Richard Brilliant

Brilliant was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on November 20, 1929. He attended Boston Latin School (1941–1947), and graduated from Yale College in 1951 with a B.A. in classical civilization. He then attended Harvard Law School, receiving his LL.B. in 1954. He was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar the same year. He was awarded an M.A. in 1956, and a Ph.D. in 1960. Brilliant’s dissertation was titled as Gesture and Rank in Roman Art: The Use of Gestures to Denote Status in Roman Sculpture and Coinage and published in 1963. ==Career==

Brilliant began his teaching career at the University of Pennsylvania in 1963. He became a full professor in 1969 and served as chairman of the art history department. He joined the faculty at Columbia University in 1970 as Professor of Art History and Archaeology, and he was later named the Anna S. Garbedian Professor in the Humanities. From 1991 to 1994, Brilliant served as Editor-in-Chief of The Art Bulletin, the American academic journal of art history published by the College Art Association in the United States. Brilliant also served as the first director of the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University. He retired from full-time teaching at Columbia in 2004 and became Professor Emeritus. ==Honors and awards==

Brilliant was awarded a Fulbright scholarship for study in Italy from 1957 to 1959 in order to complete his dissertation. ==Personal life and death==

In 1951, just after graduating from Yale College, Brilliant married Eleanor Luria, a professor of social work at Rutgers University. They had four children, twelve grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren. Richard Brilliant died in New York City on August 8, 2024, at the age of 94. ==Selected bibliography==

• Gesture and Rank in Roman Art: The Use of Gestures to Denote Status in Roman Sculpture and Coinage (Connecticut Academy of Arts & Sciences, 1963) • The Arch of Septimius Severus in the Roman Forum (American Academy in Rome, 1967) • Arts of the Ancient Greeks (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973). • Roman Art from the Republic to Constantine (London: Phaidon, 1974). • Pompeii A.D. 79: The Treasure of Rediscovery (New York: C.N. Potter, 1979). • Visual Narratives: Storytelling in Etruscan and Roman Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984). • Portraiture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991). • Commentaries on Roman Art: Selected Studies (London: Pindar Press, 1994) • My Laocoon: Alternative Claims in the Interpretation of Artworks California Studies in the History of Art. Discovery series 8. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). • Un Americano a Roma: Riflessioni sull-arte Romana (Rome: Di Renzo, 2000). • Death—From Dust to Destiny (London: Reaktion, 2017). ==References==