E. H. Gombrich Lecture Series⁴

This series, cosponsored by Princeton University Press and the Warburg Institute in London, features prominent humanities scholars who address the rich legacy of the classical tradition in art, literature, and ideas, across historical periods.

Provenance and Possession: Acquisitions from the Portuguese Empire in Renaissance Italy K. J. P. Lowe
In the fifteenth and sixteenth century, Renaissance Italy received a bounty of ‘goods’ from Portuguese trading voyages—fruits of empire that included luxury goods, exotic animals and even enslaved people. Many historians hold that...
Celestial Aspirations: Classical Impulses in British Poetry and Art Philip Hardie
Between the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination—poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and religious—displayed a pronounced fascination with images of ascent and flight to the heavens....
How the Classics Made Shakespeare Jonathan Bate
Ben Jonson famously accused Shakespeare of having "small Latin and less Greek." But he was exaggerating. Shakespeare was steeped in the classics. Shaped by his grammar school education in Roman literature, history, and rhetoric, he...
Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom Marjorie Curry Woods
Saint Augustine famously “wept for Dido, who killed herself by the sword,” and many later medieval schoolboys were taught to respond in similarly emotional ways to the pain of female characters in Virgil’s Aeneid and other...