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Dr. Anne E. Proctor, associate dean for the School of Humanities, Arts and Education at Roger Wi l l i ams University in Bristol, R.I., will present “Dearly Beloved? Michelangelo’s Funeral and the First Arts Academy in Europe,” at Virginia Military Institute on Thursday, Sept. 28, at 7:45 p.m. in the Nichols Engineering Building auditorium on post. The event is free and open to the public.
Michelangelo Buonarroti attained both wealth and fame in his time, and broke the mold of what an “artist” could be, working as painter, sculptor, architect and poet. In 1563, when he was 88 years old, he was elected (in spite of his own reluctance) president of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, Italy, the first formal academy of artists and architects in early modern Europe.
When he died a year later, the artists of that academy hosted a funeral to celebrate his legacy. In honor of their singular hero, they worked together across divisions of age, experience, medium, and technique to create a collaborative, free-standing monument in the middle of the church of San Lorenzo in Florence.
Proctor’s talk explores both the legacy of Michelangelo, and the group of artists who worked together to commemorate him. Proctor serves on the RWU Education Advisory Board. Her research focuses on sculpture, collaborative commissions, court spaces, and the professional status of artists in late Renaissance Italy. Recent work includes papers on the foundation of the Accademia del Disegno in Florence, and the role of the architect, painter, and author, Giorgio Vasari, at the court of duke Cosimo I de’ Medici.
The event is sponsored by the Dean’s Academic Speakers Fund, Sigma Tau Delta, and the Department of English, Rhetoric, and Humanistic Studies.
