Klara Steinweg (1903–1972) was a German art historian, specializing in the
Italian Renaissance
The Italian Renaissance ( it, Rinascimento ) was a period in Italian history covering the 15th and 16th centuries. The period is known for the initial development of the broader Renaissance culture that spread across Europe and marked the trans ...
.
She was a collaborator with
Richard Offner on the ''Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting'', from 1930 to 1965.
Biography
Klara Steinweg was born on 18 May 1903 in
Westphalia
Westphalia (; german: Westfalen ; nds, Westfalen ) is a region of northwestern Germany and one of the three historic parts of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia. It has an area of and 7.9 million inhabitants.
The territory of the regio ...
,
Germany
Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...
.
She started her studies in 1922 under
Heinrich Wölfflin
Heinrich Wölfflin (; 21 June 1864 – 19 July 1945) was a Swiss art historian, esthetician and educator, whose objective classifying principles ("painterly" vs. "linear" and the like) were influential in the development of formal analysis in a ...
in
Munich
Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the States of Germany, German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the List of cities in Germany by popu ...
, and later with
Adolph Goldschmidt
Adolph Goldschmidt (15 January 1863 – 5 January 1944) was a Jewish German art historian. He taught at University of Berlin from 1892 to 1903, and University of Halle from 1904 to 1912.
Biography
He was born on 15 January 1863 in Hamburg, Ge ...
at the
University of Berlin
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...
.
By 1925, she was in
Göttingen
Göttingen (, , ; nds, Chöttingen) is a college town, university city in Lower Saxony, central Germany, the Capital (political), capital of Göttingen (district), the eponymous district. The River Leine runs through it. At the end of 2019, t ...
working on writing her dissertation on
Andrea Orcagna
Andrea di Cione di Arcangelo (c. 1308 – 25 August 1368), better known as Orcagna, was an Italian painter, sculptor, and architect active in Florence. He worked as a consultant at the Florence Cathedral and supervised the construction of the fa ...
under , which was published in 1929.
In 1930, she became an assistant to Richard Offner and moved to Berlin.
She started her work on volume 4 of the book series ''Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting''. In 1935, she moved to Florence to continue her work with Offner. With the outbreak of
World War II
World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...
(in 1939), where she remained until the end of the war, and she continued to work almost exclusively on the Offner project until 1965. She lived in Florence until her death in 1972.
Richard Offner died on 26 August 1965 in Florence, aged 76. His project then moved to the
Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz
The Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz (KHI) is one of the oldest research institutions dedicated to the history of art and architecture in Italy, where facets of European, Mediterranean and global history are investigated.
Founded in 1897 by ...
, where Steinweg was appointed a co-author of the work.
Miklós Boskovits and Mina Gregori continued the project work.
Steinweg died on 10 June 1972, aged 69, in
Meerbusch, Rhein-Kreis Neuss, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
See also
*
Women in the art history field
Women were professionally active in the academic discipline of art history in the nineteenth century and participated in the important shift early in the century that began involving an "emphatically corporeal visual subject", with Vernon Lee as a ...
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Steinweg, Klara
1903 births
1972 deaths
Women art historians
German art historians