A modern classic about ancient sculpture

This review of Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 appears in the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.

Originally published in 1981, Taste and the Antique was a landmark of art-historical scholarship. Nicholas Penny and Francis Haskell inventoried a corpus of 95 classical sculptures that had been an indispensable reference point for artists, scholars, collectors and museum-goers for the best part of 400 years, before losing their authority and familiarity in the early 20th century. The book sought to reconstruct a lost world in which revered sculptures such as the Apollo Belvedere and Venus de’ Medici appeared as ‘the only bulwarks of absolute values in a world governed by capricious and frequently changing tastes’.

This new edition, expanded to three volumes, makes clear not only why Taste and the Antique became a foundational text, but also its enduring promise to encourage fresh research. In a new preface, Penny reflects on the ‘cultural amnesia’ that surrounded the sculptures that graced gardens from the Tuileries to Chatsworth. When in 1977 he and Haskell visited Rousham, the estate in Oxfordshire designed by William Kent, a copy of the Belvedere Antinous, misidentified, lay prostrate on the ground. The pair initially thought of writing a short ‘booklet’ to rectify the general ignorance, but the project grew substantially after a visit to Versailles. Soon it was clear that they had embarked on a vital chapter in European cultural history, reconstructing the process by which particular works of art were excavated, identified, reinterpreted, drawn, copied, exhibited, translated into new media and ultimately banished to the storerooms.

Farnese bull, Roman copy of a Hellenistic original. Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples. Photo: James Stevenson and Ken Jackson, Cultural Heritage Digitisation

The authors were writing when it seemed the classical inheritance was evaporating, when ‘art schools everywhere have been discarding the plaster casts that were once their raison d’être’. The speed of the backlash had been remarkable. If the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston had 800 classical casts on display in 1891, by 1927 most of these had been destroyed, sold off or given away, so that only a handful survive. Reverence for ancient marbles had been superseded by other canons of sculpture, and other itineraries through Italy. Thanks in part to Taste and the Antique, institutional cast collections have in recent years been rehabilitated and redisplayed, from Oxford and Copenhagen to Leipzig and Budapest.

In this revised edition Haskell and Penny’s original text has been preserved almost in its entirety, with expanded footnotes taking account of the wealth of scholarship that has appeared in the intervening years. For each of the 95 entries on the individual statues, from the Seated Agrippina to the Zingara, Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero have provided extensive new information about variants, replicas, material typologies, alternative names, restoration practices and bibliography. This is meticulous, generous and underrated academic labour, which neatly compresses centuries of scholarly argument and wildly divergent aesthetic responses. The refreshed entries also contain new details about the modern afterlives of a work, such as the appearance of the Capitoline Antinous in the photography of Robert Mapplethorpe.

Dying Seneca (2nd century AD), Roman. Musée du Louvre. Photo: © James Stevenson and Ken Jackson, Cultural Heritage Digitisation

Volume Two presents the fruits of a photographic campaign conducted over several years by James Stevenson and Ken Jackson of Cultural Heritage Digitisation. Almost every entry in the catalogue has been photographed in colour from multiple perspectives. For a large and complex composition such as the Farnese Bull, the results are especially compelling, but the new photography also brings out wonderfully the patina of the ancient bronzes, such as the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius, as well as the veins in the marble, the expressive gestures and historic inscriptions (as on the base of the Furietti centaurs).

The final volume, by contrast, takes the form of an expansive visual essay by Aymonino and Dodero. It tracks the mutation of the 95 sculptures into new iterations, contexts and media, from bronzes and intaglios to posters, anatomical textbooks and contemporary art. The pair known as Alexander and Bucephalus, or the Horse Tamers, decorated the top of an extravagant inkwell presented in 1786 to Pius VI to mark the completion of the Quirinale. Exercising a regulatory influence on representations of the human body, classical sculpture turns up in unexpected places: muscle man Eugen Sandow pitching himself against the Farnese Hercules; the Port Jackson Painter endowing a wounded Aboriginal around 1788 with the dignity of the Dying Gladiator (aka the Dying Gaul); young Henri Matisse relishing a rear view of Cincinnatus’s curves.

Dying Seneca (2nd century AD), Roman. Musée du Louvre. Photo: © James Stevenson and Ken Jackson, Cultural Heritage Digitisation

Taste and the Antique concerns the tenacity of forms over the longue durée, with Penny and Haskell insisting that ‘old favourites retained immense and lasting prestige’. Penny describes the prowess of acrobat Andrew Ducros who in 1826 dazzled crowds in Dublin by simulating the Farnese Hercules, the Arrotino, the Discobolus, the Borghese Gladiator and the Dying Gladiator in swift succession. That the audience for a pantomime would have recognised these poses speaks volumes about the reach of the classical corpus. By the late 19th century, this corpus was under pressure from new ideas of originality (as awareness spread that these Roman marbles were mostly copies of lost Greek bronzes), the declining quality of reproductive techniques, and changing museum priorities. But to see Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face (1957) channelling the Winged Nike of Samothrace in a red chiffon dress is to glimpse our debt to the protean classical ideal.

The Winged Nike was one of the only statues discovered in the 19th century – such as the Dancing Faun from Pompeii, the Augustus of Prima Porta from Rome or the Hermes from Olympia – to enter the public imagination. A fourth volume is mooted to explore some of these alternative stories of reception. For now, this beautifully illustrated and superbly executed edition has renewed the learning, relevance and allure of a true classic.

Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny; revised and amplified by Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero is published by Brepols.

From the May 2025 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here.