Henriette Hertz

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henriette_Hertz

https://ehne.fr/en/article/european-art/collection-european-images/...

Henriette Hertz (1846-1913), an art lover and collector from a wealthy Jewish family from Cologne, visited Italy on numerous occasions from 1888, and in 1890 moved to the Palazzo Zuccari in Rome, which was built and decorated by the painter F. Zuccari circa 1590. This German intellectual became the owner of the palazzo in 1904, and in 1908 inaugurated her salon there—one of the centres of Roman cultural life—and soon began considering the creation of a research institute dedicated to the art of the Renaissance. Hertz found an exceptional collaborator in the art historian Ernst Steinmann (1866-1934). Thus was born the project for a “Roman institute of art history for research on art and sculpture since the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Rome,” as well as a specialized academic library that would be constituted from Hertz’s collections, which in 1910 already numbered over 5,000 volumes and 10-12,000 photographs. In 1912, Hertz bequeathed the Palazzo Zuccari, along with its volumes and photo library, to Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften (today Max-Planck-Gesellschaft), and the Bibliotheca Hertziana officially opened its doors in January of the following year, with Steinmann as director. “The primary objective of the institution,” Hertz wrote in 1910, “is to explore the art and culture of the Renaissance and ensuing centuries, and particularly Rome as a centre of European civilization.”