The Fifty-fourth A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts 2003
"Great Work": Terms of Aesthetic Experience in Ancient Mesopotamia
Irene J. Winter
April–May, 2003
East Building Auditorium
April 10
Mud Brick: Ur, Nineveh, Babylon, and the Aesthetics of Scale
April 17
Alabaster: The Warka Vase and the Aesthetics of Abundance
April 24
Lapis Lazuli: The Ur Lyre and the Aesthetics of Performance
May 1
Bronze: The Basetki Statue Base and the Aesthetics of the Perfect Body
May 8
Ivory: Exotic Furniture and the Aesthetics of Skilled Craftsmanship
May 15
Gold: A Nimrud Queen's Crown and the Aesthetics of Radiance
These lectures are dedicated to all those who have helped preserve, recover, and restore archaeological sites and collections in Iraq in the aftermath of April 2003.
Irene J. Winter received an A.B. from Barnard College (1960), an M.A. from the University of Chicago (1967), and a Ph.D. from Columbia University (1973). She is presently the William Dorr Boardman Professor of Fine Arts at Harvard University, where she has served on the faculty since 1988. She spent 1996–1997 at Cambridge University as Slade Professor of the History of Art. From 1976 to 1988 she taught at the University of Pennsylvania, where she received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1983, and was also on the faculty of Queens College at the City University of New York (1971–1976).
Professor Winter participated in archaeological excavations at Godin Tepe and Hasanlu, Iran, in the 1960s and 1970s. Her numerous awards include a MacArthur Foundation Prize Fellowship (1983–1988). She was also a recipient of the Olivia James Travel Fellowship of the Archaeological Institute of America (1965–1966) and a Samuel H. Kress Foundation research fellowship (1977), was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999), and, most recently, was appointed a fellow of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study (2003–2004). In 1999, she delivered the Flexner Lectures at Bryn Mawr College.
Professor Winter has contributed over seventy-five articles, reviews, and edited volumes on topics in ancient Near Eastern art and archaeology, ranging from royal sculpture and cylinder seals of the third millennium B.C.E. to ivory carving of the first millennium B.C.E. She is currently working on a book entitled: "Visual Affect: Aesthetic Experience and Ancient Mesopotamia," to be published by Princeton University Press.
Professor Winter has served on the board of the College Art Association, several editorial boards, the academic committee of the International Congresses of the Archaeology of the Ancient Near East, and the Board of Advisors of the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art. She is a member of the Iraq Task Force of the Archaeological Institute of America.
A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts
The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts were established by the National Gallery of Art's Board of Trustees in 1949 "to bring to the people of the United States the results of the best contemporary thought and scholarship bearing upon the subject of the Fine Arts."