Thomas Puttfarken; art historian of the Renaissance
Hyfler/Rosner
An art historian of the Renaissance and pivotal figure at
Essex University
Michael Podro
Saturday October 21, 2006
Guardian
The art historian Professor Thomas Puttfarken, who has died
of an aneurysm at the age of 62, was a leonine presence,
well over six foot, with broad shoulders - literally and
metaphorically - and a quiet, easy manner. He was an
internationally eminent scholar of Renaissance and Baroque
art, elected a fellow of the British Academy in 2003 and for
30 years a pivotal figure in the department of art history
and theory at the University of Essex.
He was born in Hamburg into a family of jurists, and came to
the Warburg Institute, London, in 1967 from Hamburg's
Kunsthistorisches Institute as the first, one-year Aby
Warburg fellow (the institute itself came to Britain from
Hamburg in 1933). He returned to the institute in Hamburg as
a teacher during the political upheavals there, and although
he had not completed his doctorate, was elected chairman of
a committee. He was immediately in conflict with the
rightwing professoriate. In those circumstances he accepted,
in 1971, an invitation to a lectureship in the newly formed
art history department at Essex, a crucial move both for its
future and for his. He went back briefly to Hamburg but the
situation remained difficult and he returned to Essex as a
senior lecturer, subsequently being appointed in 1984 to a
chair.
Two themes dominated his work: the transfer of literary and
rhetorical theory to painting and, closely related,
conflicting concepts of pictorial unity. In his book of 1985
on the late 17th century French theorist Roger de Piles, he
traced the conflict between academic writers such as André
Félibien, who taught that the coherence of painting was a
matter of drawing and the lucid and decorous representation
of its subject matter, while de Piles gave priority to
visual impact and colour in the theory that reverberated
into the 19th century.
In his Discovery of Pictorial Composition (2000), based on
his Durning Lawrence lectures given at University College
London, he argued that contrary to much received opinion,
our modern notion of pictorial composition had no equivalent
in the Italian Renaissance. The term composition and its
cognates in the 15th and 16th centuries signified the
putting together of parts of the human body and the
connection of one body with another. It did not carry the
modern sense of devising an overall pictorial order that
included the total spatial and surface disposition. One of
the book's most sophisticated arguments offers a new
explanation of why it was that geometrical optics, that had
been known for centuries, came to be applied to painting
only in the 15th century.
His Titian and Tragic Painting, published last year, has
very wide intellectual scope, starting with a revision of
traditional views about the relation of painting to the
system of liberal to mechanical arts, arguing against the
view that painters strove to raise the social status of
painting by linking it to literature. The core of the book
argues that the depiction of extreme violence and suffering
is not an occasional aberration from the pastoral tone of
Titian's work, an imposition of counter-reformation patrons,
but runs through his work from an early date to the end.
Puttfarken links this to the interest in Aristotle's sense
of tragic drama that emerged in the mid-16th century among
writers close to Titian.
Puttfarken served for two periods as pro-vice chancellor, as
dean of students, recurrently as head of department; and on
numerous art history appointment committees across the
country. He handled these posts without any sense of fuss or
bother. He never seemed ruffled, administering with the same
fastidiousness found in his scholarship, retaining his
ironic smile and urbanity even when one knew he was furious.
He was, as one colleague remarked, absurdly gifted, an
accomplished painter, athlete and cook. He was a great
drinking companion and among my own most vivid memories are
of dinners in Italy, arguing late into the night. Above all,
he had the gift of making friends who remained devoted to
him, as he was to them.
He was married twice - to Herma Zimmer in 1969 with whom he
had two children, Nathalie and Malte - and then in 1981 to
Elspeth Crichton Stuart. They survive him.
· Thomas Monrad Puttfarken, art historian, born December 19
1943; died October 5 2006