Queer Places:
Downside School, Stratton-on-the-Fosse, Radstock BA3 4RJ, Regno Unito
University of Oxford, Oxford, Oxfordshire OX1 3PA
Palazzo Canigiani, Via de' Bardi, 28, 50125 Firenze FI, Italia
Cimitero Evangelico agli Allori, Via Senese, 184, 50124 Firenze FI, Italia
Sir
John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy
CBE
FBA
FSA (13 December 1913 – 31 October 1994), was a British art
historian and Director of the
British Museum (1974 – 1976). He was a scholar of
Italian Renaissance art. Many of his writings, including the tripartite
Introduction to Italian Sculpture and his magnum opus, Donatello:
Sculptor, are regarded as classics in the field.
Pope-Hennessy was born into an Irish Catholic family in Belgravia, London, to Major-General Richard Pope-Hennessy and Dame Una Pope-Hennessy (née Birch), who was the daughter of Arthur Birch, Lieutenant-Governor of Ceylon. He was the elder of two sons; his younger brother James Pope-Hennessy was a writer of note.
Pope-Hennessy was educated at Downside School, a Roman Catholic boarding independent school for boys, in the village of Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he read modern history. At Oxford, he was introduced by Logan Pearsall Smith (a family friend from the United States) to Kenneth Clark, who became a mentor to the young Pope-Hennessy.
Upon graduation, Pope-Hennessy embarked on what he referred to as his Wanderjahre, travelling in continental Europe and becoming acquainted with its great art collections, both public and private.
Friary Church of St Francis and St Anthony, Crawley
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Between 1955 and 1963, Pope-Hennessy's Introduction to Italian Sculpture was published in three volumes, covering Gothic, Renaissance and High Renaissance and Baroque sculpture. It has been said of these that "few books have dominated their field of study so thoroughly, or for so long".[1]
Pope-Hennessy served as the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1967 and 1973, and then as the director of the British Museum from 1974 until 1976. His nickname to staff was "the Pope".
Traumatised by the murder of his brother James in January 1974, Pope-Hennessy left the British Museum after only two years as director. Initially he withdrew to Tuscany, but was enticed by an offer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to head its department of European painting, and moved to New York. He combined this curatorial post with a professorship at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, and enjoyed mixing with the city's high society. His apartment was known to be lavishly furnished and he is said to have owned a large porphyry table.
Pope-Hennessy retired at 75 and moved permanently to Florence, at Palazzo Canigiani, where he died five years later. He is buried in the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori in the southern suburb of Florence, Galluzzo, Italy.
My published books:
