Art Historians

Rodenwaldt, Gerhart

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Rodenwaldt, Gerhart

Other Names:

Gerhart Martin Karl Rodenwaldt

Gender: male

Date Born: 1886

Date Died: 1945

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Berlin, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Classical, funerary arts, Roman (ancient Italian culture or period), and sarcophagi (coffins)

Overview

Classical art historian, particularly Roman art and sarcophagi. Rodenwaldt attended the university in Berlin where he studied under the classicists Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz, Eduard Meyer and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931); at Heidelberg under Friedrich von Duhn; and ultimately Halle where he wrote writing his dissertation (in Latin) in 1908 on wall painting in Pompeii under Carl Robert. Rodenwaldt also studied under the major art historians outside the classical era, including Adolph Goldschmidt in Halle, Heinrich Wölfflin and Henry Thode. Rodenwaldt incorporated their art-historical methodology of other eras into his study of Roman art. He was appointed Professor of archaeology at the University of Giessen in 1917. He left Giessen in 1922 to serve as general secretary of the deutsche archäologische Institut (German Archaeological Institute, or DAI) at a time when government support had fallen off. Rodenwaldt re-established the Institute, developing new centers of the Institute in Istanbul and Cairo. During that time, too, he published the volume on the classical Greece and Rome for the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte series in 1927. In 1931 he succeeded Ferdinand Noack at the University of Berlin. His publishing ventures were often in concert with the photographer Walter Hege (1893-1955), Olympia, Die Akropolis, etc., for the Deutscher Kunstverlag series. In 1940 he invited the Italian archaeologist Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli to hold a conference in Berlin on Roman art, the most admired classical-civilization of the Nazis. At the end of World War II, he committed suicide in Berlin as the Russian armies occupied the city, April 27, 1945. His students in Berlin included George M. A. Hanfmann. Rodenwaldt brought recognition to the Roman “popular style” of art as important for the development of the art of late antiquity and the early medieval period. The distinction he drew between “popular” and “great” art in Imperial Rome greatly influenced the English-speaking world when the concepts appeared in Rodenwaldt’s essay in the Cambridge Ancient History, on Imperial Roman art. His art-historical writing appears in German Readings by Margarete Bieber of 1946.

His students included Alice Mühsam.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation] Qua ratione pictores pompeiani in componendis parietibus usi sint. Halle, 1908, reprinted and translated into German as chapters 1-3 in, Die Komposition der pompejanischen Wandgemälde. Berlin: Weidmann, 1909; Die Akropolis. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag,1930, English, The Acropolis. Oxford: B. H. Blackwell, 1930; Griechische Tempel. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1941; Altdorische Bildwerke in Korfu. Bilderhefte antiker Kunst 5. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1938; Der Fries des Megarons von Mykenai. Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1921; Die Kunst der Antike: Hellas und Rom. Propyläen-Kunstgeschichte 3. Berlin: Propyläen-Verlag,1927; Olympia. Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 1936; Das Relief bei den Griechen. Berlin: Schoetz & Parrhysius, 1925; über den Stilwandel in der antoninischen Kunst. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1935; edited, vol. 5, pt. 1, of Die Antiken Sarkophagreliefs. Berlin: Mann, 1952ff.; and Kunze, Emil. Hundertstes Winckelmannsprogramm der Archäologischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1940; “Eine spätantike Kunstströmung in Rom.” Mitteilungen des deutschen archäologischen Instituts, Römische Abteilung 36/37 (1921/22): 58-110; Archäologisches Institut des deutschen Reiches, 1829-1929. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1929; “Kunst um Augustus.” Die Antike 13 (1937); “Ein Typus römische Sarkophage.” Bonner Jahrbücher des Rheinischen Landesmuseums in Bonn und der Gesellschaft der Freunde und Förderer des Rheinischen Landesmuseums in Bonn 147 (1942): 217-227; über den Stilwandel in der antoninischer Kunst. Berlin: Verlag der Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften/Walter de Gruyter, 1935; Die Fresken des Palastes [of Tiryns]. Athens: Eleutheroudakis und Barth, 1912; Die Bildwerke des Artemistempels von Korkyra. vol. 2 of Korkyra: archaische Bauten und Bildwerke. 2 vols. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1939-40; “Verschollene Sarkophage.” Archaologischer Anzeiger 1/2 (1930): 169-187; “The Transition to Late-Classical Art.” chapter 16 of The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. 12: The Imperial Crisis and Recovery A. D. 193-324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1939. pp. 544-570.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 2; Medwid, Linda M. The Makers of Classical Archaeology: A Reference Work. New York: Humanity Books, 2000 pp.261-2; Calder, William. “Rodenwaldt, Gerhart.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, pp. 965-66.

Robinson, John Charles

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Robinson, John Charles

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Career(s): curators

Overview

Curator and developer of the Italian sculpture collection at the South Kensington Museum 1857 to 1863. Robinson purchased the Bernal and Soulages cabinets. He negotiated the acquisition of portion of the Gigli and Campana collections in 1859. Robinson made several buying trips to Italy for the Museum. His Italian Sculpture of the Middle Ages and Period of the Revival of Art, the first work of its kind, appeared in 1862. Robinson quarreled with Henry Cole, the Secretary of the Museum, over the development of the collections. Robinson remained on as “Art Referee” until 1867 when he was dismissed. Subsequent catalogs were completed by the collector and art historian C. Drury Fortum. Robinson acquired drawings for the Museum and planed to organize a loan exhibition of drawings.

Sources

Davies, H. “John Charles Robinson’s work at the South Kensington Museum.” Part I. Journal of the History of Collections 10, no.2 (1998):169-188, Part II. Journal of the History of Collections 11 no.1 (1999): 95-115;

Robinson, Edward Stanley Gotch, Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Robinson, Edward Stanley Gotch, Sir

Other Names:

"Stanley"

Gender: male

Date Born: 1887

Date Died: 1976

Place Born: Sneyd Park, Bristol, England, UK

Place Died: Dorset, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Classical, coins (money), and numismatics

Career(s): curators

Overview

Classical numismatist and Keeper of the Coin and Medal Department, British Museum, 1949-52. Robinson was the son of Edward and Katherine Frances Robinson. After attending Clifton College and Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied under R. H. Dundas. In 1910 he won the Barclay Vincent Head prize, named for the prominent numismatist at the British Museum. Robinson was admitted to the British School in Athens, 1910-11. He joined the British Museum, Department of Coins and Medals, in 1912. He enlisted in the British army in 1914 and was wounded in combat in France. After reassignment to the Home Office, Robinson rejoined the Museum. In 1917 he married Pamela Horsley. Robinson published the first volume of the Sylloge Nummorum Graecorum for the British Academy in 1931, the corpus of Greek coinage. The volume with its detailed photographs, set the standard for the rest of the corpus. In 1933, Robinson and Harold Mattingly published the landmark The Date of the Roman Denarius effectively redating the coinage of Republican Rome. Robinson became Deputy Keeper of the Department 1936. There he worked closely with the Keeper, George Francis Hill. Robinson was appointed Reader in Numismatics at Oxford, succeeding Joseph Grafton Milne (1867-1951) in 1938. He succeeded Hill as Keeper of the Department in 1949, a position he held until 1952. During this time, he was approached by the art collector Calouste Gulbenkian (1869 – 1955) to advise him on his acquisitions. This he did, helping to amass another fine numismatic collection. The period after World War II saw a series of articles on Greek coinage that, characteristic of much of his revisionist work, set the discipline in new directions. His 1958 article “The Beginnings of Achaemenid Coinage,” established the chronology and classification for Persian coins. In 1955 Oxford conferred an honorary doctorate on him. That year, too, he relinquished his Readership at Oxford, but continued to advise in the Heberden Coin Room at the Ashmolean Museum, endowing it with his own coin collection in 1964. He was knighted in 1972. During his last years he undertook the rewrite of Head’s Historia Numorum (1911). It remained uncompleted at his death.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] “Bibliography of Stanley Robinson’s works 1914-1966.” Kraay, Colin M and Jenkins, G. Keneth, eds. Essays in Greek Coinage Presented to Stanley Robinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968, pp. 259-263; and Mattingly, Harold. The Date of the Roman Denarius and Other Landmarks in Early Roman Coinage. London: H. Milford, 1933; edited, with Allan, J. and Mattingly, H. Transactions of the International Numismatic Congress, Royal Numismatic Society, 1936. London: B. Quaritch, 1938; Catalogue of the Greek coins of Cyrenaica. London: British Museum, 1927; The Collection of Capt. E.G. Spencer-Churchill, M.C., of Northwick Park [and] The Salting Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum. London. London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1931; and Lloyd, Albert Hugh. The Lloyd Collection. London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1933 ff.; The Newnham Davis Coins in the Wilson Collection of Classical and Eastern Antiquities, Marischal College, Aberdeen. London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1936; “The Beginnings of Achaemenid Coinage,” Numismatic Chronicle 18 (1958): 187-93; “Coins from Lycia and Pamphylia.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 34 (1914): 36-46; “A gold comb – or pin-head from Egypt.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 57 (1937): 79; “Rhegion, Zankle-Messana and the Samians.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 66 (1946): 13-20; “The coins from the Ephesian Artemision reconsidered.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 71 (1951): 156-67.

Sources

[obituary:] “Sir Edward Robinson Authority on Greek Coins.” The Times (London). June 15, 1976; p. 16.

Robinson, Edward

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Robinson, Edward

Gender: male

Date Born: 1858

Date Died: 1931

Place Born: Boston, Suffolk, MA, USA

Place Died: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Classical

Overview

Scholar of classical art and director of both the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1902-05) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1910-31). Robinson was the son of Edward A. Robinson and Ellen Coburn (Robinson). After graduating from Harvard in 1879, he pursued additional study in archaeology at the university of Berlin, spending time in Greece. After returning to the United States, he married Elizabeth Gould in Boston in 1881, and assembled a study collection of classical and renaissance casts for the Slater Memorial Museum in Norwich, CT. Robinson was appointed curator of classical antiquities for the Boston Museum of Fine Art in 1885. He lectured on classical antiquities at Harvard University 1893-94 and again 1898-02. In 1902 he was appointed director, using his position and the assistance of the famous antiquities procurer John Marshall (1862-1928) to amass much of the classical objects the museum owns today. Robinson hired Gisela M. A. Richter to assist them. When Luigi Palma di Cesnola, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, died in 1904, Robinson was briefly considered to replace him. The job went to Caspar Purdon Clarke of the South Kensington Museum, with the proviso that Robinson would become Assistant Director. When Robinson took the job in 1905, he again hired Richter for a temporary assignment to write the catalog the newly acquired Greek vases. He made her position permanent the following year. Robinson and Marshall added heavily to the ancient collection, aided with the newly established Rogers Fund. He was assigned coordination of authenticating the Cesnola Cypriote collection, which was in the midst of controversy. When Clarke resigned as director in 1910, Robinson succeeded him, retaining the title of curator of classical antiquities until 1925, when he appointed Richter, the first time a woman held a full curator rank at the Metropolitan. Though Robinson took a generally positive view toward modern art, he turned down Gertrude Whitney’s offer to donate her collection of modern American art to the Metropolitan in 1929. Whitney, together with Juliana R. Force founded the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1930. Robinson presided over major American museums at a time when their conception was fundamentally changing. Although he amassed plaster cast “study collections” for both Boston and New York, he also invested heavily in original classical objects. His dubious honor of having rejected Gertrude Whitney’s donation of modern American art reflects the conservative conception of art museums of the era as much as a lack of insight on his part. His reorganization of the Metropolitan into units based upon material (as Purdon Clarke had done) but on historic periods, modernized the museum. His acquisitions of the Morgan, Havemeyer and Altman collections demonstrated his broader interests in art, although he remained at heart a Greek scholar. He died at his home after an extended illness.

Sources

Fairbanks, A. “Edward Robinson as Curator of the Classical Department.” Bulletin, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 29 (June 1931): 51-2; National Cyclopedia of American Biography 23: 8-9; Tomkins, Calvin. Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. 2nd. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1989, pp. 113- ; [obituaries:] Revue Archaologique 5 (May 1931): 318; Pantheon 7 (June 1931): 272; Connoisseur 88 (July 1931): 113; “Edward Robinson, Art Director, Dies. Metropolitan Museum Official for the Last Two Decades Succumbs at Age of 72.” New York Times April 19, 1931, p. 1

Robinson, David Moore

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Robinson, David Moore

Gender: male

Date Born: 1880

Date Died: 1958

Place Born: Auburn, Cayuga, NY, USA

Place Died: Oxford, Amite, MS, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), archaeology, ceramic ware (visual works), Classical, Greek pottery styles, pottery (visual works), and vase

Overview

Classical art historian of Greek vases at Johns Hopkins University, 1905-1947; archaeologist. Robinson was a child prodigy who earned his A. B. from the University of Chicago by age eighteen. He studied at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens (1901-1903) where he was a member of the Corinth excavation team. He also attended classes at the German universities of Halle (1902) and Berlin (1903-04). Robinson returned to Chicago, completing his Ph. D. in classics in 1904. Robinson taught a year at Illinois College before joining the faculty of Johns Hopkins University in 1905 where he spent the rest of his career. He was appointed professor of Greek archaeology and epigraphy. In 1910 he again excavated at Sardis. He was a founder and first editor of the journal Art and Archaeology in 1914 (through 1918), likewise instrumental in the founding of the College Art Association’s Art Bulletin, acting as its editor, 1919-1921. Robinson was chosen to lead the University of Michigan excavations of Pisidian Antioch in 1924. He was Charles Eliot Norton Lecturer of the Archaeological Institute of America in 1924-25 and again in 1928-29. His discovery and excavation of the Olynthos site, 1928-1938 remained his greatest accomplishment. He cataloged the Sigmund Samuel collection of Greek vases at the Royal Ontario Museum in 1930. In the later 1930s he published his collection of Greek vases at the Baltimore Museum of Art as part of the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum series. Robinson was instrumental in bringing the two classical art historians George M. A. Hanfmann and his wife, Ilse Hanfmann to Johns Hopkins. George Hanfmann was granted a second Ph. D. from Hopkins in 1935 under Robinson for his assessment of the metal finds of the Olynthus excavations which Robinson and Hopkins were sponsoring. Robinson retired from Johns Hopkins in 1947, accepting a professorship at the University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, as professor of classics and archaeology. Moore was an expert on Greek vase painting writing a number of scholarly catalogs and contributing to the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. He assisted in building the vase collection of a number of museums and amassed his own personal collection, which was dispersed at the time of his death, the bulk of which to Harvard University.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Studies Presented to David Moore Robinson on his Seventieth Birthday. 2 vols. Saint Louis, MO: Washington University, 1951-53, vol 1, pp. [xxii]-xli; [dissertation:] Ancient Sinopea. University of Chicago, 1904, published, American Journal of Philology 27, no.2, pp. 125-153, and no. 3, pp. 245-279, 294-333; and Harcum, Cornelia G., and Iliffe, J. H. A Catalogue of the Greek Vases in the Royal Ontario Museum of Archaeology, Toronto (Largely the Gift of Sigmund Samuel, Esq.). Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 1930; and Freeman, Sarah Elizabeth, and McGehee, Mary W. The Robinson Collection, Baltimore, Md., Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. United States of America fasc. 4, 6-7. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934-38; edited, Art and Archaeology: the Arts throughout the Ages. Baltimore, MD: 1914-1916; A Hoard of Silver Coins from Carystus. New York: American Numismatic Society, 1952; Architecture and Sculpture: Houses and Other Buildings. The Johns Hopkins University Studies in Archaeology 9, Excavations at Olynthus part 2. Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1930.

Sources

“Robinson, David Moore.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, pp. 963-64; Hanfmann, G. M. A. The David Moore Robinson Bequest of Classical Art and Antiquities. Cambridge, MA: Fogg Museum of Art, 1961; [obituary:] Mylonas George E. “David Moore Robinson (1880-1958).” College Art Journal 18, no. 1 (Autumn, 1958): 76

Robertson, Martin

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Robertson, Martin

Other Names:

Charles Martin Robertson

Gender: male

Date Born: 1911

Date Died: 2004

Place Born: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Place Died: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Classical, and painting (visual works)

Overview

Oxford scholar of ancient Greek painting. Robertson’s father, Donald S. Robertson (1885-1961), was a Cambridge scholar of Greek, later Regius Professor and a colleague of the classical art scholar J. D. Beazley. The younger Robertson attended the Leys School and Trinity College. In 1929 his father ventured into architectural history by publishing A Handbook of Greek and Roman Architecture. In 1934 Robertson graduated and moved to Athens as a student of the British School, under the direction of the archaeologist Humfry Payne. The summer he spent excavating Perachora with the charismatic Payne instilled a love of Greek art and of Greece itself. There he met other British classical scholars including Romilly J. H. Jenkins (1907-1969), Nicholas Geoffrey Lemprière Hammond (1907-2001), John Manuel Cook (1910-1994), Robert Manuel Cook, Peter Megaw and Thomas J. Dunbabin (1911-1955). In 1936 Payne died tragically and Robertson returned to England as assistant Keeper in the Greek and Roman department of the British Museum, cataloging the pottery from the excavations at Al Mina in Syria led by C. Leonard Woolley (1880-1960) which had come to the British Museum. Robertson’s association with the department, though brief, was enough to implicate him in the scandal of the overcleaning of the Elgin Marbles by members of his department. Though out of the country for much of the events, it cost him three year’s senior as a complicit figure. Bernard Ashmole was appointed Keeper of the department to restore confidence. Robertson served in the war from 1940 to 1946, marrying Theodosia Cecil Spring Rice in 1942 (d. 1984). Robertson returned to the museum along with another junior member of the department, Denys Eyre Lankester Haynes, whose hire by Ashmole (after the overcleaning affair) meant Haynes more than Robertson was likely to ultimately head the department. Robertson resigned in 1948 to succeeded Ashmole in another role, Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London. There he taught along side Professor of Greek T. B. L. Webster (1905-1974) and Latin Professor Otto Skutsch (1906-1990). He was Chairman of the Managing Committee of the British School at Athens between 1959 and 1968. Robertson waited until 1959 to publish his first book. The volume, Greek Painting, used vase paintings and other works to recreate the lost wall paintings known only through written accounts In 1961 Robertson again succeeded Ashmole, this time as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at Oxford. After a series of early deaths befell Payne’s his literary editors, Robertson put his own scholarship aside to edit the second volume of Payne’s excavations of Perachora (1962). When Beazley died in 1970, Robertson and another Beazley student, Dietrich von Bothmer updated and enlarged Beazley’s earlier lists of painters, in 1971 as Paralipomena: Additions to Attic black-figure Vase-painters and to Attic Red-figure Vase-painters. His History of Greek Art, which first appeared in 1975, remains admired and used for its breadth of learning and deep understanding of the topic. 1975, too, saw the publication of The Parthenon Frieze, and A History of Greek Art, an overview of the topic written by that time one of the most eminent scholars in the field. During the 1970s, Robertson published various collections of poems he had written, including Crooked Collections (1970), For Rachel (1972), A Hot Bath at Bedtime, 1975, The Sleeping Beauty’s Prince (1977). In 1978 he retired and returned to Cambridge. An abridged version of the History of Greek Art, reluctantly edited by Robertson, in 1981, lacks the insightful interpretation of the first edition. His first wife died in 1984. In 1986, Robertson was part of a group of scholars charged with determining the authenticity a Greek Kouros, which the J. Paul Getty Museum was considering buying for $7 million. Robertson believed the work genuine, joining the opinions of others such as Bruni Ridgway and the late Ernst Langlotz. Years later, when a known fake of similar carving appeared, Robertson reversed his opinion. Robertson married again in 1988 to Louise Berge (née Holstein). The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens (1992), a book summarizing his work on red-figure painting. was followed by important articles on the vases in the J. Paul Getty Museum. His brother, Giles Robertson, was also an art historian. A video of the rock song “She Blinded Me With Science,” by the musician Thomas Dolby, who is Robertson’s son, Tom Robertson, features the elder Roberston roller-skating. Robertson adopted Beazley’s technique of Greek vase-painting analysis attributing unnamed paintings to specific hands, to which he added a attributions based upon iconography as well. In the discipline of classical studies where art is studied to gain a wider appreciation of the ancients, Robertson was able to look at art for its own sake, and to compare the work of vase painters with Mantegna (Daily Telegraph). When a new generation challenged Beazley’s work and methodology after the scholar’s death, Robertson encouraged discussion while placing himself squarely in his mentor’s camp. He was particularly thoughtful about the discipline of art history and historiography. Two of his lectures, “Between Archaeology and Art History.” (1963) and “Why Study Greek Art?” (1949) remain classic commentaries in the field.

Selected Bibliography

“Europa.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 20 (January 1957): 1-3; The Art of Vase-painting in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992; Greek, Etruscan and Roman Vases in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. Liverpool: National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside/Liverpool University Press, 1987; Greek Painting. Geneva: Skira, 1959; The Parthenon Frieze. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975; Between Archaeology and Art History. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963; and Boardman, John. Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Great Britain. Castle Ashby, Northampton. Oxford: Oxford University Press/British Academy, 1979; Why Study Greek Art? An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College, London. London: H. K. Lewis & Co., 1949.

Sources

[obituaries:] Sparkes, Brian. “Professor Martin Robertson, Scholar of Classical Art and Archaeology.” The Independent (London) January 3, 2005, p.. 27, “Professor Martin Robertson, Authority on Ancient Greek Painting and Sculpture.” Daily Telegraph (London) January 4, 2005, p. 23; The Times (London) January 31, 2005.

Robertson, Giles

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Robertson, Giles Henry

Gender: male

Date Born: 16 October 1913

Date Died: 21 September 1987

Place Born: Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England, UK

Place Died: France

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

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

Institution(s): University of Edinburgh

Overview

University professor responsible for monument restoration during World War II. Robertson was born on October 16th, 1913 to Donald Struan Robertson (1885-1961), a professor of Classics at Cambridge, and Petica Jones (Coursolles) (1883–1941), a Greek vase painting scholar. As the son of a family of Classics professors at the University of Cambridge (his elder brother became the vase scholar Martin Robertson), Robertson discovered his career at the intersection of monument restoration and the fine arts. He studied painting at the elite Ley’s school near his hometown of Cambridge. After graduation, Robertson traveled to Vienna, Italy, where he met Johannes Wilde, a Courtauld Institute scholar of Venetian painting. Wilde’s influence on Robertson inspired him to study Renaissance art. In 1937, Robertson secured an assistantship at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge lasting until his draft into World War II in 1941, where he served under the British Army Searchlight Unit, spotting German night bombers. He attended the Government Code and Cipher School at Bletchley Park to decode Nazi encryptions. During this time, 1943, he married Eleanor Clark (b. 1919).

Following the end of the war, Robertson played a substantial role in assessing the artistic damage under the Searchlight Battalion & Foreign Office in Westphalia. Within this division, Robertson repaired monuments damaged by the war, evacuated paintings, and inspected various churches, museums, and archives for looting (Monuments Men). In 1946, Robertson joined the faculty as Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he immediately began research on several Italian Renaissance artists, writing a catalogue raisonné of Vincenzo Catena’s works (1954). In a joint effort with his wife, Robertson founded the Scottish Georgian Society to preserve historical buildings (1957). He was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 1961 and Reader in 1968, where Robertson wrote his most notable work, Giovanni Bellini. In it, he proposed that the Renaissance movement had “deeper springs than a mere revival of antiquity” (Times Obituary). Later, Robertson collaborated with Professor David Talbot Rice to make the Honors degree in Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh before succeeding Professor Rice as the Watson-Gordon Professor of Fine Art. Robertson retired in 1981 and died six years later in 1987, at 73 years old, in Southern France before finishing his book on Titian. His family donated his personal collection of exhibition catalogues to the University of Edinburgh.

Robertson’s work on restoring the damage done by World War II solidified his understanding of the works of antiquity and allowed him to analyze both the works of antiquity and the Renaissance in the present (Monuments Men Foundation). His dedication to exploring the deeper themes behind the Renaissance movement was obvious through his teachings in the University of Edinburgh, where he was regarded as a witty, popular professor, and his book on Giovanni Bellini, which outlined his thoughts on the Renaissance in the present on full display (Freshwater). Robertson’s approach to art history was highly connoisseurship which his interest in preservation of the works of the past required.

Selected Bibliography

‘Tiepolo’s and Veronese’s Finding of Moses.” Burlington Magazine, 91 (April 1949): 99-101;
Giovanni Bellini. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968;
“Honour, Love and Truth, an Alternative Reading of Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love.” Renaissance Studies, October 2, no. 2 (1988): 268-179, DOI: 10.1111/j.1477-4658.1988.tb00156;

Sources

[obituaries:] “Prof Giles Robertson.” Times (London), October 17, 1987;
“Robertson, Maj. Giles H.” Monuments Men Foundation. Accessed September 16, 2020. href=”https://www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/robertson-maj-giles-h” target=”blank”>www.monumentsmenfoundation.org/robertson-maj-giles-h;
Freshwater, Peter. “Giles Henry Robertson.” Edinburgh University Library Gallery of Benefactors. Accessed September 16, 2020. http://www.docs.is.ed.ac.uk/docs/lib-archive/bgallery/Gallery/records/nineteen2/robertsong.html.

Contributors: Zahra Hassan

Roberts, Laurance Page

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Roberts, Laurance Page

Gender: male

Date Born: 1907

Date Died: 2002

Place Born: Bala-Cynwyd, Lower Merion Township, Montgomery, PA

Place Died: Baltimore, Baltimore Independent City, MD, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Asian, biography (general genre), Chinese (culture or style), and Japanese (culture or style)

Overview

Brooklyn Museum director and Asianist scholar; author of Dictionary of Japanese Artists (1976). Roberts’ grandfather, George Brook Roberts (1833-1897) had been president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and his father, George Brinton Roberts, a coal magnate. Laurance Roberts attended the Montgomery School in Philadelphia and St. George’s School in Rhode Island before entering Princeton in 1925. He graduated from Princeton University in 1929 magna cum laude, a classmate and friend of John D. Rockefeller III (1906-1978). After a year of post-graduate work, Roberts accepted a position at the Pennsylvania Museum of art (now the Philadelphia Museum of Art), then under the directorship of Fiske Kimball. Without specialized training in Asian art, Roberts was asked if he would work in the Chinese department in 1930. Two years later his father sent him on a study tour of Japan and China. In China he met Harold Acton (1904-1994) who was teaching at the National University in Beijing. Roberts was appointed curator of the Oriental art department of the Brooklyn Museum in 1934. He married Isabel Spaulding (Roberts) in 1937, a Vassar alumna in the Education Department. The two traveled widely for the museum and their research. They visited with horror the “Entartete Kunst” exhibition the Nazis mounted in Munich. In 1938 Roberts was appointed Director of the Museum, a position he held until World War II. As director, Roberts channeled acquisitions to areas of strength, rather than “filling in holes” for a homogenous collection. He also encouraged mounting major exhibitions to raise the museum profile. Roberts had visited Japan before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and recalled the uncomfortable American perception of having been so close to the “enemy.” Beginning in 1942, Roberts served as a captain in army intelligence, his wife taking over his museum duties until 1946. That year the Robertses moved to Rome where he was director of the American Academy. The Roberts entertained in a semi-official capacity at the Villa Auelia (where the Academy is housed), as recorded by Roger P. Hinks. In 1960 Roberts retired, returning briefly to New York to be the first director of the State Council of the Arts, 1960-61, before moving back to Europe, living in Venice, Paris and London. In 1967 Roberts published his Connoisseur’s Guide to Japanese Museums. His Dictionary of Japanese Artists appeared in 1976, which remains an influential resource for artists biography of Japan. Roberts moved to Baltimore in 1988 where he died fourteen years later at 95. Both Acton and Hinks left moving accounts of Roberts in their memoirs.

Selected Bibliography

A Dictionary of Japanese Artists: Painting, Sculpture, Ceramics, Prints, Lacquer. New York: Weatherhill, 1976; The Connoisseur’s Guide to Japanese Museums. Rutland, VT: Japan Society of New York/C. E. Tuttle Co.,1967, 2nd ed., Roberts’ Guide to Japanese Museums. New York: Kodansha International, 1978, 3nd ed. Tokyo: Simul Press, 1987; The Bernard Berenson Collection of Oriental Art at Villa I Tatti. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1991.

Sources

“Laurence Page Roberts: 1907-2002.” International House of Japan Bulletin 22 no. 2 (Autumn 2002): 82-3; The Gymnasium of the Mind: the Journals of Roger Hinks, 1933-1963. John Goldsmith, ed. Salisbury, UK: Michael Russell, 1984, pp. 187ff, 253ff; Acton, Harold. More Memoirs of an Aesthete. London: Methuen, 1970, p. 211; [obituaries:] Roberts, Ian Lowe. “Laurance Roberts.” Independent [London] March 15, 2002, p. 6; Pace, Eric. “Laurance P. Roberts, 95, Director of Museums.” New York Times April 1, 2002, p. B7.

Brooklyn Museum director and Asianist scholar; author of Dictionary of Japanese Artists (1976). Roberts’ grandfather, George Brook Roberts (1833-1897) had been president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and his father, George Brinton Roberts,

Roberts-Jones, Philippe, Baron

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Roberts-Jones, Philippe, Baron

Other Names:

Philippe Roberts-Jones

Gender: male

Date Born: 1924

Place Born: Ixelles, Brussels-Capital Region, Belgium

Home Country/ies: Belgium

Career(s): authors, curators, educators, novelists, and poets

Overview

Chief curator of the Brussels Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique (Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium); professor of art history; poet and novelist. Roberts-Jones belonged to a family of British descent. His father, Robert Roberts-Jones, was a lawyer. The young Philippe attended high school in Uccle (near Brussels) at the Athénée communal. In 1943, after his graduation, his father, who had joined the Resistance during World War II, was executed by the Nazis. Philippe entered the British army as liaison officer. Demobilized in 1946, he enrolled at the Free University of Brussels to study law as well as art history and archaeology. After his graduation he continued his study abroad, at Harvard University and at the Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. During those years he began publishing poetry. In 1951 he received a grant from the Franco-Belgian cultural agreements. In his capacity as junior fellow of the Belgian National Fund for Scientific Research (1952-1954) he went to Paris, where he worked at the Print Room of the Bibliothèque nationale (1953-1954). Under the supervision of the curator Jean Adhémar, Roberts-Jones did research on the satirical press between 1860 and 1890. He obtained his doctorate in 1955 at the Free University of Brussels with a dissertation on this topic, La caricature française entre 1860 et 1890. From 1956 to 1958 he served the Ministère de l’Instruction Publique as inspector of Public Libraries, and subsequently, until 1961, as cultural attaché of the minister. In addition, he obtained a teaching position at his Alma Mater, in the history of engraving. In 1959 he created the course of contemporary art as professor extraordinarius. In 1962 he obtained the rank of professor ordinarius, a position that he held until 1989. Among the many topics he covered in his teaching, museology deserves to be singled out. He strongly promoted contemporary art, which in 1969 became a separate section of the art history curriculum. His career as a museum person began in 1959, as curator of the Brussels Royal Museums of Fine Arts. A year later he was appointed chief curator, a position that he held until 1984. At the beginning of his career, the museum was in a poor condition; several galleries, the modern art galleries among them, were closed due to construction work. Another problem was the lack of conservation and research personnel. Roberts-Jones soon worked hard to improve the situation. Between 1961 and 1964 he appointed a team of art historians, among them his later successor, curator Henry Pauwels (b. 1923). Another new appointee was Françoise Popelier (b. 1937), who later became his wife. A successful event was the 1963 retrospective exhibition, Le siècle de Bruegel, sponsored by Baron René Boël, which significantly contributed to the new public role of the museum and to its improving reputation. Le siècle de Rubens followed in 1965. In 1962, while the modern art galleries of the main museum were closed, Roberts-Jones was able to open a small provisional museum of modern art in a nearby location, the so-called “Musée de poche”. Until its closure in 1978, the curator of modern art, Francine-Claire Legrand organized here 92 very successful temporary exhibitions, which were freely accessible. Within the complex of the Royal Museums of Fine Arts, extensions of the Musée d’art ancient and of the Musée du XIXe siècle were inaugurated in 1974. The new Museum of modern art, the construction of which begun in 1978, opened in 1984. Roberts-Jones’ publications in the field of art history show his special interest in painting, from the old masters, such as Pieter Bruegel, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, up to contemporary art. In 1969 he published a study on trends in Belgian painting from realism to surrealism, which also appeared in Dutch and English. His monograph on the surrealist painter René Magritte appeared in 1972. In 1974 he was elected a corresponding member, and the next year a member of the Royal Academy of Belgium. In 1978 his comprehensive monograph on European non-realist painting appeared, La peinture irréaliste au XIXe siècle. In 1981 the Royal Academy of Belgium edited an anthology of a number of his previously published essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, L’alphabet des circonstances: essais sur l’art des XIXe et XXe siècles. Roberts-Jones left the Brussels museum in 1984. The next year he was elected permanent secretary of the Académie royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. He served a number of other academies and institutions, including, from 1986, the Académie des Beaux-Arts de l’Institut de France. For his achievements as chief curator he was ennobled by the Belgian king in 1988, receiving the title of Baron. In 1989 he retired from his position as professor. Another anthology of his writings, including essays on a broad range of topics, from the old masters until the present-day art scene was published in 1989, Image donnée, image reçue. In 1995 he published “Éclat et densité de la peinture en Belgique” in Une histoire visuelle de la peinture en Belgique présentée par Philippe Roberts-Jones, which is the third volume of Le Dictionnaire des peintres belges du XIVe siècle à nos jours. Roberts-Jones was a member of the academic board of this new dictionary of Belgian painters. In 1997 another collection of essays appeared: Signes ou traces: arts des XIXe et XXe siècles. In the same year he co-authored a critical study on Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pierre Bruegel l’Ancien, with his wife, Françoise Roberts-Jones. This extensive monograph was translated into several languages including Dutch and English.

Selected Bibliography

[complete list, including his poetry and novels:] http://www2.academieroyale.be/academie/documents/BaronPhilippeRobertsJones594.pdf, [selected bibliography:] “Sélection Bibliographique.” Irréalisme et art moderne: les voies de l’imaginaire dans l’art des XVIIIe, XIXe et XXe siècles : Mélanges Philippe Roberts-Jones. Brussels: Section d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie de l’Université libre de Bruxelles, 1992, pp. 42-49; La presse satirique illustrée entre 1860 et 1890. Paris: Institut français de Presse, 1956; De Daumier à Lautrec. Essai sur l’histoire de la caricature française entre 1860 et 1890. Paris: Les Beaux-Arts, 1960; Du réalisme au surréalisme. La peinture en Belgique de Joseph Stevens à Paul Delvaux. Brussels: Laconti, 1969, English, From Realism to Surrealism. Painting in Belgium from Joseph Stevens to Paul Delvaux. Brussels: Laconti, 1972; Magritte, poète visible. Brussels: Laconti, 1972; La peinture irréaliste au XIX siècle. Fribourg: Office du livre, 1978, English, Beyond Time and Place: Non-realist Painting in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1978; L’alphabet des circonstances: essais sur l’art des XIXe et XXe siècles. Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1981; Image donnée, image reçue. Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1989; Une histoire visuelle de la peinture en Belgique présentée par Philippe Roberts-Jones. in Le Dictionnaire des peintres belges du XIVe siècle à nos jours. Vol. 3. Brussels: La Renaissance du livre, 1995; Signes ou traces: arts des XIXe et XXe siècles. Brussels: Académie royale de Belgique, 1997; Pierre Bruegel l’Ancien. Paris: Flammarion, 1997, English, Pieter Bruegel. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002.

Sources

Devillez, Virginie. “Philippe Roberts-Jones, Conservateur en chef ” in Les Musées royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique. Deux siècles d’histoire. 1. Brussels: Dexia Banque et Racine, 2003, pp. 451-461; http://www2.academieroyale.be/academie/documents/BaronPhilippeRobertsJones594.pdf; “Biographrie.” Irréalisme et art moderne: les voies de l’imaginaire dans l’art des XVIIIe, XIXe et XXe siècles : Mélanges Philippe Roberts-Jones. Brussels: Section d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie de l’Université libre de Bruxelles, 1992, pp. 40-42.

Contributors: Monique Daniels

Robert, Carl

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Robert, Carl

Gender: male

Date Born: 1850

Date Died: 1922

Place Born: Marburg, Hesse, Germany

Place Died: Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): archaeology, funerary art, funerary arts, philology, Roman (ancient Italian culture or period), and sarcophagi (coffins)

Overview

Archaeologist and philologist; author of a corpus of Roman sarcophagi. Robert was born to a family of academics, originally of French origin. He studied at Bonn under Otto Jahn, Reinhard Kekulé von Stradonitz and Anton Springer and, in Berlin, under Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903) and Adolf Kirchhoff (1826-1908) and Ulrich von Wilamowtiz-Moellendorff (1848-1931). He traveled extensively on research before accepting a position as Extraordinarius (associate professor) of archaeology in Berlin in 1877. Three years later he had advanced to full professor. He remained at Berlin until 1890 when he moved to the University in Halle to direct the new archaeological museum there. He was succeeded in Berlin by Kekulé who had come to Berlin as museum director to the Kaiser. In Halle, Robert directed the university’s museum and began to issue his famous corpus of Roman sarcophagi, Antike Sarkophagreliefs, 1890-1919, with Friedrich Matz (1890-1974) based on Mommsen’s Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum, published by the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut (DAI). The corpus required more than fourteen trips to Italy. At the same time he revised the Mythologie of Ludwig Preller (1809-1861) and edited the classical journal Hermes for over forty years. The museum Robert directed at Hall was renamed the Robertinum in the 1920s to commemorate his accomplishments. The art historian Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski wrote his dissertation with his assistance at Munich under Enrico Brunn. Robert exemplifies Jahn’s methodology of “monumental philology” perhaps better than any other of Jahn’s students. The Roman sarcophagi corpus is among the most important examples. This corpus was the model for other art-historical models, including the Corpus vasorum antiquorum and the Corpus vitrearum Medii Aevi.

Selected Bibliography

and Matz, Friedrich. Die antiken Sarkophagreliefs. [ Robert wrote] vols II “Mythologische Cyklen,”and III “Einzelmythen,” parts 1-3, Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1890ff.; Archäologische Hermeneutik: Anleitung zur Deutung klassischer Bildwerke. Berlin: Weidmann, 1919; Kentaurenkampf und Tragoedienscene: zwei Marmorbilder aus Herculaneum, nebst einem Excurs über das Heraklesbild in Casa del centenario. Halle: M. Niemeyer, 1898.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 96-97; Calder, William, III. “Robert, Carl (1850-1922).” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, p. 962.

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