Art Historians

Luckner, Kurt T.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Luckner, Kurt T.

Other Names:

Kurt Thomas Luckner

Gender: male

Date Born: 1945

Date Died: 1995

Place Born: Stafford Springs, Tolland, CT, USA

Place Died: Toledo, Lucas, OH, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Classical

Career(s): curators

Overview

Toledo Museum of Art curator, 1969-1995, classical art scholar. Luckner graduated in 1967 from Georgetown University. He worked for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washgington, D. C. (a collage of his hangs in the Rayburn House building). He received an M. A. from Stanford University in art history in 1969, working briefly for the Stanford University Art Museum. The same year, Luckner was hired by Toledo Museum of Art director Otto Wittmann, Jr., as assistant curator for classical art. He married Agathokleia “Kleia” Raubitschek, a nurse-midwife and daughter of Princeton’s classics professor Antony Raubitschek, in 1971. Luckner reinstalled the classical vase collection at Toledo and created the glass gallery, an important collection of historic glass founded by glass magnate Edward Drummond Libby. Luckner was promoted to Curator of Ancient Art in 1973 where he developed the African art gallery. An NEA grant allowed him to write the second fascicule of Toledo’s Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. His “Silver for the Gods, 800 years of Greek and Roman Silver,” in 1977 was one of two important shows he oversaw. As a curator, he purchased 70 classical antiquities for the collection, none of which was ever questioned in authenticity of provenance, including the Darius painter, Exekias, and Makron. In 1985 he launched an exhibit with Dietrich von Bothmer and Marion True titled, “The Amasis Painter and his World,” one of the most heralded classical art shows of his generation. Luckner was made Curator of Special Exhibitions at Toledo in 1986. Between 1992 and 1994 he worked as guest curator at the Art Institute of Chicago researching and reinstalling that institution’s classical collection which had heretofore been stored. He worked on a similar project for the J.B. Speed Museum in Louisville, KY. He suffered a heart attack slightly before his 50th birthday and died.Luckner was according to one Toledo newspaper account, “an ebullient, indefatigable promoter of all things ancient – and an especially riveting storyteller.” His purchase of gnathia for the museum lead that painter to be named “the Toledo Painter.”

Selected Bibliography

and Boulter, Cedric G. “The Toledo Museum of Art.” Corpus vasorum antiquorum. United States of America, fascicule 17 Toledo: Toledo Museum of Art, 1976.

Sources

Vallongo, Sally. “Museum’s Exhibit of Classic Bronzes Tells Vivid Story of Civilization.” Blade (Toledo, OH) October 13, 1996, p.1; Duncan, Sally Anne. Otto Wittmann: Museum Man for all Seasons. Toledo, OH: Toledo Museum of Art, 2001, p. 23; [obituary:] Kozloff, Arielle P. “Kurt Thomas Luckner, 1945-1995.” American Journal of Archaeology 100, no. 3 (July 1996):. 599-600.

Lücken, Gottfried von

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lücken, Gottfried von

Gender: male

Date Born: 1883

Date Died: 1976

Place Born: Wredenhagen, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, and Classical

Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek art, especially sarcophagi. His 1930 book Entwicklung der Parthenonskulptur traced stylistic differences in the North frieze of the Parthenon sculptures not to different artists but to a steady process of stylistic development. Lücken’s academic career spanned the Weimar, Nazi and DDR eras as a Professor at the University of Rostock (1921-1971), but he emigrated from the DDR after retirement (at age 88) to Munich. His students included Lotte H. Eisner.

Selected Bibliography

Die Entwicklung der Parthenonskulptur, 1930.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 218-219.

Specialist in ancient Greek art, especially sarcophagi. His 1930 book Entwicklung der Parthenonskulptur traced stylistic differences in the North frieze of the Parthenon sculptures not to different artists but to a steady process of styli

Lucie-Smith, Edward

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lucie-Smith, Edward

Other Names:

Edward Lucie-Smith

Gender: male

Date Born: 1933

Place Born: Kingston, Surrey, Jamaica

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Career(s): art critics, art historians, authors, and poets

Overview

Poet, art critic and prolific art-book writer. Lucie-Smith was the son of a British civil servant assigned to Jamaica, John Dudley Lucie-Smith (d. 1941) and Mary Frances Lushington (Lucie-Smith). His forbears had been some of the first white settlers in colonizing the island in 1627. Raised in the privileged environment of the white colonial class, his father died when he was eight years old. He and his mother moved to England in 1946. In 1949 Lucie-Smith received a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford University, still only seventeen. However, the college was full of older returning servicemen and he felt much out of place. Lucie-Smith wrote art criticism for Isis, Oxford’s student magazine, and earned a B.A. in 1954. His art criticism broadened into articles for the Listener, the New Statesman and the BBC program “Critics” as well. Lucie-Smith was much impressed with the criticism of John Berger. He fulfilled a military obligation as an Education Officer in the Royal Air Force for two years. Failing the foreign-office exam, Lucie-Smith entered Notley’s Advertising agency in London as a copywriter in 1956, working as a journalist and in broadcasting on the side, and writing poetry. There he met two other writers later to be famous, the poet Peter Redgrove (1932- 2003) and the playwright William Trevor (b. 1928). The critic and poet Philip Hobsbaum (1932-2005) invited Lucie-Smith to join the avant-garde poetry discussion group known simply as “the Group.” With Hobsbaum’s encouragement, Lucie-Smith published a collection of poems, A Tropical Childhood. The book was highly praised and Lucie-Smith became a poet of note overnight. He assumed chairmanship of the Group when Hobsbaum withdrew. In 1961 the publisher Paul Hamlyn (1926-2001) commissioned Lucie-Smith’s first book, a popularized 48-page art history on Peter Paul Rubens for the “Spring Books” series. This started a spate of art book writing. He met Black Mountain and Beat poets on his various trips to New York on art research. Lucie-Smith founded Turret Books in 1965, editing The Penguin Book of Elizabethan Verse for Penguin Press the same year. In 1966 he left Notley’s to become a freelance writer. His most popular art book, Movements in Art since 1945 first appeared in 1969 and has been continually been revised. A second poetry anthology, Penguin Anthology British Poetry Since 1945 appeared in 1970. Lucie-Smith published an influential popular book on photography, The Invented Eye, in 1975 as well as his autobiography, The Burnt Child. In 1977, Art Now, a book of “unconventional judgments” (New York Times) appeared as well as a novel. The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms (1984) In the late 1990’s, he began a collaboration with the artist Judy Chicago, first co-authoring Women and Art: Contested Territory (1999) with her, a book exploring women both as subjects and creators of art, and then a biography of Chicago in 2000. Lucie-Smith’s art books do not incorporate new research, rather, they have been praised for restating the complexities of art history to a larger lay audience. Topics such as erotics in art and his work with Judy Chicago have explored new ground. Lucie-Smith’s unusual viewpoints of modern art, from the poets purview, have made his work on art more than simple survey work.

Selected Bibliography

Rubens. London: Spring Books, 1961; The Invented Eye: Masterpieces of Photography, 1839-1914. London: Paddington Press, 1975; Art Now: from Abstract Expressionism to Superrealism. New York : Morrow, 1977; Movements in Art Since 1945. London: Thames & Hudson, 1969; Visual Arts in the Twentieth Century. London: Laurence King, 1996; The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms. London Thames and Hudson, 1984; and Chicago, Judy. Women and Art: Contested Territory. London : Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999; Judy Chicago: an American Vision. New York : Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000; Ars Erotica: an Arousing History of Erotic Art. New York: Rizzoli, 1997.

Sources

Lucie-Smith, Edward. The Burnt Child: an Autobiography. London: Gollancz, 1975, pp. 181-189; “Exploring Gay Male Erotic Art: An Interview with Edward Lucie-Smith.” Journal International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies 3, no. 2 (April, 1998): 135-155.

Lübke, Wilhelm

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lübke, Wilhelm

Gender: male

Date Born: 17 January 1826

Date Died: 05 April 1893

Place Born: Dortmund, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Place Died: Karlsruhe, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): art history, nineteenth century (dates CE), and twentieth century (dates CE)

Career(s): art historians

Overview

Founder of the popular German art history survey of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Grundriss der Kunstgeschichte. Lübke’s father and grandfather were hosiery merchants. Denied art training by his father, Lübke entered a Catholic school at 21. The cruelty of the school caused him unhappiness. Lübke next studied philology at Bonn in 1845. The teaching of Gottfried Kinkel there inspired him in art history. At the time, Kinkel was one of only two professors of art history (the other being Franz Kugler). Lübke’s initial interest was in medieval art, inspired by castles in the Rheinland. After three semesters he left Bonn for Berlin, as moving about in universities was standard at that time. In Berlin, he heard the famous professors, Leopold Ranke and, in art history Heinrich Hotho and Friedrich Waagen. The philologist Franz Susemihl (1826 -1901) and art historian Friedrich Eggers became friends and also, to a lesser degree, Jakob Burckhardt. Lübke was extremely poor these years and had relied on benefactors and modest work to remain in Berlin. After passing his exam, he was hired at a gymnasium to teach philology. The work of Ludwig Puttrich, Denkmale der Baukunst des Mittelalters in Sachsen, became a model for Lübke. In 1871, Lübke was among the team of art historians (the others including Moriz Thausing, Carl von Lützlow, Adolf Bayersdorfer, Friedrich Lippmann, Alfred Wolters, Bruno Meyer, Karl Woermann, G. Malsz and Wilhelm Bode) who convened in Dresden to determine which of two versions of Hans Holbein the younger’s Meyer Madonna was the autograph work. The so-called “Holbein convention,” one of the important events in nineteenth-century art history when many methodical approaches were employed to determined authenticity, concluded that the Darmstadt version was the original. In the mid 1880s, Lübke and Lützlow took over publication of the Denkmäler der Kunst, begun by August von Voit, as an atlas to Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte of Franz Kugler. At Lübke’s death in 1893 the series was taken over by Max Semrau. His students include Cornelius Gurltt

Lübke’s Handbuch became the standard view of art among the German public much the same (and for much the same reason) that Horst Woldemar Janson and his History of Art was in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. Lübke’s declaration that “Jews, having no artistic sensibility of their own, [and had] borrowed architectural forms on an eclectic principle from the nations dwelling around them,” lent a historical validity to anti-Semitic stereotypes of Jews as parasites (Olin).

Selected Bibliography

Geschichte der italienischen Malerei: vom vierten bis ins sechzehnte Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1878-79; and Kugler, Franz, and Burckhardt, Jacob. Geschichte der Baukunst. 5 vols. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1859-72; Geschichte der deutschen Kunst von den frühesten Zeiten bis zur Gegenwart. Stuttgart; Ebner & Seubert, 1890; and Kugler, Franz, and Voit, August von.Denkmäler der Kunst, English, Monuments of Art: Showing its Development and Progress from the Earliest Artistic Attempts to the Present Period. New York: E. Seitz, [188-?].Denkmäler der Kunst, English, Monuments of Art: Showing its Development and Progress from the Earliest Artistic Attempts to the Present Period. New York: E. Seitz, [188-?].

Sources

Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 249-251; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, p. 145; Olin, Margaret. “C[lement] Hardesh (Greenberg) and Company: Formal Criticism and Jewish Identity.” in Kleeblatt, Norman L. ed. Too Jewish? Challenging Traditional Identities. New York: The Jewish Musuem/New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996, p. 42.

Founder of the popular German art history survey of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Grundriss der Kunstgeschichte. Lübke’s father and grandfather were hosiery merchants. Denied art training by his father, Lübke entered

Lozoya, Juan de Contreras y Lopez de Ayala, marquis de

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lozoya, Juan de Contreras y Lopez de Ayala, marquis de

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Spain

Subject Area(s): Spanish (culture or style)

Overview

historian of Spanish Art; professor of Madrid

Selected Bibliography

Historia del arte hispanico. 5 vols. 1931-1949.

Sources

Bazin 442

historian of Spanish Art; professor of Madrid

Löwy, Emanuel

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Löwy, Emanuel

Other Names:

Emanuel Loewy

Gender: male

Date Born: 1857

Date Died: 1938

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): archaeology, art theory, Classical, and psychology

Overview

Classical archaeologist and theorist; employed methodology of universal psychological sources of form; influenced by the concept of “das Gedächtnisbild” (image of memory) from Ernst Brücke. Also friend of and influenced by Sigmund Freud. Specialist in ancient Greek painting. Professor of archaeology at the University of Rome, 1891-1915, a. o. Professor of archaeology at the University of Vienna, 1918-1938. His students included Giulio Quirino Giglioli. The architectural historian Emil Kaufmann was influenced by his lectures.

Selected Bibliography

Die Naturwiedergade in der älteren griechischen Kunst. Rome: Loescher, 1900. Die Anfänge des Triumphbogens. Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1928. Griechische Inschrifttexte. Vienna: Tempsky: 1888. Die griechische Plastil. 2 vols. Leipzig: Klinkhardt und Biermann, 1911. Lysipp ind seine Stellung in der griechischen Plastik. Hamburg: Sammlung gemeinverständlicher wissenschafter Vorträge, 1891. Neuattische Kunst. Leipzig: Seeman, 1922. Polygnot: Ein Buch von grieschischer Malerei. 2 vols. Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1929. Stein und Erz in der statuarischen Kunst. Innsbruck: Wagner, 1915. Untersuchungen zur griescischen Künstlergeschichte. Vienna: Gerold’s [sic] Sohn, 1883. Ursprünge der bildenden Kunst. Vienna: Holder-Pilchler-Tempsky, 1930. Zur Chronologie der frügriechischen Kunst: Die Artemistempel von Ephesos. Vienna: Holder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1932.

Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 95-6; Dvorák, Max. Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Translated and noted by Randolph J. Klawiter. Preface by Karl Maria Swoboda. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967, pp. 211-12; Praschniker, C. “Emanuel Löwy.” Almanach der österreichischen Akadamie der Wissenschaft 88 (1938); Bazin 318; Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 120-121.

Lowry, Bates

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lowry, Bates

Gender: male

Date Born: 1925

Date Died: 2004

Place Born: Cincinnati, Hamilton, OH, USA

Place Died: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Architectural historian and Director of the Museum of Modern Art, New York 1968-1969. Lowry served in the army during World War II. Initially considering the law as a career, he served an assistant to Justice Robert Jackson in Paris at the war crimes tribunal. He returned to Chicago and received a B. A. degree in philosophy, working as assistant editor for the American Bar Association journal. He married Isabel Barrett in 1946. Lowry traveled again to Europe, studying art at Grenoble and the Sorbonne. Moving back to Chicago, he completed an A.M. in 1952 and his Ph.D. in 1957, both at the University of Chicago under Ulrich Middeldorf. His dissertation topic was on the architectural programs of the Louvre. After teaching at the University of California, Riverside, 1954-1957, he taught at New York University, Institute of Fine Arts, 1957-59, before chairing the art department at Pomona College in California. In 1963 he joined Brown University as professor of art, becoming chair of the department in 1967. When the 1966 floods in Florence destroyed many works of art, Lowry and fellow Brown art historian Fred Licht. Lowry became chairman of the Committee to Rescue Italian Art, (CRIA) which acted as a fund-raising group, eventually raising $1,750,000. At the retirement of Museum of Modern art Director, René d’Harnoncourt, Lowry succeeded him. From the first, however, his position was fraught with controversy. New York artists picketed the museum and threatened a sit-in demanding more of a say in museum affairs. Lowry offered to set up committees where artists would be involved. The public input to the private museum was viewed with alarm by MoMA’s wealthy board. Lowry attempted to take on the job of curator of painting and sculpture in addition to his job as director, a plan that was resented by the department. Scarcely more than a year later, Lowry tendered his resignation at the Board’s insistence in 1969. He joined the University of Massachusetts in Boston as faculty in 1971 to 1980. In 1980, Lowry was founding director of the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C. and consulted with the Getty Museum on Daguerreotype photographs, of which he and his wife were collectors. He died of pneumonia in Brooklyn, NY. He is not related to the current MoMA Director, Glenn D. Lowry.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Palais du Louvre, 1528-1624: The Development of a Sixteenth-Century Architectural Complex. Chicago, 1957; “Redefinitions of Style: High Renaissance Architecture.” College Art Journal 17 (1958): 115-28; The Architecture of Washington, D.C. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Dunlap Society, 1976-1979; The Silver Canvas: Daguerreotype Masterpieces from the J. Paul Getty Museum. Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 1998; Building a National Iimage: Architectural Drawings for the American Democracy, 1789-1912. Washington, DC: National Building Museum,1985; and Lowry, Isabel. Looking for Leonardo: Naive and Folk Art Objects Found in America. Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art /University of Iowa Press, 1993; Renaissance Architecture. New York: G. Braziller, 1962; The Visual Experience: an Introduction to Art. Englewood Cliffs, NJ:, Prentice-Hall, 1961.

Sources

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, 51 mentioned; Knox, Sanka. “Modern Museum Names Director.” New York Times May 12, 1967, p. 94; [obituary:] Glueck, Grace. “Bates Lowry, 80, Head of Building Museum.” The New York Times March 18, 2004, p. 10.

Lowrie, Walter

November 8, 2023July 26, 2024

Full Name: Lowrie, Walter

Gender: male

Date Born: 1868

Date Died: 1959

Place Born: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): art historians

Institution(s): Princeton University

Overview

His book, Monuments of the Early Church (1901) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.

Contributors: Yuhuan Zhang

His book, Monuments of the Early Church (1901) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.

Lövgren, Sven O.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lövgren, Sven O.

Other Names:

Sven Lövgren

Gender: male

Date Born: 20 February 1921

Date Died: 13 January 1980

Place Born: By, Sweden

Place Died: Reno, Washoe, NV, USA

Home Country/ies: Sweden

Subject Area(s): iconography, symbolism (artistic concept), Symbolist, and symbols

Overview

Historian of an early book on Symbolism; University of Nevada-Reno professor of art history. While working on his art history Ph.D. he translated and published the book History of Art by E. H. Grombrich into Swedish. His art history degree, from the University of Uppsala, was granted in 1959 with a dissertation written in English on French Symbolism. His dissertation was published the same year under the title The Genesis of Modernism: Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh, and French Symbolism in the 1880’s, a ground-breaking approach to the under-appreciated period of Symbolism. He married Karin Liwendahl around this time. Lövgren revised a second edtion of a standard reference work, Rabén & Sjögrens Lexikon över modern konst as Lexikon över modern konst in 1965. In 1967 Lövgren immigrated to the United States, teaching initially at Indiana University. He lectured at the University of California, Berkeley, 1969-1970, before settling at the University of Nevada at Reno as professor of art history. He served as a member of the board of directors of the Nevada Art Museum there beginning in 1971. Lövgren taught a wide variety of courses in the small art history department and held a devoted following of students. His daughter-in-law is the curator/artist Rachelle Puryear (b. 1947), married to his son, Håkan Lövgren, a film scholar and translator. Lövgren was one of the early art historians to write on the cultural period known as Symbolism, a movement which had previously been subsumed under the concept of being “after Impressionism” (i.e., Post-Impressionism). His documentary approach to Symbolism contrasted with that of the other documentary art historian of this time, John Rewald, whose book, called Post-Impressionism, had appeared three years earlier. Instead of Rewald’s “choir of strident voices” approach, Lövgren mapped disparate art forms, poetry and novels onto the whole of Symbolist painting. His book discussed the social context (economic, political, etc.) of just three representative works of art, Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” (1889), Seurat’s “La Grande Jatte” (1884-1886), and Gauguin’s “Jacob Wrestling with the Angel” (1888). A third text in English on Symbolism, by the Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker, appeared the same year. Unlike the other major Symbolist art scholar of his time, Robert Goldwater, Lövgren denied the suitability of the use of the term “Symbolism” for the period of art history.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Genesis of Modernism: Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh, and French Symbolism in the 1880’s. University of Uppsala, 1959, published, Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1959; “Bokstavsbilden och den bildande konsten.” Nordisk Boktryckarkonst no. 8 (1953): 245-249; “Il Rosso Fiorentino à Fountainbleau: une étude préliminaire inconographique du programme imagier dans la galerie François Ier.” in, Figura. I: Studies. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksells, 1951, pp. 57-76; translated (into Swedish) Gombrich, Ernst. Konstens historia. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1954; Lexikon över modern konst. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 1965.

Sources

“Historical Method and Post Impressionist Art.” Steefel, Jr. Lawrence D. Art Journal 21, no. 2 (Winter, 1961): 97-100; personal correspondence, Rachelle Puryear, March 2010, January 2011; personal correspondence, Howard Rosenberg, March 2010.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Historian of an early book on Symbolism; University of Nevada-Reno professor of art history. While working on his art history Ph.D. he translated and published the book History of Art by E. H. Grombrich into Swedi

Lotz, Wolfgang

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lotz, Wolfgang

Other Names:

Wolfgang Lotz

Gender: male

Date Born: 1912

Date Died: 1981

Place Born: Heilbronn am Neckar, Bavaria, Germany

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Renaissance, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Architectural historian of the Italian Renaissance. Lotz initially studied Law at Freiburg (im Breisgau) and art history at Munich. He received his Ph. D. in 1937 under Ludwig H. Heydenreich in Hamburg, writing his dissertation on Jacopo Vignola’s architecture. From then until 1942 he worked at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, first as a Fellow and then an Assistant. He was drafted into the German army and returned for military service in World War II. Captured by the allies in 1945, he was assigned to the International Commission for Monuments in Munich. With the conclusion of the war, Lotz found himself again working with Heydenreich, this time as deputy director (and Heydenreich as director) at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. He accepted a call from Agnes Rindge Claflin, Professor of art at Vassar, to teach there in 1952, replacing Richard Krautheimer. Lotz wrote very few books for a scholar of his stature, preferring book-length articles. One article during this period, “Die ovalen Kirchenräume des Cinquecento” (1955) broke new ground in the subject of church building types. In 1959 he again replaced Krautheimer, this time at Krautheimer’s retirement from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. Lotz supervised many dissertations at NYU. In 1962 he accepted the directorship of the Bibliotheca Hertziana (Max Planck Institut) in Rome in. There he enlarged the institution’s focus to cover Italian art and architecture, attracting scholars from throughout the world. It was during this final period of his life that Lotz wrote the two books which made him accessible to the broader and English-speaking world. The first, published in 1974 with Heydenreich, was the thirty-eighth volume of the Pelican History of Art, The Architecture in Italy: 1400-1600. Although constrained by the format Penguin Press set for the series, the survey book nevertheless demonstrated Lotz’s sensitivity to, among other issues, architectural patronage as a portion of architectural history. The following year Lotz published a selection of his articles translated into English, Studies in Italian Architecture. He was elected president of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza. He retired from the Hertziana in 1980 with the intention to continue his scholarship. However, while running on the Spanish steps in Rome to move his car (to avoid a parking ticket), he suffered a heart attack and died. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome. André Chastel succeeded him as president of the Palladio center. Lotz’s methodology has been described as pragmatic, flexible and empirical. Like many of the architectural historians of his generation (and particularly those who contributed to the Pelican History of Art series), Lotz employed a linear view of stylistic development in regard to architecture. He saw the history of architecture as the emergence of strong architect personalities (such as Bramante) on building style. Ever more Rome-focused in his thinking, he virtually ignored south Italy in favor of major architectural centers. Despite these limitations, Lotz’s work was rooted in the object. Architectural theory was less a factor in interpretation than the documents of the building itself. In this sense, he contrasts approaches like that of Rudolf Wittkower in Wittkower’s Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism. He was seldom interested in abstract theory, preferring patronage as a dominant factor in architecture. Lotz also had an appreciation for interiors, unusual among architectural historians of his age. He approached a building as a viewer would, relying less on floor plans or preliminary drawings and more on the de facto completed project. “Lotz’s youthful research on Vignola seems to have left him with an intuitive sympathy for canonical, if inventive, classicism, whereas he remained uncomfortable with what he defined as ‘mannerist’ attitudes.” (Deborah Howard).

Sources

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, 51 mentioned; Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 20 (1983): 1-5; Ackerman, James. “In Memoriam, Wolfgang Lotz.” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 41 (March 1982): 5-6; Dictionary of Art 19: 718; Howard, Deborah. “Lotz’s Text: Its Achievement and Significance.” in Lotz, Wolfgang. Architecture in Italy: 1500-1600. Pelican History of Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. pp. 1-7; “Frances Huemer.” Art History Oral Documentation [interview] October 28, 2005. [complete bibliography to 1974 in Studies in Italian Renaissance, below]. [dissertation] Vignola-Studien: Beiträge zu einer Vignola-Monographie. Würzburg-Aumühle: K. Triltsch, 1939; Studies in Italian Renaissance Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,1977; The Northern Renaissance. New York: Abrams, 1955; and Heydenreich, Ludwig. Architecture in Italy, 1400 to 1600 Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books, 1974, [reissued edition with new introduction], and Howard, Deborah, ed. Architecture in Italy, 1500-1600. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995; “Die ovalen Kirchenräume des Cinquecento.” Römisches Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte 7 (1955): 7-99; “Redefinitions of Style: Architecture in the Later 16th Century.” College Art Journal 17 (1958): 129-39.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

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