Krautheimer-Hess, Trude [née, Hess]

Date born: 1902

Place born: Erfurt, Germany

Date died: 1987

Place died: Rome, Italy

Private scholar and collector. Trude Hess was born to a wealthy manufacturing family. At 22, she married the promising art historian Richard Krautheimer (q.v.). She studied art history at the universities in Jena, Frankfurt and Berlin, graduating in 1928 under the supervision of Adolf Goldschmidt (q.v.) and Rudolf Kautzsch (q.v.). Her dissertation, Die figurale Plastik der Ostlombardei von 1100 bis 1178, was published in the Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft the same year. She assisted her husband in research in Rome and elsewhere until the two were forced to emigrate because of religious persecution of Jews. In 1935 they moved to the United States where Richard taught art history first in Louisville, Kentucky and then at Vassar. In 1942 she volunteered for war service in the American Red Cross. For most of the 1950s she was actively involved researching Lorenzo Ghiberti, which resulted in the book of the same title, co-authored with her husband published in 1956. Throughout the 1940's and 50's she published articles in the Art Bulletin and Burlington Magazine. By the 1960's, Krautheimer had amassed a personal collection of Italian master drawings and was known in New York art circles as a connoisseur of distinction. The collection was distinctly hers, not her husband's. The collection was exhibited at the Duke University Art Museum in 1966.

The Romanesque scholar Walter Cahn (q.v.) consider Krautheimer-Hess outstanding for her studies of north Italian sculpture.

Home Country: Germany/United States

Sources: Wendland, Ulrike. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nationalsozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. Munich: Saur, 1999, vol. 1, pp. 386-87; telephone conversation, Barry Hannegan, Pittsburgh, Sept. 28, 2001; Cahn, Walter. "Romanesque Art, Then and Now: A Personal Reminiscence." in Hourihane, Colum, ed. Romanesque Art and Thought in the Twelfth Century: Essays in Honor of Walter Cahn. University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2008, p. 34.

Bibliography: and Krautheimer, Richard. Lorenzo Ghiberti. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1956. revised editions, 1970, 1982; Italian Master Drawings from the Collection of Mrs. Richard Krautheimer. Durham, NC: The Gallery, Dept. of Art, Duke University, 1966; "Original Porta dei Mesi at Ferrara and the art of Niccolo." Art Bulletin 26 (September 1944): 152-74; "Excavations at San Lorenzo f.l.m. in Rome, 1957." American Journal of Archaeology 62 (October 1958): 379-82; "Sheet of Sketches by Guido Reni." Burlington Magazine 104 (November 1962): 384-7, 500; "More Ghibertia." Art Bulletin 46 (September 1964): 307-21.

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