Lecture 1: The Tyranny of Antiquity

Key Lecture Takeaways

1. Classical norms/canons of taste are difficult to fully displace from Art History

2. Classical art, for all its associations with purity, can be used for a variety of purposes, means, & agendas (we need to grapple w/ its afterlife)

An Assemblage of Works of Art, from the Earliest Period to the Time of Phydias, James Stephanoff (1945)

Provenance

• Watercolour

• Made around the time when the Parthenon marbles were installed in the British Museum (BM)

Description

• Apex: Parthenon Marbles

• Immediately below: other objects brought to the BM during this period (e.g. other marbles, parts of the Nereid Monument)

• Middle: Egyptian art, Persian reliefs

• Below: art of Central America, Indonesian art, Indian art

Interpretation

• Shows art from around the world, but only select cultures are featured (e.g. China, Japan, Africa excluded)

  • Depending on Britain’s interest in select cultures at the time

• Visual hierarchy of classical perfection, according to the artist’s own imagined conception (NOT how they were actually displayed)

  • Aesthetic hierarchy dressed up as a chronological progression

  • The cult of antiquity also involves a degree of fantasy & fabrication

• Was seen as a source of epistemological truth/knowledge

  • Useful guide/diagram to be compared & referenced

  • Presents the superiority of the Parthenon Marbles as a universal truth, fixed & indisputable

    • A historical phenomenon rather than an aesthetic judgement

East Pediment, Parthenon Marbles (447-432 BCE), British Museum London

Provenance

• From the temple of Athena (the Parthenon) on the Acropolis in Athens

• Carved by Phidius

  • Ancient Greek sculptor, painter, & architect (hailed as superior)

• Removed by Thomas Bruce (Lord Elgin) between 1801-1815, brought to Britain

• People initially didn’t know it was by Phidias, believed it to be 2nd-rate (Roman copy)

  • Rugged form

• For a while, Elgin struggled to sell them

  • Only sold to the nation in 1816

  • A select committee was held by the House of Commons inquiring into the acquisition of the sculptures (on whether it was worth spending public money on them)

    • Artists were on the committee, viewed as figures of authority w/ exclusive aesthetic knowledge

    • Rising social status of the artist

Description

• A collection of different types of marble architectural decoration (incl. friezes in relief)

Reading List

1. Aris Sarafinos, ‘BR Haydon and Racial Science’

2. Cora Gilroy-Ware, ‘Antonio Canova and the Whatever Body’

3. Darcy Grimaldo Grisby, ‘Nudity a là grecque in 1799’

Aris Sarafianos, ‘BR Haydon and Racial Science’

Benjamin Robert Haydon

• Artist & critic

• Early 19th century Britain (1800s)

Background

Engaged in debates about race & art

• ‘Negro Faculties’ debate in The Examiner

  • Leigh Hunt wrote an editorial praising an African-American businessman, Paul Cuffee

• Tied racial polygenism to artistic & scientific methods

  • Intgrated anatomical science into art

  • E.g. cited Petrus Camper

    • Dutch anatomist

    • Made charts mapping the angles of jawlines

      • E.g. used Apollo Belvedere at one end of the spectrum, and a monkey on the other

    • Intention: to make a value-free set of bodies

    • BUT his bodies were co-opted by racists to prove that white people are superior to black people

Consequences

1. Haydon (& artists in general) gained cultural capital

• Modernised & legitimised the profession

2. Formulated a new way of making sense of the body

3. Demonstrated the cultural mobility of racial discourse

Cora Gilroy-Ware, ‘Antonio Canova and the Whatever Body’

Antonio Canova (1757 – 1822)

• 18th-19th centuries

• An Italian Neoclassical sculptor (and lesser-known painter) famous for his marble sculptures

Historical Context

Evolution of ideal beauty

• Ancient Greece: designed to perfect nature

• 17th & 18th century Europe: tied to moral teachings; encouraged virtuous behaviour

• Late 18th-early 19th centuries (Canova’s time): lost its moral meaning; a blank canvas for fantasies; the female form as newly central

Key Arguments

Canova as a transitional figure whose work connects the classical world w/ postmodern visual culture

• Paintings depicted classical figures w/ elongated & stylised forms; idealised beyond traditional proportions

• Philosopher Giorgio Agamben: the ‘whatever body’

  • A body detached from prescribed/fixed meaning

  • In contemporary fashion imagery: bodies idealised & edited for commercial appeal; constantly updated & consumed anew

Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, ‘Nudity à la grecque in 1799’

Intervention of the Sabines (1799) by Jacques-Louis David

Provenance

• Made after the end of the Directory period (1795-1799)

  • After the crisis of the Terror

  • Divided society

  • Rise in feminist activism

Description

• Depicts a legendary episode following the abduction of the Sabine women by the founding generation of Rome

  • Sabine women: daughters of the Sabines, wives of the Romans

• Roman & Sabine men fighting while the Sabine women intervene

Controversy

• Female dress vs. Male nudity

  • Classical style of male nudity was rooted in ancient ideals: ideal form

  • BUT was seen by some as alien to French habits & values

    • Stripped one of class authority (for the bourgeoisie: nudity = shameful; for the working class: rendered the ruling class vulnerable to ridicule of bourgeois pretensions)

• Women’s intervention & men’s friezelike status

  • Sabine women as mediators in a fractured society

  • BUT may still reinforce traditional gender roles for women

    • Still bound to the roles of mothers & wives

Underscores the complexities of using classical art to navigate changing cultural, political, & social landscapes in revolutionary France.