ABSTRACT
Perhaps the most famous image of an early modern academy — if we except the Platonic ideal constituted by Raphael’s School of Athens — is Johann Zoffany’s collective portrait of the English Royal Academy, dating from 1771-72 (Fig. 9.1). Zoffany portrays the academicians in action, during a life class, so that we are presented with a group of clothed and bewigged men rather surreally arrayed around two naked youths in classicizing poses. The academy is figured as a profoundly masculine world, veined with drolly rendered homoerotic undertones; some of the academicians are gazing at their prospective models raptly, almost literally transfixed.
