William Bell Dinsmoor

William Bell Dinsmoor (born July 29, 1886 in Windham , New Hampshire ; died July 2, 1973 in Athens ) was an American classical archaeologist and architectural historian .

Life

William Bell Dinsmoor, son of a Boston architect, attended the Boston Latin School before studying at the School of Architecture at Harvard University from 1902 . After graduating with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1906, he worked as an architect for a New York architecture firm for two years . In 1906 he made his first trip to Europe, which also took him to Greece . A one-year scholarship from the Carnegie Institution allowed him to attend the American School of Classical Studies at Athens in 1908 . Dinsmoor was the first architect to receive this scholarship. After extending the scholarship by one year, he returned to Athens in 1910. At the request of the Carnegie Institution , his stay in Greece was extended for two more years until he was finally hired as an architect at the American School in 1912 . Interrupted from his military service during the First World War , he held this position until 1919.

From 1920 to 1926 he was director of the Avery Architectural and Fine Arts Library , the largest library of architecture in the United States, at Columbia University in New York. During this time, he acquired one of the most important works in the library, Sebastiano Serlio's unpublished manuscript and drawings of residential architecture. Dinsmoor himself devoted many years to the employment of Serlio's literary estate and published the results in a comprehensive essay in 1943. As a professor of architecture he returned to the American School in Athens in 1924 and worked there for half a year until 1928. From 1933 to 1955 Dinsmoor was also head of the Department of Fine Arts and Archeology at Columbia University, which awarded him a doctorate in 1929 and where he was appointed professor of archeology in 1935.

In 1936 he became president of the Archaeological Institute of America , which he chaired until 1946. In this function, President Roosevelt appointed him in 1943 as the responsible head of the commission that had to develop the security measures for the protection of historical monuments and works of art during the Second World War . The tasks of the Committee for the Protection of Cultural Treasures in War Areas included the creation of appropriate maps for the fighting troops, their training, the documentation of the state of preservation of the monuments and the return of abducted works of art to their owners.

After this task was completed, Dinsmoor returned to Athens in 1947 as a visiting professor at the American School . He held his professorship at Columbia University until he retired in 1967. He then moved entirely to Athens, where he died in 1973. In 1969 he received the Gold Medal Award for Distinguished Archaeological Achievement from the Archaeological Institute of America for his achievements . Dinsmoor was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1933 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1944 , and from 1949 he was a member of the Accademia dei Lincei .

Dinsmoor was married to Zillah Frances Dinsmoor (1886-1960), née Pierce. Their son William Bell Dinsmoor Jr. was also an important archaeologist and architectural historian and accompanied his father from an early age in his research in Greece.

Researches

Dinsmoor devoted his scientific work almost exclusively to the ancient buildings of Athens and Attica . Based on his preoccupation with the inscribed documents of the Attic building commissions, he focused primarily on the buildings of the Athens Acropolis . At the beginning there was the analysis and discussion of the previous building of the Propylaea , the monumental entrance area to the Acropolis, which occupied him from 1910 onwards. Among the buildings on the Acropolis itself, he was particularly interested in the Erechtheion and the Parthenon , the central Athena sanctuaries of the Athenian polis . As a result of this conflict, he was instrumental in the reconstruction of the Parthenon in Nashville , Tennessee , in the 1920s . Above all, however, he dealt with the results of Wilhelm Dörpfeld on the Parthenon in a whole series of works . A sensational debate arose between the two researchers about the construction phases of the Parthenon and their dating, which was conducted on both sides in the American Journal of Archeology between 1932 and 1935 .

In addition, Dinsmoor dealt intensively with the Temple of Apollo near Bassae , especially with the reconstruction of the 23-panel frieze of the temple , which is dedicated to the two themes of Centaur omachie and Amazonomachy and is in the British Museum in London . His most important and influential work remained his handbook Architecture of Ancient Greece , a new version of the 1902 work The Architecture of Greece and Rome by William James Anderson and Richard Spiers . Dinsmoor's second edition, still mentioning Anderson and Spiers, appeared for the first time in 1927, the third edition as a separate work in 1950. The work covered the development of Greek architecture from the Bronze Age to Hellenism .

Publications (selection)

A bibliography of the writings of William Bell Dinsmoor can be found in: Hesperia . Volume 35, 1966, pp. 87-92.

• with William James Anderson and Richard Spiers: The Architecture of Ancient Greece. An Account of Its Historic Development, being the First Part of the Architecture of Greece and Rome. Second edition. Batsford, London 1927.
  • The Architecture of Ancient Greece. An Account of Its Historic Development. Third edition. Batsford, London 1950.
• The Archons of Athens in the Hellenistic Age. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1931.
• The Athenian Archon List in the Light of Recent Discoveries. Columbia University Press, New York 1939
• Observations on the Hephaisteion (= Hesperia. Supplement volume 5). American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Baltimore 1941.

literature

• Homer A. Thompson in: Year Book of the American Philosophical Society . 1974, pp. 156-163.

Web links

• Biography in the Dictionary of Art Historians
• Biography on the website of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens
• Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved October 8, 2015

Remarks

1. ^ Member History: William B. Dinsmoor. American Philosophical Society, accessed July 17, 2018.