Speaker: Sir Richard Temple, Bt., Ph.D.

Join us for an evening lecture with Sir Richard Temple, founder of London’s Temple Gallery and specialist on Russian icons, who played an important advisory role in the Timken’s acquisition of Russian icons in the late 1970s. 

Sir Richard Temple founded the Temple Gallery in 1959 as a center for the study, restoration and exhibition of ancient icons and sacred art. He is a member of the Advisory Panel ofthe Art Fund (formerly the National Art Collections Fund of Great Britain) and has been active in the acquisition of icons by several major museums, among them the British Museum, the Musée du Louvre in Paris, the Museum of the Church of the Holy Redeemer in Moscow, as well as the Timken Museum of Art, which purchased its double-faced tabletka from the Temple Gallery in 1979. The Timken’s three icons from the Hann Collection were also acquired through Temple, who served as the museum’s agent at the Hann Collection Sale in 1980. 



Temple has played a major role in the formation of several highly important private collections such as that of Mr. Eric Bradley, which passed into the Museum of the Menil Foundation in Houston, Texas, the collection of the late Mrs. John D. Rockefeller III and the collection, now housed in Vicenza, of the Banca Intesa, Italy. 

Educated at Stowe and at the Sorbonne, he was recently awarded a Ph.D. by the Prince’s School of Traditional Arts for his thesis The Esoteric Tradition and Peter Bruegel the Elder. He is the author of Icons and the Mystical Origins of Christianity (1990, now in its fourth edition) and Icons: Divine Beauty (2004), and has published many catalogues and scholarly articles. 

The lecture discusses the origin of icons when Christianity first spread through the Late Roman Empire. The intellectual training of the great theologians of the 4th century, such as Saint Augustine, was based on the philosophy of Plato and the later schools of Platonic thought. Early Christian art was not a matter of decoration, or narrative or aesthetics, it was a vehicle for understanding the universal ideas at the heart of all religion and philosophy: the meaning of human life on earth and in eternity. 



This lecture has been organized in collaboration with Lambs Players Theatre and made possible through the generous contributions of Michael Roeder, a local icon collector.

Thursday, October 18, 2012
6:00 p.m. Program begins
Reception to follow.

Tickets:
Free for Timken members
$15 for nonmembers

Limited seating; reservations required.

Please respond by October 15, 2012.

Call to purchase tickets by credit card 619-239-5548 x100
Mail checks to: Timken Museum of Art, 1500 El Prado, San Diego, CA 92101
For questions, call 619-239-5548 x100 or email rsvp@timkenmuseum.org