Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art welcomes noted art historian Michael Davis to campus on Tuesday, Oct. 26 as part of the Harvey Stahl Lectureship 2010. Davis, of the Mount Holyoke College department of art history, will present a lecture at 12:30 p.m. in room N104 of the art school. The lecture is free and the public is invited to attend.
The Stahl Lectureship comes to UGA as the third in a four-part lecture series by Davis on Gothic architecture and related topics at Georgia Tech, Emory University and Agnes Scott College. It is sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art, The Cloisters, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
A generation of development and innovation has had profound implications for the use of technology in the study of Gothic architecture. New tools from AutoCAD to Google Earth have impacted speed, precision and visualization techniques, improving research capabilities and opening up new questions about how medieval architecture can be better understood through their use. Digital modeling of structural and cosmetic elements of Notre Dame de Paris or Chartres Cathedral may unlock the mysteries of medieval construction techniques, with implications across many fields.
“The vertical emphasis, stylistic sophistication and ornamentation in Gothic architecture is hard to understand without the building technology we have today,” said Stefaan van Liefferinge, assistant professor of art history in the school of art. “Digital technologies and data bases make possible a comparison of a wide-range of buildings or certain features to understand these extremely complex structures and the mystery of how they were built, basically by hand.”
The Lamar Dodd School of Art is located at 270 River Road on the UGA campus; N104 is located on the first floor of the building. For further information, see http://art.uga.edu.