Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton. He has been a professor of English and of Art History at universities including Northwestern, Michigan, and N.Y.U. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (Yale, 1986) and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (Yale, 1999), which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Pen American Center, and Phi Beta Kappa. He is the winner of the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been an actor and a director; he is also a regular contributor to publications in both the U.S. and Italy on the subject of food and wine. He is the author of Satyr Square (Farrar, Straus, 2006; pbk. Northwestern, 2008), which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself; and Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, the first wide-ranging study of the artist's habit of writing words on his drawings, which has been published by Princeton University Press. His latest volume is entitled Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures, released by Princeton University Press in December of 2012.