Scholars and their Intellectual Resources: Document Spotlight from the Metropolitan Museum Herzfeld Archive

I am writing today to share an announcement and some related thoughts about the utility of archival resources for the study of Samarra and Islamic art.

First the announcement:

The Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art is very happy to announce the online release of the first series of drawings from our portion of the Ernst Herzfeld Papers. For readers who may be new to the subject, Ernst Herzfeld was a German archaeologist who held the first large scale excavations at Samarra between 1911 and 1913. His archive is now dispersed, much like the Samarra Finds themselves, between several institutions, chiefly the Archives of the Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington, D.C., the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
 

In August, the Met placed over 150 drawings of monuments in Syria, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Egypt made by Herzfeld and a small number of drawings made by his colleague Carl Theodor Brodführer online in a searchable database. Herzfeld published some of these drawings in articles and books, but an equal number represent alternate or pre-publication forms of the drawings and some are unpublished altogether. Researchers can access the material through the Met’s Watson Library Digital Collections Website, where a finding aid detailing the contents of the Islamic Department’s papers is also available. The Department of Islamic Art intends to eventually publish all of its holdings and next in line are Herzfeld’s watercolors and line-drawings of architectural ornament from Samarra, so stay tuned! Here is the link to the documents currently online:

http://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/landingpage/collection/p16028coll11

Along with the announcement, I wanted to take the opportunity to spotlight a group of documents from the first released series that I found to be particularly interesting. Needless to say, there is much of interest in the Herzfeld Papers. Many drawings, for example, document buildings that have been altered or even destroyed, providing valuable data on endangered cultural resources. Others are simply beautiful to look at in and of themselves. Herzfeld’s talents as a trained architect come through strongly in his meticulous renderings of ornamental details and his analytical sections and plans. The group of drawings I want to showcase, however, is neither particularly pleasing to the eye nor contains information about a specific monument or object. In fact, they do not illustrate Herzfeld’s findings at all, but rather document Herzfeld’s interest in the work of another European scholar.


Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, eeh444

Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, eeh606

Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, eeh608

Ernst Herzfeld Papers, Metropolitan Museum of Art, eeh605


The four pages shown above are torn from an 8 x 12 cm notebook. Each contains a sketch of a vegetal motif along with Herzfeld’s shorthand notes and references to page and figure numbers. All are copied from the same source: a book written by the Viennese art historian Alois Riegl (d. 1905), entitled Stilfragen.

Stilfragen, often translated to English as Problems of Style, was published in 1893 to much acclaim. Its subtitle, Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Laying the Groundwork for a History of Ornament), speaks to Riegl’s ambition to encourage a new type of art history that focused on vegetal ornament: the flowing vines and blossom motifs found on column capitals and the spaces between figural scenes on Greek vases that his colleagues had largely ignored. Riegl’s theories have received a great deal of scholarly attention over the last two decades, and for more information about him and his intellectual milieu I will point readers to Margaret Olin, Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art (University Park, PA, 1992), and Jaś Elsner, “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901,” Art History 25 (2002). Both offer excellent analyses of Riegl's scholarship and its impact.

In addition to opening up a new field of inquiry for the discipline, Riegl’s Stilfragen also made what was at the time a bold argument: that both the Islamic arabesque and its Western-European counterpart were descended from the Greek acanthus motif, which was in turn descended from the Egyptian lotus. Throughout the text, Riegl used line drawing illustrations like the ones Herzfeld copied onto his notepads above to demonstrate the links between different vegetal elements from disparate Mediterranean artistic traditions. The result was a dense but powerful argument for the origins of an important ornamental style.

A glance at Herzfeld’s publication of the vegetal ornament from Samarra is enough to show that he was inspired to achieve a similar goal. In his Wandschmuck der Bauten von Samarra und seine Ornamentik (Berlin, 1923), Herzfeld classified the architectural fragments bearing vegetal motifs found at the site by style and, within style, by motif. Each pattern recieved a detailed formal analysis. Herzfeld's work was not simply a catalog of his finds but rather an attempt to describe the nature of the city's architectural ornament and make a case for its historical and geographic origins.

I am not the first to point to the importance of Riegl’s ideas to Herzfeld’s methodology or to the study of Islamic art in general (see Barry Flood’s essay “Faith, Religion and the Material Culture of Early Islam,” in the exhibition catalog for Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition, for example). However, the evidence from the archive is significant as tangible proof of what sorts of topics sparked the interest of Samarra’s first major excavator. These documents also raise several questions of interest to Samarra studies: What did Herzfeld himself believe about the way that architectural ornament evolved over time? What about Riegl’s work particularly interested Herzfeld or resonated with his aims as an archaeologist? And most importantly, how might these ideas have affected the way that Herzfeld excavated and published the Samarra Finds?

In her article “Between East and West: The Wall Paintings of Samarra and the Construction of Abbasid Princely Culture” (Muqarnas vol. 25), Eva Hoffman asks similar questions about Herzfeld’s analysis of Samarra’s wall paintings, examining the intellectual context in which the material was published along with the resources available to Herzfeld at that time. The items spotlighted here and the light they shed on Herzfeld's intellectual background suggest that her line of inquiry might be fruitful for the carved stucco from Samarra as well.

Such archival snippets allow us to understand some of the intellectual resources Herzfeld had at his fingertips when processing and publishing his own archaeological finds. They thus provide insight not only into the history of Islamic art, but also into the history of the history of Islamic art.

Matthew Saba

Mellon Curatorial Fellow, Department of Islamic Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art

Samarra in Boston

Dear Samarra-Finds Readers,

In 1923 the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston accessioned a type-set of finds from Ernst Herzfeld’s excavations at Samarra that it had purchased from the British Museum’s Department of Ceramics and Ethnography. Now housed in the Department of the Art of Asia, Oceania and Africa, the Samarra finds in the MFA include a range of ceramics and glass objects, including lustre ware tiles, mosaic tesserae, and imported Chinese wares. Given the recent centennial of the Herzfeld excavations, and the efforts – by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, the Freer/Sackler in Washington DC, and others – to bring to light the material and documentation from this great site, Dr Laura Weinstein, the Ananda Coomaraswamy Curator of South Asian and Islamic Art at the MFA, hopes to begin a similar project on the Samarra finds in Boston.

During the spring of 2014, this type-set was studied and re-incorporated into the Museum’s comprehensive database system. The aim was to augment the objects’ catalogue information, especially given the great deal of scholarship devoted to the field since the set had come to the Museum. The objects were measured and photographed and their descriptions, provenance, and dating were completely updated, with relevant citations to similar objects or related finds from excavations in the region being added to this information. 

As Oliver Watson has argued in a recent article on Islamic glazed pottery, the Samarra material is hardly the result of Iraqi merchants simply imitating imported ceramics from East Asia. The development of Islamic ceramics in the 9th century CE is a much more complicated process where both ideas, techniques, and styles were exchanged back and forth between East and West, and throughout Central Asia and the Mediterranean. The ceramic sherds in the MFA type-set are a great example of this variety and diversity. Certainly some Chinese celadon and white wares can be identified as imports. But a variety of green splashed, blue-on–white, and tin-glazed sherds, likely produced in Basra, are also represented. A large number of the possible Chinese imports exhibit a honey-brown glaze. As more and more research has come out in recent years on Chinese kiln sites from the 9th and 10th century, it may be possible to identify the exact locations of where this material originated before reaching Samarra. 

There are also some examples of polychrome lustre, often in an olive and brown sheen. One fragment of a cup in ruby red lustre is nearly identical to one shown in a plate from Friedrich Sarre’s publication of the Samarra ceramics. The finest examples of lustre use can be seen on the large earthenware tiles. In gold, green, and ruby red and brown polychrome, these were truly impressive tiles used to decorate very ornate and lavish rooms. 

Res 23.106 Ceramic tile fragment with green glaze (photo: Department of the Art of Asia, Oceania and Africa, MFA, Boston)

Res 23.109 Ceramic tile fragment with lustre decoration (photo: Department of the Art of Asia, Oceania and Africa, MFA, Boston)

There is also a nice variety of unglazed pottery, including the typical incised, moulded, and stamped wares, and sherds of the Sasanian-Islamic dishes that are sometimes described as semi-glazed for their gold-yellow sheen. A few of the ceramic sherds, however, were less predictable.

Some earthenware sherds with brown and black painted geometric designs were described in earlier MFA documentation as having been excavated “below the Islamic city.” Whether this was part of Herzfeld’s original notes or a later indication of the pre-Islamic nature of the pottery is unclear. Surely though, these examples of what is often termed “Samarra Fine Ware” by archaeologists working on Late Neolithic Mesopotamia, are a fine example of the Samarra region’s incredible history of human occupation. Of course we celebrate Samarra for the way the site has revolutionized our understanding of Islamic history, architecture, ceramic traditions, and more. But it’s a tribute to Herzfeld’s efforts that finds from other periods, in this case circa 6000 BC, were also collected and saved for further study.

Res 23.114 Ceramic sherd of ‘Samarra Fine Ware’ (photo: Department of the Art of Asia, Oceania and Africa, MFA, Boston)

The glass objects in the collection include a variety of fragments of flasks, bottles, bowls, and saucers, with many parallels to those in the Samarra glass publication by Carl Johan Lamm. A few shards are likely from modern vessels, but many objects were in surprisingly good condition, especially a group of very small clear flasks. 

Res 23.15 and Res 23.16 Moulded glass fragments used in decorative wall panels (photo: Department of the Art of Asia, Oceania and Africa, MFA, Boston)

In addition, the collection includes a wealth of decorative pieces and architectural fragments. There are a large group of glass window shards, often in blue or brown. But there are also several transparent, moulded glass ornaments for decorating walls, along with a group of black and green glass mosaic tesserae. Finally, the collection includes some fragments of millefiori glass which also decorated the palaces of Samarra. While finds of smaller glass vessels and window glass are to be expected at any site of this period, it is exceptional and very telling of the grandeur of Samarra that so many intricate decorative pieces and fragments also remain.

Res 23.39 and Res 23.40 Glass fragments in millefiori style (photo: Department of the Art of Asia, Oceania and Africa, MFA, Boston)

In all, the type-set of Samarra finds at the MFA provides an excellent sampling of finds from Herzfeld’s excavations with many parallels to other museums’ collections and the early publications. The vast majority of the finds still exhibit their original red Herzfeld number, and it is our hope that through the larger collaboration of this international Samarrafinds effort, some site provenance can be ascertained for these objects in the future. 

Greg Williams

Freelance archaeologist specializing in Islamic ceramics,

previously intern in the Department of the Art of Asia, Oceania and Africa, MFA, Boston