NEH director Bruce Cole to speak at Rice

NEH director Bruce Cole to speak at Rice

BY JENNIFER EVANS
Rice News staff

The chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities will be the inaugural speaker for a new lecture series at Rice designed to bring prominent art historians to campus to discuss topics significant today in art history and the humanities as a whole.

Bruce Cole

Bruce Cole, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), will visit Rice Thursday, Sept. 22, to speak on “What is a Renaissance Painting?” His talk, the inaugural lecture in the Katherine Brown Lecture Series in Art History, is set for 4 p.m. in 100 Herring Hall. A question-and-answer session will follow Cole’s lecture, which is also the Katherine Brown Distinguished Lecture in Art History for 2005-06.

The Italian Renaissance was a rich era of intellectual, social and artistic development that marked the dawn of the modern age. Cole will discuss the various ways to interpret and read paintings from the Italian Renaissance, which encompasses works by such artists as Michelangelo, Botticelli and Leonardo da Vinci.

Cole is a scholar of Renaissance art and was named the eighth chairman of the NEH in 2001. This summer the White House nominated him for a second term at the helm of the 40-year-old federal agency that was founded to cultivate the best of humanities to create educated and thoughtful citizens who can fully and intelligently participate in government of, by and for the people. Cole came to the endowment from Indiana University–Bloomington, where he was a distinguished professor of art history and professor of comparative literature.

As NEH chairman, Cole has launched “We the People,” an initiative to encourage the teaching, study and understanding of American history and culture and has increased the endowment’s budget for research, preservation, education, and public programs on American history and culture. The endowment has also been able to award more grants for the study of other cultures and other times.

Cole has written 14 books, many of them about the Renaissance, including “The Renaissance Artist at Work,” “Italian Art, 1250-1550: The Relation of Art to Life and Society,” “Art of the Western World: From Ancient Greece to Post-Modernism” and “The Informed Eye: Understanding Masterpieces of Western Art.”
This new lecture series is funded by the Katherine Brown Fund, established by Professor Emerita of Art History and Rice alumna Katherine Brown.