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(b Moscow, May 7, 1903; d Paris, Jan 25, 1988).

Lithuanian art historian, scholar of folklore and Egyptology, and diplomat of Russian birth. Son of the celebrated Lithuanian Symbolist poet of the same name, Jurgis Baltrušaitis II studied under Henri(-Joseph) Focillon at the Sorbonne and earned the PhD in 1931. The concerns of his mentor are evident in La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane (1931), which reprises and extends arguments for the ‘law of the frame’ in Romanesque sculpture. Accordingly, the shapes of architectural members, such as capitals and tympana, determined the articulation of sculptural forms. This theory could account for the genesis of a wide array of monumental carvings, from foliate capitals to narrative reliefs, but ultimately it had a rather limited impact on the field of Romanesque sculptural studies. In a scathing critique, Schapiro argued that Baltrušaitis’s book—and by implication Focillon’s methods—robbed Romanesque sculptors of agency and neglected the religious and expressive meanings of this art form....

(b Lugano, March 26, 1787; d Naples, Dec 6, 1849).

Italian architect and archaeologist, of Swiss origin. He was a pupil of Luigi Cagnola and attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Milan, graduating in architecture at Pavia in 1806. He lived in Rome and between 1810 and 1814 was superintendent of the excavation of the Colosseum, which was being directed by Giuseppe Valadier. In 1812 Bianchi published the Osservazioni sull’arena e sul podio dell’Anfiteatro Flavio … in Rome, and he also carried out excavations on the Forum Romanum.

As a member of the Accademia di S Luca, Bianchi was put forward to design the layout of the Largo di Palazzo (now the Piazza del Plebiscito), Naples; the commission was awarded him by Ferdinand I of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies (reg 1759–1825). Ferdinand had in fact announced a competition in 1817 for the completion of this work, which had been initiated by Joachim Murat, King of Naples, in ...

(b Venice, April 25, 1859; d Rome, July 10, 1925).

Italian archaeologist. He was educated in Venice at a time when there was great controversy over the conservation of original works of art, especially in connection with the restorations (1875) in S Marco. In 1888 he moved to Rome, where he became an inspector of monuments and advocated the establishment of a photographic archive and a catalogue of monuments as a basis for restoration programmes. Having collaborated on excavations inside the Pantheon in 1892, from 1895 he superintended new excavations in the Forum Romanum (see Rome, §V, 1); the latter uncovered fundamental evidence concerning the origins of Rome, including the Lapis Niger (1st century bc; in situ), an archaic Latin inscription (c. 500 bc; Corpus inscriptionum latinarum, Academia Litterarum Borussicae, Berlin, 1863–, vi, 36840) and ‘pre-Romulan’ burial grounds. He was influenced by John Ruskin’s philosophy of art and argued that the prime function of restoration is to preserve original materials. In ...

(b Casale Monferrato, Oct 24, 1795; d Florence, Oct 17, 1856).

Italian architect, archaeologist and architectural historian. He studied architecture at the University of Turin (1810–12) under Ferdinando Bonsignore (1767–1843) and his assistant Giuseppe Talucchi (1782–1863). After serving (1812–14) in the fortress of Alessandria, he resumed his studies and obtained a degree in architecture in 1814. He served a period of apprenticeship under Talucchi, who helped him obtain a three-year grant from the Court of Turin for further study in Rome, where Canina settled in January 1818. He worked on engravings of Roman monuments under the antiquarian, scholar and publisher Mariano Vasi (1744–1820), and at the end of his three-year period as pensionato, he presented a survey of the Colosseum (Anfiteatro Flavio descritto, misurato e restaurato; dispersed) to the architects of the Accademia di S Luca, including Giuseppe Valadier, who were much impressed.

In 1824 Canina was appointed to execute his scheme for the expansion of the park of the ...

(b Paris, baptAug 28, 1721; d Auteuil, Jan 19, 1820).

French architect, archaeologist and painter. He was an important if controversial figure associated with the development of the Neo-classical style of architecture and interior design and its dissemination throughout Europe and the USA. He studied at the Académie Royale d’Architecture, Paris, under Germain Boffrand and won the Grand Prix in 1746. He spent the years 1749 to 1754 at the Académie Française in Rome but left after an argument with the director Charles-Joseph Natoire over his refusal to make his Easter Communion; this may have been due to his Jansenist sympathies. He nevertheless remained in Italy until 1767. During these years he became a close friend of Piranesi, Winckelmann, Cardinal Alessandro Albani and other members of the international circle interested in the Antique.

In his early student days in Rome, Clérisseau became acquainted in particular with English travellers and began to sell them his attractive topographical drawings of Roman architecture. Initially these were influenced by his studies with ...

(Valéry Marie)

(b Aalst, Jan 3, 1868; d Woluwe, Brussels, Aug 20, 1947).

Belgian archaeologist and religious historian. Educated in Ghent, Bonn, Berlin and Paris, he taught at the University of Ghent from 1896 to 1910. He made a fundamental contribution to the understanding of the complexity of ancient paganism and its symbols, and he travelled widely in Syria and Turkey in search of ancient astrological drawings and symbols. Other important early works of this prolific scholar focused on the influence of ancient oriental cults, particularly Mithraism, on the Roman world and on Christianity. He developed an interest in pagan representations of the afterlife and collected widely dispersed information for his great work Recherches sur le symbolisme funéraire des Romains. This broke decisively with the tradition of romantic scholarship, which had concentrated on style, aesthetic quality and dating: Cumont marshalled his impressive archaeological knowledge to present a scientific categorization of the material remains of ancient funerary art, including sculpture, painting and sarcophagus reliefs, together with a penetrating and influential analysis of the selection and meaning of the artistic themes used....

(b London, March 5, 1761; d Rome, Aug 26, 1816).

English painter, archaeologist and dealer, of Irish origin. A Roman Catholic, he was the son of a prosperous London baker, originally from Cork. He entered the Royal Academy Schools in 1781; two years later he travelled to Italy via Flanders and Paris, reaching Rome in January 1784. There, under the influence of Andrea Appiani and François-Xavier Fabre, he evolved an individual and original Neo-classical style of portrait painting, with an emphasis on contour, clear colour and psychological penetration. By the early 1790s he had become a fashionable painter of English visitors and a prominent member of Roman artistic society. His portraits often include evocative Italian landscape settings, as in Elizabeth, Lady Webster (1793; priv. col.), which shows Mt Vesuvius in the background, and the double portrait of his friend Sir Corbet Corbet with his Wife and Dogs in the Roman Campagna (c. 1797; priv. col., see Crookshank and Glin, ...

(b Pigna, Liguria, June 4, 1753; d Rome, March 17, 1836).

Italian archaeologist and churchman. He went when young to Rome, where he studied philosophy and civil and canon law at the Sapienza. He took priestly orders, but after working briefly as a lawyer devoted himself entirely to archaeology. His first written work was Sulle rovine di Roma, a dissertation appended to the third volume of his translation (Rome, 1783–4) of Johann Joachim Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums. He became librarian of the Biblioteca Chigiana and was appointed by Pope Pius VII (reg 1800–23) commissioner for Roman antiquities. Numerous excavations were carried out under his direction: he took a particular interest in those on the Roman Forum. Apart from his many writings about Roman antiquities, Fea published editions of Horace, G. L. Bianconi’s Descrizione dei circhi particolarmente di quello di Caracalla and the works of Anton Raphael Mengs. He was one of the founders of the modern law for the protection of artistic ...

(b Cologne, June 15, 1790; d Paris, Dec 31, 1853).

French architect, writer and archaeologist of German birth. In 1810 he left Cologne with his lifelong friend J. I. Hittorff for Paris, enrolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1811 under the tutelage of the ardent Neo-classicists Louis-Hippolyte Lebas and François Debret. But from the beginning Gau was exposed to a wider field of historical sources, first as assistant site architect under Debret on the restoration of the abbey church of Saint-Denis (1813–15) and then from 1815 in Nazarene circles in Rome, where he met the archaeologist and philologist Barthold Nieburh (1776–1831), who arranged a scholarship for him from the Prussian government and a trip through the eastern Mediterranean. In Egypt Gau undertook an arduous trip down the Nile to visit and record the monuments of Nubia, which he published as the lavish folio Antiquités de la Nubie. He noted assiduously every trace of colour on the remains, just as he was to do in ...

(b Hopton, Derbys, April 1, 1777; d Naples, Feb 4, 1836).

English Classical scholar, archaeologist and topographer. Educated at Jesus College, Cambridge, he studied at the Royal Academy Schools, was elected Fellow of learned societies in London and, later, honoured by academic institutions abroad. Gell began his travels in Greece and the Troad in 1801, followed rapidly by exemplary publications. His travels continued until 1806, broken only in 1803 when he was sent on a diplomatic mission to the Ionian islands. The Society of Dilettanti appointed him to lead its third Ionian mission (1811–13), instructing him to make architectural measurements of Classical sites in Attica and Asia Minor, the results subsequently being published by the Society in The Unedited Antiquities of Attica (1817) and revised editions of Ionian Antiquities (1821 and 1840; see Chandler, Richard).

Gell was knighted in 1814, and accompanied Caroline, Princess of Wales, as one of her chamberlains when she set out on her foreign travels. He left her entourage after its arrival in Italy and resumed his archaeological studies, in particular at the site of Pompeii, which was his main interest throughout his life. His ...

(b Berlin, 1858; d Florence, 1935).

German architectural historian and archaeologist. He attended the University of Berlin from 1876 to 1880 and studied archaeology with Ernst Curtius and Hans Jordan, classical philology with Emil Hübner and Johannes Vahlen, ancient history with Hans Droysen and Theodor Mommsen, and epigraphy with Johann Wilhelm Adolf Kirchhoff. In 1881 he went to Rome with the aid of a grant from the German Institute of Archaeology. From then on he devoted himself to the study of Rome from the point of view of epigraphy, topography, cartography and urban development. He was especially interested in studying the ways in which Renaissance artists approached the ancient monuments of Rome. From 1887 to 1909 Hülsen held the post of second secretary of the Institute in Rome, and he was an honorary professor at the University of Heidelberg.

[Karl Anton Leo Ludwig]

(b Vienna, Nov 4, 1848; d Vienna, July 15, 1933).

Polish archaeologist, writer, collector and patron, active in Austria. As an archaeologist his main interest lay in the architectural ruins of the late Roman Empire in Anatolia. In 1884 he organized an expedition of which he later published an account, Stadt Pamphyliens und Pisidiens. Sketches made by Jacek Malczewski (e.g. Warsaw, Royal Castle; mainly watercolours) are also records of the expedition. Lanckoroński and Malczewski later toured Italy and travelled to Munich together. Other artists patronized by Lanckoroński included Antoni Madeyski (1862–1939), Henryk Rodakowski and Hans Makart. During 1888 and 1889 Lanckoroński made a round-the-world voyage and subsequently published a diary of this trip, entitled Rund um die Erde. He brought back to Vienna various works of art, mainly sculptures and textiles. Between 1890 and 1895 a Baroque Revival palace was built for him in Vienna to designs by Ferdinand Fellner and Hermann Hellmer (1849–1919). In it Lanckoroński installed paintings, mainly Dutch and French, that he had inherited and Italian paintings he had purchased (e.g. Masaccio’s ...

(bapt Rome, April 14, 1792; d Rome, Dec 29, 1839).

Italian archaeologist and topographer. He was the founder of the Accademia Ellenica in 1809 and of the Accademia Tiberina in 1814, and was a member of numerous Italian and foreign scientific academies and institutes (fellow and censor of the Roman Pontifical Academy of Archaeology and of the San Luca Pontifical Academy of Fine Arts, correspondent of the Royal Institute of France and the Turin Academy of Fine Arts etc). In 1820 he succeeded his first master, Lorenzo Re, as the Public Professor of Archaeology at the University of Rome. From 1817, when he published his first work Saggio di osservazioni critiche geografiche together with a translation of Pausanias’ Guide to Greece, his activity as an archaeologist and topographer was always based on the comparative study of sources and Classical monuments. In 1819 he identified two Roman monuments and published Del Tempio della Pace e della Basilica di Constantino, and he recognized the cultural origins of numerous Greek and Roman sculptures, including the ...

[Prudon, Pierre]

(b Cluny, Saône-et-Loire, April 4, 1758; d Paris, Feb 16, 1823).

French painter and draughtsman. Prud’hon is best known for his allegorical paintings and portraits, most of which were done during the turbulent years of the Revolution (1789–99) and the heroic years of the First Empire (1804–15). It is paradoxical that, while actively supporting the rigorous social reforms of the Jacobins and seeking approval in Napoleonic circles, Prud’hon should have produced work that generally shows great charm and sentimental appeal; these qualities distinguish his oeuvre from the more austere Neo-classicism of David and his school and place him historically in close relation to an earlier 18th-century European tradition of sensibilité and to the Anacreontic manner that was fashionable with a number of artists working in Italy when he was there. His letters from Rome contain statements of admiration for the noble and graceful forms of ancient statuary and for the work of Raphael; but these are balanced by an equal admiration for the handling of expression by Leonardo da Vinci and Anton Raphael Mengs. Later, in Paris, while he analysed physiognomy and gesture in the work of Poussin, he also studied the subtle chiaroscuro in Correggio’s work and the tenebrist practice of Caravaggio and applied these to his mythological and religious works. Prud’hon’s style is thus characterized by a softer, more lyrical form of Neo-classicism and occasionally by a dark and disquieting Romanticism. His independence from his Parisian contemporaries can be attributed partly to his idiosyncratic choice of models for study and partly to influences from patrons and teachers during his formative years....