From Temples to Museums: Afterlives of Classical Statues

Ever since their inception in classical Greece, lifelike freestanding statues representing real or ideal human forms have been prized as expressions of cultural, religious, aesthetic, and political values. This seminar traces their lives and multiple afterlives from antiquity to the present, asking how classical statues have been redefined, altered, relocated, replicated, and reinterpreted in different historical and geographical settings. Topics include the repurposing of votive statues in the ancient world and the fate of ideal and honorific statues in the late antique and medieval periods. Beginning in 14- and 15- century Rome, ancient statues were increasingly unearthed and displayed as symbols of dynastic or civic identity, often in newly invented spaces that redefined their meaning. Special attention will be given to private and princely collections of the Renaissance and early modern periods, as well as to the central role of ancient statues in the formation of state-sponsored museums in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this context, the course will also engage with recent scholarship on the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race in the reception of classical sculpture. We will examine how the white marble body of Greco-Roman statuary came to serve as a powerful, if problematic, standard of beauty, virtue, and civilization; how this ideal was racialized and gendered in European art theory; and how it became entangled with colonial ideologies of power and possession. Discussions will consider the writings of Winckelmann, Lessing, and their contemporaries alongside more recent critiques from feminist, queer, and postcolonial perspectives, tracing how the classical body has been continually reinscribed with new meanings across time and space. Attention to economic and physical aspects—including the art market and changing technologies and philosophies of restoration—will be balanced with intellectual and aesthetic developments. We will also explore the reproduction of classical statues in multiple media, from bronze, marble, and plaster to photography, cinema and 3D modeling, and the continuing debates about how best to display and interpret them for modern audiences. Throughout, the aim is to investigate how these objects’ changing settings, forms, functions, and meanings illuminate broader cultural, political, and intellectual preoccupations, and how the classical body remains a site of contested values and identities to this today. 3 credits. Satisfies the chronological requirement.