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Collectors Circle Lecture: Gothic cathedral

Dr. Peter Fergusson is a renowned medieval scholar.  The Theodora and Stanley Feldberg Professor of Art at Wellesley College, he is past chair of the art department and has served as Co-Director of Medieval and Renaissance Studies and Director of the Architecture Program.  He has also been a Visiting Professor of Visual and Environmental Design at Harvard University.

His first lecture at the MFA focuses on the Gothic cathedral, a spectacular achievement of the high Middle Ages.  The prized possession of many European cities, these 900-year-old structures, hand built and adorned with sculpture and stained glass, stand as powerful expressions of religious culture and architectural invention.  Ambitious patronage and civic pride combined in the development of the Gothic cathedral, a process in which the role of France remains central.  Dr. Fergusson will look at the earliest and finest surviving example of this phenomenon, the pilgrimage cathedral of Chartres.

His acclaimed book with Stuart Harrison, Rievaulx Abey: Community, Architecture, Memory (Yale University Press), received the Alice Hitchcock Prize from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain and the Charles Homer Haskins Gold Medal from the Medieval Academy of America.  Dr. Fergusson’s Architecture of Solitude: Cistercian Abbeys in Twelfth-Century England (Princeton University Press) was awarded the Charles Rufus Morey Prize from the College Art Association.  His most recent book is Canterbury Cathedral Priory in the Age of Becket, again from Yale.

Sponsored by: Northern Trust

FREE with MFA admission, open to the public.

Event Details


Date
February 26, 2015

Time
6:30–7:30 pm

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