Dr. David Freedberg

David Freedberg was invited to Emory for the 2006 Spring Semester. He conducted a weekly faculty seminar dealing with Neuroscience and Art, and presented a public lecture on "Galileo and the Picturing of Nature".

David Freedberg is best known for his work on psychological responses to art, and particularly for his studies on iconoclasm and censorship (see, inter alia, Iconoclasts and their Motives, 1984, and The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response, 1989). His more traditional art historical writing has centered on the fields of Dutch and Flemish art. Within these fields he has specialized in the history of Dutch printmaking (see Dutch Landscape Prints of the Seventeenth Century (1980)), and in the paintings and drawings of Bruegel and Rubens (see, for example, The Prints of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1989) and Rubens: The Life of Christ after the Passion (1984)). In more recent years he has turned his attention to seventeenth century Roman art and to the paintings of Nicolas Poussin. He has been involved in several exhibitions of contemporary art (eg. Joseph Kosuth: The Play of the Unmentionable (1992)). Following a series of important discoveries in Windsor Castle, the Institut de France and the archives of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, he has for some time been concerned with the intersection of art and science in the age of Galileo. While much of his work in this area has been published in catalogues and articles, his chief publication in this area is The Eye of the Lynx: Galileo, his Friends, and the Beginnings of Modern Natural History (2002).

Although Freedberg continues to teach in the fields of Dutch, Flemish, French, and Italian seventeenth century art, as well as in historiographical and theoretical areas, his reserach now concentrates on the relations between art, history, and the neurosciences. He is currently engaged in writing two books: 1) Dance, the Body and Emotion (from a historical and neuroscientific perspective); 2) Art and the Brain, with particular reference to emotion and vision. He continues to hope that he will be able to return to his work on the cultural history of the architecture and dance of the Pueblo peoples.

In addition to Freedberg’s teaching responsibilities, he also serves as Director of Columbia’s Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America.

His website at Columbia is: http://www.columbia.edu/cu/arthistory/html/dept_faculty_freed.html