Art Focus Lecture | House of the Muse: Stanford Collections

The idea of a museum derives from the Classical philosophy that the resident Muse of History inspires remembering and understanding the past in order to inform the present. How do the arts of different cultures reveal an individual culture's values as well as what might be universal? How could seeing art as history be perhaps more revealing than merely the subject of art history? The Cantor Arts Center's visual arts collections are wonderful learning resources. Over the course of 3 lectures, we will take a deeper look at Stanford collections including Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Chinese art and artifacts (February 7, 14, and 21).

Patrick Hunt, PhD, is an archaeologist and art historian teaching at Stanford University since 1993. Hunt is a frequently featured scholar on documentaries including National Geographic, NOVA, and PBS. His seventeen published books to date include Myth and Art in Ekphrasis, Caravaggio, Renaissance Visions: Myth and Art, and the best-selling Ten Discoveries That Rewrote History.