Pop Art and Crib Notes at the Dawn of the Renaissance: A Painting for the People in Fifteenth-Century Florence is the topic of the Ida Wise East Memorial Lecture in the Humanities go be given by Dr. George R. Bent, Sidney Gause Childress Professor in the Arts, Washington and Lee University on Monday at 7:30 p.m. in Hopwood Auditorium.
Dr. Bent received his bachelor of arts degree from Oberlin College in 1985 and his PhD in art history from Stanford University in 1993. He came to Washington and Lee University in that year and has been a member of the faculty ever since. Dr. Bent teaches courses in Medieval and Renaissance art history, and specializes in 14th- and early 15-century Italian art and culture.
He co-founded Washington and Lee’s interdisciplinary program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, chaired it from 2000 to 2003, served as associate dean of the college from 2003-06, and is currently serving his third term as chair of the Department of Art and Art History.
A two-time holder of Fulbright grants to Italy, he has written about artistic production, the function of liturgical images, and institutional patronage in early Renaissance Florence. In 2006 he published Monastic Art in Lorenzo Monaco’s Florence, a book that focuses on all of these subjects.
In 2012 his DVD lecture series, Leonardo da Vinci and the Italian High Renaissance, was produced by the Great Courses Company. His current research interests revolve around paintings produced for public spaces in late Medieval Florence between 1250 and 1400.
