Medieval Art Historian to Speak on Recent Work

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Nov. 23, 2010 – Beat Brenk, the Croghan Bicentennial Visiting Professor in Biblical and Early Christian Studies at Williams College, will give two lectures on Monday, Nov. 29, and Monday, Dec. 6, both at 7:30 p.m. in Lawrence Hall Room 231. Both focus on different aspects of Brenk’s recent work and are free and open to the public.

Brenk, Professor Emeritus at the University of Basel, Switzerland, has had a prolific and multifaceted career as a medieval art historian and archeologist. His first lecture, titled “Rhetoric, Ambition, and the Function of the Capella Palatina in Palermo,” will focus on the sumptuously decorated twelfth-century royal chapel of Roger II in Norman Sicily. The second talk, titled “Apse, Icon, and Image Propaganda,” will center on the relationship of Early Christian apse decoration to the emergence of what would become the medieval cult of icons.

Brenk is the author of 13 books, including The Apse, the Image, and the Icon: An Historical Perspective of the Apse as a Space for Images (2010), and more than 65 articles in academic publications. He has written on a wide range of topics and types of monuments, from classical temple architecture and sculpture in the Near East to early synagogue architecture and wall painting in the Holy Land, to Romanesque fresco painting in churches in Switzerland and Italy.

Brenk holds a Ph.D. in art history from the University of Basel and has taught at several universities around the world. His research interests include the Christianization of the city in late antiquity, early Christian mosaics, the meaning of the image in its religious and historical contexts, and the history of the disciplines of archeology and history of art. From 1994 to 2008 he participated in the Swiss archeological excavation project of the Jerash Cathedral in Jordan.

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Published November 23, 2010