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Morelli, Giovanni

Full Name: Morelli, Giovanni

Other Names:

  • Giovanni Morelli

Gender: male

Date Born: 1816

Date Died: 1891

Place Born: Verona, Veneto, Italy

Place Died: Bergamo, Lombardia, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): connoisseurship and Italian (culture or style)


Overview

Italian patriot and art historian; developer of a method of connoisseurship which identified attribution via minute characteristics of artists. Morelli was born to a protestant family, a minority in Italy (originally of French Huguenot decent). Raised in Bergamo, he attended the (Swiss) Kantonschule at Aarau between 1826 and 1832. From 1833-1838 he studied medicine at the universities of Munich and Erlangen because of the Italian proscription against protestants in universities. His study of anatomy and human observation assisted him in forming his conclusions in later years regarding connoisseurship. Morelli graduated in medicine under the anatomist Ignaz Döllinger (1770-1841), but never practiced. His early interest in iconography appeared in a mock iconographical study, under the pseudonym Nicholas Schäffer in 1836. A second parody on the aesthetic approach to art was published in 1839, again under the Schäffer pseudonym, Das Miasma Diabolicum. Morelli traveled to Berlin in 1838 where he me naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), the artists Karl Blechen (1802-1872), Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853), the architect Wilhelm Stier (1799-1856), but most importantly, the art historians Karl Friedrich von Rumohr and Berlin Museum director Gustav Friedrich Waagen. That same year he was instrumental in assisting the geological morphology of the Swiss geologist, Louis Agassiz (1807-1873). Until 1840, Morelli lived in Paris, where he gave up science for good and met the dealer Otto Mündler. It was Mündler who gave Morelli his first introduction to art connoisseurship. Morelli returned to Italy in 1840, embracing his birth country and acting as a conduit for the intellectual traditions of the north. He translated Johann Pieter Eckermann’s conversations with Goethe (though never published) and Friedrich Schelling’s lectures on his aesthetics in 1845 and on Dante in 1858. Morelli served in the Risorgimento of Italy in the 1860s, becoming a Senator in unified Italy in 1873. He chaired many commissions in the new government on art, most important were the ones enacting legislation forbidding export of art treasures from Italy and the standardization of conservation practices in Italian museums, the latter with restorers Luigi Cavenaghi (1844-1918) and Giovanni Secco-Suardo (1798-1873). Perhaps through his previous connections with Mündler, who had worked for the National Gallery in London and now sold them pictures, he met British collectors in Milan, including Charles Lock Eastlake, Sir James Hudson (1810-1885), British ambassador at Turin, and the amateur archaeologist Austen Henry Layard. Morelli acquired pictures for Layard and was among the first to whom he taught his technique of connoisseurship. Only after age sixty did Morelli published his famous methodology of art history. It first appeared as a series of articles in the Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst beginning in 1876 and later as book in 1880. His treatise, Die Werke italienischer Meister, was written in German under the pseudonym “Ivan Lermolieff” (a Russian-ized anagram of the Italian form his name). The work is a dialogue between an Italian master scholar (Schwarze) and his Russian pupil, Lermolieff, ostensibly the author of the book. Their topics were the major paintings in the galleries of Rome, Dresden, and Berlin. Eric Fernie points that the conversational organization of the book allowed Morelli to criticize contemporary approaches and individual scholar’s opinions on art. The book contested may accepted attributions. The two personalities discuss works with the Italian often reattributing the work, and the Russian providing supporting evidence (a drawing, for example he knows) as well popular responses. In this way, Morelli could criticize a work of art without ever declaring it a fake. Morelli followed this with a series of articles on Raphael, appearing between 1881 and 1882. His collected writings, Kunstkritische Studien, edited by himself, were published beginning in 1890. The same year he met the young Bernard Berenson, who became perhaps the most important exponent of Morelli’s method. Morelli provided letters of introduction to many sacristans to allow Berenson to examine works of art for his later, famous books. Morelli died before the third volume of his critical studies appeared; the volume was subsequently edited by Gustavo Frizzoni. His immediate influence was on Frizzoni as well as the art historians Jean Paul Richter, Adolfo Venturi, Berenson, and Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes. In 1893, Richter’s wife translated Die Werke italienischer Meister into English. Morelli’s connoisseurship employing identification of the “hands” of an artist–both literally and in the figurative sense of the characteristics of representation–was immensely popular for a group of art historians who immediately followed his generation. Scholars as different as J. D. Beazley, Berenson and Julius Alwin von Schlosser used his technique directly to establish their own reputations (Schlosser wrote effusively of his meeting with Morelli, arranged by Franz Wickhoff). This technique, frequently termed “scientific” art history in the 19th and early 20th-century, contrasted with documentary and scholars who viewed art history as a historical phenomenon, such as Joseph Archer Crowe and G. B. Cavalcaselle. His scientific classification drew from his time with Döllinger and the French comparative anatomist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832). Morelli’s conversancy with German academics allowed him to debate the issues of art history on their terms. His approach to renaissance art contrasts that of, for example, Wilhelm Bode, director of the Berlin Musuem, whose art history was heavily theoretical. Freud used Morelli’s method in his 1914 study of Michelangelo’s Moses and an aspect of the approach found favor with Edgar Wind in a 1963 essay. Morelli’s reattributions though wide-ranging, largely met with acceptance. Overall, Morelli possessed a strong anti-intellectualism. He was completely against written art histories, noting that, “the history of art can only be studied properly before the works of art themselves. Books are apt to warp a man’s judgment.” For Morelli, “the only true record [of art history] is the work of art itself,” writing elsewhere that the “art historian will gradually disappear, [and that would be] no great loss either.” His anti-academicism was visited on even Wickhoff, head of the so-called Vienna school of art history, whom he accused of taking the vocation of art history too lightly.


Selected Bibliography

“Die Galerien Roms: ein kritischer Versuch von Iwan Lermolieff.” I. “Die Galerie Borghese: Aus dem Russischen übersetzt von Dr Johannes Schwarze, mit Illustrationen.” Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst 9 (1874): 1-11, 73-81, 171-8, 249-53; Part II, 10 (1875): 97-106, 207-11, 264-73, 329-34, Part III, 11 (1876): 132-7, 168-73; Die Werke italienischer Meister in den Galerien von München, Dresden und Berlin: Ein kritischer Versuch [von Ivan Lermolieff, aus dem Russischen übersetzt von Dr Johannes Schwarze]. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann,1880, English, Italian Masters in German Galleries: A Critical Essay on the Italian Pictures in the Galleries of Munich, Dresden and Berlin. Translated by Mrs. Louise M. Richter. London: Bell and Sons, 1893; Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. 3 vols. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1890-93, [individual volumes are:] I. Die Galerien Borghese und Doria Panfili in Rom. 1890, II. Die Galerien zu München und Dresden. 1891, III. Die Galerien zu Berlin. 1893, English, Italian Painters: Critical Studies of Their Works. Translated by Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes. 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1893.


Sources

[the literature on Morelli is legion, but includes] [biographical study on Morelli by Gustav Frizzoni] Die Galerien zu Berlin. vol. 3 of Morelli, Giovanni. Kunstkritische Studien über italienische Malerei. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1893; [regarding Schlosser’s meeting with Morelli] Schlosser, Julius von. “Die Wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte.” Mitteilungen des österreichischen Instituts für Geschforschungen 13 no. 2 (1934): 145ff; Wind, Edgar. “Critique of Connoisseurship.” Art and Anarchy London: 1963, pp. 32-51, 139-53; Dvorák, Max. Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967, p. 215; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 45 (and n. 92); Wollheim, Richard. “Giovanni Morelli and the Origins of Scientific Connoisseurship.” In On Art and Mind: Essays and Lectures. London: Allen Lane, 1973; Pope-Hennessy, John. “Connoisseurship.” The Study and Criticism of Italian Sculpture. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980, pp. 11-38; Kultermann, Udo. Geschichte der Kunstgeschichte: Der Weg einer Wissenschaft. 2nd ed. Frankfurt am Main and Vienna: Ullstein, 1981, pp. 192-9; Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 48; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 234-235; German Essays on Art History. Gert Schiff, ed. New York: Continuum, 1988, p. xlil, mentioned; [conference proceedings] Agosti, Giacomo, and Manca, Maria Elisabetta, et al. Giovanni Morelli e la cultura dei conoscitori: atti del convegno internazionale, Bergamo, 4-7 giugno 1987. Bergamo: P. Lubrina, 1993; Pope-Hennessy, John. “Morelli and Richter.” On Artists and Art Historians: Selected Book Reviews of John Pope-Hennessy. Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1994, pp. 327-29; Fernie, Eric. Art History and its Methods. London: Phaidon Press, 1995, pp.103 -115; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 275-7; Anderson, Jaynie. “Morelli, Giovanni.” Dictionary of Art; Anderson, Jaynie. Collecting Connoisseurship and the Art Market in Risorgimento Italy: Giovanni Morelli’s Letters to Giovanni Melli and Pietro Zavaritt (1866-1872). Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 1999.




Citation

"Morelli, Giovanni." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/morellig/.


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Italian patriot and art historian; developer of a method of connoisseurship which identified attribution via minute characteristics of artists. Morelli was born to a protestant family, a minority in Italy (originally of French Huguenot decent). Ra

Moreau, Jacques

Full Name: Moreau, Jacques

Gender: male

Date Born: 1918

Date Died: 1961

Home Country/ies: Belgium

Institution(s): Universität Heidelberg


Overview

He co-founded with Heinz Kähler the Monumenta Artis Romanae book series.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Scripta minora. Walter Schmitthenner, ed. Heidelberg: C. Winter, Universitätsverlag, 1964, pp. 306-312; Das Trierer Kornmarktmosaik. Monumenta artis Romanae 2. Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1960; Die Welt der Kelten. Stuttgart: G. Kilpper, 1958; and Diehl, Ernst. Inscriptiones, Latinae Christianae veteres. 3 vols. Berlin: Apud Weidmannos, 1924-


Sources

Ridgway, David. Kähler, Heinz. Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, p. 628 [incorrectly identifies him as “Jean Morear”].



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Moreau, Jacques." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/moreauj/.


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He co-founded with Heinz Kähler the Monumenta Artis Romanae book series.

Moreau-Nélaton, Étienne

Full Name: Moreau-Nélaton, Étienne

Gender: male

Date Born: 1859

Date Died: 1927

Place Born: Fère-en-Tardenois, Hauts-de-France, Paris, France

Place Died: Fère-en-Tardenois, Hauts-de-France, Paris, France

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): French (culture or style) and painting (visual works)

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Painter, collector and Corot scholar, published a series of monagraphs on 19th century painters based on archival documents. Moreau-Nélaton was the son of Adolphe Moreau and Camille Moreau-Nélaton, both of whom were artists. After 1871 he studied in the studio of Albert Maignant. He became an etcher and ceramicist.


Selected Bibliography

and Robaut, Alfred. Histoire de Corot et de ses Åuvres. Paris: H. Floury, 1905.


Sources

Bazin 484; Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, Paris. De Corot aux impressionnistes : donations Moreau-Nélaton. Paris: Bibliothèque nationale/Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991.




Citation

"Moreau-Nélaton, Étienne." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/moreaunelatone/.


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Painter, collector and Corot scholar, published a series of monagraphs on 19th century painters based on archival documents. Moreau-Nélaton was the son of Adolphe Moreau and Camille Moreau-Nélaton, both of whom were artists. After 1871 he studied

Morassi, Antonio

Full Name: Morassi, Antonio

Gender: male

Date Born: 1893

Date Died: unknown

Place Born: Gorizia, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Ancient Italian, Early Western World, Italian (culture or style), Mediterranean (Early Western World), Venetian (Republic, culture or style), and Viennese


Overview

studied in Vienna with Max Dvořák and Julius Alwin von Schlosser; in Rome with Vasari; superintendant of Milan and Genoa; left civil service to pursue work on Venetian art from 1949



Sources

Bazin 163




Citation

"Morassi, Antonio." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/morassia/.


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studied in Vienna with Max Dvořák and Julius Alwin von Schlosser; in Rome with Vasari; superintendant of Milan and Genoa; left civil service to pursue work on Venetian art from 1949

Moorsel, P. P. V., van

Full Name: Moorsel, P. P. V., van

Other Names:

  • P. P. V. van Moorsel

Gender: male

Date Born: 1931

Date Died: 1999

Place Born: Wassenaar, South Holland, Netherlands

Place Died: The Hague, South Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): Coptic (culture or style), Early Christian, and Egyptian (ancient)

Career(s): clergy


Overview

Professor of Early Christian Art and Coptic Art, Catholic Priest. After his ordination, in 1958, Van Moorsel served for a short period as a priest in the parish of Roelofarendsveen, near Leiden. He then decided to attend the lectures of Henri Van de Waal, Professor of Art History at Leiden University. One year later he went to Rome, to study Church History at the Gregorian University. He received his graduate degrees in 1962, and gained his doctorate in 1964, with his dissertation Rotswonder of Doortocht door de Rode Zee (Miracle of the Rock – The Crossing of the Red Sea). His adviser was Engelbert Kirschbaum. This excellent study won the Struycken Award (Nijmegen) soon after its publication in 1965. Van Moorsel returned to the Netherlands, to work as a librarian, and as lecturer in the History of the Early Church and in Patristic Literature at the Seminary of Warmond. In 1967 he began teaching Early Christian art at Leiden University, a position which he held until 1989 (from 1971 as lecturer, from 1980 as full professor). In 1989 he gave up his position in Early Christian art and became professor of Coptic art instead. In addition to his teaching at Leiden, he lectured as a visiting professor in Louvain, Jerusalem, Paris, and Münster. Among his many interests, which included various aspects of Early Christian art and archeology, the art and material culture of Coptic and Nubian Christianity, gradually became more prominent. His experience in the field of Coptic can be traced back to 1966, when he studied the recently discovered wall paintings of the Nubian church of Abdallah-n-Irqi, which had been transferred from the excavation site to the repository of the National Museum of Cairo. Between 1974 and 1978, Van Moorsel studied the wall paintings of Saqqara, kept in the Coptic Museum in Old Cairo. In 1981, the Institut français d’archéologie orientale (IFAO) in Cairo commissioned him to continue the documentation and publication project of Coptic medieval wall paintings initiated by Jules Leroy (1903-1979). In the framework of this project, Van Moorsel headed several campaigns in Egypt, first in the Monastery of Saint Anthony near the Red Sea, and, in 1984 and 1985, in the neighboring Monastery of Saint Paul. He meticulously described the wall paintings in two richly illustrated publications: Les peintures du monastère de Saint-Antoine près de la Mer Rouge, and Les peintures du monastère de Saint-Paul près de la Mer Rouge (which appeared posthumously). From 1986 onwards, more campaigns in various monasteries followed. One of the highlights of his work in Egypt was the discovery, in 1991, of an exceptional wall painting representing the Annunciation, in the Monastery of the Syrians (Deir es Sourian). Following the successful conservation, in close cooperation with French specialists, Van Moorsel devoted a publication to it in 1995. Another field in which he combined documentation and conservation was that of Coptic icons. In 1986, he was given permission to describe the collection of icons preserved in the Coptic Museum in Old-Cairo. The catalog, co-authored with two of his former students, appeared in 1994. Van Moorsel was convinced that the Coptic Christians, including the monks, should themselves assume the responsibility for their artistic heritage in the monasteries and elsewhere, and should be given the skills and the means to do so. In 1990, a selected group of monks were invited to The Netherlands to receive instruction and training in art history and art conservation. These activities resulted in the creation of a joint program Egyptian-Netherlands Cooperation for Coptic Art Preservation, in which Dutch and Egyptian specialists worked together and continue to do so up to the present day. In 2000, nineteen of his earlier articles in the field of Nubian and Coptic Christian art were republished, along with one new article finished just before his death, in a volume edited by some of his former students and colleagues: Called to Egypt. During his academic career, Van Moorsel was an enthusiastic teacher and devoted tutor for his students at Leiden University and elsewhere. His lectures are said to have been always perfectly prepared and delivered with humor and wit. In order to acquaint the students with objects of religious art, he used to take them on exploratory visits to parish churches. As a priest and active member of various committees in the bishopric of Rotterdam, he devoted much time and energy to the preservation of the artistic and liturgical heritage of churches in The Netherlands. In 1994, he was awarded the important royal distinction of Officier in de Orde van Oranje-Nassau. After his death, his impressive collection of slides was digitized in order to be included in the Index of Christian Art of Princeton University. In Leiden University, the Paul van Moorsel Center for Christian Art and Culture in the Middle East was created in 2001 to honor him and to continue his work.


Selected Bibliography

for a complete list up to 2000, see: Paul van Moorsel: List of Scholarly Publications in Van Moorsel, P.P.V. Called to Egypt. Collected Studies on Painting in Christian Egypt. Leiden: De Goeje Fund 30, 2000: XV- XXII; Rotswonder of Doortocht door de Rode Zee. De rol en betekenis van beide in de vroegchristelijke letteren en de kunst in Mededelingen van het Nederlands Historisch Instituut te Rome 33 (1966) The Hague, 1965; Willibrord en Bonifatius. Bussum: Fibula-Van Dishoeck, 1968; Horen en zien. Ter verantwoording van een iconografische methode (Inaugural lecture at the University of Leiden) Leiden, 1972; and Jacquet, Jean and Schneider, Hans The Central Church of Abdallah Nirqi. Leiden: Brill, 1975; (Ed.) New Discoveries in Nubia. Proceedings of the Colloquium on Nubian Studies, The Hague, 1979. Leiden: Nederlands Instituut voor het Nabije Oosten, 1982; and Immerzeel, Mat and Langen, Linda Catalogue général du Musée Copte. The Icons. Cairo: Supreme Council of Antiquities Press, [1994]; Les peintures du monastère de Saint-Antoine près de la Mer Rouge. Avec des contributions de Peter Grossmann, Karel Innemée et Pierre-Henry Laferrière et la collaboration de Philippe Akermann, Abdel-Fatah Nosseir, Basile Psiroukis, Kees Crena de Iongh et Johanna Rijnierse (Mémoires de l’IFAO 112, 1-2) 2 Vols. Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 1995-1997; Called to Egypt. Collected Studies on Painting in Christian Egypt. Leiden: De Goeie Fund 30, 2000; Les peintures du monastère de Saint-Paul près de la Mer Rouge. Avec des contributions de Peter Grossmann et Pierre-Henry Laferrière et la collaboration de Victor Ghica, Karel Innemée, Kees Crena de Iongh, Alain Lecler et Johanna Rijnierse (Mémoires de l’IFAO 120) Cairo: Institut français d’archéologie orientale, 2002.


Sources

Duval, Noël and Immerzeel, Mat Paul van Moorsel, professeur à Leiden, spécialiste de l’art copte, 1931-1999 in Antiquité Tardive 7 (1999): 27-30; Het Christelijk Oosten. Tijdschrift van het Instituut voor Oosters Christendom 51 (1999), 3-4: 325; Chavannes-Mazel, C.; Immerzeel, M.; Innemée, K.; Van Loon, G.; Van Rompay, L.; Veelenturf, K. in Van Moorsel, P.P.V, Called to Egypt. Collected Studies on Painting in Christian Egypt. Leiden: The Goeje Fund 30, 2000: X-XI.



Contributors: Monique Daniels


Citation

Monique Daniels. "Moorsel, P. P. V., van." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/moorselp/.


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Professor of Early Christian Art and Coptic Art, Catholic Priest. After his ordination, in 1958, Van Moorsel served for a short period as a priest in the parish of Roelofarendsveen, near Leiden. He then decided to attend the lectures of

Moore, George Augustus

Full Name: Moore, George Augustus

Other Names:

  • George Moore

Gender: male

Date Born: 1852

Date Died: 1933

Place Born: Moore Hall, Lough Carra, County Mayo, Ireland

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Ireland

Subject Area(s): Impressionist (style), Modern (style or period), and painting (visual works)

Career(s): art critics, authors, and novelists


Overview

Writer and art critic whose essays Modern Painting brought Impressionist sensibilities to acceptance among the British public. Moore’s father was the wealthy landowner George Henry Moore (1810-1870), a Liberal MP for county Mayo and horse breeder, and his mother Mary Blake (Moore) (1830-1895). Moore attended St. Mary’s College, a Roman Catholic boarding school in Oscott, near Birmingham. In 1868 while the family lived in London, he enrolled in drawing classes at the South Kensington School of Art and elsewhere. His family discouraged these studies, but at his father’s death in 1870 he inherited the Irish estates and could determine his own life. In 1873 he moved to Paris to study painting again, first under Alexandre Cabanel at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and then at the Académie Julian, with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre. He briefly returned to London in1874 before again moving to Paris in 1875, this time as a bohemian at the Café de la Nouvelle-Athènes, a literati bistro. Moore gradually realized his talent was literary rather than graphic. He met Edouard Manet, who painted as least three portraits of Moore, Edgar Degas, who drew him as well, and August Renoir. He soon began to champion Impressionism, Degas and particularly Manet. He also met émile Zola, and decided to introduce the French writer to England. Returning to Ireland, he began to write, but his early attempts at drama and poetry were largely failures. The revolt of tenants from their landlords in Ireland meant Moore’s income was drastically reduced; he moved to London in 1879 and took up journalism. For the next thirty years, he traveled between London and Ireland writing books and journal articles and participating in artistic circles such as the Hogarth Club. He championed the paintings of the French Impressionists. His 1883 novel, his first, A Modern Lover is set in the contemporary art world. Recognizable characters from the novel, mimicking Zola’s realism, include the art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel (1831-1922) as “Mr. Bendish.” Like so much of his output, he subsequently rewrote and republished the work continually. A Mummer’s Wife (1885) followed, perhaps the first of literary realism set in a British context. Other novels followed. Moore’s abrasive stories resulted in their censoring from many libraries and Moore launched a crusade against them “A New Censorship of Literature,” in Pall Mall Gazette 1884 and elsewhere attacked Victorian sensibilities. His 1891 novel Vain Fortune made a deep impression on James Joyce who used it in his story “The Dead” in the Dubliners (1914). From 1891 to 1895 Moore wrote art criticism–one of the first in England–for the magazine The Hawk. He was also art critic for The Speaker. Echoing the sentiments of the painters of the Salon des Refusés, he attacked French formal art education in his book Impressions and Opinions in1891, singling out his alma maters, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian, as suppressing an artist’s individuality. His most important art book, Modern Painting (1893) attacked public taste and consumerism that drove much of art production. Key among those artists Moore disparaged for appealing to the public were James McNeil Whistler; Manet and Degas were praised for what Moore saw as following their personal and unique visions. Moore was one of the founders of the Independent Theatre in London, devoted to performing the drama of Ibsen, Strindberg. Moore revised this work continually after publication, as well. During the 1890s, he maintained a long affair with Maud Alice Burke, Lady Emerald Cunard (1872-1948), an American heiress, married to Sir Bache Cunard; their daughter, the bohemian Nancy Clare Cunard (1896-1965), may have been Moore’s daughter. Moore was enlisted in 1899 by William Butler Yeats to help create the Irish Literary Theatre, collaborating with Yeats on Diarmuid and Grania. He lived in Dublin between 1901 and 1911. There he produced a small book of his experiences with the artists he knew, Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters, 1906. Moore returned to London, traveling only once more to the middle east in 1914 to research a novel. He took to issuing expensive editions of his books to counteract the censorship he continued to meet. He died of uraemia (renal failure) at his home in Belgravia, London while working on his recollections, A Communication to My Friends, which were posthumously published in 1933. His ashes are buried on Castle Island in Lough Carra, County Mayo. In his lifetime, Moore owned a large collection of works by his friends, Manet, Monet, Degas, Berthe Morisot, Charles Conder and Ford Madox Brown. Moore was engaged in a quest of literary perfection, his literary works, though groundbreaking, are now almost forgotten by the general public.


Selected Bibliography

Impressions and Opinions. London: David Nutt, 1891; Modern Painting. London: Walter Scott, 1893; Reminiscences of the Impressionist Painters. Dublin: Maunsel, 1906 A Communication to my Friends. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1933.


Sources

Moore, George. A Communication to My Friends. London: The Nonesuch Press, 1933; Hone, Joseph M., et al. The Life of George Moore. New York: Macmillan, 1936; Salinger, Margaretta. “Manet and George Moore.” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 15, no. 5 (January 1957): 117-119; Farrow, Anthony. George Moore. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978 [discussion of art theory] pp. 32-33; Frazier, Adrian Woods. George Moore, 1852-1933. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.




Citation

"Moore, George Augustus." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/mooreg/.


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Writer and art critic whose essays Modern Painting brought Impressionist sensibilities to acceptance among the British public. Moore’s father was the wealthy landowner George Henry Moore (1810-1870), a Liberal MP for county Mayo and horse

Moore, Charles H.

Full Name: Moore, Charles H.

Other Names:

  • Charles Herbert Moore

Gender: male

Date Born: 1840

Date Died: 1930

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Place Died: Hartley Wintney, Hampshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Medievalist architectural historian; first director of the Fogg [Art] Museum 1896-1909 and first professor of art at Harvard with Charles Eliot Norton. Moore’s father was Charles Moore, a lace dealer, and his mother Jane Maria Berendtson [Benson] (Moore). He grew up in New York City, attending New York public schools. He never attended college. Moore began his career as a landscape painter training with painter Benjamin H. Coe in 1853 in New York. He spent summers painting in the Catskill mountains beginning in 1859, moving their permanently in 1862. Moore helped found the American Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which boasted itself the “Society for the Advancement of Truth in Art” in 1863. He married Mary Jane Tomlinson (d. 1880) in 1865, moving now to Catskill, New York. While in the Berkshires, he most likely met Charles Eliot Norton. Norton recommended Moore as an instructor of freehand drawing in Harvard’s Lawrence Scientific School in 1871. Later Norton chose Moore to as part of the college’s new art department in 1874, a move to incorporate the fine arts into Harvard’s liberal arts curriculum. In 1876 Moore took a paid leave of absence to study in Italy with John Ruskin to prepare him for teaching. The two men discussed aesthetics, sketching architecture, and studying old master paintings continuing their instruction in Venice. Moore did not return until 1878, but when he did, he launched into a curriculum which included “Principles of Design in Painting Sculpture and Architecture.” His Fine Arts 1, a combination of practical and theoretical, complemented Norton’s strict historical approach in Fine Arts 2. His wife died in 1880 and Moore married Elizabeth Fisk Hewins the following year. In 1882 he embarked on a publishing career, issuing his Facsimiles or Examples in Delineation Selected from the Masters for the Use of the Student in Drawing. He served as curator of art at Harvard’s William Hayes Fogg Art Museum in 1885. Moore made a second trip to Europe to focus on French architecture. Along the way, Moore clearly read the work of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. The book resulting from this trip, published in 1890, was The Development and Character of Gothic Architecture. It made his reputation as an architectural historian and teacher. Moore received honorary memberships in the American Institute of Architects and the Royal Institute of British Architects. Harvard awarded him an honorary A.M. degree, promoting him to assistant professor in 1891. In 1896 Moore rose to (full) professor and named the first director of the Fogg Museum of Art. At the Museum, he focused on the educational collections. A second art history The Character of Renaissance Architecture, was published in 1905, as a companion to his Gothic study. He retired emeritus in 1909 and was succeeded at the Fogg by Edward Waldo Forbes. In retirement, Moore moved to Hartley Wintney in Hampshire, England. His final architectural treatise, The Mediaeval Church Architecture of England, was published in 1912, as well as a volume on the philosopher Swedenborg. His papers are held in Houghton Library, Harvard University. Moore left a promising career as a painter to become among the first art historians at an academic institution in the United States. His Development and Character of Gothic Architecture was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.


Selected Bibliography

Catalogue with Notes of Studies and Facsimiles from Examples of the Works of Florence and Venice: belonging to the Fine Arts Department of Harvard University. Cambridge, MA: John Wilson and Son, 1878; Developement & Character of Gothic Architecture. New York: Macmillan & Co., 1890; Character of Renaissance Architecture. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905; The Mediæval Church Architecture of England. New York: The Macmillam Company, 1912.


Sources

Mather, Frank Jewett, Jr. Charles Herbert Moore, Landscape Painter. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957; Gerdts, William H. Art across America: Two Centuries of Regional Painting, 1710-1920 vol. 1, New York: Abbeville Press, 1990, pp. 160-61; Ferber, Linda S., and Gerdts, William H. The New Path: Ruskin and the American Pre-Raphaelites. Brooklyn, NY: Brooklyn Museum, 1985; Brooks, Michael W. “New England Gothic: Charles Eliot Norton, Charles H. Moore, and Henry Adams.” Studies in the History of Art 35 (1990): 113-25; “Moore, Charles Herbert.” Who Was Who in American Art 2 (1999): 2316; [obituary:] “Prof. C H. Moore Dies in 90th Year.” New York Times. February 18, 1930, p. 20.




Citation

"Moore, Charles H.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/moorec/.


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Medievalist architectural historian; first director of the Fogg [Art] Museum 1896-1909 and first professor of art at Harvard with Charles Eliot Norton. Moore’s father was Charles Moore, a lace dealer, and his mother Jane Mar

Montmercy, Anne Duc de

Full Name: Montmercy, Anne Duc de

Gender: male

Date Born: 1493

Date Died: 1567

Place Born: Cervera, Asturias, Principado de Asturias, Spain

Place Died: Paris, Île-de-France, France

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): manuscripts (documents)

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Collector and historian of antiques and illuminated manuscripts. After serving in the military, de Montmercy returned to civilian life in 1515. As a wealthy nobleman, he used inheritance money to purchase several Ch- teaus, which housed his art collection. In 1537, he rebuilt a Ch- teau at Ecouen, where he kept important sculptures of Italian artists, including Michaelangelo’s Slaves. De Montmercy’s financial support helped with the restoration of the antique remains from the Languedoc region. His Paris home included an art gallery and a library, housing a wide variety of tapestries, paintings, and pottery. Several churches were built on de Montmercy’s property, and he provided funds for illuminated manuscripts, stained-glass window construction and other aesthetic improvements. He died in the battle of St. Denis in 1567, but his coat of arms on a suit of armor and illuminated manuscripts, as well as a stone altarpiece depicting his family, attest to the influence of his patronage in France.



Sources

Dictionary of Art



Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker


Citation

LaNitra Michele Walker. "Montmercy, Anne Duc de." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/montmercya/.


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Collector and historian of antiques and illuminated manuscripts. After serving in the military, de Montmercy returned to civilian life in 1515. As a wealthy nobleman, he used inheritance money to purchase several Ch- teaus, which housed his art co

Montias, Mike

Full Name: Montias, Mike

Other Names:

  • Mike Montias

Gender: male

Date Born: 1928

Date Died: March 1917

Place Born: Paris, Île-de-France, France

Place Died: Branford, New Haven, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): art market, Dutch (culture or style), and economics

Career(s): economists


Overview

Vermeer scholar and Yale University economist; pioneer of Dutch art market history. Montias was raised in Paris by parents of Jewish extraction, Santiago Montias and Giselle (“Robin”) de la Maisoneuve (Montias). As Germany invaded France during World War II, he was sent alone to a boarding school in Buffalo, New York. In Buffalo he was baptized Episcopal. He volunteered as a teenager at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Library in Buffalo where he discovered the sumptuous volume on Rembrandt by Wilhelm Bode. He married wife Marie “Manya” Agnes Urbaniak in 1950. Montias attended Columbia University in New York receiving his B. A. in 1947 and his M.A. in 1950. He served in the U.S. Army, 1954-1956. As a doctoral student in economics, he considered writing his dissertation the historic Dutch art market, but ultimately he wrote on Soviet-block economics. His dissertation was accepted in 1958. Montias was appointed assistant professor of Economics at Yale University the same year. He remained at Yale his entire career. His work as an economist focused on centrally planned Soviet bloc countries such as Poland (1962) and Romania (1967). His Structure of Economic Systems was published in 1976. During this time he renewed his interest in the economics of Dutch Republic of the 17th century and its effects on the art market. Montias had purchased a Goltzius painting of the Magdalen in 1968 at auction (well above his financial means). His research was stimulated by his colleague in the art department of Yale, Egbert Haverkamp Begemann. Montias realized that, A) an enormous amount of art trading was documented in Dutch archives, a small portion of which had been published by Abraham Bredius, and that, B) most of it remained unanalyzed. He initially wrote a comparative study of Dutch painters’ guilds. Although he knew no Dutch, he won a 1975 grant to write a comparative study of Dutch art guilds. He researched the Delft city archives were he found rich primary sources for the city’s artist’s guild system–and less competition for the material than Amsterdam’s (Haverkamp-Begemann). In 1982 this resulted in his book, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Montias continued in this vein, publishing articles on the assembling of private Dutch collections, art dealers, artist’s productivity, and cause/effect of market demands on artistic style. Although he did not intend to study the most well-known Delft artist, Johannes Vermeer, the paucity of information about this artist intrigued him. He examined the documents of Vermeer’s relatives, ultimately publishing a full-length biography of the artist, titled Vermeer and his Milieu: a Web of Social History, in 1989. He retired from Yale in 1995. In 1996 his Le marché de l’art aux Pays Bas, 15ème-17ème siècles, a synopsis of his research written in his native French appeared. Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Houses a work appearing in 2000 was co-written with John Loughman. His study of auctions held by the Amsterdam Orphans’ Court between 1597-1638, Art at Auction in 17th-Century Amsterdam, appeared in 2002, well after his diagnosis of cancer. The database of Amsterdam inventories and auction results he compiled was donated to the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) in The Hague and transferred to the Frick Art Library in New York. The database designated as “Montias I” is a transcription of each document and can be searched by inventory number, owner name, inventory date, and by single or combined keywords. The database designated as “Montias II” contains a record for each work of art inventoried in the documents. He died of melanoma. In 2010 The Montias Database of 17th Century Dutch Art Inventories was issued as an internet database. Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century was a ground-breaking book in the history of art. Most art-history studies focused on the biography of the artist and the works of art in an historicist context. Studying art as a tradable commodity, Montias analyzed the forces of supply and demand contributing to their production. It examined how artists and crafts workers developed their commission. Like an economics book it was filled with tables and statistical data. Like humanities scholarship, it was augmented with contemporary accounts. This use of surviving documentation on 17th-century Dutch art and society had not previously been mined. His archival research skills were responsible for the discovery of previously unknown information on individual artists, notably Johannes Vermeer, whose documents on the artist were used (often uncited) in the explosion of interest in the artist in the early 21st century by other historians. In Vermeer and his Milieu Montias established that the artist rather unusually had a patron, Pieter Claesz. van Ruijven (1624-1674), who guaranteed him sales, allowing Vermeer to paint slowly and achieve the enamel-like quality his work is known for. Despite this proof, Montias remained reticent to arrive at that kind of stylistic conclusion.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Art-Historical Publications by John Michael Montias.” In His Mileau: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias. Golahny, A., and Mochizuki, M.M., and Vergara, L, eds. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006, pp.23-28; [dissertation:] Producers: Prices in a Centralized Economy: The Polish Experience. Columbia University, 1958; and Stankiewicz, W. J. Institutional Changes in the Postwar Economy of Poland. New York: Mid-European Studies Center, Free Europe Committee, 1955; Central Planning in Poland. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962; The Structure of Economic Systems. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976; Artists and Artisans in Delft: a Socio-economic Study of the Seventeenth Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982; and Aillaud, Gilles, and Blankert, Albert. Vermeer. Paris: Hazan, 1986, English, Aillaud, Gilles, and Blankert, Albert. Vermeer. New York: Rizzoli, 1988; Vermeer and his Milieu: a Web of Social History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989; “Sovereign Consumer: the Adaptation of Works of Art to Demand in the Netherlands in the Early Modern Period.” in, Bevers, Ton, ed. Artists, Dealers, Consumers: on the Social World of Art. Hilversum: Verloren, 1994; and Loughman, John. Public and Private Spaces: Works of Art in Seventeenth-century Dutch Houses. Zwolle: Waanders, 2000; Art at Auction in 17th Century Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002; The Montias Database of 17th Century Dutch Art Inventories [web database] http://research.frick.org/montias/home.php.


Sources

Haverkamp-Begemann, Egbert, and Naumann, Otto, and Scarf, Herbert E., and Schenker, Alexander M. “Four Remembrances.” in, In His Mileau: Essays on Netherlandish Art in Memory of John Michael Montias. Golahny, A., and Mochizuki, M.M., and Vergara, L, eds. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006, pp. 13-21; [obituaries:] Times (London) August 16, 2005; Shattuck, Kathryn. “John Montias, 76, Scholar of Economics and of Art.” New York Times August 1, 2005, p. 13; Naumann, Otto. “In Memoriam: John Michael Montias.” HNA Newsletter and Review of Books 22 no.2 (November 2005): 4-5 http://www.hnanews.org/archive/newsletters/nov2005.pdf.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Montias, Mike." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/montiasj/.


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Vermeer scholar and Yale University economist; pioneer of Dutch art market history. Montias was raised in Paris by parents of Jewish extraction, Santiago Montias and Giselle (“Robin”) de la Maisoneuve (Montias). As Germany invaded France during Wo

Montferrand, August Richard de

Full Name: Montferrand, August Richard de

Other Names:

  • Henry Louis August Richard de Montferrand

Gender: male

Date Born: 1786

Date Died: 1858

Place Born: Paris, Île-de-France, France

Place Died: St. Petersburg, Russia

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Russian (culture or style), and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Russian writer, architect and architectural historian. From 1806-1823, Montferrand studied architecture at the école de Speciale in Paris. After completing his studies, he worked for Charles Percier and Pierre François Leonard Fontaine, who were Napoleon’s architects. In 1814, Montferrand moved to St. Petersburg to accept the position of court architect. He worked with Karl Rossi to redesign St. Petersburg, building structures in the classical style, including St. Isaac’s Cathedral (1818-58), and the Alexander Column (1829-34), which is the world’s tallest column. Both structures were designed to represent Russia’s jubilation over the defeat of Napoleon. Monteferrand drew upon his knowledge of Chinese, Gothic, and Moorish architectural styles, which he incorporated into the design for St. Isaac’s Cathedral. He wrote several illustrated books about the construction of St. Isaac’s and the Alexander Column, where he described the construction process of each building, and provided a history of architecture from antiquity to the Renaissance.



Sources

Dictionary of Art



Contributors: LaNitra Michele Walker


Citation

LaNitra Michele Walker. "Montferrand, August Richard de." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/montferranda/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Russian writer, architect and architectural historian. From 1806-1823, Montferrand studied architecture at the école de Speciale in Paris. After completing his studies, he worked for Charles Percier and Pierre François Leonard Fontaine, who were N