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| Alinari & Cook Apollo Belvedere, Vatican Museum, Rome ca. 1890 albumen silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"Finally, at the time when full enlightenment and freedom appeared in Greece, art likewise became freer and more elevated. The more ancient style was built on a system consisting of rules that were taken from nature and subsequently departed from it and became ideal. The artist worked more according to the direction of these rules than according to nature, which was to be imitated – for art had formed its own nature. Those who improved art raised themselves above this accepted system and drew nearer to the truth of nature. Nature taught them to depart from hardness and to transform the projecting and suddenly truncated parts of figures into flowing contours, to make the violent poses and actions more civilized and judicious, and to offer not so much the learned as the beautiful, elevated and grand. . . . The style itself can be called the grand style, because – aside from beauty – the most notable aim of these artists seems to have been grandeur."
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| Alinari & Cook Capitoline Venus, Capitoline Museum, Rome ca. 1890 albumen silver print National Gallery of Canada |
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| James Anderson Antique Venus ca. 1853-77 albumen silver print National Gallery of Canada |
"In the end, nature is the best teacher with regard to the beauty of the individual parts of the human body, for in regard to particulars, nature is superior to art, just as in regard to the whole, art can rise above nature. This is especially true for sculpture, which is unable to achieve life in those parts in which painting is able to come very near to that. But because some perfectly formed parts, such as a delicate profile, are hardly to be found even in the largest cities, we must thus observe some parts (to say nothing of the naked parts) on portraits of the ancients."
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| Edizioni Brogi Venus of Capua, Museo Nazionale, Naples ca. 1890-1910 gelatin silver print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Edizioni Brogi Bas-relief of music-making children by Luca della Robbia, Museo di S. Maria del Fiore, Florence ca. 1890-1910 gelatin silver print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Giacomo Brogi Antique statue of Niobe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence ca. 1860-80 albumen silver print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
"The most exquisite and, one can say, the only works in Rome from the period of the high style are – as far as I can see – the oft-cited nine-palmi-high Pallas in the Villa Albani and the Niobe and her daughters in the Villa Medici . . . Niobe and her daughters can undoubtedly be seen as works in this high style . . . they have the chief characteristics indicating this style, namely, the concept of a beauty that is seemingly unstudied, but, even more, a high simplicity not only in the appearance of the heads but also in the drawing taken as a whole, in the drapery, and in the execution. The beauty is like an idea conceived without the help of the senses that might be produced in a lofty understanding and a happy imagination if it could soar to seeing nearly as far as divine beauty; it is of such great unity of form and contour that it seems not to have been produced laboriously but to have been awakened like an idea and imbued with the breath of life."
– quoted passages from History of the Art of Antiquity (1764) by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave (Getty Research Institute, 2006)
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| Giacomo Brogi Sala della Niobe, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence ca. 1860-80 albumen silver print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Giacomo Brogi Gallery interior, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence ca. 1860-80 albumen silver print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Giacomo Brogi Gallery interior, Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence ca. 1860-80 albumen silver print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Giacomo Brogi Michelangelo's Tomb of Lorenzo II de' Medici, Church of San Lorenzo, Florence ca. 1860-80 albumen silver print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Edizioni Brogi Detail of Michelangelo's David, Florence ca. 1865-90 albumen silver print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Fratelli Alinari Hermaphrodite, Galleria Borghese, Rome ca. 1880-95 albumen print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Fratelli Alinari Sala del Pugillatore, Museo Nazionale, Rome ca. 1880-95 albumen print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
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| Fratelli Alinari Detail of antique Cupid, Vatican Museum, Rome ca. 1865-90 albumen print Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |