Dr. Laurinda Dixon

"Feeling blue?", "Down in the dumps?", or "In a bad humour?" Most people have expressed these sentiments at one time or another in their lives. But these words once described a real medical disorder, "melancholia," ruled by the planet Saturn and the element of earth. Aristot...

Dr. Sally J. Cornelison

Description: Some of the most important Italian late medieval and Renaissance churches, chapels and shrines were built to house the remains of saints such as Francis of Assisi or images of the Virgin Mary that became the focus of popular devotions because of the miracles ...

The Enlightened Man from the West: Matteo RIcci's Extraordinary Mission to 'Open' China

Dr. Balbina Hwang

In 1582, Matteo Ricci, a Jesuit missionary and polymath from Macerata (Italy) arrived in Macao, the only place in all of China that foreigners were allowed to visit and inhabit at the time....

Dr. Wayne Kalayjian

Join structural engineer Wayne Kalayjian, author of Saving Michelangelo’s Dome, for a fascinating discussion on Renaissance art, Enlightenment thinking, and the birth of modern engineering practice.

In 1742, when the legendary dome atop St. Peter’s Basilica—designed by arti...

Dr. John Paoletti

Siena’s greatest impact on the history of art occurred in the 13th through the 15th centuries. During this time the city’s painting, sculpture and architecture constantly reinforced ideas of history as a determinant for the future, of religion – places, ceremonies, institutions...

Dr. Gary Radke

The history of Florentine Renaissance art is full of famous competitions, but collaboration was essential, too.  Learn how artists and patrons worked with and against one another to get the best from one another. Examples will range from the early fifteenth to sixteenth century, i...

Esteban Nigro

Magna Graecia is the name given in Antiquity to the territory occupied by Greek settlers in the south of the Italian peninsula and in Sicily in the 8th century BC. And just as we all sometimes must name things provisionally, the Greeks also initially called many new cities “neapol...

Dr. Joe Luzzi

The Italians have a saying traduttore, traditore – that is, the “translator" of a book can often be a “traitor” to it if he fails to capture both its letter and its spirit! In this in-person event, Joseph Luzzi, the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Literature at Bard College, will joi...

Dr. Jeremy Wasser

In the North African city of Alexandria, sometime between the 2nd and 4th centuries CE, a Christian scholar put pen to parchment and produced a manuscript known as the Physiologus. The title of the work speaks directly to the identity of this unknown author and is often transla...

with Susan Jaques

Throughout his military campaigns, Napoleon Bonaparte systematically plundered art, with a preference for Italian paintings and antiquities. After Napoleon’s defeat, the Duke of Wellington vowed to teach the French “a great moral lesson” by spearheading the restitution of stol...