André Chastel

André Adrien Chastel (born November 15, 1912 in Paris , † July 18, 1990 in Neuilly-sur-Seine ) was a French art historian who wrote important works on the Italian Renaissance .

He taught at the Collège de France , where he held the chair of the art and civilization of the Italian Renaissance from 1970 to 1984. In 1975 he was elected a member of the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres .

Life

Chastel attended the École normal supérieure from 1933 to 1938 . He was trained as an art historian with Henri Focillon at the Sorbonne .

Between 1934 and 1935 Chastel read the essay “Dürer's Melancholia I” (1923) by Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl . The essay, written in the style of the Warburg Institute , made a great impression on him. Convinced that the interpretation of works of art must be grounded in rigorous scholarly research, he traveled to Thames House in London, where the institute had now moved, and met Panofsky and Saxl and others. Inspired by a Salvador Dalí exhibition and by the surrealist movement, he was fascinated by the power of images and especially the theme of melancholy. His early publications were a. a. the subject of the temptation of Saint Anthony. After the Agrégation in 1937 he became a teacher at a high school in Le Havre. After the outbreak of World War II, he served in the French army, but was captured and spent two years in a prisoner of war camp in Germany. After his release in 1942, he studied humanism and Dante with Augustin Renaudet (1880-1958), professor of the history of the Renaissance at the École Pratique des Hautes Études . Chastel was entrusted with the inventory of the studio of the French painter Édouard Vuillard , who had died in 1940. This task brought him into direct contact with the material aspects of works of art and led to his first book Vuillard, 1868–1940 (1946). In 1943 and 1944 he worked again as a teacher, first in Paris, then in Chartres. In 1943 he married the art critic and writer Paule-Marie Grand.

After the war, Chastel worked as an assistant at the Institute for Art and Archeology at the Sorbonne, where he stayed until 1948. He taught at the Lycée Marcelin-Berthelot and later at the Lycée Carnot and became a Focillon Fellow at Yale University in 1949 . In 1950 he began writing as an art critic for the daily Le Monde . In that year he received his doctorate with Renaudet. His dissertation included a work on art and humanism in Florence in the time of Lorenzo de 'Medici and a second work on the humanist Marsilio Ficino . After Renaudet's retirement in 1951, Chastel became director of research (directeur d'études) of Section IV at the École Pratique, a position he held until 1978. His work on Ficino was published in 1954 as Marsile Ficin et l'art , his main work appeared 5 years later as Art et humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le magnifique (1959). […] In 1955, in addition to his position at the École Pratique, Chastel was appointed professor of modern art history at the Sorbonne to succeed Pierre Lavedan. The following year Chastel published a two-volume manual on the history of Italian art from the fifth to the twentieth centuries ( L'art Italy ).

During his 15 years at the Sorbonne, Chastel worked hard to improve the national and international status of art history in France. With the support of the Minister of Education, André Malraux , he launched the Inventaire des monuments et des richesses artistiques de la France and founded the art magazine Revue de l'art in 1968 . He advocated the creation of more chairs in art history at provincial universities. In Italy, he took up the subject of art history at the French Academy in Rome, which was located in the Villa Medici . As a scholar, Chastel insisted on the use of original texts in research. In 1960, in collaboration with Robert Klein, he published a critical edition together with a new translation of da Vinci's Trattato della pittura [Léonard de Vinci. Traité de la peinture ]. Together with his students and with Klein, he translated De Sculptura , a work by Pomponius Gauricus (1969) published in 1504 . In 1963, Chastel and Klein wrote L'Europe de la Renaissance, l'âge de l'humanisme together . His two-volume overview La Renaissance Italienne was published in 1965. In 1968 and 1969 the two studies, La crise de la Renaissance, 1520–1600 and Le mythe de la Renaissance, 1420–1500, were published. After Klein's suicide (1967), Chastel edited a collection of articles and essays by Klein (Robert Klein: La forme et l'intelligible. Écrits sur la Renaissance et l'art moderne , 1970).

In 1970 Chastel moved from the Sorbonne to the prestigious Collège de France , where he was appointed professor of the art and civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. In 1973 he gave the Mellon Lectures in Washington DC under the title 'The Sack of Rome in 1527'. Chastel was intrigued by this dramatic episode and its impact on art history. This topic formed the subject of his lectures at the Collège de France in 1971-72. In 1975 he was elected to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. In 1978 he published a collection of essays under the title Fables, formes, figures and in 1980 an anthology of his articles L'image dans le miroir, written for Le Monde , appeared . In collaboration with his students at the École Pratique, he translates Giorgio Vasari's vite . This larger project, Giorgio Vasari, Les vies des meilleurs sculpteurs et architectes , was published in 12 volumes (1981–1989).

Chastel was active in various organizations in the field of architecture in France and abroad. After the death of Wolfgang Lotz in 1981 he was elected President of the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza . In 1983 he advocated the establishment of a French national institute for art history. As a result of this report, a national art library was established in 1989 bringing together material from all over France, and finally the Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art , INHA, was established in 2001 .

Chastel retired in 1984. In 1987 he was honored with a commemorative publication Il se rendit en Italie: études offertes à André Chastel . The articles of French and international scholars focused on the artistic relations between France and Italy. He continued to publish until the end of his life. His last project, L'art français , a multi-volume handbook remained unfinished when he died from cancer in 1990. Four volumes appeared posthumously. They encompass French art through 1825. A number of other studies were completed and appeared posthumously. The two magazines, Histoire de l'art and Revue de l'art , devoted special issues to the memory of Chastel. Daniel Arasse (1944–2003) and Antoine Schnapper (1933–2004) were among his students .

Memberships

Since 1986 he has been a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . In 1975 Chastel was accepted into the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was also a foreign member of the Accademia dei Lincei (since 1977), the Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere "La Colombaria" , the British Academy (since 1976) and the Kungliga Vitterhets Historie och Antikvitets Academies , as well as the holder of several national orders of merit ( Legion of Honor , Ordre des Arts et des Lettres , Ordre des Palmes Académiques , Order of Merit of the Italian Republic ).

Fonts

• Florentine drawings from the 14th to 17th centuries , ed. by André Chastel, Comel, Cologne 1950
• Leonardo da Vinci par lui-même , Textes choisis, traduits et présentés par André Chastel, Édit. Nagel, Paris 1952
• Marsile Ficin et l'art , Droz, Genève 1954
• L'Art Italy , 1956, German The Art of Italy , Prestel, Munich 1987
• Botticelli , Silvana, Milano 1957, German Botticelli , representation by André Chastel, [German. Arranged by Irene Steidle], Milano: Silvana Editioriale d'arte, 1961
• Art et Humanisme à Florence au temps de Laurent le Magnifique , PUF, Paris 1959, 1961, 1982
• L'Âge de l'humanisme (with Robert Klein), Éditions de la connaissance, Bruxelles, 1963, German The world of humanism: Europe 1480 - 1530 , Callwey, Munich 1963
• Le Grand Atelier d'Italie, 1460–1500 , Gallimard, 1965
• Renaissance méridionale, 1460–1500 , Gallimard, 1965
• Le Mythe de la Renaissance, 1420–1520 , Skira, Genève, 1969, German The Mythos of the Renaissance 1420–1520 , Skira, Genève, 1969
• La Crise de la Renaissance, 1520–1600 , Skira, Genève, 1969, Ger. The crisis of the Renaissance 1520–1600 , Skira, Genève, 1968
• Fables, formes, figures (2 volumes), Flammarion, 1978
• L'image dans le miroir , Gallimard, 1980
• Grotesque , l'Arpenteur, 1980, German The Grotesque: A foray through a rampant painting , Wagenbach Verlag, Berlin 1997
• Chronique de la peinture italienne à la Renaissance, 1250–1580 , 1983, German chronicle of Italian Renaissance painting 1280–1580 , Edition Popp in Arena-Verlag, Würzburg 1984
• Le sac de Rome , Gallimard, 1984, engl. The sack of Rome , 1527, Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983
• L'Illustre Incomprise, Mona Lisa , Gallimard, 1988
• Histoire de l'art français , 4 volumes, 1992–1996
• La Pala ou le Retable Italy des origines à 1500 , 1993
• La gloire de Raphaël ou le triomphe d'Éros , RMN, 1995
• Leonardo, the artist (with Anna Maria Brizio and Maria Vittoria Brugnoli), Stuttgart; Zurich: Belser, 1981
• Leonardo da Vinci, the robe studies with texts by Françoise Viatte, Carlo Pedretti and André Chastel, Munich; Paris; London: Schirmer-Mosel, 1990. [German-language edition of the catalog for the first exhibition of the robe studies by Leonardo da Vinci (December 5, 1989 to February 26, 1990) in the Louvre, Paris]
• Leonardo da Vinci: All the paintings and the writings on painting. Edited, commented on and introduced by André Chastel. Translated from the Italian and French by Marianne Schneider, Munich: Schirmer-Mosel, 3rd edition 2002
• Giorgio Vasari , les Vies des meilleurs peintres sculpteurs et architectes. Annotated and edited by André Chastel, Paris, Berger-Levrault, "Arts" collection, 12 vol., 1981–1989. New edition: Actes Sud, "Thesaurus" collection, 2 vol., 2005.

literature

• Sabine Frommel, Michel Hochmann, Philippe Sénéchal (eds.): André Chastel: méthodes et combats d'un historien de l'art. Actes d'un colloque, tenu à l'Institut National d'Histoire de l'Art et Collège de France les 29, 30 novembre et 1er décembre 2012, Picard, Paris 2015, ISBN 978-2-7084-0992-7

swell

1. ↑ Article on Chastel in the Dictionary of Art historians
2. ^ Member entry by André Chastel (with a link to an obituary) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on January 14, 2017.
3. ↑ Chastel André, Adrien. Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres , accessed January 27, 2017 . 

See also

• Louis Marin

Web links

• Website of the Center André Chastel
• Article on Chastel in the Dictionary of Art historians