Professor Sir John (Rigby) Hale, M.A., D.Litt., F.R.Hist.S., F.B.A.

John Hale was born in Ashford, Kent, on 17 September 1923, and won a history scholarship from Eastbourne College to Jesus College, Oxford, in 1942. The scholarship was deferred until Hale, who hated militarism, finished his war service as a radio operator in the Merchant Navy in 1945, whereupon he threw himself into the social and theatrical life of the university. He became secretary of the OUDS in 1947, a disciple of Nevill Coghill and a memorable Ferdinand in Love’s Labour’s Lost, alongside Kenneth Tynan as Holofernes. Despite many diversions, which included a trip by motorbike to Italy, he took the best first in history of 1948, having chosen Renaissance Italy as his special subject. A Commonwealth Scholarship took him to the United States in 1948-9, with more exploration by motor-bike, and on his return he took up a teaching fellowship at his old college. Hale’s zest for life and irresistable charm had not deserted him; he directed Cymbeline for the OUDS in 1951, edited the Oxford Magazine in 1958-9 and undertook too many pleasant outside commitments to allow time for administerial duties, but he always disarmed his critics and got away with it. Nevertheless, Hale’s students never suffered; as a tutor he was both rigorous and inspirational and they responded to him. He also found time to write England and the Italian Renaissance (1954), The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers (1956), Machiavelli and Renaissance Italy (1961) and to translate and edit The Literary Works of Machiavelli, including the first English version of the play Mandragola, (1961). After two spells as Visiting Fellow at Cornell, 1959-60, and I Tatti, 1962-3, Hale accepted the founding professorship in history at the University of Warwick. He commuted up the M1 to the Coventry campus from London where life was more congenial than on the glorified building site of those early days, but he had the great satisfaction of moulding the new history department in his own image. His syllabus, ground-breaking in the mid-sixties, is still basically extant. He introduced an MA in Renaissance Studies with art history to the fore and, initially, his students spent a term at an American university and a further term in Venice, studying the Italian renaissance. Throughout, he placed great emphasis on Britain’s place in the wider context of European history and, from 1967, his own focus was on all aspects of Venetian history. He had conducted research into the history of war, particularly Renaissance fortifications, over a number of years and his edition of Certain Discourses Military by Sir John Smythe was published in 1964, followed by The Evolution of British Historiography in the same year and Renaissance Exploration in 1968. His period at Warwick ended with a Visiting Professorship at Berkeley in 1969-70. The plate-glass university had proved too small a pond for Hale and in 1970 he accepted the chair of Italian at University College, London, hoping to expand the syllabus to include Italian history and art history as well as literature and language The prevailing financial climate precluded this but Hale managed to introduce an obligatory period of tutored study in Venice at the beginning of the normal year abroad for his language students, and he established a joint degree in Italian and history of art. Publications during the Italian professorship include Renaissance Europe 1480-1520 (1971), Italian Renaissance Painting (1977) and Florence and the Medici (1981); and, reflecting his on-going study of the history of warfare, Renaissance War Studies (1982), The Military Organisation of a Renaissance State: Venice c 1400-1617 (jointly with Michael Mallett, 1984) and War and Society in Renaissance Europe (1985). As always, he enjoyed his regular American visits which included a Folger Library Fellowship in 1970 and two invitations to Princeton in 1982 and 1984-5. UCL’s Italian department was restructured in 1985 and Hale was awarded a personal chair in Italian history for his last few years at the college before retirement as Emeritus in 1988. His last two publications, Artists and Warfare in the Renaissance (1990) and The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance (1993), embrace the varied facets of his research; we are fortunate to have the latter book since it was completed only a month before Hale suffered a severe stroke in l992 from which he eventually recovered his mobility and mental agility but not the use of his right hand or his powerof speech – a bitter blow to such a brilliant and witty conversationalist and a sad deprivation for the many friends who loved his company. Gregarious as ever, he went to lectures and exhibitions and parties, travelled to his beloved Italy and, for the first time, to Russia. Hale relished the cultural life of the capital and the social activities which accompanied it: he was a Fellow of the British Academy (1977), chairman of the trustees of the National Gallery (1974-80); a member of the Museums and Galleries Commission (1983-93), a trustee of the Victoria and Albert Museum 1984-8, chairman of the Theatre Museum Committee 1984-7 and of the British Association for Renaissance Studies 1973-6. He masterminded the Royal Academy’s major exhibition, ‘The Genius of Venice’ in 1983, and was a prominent member of the Venice in Peril Committee. His services to Italian culture were rewarded with innumerable decorations and medals, fitting for someone who gave his recreation in Who’s Who as `Venice’ and, in fact, devoted his outstanding talents and scholarship to the city. He died at home in Twickenham on 12 August 1999.