The Future of the Antique: Interpreting the Sculptural Canon
Tickets for this conference can be booked here.
Institute of Classical Studies & Warburg Institute (School of Advanced Study, University of London)
10–12 December 2025
This conference marks the publication of the new, expanded edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s seminal Taste and the Antique (3 vols, Harvey Miller/Brepols, 2024).
The original edition was a landmark study that established a canonical list of ninety-five ancient sculptures that were widely admired, collected, and copied between c. 1500 and 1900. It traced how these works—from the Apollo Belvedere to the Farnese Bull—shaped artistic taste, collecting practices, and artistic discourse by defining a classical aesthetic and pedagogy. As one of the most influential texts in the history of art history, Taste and the Antique has profoundly shaped scholarship and curatorial practice on the reception of ancient sculpture.
The revised three-volume edition of 2024 substantially updates the original text with recent research. It broadens the discussion of the reception of the classical canon, incorporates decades of intervening scholarship, and brings the conversation into the realm of contemporary art, opening new perspectives on the afterlives of Greek and Roman sculpture.
Taking the new edition as a point of departure, the conference assesses the state of the field, explores emerging methodologies, and considers future directions.
Sessions will address how classical statues shaped visual culture beyond replication, including:
- SHAPING AND TRANSMITTING THE CANON: Examining the establishment, radical alteration, and dissolution of the sculptural canon in the early modern era.
- THE CANON AND THE BODY IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE: Exploring the role of classical statuary in the conception of “proportionate” and “disproportionate” bodies, in the representation of non-European populations, and in colonial educational and social policies.
- RESTORATION AND DISPLAY: Considering reconfigurations of the antique and notions of authenticity; situating the antique within modern museum contexts.
- CHANGING AND RETHINKING CANONS: Rethinking the antique within modern and postmodern theoretical frameworks and practices.
A core aim of this event is to foster dialogue across generations, traditions, and methodologies of scholarship.
Organised by Adriano Aymonino (University of Buckingham) & Kathleen Christian (Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Humboldt University of Berlin)
PROGRAMME
Wednesday 10 December (Institute of Classical Studies – Senate House – Beveridge Hall)
18:00: Doors open
18:20: Katherine Harloe (Director, Institute of Classical Studies), introducing:
18:30–19:30: Salvatore Settis (Accademico dei Lincei)
Keynote paper: Only Connect: Dionysus and Christ
Day 1: Thursday 11 December (Institute of Classical Studies – Senate House – Beveridge Hall)
MORNING
10:00: Registration
10:30: Welcome and Introduction
Adriano Aymonino and Kathleen Christian
SESSION 1: SHAPING AND TRANSMITTING THE CANON
Chair: Katherine Harloe (Director, Institute of Classical Studies)
10:45: Katharina Bedenbender (Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
An Antiquity of Plants and Animals? Towards a Non-Human Canon
11:05: Clare Hornsby (British School at Rome – The Walpole Society)
Piranesi and the Classical Body
11:25: Vivien Bird (University of Buckingham)
Art, Historiography and Connoisseurship: The Specimens of Antient Sculpture (1809)
11:45: Discussion
12:00: LUNCH BREAK (lunch provided for speakers only)
AFTERNOON
SESSION 2: THE CANON AND THE BODY IN THE AGE OF EMPIRE
Chair: Caroline Vout (Professor of Classics — Director of the Museum of Classical Archaeology, University of Cambridge)
14:00: Annette Kranen (Institut für Kunstgeschichte, Universität Bern)
Living Antiquities? Anthropological/Travel Imagery and the Sculptural Canon in the Late Eighteenth Century
14:20: Eva Ehninger (Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
The Bodies of Gods. Drawing from the Antique in Colonial India
14:40: Anna Degler (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Freie Universität Berlin)
A Black Apollo? John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman and the Belvedere Torso
15:00: Rebecca Yuste (Department of Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University)
Between Plaster and Stone: Reframing the Classical Canon in Bourbon New Spain
15:20: Discussion
15:35: TEA/COFFEE BREAK (for all attendees)
16:05: Kathleen Christian (Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance, Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Introducing the Updated Census
16:25: Adriano Aymonino (Department of History and History of Art, University of Buckingham) and Eloisa Dodero (Capitoline Museums, Rome)
Introducing the New Edition of Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique
16:45: Discussion
17:00: Bill Sherman (Director, Warburg Institute), introducing:
17:10: Nicholas Penny (Former Director, National Gallery, London)
Keynote paper: The Invention of the Classical
18:30: End of Day One
Day 2: Friday 12 December (Warburg Institute – Lecture Hall)
MORNING
10:00: Registration
10:30: Welcome and Introduction
Adriano Aymonino and Kathleen Christian
SESSION 3: RESTORATION AND DISPLAY
Chair: Chiara Piva (Professoressa Associata, Sapienza Università di Roma)
10:45: Jeffrey Collins (Bard Graduate Center)
Zooming In: The Social Lives of Statues
11:05: Elizabeth Bartman (Former President of the Archaeological Institute of America)
Zooming Out: Restoration as Taste
11:25: Astrid Fendt (Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart)
Restoration, De- and Re-restoration of Ancient Sculptures in the Munich Glyptothek, Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century
11:45: TEA/COFFEE BREAK (for all attendees)
12:15: Eleonora Ferrazza (Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Vatican Museums) & Claudia Valeri (Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Vatican Museums)
The Braccio Nuovo in the Vatican Museums: Display and Restorations of the Antique in the Nineteenth Century
12:45: Lisa Ayla Çakmak (Department of Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, Art Institute of Chicago) & Katharine A. Raff (Department of Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, Art Institute of Chicago)
Revealing Restorations: Assessing the Presentation and Reception of Restored Roman Sculptures from the Torlonia Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago
13:15: Discussion
13:30: LUNCH BREAK (lunch provided for speakers only)
AFTERNOON
SESSION 4: CHANGING AND RETHINKING CANONS
Chair: Flora Dennis (Warburg Institute)
15:00: Joanna Fiduccia (Department of the History of Art, Yale University)
The Head of an Etruscan: Alternative Antiquities and the Physiognomies of Modern Sculpture
15:20: Domiziana Serrano (Institut ARTS, Université Jean Monnet – Saint-Étienne)
The Fragmented Marble Body: Surrealism, Political Phantoms, and the Canon Recast
15:40: Tilman Schreiber (Department of Art History and Film Studies – Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
From the Cortile to the Cosmos: Interpreting the Sculptural Canon in the Context of US Space Travel
16:00: Discussion
16:15: TEA/COFFEE BREAK (for all attendees)
CLOSING PAPER: HISTORIOGRAPHIC PERSPECTIVES ON THE CANON
16:45: Mateusz Kapustka (Art History Institute – University of Zurich)
Fear Revealed: Jacob Burckhardt on Classical Anthropomorphism and Demonic Hybridity
17:05: Final Remarks
17:15: End of Day Two
Biographies and Abstracts
ADRIANO AYMONINO (University of Buckingham)
Bio: Dr Adriano Aymonino is Senior Lecturer and Director of the MA in Art Market and the History of Collecting at the University of Buckingham. His publications include Drawn from the Antique: Artists and the Classical Ideal (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2015); Enlightened Eclecticism (PMC for Yale University Press, 2021—winner of the 2022 Berger Prize for British Art History) and a revised and updated edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique (Harvey Miller, 3 vols, 2024). He is currently working on a book for the Burlington Magazine Press: Paper Stones: Lithic Representations in the Age of the Grand Tour.
Abstract, Introducing the New Edition of Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique
Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture: 1500–1900, published in 1981 by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, offered for the first time to specialists and the general public an accessible introduction to the enormous impact that ancient sculpture has had on Western visual arts and culture for nearly four centuries. Over the past four decades, the book’s introductory essay and the 95 catalogue entries that follow have become a classic of art history, indispensable for anyone studying the reception of the classical tradition, the history of taste and collecting, and the canonical models of Western figurative imagination. This talk will introduce a new, revised and expanded edition of Taste and the Antique, published in three volumes in December 2024, discuss the new features compared to the first edition, and assess the current state of research, as well as future perspectives.
ELIZABETH BARTMAN (Former President of the Archaeological Institute of America)
Bio: Elizabeth Bartman is a Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. The author of several books on ancient Roman sculpture, she is currently investigating the early-modern restoration of ancient marbles, work that will be published as a monograph (with Jeffrey Collins) on the Capitoline’s Red Faun as well as a book-length introduction specifically intended for archaeologists.
Abstract, Zooming Out: Restoration as Taste
Haskell and Penny’s ground-breaking Taste and the Antique paid scant attention to restoration, a shortcoming remedied in the new and expanded edition. The 95 catalogue entries now list the physical interventions and additions that virtually all the sculptures have had, while in many cases archival documents and early drawings further document the restoration process. Together, this new information permits us to consider how restoration itself is a manifestation of “taste and the antique.” Precisely because the objects Haskell and Penny selected were among the most admired between 1500 and 1900, the heyday of restoration, their corpus provides the ideal starting point for studying the ways not only restorers but also dealers and collectors imposed their own, “contemporary” visions of antiquity on broken fragments.
As tastes changed, so too did the antiquities’ physical form, with many undergoing multiple “updates” to conform with current aesthetics and/or antiquarian science.
KATHARINA BEDENBENDER (Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Bio: Katharina Bedenbender completed her PhD on ‘Stairs and Ceremonies in Early Modern Venice’ in 2019. She held doctoral scholarships at the Centro Tedesco di Studi Veneziani and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, where she subsequently worked as a postdoctoral research assistant. Since 2021, she has been a research assistant at the IKB and Census (Humboldt University, Berlin), working on her Habilitation thesis “Before Ecology: Non-human Animals and Plants in Early Modern Italy”.
Abstract, An Antiquity of Plants and Animals? Towards a Non-Human Canon
This paper discusses the anthropocentric focus of the sculptural canon in the early modern era by focusing on one of the few antique animal sculptures included in Haskell and Penny’s Taste and the Antique: the Wild Boar gifted to Cosimo I de’ Medici in 1560. In 1612, Cosimo II commissioned Pietro Tacca to create a bronze copy, which was later transformed by Francesco II into a bronze fountain sculpture for the Mercato Nuovo. Tacca added a bronze base, forming a basin covered with an ecosystem of plants and small animals reminiscent of life casts. While Kris (1926) associated the style rustique with a late Cinquecento paradigm shift away from the authority of antiquity towards a ‘naturalism’ based on field studies—the bronze fountain sculpture brings together supposedly contradictory strands of artistic production. This will be discussed in relation to Francesco II’s interest in the natural world.
VIVIEN BIRD (University of Buckingham)
Bio: Vivien Bird is a PhD candidate at the University of Buckingham, where she researches the collecting and scholarly activities of the antiquarian, classical scholar, numismatist and art connoisseur Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824). She was the Anne Christopherson Fellow in the British Museum’s Department of Prints and Drawings in 2018. Her research to date has been supported by the Francis Haskell Memorial Fund and the Royal Numismatic Society John Casey Fund.
Abstract: Art, Historiography and Connoisseurship: The Specimens of Antient Sculpture (1809)
This paper discusses the “taste for the antique” in Britain during the period Adolf Michaelis described as “the golden age of classical dilettantism”, namely the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The period was marked by the formation of significant collections of ancient art, as well as collections of marble replicas and plaster casts of iconic sculptures. It was also a period that saw an increased interest in the art, culture and literature of Greece as opposed to Rome, and the beginnings of a “modern outlook” on Greek and Roman art.
Whilst such developments – as well as the arrival of Phigaleian and Parthenon marbles in London – did not immediately alter the status of established canonical sculptures, they were manifested in contemporary discourse on taste and in some publications on ancient art.
These include the two volumes of the Society of Dilettanti’s Specimens of Antient Sculpture (1809, 1835). The text for the first volume was provided by the art connoisseur, classical scholar and collector Richard Payne Knight (1751–1824). The paper will examine how the discussion and representation of classical sculpture, as well as references to an established canon, in this volume are symptomatic of an epochal shift in the study and reception of classical art.
LISA AYLA ÇAKMAK (Department of Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, Art Institute of Chicago)
Bio: Lisa Ayla Çakmak is Mary and Michael Jaharis Chair and Curator, Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, at the Art Institute of Chicago. She recently led a reinstallation of the Art Institute’s permanent collection galleries and collaborated with artist Charles Ray on the installation of A copy of ten marble fragments of the Great Eleusinian Relief (2017) in those same galleries. She is a Martha Sharp Joukowsky lecturer for the Archaeological Institute of America for 2025–2026.
Abstract, Revealing Restorations: Assessing the Presentation and Reception of Restored Roman Sculptures from the Torlonia Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago
In this paper, we address how the recent exhibition of a selection of fifty-eight ancient sculptures from the Torlonia Collection has radically changed the way that we, as scholars of Greek and Roman art, have come to understand, interpret, and present later historic restorations in museum settings. To underscore the role of these restorations in altering the appearance of the ancient sculpture (or fragment of a sculpture), working in consultation and collaboration with the Torlonia Foundation, we included a conservation diagram for every object on display in the exhibition. These diagrams efficiently and clearly illustrated both the ancient and restored parts of each object in a format accessible to general audiences. The inclusion of the diagrams both promoted visitors’ close looking and engagement with the objects and shaped how we as scholars talk about, present, and evaluate ancient Roman sculptures within the context of major public art museums.
KATHLEEN CHRISTIAN (Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Bio: Since 2020 Kathleen Christian has been Professor of Early Modern Art at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Director of the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance. Her research focuses on the reception of antiquity, particularly in Renaissance Rome, and the collecting and display of sculpture. She is the author of Empire without End: Antiquities Collections in Renaissance Rome, c. 1350–1527 and, most recently, Raffaele Riario, Jacopo Galli, and Michelangelo’s Bacchus, 1471–1572, released by Harvey Miller Press in September, 2025. Together with Cammy Brothers, she co-edits the Harvey Miller book series All’antica.
Abstract, Introducing the Updated Census
Now in its seventy-sixth year, the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture Known in the Renaissance (https://database.census.de) has recently entered a new phase. This paper presents the database’s redesigned interface and recent upgrades. It highlights steps taken to align the Census with interoperable cultural-heritage standards. Considering shifts in approach and the launch of the new book series All’antica, it explores how new collaborations, methodologies, and technologies can help to reframe long-standing research questions in classical reception.
JEFFREY COLLINS (Bard Graduate Center)
Bio: Jeffrey Collins is Professor of Art History and Material Culture at Bard Graduate Center, where he specializes in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe. He is the author of Papacy and Politics in Eighteenth-Century Rome: Pius VI and the Arts (Cambridge 2004) and a principal contributor to History of Design: Decorative Arts and Material Culture, 1400–2000 (New Haven 2013). A fellow of the American Academy in Rome, he has published on architecture, urbanism, painting, sculpture, book illustration, museology, metalwork, furniture, and film. His current project, with Elizabeth Bartman, revisits the changing form and meanings of an ancient red-marble statue unearthed at Hadrian’s Villa in 1736 and enshrined at the Capitoline Museum.
Abstract, Zooming In: The Social Lives of Statues
In 1976, Carlo Ginzburg pioneered microhistory with his Il formaggio e i vermi; a decade later, Arjun Appadurai’s 1986 anthology The Social Lives of Things included Igor Kopytoff’s influential essay “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process.” Halfway between them, Taste and the Antique applied similar scrutiny to the lives and afterlives of classical sculptures, investigating each “as a culturally constructed entity, endowed with culturally specific meanings, and classified and reclassified into culturally constituted categories” [Kopytoff, 68]. Embracing that insight, this talk investigates two fraught but telling moments for Haskell and Penny’s sculptural canon: the alleged kidnapping of the Dying Gaul (cat. 44) by Don Livio Odescalchi in 1689 and the rivalry between Marchese Capponi and Monsignor Furietti over theFaun in Rosso Antico (cat. 39) and Centaurs (cat. 20) around 1740. Momentous but never fully untangled, these episodes suggest the continuing possibilities of pursuing macroscopic trends through microscopic investigations.
ANNA DEGLER (Kunsthistorisches Institut, Freie Universität Berlin)
Bio: Anna Degler is research associate in art history at Freie Universität Berlin. She currently is principal investigator of the research project “The Eternal Belvedere Torso: The Materiality and Temporality of Canonization” (funded by the German Research Foundation since 2025). Her research focuses on early modern European art with particular emphasis on the history of ideas, canon formation practices and materiality.
She is the author of Parergon. Attribut, Material und Fragment in der Bildästhetik des Quattrocento (Fink, 2015).
Abstract, A Black Apollo? John Quincy Adams Ward’s The Freedman and the Belvedere Torso
The paper investigates classical reception at the intersection of education, class and race in the United States. Departing from J.Q.A. Ward’s sculpture The Freedman (1863), which draws inspiration from the Belvedere Torso, it asks how artists reworked classical heritage and the canon in the so-called ‘New World’ within the context of social debates. It analyses the impact of Greco-Roman antiquity on the artistic, historical as well as on the subsequent scholarly discourse. Both strands are connected by a decided search for ‘Americanness’. To this end, the paper discusses concepts of freedom, masculinity and the idealised strong body that have been tied to the Belvedere Torso against the backdrop of U.S.-American antiquity reception and abolitionism.
It finally traces the historical imagination of a Black Apollo and thus seeks to reconsider both, the depiction of marginalized groups in U.S. classical reception and the unabated importance of the Belvedere Torso in the canon.
EVA EHNINGER (Institut für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Bio: Eva Ehninger is Professor of Modern Art History at the Institute of Art and Visual History, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Since January 2024 she has co-directed, together with Sharon Macdonald, the newly founded Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation (inherit.hu-berlin.de). In her scholarship she studies the transfer of heritage into, and by means of, different media, its dissemination in varied historical and cultural contexts, and changes of meaning and value that are based on these transformations. In her current research project, Art Education between Heritage Making and Critical Transregionality (funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, Germany) she studies conceptions of art and aesthetic education in colonial, postcolonial, national and transcultural contexts, with a geographical focus on India
Abstract, The Bodies of Gods. Drawing from the Antique in Colonial India
During the second half of the 19th century the British colonial administration founded four schools of applied art in the cities of Madras, Calcutta (Kolkata), Bombay (Mumbai) and Lahore. The curriculum of the schools was based on the “South Kensington System” of art education, developed by the British Department of Science and Art in the early 1850s. The South Kensington System promoted the skill of drawing as an essential basis for artistic education, and plaster casts of antique sculptures were considered a necessary teaching aid. Students would learn shading and perspective by drawing these casts, and also internalize the aesthetic paradigm of Greek antiquity. In the context of colonial educational policy in India, Greek antiquity was understood as a means to educate Indians in taste, and to transform them into modern, enlightened, upright subjects of the British Empire.
The implementation of this curriculum had an unwanted side effect, however. The foregrounding of antiquity as an aesthetic model eventually led to a strengthened appreciation of Indian antiquity as well. The reception of this antiquity foregrounded an entirely different ideal of the human body, which was achieved with a different, linear style of drawing as well. In my talk, I will discuss how the idea of a national Indian identity, as part of India’s move toward independence, was addressed within the very act of drawing these different antiquities.
ASTRID FENDT (Landesmuseum Württemberg, Stuttgart)
Bio: Dr Astrid Fendt is a classical archaeologist. She heads the archaeology department at Landesmuseum Württemberg in Stuttgart (Germany). Her areas of expertise are Greek and Roman sculpture, ancient jewelry and textiles, reception and restoration of antiquities. From 2012 to 2023 she was senior curator at Staatliche Antikensammlungen and Glyptothek in Munich. Before she was a research assistant at Antikensammlung Staatliche Museen zu Berlin in the project “Berlin Sculpture Network –Contextualization and Translation of Ancient Sculpture”.
Abstract, Restoration, De- and Re-restoration of Ancient Sculptures in the Munich Glyptothek, Nineteenth to Twenty-First Century
Restoration, de-restoration and re-restoration – these different concepts in dealing with ancient marble sculptures can be traced very well in the Glyptothek in Munich over a period of 200 years. The focus of this lecture is on the 20th century. In the 1960s there was a radical and comprehensive de-restoration campaign. It is clearly to be understood in the context of the long restoration debates of the 19th century and the modern art movements after the Second World War. Virulent was the discussion about the de-restoration of the famous Barberini Faun. It concerned mainly body-political and aesthetic reasons and took place between classical archaeologists and art historians.
Currently, re-restorations are taking place on selected figures. They testify to a new approach to the restoration of ancient sculptures based on an appreciation of the various historical layers inherent in restored marble sculptures.
ELEONORA FERRAZZA (Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Vatican Museums)
Bio: Holding a PhD and MA in Classical Archaeology, since 2009 Eleonora Ferrazza has been Assistant Curator in the Greek and Roman Antiquities Department of the Vatican Museums, where she has carried out research on classical sculptures: the discovery of the Apollo Belvedere; the restoration of the porphyry sarcophagus of St. Helena; case studies on the use of marble in relation to iconography and ancient workmanship, on the inspiration from the Antique, on the papal antiquities collections in the early 19th century. She also works on the funerary archaeology in the Necropolis along the Via Triumphalis.
Abstract, The Braccio Nuovo in the Vatican Museums: Display and Restorations of the Antique in the Nineteenth Century
The paper will consider the Braccio Nuovo, inaugurated in 1822. The theoretical conception of this modern museum building that adapted to the antiquities on display, and not vice versa, can be traced back to Antonio Canova. Furthermore, it is possible to assign to Antonio D’Este the operational role in the setting up of the sculptures and the decorative apparatus through an analysis of archive documents and drawings by architect Raffaele Stern. The sculptures came from the collections of Rome’s noble families and from various excavations; they therefore presented very different conservation conditions, which at the time were sought to be overcome in the perspective of aesthetic homogeneity. The recent restoration of the entire sculptural apparatus offers a broad view of the different methods of intervention: the respect for the 16th–17th-century additions; the late 18th-century interventions on the acquired sculptures ready for exhibition; the practice followed to perfect the 1822 display.
JOANNA FIDUCCIA (Department of History of Art, Yale University)
Bio: Joanna Fiduccia is assistant professor of the History of Art at Yale University, where she specializes in modern European art and the historical avant-garde. Her research explores the relationship between aesthetic forms and political formations, particularly the nation, through the history of modern sculpture and experimental art practices. Her first book, Figures of Crisis: Alberto Giacometti and the Myths of Nationalism, will be published with Yale University Press in March 2026. She is currently working on a study of the evolving relationship between automatism and political sovereignty.
Abstract, The Head of an Etruscan: Alternative Antiquities and the Physiognomies of Modern Sculpture
In the interwar period, Italian and German anthropologists awakened a sleeping subject: the so-called “mystery of the Etruscans,” or the geographic origins of the civilization behind the arrestingly naturalistic sculptures discovered in archaeological sites in present-day Tuscany and portions of Umbria and Lazio. Debates about those origins became the staging grounds for the Pact of Steel’s racial politics, as fantasies of an autochthonous European race collided with orientalist fables of routed foreign influence.
In artistic circles, a growing interest in Etruscan antiquity over Greco-Roman statuary paralleled the Etruscologists’ tendentious search for sculptural evidence of the Etruscan’s true face. Notably, Alberto Giacometti and Marino Marini embarked in those same years upon projects of portraiture that sought to remake the terms of sculptural resemblance by claiming an alternative sculptural canon: the Etruscan origins of their polychromatic figurative plasters, whose formal instability reflected the political volatility and ambiguous racialisation of the Etruscan.
CLARE HORNSBY (British School at Rome – The Walpole Society)
Bio: Clare Hornsby is an art and architectural historian who has published books on the Grand Tour, the antiquities market and on eighteenth-century architecture. Since 2020 her work has concentrated on Giovanni Battista Piranesi; a recent article for the Papers of the British School at Rome focussed on the newly-discovered first state of Piranesi’s famous Campo Marzio map. She is a Research Fellow at the British School at Rome, a member of the Scientific Committees of Studi sul Settecento Romano and of the Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Giovanni Battista Piranesi and Chairwoman of The Walpole Society.
Abstract, Piranesi and the Classical Body
In the final paragraphs of his “Ragionamento Apologetico”, published as a three-language parallel text preface to the prints of his 1769 illustrated book Diverse Maniere d’adornare i cammini, Giovanni Battista Piranesi and his scholarly collaborator the Jesuit theologian and antiquarian Gaspare Luigi Oderico make an extraordinary digression from the themes with which that essay was concerned, namely an apologia of Egyptian architectural, decorative and sculptural forms, a hypothesis regarding the derivation of forms of Greek vases (then referred to as Etruscan) from the natural world, specifically shells and an exploration of Etruscan art, architecture, and design. For the only time in the whole of his published works, in these paragraphs Piranesi refers to the canon of classical form in the representation of the human body, with specific reference to the representation of the body of Christ. This paper will examine his statements in their art historical context and look at the way in which, set within the “Ragionamento”, he proposes a hierarchy of form for the human body, placing the “Roman school” in contrast to the transgressive or archaic forms of the body as seen in Egyptian sculpture, on display in many of the chimneypiece designs in the volume.
MATEUSZ KAPUSTKA (Art History Institute – University of Zurich)
Bio: Mateusz Kapustka (ORCID: 0009–0007-6273–7314) is a Privatdozent at the Art History Institute of the University of Zurich and the PI of a DFG research project at the FU Berlin; from 2013 to 2023 he was visiting/interim professor at universities in Zurich, Frankfurt/Main, Berlin (FU, HU), and Poznań (UAM), also teaching in São Paulo (Unifesp) and New Delhi (NMI); research interests: image conflicts, visual anachronism, idolatry/iconoclasm; early modern intersections of knowledge and visual propaganda.
Abstract, Fear Revealed: Jacob Burckhardt on Classical Anthropomorphism and Demonic Hybridity
This paper explores Jacob Burckhardt’s comments on the demonisation of Hellenistic culture. His early work, The Age of Constantine the Great (1852/53) prominently features this concept of historical decline located in the conflict between Classical anthropomorphic gods and Hellenistic hybrid demons.
According to Burckhardt’s “mythistory”, in the Hellenistic 3rd century, the nexus of existential fear and aesthetic, hitherto provided with the canonical beauty of the Hellenic gods, collapsed:
their anthropomorphic statues could no longer convey the terrifying aspects of fate towards the new hybrid, composite images of Orphic demons. The Constantinian iconoclasm was thus, for Burckhardt, a perspicuously palpable response to the anxiety evoked by the undisguisedness of Hellenistic magic. The paper seeks to dialectically investigate, from today’s transcultural perspective, how this bias preconditioned Burckhardt’s establishment of the ideal of classical taste in his lectures on “The Greeks and Greek Civilisation” (1872, published posthumously in 1898/1902) and his view of the Renaissance (1860 and 1878).
ANNETTE KRANEN (Institut für Kunstgeschichte – Universität Bern)
Bio: Annette Kranen is an art historian specializing in the fields of mobility, the reception of antiquity, and concepts of landscape in early modernity. She gained her doctoral degree from the Freie Universität Berlin in 2018 and teaches at the Institute of Art History of the University of Bern since 2019. She is a co-founder of the Network Topographic Visual Media, a platform for the exchange between scholars working on topographic visualizations.
Abstract, Living Antiquities? Travel Imagery and the Sculptural Canon in the Late 18th Century
During the late 18th century, the body image of ancient sculpture, understood as a normative ideal, played a crucial role in the nascent science of anthropology. The Anthropologist Pieter Camper, for example, used the Apollo of Belvedere as a point of reference for anatomical comparisons. Travel imagery featured iconographic allusions to ancient sculptures as well, for instance the prints and paintings by artists who had travelled with James Cook. This modelling of indigenous bodies after canonical antique sculptures is more than just an academic convention. It engenders connotations on the biological and cultural character of the depicted people and reveals contradictions that arose from the intertwining of anthropology and aesthetics. The paper will thus explore how this aspect of travel imagery shaped modern notions of the “other” and shed light on the role of the sculptural canon in discourses of travel, exploration, and anthropology around 1800.
NICHOLAS PENNY (Former Director, National Gallery, London)
Bio: After teaching art history at the University of Manchester, Nicholas Penny occupied curatorial positions in the Ashmolean Museum, the National Gallery and the National Gallery of Art. From 2008 to 2015 he was Director of the National Gallery.
He is now a visiting professor at the National Academy of Fine Art in Hangzhou. His books include Taste and the Antique (together with the late Francis Haskell – 1981) which has recently reappeared in a revised and amplified edition by Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero, also Raphael (together with the late Roger Jones – 1983) and The Materials of Sculpture (1993). His catalogues of the sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum (3 vols, 1992) and of the sixteenth-century Italian paintings in the National Gallery (2004, 2008, 2016) give unusual attention to the history of collecting and taste, as do the volumes he is writing for the Norton Simon Museum. One of the latter was published in 2021 and the other, written with Imogen Tedbury, is approaching completion.
Abstract, The Invention of the Classical
The lecture will explore how the Antique was re-classified as the Classical in the late nineteenth century and how that latter term was also employed to define a stylistic episode with strict chronological boundaries within the history of ancient Greek art. At the same time art historians who detached themselves from the study of ancient Greek and Roman art, and leading connoisseurs who ignored it, also strove to define an equivalent episode during the Renaissance.
KATHARINE A. RAFF (Department of Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, Art Institute of Chicago)
Bio: Katharine A. Raff is Elizabeth McIlvaine Curator, Arts of Greece, Rome, and Byzantium, at the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has worked since 2011. Her recent projects include the reinstallation of the Art Institute’s permanent gallery of Roman art (2024); Collecting Stories, an installation on ancient artworks and their modern afterlives (2019); and the digital scholarly catalogue Roman Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (2017), for which she served as primary author and editor.
Abstract, Revealing Restorations: Assessing the Presentation and Reception of Restored Roman Sculptures from the Torlonia Collection at the Art Institute of Chicago
In this paper, we address how the recent exhibition of a selection of fifty-eight ancient sculptures from the Torlonia Collection has radically changed the way that we, as scholars of Greek and Roman art, have come to understand, interpret, and present later historic restorations in museum settings. To underscore the role of these restorations in altering the appearance of the ancient sculpture (or fragment of a sculpture), working in consultation and collaboration with the Torlonia Foundation, we included a conservation diagram for every object on display in the exhibition. These diagrams efficiently and clearly illustrated both the ancient and restored parts of each object in a format accessible to general audiences. The inclusion of the diagrams both promoted visitors’ close looking and engagement with the objects and shaped how we as scholars talk about, present, and evaluate ancient Roman sculptures within the context of major public art museums.
TILMAN SCHREIBER (Department of Art History and Film Studies – Friedrich Schiller University Jena)
Bio: Tilman Schreiber studied Art History, Film Studies, and German Literary Studies at the University of Jena, the Université Paris I – Panthéon-Sorbonne, and the Università di Roma – La Sapienza (2012–2019). Since October 2020, he has been working on a doctoral thesis dealing with the production of (neo-)classical images in Europe between 1690 and 1820. This interest is accompanied by a focus on ‘(Neo-)Classicism’ as an art historical heuristic.
Abstract, From the Cortile to the Cosmos: Interpreting the Sculptural Canon in the Context of US Space Travel
References to the art and culture of antiquity have pervaded the history of US space travel since its beginnings. They not only characterize the choice of mission names (such as Project Mercury) and the naming of command modules (such as Odyssey), but they have also shaped the design of the emblems created for each NASA mission. A prominent example in this context is the logo design for Apollo 17 (1972), which the U.S. space agency entrusted to the painter and graphic artist Robert McCall. The Apollo of Belvedere, one of the most famous ancient sculptures of all time, forms the motivic anchor point of McCall’s design. This design decision is at the centre of my paper. On the one hand, it examines the adaptation of the Apollo in the context of McCall’s oeuvre. On the other, it addresses the question of what function the reference to one of the central sculptures of the art-historical canon serves in the self-interpretation of American space travel.
DOMIZIANA SERRANO (Institut ARTS, Université Jean Monnet – Saint-Étienne)
Bio: Domiziana Serrano is a PhD candidate in Contemporary Art History at Université Jean Monnet — Saint-Étienne (France). Her doctoral research explores surrealist sculpture, with particular attention to its material practices and conceptual limits, adopting feminist and postcolonial methodologies to challenge and reframe Surrealism beyond a narrowly Western-centric paradigm. Her forthcoming publications will appear in late 2025 in the International Journal of Surrealism and as part of the Transatlantic Cultures project.
Abstract, The Fragmented Marble Body: Surrealism, Political Phantoms, and the Canon Recast
This contribution elucidates the manifold modalities through which the classical sculptural canon has been reinterpreted within the heterogeneous production of the surrealist movement. While Surrealism’s preoccupation with the so-called “primitive” has garnered sustained critical attention, the movement’s complex and ambivalent engagement with the visual and ideological legacies of classical antiquity has remained conspicuously under-theorised. Through a combined analysis of textual sources and visual material, this inquiry seeks to address this lacuna by bringing into relief both manifest and latent presences of Greco-Roman statuary within surrealist discourse and practice.
By interrogating the body as a site of re/deconstructed meaning, the classical form now fragmented and altered, as evident in the iterations of the Venus de Milo reimagined by Dalí, Magritte, and Man Ray, emerges as a “New Canon.”
Such reworkings may also be read as a political commentary on the racialised implications of contemporaneous fascist appropriation of the classical tradition.
SALVATORE SETTIS (Accademico dei Lincei)
Bio: Salvatore Settis has been Director of the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (1994–1999) and of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa (1999–2010). He chaired the High Council for Cultural Heritage of Italy (2007–2009) and the Scientific Council of the Musée du Louvre (2010–2023), has been Warburg Professor at the University of Hamburg, and delivered the Isaiah Berlin Lectures at Oxford, the Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Lectures of the Cátedra del Museo del Prado in Madrid, and the Borromini Lectures at the Università della Svizzera Italiana. His research interests include Classical Archaeology, Renaissance Art History, and the preservation of landscape and cultural heritage. He has curated exhibitions such as Serial/Portable Classic, Prada Foundation, Milan and Venice 2015; The Torlonia Marbles, Rome, Capitoline Museums, 2020–21, Milan, Gallerie d’Italia in Piazza della Scala, 2022, and Paris, Louvre, 2024; Recycling Beauty, Milan, Prada Foundation, 2022–2023.
Abstract, Only Connect: Dionysus and Christ
Connecting Classical “sources” (texts and depictions) to post-antique works and authors is both a philological and morphological operation, and no intellectual undertaking of the 20th century shows this better than the Mnemosyne Atlas, Aby Warburg’s unfinished work. The Pathosformeln conveyed from Roman sarcophagi to Christian iconography, such as The Maenad under the Cross noted by Edgar Wind and Frederick Antal, are a particularly eloquent example. But while the ‘etymological’ connection calls for a rational and historical explanation, morphological similarities may lead us to explore intuitive, emotional, and sometimes metacultural aspects. Much less observed is another family of interconnections between ancient and post-ancient literary and visual languages, which also has to do with the research protocols of various disciplines: namely, the rare and therefore even more significant convergence between morphological similarities in texts and those in images (formulas and gestures). This paper will focus on the morphological, functional, and historical similarities between Dionysian ecstasy and its excesses on the one hand, and the Passion of Christ on the other, along a path that will include both texts and images without ranking them in order of significance.
CLAUDIA VALERI (Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, Vatican Museums)
Bio: Holding a PhD in Classical Archaeology, Claudia Valeri was hired in 2007 by the Vatican Museums as Assistant Curator in the Greek and Roman Antiquities Department, of which she has been Chief Curator since 2023.
Publications range from ancient sculpture in context to research on the history of archaeology and collecting.She is currently Socio Ordinario of the National Institute of Archaeology and Art History, Socio Corrispondente of the German Archaeological Institute and of the Pontifical Roman Academy of Archaeology.
Abstract, The Braccio Nuovo in the Vatican Museums: Display and Restorations of the Antique in the Nineteenth century
The paper will consider the Braccio Nuovo, inaugurated in 1822. The theoretical conception of this modern museum building that adapted to the antiquities on display, and not vice versa, can be traced back to Antonio Canova. Furthermore, it is possible to assign to Antonio D’Este the operational role in the setting up of the sculptures and the decorative apparatus through an analysis of archive documents and drawings by architect Raffaele Stern. The sculptures came from the collections of Rome’s noble families and from various excavations; they therefore presented very different conservation conditions, which at the time were sought to be overcome in the perspective of aesthetic homogeneity. The recent restoration of the entire sculptural apparatus offers a broad view of the different methods of intervention: the respect for the 16th-17th-century additions; the late 18th-century interventions on the acquired sculptures ready for exhibition; the practice followed to perfect the 1822 display.
REBECCA YUSTE (Department of Art History & Archaeology, Columbia University)
Bio: Rebecca Yuste is an art and architectural historian, completing a PhD at Columbia University, and a Junior Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University. Her dissertation is an architectural and landscape history of late-Bourbon Mexico City. She is interested in the history of garden design, Enlightenment city planning, and the legacies of the classical world in Latin America. She is the co-founder of the Global Neoclassicism Project, which she launched in 2024. Her research has been supported by the Hispanic Society of America, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Decorative Arts Trust, and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for American Architecture.
Abstract, Between Plaster and Stone: Reframing the Classical Canon in Bourbon New Spain
In July 1791, the Valencian sculptor Manuel Tolsá arrived in Mexico City, bringing with him books, instruments, and over sixty crates of plaster casts destined for the newly-founded Royal Academy of San Carlos. These casts were intended to establish a canon of classical forms to train colonial artists in the aesthetics of Western Europe. Yet just months earlier, the 1790 unearthing of the Aztec Sun Stone in the city’s main square had unsettled the very idea of antiquity in New Spain. This paper examines how Greco-Roman and pre-Columbian aesthetics vied for authority within the colonial imagination, and how the Academy’s imported canon was destabilized by the monumental presence of indigenous antiquity. In this contested visual and intellectual landscape, antiquity was not a stable inheritance, but a site of negotiation, redefinition, and resistance within the cultural politics of late Bourbon empire.
