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The question of origin in late antique and

early Byzantine art-historical scholarship
Nigel Westbrook
Abstract
In this paper I will examine the cultural origins of, and influences upon, late antique and
early Byzantine and Islamic architecture, in the context of current debates over the
alleged orientalist distortion inherent in western scholarship in this area. A long-
standing question is the degree of influence stemming from Roman and Hellenistic
artistic practices, an influence that has been assumed by many past and recent scholars.
But the question of origin is problematic, and some art historians appear to have
manipulated the evidence of material culture to support theories of origin. Similar
disagreement has in the past centred on the question of whether the palace forms in
Constantinople derive their precedents from Rome or from Middle-eastern traditions.
Historically implicit in this disagreement is the scholarly projection of racial and ethnic
ideologies, as notably evidenced in the ‘Rom oder orient’ debate of the early twentieth
century. However, I will argue that even Said’s critique of such projections is itself
problematic as a basis for progressing beyond the limits of the east-west divide.

Introduction
In this paper I will return to some well-trodden ground in order to
discuss the argument by Annabel Wharton, in a recent study, that western
art-historical scholarship on Byzantine and Near-eastern material culture
was ‘orientalist,’ implicated in a larger western political and cultural
discourse through which the ‘orient’ was subjugated and belittled. I will
discuss early twentieth-century theories of oriental and occidental
architectural origins developed in relation to late antique and early
Byzantine and Islamic architecture. One central question is the degree of
influence on such buildings from Roman and Hellenistic artistic practices,
an influence that has been assumed by many scholars.1
However, the question of origin for this period is problematic. Inge
Nielsen, for example, has criticised the Euro-centric attitude underlying
research into the origins of the palace type, suggesting that the palaces of
the Hellenistic kingdoms, often cited as the models for later imperial
Roman palaces, owed much to their Achaemenid predecessors. She notes
that, despite the direct Macedonian knowledge of the palaces of Cyrus at

1
For the historiography of the derivation of Byzantine architectural forms from the
west, see R Krautheimer, Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture (rev ed;
Harmondsworth, 1986) chapter 9 note 24.

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Pasargadae, Persepolis and Susa, ‘... in the eagerness to find Greek

precursors for Hellenistic architectural types, the so-called pan-Hellenic
viewpoint, scholars have until comparatively recently almost completely
overlooked the oriental angle ...’2
Similar disagreement has in the past centred on the question of
whether the palace forms in Constantinople had their precedents in Rome or
in middle-eastern traditions.3 Wharton, focussing on late antique art in the
near east, has argued that historically implicit in this disagreement on
origins is the scholarly projection of racial and ethnic stereotypes. This
projection was notably evidenced by the ‘Rom oder orient’ debate of the
early twentieth century (see below), in which a contrasting of the virile and
creative/generative Roman west with the effeminate, passive, uncreative
and derivative east was opposed by an interpretation of the origins of
northern European Gothic architecture in the cultures of the eastern Aryans,
notably the Sasanid empire. This theory of an orient as origin counter-
posed a creative and abstract Aryan artistic culture with the imitative culture
of the Semitic regions.4 Separated by this so-called ‘semitic wedge’, the
eastern Aryans developed an art of abstraction, and an architecture of
volume, based on the vault and the dome.5
The Byzantine as western projection
The oriental dimension of Byzantium has been repressed or
emphasised by various authors in service of either a classical cultural
framing, or an assertion of the primacy of western culture over the
degenerate east. Thus the eighteenth-century enlightenment scholars,
2
I Nielsen, ‘Oriental models for Hellenistic palaces’ 209-212 in W Hoepfner and G
Brands (ed), Basilea: Die Paläste der Hellenistischen Könige Internationales
Symposion in Berlin Vom 16.12.1992 bis 20.12.1992 (Mainz, 1996) 210.
3
For reference to these debates, see N Westbrook with K Şunk, ‘Site and ascription:
The octagon within the Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors’ 63, and
accompanying CD-ROM in J Macarthur and A Moulis (ed), Additions to
Architectural History: Proceedings of the XIXth Conference of SAHANZ
(Brisbane, 2002); N Westbrook, ‘Spoliation and imitation: continuity and radical
disjunction in Byzantine palatine architecture’ 444-461in J Burke (ed), Byzantine
Narrative. Proceedings of the XIVth conference of the Australian Association for
Byzantine Studies, in honour of Roger Scott, 13-15 August 2004 (Melbourne,
2006); N Westbrook, ‘An architecture of traces and ascriptions: interpreting the
vanished Great Palace of the Byzantine emperors in Constantinople, Fabrications:
Journal of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand 16/1 (June 2006),
43-61.
4
A J Wharton, Refiguring the Post-Classical City: Dura-Europas, Jerash,
Jerusalem and Ravenna (Cambridge and New York, 1995) 3-14.
5
N H B, ‘Ursprung der Christlicher Kirchenkunst. Neue Tatsachen und Grundsatze
der Kunstforschung erortert von Josef Strzygowski. Acht Vortage der olaus petri-
Stiftung in Upsula’, The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 38 (1921) 309-
310.

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Gibbon and Winckelman, privileged the ‘golden age’ of classical

civilisation over the ‘decline’ of a supine, eastern-influenced Byzantine
society. This society was portrayed as a culturally static, unproductive
entity in a progressive state of decay. According to this characterisation,
the Romans, weakened by the influence of indolent, pleasure-seeking
orientals, became fair game for the vitality, and virility, of northern peoples,
of whom the English were, by implication, the rightful descendents. This
characterisation of progress and decline within an evolutionary narrative
structure was made to serve a larger imperialist project, of which the
creation of the Louvre, and its incorporation of art works looted by
Napoleon from Rome and elsewhere, was an illustration, whereby French
culture was, through its central placement in the curatorial structure,
represented as the pinnacle of historical development. Thus France was
made to appear as the inheritor of the legacy of Greece and Rome.6
Wharton has argued that the proponents of, on the one hand, a direct
genealogy of art and architecture from its classical origins, and on the other,
a creative disruption of the classical tradition through Lombardic
Romanesque and Nordic Gothic influenced by eastern precedents, were
orientalist, in Edward Said’s particularly inflected meaning, ‘configuring
the east in such a way as to privilege Europe’.7 It is Wharton’s contention,
following Said, that present-day scholars engaged in research into early
Byzantine and late Roman art and architecture are similarly compromised
by a discourse of orientalism. That is to say, their research is characterised
by a foundationalist framework that subordinates its eastern subject.8 The
specific object of Wharton’s study, the art and architecture produced in the
eastern fringes of the late antique empire, was in fact pioneered by
Strzygowski, the author of Orient oder Rom. The closely interconnected
strands of racial theories, nationalist ideology, and art historical scholarship

6
C Manasseh, ‘The Cairo Museum, the National Museum of Athens, the Ancient
Iran Museum, and the Louvre: curatorial practices from east to west and back’
331-337 in T McMinn, J Stephens and S Basson (ed), Contested Terrains:
Proceedings of the XXIII Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians,
Australia and New Zealand (Fremantle, 2006).
7
Wharton, Refiguring the Post-classical City, 12.
8
Thus, for example, she cites Bernard Berenson’s contention that ‘The past that
concerns us Mediterranean-Atlantic folk, no matter what continent we now
inhabit, the past that is history for us is the succession of events … that have made
us what we think we now are … In other words history is the biography of a
community, large or small, as wide-flung as the white race … It follows that past
events concern us in the measure that they contribute to our sense of the past, as at
the present moment we want to define it.’: B Berenson, Aesthetics and History in
the Visual Arts (New York, 1948) 51, cited in Wharton, Refiguring the Post-
classical City, 2.

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render such scholarship problematic. How should we evaluate its validity,

and the methods of scholars who were influenced by it?
The persistence of orientalist stereotyping is evident in the writing
of the celebrated twentieth-century modernist architect, Le Corbusier. On
visiting Istanbul, he enters a reverie in which he conjures up the atmosphere
of the lost Byzantine city:
SHE – I don’t know who – I suppose some Theodora, but
what does it matter as long as she wears her Ravenna finery
and as long as her eyes, enlarged by a black outline, gnaw
her cheeks; SHE is waiting in some exhedra for the lunar
blue to absorb the light of day. When she leans over the
edge of the wave-lapped stairs, her jewels seem to multiply,
the gems taking on a hard luster that the exulting water casts
back in her face ...9
The issue of the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century
western imagining of the east in literature, art and architecture, opens up the
relation of orientalist studies and the larger context of western European
romanticism and related attitudes to nationalism and race.10 While this is
too large a topic to expand upon here, I will focus upon the way in which
the study of Byzantine architecture has been influenced by such a cultural
context.
One example of a romantic interest in the Byzantine may serve to
emphasise the point. Whitby has described the history behind the
excavation of the Great Palace by a team under the auspices of Saint
Andrews in Scotland. This project, which was undertaken in two stages
between the years 1935 and 1954, resulted in the discovery of a large
palatial complex and one of the finest and most extensive Byzantine
mosaics. Whitby notes, however, that the project derived from a series of
spiritualist seances held between a wealthy businessman, Major Wellesley
Tudor Poole and several White Russian emigres. These seances had
produced the vision that a Byzantine hoard was to be found in that location.
One of the instigators wrote in 1933, ‘[n]ow we can hope and believe that
the stars are fighting on our side & that a new spiritual & historical
revelation is at hand’.11

9
J Le Corbusier, Voyage d’orient (1966) trans Ivan Žaknić, Journey to the east
(Cambridge Mass, 1987) 85.
10
Examples include William Yeats’ poem ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and Ragnar
Ostberg’s Golden Chamber within the equally neo-Byzantine Stadshus (Town
Hall) in Stockholm: see J B Bullen, Byzantium Rediscovered (London and New
York, 2003) 10-13.
11
M Whitby, ‘The Great Palace dig: the Scottish perspective’ in R Cormack and E
M Jeffreys (ed), Through the Looking Glass. Byzantium through British Eyes:

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This bizarre example of English eccentricity resulted in the most

significant archaeological discovery in Istanbul. Such an example is by no
means isolated: the study of Byzantine and neighbouring cultures was
frequently influenced by larger ideological agendas, and grand schemata for
positivist historical narratives.12 It is this larger field of Euro-centric
historical narratives about the east that formed the object of critique for
Said.
Edward Said and orientalism
The book, Orientalism, first published in 1978 by the American-
based Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said, has had a remarkable
afterlife.13 It became a core text of post-modernist studies, particularly in
America. The Marxist critic, Ijaz Ahmed, notes that Said’s book opened up
a whole field of postcolonial or ‘occidentalist’ studies.14 In this seminal
book, Said argues that European culture is inherently discriminatory in its
framing, attitudes and policies toward non-western cultures of the (eastern)
region. A central claim is that western culture, by its nature, produces the

papers from the twenty-ninth Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, London,

March 1995, (Aldershot, 2000) 46.
12
See J Elsner, ‘From empirical evidence to the big picture: some reflections on
Riegl’s concept of Kunstwollen’, Critical Inquiry 32 (2006) 741-766. Elsner
discusses Riegl’s concept of kunstwollen, its place in a larger historical narrative,
and its impact on the ensuing ‘Viennese School’ and its critics. See also S A
Marchand, ‘The rhetoric of artifacts and the decline of classical humanism: the
case of Josef Strzygowski’, History and Theory 33 (1994) 106-130. Marchand
discusses the career of fellow-Viennese Josef Strzygowski, and his attempts to
develop a trans-European Aryan theory of art history. For the impacts of Viennese
and German art history on America, see K Brush, ‘German Kunstwissenschaft and
the practice of art history in America after World War 1. Interrelationships,
Exchanges, Contexts’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 26 (1999) 7-36.
See also O Brendel, Prolegomena to the Study of Roman Art (New Haven, 1979),
for a survey of the history of art-historical approaches to classical and late antique
art and architecture.
13
E Said, Orientalism (New York, 1978). Said’s book was criticised by the
orientalist Bernard Lewis in a review of 1982: B Lewis, ‘The question of
orientalism’, New York Review of Books (24 June 1982). In a response to Said’s
reply to Lewis’s criticism, Lewis wrote: ‘The tragedy of Mr. Said’s orientalism …
is that it takes a genuine problem of real importance and reduces it to the level of
political polemic and personal abuse’: ‘Orientalism: an exchange’, New York
Review of Books (August 12 1982). See also M Kramer, Ivory Towers on Sand:
The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America (Washington, 2001) 27-43.
14
I Ahmed, ‘Orientalism and after: ambivalence and metropolitan location in the
work of Edward Said’ 159-220 in In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures
(London and New York, 1992). A notable development of Said’s thesis is the
‘school’ of ‘subaltern studies’, in particular through the writings of H K Bhabha, G
C Spivak and G Prakesh: see G Prakesh, ‘Orientalism now’, History and Theory
34 (1995) 199-212.

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orient as a counter-sign to itself. The western study of the east is therefore

unavoidably biased, and associated with the category of orientalism:
Anyone who teaches, writes about, or researches the orient –
and this applies whether the person is an anthropologist,
sociologist, historian, or philologist – either in its specific or
in its general aspects, is an orientalist, and what he or she
does is orientalism.15
Said noted the west’s simultaneous attraction to, and fear of, the
orient, an attitude characterised by earlier, romantic accounts of voyages to
the east, of which Le Corbusier’s is some form of re-enactment or
homage.16 Thus Le Corbusier’s eroticised images recall Flaubert’s
association between the oriental and sexual fantasy.17 For Said, the
essentialist characterisation of this desired east renders it passively
dependent upon the west for invigoration and progress. But for the
receptive western imagination, the east is also a liberation, a way of
returning to the west with new eyes. Said cites the lines of Goethe from
Westöstliche Diwan:
North, West and South disintegrate
Thrones burst, empires tremble,
Fly away, and in the pure east
Taste the Patriarch’s air.18
This romantic fascination with the orient as an origin is a sort of
secularised religious impulse, by which old Christian ideas and associations
with the east were, in the eighteenth century in Europe, buried within a
historicist humanism. In this sense, Said identifies what he calls a
‘naturalised supernaturalism’ by which the prior, irrational associations of
the orient were retained as ‘an un-dislodged current in its discourse’.19
According to Said’s critique, for westerners the sense of being
European (or Atlantic, but also by implication Australian) is defined by first
establishing oriental difference. The originary role of the orient precludes
an eastern agency in effecting or fomenting change. Said’s notion of a
trans-historical ‘othering’ of the orient is conflated with the notion of an
orientalist discourse, a term derived from Foucault. The theoretical
difficulty of this conflation did not preclude its incorporation into an all-
pervasive ‘postcolonial’ critique, exemplified by Prakesh’s statement that:

15
Said, Orientalism, 2, cited in Ahmed, ‘Orientalism and after’, 179.
16
Said, Orientalism, 179-90.
17
Said, Orientalism, 190.
18
J W von Goethe, Westöstliche Diwan, cited in Said, Orientalism, 168.
19
Said, Orientalism, 122.

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The authority of orientalist knowledge … depends on the

claim that its complicity with western domination was
peripheral and episodic, not integral and enduring. To open
orientalism to anything more than a fleeting association with
power is to give up the humanist conception of scholarship
as something that rises above the particular cultural and
political conditions of its production to furnish ‘universal
human truths’.20

Contemporary art-historical and archaeological approaches

This new perspective has also had an impact within art historical
writing on the late antique and early Byzantine period. Thus, central to
contemporary scholarship into the late antique and early Byzantine east is a
critical approach that similarly calls into question the theoretical
underpinnings and ideological basis of earlier writing. Luke Lavan has, for
example, referred to the need for a shift from a concern for text, and art
objects, to milieu, or activity space.21 ‘It means reconstructing a defunct
human spatial environment that is dead and gone, rather than describing
surviving buildings and structures in modern architectural terms.’22 Central
to his approach, therefore, is the need for knowledge of the specific cultural
milieu that gave rise to these objects, rather than considering them as part of
a larger Rieglian project of cultural evolution. He emphasises the broad
spectrum of culture, rather than concentration on elite culture.
Annabel Wharton, a Courtauld-trained art-historian whose research
combines the study of art works, architecture and archaeology, shares an
interest in the conventional understandings that governed use and
perception of Byzantine buildings by their occupants. Characteristic of both
scholars, perhaps, is a distrust of the significance, the latent symbolism, of
architectural monuments. Thus, for example, the architecture of the
Neonian baptistry in Ravenna, an octagonal structure of the fifth century, is
held by Wharton, contra Krautheimer, not to be symbolic, for example of
the martyrs, or of the imperium, but rather to be semiotically significant,
advertising the power of the bishop, through its placement adjacent to a
great basilica, at the heart of the city.23 The power of monuments as forms
20
Prakesh, ‘Orientalism now’, 203.
21
L Lavan, ‘Late antique urban topography’ 171-195 in L Lavan and W Bowden
(ed), Theory and Practice in Late Antique Archaeology (Leiden, 2003).
22
Lavan, ‘Late antique urban topography’, 178.
23
Wharton, Refiguring the Post-classical City (1995) 109-110. Wharton goes as far
as using Venturi’s semiotic terminology. Against Krautheimer who argued for an
intended association with mausolea and hence with baptism as the reenactment of
the death and rebirth of Christ, she argues that the meaning of the cathedral
baptisteries came from their context, not their form. Wharton does not mention
that both the ecclesiastical complexes of Old Saint Peter’s and Milan had, from

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symbolic of more complex ideas is deemphasised. This seems to be a

reaction against the previous use of such supposed symbolic form by earlier
scholars like Riegl, Strzygowski, Baldwin Smith and Krautheimer. Such
ambivalence towards form could perhaps also be traced back to the
critiques, by Gombrich, Panofsky and others, of the Vienna
Kunstgeschichte tradition represented by the opposing figures of Riegl and
Strzygowski.24
Here I would note that their critical ‘framing’ of the argument – to
use Wharton’s terminology – takes Said’s contestational stance into
difficult territory. Lavan’s concept of meaning being produced within the
social milieu of quotidian life, a notion that resembles Bordieu’s use of the
concept of habitus, or Wharton’s emphasis on the contemporary
understanding of the participating spectator, does not seem to accommodate
other layers of meaning, by which forms, and their settings, were associated
not just with Foucaultian power, but also with tradition: a tradition that in
this case takes us back to palace complexes in Rome, in the Hellenistic east,
to Sasanid and early Byzantine complexes, within which it is surely too
much to state that they were, in their disposition of formal elements, simply
signifying power through the use of commonly understood conventions
displayed in prominent locations. A theorisation of tradition in this context
is indeed complex. Within the sculptural and building traditions of the late
antique period, one would need to take into account masons’ practices,
court protocols, participants’ understandings, and the degree of acculturated
architectural knowledge, for which the written record is indeed meagre.
The itineraries of the Book of Ceremonies of Constantine VII
Porphyrogennitus suggest a close association of certain rituals with specific
forms: the octagon within the Daphne palace, a sort of transitorium in
which the emperor would robe and disrobe, but also participate at a remove
in ceremonies within the chapel of Saint Stephen, and the octagonal
Chrysotriklinos, the throne hall built by the emperor Justin II in the mid-
sixth century, appear to possess both iconographic and formal
significance.25

their inception, included polygonal mausolea. For a discussion of architectural

semiotics, see R Venturi, D Scott Brown and S Izenour, Learning from Las Vegas
(Cambridge Mass, 1972).
24
Elsner has noted the impact of their inter-war experiences upon the generation of
German and Austrian emigre art historians, notably Panofsky, Gombrich and
Wind, and generally the hostility of scholars associated with the Cortauld Institute
towards the ‘idealist’ art historical scholarship of the ‘Vienna School’: see J
Elsner, ‘The birth of late antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901’, Art History
25 (2002) 358-379.
25
See I Lavin, ‘The house of the Lord’, Art Bulletin, 44 (1962) 1-28. Bolognesi’s
recent thesis that the Chrysotriklinos was a renovation or reconstruction of an
earlier triklinos of the probably fourth- to early-fifth-century Hormisdas palace

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The anti-monumental and pluralist approaches of Wharton and

Lavin typify what Averil Cameron has identified as the influence of recent
philosophical and literary movements.26 She notes the decline of Marxist-
based theoretical agendas, and the recent emphasis on pluralist and regional
perspectives and identities, arguing that there is a new awareness of the
relation of scholarship to larger agendas, such as east-west issues. Cameron
notes the ‘striking difference’, however, in the approaches of scholars
dealing with late antiquity from the perspective of the mediaeval west,
compared to those who approach the topic from that of the ancient world, or
the east. Such a divergence echoes in part the earlier orient oder Rom
debate.
The Orient oder Rom Debate
Wharton illustrates her anti-orientalist argument with reference to
this earlier academic stoush, of approximately 1900 to 1930. At stake were,
precisely, the cultural origins of modern northern European culture. The
question was tied up, almost inevitably, with then-current debates over
racial, ethnic and linguistic origins, concerns closely bound up with ideas of
Romantic nationalism. The two central figures were the Italian art
historian, Giovanni Teresio Rivoira (1850-1919) and Josef Strzygowski
(1862-1941). Rivoira, a fervent nationalist, sought to explain the
development of the Romanesque style, and hence medieval architecture, by
recourse to an argument for its cultural continuity from classical Rome:
northerners required Italian creativity to progress beyond their barbarous
state. In contrast, Strzygowski sought to explain the emergence of medieval
art and architecture through a theory of cultural transmission from the
Aryan east, primarily from India and Iran.27 He was keen to demonstrate

does not invalidate the proposition that the specific form was understood in
relation to its symbolism. Featherstone’s argument that the octagon form, as found
in, for example, the central audience chamber of Nero’s Golden House was used
because of its utility in connecting to adjacent structures seems forced. The latter
example combined centralised form with a cosmological representation on its now
disappeared ceiling, and could be understood as a representation of the emperor as
personification of Sol Invictus, further emphasised by the colossal adjacent statue
of Nero in that guise: see E Bolognesi Recchi-Franceschini, ‘Il Gran Palazzo’
197-242 in Bizantinistica. Rivista di Studi Bizantini e Slavi. Serie seconda 2
(2000); M J Featherstone, ‘The Chrysotriklinos seen through De Ceremoniis’ 845-
852 in L M Hoffmann and A Monchizadeh (ed), Zwischen Polis, Provinz und
Peripherie: Beiträge zur byzantinischen Geschichte und Kultur (2005).
26
A Cameron, ‘Ideologies and agendas in late antique studies’ 3-21 in Lavan and
Bowden, Theory and Practice in Late Antique Archaeology, 16. These
movements are not named, but she presumably is referring to post-structuralist
theories.
27
See G T Rivoira, Le Origini dell’architettura lombarda e delle sue principale
derivazione nei paesi d’oltr’Alpe (Rome, 1901), reprinted as The origins of

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that the origins of Gothic vaulting could be traced to the east. The
Romantic nationalist basis of his theory can be compared with the
philological ‘discovery’ of Sanskrit as an Ur-language of the Indo-European
linguistic chain, thought by Bernal to be motivated by the desire to separate
this chain from African, and specifically Semitic, influences and instead to
link it to the conception of an ‘Aryan race’.28
Implicit in both theories was a pairing of opposite terms – west and
east – but there was also a professed objectivity: their ideological biases
were concealed behind a ‘scientific’ archaeological methodology that drew
upon the interpretation of material culture, rather than philology, then
permitted construction of a general theory of origins through a method of
cultural comparisons. Cultural works were treated as evidence, rather than
artworks for evaluation by the practised eye of the connoisseur. In place of
individual interpretation characteristic of art scholarship, they pretended to
empiricism, objectivity, science and truthfulness, based on direct experience
of monuments and artefacts.
Strzygowski, in a lecture at King’s College, London, referred to his
Anglo-Saxon predecessors in this regard, citing Fergusson, the comparative,
Darwinian historian of world architecture, and George Gilbert Scott’s
writings on the origins of English Gothic, among others.29 The reference to
Gothic is no accident because, as earlier stated, it was Strzygowski’s project
to determine an eastern, Aryan origin for northern Gothic architecture, in
contrast to theories which traced a lineage back through Romanesque to
Greek and Roman architecture. He proceeded to cite examples of buildings
that he thought to be too vigorous and innovative to have derived from the
‘uniformity’ of Roman ecclesiastical architecture.
I leave aside, as sterile germs of form, the Hellenistic
basilicas – that is to say, the churches with columns, wooden
roof and exterior atrium – and thus omit the sole type which
prevailed in Rome. I concern myself only with vaulted
construction which then matured in the west into that fine
flower, called by us the Romanesque and Gothic styles. 30

Lombardic Architecture (1975); J Strzygowski, Orient oder Rom. Beiträge zur

Geschichte der spätantiken und frühchristlichen Kunst (Leipzig, 1901).
28
M Bernal, Black Athena: the Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization (New
Jersey, 1987) 224-230. Bernal’s thesis has been the subject of almost as much
scholarly criticism as Said’s Orientalism: see M Lefkowitz, Not out of Africa:
How Afrocentrism Became an Excuse to Teach Myth as History (New York,
1996).
29
J Strzygowski, ‘The origin of Christian art,’ The Burlington Magazine for
Connoiseurs 20/105 (1911) 146, 149-153.
30
J Strzygowski, ‘The Origin of Christian Art’, 152. On the significance of Gothic
art and architecture to Nazi aesthetics, and hence the response to the Gothic among

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These were seen as descendents of the spatially complex buildings

of Sasanid Persia, such as Ctesiphon and Mschatta (falsely identified as
such: see below), and subsequently those of early Byzantium from the time
of Constantine and his immediate successors: for example the first church
of the Nativity in Bethlehem, the first church of the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem, the octagonal cathedral in Antioch (perhaps built by Constantine
I) and finally the cruciform church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople,
the model for Saint Mark’s Cathedral in Venice.
Instead of looking to Rome as an origin for medieval northern
European and Byzantine architecture, Strzygowski proposed that we should
examine the cultures of the Hellenistic and Aramaic-Persian traditions. To
provide evidence of this supposed influence, Strzygowski, it is now
accepted, distorted the interpretation of material culture. Thus, for example,
the eighth-century Umayyad palace of Mschatta, in present-day Jordan, was
wrongly attributed by him to a pre-Constantinian period, thus allowing it to
be seen as a precedent for early Christian architecture, and ultimately for the
development of northern Gothic architecture. For Strzygowski, it was a
Sasanid palace, an example of the formative influence of Aryan Persia. He
firmly placed Persia in the position of the fertile source of development:
Then I went to Constantinople, Greece and Asia Minor. The
result was the conviction that Constantinople does not offer
the key to the so-called Byzantine question, but is rather a
mere focus where the rays from the east meet. Then,
followed revelation, step by step. I cite, as stages, my
books: “Orient oder Rom,” “Kleinasien,” “Mschatta,” and
“Amida.” This is about how the matter stands today.31
Strzygowski’s Mschatta thesis was demolished by the Jewish art
historian, Ernst Herzfeld, who used a complex stylistic analysis to attribute
it not to the pre-Islamic Sasanid era, but rather to the early eighth century
CE and the Umayyads. It was not, he concluded, a source for early
Byzantine architecture, but possibly in part derived from it. Herzfeld,
however, exhibited comparable racial and ethnic bias in his anaysis,
referring to stone Sasanid buildings as ‘those miserable structures’ and
claiming that the ‘unsuitable soil … of the eastern provinces’ caused the
perfection of Hellenistic stonework to deteriorate and become

German and Austrian emigre art historians in the post-war period, see Elsner,
From Empirical Evidence to the Big Picture, note 62. Note, however, Nielsen’s
recent contention that Hellenistic architecture, itself, should be analysed in relation
to Persian architecture: I Nielsen, Oriental Models for Hellenistic Palaces (1996).
31
Strzygowski, ‘The origin of Christian art’, 150.

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‘bastardised’.32 Herzfeld appeared to accept the general topography of

Strzygowski’s Aryan thesis, while rejecting his Mschatta attribution.
Such attacks on his theses only made Strzygowski more entrenched
in his opinions. Strzygowski made a distinction between abstraction in
eastern art and western objectivity and decorativeness, praising the former:
a distinction that is of interest for its resemblance to Owen Jones’s praise
for Arabic geometric ornament.33 For Jones, certain non-western, ethnically
specific traditions formed a foundational source for the overcoming of
imitation in the arts. However, unlike Jones’s narrative of cultural
evolution, an overtly racialist element increasingly entered Strzygowski’s
writing, in which the culturally productive Aryan peoples were contrasted
with the uncreative, mercantile Semitic peoples. As professor of art history
in Vienna, Strzygowski publicised views that were sympathetic to the rise
of Nazism.
In contrast to Strzygowski, Rivoira had held the architectural
production of the Byzantine and Islamic east to have derived from the
example of Rome. For Rivoira, these cultural regions were, in Wharton’s
words,
... the receptacle for the generative essence of Roman
creativity. Crudely put, Byzantine and Islamic architecture
was the offspring of a corrupt and passive east inseminated
by a virile Rome. Here again the east is feminized as a
means of establishing western domination.34

Opponents of Strzygowski’s Orient oder Rom thesis

Strzygowski’s advocacy of the generative origins of late Roman,
early Byzantine and Islamic architecture in the Persian east was, before the
break in relations effected by the First World War, apparently accepted by a
wide spectrum of American scholars. Brush has noted that Morey of
Princeton was a supporter; on the advice of Morey, his student Earl
Baldwin Smith (1888-1956) moved on to Vienna to discuss his dissertation
research with Strzygowski. Baldwin Smith’s subsequent works, primarily
his book, The Dome: A Study in the History of Ideas (1950), a study of the
32
E Herzfeld, ‘The genesis of Islamic art and the problem of Mshattā’ 7-86 in J M
Bloom (ed), Early Islamic Art and Architecture (Aldershot, 2002).
33
O Jones, The Grammar of Ornament (London, 1856) chapter 8 plates XXXI-
XXXV. Jones notes, for example, that early Arabic ornament resulted from an
imperfect borrowing from earlier architecture, but that this evolved into ‘a new
order of ideas; they never returned to the original model, but gradually threw off
the shackles which the original model imposed’. Jones thought that the impetus
for this development stemmed from the influence of the Persians, together with
eastern-influenced Byzantine ornament, reaching its apex in the Moorish ornament
of the Alhambra.
34
Wharton, Refiguring the Post-classical City, 7.

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genealogy of the dome in eastern and western architecture, and his last
work, Architectural Symbolism of Imperial Rome and the Middle Ages
(1956), evidence the influence of Strzygowski in their emphasis on an
eastern origin for western architectural forms. After a break in contacts
caused by the Great War, Strzygowski was among the illustrious group of
leading German and Austrian scholars invited to join the international
committee for the new American magazine Art Studies, co-edited by Porter
and Morey. He was also invited to lecture at either Princeton or Harvard in
the 1920s.35
Strzygowski’s reputation continued into the 1920s, despite attacks
by Herzfeld and others on some of his central theses. Indeed major figures
in archaeology still supported Strzygowski: Wharton notes that Edmund
Wiegand, the director of the German Great Palace excavations in concert
with Ernest Mamboury, writing in 1923 ‘supported a modified notion of
Strzygowski’s generative east’.36 In America, the orientalist scholar A
Kingsley Porter also embraced Strzygowski’s position.
Marchand has noted Strzygowski’s increasingly Nietzscheian and
nationalist tone in the 1930s. In a text of 1933 he defended his Nordic
thesis:
The ossified humanist, obstinately clinging to his
Mediterranean creed, has today become unnecessary.
Moreover, he is now the avowed enemy of the German Volk,
for [the Volk] has the right to its northern standpoint in
scholarship, just as the Latin races have [the right] to the
Mediterranean creed.37
In a book review of 1939, Strzygowski’s former student and
follower, the American Earl Baldwin Smith, perhaps embarrassed by
Strzygowski’s later nationalist writings in the changed cultural climate of
the impending war, turned on Strzygowski, and his use of the comparative
method to make attributions:
With Strzygowski all patternistic primitiveness in Syrian art
was the direct result of Aryan sensibility coming from Iran.
As Art takes on these racial values, the reviewer, presumably
a ‘pure Nordic,’ if a touch of Celtic does not exclude him,

35
Brush, ‘German Kunstwissenschaft and the Practice of Art History in America
after World War 1’, 10.
36
Wharton, Refiguring the Post-classical City, 3. Wiegand was the German director
of extensive excavation campaigns at Istanbul, Priene, Miletus, Didyma and
Samos. He returned to Berlin in 1911 to take the post of Director of the
Department of Classical Antiquity of the Royal Museum at Berlin.
37
S A Marchand, ‘The rhetoric of artifacts and the decline of classical humanism:
the case of Josef Strzygowski’, History and Theory 33 (1994) 106-130.

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becomes suspicious of deductions based upon the fantastic

belief that everything primitive and Nordic, and hence
everything linked by a theoretical linguistic tie to a mythical
Nordic cradle in Iranian Asia, must be superior to all the
traditions of classical culture. As a result of this obsession
Strzygowski seems to consider Christ’s faith ‘of a Nordic
nature’ … rather than Jewish, although he gives serious
consideration to the theory of Wirth which purifies
Christianity of its Jewish curse by linking Syria with the
Nordic forebears who migrated there from the lost island of
Atlantis.38
He did however note Strzygowski’s previous value:
It is only since Strzygowski has ‘gone Aryan’ that we have
begun to question the value of reading his books. Even if his
last book contains almost no new material and adds nothing
to his reputation, scholars will remember and value
Strzygowski’s brilliant and stimulating contributions to the
study of art history.39
It is relevant here that Smith differentiates between Strzygowski’s
methodology and his ideology. However, writing in 1949, the director of
the second Saint Andrew’s University excavation season of the Byzantine
Great Palace, David Talbot-Rice, revealed his more general sympathy
towards Strzygowski’s position in a letter responding to an article in the
Burlington Magazine by the Marxist art historian Theodore Antal:
It is still hardly generally realised how vital are the links that
bind this subject [art history] to social, economic, and at
times also political history. Indeed, it is possible to go even
further, and to suggest a similar relationship between art and
geography and art and race.40
He noted that he had written on the subject (of art and race) before
the war, and confirmed his agreement with Strzygowski’s methodology,
noting approvingly Strzygowski’s practice of filling in architectural
‘lacunae’ by reference to comparable examples of monuments ‘from other
areas where similar natural surroundings and a similar cultural background
existed’.41

38
E Baldwin Smith, Review of J Strzygowski, L’Ancien art chretien de Syrie,
Speculum 14 (1939) 124.
39
Baldwin Smith, Review of L’Ancien art chretien de Syrie, 126.
40
D Talbot Rice, ‘Method of art history’, The Burlington Magazine 91 (1949) 142.
41
Talbot Rice, ‘Method of art history’, 142.

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Race and romantic nationalism

Wharton is thus essentially correct in detecting the presence of racist
and romantic nationalist prejudices in certain twentieth-century scholarship
in this area, but should one follow her in arguing that such scholars
‘contributed to the construction of the orientalist Other … and,
consequently, to the authorization of the political and economic subjugation
of the Near East, as well as to the grounding of orientalism’s European
domestic counterparts, nationalism and fascism’?
The example of the American orientalist Arthur Upham Pope is
instructive. Clearly a supporter of Strzygowski’s Aryan thesis, he argued
for the Persian origins of Gothic architecture. Grigor has noted however the
central significance of Pope and his collaborators, through their writing and
public role of contributing to the construction of a nationalist myth of
origins in Iran. Indeed, as a tribute to their contribution to Iranian culture,
Pope and his partner Phyllis Ackerman were, on their deaths, interred by the
Iranian Society for National Heritage in a mausoleum in Isfahan. Here I
would note the presence of a local agency, opportunistically appropriating
Pope’s western perspective.42 In this case, European nationalist, racial and
fascist ideas were appropriated by local ‘agents’ and used to synthesise a
local, Iranian ideology.
Bastea has noted a similar local agency in nineteenth-century
Greece, whereby the local educated elite enthusiastically adopted the
northern neo-classicism brought by the architects of the new Danish
monarch, and the new symbolic centre of the Acropolis as a partial
displacement of the symbol of nostos, or homecoming, the great Byzantine
church of Haghia Sophia.43 Thus the neo-classical and romantic agendas of
northern European scholars, artists and writers were actively adopted as a
newly assumed national identity, grafted onto the old Byzantine/eastern
identity. This could be described as an example of the ‘bleaching’ that
Bernal argues took place in art historical scholarship when constructing
national narratives of origin.44
The question can also be posed of Wharton whether it is fair to
judge earlier scholars by the ethical and social standards of the present. The
late antique scholar Liebescheutz declares Wharton’s position to be unfair:
she tars ‘innocent’ scholars with the same brush as past, ideologically

42
T Grigor, ‘Recultivating “Good Taste”: the early Pahlavi modernists and their
Society for National Heritage’, Iranian Studies 37 (2004) 17-46. See also T
Grigor, ‘(Re)framing rapid modernities: American histories of Iranian
architecture, Phyllis Ackerman and Arthur Pope’, Arris, The Journal of the
Southeast Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians 15 (2004) 38-54.
43
Eleni Bastéa, The Creation of Modern Athens: Planning the Myth (Cambridge and
New York, 2000).
44
Bernal, Black Athena, vol 1.

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compromised scholars. Liebescheutz argues that many of these scholars

were simply trying to communicate new knowledge in the language they
had.45 But of course both Wharton and her intellectual source, Said, argue
this to be the false claim of objectivity by scholars who are immured in the
context of power. However, the inclusion of both methodology and
ideology into an all-embracing notion of orientalist bias is problematic.
Elsner has noted the recently renewed interest, for example, in the
pioneering studies into late antique art by Riegl, while pointing out
Strzygowski’s pioneering contribution to the development of non-European
culture:
Methodologically, and anticipating a debate still current in
art history, Strzygowski attacked the literary domination of
Classical art history by emphasizing a vast and specialized
knowledge of artefacts. In effect, he is a precursor of the
highly laudable attempt to let the object speak for itself
against the world. Despite his dire political views, if we
uphold any aspects of these intellectual positions, we remain
Strzygowski’s children.46

Said and Foucault: theoretical questions

The large claim by Wharton against the tradition of late antique
studies on the middle east goes to the heart of the problem that has been
identified by Ijaz Ahmed in relation to the claims of Said in Orientalism.
Ahmed argues that Said is in fact contradictory in both basing his
stance on Foucault, and arguing for such a persistence of an anti-oriental
bias in western culture since ancient Greece, since Foucault would not
accept such a trans-historical argument.47 Furthermore, and his later
writings confirm this, Said accepted the traditions of literary humanism, as
exemplified by Auerbach’s Mimesis, through which a genealogy from
ancient Greece through to the contemporary period could be traced through
‘… the canon of its great books’. There was within Said’s argument, albeit
ambiguously posited, a sense of origin, separating it from postmodernism.48

45
W Liebescheutz, ‘Light on the dark ages’, review of A Wharton, Refiguring the
Post-classical City, American Journal of Archaeology 102 (1998) 817-819.
46
Elsner, ‘The birth of late antiquity’, 361.
47
Ahmed, ‘Orientalism and after,’, 166.
48
Ahmed, ‘Orientalism and after,’, 167. Ahmed sees a further contradiction in
Said’s notion of a long duration of this western opposition to the orient, extending
back to ancient Greece. However, Prakesh has defended the conflict in Said’s
account between synchronic and diachronic conceptions of orientalism (ie
‘timeless’ and ‘historically determined’). The latent (synchronic) becomes actual
(diachronic) through the intention to subjugate. However, this notion too runs
counter to a Foucauldian epistemology: Prakesh, ‘Orientalism now’, 206.

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There is thus the ambiguity of a text that combines the anti-humanist

Foucault with humanism, however fragmentary in its presentation.49
However, this notion, too, runs counter to a Foucaultian epistemology.
Thus Said contradicts Foucault even as he draws upon him. In so
characterising the west, he runs the risk of essentialising the west, even as
he asserts that the west essentialises the orient.50 Ahmed suggests in fact
that Said is ‘an orientalist in reverse,’ a claim that postcolonial scholars like
Prakesh reject.
A second and more fundamental problem also emerges: that of the
basis upon which a culture can be defined as ‘western’ or ‘oriental’. This is
crucial to the study of Byzantine culture. Can the ‘east’ of ancient Greek
literature be compared easily to the orient of the modern era? Can Greek
culture really be discussed as ‘western’ at all? The Farsi word for foreigner
is farangi, a word which may have originated from the medieval Greek
word Βαραγγοθ (or Varangian) referring to a north-man. Greeks were, in
contrast, part of the territory.
Perhaps one contributor to the problem is the stress that has been
laid upon origin, deriving from the discourse of national romanticism.
Strzygowski’s culturally biased theories of the genesis of western art were
based, as I have been arguing, upon a cultural milieu of romantic
nationalism, within which the ethnic, and therefore racial, origins of a
cultural group received an exaggerated emphasis. Wharton, following Said,
posits a west from whose perspective the orient was subaltern. However for
the period described by Wharton, the late antique to early Byzantine period,
the issue of origin was far more complex. Byzantines did see themselves in
relation to a sanctioned myth of origin, by which they were depicted as true
‘Romans’, albeit Greek-speaking, and characterised themselves in contrast
to ‘easterners’. However, the chief point of distinction was religious, rather
than ethnic. Bartal has noted that in Byzantine illustrations, orientals were
depicted as Persian, and similarly for the Jewish painter or painters of the
synagogue at Dura-Europos, Israelites were depicted as ‘Roman’, whereas
non-Israelite easterners were depicted in Parthian costume.51
Of interest here is the instability of what constituted an oriental. For
the Byzantines, and the Jews of Dura-Europos, the distinction was
49
Prakesh, ‘Orientalism now’, 206.
50
Ahmed, ‘Orientalism and after’, 182-183. Ahmed’s critique is supported by
Dallmeyer, who argues that ‘Said is not reticent about citing his theoretical
mentors – prominent among them are the names of Adorno, Foucault, and Deleuze
(as well as Gramsci and Raymond Williams). But as I have tried to indicate, the
counsel of these mentors is tensional and by no means compatible’: F Dallmayr,
‘The politics of nonidentity: Adorno, postmodernism and Edward Said’, Political
Theory 25 (1997) 33-56.
51
R Bartal, ‘The image of the oriental: western and Byzantine perceptions’, Assaph,
Studies in Art History – Section B n3 (1998) 132-148.

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determined based on exegesis of biblical references: the ‘east’ followed the

biblical geography. Depiction of the ‘otherness’ of orientals was
established by their dress. For inhabitants of the early Byzantine world, the
‘other’ was a Persian. Not until the seventh century, and the Arab
invasions, would this change, later supplanted by Hun and Turkoman tribes.
In contrast, a miniature painting from the time of Mehmet the Conqueror
depicts the Ottomans as white-skinned, whereas the Greek patriarch is
shown with dark skin. What is suggested here is an ambiguity in the
understanding of east and west at that time, an ambiguity that renders
questionable any Saidian trans-historical model of difference based on race
or ethnicity.
Architecture at the border of east and west
I have previously referred to Nielsen’s study of Hellenistic palace
architecture in posing the question of whether even classical Roman
architecture could be interrelated with eastern forms and practices.
Certainly, it is possible to refer to the ‘orientating’ of Byzantine culture
through the Umayyad, Seljuk and Ottoman invasions. Here one can refer to
the examples of Theophilus’s palace of Bryas on the Asian side of the
Bosphorus,52 the palace hall of Mouchroutas in the Great Palace, and the
twelfth-century palace hall and chapel, or Capella Palatina, in Palermo
built by the Norman King Roger II.53 The exchange was particularly
evident in the late Byzantine period, as evidenced by the ‘kufic’ decoration
on Attic churches of this period, for example Hosios Loukas in Phocis,
Greece, of the mid-tenth century.54 It is arguable that these examples of
cross-cultural transfer could be understood as a kind of mimicry deriving
from the greater status and wealth of the ‘Abbāsid court in Damascus. This
issue is discussed by Magdalino:
… the superior wealth of the ‘Abbāsid court provoked the
kind of competitive reaction among the Byzantines that they
normally provoked among their country cousins in western
52
The description of Theophilus’s Bryas palace as having been built in the ‘Abbāsid
style derives from Theophilus Continuatus, Chronographia excerpts trans C
Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire 312-1453: Sources and Documents (New
Jersey, 1972) 160. See H Keshani, ‘The ‘Abbāsid palace of Theophilus:
Byzantine taste for the arts of Islam’, Al-Masāq 16 (2004) for attribution of a large
building complex in the district of Küçükyalı in Istanbul as the site of the Bryas
palace. For an opposing interpretation, see A Ricci, ‘The road from Baghdad to
Byzantium and the case of the Bryas palace in Istanbul’ 131-149 in L Brubaker
(ed), Byzantium in the Ninth Century: Dead or Alive? Papers from the Thirtieth
Spring Symposium of Byzantine Studies, Birmingham, March 1996 (Cambridge,
1998).
53
S Ćurčić, ‘Some Palatine aspects of the Cappella Palatina in Palermo’, Dumbarton
Oaks Papers 41 (1987) 125-144.
54
Mango, Byzantine Architecture, 215 and illustrations 232-233.

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Europe. Read as an expression of an inverted inferiority

complex – a reading confirmed by the concluding reference
to the Arabic model for the palace of Bryas – the story of
John the Grammarian’s embassy to Baghdad does have
something to tell us about the cultural impact of the
‘Abbāsid court on the Byzantine ‘renaissance.’ But what it
tells us is mediated through the literary perception, and the
literary construction, of the ninth century by the age of
Constantine Porphyrogennitus, when Theophanes
55
Continuatus, whoever he was, was writing.
A further example of east-west fluidity at the time of The Book of
Ceremonies, or De Ceremoniis, is provided by Mathews’s analysis of so-
called ‘Islamic styled’ mansions in tenth-century Byzantine Cappadocia.56
He notes the influence upon Byzantine practice of the recently recaptured
(965) region of the Emirate of Tarsus. These Cappadocian mansions
evidence the influence of Islamic types and motifs, for example the horse-
shoe arch, and the so-called ‘inverted T-plan’ which is traced back to sixth-
to eighth-century Islamic palaces, and turns up in Norman pleasure
pavilions in Sicily. Creswell has compared palaces like Ukhaidir with what
he identifies as an ‘Iraqi-Persian’ group of structures.57 It is also a form
which persisted in Persian domestic architecture – for example Shiraz,
Mohan and Kerman – as late as the Qajar period (1794-1921), although
Mathews fails to mention this. In summary, it is evident that, from the
eighth to tenth centuries in particular, there was a considerable two-way
cultural exchange between Constantinople, Damascus and later Palermo.
The boundaries were not racial or ethnic, but religious, and yet considerable
populations of minority religious groups lived on either side of this porous
border.58
This period and milieu of cultural appropriation and exchange has
been interpreted by Magdalino as born out of a conscious policy of
emulation of and competition with the great Islamic centres. This parallels
the process of emulation by the west of Byzantine palace structures and
motifs in the same period.59 Such an east-west cross-fertilisation is not
reflected in the De Ceremoniis Aulae Byzantinae, a book of ceremonies

55
P Magdalino, ‘The road to Baghdad in the thought-world of ninth century
Byzantium’ 195-213 in Brubaker, Byzantium in the Ninth Century.
56
T F Mathews, ‘Islamic-style mansions in Byzantine Cappadocia and the
development of the inverted T-plan’, The Journal of the Society of Architectural
Historians 56 (1997) 294-315.
57
K A C Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (Oxford, 1940)
145-146.
58
Mathews, ‘Islamic-style mansions’, 310-311.
59
See Westbrook, ‘An architecture of traces and ascriptions’.

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commissioned by Constantine VII Porphyrogennitus (913-959) during the

latter part of his reign and a work which, like the buildings of the Great
Palace constructed in this period, was composed as part of what appears to
be a conscious campaign to distinguish between the Byzantine empire and
its neighbours by emphasising its Roman heritage through conscious
emulations of past forms, translated into forms incorporating Christian
symbolism.60 In contrast, for the medieval French author of La Chanson du
Pèlerinage de Charlemagne, Constantinople and its Great Palace, the
source of the palace of the mythical Hugon of Constantinople, was a place
of exotic wonderment, that could stand for the otherness of the orient.61
Conclusion
In this paper I have placed Wharton’s argument on the biases of
western art-historical scholarship within the larger context of Said’s thesis
on orientalism, and its problematic essentialising of a western hegemonic
attitude to the orient. While Wharton’s critique of the Aryan thesis is
sound, it must be nuanced by the fact that the ideologies of racial and ethnic
origin, born of the nineteenth century in Europe, were exploited by both
western and eastern agents in the creation of narratives of cultural origin.
Furthermore, Wharton’s relativist approach leaves us with the problem of
how to account for the significance of form in architecture of the late
antique and early Byzantine period. The taint to the discussion of symbolic
form produced by its association with the Third Reich needs to be overcome
if a fuller picture of the meaningful relation of architecture and ritual in this
period is to be achieved. Certainly, however, in contrast to the narratives of
origin, it seems that a fruitful area of ongoing research will be the fertile
interstitial region at the nexus of east and west.

60
P Magdalino, ‘The bath of Leo the Wise and the “Macedonian Renaissance”
revisited: topography, iconography, ceremonial, ideology’, Dumbarton Oaks
Papers 42 (1988) 97-118.
61
M. Schlauch, ‘The palace of Hugon de Constantinople’, Speculum 7/4 (1932) 500-
514.

346