Maxime Collignon

Léon-Maxime Collignon (8 November 1849 in Verdun – 15 October 1917 in Paris) was a French archaeologist who specialized in ancient Greek art and architecture.

Biography From 1868 he studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris as a student of archaeologist Georges Perrot. In 1873 he became a member of the French School at Athens. In 1876, with Louis Duchesne, he conducted archaeological research in Asia Minor, about which, he published "Rapport sur un voyage archéologique en Asie Mineure". In 1879 he was named professor of Greek antiquities at the University of Bordeaux. In 1883 he returned to Paris as a deputy to Georges Perrot at the Faculty of Arts, where in 1900 he became a full professor of archaeology. "Le khan à Bouldour" (in Pisidia, Anatolia); illustration by Maxime Collignon (1878). In 1893 he became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, of which, in 1904 he was elected as its president. In 1907 while sorting through art objects in a storage room at the museum in Auxerre, he discovered the so-called "Lady of Auxerre", a unique statuette dating to the times of Archaic Greece. How the sculpture got to Auxerre remains to this day a mystery.