Cyclical Classical: Rebirths, renaissances and reinventions of antiquity

Nicole Cochrane, University of Hull
Melissa Gustin, University of York

If, as Aby Warburg said, ‘Every age has the renaissance of antiquity that it deserves’, what is the renaissance of antiquity that we deserve today? And how does that differ – if it does – from earlier renaissances and antiquities? Whether it be a 3D print of Aphrodite, Antinous as a symbol of gay pride or the Photoshop of Donald Trump as Perseus triumphantly holding aloft a Gorgon-portrait of Hilary Clinton, in contemporary art, t-shirts and the Internet, the material remains of the classical world continue to permeate modern visual culture.

Following on from international exhibitions, Internet discourse around the use of the antique, and recent texts by scholars such as Elizabeth Prettejohn and Caroline Vout among many others, we propose a session which engages seriously with the material remains of antiquity in art to explore the ways in which the art of the ancient world has been adapted, interpreted and repurposed throughout history. By proposing an open time frame, we hope to encourage a discussion on the dialogues formed between classical art and its receptions, questioning how issues such as gender, race, status and class, as well as political, environmental and historical factors have impacted the use and reuse of the past. This session will explore the constant rediscovery, reinvention and reworking of antique material, methods and models in different media, and invites papers from any period or medium that address questions of the ‘classical’, historic or present.

Speakers

Colourless Narratives: The whitewashing of Classics and the formation of a white British identity
Hardeep Singh Dhindsa (Independent Researcher)

Re-sculpting History: Monuments to the ‘Lost Cause’ and allegory as Confederate propaganda in the early 20th century
Rebecca Senior (University of Nottingham/Henry Moore Institute)  

Classical Mythology as Parody: The realities of a ‘new’ South Africa in Diane Victor’s Birth of a Nation series
Karen von Veh (University of Johannesburg)  

A Feast for the Eyes: Illusionistic silverware from antiquity to the Italian Renaissance courts
Jasmine Clark (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

Antiquity on Display: Temporary exhibitions in Britain during World War II
Lenia Kouneni (University of St Andrews)

Animating Antiquity: Panofsky and Disney
Ciarán Rua O’Neill (University of Cambridge)

Click here to download this session's abstracts or view below

Colourless Narratives: The whitewashing of Classics and the formation of a white British identity

Hardeep Singh Dhindsa (Independent Researcher)

When we think of classical art, there are several images which come to mind: pristine sculptures such as the Apollo Belvedere or the dramatic mythological landscapes by Titian. Regardless of what we think, there is a common thread connecting these images: the figures we imagine are exclusively white. Stretching back to the Renaissance, the whitewashing of Classics has inadvertently affected how the ancient world is imagined today, both academically and publicly. No period has contributed to this more than the age of British imperialism, where fantasies of white mythical heroes were intertwined with colonialism, British identity and the torch of ‘Western Civilisation’. This paper will expose an often-ignored side of classical reception, exploring the birth of Classics as a formal discipline during a time when imperial powers were waging war to claim the cultural inheritance of Ancient Greece and Rome. To achieve this, several artworks and movements will be viewed through an imperial framework. First, the neo-classical paintings of the 18th century, particularly those by Pompeo Batoni, which openly conflated British and Roman identities. Secondly, 19th century paintings by the Pre-Raphaelites and others, including Lawrence Alma-Tadema, explicitly evidence the consistent whitewashing of mythological characters. Finally, I will explore the reception of the classical world during the dying decades of the British Empire. Thus, the aim of this paper is to publicly acknowledge that contemporary ideas we have of the classical world have filtered down to us through imperial institutions, and to continue decolonising this traditionally conservative sub-field within Art History.

Re-sculpting History: Monuments to the ‘Lost Cause’ and allegory as Confederate propaganda in the early 20th century

Rebecca Senior (University of Nottingham/Henry Moore Institute)  

Current debates around the relocation, removal and destruction of monuments have re-invigorated the study of sculpted memorials and their meaning as signifiers of violent histories across the world. This paper provides an art-historical consideration of the material that sculptors drew from to create these monuments, in order to explore how they operated collectively as an artistic symbol of oppression. To address this need, this paper traces the iconographic lineage of Confederate monuments to uncover how a complex network of allegorical symbols were used to sanitise and propagandise political, ideological and physical violence in sculpture for audiences in America.

Taking a series of Confederate monuments as case studies, the paper examines how these sculptures encapsulated the ‘Lost Cause’ narrative through classical allegorical figuration. It uncovers how a sculptural ‘allegorical mode’ became a trans-Atlantic artistic method of propaganda on Confederate monumental sculpture by chronologising the development of allegory in British monumental sculpture and evidencing a pattern of repeated figures and motifs that began on war memorials in the 18th century. Focusing on how sculptors such as Moses Jacob Ezekiel – creator of The Confederate Memorial (1914) – turned to classical allegorical imagery for simultaneously recognisable, yet distant symbols of white supremacy, this paper explores how allegory offered a catalogue of source material for sculptors seeking innovative ways to sanitise violence, and re-write history in the early 20th century.         

Classical Mythology as Parody: The realities of a ‘new’ South Africa in Diane Victor’s Birth of a Nation series

Karen von Veh (University of Johannesburg)  

In 2009, South African artist, Diane Victor, travelled to Rome and was struck by the sense of civic pride, history and glory that imbues the remnants of classical antiquity. She began to imagine what such a cultural history might express if transposed into a South African context. The result is a set of rather cynical sepia drawings (later developed as drypoint engravings) titled Birth of a Nation (2010).

This series demonstrates how antiquity’s ‘afterlife’ can be subverted to demonstrate how little our nation has to be proud of. Victor’s mythological satires are parodies not only of well-known classical antiquities (such as the wolf with Romulus and Remus) but of their reinterpretation during the Renaissance and Baroque periods by artists including Michelangelo, Bernini and Rubens. Michelangelo’s Punishment of Tityus (1532), for example, becomes an accident victim tormented by a tow-truck driver (known as ‘vultures’ in South Africa) demanding exorbitant payment. The humour in these parodies does not detract from the darker content that emerges, as each story is manipulated to engage directly with the fears and shortcomings of the new post-apartheid South African nation. In this paper, I engage with the parodic reworking of these myths and their source imagery to show how Victor interrogates and complicates their original content, with the purpose of exposing South Africa’s vulnerability to ongoing follies, the exploitation of our resources and the fact that this ‘new’ nation has emerged into an imperfect world.

A Feast for the Eyes: Illusionistic silverware from antiquity to the Italian Renaissance courts

Jasmine Clark (The Courtauld Institute of Art)

Nobles, princes and popes alike developed an insatiable taste for classically inspired anthropomorphic and zoomorphic silverware at the turn of the 16th century in Italy. Although much of the silverware was melted down for currency or refashioned in the following centuries, an extraordinary number of the paper designs have survived. Created by some of the most renowned Cinquecento artists such as Francesco Salviati and Giulio Romano, these drawings illustrate classical figures and fantastical creatures contorting into handles, spouts and stems. This increasingly illusionistic approach to silverware design emerged from the rediscovery of the ‘minor’, but no less significant, material remains of antiquity. Designers repurposed the iconography of more portable, tactile archaeological finds including silverware, pottery and even precious gems to create a new visual language for courtly dining practices. Early 16th-century treatises on courtier behaviour likewise reinterpreted ancient literary sources that promoted the necessity, display and usage of elaborate banquet silverware. In the highly political and competitive context of the 16th-century courts, silverware became integral to maintaining elite status by inciting lively discussions and the vital exhibition of classical knowledge.

This paper will therefore analyse the different ways artists approached the challenge of adapting a classical model of silverware to serve the political and social agendas of the Cinquecento courts. Examining the tension that arose between supplying silverware that ‘accurately’ recalled antiquity whilst simultaneously offering the patron an innovative design, this paper will explore how artists sought to produce their own versions of a highly revered, yet distant, past.

Antiquity on Display: Temporary exhibitions in Britain during World War II

Lenia Kouneni (University of St Andrews)

Between 1939 and 1945, a series of exhibitions was organised in Britain with antiquity and its reception as their main focus. This paper will analyse the scope of their organisers, the display of the artworks and their reception by the public. It will argue that these war-time exhibitions deployed a classical narrative to give a sense of continuity to the British public and to boost morale.

Most of recent scholarship on the use of classical art and archaeology as propaganda during that period has focused on projects prompted by totalitarian governments. However, antiquity and its reception became a useful propaganda tool for the other side too. Exhibitions such as ‘The Present Discovers the Past’, ‘English Art and the Mediterranean’ and ‘Greek Art 3000 BC–AD 1938’, showcased ancient material culture highlighting its relevance and importance to subsequent generations and the modern world. The thematic displays and the interpretation of material emphasised the links between past and present. Classical art was appropriated for its association with order during a turbulent time. Through these exhibitions, Britain emerged as an heir of classical ideals and a defender of culture.

Animating Antiquity: Panofsky and Disney

Ciarán Rua O’Neill (University of Cambridge)

In a 1936 essay, Erwin Panofsky expressed his overall admiration for the animated films of Walt Disney, declaring that they, for example, had an especial ability to distort spatial and temporal boundaries. In the same work, however, the art historian described the Pastoral Symphony segment of Disney’s 1940 Fantasia as ‘deplorable’, due to its particular combination of animation and music. This sequence, which depicts a fantastical world inspired by classical mythology, nonetheless provides a clear expression of a number of the qualities Panofsky admired in animated films. Moreover, its purely visual qualities, through their specific use of classical sources, offer ideal material for an analysis in relation to Panofsky’s art-historical theory.

This paper will use Panofsky’s theoretical definitions of iconography and iconology to interpret the Pastoral Symphony’s adoption and adaptation of Graeco-Roman motifs. To do so, it will examine the artistic sources the Disney animators drew upon, from antiquity onwards, and, in adherence to Panofsky’s iconological method of interpretation, it will query how their adaptation related to the cultural context in which the sequence was created. It will also apply the same analysis to Hercules, an animated film Disney produced some 57 years later, which also derives its visual material from classical sources but does so in a strikingly different fashion. This paper will thus contrast the manner in which ‘antiquity’ was repurposed in animated films created in differing historical and political contexts, from the interwar period to a more globalised, postmodern one.