Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896-1989). Pioneer of Armenian Art History

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chapter 34 2 Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896–1989) Pioneer of Armenian Art History Dickran Kouymjian Sirarpie Der Nersessian was the world’s foremost authority on Armenian art as well as a renowned specialist in Byzantine art. It is she who established the principles for the study of Armenian manuscript illuminations and developed its methodology. She was the discipline’s real pioneer and its most illustrious representative. She was a tireless researcher and writer with Wfteen books, one hundred articles, and forty reviews; she contributed articles in festschrifts for most of the eminent medieval, Byzantine, and Armenian scholars of the twentieth century. 1 Der Nersessian was born to an upper-middle-class family in Constantinople in 1896; her father, Mihran, was a well-known printer in the Ottoman capital and her mother, Akabi, the sister of Archbishop Maghakia Ormanian, patriarch of Constantinople and a distinguished church scholar and historian who lived with the family. 2 Orphaned at a young age, Der Nersessian and her older sister, Arax, Xed to Bulgaria with an aunt—in the wake of the Turkish genocide of the Armenians in 1915—and then on to Geneva, Switzerland. Her uncle, Archbishop Ormanian, had an enormous inXuence on her life, as she so often mentioned, and he inspired her to become a historian. As the Armenian patriarch from 1896 to 1908, he was the oYcial leader of the entire Armenian community in the Ottoman Empire and answered directly to the sultan. In 1910 he went to the Armenian monastery of St James in Jerusalem to complete the third and Wnal volume of his massive History of the Armenian Nation. 3 He returned to Constantinople in 1918 and died the same year after his nieces were already settled in Paris. Unfortunately, his death and that of their aunt in the same year left the young Der Nersessian girls without resources or relatives except for their older brother, Boghos, who stayed in Constantinople. Supporting herself during college, very unusual for a woman in those years, Der Nersessian went from the University 483
484 Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896–1989) of Geneva to the École des hautes études in Paris, where, through her great tenacity, she pursued her distinguished academic career. Der Nersessian’s teachers were the great Wgures of Byzantine and medieval studies of the time. In 1922 she was taken on as an assistant by Gabriel Millet, the renowned early Christian and Byzantine art historian, to help organize the world’s foremost photographic archive of early Christian and Byzantine archaeology and iconography at the École des hautes études, inspiring her gradual drift from history to art history. She also studied with such luminaries as Henri Focillion, Charles Diehl, and Emile Mâle, the leading scholars in medieval art and art history, as well as with the linguist and Armenologist Antoine Meillet. Her main access to Armenian scholarship was through the impressive works of her uncle. It was principally with Gabriel Millet that her career was shaped toward Byzantine and, secondarily, Armenian art, especially manuscript illumination. In 1929, together with Millet, she published her Wrst major study on the illustrations of the Armenian Psalter. 4 Five years later, after completing a series of long articles on Byzantine miniatures, she returned to Armenian art to examine the very beginnings of manuscript illumination in her Wrst English-language article, “The Date of the Initial Miniatures of the Etchmiadzin Gospel.” 5 Forty years after her Wrst article, she again attacked the study of Byzantine psalm books, this time publishing an entire volume devoted to the famous eleventh-century marginal psalter in the British Library. 6 One of her two doctoral theses was also on the miniatures of Barlaam and Joasaph in the Byzantine tradition. 7 In between there were dozens of articles on Byzantine art, including a major study of the tenth-century Menologium of Basil I. 8 Her precocious engagement in the interwar period made Der Nersessian one of the pioneers in the study of Byzantine illumination, a discipline just beginning to establish itself in the broad domain of Byzantine art, then considered a subdiscipline of early Christian and medieval art. After some years of teaching as an assistant at the École des hautes études, she was invited in 1930 to join the art history faculty of Wellesley College near Boston. She eventually became chairperson of the art history department and director of the university’s Farnsworth Museum. In 1946 she was invited to Dumbarton Oaks, the newly established Byzantine center of Harvard University in Washington, D.C., as one of its Wrst senior fellows and resident scholar, which reinforced her research in Byzantine studies. She held that post as well as that of professor at Harvard University until her retirement in 1963, after which she moved back to Paris. One must, however, consider her personal specialty as Armenian art, particularly the discipline she pioneered, the interrelations of Armenian and Byzantine art, especially in manuscript illumination. Already during the war years she gave a series of lectures in New York at the Pierpoint Morgan Library in French under the auspices of New York University and the École libre des hautes études, the “resistance movement” of exiled French intellectuals. These lectures were eventually published in 1945 by Harvard University Press under the title Armenia and the Byzantine Empire. It is tempting to think of Sirarpie Der Nersessian as a feminist before feminism.
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Sirarpie Der Nersessian (1896-1989). Pioneer of Armenian Art History

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