Legacy
In general Strzygowski's work was characterized by a total reliance on formal comparisons, at the expense of historical context, and by a pervasive exaltation of the peoples of the "North" and "East," with an attendant disdain for "Mediterranean" culture. This latter tendency led him to embrace the racist ideology of the Nazis and to support Adolf Hitler.
If Strzygowski's erratic methodology and racial prejudices have largely discredited his own scholarship, his breadth of geographical interest helped to establish Islamic art and (ironically, given his own anti-Semitism, something which, incidentally, Ernst Gombrich denied in his conversations with Didier Eribon), Jewish art as legitimate fields of study. Certain of his students (most notably Otto Demus, Fritz Novotny, and Ernst Diez) were successfully able to pursue these interests without subscribing to their teacher's ideology.
Read more about this topic: Josef Strzygowski
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“What is popularly called fame is nothing but an empty name and a legacy from paganism.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)