Sybille Pantazzi

Sybille Pantazzi (April2, 1914July23, 1983) was a Canadian librarian, bibliophile and writer. She was librarian of The Edward P. Taylor Library & Archives of the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto for 32 years, where she was responsible for its collection of books and periodicals. Besides being a notable book collector, she was a scholar with wide-ranging interests. She and her work influenced researchers and gallery staff, a number of whom went on to become curators or directors of galleries and museums across Canada.

Early life

Pantazzi was born in Galați, Romania, on April 2, 1914, to Commander, later Admiral Vasile "Basil" Pantazzi (1871–1945), a Romanian naval officer and occasional diplomat; and Canadian Ethel Sharp Greening (1880–1963), an author and a committed feminist.

In her early years, Pantazzi accompanied her family in their trans-continental peregrinations. She spent the period of 1916–1917 in Odessa, Russia, where her father installed the Romanian Senate and some ministries in exile, owing to the German invasion of Romania. Then came the Russian Revolution. After a brief spell in Romania, the family moved to Paris where Commander Pantazzi was a delegate to the Paris Peace Conference. At the end of 1919, the family moved to North America where he established the first Romanian embassy in Washington, D.C., and the first Romanian consulate in Canada, in Montreal.

Her collecting instinct was almost entirely focused on the Art Gallery of Ontario. The collection of book jackets along with her index cards is in the Edward P. Taylor Library & Archives Special Collections at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, where the library's current online catalogue was named "Sibyl" in her honour. She also was a devoted collector of Pinocchio and gave many items to the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books in Toronto.

Curator

Pantazzi served as a unofficial research curator from 1956 on, at the then Art Gallery of Toronto and other institutions. She was particularly interested in Old Master paintings, drawings and prints. Along with organizing an exhibition of Alan Garrow's collection of British 19th century illustrated books and bindings which had been given to the Gallery, she supported many exhibitions with articles, bibliography or catalogue entries, as well as writing scholarly articles for magazines such as Connoisseur. She continued this role when Nancy Dillow, who had formerly worked at the Art Gallery of Toronto, became director of the Norman Mackenzie Art Gallery in Regina (now the MacKenzie Art Gallery) (1967–1978), supporting many scholarly exhibitions for her, as well as continuing to support exhibitions at the Art Gallery of Ontario, often those organized by Katharine Lochnan, Curator of Prints and Drawings.

In the Canadian area of the collection, she wrote in depth about the foreign art shown at the Canadian National Exhibition, 1905–1938. She also was the first to write about book illustration and design by Canadian artists.

During her lifetime, she gave the children's books she collected to the Osborne Collection of Early Children's Books at the Toronto Public Library, where an annual Sybille Pantazzi Memorial Lecture is held.

Her nearly twenty-year correspondence and the library on art in fiction she formed with the American art-historian Ulrich Alexander Middledorf (1925–1981) is in special collections at the Getty Research Institute, Research Library.

Selected works Four Designers of English Publishers' Bindings, 1850–1880, and Their Signatures (1961) The Donna Laura Minghetti Leonardo: An International Mystification (1965) An Album of 18th Century Venetian Operatic Caricatures Formerly in the Collection of Count Algarotti, Biographical note on Algarotti (1980)

Gallery