SHEARMAN, John (Kinder Gowran) 1931-2003

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born June 24, 1931, in Aldershot, England; died of a heart attack August 11, 2003, near Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada. Art historian, educator, and author. Shearman was a scholar of Renaissance art who helped in the restoration of the Sistine Chapel frescoes by Michelangelo. A graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art at the University of London, where he received his Ph.D. in 1957, he joined the faculty there as a lecturer after graduation, becoming a professor of art history and director of the department in 1974. He moved on to Princeton in 1979, where he was chair of the Department of Art and Archaeology, and then to Harvard University in 1987, where he was Charles Adams University Professor from 1994 until his retirement in 2002. Shearman was an authority on the art of Michelangelo, da Vinci, Poussin, del Sarto, Raphael, and Bartolomeo. He was also an expert on art restoration, and traveled to Italy in 1966 after a flood in Florence to help repair the art that had been damaged; in the early 1990s, he also worked with the Pontifical Advisory Commission for the Restoration of the Sistine Chapel. As an author, Shearman completed a number of valuable texts about Renaissance art, including Andrea del Sarto (1965), The Early Italian Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen (1983), Funzione e illusione (1983), Only Connect: Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (1992), and his last book, Raphael in Early Modern Sources.

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, August 30, 2003, p. B23.

New York Times, August 29, 2003, p. A21.

Times (London, England), September 8, 2003.

Washington Post, August 30, 2003, p. B23.