Full Name: Freemantle, Katharina
Gender: female
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre) and sculpture (visual works)
architectural history
The Baroque Town Hall of Amsterdam. Utrecht, 1959.
Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 pp. 500-501
architectural history
Full Name: Frel, Jiří K.
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1923
Date Died: 2006
Place Born: Czech Republic
Place Died: Paris, Île-de-France, France
Home Country/ies: Czech Republic
Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style) and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)
Career(s): curators
Curator of Greek and Roman art at the Getty Museum, 1973-1985; fired for impropriety. Frel’s father was an elementary school teacher in a Czechoslovakian village. The family changed the name to Frel from one of Jewish origin to escape Nazi persecution during their occupation. After World War II, Frel studied at the Sorbonne école normale supérieure in Paris. He returned to Czechoslovakia where he taught classical art at Charles University (Universitas Carolina) from 1948 to 1968. During the 1968 Czech revolt, he defected from Czechoslovakia, then under communist rule, to the United States. He taught at Princeton University before joining the staff of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in 1970 as associate curator of Greek and Roman Art. In 1973 the American billionaire J. Paul Getty (1892-1976) appointed him curator of ancient art for his future museum, the J. Paul Getty Museum. Working with Getty, who had narrow views of art, and the board of directors, proved difficult and Frel actually found himself soliciting donations from outside the museum for greater freedom to purchase. After Getty’s death in 1976, the museum, recipient of his fortune, became the wealthiest in the world. Frel married the classicist curator Faya Causey (later divorced). At the Getty, he was assigned to acquire the best classical works of art available as the Museum’s focal-point collection. He used two principal antiquities dealers, Giacomo Medici in Italy and Robert Hecht of Los Angeles, both of whom were subsequently accused of major antiquities export violations in Italy. He acquired thousands of small ancient Greek pottery sherds to fill the collection which later scholars charged to be of dubious research value. Frel also devised a scheme where individuals could buy works from Hecht’s antiquities gallery and donate them to the Getty for inflated values Frel secured. In 1979, Frel was instrumental in buying a stone head of Achilles for the Museum, supposedly carved by Scopas, for $ 2.5 million. Frel hired Marion True (b. 1948), then a Ph.D candidate in classical art, to catalog objects. In 1982 the Museum hired Arthur A. Houghton III (b.1940), son of Metropolitan Musuem of Art Board President Arthur A. Houghton, Jr. (1906-1990), formerly of the U.S. State department and a Corning Glass heir, as its Associate Curator of Antiquities. Houghton uncovered, Frel’s overvaluing the donations of objects to the Museum by donors for tax breaks. Some of the most aggregious of which were Frel’s typing valuations on dealer stationary. Over the eleven years he worked at the Getty, his evaluation of donations totaled a purported $14.4 million. The Museum launched an internal probe and Frel was relieved of acquisitions duties in 1984 for what the museum publicly termed ”serious violations of the museum’s policies and rules regarding donations to the antiquities collection,” but still kept on the Museum’s payroll, succeeded by Houghton. In 1985 a purchase of a Greek kouros (standing nude youth) was made at Frel’s urging and based on Frel’s attribution of 6th century B.C. The Museum paid for $7 million. Federico Zeri, then the only art historian on the Getty’s board, denounced it as a fake. The attribution was effusively supported by New York Times art critic John Russell. Though the kouros was added to the museum, the controversy grew. Ultimately, the Museum decided to describe the Getty kouros as ”6th century Greek or modern forgery.” Then, in 1987, a University of Mainz professor, German Hafner, proved that the stone Achilles’ head Frel had purchased wore an incorrect helmet for the period, one apparently copied from another 19th-century fake. Frel’s judgments were attacked in the popular press by the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Thomas Hoving, editor of Connoisseur magazine, and Geraldine Norman (b. 1940), a freelance writer for the arts for the London Independent in 1986. Frel moved back to Europe after these incidents. His wife divorced him. He died at age 82 and is buried at Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Frel’s disregard for provenance and legal ownership apparently continued. Marion True, his eventual successor at the Getty, resigned because of litigation by the Italian government over stolen works.
Contributions à l’iconographie grecque. vol. 5. Praha: Academia, 1969; The Getty Bronze. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1978; and Morgan, Sandra Knudsen. Roman Portraits in the Getty Museum. Tulsa, OK: Philbrook Art Center, 1981; Greek Portraits in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Malibu, CA: The Museum, 1981; Death of a Hero. Malibu, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 1984; and Houghton, Arthur, III, and True, Marion. Ancient Portraits in the J. Paul Getty Museum. Malibu, CA: The Museum, 1987ff.
Hoving, Thomas. “The Getty Kouros: Sixth Century B.C. or Twentieth Century A.D.?.” Connoisseur 216 (September 1986): 100; Hoving, Thomas, and Norman, Geraldine. “The Getty Scandals: How the Questionable Activities of One Curator Cast a Shadow Over an Entire Museum.” Connoisseur 217 (April 1987): 29; Norman, Geraldine. “Greek Youth Younger than He Looks? A Damaged Torso May Hold the Answer to One of the Most Famous Whodunits of the Antiquities Market.” The Independent (London), July 14, 1990, p. 34; personal correspondence, Getty Museum; Eakin, Hugh. “An Odyssey in Antiquities Ends in Questions at the Getty Museum.” New York Times October 15, 2005 p. B 7; Felch, Jason, and Frammolino, Ralph. Chasing Aphrodite: the Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011; [obituary:] Kennedy, Randy. “Jiri Frel, Getty’s Former Antiquities Curator, Dies at 82.” New York Times May 17, 2006, p. 20.
Curator of Greek and Roman art at the Getty Museum, 1973-1985; fired for impropriety. Frel’s father was an elementary school teacher in a Czechoslovakian village. The family changed the name to Frel from one of Jewish origin to escape Nazi persecu
Full Name: Fox, Milton S
Gender: male
Date Born: 1904
Date Died: 1971
Place Born: New York, NY, USA
Home Country/ies: United States
Subject Area(s): painting (visual works)
Career(s): art critics, artists (visual artists), and authors
Artist and arts editor for Harry N. Abrams publishers, wrote a 1972 volume on Renoir for the Great Ages of Art series. He trained as a painter at the Cleveland School of Art and later at the Adadémie Julian in Paris. He was invited to become “élève École des Beaux-arts” in 1926. Fox married fellow Adadémie Julian student Ruby Canfield in 1928. He returned to his alma mater in Cleveland to teach, then the Cleveland School of Architecture and Western Reserve University, where he received an M.A. Although a successful portrait painter in Cleveland and as a muralist (he painted two for the Cleveland Public Auditorium), his interest was always in writing. He joined the Education Department at the Cleveland Museum of Art, writing art reviews for the Cleveland News. After World War II was declared, he served as a camouflage painting instructor for the U.S. Civil Defense, 1942-1944. After the war, Fox left for Hollywood, writing scripts for movies and chairing the Education Committee of the Beverly Hills Institute of Modern Art. In 1950, Harry Abrams founded an art-book publishing company devoted to books which high-quality illustrations. Fox joined the New York firm as its Vice President and Editor-in-Chief. At Abrams, he edited most all of the firms books, many first published in other countries. In 1956 he edited a volume the Suite Vollard. Abrams’ brainchild, The Library of Great Painters, saw unusual fruition under Fox. Major art historians were commissioned to write significant though briefer essays on artists, accompanied by a series of fine-colored plates and one-page analysis of the work. This unusual format, modeled on a series by Phaidon resulted in important art histories including two by Meyer Schapiro (Cézanne and van Gogh), Bill Seitz (Monet), Walter F. Friedländer (Poussin), Bob Rosenblum (Ingres) and Robert Goldwater (Gauguin). Fox himself wrote the volume on Renoir in 1972. During this time Fox consulted on two NBC television programs on art, “The Museum Without Walls” and “The Louvre, Golden Prison.” Fox’s later years were overshadowed with serious heart troubles. He suffered a number of attacks, each time returning to work. He suffered a fatal attack at home at age sixty-seven. A memorial volume published in his memory comprised essays by the most important art historians of his era in 1974.
Picasso for Vollard. New York: H.N. Abrams, 1956; Pierre Auguste Renoir. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1972.
Hartt, Frederick. “Milton S. Fox.” Art Studies for an Editor: 25 Essays in Memory of Milton S. Fox. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1975, [unpaginated]; [obituary:] “Milton S. Fox, Editor, Is Dead, Official of Art Book Company.” New York Times October 26, 1971, p. 44.
Artist and arts editor for Harry N. Abrams publishers, wrote a 1972 volume on Renoir for the Great Ages of Art series. He trained as a painter at the Cleveland School of Art and later at the Adadémie Julian in Paris. He was invited to become “élèv
Full Name: Fraenger, Wilhelm
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1890
Date Died: 1964
Place Born: Erlangen, Bavaria, Germany
Place Died: Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): folk art (traditional art), folk tales, folklore (culture-related concept), literary studies, and literature (general genre)
Bosch scholar and folk literature specialist. Fraenger’s father was a judge and twice mayor of Erlangen, Emil Karl Hermann Fraenger; his mother was Wilhelmine Jacobine Fraenger. He entered the university in Heidelberg in 1910, beginning his art writing career with reviews of contemporary art shows for the Heidelberger Zeitung in 1912, including Alfred Kubin und Max Zachmann. Fraenger was awarded a prize by the University in 1913 for an essay, “Kunsttheorie des 17. Jahrhunderts und ihr Vertreter Arnold Houbraken,” on the art theory of the seventeenth century as manifested in the artist (and proto-art historian) Arnold Houbraken. He studied art history at Heidelberg beginning in 1915, serving as a volunteer in the reserve infantry during World War I. Fraenger joined the art history institute there (Kunsthistorischen Institut der Universität Heidelberg), receiving his doctorate in 1917 with a dissertation on the pictorial analysis of French Academy theorist Roland de Chambray Fréart (1606-1676), supervised by Carl Neumann. He founded the Heidelberg intellectual group “Die Gemeinschaft,” (the Community) in 1919 to counteract the elitism of academic treatment of the arts. Fraenger was initially interested in Mathias Grünewald and lectured on the artist during this time. He married Auguste “Gustel” Esslinger (1892-1979) in 1920. While lecturing on art, he met the artist Louise “Lulu” Darmstädter (later) Kayser-Darmstädter (1894-1983) with whom he exchanged an intimate life-long friendship. Fraenger’s strong interest in the study of folk culture began with the founding of the Jahrbuch für historische Volkskunde (historical ethnography yearbook), which he edited for the 1925-1926 year. He was hired at the Schloßbibliothek Mannheim as its library director in 1927. Though not Jewish, he was forced out of this position with the asumption of power by the Nazis in 1933 because of his progressivist views and his books burned. A book on Grünewald appeared in 1937 which was again opposed by the Nazis because of Fraenger’s interpretive approach to an artist the National Socialist’s consider “urdeutsch.” He worked as an artistic advisor for a Berlin theater company beginning in 1938 through 1943. After World War II he was briefly interned in a Soviet prison camp. After release, Fraenger joined the Communist Party and became involved in politics in what was declared East Germany. He was mayor of Brandenburg an der Havel between 1945 and 1947. During that time he acted as councilman for Education under its famous Communist mayor Fritz Lange (1898-1981). As educational councilman he established and led an adult education school in the city. Perhaps his best known book, his study on Hieronymus Bosch, was published in 1947. In it, Fraenger argued controvercially that Bosch’s most famous picture, the “Garden fo Earthly Delights” (Madrid), should not be read through Christian iconography, but rather as a social utopian statement. He was appointed director for the center for German folk studies (Institut für deutsche Volkskunde), part of the German Academy of Sciences (Deutschen Akademie der Wissenschaften or DAW) in Berlin in 1952. He helped found the literary and art journal and publishing house Castrum Peregrini with the Dutch painter Gisèle van Waterschoot van der Gracht (b. 1912) and Wolfgang Frommel (1902-1986) in 1950. He was named a professor at the Institute in 1955. After his death, a foundation was established in Potsdam for him in 1992. His papers are held at this institution, the Wilhelm Fraenger Gesellschaft administered by his wife and stepdaughter, Ingeborg Baier-Fraenger (1926-1994). In his book on Bosch, Fraenger constructed an explanation of the artist’s work based on his theory that Bosch belonged to a heretical group, the Adamites in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, which practiced many of the rites depicted in Bosch’s paintings. The theory remained controvercial and unaccepted by other Bosch scholars.
[complete bibliography:] Baier-Fraenger, Ingeborg, ed. Der Kunsthistoriker Wilhelm Fraenger, 1890-1964: eine Sammlung von Erinnerungen mit der Gesamt-Bibliographie seiner Veröffentlichungen. Amsterdam: Castrum Peregrini Presse, 1994, pp. 101 ff.; [dissertation:] Die Bildanalysen des Roland Fréard de Chambray: der Versuch einer Rationalisierung der Kunstkritik in der französischen Kunstlehre des 17. Jahrhunderts. Heidelberg 1917; Matthias Grünewald in seinen Werken: ein physiognomischer Versuch. Berlin: Rembrandt 1936; Hieronymus Bosch: Das Tausendjährige Reich: Grundzüge einer Auslegung. Coburg: Winkler, 1947, English, The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch: Outlines of a New Interpretation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951; Die Hochzeit zu Kana: ein Dokument semitischer Gnosis bei Hieronymous Bosch. Berlin: 1950.
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. 6; [Fraenger’s theories on Bosch] Gibson, Walter S. “Letters to the Editor.” Art Bulletin 58, no. 1 (March 1976): 148-149; Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. 2nd. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2007, pp. 98-100; Weckel, Petra. Wilhelm Fraenger (1890-1964): ein subversiver Kulturwissenschaftler zwischen den Systemen. Potsdam : Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2001; Wilelm Fraenger Gesellschaft [website] “Biographie.” http://www.fraenger.net/per_fraenger_start#oben.
Bosch scholar and folk literature specialist. Fraenger’s father was a judge and twice mayor of Erlangen, Emil Karl Hermann Fraenger; his mother was Wilhelmine Jacobine Fraenger. He entered the university in Heidelberg in 1910, beginning his art wr
Full Name: França, José Augusto
Gender: male
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Subject Area(s): painting (visual works) and Portuguese (culture or style)
historian of Portuguese art; studied at L’école des Hautes études
Una città dell’ illuminismo. La Lisona del marchese di Pombal. Rome, 1972.
Bazin 450
historian of Portuguese art; studied at L’école des Hautes études
Full Name: Francastel, Pierre
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1900
Date Died: 1970
Place Born: Paris, Île-de-France, France
Place Died: Paris, Île-de-France, France
Home Country/ies: France
Sociological art historian. Francastel’s father was Albert Francastel and his mother Isabelle ter Linden. Francastel initially studied literature at the Sorbonne under the French Hellenist Paul Mazon (1874-1955). Beginning in 1925, he worked for the architecture conservation department at the Palace of Versailles while researching his Ph.D. His thesis, which was published in 1930, was on the sculpture of Versailles. Francastel was appointed director of the Institut français in Warsaw, Poland in 1930. There he focused on the materialist theories of art history. He moved to Strasbourg as professor at the university of Strasbourg in 1936. At Strasbourg, he continued to concentrate on the social production of art, weaving a combination of political, religious and scientific history into his writing. Francastel changed research period to the 19th century, retaining his methodology. In 1937 he published l’Impressionnisme, les origines de la peinture moderne de Monet à Gauguin. His sociological thrust brought him to theorize particularly about space–cultural and physical–as an organizing principal in art. After World War II, Annales scholar Lucien Febvre (1878-1956) created the chair Professeur de sociologie de l’art (Professor of the Sociology of Art) at the l’école pratique des hautes études in 1948, appointing Francastel. Francastel’s books Art et Sociologie (1948) and Peinture et Société (1952) were both produced during this time. His seminar on modern architecture resulted in his most influential book, Art et Technique aux 19e et 20e siècles, 1956. The book challenged the standard architectural interpretation of the era, asserting most fundamentally that the industrial revolution of the eighteenth century did not create a cultural rupture in the art of the western world. The book departed with the dominant architectural historians such as Sigfied Giedeon, Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner and Bruno Zevi. After his death, an English translation was published as Art and Technology. His students at the école included the Marxist/El Greco scholar Nicos Hadjinicolaou. Francastel’s sociological approach is indebted to the work of émile Durkheim (1858-1917), particularly Durkheim’s studies of symbolic classification. Francastel disagreed with Marxist art historians such as Frederick Antal and others writing social histories of art, insisting that art is not simply an expression of class ideology, but rather is an operative system acting on society and society reciprocating (Tanner). Likewise, he discarded the “mystique of progress” concept of Lewis Mumford in which Mumford and others asserted that the development of the machine results in the greatest advancement of humankind. Henry-Russell Hitchcock and his view of “first generation” of modern architecture was anathema to Francastel. Francastel posited that architecture, sculpture and painting constituted specific forms of knowledge. He analyzed works according to their “plastic or aesthetic thought” manifested in these different figurative systems. His sociological framework differs as well from Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002) and Bourdieu’s dynamic theory of art. His writing was full of contradictions and assertions that have not been adopted into mainstream architectural history; he termed Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture “Victorian,” denied the modernity in Henry Hobson Richardson’s architecture, and suggested more than a little chauvinistically that modernism was key to understanding Eugène Viollet-le-Duc (Bois). Among historians, his thought is most closely associated with Annales historians Febvre and Ferdinand Braudel (1902-1985). Historians of the Nouvelle Historie in France considered him a pioneer of the history of mentalities and of the “imaginary,” the organization of social space (Doyon). Michel Foucault condemned Francastel for a “totalizing vision” of history that allowed comparisons of the Eiffel tower with Cézanne. Within the field of art history, his theories have lingered but have neither become mainstream nor incorporated into other methodologies.
[dissertatioin:] La sculpture de Versailles; essai sur les origines et l’évolution du gout français classique. Paris: A. Morancé, 1930; Girardon: biographie et catalogue critiques, l’œuvre complète de l’artiste. Paris: Les Beaux-arts, édition d’études et de documents, 1928; Art et Technique aux 19e et 20e siècles. Paris: éditions Denoël, 1956, English, Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2000; Peinture et société: naissance et destruction d’un espace plastique, de la Renaissance au cubisme. Lyon, France: Audin, 1951 [in fact, 1952]; La Figure et le lieu, l’ordre visuel du Quattrocento. Paris: Gallimard, 1967, English, Medieval Painting. vol. 2 of 20,000 Years of World Painting. New York: Dell Pub. Co., 1967, [also appearing as an essay incorporated into the set,] Jaffé, Hans Ludwig C., and Kahane, P. P., eds. 20,000 Years of World Painting. New York: H. N. Abrams, 1967; Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2000
Michel, J. “Lo strutturalismo nelle arti visuali, intervista a Pierre Francastel.” L’Architettura 14 (October 1968): 470-1; Sypher, Wylie, ed. Art History; an Anthology of Modern Criticism. Gloucester, MA: P. Smith, 1975, pp. 378-379; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art: de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 344; Doyon, Carol. “Francastel, Pierre (1900-1970).” A Global Encyclopedia of Historical Writing. vol. 1 D. R. Woolf, ed. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998, p. 326; Bois, Yve Alain. “Forward.” Francastel, Pierre. Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. New York: Zone Books/MIT Press, 2000, pp. 7-15 [n. b., Bois vigorously repudiates an earlier version of his essay, edited without his permission, appearing as, “Francastel’s Interdisciplinary History of Art.” Architectural Design (1981)]; Tanner, Jeremy. The Sociology of Art: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 36, 211-212; [obituary:] Gállego, Julián. Goya no. 94 (January 1970): 259.
Sociological art historian. Francastel’s father was Albert Francastel and his mother Isabelle ter Linden. Francastel initially studied literature at the Sorbonne under the French Hellenist Paul Mazon (1874-1955). Beginning in 1925, he worked for t
Full Name: Franck-Oberaspach, Karl
Other Names:
Gender: male
Date Born: 1872
Date Died: unknown
Place Born: Oberaspach, Württemberg, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Franck-Oberaspach studied at the technische Hochschule in Stuttgart beginning in 1890. After his examinations in 1896, he entered Kaiser-Wilhelms Universität in Strassburg where he studied art history. His thesis, written under the classicist art historian Adolf Michaelis and the architectural historian and head of the Strassburger Institute Georg Dehio in 1898, was one of the first to examine the relationship between French medieval sculpture and German of the thirteenth century. He returned to the technische Hochschule in Stuttgart to write his habilitation, which appeared in 1907. His dissertation was influential for the work of Otto Schmitt.
[dissertation:] Geschichte der deutschen Bildhauerkunst des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres Verhaltnisses zur französischen Kunst. Kaiser-Wilhelms Universität zu Strassburg, 1898, partially published as, Der meister der Ecclesia und Synagoge am strassburger Münster: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Bildhauerkunst des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres Verhältnisses zur gleichzeitigen französischen Kunst. Dusseldorf: L. Schwann, 1901; [habilitation:] Künstlerschaft und Fabrikantentum im württembergischen Kunstgewerbeverein: Eine Abwehr von [. . .] Privatdozant der Kunstgeschichte an der Königlichen technischen Hochschule zu Stuttgart, Januar 1907. Stuttgart: Decker und Hardt, 1907; and Renard, Edmund. Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kreises Heinsberg. Dusseldorf: L. Schwann, 1906.
Sauerländer, Willibald. “Sculpture on Early Gothic Churches: The State of Research and Open Questions.” Gesta 9, No. 2, [“Papers on the Renaissance of the Twelfth Century Read at the Symposium Held in the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, May 14 and 15, 1969.”] (1970): 32-48; “Lebenslauf.” Der meister der Ecclesia und Synagoge am strassburger Münster: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Bildhauerkunst des dreizehnten Jahrhunderts in Deutschland, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung ihres Verhältnisses zur gleichzeitigen französischen Kunst. Dusseldorf: L. Schwann, 1903, p. i-ii.
Franck-Oberaspach studied at the technische Hochschule in Stuttgart beginning in 1890. After his examinations in 1896, he entered Kaiser-Wilhelms Universität in Strassburg where he studied art history. His thesis, written under the classicist art
Full Name: Francke, Kuno
Gender: male
Date Born: 1855
Date Died: 1931
Place Born: Kiel, Schleswig Holstein, Germany
Place Died: Cambridge, Middlesex, MA, USA
Home Country/ies: Germany
Career(s): curators
Harvard professor and first curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Francke took his Ph.D. in Munich in 1878 in medieval folklore and poetry. A friendship with Ephraim Emerton in Berlin in 1875 led to a letter of introduction to Harvard president Charles W. Eliot. He came to Harvard in 1884 as an instructor, assistant professor 1887 and professor in 1896. Throughout his career, Francke remained a literary historian. Between 1884 and 1916 he delivered university course lectures on German literature, art and thought. In 1903 he accepted the post of curator of the new Germanic Museum of the University, later to be renamed the Busch-Reisinger. He remained at that post until 1929. As curator, he focused much of his attention on procuring reproductions of German sculpture, as opposed to originals, in an effort to represent a complete view of German art development. The Kuno Francke Professorship of German Art and Culture, established at his retirement, is named for him.
Glimpses of Modern German Culture. New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1898;. Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar in the Second Part of Faust. Boston: Harvard University Modern Language Department, 1892.
Busch-Reisinger Museum: History and Holdings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Art Museums, 1991, pp. 26-9.
Harvard professor and first curator of the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Francke took his Ph.D. in Munich in 1878 in medieval folklore and poetry. A friendship with Ephraim Emerton in Berlin in 1875 led to a letter of introduction to Harvard president C
Full Name: François, Alessandro
Gender: male
Date Born: 1796
Date Died: 1857
Place Born: Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy
Home Country/ies: Italy
Subject Area(s): archaeology
Archaeologist; discoverer of the “François Vase” (inv. 4209). François traveled widely as a young man. In 1825 he elected to excavate Etruscan sites, beginning with Cosa (until 1828) and then at Cortona in 1843. He also worked at digs in Volterra, Fiesole, Vetulonia, Populonia, Chiusi and Vulci. In 1844 François discovered black-figure vase fragments at Fonte Rotelle near Chiusi in the vicinity of several plundered tombs. The spectacular sherds immensely impressed the archaeologist Arcangelo Michele Migliarini (1779-1865), who encouraged François to search for more fragments. In 1845 François recovered five more pieces. The pieces were assembled by Vincenzo Monni and Giovan Gualberto Franceschi into a complete vase. The size and quality of the vase made it an immediate sensation. Leopoldo II, Grand Duke of Tuscany, purchased it for the Uffizi in 1846. Emil Braun, first secretary of the Archaeological Institute of Rome, was the first to published it. An additional piece was discovered and donated to the museum by Carlo Strozzi. François, who worked as the commissary of war for the Duke, had an abiding dream to found a museum comprising his finds. Together with the epigrapher A. Noël des Vergers (1805-1867) he created his own excavation society. He kept his finds in his home in Florence. When numerous attempts to found a public museum failed in Italy, he turned to the French government, also without success. In 1857 François made a second great find, an Etruscan painted tomb, now believed to be fourth century. Once again official interest in establishing a museum of his collection grew. François fell ill however and died the same year, never able to fulfill his dream. François lent his name to two important monuments in art history: the François Vase and François Tomb. A major monument in the history of Greek pottery, the François Vase is a large (66 cm) volute krater in a black-figure design, signed both by the potter, Ergotimos, and the painter, Kleitias. The Attic work has been dated to 570 B. C. In 1900, a disgruntled museum guard threw a stool at the case and smashed the François Vase to pieces (638!). It was restored in by Pietro Zei, incorporating the Strozzi fragment, but missing another piece which had been stolen. That piece was returned in 1904. A new reconstruction was performed in 1973. Today the krater is located in the Florence Archaeological Museum.
[François left no published writing].
“François, Alessandro.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 461-62; “François Vase.” ibid, P. 463; Minto, Antonio. Il vaso François. Florence: L. S. Olschki, 1960; Materiali per servire alla storia del vaso François. Rome: Istituto poligrafico e zecca dello stato, 1981.
Archaeologist; discoverer of the “François Vase” (inv. 4209). François traveled widely as a young man. In 1825 he elected to excavate Etruscan sites, beginning with Cosa (until 1828) and then at Cortona in 1843. He also worked at digs in Volterra,
Full Name: Francovich, Géza de
Gender: male
Date Born: unknown
Date Died: unknown
Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Renaissance, and sculpture (visual works)
Italian church architecture
Benedetto Antelami architetto e scultore e l’arte del suo tempo. Milan: Milano Electa editrice, 1952.
Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986 p. 263
Italian church architecture