P

Pückler-Muskau, Hermann, Fürst Prince von

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Pückler-Muskau, Hermann, Fürst Prince von

Gender: male

Date Born: 1785

Date Died: 1871

Place Born: Bad Muskau, Saxony, Germany

Place Died: Branitz, Brandenburg, Germany

Home Country/ies: Germany

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), gardens (open spaces), landscape architecture (discipline), landscapes (representations), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

German noble interested in garden design; wrote the first book to alert the German reading public of the art treasures in England. Pückler-Muskau served in the army at Dresden, before traveling in France and Italy. He inherited the barony of Muskau and its fortunes upon the death of his father in 1811. He married the Grafin von Pappenheim, daughter of Prince von Hardenberg. His service in the wars of liberation from Napoleon were rewarded in a military and civil governorship of Bruges. He retired from the army at the war’s conclusion, traveling in England for nearly a year. In 1826 his marriage was legally dissolved. He visited England a second time, planning to visit America and Asia Minor. In 1830-31 he issued the four-volume Briefe eines Verstorbenen, his experiences traveling in England and his accounts of the art contained in the private estates there. Pückler-Muskau’s visit America in 1834 failed when he missed his ship in Paris. Instead, he traveled to North Africa, where he wrote some of his most famous travel commentaries. Semilassos vorletlter Weltgang (3 vols., 1835), and Semilasso in Afrika (5 vols., 1836) followed. He also wrote a treatise on Landscape gardening, Andeutungen über Landschaftsgärtnerei (1834). He sold his Muskau estate to Prince Frederick of the Netherlands in 1845, living at principal residence, Schloss Branitz near Kottbus, south of Berlin. An intense formal garden interest led to him design gardens there as he had earlier done at Muskau. In 1863 he was made an hereditary member of the Prussian Herrenhaus, engaging in 1866 with the Prussian army in the war against Austria. He died at Branitz in 1871; his body was cremated. Pückler-Muskau alerted the reading German public to the art holdings in England, awakening a sense of national pride for the acquisition of works in their own (forming) nation. Gustav Friedrich Waagen among others, built on these sentiments to help form the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin during this time. He was voluptuary who conducted many affairs, including one with his English translator, Sara Austin.

Selected Bibliography

Brief eines Verstorbenen (1830-32), English, A regency visitor: the English tour of Prince Pückler-Muskau described in his letters, 1826-1828. Sarah Austin trans. London: Collins, 1957.

Sources

Lightbrown, Ronald W. “An introduction to the 1970 edition,” in, Waagen, Gustav. Works of Art and Artists in England. [facsimile reprint.] 3 vols. London: Cornmarket Press, 1970: unpaginated [iv]; Butler, E. M. (Eliza Marian), 1885-1959. The Tempestuous Prince: Hermann Puckler-Muskan. New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929; private email with Rachel Hildebrandt, Exhibit Consultant, “Fuerst-Pueckler-Park Bad Muskau” Foundation, August 11, 2004.

Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Pugin, Augustus Welby Northmore

Gender: male

Date Born: 1812

Date Died: 1852

Place Born: London, Greater London, England, UK

Place Died: London, Greater London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), art theory, Medieval (European), and sculpture (visual works)

Overview

Architect, architectural theorist and medievalist. Pugin was the son of the architect Auguste Charles Pugin (1768/9-1832) and Catherine Welby (c.1772-1833). Though his father was nominally Roman Catholic, his mother was a fanatical protestant, who raised the boy in the tradition of the theologian Edward Irving (1792-1834), whose sermons they frequently attended in the 1820s. He briefly attended school at Christ’s Hospital, London, but from the first manifested an interest in medieval architecture. His family traveled to France, visiting the medieval monuments, beginning in 1819. In 1827 Pugin was commissioned to design a gothic-style chalice for George IV, known today as the Coronation Cup. Further commissions for Windsor Castle furniture followed. Pugin also developed an interest in theater design. In 1829 Pugin joined Covent Garden as a stage carpenter and for the King’s Theatre. A business he formed the same year created gothic furniture. He met the architect James Gillespie Graham (1776-1855), who assisted him with his designs. In 1831 his business failed and, though he married Anne Garnet (c.1811-1832) the same year, she died in childbirth in 1832. Pugin’s father also died in 1832, and his mother and aunt in 1833. He married Louisa Burton (c.1813-1844) the same year. Between 1832 and 1834 he toured France, Germany, Belgium and England studying and drawing medieval architecture. Now with a measure of wealth from his late aunt, Pugin hoped to become an architect, though he lacked the foundation training. He started designing imaginary medieval buildings in book form. These included The Hospital of St. John (1833), The Deanery, and St. Marie’s College (both 1834). In 1835 and 1836, he published books on his furniture designs. Pugin converted to Roman Catholicism in 1835, resolving to make at least one continental sketching tour every year, which he did. He joined the architectural firm of his friend, Graham, and Charles Barry (1795-1860); his drawings for the new Houses of Parliament for their firm won them the commission in 1836. Pugin designed and built a home he called St. Marie’s Grange, Alderbury, near Salisbury. In 1836, too, he published his manifesto asserting the gothic style over Regency: Contrasts, or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, and Similar Buildings of the Present Day, Shewing the Present Decay of Taste: Accompanied by Appropriate Text. The book is a series of comparisons between idealized medieval building types and caricatures of “modern” buildings of similar function. Major architectural commissions soon followed, including the renovations and new structures for Scarisbrick Hall, Lancashire, for Charles Scarisbrick (1801-1860). Pugin began an association with the Roman Catholic school St. Mary’s College, Oscott, Warwickshire, establishing a museum and lecturing on medieval architecture. With the medalist John Hardman (1811-1867) he began producing stained glass and furnishings between 1838 and 1845. His major architectural work, Alton Towers, Staffordshire, designed for John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury (1791-1852), began at this time, too. Other, largely church commissions followed. In 1839 he met Charles-Forbes-René, comte de Montalembert (1810-1870) a fellow medieval revivalist. In 1841 he published The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, a treatise for architects. His motto that “all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building,” was a plea for clarity of his style. A revised edition of Contrasts with a new conclusion appeared in 1841 as well with an appendix on the French architectural practice by comte de Montalembert. Pugin worked with Herbert Minton (1793-1858), the pottery manufacturer, and J. G. Crace (1809-1889), the interior designer during this time. Working exclusively for a Roman Catholic clientele, he built numerous churches, including St. George, Southwark, London (1841-8) and the first post-Reformation monastery in Britain, Mount St. Bernard’s Abbey, Leicestershire (1839-c.1844). Pugin’s designed a second home, St. Augustine’s (now known as The Grange), on a cliff at Ramsgate, Kent, was begun in 1843. After his designs for rebuilding Balliol College, Oxford, were rejected (largely because of his denomination), he completed another book, his scholarly Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume, 1844. The book explained symbolism, vestments and church furnishings in color plates and other stunning illustrations and was responsible for reviving liturgical objects long out of use before in both the Anglican and Roman Catholic ceremony. When his second wife, Louisa, died the same year, (1844) he proposed to Mary Amherst (1824-1860) who accepted him, but by 1846 had instead entered a convent. Pugin began the Roman Catholic church of St. Augustine, Ramsgate, in 1845 at his own expense. Despite his return to the Parliament interior project under Barry, Pugin’s architectural commissions declined, partially because other architects, such as M. E. Hadfield (1812-1885) and Charles Hansom (1816-1888) had taken up his stance. Pugin worked on the college of St. Patrick, Maynooth, Ireland in 1845 and the Parliament projects. Barry and Pugin completed the House of Lords in 1847, a triumph for Pugin’s True Principles. In 1847 he left for Italy (his only visit to that country). He was briefly engaged in 1848 to Helen Lumsdaine, whose parents would not allow her conversion, before marrying Jane Knill (1825-1909) the same year. Floriated Ornament, a work chiefly of plates, appeared in 1849. The Great Exhibition of 1851 proved Pugin’s greatest triumph for the public. A “medieval court” was created to highlight the Pugin’s designs realized in metalwork and stained glass by Hardman, sculpture (a tomb) by Myers, ceramics and encaustic tiles by Minton, and textiles, wallpaper, and furniture by Crace. That year, too, the medieval exponent and art critic John Ruskin attacked St. George’s Cathedral, Southwark, in his book Stones of Venice as and “eruption of diseased crockets”. The House of Commons was opened in 1852 along with Pugin’s work for the libraries, and committee rooms. Admission to the Royal Academy was declined. Pugin’s broke down and was declared insane in 1852 and eventually housed in the Bethlehem Pauper Hospital for the Insane (“Bedlam”). He returned to his home at Ramsgate shortly before his death the same year, age 40. He is buried in the Pugin chapel in St. Augustine’s Church. His son, Edward Welby Pugin, assumed his practice. His library and collection of medieval artifacts were sold at auction in 1853. Hardman, Minton, and Crace all continued to use Pugin’s designs after his death. The end of the nineteenth century saw a revival of his principles in the work of the architects G. F. Bodley (1827-1907) and Thomas Garner (1839-1906) and stained-glass designer C. E. Kempe (1837-1907). In 1995, the Pugin Society was founded to further the appreciation of his works and the gothic-revival style. Pugin was one of the principal exponents of the gothic revival in the English-speaking world disseminated primarily through his books. His theme, that Christian practice, both architectural and moral, is inextricably connected with the gothic style, took hold in the Victorian age. Pugin’s writing owes much to gothic exponent and antiquary, John Carter (1748-1817). As an architect and designer, the reform movement in nineteenth-century England can be traced back to his writing (Pevsner). Pugin’s architectural work was disparaged by John Ruskin, who found Pugin’s eclecticism “untruthful,” although Ruskin owed much to Pugin’s thought. Among those who came to Pugin’s defense were the first Cambridge University Slade professor, Matthew Digby Wyatt. The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture, conformed to the theoretics of Abbé Laugier (1713-1769) in Laugier’s Essai sur l’architecture (1753), and the French rationalists who envision their dictum in classical terms.

Selected Bibliography

[complete bibliography:] Belcher, Margaret. A. W. N. Pugin: an Annotated Critical Bibliography. London: Mansell, 1987; Belcher, Margaret, ed. The Collected Letters of A. W. N. Pugin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001ff.; An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England. London: J. Weale, 1843; Floriated Ornament: a Series of Thirty-one Designs. London: H. G. Bohn, 1849; A Treatise on Chancel Screens and Rood Lofts, their Antiquity, Use, and Symbolic Signification. London: C. Dolman, 1851; Glossary of Ecclesiastical Ornament and Costume. London: H. G. Bohn, 1844; Contrasts; or, A Parallel Between the Noble Edifices of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries and Similar Buildings of the Present day. Shewing the Present Decay of Taste. London: A. W. N. Pugin, 1836; The True Principles of Pointed or Christian Architecture. London: J. Weale, 1841.

Sources

Stanton, Phoebe B. Pugin. New York: Viking Press, 1971; Trappes-Lomax, Michael. Pugin: a Mediaeval Victorian. London: Sheed & Ward, 1932; Atterbury, Paul, ed., and Wainwright, Clive. Pugin: a Gothic Passion. New Haven: Yale University Press/Victoria & Albert Museum. 1994; Aldrich, Megan, and Atterbury, Paul, ed. A. W. N. Pugin: Master of Gothic Revival. New Haven: Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York/Yale University Press, 1995; Pevsner, Nikolaus. Matthew Digby Wyatt: the First Cambridge Slade professor of Fine Art: an Inaugural Lecture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950; Ferrey, Benjamin. Recollections of A. W. N. Pugin and his Father Augustus Pugin. 2nd ed. London: Scolar Press, 1978.

Poynter, Edward John, Sir

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Poynter, Edward John, Sir

Gender: male

Date Born: 1836

Date Died: 1919

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

Place Died: Kensington, Kensington and Chelsea, London, England, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): museums (institutions)

Career(s): directors (administrators) and museum directors

Overview

Director, National Gallery, 1894-1905 and artist. Poynter was the son of the architect Ambrose Poynter (1796-1886) and Emma Forster (Poynter) (1800-1848), the latter the granddaughter of sculptor Thomas Banks (1735-1805). Poynter studied at Westminster School, Brighton College, and Ipswich grammar school, between 1847-52, inclusively. He further studied under Thomas Shotter Boys and Leigh’s academy. In the winter of 1853 he traveled to Rome where he met the painter Frederic Leighton (1830-1896) and was greatly impressed by the classicizing genre. He joined the studio of Charles Gleyre (1806-1874) in Paris in 1856 and later the éole des Beaux-Arts. There he met James McNeill Whistler (1834-1903), the author and illustrator George Du Maurier (1834-1896) (in whose novel, Trilby, 1894, Poynter appears), Thomas R. Lamont (1826-1898), and Thomas Armstrong (1832-1911). He returned to London in1860, working for a glassworks firm. Poynter married Agnes Macdonald (1843-1906) in 1866, a beautiful and socially aspiring woman who became the aunt of Rudyard Kipling and the sister-in-law of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898). Poynter also worked illustrating magazines, including London Society, and books, such as the Dalziel brothers’ popular Bible Gallery (1880). Poynter began exhibiting Orientalist paintings at the Royal Academy in 1861. He traveled to Venice in 1868 to study mosaics for a decoration and, in 1869, was made a member of the Royal Academy. As such he worked on designs the frieze of the Royal Albert Hall and the St. George mosaic in the British houses of parliament, both of that same year. Poynter was appointed the first Slade professor at University College, London in 1871. His lectures were published in 1879 as Ten Lectures on Art. Intensely impressed with French methods of artistic pedagogy, including the importance of drawing, Poynter made many reforms and saw to it at his resignation in 1875 that his successor was the French artist Alphonse Legros (1837-1911). That year Poynter was appointed the director and principal of the National Art Training School at South Kensington. Poynter again took a reformist stance to the school, publishing of a series of art history textbooks. During these years he also executed many important public painting projects for which he is still principally remembered. His Visit to Aesculapius (1880, Tate Gallery), and The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to King Solomon (1890, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) were among these. In 1894 he was appointed director of the National Gallery, London, succeeding Frederic William Burton, beating out Charles Fairfax Murray and Charles L. Eastlake for the position. Poynter’s acquisitions during his years as director included The Vision of St. Eustace by Pisanello, Agony in the Garden by Mantegna, Portrait of a Man by Titian and the Rembrandt portraits of Jacob Trip and his wife, and works by Lorenzo Monaco, Zurbaran, and Goya. Unlike his predecessor, Poynter’s acquisitions were performed in concert with the Board of Trustees. In 1896 he was knighted and then elected president of the Royal Academy, succeeding John Everett Millais (1829-1896). Poynter was instrumental in the installation of objects in the National Gallery of British Art (later the Tate Gallery) in 1897. He retired from National Gallery in 1905 (succeeded by Charles Holroyd), retaining the Academy directorship until 1918. His health failing, Poynter sold his extensive collection of master drawings in 1918. He died at his house and studio in Kensington (London) and is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral, London. His nephew was the director of the Ashmolean Museum, Charles F. Bell. Though primarily remembered as an academic artist, Poynter’s contribution to art history is significant. At the National Gallery, he issued the first complete illustrated catalog of the collection in 1899. As an artist he was frequently criticized by modernists as the embodiment of the stilted “Victorian Olympian,” however, his work in art education and art-historical survey texts became the model for the next generation. A cosmopolitan artist, he did not shrink from portrayal of the nude or works that glorified its sensual qualities, even during a time when this was not popular.

Selected Bibliography

edited, The National Gallery. 3 vols. London/New York: Cassell, 1899-1900; Ten Lectures on Art. London: Chapman & Hall, 1879; The National Gallery of British Art (Millbank) Illustrated Catalogue. London/New York: Cassell and Co., 1902; Illustrated Text-books of Art Education [series:] and Head, Percy R. Classic and Italian Painting. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1880; and Buxton, Henry Wilmot. German, Flemish and Dutch Painting. London: S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1881; and Smith, Thomas Roger. Architecture, Gothic and Renaissance. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1880;[drawings collection sale:] Sotheby, Wilkinson & Hodge. Catalogue of the Superb Collection of Drawings by Old Masters, the Property of Sir Edward J. Poynter. London: Dryden press, 1918.

Sources

Inglis, Alison. “Sir Edward John Poynter (1836-1919).” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Connor, P. “‘Wedding Archaeology to Art’: Poynter’s Israel in Egypt.” in, Macready, Sarah, and Thompson, F. H., eds. Influences in Victorian Art and Architecture. London: Society of Antiquaries, 1985, pp.112-20; Inglis, Alison. “Sir Edward Poynter and the Earl of Wharncliffe’s Billiard Room.” Apollo 126 (1987): 249-55; Kestner, Joseph. “Poynter and Leighton as Aestheticians: the Ten Lectures and Addresses.” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite and Aesthetic Studies 2 no. 1 (1989): 108-20; Smith, Alison. The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art. Manchester/New York: Manchester University Press/St. Martin’s Press, 1996; M. Liversidge and C. Edwards, eds., Imagining Rome: British artists and Rome in the nineteenth century. London: Merrell Holberton, 1996; Arscott, C. “Poynter and the Arty.” in, Prettejohn, Elizabeth, ed. After the Pre-Raphaelites: Art and Aestheticism in Victorian England. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999, pp. 135-51; Smith, Alision. ed., Exposed: the Victorian Nude. London: Tate Publishing, 2001; Freeman, Julian. Life at Arm’s Length: Sir Edward Poynter 1836-1919: a Pupil at Brighton College from 1849-1850. Brighton, UK: Brighton College, 1995. [depicted] Trilby: a Novel. New York: Harper & Bros., 1894. [obituaries:] “Death of Sir E. Poynter. A Great Victorian.” The Times (London), July 28, 1919, p. 16.

Praschniker, Camillo

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Praschniker, Camillo

Gender: male

Date Born: 1884

Date Died: 1949

Place Born: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Place Died: Vienna, Vienna state, Austria

Home Country/ies: Austria

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

Overview

Specialist in ancient Greek art and sculpture. Lecturer in Archaeology at the University of Vienna (1919-1923), then Professor at the German University of Prague (1923-1930) and Vienna (1930-1949). Director of the Austrian Archaeological Institute 1935-1938.

Selected Bibliography

Parthenonstudien, 1928;Bäderbezirk von Virunum, 1947.

Sources

Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 224-225.

Praz, Mario

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Praz, Mario

Other Names:

Mario Praz

Gender: male

Date Born: 1896

Date Died: 1982

Place Born: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Place Died: Rome, Lazio, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

Subject Area(s): decorative art (art genre)

Career(s): art critics and literary critics

Overview

Interdisciplinary arts writer, literary critic and art historian (particularly of decorative arts). Praz was the son of Luciano Praz, a clerk in a bank and Giulia Testa di Marsciano (Praz). He attended the University of Rome, gaining a law degree in 1918. Moving to the University of Florence, he was granted a bachelor of letters degree in 1920. Praz earaned a scholarship and left Italy for England in 1923 to earn his libero docente (Ph.D). He worked at the British Museum, which gained him entrance as a professor of Italian Studies at the University in Liverpool in 1924. He delivered the British Academy annual Italian Lectures in 1928 on Machiavelli. During his tenure in Liverpool, he wrote his most important work for art history, Carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica in 1930 and translated into English as The Romantic Agony 1933. The study was one of the first interdisciplinary ones on the arts to include art history. By tracing the embedded and overt erotic and Sadistic impulses in the Romantic movement through all of the arts: art, literature and music, Praz deftly characterized the interrelation of these themes among the Romantic era. In 1932 he moved to Manchester University, also teaching Italian studies. He married the British subject Vivyan Eyles (b. 1910) in 1934 and returned to Italy the same year to become professor of English Literature at Rome University with the title cattedra di Letteratura inglese alla Sapienza. The couple initially lived on the via Giulia, at the Palazzo Ricci where their home was a meeting point for visitors across Europe. Praz’s 1939 study of baroque art, Studi sul concettismo, showed his knowledge of emblemata and included an important bibliography on the subject. The following year Praz published his volume on Neoclassical taste and art, Gusto neoclassico, another period at its nadir in public opinion. Praz continued to hold his chair at the University of Rome during the Fascist period through World War II and the German occupation. His interest in decorative arts, particularly furniture increased but led to his divorce from Eyles in 1947, she claiming, wryly, that he cared more about his furniture than her. In 1961 he wrote the introduction for Magnificenza di Roma‘s republication of Prianesi’s Vedute. Praz collected furniture and decoration in the Empire and Regency styles, leading to his history of interior design in 1964, La filosofia dell’arredamento. He retired in 1966 emeritus. Among the works Praz translated were text by the art critic/theorist Walter Pater. Praz contributed the essay, “Francesco Pianta’s Bizarre Carvings,” to the 1967 Festschrift of Rudolf Wittkower. In 1969 Praz moved from his Ricci palace home to the third floor of the Primoli palace, near the Piazza Navona, where he spent his final years. In 1967 he delivered the A. W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washgington, D. C., which were published in 1970 as Mnesomyne: the Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts. In 1976 he authored a volume on the complete works of the sculptor Anontio Canova. Praz died in Rome in 1982. His Palazzo Primoli home was opened to the public in as a museum in 1995. A monograph on Canova remains untranslated. Most of Praz’s publications discussed Romantic and Neo-classical art and literature. The Romantic Agony analyzes the erotic details in the works of Baudelaire, Sade, Flaubert, and Wilde. As an art historian, also wrote a catalog of his personal decorative arts collection arranged as an autobiography, entitled, La casa della vita. The catalog describes objects in Praz’s home, accompanied by personal anecdotes that give the reader intimate insight into the life of a collector. Praz was largely responsible for the excellent translations into Italian for English-language writers, including Pater. Among American literary critics, Edmund Wilson (1895-1972) was a strong exponent, who characterized Praz’s autobiography House of Life as a masterpiece. The art historian and literary critic Wylie Sypher also praised Praz’s literary work.

Selected Bibliography

[bibliography to 1966:] “A Bibliography of the Published Writings of Mario Praz.” in, Gabrieli, Vittorio, ed. Friendship’s Garland: Essays Presented to Mario Praz on his Seventieth Birthday. Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1966 vol. 1, pp. xxvii-clvii; Carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Milan/Rome: Societé editrice “La Cultura,” 1930, English, The Romantic Agony. London: Oxford University Press, 1933; Studi sul concettismo. Florence: G. C. Sansoni, 1946, English, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery. 2 vols. London: The Warburg Institute, 1939-1947 [revised ed., 1964-74], supplement, and Sayles, Hilary M. J. Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery, part II. Rome: Ed. di Storia e Letteratura, 1974; “Introduction.” Piranesi, Giovanni Battista. Magnificenza di Roma. Rome: Edizione Il Polifilo, 1961, English, The Magnificence of Rome. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1962; La filosofia dell’arredamento: i mutamenti nel gusto della decorazione interna attraverso i secoli dall’antica Roma ai nostri tempi. Milan: Longanesi 1964, English, An Illustrated History of Interior Decoration, from Pompeii to Art Nouveau. London: Thames and Hudson, 1964; Mnemosyne: the Parallel Between Literature and the Visual Arts. A. W. Mellon Lectures, 1967. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970; An Illustrated History of Furnishing, from the Renaissance to the 20th Century. New York: G. Braziller, 1964; “Francesco Pianta’s Bizarre Carvings,” in Essays in the History of Art Presented to Rudolf Wittkower. volume 2. London, Phaidon, 1967; Scene di conversazione: Conversation Pieces. Rome: U. Bozzi, 1971, English, Conversation Pieces: a Survey of the Informal Group Portrait in Europe and America. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press,1971; Gusto neoclassico. Florence: G .C. Sansoni, 1940, On Neoclassicism. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969; L’opera completa del Canova. Milan: Rizzoli, 1976.

Sources

Praz. Mario. La casa della vita. Milan: A. Mondadori, 1958, English, The House of Life. London: Oxford University Press, 1964; [obituaries:] New York Times, April 8, 1982, p. 12; “Professor Mario Praz, Outstanding Italian Interpreter of English Life and Letters.” The Times (London) March 26, 1982, p. 10.

Preimesberger, Rudolf

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Preimesberger, Rudolf

Gender: male

Date Born: 1936

Home Country/ies: Austria

Subject Area(s): Italian (culture or style)

Institution(s): Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte

Overview

Scholar of Bernini at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Preimesberger’s work attracted the praise of Otto von Simson.

Sources

[transcript] “Otto von Simson, interviewed by Richard Cándida Smith.” Art History Oral Documentation Project. Getty Research Institute, Malibu, CA, p. 82.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

Scholar of Bernini at the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte in Munich. Preimesberger’s work attracted the praise of Otto von Simson.

Pressouyre, Léon

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Pressouyre, Léon

Other Names:

Léon Pressouyre

Gender: male

Date Born: February 1935

Date Died: 10 August 2009

Place Died: Athens, Region of Attica, Greece

Home Country/ies: France

Subject Area(s): Medieval (European)

Overview

Professor of medieval art at the Université de Paris 1; member of the internationalcouncil on monuments and sites, UNESCO (1980-2005). Pressouyre furthered the research of the Châlons-sur-Marne cloister fragments, a discovery orginally made by Willibald Sauerländer.

Selected Bibliography

Un apôtre de Châlons-sur-Marne. Bern: Abegg-Stiftung Bern, 1970; “Histoire de l’art et iconographie.” Actes des congrès de la Société des historiens médiévistes de l’enseignement supérieur public 20 no. 1 1989, pp. 247-268; Saint Bernard & le monde cistercien sous la direction de Léon Pressouyre et Terryl N. Kinder. Paris: Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites, 1992; Utilis est lapis in structura: mélanges offerts à Léon Pressouyre. Paris: Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2000; La commanderie: institution des ordres militaires dans l’occident médiéval sous la direction d’Anthony Luttrell et Léon Pressouyre. Paris: CTHS. Comité des travaux historiques et scientifiques, 2002; Du Bosphore à l’Adriatique: des photographes français découvrent les monuments des Balkans, 1878-1914. Paris: Monum Ed. du patrimoine, 2009.

Sources

[obituary:] Blary, François, et al. Bulletin Monumental 168 no. 2 (2010):131-2.

Previtali, Giovanni

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Previtali, Giovanni

Gender: male

Date Born: 1934

Date Died: 1988

Place Born: Florence, Tuscany, Italy

Place Died: Naples, Campania, Italy

Home Country/ies: Italy

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

Overview

Italianist, Giotto and Bellori scholar. Previtali came from a family of prominent musicians, his father was the conductor Fernando Previtali (1907-1985) and his mother the daughter of the conductor Vittoria Gui (1885-1975). He studied art history under Roberto Longhi. He assumed the editorship of Longhi’s magazine, Paragone. In 1961 he was appointed to the University of Messina. In 1964 he published a pioneering study of reception of medieval art, La fortuna dei primitivi dal Vasari ai neoclassici. He followed this with his 1967 Giotto e la sua bottega, a book placing Giotto in the context of his followers. Though he agreed with his other Italian colleagues, Longhi, Pietro Toesca and others that the St. Francis cycle was Giotto’s conception but not his accomplishment, his book framed the question in terms of his specific accomplishment, rather than, as viewed by Richard Offner, a question of “Giotto or non-Giotto” (Castelnuovo). The same year he and Paola della Pergola and Luigi Grassi brought out a nine-volume edition of Varsari’s 1568 edition of the Lives. Previtali contributed to a film on Giotto, adapted and issued in English as “Giotto and the Pre-Renascence [sic],” narrated by Richard Basehart, in 1969. His academic career was followed with teaching positions at Siena and Naples through 1971. By the early 1970s, dissention from the other members of Paragone, also Longhi students, arose regarding whether classical art subjects should be included. In 1975, Previtali and the archaeologist Mauro Cristofani (1941-1997) founded the art journal Prospettiva, open to all areas of art history. In 1976 Previtali wrote an introduction to the Italian translation of the Shape of Time by George Kubler. His interest in historiography continued with an essay in the Einaudi series, Storia dell’arte italiana on “La periodizzazione della storia dell’arte italiana” in 1979. In the 1980s he curated two exhibitions during the years he taught at Siena. These included Gotico a Siena (1982) and Simone Martini. He died at age 54. His periodization essay appeared in an English translation in 1994. Previtali’s main area of scholarship was the Italian Gothic. Articles first in Paragone (1965-1970) and then in Prospettiva (1983-1986) on Gothic Umbrian sculpture were particularly original. La fortuna dei primitivi dal Vasari ai neoclassici traced the changes in attitude toward medieval (“primitives”) from the Renaissance to the eighteenth century. It launched an career interest in art criticism. Previtali’s introduction to the Borea edition of Bellori’s Lives, still the most important study devoted to the scholar, placed him for the first time in a truly historical context. Previtali both located him in the evolution of an aesthetic theory and in his own historical time. His evaluation of the Lives was not on the basis of the Idea, but as a work addressing the relations of power within artistic culture and society in Rome in the seventeenth century. Previtali asserted that “Bellori was a true critic (beset with doubts, like every true critic, to a greater extent than is usually imagined) and at times a great one,” i.e., profoundly sensitive to the values of figurative language. (Montanari). A Marxist politically and somewhat methodologically, he followed Longhi (especially the late Longhi) in addressing large-scale issues and questions of reception (Castelnuovo).

Selected Bibliography

Scritti in ricordo di Giovanni Previtali. 2 vols. Florence: Centro Di, 1990; La pittura del Cinquecento a Napoli e nel vicereame. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1978; “Introduzione.” Kubler, George. La forma del tempo: considerazioni sulla storia delle cose. Turin: Giulio Einaudi, 1976, “Ingtroduzione.” in Borea, Evelina, ed. Bellori, Giovanni Pietro. Le vite de’ pittori, scultori e architetti moderni. Turin: G. Einaudi,1976; L’Arte di scrivere sull’arte: Roberto Longhi nella cultura del nostro tempo. Rome: Editori riuniti, 1982; Early Italian Painting [chiefly a slide collection]. New York: McGraw-Hill 1964; Giotto e la sua bottega. Milan: Fabbri, 1967; La fortuna dei primitivi dal Vasari ai neoclassici. Turin: Einaudi 1964; Studi sulla scultura gotica in Italia : storia e geografia. Turin: G. Einaudi, 1991; and della Pergola, Paola, and Grassi, Luigi, eds. Vasari, Giorgio. Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori. 9 vols. Novara,: Istituto geografico De Agostini, 1967; “Periodizzazione della storia dell’arte italiana,”and “Materiali e problemi ,” in Bollati, Giulio, and Fossati, Paoloed, eds. Storia dell’arte italiana. vol. 1, Turin: G. Einaudi, 1979, English, “The Periodization of the History of Italian Art,” in Burke, Peter, ed. History of Italian Art vol. 2, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994, pp. 1-118.

Sources

Romano, Giovanni. Storie dell’arte: Toesca, Longhi, Wittkower, Previtali. Rome: Donzelli,1998; Montanari, Tomaso. “Introduction.” Giovan Pietro Bellori: The Lives of the Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects: A New Translation and Critical Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 3; [obituaries:] Castelnuovo, Enrico. “Giovanni Previtali.” Burlington Magazine 131, no. 1033 (April 1989): 298; “Giovanni Previtali (1934 – 1988).” Prospettiva 53/56 (1988/1989): 7-9; Romano, Giovanni. Storie dell’arte: Toesca, Longhi, Wittkower, Previtali. Rome: Donzelli, 1998.

Preziosi, Donald

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Preziosi, Donald

Other Names:

Donald Anthony Preziosi

Gender: male

Date Born: 1941

Place Born: New York, NY, USA

Home Country/ies: United States

Subject Area(s): architecture (object genre), Classical, and sculpture (visual works)

Career(s): educators

Overview

Architectural- and art historian of the classical-era; professor, University of California, Los Angeles (1986-). Preziosi was the son of Romulus M. Preziosi and Mary Fazioli (Preziosi). He attended Fairfield College, Fairfield University in Connecticut, graduating in 1962 with degrees in English and Classics. He continued at Harvard University, receiving a master’s degree the following year in Linguistics. He was a Charles Eliot Norton Fellow at Harvard, 1964-65, and taught at the American School, Athens (Harvard Traveling Fellow) between 1965-1966 and at Yale University, beginning in 1967 (through 1973). His Ph.D. in art history was granted at Harvard in 1968. In 1973 he was appointed assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He was awarded an NEH Fellowship for 1973-74. After an visiting professorship at Cornell, 1977-78, he became an Associate Professor at the State University of New York, Binghamton, in1978 (through 1986) where he acted as chair of the department of art history. His Semiotics of the Built Environment appeared in 1979, a strong example of a linguistic approach to architecture. Preziosi was a Senior Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), National Gallery of Art for 1981-82. After another visiting appointment at Indiana University, 1985, he joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1986. At UCLA he developed the art history critical theory program and the UCLA museum studies program. In 1989, his Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science, his critique of the discipline of art history, appeared. He was a visiting professor at the Centre d’Histoire et Theorie d’Art, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris from 1991 and from that year on the Board of Directors of UCLA’s Paris Program in Critical Theory. In 1992 he delivered a paper on ethnicities at the National Gallery of Art conference on “Shaping of American Museums of Art. In the fall of 1993 he was the Cass Gilbert and Hill Distinguished Visiting Professor, University of Minnesota. In 1995 Preziosi received an Oxford University Resident Fellowship. Preziosi authored the essay on “Collecting/Museums” in the Critical Terms in Art History (1996). After being named emeritus professor at UCLA, he served as the 2000-2001 Slade Professor of Fine Arts at Oxford, delivering the annual Slade Lectures “Seeing Through Art History,” published as the Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity (2003). Preziosi was among those art historians trained in linguistics whose numbers also included Norman Bryson, although Preziosi’s work was less heavy-handed than Bryson’s. His critique on the methods of art history, Rethinking Art History, came at a critical time when the discipline was examining its origins and destiny. In later years he became an advocate for gay studies in art history.

Selected Bibliography

[dissertation:] Minoan Palace Planning and its Origins. Harvard University, 1968; Minoan Architectural Design: Formation and Signification. New York: Mouton, 1983; Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989; edited, The Art of Art History: a Critical Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998; edited, with Claire Farago. Grasping the World: the Idea of the Museum. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004; edited, with Bierman, Irene A., and Abou-El-Haj, Rifa’at Ali. The Ottoman City and its Parts: Urban Structure and Social Order. New Rochelle, NY: A. D. Caratzas, 1991; Architecture, Language and Meaning: the Origins of the Built World and its Semiotic Organization. The Hague: Mouton, 1979; Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of Modernity. [Slade Lectures, 2001]. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003; The Semiotics of the Built Environment: an Introduction to Architectonic Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979; “Constructing the origins of art.” Art Journal 42 no. 4 (Winter 1982): 320-5; “Museology and Museography.” Art Bulletin 77 (March 1995): 13-15; “Putting Up (with) Meaning.” Oxford Art Journal 13 no. 2 (1990): 121-4; “In the Temple of Entelechy: the Museum as Evidentiary Artifact.” Studies in the History of Art 47 (1994): 165-71.

Sources

“Champs des recherche: Donald Preziosi.” Université Laval website. http://www.fl.ulaval.ca/hst/visio/preziosi.htm; Donald Preziosi CV. http://www.humnet.ucla.edu/humnet/arthist/fac/preziosi/preziosi.htm;

Prichard, Matthew Stewart

November 8, 2023March 29, 2024

Full Name: Prichard, Matthew Stewart

Other Names:

Matthew Stewart Prichard

Gender: male

Date Born: 04 January 1865

Date Died: 15 October 1936

Place Born: Keynsham, Bath and Northeast Somerset, UK

Place Died: Great Hampden, Buckinghamshire, UK

Home Country/ies: United Kingdom

Subject Area(s): Byzantine (culture or style)

Career(s): curators

Overview

Museum curator and exponent of Byzantine art. Prichard’s parents were Charles Henry Prichard, a merchant, and Mattie Stewart (Prichard) (d. 1881). He attended Marlborough College in 1883 and graduated from New College, Oxford, 1887 with a law degree. He practiced briefly London. In 1892 he came under the spell a group of predominantly homosexual Oxford-educated esthetes living at Lewes House, Sussex, centered around the wealth Bostonian Edward Perry “Ned” Warren (1860-1928), his partner John Marshall (1862-1928). Warren introduced Prichard to his brother, Samuel Dennis Warren (-1910), then president of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, who appointed Prichard museum secretary in 1902. Prichard worked as a classical antiquities specialist for the museum and, by 1904, assistant director. He developed a disdain for the artificial arrangement and display of objects in museums and their appeal to the wealthy, a theme he would carry with him his life. Through the MFA he met the art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924) and the Japanese museum curator and artist Okakura Kakuzo (1862-1913), the latter instilling in him an appreciation of oriental art. In 1905 he also met the British art historian Roger Fry, then a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in Boston impressing Fry with his singular ideas of museums and knowledge of oriental art. Prichard’s views on museology, which ran counter to most institutional collecting naturally led to conflicts. Ultimately the board of trustees dismissed him in 1907 for demanding the removal of the museum’s plaster casts of classical sculpture. Prichard left the U.S., living for Europe. In Italy he discovered Byzantine art at San Marco and Ravenna, an art genre which, for the rest of his life, he would inspire collectors, artists and scholars to pursue. He met and maintained a correspondence with the Italianist Bernard Berenson. He settled in Paris at the end of 1908. In Paris he toured the Louvre with Fry. He also met the art collectors Michael Stein (1865-1938) (Gertrude Stein’s oldest brother) and his wife, Sarah (1870-1953), who introduced him to Henri Matisse the following year; the two developed creatively from one another. Prichard introduced Matisse to Byzantine art and he, in turn, became a devotee to the artist (Matisse did a drypoint of Prichard in 1914). Prichard made the acquaintance of the nineteen-year-old Georges Duthuit, who became Prichard’s most important pre-war disciple. Prichard adopted the art philosophy of Henri Bergson (1859-1941) as personal esthetic, disparaging Western art’s traditional verisimilitude in favor of decoration. An alluring personality, he imparted his esthetic to many, including the art critic (and future son-in-law of Matisse), Georges Duthuit, Fry and the poet T. S. Eliot (1888-1965). In 1910, he visited the seminal exhibition of Islamic art in Munich. The show also caught the eye of others he inspired, particularly Whittemore, who was on hand to nurse Prichard through a long illness recovery in Paris the same year. Prichard was caught in Germany when World War I was declared in 1914 and was interned as an enemy citizen in Ruhleben, a POW camp. He remained there until the War’s end, having food sent to him by his American friends (the U.S. was not yet a participant in the War). The confinement affected Prichard dramatically. He settled in London in 1918, and after briefly working for a government committee on prisoners, developed a new coterie of followers at the Gargoyle Club, holding morning discourses on aesthetics (Pope-Hennessy) to David Tennant, the club’s owner, and (future V&A and Met curator) John Pope-Hennessy. Prichard organized a conference at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, in 1919. The conference lectures appeared in 1921, one of his few published writing on art. In the 1930, he supported and anonymously wrote portions of the first and second preliminary reports on the Byzantine mosaics in Hagia Sofia organized by Whittemore. He suffered a heart attack at his brother’s home in 1936 and died. His personal papers consist of letters to Mrs. Gardner and notebooks, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and notebooks at the Bibliothèque Byzantine, Fonds Thomas Whittemore, Paris. Though Prichard’s career as a professional art historian was limited to brief work in a museum and ghost-written reports on Byzantine art, his influence on art historians and developers of the discipline was immense. A charismatic teacher religious and in later years, profoundly anti-materialistic, his interests in both art and Byzantium were intensely spiritual.

Selected Bibliography

“Current Theories of the Arrangement of Museums of Art.” ; Greek and Byzantine Art (1921), is the text of a conference given at the Taylor Institution, Oxford, in 1919; [anonymous contributions] and Whittemore, Thomas, et al. The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul: Preliminary Report on the Year’s Work, 1931-1932: The Mosaics of the Narthex. Paris: Byzantine Institute of America, printed by J. Johnson at the Oxford University Press, 1933, The Mosaics of St. Sophia at Istanbul: Preliminary Report on the Year’s Work: Second Preliminary Report, Work Done in 1933 and 1934: the Mosaics of the Southern Vestibule, 1936.

Sources

Prichard, Matthew Stewart. [unpublished notebooks]. Boston, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archives; Prichard, Matthew Stewart. [manuscript notebooks]. Paris, Collège de France, École des Langues Orientales Vivantes Bibliothèque Byzantine, Fonds Thomas Whittemore; Ketchum, John Davidson. Ruhleben: a Prison Camp Society. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1965, p. 260; Hadley, Rollin van N., ed. The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887-1924, with Correspondence by Mary Berenson. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987, pp. 381, 444, 624; Labrusse, Rémi. “Prichard, Matthew Stewart.” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; Sox, David. Bachelors of Art: Edward Perry Warren and the Lewes Brotherhood. London: Fourth Estate, 1991 pp. 167-186; Pope-Hennessy, John. Learning to Look. New York: Doubleday, 1991, pp. 273-274; Nelson, Robert. Hagia Sophia, 1850-1950: Holy Wisdom Modern Monument. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004, pp. 156-161.

Contributors: Lee Sorensen

« Previous
1
2
3
4
5
…
14
Next »

P

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

Overview

Selected Bibliography

Sources

Citation

More Resources

General Citation

License

Sponsored by

General Citation

License

Sponsored by