Dictionary of Art HistoriansItalian priest who wrote the first serious biographical account of artists of Ferrara, beginning in 1704, and other histories of art. Baruffaldi was the son of the collector and scholar Nicolò Baruffaldi (1645-1748). He initially attended the Jesuit seminary in Ferrara before studying under his father. He was ordained a priest, then a doctor of philosophy, joining the literary Colonia Ferrarese dell'Arcadia.
Browse Entries
Bruegel specialist; Curator Cabinet des Estampes, Bibliothèque royale de Belgique. René van Bastelaer was the son of Désiré Alexandre Henri van Bastelaer (1823-1907), a distinguished pharmacist, chemist, and archaeologist. His mother was Elisa van der Spiecke. Van Bastelaer obtained his BA degree from the Faculty of Arts of the Catholic University of Louvain. Rather than continuing his studies he trained in the studio of the history painter Antoine Van Hammée (1836-1903). Van Bastelaer was particularly attracted to engraving.
Specialist in Spanish painting;;curator of painting at Louvre Museum; co-authored the Propyläen Kunstgeschichte volume on eighteenth-century art with Harald Keller.
Explored transformation of Classicism into Baroque; suggested "anti-Renaissance" as intermediary term (versus Mannerism).
Rembrandt scholar and professor of art history, Freiburg. The son of a Mecklenburg judge, Bauch served as cadet and a second lieutenant in the imperial navy, 1916-18. After a 1919-21 volontariat at the Schweriner Museum in Rostock, Germany, under Albert Brinckmann, Bauch studied art history at the universities in Berlin, under Adolph Goldschmidt and Munich, under Heinrich Wölfflin.
Nazi-appointed director of the Folkwang Museum in Essen, after the forced retirement of Ernst Gosebruch. Baudissin, as part of a commission headed by the painter and president of the Reich Culture Chamber, Adolf Ziegler, seized over 5,000 works from private and public collections including Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Max Beckmann.
Student of Freud and Jung; psychoanalytic interpretation of historical works of art and the creative process.
Rubens scholar and director of the Rubenshuis. Baudouin studied during World War II. After the liberation of Belgium he assisted between 1946 and 1948 in the repatriation of artworks stolen by the Nazis. He worked as a research assistant at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam where he met the scholars Ludwig Burchard and Roger-Adolf d'Hulst. A delegation of Antwerp city officials visiting the museum in 1949, including the Burgomeister Lode Craeybeckx (1897-1976), noticed his activities and invited him back to his native Belgium.
Expert in the German Art of the Middles Ages. Baum studied art history at the universities of Munich, Berlin and Tübingen, where he worked under Karl Voll and Heinrich Wölfflin. He completed his dissertation in Tübingen in 1905 on the churches of the architect Heinrich Schickhardt (1558-1634) under Konrad von Lange. Baum wrote his habilitation under Heinrich Weizsäcker in Technische Hochschule in Stuttgart.
Architectural historian and Italianist.
Americanist and Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1968-74. Baur was the son of a Yale professor of archaeology, Paul V. C. Baur (1872-1951) and mother Susan Whiting. The younger Baur attended Yale, graduating with a B.A. in English in 1932. Finding little teaching work during the height of the depression, he returned to Yale on an art history scholarship. At Yale he studied with Henri Focillon and Marcel Aubert. His 1934 M.A. thesis was on a topic of baroque art.
Curator Musée royal des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, in Brussels; maecenas. Bautier was the son of Edmond Bautier and Marie Querton. After having attended the Athénée royal at Ixelles, near Brussels, he studied law and history at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. From this university he earned the degree of doctor in law and the degree of doctor in philosophy and letters. He enrolled at the Brussels Bar, but he soon left the practice of law. He instead chose a career in art history. In 1907 he was among the founders of the Société des Amis des Musées royaux de l'État in Brussels.
Director of the National Gallery of Scotland, 1952-1970. Baxandall's father was the scientific historian David Baxandall (1874-1938). The younger David Baxandall joined the National Museum of Wales in 1929 as an assistant keeper (curator). The National Museum was a modest institution where Baxandall had difficulties convincing the Trustees to accept even a watercolor by the Welsh artist David Jones. In Cardiff he met and married Isobel Thomas, daughter of a Welsh rectory, in 1931. He advanced to Keeper in 1939.
Scholar of Italian Renaissance art who employed postmodernist and social-history methods. Baxandall's parents were the museum director David Kighley Baxandall and Isobel Thomas (Baxandall). He attended Manchester Grammar School, Manchester, England, and then Downing College, Cambridge University where he received an A. M. At Cambridge, the literary critic William Empson (1906-1984) and literary scholar Frank Raymond Leavis (1895-1978) helped him form a lingual approach to culture. He continued study at the University in Pavia and Munich.
wrote early work of South American art history
Connoisseur and art critic, co-founder of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence. Bayersdorfer initially studied medicine before moving to Munich in 1853 and switching to the humanities. Beginning in 1862 he studied philosophy, art history as well as economics, never attaining a degree in any of these fields. In 1870 he became noted as a journalist and chess player. In the following years he wrote for the theatre reviews for the newspapers of Vienna and Munich, including Richard Wagner's Die Meistersinger and Die Walküre, 1868/70.
His book, L'art byzantin (1883) was one of the early required texts to be listed in the course catalog for the art history classes of Princeton University. Notes about Bayet's opinions on Giotto appear in Richard Offner's annotated catalog of the 1937 Mostra Giottesca.
Curator of paintings at the Louvre Museum, 1951-1965; historian of 19th century French art. Bazin was the son of Charles Bazin and Jeanne Laurence Mounier-Pouthot (Bazin). He studied art history at the Sorbonne with both Henri Focillon and Émile Mâle, where he reached the baccalaureate and licentiate levels. After completing his studies at the Sorbonne, Bazin received a diploma in museology from the école du Louvre. In 1928, he joined the department of drawings at the école des Beaux Arts in Paris.
Winslow Homer scholar and professor of art, Bowdoin College, 1936-1978. Beam's parents were Millard Filmore Beam and Georgia Bettye Avera (Beam). He graduated from Harvard University, cum laude in 1933, joining the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art (later Nelson-Atkins Museum) in Kansas City, MO, the same year, under Paul Gardner, and working with Otto Wittmann, Jr. Beam was appointed professor at the Kansas City Art Institute as well. He traveled to London receiving a Certificate of the Courtauld Institute in 1936.
Classical archaeologist; created the major index of Greek black-figure and red-figure pottery based on artistic styles. Beazley's father was Mark John Murray Beazley (d. 1940), a London interior designer and Mary Catherine Davidson (Beazley) (d. 1918). After attending King Edward VI School, Southampton, he entered Christ's Hospital and Balliol College, Oxford, where he was "much involved" (Boardman) with the poet James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915). Flecker wrote poetry dedicated to Beazley and the two enjoyed an aesthete lifestyle similar to their fellow Oxford student, Oscar Wilde.
Art historian of classical art. Educated at the University of Rome under Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli, Becatti was appointed to the Superintendency of Ostia in 1938 at a time when Mussolini sped up excavations in order to showcase them at the (unrealized) International Exposition in Rome. Becatti altered his publishing interests from Etruscan subjects to Roman Ostia as a result.
Columbia University professor of art history for Italian Renaissance; critic of vigorous art restoration. Beck was the son of Samuel Beck, a businessman, and Margaret Weisz (Beck). He studied history, political science and painting at Oberlin, graduating with a B. A. in 1952. He continued study in studio art at New York University, gaining his master's degree in studio in 1954, and then studied at the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Florence with the hopes of becoming a painter. There he met and married Darma Tercinod in 1956.
Co-editor of the magisterial dictionary of artists, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler. Becker studied art history in Bonn and in Leipzig as the assistant to August Schmarsow. He and Ulrich Thieme began work on a comprehensive dictionary of artists, architects and decorators in 1898. The first volume appeared in 1907. Becker withdrew from the project in 1910 because of ill health.
Byzantinist and curator in the Department of Architecture and Sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum 1948-1979. At age two Beckwith's mother died and his father, John Frederick Beckwith, abandoned him. His father lived anonymously in London's East end only discovered by Beckwith in his father's final years. Beckwith was raised by his paternal grandmother in Whitby, North Yorkshire, until she died in Beckwith's teens. Since Beckwith was Roman Catholic, he qualified for and was awarded a scholarship at Ampleforth College, a private Catholic boarding school also in Yorkshire.
Historian of medieval and Renaissance art; among the key group of German art historians to recast the conception of the middle ages in their scholarship. The son of a salesman, Beenken studied in Freiburg and Munich, the latter where he wrote his dissertation under Heinrich Wölfflin on the topic of Enlightenment sculpture, Die allgemeine Gestaltungsproblem in der Baukunst des deutschen Klassizismus (1920). Afterward he turned his attention toward German sculpture of the Middle Ages. His habilitation Die Rottweiler: eine deutsche Bildhauerschule des 14.
Assistant-director of the Print Room of the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum (1913-1920); specialist in early Dutch graphic art and painting; art seller. Beets was born in Batavia, Indonesia which is present-day Jakarta. He was the only child of Dirk Beets and Clara Johanna van de Poll, and the grandson of the Dutch writer and poet Nicolaas Beets (1814-1903). He was raised in Batavia, then the capital of the Netherlands Indies. At the age of eight, he was sent to his mother's family in The Netherlands, in Driebergen.
Librarian and scholar of classical art. He served as librarian for Prince Karl Ludwig von der Pfalz from 1675 as well as conservator for the prince's collection of coins and medals. In 1685, Berger began publishing these in his Thesaurus ex Thesauro Palatino Selectus. The arrangement of the gems was according to era (rulers), mythological subject. Bronze sculpture was also included in his publications. In 1693 Berger was appointed librarian of the coin, art and artifact collection of Frederick I of Prussia in Berlin.
Architectural social-art theorist and historian. Behne was the son of architect Carl Behne. At age one, his family moved to Berlin where he grew up in the Centralviehhof district. After graduation from the local Gymnasium, he attended the Hochschule in Berlin-Charlottenburg intending on a career in architecture. In 1907 he switch to art history, studying at the Friedrich-Wilhelm Universität. After research in Italy in 1911, he completed his dissertation (granted in 1913), Der Inkrustationsstil in der Toskana (The Incrusted Style of Tuscany).
Americanist art historian and architect. Belknap came to art history comparatively late in his career. His father, of the same name (1873-1943), was a vice president of Bankers Trust. His mother was Rey Sealy Hutchings Belknap (1885-1960). Belknap graduated magna cum laude at St. Paul's School, Concord, NH, in 1916 and attended Harvard University. Although his college years were interrupted by war service, he nevertheless graduated with his class in 1920. Following his father's profession, he worked in various finance and investment firms in New York and London until 1928.
First Keeper of the Fine Art Department, Ashmolean Museum, 1909-1931. Bell's father was Robert Courtenay Bell (1816-1896), a banker, and mother Clara Poynter (Bell) ( 1834-1927), whose brother was Edward John Poynter, a director of the National Gallery. He was distantly related on his mother's side to Edward Burne-Jones and the writer Rudyard Kipling. Poynter, Bell's uncle, married Agnes Macdonald, a sister of Burne-Jones's wife; she was in turn aunt of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936). Bell was educated privately.
Art critic and Bloomsbury theorist. Bell was son of William Heward Bell (1849-1927), a civil engineer, and Hannah Taylor Cory (1850-1942). He entered Trinity College, Cambridge in 1899 studying history. There he was greatly influenced by G. E. Moore's philosophy. He was awared a Earl of Derby studentship in 1902 to study in Paris which he instead spend looking at art. Upon his return, he joined the "Thursday evenings" at the Gordon Square home of Thoby Stephen (1880-1906), whom he had met at Cambridge.
First curator of the John G. Johnson Collection, and assistant director, Pennsylvania Museum of Art (later Philadelphia Museum of Art). Bell's father was Robert Courtenay Bell (1816-1896), a banker, and mother Clara Poynter (Bell) ( 1834-1927). He was distantly related on his mother's side to Edward Burne-Jones and the writer Rudyard Kipling. Poynter, Bell's uncle, married Agnes Macdonald, a sister of Burne-Jones's wife; she was in turn aunt of Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936).
Artist, author and Professor of the History and Theory of Art at the University of Sussex from 1967 to 1975. Son of Clive Bell and nephew of Virginia Woolf. His papers are housed at the University of Sussex.
Antiquarian, art theorist and biographer in the tradition of Vasari; Librarian to Queen Christina of Sweden, and curator for Pope Clement X. Bellori was raised by his uncle, the antiquarian Francesco Angeloni (1559-1652). He studied from Angeloni's private archaeological collection and drawings by Annibale Carracci, and painting (perhaps with Domenichino) though few artworks by Bellori are known. Bellori became Angeloni's heir at Angeloni's death in 1652. He assembled his own collection of paintings, including those by Titian, Tintoretto, [Annibale] Carracci, as well as coins and medals.
Historian of the trecento Italian Renaissance. Bellosi was the son of Enrico Bellosi and Maria Cuccuini (Bellosi). His father worked as a gardener and his mother in domestic service. The younger Bellosi attended the University of Florence where he wrote his dissertation under Roberto Longhi in 1963 on the trecento artist Lorenzo Monaco. After a year in the Italian military, 1963-1964, he worked under the Soprintendenza per I Beni Artistici e Storici di Firenze, 1969 to 1979. Bellosi was awarded the Premio Viareggio (award) in 1974.
Professor for Art History and Media Theory, Hochschule für Gestaltung, Karlsruhe, Germany. Belting studied Art History, Archaeology and History at the universities of Mainz and Rome. He completing his dissertation in 1959 in Mainz. He was a Visiting Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Washgington, D. C. where he studied under Ernst Kitzinger. Belting returned to Germany where he taught as assistant professor at the University of Hamburg in 1966. He was promoted to Professor for Art History at Heidelberg in 1970.
Historian of the art of Chile and Peru.
Curator of the Luxembourg Museum and first director of the Musée Rodin.
Early collector of Egon Schiele, wrote a memoir of the artist. Benesch was a railroad administrator in Vienna for the southern line. Although the position was not a particularly lucrative one, he collected contemporary Austrian art. Early on he befriended the Austrian expressionist artist Egon Schiele and became one of his earliest patrons. Schiele painted a combined portrait of him and his son in 1913 (Doppelbildnis H. Benesch und Sohn, Neue Galerie der Stadt Linz, Wolfgang Gurlitt Museum, Inventory 12).
Rembrandt scholar and director of the Albertina 1947-61. Benesch's father was the art collector Heinrich Benesch. Among the elder Benesch's friends was the Austrian Expressionist Egon Schiele. A double portrait of father and son, painted by Schiele in 1913, is owned by the Wolfgang-Gurlitt-Museum in Linz, Austria. The younger Benesch studied art history at the University of Vienna and a semester in Stockholm under Johnny Roosval. Around 1919 he assisted Frederick Antal in organizing the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest.
Art dealer who authored an important biographical dictionary of artists Dictionnaire critique et documentaire des peintres, sculpteurs, dessinateurs et graveurs. Following on the inspiration of Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler. In 1898, Felix Becker launched an initiative to write a comprehensive dictionary of artists, architects and decorators, the first volume of which appeared in 1907. Bénézit began a similar work in the French language shortly thereafter.
Self-taught historian and critic of American art. Benjamin was born in Argos, Greece in 1837 where his parents were American missionaries. He was educated at the English College in Smyrna, Turkey and Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He graduated from Williams College in 1859 having studied both law and art, also seamanship. During his travels, he gained experience as a maritime painter and illustrator. Benjamin published a series of marine depictions of the Crimean War in the London Illustrated News in 1854. He married Clara Stowell, (d. 1880) in 1863.
Classicist art historian. Benndorf studied under the archaeologist/philologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker (1784-1868), the pottery scholar Otto Jahn and the classicist Friedrich Ritschl (1806-1876) at Bonn. He wrote his habilitationschrift in 1868 under Friedrich Wieseler (1811-1892) in Göttingen. During a brief position teaching at Schulpforte, Germany, his pupils included the young Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900).
Print and book collector, wrote major inventory of prints.
Influential scholar of the Italian Renaissance employing connoisseurship; consultant to the major American museums and collectors in the early 20th century. Berenson was born to Albert (originally Alter) Valvrojenski and Julia (originally Eudice) Mickleshanski (Valvrojenski). His father emigrated to Boston from Lithuania with his family in 1875, changing their family name to "Berenson." Bernard Berenson was educated at the Latin School, Boston. A Jew by birth, he converted to Christianity and was baptized in 1885.
Wife of Bernard Berenson and scholar of Italian paintings. Mary Berenson was born Mary Smith to Robert Pearsall Smith (1827-1899), an evangelizing preacher and Hannah Whitall (Smith) (1832-1911), both of Quaker extraction. She was given the nick-name "Mariechen" (little Mary) by a German nursemaid. She attended Smith College and Harvard Annex (later Radcliffe College). At Harvard Annex she met the Scots-Irish Benjamin Francis Conn "Frank" Costelloe (1855-1899). The future barrister and political reformer and Smith married in 1885.
Marxist literary critic and art historian. Berger was born to S. J. D. Berger and Miriam Branson (Berger). He attended Central School of Art and Chelsea School of Art and served in the British army, Oxford and Buckinghamshire Infantry, during and immediately after World War II (1944-1946). Berger initially worked as an artist and teacher, exhibiting his work at galleries in London. He wrote art criticism for the The New Statesman beginning in 1951 under its editor, Kingsley Martin (1897-1969).
Modernist art historian and art librarian, professor University of Kansas. Berger studied art history under Heinrich Wölfflin, Adolph Goldschmidt, Georg Vitzthum von Eckstädt and Paul Frankl at the respective universities of Munich, Berlin, Heidelberg and Göttingen. He completed his dissertation under Moritz Geiger in aesthetics at Göttingen in 1925, his topic addressing Wölfflin's methodology.
Harvard professor and director of the Walters Art Gallery and Cleveland Museum of Art. Bergman attended Rutgers University undergraduate, graduating in 1966. His master's degree, 1969 and Ph.D., 1972, were both awarded from Princeton University. He received Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships. His dissertation, written under Kurt Weitzmann was on the Salerno Ivories. In 1971 he taught as an assistant at Princeton, joining Harvard in 1976 as associate professor of fine arts. He published a revised version of his thesis in 1980.