Johan Jakob Tikkanen was appointed docent in art history and aesthetics in 1884, the same year he completed his doctoral dissertation Der malerische Styl Giotto’s – Versuch zu einer Charakteristik desselbe. It was the first purely formal analytic study of the works of the Italian master Giotto.

At the beginning of his career, Johan Jakob Tikkanen only taught in Swedish, as it had effectively become his mother tongue at home and school, and he could speak it much more fluently than Finnish.

Fennomans defended not only language but national culture in a wider sense. The only contemporary of Johan Jakob Tikkala known to have accused Tikkanen of being a Svecoman was his student Ludvig Wennervirta, who did so in an obituary published in 1933.

In the 19th century, not only photographs and architectural drawings but also a significant collection of plaster cast copies of ancient and Renaissance art were collected for the purposes of teaching art history. Carl Gustaf Estlander had already begun the systematic collection of (mainly classical) sculptures in 1869. When the collection was expanded with copies of Renaissance sculptures in the 1880s, the responsibility for the acquisitions rested with Johan Jakob Tikkanen.

At the close of the 19th century, Europe was in many respects an open cultural environment, one to which Finns also had access. Researchers travelled much, and when reading the correspondence of Johan Jakob Tikkanen one cannot help feeling that all researchers of merit must have been familiar with each other.

Johanna Vakkari has written on several aspects of the life of Johan Jakob Tikkanen. These include his early years, his choice between art and art history, his career as a teacher of art history and an international researcher, and his archive. In these articles he is viewed in the…