Philippe Morel

Institut national d'histoire de l'art (INHA), Paris

September–December 2007

Philippe Morel is professor of art history and director of the Center for the Study of Renaissance Art at the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne). As a Renaissance scholar, Morel has addressed such diverse topics as grotesques, mythology, scientific culture, magic, astrology, and cosmology, appearing in Le Parnasse Astrologique (Rome, 1991) and in the more recent Mélissa. Magie, astres et démons dans l’art italien de la Renaissance. Morel is also the author of the prize-winning Les Grotesques: Les Figures de l’imaginaire dans la peinture italienne de la fin de la Renaissance (Paris, 1997), an exploration of the language of the “grotesques” as it developed in the late Renaissance culture. His book on Les Grottes Maniéristes en Italie (Paris, 1998) is partially translated in English. In his Clark project, “Bacchus and Christ: Wine and Vine in Renaissance and Seventeenth-Century Art,” Morel will focus on the representation of Bacchus and wine, most especially the relationships between pagan Bacchus imagery and Christian imagery (eucharistical and sacrifical, liturgical and ecclesiological).