Ernst Kitzinger

Influential historian of Byzantine art

Ernst Kitzinger, art historian: born Munich, Germany 27 December 1912; Junior Fellow and Fellow, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington 1941-46, Assistant Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology 1946-51, Associate Professor 1951-56, Professor 1956-67, Director of Studies 1955-66; Arthur Kingsley Porter University Professor, Harvard University 1967-79 (Emeritus); Slade Professor of Fine Art, Cambridge University 1974-75; married 1944 Susan Theobald (died 2000; two sons, one daughter); died Poughkeepsie, New York 22 January 2003.

Ernst Kitzinger, the great historian of Byzantine art, was the last survivor of a prodigiously gifted group of German art historians, which included Richard Krautheimer, Erwin Panofsky and Kurt Weitzmann, whose working life was predominantly spent in the United States.

The son of the Munich lawyer Dr Wilhelm Kitzinger and his wife Elisabeth, Ernst Kitzinger was born in 1912. He studied first at the Max-Gymnasium in Munich and subsequently, between 1931 and 1934, Archaeology, History of Art and Philosophy at Munich University, where he counted among his teachers the classical art historian Ernst Buschor and Wilhelm Pinder, a dominating scholar who strove to emphasise the fundamental Germanic qualities of medieval art.

Kitzinger never worked on German painting or sculpture – Pinder's great field. But it was Pinder, as supervisor, who saw him through his doctorate at the blazingly precocious age of 21 on 29 November 1934. The doctoral thesis analysed Roman painting from the early seventh to the middle of the eighth century. Barely 40 pages in length, its influence on subsequent study of medieval art in Rome was incalculable. It depicted Roman painting as both creative in itself, whilst subject to influences from the Eastern Mediterranean, so persuasively as to constitute a powerful counter- argument to the prevailing orthodoxy of a hegemonic "Alexandrian" style.

Two years after the Nazi seizure of power Kitzinger left Germany. It was, as Krautheimer later remarked, already abundantly clear that there was no place for Jews in the new German academy. Kitzinger emigrated first to Italy, where he studied briefly with the Italian art historian Pietro Toesca in Rome, and subsequently to England, where between 1935 and 1940 he worked in the Department of British and Mediaeval Antiquities at the British Museum under the sympathetic Keeper T.D. Kendrick. Here he produced the seminal brief guide Early Mediaeval Antiquities in the British Museum (1940).

While others of the great émigré generation of art went directly to America, Kitzinger's London sojourn nurtured a love of England: Oxford was the chosen place of his initial retirement. His years at the British Museum, where he worked on the silver objects unearthed in 1939 at the great ship-burial of Sutton Hoo in Suffolk, and Coptic sculpture, developed his gifts for subtle analysis of the stylistic characteristics of objects, and refined a prose style of marmoreal concision.

In 1941 he was on the move again, reaching the United States via Australia, learning Russian en route from a fellow internee. He reached Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC, where he came under the eagle eye of its Director, the great Carolingian manuscript scholar Wilhelm Koehler. Kitzinger was to remain at that haven in one role or another for 26 years, with a break for war service in the Office of Strategic Service between 1943 and 1945. In 1944 he married Susan Theobald, a Quaker and a painter, whose warmth and tireless enthusiasm were an immeasurable support.

The years 1950-51 were in many ways the turning point in Kitzinger's scholarly career. As a Fulbright Scholar, he worked on the Byzantine mosaics of the Norman kingdom of Sicily, an inexhaustible topic that was contemporaneously interesting the distinguished Austrian émigré Byzantinist Otto Demus. Kitzinger reviewed Demus's pioneering book The Mosaics of Norman Sicily (1950) with scrupulous fairness, and his own monograph The Mosaics of Monreale was published in 1960. It remains the standard work in the field, although he continued patiently to edit the great corpus of photographs taken of the Sicilian mosaics until his death. He became Director of Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in 1955. In 1967 he was appointed as the first A. Kingsley Porter University Professor at Harvard, where he remained until his retirement in 1979.

After his retirement the Kitzingers lived in Oxford, where the tall, awkward house in Richmond Road was always a centre of warm, deeply civilised hospitality. Ernst Kitzinger remained disappointed – and his disappointment was shared by many – that Oxford University neglected his presence. He delivered the Slade Lectures at Cambridge in 1974, and the fruit was the hugely influential Byzantine Art in the Making (1977), which traced in compelling detail the stylistic development of art in the Mediterranean between the third and seventh centuries.

He explicitly rejected as inappropriate the conventional nomenclature of Early Christian for the period – it was, he judged, inadequate to describe such towering artistic achievements as the Hagia Sophia of the emperor Justinian or the majesty of the great encaustic icons preserved at St Catherine's monastery on Mount Sinai.

Kitzinger's publications had an extraordinary impact on the field of Byzantine studies. His concept of artistic "modes", distinct styles linked to particular categories of subject matter, first used to characterise the different appearances of two angels at Santa Maria Antiqua in Rome, is still widely employed. His Munich Conference paper of 1958, "Byzantine Art in the Period Between Justinian and Iconoclasm", remains an incomparably acute taxonomy of the arts in the Mediterranean before the destruction of images.

In the preface to his collected essays, published in 1976, he articulated his intellectual starting point thus:

[M]y primary interest has always been the specifically artistic (that is, visual) aspect of the work of art. Much of my work has been concerned with processes of stylistic change and the interpretation of these processes in historical terms.

Kitzinger's insistence on the importance of artistic style has not been without its critics in Byzantine Studies. By some it has been felt to be too abstract and at times based on objects whose provenance and date were contested. He worked more in his study than in the field. But Kitzinger's scholarly range was awe-inspiring, and at his best he was marvellously persuasive in his localisations and subsequent interpretations of the material. His passing hugely impoverishes the study of medieval art and the discipline as a whole.

Julian Gardner