Full Name: Schreiber, Theodor
Other Names:
- Georg Theodor Schreiber
Gender: male
Date Born: 1848
Date Died: 1912
Place Born: Strehla an der Elbe, Saxony, Germany
Place Died: Leipzig, Saxony, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): archaeology
Overview
Schreiber studied at the University of Leipzig where he studied archaeology with Johannes Overbeck and philology with Friedrich Ritschl (1806-1876). In 1874 through a travel stipend from the DAI (Deutsche Archäologische Institut or German Archaeological Institute) he studied in Rome with Wilhelm Henzen (1816-1887) and Wolfgang Helbig. He traveled to Greece and after particularly important study in Athens in 1876 he returned to Rome to catalog the Ludovisi family collection of classical sculpture. He completed this in 1880. In 1885 he became associate professor at Leipzig, adding the directorship of the museum in Leipzig the following year. Schreiber published widely on Hellenistic art topics. His Kunsthistorische bilderbogen was an early study of polychromy in art. His 1894 Hellenistischen Reliefbilder used a group of marble reliefs containing landscape and pictorial style associated through literary evidence with Hellenistic Alexandria, for which little art has been found. Schreiber launched the Ernst von Sieglin expedition to the Alexandian necropolis at Kom-el-Shugafa. He was a chief collaborator in the publication of the expedition in 1908. Hellenistischen Reliefbilder was a controvercial work. The Romanist art historian Franz Wickhoff thought Schrieber’s Greek reliefs actually to be Roman. Regardless, the work brought Alexandria as an art historical issue into the fore of archaeological and art historical thinking. Kunsthistorische bilderbogen was so influential that Anton Springer wrote Die Kunst des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts to accompany it.
Selected Bibliography
Die alexandrinische Toreutik: Untersuchungen über die griechische Goldschmiedekunst im Ptolemaerreiche. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1894; and Anderson, W. C. F. Atlas of Classical Antiquities. New York: Macmillan and Co., 1895; and Seemann, Ernst Arthur. Kunsthistorische bilderbogen: für den Gebrauch bei akademischen und öffentlichen Vorlesungen, sowie beim Unterricht in der Geschichte und Geschmackslehre an Gymnasien, real- und höheren Töchterschulen zusammengestellt. 2 vols. Leipzig, E. A. Seemann, 1877-79; Die hellenistischen Reliefbilder. Mit Unterstützung des Königlich Sächsischen Ministeriums des Cultus und Öffentlichen Unterrichts und der Philologisch-historischen Classe der Königlich Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften. 11 parts. Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1889-94.
Sources
Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 90-91; “Schreiber, Theodor.” Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archaeology. Nancy Thomson de Grummond, ed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1996, vol. 2, p. 1019.