Bryn Mawr College Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College
History of Art Faculty Research and Scholarship History of Art
2013 Persistence and Polychronicity in Roman Churches Dale Kinney Bryn Mawr College, [email protected]
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Custom Citation Kinney, Dale. 2013. "Civis romanus. Richard Krautheimer." In S. Ebert-Schifferer with M. von Bernstorff e( ds.), 100 Jahre Bibliotheca Hertziana, Max-Planck-Institut für Kunstgeschichte. Die Geschichte des Instituts 1913-2013, Munich, Hirmer Verlag: 192-199.
This paper is posted at Scholarship, Research, and Creative Work at Bryn Mawr College. https://repository.brynmawr.edu/hart_pubs/102
For more information, please contact [email protected]. THIS IS THE ENGLISH ORIGINAL OF THE TEXT PUBLISHED IN GERMAN AS “CIVIS ROMANUS. RICHARD KRAUTHEIMER,” IN 100 JAHRE BIBLIOTHECA HERTZIANA, MAX-PLANCK-INSTITUT FÜR KUNSTGESCHICHTE. DIE GESCHICHTE DES INSTITUTS 1913-2013, ed. S. Ebert-Schifferer with M. von Bernstorff (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2013) 192- 199 (see the publication for great photos!)
RICHARD KRAUTHEIMER
Richard Krautheimer, one of the greatest art historians of the twentieth century, resided for the last 23 years of his life in an apartment in the Palazzo Zuccari.1 There he wrote four books and many articles, received former students, colleagues and distinguished guests, and mentored a new generation of scholars eager to absorb the learning of the »grand old man«.2 His legacy can be measured by his publications, including the five-volume Corpus basilicarum christianarum
Romae, the textbook Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture, and the best-selling monograph on medieval Rome, but equally by the publications of the many younger scholars who flourished and matured in his »Roman meadow« – the title of the so-called Kinderfestschrift published by some of them in what would have been his 100th year.3
Krautheimer’s biography is well known. Approaching age 90 he wrote two versions of it, in
German and in English, and its outlines were often repeated in the many appreciations published after his death in 1994.4 He was born in Fürth, Bavaria, on 6 July 1897, the first of three children of Nathan Krautheimer (d. 1910) and Martha Landmann (d. 1967).5 After completing his military service (1916–1918) he went to Munich to study law. He was soon distracted by art history and found his métier in the history of architecture, the objects of which seemed concrete, legible, contextual; both Geschichtsquelle and Kunstwerk. He wrote his Doktorarbeit for Paul
Frankl at Halle on German mendicant churches (1923).6 His Habilitation met an obstacle when an official at the university suggested that it would be better if he were not Jewish; offended, he Kinney/Krautheimer 2
went elsewhere and was habilitated at Marburg by Richard Hamann, not on the strength of the original two-volume Habilitationsschrift but for his book on medieval synagogues (1927).7 The race laws of 1933 ended his career in Germany, so he and his wife, Trude Hess, moved to Rome, and then in 1935 to the United States. They immediately mastered English – a language
Krautheimer came to love for its logical structure and resistance to »hegelianische Nebel«8 – and soon became citizens (1941). After a baptism by fire at the University of Louisville, a public university in the racially segregated South (1936–1937), Krautheimer was called to Vassar
College, an elite undergraduate women’s college near New York City with a strong tradition of art history (1937–1952) (Abb. 1).9 He also gave courses at the newly established Institute of Fine
Arts, a graduate department of New York University staffed largely by fellow emigrés.10 A formidable and charismatic teacher, he was appointed to a full-time position at the Institute in
1952 and remained there until 1971.11 Already »a star«12 in the 1940s, by the time of his retirement Krautheimer was one of the most respected and influential art historians in America.
Krautheimer made his reputation with two extraordinary articles published in 1942,
»Introduction to an ›Iconography of Medieval Architecture‹« and »The Carolingian Revival of
Early Christian Architecture«.13 The first article offered a theory of architectural content
(»iconography«), the »meaning which transcends the visual pattern of the structure«14 and yet is embodied in the visual pattern by means of numbers (dimensions, quantities of parts), function, or names that allude to other meaningful buildings. The novel concept of architectural iconography had a profound and lasting influence on the study of architectural history, not only of the middle ages but of many other eras and cultures.15 The second article reconceptualized the history of Western church architecture from its origins to the end of the middle ages by defining Kinney/Krautheimer 3
its course as a series of deliberate revivals, of which the Carolingian era saw the first. Because the ideologically-motivated object of the revival was the stadtrömische version of the early
Christian basilica associated with Constantine the Great, Rome – the Christian seat of the papacy rather than the homonymous realm of antiquity – was seen as the fountainhead of all that followed, down to the High Gothic cathedral and beyond.16
Willibald Sauerländer traced Krautheimer’s nearly lifelong fascination with Rome to his first thrilling encounter, in 1924, with the Urbildern of the mendicant churches that had been the subject of his dissertation.17 Krautheimer himself gave credit to Ernst Steinmann, who welcomed him to the Bibliotheca Hertziana and later invited him to write a handbook on early
Christian Roman churches. This became the Corpus basilicarum christianarum Romae. The
Hertziana dropped the project in 1933, but Steinmann moved to have it adopted by the Pontificio
Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana, which supported it for the next 44 years.18 Krautheimer could have left the Corpus behind when he went to America, but this evidently did not occur to him
(»man läßt so etwas nicht unfertig liegen, der buchführende Erzengel nimmt das übel«).19
Instead he returned to Rome each summer until 1938, and wrote the first fascicle in »two foreign languages« (English and Italian) at »ocean-far distance« in Louisville.20 Volumes two through four were written in New York and – whenever possible – back in Rome, where his base became the American Academy. The format was carried through consistently from volume one. The
CBCR is a reference work with entries on 78 churches built before ca. 850 A.D., in which
Krautheimer applied the »modern methods«21 of building analysis pioneered by his mentor Paul
Frankl in conjunction with the archaeological, epigraphical, historical, and graphic evidence for each church. The presentation of the results is rigorously objective, with separate itemizations of Kinney/Krautheimer 4
each category of external evidence (modern bibliography, pre-modern descriptions, pre-modern plans and views), a chronology abstracted from the available historical sources, and an extended description and analysis of the building in its current state. A synthesis of all types of evidence produces a reconstruction of the building’s original form and later modifications, followed by an assessment of its historical position. With this innovative method Krautheimer effectively reinvented the field of Roman Christian archaeology, a field 400 years old.
The CBCR is a monument of empirical research and archaeological discovery, but Krautheimer was never satisfied with only that dimension of scholarship. Simultaneously he sought other kinds of projects that stretched his historical and aesthetic imagination; one such was the monograph on Lorenzo Ghiberti written with Trude Hess in the early 1950s, another the handbook on Early Christian and Byzantine Architecture first published in 1965.22 Recognized as »a staggering achievement in scholarship«, the handbook exercised the »geradzu herkulische
Fähigkeit, ganze Provinzen der Architekturgeschichte ordnend in den Griff zu nehmen«, which
Sauerländer found already in the 28-year-old’s dissertation.23 Systematizing 1200 years of architectural history across more than 20 modern countries, Early Christian and Byzantine
Architecture is, of course, not perfect.24 With his penchant for self-critique, Krautheimer judged it »nicht mein bestes Buch« and predicted for it a short lifespan.25 Instead, the fourth edition is still in print in several languages, and it remains an indispensable resource for teachers and researchers in the field.
When he retired from the Institute of Fine Arts the fifth and most difficult volume of the Corpus, treating San Giovanni in Laterano, San Pietro in Vaticano, and San Paolo fuori le mura, Kinney/Krautheimer 5
remained to be written. Rome beckoned, and the Krautheimers accepted Wolfgang Lotz’s invitation to take an apartment in the Palazzo Zuccari. So his base of operations moved back across the Atlantic from New York to Rome, and within Rome from the Gianicolo to the Pincio, from the American Academy to the German art history institute. On the one hand this last move was obvious (»die Bücher wie die Freunde im gleichen Haus, und das in Rom, wer konnte da zögern?«26); on the other hand not at all. For emigrés who had been viciously robbed of home and family – Trude’s parents and Richard’s sister Sophie all were Holocaust victims – there was an »Abgrund ... Erlittenes, Mißtrauen, regelrechter Haß auf alles Deutsche« .27 The abyss began to be bridged already in the 1950s, however, person by person, friend by friend. Lotz was one of the early bridge-builders – a new friend in 1950 – and pre-War friendships were joyfully renewed.28 Though he initially refused to be introduced to a student of the »schwerbelasteten« former Nazi Hans Sedlmayr, a few years later Krautheimer invited that same student, Luitpold
Frommel, to dinner in his American Academy apartment (»a spontaneous gesture that none of my professors at Munich would ever have made«), thus beginning another long friendship.29
Around the same time his rapprochement with the Bibliotheca Hertziana was facilitated by the tact and sensitivity of Franz Graf Wolff Metternich.30
Once installed in the Hertziana, Krautheimer’s impact was immediate. In 1972 he and Lotz conducted a Ferienkurs über San Giovanni in Laterano, which led to an important article on the
Lateran’s medieval facade by one of the participants.31 Over the years his criticism and advice were gratefully acknowledged in a number of publications in the institute’s Jahrbuch, to which he also contributed four articles of his own.32 The first decade in Rome was exceptionally prolific, as Krautheimer completed the last volume of the Corpus (1977) and simultaneously Kinney/Krautheimer 6
wrote an entirely different kind of book, the »profile« of Rome published in 1980.33 Rome was and remains a sensation. It was soon translated into European languages, with »profile« variously rendered as »profilo«, »Schicksal«, »portrait«. No single word conveys the effect, or the author’s intention to »sketch ... Rome as a living organism« waxing and waning over one thousand years, from the inauguration of the Christian city by Constantine to its abandonment by the popes in 1308; »to outline a history of Rome ... through, rather than of, her monuments, and of changes in the map of the city«.34 This metamorphic history is visualized for the reader by
Krautheimer’s vivid verbal descriptions and the illustrations that are one of the book’s chief delights: Renaissance drawings, old maps, 19th-century photographs.
Krautheimer wrote that Rome: Profile of a City was done for »fun«.35 It is one of his most personal publications and in some respects a valedictory one, synthesizing 40 years of research for the Corpus with his own memories of the medieval city. When he first saw Rome in 1924 there were still medieval quarters in the Ghetto and the Borgo, the Foro Boario, the Suburra, and along the banks of the Tiber; Mussolini’s sventramenti, which swept them all away, were still a few years off.36 The Rome he remembered was of a different era than the one that greeted his students after the War. The book is valedictory in another respect as well. As pointed out in a review by an economic historian, it is a work of »humanistic« history, structured by the assumed influence of great individuals, ideologies and intellectual movements, and the classical past.37 In the next twenty years this approach would be overshadowed by a preference for bottom-up histories written from sociological rather than political perspectives, and by an unexpected florescence of archaeology. Focused on secular buildings rather than churches, the Kinney/Krautheimer 7
archaeological study of medieval Rome has revealed ruptures and continuities that do not always match the humanistic paradigm of lulls between ideologically driven classicizing revivals.38
Krautheimer kept working (»es hält einen jung«).39 He viewed the book on medieval Rome as an »Abschlagszahlung« on what was once imagined as a three-volume work, admittedly an impractical project for a scholar in his eighties, but he did make another payment on it with »Teil
III des dritten Bandes«, The Rome of Alexander VII.40 That accomplished, he returned to early
Christian architecture, revisiting questions that continued to intrigue him: Constantine’s church foundations, the patronage of San Paolo fuori le mura, »the sphinx of the Celian«, Santo Stefano
Rotondo.41 His viewpoints were fresh, his conclusions new – even speculative – and his energy only slightly diminished in his nineties.42 In a marvelous coda to the Corpus, an excavation in the courtyard of the Palazzo della Cancelleria confirmed that wall fragments he had glimpsed exactly fifty years earlier, in 1938, indeed were remains of the fourth-century basilica of San
Lorenzo in Damaso.43 Krautheimer visited the excavation almost daily, turning it into a
»permanent scholarly conference [convegno]« on early Christian archaeology.44 At age 94, he traveled to Bonn to present a vorläufiger Grabungsbericht at the Internationalen Kongress für christliche Archäologie, and he was working on the final publication when he died.45 At Bonn he also took part in the concluding Podiumsdiskussion, in which he genially exhorted the participants to take a more rigorous approach to historical interpretation than that employed in the papers he had heard, which tended to elide chronological and geographical distinctions
(»Jerusalem ist nicht Konstantinopel und Rom ist nicht Tyrus. Man muß das scharf auseinanderhalten.«).46
Kinney/Krautheimer 8
He demanded rigor of his students and equally of his many assistants. Accustomed to having research assistants at the Institute of Fine Arts, Krautheimer also employed them in Rome. This was not a simple matter of checking footnotes; his assistants became collaborators and interlocutors, doing original research, contributing to his analysis of the results and ultimately to the final publication (in which they were always acknowledged). For many graduate students the job became a tutorial in research methods and resources, as well as an opportunity to discuss their own research and to receive his advice.47 After his wife died in 1987, in addition to research assistants Krautheimer employed a resident student who helped maintain the daily routine. The »job description« included: »Breakfast at 7 AM ... It is prepared by the professore and is complete with Herald Tribune and the Corriere della Sera which provides fresh fodder for discussions... We tended to discuss politics and foreign policy, the Italian scandals and the stumbles of Clinton ... You [must] also ... change light bulbs, [buy] cases of wine and when dining at home prepare salad...«.48 Krautheimer’s »Gespräche at the Via Gregoriana«49 constituted a kind of ongoing seminar on life and scholarship that involved not only the resident students and research assistants, but other students and colleagues who came to his door, braving his gruff voice and demeanor in order to hone their ideas. »Seine Wohnung, sein Tisch und seine Ohren waren bis zuletzt offen«.50
The Tisch was not any Tisch. It is a special object, a stainless steel rectangle on slender tubular legs that he and Trude purchased after visiting the Bauhaus in Dessau and determining that their tastes in design were compatible.51 They soon acquired a variety of Bauhaus-inspired furnishings by such designers as Otto and Eduard Fukker in Frankfurt and Egon Eiermann.52
The furniture went with them into exile, and his American students remember the table in the Kinney/Krautheimer 9
Krautheimers’ apartment on East 86th Street, where they would be invited for dinner (and where it was overshadowed, for some, by Trude’s collection of Italian master drawings, which they were invited to examine, sometimes with a quiz on attributions).53 In 1971 the furniture traveled back to Rome, and key pieces remain there in the office of the Krautheimer Professor, including
Eiermann’s desk chair (Abb. 2). The chair is hard and enforces good posture.54
At his desk in Rome Krautheimer continued to write and to think in English, but he conversed with equal ease in nearly all the languages of his interlocutors: English, Italian, German, French.
He enjoyed being again in a German-speaking milieu, and when asked to compose a preface for the German translation of his collected essays, he made an exception and wrote it – not in the end a preface, but an autobiography – in his native tongue (he also wrote a version in English, very similar but slightly less detailed). Monitoring the translations of the essays, he sometimes transposed words and phrases »aus dem Deutsch von 1987 in das mir vertrautere Deutsch von vor 1933«.55
»Die Jahre mit Krautheimer wurden zu einer glückhaften Zeit für die Hertziana und für die römischen Kunstgeschichte«.56 It was a great time for the study of medieval Rome and Italy, and for the »humanist« kind of history that was increasingly neglected in the U.S. His death – unexpected, even at age 97 – left a silence; literally so, since no one else would dare to talk aloud, as he did, in the stacks, during lectures, and even while consulting the card catalogue, inches from the warning sign SILENTIUM; and less tangibly, the sudden absence of a unique life-force. 57 In his final departure from the second-floor apartment, some of the Mitarbeiter were honored to carry his coffin down the broad stair past files of others ranged along the steps, a sad Kinney/Krautheimer 10
but singularly privileged moment. He was buried in the cemetery for non-Catholics with his wife, under a stone inscribed civis romanus (»Roman citizen« ) (Abb. 3). Although it could have been a metaphor, the title civis romanus was a real honor bestowed upon him by the city of
Rome in April 1994, just months before he died.58 Like all of his many honors, it was unusually well deserved.59
Dale Kinney
1 I would like to thank the friends and former assistants of Richard Krautheimer who shared memories and information for this essay: Joan Barclay Lloyd, Renate Colella, Karin Einaudi, Meredith Gill, Andrew Hopkins, Hans-Rudolf Meier, John Osborne, Lee Striker, and Patricia Waddy; as well as Elizabeth Sears for sharing her knowledge of emigré scholars and Robin Schuldenfrei for her advice about the furniture. 2 »Richard Krautheimer« 1994; the books are vol. 5 of KRAUTHEIMER 1937–1977; KRAUTHEIMER 1980; KRAUTHEIMER 1983b; KRAUTHEIMER 1985. 3 KRAUTHEIMER 1937–1977; KRAUTHEIMER 1965–1986; KRAUTHEIMER 1980; Pratum romanum 1997. 4 »Anstatt eines Vorworts«, in KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 7–37; KRAUTHEIMER 1991. See also WENDLAND 1999, Bd. 1., S. 377–386. 5 On his childhood: GEMEINHARDT 2003–2004. 6 KRAUTHEIMER 1925, 2000; SCHENKLUHN 2004. 7 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 11; KUNST u. a. 2005, S. 49f .; KRAUTHEIMER 1927. 8 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 18; despite his disclaimers, he knew English well enough when he arrived: GEMEINHARDT 2003–2004, S.121f. 9 On the culture shock: MICHELS 2003. 10 EISLER 1969, S. 569–573, 584f.; SMYTH 1991. 11 KINNEY 2002b. 12 SMYTH 1991, S. 76. 13 KRAUTHEIMER 1942a, KRAUTHEIMER 1942b; KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 142–197, 198–276. 14 KRAUTHEIMER 1942a (1969), S. 131. 15 On the roots of his theory see SAUERLÄNDER 1997, S. 20; STRIKER 1997, S. 33–35; for its recent reception: CROSSLEY 1986; CROSSLEY 1988; SCHENKLUHN 1999. 16 KRAUTHEIMER 1942b (1969), S. 228; cf . SAUERLÄNDER 1997, S. 23. 17 SAUERLÄNDER 1997, S. 18. 18 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 10, 12f.; »Roma 1930« 1989, S. 49f.; GUIDOBALDI 1994, S. 464f. 19 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 22. 20 KRAUTHEIMER 1937–1977, Bd. 1., S. XVI. 21 KRAUTHEIMER 1937–1977, Bd. 1., S. XIII. 22 KRAUTHEIMER 1956; KRAUTHEIMER 1965–1986. On the Ghiberti monograph see WEIL-GARRIS BRANDT 1997. 23 KLEINBAUER 1992, S. 78; SAUERLÄNDER 1997, S. 16. 24 FELD 1995, S. 3; PESCHLOW 1995, S. 361f. 25 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 30. 26 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 31. 27 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 21f.;WENDLAND 1999, Bd. 1., S. 377, 386. 28 FELD 1995, S. 1f. Kinney/Krautheimer 11
29 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 22; FROMMEL 1997, S. 121. 30 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 22. 31 HOFFMANN 1978; siehe S. 1. 32 Acknowledgements: DAVIS-WEYER/EMERICK 1984; GÜNTHER 1984; HERKLOTZ 1985; CONNORS 1989; SCHWARZ 1989; KERSCHER 1990; POPP 1990; SCHWARZ 1991/1992; LISNER 1994. Articles: KRAUTHEIMER/JONES 1975; KRAUTHEIMER 1983a; KRAUTHEIMER 1989; KRAUTHEIMER 1994. 33 KRAUTHEIMER 1980. 34 KRAUTHEIMER 1980, S. xv. 35 KRAUTHEIMER 1980, S. xv. 36 KOSTOF 1973. 37 PARTNER 1981. 38 The archaeological approach was pioneered at the Crypta Balbi: Roma 2001; Roma 2004. 39 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 35. 40 KRAUTHEIMER 1985; KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 34. 41 KRAUTHEIMER 1989; KRAUTHEIMER 1993; KRAUTHEIMER 1994; BARCLAY LLOYD 2002; KINNEY 2002a. 42 On some questions, however, his mind was made up: DE BLAAUW 2002. 43 KRAUTHEIMER 1937–1977, Bd. 2, S. 148–151 u. Pl. IX. 44 FROMMEL 1997, S. 125. 45 KRAUTHEIMER 1995; L’antica Basilica 2009, S. 267–276; 313–327; 383–385. 46 Akten 1995, S. XLII–XLIV. 47 GILL 1995. 48 Gabriele Geier, in Pratum romanum 1997, S. 8. 49 Pratum romanum 1997, S. 10. 50 FELD 1995, S. 2. 51 Phyllis Lambert, in »In Memoriam« 1995, S. 117. 52 Patricia Waddy and Karin Einaudi, in correspondence. 53 For the drawings: Italian Master Drawings 1966. 54 th FROMMEL 1997, S. 127f. The present chair is a replica made for Krautheimer’s 90 birthday following drawings by Robert Einaudi. 55 KRAUTHEIMER 1988, S. 39. On the German of the autobiography see HAUSHERR 1997, S. 578. 56 HAUSHERR 1997, S. 578. 57 FROMMEL 1997, S. 119f., 127; on the energy and passion of his last days see Craig Hugh Smyth, in »In Memoriam« 1995, S. 120f. 58 FROMMEL 2005, S. 28. 59 For the other honors see ĆURČIĆ/STRIKER/KESSLER 1995.