Linda Murray, Renaissance scholar
marilyn...@aol.com
November 19, 2004
Linda Murray
Scholar who, with her husband, made the art of the Renaissance
accessible in a series of bestselling books
LINDA MURRAY was unrivalled in her ability to explain art history to
the general reader. She enjoyed a long and successful literary
partnership with her husband Peter, and they collaborated on the
writing of such enduringly popular works as the Penguin Dictionary of
Art and Artists (1959), still in print and in its seventh edition, and
The Art of the Renaissance (1963), in Thames and Hudson's World of
Art Library. She was also a superb lecturer, totally in command of her
text, her slides and herself.
Linda Bramley was born at Herne Bay, Kent, in 1913. As the daughter of
an exporter, she had a peripatetic childhood. Unable to stand the
separation involved in boarding school, she travelled with her parents,
occasionally joining a school for a term but mostly studying at home
with her mother, Hélène Marie Blanche Manso di Villa.
She had French from birth and then picked up Spanish and Italian; but
her father didn't do business in Germany, so German had to wait.
Along with the languages, she picked up illnesses - in the course of
her life she underwent to fewer than 26 operations for different
ailments.
As a young woman she studied painting at the Académie Royale des
Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Later she acknowledged that her experience as a
practitioner had been invaluable to her work as an art historian.
During the war she worked as a civilian with the US High Command in
London, which she described as "a marvellous life".
She became an expert draughtswoman who could draw maps indicating the
aftermath of bombing raids all over Europe. Later in the war she worked
in intelligence, on Eisenhower's staff. In 1944 she was asked to
write an account of the operations in which she had been involved. When
she pointed out to her American officers that she would have to include
the negative as well as the positive side of the story, she was shown
the door.
After the war she studied at the Courtauld Institute. The other two
recruits in her group were Peter Murray from Aberdeen and Oliver (later
Sir Oliver) Miller. She and Peter married in 1947. They had no children
and much of her creative energy went into writing and teaching, in
London University's department of extramural studies, from 1949 to
1979. Her teaching ranged widely and included medieval architecture.
Her tours of Gothic cathedrals were legendary. Typically, when a
colleague was immobilised by an attack of vertigo on a particularly
tricky crossing, high above the floor of a cathedral nave, it was
Murray who coaxed him to safety on hands and knees. She was equally
fearless when driving fast cars and passed various police driving
tests. Senior colleagues who tried to bully her soon learnt the error
of their ways.
She never turned down an invitation to lecture and would go anywhere in
the country. This was often tedious and poorly paid work, but it
carried the history of art to some out-of-the-way places. She loved the
challenge of making the subject popular and accessible.
It was in this spirit that she collaborated with Peter on the
Dictionary of Art and Artists. Dividing the entries between them, they
would read and correct each other's drafts, repeating the process
until often they could not remember who had first drafted an article.
Like the dictionary, the famous Art of the Renaissance was written
collaboratively. Those close to them would be set the test of guessing
which of them had written which sections - most failed the test.
Linda Murray believed that no self-respecting art historian could
operate without at least three modern languages, and her solo
publications included a number of translations. There was also a little
known but excellent novel, The Dark Fire (1977), based on the life of
Caravaggio and published only in America. Why no British publisher
wanted it is still a mystery.
It is above all as a Renaissance scholar that she will be remembered.
Her Michelangelo: His Life, Work and Times appeared in 1984, and she
contributed further volumes to the Thames and Hudson series: The High
Renaissance (1967), The Late Renaissance and Mannerism (1967) and
Michelangelo (1980).
In her heyday, in the late 1960s and 1970s, she lectured frequently and
published prolifically while also renovating a handsome house in
Dulwich and delighting her guests with cordon bleu food and excellent
wines. On Peter's retirement in 1980, they moved to the village of
Farnborough, near Banbury. Gravitating from the London Oratory towards
the Oxford Oratory, they also enjoyed evensong at the village church
next door to their former rectory.
After Peter's sudden death in 1992, she soldiered on with their last
joint book, The Oxford Companion to Christian Art and Architecture
(1996). In the preface they explained the need for such a book. One of
them, standing in front of Piero della Francesca's Baptism of Christ,
overheard someone ask his companion: "What's the pigeon for?" The
other capped it with the English couple in front of Leonardo's Last
Supper in Milan who agreed that they didn't understand the painting,
but that the figures "seemed to be having some sort of a meal".
Having moved to Woodstock and completed the Companion, Linda Murray
established the Murray Bequest to Birkbeck College, where Peter had
been Professor of Art History. It pleased her that their books,
including a fine collection on the Renaissance, were housed in
Birkbeck's library. Other consolations of a difficult widowhood in
Woodstock and Oaken Holt House at Farmoor included Sunday Mass at the
Oxford Oratory, regular outings to decent restaurants and a stock of
good wine.
Linda Murray, art historian, was born on October 31, 1913. She died on
November 12, 2004, aged 91.