Classical Clayton

TROY STORY: REVIEW OF ‘ TROY : MYTH & REALITY’ AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM Back in the Noughties, Boris Johnson wrote a book, The Dream of Rome (2006) in which he compared the European Union to the Roman Empire (use of a single currency etc).   A suggestion he made in the book was that all students in the EU should be required to read Book 4 of Virgil’s Aeneid (the section that describes Dido’s affair with Aeneas, culminating in Dido’s suicide) in order to provide every citizen of the EU with a shared cultural experience. It conjured up visions of people sitting in the bars and cafés of Ljubljana , Zagreb and Budapest arguing over the classic A-level question: ‘Who carries the most responsibility for Dido’s death?’ (there’s a long list of suspects, not least Dido herself).   This is essentially what the Troy: Myth & Reality exhibition is all about: the idea that the Trojan War cycle (including the Aeneid ) acts as a shared language across time and space, t...

UNCLE MONTY, DJANGO &THE WRESTLERS One of my sadder hobbies (OK, I admit that I do jigsaws and Sudoku as well) is spotting appearances of Classical statues in unexpected contexts: advertising, films, television game shows.   Classical statues are used as a form of visual shorthand to convey a message or an atmosphere – for example, the casts of Riace Warrior A in Celebrity Juice are presumably intended to convey ‘decadence’, or at least a Carry On -style naughtiness.   In other modern contexts, Classical sculptures have been used to convey everything from beauty, purity and civilised ‘good taste’ to sexual licence, narcissism, paganism or even fascism.   In this article I’m going to explore how one particular ancient sculpture – the Wrestlers - has been used as a piece of set-dressing to create very different messages in two popular films, Withnail & I and Django Unchained .             ...

APOLLO BELVEDERE STATUE OF THE MONTH: JANUARY 2020 Casts of the Apollo Belvedere in the fabulous Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen In 1816, the UK Parliament appointed a Select Committee to advise on whether the state should purchase the Parthenon Marbles from Lord Elgin.   The committee called several famous painters and sculptors as expert witnesses, including Thomas Lawrence and John Flaxman.   One of the questions they were asked was whether they considered the Elgin Marbles to be in the same league as three ancient sculptures from the Vatican collections: the Laocoön, the Belvedere Torso and the Apollo Belvedere.   This article will explore how the Apollo Belvedere came to be regarded as the ‘gold standard’ against which other sculptures came to be judged.       As a teacher of Classical art history, the Apollo Belvedere has fascinated me for many years, partly because there are so many copies of it.   Prior to the First ...