KNOXVILLE — Internationally renowned art and architecture historian Stefano Riccioni will lecture at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, April 7, in the McCarty Auditorium, Room 109, of the Art + Architecture Building.
Free and open to the public, this lecture is part of the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Series organized each semester by the College of Architecture and Design. During its 30-year history, the series has brought some of the most innovative and important thinkers in the world of design to the UT campus.
Riccioni received his doctorate from La Sapienza, the University of Rome, followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies in Toronto. He also received a research grant from the J. Paul Getty Foundation.
Riccioni stands at the forefront of a new discipline he pioneered that unites paleography — the study of old handwriting — with the visual culture of the Middle Ages as the basis for interpreting architecture. He explored his ideas about building, writing and picturing in a 2006 book on the 12th-century church of San Clemente in Rome.
This new discipline, which Riccioni calls epiconography, will be the subject of his lecture.
“This methodology could be the beginning of a new way to study visual art by incorporating analyses of accompanying inscriptions,” Riccioni said. “I think its approach could be used in the classification and study of inscriptions in works of art from the Middle Ages to the modern period.”
Riccioni’s lecture is co-sponsored by the School of Art, the classics department, history department and the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies and qualifies for continuing architectural education credit.
The lecture series also is viewable over the Internet, both live and in archive form. See the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Series Web page, http://www.arch.utk.edu/news/lectures08.html.
—
Contacts:
Florence Graves, (865) 974-5267, fgraves@tennessee.edu
Kristi Hintz, (865) 974-3993, khintz@utk.edu