Martin Robertson

Charles Martin Robertson (11 September 1911 – 26 December 2004) was a British classical scholar and poet. He specialised in the art and archaeology of Ancient Greece, and was best known for his 1975 publication, A History of Greek Art.

Born in Pangbourne, Robertson was the son of a classicist and the brother of a noted art historian. He was educated at The Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and took part in archaeological excavations from 1930. After a period at the British School at Athens (BSA), he joined the British Museum in 1936, where he became an apprentice of the art historian Bernard Ashmole. During the Second World War, Robertson served briefly in the Royal Signals before being transferred to intelligence work, in which capacity he was a subordinate of the archaeologist Alan Wace and a colleague of the Soviet agent Kim Philby, who had been his contemporary at Cambridge.

Robertson succeeded Ashmole as Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London in 1948. He returned to the BSA in 1957–1958, and became chair of its governing council in 1959. In 1961, once again following Ashmole, he was appointed Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, where he remained until his retirement in 1978. Alongside his archaeological work, Robertson wrote and published poetry, releasing four collections of his works in the 1970s.

Robertson's archaeological publications included material from Ithaca and Perachora in Greece and from the site of Al-Mina in Syria. His work on Greek art extended that of John Beazley, who had pioneered the study of Attic vase-painting in the first half of the twentieth century. His History of Greek Art remained a standard reference for many decades, and in 1983 the museum curator Ian Jenkins wrote that "there can be few students of Greek art who would not readily admit their debt to him". his father was a classicist, who had been appointed as an assistant lecturer at the University of Cambridge in the year of Robertson's birth and became the university's Regius Professor of Greek in 1930. While in Athens, he worked on Iron Age material from the excavation of Ithaca. Three members of staff left the museum's employment as a result; Robertson was not involved, and so kept his job (leaving him as the only member of the department). He was, however, demoted in seniority. As a consequence of the departures, Denys Haynes was recruited as an Assistant Keeper, and the art historian Bernard Ashmole, the Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London, was brought in on a part-time basis to run the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Haynes and Robertson became lifelong friends, and Robertson later wrote of the "precious apprenticeship" he gained from working with Ashmole. He resigned in 1948 to succeed Ashmole as Yates Professor at UCL. John Boardman, who wrote Robertson's entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, described him as a "careful, not enthusiastic lecturer, with a minor voice impediment", and as a diligent supervisor of graduate students, albeit one sometimes excessively slow to criticise their work.

Poetry ...But I'd talked enough. I laid the girl down among the flowers. A soft cloak spread, my arm around her neck, I comforted her fear. The fawn soon ceased to flee. Over her breasts my hand moved gently, the new-formed girlhood she bared for me; over all her body, the nude skin bare, I spilt my white force, just touching her yellow hair.|author=From Archilochus, PColon 7511 ( Robertson)

Family Robertson's mother was killed in 1941 while serving as an air-raid warden in Cambridge. His brother, Giles Henry Robertson, was a professor of art history at the University of Edinburgh.

Robertson married Theodosia (known as Cecil; Spring Rice) on 4 September 1942: the couple had six children, including the computer scientist Stephen and the musician Thomas Dolby. Their first child, Lucy, was born while Robertson was posted to Cairo, and raised by Cecil in Iken in Suffolk. While in Suffolk, the Robertsons became friends with the composer Benjamin Britten and his partner, the singer Peter Pears. Cecil died in an accident in 1984. Robertson remarried in 1988, to Louise Berge (née Holstein), who had been his graduate student at Oxford in the late 1960s. She was diagnosed with tongue cancer shortly after Robertson's death, and died in February 2022.

Selected academic publications

As sole author

As co-author