Endosmosis: bio-geographical sources of a World Art History

Abstract

The establishment of non-European art historical scholarship at the University of Vienna narrates the influence of turn of the twentieth century German academic exchanges between natural sciences and the humanities. A reading of the historiographical approaches of the works of its scholars, Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941), Ernst Diez (1878-1961) and Heinrich Glück (1889-1930) on Islamic, Byzantine, Persian, Armenian and Turkish art histories connect to recent biological and geographical research centred at the University of Leipzig. Their works unfold a new understanding of the world’s art geography consequential to the influence of biogeographical approaches of Friedrich Ratzel (1844-1904) and read parallels to Ratzel’s impact on the universal historical approaches Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915) and the Diffusionist school in anthropology, in which the world geography is imagined as an intelligible organism with migratory and adaptive mechanisms. The approach made possible for these scholars of the Vienna School to take in account of the previously uncharted areas of art history, by tracing flows and interactions of art forms. The discussion on the biogeographical approaches of Diez, Glück and Strzygowski opens new perspectives into the history of world art history and challenges the colonial and the ethnographical emphasis on the museological, object-based premise of non-European art historiography.