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Art Historians

Robbins, Daniel J.

Full Name: Robbins, Daniel J.

Other Names:

  • Jeremiah Drummer, pseudonym

Gender: male

Date Born: 1932

Date Died: 1995

Place Born: Brooklyn, Cattaraugus, NY, USA

Place Died: Lebanon, Grafton, NH, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Cubist


Overview

Director of the Fogg Art Museum and Cubist scholar. Robbins received his A. B. at age 19 from the University of Chicago and his M. A. in art history from Yale University. He had applied to Yale initially to study painting, but switched to art history when he discovered the painting department was dominated by the minimalist painter Josef Albers (1888-1976). Robbins graduated from Yale in 1955 and began teaching at Indiana University (1955-1956). He pursued his Ph.D. at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, studying under Robert Goldwater, completing his course work for the degree in 1958 in the joint Certificate of Museology program under A. Hyatt Mayor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Robbins continued to paint, exhibiting under the pseudonym Jeremiah Drummer, and wrote art criticism for the Village Voice under the name of George Gregory Dobbs. He received a Fulbright grant to study at the University of Paris in 1958 and on his return joined the National Gallery of Art in Washgington, D. C., in 1959 as a research assistant to the Chief Curator. He also married Eugenia Scandrett that same year. In 1961 he moved to the Guggenheim Museum to be a curator and then, in 1965, director of the Art Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD, Robbins made exhibiting and collecting contemporary art a priority, something which the Museum had not done for sixty years. He mounted the first exhibitions which were curated by Andy Warhol (“Raid the Icebox 1,” 1969). Robbins became the director of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University in 1971. At Harvard, he continued to champion modern art, including leading the restoration of the Mark Rothko murals in the dining room of Harvard’s Holyoke Center. Robbin’s duties as a curator and director prevented him from completing a dissertation; he left Harvard in 1974 and completed his dissertation and received his degree from NYU in 1975. Thereafter he held a professorship at Dartmouth college, 1975-80, but spent much of his time as guest lecturer at a variety of institutions, Senior Fellow at the National Endowment for the Humanities (1976), Yale (1977), Williams College (1978-79), Hunter College (1984), the University of Iowa (1985), a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1980 he accepted a permanent position as the May I. C. Baker Professor of the Arts at Union College. He was directing a catalogue raisonné on Albert Gleizes when he was diagnosed with Waldenstrom’s macroglobulinemia, a cancer of the lymphatic system. He died shortly before his sixty-third birthday. Robbins’ area of scholarship was on the theoretical and philosophical origins of Cubism, especially Albert Gleizes (1881-1953) and Henri Le Fauconnier (1881-1946).


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] The Formation and Maturity of Albert Gleizes: A Biographical and Critical Study, 1881 through 1920. New York University, 1975; Raid the icebox 1 with Andy Warhol: an exhibition selected from the vaults of the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design. Providence, R.I., 1969; Jacques Villon Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, 1976; and Moser, Joann. Jean Metzinger in Retrospect. Iowa City: University of Iowa Museum of Art, 1985; Albert Gleizes, 1881-1953: a Retrospective Exhibition. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1964; Cézanne and Structure in Modern Painting. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1963; and Pierre Georgel, and Anne Varichon. Albert Gleizes: Catalogue Raisonné. 2 vols. Paris: Fondation Albert Gleizes, 1998; The Vermont State House: a History & Guide. Montpelier: Vermont Council on the Arts & Vermont State House Preservation Committee, 1980; and Metzinger, Fritz. Die Entstehung des Kubismus: eine Neubewertung. Frankfurt: R. G. Fischer, 1990; “An Abbreviated Historiography of Cubism.” Art Journal 47 (Winter 1988): 277-83.


Sources

“Daniel J. Robbins.” Rhode Island School of Design Museum Notes 83 (1996): 2-3; [obituary:] Kimmelmann, Michael. “Daniel Robbins, 62; Was Art Historian And a Modernist.” The New York Times, January 18, 1995, p. D21.




Citation

"Robbins, Daniel J.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/robbinsd/.


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Director of the Fogg Art Museum and Cubist scholar. Robbins received his A. B. at age 19 from the University of Chicago and his M. A. in art history from Yale University. He had applied to Yale initially to study painting, but switched to art hist

Robb, David M.

Full Name: Robb, David M.

Other Names:

  • David Metheny Robb

Gender: male

Date Born: 1903

Date Died: 1990

Place Born: Tak Hing Chau, China

Place Died: Scituate, Plymouth, MA, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Career(s): educators


Overview

Medievalist art historian; professor at University of Pennsylvania. Robb graduated from Oberlin College 1926 and began his teaching career as an associate professor of the history of art from 1930 to 1935 at Colgate University. He was a professor of fine arts at the University of Minnesota from 1935 to 1939. In 1935 he wrote one of the early surveys of the history of art in the United States with J. J. Garrison, his Art of the Western World. It went into many subsequent editions and built a reputation for him as an art history teacher. He moved to the University of Pennsylvania in 1939. Robb continued to study art history at the graduate level, eventually receiving his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1941 under Charles Rufus Morey, He advanced to professor of the history of art at Pennsylvania. Robb was president of the Art Association of America in 1960. He retired emeritus in 1974. He was also a Guggenheim fellow and Fulbright scholar.  His students included Samuel Y. Edgerton.


Selected Bibliography

  • [dissertation:] The Romanesque Sculpture of Languedoc and Spain in the Late XI and Early XII Centuries. Princeton University, 1941.
  • and Garrison, J. J. Art in the Western World. New York: Harper, 1935;
  • The Harper History of Painting: the Occidental Tradition. New York: Harper, 1951
  • The Art of the Illuminated Manuscript. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Art Alliance, 1973;

Sources

  • [obituaries:] “David M. Robb, 86; Scholar, Teacher, Art Historian.” Boston Globe, April 11, 1990, p. 94;
  • “David M. Robb, Art Historian, 86.” The New York Times, April 11, 1990, Section D, p. 26,



Citation

"Robb, David M.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/robbd/.


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Medievalist art historian; professor at University of Pennsylvania. Robb graduated from Oberlin College 1926 and began his teaching career as an associate professor of the history of art from 1930 to 1935 at Colgate University. He was a professor

Robaut, Alfred

Full Name: Robaut, Alfred

Gender: male

Date Born: 1830

Date Died: 1909

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Impressionist (style)

Career(s): art collectors


Overview

Collector of documents on Corot and impressionism. He published the first catalogue raisonné on Eugene Delacroix and, together with Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, he published theon Corot.



Sources

Bazin 484-485




Citation

"Robaut, Alfred." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/robauta/.


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Collector of documents on Corot and impressionism. He published the first catalogue raisonné on Eugene Delacroix and, together with Étienne Moreau-Nélaton, he published theon Corot.

Rizzo, Giulio Emanuele

Full Name: Rizzo, Giulio Emanuele

Gender: male

Date Born: 1865

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): archaeology and Italian (culture or style)


Overview

Italian archaeologist. Rizzo published a pamphlet in 1939, Maniere “corrette” e metodi corrotti di Bernardo Ashmole, which Ashmole replied to in the Journal of Hellenic Studies the same year.


Selected Bibliography

Maniere “corrette” e metodi corrotti di Bernardo Ashmole. Rome: privately printed, 1939;





Citation

"Rizzo, Giulio Emanuele." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/rizzog/.


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Italian archaeologist. Rizzo published a pamphlet in 1939, Maniere “corrette” e metodi corrotti di Bernardo Ashmole, which Ashmole replied to in the Journal of Hellenic Studies the same year.

Rivoira, Giovanni Teresio, Commendatore

Full Name: Rivoira, Giovanni Teresio, Commendatore

Other Names:

  • Giovanni Rivoira

Gender: male

Date Born: 1849

Date Died: 1919

Place Born: La Manta di Saluzzo, Piedmont, Italy

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

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

Institution(s): Università degli Studi di Torino


Overview

Archaeologist, architectural historian and government administrator; major exponent of Rome in the “Orient oder Rom” debate with Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski. Rivoira was born the year of Victor Emmanuel’s accession to power. His father was Franceso Rivoira (1814-1875), descended from an old Savoy family now in the Piedmont. His mother was related to the mathematician Jacopo Francesco Riccati (1676-1754). After attending the local Collegio, he enter the University of Turin where he studied engineering. He briefly worked supervising construction before the unification of Italy when he moved to Rome joining the army of General Cadorna and the “liberation” of the city. He joined the department of Posts and Telegraphs, rising to the position of secretary to the Director-General. The position allowed him much travel. He married an English woman in 1884, ten years later he read a paper on electricity to the British Association at Oxford. He made the strong friendship of the English classicist Gordon McNeil Rushforth (1862-1938), who subsequently translated Rivoira’s books into English. In Italy, Rivoira experienced the monuments of Italy first hand. Although initially interested in painting, having read the work of Giovanni Morelli, he turned to architecture as a “less crowded field.” He left his government post in 1899, embarking on a tour of architecture through the middle east, Greece, Spain and Germany. In 1901, Rivoira published the first volume of his Le origini dell’architetura lombardia, a book arguing that Rome was the source of medieval architecture. He traced the church of Hagia Sophia to the Thermae of ancient Rome and the Gothic from the Lombardic vaulted basilica such as Sant’Ambrogio, Milan. The same year, a University of Graz scholar, Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski published his book Orient oder Rom, (Orient or Rome) arguing that Western art derived from Eastern origins. These antithetical and contemporary theories fueled a debate which would last Rivoira’s life. In 1908 he travelled again to Constantinople and the Balkans (cut short by Armenia’s cholera epidemic) and North Africa in 1910. He lectured at the American School of Classical Studies in Rome the same year on the architectural achievements of Hadrian, perhaps his most important synthetic work. Studies of Spanish and north African architecture confirmed his life-long thesis that even Islamic architecture owed much to Rome, which his second book, Architettura Musulmana, 1914, espoused. Rivoira returned to the Roman Empire as the source of all architecture in the West, writing his Architettura romana: costruzione e statica nell’ età imperiale. The expansive book examined Roman architecture through the seventeenth century. The influenza pandemic of 1918 took his life early in 1919 before he could see its publication. Rivoira died in Rome at age 69. His manuscript was published posthumously. A Rivoira fellowship in medieval archaeology was established at the British School at Rome in his honor. Rivoira’s method was to carefully measure monuents, compiling an immense amount a factual data about monuments to reach “scientific conclusions.” Like his compatriot, Giacomo Boni, he used his engineering training to bring a new accuracy to archaeology. His long-term and ferocious debate with Strzygowski on the question of origins of the medieval styles came as a result of the newly staked out epistemological question. Both maintained that their method differed from traditional, subjective art history by what they considered scientific objectivity (Wharton). That their mutual belief in empirical archaeological evidence resulted in opposite conclusions stoked the debate more, both claiming to be free of bias. Both were susceptible to nationalistic sentiment, though Strzygowski’s accusation that Rivoria’s need to see Rome as the origin was because of Rivoira’s nationalism, appeared more sustained. Rivoira was a patriot and made references to it in his writing. The extremes of the debate worsed with the world war into “anti-Teutonic prejudices [which] caused Rivoira terrible anxieties,” (Strong). His work was admired and used by Robert Charles de Lasteyrie du Saillant and W. R. Lethaby, among others. His belief of the supremacy of Lombardy in Romanesque and early Gothic architecture is today universally rejected (Ehresmann). His arguement, however, convinced A. Kingsley Porter at the time, who espoused it in his 1915 book Lombard Architecture.


Selected Bibliography

[bibliography:] “Bibliography of the Author.” Rivoira, Giovanni. Roman Architecture and its Principles of Construction Under the Empire. New York: Hacker Arts Books, 1972, p. xxvii; Le Origini dell’Architettura e delle sue principali derivazioni nei paesi d’Oltr’Alpe. Rome: Loescher, 1901, vol. 2 1907, reissued condensed version, Milan: Hoepli, 1908; English, Lombardic Architecture: Its Origin, Development and Derivatives. London: W. Heinemann, 1910; Architettura Musulmana sue origini e suo sviluppo. Milan: Hoepli, 1914, English, Moslem Architecture: Its Origins and Development. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1918; Architettura romana: costruzione e statica nell’ età imperiale; con appendice sullo svolgimento delle cupole fino al sec. XVII. Milan: Hoepli, 1921.


Sources

Rushforth, Gordon McNeil. “Biographical Note.” Rivoira, Giovanni. Roman Architecture and its Principles of Construction Under the Empire. New York: Hacker Arts Books, 1972, pp. xxi-xxvi; Ehresmann, Donald L. Architecture: A Bibliographic Guide to Basic Reference Works, Histories and Handbooks. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1984, nos. 533, 535; Wharton, Annabel Jane. “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; [obituaries:] Strong, Eugene Sellers. “Teresio Rivoira.” Times Literary Supplement March 27, 1919 p. 164; Van Buren, A. W. “Teresio Rivoira.” Classical Journal 14 no. 9 (June 1919): 566-567.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Rivoira, Giovanni Teresio, Commendatore." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/rivoirag/.


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Archaeologist, architectural historian and government administrator; major exponent of Rome in the “Orient oder Rom” debate with Josef Rudolf Thomas Strzygowski. Rivoira was born the year of Victor Emmanuel’s accession t

Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff

Full Name: Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff

Other Names:

  • Andrew Ritchie

Gender: male

Date Born: 18 September 1907

Date Died: 12 August 1978

Place Born: Bellshill, North Lanarkshire, Scotland, UK

Place Died: Sharon, Litchfield, CT, USA

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions), painting (visual works), and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): directors (administrators), gallerists, and museum directors


Overview

Director of the Painting and Sculpture Department, Museum of Modern Art, NY, from 1949 to 1957 and Director, Yale Art Gallery, 1957-1971, sculpture scholar. Ritchie moved with his family to the United States when he was 15 years old, settling in Pittsburgh. He took a job at 17 at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh to fund his education. Ritchie entered the University of Pittsburgh in 1927 graduating with an MFA (art history in medieval studies) degree in 1933. He secured a fellowship to study at the Courtauld Institute, University of London for 1933. His Ph.D., from the Courtauld was granted in 1935 with a dissertation topic on English medieval art. Beginning in 1935 was a lecturer and researcher at the Frick Collection, New York, and taught at New York University and Johns Hopkins. The same year he married Jane Thompson (d. 1986), a Pittsburgh native. In 1942 he was appointed the director of the Albright Art Gallery (modern, Albright-Knox Gallery) in Buffalo, NY, replacing Gordon Washburn (1904-1983). As director, Ritchie oversaw the additions to the collection including Seurat’s Le Chahut and Gauguin’s Yellow Christ. At the conclusion of World War II, Ritchie served in the Monuments and Fine Arts Section of the United States Army, “Monuments Men” as a representative of the Commanding General in Austria, a civilian with the rank of colonel. He assisted in the repatriation of stolen art by the Nazis, between June 1945 and May 1946, for which he was subsequently honored by France and the Netherlands. He retunred to the Albright, hiring one of the officers from the Monuments Division, Charles Parkhurst, as an assistant curator. Ritchie left the Albright Museum in 1949, replaced by Edgar Schenck, to head the department of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, succeeding René d’Harnoncourt who had now become the MoMA’s director. In 1957 accepted an appointment to head the Yale University Art Gallery, replacing Lamont Moore. As director, he acquired objects for the Gallery’s collections (David Smith, Noguchi, Maillol) before their jump in art market price. When the major art collector Paul Mellon (1907-1999) was looking for a university to place his British art collection in the mid-1960s, Ritchie successfuly persuaded him to create the Yale Center for British Studies (today, Yale Center for British Art), guiding the selection of Louis Kahn (1901-1974) as architect (Russell). Ritchie received an honorary doctorate from the Royal College of Arts, London, in 1970, the first American to be honored. He retired from Yale in 1971, lecturing as the Clark Professor at Williams College the following year. He received decorations from France, the Netherlands, and Germany for his efforts. He retired to a home in Canaan, CT. His papers are held at the Albirght-Knox Art Gallery Archives and the Archives of American Art. An annual Andrew C. Ritchie Lecture was established, jointly sponsored by the Yale Center for British Art and the Yale University Art Gallery, in his memory. Though initially trained and educated as a medievalist, it is as a British 18th-century specialist and modern sculpture authority that was Ritchie’s reputation. His approach to art was largely the formalism typical of his era.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Types and Antitypes of the Passion in English Mediaeval art, 12th-13th Centuries. University of London (Courtauld Institute of Art), 1935; English Painters, Hogarth to Constable: Lectures Delivered April 9, 10, 11, 16, 17, 1940, at the Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1942; and Rewald, John. Aristide Maillol, with an Introduction and Survey of the Artist’s Work in American Collections. Buffalo: Albright Art Gallery, 1945; Abstract Painting and Sculpture in America. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951; Sculpture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1952; The New Decade: 22 European Painters and Sculptors. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1955; Masters of British Painting, 1800-1950 [from the collections of] the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the City Art Museum of St. Louis and the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Francisco. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1956; edited, and Haftmann, Werner, and Hentzen, Alfred, and Lieberman, William S. German Art of the Twentieth Century. New York: Museum of Modern Art/Simon and Schuster, 1957;


Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Modern Perspectives in Western Art History: An Anthology of 20th-Century Writings on the Visual Arts. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971, p. 40; “Museum Aide to Head The Yale Art Gallery.” New York Times, January 3, 1957, p. 10; [finding aid] Tallman, Nathan. “Andrew C. Ritchie Records, 1942-1949.” Albirght-Knox Art Gallery Archives http://www.albrightknox.org/research/archives-collection/andrew-c-ritchie/; [obituaries:] Shestack, Alan. “Andrew Carnduff Ritchie.” Yale University Art Gallery Bulletin 37 no. 2 (Summer 1979): 12-13; R[ussell], J[ohn]. “Mr A. C. Ritchie.” The Times (London) August 30, 1978; p. 14.




Citation

"Ritchie, Andrew Carnduff." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/ritchiea/.


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Director of the Painting and Sculpture Department, Museum of Modern Art, NY, from 1949 to 1957 and Director, Yale Art Gallery, 1957-1971, sculpture scholar. Ritchie moved with his family to the United States when he was 15 years old, settling in P

Rishel, Joseph H. Jr.

Full Name: Rishel, Joseph H. Jr.

Gender: male

Date Born: unknown

Date Died: unknown

Home Country/ies: United States

Career(s): curators


Overview

Senior curator of pre-1900 European painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was married the art historian Anne d’Harnoncourt in 1971.






Citation

"Rishel, Joseph H. Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/rishelj/.


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Senior curator of pre-1900 European painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art. He was married the art historian Anne d’Harnoncourt in 1971.

Ripa, Cesare

Full Name: Ripa, Cesare

Other Names:

  • Giovanni Campani

Gender: male

Date Born: c. 1560

Date Died: c. 1623-1625

Place Born: Perugia, Perugia, Umbria, Italy

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): iconography


Overview

Compiler of a famous early iconographic dictionary, the Iconologia. Little is known about Giovanni Campani, who wrote under the name of Ceasare Ripa. He was not a professional scholar, although he was associated with literary academies in Siena and Perugia. Ripa wrote as a leisure pursuit when not working as majordomo to Cardinal Antonio Maria Salvini (1537-1602). Ripa’s fame rests solely on one dictionary of iconographic forms that was used heavily in the baroque world. In 1593, Ripa published a manual in Rome called Iconologia, alphabetically arranging classical and baroque symbolism. The first edition appeared without illustrations. By the second edition of 1603, his categories of personifications, which were composed of over 700 concepts, formed a complete array of allegory to be observed in the art of the seventeenth century. The Iconologia was used both by viewers of art as well as by artists wishing to employ complex iconography in their work. The book was proscriptive, carefully outlining the decorum of image use as much as its meaning. Ripa had compiled his work from a variety of mythological manuals, emblemata (emblem books), archaeological compendia and discussions of numismatics. He was the first to consult a wide variety of media, including sculpture, medals, coins, waxes and engravings, although often the examples he cited had been gleaned only from other books. His printed sources, though unmentioned, included the mythological dictionary, Le imagini de i dei of 1556 by Vincenzo Cartari (b. ca. 1500) and the Hieroglyphica of 1556 by Pierio Valeriano (1477-1558). Although Ripa claimed his personifications were derived from antiquity and elsewhere, most of his examples were drawn from more modern sources. The Etruscan scholar Pietro Leone Casella (c.1540-c.1620) issued an amplified edition of the Iconologia, which thereafter saw numerous editions. Ripa fell out of favor during the Enlightenment era when the excesses of the baroque were disparaged. The art historian Émile Mâle rediscovered Ripa, at least for art history, in 1932. Today Ripa’s Iconologia is an essential primary source for how baroque symbolism was understood. Although it is clear that artists used his interpretations liberally and sometimes not at all, other subsequent artistic compositions can be traced directly to Ripa. Giovan Francesco Guerrieri’s paintings in the Palzzo Borghese in Rome and Francesco Pianta’s carvings in the Scuola di San Rocco in Venice are peculiar representations that are taken directly from Ripa (Praz). Art historians and archaeologists use the Iconologia both as proof that specific symbols held specific meaning and as a paradigm for how personifications were transmitted.


Selected Bibliography

[comprehensive bibliography:] Praz, Mario. Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery. 2 vols. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1964-74, pp. 472-75; Iconologia, overo, Descrittione dell’ imagini universali cavate dall’antichità, et da altri lvoghi. Rome: Per gli Heredi di Gio. Gigliotti, 1593; 2nd. ed., Iconologia, overo Descrittione di diverse imagini cauate dall’antichità, & di propria inuentione. Rome: Appresso Lepido Facij., 1603; [the various editions include,] German, Pars I[-X] des berühmtem italiänische: Ritters, Caesaris Ripae, allerleÿ Künsten, und Wissenschafften, dienlich seÿender Sinnbildern, und Gedancken, welchen jedesmahlen eine hierzu taugliche Historiam oder Gleichnis, [etc.]. Augspurg: J.G. Hertel 1760; English Iconology: or, A Collection of Emblematical Figures. 2 vols. George Richardson, trans. London: G. Scott, 1777-79; Iconologia; or Moral emblems. Tempest, Pierce, translator, Fuller, Isaac, illustrator. London: B. Motte, 1709; Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery: The 1758-60 Hertel Edition of Ripa’s Iconologia. Introduction and translation by Edward A. Maser. New York: Dover, 1971.


Sources

Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 60; McGrath, Elizabeth. “Ripa, Cesare.” Dictionary of Art; Maser, Edward A., “Introduction.” Ripa, Cesare. Baroque and Rococo Pictorial Imagery: The 1758-60 Hertel Edition of Ripa’s Iconologia: Edited by Edward A. Maser. New York: Dover, 1971, pp. vii-xix; Praz, Mario. Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1964-74, vol. 1, esp. p. 201, note 1; Mâle, Emil. L’art religieux après le Concile de Trente: étude sur l’iconographie de la fin du XVIe siècle, du XVIIe, du XVIIIe siècle: Italie, France, Espagne, Flanders. Paris: Colin, 1932, pp. 383-428; Stefani, Chiara. “Cesare Ripa: New Biographical Evidence.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 53 (1990): 307-12; Witcombe, Chris. “Cesare Ripa and the Sala Clementina.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55 (1992): 277-82; McGrath, Elizabeth. “Ripa, Cesare.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, pp. 960-61.




Citation

"Ripa, Cesare." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/ripacf/.


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Compiler of a famous early iconographic dictionary, the Iconologia. Little is known about Giovanni Campani, who wrote under the name of Ceasare Ripa. He was not a professional scholar, although he was associated with literary academies in

Rio, Alexis-François

Full Name: Rio, Alexis-François

Gender: male

Date Born: 1797

Date Died: 1874

Place Born: Port-Louis, Brittney, France

Place Died: Port-Louis, Brittney, France

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style)


Overview

Early art historian to popularize the study of the Italian “Primitives” De la poésie chétienne, 1836. Rio’s parents were deeply religious Royalist peasants. The younger Rio was raised in Brittany, fought for the Royalists in the Petite Chouannerie of 1814, and considered the priesthood until 1819 when he moved to Paris. By 1828 he was aligned with the Comte Auguste de la Ferronays (1777-1842), the Foreign Minister to Charles X and a major exponent of the Catholic Revival in France. Through another friend, Charles Forbes René de Montalembert (1810-1870), Rio became acquainted with the work of the so-called “Catholic philosophers of Munich,” Franz Xaver Baader (1765-1841), Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) and Patrick Benedict Zimmer (1752-1820). A trip with Ferronays to Rome resulted in a lifelong devotion Italian art. Rio’s particular fascination was in an ultra-Roman-Catholic interpretation of art akin to the Nazarenes spiritual connection to medievalism. Rio met Schelling and the historian Ignaz von Döllinger (1799-1890) in Munich in 1830. Döllinger introduced him to the recently published Italienische Forschungen by the art historian Karl Friedrich von Rumohr. Rio continued his continental travels as well as to England and Wales in 1832-3. In Llanarth, Wales, he met and married Apollonia Jones in 1833. His systematic history of Italian art first appeared in an abbreviated form as De la poésie chétienne in 1836. Rio used Schelling’s theories of transcendental idealism in art, that truth is revealed in art through the unconscious impulses of the artist, and the romantic mysticism of Baader and Johann Joseph von Görres as the foundation of his art history. Though it initially foundered in France, where it was attacked as employing too narrow a standard for art, translations appeared in Italian (1841) and English in 1854 where the book became highly influential. William Gladstone (1809-98) praised him and Wordsworth wrote a sonnet to him. Between 1861 and 1867 an enlarged edition of De la poésie chétienne appeared under the title De l’art chétien. De la poésie chétienne is important in the history of art history for its early sympathetic account of early medieval painting as well as the historical approach it gives to Italian art (Rowland). Central to Rio’s work is the idea that the spiritual qualities of a work of art, its mysticism, not it’s artistic accomplishment, is the key to its importance. His insistence on these spiritual qualities of art made it as much a book of religious devotion as art history, but his bias against the schismatic Byzantium blinded him to the strengths of that art. The book was responsible for the rival of interest Franciscan and Trecento art and the de-emphasis of Raphael’s later (Vatican) works in favor of his earlier ones (Lightbown). Rio’s work had a significant effect on the art historians and critics, especially in Britain, who immediately followed him. These included Anna Jameson, Alexander Crawford Lindsay, who took a more positive view of Byzantine art than Rio, and John Ruskin. Indeed, Ruskin’s hallmark division of renaissance production into “pre-renaissance” (early renaissance artists) [Botticelli and Fra Angelico] artists filled with religiosity, and (high) renaissance artists, whom Ruskin and Rio disparaged as too influenced by classicism. Italians directly influenced by Rio include the writer Alessandro Manzoni (1785-1873) and the art historian Pietro Selvatico.


Selected Bibliography

De la poésie chétienne dans son principe dans sa matière et dans ses formes. Paris: Debécourt, Hachette, 1836, English, The Poetry of Christian Art London: T. Bosworth, 1854; De l’art chrétien. 4 vols. Paris: Hachette 1861-67; Essai sur l’histoire de l’esprit humain dans l’antiquité. 2 vols. Paris: Alexandre Mesnier, 1828-1830; Michel-Ange et Raphaël avec un supplèment sur la décadence de l’école romaine. Paris: Hachette 1867; L’idéal antique et l’idéal chétien: extrait de l’art chétien du mème auteur. Paris: F. Didot Frères, 1873.


Sources

Rio, Alexis-François. Épilogue a lárt Chétien. 2 vols. Fribourg-en-Brisgau: M.-B. Herder, 1870; Rowland, Jr. Benjamin. “Introduction.” Jarves, James Jackson. The Art-idea. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1960, p. xii, note 2; Lightbrown, R. W. “Rio, Alexis-François.” Dictionary of Art; Lightbown, R. W. “The Inspiration of Christian Art.” in, Macready, Sarah, and Thompson, F. H., eds. Influences in Victorian Art and Architecture. London: Society of Antiquaries/Thames and Hudson, 1985, pp. 3-40; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 131; Ferrara, Paul Albert. “Renaissance, Interpretation of the, ‘John Ruskin'” The Encyclopedia of the Renaissance (1999) 5: 291.




Citation

"Rio, Alexis-François." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/rioa/.


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Early art historian to popularize the study of the Italian “Primitives” De la poésie chétienne, 1836. Rio’s parents were deeply religious Royalist peasants. The younger Rio was raised in Brittany, fought for the Royalists in the Petit

Rintelen, Friedrich

Full Name: Rintelen, Friedrich

Other Names:

  • Friedrich Rintelen

Gender: male

Date Born: 20 February 1881

Date Died: 04 May 1926

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Catania, Sicily, taly

Home Country/ies: Germany

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


Overview

Giotto scholar and professor of art, Basle. His undergraduate students at Basle included Hans R. Hahnloser. His methodology was carried on by Theodor Hetzer. Rintelen’s opinions were so valued they were pencilled in as notes by Richard Offner in Offner’s copy of the 1937 catalog Mostra Giottesca.


Selected Bibliography

[bibliography:] Dvorák, Max. Idealism and Naturalism in Gothic Art. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1967, p. 221, works cited only; Giotto und die Giotto-Apokryphen. Munich: Müller, 1912; Reden und Aufsätze. Edited by Edith Rintelin. Basel: Schwabe, 1927.


Sources

German Essays on Art History. Gert Schiff, ed. New York: Continuum, 1988, p. xxxix mentioned; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 348-349; Ladis, Andrew. “The Unmaking of a Connoisseur.” in, Offner, Richard. A Discerning Eye: Essays on Early Italian Painting. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998, p,19, note 1.




Citation

"Rintelen, Friedrich." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/rintelenf/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Giotto scholar and professor of art, Basle. His undergraduate students at Basle included Hans R. Hahnloser. His methodology was carried on by Theodor Hetzer. Rintelen’s opinions were so valued they