X-Nico

8 unusual facts about Meyer Schapiro


Bewcastle Cross

Schapiro, Meyer, Selected Papers, volume 3, Late Antique, Early Christian and Mediaeval Art, 1980, Chatto & Windus, London, ISBN 0-7011-2514-4 (includes The Religious Meaning of the Ruthwell Cross (1944), etc.

Forrest Bess

He did forge lasting relationships with a few friends and neighbors, and maintained years-long friendships and correspondence with Meyer Schapiro and with Betty Parsons.

Joshua Roll

The subject produced a sharp disagreement between Kurt Weitzmann, who thought the form of the roll was a classicising invention of the Macedonian Renaissance, and Meyer Schapiro, who, whilst agreeing with Weitzmann on a 10th-century date, held to the more traditional view that painted rotuli existed in Late Antiquity, and that the roll was essentially copied from such a work, perhaps through intermediaries.

Madonna in the Church

However, following research from Meyer Schapiro, he revised his opinion to the late 1430s in the 1953 edition of his Early Netherlandish Painting.

Maximianus of Ravenna

To a modern art historian Meyer Shapiro, "Maximian was "a poor deacon of Pola who to a high position through his political adroitness" as a protegé of Justinian II. He had not been wanted as archbishop by the people of Ravenna, but "by shrewd maneuvres he overcame their opposition, and won their respect by his discretion, generosity, and great enterprises of church building and decoration".

Schapiro, Meyer, "The Joseph Scenes on the Maximianus Throne", in Selected Papers, volume 3, Late Antique, Early Christian and Mediaeval Art, 1980, Chatto & Windus, London, ISBN 0701125144, also on JSTOR from the Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 1952

Saint Petersburg Bede

Meyer Schapiro, The Decoration of the Leningrad Manuscript of Bede, in Selected Papers, volume 3, Late Antique, Early Christian and Mediaeval Art, 1980, Chatto & Windus, London, ISBN 0-7011-2514-4 (originally Scriptorium, xii, 2, (1958), also JSTOR etc.

The Card Players

The Orsay painting was described by art historian Meyer Schapiro as "the most monumental and also the most refined" of the versions, with the shapes being simpler but more varied in their relationships.


Lionel Abel

A lively and sometimes cantankerous polemicist, he counted numerous members of his generation's intellectual elite among his friends and sparring partners, including Delmore Schwartz, Meyer Schapiro, Clement Greenberg, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Lionel Trilling, James Agee, Mary McCarthy, Hannah Arendt, Leslie Fiedler and Elizabeth Hardwick.

Mercedes Matter

Early teachers, chosen by the students, included the artists Philip Guston, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Charles Cajori, Louis Finkelstein and Sidney Geist; the art historian Meyer Schapiro; and the composer Morton Feldman.

New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture

Nicolas Carone and Mercedes Matter focused on drawing instruction and Meyer Schapiro and Leo Steinberg taught art history.

Tess Slesinger

In James T. Farrell's novel Sam Holman (not published until 1994), there are thinly-veiled fictional portraits of many prominent New York intellectuals (including Meyer Schapiro, Lionel Trilling, Elinor Rice, and Edmund Wilson), the character of Frances Dunsky is based on Slesinger.


see also