Dietrich von Bothmer

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Dietrich Felix von Bothmer (born October 26, 1918 in Eisenach , † October 13, 2009 in New York ) was a German-American classical archaeologist .

family

He was the son of the royal Prussian Colonel Wilhelm von Bothmer (1869-1922) and his wife Marie, née Freiin von und zu Egloffstein (1887-1960). Bothmer married on May 28, 1966 in New York the divorced Joyce Blaffer (born August 27, 1926 in Houston , Texas , USA), the daughter of the industrialist Robert Lee Blaffer and Sarah Jane Campbell. The couple has two children. His older brother was the Egyptologist Bernard V. Bothmer .

life and career

A room in the Bothmer Gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Bothmer began his studies at the Friedrich Wilhelms University in Berlin . Together with his brother Bernard V. Bothmer , Ernst Morwitz introduced him to the George Circle in 1927 . Both maintained contact even after the poet's death. After the emigration Morwitz 'to the United States he went 1938-39 first with a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University . There he met John D. Beazley , who introduced him to the Greek vases. He then did not go back to Germany, but to the USA, where he received his doctorate in 1944 at the University of Berkeley . Here, like his brother, he again contacted Morwitz, who appointed him as heir. In this function he made sure that his estate is still not accessible to a scientific evaluation and publication. In 1944/45 he served in the Pacific War . In 1946 he began work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where he would spend the rest of his life, from 1973 to 1990 as head of the Greek and Roman Department. In addition, he taught from 1965 to 2006 as a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University .

His scientific specialty was Greek art and especially vase painting . He brought together one of the most important collections of fragments of Greek vases, which he bequeathed to the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University . His contacts on the trade in illegally acquired antiquities and in particular the acquisition of a large chalice crater by the late Archaic vase painter Euphronios for the Metropolitan Museum in 1972 , which was returned to Italy in 2008, sparked discussions .

In addition to numerous other honors, von Bothmer was a corresponding member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres and a full member of the German Archaeological Institute .

Fonts (selection)

  • Greek, Etruscan and Roman Antiquities, an Exhibition from the Collection of Walter Cummings Baker. New York 1950.
  • Amazons in Greek Art. Oxford 1957 (= Dissertation University of California, Berkeley 1944).
  • Ancient art from New York private collections. Catalog of an exhibition held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, December 17, 1959 - February 28, 1960 . New York 1961.
  • with Joseph V. Noble: An Inquiry into the Forgery of the Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York 1961.
  • Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum . United States of America Vol. 12. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Fasc. 3: Attic Black-Figured amphorae. 1963.
  • Greek and Roman art. Guide to the collections. Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York 1964. 2nd edition 1975.
  • The Euphronios Crater in New York . In: Archäologischer Anzeiger 1976, pp. 485-512.
  • Greek vase painting. An Introduction . Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York 1972. 2nd edition 1987.
  • with Mary B. Moore: Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. United States of America. Vol. 16 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Fasc. 4: Attic black-figured neck-amphorae. 1976.
  • A Greek and Roman treasury. Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 42.1. New York 1984.
  • The Amasis Painter and His World. Vase painting in sixth-century BC Athens. Malibu 1985.
  • Glories of the Past. Ancient Art from the Shelby White and Leon Levy Collection. New York 1990.

literature

  • Biographical handbook of German-speaking emigration after 1933 . Vol. 2, 1. Munich 1983. sv
  • Genealogical manual of the nobility . Noble houses A Volume XXI, Volume 98 of the complete series, Limburg (Lahn) 1990, p. 58.
  • Martine Denoyelle , Jasper Gaunt: Dietrich von Bothmer. Une bibliographie de ses oeuvres de 1941 à 1993; établie en l'honneur de son soixante-quinzième anniversaire . Paris 1993.
  • Andrew J. Clark, Jasper Gaunt (Ed.): Essays in Honor of Dietrich von Bothmer . Amsterdam 2002. therein:
    • Martine Denoyelle: Biographical Note. P. 14.
    • Jasper Gaunt, Martine Denoyelle: The publications of Dietrich von Bothmer. Pp. 15-26.
  • Peter Watson, Cecilia Todeschini: The Medici Conspiracy. The trade in art treasures from the looting of Italian graves and museums . Berlin 2006, ISBN 978-3-86601-905-8 , esp. Pp. 10-18, 189-191.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Alfred Grimm , Bothmer, Bernhard Wilhelm von . In: Achim Aurnhammer et al. (Ed.): Stefan George and his circle. A manual. Volume 3, de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-018461-7 , pp. 1304-1307; Alfred Grimm, Bothmer, Dietrich Felix von . In: Achim Aurnhammer et al. (Ed.): Stefan George and his circle. A manual. Volume 3, de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-018461-7 , pp. 1307-1309; Michael Philipp: Ernst Morwitz. In: Achim Aurnhammer et al. (Ed.): Stefan George and his circle. A manual. Volume 3, de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 2012, ISBN 978-3-11-018461-7 , pp. 1559–1564, here pp. 1561f.
personal data
SURNAME Bothmer, Dietrich von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES From Bothmer, Dietrich; Bothmer, Dietrich Felix von (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German-American archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Eisenach
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 2009
Place of death new York