Full Name: Bandinelli, Baccio
Gender: male
Date Born: 1493
Date Died: 1560
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): biography (general genre)
Career(s): authors, biographers, and memoirists
Wrote memoirs of artists; first published in 1905.
KGK, 35
Wrote memoirs of artists; first published in 1905.
Full Name: Baltrušaitis, Jurgis, II
Gender: male
Date Born: 1903
Date Died: 1988
Place Born: Moscow, Russia
Home Country/ies: Lithuania
Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)
Medievalist, Focillon student. Baltrušaitis was the son of Jurgis Baltrušaitis, senior (1873-1944) a Symbolist poet, translator and man of letters. He was raised in the intensely cultural environment of his parents. His father was deeply pro-Russia, translating many Western works of literature into Russian and acting as the first chairman of the Soviet Writers’ Union. The younger Baltrušaitis had the poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) as a teacher. Baltrušaitis moved to Paris to further his education in 1923, studying at the Sorbonne. There, he took classes under the medievalist art historian Henri Focillon who inspired him to study art history. Beginning in 1927 Baltrušaitis’ traveled to Armenia, Georgia, and later to Spain, Italy, and Germany studying Romanesque architecture. He received his doctorate from the Sorbonne in 1931. He married Focillon’s daughter, Hélène Focillon, and initially worked for the Lithuanian Legation in Paris as the cultural attaché. In 1933 Baltrušaitis studied monuments in Persia and Mesopotamia examining the connection between Oriental (middle eastern) and medieval art. The same year he accepted a position lecturing in art history at the Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania (through 1939). Baltrušaitis organized an exhibition of Baltic folk art in 1934 in Paris. During these years he also lectured at the Sorbonne and at the Warburg Institute in London. With the liberation of France in 1944, Baltrušaitis again represented Lithuanians in various international organizations, such as the Assemblée des Nations Captives d’Europe and the Congress for Cultural Freedom. After World War II, Baltrušaitis lectured at New York University, 1947-1948. He was a visiting professor at Yale University and lecturer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1952. He lectured in the Netherlands between 1952-1953. Baltrušaitis took up Focillon’s theme of metamorphoses in several important works of the 1950s, Le moyen âge fantastique: antiquités et exotimes dans l’art gothique and Aberrations: quatre essais sur la légende des formes. In these, Baltrušaitis traced the influences of Oriental inspiration on medieval art. Like Focillon, Baltrušaitis’ focus was the metamorphosis of central themes of Romanesque art over time. Both historians emphasized the outer perimeter or frame as the key to Romanesque composition, what he termed in La stylistique ornementale dans la sculpture romane the “Law of the Frame.” The Romanesque stylized its treatment of objects rather than attempting to be true to nature. Linear designs, he contended, are derived from plant forms, which reveal an intellectual conception. The saints and beasts of the Romanesque belong were transformed into a decorative and conceptual design belonging to the architectural order from which they sprang (Sypher). His methodology blends iconographic and formal approaches. Like his mentor, Focillon, his work was criticized by Meyer Schapiro in Schapiro’s 1932 essay, “über den Schematismus in der romanische Kunst.” The medievalist Oleg Grabar considered Baltrušaitis’ writing too purely theoretical and abstract, chiding it as learned, subjective trivia. Scholars similar in approach included Louis Bréhier and M.-M. Davy.
[complete bibliography:] “Bibliographie de Jurgis Baltrusaitis,” in Chevrier, Jean-Francois. Portrait de Jurgis Baltrusaitis [suivi de] Art sumérien, art roman de Jurgis Baltrusaitis. Paris: Flammarion, 1989, pp. 270-271; [dissertation:] études sur l’art médiéval en Géorgie et en Arménie. Paris: E. Leroux, 1929; La stylistique ornemntale dans la sculpture romane. Paris, Collège de France, 1931, excerpt translated into English in, Sypher, Wylie, ed. Art History; an Anthology of Modern Criticism. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1975, pp. 116-131; Le problème de l’Ogive et l’Arménie. Paris: Librairie Ernest Leroux, 1936; Aberrations: quatre essais sur la légende des formes. Paris: O Perrin, 1957; Anamorphoses; ou, Perspective curieures. Paris: O Perrin, 1955; Anamorphoses, ou, Perspectives curieuses. Paris: O. Perrin 1955, English, Anamorphic Art. New York: Abrams, 1976; Le moyen âge fantastique: antiquités et exotimes daans l’art gothique. Paris: A. Collin, 1955.
Schapiro, Meyer. “über den Schematismus in der romanische Kunst.” Kritische Berichte zur kunstgeschichtlichen Literatur 1 (1932-1933): 1-21; 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. 43 mentioned; 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. 42; “Jurgis Baltrušaitis.” Sužiedelis, Simas, ed. Encyclopedia Lituanica 1. Boston: J. Kapočius, 1970: 271-272; Chevrier, Jean-Francois. Portrait de Jurgis Baltrusaitis [suivi de] Art sumérien, art roman par Jurgis Baltrusaitis. Paris: Flammarion, 1989; Grabar, Oleg. “Dissemination. (ii) Examples and Problems: Models from the Social Sciences.” Dictionary of Art 9:36; Mazzocut-Mis, Maddalena. Deformazioni fantastiche: introduzione all’estetica di Jurgis Baltrusaitis. Milan: Mimesis, 1999; Cahn, Walter. “Henri Focillon.” Medieval Scholarship: Biographical Studies on the Formation of a Discipline. Volume 3: Philosophy and the Arts. Edited by Helen Damico. Garland Reference Library of the Humanities 2110. New York: Garland Publishing, 2000, p. 267.
Contributors: Emily Crockett and Lee Sorensen
Medievalist, Focillon student. Baltrušaitis was the son of Jurgis Baltrušaitis, senior (1873-1944) a Symbolist poet, translator and man of letters. He was raised in the intensely cultural environment of his parents. His father was deeply pro-Russi
Full Name: Balet, Leo
Gender: male
Date Born: 1878
Date Died: 1965
Place Born: Rotterdam, South Holland, Netherlands
Place Died: New York, NY, USA
Home Country/ies: Germany
Die Verbürgerlichung der deutschen Kunst, Literatur und Musik im 18 Jahrhundert. In Arbeitsgemeinschaft mit Dr. E. Gerhard [pseudonym Eberhard Rebling]. Strassburg: Heitz & co., 1936. 0.Metzler
Bazin 194; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munchen: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 25-7.
Full Name: Baldinucci, Filippo
Gender: male
Date Born: 1625
Date Died: 1697
Place Born: Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): connoisseurship and drawings (visual works)
Career(s): art collectors
Collector of drawings and connoisseur; worked on a universal history of art. An annotated translation of his life of Bernini was annotated and translated into German by the eminent Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl, published in 1912.
Notizie de’ professori del disegno da Cimabue : in qua, per le quali si dimostra come, e per chi le bell’ arti di pittura, scultura, e architettura lasciata la rozzezza delle maniere greca, e gottica, si siano in questi secoli ridotte all’ antica loro perfezione. 1658.; Vocabulario toscano dell’arte del disegno. Florence: Santi Franchi, 1681.; Vita del Cavaliere Gio Lorenzo Bernini. 1682; Riegl, Alois, and Burda, Arthur, and Pollak, Oskar, eds. Filippo Baldinuccis vita des Gio. Lorenzo Bernini: mit übersetzung und Kommentar. Vienna: A. Schroll, 1912.
Bazin 53
Collector of drawings and connoisseur; worked on a universal history of art. An annotated translation of his life of Bernini was annotated and translated into German by the eminent Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl, publishe
Full Name: Baldini, Umberto
Gender: male
Date Born: 1921
Date Died: 2006
Place Born: Pitigliano, Arezzo, Tuscany, Italy
Place Died: Marina di Massa, Massa-Carrara, Tuscany, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Renaissance, and restoration (process)
Historian of the Italian Renaissance; headed restoration in Italy after Arno River flood, 1966. He was born in Pitigliano, Italy, near Grosseto. Baldini studied art history under Mario Salmi at the University of Florence. In the 1940’s began working as a conservator in Florence. After the war, he was appointed a temporary worker in the restoration office in 1949, housed at the time in the loggia of the Uffizi. He rose to Uffizi conservation director, and, during the early morning hours of November 4, 1966, it fell to him to try and prevent the sudden flooding of the Arno River from pouring into the museum’s storerooms. Despite personally sandbagging the Uffizi doors (it was a holiday and most museum workers were on vacation), the conservation labs were submerged, damaging more than 1,000 medieval and Renaissance paintings, sculptures and frescoes. Baldini took over the restoration of hundreds of these artworks, not only at the Uffizi, but also in organizing efforts at other museums, libraries and churches. He helped to hire and train hundreds of assistants to dry, clean and restore artworks and worked with experts to develop new restoration techniques. As a result of this campaign, the Florentine state restoration laboratories were merged into the historic ‘Opificio dei Medici’ (located in a Medici building), which had taken lead role after the 1966 catastrophe. Baldini became the director in 1970 of this new body, now known as the Opificio delle Pietre Dure. He reorganized the museum’s new conservation facilities, creating a single institute with training programs for students. In 1972 he organized an exhibition on the conservation works damaged the flood. His important book on conservation-a fundamental work-Teoria del restauro e unità di metodologia, appeared in 1978. Baldini moved to Rome in 1983 as director of the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro, the most important conservation institute in Italy. As director, he and his wife, Ornella Casazza, led the project to clean and restore the Masaccio frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine Church in Florence. Using as their guide colors from a portion of the fresco hidden behind an altar–and very nearly original–the restorers brought Masaccio’s masterpiece back to vivid colors, avoiding the kind of criticism later applied to the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Baldini published a book on this project as well, La Cappella Brancacci, in 1990. He retired from the Institute in 1987. However, he continued to write about restoration, and to contribution to conservation in his role as President of the ‘Universitá Internazionale dell’Arte’ (International University of Art or UIA) in Florence. Using the famous Cimabue Crucifix in the Basilica Santa Croce as the prime example Baldini published Brunelleschi e Donatello nella Sagrestia Vecchia di S. Lorenzo in 1989. Baldini contributed art reviews in Italian art journals, including Critica d’arte, Arte documento, Museologia, Bollettino d’arte, Commentari and Antichità viva. He was president of the Horne Museum, the museum-home of the British historian of Renaissance art, Herbert P. Horne. In 2004 he joined other Italian art historians in authenticating wooden crucifix as an early work of Michelangelo, still controversial. Baldini died after a long illness at the age of 84, shortly before he was to deliver a speech at a conference on the 40th anniversary of the flood. His funeral was held at the church of San Giuseppe Vecchio in Marina di Massa, Tuscany. Baldini was known as an authority on Michelangelo, Botticelli, Masaccio and Della Robbia family. His restoration work was open to criticism, some asserting that the subtleties of the Brancacci frescoes had been effaced. His bold restoration moves during the Arno flood saved countless works; he removed entire frescoes from church walls to protect them from corrosive salts seeping through masonry from basement crypts.
Palazzo Vecchio e i quartieri monumentali. Florence: Tip.Giuntina, 1950; Mostra di opere d’arte restaurate: settima esposizione. Soprintendenza alle Gallerie per le Provincie di Firenze, Arezzo e Pistoia, Gabinetto dei Restauri. Florence: Tipografia Giuntina, 1953; Il Rinascimento nell’Italia centrale. Bergamo: Istituto italiano d’arti grafiche, 1962; Umanesimo e Rinascimento. Florence: Sadea/Sansoni, 1966; Firenze 4 novembre 1966: rapporto sui danni al patrimonio artistico e culturale. Florence: C.E. Giunti/G. Barbèra, 1967; La bottega dei Della Robbia. Florence: Sadea, 1965; Michelangelo. Rome: C.E.I. – Compagnia Edizioni Internazionali, 1966; Luca Signorelli. Milan: Fabbri, 1966; and Perugi, Liberto. L’opera completa di Michelangelo scultore. Milan: Rizzoli, 1973, English, The Sculpture of Michelangelo. New York: Rizzoli, 1982; Teoria del restauro e unità di metodologia. Florence: Nardini, 1978;and Casazza, Ornella. La Primavera del Botticelli: storia di un quadro e di un restauro. Milan: A. Mondadori, 1984 English, Primavera: the Restoration of Botticelli’s Masterpiece. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1986; Brunelleschi e Donatello nella Sagrestia Vecchia di S. Lorenzo. Florence: Il Fiorino-Alinari, 1989; and Casazza, Ornella. La Cappella Brancacci. Milan: Electa, 1990, English, The Brancacci Chapel. New York: Abrams, 1992;”Theory of Restoration and Methodological Unity.” in, Price, Nicholas Stanley, and Talley, M. Kirby, Jr. and Vaccaro, Alessandra Melucco, eds. Historical and Philosophical Issues in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 1996, pp. 355-357; Masaccio. Milan: Electa, 2001.
Numero speciale dedicato a Umberto Baldini. Critica d’arte 69 no. 32 (December 2007); [obituaries:] Lapucci, Roberta. “Umberto Baldini” Arte documento 22: 286-287, 2006; “Umberto Baldini.” Times (London), August 26, 2006, p. 73, Lavietes, Stuart. “Umberto Baldini, 84, Restorer Who Saved Italy’s Treasures.” New York Times August 22, 2006, p. C11;
Contributors: Giulia Savio
Historian of the Italian Renaissance; headed restoration in Italy after Arno River flood, 1966. He was born in Pitigliano, Italy, near Grosseto. Baldini studied art history under Mario Salmi at the University of Florence. In
Full Name: Baldass, Ludwig von
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1887
Date Died: 1963
Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria
Place Died: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria
Home Country/ies: Austria
Subject Area(s): art theory, Netherlandish, Northern European, and Vienna School
Vienna-School art historian, Netherlandish specialist and Director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Baldass studied in Graz, Halle (under Adolph Goldschmidt) and Munich before gaining his degree at the University in Vienna. His thesis, written under Max Dvořák and accepted in 1911, was on portraiture of the Emperor Maximilian. Baldass joined the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna the same year, eventually being appointed curator in 1918. He married Paula Wagner, granddaughter of the architect Otto Wagner (1841-1918). The first of two books on Albrecht Altdorfer by him appeared in 1923. He qualified as a lecturer at the University of Vienna in 1926. In 1934 he was appointed professor Professor. When Austria was annexed by Germany in 1938, Baldass, as a Reich curator, carried out Nazi policy. The Kunsthistorisches director, together with director of of the Führermuseum project Hans Posse, plunderers took thousands of objects from the longtime Jewish Viennese residents. Prominent Jewish art collector brothers, Alphonse Mayer Rothschild (1878-1942) and Louis Rothschild (1882-1955), attempted to flee Nazi-controlled Austria with their art collection that year, but Baldass refused to allow the paintings leave Austria. The treasures were taken to the Hofburg palace, the Nazis’ Zentraldepot for confiscated art. Lesser pieces went to Viennese museums, including the Kunsthistorisches, while much of the decorative arts, mainly porcelains, were auctioned at the state-owned Dorotheum. Baldass published an expanded version of his Aldorfer monograph in 1941. He remained as director throughout the war years, retaining his position afterward. After the war, the remaining Rothschild, Louis, made an attempt to recover his family’s art work. Baldass again took an administrative tac, pressing Rothschild to “donate” them to the Kunsthistorisches, which the family reluctantly did in return for getting control of some others. In 1949 he retired from the Museum to devote himself to writing. Two of his most important books appeared during this later part of his career, a monograph on Jan van Eyck in 1952 and one on Hieronymus Bosch the following year. The former showed the influence of Dvořák’s “Das Rätsel der Kunst der Brüder Van Eyck.” In 1959 he issued a second edition of the Bosch book. In his final years, Baldass wrote on Venetian sixteenth-century art, principally Titian and Giorgione. After his death, the Rothschild objects were renegotiated and more returned to the heirs. Methodologically, Baldass was one of the last art historians to carry on (first) Vienna-school methodology (specifically Max Dvořák‘s) well into the post-World War II years (de Tolnay). His approach was generally to place individual works of art within the oeuvre of the artist’s career, evaluating and assigning art-historical importance, another Vienna-school goal. His strong connoisseurship approach was praised by many and his work on the northern Renaissance remains consulted. However, his complicity in forcing Jews to turn over their art works to the Kunsthistorisches Museum during the Nazi years tarnished his reputation. Some colleagues, such as Charles de Tolnay, however, attributed the rehabilitation of German art history after the war to him.
[dissertation:] Die Bildnisse Kaiser Maximilians I. Vienna, 1911, published, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des Allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses 31, part 1, section 5, (1913): 247-334; “Die Entwicklung des Dieric Bouts.” Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien , n.s., 6 (1932): 77-114; “Die Chronologie der Gemälde des Hieronymus Bosch.” Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 38. (1917): 177-195; “Eine südböhmische Malerwerkstatt um 1420.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte 4 no. 5/6 (1935): 301-319; Hieronymus Bosch. Vienna: A. Schroll 1943, English, Hieronymus Bosch. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1960; and Heinz, Günther. Giorgione. Vienna: A. Schroll, 1964, English, Giorgione. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1965.
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. 46, Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 163; Czeike, Felix, ed. Historisches Lexikon Wien 1. Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 1992, p. 237; “How the Republic of Austria Forced the Rothschilds to Donate Art.” Museum Security Report February 17, 1998 (online) http://www.museum-security.org/reports/01798 (from a report of Der Standard February 14-15, 1998); Dictionary of German Biography 1 Munich: K. G. Saur, 2001, p. 273; [obituary:] de Tolnay, Charles. “Ludwig von Baldass.” Burlington Magazine 106, no. 732. (March 1964): 136.
Vienna-School art historian, Netherlandish specialist and Director of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Baldass studied in Graz, Halle (under Adolph Goldschmidt) and Munich before gaining his degree at the Universit
Full Name: Baker, C. H. Collins
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1880
Date Died: 1959
Place Born: Ilminster, Somerset, England, UK
Place Died: Finchley, Barnet, Greater London, England, UK
Home Country/ies: United Kingdom
Subject Area(s): painting (visual works)
Blake scholar; National Gallery, London, keeper and painter. Baker’s parents were John Collins Baker, a solicitor in Somerset, and Fanny Henrietta Remmett. He attended Berkhamsted before entering the Royal Academy Schools, studying painting. In 1903 he married Muriel Isabella Alexander (1874/5-1956). Baker worked as a landscape painter, exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1907 and elsewhere through 1916. In 1911 he began writing art criticism for The Outlook and succeeded D. S. MacColl as the art critic for the Saturday Review. In the meantime, Charles Holroyd, director of the National Gallery, hired him as his personal assistant and secretary. He authored Lely and the Stuart Portrait Painters in 1912, and early study of British art. Baker rose to keeper of the Gallery in 1914. There he met the future writer E. M. Forster (1879-1970), then working as a cataloger and guard for the Gallery; the two became lifelong friends. When C. J. Holmes succeed Holroyd in 1916, he retained Baker. Holmes and Baker became the driving forces of the Gallery, moving some 900 pictures to safekeeping in a London subway (the Tube) during World War I. Baker wrote catalogs for some of the holdings of the Gallery at the time. Books on John Crome and Pieter de Hooch appeared in 1921 and 1925, respectively. In 1928, he added the responsibilities of surveyor of the king’s pictures, replacing Lionel Cust. The following year he published A Catalogue of the Pictures at Hampton Court. His staff at the Gallery during this time included Ellis K. Waterhouse, whom he greatly influenced. In 1930 he was commissioned to write the catalog of British paintings in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, CA. In England, his friend Holmes had retired and Baker found himself ever more disagreeing with the chairman of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery, the powerful Arthur Hamilton Lee (Lord Lee of Fareham, 1868-1947). In 1931 the director of the Huntington, Max Farrand, offered him the position of senior research associate in British art at the Huntington which Baker accepted in 1932. He moved to California in 1933 researching the papers of James Brydges, first duke of Chandos. Baker resigned as the King’s surveyor and was awarded a CVO, both in 1934. The Huntington collections catalog was completed in 1936 and the Royal Collection, Principal Pictures in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle, in 1937. He published his Brydges books with his wife in 1949. Baker retired to England the same year where he worked on a book on minor Georgian portrait painters, a Catalogue of William Blake’s Drawings and Paintings in the Huntington Library, published in 1957, and continuing to advise the Huntington on purchases. He died at his Finchley, Middlesex home. His papers are held at the National Gallery, London, and the National Portrait Gallery, Heinz Archive and Library.Baker was among the last generation of self-taught scholars who served the art museum community. Waterhouse dedicated his Pelican History of Art volume, Painting in Britain, 1530-1790 to Baker in 1953. Kenneth Clark, who became director of the Gallery the year after Baker’s departure, disparaged Baker’s catalogs of the Museum as sloppy, though they remained in use through the 1950s.
Paintings in Oil & Water Colours by Early & Modern Painters. London: Medici Society, 1913; and James Montague R. British Painting. London: The Medici Society, 1933; Catalogue of the Principal Pictures in the Royal Collection at Windsor Castle. London: Constable & Co., ltd., 1937; and Constable, William George. English Painting of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1930; Lely & the Stuart Portrait Painters: a Study of English Portraiture before & after Van Dyck. 2 vols. London: P. L. Warner/Medici Society, 1912; The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, First Duke of Chandos, Patron of the Liberal Arts. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1949; Catalogue of William Blake’s Drawings and Paintings in the Huntington Library. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1957.
Holmes, Charles John. Self and Partners 1936; Millar, Oliver. The Queen’s Pictures. New York: Macmillan, 1977, p. 209; Clark, Kenneth. The Other Half: a Self Portrait. New York: Harper & Row, 1977, p.8; Millar, Oliver. “Caring for the Queen’s Pictures: Surveyors Past and Present.” in Lloyd, Christopher. The Queen’s Pictures: Royal Collectors through the Centuries. London: National Gallery Publications/H. N. Abrams, New York, 1992, pp. 14-18; Cast, David. “Baker, C(harles) H(enry) Collins.” Dictionary of Art; [obituaries:] Waterhouse, Ellis. Burlington Magazine 101 (1959): 354; Times (London) July 6, 1959), p. 8; Forster, E. M. “Mr. C. H. Baker.” Times (London) July 14, 1959, p. 9; New York Times July 6, 1959, p. 27.
Blake scholar; National Gallery, London, keeper and painter. Baker’s parents were John Collins Baker, a solicitor in Somerset, and Fanny Henrietta Remmett. He attended Berkhamsted before entering the Royal Academy Schools, studying painting. In 19
Full Name: Baigell, Matthew Eli
Gender: male
Date Born: 1933
Place Born: New York, NY, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): American (North American)
Career(s): educators
Americanist art historian and professor of art history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N. J. Baigell graduated undergraduate from the University of Vermont in 1954 and received his M.A. from Columbia University in 1955. He married Renee Moses in 1959. His Ph.D. was awarded at the University of Pennsylvania in 1965. He served in the U.S. Air Force between 1955-57 as lieutenant. Between 1961-65 was an instructor at Ohio State University, advancing to assistant professor, 1965-67, and then associate professor of art, 1967-68. He joined the Art Department of Rutgers University in New Jersey as associate professor in 1968, promoted to professor in 1972. Since 1978 he has been Distinguished Professor of art. Baigell has written seventeen books on art. His latest work is Peeling Potatoes, Painting Pictures: Women Artists in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia, and Latvia (coauthored with Renee Baigell). He is also the co editor (with Milly Heyd) of Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art (both titles from Rutgers University Press). His students include Gail Levin.
[dissertation:] John Haviland. University of Pennsylvania, 1965; Edited and introduced by, and Williams, Julia. Artists Against War and Fascism: Papers of the First American Artists’ Congress. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 1986; Albert Bierstadt. New York: Watson-Guptill, 1981; The American Scene: American Painting of the 1930’s. New York: Praeger 1974; Artist and Identity in Twentieth-century America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001; A Concise History of American Painting and Sculpture. New York: Harper & Row, 1984; Dictionary of American Art. New York: Harper & Row, 1979; Jewish-American Artists and the Holocaust. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University press, 1997; Jewish Artists in New York: the Holocaust Years. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Thomas Cole. New York: Watson-Guptill Publications, 1981; The Western Art of Frederic Remington. New York: Ballantine Books, 1976; and Baigell, Renee. Peeling Potatoes, Painting Pictures: Women Artists in Post-Soviet Russia, Estonia, and Latvia: the First Decade. New Brunswick, NJ: Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum and Rutgers University Press, 2001. Thomas Hart Benton. New York: Abrams,1974; and Heyd, Milly. Complex Identities: Jewish Consciousness and Modern Art. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press , 2001; and Borovsky, Alexander, and Manevich, Galina. Moscow: the Group. New York: NY: Neuhoff Gallery, 1995; Edited, and Baigell, Renee. Soviet Dissident Artists: Interviews after Perestroika. New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers University Press, 1995; Edited, and by Hurt, R. Douglas, and Dains, Mary K. Thomas Hart Benton: Artist, Writer, and Intellectual. Columbia, MO: State Historical Society of Missouri, 1989.
Rutgers University Press announcement, 1999.
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Americanist art historian and professor of art history at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, N. J. Baigell graduated undergraduate from the University of Vermont in 1954 and received his M.A. from Columbia University in 1955. He married Renee Mose
Full Name: Baglione, Giovanni
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1566
Date Died: 1643
Place Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy
Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): Baroque, biography (general genre), Italian (culture or style), and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)
Painter and first historian of the Roman Baroque through two early art histories, a biography of artists, Vite de’ pittori, scultori, architetti (1642), and a survey of Roman churches, Le nove chiese di Roma (1639). Baglione described himself as having descended a noble family from Perugia. In his autobiography appended to his Lives of the Artists, Le vite, 1642, Baglione claimed as well that he studied art under the painter Francesco Morelli in Rome. He worked as a painter, employing a Caravaggesque style, and received numerous commissions. By 1600 Baglione was an Accademia di S Luca member. He brought a libel suit against Caravaggio in 1603 for some verses supposedly written by him against Baglione. Within that context Orazio Gentileschi, a plaintiff in the suit, admitted Baglione a “first-class painter.” Baglione was knighted in 1606. Between 1621 and 1622 he traveled to Mantua. In the 1630s, he began compiling notes for his two art-historical works. Baglione published his first, Le nove chiese di Roma, a discussion on the contemporary paintings and sculpture in nine major Roman churches, with some references to ancient and medieval works, in 1639. This alone might have secured him the sobriquet “First historian of the Roman Baroque” (Pace), because Le nove chiese is more than a devotional guidebook for pilgrims, the genre of the period. His more important work, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori & architetti, a biography of artists, appeared in 1642 in Rome, containing biographies of more than 200 artists who worked in Rome between 1572 and 1642. A second edition with an expanded section on the achievements of Pope Urban VIII was issued, also in Rome, in 1649. Subsequent editions were issued from Naples in 1733, 1739 and 1743. Le nove chiese di Roma was, in the words of Roberto Longhi, the “first strictly artistic guide of the churches of Rome.” It’s importance today is the snapshot it gives of Roman churches which were all significantly altered. Baglione’s “guide” avoids religious discussion and hagiography and focuses on the art and artists of the churches. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori & architetti became an important primary source for 17th-century art in Rome. A broad-minded critic who avoided overly theoretical discussions of many art biographies–unlike other biographers of the period–he used his knowledge as a practicing artist to evaluate, often singularly, the important stylistic transformations occurring at the time of his writing. He limited the discussion of paintings to those viewable by the public (with few exceptions) for readers to better appreciate his own criticism. He praised Caravaggio, despite his legal disputes. His commentary included architecture and sculpture. Baglione’s anecdotes on artist’s lives–a necessary feature on biographies, then as now–also provide insights on the realities of commissions and the conditions for artistic success in the 17th century. In his own time Giovanni Pietro Bellori used Baglione’s Vite for his book Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni of 1672, though Bellori was jealous of Baglione’s authority accused him of having the work ghostwritten by the antiquarian Ottavio Tronsarelli (d. 1646). Others using Baglione included Carlo Cesare Malvasia for his biographies published beginning in 1678, Giovanni Battista Passeri for his work of 1678 and in Spain, Acisclo Antonio Palomino de Castro y Velasco in his Museo pictórico y escala óptica, 1715-1724. His work became an important source for modern art historians studying his age, including Luigi Antonio Lanzi, Girolamo Cluento Nettunio Baruffaldi, Hermann Voss, Jacob Hess and Anthony Blunt. The importance of his work is testified by the fact that a separate index to it appeared in 1924 (Rome), a facsimile edition in 1935 (also Rome), and Hess’ commentary in 1995.
Le nove chiese di Roma nelle quali si contengono le historie, pitture, scolture, & architetture di esse. Rome: A. Fei, 1639; Le vite de’ pittori, scultori, et architetti dal Pontificato di Gregorio XIII del 1572: in fino a’tempi di Papa Urbano Ottauo nel 1642. Rome: Nella stamperia d’Andrea Fei, 1642, [facsimile edition with marginal notes by Bellori:], ed. Mariani, Valerio. Rome: Stampato in calco-offset dallo Stab. arti grafiche E. Calzone, 1935.
Longhi, Roberto. “Giovanni Baglione.” Me pinxit e quesiti caravaggeschi, 1928-1934. Florence: Sansoni, 1968, pp. 145-153 [especially 149-153]; Pace, Claire. Félibien’s Life of Poussin. London: A. Zwemmer, 1981, p. 16; O’Neil, Maryvelma Smith. “First Historian of the Roman Baroque.” chapter 5 of Giovanni Baglione: Artistic Reputation in Baroque Rome. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002, pp. 177-196.
Painter and first historian of the Roman Baroque through two early art histories, a biography of artists, Vite de’ pittori, scultori, architetti (1642), and a survey of Roman churches, Le nove chiese di Roma (1639). Baglione desc
Full Name: Badt, Kurt
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1890
Date Died: 1973
Place Born: Berlin, Germany
Place Died: Überlingen am Bodensee, Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): art theory, Baroque, methodology, and Modern (style or period)
Private scholar; art historian of the baroque and modern periods; methodological theorist. Badt was born to a prosperous Banking family in Berlin. His father, Leopold Badt (1858-1929) raised his children in a rarefied cultural atmosphere, giving them every opportunity to experience art. The younger Badt attended the Berlin-Charlottenburg Reformgymnasium, graduating in 1906. Between 1909-1914 he studied art history and philosophy at the universities of Berlin, Munich and finally at Freiburg (im Breisgau) under Wilhelm Vöge. While a student, Badt took a young Erwin Panofsky to hear a lecture by Vöge and thus cementing one of the most famous pupil/teacher relationships in art history. Badt’s doctoral thesis, written in 1914, was on the Renaissance painter Andrea Solario. He never wrote a habilitation or taught professionally until nearly his retirement. Badt began his career as an assistant at the Bremen Kunsthalle, studying studio painting and sculpture. Throughout his career, his art-historical writing always reflected a painter’s interest in details and their relationship to the world. He married Ella C. Wollheim around this time. Badt taught privately at Ludwigshafen/Bodensee, lecturing on the philosophy of G. F. W. Hegel (1770-1831), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) and Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), the latter whom he knew personally. His early writings in the 1920s included contemporary artists, such as Wilhelm Lehmbruck. His first marriage dissolved, Badt married Helen “Leni” Arnheim (1906-1973), the sister of the esthetician and art historian Rudolf Arnheim. With the ascension of the Hitler’s party in Germany in 1933, Badt moved to Munich in anonymity to avoid Nazi persecution. Although a declared Roman Catholic, Badt’s Jewish heritage eventually forced him to flee Nazi Germany at the outbreak of World War II in 1939. He gained a research position at the newly founded Warburg Institute in London, remaining there until after the war. In 1946 he published Eugène Delacroix Drawings, his first book since the partial publication of his thesis in 1914. Badt returned to Germany in 1950 and became a German citizen in 1952, assisting with the reorganization of the university system. The post-war German period of his life resulted in his greatest publishing output. In 1961 Badt issued a series of essays (some previously published) on Jan Vermeer which outlined Badt’s methodology ‘Modell und Maler’ von Vermeer, but also pointedly criticizing the methodology of ‘second Vienna school’ art historian Hans Sedlmayr. Sedlmayr, perhaps staunchest supporter of Nazism to retain an art history professorship after World War II, argued for a pseudo-scientific theoretic approach to art. Ever rooted in the object, Badt’s Vermeer attacked Sedlmayr on methodological grounds. In 1968 he was invited by literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss (1921-1997) to the newly founded University of Constance (Konstanz). Badt’s work greatly influenced the art historians Gertrude Berthold (b. 1920), the Sedlmayr student Lorenz Dittmann, Martin Gosebruch, Walter Hatto Gross, Josef Adolf Schmoll genannt Eisenwerth and Max Imdahl. Despondent in old age, Badt committed suicide at 83. Badt regarded art as a portrait of reality (Wirklichkeitsdarstellung). Of particular interest to him was the subject matter of the work and meaning of colors in paintings. This method lent itself best to the artists he studied: Nicolas Poussin, Jan Vermeer, John Constable, Eugène Delacroix, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh and Paolo Veronese. Badt considered the “masterpiece” to be the only art worth studying. Among his appreciators, Jauss, (1975) praised him for mentioning human suffering in his works, often forgotten by other historical works. W. Eugene Kleinbauer, Jr. characterized him as “too rigid for analysis.” Badt’s art history owes much to Johann Gustav Droysen’s Historik (1868). Badt wrote about the distinction between art history and its political, social and economic implications. He questioned deeply rooted principles of art history as had Heinrich Wölfflin. Since he was writing against the norm, other art historians often portrayed as a traitor and his understanding of art was questioned. His writings and methodology sparked greatest interest in fields outside art history.
[dissertation:] Andrea Solario: Sein Leben und sein Werke: Ein Beitrag zur Kunstgeschichte der Lombardei. Freiburg, 1914, [partially published as] Grundlagen zu einer kritischen Biographie des Malers Andrea Solario. Leipzig: s.n., 1914; “Cezanne’s Watercolour Technique.” The Burlington Magazine 83 (October 1943): 246-8; Eugène Delacroix Drawings. Oxford: B. Cassirer, 1946; John Constable’s Clouds. London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1950, [the original German-language text was never published]; Die Kunst Cézannes. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 1956, English, The Art of Cézanne. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965; “Raphael’s Incendio del Borgo.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 22 (January 1959): 35-59; Modell und Maler von Jan Vermeer, Probleme der Interpretation; eine Streitschrift gegen Hans Sedlmayr. Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1961; Die Farbenlehre Van Goghs. Cologne: DuMont, 1961; Eugène Delacroix: Werke und Ideale. Cologne: DuMont,1965; Kunsttheoretische Versuche: ausgewählte Aufsätze, Cologne: M. Dumont Schauberg, 1968; Die Kunst des Nicolas Poussin. Cologne: DuMont Schauberg, 1969; “Ein angebliches selbstbildnis von Nicolas Poussin.” Pantheon 27 (September 1969): 395-8; Das Spätwerk Cézannes. Constance: Druckerei u. Verlagsanst. Universitätsverlag, 1971; Ernst Barlach, der Bildhauer. Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1971; Eine Wissenschaftslehre der Kunstgeschichte. Cologne: M. Dumont Schauberg, 1971.
Panofsky, Erwin. “Wilhelm Vöge: A Biographical Memoir.” Art Journal 28 no. 1 (Fall 1968): 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. 74, 103; 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. 104 mentioned; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1999, pp. 4-6; Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 21-24; [personal correspondence, W. Lee Troutman, January, 2011].
Contributors: HP and Lee Sorensen
Private scholar; art historian of the baroque and modern periods; methodological theorist. Badt was born to a prosperous Banking family in Berlin. His father, Leopold Badt (1858-1929) raised his children in a rarefied cultural atmosphere, giving t