Think the Renaissance is ancient news? Not to Anne Leader, professor of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta.

Leader will be speaking today on her area of expertise — the 15th century frescoes adorning the cloister walls of the Badia of Florence.

The “Badia”, meaning “abbey” in Italian, is a monastery located in the heart of Florence — the city some see as the birthplace of the Renaissance, Leader said.

In the early 15th century, the monastery went through a major reform, and began to model itself after the teaching of St. Benedict, the father of western monasticism.

Leader believes that second to the church, the cloister is the most important space a monk will encounter, since it connects all areas of the monastery. “I argue that this art and architectural reform is a key component of reforming the monastery as a whole,” Leader said. “This is a community that is trying to get closer to an authentic way of being a monk, and this is a part of their every day. They’re going to walk by these frescoes and, in theory at least, they’re going to think about St. Benedict and how they’re trying to live like him.”

Spiritual significance is not the only reason these frescoes are worth studying. “They were painted in the 1430s,” Leader said, “And they’re some of the earliest frescoes to show some of the new developments of the renaissance, namely naturalism, linear perspective — some of the earliest ones to do that, to sort of show that new kind of art making.”

Leader was initially fascinated with the frescoes because, for a major monument in a city with strong ties to the Renaissance, they had received very little attention.

“They’ve kind of been left out of your standard textbooks and other typical courses on Renaissance art,” she said. “You probably wouldn’t see these frescoes in a class, and so I was curious about how it was that no one had really paid much attention to them.”

The frescoes became the subject of her upcoming book, “The Badia of Florence: Art and Observance in a Renaissance Monastery”, from which her lecture is derived.

Her lecture will be the first of this year’s Visual Culture Colloquium series, a program through Lamar Dodd School of Art that brings lecturers to the University to expound upon scholarly topics of art history.

Leader wants to excite her listeners with a desire to see the frescoes for themselves, and if they’ve been to Florence and missed them — give a reason to go back.

“I think a lot of us think, ‘Oh, you know, the Renaissance happened a long time ago, we know everything about it, Florence has been studied to death…’ but there still are a lot of new and interesting things to discover even in really familiar places,” Leader said.