Nagler, G. K.

Book dealer and architectural historian. Nagler earned his doctorate from the Universität Erlangen in 1829. Through his research at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich, he completed his first major scholarly reference publication, Neues allgemeines Künstler-Lexicon (1835-52). It took Nagler seventeen years, scrupulously delivering a manuscript every month to his printer, E.A. Fleischmann, in Munich. Comprehensive art dictionaries and encyclopedias were only then being written. Scholars had mixed feelings about such works. The art historian Hans Wolfgang Singer wrote of the work that "value of the encyclopaedia as a reference work is not...quite as great as the amount of work that has gone into it." Outside of his book dealing business, Nagler wrote articles about art for the Bayerische Nationalzeitung. Between 1857 and 1878, he wrote his second art historical reference work, Die Monogrammisten und diejengien bekannten und unbekannten Künstler aller Schulen. Nagler intended this dictionary as a complement to this dictionary of artists. Die Monogrammisten became one of the first efforts to approach art historical research in a systematic and scientific way. In 1836, Nagler began lecturing on architectural history at the Königliche Baugewerbschule in Munich. Nagler considered a second edition of Künstler-Lexicon, but died before it could be begun. In 1867, Wilhelm Engelmann (publishers) bought the rights to the Künstler-Lexicon from Tendler/J. Grosser publishers. Julius Meyer was entrusted with a new edition, but it took a reorganization under Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker to bring the modern Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler for fruition.