Rudolf Wittkower (22 June 1901 – 11 October 1971) was a British art historian specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture, who spent much of his career in London, but was educated in Germany, and later moved to the United States. Despite having a British father who stayed in Germany after his studies, he was born and raised in Berlin.[1][2]
Early life
Wittkower was born in Berlin to Henry Wittkower (1865–1942) and Gertrude Ansbach (Wittkower) (1876–1965).[1] His siblings were Kate Wittkower (1900-1968), Werner Joseph Wittkower (1903-1997), and Elly Friedmann (1912-1988).[3]
Among Wittkower's books were monographs on Bernini and Michelangelo, volumes in standard textbook series, and more individual subjects such as his Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism, "his most significant book".[1] This introduced an in depth analysis of the Venetian architectAndrea Palladio and his relation to sixteenth century music theory. Part Four specifically deals with how and why Palladio adapted harmonic musical ratios and incorporated them into the physical proportions of his buildings. Although this theory of Palladian proportions was universally accepted after the book's release, recent works in art history have made it the subject of much controversy. Wittkower had encountered this notion that musical harmony may act in a manner analogous to visual harmony in Pythagoras, where it was also noted by Alberti.[5]
^Wittkower, Rudolf (1940). "Alberti's Approach to Antiquity in Architecture". Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 4 (1/2: Oct., 1940 – Jan., 1941). London: Warburg Institute: 1–18. doi:10.2307/750120. JSTOR750120. S2CID195049595.
Henry Millon, “Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism: Its Influence on the Development and Interpretation of Modern Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 31, no. 2 (1972): 83–91.
J. S. Ackerman, “Rudolf Wittkower’s Influence on the History of Architecture,” Source 8, no. 4, and 9, no. 1 (Summer/Fall 1989): 87–90.
J. Montagu and J. Connors, “Rudolf Wittkower, 1901–1971,” in Art and Architecture in Italy 1600–1750 by R. Wittkower (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 1:ixff.
U. Wendland, “Rudolf Wittkower,” Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil (Munich: Saur, 1999), 779–90.
Alina Payne, Rudolf Wittkower, 1994 and 2008; traduzione di Francesco Peri, Rudolf Wittkower, Torino, Bollati Boringhieri, 2011.
Daniel Sherer, "Panofsky on Architecture: Iconology and the Interpretation of Built Form, 1915-1956," Part I, History of Humanities 5 (2019), 189ff: section 1: "Panofsky vs. Wittkower: Independence and Interdependence of Architecture in the Aesthetic Field."