Lecture Date: April 23, 2013
Professor Wallace’s biography has been called “the most important re-assessment of Michelangelo in more than one hundred years. Not since Irving Stone’s novel The Agony and the Ecstasy has there been such a compelling and human portrayal of this remarkable yet credible human individual.”An internationally recognized expert on Michelangelo, Wallace will speak about the challenges and excitement of writing a modern biography of the famous Renaissance artist. He will present a substantially new view of the extraordinary man, who was not only a great sculptor, painter, architect, engineer, and poet but also an aristocrat who believed in the ancient and noble origins of his family. Utilizing the words of Michelangelo and his contemporaries, the lecture will place the famous artist firmly in his times, among his workers, family, friends, popes and patrons.
Speaker: William E. Wallace
William E. Wallace received his Ph.D. in Art History from Columbia University in New York in 1983 and is currently Professor in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches Renaissance art and architecture, and is an internationally recognized authority on Michelangelo and his contemporaries. In 1990-91 he was a fellow at Harvard University’s Center for Renaissance Studies in Florence; in 1996-97 he was at the American Academy in Rome; and in 1999 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at Williams College. In addition to more than eighty essays, chapters and articles (as well as two works of fiction), he is the author and editor of six different books on Michelangelo, including Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and his Times (2010), which has been widely hailed as the foremost recent study of the artist. He served as the principal consultant for The Divine Michelangelo, a two-part film produced by the BBC.