Stark, Karl Bernhard

Date born:  1824

Place Born:  Jena, Germany

Date died:  1879

Place died:  Heidelberg (?), Germany

Classicist art historian. Stark hailed from an illustrious professional family who saw to it that he gained a classical education early. He read the Odyssey in Greek at age nine. Stark studied philology at the University in Jena and then Leipzig between 1841 and 1845. The lectures of August Böckh (1785-1867) turned his interest to classical art. He traveled to Italy. In 1850, at just age 26, he was associate professor and director of the museum. At Jena he wrote a book on Albrecht Dürer in 1851. His book on the arts of Gaza, a broadly conceived cultural history, appeared in 1852. By 1855, at the untimely death of Karl Friedrich Hermann (q.v.) at the University in Heidelberg, Stark moved to become its first chair in archaeology. He also took over subsequent publications of Hermann's Lehrbuch der griechischen Antiquitäten with Johann C. F. Bähr (1798-1872). His publications at Heidelberg included a study of the myth of Niobe in 1863. Stark conceived of a survey of the archaeology of art from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. It was characteristic of Stark's broad vision of the nascent disciplines of art and archaeology in which he worked. However, only volume one appeared, and that posthumously in 1880. Stark also wrote a travel book on France and Belgium.

Home Country:  Germany

Sources:  Archäologenbildnisse: Porträts und Kurzbiographien von Klassichen Archäologen deutscher Sprache. Reinhard Lullies, ed. Mainz am Rhein: Verlag Philipp von Zabern, 1988: 49-50. 

Bibliography: Dürer und seine Zeit, 1851 [citation unconfirmable]; Städteleben, Kunst und Alterthum in Frankreich: nebst einem Anhang über Antwerpen. Jena: F. Frommann, 1855; Niobe und die Niobiden in ihrer literarischen, künstlerischen und mythologischen Bedeutung. Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1863; updated, with Bähr, Johann Christian Felix. Hermann, Karl Friedrich. Lehrbuch der griechischen Antiquitäten. 3 vols. Heidelberg: J. C. B. Mohr, 1855; Gaza und die philistäische Küste. Jena: F. Mauke, 1852; Handbuch der Archäologie der Kunst: Systematik und Geschichte der Archäologie der Kunst. Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1880; "Wanderungen und Wandlungen der Antike." Preussische Jahrbuch (Berlin) 26, p. 29; Johann Joachim Winckelmann: sein Bildungsgang und seine bleibende Bedeutung. Berlin: C. G. Lüderitz, 1867; Zwei Alexanderköpfe der Sammlung Erbach und des Britischen museums zu London. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härte, 1879.