The Living Death of Antiquity

Neoclassical Aesthetics
Erscheinungsjahr 2022
ISBN: 978-0-19-289396-3
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 288 Seiten, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 231 mm, Gewicht: 635 g

Reihe: Classical Presences

The Living Death of Antiquity examines the idealization of an antiquity that exhibits, in the words of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 'a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur'. Fitzgerald discusses the aesthetics of this strain of neoclassicism as manifested in a range of work in different media and periods, focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the aftermath of Winckelmann's writing, John Flaxman's engraved scenes from the
Iliad and the sculptors Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen reinterpreted ancient prototypes or invented new ones. Earlier and later versions of this aesthetic in the ancient Greek Anacreontea, the French Parnassian poets and Erik Satie's Socrate, manifest its character in different media and periods. Looking with a
sympathetic eye on the original aspirations of the neoclassical aesthetic and its forward-looking potential, Fitzgerald describes how it can tip over into the vacancy or kitsch through which a 'remaindered' antiquity lingers in our minds and environments. This book asks how the neoclassical value of simplicity serves to conjure up an epiphanic antiquity, and how whiteness, in both its literal and its metaphorical forms, acts as the 'logo' of neoclassical antiquity, and functions aesthetically
in a variety of media. In the context of the waning of a neoclassically idealized antiquity, Fitzgerald describes the new contents produced by its asymptotic approach to meaninglessness, and how the antiquity that it imagined both is and is not with us.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fitzgerald, William

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: Barock, Klassizismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 19. Jahrhundert
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: 20./21. Jahrhundert
• Geisteswissenschaften Kunst Kunstgeschichte Kunstgeschichte: Klassisch (Griechisch & Römisch)
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Alte Geschichte & Archäologie Geschichte der klassischen Antike

Über Autor(innen)

After taking a BA in Classics at Oxford (1974) and a PhD in Comparative Literature at Princeton (1980), William Fitzgerald taught for 23 years in the US, at the University of California, San Diego and Berkeley. He returned to the UK in 2003 and taught at Cambridge University until 2007, when he became Professor of Latin Language and Literature at King's College London. He has published books and articles on Latin literature, especially poetry, and on classical
reception.