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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

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

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

Boni, Giacomo  

Alessandro Conti

(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 ...

Article

Brandes, Jan Laurens Andries  

H. I. R. Hinzler

(b Rotterdam, Jan 13, 1857; d Weltevreden [now Jakarta], June 26, 1905).

Dutch archaeologist. The son of a theologian, he was supposed to study theology but felt more attracted to Asiatic languages and studied Sanskrit, Malay and Old Javanese at Leiden University from 1879 to 1883. In 1884 he completed a thesis on linguistics. In 1884 Brandes was appointed civil servant in Indonesian languages in Batavia (now Jakarta). Between 1884 and 1898 he concentrated on Old Javanese inscriptions, manuscripts and literature. A visit to H. N. van der Tuuk in 1885 gave him much inspiration. Through the inscriptions Brandes discovered the ancient monuments, and he started to specialize in the role of ornamentation. In 1900 he was appointed head of the Borobudur Restoration committee, and in 1901 he became head of the Commission for Archaeological Survey in the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). During a visit to Hanoi in 1902, he became aware of the Chinese influences in East Javanese art. He wrote important articles on the foreign origin of ornamentation in Javanese art and compiled monographs on two 13th-century East Javanese temples, Candi Jago (pubd ...

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

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

Cumont, Franz  

John Curran

(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....

Article

Dalton, Ormonde Maddock  

(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 ...

Article

Evans, Sir Arthur  

D. Evely

revised by Gordon Campbell

(John)

(b Hemel Hempstead, Herts, July 8, 1851; d Oxford, July 11, 1941).

English archaeologist and historian. He is best known as the discoverer of the Palace of Minos at Knossos and the inventor of the term Minoan to designate the Bronze Age civilization of Crete. His father ran a paper-milling business and was also a prominent antiquary. Evans studied modern history at Brasenose College, Oxford (1870–74), during which time he also travelled widely, from war-torn France to the Turkish-occupied Balkans (1871) and Romania (1872). His sympathies for the Slavs and his interest in the ancient remains of the region led him to settle at Ragusa (now Dubrovnik) in 1875. There he divided his time between investigating the political turmoil of the area, assisting refugees, visiting numerous historical sites, producing a series of books and scholarly articles and working as a reporter for the Manchester Guardian (from 1877); but as Austrian involvement in the Balkans increased, he was accused of mixing with nationalistic elements, arrested, imprisoned and expelled (...

Article

Fałat, Julian  

Janina Zielińska

(b Tuligłowy, nr Lwów [now Lviv, Ukraine], July 30, 1853; d Habelschwerdt, Silesia [now Bystrzyca Kłodzka, Poland], July 9, 1929).

Polish painter. He studied (1869–71) at the Kraków School of Fine Arts before working as a draughtsman for the archaeologist Stanisław Krzyżanowski (1841–81) on excavations in the Ukraine, then for the architect Feliks G̨siorowski. With the latter’s support, Fałat was able to study architecture in Zurich and Munich, but he gave up his studies to work as a technical draughtsman in Zurich. He continued with his painting studies in Munich (1877–80) under Alexander Strähuber (1814–82) and Georg Raab (1821–85). Fałat’s early work shows the influence of the watercolourists Hubert von Herkomer and Ludwig Passini (1832–1903), and of Eduard Grützner (1846–1925). Fałat’s own watercolour work was soon acclaimed both by the large group of Polish painters in Munich and also by those at home. In 1882–6 Fałat lived in Warsaw painting realistic genre scenes and landscapes and contributing illustrations to Polish and German periodicals, such as the Viennese Secession journal ...

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

Finot, Louis  

(b Bar-sur-Aube, July 10, 1864; d Toulon, May 16, 1935).

French art historian and archaeologist. He became interested in the history of India and in Sanskrit literature while working at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, and this led to his first publication, Lapidaires indiens. In 1898 he became Director of the new Mission Archéologique of Indochina in Saigon, later known as the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient. In the following years he travelled throughout Indochina, organizing an inventory of historical monuments, establishing a library and a museum for the archaeological mission at Saigon, which was later transferred to Hanoi, and creating the Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient in 1901. In 1904 he was appointed to a chair of the Collège de France and to the Ecole de Paris. He resumed directorship of the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient in 1930 for 17 years, and his name was given to the school’s archaeological museum in Hanoi. His publications included important work on the epigraphy of Indochina....

Article

Foucher, Alfred Charles Auguste  

E. Errington

(b Lorient, Nov 21, 1865; d Paris, Oct 30, 1952).

French art historian and archaeologist. He qualified with an arts degree in 1888 and began postgraduate Sanskrit and Indian studies in 1891 at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Sorbonne University. His primary interest was in Buddhist legend and tradition, and the relationship between India and the Western Classical world. In 1895, after obtaining his doctorate and a lectureship at the university, he spent two years on a scientific mission in India, visiting museums and sites, taking photographs and collecting manuscripts, coins and sculpture. The information he gathered on the art and sites of Gandhara during this survey was presented as his doctorat ès lettres thesis in 1905.

In 1898 he helped to establish a permanent archaeological mission, the Ecole Française d’Extrême Orient. While stationed in Saigon as the mission’s director (1904–7), he organized an archaeological expedition to Java. In May 1907 he was given charge of Indian language and literature at the Sorbonne. Later in that year he was appointed assistant director, and 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

Hill, Sir George Francis  

J. G. Pollard

(b Berhampore, Bengal, Dec 22, 1867; d London, Oct 18, 1948).

English archaeologist and art historian. He was born at a mission station, the youngest of five children, and later had a brilliant career as a student of Classics, first at University College, London, then at Merton College, Oxford. In 1893 he was appointed as an assistant in the Department of Coins and Medals at the British Museum, and he helped on a series of museum catalogues of Greek coins; over the years 1897 to 1922 he wrote six of the volumes in the series. He also wrote numismatic handbooks, a manual of Greek inscriptions and a volume of sources for Greek history. His activities as an art historian included founding the Vasari Society. He wrote a long series of articles and notes (1896–1941) on medals, and published a biography of Pisanello in 1905. He was appointed Keeper of the Department of Coins and Medals in 1912. In 1915...

Article

Hülsen, Christian  

Massimiliano David

(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.

Das Forum Romanum (Rome, 1904; Eng. trans., Rome, 1906, 2/1909) ‘La pianta di Roma dell’anonimo einsidlense’, Atti della Pontificia accademia romana di archeologia...