DAVID MAYERNIK
LTD.
photo by Laura Bianchi
"I've invested decades in mastering the ideas & techniques that privilege the Ideal, the Beautiful, & the Meaningful."
About David Mayernik
FAAR, FRSA
President, Tuscan Renaissance Academy
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David Mayernik is an artist, designer, author, and educator. With almost forty years of experience in art and design, he embodies the Renaissance ideal of thoughtful practice. Uniquely able to weave the arts and architecture together into a beautiful whole, his integrated practice of art and design is a model for the modern recovery of humanist principles.
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David Mayernik is a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce (RSA). Named one of the top forty architects in the United States under forty for the decade 1986-1995, he has won an Arthur Ross Award from Classical America along with Thomas N. Rajkovich for their design of the Minnesota State Capitol grounds. A winner of the Gabriel Prize for study in France, his research has resulted in two books, numerous articles and book chapters, and an online course about Rome on the edX platform that reached almost six thousand students around the world. With Federico Del Carlo he has founded the Tuscan Renaissance Academy in Lucca to promote and teach the principles of Renaissance art and culture.
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His paintings and drawings have been featured in several fine arts magazines, and illustrated his two books. He has had solo exhibitions in New York, and group shows in New York and London. For four seasons he designed stage sets for the Haymarket Opera company of Chicago's period-informed performances of Baroque operas.
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In addition to shaping the TASIS campus in England for more than a decade, he has been the design architect for the campus in Switzerland for over 26 years, work which has been published widely and recognized with a Palladio Award from Traditional Building magazine, and mentions from INTBAU and the European Prize of Architecture Philippe Rotthier. He also designed the master plan for TASIS Portugal.
David Mayernik studied fresco painting with renowned restorer Leonetto Tintori. He has painted frescoes for his own buildings at the TASIS campus in Lugano, and for churches in Ticino and Tuscany. He painted the Palio for his adopted city of Lucca in 2013.
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He is an associate professor with the University of Notre Dame's School of Architecture, having taught design studios, graduate seminars in history and theory, and drawing, in both the United States and in Italy. He has taught in a Prince of Wales' Summer School, and at the New York Academy of Art. He was recently a resident Fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria.
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It is a tremendous gift, and one not granted to any of the ancients, for a man to be, I will not say outstanding, but even moderately learned in everything. Yet I think every effort should be made to see that we do not lack through our own negligence those things which bring high praise if they are achieved, and blame if they are neglected.
—Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, trans. Cecil Grayson, Penguin Books, p.9