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Document Details : Title: Un'apologia del primo Strzygowski e l'infanzia degli studi sui manoscritti miniati orientali Author(s): BERNABÒ, Massimo Journal: Orientalia Christiana Periodica Volume: 90 Issue: 1 Date: 2024 Pages: 209-237 DOI: 10.2143/OCP.90.1.3293761 Abstract : This paper considers on the first thirty years of Josef Strzygowski scholar activity, from his Ph.D. up to 1911, the year when he published his last essay on illuminated manuscripts. Strzygowski was branded as a supporter of Nazism, this is true: racism and Aryanism were part of his vision, but only in his last years of life. In his early years, he was the first to apply an innovative method of studying to illustrated manuscripts: he considered the historical context, transcribed inscriptions in a variety of languages, gave an accurate description of the illuminations, focused on iconographical relations and stylistic comparisons. He did all this systematically. His method has marked a generation of German scholars in the first half of the twentieth-century (Goldschmidt, Weitzmann, Buchthal, Demus and others); they founded the modern approach to book illumination and taught it all over the world, as they fled Nazism and took refuge in American and British universities. The late research of Strzygowski is out of bound of the paper. More than Ajnalov, Strzygowski revolutionized current ideas on the origin of Medieval art in both the West and Byzantium. His numerous pupils and followers spread his theories in every country. The paper is divided into two sections: the first one talks about the ‘early Strzygowski’, the second section describes his writings on book illumination in a chronological order. |
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