Cornelius Peter Bock

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Cornelius Peter Bock (born June 8, 1804 in Aachen , † October 10, 1870 in Freiburg im Breisgau ) was a German archaeologist , art historian and university professor.

Life

The son of an old patrician family from Aachen first completed a semester at the University of Bonn with Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776–1831) before he moved to the University of Heidelberg and the University of Freiburg . Here in Freiburg, Bock was influenced in particular by Johann Leonhard Hug (1765–1846) and by Joseph Görres (1776–1848), whom he had met in Strasbourg in the meantime and with whom he had a long, close friendship. During these years he was already publishing smaller poetic and literary articles for well-known magazines and almanacs of the time under the pseudonym "Christodorus" .

In the years 1826 to 1829 Bock dealt with archaeological and Romanesque studies in Italy and worked here primarily with Eduard Gerhard (1795–1867) and the " Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica " founded by him in 1828 , which later became the German Archaeological Institute had been renamed.

After Cornelius Peter Bock returned to Aachen in 1829 for family reasons, he was appointed to the University of Marburg as associate professor on December 28, 1831, and from April 6, 1833 as full professor of antiquity . But frustrated by certain organizational inadequacies, he returned to Aachen a few weeks later before moving to Brussels in 1840 . After his marriage to Josephine Lefebvre, his second wife and daughter of a Belgian statesman, Bock frequented illustrious circles here and soon became an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Science and Fine Arts of Belgium . He participated intensively in relevant publications and his studies of history and antiquity, which he continued there, should also be of advantage for his hometown Aachen. In his essay The City Hall of Aachen in 1843, he campaigned for the unchanged preservation of the historic coronation hall, the necessary restoration of which had to be arranged by Aachen's Lord Mayor Johann Contzen (1809–1875).

After the early death of his wife, Bock left Brussels and traveled via Stuttgart, where he associated with Christoph Friedrich Stälin and Wolfgang Menzel (1798–1873), and via Graz to Freiburg im Breisgau, where he took up a position as honorary professor at his old university in 1858 . Here he held lectures on early Christian literature and art history until the end of his life , later on Roman imperial history as well as French and Italian literature, and he mainly dealt with Dante . In addition, he wrote numerous essays for the Freiburg Diocesan Archive on mainly regional church-historical topics. Here in Freiburg he found happiness in life through a third marriage with Baroness Elise de Fabert before he finally died in 1870 as a result of a stroke.

Cornelius Peter Bock was a staunch Catholic and, like his friend and historian Charles de Montalembert (1810-1870), who died shortly before him, regretted the renewed rampant absolutism and the decline of science in the Church. Politically, he was considered to be a promoter of a greater German federalist direction and could not make friends with the dissolution of the German Confederation in 1866.

In a necrology by Alfred von Reumont (1808–1887), published in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung No. 322 from 1870, the merits of Cornelius Peter Bock were recalled in detail. After his death, his extensive essay and literature collections were transferred to the Aachen City Library .

Fonts (selection)

  • Charles d. Great tomb ; Aachen 1837
  • The town hall of Aachen 1843 [book]
  • The pictorial representations in Ingelheim . In: Niederrheinisches Jahrbuch 1844
  • The equestrian statue of the Ostrogoth king Theoderic in the yearbook of the Society for Friends of Antiquity in the Rhineland 1844
  • The Column of Cuffy, a monument to K. Probus ; ditto, 1845
  • Les dernières solennités des jeux Capitolins à Rome ; 1849 [special print]
  • L'amphithéatre de Constantinople ; 1849 [special print]
  • Notices sur plusieurs ouvrages d'art antiques qui sont mentionnés ou décrits par les auteurs du Moyen Age ; 1849 [special print]
  • with L. Alvin: Église abbatiale de Nivelles ; 1850 [book]
  • The cycle of images in the vestibule of the Freiburg Cathedral ; 1862 [special print], 1862
  • with Karl Zell: The church of the Benedictine Abbey Petershausen near Konstanz ; 1867
  • A relic of the apostle of the Germans or Aenigmata s. Bonifacii ; In: Freiburg Diocesan Archive 1868
  • The cross as the signature of the Christian church building ; in Freiburg Christian Art Papers, 1869

literature

Web links

  • Entry in the catalog of the Freiburg University Library
personal data
SURNAME Bock, Cornelius Peter
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Christodorus (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German archaeologist, art historian and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH June 8, 1804
PLACE OF BIRTH Aachen
DATE OF DEATH October 10, 1870
Place of death Freiburg in Breisgau