Date: 10-02-2008
Owning Institution: Tate Britain
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2010  
Subject:     18th Century    

The ghost of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, author of the History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), haunts the compelling new display of Neoclassical sculpture in the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. A crowd of deities, carved from marble as white as snow by some of the most gifted sculptors of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, stand spotlit in darkness: a collective memorial to the depth and strength of the writer’s influence. It was Winckelmann who had condemned the decadence of the rococo style and who had proposed a return to the noble simplicity and calm grandeur of the art of ancient Greece and Rome; it was he who, in passages such as the following rhapsody on the famous ancient statue of the Apollo Belvedere in Rome, inaugurated that great shift in sensibilities whereby the rapturous experience of a work of art might replace religious devotion itself:

“Like the soft tendrils of the vine, his beautiful hair flows round his head, as if gently brushed by the breath of the zephyr. It seems to be perfumed by the essence of the gods, and tied with charming care by the hands of the Graces. In the presence of this miracle of art I forget the whole universe and my soul acquires a loftiness appropriate to its dignity. From admiration I pass to ecstasy, I feel my breast dilate and rise as if I were filled with the spirit of prophecy; I am transported to Delos and the sacred groves of Lycia – places Apollo honoured with his presence – and the statue seems to come alive like the beautiful creation of Pygmalion.”

No one had written about art in this way before. Winckelmann preached his beliefs with such force and passion that he changed the course of taste, inspiring generations of artists to emulate the works of classical antiquity, as well as persuading the European aristocracy of his time to collect ancient sculpture with an unprecedented, consuming zeal (without his influence, the Earl of Elgin would never have conceived the project of rescuing the sculptures of the Parthenon frieze from centuries of neglect). In the process he unintentionally created a whole new market in fakes, frauds and other ingenious deceptions. As the sculptor and writer Allan Cunningham noted on a visit to Rome in the early 1830s, “they gather together the crushed and mutilated members of of two or three old marbles … raise up a complete figure, on which they confer the name of some lost statue, and as such sell it to those whose pockets are better furnished than their heads – especially our English cognoscenti.”

Tate’s new show, “The Return of the Gods: Neoclassical Sculpture in Britain”, focusses on the works of art that “our English cognoscenti” acquired not from the distant past but from their own contemporaries – broadly speaking, that generation of British and European sculptors, including John Flaxman, Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, who flourished during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In their day, such artists were considered to be titans, creative geniuses of the first order – men who had indeed brought back to life the gods and goddesses of the distant past, creating a whole new race of Apollos, Daphnes and Dianas to help people the vast new sculpture galleries built by England’s milords to parade their collections and, by extension, their probity in matters of both morals and taste. Such works look particularly at home in Tate Britain’s late nineteenth-century Duveen Galleries, which are themselves Neoclassical in design – created, in fact, at precisely the moment when the style was going out of vogue.

The once celebrated masters of the Neoclassical age fell dramatically out of fashion at the turn of the twentieth century, their works seeming hopelessly out-of-date and irrelevant compared to the “painting of modern life” practised by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, and even more so by contrast with the iconoclastic creations of the Fauvists, Cubists and other pioneers of early modern art. Their sculptures were branded lifeless, precious, empty, bombastic. They were so thoroughly forgotten and discredited, in fact, that Tate Britain’s Director Stephen Deuchar is able to make the claim, in the catalogue to the present exhibition, that “this is the first time that eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century sculpture has been shown in depth within the national gallery of British art.” That might seem astonishing but it is true, and is all the more reason to visit the present exhibition.

The works on display are drawn principally from the holdings of the V&A, the Sir John Soane’s Museum and Tate itself, although there are also significant loans from English private collections and the National Trust, and from as far afield as the Getty Museum in California. Between them, they demonstrate that the best Neoclassical sculpture is anything but dull, arid and straitjacketed by convention. The decision to darken the galleries and use subtle, form-modelling spotlights, is a masterstroke of exhibition design. It evokes the candlelit or lamplit galleries of the eighteenth century, populated by rapt connoisseurs, memorably painted by Joseph Wright of Derby; and it  brilliantly heightens the tactile qualities and Pygmalion lifelikeness of the sculptures on display. 

Some of the most vivid works in the show are portraits, harking back not to the mythological art of the past but to Roman bust portraiture – a tradition itself rooted in a robust, unsentimental realism. Benedetto Pistrucci’s Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington of 1832 presents a gaunt-faced warrior, past his prime, looking up to meet the gaze of posterity. Joseph Nollekens’ Sophia, Daughter of George Aufrere is a masterpiece of high realism, like the demure but spirited heroine of a Jane Austen novel preserved forever in marble. John Bacon the Younger’s jowly portrayal of Richard Payne Knight perfectly captures the arrogance of the so-called “arrogant connoisseur” – infamous for petulantly branding Elgin’s great acquisition of the Parthenon frieze sculptures as Roman imitations and notorious, too, for his Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, a study of phallus worship in the ancient world.

Payne Knight’s presence is a reminder that Neoclassical taste was by no means always as lofty as it has often been made out to be. The same moral  might be drawn from Winckelmann’s aesthetic writings, which for all their insistence on the moral purity of antique art, also pulsate with forbidden, homoerotic feelings (feelings that played a part in his untimely and brutal death at the hands of a rent-boy in a tavern in Trieste in 1768). Tate Britain’s exhibition is devoted, above all, to naked bodies rather than naked faces. Some of these are stirringly patriotic, idealistic works, most notably John Charles Felix Rossi’s charmingly idiosyncratic The British Athlete, of 1828, which is simultaneously a portrait of an actual cockney pugilist, taking guard in a high-fitting pair of nineteenth-century boxing breeches, and a high-minded civic exhortation – Rossi’s way of saying the martial virtues of ancient Sparta will thrive in Britannia if all young men follow such examples. But overall, this is a show which suggests that the project of reviving the art of classical antiquity was, more often than not, a cover for the exploration of sensual desire, if not outright sexual fantasy.

Sexual pursuit and sexual consummation are the themes of two exquisitely decadent bas-reliefs of the late 1780s and early 1790s. John Flaxman’s Apollo and Marpesa shows the lithe and athletic figure of the young god pulling at the elbow of the statuesque, naked Marpesa. Nearby, John Deare’s Venus Reclining on a Sea Monster with Cupid and a Putto depicts the aftermath of an orgiastic coupling between woman and beast. Deare’s sea monster is a priapic amphibian goat roaring its satisfaction to a complacent female nude, who caresses the creature’s bearded face while reclining on its back with an expression of perfect post-coital complacency on her face. The animal’s shaggy coat, and the lightly rippling waves that serve as the waterbed for this unconventional lovers’ tryst, have been lovingly conjured from stone with virtuoso skill – evidence that Deare would certainly be better known as an artist today had he not devoted most of his career, as an expatriate in Rome, supplying the international market in fake antiquities.

The Greek Slave, created by the American artist Hiram Powers in 1844, has been given a prominent position near the entrance to the exhibition. At first sight, this graceful standing nude looks like a study in feminine grace and virtue, but closer inspection reveals the sculpture’s dark and kinky side – the marble chains that bind her hands and reveal her as an object of sexual predation. John Gibson’s Hylas Surprised by the Naiads, offers, by contrast, a marble daydream of a man being raped by women. A pair of tall and slinky nudes bear down on an adolescent boy, feeling his flesh as though prodding a piece of meat at market, as they prepare to bear him away to their watery world. At the far end of the gallery stands Canova’s Three Graces, the greatest beauty contest of the nineteenth century, especially designed to be appreciated from the back – its first owner even designed a revolving plinth, likerecord turntable, on which to display it. It forms a fitting climax to the show as a whole.

Neoclassical art is often thought of as the opposite of Romantic art – Neoclassicism, with its emphasis on purity and virtue, seen as a rebuttal of the dark and often violent energies of Romanticism. It makes more sense to think of them as identical twins wearing different clothing. Canova’s friend, the Italian writer Leopoldo Cicognara, got to the heart of the passions that animate so much Neoclassical art, when he wrote, of one of the sculptor’s works, that “if statues could be made by stroking stone rather than roughly cutting, I would say that this one had been formed by wearing down the surrounding marble by dint of kisses and caresses.”