Laocoön

~~Drouais was marked as an exception, by himself and by his admirers, in a state system that placed a premium on discipline and conformity. Being distant from Paris did not for Drouais lessen the reach of administrative control from Paris; rather, it intensified and concentrated the application of...

~What are the mechanics of inspiration? Michelangelo’s contemporaries, referring to him as Michehngelo divino, held his creative capacities to be godlike – with the...

In the summer of 1893, the wide-eyed visitor to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago would have seen a vast, gleaming array of white Italian-ate buildings, interspersed with lagoons complete with Venetian gondolas, landscaped slopes and gardens, and abundant outdoor statuary. What might have seemed odd amid this overwhelming emulation of...

A new understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture began to emerge in the second half of the eighteenth century. The real issue here is not the distinction as such. Sculpture had always been thought of as different, if only because its execution required different skills, it was made of different materials and existed as solid thing rather than painted surface. In art theory, where painting and sculpture were seen to be grounded in a common mastery of drawing or dessin or …

The novelty of Winckelmann’s history of ancient art did not just consist of his representing the entire history of the ancient Greek and Roman tradition in terms of a systematic pattern of rise and decline. He also gave this bare schema a more richly articulated, specifically visual character by tracing the evolution of ancient Greek art through an archaic, a high, a beautiful, and an imitative phase. The crucial distinction he introduced between the high and the beautiful, as two equally valid …