The National Gallery of Art’s 53rd A.W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts — this year presented by Irving Lavin, a professor emeritus at Princeton University’s Institute for Advanced Study — kicked off over the weekend with “The Story of O from Giotto to Einstein,” the first of a half-dozen presentations collectively titled “More Than Meets the Eye.”

Lavin, a prominent art historian who has authored several books on Florentine and Roman sculpture and architecture, joins a distinguished group of past lecturers including Kirk Varnedoe, Stephen Spender and Sir Isaiah Berlin, among others.

The remaining lectures in the series will focus on the following topics: April 25, “Michelangelo, Moses, and the Warrior Pope”; May 2, “Caravaggio I: Divine Dissimulation”; May 9, “Caravaggio II: The View from Behind”; May 16, “The Infinite Spiral: Claude Mellan’s Miraculous Image”; and May 23, “Going for Baroque: Observations on the Postmodern Fold.”

The popular annual lecture series runs each Sunday through May 23 at 2 p.m. in the National Gallery’s East Building auditorium.

— Bree Hocking