Ernst Kitzinger

Ernst Kitzinger (December 27, 1912 – January 22, 2003) was a German-American historian of late antique, early medieval, and Byzantine art.

Kitzinger was born into a well-educated Jewish family in Munich; his father, Wilhelm Nathan Kitzinger, was a prominent lawyer; his mother, , née Merzbacher, was a pioneering social worker involved with child welfare among Eastern European Jewish refugee and immigrant families. Kitzinger entered the University of Munich in 1931, where he studied the history of art, principally under . From the summer of 1931 on, Kitzinger spent significant time in Rome, enrolled in the University of Rome and intellectually centered at the Bibliotheca Hertziana. (Kitzinger’s distant relation, Richard Krautheimer [1897–1994], who also became a major art historian, of late antique and Byzantine architecture, was coincidentally doing research at the Hertziana at the same time.) The beginning of the Nazi regime in 1933 raised the immediate possibility that Jewish students might be banned from receiving degrees. Kitzinger accordingly completed his dissertation, a brief but influential study of Roman painting in the 7th and 8th centuries, with exceptional speed, and defended it in the fall of 1934. He left Germany the day after his thesis defense.

Kitzinger first returned to Rome, before moving on to England, where he found volunteer employment at the British Museum while eking out a living doing casual academic work, writing book reviews, and receiving the occasional small grant. Among a wide range of art historical interests, he quickly developed a particular focus on Anglo-Saxon art through being enlisted by T. D. Kendrick to assist in a comprehensive survey of surviving pre-Norman stone sculpture in England. Kitzinger's first published article was on Anglo-Saxon vinescroll ornament; he also contributed to the assessment of the treasures of the Sutton Hoo Ship Burial as it was unearthed over months in 1939. In 1937, on a modest grant from a patron of the British Museum, he travelled to Egypt and Istanbul, further widening his perspective on late antique and early medieval art as an "international" phenomenon. It was this perspective that he brought to his first book, Early Medieval Art in the British Museum (1940). Ostensibly a guidebook, this was in fact an attempt to trace the transformation of classical art into medieval, a subject which Kitzinger would revisit on many occasions throughout his career. The book has never gone out of print; more recent editions are just called Early Medieval Art.

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