Adolf Furtwängler
Adolf Furtwängler , born the June 30th 1853 with Freiburg-in-Brisgau, dead the October 10th 1907 with Athens, is a archeologist and historian of German art . He is the father of the Leader Wilhelm Furtwängler and of the mathematician Philipp Furtwängler.
Biography
Born with Freiburg-in-Brisgau, Furtwängler initially made there its studies. He continues them with Leipzig and Munich, where he becomes the pupil of Heinrich Brunn, of which he develops the method of comparative criticism. He takes share in the excavation campaign carried out in 1878 by the German archaeological Institute to Olympie. In 1880, it takes a station of assistant to the museum of Berlin. Four years later, it obtains a pulpit with Berlin then Munich. Its last excavations take place with Égine.
Work
Furtwängler is one of the first archeologists to have recognized the interest of the ceramics shards as regards chronology, whereas they were regarded before as waste. Constant the recurrence of the same type of pottery in the same layer, Furtwängler uses them like elements of dating of a site. Mykenische Vasen ( Vases mycéniens ), published jointly with Georg Loeschcke in 1891, exhaustive publication of the potteries mycéniennes discovered on the island of Égine, constitutes thus not only one invaluable chronology but also the first corpus published of potteries in the history of archeology.
Its reconstitutions of the Athéna Lemnia of Phidias, in 1891, are greeted by the specialists, before causing the polemic. They are preserved at the Albertinum Dresden.
Furtwängler is a prolific author, endowed with an extraordinary memory and knowledge, as well as a perspicacious and sure critic, whose work dominated archaeological criticism a long time. Among his principal work, one can quote a volume on the bronzes discovered with Olympie, of the works on the glyptique one and ceramics Greek and especially the Meisterwerke DER griechischen Plastik ( Chefs-d'oeuvre of the Greek sculpture ), published in Berlin and Leipzig in 1893.