Full Name: Züchner, Wolfgang
Gender: male
Date Born: 1906
Date Died: 1981
Place Born: Dresden, Saxony, Germany
Place Died: Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Home Country/ies: Germany
Subject Area(s): Ancient Greek (culture or style), ceramic ware (visual works), ceramics (object genre), Classical, pottery (visual works), preservation (function), preserving, protection (maintenance function), restoration (process), and Roman (ancient Italian culture or period)
Overview
Scholar of classical Greek and Roman art; specialist in preservation and restoration of ceramic artwork. Züchner studied archaeology beginning in 1925 at the universities in Berlin and Dresden and ultimately writing his dissertation at Christian-Albrecht-Universität, Kiel, completed in 1934. His dissertation was on Greek mirrors. That year he was hired as Scientific Assistant at the Staatlichen Museum in Berlin. There he issued a book on the Berlin Maned krater in 1938. In 1939 he moved to the Archaeological Institute in Leipzig. He issued a revised version of his doctoral thesis in 1942 as Griechische Klappspiegel. He fought in World War II and was incarcerated as POW. After the war, beginning in 1946, he was responsible for restoring the many broken objects in the Grecian vase collection of the Martin-von-Wagner Museum in Würzburg. In 1953 Züchner was appointed Ordentliche (full) professor at the University of Tübingen. At Tübingen Züchner was head of the collection of plaster and original sculpture of the archaeological institute there. He wrote a curious volume in 1959 on the usefulness and place of the illustration in visual studies. He retired in 1971. Züchner was a specialist in toreutics, or embossing or chasing metal, of the classical era.
Selected Bibliography
Der berliner Mänadenkrater. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1938; Griechische Klappspiegel. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1942; über die Abbildung. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1959.
Sources
Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 297-298; Deutsche biographische Enzyklopädie 10: 696.