I’ve only just now been made aware that the great Renaissance scholar Konrad Oberhuber passed away on September 12, aged 72. I never had the pleasure of meeting the by all accounts charismatic and gregarious scholar, but have found great inspiration — and also at times frustration — in his work. It’s sad to see him go so relatively early, and — paranthetically as well as selfishly — to know that now I’ll never get the chance to discuss Venetian drawings with him.

Born in Linz, Austria, Oberhuber studied the history of art, archaeology, psychology and philosophy at the University of Vienna, earning his doctorate in 1959. He worked for a decade at the Albertina after which he spent a number of years as a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. In 1975, he became curator of prints and drawings and professor of fine arts at Harvard. He left in 1987 to return to the Albertina as its director, a post he held until his retirement in 2000. The last years of his life were spent in California. He was by all accounts an inspiring teacher and has clearly been a great influence to the considerable number of his former students now in top positions in the art world.

His greatest, and concomitantly most problematic scholarly contribution to his field is surely his large body of work on Raphael, especially on his drawings. His long list of publications on the master from Urbino of the 60s and 70s, culminating in the 1983 monograph Raphael — Die Zeichnungen, which he co-authored and clearly dominated, has been seminal; an invaluable expansion upon the foundational work by Pouncey and Gere of the early 60s. This work however led him to a considerable muddying of the waters in subsequent publications, giving to Raphael a large number of drawings previously attributed to his assistants, eventually bloating the oeuvre into the vastly expanded corpus of the 1999 exhibition catalogue Roma e lo stilo classico di Raffaello.