Frothingham was born in
Boston,
Massachusetts, and came from a wealthy family background, which allowed him to study languages at the Catholic Seminary of San Apollinare in Rome and the
Royal University of Rome between 1868 and 1881. In 1882, he began teaching
Semitic languages at
Johns Hopkins University. He completed his
doctorate in
Germany, at the
University of Leipzig in 1883, and he married Helen Bulkley Post. In 1884, he was secretary of the newly founded
Archaeological Institute of America. In 1885, with Princeton professor
Allan Marquand, he co-founded the
American Journal of Archaeology, the journal of the Institute, and became the first editor. He remained editor of the
Journal until 1896. Frothingham lectured at Princeton when it was still known as the
College of New Jersey (1885). In 1886, he became a professor there, teaching
art history and
archaeology, although it is rumored that he took no salary at first. Among his courses were offerings in
renaissance art history, among the first post-classical art courses taught at the College. Together with
Allan Marquand, Frothingham worked to rewrite
Moritz Carrière's
Bilder Atlas as a fourth volume of the
Iconographic Encyclopedia (1887). About 1890, Frothingham and Marquand began to have major difficulties working together, perhaps stemming from the overlap in their areas of expertise and teaching. Frothingham taught his
renaissance course (which was largely
medieval monuments) for the last time in 1892-93. During the 1890s, Frothingham became the associate director of the
American Academy in Rome, a position that largely involved directing visitors and acting as an agent for
American museums. In this capacity, he acquired twenty-nine
Etruscan tomb groups excavated by
Francesco Mancinelli at
Narce as well as from other sites. Frothingham also studied the
topography of
Latium and was interested in an excavation at the site of
Norba, but he was not granted a permit for fieldwork. Back at Princeton, Frothingham was innovative in the curriculum. He added a famous course that he called "Subjects and Symbols in Early Christian Art," which would serve as the prototype for iconographic studies for which Princeton would later become famous. When Marquand returned from a year at the
American Academy in Rome, he found that Frothingham was teaching yet another new course: Italian art of the
Middle Ages. Marquand was unhappy with this, and since he controlled the salaries of art historians who were paid from the Frederic Marquand Bequest, he stopped Frothingham's salary mid-semester. The university's president
Francis Landey Patton paid Frothingham for the rest of the semester and reconfigured Frothingham's position as one of ancient art and archaeology, but stripped him of the ability to teach
medieval art or be editor of the
American Journal of Archaeology. Frothingham and Marquand co-wrote a textbook in 1896,
A Textbook of the History of Sculpture. Frothingham remained professor of ancient history and archaeology at Princeton until 1906. In 1903-04, however, his thinly-disguised
medieval course, now lasting two full semesters, caused trouble with university officials. His name was removed from the faculty rolls the following year, and though he remained in the city of
Princeton, New Jersey, the rest of his life, publishing as a private scholar, he never again taught. In 1895-96, Frothingham was an associate director of the American School of Classical Studies at Rome. He prepared articles on architecture for the
New International Encyclopedia. In the years after
World War I, Frothingham studied the issues of immigrant populations in the
United States, testifying at the
Lusk hearings in
Washington D.C.. Toward the end of his life, he traveled to
Italy to study
fascism. He died in
New York City of heart disease. ==Bibliography==