David Gordon Mitten, 86

At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on Oct. 1, 2024, the following tribute to the life and service of the late David Gordon Mitten was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.

Have you seen the Attic black-figure vase in the Harvard Art Museums depicting Herakles playing the kithara and coping with his lionskin at the same time?  Or the early Byzantine weighing machine, with its bust-shaped weight depicting an empress?  Or the medallion portrait of the comic playwright Menander, uniquely inscribed in antiquity with his name and, therefore, invaluable for identifying uninscribed copies elsewhere?  If so, you owe the fascination of seeing these objects at Harvard to David Gordon Mitten, curator, teacher, and archaeologist.

Mitten was born in Youngstown, Ohio.  New World archaeology at the University of New Mexico and in the Smithsonian Institution’s River Basin Surveys provided his early training in fieldwork.  In 1957 he was awarded his B.A. in Classics at Oberlin College and, in 1962, his Ph.D. in Classical Archaeology at Harvard, where he spent the rest of his career.  His participation in the University of Chicago’s Isthmia excavations in Greece yielded his doctoral dissertation on the terracotta figurines from the Isthmian sanctuary of Poseidon, which he wrote under the direction of George Hanfmann.  As an excavator, Mitten’s most significant contribution was the discovery of a synagogue from the Roman era at Sardis, the capital of the fabled kingdom of Lydia in western Anatolia, where the Harvard–Cornell Archaeological Exploration of Sardis started annual excavation in 1958.  He was an associate director of the Sardis excavation for 40 years.

Upon completion of his Ph.D., Mitten was appointed Instructor in the Fine Arts and, in 1964, Francis Jones Assistant Professor of Classical Art.  In 1968 he was appointed associate professor with tenure (a short-lived concept at Harvard), and, the following year, he received a full professorship as the James Loeb Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology in the Department of the Classics.  In 1974, succeeding his teacher and mentor, he was appointed Curator of Ancient Art; in 1996, to his humble delight, the position was endowed as the George M. A. Hanfmann Curatorship of Ancient Art.

Until his retirement from the curatorship in 2005, an occasion on which he was celebrated at an international symposium of friends, colleagues, and former students, Mitten acquired a rich array of ancient objects in all media for Harvard, especially bronzes and coins but also marble sculptures and pottery.  In 2010 he retired from his professorial chair, having taught generations of students — in the Harvard Divinity School, where he offered a renowned seminar on the archaeology of the New Testament with Helmut Koester; the Division of Continuing Education; the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences; and, with special enthusiasm, Harvard College, where his course Images of Alexander the Great was a legend in the Core Curriculum.

Mitten’s major contributions in print comprise two catalogs, “Master Bronzes from the Classical World,” co-edited with Suzannah Doeringer and published to accompany an exhibition that traveled from Harvard in 1967–68 to the City Art Museum of St. Louis and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and “The Gods Delight: The Human Figure in Classical Bronze,” co-edited with Arielle P. Kozloff and published to accompany an exhibition that traveled from the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1988–89 to, once again, the Los Angeles County Museum and then to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  His special interest in bronzes left Harvard a legacy of important acquisitions, including small objects of personal attire (fibulae, the ancient equivalent of the safety pin) and some larger pieces ranging from elegant Picasso-esque figures of the Greek Geometric period to a Roman statuette of a goddess wearing a bird-shaped headdress.

Mitten’s love of ancient objects benefited not only the Harvard Art Museums, through 30 years of passionate curatorial acquisition, but also generations of students, whom he charmed and enthused with hands-on demonstration of the intricacies of craftsmanship residing in the humblest of objects.  Far from protecting these pieces from the hazards of human touch, he would hand round gloves at the beginning of every class and teach his students how handling an object is key to understanding it.  He believed in the capacity of fragments to tease students’ imagination and test their connoisseurship, and, alongside glamorous purchases like an Etruscan black-figure amphora depicting the ambush of the Trojan hero Troilus by Achilles, he created a valuable teaching tool by gathering ostensibly trivial fragments of red- and black-figure pottery.  Intermittently during his career, he published articles on objects in Harvard’s collections, thereby making them known beyond the confines of the Yard.

Just as Mitten could make an inert object come alive as he cradled it in the palm of his hand or held it up to the light to illustrate a particular swirl of drapery or carefully shaped lock of hair, so, too, could he enthrall an audience with tales of excavating at Sardis or a detective story tracing the pedigree of a new acquisition.  He took an intense interest in other people, both their dreams and their challenges, and sought opportunities to further their ambitions.  The legacy of his passion for ancient coins was secured with the appointment of Harvard’s first curator of coins, Dr. Carmen Arnold-Biucchi, in 2002.  Students of the civilizations adjacent to Greece and Rome also benefited from acquisitions that he made, such as two groups of cylinder seals intricately carved in Mesopotamia long before the Greeks and Romans came to dominate the Mediterranean world.

Mitten was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in 1976, the Petra Shattuck Teaching Prize from the Harvard Extension School in 1988, and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1993.  In 2009 he received the Faculty of the Year Award from the Harvard Foundation.  Having accepted Islam during his excavations at Sardis in 1969, he became a faculty advisor to the Harvard Islamic Society; he practiced Sufism and frequently delivered the homily at Morning Prayers in Appleton Chapel.  He is survived by his wife Heather Barney; two daughters from his first marriage, Claudia Hon and Eleanor Mitten; his stepdaughter, Sophia Barney-Farrar; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.

Respectfully submitted,

Amy Brauer
Susanne Ebbinghaus
Ioli Kalavrezou
Kimberley Patton
Kathleen M. Coleman, Chair