Michael Hirst
Art historian and authority on Michelangelo who once picked up a Correggio drawing for £30
MICHAEL HIRST, who has died aged 84, was Professor of the History of Art at the Courtauld Institute and a great authority on the life and career of Michelangelo. David Michael Geoffrey Hirst (always known as Michael) was born on September 5 1933 and educated at Stowe School. He then read History at New College, Oxford, before moving on to the Courtauld Institute of Art as a postgraduate student.
At the age of 12, Michael dazzled his future headmaster at Stowe, JF Roxburgh, by correctly identifying all eight Medici prints surrounding the fireplace in Roxburgh’s study. One of them was Piero della Francesca’s portrait of Federigo da Montefeltro.
If Oxford was something of a disappointment, at the Courtauld he was entirely in his element, and it was to remain his professional home. Illness prevented him from taking the postgraduate diploma, and he then started on a doctorate on artists in Rome in the third, fourth, and fifth decades of the 16th century.
His first article, on the Chigi Chapel in Santa Maria della Pace in Rome, which was published in 1961, was a stunning debut.
The following year he was appointed lecturer at the Courtauld; he was made a Reader in 1980, and a Professor in 1991.
Sebastiano del Piombo was the subject of Hirst’s first monograph in 1981. As demonstrated by the Sebastiano and Michelangelo exhibition at the National Gallery earlier this year, the links between the two artists were profound, and many of Hirst’s subsequent publications were devoted to Michelangelo.
Together with a whole host of articles and two important exhibitions and their catalogues – Michelangelo
Draftsman at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1988 and The
Young Michelangelo (with Jill Dunkerton) at the National Gallery in 1994 – Hirst also wrote two books on the artist, Michelangelo and his Drawings (1988) and Michelangelo: The Achievement of Fame 1475-1534 (2011). This final work was intended to be the first half of a full biography, but Alzheimer’s increasingly took its toll, and the second volume remained unwritten.
Hirst’s writing was distinguished by its elegance of style and absolute precision, but perhaps above all by its range. He was a master of documents and iconography who also understood how things are made, and – almost uniquely – was equally at home in the very different fields of paintings, drawings, sculpture, and architecture.
He had an excellent eye; he once picked up a double-sided Correggio drawing (now in the Washington National Gallery) for £30. He also recognised that, contrary to the misguided but still widespread assumption that Rembrandt only knew Caravaggio’s work at one remove, the former’s Lucretia revealed his direct awareness of the appearance of the latter’s David. He published this aperçu in the form of a letter to the Burlington Magazine, where others might have made such a discovery the basis for a book.
After his retirement from the Courtauld in 1997, he became an Emeritus Professor, and in 1998 an Honorary Fellow of the Institute. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 1983, and awarded the Serena Medal, its highest accolade for Italianists, in 2001.
Visiting positions at the Villa I Tatti and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and his membership of the Ateneo Veneto and the Pontifical Commission for the Restoration of the Sistine Chapel, were among his other distinctions.
When Hirst joined the staff of the Courtauld, the director was still Anthony Blunt, although for him it was always more significant that it also housed Johannes Wilde. Both Wilde’s art historical method and his twin passions, Venetian painting of the 16th century and Michelangelo, proved decisive for Hirst.
As a teacher, especially viewed from today’s perspective, Hirst was both savagely demanding and almost comically grudging with his praise, but this only seemed to have the effect of making those who stayed the course revere him the more.
Beyond the world of the history of art, Hirst was a staunch member of an informal discussion group devoted to the novels of Henry James, and loved the opera, but more generally he appreciated the good life. An undeniable element of his public persona involved pretending to see doom and gloom round every corner, but secretly he was a happy man who had much to be happy about, something that emerged with unexpected and touching force during his last illness.
Hirst was married three times: from 1960 to 1970 to Sara Vitali, with whom he had a son; from 1972 to 1984 to Jane Martineau; and from 1984 to Diane Zervas, whose emotional sympathy and intellectual understanding were always an invaluable support, and even more so in recent years.
Michael Hirst, born September 5 1933, died December 14 2017