Ugo Monneret de Villard was born in
Milan, Italy on 16 January 1881 to a family of
Burgundian origins from
Piedmont, where they had moved during the French Revolution. He attended the
Polytechnic University of Milan for his studies. He graduated in 1904 as a
chemical industrial engineer. However, he had also nurtured a study of the arts at the same period, studying under
Camillo Boito, who similarly combined a love of engineering with a love of architecture and art. He studied the history of
architecture and medieval architecture specifically. He also did scholarship on the history of
Italian art and
Byzantine art. He began to travel in 1908 for his scholarship, largely to Africa and Asia. He acquired a teaching certification at the Polytechnic University, and taught there from 1913 to 1924 in the History of Architecture. Before 1920, his main academic output was in the field of
Lombard history. He began working with the
Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1921, especially in
Egypt. This coincided with a shift in his scholarly interests toward Oriental art (in the sense of the "Near East"). His work in Egypt concluded in 1928, and he moved to
Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, where he served until 1934. In January–March 1937, he visited
Axum in Ethiopia in the aftermath of its
Italian conquest. After this finished, he moved his Italian residence from Milan to Rome. In Rome, he largely concentrated on publishing the enormous backlog of work he'd already compiled, rather than doing new travels. Monneret de Villard was the only Italian specialist in Islamic art in the era, and his publications essentially were the entire body of Italian scholarship on the matter. He taught archaeology for a year at the
Sapienza University of Rome in 1944, after the
fall of fascism in Rome. There were plans to make a chair for Medieval Oriental art at the university and to assign the position to him, but the plans never came through, and his academic appointment ended. In 1950, he was elected a member of the
Accademia dei Lincei. Monneret de Villard died on 4 November 1954. While respected among those who knew his work, he still died "proud and impoverished", with wider recognition of his work only coming late in his life. Despite his work in Africa being technically affiliated with the government, Monneret de Villard had been cool toward the fascist regime, perhaps explaining him not bothering to attempt to gain an academic position in an era where professors were required to swear an oath to fascism. His archive of collected material and writings was donated by his family to the Archaeology and Art History Library in the
Palazzo Venezia, Rome. The Library is run by INASA, the Italian department of architecture and art history. The collection was so overwhelming that David Storm Rice, who was assigned to investigate the boxes of his materials and organize them, died in 1962 without having completed the task. ==Selected works==