Emile Gilliéron

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Emile Gilliéron (born October 26, 1851 in Villeneuve , Canton of Vaud , † 1924 in Athens ) was a Swiss painter and restorer , active in Greece.

Live and act

Emile Gilliéron, brother of Jules Gilliéron , studied drawing from 1872 to 1874 at the trade school in Basel , from 1875 to 1876 ​​at the Munich Art Academy and from 1875 to 1877 in Isidore Pils' studio in Paris . From 1877 he lived in Athens and worked there mainly as an archaeological draftsman, initially for Heinrich Schliemann . At times he was also a drawing teacher for the children of King George I of Greece . Gilliéron's drawing student was also the young Giorgio de Chirico , in whose work numerous classical motifs can be found.

In 1896 and 1906, Gilliéron designed the commemorative stamps for the Olympic Games in Athens.

Together with his son Emile (1885-1939) he played an important role in the restoration of frescoes and other finds in Knossos in Crete for Arthur Evans . The father-son team worked in Knossos for over 30 years. It painted colorful and carefully crafted reproductions that were distributed all over the world. With their supposed reproductions, which were very different from the original temple paintings (for example palm representations were arbitrarily replaced by representations of lilies), they left a vivid impression of the Minoan culture , which a whole generation of writers, intellectuals and artists, from James Joyce to Sigmund Freud and Pablo Picasso inspired.

Although Emile Gilliéron and his son are involved in the reconstruction of Knossos, for example, their results are often “artistically very free” or are viewed by some specialists as art forgeries. and were not based on the archaeological standard at that time either; some (such as the Phaistos disc or the snake goddess of Knossos) are even suspected of being fakes .

His life and that of his son are treated like a novel in the novel The Forger, the Spy and the Bomb Maker (2013) by Alex Capus .

literature

  • Ch. Vuillermet: Gilliéron, Emile. In: Carl Brun (Hrsg.): Schweizerisches Künstlerlexikon. Vol. 1, 1905.
  • Gerhart Rodenwaldt : Emile Gilliéron. Obituary. In: Archäologischer Anzeiger 1923/24, Sp. 358–361.
  • Veit Stürmer : Gilliéron's Minoan-Mycenaean world. (Exhibition catalog), Berlin 1994.
  • Rachel Hood: Faces of Archeology in Greece. Caricatures by Piet de Jong. Leopard's Head Press, Oxford 1998, pp. 23-26.
  • Kenneth Lapatin: Mysteries of the Snake Goddess. Art, Desire, and the Forging of History. Houghton Mifflin, Boston 2002, pp. 120-139.
  • Veit Stürmer: Gilliéron as a mediator of the Aegean Bronze Age around 1900. In: Studia Hercynia 8, Prague 2004, pp. 37–44.
  • Tim Heilbronner / Heinz Scheiffele: The "Phaistos Disc" and the plaster bowl in the historical goods archive of WMF. A new reference to the artist-restorers father son Emile Gilliéron, in: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg. News bulletin of the State Monument Preservation, 2 (2017), pp. 147–150.

Fiction:

  • Alex Capus : The forger, the spy and the bomb maker, Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 2013

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kenneth DS Lapatin: Snake Goddesses, Fake Goddesses. How forgers on Crete met the demand for Minoan antiquities. Archeology (A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America) Volume 54 Number 1, January / February 2001
  2. ↑ Tim Heilbronner, Heinz Scheiffele: The "Diskos of Phaistos" and the plaster bowl in the historical goods archive of WMF. A new reference to the artist-restorers father son Emile Gilliéron. In: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg. News bulletin of the State Monument Preservation, 2 (2017), pp. 147–150.
  3. ↑ Kenneth DS Lapatin: Mysteries Of The Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, And The Forging Of History Paperback. on-line
  4. ↑ The authenticity of the Minoan snake goddess of Knossos ( Minoan religion ) is seriously questioned based on the results of the radiocarbon method ( 14 C dating).
  5. ↑ Kenneth DS Lapatin: Snake Goddesses, Fake Goddesses. How forgers on Crete met the demand for Minoan antiquities. Archeology (A publication of the Archaeological Institute of America) Volume 54 Number 1, January / February 2001
  6. ↑ Kenneth DS Lapatin: Mysteries Of The Snake Goddess: Art, Desire, And The Forging Of History Paperback. Da Capo Press, 2003, ISBN 0-30681-328-9
personal data
SURNAME Gilliéron, Emile
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gillieron, Emile Victor
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss painter and restorer, active in Greece
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1851
PLACE OF BIRTH Villeneuve VD
DATE OF DEATH 1924
Place of death Athens