Leopold Ettlinger (art historian)

Leopold Ettlinger (born April 20, 1913 in Königsberg , East Prussia , † July 4, 1989 in Berkeley , California ) was a German-British art historian specializing in the Italian Renaissance . He worked at the Warburg Institute and was a professor at University College London and the University of California, Berkeley .

Life

Leopold Ettlinger's father Emil Ettlinger was a scientific librarian in various German cities. Leopold went to high school in Halle (Abitur 1932) and studied archeology, philosophy and art history in Halle and Marburg, among others with Paul Frankl . In 1937 he received his doctorate in Halle with Herbert Koch on " Gottfried Semper and the ancient world". He also cataloged archaeological objects from Crete and Mycenae for Koch. Since he came from a family of Jewish faith, he had to leave Germany in 1938. He worked in London at the Warburg Institute, was briefly interned on the Isle of Man in 1940 like other German citizens and then worked again at the Warburg Institute and a school teacher in Birmingham . In 1948 Fritz Saxl made him curator of the Warburg Institute's photography collection. He was a lecturer at the University of Reading and at the Warburg Institute (which he was until 1964), was in 1956 at the invitation of Erwin Panofsky at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and in 1959 he succeeded Ernst Gombrich as professor of art history at University College London ( Slade School). From 1966 to 1970 he headed the faculty. In 1970 he went to Berkeley, where he was head of the art history faculty until 1980.

1963/64 he was visiting professor at Yale University .

Ettlinger became famous for his investigation of the patronage of painters by Pope Sixtus IV and the early phase of the Sistine Chapel in 1965. In 1976 he published a monograph on Botticelli with his third wife, Helen Shahrock Lewis . He also published the catalog raisonné by Antonio Pollaiuolo and Piero del Pollaiuolo .

At Easter 1979 he converted to the Catholic faith.

Fonts (selection)

• Gottfried Semper and antiquity; Contributions to the view of art in German classicism . Halle: Nieft 1937 (dissertation).
• with RG Holloway: Compliments of the Season . London: Penguin Books 1947.
• Kandinsky 's "At Rest". Charlton lecture 1960, London: Oxford University Press 1961.
• Art History Today. [inaugural address for University College] London: HK Lewis 1961.
• On Science, Industry and Art: Some Theories of Gottfried Semper . In: Architectural Review, Volume 86 (1964), pp. 57-60.
• The Sistine Chapel Before Michelangelo: Religious Imagery and Papal Primacy , Oxford: Clarendon Press 1965.
• with Helen S. Ettlinger: Botticelli. London: Thames and Hudson 1976.
• Antonio and Piero Pollaiuolo: Complete Edition with a Critical Catalog . Oxford: Phaidon 1978, ISBN 0-7148-1768-6 .
• Vienna and the development of the art historical method . Vienna: Böhlau 1984 (files of the XXV. International Congress for Art History; 1) ISBN 3-205-06380-5 .
• The Arts in Western Europe: Northern Europe . In: The New Cambridge Modern History , Vol. 1, 1953.

literature

• Ettlinger, Leopold David , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical Handbook of German-Speaking Art Historians in Exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 139-142

Web links

• Ettlinger, Leopold D. , in: Dictionary of Art Historians