Barbarian Invasions and the Racialization of Art History*

Barbarian Invasions and the Racialization of Art History* ERIC MICHAUD If the German peoples had not been able to shake off the Roman yoke . instead of this rich and free Europe, we would only have Rome, in which every - thing was mixed and confused. Instead of the history of European kingdoms, we would have nothing but the annals of Roman history, offering the sad uniformity of Chinese chronicles. —Friedrich Schlegel, 1809 Yes, we are Oriental—by race—We are doubly Oriental, both because of our Celtic origins and because of our Germanic incursions of the fourth to the tenth centuries. We are only Latin and Graeco- Roman through our literary education. —Louis Courajod, 1891 A historical and cultural model of remarkable strength and longevity has, through its mythical dimensions, structured art-historical writing in Europe since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Surprisingly, given how profound a stamp it has left on the field—right down to the formal categories with which the discipline sought to order its objects scientifically—the historiography of art has not paid it much attention. Even before Edward Gibbon published his monumental History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–1788), eighteenth-century Europe, especial - ly France, extensively debated the role “barbarians” played in the formation of mod - ern nations. But nobody had yet assigned “the barbarian invasions” a pivotal role in European history, and nobody had seen them as the matrix and origin of contempo - rary conflicts. It was not until barbarian times returned to the heart of European * This text is the result of research conducted at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, Spring 2010 (funding provided by the Florence Gould Foundation Fund). The author wishes to thank those who made this possible. He also wishes to thank Catherine Fraixe for her invaluable editorial counsel. OCTOBER 139, Winter 2012, pp. 59–76. © 2012 October Magazine, Ltd. and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00080 by guest on 24 September 2021 60 OCTOBER Romanticism—as a reaction against the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the Napoleonic empire—that the opposition between the Germanic and the Latin races became the most common interpretative model of cultural production. 1 This model was so commonplace it became almost invisible in the discourses of art, where even now it is actively disseminated. In what follows, I will merely confine myself to sketching out the emergence of the model and its influence on the ideas of some of the art historians who contributed to the foundation of the discipline. On the basis of a geographical and climatic antithesis between North and South inherited from the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century developed, with surprising consistency, a whole arsenal of oppositions that the twentieth century then refined further. 2 To put it succinctly: thanks to their male energies, young Northern peoples—the barbarians—regenerated feminine and decadent old Roman Europe, propelling it into modernity. It was the Northerners who shifted the history of Europe northward, spreading a Christian religion that they soon embodied in an art that opposed itself in every aspect to classical antiquity, and was referred to almost interchangeably as “Romantic,” “Gothic,” or “Germanic.” It was thanks to them that Europe was able to surpass the paganism of antiquity, escaping the gloom of Latin classicism and the crushing norms of Rome, which stifled the spirit of the peoples she had conquered. At last, the North, as Montesquieu said, “forged the tools that broke the chains framed in the South.” 3 Rome and the barbarians: this model was easily transposed to Napoleonic Europe, especially after 1806, by which time the Germanic Holy Roman Empire had disappeared and Napoleon had conquered part of Prussia. Herder’s convic - tion of the necessity of another history , one written not by the victors, made its way into occupied Germany. In 1774, he described the fall of Rome “as a break in the thread of universal events”: Nothing less than a whole new world was needed to heal the tear. This world was the North. When at last everything crashed, what an inunda - tion of the South by the North! And after all the upheaval, all the hor - rors, what a new world, Nordic and Southern! . Everything was exhaust - ed, enervated, dislocated. And then a new man was born in the North. Goths, Vandals, Burgundians, Angles, Huns, Herules, Franks and Bulgarians, Slavs and Lombards arrived, settled down, and the whole new world, from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, from the Atlantic to the North Sea, was their creation! Their race! Their constitution! 4 1. See Käthe Panick, La Race Latine: Politischer Romanismus im Frankreich des 19. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Ludwig Röhrscheid Verlag, 1978); and Pierre Michel, Un mythe romantique: Les barbares, 1789 –1848 (Lyon: P.U.L., 1981). 2. See James F. Hamilton, “Structural Polarity in Mme de Staël’s De la littérature ,” The French Review 50, no. 5 (April 1977), pp. 706–12. 3. Montesquieu, De l’esprit des lois , bk. 17, chap. 5 (Geneva: Barillot, 1748). 4. Johann Gottfried Herder, Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774), in vol. 1 of Sturm und Drang: Weltanschauliche und ästhetische Schriften , ed. Peter Müller (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1978), p. 323. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00080 by guest on 24 September 2021 Joseph Noël Sylvestre. The Sack of Rome by the Barbarians in 410. 1890. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00080 by guest on 24 September 2021 62 OCTOBER After 1806, this other history no longer encompassed North and South but pit - ted them against each other, often accentuating what it saw as irreconcilable dif - ferences. Friedrich Schlegel was one of the most active artisans of this extreme opposition. At first an uncompromising admirer of Hellenism, Schlegel soon became convinced that the time had come to found a new religion, with Novalis as Christ and himself as “his valiant St Paul.” Starting in May 1799, he gave this “biblical project” a purifying and eschatological dimension: just as primitive Christianity had, against all expectations, engulfed the Roman Empire, “similarly, this new big catastrophe, in its continuous expansion, will absorb the French Revolution, whose main achievement will have been precisely to provoke this reac - tion.” 5 Visiting the ruins of the Basilica of Saint-Denis in 1806, he nostalgically recalled the “ancient days when France was conquered and governed by Germans” 6 and thought the term “German architecture” should be assigned to the Gothic style common to all Germanic peoples. Four years later, having put himself at the service of Metternich, Schlegel began teaching contemporary history in Vienna. Like Fichte, who in his “Address to the German Nation,” delivered in Berlin in 1807 and 1808, had compared the French conquest of Prussia with the Roman invasions of the first century C.E. and urged Germans to resist as their ancestors had before them, Schlegel posited that the era of invasions held the key to understanding the present correctly, and vice versa. If the past alone, he said, allowed us to evaluate the present, the present served to illuminate the obscurity of the past: “how many pages of history not understood until now have, because of the events of the last few years, clarified themselves to us!” 7 The migrations, usually seen as a kind of overflow of barbarian hordes, were in fact a struggle between the Germanic tribes and Rome; the arrival of the Huns in limited numbers had not, in fact, changed anything. The truth could only be reestablished after the barbarians had been de-barbarized and the unjust but widely spread opinion that the ancient Germans were “completely bar - baric peoples,” comparable to American savages, demolished. Only then could the phenomenon that the French and Italians obstinately referred to as “the barbar - ian invasions” finally be seen in all its brilliance and decisive importance—as a migration that, as Schlegel declared, constituted the “wall of separation that divides the ancient and the modern world.” 8 From this extraordinary event, with its incalculable consequences, modern European history flowed: if this migration had not occurred, and if the “Germanic 5. Novalis, quoted by Edouard Spenlé in Novalis: Essai sur l’idéalisme romantique en Allemagne (Paris: Hachette, 1904), pp. 244–45. The letter from May 7, 1799, can be found in Friedrich Schlegels Briefe an seinen Bruder August Wilhelm , ed. Oskar Walzel (Berlin: Speyer and Peters, 1890), p. 421. 6. Friedrich von Schlegel, “Briefe auf einer Reise durch die Niederlande, Rheingegenden, die Schweiz, und einen Theil von Frankreich,” in Poetisches Taschenbuch für das Jahr 1806 (Berlin: Unger, 1806), pp. 267, 278. 7. Friedrich von Schlegel, Über die neuere Geschichte: Vorlesungen gehalten zu Wien im Jahre 1810 (Vienna: Karl Schaumburg and Comp., 1811), p. 10. For the English translation, see Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Modern History , trans. Lyndsey Purcell and R. H. Whitelock (London: H. G. Bohn, 1849), p. 4. 8. Schlegel, A Course of Lectures , p. 4. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/OCTO_a_00080 by guest on 24 September 2021 Barbarian Invasions 63 peoples” had not thrown off “the Roman yoke,” “the rest of Europe would certain - ly have been incorporated into Rome, the

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