is Professor emeritus at the Collège de France, where he was a Professor in Rhetoric and Society in Europe (16th–17th centuries). A world-class scholar on the transmission of the Classics in both literature and the visual arts, he is a member of the Académie française, the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, of the British Academy, the American Academy of Sciences, Letters and Arts, the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia, the Accademia dei Lincei. In 2000 he was invited to give the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (D.C.), and in 2001, he was awarded the Prix Balzan, the most prominent distinction in the Humanities. He is the author of numerous books, such as When the World Spoke French (NYRB Classics, 2011), The Republic of Letters (Yale University Press, 2018). In 2007, and again in 2011–12, he exhibited his photographs at the Maison européenne de la photographie.