Diploma Lecture Series 2013 Revolution to Romanticism: European Art and Culture 1750-1850

From Pompeii to the Elgin Marbles

Dr Christopher Allen

13/14 February 2013

Lecture summary:

The modern view of Antiquity has evolved constantly over the last half millennium but the eighteenth century witnessed a particularly dramatic revaluation of our relationship with our ancient forebears. This was partly a result of the ‘Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns’ in the latter part of the seventeenth century, which forced us to reconsider our relationship to the heritage of Antiquity. It was also partly because of the remarkable progress of archaeology from the beginning of excavations at Pompeii to the rediscovery of the early Greek temples at Paestum (ancient Poseidonia) and in Sicily, visited and described by a new generation of Grand Tourists and above all by Goethe himself. Shocking at first in their stark simplicity these grand edifices of the Archaic age soon came to seem more authentic and powerful than the Roman Imperial buildings that had long defined ancient architecture. Finally, Greece herself – for centuries under the dead hand of Ottoman rule – was visited and her monuments studied, drawn and published, revealing the masterpieces of the Greek Classical Age for the first time. Soon after, some of the greatest of these works, the Parthenon friezes and pediments, found their way to the British Museum in London.

Slide list:

* Phidias, Detail of the Ionic Frieze of the Parthenon (Block II from the West Frieze), marble, London, British Museum

* After Leochares, Apollo Belvedere, marble, Rome, Vatican

After Praxiteles, Medici Venus, marble, Florence, Uffizi

Apollonius, The Belvedere Torso, marble, Rome, Vatican

Agesander, Athenodorus, Polycleitus, Laocoön, Rome, Vatican

The Dying Gaul, marble, Rome, Capitoline Museum

After Leochares, The Diana of Versailles, marble 201 cm high, Paris, Louvre

School of Praxiteles, The Belvedere Hermes (‘The Antinous’), marble, Rome, Vatican

* The Nicholson Hermes, marble, Sydney, Nicholson Museum

Glykon, The Farnese Hercules, marble, Naples, Archaeological Museum

Castor and Pollux (the San Ildefonso Group), marble, Madrid, Prado

Proudly sponsored by

* After Myron, The Discobolus, marble, Rome, National Museum (Baths of Diocletian)

Attr. to Alexandros of Antioch, Venus de Milo, Paris, Louvre

After Lysippus,The Apoxyomenos, marble, Rome, Vatican

Anonymous (Rhodian?) sculptor, Victory of Samothrace, marble, Paris, Louvre

After Polycleitus, The Doryphorus, marble, Naples, Archaeological Museum

* Bertel Thorvaldsen, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Copenhagen, Thorvaldsen Museum

Praxiteles, Hermes with the infant Dionysus, 4th c., marble, Olympia, Archaeological Museum

Riace Warriors (Warrior A and Warrior B), bronze, 5th c., Reggio di Calabria, Museum

The Battle of Ilissus, c. 100 BC, mosaic, (Pompeii, House of the Faun), Naples, Archaeological Museum

* Joseph-Marie Vien, The Seller of Loves, 1763, oil on canvas, Paris, Louvre

Seated Hermes from Pompeii, bronze, Naples, Archaeological Museum

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Veduta della Piazza di Monte Cavallo, etching and engraving

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, ’Temple of Neptune’, 1778, etching and engraving

James Stuart, The Tower of the Winds, gouache, 1751, London, V&A Museum

James Stuart and Nicolas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens, 1762-94

James Stuart, View of the Parthenon, 1762 (from The Antiquities of Athens)

James Stuart, View of the Caryatid Porch of the Erechtheum, 1750-60, London, V&A Museum

Phidias, Figures from the East Pediment of the Parthenon, marble, London, British Museum

* Charles Lock Eastlake, Classical Landscape, c. 1825-30, oil on canvas, 67.3 x 90.3 cm, Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW

References:

Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny. Taste and the Antique. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981. Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth Rubinstein. Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: a handbook of sources. Brepols (Harvey Miller), 1986; revised edition, 2011. Carl Bluemel. Greek Sculptors at Work. London: Phaidon, 1969. Robert Rosenblum. Transformations in late eighteenth-century art. Princeton University Press, 1967. Hugh Honour. Neoclassicism. Penguin (Style and Civilization series), 1991.

Note: There is a substantial current exhibition at the Staedel in Frankfurt, Schoenheit und Revolution: Klassizismus 1770-1820, whose catalogue (only in German) I have not yet seen.

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Myron, Discobolus (first rediscovered 1781) Left: 1781 version correctly restored [found on Esquiline]; Rome, National Museum (Baths of Diocletian) Right: Townley’s incorrectly restored version, which he obtained in 1794 (now in the British Museum)

Bertel Thorvaldsen, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Copenhagen, Thorvaldsen Museum (Left)

Joseph-Marie Vien, The Seller of Loves, 1763, oil on canvas, Paris, Louvre (Right)

Charles Lock Eastlake, Classical Landscape, c. 1825-30, oil on canvas, 67.3 x 90.3 em, Sydney, Art Gallery of NSW