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July 2016

Vol. 158 / No. 1360

Obituary: Charles Davis (1939–2015)

By Dorothea Diemer

CHARLES DAVIS DIED in Munich on 26th October 2015. He was born in Burlington, North Carolina, on 19th October 1939 and in 1973 he received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; his dissertation was entitled ‘Studies in the Sculpture of Bartolomeo Ammannati’. He began his research in Florence in 1968, and from 1969 to 1971, with a Fellowship from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, continued his studies on Italian sculpture at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. This focus, and his research in Florence during these years, became the foundation upon which his later studies dedicated to Italian cinquecento sculpture, painting and architecture rest.

 

It seems characteristic that as early as 1969, Davis wrote a critical review of a book by Mazzino Fossi on Ammannati’s architecture (of Architectural Historians 28 (1969), pp.302–05); throughout his life he understood his role to be that of an interlocutor, an attentive and critical companion and a commentator. Thoroughly informed, and with a knowledge of cinquecento texts, he accommodated Ammannati’s architecture within the wider framework of ‘Mannerism’ in this review, which advanced the argument. Several well-regarded articles, including one on the colossal statue of Hercules for Marco Mantova Benavides in Padua (Psicon 3 (1976), pp.33–47) and another on the tomb of Mario Nari (Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 21 (1977), 1, pp.69–94) were developed from his dissertation.

 

Davis wrote a number of contributions on the great artists of the sixteenth century – the results of his own research as well as reports and reviews – including several for this Magazine. They treat Michelangelo, Benvenuto Cellini, Giorgio Vasari, Jacopo Sansovino, Sebastiano del Piombo, Titian, Alessandro Vittoria, Giulio Romano, Giovan Francesco Rustici, Niccolò Tribolo, Vincenzo Scamozzi, Valerio Belli, Tullio Lombardo and Vincenzo Danti. Davis was also involved in the planning of several exhibitions, which provided the impetus for him to write monographic treatments of artistic personalities, always adding something new or critical. Thus he drafted the concept for the exhibition on Giorgio Vasari held in Arezzo (1981) which, for the first time, devoted as much consideration to Vasari the writer as to Vasari the artist. Over the years Vasari became one of Davis’s major concerns to which he constantly returned. Perhaps his most significant contribution in later years was to the exhibition on Vincenzo Danti held at the Bargello in Florence (2008). By tracing the sculptor’s creative process from disegno to the finished work, he was able to elucidate an understanding of the artist’s train of thought and explain the singularity of Danti’s reliefs. A further achievement was his linking Danti’s monumental Madonna in S. Croce with the tomb of Benedetto Varchi.

 

Charles Davis lived and worked in Florence, Venice and Munich. Geographical and linguistic flexibiliy permitted him to take an objective view of the research traditions and limitations within his various cities, and also of their social environment.

 

This is clear in his review of the Giulio Romano exhibition held in Mantua in 1991 (Kunstchronik 44 (1991), pp.72–83) as well as in the report ‘Tendenzen und Perspektiven deutscher Italienforschung vom Ausland her gesehen’ (Kunstchronik 40 (1987), pp.195–96). Friends often profited from Davis’s wonderfully precise and nuanced language when he turned their lectures – sometimes written in awkward English – into accomplished texts. Friendships were important to him and he endeavoured to maintain them even if, on occasion, those he reviewed severely may not have suspected it.

 

The basis of many of Davis’s iconographic discoveries lay in his wide-ranging knowledge of the source literature, evident, for example, in his identification of the theme of Danti’s bronze sportello in the Bargello in the exhibition catalogue. His writings were distinguished by an understanding of Italian culture and language that went beyond the purely art historical and showed a familiarity with the everyday environment, with wordplay and double-meanings, and equally with the knowledge of antiquity in the Renaissance.

 

In recent years art-historical and theoretical texts have engaged his interests; he edited numerous well-known texts as well as some sources that were virtually inaccessible. Together with his wife, Margaret Daly Davis, and Ulrich Pfisterer he founded the internet platform FONTES Sources and Documents for the History of Art 1350–1750, a constantly growing critical reformulation of Julius von Schlosser’s Kunstliteratur of 1924. To date it contains about eighty-five texts and sources of which some thirty-six were critically edited by Davis, with commentaries, ranging in subjects from Michelangelo to Hogarth. His interest in works of art as well as in the relevant literature extended beyond his own fields of research. Thus he wrote on topics such as the Byzantine Madonna reliefs in S. Marco, Venice, and other Byzantine reliefs on the Adriatic coastline, asking new questions of the many objects which he examined

 

Davis also contributed to arthistoricum.net blog: the blog was a medium that particularly suited him in which he could freely communicate both his delights and concerns, raising questions on cultural and institutional policies. He wrote articles on comic strips, on the on-line catalogue of drawings in the British Museum, on the Vasari year of 2011, on plagiarism by a German politician, on sources and documents for Michelangelo and on the consequences of the sale of the Fondaco de’ Tedeschi in Venice to the clothes company Benetton. He also wrote about the art market, observing its fluctuations and fashions, but never participated in it. The blog facilitated his open approach to discussion. In a book review (Seeing slaves, Warburgiana, 2012) one finds harsh words for the German Wissenschaftsrat, which took it upon itself to prescribe to the Herzog August-Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel the direction of research the renowned library should take. In an internet commentary on the events surrounding a spurious edition of Galileo’s Sidereus Nuncius in 2014, Davis considered the limited impact of German research because of the language barrier and noted the lack of attention to literature in the English language often found in German universities, rooted seemingly in vanity and a certain self-referential detachment. A German art historian might not have written of this, nor perhaps have been capable of doing so. In his last years, when in Munich, he often visited the Alte and the Neue Pinakothek, and studied Friedrich Overbeck’s portrait of Vittoria Caldoni so profoundly that he was able to provide a new and convincing interpretation in a blog.

 

Davis did not collect works of art in the usual sense, and the status of a work of art was not important to him, but he took great joy in the acquisition of the unrecognised and derived enormous pleasure from having abstract, often witty and unconventional objects around him, some of which he created himself.

 

Several manuscripts were left unfinished at Davis’s death, including a review of a monograph on Pietro Candido and an article on Sebastien Bourdon and French art theory in the seventeenth century. Other topics discussed in internet reports, for example his interpretation of Giambologna’s relief for Prince Francesco de’ Medici (blog.arthistoricum.net 2015), may still be developed. It is to be hoped that these manuscripts will see the light of day.