Art Historians

Sulze, Heinrich

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sulze, Heinrich

Gender: male

Date Born: 1888

Date Died: 1958

Place Born: Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Dresden, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), gardens (open spaces), Roman (ancient Italian culture or period), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Archictectural historian and specialist in the garden architecture of ancient Greece and Rome. Affiliated with the Technical University of Dresden (1921-1945). Much of his original work (research notes, manuscripts, and drawings) was destroyed in the firebombing of Dresden in 1945. After 1945, Sulze worked less on scholarship in order to concentrate on the architectural rebuilding of Dresden.

Selected Bibliography

and K. Müller. Archäologische Schriften: Die Architektur der Burg und des Palastes Tiryns III. (1930; “Das dorische Kapitell der Burg von Tiryns,” in: AA 1936, 14ff; “Der Decumanus Maximus des ältesten Pompeji,” in: FuF 17, 1941, 377 ff.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 242-243.

Suida, William

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Suida, William

Other Names:

William Suida

Gender: male

Date Born: 24 April 1877

Date Died: 29 October 1959

Place Born: Neunkirchen, Niederösterreich, Austria

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: Austria

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

Overview

Kress Foundation art historian; Italian renaissance specialist. Suida was born to Albert Suida and Betha von Heim, his mother a descendant of Richard Wagner. His uncle was the art historian Henry Thode. After attending a Gymnasium in Vienna, he studied art history in Vienna under Aloïs Riegl and Franz Wickhoff, in Leipzig and finally Heidelberg under Thode with whom he wrote his dissertation in 1899. It was published the following year. Between 1902-04 he was an assistant at the Deutsches Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, the model for Italian research institutes, where he researched the book for his habilitation. He qualified with a 1905 monograph on Florentine painting. He taught as a Privatdozent in Vienna and for the academic year 1909-10 at the Technische Hochschule in Graz, Austria. Beginning in 1911 was appointed a professor of art history at the university in Graz, and managed the picture gallery (Bildergalerie) of the Landesmuseum Joanneum in Graz. During World War I he fought as a captain. Between 1934-38 he was on leave teaching at various schools in Austria and Italy, but with the annexation of Austria by the Nazis in 1939, he emigrated first to England and then to the United States. In 1947 he found a position as Head of the department of art-historical research at the Kress Foundation, advising on art purchases for Samuel Kress and later helping to disperse the collection to museums across the United States. His daughter Bertina Suida (d. 1992) studied art history at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts where she met fellow art history student Robert Manning. They married and the elder Suida gave his son-in-law a position as curator for the Kress collection. Bertina was a curator at the Chrysler Collection. William and his children amassed large personal collections of Baroque art. Suida was an expert in Lombard art and only slightly less Venetian. At his death in 1959, his collection passed to his children. The combined art collection was donated to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas, Austin, in1999, as the Suida-Manning Collection.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Studies in the History of Art, Dedicated to William E. Suida on his Eightieth Birthday. London: Phaidon Press/Samuel H. Kress Foundation, 1959, pp. 395-402; [dissertation:] Die Genredarstellungen Albrecht Dürers. Heidelberg, 1899, published, Strassburg: J. H. E. Heitz, 1900; [habilitation:] Florentinische Maler um die Mitte des XIV. Jahrhunderts. Strassburg: Heitz, 1905; The Samuel H. Kress collection: Brooks Memorial Art Gallery. Memphis, TN: Brooks Memorial Art Gallery, 1958; and Suida, Bertina. Luca Cambiaso: la vita e le opere. Milan: Ceschina, 1957; Raphael. New York: Oxford University Press,1941; The Samuel H. Kress Collection at the University of Arizona. Tucson, Arizona: University of Arizona, 1957; and Hofer, Hans, and Wright, Herbert. Aspects on Austrian Art and Music. Washington, DC: s.n, 1944; Bramante pittore e il Bramantino. Milan: Ceschina, 1953; Genua. Leipzig: Seemann, 1906; Leonardo und sein Kreis. Munich: F. Bruckmann, 1929; Tizian. Leipzig: Orell Füssli,1933.

Sources

Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 2, pp. 672-677; [obituaries:] Morassi, Antonio. William Suida. Burlington Magazine 102, no. 689 (August 1960):371; “William E. Suida, Art Historian, 82, Curator of Research for Kress Foundation Dies-Studied Italian Masters.” New York Times October 30, 1959, p. 27.

Stuttmann, Ferdinand

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Stuttmann, Ferdinand

Gender: male

Date Born: 1897

Date Died: 1968

Home Country/ies: Germany

Overview

Director of the art gallery at the Landesmuseum in Hanover, 1937-1962. After the Nazi’s rise to power, Stuttmann served as an appraiser for some of the art looted from Jewish collections by various Reich groups, including the infamous Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg.Even after the war, Stuttmann purchased 100 objects from the Doebbeke Collection in 1949, a collection of Nazi-era objects confiscated Jewish collections.

Sources

“Raub und Restitution.” [website]. Jüdisches Museum Berlin. http://www.jmberlin.de/raub-und-restitution/en/home.php

Sturgis, Russell

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Sturgis, Russell

Gender: male

Date Born: 1836

Date Died: 1909

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Institution(s): Metropolitan Museum of Art

Overview

His book, European Architecture: A Historical Study (1896) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

His book, European Architecture: A Historical Study (1896) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University.

Stuers, Victor Eugène Louis de, Jonkheer

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Stuers, Victor Eugène Louis de, Jonkheer

Other Names:

Jonkheer Victor de Stuers

Gender: male

Date Born: 1843

Date Died: 1916

Place Born: Maastricht, Limburg, Netherlands

Place Died: The Hague, South Holland, Netherlands

Home Country/ies: Netherlands

Subject Area(s): Dutch (culture or style), Netherlandish, Northern Renaissance, and painting (visual works)

Overview

Influential head of the Arts and Sciences Department of the Netherlands and historian of Dutch art, consolidator of art museums in the Netherlands. Stuers wrote an inventory catalog of the art in the Maurtishuis in the Hague in 1874. When the first Dutch department dealing with conservation was established in 1875, de Stuers assumed responsibility for the Arts and Sciences Department within the Ministry of Home Affairs, in addition to being secretary of various influential committees which provided the state with advice on proposed restorations. De Stuers made the first systematic survey of pre-1850 historic buildings in the Netherlands. In 1881 he and the art collector A. A. des Tombe discovered the now famous “Girl with the Pearl Earring” by Vermeer at a Hague auction house, then ascribed as an unknown master. De Stuers agreed not to bid against Des Tombe, who acquired the picture, but obviously with a certain obligation to de Stuers. De Stuers oversaw the consolidation of paintings in the Netherland into the new Rijksmuseum building, elevating Rijksmuseum van Schilderijen (National Museum of Paintings) director Frederik D. O. Obreen to the position in 1885. Obreen and de Stuers played an important role in the relocation and rearrangement of the collections of the Rijksmuseum. Both Obreen and De Stuers had rather conservative views on the display of the works of art, however, preferring to show as many paintings as possible floor to ceiling, even when other museums such as the National Museum in Berlin under Wilhelm Bode were grouping paintings by school and selectively. The design of the new Rijksmuseum caused an controversy; a very public quarrel with Nicolaas de Roever and de Stuers over the final form for the building of the Rijksmuseum ensued. De Stuers retired from government service in 1901. When des Tombes died in 1902, a secret will bequeathed “The Girl with the Pearl Earring” to the Mauritshuis along with twelve other paintings. De Stuer’s Arts and Sciences Department was replaced by the National Committee for the Protection of Monuments in 1903.

Selected Bibliography

Notice historique et descriptive des tableaux et des sculptures exposés dans le Musée royal de La Haye. La Haye: M. Nijhoff, 1874; Beknopte beschrijving van de kunstvoorwerpen tentoongesteld in het Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen te ‘s-Gravenhage. ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1877; Het Rijks-museum te Amsterdam. Amsterdam: Van Holkema & Warendorf, 1890; Mr. N. de Roever en de minister Heemskerk. ‘s-Gravenhage: W.P. van Stockum, 1892.

Sources

Tutein Nolthenius, R. P. J. Het levenswerk van Jhr. Mr. Victor de Stuers: herdacht door zijne vrienden. Utrecht: Oosthoek, 1913; Harms Tiepen, C. Jhr. Victor de Stuers: adviseur voor de monumenten van geschiedenis en kunst (een interview). Amsterdam: Harms Tiepen, 1913; Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. vol. 32. Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1938, p. 242; Biografisch woordenboek van Nederland. vol. 1. ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1979, p. 566; Bervoets, J. A. A., and Wishaupt, M. C. M., and Dongen, J. van. Victor de Stuers, referendaris zonder vrees of blaam: catalogus bij de tentoonstelling in de Koninklijke Bibliotheek en het Algemeen Rijksarchief. s-Gravenhage: Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1985

Studniczka, Franz

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Studniczka, Franz

Other Names:

Franz Studniczka

Gender: male

Date Born: 14 August 1860

Date Died: 04 December 1929

Place Born: Poland

Place Died: Leipzig, Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Antique, the, Classical, and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)

Overview

Specialist in classical Roman and Greek art; Professor of Archaeology at the University of Leipzig 1896-1929. He was born in Jaslo, Galicia, which is present day Poland. Studniczka attended the University in Vienna studying classical archaeology under Otto Benndorf. He wrote his habiliation in 1887 also at Vienna and was appointed professor at the University of Freiburg, 1889. In 1896 he moved to University of Leipzig as professor of classical archaeology, succeeding Johannes Overbeck. As an educator he expanded the collection of casts of antique sculptures at the Leipizig Classical Museum, which became one of the largest collections of casts in Germany. In the 1920s he taught sculpture cleaning and photographing techniques to the Smith College professor Clarence Kennedy who was to become one of the important art photographers of the age. Studniczka’s scholarship resulted in a greatly-admired restoration of the fragment sculpture of the Artemis-Iphigenia Group (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek). He was succeeded in 1932 by Bernhard Schweitzer.

Selected Bibliography

Identifizierung des Aristoteles-Porträts, 1900.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 138-139; Hartswick, Kim J. The Gardens of Sallust: a Changing Landscape. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004, pp. 85-88ff.

Stubblebine, James H.

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Stubblebine, James H.

Other Names:

James Stubblebine

Gender: male

Date Born: 28 December 1920

Date Died: 03 February 1987

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

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

Career(s): educators

Overview

Rutgers University professor of art history and early Italian Renaissance-era scholar and Giotto specialist. Stubblebine’s parents were Albert Day Stubblebine and Ruth Harvey (Stubblebine). He attended Harvard University, graduating in 1942. World War II declared, he joined U.S. Navy, serving 1943-1946 and rising to the rank of lieutenant. After discharge he entered New York University as a graduate student, studying under Richard Offner. Having secured a Fulbright fellowship, 1953-1954, he completed his Ph.D. in 1954 with a dissertation on Guido da Siena. Other scholars who assisted his research included Rensselaer W. Lee and Millard Meiss. He taught as an instructor at Wellesley College, Wellesley, MA before his appointment at New Jersey’s state university, Rutgers, in 1957. Stubblebine headed the department of art between 1961 and 1969. As chair, he strengthen undergraduate studies and was a founding member of the graduate program in art history at Rutgers. Stubblebine issued a revised version of his dissertation by Princeton University Press as Guido da Siena in 1964. He taught as a visiting lecturer at University of Pennsylvania for the academic year1965-1966. He received a Kress fellowship for the1969-1970 year. He published collected essays by scholars with his own introduction in the ‘Norton Critical Studies in Art History’ series as Giotto: the Arena Chapel Frescoes. Stubblebine was a National Endowment for the Humanities fellow, 1975-1976. In 1977 he was appointed Distinguished Professor II at Rutgers, the University’s highest rank. He published the catalogue raissone on Duccio, Duccio di Buoninsegna and his School in 1979. His annotated bibliography, Dugento Painting, was intended to launch a larger project on that topic. However, Stubblebine suffered a sudden heart attack at age 66 and died in a Manhattan hosptial. Stubblebine’s Duccio di Buoninsegna and his School is seen has his major contribution to the discipline. His final work, Assisi and the Rise of Vernacular asserted controversially that the St. Francis cycle in the Arena Chapel is a later work, not by Giotto but a follower.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] An Altarpiece by Guido da Siena and his Narrative Style. New York University, 1958, revised and published as Guido da Siena. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964;
Giotto: the Arena Chapel Frescoes. Norton critical studies in art history. New York: Norton, 1969;
Duccio di Buoninsegna and his School. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979; Dugento Painting: an Annotated Bibliography. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1983;
Assisi and the Rise of Vernacular Art. Cambridge, MA: Harper & Row, 1985.

Sources

[obituaries:] “James Stubblebine.” New York Times February 5, 1987, p. B6; McHam, Sarah Blake. “James Stubblebine.” Burlington Magazine 129 (December 1987): 808;
Stubblebine, James. “Preface and Acknowledgement.” Guido da Siena. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964, pp. vii-viii;

Stuart, James

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Stuart, James

Other Names:

James "Athenian" Stuart

Gender: male

Date Born: 1713

Date Died: 1788

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Overview

Architect; first to write an accurate book on Greek architecture. Stuart was born to a Scottish seaman’s family in London. After his father’s death, he was apprenticed to the fan painter Louis Goupy (1700-1747). Following his mother’s death, Stuart traveled Rome in 1742 to study art. He learned engraving and conducted English tourists around the city for income. In 1748, he, the architect Nicholas Revett (1720-1804) and the painter/art dealer Gavin Hamilton (1723-1798) developed a plan to measure and publish detailed drawings of the extant architecture in Greece. The scheme was largely driven by the lure of financial gain. However, publications on historic architecture, such as the popular Entwurff einer historischen Architektur by the architect Johann Bernhard Fischer von Erlach (published in Vienna in 1721 and appearing in an English translation in 1730) seemed to assure success. Stuart gained some income drawing and publishing a Roman obelisk which he contributed to De obelisco Caesaris of Angelo Maria Bandini (1726-1803), published in 1750. He studied Greek and Latin at the Collegio di Propaganda Fide. He also gained practical advice from the antiquaries James Dawkins (1722-1757) and Robert Wood (1717?-1771), based in Rome. An Englishman living in Venice, Sir James Gray, second baronet (c.1708-1773), introduced the men to the Society of Dilettanti, the British group of wealthy amateur scholars leading the vogue of interest in the antique. The Society hoped that a detailed analysis of Greek monuments would aid further study. Hamilton abandoned the project, but Revett and Stuart left Italy for Greece in 1751, the former making detailed measurements and drawings of Greek architecture and the latter the notes. When they returned to England in 1755, Stuart was hired by individual Society of Dilettanti members to modify their houses and parks in Greek style. Stuart’s personal familiarity with the monuments and his association the with Society of Dilettanti posed a professional rivalry with two other neo-classical architects, Robert Adam and William Chambers. Adam publicly criticized Stuart, which resulted in the loss of a commission to design the home of the collector Nathaniel Curzon (1727-1804). Stuart’s casual business practice and mounting alcohol addiction were also a liability. Curzon, however, retained Stuart to make designs for the interior in 1757; Stuart’s colored drawings for the commission are among the earliest of completely-furnish neoclassical interiors (Watkin). The project for Antiquities of Athens had grown to four projected volumes and the subscribers number well over 300. Stuart continued to delay publishing, marrying his housekeeper around this time. In the meantime, the French architect Julien-David Le Roy issued his Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grčce in 1758, a smaller and much less accurate book of the same kind. Publication of Antiquities of Athens dragged on, Stuart insisting that he take Le Roy to task in the pages of his new book. Revett sold his interest to Stuart. Stuart was engaged in another commission, this from George Lyttelton, Baron Lyttelton (1709-73) for the Temple of Theseus, 1758, Hagley Park, Worcestershire. The project was the first to use fluted, baseless Greek Doric order. It became the model for that order of Greek revival architecture throughout Europe and America. The first volume of Antiquities of Athens finally appeared, with text by Stuart, in 1762, covering only a small portion of what their proposal to the Society had suggested. Somewhat ironically, the volume focused on on minor Hellenistic buildings and omitted, some major 5th-century buildings of Athens. The book’s major influence was not so much architectural scholarship, but to designers who took Stuart and Revett’s drawing of ornament for their own designs. The Greek revival in the decorative arts in England was largely due to Antiquities of Athens. Other architectural commissions included Greek designs for Thomas Anson at Shugborough, Staffordshire, in 1765 (the famous Tower of the Winds among other works) and the interiors for John, 1st Earl Spencer, at Spencer House, St. James’s Place, including furniture (London, V&A, on loan to Spencer House) in the 1760s. Private monumental marble commissions from this time include funerary monuments such as the 1766 tomb of Philip Yorke, 1st Earl of Hardwicke and his wife in Wimpole church, Cambs. In 1771, Stuart wrote Critical Observations on the Buildings and Improvements of London an architectural and art assessment of the city. A London house for Mrs. Elizabeth Montagu (1720-1800) built at 22 Portman Square was begun in 1775 (today demolished). Stuart was appointed Surveyor to the Greenwich Hospital, charged with rebuilding the interior of the chapel in 1780 after a fire. Stuart married a second time the same year, to the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Blacland (1764-1798) with whom he fathered five children. His drinking increased and his health declined. He died at his home in London without completing the second volume of the Antiquities, which appeared with the assistance of William Newton (1735-1790). Volume three appeared in 1795. The publisher Josiah Taylor acquired Stuart’s papers and issued a fourth volume in 1816. A final supplement to the series was issued in 1830. Stuart, who in his lifetime was called “Athenian,” wrote the first accurate record of Classical Greek architecture. The Antiquities of Athens was second only to the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann in promoting the primacy of the Greek artistic ideal in eighteenth-century Europe. His accurate drawings and topographical views became basis for the Greek Revival architecture of Europe and North America in the early 19th century.

Selected Bibliography

contributed, Bandini, Angelo Maria. De obelisco Caesaris Augusti e Campi Martii ruderibus nuper eruto commentarius auctore Angelo Maria Bandinic accedunt cll. virorum epistolae atque opuscula. Rome: Excudebant N. & M. Palearini, 1750; and Revett, Nicholas. Antiquities of Athens. 4 vols. London: printed by J. Haberkorn, 1762-1816, vol. 5, supplement, 1830; Critical Observations on the Buildings and Improvements of London. London: Printed by J. Dodsley, 1771.

Sources

Arbuthnott, Catherine. “The Life of James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, 1713-1788.” in, Soros, Susan Weber, ed. James “Athenian” Stuart, 1713-1788: The Rediscovery of Antiquity. New York: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture/Yale University Press, 2006, pp. 59-101; [Lawrence] Lewis, Lesley. “Stuart and Revett: Their Literary and Archaeological Careers.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 2 (1938-9): 128-145; Landy, Jacob. “Stuart and Revett: Pioneer Archaeologists.” Archaeology 9 (1956): 252-259; Watkin, David. Athenian Stuart: Pioneer of the Greek Revival. London: Allen and Unwin, 1982; Harris, Eileen. British Architectural Books and Writers 1556-1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. 439-450; Soros, Susan Weber, ed. James “Athenian” Stuart, 1713-1788: the Rediscovery of Antiquity. New Haven: Bard Graduate Center for Studies/Yale University Press, 2006; Wiebenson, Dora. Sources of Greek Revival Architecture. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1969.

Strzygowski, Josef Rudolf Thomas

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Strzygowski, Josef Rudolf Thomas

Other Names:

Josef Strzygowski

Gender: male

Place Born: Bielsko-Biala, Silesian Voivodeship, Poland

Place Died: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): European, Late Antique, and Medieval (European)

Overview

Professor in Graz and later at Vienna (from 1909); major exponent of the concept that western European late antique and medieval arts owed much to the influences of the east. He was born in Bielitz, Silesia, Austria which is present-day Bielsko-Biala, Poland. Strzygowski’s father was a clothing manufacturer. His mother, Edle Trass von Friedelfeldt was from minor nobility. He was raised in Biala, Austrian Silesia, predominently Polish in its makeup. Strzygowski attended the Gymnasium in Jena and then a Realschule in Brunn. After graduation at age 18 he entered his father’s weaving factory. After two years, he left to return to study in Vienna under Rudolf Eitelberger von Edelberg and Moriz Thausing, then with Herman Grimm in Berlin, before writing a dissertation in Munich in 1885 under Enrico Brunn and the Halle classicist Carl Robert. His dissertation topic was on images of the baptism of Christ, drawn from eastern sources. He wrote his Habilitationschrft in Vienna in 1887 and at 25, began lecturng there. After study trip supplied by the DAI to Rome and subsequently Greece, Russia and France, Strzygowski accepted the first chair (professorship) of art history at the University of Graz in 1892. His early publications on Byzantine and Roman art were severely criticized by the Vienna School art historians Aloïs Riegl and Franz Wickhoff as being poorly researched and thought out. Personal and methodological enmity between Strzygowski and the scholars of Vienna developed which lasted their lifetimes.

Strzygowski spent the years 1894-1895 in Egypt. In 1901, he published a groundbreaking theoretical study, Orient oder Rom, arguing that early medieval architecture owed much of its influence to the oriental middle east. This effectively questioned the cannon of art history predominant at the time, that Christian art was a direct outgrowth of the styles of Greece and Rome. Strzygowski developed an elaborate “Nordic myth” explanation for art, contending that non-objective ornament was a northern-European tendency, whereas illusionistic verisimilitude was a “southern” trait. He championed the work of contemporary artist Arnold Böcklin as a re-emerging of the Nordic style. Strzygowski was voted to succeed the chair held by his adversary, Wickhoff at Wickhoff’s death in 1909 to the University of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Institut–a decision determined by only one vote and perhaps pushed by the Archduke Ferdinand. The Institut selected the other holder of the chair be the more conventional art scholarly, Max Dvořák. This sealed a rivalry between Strzygowski and Dvořák (and his student and successor, Julius Alwin von Schlosser). Strzygowski’s work attracted the notice of Princeton art department chair Allen Marquand in a 1910 article. His plans for a research Institute to study the arts of the Middle East, Southeast Europe and Asia, with offices in Tehran and Beijing, foundered in1912 because of financing. In 1913, Strzygowski and a group of colleagues mapped Armenian monuments. The result was the 1918 book Die Baukunst der Armenien und Europa Ergebnisse the first architectural history of Armenia.

Divisions at the Institut worsened with Dvořák’s untimely death in 1921. Dvořák’s student, Schlosser, assumed his chair, proving more agressive in his personal and methodological opposition to Strzygowski than his mentor had been. Strzygowski, claiming he held the longer chair to the Institut split the instituion in half with his as the first, Erstes Kunsthistorisches Institut or Wiener Institut, and Schlosser’s as the second. Strzygowski’s Institute was a center where scholars from various countries and disciplines could study and teach. The popularity of his institute further angered the Vienna-School scholars. Strzygowski lectured widely; at Havard and Bryn Mawr in the United States in 1922 and in Europe. His lectures delivered for the Olaus-Petri foundation in Upsala appeared as Origin of Christian Church Art, 1923, and lectures at the University of London as Early Church art in Northern Europe, 1928. After the death of his first wife, he married a painter, Herta Karasek. When he retired in 1933, his institute was dissolved. In the final years, Strzygowski embraced the Nazi sentiments of racism and nationalism, although these appeared to be more the logical conclusion of his earlier theories than any attempt to court the political authorities. His most famous pupils, Otto Demus, Ernst Diez, and Fritz Novotny were able to employ his methodology without its political ramifications. Even pupils of his Vienna School rivals, such as Hans Sedlmayr (Schlosser’s student) adopted the structural analysis and methodological analogies of Strzygowski’s best work (Lachnit).

Strzygowski sought the origins of early Christian iconography in the Hellenistic cities of its origins. He approached works by determining their parent forms. His work was characterized by the study of origins of constructive processes in architecture (i.e. the vault and the cupola), stylistic representations of animals in northern art, and the origins of Viking ship building in native wood construction of Central Europe. Strzygowski’s methodological vision was one of uniting two strands of observation which he termed “factual research” and “viewer-research.” His essays ranged from the art of Armenia, Ravenna and the Middle East, as well as on aspects of northern European art. His work encouraged Wladimir Sas-Zaloziecky in Graz and Demus in Vienna to study the history of Byzantine art and Dagobert Frey, then teaching in Wrocław, and Heinrich Gerhard Franz in Graz for the areas of East Asia. The architectural historian David Watkin wrote of Kleinasien, ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte sixty-seven years later that is it “rich, stimulating, and written from the heart about the things he loved best..

Selected Bibliography

[partial bibliography:] Karasek, Alfred. Verzeichnis der Schriften von Josef Strzygowski. Klagenfur: A. Kollitsch, 1933; Orient oder Rom? Beiträge zur geschichte der Späantiken und frühchristlichen Kunst. Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1900; Hellas in des Orients Umarmung. Munich: Ullgemeinen Zeitung, 1902; Kleinasien: ein Neuland der Kunstgeschichte. Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs, 1903; and Schulz, Bruno. “Mschatta, I: Bericht über die Aufnahme der Ruine.” and “II: Kunstwissenschaftliche Untersuchung.” Jahrbuch der preuszischen Kunstsammlungen 25 (1904): 205-373; and Berchem, Max van, and Bell, Gertrude Lowthian. Amida: Matériaux pour l’épigraphie et l’histoire musulmanes du Diyar-bekr. Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1910; Altai-Iran und Völkerwanderung: ziergeschichtliche Untersuchungen über den Eintritt der Wander- und Nordvölker in die Treibhäuser geistigen Lebens, anknüpfend an einen Schatzfund in Albanien. Leipzig: J.C. Hinrich, 1917; Die Baukunst der Armenien und Europa Ergebnisse einer vom Kunsthistorischen Institute der Universität Wien 1913 durchgeführten Forschungsreise. Vienna: A. Schroll & Co., 1918; Ursprung der christlichen Kirchenkunst: neue Tatsachen und Grundsätze der Kunstforschung: 8 Vorträge der Olaus Petri-Stiftung in Upsala. Leipzig: Hinrichs 1920; Die Krisis der Geisteswissenschaften: Vorgeführt am Beispiel der Forschung über bildende Kunst; Ein grundsätzlicher Rahmenversuch. Vienna: A. Schroll, 1923 [a Proto- Nazi work, Kleinbauer, Modern Perspectives, 23]; Origin of Christian Church Art: New Facts and Principles of Research. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923; “Grundsatzliches und Tatsachliches.” Die Kunstwissenschaft der Gegenwart, in Selbstdarstellungen. Edited by Johannes Jahn. Leipzig: 1924: 157-81; Early Church Art in Northern Europe with Special Reference to Timber Construction and Decoration. London: B.T. Batsford, 1928; Asiens bildende Kunst in Stichproben, ihr Wesen und ihre Entwicklung, ein Versuch. Augsburg: Dr. B. Filser, 1930; Aufgang des Nordens, Lebenskampf eines Kunstforschers um ein deutsches Weltbild. Leipzig: Schwarzhäupter-Verlag, 1936.

Sources

Marquand, Allan. “Strzygowski and his Theory of Early Christian Art.” Harvard Theological Review (July 1910): 357-365; 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. 23; Watkin, David. The Rise of Architectural History. London: Architectural Press, 1980, p. 91; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 155, 165-171; Marchand, Suzanne. “The Rhetoric of Artifacts and the Decline of Classical Humanism: The Case of Josef Strzygowski.” in Grafton, Anthony, and Marchand, Suzanne L., eds., Proof and Persuasion in History. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1994, pp 117; Wharton, Annabel. “The Scholarly Frame: Orientalism and the Construction of Late Ancient Art History.” chapter 1 of Refiguring the Post Classical City. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 1-14; Edwin Lachnit, “Josef Strzygowski.” The Dictionary of Art 29: 795-6; Maranci, Christina. Medieval Armenian Architecture in Historiography: Josef Strzygowski and his Legacy. Dissertation, Princeton University, 1998, pp. 89-99; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 400-403; Maranci, Christina. Medieval Armenian Architecture: Constructions of Race and Nation. Sterling, VA: Peeters, 2000; Olin, Margaret. “Art History and Ideology: Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski.” in Gold, Penny Schein, and Sax, Benjamin C., eds. Cultural Visions: Essays on the History of Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000, pp. 151-172; Elsner, Jaś. “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901.” Art History 25 no. 3 (2002): 358-79; [obituary:] Diez, Ernst. “Josef Strzygowski, Biographisches.” Felsefi Arkivi (Istanbul) 2 no. 1 (1947): 13-25; Zäh, Alexander. “Strzygowski, Josef, Kunsthistoriker.” Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon XLI (2020) pp.1239-1246. STRZYGOWSKI, Josef, Kunsthistoriker,

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Stroud, Dorothy

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Stroud, Dorothy

Other Names:

Dorothy Nancy Stroud

Gender: female

Date Born: 1910

Date Died: 1997

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), gardens (open spaces), landscape architecture (discipline), landscapes (representations), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Garden and landscape architecture historian; assistant at the Sir John Soane Museum under John Newenham Summerson. Stroud’s father abandoned her mother when Stroud was two years old. Though Stroud received an solid grade school education in Eastbourne and then in Edgbaston, Birmingham, though she could not afford college. She trained as a typist and joined the staff of Country Life magazine in 1930 initially in the book department, but soon transferring to the editorial department. Country Life’s editor, Christopher Hussey, encouraged a native interest in landscape architecture. She collected material on “Capability” Brown for publication.

Through Hussey, Stroud also met the architectural historian John Newenham Summerson, a contributor to the magazine. Summerson joined the National Buildings Record in 1941, an initiative to document the buildings in London before the blitz destroyed them. When Summerson was appointed curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in 1945, he hired Stroud as “inspectress,” a position created in the original charter of the museum. Stroud saw to the day-to-day operation of the Museum while its formal head, Summerson, went on various scholarly and lecture forays. The two worked to raise the profile of the museum to an international reputation. Stroud’s lack of formal education perhaps appealed to Summerson, who was also self-trained in architectural history.

In 1950 she published a book on Brown, whose own account-book she discovered in the course of her research, as well as a biography of Henry Holland. A book on Soane’s architecture appeared in 1961. In 1962 she issued a biography of a landscape gardener, Humphrey Repton. A book on George Dance was published in 1971. She served on the Historic Buildings Council between 1974 and 1982. She retired in 1984 and was succeeded by Margaret Richardson. Her book on John Soane, a monograph Summerson himself was never able to write, appeared in 1986. It was her last. Failing memory in her final years prevented her from being celebrated as one of the pioneers of the history of landscape architecture. She was vice-president of the Garden History Society from 1982 until her death.

Stroud’s accomplishments are all the more significant when framed in the backdrop of private women scholars in the first half of the 20th century. Unmarried and uneducated formally, her research was possible only after she completed a full-day’s job managing a museum. Her tenacity was only hampered by her gender: her search of Capability Brown’s plan for Blenheim Palace’s park was thwarted because it hung in the men’s lavatory. She also sewed the curtains in the museum and scrubbed the sarcophagus.

Selected Bibliography

The Architecture of Sir John Soane. London: Studio, 1961; Capability Brown. London: Country Life, 1950; George Dance, Architect, 1741-1825. London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 1971; Henry Holland, 1745-1806. London: Art and Technics, 1950; Sir John Soane, Architect. London: Faber & Faber, 1984.

Sources

[obituraries:] Colvin, Howard. “Dorothy Stroud: Keeper of the Treasure.” Guardian (London) January 26, 1998, p. 13; “Dorothy Stroud.” The Times (London) January 22, 1998; Cornforth, John. “Dorothy Stroud.” The Independent (London), January 1, 1998, p. 14.

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