John Pope-Hennessy

Sir John Wyndham Pope-Hennessy, was a British art historian. Pope-Hennessy was director of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1967 and 1973, director of the British Museum between 1974 and 1976, and subsequently lead the department of European painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 1988. He was a scholar of Italian Renaissance art. Many of his writings, including the tripartite Introduction to Italian Sculpture, and his magnum opus, Donatello: Sculptor, are regarded as classics in the field.

Early years

Born into an Irish Catholic family in the Belgravia district of Central London, Pope-Hennesssy's father was Major-General Richard Pope-Hennessy, who was the son of the politician Sir John Pope Hennessy. Pope-Hennessy's mother was Dame Una Pope-Hennessy. He was the elder of two sons; his younger brother, James Pope-Hennessy, was a noted writer.
Pope-Hennessy was educated at Downside School, a Catholic boarding school for boys, in Stratton-on-the-Fosse. He then went on to Balliol College, Oxford, where he specialised in modern history. At Oxford, he was introduced by Logan Pearsall Smith, a family friend, to Kenneth Clark, who later became a mentor.
Upon graduation, Pope-Hennessy embarked on his grand tour by travelling in continental Europe and becoming acquainted with art collections, both public and private.
During World War II he served as a Flight Lieutenant in the Deputy Directorate of Intelligence at the Air Ministry.

Career

Between 1955 and 1963, Pope-Hennessy's three-volume Introduction to Italian Sculpture was published, covering Gothic, Renaissance and High Renaissance and Baroque sculpture. The following year, he was named Slade Professor of Fine Art at the University of Cambridge.
Pope-Hennessy served as the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum between 1967 and 1973, and then as director of the British Museum from 1974 until 1976. There, he was nicknamed by colleagues as "The Pope". He is the only person to have served as head of both museums.
Traumatised by the murder of his gay brother James in January 1974, Pope-Hennessy left Britain in 1976 for good. Initially, he went to Tuscany, but was enticed by an offer from the Metropolitan Museum of Art to head its department of European painting, and moved to New York City. He combined this curatorial post with a professorship at New York University's Institute of Fine Arts. Pope-Hennessy was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1974 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1978. In 1986, Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, created the John Pope-Hennessy Curatorship of European Paintings.
Pope-Hennessy also served on the boards of the Venice in Peril Fund and Save Venice Inc., two non-profit organisations dedicated to the conservation and preservation of Venetian cultural heritage.
Besides his own scholarly publications, some of which became classics and were often reprinted, and his responsibilities as a museum director, he provided his name and expertise for others. He also wrote a foreword for Helmut Gernsheim's photographies of Beautiful London, contributed to a book on Westminster Abbey, and wrote an autobiography that was published in 1991.

Death and legacy

Although never really rich, Pope-Hennessy improved his financial situation substantially in the 1980s by selling two paintings he had acquired in 1946 in the sale of the Bridgewater House collection: Domenichino's Christ Carrying the Cross, which he had bought for GBP38, to the Getty Museum for USD750,000 and Annibale Carracci's Vision of Saint Francis, which he had bought for only GBP28, to the National Gallery of Canada for GBP100,000. With these proceeds he was able to afford his new lodging in Florence.
Hence, he retired at the age of seventy-five and moved permanently to Florence with his lover, Michael Mallon, and resided at Palazzo Canigiani, where he died five years later of complications from a liver ailment. After the funeral service at the small church of San Francesco Poverino in piazza Santissima Annunziata Pope-Hennessy was buried in the Cimitero degli Allori in Florence. His gravestone includes a quote from the First Epistle to the Corinthians in the Bible: ubi est mors victoria tua?. The remains of his impressive art collection in Florence were sold two years after his death for roughly GBP1,000,000 at Christie's in New York.