Sunday, September 2, 2018

Nineteenth-Century Antiquarianism in Pictures

Mariano Fortuny
Antiquaries
1863
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

"In all of the relevant discussions of antiquarianism, from Momigliano onward, there is a presumption – either stated or implied – that from sometime in the late eighteenth century, whether dated to Gibbon or Winckelmann, the modern discipline of history begins.  . . .  If, however, we expand our notion of history beyond the definitions that professional historians accepted and then imposed on others through their writing and institutions, then we can consider the nineteenth century as indeed dominated by history, but it is not a professional history.  As the historian of nineteenth-century culture, Stephen Bann showed conclusively long ago, in domains shaped by the imagination – such as literature but also art and museums – history was a powerful force.  All of these domains worked through concrete encounters with discrete artifacts.  . . .   Nietzsche's notion of "longing" is crucial, because Nietzsche seeks, as did Goethe, to find a way beyond, around, or under the self-conscious, rationalizing framework that we use to explain  or explain away  how it is that one particular past or another grasps and takes hold of us.  Both Nietzsche and Goethe forcibly try to connect a scholarly interest to a personal, and often unexamined, drive.  . . .  Antiquarianism, as described by Nietzsche, serves life by connecting a person to the past of his things, and of his place.  "The small and limited, the decayed and obsolete receives its dignity and inviolability in that the preserving and revering soul of the antiquarian moves into these things and makes itself at home in the nest it builds there."

– from Peter N. Miller's essay A Tentative Morphology of European Antiquarianism, published in World Antiquarianism: Comparative Perspectives (Getty Research Institute, 2014)

Elihu Vedder
The Questioner of the Sphinx
1863
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

David Dalhoff Neal
Oliver Cromwell of Ely visits Mr John Milton
1883
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Édouard Manet
The Little Cavaliers
1861-62
hand-colored etching
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Karl Ludwig Friedrich Becker
The Petition to the Doge
1860
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Tibullus at Dealia's House
1866
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Lawrence Alma-Tadema
The Triumph of Titus: AD 71, The Flavians
1885
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

"In this canvas, the artist shows Titus returning to Rome in triumph following his capture of Jerusalem in AD 70.  His father, Emperor Vespasian, clad in a white toga, leads the procession.  Titus comes next, holding the hand of his daughter Julia, who turns to address her father's younger brother and successor, Domitian.  In the background is the Temple of Jupiter Victor.  Among the spoils from Jerusalem is a 7-branched candlestick from the temple.  Alma-Tadema depicted these events by drawing on classical sources, like the reliefs of the Arch of Titus, and on the latest 19th-century scholarship regarding everyday life in Rome."

– from curator's notes at Walters Art Museum

Lawrence Alma-Tadema
A Roman Emperor: 41 AD
1871
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

"In AD 41 the debauched Roman emperor Caligula was murdered.  Gratius, a member of the Praetorian Guard, draws a curtain aside to reveal the terrified Claudius, who is hailed as emperor on the spot.  Beneath the herm in the background lie the bodies of Caligula, his wife Caesonia, their young daughter, and a bystander.  The blood stains on the herm denote the struggle that has transpired as well as the setting, the Hermaeum, an apartment in the Palace where Claudius had sought refuge."

– from curator's notes at Walters Art Museum

Lawrence Alma-Tadema
Promise of Spring
1890
oil on panel
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Paul-Jacques-Aimé Baudry
Diana Reposing
1859
oil on panel
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Jean-Léon Gérôme
A Roman Slave Market
ca. 1884
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Jean-Léon Gérôme
Diogenes
1860
oil on canvas
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

Richard Westall
Telemachus landing on the Isle of Calypso
1803
oil on panel
Glasgow Museums

William Jacob Baer
Cabinet Miniature of a Nymph
1898
watercolor on ivory
Walters Art Museum, Baltimore