(1923-2007)

Art and architecture historian, and art professor at Yale University from 1963 to 1998, George Hersey died at home in New Haven in October. He was an authority in Italian Renaissance architecture and sculpture, and 19th-century art and architecture in Europe and North America. After graduating from high school, Hersey entered the merchant marine and helped ferrying troops back to the US after World War II. After a short time in the Army, he went to Harvard to initiate art studies, which he complemented with a masters in drama and set design at Yale, university to which he was linked all his life and which he left only during the five years he spent at Bucknell University. He returned to New Haven in 1959 to complete another masters degree and his doctorate, and four years later he began teaching there. He is the author, among other titles, of Pythagorean Palaces: Architecture and Magic in the Italian Renaissance (1976); The Lost Meaning of Classical Architecture (1988) and Possible Palladian Villas (1992), in which, fascinated by the new technologies, he used computer science to re-read Palladio’s projects.