The Portrait of Zelide

Geoffrey Scott (1884–1929) was an English scholar, poet, and architectural historian whose seminal work The Architecture of Humanism (1914) established his reputation as a leading thinker on aesthetics and taste, while his biography The Portrait of Zélide (1925) won the prestigious James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Educated at Oxford where he earned the Newdigate Prize for poetry, he moved in influential circles including the Berensons in Florence and died of pneumonia in New York City while editing James Boswell's papers. His works blend poetry, biography, and architectural criticism, influencing taste in design for decades.