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Article

Adler, (Johann Heinrich) Friedrich  

(b Berlin, Oct 15, 1827; d Berlin, Sept 15, 1908).

German architect, archaeologist and writer. He was one of the leading figures of Berlin’s architectural establishment in the latter half of the 19th century. On completion of his studies in 1852, he was given the prestigious post of Bauleiter at the Neues Museum in Berlin, designed by Friedrich August Stüler. He subsequently became a lecturer and in 1861 a professor of architectural history at the Bauakademie in Berlin. Many of his church buildings used medieval motifs and elements, for example the Christuskirche (1862–8) in Berlin and the Elisabethkirche (1869–72) in Wilhelmshafen. He followed Karl Bötticher in his attempts to merge medieval and classical elements, best illustrated in his design for the Thomaskirche (competition 1862; built 1865–70), Berlin. There, Adler used Gothic structural devices embellished with rich Renaissance detail, a tendency that was also present in many of the entries for the Berlin Cathedral competition (...

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

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

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

Engonopoulos, Nicos or Nikos  

Greek, 20th century, male.

Born 1910, in Athens; died 1985.

Painter, illustrator, decorative designer, poet. Mythological subjects, genre scenes, urban landscapes. Stage sets, stage costumes, icons.

Nico Engonopoulos spent his childhood in Istanbul, then known as Constantinople. After an aimless stay in Paris, he studied at the school of fine art in Athens ...

Article

Farmakovsky, Boris  

V. Ya. Petrukhin

(Vladimirovich)

(b Vyatka, Feb 12, 1870; d Pargolovo, Leningrad [now St Petersburg] province, July 29, 1928).

Russian archaeologist and art historian. He graduated from the historical philology department at Novorossiysk University in 1892 and then visited museums and studied the results of excavations in Greece, Italy, France and Turkey (1894–7). From 1896 to 1900 he was academic secretary of the Russian Archaeological Institute in Istanbul. From 1901 to 1918 he was a member of the Archaeological Commission in St Petersburg (Petrograd from 1914) and academic secretary of the Russian Archaeological Society (1906–19). He became a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1914 and a professor at Petrograd University in 1919. In 1921 he was appointed academic secretary of the State Academy for the History of Material Culture and curator of the State Hermitage Museum in 1924. He began independent excavations of the necropolis at Ol’viya and on Berezan’ Island in 1896 and followed this with a systematic study of Ol’viya in ...

Article

Furtwängler, (Johann) Adolf  

Thomas Braun

(Michael)

(b Freiburg im Breisgau, June 30, 1854; d Athens, Oct 10, 1907).

German archaeologist. His pioneering work transformed the study of Greek art from dependence on literary sources into a discipline based on a comprehensive knowledge of artefacts. Furtwängler was descended from a Black Forest family of peasants, wood-carvers and clockmakers; he attended Freiburg school, where his father was headmaster, studied Classics at Freiburg and Leipzig, and Classical archaeology under Heinrich Brunn (1822–94), the first professor of the subject at Munich. At the newly established Deutsches Archäologisches Institut at Rome (1877–8), he acquired mastery of the vast quantity of Greco-Roman sculpture in Italian collections. In Greece (1878–9) he studied original Greek artefacts, plentifully unearthed in recent excavations. He and Georg Loeschke (1852–1915) classified and published the pottery excavated by Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae. Furtwängler’s work on 14,150 small bronzes from Olympia culminated in his authoritative fourth volume of the German excavation reports (1890...

Article

Osman Hamdi  

S. J. Vernoit

[Edhem, Osman HamdiHamdi Bey]

(b Istanbul, Dec 30, 1842; d Eskihisar, Gebze, nr Istanbul, Feb 24, 1910).

Turkish painter, museum director and archaeologist. In 1857 he was sent to Paris, where he stayed for 11 years, training as a painter under Gustave Boulanger and Jean-Léon Gérôme. On returning to Turkey he served in various official positions, including two years in Baghdad as chargé d’affaires, while at the same time continuing to paint. In 1873 he worked on a catalogue of costumes of the Ottoman empire, with photographic illustrations, for the Weltausstellung in Vienna. In 1881 he was appointed director of the Archaeological Museum at the Çinili Köşk, Topkapı Palace, in Istanbul. He persuaded Sultan Abdülhamid II (reg 1876–1909) to issue an order against the traffic in antiquities, which was put into effect in 1883, and he began to direct excavations within the Ottoman empire. As a result he brought together Classical and Islamic objects for the museum in Istanbul, including the Sarcophagus of Alexander, unearthed in Sidon in ...

Article

Kitzinger, Ernst  

W. Eugene Kleinbauer

(b Munich, Dec 12, 1912; d Poughkeepsie, NY, Jan 22, 2003).

German art historian of late antiquity, Byzantium and Norman Sicily, active also in the USA. Kitzinger was a prominent medievalist who went to Rome in 1931 to begin doctoral work in medieval art history under the supervision of Wilhelm Pinder. Within three years he earned his PhD at the University of Munich. His dissertation, Roman Painting from the Beginning of the Seventh to the Middle of the Eighth Century, analysed the style of mosaics and frescoes in church buildings and catacombs, and convincingly demonstrated that no linear development can be traced in this period in part because different ‘styles’ can sometimes be shown to have coexisted. He effectively refuted the thesis advanced by Charles Rufus Morey of Princeton University that the Greek Hellenistic style had been transplanted by Alexandrian refugees to Rome in the earliest Middle Ages. Kitzinger pursued this research in major papers—his exacting analysis of texts related to the cult of images before Iconoclasm (...

Article

Lamb, Winifred  

D. Evely

(b London, Nov 3, 1894; d Borden Wood, W. Sussex, Sept 16, 1963).

English archaeologist and writer. Coming from a landed and educated family, she was taught first at home. Lamb went on to read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge (1913–17), and served with Naval Intelligence (1917–18), before beginning her career as a Greek and Near Eastern archaeologist. Her first association was with Greece (1920s–30s), where she worked with Alan Wace at Mycenae and with A. M. Woodward at Sparta, assisted in publication and investigated sites on Ithaka and Chios: her contacts with the British School in Athens were never broken. She was Honorary Keeper (Greek and Roman) of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, from 1919 to 1958, but her attentions increasingly turned eastwards. In 1929 she visited Troy, and then conducted a self-financed campaign (1929–33) on the Early Bronze Age site of Thermi on Lesbos. In Anatolia exploration work was made on the Bronze Age site of Kusura. These achievements were recognized by election to the Society of Antiquaries (...

Article

Lehmann [Lehmann-Hartleben], Karl  

Phyllis Pray Bober

(b Rostock, Sept 27, 1894; d Basle, Dec 17, 1960).

German art historian and archaeologist. He was educated at Tübingen, Göttingen and Munich, and in 1922 he received his PhD from Berlin and became a Fellow of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Athens. He pursued his archaeological career first at Berlin and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut in Rome (1922–5), then at Heidelberg. In 1929 he was appointed to the chair at Munster and served as the director of the university museum. Under pressure from the Nazi regime, Lehmann left to reside in Rome, subsequently joining the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, then being developed as a premier research centre in archaeology and the history of art. By 1938 Lehmann had founded and was directing the Institute’s Archaeological Research Fund, its primary objective being the study of ancient mystery cult and excavation of the Sanctuary of the Great Gods on Samothrace. His scholarship and teaching reflected the wide interests of a modern humanist, including, for example, the study of ancient buildings as represented by die-cutters for coins and the transformation of such ancient ship-fountains as the ...

Article

Poulsen, (Poul) Frederik  

Flemming Johansen

(Sigfred)

(b Dalsgaard, Denmark, May 7, 1876; d Copenhagen, Nov 8, 1950).

Danish archaeologist and writer. He studied in Göttingen and Munich 1886–97, was a private tutor in Poland 1901–2, received a PhD from the University of Copenhagen in 1904 and was director of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, from 1926 to 1943. Throughout much of the latter period (1926–32) he excavated at Kalydon. He wrote novels, short stories and travel sketches and contributed articles on the history of art and the ancient world to Danish newspapers for many years. His memoirs describing life in Europe around 1900 are still readable. His book Der Orient und die frühgriechische Kunst was a pioneering work, and his scholarship in Greek and Roman iconography was innovative. He studied the Greek and Roman portraits in English country houses and had a special interest in Etruscan art. As director of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek he made many important acquisitions, such as the statue of Demosthenes...

Article

Tombros, Michael  

Greek, 20th century, male.

Born 1889, on Andros; died 1974.

Sculptor, writer.

Michael Tombros studied at the academy of fine arts in Athens and at the Académie Julian in Paris, returning to the city many times afterwards. He published the avant-garde magazine Vingtième Siècle in Athens, which ran contributions from such figures as Le Corbusier, Fernand Léger and Christian Zervos. In ...