Juergen Schulz (1927-2014)

Abstract

Generations of Venetian scholars will recall Juergen Schulz, who died on 23 November 2014, as the distinguished figure at the desk by the window in the reading room of the city’s State Archives. He arrived early to secure that place, and he worked through the day from his knees, a posture forced on him by the pain in his back that he would not let compromise his research. They will also remember him as the colleague who led study tours through the outback of the city to see the often obscure traces of its early urban fabric. “Venice,” he’d say, in the argot of a 1950s radio detective, “is my beat.” These are the two sides of the man. He was tall and straight, elegant and learned, but he was also down-to-earth and possessed of a lively sense of humor. He knew his way around the libraries, print cabinets, and bookshops of Europe, and he could also fix a carburetor. At home in Providence, Rhode Island, he and his wife, Anne, entertained often and well in their grand early nineteenth-century house on Bowen Street. Beautifully ordered books lined the rooms, and stack space excavated below the house accommodated a collection of Venetian material among the best in the United States.