A month or two before her death in the autumn of 1958, the novelist Rose Macaulay paid a final visit to Trabzon (the ancient Trebizond), the setting of her most famous novel. In it Macaulay had written about the exquisitely beautiful early-12th-century church of Ayasofya there, a remnant of the short-lived Empire of Trebizond. To her delight, a young English art historian, David Winfield, was at work on a British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara project to restore its magnificent early-13th-century frescoes to sight.
Cast in the mould of the great 19th-century scholar-travellers, Winfield was an investigative archaeological explorer, a meticulous explorer who would often move only a few kilometres a day when exploring the Black Sea hills for Roman or Byzantine remains as he talked to the villagers in cafes about ‘the old stones’ in their area. According to a reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement, he and his co-workers had 'tramped or ridden up every river and rivulet valley in the Black Sea mountains without neglecting the sights and sounds of modern Turkey'. Like his 19th-century predecessors, Winfield was also patriotic. When an old man on a remote Black Sea hillside told him that the French had a world hero in Napoleon, the Turks in Atatürk, and asked what heroes the English had, Winfield proudly informed him that the British had Wellington who had beaten Napoleon.
David Winfield was born in London in 1929, the son of a civil servant, and educated at Bryanston School and Merton College Oxford, where he read history. His earliest ventures into Byzantine exploration came in 1950 when he drove across Europe on a motorbike to Mount Athos. After graduating he was taken up by the most famous Byzantine art historian of the period, David Talbot Rice. Talbot Rice suggested that he take a British Council scholarship to work on Byzantine wall painting in the Balkans.
In 1957 Talbot Rice selected Winfield as field director of a project to restore Ayasofya in Trabzon, a project which at the time received the full assistance of both the Turkish Government of the day and the local people of the city. The latter, once he had shaved off his beard, adopted him as a firm friend. Winfield reciprocated by driving two large pedigree dogs from Britain to Trabzon for one of the town’s patriarchs. Among his student assistants were several who became eminent in their own right in the next generation; one, June Wainwright, in charge of architectural drawings and images, became his wife and close collaborator in all his work for the rest of his life.
In the later stages of at Trabzon, the Winfields worked again for the Ankara Institute at Cappadocia’s finest mid-Byzantine church at Eski Gümüş, near Niğde, in 1963. Their work there earned a news report in The Times. The next decade of his career was largely spent in the Troodos Mountains of Cyprus, restoring the frescoes of 12th-century churches at Asinou and Lagoudhera. By then he had established a reputation among the finest restorers of Medieval wall-paintings in Europe.
In 1973, Winfield moved to Oxford as a Visiting Fellow at All Souls College and the next year became a Senior Research Fellow at Merton. The Winfields bought a large Victorian house in Crick Road and dispensed lavish hospitality on colleagues and students alike. When his Oxford Fellowship expired, Winfield returned to conservancy, working first at Canterbury Cathedral and then becoming the first-ever Surveyor of Conservation for the National Trust, responsible for conservation across the country. He worked for a decade at the Trust until his retirement in 1990.
Never entirely at home in suburban southern Britain, the Winfields then opted for a further transformation, buying a dilapidated farm house at Dervaig on the isle of Mull and taking up farming – a profession of which they had no previous experience but at which, initially helped by a local partner, they were successful during more than two decades of retirement.
Winfield was however always a scholar first and a productive one. Retirement, farming, and even a fire which destroyed much of his library, did not stop the production of a stream of learned and important monographs on the art and architecture of the Black Sea and Cyprus, five of them written during his years on Mull. A sixth, on the links between the wall-painting of Byzantium and Renaissance Italy, is due to appear later this year.
In 1973 Winfield was awarded an MBE for his services to Byzantine Studies and Conservation and relations with Turkey and Cyprus.
He is survived by his wife, June, and two daughters and one son.
David Crampton Winfield. M.B.E., M.A., F.S.A., F.S.A.S.
Born London, December 2, 1929.
Died Mull, September 28, 2013