Full Name: Spon, Jacob
Gender: male
Date Born: 1647
Date Died: 1685
Home Country/ies: France
Subject Area(s): Antique, the and catalogues raisonnés
Institution(s): Université de Montpellier
early developer of catalogue raisonné for antiquity
Miscellanea eruditae antiquitatis. Lugduni [ ]: Sumptibus Fratrum Huguetan, 1685.
KRG, 53
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
early developer of catalogue raisonné for antiquity
Full Name: Spinden, Joe
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1879
Date Died: 1967
Place Born: Huron, Beadle, SD, USA
Place Died: Beacon, Fulton, NY, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): American (North American), ancient, and Ancient American
Historian of Ancient American art. Spinden was the grandson of Swiss immigrants. As a teenager he worked on railroad survey parties in the western United States and briefly followed the gold rush in Nome, Alaska in 1900. In 1902 he entered Harvard University, graduating with a B. A. in anthropology in 1906. Spinden continued with amazing speed for a Master’s degree in 1908 and his Ph. D., the following year, working at the Peabody Museum, Harvard, under its director, Frederick W. Putnam (1839-1915). His dissertation, on Mayan art, was written under the eminent anthropologist Alfred Tozzer (1877-1954) with the assistance of Roland Dixon (1875-1934) and Putnam. That same year Spinden secured a position as assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. He made his first visit to the Mayan lands in 1910 when he traveled to the Yucatan. He presented a paper on his work, “On the Historical Development of Art at Copan,” before the International Congress of Americanists, held in Mexico City, the same year. In 1913, Spinden published a revised version of his thesis, A Study of Maya Art, which remains a classic in the field of ethnographic art history and anthropology. A second Mayan excursion was made in 1914 with the Mayan archaeologist Sylvanus Griswold Morley (1883-1948). Spinden’s handbook, Ancient Civilizations of Mexico and Central America appeared in 1917, published by the Museum. During World War I, Spinden served as a naval intelligence officer in Honduras and El Salvador. During this time he became ever more interested in correlating the Mayan calendar with Western dating. It was clear once this was accomplished, other archaeological objects could be more effectively dated. Matching events recorded in both Spanish (western) and Mayan calendars, Spinden read a paper in 1919 at the National Academy of Sciences on this work. In 1920 he left the Museum to become curator of Mexican archaeology and ethnology at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University. A third excursion, this time to search for unreported Mayan ruins, took place in 1921. The years at the Peabody were largely consumed, however, with the completion of the Mayan chronology, financed by Tozzer and others, which he published in 1924 as The Reduction of Maya Dates. Spinden was appointed curator of Anthropology at the Buffalo Museum of Arts and Sciences in 1926. He married the archaeologist Ellen Collier in 1928. He joined the Brooklyn Institute (later Brooklyn Museum) staff as curator of ethnology (later renamed curator of American Indian Art and Primitive Cultures) in 1929, replacing its first curator, R. Stewart Culin (1858-1929). In 1930, however, a private scholar John E. Teeple (1874-1931) published a paper proving Spinden’s 1924 Mayan chronology to be wrong, based on Teeple’s astronomical calculations. Spinden never conceded Teeple’s work, despite Teeple’s convincing arguments, devoting years to defending his timeline which became increasingly dubious. As curator at Brooklyn, Spinden concentrated on collectiong pre-Columbian, Mexican and Central/South American indigenous art. He led numerous expeditions to the region, acquired significant extant collections from private individuals as well. He married again in 1948 to Ailes Gilmour, the sister of the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. He retired from the Museum in 1950 and settled in Croton, NY where he died in 1967. “Spinden was an art historian rather than an archaeologist, having studied the art of various early primitive cultures long before public interest in that field was aroused” (Thompson), an estimation seconded by George Kubler, who described Spinden as an “historian of art among anthropologist and archaeologists.” His interests included visual motifs; he once made a study of bat motifs in the New World. Spinden’s A Study of Maya Art approached cultural production not as a series of artifacts, but as a social art history. His interest, not only in the ethnographic art of South America, but in the interaction between post-Conquest pre-Columbian and European-influenced cultures made the Brooklyn Museum one of the richest museums of Spanish Colonial art in the United States. However, Spinden, even according to those who respected him, was severely disorganized and unable to discard theories he had once advanced, no matter how convincingly they could be disproved. His almost non-stop talking is also frequently remarked in personal reminiscences. A description of Spinden on an archaeological excursion appears in Gregory Mason’s Silver Cities of the Yucatan (1927).
[dissertation:] Maya Art, Harvard, 1909; A Study of Maya Art: its Subject Matter and Historical Development. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1913 [subsequent editions reissued as] Maya Art and Civilization; The Reduction of Mayan Dates. Cambridge, MA: Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, 1924; and Hodge, Frederick Webb, and La Farge, Oliver. Introduction to American Indian Art: to Accompany the First Exhibition of American Indian Art Selected Entirely with Consideration of Esthetic Value. New York: The Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, 1931; and Mason, Gregory. Silver cities of Yucatan. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927.[calendar discrediting:] Teeple, John E., “Maya Astronomy,” Contributions to American Archaeology no. 2. Washington DC: Carnegie Institution of Washington Publications. 403, 1930: 29-115.
Kubler, George. Esthetic Recognition of Ancient Amerindian Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991 [book jointly dedicated to Spinden and Donald Robertson]; [mentioned] Bober, Phyllis Pray. A Life of Learning. Charles Homer Haskins Lecture. New York: American Council of Learned Societies, 1995, p. 7; Winters, Christopher, ed. International Dictionary of Anthropologists. New York: Garland Pub., 1991, pp. 659; Thompson, J. Eric S. ” J. H. Spinden (1879-1967).” in Spinden, Herbert Joseph. A Study of Maya Art, its Subject Matter and Historical Development. New York: Dover, 1975, pp. v-x; [obituary:] “Dr. Spinden Dead, Indian Authority.” New York Times October 24, 1967, p. 43
Historian of Ancient American art. Spinden was the grandson of Swiss immigrants. As a teenager he worked on railroad survey parties in the western United States and briefly followed the gold rush in Nome, Alaska in 1900. In 1902 he entered Harvard
Full Name: Spezzaferro, Luigi
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Home Country/ies: Italy
Director
L’amore e la rabbia: dialogo con Luigi Spezzaferro. Rome: Carocci, 2008; Julier, Insley. [finding aid for] Luigi Salerno research papers, 1948-1996. Getty Research Center. http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa2000m26.
Director
Full Name: Spencer, John R.
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1923
Date Died: 1994
Place Born: Moline, Rock Island, IL, USA
Place Died: Durham, NC, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style)
Scholar of the Italian quattrocento; Professor of art history, Duke University 1978-1986. As an eighteen-year-old in 1941, Spencer joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, flying as a bombardier in B-24s during World War II over Vincenza, Italy. Already interested in art, he later quipped that he was likely the only one in his unit who knew what was down there. He helped spare Palladio buildings from U. S. bombs (Newton). After the war, Spencer attended Grinell College, receiving his B. A. in 1947 and a second B.A. from the Universite Laval, Quebec, in 1948. Intent on studying languages, he entered Yale University for his graduate work, receiving an M.A. in Romance Languages (French) in 1950. His interest turned to the history of art and Spencer took a second M.A. at Yale in art history in 1951. While working on his Ph.D., he began lecturing at Yale in 1952. His Ph.D.was awarded in 1953 writing his dissertation on Alberti’s painting treatise. Spencer continued teaching at Yale University as an assistant professor until 1958. That year he became professor and (acting) chairman of the art department, University of Florida. In 1962 he accepted a joint appointment as director of the Allen Museum of Art and professor at Oberlin University. He remained there until 1972 when he became head of the Museum Program at the national Endowment for the Arts under Nancy Hanks. In his capacity, he obtained millions of dollars for museums with a particular interest in helping promote centers for conservation. In 1978 Spencer joined the Department of Art and Art History at Duke University as professor of art and chair. He was appointed director of the Duke University Museum of Art (today the Nasher Museum of Art) in 1982, which he held until 1986. He contracted multiple myeloma (bone cancer) and died at his Durham home. Spencer was a tireless campaigner for the academic art museums’ role in the university. In a 1971 Art in America article, he chided university and college art museums as being ill-used and overlooked, a “product of chance.” James Cuno wrote of Spencer, “in the height of the boom in academic museums, Spencer called for an assessment of the phenomenon and, on a case-by-case basis, for a review and redefinition of the purpose of each museum or gallery…a greater diversity.” As a scholar, he was interested in renaissance theory; his book, Andrea del Castagno, examined the patronage structure of Andrea.
[dissertation:] Leon Battista Alberti on Painting. Yale University, 1953; edited, Filarete. Treatise on Architecture: being the Treatise by Antonio di Piero Averlino, known as Filarete. 2 vols. New Haven, Yale University Press, 1965; edited, Alberti, Leon Battista. On Painting. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966; “The Lament at the Tomb by Filippino Lippi.” Allen Memorial Art Museum Bulletin 24, no. 1 (1966): 23-34; “University Museum: Accidental Past, Purposeful Future?”. Art in America 59 (July 1971): 84-90, reprinted in, O’Doherty, Brian, ed., Museums in Crisis. New York: G. Braziller, 1972, pp. 131-43; and Newton, H. Travers. “On the Location of Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari.” Art Bulletin 64, no. 1 (March 1982): 45-5;. Andrea del Castagno and his Patrons. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991; “Leonardo da Vinci.” Encyclopedia Britanica.
“John Spencer; Art Historian, Museum Head.” The News & Observer [Raleigh, NC]. July 17, 1994; Cuno, James. “Assets? Well, Yes of a Kind: Collections in College and University Art Museums and Galleries.” Harvard University Art Museums Professional Training, Occasional Papers 1 (fall 1992), http://www.artmuseums.harvard.edu/professional/occpapers1#note8thru14; [John Spencer] Curriculum Vitae. Duke University Archives; personsal correspondence, H. Travers Newton, May 2009, Matthew Spencer, July 2011.
Scholar of the Italian quattrocento; Professor of art history, Duke University 1978-1986. As an eighteen-year-old in 1941, Spencer joined the U.S. Army Air Corps, flying as a bombardier in B-24s during World War II over Vincenza, Italy. A
Full Name: Speiser, Werner
Gender: male
Date Born: 1908
Date Died: 1965
Home Country/ies: Poland
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre) and sculpture (visual works)
Institution(s): Museum of the Far East in Köln
art and architectural historian; director of the Museum of the Far East in Köln
Kunst der Welt. Die grosse Kunstgeschichte. 20 vols. Baden-Baden: Holle Verlag, 1957-
Bazin 376
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
art and architectural historian; director of the Museum of the Far East in Köln
Full Name: Speier, Hermine
Gender: female
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): archives (institutions), German (culture, style, period), and photographs
First director of the photographic archives of the Deutsches Archäogisches Institut (DAI) in Rome in 1929. Speier was appointed by Ludwig Curtius to develop a separate photographic archive. Under Speier, it expanded to cover entire collections and classes of monuments, such as sarcophagi and portraits. She also edited and republished Helbig’s Führer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertumer in Rom (1963-72).
Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, p. 492, 493.
First director of the photographic archives of the Deutsches Archäogisches Institut (DAI) in Rome in 1929. Speier was appointed by Ludwig Curtius to develop a separate photographic archive. Under Speier, it expanded to cove
Full Name: Spector, Jack J
Gender: male
Date Born: 1925
Place Born: Bayonne, Hudson, NJ, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): education
Historian, Educator. BS from City College New York (1956). MA (1959), PhD (1964). Visiting Distinguished Professor, Columbian College, George Washington University (1985). Visiting Scholar, University Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1989).
The Aesthetics of Freud; A Study in Psychoanalysis and Art. New York: Praeger, 1973. Delacroix: The Death of Sardanapalus. London: Allen Lane, 1974. The Murals of Eugene Delacroix at St. Sulpice. New York: College Art Association of America, 1967.
Who’s Who in American Art 22 (1997-98):
Historian, Educator. BS from City College New York (1956). MA (1959), PhD (1964). Visiting Distinguished Professor, Columbian College, George Washington University (1985). Visiting Scholar, University Queensland, Brisbane, Australia (1989).
Full Name: Spanheim, Ezechiel
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1629
Date Died: 1710
Home Country/ies: Switzerland
Subject Area(s): Modern (style or period) and numismatics
Institution(s): Universiteit Leiden
“founder of modern numismatics”
Dissertataions de prestantia et usu numismatum antiquorum. New ed. London: Richard Smith, 1706-17.
KRG, 53 mentioned
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
“founder of modern numismatics”
Full Name: Soteriou, Georgios M.
Gender: male
Date Born: 1880
Date Died: unknown
Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), Christianitypre-Christian, Early Christian, and sculpture (visual works)
historian of early Christian Greek architecture
KMP, 50 mentioned
historian of early Christian Greek architecture
Full Name: Soria, Martin S.
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 03 July 1911
Date Died: 15 February 1961
Place Born: Berlin, Germany
Place Died: Brussels, Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium
Home Country/ies: Spain
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Baroque, Colonial Spanish American, colonialism, colonization, Portuguese (culture or style), sculpture (visual works), and Spanish (culture or style)
Institution(s): Michigan State University
Zurbaran scholar and co-author of the Pelican History of Art volume, Baroque Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500-1800. Soria was the son of Carlos Schapira, Ph.D., (1879-1957), an engineer (and later Technical Director) at Telefunken, Berlin, and Pola (Heilpern) Schapira (1887-1964). The couple changed their name to “Soria” to avoid the anti-semitism in Germany at the time. The younger Soria attended Zuoz College, Zuoz Switzerland. The rise of national socialism in Germany forced Jews, such as Carlos, to be dismissed from their posititions in 1933. The family moved to Madrid where the younger Soria earned a B.A. from the University of Madrid the same year. At his father’s insistence, he entered law school, receiving his Doctor of Jurisprudence degree at the University of Zürich in 1935. Spain, however, was now engulfed in a civil war and once again the family was forced to flee fascism. Martin Soria and his brother moved to the United States, sponsored by a colleague of his father’s in New York. His parents followed in 1941. Soria began studying his true passion, art history, at Harvard University, receiving an M.A. in it in 1942. During World War II he taught Spanish to American GI’s. He married Marion Louise Vail (1922-2003). Soria settled on Spanish art for his dissertation topic owing to the time he spent at the Prado during the family’s stay in Spain. Harvard art historians Chandler R. Post and Frederick B. Deknatel supervised his research. He worked for eight months in Spain initially researching El Greco until the artist’s archives were withdrawn and moved to a place of safety. Soria then decided to write on Mexican art, but again, after a year’s research in the country, Mexican travel was restricted due to the War. He then determined to write a catalog of Spanish painting for his thesis, though upon advice of his committee focused simply on Francisco de Zurbaran. Soria became a United States citizen while writing his dissertation. During this time he taught art as an instructor in the Spanish Department at Princeton University (1944-1946). He accepted an appointment at Michigan State University as a visiting lecturer in 1948. His dissertation on Zurbaran, in addition to Post and Deknatel, was supervised by Jakob Rosenberg (and perhaps Benjamin Rowland, Jr.), and accepted in 1949. Soria was offered a tenure-track position at MSU as assistant professor; the following year he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship. He published an extended version of his dissertation in 1953 as The Paintings of Zurbaran. In 1956, Soria issued a volume on Renaissance painting in Latin America, published by the University of Buenos Aires’ Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas. The same year he was appointed full professor at Michigan State. The Yale art historian George Kubler contacted Soria to co-author the volume in the Pelican History of Art, which Kubler had convinced the series editor, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner, to expand from a volume only on Iberian visual arts. Kubler wrote the section on architecture and Soria the second half, on painting and sculpture. The volume, Baroque Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500-1800, appeared in 1959. While en route to the Congress on International Cooperation in Spain, he was killed when the Sabena Airlines jet he was riding in crashed at the Brussels airport.
Soria’s 1952 article, “Una nota sobre pintura colonial y estampas europeas,” demonstrated that Latin American artists produced paintings in part copied from images in printed books rather than original designs. His knowledge of Spainish books allowed him to recognize this, mapping several works to illustrations in contemporary books. At the time of his death he was the principal scholar of Zurbaran in the English-speaking world.
[dissertation:] Francisco de Zurbaran: His Life and Works. Ph.D., Harvard, 1949, revised as, The Paintings of Zurbaran. London: Phaidon Press, 1953; “Una nota sobre pintura colonial y estampas europeas.” Anales del Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, 5 (1952): 72–85 reprinted, Revista Kaypunku, June 31, 2016 https://www.academia.edu/26689242/Una_nota_sobre_pintura_colonial_y_estampas_europeas; La pintura del siglo XVI en Sudamérica. Buenos Aires: Instituto de Arte Americano e Investigaciones Estéticas, 1956; and Kubler, George. Baroque Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500-1800. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1959; “Andrea de Leone, a Master of the Bucolic Scene.” Art Quarterly 23 no. 1 (Spring 1960): 23-35; “Painters in Puerto Rico: Paret and Campeche.” Art Quarterly 23 no. 3 (Autumn 1960): 228-31; “Goya’s Portrait of Miguel de Lardizabal.” Burlington Magazine 102 (April 1960): 161-3.
biographical file, Media Communications Department, Michigan State University Archives & Historical Collections; [death notice] “Martin Soria.” Bulletin of the American Group. International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works 1, no. 2 (April 1961): 11; The Author’s and Writer’s Who’s Who. 6th ed. Darien, CT: Hafner, 1971, p 741; personal correspondence, Andrew Soria, February 2011 and November 2018; “Orenstein & Loewe: Twenty German-Jewish Engineers, Inventors and Photographers 1933–1945.” Deutsches Technikmuseum [exhibition website] https://sdtb.de/museum-of-technology/exhibitions/2136/; [obituaries:] H[itchcock], H[enry] R[ussell]. “Martin S. Soria.” Art Journal 20, no. 3 (Spring 1961):174; Meyer, Charles E. “Martin Soria.” Art Quarterly 24 no. 2 (Summer 1961): 195.
Zurbaran scholar and co-author of the Pelican History of Art volume, Baroque Art and Architecture in Spain and Portugal and Their American Dominions, 1500-1800. Soria was the son of Carlos Schapira, Ph.D., (1879-1957), an engineer (