“When I first arrived at Harvard,” said Natasha Staller, an associate professor of Fine Arts at Amherst College and a student of Kitzinger, “I asked fine arts students who the hardest, and the answer was unanimously Kitzinger.”

During his lifetime, Kitzinger was rewarded with numerous honors and awards including a Fulbright Scholarship and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and Slade Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Cambridge.

His publishing record is no less distinguished. During his early years at the British Museum, Kitzinger published the comprehensive and accessible book, Early Medieval Art in the British Museum. Later works such as The Art of Byzantium and the Medieval West: Selected Studies earned equal praise.

Born in Germany in 1912, Kitzinger did his graduate work at the University of Munich and the University of Rome. He earned his doctorate from the University of Munich in 1934.

Kitzinger’s wife Suzan died in 2002. The couple is survived by three children, Stephen Anthony, Margaret Rachel and Adrian Nicholas Kitzinger and three grandchildren.

Plans for a memorial service and scholarly symposium at Harvard are being finalized.

—Staff writer Ella A. Hoffman can be reached at ehoffman@fas.harvard.edu.