Sergio Donadoni, a professor of Egyptology at the Sapienza University of Rome, died on 31 October, aged 101. Born in Palermo, Donadoni attended the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa, where he completed his PhD thesis in 1935. He then studied at the University of Paris for two years and, in 1948, in Copenhagen. He conducted nine archaeological expeditions for the Universities of Rome and Milan, including the relocation of the temples of Abu Simbel between 1964 and 1968 to save them from the reservoir created by the Aswan High Dam.
Wojciech Fangor, a pioneer of Op Art, died on 25 October, aged 92. The outbreak of the Second World War meant that Fangor, who was born in Warsaw in 1922, had to study art privately. He received a diploma in absentia in 1946 from Warsaw’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he served as an assistant professor from 1953 to 1961. He then left Poland, living in West Berlin and England before settling in the US in 1966. He taught at the Farleigh Dickinson University, in New Jersey, and at Harvard University. New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum staged a solo exhibition of his work in 1970. One of Poland’s most highly regarded artists, Fangor is best known for his circular abstract paintings and for being a founding member of the Polish Poster School.
Ernst Fuchs, the Austrian painter, sculptor, designer and printmaker, died on 9 November, aged 85. Fuchs entered the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts in 1945. There, with five fellow students under the direction of their professor, Albert Paris Gütersloh, he founded the Vienna School of Fantastic Realism, which combined German Old Master techniques of realistic painting combined with religious and esoteric symbolism. From 1950 to 1961, he lived mainly in Paris, and in 1956, he converted to Roman Catholicism and began to paint religious subjects. Having returned to Vienna, he acquired and restored the derelict Otto Wagner Villa in 1972 (it became the Ernst Fuchs Museum in 1988). Fuchs also designed stage sets and costumes.
Lisa Jardine, a professor of Renaissance studies at the University of London and an art historian, died on 25 October, aged 71. The eldest daughter of Jacob Bronowski, the scientist best known as the presenter of the 1973 BBC series The Ascent of Man, Jardine was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, the University of Essex and Newnham College, Cambridge, where she studied mathematics before reading English in her final year. In 1969, she married the scientist Nicholas Jardine, and in 1982, the architect John Hare. She wrote, sometimes with others, many books for academic and popular audiences, notably Worldly Goods: a New History of the Renaissance (1996) and Going Dutch: How England Plundered Holland’s Glory (2008), as well as biographies of Francis Bacon (1974), Christopher Wren (2002) and Robert Hooke (2003), and several works on Francis Bacon. Jardine was a regular radio broadcaster and television presenter. From 2008 to 2014, she served as the chair of a UK government regulatory body, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority.
The Earl of Mansfield (William David Mungo James Murray), the owner of Scone Palace, one of the great stately homes of Scotland open to the public, died on 21 October, aged 85. The huge edifice was built for the Third Earl between 1803 and 1812 by the architect William Atkinson, a pupil of James Wyatt. It stands in the grounds of the Medieval Scone Abbey, destroyed in the Reformation, where the kings of Scotland had been crowned. Educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, he succeeded to the earldom on the death of his father in 1971. He served as the minister of state at the Scottish Office from 1979 to 1983 in Margaret Thatcher’s first administration, and urged the Lords in the 1982 debate on national museums and galleries to ensure that examples of industry and technology be conserved.