Eve Tempted

During the years of its greatest popularity, ideal sculpture provided an occasion for its makers, purchasers, and viewers to elaborate a narrative central to nineteenth-century culture: the story of woman’s nature and woman’s destiny. Transformed into a spectacle in the most literal sense, the sculptured woman invited responses that tapped her...

John Singer Sargent’s Roman sketchbook of 1869 contains—besides a pale gray wash of the Colosseum and a drawing of the white oxen of the Campagna—studies by the sixteen-year-old artist of the Laocoon and the Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican ...