Mediation and Attentiveness: Oleg Grabar and Alois Riegl

Margaret Olin
Department of Religious Studies, Yale University https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7795-2663

Volume 9, October 2025

Abstract

This essay explores responses to Riegl’s work on ornament, primarily in Stilfragen, by two books on the theory of ornament from the late twentieth century, centering on The Mediation of Ornament (1992), by Islamicist Oleg Grabar, as well as on the correspondence between myself and Grabar. As the title implies, Grabar devises a theory of ornament as an intermediary power that establishes a relationship between viewer and object. Grabar’s theory of ornament, as articulated in his book Mediation of Ornament (1992) does not follow Riegl’s theories of ornament, and in fact misrepresents them. Further, a relational element was not immediately evident in Riegl’s earlier works on ornament. Yet Grabar’s notion of ornamental mediation can be interpreted in light of Riegl’s theories that focused on relationships between the work of art and the viewer, a mediating role that developed only in his late writings on seventeenth^–century Dutch group portraits and landscapes. The work of E.H. Gombrich, who responded to Riegl in his book The Sense of Order (1979), is applicable as a figure whose work speaks to both Riegl and Grabar. The main focus of the essay is my review of Mediation of Ornament, and the correspondence that ensued between Grabar and myself as a result of it. In the process, there surfaced an episode with further implications for Riegl’s conception of the relation between the viewer, the art object, and the art historian. It concerned the exploration of the site of Qusayr Amra in present-day Jordan. This curious incident leads me, finally, to widen the application of the idea of mediation to include the gaze of the art historian on the visual subject of art history.

Keywords

Alois Riegl, Oleg Grabar, E.H. Gombrich, Style, Ornament

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Bibilography

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