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Ernst Benkard

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German art historian

Ernst Benkard (27 February 1883 – 8 May 1946) was a German art historian and private lecturer.

Biography

Born in Frankfurt, Benkard attended a grammar school, then studied art history and obtained his doctorate in 1907.

Among other things he worked as a correspondent and art critic for the Frankfurter Zeitung. From the winter semester 1927/28 to the winter semester 1937/38, he was employed at the Kunstgeschichtliches Institut der Johann-Wolfgang-Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main [de], where he mainly offered classes on regional art as well as events on Italian Renaissance. He is said to have reported on the 1937 Große Deutsche Kunstausstellung with "barely concealed irony, distance, and rejection."

Benkard's works include an illustrated book on the death masks of statesmen and artists, which was published in Berlin in 1926 with a foreword by Georg Kolbe. It bears the title Das ewige Antlitz (The Eternal Face) and immediately triggered a dispute with Ernst Gundolf [de] about a death mask of William Shakespeare. In Das ewige Antlitz, Benkard also introduced L'Inconnue de la Seine, about which he poetically wrote that she is for us "a tender butterfly, which, carefreely elated, has fluttered and scorched its fine wings before time at the lamp of life". Another temporarily popular work of art, allegedly based on a death mask, was the Luther in effigie [de] in Halle, which Benkard described as a "mannequin" and a "doll".

Benkard died in Freiburg im Breisgau.

References

  1. Breisgau-Geschichtsverein Schauinsland: Zeitschrift des Breisgau-Geschichtsvereins Schauinsland. Breisgau-Geschichtsverein Schauinsland, 2000, p. 194.
  2. Benkard, Ernst, in Hessische Biografie on www.lagis-hessen.de
  3. Frankfurt on kg.ikb.kit.edu Archived 2017-11-07 at the Wayback Machine
  4. Dagmar Bussiek: Benno Reifenberg (1892-1970). Wallstein Verlag, 2012, ISBN 978-3-835-32117-5
  5. Das ewige Antlitz on WorldCat
  6. Ernst Gundolf: Werke. Wallstein Verlag, 2006, ISBN 978-9-060-34116-2, p. 27
  7. For the dispute over Shakespeare's death mask, see also the interview with Hildegard Hammerschmidt-Hummel on 9 May 2006 on the occasion of the publication of her book Die authentischen Gesichtszüge William Shakespeares. The poet's death mask and portraits from three stages of his life on www.hammerschmidt-hummel.de.
  8. Quoted after Dorle Dracklé, Bilder vom Tod. LIT Verlag Münster, 2001, ISBN 978-3-825-83895-9, p. 56.
  9. Quoted after Horst Bredekamp, Bodies in Action and Symbolic Forms. Walter de Gruyter, 2012, ISBN 978-3-050-06140-5, p. 159.

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