GRICE E CARBONI: SEGNO

 Grice e Carboni – desegno dall’antico, desegno dalla natura -- drawn from life -- tratto dalla vita – royal academy –drawn from the antique -- filosofia italiana – Luigi Speranza (Livorno). Filosofo. Grice: “I love Carboni – my favourite of his tracts is ‘between the image and the ‘parable’” – a semiotics of communication with sections on ‘the tacit response,’ through the looking-glass’, ‘towards the hypertext,’ and quoting extensively from some ‘conversational-implicature’ passages in Aristotle’s metaphysics, ‘To ask ‘why is man man?’ is to ask nothing!” “For some expressions, analogy suffices!” Insegna a Roma, Bari, Viterbo.  Altre opere: L’angelo del fare. Melotti e la ceramica (Skira) e Il colore nell’arte (Jaca).  Cura Dorfles, Brandi, Deleuze, Guattari, Adorno. Tra le recensioni dei suoi saggi si segnalano: Giacomo Marramao, Gianni Vattimo (“L’Espresso”), Gillo Dorfles (“Il Corriere della Sera”), Victor Stoichita (“il manifesto”). Al Festival delle Letterature di Mantova hanno presentato i suoi saggi Sini  e Didi-Huberman. Scrive su  “Nòema” e “Images Re-vues” e sulla “Rivista di Estetica”.   “L’Impossibile Critico. Paradosso della critica d’arte, Kappa); “Cesare Brandi. Teoria e esperienza dell’arte, Editori Riuniti); “Il Sublime è Ora. Saggio sulle estetiche contemporanee, Castelvecchi); “Non vedi niente lì? Sentieri tra arti e filosofie del Novecento, Castelvecchi); “L’ornamentale. Tra arte e decorazione, Jaca); “L’occhio e la pagina. Tra immagine e parola, Jaca); “Lo stato dell’arte. L’esperienza estetica nell’era della tecnica, Laterza); “La mosca di Dreyer. L’opera della contingenza nelle arti, Jaca); “Di più di tutto. Figure dell’eccesso, Castelvecchi); “Analfabeatles. Filosofia di una passione elementare, Castelvecchi); “Il genio è senza opera. Filosofie antiche e arti contemporanee” Jaca); “Malevič. L'ultima icona. Arte, filosofia, teologia, Jaca).  Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State, Martin Myrone Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State Martin Myrone Abstract From 1808 the British Museum in London began regularly to open its newly established Townley Gallery so that art students could draw from the ancient sculptures housed there. This article documents and comments on this development in art education, based on an analysis of the 165 individuals recorded in the surviving register of attendance at the Museum, covering the period 1809–17. The register is presented as a photographic record, with a transcription and biographical directory. The accompanying essay situates the opening of the Museum’s sculpture rooms to students within a farreaching set of historical shifts. It argues that this new museum access contributed to the early nineteenth-century emergence of a liberal state. But if the rhetoric surrounding this development emphasized freedom and general public benefit in the spirit of liberalization, the evidence suggests that this new level of access actually served to further entrench the “middleclassification” of art education at this historical juncture. Authors Martin Myrone is an art historian and curator based in London, and is currently convenor of the British Art Network based at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. Acknowledgements The register of students admitted to the Townley Gallery was originally consulted during my term as Paul Mellon Mid-Career Fellow in 2014–15. Thank you to Mark Hallett and Sarah Victoria Turner of the Mellon Centre for their continuing support and guidance, to Baillie Card and Rose Bell for their careful editorial work, Tom Scutt for crafting the digital presentation of my research, the two anonymous readers for their valuable critical input, and to Antony Griffiths, formerly of the British Museum, and Hugo Chapman, Angela Roche, and Sheila O’Connell of the British Museum, for providing access to the register and for their advice. I am especially indebted to Mark Pomeroy, archivist, and his colleagues at the Royal Academy of Arts for the access provided to materials there and for advice and suggestions. I would also like to thank Viccy Coltman, Brad Feltham, Martin Hopkinson, Sarah Monks, Sarah Moulden, Michael Phillips, Jacob Simon, Greg Sullivan, and Alison Wright. Cite as Martin Myrone, "Drawing after the Antique at the British Museum, 1809–1817: “Free” Art Education and the Advent of the Liberal State", British Art Studies, Issue 5, https://dx.doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-05/mmyrone From the summer of 1808 the British Museum in London began regularly to open its newly established galleries of Graeco-Roman sculpture for art students. The collection, made up almost entirely of pieces previously owned by Charles Townley, had been purchased for the nation in 1805 and installed in a new extension to the Museum’s first home, Montagu House, which was built earlier in 1808. After some protracted discussion with the Royal Academy, detailed below, the collection was made available for its students in time for the royal opening of the Townley Gallery on 3 June 1808. From January 1809, a written record was kept of students admitted to draw from the antique. This volume survives in the library of the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum and identifies one hundred and sixtyfive separate individuals admitted through to 1817. 1 The register forms the focus of this essay and is presented here as a facsimile and transcription, with an accompanying directory of student biographies (see supplementary materials below). This may be taken as a straightforward contribution to the literature on early nineteenth-century art education, and the author hopes it may be useful as such. However, it also situates the opening of the Museum’s sculpture rooms to students within a rather more far-reaching set of historical shifts. Namely, it argues that this new form of museum access was part of the early nineteenth-century emergence of a liberal state that “actively governs through freedom (free ‘individuals’, markets, societies, and so on, which are only ‘free’ because the state makes them so)”. 2 Access to the British Museum was “free” in that there were no charges or fees. Meanwhile, the arrangement offered a degree of freedom to the students themselves; they were expected to be largely self-selecting and self-regulating. When the arrangement was exposed to public scrutiny, as a result of questions asked in parliament in 1821, the freedom of access and the service this did to the public good were emphasized. But, once closely scrutinized, the evidence suggests that this manifestation of the freedoms encouraged by the liberal state had a social disciplinary role (even if disciplinary function can hardly be recognized as such), in serving to further entrench the “middle-classification” of art at this historical juncture. 3 The conjunction of art education and a grandiose notion such as the liberal state may be unexpected, and rests on three key assertions. The first is that art worlds are structured and in their structure have a homological relationship with the larger social environment. 4 The initial part of this statement (that art worlds are structured) may not be especially hard to swallow, given the relatively formalized and hierarchical nature of the London art world during the early nineteenth century, when cultural authority was vested in a small number of institutions, and the practices associated with academic tradition in principle still held sway. However, that the structure of the art world, in its hierarchical dimension, may also be homologically related to the larger field of power, so that social relationships are reproduced within this relatively autonomous sphere, is more clearly contentious, and runs contrary to commonplace beliefs and expectations about talent and luck in determining personal fate in the modern age—artists’ fortunes most especially. In fact, in the period under review here, the artist became an exemplary figure in the new narratives of social mobility: the art world came to serve as a model of how talent or sheer good fortune could override social origins and destinies. 5 The second assertion is that the Royal Academy and British Museum were developing new forms of state institution, underpinned by the conjoined principles of freedom of access and public benefit. Such has been argued importantly by Holger Hoock, and while I depart from his arguments in some key regards, his insights into the status of these institutions and the role of forms of public–private partnership in their formation are crucial. 6 The third assertion (and this marks a departure from Hoock), is that the state is not a stable, centralized entity, or site of power either “up above” or “below” historical actors. Instead, it is taken to be the sum of actions and dispositions ostensibly volunteered by these historical agents in all their multitude and variety. The crucial point of reference here is the sustained body of work on the liberal state by the historian Patrick Joyce, deploying the work of Bruno Latour and Michel Foucault, among others, to yield a more materialistic and decentralized understanding of the emergence and role of state bodies. 7 The state, in this view, is composed of technologies, disciplinary structures, habits of mind, and ways of doing things. The mechanics of art education, insofar as this involves the movement through or exclusion of individuals from identified places, the arrangement of their bodies in relation to one another and to their model, the management of their behaviour within those places, the very motion of their bodies, hands, and eyes under the surveillance of their peers, teachers or other authorities, may be considered as a form of biopolitics; the student who entered his or her name into the British Museum’s register of admission was producing his or her governmentality. 8 The argument here is emphatically historical and states that this arrangement, while it may have precedents and may have been seminal, belongs to an historical moment—the emergence of the liberal state. My case, which can be sketched out only in outline in this context, is that the emergence of the familiar institutional arrangements of the modern art world between the 1770s and the 1830s (in the form of actual institutions and regulatory structures or permissions, including annual exhibitions, centralized art schools supported by the state directly and indirectly, emphasis on quantifiable measures of access and engagement as the test of public value, and so forth) represents in an exemplary way the illusory freedoms promoted by liberalism, and renewed by present-day “neo- liberalism”, as addressed by commentators from the prophetic Karl Polanyi through to the later work of Foucault and Bourdieu on the state, and Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, among others. 9 The early nineteenth-century art world can be proposed as a privileged focus of attention because it was still of a scale which can allow for the kinds of data-based analysis which must underpin any sort of sociological exploration, and because its individual membership can be documented in fine detail in a manner which is simply not possible at an earlier historical date. Paradoxically, despite its announced commitment to non-intervention and personal freedom, the emerging liberal state generated huge amounts of documentation about society and its individual members—tax records, parochial and civil records, the national census from 1801—which digitilization has made more readily available than ever before, allowing this generation of artists to be documented as never previously. 10 The production of artistic identities through these records is not unrelated to changes in artistic identity itself over the same timeframe. One way of realizing this might be to consider the period outlined above—c. 1770–1830s—not as a period from the foundation of the Royal Academy (1769) to its removal to Trafalgar Square, or even as the era of Romanticism, as much literary and cultural history-writing would dictate, but as the era from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) to the Reform Act (1832) and the Speenhamland system, a last experiment in patrician social care before the Poor Law Amendment Act (1834), taking in Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. The challenge is thinking of these two frameworks not in sequential or spatially differentiated ways, but as simultaneous and identical. Within this emerging liberal state the figure of the artist is attributed with a special degree and form of freedom, what has conventionally been alluded to, in generally sociologically imprecise ways, as a feature of “Romanticism”, slumping into “bohemianism” and a generic idea of art student lifestyle. If this was a moment of unprecedented state investment in the arts (from the Royal Academy through to the Schools of Design) and government scrutiny (notably with the Select Committees), it simultaneously saw the emergence of artistic identities expressing the values of personal freedom, freedom from regulation, and even active opposition to the state. I propose that art education, as it took shape in the emerging liberal state, might be explored as a “liberogenic” phenomenon: among those “devices intended to produce freedom which potentially risk producing exactly the opposite.” 11 As such, it may have renewed pertinence for our own time, although this does not entail seeing a “causal” relationship between the past and present, or a linear genetic relationship between then and now. In fact, the purpose of this commentary, and the larger project it arises from, 12 is rather to trouble our relationship with that past. The intention is not, however, to point unequivocally to the era under consideration as here entailing “the making of a modern art world”, with the rise of art education and museums access representing a stage towards democratization, as illuminated in stellar fashion by the great Romantic artists (J. M. W. Turner—famously the son of a lowly London barber—pre-eminently). I would want instead to take seriously Jacques Rancière’s call for “a past that puts a radical requirement at the centre of the present”, eschewing causality and “nostalgia” in favour of “challenging the relationship of the present to that past”. 13 If giving attention to the “freedom” of art education at the advent of the liberal state provides any insight at all, it should do so by troubling rather than affirming our narratives of the genesis of a modern art world. Access to the Townley Gallery The arrival at the Museum of the Townley marbles, together with the development of the prints and drawings collection and its installation in new, secure rooms in the same wing, fundamentally changed the character of the institution. As Neil Chambers has noted, having been primarily a repository of (often celebrated) curiosities of many different forms, quite suddenly “The Museum was now a centre for art and the study of sculpture.” 14 The shift was acknowledged internally at the Museum by the creation in 1807 of a distinct Department of Antiquities, which also had responsibility for the collection of prints and drawings. But while the significance of the opening of the Townley Gallery in the history of the British Museum is clear, the opening of the collection to students has barely been noticed in the art-historical literature. The register has been overlooked almost entirely, and the relevance of this development in student access may not even be immediately obvious. 15 Figure 1. William Chambers, The Sculpture Collection of Charles Townley in the dining room of his house in Park Street, Westminster, 1794, watercolour, 39 x 54 cm. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum Figure 2. Attributed to Joseph Nollekens, The Discobolus, 1791–1805, drawing, 48 x 35 cm. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum Townley’s collection had already famously been on display for many years at his private house in Park Street, London. William Chambers’ (or Chalmers’) drawing of the Park Street display from 1794 includes a well-dressed young woman drawing under the supervision or advice of a man, promoting the idea that the collection was available for sufficiently genteel students of the art more generally (fig. 1). In his recollections of the London art world, J. T. Smith described “those rooms of Mr Townley’s house, in which that gentleman’s liberality employed me when a boy, with many other students in the Royal Academy, to make drawings for his portfolios”. 16 Smith’s former employer, the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, has been identified among the more established artists who were also engaged by Townley to draw from marbles in the collection (fig. 2). As Viccy Coltman has noted, “The townhouse at 7 Park Street, Westminster became an unofficial counterpoint to the English arts establishment that was the Royal Academy: as an academy of ancient sculpture, much as Sir John Soane’s London housemuseum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields would become an academy of architecture in the early 19th century.” 17 Evidently, a number of the students and artists admitted to draw from the Townley marbles once they were at the British Museum knew them formerly at first hand from visiting 7 Park Street; for instance, William Skelton, admitted to draw at the Museum in 1809, had apparently already studied and engraved three busts from the collection for inclusion in the design of Townley’s visiting card (fig. 3). Townley had hoped for a separate gallery to be erected to house the collection, but his executors, his brother Edward Townley Standish and uncle John Townley were unable to agree a plan. 18 The sale of the collection to the Museum was a compromise. With the erection of a new gallery space for the collection underway, the Museum considered how special access might be given to artists. That the question was posed at all should be an indication of how far the realm of cultural consumption and production was being folded in to the emerging liberal state at this juncture. At a meeting of the Trustees on 28 February 1807, a committee was set up to consider how the prints and drawings collections might be used by artists, and to draw up “Regulations... for the Admission of Strangers to view the Gallery of Antiquities either separately from, or together with the rest of the Museum: And also for the Admission of Artists”. 19 Figure 3. William Skelton, Charles Townley's visiting card, 1778–1848, etching, 65 x 96 cm. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum With the Gallery still under construction, the Sub-Committee was not obliged to move quickly, and it proved to be a protracted and unexpectedly fractious affair. 20 It was not until the Museum’s general meeting of 13 February 1808, that the principal librarian, Joseph Planta, reported “his opinion of the best time & mode of admission of Strangers as well as artists, to the Gallery of Antiquities”, with the request that Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy, be asked to attend a further meeting. 21 After delays, he did so on 10 March, after which the Council drew up a set of regulations. 22 These went back to the Academy with additions and changes, which were accepted by the Council who wrote to the British Museum on the 10 May to that effect, noting that a General Meeting of the Academy was to take place, “to prepare the final arrangement for his Majesty’s approbation”. 23 Accordingly, at the British Museum, the Sub-Committee’s reports and proposals were approved by the Standing Committee, with “Resolutions founded on the above mentioned Reports” read at the General Meeting of 14 May. 24 The resolutions, numbered so as to be inserted in the existing regulations regarding admissions, were confirmed in the meeting of 21 May, over three months after what should have been a straightforward matter was raised (see Appendix, below). 25 Clause number eight, concerning the payment of Academicians charged with the supervision of students, evidently caused some consternation within the Academy, as recorded in the diary of Joseph Farington. 26 The relative authority of the Council and General Assembly had been a contentious matter in previous years, and the lengthy dispute over arrangements with the Museum reflected lingering tensions. On 12 July 1808 the proposals were read, and “After a long conversation it was Resolved to adjourn.” 27 The subject was taken up on re-convening on 21 July, but without resolution. 28 At yet another meeting, on 26 July 1808, the point about the Academy’s provision of superintendents to monitor the students while at the British Museum was referred back to Council. 29 We have to turn to Farington’s diary for a fuller account. He noted that the Academy’s General Assembly had met on 12 July “for the purpose of receiving a Law made by the Council ‘That permission having been granted by the Trustees of the British Museum for Students to study from the Antiques &c at the Museum, certain days are fixed upon for that purpose, & that an Academician shall attend each day at the Museum & to be paid 2 guineas for each day’s attendance’... Much discussion took place.” 30 At a further meeting: “The Correspondence of the Council with the Sub Committee of the British Museum was read from the beginning” and “much discussion” was had about the supervision of the students, Farington making the point that: as the studies of the British Museum shd. be considered those of completion and not to learn the Elements of art the Academy shd. not recommend any student whose abilities & conduct wd. not warrant it, that it should be considered the last stage of study, when those admitted wd. not require constant inspection; therefore daily attendance of a Member of the Academy wd. not be necessary. 31 The point of contest may have concerned the right of the Council to organize things independent of the General Assembly of the Academicians, and a more general question about economy (“Northcote proposed that the Academician who in rotation shall attend at the British Museum, shd. have 3 guineas a day. West thought one guinea sufficient”). 32 But Farington’s point is more revealing in indicating the expectation that the selected students of the Academy were to be largely self-regulating, and self-disciplining; they were to be granted freedom because they had already internalized the discipline required by these institutions. Figure 4. Front cover, Register of Students Admitted to the Gallery of Antiquities, 1809–17. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum The matter finally settled, students were admitted to the Townley Gallery from at least the beginning of 1809: the first entries in the register book are dated 14 January 1809 (figs. 4 and 5 to 11). On that date four students were enrolled, although only one of them was at the Royal Academy. That was Henry Monro, the son of Dr Thomas Monro, Physician at Bedlam and an amateur and collector who ran the influential “academy” at his home in Adelphi Terrace. The other students included two of the daughters of Thomas Paytherus, a successful London apothecary, and a Ralph Irvine of Great Howland Street, who seems quite certainly to have been Hugh Irvine, the Scottish landscape painter and a member of the landowning Irvine family of Drum, who gave that address in the exhibition catalogue of the British Institution’s show in 1809. Another five students registered in February and July. This included another recently registered Royal Academy student, Henry Sass, whose name was entered into the Academy’s books in 1805, recommended for study at the British Museum by the architect and RA John Soane, and the artists William Skelton, Adam Buck, Samuel Drummond, and Maria Singleton. The mix of amateur and professional artists, young and old, and indeed the mix of male and female students (discussed below), continued throughout the register. View this illustration online Figure 5. Page 1, Register of Students Admitted to the Gallery of Antiques, 1809–17. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of British Museum View this illustration online Figure 6. Page 2, Register of Students Admitted to the Gallery of Antiquities, 1809–17. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum View this illustration online Figure 7. Page 3, Register of Students Admitted to the Gallery of Antiquities, 1809–17. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum View this illustration online Figure 8. Page 4, Register of Students Admitted to the Gallery of Antiquities, 1809–17. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum View this illustration online Figure 9. Page 5, Register of Students Admitted to the Gallery of Antiquities, 1809–17. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum View this illustration online Figure 10. Page 6, Register of Students Admitted to the Gallery of Antiques, 1809–17. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum View this illustration online Figure 11. Page 7, Register of Students Admitted to the Gallery of Antiques, 1809–17. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum Eight of the twelve students registered on 11 November were current Academy students; this proportion of Academy students to others continues throughout the record. But on the same day Planta noted to the standing committee that the Royal Academicians not having availed themselves of the Regulations in favour of their Pupils, & many applications having been made to him for leave to draw in the Gallery of Antiquities, he therefore submitted to the consideration of the Trustees, whether persons duly recommended might not be admitted in the same manner as in the Reading Room. 33 The matter was referred on to the general meeting. 34 On 9 December 1809 the new regulations were confirmed: Students who apply for Admission to the Gallery are to specify their descriptions & places of abode; and every one who applies, if not known to any Trustee or Officer, will produce a recommendation from some person of known & approved Character, particularly, if possible, from one of the Professors in the Royal Academy. 35 On 10 February 1810 it was instructed “That the Regulation respecting the mode of Admission of Students to the Gallery of Sculpture, as made at the last General Meeting be printed & hung up in the Hall, & at the entrance into the Gallery”. 36 The students admitted through 1810 were predominantly students at the Royal Academy, but also included the emigré natural history painter the Chevalier de Barde and Charles Muss, already established as an enamel and glass painter. The same pattern was apparent in subsequent years. Twenty-five students were registered in 1811 and again in 1812, before numbers dropped to twelve in 1813, eight in 1814, picking up with nineteen in 1815, and dropping to nine in 1816. The Museum’s original stipulation that no more than twenty Academy students be admitted each year did not, it appears, create any undue constraints on the flow of admissions. Far from having a monopoly over student admissions, as the Museum’s original regulations had anticipated, the Royal Academy had apparently been distinctly laissez-faire, doing little to try to push students forward to make up the numbers. The galleries the students gained access to comprised a sequence of rooms within the new wing added to accommodate the growing collection of sculptural antiquities, notably the Egyptian material taken from the French at Alexandria in 1801. The Egyptian antiquities dominated the galleries in terms of sheer size, although the visual centrepiece, whether viewed from the Egyptian hall or through the extended enfilade of rooms II–V where the Townley marbles were displayed, was the Discobolus (fig. 12). 37 The intimate scale of the galleries brought benefits, as German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel noted on his visit of 1826: “Gallery of antiquities in very small rooms, lit from above, very restful and satisfying”. 38 But is also imposed a practical limit on the numbers of students who could attend. This changed when, in 1817, the Elgin marbles were put on display at Montagu House in spacious, if warehouse-like, temporary rooms newly annexed to the Townley Gallery (fig. 13). The spike of interest recorded in the register, with thirty-seven students listed under the heading “1817”, must reflect this new opportunity. The register terminates at this point, although the volume continued to be used to record students and artists admitted to the prints and drawings room (upstairs from the Townley Gallery) from 1815 through to the 1840s. 39 Figure 12. Anonymous, View through the Egyptian Room, in the Townley Gallery at the British Museum, 1820, watercolour, 36.1 x 44.3 cm. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum Figure 13. William Henry Prior, View in the old Elgin room at the British Museum, 1817, watercolour, 38.8 x 48.1 cm. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum Some form of register must have been maintained, but appears not to have survived, and evidence of student attendance after 1817 is largely a matter of anecdotal record. 40 These later records also, incidentally, point to the variety of student practice in the galleries. While the Museum’s original stipulations made the presumption that admitted artists would be drawing (“each student shall provide himself with a Portfolio in which his Name is written, and with Paper as well as Chalk”), students evidently worked in different media as well. James Ward referred explicitly to “modelling” in the Museum in his diary entries of 1817; and George Scharf’s watercolour of the interior of the Townley Gallery from 1827 (fig. 14) shows a student sitting on boxes at work at an easel, with what appears to be a paintbrush in his right hand and a palette in his left. 41 Nonetheless, the Townley marbles had lost much of their allure. Jack Tupper, a rather unsuccessful artist associated with the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, recalled his growing disillusion when studying at the British Museum in the late 1830s: “So the glory of the Townley Gallery faded: the grandeur of ‘Rome’ passed.” 42 Figure 14. George Scharf, View of the Townley Gallery, 1827, watercolour, 30.6 x 22 cm. Collection of the British Museum. Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum The material record of student activity in the Townley Gallery, in the form of images which seem definitely to derive from this special access to the Museum, is extremely scarce. 43 Whatever was produced in the Gallery was, after all, generally only for the purposes of study, and was unlikely to be retained or valued after the artist’s death. John Wood, a dedicated student at the Royal Academy from 1819, noted: “I am surprised at the comparatively few drawings I made in the Antique School at the Royal Academy, including my probationary one, not exceeding five, with an outline from the group of the Laocoon.—In the British Museum I made a chalk drawing from the statue of Libēra for Mr Sass”, that is, the Townley Venus, apparently drawn by Wood as an exercise for the well-known drawing teacher Henry Sass. 44 Student drawings after the antique must have been numerous, but that does not mean they were preserved. J. M. W. Turner had apparently attended the Plaster Academy over one hundred and thirty times up to the point he became an ARA, in 1799. 45 Yet even with a figure of his stature, whose studio contents were so completely preserved, and whose dedication to academic study was so notable, we have only a handful of drawings which appear certainly to derive from his time at the schools. 46 There are, doubtless, traces of study in the Museum to be uncovered in finished works of the period. Charles Lock Eastlake’s youthful figure of Brutus in his ambitious early work is evidently a direct lift from the marble of Actaeon attacked by his own hounds in the Townley collection; he had been admitted to draw from the antique in 1810 (figs. 15 and 16). But given the dissemination of classical prototypes (in graphic form as well as in plaster) it would be hard to insist that it was only access to the British Museum’s antiquities which made such allusion strictly possible. Figure 15. Charles Lock Eastlake, Brutus Exhorting the Romans to Revenge the Death of Lucretia, 1814, oil on canvas, 116.8 x 152.4 cm. Collection of the Wiliamson Art Gallery & Museum. Digital image courtesy of Wiliamson Art Gallery & Museum Figure 16. Anonymous, Marble figure of Actaeon attacked by his hounds, Roman 2nd Century, marble, 0.99 metres high. Collection of the British Museum (1805,0703.3). Digital image courtesy of Trustees of the British Museum The Register of Students as Social Record Of arguably greater interest than the question of the “influence” of access to the marbles on artistic practice is the evidence the register provides about the social profile of the students. This takes us to the heart of the question about the relationship between art education and the state. This was, in fact, a question raised at the time. The British Museum was in 1821 obliged to draw up a report on student and public attendance of the Museum, prompted by Thomas Barrett Lennard MP, who had entered a motion in the House of Commons seeking reassurance that this publicly funded institution was not “merely an establishment for the gratification of private favour or individual patronage”. 47 Lennard’s questions arose from a growing body of criticism directed against the Museum, which turned on the question of whether, as a publicly funded body, everyone could expect free access, or only a more specialist minority. As one critic jibed in 1822, “If the British Museum is open only to the friends of the librarians, & their friends’ friends, it ceases to be a public institution.” 48 The report elicited by Lennard’s question provided a detailed breakdown of admissions. With regard to providing access to draw from the antique, the Museum indulged the impression that it not only fulfilled but exceeded its commitment to admitting Royal Academy students: providing the figures for the period 1809–17 (based, surely, on the register under consideration here), the Museum’s report elaborated: The Statute for the admission of Students in the Gallery of Sculptures being among those required by the Order of the House of Commons, it may not be irrelevant to add, that the number of students who were admitted to make drawings in the Townley Gallery, from the year 1809 to the year 1817, amounted to an average of something more than twenty. 49 Notably, this summary gives the clear impression that the antiques were being opened to the students of the Royal Academy; such is, quite reasonably, presumed by Derek Cash in his recent, careful commentary on admission procedures at the Museum. 50 The report also pointed to recent changes: In 1818, immediately subsequent to the opening of the Elgin Room, two hundred and twenty-three students were admitted: in 1819, sixty-nine more were admitted, and in 1820, sixty-three. It asserted that, now: Every student sent by the keeper of the Royal Academy, upon the production of his academy ticket, is admitted without further reference to make his drawings: and other persons are occasionally admitted, on simply exhibiting the proofs of their qualification. According to the present practice, each student has leave to exhibit his finished drawing, from any article in the Gallery, for one week after its completion. 51 Thus stated, the Museum appeared to be fulfilling its public duty in providing free access to appropriately qualified students. The bare figures might seem to indicate a steady rise in student interest, which could be taken as a marker of quantitative success. In one of the earliest historical accounts of the Museum, Edward Edwards implied that the statistical record was evidence of how Planta had progressively extended access to the Museum: “From the outset he administered the Reading Room itself with much liberality... As respects the Department of Antiquities, the students admitted to draw were in 1809 less than twenty; in 1818 two hundred and twenty-three were admitted.” 52 At that level of abstraction the information appears beyond dispute. What I test in the remainder of this essay is how these statements stand up to the more individualized account of student activity represented in the biographical record. That record does include the most assiduous students of the Royal Academy of the time, who certainly did not need the kind of “constant inspection” Farington worried about, the kind of student anticipated by the Museum’s regulations. Among these we could count Henry Monro, Samuel F. B. Morse and Charles Robert Leslie, William Brockedon, Henry Perronet Briggs, William Etty and Henry Sass, the last two famously dedicated as students of the Academy. 53 However, the full biographical survey of the register points to a more complicated situation. Of the one hundred and sixty-five individuals named in the register, it has proved possible to establish biographical profiles for the majority: details are most lacking for about twenty-four of the attending students, although in most of those cases we can conjecture at least some biographical context. 54 Slightly less than half the total number of individuals listed were recorded as students at the Academy at a date which makes it reasonably likely that they were actively attending the schools when they were admitted to the British Museum (eighty in all). 55 Around twenty more established male artists attended, and several of these were formerly students at the Royal Academy, including John Samuel Agar, John Flaxman, and James Ward. Whether they were pursuing their private studies or undertaking more specific professional tasks is not always clear. There are, certainly, a few cases where the latter appears to be the case. When William Henry Hunt was admitted it was explicitly for the purpose of preparing drawings for a publication; both William Skelton and John Samuel Agar were probably admitted in connection with his ongoing work engraving from sculptures at the Museum. It seems likely that the “Students to Mr Meyer”, that is, the engraver and print publisher Henry Meyer, were engaged on professional business, as was Thomas Welsh, recommended by the publisher Thomas Woodfall. More striking, though, is the determined presence in the register of artists who did not pursue the art professionally or full-time, including the relatively well-documented Chevalier de Barde, Arthur Champernowne, John Disney, Hugh Irvine (assuming he is the “Ralph Irvine” who appears in the register), Robert Batty, Edward John Burrow, Edward Vernon Utterson, and a number of others designated as “Esq”, so clearly from the polite classes, even if their exact identities remain unclear. There are at least fifteen male individuals who appear to come from backgrounds sufficiently socially elevated or affluent enough to suggest they were taking an amateur interest rather than pursuing serious studies. 56 Enough of these men are known to have practised art to make it quite certain that they were not, at least generally, being admitted to consult the collection without intending to draw, and John Disney was admitted explicitly “to make a sketch of a Mausoleum”. Notable, in this regard, are the large number of women admitted to study, most of whom are or appear to be from polite backgrounds, including the Paytherus sisters, Elizabeth Appleton, Louisa Champernowne, Miss Carmichael, Elizabeth Batty, Miss Home, Lucy Adams, Jane Gurney, Maria Singleton, and Anne Seymour Damer. 57 Some were established artists, or became so; others were pursuing art as a polite accomplishment, or at least we can assume so given their family circumstances; in other cases the situation is by no means clear-cut. All were admitted without special comment or notice despite the issues of propriety around the drawing of even the sculptured nude figure by female artists which crops up in contemporary commentaries. 58 This may be all the more striking given the relative paucity of women admitted as readers at the British Museum library over the same period: only three out of the three hundred and thirty-three admitted between 1770 and 1810, as surveyed by Derek Cash. 59 On this evidence, the field of artistic study was, in the most literal terms, relatively female compared even to the study of literature or history. This points to an under-explored context for the inculcation of the students into life as an artist: the “feminine” sphere of the home, and of siblings (whether brothers or sisters) alongside parents. We have, surely, barely begun to consider the family as the context in which artists are made as much as, if not more than, the studio and academy. Nor is it straightforward to assume that those individuals who had enrolled as Academy students also had expectations about the professional pursuit of the art. Among the Academy students who attended, a large proportion, including a majority of the most assiduous, were from polite social backgrounds, with fathers in the professions, or who were office-holders or from the landowning classes, including Henry Monro, John Penwarne, Richard Cook, William Drury Shaw, Charles Lock Eastlake, Henry Perronet Briggs, Alexander Huey, Thomas Cooley, Samuel F. B. Morse, Andrew Geddes, John Zephaniah Bell, Thomas Christmas, John Owen Tudor, and Samuel Hancock. Others were the sons of elite tradesmen, highly specialized craftsmen or merchants, including William Brockedon, Seymour Kirkup, Charles Robert Leslie, Gideon Manton, and John Zephaniah Bell. These were not, either, predestined to be artists, by simply following in their father’s footsteps, but were opting in to an artistic career, having had, usually, a decent education, and access to material and social support. In many cases their brothers, who shared the same upbringing, became doctors or lawyers, property-owners or merchants. A number of individual students gave up the practice of the art—Thomas Christmas became a landowner in Willisden; Richard Cook was able to retire, wealthy; Seymour Kirkup languished in Rome dabbling in the arts; William Brockedon became more engaged as an inventor and traveller; while others were never really obliged to draw an income from their practice but pursued art as a pastime. It remains the case that there was a high level of occupational inheritance; perhaps thirty-eight of the students (23 percent) had fathers who were architects, engravers or artists in painting or sculpture. Many were the sons of established artists (including Rossi, Bone, Stothard, Ward, Dawe, Wyatt, Bonomi, and the brothers Stephanoff); a few were part of “dynasties” encompassing generations engaged in the arts (Wyatt, Wyon, Hakewill, Landseer). Even then, there is the case of John Morton (noted confusingly as “John Martin” in the register, although the address given provides for a firm identification), who, although the son of an artist and a student at the Royal Academy, exhibited personally as an “Honorary”, suggesting he was not professionally engaged. That his brother became quite prominent as a physician suggests that this was a quite emphatically middle-class family setting. There are several points to derive from this information, even as lightly sketched as it necessarily is here. Firstly, it is noteworthy that while female students were a minority they were a definite presence; in this regard, the British Museum was like other spaces of artistic study, notably the painting school at the British Institution. 60 The observation is upheld by the contemporary records of student attendance at the British Institution or of copyists at Dulwich Picture Gallery, and should serve as a reminder that the Royal Academy was exceptional among the spaces of art education in being so entirely male. 61 Secondly, it is striking how few came from humble backgrounds unconnected with the art world; really, only a handful, which would include John Tannock (son of a shoemaker in Scotland), William Etty (son of a baker in York), John Jackson (son of a village tailor in Yorkshire), and William Henry Hunt (whose father was a London tin-plate worker). The circumstances which led to their gaining access to the London art world are, therefore, noteworthy, as a third and most important point would be to emphasize how emphatically metropolitan, polite, and middle-class was the British Museum as a site of artistic education. The Townley Gallery on student days was a place where working artists, students, amateurs, and patrons mingled. 62 While the Royal Academy is conventionally seen as an engine of professionalization, it is striking that the social affiliations of artists point to strong, arguably increasingly strong, affiliations between amateurs and professionals—to the extent that our terminology around this point needs to be reconsidered. Looking over the biographical survey, the kind of social suffering or precariousness typically associated with artists’ lives, perhaps especially during the era of industrialization, is markedly absent. When it does appear—most strikingly with the grim life-stories of the siblings Jabez and Sarah Newell—they are among the minority of students from backgrounds neither closely connected with the art world, nor comfortably middle-class or genteel. The examples of stellar social ascent and achievement on the basis of talent alone are real; but they are the exceptions rather than representative. The relative weight of personal and Academic connection is exposed in the record of the provision of references for students. Of the forty-three referees recorded between 1809 and 1816, less than half (nineteen) were Academicians. One of those was Henry Fuseli, who as Keeper of the Academy Schools through this period must have provided references as part of his duties, and accordingly provided the second largest number of recommendations (nineteen; all but one students at the RA). The lead in providing references was taken by William Alexander, artist and keeper of prints and drawings (twenty-two; mainly but not exclusively students). Overall, officers and Trustees were most active in admitting students. Most only ever provided a reference for one, or at most a handful, and the jibe about “friends of the librarians, & their friends’ friends” contains some truth. But the same point applies to the artists, most of whom only ever recommended one student, often known personally to them already: David Wilkie recommended his assistant, John Zephaniah Bell; George Dawe provided a reference for his own son; Thomas Lawrence for his pupil William Etty; Thomas Phillips and John Flaxman, the relatives of fellow Academicians; Thomas Stothard, the son of a neighbour (Kempe). Geography, too, seems to have played a role, with referees often coming from the same area as their favoured student: Francis Horner recommended John Henning, whom he had known in their native Scotland; the Scottish George Chalmers recommended James Tannock; Arthur Champernowne put forward William Brockedon, his protégé, whom he had supported in moving from Devon to the metropolis to pursue art; James Northcote recommended two fellow West Countrymen; Benjamin West, notorious for giving special assistance to visiting American students, two such (Leslie and Morse). If the admission procedure could be interpreted as an opportunity for the Academy to assert a corporate, professionalized identity, based purely on merit, we can nonetheless detect underlying patterns of kinship, personal, social, and geographical affiliation. Simply stated, even if study at the Museum was free and freely available, any given student would still need to access a letter of reference and the time to go to the Museum (as well as the material means to acquire the portfolio, paper, and chalks anticipated by the Trustees). The opening hours for students militated against anyone attending who had to use these daylight hours for work, a point which was made quite often with reference to the Reading Room through this period. 63 The most assiduous students needed the time free to study at the British Museum, something that well-off students like Eastlake, Brockedon, Briggs, and Monro had readily available to them. Their peers at the Academy who were obliged to work during the day to make a living, or who were serving apprenticeships, would simply not be able to make the hours available at the Museum. 64 The ambitious painter Thomas Christmas was free to attend the Museum, having dedicated himself to study after working as a clerk, but his brother, Charles George Christmas, who held down a job in the Audit Office, would have struggled; accounting for his studies at the Academy, he had told Farington, “He shd. continue to do the business at the Auditors' Office, Whitehall, which occupies Him from 10 oClock till 3 each day, as it will keep His mind free from anxiety abt. His means of living and leave Him with a feeling of independence.” 65 Given that the students were admitted to the Townley Gallery from noon to 4 o’clock in the afternoon, and that the Trustees continued to prohibit the use of artificial lights in the Museum, there was scarcely any real possibility of Charles George Christmas attending, although he also enjoyed the comforts of a middle-class home background (their father was a Bank of England official). With the ascent of utilitarian criticism, visitor levels were turned to anew as a measure of the institution’s fulfilment or failure to fulfil its “national” purpose. On strictly statistical terms, the Museum seemed to be successful at providing opportunities for art students. Only under the closest scrutiny, with attention to the “micro-history” of individual lives, does that illusion start to be tested. It is, though, at this “micro” level that we can apprehend the characteristic paradox of an emerging cultural modernity, one that is still with us. Yet the point, to follow Rancière, is not to see the past ascent of a present situation, but to force ourselves to feel uneasy with that sense of recognition and its tacit model of history. The evidence is that free access to culture and the (circumscribed) promotion of equality were combined with socially restrictive patterns of preferment. 66 Study at the British Museum may have been free, and freely available to properly qualified students of the Academy, but you needed to be in the right place at the right time, to have the time available, and, indeed, to know or at least be able to access the right people, to get in. This point may seem unduly sociological or even tendentious, but overlooking it involves a denial of the socially invested nature of time, specifically, of the scholastic time (given over to study or contemplation or to creation) mythically removed from the influence of social forces. 67 The acts of nomination which saw certain men and women given special access to the Townley Gallery, acts so seemingly trivial in themselves involving perhaps only an exchange of words and a scribbled note, were microcosmic manifestations of social authority of the most far-reaching kind. 68 When Robert Butt, the principal manager of the bronze and porcelain department at Messrs Howell & James, Regent-street, was examined by the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures in 1835, he noted: The process by which a knowledge of the arts of painting and sculpture is now acquired is this: a young man receives tuition from a private master; he draws from the antique at the British Museum for a certain time, and when he shows that he has sufficient talent to qualify him for a student of the Royal Academy he is admitted; but the expense of acquiring that preliminary knowledge is considerable, and the young artist must also be maintained by his relatives during the time that he is acquiring it. 69 The following year, in a further parliamentary committee, this time dedicated to testing out the British Museum’s claims to public status, James Crabb, “House Decorator” of Shoe Lane, Fleet Street, was asked, “Did you ever obtain any assistance, by means of casts, from the better specimens of sculpture in the Museum or elsewhere?”, to which he replied, “I should derive assistance from them if I had the opportunity, but I have not time.” 70 Considered sociologically, as the personal experience of these men seems to have obliged them to do, time was certainly of the essence. The prevalence of students with secure middle-class backgrounds at the British Museum might, then, be taken as evidence of an early phase in the “middle-classification” of art practice, the awkward but evocative phrase used recently by Angela McRobbie in her eye-opening observations of careers in the present-day creative industries. 71 Whatever emphasis may be put on equality of access to educational opportunity, however rigorously fairminded and anonymized the tests and measures involved in admission procedures, without forms of positive support to counterbalance or actively adjust social inequalities, those same inequalities will tend to be reproduced, homologically, in the educational field. This is patently not a simple matter of social and material advantage underpinning artistic enterprise in a wholly predictable way; such would be a nonsense, in light of the many students who did not enjoy such advantages. Instead, it is the very flexibility built into the exclusionary processes of the emerging cultural field which is significant—the possibility that talented students could get access, gain reputation, achieve success, without being limited by their social origins. “Freeing” art education allowed for the expression of personal preferences or dispositions at an individual level, which at an aggregate level reproduced larger power relations. Exposing that ultimately exclusionary process, which may be marked only in small differences, in personal dispositions and behaviours, in the personal choices and decisions which are neither truly personal nor really pure as choices, is no small task. This essay, and the biographical survey accompanying it, with its details of a multitude of student lives otherwise scarcely recorded or recognized, is intended as a small contribution to that larger project, with the excess of data presented here perhaps imposing, in itself, new requirements on our understanding of the history of art education. Appendix Regulations for the admission of students of the Royal Academy to the Townley Gallery at the British Museum (May 1808): [7] That the students of the Royal Academy be admitted into the Gallery of Antiquities upon every Friday in the months of April, May, June, & July, & every day in the months of August and September, from the hours of twelve to four, except on Wednesdays and Saturdays the Students, not exceeding twenty at a time, to be admitted by a Ticket from the President and Council of the Royal Academy, signed by their Secretary. [8] The better to maintain decorum among the Students, a person properly qualified shall be nominated by the Royal Academy from their own body, who shall attend during the hours of study; the name of such person to be signified in writing, from time to time, by the Secretary of the Royal Academy to the Principal Librarian of the British Museum. [9] That the members of the Royal Academy have access to the Gallery of Antiquities at all admissible times, upon application to the Principal Librarian or the Senior under Librarian in Residence [10] That on the Fridays in April, May June & July one of the officers of the Department of Antiquities do attend in the Gallery of Antiquities according to Rotation in discharge of his ordinary Duty. [11] That in the months of August & September some one of the several Officers of the Museum, then in Residence, do (according to a Rotation to be agreed upon by themselves & confirmed by the Principal Librarian) attend on the Gallery upon the Days for the admission of Students. [12] That the attendants in the Department of Antiquities be always present in the Gallery during the times when the Students are admitted. 72 Footnotes The original register is held in the Keeper’s Office, Department of Prints and Drawings, British Museum. Patrick Joyce, “Speaking up for the State” (2014), https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/patrick-joyce/ speaking-up-for-state. These points are made in light of a larger research project, which has given rise to the present study: a biographical survey of all the students of paintings, sculpture, and engraving who were active at the Royal Academy schools between its foundation in 1769 and 1830 together with a monograph, provisionally titled The Talent of Success: The Royal Academy Schools in the Age of Turner, Blake and Constable, c. 1770–1840 (forthcoming). This fuller survey indicates several important shifts over these decades, including a fundamantal shift in the proportion of students coming from family backgrounds in the arts and design-oriented trades, in comparison with those coming from professional and genteel backgrounds. It exposes, specifically, a new group whose fathers were engaged as “officers”, in the civil service or bureaucratic roles, who in turn had a disproportionate representation within the developing art establishment (as Academicians, or as officials in other cultural bodies). The term “art world”, as designating a space of co-production, stems from Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (1984), rev. edn (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008). As deployed here, it is closer in conception to the sociological “field” as detailed by Pierre Bourdieu across a succession of influential works. Notable among these, for present purposes because of its methodological statement about the homological analysis of the world (field) of art in relation to the field of power, is The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), esp. 214–15. See, notably, the chapter on “Workers in Art” in Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, first published 1859 with numerous further editions. On the self-motivated artist as the model for all forms of work, see Angela McRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), esp. 70–76. Holger Hoock, The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) and Hoock, “The British State and the Anglo-French Wars Over Antiquities, 1798–1858”, Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (2007): 49–72. Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003) and Joyce, The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State Since 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); also his “What is the Social in Social History?”, Past and Present 206, no. 1 (2010): 213–48. On this Foucauldian framing of art education and creative production within liberalism, see McRobbie, Be Creative, 71–76 and passim. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944; Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, ed. Michel Sennelert, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (London and New York: Verso, 2007); Pierre Bourdieu, On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992, ed. Patrick Champagne and others, trans. David Fernbach (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014). See Edward Higgs, Identifying the English: A History of Personal Identification 1500 to the Present (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 97–119. Higgs’s account is, essentially, positive about the liberties and rights secured by this rising documentation. The position taken here is more determinedly Foucauldian. For the foundational role of statistics in “liberalisation”, and the hidden affinities between the liberal and the totalitarian, see Michael Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 2004). Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 69. A biographical dictionary of Royal Academy students from 1769–1830. See note 3, above. Jacques Rancière, The Method of Equality: Interviews with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan, trans. Julie Rose (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016), 108. Neil Chambers, Joseph Banks and the British Museum: The World of Collecting, 1770–1830 (London: Routledge, 2007), 107. The register is mentioned in the notice of Seymour Kirkup in G. E. Bentley, Blake Records, 2nd edn (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2004), 289n. Kirkup was an unusually assiduous student at the Museum, admitted in 1809 and renewing his ticket through to 1812. The reference in Bentley appears to be the only published reference to the register. The admission of the Paytherus sisters to draw at the Museum is noted by James Hamilton in his London Lights: The Minds that Moved the City that Shook the World, 1805–51 (London: John Murray, 2007), 72, although with reference to the early Reading Room register (marked “1795”) in the British Museum Central Archive, rather than the volume in Prints and Drawings. See J. T. Smith, Nollekens and his Times, 2 vols., 2nd edn (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), 1: 242. Viccy Coltman, Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 242–44. See B. F. Cook, The Townley Marbles (London: British Museum Press, 1985) and Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum, 1800–1939 (London: British Museum Press, 1992). Chambers, Joseph Banks, 107. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 Derek Cash, “Access to Museum Culture: The British Museum from 1753 to 1836”, British Museum Occasional Papers 133 (2002), 68. http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/publications/research_publications_series/2002/ access_to_museum_culture.aspx. The British Museum, Central Archive, C/1/5/1029–30. Library of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, CM/4/50–52. Library of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, CM/4/59. The British Museum, Central Archive, C/1/5/1034. The British Museum, Central Archive, C/1/5/1043–144. Cf. “Chapter III: Concerning the Admission into the British Museum”, in Acts and Votes of Parliament, Statutes and Rules, and Synopsis of the Contents of the British Museum (London, 1808), 15–16. Joseph Farington, The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kenneth Garlick, Angus Macintyre, and others, 17 vols. (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1978–98), 9: 3284. Library of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, GM/2/366, 370. Library of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, GM/2/371. Library of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, GM/2/372–73. Diary of Joseph Farington, 9: 3313. Diary of Joseph Farington, 9: 3317. Diary of Joseph Farington, 9: 3284. The British Museum, Central Archive, C/3/9/2426. The British Museum, Central Archive, C/3/9/2428. The British Museum, Central Archive, C/1/5/1069. The British Museum, Central Archive, C/1/5/1070. The arrangement of the galleries was first detailed in a written description provided by Westmacott for Prince Hoare’s Academic Annals (London, 1809) and in Taylor Combe’s A Description of the Ancient Marbles in the British Museum, 3 vols. (London, 1812–17). See Cook, Townley Marbles, 59–61. Karl Friedrich Schinkel, “The English Journey”: Journal of a Visit to France and Britain in 1826, ed. David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann (New Haven, CT, and London, 1993), 74. The record of admissions to view prints and drawings must have arisen from the new regulations issued by the Trustees in November 1814; see, Antony Griffiths, “The Department of Prints and Drawings during the First Century of the British Museum”, The Burlington Magazine 136, 1097 (1994): 536. In March 1817 the student artist William Bewick wrote to his brother: “I last Monday set my name down as a student in the British Museum.” See Thomas Landseer, ed., Life and Letters of William Bewick (Artist), 2 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1871), 1: 37. Edward Nygren, “James Ward, RA (1769–1859): Papers and Patrons”, Walpole Society 75 (2013): 16. Jack Tupper, “Extracts from the Diary of an Artist. No.V”, The Crayon, 12 December 1855, 368. An album of drawings of the Townley Marbles in the British Museum (2010,5006.1877.1–40) appears to have been collected by Townley himself, so dates to before the installation of the marbles at the Museum. The drawings serve as records of the objects rather than student exercises. The drawings by John Samuel Agar in the Getty Research Institute are evidently preparatory for the prints published in Specimens of Antient Sculpture. BL Add MS 37,163 f.106. This and other figures in the Townley collection could also be found as casts in the Royal Academy’s plaster schools, so even if Wood’s drawing, for example, could be traced, it could not definitively be said to be made in the Townley Gallery. See Ann Chumbley and Ian Warrell, Turner and the Human Figure: Studies of Contemporary Life, exh. cat. (London: Tate Gallery, 1989), 12–13. Eric Shanes, Young Mr Turner: The First Forty Years, 1775–1815 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2016), 33–34. Hansard (House of Commons), 16 February 1821, c.724 (online at http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/ 1821/feb/16/british-museum). See Cash, “Access to Museum Culture”, 197–225 for a full account of public discussions around this date. Quoted in Cash, “Access to Museum Culture”, 208. British Museum: Returns to two Orders of the Honourable House of Commons, dated 16 th February 1821, House of Commons, 23 February 1821, 2. Cash “Access to Museum Culture”, 71. Quoted in The Literary Chronicle, 17 March 1821, 168. Edward Edwards, Lives of the Founders of the British Museum (London: Trübner and Co., 1870), 520. 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 Bibliography Acts and Votes of Parliament, Statutes and Rules, and Synopsis of the Contents of the British Museum. London, 1808. Becker, Howard S. Art Worlds (1984). Rev. edn. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008. Bentley, G. E. Blake Records. 2nd edn. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. Boltanski, Luc, and Eve Chiapello. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Trans. Gregory Elliott. London and New York: Verso, 2007. See Martin Myrone, “Something too Academical: The Problem with Etty”, in William Etty: Art and Controversy, ed. Sarah Burnage, Mark Hallett, and Laura Turner (London: Philip Wilson, 2011), 47–59. The barest and most conjectural biographies include those for William Carr of New Broad Street; W. W. Torrington; Edward Thomson; Richard Moses; and Mr Lewer. Information is most notably lacking for the trio of Miss Cowper, Miss Moula, and Mr Turner of Gower Street; William Hamilton of Stafford Place; William Irving of Montague Street; Thomas Williams of Hatton Garden; Daniel Jones; M. Hatley of Albermarle Street; Miss Edgar; Miss Carmichael of Granville Street; Mr Atwood; Mr Higgins of Norfolk Street; George Pisey of Castle Street; Charles White of George Street; Robert Walter Page of Wigmore Street; Henry A. Matthew; Thomas Welsh; and John Hall. Students were entered as “probationers” for a period of three months (which might be extended), and once registered could attend the Schools for a period of ten years. Ralph Irvine; Arthur Champernowne; the Chevalier de Barde; John Disney; John Campbell; Edward Utterson; John Lambert; Robert Batty; Alexander Huey; Richard Thomson; Charles Toplis; John Frederick Williams; Edward Burrows; William Carr; W. W. Torrington. Jane Landseer; Janet Ross; Georgiana Ross; the two Misses Paytherus; H. Edgar; Maria Singleton; Elizabeth Appleton; Louisa Champernowne; Miss Carmichael; Elizabeth Batty; Frances Edwards; Eliza Kempe; Ann Damer; Miss Cowper; Miss Moula; Miss Trotter; Miss Adams; Sarah Newell; Emma Kendrick; Jane Gurney. Gentleman’s Magazine (1820) and A Trip to Paris in August and September (1815), quoted by William T. Whitley in his Art in England, 1800–1820 (London: Medici Society, 1928), 263, as evidence that “It was still thought improper for women to study from such figures” as the Apollo Belvedere. Cash, “Access to Museum Culture”, 113. As the American Samuel F. B. Morse (a student at the Royal Academy and the British Museum) noted in 1811: “I was surprised on entering the gallery of paintings at the British Institution, at seeing eight or ten ladies as well as gentlemen, with their easels and palettes and oil colours, employed in copying some of the pictures. You can see from this circumstance in what estimation the art is held here, since ladies of distinction, without hesitation or reserve, are willing to draw in public.” See Edward Lind Morse, ed., Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals, 2 vols. (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1914), 1: 45. Lists of students admitted to copy at the British Institution appear in the Directors’ minutes, NAL RC V 12–14, and in contemporary press reports. Individuals admitted to copy at Dulwich Picture Gallery were routinely listed in the “Bourgeois Book of Regulations” from 1820; photocopies and notes at Dulwich Picture Gallery, C1 and H3. This is expecially clearly expressed in James Ward’s diary notes on his visits in 1817, meeting there the artists William Skelton, Joseph Clover, Henry Fuseli, and William Long, but also the gentlemen collectors and scholars William Lock, Edward Utterson, and Francis Douce (Nygren, “James Ward”). See Cash, “Access to Museum Culture”, 217 and passim. Although the timing of the Academy’s evening classes might seem to be more accommodating, even this may have been challenging. The master of Richard Westall, later a watercolour painter, “permitted him to draw at the Royal Academy, in the evenings; but for that indulgence he worked a corresponding number of hours in the morning”. Gentleman's Magazine, February 1837, 213. Diary of Joseph Farington, 4: 4783. On educational tests as linking “macro” and “micro”, “both sectoral mechanisms or unique situations and societal arrangements”, see Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism, 32. See Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). “Acts of nomination, from the most trivial acts of bureaucracy, like the issuing of an identity card, or a sickness or disablement certification, to the most solemn, which consecrate nobilities, lead, in a kind of infinite regress, to the realization of God on earth, the State, which guarantees, in the last resort, the infinite series of acts of authority certifying by delegation the validity of the certificates of legitimate existence”, Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, 245. The potentially trivial nature of the acts of nomination involved in gaining access to the British Museum is highlighted in Joseph Planta’s own account of providing recommendations (for the Reading Room) often only on the basis of casual conversations. See Cash, “Access to Museum Culture”, 207. Report of the Select Committee on Arts and Manufactures, House of Commons, 4 September 1835, 40. Report of the Select Committee on the British Museum, quoted in Edward Edwards, Remarks on the “Minutes of Evidence” Taken before the Select Committee on the British Museum, 2nd edn (London [1839]), 14. McRobbie, Be Creative. The British Museum, Central Archive, C/1/5/1043–144. 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 Bourdieu, Pierre. On the State: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1989–1992. Ed. Patrick Champagne and others. Trans. David Fernbach. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014. – – –. Pascalian Meditations. Trans. Richard Nice. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. – – –. The Rules of Art. Trans. Susan Emanuel. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996. Cash, Derek. “Access to Museum Culture: The British Museum from 1753 to 1836.” British Museum Occasional Papers 133 (2002) http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/publications/research_publications_series/2002/ access_to_museum_culture.aspx Chambers, Neil. Joseph Banks and the British Museum: The World of Collecting, 1770–1830. London: Routledge, 2007. Chumbley, Ann, and Ian Warrell. Turner and the Human Figure: Studies of Contemporary Life. London: Tate Gallery, 1989. Coltman, Viccy. Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Combe, Taylor. A Description of the Ancient Marbles in the British Museum, 3 vols. London, 1812–17. Cook, B. F. The Townley Marbles. London: British Museum Press, 1985. Edwards, Edward. Lives of the Founders of the British Museum. London: Trübner and Co., 1870. – – –. Remarks on the “Minutes of Evidence” Taken before the Select Committee on the British Museum. 2nd edn. London [1839]. Farington, Joseph. The Diary of Joseph Farington. Ed. Kenneth Garlick, Angus Macintyre and others. 17 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1978–98. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Ed. Michel Sennelert. Trans. Graham Burchell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. – – –. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76. Ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Trans. David Macey. London: Penguin, 2004. Griffiths, Antony. “The Department of Prints and Drawings during the First Century of the British Museum.” The Burlington Magazine 136 (1994): 531–44. Hamilton, James. London Lights: The Minds that Moved the City that Shook the World, 1805–51. London: John Murray, 2007. Higgs, Edward. Identifying the English: A History of Personal Identification 1500 to the Present. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Hoock, Holger. “The British State and the Anglo-French Wars Over Antiquities, 1798–1858.” Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (2007): 49–72. – – –. The King’s Artists: The Royal Academy of Arts and the Politics of British Culture, 1760–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Jenkins, Ian. Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum, 1800–1939. London: British Museum Press, 1992. Joyce, Patrick. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso, 2003. – – –. “Speaking up for the State” (2014). https://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/patrick-joyce/speaking-up-for-state – – –. The State of Freedom: A Social History of the British State Since 1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. – – –. “What is the Social in Social History?” Past and Present 206, no. 1 (2010): 213–48. Landseer, Thomas, ed. Life and Letters of William Bewick (Artist). 2 vols. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1871. McRobbie, Angela. Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Culture Industries. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Morse, Edward Lind, ed. Samuel F. B. Morse: His Letters and Journals. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1914 Myrone, Martin. “Something too Academical: The Problem with Etty.” In William Etty: Art and Controversy, ed. Sarah Burnage, Mark Hallett, and Laura Turner. London: Philip Wilson, 2011, 47–59. Nygren, Edward. “James Ward, RA (1769–1859): Papers and Patrons.” Walpole Society 75 (2013). Polanyi, Karl. The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944). Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002. Rancière, Jacques. The Method of Equality: Interviews with Laurent Jeanpierre and Dork Zabunyan. Trans. Julie Rose. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2016. Schinkel, Karl Friedrich. “English Journey”: Journal of a Visit to France and Britain in 1826. Ed. David Bindman and Gottfried Riemann. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1993. Shanes, Eric. Young Mr Turner: The First Forty Years, 1775–1815. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2016. Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help: With Illustrations of Character and Conduct. London: John Murray, 1859. Smith, J. T. Nollekens and his Times, 2 vols. 2nd edn, London: Henry Colburn, 1829. Tupper, Jack. “Extracts from the Diary of an Artist. No.V.” The Crayon, 12 December 1855. Whitley, William T. Art in England, 1800–1820. London: Medici Society, 1928.  drawn from the antique Artists & the Classical Ideal Adriano Aymonino and Anne Varick Lauder with contributions from Eloisa Dodero, Rachel Hapoienu, Ian Jenkins, Jerzy Kierkuc ́-Bielin ́ski, Michiel C. Plomp and Jonathan Yarker sir john soane’s museum 2015  Drawn from the Antique: Artists & the Classical Ideal An exhibition at Teylers Museum, Haarlem 11 March – 31 May 2015 Sir John Soane’s Museum, London 25 June –26 September 2015 This catalogue has been generously supported by the Tavolozza Foundation and the Wolfgang Ratjen Stiftung, Vaduz This exhibition has been made possible through the support of the Government Indemnity Scheme Sir John Soane’s Museum is a non-departmental body and is funded by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport Published in Great Britain 2015 Sir John Soane’s Museum, 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London, wc2a 3bp Tel: 020 7405 2107 www.soane.org Reg. Charity No. 313609 Text © the listed authors All photographs © as listed on pages 254–56 ISBN (paperback): 978-0-9573398-9-7 ISBN (hardback): 978-0-9932041-0-4 Designed and typeset in Albertina and Requiem by Libanus Press Ltd, Marlborough Printed by Hampton Printing (Bristol) Ltd Frontispiece: Michael Sweerts, A Painter’s Studio (detail), c. 1648–50, cat. 12 (p. 134) Page 10: Hendrick Goltzius, The Apollo Belvedere (detail), 1591, cat. 6 (p. 107) Page 78: William Pether, An Academy (detail), 1772, cat. 24 (p. 189) Contents Preface 6 Abraham Thomas Introduction 7 Adriano Aymonino and Anne Varick Lauder Acknowledgements 9 Ideal Beauty and the Canon in Classical Antiquity 11 Ian Jenkins and Adriano Aymonino ‘Nature Perfected’: The Theory & Practice of 15 Drawing after the Antique Adriano Aymonino  Catalogue Bibliography Photo credits 79 232 254  - authors of catalogue entries AA: Adriano Aymonino: cats 12, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 27 AVL: Anne Varick Lauder: cats 3, 5, 10, 12, 13, 14, 17, 18, 19, 23, 30, 34, 35 ED: Eloisa Dodero: cats 9, 22 JK-B: Jerzy Kierkuc ́-Bielin ́ski: cat. 29 JY: Jonathan Yarker: cats 24, 25, 26, 27, 28 MP: Michiel C. Plomp: cats 6, 7, 8, 11, 31, 32 RH: Rachel Hapoienu: cats 1, 2, 4, 33. The exhibition ‘Drawn from the antique: artists and the classical ideal” examines the crucial role played by antique sculpture in artistic education and practice, a theme which lies at the heart of the conception of Sir John Soane’s Museum. As a student at the Royal Academy, Soane wins a travelling scholarship to embark on the grand tour. This forms the basis of a classical education which would prove to be an enduring influence on his subsequent career as one of the most important architects of the Regency period. The drawings, paintings and prints selected for the exhibition ‘Drawn from the antique – artists and the classical ideal’ offer a glimpse into an intriguing world of academies, artists’ workshops and private studios, each populated with carefully chosen examples of statuary which provide compelling snapshots of classical antiquity. Similarly, within his house and museum at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, Soane creates his own bespoke arrangements of ancient statuary and architectural fragments, providing educational tools which defined an informal curriculum for both his Royal-Academy students and the apprenticed pupils working within his on-site architectural office. In fact, one could consider much of Soane’s museum as an extended series of studio spaces, intended for academic improvement and personal inspiration. The concept of the exhibition ‘Drawn from the antique – artists and the classical ideal’ evolves from a series of conversations between Timothy Knox, and the collector K. Bellinger, to see if there may be some way to showcase the Bellinger extraordinary and unique collection of art-works *depicting* artists’ studios. We extend a special thanks to K. Bellinger, not only for her generosity in allowing us to exhibit these wonderful pieces but also for all the hard work in securing some stunning loans from other collections. We are grateful for the loans from the Getty Collection, the Rijksmuseum, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Kunstbibliothek in Berlin. For the UK loans we would like to thank The British Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Royal Academy of Arts and the Courtauld Gallery. “Drawn From The Antique: Artists and The Classical Ideal” is a collaboration between The Soane Collection and the Teylers Collection, and I am grateful to M. Scharloo for agreeing to host the first leg of this exhibition, and also to Michiel Plomp, for facilitating the exhibition in Haarlem. It feels rather appropriate that the founders of our two institutions, Teyler and Soane, were both collectors with singular visions of how their collections should provide a resource for academic study and creative practice. This exhibition would not have been possible without the fantastic curatorial team that K. Bellinger assembled: A. Aymonino, A. Varick Lauder, and R. Hapoienu. I would like to express my gratitude to them for bringing the project to fruition. I would also like to thank Paul Joannides for his editing work on the catalogue and all of my colleagues at the Soane who worked to make this exhibition a reality, especially S. Palmer, D. Jenkins and J. Kierkuc-Bielinski, as well as S. Wightman at Libanus for designing such a beautiful catalogue. Finally, I would like to extend a special thanks to the Tavolozza Foundation and the Wolfgang Ratjen Stiftung, Vaduz, for their generous support of the exhibition and the catalogue. The exhibition explores one of the central practices of artists for years: drawing after the antique – l’antico. Ancient Graeco-Roman statuary provides artists with a “model” from which he learns how to represent the volume, the pose and the expression of the male nude and which simultaneously offers a perfected example of anatomy and proportion. For an established artist, a piece of antique statuary or a elief offers a repertory of form that serves as inspiration. Because the imitation (mimesis) and representation of nature is the principal aim of the classical artist, education in a workshop or an academy revolves around the study of geometry and perspective – to represent space – and anatomy, the antique but also THE LIVE MODEL – to learn how to deploy and mould the male body convincingly in a piece of statuary. This practical approach to the antique – as a convenient model for depicting or moulding  the naked male form – is accompanied by a more theoretical, aesthetic, and philosophical one. A piece of ancient Graeco-Roman statuary statue is perceived as a bench-mark of perfection and of the Platonic concept of ideal beauty, the physical result of a careful selection of the best parts of nature. Classical Graeco-Roman authors, such as the Italians Vitruvio, Cicerone or Plinio, reveal to the artist and the philosopher that antique statuary is based on a system. There is a Pythagoreian harmonic proportions. This rests on the mathematical relationships between a part of the body and the whole body. A piece of ancient statuary therefore embodies the same rational principle on which the harmony of the cosmos and nature are based. It is the powerful combination of this rational and universal principle that the antique expresses, together with its extreme versatility as a model of forms, that guarantees its ubiquitous success. Students in the early stages of their training are encouraged to ‘assimilate’ fully the idealised beauty of a classical statue through the copying of plaster casts. Only then can he be exposed to an ‘imperfections of nature’ as embodied by the live naked male model (“Drawn From Life”). This is intended to provide the craftsman with a standard of perfection that is then infused into his own statuary. For an artist, it was considered essential to travel to Rome. At Rome, the artists confront the venerated antique ‘original’ – not the copy -- and assembles his own ‘drawn’ collections of models – ‘drawn from the antique’ only, not ‘drawn from life’, for which you don’t need to go to Rome. Drawing (desegno) is considered the only intellectual part of an art – the first sensorial (specifically visual) manifestation of an idea. Drawing from and ‘after’ the Antique (desegno dall’antico) is the union of intellectual medium and intellectual subject. It becomes an integral part of the learning process and the activity of the artist who aims at pleasing the Society gentleman. It proves crucial for legitimising the ambitions of the artist who fashions himself as a practitioner of a liberal and intellectual activity. So widespread is it, that representing the practice itself developed into an artistic genre. Through a selection of pieces exemplifying this fascinating category of images, by artists as diverse as the Italian Zuccaro, Dutch Goltzius and Rubens, French Natoire, Swiss Fuseli and English Turner, we may attempt to analyse this phenomenon. We begin with an image relating to an early Italian academy and with a portrait, in which a piece of ancient statuary is included.We may proceed to an image of an artist as he ‘draws’ after a celebrated statue – the Apollo del Belvedere and the Laoconte, il torso del Belvedere, l’Antino del Belvedere – in the cortile ottogono del casino della villa Belvedere in Monte Vaticano, the Belvedere collection that serves as a model. We next may explore the varied approaches of artists to a piece of ccanonical statuary in Rome and the ways in which the Italian academic curriculum – with the antique (l’antico) as one of the two cornerstones (the other being: ‘natura’) – spreads all over Rome, where each palazzo claims its collection – Farnese, Ludovisi, Albani – and even up to La Tribuna di Firenze.An Italian drawing manual is a powerful vehicle for the uncostested establishment and entrenchment of the classical ideal. Significantly, a manual illustrates the practice of copying after the antique in their frontispieces. Next follow two of the most relevant images embodying the classicist credo of the accademia dell’arte at Rome and academie des beaux arts a Paris. The accademia a Roma codifies a structured syllabus. First-hand experience of the Antique ‘original’ in Rome becomes a must. Fuseli magnificently draws the fragments of the head, right hand, and left foot of the colossal statue of Constantine at the  Campidoglio. Fuseli’s image expresses a ‘romantic’ attitude towards classical statuary, based on the direct emotion and empathy – the eros of Plato, and the catharsis of Aristotle -- rather than a ‘study’ (studio) of an idealised beauty and proportion. Classicism is embraced and an academic syllabus is developed to graduate from the academy – as opposed to the nobility who can still practice amateur and present their statues at the annual exhibitions. The elite, educated in the classics, has a crucial role in disseminating the classical ideal. For less privileged students at Oxford (‘only the poor learn at Oxford’) the Ashmolean starts collecting a plaster cast of this or that original in Rome. Statues serve a decorative purpose in the villa garden fountain --- and the palazzo interior -- a clear sign of the commercialisation and further diffusion of the Antique. But while classical statuary becomes a n attract when doing the calls. Its role within academic curricula remains well-established. The Antique as a canonical model begins to be challenged by the more dynamic and innovative forces of art, a challenge that led to its rapid decline. The last exhibit shows a plaster copy of the celebrated ancient bust of Homer at the Farnese collection in Napoli is placed on equal footing with a bust of a non-classical author, neo-classical statuary, and even with a multicoloured porcelain parrot, reveals how the Antique becomes just one of the many historical references favoured by society, if not by Society. Although focused on images representing the relationship of an artist WITH the Antique, that is, the act or performance of copying or drawing from or after it, this catalogue includes also examples of the product of the practice: sketches actually ‘drawn from the antique’ not by students wanting to pass, but by professionals such as Goltzius, destined to be disseminated through the engraving. We have also included drawings by Rubens and Turner showing the compromising practice of setting a live model in the pose of the antique model – lo spinario, i lottatori in the case of a syntagma or statuary group -- and an early academic study by Turner the student of the torso del Belvedere (Aiace contempla suicidio). An image may portray how the artist HIMSELF in the presence of the Antique. The point of view should always be that of the intended addressee: the noble Epicurean connoisseur. The form and ideas that he enjoys and seeks in the classical model, the diversity of his taste according to his mood, and the kinds of image that are created to show their own relationship with the Antique. The attitudes towards classical statuary of a manic collector or an antiquarian, although touched upon in the essays and in some of the entries, are not discussed at length. We also decided to focus primarily on free-standing in the round male nude statue or syntagma (i lottatori), as opposed to a relief. The free-standing in the round reproduction of the male naked body is what the gentleman enjoys in terms of the proportion, the anatomy and his beauty. A relief rather serves as a compositional model and inspiration for a narrative mythological or historical scene. Drawings after reliefs would be the subject of a different exhibition. The choice of the two venues is entirely appropriate. Haarlem is one of the earliest Northern cities where the Antique is a subject of debate – within the private academy established by Mander, Cornelisz, and Goltzius – whose magnificent series of drawings after canonical classical statues is preserved in the Teylers Collection. The Soane Collection at Lincoln Fields, on the other hand, represents an incarnations of the classicist curriculum. It is an eccentric, kaleidoscopic academy where, in the name of the union of the arts, the study of Vitruvian and Palladian architecture gets integrated with the copying of paintings, classical statuary and plaster casts, to attain that mastery of drawing of the  human forms (uomo vitruviano) advocated by Vitruvius as a crucial element of architecture (to be replaced by Le Corbusier’s functionalist metron!). The idea for this exhibition has evolved. The Bellinger Collection is based on a just one theme: the sculptor at work. Fascinated by the creative process and the mystique surrounding it. The Bellinger Collection includes items in a range of media – drawings, paintings, prints, photographs and sculpture. Rather than stage an obvious ‘greatest hits’ exhibition focusing on celebrity, my idea is to show little-known, rarely exhibited, works and to present aspects of the collection, which had been rather neglected by scholarship in an attempt to open new ground. A preliminary step is made by Knox, who approached K. Bellingerto enquire whether she might showcase works from the collection in the piano nobile of the Palazz Soane. It soon became apparent that the theme of the relationship between the sculptor and antique statuary, which seemed so suitable to the venue of an architect’s palazzo-cum-academy-cum-museum with its rooms filled with antiquities and plaster reproductions, would have resonance with the Few. Accompanying a selection of works from the Bellinger Collection we have attempted to borrow on loan some of the most ‘iconic’ images, and others less well-known, that demonstrate the evolution of this practice of this class of ‘Drawn from the Antique’ over an extended period. Almost half of the works on display have never previously been exhibited and most have not been shown. The resulting display provides the first overview of a phenomenon crucial for the understanding and appreciation of ancient Roman art of the classical Augustean period, which lays stress on the creative processes of the Italophile artist and on the norms and conventions that guides and inspires his art. Presenting a relatively small yet coherent display on a topic that encompasses one of the major themes in the history of Art has been a serious challenge but a most pleasurable one. Our exhibition could not have been accomplished without the unwavering support of K. Bellinger, who generously agreed to part with fourteen choice examples from her little-seen private collection of images of artists at work and who has remained committed to the project since its inception: to Ballinger we owe our deepest gratitude. For the other works on display, we have benefited from the great generosity of colleagues at lending institutions for agreeing to send works in their care – some of them among their most popular and requested – to one or both venues of the exhibition. We owe sincere thanks to H. Chapman at the British Museum, S. Buck at the Courtauld, R. Hibbard and H. Dawson at the Victoria and Albert, C. Saumarez-Smith, H. Valentine and R. Comber at the Royal Academy. Abroad we wish to acknowledge the generosity of L. Hendrix and J. Brooks at Villa Getty, Bernhard von Waldkirch at the Kunsthaus Zürich, T. Dibbits at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and K. Käding at the Kunstbibliothek, Berlin. We are enormously grateful both to the Soane Collection and the Teylers Collection for hosting this two-venue exhibition. Thanks are due to T. Knox and A/ Thomas, for their support for the project, and to S. Palmer, and D. Jenkins, for assisting with the loans. M. Scharloo, of the Teylers and Michiel Plomp, kindly agreed to house the first showing of the exhibition and to lend works from their collection. The catalogue was thoughtfully designed and produced by S. Wightman at Libanus, to whom we owe our warmest thanks, and printed by Hampton Printing in Bristol. R. Hapoienu, oversaw the photography and contributed immeasurably to the catalogue. Other curatorial colleagues have given their time and effort in preparing scholarly entries or essays: E. Dodero, I. Jenkins, J. Kierkuc -Bielinski, M. Plomp and J. Yarker. Special thanks are due to Dodero for sharing an infinite knowledge of antique sources. Finally, we are greatly indebted to P. Joannides for his input. Any and all errors are entirely our own. We wish to acknowledge warmly P. Taylor and Rembrandt Duits for granting us unfettered access to the Photographic Collection of the Warburg and other colleagues and friends who assisted in various ways in bringing this project to fruition: Mattia Biffis, R Blok, Yvonne Tan Bunzl, Wolf Burchard, Elisa Camboni, Martin Clayton, Zeno Colantoni, Paul Crane, Daniela Dölling, Alexander Faber, Cameron Ford, Ketty Gottardo, Martin Grässle, Axel Griesinger, Florian Härb, Eileen Harris, John Harris, Niall Hobhouse, Matthew Hollow, Peter Iaquinandi, Catherine Jenkins, Theda Jürjens, Jill Kraye, David Lachenmann, Alastair Laing, Barbara Lasic, Huigen Leeflang, Cornelia Linde, Anne-Marie Logan, Olivia MacKay, Austeja MacKelaite, Bernard Malhamé, Patrick Matthiesen, Mirco Modolo, Jane Munro, Lorenzo Pericolo, Benjamin Peronnet, Camilla Pietrabissa, Eugene Pooley, Pier Paolo Racioppi, Cristiana Romalli, Gregory Rubinstein, Susan Russell, Nick Savage, Nicolas Schwed, Ilaria Sgarbozza, Kim Sloane, Perrin Stein, MaryAnne Stevens, Marja Stijkel, Michael Sullivan, C. Treves, Michiel Ilja M. Veldman, Anna Villari, Rebecca Wade and Alison Wright. Support for the exhibition and catalogue was provided by the Tavolozza Foundation and the Wolfgang Ratjen Stiftung, Vaduz, to whom we owe our sincere gratitude. Ideal Beauty is the Canon in Classical Antiquity. The practice of drawing from the antique is a time-honoured one – if not antique! But even the Augustean copy makers knew who to imitate --. Since Antino became such an icon, we can say that Adrian finished the practice of ‘drawing from the antique’: He started to ask his slaves to ‘draw from nature’ – the nature of his lover! The philosopher should be reminded of the substantial role that the Antique has played in the education and inspiration of artists for years. Soane famously mixed marble sculpture with plaster reproductions in the learned and decorative interiors of his Lincolnfields villa. A constant theme in ancient philosophy (with which any Oxonian with a Lit. Hum. is more than acquainted with) is that behind the surface chaos of the tangible sensible world, there is a hidden order (kósmos). Harmony occurs when the opposite forces in nature (natura, physis), such as wet and dry, hot and cold, strong and weak, are properly balanced. Well-being depends upon a set of complementary humours. Reason (logos) – but cf. Dodds on the irrational -- is the weapon wielded in a constant struggle against the dark forces of the natural and non-natural artificial conventional realms alike. The concept of ‘number’ plays an especially important role in the Graeco-Roman, or Italic world view. Mathematics was most probably acquired from Babylon and first took root in the cities of Ionia. Pythagora, who had settled in Crotona and Melosponto in southern Italy, discovers the measurable intervals of the musical scale This demonstrates that number holds the key to the mysteries of the harmony of the Universe. Pythagoras was born on the Aegean island of Samos, which was just one of the many city states that participated in the Ionian Enlightenment with its concentration of natural philosophers. Applied mathematics finds a new purpose in the creation of colossal temples in an architectural culture that takes its inspiration from that of East. The technical aspects of this new tectonic art are explained in philosophical treatises. None of them survive but they were known to the Roman philosopher Vitruvio, who uses them extensively for “De Architectura”. His is the only complete treatise on ancient Roman architecture to survive. It is the main channel through which knowledge of ancient Roman architectural principles are handed down. The impact it has on architecture is paramount. Colossal temples are erected and foremost among them is the archaic temple of Diana at Efeso. Its forest of columns, some of them carved pictorially and its painted and gilded mouldings are breath-taking. The Ionian Enlightenment terminates by the catastrophic destruction of Mileto y the Persians. The Persians next set out to punish Athens for her instigation of the revolt. The failure of the Persian invasion in a series of battles on land and sea serve as a catalyst for a great surge of art and thought in the city that was the world’s first democracy. It was in Athens – the ‘Athenian dialectic’ -- that humanity’s sense of self is forged. It is there that mankind acquires a unique and individual soul with personal responsibility for its welfare. In classical antiquity mankind places itself at the centre of the universe and is as Protagoras famously says, ‘the measure of all things’. Protagoras’s contemporary, the philosopher Socrates, leads the way in a moral philosophy aimed at penetrating the dark hinterland of human existence. Humanism prompts a “realism” (de rerum matura) in  product of an ‘ars’ that re-presents the naked male body in a ‘naturalistic’ way. There were those, however, who ha less positive view of human capacity for self-determination. A recurring theme in the philosophy of Socrates’ famous pupil, Plato, is the theory of ‘mimesis’ (‘imitatio’), whereby the product of an ‘ars’  is twice removed from reality by virtue of its being a ‘copy’ of Nature, which is itself a copy of the hidden, intangible reality of the abstract world of the Idea. In Plato’s kósmos, reality is not to be found in Nature. Reality (and ideal beauty) cannot be detected by *sensing*. Rather, reality and beauty is ‘noetic’ and exists beyond nature (trans-naturalia) and can be grasped only through an effort of the ‘intellectual’ (logistikon) part of the tri-partite soul (the other two parts being the thymoeides and the epithymtikon). A man never gets to ‘know’ or grasp this ideal beauty. Man must be governed by the philosopher king, who has the intellectual capacity to achieve true knowledge and understanding of the universal law. The nature that man knows is itself a ‘copy’ (mimesis, imitation – imitative) of this suprasensible realm, so Plato argued and. As an imitation of nature, a product of an ‘ars’ is twice removed from the meta-physical intelligible world. There is no place for the pretensions of artists in the world of true reality. Only the pure and virtuous abstract beauty and goodness (kalloskagathia, bonus et pulchrus) of a ‘form’ (‘forma’) is to be found in the realm of the idea. The clearest and most developed account of Plato’s condemnation of the idols or products of ‘ars’ and his reasons for banning it from his ideal state (polizia, politeia) are to be found in the Socratic dialogue known to modern readers as The Polizia (Politeia). The ‘Polizia’ (Politeia) is beautifully crafted in a series of carefully honed set-piece speeches in which, and the irony is obvious, Plato demonstrates his skills as a philosophical artist – the dialogue aimed at beauty, rather than truth. It is difficult to say to what extent Plato puts words into or takes them out of the mouth of Socrates. The historical Socrates never wrote anything himself. We can at least be sure of Socrates’ insistence upon the imperative to pursue justified true belief (knowledge) as distinct from mere belief or opinion (doxa) and to seek understanding, as distinct from mere creed. These are after all the goals by which Socrates measures the moral integrity of man’s intelligence. When it comes to the standing of the product of an ‘ars’ in Socrates’s moral landscape, we may wonder whether this marble worker who had followed in his father’s ‘ars’ himself shares aristocratic Plato’s anti-thetical view of the ‘artista’. In a dialogue recorded by Xenophon between Socrates and Parrhasio, it is concluded that the product of an ‘ars’ cannot achieve beauty by simply ‘reproducing’ (or imitating, or copying) an individual, particular, single, naked male live model. He who pursues to give a product of an ‘ars’ must instead select the best part of more than one particular, singular male naked live model – this is not Adriano’s portraiture of Antino --  melding (or moulding) those parts (individua) together in such a way as to transcend, by way of a universalium, nature itself (the natural naked male live model) and turn the ‘re-presentation’ of a ‘beautiful’ (kalos) naked male live model into an ‘ideally’ beautiful naked male body. Aristotle. ever practical, ever helpful, opposes Plato in arguing that, instead of being a slave to Nature, man may create (poien) as nature itself created. In his Poetics and Politics he recognises the civic role of the product of an ‘ars’, as he praises the value of the products of the ‘ars’ of Polygnotos. “For Polygnotos re-presents but tweaks a natural male body better than the natural male body is. It’s an improving (perfection) on, rather than an imitation, of ‘imperfect’ nature of this or that particular naked male body – again this is not Antino’s portraiture – To this product of the ‘ars’ Aristotle grants the label of an ideal model – not the live model of imperfect nature. It is futile to try to guess who said what when. Suffice it to say that the statuary-maker is under pressure from various sides to justify the product of his ‘ars’ as a proper exemplar that perfects the imperfection of the natural male live model, reflecting the universal law of the kósmos. The artist has to look at philosophical mathematics. There is a historic change in the re-presentation (improved re-presentation, improvement) in the product of ‘ars’ of the body of a naked live model. Ironically, the abstract concept behind a ‘youth’ or ‘kouros’ [e. g. marble 194.6 cm (h) Met Museum 32.11] with its ‘formulaic’ tendency to convey the naked male form of a live model through a descriptive line and a block-like (rather than waving) form  gives way to contrapositum (contrapposto), and a greater fluidity – if not ‘naturalism’ -- conjuring a three-dimensional volume of live flesh. This ‘naturalistic’ figure type becomes the standard or canon. The ‘canon’ itself (first canon, as we shall see – cf. Lisippo) referred to the Doriforo of Policleto. Policleto obviously moulded and cast in bronze as he was in front of the real ‘doriforo’ (name unknown), the canon (qua model what exemplum) with copyists, notably in the copy of 212 com (h) at Naples – Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Napoli, 1^st century bc copy of original of c. 440 bc, -- inv. 6011  The canon was famous in antiquity for its elaborate system of measurements about which Policleto wites a philosophical treatise known as ‘The Canon.’ To judge from what philosophers say about the spear-bearer, it is an explanation of the principle of proportion that Policleto declares to be the key to perfection in the product of the ‘ars’ qua re-presentation of the body of the male live model. The concept of ‘symmetria’ (commensuratio) is used to describe this system of a measured proportion. To the ancient authors, however, it signified a commensurability of parts measured in relation to one another and to the whole. Thus, the length of a finger was calculated in relation to the hand and the hand in relation to the whole arm and so on. Ideal beauty, based on mathematical perfection was, therefore, quantifiable. The preoccupation with numbers in idealised sculpture has strong links to the number-based aesthetics of the Pythagorean school of mathematics, first anticipated in architecture. Another link to the natural philosophy of the Ionian Enlightenment is the deliberate balancing of opposite motifs. There was found a bio-mechanical system of parts that were at once weight-bearing and weight-free, engaged and disengaged, stretched and contracted, tense and relaxed, raised and lowered – an overall balancing principle of contrapposto found in the statue Doryphoros and in many classical statues extremely influential. Polykleitos trains at a workshop (not an academy like Plato’s!) of Ageladas of Argos, along with Mirone. Mirone’s statue [v. Museo Nazionale Romano, Roma, inv. 126371 – 155 cm (h) copy of original of c. 460-450, marble]  is said to have more by way of ‘commensuratio’ about them than any other statues of his generation. As with the Doryphoros so with Myron’s Discobolo, known only through Roman copies, it is pretty difficult to hypothesise the exact system of proportion that he uses. We detect the deployment of balanced opposites in the composition. The creators of the doriforo and the discobolo share a common regard for the live model that transcends the nature of the live model. Although Polykleitos’ Canon and its physical embodiment, the original doriforo, are lost – the most famous Roman copy was excavated ONLY AT THE END OF THE OTTOCENTO – various literary sources handed over to the Renaissance the knowledge of them and the classical principle that the beautiful model is based on proportion, commensurability and mathematical perfection. This is the quest for the beautiful model that is measured and defined within the premises of natural philosophical mathematics. In the minds of commentators, the attribution of the power of creation (poiesis) to the statue-maker likens him to a seer and affords him a unique insight into his subject. It was said of Policleto that while his skill is suitable for representing what Vico (and Carlyle) calls a ‘hero’ (Italian ‘eroe’ – cf. il culto dell’eroe), the imaginative power of Fidia – author of the Parthenon’s sculptures, notably the Elgin marble of MARTE qua simbolo della mascolinita – conjures a ‘deus’ (dio). His positive view of the intuitive process of artistic creation (poiesis) becomes especially important in Rome where copies of the great works of Greek classical sculpture are reproduced in large numbers. ‘Re-produced’, that is, but not ‘re-plicated’ (cf. replicatura). For no two copies are, by definition, ever exactly *the same* (for one, the piece of marble is ‘another’). A Roman copyist, so-called, is, mostly an ethnic [it. ennico] Greek. He probably saw his product as a variation on a theme, or an improvisation (if not improvement) on the ‘original’, not a slavish copy – plus, his Roman Mecenas couldn’t care less – connoisseurship was looked own. A Roman vir has other things in mind, such as battle! It is through this army of Roman copies that Italian artists acquire a fragmentary knowledge of the proto-type (cf. Weber’s ideal type], the vast majority of which, in bronze, as they should – for sculpting marble is different than moulding wax -- are deliberately melted by Christians as blasphemous pagan, heathen, gods and heroes. The spectre of the greatest mind of all antiquity, Plato, and his condemnation of art always hover over the heads of artists and art lovers alike. In the high empire of ancient Rome a neo-Platonist movement challenges Plato’s extreme opinion and argues for the product of an ‘ars’ of being possessed of the intellectually beautiful (even if first perceived through the senses – nihil est in intellectu quod prior non fuerit in sensu. Plotino notes: ‘now it must be noted that the wax [...] brought under a hand to a ‘beautiful’ ‘form’ or ‘shape’ (eidos, idea, morphe) is ‘beautiful’ not ‘he’ or qua wax – for so the crude block would be as ‘pleasant’ or pleasurable or pleasing – but *qua* form, eidos, shape, morphe, or idea. This practical and workable Aristotelian and neo-Platonic rather than the Platonic philosophy of art was that adopted by most Italians (even if they let Ficino dreamed about!). The paradoxical (feigned, ironic, taunting) superiority of the product of an ‘ars’ art to nature – as a selected, ideal, improved, correctio version of it (no ‘warts and all’) – has been a central premise of the “beau ideal” where ‘beau’ can be in the Romance languages both masculine and neuter (‘il bello’ – il bello ideale) in the humanistic theory of art and especially in its neo-classical incarnation. A statue is admired and enjoyed as the embodiment of a moral aesthetic that can be applied also to a plaster cast. It serves both as the paradigm of art training and as source of inspiration for artists for centuries. For an introduction to ancient aesthetics and views on art, see Tatarkiewicz 1970; Pollitt 1974. Selections of primary sources are included in Pollitt 1983; Pollitt 1990. The main source for this famous sentence is Platone, Theaetetus 151e. See also Diogenes Laertius, De Vitis ... philosophorum, 9.51. 3 Platone, Republic, 10, esp. 10.596E–597E. 4 Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.10.1–5. 5 Aristotele, Poetica, 1448a1; Politica, 1340a33. See also Metafisica, 1.1, 981a. 6 Plinio, Naturalis Historia, 34.57–58. 7 Cicerone, Bruto, esp. 69–70, 296; Plinio, Naturalis Historia, 34.55; Galeno’s treatises, esp. De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis, 5, and De Temperamentis, 1.9; Quintiliano, Institutio Oratoria, esp. 5.12.21 and 12.10.3–9; Vitruvio’s De Architectura, 3.1. 8 Quintiliano, Institutio Oratoria, 12.10.3–9. 9 Plotino, Enneads, 5.8.1. 14  ‘Nature Plus-Quam-Perfected’: -- the ‘Drawn from the Antique’ at the Royal Academy. ‘Desegno dall’antico’, ‘desegno dalla natura’. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Painting at The Royal Academy of Arts in London, Opie arranged a few headings, which included a general definition of painting, the imitation of Nature, the idea of general beauty, the idea of general perfect beauty, the idea of perfect beauty the true object of the highest style, as the aim of the highest style, design, drawing, the most important part of painting, the uses of knowledge of anatomy, symmetry and proportion the next in importance. great excellence of the *ancients*, the ancient sculptor in those points; studying antique statuary to advantage, perfection of the Art of painting under Vinci, Buonarroti, and Sanzio. Opie’s outline, with its standardised categories, is a clear example of ‘inglese italianato e un diavolo incarnato’ and a summary of a time-honoured aesthetic tradition which indeed he is drawing from the antique! Opie’s proposal of what constitutes ‘the high style’ is a direct continuation of the humanistic theory of art, formulated in early Renaissance Florence and expanded and modified in the succeeding centuries, mainly in Italy. At the core of this tradition is the thesis that art imitates nature and, in art’s highest manifestation, perfects nature by selecting her best parts, to create (poien, design) a model of ideal beauty – drawn from the antique -- a universal standard to which man aspires. Classical statuary plays a crucial role in this theoretical framework. An antique statues is perceived, and often revered, as works in which the process of this selection of the best parts of nature is accomplished. An antique – and thus a sketch ‘drawn from the antique’ -- offers the ‘antique’ (not natural live) model from which the form, the pose, the gesture and the expression of a naked male is appreciated, in its idealised anatomy and proportion. As the theory evolves from the 16th century onwards, the three leading protagonists of the High Renaissance, Vinci, Buonarroti and Sanzio – not mannerist Bernini, such as Tasso is not in the canon as Ariosto is -- are placed on the same level as the antique, as the first trio of non-antique or non-ancient (i. e. modern) artists – cf. Hymns Ancient & Modern) whose statues equal, if not surpass, the antique (but there was not ‘Drawn from Buonarroti!’). The humanistic theory of art remains for centuries the philosophical aesthetics. It undergoes many developments and was at times challenged. It is primarily through the medium of ‘desegno’, drawing, that one is educated in geometry and perspective – to learn how to re-present space – and in anatomy and the male naked live model – to learn how to deploy the naked male. ‘Drawn from the antique’ represents the essential component of this educational method, initially as a convenient model for the copying the male form, and then progressively as a bench-mark of perfection whose appreciation one is supposed to assimilate before being exposed to ‘fallible Nature’, embodied by the naked male LIVE model with all its imperfections – the profession being underpayed and carried out by Italians! – and this or that unnecessary feature – however necessary this unnecessary feature is for the photographer of Antino, before he photoshops! In its codified and pedantic rigidity, this Vitruvian categorization reveals that, at the same time as they held theoretical sway, by the beginning of the 19th century the tradition that he espoused had become increasingly stifling. At the dawn of the Modern era, a system based on the principle that art is a rational practice that can be taught by precepts resting on a fixed aesthetic is progressively being dismantled by those who advocate subjectivity, individual expression and the conceptual freedom required by inventive genius. Although the normative principle of the humanistic theory of art remains solidly established within the academic programme, the creative forces of art are increasingly to be found ‘outside Plato’s Academy’. With this epochal shift of aesthetic values, classical statuary, unsurprisingly, suffered most. Precisely because of its status as a model and standard of perfection in academic curricula, it inevitably encountered the indifference, if not open hostility, of Marinetti (if not Mussolini) and those avant-garde Italian artists who did not believe in the idealising role of art and, increasingly, not even in its imitative one. The Antique, which sustains and inspires creativity and diversity in art, offering an immense repertory of forms, expressions and aesthetic principles, loses its propulsive drive. To understand the pervasive role  the classical statue or statuary group plays in the education and inspiration of artists in the Early Modern period, that is from the 15th to the early 19th century, we return to the theoretical foundations and the practical concerns that create and sustain the conditions for its immense success and eventual decline. After the Middle Ages, in which the visual arts had been essentially symbolic, aiming to represent the metaphysical and the divine, in the early Renaissance focus shifts to an art that, as in antiquity, aims at a convincing ‘imitation’ of the external world, the world of Nature, with man at its centre. The primary concern of early Renaissance artists and art theorists is to set a rational rule for the faithful (or improved) representation of space and the human figure on a two-dimensional surface, free-standing, in the round. In his “De Pictura”, Alberti establishes the principle of art as an intellectual discipline, focusing on geometry, mathematical perspective and the representation of the naked male. The philosophical conviction that ‘man is the scale and measure of all things’ is applied to space: Alberti’s choice of viewpoint and scale in the perspective diagrams is based on the *height* of a well-formed male and the units into which he is divided. This philosophical position also accepts that the main aim of the art of statue-making is the depiction of a man’s action, emotion and deed, what Alberti called “la storia”. Naturally, the study and drawing of the LIVE model in a work-shop, and later of anatomy and classical statuary in a studio and an academy or club, are essential for this purpose. Although Alberti’s approach, and even the literary structure of De Pictura, is based on classical models and examples, his conception of art is ‘naturalistic’. For Alberti, to become skilled in the visual arts ‘the fundamental principle will be that all steps of learning should be sought from nature’ (“dalla natura”, not “dall’antico”). Earlier, more practical treatises, like Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’Arte advocates the study of a painting produced by a master, a practice that encourages repetition and which could eventually lead to artistic sterility. Alberti accepts the copying of two-dimensional works by other artists only because ‘they have GREATER STABILITY OF APPEARANCE than the living, live, lively, model’, but he privileges the drawing of a statue because, being life-*like* (cf. ‘natura morta’), it does not impose just ONE viewpoint on its copyist, but infinite – which makes ‘drawn from the antique’ a fascinating reflection on the draughtsman, who seeks, say, for rear views!  Hence, while the practice of the early workshop often involved the copying of three-dimensional models or drawings of such models, it is as a preparation for life-study (“DRAWN FROM LIFE”) rather than an end in itself. This is is not to ignore the impact of antique proto-types on artists, which was enormous. One need only think of Donatello’s Ganimede who was responding to antique models from very early in the Quattrocento. But from a theoretical point of view, for Alberti, the emphasis is on the full mastery of the natural forms (‘DRAWN FROM LIFE’) rather than on the imitation of other works of art, even those from antiquity. The artist’s goal is to achieve an illusionistic translation of the external world onto the flat surface of a drawing (‘DRAWN FROM LIFE’) or into the volumes and masses of sculpture – as in Italian statuary not based on the Antique: Michelangelo’s Bacco, Bernini’s Enea, etc. -- Nevertheless, in Alberti we find the roots of two intertwined concepts, both originating in classical sources, which progressively support and justify the practice of copying as in ‘drawn from the antique’. The ultimate point is to create a ‘beautiful’ naked male by selecting the most ‘excellent parts . . . from the most beautiful naked males. Every effort should be made to perceive, understand and express beauty. To substantiate this principle, Alberti recalls the episode of the celebrated painter of antiquity -- depicted by Vasari in his fresco at his own palazzo in Arezzo, ‘Zeusi compone Elena dalle fanciulle di Crotona’-- the Italian Zeuxis, who, in order to create Elena, the image of female perfection, selects the most beautiful maidens from the city of Crotona and unfairly goes to choose the best part from each. This silly anecdote – sexist, since the male equivalent would be unthinkable --, derives from ancient literary sources, and becomes one of the most recurrent adaggi of the art treatise in the following centuries. Zeuxis embodies and clearly explains the idea of art as a form of ‘perfected nature’. The beautiful (‘il bello’, for Italians hardly use ‘bellezza’, unless you are Sorrentino) is based on a system of a harmonic proportion. For Alberti, in the perfect male the single part – the two hands, the head, the two legs, he torso, the back, etc. – is related numerically to the other parts and to the whole (il totto)  in the principle of commensurability or syn-metron, literally the measurability by a common standard. The overall result is harmonic perfection (‘ Just look in my direction! Ain’t that perfection!’) which Alberti defines as ‘concinnitas’, a theory that Alberti bases on Vitruvio’s De Architectura. Pro-portion, which Alberti covers in depth in his “De Statua” becomes a major subject of philosophical aesthetic speculation. Vinci and Dürer produce in-depth studies, and Vinci’s ‘uomo vitruviano’ is the perfect expression of the theory of the mathematical conception of the naked male [Vinci, Gallerie dell’Academia, Venezia, inv. 228 – Le proporzione dei corpo umano secondo Vitruvio, metal point, pen and brown ink with touches of wash, 344 x 245 mm c 1490] For Alberti, one selects the best from nature and reassembles the selection according to a system of harmonic proportion ultimately resting on the mathematical relation THAT IS rationally inferred from Nature itself. This principle is the cornerstone of aesthetics. Although the central textual foundation for the concept that ‘il bello’ is based on proportion, Policleto’s Canon, had been lost, Renaissance artists and scholars are well aware through Vitruvio and other classical writers that ancient artist base his work on this principle. Therefore, from the 16th century onwards, and especially in the following two centuries, the crucial appeal that an antique statue had for artists rested not only in its aesthetic quality and form, but also on the very fact that it embodied the intellectual principle of proportional perfection. The rationalistic (indeed illuministic) approach of the Canova’s French academy (when moulding the wax of Napoleon in nudita eroica) even provides students with manuals in which the numerical proportion of a statue is carefully laid out. This idea-guided naturalistic attitude of art theory, which had in any case been greatly modified in High Renaissance practice, shifts towards an even more idealistic (hyper-idealistic, not romantic) approach and, simultaneously, a more systematic one, laying the ground plan for the classicist theory. Because most art theoreticians consider their era to be a period of artistic decadence and excess after the great achievements of the High Renaissance, and also because many of them focus on the codifying of a rule that may be imposed in the academy, the model of perfection is increasingly deemed mandatory (Dolce, Lomazzo, Armenini), the antique that they feel inspired and guided the ‘buona maniera’ of Buonarroti and Sanzio (whom the pre-raphaelites hated), became the standard by which a fault (errore) of Nature or this or that affectation (say, the length of necks in Modigliani) is corrected. The ‘drawn from the antique’ takes a decisive lead over the ‘drawn from life’ (DESEGNO DALLA VITA), and the construction of taste – the lure of the antique that had lured the antiques themselves, such as Adriano! Correspondingly, in the classicist tradition that develops in Rome – the headquarters of the French Academy at Villa Medici -- the Antique (l’antico) becomes the essential model for the composition. This, definable as the depiction of episodes based on Roman mythology or Roman history, with a moral value attached, is considered from Alberti the highest form and final aim and receives the place of honour in the academic hierarchy of the genres. Although a naturalistic and anti-classicist tendency remains alive even within the academic system, classicism establishes itself as the predominant aesthetic principle, as Opie’s inaugural lecture as Chair of Painting (but not Chair of Sculpture – since that’s a whole different animal!) at the Royal Academy attests. Its success rests primarily on the fact that it represents an aesthetic approach that is considered to express a universal and a ‘true’ principle. And this, because of its rational nature, can be taught by rule, which suits the systematic attitude of Enlightenment culture. The proliferation of the academy encourages the penetration of this set of values even within contexts and cultures that until then had been only superficially exposed to it. The humanistic theory of art, clothed in a new and codified form, eventually reaches the most remote corners of the world, with the antique army as the herald. At the centre of the education of any artist in the Renaissance was the practice of ‘disegno,’ drawing or design, considered to be one of the essential foundations of art from Cennini onwards. ‘Disegno,’ (dall’antico, dalla vita), endowed with an intellectual role by Vasari  and other theorists, as the manifestation of the idea and invention of the artist, becomes the essential quality of the Roman and Florentine academies. Successively, it assumed a central role in the theory of European academies as the expression of the rational common denominator of the three sister arts: painting, sculpture and architecture. Opie, himself a poor draughtsman – hence his teaching of ‘disegno’ --, still considered ‘Design, or Drawing, the most important part of Painting’. Drawing after the Antique, or Drawing from the Antique, as a union of intellectual medium and intellectual end, becomes integral to the learning process and the activity of artists, along with ‘Drawn from Life’. The academy is depicted, the studio, an artists copying from some original or drawing from a cast, in situ in, usually, Rome or back at home. Whether he is drawing from the antique on paper to learn how to represent outlines and chiaroscuro – the effects of light on three-dimensional forms – or to assemble a repertory of the body’s form, pose and expression, or to assimilate a system of ‘correct’ proportions and anatomy, no would-be member of the academy can avoid confronting the lessons of the Antique, and of adjusting his creative process in relation to it. Apart from the didactic and inspirational functions of drawing from the antique (as opposed as from life), many other reasons justified the practice. As a result of their pervasiveness, a studio ‘drawin from the antique’ (disegnato dall’antico’) – which are innumerable – are difficult to categorise because they are produced for different reasons, serve different purposes and display different conceptions and relations to the antique. Nevertheless, one might attempt a division. There is the didactic ‘drawn from the antique’: a copy produced his education as an a course assignment at the Academy: a drawing produced by a master in a workshop to provide the apprentice with an accessible repertory of classical forms to copy. There is RECORD drawing: a sketch created to serve as inspiration for a form, a pose, am expressios, a composition, a movement, a proportion, etc., for its own artistic purpose. There is translation, a precisely finished drawings intended to be engraved, usually conveying as much information as possible about the statue’s form and pose. There is documentary drawings, produced with the purpose of recording accurately the physical appearance of an antiquities obviously including any damage the statue may have undergone. To this category belong many drawings produced specifically for the antiquarian collector, from the “Codex Coburgensis” to those of the famous ‘Paper Museum’ assembled  by Pozzo. There is the marketable drawing: a finished copy specifically produced to be sold on the market or commissioned by a collector to fill his ‘paper museum’ of classical antiquities. Examples are those by Batoni for Richard Topham, Esq. – The Topham Collection --. There is the promotional drawing, a drawing made with the specific purpose of promoting the acquisition of an item (statue or statuary group), such as those by Jenkins to Townley – The Townley Collection. Naturally, as with any categorisation, these divisions are a simplification and a drawing may overlap two or more classes, such as this or that drawing by Goltzius, intended to be engraved, but which also function as a repertory of an antique forms to be used in the artist’s practice. Whatever their categories, all these drawings followed the technical evolution of the medium, from the predominant metalpoint and pen-and-ink to the black and red chalk. Athough pen-and-ink remains a favoured medium, chalk becomes the choice for FULL-SIZE statuary, as a softer, more pliable medium it allows a more sophisticated rendering of a tonal passage and, therefore, of relief and anatomu. Red chalk especially offers the impossibility of bringing the ANTIQUE (antico) to LIFE (vita), transforming or transubstantiating inorganic matter into ‘warm flesh’. In artists’ workshops one of the most important aspects of an apprentice’s training, aside from mastering the manual procedures of painting, is copying works by the master and other artists. This is intended as a means to shorten the process of learning how to represent the THREE-DIMENSIONS onto two thanks to examples already produced by others. This practice is described by Cennini, although still intended only to train the apprentice to reproduce the master’s style and not yet Nature or Life. An aapprentices could resort to copying model books and sketchbooks already assembled by the master or by others. These were repertories of a drawing of an animal, a plant, decorative details, a male nude at rest, a male nude in action, usually produced as teaching tools, and it is in these collections on paper that we find the earliest surviving drawings derived from classical antiquities. The Antique is included mainly as a source of information on the anatomy, its form, modelling, pose, expression, movementsand the interaction of all t hese elements. Most of the early drawings that represent antique forms are produced by artists active in Rome where the largest number of accessible physical remains from antiquity is concentrated. AN ANCIENT FULL-SIZE STATUE IN THE ROUND may have survived above ground. Among the most famous publicly displayed examples are the ANTONINO, or pseudo-Constantine the Great. outside the Lateran Palace, the Spinario, and the Camillo, both of which are moved from the Lateran to the Campidoglio by Sesto IV; the Quirinal Horse Tamers, I DIOSCURI, and the two Quirinal Recubantes or Rivers. Virtually no ancient painting is known, and its appearance was conjectured from a description (ecphrasis) in a literary sources, notably Pliny’s Naturalis Historia (esp. book XXXV). It was only with the exploration at the end of the 15th century of the buried interiors of the Domus Aurea of Nerone in Rome, known as grotte, that artists access ancient examples, and from this time a wave of grotesque motifs and decorations spread widely. More readily available is a sarcophagus relief or a large imperial relief. A drawing may depict mainly this category of ancient artefacts. They are popular because, with their complex, frieze-like narratives, it inspires the compostion of a “storia” as Alberti notes. Among the most frequently represented are the reliefs of sarcophagi and the imperial reliefs of Trajan’s Column and the Arches of Titus and Constantine. The subjects preferred by late Gothic or early Renaissance artists – Bacchic themes, Amazons, the story of Adone, marine deities or ancient battles – demonstrate an interest in the nude and in the depiction of movement, dynamism and strong expressions. Although it is recorded that Donatello and Brunelleschi copy antiquities during their stay at Rome, no drawings survive by either of them to reveal their approach to the Antique. The earliest surviving drawings of an antique is by artists in the workshops of Fabriano and Pisanello, when they were in Rome working for Martino V in St John in Lateran. The drawings correspond in many ways to the paintings. They show little awareness of the formal principle of classical art, transforming a figure from a Roman sarcophagus relief into a Gothic type. They often re-interpret the pose and, sin! -- proportion of the original, even, as in the case of a sheet of a fantasia in the Louvre, assembling figures from different s arcophagi. This process of extra-polation, isolation and modification is common to many drawings from the Antique. The draughtsman creates a visual repertories of single figures, or isolated groups of figures which are easy to re-use in their own compositions. From a teaching point of view, an isolated figure is probably considered, at least in the model books and sketchbooks, to be more readily assimilable by the apprentice in the workshop than a whole composition. A good example of such an approach is seen in a drawing attributed to the so-called ‘Anonymous of the Ambrosiana’, from a sketchbook made in Rome in The original model is a celebrated sarcophagus relief of the Muses, Minerva and Apollo then in the church of Santa Maria Maggiore. It was copied in drawings by several later growing archaeological awareness, in parallel with the spread of antiquarian studies and rising interest in the classical world and its physical remains. On the other hand, artists display a free handling and more personal approach to the original, as they move away from the restraints of the model book. With the exception of Donatello, from whom he learned much, MANTEGNA is the quattrocento artist who had the most complex and sophisticated relationship to the antique. Mantegna’s approach is evident in the introduction of direct quotations from ancient architecture, reliefs and sculptures in his paintings and frescoes and in his adoption of a precise, highly sculptural painting style. A drawing by MANTEGNA – or a copy after a drawing – executed during his stay in Rome accurately renders a classical proto-type but with a vivacious freedom in style. It represents one of the Trajanic reliefs inserted in the central passage of the Arch of Constantine. MANTEGNA sketches it at an angle from the right side and from below. He precisely records the relief’s damaged condition by showing both the emperor and the helmeted soldier on the right without their right hands. He interprets the composition freely, concentrating on the most prominent actors and on the relief’s formal principle, specifically its treatment of movement and emotion, qualities praised by Alberti as essential for the construction of a “storia”. The flow from left to right is accentuated, Trajan has windswept hair.The horse is shown galloping, less upright and frontal. The mouths are wide open, as are those of the soldiers on the right, expressing the intensity of emotion in the victory over the Dacians. A drawing like this serves a two- fold purpose, as a study of a formal principle and a record of antique costumes, armours, shields and helmets. Its organisational lessons and visual references could then be re-used to demonstrate the artist’s power of inventio and his erudite knowledge of the classical past, as Mantegna indeed does at Mantova in his sequence of canvases of the Triumph of Caesars [Sarcophagus of the Muses, with Apollo and Minerva, front, 2nd c. ad, marble, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Antikensammlung, Vienna, inv. I 171. Andrea Mantegna, or circle of, Drawing after the Relief on the Arch of Constantine, end of the 15th century – beginning of the 16th, black chalk with brown ink, 273 × 189 mm, Albertina, Vienna, inv. 2583r. Workshop of Pisanello, Three Nude Figures from Ancient Roman Sarcophagi, c. 1431–32, silver point, pen and brown ink on vellum, 194 × 273 mm, Louvre, Paris, inv. 2397]. artists, including Lippi and Franco and it was engraved by Raimondi. The Ambrosiana draughtsman reproduces only a few figures, changing their position and disregarding their interrelations and the background, no doubt with the intention of assembling a range of drapery studies that could be re-used in the future. The artist selects primarily figures that offered the greatest variety and movement of cascading robes, leaving the nude Apollo in the bottom right corner unfinished. Two tendencies, apparently opposed but both symptomatic of a more profound understanding of the antique, gains ground in sketchbooks and loose drawings. On one hand there was a [Anonymous of the Ambrosiana, Figures from an ancient Roman Muses Sarcophagus, c. 1460, metal point, pen and brown ink, heightened in white, on pink prepared paper, 310 × 200 mm, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, inv. F. 214 inf.] A similar evolution is seen in drawings that reproduce FREE-STANDING classical statuary. Not surprisingly, all are after the most famous statues then visible in Rome which, given their size and anatomical detailing, were an invaluable source for the study of the male body. The earliest examples are again a group of drawings by Pisanello. They represent, among other figures, the ANTONINO and one of the two Horse Tamers or Dioscuri on the Quirinal Hill. The latter is especially relevant for our purpose, as the Dioscuri constitute the two most complete free-standing nude in Rome. Both Dioscuri are copied repeatedly, praised by contemporary written sources, and [Trajan overpowering Barbarians, Roman, c. 117 ad, marble, Arch of Constantine, central arch, north façade, Rome remained constant sources of inspiration for artists into the 19th century. In a drawing of one of the Dioscuri, the draughtsman isolates the sculpture from its context, and focuses exclusively on rendering the anatomy. The cloak on the forearm is just outlined. Although it is an impressive achievement and while the male nude is realised much more plausibly than those figures taken from sarcophagus reliefs,  the ELONGATION and SLIMMING of the figure and the inaccurate rendering of the idealised anatomy betrays a Gothic mindset. The same DIOSCURO is copied in a drawing by Gozzoli [ Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, Roman, 161–180 ad, bronze, 424 cm (h), Capitoline Museums, Rome, inv. MC3247. Workshop of Pisanello, Marcus Aurelius, c. 1431–32, pen, brown ink and wash heightened in white on brown-orange prepared paper, 196 × 156 mm, CASTELLO SFORZESCO, Civico Gabinetto dei Disegni, Milan, inv. B 878 SC. One of the Two Dioscuri or Horse Tamers, Roman copy of the 2nd century ad, after a Greek original of the 5th century bc, marble, 528 cm, Quirinal Square, Rome] Pollaiuolo. Many are modelled on an ancient proto-type, like those being handled and studied by the artists at  Bandinelli’s academy. But ‘DISEGNO DALLA VITA’ from a posed apprentice is also widely practised and becomes increasingly common in the final decades, especially in Florence. Another drawing by Gozzoli’s circle shows the practice of setting a male naked LIVE MODEL in the pose of (apres, after) “l’antico” – a contradiction: DISEGNO DALLA VITA E DALL’ANTICO. In this case the obvious reference is the Spinario, the celebrated bronze antique figure whose complex pose remains one of the most popular for a live model. The use of the model book as a teaching tool disappeared but sketchbooks and the travel book reproducing antiquities became more widespread. Their progressive diffusion is one of the clearest indications of the spread of interest in the antique and goes hand-in-hand with the formation of collections of antiquities and the pursuit of antiquarian studies, such as Biondo’s influential “Roma Instaurata”, a methodical guide to the monuments of Rome. Enthusiasm for classical art and a more attentive study of its forms and principles is reflected in the increased dynamism, pathos and complexity of the compositions that we can see in Italian painting and sculpture in the work of Florentine artists like Pollaiolo, Ghirlandaio and Lippi [Workshop of Benozzo Gozzoli, A Nude Young Man Seated on a Block, His Right Foot Crossed over His Left Leg, c. 1460, metalpoint, over stylus indications, grey-brown wash, heightened with white, on pink-purple prepared paper, 226 × 150 mm, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, London, inv. Pp, 1.7] probably executed when he was in Rome to assist Fra Angelico in the St Nicholas Chapel in the Vatican Palace]. In this case the drawing is again far from accurate, and the draughtsman combines the Dioscuro with the horse held by his twin. Again the forms are isolated. As in the earlier drawing the supporting cuirass and the strut between the right arm and thigh are omitted as is the cloak on the forearm. The group is set against a neutral backdrop and on the ground rather than on its pedestal. Although the Dioscuro stands firmly, and although his anatomical structure, his surface musculature and their modelling are rendered much more convincingly than in the Pisanello drawing, the idealisation of the male is still not emphasised and we seem to be looking at a real MALE taming his horse rather than at a heroic marble statue. Although it is difficult to draw general conclusions based on such exiguous surviving material, it seems safe to say that formost 15th-century artists, classical free-standing statuary was seen as a model for the nude male, its poses and movements. With notable exceptions, such as Donatello, artists did not try to grasp the anatomical and formal principle of the original nor does he aspire to recreate the process of idealisation innate in so many classical nudes. For this reason, the drawings are often not immediately recognisable as copies after the Antique (‘drawn from the antique’). The Antique could also be copied inside the workshop using SMALL-SCALE three-dimensional models. We have plenty of evidence about collections of antique statues, often fragments, and the ownership of plaster casts by artists. Their presence in the work-shop is also acknowledged in “De Sculptura” by Gaurico, who speaks of artists having cabinets ‘filled with any sort of sculptures’ and ‘chests filled with casts’. Although a cast may OBVIOUSLY BE TAKEN from a male naked live model, as described by Cennini, others are ‘cast from the antique’, such as those mentioned by Ghiberti and Squarcione, the teacher of Mantegna, whose workshop at Padova contained a collection of antiquities. Casts and antiquities are part of the working material of the bottega. They also serve to elevate the status of the workshop to that of a STUDIO or STUDIUM, a place of cultivation of liberal arts, the beginning of that process of the intellectual emancipation of the artist that would be fully developed with the foundation of the academies. A beautiful drawing of feet, part of a sketchbook by Gozzoli eloquently shows the use of casts, in this case most likely taken from antique fragments, as teaching tools in the bottega. We see here one of the earliest visual records of a [Spinario, Roman, 1st century bc, bronze, 73 cm (h), Capitoline Museums, Rome, inv. MC1186. Pisanello, or circle of, One of the Two Dioscuri or Horse Tamers, c. 1431–32, silverpoint, pen and brown ink on vellum, 230 × 360 mm, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, inv. F. 214 inf.10v. Benozzo Gozzoli (attr.), One of the Two Dioscuri or Horse Tamers, c. 1447–49, metalpoint, grey-black wash, heightened with lead white, on blue prepared paper, 359 × 246 mm, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, London, inv. Pp, 1.18. Workshop of Benozzo Gozzoli, Studies of Plaster Casts of Feet, c. 1460, silverpoint heightened with white, on green prepared paper, 225 × 155 mm, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Benozzo Gozzoli Sketchbook, fol. 53] practice, copying from a cast, that would expand exponentially. For the study of the naked male and the three-dimensional form, a pupil could rely also on small models in wax, CLAY, or bronze, provided by such sculptors as Ghiberti or  Sanzio, Buonarroti, and Rome as the Centre of the Study of the Antique. The following generation, that of Buonarroti and Sanzio, sees a seismic shift in the approach to the antique. They now attempted to equal or even surpass the antique by penetrating its principles.The two titans of the High Renaissance had a radically different approach towards the classical naked male form, but they both aime at assimilating the ancient ‘mimetic’ or imitative standard of an idealised naturalism, full mastery of the naked male, its anatomy and proportions, and the convincing rendering of the EMOTION or EX-pression (or affect) of the soul. Vinci expresses a deep interest in the Antique and is directly exposed to it in Florence and in Rome. The classical naked male form is referenced in many of his works, particularly in the unrealised project for an equestrian statue of Francesco Sforza in Milan. But Vinci’s naturalism, based on empirical observation, means that he always checks his ancient sources against the scientific observation of the natural world. He remains a naturalist at heart, famously stating that ‘he who copies a copy is Nature’s grandchild when he may been her son’. On the other hand, from a practical point of view, Vinci also acknowledges the usefulness of copying from a ‘good master’ and sculpture. While for Vinci the Antique remains an interest secondary to Nature, Sanzio’s and Buonarroti’s engagement with the antique is on an unprecedented level. The immense impact that Sanzio and Buonarroti have on their own generation and on Western art in the centuries that followed lies in the very fact that they are perceived and celebrated as the first modern masters who had equalled, if not surpassed, the ancients. Opie, lecturing on painting at the Royal Academy, proclaims the ‘perfection of the Arts under Leonardo da Vinci, Michael Angelo, and Raffaelle’, but their status as modern classics was already acknowledged during their lifetime. Bembo elevates Buonarroti and Sanzio to the same pedestal of the ‘ancient good masters’ and Vasari sustains his uncompromising panegyric of Buonarroti by affirming that his Davide (Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence) surpasses in beauty and measure even the best ancient monumental sculptures of Rome, in particular the various Rivers and the Horse Tamers on the Quirinal. The Mondern, now capable of providing an idealised nude more convincing than the most famous surviving classical ones, outshines the Ancient. Artists of Sanzio’s and Buonarroti’s generation have the advantage of benefiting from more, and more readily available, ancient statuary, including those discovered in excavations and those displayed in relatively accessible settings. However, both Vinci and Buonarroti must already have been exposed to drawings, casts and models after the Antique respectively in the workshops of Verrocchio and Ghirlandaio. Both studied (although Vinci briefly) in the Giardino di San Marco, an informal academy set up by Lorenzo il Magnifico to train artists specifically in drawing and copying after the antique under the supervision of the sculptor Giovanni. Vasari informs us that Buonarroti devoted himself obsessively to the task, and Condivi, Buonarroti’ss biographer, emphatically states that the genius ‘having savoured their beauty [...] never again goes to Ghirlandaio’s workshop or anywhere else, but there he would stay all day, always doing something, as in the best school for such studies’ As a pupil Sanzio probably did not receive a similar training in the workshop of Perugino, who had less interest in the Antique. But some drawings with reference to classical models survive and he certainly participates in the sophisticated antiquarian environment in Florence, where he moves. It is the impact of what Buonarroti and Sanzio see in Rome, where they both moved that has the most far-reaching and radical impact on the evolution of their art and their relationship with the anqique. Under the pontificates of Rovere (Giulio II and Leone X, Rome establishes herself as the centre for the study of the Antique. Many of the most celebrated collections of antiquities – Medici, Farnese, Borghese, Ludovisi, Albani -- are formed or consolidated, such as those of Riario, Maffei, and Della Valle  and later on the Cesi and the Sassi. The collection of antiquities at the Campidoglio is enlarged with the transfer of the statues of the Rivers, the Nile and the Tiber from the Quirinal and the Antonino from the Lateran, the latter a statue so important for the symbolic imagery of Rome that Buonarroti designs a square around it. However, the real centre of attention in the early years of Buonarroti and Sanzio in Rome are the new discoveries emerging from the soil of the city. Within a few years some of the statues that would attract the attention of artists and connoisseurs for centuries to come are discovered, [Anonymous engraver after Maarten van Heemskerck, The Antique Courtyard of the Palazzo Della Valle, 1553, engraving, 289 × 416 mm, Rijksmuseum, inv. RP-P-1996-38] provoking enormous enthusiasm among contemporaries: the Apollo del Belvedere, the Laoconte, the Cleopatra, the Ercole Commodo, and the large rivers Tevere and Nilo. By 1512 all could be admired, with the addition of the Venere Felice in the Cortile Ottogono del casino della Villa del Belvedere nel Monte Vaticano, a purpose-built space commissioned by Giulio II from Bramante, the great interpreter of ancient Roman architecture. The Cortile, displaying some of the most complete and prestigious sculptures from antiquity, soon became the canonical Roman site for making a copy ‘drawn from the antique’. It retains its unparalleled prestige, as the many drawings after its statues eloquently attest. It is invaluable, as the Cortile del Belvedere offers them the opportunity to study different male forms and positions and different sub-types of ideal beauty at the same time: moving from the Apollo, to the strong and pronounced muscular anatomy of Ercole Commodo. Two more statues are added to the Courtyard: the Antino del Belvedere and the Torso del Belvedere. The Antino del Belvedere is to become the canonical model for artists for the perfect proportions of the naked male body. The Torso del Belvedere becomes one of the most copied of all antiquities, a compulsory reference for the body of the muscular male at rest, especially because of Buonarroti’s admiration for it and the popular belief that he gives instructions to leave it unrestored. The master’s praise of the evocative fragment became a leitmotif in artistic treatises and literary sources to the point that it [Fig. 17. Hieronymous Cock after Anonymous Draughtsman, The Capitoline Hill, 1562, etching and engraving, 155 × 212 mm, Metropolitan Museum, New York, inv. 2012.136.358] became known in 18th-century Britain as the ‘School of Michelangelo’. The Cortile del Belvedere, the Campidoglio, and the collections in the various palazzi: Palazzo della Valle and others, remain the privileged centres for copying the Antique in Rome. The increasing number of accessible classical statues makes Rome a pole of attraction, to congregate and to complete one’s education and gather on paper a repertory of classical forms and motifs. This was a phenomenon central to the development of art. It is  evocatively described by Bembo. Under Giulio II and Leone X both Buonarroti and Sanzio are at the centre of the antiquarian debate and, as Bembo puts it, play an essential role in their efforts to emulate and surpass the antique (they fail). Indeed Vasari attributes the rise of the ‘bella maniera’, and the great achievements of Sanzio and Buonarroti, to their familiarity and exposure to the Belvedere statues. Even if Vasari’s words are a retrospective celebration aimed at establishing the primacy of the Florentine and Roman schools, the spirit of classical art permeates much of Buonarroti’s and Sanzio’s Roman production and specific antique proto-types are evoked in many of their works. One need only think of the inspiration Buonarroti derives from the Torso del Belvedere for his Ignudi in the Sistine Chapel. Given their familiarity with classical antiquity, it may seem strange therefore that very few drawings after classical statuary by either Buonarroti or Sanzio survive. Many might have been intentionally destroyed. Vasari recounts Buonarroti’s burning large numbers of drawings, sketches   [Fig. 18. Apollo del Belvedere, Roman copy of the Hadrianic period (117–138 ad) after a Greek original of the 4th century bc, marble, 224 cm (h), Vatican Museums, Rome inv. 1015 Laocoön, possibly a Roman copy of the 1st century ad after a Greek original of the 2nd century bc, marble, 242 cm (h), Vatican Museums, Rome, inv. 1064. Cleopatra, Roman copy of the Hadrianic period (117–138 ad) after a Greek original of the 2nd century bc, marble, 162 (h), Vatican Museums, Rome, inv. 548] and cartoons so that none could see the efforts of his creative process. Nonetheless, in the few surviving drawings which bear direct references to classical models, one sees their tendency towards ‘assimilating’ the spirit of antique forms rather than *slavishly* copying them (as an amanuensis would). This attitude can be shown by comparing a drawing by Aspertini after the Belvedere Cleopatra with one by Sanzio derived from the same statue. Aspertini’s copy, paired on the facing page with one from a relief from the Arch of Constantine, embodies the attitude typically seen in a sketch- book: a more or less faithful rendering of the antique form, in this case rather finished and accurate, that serves as a record. Sanzio’s drawing represents a more evolved phase, when the ancient form takes a new shape: the elegant and difficult pose of the body of the Cleopatra and the play of the drapery over her intertwined [Aspertini, The Sleeping Cleopatra and a Relief from Trajan’s Column, (verso) post 1496, pen and brown ink, over black chalk, on two sheets conjoined, 254 × 423 mm, The British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, London, inv. 1905,1110.1-2. Sanzio, Figure in the Pose of the Sleeping Cleopatra, c. 1509, pen and brown ink, 244 × 217 mm, Albertina, Vienna, inv. 219. Sanzio, The Muse Calliope, detail from the Parnassus, c. 1509–10, fresco, Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican Palace, Rome] legs are used as an inspiration for the muse Calliope in his Vatican Parnassus. Sanzio nevertheless also produces some ‘record’ drawings. Nominated by Leo X as inspector of all the antiquities in and around Rome and embarked on a project to reconstruct the aspect of ancient Roman buildings based on precise architectural surveys of their remains. His method, based on a precise analysis paired with ancient literary sources, remains unmatched. His scholarly attitude towards classical art and his thorough understanding of it are clearly expressed in a famous letter that he wrote to Leo X with the help of the courtier Castiglione in which he appeals against the destruction of classical monuments. At the same time, he provides an outstandingly accurate description of the different styles of ancient sculpture found on the Arch of Constantine. One of the very few surviving exact copies of classical statues in Sanzio’s hand is indicative of his precise, almost  [Hendrik III Van Cleve, Detail from View of Rome from the Belvedere of Innocent VIII, 1550, oil on panel, 55.5 × 101.5 cm, Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels, inv. 6904. Pseudo-Antino del Belvedere, Roman copy of the Hadrianic period (117–138 ad) after a Greek original of the 4th century bc, marble, 195 cm (h), Vatican Museums, Rome, inv. 907. Belvedere Torso, Greek or Roman, 1st century bc, marble, 159 cm (h), Vatican Museums, Rome, inv. 1192] archaeological approach to the Antique, and we can assume that he produced similar ones during his period as inspector of Roman antiquities. It is a clear rendering of one of the two horses from the Horse Tamers on the Quirinal, that we encountered in Gozzoli’s study. There could not be a better comparison to demonstrate the progress made in the understanding of classical statuary. Sanzio’s drawing is ‘scientific’. We clearly recognise that the horse is a piece of marble sculpture, with a faithful record of its missing left leg and the joint between the neck and the body. The horse is COPIED, i. e. DRAWN AT EYE LEVEL (Sanzio presumably stood on a platform) and not seen from below, as in most other contemporary views. This allows the proper study of the proportion of the sculpture, in a way similar to an architectural elevation. Outstandingly, even the measurements of the statue are recorded on the drawing, probably by one of his pupils, making this the first surviving measured drawing of a classical statue. Incidentally Sanzio’s drawing also shows the introduction of a new medium – red chalk – which would become one of the preferred tools for drawing after the Antique. It is likely, nevertheless, that Sanzio generally left making such specific records of classical sculptures to the pupils of his large workshop, as several surviving drawings in the hand of Romano and Polidoro da Caravaggio, among others, attest. Some of these were probably intended to be engraved, as it is in Sanzio's circle that we find the first printed images of celebrated statues and reliefs, such as those of Raimondi, Marco [Sanzio The Right Horse of the Horse Tamers on the Quirinal Hill, c. 1513, red chalk and pen and brown ink over indentations with the stylus, 219 × 275 mm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., inv. 1993.51.3.a, Woodner Collection. Buonarroti, Study of an Antique Torso of Venus, c. 1524, black chalk, 256 × 180 mm, The British Museum, Departments of Prints and Drawings, London, inv. 1859,0625.570. Buonarroti, A Youth beckoning; A Right Leg, c. 1504–05, pen and brown ink, black chalk, 375 × 230 mm, The British Museum, Departments of Prints and Drawings, London, inv. 1887,0502.117. Romano (attr.), Apollo del Belvedere, c. 1513–15, pen and brown ink, pencil, 316 × 155 mm, Albertina, Vienna, inv. 22449. Veneziano, Apollo Belvedere, engraving, c. 1518–20, 269 × 169 mm, private collection. Dente and Agostino Veneziano (c. 1490–after 1536; fig. 29). The print medium, which plays a crucial role in disseminating the knowledge of the Antique is to be increasingly used in work-shops and academies for training. One first copies the Antique from a flat image, before turning to the third dimension of a cast or an original. Sanzio’s approach towards the Antique, based on study, measurement, reconstruction and dissemination, cannot be more distant from that of Buonarroti, who constantly confronts the classical models with a challenging spirit. Several anecdotes reported by contemporaries reveal his approach towards antiquity. Boissard informs us that shortly after having seen the Laooconte emerging from the ground of the Esquiline, Buonarroti enthusiastically comments that it is ‘a singular miracle of art in which we should grasp the divine genius of the sculptor rather than trying to make an imitation of it’.This quotation is poignant for understanding the Platonic concept of divine inspiration for Buonarroti. At the same time it shows clearly that his relationship with the antique model was not based on a process of imitation but rather on that of ‘aemulatio,’ a creative rivalry possible only after the assimilation and internalisation of its principle. This approach is reinforced in a celebrated passage from Vasari which became a recurrent leitmotif in subsequent art literature – in which he reports that Buonarroti creates figures of nine, ten or even twelve heads high, searching only for the overall grace in the artistic creation, because in matter of the proportion, ‘it is necessary to have the compass in the eyes and not in the hand, because the hands *work* and the eyes *judge*’. Advocating the principle of grace, consistency of artistic creation, and the artist’s own judgement, Buonarroti therefore disregards the canon of *eight* heads comprising the male figure established by Vitruvio, implicitly expressing a relation with the classical proto-type based on empathy and intimate understanding of its form, rather than on a rational adherence to a rule based on a number– an approach he replicates in his architecture. Buonarroti’s surviving copies after classical statues can be counted on one hand, such as a series of reproducing the torso of an antique Venus, probably made in preparation for one of the female figures in the Medici Chapel. His free relationship with the Antique emerges from many of his drawings, for instance the Beckoning Youth, loosely inspired by the Apollo del Belvedere. Buonarroti evokes the pose and aspect of the celebrated statue, but turns it into something new, where the hint of movement of the original is dramatically accentuated and balance is replaced by unstable dynamism. Sanzio and Buonarroti have been discussed at length because their different attitudes towards classical forms resurface constantly in Art. This polarity may be defined as assimilating the principles of the Antique by sticking to its rules and system of proportions OR assimilating the creative spirit of the Antique by breaking its rules. At the risk of oversimplification we could argue that Reni and Poussin fall within the first sphere and Rubens and Bernini in the second. It is not by chance that the classicist credo that permeates the Italian and French academies for most of their history elects *Sanzio* as their champion, while the eccentric and unruly Buonarroti remains a figure more difficult to celebrate from a didactic point of view. The Antique in Theory plays a Role in the Academic ‘Alphabet of Drawing’. More statues emerge from the soil of Rome and those already discovered are given new life and integrity by partial or full ‘restoration’. A statue is usually unearthed in fragmentary states, as can be seen from the evocative drawings of Roman collections by Heemskerck. Whether philologically correct or not, the practice of restoration allows one to copy the naked male in its entirety rather than in mutilated fragments. Celebrated restorations included those of the Apollo del Belvedere and the Laooconte by MONTORSI on the recommendation of Buonarroti. Among the excavated statues three must be mentioned as they immediately became constant references for artists. The place of honour goes to the Ercole Farnese. It provides an ideal model for the muscular male at rest and copies after it become ubiquitous in artists’ work-shops and academies. The other two statues are discovered together in and immediately entered the collection of the Villa Medici in Rome: I LOTTATORI, representing two males in a  complexly interlocked ‘syntagma’ or group. I LOTTATORI are used often in later academies as a source for posing TWO LIVE MODELS – SYNTAGMA DISEGNATO DALLA VITA  (see cats 16 and 27b); and the Niobe Group whose suffering expressions would be widely referenced as a source for drama and pathos, for instance by Reni, among others. In time, a standard set of ideal types (to use Weber’s term) begins to take shape, thanks to the diffusion of bronze and plaster casts and, especially, of prints. After the loose sheets of Raimondi, Dente and Veneziano, more systematic enterprises are launched. Collections such as SPECVLVM ROMANÆ MAGNIFICENTIÆ by Lafréry  or ANTIQVARVM STATVARVM URBIS ROMAE by Cavalieri, play a crucial role in the wide dissemination of a canonical selection of classical statues, thus attracting more and more artists to Rome to study the originals. This tendency towards codification also affects the relationship of artists and art writers with the Antique, as the imitation of classical statuary is given theoretical underpinning. At the same time the Antique acquires a clear role within the curricula of the emerging academies as a teaching tool, systemising a practice that, as we have seen, is already widely diffused within Renaissance workshops. Art theory in general goes through a process of radical systematization. Many artists and writers feel that rules are required to give ‘ars’ an intellectual frame-work that would lift its status from ‘mechanical’ to ‘liberal’ arts – (as in M. A. Magister in Arts, MA before DPhil Lit Hum) an ambition dating back to the writings of Alberti. Most theoreticians and artists believe that a codified precept is also vital to inculcating the ‘correct’ principle in an age that they considered to be one of artistic corruption. Armenini speaks explicitly of the ‘pain’ that masters like Sanzio and Buonarroti would have felt in seeing the art of his own time. And Armenini, Lomazzo, Zuccaro and others, notwithstanding differences among them, consider that the rule can be inferred from study of the best examples of the great Renaissance masters and those of antiquity. The latter especially, it was thought, would provide with correct proportions and anatomy and inculcate the ideal standard. A foundation of this theoretical effort is provided by the assimilation of Artistotle’s Poetica, the first reliable Latin translation of which circulated widely. Since no comprehensive treatise on painting had [Cavalieri, The Laocoön, engraving plate 4, from Antiquarum statuarum urbis Romae, Rome, 1585] readily found in his work. For him the best ancient sculptures embodied the supreme quality of ‘grazia’, which cannot be attained by study but only by judgement – a concept that remains one of the central tenets of Italian art theory. Vasari’s Lives also proclaims the superiority of the Central Italian School of painting, based on ‘disegno’ to the Venetian one, based on ‘colore’, initiating a debate over the respective merits of the two traditions. Although traditionally the Venetians aim at imitating nature directly on the canvas through colour and therefore are less attached to the laborious practice of drawing after the antique, classical statuary plays a role in the formation of many Venetian painters, and casts are used in their workshops. Tintoretto, for instance, owns a large collection of casts and reductions of ancient and modern sculptures. The importance attached to the study of the Antique by all the Italian schools of painting is shown by the fact that one of the very first consistent formulations of the principle of the ‘imitation’ of classical statuary is to be found in Dolce’s “Dialogo della pittura.” Dolce’s “Dialogo della pittura” contains the strongest defence of the Venetian tradition against the Vasarian point of view. It also contains, if not fully developed, most of the fundamental elements of the artistic theory. Dolce clearly specifies that in the search for the perfect proportion of the naked male, the artist should ‘*partly* imitate nature’ and partly ‘the best marbles and bronzes of the antient [sic] masters’, because through them he can ‘correct’ this or that defects of this or that living form – the live model -- as they are ‘examples of perfect beauty’, an ideal version of Nature. But in Dolce we find also a warning against regarding the copying of ancient sculpture as an end in itself rather than the means by which an artist creates his own ideal artistic forms – something already stressed by Vasari in his Lives. An ancient statue is to be ‘imitated’ with ‘judgement’, to avoid turning a pleasing trait into a formula or, worse, an eccentricity. This warning would be repeated frequently, notably, y Rubens and Bernini and it could lead to open opposition to copying the Antique. Similar advice appears in Armenini’s Veri Precetti della Pittura. Armenini’s “VERI PRECETTI DELLA PITTURA” is quite systematic and offers one of the most articulated approaches towards the role of the Antique in the artist’s education. Many of Armenini’s ideas and much of his advice would becomes standard practice. In the chapter on ‘disegno’, Armenini states that to acquire the ‘bella’ or ‘buona     [The Farnese Hercules, Roman copy of the 3rd century ad of a Greek original of the 4th century bc, marble, 317 cm (h), MUSEO ARCHEOLOGICO NAZIONALE, Napoli,  inv. 6001. I LOTTATORI. Roman copy of a Greek original of the 3rd century bc, marble, 89 cm (h), Uffizi, Firenze, inv. 216. The Niobe, possibly Roman copy of a Greek original of the 4th century bc, marble, 228 cm (h), Uffizi, Firenze, inv. 294] survived from antiquity, the Poetics, together with Orazio’s Ars Poetica, offer a theoretical structure that could be transferred from the literary disciplines to visual art – justified by Orazio’s celebrated motto ‘ut pictura poesis’, ‘as is painting so is poetry’. More relevant from our perspective, Aristotle’s Poetica provides, in several passages, an authoritative ancient source for the principle that art may ‘perfect’ nature to create an ideal model – a concept implied but never clearly defined by Alberti – and which constituted one of the most solid bases for the classicist doctrine of art. This Aristotelian trend had a counter-balance in a neo-Platonic tendency in which ideal beauty does not derive from Nature but is infused in the mind of the artist by God, two approaches that at times were combined by the same author, such as Lomazzo or Zuccaro. But whether of Aristotelian or Platonic origins, or indeed a combination of both, the principle of imitation of those works of art that had already accomplished idealisation – particularly the antique statue – becomes one of the leitmotifs of Italian art theory (v. Dorfles, “Natura e Artificio”). The most important writer on art of the Renaissance, Vasari, firmly establishes the primacy of disegno, design or drawing, as the intellectual part of art, the ‘parent’ of the three sister arts of architecture, sculpture and painting. In his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects drawing is described as the physical, sensible manifestation EX-pression of an idea, encompassing ‘all the objects in nature’. Although he does not provide a theoretical case for drawing after the Antique, nonetheless passages referring to the impact that classical statues have on artists are  maniera’ of the great Renaissance masters, the student needs fully to assimilate through drawing those principles of the ancient statues that those Renaissance masters themselves copy, as they embody the best of Nature. Armenini’s importance lies also in the fact that he is the first to list the specific statues and reliefs to copy and to praise the didactic use of plaster casts, of which he saw many collections throughout Italy – testifying to a practice that must already have been quite widespread. The imitation of the Antique also becomes a central tenet of the earliest art academies. Deriving their name from the ancient philosophical Academy (Hekademos) of Plato, an ‘accademia’ is intended as a venue for the cultivation of the practical, but even more, the intellectual aspects of art. Its role is conceived in parallel and not in opposition to the artist’s workshop, where the apprentices is still supposed to learn art’s technical rudiments. One of the first mentions of the word ‘accademia’ in conjunction with art is found in the first object shown in this catalogue, the Accademia del Belvedere run by BANDINELLI eengraved by Veneziano. This depicts an ‘accademia’ centred on disegno set up in the Belvedere, where Leo X gives him quarters. It shows artists learning how to draw the naked male and it is significant that the focus of their attention is a series of statuettes modelled after a classical proto-type. This, and the later view of Bandinelli’s Florentine Academy, are the very first examples of an iconographical genre: the image of an accademia, workshop, studio, often created with a programmatic or didactic purpose, showing pupils learning the different branches of art or going through different stages in their education. Just glancing at the works illustrated in the catalogue shows how the presence of the Antique becomes progressively relevant. The centrality of disegno and the naked male is firmly stressed by the institutional, more organised, ‘accademia’.. The first, and a model for all future academies, was the aptly named ‘Accademia del Disegno,’ – or ‘dei disegnanti’ -- founded in Florence by Cosimo de’ Medici on the initiative of Vasari. Its aim is to emancipate the artist from guild control, and to affirm the intellectual status of the art.The two most significant academies that followed before the are ‘Gl’Incamminati’, or ‘Accademia degl’incamminati, founded in Bologna by the three Carraccis, and the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, relaunched and given a didactic curriculum under Zuccaro. These academies – although there were significant differences among them, and often huge discrepancies between the theory they supported and the everyday teaching they practised – proposes a system that could give a broad education to aspiring artists. This usually included the study of mathematics, geometry and perspective, to teach the student how to represent space rationally; and of anatomy, the antique and the live model, -- DISEGNO DALL’ANTICO, DISEGNO DALLA VITA -- to teach him to master the correct depiction of the naked male. We can see an idealised version of early academic practices in a complex and fascinating drawing by  Stradano, engraved by Cort, where the stress is on anatomy, the Antique and on the three arts of disegno. Similar practices are illustrated in an etching by Alberti showing a structured curriculum of studies involving anatomical dissection, geometry, the Antique and architectural drawing. These studies codify artistic exercises (and give a bad name to ‘academic’) that had been current from the early Renaissance onwards but important new teaching structures were introduced. These include a rotating academic staff, a competition and a prize, and an organised debate on artistic questions and they are supported especially by the regulations of the Accademia di San Luca. Although we do not know to what extent and how effectively these new structures functioned in the first decades of the Roman institution, they soon spread to other academies, becoming the model for the Académie Royale in Paris. All these institutions strongly advocate the copy of the Antique, both in plaster reproduction or in the original. The Accademia del Disegno supervises drawing from the Antique both in the Academy and in the workshops where apprentices were trained. It also owns a ‘libreria’, which includes drawings, models of statues, architectural plans, and ancient sculpture, all used as teaching tools. The Accademia di San Luca lists the copying after the Antique in its first statutes and  receives a donation of casts, while numerous plasters – such as reliefs from Trajan’s Column, the bust and the head of the Laocoonte, one of the Horse Tamers of the Quirinal, the Torso del Belvedere and many other entire or in fragments – appear in its early inventories. The importance accorded by Zuccaro, the founder of the Roman Academy’s curriculum, to the thorough study of Rome’s most famous statues, emerges from his wonderful drawing of his brother, Taddeo sketching the Laocoonte at the Belvedere. The series to which this drawing belongs, produced around the same time as the foundation of the Accademia di San Luca, illustrates the ideal training that am artist should follow: imitation of the Antique and the works of Renaissance masters, such as Sanzio’s Stanze and Loggie, Buonarroti’s Last Judgment and Polidoro’s painted façades. Another sketch, by a Zuccaro follower, depicts Zuccaro himself in the Accademia, surrounded by students sketching after the cast of an ancient torso. The Carracci academy too, although primarily focused on life-drawin (DISEGNO DALLA VITA), advocates study of the Antique and we know that Carracci makes his collection of drawings, medals and casts available for students. Early academies also codified a teaching model, defined as the ‘alphabet of drawing’ or the ‘ABC’ method, which, in a less regulated form, was already established within work-shops and which would have a long-lasting impact. This contributes significantly to giving the Antique a fixed place within teaching curricula. Modelled on the learning of grammar, the ‘alphabet’ is a sequence that encourage students to advance from elementary unity to complex whole and from the simple and similar to the varied and different. The scheme once again originated in Alberti, who advises a painter to follow the method practiced by teachers of writing, from the alphabet to whole words. So the beginner is supposed to learn first ‘the outlines of surfaces, then the way in which surfaces are joined together, and after that the forms of all the members individually; and they should commit to memory all the differences that can exist in those members’. He recommends the same process for the study of the male anatomy: starting from the bones, proceeding to the sinews and muscles, and finally to the flesh and skin. An iincreased stress on the naked male means that pupils often start from the eye, then assembles different parts of the body in ever more intricate combinations, and finally reaches the whole naked male, via the study of ancient sculpture AND the live model. Benvenuto [Workshop of Federico Zuccaro, A Group of Artists Copying a Sculpture, c. 1600, 190 × 264 mm, pen, black and red chalk on prepared paper, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, inv. F 261 inf. n. 128, p. 125] Cellini reports that starting with the eye is the common practice and advised, like Alberti, a similar process for the study of anatomy. This process is reflected in the various images of early academies or studios, such as Stradanus’ The Practice of the Visual Arts, where one pupil is shown drawing an eye on his sheet, or Alberti’s Painters’ Academy where an artist is presenting a similar drawing to his master. A parallel progression led the student from simplicity to complexity in the depiction of outlines, surfaces, chiaroscuro, poses and expressions: from copying objects in the same medium and in two dimensions, to the imitation of three-dimensional figure. The process usually starts with copying a drawing or print, then paintings, first in grisaille and then in colour, moving onto ancient sculpture [PRELIMINARY to the LIVE MODEL – drawn from life], either originals or casts, and, FINALLY, to the live model. This progression, already outlined by Vinci in his treatise on painting, and advocated also by Vasari, is codified by Armenini, the first to list all its stages while simultaneously assigning a central role to classical statuary in providing a model for ideal forms. Armenini delineates both the progression from the eye to the whole body and from a drawing or print to the live model (via the preliminary of the ‘drawn from the antique’,  and warned the reader not to subvert this order. The earliest academies applied this method and Zuccaro’s statutes of the Accademia di San Luca, which are the most explicit, specifically mentioned the ‘alphabet’ or ‘ABC’ of drawing. It becomes standard practice in academies. The  aim is, as most writers reiterated, to assimilate this repertory of forms through constant study and the exercise of memory, as to finally be able to create a form from imagination – for a mythological heroic figure -- *independent* of any object of imitation (IMITATUM). The ‘alphabet of drawing’ has its physical manifestation in the publication of the drawing-book, conceived in the environment of the Carracci academy, such as Fialetti’s “Il vero modo”. The diffusion of such manuals contributed enormously to spreading the knowledge of the didactic role of the Antique to artists who makes a grand tour to Rome a compulsory part of his education. Odoardo Fialetti, Il vero modo et ordine per dissegnar tutte le parti et membra del corpo humano, Venice, c. 1608, etching, 100 × 140 mm, The Bellinheger Collection]. Rome establishes herself as the preeminent centre for anyone eager to assimilate the principle of Italian art. The first significant artist, and one of the greatest of all to do the tour to the Belvedere with the specific educational intent, is Dürer. Durer spends the years in Rome. The impact of classical statuary is evident in many of his prints and paintings, for example, in his “Adam and Eve”. But the largest number of artists to travel to Rome originates from the Low Countries. Coming from a powerful and influential pictorial tradition that privileged an analytical representation of nature, and having received little or no exposure to classical antiquity in their training, Netherlandish artists seek especially to learn how to master the naked male through the lessons of the Antique and the works of Sanzio and Buonarroti. Rome offers also the opportunity of training in one of its many workshops and the appealing possibility of benefiting from the system of commissions. Indeed the ‘fiamminghi’, as they are called in Rome, gain an increasing number of commissions, eventually, in their turn, influencing the Roman art world. Some of them stayed for long periods or moved permanently, such as Stradanus, Giambologna – il ratto delle sabine, il mcurio di Medici -- or Tetrode. We know about the Roman years of many of these artists mainly thanks to Mander’s “Schilderboeck”, the earliest systematic account of Netherlandish and Northern European painters, based on Vasari’s “Vite”. The approach of these artists towards the Antique could be varied and multi-faceted. Most fill their sketchbooks with drawings that served as a collection of forms to be re-used. Others, like Spranger, according to Van Mander, aim to assimilate the principles of classical art to establish a repertoires of forms and an attitude towards the naked male that could be infused in their own creations, rather than spending too much time in the physical act of drawing. Although ‘Mabuse’ is the first Fleming to pass time in the peninsula, it was only with Scorel that the lesson of antiquity was transmitted, through his work-shop at Utrecht. Of his various pupils, Heemskerck is certainly the most prolific and versatile in copying antique statuary. Two albums from the  years he spent in Rome are preserved in Berlin. They constitute one of the largest surviving collections of copies after the Antique and are filled with exceptional drawings in different media and size, offering an invaluable opportunity to categorise the many different approaches to classical statuary that can be described as record drawings. Many are topographical views of Rome in which Heemskerck indulges in the depiction of architectural ruins and sculptural fragments, and which he later reuses in imaginary landscapes. Some of his views are poetic meditations on the colossal ruins of the city, physical reminders of the passage of time, of human grandeur and fragility, a mood he shared with other artists, such as Herman [Heemskerck, View of the Santacroce Statue Court, 1532–37, pen and brown ink, 136 × 213 mm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, Heemskerck Album I, fol. 29r] Posthumus. Other drawings are more or less accurate depictions of classical statues in their physical locations, from the Belvedere to the Campidoglio, to Roman private courtyards and gardens (figs 16 and 38), where the antiquities are shown in their still fragmentary state. In numerous detailed drawings focusing on single statues, we see Heemskerck’s different approaches to copying the Antique and, correspondingly, the different media he employs to do so. His drawings range from the precise pen-and-ink study, in which he faithfully records the condition of celebrated statues, isolating the head as a physiognomic type to a drawing where the whole statue is presented FROM DIFFERENT ANGLES, to record the different poses and volumes of the naked male in space. He also makes copies in which he exploits the softness of red chalk to study anatomical details, assembling parts from different statues on the same sheet and focusing on torsos and legs, sometimes even disregarding the face, the drapery or other details. Finally, in yet other red chalk drawings he carefully records decorative details from a statue or a relief. The variety of techniques and handling deployed in these [Fig. 39. (top left) Maarten van Heemskerck, Head of the Laocoön, 1532–36, pen and brown ink, 136 × 211 mm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, Heemskerck Album I, fol. 39r. Heemskerck, Two Studies of the Head of the Apollo Belvedere, 1532–36, pen and brown ink, 136 × 211 mm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, Heemskerck Album I, fol. 36v. Heemskerck, Three Studies of a Fragmentary Statue of a Crouching Venus in the Palazzo Madama, 1532–36, pen and brown ink, 135 × 210 mm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, Heemskerck Album I, fol. 06v. Heemskerck, Studies of Three Torsos and a Leg from Classical Statues in the Casa Sassi, 1532–33, red chalk, 135 × 211 mm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, Heemskerck Album I, fol. 51v. Heemskerck, The Right Foot of the So-Called ‘Colossal Genius’, 1532–33, red chalk, 135 × 208 mm, Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Kupferstichkabinett, Heemskerck Album I, fol. 65v ] copies allowed him to find appropriate solutions to the variety of problems posed by the style and condition of the works that he copied. The result is a stunning visual repertory that is easy to access and use, and which would inspire him when he returned home. Several Frenchmen also established their residence in Rome. Many of them, such as Beatrizet, Lafréry, or Dupérac, specialise in engraved views of the city and its ancient remains, catering to a market increasingly fascinated by Rome’s ruins and statues. In one engraving attributed to Beatrizet, we find a rare image of an artist in the act of copying from ancient statuary in situ – in this case the famous colossal “Grande Bellezza” Marforio, at that time located in the Forum now in the courtyard of the Palazzo Nuovo of the Campidoglio. The image clearly expresses the sense of awe that one feels in front of the grandeur of the remains of Roman classical statuary. The fragmentary condition of so much monumental sculpture inspired thoughts about the fragility of the human condition and the ultimate insignificance of worldly troubles, which, as the inscription on the print remarks, the old Marforio ‘does not consider worth a single penny’. It is against this backdrop that we must consider Goltzius’ draughtsmanly activity in Rome, where he arrived almost certainly on the recommendation of his friend Mander, who had already been in Italy. Goltzius was then is celebrated as an [Fig. 44. Beatrizet (attr.), An Artist Drawing the ‘Marforio’, 1550, engraving, 370 × 432 mm, published in Antoine Lafréry’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae] engraver throughout Europe. With Mander and Haarlem he establishes an academy in Haarlem. Although we know almost nothing about this artistic association, it must have involved discussions about the Antique and its representation among the three friends, who had the advantage of direct access to Heemskerck’s Roman drawings, then owned by Cornelisz. It is therefore significant that while in Rome, Goltzius takes an approach to classical statuary that is very different from Heemskerck’s. Goltzius concentrates from the beginning on *thirty* of the most famous classical statues, of which 43 drawings in total survive. Goltzius’s drawings are highly finished and unprecedentedly detailed, carefully recording the tonal passages on the muscles of the statues. The viewpoint is almost always close and frontal to the statue, or exploits the most dramatic or informative angle. Most importantly, unlike almost all of his predecessors, who fill single pages of their sketchbooks with details from unrelated sculptures, he devotes a full page to *each*, a practice followed by Rubens. Goltzius’s intent from the beginning is clearly to produce a drawing that may be transformed into an engravings capable of surpassing in precision all previously published series, and which, in faithfully reproducing the volume of the naked male, would also demonstrate his renowned virtuosity in handling the burin. His set is intended for a market of connoisseurs and collectors, but it is also likely that Goltzius wishes to provide anyone with correct and detailed images of classical statues that they could copy during their apprenticeships. Goltzius engraves only three plates, one of which, significantly, shows an artist at work copying the celebrated Apollo del Belvedere. A few years after Goltzius’s tour to Rome, Rubens arrives. He spends two prolonged periods in Rome. Rubens constitutes a special case, being the perfect embodiment of the humanistic ideal of the artist-scholar: the son of a wealthy Antwerp family, highly educated in the classics and socially accomplished, Rubens arrives in Rome already equipped with a thorough understanding of the Antique and its literary sources, a passion he cultivates throughout his life with his circle of scholarly friends and patrons. Rubens’s approach towards classical statuary is therefore fascinating, complex and varied. Rubens’ appetite for the most famous ancient statues must have been stimulated already in Antwerp through the engravings by Raimondi and his pupils and through those in the collections published by Lafréry and De Cavalieri. When in Rome Rubens devotes himself completely to copying this or that original with unique thoroughness, both to exercise his draughtsmanship and to create an immense repertory of forms, to which he refers for inspiration throughout his life. His approach towards classical statuary istwofold. One is purely intellectual, focused on understanding the mathematical proportions and volumes of this or that emblematic antique which he divides into different categories according to muscular strength, to capture the very essence of their perfection. The other is more direct: to study the statue exhaustively in order to assimilate its formal principle For Rubens it is not only necessary to ‘understand the antique’, but ‘to be so thoroughly possessed of this knowledge, that it may diffuse itself everywhere’. Unlike Goltzius, Rubens studies a statue over and over again, copying it from many, and often unusual, points of view, devoting a single page to each. No one before Rubens shows such a painstaking interest in understanding the formal logic of a single statue intended as a whole. Rubens’s focus on the naked male – to learn the principles of a perfect naked male  – on specificslly ‘muscular’ masculine male statues, such the Laocoonte, the Torso del Belvedere, and the Ercole Farnese and his choice of the most favourable points of view, may reflect the specific advice and examples given in Lomazzo’s Trattato and in Armenini’s Veri Precetti. But, as Dolce and Armenini had already done before him, Rubens also cautions to focus on the form and not on the matter of the statue, to avoid the ‘smell’ in a drawing or a creation. Rubens is aware of the danger of transferring the characteristics and limits of a three-dimensional medium (is flesh the medium of the live model?) into another – drawing or painting. In a section titled “De Imitatione Statuarum” of a larger theoretical notebook that he compiles over several years, Rubens refers to painters who ‘make no distinction between the form and the matter -- the ‘figura’ and the flesh, with the result that ‘instead of ‘imitating’ living flesh from the life of nature, they only represent marble tinged with various colours’. We can see Rubens’s genius at re-vitalising the ‘inert’ substance of the antique model as if it were a live model to be drawn from life, by applying his principle of inventive and transformative imitation in most of his drawings after the Antique, for which he uses soft chalk on rough paper better to ‘re-translate’ the substance back into the natural living flesh, as if drawn from life. This is particularly evident in muscular figures such as the Torso del Belvedere and the Laocoonte, which he brings back to life, to the life Virgil instilled Laocoonte with, or Aiace had. -- adopting a dramatic angle and a diagonal that completely abandons the static   [Rubens, The Back of the Belvedere Torso, c. 1601–02, red chalk, 395 × 260 mm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, inv. 2002.12b] and the academic frontal point of view of most academic drawings. This attention to the qualities of the naked male skin and flesh, and the dynamism, pathos, and drama that he learns mainly from classically Roman – but POST-classically Greek] statuary is to become the main traits of his own art. In this he is following in the footsteps of Buonarroti, who, not by chance, Rubens copied extensively, focusing especially on the nudes of the Sistine Chapel and on his statues. Rubens adopts a similar approach to the live model, which he often poses in attitudes reminiscent of an antique – such as the Spinario, or the Wrestlers. Unsurprisingly, he frequently cited the Laocoonte and the Torso, but the most recurrent is the Spinario in the Campidoglio – even though the head is not the original one -- for which several drawings of the complex pose made from different angles survive.  The Spinario pose is already chosen by one of the pupils of Gozzoli for this particular purpose of the antique-imitating live model, and it remains one of the most popular, even, easiest, for posing the live model – everyone has a thorn! -- Rubens’s drawings of the Spinario convey the essence of Rubens’s attitude towards the ideal human form, and the Spinario’s attitude towards his own thorn. By posing flesh as imitatiang another substance imitating flresh, Rubens – or the artist who does this -- is able to bypass the dangers of the ‘matter’ to focus only on the complex form and pose of the original statue or statuary group or syntagma (think Lottatori!). Back in Antwerp, Rubens retains until his death his drawings after the Antique, bound together in separate books, as a distinctive part of the collection of his house-museum, which hosted also numerous antiquities. They remain a constant source of inspiration and they may also have been used as teaching tools – as in the best tradition of Renaissance workshop practices – judging by the copies deposited by his pupils in the cantoor, Rubens’s cabinet or studio. The flux of artists coming to Rome did not cease, although most become fascinated by the radical naturalism of Caravaggio and his followers, rather than aiming at recreating the principles of classical art. A group of artists even develops a successful speciality in the depiction of contemporary Roman street life and everyday reality: a rustic tavern, a drinking scenes, brigands, street vendors, charlatans and carnivals. The art of the ‘Bamboccianti’, so named after their leader, Laer, dubbed ‘Bamboccio’, or ‘ugly puppet’, is fiercely criticised as a debased form of art that deliberately chose the ‘worst’ of nature (cf. verismo, and the customs of realistic naturalism) by the supporters of classicism and history painting, such as Albani, Sacchi, and Rosa, as well as by the philosophers of ‘ideal beauty’ such as Bellori. In contrast to the Dutch, among the foreign communities in Rome, it was the French who are to take the lead in the cause of classicism, the defence of Ideal Beauty and the copy and study of the Antique. The contrasting attitudes of artists towards the study of art in Rome is perfectly visualised in a canvas by Goubau, a Flemish painter influenced by the Bamboccianti, who had been in Rome. On the right, judicious [Rubens, Study of the Laocoön Seen from the Back, c. 1606–08, black chalk, 440 × 283 mm, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, inv. 624, F 249 inf. n. 5, p. 11. Rubens, Study of the Younger Son FIGLIO PIU GIOVANE of the Laocoön Seen from the Back, black chalk, 444 × 265 mm, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan, inv. 623, F 249 inf. n. 5, p. 11] artists under the supervision of a master are busy at work among imaginary Roman ruins, copying and measuring an ancient statue or a relief, among them the ERCOLE FARNESE; on the left the Bamboccianti indulge in the pleasures of wine and music under the pergola of a rustic tavern. Nevertheless, this wittily expressed opposition should not be taken too literally, as the educational and inspirational role of classical statuary had been deeply assimilated by artists of every inclination or aesthetic Many move between genres and artistic currents such as the Flemish genre painter Lint, who produced many drawings after the Antique while in Rome. Even those close to the Bamboccianti clearly treasured the didactic role of classical statuary, as can be seen in the depictions of workshops and artists at work by the Flemish Sweerts. The Antique, and its didactic role in the Italian model of artistic education, also made rapid progress in all of civilised Europe, supported by the publication of Karel van Mander’s Schilderboeck. Knowledge was transmitted mainly through drawings, drawing-books and plaster casts. These are used in the drawing schools or private academies that proliferate, some of which were founded by the same artists who had been exponents of the Bamboccianti in Rome. These drawing schools often had to struggle against regulations by the guilds, which remained the dominant associations for artists, dictating what goes on in a workshop – the notable exception being the academy founded in Antwerp by royal [Goubau, The Study of Art in Rome, 1662, oil on canvas, 132 × 165 cm, Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Antwerp, inv. 185] decree. But despite the heavy hands of the guilds, many thriving workshops, while accepting individual apprentices, adopt *Italian* academic practices, such as conducting classes for groups of students, or implementing a training programme focused on drawing and the mastery of the human form. This often included the ‘alphabet of drawing’, as was the practice of Rembrandt’s studio in Amsterdam, in which many students were taught annually, and of Rubens, who, as court painter, did not have to register his apprentices with the Antwerp guild.142 According to Van Mander, another studio famous for its educational efficacy was that of Abraham Bloemaert (1566– 1651) in Utrecht (see cat. 11).143 During the second half of the century, other private drawing schools or ‘colleges’ were founded, which cater for a clientele of artists or the dilettanti giving them the chance to draw from casts and the nude live model alongside their studio practice. Among the most famous are those of Sweerts, opened in Brussels and of Bisschop in The Hague. Closely connected with workshops’ and schools’ drawing practices was the proliferation of drawing-books and artists’ manuals. Most of them were based on the example of Odoardo Fialetti’s Il Vero Modo and Giacomo Franco’s De excellentia et nobilitate delineationis (1611) sometimes re- printing parts of them.147 Like their Italian predecessors, Netherlandish drawing-books focused on the human form, on classical statuary, and on the different stages of the academic learning process.148 The increasing importance of  38 39  the Antique in the Netherlands is well expressed by the various Dutch translations of François Perrier’s Segmenta (1638) – the most successful collection of prints after classical statues of the 17th century (fig. 57 and cat. 16, figs 3–6) – and by the equal success of its Dutch counterpart, Jan de Bisschop’s Icones (1668, see cat. 13), explicitly compiled as a teaching tool.149 Antique models were also copied by young Northern artists in three dimensions, thanks to the proliferation of casts, as shown in the frontispiece of Abraham Bloemaert’s Konstryk Tekenboek (c. 1650) – one of the most influential draw- ing-books of the second half of the century (see cat. 11). Many studios and drawing schools owned collections of casts, often of famous prototypes such as the Laocoön or the Apollo Belvedere. Inventories of the studios of Cornelis Cornelisz. van Haarlem, Hendrik van Balen (1575–1632), and Rembrandt, for instance, testify to their presence.150 The diffusion of casts appears explicitly in the numerous paintings depicting young artists at work, which became popular from the middle of the century onwards (figs 49–53, see also cats 12 and 14). These works constitute an individual iconographical genre that probably derives from Fialetti’s striking etching (see cat. 10), which, as we have seen, was well known and reprinted several times in the Netherlands.151 This genre was practised mainly by Jacob Van Oost the Elder (1601–71, fig. 50), Wallerant Vaillant (1623–77, fig. 51), Balthasar Van den Bossche (1681–1715) and Michael Sweerts (fig. 52 and cat. 12), whose canvases tend to represent the ideal training curricu- lum, where the copying of plaster casts after the Antique has the place of honour.152 As ‘low’ genre paintings that celebrate the didactic role of the Antique – traditionally considered to be essential for the lofty genre of history painting rather than for scenes of daily life – they indirectly attest to the ubiquitous penetration of classical models in all 17th-century artistic practices. Incidentally they are also a direct visual source for the most widely diffused typologies of classical statues in the North of Europe in the 17th century: from busts of the Apollo Belvedere (figs 18 and 50), of the Laocoön group, both father and sons (figs 19 and 51), and of the so-called Grimani Vitellius (fig. 52), to reduced copies of the Spinario (figs 15 and 49), the Belvedere Antinous (figs 22 and 51), the Venus de’ Medici (figs 53 and 56), and the Farnese Hercules (see fig. 32 and cat. 14). Also frequently depicted are busts of Niobe (see fig. 34 and cat. 12), reduced copies of the Wrestlers (fig. 33) and the Borghese Gladiator (fig. 54). The Italian and the French Academies in the Seventeenth Century and the Establishment of Classicism The 17th century witnessed dramatic changes of attitude towards the study of the Antique in terms of codification, diffusion and theoretical debate; at the same time it saw the formulation of a style heavily dependent on classical sculp- ture, setting the stage for the final affirmation of classicism as a pan-European phenomenon in the following century. The selection of the most significant antique statues, begun in the 16th century, was further refined, especially in the cos- mopolitan antiquarian environment of Rome. Excavations continued and some of the new discoveries immediately joined the canon of ideal models. Three of them, in particu- lar, were ubiquitously reproduced and copied in studios and academies: the Borghese Gladiator (fig. 54), discovered in 1611, which soon became the preferred model for the anatomy of the muscular man in action; the Dying Gladiator (fig. 55), first mentioned in 1623, whose complex pose could be drawn from different angles and which offered an ideal of heroic pathos expressed in the moment of death; and finally, the Venus de’ Medici (fig. 56), first recorded in 1638 but possibly known in the late 16th century, which rapidly became the most admired embodiment of the graceful female body.153 New collections gradually replaced earlier ones and a few families succeeded in acquiring some of the newly discovered statues that had gained canonical status. The magnificent urban palaces and suburban villas of the Medici, Farnese, Borghese, Ludovisi and Giustiniani attracted an increasing number of visitors and artists, becoming privileged centres for the study of the Antique, and family names became attached to certain statues, as the Farnese Hercules or the Venus de’ Medici testify.154 Some of these, such as the Palazzo Farnese (see cat. 21), and the Casino Borghese retained their status as ‘private museums’ until the end of the 18th century. Prints continued to play a vital role in the dissemination of images of classical statues throughout Europe. They were produced predominantly in Rome, where, as in the 16th century, French printmakers played a prominent role along- side Italian antiquarians and engravers.155 Among others, the publications of François Perrier (1594–1649) and the duo comprising the antiquarian and theoretician Giovanni Pietro Bellori (1613–96) and the engraver Pietro Santi Bartoli (1615– 1700), offered artists and the educated public a choice of Fig. 54. Agasias of Ephesus, Borghese Gladiator, c. 100 bc, marble, 199 cm (h), Louvre, Paris, inv. Ma 527 Fig. 55. Dying Gladiator, Roman copy of a Pergamene original of the 3rd century bc, marble, 93 cm (h), Capitoline Museums, Rome, inv. MC0747 Fig. 49. (top left) Jan ter Borch, The Drawing Lesson, 1634, oil on canvas, 120 × 159 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. SK-A-1331 Fig. 50. (top right) Jacob van Oost the Elder, The Painter’s Studio, 1666, oil on canvas, 111.5 × 150.5 cm, Groeningenmuseum, Bruges, inv. 0000.GRO0188.II Fig. 51. (bottom left) Wallerant Vaillant, The Artist’s Pupil, c. 1668, oil on canvas, 119 × 90 cm, Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, inv. 673 Fig. 52. (bottom centre) Michael Sweerts (attr.), Boy Copying a Cast of the Head of Emperor Vitellius, c. 1658–59, oil on canvas, 49.5 × 40.6 cm, The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, inv. 72-65 Fig. 53. (bottom right) Pieter van der Werf, A Girl Drawing and a Boy near a Statue of Venus, 1715, oil on panel, 38.5 × 29 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. SK-A-472 40 41  the ‘best’ ancient statues and reliefs; the authority of their selections lasted throughout the 18th century. For full-length statues, crucial was the appearance in 1638 of Perrier’s Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum (fig. 57 and cat. 16 figs 3–6), a collection of prints which in many ways fulfils what Goltzius had intended to publish four decades earlier (see cats 6–7).156 Offering good quality reproductions and different points of view– three for the Farnese Hercules and four for the Borghese Gladiator, for instance – Perrier’s images were essential in focusing the attention of artists on a selected number of models considered exemplary in anatomy, proportions, poses and expressions. Reprinted and trans- lated several times, the success of the Segmenta was immense and it was used in studios and academies as a teaching tool for almost two centuries, as we have seen earlier in the Netherlands. As late as 1820 John Flaxman was still recom- mending the use of Perrier to his students at the Royal Academy.157 Such publications were the results of the antiquarian and theoretical interests of a French-Italian classicist milieu that flourished in the first half of the century in Rome.158 Innumerable French artists now spent time in the city, filling sketchbooks with copies after the Antique and Renaissance Fig. 56. Venus de’ Medici, Greek or Roman copy of the 1st century bc of a Greek original of the 4th century bc, marble, 153 cm (h), Uizi, Florence, inv. 224 Fig. 57. François Perrier, Venus de’Medici, plate 81, from Segmenta nobilium signorum et statuarum, Rome, 1638 masters, and devoting increasing space to the study of Raphael.159 Two of the most relevant figures in this context were the great French painter Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), who resided in Rome between 1624 and 1665 (with a brief sojourn in France in 1640–42), and his friend and biographer Giovanni Pietro Bellori, possibly the most influential art writer of the century, who deserves to be called the pro- tagonist in the theoretical formulation of classicism. Of similar significance was the scholar, antiquarian, collector and patron Cassiano dal Pozzo (1588–1657), a friend of both Poussin and Bellori – and patron of the former – who assem- bled a vast encyclopaedic collection of drawings divided by themes, a ‘Paper Museum’, with sections devoted to classi- cal antiquity commissioned from several contemporary artists.160 Classicism found probably its clearest and most influen- tial formulations in a landmark discourse composed by Bellori and delivered in 1664, the year before Poussin’s death, in the Roman Accademia di San Luca: the ‘Idea of the painter, the sculptor and the architect, selected from the beauties of Nature, superior to Nature’ (see Appendix, no. 11). Bellori’s theoretical statement, published as a prologue to his Vite in 1672, was to become enormously influential in defining and disseminating the central tenets of the classicist ideal (see cat. 15).161 Joining Aristotelian and neo-Platonic premises, Bellori’s Idea advocates in the selection of the best parts of Nature according to the right judgement of the artist in order to create ideal beauty – a concept that we have already encountered many times. According to Bellori, the Idea had been embodied in art at several periods of history and he traced its development according to a scheme of peaks and descents. It took shape first and foremost in the ancient world and was revived in modern times by Raphael, who is accorded nearly divine status. After the decadence and excesses of Mannerism, it was revitalised by the Bolognese Annibale Carracci (1560–1609) and by his pupils and follow- ers, notably Domenichino (1581–1641). Their flame was kept alive in Bellori’s time by Poussin and Carlo Maratti (1625– 1713), a protégé of Bellori, who fashioned himself as the new Raphael and whose Academy of Drawing is the most program- matic representation of the principles of Roman classicism (see cat. 15). Bellori’s classicism, heir of the rich debates of the first half of the century, can be defined as a codification and defence of an idealistic style and of moralising history painting against the radical naturalism introduced by Caravaggio and his followers, whose slavish dependence on Nature and choice of low subjects were seen to undermine the intellectual premises of art. On the other hand, Bellori also confronted the excesses and liberties of the Baroque, whose representatives, according to him, leaned towards artificiality and despised the ‘ancient purity’.162 Classicism in many ways was based on the princi- ples laid down by the art theory of the second half of the 16th century, as it shared with it a fundamental premise: the neces- sity of the defence of what was perceived as the ideal path of art – the ‘bella maniera’ – against contemporary artistic trends which were considered erroneous or even noxious.163 The classicist theoretical approach further reinforced the practice of copying: it reinstated the intellectual value of drawing while providing a selected group of correct models to follow, with the Antique and Raphael on the loftiest pedestal. These premises were embraced by the Italian and French academies, and became the basis of most of the European academies of the following century – Opie’s words to the young pupils of the Royal Academy in 1807 still reiterate their fundamental tenets. Although the debate was at times fierce – as for instance within the Accademia di San Luca in the 1630s – a strict division of 17th-century artists into classicist, naturalist and Baroque categories would be arbitrary and inaccurate, as many of them moved between currents and at times incor- porated elements of each in their own creations. Indeed, artists of all allegiances copied, studied and took inspiration from the Antique. We know from surviving drawings and contemporary written sources that ‘classicist’ artists such as Annibale Carracci, Poussin and Maratti copied antique statues (figs 58–61), yet an equal number of ‘Baroque’ Fig. 58. Annibale Carracci, Head of Pan from the marble group of Pan and Olympos in the Farnese Collection, 1597–98, black chalk heightened with white chalk on grey-blue paper, 381 × 245 mm, Louvre, Paris, inv. 7193  artists, such as Rubens (figs 45–47 and cat. 9), Pietro da Cortona (1596–1669, fig. 62) and Bernini (figs 63–64) spent as much time in absorbing the principles of the Antique.164 Nevertheless their approaches towards the Antique could be very different. Poussin, the intellectual and antiquarian painter par excellence, copied hundreds of details from classical sculpture, especially reliefs and sarcophagi, to give archaeo- logical consistency to his art, so that his paintings would represent classical histories with the maximum of accuracy,  42 43 Fig. 59. Nicolas Poussin, Equestrian Statue of Marcus Aurelius, c. 1630–32, pen and brown ink and brown wash, 244 × 190 mm, Musée Condé, Chantilly, inv. AI 219; NI 264 Fig. 60. Carlo Maratti, The Farnese Flora, c. 1645–70, black chalk, 294 × 159 mm, The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, inv. 904377 Fig. 61. Carlo Maratti, or Studio of, The Farnese Hercules, c. 1645–70, red chalk, 292 × 165 mm, The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, inv. 904382 Fig. 62. Pietro da Cortona, The Trophies of Marius, c. 1628–1632, pen, brown ink, brown wash, heightened in white, on blue sky prepared paper, 518 × 346 mm, The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, inv. RL 8249 integrity and power, an approach in several ways similar to that of Mantegna and Raphael. Bernini, arguably the greatest 17th-century sculptor, spent his youth obsessively copying the ancient statues in the Belvedere (see Appendix, nos 9–10) and in his old age recommended that students of the Académie Royale in Paris begin their studies by copying casts of the most famous classical statues before approaching Nature (see Appendix, nos 9–10). But Bernini’s attitude towards ancient statuary was poles apart from that of Poussin (whom he nevertheless highly admired): he assimilated its principles in order to create his own independent forms, at times deviating radically from the classical model – an atti- tude that we have already seen in Michelangelo and Rubens. To develop their own style and avoid a slavish dependency on the Antique – something already stressed by Dolce, Armenini and Rubens (Appendix, nos 4, 6, 8) – he advised his students to combine and alternate ‘action and contemplation’, that is to alternate their own production with the practice of copy- ing (Appendix, no. 10). A wonderful example that allows us to follow Bernini’s creative process of transforming of the antique model is provided by a study of the torso of the Laocoön, the unbalanced and twisted pose of which he then ingeniously adapted in reverse for the complex attitude of his Daniel (figs 63–66). A recollection of the Laocoön is further- more recognisable in Daniel’s powerful expression (fig. 66).165 A practical outcome of the French and Italian theoretical formulation of a classicist doctrine was the foundation in 1648 of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris, followed in 1666 by that of the Académie de France in Rome – the latter intended to give prize-winning students the opportunity to study the Antique in situ and to provide 44 Louis XIV (r. 1643–1715) with copies of classical and Ren- aissance statues.166 The foundation of the French Académie in Paris is a turning point in the history of the teaching of art, as its codified programme – based on Italian examples, and especially the Roman Accademia di San Luca – would constitute the basis for the academies that spread over the Western world in the 18th and 19th centuries. Founded by several artists, most of whom had spent periods in Rome such as Charles Le Brun (1619–90), the Paris Académie was supported by the monarch and candidates could apply for admission only after they had trained in a workshop. Its regulations aimed at full intellectual develop- ment for its students to prepare them for the creation of the highest genre, history painting, or the grande manière. Although its curriculum was rather loosely organised and, in the first tw  o decades of its history, fairly tolerant in its aesthetic positions, during the 1660s the Académie was drastically reformed by the powerful Minister and Super- intendent of Buildings Jean-Baptiste Colbert (1619–83) and by Le Brun to become an institution in the service of the absolutist policy of Louis XIV, with a codified version of classicism as its official aesthetic. The rationalistic nature of French 17th-century culture meant that the Académie conceived of art as a science that could be taught by rules. This was explicitly stated by Le Brun in 1670,167 and efforts were concentrated in clarifying and applying most of the precepts already devised by the early Italian academies and theoreticians. If a student followed these precepts correctly he – and only he, as the institution was limited to male pupils until the late 19th century – would be able to assimilate the principles of ideal beauty and create grand art.168 The future European success of this regimented version of the humanistic theory of art rested exactly in its rational nature, as a clear system of rules easy to export and replicate, offering at the same time a safe path towards ‘true’ and universal art. Pupils were supposed to follow the ‘alphabet of drawing’, from copying drawings, to casts and statues, to the live model, which remained the most difficult task and one reserved for the most advanced students. Regular lectures on geometry, perspective and anatomy were provided. As in Federico Zuccaro’s statutes for the Accademia di San Luca, professors rotated monthly to supervise the life class, prizes were awarded to students and regular debates were initiated on the principles of art – the celebrated so-called Conférences, regularly held from 1667 onwards on the advice of Colbert, although they faltered by the end of the century to be revived only a few decades later.169 Other aspects of the reforms of the 1660s included the division of the drawing course into lower classes, devoted to copying, and higher classes, for Fig. 63. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Study of the Torso of the Father in the Laocoön group, c. 1650–55, red chalk heightened with white on grey paper, 369 × 250 mm, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, inv. 7903 Fig. 64. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Two Studies for the Statue of ‘Daniel’, c. 1655, red chalk on grey paper, 375 × 234 mm, Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig, inv. 7890 Fig. 65. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, c. 1655, terracotta, 41.6 cm (h), Vatican Museums, Rome, inv. 2424 drawing from the live model. Competitions were further structured to lead towards the highest reward, the famous Grand Prix or Prix de Rome, which allowed the winners to spend between three and five years at the Académie de France in Rome, to complete their education and to assimilate the principles of the greatest ancient and modern art. The official doctrine of the Paris Académie was distilled and diffused by André Félibien (1619–95), the most promi- nent French art theorist of the period, in his preface to the first series of Conférences held in 1667 and published in 1668. Félibien offered a clear structure for the hierarchy of genres that would be associated with academic painting for the next two centuries: at the bottom was still life, followed on an ascending line by landscape, genre painting, portraiture and finally by history painting, for which the study of the Antique, of modern masters and of the live model were considered necessary.170 The first Conférences reveal in their subjects and approach the central tenets of the Parisian Académie: paintings by Raphael, Poussin, Le Brun and the Laocoön were meticulously analysed in their parts according to strict rules: invention, expression, composition, drawing, colour, proportions etc. Some Conférences were devoted to specific parts of painting: one given by Le Brun in 1668, on the ‘passions of the soul’, which was printed posthumously and translated into several languages, constituted the basis for the study of facial expres- sions until well into the 19th century.171 The Antique remained one of the favourite subjects to be dissected by the academicians. After the 1667 Conférence on the Laocoön (see Appendix, no. 12),172 praised as the ideal model for drawing and for the ‘strong expressions of pain’,173 many more followed specifically devoted to the Farnese Hercules, Belvedere Torso, Borghese Gladiator, and Venus de’ Medici, the ultimate selected canon of sculptures.174 Conférences were also given on the study of the Antique in general.175 Sébastien Bourdon’s (1616–71) Conférence sur les proportions de la figure humaine expliquées sur l’Antique, in 1670 advised students to fully absorb the Antique from a very early age, measure precisely its proportions and control ‘compass in hand’ the Fig. 66. Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Daniel in the Lion’s Den, 1655–57, marble, over life-size, Chigi Chapel, Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome  45  live model against classical sculptures, as they are never arbitrary – a method, according to Bourdon, approved by Poussin.176 This extreme rationalistic approach, based on the actual measurement of the Antique, which, as we will see, would generate opposition, was put into practice by Gérard Audran (1640–1703), engraver and ‘conseiller’ of the Académie (Appendix, no. 13). His illustrated treatise of 1682 (figs 72–73) provided students with the carefully measured proportions of the antique statues that they were supposed to follow and became a standard reference work in many languages, continuously republished until 1855. While the Académie de France in Rome must have started accumulating casts after the Antique from early on – the inventory of 1684 lists a vast collection of statues, reliefs, busts, etc.177 – it is not entirely clear how readily the students of the Académie in Paris had access to casts or copies in the first decades of the institution’s history. Bernini, in his 1665 visit, explicitly advised the formation of a cast collection for the Parisian Académie, and some, among them a Farnese Hercules, were ordered or donated in the following years.178 But although students certainly copied casts already in Paris, full immersion in the practice was reserved for the period they spent in Rome.179 ‘Make the painters copy everything beautiful in Rome; and when they have finished, if possible, make them do it again’ Colbert tellingly wrote in 1672 to Charles Errard (c. 1606–9 – 1689), the first Director of the Académie de France in Rome.180 In Rome a similar practice was encouraged in the Accademia di San Luca, which, like its Parisian counterpart, was significantly reformed in the 1660s, perhaps a sign of the increasingly important reversal of influence, from France to Italy. From the beginning of the presidency of Carlo Maratti in 1664, a staged drawing curriculum, competitions and lectures were implemented and new casts were ordered (see cat. 15).181 Some twenty years later the Accademia received the donation of hundreds of casts of antique sculp- tures from the studio of the sculptor and restorer Ercole Ferrata (1610–86).182 Sharing the same values and similar curricula, in 1676 the Accademia di San Luca and the Parisian Académie Royale were formally amalgamated and on occa- sion French painters even became principals of San Luca – Charles Errard in 1672 and 1678, and Charles Le Brun in 1676–77.183 But the Italians could never feel wholly comforta- ble with the extreme rationalisation of art characteristic of so much French theory.184 After the publication of the French Conférences, debates were held in defence of the Vasarian tradi- tion and of the value of grace, judgement and natural talent against the rules and the overly rational analysis of art and the Antique by the French.185 The engraving by Nicolas Dorigny (1658–1746) after Carlo Maratti is the most eloquent 46 visual expression of this intellectual confrontation that con- tinued into the 1680s (cat. 15). Some of the most doctrinal aspects of the Parisian academy also generated an internal counteraction and the supporters of disegno, classicism and Poussin, headed by Le Brun, were challenged by the promot- ers of Venetian colore and Rubens, led by the artist and critic Roger de Piles (1635–1709) and by the painter Charles de la Fosse (1636–1716). The battle between ‘Poussinisme’ and ‘Rubénisme’ – a new incarnation of the debate started more than a century earlier by Giorgio Vasari and Lodovico Dolce – captured the imagination of the French academic world between the end of the 17th and the first decade of the 18th centuries. The victory of the Rubénistes led the way to a freer, anti-classicist and more painterly aesthetic and to the eventual affirmation of the Rococo in French art.186 But the next century would also witness the triumph of the classicist ideal, as its principles spread all over Europe. The Antique Posed, Measured and Dissected Given the rationalistic approach of French artists and theo- rists to the Antique – ‘compass in hand’ – it does not come as a surprise that, during the 17th century, they actually started to measure ancient statues in order to tabulate their pro- portions. And as well as measuring statues they began to merge the study of anatomy with study of the Antique to provide young students with ideal sets of muscles to copy. Such efforts produced a series of extremely influential drawing-books filled with fascinating and disturbing images, in which ancient bodies are covered by nets of numbers or flayed and presented as living écorchés. In a way it was inevitable that the study of human propor- tions applied by Alberti, Leonardo and Dürer to living bodies Fig. 67. Peter Paul Rubens, Study of the Farnese Hercules, c. 1602, pen and brown ink, 196 × 153 mm, The Courtauld Gallery, Samuel Courtauld Trust, London, inv. D.1978.PG.427.v, Fig. 68. Charles Errard, Antinous Belvedere, plate on p. 457 in Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori scultori e architetti moderni, Rome, 1672 would eventually be merged with the study of the ideal bod- ies of ancient statues, to test Vitruvius’ assertion that ancient artists worked according to a fixed canon (Appendix, no. 1). The main problem was that the canonical proportions of 5th-century bc sculpture had been disregarded from the 3rd century bc onwards. Furthermore, as we now know, most of the ‘perfect’ Greek statues were actually modified Roman copies of lost originals. The measuring efforts of 17th- century art theorists were therefore for the most part in vain, as most of the revered marbles did not embody the principles of commensurability and overall harmonic proportion that they believed they did. Although we have seen that Raphael had already initiated the practice of measuring statues (fig. 27), the first to refer explicitly to this exercise is Armenini in his 1587 De veri precetti della pittura, in which a chapter is devoted specifically to the ‘measure of man based on the ancient statues’.187 Rubens also devoted much attention to trying to discover the perfect num- bers and forms of ancient statues, dividing for instance the Farnese Hercules, the strongest type of male body, according to series of cubes, the most solid of the perfect forms (fig. 67).188 Not surprisingly, Poussin’s approach to the Antique in Rome was similar, and we know from Bellori that he and the sculptor François Duquesnoy (1597–1643) ‘embarked on the study of the beauty and proportion of statues, measuring them together, as can be seen in the case of the one of Anti- nous’ – two illustrations of which he published in Poussin’s life in his Vite (fig. 68).189 But the first artist to provide accurate drawings of the most famous statues was the future founding director of the Académie de France in Rome, Charles Errard, who, later, also provided the measured Antinous illustrations for Bellori’s Vite (fig. 68). In collaboration with the theorist Roland Fréart de Chambray (1606–76), and most likely inspired by Poussin, he executed in 1640 a series of intriguing measured red chalk drawings today preserved at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (figs 69–71).190 Produced only two years after the publication      Fig. 69. Charles Errard, or collaborator, Measured Drawing of the Belvedere Antinous, 1640, red chalk, pencil, pen and brown ink, 430 × 280 mm, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, inv. PC6415, no. 27 Fig. 70. Charles Errard, Measured Drawing of the Laocoön, 1640, red chalk, pen and brown ink, 430 × 280 mm, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, inv. PC6415, no. 11 Fig. 71. Charles Errard, Measured Drawing of the Venus de’Medici, 1640, red chalk, pencil, pen and brown ink, 430 × 280 mm, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, inv. PC6415, no. 28 47  of Perrier’s successful Segmenta, Errard’s drawings were clearly intended to be published and to present young artists with a set of certain and ideal proportions on which they could base their own figures. A similar search for discipline was undertaken by Fréart de Chambray, and later by other theorists, among the remains of ancient architecture, which involved an even more intense effort to discover their ‘perfect’ proportions. Although a few of Errard’s drawings were published in 1656 by Abraham Bosse – the first professor of perspective of the Parisian Académie Royale – the first successful manuals appeared in the 1680s, as a result of the theoretical debates on the proportions of ancient statues held in the Académie during the previous decade.191 By far the most influential was a manual we have already encountered, Gérard Audran’s Proportions du corps humain mesurées sur les plus belles figures de l’antiquité, published in 1683 (Appendix, no. 13). This provided a fully ‘classicised’ drawing-book, following the ‘alphabet of drawing’ from the measured eye, nose and mouth of the Apollo Belvedere (fig. 72), to whole canonical statues, such as the Laocoön (fig. 73). Audran’s book, republished several times in various languages, became the model for many similar publications that appeared during the 18th and early 19th centuries and espoused a practice embraced by many artists. Examples from different nations include a Dutch manual, where, fascinatingly, the Apollo Belvedere is presented according to Vitruvian principles (fig. 74; see also fig. 2 and Appendix, no. 1); drawings by the sculptor Joseph Nollekens (1737–1823; fig. 75); and measured notes drawn by Antonio Canova (1757– 1822) over an engraving of the Apollo Belvedere from a didactic series of prints after the Antique (fig. 76).192 In addition to being carefully measured, antique bodies were also dissected. If classical statues displayed perfect anat- omies, then, it was thought, they would offer an ideal starting point for young students to study bones and muscles. Combining the study of the Antique with that of anatomy was intended to reinforce the familiarity of young artists with ancient canonical models, now also analysed from the inside. Students until then had trained mainly on the immensely influential De humani corporis fabrica, published by Andrea Vesalius in 1543, and on the anatomical treatises that were based on it, but from the late 17th century new ‘classicised’ manuals appeared.193 The first, Anatomia per uso et intelligenza del disegno... , based on drawings by Errard, was published in 1691 by Bernardino Genga (1655–1720), professor of anatomy at the Académie de France in Rome.194 Probably conceived much earlier, the set of engravings included fascinating and somewhat morbid images of the skeletons of classical statues (figs 77–78; although these were not eventually included in the book) and several different views of the muscles of the strongest types of ancient prototypes, the Laocoön, the Borghese Gladiator, the Farnese Hercules and the Borghese Faun (figs 79–80).195 Genga and Errard’s Anatomia was a model for several similar books which appeared in the 18th and early 19th centuries to satisfy the needs of the increasingly classicistic curricula of European academies. Not surprisingly, only male antiquities, and usually the most muscular ones, were illustrated, both for reasons of decorum and also because the Fig. 74. Jacob de Wit, Measured ‘Apollo Belvedere’, plate 8 in Teekenboek der proportien van ‘t menschelyk lighaam, Amsterdam, 1747 Fig. 75. Joseph Nollekens, Measured Drawing of the ‘Capitoline Antinous’, 1770, pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk, 431 × 292 mm, Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, inv. DBB 1460 Fig. 76. Giovanni Volpato and Rafaello Morghen, Measured ‘Apollo Belvedere’, engraving (with inscribed measures in pencil, red chalk, pen and brown ink by Antonio Canova), post 1786, plate 35 in Principi del disegno. Tratti dall più eccellenti statue antiche per il giovanni che vogliono incamminarsi nello studio delle belle arti, Rome, 1786, Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa, inv. B 42.69          Fig. 72. Gérard Audran, Measured Details of the ‘Apollo Belvedere’, plate 27 in Les Proportions du corps humain mesurées sur les plus belles figures de l’antiquité, Paris, 1683 Fig. 73. Gérard Audran, Measured ‘Laocoön’, plate 1 in Les Proportions du corps humain mesurées sur les plus belles figures de l’antiquité, Paris, 1683 48 49 Fig. 77. (above left) After Charles Errard, The Skeleton of the ‘Laocoön’, c. 1691, engraving, 328 × 198 mm, Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, Paris, Album Maciet 2-4 (4) Fig. 78. (above centre) After Charles Errard, The Skeleton of the ‘Borghese Gladiator’, c. 1691, engraving, 334 × 280 mm, Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, Paris, Album Maciet 2-4 (1) Fig. 79. (above right) After Charles Errard, Anatomical Figure of the ‘Borghese Gladiator’, c. 1691, plate 51 in Bernardino Genga and Charles Errard, Anatomia per uso et intelligenza del disegno . . . , Rome, 1691 Fig. 80. (left) After Charles Errard, Anatomical Figure of the ‘Laocoön’, c. 1691, plate 43 in Bernardino Genga and Charles Errard, Anatomia per uso et intelligenza del disegno . . . , Rome, 1691  male body was believed to provide more anatomical infor- mation compared to the female one. One of the most dis- turbingly accurate, printed in two colours to distinguish the muscles from the bones, is the Anatomie du Gladiateur combatant ... published in 1812 by the military surgeon Jean- Galbert Salvage (1772–1813). Although this provided a precise anatomical analysis of the head of the Apollo Belvedere (fig. 81), its main focus was on the anatomy of the Borghese Gladiator analysed in all its parts (fig. 82). The accuracy of the manual’s plates made it extremely influential throughout Europe.196 Fig. 81. Nicolaï Ivanovitch Outkine after Jean-Galbert Salvage, Muscles and Bones of the Head of the ‘Apollo Belvedere’, engraving in two colours, plate 1 in Jean Galbert Salvage, Anatomie du Gladiateur combatant ..., Paris, 1812 Fig. 82. Jean Bosq after Jean-Galbert Salvage, Anatomical Figure of the ‘Borghese Gladiator’, engraving in two colours, plate 6 in Jean Galbert Salvage, Anatomie du Gladiateur combatant ..., Paris, 1812 50 The stress on anatomical precision also produced a spectacu- lar three-dimensional écorché of the Borghese Gladiator created by Salvage in 1804 and acquired as a teaching tool in 1811 by the École des Beaux-Arts, where it remains (fig. 83).197 An earlier model, which had served as inspiration for Salvage, was the gruesomely naturalistic écorché posed as the Dying Gladiator (see fig. 55) made by William Hunter (1718– 83), the professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, in collaboration with the sculptor Agostino Carlini (1718–90; fig. 84). Casted on the body of an executed smuggler, it was aptly Latinised as Smugglerius.198 The Antique found its way into academic anatomical manuals for students throughout the 19th century, and its pervasiveness was enormous, extending even beyond Western culture. A plate with a flayed Laocoön from the popu- lar Anatomie des formes extérieures du corps humain, published in 1845 by Antoine-Louis-Julien Fau (fig. 85), served as inspira- tion for a popular artists’ manual produced in Japan at the end of the century, resulting in an extraordinary image which fuses the Western canon and the Japanese woodblock print tradition of the Ukiyo-e (fig. 86).199 The osmosis between the Antique and other disciplines of the academic curriculum gained ground also in the study of the live model. We have seen that already in the 15th century it was common practice to pose apprentices in imitation of ancient sculpture (see fig. 14), and great artists like Rubens often returned to this expedient (see cat. 9). But the practice became increasingly diffused within the codified curricula of French and Italian academies during the 17th and 18th centuries (figs 87–89). Recommended by several Fig. 83. Jean-Galbert Salvage, Écorché of the ‘Borghese Gladiator’, 1804, plaster, 157 cm (h), École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, inv. MU11927 Fig. 84. (top left) William Pink after Agostino Carlini, Smugglerius, c. 1775 (this copy c. 1834), painted plaster, 75.5 × 148.6 cm, Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 03/1436     Fig. 85. (middle left) M. Léveillé, Anatomical Figure of the ‘Laocoön’, lithography, plate 24 in Antoine-Louis-Julien Fau, Anatomie des formes extérieures du corps humain, Paris, 1845 Fig. 86. (middle right) Anatomical Figures of the ‘Laocoön’ and of a Small Child, woodblock print, plate in Kawanabe Kyo-sai, Kyosai Gadan, 1887      Fig. 87. (bottom left) Antoine Paillet, Drawing of a Model Posing as the ‘Laocoön’, 1670, black and white chalk on brown paper, 580 × 521 mm, École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Paris, inv. EBA 3098 Fig. 88. (bottom centre) Giuseppe Bottani, Drawing of a Model in the Pose of the ‘Lycean Apollo’ Type, c. 1760–70, red and white chalks on red-orange prepared paper, 423 × 270 mm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, inv. 1978-70-197 Fig. 89. (bottom right) Jacques-Luois David, An Academic Model in the Pose of the ‘Dying Gaul’, 1780, oil on canvas, 125 × 170 cm, Musée Thomas Henry, Cherbourg, inv. MTH 835.102 51  academicians, posing the live model with the same tension and flexing of muscles as the ancient statues encouraged students to correct their drawings after fallible Nature against the perfection of the antique examples and to derive universal principles from particular living models (see cats 16 and 27b).200 The Eighteenth Century and the Diffusion of the Classical Ideal The seeds planted by 17th-century classicist theory fully blossomed during the 18th with the affirmation of Neo- classicism in the second half of the century. Supported by and supporting the exponential diffusion of academies – from some nineteen in 1720 to more than 100 in 1800 – the cult of the Antique spread to the four corners of Europe, from St Petersburg to Lisbon and beyond.201 The ‘true style’, as classicism was often called in the 18th century, was inextri- cably linked with many of the values of Enlightenment culture: in an age in search of order and universal principles, the appeal of the rational and ‘eternal’ ideals embodied by classical statuary proved irresistible. At the same time they provided a useful tool for existing political powers and a for- midable one for new authorities in search of legitimisation. The new academies based their curricula mainly on that of Paris and Rome, and the didactic role assigned to the Antique was physically imported through an army of plaster casts – the ‘Apostles of good taste’ – as Denis Diderot called them, which became the most recognisable trademark of the newly founded institutions (fig. 90).202 The progressive method of the ‘alphabet of drawing’ definitively established itself as the basis of the training of European artists well into the 20th century. Not necessarily followed in practice, as students often wanted to rush to the copy of the live model, its didactic value was, in Fig. 90. After Augustin Terwesten, The Life Academy at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin, engraved vignette on p. 217 from Lorenz Beger, Thesaurus Brandenburgicus Selectus..., vol. 3, Berlin, 1701 theory, supported by the vast majority of academies.203 The plate illustrating the entry on ‘Drawing’ in Diderot and D’Alembert’s epochal Encyclopédie significantly focuses on the three steps, being followed in different media (fig. 91).204 While the French model was spreading throughout Europe during the first half of the century, ironically the Parisian Académie itself underwent a period of crisis. After the death of Colbert in 1683 and of Le Brun in 1690, the royal institution became decreasingly relevant in determining the direction of the national school of painting. Financial constraints and the waning of royal patronage coincided with the fact that the vital forces of French art were becoming less interested in adhering to the precepts of the Académie. A change in taste under the regency of Philippe d’Orléans (r. 1715–23) favoured the so-called petite manière, a form of painting dealing with light-hearted subjects – ‘bergeries’, ‘fêtes galantes’ – against the grande manière. Partly as a conse- quence, the traditional curriculum of the Académie, centred on the study of the human figure to prepare for history painting, was increasingly neglected.205 But things changed radically in 1745 with the appointment of Charles-François- Paul Le Normant de Tournehem – the uncle of Madame de Pompadour – as Surintendant des Bâtiments du Roi, the official protector of the Académie Royale on behalf of the king. He initiated a reform involving the reinvigoration of royal patronage, the re-establishment of Conférences and, more generally, a series of initiatives aimed at re-establishing the leading role of the Académie and of history painting in the French art world.206 The principles of Le Normant’s reform, supported by the influential antiquarian and theorist Comte de Caylus (1692–1765) and visualised by Charles-Joseph Natoire’s beautiful drawing (cat. 16), paved the way for the final affirmation of the grande manière in the second half of the century, despite the continuing clamour of dissenting voices. If Paris progressively became the centre of the modern art world, Rome retained its status as the ‘academy’ of Europe Fig. 91. Benoît-Louis Prévost after Charles-Nicolas Cochin the younger, A Drawing School, plate 1, illustrating the entry ‘Dessein’ from Denis Diderot and Jean Le Ronde D’Alambert, Encyclopédie ..., Recueil de planches, sur les sciences, les art libéraux, et les arts méchaniques ..., Paris, 1763, vol. 20 where a thriving international community of artists congre- gated to round off their education in the physical and spirit- ual presence of the Antique and the great Renaissance masters.207 The crucial role that Rome occupied in 18th- century culture is evoked in the words of the most famous art critic of the age and the champion of classicism Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–68): ‘Rome’ he wrote in his letters ‘is the high school for all the world, and I also have 208 been purified and tried in it’. Of course, artists and travel- lers had visited the city to study its art for at least two centu- ries, but the 18th century represented Rome’s golden age as the traveller’s ultimate destination. The Grand Tour – as the trip to Italy and to Rome was known – became a social and cultural phenomenon that included artists, antiquarians, collectors and, in general, members of European elites.209 It generated an industry of collectibles that travellers could bring back to their homeland, and an army of original ancient statues and modern copies in all media was exported, alongside portraits and paintings of various kinds that would powerfully recall the time spent by their owners in the eternal city. Among the most fascinating and systematic evocations of Rome are a series of celebrated canvases by Giovanni Paolo Panini (1691–1765), where ‘the best of the best’ of Roman sites and antiquities are gathered together in imaginary galleries. In the foreground of fig. 92, (see also cat. 20, fig. 5) artists are busy drawing and measuring with their compasses a selected choice of canonical classical statues – a reminder of one of the most widespread artistic activities in the city.210 The demands of the Grand Tour ‘industry’ also generated a specific category of ‘marketable drawings’ after the Antique destined to fill the ‘paper museums’ of collectors and anti- quarians all over Europe. They were mainly produced for collectors and travellers from Britain, a nation that became increasingly important in the study of the Antique through- out the century. Among the most famous drawings were those produced in the workshop of the entrepreneurial painter Francesco Ferdinandi Imperiali (1679–1740) in the 1720s by various painters and draughtsmen – among them Giovanni Domenico Campiglia (1692–1775; see cats 19–20) and the young Pompeo Batoni (1708–87; fig. 93).211 Created for the extensive collection of the antiquarian Richard Topham    52 53 Fig. 92. Giovanni Paolo Panini, Roma Antica, 1754–57, oil on canvas, 186 × 227 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, inv. Nr 3315  (1671–1730), Batoni’s red chalk drawings are among the most extraordinary produced in the 18th century. With their preci- sion, attention to detail, fidelity to the originals and frontal viewpoint, they encapsulate many of the typical qualities of this category of drawings. Their manner continues and devel- ops some of the characteristics already seen in the classicist drawings of Carlo Maratti, of whom Batoni was the natural artistic heir (figs 60–61). Growing interest in the classical past was also supported by massive expansion in antiquarian publications, such as the monumental Antiquité expliquée (Paris, 1719–24) by the Abbé Bernard de Montfaucon, an illustrated encyclopaedia of the Antique for the use of the European educated public. Artists could also benefit from an increase in printed collec- tions of classical statues.212 Paolo Alessandro Maffei and Domenico de Rossi’s Raccolta di Statue Antiche e Moderne (1704) set new standards of accuracy, and it was followed by the various sumptuous volumes devoted to the antiquities of the Grand Ducal collection in Florence and of the Capitoline Museum in Rome (see cats 19–20). With its wealth of patrons, artistic competitions, acade- mies and artists’ studios, many displaying collections of casts, Rome also offered an unrivalled opportunity to learn and practice the arts of disegno.213 The classicist direction given to the Accademia di San Luca by Giovanni Pietro Bellori and Carlo Maratti, was sanctioned by the Pope Clement XI (r. 1700–21) who in 1702 established papal- supported competitions, the celebrated Concorsi Clementini, which thrived especially during the second half of the century (see cat. 20).214 Open to all nationalities, the Concorsi Fig. 93. Pompeo Batoni, Drawing of the Ceres of Villa Casali, c. 1730, red chalk, 469 × 350 mm, Eton College Library, Windsor, inv. Bn. 3, no. 45 were divided into three classes of increasing difficulty, the third and lowest class being reserved for copying, usually after the Antique (see cat. 20, fig. 4). This reinforced, as nowhere else in Europe, the study of classical statuary as the cornerstone of the artist’s education, giving to Italian and foreign artists alike the chance to be rewarded publicly in sumptuous ceremonies held in the Capitoline palaces, even in early stages of their careers. The cosmopolitan atmos- phere of the Accademia di San Luca is reflected in the fact that among its Principals were several foreigners, such as the Frenchman Charles-François Poerson (elected 1714) or the Saxon Anton Raphael Mengs (1771–2) and the Austrian Anton von Maron (1784–6). The Accademia was also open to leading women painters such as Rosalba Carriera (1675–1757) or Elisabeth-Louise Vigée Le Brun (1755–1842), although they were not allowed to attend meetings. Crucial for artistic education was the opening of the Capitoline as a public museum in 1734, thanks to the enlight- ened policy of Pope Clement XII (r. 1730–40).215 One of the main reasons behind the papal decision was specifically to support ‘the practice and advancement of young students of the Liberal Arts’ through the copy of the Antique.216 An evocative vignette inserted in the Musei Capitolini – the first sumptuously illustrated catalogue of the collection – reflects the popularity of its cluttered rooms among artists of all nations (see cat. 20). With the opening in the Capitoline of the Accademia del Nudo in 1754 – specifically devoted to the study of the live model and controlled by the Acca- demia di San Luca – the museum became a sort of ideal academy where art students could copy concurrently from the Antique, Old Masters paintings and the live model.217 Apart from the Capitoline and other traditional places, such as the Belvedere Court or the aristocratic palaces where original antiquities could be studied in situ (cat. 21), the other favoured locus for the study of the Antique in the city was the Académie de France in Rome, which owned the largest collection of plaster casts in Europe. Although the Académie, like its Parisian counterpart, had gone through a troubled period in the early decades of the century – the Prix de Rome was cancelled for lack of funds in 1706–8, 1714 and 1718–20 – its role was revamped and its practices drastically reformed under the directorship of Nicholas Vleughels (1668–1737) between 1725 and 1737.218 The casts were redisplayed in Palazzo Mancini, the Académie’s prestigious new location on the Corso, and integrated for didactic purposes with the study of the live model (see cat. 16). The collection of the Académie served as an example for similar institutions throughout Europe, as its arrangement of many copies side- by-side was considered ideal for the assimilation of classical forms. With the advancing neo-classical aesthetic, their flawless white appearance was even preferred for didactic purposes above the originals: young students could concen- trate on their purified forms, without the signs of time shown by real antiquities. No other nation had as many members in Rome as France, both as pensionnaires of the Académie and permanent residents (see cats 17–18, 21).219 The long directorship of Charles-Joseph Natoire, between 1751 and 1775, greatly devel- oped and expanded the copying of antiquities that had been reinstated by Vleughels. But Natoire also encouraged the creation of ‘classical’ landscapes of the Roman campagna, following the principles established by the great 17th-century French landscapists: Poussin, Dughet and Claude.220 Natoire and his most gifted and prolific pupil, Hubert Robert (1733– 1808), who spent more than a decade in Rome between 1754 and 1765, produced a series of drawings in which copy- ing in the city’s museums and palaces is splendidly evoked (figs 94–97 and cat. 17).221 Focused in particular on the Capitoline collection, Robert’s images are among the most fascinating products of a genre – that of the artist drawing in situ surrounded by classical statues – that, as we know, goes back to the 16th century (see cat. 5 and fig. 44). Robert specialised in evocative views of the remains of ancient Rome, with artists and wanderers lost among their crumbling grandeur. In many ways he recaptured the spirit of wonder and meditation on the ruins of the city expressed by 16th-century Northern artists, such as Maarten van Heemskerck, Herman Posthumus, and Nicolas Beatrizet (fig. 44).222 Boosted by the enthusiasm generated by the unearthing of the remains of Herculaneum and Pompeii in 1738 and 1748, in the second half of the century the ‘true style’ of Neo-classicism firmly established itself, spreading from the international community in Rome to the whole of Europe. Significant figures in the formulation of the new taste were the architect and engraver Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720– 78), whose lyrical etchings and engravings of ancient and modern Rome established – and sometimes created – the image of Rome among a European public, and the art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, whose powerful descriptions of classical statues inspired generations of artists and travellers, firmly establishing a new classicist doctrine in European taste.223 More than ever before, artists now aimed not only at assimilating the principles of classical sculpture, but at recreating its formal aspect, as a universal standard of perfection to which any great artist should aspire.   54 55 Fig. 94. Charles-Joseph Natoire, Artists Drawing in the Inner Courtyard of the Capitoline Museum in Rome, 1759, pen and brown ink, brown and grey wash, white highlights over black chalk lines on tinted grey-blue paper, 300 × 450 mm, Louvre, Paris, inv. 3931381      Fig. 95. Hubert Robert, The Draughtsman at the Capitoline Museum, c. 1763, red chalk, 335 × 450 mm, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Valence, inv. D. 80 Fig. 96. Hubert Robert, Antiquities at the Capitoline Museum, c. 1763, red chalk, 345 × 450 mm, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Valence, inv. D. 81 Fig. 97. Hubert Robert, The Draughtsman of the Borghese Vase, c. 1765, red chalk, 365 × 290 mm, Musée des Beaux-Arts et d’Archéologie de Valence, inv. D28 As Winckelmann famously stated in his Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755): ‘There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled; I mean, by imitating the ancients’ (see Appendix, no. 15). Although in 1775 new regulations for the Académie de France in Rome stressed again the centrality in the curriculum of study of the live model, most pupils now favoured the study of the Antique, an evident sign of the evolution of taste towards a new radical classicism.224 Of all the artists converging on Rome, Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825), was one of the most prolific in making copies after the Antique.225 Leaving Paris in 1775 with the firm resolution of maintaining his independence and avoiding the seductions of the Antique, his arrival in Rome, according to his own words, opened his eyes.226 He started his artistic education again by spending the next five years as a pension- naire obsessively copying from modern masters and classical statues, reliefs and sarcophagi with an attention to detail that recalls Poussin’s approach to antiquity (fig. 98).227 Generally speaking, between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, artists copying from the Antique concentrated progressively on the outlines of statues rather than on the modelling or the chiaroscuro, as the neo-classical aesthetic valued the purity of the line over any other pictorial element, accentuating the stress on disegno inaugurated by Vasari more than two centuries before. Fig. 98. Jacques-Louis David, Drawing of a Relief with a Distraught Woman with Her Head Thrown Back, 1775/80, pen and black ink with gray wash over black chalk, 196 × 150 mm, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Patrons’ Permanent Fund1998.105.1.bbb But coinciding with David’s residence in Rome, other interpretations of the Antique started to emerge within a circle of artists that included Tobias Sergel (1740–1814) and Thomas Banks (1735–1805) and which revolved around the Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741–1825).228 The approach of this ‘Poetical circle’ was utterly anti-academic and prefigures some of the principles that would be embraced by Romantic artists a few years later. For them ancient sculptures were embodiments of the emotions of the artists who created them, rather than models of ideal beauty and proportional perfection. Fuseli’s extraordinary drawing, The Artist Moved by the Grandeur of Antique Fragments (cat. 22), which he produced immediately after leaving Rome in 1778, perfectly expresses this more empathic and meditative relation with classical antiquity and its lost grandeur. The attitude of Fuseli and his friends represents a turning point in the relation of the artist with ancient statuary, stressing the creative genius of the artist, his or her individuality and, in general, the subjective values of art: all principles that would contribute to the decline of the classical model in the following century. The Antique in Britain: The eighteenth century Of the various nationalities of artists resident in Rome during the 18th century, the British were among the most numerous. Britain had arrived late on the international artistic stage. Until the late 17th century, several factors, including the theological disapproval of pagan and Catholic imagery of large sections of Protestant society, had made Britain, outside the confined patronage of the Court, a virtual backwater in the visual arts. There was no established national school of painting or sculpture and no academy; painters were tied to the craft guild of the Painter Stainers’ Company; it was illegal to import pictures for sale, and there was no proper art market.229 However, by a century later, things had changed radically: following the nation’s dramatic political liberalisa- tion and economic expansion, Britain had one of the most dynamic national art schools in Europe and a Royal Acad- emy, founded in 1768. Several hundred thousand artworks – including a multitude of original antiquities and copies – had been imported to adorn the urban townhouses and country mansions of the upper classes; and London had become the centre of the international art market, displacing Antwerp, Amsterdam and Paris.230 The new ruling class that had emerged from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 embraced classicism, defined as the ‘Rule of Taste’; at the same time artists started gathering to form private academies where they could study together and where beginners could receive at least some training, based, 56 57  of course, on the continental model, with the copy after the Antique as one of its cornerstones.231 Many British artists also travelled to Rome, where they participated in the Concorsi of the Accademia di San Luca or attended the Accademia del Nudo in the Capitoline and several built national and interna- tional reputations thanks to their success in the city.232 In Rome, furthermore, artists encountered British travellers and potential future patrons. Plaster casts must already have been relatively widely available during the first half of the 18th century.233 Drawings after classical sculptures survive by British artists who did not travel to Italy: among them some fascinating, rough, early studies by Joseph Highmore (1692–1780), possibly from casts in the Great Queen Street Academy – which operated under Sir Godfrey Kneller and Sir James Thornhill between 1711 and 1720 – where he enrolled in 1713 (fig. 99).234 But the insular situation of the British art world, where many painters struggled in vain to create a modern and national school and genre of painting, plus an innate distrust of cultural models imported from the Continent, especially France, meant that copying the Antique encountered strong criticism. The most vociferous opponent was William Hogarth (1697–1764), who, as director of the second St Martin’s Lane Academy from 1735, became increasingly hostile to a curriculum based on the French Académie model and to history painting in general, although, paradoxically, he demonstrated great admiration for a few classical statues in his writings (see Appendix, no. 14).235 His war against fashionable imported taste and didactic principles is well Fig. 99. Joseph Highmore, Study of a Cast of the Borghese Gladiator, Seen from Behind, c. 1713, graphite, ink and watercolour on paper, 354 × 230 mm, Tate, London, inv. T04232 expressed by the celebrated first plate in his Analysis of Beauty (1753), where the Antique, anatomy and the study of proportions evocated in the centre of the composition are surrounded by vignettes illustrating Hogarth’s own aesthetic ideas (fig. 100).236 But despite such discontented voices, fascination with the Antique would only intensify, and educational curricula based on French or Italian models would gradually impose themselves. In 1758, a ‘continental’ enterprise was launched by the 3rd Duke of Richmond with the opening of a gallery attached to his house in Whitehall ‘containing a large collec- tion of original plaister casts from the best antique statues and busts which are now at Rome and Florence’.237 With a curriculum based on the ‘alphabet of drawing’ and under the directorship of the Italian painter Giovanni Battista Cipriani (1727–85) and the sculptor Joseph Wilton (1722–1803) – the first Englishman to receive, in 1750, the prestigious first prize of the Accademia di San Luca – the gallery was set up specifically with the didactic purpose of training youths on the basis of the Antique (fig. 101).238 To compensate for the absence of a national Academy, a semi-formal system developed probably inspired by the joint model of the Accademia di San Luca and the Capitoline, where many British artists had worked.239 Students would have started by copying drawings, prints and parts of the body in the private drawing school set up in 1753 by the entrepreneur and drawing master William Shipley (1714– 1803); they would then progress to the Duke of Richmond’s Academy when they were ready to study three-dimensional forms; finally they would proceed to the study of the live model in the second St Martin Lane’s Academy.240 Competi- tions were set up and the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, which was founded Fig. 100. William Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty (Plate 1), 1753, etching and engraving, 387 × 483 mm, private collection, London Fig. 101. John Hamilton Mortimer, Self-portrait with Joseph Wilton, and an Unknown Student Drawing at the Duke of Richmond’s Academy, c. 1760–65, oil on canvas, 76 × 63.5 cm, Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 03/970 in 1754, awarded prizes for the best drawings after casts and copies, several of which survive in the institution’s archive (figs 102–03).241 The continental system also reached cities outside London. For example, academies and artists’ societies were set up in Glasgow – in an image of the Foulis Academy of Art and Design founded there in 1752 we see the familiar presence of the Borghese Gladiator (fig. 104) – and in Liverpool (see cat. 24).242 But it was with the foundation of the Royal Academy in London in 1768 that Britain finally had a national institution with a formal curriculum based on continental models (see cats 25–27). Directed by Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–92) – its first president between 1768 and 1792 – the Academy had a teaching structure that centred on the Antique or ‘Plaister’ Academy and the Life Academy, to which students would progress after having practised for years on plaster casts.243 To advance from one stage to another, they had to supply a presentation drawing showing their skills in depicting antique forms: one by the young Turner (1775–1851), who enrolled in the Academy in 1789 as a boy of fourteen, proba- bly belongs to this category (cat. 27a). Several evocative images testify to the study of the growing collection of plaster casts, both in daylight and at night (fig. 105 and cats 25–27),244 while the Life Academy is evoked in the famous painting by Johan Zoffany (1733–1810) which shows the first academicians in discussion around two male models – one glancing at us in the pose of the Spinario – surrounded by familiar plaster casts of classical and Renaissance sculpture (fig. 106). In the background, on the right, an écorché appears among the other casts, to remind us that anatomy lessons were delivered in the Academy by the physician William Hunter (1718–83). By bringing together plaster casts, anatomy and the study of the live model, Zoffany’s image declared unmistakably the Royal Academy’s affinity with continental academic models of teaching. The two female members, Mary Moser (1744–1819) and Angelica Kauffmann (1741–1807) are evoked through their portraits, as their presence in the Life Academy was considered improper.245 A system of discourses, competitions and exhibitions, complemented and completed the teaching curriculum. The official theoretical line of the Academy, fixed in Reynolds’ celebrated Discourses – which were delivered between 1769 and 1790 – was a distillation of the idealistic theory of the previous centuries and included frequent references to the Antique (see Appendix, no. 17). Reynolds’ highest praise was reserved for the Belvedere Torso, which embodied the Fig. 102. William Peters, Study of a Cast of the ‘Borghese Gladiator’, c. 1760, pencil, black and white chalk on coloured paper, 410 × 450 mm, Royal Society of Arts, London, inv. PR/AR/103/14/621 Fig. 103. William Peters, Study of a Cast of the ‘Callipygian Venus’, c. 1760, pencil, black and white chalk on coloured paper, 525 × 355 mm, Royal Society of Arts, London, inv. PR/AR/103/14/669      58 59    Fig. 104. David Allan, The Foulis Academy of Art and Design in Glasgow, c. 1760, engraving, 134 × 168 mm, Mitchell Library, Glasgow, inv. GC ILL 156 Fig. 105. Anonymous British School, The Antique School of the Royal Academy at New Somerset House, c. 1780–83, oil on canvas, 110.8 x 164.1 cm, Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 03/846 Fig. 106. Johan Zofany, The Portraits of the Academicians of the Royal Academy, 1771–72, oil on canvas, 100.1 × 147.5 cm, The Royal Collection, Windsor Castle ‘superlative genius’ of ancient art, and this judgement is reflected in the official iconography of the Royal Academy, as the Torso appeared, significantly below the word ‘Study’, on the silver medals awarded in the Academy’s competitions (see cat. 27a).246 The muscular fragment reappears as well in one of the female allegories of Invention, Composition, Design and Colour, commissioned by the Royal Academy from Angelica Kauffman in 1778 to decorate the ceiling of the Academy’s new Council Chamber and to provide a visual manifesto for Reynolds’ theory of art (fig. 107).247 Showing her wit and erudition, Kauffman’s Design is a significant image, as she took the traditional personification of Disegno, depicted as male (the word is masculine in Italian), and transformed it into a woman copying the ideal male body – thereby asserting the right of women to study the Antique and pursue a traditional artistic career. Although increasingly questioned by anatomists and by a growing number of artists, plaster casts were used in the Academy’s curriculum well into the 19th century and beyond. In London the didactic role of original sculptures and casts was also exploited outside official institutions. This was the case of the antiquities assembled by the influential antiquar- ian and collector Charles Townley (1737–1805) at his house on 7 Park Street, which became a sort of alternative academy where artists, amateurs – and also women – could study the statues he had imported from Italy (cat. 28).248 Another private space set up with the specific intention of training young architects in the study of the Antique was the house- academy established by Sir John Soane (1754–1837) at No. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields (cat. 29). In the labyrinthine spaces of Soane’s interiors, which were constantly enlarged to house Fig. 107. Angelica Kaufman, Design, 1778–80, oil on canvas, 130 × 150.3 cm, Royal Academy of Arts, London, inv. 03/1129 his growing collections, he obsessively juxtaposed paintings, architectural fragments, copies of celebrated classical statues, drawings and objects of all sorts.249 Architecture, sculpture and painting were seamlessly integrated to create a whole and to express the qualities of ‘variety and intricacy’, advocated by Reynolds in his 13th Discourse (1786). This variety was intended to stimulate the imagination of Soane’s students – in 1806 he was appointed the Royal Academy’s Professor of Architecture – and to invite would-be architects not to limit themselves but to train in the three sister arts, as recommended by Vitruvius.250 Academic training continued as students gathered to copy the Antique in the newly built galleries of the British Museum,251 but, as the 19th century progressed, its authority faded dramatically as young artists looked increasingly to the modern world for their inspiration. Dissenting Voices and Seeds of Decline The linear evolution of the classical ideal from the early Renaissance to the beginning of the 19th century was in reality punctuated by several opposing voices. But none of them, with rare exceptions, ever questioned the greatness and authority of classical art. What was at times disputed was the didactic value of copying from the Antique or the slavish dependence on its forms demonstrated by some of the most dogmatic devotees of classicism. We have seen that even in the 16th century, art critics like Vasari, Dolce and Armenini had warned against excessive dependence on classical forms and had advocated an independent and creative approach based on the artist’s own judgement. Rubens and Bernini too had warned against the ‘smell of stone’ in painting or psycho- logical dependence on the model. This balanced approach to the Antique would become a leitmotif among later genera- tions of art theorists. Furthermore, artistic traditions outside Central Italy had always demonstrated a good dose of scepticism towards the dependence of the Florentine and Roman schools on the forms and ideals embodied by classical statuary. One of the most intelligent expressions of this attitude is the famous woodcut by Nicolò Boldrini, almost certainly after an original drawing by Titian, in which Laocoön and his sons are transformed into three monkeys and set in a bucolic landscape (fig. 108).252 In this complex image Titian, one of the greatest creative geniuses of the Renaissance, who him- self had a profound and fruitful relationship with the Antique, was presumably issuing an ironic statement against the faithful artistic imitation of the classical models – a behav- iour similar to that of mimicking monkeys. Fig. 108. Nicolò Boldrini after Titian, Caricature of the Laocoön, c. 1540–50, woodcut, 267 × 403 mm, private collection In the 17th century the pernicious effect on painting from too-slavish imitation of sculptural forms would be summa- rised by the Bolognese art theorist Carlo Cesare Malvasia (1616–93) with the specific neologism ‘statuino’ or ‘statue- like’ (see cats 9 and 15).253 But during the 17th and 18th centuries even the most outspoken critics of the perfection of the Antique, such as the champion of colore versus disegno Roger de Piles, or the defender of a modern and independent artistic language like Hogarth, always demonstrated great admiration for classical statues, especially in terms of their proportions (see Appendix, no. 14).254 According to Bellori, the only great master who showed no interest at all in them was the ultra-naturalist Caravaggio. In a famous passage of his Vite, the champion of classicism reported that Caravaggio expressed ‘disdain for the superb marbles of the ancients and the paintings of Raphael’ because he had decided to take ‘nature alone for the object of his brush’. ‘Thus’, Bellori continues, ‘when he was shown the most famous statues of Phidias and Glycon so that he might base his studies on them, his only response was to gesture toward a crowd of people, indicating that nature had provided him with masters enough’.255 But this anecdote must not be taken too literally, as it certainly contains Bellori’s defence of idealism against the dangers of the unselective imitation of Nature, as repre- sented by Caravaggio and his followers. In fact, although it is not immediately obvious, Caravaggio had a profound under- standing of antique forms, and was deeply conscious of High Renaissance prototypes by Michelangelo (his namesake) and by Raphael. Even if Bellori’s account of Caravaggio had been accurate, such a radical attitude would have to be considered an exception in the long period covered here. In the 18th century criticism of the academic curriculum, in particular that of the Parisian Académie, and the art that it produced, increased. But, once again, two of its sternest    60 61  critics, Diderot and David, had an immense admiration for classical statuary and Diderot’s attack was directed at the codified and repetitive nature of academic practices, in particular the drawing lessons, and at the slavish dependence on the Antique at the expense of Nature of most of his contemporaries, not at classical models as such (see Appen- dix, no. 16).256 Significantly David, who played a crucial role in the closure of the Parisian Académie in 1793 during the French Revolution, would become the hero of the refounded École des Beaux-Arts in the 19th century. More significant criticism came from the students forced to copy casts for sessions on end. The great French painter Jean-Siméon Chardin (1699–1769) recalled the frustration that many artists must have felt by being forced to follow the oppressive ‘alphabet of drawing’, as powerfully evoked in his recollections (see also cat. 26): We begin to draw eyes, mouths, noses and ears after patterns, then feet and hands. After having crouched over our portfolios for a long time, we’re placed in front of the Hercules or the Torso, and you’ve never seen such tears as those shed over the Satyr, the Gladiator, the Medici Venus, and the Antinous [...]. Then, after having spent entire days and even nights by lamplight, in front of an immobile, inanimate nature, we’re presented with living nature, and suddenly the work of all preceding years seems reduced to nothing.257 But even the painter of still-lifes and domestic genre scenes Chardin recognised the greatness of the original statues. The appeal of the forms and principles of the Antique was still supreme within an aesthetic system – the humanistic theory of art – that placed the representation of mankind and its most noble behaviours at the centre of the artistic mission, and this was true even for painters, like Chardin, who did not abide by the academic hierarchy of genres. The real beginning of the decline of the authority of the Antique started when these premises began to be challenged by artists who felt at odds with a conception of art that they perceived as increasingly inadequate. Romanticism landed a first, but eventually fatal, blow by challenging the rationalistic, idealistic and supposedly ‘universal’ principles of classicism, in the name of subjective emotion and individ- ual genius. The drastic changes imposed by industrialisation and urbanisation accelerated the process. Opie’s outline of what constitutes art, with which this essay began – a pedantic and codified version of Reynolds’ aesthetic – came to be perceived as increasingly irrelevant by students exposed to urban life in London, Paris or any other modern city, as the words of the painter James Northcote (1746–1831) in 1826 clearly express (see Appendix, no. 19). But if various ‘progres- sive’ avant-gardes rejected more decisively the principles of classicism and academic art, one need only remember that artistic education remained almost everywhere based on the traditional curriculum and that casts were used in academies and art schools until a few decades ago. Some of the greatest modern painters, such as Cézanne, Degas, Van Gogh and Picasso, spent portions of their youth copying plaster casts. And, as the last part of this exhibition shows (cats 32, 34–35), with mass-production casts became ever more available to wider audiences, including women and the bourgeoisie, entering the realm of the private home, often in a reduced format. But an assault on the canonical status of many of the most famous sculptures also came from another ‘academic’ direction, as a new archaeological precision recognised them as more or less accurate Roman copies of Greek originals. If art education remained solidly structured around the traditional curriculum, becoming more and more conserva- tive, the creative forces of European art placed themselves firmly outside the academic system, and principles of ideal imitation would become progressively irrelevant. An image that perfectly visualises the dawn of the new aesthetic era, and an ideal conclusion to our journey, is a painting produced by Thomas Couture (1815–79) as a satire against the Realist fashion of the mid-19th century (fig. 109) – a preparatory study for which is in the Katrin Bellinger collection.258 Couture, who ran a successful studio in Paris, described his own painting in his Methodes et Entretiens d’Atelier published in 1867: I am depicting the interior of a studio of our time; it has nothing in common with the studios of earlier periods, in which you could see fragments of the finest antiquities. At one time, you could see the head of the Laocoön, the feet of the Gladiator, the Venus de Milo, and among the prints covering the walls there were Raphael’s Stanze and Poussin’s Sacraments and landscapes. But thanks to artistic progress, I have very little to show [...] because the gods have changed. The Laocoön has been replaced by a cabbage, the feet of the Gladiator by a candle holder covered with tallow or by a shoe [...]. As for the painter [...], he is a studious artist, fervent, a visionary of the new religion. He copies what? It’s quite simple – a pig’s head – and as a base what does he choose? That’s less simple, the head of Olympian Jupiter.259 Couture’s image, wherein a once revered antique frag- ment of the Olympian god, Jupiter, has been relegated to a mere stool and the object of study is now the severed head of a pig, encapsulates the decline of the Antique in the 19th century and the shift of interest from the ‘ideal’ to the ‘real’. Little did Couture kn0w that in a few decades not only the traditional role of imitation would be subverted, but that the principle of imitation itself – formulated by Alberti four hundred years before – would be questioned in favour of expressive or abstract values, leaving even less space for the previously revered Laocoön, Borghese Gladiator and the Venus de Milo. The Antique continued its life in the 20th century in many, often unexpected ways: quoted, subverted and deconstructed by many avant-garde artists; in the official art of totalitarian regimes; in the ironic and playful, but often shallow game of post-modernism; and even, one may say, in much of the aesthetic of fashion advertisement. The relation of the classical model and ideal with modernity is a story that still needs to be written fully and would be a fascinating subject for another exhibition. Fig. 109. Thomas Couture, La Peinture Réaliste, 1865, oil on panel, 56 × 45 cm, National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, inv. 4220.