CONTRIBUTOR:

Samuel Y. Edgerton

AFFILIATION:

TITLE:

Amos Lawrence Professor of Art, Emeritus

DEPARTMENT:

Art History

INSTITUTION:

Williams College

BIOGRAPHY:

Samuel Y. Edgerton is Amos Lawrence Professor Art History Emeritus at Williams College, Williamstown, MA, where he taught until his retirement in 2007. He began his college teaching career at Boston University in 1964 and remained there until 1980. During the past fifty years his scholarly interests have continued to range from studying the arts of medieval and Renaissance Europe to the arts of both Pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial America. However, the single thread that unites the seemingly diverse subjects of his several books is his desire to reveal how the history of art interacted with the ideologies and social institutions of diverse cultures, such as the way art was deployed in the service of the Christian judicial system in medieval Florence, or the way Catholic missionaries used the arts to convert the indigenous “pagan” peoples of post-conquest Mexico. Edgerton's latest work traces how the advent of linear perspective was originally conceived to reinforce the devotional power of Christian pictures, but how it then became the universal trademark of secular "realism." And finally, how perspective art training allowed Galileo Galilei to "see" both secularly and scientifically for the first time the true form of the surface of the moon.