Julius Meyer (art historian)

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Julius Meyer (art historian)

Julius Meyer (born May 26, 1830 in Aachen , † December 16, 1893 in Munich ) was a German art historian and Berlin museum director .

Live and act

The son of an officer initially studied law at the University of Göttingen , but later switched to Heidelberg University after a year abroad , where he studied philosophy and aesthetics and received his doctorate with the dissertation The History of German Aesthetics since Kant .

After his marriage, Meyer moved to Munich and specialized more and more in the field of art history. In 1872 he followed the call from Count Guido von Usedom to the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, where he was director until 1890 as the successor to Gustav Waagen . Meyer had assertiveness and broke new ground here. One of his first measures was to convert the skylight on the Schinkel building . Meyer's particular concern was to complete the museum's collection, and in this context he succeeded in adding parts of the Barthold Suermondt collection and Albrecht Dürer's wooden shoe portraits to the museum's holdings.

As early as 1852, the publisher Wilhelm Engelmann acquired the rights to the New General Artist Lexicon from Georg Kaspar Nagler from Tendler-Verlag and then asked Meyer to revise this encyclopedia. Fifteen volumes were planned, and by 1885 three volumes had been published. In 1876, Meyer's biography of Antonio da Correggio was translated into English by Mary Margaret Heaton . From 1880 to 1883, together with Ludwig Scheibler , Wilhelm Bode and Hugo von Tschudi at the Berlin gallery, he revised the catalog of the numerous exhibits in the house. In the course of his years of service, Meyer gained a high international reputation.

As a result of a serious illness, Julius Meyer withdrew to Munich in 1890, but tried to continue the official business from there temporarily. Meyer's successor in Berlin was Wilhelm Bode, who had been his assistant since 1872.

Julius Meyer was married to Luise Bode. Their daughter Mary (1854-1919) married Konrad Fiedler , an art historian and theorist, for the first time. In her second marriage she married the conductor Hermann Levi .

Publications (selection)

  • History of modern French painting. Neufeld & Mehring, Berlin 1860 (?).
  • History of modern French painting since 1789, at the same time in its relation to political life, to morality and literature. EA Seemann, Leipzig 1867.
  • Antonio da Correggio. 2 volumes. W. Engelmann, Leipzig 1871.
    • English: Antonio Allegri Da Correggio. translated from German by Dr. Julius Meyer. Macmillan, New York 1876.
  • (Ed.): General artist lexicon . 3 volumes [not published more]. Engelmann, Leipzig 1872 to 1885 (Volume 1, 1872: Aa – Andreani digitized ; Volume 2, 1878: Appiani – Domenico del Barbiere digitized ; Volume 3, 1885 (edited by Julius Meyer, Hermann Lücke , Hugo von Tschudi ) Giambattista Barbieri– Giuseppe Bezzuoli digitized ).
  • Giovanni Antonio Amadeo: scultore ed architetto (n.1447 m. 1522). T. delle Scienze Matematiche e Fisiche, Rome 1873.
  • Descriptive list of the paintings exhibited during the renovation. C. Berg & V. Holten, Berlin 1878.
  • with Ludwig Scheibler, Wilhelm Bode: Catalog of the Royal Painting Gallery in Berlin. 2nd edition. Weidmann, Berlin 1883.

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tilmann von Stockhausen: Gemäldegalerie Berlin. The history of their acquisitions policy 1830–1904. Berlin 2000, p. 55 ff .; Review .
  2. ^ Mary Margaret Heaton in the Dictionary of Art Historians
personal data
SURNAME Meyer, Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German art historian and museum director
DATE OF BIRTH May 26, 1830
PLACE OF BIRTH Aachen
DATE OF DEATH December 16, 1893
Place of death Munich