Martin Robertson

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Charles Martin Robertson (born September 11, 1911 in Cambridge ; died December 26, 2004 there ) was a British classical archaeologist .

Martin Robertson was the older son of Donald Struan Robertson (1885-1961), a Graecist and Regius professor at Cambridge University , and Petica Coursolles, née Jones (1883-1941). His brother was the art historian Giles Robertson . Robertson attended Leys School and Trinity College in Cambridge, where he graduated in 1934. As a scholarship holder of the British School at Athens , which was then headed by Humfry Payne , he went to Athens and took part in the excavations in Perachora . After Payne's death, however, he returned to England in 1936 to catalog the ceramic finds from the excavations in Al Mina at the British Museum in London . Robertson was involved in the scandal of the excessive cleaning of the Elgin Marbles , which brought him, as one of those responsible, to the support of the museum. From 1940 to 1946 Robertson served in the British Army. During this time he married Theodosia Cecil Spring Rice in 1942. After the war Robertson returned briefly to the British Museum, but resigned in 1948 to succeed Bernard Ashmole as Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archeology at University College London. Here he taught u. a. at the side of the classical philologists Thomas Bertram Lonsdale Webster and Otto Skutsch .

Robertson published his first book in 1959: Greek Painting . In this he tried to reconstruct the lost large-format wall paintings of ancient Greece , of which one only knew in the form of mentions and literary descriptions, based on their echo in Greek vase painting . In 1961 he followed Ashmole once more on the chair, this time as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archeology and Art at Oxford University . He kept this chair until his retirement in 1978. Among his academic students is Donna C. Kurtz .

From 1959 to 1968 Robertson served on the board of directors of the British School at Athens . During that time, he took over the publication of the excavation results on Perachora, which was not progressing properly due to a few deaths, and in 1962 published the second volume of the excavations. After Sir John Beazley's death in 1970, he and Dietrich von Bothmer , another Beazley student, revised the earlier lists of Greek vase painters. The additions to Beazley's work were published in 1971 as Paralipomena: Additions to Attic black-figure Vase-painters and to Attic Red-figure Vase-painters under Beazley's name. In 1975, Robertson's two works on the Parthenon frieze and the history of Greek art followed. At the same time he published a number of his own volumes of poetry in the 1970s: Crooked Collections (1970), For Rachel (1972), A Hot Bath at Bedtime (1975), The Sleeping Beauty's Prince (1977).

After his retirement, Robertson returned to Cambridge. In 1986, in a dispute about the authenticity of the Getty - Kouros , he pleaded for its authenticity, but changed his mind when more forgeries came onto the market. After the death of his wife in 1984, he married the classical archaeologist Louise Berge, née Holstein, in 1988. In 1992 he published the book The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens as the sum of his research on Greek red-figure vase painting . Nevertheless, numerous articles followed in which he devoted himself to this topic. Robertson, father of the musician Thomas Morgan Robertson, who performed under the pseudonym Thomas Dolby , died in Cambridge in 2004.

Publications (selection)

  • Greek painting . Skira, Geneva 1959.
  • Between Archeology and Art History . Clarendon Press, Oxford 1963
  • The Parthenon Frieze . Oxford University Press, New York 1975
  • Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum. Great Britain. Castle Ashby, Northampton . Oxford University Press / British Academy, Oxford 1979
  • Greek, Etruscan and Roman Vases in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight . National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside / Liverpool University Press, Liverpool 1987.
  • The Art of Vase-painting in Classical Athens . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992, ISBN 0-521-330-10-6 .

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Robertson, Martin
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Robertson, Charles Martin (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British Classical Archaeologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 11, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Cambridge
DATE OF DEATH December 26, 2004
Place of death Cambridge