Ernst Kitzinger

Ernst Kitzinger ( born December 12, 1912 in Munich, † 22 January 2003 in Poughkeepsie, USA ) was a German - American art historian. His focus was the Byzantine and early medieval art.

Life

The son of Jewish parents - his father, William Nathan Kitzinger was a well-known Munich lawyer, his mother, the social activist Elizabeth Kitzinger, daughter of numismatist Eugen Merzbacher - studied from 1931 to 1934 Art History of Wilhelm Pinder at the University of Munich. His dissertation was a study of Roman painting of the 7th and 8th century. Due to the beginning of the persecution of the Jews left Germany Kitzinger 1934. About Rome he came to London in 1935 and found employment at the British Museum. During this time he dealt with the art of the Anglo-Saxons. In 1937 he visited Egypt and Turkey to deepen his knowledge of the art of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. In 1940 his first book, Early Medieval Art at the British Museum appeared.

As German Kitzinger was forced in the same year to leave England. He was interned for nine months in Australia. During this time he was in correspondence with his cousin Richard Kraut Heimer, who lived since the end of 1935 in the U.S. and taught since 1937 at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie. 1941 succeeded the Warburg Institute to secure his release. Kitzinger went to the USA, where the Dumbarton Oaks Research Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, DC He found a job. During the first time in Dumbarton Oaks, he dealt with the Byzantine monuments of the Balkans. In 1955, Kitzinger "Director of Studies" Dumbarton Oaks. In 1967, he left the Institute to take over the chair at Harvard University and an Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, a position he held until his retirement in 1979.

Work

Kitzinger studies of Byzantine and early medieval art found in numerous publications reflected:

His studies at Dumbarton Oaks on the Byzantine monuments in the Balkans led to a publication on the monuments of Stobi. Then Kitzinger dealt with the mosaics of Norman Sicily, which he described in the sechsbändigem plant I mosaici del periodo normanno in Sicilia.

Under his leadership, Dumbarton Oaks has developed into an internationally recognized institution, of which the annual Dumbarton Oaks Papers testify. At Harvard, sat Kitzinger - in addition to his teaching and supervision of graduate students - his studies. The books Byzantine art in the making and The art of Byzantium and the medieval West are the results of these studies.

Even after his retirement, he continued his studies. For example, the discussion of the mosaics of Norman Sicily was brought to an end only in 1992.

Kitzinger was honored with the Order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts (1982 ) and the Austrian Badge of Honour for Science and Art (1990).