Table Of ContentCLASSICAL ART
C L AS S I C A L A R T
A Life History from Antiquity to the Present
Caroline Vout
Princeton University Press
Princeton & Oxford
For my “collecting” students
Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press
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Frontispiece: Honoré Daumier, The Connoisseur,
ca. 1860–65. Pen and ink, wash, watercolor,
lithographic crayon, and gouache over black chalk
on wove paper, 43.8 × 35.5 cm. H. O. Havemeyer
Collection, bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer,
1929, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Jacket art: Pieter van der Werff, A Girl Drawing and
a Boy Near a Statue of Venus, 1715. Oil on panel,
h. 38.5 cm × w. 29 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Vout, Caroline, author.
Title: Classical art : a life history / Caroline Vout.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press,
2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017023421 | ISBN 9780691177038
(hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Art, Classical—Appreciation—
History. | Sculpture, Classical—Appreciation—
History. | Classical antiquities—Appreciation—
History. | Art and society—History.
Classification: LCC N5613 .V68 2018 | DDC 709.38—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017023421
British Library Cataloging-i n- Publication Data is available
This book has been composed in Gotham and ScalaOT
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS
Preface vii
acknowledgments xi
1. Setting the Agenda, or Putting
the Art into Heritage 1
2. Finding the Classical in
Hellenistic Greece 20
3. Making Greek Culture Roman
Culture 43
4. Roman Art, the Building Blocks
of Empire 71
5. Reviving Antiquity in
Renaissance Italy 97
6. European Court Society and the
Shaping of the Canon 125
7. “Neoclassicisms” and the
English Country House 151
8. Seeing Anew in the Nineteenth
Century 186
9. The Death of Classical
Art? 220
10. And the Moral of the Story . . . 243
notes 247
BiBliograPhy 301
index 343
PREFACE
Every picture tells a story. Hang pictures sculpture. It would be disingenuous to
together, and the conversation between deny the part played by gems, pottery,
them enriches that story. This book taps painting, and architecture, but sculpture
one such conversation. It traces the is the most eloquent advocate; indeed it is
narrative that unfolds as ancient Greek our only advocate, if what we are wanting
and Roman artifacts are grouped first to track is an available, moveable material
in sanctuaries, and then in new config- that has been in the public domain from its
urations, as they travel across cultures production in Greece or Rome and its dis-
and time. As they travel— the lucky ones cussion in Greek and Latin literature, con-
at least— they change the world around tinuously through to the present— material
them. Symbiotically, they too are changed, that offers not just a close- up but a pan-
accruing values positive and negative. ning shot of classical art’s entire trajectory.
These values, and the ongoing embrace In as far as this book is concerned with
of these values, create “classical art.” more private narratives, it is less with the
Overinvestment in value- laden catego- biographies of individual enthusiasts than
ries makes them inevitably slippery. But with how these biographies have inter-
that should not dissuade us from wrestling sected with (inter)national narratives to dic-
with them. “Classical art” is sometimes tate classical art’s makeup and influence.
used capaciously to describe the material As I will show, the “classical art” of
cultures of the Greeks, Etruscans, and today’s textbooks and galleries is different
Romans from as early as 1200 BCE to from the “classical art” of the nineteenth
the fall of the Roman empire.1 But this century, which is different again from
underrates the values implied by both the the “classical art” of the Renaissance or
“classical” and “art” labels, values that have of antiquity. Not that the terminology
evolved over centuries. This book is about “classical art” existed in antiquity or in
that evolution, and employs “classical art” the Renaissance; it is an observers’ cate-
for a category comprising “chosen objects,” gory (“classical” derives ultimately from
objects that have outgrown their Greek the Latin word “classicus” meaning of the
or Roman origins, and often also their first order), which I apply retrospectively
intended function, to become part of some- to specimens of Greek and Roman pro-
thing bigger— an elite club or canon that duction freighted with normative values.
dictates taste, and shapes culture and cul- Nor is it a self- standing category: it is
ture’s questions. This book also privileges always relational. Were one able to ask the
inhabitants of Ptolemaic Alexandria, Seleu- to artifacts produced in the fifth and fourth
cid Mesopotamia, or Etruria to pick their centuries BCE when Athens at least was,
“first order” artifacts from the remnants for the most part, a democracy. Today, this
of the past, they may well have pointed to concept of “classical art” will often be given
imported Greek artifacts, and they may a capital “C” to put it on an even higher
equally have pointed to pharaonic, near plane than any broader “classical” category.
eastern, or Italic styles respectively, cre- The two definitions coexist. But when
ating a capacious and, to us, unfamiliar it is “classical” style that is being talked
kind of “classicism.” So too the residents about, it is fifth- and fourth- century style
of imperial Rome, whose style palette that is typically meant, as distinct from
blended Greek, Egyptian, Asian, and the archaic, frontal style of earlier Greek
Italian motifs. Indeed it is arguably only in production, or the “baroque” style of works
the Renaissance and Enlightenment, when produced after the death of Alexander the
Continental powers competed for own- Great in 323 BCE. The naturalism of this
ership of the new world and defined the “Classical art” gives it, and has always
old world in opposition to it, each of them given it, a particular kind of potency.
laying claim to an ancestral Greco- Roman- Grappling with these variations on a
imperial heritage that put them on a surer theme means managing the linguistic
footing at home, that “classicism” became problems they generate— not only the
the Eurocentric model it is today. Even different versions of “classical,” but also
then, the Greek and Roman still interacts “classicism” and “classicizing.” Avoiding
with the Indian, the Japanese, the gothic. “Classical” is not difficult: it is a subgenre
The Greek and Roman was paradigmatic as far as this book is concerned; “fifth-
before it became uniquely dominant— had century” or “fourth- century” are more
been made so by the reading of Greek precise as adjectives. But the other terms
and Latin texts. “Classical art” as a dis- remain tricky: usually in what follows,
cipline comes into its own in the nine- they imply a debt to the arts of Greece and
teenth century, when the Greco- Roman is Rome, as interpreted by a particular period,
prized apart from other ancient cultures but occasionally, as in the phrase “Augus-
in the lecture rooms of universities.2 tan classicism,” they infer the narrower
This book follows the Greek and Roman nostalgia of our previous paragraph, one
as it reaches these dizzy heights, and “clas- that urgently asks us to examine not only
sicism” its hellenocentric bias. When the modernity’s relationship to the classical
Parthenon sculptures were making waves antique and vice versa but “classicism’s”
in London in the nineteenth century, they relationship to “hellenism.” I rely on the
were bolstering an already burgeoning context to clarify, and work hard every
hellenism, the ideals of which were tied to time to qualify their different sense of
the materiality of Greece, real and imagi- timelessness. Harder is the distinction
nary.3 But the Parthenon sculptures were between “classical” and “classicizing”: is
also, inevitably, surprising, bringing many an eighteenth- century cast of the Apollo
into contact with genuine Greek sculp- Belvedere one or the other? Find the
ture for the first time, and accelerating a answer and we pin down the nature of
refinement of the category of “classical art” the statue’s imitation. But pinning down
viii PREFACE
is not what “classical art” enables. It has a
transcendent quality that defies logic. The
best we can do is approximate its appeal,
and focus our energies instead on its
evolution and impact. If we are occasion-
ally mercurial in our use of these terms,
this is as appropriate as it is unavoidable.
All books on the classical have the
additional problem of whether to adopt
Greek, Latin, or anglicized spellings for
Greek names. Because of the massive
part played in my story by ancient and
Renaissance Rome, I prefer the Latin,
except when that is ugly in my eyes: so
I call the fifth- century Athenian sculptor
“Kritios,” as opposed to “Critius,” but
otherwise prefer “Polyclitus,” “Caria,”
“Doryphorus,” and so on. “At best, I hope
to have been consistently inconsistent.”4
Caroline VoUt
Cambridge, March 2017
PREFACE ix
