Walter Simon Melion

Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has taught since 2004. He was previously Professor and Chair of Art History at The Johns Hopkins University. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artist Hendrick Goltzius. In addition to monographs on Jerónimo Nadal's Adnotationes et meditationes in Evangelia (2003-2007) and on scriptural illustration in the 16th-century Low Countries (2009), his books include Shaping the Netherlandish Canon: Karel van Mander's `Schilder-Boeck' (Chicago: 1991), The Meditative Art: Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550-1625 (Philadelphia: 2009), and Karel van Mander and His Foundation of the Noble, Free Art of Painting (Leiden & Boston: 2022), winner of the Roland H. Bainton Prize in Art History. He has authored more than one hundred articles and is editor or co-editor of more than twenty-five volumes, most recently Quid est sacramentum? Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700 (Leiden & Boston, Brill, 2019); Quid est secretum? Visual Representation of Mystery and Secrecy in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2020); Landscape and the Visual Hermeneutics of Place, 1500-1700 (Leiden and Boston: 2021); Ekphrastic Image-making in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1700 (Leiden and Boston: 2022); and Customised Books in Early Modern Europe, 1400-1700 (Leiden and Boston: 2023). Forthcoming in 2024 is ‘Motus mixti et compositi’: The Portrayal of Mixed and Compound Emotions in the Visual and Literary Arts of Northern Europe, 1500-1700.