Jenő Lányi

Jenő Lányi (born 1902 in Varín , Austria-Hungary ; died September 18, 1940 in the North Atlantic when the ship City of Benares sank ) was a Hungarian art historian.

Life

Jenő Lányi was born in Varín (Várna in Hungarian), which is mainly inhabited by Slovaks, his father Arpád Lányi was a Hungarian civil servant. Lanyi graduated from high school in Budapest in 1920. Due to the anti-Semitic numerus clausus in post-war Hungary, he did not study art history, history and archeology in Hungary, but in Vienna and Munich. He received his doctorate in 1924 with a dissertation on Jacopo della Quercia under Wilhelm Pinder in Munich. Between 1929 and 1932 he was employed as an unpaid research assistant at the Staatliche Museen Berlin, in the Kupferstichkabinett and at the Deutsches Museum with Max J. Friedländer , Theodor Demmler and Frida Schottmüller .

From 1932 he researched the Italian sculpture of the 15th century and regularly attended the Art History Institute in Florence , where he met his future wife Monika Mann , a daughter of Thomas Mann . Due to the Italian Racial Laws , Lányi was forced to leave Italy in 1938. He went to Zurich and from there to London, where he continued his research and lectured at the Warburg Institute and the Art Workers' Guild . Lányi and Mann married in 1939. In 1940 they both fled to Canada, the ship City of Benares was sunk in the North Atlantic by the German submarine U48 , 248 of 406 people were killed, Monika Mann was one of the survivors.

Lányi's research materials, which had been sent separately to the United States, have been preserved. They were left to the art historian Horst W. Janson , whom Lányi probably met in Florence in the summer of 1938. Two of his articles appeared posthumously in Art Bulletin and Burlington Magazine . Janson published a fundamental monograph on Donatello in 1957 on the basis of Lányi's preliminary work .

Fonts (selection)

• Quercia studies . Berlin: Klinkhardt & Biermann, 1930 (from: Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft, 7 (1930): pp. 25–63) Munich, Phil. Diss.
• Pontormo's portrait of Maria Salviati de'Medici . Announcements from the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz, 4 no.2 / 3, 1933 pp. 88–102
• Le statue quattrocentesche dei Profeti nel Campanile e nell'antica facciata di Santa Maria del Fiore . in: Rivista d'arte. 17.1935, pp. 121-159, pp. 245-280
• Il Profeta Isaia di Nanni di Banco . in: Rivista d'arte. 18.1936, pp. 137-178
• Un autoritratto di Melozzo da Forli , Critica d'arte. 3.1938, pp. 97-103
• Donatello's Angels for the Siena Font: A Reconstruction . Burlington Magazine, 75, no.439 (October 1939): pp. 142ff.
• Ilse Falk: The Genesis of Andrea Pisano's Bronze Doors . Art Bulletin, 25, no. 2 (June 1943): pp. 132-153
• The Louvre Portrait of Five Florentines . Burlington Magazine, 84, no. 493 (April 1944): pp. 87-93
• HW Janson: The Sculpture of Donatello . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957

literature

• Lányi, Jenö , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical manual of German-speaking art historians in exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 419-420
• Alessandra Sarchi: Sulle tracce di Lányi e Malenotti. Il fondo Brogi su donatello nella Fotogeca Zeri , in: Costanza Caraffa (Ed.): Photo archives and the photographic memory of art history . Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2011, ISBN 978-3-422-07029-5 pp. 227-239
• Monika Mann : the past and the present. Memories. Kindler, Munich 1956; Rowohlt, Reinbek 2001, ISBN 3-499-23087-9 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Jenő Lányi in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Jenő Lányi in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Lee Sorensen: Lányi, Jenö , in: dictionary of arthistorians

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Falk Silvers, Ilse , in: Ulrike Wendland: Biographical Handbook of German-speaking Art Historians in Exile. Life and work of the scientists persecuted and expelled under National Socialism . Munich: Saur, 1999, ISBN 3-598-11339-0 , pp. 142f.