In memoriam Miklós Boskovits

Miklós Boskovits in 2005 

I learned with sadness of the passing of Miklós Boskovits, perhaps the most eminent art historian of Hungarian origin. The sad news was announced by Villa I Tatti in Florence, where Boskovits had been a fellow back in the 1960s, a short time after he had left Hungary. Miklós Boskovits, a university professor at the University of Florence and researcher at the Kunsthistorisches Institut was the leading expert of Florentine (and Italian) late medieval and early Renaissance painting. He was the author of a number of collection catalogues of early Italian paintings for major museums - including the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (1988), the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (2001), and most recently, the National Gallery of Art, Washington (2003). He wrote the most extensive monograph on Florentine painting of the late 14th century (1975), and took over the editing of the Corpus of Florentine Painting, started by Richard Offner in 1930 - authoring two recent volumes of the series: about the Origins of Florentine Painting and, more recently (in 2007) about the Mosaics of the Baptistery of Florence. He also worked on a number of major exhibition projects, and served as the editor of Arte Cristiana.
He was 76 years old.

Miklós Boskovits received his training as an art historian in Hungary, at Eötvös Loránd University of Budapest. Emigrating to Italy, he joined the ranks of a number of eminent Hungarian researchers working abroad. Listing only those working on Florentine art, we have to mention Frederick Antal, author of Florentine Painting and its Social Background (1948), and two great Michelangelo-scholars: Johannes Wilde and Charles de Tolnay. Throughout his career, Boskovits maintained close contacts with his home country, and was always willing to help his fellow Hungarians. He was instrumental in establishing a program at Villa I Tatti, providing a grant to art historians from East-Central Europe (a program benefiting a lot of Hungarian scholars). He was always very helpful to me, as well: consulting with me as I was writing my dissertation; helping a lot as a member of the advisory board of the 2006 Sigismundus-exhibition, and advising me in my research on Masolino, during my I Tatti fellowship last year. His death was unexpected, and he will be greatly missed.

You can browse the books written or edited by him at Kubikat - where you can also find his other publications numbering in the hundreds.


Update: I would like to call attention to a few more obituaries of Boskovits:


Notice in Il Giornale dell'Arte
Neville Rowley in The Art Tribune
Obituary in the Storia dell'Arte blog - with links to several newspaper articles
Finally, the brief news which appeared in the Hungarian press