Between October 2026 and February 2027, Sarah Carter will be the Census Fellow in the Reception of Antiquity at the Warburg Institute in London and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome. Splitting her time between these institutions, she will be working on her book project, “Art, Eros, and the British Enlightenment.”
Sarah specialises in British art of the long eighteenth century with an emphasis on histories of collecting, antiquarianism, and the reception of antiquity. She has had held postdoctoral fellowships at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the University of Chicago, the Yale Center for British Art, the Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, and the Huntington Library. Her work has appeared in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, RACAR, and Lumen, and she has journal articles forthcoming in Pegasus. Beiträge zum Nachleben antiker Kunst und Architektur, Oxford Art Journal, and Eighteenth-Century Studies.
Art, Eros, and the British Enlightenment, Sarah Carter
Reproduced in print and housed in museum collections, turgid phalluses and sculpted vulvas unearthed at Herculaneum and Pompeii or looted from the expanding colonial frontier complicated stories told about the classical past in Britain in the second half of the eighteenth century. How, I ask, did thinkers, artists, and curators grapple with such evidence of ancient cultures’ exuberant sexuality? To answer this question, my book follows erotic antiquities sourced from the Mediterranean and South Asia into the worlds of antiquarian scholarship, private collecting, museums, commercial publishing, and the interdisciplinary work of Henry Fuseli and William Blake. I argue that Eros, whether disguised as vulgar Priapus, celebrated as the primordial “Prime Mover” of an ancient philosophical cosmology or apprehended simply as sexual desire, became a crucial force of negotiation, initiating new global understandings of Western art history, challenging conventional ideas about gender, sexuality, and culture, and providing a radical visual and conceptual infrastructure through which to articulate modern identity. Although the figures around which the book is structured are unlikely allies according to the usual stories told about this period, I show that each courted an ancient past teeming with more philosophy, mystery, and erotic possibility than their own moment could afford.
Figure: Plate I (frontispiece), “Ex: Voti of Wax presented in the Church at Isernia 1780,” from Richard Payne Knight, An Account of the Remains of the Worship of Priapus (London: Printed by T. Spilsbury, 1786); The Huntington Library, San Marino, California, RB 400897.
