Irving Lavin (14 December 1927 – 3 February 2019) was an art historian of Late Antique, Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, and Modern painting, sculpture, and architecture. His wide-ranging contributions centered primarily on the correlation between form and meaning in the visual arts.
Scholarly life and work
Irving Lavin was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the son of Isadore Lavin and Jenny Shuff. Lavin began his career studying philosophy, first at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, then as a student of Horst W. Janson at Washington University in St. Louis, where he graduated with a B.A. in 1949. At the invitation of Bertrand Russell, Lavin went to Cambridge University to become his tutee. The following year, as he often joked, he turned to a more practical field, namely art history. At the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, he studied with, and was the assistant to, Walter Friedländer, Richard Offner, and Erwin Panofsky. With Horst W. Janson he wrote his master's thesis, "The Sources of Donatello's Bronze Pulpits in Lorenzo" (1951), and received his M.A. in 1952. At Harvard University he received a second M.A. in 1953, working with Ernst Kitzinger and John Coolidge. Under the latter, he wrote his doctoral thesis on "The Bozzetti of Gianlorenzo Bernini," and received his Ph.D. in 1955 from Harvard University. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957 as Assistant for the Human Resources Research Office, Continental Army Command at Fort Monroe, Virginia, Specialist Second Class. Between 1957 and 1959, Lavin was a Senior Fellow at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Center in Washington, D.C., where he wrote a major study of "The Hunting Mosaics of Antioch and Their Sources: A Study of Compositional Principles in the Development of Early Mediaeval Style" (1963).
Lavin's success became noteworthy early on: his publications won the College Art Association's prestigious Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize for Scholars under 40 on three occasions (1959, 1962, and 1968), so often, in fact, the paradigm for the prize was changed. After teaching art history at Vassar College for two years (1959–61), Lavin began a period of over twenty years in which he alternated teaching at New York University—first at Washington Square College, then in 1967 at the Institute of Fine Arts graduate school—and doing intensive research in Rome, Italy. His work was supported there by various grants, including a Senior Fulbright Scholarship, Italy, 1961–63; a Senior Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, 1965–66; and a Guggenheim Fellowship, 1968–69. Circa 1966, he made a historic discovery of the previously unknown earliest portrait bust (1612, Antonio Coppola) by the young prodigy Gianlorenzo Bernini, thirteen years old at the time, along with another equally remarkable unknown bust of Antonio Cepparelli dated 1622. These revelations were the first of many such Bernini discoveries made throughout Lavin's career, the last of which is a black and white marble sculpture of the famous Roman lawyer Prospero Farinacci, published in spring 2018.
Lavin was appointed in 1973 as Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, to the chair previously held by Erwin Panofsky and Millard Meiss. From that position, Lavin contributed to many aspects of art history’s position in America. He broadened the emphasis of scholarship from its long-held tightly Eurocentric attention, to include for the first time in the memberships at the Institute, on the board of the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art, and in the programs of meetings of the College Art Association, specialists in the fields of African art, the art of Mexico and South America, India, and the Far East. As a founding committee member, he played a major role in the creation of three new research institutes in North America: the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles; the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; and the Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montreal, Canada.