Art Historians

Dodwell, C. R.

November 8, 2023April 9, 2024

Full Name: Dodwell, C. R.

Other Names:

Charles Reginald Dodwell

Gender: male

Date Born: 1922

Date Died: 1994

Place Born: Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, UK

Place Died: Taunton, Somerset, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Anglo-Saxon (culture or style) and Medieval (European)

Overview

Medievalist art historian of the Anglo-Saxon era, university professor. Dodwell was educated at Pate’s School in Cheltenham and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge University, where he was impressed with the writings on English monastic life by David Knowles (1896-1974). During World War II he served in the Royal Navy, 1941-45. He married Sheila Juliet Fletcher in 1942. After the war, Dodwell held a 1950-51 research fellowship and completed his Ph.D. at Cambridge. He secured a senior research fellowship at the Warburg Institute in London between 1950-53. With few academic jobs available at the time, he accepted in the position of Librarian at Lambeth Palace in 1953, the historic library of the Bishops of Canterbury since 1610 and a library with important manuscript holdings. The job was a difficult one: the library had been partially destroyed by a bomb during the Battle of Britain and its collection not repaired. To make matters worse, the current librarian refused to leave the job. Dodwell was highly successful administrator at Lambeth and worked daily with the manuscripts there. In 1954 he wrote one of his greatest books, The Canterbury School of Illumination: 1066-1200. A rewrite of his doctoral dissertation, it was the first account of any English school of manuscript art, addressing one of the most original and influential schools of English manuscript painting. Dodwell sorted out the classical, Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon sources of the school. Its breadth and solid visual analysis set new standards, and its conclusions have not been overturned. In 1958 he was appointed librarian, fellow, and lecturer at Trinity College, Cambridge. His book, The Great Lambeth Bible appeared in1959, furthering his reputation. The following year he published a study of the St. Albans Psalter, work concerned with the illuminated letters of that manuscript. Dodwell was also an outstanding textual historian. His translation of Theophilus’12th-century treatise on pointing, metalwork and stained glass, The Various Arts, 1961, proved again to be a definitive text of an important document in the history of western art. In 1966 Dodwell was appointed the Pilkington Chair in the history of art at the Manchester University and the Director of the Whitworth Art Gallery. He was adept as a museum director, establishing a number of high-profile international exhibitions and, with the assistance of keeper Francis Howcroft, launching an annual show of contemporary art. Dodwell used his endowed chair position to stave university financial cuts in 1981 and building the art history department for which Manchester is today well known. During this same time, Dodwell wrote the volume on medieval art for in the distinguished Pelican History of Art series, Pictorial Arts of the West: 800-1200 (1971). The book takes the disparate arts, nationalities and histories of the period, synthesizing them into a cohesive overview. He was elected a Fellow to the British Academy in 1973 and between 1987 and 1990 acted as Chairman to the Academy’s section on History of Art and Music. He served on the committee of the Corpus Vitrearum Medii Aevi. In 1982, Anglo-Saxon Arts: A New Perspective appeared, a work again mining medieval written sources to supplement an area where much of the art had been destroyed: Anglo-Saxon England. Dodwell used saints’ lives, wills, poems, monastic chronicles to document the corpus of artistic production and use. Though some critics felt Dodwell exaggerated the veracity of some of his evidence, the book remains an important example of his insight and originality. Dodwell retired emeritus from Manchester in 1989. Despite a stroke in his last years which left him partially sighted, he finished a complete rewrite of his Pictorial Arts of the West, described (by the Guardian) as a tour-de-force of the synoptic art history survey genre, published in 1993. He was working on the text to Anglo-Saxon gestures and the Roman stage at the time of his death. Dodwell was greatly influenced by the continental medievalist art historians, specifically Émile Mâle, Georg Swarzenski, and Albert Boeckler, combining their rigorous iconographic and stylistic methodology with the English tradition of manuscript studies of Montague R. James (1862-1936). Despite these influences, Dodwell was an independent thinker of note among medievalists. His 1965 Reichenau Reconsidered essays (with Derek Turner) argued that most decorated manuscripts ascribed to the Reichenau School were produced in Trier. He also led the way in asserting that twelfth-century metal work of the Rhine-Maas region was the impetus for the hardening line of late Romanesque draughtsmanship. Dodwell based his scholarship on a vast knowledge of textual sources, of which historians described him an undisputed master (Owen-Crocker, Graham). His devotion to textual documentation led Otto Lehmann-Brockhaus to dedicate his five-volume Lateinische Schriftquellen zur Kunst in England (1955-60) to Dodwell. His scholarship built the reputation of Manchester University as a center for art history.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] The Published Writings of C. R. Dodwell. In, Medieval Art: Recent Perspectives: A Memorial Tribute to C. R. Dodwell. New York: Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 231-34; Anglo-Saxon Gestures and the Roman Stage. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, vol. 28. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000; The Old English Illustrated Hexateuch: British Museum Cotton Claudius B. IV. Early English Manuscripts in Facsimile18. Copenhagen: Rosenkilde og Bagger, 1974; The St. Albans Psalter (Albani Psalter). Volume 2. The Initials. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1960; Essays on Dürer. Manchester Studies in the History of Art 2. Manchester, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973; Pictorial Arts of the West 800-1200. Pelican History of Art 34. Harmondsworth, Eng: Penguin Books 1971, 2nd ed.,. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993; Anglo-Saxon Art: A New Perspective. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982; The English Church and the Continent: Lectures. London: Faith Press, 1959; The Great Lambeth Bible. New York: T. Yoseloff, 1959; Lambeth Palace. London: Country Life Limited, 1958; Reichenau Reconsidered: A Re-assessment of the Place of Reichenau in Ottonian Art. Warburg Institute Surveys 2. London: Warburg Institute, University of London, 1965; The Canterbury School of Illumination: 1066-1200. Cambridge, Eng: University Press, 1954; Theophilus, Presbyter: The Various Arts. New York: T. Nelson, 1961; [collected essays] Aspects of Art of the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. London: Pindar Press, 1996.

Sources

Owen-Crocker, Gail, and Graham, Timothy. Introduction. In, Medieval Art: Recent Perspectives: A Memorial Tribute to C. R. Dodwell. New York: Manchester University Press, 1998, pp. 1-7; Palmer, Richard. Reginald Dodwell, Lambeth Librarian 1953-1958. In, Medieval Art, op. cit., pp. 224-230; The Guardian [London] May 16, 1994; The Times [London], May 3, 1994; The Independent [London], April 30, 1994.

Dodgson, Campbell

November 8, 2023April 9, 2024

Full Name: Dodgson, Campbell

Gender: male

Date Born: 1867

Date Died: 1948

Place Born: Crayford, Kent, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): drawings (visual works), Flemish (culture or style), German (culture, style, period), Northern Renaissance, and prints (visual works)

Overview

Historian of German and Flemish drawings, Keeper of the Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. Dodgson came from a middle-class investment family, distantly related to Lewis Carroll (née Charles Lutwidge Dodgson). He attended Winchester and then New College, Oxford, where he read in Classics and Theology. His intention to be ordained changed after college (perhaps because of his realization of latent homosexuality). Dodgson assisted Oscar Wilde’s friend Lord Alfred Douglas at Oxford, spending a well-documented weekend with Wild and Douglas at Babbacombe near Torquay. He joined the British Museum in 1893 in the Department of Prints and Drawings under Sidney Colvin. He hired Oxford poet Laurence Binyon as an assistant Keeper in 1895. In 1898 he co-founded the publications of the Dürer Society (lasting until 1911) with Montagu Peartree. He translated many of the immensely popular Künstler-Monographien series of Velhagen & Klasing publisher into English, especially those of Hermann Joseph Wilhelm Knackfuss. In 1903 and 1911, the two volumes of his catalog of the Flemish and German woodcuts of the British Museum were published. This achieved him international recognition as an authority of those areas. Other volumes in this series were written under the emerging scholars of the department, including the young Arthur Mayger Hind. In 1912 Dodgson succeeded Colvin as Keeper. In 1913 he married Catharine Spooner, daughter of the Reverend W. A. Spooner, Warden of New College. Dodgson edited the Print Collectors Newsletter for and frequently contributed articles to the Burlington Magazine. During World War I, he was a German translator for the British government running the Department largely by himself because of the lack of labor the war had caused. In 1929, Dodgson’s niece married the art historian Jim Shaw. Shaw and Dodgson became close, despite a subsequent divorce by Shaw. Binyon succeeded Dodgson as Keeper in 1932 for one year before his own retirement. Throughout his life, Dodgson collected prints and, being heirless, did so with the understanding they would go to the Department of Prints and Drawings. He also was instrumental in donating £32000, a large sum of money at the time, to assist in the purchase of the magnificent Dürer drawing of a Tirolean womanPeter Roth describes Dodgson as being one of the first in England to apply the rigorous techniques of German art history. Dodgson carefully described and analyzed prints. His interests were primarily northern renaissance prints and drawings.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Schilling, E. “Campbell Dodgson.” The Burlington Magazine 90 (October 1948): 293-4; Catalogue of early German and Flemish woodcuts preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum. London: The Trustees of the British Museum, 1903 ff.

Sources

Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art.” In The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953, mentioned, p. 85; Erwin Panofsky. “Wilhelm Vöge: A Biographical Memoir.” Art Journal 28 no. 1 (Fall 1968): 27, mentioned; Roth, Peter. “Campbell Dodgson” Print Review 4: 34; [obituaries:] “Dr. Campbell Dodgson, Prints And Drawings.” The Times [London]. July 14, 1948, p. 7; Schilling, E. “Campbell Dodgson.” The Burlington Magazine 90 (October 1948): 293-4.

Dobbert, Eduard

November 8, 2023April 9, 2024

Full Name: Dobbert, Eduard

Other Names:

Eduard Dobbert

Gender: male

Date Born: 25 March 1839

Date Died: 29 September 1899

Place Born: St. Petersburg, Russia

Place Died: Lake Lucern, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style), Italian (culture or style), Italian Medieval styles, and Medieval (European)

Overview

Specialist in medieval Italian and Byzantine art. Dobbert’s father was medical doctor assigned to imperial Russia, James Dobbbert. The younger Dobbert was raised in St. Petersburg. Dobbert entered at the University of Tartu, in Estonian Russia in 1857, but the following year he moved to Jena, studying history under Johann Gustav Droysen (1808-1884) and philosophy under Kuno Fischer (1824-1907). He further studied in Berlin under the literary historian Karl Werder (1806-1893), and Heidelberg, 1860 under the historian Ludwig Häusser (1818-1867), writing his dissertation on Missi Dominici (court officials appointed by Charlemagne) published in 1861. Returning to St. Petersburg, he taught first at the German school St. Petri-Schule and lecturing independently. He founded and edited a German-language newspaper St. Petersburger Wochenschrift. He married Emilie Brückner (1837-1922) in 1863. Dobbert returned to Germany, studying classical archaeology in Munich under Heinrich Brunn and writing Die monumentale Darstellung der Reformation durch Rietschel und Kaulbach in 1869. After further study in Italy, Dobbert wrote his habilitation in 1873 on the Italian sculptor Niccolò Pisano, also at the University in Munich, where he taught as a privatdozent. Before his inaugural lecture, however, he was appointed to a post in Berlin at the Akademische Hochschule für die bildenden Künste (HfbK), the modern Universität der Künste Berlin (University of the Arts) in 1873 following the death of Friedrich Eggers. Dobbert was elevated to professor in 1875. In 1880 he became a member of the Imperial Senate of Royal and director of its library. Dobbert was instrumental in the career of the first chair of art history in Finland, J. J. Tikkanen, introducing the young provincial scholar Russian collectors and scholars and advising him on his dissertation on Giotto. Dobbert’s unpublished Lexikon der russischen Kunstler was one of the sources for Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker in their 37-volume dictionary of artists.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Das Wesen und den Geschäftskreis der Missi Dominici. Munich, 1861; Das Mittelalter Italiens und die Grenzgebiete der abendlandischen Kunst. 1876. Volume III, part iv of Geschichte der Bildenden Künste. 7 vols. Düsseldorf: Buddeus, 1843-1864.

Sources

“The Fate of Thieme-Becker.” Burlington Magazine 90, no. 543 (June 1948): 174; Ringbom, Sixten. Art History in Finland before 1920. Helsinki: 1986, p. 66.

DiVita, A.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: DiVita, A.

Gender: unknown

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Overview

Sources

Ridgway, Brunhilde Sismondo. “The State of Research on Ancient Art,” Art Bulletin 68 (March 1986): 8, note 8.

Dittmann, Lorenz

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Dittmann, Lorenz

Other Names:

Lorenz Dittmann

Gender: male

Date Born: 1928

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Dinsmoor, William Bell

November 8, 2023April 9, 2024

**Image Credit:** American School of Classical Studies of Athens

Full Name: Dinsmoor, William Bell

Other Names:

William Bell Dinsmoor Sr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1886

Date Died: 1973

Place Born: Windham, Rockingham, NH, USA

Place Died: Athens, Region of Attica, Greece

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), archaeology, architecture (object genre), Classical, and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Architectural historian of classical Greece; Columbia University Professor of Art and Archaeology. Dinsmoor graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor of science degree in 1906. After working in an architectural firm, he joined the American School of Classical Studies in Athens in 1908 and in 1912 became the School’s Architect. Dinsmoor joined the faculty of Columbia University in 1919. In the early 1920s, he consulted on the erection of the concrete replica of the Parthenon in Tennessee (a wooden structure had previous been at the Nashville site). His assumptions regarding the original construction were verified by the construction, which took roughly the same number of years as the orginal. From 1924-28 he returned to the American School as professor of Architecture. He married Zillah Frances Pierce (1886-1960). During those years he compiled his magum opus, a rewritten edition of the Architecture of Ancient Greece by William J. Anderson (1844-1900) and R. Phené Spiers (1838-1916), which appeared in 1927. In 1929 he received an [honorary?] doctorate from Columbia. In 1934, following the resignation of S. Butler Murray, Jr., the Department of Fine Arts was reorganized to include the Department of Archaeology and Dinsmoor was made chair. He held this position of executive director of the Department of Fine Arts and Archaeology until 1955. During the mid-1930s, Dinsmoor took on a celebrated debate on the configuration of the three phases of the Parthenon with the eminent Acropolis scholar Wilhelm Dörpfeld. In 1935 he was named professor of archaeology at Columbia. Between 1936 and 1946 he was president of the Archaeological Institute of America. During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt appointed Dinsmoor chair of the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas. For much of his career he taught at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens as Fellow in Architecture and Professor of Architecture. Dinsmoor returned to the American School in 1947 as a visiting lecturer. He retired from Columbia University in 1963. In 1969 he was awarded the gold medal for his archaeological achievements by the Archaeological Institute of America. He died of a stroke while in Greece, just short of his 87th birthday. His son, William B. Dinsmoor, Jr., was also a distinguish classical architectural historian. Dinsmoor’s reputation rests on two key works. The first is his complete rewriting of The Architecture of Ancient Greece (1927). Although Dinsmoor always allowed much credit for the work to Anderson and Spiers, the revision of the book was essentially a unique accomplishment of Dinsmoor’s. In 1931 Dinsmoor published his discovery of the archons from the Propylaia in Athens. These lists of magistrates assisted greatly in the study of other objects exhumed from the Athenian Agora. Dinsmoor gleaned the original design to the Propylaia in Athens, but never published his complete findings.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliography of William Bell Dinsmoor.” Hesperia 35 (1966): 87-92; (1st Dinsmoor edition:) Anderson, William J., and Spiers, Richard Phené. The Architecture of Ancient Greece: an Account of its Historic Development, being the First Part of the Architecture of Greece and Rome. 2nd ed. New York: C. Scribner’s,1927; The Architecture of Ancient Greece: an Account of its Historic Development. 3rd ed. New York: Batsford, 1950; Observations on the Hephaisteion. Baltimore: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1941; The Archons of Athens in the Hellenistic Age. Cambridge, MA: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Harvard University Press, 1931; “Anchoring two floating temples [of the Agora, Athens].” Hesperia 51 (October/December 1982): 410-52; [Parthenon date debate:] “The Burning of the Opisthodomos at Athens. I: The Date.” American Journal of Archaeology 36 (1932): 143-172; “The Burning of the Opisthodomos at Athens. II: The Site.” American Journal of Archaeology 36 (1932): 307-326; reply, Dörpfeld, Wilhelm. “Der Brand des alten Athena-Tempels und seines Opisthodoms. American Journal of Archaeology 38 (April 1934): 249-57; reply, continued, Dörpfeld, Wilhelm. “Parthenon I, II und III.” American Journal of Archaeology 39 (October 1935): 497-507; [rejoinder by Dinsmoor] “The Older Parthenon, Additional Notes.” American Journal of Archaeology 39 (October 1935): 508-9.

Sources

Medwid, Linda M. The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp. 86-88; [obituaries:] “W. B. Dinsmoor, 87, an Archaeologist; Expert on Greece Is Dead–Long on Columbia Faculty.” New York Times July 3, 1973, p. 26; Archaeology 26 (October 1973): 308; A History of the Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia University. New York: Columbia University Press, 1957, p. 54, 263-64; Nicgorski, Ann M. “Dinsmoor, William Bell.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 363-64.

Dinsmoor, William B., Jr.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Dinsmoor, William B., Jr.

Other Names:

William Bell Dinsmoor Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: 1923

Date Died: 1988

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Place Died: Athens, Region of Attica, Greece

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Overview

Classical archaeologist and architectural historian, son of William Bell Dinsmoor, Sr. Dinsmoor was born to William Bell Dinsmoor and Zillah F. Pierce (Dinsmoor,1886-1960). His father was an eminent classical era architectural historian. The younger Dinsmoor attended Phillips Exeter Academy and then Columbia University, taking time out for active service in the military during World War II. After service in Indian and China, he returned to Columbia where he received a B.A. in modern languages in 1947. Like his father, he trained in practicing architecture, achieving a Bachelor’s (1947) and Master’s (1951). Moving to El Paso, Texas, Dinsmoor ran a small business as an architect and engineer. Dinsmoor returned to Greece to assist Lucy Taxis Shoe Meritt (1906-2003) with her survey of Greek architectural moulding and Carl W. Blegen (1887-1971) on his books on Troy and Pylos. Dinsmoor’s archeological experience came working with Oscar Broneer, then publishing his find of the temple of Poseidon in Athens. He was the 1962-63 Olivia James Fellow at the Archaeological Institute of America. In 1966 Dinsmoor was appointed Architect for the Agora archeological excavations, a position which he held until his death. In 1971 Dinsmoor began publishing his own research, mostly on Athenian architecture, but also on Corfu and Stobi. He was edited a work of his father’s, the Propylaia of Athena, at the time of his death. A work on Athena Sounias, with Homer Thompson (1906-2000), also failed to appear in his lifetime, though Thompson had planned to publish it after Dinsmoor’s death. Dinsmoor’s research established the configuration of the entrance way before the Propylaia, a work he published in The Propylaia to the Athenian Akropolis, volume one, The Predecessors (1980).

Selected Bibliography

The Propylaia to the Athenian Akropolis. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1980; and Camp, John McKesson. Ancient Athenian Building Methods. Athens: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 1984. Our Organization: Mission & history

Sources

[obituaries:] Camp, John McKesson. American Journal of Archaeology 93 (April 1989): 233-4; American School of Classical Studies at Athens Newsletter no.22 (Fall1988):14.

Dinkler, Erich

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Dinkler, Erich

Gender: male

Date Born: 1909

Home Country/ies: Germany

Institution(s): Heidelberg Academy of Sciences

Overview

Sources

KMP, 87 mentioned

Dimier, Louis

November 8, 2023April 9, 2024

Full Name: Dimier, Louis

Other Names:

Louis Dimier

Gender: male

Date Born: 11 February 1865

Date Died: 21 November 1943

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

Place Died: Saint-Paul-sur-Isère, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, France

Home Country/ies: France

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

Career(s): activists and art critics

Overview

Specialist in French painting; art critic; royalist; political activist. Dimier was the son of Joseph Dimier (d. 1870) and Marie Delsart. His father hailed from the Savoie and settled in Paris, where he dealt in paper ware. After his father’s death when the young Dimier was five, he began his formal education with the Catholic Brothers of the rue Saint-Antoine. During a six-month stay in Stuttgart (Germany), at age fourteen, he learned German. In 1882-1883 he studied at the lycée Saint-Louis and then went on to study philosophy with the Jesuits. In 1889 he earned his licence è lettres at the Institut catholique de Paris. He obtained his agrégation de philosophie in 1892. In 1893 he considered starting a political career and was a candidate for the elections in La Tarentaise in the Savoie, but after having been defeated, he began teaching philosophy at the lycée of Saint-Omer in 1894. In that year he married Marie Barbeau. In 1898 he obtained a position at the lycée in Valenciennes, again as a teacher of philosophy. Attracted to art, he began a study Primaticcio, and traveled to several museums in Europe to research the drawings of this artist. In 1900 he submitted his dissertation, Le Primatice, at the Sorbonne under Eugène Müntz. Dimier’s claim that Primaticcio played a major role in the introduction of the Renaissance in France was severely criticized. In the same year he met the royalist publicist and nationalist Charles Maurras (1868-1952), who influenced Dimier’s political thinking. Unable to obtain an academic position, Dimier returned to his post in Valenciennes. When in 1903 he was suspended for five months, he quit. In the same year he began teaching rhetoric at the Stanislas college in Paris. Together with his friend Maurras he became an activist in the anti-republican and nationalist organization, Action française. The famous 1904 exhibition of the French Primitives held in Paris under the direction of Henri Bouchot aroused Dimier to assert his controversial views on the beginnings of the French Renaissance. Dimier, who was very critical of the concept of an indigenous ethnic and nationalistic art, objected to the nationalist character of the exhibition of the French Primitives. In the same year he published notes and corrections on Bouchot’s descriptions of sixteenth-century portraits in the catalog, Le portrait du XVIe siècle aux primitifs français. That year also saw the English language publication, French Painting in the Sixteenth Century. This work deals with the history of the school of Fontainebleau and later developments, from the reign of François I until the death of Henry IV. Because of his conservatives ideas Dimier was excluded, in 1905, from his post at the Stanislas college. In 1906 Dimier founded the Institut d’Action française. He served this educational institution as general secretary. In 1908 he published a monograph on the history and the decoration of the palace of Fontainebleau, Fontainebleau. In 1911 Dimier dealt again with the question of the French Primitives in Les Primitifs français. Biographie critique illustrée. The revised second edition appeared in 1929. In this study Dimier placed the small number of genuine works of the French primitives in the broader context of the rich production of Flemish and Dutch masters, and he also dealt with the influence of Italian painters in France. Dimier did not hide his low esteem for the “dissident” style of the painters of the school of Bruges, which, in its detachment from the elegant international style, had influenced the French painters. Although Dimier admired the splendid execution of the panels of the Flemish painters, such as Van Eyck, he denounced their “barbarous” realism. In 1914 he wrote a monograph on nineteenth-century French painting. Dimier stated that the revolution, along with the rejection of the rules of classical beauty and the break with the tradition of academic art under the Ancien Régime, had led to a cultural crisis. He condemned several trends of archaisms in post-revolutionary art, such as David’s perverse classicism and Ingres’ identification with Raphael. Between 1914 until 1920 he directed the daily L’Action française. In 1920, Dimier broke with Maurras, and quit the movement. Excluded from public and private teaching positions, Dimier continued writing surveys and monographs on French painting. In 1924-1926 he published a major study on sixteenth-century French portraits along with a critical catalog of all the works, Histoire de la peinture de portrait en France au XVIe siècle accompagnée d’un catalogue de tous les ouvrages…. It was the result of ten years of research in France and abroad. In 1925 he wrote a survey of the period from 1300 to 1627, which in his view was the preparation for the famous seventeenth-century French school of painting. In 1926-1927 he devoted a two-volume work to this period (1627 to 1690), the age of Eustache Lesueur, Nicolas Poussin, and Claude Lorrain. A new study on Primaticcio, intended for a larger readership, appeared in 1928. In collaboration with a number of experts, including Louis Réau and others, Dimier set up an ambitious project on the life and works of eighteenth-century French painters. Only two volumes appeared (1928-1930), covering 35 painters. In 1930 Dimier published an introductory essay and a catalog of 81 wood-cuts after Honoré Daumier. In 1939 Dimier retired in Saint-Paul-sur-Isère (Savoie), where he spent the last years of his life. His son, Joseph, known as le Père Anselme Dimier, was an historian of Cistercian architecture.

Selected Bibliography

[Dissertation:] Le Primatice. Peintre, sculpteur et architecte des rois de France. Essai sur la vie et les ouvrages de cet artiste suivi d’un catalogue raisonné de ses dessins et de ses compositions gravées. Paris: Leroux, 1900; Le portrait du XVIe siècle aux primitifs français. Notes et corrections au catalogue officiel sur cette partie de l’exposition d’avril-juillet 1904. Paris: Schmitt, 1904; French Painting in the Sixteenth Century. London: Duckworth and Co., 1904; Fontainebleau. Paris: Renouard/H. Laurens, 1908; Les Primitifs français, biographie critique illustrée. Paris: Henri Laurens, 1911; Histoire de la peinture française au XIXe siècle. Paris: Delagrave, 1914; Histoire de la peinture de portrait en France au XVIe siècle accompagnée d’un catalogue de tous les ouvrages …. 3 vols. Paris/Brussels: G. van Oest, 1924-1926; Histoire de la peinture française des origines au retour de Vouet, 1300 à 1627. Paris/Brussels: G. van Oest, 1925; Histoire de la peinture française du retour de Vouet à la mort de Lebrun, 1627 à 1690. 2 vols. Paris/Brussels: G. van Oest, 1926-1927; Le Primatice. Paris: Albin Michel, 1928; Les peintres français du XVIIIe siècle. Histoire des vies et catalogue des Åuvres. 2 vols. Paris/Brussels: G. van Oest, 1928-1930 ; Physionomies et Physiologies. 81 gravures sur bois d’apres Daumier, exécutées par E. Dété. Avec une préface et un catalogue d’Åuvre gravé sur bois de Daumier par Louis Dimier. Paris: Nourry, 1930; La Gravure. Paris: Garnier, 1930.

Sources

Thérive, A. “Louis Dimier ou l’anti-moderne” in Moralistes de ce temps. Paris: Amiot-Dumont, 1948, p. 199-249; Du Colombier, P. “Louis Dimier historien et critique d’art” Revue de Savoie (1956): 79-88; Zerner, Henri (ed) Louis Dimier. L’art français. Paris: Hermann, 1965; Biass-Fabiani. “Dimier, Louis” Dictionary of Art 8 (1996): 900; Passini, Michela and Zerner, Henri. “Dimier, Louis” Dictionnaire critique des historiens de l’art actifs en France [website]. Institut national d’histoire de l’art; Zerner, Henri. “Histoire de l’art et idéologie politique chez Jules Renouvier et Louis Dimier” in Recht, Roland, Sénéchal Philippe, Barbillon, Claire, Martin, Francois-René (eds.) Histoire de l’histoire de l’art en France au XIXe siècle. Paris: La documentation Française, 2008, p. 391-401; McWilliam, Neil. “Érudition et engagement politique: la double vie de Louis Dimier” in Histoire de l’histoire de l’art en France au XIXe siècle, p. 403-417.

Dillis, Georg von

November 8, 2023April 9, 2024

Full Name: Dillis, Georg von

Other Names:

Maximillian Johann Georg von Dillis

Gender: male

Date Born: 1759

Date Died: 1841

Place Born: Dorfen, Bavaria, Germany

Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

First director of the Alte Pinakothek and advisor to Ludwig I of Bavaria. Dillis was the son Wolfgang Dillis, the Elector Maximillian’s head forester, as well as godchild of Maximilian III Joseph, Electoral Prince of Bavaria. Dillis attended the Gymnasium in Munich, paid for by the royal family. He initially studied theology in Ingolstadt, but by 1782 entered the Munich Zeichnungsakademie where he studied under Ignaz Oefele (1721-97) and Johann Jakob Dorner the elder. Dillis excelled at landscapes and took a number of important early commissions. In 1790 he was appointed supervisor of the Gemäldegalerie by Maximilian I Joseph. Dillis documented and reorganizing the state collections, which comprised the core Wittelsbach family collections as well as religious art objects from deconcecrated churches. After an initial sojourn to Prague, Dresden and Vienna in 1792 to study the art collections there, he traveled with Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston, (1739-1802) to Salzburg in 1794 and subsequent trips to Italy, the first being 1794-5. He also journied to Rome in 1805 and Paris the following year. In 1808 he was elevated to the nobility because of his service and the same year named professor of landscape painting at the Munich Akademie. In 1822 Maximillian appointed him director Gemäldegalerie. When Ludwig I became king of Bavaria in 1825, the king was anxious to build the royal collections on a par with those of Dresden, Paris and Italy. Dillis advised Ludwig I on all art concerns and at Ludwig’s behest, the royal acquisions and buildings for them blossomed. In 1827 he purchased the magnificent collection of northern renaissance art amassed by Melchior Boisserée and Sulpiz Boisserée. The collection, which had been turned down by the governments of Cologne, Frankfurt-am-Main and Berlin, comprises among the most important work of the Cologne school Flemish schools. The Alte Pinakothek opened in 1836 under Dillis’ direction. He wrote the first catalog. Though Ludwig never acquired a painting of Dillis’, some, including portraits of Clemens Neumayr and his wife, Therese Neumayr (1809) hang today in the Neue Pinakothek.

Selected Bibliography

Messerer, Richard, ed. Briefwechsel zwischen Ludwig I. von Bayern und Georg von Dillis 1807-1841. Munich: Beck, 1966; Verzeichniss der Gemälde in der Königlich bayerischen Gallerie zu Schleissheim. Munich: J.G. Fleischmann, 1831.

Sources

Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon 27: 407-08; Lessing, Waldemar. “Johann Georg von Dillis.” Münchner Jahrbuch der Bildenden Kunst 11 no3-4 (1934-1936): 271-95; Johann Georg von Dillis, 26. Dezember 1759-28. September 1841. Munich: Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, 1960; Lessing, Waldemar. Johann Georg von Dillis, als Künstler und Museumsmann, 1759-1841. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1951; Höhn, Heinrich. Leben und Werke des Landschaftsmalers Georg von Dillis. Ph.D., dissertation, Strassburg: Heitz, 1908; Böttger, Peter. Die Alte Pinakothek in München: Architektur, Ausstattung und museales Programm. Munich: Prestel 1972.

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