Art Historians

Laurie, Arthur

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Laurie, Arthur

Other Names:

A.P. Laurie

Gender: male

Date Born: 1861

Date Died: 1941

Home Country/ies: Scotland

Subject Area(s): chemistry and painting (visual works)

Career(s): chemists (scientists)

Institution(s): Royal College of Arts

Overview

art historian and chemist of painting technique

Selected Bibliography

New Light on Old Masters. London: 1935.The Technique of the Great Painters. London: 1949. The Brush Work of Rembrandt and His School. London: 1932.

Sources

KMP, 38-9

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

art historian and chemist of painting technique

Laurent, Marcel

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Laurent, Marcel

Other Names:

Marcel Laurent

Gender: male

Date Born: 25 December 1872

Date Died: 07 June 1946

Place Born: Mussy-la-Ville, Luxembourg, Wallonia, Belgium

Home Country/ies: France

Overview

Professor of art history at Liège University, Belgium. He and Willem van der Pluym co-authored a broad overview of the highlights of sculpture and architecture from Antiquity to the present. Professor of art history; curator Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire/Koninklijke Musea voor Kunst en Geschiedenis at Brussels. Laurent received his high school education at the college of Virton, Belgium. He studied classical philology (Greek and Latin) at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters of the University of Liège, where he obtained his doctoral degree under the Hellenist Charles Michel (1853-1929). After periods of advanced study in Paris and Strasbourg, he spent two years in Greece as a foreign member of the École française d’Athènes. Upon his return to Liège (around 1902) he taught Greek Antiquity at the University of Liège. When, however, art history and archaeology were added to the university curriculum in 1903, Laurent was appointed professor of mediaeval art history. In 1909 the Congrès archéologique de Liège gave Laurent the opportunity to publish a paper on the arts in the Meuse valley in the Carolingian, Romanesque and Gothic periods, “Note sur l’état de nos connaissances relativement aux arts plastiques dans la vallée de la Meuse aux époques carolingienne, romane et gothique.” Inspired by the findings of Otto Falke in his 1904 study, Deutsche Schmelzarbeiten des Mittelalters, Laurent stressed the importance of the art of the metalworkers and goldsmiths, including Renier and Godefroid de Huy, both natives of the city of Huy (halfway between Liège and Namur), Nicolas de Verdun, and Hugo d’Oignies, who were active in the Meuse valley during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. In 1910-1911 he published a two-volume handbook on early Christian art, Art chrétien primitif. Among his pupils was Marguerite Devigne. In 1912 he obtained an additional appointment as attaché at the section of industrial arts of the Brussels Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, where he studied the ceramic collections. He also published a survey of the ivories, Les ivoires prégothiques conservés en Belgique (1912). With the Dutch architectural historian Willem van der Pluym he co-authored a broad overview of masterpieces of architecture and sculpture, Les chefs-d’oeuvre de l’architecture et de la sculpture depuis l’antiquité à nos jours (1916). In 1920 Laurent was appointed curator of the Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire, as the successor of Joseph Destrée. His ongoing interest in ceramics led to his 1922 article on Guido di Savino, or Guido Andries, who in the sixteenth century introduced the art of maiolica from Italy to Antwerp, “Guido di Savino & the Earthenware of Antwerp.” At the occasion of the 1924 exhibition of the arts of the region of Liège, held at the Louvre (Pavillon de Marsan), Laurent wrote the introduction to the catalog, “Esquisse de l’art ancien au Pays de Liège.” In the overview article of the exhibition, “L’art du Pays de Liège au Pavillon de Marsan,” which he published in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, Laurent paid tribute to the career of the goldsmith Godefroid de Huy, whose art, after his training in Koln, reached its apogee in the Meuse valley. The most impressive art work on show was the splendid bronze font by Renier de Huy (made between 1107 and 1118), preserved in the Saint Barthélemy Church in Liège. Laurent dedicated two separate articles on this masterwork, the first in 1924, “La question des fonts de Saint-Barthélemy à Liège.” In 1928 he published L’architecture et la sculpture en Belgique. As a member of the Commission royale des monuments, Laurent often carried out inspection missions. In his 1931 essay, “Art rhénan, art mosan et art byzantin,” he defended the originality and uniqueness of Mosan art against the views of Hermann Theodor Beenken and others. In 1932 his essay, “Les origines lointaines de l’art mosan” followed. At the death of Destrée, in 1932, Laurent wrote the obituary of his predecessor. In 1936 Laurent retired from his position as curator in order to fully dedicate himself to his academic career. His successor was his former student, Marthe Crick-Kuntziger. The Académie royale de Belgique elected Laurent in 1938 as corresponding member, and as a member in 1941. In that year he chose his French colleague Henri Focillon as the subject of his lecture, “Un grand théoricien de l’art: Henri Focillon”. Being in poor health, Laurent was forced to retire from his professorship in 1945. His students included Joseph A. P. M. Ch. Borchgrave d’Altena. As a teacher, Laurent was convinced that a work of art had to be studied in different contexts, including philology, iconography, and style analysis, before a final synthesis could be reached. Laurent’s publications are marked by the controversy that existed between Belgian and German scholars, especially in the 1920s and 1930s, about the concept of Mosan art. While some German art historians tried to reduce Mosan art to a regional variant of the Rhine School, Laurent went as far as to claim the independent position and even the superiority of certain aspects of Mosan art. After World War II the question gradually lost its urgency and eventually its significance. The 1972 exhibition, Rijn en Maas. Kunst en Cultuur 800-1400, held in Germany and Belgium, celebrated the interconnections of the arts that flourished between Rhine and Meuse.

Selected Bibliography

[list of works by Marcel Laurent:] Crick-Kuntziger, Marthe. Bulletin des Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire 3rd series, 18 (1946): 91-93 ; “Note sur l’état de nos connaissances relativement aux arts plastiques dans la vallée de la Meuse aux époques carolingienne, romane et gothique” in Annales de la Fédération archéologique et historique de Belgique, Congrès de Liège, (1909) vol. 2, pp. 67-76; Art chrétien primitif. 2 vols. Brussels, 1910-1911; Les ivoires prégothiques conservés en Belgique. Brussels: Vromant, 1912; and Van der Pluym, Willem. De meesterwerken der beeldhouwkunst en der bouwkunst: uit den vroegsten tot in dezen tijd. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 1916, French. Les chefs-d’oeuvre de l’architecture et de la sculpture depuis l’antiquité à nos jours. Paris: E. Flammarion, s.d. “Guido di Savino & the Earthenware of Antwerp” Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs 41, no 237 (December,1922): 288-297; “Esquisse de l’art ancien au Pays de Liège” in [exhibition catalog] Exposition de l’art ancien au pays de Liège. Paris, Musée des arts décoratifs, 1924; “L’art du Pays de Liège au Pavillon de Marsan” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts 66, series 5, 10 (1924): 25-40; “La question des Fonts de Saint-Barthélemy à Liège” Bulletin monumental 83 (1924): 327-348; L’architecture et la sculpture en Belgique. Paris-Brussels: G. van Oest, 1928; and Capart, Jean. “Joseph Destrée” Bulletin des Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire 3e série, 4 (1932): 50-55; “Art rhénan, art mosan et art byzantin” Byzantion 6 (1931): 75-98; “Les origines lointaines de l’art mosan” Annales de la Fédération archéologique et historique de Belgique, Congrès de Liège (1932): 48-64; “Aspects de l’art mosan dans les Fonts de Saint-Barthélemy de Liège” Annales de la Fédération archéologique et historique de Belgique, Congrès de Namur (1938): 133-143 ; “Un grand théoricien de l’art: Henri Focillon” Bulletin de la Classe des Beaux-Arts 23 (1941): 71-84.

Sources

[obituaries:] Crick-Kuntziger, Marthe. Bulletin des Musées royaux d’Art et d’Histoire 3e série, 18 (1946): 88-93; Squilbeck, Jean. “Marcel Laurent (1872-1946)” Revue belge de philology et d’histoire 26, 1-2 (1948): 448-453; Balace, Sophie. [doctoral thesis, Liège University:] Historiographie de l’art mosan. Liège, 2009, pp. 108, 131, 216-217.

Contributors: Monique Daniels

Lasteyrie du Saillant, Robert Charles, comte de

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lasteyrie du Saillant, Robert Charles, comte de

Other Names:

Robert de Lasteyrie

Gender: male

Date Born: 1848

Date Died: 1921

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): archaeology, French (culture or style), Medieval (European), monuments, Romanesque, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Medieval archaeologist who helped establish a chronology for Romanesque monuments in France. His students at the école des Chartes included Camille Enlart and Marcel Aubert.

Selected Bibliography

and Quicherat, Jules étienne Joseph. Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, archéologie du moyen âge, mémoires et fragments réunis. Paris: A. Picard, 1886; Bibliographie générale des travaux historiques et archéologiques publiés par les sociétés savantes de la France. 6 vols. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1888-1916; L’architecture religieuse en France à l’époque gothique. Paris: A. Picard, 1912.

Sources

Aubert, Marcel, ed. L’architecture religieuse en France à l’époque gothique. 2 vols. Paris: A. Picard, 1926-27; Cahn, Walter. “Henri Focillon.” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 3: Philosophy and the Arts. Edited by Helen Damico. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 2110. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000, p. 265, mentioned.

Medieval archaeologist who helped establish a chronology for Romanesque monuments in France. His students at the école des Chartes included Camille Enlart and Marcel Aubert.

Lassus, Jean-Baptiste

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lassus, Jean-Bapiste

Other Names:

Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Lassus

Gender: male

Date Born: 1807

Date Died: 1857

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

Place Died: Vichy, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France

Home Country/ies: France

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

Career(s): restorers

Overview

Medievalist architectural historian and restorer. Lassus studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris moving to the architectural studio of Henri Labrouste. He early on became a critic of the dominance of the Académie Française and the exclusivity it placed on the Greco-Roman ideal of architecture. His Salon work included an 1833 reconstruction of the Palais des Tuileries conforming to their original design (by Philibert de L’Orme, but the most indicative were the restoration proposals for Gothic monuments, such as a project for Sainte-Chappelle in 1835. Lassus began a restoration of St-Séverin, Paris the same year. Lassus’ espousal of the Gothic as a valid (and indeed, primally French) style put him at odds with classicists. To Lassus, the Renaissance’s reintroduction of the classic-order style was a foreign and pagan influence to French building. In 1836, he mounted another Salon project, the restoration of the refectory of St. Martin-des-Champs. He and Félix Duban were appointed that same year to restore Sainte-Chappelle, a project which involved Lassus the rest of his life. He focused his attention on the spire and interior decoration, removing later alterations. Lassus also maintained an architectural practice designing churches and additions to convents. In 1842, Lassus, together with the painter Eugène Emmanuel Amaury Duval (1806-1885) and restorer Adolphe Napoléon Didron issued their nine-volume documentation on Chartres cathedral, Monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres. Together with the other great Gothic-architecture restorer and exponent, the auditor to the Conseil des Bâtiments Civils, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc the two launched the restoration Notre-Dame, Paris, in 1844, beginning an era of extreme intervention of architectural restoration in France (Leniaud, Dictionary of Art). New sculpture was substituted for the old, the old often moved to museums. Lassus received commissions for the reworking of Chartres in 1846 and in Le Mans and Moulins, 1852. Lassus’ assumptions, that the early Gothic was A) rational and functional, B) an acme of archtitecture, C) indigenously French and core to its national identity and D) inherently Christian, directly opposed the theory and hegonomy expounded by French Academy’s theorist, Antoine Quatremère de Quincy. As an architectural “restorer,” Lassus remained the most scrupulous of his group by insisting on historic materials and building materials. He did not allow iron or stucco as previous practice had. In contrast to Vilolette-le-duc, who frequently discarded historical accuracy for effect, Lassus insisted on pragmatic and erudite solutions to his restorations, resulting a lower profile than Vilolette-le-duc.

Selected Bibliography

and Amaury-Duval, Eugène Emmanuel, and Didron, Adolphe Napoléon. Monographie de la cathédrale de Chartres. 9 vols of 72 plates. Paris: Imprimerie impériale, 1842-1865.

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, p. 71; 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. 66 cited; Middleton, Robin, and Watkin, David. Neoclassical and 19th Century Architecture. New York: Electa/Rizzoli, 1987.

Lasko, Peter Erik

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lasko, Peter Erik

Other Names:

Peter Lasko

Gender: male

Date Born: 1924

Date Died: 2003

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Overview

Medievalist and director of the Courtauld Institute; authored Pelican History of Art volume, Ars Sacra. Lasko grew up in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. His father, Leo Lasko, was a prominent figure in the German film industry and a Jew. The younger Lasko knew the avant-garde and Bauhaus sensibilities first hand. With the Nazi rise to power in 1933, Lasko’s father retired to Paris, but returned Germany believing the threat to Jews had passed. Leo Lasko fled again in 1936, this time to England and the family, including Peter, his mother, Wally, and sister, followed in 1937. Lasko first considered being a painter and attended Hammersmith and St. Martin’s School of Art, but switched to art history at Birkbeck College, under the guidance of Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner. Lasko was admitted to the Courtauld Institute in 1946. His German background won him friends with the refugee art historians at the University of London and the Warburg. He became a British subject in 1948, marrying Lyn Norman the same year. Lasko graduated from the University of London in 1949. He was appointed assistant keeper in the department of British and medieval antiquities of the British Museum in 1950. It was the era when Rupert Bruce Mitford (1914-1993) was publishing the Sutton Hoo ship burial and Lasko work slightly on this project. He left the Museum in 1965, lured away to set up a school of music and the fine arts at the new University of East Anglia. He acceded to the chair in art history there and set about assembling one of the most dynamic faculties in the British Isles. In 1971 his Kingdom of the Franks appeared, partially the result of his years of research on medieval migrational peoples at the British Museum. His earlier connection with Pevsner, who was now editor of the Pelican History of Art series, led to the commissioning of the 1973 volume in the series on medieval objects, Ars Sacra: 800 and 1200. The book was stylistic analysis major ecclesiastical objects, and, though perhaps more conservative than the main currents of art-historical methodology, fit well into the limited subject of portable objects of the middle ages. At the University, Lasko proved an able administrator. Among other accomplishments, he persuaded Robert and Lisa Sainsbury to donate their art collection, where the University built a new building to house art and the department designed by Norman Foster. In 1974, Lasko made a bid to replace Anthony Blunt as director of the Courtuald Institute. Lasko won the appointment, largely on his record as an administrator. However, the Courtauld faculty were powerful and deeply entrenched in their traditions. Lasko was unable to make the administrational reforms he had with the new institution in Norwich. Among his successes, however, was the moving of the Courtauld to a permanent building. The lease on the former Robert Adam building at 20 Portman Square had not been renewed and attempts to build a modern building for the Courtauld failed. Lasko assembled a large part of the funding and negotiations to move to Somerset House, combining art and faculty into a single environ. Lasko resigned citing ill health in 1985 before the move was completed. In retirement, Lasko worked on The Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Great Britain And Northern Ireland, which he had taken over from George Zarnecki, and a book on German expressionist art, which never ceased to fascinate him. His book on German Expressionism, The Expressionist Roots of Modernism, was published posthumously.

Selected Bibliography

The Expressionist Roots of Modernism. New York: Manchester University Press: Palgrave,2003; The Kingdom of the Franks: North-west Europe Before Charlemagne. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971; Ars Sacra: 800-1200. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972; Medieval Art in East Anglia, 1300-1520. Norwich, England: Jarrold & Sons, 1973; The Painting Collections of the Courtauld Institute of Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Sources

[obituaries:] The Guardian (London) May 29, 2003, p. 27; The Times (London), May 29, 2003, p. 40.

Medievalist and director of the Courtauld Institute; authored Pelican History of Art volume, Ars Sacra. Lasko grew up in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. His father, Leo Lasko, was a prominent figure in the German film industry and a Je

Larson, Lars Olof

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Larson, Lars Olof

Gender: male

Date Born: 1934

Home Country/ies: Sweden

Institution(s): Växjö University

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Adrian de Vries, Hagiensis Batavus. Vienna and Munich, 1967.

Sources

Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 pp. 191, 501

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Larkin, Oliver Waterman

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Larkin, Oliver Waterman

Gender: male

Date Born: 17 August 1896

Date Died: 17 December 1970

Place Born: Medford, Piscataquis, MA, USA

Place Died: Northampton, Hampshire, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Institution(s): Harvard University

Overview

Professor of art at Smith college and Pulitzer Prize author. Larkin was born in Massachusetts to Charles Ernst and Kate Mary Larkin. His father worked as a collector and dealer of antiques. The younger Larkin took an early interest in the arts as a high school student in Perley Free School in Georgetown, Massachusetts. He received his B.A. from Harvard in 1918. Between 1918 and 1919 Larkin served in the medical corps of the 73rd infantry during World War I. In 1919 he earned his M.A. degree from Harvard and, two years later, returned as an assistant of fine arts. Larkin was appointed assistant professor of art at Smith College in 1925. That summer he married Ruth Lily McIntire. The following year he was named associate professor and was awarded a full professorship in 1931.

Larkin is best known for Art and Life in America. The book, published in 1949, was an introductory survey to the art and architecture of the United States from the seventeenth century onward. Larkin’s focus was to demonstrate the ways in which the arts served to express American culture, in particular its democratic norms. Larkin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History in 1950 — the first such award for an art historical study — and the book went on to serve as “a standard text for the study of American art and culture” for almost two decades (Wallach).

In 1950, and again in 1955, Larkin lectured at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. In 1954, continuing his emphasis on the relationship between American democracy and art, he published Samuel F.B. Morse and American Democratic Art which focused on the renowned inventor’s early career as a painter. Larkin argued that Morse’s turn to the telegraph as a source of income had deprived America of the career of a great artist. His third book, Daumier in His Time and Ours, was published in 1962. He retired from teaching in 1964.

Although it was not widely recognized or promoted in the early years of the Cold War, Larkin’s emphasis on the social and cultural context, in addition to is affiliation with the Communist party, the “Popular Front,” and the New Masses in the early 1930s, have led subsequent historians to identify his work as Marxist (Denning; Wallach). Of all the surveys of American art published in the twentieth century, “Larkin’s book stands out as the most intellectually serious,” not only for the “scope and profundity” of his work, but his “warm sympathy for the aspirations of ordinary Americans” (Wallach).

Selected Bibliography

Art and Life in America. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1949;
Samuel F.B. Morse and American Democratic Art. Boston: Little, Brown, 1954;
Daumier in His Time and Ours. Northampton, MA: Smith College, 1962.

Sources

“Oliver W. Larkin Is Dead at 74.” New York Times, December 19, 1970: 30;
Brennan, Elizabeth A., Elizabeth C. Clarage, and Seymour Topping. Who’s Who of Pulitzer Prize Winners. Phoenix: Oryx Press, 1999;
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring ofAmerican Culture in the Twentieth Century. London: Verso, 1996;
Larkin, Oliver Waterman. Art and Life in America. New York: Rinehart & Co., 1949;
Wallach, Alan. “Oliver Larkin’s “Art and Life in America”: Between the Popular Front and the Cold War.” American Art, Vol. 15, No. 3. (Autumn, 2001): 80-89.

Laporte, Paul

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Laporte, Paul Milton

Other Names:

Paul Milton Heilbronner

Gender: male

Date Born: 22 November 1904

Date Died: 04 June 1980

Place Born: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Place Died: Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, USA

Home Country/ies: Germany

Institution(s): Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles

Overview

Art historian, professor, and artist; taught at numerous universities including Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles. Paul Laporte was born as Paul Milton Heilbronner in 1904 Munich, Germany to banker Hugo Heilbronner (1869-1924). Heilbronner attended Altes Realgymnasium in Munich, earning his Abitur in 1924. From 1921 to 1925, he studied painting, arts, and crafts at the Kunstgewerbeschule and Akademie in Munich, and the Kunstschule in Halle. At these institutions, Heilbronner worked under teachers such as the architect Richard Riemerschmid (1868-1957), painter and graphic artist Erwin Hahs (1887-1970), and painter Karl Caspar (1879-1956). After departing these arts and crafts schools, he developed his artistic career as a painter and etcher until 1931. Heilbronner experienced some success as an artist in Thomas Mann’s Unordnung und frühes Leid (Disorder and Early Suffering) where his woodcuts were featured (1930).

In 1929, Heilbronner resumed his educational career at the University of Munich, where he studied art history, archaeology, and philosophy. During his university studies, Heilbronner gained practical experience in photography, with an emphasis on photography of artworks. This experience likely influenced his later projects with film. In 1933, Heilbronner finished his studies and published his dissertation under Wilhelm Pinder, titled Studien über Johann Michael Fischer (Studies on Johann Michael Fischer).

In response to growing anti-semetic policies enforced under Hitler in the same year, Heilbronner was forced to flee his home of Germany. He emigrated to Florence, Italy, where he spent his time conducting research on a variety of subjects, including prehistoric art, anthropology, and ethnology. He also became deeply involved with the Italian art and film scene, which was greatly prompted by his newfound relationship with Rudolf Arnheim and his wife Annette Siecke. Heilbronner’s relationship with film took the form of both critic and artist. He published articles on art and film in numerous popular Italian magazines, such as Il municipio di Augusta, di Elia Holl, e i suoi rapporti con il barocco Italiano (Elia Holl’s Augsburg Town Hall and its Relations to the Italian Baroque, 1938) in Palladio. Heilbronner also created his own short films focused on art works in Italy, with the most notable cinematic being a larger film project centered on Florence.

In 1939, Heilbronner emigrated to the US with the help of Arnheim and the American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, and officially took the name of Laporte. Upon arriving, he continued his scholarly work and contributed to a publication on human representation in the Palaeolithic. He also began to lecture for the College Art Association, commencing his lifelong involvement with education. From 1939 to 1940, Laporte worked as a teacher of art and handicrafts at numerous schools, including the Gordon School in Providence, Rhode Island and at the Providence Country Day School. In 1940, Laporte became an art and art history teacher at the Ethel Walker School in Simsbury, Connecticut until 1944. During this time period, he also worked at the Institute of International Education.

In 1943, Laporte married Annette Siecke, the former wife of Arnheim. Their romantic relationship began during his stay with the Anheims in Italy, where the two scandalously parented a child in 1937. Their union was Laporte’s second marriage, as he had previously been married in Germany before getting divorced in 1933.

In terms of his writing, Laporte published numerous works on a variety of subjects in 1943, including Humanism and the Contemporary Primitive (1946) and The classic art of Renoir (1948). Over time, his work became more focused on the intersection of science and the arts, a relationship he often explored through the cubist work of Picasso. While teaching art history at Olivet College in 1946, Laporte corresponded with Albert Einstein for input on his own investigations into this relationship that would inform his later works. Based upon his research up until this point, Laporte published The space-time concept in the work of Picasso and Cubism and science in 1948.

From 1948 to 1949, Laporte became a lecturer at the Design Institute in Chicago. In that year, he left to assume the role of Chairman of the Department of Art at Macalester College, which he would hold until 1956. After leaving Macalester College, Laporte continued his career in education that same year as a professor of art history at Immaculate Heart College, Los Angeles. From 1960 to 1961, he taught at the Chouinard Institute of Art and in 1962, became a visiting professor at University of Southern California until 1963, when he transitioned to University of California at Berkeley. During this time, Laporte’s scholarly interest in Picasso continued with the publication of Picasso’s portrait of the artist in 1961 and Four paintings by Picasso in 1963. His continued interest into the scientific intertwinings of cubism is represented in Cubism and Relativity, which was first published in 1965 and then republished posthumously in 1988. The later version featured a more thorough translation of a letter from Albert Einstein from their 1946 correspondence, as well as an introduction by Rudolf Arnheim. Laporte remained in California until his death in 1980 in Santa Barbara.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] (Paul Heilbronner): Studien über Johann Michael Fischer. München 1933;
(Paul Heilbronner): II municipio di Augusta di Elia Holl e i suoi rapporti con il barocco italiano. In: Palladio. 1938, pp. 45-54;
Humanism and the contemporary primitive. In: Gaz. Bx Arts. 29,1946, pp. 47-62;
The classic art of Renoir. In: Gaz. Bx-Arts. 35, 1948;
Cubism and science. In: Aesthetics. 7, 1948, pp. 243-256;
The space-time concept in the work of Picasso. In: Mag. of Art. 41, 1948, pp. 26-30;
Picasso’s portrait of the artist. In: Centennial R. 1961;
Four paintings by Picasso. In: B. Los Angeles County Mus. 15,1963, H. 3, pp. 3-13;
Cubism and relativity. In: Art. 25,1965, pp. 246-248;
Cubism and relativity, with a letter of Albert Einstein. Introd. by Rudolf Arnheim. In: Leonardo. 21,1988, pp. 313-315;

Sources

Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 351-355.;
Mann, Thomas, Felix Wittmer, Thomas Mann, and Thomas Mann. 1930. Unordnung und frühes Leid . New York: Prentice-Hall.;
Jung, Sebastian. “Paul Heilbronner (Laporte)” Einblicke – Ausblicke. Jüdische Kunsthistoriker in München (website) Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München https://www.kunstgeschichte.uni-muenchen.de/forschung/ausstellungsprojekte/archiv/einblicke_ausblicke/biografien/heilbronner/index.html

Contributors: Helen Jennings and Lee Sorensen

Lanzi, Luigi Antonio

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lanzi, Luigi Antonio

Other Names:

Abate Luigi Lanzin

Gender: male

Date Born: 14 June 1732

Date Died: 30 March 1810

Place Born: Monte dell'Olmo, Treia, Macerata, Marche, Italy

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance

Overview

Historian of classical and renaissance Italian art; father of modern art history in Italy. Lanzi was educated as a Jesuit priest at Fermo and Rome, joining the Order of St. Ignatius. He taught classics at various schools and came under the classicizing spell of Anton Mengs and the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, both of whose work appeared at that time. Lanzi survived the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 having been in Siena for health reasons, to be appointed by Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany (1747-1792) to the office of antiquities assistant at the galleries in Florence in 1775. The following year he was appointed curator of the museum, where he published Guida alla Galleria di Firenze, a guide to the newly reorganized collections in 1782. During these years Lanzi had also studied archaeological sites, particularly the little-known Etruscan finds. After nearly five years in Rome preparing his work, Lanzi published his Saggio di lingua etrusca e di altre antiche d’Italia in 1789, a summary catalog on Etruscan life and art. The book formed a comprehensive collection of the Etruscan language and customs. But his assertion that Etruscan language derived from Hebrew was strongly criticized and never gained acceptance. Lanzi continued to study Italian art as a private scholar. In 1790 the Grand Duke recalled him to Florence to resume his antiquarian work. However, Lanzi spent much of the following years traveling and taking notes for his next project, a history of Italian painting. His monumental Storia pittorica dell’Italia appeared between 1795 and 1796. The Storia was the first treatment of the history of Italian art viewed as a succession of stylistic developments rather than fit into the biographies of the artists. It begins with a bold refutation of the claim of Giorgio Vasari that painting had been “altogether lost” before Cimabue. Lanzi had met and exchanged ideas with many of the important scholars of the time, including Bartolomeo Gamba (1770-1841), Mauro Boni (1746-1817), and the collector/art historians Pietro Brandolese (1754-1809) and Giovanni de Lazara (1744-1833) as well as the German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen. In 1806 Lanzi’s work on the so-called Etruscan vases appeared, correctly identifying their Greek origin, and refuting many errors current with the mania of things Etruscan at the time. His findings were convincingly confirmed by Eduard Gerhard in 1831. Lanzi put together a collection of Etruscan antiquities which now forms the Archaeological Museum in Florence. In 1809 his second edition of the Storia appeared, which is considered his masterpiece. He is buried in Florence at Santa Croce next to Michelangelo. Lanzi employed connoisseurship and a systemization derived from his classification of sculpture as a means to distinguish and organize art into a coherent vision. He saw the artist as an independent creator, defining the styles and manner of artists and epochs with the artist and less of their time. His rigorous scientific method to the study objects and languages fit the Enlightenment age of which he was a part. His revisionist view of Vasari was supported by the work of Karl Friedrich von Rumohr in his Italienische Forschungen, 1827-1831. The philologist Wilhelm Corssen (1820-1875) called Lanzi “the father of ancient Italian studies.” Rudolf Wittkower, in the introduction to his Art and Architecture in Italy, termed Lanzi’s work as “still unequaled.” His work inspired the Berlin school of art historians, Rumohr and especially Waagen.

Selected Bibliography

Storia Pittorica della Italia dal risorgimento delle belle arti fin presso al fin del XVIII secolo. 3 vols. Bassano: Remondino, 1795-1796; La Real Galleria di Firenze. Florence: Francesco Moücke, 1782; Saggio di lingua etrusca: e di altre antiche d’Italia, per servire alla storia de’ popeli, delle lingua, e delle belle arti. Rome: Pagliarini, 1789.

Sources

An Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 659-60; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 89; Bernabei, Franco. Dictionary of Art.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Lányi, Jenö

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Lányi, Jenö

Other Names:

Jenö Lányi

Gender: male

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 18 September 1940

Place Born: Varín, Slovakia

Place Died: North Atlantic Ocean

Home Country/ies: Hungary

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

Overview

Donatello and Italian Renaissance sculpture scholar. Lányi’s father was Arpád Lányi, a Hungarian bureaucrat. The younger Lányi was born in Várna, Hungary, which is present-day Varín, Slovakia. He attended a humanities Gymnasium in Budapest, receiving his Abitur in 1920. Between 1920 and 1924 and again in 1927 he studied art history, archaeology and history in Vienna under the Vienna-School scholar Julius Alwin von Schlosser and then in Munich under Wilhelm Pinder. He wrote a dissertation (likely supervised by Pinder) in Munich on Jacopo della Quercia in 1929. Between 1929 and 1932 he worked as a volunteer researcher for the State Art Museum in Berlin in the graphics collection under Max J. Friedländer and at the Kaiser Friedrich-Wilhelm Museum under Thomas Demmler and, particularly important for his later work, the Italian Renaissance sculpture scholar Frida Schottmüller. In 1932 a Swiss benefactor financed a research stay in Florence at the Kunsthistorisches Institut where he worked on a monograph on Donatello. There he met Monika Mann (1910-1992), the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955), who was studying art history at the time. The 1938 laws against Jews holding academic or museum positions in the Reich made a career in German-speaking countries impossible for him. He emigrated to England in 1938 with Mann where he continued his Donatello research. The two married in 1939. As England became a target for Nazi strikes, his father-in-law, living in Princeton, N. J., used his connections to secure a visa for travel to Canada. The boat carrying them to North America, the “SS City of Benares” was torpedoed in the North Atlantic by the German U-boat U-48 and sunk. Lányi drowned and his wife was injured, but survived. The suitcases containing his notes for his book on Donatello were returned to his widow recovering in Scotland who took them with her to the United States. Two of Lányi’s articles in English appeared posthumously in the Art Bulletin and the Burlington Magazine. His notes and photographs on Donatello was considered so important they were taken over by the New York University Renaissance scholar Horst Woldemar Janson and published with Janson’s text in 1957 as the critical catalog on the sculptor. Lányi’s untimely death is one of the great tragedies of art history. An historian of great promise, his writings influenced John Pope-Hennessy, later the director of Victoria and Albert Museum and eminent sculpture historian. Drowned at sea.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Quercia Studien. Munich, 1929, published as the same in, Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 7 (1930): 25-63; “Pontormos Bildnis der Maria Salviati de’Medici.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 4 no.2/3 (January-July 1933): 88-102; “Donatello’s Angels for the Siena Font: A Reconstruction ” Burlington Magazine 75, no. 439 (October 1939): 142-143ff.; and Falk, Ilse. “The Genesis of Andrea Pisano’s Bronze Doors.” Art Bulletin 25, no. 2 (June 1943): 132-153; “The Louvre Portrait of Five Florentines.” Burlington Magazine 84, no. 493 (April 1944): 87-93ff.; and Janson, H. W. The Sculpture of Donatello. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Sources

Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 419-420; Mann, Monika. Vergangenes und Gegenwärtiges: Erinnerungen. Munich: Kindler, 1956, pp. 106ff; “Forward” and “Introduction.” Janson, H. W.The Sculpture of Donatello. vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957; viii-xvii.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

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