Sir Michael Vincent Levey, LVO, FBA, FRSL (8 June 1927 – 28 December 2008) was a British art historian and was the director of the National Gallery from 1973 to 1986.
After demobilisation in 1948, Levey went to Exeter College, Oxford, to read English; he graduated with first class honours after only two years' study.
From 1963 to 1964, Levey was Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University; his lectures were published as From Rococo to Revolution in 1966.
The Early Renaissance, written a year later, is considered another milestone in popular art publishing, and was the first non-fiction work to win the Hawthornden Prize for Literature.
[2] He relinquished his directorship to care for his wife, the novelist and critic Brigid Brophy, after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1985; the disease ultimately claimed her life.