Professor Andrew J. Tallon, died Friday, November 16, 2018. Professor Tallon was born on March 12, 1969 in Louvain, Belgium, the son of Andrew F. Tallon and Mary Beth Tallon Vander Vennet. He was educated at Princeton and Columbia Universities, and joined the faculty at Vassar College in the Department of Art in 2007 teaching medieval art, architecture and pre-modern acoustics. He received a Ph.D. from Columbia University with distinction, M.A. from the University of Paris-Sorbonne, and B.A. with highest honors from Princeton University.
Andrew Tallon was esteemed worldwide as an innovative scholar of French Gothic art and architecture, one who introduced new digital techniques to the analysis and re-creation of the spatial archaeology of medieval buildings. In all his work, he was an inspired and generous educator who brought the past to life in vivid and meaningful ways. His second book (in progress) is entitled The Structure of Gothic. His first, Notre-Dame de Paris, was coauthored in French with Dany Sandron and published in 2013; an English edition is under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press. He received research funding through a grant from the Samuel Kress Foundation for a study of the cathedral of Bourges and a five-year grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation for the web-based project Mapping Gothic. His research was featured in an Emmy-nominated PBS | Nova production, Building the Great Cathedrals, which has regularly aired nationally since 2010, the Arte documentary Les cathédrales dévoilées, which first aired in Europe in 2011, in a 2013 edition of Des racines et des ailes on France 3, and on National Geographic as part of the Innovators series. Tallon was a former director of the International Center of Medieval Art and of AVISTA, and was co-founder and a director of the US-based charitable association the Friends of Notre-Dame.
He is survived by his children; Ambrose,12; Augustin,10; Gabriel, 9; and Anatole, 5; and his wife, Marie Tallon-Daudruy. He is also survived by his parents; his sister, Clare, and her husband, Dan, and their children; his brother, Barry; and many other loving family members, devoted friends, former colleagues, and students.
Dr. Tallon was an SAH member from 2006 through 2017.
Obituary from The Poughkeepsie Journal here
