Antiquity as Subject
Art that looks back to ancient Greece and Rome: its ruins, statues, myths and imagined daily life.
No works indexed yet · 9 related artists
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About
Greek and Roman antiquity has served European and American artists as a lost golden age, a stage set and a source of authority. Its ruins came first. Giovanni Paolo Panini painted imaginary picture galleries hung with views of Roman monuments, among them Ancient Rome (1757), and Giovanni Battista Piranesi's etchings made the Colosseum and the aqueducts loom larger than life. James Stuart and Nicholas Revett measured Athenian buildings for The Antiquities of Athens (from 1762), giving architects a Greek vocabulary.
The 19th century reconstructed daily life. Lawrence Alma-Tadema filled scenes such as The Roses of Heliogabalus (1888) with marble, silks and archaeological detail. Modern artists treated the ancient world as memory: Giorgio de Chirico placed classical statues in empty arcaded squares in the 1910s, and Anne and Patrick Poirier have built miniature ruined cities since the early 1970s. Look for broken columns, togas and plaster casts.
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More in Subject Matter
Architecture's Effects
Artist as Ethnographer
Atmospheric Landscapes
Attenuated Figure
Bars and Restaurants
Bathers
Bedrooms and Bathrooms
Bible Story
Body Parts
Caricatures and Parody
Celebrity
Censorship
Childhood
City Scenes
Cityscapes
Cityscapes and City Scenes
Classical Figure
Classical Mythology
