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Lavin, Irving

Full Name: Lavin, Irving

Gender: male

Date Born: 1927

Place Born: St. Louis, Saint Louis City, MO, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Late Antique, Renaissance, and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Architectural historian of Bernini and the late antique era; New York University and Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton scholar. Lavin studied under Horst Woldemar Janson at Washington University, St. Louis, graduating with a B.A., 1949. His graduate teaching assistant for his first art-history course was Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, whom he later married. He continued graduate work at Cambridge University, 1948-49 and then New York University, where he received his M.A. in 1952 under Richard Krautheimer. That same year he married Aronberg, two years his senior. Lavin was awarded a second M. A. at Harvard University in 1953; his Ph.D., followed in 1955, written under Ernst Kitzinger, for whom he was one of that expatriate’s first American Ph. D., students. Lavin served in the United States Army from 1955-1957. He was a Matthews Lecturer for Columbia University in 1957 and a senior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks between 1957 and 1959. Lavin was awarded the A. Kingsley Porter Prize in 1959 (the first of three times, written for an outstanding article in the Art Bulletin). He lectured in art history at Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, from 1959 until 1962 and was Fulbright senior scholar from 1961-1963. In 1963 he was appointed associate professor (and later professor) at Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. From 1965 to 1966 he was a senior fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Lavin’s monograph, Bernini and the Crossing of St. Peter’s, the major monograph on Bernini’s contribution to St. Peter’s Cathedral, Rome, was published in 1968. He was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for the 1968-1969 year. In 1973 he was named professor of historical studies at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N. J. In 1975 Lavin was Franklin Jasper Walls Lecturer at the Pierpont Morgan Library in New York. He served on the board of directors of the College Art Association from 1976-1980. His Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts, 1981, using the Cornaro Chapel in Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome, as the paradigm, outlined Bernini’s use of theatrics to coordinate architecture, painting, sculpture. He delivered the the Slade Lectures at Oxford University in 1985. In 1993 Lavin hosted a centennial birth symposium on the work of Erwin Panofsky at the Institute for Advance Study, where Panofsky had also been a member. That year, too, his collected essays, Past-Present: Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso, were published. Lavin made headlines in 1996 when he authenticated a marble bust Pope Gregory XV as a lost work of Bernini. In 2001 he was named emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study. In 2004, Lavin presented the 53rd A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, “More Than Meets the Eye,” at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C. Lavin’s work is wide-ranging, from Late Antique architecture to North African floor mosaics, from the renaissance (Donatello, Michelangelo, Pontormo, and Giovanni Bologna) to baroque (Caravaggio and Bernini). He has also written essays on Picasso and Jackson Pollock. Lavin’s approach to architecture is essentially iconographic, an interpretation of the symbolic details of a structure to create a meaning, similar to Erwin Panofsky whose essays he edited in 1995. Lavin’s work was greatly admired in his time. The great baroque scholar Anthony Blunt wrote that Lavin’s Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts supplied “a new and deeper understanding of the artist’s ideas and methods.” Michael Jaffé and Charles Hope also praised his scholarship.


Selected Bibliography

[bibliography to 1989:] “Bibliography of the Works of Irving Lavin, 1955-1989.” IL 60: Essays Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday. New York: Italica Press,1990, pp. xiii-xviii; [dissertation:] The Bozzetti of Gianlorenzo Bernini. Harvard, 1955; [collected essays] Past-Present: Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993; “The House of the Lord: Aspects of the Role of Palace Triclinia in the Architecture of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages.” Art Bulletin 44 (1962): 1-28; Bernini and the Crossing of St. Peter’s. New York University Press, 1968; Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts. 2 vols. New York: Oxford University Press , 1980; and Gordon, Pamela. Drawings by Gianlorenzo Bernini: From the Museum der Bildenden, Kunste Leipzig, German Democratic Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1981; Bernin et l’Art de la Satire Social. Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris, 1987; edited, and Plummer, John. Studies in Late Medieval and Renaissance Painting in Honor of Millard Meiss. 2 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1978; Gianlorenzo Bernini: New Aspects of his Art and Thought: A Commemorative Volume. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1986; and Tronzo, William, eds. Studies on Art and Archeology in Honor of Ernst Kitzinger on his Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1987; Meaning in the Visual Arts: Views from the Outside: A Centennial Commemoration of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968) (symposium). Princeton, NJ: Institute for Advanced Study, 1995; edited. Panofsky, Erwin. Three Essays on Style. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996; Bernini e il Salvatore: la “buona morte” nella Roma del Seicento. Rome: Donzelli, 1998; Marner, Eugene, director. Art of the Western World, Program V, “Realms of Light, The Baroque.” [videorecording]. Intellimation (Santa Barbara, CA)/WNET (New York, NY), 1989; Santa Maria del Fiore: il Duomo di Firenze e la Vergine incinta. Rome: Donzelli, 1999.


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. 70; Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. “Preface.” IL 60: Essays Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday. New York: Italica Press,1990, pp. ix-xii; Institute for Advanced Study, Faculty and Emeriti, http://www.ias.edu/About/faculty/lavin.php.




Citation

"Lavin, Irving." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lavini/.


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Architectural historian of Bernini and the late antique era; New York University and Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton scholar. Lavin studied under Horst Woldemar Janson at Washington University, St. Louis, graduatin

Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg

Full Name: Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg

Other Names:

  • Marilyn Aronberg Lavin

Gender: female

Date Born: 1925

Place Born: St. Louis, Saint Louis City, MO, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, painting (visual works), and Renaissance


Overview

Piero Della Francesca and quattrocento art scholar. Aronberg was the daughter of Charles Aronberg and Blanch Silverstone (Aronberg). Aronberg attended Washington University, St. Louis, MO in under Horst Woldemar Janson, graduating in 1947. She continued her M.A. in 1949 under Janson, who himself was still pursuing his Ph. D. at Harvard. While a graduate assistant in art history for the 1949-1950 year, she met Irving Lavin, a student in her class taking his first art history course. Aronberg gained a certificate at the Free University of Brussels also in 1949. In 1952 she married Lavin two years her junior, who had been admitted to Harvard graduate school in art history. Between 1953-1955 she worked as a curator of the Robbins Print Collection, Arlington, MA. From 1955 until 1957 she was a Fulbright fellow in Rome, Italy. In 1957 she became a staff writer for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, advancing to researcher in 1959. She worked as a consultant for the publishers Time, Inc., beginning in 1965 and the Heritage Press, a fine-press editions publisher, editing a two-volume Lives of the Most Eminent Painters by Giorgio Vasari for the latter in 1967. In 1972 she wrote the volume on Piero della Francesca’s Flagellation, for the important Art in Context series issued by Allan Lane. Her Ph.D. was awarded in 1973 from New York University with a dissertation on Piero Della Francesca. In 1975 she resigned from the Metropolitan to become visiting professor of art history at Princeton University. She published Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art 1977 which won the Charles Rufus Morey Award from College Art Association of America. She was also a visiting professor at Yale University in 1977, and at the University of Maryland in 1979. In 1981 her monograph on Piero’s “Baptism of Christ” was published by Yale University Press. Lavin wrote a history of the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton in 1983, Eye of the Tiger. She was the organizing scholar for the 1995 exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., on “Piero Della Francesca and His Legacy.” Much of Lavin’s career was determined by her marriage and dual-career with her husband, Irving Lavin. When her husband was appointed at New York University in 1963, she worked at the Metropolitan and continuing her graduate work at NYU. She was never a derivative scholar, however, and her works stands separate in method and merit from her husband’s. She has written that the bulk of her research has been through personal interest rather than employment. As such, she said, she could afford to publish books that weren’t written to persuade tenure committees. Seventeenth-Century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art was an early publication in the primary source documentation within the field of the history of collecting.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Studies in Urbinate Painting, 1458-1474: Piero della Francesca, Paolo Uccello, and Joos van Ghent. New York University, 1973; Seventeenth-century Barberini Documents and Inventories of Art. New York: New York University Press, 1975; Vasari, Giorgio. Lives of the Most Eminent Painters. 2 vols. New York, Heritage Press, 1967; Piero della Francesca: The Flagellation. New York: Penguin, 1972; Piero della Francesca’s “Baptism of Christ”. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981; The Eye of the Tiger: The Founding and Development of the Department of Art and Archaeology, 1883-1923, Princeton University. Princeton, NJ: Department of Art and Archaeology and Art Museum, 1983; edited, IL 60: Essays Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday. New York: Italica Press,1990; The Place of Narrative: Mural Decoration in Italian Churches, 431-1600. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990; edited. Piero Della Francesca and His Legacy Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1995.


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. 34; Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg. “Preface.” IL 60: Essays Honoring Irving Lavin on His Sixtieth Birthday. New York: Italica Press,1990, pp. ix-xii.




Citation

"Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lavinm/.


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Piero Della Francesca and quattrocento art scholar. Aronberg was the daughter of Charles Aronberg and Blanch Silverstone (Aronberg). Aronberg attended Washington University, St. Louis, MO in under Horst Woldemar Janson<

Lawrence, Arnold Walter

Full Name: Lawrence, Arnold Walter

Other Names:

  • "Lawrence"

Gender: male

Date Born: 1900

Date Died: 1991

Place Born: Oxford, Oxfordshire, England, England, UK

Place Died: Devizes, Wiltshire, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): ancient, Ancient Greek (culture or style), architecture (object genre), Classical, Greek sculpture styles, and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Historian of ancient Greek sculpture and architecture and the history of fortifications. Lawrence’s older brother was the medieval scholar and popular desert hero T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) (1888-1935), under whose shadow the younger Lawrence remained. Like his brothers, A. W. Lawrence was conceived out of wedlock, a huge stigma at the time. Their parents were Sir Thomas Robert Tighe Chapman (1846-1919) and Sarah Junner (1861-1959) who assumed the names “Thomas Robert Lawrence” and “Sarah Lawrence” to raise their children jointly. The Lawrence boys were raised in Oxford by the intensely religious Sarah, resulting in Lawrence’s outspoken anti-religious stance (“All religion is vermin” he once said). He attended the City of Oxford School before New College, Oxford, graduating in 1921 with a diploma of Classical Archaeology. Lawrence was a student at the British Schools at Rome in 1921 and then at Athens (through 1926). In 1923 Lawrence worked on the excavation of Ur (where he discovered he did not want to be an excavator), directed by C. Leonard Woolley (1880-1960), and under whom T. E. Lawrence had excavated at Carchemish before World War I. Lawrence married Barbara Inness Thompson (1902-1986) in 1925. A chance visit to the museum in Alexandria on his return trip to England convinced him that the city could not have been (as was commonly stated) the leading center of Hellenistic sculpture. Lawrence used his fellowship as the Oxford Craven student to write the 1927 book Later Greek Sculpture and its Influence, setting out this thesis in a bold fashion. This early revisionist work did not gain immediate acceptance. In 1929 he published a second work on Greek plastic arts, Classical Sculpture, which became a standard survey for the next generation, though Lawrence lacked sympathy for the Archaic style. Nevertheless, the book led to his appointment as Laurence Reader in Classical Archaeology in Cambridge University in 1930. His wide-ranging scholarly interests resulted in the 1931 Narratives of the Discovery of America. In the 1930s when part of the Avebury megaliths site was threatened by development, Lawrence used his personal funds to buy the land in order to preserve it. Lawrence caused a minor scandal in 1934 by having a “sun-worshipper style” bronze nude statue of himself, sculpted by Lady Kathleen Scott, placed at the entrance to the Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge, near a larger statue of the Virgin Mary outside a nearby Catholic church. After his brother’s death on a motorcycle in 1935, Lawrence became the literary executor; this took considerable time from his scholarly production. It also stimulated an interest in fortifications of which T. E. had been a specialist; for the rest of A. W.’s life, he would research ancient fortifications. In 1936 Lawrence’s first revision of Rawlinson’s Herodotus translation appeared with notes by Lawrence. In 1937 he edited a book on his brother, T. E. Lawrence by His Friends. During World War II, Lawrence served in a variety of capacities, though none which he found satisfying to the war effort. He was elected to the Laurence Chair of Classical Archaeology at Cambridge in 1944 (succeeding Alan J. B. Wace, 1879-1957). He was awarded a Leverhulme research fellowship in 1951 to study ancient and medieval fortifications in classical lands. Somewhat surprisingly, Lawrence resigned his Cambridge chair the same year to become the first professor of archaeology at the University College of the Gold Coast (modern University of Ghana). He was appointed Secretary and Conservator Monuments and Relics Commission of Ghana in 1952. At the university, Lawrence founded the museum (and became its first director), organized the classics department and restored local fortresses. He donated a bust by his friend, Jacob Epstein, to the National Museum of Ghana. Lawrence had not escaped British attention, however. While in Ghana, He was asked by Nikolaus Bernard Leon Pevsner to write the volume in the prestigious Pelican History of Art series on Greek architecture. It appeared in 1957. In it, Lawrence departed from the traditional encyclopedic survey format, preferring instead to stress the continuity Aegean architecture as a series of developing styles, beginning with prehistoric architecture. A passage relating religious attitudes toward architectural function of the Greeks, was actually written, Lawrence said, to describe the mentality in the West African bush (!). He retired in 1957 to Nidderdale, Yorkshire, UK, and where he wrote Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa,1963. The same year he and his wife moved near Biggleswade, Bedfordshire. Lawrence returned to the British School at Athens as visiting fellow in 1967. In 1972 he published another book on classical sculpture, Greek and Roman Sculpture. At age 80, Greek Aims In Fortification a book for which he was uniquely qualified, appeared in 1980. His A Skeletal History Of Byzantine Fortifications, despite its title a large work, was published by the British School at Athens in 1983. Lawrence’s published scholarship on fortifications in the classical era thus spanned from prehistoric systems of the Aegean to the medieval crusader castles of the Levant. In 1985 Lawrence was interviewed for a BBC Omnibus production by Julia Cave and Malcolm Brown about T. E. After the death of his wife, Lawrence’s final years were shared with Peggy Guido (1912-1994), an archaeologist previously married to the archaeologist Stuart Piggott (1910-1996), living together in Devizes, north Wiltshire. Lawrence was completing a new revision of his earlier annotated edition of Rawlinson’s Herodotus when he died in 1991. The manuscript was never completed.Both Lawrences, T. E. and A. W. were architectural historians (T. E. wrote a monograph on crusader castles). Like his famous brother, Lawrence was a shy man–resulting in what students called his appallingly bad lecture style–who had spent much of his life avoiding publicity. Described as one of the last great traditional archaeologists, A. W. Lawrence’s interest was more in art and architecture, than excavation or reconstruction of the ancient environment. Brown described him as “the sort [who] do not even suffer wise men gladly.” Lawrence spent much of his non-academic life renouncing various characterizations of his more famous brother. These included Richard Aldington’s sensationalized disclosure of their illegitimacy in 1955, the 1962 David Lean film Lawrence of Arabia (Lawrence withdrew his support and refused the movie the use of the title Seven Pillars of Wisdom because of what he termed character distortions of not only his brother but also of Allenby), and the Times (London) 1968 revelation of T. E.’s masochism.


Selected Bibliography

Greek Architecture. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1957; Classical Sculpture. London, J. Cape [1929; Greek Aims in Fortification. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979; Later Greek Sculpture and its Influence on East and West. London: J. Cape, 1927; edited, T. E. Lawrence, by his Friends. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1937; Trade Castles & Forts of West Africa. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1964 (copyright 1963); Greek and Roman Sculpture. London: Cape, 1972; T. E. Lawrence. BBC Omnibus film (production), 1986.


Sources

Cave, Julia. “Brotherly Reminders and Avebury Saved: Appreciations of A. W. Lawrence.” The Guardian (London), April 8, 1991; [obituaries:] Tomlinson, Richard. “Unlocking Doors to Fortresses of the Ancient World: Obituary of Professor A W Lawrence.” The Guardian (London), April 5, 1991; Cook, R. M. “Professor A. W. Lawrence.” The Independent (London), April 4, 1991, p. 29; Brown, Malcolm. “Obituary: Professor A. W. Lawrence.” The Independent (London), April 4, 1991, p. 29; personal correspondence, Michiel Hegener, January 2008.




Citation

"Lawrence, Arnold Walter." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lawrencea/.


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Historian of ancient Greek sculpture and architecture and the history of fortifications. Lawrence’s older brother was the medieval scholar and popular desert hero T. E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”) (1888-1935), under whose shadow the younger La

Lawrence, Marion

Full Name: Lawrence, Marion

Gender: female

Date Born: 1901

Date Died: 1978

Place Born: Longport, Atlantic, NJ, USA

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): Early Christian, funerary arts, and sarcophagi (coffins)

Career(s): educators


Overview

Scholar of early Christian sarcophagi; Chair of the Art Department at Barnard College. Lawrence graduated from Byrn Mawr College in art history in 1923. She continued on to graduate school at Harvard, where she worked under the Princeton scholar Charles Rufus Morey who was on exchange for that year. It was Morey who introduced her to early Christian art. In 1924-25 she was appointed assistant at Wellesley. She was awarded a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome for the 1925-27 period. Two long articles in the Art Bulletin, one on the City-gate sarcophagi and another on columnar sarcophagi date from this time. She was an instructor at Bryn Mawr, 1927-28. In 1929 she moved to Barnard College, where she made her career. She continued to pursue her doctorate, which she received her Ph.D. in 1932 from Radcliffe in art history, although her connections with the Princeton scholars during these years really indicated a dual allegiance. She remained closed to Morey throughout their lives. At Barnard she rose to (full) professor and chair of the department. In 1941-42 she was a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, working on Ravennate sarcophagi, which appeared as her 1945 book with the same title. The book was only the second monograph in the Archaeology and Fine Arts series to be sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America. Later articles appeared in a number of festschriften, including those devoted to Belle da Costa Greene in 1954, Erwin Panofsky in 1961 and Rudolf Wittkower in 1967. In 1967 she retired from Barnard. In retirement she divided her time between Rome, New York and Little Deer Island, ME. In 1970 Bretschneider reprinted her 1945 Sarcophagi of Ravenna. Her final essay was that to the festschrift to Otto J. Brendel in 1976. While lecturing to a group of scholars on her current topic of interest, Roman pagan sarcophagi, she fell in Velletri, Italy, breaking her hip and elbow. She died ten days later in a Roman hospital.


Selected Bibliography

“City-Gate Sarcophagi.” Art Bulletin 10 (September 1927): 1-45; “Columnar Sarcophagi in the Latin West.” Art Bulletin 14 (June 1932): 103-85; The Sarcophagi of Ravenna. [2nd Monograph on Archaeology and Fine Arts sponsored by the Archaeological Institute of America.] New York: College Art Association, 1945; “The Velletri Sarcophagus.” American Journal of Archaeology 69, No. 3. (July 1965): 207-222; “Season Sarcophagi of Architectural Type” American Journal of Archaeology 62, No. 3. (July 1958): 273-295; “The Importance of College Art Courses in the Present Emergency.” College Art Journal 2, No. 4, Part 1. (May 1943): 102-103.


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. 63, mentioned; [obituary:] Heuser, Mary. “Marion Lawrence.” American Journal of Archaeology 82, No. 4. (Autumn, 1978): 575.




Citation

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Scholar of early Christian sarcophagi; Chair of the Art Department at Barnard College. Lawrence graduated from Byrn Mawr College in art history in 1923. She continued on to graduate school at Harvard, where she worked under the Princeton scholar <

Layard, Austen Henry, Sir

Full Name: Layard, Austen Henry, Sir

Other Names:

  • Henry Austen Layard

Gender: male

Date Born: 1817

Date Died: 1894

Place Born: Paris, Île-de-France, France

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): archaeology, Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance


Overview

Archaeologist, adventurer and amateur scholar of Italian renaissance art; discoverer of Nineveh. Layard was the son of Henry Peter John Layard, a civil servant, and Marianne Austen (Layard). He grew up in Florence near the Palazzo Rucellai, instilling in him a lifelong affection in Italy. He knew the British expatriate esthete Seymour Stocker Kirkup (1788-1880) and poet Walter Savage Landor (1775-1864). At 12, Laynard returned to England and was apprenticed as a solicitor under his uncle in 1833. While heading to Ceylon to assist another uncle’s business in 1839, he detoured to see the archaeological sites Asia Minor, copying cuneiform inscriptions. He elected to stay in Iraq where he learned Arabic. In 1842 he worked on diplomatic missions for Sir Stratford Canning (1786-1880) in Constantinople. By 1845 Layard convinced Canning to support excavating a mound at Mosul (Nimrud, ancient Kalhu)–ahead of the French–then thought to be Nineveh. His excavations included 9th century BC sculptures, the so-called Black Obelisk of Shalmaneser III and several pairs of human-headed winged lions and bulls (British Museum). In 1849 Layard published Monuments of Nineveh still believing he had discovered the famous city. It was only while excavating the citadel mound at Kuyunjik that he realized it was the true Nineveh. There his spectacular discoveries included Sennacherib’s palace and its rich relief cycles. The same year he published his popularized account of his findings, Nineveh and its Remains. In 1852 Layard, ever the 19th-century, romantic man of action was elected to Parliament for the Liberal party. His denunciation of the British handling of the Crimean War and British imperialism in general eventually alienated him from government. During his many trips to Italy, which was his homeland in many ways, he became interested in the Risorgimento (reorganization of Italy into the modern secular state) and concerned at the decline of the frescos there. In 1856 he enlisted the Arundel Society (founded in 1848 to disseminate art reproductions) to produce a chromolithography edition of the St. Sebastian by Perugino to publicize the fresco’s plight. Layard also published short books on Pinturicchio and Ghirlandaio to assist the project as well as collecting Italian art personally. In 1853 his second book on his archaeological finds, Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, appeared. At the new founding of the Crystal Palace in 1854, Layard advised the Assyrian court design and objects. This resulted in the Assyrian-mania design of the following decades. He began corresponding with the connoisseur-art historian Giovanni Morelli in 1863 and taking an ever-increasing role in the governing of the National Gallery. When the director, Charles Lock Eastlake died 1865, Layard was considered a possible successor. He instead became a Trustee in 1866, actively advising the museum on acquisitions. As commissioner of works in Gladstone’s cabinet, he appointed the historian of Indian architecture James Fergusson in 1869 to create a new plan of London public buildings. This was scuttled and Layard, much against protocol, was offered the Ambassador position for Madrid. This allowed Layard to include Spanish art work in his acquisitions as well. That year, too, he married Mary Enid Evelyn Guest (1843-1912), a well-connected woman with whom he had had a relationship since the 1840s. In 1877 Disraeli appointed Layard ambassador to Constantinople. The Layards returned Italy after Austen Henry’s (always known as “Henry”) retirement in 1883, settling in Venice at the Ca’ Cappello, later known as the Palazzo Cappello-Layard. After the death of his friend, Morelli, in 1891, he financed the second and more comprehensive English edition, co-edited by Constance Jocelyn Ffoulkes of Morelli’s Italian Painters, writing a brief biography of Morelli. In 1887 he issued a revised version in English of the 1837 Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei by Franz Kugler. A revision of the painting galleries section of the original 1843 Murray guidebook of Rome appeared in 1894. Layard returned to London, now suffering from cancer, where he died, his body cremated. His papers are held at the British Library and his collection bequeathed to the National Gallery, London, although only incorporated 1916. His Venetian palazzo is today the Istituto Orientale, Università degli Studi. Layard’s work was important for the discovery of Assyrian objects and the dissemination of the important art-historical writings of Morelli (and connoisseurship) and Kugler to the English-speaking world. His correspondence reveals much about the early history of the National Gallery and the history of conservation of object. His home in Venice became a visiting point for British and an important private art collection.


Selected Bibliography

The Monuments of Nineveh: From Drawings Made on the Spot. London: J. Murray, 1849; Nineveh and its Remains: With an Account of a Visit to the Chaldean Christians of Kurdistan, and the Yezidis, or Devil-Worshippers and an Enquiry into the Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians. 2 vols. London: J. Murray, 1849; Discoveries in the Ruins of Nineveh and Babylon; with Travels in Armenia, Kurdistan and the Desert: Being the Result of a Second Expedition Undertaken for the Trustees of the British Museum. London: J. Murray, 1853; The Nineveh Court in the Crystal Palace. London: Crystal Palace/Bradbury & Evans, 1854; The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian Painted in Fresco by Pietro Perugino in the Chapel of the Saint at Panicale. London: Arundel Society, 1856; The Frescoes by Bernardino Pinturicchio, in the Collegiate Church of S. Maria Maggiore at Spello. London: Arundel Society, 1858; Domenico Ghirlandaio and his Fresco of the Death of S. Francis. London: Arundel Society, 1860; Handbook of Painting: The Italian Schools, Based on the Handbook of Kugler, Originally Edited by Sir Charles Eastlake, P.R.A. Fifth Edition. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1887; and Ffoulkes, Constance Jocelyn. [edited and wrote] “Introduction.” Morelli, Giovanni. Italian Painters: Critical Studies of their Works. 2 vols. London: John Murray, 1892-1893; revised section on “Painting Galleries” section in Lanciani, Rodolfo, and Murray, Alexander Stuart, and Pullen, Henry William. A Handbook of Rome and its Environs. 15th ed. London: J. Murray, 1894; The Frescoes by Bern: Pinturicchio, in the collegiate church of S. Maria Maggiore, at Spello. London: Arundel Society, 1858; The Brancacci Chapel and Masolino, Masaccio, and Filippino Lippi. London: Arundel Society, 1868.


Sources

Venturi, Adolfo. “La Formazione della Galleria Layard a Venezia.” L’Arte 15 (1912): 449-62; Waterfield, Gordon. Layard of Nineveh. New York: F. A. Praeger; Anderson, Jaynie. “Layard, Austin Henry.” Dictionary of Art; Fleming, John. “Art Dealing and the Risorgimento.” Burlington Magazine 115 (1973): 4-16; 121 (1979): 492-508, 568-80; Layard, Austin. Sir A. Henry Layard, G.C.B., D.C.L.: Autobiography and Letters from his Childhood until his Appointment as H. M. Ambassador at Madrid. London: J. Murray, 1903; Parry, Jonathan. “Layard, Austen Henry.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.




Citation

"Layard, Austen Henry, Sir." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/layarda/.


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Archaeologist, adventurer and amateur scholar of Italian renaissance art; discoverer of Nineveh. Layard was the son of Henry Peter John Layard, a civil servant, and Marianne Austen (Layard). He grew up in Florence near the Palazzo Rucellai, instil

Lazarev, Viktor Mikitich

Full Name: Lazarev, Viktor Mikitich

Gender: male

Date Born: 1896

Date Died: 1976

Home Country/ies: Russia

Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style), iconography, and Medieval (European)


Overview

Byzantine iconography; student of Dmitrii Vlas’evich Ainalov III



Sources

KRG, 61 mentioned




Citation

"Lazarev, Viktor Mikitich." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lazarevv/.


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Byzantine iconography; student of Dmitrii Vlas’evich Ainalov III

Lange, Konrad von

Full Name: Lange, Konrad von

Other Names:

  • Konrad von Lange

Gender: male

Date Born: 1855

Date Died: 1921

Home Country/ies: Germany


Overview

Professor of art history at Tübingen. Early theorist in psychology and art. His students included Julius Baum and his influence is evident in the work of Dagobert Frey.


Selected Bibliography

Die bewusste selbsttäuschung als kern des künstlerischen genusses. Antrittsvorlesung gehalten in der aula der Universität Tübingen am 15. november 1894, Leipzig: Veit & comp., 1895; Das wesen der kunst; grundzüge einer realistischen kunstlehre. 2 vols. Berlin: G. Grote, 1901.





Citation

"Lange, Konrad von." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/langek/.


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Professor of art history at Tübingen. Early theorist in psychology and art. His students included Julius Baum and his influence is evident in the work of Dagobert Frey.

Langlotz, Ernst

Full Name: Langlotz, Ernst

Gender: male

Date Born: 1895

Date Died: 1978

Place Born: Ronneburg, Thuringia, Germany

Place Died: Bonn, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), Antique, the, and Classical


Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek and Roman art, particularly Greek sculpture from the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. and the early Christian era. Langlotz’s father was a weaver. Langlotz himself studied classical archaeology, philology and art history in Leipzig. Although schooled in the positivistic tradition of Franz Studniczka, for whom he wrote his promotionsschrift at Leipzig in 1921, Langlotz was strongly influenced by the Lebensphilosophie of the poet Stefan George (1868-1933) and by Friedrich Nietzsche’s theories of art history and classical studies. He also attended courses in art history under Heinrich Wölfflin in Munich. In Greece, he met and was further influenced by the classical pottery scholar Ernst Buschor. He taught as a privatdozent in Wurzburg and acted as conservator of the Martin von Wagner Museum. In 1932 he published a catalog of the collection, Griechische Vasen in Würzburg, the first in what would be a long interest in vase painting. He was professor at the University of Jena from 1931 to 1933 and then at Frankfurt a. Main, 1933-1941. In 1939 he published Die Archaischen Marmorbildwerke der Akropolis with Hans Schrader. In 1941 he joined the University of Bonn where he remained the rest of his career. During the time as professor in Bonn time he also acted as director of the Akademisches Kunstmuseum in Bonn. In 1952 Langlotz saw and visually authenticated in a letter a kouros (archaic Greek statue) in a Swiss collection. This documentation formed the beginning of the controversial validity of the work, since 1983 in the Getty Museum, California. He retired from Bonn in 1963. Near the end of his life he published a volume on the art of northern Greece in 1975.Although close to the Strukturforschung (structural research) school, he rejected the school’s excessive abstractions and formalism: for Langlotz, the developments in representing the human form concretized the development of artistic style, and the wider Zeitgeist (spirit of the age) of a given culture. He wrote that Zeitgeist or the spirit of the age was the motivating force in stylistic change. (Archäologenbildnisse, 268). Langlotz’s method employed stylistic analysis borrowed from Wölfflin and a positivism akin to that of Studniczka. His acknowledgment of Roman copies as important for the study of lost Greek originals and his work on the sculpture of the archaic period and southern Italy (magna Grecia) remain important.


Selected Bibliography

Griechische Vasenbilder. Heidelberg: E. von König, 1922; Frühgriechische Bildhauerschulen. Nurnberg: E. Frommann & Sohn, 1927; and Schrader, Hans. Die archaischen Marmorbildwerke der Akropolis. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann, 1939; Die Darstellung des Menschen in der griechischen Kunst. Bonn: Scheur, 1941; über das interpretieren griechischer plastik. Bonn: Gebr. Scheur [Bonner universitäts-buchdruckerei], 1942; Archaische Plastik auf der Akropolis. Frankfurt am Main: V. Klostermann,1943; Das Ludovisische Relief. Mainz: F. Kupferberg, 1951; Alkamenes-Probleme. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1952; Die kulturelle und künstlerische Hellenisierung der Küsten des Mittelmeers durch die Stadt Phokaia. Cologne: Opladen, Westdeutscher Verlag, 1966; Der architekturgeschichtliche Ursprung der christlichen Basilika. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1972.


Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 268-269; An Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 658-7; Kimmelman, Michael. “Absolutely Real? Absolutely Fake?” New York Times, August 4, 1991, Section 2, p. 1.




Citation

"Langlotz, Ernst." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/langlotze/.


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Specialist in ancient Greek and Roman art, particularly Greek sculpture from the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. and the early Christian era. Langlotz’s father was a weaver. Langlotz himself studied classical archaeology, philology and art history in L

Lányi, Jenö

Full Name: Lányi, Jenö

Other Names:

  • Jenö Lányi

Gender: male

Date Born: 1902

Date Died: 18 September 1940

Place Born: Varín, Slovakia

Place Died: North Atlantic Ocean

Home Country/ies: Hungary

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, Renaissance, and sculpture (visual works)


Overview

Donatello and Italian Renaissance sculpture scholar. Lányi’s father was Arpád Lányi, a Hungarian bureaucrat. The younger Lányi was born in Várna, Hungary, which is present-day Varín, Slovakia. He attended a humanities Gymnasium in Budapest, receiving his Abitur in 1920. Between 1920 and 1924 and again in 1927 he studied art history, archaeology and history in Vienna under the Vienna-School scholar Julius Alwin von Schlosser and then in Munich under Wilhelm Pinder. He wrote a dissertation (likely supervised by Pinder) in Munich on Jacopo della Quercia in 1929. Between 1929 and 1932 he worked as a volunteer researcher for the State Art Museum in Berlin in the graphics collection under Max J. Friedländer and at the Kaiser Friedrich-Wilhelm Museum under Thomas Demmler and, particularly important for his later work, the Italian Renaissance sculpture scholar Frida Schottmüller. In 1932 a Swiss benefactor financed a research stay in Florence at the Kunsthistorisches Institut where he worked on a monograph on Donatello. There he met Monika Mann (1910-1992), the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955), who was studying art history at the time. The 1938 laws against Jews holding academic or museum positions in the Reich made a career in German-speaking countries impossible for him. He emigrated to England in 1938 with Mann where he continued his Donatello research. The two married in 1939. As England became a target for Nazi strikes, his father-in-law, living in Princeton, N. J., used his connections to secure a visa for travel to Canada. The boat carrying them to North America, the “SS City of Benares” was torpedoed in the North Atlantic by the German U-boat U-48 and sunk. Lányi drowned and his wife was injured, but survived. The suitcases containing his notes for his book on Donatello were returned to his widow recovering in Scotland who took them with her to the United States. Two of Lányi’s articles in English appeared posthumously in the Art Bulletin and the Burlington Magazine. His notes and photographs on Donatello was considered so important they were taken over by the New York University Renaissance scholar Horst Woldemar Janson and published with Janson’s text in 1957 as the critical catalog on the sculptor. Lányi’s untimely death is one of the great tragedies of art history. An historian of great promise, his writings influenced John Pope-Hennessy, later the director of Victoria and Albert Museum and eminent sculpture historian. Drowned at sea.


Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Quercia Studien. Munich, 1929, published as the same in, Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 7 (1930): 25-63; “Pontormos Bildnis der Maria Salviati de’Medici.” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 4 no.2/3 (January-July 1933): 88-102; “Donatello’s Angels for the Siena Font: A Reconstruction ” Burlington Magazine 75, no. 439 (October 1939): 142-143ff.; and Falk, Ilse. “The Genesis of Andrea Pisano’s Bronze Doors.” Art Bulletin 25, no. 2 (June 1943): 132-153; “The Louvre Portrait of Five Florentines.” Burlington Magazine 84, no. 493 (April 1944): 87-93ff.; and Janson, H. W. The Sculpture of Donatello. 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957.


Sources

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. 419-420; Mann, Monika. Vergangenes und Gegenwärtiges: Erinnerungen. Munich: Kindler, 1956, pp. 106ff; “Forward” and “Introduction.” Janson, H. W.The Sculpture of Donatello. vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957; viii-xvii.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Lányi, Jenö." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lanyij/.


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Donatello and Italian Renaissance sculpture scholar. Lányi’s father was Arpád Lányi, a Hungarian bureaucrat. The younger Lányi was born in Várna, Hungary, which is present-day Varín, Slovakia. He attended a humanities Gymnasium in Budape

Lanzi, Luigi Antonio

Full Name: Lanzi, Luigi Antonio

Other Names:

  • Abate Luigi Lanzin

Gender: male

Date Born: 14 June 1732

Date Died: 30 March 1810

Place Born: Monte dell'Olmo, Treia, Macerata, Marche, Italy

Place Died: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style), Italian Renaissance-Baroque styles, and Renaissance


Overview

Historian of classical and renaissance Italian art; father of modern art history in Italy. Lanzi was educated as a Jesuit priest at Fermo and Rome, joining the Order of St. Ignatius. He taught classics at various schools and came under the classicizing spell of Anton Mengs and the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, both of whose work appeared at that time. Lanzi survived the suppression of the Jesuit order in 1773 having been in Siena for health reasons, to be appointed by Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany (1747-1792) to the office of antiquities assistant at the galleries in Florence in 1775. The following year he was appointed curator of the museum, where he published Guida alla Galleria di Firenze, a guide to the newly reorganized collections in 1782. During these years Lanzi had also studied archaeological sites, particularly the little-known Etruscan finds. After nearly five years in Rome preparing his work, Lanzi published his Saggio di lingua etrusca e di altre antiche d’Italia in 1789, a summary catalog on Etruscan life and art. The book formed a comprehensive collection of the Etruscan language and customs. But his assertion that Etruscan language derived from Hebrew was strongly criticized and never gained acceptance. Lanzi continued to study Italian art as a private scholar. In 1790 the Grand Duke recalled him to Florence to resume his antiquarian work. However, Lanzi spent much of the following years traveling and taking notes for his next project, a history of Italian painting. His monumental Storia pittorica dell’Italia appeared between 1795 and 1796. The Storia was the first treatment of the history of Italian art viewed as a succession of stylistic developments rather than fit into the biographies of the artists. It begins with a bold refutation of the claim of Giorgio Vasari that painting had been “altogether lost” before Cimabue. Lanzi had met and exchanged ideas with many of the important scholars of the time, including Bartolomeo Gamba (1770-1841), Mauro Boni (1746-1817), and the collector/art historians Pietro Brandolese (1754-1809) and Giovanni de Lazara (1744-1833) as well as the German art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen. In 1806 Lanzi’s work on the so-called Etruscan vases appeared, correctly identifying their Greek origin, and refuting many errors current with the mania of things Etruscan at the time. His findings were convincingly confirmed by Eduard Gerhard in 1831. Lanzi put together a collection of Etruscan antiquities which now forms the Archaeological Museum in Florence. In 1809 his second edition of the Storia appeared, which is considered his masterpiece. He is buried in Florence at Santa Croce next to Michelangelo. Lanzi employed connoisseurship and a systemization derived from his classification of sculpture as a means to distinguish and organize art into a coherent vision. He saw the artist as an independent creator, defining the styles and manner of artists and epochs with the artist and less of their time. His rigorous scientific method to the study objects and languages fit the Enlightenment age of which he was a part. His revisionist view of Vasari was supported by the work of Karl Friedrich von Rumohr in his Italienische Forschungen, 1827-1831. The philologist Wilhelm Corssen (1820-1875) called Lanzi “the father of ancient Italian studies.” Rudolf Wittkower, in the introduction to his Art and Architecture in Italy, termed Lanzi’s work as “still unequaled.” His work inspired the Berlin school of art historians, Rumohr and especially Waagen.


Selected Bibliography

Storia Pittorica della Italia dal risorgimento delle belle arti fin presso al fin del XVIII secolo. 3 vols. Bassano: Remondino, 1795-1796; La Real Galleria di Firenze. Florence: Francesco Moücke, 1782; Saggio di lingua etrusca: e di altre antiche d’Italia, per servire alla storia de’ popeli, delle lingua, e delle belle arti. Rome: Pagliarini, 1789.


Sources

An Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, pp. 659-60; Bazin, Germain. Histoire de l’histoire de l’art; de Vasari à nos jours. Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, p. 89; Bernabei, Franco. Dictionary of Art.



Contributors: Lee Sorensen


Citation

Lee Sorensen. "Lanzi, Luigi Antonio." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/lanzil/.


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Search for materials by & about this art historian:

Historian of classical and renaissance Italian art; father of modern art history in Italy. Lanzi was educated as a Jesuit priest at Fermo and Rome, joining the Order of St. Ignatius. He taught classics at various schools and came under the classic