We are sad to share the news of the passing of Professor John Lowden FBA last week.
One of the most influential medieval art historians of his generation, John completed an English degree at Cambridge (Emmanuel College, 1974) and after an interlude spent travelling and learning Greek, he studied for an MA (1977) and PhD (1980) at the Courtauld, met Joanna Cannon at the Courtauld and they married in 1980. In 1982, John joined the Courtauld’s faculty, retiring in 2017.
Illuminated manuscripts were at the heart of John’s intellectual project. As a researcher and teacher, John focused on relationships between images, words, ideas and people, from late Antiquity to the close of the Middle Ages, and ranging from Byzantium to the British Isles.
He brought to the study of illuminated manuscripts a remarkable facility for languages, palaeography, codicology, and the methods of textual criticism, while always prioritising the image. This holistic approach enabled John to challenge the philological methods which had dominated his field.
His first major publications focused on illuminated Greek manuscripts, beginning with Illuminated Prophet Books (1988), which argued that instead of supposing that the visual innovations in his seven case studies represented copies of lost late antique prototypes, the books’ illuminators could themselves be given credit for invention and improvisation. He followed this in 1992 with The Octateuchs, an examination of copies of the first eight books of the Bible; this also explored relationships between exemplar and copy, emphasising, inter alia, the intellectual facility and agency of the artists.
John continued to contribute to the art history of Byzantium throughout his research career, and he also wrote a compelling introduction to the field, aimed at students and the general reader: his Early Christian and Byzantine Art (1997) has been translated into French, Greek, Japanese and Korean.
Even as he continued to publish on Byzantine art, John’s fascination with illuminated books drew him to new lines of inquiry, including the Bibles Moralisées, made in Paris in the first decades of the 13th century. While earlier scholars had, understandably, focused their attention on the richly illuminated facing pages of these manuscripts, John’s attention was also caught by the blank openings with which the text-and-image openings alternated. Examining the blank pages of the British Library’s Bible Moralisée (Harley 1526 and 1527) with raking light, he realised that pressured underdrawings were visible on these sheets, implying that designs had been traced from one manuscript to another as an innovative method of speeding simultaneous production of two great sets of manuscripts. This observation led to research trips to Oxford, Vienna, Paris, New York and Toledo to examine the other copies. The Making of the Bibles Moralisée (2000), in two volumes, followed.
This endeavour entailed the analysis of a vast body of material (taken together, there are more than a million images in the Bibles Moralisées). John articulated how and for whom these books were made, re-considering their visual and textual relationships. Volume 1 offered a critical assessment of the core group of manuscripts, paying particular attention to how they were made; volume 2 offered a careful appraisal of the differences between these similar books through a close reading of the shortest book of the Bible, Ruth. This achievement was recognised with the 2002 Gruendler Prize for the best book in medieval studies.
A committed Europhile, John believed in the vital importance of travel, collaboration, and community. At the Courtauld, he established the Research Centre for Illuminated Manuscripts as a focus for bringing students, scholars and curators together, and as an engine for collaboration. This resulted in conferences, publications, and an enduring relationship with the British Library that supported its online Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, collaborative doctoral supervision and, with Dr Scot McKendrick and his former doctoral student Dr Kathleen Doyle, the AHRC-supported project leading to the major exhibition Royal Manuscripts: The Genius of Illumination (British Library, 2011-12). With colleagues at universities in Lille and Leuven, John established the roving ‘Lille-London-Leuven’ seminar, which brought research students from each centre together annually to share their research and visit collections between 1999 and his retirement.
Long fascinated by medieval ivory carving, especially in the context of early medieval book covers, John often taught classes using the Courtauld’s historic collection of fictile ivories (reproductions of medieval ivories in collections all over the world) as well as the Courtauld Gallery’s outstanding group of Gothic ivory objects.
In the early 2000s, wanting to create a catalogue of the Courtauld Gallery’s material, John began to assemble an international team of academics, curators and other experts in a new venture that aimed to catalogue all the Gothic and Neo-Gothic ivories in the world. Generously supported by Thomson Works of Art, the Ruddock Foundation for the Arts, and the Audrey Love Foundation, the Gothic Ivories Project was led by Dr Catherine Yvard and created a platform for institutions to publish the ivories in their collection which continues to generate innovative research. Meanwhile, John produced scholarly catalogues of the medieval ivories in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s Thomson Collection (with John F. Cherry, 2008), and of the Courtauld Gallery (with Dr Alexandra Gerstein, 2013).
John’s scholarly achievements were recognised internationally. He was elected a member of the Academia Europaea (2006), a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America (2011), and a fellow of the British Academy (2013). In 2011, he was made an honorary fellow of his alma mater, Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
Alongside his extraordinary brilliance, productivity, and scholarly range, John will be remembered for his exceptional qualities as a teacher, colleague, and mentor. Encouraging, kind, and wittily pragmatic, John often delivered advice in epigrams (known as Lowdenisms): always follow the most interesting path; the point of starting something is to finish it; ignore the similarities – difference is what matters in the end; whenever you get lost, return to the object. John’s creativity often manifested itself in the discovery of long-lost Middle English verses just in time for special occasions, which he would declaim with Chaucerian brio.
Generations of students benefitted from the scholarly community that John created with such close colleagues as Paul Crossley, Antony Eastmond, Eric Fernie, Lindy Grant, Michael Kauffman, Susie Nash, Rose Walker and, of course, Joanna, herself a stellar art historian and a long-time member of the Courtauld’s faculty.
John is survived by Joanna, their son Gregory, daughter-in-law Nady, and two grandchildren. He will be remembered with love and admiration by his family, friends, colleagues, and his many students.
By Alixe Bovey, Professor of Medieval Art History
