Classical Art: A Life History from Antiquity to the Present revolutionizes our understanding of what classical art has meant and continues to mean. In this ambitious, beautifully illustrated book art historian and classicist Caroline Vout provides a study of how classical art has been continuously redefined over the years being in new contexts and cultures.
What we call classical art did not simply appear in ancient Rome, or in the Renaissance, or in the 18th century Academy. Endlessly repackaged and revered or rebuked, Greek and Roman artifacts have gathered an amazing array of values, in each new historical period, even as these objects themselves have reshaped their surroundings. Vout shows how this process began in antiquity, as Greeks of the Hellenistic period transformed the art of fifth-century Greece, and continued through the Roman empire, Constantinople, European court societies, the neoclassical English country house, and the nineteenth century, up to the modern museum.
This is a very informative book that gives a great analysis of what classical art has meant over the years and what it continues to mean.
