Search

Establishing the identity, and the chronology, of the Persian religious reformer Zarathustra has been of great interest to western scholars since antiquity—but became an urgent question in the early modern era. Scholars trained chiefly in biblical exegesis particularly wished to know if Zarathustra had preached a monotheistic or a dualistic faith. The complexity of the source material, however, made it difficult to decide this question, and impossible to securely place Zarathustra in time. Even after the deciphering of Old Avestan, the question of Zarathustra’s dates has remained enormously fraught, and dependent on inferences from classical or biblical texts. The ongoing quest to date Zarathustra shows us that ‘orientalism’ as a scholarly enterprise exhibits many continuities across the centuries and that chronology continues even today to be a crucial and controversial subject.

This essay focuses on two different Austrian art historians, Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg and Josef Strzygowski, both of whom made very significant contributions to Austrian, and more broadly, European, discussions of the origins and meaning of Dalmatian art and architecture. Eitelberger first visited the Dalmatian coast in 1859, seeking medieval monuments, and finding what he called an artistic terra incognita unknown to western European scholars. The moment was a hotly political one: just 10 years earlier, the Hungarians, who controlled northern Croatia had rebelled against Austrian rule. The Croatians had then taken up arms against the Hungarians, in the hopes that they would be rewarded by the Austrians for their loyalty. Strzygowski thought he could use Croatian art to prove his claims about the superficiality of classical forms and the real origins of all important styles in the Aryan East. Keywords: Croatian art; Dalmatian coast; Hungarians; Josef Strzygowski; Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg