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2015 Commencement Citations

William Wallace

William Wallace honorary degree

COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES, MAY 17, 2015

Citation presented by Melinda Schlitt
Professor of Art History, William W. Edel Professor 
of Humanities

Conferring of the degree by Nancy A. Roseman, President

The turbulent world within which Michelangelo Buonarroti lived and worked, from 1475-1564, was in many ways not that dissimilar to our own. Wars, religious and political conflict, economic and environmental instability, killer bacteria and viruses, and new technologies defined the landscape of early modern Europe. For Michelangelo, hope resided in his faith through the institution of the Church in Rome, and in his art—sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry—as vehicles for expressing the ineffable about humankind, its future, and his own personal salvation, which he also feared lay in doubt.

It is largely through your years of research and writing about Michelangelo’s life and art, William Wallace, that we have greater insight into, and understanding of, one of the most prolific, ingenious, and complex artists in history. Drawing on exhaustive knowledge of thousands of pages of archival documents, and of course the works themselves, you have revealed relationships between artists, patrons, friends, and family that have corrected and problematized long-held assumptions about Michelangelo’s creative process and how some of his most well-known works, like the Sistine Ceiling, the Medici Chapel, or St. Peter’s Basilica came to be.

Michelangelo’s art, however, did not spring forth fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. As you have shown us, he achieved what he did through incessantly hard work, often in collaboration with many others whom he held to his own exacting standards. And, as you remark in your noted 2010 biography, Michelangelo: The Artist, the Man, and his Times, “... only Shakespeare and Beethoven have inspired a comparable scholarly and popular literature.”

In 1974, you were a soon-to-be graduate of Dickinson College, as our students are today. Earning magna cum laude with a major in art history, you went on to a master’s degree at the University of Illinois in 1976, and a Ph.D. in art history at Columbia University in 1983, landing a job that same year in the Department of Art History & Archaeology at Washington University, St. Louis, a position you have held ever since.

In addition to numerous teaching and faculty awards, fellowships and grants, you now hold The Barbara Murphy Bryant Distinguished Professor of Art History Chair at Washington University.

It was during a three-week trip to Italy in your sophomore year at Dickinson that you decided to pursue art history: “I became an art historian on my first trip to Italy, perhaps on that first night in Rome, when I walked to St. Peter’s in the rain and tried to grasp the enormity of this building, and its equally important place in history.” It is this synthesis between the visual and historical that first inspired you, and that has informed your prodigious scholarship ever since.

To date, you have published some 90 articles and essays, seven books (two of which are award-winning), given numerous lectures world-wide, and served as consultant to and made guest appearances for, the BBC, ABC, the Canadian CBC, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. You also were brought to the Vatican in 1990 as part of a team of scholars, curators, and conservators to consult on the restoration of Michelangelo’s frescoes in the Sistine Chapel. In short, you are an internationally recognized expert, perhaps the expert, on Michelangelo.

Michelangelo was not known as a teacher, in the way that many of his contemporaries, like Raffaello, were. You, on the other hand, embody the ideal of the dedicated pedagogue, with legions of students singing your praises that echo in the following: “Wallace is the man ... I came in with no interest in art history and left loving it. If you have the chance to take a class with this man, do it. You won't regret it.” In your teaching and scholarship, you have done the great service of revealing to us that genius also partakes in a common humanity, frailty, and uncertainty that defines life in general.

Your work is an important example of cultural biography—what the late, great Erwin Panofsky called a “cosmos of culture” in his fundamental essay, “The History of Art as a Humanistic Discipline.”

Panofsky outlined a subtle distinction between the Latin terms scientia and eruditio as they would have been understood during Michelangelo’s lifetime, as one, broadly, between the ideas of “knowledge” and “learning” in English: the former suggesting a kind of mental possession and the latter, more of an intellectual process—something like “mastery” and “wisdom.”  

While undeniably masterful, your work is erudite in the most accessible of ways. It is an example of humanistic scholarship of the most persuasive kind, not only for the conviction and veracity of its interpretations, but also because it is invested with the voice of its author at every turn—a relative rarity in modern, historical scholarship about the Italian Renaissance that lends credibility beyond the evidentiary.

You have inspired countless students and scholars through your teaching, generosity, and friendship. And in that inspiration you epitomize the ideal bonds of a well-motivated scholarly community.

In the study of the past by scholars in Michelangelo’s era, the emphasis was on relationship. The relation of one historical period or idea to another was a model for the relationship of self to self; there was always an expectation of reciprocity.

President Roseman, for continuing to enlighten, edify, and excite us about the struggle for artistic excellence and the legacy of accomplishment, it is my honor to present William Wallace, class of 1974, for the honorary degree, Doctor of Fine Arts.

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William Wallace, upon the recommendation of the Faculty to the Board of Trustees, and by its mandamus, I confer upon you the Degree of Doctor of Fine Arts, honoris causa, with all the rights, privileges, and distinction thereunto appertaining, in token of which I present you with this diploma and cause you to be invested with the hood of Dickinson College appropriate to the degree.


Honorary Degree Recipients