| This thesis traces the scholarship concerning medieval Armenian architecture and architectural sculpture from its beginnings in the eighteenth century to the present, focusing on questions of origins, development, and diffusion.;Chapter One explores travel accounts and surveys of the field which launched the main themes of the study of Armenian architecture: its origins and relations to the West, Byzantium, and Persia. The second chapter explores the work of Armenian art historian T'oros T'oramanyan. Both chapters assess the validity of the theories presented as well as the contexts that informed them. For example, T'oramanyan's theories regarding the sources of Armenian church architecture are shown to reveal the influences of Nikolai Marr and Auguste Choisy, and the contemporary political world, which included the Armenian genocide in Turkey in 1915.;Chapter Three, the main chapter, evaluates Josef Strzygowski's Die Baukunst der Armenier und Europa(1918). Charged with nationalist and racist ideology, this work was the first to consider thoroughly Armenia's relations to Byzantine, Gothic, and Persian architecture. Using archival materials, this chapter explores Strzygowski's theory of the "Aryan" nature of Armenian architecture in light of major contemporary political events--the First World War, the rise of Austrian Pan-Germanism, and the situation in Turkey and Russia.;The subsequent chapter traces the retreat from broad comparative studies like Die Baukunst towards more insular works, such as monographic and typological studies, accompanied by increasing interest in theories of indigenous origins. Further, I identify a personal hostility, understandably, towards Strzygowski on the part of modern scholars. I thus argue that the insularity of modern studies is both a general reaction to the synthetic approach of the early twentieth century, and a specific reaction against Strzygowski's ideas and political affiliations.;Because of this problem, no comparative study of Armenian architecture has replaced Die Baukunst, and Armenia's position within the development of medieval architecture is no better understood. Chapter Five formulates preliminary questions towards a new cross-cultural study of Armenian architecture which considers Armenia's relations with neighboring traditions, and suggests ways to undertake it without employing paradigms of racial and national superiority characteristic of much of the older scholarship. |
