Living on the Byzantine Borders of Western Art

Abstract

In general surveys of art history in current use, Byzantine art has been separated from Western Medieval art by several strategies. Most often Early Christian and Byzantine art follows Roman art and precedes Islamic art. Advancing as late as the sixteenth or seventeenth century in Orthodox and Islamic countries, the surveys turn back to early medieval Western Europe from which another narrative proceeds directly to the Renaissance. In some survey books, the transition from Rome to Byzantium and Islam is also the moment to introduce the arts of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. These organizational strategies, which disassociate Byzantium from Western Europe, are encountered in art history's first general handbooks, published in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century by Franz Kugler and Carl Schnaase, and still earlier in the influential Philosophy of History by G. W. F. Hegel. The surveys' chronological inversions and Hegel's general assessment of Byzantium should be understood as a manifestation of Orientalism, a cultural prejudice detected in other aspects of the treatment of Byzantine art in American textbooks. Instead, it is suggested that new accountings of medieval art transcend the rigid conceptual boundaries inherited from European nationalism and explore larger problems across the many cultures and spaces of the Middle Ages.