Julius von Schlosser

Julius Alwin Franz Georg Andreas Ritter von Schlosser (23 September 1866, Vienna – 1 December 1938, Vienna) was an Austrian art historian and an important member of the Vienna School of Art History. According to Ernst Gombrich, he was "One of the most distinguished personalities of art history".

From 1884 to 1887, Julius Schlosser studied philology, art history and archaeology at the University of Vienna. In 1888, he completed a Ph.D. thesis on early medieval cloisters supervised by Franz Wickhoff. In 1892, he wrote his Habilitationsschrift. In 1901, he was appointed professor and director of the sculpture collection at Vienna. In 1913, he was knighted and changed his name from Julius Schlosser to Julius von Schlosser. In 1919 he became member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences. After the unexpected death of Max Dvořák in 1922, he chaired the second art history department of the University of Vienna, his colleague, and opponent, Josef Strzygowski chairing the first art history department. Von Schlosser retired in 1936.

In 1908, Von Schlosser published Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spätrenaissance, and in 1912 a study on Lorenzo Ghiberti's memoirs. From 1914 to 1920, he wrote his eight-part Materialien zur Quellenkunde der Kunstgeschichte, and in 1923 a study on medieval art, entitled Die Kunst des Mittelalters. In 1924, he published Die Kunstliteratur, a bibliography on writings on art, which was translated into Italian as La letteratura artistica: Manuale delle fonti della storia dell'arte moderna (1935; 2nd edition, 1956; 3rd edition, 1964). In 1984, it was also translated into French. This publication, which expressed discontent with Jacob Burckhardt's assessments in Die Kultur der Renaissance in Italien (1860) on several counts, is a "famous standard work ... which is still the most admirable survey of writings about art from antiquity to the eighteenth century". "Written with the profound insight of first-hand knowledge, it is not only indispensable as a bibliographical reference book, but it is also one of the few works in our subject to be both genuinely scholarly and readable."

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