Lecture:
NEW Curatorial Lecture Series: Shawn Eichman
Showtimes:
Wednesday Sep 12 10:30 AM
Wednesday Sep 19 10:30 AM
Location:
Doris Duke Theatre
About the Lecture:
The museum launches a new lecture series featuring its curators, as part of its push to develop a cohesive adult education program. Earlier this year, the museum conducted an online survey of members, and learned that visitors want to hear the museum’s curators speak about topics that are meaningful to them.
Starting today, each Wednesday a museum curator will give a free talk in the Doris Duke Theatre at 10:30am.
Kicking off the series is Shawn Eichman, Curator of Asian Art, who gives the two-part lecture "From China to Constantinople and Beyond: In the Footsteps of Nestorius."
One of the most remarkable artifacts of early Christianity, the Nestorian Stele today rests in an overlooked corner of a museum in Xi'an in the western Chinese province of Shaanxi. Documenting the early arrival of Christians in China and the official recognition granted to them in the 8th century, the stele is largely unknown outside of a small circle of religious historians. Even within China, one of the most fundamental questions surrounding this stele is rarely asked: who was Nestorius? What was his role in the early church?
In these two talks, Dr. Eichman will take the audience on a journey in search of traces of Nestorius from China to Ephesus and then to Constantinople and farther west, along the way discovering the beauty of early Christian art from the grandest of all Byzantine monuments, the Hagia Sophia, to the early Roman, Ostrogothic and Byzantine churches of Ravenna in Italy, one of the world's greatest artistic inheritances, now designated as UNESCO World Heritage monuments.
