Classical Clayton

AN ART HISTORY MYSTERY: APOLLO SAUROKTONOS & THE CLEVELAND APOLLO STATUE OF THE MONTH, FEBRUARY 2020 This month we’re going to look at an intriguing art historical mystery – the possibility that a lost statue by Praxiteles, one of the greatest Classical Greek sculptors, may have turned up after almost two thousand years.   The statue’s rediscovery attracted surprisingly little attention in the mainstream press, so this is an attempt to spread the news - and to help you decide whether you think the original statue has indeed been found.   A few years ago, the World Museum in Liverpool received an intriguing request from the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio : could they borrow the Liverpool copy of the Apollo Sauroktonos (‘Apollo the Lizard-Slayer’) by the Greek sculptor Praxiteles?   It’s worth pointing out that unlike the Apollo Belvedere (Statue of the Month for January 2020), which only survives in a single ancient copy, there are about twenty exta...

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 .             ...