Samuel Guyer

Heinrich Johann Samuel Guyer (born May 31, 1879 in Marseille ; † August 26, 1950 in Bern ) was a Swiss art historian .

Samuel Guyer was born in 1879 as the son of the German-Swiss pastor in Marseille, Johannes Gujer, and his wife Emma Eugenie. After schooling in southern France and at the grammar school in Basel from 1892 to 1898, he first studied theology in Zurich . After the state examination he switched to art history, where he received his doctorate in 1906 with the work The Christian Monuments of the First Millennium in Switzerland , suggested by Johann Rudolf Rahn . After that, his research focused primarily on early Christian architecture in Asia Minor and northern Mesopotamia . His first trip took him to Cilicia in 1906 , the following year he traveled again to where he and Ernst Herzfeld explored the buildings of Meriamlik and Korykos . In 1910/11 he visited Amida , today's Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey , and Samarra in what is now Iraq , where he took part in the excavations. The following years brought further trips to northern Mesopotamia. For the work Archaeological Journey in the Euphrates and Tigris Region (1907/08) by Ernst Herzfeld and Friedrich Sarre , he worked on the monuments of Resafa (Sergiopolis) in today's Syria . In his later work from 1930 onwards, he mainly devoted himself to processing the material produced on his travels. He dealt with the connections between Asia Minor and Western sacral architecture. He takes the view that various elements of medieval church buildings such as the cross-shaped floor plan, crossing and crossing tower are anticipated in the buildings of Anatolia from the 6th century.

Samuel Guyer never held an academic position. After his possessions in Istria were lost during the First World War, he spent his later years in Florence, Munich and Switzerland. There he worked on the recording of Swiss monuments until his death in 1950. He had been married to Hanna Bäschlin since 1909 and the couple had three daughters.

Fonts (selection)

• The Christian monuments of the 1st millennium in Switzerland , Dieterich'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, T. Weicher, 1907
• My trip to the Tigris , Dietrich Reimer Berlin 1923
• with Harry Spanner and Friedrich Sarre: Rusafa, the pilgrimage city of St. Sergios, Dietrich Reimer Berlin 1926
• Venice: buildings and sculptures; With an abstract of art history, Dr. B. Filser Augsburg 1927
• with Ernst Herzfeld: Meriamlik and Korykos. Two Christian ruins of the rough Cilicia (= Monumenta Asiae Minoris antiqua. Vol. 2 = Publications of the American Society for Archaeological Research in Asia Minor. Vol. 2, ZDB -ID 972862-4 ). Longmans, Green & Co, London et al. 1930.
• Basics of medieval occidental architecture: Contributions to the development from the ancient temple to the cruciform basilica of the occidental Middle Ages, Benziger 1950

literature

• Johannes Kollwitz : Guyer, Heinrich Johann Samuel In: New German Biography ( online )