My inaugural lecture as a Professor of the Dublin Institute of Technology in September 2008 was the highlight of my career and I spent a lot of time preparing for it. I wanted to refer to Pietro Perugino’s painting of ‘Christ handing over the keys to St. Peter’ from the Sistine Chapel, the Vatican, 1482, and I prepared the illustration as a pencil drawing or study. I had seen and taken photographs of the painting while on a holiday in Rome. I used a straight edge in setting out the square grid base of the scene in perspective, much as I believe the artist and his team must have done. At a later stage I used software to add a small amount of tinting and to superimpose silhouettes of some of the foreground characters of the original painting.

Jim McGovern giving his inaugural lecture as a Professof of Dublin Institute of Technology