For millennia, artists have enjoyed a love affair with the ancient past. In Classical Greece, they found creative inspiration in the Bronze Age civilisation of the Mycenaeans. In the time of the Roman Empire, they looked back with reverence to Greece. Rome itself became a source of fascination to artists of the early Italian Renaissance, who themselves offered a guiding light to the Pre-Raphaelite movement of the mid 19th century. No group, however, has shown greater ‘reverence for the antique’ – as The Art Journal put it in 1871, when announcing its formation – than the school now widely referred to as the Victorian Classical Revival. As evidenced by the exhibition of hundreds of paintings featuring scenes from antiquity, this small group had by the 1880s grown into a flourishing artistic tradition.
This story is from the May/June 2020 edition of Minerva.
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This story is from the May/June 2020 edition of Minerva.
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Rome In The 8th Century: A History In Art
John Osborne CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS, £75 HARDBACK - ISBN 978-1108834582
