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Persian Art Across Central Europe from the Mongols to World War II

Our panel invites to take a distant look at Persian art from a regional vantage point, with the supposition that a substantial part of what we understand as ‘Persian art’ has in fact been coined, conceptualized, and, of course, collected in Central Europe. Through a set of case studies, the panel will demonstrate that ‘Persian art’ may have been articulated throughout the times but it was particularly shaped in the wake of nineteenth-century discourses and served to provide a framework for the categorization of artistic production across a vaguely defined Western Asian horizon by accommodating the aesthetic principles that the users of the term applied to the region. This panel concentrates not as much on the career of the term as on the agents who shaped it and the available items which helped it taking shape. The protagonists are dislocated objects, uprooted from their original milieus, and innovative scholars who attempted to recreate the parent civilizations on the basis of these objets trouvés, with Vienna, the political, economic, and intellectual center of the region serving as a constant backdrop for the four papers which follow a chronological order. It will be shown that ‘Persian art’, without ever having been convincingly defined, was constantly dependent on the different politics, interests, tastes, and theories which induced its use. The papers will illustrate not only the diversity of its presence and usage in Central Europe, chiefly Austria, but also its occasional permutations within the scholarly output of individual scholars. The first paper, Persian Textiles in the Time of the Mongols - aspects of their production and distribution (Juliane Fircks), will analyse how silk fabrics traveled up to medieval Central Europe and how they were divided at the end of their journey. Concentrating on early studies about the Pre-Mongol period, Katharina Otto-Dorn and her view on Persian (Seljuk) Art in Anatolia and Persia (Joachim Gierlichs) will discuss the attitudes of Vienna-educated scholars towards the arts of the Seljuqs. Parallel Odysseys of Ernst Herzfeld and Ernst Diez (Zehra Tonbul) will move on to the twentieth century to show the influence of the respective German-Austrian backgrounds of these two major scholars on the evolving discourses of Iranian/Turkish art in both national and international contexts. Finally, Arthur Upham Pope and Persian Art in Interwar Central Europe (Yuka Kadoi) will investigate the involvement of this twentieth-century doyen of Persian art studies in Central European museum affairs.

Presentations

Arthur Upham Pope and Persian Art in Interwar Central Europe
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Arthur Upham Pope (1881-1969) was an American pioneer in the study of Persian art, as well as an energetic, self-made entrepreneur who was instrumental for the awareness of Persian cultural heritage in the form of public events, such as exhibitions and congresses. The aesthetic criteria he, his wife Phyllis Ackerman (1893-1977) and their contemporary colleagues established for assessing the importance of cultural remains from modern Iran and Central Asia thus greatly influenced the way many people worldwide, including Iranian themselves, came to understand the art, architecture and material culture of the Persianate lands in the early 20th century.

This paper readdresses Pope’s activities in Central Europe during the inter-war period and reconsiders Pope’s role as a global advocate who mediated closer scholarly and curatorial cooperation between Central Europe (including Germany and Russia) and West Europe/North America. Compared with Pope’s other, well-known activities—such as the International Exhibition of Persian Art at the Burlington House in London (1931) and the publication of A Survey of Persian Art (1938-9), little has been critically analysed on his Persian art enterprise in Central Europe. The proposed paper thus elaborates on the historiographical background of his interaction with art historians, curators, collectors and dealers in the region, drawing upon various types of archival records (letters, photographs, etc.) and actual Persian objects.

Mongol Invasion and Collective Memory in Central Europe - The Chasuble of Saint Hedwig in Hall (Tirol)
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The former Royal Chapter of Hall in Tirol preserves an old chasuble. Its history goes back to one dramatic chapter in the History of Central Europe – the invasion of the Mongols. The textile material is much older than the garment, which belongs to baroque times. Style and technical features make it perfectly clear that this precious silk is an example of the panni tartarici, which filled the European Markets in the 13th and 14th centuries.
Local tradition says that the chasuble was made of a robe of Saint Hedwig, who was the Duchess of Silesia. The silk is to young to have been owned by Saint Hedwig herself, who died in 1243. But the connection is not a modern invention. Written records tell us that “a robe called Saint Hedwig’s” was given to the Royal Chapter in Hall by Archduke Karl von Habsburg (1590-1624) on the occasion of his election as Head of the Teutonic Order in 1618. He had been bishop of Breslau in Silesia before and had had the possibility to take possession of a true or false relic of Hedwig. She was one of the few Silesian aristocrats who survived the invasion of the Mongols in Silesia in 1240. A large part of her vita describes the “Battle of Wahlstatt” near Liegnitz. Under the lead of her son, Duke Henry II, local noblemen and knights of the Teutonic order fought against the Mongols. Henry lost his life in the battle. Contemporaries and successors saw him as a Christian martyr; and Hedwig was venerated as the mother of a martyr.
My investigation will focus on the analysis of the object and of its history from the 17th century back to 1300. The textile material belongs to a group of silks woven in the Ilkhanid Empire. It wish to demonstrate on which ways the pannus tartaricus could have found its way from Iran to Central Europa. To reconstruct the network of contacts between the Ilkhanid Empire and Europe I will compare the object with textiles preserved in Vienna, Regensburg, and Prague. Finally, I ask for the genesis of the idea that the silk from the Ilkhanid Empire preserved in the chasuble was a relic of Saint Hedwig, mother of the knight, who fought against the mongols.

Juliane von Fircks
Mainz-Berlin, Germany

Parallel Odysseys of Ernst Herzfeld and Ernst Diez
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This paper aims to present the conditions around Herzfeld’s departure from Iran in 1934 together with the reasons behind Ernst Diez’ leave of Turkey in 1949, as parallel instances of confrontations of fin-de-siècle art historical scholarship. The common Austrian-German background of these scholars and their pioneering role in defining Islamic, Persian and Turkish art historiography deem these controversies of 1930s and 1940s, as signifiers of change in their reception in later socio-political contexts. The confrontations are marked by the involvement of the transforming nationalisms in Iran and Turkey, but also both art historians confront change in their home countries. Herzfeld escapes Nazism in Germany to States, and although Diez conforms to the political circumstance in Vienna, he becomes an outcast in the changing art historical scholarship of Vienna’s Art Historical Institute. The paper reads these many-fold controversies as parallel odysseys of both biographical and academic nature, from expeditions to expatriations and to exiles.

Katharina Otto-Dorn and Her View on Persian (Seljuk) Art in Anatolia and Persia
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Katharina Otto-Dorn (1908-1999) studied with Josef Strzygowski (1862-1941) in Vienna, and received her PhD (dissertation on Sasanian Silver) in 1934. She moved to Berlin, where she volunteered for a year at the “Islamische Abteilung” under Ernst Kühnel (1882-1964). In 1935, aged 27, she went to Istanbul and stayed in Turkey for almost 10 years. After WW II, in 1954 she was appointed Professor for Islamic Archaeology & Art History in Ankara (Ankara Üniversitesi, Dil, Tarih va Gografya Fakültesi). During the next 10 years she established a successful institute, which created a generation of scholars who would become the leading figures in Turkish Islamic Art and Architecture in Turkey for the next 30 years. In her “Ankara period” she researched and wrote on various topics mainly related to the Seljuk period contributing substantially to what is known as Anatolian Seljuk Art.
This paper will try to analyse - for the first time - some of her influential articles as well as her widely used “Kunst des Islam” (1st ed. 1964) and the unpublished 2nd revised and enlarged edition (Art and Architecture of the Islamic World) in order to determine how she defined and described the Art and Architecture of the Seljuk period, both in Anatolia and Persia.