George Zarnecki

Word has just reached us of the death of one of the greats of medieval art history, George Zarnecki. No obituaries yet, but a good synopsis of at least part of his contribution is found at the Corpus of Romanesque Sculpture in Britain and Ireland:

Professor Zarnecki began researching English Romanesque sculpture at the suggestion of Fritz Saxl of the Warburg Institute in 1945, resulting in his 1950 dissertation at the Courtauld Institute entitled Regional Schools of English Sculpture in the Twelfth Century. This has never been published, but his two slim but lavishly illustrated volumes English Romanesque Sculpture 1066-1140 (1951) and English Romanesque Sculpture 1140-1210 (1953) have served to introduce the subject to generations of scholars. He was responsible for the major exhibition English Romanesque Art 1066-1200 (Arts Council 1984), and his Gislebertus, Sculptor of Autun (London 1961) with photographs by Denis Grivot, set the standard for a biography of a twelfth-century sculptor. Most of his publications have been admirably short and pithy, and the best of them are collected in Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1979) and Further Studies in Romanesque Sculpture (1992).

Posted by David on September 8, 2008 2:27 PM