Art lectures this week at Flagler

As the senior lecturer at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., David Gariff knows a thing or two about painters.

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Gariff will be discussing a pair of them, Botticelli and Klimt, when he kicks off Flagler College’s “Ideas and Images” series Monday and Tuesday.

Gariff’s presentations will take place at 7 p.m. in the Flagler Room at Flagler College, 74 King St.

Unique Gift

“I’m looking forward to my visit to Flagler College and to meeting with the students, faculty and staff,” said Gariff, who also teaches art history as an adjunct professor at The Catholic University of America. “My hope is that through my long experiences as both a university professor and museum educator, I can contribute something meaningful to the ‘Ideas and Images’ program.”

Portrait Oil Painting

Gariff will be speaking on lecture topics that he says reflect two periods of Western art history in which he is particularly interested: the Italian Renaissance and late 19th-century European art.

Portrait Artist

Monday, Gariff will tackle “Sandro Botticelli (1446-1510): An Anniversary Lecture,” marking the 500th anniversary of the Italian painter’s death. Gariff says the artist’s refined and sensual paintings are among the greatest achievements of Florentine painting in the 15th century.

Gariff’s lectures will continue Tuesday with an anniversary of a different kind, this one the birth of Austrian painter Gustav Klimt as he speaks on “Gustav Klimt and the Vienna Secession.” Gariff says the lecture will explore Klimt’s art and career against the richness and intellectual ferment of Viennese life and culture.

And though the two painters were born more than 400 years apart, Gariff says the environment in which the two existed were very similar.