Recommended | Dictionary of Art Historians

Mavi Boncuk | DICTIONARY OF ART HISTORIANS

A Biographical Dictionary of Historic Scholars, Museum Professionals and Academic Historians of Art

Sample Item:  Der Nersessian, Sirarpie [Véronique] 

Medevialist scholar of Armenian art. Born to an educated Armenian family in Constantinople, Der Nersessian was educated in the Armenian School of the city and the English High School for Girls. Her maternal uncle, Malachia Ormanian (1841-1918) was patriarch of the Armenian church in the Ottoman Turkey and lived with the family. A distinguished theologian and politician (by necessity as representative for Armenian Christians living in the city), he exerted a strong educational and religious influence on her. After the death of her father when she was eighteen (her mother had died when the girl was nine), Der Nersessian fled with her sister and aunt in the midst of World War I (and the Armenian genocide) to Bulgaria and eventually Switzerland in 1915. Despite financial hardships, she graduated from the Collège de Genève in 1917 and studied further at the university in Geneva until 1919. She and her now married sister moved to Paris where Der Nersessian attended the Sorbonne. At the Sorbonne she studied with the historian Francis Dvornik (1883-1975) and the art historian André Grabar, who was her same age. She received a Licencse ès Lettres in 1920 and a Diplôme d'Histoire Supérieure in 1921. Charles Diehl, the Byzantinist, and art historians Gabriel Millet and Henri Focillon were major influences. Millet made her his assistant at the École pratique des hautes ètudes of the University of Paris in 1922. Between 1922-23 she researched the Baberini Psalter at the Vatican Library and the Bristol Psalter at the British Museum. In 1925 she was awarded a Diplôme des Hautes Études. She spent 1927 researching the collection of Armenian Mekhitarist congregation of San Lazzaro degli Armeni in Venice, work which would later contribute to her doctoral thesis.

MORE See also: Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896–1989) Pioneer of Armenian Art History by Dickran Kouymjian PDF