John Fleming

John Fleming, art historian: born Berwick-upon-Tweed, Northumbberland 12 June 1919; FRSL 1963; died Tofori, Italy 29 May 2001.

John Fleming was one of the last of that great generation of art historians who learned their craft through travel and connoisseurship rather than degree courses.

Born in Berwick-upon-Tweed, he spent the greater part of a long and productive life in Italy, where he produced the standard reference works on architecture and the decorative arts, in tandem with his partner, Hugh Honour. Together, they brought to their work an authoritative and elegant style of writing, refreshingly free from jargon or dogma, but Fleming's abiding interest lay in the creative interchange between Britain and Italy, ranging from the great Neoclassical architect Robert Adam to 19th-century connoisseurs and artists like James Hudson and William Spence, men whose careers in some ways adumbrated his own.

Fleming's original intention was to become a painter, but he bowed to his father's wishes and, after schooling at Rugby, read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, before the Second World War. At that time, he discovered Italy and made the first of many journeys south, studying the frescoes of Piero della Francesca in Arezzo. When war came, he was sent to Cairo with the Intelligence Corps; there he explored the fantastic buildings erected during the early 19th century in a style he dubbed "Turkish rococo". Fleming sent an article on the subject to the Architectural Review, whose editor, Nikolaus Pevsner, encouraged him to write more. He subsequently produced further articles on Maltese churches and baroque sculpture, as well as turning to contemporary Italian painting for Penguin New Writing.

After the war, Fleming qualified as a solicitor, his father's profession, and served with the John Hilton bureau at Cambridge, where he met Hugh Honour, then an undergraduate. The death of his parents enabled Fleming to follow his own inclinations by going to Italy to try his luck as a freelance writer.

Initially, he took up a position as reader to the nearly blind Percy Lubbock, an Edwardian man of letters who lived in considerable luxury on the Gulf of Spezia. Honour joined him there in 1954, and through Lubbock they were introduced to the Anglo-Italian community, including Bernard Berenson and his entourage at Villa I Tatti. More decisive for their careers, however, were Pevsner and Rudolf Wittkower, who encouraged their interest in baroque sculpture and architecture at a time when both seemed remarkably out of tune with contemporary taste.

Their early years in Italy produced a memorable series of articles for The Connoisseur and other publications, in which Fleming displayed an enviable knowledge of primary sources as well as a sure sense of quality. This period culminated with his first book, Robert Adam and his Circle (1962), which drew together Fleming's interests in an admirable account of the Scottish architect's formative years.

At the time, the study of British architecture was insular ­ in the double sense of that word ­ and Fleming's book provided a totally new perspective on Neoclassicism, exploring its social and cultural implications as much as its artistic ones. Its inspiration came through the chance discovery of letters written to their family by Robert and James Adam from Italy; yet Fleming expanded this into a much broader study of the relations between two generations of Scottish connoisseurs and architects and their Italian counterparts in the first half of the 18th century. The book won several prizes, but its author was diverted from writing a companion volume by his growing work as editor and collaborator with Honour.

In 1957, they abandoned Lerici for Asolo, north of Venice, where they rented a house from Freya Stark. In Asolo, a chance encounter with the publisher Allen Lane led to commissions from Penguin Books for two series of books on "Style and Civilisation" and "The Architect and Society". In retrospect, it was a golden age of publishing when idealism and design counted for more than marketing and accountancy. Fleming and Honour had the knack for finding the best scholars and giving them an opportunity to write short, well-illustrated texts that were not only scholarly but also introduced art history to wider audiences.

A number of these books, such as Andrea Palladio by James Ackerman (1966), Mannerism by John Shearman (1967) and Honour's Neo-Classicism (1968) and Romanticism (1979), have become classics and are still in print. At the same time, they collaborated with Pevsner to produce The Penguin Dictionary of Architecture (1966). For the first edition, Pevsner wrote about half the book, but with successive editions (the last appearing in 1998), Fleming and Honour transformed it into a volume four times the original size with new sections on landscape architecture and entries such as Computer-Aided Design and Deconstructivism, topics scarcely conceivable four decades ago.

This work was followed by a companion volume, The Penguin Dictionary of Decorative Arts (1977), which offered an inventive approach to subjects often missed in dictionaries of the plastic arts, chiefly by focusing on design and designers from Alvar Aalto to Zwischengoldglass.

It says much for their range and scholarship that Fleming and Honour were able to keep abreast of such diverse material, but their interests broadened over the years to include virtually every province of art. This eventually led to the capstone of their joint productions, A World History of Art. First published in 1982, the volume celebrated its fifth edition two years ago and is widely held to be the most informative and best-written of such surveys.

Where most books of this kind are the product of a team of "qualified" experts, Fleming and Honour produced a more coherent as well as a personal vision, one which gave greater prominence to non-Western art. One of the book's many virtues is the degree to which non-Western art is presented in chronological sequence with Western art. They were indefatigable travellers, and their research took them around the world to see the huge mural paintings at Yonglegong, in the middle of the Gobi desert, to Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and to Disneyland in California, which, to their surprise, they quite enjoyed.

Fleming and Honour had made their home in the hills above Lucca since 1962. There they enjoyed the rural quiet necessary for their strenuous regime of reading and writing, but they were also near to Florence with its array of libraries, museums, and concerts. To visit them was to enjoy a life of the mind rare nowadays, and they seemed much better informed about the art world than most denizens of London or New York.

Both John Fleming and Hugh Honour took an active interest in younger people and new ideas and helped many younger scholars with advice and encouragement. Fleming's last year was clouded by illness and loss of sight, but he bore his afflictions with remarkable equanimity and became a great devotee of audio books. He is buried in the cemetery of the parish church above his villa, overlooking the landscape he loved.

Bruce Boucher