TEHRAN -- Dr. Lorenz Korn, Professor of Islamic Art History at the University of Barnberg in Germany, delivered a lecture on dome chambers of the Seljuk era at the residence of the German ambassador to Tehran on Saturday night.

Ambassador Herbert Honsowitz introduced the program, which was held on the occasion of Winckelmann Day, and announced that the German Archaeological Institute and the Iranian Center for Archaeological Research had just signed a new cooperation agreement.

Professor Korn’s lecture was well balanced in that it seemed to satisfy the experts in the audience while not being too technical for the non-specialists attending the event.

He eloquently elaborated on the history and development of Seljuk dome chambers using a number of slides. He specifically pointed to the influence of Sassanid era architecture on Seljuk domes and dome chambers.

Korn concluded his lecture by saying, “The different examples which we have seen, starting from the Friday mosque in Saveh through various buildings of the Seljuk period, should have made obvious that the monuments of Islamic Iran need no mystification to be considered great. We can be enchanted by the aesthetic qualities of these buildings, but art history and archaeology remain, since Winckelmann’s days, analytical. The architectural heritage of Islamic Iran offers material which needs to be explored and approached from different sides: Archaeological research and structural analysis should go hand in hand with each other, to establish the material evidence in the individual case. Besides, we need the testimony of the texts -- inscriptions, chronicles, sometimes even poems -- to understand the meaning of the material evidence and to interpret the phenomenon which began with the appearance of the first dome hall in mosque architecture nine hundred years ago and has its effect upon the present day.”

Winckelmann Day is held to commemorate the birthday of Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) on December 9.

Winckelmann ranks among the founding fathers of modern archaeology.

Winckelmann Day is celebrated every year in early December in the countries hosting departments or foreign branches of the German Archaeological Institute as well as in Germany, according to the German Embassy in Tehran.

Johann Winckelmann was an archaeologist and art historian who was born in Stendal, Germany, on December 9, 1717 to a poor family. He is regarded as the father of modem archaeology because of his influential writings on ancient art that are strongly based in aesthetics. His work has strongly shaped the European reception of ancient art and the so-called “Greek revival” of the classicist period. Eminent German writers such as Goethe and Schiller have been influenced by Winckelmann’s work.

Winckelmann studied theology and medicine at Halle and Jena Universities and worked as a teacher starting in 1743. From an early age onwards, his major interest was history and especially the history of Greek art. He became the secretary in Count Buenau’s famous library in Noethnitz, close to Dresden, in 1748. There he had the opportunity to further pursue this interest and to write his first essay “Gedanken Uber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst” (Thoughts on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture). This essay was published in 1755 and was recognized as a manifesto of the Greek ideal in education and art.

In 1755, Winckelmann moved to Rome to serve as a librarian, and later became the Secretary to Cardinal Albani who had an extensive collection of classical art. He was appointed prefect of antiquities and scriptor of the Vatican in 1763. This allowed him to achieve a thorough knowledge of the collections in Rome, and to visit the archaeological sites of Herculanaeum and Pompeii which had both been buried by the eruption of the Vesuvius volcano in 79 CE. His “Letter about the Herculanean discoveries 1762” and “Report about the latest Herculanean discoveries 1764” were the first publications providing information about the treasures from Herculaneaum and Pompeii to the European scholarly public.

In his main work, “History of the Art of Antiquity” (1764), Winckelmann presented the conception of art of classical times and laid down the principles of modem archaeology and history of art. His writings reawakened the taste for classical art and were responsible for the generation of the neoclassical movement in the arts.

On June 8, 1768 on his way back to Rome from Germany and Austria, he was murdered by a chance acquaintance in Trieste, Italy, which is where he was buried.