Over one hundred years ago, Alois Riegl, an influential scholar of the ‘‘Vienna School’’ so prominent in the early development of art history, explored how Egyptian ornament participated in widespread artistic trends of Late Antiquity. In contrast, the scholarship of Josef Strzygowski, also of the Vienna School, characterized what he understood to be the autochthonous traits of Late Antique Egyptian ‘‘folk’’ art (Elsner 2002; Torok 2006b). Studies in line with Stryzgowski’s characterization of Coptic art as unschooled and in opposition to a Hellenism nearly exclusive to Alexandria predominated well into the 1960s. Abetted by a burgeoning market for Coptic art and neglect of confirmatory archaeological context, such views allowed many works ‘‘said to have come from Egypt,’’ modern pastiches composed of textile fragments, recarved sculptures, and outright forgeries to infiltrate the corpus of documented works (Russman 2009). Art historians have since come to pay much closer attention to details of materials and techniques, compositional and icono-graphic repertories, and archaeological evidence. Interestingly, the role of Alexandria is again at center stage in studies of widespread trends affecting artistic production, albeit now within the urban matrix of the later Roman Empire extending across Egypt (McKenzie 2007; Kiss 2007). Just as Late Antique art is both universalizing and intensely local through the ways in which Graeco-Roman traditions were adapted in combination with local traditions and those from elsewhere, Egyptian art of Late Antiquity was receptive to multiple historic legacies and to exotic artistic trends, and grounded in an aesthetic that was capacious, adaptive and, ultimately, transformative (Torok 2005).
World History
