Maxime Collignon


Léon-Maxime Collignon was a French archaeologist who specialized in ancient Greek art and architecture.

Biography

From 1868 he studied at the École normale supérieure in Paris as a student of archaeologist Georges Perrot. In 1873 he became a member of the French School at Athens. In 1876, with Louis Duchesne, he conducted archaeological research in Asia Minor, about which, he published "Rapport sur un voyage archéologique en Asie Mineure". In 1879 he was named professor of Greek antiquities at the University of Bordeaux. In 1883 he returned to Paris as a deputy to Georges Perrot at the Faculty of Arts, where in 1900 he became a full professor of archaeology.

In 1893 he became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, of which, in 1904 he was elected as its president. In 1907 while sorting through art objects in a storage room at the museum in Auxerre, he discovered the so-called "Lady of Auxerre", a unique statuette dating to the times of Archaic Greece. How the sculpture got to Auxerre remains to this day a mystery.

Published works

His 1883 book on Greek archaeology, "Manuel d'archéologie grecque" was translated into English by John Henry Wright and published as "A manual of Greek archæology". In 1890 Jane Ellen Harrison translated and published Collignon's "Mythologie figurée de la Grèce" as "Manual of mythology in relation to Greek art". He was also the author of writings associated with archaeological digs that he participated in at Pergamon and Delphi. The following are some of his principal works in the fields of Greek art and architecture: