John Pope-Hennessy


Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy , was a British art historian and Director of the British Museum. He was a scholar of Italian Renaissance art. Many of his writings, including the tripartite Introduction to Italian Sculpture and his magnum opus, Donatello: Sculptor, are regarded as classics in the field.

Early years

Pope-Hennessy was born into an Irish Catholic family in Belgravia, London, to Major-General Richard Pope-Hennessy and Dame Una Pope-Hennessy, who was the daughter of Arthur Birch, Lieutenant-Governor of Ceylon. He was the elder of two sons; his younger brother James Pope-Hennessy was a writer of note.

Education

Pope-Hennessy was educated at Downside School, a Roman Catholic boarding independent school for boys, in the village of Stratton-on-the-Fosse in Somerset, followed by Balliol College at the University of Oxford, where he read modern history. At Oxford, he was introduced by Logan Pearsall Smith to Kenneth Clark, who became a mentor to the young Pope-Hennessy.

Life and career

Upon graduation, Pope-Hennessy embarked on what he referred to as his Wanderjahre, travelling in continental Europe and becoming acquainted with its great art collections, both public and private.
Between 1955 and 1963, Pope-Hennessy's Introduction to Italian Sculpture was published in three volumes, covering Gothic, Renaissance and High Renaissance and Baroque sculpture. It has been said of these that "few books have dominated their field of study so thoroughly, or for so long".
Pope-Hennessy served as the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1967 and 1973, and then as the director of the British Museum from 1974 until 1976. His nickname to staff was "the Pope".
Traumatised by the murder of his gay brother James in January 1974, Pope-Hennessy left the British Museum after only two years as director. Initially he withdrew to Tuscany, but was enticed by an offer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to head its department of European painting, and moved to New York. He combined this curatorial post with a professorship at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts, and enjoyed mixing with the city's high society. His apartment was known to be lavishly furnished and he is said to have owned a large porphyry table.

Death

Pope-Hennessy retired at 75 and moved permanently to Florence with his lover Michael Mallon, at Palazzo Canigiani, where he died five years later. He is buried in the Cimitero Evangelico degli Allori in the southern suburb of Florence, Galluzzo, Italy.

Selected works