17 Facts About Ernst Kitzinger

Ernst Kitzinger FBA was a German-American historian of late antique, early medieval, and Byzantine art.

Ernst Kitzinger entered the University of Munich in 1931, where he studied the history of art, principally under Wilhelm Pinder.

Ernst Kitzinger accordingly completed his dissertation, a brief but influential study of Roman painting in the 7th and 8th centuries, with exceptional speed, and defended it in the fall of 1934.

Ernst Kitzinger left Germany the day after his thesis defense.

Ernst Kitzinger first returned to Rome, before moving on to England, where he found volunteer employment at the British Museum while eking out a living doing casual academic work, writing book reviews, and receiving the occasional small grant.

Ernst Kitzinger's first published article was on Anglo-Saxon vinescroll ornament; he contributed to the assessment of the treasures of the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial as it was unearthed over months in 1939.

Ostensibly a guidebook, this was in fact an attempt to trace the transformation of classical art into medieval, a subject which Ernst Kitzinger would revisit on many occasions throughout his career.

Ernst Kitzinger was transported to Australia in a perilous and fraught sea voyage on HMT Dunera.

Ernst Kitzinger did succeed in putting the time on the voyage and in the camp to valuable use, though, acquiring a working knowledge of Russian from a fellow internee.

In 1941 Ernst Kitzinger managed, with some difficulty, to travel to Washington, DC, where he became a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, which had in 1940 been donated as a research library to Harvard University.

Once there, Ernst Kitzinger was assigned by Wilhelm Koehler to a systematic study of the Byzantine monuments of the Balkans.

Several years later, after a wartime stint with the OSS in Washington, London, and eventually Paris, Ernst Kitzinger began work on a complete survey of the mosaics of Norman Sicily.

Ernst Kitzinger resigned as director of studies at Dumbarton Oaks in 1966, in part to rebalance his work as a scholar after eleven years of heavy administrative duties.

Ernst Kitzinger maintained his lifelong preoccupation with the analysis of style change in late antique and early medieval art, and his conviction that stylistic analysis could speak with an authority equal to that of iconography or textual history.

The totality of Ernst Kitzinger's work was enormously influential in making Byzantine art a field of art historical study.

In 1944, Ernst Kitzinger married Margaret Susan Theobald, an English artist, whom he met through Otto Demus in 1939.

Ernst Kitzinger died in Poughkeepsie, New York in 2003, at age 90.