The joy of leading ‘art-history Outward Bound’

Emeritus professor was ‘interdisciplinary’ before it was cool

In academic circles, the term “interdisciplinary” may be jargon, but it is also one measure of scholarly excellence. “Interdisciplinary” studies strive to make sense of the world through the lenses of disparate fields—say, astronomy, philosophy and art history.

Vernon Minor was championing and practicing interdisciplinary study years before it was in vogue. Minor, a professor emeritus of art and art history at the University of Colorado, notes that CU professors have been weaving complementary disciplines into their teaching since at least the 1950s.

Minor sometimes sat in on the courses of the late Hazel Barnes, renowned professor of philosophy. “The erudition and the ease with which she brought together various disciplines impressed me and was something I strived for,” Minor says.

It was also something he attained, former students say.

After joining the faculty in 1976, Minor served in the departments of Art and Art History and Comparative Literature and Humanities.

He taught the Introduction to Humanities noon lectures nearly every semester for 30 years. More than 20,000 students took this class. And for 17 years, he also led the Art History in Italy Program, a five-week summer study-abroad program in art-drenched Florence and Rome.

In CU classrooms and in Italy, Minor approached art history and the humanities as pieces of a larger whole.

“I would teach art history in large courses, and they would read contemporaneous literature,” Minor recalls. “It was all these big ideas … we were not disciplinary-focused.”

In Rome, for instance, Minor took students to St. Peter’s Basilica to see the tomb of Pope Urban VIII, which illustrated the Magisterium, or the teaching authority of the church. Students understood that. “It was a rich period, and not alien to us at all.”

Minor also took students into mostly-empty churches in Rome. “It is interesting to go into these exquisite 17^th century churches, and nobody’s in there.” A church and its art might be dedicated to a plague. “Everything that occurred reflected a higher meaning … and students would get that.”

In teaching, “I would consistently bring up contemporary events that I thought were echoes of what were going on in the 17^th century. Religion is still around, very powerfully around. It can be political, and it can be spiritual,” Minor notes.

Protestantism, a tradition that guides the perspective of many Americans, is often anti-iconic and historically not interested in images “because images were often seen as carnal,” Minor says.

Protestants may believe the word of God itself offers enough spiritual guidance, and that view could bring into question the value of religious art. Essentially, some might wonder, “If (the word) is all you need, why do you need all this ornate art?”

Minor’s answer: “Michelangelo wouldn’t have existed if various popes hadn’t believed … that this was helping to project the word, to make it physical, to give them the imagery, the magical imagery. … They wanted to create this visual cosmos.”

Conveying religious themes via visual art served a practical purpose in Christian Rome, where a large part of the public was illiterate. Despite their inability to read, these Romans received messages the church conveyed.

“They looked and they understood,” Minor says. “Pictures were revelations to them, as representing sacred power.”

Students who immersed themselves in Italian art and its meaning with Minor often seemed more mature and poised upon returning to America, Minor said, adding that a “kind of seriousness would overtake them, a kind of confidence, a calming effect.”

“They found out something about themselves. It’s like art-history Outward Bound.”

Part of their confidence came from the fact when they were done, Minor could accurately say, “You probably know more about Italian art than most graduate students at the master’s level.”

“This was such an unusual experience. I was jealous. I wish I could have matured that quickly.”

Minor remains passionate about teaching the humanities. “It’s kind of hard to know what it is to be human if you don’t study the humanities,” he says. “We teach students to question things … (and) the constructedness of things.”

“How do things have meaning? You get that in the humanities,” he adds. “I don’t teach art history as aesthetics only. I think you should also appreciate mathematics and physics.”

“I don’t find the students ask me why this is relevant. They just enjoy it. It feeds into all the things they’re curious about. Students are really curious and love to find meaning.”

Minor also took an interdisciplinary approach to a book on art history. He was inspired partly by some of CU’s experts in literary criticism. “Literary criticism is more theoretically rigorous than art history,” he says. “My literary-critic friends would tell me what they were working on, and I was fascinated by their ability to interpret text.”

That gave him the idea to write an art-history book that was colored by his exposure to literary critics. The result was “Art History’s History,” a book published in 1994 and since translated into Japanese, Chinese and Persian.

As Minor recalls, he told himself: “I’m going to write this as if I’m talking to my students … how this works, how these various theories work.”

Now a research professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he looks back on his years at CU with fondness and gratitude.

“I was lucky. I had a well-rounded experience,” he says. At CU, he served as chair of humanities, chair of fine arts, director of the summer study-abroad program and associate director of the University Museum.

“Almost never did I have a bad day on campus,” he recalls, adding, “Generally speaking, when I stepped on campus, I was happy. It is a wonderful thing to be a teacher.”

Though he was a great fan of interdisciplinary study, Minor was also a highly focused specialist.

While in graduate school in the 1970s, Minor worked with a faculty member whose research focused on 18^th-century Rome. One artist of that period was a sculptor named Filippo della Valle.

Minor spent a year studying the sculptor’s work. He found some tombs that had been crafted by della Valle had been misattributed to another sculptor. Later, Minor wrote a book on the artist: “Passive Tranquility: The Sculpture of Filippo della Valle.”

“I really did focus on him as a great man,” Minor says. “I knew him as if he were a member of my family.”

Minor’s four books have sold more than 50,000 copies. His scholarship has been honored with a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and with membership at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

In Illinois, Minor, meanwhile, continues to teach “because I don’t know if I could not teach.”