ABSTRACT
RIEGL’S SPÄTRÖMISCHE KUNSTINDUSTRIE was a monumental undertaking: an attempt to reinterpret the whole of late Roman culture (313–768 AD) to show that it was finer than was generally thought. Riegl’s method was to range across the artistic output of the era, including both fine and applied arts, and clearly the scale of the project grew beyond being manageable. Spätrömische Kunstindustrie (Late Roman Art Industry) as published is a very substantial book, but it covered only the earlier part of the period—from Constantine to Justinian—and led readers to expect a second volume to cover the rest. 1 It is not difficult to imagine why the second volume never saw the light of day. Even in the first volume the argument becomes convoluted, and the task would have become still more arduous in the later period. Riegl developed and sustained the idea of the Kunstwollen, the “artistic volition,” which he supposed each epoch to have, and as his period should have concluded with Charlemagne on the one hand and the Byzantine emperors on the other, it is clear that his subject matter would have become increasingly diverse and disparate as he progressed, making it increasingly difficult to show the work as being produced by a unitary will. The book began with a consideration of architecture, which gives that subject some prominence, and it was surprisingly widely read by German-speaking architectural theorists. However Riegl did not claim architecture as a special case—far from it—he rather claimed it as absolutely typical, unusual only in the clarity with which it responded to the Kunstwollen:
Basic laws are as common to all four media [i.e., architecture, sculpture, painting, decorative art], as is Kunstwollen, which rules them all; but these laws cannot be recognized with the same clarity in all media. The clearest case is architecture, next the crafts, particularly when they do not incorporate figurative motives: often architecture and these crafts reveal the basic laws of the Kunstwollen with an almost mathematical clarity. However, these laws do not appear in figurative sculpture and painting with their basic clarity. 2
