Rudolf Wittkower

Rudolf Wittkower (22 June 1901 – 11 October 1971) was a British art historian specializing in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture, who spent much of his career in London, but was educated in Germany, and later moved to the United States. Despite having a British father who stayed in Germany after his studies, he was born and raised in Berlin.

Wittkower was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1959 and the American Philosophical Society in 1971. He was awarded the Alice Davis Hitchcock Award posthumously in 1975 for his book Gothic vs. Classic, Architectural Projects in Seventeenth-Century Italy.

Wittkower died on 11 October 1971.

Selected publications Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (1949) Bernini: The Sculptor of the Roman Baroque (1955) The Arts in Western Europe: Italy in New Cambridge Modern History, vol. 1 (1957), pp. 127–53 Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600–1750 (Pelican History of Art, 1958, and revised editions) Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (1963, co-authored with Margot Wittkower) The Divine Michelangelo (1964, co-authored with Margot Wittkower) Gothic vs. Classic, Architectural Projects in Seventeenth-Century Italy (1974) Sculpture: Processes and Principles (1977, co-authored with Margot Wittkower)