James S. Ackerman

James Sloss Ackerman (born 1919) is a prominent American architectural historian, a major scholar of Michelangelo's architecture, of Palladio and of Italian Renaissance architectural theory. He was born in San Francisco. At Yale, 1938-41, he came under the influence of Henri Focillon. His graduate work was at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (MA 1947, PhD 1952), where he studied with Richard Krautheimer and Erwin Panofsky. His studies were interrupted by his World War II service in the US Army in Italy, which, however, gave him an opportuniuty to increase his on-site understanding of Italian Renaissance architecture, his specialty -- He was assigned to retrieve the archives secured at the Certosa di Pavia. He was a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome (1949-52). He taught at Berkeley and from 1960 at Harvard as Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Fine Arts until his retirement in 1990. He was the editor of The Art Bulletin (1956-60) and Annali d'architettura; Ackerm