What are the Bross Lectures?
The Bross lecture series is endowed in memory of Louise Smith Bross, presented every three years by a distinguished scholar of pre-1800 European art and resulting in a book-length publication. There are three lectures presented in this series and the invited lecturer for the 2022 series is Alina Payne.
2022 Alina Payne, Harvard University
Lecture Series title: “Architecture in Two Dimensions"
- Lecture one: “The Case for and Against Drawing"
- Lecture two: “Plane and Simple. Architecture and the Seduction of Relief"
- Lecture three: “Photospace: Renaissance Architecture and the Photographic Atlas"
2018 Milette Gaifman, Yale University
Lecture Series title: “Classification and the History of Greek Art”
- Lecture one: “How to View a Dionysiac Monument”
- Lecture two: “The Limits of Taxonomy”
- Lecture three: “The Unclassified Past”
2015 Jeffrey Hamburger, Harvard University
Lecture Series title: “Visible Theology: Diagrams and the Dynamics of Medieval Thought”
- Lecture one: “Diagrams as Paradigm: The Diagrammatic Mode in Medieval Art”
- Lecture two: “From Cross to Crucifix: Rereading Hrabanus Maurus’s in Honor of the Holy Cross in the Late Thirteenth Century”
- Lecture three: “Marian Diagrams and Dominican Devotion: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Supplement to Hrabanus Maurus”
Published as Diagramming Devotion: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Transformation of Hrabanus Maurus’s Poems in Praise of the Cross (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020).
2012 Stephen Campbell, Johns Hopkins University
Lecture Series title: “Inventions of Place: Rethinking the Geography of Italian Art in the Age of Lotto and Titian”
- Lecture one: “Re-mapping the Italian Renaissance”
- Lecture two: “Distant Cities: Lorenzo Lotto, Gaudenzio Ferrari, and Making of Sacred Landscape”
- Lecture three: “Sacred Naturalism and the Art of Moretto and Savoldo”
- Lecture four: “Against Titian”
Published as The Endless Periphery: Toward a Geopolitics of Art in Lorenzo Lotto’s Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
2009 Susan E. Alcock, Brown University
Lecture Series title: “Some Archaeologies of Surveillance”
- Lecture one: “Scanning and Planning: Modern Modes of Watching the Ancient World”
- Lecture two: “Spying and Crying: Ancient Modes of Watching the Ancient World”
- Lecture three: “The Utility of Surveillance: Case Studies and Observations”
2007 Joseph Koerner, Courtauld Institute of Art
Lecture Series title: “Enemy Painting: Enmity and the Unspeakable Subject”
2003 Victor Stoichita, University of Fribourg
Published as The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
2000 Martin Kemp, Oxford University
Published as The Human Animal in Western Art and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).