page_title: Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli / Career
caption_attribution_description: The Italian archaeologist and art historian Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli posing in the Soviet Embassy to receive diploma of the U.S.S.R. Academy of Sciences. Rome, 19th October 1959
context_page_description: Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli was an Italian archaeologist and art historian.
context_section_description: From his chairs at the universities of Florence and Rome, Bianchi Bandinelli directed a new breed of Italian archaeologists sensitive to classical history based upon dialectical materialism. He also taught at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.  In the 1950s and 1960s he undertook the writing of comprehensive texts on classical art intended to reach a wide and literate audience.  He founded the Enciclopedia dell'arte antica in 1958, and in the same year was elected as a foreign member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In the mid 1960s, Bianchi Bandinelli was commissioned to write the two volumes on Roman art for the French Arts of Mankind series. These works brought his writing to a larger audience and helped usher in social criteria for art into a larger and English-speaking audience.  In 1967 he founded the Dialoghi di archeologia with his students, one of the most innovative, if controversial, periodicals on classical archaeology.
  He was frequently a maverick in his interpretation of art and his arguments were, if not always compelling, forcefully grounded.  One such case is his interpretation of the famous Belvedere Apollo, a Roman copy of a Greek work now thought to date to the fourth century B.C.  Although hailed by most art historians as a copy of the original work by the Greek master Leochares, Bianchi Bandinelli characterized the piece as a frigid copy of a Hellenistic work without relation to Leochares.
  One of his interests was the interrelation between Hellenistic, Etruscan and Roman art. His students included some of the most influential Italian archaeologists of the 20th century, among whom were Giovanni Becatti, Antonio Giuliano, Mario Torelli, Andrea Carandini and Filippo Coarelli.
  Bianchi Bandinelli was elected a foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1966.
caption: Ranuccio Bianchi Bandinelli receiving a foreign member diploma from the Soviet Academy of Sciences at the Soviet Embassy in Rome, October 1959
exif: {"Image ExifOffset": "26"}