Apollo Belvedere

THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA originated as a slave society, holding millions of Africans and their descendants in bondage, and remained so until a civil war took the lives of a half million soldiers, some once slaves themselves.1 This book explores how that history of slavery and its...

A CHAOS OF BODIES, male and female, young and old, confronts the viewer of Ford Madox Brown’s great secular altarpiece, Work (fig. 8), just as the language of the body permeates the sonnet published to accompany its first exhibition. The setting is the elegant suburban prospect of The Mount,...

~In the tense weeks after Marat’s death, Girodet’s Endymion finally went on public display in Paris at the Salon of 1793. The exhibition opened on 10 August, the first anniversary of the monarchy’s downfall in the storming of the Tuileries palace by the forces of the Parisian sans-culottes. Only two days before, the...

Who cares about the Italian Renaissance nude? A subject more redolent of an old-fashioned type of art history would be hard to find. For many people it may bring to mind those...

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 ...

The question that I have repeatedly asked myself over the years as I taught Ovid and contemplated various works of art related to Metamorphoses is this: What exactly does the influence of Metamorphoses add up to in the history of art?

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 …