Martin Robertson

Charles Martin Robertson was born in Pangbourne, Berkshire, the eldest child of Donald Struan Robertson and Petica Coursolles, née Jones. His mother hosted a literary salon;[2]^: 321 his father was a classicist, appointed Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge in 1930.[3]^: 557[2]^: 321His childhood friends included Kim Philby, later a double agent for the Soviet union within the British Secret Intelligence Service.[2]^: 324

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.[2]^: 322 He attended his first excavations in 1930, in the summer before his matriculation at Trinity,[2]^: 321 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.[2]^: 322 Later, in 1934–1936, Robertson moved to Athens as a student of the British School, where Payne was the director.[3]^: 557 At the BSA, he worked on Iron Age material from the excavation of Ithaca.[2]^: 322

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.[2]^: 323 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.[4] 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.[2]^: 323

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.[2]^: 323 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".[2]^{: 323–324} 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.[2]^: 324

Robertson left the army in 1946,[2]^: 325 and returned to the British Museum, where he assisted in returning the evacuated collections to the galleries.[5] 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.[2]^: 322 In 1959, he published his first book, Greek Painting, in which he used vase-paintings and work in other media to try to recreate the lost wall-paintings known only through textual references. Between 1959 and 1968. he was chair of the governing council of the BSA.[2]^: 322 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 at Princeton University; he also held a visiting appointment at the J. Paul Getty Museum, then in Malibu, in 1930.[5]

From 1994,[2]^: 330 Robertson suffered from Guillian-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.[5]

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.[5] Among his students at UCL was the Mycenaean archaeologist Lisa French, who completed her doctorate in 1961.[6]^: 461

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.[5] 1975, too, saw the publication of The Parthenon Frieze. In 1982, he received a Festschrift, The Eye of Greece, edited by Donna Kurtz and Brian Sparkes.[7] 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".[1]^: 208

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,[5] including one of a fragment of an erotic work by Archilochus discovered in 1974.[8]

Robertson's brother, Giles, was a professor of art history at the University of Edinburgh.[3]^: 557 His mother was killed in 1941 while serving as an air raid warden in Cambridge.[2]^: 324 Martin Robertson married (Theodosia) Cecil, née Spring Rice, on 4 September 1942:[5] the couple he had six children, including the musician Thomas Dolby.[9] His first child, Lucy, was born while he was posted to Cairo, and raised by Cecil in Iken in Suffolk.[2]^: 324

Cecil Robertson died in an accident in 1984.[5][2]^: 325 Martin Robertson later remarried in 1988, to Louise Berge (née Holstein), who had been his graduate student at Oxford in the late 1960s.[5][10][2]^: 330

• Biographical obituary
• Festschrift with biographical foreword and a full bibliography