John D. Beazley

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John D. Beazley, 1956

Sir John Davidson Beazley (born September 13, 1885 in Glasgow , † May 6, 1970 in Oxford ) was a British classical archaeologist . He was the foremost scholar in the field of research into Greek vase painting . The method of attribution to vase painters, which is still valid today, goes back to him.

Life

Beazley was born as the son of the interior designer and glass artist Murray Beazley († 1940) and his wife Mary Catherine Beazley, née Davidson († 1918) in Glasgow. He first attended King Edward VI School in Southampton and studied at Christ's Hospital and Balliol College, Oxford University. In Oxford he began a close relationship with the British playwright James Elroy Flecker (1884–1915) and with this he cultivated a very aesthetic lifestyle based on the model of Oscar Wilde . Joint fellow student TE Lawrence claimed that Beazley at the time displayed more of an artist than a scientist. After spending a year at the British School at Athens , he returned to Oxford in 1908. There he worked as a student and tutor at Christ Church College . During this time he inspired Bernard Ashmole .

From 1910 he began to research the red-figure Attic vase painting . His first publication in this regard is dated 1911. During the First World War , he worked in Room 40 for the British Naval Intelligence Department . In 1918 he then published Attic Red-Figure Vases in American Museums . In 1919 he married the war widow Marie Bloomfield, who was to drive him to deeper studies of Greek antiquity and trained herself to be a photographer in order to be able to support his work.

In 1925 he became the Lincoln Professor of Classical Archeology and Art at Oxford University, a professorship he held until his retirement in 1956. In the same year he published the first edition of his main work Attic Vase Painter of the Red Figure Style in German . It was a list of the vase painters of the Greek red-figure style and the relationships between the individual artists. Beazley continuously expanded this work in the course of his further life. In 1927 his first volume was published for the Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum . In the same year he became a member ( fellow ) of the British Academy . In 1931, together with Lacey D. Caskey , he began to publish the collection of Greek vases in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston ( Attic Vase-Paintings in Boston ); this work was not completed until 1963. With Ashmole he wrote the work Greek Sculpture and Painting in 1932 . In 1942 the English edition of his 1925 work Attic Red-figure Vase-painters was published . He was knighted in 1949 and elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1954. In 1956 he published his work on black-figure Greek vase painting , Attic Black-figure Vase-painters . He retired in 1956 and was succeeded by Bernard Ashmole. In 1963 the second English edition of his work on red-figure vase painting was published in three volumes. In 1965 he was awarded an Antonio Feltrinelli Prize .

Meaning of beazley

Beazley's investigations are fundamental to the detailed, stylistic analysis of Attic vase painting . Based on the method of the art historian Giovanni Morelli , based on the comparison of the smallest details of works of art, to work out characteristic features that are typical for an individual artist or painter, he succeeded in dividing Attic vase painting into schools and groups with individually definable painters. Since these painters mostly did not sign, he often gave them an emergency name, see vase of names . Beazley's style of analysis has been criticized again and again, but has become generally accepted in research for the determination of vase painters.

His academic legacy is located in Oxford and serves as the basis of the Beazley Archive , which tries to provide an overview of ancient vase painting with a database in the tradition of Beazley's list works , with a continued focus on Attic production. Beazley's original collection went to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford .

Fonts (selection)

  • Attic vase painters of the red-figure style. Mohr, Tübingen 1925.
  • Greek Vases in Poland. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1928.
  • The Berlin painter (= research on ancient ceramics . Series 1: Pictures of Greek vases. Vol. 2) Keller, Berlin-Wilmersdorf 1930 (English: The Berlin Painter. Von Zabern, Mainz 1974, ISBN 3-8053-0070-0 ).
  • Potter and Painter in Ancient Athens. In: Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol. 30, 1940, pp. 87-125 (special reprint: Cumberlege, London 1944).
  • Attic Red-figure Vase-painters. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1942 (2nd edition. 3 volumes. Ibid. 1963), [= ARV² ].
  • Etruscan vase painting (= Oxford Monographs on Classical Archeology. 1). Clarendon Press, Oxford 1947.
  • The Development of Attic Black-figure (= Sather Classical Lectures. Vol. 24. University of California Press et al., Berkeley CA 1951 (Revised edition. Dietrich von Bothmer and Mary B. Moore. Ibid. 1986, ISBN 0-520-05593-4 ).
  • Attic Black-figure Vase-painters. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1956 [ = ABV ].
  • Paralipomena. Additions to Attic black-figure vase-painters and to Attic red-figure vase-painters. 2nd edition. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1971.
  • Greek vases. Lectures. Ed. by Donna C. Kurtz. Clarendon Press, Oxford 1989, ISBN 0-19-813412-6 .

literature

  • Herbert A. Cahn : John Davidson Beazley. In: Herbert A. Cahn: Small writings on coin science and archeology. Archäologischer Verlag et al., Basel et al. 1975, pp. 168–170.
  • Martin Robertson : Beazley and after. In: Munich Yearbook of Fine Arts. Third Series, Volume 27, 1976, pp. 29-46.
  • Donna C. Kurtz (Ed.): Beazley and Oxford. Lectures delivered at Wolfson College, Oxford on June 28, 1985 (= Oxford University Committee for Archeology. Volume 10). Oxford University Committee for Archeology, Oxford 1985, ISBN 0-947816-10-0 .
  • Philippe Rouet: Approaches to the study of Attic vases. Beazley and Pottier. Oxford University Press, Oxford et al. 2001, ISBN 0-19-815272-8 .
  • Bernard Ashmole: Sir John Beazley, 1885-1970 . In: British Academy (Ed.): Proceedings of the British Academy . tape 56 , 1971, p. 443-461 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).
  • Cornelia Isler-Kerényi : Beazley, John Davidson. In: Peter Kuhlmann , Helmuth Schneider (Hrsg.): History of the ancient sciences. Biographical Lexicon (= The New Pauly . Supplements. Volume 6). Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2012, ISBN 978-3-476-02033-8 , Sp. 54-57.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ About James Whitley: Beazley as theorist. In: Antiquity 71, 1997, pp. 40-47; Richard T. Neer: Beazley and the Language of Connoisseurship. In: Hephaistos 15, 1997, pp. 7-30.
personal data
SURNAME Beazley, John D.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beazley, John Davidson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Classical Archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 13, 1885
PLACE OF BIRTH Glasgow
DATE OF DEATH May 6, 1970
Place of death Oxford