Background

He was born on June 30, 1853 at Freiburg im Breisgau to middle-class parents, Furtwängler grew up with two sisters and a brother in Catholic Freiburg.

Education

He attended the local gymnasium, directed by his own father, but was formally excused in his final year to finish his studies from home, and later expressed dislike for schools and other institutions such as the military. Yet he did well, and went on to study philosophy and philology at Freiburg and Leipzig before turning to archaeology at Munich, where his dissertation on Eros in Greek vase-painting (Furtwängler 1874) was supervised by Heinrich Brunn (1822–1894), a pioneer in the study of ancient art who had spent two decades in Rome acquiring extensive first-hand knowledge, of sculpture in particular. Furtwängler graduated in 1874 and spent the years 1876–1878 in Italy and Greece supported by a travel grant from the German Archaeological Institute. After a year in Rome, where he focused on studying sculpture in the great public and private collections, he was hired by the excavation team at Olympia.

Career

Before the digging season started, he and Georg Loeschcke (1852–1915) were set to work in the Athens Polytechnikon, where they brought order to the unsorted pottery sherds from Schliemann’s Mycenae excavations. Their meticulous studies of shapes and designs (Furtwängler & Loeschcke 1879, 1886) showed the great potential of this previously neglected archaeological evidence and laid the foundations for future research. Equally significant was Furtwängler’s work at Olympia, where he carefully documented bronzes and small finds, linking them to stratigraphical data and developing useful typologies and a chronological framework. His volume in the Olympia series (Furtwängler 1890) remained a long-standing model for such publications. On his return to Germany, Furtwängler habilitated in Bonn under Reinhard Kekulé (1839–1911) and was then hired by the expanding Berlin Museums as a curatorial assistant, first to Alexander Conze (1831–1914) in the sculpture department, then to Ernst Curtius (1814–1896) in the Antiquarium. The experience gained in Italy and Greece had prepared him well for this kind of work, and his 14 years in Berlin (1880–1894) turned out to be exceptionally productive. Equipped with a remarkable visual memory and a talent for structuring great masses of materials, Furtwängler set to work on the collections and produced impressive catalogues of the museum’s 4000 vases and 12 000 engraved gems. He also published the Sabouroff collection, finished his manuscripts on Mycenaean pottery and bronzes from Olympia, wrote numerous encyclopedia entries, articles and reviews, as well as teaching art history at the Königin-Luise-Stiftung and archaeology at the university, where he was made professor extraordinarius in 1884, although he was never offered a chair. His work also included extensive travelling to major museums, private collections and auction houses. Soon he had acquired an extraordinary command of a wide spectrum of materials and become exceptionally well connected in the international world of curators, collectors and dealers. These contacts, expertly cultivated for mutual benefit, constituted Furtwängler’s primary powerbase, especially after he left Berlin for Munich. His magnum opus, the three-volume history of ancient gem-engraving, contained high-quality reproductions of over 3600 items. In order to understand his material better, Furtwängler found that he often had to start from scratch and examine afresh the whole corpus of artefacts. The primacy of original objects and the importance of his own empirical work were repeatedly stressed in his publications, often at the expense of previous scholarship, on which Furtwängler drew considerably more than he acknowledged. Working at the height of positivism and influenced by Darwin and Haeckel whose work he knew well Furtwängler’s Winckelmannian belief in the absolute normativity of Greek classical art nevertheless remained unshakable throughout his career. In 1894, on recommendation from both Conze and Kekulé who wanted him out of Berlin, Furtwängler was at last called to a prestigious chair, succeeding his teacher Brunn in Munich. He was also appointed director of four important Bavarian collections, including the Glyptothek, which housed the pediment sculptures from the temple of Aphaia on Aegina. Dissatisfied with Thorvaldsen’s reconstruction of these sculptures and to understand their context better, Furtwängler embarked on new and successful excavations of the sanctuary in 1901. During the 1907 campaign, he contracted dysentery and was taken to the Evangelismos hospital in Athens, where he died a few days later on 10 October. Adolf Furtwängler was honoured with a Greek state funeral and is buried in Athens’ First Cemetery.

Works

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  • Der Dornauszieher und der Knabe mit der Gans: Entwurf einer Geschichte der Genrebildnerei bei den Griechen (German Edition)

    (Der Dornauszieher und der Knabe mit der Gans - Entwurf ei...)

  • Beschreibung Der Vasensammlung Im Antiquarium, Volume 2 (German Edition)

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • Eros in der Vasenmalerei (German Edition)

    (Eros in der Vasenmalerei ist ein unveränderter, hochwerti...)

  • Die Bronzefunde aus Olympia und Deren Kunstgeschichtliche Bedeutung (German Edition)

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Archäologische Studien Ihrem Lehrer Heinrich Brunn zur Feier Seines Fünfzigjährigen Doctorjubiläums AM 20. Marz 1893 (German Edition)

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Ueber Kunstsammlungen in Alter und Neuer Zeit: Festrede Gehalten in der Öffentlichen Sitzung der k. b. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu München zur ... am 11. März 1899 (German Edition)

    (Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part...)

  • Das Tropaion von Adamklissi: und provinzialromische Kunst (German Edition)

    (A reissue of Adolf Furtwängler's 1903 study of the Tropai...)

  • Der Goldfund von Vettersfelde

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture: A Series of Essays On the History of Art - Primary Source Edition

    (This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. T...)

  • Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik: Kunstgeschichtliche untersuchungen (German Edition)

Personality

Furtwängler had always suffered from a bad temper and paranoid tendencies, which resulted in strained relations with his superiors and colleagues, with whom he interacted in a tactless and often aggressive manner. Conze found him difficult to work with and soon had him reassigned to the more sympathetic Curtius in the Antiquarium. The situation worsened after 1889 with the appointment of Kekulé as director of the sculpture department and later to the university chair in archaeology. Furtwängler, who saw himself as the best candidate for both positions and had already declined offers from lesser universities, was bitterly disappointed. These negative professional experiences and personality traits interfered with his work and are also reflected in his publications, where references to his colleagues’ work are often unreasonably harsh and sometimes border on personal attacks. The controversial Meisterwerke volume (Furtwängler 1893), Furtwängler’s last work from the Berlin years and a milestone in the field of ‘Kopienkritik’, is one example. Still, even those who disliked and dreaded Furtwängler as a person generally acknowledged the quality of his scholarship. Although a mediocre and often ill-prepared speaker, Furtwängler’s otherwise well-informed lectures always drew large, enthusiastic crowds. He was a pioneer in the use of lantern slides as a teaching tool and took full advantage of photography in his own research and lavishly illustrated publications.

Connections

While in Berlin, Furtwängler married the artist Adelheid Wendt (1863–1944), with whom he had four children.

Father:

Wilhelm Furtwängler, Dr.

October 10, 1809 - March 8, 1876

Mother:

Christiane Furtwängler

January 25, 1829 - June 18, 1901

Sister:

Annele Furtwängler

1900 - ___

Sister:

Luise Furtwängler

1835 - 1895

Sister:

Minna Furtwängler

1835 - 1895

Wife:

Adelheid Wendt

1863–1944

Daughter:

Märit Marta Klara Scheler (Furtwängler)

1891 - 1971

Son:

Walter Eugen Georg Furtwängler

1887 - 1967

Son:

Gustav Heinrich Ernst Martin Wilhelm Furtwängler

January 25, 1886 - November 30, 1954