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Ring, Grete

Full Name: Ring, Grete

Gender: female

Date Born: 1887

Date Died: 1952

Place Born: Berlin, Germany

Place Died: Zürich, Switzerland

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): drawings (visual works), nineteenth century (dates CE), and painting (visual works)

Career(s): art collectors and art dealers


Overview

Dealer, collector and historian of 19th-century panting and drawings. Ring studied with Heinrich Wölfflin at Munich University, completing a thesis on early Netherlandish portrait painting. She became interested in 19th century drawings while working at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Ring began working for the firm of Paul Cassirer in 1919, and became a partner in 1924. After working with Helmuth Lutjens in Amsterdam, she established the Paul Cassirer Gallery in London in 1938. In her book, A Century of French Painting, 1400-1500, Ring argued that French painting of the period should be studied for its own merits, rather than in light of the accomplishments of the Italian Renaissance. She collected drawings by the Lukasbrüder, Max Liebermann, Caspar David Friedrich, Anselm Feuerbach, and Adolf Friedrich Erdmann Menzel, which she bequeathed to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford.



Sources

The Dictionary of Art




Citation

"Ring, Grete." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/ringg/.


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Dealer, collector and historian of 19th-century panting and drawings. Ring studied with Heinrich Wölfflin at Munich University, completing a thesis on early Netherlandish portrait painting. She became interested in 19th ce

Rigollot, Marcel Jerôme

Full Name: Rigollot, Marcel Jerôme

Gender: male

Date Born: 1786

Date Died: 1855

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): archaeology and Renaissance


Overview

Renaissance scholar [and early prehistoric archaeologist?]. In 1853 at Acheul Rigollot discovered prehistoric implements, akin to those unearthed by Jacques Boucher de Perthe in 1837 which refuted the biblical claim that humankind did not predate 4004 BC.


Selected Bibliography

Catalogue de l’oeuvre de Le´onard de Vinci. Paris: Chez Dumoulin, 1849; Histoire des arts du dessin, depuis l’e´poque romaine jusqu’à la fin du XVIe siècle. 2 vols. Paris: Dumoulin, 1863-64; Monnaies inconnues des e´vêques des innocens, des fous : et de quelques autres associations singulières du même temps. Paris: Merlin libraire, 1837; Essai sur le Giorgion. Amiens: Duval et Herment, 1852.





Citation

"Rigollot, Marcel Jerôme." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/rigollotm/.


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Renaissance scholar [and early prehistoric archaeologist?]. In 1853 at Acheul Rigollot discovered prehistoric implements, akin to those unearthed by Jacques Boucher de Perthe in 1837 which refuted the biblical clai

Rigby Eastlake, Elizabeth

Full Name: Rigby Eastlake, Elizabeth

Other Names:

  • Lady Eastlake

Gender: female

Date Born: 1809

Date Died: 1893

Place Born: Norwich, Norfolk, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): feminism and German (culture, style, period)


Overview

Early female and feminist art historian; translator of early and important German art histories into English. Rigby was the daughter of Edward Rigby (1747-1821), gynecologist and amateur classical scholar, and Anne Palgrave (Rigby) (1777-1872). She was privately educated in the arts and sciences as her well-connected and cultured parents determined. Her father died when she was twelve and thereafter she determined her education more personally. While living in Switzerland in 1827, taking a cure for typhoid fever, she learned German, translating the essay on English art collections by Johann David Passavant, Kunstreise durch England und Belgien, 1833. In 1836 work was published as Tour of a German Artist in England. She returned to London in 1832 studying art at the British Museum and the National Gallery in hopes of becoming a painter. Her first documented article was published in the Quarterly Review in 1842, writing regularly for it thereafter. She became close friends with John Murray III (1808-1892), the publisher of many art monographs, and his family. Through Murray, she met the painter J. M. W. Turner and literati. Rigby, a striking 5′ 11″ beauty, came to be known as a noted conversationalist. During an 1846 visit to the Royal Academy exhibition, she met the artist and then Keeper (curator) of the National Gallery, Charles Lock Eastlake. More travel to the continent, including an 1848 meeting with Passavant in Frankfurt, ensued. She continued writing reviews for the Quarterly Review. At age 40, she married Eastlake in Edinburgh in 1849, who had resigned from the National Gallery. Now Lady Eastlake, she moved to London to live with him. Her husband was knighted in 1850 and their only child stillborn the following year. The Eastlakes continued as fixtures in London intellectual circles: the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) among others. In the early1850s their formal dinners included Passavant and director of the Berlin Royal Gallery, Gustav Friedrich Waagen, both of whom stayed with the Eastlakes. In 1854 Lady Eastlake sided with Euphemia Chalmers Gray (1828-1897), the wife of John Ruskin, in her move to annul her married to Ruskin. Ruskin had been no friend to either of the Eastlakes, being partially to blame in her husband’s resignation from the National Gallery. Beginning in 1852, the Eastlakes included Italy in their European excursions, which broadened Lady Eastlake’s art-historical knowledge. In 1855 her husband was appointed first Director of the National Gallery; Lady Eastlake appears from that point to have been involved with purchase decisions for the Gallery. She translated anonymously the first volume of Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei seit Constantin dem Grossen as Handbook of the History of Painting, The Italian Schools, the second edition of by Franz Kugler, in 1851, a work her husband had translated originally in 1842. The following year she began translating Waagen’s evaluation of English collections, which appeared beginning in 1854 as Treasures of Art in Great Britain. When Anna Jameson, the early and important woman art historian died in 1860, Lady Eastlake consented to complete Jameson’s History of Our Lord, a study of the iconography of Christ. Jameson’s early proto-feminist art history appeared in 1864 completely due to Lady Eastlake. Her Quarterly Review contributions of 1850s and early 1860s, included a review of the Crystal Palace. Her sensitive article on photography (April 1857) was an accurate summary the history of photography and its relationship to art (Mitchell). In 1865, during their annual visit to Italy, Charles died in Pisa. In her widowhood, she developed a closer circle of friends, particularly with the archaeologist and National Gallery Trustee Austen Henry Layard. Through Layard’s urging, Eastlake penned a memoir of her husband, published in 1870. Eastlake retained her interest in art history. In 1871 visited the famous Holbein exhibition in Dresden and trips to Venice in 1877, the Baltic provinces and St. Petersburg in 1878. In1883 she toured the Rossetti exhibition in London (describing it as “horrors, without a single merit”). In 1868 she co-wrote a piece with Harriet Grote espousing reform of the British Museum for the Quarterly Review. Her art historical work, on Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Titian, and Raphael, appeared mainly in the Edinburgh Review in the 1870s and early 1880s. She published her collected essays in 1883 as Five Great Painters. A new edition of her Handbook of Italian Art translation of Kugler also appeared. She died after declining health at her London home in 1893. She is buried in Kensal Green cemetery. Eastlake was a pioneer woman art writer, like several other women of her generation, Maria Callcott, Emilia Francis Strong Dilke, and Julia Cartwright.

At her best, her writing was an antidote to Ruskin’s literary and Romantic approach to art. Her early and complete knowledge of continental art historians such as Joseph Archer Crowe, G. B. Cavalcaselle, and Giovanni Morelli gave her better connoisseurship than many of her male contemporaries. She and Charles were early champions of the so-called “Italian primitives.” Lady Eastlake possessed a “readiness to appreciate, what was, at any given time, generally considered to be somewhat beyond the average range of approval.” (Haskell). She was, characteristic of many nineteenth-century wealthy tastemakers, a contraction. Though she opposed compulsory elementary education, she supported women’s suffrage. Though highly religious, she doubted Ruskin’s (and other’s) claims that art represented an age’s moral values.


Selected Bibliography

“Photography” [entire issue] Quarterly Review 101, no. 202 (April 1857): 442-468; [anonymously published] A Residence on the Shores of the Baltic. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1841; Five Great Painters: Essays Reprinted from the Edinburgh and Quarterly Reviews. 2 vols. London: Longmans, 1883; completed, Jameson, Anna. The History of Our Lord as Exemplified in Works of Art: with that of His types; St. John the Baptist; and Other Persons of the Old and New Testament. 2 vols. London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, & Green, 1864; translated, Waagen, Gustav, and Graves, Algernon. Treasures of Art in Great Britain: Being an Account of the Chief Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Illuminated Mss., &c., &c. 3 vols + index. London: J. Murray, 1854, supplement, Galleries and Cabinets of Art in Great Britain: Being an Account of More than Forty Collections of Paintings, Drawings, Sculptures, Mss., &c. &c. Visited in 1854 and 1856, and Now for the First Time Described. London: J. Murray, 1857; [“Tr. from the German of Kugler, by a lady”]The Schools of Painting in Italy. Kugler’s Handbook of Painting (series). 2 vols. London: Murray, 1851


Sources

Lochhead, Marion. Elizabeth Rigby, Lady Eastlake. London: Murray, 1961; Ernstrom, Adele. M. “‘Equally Lenders and Borrowers in Turn:’ the Working and Married Lives of the Eastlakes.” Art History 15 (1992): 470-85; Holcomb, Adele. Women as Interpreters of the Visual Arts, 1820-1979. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981, pp. 10, 117-118; Mitchell, Rosemary. “Eastlake [née Rigby], Elizabeth, Lady Eastlake.” Dictionary of National Biography; Haskell, Francis. Rediscoveries in Art: Some Aspects of Taste, Fashion, and Collecting in England and France. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976, p. 20; Robertson, David Allan. Sir Charles Eastlake and the Victorian Art World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978; Eastlake, Elizabeth. Journals and Correspondence of Lady Eastlake. London: J. Murray, 1895.




Citation

"Rigby Eastlake, Elizabeth." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/rigbye/.


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Early female and feminist art historian; translator of early and important German art histories into English. Rigby was the daughter of Edward Rigby (1747-1821), gynecologist and amateur classical scholar, and Anne Palgrave (Rigby) (1777-1872). Sh

Riehl, Berthold

Full Name: Riehl, Berthold

Gender: male

Date Born: 1858

Date Died: 1911

Home Country/ies: Germany


Overview

Founder of the Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Art History Institute) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1890. Riehl beat out Richard Muther and Heinrich Wölfflin for the position in art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München. There he founded the Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Art History Institute), initially named the “Kunsthistorisches Seminar und Kupferstichsammlung” (Art history seminar and Graphics Collection) in 1890, becoming its first-time art professor. Art-historical research at Ludwig-Maximilian University had begun in the 19th century with lectures in art from faculty in other departments, such as Ludwig Schorn and Moritz Carrière and the Florian Meilinger (1763-1836/7). The future art historian Aby M. Warburg heard his lectures there in 1888. Riehl died in 1911 and was succeeded by Wölfflin. His students included Paul Frankl, and August Grisebach. Riehl’s tenure as chair of art history focused on a regional search for identity in the study of Bavarian art. His successors, Wölfflin, Wilhelm Pinder and Hans Jantzen steered the Institute toward more mainstream issues of art history over the entire German-speaking world. A second chair with a focus Bavarian art history was established in 1963.


Selected Bibliography

Deutsche und italienische Kunstcharaktere. Frankfurt/Main: Verl. Keller, 1893; Die Kunst an der Brennerstrasse. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel 1898; Bayerns Donautal: Tausend Jahre deutscher Kunst. Munich: Georg Müller, 1912.


Sources

Gombrich, Ernst H. Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986, p. 39 [identifies him as “A. Riehl”].




Citation

"Riehl, Berthold." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/riehlb/.


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Founder of the Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Art History Institute) at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München in 1890. Riehl beat out Richard Muther and Heinrich Wölfflin for the position in art h

Riegl, Aloïs

Full Name: Riegl, Aloïs

Other Names:

  • Alois Riegl

Gender: male

Date Born: 14 January 1858

Date Died: 17 January 1905

Place Born: Linz, Oberösterreich, Austria

Place Died: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Baroque, Medieval (European), and Viennese


Overview

Art historian of the medieval and later Baroque areas; seminal member of the so-called “First Vienna School” of art history; key figure for modern methods of art history. Riegl’s father was a bureaucrat in the imperial tobacco administration in Austria who moved his family to Bohemia and Galacia where the younger Riegl attended a Polish-speaking Gymnasium. The death of his father in 1873 resulted in his family’s move back to Linz. Riegl enrolled at the University of Vienna, but eschewing legal studies his father would have wished him to study, he instead pursued philosophy and history courses under Franz Brentanno (1838-1917), Alexius Meinong (1853-1920) and Robert Zimmermann (1824-1898). From Max Büdinger (1828-1902) Riegl learned a positivist historical method. He earned a certificate from the Institute for Austrian Historical Research, needed for civil service positions in Austrian archives. It was in the classes of Moriz Thausing, however, where Riegl learned Morellian “scientific” method of connoisseurship (see Giovanni Morelli). In 1883 Riegl wrote his dissertation on the Romanesque Church of St. Jacob, Regensburg (manuscript lost). He joined the staff of the Austrian Museum of Decorative Arts (Institut für Österreichische Geschichtsforchung) and began writing his Habilitation, Die Mittelalterliche Kalenderillustration, in 1889, which examined the Hellenistic tradition in medieval calendar manuscripts. In 1886 he began curatorial training in the Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, succeeding another Thausing student, Franz Wickhoff, in 1887 working for the next ten years as curator of textiles at the Austrian museum. Riegl’s first two books, Altorientalische Teppiche and Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik, 1891 and 1893 respectively, follow from his work in the museum. Even in these first books, his interest in theory as well as an interdisciplinary view of art history was evident. Stilfragen gained Riegl an extraordinarius position at the University of Vienna in 1894. He continued his interest in common art objects–what were then considered minor arts–in his next book, Volkskunst, Hausfleiss und Hausindustrie, 1894, which employed economic theory in constructing their history. In 1894 and 1895 he began lecturing on baroque art, a period still largely viewed as decadent, ushering in (together with the work of Cornelius Gurlitt) a new evaluation of the stylistic period. At Vienna, he and Wickhoff formed what came to be known as the (first) Vienna school of art historical method. Both scholars approached art empirically, denying the pervasive view that particular periods or media of art (in their cases, late Roman and early medieval) experienced a degeneration of style. Their treatment of this period elevated it by examining underappreciated genres (carpets and tapestries) and by applying new criteria for its appreciation and analysis. Riegl’s Spätrömische Kunstindustrie, 1901 and Wickhoff’s Die Wiener Genesis (1903) solidified their reputations in the areas of late and early Roman Empire objects. The relationship of elements to each other in a work of art–one of Riegl’s methodological fascinations–led him to leave late Roman/early medieval period in order to write about Dutch baroque portraiture. His Das holländische Gruppenporträt, published in 1902, centered on portrait paintings whose subjects gazed at the viewer. Once again, he forged a new theory to fit his subject, positing the idea of “attentiveness” to describe the relationship between the viewer and the object (Olin, 2000). Riegl was at work on a sequel to his Spätrömische Kunstindustrie and other topics when he developed cancer. His death at age 47 is one of the tragedies of discipline. His influence was far greater than the students he taught directly, among whom included Hans Tietze. His work on baroque architecture, Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom, was published posthumously in 1908 and his annotated translation of the life of Bernini by Filippo Baldinucci published in 1912. Riegl is one of the seminal theorists in art history. His methodology was diverse and appeared to adumbrate various directions adopted by art historians in the later twentieth century, including formalism, structuralism, post structuralism and reception theory. Riegl’s foundation was the positivism of much of nineteenth-century historiography, i.e., the idea that history progresses to ever higher levels. His earliest writing demonstrated how carpet artisans of the middle east reinvented the forms of late antiquity into new content that could be immediately understood. In his book Stilfragen, Riegl used the key notion of surface ornamentation to show artists representing the world through naturalistic or scientific technique. Riegl adopted this structural symbolism notion from the work of Gottfried Semper while denying the technological determinism of Semper’s writings. Reaction to Semper’s notion of materialism led to another Stilfragen concept, Kunstwollen, or “artistic will.” Kunstwollen as the force driving the evolution of style was evident to Riegl in both high and low art. In Spätromische Kunstindustrie, Riegl “rehabilitated” late Roman Imperial art, which his contemporaries had considered a decline in style. Riegl saw the hard outlines of late Roman artistic production as a development, a way to isolate the background elements from the foreground subject, opening up the way for modern art’s concept of space. His theory that artistic representation was not of reality, but a representation of the wished for, made much of this neglected art readable. Illusionistic art, he argued, was only employed when it showed the world view agreeable to the viewer. Artifacts or even dissolute pictorial representation demonstrated to Riegl the will’s desire for the more spiritual, the combination of what he termed “tactile” and “optical.” Das holländische Gruppenporträt showed Riegl re-evaluating his method to seriously consider the viewer as a principal in art history. His work built on the philosophical premise of Geschichte der bildenden Künste of Karl Julius Ferdinand Schnaase, the first cultural history of art. His methodology was both so unique and important that Paul Frankl, in his book on literary sources and theory for late medieval architecture, The Gothic (1960), devoted an entire section to Riegl’s theory of “Artistic Volition,” the only historian in Frankl’s book to have an entire chapter. The critic Hermann Bahr (1863-1934) noted in his 1919 book on Expressionism that Riegl was the first to recognize art history’s subjectivity and that Riegl’s approach to older artistic periods liberated contemporary art as well. Wilhelm Worringer also praised him in his important book on modern art, Abstraktion und Einfühlung. Riegl’s Barockkunst in Rom, 1908, celebrates the multicultural influences of the style, and by extension, the multiculturalism of the Hapsburg Empire under which he wrote. Another groundbreaking area for Riegl was in art conservation. His years with the K. K. [Kaiserlich-Königliche] Central Commission für die Erforschung und Erhaltung der Baudenkmale (Imperial and Royal Central Commission for Researching and Preserving of Monuments) instilled in him a respect for the object as it existed to the historian today. His concept of Alterswert (the value of aging and the importance of marks of usage) was outlined in his pioneer work Moderne Denkmalkultus, 1903. The nineteenth century’s impulse to make objects prettier for the public by means of “restoring” them was both disingenuous and misleading. Objects, Riegl contended, should bear the signs of their age. The mantra of “conservation not restoration” was adopted by another monuments preservationist, Georg Dehio. Riegl also disputed the assertion of Jacob Burckhardt that the historian could place moral judgments to works of art of other centuries. Burckhardt, already no friend of the Baroque era, had famously objected in particular to Bernini’s St. Teresa as immoral. Riegl, on the other hand, questioned any historian’s ability to be objective when moral issues were at play (Deinhard). The brilliance of the (first) Vienna school is best demonstrated in the divergent writings of Riegl and Wickhoff. Udo Kultermann contrasts Riegl, the intellectual, theorist and abstract thinker with Wickhoff, an art historian of a strongly humanist tradition of broad erudition.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Gesammelte Aufsätze. Klassische Texte der wiener Schule der Kunstgeschichte. I. volume 5. Vienna: WUV-Universitätsverlag, 1996; [habilitation:] Die Mittelalterliche Kalenderillustration: ihr Ursprung und ihre Entwicklung bis zur vollständigen Ausbildung der Typen im 11. Jahrhundert . Innsbruck: Wagner, 1889; Stilfragen. Berlin: G. Siemens, 1893; Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie. 2 vols. 1) Die spätrömische kunst-Industrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn im zusammenhange mit der Gesammtentwicklung der bildenden Künste bei den Mittelmeervölkern. Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staats-druckerei, 1901, 2) and Zimmermann, E. Heinrich, ed. Kunstgewerbe des frühen Mittelalters auf Grundlage des nachgelassenen Materials Alois Riegls. Vienna: K. K. Hof- und Staats-druckerei, 1923; Moderne Denkmalkultus: sein Wesen und seine Entstehung. Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1903; “Das holländische Gruppenporträt.” Jahrbuch der allerhöchsten Kaiser hauses XXII. Vienna, 1902; Die Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom. Vienna: Anton Schroll, 1908, English, Hopkins, Andrew, and Witte, Arnold, eds. The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010; Historische Grammatik der bildenden Künste. [published by Karl M. Swoboda and Otto Pächt.] Graz: privately printed, 1966; Burda, Arthur, and Pollak, Oskar, eds. Filippo Baldinuccis vita des Gio. Lorenzo Bernini: mit Übersetzung und Kommentar. Vienna: A. Schroll, 1912.


Sources

[literature on Reigl and his methodology is legion. A few of the important books and articles include:] Dvorák, Max. “Alois Riegl.” Mitteilungen der kaiserlich-königlichen Zentralkommission zur Erforschung der Kunst- und historischen Denkmale 3, vol. 4 (1905): 255-76, reprinted in Dvořák, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kunstgeschichte. Munich: Piper, 1929, pp. 279-298; Bahr, Hermann. Expressionismus. Munich: Delphin-Verlag, 1920, p. 72; Sedlmayr, Hans. “Die Quintessenz der Lehren Riegls.” Kunst und Wahrheit: zur Theorie und Methode der Kunstgeschichte. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1958, pp. 14-34; 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, pp. 20-1; Deinhard, Hanna. “Review of ‘Das Kunstwerk zwischen Wissenschaft und Weltanschauung’ by Martin Warnke.” Art Bulletin 54, no. 1 (March 1972): 113; Zerner, Henri. “Alois Riegl: Art, Value, and Historicism.” Daedalus. 105 (Winter 1976): 177-88; Pächt, Otto. “Alois Riegl.” In Methodisches zur Kunstgeschichten Praxis, ausgewählte Schriften. Munich: Prestel, 1977: 141-152, reprinted from the English version of “Art Historians and Art Critics VI: Alois Riegl.” Burlington Magazine 105 (May 1963): 188-193; Podro, Michael. “Alois Riegl” in The Critical Historians of Art. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982, pp. 71-97; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 159-163, 220; Olin, Margaret. Forms of Representation in Alois Riegl’s Theory of Art. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992; Iverson, Margaret. Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp. 163-164; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 344-347; Olin, Margaret. “Alois Riegl (1858-1905)” in Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 3. New York: Garland, 2000, pp. 231-244; Olin, Margaret. “Art History and Ideology: Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski.” in Gold, Penny Schein, and Sax, Benjamin C., eds. Cultural Visions: Essays on the History of Culture. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000, pp. 151-172; Elsner, Jaś. “The Birth of Late Antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901.” Art History 25 no. 3 (2002): 358-379: Payne, Alina. “Beyond Kunstwollen: Alois Riegl and the Baroque.” Witte, Arnold. “Reconstructing Riegl’s Entstehung der Barockkunst in Rom.” Hopkins, Andrew. “Riegl Renaissances.” all in, Hopkins, Andrew, and Witte, Arnold, eds. The Origins of Baroque Art in Rome. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2010, pp.1-33, 34-59, 60-89.




Citation

"Riegl, Aloïs." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/riegla/.


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Art historian of the medieval and later Baroque areas; seminal member of the so-called “First Vienna School” of art history; key figure for modern methods of art history. Riegl’s father was a bureaucrat in the imperial tobacco administration in Au

Riegel, Herman

Full Name: Riegel, Herman

Gender: male

Date Born: 1834

Date Died: 1900

Place Born: Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany

Place Died: Braunschweig, Lower Saxony, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany


Overview



Sources

Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 321-323.




Citation

"Riegel, Herman." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/riegelh/.


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Ridolfi, Enrico

Full Name: Ridolfi, Enrico

Gender: male

Date Born: 1829

Date Died: 1910

Place Born: Lucca, Tuscany, Italy

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): monuments and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Museum director and historian of artistic monuments in Lucca. Ridolfi was the son of Michele Ridolfi, a painter and historian of the art of Lucca. Enrico Ridolfi was also trained as a painter, joining the Accademia di Lucca in 1863. Ridolfi focused on the archives, monuments, and artistic partimony in Lucca. He served as secretary of the Commissione di Conservazione dei Monumenti from 1860-71. In 1877, Ridolfi organized the city of Lucca’s first exhibition of historic works. He relocated to Florence, becoming the vice-director, and later the director of the city’s art galleries. His goal was to reorganize the Galleria degli Uffizi. Under Ridolfi’s supervision, the Uffizi’s exhibition halls were expanded and redecorated, and paintings studied by well-known art historians such as Giovanni Morelli, Adolfo Venturi, and Bernard Berenson were prominently displayed. He also alleviated the overcrowding of the 17th century paintings in the Tribuna, and highlighted the gallery’s recent purchases of 15th-century Flemish and Tuscan paintings such as the Portinari Alterpiece (c. 1473-9) by Hugo van der Goes.



Sources

The Dictionary of Art




Citation

"Ridolfi, Enrico." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/ridolfie/.


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Museum director and historian of artistic monuments in Lucca. Ridolfi was the son of Michele Ridolfi, a painter and historian of the art of Lucca. Enrico Ridolfi was also trained as a painter, joining the Accademia di Lucca in 1863. Ridolfi focuse

Ridolfi, Carlo

Full Name: Ridolfi, Carlo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1594

Date Died: 1658

Place Born: Lonigo, Vicenza, Veneto, Italy

Place Died: Venice, Veneto, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): biography (general genre), Italian (culture or style), painting (visual works), Venetian (Republic, culture or style), and Viennese

Institution(s): none


Overview

Art biographer, painter and collector; his biographies of more than 150 painters in the Venetian state contributed to his title, “the Venetian Vasari.” Ridolfi’s father was a tailor (he used the name Marco Sartor in his will), who died when the young Ridlofi was five. Eventually his mother, Angela, remarried and he entered the studio of a local German painter (Ridolfi was of German decent himself). At thirteen, he traveled to Venice to study uner Antonio Vassilacchi, known as l’Aliense. A diligent student, he made drawings from reliefs and assisted the master. He left Vassilacchi’s studio after only five year because of dissatification with other students, and, after a brief stay at home, returned to Venice studying drawing. He also mastered history, architecture, and classical literature. Various commissions followed, but the great plague in Venice forced him to flee, living with a friend in Spineda. His mother, friends and some of his patrons were lost to the outbreak. Artistically, his paintings reflect the artistic influence of Tintoretto and Titian. Ridolfi collected drawngs, perhaps already styling himself after his earlier counterpart, Giorgio Vasari, assembling works in the 1630s by earlier masters Vittore Carpaccio and works attributed to Tintoretto and Leonardo da Vinci. By 1641 Ridolfi was in Dalmatia painting works now in a Mannerist style. His petition to the Venetian government to receive a “favor,” probably a pension, was refused. Ridolfi had also been collecting material for a life of Tintoretto, the first on that artist, and this appeared in 1642 as La vita di Giacopo Robusti. The success of this literary venture meant that Ridolfi was made a Knight of the Order of St. Mark by the Venetian Senate, perhaps because the Vita was dedicated to Doge Francesco Erizzo (d. 1646) and the Venetian Republic. He was knighted in 1645 by Pope Innocent X. Ridolfi published a life of Veronese in 1646. In 1648 he issued his major work, a complilation of more than 150 biographies of painters active in the Venetian Republic, Le meraviglie dell’arte (The Marvels of Art) including his Tintoretto biography as well as his own. The work provides a strong counter to Vasari’s Vite (1550/1568) which was strongly biased against Venetian artists. Where Vasari had ignored and depricated Venetian talent, Le meraviglie dell’arte covers Venice artists in a positive light and contains the earliest reference, for example, to Giorgione’s Castelfranco Altarpiece in San Liberale. Conversely it ignores Sebastiano del Piombo, a Venetian who spent most of his career in Rome. Ridolfi painted throughout his career. He married in 1656, but died of a fever two years later. Le meraviglie dell’arte was an important source for Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellens paintres anciens et modernes (1666ff.), by André Félibien. His collection of drawings survives in three volumes, dating from the 1630s at Oxford University, Christ Church Collection.

Ridolfi’s Le meraviglie dell’arte is important in the history of art because it documents many Venetian art works gone today and locates a provenance for those still known. His work is the starting point in researching many major and minor Venetian artists. Like Vasari’s Vite, many of Ridolfi’s attributions were incorrect. Unlike Vasari, however, Ridolfi avoided a stylistic development of Venice; he considered the 16th-century Venetice the acme of its artistic production at the expense of his contemporaries. He also diverged from Vasari contending that painting was above all the other arts (Vasari consister paintng, sculpture and architecture equal). His basic premise countered Vasari’s assertion that Florence had rediscovered the arts after the dissolution of the classical tradition in the Middle (Dark) Ages. Le meraviglie dell’arte instead maintained that artistic endeavor had never been lost in Venice because of the constant influence of the Byzantines. He took great pains to cite documents and letters supporting his arguments. Consistent with the writing of his age, Le meraviglie dell’arte contains many asides. Ridolfi sees creation of fine art as a closeness to God. Painting for him was the universal impulse that included all things within it. The work may have been supported financially by the Venetian government to counter Vasari’s Vite of a hundred year before which was strongly biased against Venetian artists. Ridolfi’s biography of Tintorietto was the first on the artist and remains an important early source on Tintoretto’s working methods


Selected Bibliography

Vita di Giacopo Robusti detto il Tintoretto, celebre pittore cittadino venetiano. Venice: Appresso Guglielmo Oddoni., 1642, English, Enggass, Catherine, and Enggass, Robert. The Life of Tintoretto, and of his Children Domenico and Marietta. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1984; Le maraviglie dell’arte, ouero, Le vite de gl’illvstri pittori veneti, e dello stato: Oue sono raccolte le opere insigni, i costumi, & i ritratti loro. Con la narratione delle historie, delle fauole, e delle moralità da quelli dipinte. Venetia: Presso Gio. Battista Sgaua, 1648


Sources

Puppi, Lionello. “La fortuna delle Vite nel Veneto dal Ridolfi al Temanza.” Il Vasari storiografo e artista: atti del Congresso internazionale nel IV centenario della morte, Arezzo-Firenze, 2-8 settembre 1974. Florence: Istituto nazionale di studi sul Rinascimento, 1976, pp. 405-37; Byam Shaw, James. Drawings by Old Masters at Christ Church Oxford. vol. 1. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. pp. 401-8; Carroll, Alison. “On the Credibility of Carlo Ridolfi’s Lives of the Venetian Painters.” Australian Journal of Art 2 (1980): 51-62; Pace, Claire. Félibien’s Life of Poussin. London: A. Zwemmer, 1981, pp. 66-67; Hope, Charles. “Historians of Venetian Painting.” in The Genius of Venice, 1500-1600. New York: Abrams, 1984, p. 39; Gould, Cecil. “Ridolfi the Historian” Apollo 125, no. 301 (1987): 197-199; Shiffman, Jody Robin. “‘Artistic License:’ Titian in the works of Vasari and Ridolfi.” in Bondanello, Julia Conaway, ed. Ridolfi, Carlo. The Life of Titian. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996; Hope, Charles. Giorgione or Titian? History of a Controversy. Council of The Frick Collection Lecture series. New York: Frick Collection, 2003, p. 12.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Ridolfi, Carlo." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/ridolfic/.


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Art biographer, painter and collector; his biographies of more than 150 painters in the Venetian state contributed to his title, “the Venetian Vasari.” Ridolfi’s father was a tailor (he used the name Marco Sartor in his will), who died when the yo

Ridgway, Bruni

Full Name: Ridgway, Bruni

Other Names:

  • Brunilde Ridgway

Gender: female

Date Born: 1929

Place Born: Chieti, Abruzzi, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): Classical and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Scholar of classical sculpture. Sismondo was the daughter of Giuseppe G. Sismondo, a career army officer, and Maria Lombardo (Sismondo). As a girl, Sismondo lived in Sicily and then Ethiopia where her father had been stationed during World War II. When her father was captured by the British in World War II and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Kenya, Sismondo secured a job as a telephone operator at police headquarters in Asmaria in Eritrea where she learned to speak English. After the war, she earned her high school diploma doing double courses, entering the University of Messina, where she was awarded a Laurea in Lettere Classiche in1953. She same year she won a scholarship to classical archaeology at Bryn Mawr College under the famous head of the department, Rhys Carpenter. She wrote her M.A. thesis under Carpenter on the chronology of archaic sculpture in 1954. Sismondo continued for her Ph.D., studying at the American School of Classical Studies, between 1955 and 1957. She taught as an instructor in archaeology at her alma mater, 1957-1960. Her Ph.D. was granted in 1958; her dissertation was on archaic sculptural styles. She married Henry W. Ridgway, Jr. (b. 1930), a physical therapist, the same year, changing her name to Ridgway. Ridgway accepted an appointment at Hollins College, Virginia, as an assistant professor and head of department of classics in 1960, but returned to Bryn Mawr the following year as an assistant professor, where she remained the rest of her career. She became a U. S. citizen in 1963 and was appointed associate professor in 1967. She directed the summer school program at American School of Classical Studies, Athens, in 1967 (and a second time, 1971). For the 1967-1968 Ridgway researched as a Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N. J. Promotion to (full) professor of archaeology at Bryn Mawr occurred in 1970, the same year as the appearance of her Severe Style in Greek Sculpture book. In 1977 she was named Rhys Carpenter Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Archaeology. That same year her second monograph on Greek sculptural styles, The Archaic Style in Greek Sculpture, appeared. The following year she was the Mellon visiting professor in fine arts, University of Pittsburgh. The third of her stylistic treatment of sculpture books, Fifth Century Styles in Greek Sculpture was published in 1981. Ridgway wrote a controversial essay in the Art Bulletin in 1986, the beginning of a series of guest essays on “The State of the Discipline.” In it, she distanced herself from art history, decrying the field as the “study of aesthetically pleasing objects, in a scale ranging from the beautiful artifact to the masterpiece.” Although much of her criticism was accepted by the art-historical community, the essays met with several replies defending art history. The same year she 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. Ridgway pronounced the work genuine on stylistic grounds, joining the opinions of others such as the late Ernst Langlotz and Martin Robertson, and against those such as Federico Zeri and Thomas Hoving. Years later, the initial scientific proof for the work has collapsed and the certainly of the sculpture has again became clouded. She received the gold medal for distinguished achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America in 1988. She retired from Bryn Mawr in 1994. She oversaw 36 dissertations in her career, including Paul Rehak, Mary Sturgeon, Susan Kane and Anne Weis. Her book Second Chance: Greek Sculptural Studies Revisited appeared in 2004. Ridgway was a highly influential classical scholar noted for balancing a connoisseurship approach to sculpture with a solid knowledge of archaeology. As an art historian, she built her reputation on the traditional methodology of stylistic analysis of sculpture, a technique drawn from her mentor, Carpenter. Ridgway fell so much under his spell that she took notes on his undergraduate courses, “not simply on what he said, but on how he said it.” But Ridgway disparaged the discipline of art history, considering herself a classicist who instead wrote on art. A crusader against the practice of smuggling art objects out of their country of origin, as the editor of the American Journal of Archaeology for eight years she refused to accept articles that pertained to objects of suspicious provenance.


Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] στεφαNvoσ [Stephanos]: Studies in Honor of Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway. Philadelphia: University Museum, University of Pennsylvania for Bryn Mawr College, 1998, pp. 287-291; [dissertation:] Observations on Style and Chronology of Some Archaic Sculptures. Bryn Mawr, 1958; The Severe Style in Greek Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970; The Archaic Style in Greek Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977; Fifth Century Styles in Greek Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981; Second Chance: Greek Sculptural Studies Revisited. London: Pindar, 2004; “The State of Research on Ancient Art” Art Bulletin 68 (March 1986): 7-23, (response) Hood, William. “In Defense of Art History: A Response to Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway.” Art Bulletin 68 (September 1986): 480-481, Ridgway response, 481-482.


Sources

Directory of American Scholars. 9th ed., Volume 1: History. Detroit: Gale Group, 1999; Ridgway, Brunilde [personal email recollections contained in an essay] “A Carpenter Builds.” Section IV in Dessy, Raymond. Exile from Olynthus: Wilhelmina van Ingen http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/faculty_archives/dessy/Section_IV.pdf; “Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway.” Interviews with Art Historians. [unpublished interview.] Getty Research Institute, 2002?; Sama, Dominic. “Sleuth: an Archaeologist Excavates the Past without a Shovel.” Philadelphia Inquirer July 9, 1989.




Citation

"Ridgway, Bruni." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/ridgwayb/.


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Scholar of classical sculpture. Sismondo was the daughter of Giuseppe G. Sismondo, a career army officer, and Maria Lombardo (Sismondo). As a girl, Sismondo lived in Sicily and then Ethiopia where her father had been stationed during World War II.

Rickman, Thomas

Full Name: Rickman, Thomas

Other Names:

  • Thomas Rickman

Gender: male

Date Born: 08 June 1776

Date Died: 04 January 1841

Place Born: Maidenhead, Windsor and Maidenhead, England, UK

Place Died: Birmingham, West Midlands, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), British Isles Medieval styles, English (culture or style), Romanesque, and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Architectural historian and architect; coiner of the term “Norman” for English Romanesque architecture. Rickman hailed from a large Quaker family. His father, Joseph Rickman (1749-1810) a surgeon and apothecary, and mother Sarah Neave Rickman (1747-1809), ardent Quakers, disallowed a university education or an interest in the arts, which they considered frivolous. Instead, his father trained him also to be an apothecary and surgeon. By 1800 his studies were completed in London and briefly practiced in Lewes, Sussex. Uninterested in medicine, however, he tried business as a partner in a corn (wheat) firm in 1803, marrying his first cousin Lucy Rickman (c.1773-1807) following year. By 1807 the business had failed and Rickman moved to Liverpool as an accountant. His wife’s death (before they could be reunited) distressed him so he found respite only by long walks in the countryside. These walks included making drawings which he annotated and expanded over the years. He wrote an essay on Chester Cathedral (published only posthumously in 1864). By 1812 Rickman was lecturing locally and to learned societies. An invitation by James Smith (1759-1828?) to write an entry in his forthcoming Panorama of Science & Art (1812-1815) led to his assisting on local building projects and designs for Gothic ironwork. These projects included renovations to Scarisbrick Hall (1813-1816) in a Gothic style, a project continued by another architect and historian of the Gothic, Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin in 1836. In 1813 he married Christiana Hornor (c.1780-1814) a Quaker day school teacher, who died after the birth of their first child. With the budding Government patronage adopting the Gothic Revival style, Rickman expanded his article for Smith’s book into a book his own, An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of Architecture in England in 1817 which came to be known as Rickman’s Gothic Architecture. The book quickly became popular and influential particularly with scholars and architects wishing to design in antique idioms. The 1818 Church Building Act, which proscribed the building of new churches in largely industrial areas gave impetus to the book’s use. Rickman himself presented over 50 copies to influential leaders and received a commissioned to design St. George’s in Birmingham the same year (built 1820-1822). Rickman eventually designed 49 churches; his most notable public work may have been New Court, St. John’s College, Cambridge University, constructed 1825-1831. Rickman married a third time Elizabeth Miller (b. ca.1800) of Edinburgh in 1825. In 1830 Rickman was elected to the Society of Antiquaries of London, his architectural practice increased to partners and assistants. The same year he visited France with Henry Hutchinson, his partner. A second visit in 1832 to Picardy and Normandy with William Whewell resulted in his meeting the two other important leaders in medieval scholarship, the French antiquaries Auguste Le Prévost (1787-1859), and Arcisse de Caumont. Subsequent editions of his book Attempt, revised by Rickman, appeared in 1819, 1825 and 1835, the fourth and last to be worked on by himself personally. He contributed to the 1838 Specimens of Architectural Remains by John Sell Cotman (1782-1842). Rickman was confined to bed in the last years of his life, dying of liver disease in 1841. He is buried on the grounds of St. George’s Church, Birmingham. His architectural handbook was taken over in 1848 by John Henry Parker, ending with a 7th edition in 1881. His papers are held in the British Library and diaries at the library of the Royal Institute of British Architects, London. His son (by his third marriage) was the architect Thomas Miller Rickman (1827-1912), later president of the Architectural Association in London. Rickman was the first to use the term Norman to refer to the English Romanesque style of medieval architecture in his 1819 An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation. The book was one of the first to establish a chronology of medieval styles (Summerson) and set down the accepted terminology of Norman, Perpendicular Gothic and Decorated Gothic. The book avoided romanticism laying down a rational approach using comparative methods. His education and sensibilities outside the Church of England and British formal education (he could not read Latin) may have allowed a more objective view of the Gothic than his contemporaries (Aldrich, DNB). When Rickman’s architectural style fell out of favor with subsequent generations, his importance as an early scholar also declined (Bailey). Except for the years of his first marriage, he remained a devout Quaker in dress, language and beliefs.


Selected Bibliography

“Gothic Architecture.” in Smith, James. A Panorama of Arts and Sciences. vol.1. Liverpool: Printed for Nuttall, Fisher, and Co., 1815; An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture, from the Conquest to the Reformation; Preceded by a Sketch of the Grecian and Roman Orders, with notices of Nearly Five Hundred English Buildings. London: Longman, Hurst, etc., 1817; and Cotman, John Sell, and Turner, Dawson. Specimens of Architectural Remains in Various Counties in England, but Principally in Norfolk. London: H.G. Bohn, 1838; [Chester Cathedral] Journal of the Archaeological, Architectural, and Historic Society for the County of Chester 2, 1864.


Sources

Rickman, Thomas Miller. Notes on the Llife and on the Several Imprints of the Work of Thomas Rickman, F. S. A., Architect. London: G. J. W. Pitman, 1901; Summerson, John. “Viollet-le-Duc and the Rational Point of View.” Heavenly Mansions and Other Essays on Architecture. New York: Norton, 1963, p 138; Aldrich, Megan Brewster. Thomas Rickman (1776-1841) and Architectural Illustration of the Gothic Revival. Dissertation, University of Toronto, 1983; Baily, John. “Rickman, Thomas.” Dictionary of Art 26: 361-362; Colvin, Howard. A Biographical Dictionary of British Architects, 1600-1840. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008; Megan Aldrich. “Rickman, Thomas (1776-1841).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Rickman, Thomas." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/rickmant/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Architectural historian and architect; coiner of the term “Norman” for English Romanesque architecture. Rickman hailed from a large Quaker family. His father, Joseph Rickman (1749-1810) a surgeon and apothecary, and mother Sarah Neave Rickman (174