Martin Robertson

Charles Martin Robertson (11 September 1911 – 26 December 2004), known as Martin Robertson, was a British classical scholar and poet. He specialised in the art and archaeology of Ancient Greece, and was best known for his 1975 publication, ''A History of Greek Art.''

Born in Pangbourne, Robertson was the son of a classicist and the brother of a noted art historian. He was educated at The Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and took part in archaeological excavations from 1930. After a period at the British School at Athens, he joined the British Museum in 1936, where he became an apprentice of the art historian Bernard Ashmole. During the Second World War, Robertson served briefly in the Royal Signals before being transferred to intelligence work, in which capacity he was a subordinate of the archaeologist Alan Wace and a colleague of the Soviet double agent Kim Philby.

Robertson succeeded Ashmole as Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London in 1948. He returned to the BSA in 1957–1958, and became chair of its governing council in 1959. In 1961, once again following Ashmole, he was appointed Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, where he remained until his retirement in 1978. Alongside his archaeological work, Robertson wrote and published poetry, releasing four collections of his works in the 1970s. He died in Cambridge in 2004.

Robertson's archaeological publications included material from Ithaca and Perachora in Greece and from the site of Al-Mina in Syria. His work on Greek art developed that of John Beazley, who had pioneered the study of Attic vase-painting in the first half of the twentieth century. His ''History of Greek Art'' remained a standard reference for many decades, and in 1983 the museum curator Ian Jenkins wrote that "there can be few students of Greek art who would not readily admit their debt to him".

Early life

Charles Martin Robertson was born in Pangbourne, Berkshire, the eldest child of Donald Struan Robertson and Petica Coursolles, . His mother hosted a literary salon; his father was a classicist, appointed Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge in 1930. His childhood friends included Kim Philby, later a double agent for the Soviet union within the British Secret Intelligence Service.

Martin Robertson, as he was always known, attended The Leys School and Trinity College, Cambridge. His Cambridge contemporaries included Philby, the art historian Dale Trendall and the politician Enoch Powell. He attended his first excavations in 1930, in the summer before his matriculation at Trinity, at Perachora in the Corinthia, under the directorship of the archaeologist Humfry Payne. He graduated from Trinity in 1934 with a First in part two of tripos. Later, in 1934–1936, Robertson moved to Athens as a student of the British School, where Payne was the director. At the BSA, he worked on Iron Age material from the excavation of Ithaca.

Academic career

Robertson returned to England in 1936 as Assistant Keeper in the Greek and Roman department of the British Museum, cataloguing the pottery from the excavations at Al-Mina in Syria led by Leonard Woolley in 1936–1937. In 1937–1938, staff in the department carried out an aggressive cleaning of the Elgin Marbles, using copper chisels and highly abrasive silicon carbide, at the request of the entrepreneur Joseph Duveen; Duveen wanted the sculptures, originally painted, to look whiter for their display in a new gallery which he was funding. Robertson was the only junior Assistant Keeper not involved in the cleaning, and so the only one to keep his job; however, he was demoted in seniority. As a consequence of the dismissals, Denys Haynes was recruited as an Assistant Keeper, and the art historian Bernard Ashmole, then the Yates Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology at University College London, was brought in on a part-time basis to run the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. Haynes and Robertson became lifelong friends, and Robertson later wrote of the "precious apprenticeship" he gained from working with Ashmole.

Robertson attended a classical conference in Berlin in August 1939, on behalf of the British Museum; he was recalled shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. From 23 August, he took part in the removal of material from the museum to London Underground stations and country houses, so as to protect the artefacts from bombing. In 1940, he enlisted in the British Army as a member of the Royal Signals, but was soon transferred to the Intelligence Corps and trained to work in cryptanalysis at Bletchley Park. In an obituary of Robertson, the archaeologist Brian Sparkes wrote that his military service was largely unsuccessful and characterised by "mind-numbing boredom". In late 1942, shortly after the end of the Second Battle of El Alamein in November, he was sent to Cairo to work with Alan Wace, a fellow archaeologist and former director of the BSA, who had requested Robertson's assistance in carrying out intelligence work in the British embassy there. Due to an administrative mistake, he was transferred to Naples instead of to Athens in 1943–1944, and later served in Salonica in Greece alongside Philby.

Robertson left the army in 1946, and returned to the British Museum, where he assisted in returning the evacuated collections to the galleries. He resigned in 1948 to succeed Ashmole as Yates Professor at UCL. He was a visiting fellow of the BSA for the 1957–1958 academic year. In 1959, he published his first book, ''Greek Painting,'' in which he used vase-paintings and work in other media to try to recreate lost wall-paintings known only through textual references. Between 1959 and 1968. he was chair of the governing council of the BSA. In 1961 Robertson again succeeded Ashmole, this time as Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and Art at the University of Oxford, in which role he served until his retirement in 1978. He edited the second volume of the BSA's excavations at Perachora in 1962. In 1968–1969, he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; he also held a visiting appointment at the J. Paul Getty Museum, then in Malibu, in 1930.

From 1994, Robertson suffered from Guillain–Barré syndrome and myasthenia gravis. He died of cardiovascular disease and bronchopneumonia at home in Cambridge on 26 December 2004, and was buried in Cambridge City cemetery.

Influence on classical scholarship

As a scholar, Robertson is best remembered for his work on Greek art, in particular vase painting. He developed the techniques of attribution developed by the Oxford art historian John Beazley. When Beazley died in 1970, Robertson and another of Beazley's students, Dietrich von Bothmer, updated and enlarged Beazley's earlier lists of painters, ''Paralipomena: Additions to Attic Black-Figure Vase-Painters and to Attic Red-Figure Vase-Painters'', published in 1971. Among his students at UCL was the Mycenaean archaeologist Lisa French, who completed her doctorate in 1961.

Robertson's ''History of Greek Art'', which first appeared in 1975, was still considered an authoritative text and used for its breadth of learning and deep understanding of the topic in the twenty-first century. 1975, too, saw the publication of ''The Parthenon Frieze'', a joint project between Martin and the photographer Alison Frantz. In 1982, he received a ''Festschrift,'' ''The Eye of Greece,'' edited by Donna Kurtz and Brian Sparkes. Robertson's work on Athenian red-figure vase-painting culminated in ''The Art of Vase-Painting in Classical Athens,'' published in 1992 while he was in his eighties. The museum curator Ian Jenkins wrote in 1983 that "there can be few students of Greek art who would not readily admit their debt to him".

Poetry

As a poet Robertson published various collections, including ''Crooked Connections'' (1970), ''For Rachel'' (1972), ''A Hot Bath at Bedtime'' (1975), and ''The Sleeping Beauty's Prince'' (1977). He also published translations of Greek poetry, including one of a fragment of an erotic work by Archilochus discovered in 1974.

Family

Robertson's mother was killed in 1941 while serving as an air raid warden in Cambridge. His paternal aunt, Agnes Arber, was a botanist: she was the third woman and the first female life scientist to be granted membership of the Royal Society. Another paternal aunt was Margaret Hills, a suffragist organiser and the first woman to sit on Stroud Urban District Council.. His brother, Giles Henry Robertson, was a professor of art history at the University of Edinburgh.

Robertson married (Theodosia) Cecil, Spring Rice, on 4 September 1942: the couple had six children, including the musician Thomas Dolby and the computer scientist Stephen Robertson. Their first child, Lucy, was born while Martin was posted to Cairo, and raised by Cecil in Iken in Suffolk. Cecil Robertson died in an accident in 1984. Martin remarried in 1988, to Louise Berge (), who had been his graduate student at Oxford in the late 1960s.

Selected academic publications

As sole author

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As co-author

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References

Further reading

Biographical obituary

''Festschrift'' with biographical foreword and a full bibliography

{{DEFAULTSORT:Robertson, Martin
Scholars of ancient Greek pottery
1911 births
2004 deaths
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Lincoln Professors of Classical Archaeology and Art
British male poets
20th-century British poets
20th-century British male writers
Academics of University College London
Employees of the British Museum
People educated at The Leys School