The culture of the copy

Shaping the royal image: Gerrit van Honthorst and the Stuart courts in London and the Hague, 1620-1649

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The Classical in the Contemporary: Contemporary Art in Britain and its Relationships with Greco-Roman Antiquity

Greek prototypes, constituted an ideal form that extracted aesthetic purity from the earthiness of the naked body. The catalogue challenges the assumptions behind this historical correspondence and reconnects the nude to the strangeness that it clearly carried in the Renaissance: it draws out the nude’s erotic but also abject and uncanny aspects, as well as its role in indexing youth, age, illness, disability, punishment, and fetishization. The catalogue and exhibition disturb the reader’s expectations, provoking an uneasiness similar to that elicited by the disclosure that ancient Greco-Roman sculptures were never intended to be pristinely white but were actually polychromed in vivid colors, with all the unsettling and, for some, repellant connotations this carries. The catalogue’s essays do a fine job of posing new questions while reviewing old ones. Focusing on Christian visual traditions, Thomas Krens elegantly outlines the intertwined demands of desire, sublimation, and transcendence required by depictions of the nude Christ, Saint Sebastian, and Bathsheba (among others) in the volume’s first essay. C. Jean Campbell and Diana Wolfthal reveal the dual nature of the female body as both image-ideal in Neoplatonic terms and instigator of dangerous or unstable sexual impulses on the other. Stephen J. Campbell and Ulrich Pfisterer point to the historically problematic dialectic between the nonnormative nude that represents a unique or deeply personalized vision and the generic ideal nude that glosses over differences between bodies. Jill Burke and Davide Gasparotto show how artists grappled with the problem of representing the body when moving between the real and the ideal. And Thomas Depasquale recalibrates our understanding of the Counter-Reformation reaction to public nudity via reactions to Michelangelo’s Last Judgment, of which Marcello Venusti’s early and revealing copy (included in the exhibition) is just one example.

John Onians

Papers

Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture (1500–1900)