Adolf Michaelis

Adolf Michaelis (22 June 1835 – 12 August 1910) was a German classical scholar, a professor of art history at the University of Strasbourg from 1872, who helped establish the connoisseurship of Ancient Greek sculpture and Roman sculpture on their modern footing. Just at the cusp of the introduction of photography as a tool of art history, Michaelis pioneered in supplementing his descriptions with sketches.

Adolf Michaelis was born in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, the son of the gynecologist Gustav Adolf Michaelis (1798–1848) and the nephew of Otto Jahn, who introduced scientific philological method into classical archaeology; Jahn first guided his nephew's interest in the classics. After Jahn's death, Michaelis produced in 1880 a second edition of Jahn's scholarly presentation of an excerpt of Pausanias' description of Greece, Arx Athenarum a Pausania Descripta, offering the Greek text with Latin introduction and notes. The title was a modest understatement: Jahn collected all the classical references to the Acropolis of Athens and all the surviving inscriptions, and incorporated them into a history woven from classical sources. In the 1880 edition, Michaelis added forty plates of site plans, drawings and scholarly restorations of buildings and monuments, as well as engravings of sculpture, terracottas and coins illustrating the cult practices and deities honored on Arx Athenarum, "Athena's hill".

Michaelis read classical philology and archaeology at the University of Leipzig, where he attended the classes of Johannes Overbeck (1826–1895), an expert on Pompeii whose emphasis on written sources for documenting Greek art was influential in formulating Michaelis' approach to antiquities and whose corpus of mythological representations in Greek art, Griechische Kunstmythologie, begun in 1871, helped spark Michaelis' own compilation of antiquities in English collections.

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