David Gordon Mitten (1935-2022)
David Gordon Mitten, James Loeb Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology Emeritus at Harvard University and the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient Art Emeritus at the Harvard Art Museums, passed away peacefully with his beloved wife at his side – just as he had wished –at his home in Cambridge on the morning of January 18, 2022, at the age of 86.
A renowned and kind archaeologist, teacher, lecturer, scholar, and museum curator with 60 years of service at Harvard, Professor Mitten had a transformative effect on students, colleagues, and friends over the course of his career. Known for his extensive photographic memory and encyclopedic knowledge of world history, he could recall everything he had read, each object he had seen, its origin, and the interests and works of his teachers, colleagues, and students. He generously shared the prodigious gifts of his magnificent mind and scholarly resources to connect people with history, to understand their place and responsibilities within it, and to connect them with each other. He retained his expansive intellect, humble demeanor, and love of people up until the last moment of his life.
Son of Joe Atlee Mitten, a principal, superintendent, and World War I veteran, and Helen Louise (Boyd) Mitten, a schoolteacher, Professor Mitten is survived by his cherished partner and wife Heather Baird Barney, his sister Dr. Martha Mitten Allen, niece Shannon Allen, nephew Matthew Allen and his wife Lori Morang, daughter Claudia Hon, son-in-law Mark Hon, and daughter Eleanor Mitten and son-in-law Robert Sapiro, grandchildren Lauren Hon, Alexander Hon, Peter Sapiro-Mitten, Elizabeth Schaefer and her husband Richard Schaefer, and great-grandchildren Hannah and Montgomery Schaefer. His extended family members who survive him are Sophia Barney-Farrar, Rose Marie Mazza Stiffler, Marylin Mazza, Laura Mazza-Dixon, Gina Mazza, Susan Van Etten and her husband Robert Van Etten, David Mazza and his wife Taylor McCall Mazza, Paul Mazza and his wife Sue Mazza, and Emily Tancredi-Brice Agbenyega and Constance Tancredi-Brice Girvan. His brother Thomas Mitten died tragically at age 12, as did his nephew Thomas Mazza at age 44. He leaves a host of friends and students he cared about deeply. He also leaves two Shih Tzus, Zena and Hercules, who gave him comfort and comic relief.
Professor Mitten grew up in Stow, Ohio, during the Great Depression and World War II, raised in a resourceful extended family of avid educators and farmers. Gifted with phenomenal intellect, he could read by age three and gave his first public talk in church at age four. In elementary school he learned to spell every word in the dictionary. When not reading about history, anthropology, and geology, or caring for animals in 4-H, he spent much of his childhood on the farmland of his grandparent’s home in Holmes County, where he found fossils, flints, potsherds, and arrowheads in the plowed earth. This trained his keen eye, gave him a deep appreciation for archaeology, and for the immense value of small overlooked objects.
Known as “The boy wonder from Ohio”, Professor Mitten initiated an excavation of a rock shelter in Stow when he was 16 and published his first scholarly article about it when he was 19. He attended Stow High School and went to Oberlin College, which instilled in him a global perspective. After graduating from college with a B.A. in Latin in 1957 and participating in excavations in New Mexico and South Dakota, he received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study with Prof. George Hanfmann at Harvard University. He received his M.A. degree in Classical Archaeology at Harvard University in 1958, a Fulbright Fellowship in 1959 to study at the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, participated in the excavations at Isthmia from 1960-1961, and earned his Ph.D. degree in Classical Archaeology at Harvard in 1962.
Professor Mitten started teaching in the Department of Fine Art in 1962, and became a professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture in 1969. His work in the Department of the Classics began in 1964 as Francis Jones Assistant Professor of Classical Archaeology led in 1969 to being appointed as James Loeb Professor of Classical Art and Archaeology. He was appointed Assistant Curator of Ancient Art at Harvard’s Fogg Museum in 1965, then rose to Curator of Ancient Art in 1975. In 1996, he became the George M.A. Hanfmann Curator of Ancient and Byzantine Art and Numismatics, a newly established position named in honor of his former professor and predecessor. Professor Mitten held this position until he retired from the Harvard Art Museums in 2005 on his 70th birthday, an occasion celebrated with friends, students, and colleagues at a two-day symposium “Teaching with Objects: The Curatorial Legacy of David Gordon Mitten” in November of that year.
Fascinated by and immersed in all elements of classical antiquity, and the author of papers, articles, essays, and scholarly contributions to numerous collection catalogues, he focused primarily on publishing classical bronzes, including Master Bronzes from the Classical World (1967, with Susannah F. Doeringer), Classical Bronzes Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (1975), and The God's Delight: The Human Figure in Classical Bronze (1988, with Arielle P. Kozloff). Recently, he collaborated with Michael Bennett and Sol Rabin on the 2020 publication of From Chaos to Order: Greek Geometric Art from the Sol Rabin Collection, also a traveling exhibition.
Professor Mitten was a member of the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis. Fluent in Turkish, he considered Sardis, Turkey his second home and his colleagues and residents there as family. Beginning in 1959, he participated in in many excavation seasons, becoming the Assistant Director in 1969, and then appointed Associate Director in 1976, the same year he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship. During the sixth campaign of the expedition, he uncovered “the largest early synagogue yet known with a plan strikingly resembling Early Christian churches.” His participation in the discovery of the synagogue at Sardis had a profound influence on the evolution of his perspective on life and faith, and he continued to write about it through his final years.
Professor Mitten also taught for over 25 years at Harvard Extension School and began teaching seminars with the Divinity School in 1984 that culminated with students giving onsite tours at ancient sanctuaries in Greece and Turkey. He continued teaching in Harvard’s Department of the Classics until 2009 and the Department of History of Art and Architecture until he retired from teaching in 2010. His devotion to teaching brought him out of retirement in 2014, and he co-taught seminars and supervised student theses with Kimberley Patton at Harvard Extension School through the fall of 2019.
Above all, Professor Mitten valued people and relationships over objects, and revered the lineage of the teachers from whom he had the privilege to learn. He loved helping students develop their talents and gifts –whatever their field of interest. Sincerely committed to the well-being of students even in the midst of a large lecture course, he knew undergraduates by name and enthusiastically supported graduate student teaching assistants. Teaching was his exuberant ministry, as the professional lives of former students and the volumes of letters of recommendation he wrote for them attest. His office overflowed with papers and books, and its door was always open for students to come and consult with him, if they could navigate their way to a chair through the maze of stacked periodicals and books. He effusively poured his soul into the development of the capacities of future generations of curators, archaeologists, and scholars serving in universities, art institutions, and museums around the world, which is his living legacy.
In 1989 he was awarded the Petra Shattuck Teaching Prize, and the Phi Beta Kappa Prize for Excellence in Teaching in 1993. Professor Mitten was particularly known for bringing objects into the classroom and encouraging students to handle and examine them for hints about their fabrication and use. He believed his students were his teachers, and he humbly learned with them about what antiquities could reveal about those who made them. He shared the value he saw in small ancient objects, and would declaim with an upraised hand and a mischievous delighted grin, “Never underestimate the importance of fibulae in the ancient world!”
Professor Mitten converted to Islam in the late 1960’s, and motivated by the Qur’anic verse, “I have made you tribes and people so that you may get to know one another” served as a faculty advisor to the Harvard Islamic Society beginning in 1995 until his retirement. He practiced Sufism in the Inayati lineage, and had a deep interest in the spiritual paths of Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, and the Bahá’í Faith. A frequent contributor to Morning Prayers in Appleton Chapel, he knew the hymns, sang with gusto, and was committed to nurturing friendships and learning from all traditions about faith and life. He loved to pray for people and for peace. He championed intercultural and interreligious understanding and social justice on campus and in Cambridge. As a member of the North Cambridge Family Opera, he enjoyed participating in intergenerational community performances with residents of the city he loved so much and had lived in for so long. He served for decades on numerous university committees, boards, and scholarly societies, and thus knew a vast interconnected institutional history. He used this knowledge and these positions to serve others. At times he was outspoken, or he would work quietly behind the scenes to support students, colleagues, and staff when challenges would arise. In 2009, when Professor Mitten received the Harvard Foundation’s Faculty of the Year Award, he stated his hope that all people would be lead “to listen with attention and respect, to practice compassion, gratitude and kindnesses in every action of our every days...” and finished his remarks, as he so often said when taking leave of his friends, “Thank you all, and God bless you all.”
Casper Funeral & Cremation Services, of Boston, MA, assisted Professor Mitten’s family in carrying out his wishes. The interment of his ashes at Mount Auburn Cemetery and memorial services will be held in the future. Donations in honor of David Gordon Mitten can be made to the Archaeological Exploration of Sardis, https://sardisexpedition.org/en/support, the Cambridge Public Library https://www.cplfound.org/annual-fund.html, and Beth Israel Leahy Health at Home Hospice Care, https://www.bilhathome.org/home-health-services/hospice-care/support-us/