Brunilde Sismondo Ridgway (14 November 1929 – 19 October 2024) was an Italian-American archaeologist and specialist in ancient Greek sculpture.
Life and career
The daughter of Giuseppe Sismondo, a career army officer, and Maria (Lombardo) Sismondo, Ridgway was born in Chieti on 14 November 1929;[1] as a young child she lived in Sicily and then in Ethiopia and Eritrea, where her father had been stationed during World War II. When her father was captured by the British in World War II and sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Kenya, she secured a job as a telephone operator at police headquarters in Asmara (Eritrea) where she learned to speak English.
Brunilde Ridgway is, in keeping with her mentor Rhys Carpenter, a follower of the radical questioning of the Meisterforschung, or search for the masterpiece or archetype that inspired a replica series, that dominated the history of Greek art since Adolf Furtwängler. Elaborating on Carpenter's remark that Greek sculpture is “the anonymous product of an impersonal craft,”[5] she maintained that the notion of the artistic personality didn't emerge in the West before the 15th century AD. She also addressed the Kopienforschung ("copy research") of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who is finding a type statuary through its Roman copies, focusing on identifying the originality of Roman sculptors. Rather skeptical vis-à-vis the literary sources, she stuck to the stylistic analysis of the works.
Known for the safety of her erudition and for the stimulating quality of its analyses,[6] it has been criticized, like Carpenter, for what was described as a "devastating"[7] or "systematic scepticism”,[8] or revisionism.[9]
Selected writings
Her main works and writings are:
Severe Style in Greek Sculpture, Princeton University Press, 1970.