Ernst Kitzinger
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Ernst Kitzinger (December 12, 1912 - January 22, 2003) was a German-American historian of late antique, early medieval, and Byzantine art.
[edit] Biography
Kitzinger was born into a highly educated Jewish family in Munich; his father, Wilhelm Nathan Kitzinger, was a prominent lawyer, and his cousin, Richard Krautheimer, would likewise become a major historian of late antique and Byzantine architecture. He entered the University of Munich in 1931, where he studied the history of art under Wilhelm Pinder. The beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933 raised the immediate possibility that Jewish students might be banned from receiving degrees. Kitzinger accordingly completed his dissertation, a brief but influential study of Roman painting in the 7th and 8th centuries, with exceptional speed, and defended it in the fall of 1934. Later that same year he left Germany.
Kitzinger travelled first to Rome, before settling in England, where he found employment at the British Museum. He quickly developed an interest in Anglo-Saxon art, publishing several important studies of the subject, and assessing the Sutton Hoo treasure when it was unearthed in 1939. In 1937 he travelled to Egypt and Istanbul, thus further widening his perspective on late antique and early medieval art as an "international" phenomenon. It was this perspective that he brought to his first book, Early Medieval Art at the British Museum (1940). More than a guidebook, this was in fact an attempt to describe the transformation of the classical style into the medieval, a subject which Kitzinger would revisit on many occasions throughout his career.
In a paradoxical turn of events, Kitzinger, forced to leave Germany because he was Jewish, was in 1940 forced to leave England because he was German. He was imprisoned in Australia for nine months, where he passed the time by learning Russian from a fellow prisoner.
In 1941 the Warburg Institute was able to secure Kitzinger's release, and he travelled to Washington D.C., where he became a fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. There Kitzinger was assigned to study the Byzantine monuments of the Balkans, producing as a result an important article on the monuments of Stobi. Several years later, and also as the result of an assignment, Kitzinger began work on a complete survey of the mosaics of Norman Sicily. This project would occupy him for the rest of his life, resulting in the eventual publication of his six-volume corpus, I mosaici del periodo normanno in Sicilia (1992).
Kitzinger quickly advanced through the ranks at Dumbarton Oaks, becoming an Assistant Professor in 1946, Associate Professor in 1951, Director of Studies in 1955, and Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology in 1956. As Director of Studies he transformed Dumbarton Oaks into an academic institution of international renown, ensuring the annual publication of the institute's journal of Byzantine studies (Dumbarton Oaks Papers), creating a photographic archive, and serving as a mentor to the younger scholars.
Dumbarton Oaks had always been associated with Harvard University, and Kitzinger had occasionally taught courses at its Cambridge campus. In 1967 he moved to Harvard permanently, accepting a position as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, which he held until his retirement in 1979. At Harvard Kitzinger supervised eighteen dissertations, and many of his students (including Christine Kondoleon, Irving Lavin, Henry Maguire, Lawrence Nees, and William Tronzo) became significant art historians in their own right.
The major theoretical contributions of Kitzinger's later career are embodied in his book Byzantine art in the making (1977), originally delivered as a series of lectures at the University of Cambridge, and in a volume of his collected essays, The art of Byzantium and the medieval West (1976). In both volumes Kitzinger maintained his life-long preoccupation with the analysis of style change in late antique and early medieval art, and his conviction that stylistic analysis could speak with an authority equal to that of iconography or textual history. To this end he developed a theory of "modes," according to which certain styles were appropriate to the depiction of certain subjects. In Byzantine art in the making, furthermore, he essayed a bold attempt to trace the stylistic "dialectic" of the period in question:
At certain times and in certain places bold stabs were made in the direction of new, unclassical forms, only to be followed by reactions, retrospective movements and revivals. In some contexts such developments - in either direction - took place slowly, hestitantly, and by steps so small as to be almost imperceptible. In addition there were extraordinary attempts at synthesis, at reconciling conflicting aesthetic ideals. Out of this complex dialectic, medieval form emerged.[1]
Since stylistic analysis fell out of fashion in the 1980s and 1990s, the legacy of Kitzinger's theories remains uncertain. Byzantine art in the making has been described as the last gasp of Viennese-style formalist art history on the model of Alois Riegl and Josef Strzygowski.[2] However, it has also been argued that "when the pendulum of fashion swings back again, [Kitzinger's] works will undoubtedly be central to a reconsideration of style."[3].
Kitzinger died in Poughkeepsie, New York at age 90.
[edit] Notes
^ E. Kitzinger, Byzantine art in the making: main lines of stylistic development in Mediterranean art, 3th-7th century (Cambridge, 1977), 4.
^ J. Elsner, "The birth of late antiquity: Riegl and Strzygowski in 1901," Art History 25 (2002), 374-76.
^ H. Maguire, "Ernst Kitzinger: 1912-2003," Dumbarton Oaks Papers 57 (2003), ix-xiv.
[edit] Bibliography
Maguire, Henry (2003). "Ernst Kitzinger: 1912-2003". Dumbarton Oaks Papers 5: ix-xiv. ISSN 0070-7546. (Available online.)
[edit] External links
Kitzinger at the Biographical Dictionary of Art Historians
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Kitzinger" |
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| Ernst Kitzinger |
Esteemed medieval art historian Kitzinger dies at 90
By Ken Gewertz
Gazette Staff
Ernst Kitzinger, the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor Emeritus, an art historian specializing in Byzantine, early Christian, and early medieval art, died of a stroke Jan. 22 at his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. He was 90 years old.
President Lawrence H. Summers said, "The death of Ernst Kitzinger is a great loss for Harvard and for scholarship worldwide. Professor Kitzinger will be remembered not only as one of the greatest medieval art historians of the 20th century, but as a scholar who combined intellectual integrity, a love of the arts, and a gentle and sympathetic personality that endeared him to his students and colleagues."
Kitzinger spent a large part of his career at Harvard's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., which houses collections of Byzantine and pre-Colombian art and rare books and is a center for the study of landscape architecture. Kitzinger began as a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in 1941 and rose through the ranks of assistant professor, associate professor, and professor, ending with an 11-year stint as director of studies, from 1955 to 1966.
Kitzinger's special interests lay in the fields of early Christian art, the relation between the art of Byzantium and the medieval West, and the medieval mosaics of Sicily. During his long career, he trained many members of the current senior generation of American historians of Byzantine art.
He was born in Munich, Germany, in 1912. He did graduate work at the Universities of Munich and Rome, receiving his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1934. He left Germany soon afterward, settling in England, where he spent five years as an assistant in the British Museum.
In 1941, he came to the United States, where he became a junior fellow at Dumbarton Oaks. During World War II, Kitzinger served with the Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.) in Washington and London as a research analyst. In 1945, he returned to Dumbarton Oaks, where he remained for the next 22 years.
Kitzinger left Dumbarton Oaks to teach at Harvard's main campus in 1967, as the Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, a post he held until 1979, when he retired. University professorships are awarded to individuals of distinction whose work cuts across the traditional boundaries of academic specialties.
Kitzinger was a member of the Lowell House Senior Common Room. In 2001, a house prize, the Ernst Kitzinger Award, was established in his honor.
He received many awards and honors during his career. He was a Fulbright Scholar in Sicily from 1950 to 1951; a Guggenheim Fellow in Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey from 1953 to 1954; a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University from 1966 to 1967 and in 1980 and 1982. He was Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge from 1974 to 1975 and Visiting Distinguished Professor at the University of Washington, Seattle, in 1989.
His books include: "Early Medieval Art in the British Museum" (1940), "Mosaics of Monreale" (1960), and "The Art of Byzantium and the Medieval West: Selected Studies" (1976).
Kitzinger's wife Susan died in 2000. The couple are survived by three children, Stephen Anthony Kitzinger, Margaret Rachel Kitzinger, and Adrian Nicholas Kitzinger, and by three grandchildren.
A memorial service will be held in Cambridge some time in the next few months. A scholarly symposium is also being planned.
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| Date Accessed: 9 Oct. 2007 |
| Title: Windows Clipboard |
Ernst Kitzinger, 90, Professor And Writer on Byzantine Art
By KEN JOHNSON
Published: February 9, 2003
Ernst Kitzinger, one of the 20th century's foremost historians of Byzantine, early Christian and early medieval art, died at his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., on Jan. 22. He was 90.
Dr. Kitzinger, who taught at Harvard for many years, was one of the last surviving members of an influential generation of German art historians who fled their country with the rise of Nazism. Others included Ernst Gombrich, Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Wittkower and Julius Held. Along with them Dr. Kitzinger brought to the study of art a methodologically rigorous and intellectually ambitious attention to iconography, style and factual evidence that affected the practice of art history in the English-speaking world. At the same time, the lucidity and grace of Dr. Kitzinger's writing in English, his second language, offered his scholarship to a wide audience.
The virtue of Dr. Kitzinger's work, said Dr. Irving Lavin, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and one of Dr. Kitzinger's first students in the United States, was its ability ''to connect what was happening visually to what was happening conceptually; the history of art became a history of ideas.'' Writing on subjects like the floor mosaics of early Christian churches, the phenomenon of iconoclasm and medieval art in northern England, Dr. Kitzinger traced ''a fundamental shift from a humanistic to a spiritual view of the world.'' His work transformed the conventional view of art of the Middle Ages as an incoherent decline from the art of classical antiquity.
Born in Munich on Dec. 27, 1912, Ernst Kitzinger studied at the universities of Munich and Rome. He received his doctorate in 1934 for work on Medieval painting and mosaics in Rome. Shortly afterward, he went to England, where he was hired by the British Museum. There he immersed himself in the Anglo-Saxon arts of northern England and southern Scotland, and in 1940 he published ''Early Medieval Art at the British Museum,'' still considered one of the best introductions to the art of the Middle Ages.
At the start of World War II, Dr. Kitzinger was interned as an enemy alien and sent to Australia. After his release in 1941, he came to the United States, where he became a junior fellow at the new Center for Byzantine Studies at the Harvard Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington. During the war he was a research analyst for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington and London.
Returning to Dumbarton Oaks in 1946, he became a professor of Byzantine art and archaeology and from 1955 to 1966 director of Byzantine studies. During his tenure, Dumbarton Oaks became the world's leading institution for Byzantine studies. In 1967 he went to Harvard's campus in Cambridge, Mass., to teach until his retirement in 1979.
Among Dr. Kitzinger's many honors was his appointment as Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge. In 1974 and 1975 he gave a series of lectures that became a widely read book, ''Byzantine Art in the Making'' (Harvard University Press). In 1976 a collection of his published articles appeared as ''The Art of Byzantium and the Medieval West: Selected Studies'' (Indiana University Press).
Dr. Kitzinger continued to work after retirement, dividing his time between the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Oxford. In his 80's he finished a lifelong project with a six-volume photographic survey of the Norman mosaics of Sicily.
Dr. Kitzinger's wife, the former Margaret Susan Theobald, whom he married in 1944, died in 2000. He is survived by his children, Stephen Anthony Kitzinger of London, Margaret Rachel Kitzinger of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and Adrian Nicholas Kitzinger of Manhattan, and by three grandchildren. |
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