Ernst Kitzinger and the Making of Medieval Art History

Book excerpt: The essays collected in this volume publish the proceedings of a colloquium held at the Warburg Institute on 11 January 2013 to mark the 100th anniversary of the birth of Ernst Kitzinger. His work has been, and still is, fundamentally influential on the present-day discipline of art history in a wide range of topics. He pioneered the study of iconoclasm, of Anglo-Saxon art in relation to the art of the Mediterranean, of the manipulation of Byzantine artistic forms by the rulers of Norman Sicily and of the functions and meanings of ornament in media such as textiles and architectural sculpture. The first half of the book is primarily biographical, with papers covering his extraordinary career, which began in Germany, Italy and England in the tumultuous years preceding World War II, before leading to internment in Australia and, eventually, to America. He developed a major centre for the study of Byzantium at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington DC and, in the years before his retirement, taught a new generation of students at Harvard. The second half of the book is devoted to assessments of Kitzinger's scholarship, including his concern with the theory of style, with the early medieval art of Britain and Continental Europe, with the art of Norman Sicily and with the sources and impact of iconoclasm in the East. The authors describe his pioneering contributions to the field of medieval art history and assess their impact on, and relevance to, the concerns of contemporary scholarship.