In early years of art appreciation, while judging Kyoto’s International Film Festival, I asked Oscar-winning cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, whom he favored as a painter. Storaro inquired if I had seen, what he deemed as the narrative genesis of film in early modern history, Giotto’s fresco cycle in Padua’s Capella Scrovegni. I had not; whereupon Storaro whiffed, "we cannot discuss art. A dialogue on Rembrandt or Max Ernst, ignorant of Giotto’s space, time, emotion of narrative or Caravaggio’s color, drama and tenebroso, would be a pointless." For without the visual compendium from Giotto through Caravaggio’s 16th century and beyond; we can only assess art and film — be it Matisse, Rothko, Coppola or Kubrick — in modern myopia.

Peter Frederick Weller (born June 24, 1947) is an American film and stage actor, television director, and art historian.
Weller has appeared in more than 70 films and television series, including RoboCop (1987) and its sequel RoboCop 2 (1990) (in which he played the title character), The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984), and Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). He has also appeared in such films as Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite (1995), the Oliver Stone-produced The New Age (1994), and David Cronenberg’s adaptation of William Burroughs’s novel Naked Lunch (1991).

Aside from a Saturn Award nomination for his RoboCop role, Weller received an Academy Award nomination for his 1993 short Partners, in which he also acted. In television, he hosted the program Engineering an Empire on the History Channel from 2005 to 2007. He also played Christopher Henderson in the fifth season of 24, Stan Liddy in the fifth season of the Showtime original series Dexter, as well as Charles “Charlie” Barosky in 11 episodes in the sixth season of Kurt Sutter’s Sons of Anarchy. From 2012 to 2017, Weller was involved in the A&E (now Netflix) series Longmire both as a director and an actor. In 2017, Weller appeared on The Last Ship as Dr. Paul Vellek.
While enrolled at North Texas State University (now the University of North Texas), he played trumpet in one of the campus bands. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and began his acting career after attending the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (class of 1972).

In 2004, Weller completed a Master of Arts degree in Roman and Renaissance Art at Syracuse University, and occasionally taught courses in ancient history at the university.

In 2007, Weller began a Ph.D. at UCLA, in Italian Renaissance Art History. In October 2013 he filed his dissertation, entitled “Alberti Before Florence: Early Sources Informing Leon Battista Alberti’s De pictura“, and was awarded his doctorate in 2014.