Kugler, Franz Theodor

Date born:  1800

Place Born:  Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland)

Date died:  1858

Place died:  Berlin, Germany

Cultural administrator for the Prussian state; wrote early survey of art history.  Kugler studied at the University of Berlin. In 1837 he published his Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei of his  Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte.

 Kugler was the first to use the term "Carolingian" as an art-historical concept in 1837 and to characterize the style of Carolingian art.  Gustav Waagen (q.v.) adopted it in 1839.   In 1843, Karl Schnaase (q.v.) wrote a second, although completely dissimilar synthetic history of art, which he dedicated to Kugler.  The second edition of Part I of Kugler's  Handbook of the History of Painting, The Italian Schools, was translated in 1851 by art writer Lady Elizabeth Rigby Eastlake (q.v.), bringing his work into cognition with the English-reading world.

Contemporary art critic; teacher of Jakob Burckhardt;  friends with Adolf Menzel and Schinkel; early work on a general history of art.  In 1845, he examined the Berlin (later Darmstadt) version of Hans Holbein's Burgomeister Meyer Madonna, now known to be the original.  His opinion came to be part of the body of critical opinion considered in the so-called "Holbein convention" held in 1871. Kugler (and Gustav Waagen q.v.) were the first to describe a characteristic style within the Romanesque art, first noted by Johann Fiorillo (q.v.), as "Ottonian art."  Kugler emphasized its the Byzantine influence and its free adaptation.

Like his contemporaries, including Gustav Heider (q.v.), Kugler wedged his art writing amid his administrative duties because the discipline was too young to make as a vocation.  Kugler's Handbuch projected a Romantic view of the Germans as the true successors of the Greeks through something Kugler termed their "organic unity" with the Greeks.  German medieval art was the honest expression of the people.  Renaissance art was viewed by Kugler as degenerate and derivative.  In the revision of his Handbuch by Jacob Burckardt (1847), Burckhardt changed the emphasis.  The Handbuch is considered one of the early art history survey texts whose theme was global.

Home Country:  Germany

Sources:  Bazin, Germain.  Histoire de l'histoire de l'art; de Vasari à nos jours.  Paris: Albin Michel, 1986, pp. 373, 530;   Metzler Kunsthistoriker Lexikon: zweihundert Porträts deutschsprachiger Autoren aus vier Jahrhunderten. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1999, pp. 228-30; Schwarzer, Mitchell.  "Origins of the Art History Survey Text."  Art Journal 54 (Fall 1995): 24; Kultermann, Udo. The History of Art History. New York: Abaris, 1993, pp. 145, 157.

Bibliography:  Handbuch der Geschichte der Malerei.  Handbuch der Kunstgeschichte. 3 vols. 1837.