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Schulz, Juergen

    Full Name: Schulz, Juergen

    Other Names:

    • Jürgen Schulz

    Gender: male

    Date Born: 18 August 1927

    Date Died: 23 November 2014

    Place Born: Kiel, Schleswig Holstein, Germany

    Place Died: Providence, RI, USA

    Home Country/ies: Germany and United States

    Institution(s): Brown University and University of California Berkeley


    Overview

    Architectural historian, principally of Venice. Schulz’s parents were Johannes Martin Askan Schulz, an engineer and and Ilse Lebenbaum Hiller. When the Nazi Reich assumed power in Germany the six-year-old Schulz, whose maternal grandparents were Jewish, was prevented from ever attending a Gymnasium because of the racial laws, which was the route to a university education. In 1938 his mother moved with Schulz and his brother to Berkeley, California, where the art historian Walter W. Horn, a friend of hers, helped them settle. Schulz attended Berkeley public schools, and then the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a degree in engineering. He was drafted into and served in the postwar United States Army serving as a sergeant, 1945-1948. He joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 1950 as a reporter, then  moving to London as a copy editor United Press International, between 1952-1953. He enrolled in 1953 at the Courtauld Institute of Art, London. At the Courtauld he studied with Anthony Blunt writing his dissertation in 1958 under Johannes Wilde on the topic of Venetian painted ceilings in the Renaissance. Schulz served in Berkeley’s art department, beginning as an instructor, then named associate curator of Renaissance art in 1964 at the Berkeley art museum, and eventually (full) professor of art. He was active in the rescuing of artworks in Florence during the flooding of the Arno river in 1966.  He published a revised version of his dissertation in 1968. The same year Brown University selected him to join their art department as chair. At Brown he set about building the department, including dramatic faculty hires He sparred with the architect Philip Johnson on the new List Art Center being designed during Johnson’s Brutalist phase for the school. Schulz widened his scholarship to the material culture of Venice in general. He married Anne Markham, also an art historian, around this time. Schulz compiled a catalog of the printed images of the city in 1970, as much, he said as a reference work for scholars than a stand-alone monograph. One of the images, the Jacopo de’ Barbari’s view of Venice of 1500, became the focus of a 1978 Art Bulletin article, one that was hailed for its contextual reading of the map. The article was one of the first in art history to use what today is known as geo-rectification, although Schulz’ work was done without the aid of computers. He next turned his attention to pre-Gothic palaces of Venice, publishing articles in 1982 and culminating in his 2004 book, The New Palaces of Medieval Venice. Beginning in 1984 he was a member on the scientific council of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura “Andrea Palladio” at Vicenza. Schulz retired in 1995 as the Andrea K. Rosenthal Professor Emeritus. He was awarded a Kress Professorship at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts (CASVA) for the 2000–2001 year. He died of a stroke in 2014.

    Schulz’ scholarship usually followed a form of, A) catalog of the objects, B) contemporary evidence, and C) the concomitant historiography. He broadly viewed art, and particularly Venetian projects as phenomena, with world connections, never uniquely local achievements. His study of the de Barbari map, “pioneered fundamentally new ways to interpret images of this kind, ways that have had a profound influence not only on the treatment of maps and views by art historians but also on the way historians of cartography view their material.” (Friedman). Schulz’ technique was to focus attention not on the topographical content of the map but rather its iconography.


    Selected Bibliography

    • {dissertation] Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance.  University of London,1968;
    • “Saggi e memorie di storia dell’arte” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 24 no. 3 (September 1967): 458
    • Venetian Painted Ceilings of the Renaissance.  Berkeley, University of California Press,1968
    • “Jacopo de’ Barbari’s View of Venice: Map Making, City Views, and Moralized Geography before the Year 1500,” Art Bulletin 60, no. 3 (1978), 425–74;
    • The New Palaces of Medieval Venice. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004.

    Sources

    [obituaries:]


    Archives


    Contributors: Lee Sorensen


    Citation

    Lee Sorensen. "Schulz, Juergen." Dictionary of Art Historians (website). https://arthistorians.info/schulzj/.


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