Caroline Vout - Classical Art

Every picture tells a story. Hang pictures together, and the conversation between them enriches that story. This book taps one such conversation. It traces the narrative that unfolds as ancient Greek and Roman artifacts are grouped first in sanctuaries, and then in new configurations, as they travel across cultures and time. As they travelthe lucky ones at leastthey change the world around them. Symbiotically, they too are changed, accruing values positive and negative. These values, and the ongoing embrace of these values, create classical art.

Overinvestment in value-laden categories makes them inevitably slippery. But that should not dissuade us from wrestling with them. Classical art is sometimes used capaciously to describe the material cultures of the Greeks, Etruscans, and Romans from as early as 1200 BCE to the fall of the Roman empire. But this underrates the values implied by both the classical and art labels, values that have evolved over centuries. This book is about that evolution, and employs classical art for a category comprising chosen objects, objects that have outgrown their Greek or Roman origins, and often also their intended function, to become part of something biggeran elite club or canon that dictates taste, and shapes culture and cultures questions. This book also privileges sculpture. It would be disingenuous to deny the part played by gems, pottery, painting, and architecture, but sculpture is the most eloquent advocate; indeed it is our only advocate, if what we are wanting to track is an available, moveable material that has been in the public domain from its production in Greece or Rome and its discussion in Greek and Latin literature, continuously through to the presentmaterial that offers not just a close-up but a panning shot of classical arts entire trajectory. In as far as this book is concerned with more private narratives, it is less with the biographies of individual enthusiasts than with how these biographies have intersected with (inter)national narratives to dictate classical arts makeup and influence.

As I will show, the classical art of todays textbooks and galleries is different from the classical art of the nineteenth century, which is different again from the classical art of the Renaissance or of antiquity. Not that the terminology classical art existed in antiquity or in the Renaissance; it is an observers category (classical derives ultimately from the Latin word classicus meaning of the first order), which I apply retrospectively to specimens of Greek and Roman production freighted with normative values. Nor is it a self-standing category: it is always relational. Were one able to ask the

This book follows the Greek and Roman as it reaches these dizzy heights, and classicism its hellenocentric bias. When the Parthenon sculptures were making waves in London in the nineteenth century, they were bolstering an already burgeoning hellenism, the ideals of which were tied to the materiality of Greece, real and imaginary. But the Parthenon sculptures were also, inevitably, surprising, bringing many into contact with genuine Greek sculpture for the first time, and accelerating a refinement of the category of classical art to artifacts produced in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE when Athens at least was, for the most part, a democracy. Today, this concept of classical art will often be given a capital C to put it on an even higher plane than any broader classical category. The two definitions coexist. But when it is classical style that is being talked about, it is fifth- and fourth-century style that is typically meant, as distinct from the archaic, frontal style of earlier Greek production, or the baroque style of works produced after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 BCE. The naturalism of this Classical art gives it, and has always given it, a particular kind of potency.

Grappling with these variations on a theme means managing the linguistic problems they generatenot only the different versions of classical, but also classicism and classicizing. Avoiding Classical is not difficult: it is a subgenre as far as this book is concerned; fifth-century or fourth-century are more precise as adjectives. But the other terms remain tricky: usually in what follows, they imply a debt to the arts of Greece and Rome, as interpreted by a particular period, but occasionally, as in the phrase Augustan classicism, they infer the narrower nostalgia of our previous paragraph, one that urgently asks us to examine not only modernitys relationship to the classical antique and vice versa but classicisms relationship to hellenism. I rely on the context to clarify, and work hard every time to qualify their different sense of timelessness. Harder is the distinction between classical and classicizing: is an eighteenth-century cast of the Apollo Belvedere one or the other? Find the answer and we pin down the nature of the statues imitation. But pinning down 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 occasionally 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.