Josef Strzygowski

"[2]: 117 Following his Roman sojourn, Strzygowski travelled to Thessaloniki, Mount Athos, Saint Petersburg, and Moscow, thus developing a greater acquaintance with Byzantine and Russian art.

"[3] Orient oder Rom was explicitly framed as an attack on Die Wiener Genesis (1895), by the Viennese art historian Franz Wickhoff, which had posited a Roman origin for the late antique style, a thesis that was pursued further by Alois Riegl in his Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, which also appeared in 1901.

The ensuing controversy continued for decades and, if it resulted in no clear resolution, significantly raised the prominence of late antique art as an academic field of study.

"[2]: 121  Strzygowski's own radical pan-Germanism had already become clear in his popular Die bildende Kunst der Gegenwart (1907) ('The visual art of the future'), in which he praised the painting of Arnold Böcklin and called for a new German artist-hero to reject the heritage of classical antiquity and the Renaissance.

"In the final years, Strzygowski embraced the Nazi sentiments of racism and nationalism, although these appeared to be more the logical conclusion of his earlier theories than any attempt to court the political authorities.

In general Strzygowski's work was characterized by a reliance on formal comparisons at the expense of historical context, and by a pervasive exaltation of the peoples of the "North" and "East", with an attendant disdain for "Mediterranean" culture.