Leonard Barkan is one of the most distinguished and inventive scholars of Comparative Literature in the United States, who has explored the intersections between literature and art history for many years. Before moving to Princeton, he was a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and New York University. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, and Phi Beta Kappa. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the US and Italy, where he writes on the subject of food and wine. He has recently published Satyr Square, which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself, and completed Michelangelo: The Hieroglyphs of the Mind, a study of the artist’s habit of writing words on his drawings.

In his project at the Academy, Barkan will focus on the relation between fragments of classical art and the modern experience of viewing them. Conceived as a story about the historical intersection between aesthetics and subjectivity, Barkan’s project specifically focuses on Berlin’s relation to the classical heritage as it is expressed in the testimonies of Winckelmann and Rilke, as well as in the display of classical art in the modern museum.