Frankreich oder Rom? Strzygowski's Reception Through the 'Italo-Gallic School' of Early Christian Art
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| Year of publication | 2017 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | An important historiographical response to Strzygowski's Orient oder Rom (1901) is found under the impulse of Earl Baldwin Smith (1888-1956), who in 1918 published his Early Christian Iconography and a school of ivory carvers in Provence, a repertory of iconographies focused on typical motifs of "Provençal" origins. Strongly tied with the famous Index of Christian Art (ICA) begun by Charles Rufus Morey (1877-1955) at Princeton, Smith recognized a strong individual creativity of artists in South of France, particularly in the common liturgical province that united Arles, the Provence and the North of Italy in the first centuries of Christianity. Furthermore, this region is according to Smith - in continuity with French scholars such as Salomon Reinach (1858-1932) or Louis Bréhier (1868-1951) -, but even more so to his most important later "followers", Marion Lawrence (1901-1978) or Alexander Coburn Soper (1904-1993), to be understood as the receptacle of Oriental iconographies and ideas, in this sense opposing the primacy of Rome as creative centre. The questioning inscribes itself directly in the period successive to Strzygowski's dualistic opposition, at a historical and historiographical moment at which the dissolution of the strict frame of classical art offered to the oriental traditions a chance of rediscovery. In Smith's words: "Hellenism was dying, the dormant spirit of the Orient reawakened". The aim of this paper is threefold: 1) reassessing and framing the theories held by the tenants of the "Italo-Gallic School" in both the context of early Christian art and of beginning of twentieth century art historical studies; 2) analysing how Strzygowski's theses were received both in France (Bréhier, Millet, Reinach) and in America; 3) to understand to how Orient can become France in the eyes of American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century. |