peter L'Orange ................................................................................485
Aldo Schiavone
Il Tardoantico di Arnaldo Momigliano ....................................................505
Sebastian Schmidt-Hofner
Ernst Hartwig Kantorowicz (1895-1963) .................................................517
Sigrid Schottenius Cullhed
The Consolation of Late Antiquity: Pierre Courcelle (1912–1980) .........535
Gareth Sears
Transforming Late Antique Africa: Claude Lepelley...............................551
Cristiana Sogno
François Paschoud and Late Antique Historiography ..............................567
Ignazio Tantillo
André Chastagnol (1920-1996) ................................................................579
Maria Taroutina
From First Rome to Third Rome: Nikodim Kondakov and Late
Antique Studies ........................................................................................595
Contents VII
Chiara O. Tommasi
Averil Cameron ........................................................................................609
Guisto Traina
Ronald Syme ............................................................................................630
John Weisweiler
Paideia in the Andes: Sabine MacCormack on the History of Imperial
Culture in Late Antiquity .........................................................................643
Alois Riegl: Art History and the Beginning of Late
Antique Studies as a Discipline*
Jaś Elsner
1 The cultural frame
Let us begin before the beginning. Since the Renaissance, the cultural invest-
ment in Classical art as the paradigmatic model for the European tradition cannot
be exaggerated. Inevitably, this created a dismal place for late antiquity as the
fag-end and dust-bin of a dying aesthetic – the necessary decline that led to the
Dark Ages (with all the pejorative meanings of the term ‘Gothic’ from Alaric to
St Denis, as it were) which was itself the tabula rasa from which the Renaissance
rose again. This is in effect Giorgio Vasari’s story. By the eighteenth century,
and especially the monumental contribution of Johann Joachim Winckelmann,
that classical aesthetic had been cashed out, indeed embodied, in terms of a his-
tory of Greece and all the ideals carried by the notion of Greece (freedom, de-
mocracy, genius, culture, sexual license, for instance), despite the fact that most
of the visual materials packaged in terms of this story were in fact Roman. By
the mid-nineteenth century, when scholars and connoisseurs were much clearer
about what objects were Roman and what were Greek, it was the post-
Winckelmannian narrative that remained in place, with Roman materials and
especially late Roman visual culture increasingly downgraded.
Alongside this art-historical story, there is a religious story, which we cannot
ignore. First, the principal writers about art in the German tradition (frankly, the
dominant one until the mid twentieth century) – both among connoisseurial
experts and among philosophers of aesthetics – were Protestant in education and
outlook (including Winckelmann himself, who was a convert to Roman Catholi-
cism). That Protestant tradition had a strange bifocalism about art: the aesthetic
was a wonderful thing when divorced from idolatry and religion (so well placed
in the world of the Kunstkabinett, the art gallery, and in pre-Christian culture)
and it was a dangerous thing when it contaminated the aniconic ideal of a pris-
tine and pure early Church that became adulterated with pagan practices as it
developed. This is a double-whammy for late antique art – not only was it aes-
*
This paper was written for Cliff Ando and Marco Formisano’s conference, The New
Late Antiquity, in Ghent, February 2015. Subsequent versions were delivered at the
Art History Research Seminar at UCL and in the Riegl and His Viennese Legacy con-
ference in Chicago. My thanks to all who commented and took part.
168 Art History and the Beginning of Late Antique Studies as a Discipline
thetically the decadent nadir of the Classical tradition and hence the contradic-
tion of all Enlightenment values, but it was also the vehicle of Hellenistic corrup-
tion as it imported idolatrous images into early Christianity. Despite the very old
history of this twin condemnation, and its total dependence on big-picture as-
sumptions that have nothing to do with the stuff itself, aspects of the aesthetic
decline picture, on the one hand, and the ideal of a better, aniconic, Christianity,
on the other, continue to emerge from time to time into the current period.
It is essential to have a sense of this double negation in mind when turning to
the key moment of the late nineteenth century, which saw a series of strong ad-
verse responses to what we might call the Protestant status quo about the value
of Classical art, mainly from positions of anti-Protestant intellectual empower-
ment. The context of a late nineteenth century imperial world where the state’s
large centralized resources could be martialled into the support of scholarship
that was ideologically supportive of the imperial project, coupled with signifi-
cant technological development (above all the ability to write art history from
photographic resources) and a universal European commitment to the values of
positivism and the collection of corpora, are all essential to the moment of late
antiquity at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
We can identify at least three interconnected stories from three different anti-
Protestant contexts. All belong to the late imperial moment of the long nine-
teenth century, which ended with World War 1 in 1914-18. The three intellectu-
al contexts for a positive, non-Protestant, embrace of late antique art are Rome,
Vienna and St Petersburg/Moscow. Catholic scholarship in Rome in the later
nineteenth century, following the papacy of Pio Nono (Pope, 1846-1878), has the
triumphalist agenda of the first Vatican Council and the dogma of Papal Infalli-
bility, at a period of significant actual decline in Papal power and authority:
Vatican 1, which adjourned in October 1870, coincided with the final fall of the
Papal states as a self-governing secular territory in the same month of the same
year. Yet, in contradiction to the political weakness (the disbanding of the Papal
army as well as its monarchical domains), the Church mounted a hugely power-
ful ideological campaign – promoting the Immaculate Conception as well as
Infallibility. In 1851, Pius established the Commission for Sacred Archaeology
as the official vehicle for the remarkable string of excavations and publications
orchestrated by Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822-1894). Within this context, a
series Roman Catholic priest-scholars resident for a large part of their careers in
Rome and working in the orbit of de Rossi, like Anton de Waal (1837-1917),
Franz Xaver Kraus (1840-1901), Peter Kirsch (1861-1941) and Joseph Wilpert
(1857-1944), contributed a radically enlarged and scholarly reappraisal of early
Christian art in Rome, focused on the churches, catacombs and sarcophagi,
which might arguably be said to have culminated in Richard Krautheimer’s Cor-
Jaś Elsner 169
pus Basilicarum (1937-77). 1 This is an early Christian religious take on late

antique art, strongly affirmative of course and Romano-centric, and ultimately in
the tradition of Antonio Bosio’s Counter-Reformation archaeology of the cata-
combs as a Roman Catholic claim to continuous tradition, embodied in the con-
tinuity of material culture, in response to Protestant assaults on the primacy of
Rome.
Alongside this Christian story, the Viennese produced a positive narrative of
the history of Roman art and particularly of late Roman art in the wake of the
post-Constantinian empire. This is not really a religious account except insofar

as it emphasized the Holy Roman empire – which by the nineteenth century
could be conceptualized as the Viennese continuation of Constantine’s Christian
transformation of the Roman empire. By contrast with narratives of decline (like
that of Gibbon), this view offered an optimistic emphasis on the internal re-
sources of a large and multicultural empire (both late Roman and Austro-
Hungarian) to weather, manage and embrace change in a positive spirit and as a
progressive development. Associated in particular with the art historians of the
Vienna School, notably Franz Wickhoff (1853-1909) and Alois Riegl (1858-
1905), and dependent theoretically on positivistic, evolutionary thinking in the
natural sciences, it fostered a vision of the Christian transformation of the Ro-
man empire into what ultimately became the Holy Roman empire, as a force for
good, a civilizing process for all the multiplicity of nations and races that made
up the late Roman state (in parallel to the overtly multicultural and multilingual
Hapsburg empire). This mapped out as an account of material culture and art
whose styles and forms may have changed from earlier antiquity but which were
of fundamentally equal value with the art and material culture of Greek and
Roman times. In being asked here to focus on the special contribution of Riegl, I
will dwell a bit more on this later on. But it is worth emphasizing that Riegl’s
choice of ‘Late Roman’ as opposed to ‘Late Antique’ for his label of the period
is surely ideologically motivated by the deep ancestral link of Austro-Hungary
with Rome.
But it should be added that the Vienna school is much more complex than ei-
ther the Roman or Russian models, first because Viennese attitudes within the
tradition of Riegl and Wickhoff changed swiftly and second because they faced
persistent internal opposition. The influence of the Roman archaeological school
on Riegl’s successor in Vienna, Max Dvořák (1874-1921), would make Christi-
anity much more of a decisive factor for the changes in the Geist of late antiquity
1
See e.g. G. Parpulov, ‘De Rossi’s School and Early Christian Iconography’ Journal of
Art Historiography 19 (2018) 1-10 and J. Elsner, ‘The Viennese Invention of Late
Antiquity: Between Politics and Religion in the Forms of Late Roman Art’ in J. Els-
ner (ed.), Empires of Faith in Late Antiquity: Histories of Art and Religion from India
to Ireland, Cambridge, 2020, 110-127, esp. 117-121.
than it was in the works of Wickhoff and Riegl.2 The Viennese scholarly context
is also complicated intellectually, because in the late Hapsburg years, there was a
serious fight between forward-looking, aesthetically modernist, cultural plural-
ists in the Austro-Hungarian empire (like Wickhoff, Riegl and Dvořák) and
relatively more conservative pan-Germanicists. The latter, dismissive of peoples
and races that were not Germanic, paranoid about external forces potentially
corrupting what good had been preserved from the degeneracies of historical
change in modernity – offered a much more pessimistic model. In late antique
art, this model presented the cults and non-naturalistic art forms of the east as
invading and corrupting the last vestiges of the Greek spirit, which had survived
in the Roman world, with aesthetic forms that would drive the last nails into the
coffin of Greek naturalism. The fears for a Hapsburg world threatened from all
sides, within and without, mapped itself onto an art history where the Hellenic
glories fell in late antiquity into Semitic decadence. This thesis, promulgated at
the same moment at Riegl’s account of late antique art, came to a head in the
work of Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), a professor at Graz who in 1909 would
be called to Vienna to succeed Wickhoff. Both models – fundamental to all the
writing and thinking about the art history of late antiquity that has taken place
since – are effectively versions of aspirations and anxieties about the late Austro-
Hungarian empire.
The final key context for an art history of late antiquity is late Romanoff
Russia, where an Orthodox account was founded on a homology between Byzan-
tium (the second Rome) and Russia (the third Rome), an account ideologically
similar in certain ways to that of the Hapsburgs and the late Roman empire, but
fundamentally different in both its theological Christian inflection and in its
emphasis on the Christian East as opposed to the West. The parameters of this
story remain the least understood, partly because so many primary texts of
scholarship remain untranslated from the original Russian and because so many
of its key figures were persecuted or killed in the aftermath of the Russian Revo-
lution, or forced into Soviet careers where one could not mention such topics as
Christianity. The most important intellectual force for the development of a
critical scholarship of late antique, Byzantine and ancient Russian art was Ni-
kodim Pavlovich Kondakov (1844-1925), born into a serf family and only freed
in 1861, when Tsar Alexander II abolished serfdom. A fervent apologist for the
2
See M. Dvořák, Geschichte der abendländischen Kunst im Mittelalter (1917/18), pp.
370–475 – unpublished manuscript in Vienna, which revises the Wickhoff/Riegl line
of a coherent developmental process of cultural transformation inherent in the Greco-
Roman tradition, with fine discussion by H. Aurenhammer, ‘Max Dvořák and the His-
tory of Medieval Art’, Journal of Art Historiography 2 (2010) http://arthistoriography
.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/media_152487_en.pdf, esp. pp. 4-7. Dvořák’s devel-
oped line appears in his posthumous book Kunstgeschichte als Geistesgeschichte:
Studien zur abendländischen Kunstentwicklung, Munich, 1924, 1-40 (= The History of
Art as the History of Ideas, London, 1984, 1-25).
Jaś Elsner 171
Tsarist state, Kondakov was forced into exile in 1917, fleeing via Odessa to
Sofia and then Prague. Before the Revolution, his teaching in St Peterburg ap-
pears to have inspired many who later came to great prominence in exile in the
West – such as Mikhail Rostovtzev (1870-1952), André Grabar (1896-1990) and
George Ostrogorsky (1902-1976); while his main students who remained in
Russia included Dmitrii Ainalov (1862-1939), E.K. Redin (1863-1908) and I.I.
Smirnov (1869-1918).3
Espousing a late imperialist and positivist ideology – and the belief that with
hard empirical work all the puzzles and uncertainties of scholarship could be
successfully resolved – the three traditions mentioned here shared a resistance to
the Protestant rejection of images in the early Church and to the model of medie-
val art as a decline. Although the specific politics of the three traditions was
very different, and although all were autonomous, there was nonetheless some
mutual influence. Our own contemporary scholarly positions lie in the inher-
itance of the strands of thought developed at this period, which I think largely
defines a positive model of conceiving late antiquity (at any rate, art-historically).
But at least as important as the energies defining the genesis of an interest in late
antique art, is the catastrophe of the First World War, which rendered immedi-
ately obsolete the entire ideological context that had underpinned the rising in-
terest in late antiquity and the theoretical models formulated to address it. After
1918 there were no Christian empires, no large multicultural Austro-Hungarian
state, no Orthodox Russia, while the Catholic church became locked in a war far
more visceral even than the fights with Orthodox and Reformed believers – the
battle against the secularist atheist faith of Marxism, now upheld by a powerful
Communist empire. That is, the scholarly frames and discourses forged with the
support of the state in radically different ideological conditions came to be used
(indeed, are still used) in political and conceptual contexts where the rationales
for their creation are little short of incomprehensible. This is an interesting prob-
lem, one we all share and one that – in my view – makes the significance of
critical historiography an essential, indeed a necessary, aspect of the enterprise
of studying late antiquity; and not only late antique art.
2 Vienna c. 1900
In 1894-5, focusing on the Vienna Genesis, an early Christian illuminated manu-

script in the Viennese imperial collections, Franz Wickhoff presented a reinter-
pretation of Roman art as an authentic and valuable cultural phenomenon in its
own right, with artistic effects parallel to the most up to date and contemporary
aesthetics of the avant garde – he mentions Impressionism explicitly and more
3
See e.g. M. Lidova, ‘The Rise of Byzantine Art and Archaeology in Late Imperial
Russia’ in Elsner, Empires of Faith, 128-60.
than once.4 Wickhoff’s book – surprisingly but significantly – is in fact the first
positive account of Roman art in its own right, rather than the usual narrative of
a steady decline from the glory that was Greece.5 In 1901, in a landmark volume
that built on Wickhoff’s contribution, Alois Riegl published his magisterial Late
Roman Art Industry, a book which made a vibrant claim for late antique art with-
in the Roman empire as being far from decadent and the expression of the collec-
tive cultural will of its time – the will of course that gave rise also to a Christian
imperium.6 It is this book, huge in its influence among cultural theorists and
sociologists as well as in the fields of art history and archaeology,7 that estab-
lished the concept of late antiquity as a meaningful historical period, capable of
independent study.8
4
Wilhelm Ritter von Hartel and Franz Wickhoff, Die Wiener Genesis, Vienna, 1894-5,
2 vols., esp. pp. 1-98 and 143-66 of the text volume (all written by Wickhoff), with
the key section on Roman art translated by Eugenie Strong as Franz Wickhoff, Roman
Art: Some of its Principles and their Application to Early Christian Painting, London,
1900.
5
See Otto Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art, New Haven, 1979, 28-9.
6
Alois Riegl, Die spätrömische Kunst-Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-
Ungarn, Vienna, 1901, volume 1. Translated (horribly) by Rolf Winkes as Late Ro-
man Art Industry, Rome, 1985. For some historiographic discussion see Brendel,
Prolegomena, 25-47.
7
For sociologists inspired by Riegl see Max Weber, ‘The Meaning of “Value Freedom”
in the Sociological and Economic Sciences’ (1917) in Collected Methodological Writ-
ings, London, 2012, 304-334, esp. 322-3 and K. Mannheim, ‘On the Interpretation of
Weltanschauung’ (1923) in From Karl Mannheim, New York, 1971, 8-58. For his in-
fluence among Marxists, see Georg Lukacs in ‘Reification and the Consciousness of
the Proletariat’ (1922) in History and Class Consciousness , Cambridge Mass, 1971,
153; Walter Benjamin, ‘Berlin Chronicle’ (1932) in Selected Writings vol. 2, part 2.,
1931-34, Cambridge Mass., 1999, 615; ‘The Rigorous Study of Art’ (1932) ibid 668;
‘Johann Jakob Bachofen’ (1934-5) in Selected Writings vol. 3 (1935-38), Cambridge
Mass., 2002, 10; ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility’ (second version,
1935-6) ibid 104 and ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility’ (third ver-
sion, 1936-39) in Selected Writings vol. 4 (1938-40), Cambridge Mass., 2003, 255
and especially his ‘Curriculum Vitae (VI): Dr Walter Benjamin’ (1940) ibid 381
where Late Roman Art Industry is the first book mentioned in the list of ‘decisively
influential’ writings ‘some of them far from my main field of study’. Also Theodore
Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, London, 1997, 60, 156, 169 and Umberto Eco Postscript to
The Name of the Rose San Diego, 1984, 66.
8
See Andrea Giardina, ‘Esplosione di tardoantico’, Studi Storici 40 (1999) 157–180,
esp. 157-9; Jas’ Elsner, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901’,
Art History 25 (2002) 358–379; W. Liebeschuetz, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity’ An-
tiquité Tardive 12 (2004) 253-61, esp. 254-55; Hervé Inglebert, ‘Introduction: Late
Antique Conceptions of Late Antiquity’ in Scott Johnson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of Late Antiquity, Oxford, 2012, 1-17, esp. 1. The most nuanced historical approach
to the great contribution of the Viennese (not only Riegl but Strzygowski, on whom
Jaś Elsner 173
Riegl’s book shows a real commitment to modernist aesthetics that is signaled by

its title’s gesture to industrial production and emblematized by the focus of its
last chapter on arts and crafts as being of a historical and artistic value equal to
the high arts of sculpture, painting and architecture, not to mention the Jugendstil
luxury quality of the volume’s production. This is combined with an extraordi-
narily rigorous formalist account of a vast range of objects of all kinds, conduct-
ed in difficult but brilliantly orchestrated descriptive prose. The argument was
designed to demonstrate that the changes in visual style and form, which earlier
scholarship had pretty universally interpreted in terms of decline and corruption

were in fact the result of changes in the artistic and cultural will of the later Ro-
man era. In a gesture redolent of the psychological interests that permeated the
Vienna of Freud, Riegl offered a historical account of art with a significant place
for the subjective volition of artists, viewers and cultural collectives. Yet, even
in what was designed to be a normative and essentially Eurocentric Western
model for late antique art as a kind of homology to the contemporary Holy Ro-
man empire, at the same time Riegl’s project was governed by a deeply apolo-
getic defense of an aesthetics and an era in the face of art-historical scholarship’s
Hellenocentric adherents of medieval decline. This was simultaneously a histor-
ical defense of late antiquity against a largely antipathetic scholarly tradition and
a contemporary nationalistic justification of (Catholic) Austro-Hungarian culture
against that of (mainly Protestant) imperial Germany.
In different ways, these stories – both the work of Riegl and Wickhoff at the
end of the nineteenth century and the various responses in the discipline in the
first decades of the twentieth – are an argument about the internal progress and
regeneration of the European artistic tradition from and within its own resources.
Insofar as art is itself an emblem for the culture and history of Europe, they are a
claim for the self-sufficiently of European culture as descended from Greece and
Rome via Christianity. One of the crucial aspects of the Rieglian legacy is the
notion of Eurocentric independence and indeed priority in artistic development, a
claim that effectively follows from and develops Winckelmann. This European
story about the post-antique heritage of European traditions of art (whether in the
western middle ages or Byzantium) chooses to emphasize continuous internal
development within the visual tradition and to elide the fundamental differences
implicit in the move from pagan polytheism to Christian hegemony within the
territories of the Roman empire. Where it differed from traditional views is that
it denied any moment of decline within that tradition. The story is not only ten-
dentious but it is also an apologetic claim against another set of views, which
surfaced at the same time as Riegl published Late Roman Art Industry and were
polemically targeted against it.
see below, and indeed a larger intellectual community) to the concept and study of
late antiquity, beyond but including its art, is Garth Fowden, Before and After Mu-
hammad, Princeton, 2014, 23-37 and 42-44.
The long tradition of Christian theology had always recognized that Christianity
was something radically new in its advent into the Roman world. It came from
the East with models of canonical Scripture and Hebraic, rather than Greco-
Roman, categories of thought that were not remotely normative in pagan antiqui-
ty. Protestant scholarship – which was the dominant theological tradition in the
years after the Reformation (and against which the Catholic Viennese were in
part reacting) – tended to see the emergence of Christian art as a form of degen-
eracy from the pure, aniconic and Scriptural world that was imagined as the
earliest Church. 9 Hellenic traditions – such as the veneration of images and

other kinds of ‘idolatry’ – corrupted the pristine integrity of the new religion,
leading to the kinds of medieval Catholicism,10 from which it took Martin Lu-
ther’s Reformation to rescue the Church. But for those who upheld an aesthetic
ideal of the glories of Greek art, this narrative was reversible. While Christianity
was always capable of corruption by Hellenism, the wonders of Greek and Ro-
man naturalism were equally corruptible by the degenerate and non-naturalistic
arts of the Semitic east, brought into the Roman world by the adherents of orien-
tal cults like Christianity. That is, if the ancient history of the west were under-
stood not as a triumphant tale of imperial progression through time (in the man-
ner of Wickhoff and Riegl) but as the sad narrative of artistic decline from the
Greeks to the middle ages, then no model of explanation could be more powerful
than the racial intervention of degenerates from the east. In a turn of the century
context around 1900 this drew on a host of contemporary prejudices against all
kinds of primitives, colonials and, not least, Semites.
In 1901, the same year as the publication of Late Roman Art Industry, anoth-
er Austrian Professor – one of the world’s greatest experts on ancient Coptic,
Jewish, Islamic and eastern Christian art – Josef Strzygowski published The
Orient or Rome?, a brutal attack on the continuity model of Roman and early
Christian art envisaged by Wickhoff in his book on the Vienna Genesis,11 and he
9
The inspiration for this position lies in the major project of Adolf von Harnack (1851-
1930), the major Lutheran historian of the early Church. For its principal expression
in relation to art see Hugo Koch, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage nachden literarischen
Quellen, Göttingen, 1917, esp. 1-3 and 81-105 with the discussion of Paul Corby Fin-
ney, The Invisible God: The Earliest Christians on Art, Oxford, 1994 7-10. For recent
discussion of the wider issues see C. Markschies, ‘Décadence? Christliche Theologen
der Spätantike über den Verfall von Moral und Glauben seit Kaiser Konstantin’ in M.
Formisano and T. Fuhrer (eds.), Décadence: “Decline and Fall” or “Other Antiqui-
ty”?, Heidelberg, 2014, 385-98.
10
See Koch, Die altchristliche Bilderfrage 81-100.
11
J. Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom? Beiträge zur Geschichte der spätantiken und
früchristlichen Kunst, Leipzig, 1901. For some discussion of Strzygowski, see S.
Marchand, "The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The
Case of Josef Strzygowski," History and Theory 33 (1994), 106-30; M. Olin, ‘Art
History and Ideology: Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski’ in P. S. Gold and B.C. Bax
(eds.), Cultural Visions: Essays in the History of Culture, Amsterdam, 2000, pp. 151-
Jaś Elsner 175
swiftly followed this with a number of assaults on Riegl.12 Although it is easy to

personalize the polemic that ensued, and to see it in terms of the local power-
politics of Austro-Hungarian academia,13 the positions taken effectively define
profoundly different views of modernity as envisaged through artistic genealogy.
Riegl and Wickhoff had embraced and celebrated cultural transformation, cast as
stylistic change, emphasizing an internalist but multicultural model of European
development. Theirs was an account that stressed the self-sufficiency of the
European tradition.14 Strzygowski deplored the decline from Greek naturalistic
ideals to the kinds of schematism and abstraction found in early medieval art,
and he explored a vast array of visual materials from the east and from Egypt to
show how this development in the west was dependent on the malign influence
of external forces, although he was also later to argue for positive ‘Aryan’ influ-
ences that would bring new life from the east.15 His story is thus one that de-
pends willy-nilly on global communication, and cultural interaction for good and
for ill. It is not internalist or self-sufficient in its view of European art and it
gives a strong (although often negative) agency to the late antique arts of Egypt,
Mesopotamia and Palestine.
70; S. Marchand, German Orientalism in the Age of Empire: Religion, Race and
Scholarship, Cambridge, 2009, 387-426 on Orientalism and art in general and 403-
410 on Strzygowski; Christina Maranci in this volume; and I. Foletti and F. Lovino
(eds.), Orient oder Rom? History and Reception of a Historiographical Myth (1901-
1970), Rome 2018.
12
See J. Strzygowski, ‘Hellas und des Orients Umarmung', Beilage zur Münchener
Allgemeinen Zeitung, nos. 40 and 41, 18 and 19 February 1902, 313-17 and 325-27
and in his review in Byzantinischer Zeitschrift 11 (1902) 263-6. The former of these
is an extraordinary racist rant, very hard to find outside Germany, which ought to be
republished and read, perhaps even translated, despite and because of its content.
13
See Alois Riegl, ‘Spätrömisch oder orientalisch’, Beilage zur Münchener Allgemeinen
Zeitung, nos. 93 and 94, 22 and 23 April 1902, 133-56 and 162-5, reprinted in Maske
und Kothurn 58 (2012) 10-26, translated as ‘Late Roman or Oriental?' (1902) in G.
Schiff (ed.) German Essays on Art History, New York, 1988, 173-90; Josef
Strzygowski, ‘Die Schicksale des Hellenismus in der Bildenden Kunst’, Neue
Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, Geschichte und deutsche Literatur 8 (1905)
19-33. For discussion see G. Vasold, ‘Riegl, Strzygowski and the Development of
Art’, Journal of Art Historiography 5 (2011) 103-16 = http://arthistoriography.files.
wordpress.com/2011/12/vassold.pdf.
14
See also G. Rivoira, Lombardic Architecture: Its Origin, Development and Deriva-
tives (1901) London, 1910, 2 vols., which sees the rise of Gothic as a result of internal
developments within the Roman tradition as opposed to external influences. See the
discussion of Annabel Wharton, Refiguring the Post-Classical City, Cambridge, 1995,
3-12.
15
See e.g. C. Maranci, Medieval Armenian Architecture: Constructions of Race and
Nation, Louvain, 2001, 85-158.
The politics of this set of narratives are tightly wrapped up in the internal com-
plexities of a long-deceased empire. But the conceptual drives that governed
them – multiculturalist and racist, internalist and globalizing, confident and par-
anoid – would have long histories in the ideologies of the later twentieth century.
Within the study of late antique art, as late as the 1970s, the deep polarity of the
Rieglian and Strzygowskian approaches continued to frame the field with schol-
ars attempting to find options of compromise.16 Interestingly, neither the stories
espoused by Riegl and Wickhoff nor by Stzygowski were primarily concerned
with the religious aspects of Christian art. The two narratives were ultimately
interpretations of the heritage and continuity of the Greco-Roman artistic tradi-
tion in relation to changes in form and style, not about the advent of a new reli-
gious mentality and mythology with origins outside Europe or at any rate on its
borders. The deep forces of Eurocentrism – which provide a founding impetus
for the interest in late Roman culture – would remain a dominant issue in the
study of late antique art, and do so up to the present.
3 Riegl’s Late Antiquity and the Discipline of Art History
In the larger field of art history, it would be Riegl’s work that proved monumen-
tally influential. In order to justify his argument, Riegl had cause to invent a
concept – which he called Kunstwollen – meaning something like ‘artistic will’
or ‘cultural drive’ which is not only untranslatable but was to prove one of the
most controversial, influential and radical ideas ever formulated in the history of
art.17 While Riegl’s assault on the decadence of late Roman art would be resist-
ed (indeed largely overturned) by scholarship in the decades after his book was
published, 18 most of his methods (and notably his thesis of Kunstwollen as a
16
Notably, E. Kitzinger, Byzantine Art in the Making, London, 1977, 7-21, with critique
by Elsner, ‘The Birth of Late Antiquity’ 374-6.
17
The literature on Kunstwollen is vast; for relatively recent accounts, see Margaret
Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art, University Park, 1992,
71-2, 129-53; Margaret Iversen, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory, Cambridge,
Mass., 1993, 6-16, 71-3, 76-83, 96-112; Allister Neher, ‘“The Concept of Kunstwol-
len”, neo-Kantianism, and Erwin Panofsky’s Early Art Theoretical Essays’, Word and
Image 20, no. 1 (2004) 41–51; Matthew Gubser, Time’s Visible Surface: Alois Riegl
and the Discourse of History and Temporality in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, Detroit, 2006,
153-61; Jas’ Elsner, ‘From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture: Some Reflections
on Riegl’s Concept of Kunstwollen’ Critical Inquiry 32 (Summer, 2006) 741-66; M.
Rampley, The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship,
1847–1918, University Park, 2013, 37-44; D Reynolds Cordileone, Alois Riegl in Vi-
enna 1875-1905, Aldershot, 2014, 202-7.
18
A famous voice affirming decline is Bernard Berenson, The Arch of Constantine or
the Decline of Form, London, 1954, 18-19, 21-3, 32 – all directly against Wickhoff
and Riegl.
Jaś Elsner 177
collective social force that explained both how objects appeared and how they
were generated) were rapidly assimilated, although in rather different ways
across both art history and archaeology.19 The idea – frequent and uncontrover-
sial in most art history and archaeology, even today – that an object expresses its
culture in some way, or embodies the mentalities of those who made and used it,
ultimately comes down to the assumption that what Riegl called Kunstwollen is
working in the culture as a kind of active force disseminating its worldview.20
It is significant that Riegl’s late antique researches were not the major focus
of his career (which included seminal works on ornament throughout antiquity,

on Oriental textiles, on the Roman baroque and Dutch group portrait, as well as
fundamental essays in such themes as the conservation of monuments). His
reception was by no means primarily by late antique specialists. But he did work
out his great theoretical contribution to the history of art – the theory of Kun-
stwollen – through his writing on late antiquity. There is something poignant
about a theoretical frame, developed in relation to a specific problem, which
rapidly becomes applied elsewhere and swiftly ceases to be relevant to the field
of its original creation. In part, Kunstwollen and its relation of objects, empiri-
cally accessible by modern scholars, to the Weltanschauung of the cultures of
their making (both the generative impulses of artists or artisans and the cultural
needs of their consumers and viewers) became swiftly a truism for all the mate-
rial-cultural disciplines, for the obvious reason than it allowed objects to perform
roles in the writing of history. But Riegl’s specific fight against decline was
rapidly rejected, and the terms within which late Roman art would come to be
seen (especially the dualism associated with twentieth century scholars such as
Gerhard Rodenwaldt, Guido Kaschnitz Weinberg and Ranuccio Bianchi Bandi-
nelli) quickly made his framework outdated.21 What lasted was less an art his-
torical legacy than the formulation of the distinct spirit of a distinct age – the
notion of a discrete late antiquity, which we have ourselves inherited.
In the relatively new discipline of art history, in the decades after Riegl’s
death in 1905, the theoretical battle over what Kunstwollen meant and how it
should be employed came to define significant aspects of the field and to domi-
nate conceptual debate in the discipline in the 1920s – notably the work of many
Austrian scholars in the Vienna School from Max Dvořák to the formulators of
19
See Jas’ Elsner, ‘Alois Riegl and Classical Archaeology’ in Peter Noever, Artur
Rosenauer and Georg Vasold (eds.) Alois Riegl Revisited: Beiträge zu Werk und
Rezeption/ Contributions to the Opus and its Reception, Vienna, 2010, 45-57.
20
See Elsner ‘Alois Riegl and Classical Archaeology’, 54-7.
21
The case for Riegl’s outdatedness is well made by Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg, ‘Alois
Riegl: Die Spatromische Kunstindustrie’ Gnomon 5 (1929) 195-213 (translated by M.
Schwarz, Art History 39 (2016) 84-97), and the dualist theme is summarized by Bren-
del, Prolegomena, 101-21 and Salvatore Settis, ‘Un’ arte plurale. L’impero romano, i
Greci e i posteri’ in E. Gabba and A. Schiavone (eds.), Storia di Roma IV: Caracteri e
morfologie, Turin, 1989, 827-78, esp. 833-41.
Strukturanalyse (Otto Pächt, Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg and Hans Sedlmayr),

and of a number of the more theoretical German scholars in the orbit of the War-
burg Institute in Hamburg – especially Erwin Panofsky and Edgar Wind.22 The
debates between these scholars, focusing on problems that are at the very heart
of writing a history of art (including the place of subjectivity and psychology, the
relation of the scholar’s interpretative position to that of the culture he or she
studies, the ways form may structure content, the question of whether the form
of a work of art is an essential expression of its culture of creation or whether its
meanings are conventionally attached to it by varieties of interpretation, the

problems of description) are beyond a discussion of late antiquity specifically,
and indeed the bulk of these scholars were not themselves primarily concerned
with late antique art.23 But it is striking that, insofar as they were thinking with
and against Late Roman Art Industry, their work was informed by a deep reflec-
tion on the problems of late antique art as Riegl had inflected them.
4 The Continuity of the Dual Narrative of Late Antique Art
One of the striking aspects of the place of late antique art in the history of the
discipline is the continuity but also the reversibility of positive and negative or
optimistic and pessimistic interpretative frames. Riegl’s account of late antiquity
had largely been a story of progressive internal change, actively aimed at contra-
dicting the model of decline. Strzygowski’s narrative was a lament for deca-
dence triggered by the influence of external forces. In the succeeding years,
Classicists would broadly follow Riegl’s internalist emphasis on formal change,
22
For some discussion, see e.g. C. Wood, ‘Introduction’, The Vienna School Reader,
New York, 2000, 9-72; Jas’ Elsner and Katharina Lorenz, ‘The Genesis of Iconology’,
Critical Inquiry 38 (2012), 483-512; Jas’ Elsner and Martin Schwarz, ‘The Genesis of
Struktur: Kaschnitz-Weinberg’s Review of Riegl and the New Viennese School’, Art
History 39 (2016) 70-83. On the ‘Hamburg School’, see now Emily Levine, Dream-
land of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky and the Hamburg School, Chicago,
2013.
23
The essential papers in this debate – at the core of the theoretical developments of art
history in the 1920s – are: Erwin Panofsky, ‘The Concept of Artistic Volition’ (1920)
Critical Inquiry 8 (1981) 17-33; Erwin Panofsky, ‘On the Relationship of Art History
and Art Theory: Towards the Possibility of a Fundamental System of Concepts for a
Science of Art’ (1925), Critical Inquiry 35 (Autumn 2008) 43-71; Edgar Wind, ‘On
the Systematics of Artistic Problems’ (1925), Art in Translation 1 (2009) 211-257;
Kaschnitz-Weinberg, ‘Alois Riegl: Die Spatromische Kunstindustrie’ (1929); Hans
Sedlmayr, ‘The Quintessence of Riegl’s Thought’ (1929) in Richard Woodfield (ed.),
Framing Formalism: Riegl’s Work, Amsterdam, 2001, 11-32; Hans Sedlmayr, ‘To-
wards a Rigorous Study of Art’ (1931) in Wood, Vienna School Reader, 133-79; Er-
win Panofsky ‘On the Problem of Describing and Interpreting Works of the Visual
Arts’ (1932), Critical Inquiry 38 (Spring 2012) 467-82.
Jaś Elsner 179
largely eschewing too much investment in Christianity, but adopting the trajecto-
ry of decline (an old story going back to Winckelmann and Vasari), which Riegl
had done so much to combat.24 A second model, accepting eastern influence and
tracing a positive medieval story with its origins in the rise of Christian art, ef-
fectively had its roots in Strzygowski’s account but transformed into positive
mood-music with a much stronger emphasis on Christian renewal.25 Arguably,
the model that stresses the origins of Christian art has its roots not only in the
Viennese story but also in the romantic Russian narrative of renewal from the
east and of the rise of imperial Constantinople as the Christian Second Rome –
the ancestor of Moscow as the Third Rome. The two lines (with transformation
being either positive or negative and the causes of changes being either internal
or external) were mutually exclusive.26
In the 1960s – when Andre Malraux, De Gaulle’s Minister for Cultural Af-
fairs in France from 1958 to 1969, created the Arts of Mankind series of volumes
on the history of art for the French publisher, Gallimard, which were produced to
very high standards and translated into many European languages – the impasse
between the two approaches was so great that two entirely different volumes
were commissioned for what is effectively the same subject and period of art. In
1966, Gallimard published by André Grabar’s Early Christian Art: AD 200-395.
In 1970, the same press published Rome: The Late Empire. Roman Art 200-400
by Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli. There are striking overlaps in the images used,
in the geographic span (both books effectively focus on the Roman empire), in
the period covered (exactly the same) and in the range of kinds of objects treated
by both books. 27 But the White Russian, Paris-based, Orthodox-raised exile
from the Revolution – Grabar fled Petrograd in November 1917, days after the
Bolsheviks seized power – and the Italian Marxist presented radically different
and frankly incompatible ideological pictures. Those accounts – written well
into the second half of the twentieth century – not only enact the fundamental
ideological divide of Europe in the era of the Iron Curtain through its surviving
24
For example, Hans Peter L’Orange, Art Forms and Civic Life in the Late Roman
Empire, Princeton, 1965, 126-131; Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Rome: The Late
Empire. Roman Art AD 200-400, London, 1971, 1-38, 369-78: cf Berenson, The Arch
of Constantine, passim.
25
E.g. André Grabar, Christian Iconography: A Study of its Origins, Princeton, 1968;
Thomas Mathews, The Clash of Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art,
Princeton, 1993; R.M. Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art, London, 2000.
26
See e.g. Jas’ Elsner, ‘Late Antique Art: The Problem of the Concept and the Cumula-
tive Aesthetic’ in Simon Swain and Mark Edwards (eds.), Approaching Late Antiqui-
ty: The Transformation from Early to Late Empire, Oxford, 2004, 271-309, esp. 271-
86.
27
André Grabar, Early Christian Art: AD 200-395, New York, 1966 (published in the
UK as The Beginnings of Christian Art: 200-395, London, 1967) and Bianchi Bandi-
nelli, Rome: The Late Empire.
late antique material culture (ironically pitting the émigré Russian against the
Italian Communist), but also perform the heritages of both lines of interpretation
by playing Grabar’s Russian Byzantinism (ultimately looking to Christian Or-
thodox renewal in the east) in contrast to Bianchi Bandinelli’s Romanism (rooted
in a sense of the implosion of the Italic visual tradition).
If we compare their conclusions, Grabar speaks of ‘the rise of an art of truly
Christian inspiration’, the modesty and ‘highly discrete nature’ of its early stages,
‘its touching quality’ (279-80). This is the cautious optimism of new begin-
nings. 28 Bianchi Bandinelli writes of a ‘problem-ridden yet exhilarating era’

(369) in which he laments the ‘final break with Hellenistic canons of form’ in the
context of ‘profound ideological revolution’ and a world that ‘no longer offered
either external security or inner peace of mind’ (371). In particular, he regrets
the ‘tendency towards the irrational’, which steadily ‘gains ground during the
centuries covered by this book’ (375) to culminate in a ‘new, irrational, symbolic
vision’ (377). In his final lines about how ‘external forces … played a far small-
er part in the overthrow of this great civilization than did the internal transfor-
mation which took place in the social fabric of the Roman empire’ (378), Bian-
chi Bandinelli reveals his close allegiance to Riegl’s internalist model and yet his
adoption (in espousing multiple centres for artistic production, in lamenting the
changes that took place as a form of decline, in deploring their religious inspira-
tion) of most of the driving forces of the Strzygowskian model. Grabar’s focus
on Rome and the essentially positive nature of his account speaks forcefully of
the influence of Riegl, even if his Christian narrative is much more explicit than
Riegl’s.
The problems, which this overview has attempted to reveal, are deep. The
interest in late antique art was born at a moment of empowered Catholic and
Orthodox imperial reactions to the dominance of Protestant narratives in the
context of the early Church and in opposition to Western European Philhellen-
ism’s decline thesis for Roman and Byzantine art. But almost as soon as a viable
intellectual discourse for late antiquity had been invented in the late nineteenth
century, all the cultural underpinnings, which it was created to serve both in
Austro-Hungary and in Russia, became obsolete as a result of the Great War.
Most importantly, the fundamental fight between Catholic and Reformed, which
had governed most of European politics (military, diplomatic and cultural) from
the sixteenth century to the nineteenth, was rendered close to irrelevant by the
October Revolution which brought to political power the new atheist and secu-
larist ideology of Marxist Communism, in many ways a religion in its own right.
Marxism’s investments in late antiquity are huge, especially because the shift
from a slave economy to feudalism was precisely located by ancient history at
28
Elsewhere he is sympathetic to a Strzygowskian model of influence from the margins
in the rise of Christian art. See André Grabar, ‘Le tiers mode de l’Antiquité à l’école
de l’art classique et son rôle dans la formation de l’art du Moyen Age’ Revue de l’art
18 (1972) 9-26.
Jaś Elsner 181
the late antique moment of the rise of the colonate.29 Therefore it is no surprise
that some of Riegl’s most assiduous readers outside art history in the heady years
of the 1920s were Marxists, like Walter Benjamin and Gyorgi Lucasz. Our own
current practice within the art history of the later empire is born from the ances-
try of the implicit fight between Bianchi Bandinelli’s Marxist analysis and Gra-
bar’s romantic early Christian account. The critical terms and concepts govern-
ing their discussions still employed art historical models created before World
War 1, but deployed them in relation to ideological targets of the mid twentieth
century, targets themselves arguably obsolete for us today, after the fall of the
Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. What is problematic, and the reason
that we desperately need a self critical and astute understanding of the historio-
graphic underpinnings of the discipline of late antique studies (not only its art
history), is that most scholars working today are largely blind to the now largely
forgotten ideological drives that governed the conceptual apparatus and method-
ological models we still use, as well as the theories and the truths that are most
forcefully asserted, about the period and its art.
In terms of the larger field of late antique studies, I am arguing that a cultural
model of ancestral genealogy was the key impetus for the late nineteenth century
birth of the study of late antiquity. This was grounded not only in the assump-
tion of artistic continuities and religious connectivities but also in an archaeolog-
ical fantasy of late-antique objects dug out of (at least some parts of) the territo-
ries belonging to the late Russian and Austrian empires and in Rome. Riegl’s
book explicitly makes this claim: its original title in 1901 was Die spätrömische
Kunst-Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn. The social and ideo-
logical underpinnings of this argument fell apart with the end of the European
29
One might cite Marc Bloch, ‘Comment et pourquoi finit l’esclavage antique?’ An-
nales ESC 2 (1947) 30-44, 161-70; A.H.M. Jones, ‘The Roman Colonate’ Past and
Present 13 (1958) 1-13; A.H.M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire Oxford, 1964, 795-
808 (note the modernity of Russian terms such as ‘kulak’, 809 and of Marxist con-
cepts such as ‘oppression’, 812); Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudal-
ism, London, 1974, 93-103; G.E.M. de Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient
Greek World, London 1981, 158-60, 249-59, 373-4 (‘an intensification of the forms of
exploitation’, italicized in the original, with riposte from Peter Brunt, ‘A Marxist
View of Roman History’, JRS 72 (1982) 158-63: ‘there is no reason to think that the
colonate was designed to make intensified exploitation possible’). Of course all the
issues have changed in the wake of 1989: see e.g. Jean-Michel Carrié, ‘Colonato del
Basso Impero: La resistenza del mito’ in Elio Lo Cascio (ed.), Terre, proprietari e
contadini dell'impero romano : dall'affitto agrario al colonato tardoantico, Rome,
1997, 75-150; id. ‘Le “Colonat du Bas-Empire”: Un mythe historiographique’ Opus 1
(1982) 351-70; id. ‘Un roman des origins: Les genealogies du “Colonat du Bas-
Empire”’ Opus 2 (1983) 205-51; Peter Sarris, Economy and Society in the Age of Jus-
tinian, Cambridge, 2006, 137-9, 149-76; for an overview and critique of the field at
present, see Jairus Banaji, ‘Late Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages: What Kind of
Transition?’ Historical Materialism 19 (2011) 109-44.
imperial experiment in the Great War, but the supreme event for the ways late
antiquity would be conceived thereafter was the October Revolution and the shift
within Europe from the long centuries of Catholic-Protestant ideological conflict
to a fight between what the West considered free democracy and Christendom,
on the one hand, and what it saw as the atheism of Marxist totalitarianism on the
other. That is, the study of late antiquity – and the interest in it – changed from a
cultural model to an economic one, with the focus on issues of administrative
control, taxation and institutional structure as designed to deliver the products of
a serf economy. In 1989 this changed again with the end of the Iron Curtain, and
we are in entirely new and rather exciting intellectual terrain as a result. A cul-
tural historical model, with the visual arts back in the centre, is certainly possible
again, as heralded already in what transpires were the later years of the Cold War
by Peter Brown’s World of Late Antiquity (1971).
From the point of view of art history as a broad discipline, hardly anyone is
interested anymore in late antiquity as it developed in the European tradition.
The urgency in that direction lay in late European imperialism, in anti-
Protestantism, and later (but from a very different direction) in Marxism. Today,
very few people care about any of this. But Riegl’s legacy through Kunstwollen
and its inheritance – both the Geistesgeschichte and the Struktur of the later
Viennese, and the various forms of Iconology promulgated by Panofsky and the
Warburgians – is vast within art history, and especially through his work on late
antiquity. But in the era of globalism and the need for a comparative art history
that extends beyond Europe, we need to be clear. The invention and subsequent-
ly the study of late antiquity – themselves simultaneous with the invention of late
antique art as a distinct subject – have been fraught with the political and ideo-
logical complexities of modern European ancestry and self-fashioning. No story
can help being Eurocentric. All accounts are deeply flummoxed about the issue
of religion (we may study ‘early Christian art’ as a subset of ‘late antique art’ but
no one works on ‘Christian art’), in part because the question of originality and
innovation (the newness of Christianity in the Roman world) is deeply at odds
with the ideological desire for continuity with Greek art and Roman governance
– a Europe that is founded on antiquity. In part also, the rise of secularism espe-
cially in academia (hardly separable from the Marxist Orthodoxy that governed
half of Europe for the bulk of the twentieth century), have made the sympathetic
understanding of religion a difficult and alien procedure. The interpretative
divisions in relation to cultural change (as a process of natural and internal de-
velopment, or an invasion of malign foreign influence and so forth) have re-
mained in place from the imperial moment to well after the establishment of the
European Community, across two world wars and the Cold War. The need for a
new beginning, even in the limited field of the study of Western European and
Byzantine late antique art, is pressing; the need for a rethink that removes some
of the Orientalist, Aryanist and other nonsense in relation to late antique arts that
are not Christian, is at least as urgent.

Alois Riegl Art History and The Beginning of Late Antique Studies As A Discipline

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The New

Clifford Ando and Marco Formisano

Nina Pigulevskaya: Late Antiquity in Leningrad .....................................353

1 The cultural frame

pus Basilicarum (1937-77). 1 This is an early Christian religious take on late

post-Constantinian empire. This is not really a religious account except insofar

In 1894-5, focusing on the Vienna Genesis, an early Christian illuminated manu-

Riegl’s book shows a real commitment to modernist aesthetics that is signaled by

scholarship had pretty universally interpreted in terms of decline and corruption

earliest Church. 9 Hellenic traditions – such as the veneration of images and

swiftly followed this with a number of assaults on Riegl.12 Although it is easy to

3 Riegl’s Late Antiquity and the Discipline of Art History

of his career (which included seminal works on ornament throughout antiquity,

Strukturanalyse (Otto Pächt, Guido Kaschnitz-Weinberg and Hans Sedlmayr),

meanings are conventionally attached to it by varieties of interpretation, the

4 The Continuity of the Dual Narrative of Late Antique Art

nings. 28 Bianchi Bandinelli writes of a ‘problem-ridden yet exhilarating era’

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