Walter Hatto Gross

Walter Hatto Gross (Photo: around 1952)

Walter Hatto Gross (born March 30, 1913 in Heidelberg ; † December 24, 1984 in Hamburg ) was a German classical archaeologist .

Live and act

He attended the humanistic grammar school in Greifswald and Münster, which he graduated from high school in 1931. He then studied classical archeology in Münster , Munich , Naples , Leipzig and Würzburg with Professors Reinhard Herbig , Bernhard Schweitzer and Karl Lehmann-Hartleben, among others . When he lost the material for his doctoral thesis at Schweitzer on imagines clipeatae , the Greek and Roman shield medallions, he gave up the project and asked Herbig for support on a likewise iconographic topic and completed his doctorate in 1937 with Reinhard Herbig with studies on the portraits of Traian in Würzburg.

In 1938 he received a travel grant from the German Archaeological Institute , which he spent in Greece and Italy. A few months after his return, he was drafted into military service in December 1939. Only after a serious injury was he released at the end of 1942, then worked as an assistant in Würzburg and, after the lost material from his planned doctoral thesis appeared again, on the completion of his habilitation thesis Imago clipeata , of which all copies were destroyed by bombing after his habilitation in 1943 were. It later became the subject of the dissertation of his first student, Rolf Winkes , who later taught at Brown University , where Gross was also a "Parker Visiting Scholar". At his request, the extensive private Gross Library also became part of Brown University's library.

In 1944, Gross became a lecturer in Classical Archeology in Göttingen . In 1952 he was appointed adjunct professor in Göttingen. In 1964 he followed a call from the University of Giessen as professor and chair of classical archeology. In 1968 he accepted a call to Hamburg , where he was institute director until his retirement in 1979.

Fonts (selection)

• Heracliscus Commodus. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1973, ISBN 3-525-85116-2 .
• Julia Augusta. Investigations into the foundation of a Livia iconography. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1962.
• To the Augustus statue at Prima Porta. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1959.
• Studies on the portraits of Traian. Mann, Berlin 1938.

literature

• Rolf Winkes, Lambert Scheider: Walter Hatto Gross , in Hamburg Contributions to Archeology 9, 1982, p. 9ff. (with list of scriptures)
• Jochen Bleicken : Obituary Walter Hatto Gross, in: Yearbook of the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen 1987, pp. 74–79 = in: Collected writings . Stuttgart 1998, ISBN 3-515-07241-1 . Pp. 1092-1097.
• Rolf Winkes: Obituary Walter Hatto Gross. In: Gnomon 58, 1986, 83-84.
• Hans-Günter Buchholz : Walter Hatto Gross 1913–1984. In: portraits of archaeologists . Portraits and short biographies of classical archaeologists in the German language. Pp. 315-316, Mainz 1988, ISBN 3-8053-0971-6 .
• Nadine Leisner: Gross, Walter Hatto. In: Franklin Kopitzsch , Dirk Brietzke (Hrsg.): Hamburgische Biographie . Vol. 7, Wallstein, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-8353-3579-0 , pp. 114–115.

Web links

• Literature by and about Walter Hatto Gross in the catalog of the German National Library
• Institute for Classical Archeology at the Justus Liebig University in Gießen: Ancestral Gallery - Walter Hatto Gross , accessed on February 18, 2013