Comparativism in Art History by Elsner Jas;

Author:Elsner, Jas;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Figure 7.4

The façade of the Umayyad palace Mshatta in Pergamon Museum, Berlin, most probably 1931

Source: Islamic Museum, Berlin

The use of both adjectives eingenartig (unique) and einheitlich (uniform) is revealing. Herzfeld was programmed to search for the uniqueness of Islamic art. The presupposition that Islamic art was a single entity that could be defined as unique and hence divorced from the more general aesthetic trends of Late Antiquity is highly problematic. It assumes that Islamic art has a distinct and special identity, one that is generalizable forever thereafter, in the very moment it attains its first appearance as novel or different, which comes to mean original and distinctive. This moment is of course, for Herzfeld, the moment of rupture. True Islamic art cannot really evolve after this, nor is it able to unfold from the aesthetic forms and norms defined at its originary moment. The second adjective, einheitlich, which can be translated as uniform or unitary or even homogeneous, raises a further methodological problem. It imagines the art of Islam as a monolithic aesthetic phenomenon encompassing the whole Dar al-Islam (meaning, the whole Muslim Empire). These two problems in Herzfeld’s writing on Mshatta reveal his logic and his matrix of reasoning. His definition of what Islamic art is posits Mshatta’s style as a single moment within its origins, from which a sole solid and uniform aesthetic is generated, that comes to fruition in Baghdad. On top of this, conforming to the juxtaposition of jahiliyya (the age of ignorance, that is the world of Arabia before Muhammad’s revelation) vis-à-vis divine law, he even posits the pre-Islamic Hellenistic art as in opposition to early Islamic art. He says:

When Hellenism conquered the world under Alexander the Great, the conquerors were the most artistically gifted people on earth; thus the victorious progress of Alexander’s armies simultaneously represented the victorious progress of Hellenistic art. In contrast, the armies of Umar und al-Walid had neither artisans nor artists among their ranks; they lacked all artistic traditions and aesthetic requirements. There can have been few world conquerors as hostile to any form of fine art as these Arabs.40

The Arabs in the age before Muhammad live in a cultural vacuum, which has nothing to do with Hellenistic tradition and which cannot shape any artistic style, until – we must assume – they accept monotheistic religion. Jahiliyya, the age of ignorance, is thus applied to the story of art. Idolatry and paganism are implicitly presented as beliefs with no visual culture, and the possibility of an indigenous tradition of artistic practice in Arabia is totally annulled. But if access to the Classical is denied, Islamic art would seem to emerge from a cultural void. Indeed, the beveled style discovered by Herzfeld in Samarra made this kind of argument possible by emphasizing a sharp formalist turning point in the evolution of the classical vegetal motif. The beveled style marked the end of the Late Antique art in the classical tradition and opened the new era of the arabesque – Herzfeld’s synonym for the monolithic art of Islam.

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