Griechen und Römer. 1866. Volume I of Geschichte der Bildenden Künste (Karl Schnasse, see entry for full record). 2nd. ed. 8 vols. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1866-79. Catalogs of Berlin Museum holdings in antiquities: Bausteine zur Gescheichte der griechisch-römischen Plastik oder Berlins antike Bildwerke. Die Gipsabgüsse im Neuen Museum, in historischer Folge erklärt, 1868; and Geräte und Bronzen im Alten Museum, 1871.
Sources
Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 57-58.
Citation
"Friedrichs, Karl." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/friedrichsk/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Succeeded Eduard Gerhard as Director of Berlin Antiquarium 1868-1871, a.o. Professor at Berlin University 1859-1871. His students at Erlangen included the early study years of Reinhard Kekulé von Stradoni
Princeton University Byzantinist and early administrator of Dumbarton Oaks. Friend entered Princeton University in 1911, received his B. A. in 1915 and continued his graduate work in the Department of Art and Archaeology with Allan Marquand as chair. It was with medievalist Charles Rufus Morey that Friend did most of his graduate work. During World War I he served with the American Expeditionary Force in France in 1918. After his return he joined the Princeton Department in 1921, remaining on the faculty the rest of his life. He never completed the Ph.D. degree. Initially Friend researched and wrote on medieval manuscript illumination. His studies on the manuscript style of the Abbey of St. Denis, although today generally discredited, was his initial foray into the field. From there, Friend’s interest in Evangelist types in the art of both east and west, ultimately brought him into his mature area, Byzantine studies. He was elected Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America in 1936 and made Professor of the department. Friend built a research room at Princeton equipped with a library and photographs to better research the topics of the so-called “Manuscript Seminar,” begun by Morey and attended by scholars from throughout the world. The photographs were those taken on Princeton expeditions to Greek Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos. Friend used the collection to make important discoveries, including tracing the work of the eighth-century theologian, John of Damascus, through a sticherarium or hymn book, concluding John as the “father” of both Byzantine music and art. Friend became editor of the project to publish a corpus of Greek Bible manuscripts based on the “Athos photographs” a project known as the volumes, Illustrations in the Manuscripts of the Septuagint. The first volume appeared in 1941. His single publication on renaissance art, an article on Dürer, appeared in 1943. In 1943, too, he was named named a member of the Board of Scholars to Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks, a research center for Byzantine studies outside Washgington, D. C. Thus began a long and important relationship with the institution. He directed the 1944 symposium at the center, became a resident scholar between 1947-48, and from 1948, Director of Studies. Although retaining Princeton faculty status, Friend’s devotion to Dumbarton Oaks developed it into the premier Byzantine studies center on which its current reputation is based. As an administrator, he strengthened its ties with the university, giving scholars academic rank while there, and creating junior position for newer scholars. Each spring Friend hosted distinguished seminars at Dumbarton Oaks, bringing together the best scholars on Byzantine culture. In 1946 succeeded Morey as Marquand Professor at Princeton. A three-year illness cut short his work. He died at 62.Friend’s research focused on reconstructing the origins of early manuscript illumination. His methodology followed that of C. R. Morey, his mentor and colleague.
Selected Bibliography
“Portraits of the Evangelists in Greek and Latin Manuscripts.” Art Studies 5 (1927): 115-47, 7 (1929): 3-29; “Carolingian Art in the Abbey of St. Denis.” Art Studies I (1923): 67-75; “The Canon Tables of the Book of Kells.” in Medieval Studies in Memory of A. Kingsley Porter, ed. Wilhelm R. W. Koehler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1939: 611-66; “Dürer and the Hercules Borghese-Piccolomini.” Art Bulletin 25 (1943): 40-9. and DeWald, Ernest T., and Weitzmann, Kurt. The Illustrations in the Manuscripts of the Septuagint. 3 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941- .
Sources
Panofsky, Erwin. “The History of Art.” In The Cultural Migration: The European Scholar in America. Introduction by W. Rex Crawford. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1953, p. 87, mentioned; 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. 63, 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, pp. 59, 53 n. 110; [obituaries] DeWald, Ernest. “Albert Mathias Friend, Jr.” Speculum 32 (July 1957): 641; Menzies, Elizabeth. “A.M. Friend, Jr. Educator, 62, Dies.” The New York Times March 25, 1956; p. 92; “Albert Mathias Friend, Jr.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1958): 1-2.
Citation
"Friend, Albert M., Jr.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/frienda/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Princeton University Byzantinist and early administrator of Dumbarton Oaks. Friend entered Princeton University in 1911, received his B. A. in 1915 and continued his graduate work in the Department of Art and Archaeology with
Place Born: Prague, Praha, Hlavní Město, Czech Republic
Place Died: Princeton, Mercer, NJ, USA
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), art theory, Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)
Institution(s): Institute for Advanced Study
Overview
Medievalist architectural historian and Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, scholar; important Kunstwissenschaft Gothic theorist. Frankl’s family stemmed from a line of Jewish scholars. His father a Prague businessman, was Carl Frankl and his mother Amalia von Wiener (Frankl). He was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, which is present-day Prague, Czech Republic. He attended to German Staats-Obergymnasium in Prague, graduating in 1896. Following a year’s service in the Austrian military at a Lieutenant’s rank in 1897, he entered the Technische Hochschule in Munich and then Berlin, graduating with a degree in (practicing) architecture in 1904. He married an artist, Elsa Johanna Herzberg in 1905, working as an architect. He returned school in 1908, studying philology, history and art history at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, the latter topic under Heinrich Wölfflin. Frankl’s dissertation advisor, however, was Berthold Riehl, founder of the Institut für Kunstgeschichte (Art History Institute) there. The topic was on fifteenth-century glass painting in southern Germany, accepted in 1910. Frankl remained at Munich as Wölfflin’s assistant (through 1913), who was now Riehl’s successor, writing his Habilitationschrift on developmental phases in architecture under Wölfflin. While this work employed Wölfflin’s theoretical structure of development (and was dedicated to the master), it rejected Wölfflin’s formalism.
Frankl worked as a privatdozent at Munich from 1914, exempt from military service in World War I because of an amputated arm, participating in the Handbuch der Kunstwissenschaft editions (under the editorship of Albert Brinckmann and Fritz Burger) beginning in 1916. In 1920 he was promoted to außerordentlicher (assistant) Professor at Munich, called the following year to become ordentlicher (full) Professor at Halle. It was there that Frankl turned to the topic of Gothic architecture, which would become his life’s work and fame. His 1924 contribution to Wölfflin’s festschrift–a seminal essay–theorized stylistic laws governing Gothic and Romanesque architecture. Two years later it was expanded into his book Baukunst des Mittelalters. In 1933 at the 13th International Congress of the History of Art, Stockholm, he traveled with a group of medievalists including Richard Hamann, Kenneth John Conant and Hans R. Hahnloser, lead by Johnny Roosval, to see the discovery of the only gothic church still with its wooden arch scaffolding remaining (Frankl, Gothic). That same year the Nazis assumed control of the German government forcing the dismissal of Jews from government positions, including academics. Frankl was terminated in 1934, returning to Munich were he lived in poverty. After a brief trip to Constantinople, he published his important theory of art-historical practice, Das System der Kunstwissenschaft issued in Czechoslovakia because works by Jewish authors were no longer permitted in Germany or Austria. The 1000-plus-page treatise is his most pure example of his Kunstwissenschaft notion, a systematic art history covering all principles in all forms from all periods. This book was among those the Nazi’s selected for their book burnings.
He traveled to the United States in 1938 but was prevented from returning because of illness. He was financially assisted in the U.S. by the German-American museum director Wilhelm Rheinhold Otto Valentiner. In 1940 Frankl was appointed a member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton through the initiative of Princeton University professor Charles Rufus Morey and Institute of Advanced Study member (and fellow Nazi-refugee) Erwin Panofsky. Panofsky argued for the non-teaching IAS position because Frankl’s English was too poor to lecture in U.S. schools. Frankl spent much of his efforts at Princeton writing a book on the commentaries on the Gothic from that time to the present. After the War, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner invited him to write the volume on Gothic architecture for his English-language survey series, the Pelican History of Art. In 1948 Frankl returned to Germany as a guest lecturer at the universities of Berlin and Halle and in the United States at Yale University. From 1951 onward he took as his assistant the wife of Princeton medievalist Kurt Weitzmann, Josepha Weitzmann-Fiedler (1904-2000). She helped him see the completion of his manuscript for the Gothic Architecture volume for the Pelican History of art, completed in German in 1956 and his Gothic literature study, The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries, published in 1960. He finished reading the English translation of the manuscript of the Gothic Architecture volume the day before he died, at his desk, at the Institute, at age 83. A revision of his System der Kunstwissenschaft remained unfinished, but was later issued under Weitzmann-Fiedler’s direction in 1988 as Zu Fragen des Stills. His students in Halle included Richard Krautheimer, Georg Hoeltje and Ludwig Grote.
Frankl was one of the giants of Kunstwissenschaft (Crossley) as well as one of the last. This theoretical approach to art history had been practiced most profoundly by Vienna School historian Aloïs Riegl and Wölfflin. His Kunstwissenschaft writing consistently shows an interest in principles and categories–visual and intellectual–that control the viewer, the work of art and the conditions of its construction (Krautheimer). In Das System der Kunstwissenschaft Frankl demonstrated his ambition to create a comprehensive art history. Broken down into numerous categories (persons, things, places, time) and then into intricate substructures, (membrism, regularism, limitism, harmonism, etc.), the work constitutes “probably the most ambitious morphological and phenomenological study of the visual arts ever undertaken” (Crossley). He coined terms, such as “akyrism” to define the changing contexts and meanings of art, mostly clearly realized in his final article on Boucher’s 1752 painting “Girl on the Counch.” Frankl’s system was not always easy to follow, a fact about which Frankl himself worried. His emphasis on space as an analytic for architecture can be traced to the earlier pioneering work of Albert Brinckmann (Watkin). Frankl saw French Gothic architecture as a progressive style of the avante-garde, a laboratory of diverse ideas, in similar ways to the work of Jean Bony. (Crossley).
Selected Bibliography
[complete bibliography:] van der Osten, Gerd. “Paul Frankl 1878-1962.” Wallraf-Richartz Jahrbuch 24 (1962): 7-14;
[dissertation:] Beiträge zur Geschichte der süddeutschen Glasmalerei im 15. Jahrhundert. Munich, 1910, published, Strassburg: J.H.E. Heitz, 1912;
[habilitation:] Die Entwicklungsphasen der Neuren Baukunst. Munich/Berlin: B. G. Teubner, 1914, published Leipzig: 1914, English: Principles of Architectural History: The Four Phases of Architectural Style, 1420-1900. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1968;
“Der Beginn der Gotik und der allgemeine Problem des Stillgeninnes.” inFestschrift Heinrich Wölfflin: Beiträge zur Kunst- und Geistesgeschichte. Munich: H. Schmidt, 1924, expanded as, Baukunst des Mittelalters: die frühmittelalterliche und romanische Baukunst. Wildpark-Potsdam: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1926;
Das System der Kunstwissenschaft. Brunn, Czechoslovakia [and nominally Leipzig]: Rohrer, 1938, [shortened version by the author and Ullmann, Ernst.] Zu Fragen des Stils. Leipzig: E.A. Seemann, 1988;
The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960;
“Girl on a Couch.” in Meiss, Millard, ed. Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky. vol. 1. New York: New York University Press, 1961, pp. 138-152;
Gothic Architecture. Pelican History of Art. Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1962, appeared 1963.
Frankl, Paul. The Gothic: Literary Sources and Interpretations through Eight Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960, p. 15, n. 20;
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. 21 mentioned, 51 mentioned, 81 mentioned, 89 mentioned, 29 n. 59 (important);
Watkin, David. The Rise of Architectural History. London: Architectural Press, 1980 p. 12;
Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, pp. 22, 33, 122 mentioned; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 266, 287, 543;
Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 96-99;
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. 152-7;
[insightful historiographic essay:] Crossley, Paul. “Introduction: Frankl’s Text: Its Achievement and Significance.” Frankl, Paul and Crossley, Paul. Gothic Architecture. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000, pp. 7-31;
Contributors: Lee Sorensen
Citation
Lee Sorensen. "Frankl, Paul." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/franklp/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Medievalist architectural historian and Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, scholar; important Kunstwissenschaft Gothic theorist. Frankl’s family stemmed from a line of Jewish scholars. His father a Prague businessman, was Carl Frankl
Subject Area(s): archaeology, Medieval (European), and numismatics
Career(s): curators
Overview
Numismatist; archaeologist; Keeper of the department of British and Medieval Antiquities and ethnography, British Museum; assembled major collections for the British Museum, responsible for diversify British Museum Collections to non-West (Japanese) porcellains and other areas. He hired the medievalist and later keeper of the department, Ormonde M. Dalton in 1885.
Sources
A. W. Franks: Nineteenth-century Collecting and the British Museum. Marjorie Caygill and John Cherry, eds. London: British Museum Press, 1997. DNB vol. 22 (supplement) 665-668.
Citation
"Franks, Wollaston, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/franksa/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Numismatist; archaeologist; Keeper of the department of British and Medieval Antiquities and ethnography, British Museum; assembled major collections for the British Museum, responsible for diversify British Museum Collections to non-West (Japanes
Subject Area(s): Baroque, Italian (culture or style), and sculpture (visual works)
Overview
Pioneer scholar in Bernini scholarship; wrote early important monograph of the sculptor.
Selected Bibliography
Il Bernini, la sua vita, la sua opera, il suo tempo; con prefazione di Adolfo Venturi. Milano: U. Hoepli, 1900.
Sources
[mentioned] Jennifer Montagu and Joseph Connors. “Rudolf Wittkower 1901-1971.” Introduction to Art and Architecture in Italy: 1600-1750. 6th edition, volume 1, Painting in Italy. Pelican History of Art. pp. ix.
Citation
"Fraschetti, Stanislao." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/fraschettis/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance
Overview
Harvard professor and scholar of the Italian Renaissance. Freedberg attended the Boston Latin School and then Harvard University where he graduated summa cum laude in 1936. He continued to pursue his Ph.D. there studying under Bernard Berenson at Villa I Tatti in Florence. His 1940 dissertation topic was the painting of Parmigianino. When the United States entered World War II the following year, Freedberg commanded an intelligence unit for the United States Army that reported to the British war cabinet. Assigned to assemble information for Rome, Freedberg refused, risking disciplinary action, because he later stated, he worried that the information would result in a military operation leading to the destruction of artworks there. He was nevertheless awarded the Order of the British Empire (Military Division) in 1946. After the war, Freedberg joined the faculty at Wellesley College, teaching as an associate professor from 1950 to 1954. He joined the faculty at Harvard University in 1954, eventually rising to A. Kingsley Porter professor of fine arts. After Berenson’s death in 1959, Freedberg assisted in the transforming of I Tatti into a research center for Havard, twice serving as professor in residence at the Center for Renaissance Studies, as I Tatti was named. He was chairman of the Department of Fine Arts for several years. In 1978-79 he was acting director of the Fogg Art Museum. As professor, he advised the Fogg Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. That year Harvard appointed the controversial T. J. Clark from UCLA to the faculty. Clark, a self-described Marxist, was vigorously opposed by the highly traditional Freedberg and others. Freedberg’s displeasure led to his early retirement from Harvard in 1983. That year, that year he accepted a position offered by one of his former students, National Gallery of Art director J. Carter Brown, as chief curator. Freedberg’s assignment was to improve the Gallery’s comparatively weak collection of baroque Italian art. Freedberg also mounted several exhibitions including the 1986 “Age of Correggio and the Carracci” show, an innovative survey of 16th-century Italian painting. Freedberg acquired of a pair of paintings from that exhibition, Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife and Amnon and Tamar, 1649, by Guercino, in 1988. He was named to the rank of Grand Officer in the Order of the Star of Solidarity by the Italian Government for his rescue work during the catastrophic flooding of Florence in 1966, and Grand Officer of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 1982. He received the National Medal of Arts in 1988, and remains the only art historian to have been so honored. Freedberg died of cardiac arrest and renal failure. His students included Marcia B. Hall. Holland Cotter characterized Freedberg as one who “embodied a formalist approach that emulated the patrician scholarly style of an earlier era.” He was an old-style connoisseur that was a hallmark of Harvard’s brand of art historian. Freedberg’s authoritarian personality led to what Hilton Kramer termed the clubbiness of the Fogg tradition, “an example of cultural elitism that serves the public interest.” Freedberg affected, by his own admission, an accent that was partially British and his native Bostonian.
Selected Bibliography
[dissertation:] The Works in Painting of Francesco Mazzola, ‘il Parmigianino: An Analytical Catalogue. Harvard University, 1940; Andrea del Sarto. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963; Painting in Italy: 1500 to 1600. Pelican History of Art 35. Harmondsworth and Baltimore: Penguin, 1971, [revised integrated ed., 1975]; Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961.
Sources
Kleinbauer, W. Eugene. Research Guide to the History of Western Art. Sources of Information in the Humanities, no. 2. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982, p. 84; 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. 49; Tassel, Janet. “Reverence for the Object: Art Museums in a Changed World.” Harvard Magazine 105 no. 1 (September-October 2002): 48 ff.; [obituaries:] Long, Tom. “Sydney Freedberg, 82; professor and expert on Renaissance art,” The Boston Globe, May 10, 1997, p. A13; Barnes, Bart. “Sydney J. Freedberg Dies; Curator at National Gallery,” The Washington Post, May 9, 1997, p. B06; Cotter, Hollard. “Sydney J. Freedberg, Art Historian, Dies.” New York Times, May 8, 1997, p. D25; Column 4;
Citation
"Freedberg, Sydney Joseph." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/freedbergs/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Harvard professor and scholar of the Italian Renaissance. Freedberg attended the Boston Latin School and then Harvard University where he graduated summa cum laude in 1936. He continued to pursue his Ph.D. there studying under
Medievalist and curator, Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Freeman was the daughter of Orville Ezra Freeman (1863-1909), a grocer, and Sarah Adelaide Sigler (Freeman). She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A, continuing for a master’s degree at Columbia University. Freeman continued study at the College de France, Sorbonne, summer school. After returning, she worked as a research assistant at the Newark Museum, 1924-1925, and as an instructor at the Dana Hall School, a girls’ boarding school in Wellesley, MA, between 1925-1927. She joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art first as a lecturer in the department of Egyptian and Medieval art in 1928. When the Cloisters opened in 1938, Freeman moved to the medieval-concentration museum, under James Rorimer, developing the medieval gardens and organized the music programs held there. She rose to assistant curator in 1940 and, when Rorimer was called to military duty in 1943, became associate curator, acting as director of the Cloisters until his return. Her interest in medieval gardens resulted in her book Herbs for the Mediaeval Household, published in 1943. After Rorimer’s appointment as director of the Met in 1955, Freeman became curator of the Cloisters. She wrote two books on Cloisters textiles, the St. Martin Embroideries, 1968, and on the Museum’s famous Unicorn Tapestries in 1976. She retired in 1965 as curator emeritus.
Selected Bibliography
Herbs for the Mediaeval Household: For Cooking, Healing, and Diverse Uses. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1943; Les Belles Heures du Duc de Berry. New York: Thames & Hudson, 1959; The St. Martin Embroideries. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1968; The Unicorn Tapestries. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976.
Sources
private communication Lee Murrah (Freeman family genealogy website), July 2008; [correction of middle name from ‘Bars’ to ‘Beam’ [obituary:] personal correspondence, Hope Pinkerton, February 2012, “Margaret B. Freeman, 80, Dies, Curator Emeritus of the Cloisters.” New York Times May 28, 1980, p. D21.
Citation
"Freeman, Margaret B.." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/freemanm/.
More Resources
Search for materials by & about this art historian:
Medievalist and curator, Cloisters, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Freeman was the daughter of Orville Ezra Freeman (1863-1909), a grocer, and Sarah Adelaide Sigler (Freeman). She graduated from Wellesley College with a B.A, continuing for a master’s
