Walter Melion, born in Manila, Philippines, in 1952. Ph.D from the University of California, Berkeley. Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University, Atlanta.
Fellow (1 September 2008 – 30 June 2009)
THE MEDITATIVE FORM AND FUNCTION OF OTTO VAN VEEN’S BRUSSELS ALTARPIECES: MYSTICAL MARRIAGE OF SAINT CATHERINE (1589), DEPOSITION (1605), AND CARRYING OF THE CROSS (CA. 1610)
During the academic year 2008-2009 at NIAS, I finished and saw into production a new book, The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550-1625 (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2009) on the hermeneutics of the meditative print in the Low Countries; completed an exhibition catalogue on the exegetical, meditative, and historical functions of Dutch and Flemish Bible prints, Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries (London and New York: Museum of Biblical Art and D. Giles Ltd., 2009); and co-edited a volume on early modern discourses of vision, Early Modern Eyes [Intersections 17] (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming in 2009). I also wrote four articles, “Marian Devotion and the Fine Style in Heronymus Wierix’s Maria of ca. 1611”; “Picta sibi antica schemata: Willem van Branteghem, Benito Arias Montano, and Petrus Canisius on the Meditative Image as Pictura”; “The Representation of Vision in Cornelis Galle’s Life of Blessed Father Ignatius of Loyola of 1610″; and, ” Exegetical Duality as a Meditative Crux in Maarten van Heemskerck’s Balaam and the Angel in a Panoramic Landscape of 1554″. Further, I co-organised NIAS colloquium “Discourses of Meditation in Art and Literature, 1300-1600” (April 23-25, 2009), as well as the follow-up colloquium, “The Authority of the Word: Reflecting on Text and Image in the Low Countries, 1400-1700”, scheduled to take place at Emory University in October 2009.