DRAWN FROM THE ANTIQUE:

ARTISTS AND THE CLASSICAL IDEAL

The Teylers Museum, Haarlem, 11 March – 31 May 2015

Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 25 June – 26 September 2015

Featuring a selection of some thirty-five works - drawings, paintings and prints - from

the Katrin Bellinger collection and selected loans from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the

Rijksmuseum, the Kunsthaus, Zurich, the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Art,

the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Courtauld Gallery, this two-venue exhibition

will explore the role of the Antique in artistic education and practice from the

Renaissance through the nineteenth century.

The display will address two essential themes: one, the formal role of the Antique in

the academic curriculum as the preferred learning tool to train young artists in the

classical ideal. Together with the study of the live model and anatomy, the Antique

played a seminal role in the formal education of the artist. Sculpture, especially the

heroic nude of ancient Greece and Rome, served an essential function in inspiring

artistic innovation from Renaissance workshops throughout the formalised academies

of the seventeenth century and onwards. The second theme of the exhibition is the

more intimate role played by the Antique in the representation of the artist, especially

in portraiture. This section will examine such topics as the changing status of the artist

and the Antique as a tool for self-promotion.

The exhibition will include works from all periods and national schools in which

artists’ workshops, academies and private study played equally important roles in the

pursuit of the classical model. The display will feature celebrated images of the

subject by Federico Zuccaro, Agostino Veneziano, Hendrik Goltzius, William Pether,

Charles-Joseph Natoire, Henry Fuseli as well as rarely or never before exhibited

works by Peter Paul Rubens, Michael Sweerts, Philippe Joseph Tassaert, Hubert

Robert, William Chambers, J.M.W. Turner and William Daniels.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial catalogue that will provide an

overview of this multi-faceted subject and present new scholarship as well as never

before seen images from works from a private collection. Included will be scholarly

essays on such themes as the canonical ideal in Antiquity from Polykleitos to

Vitruvius and beyond; the classical ideal in the Early Modern period from Alberti to

Reynolds; and the artistic training across European academies through the centuries -

from Baccio Bandinelli’s early academy to the Académie Royale in Paris and the

Royal Academy in London. The importance of portraiture and self-portraiture and the

role the antique played therein, will also be examined. Not since Ilaria Bignamini and

Martin Postle’s The Artist's Model: Its Role in British Art from Lely to Etty (1991) or

Martin Postle and William Vaughan’s The Artist and the Model: from Etty to Spencer

(1999) has the general subject of formal artist education been addressed by an

exhibition. This show and the accompanying catalogue will serve to complement

those exhibitions while breaking new academic ground in the subject.

The exhibition will be co-curated by Adriano Aymonino and Anne Varick Lauder.

Other contributors to the catalogue will include James Hall, Rachel Hapoienu, Ian

Jenkins, Jerzy Kierkuć-Bieliński, Michiel Plomp and Jonathan Yarker.