John Bryan Ward-Perkins

John Bryan Ward-Perkins (born February 3, 1912 in Bromley , Kent ; died May 28, 1981 in Cirencester ) was a British classical archaeologist and architectural historian .

Ward-Perkins was the eldest son of Bryan and Winifred Mary Ward-Perkins, née Hickman. His father was a civil servant in India . Ward-Perkins attended Winchester School and New College , Oxford , from which he graduated in 1934. He then received the Craven Travel Scholarship from Magdalen College , which he used to study archeology in Great Britain and France, and as part of which he attended the British School at Rome for the first time . In 1936 he became assistant to RE Mortimer Wheeler at the former London Museum, whose collection dedicated to the history of London is now housed in the Museum of London, which opened in 1976 . During his time at the museum he also took part in the excavation of the Roman villa at Lockleys near Welwyn Garden City , the results of which he published in an essay. At the museum, Ward-Perkins was primarily concerned with the collection of medieval art, which he presented in his own catalog in 1940.

In 1939 he followed a call to the chair of archeology at the University of Malta . After just six months, the impending World War II ended this episode . During the war, Ward-Perkins served in the Royal Regiment of Artillery , again under Mortimer Wheeler. He initially served in the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Commission, North Africa Division, and his first duties in the army were to protect the archaeological sites of Leptis Magna and Sabratha in North Africa. The stay from 1943 in Tripolitania and the Cyrenaica shaped his scientific interest and he remained connected to this research area all his life. In 1943 he married Margaret Sheilah Long, with whom he had three sons and a daughter. After the end of the war in Italy he was director of the Allied sub-commission for Monuments and Fine Arts in Italy, which recorded and documented the damage caused by Allied bombing. He left the army with the rank of lieutenant colonel .

In June 1945 he was appointed director of the British School at Rome , which was closed during the war . In the same year he was one of the driving forces behind the founding of the Associazione Internazionale di Archeologia Classica , which was constituted in 1945. Since no excavations in Italy by foreign institutions could be carried out in the first years after the Second World War, Ward-Perkins continued to devote himself to the exploration of North Africa. This led to a fruitful collaboration with Richard Goodchild (1918–1968), who was head of the antique collection in the province of Tripolitania from 1946 to 1948 and then worked from 1948 to 1953 at the British School at Rome . When archaeological field research in Italy became possible again, Ward-Perkins secured the aerial images of the British aerial reconnaissance of the country in order to be able to plan excavations and prospections more precisely. In the 1950s he turned his interest primarily to manufacturing technology, the planning and implementation of ancient Roman architectural projects and was primarily concerned with the architecture of the Roman Empire and late antiquity . Another focus of his research was the topography of various cities and the ancient urban planning of the Greeks and Romans. His investigations into land use and the identification of the marble used in architecture and sculpture were fundamental and changed questions about and approaches to Roman antiquity permanently.

In 1963, Ward-Perkins revived the project, which had already begun in the 19th century but had come to a standstill, to record all ancient Roman statues and stone monuments worldwide and to present them as part of the Corpus Signorum Imperii Romani . The first volumes could already be presented in 1967. The resumption of work on the Tabula Imperii Romani is also due to his initiative . This project to map the entire Roman Empire, which was ambitiously begun in 1928, came to a standstill due to the war. In 1957 it was placed under the organizational management of the Union Académique Internationale . From 1968 to 1980 Ward-Perkins was the head of the project.

Ward-Perkins was visiting professor at numerous universities and institutions, including 1957 at the University of New York and 1960 at the University of Edinburgh , where he gave the Rind Lectures . With Axel Boethius , he worked on the ambitious Pelican series History of Art of the publishing house Penguin Books , for which he published in 1970 the area of Roman architecture in the band Etruscan and Roman Architecture processed. In a second edition in 1981 his contribution was published as a separate volume under the title Roman Imperial Architecture . In 1972 he left the British School at Rome and went into retirement. John Bryan Ward-Perkins is the father of historian Bryan Ward-Perkins .

Memberships and honors

• Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George
• Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• Member of the British Academy
• Member of the American Philosophical Society (1981)

Publications (selection)

• London Museum. Medieval Catalog . HM Stationery Office, London 1940.
• with Joyce Maire Reynolds: The Inscriptions of Roman Tripolitania . British School at Rome, Rome 1952.
• with Jocelyn Toynbee : The Shrine of St Peter and the Vatican Excavations . Longmans / Green, London 1956.
• Veii. The Historical Topography of the Ancient City. British School at Rome, London 1961.
• Landscape and History in Central Italy . 2nd JL Myres Memorial Lecture. BH Blackwell, Oxford 1965.
• with Axel Boëthius: Etruscan and Roman Architecture . Penguin, Baltimore 1970 ( Pelican History of Art . Volume 32); 2nd edition published as a single volume with sole authorship and the title: Roman Imperial Architecture . Penguin Books, New York 1981.
• Cities of Ancient Greece and Italy: Planning in Classical Antiquity . G. Braziller, New York 1974.
• Roman Architecture . Harry N. Abrams, New York 1974; German translation: Architecture of the Romans . Belser, Stuttgart 1975; New edition: Rome . Translated from the Italian by Hertha Balling. Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, Stuttgart 1988 ( world history of architecture ).
• From Classical Antiquity to the Middle Ages: Urban Public Building in Northern and Central Italy AD 300–850 . Clarendon, Oxford 1984.
• Marble in Antiquity: Collected Papers of JB Ward-Perkins . Edited by Hazel Dodge and Bryan Ward-Perkins. Archaeological Monographs of the British School at Rome, Volume 6. British School at Rome, London 1992. (here p. 7–12 complete list of publications)
• Studies in Roman and Early Christian Architecture . Pindar Press, London 1994.

literature

• Joyce Reynolds: John Bryan Ward-Perkins, CMG, CBE, FBA . In: Papers of the British School at Rome . Volume 48, 1980. pp. XIII-XVII.
• John J. Wilkes : John Bryan Ward-Perkins: 1912-1981 . In: Proceedings of the British Academy . Volume 64, 1983, pp. 631-655 [1] .
• David Ridgway: John Bryan Ward-Perkins . In: Nancy Thomson de Grummond (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the History of Classical Archeology . Greenwood Press, Westport (CT) 1996, p. 1185.
• Andrew Wallace-Hadrill: The British School at Rome. One Hundred Years , Rome 2001, pp. 100-117.
• David Gill: John Bryan Ward-Perkins . In: RB Todd (Ed.): The Dictionary of British classicists , Vol. 3, Bristol 2004, pp. 1026-1028.

Web links

• Biography in the Dictionary of Art Historians
• Literature by and about John Bryan Ward-Perkins in the catalog of the German National Library