M. Boskovits Biography
Miklós Boskovits (1935 - 2011) completed his university studies in his native Budapest, graduating in 1959 with a thesis on the theory of Renaissance perspective. After a year of volunteering at the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest, he became interested in questions of stylistic criticism and was strongly encouraged to improve in this field. In 1963 he was offered the opportunity to visit Italy for the first time. Returning to Italy in the following years, again for short stays, he had the opportunity to meet and associate with established scholars working in the field of fourteenth-century painting. The young Boskovits was mainly in contact with the disciples of Roberto Longhi, but also with Klara Steinweg, who, after Richard Offner's death, led the monumental undertaking A Critical and Historical Corpus of Florentine Painting. By this point, Boskovits had begun to investigate specific problems relating to fourteenth-century painting in Florence and beyond, pursuing branches of research independent of painting in Hungary. Having moved to Italy in 1968, he conceived, with the encouragement of Carlo Volpe and Mina Gregori, the ambitious project of reconstructing the history of Florentine painting in the last thirty years of the fourteenth century. At the same time, and by virtue of three consecutive scholarships that allowed him a long period of research at Villa I Tatti in Florence, Boskovits extended his range of interest to Sienese, Umbrian and Marche painting, as well as to thirteenth-century art. In the following years he published studies on Florentine and northern Italian art in the fifteenth century, as well as research on medieval painting in Lazio. In 1977 Boskovits was appointed full professor at the department of history of medieval and modern art at the University of Calabria and from 1980 to 1995 he taught at the Università Cattolica del S. Cuore in Milan. Much of Boskovits' career was dedicated to the Corpus of Florentine painting. Throughout the late 1980s, and with growing dedication after becoming professor of medieval art history at the University of Florence, a position he held from 1995 to 2008, Boskovits dedicated himself to the Corpus. In addition to the Corpus of Florentine Painting, Boskovits has cataloged 13th-, 14th-, and 15th-century Italian paintings in numerous public collections (Gemäldegalerie Berlin…, 1988; Italian Paintings of the 15th Century, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2003; Catalogs of the Galleria dell'Accademia di Firenze, volume 1, 2003, and volume 2, 2010; Italian Paintings of the Thirteenth and XIV Centuries, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, 2016) and private collections (The Martello Collection, volume 1, 1985 , and volume 2, 1992; Italian Paintings…, 2000; The Alana Collection…, 2009, volume 2, 2011 .
