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(b Paris, April 9, 1884; d Paris, Dec 28, 1962).

French art historian. The son of an architect, he graduated from the Ecole des Chartes in Paris in 1907 and became a DLitt in 1921. He was a curator at the Bibliothèque Nationale, then in the department of sculpture at the Louvre, of which he became chief curator in 1940. He taught at the Ecole des Chartes, the Ecole du Louvre, and at the universities of Harvard and Yale in the USA. He presided over the Société Française d’Archéologie for 25 years and was a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres from 1934. A specialist in the Middle Ages, Aubert particularly studied the cathedrals of Senlis and Notre-Dame, Paris, Cistercian architecture, and French sculpture and stained glass. He trained a generation of medievalists and above all influenced the study of medieval architecture, especially in his precise analysis of the details of a building in order to establish its chronology. His work on sculpture was more limited, however, because he was interested only in the development of style, not in sources or iconography. Aubert was editor of the ...

(Vlas’yevich)

(b Mariupol’, Feb 20, 1862; d Leningrad [now St Petersburg], Dec 12, 1939).

Russian art historian of Ukrainian birth. He studied first in Odessa at the Novorossiysky University under Professor N. P. Kondakov and in 1888 followed Kondakov to St Petersburg, where he completed his education. During his university years, together with his fellow student E. Redin Aynalov, he researched the mosaics and mural paintings of St Sophia in Kiev, where his main interest was devoted to their iconography. He received his master’s degree in 1901. In 1903 Aynalov was appointed to a chair at Kazan’ University.

In one of his first works, Mosaics of the Fourth and Fifth Centuries (1895), Aynalov not only gave a very complete survey of the material, but replaced the prevailing theory held by Western scholars concerning a Roman school that was said to have determined the initial history of Byzantine art. Aynalov considered that it was not the West but the East that had been responsible for its stylistic development. He dealt with another of the most fundamental problems of Byzantine art in his monograph ...

(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 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 ...

(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 ...

(b Dundee, Aug 31, 1898; d London, April 14, 1974).

British art historian, scholar, and teacher. Boase studied history at Magdalen College, Oxford before teaching at Hertford College, Oxford from 1922 to 1937. As an historian his appointment as Director of the Courtauld Institute of Art and Professor of the History of Art in 1937 was controversial, but in this role he helped to establish the history of art as an undergraduate degree course. His time at the Courtauld was disrupted by World War II, and he worked to revive the Institute in its aftermath. Boase brought his historical training to his writing on art. His interests were extremely wide-ranging and he published on subjects as diverse as ‘The Arts in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem’ and ‘Illustrations of Shakespeare’s Plays in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’. Both these articles were among his regular contributions to the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. In addition to his articles on medieval art, in ...

(b Le Mans, Nov 1, 1908; d Brisbane, Australia, July 7, 1995).

French architectural historian, active also in America. Bony was educated at the Sorbonne, receiving his agregation in geography and history in 1933. In 1935, converted to art history by Henri(-Joseph) Focillon, he travelled to England under a research grant from the Sorbonne, after which time he became Assistant Master in French at Eton College (1937–9 and 1945–6). He returned to France in 1939 as an infantry lieutenant in World War II in the French Army, was taken as a prisoner of war and spent the years 1940–43 in an internment camp in Germany. After the war he returned to England, first to Eton, then as Lecturer in the History of Art at the French Institute in London (1946–61), Visiting Lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art (1948–58), and Slade Professor of Fine Art at St John’s College, Cambridge (1958–61). From 1961 to 1962...

(b Berlin, Aug 11, 1909; d London, Nov 10, 1996).

German scholar of Byzantine, East Christian and European illuminated manuscripts. He took his degree in 1933 at the University of Hamburg in the heady community of the Warburg Library (later Institute) under the tutelage of Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Immigrating with the Warburg staff and library to London in 1934, he served from 1940 to 1949 as the Institute’s Librarian and from 1944 to 1965 as Lecturer, Reader and then Professor of Byzantine art at the University of London. In 1965 he came to the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, becoming in 1970 the first Ailsa Mellon Bruce Professor. He retired in 1975 to London, where he died in 1996.

Buchthal is best known for his Miniature Painting in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem (1957), which laid the foundation for the now well-established art-historical field of Crusader studies. It exemplifies both his originality and the methods that made his scholarship so durable. Fundamental among these were his holistic approach to manuscripts, giving as much attention to ornament, liturgical usage, text traditions, palaeography and apparatus as to miniatures, and his relentlessly keen visual analysis. Aided by a powerful memory, he worked from original monuments, developing exceptional acuity in dissecting the formal components of their images. Mobilized in his dissertation, published in ...

(b London, Feb 26, 1905; d off Stornaway, Feb 24, 1941).

British writer and traveller. His travels in Greece in 1925–7 resulted in two books, The Station and The Byzantine Achievement, in which he presented readers brought up on the culture of Classical antiquity with a novel view of the importance of the civilization of Byzantium and the seminal influence of its art on the later development of European painting. In The Birth of Western Painting he developed this line of thought with a reassessment of El Greco as the ‘last and greatest flower of Byzantine genius’. His best-known book is The Road to Oxiana, a record of travels through Persia and Afghanistan in 1933–4 in search of the origins of Islamic architecture and culture. He contributed a conspectus of Timurid architecture and photographs taken on his journeys to the Survey of Persian Art. Although his views were often coloured by personal enthusiasm and prejudices (for example his hatred of the historical writings of Edward Gibbon) a surprising number of his insights into Byzantine and Islamic culture have been confirmed by later scholarship, and he played a major role in bringing these cultures to the attention of educated readers. He was also a founder-member of the ...

In the 20th century, discussion of the relationship between Byzantine art and the art of the Latin West evolved in tandem with scholarship on Byzantine art itself. Identified as the religious imagery and visual and material culture of the Greek Orthodox Empire based at Constantinople between ad 330 and 1453, studies of Byzantine art often encompassed Post-Byzantine art and that of culturally allied states such as Armenian Cilicia, Macedonia, and portions of Italy. As such fields as Palaiologan family manuscripts and wall paintings, Armenian manuscripts, and Crusader manuscripts and icons emerged, scholars identified new intersections between Western medieval and Byzantine art. Subtle comparisons emerged with the recognition that Byzantine art was not static but changed over time in style and meaning, although most analyses identified Byzantine art as an accessible reservoir of the naturalistic, classicizing styles of antiquity. Scholars considering the 7th-century frescoes at S Maria Antiqua and mosaics at S Maria in Cosmedin, both in Rome, and the 8th-century frescoes at Castelseprio and Carolingian manuscripts such as the Coronation Gospels of Charlemagne (Vienna, Schatzkam. SCHK XIII) used formal comparisons with works such as pre-iconoclastic icons at St Catherine’s Monastery on Sinai, along with the history of Byzantine iconoclasm, to argue for the presence of Greek painters in the West. Similarly, Ottonian and Romanesque painting and luxury arts, such as ivories, provided examples of the appropriation of Byzantine imperial imagery. Yet the study of works such as the great 12th-century ...

(b Keighly, Yorks, March 6, 1958; d Chicago, IL, April 29, 2002).

British art historian and medievalist, active in America. He studied English and Art History at the University of Cambridge, graduating with honours in 1980 and then worked towards a PhD (1985) in medieval art under George Henderson and Jean Michel Massing, while reading critical theory with Norman Bryson, who was a key early influence. Hired in 1985 by the University of Chicago, he served as the Mary L. Block Professor until his death in April 2002. Considered among the most innovative medievalists of the 20th century, Camille experimented broadly with literary theory, semiotics and deconstruction, psychoanalysis, gender studies, body history, biographical, and auto-biographical narrative modes. A meteoric streak of provocative and iconoclastic publications, some of them avowedly post-modern, signalled a profound rejection of the 19th century’s romantic and nationalistic vision of the Middle Ages and found audiences far beyond both art history and medieval studies.

Two pioneering articles, coinciding with his arrival in the United States in ...

[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 ...

(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 ...

(b Hampton Falls, NH, Dec 16, 1863; d Boston, Sept 22, 1942).

American architect and writer. Cram was the leading Gothic Revival architect in North America in the first half of the 20th century, at the head of an informal school known as the Boston Gothicists, who transformed American church design.

In 1881 Cram was apprenticed to the firm of Rotch & Tilden in Boston. His letters on artistic subjects to the Boston Transcript led to his appointment as the journal’s art critic by the mid-1880s. In 1886 he began his first European tour. In 1888 he founded the firm of Cram & Wentworth with Charles Wentworth (1861–97). With the arrival of Bertram Goodhue, the firm became Cram, Wentworth & Goodhue in 1892, and in 1899 Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson, with Frank Ferguson (1861–1926) having joined the office as business and engineering partner following the death of Wentworth.

Cram was strongly influenced both by the philosophies of John Ruskin...

(b Romorantin, Sologne, April 26, 1896; d Poitiers, March 26, 1972).

French art historian. He was a DLitt (1932) and professor of the history of medieval art (1946–66) at Poitiers University; he was also director (1954–66) of the Centre d’Etudes Supérieures de Civilisation Médiévale (CESCM), Poitiers. Crozet published some 400 works, but he was a specialist above all in Romanesque art and wrote three fundamental volumes on the Romanesque in central and western France: Berry (1932), Poitou (1948) and Saintonge (1971). He was also interested in geography, urban development, history, liturgy, methodology and even aviation and the railways. His research was founded on an exemplary working method: observation, analysis and classification of facts. He sanctioned the study of texts in order to identify chronological data with the greatest possible accuracy. Systematically sceptical, he accepted stylistic similarities and symbolic interpretations only in cases supported by substantial evidence. With Edmond-René Labande, Crozet contributed to the reputation and appreciation of the CESCM at Poitiers....

(b Pisa, Nov 7, 1878; d Milan, April 30, 1964).

Italian art historian. He was educated at Pisa University. From 1909 he taught art history at Milan University, where he was responsible for introducing courses in art history into the literature degree, and where he began to pursue his early interest in manuscript illumination. His first book, and one of his major works, La miniatura fiorentina (1914), was the result of almost a decade of documentary research and stylistic analysis—a vast corpus of material, which established the characteristics of the numerous schools and workshops. In 1925 he published La Miniature italienne, a work that traced the roots of Italian miniature painting in Byzantine, Carolingian, Irish, and French illumination. Alongside his study of manuscript illumination D’Ancona developed an interest in other periods of art history, and published from the mid-1940s a series of monographs and works on aspects of the Italian Renaissance and of modern art. Towards the end of his life he returned to his early interests with the publication of the essay ‘Contributo alla storia della miniatura del sec. XV’, which was based on documents found in the archives of S Lorenzo, Florence. D’Ancona was a gifted teacher and was concerned throughout his career with the promotion of art-historical studies. He wrote a number of guides to the teaching of art history and collaborated on the three-volume work ...

(b Cardiff, Jan 3, 1866; d Holford, Somerset, Feb 2, 1945).

British Classical scholar and Byzantine archaeologist. He entered the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities at the British Museum under Sir A. W. Franks in 1896, and became Keeper of that department in 1921. His early interest in ethnography shifted to archaeology with the publication of his Catalogue of Early Christian Antiquities and his Guide to Early Christian and Byzantine Antiquities, which accompanied an exhibition that he organized. The Byzantine collections of the British Museum had not until then received much attention, and Dalton’s scrupulous research gained him recognition as one of the leading early Byzantinists. Until his retirement in 1927 he regularly published and re-edited official guides and catalogues to the Early Christian and Byzantine antiquities in the British Museum, all of which became standard works on the subjects concerned. He also produced catalogues of the medieval collections and works of Byzantine art history. His most distinguished publication was the vast survey work ...

(b Gorizia [Görz], Aug 28, 1902; d Rome, Nov 24, 1996).

Italian art historian. He graduated from the University of Florence in 1925. From 1937, he was Assistant Professor of Medieval Art History in the University of Rome, and between 1956 and 1972 he was a full Professor, succeeding Mario Salmi.

His early publications in the late 1920s developed from his studies under Pietro Toesca on the workshop of Ghirlandaio family §(1). While working in the Soprintendenza of Perugia he drastically changed the nature of his research, focusing on 14th- and 15th-century sculptors such as Lorenzo Maitani in Orvieto, Donatello and Jacopo della Quercia, as well as wooden sculpture in the Marches. His early training under Toesca gave him a strong methodological approach which was largely based on the ‘power of eyes’, with priority given to matters of style.

Further research developed into his pioneering studies on wooden sculpture, mainly from central and north Italy, which were contextualized within the broader picture of European art, from Germany to France. His pivotal studies on the Romanesque wood-carvers of central Italy and the origins and diffusion of the Gothic ‘crocifisso doloroso’ are still key references in the field....

(b Herseaux [Flem. Herzeeuw], Sept 7, 1914; d Oxford, Jan 4, 1972).

Belgian art historian. He studied the philology of Romance languages at the Catholic University of Leuven and in 1940, after the outbreak of World War II, took part in the 18-day campaign and thereafter joined the Resistance. He was seriously injured in the Normandy landings of 1944. In 1946 he joined the Bibliothèque Royale Albert 1er in Brussels, working first in the department of Belgian bibliography and later in the department of manuscripts. He was appointed librarian in 1948 and assistant curator in 1956. From 1959 to 1963 he taught in several American universities (Princeton, Berkeley, and Harvard); he resigned from the Bibliothèque Royale in 1963 and became a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, where he worked until his death.

As a codicologist, Delaissé contributed to the knowledge of manuscripts of the late Middle Ages, particularly by his study of the original manuscript of Thomas à Kempis (Brussels, Bib. Royale Albert 1er, MSS. ...

(b nr St Pölten, 1902; d Vienna, 1990).

Austrian art historian. A highly influential scholar of Byzantine art, he was also concerned with western medieval painting, particularly Romanesque, and with the restoration of Austrian monuments. He studied art history under Josef Strzygowski at the University of Vienna (1921–8). From 1930 to 1936 he worked for the Austrian monuments service as keeper of monuments in Carinthia. In 1939 he emigrated to England where he worked as librarian of the Warburg Institute in London and taught at the Courtauld Institute. In 1946 he returned to Austria as president of the reconstituted monuments service, and from 1963 to 1973 held the chair of art history in the University of Vienna, where he taught medieval and Byzantine art.

Although he often demonstrated an unerring ability to set a medieval monument in the context of its artistic tradition, he appears sometimes to have been inattentive to detail and to historical textual issues. Yet, even in his earliest work (...