Déonna, Waldemar

Archeologist and scholar of ancient Greek art; Director of the Musée de Genève, 1922-1955. Déonna was the son of Auguste-Henri Déonna (1846-1894), the Swiss vice consul to Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and mother Marie-Augusta Bönecke (Déonna). He married Marie-Edmée Gans. After attending the universities in Geneva and Paris studying archaeology, epigraphy and vase painting, he spent the years 1903-07 at the Ecole française d'archéologie in Athens, traveling extensively in Greece and Turkey and writing his Ph.D. on terracotta sculpture. During his time, he amassed more than 3500 images of classical sites and objects. He knew Wilhelm Dörpfeld. In 1920 he joined the faculty at the university in Geneva, becoming professor of classical archaeology in 1925, a position he would hold until 1955. In 1922 he also became director of the Musée d'art et d'histoire, and the Musée archéologique in Geneva. He founded the periodical Genava in 1932. In 1950 he directed the founding of the Library for art and archaeology (Bibliothèque d'art et d'archéologie). Methodologically, Déonna contributed to scholarship surrounding the development of form; his morphological comparisons between Greek and Christian medieval art, which appear in Du miracle grec au miracle chrétien (3 vols. 1945-48).