John Shearman, art historian
Hyfler/Rosner
Distinguished historian of Italian Renaissance art
22 August 2003
John Kinder Gowran Shearman, art historian: born 24 June 1931;
Lecturer, Courtauld Institute 1957-67, Reader 1967-74, Deputy Director
1974-78, Professor of the History of Art 1974-79; FBA 1976; Professor,
Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University 1979-87, Chairman
1979-85; Professor of Fine Arts, Harvard University 1987-94, Chairman of
Department 1990-93; Adams University Professor, Harvard University 1994-2002
(Emeritus); married 1957 Jane Smith (deceased; one son, three daughters),
1983 Sally Roskill (marriage dissolved), 1998 Kathryn Brush; died 11 August
2003.
John Shearman was the most distinguished historian of Italian Renaissance
art to have been produced by the Courtauld Institute.
Beginning his career there as an undergraduate, he proceeded to the PhD
under the supervision of Professor Johannes Wilde, the visionary pupil of
Max Dvorák. Shearman was passionately attached to the Courtauld Institute,
then in its idiosyncratic setting of Home House, 20 Portman Square, London.
Immediately after his doctorate he became a Lecturer, was promoted to a
Readership in 1967, and became Professor of the History of Art in 1974. He
was a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1964. In
1976 he was elected a Fellow of the British Academy, and he received its
Serena Medal in 1979.
Unsuccessful in his application for the Directorship of the Courtauld
Institute on the retirement of Sir Anthony Blunt, he afterwards served as
Deputy Director for four years before becoming in 1979 Professor and
Chairman of the History of Art Department at Princeton University. In 1987
he moved to the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Harvard,
where he became Adams University Professor in 1994. He remained at Harvard
until his retirement in 2002, when he became Emeritus Professor.
This apparently unruffled career of immense academic distinction gives only
a partial picture of a complex man. From an army background John Kinder
Gowran Shearman was educated at St Edmund's School, Hindhead, and at Felsted
School. At the Courtauld Institute, he was a marvellous teacher of
undergraduates and a lecturer, at his best, of electrifying intensity. He
could be a devoted, almost paternal supervisor, but was less at ease with
postgraduates, then a much rarer breed in England, and he could at times be
a prickly and defensive colleague. But always he was a man of enormous
instinctive intellectual generosity.
Part of his year was always spent sailing: he was a member of the Bembridge
Club, and there he could be a formidably and joyously competitive sailor.
His recent Festschrift is aptly named Turning About (2002). He was a
passionate music-lover throughout his life, and could discuss it
illuminatingly.
His early career at the Courtauld Institute coincided with that of another
wunderkind, John White - together they were early to write an important
paper on Raphael's tapestries and their cartoons for the Art Bulletin
(1958) - work which later Shearman partially disowned as "too rigid an
analysis of appearances", when in he wrote his definitive account of the
tapestries and Raphael's cartoons (Raphael's Cartoons in the Collection of
Her Majesty the Queen and the Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, 1972), and
as he became less confident of definitive solutions.
It was a period which saw the professionalisation of the History of Art in
England, the expansion of the Courtauld Institute and the pervasive spread
of its influence in universities and museums. Apart from the lasting impact
of his teacher Johannes Wilde, the presence of great émigré scholars in
London like Rudolf Wittkower, whose lectures on Italian architecture he
heard as an undergraduate, deeply stimulated his interest. The work of Ernst
Gombrich, and particularly his Art and Illusion (1960) was, he declared,
always at the back of his mind.
Shearman's doctoral thesis was soberly entitled "Developments in the use of
Colour in Tuscan Paintings of the Early 16th Century" (1957). It was a
subject almost wholly neglected in England, although very important work on
the topic had already been done by such eminent German scholars as Theodor
Hetzer and Wolfgang Schöne. The thesis still remains unpublished, but it
none the less had an incalculable effect on generations of scholars. Some
parts of it resurfaced in seminal articles such as "Leonardo's colour and
chiaroscuro" in the Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte (1962).
Shearman's first monograph was on Andrea del Sarto, a painter who he felt
passionately had been underestimated by the current standard histories of
Florentine art. It appeared in 1965, two years after the appearance of
another monograph on Sarto by the Harvard-based art historian Sydney
Freedberg, who remained a life-long friend. In the following year the
devastating Florence flood took enormous emotional and physical toll. He
rushed out to the stricken city to help in the rescue efforts, and the
short-term effect of that experience on him was shattering, not dissimilar
indeed to the impact on the great German student of Gothic sculpture Wilhelm
Vöge, of the shelling of his beloved Reims cathedral by his countrymen in
1914.
His book Mannerism appeared nevertheless in 1967. The fundamental themes of
this epoch-making book had been trailed in an austerely titled paper
"Maniera as an Aesthetic Ideal" delivered at the 20th International Congress
of the History of Art held at Princeton in 1961. As Shearman breezily
remarked in the opening page of the first edition, it was confusion about
the meaning of the term which provoked him to write the book, and also the
then prevalent position that Mannerism did not even exist as a phenomenon.
For him its proper definition was a problem of method. The resultant book
was as stylish as the style it described. Even now, when Mannerism has gone
through many editions, and one can sense its impact subsiding, the change it
wrought upon perceptions of the art of the early 16th century and the
break-up of the High Renaissance moment of equilibrium remains profound.
Two luminous publications which grew out of this creative engagement with
Mannerism were the Charlton Lecture at Newcastle University on "Pontormo's
Altarpiece in S. Felicità" (1971), where the corpse of the Saviour is
lowered to the tomb by a group of eerily distraught mourners as the Virgin
bids farewell, and the article on the equally moving Dead Christ supported
by Angels by Pontormo's contemporary Rosso Fiorentino in the Boston Museum
Bulletin of 1966. Mannerism confirmed his reputation as an international
star of exceptional magnitude, as respected in Europe and the United States
as he was revered in Britain.
For Wilde the place for which a work had been painted, and the light in
which it was seen, were vital. These concerns lodged deep in Shearman's
sensibility and he developed them to new levels of subtlety and
sophistication. He delivered A.W. Mellon lectures at the National Gallery of
Art in Washington in 1988 on the theme "Only Connect . . . Art and the
Spectator in the Italian Renaissance". The opening lecture aptly
characterises the author himself - a more engaged spectator. The observer is
seen as moving from the growing awareness of his place and involvement, so
to speak "completing the plot", until finally the artist can confidently
assume the observer's complicity. It was evident that, as Shearman wrote in
his preface about the Theory of Reception (Rezeptionsgeschichte) ". . . no
other new critical technique has changed my thinking as much".
Shearman was greatly concerned about degrees of access in specific artistic
situations. However, his beholder is an ideal beholder - at times perilously
similar to the late 20th-century art-historian produced by the Courtauld
Institute - a construct helping us discern the work's expected reception.
But this approach rarely considers a plurality of views or of viewers.
Shearman's painters and indeed his own reconstructions seem at times to
exist in a somewhat sanitised space, remote from the cacophony of competing
claims on the visitor's attention which surely constituted the reality of
the late medieval or early Renaissance church interior. That the work of art
and its spectator might be reciprocally interpreting entities was hardly
considered.
One book project which will not now see the light of day is the volume
originally planned as part of the Pelican History of Art on Quattrocento
painting in Italy. Shearman kept a lively interest in the Quattrocento
throughout his career. His writings included a brilliantly original taxonomy
of the placement in the painted church of Piero della Francesca's Brera
Madonna (1968). The substantial Catalogue of The Early Italian Paintings in
the Collection of Her Majesty The Queen (1983) contains what is still the
best single sustained piece of writing on a painting by Gentile da Fabriano.
Shearman maintained a long-standing (and surely justified) scepticism about
the usefulness of the term "International Gothic" when applied to sculptors
and artists such as Ghiberti and Lorenzo Monaco, and one of his last
publications concerned the identity of the mysterious collaborator of
Gherardo Starnina, the early 15th-century Florentine painter active in
Valencia and Toledo. His extraordinarily creative attempt (1966) to
reconstruct Masaccio's path-breaking altarpiece painted for the chapel of a
conservative local notary Ser Giuliano degli Scarsi in the Carmelite church
at Pisa in 1426 has resonated until the present day, and in a collaborative
effort between the Opificio delle Pietre Dure at Florence and the National
Gallery in London scholars are still wrestling with the consequences of that
explosive interpretation.
But Raphael lay at the core of his life's work. John Shearman was in some
sense always preparing himself to write the definitive work on Raphael. He
wished above all to elucidate the painter's profound sense of purpose and
his extraordinary intellectual agility. To the often mesmerised
undergraduates at the Courtauld he was giving a series of 10 lectures
devoted to Raphael in the early 1960s. A number of seminal articles
followed, all of which changed fundamentally the acepted view of that
protean artist. They ranged from the brilliant investigation of the
decoration of the Chapel of the Sienese banker Agostino Chigi in Santa Maria
del Popolo in Rome (1961) to subsequent meditations on clouds in Raphael and
Correggio (1984).
With two works of the early 1970s the level of concentration once again
deepened. First came the British Academy Italian Lecture (1971) "The Vatican
Stanze : functions and decoration", which in its published format had 20
pages of text buttressed by 34 pages of occasionally lethal footnotes. In
Raphael's Cartoons in the Collection of her Majesty the Queen and the
Tapestries for the Sistine Chapel, 1972, an idiosyncratic part of the
programme for cataloguing the Royal Collections developed by Anthony Blunt,
a marked change of approach can be discerned. He became more of a historian,
and the focus shifted permanently towards Rome.
Shearman increasingly did not believe in clean breaks with the past. The
book has a curious format, with the voluminous notes assembled around the
page margins, giving it the appearance of some great medieval glossator's
manuscript. He now concentrated less on how Raphael drew and more on what
brought the drawings into being, and why they now appear to us as they do.
But the great work of synthesis of which perhaps he alone was capable will
not now be written.
Most fortunately, however, the majestic series of documents which he
assembled over the last decades on Raphael and his works, will shortly be
published by the Bibliotheca Hertziana under the auspices of the
Max-Planck-Gesellschaft. This in itself constitutes a towering achievement,
running to some 2,000 pages in proof. Raphael will be documented as no other
artist of the High Renaissance, and the book will assuredly provide John
Shearman with a permanent monument. He influenced the development of art
history in Britain and abroad as did few others : his loss, still at the
height of his powers, is irreparable.
Julian Gardner