Adolf Furtwängler

Adolf Furtwängler
Adolf Furtwängler
Born	June 30, 1853 Freiburg im Breisgau
Died	October 10, 1907(1907-10-10) (aged 54) Athens
Nationality	German
Fields	archaeology

Adolf Furtwängler (June 30, 1853 – October 10, 1907) was a famous German archaeologist, teacher, art historian and museum director. He was the father of the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler and grandfather of the German archaeologist Andreas Furtwängler.

Furtwängler was born at Freiburg im Breisgau, where his father was a classical scholar and schoolteacher; he was educated there, at Leipzig and at Munich, where he was a pupil of Heinrich Brunn, whose comparative method in art criticism he much developed.

After studying at the university of Leipzig, with Johannes Overbeck, and having graduated from Freiburg (1874), with a dissertation, Eros in der Vasenmalerei, he spent the academic years 1876-1878 supported by a scholarship at the German Archaeological Institute, studying in Italy and Greece. In 1878 he participated at Heinrich Schliemann’s excavations at Olympia.

In 1879 he published with Georg Loeschcke Mykenische Thongefäβe, a complete publication of the Mycenean pottery finds on Aegina, was not only a valuable chronology but the first corpus of pottery finds in archaeology. The study first distinguished between Mycenaean and Geometric styles in pottery, and contributed to the developing technique of identifying archaeological strata, and giving them relative dates, through the painting styles represented on pottery sherds, which previously had been discarded as spoil. By noting the recurrence of similar vases within a variety of strata Furtwangler was able to use these sherds as a tool for dating sites.