Leonard Barkan is the Class of 1943 University Professor Emeritus at Princeton, where he taught in the Department of Comparative Literatyre alongwith appointments in Art and Archaeology, English, and Classics. Among his books are The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism and Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture, which won prizes from the Modern Language Association, the College Art Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, Architectural Digest, and Phi Beta Kappa. He has won the Morton Dauwen Zable award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He is the author of Satyr Square, which is an account of art, literature, food, wine, Italy, and himself. In recent years, he has published Michelangelo: A Life on Paper, Mute Poetry Speaking Pictures, Berlin for Jews: A Twenty-First Century Companion, Reading for the Food: Art, Literature, and the Hungry Eye, and Reading Shakespeare Reading Me. Currently he is completing Museum of Ashes, which chronicles the collection of some four hundred old master paintings in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie that was placed for safe keeping in an anti-aircraft tower and was incinerated purely by accident after the Second World War was over.