Teaching about Leonardo da Vinci is focus of Fall 2008 Tolley Lecture

Teaching about Leonardo da Vinci is focus of Fall 2008 Tolley LectureAugust 25, 2008Judy Holmesjlholmes@syr.edu

Syracuse University Meredith Professors Samuel Clemence and Gary Radke will present a lecture about their interdisciplinary course “Leonardo da Vinci: Artist and Engineer” Tuesday, Sept. 9, at 7:30 p.m. in the Shaffer Art Building’s Shemin Auditorium. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is co-presented by the 2008 Syracuse Symposium™ and the William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities.

Leonardo was the prototypical “Renaissance Man” in the breadth and creativity of his activities. His life and work have been explored in a remarkable interdisciplinary course co-taught by Clemence, professor of civil engineering in the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science, and Radke, Dean’s Professor of the Humanities in The College of Arts and Sciences. Clemence and Radke will provide an overview of their course and of some key interdisciplinary episodes in Leonardo’s life and work. They intend to provoke discussion about interdisciplinarity and how the idea of a “Renaissance scholar” may apply in our age of disciplinary specialization.

The Syracuse Symposium is a semester-long intellectual and artistic festival celebrating interdisciplinary thinking, imagining and creating, presented by The College of Arts and Sciences to the entire Syracuse community. The Fall 2008 symposium theme is “migration.”

Clemence is a fellow in the American Society of Civil Engineers, a member of Chi Epsilon and Sigma Xi, and was elected to Tau Beta Pi as an Eminent Engineer in 1977. He is recipient of numerous awards, including Outstanding Teacher Awards at the University of Missouri-Rolla (1975, 1977) and Syracuse University (1989). He was named SU’s 1990 Scholar/Teacher of the Year and received the 1998 Outstanding Educator Award from the St. Lawrence Section of the American Society for Engineering Education. Clemence served as senior associate dean of the L.C. Smith College of Engineering and Computer Science from 1991-96 and is the editor of three books and author or co-author of more than 60 technical publications.

An internationally renowned expert in Italian medieval and Renaissance art and architecture, Radke served as curator of “The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece,” an exhibition that toured Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Seattle in 2007-08. The New York Times selected the exhibition catalogue for “The Gates of Paradise,” which Radke edited, as one of the top art books of 2007. He previously organized traveling exhibitions of Verrocchio’s “David Restored” (2005) and “Michelangelo: Drawings and Other Treasures from the Casa Buonarroti, Florence” (2001). He is scholarly advisor for the current SUArt Galleries exhibition “Michelangelo: The Man and the Myth.” A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, Radke is a prolific writer whose publications include “Viterbo: Profile of a 13th-Century Papal Palace” (Cambridge University Press, 1996) and, with John T. Paoletti, “Art in Renaissance Italy” (Laurence King Publishing, 1997).