Giulio Emanuele Rizzo

Giulio Emanuele Rizzo (born May 27, 1865 in Melilli ; died February 1, 1950 in Rome ) was an Italian classical archaeologist .

Life

Giulio Emanuele Rizzo, son of an anti- Bourbon and liberal family, attended high school in Catania and, at his father's request, initially studied law and graduated in 1887. Dissatisfied with the prospect of a life as a lawyer in the province, he then followed his inclination to the humanities and studied classical studies at the University of Palermo , where the Graecist Giuseppe Fraccaroli and the archaeologist Antonino Salinas became his formative teachers. In 1887 he was laured and immediately took part in the excavation in Megara Hyblaea , one of the oldest Greek cities in Sicily , under the direction of the then 26-year-old Paolo Orsi . A lasting and deep friendship developed between them. At the same time he began to teach as a high school teacher.

In the service of antiquities administration

Through Orsi's mediation, Rizzo entered Italy's antiquities administration in 1900 and became an inspector at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples . Affected by the chaotic conditions of the local collection, he tried to bring order to the holdings and the exhibition, but failed due to resistance by Ettore Pais , then director of the museum. In 1901 he moved to the Museo Nazionale Romano in Rome .

Discobol from Castelporziano, Museo Nazionale Romano

The move to Rome led him to a different world of science, which had a fruitful effect on his own research and his scientific career. Under Giacomo Boni he took part in the excavation of the Ara Pacis Augustae in 1903 . Although already known from individual relief finds, this was the first systematic investigation of this important monument of Augustan self-representation. Rizzo began to visit the prestigious and elegant, academic salons, especially the salon of Contessa Ersilia Caetani-Lovatelli , who was herself an archaeologist and the only female member of the Accademia dei Lincei .

In 1906 he took part in an expedition from Heidelberg University led by Friedrich von Duhn to Greece and Turkey. For an Italian scientist, in the years before the Scuola Archeologica Italiana di Atene was founded in 1909, this was an excellent opportunity to conduct archaeological research outside of Italy and the Italian museums. In the same year he managed to find a statue during an excavation in Castel Porziano : the torso of the Myronic Discobol in a Roman copy of Hadrian times. Using plaster casts of further replicas, he made a reconstruction of the entire statue, which was in the presence of King Victor Emanuel III. was presented. The following publication formed the opening contribution to the Bollettino d'Arte, first published in 1907 .

Professorships

As a result of the associated recognition, he was appointed to the chair of archeology at the University of Turin in 1907, where he taught until 1915, founded the archaeological institute, library and a plaster cast museum. Far from the academic life of Rome, he developed his own ideas about the position of his subject within the Italian scientific community. He vehemently demanded that Italian research should catch up with research in other countries, especially Germany, on Italian antiquity and the Italian Middle Ages: All lexicons, text editions , corpora, museum catalogs, etc. - "tutta roba" Made in Germany "" . As a consequence, he created the multi-volume Storia dell'arte classica e italiana , the first volume of which he published, “Storia dell'arte greca” in 1913 - the work was the first comprehensive presentation of Minoan and Mycenaean art in Italian.

When Giulio De Petra retired in 1915, he expressed the wish that Rizzo would be his successor on the chair of archeology at the University of Naples . In the following year Rizzo followed this call and taught in Naples until 1924, where he gathered a small group of students, among them Domenico Zancani, Paola Montuoro, Domenico Mustilli and Olga Elia.

In 1924, Rizzo applied for the professorship for archeology at the University of La Sapienza in Rome, which had to be filled after the death of Lucio Mariani , and narrowly prevailed against his competitor Alessandro Della Seta . The decisive factor was the influence of Julius Beloch , who, due to anti-Semitic resentment and old hostility with his doctoral supervisor Emanuel Loewy , wanted to prevent the much younger Della Seta at all costs. In 1926, Rizzo became the third person after Löwy and Mariani to hold the oldest chair in archeology in Italy, which he held until 1935.

In 1925 Rizzo was one of the 93 signatories of the "Manifesto degli intellettuali antifascisti" ("Manifesto of the anti-fascist intellectuals") written by Benedetto Croce , which was published in the daily newspaper on May 1 in response to the "Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti" by the fascist education minister Giovanni Gentile Il Mondo was published. Despite this openly anti-fascist stance, Rizzo became a member of the Partito Nazionale Fascista when he was called to Rome in 1926 and remained so until his retirement in 1935. In addition to teaching, his most important activities in Rome included expanding the Museo dei Gessi - the plaster cast collection (today the Museo dell'Arte Classica ) - at La Sapienza and the resulting intensive preoccupation with Greek art . In addition, he published three volumes of the "Monumenti della pittura antica scoperti in Italia", which he directed . After his retirement the "Ritratti di età ellenistica" followed . He worked extensively on the Greek coins of Sicily, which he published after minor preparatory work in 1946 in the monumental work "Monete greche della Sicilia" .

Rizzo was from 1919 corresponding, from 1923 national member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei .

Publications (selection)

• Saggio su Imerio il sofista. Turin 1896
• Studi archeologici sulla tragedia e sul ditirambo. Loescher, Turin 1902.
• Il ceramografo skythes. Leroux, Paris 1913.
• Il sarcofago di Torre Nova. Loescher, Rome 1913.
• Storia dell'arte greca. Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, Turin 1913
• Il sarcofago di Torre Nova. Rome 1913.
• La pittura ellenistico-romana. Milan 1930.
• Prassitele. Milan 1932.
• Le pitture della Casa dei Grifi. Libreria dello Stato, Rome 1936.
• Le pitture dell'aula isiaca di Caligola. Libreria dello Stato, Rome 1936.
• Le pitture della Casa di Livia. Libreria dello Stato, Rome 1937.
• Saggi preliminari su l'arte della moneta nella Sicilia greca. Libreria dello Stato, Rome 1938.
• Ritratti di età ellenistica. Libreria dello Stato, Rome 1940.
• Monete greche della Sicilia. Libreria dello Stato, Rome 1946.

literature

• Rizzo, Giulio Emanuele. In: Enciclopedia Italiana. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1936 (Italian).
• Ettore Gabrici: Commemorazione del socio Giulio Emanuele Rizzo. In: Rendiconti dell'Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei. Volume 5, 1950, pp. 631-641.
• Giulio Quirino Giglioli : Giulio Emanuele Rizzo. In: Archeologia Classica. Volume 2, 1950, pp. 220-221.
• Rizzo, Giulio Emanuele. In: Enciclopedia Italiana. Appendix 3. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 1961 (Italian).
• Marcello Barbanera: Giulio Emanuele Rizzo (1865–1950) e l'archeologia italiana tra ottocento enovecento: dalla tradizione letteraria alla scienza storica dell'arte. In: Maria Grazia Picozzi (ed.): L'immagine degli originali greci. Ricostruzioni di Walther Amelung e Giulio Emanuele Rizzo. Università degli studi di Roma La Sapienza, Rome 2006, pp. 19-40 ( online ).
• Rachele Dubbini: Giulio Emanuele Rizzo. Lo studio della Grecità against the romanescheria fascista. In: Fragmenta. Journal of the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. Volume 2, 2008, pp. 215-232 ( online ).
• Rachele Dubbini: Giulio Emanuele Rizzo (1865-1950) . In: Gunnar Brands , Martin Maischberger (editor): Lebensbilder. Classical archaeologists and National Socialism . Rahden 2012, pp. 36–49
• Fabrizio Vistoli: Rizzo, Giulio Emanuele. In Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani . Volume 87. Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, Rome 2016, pp. 735-738.

Remarks

1. ^ Giulio Emanuele Rizzo: Il Discobolo di Castel Porziano. In: Bollettino d'Arte. Volume 1, 1907, pp. 3-14 ( digitized version ).
2. ^ Giulio Emanuele Rizzo: Storia dell'arte greca. Unione tipografico-editrice torinese, Turin 1913, p. 9.