Leonidas at Thermopylae

~~In 1800, before the Battle of Nazareth competition began the cycle of Napoleonic military subjects, the artistic requirements of the new order were much less clear than they would become by the middle of the new decade. Gérard,...

This story of David’s unfinished business with Juliette Récamier, which we have reasons to believe came from the artist himself, has echoed in the Davidian literature...

He lies face down. His long and vulnerable neck is stretched out taut like his extended arm but, unlike his limb, it is bluntly ruptured by a mass of dark hair...

Among many ways in which I might have defined the historical afterlife of Winckelmann’s work, I have deliberately singled out two very loaded engagements with his image of the Greek ideal, the first connected with the politics of the 1789 French Revolution and the second with late nineteenth-century aestheticism and definitions of homosexual identity. In each instance, a distinctive combination of historical circumstances made Winckelmann’s conception of Greek art particularly compelling as the …