Venus de' Medici

OVID’S PYGMALION HAS USUALLY been read as a myth of the artist...

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 ...

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 …

This chapter takes as its point of departure a puzzle—the apparently paradoxical gendering that occurs when Winckelmann exemplifies the sublime style by a female figure, the Niobe (Plate 15), and the beautiful style by a male one, the Laocoon (Plate 16). At one level he appears to be reversing conventional sexual paradigms. In the aesthetics of the period the sublime, with its intimations of power, elevation, or austerity, was usually associated with the masculine, and the beautiful, with its …