James Ackerman (1919–2016)

Abstract

James Sloss Ackerman, author of two of the most influential books on Renaissance architecture in the English language, The Architecture of Michelangelo (1961) and Palladio (1966), died in the last hours of 2016.1 He was ninety-seven years old and had been active as an art historian since 1949, publishing his last book in the fall of 2016.2 He was a student of Richard Krautheimer, Erwin Panofsky, and Karl Lehman at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts and came to be thought of as the living link to the generation of German emigres who founded modern American art history. It was an honor he earned by his own considerable achievement, much of which aimed to push the profession beyond the lessons of his teachers.3 Figure 1 James Ackerman (photo courtesy of Bill Burke). Ackerman came from an affluent German Jewish family that settled in San Francisco during the California gold rush of the mid-nineteenth century. His interest in art was nurtured by his mother, an amateur potter and patron of local artists, and by the instruction in fine arts that he received in the prep school to which he was sent. At Yale he wrote a senior thesis on abstraction in Paleolithic painting. It was rejected for honors by the department, but, as the inscription in a book he received from visiting professor Henri Focillon put it, he was encouraged to “remain faithful to our studies for which you are so well suited.” He went to the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU in 1942 to study classical sculpture, but within a year he was in the army. Ackerman served in a mobile intelligence unit in Africa and Italy that decoded intercepted communications and traveled in the wake of the Allied front.4 It was this experience that oriented …