Art Historians

Giovannoni, Gustavo

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Giovannoni, Gustavo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1873

Date Died: 1947

Place Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), documentary (general concept), sculpture (visual works), and urban planning

Overview

Documentary architectural historian, architect, and urban planner. After graduating in civil engineering from the University of Rome in 1895, Giovannoni took a degree in public health before studying art and architectural history in Rome under Adolfo Venturi. In 1899 he was appointed assistant under Guglielmo Calderini (1837-1916) in the Engineering School and in 1905 professor of general architecture. A strong technical as well as art-historical interest took him into the conservation field and projects for urban redevelopment. In 1910 he became president of the Associazione Artistica tra i Cultori dell’ Architettura (AACA), founded in Rome in 1890 with the aim of extending the awareness of the historic and artistic heritage and to promote conservation initiatives. This aspect of his career is reflected in such early schemes as that for the Caprera quarter of Rome (1907-1911), which overlapped with his work for the Peroni brewery, a factory (1909) and a company headquarters (1913), putting into practice his belief in the architetto integrale, able to encompass both artistic and technical skills. In 1911 Giovannoni was a member of the staff for the creation of the ethnographic pavilions of the Exhibition in Rome. In 1913 Giovannoni published his most important essay “Città vecchia ed edilizia nuova” where underlining the diversity of the historical city centre that for structural and social reasons cannot effectively comfort to the modern city. Giovannoni was interested in valorizing national patrimony as the key component to the industry of tourism. His research interests focused on the work of the Italian Renaissance architect Antonio da Sangallo, who himself combined careful archaeological knowledge with architectural skills. This Renaissance concept of the architect inspired Giovannoni’s approach to architectural pedagogy. In 1918, through the AACA, he was instrumental in the establishment of the Scuola Superiore di Architettura and eventually the new Istituto Universitaria where he lectured in the restoration of historic monuments. In 1921 Giovannoni became the editor with the architect Marcello Piacentini (1881-1960) of the journal Architettura e Arti, the official organ of the Associazione artistica fra i cultori di architettura. In the same year Giovannoni with Piacentini and the architect Vittorio Ballio Morpugno curated the “Mostra d’arte rustica”. Giovannoni summed up the operative aims of the exhibition in some letters to the Trieste-based architect Camillo Jona (1886-1974). Giovannoni was appointed Dean of the Scuola Superiore di Architettura from 1931 to 1935. He and Venturi wrote an important text on the theory of architecture, Sul metodo della storia dell’architettura, in 1938. He died at the age of 74 in Rome, 15 July 1947. His students at the University of Rome included Roberto Pane. Giovannoni’s colleagues included the American archaeologist William H. Goodyear. His scholarship influenced the art historian Mario Salmi and the art historian Federico Hermanin (1871-1953), a member of the Amministrazione delle Belle Arti of Rome Guglielmo De Angelis D’Ossat, dedicated obituaries and essays in his memory. Giovannoni wrote numerous articles and books in which discussed themes ranging from urbanism to art history, especially art connected with architecture. He wrote essays in Italian art journals including Palladio, (of which he was also an editorial board member), and Annali d’ingegneria e d’architettura, Bollettino d’arte del Ministero della Pubblica Istruzione, L’Arte Rassegna d’arte antica e moderna. Giovannoni’s writings on art and architecture theory, and his historical research were highly influential on his and the ensuing generations of architecture historians.

Selected Bibliography

“Building and Engineering.” in, Bailey, Cyril. The Legacy of Rome, Essays by C. Foligno [and others]. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923; essay expanded as, La tecnica della costruzione presso i Romani. Rome: Società editrice d’arte illustrata, 1925?; Note sui marmorari romani. Rome: R. Società Romana di Storia Patria, 1904. La sala termale della Villa Liciniana e le cupole romane . Rome: Stabilimento Tipo-Litografico del Genio Civile, 1904. Attraverso la storia dell’architettura: note bibliografiche. Rome: Battarelli, 1913. Il rinnovamento della falconatura nella facciata del Duomo di Milano. Milan: Tipo-Litografico del Genio Civile, 1916. Gli architetti e gli studi di architettura in Italia, Associazione Artistica fra i Cultori d’Architettura Questioni di architettura nella storia e nella vita : edilizia, estetica architettonica, restauri, ambiente dei monumenti. Rome: Società Editrice d’Arte Illustrata, 1925. La tecnica della costruzione presso i Romani. Rome: Società Editrice d’Arte Illustrata, 1928. La Reale Insigne Accademia di San Luca nella inaugurazione della sua nuova sede. Rome: Castaldi, 1934. L‘architettura del Rinascimento..Milan: Treves, 1935. La nuova legge sulla difesa delle bellezze naturali. Rome: Reale Accademia d’Italia, 1940. Spigolature nell’Archivio di S. Pietro in Vaticano. Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani, 1941. La cupola di S. Pietro. Rome: Reale Istituto di Studi Romani, 1942. La Reale Insigne Accademia di S. Luca. Rome: Reale Istituto di Studi Romani, 1945. L‘abbazia di Montecassino . Florence: Electa, 1947.

Sources

mentioned, Ackerman, James S. “In Memoriam: Manfredo Tafuri, 1935-1994.” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 53, no. 2 (June 1994): 137; Hermanin, Federico. “Gustavo Giovannoni” in Bollettino del Centro di Studi per la Storia dell’Architettura. 5.1947, pp. 1-2; De Angelis d’Ossat, Guglielmo. Gustavo Giovannoni, storico e critico dell’architettura: (con l’elenco delle sue pubblicazioni). Rome: Istituto di Studi Romani Ed., 1949; Salmi, Mario. “Commemorazione di Gustavo Giovannoni” in Atti del V Convegno Nazionale di Storia dell’Architettura. Florence: Noccioli, 1957, pp. 1-10 Curun, Alessandro. Riordino delle carte di Gustavo Giovannoni: appunti per una biografia. Rome: Multigrafica Editrice, 1979; Giavarina, Adriano Ghisetti. “Pane, Roberto.” The Dictionary of Art 24: 2; Marcucci, Laura. “Gustavo Giovannoni inediti e ricerche: nota introduttiva.” in Gustavo Giovannoni: riflessioni agli albori del XXI secolo. Rome: Bonsignori, 2005, pp. 87-88; Berta, Barbara. “Gustavo Giovannoni: un metodo per la storia dell’architettura” in Storia dell’arte e storia dell’architettura: un dialogo difficile. San Casciano (FI): Libro Co., 2007, pp. 21-22.

Contributors: Giulia Savio

Ginzburg, Carlo

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Ginzburg, Carlo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1939

Place Born: Turin, Piedmony, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Career(s): educators

Overview

UCLA historian who made important contributions to art history. Ginzburg was born to Leone Ginzburg (1909-1944) and Natalia Levi (Ginzburg) (1916-1991). His father was a professor of Russian co-founder the publishing firm Einaudi; his mother became one of Italy’s leading writers. During World War II, his father’s anti-Fascist stance resulted in police harassment and a forced relocation from their home in Turin to a village in the Abruzzi. After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, his father, a Jew, was arrested by the Nazis, who had taken over Italy, for publishing an underground newspaper. He was beaten to death by the Gestapo in 1944. Carlo was hidden by his only non-Jewish relative under the name Carlo Tanzi. After the war, his mother married Gabriele Baldini (1919-1969) in 1950, a professor of English literature. Ginzburg attended one of Italy’s most prestigious secondary schools, the Scuola Normal Superiore in Pisa before entering the University of Pisa where he received a Doctor of Letters in 1961. He was appointed assistant in modern Italian history at the University of Rome. Ginzburg visited the Warburg Institute, London as a fellow in 1964. In 1966 he emerged as an innovative historian with his book, I benandanti, (translated into English initially as an article in a collection of essays in 1969 and later as the book Night Battles), a book documenting witches as practitioners of an ancient fertility religion in the sixteenth century. The publication of the practice of the benandanti, or “good walkers” set Ginzburg up as a major innovative cultural historian. In 1970 he moved to the University of Bologna as professor of modern history, but by 1973 was in the United States as a visiting professor at Princeton University. He followed this with a visiting fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1975, the first of two times. In 1979 Ginzberg and the art historian Enrico Castelnuovo published a discussion of “center and periphery” in the history of Italian art. A Yale University visiting fellowship followed in 1983 before his second Institute for Advanced Study fellowship in 1986. He was appointed Franklin D. Murphy Professor of Italian Renaissance Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles in 1988. He was awarded a Getty Center visiting fellowship and one at the école Pratique des Hautes études, Paris. In 1992 he was awarded the Aby M. Warburg Prize. Between 1996 and 1997 he was a Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Berlin, followed by an Italian Academy for Advanced Study on America, Columbia University, New York, in 1998. Ginzburg married for a second to Luisa Ciammitti, a curator at the National Museum of Art in Bologna, and a research associate for 18th-century Italian documents in the Getty Center’s in Malibu, California.As an historian, Ginzburg researched myths, customs and court records (the Inquisition), to trace a history of common people through, in some cases, the most modest of facts. Together with the historians Robert Darnton and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie the formed a group working on the “history of mentalities.” His worked incorporated anthropology, psychology, literary analysis and linguistics as well as other disciplines into a cohesive history.

Selected Bibliography

Occhiacci di legno: nove riflessioni sulla distanza. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1998, English, Wooden Eyes: Nine Reflections on Distance. New York: Columbia University Press, 2001; “From Aby Warburg to E.H. Gombrich.” in, Miti, emblemi, spie: morfologia e storia. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1986, English, Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989; Indagini su Piero: il Battesimo, il ciclo di Arezzo, la Flagellazione di Urbino. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1981, English, The Enigma of Piero: Piero della Francesca. London: Verso, 1985; “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” in Eco, Umberto, and Sebeok, Thomas Albert, eds. The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983; “Titian, Ovid, and Sixteenth-century Codes for Erotic Illustration.” in, Goffen, Rona, ed. Titian’s “Venus of Urbino”. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997; edited. Die Venus von Giorgione. Berlin: Akadamie Verlag, 1998.

Sources

Kandell, Jonathan. “Was the World Made Out of Cheese?” [biographical portrait] New York Times, November 17, 1991, p. 45

Gilpin, William

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Gilpin, William

Other Names:

William Gilpin

Gender: male

Date Born: 1724

Date Died: 1804

Place Born: Scaleby, Cumbria, England, UK

Place Died: Boldre, Hampshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): art theory and prints (visual works)

Overview

Clergyman, garden theorist and early historian of prints. Gilpin was the son of Captain John Bernard Gilpin (1701-1776) and Matilda Langstaffe (1703-1773). He attended school in Carlisle, then at St. Bees, near Whitehaven in Cumberland, England. He entered Queen’s College, Oxford in 1740, graduating with a B.A. in 1744. After ordination as a deacon in 1746, he was appointed curate of Irthington in Cumberland. He returned to Oxford for an MA in 1748. There he began collecting prints, developing a sophisticated appreciation well beyond the simple criteria of verisimilitude. The same year he wrote of his experiences of the gardens at Stowe, Buckinghamshire in his anonymous, Dialogue upon the Gardens of the Right Honourable the Lord Viscount Cobham at Stowe. Gilpin married his first cousin, Margaret Gilpin (1725-1807), in 1751/52. In 1753 he became headmaster at Cheam School for Boys, Surrey. At Cheam, he introduced new scheme for educating his wards, including esthetic appreciation and sports. At the time, Gilpin’s early garden theory his his Dialogue was overshadowed by the 1756 essay on The Sublime and the Beautiful by the philosopher Edmund Burke (1729-1797). Gilpin turned his attention to graphics, issuing his 1768 Essay on Prints, again written anonymously, as a primer to the collecting and appreciation of graphics. The essay, which included a discussion of types of print and on individual artists, went through numerous editions. Between 1768 and 1776 Gilpin spent his summers traveling throughout England making notes for a further book. These writings circulated privately until William Mason (1725-1797) and the Dorothy (Cavendish), Duchess of Portland (1750-1794), convinced him to publish the accounts. These influenced aesthetic perception for amateur artists and travelers for the next generation. In 1777 Gilpin retired as headmaster to be the Vicar of Boldre in the New Forest, Hampshire. A third edition of his Essay on Prints appeared in 1781, the first to carry Gilpin’s name. Among later works, Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty […] of Cumberland and Westmorland (1786) was particularly important for its prefiguring of romantic appreciation of ruins (Scaleby Castle, in that case) and the Lake District. By the end of his life, Gilpin’s Essay on Prints had gone through four editions. Although Gilpin is today most remembered for his esthetic theory, his Essay on Prints was an early art history of the graphic medium. His concept of “the Picturesque,” first appearing in the Essay on Prints as an additional concept to “sublime” and “beautiful,” was intended to encompass landscape appreciation in the paintings of Nicolas Poussin or Claude Le Lorrain. His theory formed one of the bases for the late eighteenth-century theories of the landscape architects Sir Uvedale Price (1747-1829) and Humphry Repton (1752-1818), and the connoisseur Richard Payne Knight. Gilpin was mocked by William Combe (1741-1823) in his Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque of 1812 as well as in the etchings of Thomas Rowlandson and to a lesser or kinder degree in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility and Northanger Abbey. His picturesque definition took on broad acceptance in continental European thought. His notions of the picturesque led him, along with Marc-Antoine (Abbé) Laugier (1713-1769) in France and August Wilhelm Schlegel in Germany, to reevaluate Gothic art, elevating it to a positive conception (Grodecki).

Selected Bibliography

An Essay on Prints: containing Remarks Upon the Principles of Picturesque Beauty, the Different Kinds of Prints, and the Characters of the Most Noted Masters, illustrated by Criticisms upon Particular Pieces to which are Added some Cautions that may be Useful in Collecting Prints. London: J. Robson, 1768 [editions one and two published anonymously]; Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770. London: 1782; Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty Made in the Year 1772, on Several Parts of England, Particularly the Mountains and Lakes of Cumberland and Westmoreland. London: 1786.

Sources

Barbier, Carl Paul. William Gilpin: his Drawings, Teaching, and Theory of the Picturesque. Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1963; Templeman, William D. The Life and Work of William Gilpin (1724-1804) Master of the Picturesque and Vicar of Boldre. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois press, 1939; Grodecki, Louis. “Definitions and Theories/Historical and Physical Circumstances.” Gothic Architecture. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1977, p. 9.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Gilman, Benjamin Ives

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Gilman, Benjamin Ives

Gender: male

Date Born: 1852

Date Died: 1933

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): curators

Overview

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, curator. Proponent of the Arts-and-Crafts notion of museum installation of objects outside their context in order to appreciate their esthetic value more. This idea was opposed by progressive museum directors such as John Cotton Dana. Gilman argued that objects are appreciated best when they are removed from their context, where all but their esthetic meaning falls away (Duncan). By viewing them in a pristine environment of the museum, the public could appreciate them in what he described as a secular state of grace.

Selected Bibliography

Museum Ideals: of Purpose and Method. Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1918; Manual of Italian Renaissance Sculpture as Illustrated in the Collection of Casts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Boston: Riverside Press, 1904.

Sources

Duncan, Carol. “Cotton Dana’s Progressive Museum.” in D’souza, Aruna, ed. Self and History: a Tribute to Linda Nochlin. London: Thames & Hudson, 2001, p. 132.

Gillet, Louis

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Gillet, Louis Marie Pierre Dominique

Gender: male

Date Born: 11 December 1876

Date Died: 01 July 1943

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

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

Home Country/ies: France

Career(s): curators

Institution(s): Université Laval

Overview

French critic of both classical art and literature throughout Europe. Gillet was born in Paris, France. His parents were third or fourth generation Parisians: his father, Stanislas Gillet (1845-1905), was an automobile manufacturer. His mother was Louise-Victoire Born (1851-1925). Gillet attended the Collège Stanislas de Paris Preparatory school, the largest private school in France, before entering the École normale supérieure, a prestigious graduate school in France. His education coincided with the founding of art history as an academic discipline at the Sorbonne under Henry Lemonnier (and assisted by the young Émile Mâle). Throughout his schooling, he cultivated friendships with writers that later influenced his works, including the poet, Charles Peguy (1873-1914), and the writers Romain Rolland (1866-1944), Paul Claudel (1868-1955), and James Joyce (1882-1941). At the École Gillet pursued a thesis on the history of landscape in painting.

After his education, he was appointed professor of art history at the Catholic Institute, Paris. He married Suzanne Doumic (1883-1975) whose father was the future publisher of the conservative literary journal Revue des Deux. In 1900, Gilet moved to Germany to lecture on French at the Universität Greifswald (University of Greifswald). By 1904 he was back in Paris, writing criticism for the Revue des Deux, along with his father-in-law. From 1905 onward, his art interests broadened to contemporary art and artists whom he termed “great masters of a dying generation” such as Cézanne, Rodin, and Manet. His criticism for the Revue des Deux brought him invitations to write at the more respected journals, Revue des Deux Mondes, and the nascent art-history journals Revue d’art and la Revue de l’art ancien et moderne. He moved to Canada where he taught art history at the Université Laval beginning in 1907. However, a caustic review by Gillet in 1911 of a loan exhibition of XVIIth-century French religious painting at the University’s art galleries destroyed Canadian his reputation. (In the article, he wrote: “It is better to have nothing [than the proposed] Musée de Québec preserved in the buildings of Laval University; it’s a worthless cargo.”) (Karel). Gillet was commission to write many articles in English on artists for the Catholic Encyclopedia. He returned to Paris where he became a curator of the recently opened Musée Jacquemart-André in 1913. At the outbreak of World War I he resigned his position to join the French military, serving as an Officer of the Legion of Honor from 1914-1918. After the war he focused on his art book publishing. His 1927 Trois Variations Sur Claude Monet was followed by a 1928 booklet, La Peinture française Moyen Age et Renaissance. In 1929 he was tapped to write the art volume, Histoire Des Arts, for the multi-volume history, Histoire de la nation française, edited by Gabriel Hanotaux (1853-1944). Gillet devoted much of his energies in his later years to researching Chartres Cathedral, publishing La cathédrale de Chartres in 1929. Gillet was elected to the Académie Française on Nov 21, 1935, joining his father-in-law, Rene Doumic (1860-1937). His review of the Goya exhibition in France in 1938 became a clarion in France to save the Prado museum in Madrid from destruction during the Spanish civil war. Gillet died on July 1st, 1943, in Paris, France. He is interred at Père Lachaise Cemetery (59th division). His daughter was the World War II resistance fighter Simone Demangel (1903-1995) and his son the architect Guillaume Gillet (1912-1987).

Though Gillet was known as a critic, he was regarded as more of an art and literature historian than a critic in his own time, largely for his essays in the Revue des Deux Mondes for over 40 years. At Gillet’s induction into the Académie Française, his colleague, the historian Georges Goyau (1869-1939), declared “There is in you [Gillet] a poet who gives wings to the historian, a poet who knows how to embrace the horizon of history.”

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Gillet, Louis. Histoire de l’art français. vol. 2. Paris: Zodiaque, 1977, pp. 401-402;
[collected essays:] Eryck de Rubercy, ed. Essais Et conférences Sur L’art: De Giotto à Matisse. Paris: Klincksieck, 2012;
Péguy Charles, Jean Tharaud, and Tharaud Jérôme. Les Primitifs français. Contes De La Vierge Jérôme Et Jean Tharaud. Paris, 1904;
[example Catholic Encyclopedia entry]. “Filippo Lippi.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 9. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/09278a.htm;
“Un projet de musée à Montréal”. La Canadienne. January, 1911, pp. 4-7;
Histoire Artistique Des Ordres Mendiants: Essai Sur L’art Religieux Du XIIIe Aud XVIIe siècle. Paris: Flammarion, 1912;
La Bataille De Verdun, 1919;
Louis De Clermont Tonnerre. Paris: Perrin, 1919;
Lectures étrangères: 1.-2. série. Paris: Plon-Nourrit, 1924;
Trois Variations Sur Claude Monet. Paris: Librairie Plon, Les Petits-Fils de Plon et Nourrit, 1927;
Dans Les Montagnes sacrées; Orta, Varallo, Varese . Paris: Plon, 1928;
La Peinture française Moyen Age Et Renaissance. Paris: Vanoest, 1928;
“Les Vitraux De Chartres, Ou, La cathédrale enchantée”. L’Illustration. no. 4474 (December 1928), issued separately, Paris: L’Illustration, 1928;
Hanotaux, Gabriel, and Piot René. Histoire De La Nation française. Paris: Plon, 1929;
Histoire Des Arts. Volume 11 of Hanotaux, Gabriel, ed., Histoire de la nation francaise. Paris: Sté de l’Histoire Nationale, Plon, 1929;
Shakespeare. Paris: Grasset, 1931;
Watteau, Un Grand maître Du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Plon, 1943;

Sources

The Catholic Encyclopedia and Its Makers. New York: Encyclopedia Press, 1917, p. 64 (portrait);
“Discours De Réception De Louis Gillet.” 1936. Accessed November 15, 2020. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/discours-de-reception-de-louis-gillet;
Karel, David, and Perron, Gloria. Univers cité: collections pour voir, collections pour savoir. Québec: Le Musée de l’Amérique française, 1993;
Powell, Véronique Gerard. “Louis Gillet, Écrivain d’Art.” Revue des Deux Mondes, September 2012. https://www.revuedesdeuxmondes.fr/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/396c05560873bf6fc56b6f9d9d07065f.pdf;
Tharaud, Jérome, and Jean Tharaud. “Louis GILLET.” Revue Des Deux Mondes (1829-1971), HUITIÈME PÉRIODE, 76, no. 4 (1943): 349-57. Accessed November 23, 2020. http://www.jstor.org/stable/44848506;
Slote, Sam. “Gillet Lit Le Joyce Dans La Woolf: Genre in ‘Orlando’ and …” Journal of Modern Literature, 2004;
“BnF Catalogue Général.” Catalogue Général. Accessed November 15, 2020. https://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb11904932x;
“Louis Gillet.” Academie française (website). Accessed November 15, 2020. http://www.academie-francaise.fr/les-immortels/louis-gillet?fauteuil=13;

Contributors: Lee Sorensen and Zahra Hassan

Gilbert, Creighton E.

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

Full Name: Gilbert, Creighton E.

Other Names:

Creighton Gilbert

Gender: male

Date Born: 1924

Date Died: 06 April 2011

Place Born: Durham, NC, USA

Place Died: West Haven, New Haven, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): educators

Overview

Cornell and Yale professor of the Italian Renaissance and Michelangelo. Gilbert was the son of Allan H. Gilbert (1888-1976) and Katharine Everett (Gilbert) (1886-1952), both professors at Duke University. His mother was a distinguished aesthetician for whom a dormitory at Duke is named. The younger Gilbert grew up in Durham, NC, attending the public schools (where he learned Latin as a requirement) and various undergraduate colleges including Duke University, 1938-1940, Johns Hopkins University, 1940, and New York University where he received a B.A. in 1942. He pursued graduate work at New York University, teaching as an instructor in the department of art history at Emory University, Atlanta, GA in 1946 and the University of Louisville, Louisville, KY, the following year. He remained at Louisville until 1956 except for a year as Fulbright professor, University of Rome in 1951-1952. He published an early article, “On Subject and Non-Subject in Renaissance Pictures” in the Art Bulletin following his return. His Ph.D., from NYU was granted in 1955 on the somewhat obscure topic of Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo (fl 1506-1548). Walter Friedlaender and Richard Krautheimer supervised the dissertation. Gilbert was hired as assistant professor of fine arts at Indiana University at Bloomington, a position he held until 1958. He was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959 and then curator of the Ringling [Art] Museums in Sarasota, FL, through 1961. That year he moved to Waltham, MA, to be associate professor of art at Brandeis University, where he chaired the department (1963-1966). He was visiting professor at Harvard University, 1964, receiving the Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Award for art journalism from the College Art Association the same year. In 1965 Gilbert was named Sidney and Ellen Wien Professor of History of Art; he left Brandeis for Queens College (Flushing, NY), City University of New York, as professor of art, and chairman of department. For the 1967-68 year, Gilbert was named a Kress fellow, Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. He relinquished the chair in 1972, remaining on the faculty until 1977. During that time he taught asa Robert Sterling Clark Visiting Professor at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, in 1976, and Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of the History of Art at Cornell University in 1977. Gilbert was appointed Yale University professor of history of art in 1981. He was editor-in-chief of the Art Bulletin between 1980-1985. His translation of Michelangelo poetry were set to music in 2004 by David Ashley White.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Works of Girolamo Savoldo. 2 vols. New York University, 1955, updated and published as, The Works of Girolamo Savoldo: the 1955 Dissertation, with a Review of Research, 1955-1985. New York: Garland, 1986; “On Subject and Non-Subject in Renaissance Pictures.” Art Bulletin 34 (1952): 202-16; [translated] Complete Poems and Selected Letters of Michelangelo. New York: Random House, 1963; Seventeenth-Century Paintings from the Low Countries. October House, 1966; Michelangelo. New York: McGraw, 1967; Change in Piero della Francesca. J. J. Augustin, 1968; History of Renaissance Art. New York: Abrams, 1973; edited, Italian Art, 1500-1600: Sources and Documents. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1980; Poets Seeing Artists’ Work: Instances in the Italian Renaissance. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1991; Michelangelo: On and Off the Sistine Ceiling. New York: George Braziller, 1994; Caravaggio and His Two Cardinals. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995; How Fra Angelico and Signorelli Saw the End of the World. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003.

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. 82; Who’s Who in American Art 16th (1986), p. 330; [videotape interview] 1997 University of Louisville, Bridwell Library.

Giglioli, Giulio Quirino

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Giglioli, Giulio Quirino

Gender: male

Date Born: 1886

Date Died: 1956

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): ancient, Classical, Etruscan (culture or style), and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)

Overview

Art historian of classical Roman and Etruscan art; associated with Fascism in Itlay. Giglioli studied under Emanuel Löwy and Rodolfo Lanciani. He fought as a solider in World War I. While on leave, he published the Apollo of Veii in 1916. After the war, he occupied the chairs of ancient topography, beginning in 1923, and classical art history, 1925, at the University of Rome. He was elected a city councilor and in 1935, parliamentary deputy to Rome. As an art historian, he worked on excavations as well as the restorations of the Mauoleum and Forum of Augustus. He published the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum fascicules for the Villa Giulia and the Capitoline Museum. He also issued a major study of etruscan art, Arte etrusca, 1935. All this required in the 1930s an allegiance to fascism and Mussolini. After Mussolini’s fall in 1943, Giglioli returned to his chair at the University, founding the classical studies journal Archeologia Classica in 1948. His teaching inspired students including Massimo Pallottino, who went on to be one of the founders of Etruscan studies as a discipline.

Selected Bibliography

L’arte etrusca. Milan: Fratelli Treves, 1935; Arte greca. 2 vols. Milan: F. Vallardi, 1955; Corpus vasorum antiquorum. Italia. Museo nazionale di Villa Giulia in Roma. 1925ff. 1-3, 64; Corpus vasorum antiquorum. Italia. Musei capitolini di Roma. 1962, 36, 39.

Sources

Ridgway, F. R. “Giglioli, Giulio Quirino.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 502

Giesau, Hermann

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Giesau, Hermann

Gender: male

Date Born: 1883

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Overview

Medievalist, Goldschmidt student in Halle.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation] Der Erbauer der Klosterkirche zu Walkenried: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Frühgotik in Sachsen. University of Halle, 1912; Burg Querfurt. Forschungen zur Denkmalpflege in d. Prov. Sachsen 2. Querfurt: Jaeckel, 1941; Geschichte des Provinzialverbandes von Sachsen, 1825-1925. Merseburg: s. n., 1926; Eine deutsche Bauhütte aus dem anfange des 13. Jahrhunderts. Studien zur geschichte der frühgotik in Sachsen und Thüringen. Studien zur thüringisch-sächsischen kunstgeschichte 1. Halle: Gebauer, 1912; Der Dom zu Halberstadt. Burg bei Magdeburg: A. Hopfer 1929; Der Dom zu Naumburg. Burg bei Magdeburg: A. Hopfer, 1927; Der Dom zu Magdeburg. Burg bei Magdeburg: A. Hopfer, 1924.

Medievalist, Goldschmidt student in Halle.

Giehlow, Karl

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Giehlow, Johann Carl Friedrich

Other Names:

Johann Carl Friedrich Giehlow
Carl Giehlow

Gender: male

Date Born: 25 May 1863

Date Died: 03 March 1913

Place Born: Oppeln, Saxony, Germany

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

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Netherlandish and Northern Renaissance

Overview

Dürer scholar. Giehlow was born to Theodor Giehlow (d. before 1899), a senior civil servant, and Ludovica Saltzmann (Giehlow) (d. after 1897). Giehlow attended a gymnasium in Kiel, receiving an abitur in 1892. He studied law in Munich and Berlin from 1893 working in the civil service in the latter city. In 1895 he left his position as a government assessor. He completed degrees in philosophy and art history in Berlin under Valerian von Loga, Anton Springer, and the classicist Christian Belger (1847-1903),(art history under Herman Grimm). He studied art history further in Vienna. In 1898 he received his Ph.D., writing a dissertation on the Prayer Book of Maximilian I. He settled in Vienna, apparently as a private scholar. His work on the triumphal gate and the Prayer Book of Emperor Maximilian closely examined the symbolism and the circle of artists contributing to the works. In later years he examined how the Renaissance viewed Egyptian hieroglyphics and their symbolism from a humanistic purview. His work on the pictorial language and allegory of the court humanists was considered definitive. This hitherto almost unknown field of research of a humanistic imagery, which enriched the medieval symbolism with elements from Egyptian hieroglyphics and Neoplatonism, owes to G. its rediscovery and first scientific presentation. G.’s works, always based on extensive source studies, secure him a place of honor in the scholarly literature on the Renaissance period and make him a chief exponent of that iconographic-iconological method which has since developed into a discipline of its own within the framework of art history.

Giehlow taught the university in Vienna for most of his career. An iconographer, he published an influential study on the meaning of Albrecht Dürer’s etching.Melencolia I beginning in 1903. He died in 1913 in Auteuil, France, today a part of modern Paris.

Giehlow’s research examined the mythic and pictorial world of the age of Emperor Maximilian I. His research was later completed and amended by Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl. Panofsky mentioned Giehlow in his memoir on Wilhelm Vöge. Giehlow’s accomplishment, according to Panofsky, was, like of Émile Mâle, one “by and large in the realm of interpretation of content.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Kritische Darstellung der Forschungen über die Entstehungsgeschichte des Gebetbuchs Kaisers Maximilian I. Berlin,. Universität. Dissertationen, 16, no. 6. Berlin: E. Ebering,1898, https://openlibrary.org/books/OL23367798M/Kritische_Darstellung_der_Forschungen_%C3%BCber_die_Entstehungsgeschichte_des_Gebetbuchs_Kaisers_Maximili;
“Dürers Stich ‘Melencolia I’ und der maximilianische Humanistenkreis,” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für vervielfältigende Kunst, 1903 and 1904;
Kaiser Maximilians I. Gebetbuch, Vienna: [self-published]. 1907;
“Die Hieroglyphenkunde des Humanismus in der Allegorie der Renaissance.” (Jahrbuch der kunsthistorischen Sammlungen der allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 32, pt. 1. Vienna: F. Tempsky, 1915;
[Melancholy study completed:] Panofsky, Erwin and Saxl, Fritz. Dürers ‘Melencolia I’,eine quellen- und typengeschichtliche Untersuchung. Berlin, B.G. Teubner, 1923;

Sources

Erwin Panofsky. “Wilhelm Vöge: A Biographical Memoir.” Art Journal 28 no. 1 (Fall 1968): 27-28, mentioned.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Giedion, Sigfried

November 8, 2023April 19, 2024

**Image Credit:** Lars Muller Publishers

Full Name: Giedion, Sigfried

Other Names:

Sigfried Giedion

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1968

Place Born: Prague, Praha, Hlavní Město, Czech Republic

Place Died: Zürich, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Czechoslovakia

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), German (culture, style, period), Neoclassical, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Architectural historian; German Neo-Classicism. Giedion was born to Johann and Bertha Jacobs Giedion. He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, which is present- day Prague, Czech Republic. He received his Ph.D. in art history under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. Giedion was appointed professor at the university in Zürich. He left Switzerland shortly before World War II to be the Charles Eliot Norton professor of poetry in 1938 at Harvard University. His Norton lectures for 1938-1939 became his most famous book, Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition. He married fellow Heinrich Wölfflin student Carola Giedion-Welcker, who under her married name Giedion-Welcker, also published on modern architecture. Giedion was appointed professor in Harvard University’s new Graduate School of Design in 1938, founded by Walter Gropius. He returned to Europe to head of the Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich in 1947. The following year his Mechanization Takes Command appeared. In 1951 he returned to the United States to teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lecturing at Harvard. After Gropius’ retirement in 1952, his biography of Gropius appeared in 1954. Giedion returned to Harvard as a visiting professor from 1954-1956, lobbying with another part-time Harvard lecturer, Eduard F. Sekler, for a return architectural history courses to Harvard’s architectural program, which Gropius had eliminated. In 1957 he delivered the A. W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C. In 1962 Giedion published his Bollingen lectures. His Mellon lectures were published in 1964 as Eternal Present. Giedion’s Mechanization Takes Command was criticized by Pierre Francastel in Francastel’s Art et Technique, 1956, accusing him of among other things, idealism. He doubted Giedion’s contention that the Crystal Palace and balloon-frame architecture in America were the seeds of modernist architecture. His classroom lectures, particularly at Harvard, presented a view of architectural history that all periods and styles led to modernism rather than that of some colleagues, such as Sekler, to examine each period on its own (Hoffman).

Selected Bibliography

[collected writings, Italian:] Siegfried [sic] Giedion: scritti di architettura 1928-1968: antologia critica. Palermo: D. Flaccovio, 2000; Bauen in Frankreich: Eisen und Eisenbeton. 2nd ed. Leipzig: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1928; Space, Time and Architecture: the Growth of a New Tradition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941; Spätbarocker und romantischer Klassizismus. Munich: F. Brückmann, 1922; Walter Gropius. Paris: G. Crès & cie, 1932.

Sources

Rykwert, Joseph. “Siegfried [sic] Giedion and the Notion of Style.” Burlington Magazine 96, no. 613 (April 1954): 123-124; Hommage à Giedion: Profile seiner Persönlichkeit. Schriften und Dokumente von Sigfried Giedion sowie Beiträge der Freunde. Basel: Stuttgart, Birkhäuser, 1971; Hommage à Giedion, seines Persönlichkeit. Basel: Birkhäuser, 1971; 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. 40, 51 mentioned; 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. 46; Wölfflin, Heinrich. Heinrich Wölfflin, 1864-1945: Autobiographie, Tagebücher und Briefe. Joseph Ganter, ed. Basel: Schwabe & Co., 1982, p. 491; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 198; Hoffman, Alexander von. “Seeking a Place for History: An Introduction.” Form, Modernism, and History: Essays in Honor of Eduard F. Sekler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Graduate School of Design/Harvard Unversity Press, 1996, pp. ix; Georgiadis, Sokratis. Sigfried Giedion: an Intellectual Biography. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 117-119; [obituary:] “Sigfried Giedion, Historian, 74, Dies, Architecture Theorist Was Professor at Harvard.” New York Times April 12, 1968, p. 35.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

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