"The Pope Who Made Our Millennium: Gregory Xiii And The Art Of Calendrical Politics In The Counter-Reformation"

The Institute for Advanced Study will host a Millennium Lecture on the genesis and original celebration of the Gregorian calendar by Nicola Courtright, Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Amherst College. The lecture, which is intended for a general audience and is open to the public, will take place Friday, December 17, 1999 at 4:30 p.m. in Wolfensohn Hall on the campus of the Institute, Olden Lane, Princeton. A reception will follow in the Fuld Hall Common Room.

In the midst of the religious struggles that bloodied the sixteenth century, Pope Gregory XIII ordered that ten days disappear from the month of October in 1582, and a new measurement of time commence. His command, accompanied by vigorous diplomatic initiatives, caused the papal calendar -- our Gregorian calendar -- to replace the classical one inaugurated by Julius Caesar in much of the Western world. The primary purpose of the new calendar was not, however, to act as a scientific corrective, but to amend and celebrate the date of Easter, the feast commemorating Christ’s resurrection, the fundamental event of Christian faith. Gregory’s regulation of nature, understood instantly by fellow leaders as serving his own religion’s transcendent purpose, and his claim to the universal dominion of his ancient predecessor in both physical and metaphysical domains, set off a firestorm of protests throughout Europe and Asia Minor, as well as fears of apocalyptic repercussions in the natural world. In the face of this reaction, Gregory built a magnificent apartment in the heart of the Vatican Palace which was decorated with lavish frescoes that commemorated his reform of the calendar, and proclaimed what he regarded as his rightful place as the prime spiritual and secular leader of the universe, and Rome as the divinely sanctioned locus for calendar reform.

Nicola Courtright, a 1976 graduate of Oberlin College, received her M.A. in art history from Yale in 1978, and her PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, in 1990. An Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Amherst College since 1998, she has received numerous grants, including a Fulbright, the Rome Prize, and an ACLS post-doctoral fellowship, to support her research on the art of Counter-Reformation Rome, Rembrandt drawings, and, most recently, the ideology of rule expressed in domiciles of French early modern rulers, especially queens. Her forthcoming book, entitled Gregory XIII and the Art of Reform: The Tower of the Winds in the Vatican Palace, will be published by Cambridge University Press in the series "Monuments of Papal Rome," edited by Irving Lavin and Joseph Connors.