Recent Acquisitions and Announcement

Transcription

1 Recent Acquisitions and Announcement Zhejiang University Library (11/2012) Above: Front View (design drawing) of ZUMAA, where the Art and Archaeology Library will be located 1. Background To broaden the scope of education and research at Zhejiang University and to provide references for better planning the collections and educational programs of Zhejiang University Museum of Art and Archaeology (ZUMAA), a Library of Art and Archaeology Library will be established under the Zhejiang University Library (ZUL). With an area of 2,000 square meters for holding approximately 160,000 physical volumes, the new library will be located within ZUMAA complex. Its collections will invariably be art and archaeology-related materials, such as books, catalogues, archaeological reports, printed and electronic images, and archives from different civilizations and period. To demonstrate our commitment to building one of the most important scholarly libraries on the history of archaeology, art, architecture, and design, we have acquired four distinguished art historical and archaeological libraries during the past 13 months (starting from November, 2011), which amount to well over 15,000 physical volumes in total, the largest such assemblage of Western-language books on those disciplines at a Chinese university to date. Having arrived in Hangzhou at the beginning of November 2012, the four libraries have already been unpacked and put on shelves at ZUJ. The cataloguing will commence soon in order to make them available for use to the students and faculty of Zhejiang University. 2. Acquisitions i). The Fernandez Library The first library was the library of the late Professor Henry Fernandez, a collection of some 4,000 physical volumes on the history of architecture and related

2 disciplines. At the time of his early death, Dr. Fernandez was on the faculty of the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, one of the pre-eminent schools of architecture in America. He also taught at Tufts University, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and at the Warburg Institute (London). A specialist in Renaissance and pre-renaissance Italian architecture, and an expert on architectural projects at the Vatican, he was just completing his study Bramante and Raphael in Renaissance Rome for Yale University Press. Well known among his colleagues for his interest in books on the history of architecture, Professor Fernandez was a passionate intellectual who devoted virtually all of his financial resources for more than thirty years to the building of this library. He did so with real discrimination, combining the priorities of an architectural historian whose primary focus was on the Renaissance and Baroque, with the acumen of a sophisticated practicing architect, whose understanding of modern and contemporary buildings was very finely honed. With these dual qualifications, he was well-placed to work on highly specialized research projects that called on both disciplines, such as Reconstructing Renaissance Rome, begun in 2003, in which he led a team using advanced computer techniques to recreate now-lost pre-renaissance buildings next to the Vatican. The library is intended to illuminate all aspects of architecture: cultural, sociological, religious, political, material and technical, theoretical, historical. Apart from the impressive strength of the monographic section of the collection more than 1700 titles on individual architects and artists the collection is rich in studies of all kinds, covering garden design, festivities and spectacle, architectural drawings and models, architectural theory of all periods, fountains and obelisks, city planning, topographic maps and panoramas, villas and basilicas, tomb sculpture, watermarks, historical excavations, the papacy and papal politics, religious orders, Byzantine palaces, English parish churches, and Egyptian, Greek, and Roman construction techniques, to cite representative examples. Particularly rich in studies of the Renaissance and Baroque, with a comprehensive collection of some 600 monographs on the city of Rome, the library is also extremely well developed in its attention to the twentieth century, with superb coverage of all phases of modernism, from the Prairie School and Frank Lloyd Wright, the Bauhaus and De Stijl, Le Corbusier and CIAM, through to the twenty-first century and Rem Kolhaas. Although an ebullient expert on Vatican politics and its influence on design history, Fernandez researched and taught subjects from Derrida to Alvar Aalto (entry in Wikipedia). More than merely comprehensive, the library is exceptionally well selected for modern scholarship: virtually everything in it is of current interest; there are virtually no outdated period pieces. It is also in extremely fine condition throughout. It is an index of the library s real distinction that, before its acquisition by us, the Warburg Institute at the University of London made serious efforts to acquire the Fernandez Library, and was prevented from doing so only by budgetary constraints. The Fernandez Library which includes many very rare volumes is surely the most important resource on this subject at a Chinese university. It should also be pointed out that the books in this library are in excellent physical condition.

3 ii) The Dryer Library Professor Dr. Günter Dreyer, the former head of the German Archaeological Institute, Cairo Section [Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Abt. Kairo DAI-Kairo], has been one of the leading German Egyptologists of his generation. He has been in charge of the very important excavations at Elephantine since 1978, and the equally important excavations at Abydos since He studied Assyriology, Egyptology, and Biblical archaeology at the universities of Hamburg and Berlin and received his Ph.D. at the Free University Berlin in 1978 with a dissertation on Tempelweihgaben der Frühzeit und des Alten Reiches/ Votive Offerings in Temples of the Archaic Period and the Old Kingdom and a habilitation on Das prädynastische Königsgrab U-j in Abydos und seine frühen Schriftzeugnisse/ The Predynastic Royal Tomb U-j at Abydos and Its Evidence for Early Writing. His central research interest is the study of Egyptian prehistory, i.e. the beginnings of pharaonic history and questions of the origin of the pharaonic state and its early monuments. In addition to his position as Director of the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo and his extensive excavations in Elephantine, Wadi Garawi, Abydos, Giza and Saqqara (since 2003), Professor Dr. Dreyer was lecturer of Egyptology at Berlin University and has been a visiting research scholar at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University, New York, since He has now returned to his excavation in Abydos which had been interrupted by the Egyptian Revolution. Professor Dreyer is the author of important monographs (Elephantine VIII: Der Tempel der State. Die Funde der Frühzeit und des Alten Reiches, 1985; Umm el-qaab, I: Das prädynastische Königsgrab U-j in Abydos und seine frühen Schriftzeugnisse, 1998) as well as numerous articles in scholarly journals. In 2008, Professor Dreyer was honored by a collection of essays devoted to him by his colleagues and students Zeichen aus dem Sand: Streiflichter aus Ägyptens Geschichte zu Ehren von Günter Dreyer (Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz). The library of Professor Dr. Dreyer consists of over 2,000 physical volumes on the art and archaeology of Ancient Egypt from pre-dynastic times to the New Kingdom. Professor Dreyer, an ardent bibliophile, managed to assemble during the course of his career, a virtually complete set impossible to duplicate today of the Catalogue général of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, a project, still ongoing, which was started at the end of the 19 th -century by an international group of scholars to catalogue all the objects in the museum, a project which by now amounts to over 100 massive volumes. This extremely important work remains the most fundamental tool for research in the art of ancient Egypt. In addition, the Dreyer Library contains comprehensive collections of the publications of all the major international research institutes which have pursued scientific investigations on Ancient Egypt since the middle of the 19 th -century. In addition to Professor Dreyer s own institute, the German Archaeological Institute (DAI), which is represented with a complete collection of its publications including its exemplary excavation reports, there are extensive collections of scientific publications by the British School of Archaeology in Egypt together with the Egypt Exploration Fund, the Institut Français d Archéologie Orientale du Caire (IFAO, the oldest excavating institution in Egypt), the American Research Center in Egypt (ARCE), as well as other foreign missions, such as those of Poland, Sweden, Czechoslovakia, Italy, and Spain. It includes complete runs of all the important journals in the field from the late 19 th -century

4 until today. The most spectacular volume in the Dreyer Library is the extremely rare and beautiful original edition of Giovanni Battista Belzoni s Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries within the Pyramids, Temples, Tombs, and Excavations, in Egypt and Nubia, London/Paris 1820, with spectacular color plates of frescoes, objects, and buildings. It is one of the earliest important studies of the art and architecture of Ancient Egypt after the Napoleonic Expedition. The Dreyer Library represents a basic research collection on the art, architecture, and archaeology of pre-dynastic and dynastic Egypt, the first such library in China. iii) The Grimm Library Professor Dr. Günter Grimm ( ) wrote his dissertation on Roman mummy portraits from Egypt at the University of Frankfurt, Germany, in He was a researcher at the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, Egypt (Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, Abt. Kairo) from 1970 to 1974 and professor for classical archaeology at the University of Trier, Germany from 1975 until his retirement in His primary academic research interests were Graeco-Roman civilization, centered on the city of Alexandria, one of the great urban centers of antiquity which was home to the fabled Alexandrian Library. Professor Grimm s other academic interest was the survival and reception of antiquity in the Renaissance, the Baroque era and extending to the 19 th century. Together with the historian of the ancient world Heinz Heinen and the Egyptologist Erich Winter, Grimm founded the Research Center Graeco-Roman Egypt at the University of Trier. He was the author of a number of seminal monographs including Die Zeugnisse ägyptischer Religion und Kunstelemente im römischen Deutschland, (Leiden, Brill, 1969); Die römischen Mumienmasken aus Ägypten, (Wiesbaden, Steiner, 1974); Kunst der Ptolemäer- und Römerzeit im Ägyptischen Museum Kairo, (Mainz, Zabern, 1975); Alexandria. Die erste Königsstadt der hellenistischen Welt. Bilder aus der Nilmetropole von Alexander dem Großen bis Kleopatra VII, (Mainz, Zabern, 1998); Von der Liebe zur Antiken Welt. Kleine Schriften (Mainz, Zabern, 2005); and, Heroen. Götter. Scharlatane Heilserwartungen und Heilsbringer der Antike, (Mainz, Zabern, 2008), as well as numerous articles. At the core of Professor Grimm s library of over 5,000 volumes is a unique collection of books devoted to the topography, art, architecture, and archaeology of the city of Alexandria from the Ptolemaic period until the beginning of the Islamic era, and its artistic and archaeological relationship with other Mediterranean cultures of the Graeco-Roman period, extending from Asia Minor in the East to the Iberian Peninsula in the West. The collection of books on Graeco-Roman Egypt in the Grimm Library is a logical extension and completion of the library of Professor Dreyer. Additionally, the Greek and Roman collections of the library are comprehensive as concerns scholarly publications on classical sculpture (including portraiture) and painting, as well as architecture (where they are a perfect complement to the Fernandez Library). A further aspect of this important library is the great wealth of publications on the art and

5 archaeology of the Roman provinces from the Black Sea area and Asia Minor, the Middle East and North Africa, from Gallo-Roman France and Roman Germany across Europe to Roman Britain. The systematic coverage of this topic is rounded of by an important collection of monographs on the influence of Graeco-Roman civilization on the art of Afghanistan and India. The Grimm Library is one of the outstanding libraries on this subject in the world, and includes many scholarly rarities published during the last 120 years. iv). The Lamberg-Karlovsky Libray The final library, the library of Professor C.C. [Karl] Lamberg-Karlovsky of Harvard University, extends the holdings of ZUJ both geographically and historically. Karl Lamberg-Karlovsky is a scholar of Old World archaeology who has made fundamental contributions to basic research, the expansion of intellectual horizons, and has stimulated generations of young scholars. He has been a leading scholar in the study of the archaeology of Iran, Central Asia, and the Indo-Iranian borderlands. D.T. Potts has written, For over 35 years he has been one of those Ingenious men with an Inquisitive Soul who, in the words of the 17 th -century philosopher-scientist Robert Boyle, were able to pry into the innermost Recesses of Mysterious Nature and, at least in archaeological terms, give the whole Immensity of the Universe a decent shake (Iranica Antiqua, vol 37). His office at the Peabody Museum at Harvard University has been a center of scholarship and a venue for inquiry into the origins, growth and transformations of Old World civilizations ever since he joined the Department of Anthropology at Harvard in Born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1937, Lamberg-Karlovsky emigrated to the United States in He took his first degree at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire in 1959 and entered the University of Pennsylvania for his doctoral studies. He was named Benjamin Franklin Scholar which allowed him to attend Yale University for a year to study with the eminent Chinese archaeology specialist K.C. Chang. In 1961 he excavated with Dame Kathleen Kenyon in Jerusalem, but the same year went to work with Professor Robert H. Dyson, Jr. at Hasanlu in Azerbaijan, Northwestern Iran. This was the beginning of a decades-long involvement with Iran and Iranian archaeology. In 1965 Lamberg-Karlovsky accepted a position at Harvard University where he became Professor of Anthropology in 1979, Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology in 1977 (until 1990); he was the Peabody Museum s curator of Near Eastern archaeology since 1969, and in 1991 was appointed the Stephen Phillips Chair of Archaeology and Ethnology. He served on the boards of numerous academic institutions concerned with the Near East, including the American Institute of Iranian Studies, the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, the Centro di Ricerche Ligabue, the UNESCO Committee for the Scientific Study of Mankind. He served as Director of Research for the American School of Prehistoric Research and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Istituto Italiano per l Africa e l Oriente, the Society of Antiquaries and the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. Beyond his work in Jerusalem

6 and at Hasanlu, Professor Lamberg-Karlovsky participated and directed archaeological excavations in northern Syria, southeastern Iran, The Arabian Peninsula, Central and Inner Asia, and Pakistani Baluchistan. It is undoubtedly his excavations at Tepe Yahya, Iran ( ) for which he is best known. The Lamberg-Karlovsky Library of over 3,500 volumes reflects the diverse interests of its former owner. It is particularly devoted to an exceptionally difficult topic, namely the archaeological relationship between the cultures of Central-and Western Asia, the Indus Valley Civilization, and the civilizations of the ancient Arabian Peninsula. Covering the prehistory of those areas, the library contains in-depth collections of excavation reports from Iraq (Mesopotamia, Babylon, Assyria, Sumer), Turkey (particularly Anatolia), Iran, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Pakistan and India, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine; as well as comprehensive collections of excavations in Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates. These groupings are complemented by an important collection of general and theoretical publications on archaeology as well as the historiography of the field. Lamberg-Karlovsky is particularly well-known as a passionate and generous teacher and the library contains a comprehensive collection of the basic teaching tools for archaeology from the past 100 years. As well, the library contains occasional publications on European archaeology, and, finally, a collection of over 250 volumes on New World archaeology which Lamberg- Karlovsky obtained in his function as the Director of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University.