Ernst Kitzinger, Professor and Writer, NYTimes obit
Hyfler/Rosner
By KEN JOHNSON
Ernst Kitzinger, one of the 20th century's foremost historians of Byzantine,
early Christian and early medieval art, died at his home in Poughkeepsie,
N.Y., on Jan. 22. He was 90.
Dr. Kitzinger, who taught at Harvard for many years, was one of the last
surviving members of an influential generation of German art historians who
fled their country with the rise of Nazism. Others included Ernst Gombrich,
Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Wittkower and Julius Held. Along with them Dr.
Kitzinger brought to the study of art a methodologically rigorous and
intellectually ambitious attention to iconography, style and factual
evidence that affected the practice of art history in the English-speaking
world. At the same time, the lucidity and grace of Dr. Kitzinger's writing
in English, his second language, offered his scholarship to a wide audience.
The virtue of Dr. Kitzinger's work, said Dr. Irving Lavin, professor
emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and one of Dr.
Kitzinger's first students in the United States, was its ability "to connect
what was happening visually to what was happening conceptually; the history
of art became a history of ideas." Writing on subjects like the floor
mosaics of early Christian churches, the phenomenon of iconoclasm and
medieval art in northern England, Dr. Kitzinger traced "a fundamental shift
from a humanistic to a spiritual view of the world." His work transformed
the conventional view of art of the Middle Ages as an incoherent decline
from the art of classical antiquity.
Born in Munich on Dec. 27, 1912, Ernst Kitzinger studied at the universities
of Munich and Rome. He received his doctorate in 1934 for work on Medieval
painting and mosaics in Rome. Shortly afterward, he went to England, where
he was hired by the British Museum. There he immersed himself in the
Anglo-Saxon arts of northern England and southern Scotland, and in 1940 he
published "Early Medieval Art at the British Museum," still considered one
of the best introductions to the art of the Middle Ages.
At the start of World War II, Dr. Kitzinger was interned as an enemy alien
and sent to Australia. After his release in 1941, he came to the United
States, where he became a junior fellow at the new Center for Byzantine
Studies at the Harvard Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in
Washington. During the war he was a research analyst for the Office of
Strategic Services in Washington and London.
Returning to Dumbarton Oaks in 1946, he became a professor of Byzantine art
and archaeology and from 1955 to 1966 director of Byzantine studies. During
his tenure, Dumbarton Oaks became the world's leading institution for
Byzantine studies. In 1967 he went to Harvard's campus in Cambridge, Mass.,
to teach until his retirement in 1979.
Among Dr. Kitzinger's many honors was his appointment as Slade Professor of
Fine Art at the University of Cambridge. In 1974 and 1975 he gave a series
of lectures that became a widely read book, "Byzantine Art in the Making"
(Harvard University Press). In 1976 a collection of his published articles
appeared as "The Art of Byzantium and the Medieval West: Selected Studies"
(Indiana University Press).
Dr. Kitzinger continued to work after retirement, dividing his time between
the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Oxford. In his 80's he
finished a lifelong project with a six-volume photographic survey of the
Norman mosaics of Sicily.
Dr. Kitzinger's wife, the former Margaret Susan Theobald, whom he married in
1944, died in 2000. He is survived by his children, Stephen Anthony
Kitzinger of London, Margaret Rachel Kitzinger of Poughkeepsie, N.Y., and
Adrian Nicholas Kitzinger of Manhattan, and by three grandchildren.