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‘South Opposed to East and North’: Adrian Stokes and Josef Strzygowski. A study in the aesthetics and historiography of Orientalism
Author(s) -
Kite Stephen
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.0141-6790.2003.02604002.x
Subject(s) - orientalism , historiography , inscribed figure , orient , the renaissance , art history , art , classics , history , literature , archaeology , far east , geometry , mathematics
The ‘South Opposed to East and North’ of this paper's title comes from the third section of Adrian Stokes's book The Quattro Cento of 1932 – subtitled A Different Conception of the Italian Renaissance , and the founding work of his aesthetic. The Quattro Cento can be viewed as a response to the need expressed by Strzygowski in his Origin of Christian Church Art of 1923 ‘for a work dealing with the penetration of the South by the North of Europe and the subsequent rise of the so‐called Renaissance’; a North, in Strzygowski's view, already permeated by influences from the East. Within the contested terrain inscribed in the term, this paper isolates three key ‘Orients’ crucial to Stokes's Quattro Cento aesthetic: the experiential Orient of his Conrad‐inspired voyage to the East; the Orient of the British Museum; and that of the Orientalist texts – primarily the now‐marginalized Josef Strzygowski. As a study in the historiography of Orientalism, the essay examines how Adrian Stokes inflected his experience and readings of these Orients to re‐evaluate European – specifically Italian Renaissance – culture.