August Schmarsow

August Schmarsow (26 May 1853, Schildfeld – 19 January 1936, Baden-Baden) was a German art historian.

He was born in Schildfeld (now part of Vellahn), Mecklenburg-Schwerin, and was educated in Zürich, Strassburg and Bonn.

He became docent of the history of art at Göttingen in 1881, professor there in 1882, at Breslau in 1885, and went to Florence in 1892, and thence to Leipzig in 1893.

He wrote biographies of David D'Angers, Ingres, and Prudhon in Robert Dohme's Kunst und Kunstler; Raphael und Pinturicchio in Siena (1880); he also wrote: Schmarsow is known for his theory of German: Raumgestaltung, "space-forming", that he developed in a short Das Wesen von architektonischen Schöpfung (1893) and the Grundbegriffe der Kunstwissenschaft (1905).

Schmarsow declared that the architectural form should be understood through the movement of visitors through the space and not as an object of stationary observation.