"Unframing" Byzantine ivories: painterliness, reliefs, and the place of Byzantine art in early twentieth-century German scholarship

Abstract

This paper scrutinises Adolf Goldschmidt and Kurt Weitzmann’s publication on Byzantine ivories to reveal its entanglement with contemporaneous art theories and art historical discourses. It identifies the bedrock of the authors’ observations in Heinrich Wölfflin’s stylistic dialectic and in the critical writings by Adolf von Hildebrand and Aloïs Riegl devoted to the subject of relief. Such contextual and critical approaches to the publication allow for a reconsideration of some of the criticisms addressed to it while further questioning the reliability of its analysis. Nevertheless, the article intends to reappraise the innovativeness of the volume and its importance for the history of the discipline, offering an opportunity to reflect on the early research practices that produced some of Art History’s foundational works.