On Thursday, November 18, at 4:30 p.m. at Colby College art historian John Varriano will present a lecture titled "Caravaggio and Violence." The lecture will be held in room 154 of the Bixler Art and Music Center and is open to the public free of charge. Varriano’s lecture will focus on the art of the Italian painter Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio.

Varriano, one of the foremost experts on Italian Baroque art and architecture, is the Idella Plimpton Kendall Professor of Art History at Mount Holyoke College. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He has written numerous scholarly articles on Baroque painting and architecture including Caravaggio’s art. Varriano is also the author of Italian Baroque and Rococo Architecture (1986) and A Literary Companion to Rome (1991). He is currently completing a book titled Caravaggio and the Art of Realism.

Varriano has curated exhibitions and written essays for several museums on subjects as varied as Papal medals to master prints by the Venetian painter Canaletto and the Italian engraver and architect Piranesi. For Boston College’s recent exhibition Saints and Sinners: Caravaggio and the Baroque Image Varriano wrote an essay for the exhibition catalogue.