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This contribution raises a number of questions about the instruments and the goals of sculptors who set out to make a “copy” after the antique, taking a renewed interest in the status of such copy drawings. Tracing back from Preissler’s print edition after Bouchardon copies from classical statuary, this essay seeks to reconstruct the Roman circles in which the drawings originated, bringing together evidence for a counterhistory of the Roman sojourn, and suggesting that in sculptors’ drawings we witness an invitation for a conscious activation of the beholder.
Chapter 13 How Hercules Lost His Poise: Reason, Youth and Fellowship in the Heroic Neoclassical Body
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Abstract
As a result of the advent, in the late-mid eighteen-hundreds, of an art history of ancient statuary, Hercules’ heroism underwent a process by which new figures began to compete for prominence in a fluctuating symbolic imaginary of virile rule, autonomy and self-rule. The new ways of accommodating the beholder to heroic force was heralded by accounts of Greek statuary in Winckelmann’s Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums (1764). In his insistence on a poetic and aesthetic Greek mindset, and in his portrayal of a society devoted to cultural displays of autonomy, truth-seeking and beauty, Winckelmann evacuated the political purchase of the active and triumphant Herculean warrior, and turned instead on a youthful male heroic ideal, one inseparable from the emblematic ‘suppleness’ and quiet solemnity of the actual adolescent body. This and later accounts turned on ancient statues of young male gods as the new imaginary of the hero, their virility not yet distinct, and their bodies a renewable source of aesthetic interest in Greek liberty. The current contribution considers, first, the contested position occupied by Hercules in accounts of classical statuary such as those of Winckelmann. Second, it examines how the gradual fracturing of Hercules’ grip on virile rule and power, along with the aesthetic treatment given to Greece’s warrior-youths, might go some way towards explaining the problematic image of Hercules in examples of statuary by John Flaxman and Antonio Canova around 1790–1800, as Hercules becomes the protagonist of negative images of dishevelled violence and senseless pain.
Spectacle and Affect of Monument Removal
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, monuments became a focal point: protestors toppled or spray-painted them, even danced on them. These politically, visually, and emotionally potent events may have looked instantaneous, yet frequently sprang from years of activism, as well as protracted political and academic debate. Toppling Things challenges stereotypical notions monument topplings as riotous, spontaneous, or irrational. Bringing together the ideas and emotions, the uncertainty and convictions, of artists, activists, and academics, the volume rejects a neatly tied-up, distant narrative. As it sheds light on the global, personal, immediate, and historical processes around the fall of a monument, the volume engages directly with the complexity of toppling activism and monument removal as a form of lived experience.
Spectacle and Affect of Monument Removal
Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, monuments became a focal point: protestors toppled or spray-painted them, even danced on them. These politically, visually, and emotionally potent events may have looked instantaneous, yet frequently sprang from years of activism, as well as protracted political and academic debate. Toppling Things challenges stereotypical notions monument topplings as riotous, spontaneous, or irrational. Bringing together the ideas and emotions, the uncertainty and convictions, of artists, activists, and academics, the volume rejects a neatly tied-up, distant narrative. As it sheds light on the global, personal, immediate, and historical processes around the fall of a monument, the volume engages directly with the complexity of toppling activism and monument removal as a form of lived experience.