John Onians

Emeritus Professor in the School of World Art Studies at the University of East Anglia where he was Director of the World Art Research Programme. In 1997-99 he established the division of Research and Academic Programs at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown Mass.

He has lectured at many universities in Britain, the United States, Canada,  Denmark, France, Germany, Holland, India, China, Japan, Australia and New Zealand and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Visual Arts, Washington D.C., a Getty Scholar at the Getty Center for the History or Arts and the Humanities, Los Angeles, William Evans Fellow at the University of Otago, New Zealand, and Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Germany and at the Clark Art Institute, Williamstown Mass. He has served on three different committees of the J.Paul Getty Trust.

He was founding Editor of the journal Art History, and  has written many  articles and several books, including, Bearers of Meaning.  The Classical Orders in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Princeton 1988, which was awarded the Sir Bannister Fletcher Prize as the best book on the Fine Arts, and Classical Art and the Cultures of Greece and Rome,Yale 1999.  He also edited the first ever Atlas of World Art,2004, which has also appeared in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian and Spanish editions. In recent years he has been working on the problems associated with the use of neuroscience as an aid to art history. The first of three volumes on the framework he has developed, Neuroarthistory. From Aristotle and Pliny to  Baxandall and Zeki, was published in 2007. The second volume, Neuroarthistory. European Art from Prehistory to the Present will appear in 2014. At a conference in Abu Dhabi in 2011 he launched the concept of Neuromuseology.