Henning Wrede

Henning Wrede was born on 8 November 1939 in Frankfurt (Oder). From 1961 he studied classical archaeology, ancient history and Greek at the universities of Frankfurt am Main and Göttingen. He took his doctorate at Frankfurt in 1968 with Die spätantike Hermengalerie von Welschbillig, a study of art tradition in the fourth century AD and of the general significance of the ancient herm. The German Archaeological Institute awarded him its travel scholarship for 1969/70.

In 1971 Wrede became a research assistant at the University of Munich. He completed his habilitation there in 1975 with Consecratio in formam deorum, on the deification of private persons in the Roman imperial period, and then taught as a Privatdozent. From 1978 he held a post as Wissenschaftlicher Rat and professor at the Archaeological Institute of the University of Cologne, later as a C3 professor.

In 1994 he moved to the Winckelmann-Institut of Humboldt University of Berlin as professor of classical archaeology. He retired in 2006 and remained on the chair in an acting capacity until 2007.

His research interests included the Parthenon sculptures, Greek portraits of the fifth to first centuries BC, Hellenistic genre sculpture, and Greek and Roman herms. On the Roman side he worked on the social history of art, state monuments, sepulchral art, dress and status symbols, and late antique art. A further strand was the history of archaeology itself: the formation of Altertumswissenschaft, antiquarian collecting from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, and the reception of classical monuments into the nineteenth century. His published books ranged from the Antikengarten of the del Bufalo near the Trevi Fountain and the Codex Coburgensis to senatorial sarcophagi of Rome and the monumentalisation of antiquity around 1700. In 2024 he issued another study of the Codex Coburgensis.

Public sources on Wrede focus on his academic career and publications. Details of his family life were not widely reported in coverage of his death.

Henning Wrede died on 1 October 2026, aged 86. His death was recorded in the German Wikipedia nekrolog for October 2026 and in the biographical notice on his German Wikipedia page. The place of death and funeral arrangements were not widely reported in English-language sources.

Wrede is remembered as a classical archaeologist who linked close study of Greek and Roman sculpture with the history of collecting and of the discipline itself. His work on herms, private deification in the Roman empire, and the Codex Coburgensis remains a reference point for students of ancient art and of early modern antiquarianism. In 2013 the city of Stendal awarded him the Winckelmann Medal. He was a corresponding member of the German Archaeological Institute.