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(b. 1905; d. Hamburg, 1951).

Iranian scholar of Persian art. After graduating from the Dar al-Moallemin in Tehran in 1931, he worked at the court of Riza Pahlavi (r. 1925–41) until 1934, when he was sent to study art and archaeology in Europe. There, he studied at the Ecole du Louvre in Paris and under Ernst Kühnel at the Kaiser-Friedrich Museum in Berlin. In 1937 he received his doctorate and returned to Tehran, where he specialized in the study of Islamic pottery at the Archaeological Museum and taught at the University. He was later appointed chief curator and then director of the museum. In 1948 he helped organize the Iranian exhibition at the Musée Cernuschi to coordinate with the XXI International Congress of Orientalists in Paris; in the following year, on the occasion of the Shah’s state visit to the USA, he brought an exhibition of Iranian art to New York (Met.) and Boston (Mus. F.A.)....

(b Croton Falls, NY, March 7, 1872; d Paris, Aug 13, 1922).

American archaeologist and teacher. After receiving his MA in 1893 from Princeton University with a fellowship in archaeology, Butler studied architecture at Columbia University. From 1895 until his death he held various appointments at Princeton in architecture, archaeology, and art: his teaching of architecture as one of the fine arts led to the creation of the Princeton School of Architecture, of which he became the founding director in 1922. He was one of the most influential American archaeologists of his time, owing to his discoveries in Syria and at Sardis. His work in Syria was inspired by Melchior de Vogüé’s explorations there in the 1860s. Butler organized and led an American expedition in 1899 with the intention of verifying, photographing, and adding to the list of de Vogüé’s sites. His work in Syria continued until 1909 and resulted in several important publications on the early Christian architecture. In 1910 he began excavating at Sardis, uncovering the Artemis Temple and a number of important Lydian objects, until ...

(b London, Oct 17, 1795; d London, Aug 1, 1885).

English architect, archaeologist and teacher. He was the son of an architect, James Donaldson (c. 1756–1843), and great-nephew of Thomas Leverton. Trained in his father’s office and at the Royal Academy, London, Donaldson travelled in Italy, Greece and Asia Minor from 1818 to 1823 and on his return set up in practice. His first sizeable commission (won in competition) was for the church of the Holy Trinity, Brompton Road, London (1826–9), constructed in the non-archaeological Commissioners’ Gothic style, which was typical of those churches built as a result of the 1818 Act. Other works include the library (1848–9) of University College, Gower Street, London, in a classical style, and University Hall (1848–9; formerly Dr Williams’s Library), Gordon Square, London, in a Tudor Gothic style.

Donaldson’s principal achievements were not as an architect but in his other roles and in his wide range of publications. He was the leader of the ...

(b. Eger, 1926).

Hungarian art historian and archaeologist active in Britain. After studing Arabic and Oriental Art in Budapest, Fehérvári began his career there in 1952 at the Francis Hopp Museum of Eastern Asiatic Arts. Following the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he moved to Vienna to begin a Ph.D. at the university of Vienna. He continued his doctoral research with a scholarship to the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London, working under the supervision of David Storm Rice. He was awarded a doctorate in 1961 for his study of the mihrab, and soon after he was appointed lecturer and later professor at SOAS. He conducted excavations in Iran (Ghubayra, 1971–6), Libya (Medinat al-Sultan, 1977–81) and Egypt (Bahnasa/Oxyrhynchus, 1985–7), and published on Islamic ceramics and metalwork. Following his retirement in 1991 and political changes in Hungary, he joined the Hungarian diplomatic service and was appointed Ambassador to Kuwait and other Gulf states, remaining in that position until ...

(b. Leningrad, July 3, 1929).

Russian curator and historian of Islamic art. He studied and taught at the University of Leningrad in the late 1940s and 1950s and received his Ph.D. in 1972 from the Institute of Archaeology there. From 1956 he worked in the Oriental Department at the Hermitage Museum, serving as Keeper from 1984. A specialist in the arts of Iran, he wrote many articles on metalwares and manuscript painting for such journals as Epigrafika Vostoka (Epigraphy of the East), Soobshcheniya Gosudarstvennogo Ermitazha (the journal about the Hermitage collections) and Iran (the bulletin of the British Institute of Persian Studies). He contributed essays and entries to such important catalogues as Masterpieces of Islamic Art in the Hermitage Museum (Kuwait, Dar al-Athar al-Islamiyyah; 1990), Heavenly Art, Earthly Beauty: Art of Islam (Amsterdam, Nieuw Kerk; 1999–2000); Iran v Ermitazkhe: Formirovanie Kollektsii [Iran in the Hermitage: The Formation of the Collection] (St. Petersburg, Hermitage; ...

(b. Luga, July 9 1933; d. Penjikent, July 28, 2006).

Russian museum curator, archaeologist and authority on Central Asian archaeology, particularly the Sogdian ruins at Pendzhikent, Tajikistan.

After archaeological training at Moscow University (MA in Archaeology in 1956), Marshak pursued doctoral research at St. Petersburg and Moscow (first doctorate on 5th- and 7th-century Sogdian pottery at the Institute of Archaeology of the Soviet Academy of Sciences in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1965; second doctorate on 3rd- and 11th-century oriental silverware at Moscow University in 1982). In 1954 while pursuing his MA, he began excavating at Penzhikent. In 1978 he was appointed director of the expedition, a position he held until his death. In 1978 he became the Head of the Central Asia and Caucasus Department at the State Hermitage Museum. Although his professional life was threatened after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, he managed to remain as director of the Pendzhikent excavations during the civil war in Tajikistan (...

(b. Vienna, 6 Nov. 1941; d. Berlin, 10 Jan. 1995).

German art historian, archaeologist and museum curator of Islamic art. Meinecke already developed an interest in Islamic art and architecture during his stay in Istanbul at an early age. He read art history, archaeology and Islamic studies in Vienna and Hamburg and completed his dissertation on the ceramic architectural decoration of Saljuq monuments in Anatolia in 1968. A year later he joined the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, where he undertook an architectural survey of historical buildings in the old city. His magna opus on the study of Mamluk architecture, which was accepted as Habilitationschrift by the University of Hamburg in 1978 and published in 1992, remains a standard in the field of Islamic architectural studies. After a short teaching period at the University of Hamburg between 1977 and 1980, he returned to the Middle East and became involved in the foundation of the German Archaeological Institute in Damascus. He left Syria in ...

(b. London, 17 Jan. 1919).

British art historian and archaeologist. After serving in the Indian Army, Pinder-Wilson read Persian and Arabic at Oxford, taking an MA in 1947. He joined the Oriental Department of the British Museum as Assistant Keeper in 1949 and was appointed Deputy Keeper in 1969. In 1976 he was appointed Director of the British Institute of Afghan Studies in Kabul. There he supervised preservation work, excavations and fieldwork and made major contributions to the field of Afghan studies. He participated in archaeological excavations at Harran and Siraf and was also an active member of the British Institute of Persian Studies for many years. After the British Institute in Kabul was closed in 1982 following the Soviet invasion, he returned to London and became involved in several research projects as a consultant. His expertise covers Islamic decorative arts from Persian painting to Islamic glass and rock crystal.

(b Caracas, Mar 20, 1922; d Caracas, Dec 19, 2008).

Venezuelan architect and educator. Sanabria is the most prominent figure among the second generation of Venezuelan architects formally trained in the discipline. Sanabria attended Engineering School in Caracas between 1941 and 1945. While working at a design and construction firm VRACA (Vegas y Rodríguez Amengual, Compañía Anónima), Sanabria’s talent was noticed by the owners, who sponsored him, to study at Harvard Graduate School of Design. He graduated from Harvard in 1947 and returned to Venezuela in 1947. Back in his native country, Sanabria joined the Department of Architecture and became the first Program Director of the School of Architecture, founded in 1954.

In 1948 he opened the first local firm exclusively dedicated to design, with his friend and colleague Diego Carbonell. The partnership lasted until 1953 and stood out for its modern proposals, fine detailing, and environmental responses to the local conditions; qualities that, with a particular sense of both regional and urban scales, characterized Sanabria’s designs....

(b Bielitz-Biala, Austrian Silesia [now Bielsko-Biala, Poland], March 7, 1862; d Vienna, Jan 2, 1941).

Austrian art historian. After studying classical archaeology and the history of art at the universities of Vienna, Berlin and Munich, where in 1885 he completed a dissertation on the iconography of the baptism of Christ, Strzygowski did research in Rome until 1887, when he took up an academic post in Vienna. His papers on Romano-Byzantine art were criticized by Alois Riegl and Franz Wickhoff as deficient in their analysis of sources and unscientific; thus began a lifelong conflict between Strzygowski and the ‘Vienna School’. Disappointed with the western approach to art history, Strzygowski turned to the East. He made extensive expeditions through Asia Minor, Armenia and Iran. This gave him an anti-Classical awareness of history and made him re-evaluate the civilization of the ‘barbaric’ nomadic peoples in relation to the Classical antiquity of the Mediterranean, thus introducing new dimensions to artistic research.

Strzygowski’s unconventional geographical perspective on art led him to espouse an irrational ‘Nordic myth’ according to which religion, politics, philosophy and the liberal arts had all served as instruments in the ‘southern struggle for power’ to suppress the original ‘northern man’, who was notable for his depth of feeling, his urge to express himself and his propensity for non-objective ornament. These characteristic ‘Nordic’ qualities were supposedly breaking out again in the landscape painting of Arnold Böcklin and in abstract art, while figural expressionism was a symptom of the reprehensible ‘art of the dominant group’. In order to carry out systematic ‘research into the north’, Strzygowski designed a ‘comparative science of art’ which distinguished between exact ‘factual research’ and ‘observer-based research’ underpinned by historical perception; he himself, however, was unable to adhere to this strict division. He dreamt of cooperation with allied disciplines and with the natural sciences within an ‘international house of researchers’, and he attempted to realize this ideal in his extraordinarily popular Wiener Institut. He had already held a professorship in Graz since ...

(b Valencia, Mar 20, 1936; d Caracas, Dec 10, 2007).

Venezuelan architect, educator, and intellectual. After completing his architectural studies in 1957, Jesús Tenreiro spent a year in Europe, thanks to a scholarship from the Universidad Central de Venezuela. During that year he broadened his exposure to, and understanding of, architecture, philosophy, and other artistic fields.

Although only a small number of his buildings were ever constructed, Tenreiro is nonetheless considered a fundamental figure in Venezuelan Architecture. And though he rarely wrote, lectured, or gave interviews he is regarded as an important intellectual authority in the country. He is also recognized as an inspiring educator, though he avoided creating a “school” of followers. His work is often related to that of Louis Kahn, although the two never met. His erudition was overwhelming, but his creative process appears to have been driven by a devotedly educated intuition. His courses often dealt with Jungian thought and archetypal theories, but these intellectual investigations were actually taken up years after completing most of his buildings. He referred to what now appears as an astonishingly coherent body of work as a “collections of fragments.” Indeed, Tenreiro’s legacy, in its multiplicity and diverse quality is as admirable as not fully investigated....