Podcast appearances and mentions of Samuel H Kress

This past May, the ancient Roman-era city and UNESCO World Heritage site of Palmyra in Syria was seized by ISIS. Later in the summer, Khaled al-Asaad, an 82-year-old archaeologist and renowned antiquities scholar, was brutally murdered in Palmyra by Islamic State militants when he refused to reveal where valuable artifacts had been moved. Since then, ISIS has set about demolishing the architectural riches of the city. Why is the preservation of these sites and the objects within them so important, a life or death matter for someone like al-Asaad? Dr. Laura Veneskey joins Humanities Viewpoints this month to discuss this and other questions related to the systematic destruction of one of the world’s most important ancient sites. Laura Veneskey (Sarah Lawrence College, B.A.; Northwestern University, Ph.D.) teaches courses in ancient, medieval, and Byzantine art. Her research explores the visual culture of the late Roman and early medieval Mediterranean, particularly Syria-Palestine, with special focus on issues of materiality, medieval image theory, pilgrimage, and the cult of relics. She is currently preparing a book manuscript investigating the material aspects of Mediterranean visual culture between the 3rd and 9th centuries. Professor Veneskey has received grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Max-Planck-Institut, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and the Warburg Institute. Before coming to Wake Forest, she was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University.

"The Altarpiece of Ciudad Rodrigo" is the centerpiece of the UAMA’s Samuel H. Kress Collection, which consists of more than 60 European paintings, sculptures and decorative objects dating from the 14th through the 19th centuries. In addition to the Altarpiece, the Kress holdings include paintings by Vittore Carpaccio, Jusepe de Ribera, Domenico Tintoretto, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, Horace Vernet, Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and many others. The technical analysis of the paintings, under the direction of Claire Barry, chief conservator for the Kimbell Art Museum, allowed scholars to look beneath the painted layers and to see the artists’ preparatory underdrawings. Sept. 2008.