Abstract
In 1875, Lorentz Dietrichson was called to a chair in the history of art in Kristiania (Oslo), the first professorship established for this discipline in Norway. With boundless energy he laid the groundwork for a distinguished tradition of academic studies of art in this country, and worked for the establishment of organizations and museums for the advancement of artistic culture. He wrote the first large survey on the history of Norwegian art and published pioneering books on Norwegian medieval architecture and ornament. Foremost among the latter ranks his 1892 monograph on the Norwegian stave churches, which with its solid documentation of the surviving specimens of this unique architectural category, supplemented by the available information on those which were lost over the centuries, is still regarded as the fundament for all studies on the matter. Dietrichson was a prolific writer of popular articles and essays, and as a lecturer he became famous for his precious language and for his exquisite and ‘soulful’ interpretations of art works. However, the easiness with which enlightened judgements on art flowed from his lips and pen should not mislead us to doubt the seriousness he brought to his scholarly efforts or his involvement in the improvement of the instruments of research. He and the scholars from his generation moved the art of describing art objects towards a higher level of precision. Late in life he witnessed the rise of the new tool, photography, as an auxiliary in the study of images and their meaning. It brought comparison, the methodical key to advanced iconographic study, to new heights of exactness. Most of Dietrichson’s research, however, took place in the period before this means became fully available. His never-ending hunt for his material, which he sought in uncharted collections spread over many countries, and the problems he met in providing illustrations of it, is the theme of this essay. These are forgotten pages in the annals of Norwegian archaeological research.
Highlights
To start this survey with Dietrichson’s work on classical portraiture, will seem, for an art historian, to attack the matter from the wrong end.1 Still, it is from his descriptions of the toil suffered in the collecting of the objects pertaining to Antinous that we get the best idea of what it took to bring together facts and pictures on an artistic matter
Work on a general ‘Iconography of the Roman Emperors’ was in the coming in the latter half of the nineteenth century, when the task of cataloguing the contents of the large European collections of classical art began under new and heightened principles of scholarly acumen
The ideals of empirical perfectionism which are perceptible here no doubt sprang from German archaeological scholarship, a discipline with which Dietrichson had become acquainted during his study years at the European universities, and which in the last part of the nineteenth century had become the leading school in the charting of the relicts from the past
Summary
To start this survey with Dietrichson’s work on classical portraiture, will seem, for an art historian, to attack the matter from the wrong end.1 Still, it is from his descriptions of the toil suffered in the collecting of the objects pertaining to Antinous that we get the best idea of what it took to bring together facts and pictures on an artistic matter.
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