John Shearman

John Kinder Gowran Shearman (born June 24, 1931 in Aldershot , † August 11, 2003 in Lethbridge ) was an English art historian and expert on the Italian Renaissance and Mannerism .

Life and Academic Work

John Shearman was born to Charles EG Shearman, a British Army officer , and Evelyn Shearman (née White). In 1951 he began studying art history at the Courtauld Institute , where he attended seminars with Rudolf Wittkower and Ernst Gombrich , among others , but mainly focused on Johannes Wilde (1891–1970). At Wilde he first completed his bachelor's degree (1955) and then his doctorate (1957) on Developments in the Use of Color in Tuscan Paintings of the Early 16th Century .

Immediately after his doctorate, Shearman was offered a position as a lecturer at the Courtauld Institute, where he became a reader in 1967 . In these and the following years, supported by fellowships in Princeton , among others, he wrote several standard works on artists such as Raffael and Andrea del Sarto and, last but not least, a narrow but groundbreaking study on the phenomenon of Italian, which has been reissued many times and has been translated into numerous languages Mannerism . After Anthony Blunt's resignation , Shearman led the Courtauld Institute for several years as acting director before accepting an appointment at Princeton University in 1979 . In 1986/87 he left the university after a controversy over the tenure track procedure of a colleague and accepted a position at Harvard University , where he stayed until his retirement in 2002. He was a member of the British Academy since 1976 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993 .

In addition to his academic work, Shearman was often actively involved in the preservation and restoration of works of art, for example after the flood in Florence in 1966 and as a consultant for the restoration of the Sistine Chapel , which was completed in 1994.

John Shearman was married three times: his first wife, Jane Dalrymple Smith, died in 1983, and this marriage resulted in four children. A second marriage with Sally Roskill was divorced, in 1998 he married the colleague and medieval expert Kathryn Brush . He died of a heart attack in 2003 while on an excursion with Brush in Canada , when his two-volume, monumental work Raphael in Early Modern Sources 1483–1602 was in the galley proofs. He left an unfinished manuscript behind a project he had started for Penguin Books on Italian painting of the Quattrocento .

Works (selection)

• Andrea del Sarto . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1965.
• Masaccio 's Pisa Altar-piece: an Alternative Reconstruction. In: The Burlington Magazine , Vol. 108, 1966, pp. 449-455.
• Mannerism . Penguin Books, London 1967.
• Raphael's Cartoons in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel. Phaidon, London 1972 (together with Michael Hirst and Johannes Wilde ).
• The Vatican punch : Functions and Decorations . British Academy Italian Lecture 1971. Oxford University Press, London 1972.
• The collections of the younger branch of the Medici . In: The Burlington Magazine , Vol. 117, 1975, pp. 12-27.
• The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983.
• Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance. Princeton University Press, Princeton 1992.
• Michelangelo : Six Lectures. Oxford University Press, London 1978.
• Raphael in Early Modern Sources 1483-1602. Yale University Press, Yale 2003.

literature

• Coming about ...: a Festschrift for John Shearman. Harvard University Art Museums, Cambridge 2001.
• Matthias Winner : Memorial for John Shearman. In: Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana , Vol. 35, 2003/04, pp. 11–15.
• Meredith J. Gill: John Shearman (1931-2003). In: Renaissance studies , Vol. 18, 2, 2004, pp. 304-307.
• Caroline Elam: John Shearman (1931-2003). In: The Burlington Magazine , Vol. 146, 2004, pp. 264-265.
• Benjamin Paul: John Kinder Gowran Shearman, 1931–2003 . In: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy . tape XIV , 2015, p. 549-569 ( thebritishacademy.ac.uk [PDF]).

Web links

• Entry in the Dictionary of Art Historians