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Article

Mélida y Alinari, José Ramón  

Concha Vela

(b Madrid, Oct 26, 1856; d Madrid, Dec 30, 1933).

Spanish archaeologist, art historian and writer, brother of Enrique Mélida y Alinari and Arturo Mélida y Alinari. He studied in Madrid, and in 1881 he became an assistant in the department of Archiveros, Bibliotecarios y Arqueólogos at the Museo Arqueológico Nacional, Madrid. In 1884 he was appointed head of the department of Prehistoria y Edad Antigua at the museum. There he began his work on the inventory and cataloguing of items that resulted in the organization and establishment of the Sala de Antigüedades Ibéricas. In the same year he was appointed Director of the Museo de Reproducciones Artísticas, Madrid. In 1899 he became a member of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de S Fernando and in 1906 was elected a member of the Real Academia de la Historia. His two areas of specialization were those of Classical art and ancient Spain, and in 1906 he was in charge of excavations at Numancia in Soria. As Chairman of the Department of Archaeology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, he excavated in ...

Article

Artamonov, Mikhail  

V. Ya. Petrukhin

(Illarionovich)

(b Vygolevo, Tver’ Province, Dec 5, 1898; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], July 29, 1972).

Russian archaeologist and art historian . He began studying archaeology at the Archaeological Institute in Petrograd (now St Petersburg) in 1921 and subsequently at the University in that city. He became a postgraduate student in 1926, then joined the staff of the State Academy for the History of Material Culture, where he studied aspects of Old Russian art, including the miniatures of the Königsberg (Radziwill) Chronicle (St Petersburg, Acad. Sci., Lib.). He became a professor in 1935 and was appointed head of the faculty of archaeology at Leningrad State University in 1949. He was director of the Institute for the History of Material Culture from 1938 to 1945 and curator of the State Hermitage Museum from 1951 to 1964. His most important works deal with the history, archaeology and art of the Scythians, Slavs and Khazars and include a study of the Hermitage’s collection of Scythian art (1970); he also conducted research into the Scythian–Siberian Animal Style. He directed excavations of numerous ancient and early medieval monuments in the Don region, the Ukraine and the northern Caucasus, including excavations of the Khazar Sarkel fortress (Rus. Belaya Vezha). The art of medieval nomads is discussed in his monograph on the history of the Khazars....

Article

Ashmole, Bernard  

Geoffrey Waywell

(b Ilford, June 22, 1894; d Peebles, Feb 25, 1988).

English archaeologist . One of the most distinguished Classical scholars of the 20th century, specializing in Greek and Roman sculpture, he was equally well-known for his skills as an administrator and teacher. He was appointed Assistant Curator of Coins at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, in 1922, leaving the post to become Director of the British School in Rome in 1925. Tempted by the opportunity of proximity to the British Museum collections and library, Ashmole returned to England in 1929 to take up the Yates Chair of Classical Archaeology at the University of London (1929–48), soon arranging a transfer to the university of the museum’s collection of plaster casts. As Keeper of Greek and Roman Antiquities at the British Museum (1939–56), he was largely responsible for the eventual display of the Elgin Marbles in the Duveen Gallery. He returned to Oxford in 1956 as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology, from which post he retired in ...

Article

Bahrami, Mehdi  

Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom

(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.)....

Article

Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, II  

Kirk Ambrose

(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....

Article

Bayet, Charles  

(b Liège, May 25, 1849; d Toulon, Sept 17, 1918).

Belgian administrator, historian and art historian. During his early career Bayet spent some years at the French schools of archaeology at Athens and Rome (1871–74), where he developed a special interest in Byzantine studies. In 1874 he was sent with Father Duchesne on an archaeological expedition to Mt Athos. Their study of the mosaics, inscriptions and manuscripts found there and elsewhere in Greece was published in 1876. Bayet became Professor of the Faculty of Literature at Lyon in 1876, but he was compelled to widen his field and cover medieval art and history, since Byzantine art and archaeology were still considered very narrow and negligible subjects. From 1896 he took a succession of administrative posts and was forced to give up his research altogether. Despite the brevity of his career as a Byzantinist, Bayet contributed works of meticulous scholarship that rejected the hypothesizing of previous scholars, laid solid groundwork for further study and established him as master in his field. The culmination of his research, and the first complete survey of the subject, was his ...

Article

Beazley, Sir J(ohn) D(avidson)  

D. C. Kurtz

(b Glasgow, Sept 13, 1885; d Oxford, May 6, 1970).

British scholar and archaeologist. He is best known for his life-long study of Athenian figure-decorated vases. His career at Oxford began in 1903, when he went up to Balliol College as a student. From 1907 to 1920 he was a lecturer at Christ Church College, from 1920 to 1925 University Lecturer in Classical Archaeology, and in 1925–56 Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology. He was created a Knight Bachelor in 1949 and a Companion of Honour in 1959.

Beazley contributed significantly to many aspects of Classical scholarship. His extensive work on Athenian vase painting of the 6th, 5th and 4th centuries bc includes such publications as Attic Black-figure Vase-painters (1956) and, in 1963, the expanded edition of his Attic Red-figure Vase-painters (1942). These volumes together list over 50,000 vases, which he assigned to more than 1000 artists, classes and groups. Further attributions followed in Paralipomena (1970...

Article

Bell, Gertrude  

Stephen Hill

(Margaret Lowthian)

(b Washington, Co. Durham, July 14, 1868; d Baghdad, 11/July 12, 1926).

English archaeologist and architectural historian. The first woman to achieve a first-class honours in modern history at Oxford University, she travelled widely in Europe, Japan and especially the Middle East in the 1890s, achieving fluency in a number of European languages as well as in Persian, Turkish and Arabic. She developed an interest in archaeology and architecture that was reflected in an authoritative set of articles on the Early Byzantine churches of Syria and southern Turkey, based on her travels in 1905. Her first major travel book, The Desert and the Sown, contains a mixture of travellers’ tales and archaeological information, as does her Amurath to Amurath. Between 1905 and 1914 she made archaeological studies of the Early Byzantine and Early Islamic monuments of Turkey, Syria and Mesopotamia (now Iraq). In 1905 and 1907 she surveyed Binbirkilise with Sir William Ramsay; their book, The Thousand and One Churches, remains the authoritative account of this important site. The architectural recording by survey and photography at Binbirkilise was carried out by Bell and is a lasting monument in its own right. Bell’s interest in Anatolia was inspired by Josef Strzygowski and his book ...

Article

Berchem, Max van  

Oleg Grabar

(b Geneva, March 16, 1863; d Geneva, March 13, 1921).

Epigrapher and historian of Islamic art and archaeology. Born to a well-to-do and intellectually active Genevan family of bankers (the scholar of linguistics Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) was a cousin), van Berchem was educated as a philologist and historian in Geneva, Germany and France. He combined the intellectual traditions of France and Germany and belonged to a supranational brotherhood of wealthy scholars independent of political or other contingencies. In 1889 he travelled through Egypt, Palestine and Syria and became convinced that ‘a well-studied monument is of greater value than the best text’. He discovered that the inscriptions typical of Islamic urban architecture provided an extraordinary documentation on everything from the means of construction and date to symbolic and esoteric meanings. This discovery, honed by other trips, led to a series of articles on what van Berchem called ‘l’archéologie arabe’, still the most profound statements about the methods of explaining classical Islamic architecture in context. Van Berchem also persuaded the French Academy to sponsor the series ...

Article

Blavatsky, Vladimir  

V. Ya. Petrukhin

(Dmitriyevich)

(b St Petersburg, Sept 12, 1899; d Moscow, Nov 10, 1980).

Russian archaeologist and art historian. He graduated from the social sciences department at Moscow University in 1923 and joined the staff of, first, the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and then the State Academy of Art Sciences (later the Research Institute for the Theory and History of Fine Art), taking part in several archaeological expeditions. From 1925 to 1929 he was a postgraduate student at the Russian Association of Social Sciences Research Institutes and took part in excavations of Ol’viya under the direction of Boris Farmakovsky. In the 1930s he was on the staff of the State Academy for the History of Material Culture, teaching and conducting excavations at the ancient cities of Charaxes, Panticapaeum (now Kerch) and Phanagoreia. His general works on Classical architecture and Greek sculpture were published in this period. In 1943 he defended his doctoral thesis on the techniques of Classical sculpture and became a professor of archaeology at Moscow University. In ...

Article

Blegen, Carl  

Donald F. Easton

(William)

(b Minneapolis, Jan 27, 1887; d Athens, Aug 24, 1971).

American archaeologist. From 1911 to 1927 he held posts at the American School of Classical Studies, Athens; from 1927 onwards he was Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Cincinnati. Early surveys and soundings around Corinth led to excavations at Korakou (1915–6), which established a full Bronze Age sequence for the Greek mainland, a sequence then confirmed at Zygouries (1921–2). Excavations at Nemea (1924–6) and Acrocorinth (1926) dealt mainly with Classical periods. But at Prosymna in the Argolid (1925–8) Blegen exposed a large Middle and Late Helladic cemetery. Further study of burial customs and of the distribution of prehistoric sites convinced him that Greek-speakers entered Greece c. 1900 bc, a view long influential but now doubted. His excavations at Troy (1932–8) greatly refined previous findings by Heinrich Schliemann and Wilhelm Dörpfeld and suggested that Troy VIIa, not VI, was destroyed in the Trojan War (...

Article

Bloch, Herbert  

Carmela Vircillo Franklin

(b Berlin, Aug 18, 1911; d Cambridge, MA, Sept 6, 2006).

German historian of antiquity and the Middle Ages, active also in Italy and America. Bloch was trained at the University of Berlin under the historian of ancient Greece Werner Jaeger, art historian Gerhart Rodenwaldt and medievalist Erich Caspar from 1930 until 1933, when the rise of National Socialism convinced him to move to Rome. There he received his tesi di laurea in ancient history in 1935 and his diploma di perfezionamento in 1937. He then participated in the excavations at Ostia, Rome’s ancient port, which was an important site in the revival of Italian archaeology under Fascism. At the outbreak of World War II, he immigrated to the USA, and began his teaching career in 1941 at Harvard University’s Department of Classics, where he remained until his retirement in 1982. His experience of totalitarianism shaped both his personal and professional beliefs.

Bloch applied a deep knowledge of epigraphy, history and material culture, art history, literary and archival sources to his research and he had a propensity for uncovering the significance of new or neglected evidence. One such area was Roman history. His first publications, on ancient Rome’s brick stamps (many of which he discovered ...

Article

Borenius, (Carl) Tancred  

Denys Sutton

(b Viipuri, Finland [now Vyborg, Russia], 1885; d Coombe Bissett, Wilts, Sept 2, 1948).

Finnish art historian, dealer and archaeologist, active in England. After studying at Helsinki University, then in Berlin and Rome, he settled in London in 1906 and published The Painters of Vicenza, 1480–1550 (1909), based on his doctoral thesis. Through his friendship with Roger Fry, he was introduced to the London art world. He revised (1912) A History of Painting in North Italy (1871) by J. A. Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle and the last two volumes (1914) of their A New History of Italian Painting (1864–6). Appointed lecturer in 1914 at the University of London, he served as Durning-Lawrence Professor of the History of Art (1922–47). He was a member of the Burlington Fine Arts Club and wrote on a wide range of subjects in the Burlington Magazine. A pioneer historian of early English art, he edited the University College, London, monographs on English medieval art and started excavations at Clarendon Palace near Salisbury in ...

Article

Bottari, Giovanni Gaetano  

Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò

(b Florence, Jan 15, 1689; d Rome, June 4, 1775).

Italian historian, collector and writer. His special interests were the literature of Tuscany during the 14th and 15th centuries, medieval and contemporary art, sacred archaeology and ecclesiastical history. As a scholar of art he brought out (in 1730) a new edition of Raffaele Borghini Il riposo … and wrote the Dialoghi sopra le tre arti del disegno, which was published some years later (Lucca, 1754). The artistic theories he expressed in these works owed something to L. A. Muratori and were influenced by a view of works of art as documents of their time. He exalted the classical traditions of Tuscan art in the early and high Renaissance, praised the classicism of the Carracci and bluntly opposed Mannerist and Baroque art. In the Dialoghi he demonstrated a practical interest, unusual for the period, in methods of restoring and conserving artefacts.

Bottari served the Corsini family from 1718, in Florence at first and then in Rome, where he was summoned in ...

Article

Brown, Percy  

S. J. Vernoit

(b 1872; d Srinagar, 1955).

English art historian, museum curator, educationalist, painter and collector. In 1899, after a short period of training as an archaeologist in Egypt, Brown went to India, where he served as curator of Lahore Museum and principal of the Mayo School of Art, Lahore. While working in these posts, he was also assistant director of the Delhi Exhibition of 1902–3 (see Delhi, §II), under George Watt. In 1909 he took up employment in Calcutta as principal of the Government School of Art and curator of the art section of the Indian Museum. In 1927 he retired from the Indian Educational Service to take up an appointment as secretary and curator of the Victoria Memorial Hall in Calcutta, where he remained until 1947. After this he lived on a houseboat on the Dal Lake in Srinagar, Kashmir.

Brown’s earliest publications included a contribution to the catalogue of the Delhi Exhibition and a descriptive guide to the Department of Industrial Art at Lahore Museum in ...

Article

Canina, Luigi  

Valeria Farinati

(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 ...

Article

Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale  

Stephanie Luther

[CESCM]

French organization founded in Poitiers in 1953. The Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale (CECSM) is affiliated with the Université de Poitiers, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), and the Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication. The founders, among them historian Edmond-René Labande and art historian René Crozet, began CESCM as a month-long interdisciplinary study of medieval civilization, inviting foreign students to participate. CESCM has since developed into a permanent organization but maintains the international and interdisciplinary focus of its founders.

CESCM continues to hold its formative summer session, known as ‘Les Semaines d’études médiévales’, and invites advanced graduate students of all nationalities. The summer session spans two weeks and includes sessions on a variety of topics, each conducted by a member or affiliate of CESCM. CESCM supports collaborative research groups and regularly holds colloquia attended by the international scholarly community.

Since 1958 CECSM has published ...

Article

Coedès, George  

S. J. Vernoit

(b Paris, Aug 10, 1886; d Oct 2, 1969).

French art historian and archaeologist. He taught himself Sanskrit and Khmer while still at school and published his first article, on the early history of Cambodia, in 1904. He studied from 1911 at the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, becoming a research fellow in Indo-Chinese philology in 1914. From 1917 he worked in Thailand for thirteen years, as Chief Librarian of the Vajiranana National Library in Bangkok and as Secretary-General of the Royal Institute of Siam. He left Thailand for Hanoi before the revolution of 1932 to become Director of the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient, where he remained until his retirement in 1947. The same year he was appointed curator of the Musée d’Ennery in Paris. He was President of the Société Asiatique from 1964 and a member of the Institut de France. He also taught at the Ecole Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris from 1928 to 1929 and from 1947 to 1951...

Article

Conant, K(enneth) J(ohn)  

Joseph R. Kopta

(b Neenah, WI, June 28, 1894; d Bedford, MA, March 4, 1984).

American architectural historian. Conant was the leading 20th-century American architectural historian specializing in Romanesque architecture, and was the primary archaeologist of the monastic complex at Cluny. He earned his degrees from Harvard, including a BA in Fine Arts in 1915, an MArch. in 1919, and a PhD with a dissertation on the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, supervised by Arthur Kingsley Porter, in 1926. He trained in archaeological practices in 1926 at the excavations of Chichén Itzá and Pueblo Bonito before directing excavations in earnest at Cluny starting in 1928. He was Professor of Architecture Emeritus at Harvard University, retiring from teaching in 1954.

An active member of the Medieval Academy of America (which funded his excavations after initial funding from the Guggenheim Foundation), Conant published frequent field reports documenting the excavations of Cluny as articles in Speculum. Additionally, Conant published a monograph on the sum of the excavations in ...

Article

Correia, Vergílio  

Maria Adelaide Miranda

[Virgílio]

(b Régua, Oct 19, 1888; d Coimbra, June 3, 1944).

Portuguese art historian, writer, archaeologist and museum official. He studied Law at the Universidade de Coimbra but soon became involved in research in the history of art, archaeology and ethnography, and in 1921 he was appointed as a lecturer in art history and aesthetics at the university. He was also a distinguished museum official, serving as Curator of the Museu Etnológico Português and of the Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, in Lisbon. In 1929 he was appointed Director of the Museu Nacional de Machado de Castro, in Coimbra. Among his archaeological activities was that of directing the excavations at Conímbriga, south of Coimbra. Aware of the lack of objectivity in the study of archaeology and art history in Portugal, he investigated these disciplines thoroughly and sought to found them on direct observation and the consultation of sources. He favoured a method of research based on the study of documents, believing that only the document and the work of art remained constant, whereas aesthetic appreciation constantly changed. However, he thought that the document alone was not enough but had to be supported by material from photographic archives and by the gathering of data from museums, such that everything that might clarify the subject of study was brought together in one place. His vast body of published work includes ...