The Fifty-third A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 2004
More Than Meets the Eye
Irving Lavin
April 18–May 23, 2004
East Building Auditorium
April 18
The Story of O from Giotto to Einstein
April 25
Michelangelo, Moses, and the Warrior Pope
May 2
Caravaggio I: Divine Dissimulation
May 9
Caravaggio II: The View from Behind
May 16
The Infinite Spiral: Claude Mellan's Miraculous Image
May 23
Going for Baroque: Observations on the Postmodern Fold
Irving Lavin is professor emeritus of the history of art at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he served on the faculty from 1974 until 2002. He taught at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University from 1963 to 1974 and at Vassar College from 1959 to 1961. He received his B.A. from Washington University (1948), an M.A. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University (1952), and an M.A. (1953) and Ph.D. (1955) from Harvard University. He was a Dumbarton Oaks senior research fellow (1957–1959), a senior Fulbright scholar in Italy (1961–1963), an American Council of Learned Societies fellow (1965–1966), a Guggenheim fellow (1968–1969), and resident scholar at the American Academy in Rome (1972, 1979). He delivered the C. T. Mathews Lectures at Columbia University (1957), the F. J. Walls Lectures at the Pierpont Morgan Library (1975), the Slade Lectures at Oxford University (1985), the Jerome Lecture at the University of Michigan and the American Academy in Rome (1985–1986), and the UnaÕs Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley (1987), and has held lectureships at the Collège de France (1984, 1990). His numerous books on Florentine and Roman sculpture and architecture include: Santa Maria del Fiore: The Cathedral of Florence and the Pregnant Madonna (1999); Bernini, the Savior, and the "Good Death" in Seventeenth-Century Rome (1998), Bernini and the Unity of the Visual Arts (1980), and Bernini and the Crossing of Saint Peter's (1967). Studies published in Past-Present: Essays on Historicism in Art from Donatello to Picasso (1993) range from the early Renaissance through the twentieth century. Professor Lavin served on the boards of the College Art Association and the Society of Architectural Historians, as a trustee of the Canadian Center for Architecture, as president of the United States National and International Committees for the History of Art, and is a trustee of the SacraTech Foundation. Honorary awards include membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Rome; the Premio "Cultori di Roma" by the city of Rome and Istituto di Studi Romani; Accademico d'Onore by the Accademia Clementina, Bologna; the Premio Daria Borghese, Rome; the Medal of Honor on the Tercentenary of Gianlorenzo Bernini by the city of Rome; the Medal of Honor, Tercentenary of Francesco Mochi by the city of Montevarchi. He was three times winner of the Arthur Kingsley Porter Prize awarded by the College Art Association of America.
A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were established by the National Gallery of Art's Board of Trustees in 1949 "to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts."