Martin Robertson

Martin Robertson
Image of a smiling man, wearing a jacket and tie with glasses
Photograph of Robertson in later life
Born
Charles Martin Robertson

(1911-09-11)September 11, 1911
Pangbourne, United Kingdom
DiedDecember 26, 2004(2004-12-26) (aged 93)
Cambridge, United Kingdom
Resting placeCambridge City Cemetery
Alma materTrinity College, Cambridge
Children6, including Thomas Dolby and Stephen Robertson
Parents
Relatives
Academic background
EducationThe Leys School, Cambridge
Academic work
DisciplineClassics
Sub-disciplineAncient Greek art
InstitutionsBritish Museum
University College London
University of Oxford
Notable studentsLisa French
Notable worksA History of Greek Art (1975)
Military service
AllegianceUnited Kingdom
Service / branchBritish Army
Years of service1940–1946
UnitRoyal Signals
Intelligence Corps

Charles Martin Robertson (11 September 1911 – 26 December 2004), known as Martin Robertson, 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, 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 double agent Kim Philby.

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. He died in Cambridge in 2004.

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 developed 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".[1]: 208 

Early life

Charles Martin Robertson was born in Pangbourne, Berkshire, the eldest child of Donald Struan Robertson and Petica Coursolles, née Jones. His mother hosted a literary salon;[2]: 321  his father was a classicist, appointed Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge in 1930.[3]: 557 [2]: 321  His childhood friends included Kim Philby, later a double agent for the Soviet union within the British Secret Intelligence Service.[2]: 324 

Martin Robertson, as he was always known, attended The Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge. His Cambridge contemporaries included Philby, the art historian Dale Trendall and the politician Enoch Powell.[2]: 322  He attended his first excavations in 1930, in the summer before his matriculation at Trinity,[2]: 321  at Perachora in the Corinthia, under the directorship of the archaeologist Humfry Payne. He graduated from Trinity in 1934 with a First in part two of tripos.[2]: 322  Later, in 1934–1936, Robertson moved to Athens as a student of the British School, where Payne was the director.[3]: 557  At the BSA, he worked on Iron Age material from the excavation of Ithaca.[2]: 322 

Academic career

Robertson returned to England in 1936 as Assistant Keeper in the Greek and Roman department of the British Museum, cataloguing the pottery from the excavations at Al-Mina in Syria led by Leonard Woolley in 1936–1937.[2]: 323  In 1937–1938, staff in the department carried out an aggressive cleaning of the Elgin Marbles, using copper chisels and highly abrasive silicon carbide, at the request of the entrepreneur Joseph Duveen; Duveen wanted the sculptures, originally painted, to look whiter for their display in a new gallery which he was funding.[4] Robertson was the only junior Assistant Keeper not involved in the cleaning, and so the only one to keep his job; however, he was demoted in seniority. As a consequence of the dismissals, Denys Haynes was recruited as an Assistant Keeper, and the art historian Bernard Ashmole, then 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.[2]: 323 

Robertson attended a classical conference in Berlin in August 1939, on behalf of the British Museum; he was recalled shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. From 23 August, he took part in the removal of material from the museum to London Underground stations and country houses, so as to protect the artefacts from bombing.[2]: 323  In 1940, he enlisted in the British Army as a member of the Royal Signals, but was soon transferred to the Intelligence Corps and trained to work in cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park. In an obituary of Robertson, the archaeologist Brian Sparkes wrote that his military service was largely unsuccessful and characterised by "mind-numbing boredom".[2]: 323–324  In late 1942, shortly after the end of the Second Battle of El Alamein in November, he was sent to Cairo to work with Alan Wace, a fellow archaeologist and former director of the BSA, who had requested Robertson's assistance in carrying out intelligence work in the British embassy there. Due to an administrative mistake, he was transferred to Naples instead of to Athens in 1943–1944, and later served in Salonica in Greece alongside Philby.[2]: 324 

Robertson left the army in 1946,[2]: 325  and returned to the British Museum, where he assisted in returning the evacuated collections to the galleries.[5] He resigned in 1948 to succeed Ashmole as Yates Professor at UCL. He was a visiting fellow of the BSA for the 1957–1958 academic year.[2]: 322  In 1959, he published his first book, Greek Painting, in which he used vase-paintings and work in other media to try to recreate the lost wall-paintings known only through textual references. Between 1959 and 1968. he was chair of the governing council of the BSA.[2]: 322  In 1961 Robertson again succeeded Ashmole, this time as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, in which role he served until his retirement in 1978. He edited the second volume of the BSA's excavations at Perachora in 1962. In 1968–1969, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; he also held a visiting appointment at the J. Paul Getty Museum, then in Malibu, in 1930.[5]

From 1994,[2]: 330  Robertson suffered from Guillain–Barré syndrome and myasthenia gravis. He died of cardiovascular disease and bronchopneumonia at home in Cambridge on 26 December 2004, and was buried in Cambridge City cemetery.[5]

Influence on classical scholarship

As a scholar, Robertson is best remembered for his work on Greek art, in particular vase painting. He developed the techniques of attribution developed by the Oxford art historian John Beazley. When Beazley died in 1970, Robertson and another of Beazley's students, Dietrich von Bothmer, updated and enlarged Beazley's earlier lists of painters, Paralipomena: Additions to Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters and to Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters, published in 1971.[5] Among his students at UCL was the Mycenaean archaeologist Lisa French, who completed her doctorate in 1961.[6]: 461 

Robertson's History of Greek Art, which first appeared in 1975, was still considered an authoritative text and used for its breadth of learning and deep understanding of the topic in the twenty-first century.[5] 1975, too, saw the publication of The Parthenon Frieze, a joint project between Martin and the photographer Alison Frantz. In 1982, he received a Festschrift, The Eye of Greece, edited by Donna Kurtz and Brian Sparkes.[7] Robertson's work on Athenian red-figure vase-painting culminated in The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens, published in 1992 while he was in his eighties. The museum curator Ian Jenkins wrote in 1983 that "there can be few students of Greek art who would not readily admit their debt to him".[1]: 208 

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.

From Archilochus, PColon 7511 (trans. Robertson)[8]

As a poet Robertson published various collections, including Crooked Connections (1970), For Rachel (1972), A Hot Bath at Bedtime (1975), and The Sleeping Beauty's Prince (1977). He also published translations of Greek poetry,[5] including one of a fragment of an erotic work by Archilochus discovered in 1974.[8]

Family

Robertson's mother was killed in 1941 while serving as an air raid warden in Cambridge.[2]: 324  His paternal aunt, Agnes Arber, was a botanist: she was the third woman and the first female life scientist to be granted membership of the Royal Society.[9] Another paternal aunt was Margaret Hills, a suffragist organiser and the first woman to sit on Stroud Urban District Council.[10] His brother, Giles Henry Robertson, was a professor of art history at the University of Edinburgh.[3]: 557 

Robertson married (Theodosia) Cecil, née Spring Rice, on 4 September 1942:[5] the couple had six children, including the musician Thomas Dolby[11] and the computer scientist Stephen Robertson.[12] Their first child, Lucy, was born while Martin was posted to Cairo, and raised by Cecil in Iken in Suffolk.[2]: 324  Cecil Robertson died in an accident in 1984.[5][2]: 325  Martin remarried in 1988, to Louise Berge (née Holstein), who had been his graduate student at Oxford in the late 1960s.[5][13][2]: 330 

Selected academic publications

As sole author

  • Robertson, Charles Martin (1949). Why Study Greek Art? An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at University College, London. London: H. K. Lewis & Co. Ltd. OCLC 22090898.
  • — (1959). Greek Painting. Great Centuries of Painting. Geneva: Skira. ISBN 978-0-302-00052-6.
  • — (1963). Between Archaeology and Art History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. OCLC 5288681.
  • — (1987). Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Vases in the Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. ISBN 978-0-85323-495-1.
  • — (1992). The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-33881-3.

As co-author

References

  1. ^ a b Jenkins, Ian D. (1983). "The Eye of Greece. Studies in the Art of Athens. Edited by Donna Kurtz and Brian Sparkes. Cambridge U.P., 1982. Pp. xxv 188, with 48 plates and 4 text figures. £29.50 net". Greece and Rome. 30 (2): 208–209. doi:10.1017/S0017383500027169. S2CID 162903320.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Sparkes, Brian A. (2006). "Charles Martin Robertson 1911–2004" (PDF). Proceedings of the British Academy. 138: 321–335. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
  3. ^ a b c Rigway, Brunilde Sismondo (2005). "Charles Martin Robertson, 1911–2004". American Journal of Archaeology. 109 (3): 557–559. doi:10.3764/aja.109.3.557. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
  4. ^ Bailey, Martin (1 January 2000). "Parthenon Marbles Conference Report: Academic Interchange Remains Almost Completely Civil at the British Museum". The Art Newspaper. Retrieved 24 October 2023.
  5. ^ a b c d e f g h i Boardman, John (3 January 2008). "Robertson, (Charles) Martin". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/94618. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  6. ^ Sherratt, Susan (2022). "Elizabeth (Lisa) Bayard French (1931–2021)". The Annual of the British School at Athens. 117: 457–463. doi:10.1017/S0068245422000089. S2CID 251085986.
  7. ^ Boardman, John (3 January 2008). "Robertson, (Charles) Martin". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/94618. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  8. ^ a b Robertson, Martin (1975). "Appendix III". In Lloyd-Jones, Hugh (ed.). Females of the Species: Semonides on Women. London: Duckworth. pp. 99–101.
  9. ^ Packer, Kathryn (23 September 2004). "Arber [née Robertson], Agnes". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/30427. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  10. ^ Hanshaw Thomas, H. (1960). "Agnes Arber, 1879–1960". Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society. 6..
  11. ^ Boardman, John (3 January 2008). "Robertson, (Charles) Martin (1911–2004), archaeologist and poet". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Vol. 1 (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/94618. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
  12. ^ "Son Repatriates U.K. Prof's Greek Artifacts". CBC.ca. 18 April 2007. Retrieved 30 June 2024.
  13. ^ "Professor Martin Robertson". The Independent. 3 January 2005. Retrieved 30 September 2021.

Further reading