ABSTRACT
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, the anthropomorphic, free-standing classical statue had been raised to the pinnacle of aesthetic and cultural value. As the heyday of archeological discovery, this period saw a significant increase in the circulation of authentic Greek sculpture, while the growth of tourism to Italy and Greece, and the multiplication of casts, engravings, and photographs, made the antique statue accessible to a growing number of nineteenth-century travelers and writers. At the same time, early modern art theory found its chief representatives in Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and G. W. F. Hegel, who formulated a hierarchical and evaluative system of the arts that rendered Greek sculpture a synecdoche for classical excellence. Due to this privileged aesthetic and cultural character, acquisition of ancient works and collections became the object of considerable international competition among the English, French, and Bavarian sovereigns.1 A rare 1813 Sèvres vase depicts Napoleon’s Parisian parade of his antique spoils from the Vatican as a Roman triumph, with the statues in the role of war captives (Figure 1). The parade exemplifies the sculptural canon constructed by Winckelmann and his followers: the Apollo Belvedere, theMedici Venus, and of course the Laocoön all are present. The contrast of the gleaming nudes to the clothed and animated figures of the soldiers and bystanders, the simultaneously elevated and subdued position of the statues, and the overtones of display and defeat suggested by the procession all reflect the complex hold of the classical statue on the nineteenth-century imagination.
