Otto Jahn was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 archaeologist, philologist, and writer on art

Art

Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect....

 and music

Music

Music is an art form whose medium is sound and silence. Its common elements are pitch , rhythm , dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture...

.

He was born at Kiel

Kiel

Kiel is the capital and most populous city in the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein, with a population of 238,049 .Kiel is approximately north of Hamburg. Due to its geographic location in the north of Germany, the southeast of the Jutland peninsula, and the southwestern shore of the...

. After the completion of his university studies at Christian-Albrechts-Universität in Kiel, the University of Leipzig

University of Leipzig

The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...

 and Humboldt University, Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

, he travelled for three years in France

France

The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...

 and Italy

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

; in 1839 he became Privatdozent

Privatdozent

Privatdozent or Private lecturer is a title conferred in some European university systems, especially in German-speaking countries, for someone who pursues an academic career and holds all formal qualifications to become a tenured university professor...

at Kiel, and in 1842 professor-extraordinary of archaeology and philology

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

 at the University of Greifswald (ordinary professor 1845).

In 1847 he accepted the chair of archaeology at Leipzig, but was deprived in it in 1851 for having taken part in the political movements of 1848-1849

Revolutions of 1848

The European Revolutions of 1848, known in some countries as the Spring of Nations, Springtime of the Peoples or the Year of Revolution, were a series of political upheavals throughout Europe in 1848. It was the first Europe-wide collapse of traditional authority, but within a year reactionary...

. In 1855 he was appointed professor of the science of antiquity, and director of the academic art museum at Bonn

Bonn

Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....

, and in 1865 he was called to succeed Eduard Gerhard at Berlin. He died at Göttingen

Göttingen

Göttingen is a university town in Lower Saxony, Germany. It is the capital of the district of Göttingen. The Leine river runs through the town. In 2006 the population was 129,686.-General information:...

.

His biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , baptismal name Johannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Mozart , was a prolific and influential composer of the Classical era. He composed over 600 works, many acknowledged as pinnacles of symphonic, concertante, chamber, piano, operatic, and choral music...

 appeared in 1856, the centenary of Mozart's birth. The work is admired for its scholarly approach (at the time, novel in Mozart biography), and in versions revised by Hermann Abert

Hermann Abert

Hermann Abert was a German historian of music.-Life:Abert was born in Stuttgart, the son of Johann Josef Abert , the Hofkapellmeister of that city....

 and Cliff Eisen

Cliff Eisen

Cliff Eisen is a Canadian musicologist and a Mozart expert. He has been based, since 1997, in the Department of Music at King's College London. As part of the Department's strong connections with the Royal Academy of Music, Eisen also leads courses there...

, continues in use today.

List of most important works

• Archaeological:
  • Palamedes (1836)
  • Telephos u. Troilos (1841)
  • Die Gemälde des Polygnot (1841)
  • Pentheus u. die Mänaden (1841)
  • Paris u. Oinone (1844)
  • Die hellenische Kunst (1846)
  • Peitho, die Göttin der Überredung (1847)
  • Über einige Darstellungen des Paris-Urteils (1849)
  • Die Ficoronische Cista (1852)
  • Pausaniae descriptio arcis Athenarum (3rd ed., 1901)
  • Darstellungen griechischer Dichter auf Vasenbildern (1861)
• Philological:
  • Critical editions of Juvenal, Persius and Sulpicia
    Sulpicia
    -Sulpicia I:The earlier Sulpicia is the only known woman from Ancient Rome whose poetry survives to this day. She is said to have lived in the reign of Augustus and have been probably the daughter of Servius Sulpicius Rufus and a niece of Messalla Corvinus, an important patron of literature...
    
     (3rd ed. by F Bücheler
    Franz Bücheler
    Franz Bücheler was a German classical scholar, was born in Rheinberg, and educated at Bonn.He held professorships successively at Freiburg , Greifswald , and Bonn , and in 1878 became joint-editor of the Rheinisches Museum für Philologie...
    
    , 1893)
  • Censorinus
    Censorinus
    Censorinus, Roman grammarian and miscellaneous writer, flourished during the 3rd century AD.He was the author of a lost work De Accentibus and of an extant treatise De Die Natali, written in 238, and dedicated to his patron Quintus Caerellius as a birthday gift...
    
     (1845)
  • Florus
    Florus
    Florus, Roman historian, lived in the time of Trajan and Hadrian.He compiled, chiefly from Livy, a brief sketch of the history of Rome from the foundation of the city to the closing of the temple of Janus by Augustus . The work, which is called Epitome de T...
    
     (1852)
  • Cicero
    Cicero
    Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
    
    's Brutus (4th ed., 1877) and Orator (3rd ed., 1869)
  • the Periochae of Livy
    Livy
    Titus Livius — known as Livy in English — was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people. Ab Urbe Condita Libri, "Chapters from the Foundation of the City," covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome well before the traditional foundation in 753 BC...
    
     (1853)
  • the Psyche et Cupido of Apuleius
    Apuleius
    Apuleius was a Latin prose writer. He was a Berber, from Madaurus . He studied Platonist philosophy in Athens; travelled to Italy, Asia Minor and Egypt; and was an initiate in several cults or mysteries. The most famous incident in his life was when he was accused of using magic to gain the...
    
     (3rd ed., 1884; 5th ed., 1905)
  • Longinus
    Longinus (literature)
    Longinus is the conventional name of the author of the treatise, On the Sublime , a work which focuses on the effect of good writing. Longinus, sometimes referred to as Pseudo-Longinus because his real name is unknown, was a Greek teacher of rhetoric or a literary critic who may have lived in the...
    
     (1867; edited. by J Vahlen, 1905)
• Biographical and aesthetic:
  • Ueber Mendelssohn's Paulus (1842)
  • Biographie Mozarts. The 11th edition Encyclopædia Britannica
    Encyclopædia Britannica
    The Encyclopædia Britannica , published by Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., is a general knowledge English-language encyclopaedia that is available in print, as a DVD, and on the Internet. It is written and continuously updated by about 100 full-time editors and more than 4,000 expert...
    
     called this "a work of extraordinary labour, and of great importance for the history of music" (3rd ed. by H. Deiters, 1889-1891; Eng. trans. by PD Townsend, 1891)
  • Ludwig Uhland (1863)
  • Gesammelte Aufsatze über Musik (1866)
  • Biographische Aufsatze (1866).

His Griechische Bilderchroniken was published after his death, by his nephew Adolf Michaelis

Adolf Michaelis

Adolf Michaelis was a German classical scholar, a professor of art history at the University of Strasbourg from 1872, who helped establish the connoisseurship of Ancient Greek sculpture and Roman sculpture on their modern footing...

, who has written an exhaustive biography in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie

Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie is one of the most important and most comprehensive biographical reference works in the German language....

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