The Vienna School of Art History: Empire and the Politics of Scholarship, 1847–1918

Chapter 8: Between East and West

beTween eaST and weST 167 the monarchy’s specific history. Because of the long history of Austrian contact (and conflict) with the Ottoman Empire, the term “Orient” bore powerful associations with Islamic culture, but it also had connotations that were particular to the Habsburg experience . Specifically, after the failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1683, the Austrian Empire rapidly expanded its territories southward and eastward and came to encompass a population of considerable confessional and linguistic diversity. A prominent element in this encounter with cultural difference was the Eastern Orthodox Church; not only did Austria come to encompass large numbers of Serbs and Romanians within its borders, but also, after the Congress of Berlin in 1878, it had to contend with independent Serbian and Romanian states, as well as the significant Serb population of Bosnia. “Orient” thus signified not only the Islamic Middle East but also the Orthodox eastern fringes of the Empire at a time when, as Larry Wolff has pointed out, the very idea of “eastern” Europe was created as an instrument of political, social, and cultural division.4 The history of the complex political entanglements of Austria-Hungary in east central Europe and the Balkan Peninsula has been exhaustively examined, and it is not the aim of this discussion to rehearse the issues again.5 The point here is merely to stress that the difference between Catholicism and Orthodoxy functioned as a cultural and political boundary. As the great-power rivalry with Russia over influence in the Balkans became increasingly fraught during the second half of the nineteenth century, confessional affiliation gained political significance . It is against this background that the meaning of the “East” in Austria-Hungary has to be interpreted. orientalism and tHe byzantine revival On 8 May 1856 Kaiser Franz Joseph laid the final stone of the Museum of Military History in the Arsenal in Vienna (fig. 15). Opened in 1869, it was designed by the Danish architect Theophil Hansen, who would go on to enjoy a successful career in the capital, designing a number of signature buildings on the Ringstrasse, including the concert hall of the Vienna Musikverein (1870), the Academy of Fine Arts (1876), and the Parliament Building (1883).6 The museum was the first purpose-built museum building in Vienna, constructed to glorify “the honor of arms, military glory, and the unity of Austria” and to provide “a visible support for the throne of all Austria.”7 Hansen had studied with Karl Friedrich Schinkel and had designed a number of neoclassical buildings in Athens in the previous two decades, but for the museum he opted for an eclectic neo-Byzantine structure, with Gothic elements, references to the medieval Arsenal of Venice, Moorish ornamental details, and prominent neo-Romanesque round arches on the façade of the central section.8 Hansen’s building belongs in the context of the wider Byzantine revival that took place across Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century. Initially the object of an exoticizing, antiquarian gaze, Byzantine architecture came to be adopted and championed as a vital language for the present.9 Most famously, John Ruskin sought to rehabilitate Byzantine culture, in a pointed rebuttal of Gibbon’s negative views of Byzantium as a phenomenon of decay and decadence.10 In Prussia, neo-Byzantine architecture became the object of royal attention when Friedrich Wilhelm IV, after traveling to 168 The Vienna School of arT hiSTory Ravenna and Venice, attempted to introduce the style to his kingdom. In addition to designing his own neo-Byzantine projects , such as the Friedenskirche in Potsdam (1843–48) and the Church of the Redeemer in Sacrow (near Potsdam, 1841–43), the Prussian monarch sponsored the architect Wilhelm Salzenberg to document the architecture and mosaics of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul.11 In Austria neo-Byzantine architecture frequently was indistinguishable from the eclectic constructs of Moorish revivalism and was particularly visible as the language of the large numbers of synagogues that were built across the Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. The largest example was the Dohány Street Synagogue in Budapest, built by the Viennese architect Ludwig Förster between 1854 and 1859, but there were numerous others, including the Leopoldstadt synagogue in Vienna (1858), also by Förster, the synagogue in Czernowitz (1873–78), by the Polish architect Julian Zachariewicz, and Vojtěch Ullman’s so-called Spanish Synagogue in Prague (1868). As Ákos Morav...