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Leonard Barkan
Ellen Maria Gorrissen Fellow - Class of Fall 2009, Class of Spring 2010
Class of 1943 University Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, Princeton University
Biography
Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. Since his time as an American Academy Fellow, in Fall 2009, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper with Princeton University Press. During 2010-2011, he gave the Thomas Spencer Jerome Lectures at the American Academy in Rome and the University of Michigan; his subject, which he first aired at the Academy in Berlin, was Food Culture and High Culture in Antiquity and the Renaissance. Another current project, on the relations between words and images, is entitled Mute Poetry Speaking Pictures. He spent July of 2011 in Charlottenburg, Berlin, thinking about a possible Berlin project. During the Fall semester of 2011, in addition to his work at Princeton, Barkan will be a Visiting Professor in the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at Johns Hopkins University.
American Academy Project
On Gazing at Art and Changing Your Life
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.
Lecture Summary
On High Culture and Food Culture in Early Modern Europe
De gustibus non est disputatum advises the famed Latin maxim for not arguing over taste. It’s something subjective, the logic goes, and arriving at universals for aesthetic preference is a task better suited to philosophers -- like Immanuel Kant, who contemptuously derided the use of the word “taste” to refer to that highest of human judgments. »