Scholars

Thu - March 22, 2007

Richard Trexler, noted historian, dies at age 74

Richard Trexler, 74, distinguished professor emeritus of history, died March 8 in Princeton, N.J., after suffering complications related to a kidney transplant.

Trexler, a Florentine Renaissance specialist who did his undergraduate work at Baylor University, received his doctorate in 1964 from the University of Frankfurt am Main in Germany.

He joined Binghamton’s faculty in 1978 after teaching in Texas and Illinois.

Trexler, who was named distinguished research professor of history in 1996, retired in 2003 and continued to teach part time until last year.

Karen-edis Barzman, associate professor of art history and director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, wrote an appreciation of Trexler that she shared with colleagues this week. “Trexler casts a monumental shadow over a vast academic terrain and will be missed,” she wrote.

Trexler had 20 single-authored and edited books to his credit, along with more than 60 articles appearing in anthologies and scholarly journals.

“Among the first in the 1960s in the discipline of history to draw on anthropology, he spent much of his career demonstrating how various forms of ritual in the Renaissance (from city-wide spectacles to neighborhood parades and parish festivals) structured public and private life, explaining how the repeated performance of formalized acts governed thought, shaped behavior and constituted community in the Renaissance city,” Barzman wrote.

Full article at binghamton.edu >>>

Posted at 09:12 AM

Fri - March 2, 2007

Art historian examines abundance, excess of French Renaissance through art, literature, architecture

By Josh Schonwald

Rebecca Zorach, Assistant Professor in Art History and the Chicago University College, has won the 2006 Gustave O. Arlt Award from the Council of Graduate Schools. Each year, the council recognizes a promising young humanist who has written a book deemed to be an outstanding contribution to humanities scholarship. Zorach, a specialist in late medieval and Renaissance art, was recognized for her groundbreaking book, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance, published by the University Press.

The Society for the Study of Early Modern Women also honored Zorach as a co-recipient of its 2005 book prize for the best book relating to women and gender in the early modern period.

Zorach’s winning book is an interdisciplinary look at the visual culture of the French Renaissance, connecting multiple forms of art with social, economic and political forces of the period. Mary Sheriff, a University of North Carolina art historian who reviewed the book wrote, “It offers new possibilities for configuring a cultural history of any period.” Evelyn Welch of University of London called it “an exciting, innovative perspective . . . should be essential reading for art historians and historians alike.”

Full article at chronicle.uchicago.edu >>>

Posted at 10:24 AM

Thu - October 12, 2006

Harding University hosts Columbia University professor

By Susanna Smith

The Harding University Honors Council hosted Professor David Rosand of Columbia University Monday night, for the third seminar in the L.C. Sears Collegiate Seminar Series. Rosand presented a program entitled “Leonardo da Vinci and Creation,” covering the connection between the great artist’s work and his understanding of the universe around him.

Rosand graduated from Columbia College and now is the Meyer Schapiro Professor of Art History. His areas of special interest include the history of painting, especially the Renaissance era. The passion behind his knowledge was obvious in his presentation of the quintessential renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci.

“As Leonardo explored painting, he recognized a problem — a contradiction,” Rosand said. “Nature has no outlines. What is an artist to do? This constant concern of no edge is one of the great accomplishments of Leonardo. What the absence of outline does is leave something to the viewer’s imagination.”

Full article at thedailycitizen.com >>>

Posted at 10:01 AM

Tue - May 23, 2006

Free Radical

Baruch Spinoza inspired Rebecca Goldstein. So why is she out to betray him?

INTERVIEW BY STEPHEN VIDER

Betraying Spinoza, the fourth book in Nextbook's Jewish Encounters series, presents the 17th-century rationalist as both the first modern thinker and the original yeshiva dropout. Baruch Spinoza's rejection of traditional tenets—and his questioning of what it means to be a Jew—scandalized his Amsterdam community but has inspired disciples from Moses Mendelssohn to Albert Einstein to Rebecca Goldstein. A novelist and professor of philosophy at Trinity College, Goldstein dares to inhabit the mind of a man who preached objectivity, offering a lucid and often surprising exploration of how Spinoza's Sephardic roots informed his greatest work, The Ethics.

Who was Spinoza?

He is the greatest philosopher the Jews produced. And he was excommunicated in the most vehement and irreconcilable terms possible, before writing the works for which he is now famous. The 17th-century Amsterdam community of Sephardic Jews—people returning to Judaism after being separated from it by the Spanish-Portuguese Inquisition—used excommunication, as many communities did at that time, as a means of control. People were often put in kherem for days, sometimes years. There were conditions for returning to the fold, and then they did. Spinoza's excommunication was final, there's nothing he can do. Every curse is called down on the head of this 23-year-old philosophically inclined young merchant. It really is part of the mystery: what had that boy done that made people so angry?

Full interview at nextbook.org >>>

Posted at 06:00 AM

Thu - March 30, 2006

Award-winning art historian specializes in Italian Renaissance

One of the first points that art history professor Bette Talvacchia makes to her students is this: “When you look at a piece of art, don’t expect to automatically understand it.

“You can say you like it, you can say you don’t,” she adds.

“But that’s different from understanding what’s there, knowing the reasons why it was created, or what function it had in a particular culture.”

That’s what historical study does, she says.

An acclaimed scholar in Italian Renaissance art, Talvacchia is a 2005 Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor. The honor is given for exceptional distinction in scholarship, teaching, and service. Recipients hold the title for life.

One of Talvacchia’s research interests involves examining the use of sexual imagery in religious paintings during the Renaissance (15th and 16th centuries). The research is an outgrowth of her 1999 book, Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture, in which she examines a notorious set of graphic sexual images.

Full article at advance.uconn.edu >>>

Posted at 04:45 PM

Mon - May 23, 2005

Da Vinci Expert Joins Harvard

By LULU ZHOU

While “The Da Vinci Code” depicted a fictional Harvard symbologist, students will be able to take classes next year with an actual da Vinci scholar—Frank M. Fehrenbach, who will join the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on July 1 as a professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture.

Fehrenbach, a seminal scholar in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art with a focus on Leonardo da Vinci, is one of two new additions to the department. Benjamin Buchloh, a specialist in contemporary art at Barnard, will also come to Harvard next year.

Currently in Florence, Fehrenbach will arrive with teaching experience gained at famous European institutions such as Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, Humboldt University in Berlin, and Schiller University in Jena, Germany. He has also penned several books in his field.

This will not be Fehrenbach’s first time teaching at Harvard—he was a visiting professor this past fall. He praised the department, especially its proximity to resources.

“[It’s] a terrific department with leading art historians from all over the world, covering a variety of topics and epochs other universities (even the biggest in Europe) can only dream of,” Fehrenbach wrote in an e-mail. “One of the major advantages is the presence of wonderful collections—in my case, of course, first of all the Fogg Museum, an excellent educational tool.”

Full article at thecrimson.com >>>

Posted at 09:18 AM

Mon - March 14, 2005

Outgoing gallery chief Clifford set for Italian job

By Senay Boztas

The flamboyant outgoing director of Scotland’s National Galleries Sir Timothy Clifford has revealed he is to create an institute in Italy to research Raphael’s jugs – and other areas of the applied arts.

The director-general, who is due to retire next January, is renowned for his interest in this branch of the arts – comprising textiles, ceramics, metalwork and other such artefacts – but is sick of the intellectual snobbery with which they are treated.

Now he has publishers interested in a volume comparing the fine arts with the artes minores, as the Italians (and Clifford) would call them, from the late Gothic period to the present day. It will cover artefacts from the beautiful ceramics created by Raphael, to the humble shoes made by the Northern Renaissance artist, Albrecht Durer.

Speaking to the Sunday Herald after being honoured with an award from Arts And Business in recognition of his attainment of business support for the arts, Clifford said he intends to keep a low profile in Scotland for the first year after his retirement, and will concentrate on setting up an endowment trust to finance his institute. His project is not unlike that of the American art critic Bernard Berenson, who based his researchers in the Florentine villa, I Tatti, now bequeathed to Harvard University and a Centre for Italian Renaissance Culture.

Full article at sundayherald.com >>>

Posted at 11:21 AM

Fri - March 4, 2005

Eugenio Garin

Italian historian of philosophy who was internationally acclaimed for his writings on the culture of the Renaissance

THE English-speaking world has long recognised the Italian scholar Eugenio Garin as one of the past century’s two leading authorities — the other being Paul Oskar Kristeller — on the cultural history of the Renaissance. Garin saw the Renaissance as the doorway to modernity and praised its humanism as “the finest moment of our (Italy’s) history in the modern world”. His view of Renaissance humanism as a revolutionary unity of culture, combining art, letters, philology, philosophy, politics, history and science in a creative whole, was informed by his unitary vision of the life of the mind, linking theory to practice and the past to the present. His belief that intellectuals must have public voices, that they have a duty to link teaching with politics, gave a profound moral depth to his immense scholarly achievement.

Full article at timesonline.co.uk >>>

Posted at 10:45 AM

Fri - November 19, 2004

Linda Murray

Scholar who, with her husband, made the art of the Renaissance accessible in a series of bestselling books. Born on October 31, 1913 and dead on November 12, 2004, aged 91.

LINDA MURRAY was unrivalled in her ability to explain art history to the general reader. She enjoyed a long and successful literary partnership with her husband Peter, and they collaborated on the writing of such enduringly popular works as the Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists (1959), still in print and in its seventh edition, and The Art of the Renaissance (1963), in Thames and Hudson’s World of Art Library. She was also a superb lecturer, totally in command of her text, her slides and herself.

Linda Bramley was born at Herne Bay, Kent, in 1913. As the daughter of an exporter, she had a peripatetic childhood. Unable to stand the separation involved in boarding school, she travelled with her parents, occasionally joining a school for a term but mostly studying at home with her mother, Hélène Marie Blanche Manso di Villa.

She had French from birth and then picked up Spanish and Italian; but her father didn’t do business in Germany, so German had to wait. Along with the languages, she picked up illnesses — in the course of her life she underwent to fewer than 26 operations for different ailments.