Art Historians

Janson, Horst Woldemar

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Janson, Horst Woldemar

Other Names:

"Peter" Janson

Gender: male

Date Born: 04 October 1913

Date Died: 30 September 1982

Place Born: St. Petersburg, Russia

Place Died: Europe [Died on a train between Zürich and Milan.]

Home Country/ies: Germany and United States

Subject Area(s): Renaissance and sculpture (visual works)

Institution(s): New York University and Washington University in St. Louis

Overview

Renaissance sculpture specialist, chairman and professor of the department of art, New York University, 1949-1979; wrote the famous survey of art history. Janson was born to Friedrich Janson (1875-1927) and Helene Porsch (Janson) (1879-1974). His parents were of Swedish and Latvian extraction living in Russia. The family moved to Hamburg after the Russian Revolution, where Janson graduated from the Wilhelms Gymnasium in 1932. He studied at Munich and then at the new art history program at the university in Hamburg where he was a student of Erwin Panofsky. He was a part of the so-called Hamburg school of art history whose other students included William S. Heckscher, Lotte Brand Foerster, and Klaus Hinrichsen (b. 1927) and Liselotte Müller. In 1935, at the suggestion of Panofsky, who had fled Germany in 1933 for the United States, Alfred H. Barr, Jr., director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, sponsored Janson as an immigrant to the United States where he had been awarded a Charles Holtzer fellowship at Harvard University. Janson studied at Harvard between 1935-1942 under Chandler R. Post and Paul J. Sachs. He became close and lifelong friends with fellow Harvard art-history student Sydney Joseph Freedberg. Janson worked at the Worcester Museum of Art, Worcester, MA, 1938, while pursuing his graduate degree and then at the University of Iowa, 1938-1941. According to his son, Anthony, Janson drew the ire of the chairman of the Iowa department of art, the painter Grant Wood, for taking art students to see a Picasso show in Chicago. In 1941 he left Iowa for Washington University in St. Louis, MO, and an assistant professorship, marrying Dora Heineberg, an art-history undergraduate at Radcliffe, the same year. His Ph.D. was awarded from Harvard in 1942 on the subject of Michelozzo. His family remained in Germany during World War II, where his brother, fighting for the Nazis, was killed in 1943. During World War II, when many universities had been converted to soldier training camps, Janson lectured on physics and Russian to American soldiers in St. Louis. He became a citizen in 1943. In 1946 he was appointed associate professor of art history.

Janson left Missouri for New York in 1949 where he was appointed professor and chairman of the department of art at New York University. He remained chair for twenty-five years, developing the undergraduate (Washington Square) program into one of the finest in the nation. He was adjunct faculty at the Institute of Fine Arts, the graduate program at NYU, though frictions developed between the graduate faculty and Janson. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for 1952-1953. That same year he published Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, for which he was a recipient of the Charles Rufus Morey Prize from the College Art Association. In 1957, using the initial work of the late Jenö Lányi, Janson published a book on Donatello, The Sculpture of Donatello, which was again awarded a Morey Prize from the College Art Association. In 1959. Janson issued a book of plates of the monuments of art history, titled Key Monuments of the History of Art, to aid his undergraduates in their student of art since the availability of good personal study images was not then available. He followed this in a work co-written with his wife, Dora, with a survey of Western art, their History of Art. It grew over the years to be the best-selling textbook of any subject in the United States and, known simply as “Janson,” was for years was the standard text. Janson’s interests turned to nineteenth-century art in later years. In 1974 Janson delivered the Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C. on 19th-century sculpture. Together with Peter Fusco (b. 1945), he organized a show of that era sculpture for the Los Angeles County Museum of art in 1980. Janson was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Institute of Fine Arts in 1981. He was working on revisions of his Mellon lecture for a book at the time of his death on a train between Italy and Switzerland.

Janson built the (undergraduate) art history department of New York University to the eminence it enjoys today, hiring Jane Costello, Anne Coffin Hanson, Isabelle Hyman, Sarah Landau, Lavin, Robert Rosenblum, Lucy Freeman Sandler, Gert Schiff, Marvin Trachtenberg, and Guy Walton. He was one of the first to hire a significant number of female art historians at a time when teaching faculty in art history were, outside of women’s colleges, largely male. Because Janson’s appointment at NYU was primarily at the undergraduate level, he had few Ph.D. students compared to others of his profile at the University. His students (at Washington University) included Irving Lavin and Marilyn Aronberg Lavin. Janson’s work, especially his Ape lore book, show the influence of the Hamburg school/Warburg influence. The book focuses on the history of art or styles as much as it does mythological phenomenon and its manifestation in material culture. Janson 1962 History of Art was an instant best seller, contrasting it from the other predominant art-history text, Art Through the Ages by Helen Gardner, which by its numerous posthumous revisions treated art as a history of styles. Janson’s book came under criticism in later years for its lack of any women artists. Subsequent editions written by his son, Anthony F. Janson (b. 1943), altered this.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliography of H. W. Janson” in, Barasch, Moshe, and Sandler, Lucy Freeman eds. Art, the Ape of Nature: Studies in Honor of H. W. Janson. New York: H. N. Abrams/Prentice-Hall, 1981, pp. 805-812; [dissertation:] The Sculptured Works of Michelozzo di Bartolommeo. Harvard University, 1942; Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1952; and Lányi, Jenö. The Sculpture of Donatello. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957; Key Monuments of the History of Art: a Visual Survey. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1959; and Janson, Dora Jane. History of Art: a Survey of the Major Visual Arts from the Dawn of History to the Present Day. New York: Abrams, 1963; and Janson, Dora, and Kerman, Joseph. A History of Art & Music. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968; and Cauman, Samuel. History of Art for Young People. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1971; “The Myth of the Avant-Garde.” in, Art Studies for an Editor: 25 Essays in Memory of Milton S. Fox: New York: Abrams, 1975, pp. 167-75; and Fusco, Peter. The Romantics to Rodin : French Nineteenth-century Sculpture from North American Collections Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art/G. Braziller, 1980; Form Follows Function – or Does It? Modernist Design Theory and the History of Art. Maarssen, The Netherlands: Gary Schwartz, 1982; and Rosenblum, Robert. 19th Century Art. New York: Abrams, 1984; and Herschman, Judith. An Iconographic Index to Stanislas Lami’s Dictionnaire des sculpteurs de l’Ecole française au dix-neuvième siècle. New York: Garland 1983.

Sources

[obituaries:]
White, John. “H W Janson.” The Burlington Magazine 125, no. 961. (April 1983): 226;
Russell, John. “Prof. H.W. Janson Is Dead at 68, Wrote Best-Selling ‘History of Art’.” New York Times October 3, 1982, p. 44.

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. 65,
cited; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 543;
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. 332-8;
Janson, Anthony. “Janson, Horst Woldemar” American National Biography;
About DAH NYU Department of Art History and “Masters of the Third Floor: NYU Art History Documentary.” (video) https://as.nyu.edu/content/nyu-as/as/departments/arthistory/about.html

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Janson, Dora Jane

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Janson, Dora Jane

Other Names:

née Dora Jane Heineberg

Gender: female

Date Born: 1916

Date Died: 2002

Place Born: Philadelphia, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Place Died: Devon, Chester, PA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Overview

Wife of art historian Horst Woldemar Janson and co-author of his books. Heineberg met her husband while an undergraduate at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, MA, and he a graduate student at Harvard. Janson had fled Germany in 1935 using a graduate scholarship. After his Ph.D. was completed in 1941, they were married. Dora Janson never denied that she consciously sacrificed her career to raise children. She collaborated with her husband on Apes and Ape Lore in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in 1952, which won her husband a Charles Rufus Morey Book Award from the College Art Association in 1956, and The Story of Painting for Young People (1954). In 1962, her husband’s famous History of Art, appeared, which has been updated through numerous editions and for which most of the popular readership knows their names. In 1971 she wrote an innovative exhibition catalog for the art museum at Duke University on Art Nouveau jewelry, From Slave to Siren: The Victorian Woman and Her Jewelry from Neoclassic to Art Nouveau. Her son, Anthony Janson, is also an art historian.

Sources

CAA News 27 no. 6 (November 2002),

Janitschek, Hubert

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Janitschek, Hubert

Gender: male

Date Born: 1846

Date Died: 1893

Place Born: Troppau, Silesia

Place Died: Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Romanesque

Overview

Alberti and Romaneque art scholar; Gratz education; taught at Leipzig. In 1882 he married the writer Maria Tölk (1859-1927) [pseudonym Marius Stein]. His students included Georg Dehio, Aby M. Warburg and Paul Clemen. Colleague of Anton Springer. At Strassburg, Janitschek’s students included Wilhelm Vöge. In 1890, Janitschek was the first to use the terms “Ottonian art” and “Ottonian painting” for art (i.e., independent of the architectural mode) first identified by Johann Dominico Fiorillo, Franz Kugler and Gustav Friedrich Waagen. His terminology left unclear a terminus of either the beginning or end of 11th century, which his colleague Springer insisted ended mid-century.

Selected Bibliography

Leone Battista Albertis kleinere kunsttheoretische Schriften. Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1877; Die Gesellschaft der Renaissance in Italien und die Kunst. Stuttgart: W. Spemann, 1879; Die Geschichte der deutschen Malerei. Vol. III of Geschichte der deutschen Kunst. 5 vols. Berlin: Grote, 1887-1890; Die Kunstlehre Dantes and Giottos Kunst. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1892; “Zwei Studien zur Geschichte der karolingischen Malerei.” In Strassburger Festgruss an Anton Springer zum 4. Mai 1885. Stuttgart: Spemann, 1885: 1-30.

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. 32, 147 mentioned; Dvorák, Max. Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967, pp. 205-6; 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. 91; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 190-2

Jamot, Paul

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Jamot, Paul

Gender: male

Date Born: 1863

Date Died: 1939

Home Country/ies: France

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

Career(s): art collectors and curators

Overview

Curator of the department of Painting, Louvre, 1927-1939; art collector. Jamot studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, Paris and the École normale supérieure in Paris where his classmate was the future art historian Étienne Michon. Graduating in 1884 he was named member of the School of Athens in 1887. There he explored Argos and the valley of the Spercheios, leading excavations in the valley of the Muses in Thespies between 1888 and 1891. He cataloged inscriptions, most notably the so-called stele of Hesiod. These recollections were covered in his En gréce avec Charalambos Eugénidis (1914). He married Madeleine Dauphin-Dornès (1864-1913). He joined the Musee du Louvre’s Department of Oriental Antiquities and Ancient Ceramics in1890, under the direction of Léon Alexandre Heuzey and Pottier. There he devoted his time to writing catalogs for the department and developing a reputation for disputing long-held attributions. A celebrated disagreement over the Athena Lemnia, an attribution by the eminent Adolf Furtwaengler ultimately ended in his favor. In 1894, Georges Perrot appointed him secrétariat de la publication, editor of the newly established publication Monuments et mémoires de la Fondation Eugène Piot, (Monuments et mémoires publiés par l’Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres), ultimately editing twenty-two volumes. He became deputy curator in 1902. Jamot turned his interest to painting, initially research in 1906 on Nicolas Poussin. In 1909, he was assigned the task of reorganizing the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Valenciennes with Le Prieur. He supervised the installation of art at the new Musée des beaux-arts de Reims in 1913. At the outbreak of World War I in 1914 Jamot oversaw the evacuation of Louvre artworks to Toulouse, remaining with them there. He returned to Paris at the sudden death of Le Prieur succeeding him in the painting department overseeing the return of the work. He was awarded the chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur, one of the first civilians. He resigned from Monuments editorship in 1919 when named deputy curator of the painting department at the Louvre at the suggestion of Jean Guiffrey. Jamot began publishing catalogs and writing on a variety of French painters, but his affection was clearly Delacroix. Together with the comtesse Waresquiel, he lead the l’âme de la Société des Amis de Delacroix. He became head of the department of painting in 1927. Under his leadership at the Louvre, many scholars developed their craft, including Charles Sterling. Jamot and Sterling mounted the famous 1934 exhibition at the Orangerie, Peintres de la réalité en France au XViie siècle. The exhibition caused a re-evaluation of French 17th-century painting, revealing Georges de la Tour as major figure and bringing to fore the work of the Le Nain, among others. After retiring from the Louvre, he focused attention on monuments preservation, succeeding Henri Cochin as the head of the Société Saint- Jean. His interest was particularly the cathedrals of Reims and Autun. He was succeeded at the Louvre department by Rene Huyghe. At his death, his personal art collection of paintings by Corot, Carpeaux, Courbet, Delacroix, Maurice Denis, Forain, Ingres, Picasso, and Renoir was bequeathed to the Louvre. He is buried at the Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris.

Marcel Aubert characterized Jamot’s scholarship as focusing mainly on the technique and connoisseurship, “à son esprit: méthode délicate, parfois dangereuse, mais qu’il maniait avec une habileté remarquable.” Daniel Catton Rich in his Degas (1966) praised Jamot for his careful analysis, attributing him as first recognizing Degas’ psychology (“interior drama”).

Selected Bibliography

En gréce avec Charalambos Eugénidis. Paris: H. Floury ed. 1914; Degas. Paris: Éd. de la Gazette des Beaux-arts, 1924; Edouard Manet, 1832-1883 : a retrospective loan exhibition for the benefit of the French Hospital and the Lisa Day Nursery. New York: Wildenstein, 1937; Connaisance de Poussin. Paris: Floury, 1948; Introduction à l’histoire de la peinture. Paris: Plon 1947.

Sources

Qui êtes-vous?: annuaire des contemporains: notices biographiques. Paris: Ruffy, 1924; Gros, G. J. “La collection Paul Jamot.” Beaux Arts Magazine (October 7 1938): 4; Haskell, Francis. The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 137ff; [obituary:] Beaux Arts Magazine (January 1 1940): p.26; Rich, Daniel Catton. Degas. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1966, p. 11.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Jameson, Anna

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Jameson, Anna

Other Names:

Anna Jameson

Gender: female

Date Born: 1794

Date Died: 1860

Place Born: Dublin, Ireland

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Overview

Early female art historian of the Italian Renaissance; author of the first systematic study of Christian iconography in the English language. Born the daughter of the Irish miniaturist painter Denis Murphy and English wife (name now lost), the family emigrated to England in 1798, finally settling in London in 1803. Anna Murphy worked as a governess for several wealthy families, one of whom took her to the continent. She met Robert Jameson (1773/4-1854), a barrister, in 1821 and after some doubt about marriage and a termination of the engagement the same year, they eventually married in 1825. The couple moved to Bloomsbury. Jameson’s earliest novel, The Diary of an Ennuyée, 1826, employs keen descriptions of the art works viewed by her protagonist. Jameson’s own marriage was not happy. Robert was a poor husband and moved, without Anna, first to the West Indies and then to Canada. Mrs. Jameson earned a meager living writing. Two works, Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns, 1831 and Characteristics of Women, 1832, established her serious literary reputation. She traveled to Germany in 1829 and 1833, and armed with letters of introduction, met the novelist Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853) and philosopher August Wilhelm Schlegel (1772-1829). In Munich she toured the new royal palace with its architect, Leo von Klenze (1784-1864). Her travelogues published during this period discussed art at length. Her husband now established in Canadian politics, she made a brief trip to North America for appearances, and returned to Europe with an understanding to live independently of him with a small yearly stipend. In 1840, Jameson wrote an introduction to the English translation of Peter Paul Rubens by Gustav Friedrich Waagen. In it she argued for the broader, German interpretation of images over the rather pedestrian view most British art critics took. In 1842 she published A Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in and Near London, a guide to the art museums of London, but also an apology for a wider collecting policy for the National Gallery. The work was so successful that a sequel, Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of London appeared in 1844. Her espousal of British art as worthy of study predated that of John Ruskin in Modern Painters. Her criticisms of the National Gallery coincided with and perhaps resulted in the naming of Charles Lock Eastlake and Ralph Nicholson Wornum by Sir Robert Peel, both of whom she had been corresponding for her Private Galleries series. Between 1834-1845 Jameson wrote a series of profiles of Italian quattrocento painters, then known as “primitives,” in the Penny Magazine. The series was republished as a book, Memoirs of the Early Italian Painters in 1845. In 1848 her most important art-historical work, Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art, appeared. Published in two volumes, it is a systematic treatment of Christian iconography. Its encyclopedic scope resembles the Iconographie Chrétien (1843) of Adolphe Napoléon Didron. Unlike Didron or Ruskin, Jameson discusses Christian symbolism without arguing its supremacy through personal religious faith. Her dispassionate prose shows the detachment of the historian rather than the polemicist or critic. Several works on religious subject matter analyzed through art sources followed, including Legends of the Madonna, 1852. That year, too, she and other burgeoning art writers, including Matthew Digby Wyatt, later Slade Professor of Art at Cambridge University, published The History of the Painters of All Nations. Her husband had retired because of alcoholism in 1851 and in 1854 he died, leaving her excluded completely from any inheritance. Jameson, who always supported her parents and unmarried sisters, was given a small annual stipend by the crown. Jameson authored several pamphlets of women’s suffrage in the 1850s and became part of the British ex-patriot community in Florence, along with the Brownings and James Jackson Jarves. At age 65 she began to write two more volumes of Sacred and Legendary Art and a new work, A History of Our Lord. However, after a trip to Rome, she fell ill and, complicated by arthritis and failing eyesight, succumbed to pneumonia in 1860. Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake completed A History and was executor of her estate. Bernard Berenson ranked her among the other 19th-century pioneers of art history including Luigi Antonio Lanzi, Karl Julius Ferdinand Schnaase and Ruskin. Ruskin himself charged that Jameson was totally devoid of any critical faculty in art, but the American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) observed that she could read a picture like a book. Jameson represents the best 19th-century art writing without consultation of primary documents. Drawing upon Vasari’s Lives and the Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei by Franz Kugler, she fearlessly, if politely, debunked many myths of art and argued for a more direct public appreciation of art. She was clearly familiar with the writing (and bibliography) of Karl Friedrich von Rumohr. Her iconography was in part the inspiration for George Kaftal and his work on Italian saints. Though her writing reputation today as an art historian rests today upon her Sacred and Legendary Art volumes, Jameson’s championing of the “primitive” schools of art, i.e., the late-medieval and early Renaissance art, is her greatest contribution to the history of art history.

Selected Bibliography

Diary of an Ennuyée. Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman, and Holden, 1833; The History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art: with that of His types; Sketches of Art, Literature, and Character. 2 vols. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1857; Poetry of Sacred and Legendary Art. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1848; and Waring, John Burley, and Wyatt, Matthew Digby, and Blanc, Charles. The History of the Painters of All Nations. London: John Cassell, 1852.

Sources

Macpherson, Gerardine. Memoirs of the Life of Anna Jameson. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1878; Rowland, Jr. Benjamin. “Introduction.” Jarves, James Jackson. The Art-Idea. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1960, p. xii, note 1; Thomas, Clara. Love and Work Enough: The Life of Anna Jameson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967; Steegman, John. Victorian Taste: a Study of the Arts and Architecture from 1830 to 1870. [previously published as, Consort of Taste, 1830-1870]. Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1971; Holcomb, Adele M. A.-F. Rio, Anna Jameson and Some Sources of the Second Volume of Modern Painters by Ruskin (1846). Gazette des Beaux-Arts 91 (1978): 35-8; Holcomb, Adele M. Anna Jameson (1794-1860): Sacred Art and Social Vision. In, Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981, pp. 93-121; Johnston, Judith. Anna Jameson: Victorian, Feminist, Woman of Letters. Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1997; Adams, Kimberly Van Esveld. Our Lady of Victorian Feminism : the Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2001; Warr, Cordelia. “Anna Jameson (1794-1860): ‘Primitive’ Art and Iconography.” in, Chance, Jane, ed. Women Medievalists in the Academy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005, pp. 25-36.

James, Monty

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: James, Monty

Other Names:

Monty James

Gender: male

Date Born: 1862

Date Died: 1936

Place Born: Goodnestone, Kent, England, UK

Place Died: Eton, Windsor and Maidenhead, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): manuscripts (documents) and Medieval (European)

Overview

Medieval manuscripts scholar and provost, King’s College, Cambridge (1905-1918). James was the son of Herbert James (1822-1909), rector of Great Livermere in Suffolk (near Bury St. Edmunds) and Mary Emily Horton (1818-1899) daughter of Admiral Joshua Sydney Horton. James attended the private boarding school at Temple Grove in Surrey between 1873-76 and then Eton (1876-82). He received a scholarship for King’s College, Cambridge in 1882. He graduated in 1886, writing a thesis on the Apocalypse of Peter, a second-century apocryphon, which led to an election a fellow of the college and soon, dean. James published his work on the Apocalypse of Peter after discoveries aiding the document in Egypt, 1886-87, J. Armitage Robinson (1858-1933) in 1892. His Apocrypha anecdota of 1893 and 1897 also appeared. James was appointed assistant director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, in 1886 and director in 1889, which he held until 1908. At the Fitzwilliam, he concerned himself with iconographic studies of medieval art, such as the damaged sculptural program of the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral, which he published in 1892. In 1895 James began a series of descriptive catalogs of medieval and Latin manuscripts of holdings at Eton, the Fitzwilliam, but the Cambridge colleges of King’s College, Jesus College, and Sidney Sussex College, continuing until 1914. Compiled from his teenage examination of manuscripts while an Eton student and later evaluation, they formed his reputation as a manuscripts scholar. James’ reputation was so great that the manuscripts from these libraries were delivered to his apartments at King’s College in order to review them during his private time. He also wrote the catalogs for the private collection of publisher and manuscript collector Henry Yates Thompson (1838-1928) in 1898 and 1902. The collection of Trinity manuscripts was published in four volumes between 1900 and 1905. These included the manuscripts of the Parker Library at Corpus Christi, one of the most valuable collections of Anglo-Saxon manuscripts extant, the Bury Bible and the two-volume Matthew Paris Chronica maiora. In 1905 James was elected provost of King’s College, which he held through the difficult years of World War I. In 1907 he cataloged the manuscripts for J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913) and his library in New York. At his resignation from the Fitzwilliam in 1908, he was succeeded by Sydney Cockerell. The catalogs for Gonville and Caius Colleges appeared 1907-1908, and 1914, the McClean collection at the Fitzwilliam Museum (1912), and St. John’s (1913) appeared in rapid succession. These are still considered among his best. During the years of World War I, James worked on manuscripts outside the Cambridge University system, the Latin manuscripts of the recently founded John Rylands Library in Manchester and those at Lambeth Palace, published 1921 and 1930-32 respectively. At the end of the war, James left Cambridge to become provost of Eton. In 1925 James wrote a survey of abbeys for the Great Western Railway and an East Anglian guidebook, Suffolk and Norfolk (1930). In 1927 he delivered the British Academy Schweich lectures, published as The Apocalypse in Art in 1931. He died purportedly of renal failure in 1936 and is buried in the parish churchyard of Eton. His catalog of the medieval manuscripts at the university library at Cambridge remained uncompleted at the time of his death. James also produced several volumes of ghost stories in 1904, 1911, 1919 and 1925. James’ strength as a manuscript cataloger was in the thoroughness of description of illustration and hagiographic knowledge, his analysis of legal and scientific manuscripts were less learned.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Scholfield. A. F. “List of Writings” in, Lubbock, Samuel Gurney. A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James. Cambridge, University Press, 1939, pp. 47-87; Apocrypha anecdota: a Collection of Thirteen Apocryphal Books and Fragments now First Edited from Manuscripts. Cambridge: The University Ppress, 1893; The Apocalypse in Art. London: British Academy/H. Milford/Oxford University Press, 1931; Robinson, Joseph Armitage. The Gospel According to Peter, and the Revelation of Peter: Two Lectures on the Newly Recovered Fragments, together with the Greek Texts. London: C. J. Clay, 1892; A Descriptive Catalogue of Fifty Manuscripts from the Collection of Henry Yates Thompson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1898; A Descriptive Catalogue of the Manuscripts in the Library of Gonville and Caius. 2 vols. Cambridge: University press, 1907, 1908, supplement, 1914; The Sculptured Bosses in the Roof of the Bauchun Chapel of Our Lady of Pity in Norwich Cathedral. Norwich: Goose and Son, 1908; Catalogue of Manuscripts and Early Printed books from the Libraries of William Morris, Richard Bennett, Bertram, Fourth Earl of Ashburnham, and Other Sources now Forming portion of the Library of J. Pierpont Morgan. London: Chiswick Press, 1906-07; and Thompson, A. Hamilton. Abbeys, with an Additional Chapter on “Monastic Life and Buildings.” London: The Great Western Railway, 1925.

Sources

Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art.” In, The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America. Introduction by W. Rex Crawford, p. 85, mentioned; Pfaff, Richard W. “James, Montague Rhodes (1862-1936).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Lubbock, Samuel Gurney. A Memoir of Montague Rhodes James. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939; Cox, Michael Andrew. M. R. James: an Informal Portrait. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983; Gaselee, Stephen. “Montague Rhodes James, C.M., 1862-1936.” Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936); Pfaff, Richard William. Montague Rhodes James. London: Scolar Press, 1980.

James, John

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: James, John

Gender: male

Date Born: 1931

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: Australia

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

Institution(s): none

Overview

Medievalist, École de Chartes scholar; used an archaeological approach for Chartres scholarship. James entered the University of Melbourne in 1949. As a student, completed a sub-major in art history under Joe Burke by surveying the Melbourne terrace house and its cast-iron tracery in 1951. His Bachelor’s degree in [practicing] Architecture (with honors) was awarded in 1953. He married his wife, Hilary, at this time. After working in British West Africa, the couple returned to Australia where James founded an architectural practice in Roseville (greater Sydney) in 1957. James’ interest was always as an architect/builder; he became the first certified builder-architect approved by the Australian Institute of Architects in 1958. James became the first certified builder-architect approved by the Australian Institute of Architects in 1958; his Readers Digest head office in Sydney is now a protected National Monument. Bconstruction and design experience spurred an interest in the part master masons played in medieval European building. James left his practice in 1963 to pursue a Master of Building Science degree under Sydney University. While a student, he taught courses in architectural history and studio design from 1965 at Sydney Technical College and the Universities of Sydney and New South Wales. After receiving his degree in 1966, he traveled to France in 1969 to examine the construction archaeology of Chartres cathedral from the builder’s point of view in an attempt to reconcil it with established art history. James developed a research technique he termed “Toichology” (above ground archaeology) for deducing the construction history from the masonry. His first research article on this appeared in the AAQ in 1972. The article demonstrated how Chartres had been built layer by layer and as such redefining the entire constructional history of the building. This article spurred Columbia University architectural historian Robert Branner to write an endorsement on what such a method could offer to scholarship. James and his family remained in Europe for the next five years, except for a brief stay in Bali, funded by income from rental properties he owned and had designed. To gain a serious appreciation of medieval experience, he took his family on the pilgrimage route from Chartres to Compostella (walking nearly 400 kilometers) in 1973. James returned to Australia in 1974. He lectured in the U.S., Europe and Australia in 1977, researching the cathedral of Durham and Southwell Minster in the UK and a buildings in France associated with Chartres. His Chartres, les constructeurs (translated into French by local architect Dominique Maunoury) appeared beginning in 1977. The English version, The Contractors of Chartres appearing between 1979 and 1981. James expanded his research work in 1980 to the region around Paris, resulting in his on-site survey to identify all the early Gothic churches in the Paris area. His research, requiring visits to more than 3500 sites to determine which had been constructed between 1100 and 1250, appeared in the Art Bulletin in 1984. He was awarded a Ph D from the University of New South Wales in 1988. James returned to the topic of Gothic construction, examining the evolution of the rib vault and a catalog of early Gothic capitals in the Paris region in 1993, attempting to identify the distinct carvers. In 2000, he received a grant to study the construction history of Durham Cathedral in northern England, and began to assemble the material needed for a ten-volume Corpus of French Early Gothic architecture. His work appeared in 2002 as the first two volumes of The Ark of God. In 2004 he Robert Ferré began investigating the meanings of the labyrinth of Chartres cathedral. He published two further books in 2005, In Search of the Unknown in Medieval Architecture and volume 3 of The Ark of God.

James never recieved advanced training in architectural history and some of his views have been termed “eccentric” (Crossley). He used his building knowledge and detailed measurements to construct an investigative technique of medieval architecture. His work is akin to that of the French archéolgists, historians of medieval architecture who focus on archaeological analysis, a group including Arnold Wolff, Richard Hamman-MacLean and Jan van der Meulen. Their work commonly appears in the monograph form, a “congenial vehicle for exercise in the most precise and detailed examination of a great church’s fabric” (Crossley). James’ conclusion regarding Chartres scholarship included that the tilted, almost annual, layers was the work of different master masons, that nave and the choir were built at the same time, not following each other, the central importance of geometry to the entire design, and that the Royal Portal was not moved but was erected with the western towers. Many of James conclusions have not been accepted by architectural historians. His assertion that architects did not exist for most Gothic churches but rather that Chartres and other ecclessiastical buildings were constructed by bands of wandering ‘contractors’ was effectively refuted by the work of John Harvey and Howard Montagu Colvin. He himself reversed his initial conclusion of 1979 that Chartres experienced as many as thirty-six separate building campaigns because of funding issues in his later Chartres study of 1989. James’ demotion of the architect as prime designer may have inadvertently been driven by the popular “death of the artist'” notion among art historians of the 1970’s and 1980’s (Crossley). James used a connoisseurship approach akin to Giovanni Morelli to try and determine the individual carver of Parisian capitals, as he had done for architecture, completed before 1170.

Selected Bibliography

Chartres, les constructeurs. 2 vols. Chartres: Société archéologique d’Eure-et-Loir, 1977-1982, English, The Contractors of Chartres. 2 vols. Dooralong, N.S.W.: Mandorla, 1979-1981; Chartres: the Masons who Built a Legend. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982; “An Investigation into the Uneven Distribution of Early Gothic Churches in the Paris Basin, 1140-1240.” Art Bulletin 66 no. 1 (March 1984): 15-46; The Template-makers of the Paris Basin: Toichological Techniques for Identifying the Pioneers of the Gothic Movement. Leura, Australia: West Grinstead, 1989; The Creation of Gothic Architecture: an Illustrated Thesaurus: the Ark of God. 5 vols. Hartley Vale, Australia: West Grinstead., 2002ff.; In Search of the Unknown in Medieval Architecture. London: Pindar Press, 2007; Creation of the Gothic (interactive website) https://www.creationofgothic.org/index.php.�

Sources

Crossley, Paul. “The Monograph.” [sect xvi of] “Introduction: Frankl’s Text: Its Achievement and Significance.” Frankl, Paul and Crossley, Paul. Gothic Architecture. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, p. 24, 26; “John and Hilary James – Lifestory” [personal web site] http://www.johnjames.com.au/johnjames-bio.shtml; personal correspondence, John James, March 2012.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Jahn, Otto

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

Full Name: Jahn, Otto

Gender: male

Date Born: 1813

Date Died: 1869

Place Born: Kiel, Schleswig Holstein, Germany

Place Died: Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): ceramic ware (visual works), Classical, and pottery (visual works)

Career(s): biographers and educators

Overview

First scholar of classical pottery to write a major study of them; influential teacher to a generation of classicists and art historians; Mozart biographer. Jahn was born to a wealthy family; his father was a successful lawyer in Kiel. The younger Jahn attended the Schulpforte before the university at Kiel where his professors included Gregor Wilhelm Nitzsch (1790-1861), under whom he eventually wrote his dissertation and Joannes Classen (1805-1891). He also trained under Gottfried Hermann (1772-1848) at Leipzig and August Böckh (1785-1867) and Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) in Berlin before returning to Kiel to complete his doctorate. His dissertation was on Palamedes. Jahn made an extended research trip in Italy. He met and was greatly influenced by Emil Braun in Rome and Otfried Müller in Florence. He joined the faculty at Kiel in 1839 where among his first students was Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903). In 1842 he was appointed Extraordinarius professor at Greifswald in philology and archaeology. When Wilhelm A. Becker (1796-1846) retired as professor of archaeology in 1847 at Leipzig, Jahn succeeded him, teaching along side his former student Mommsen. However, he, Mommsen and Mortiz Haupt (1808-1874) were dismissed from the university in 1851 for political agitation in support of the imperial constitution. For the next four years Jahn wrote to support himself, authoring Florus (1851) and, in 1853, an important catalog on the vase collection of Ludwig I in Munich, Museum Antiker Kleinkunst. In 1855 he was appointed professor of Classics and director of the university art museum in Bonn. The following year the first volume of his biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart appeared, a work he is remembered for as much as his archaeological writing. Jahn engaged in a bitter dispute in his later years with Friedrich Ritschl (1806-1876) over the hiring of Hermann Sauppe (1809-1893) at the university in Göttingen. Jahn was succeeded in Bonn by Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz. His students, in addition to Mommsen, included Otto Benndorf, Hugo Blümner, Carl Robert, Wolfgang Helbig, Ulrich von Wilamowtiz-Moellendorff (1848-1931) and his nephew was Adolf Michaelis. Jahn opposed the mythical-symbolic interpretation of his contemporaries such as G. F. Creuzer and Theodor S. Panofka. His scientific approach, based on the best 19th-century positivism, forever changed the discipline of archaeology and vase painting studies. His life, however, was ever tragic: his wife went insane, his illegitimate son pursued him, his Leipzig appointment was withdrawn for political reasons, and his bitter feud with Ritschl distracted him from his projects, left uncompleted as his death, such as biographies of Beethoven and a study of Juvenal, as well as a handbook on archaeology. Michael Vickers termed Jahn’s vase scholarship to be the first major study of Greek pottery painting.

Selected Bibliography

Beschreibung der Vasensammlung König Ludwigs in der Pinakothek zu München. Munich: J. Lindauer, 1854, [also issued in a briefer version as] Kurze Beschreibung der Vasensammlung König Ludwigs in der Pinakothek zu München. Munich: J. Lindauer, 1854; “über die Kunsturtheile bei Plinius.” Berichte der sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften II (1850): 105-42; Archäologische beiträge. Berlin: G. Reimer, 1847; W. A. Mozart. 4 vols. Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1856-59.

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. 32; Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 35-36; Calder, William, III. “Jahn, Otto (1813-1869).” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 616-18; mentioned, Vickers, Michael. “Greek Vases.” Ibid., p. 538; Cook, Robert Manuel. “The History of the Study of Vase-Painting.” Greek Painted Pottery. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 285.

Jahn, Johannes

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Jahn, Johannes

Gender: male

Date Born: 1892

Date Died: 1976

Place Born: Wysoka, Greater Poland Voivodeship, Poland

Place Died: Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Professor and Director of Institut für Kunstgeschichte at the University of Leipzig, 1958-1964. He was born in Orlandshof, Germany, which is present-day Wysoka, Poland. Jahn studied under August Schmarsow and beginning in 1919 was an assistant for Wilhelm Pinder. After World War II, Jahn was appointed the Director of the Fine Art Museum (Museum der bildenden Künste) in Leipzig. In 1958 he succeeded Heinz Ladendorf as Director of Institut für Kunstgeschichte at the University of Leipzig. He stepped down in 1964 and was succeeded by Ernst Ullmann. In 1973 he became emeritus. Jahn’s Die Kunstwissenschaft der Gegenwert in Sebstdarstellung was one of the early attempts to address the methods of the discpline.

Selected Bibliography

edited, Die Kunstwissenschaft der Gegenwert in Sebstdarstellung. Leipzig: 1924.

Sources

Dilly, Heinrich. Kunstgeschichte als Institution: Studien zur Geschichte einer Diziplin. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1979, p. 25; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 187-90.

Jaffé, Michael

November 8, 2023April 25, 2024

**Image Credit:** National Portrait Gallery

Full Name: Jaffé, Michael

Other Names:

Andrew Michael Jaffé

Gender: male

Date Born: 1923

Date Died: 1997

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: Yeovil, Somerset, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Baroque, Flemish (culture or style), museums (institutions), Northern European, and painting (visual works)

Career(s): directors (administrators) and museum directors

Overview

Rubens scholar and director, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge University 1973-1990. Jaffé (who despite his English heritage, retained the accent ague on his name) was born to a wealthy Jewish banker. He was schooled at Eton, and won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge. He instead served in the Royal Navy (1942-45). He entered King’s College in 1945, reading in History and English and obtaining a First. In 1949 he was admitted to the Courtauld Institute, attending lectures by Johannes Wilde and procuring student access to the Seilern Collection. But Jaffé was unhappy at the Courtauld and in 1951 traveled by means of a grant to the museums and archives of Europe and Harvard and the Institute of Fine Arts of New York University in the United States. His dissertation, on Rubens’s early career in Italy, was completed in 1952. For the rest of his life, Jaffé would remain associated with Rubens and his period as well as Cambridge University and King’s College. By the early 1950s, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner was broadening the Cambridge to the disciplines of visual research. Jaffe became a Fellow of King’s College in 1952–Cambridge’s only Assistant Lecturer in Fine Arts at the time. In 1956 he began teaching undergraduate classes on art history. When Major A. E. Alnatt donated Rubens’s Adoration of the Magi to the College, Jaffé supervised its controversial installation into the east end of the College’s chapel. In 1960, he argued successfully for Cambridge to offer art history as a degree program. He was visiting professor at Washington University, St. Louis, in 1960-61. Key among Jaffe’s ideas on art pedagogy at Cambridge was an integration of the museum and the classroom, a relationship he had admired at Harvard. His notions at Cambridge had powerful subscribers, among them E. H. Gombrich and Francis Wormald. Jaffe’s skill and commitment in constructing the art history program at Cambridge was largely responsible for the eminent art historians, curators, art dealers and critics, that Cambridge produced in the 1960s and 70s. In 1968 he was appointed Reader in the History of Western Art. An independent department of Art History, with Jaffe as its Head, was created in 1970. He married the art historian Patricia Milne-Henderson in 1964. In 1971 he was appointed a Syndic to the Fitzwilliam Museum. By 1973 he had succeeding David Piper as the director, and secured a personal Chair in the History of Western Art. At the Fitzwilliam, he reinstalled the galleries and other spaces, setting the renaissance and baroque works into a context closer to their original. Jaffé was a relentless collector for the museum. Even in years of tight money at Cambridge, he raised funds to acquire important paintings by Stubbs, Poussin and Van Dyck, purchasing works which otherwise would have left the country. Jaffé also created a conservation program, the Hamilton Kerr Institute, as a sub-department of the museum. He oversaw the expansion of the gallery (opened in 1975) and the developing bequests. Plagued with ill health in his later years, he retired from the Fitzwilliam in 1990 according to his original plan. The October 1991 Burlington Magazine was devoted to tribute essays to him by his friends. His personal home at Somerset, Clifton Maybank, was a second museum of sorts, displaying his erudite personal collection. Jaffé cultivated a personality of condescension and intimidation, which his training as an art historian, his personal wealth, and his position at a major academic gallery, allowed him to support. His personal disputes with other art historians of the baroque period–a celebrated one with Julius S. Held in particular–show the intensity of his personality as well as the breadth of his scholarship. Even his decision to become a Rubens scholar points to his tenacity. In the 1950s, Ludwig Burchard a scholar who had accumulated a vast amount of material on Rubens and published only a small part, was still alive. Many burgeoning scholars were intimidated to make a career of Rubens. Jaffe, however, was not deterred, building in relative few years a scholarly reputation because in part he had the courage to take up the study of Rubens. Although rooted in archival scholarship, of utmost most importance to Jaffé was connoisseurship. He was famous for testing even season colleagues by showing them a bronze or an oil sketch in his home and wait for them to evaluate the work. He himself was responsible for adding many paintings to the accepted oeuvre of Rubens, Van Dyck, and others. Among his discoveries (reattributions, really) was his1955 discovery in the library in Chatsworth of Van Dyck’s Antwerp Sketchbook. It had long been known to scholars but dismissed as the work of others. His 1968 exhibition in Ottawa on Jordaens, highlighted some of his bolder attributions, which were challenged by other scholars.

Selected Bibliography

“Peter Paul Rubens and the Oratorian Fathers.” Proporzioni 4 (1963): 209-41; The Devonshire Collection of Northern European Drawings. 5 vols. Turin: U. Allemandi, 2002; European Drawings from the Fitzwilliam: lent by the syndics of the Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge. Washington, DC: International Exhibitions Foundation, c1976; A Great Heritage: Renaissance & Baroque Drawings from Chatsworth. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, and New York: H.N. Abrams, 1995; Old Master Drawings from Chatsworth. London: British Museum, 1993; Jacob Jordaens 1593-1678. Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1968; Van Dyck’s Antwerp Sketchbook. London: Macdonald, 1966; Rubens and Italy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977, (British) Oxford: Phaidon, 1977.

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, p. 68 n. 155; Kitson, Michael. “A House that History Built.” The Guardian (London), July 18, 1997, p. 20; Henderson, George. The Independent (London), July17, 1997, p.18; The Times (London), July17, 1997.

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