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Dr. James Walker kept telling his art history students that they needed to travel abroad to see in person the works they studied in books, and his students kept telling him he needed to take them. Then the impetus to lead 22 students on a trip to Italy to see the great works of the Renaissance came like a bolt out of the blue.
Actually, the sky was pretty dark when it happened.
Walker was delivering a lecture in the Instructional Resource Center in September of 1999 when a tornado touched down on the campus. “It started to rain very hard—I was almost shouting my lecture. The wind knocked cement blocks down in my classroom, ductwork fell from the ceiling and three of my students were cut by flying glass.”
Surviving the storm proved to be a great bonding experience between teacher and students, a bond that culminated in Walker leading the first group of students overseas. The experience was so positive that Walker worked with the University’s International Program to repeat it. This year, Walker took a third set of students to Italy and Spain to
study great works of art in their original settings.

Touching Down Again
As if that trip weren’t enough for one year, Walker returned to Europe in the fall as one of the very few scholars who will be allowed to study the prehistoric cave paintings located in Lascaux, France. The Lascaux site has been described as the “Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art.” Discovered in 1940, the cave was open to the public until 1963, when it was closed to all but a small number of researchers due to “green disease”—mold caused by excess carbon dioxide brought about by visitors’ breath. “The only time I could go was the third week of September, when the humidity was lowest,” Walker says. The precautions are necessary; even an exact replica of the cave constructed by the French government to accommodate tourists is now being attacked by mold. Researchers sometimes don’t know until the last minute if conditions will permit them to enter the caves.
Because this time requirement falls in the middle of a semester Walker was given a sabbatical for this travel and study in preparation for teaching a graduate course entitled “Prehistory and the Origins of Civilization.”
Walker packed in plenty of other stops so the trip would be productive even if conditions at the Lascaux caves prevented him from studying there. In Germany Walker studied at the Neanderthal Museum in the Neander Valley, visited Stonehenge and the British Museum in England and made plans to visit other French caves with prehistoric paintings if conditions at Lascaux prohibited viewing.

Whirlwind Tours
The importance of such trips for Walker lies in understanding the connections between these world traditions and passing that understanding on to his students. Students, on the other hand, experience directly the impact of original work, something that can’t be done just looking at a slide projected on a screen. There’s certainly no way to experience the scale of a place like St. Peter’s, the group’s first stop in Rome, except in person.
“It’s hard to imagine a building as big as St. Peter’s, where it’s a tenth of a mile from the alter to the front door. All of the statues are somewhere between 18 and 22 feet high, because if they weren’t they’d look too small. The place is just huge.”
From Rome there was a day trip to Pompeii, then on to Florence for a visit to the Uffizi, to Venice for its many art and architectural attractions, to Barcelona with its Museu Picasso and finally Madrid and the Prado. Walker stresses that this is academic study, not a tour. “We spend from about 8 in the morning
to about 7 at night going from one museum to another,” he says. “I want my students to see every single thing they can see.”

Lessons Learned
There’s no doubt that Walker has been successful in taking his experiences from the field and applying them in the classroom, preparing his students for their own experiences. Two years ago a group of his students proved formidable competition for tour guides. He had been teaching the interpretation of Christian iconography, which Walker explains as “art for people who couldn’t read or write.” He and his students were in the Baptistery in Florence where many stories portrayed in symbols spiral around the ceiling to the top of the Baptistery’s dome.
“The students went all the way around and explained every single image, all the way to the top,” Walker says. “People broke off from tour groups to come over and listen.”
Walker and his students have made it a tradition to climb to the top of the domes they visit by means of the built-in scaffolding between a dome’s ceiling and its roof. One group of students went up to the cupola of St. Peter’s Cathedral and down into the Christian catacombs and all in the same day. Call it the scenic route for getting to a safe place to be in a storm.

C&G