Throughout his life, he was anti-sectarian and unreligious. Gombrich was born into an extremely sophisticated family in Vienna, originally Jewish but converted at the turn of the 20th century to a rather mystical protestantism in an ambience close to that of Gustav Mahler. The sheer scope of his reading, the way he coordinated his knowledge and the accuracy of his memory were - as another historian described it - "awesome". The Story of Art (1950, 16th edition 1995) has been the introduction to the visual arts for innumerable people for more than 50 years, while his major theoretical books, Art and Illusion (1960), the papers gathered in Meditations on a Hobby Horse (1963) and other volumes, have been pivotal for professional art historians. Sir Ernst Gombrich, who has died aged 92, was the most eminent art historian of the last half-century, both for specialist scholars and for a wider public.
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