Extended from one volume to three, the new ‘Taste and the Antique’ expands on four centuries of interactions with sculpture

When I moved in with my partner, a fellow art historian, 25 years ago, we faced the inevitable question of whether to keep both copies of Taste and the Antique. It was a problem any art-historical couple of the time would have had, given its indispensability. Published in 1981 and tracing the reception history from 1500 to 1900 of the ancient Greek and Roman statues that composed the canon of Western antique taste, Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s book charted the discovery, display, appreciation, copying and dissemination of the Laocoön (Vatican Museums), the Venus de Milo (Louvre) and dozens of other vaunted survivals of the Classical world.

Ranging over centuries and geography, and migrating across syllabi, the book was as familiar to Dutch paintings experts as students of British sculpture. Its focus on the Classical tradition was legible to more traditional art history, while its fugitive philosophy of giving a material history to “taste” was radical enough to see its inclusion on courses in the social history of art. (When the history of late 20th-century academic taste gets written by a reception historian of the future, Taste and the Antique will form a substantial chapter.) In the end we kept both copies, neither wanting to part with their own. And having two on the shelf seemed a clever reference to the notion of artistic duplication.

Now in colour

The fields that the book helped to inaugurate—the history of sculptural reception, display and reproduction—have ballooned since its publication, yet my edition is still in regular use; chiefly when looking at an 18th- or 19th-century sculpture, and feeling a flickering recognition that I have seen that pose, hairstyle, set of buttocks somewhere in the ancient world, before ritually flicking through the catalogue to check the theory. This search is not always concluded successfully, however, typically because of the single-view, monochrome photography—a source of complaint from the earliest 1981 reviews. (The eminent American professor of Classical art and its afterlife, Seymour Howard, called them “hack study photos”.)

This new edition of Taste and the Antique triumphantly overcomes the one notable failure of the original. The two-volume catalogue illustrates all 95 works in magnificent colour, with the photographic images mostly by James Stevenson and Ken Jackson.

Bathed in a cool, legible light, the statues are usually recorded from all directions (including from above in the case of the Louvre’s Nymph with a Shell), often with detail shots of inscriptions, or notable passages of carving. Traces of polychromy are fully visible, along with restorations, stains and chisel marks. Packed with visual information, the catalogue is a vital academic resource and fully achieves the original aim of providing a set of illustrations with which to recognise and identify works in the 1500-1900 canon of antique statuary.

A third volume illustrates in colour many of the copies, prints, casts, commercial reproductions and drawings that were taken from the Classical statues. This flits across time and media, encompassing renaissance red-chalk drawings, glazed porcelain, garden sculpture, a shoe advertisement, pictures of Nazis and Hollywood stars standing next to statues, and a host of other eye-grabbing images. A print of an Aboriginal Australian in the pose of the Dying Gladiator nods towards growing research on Classicism and colonialism.

Inspiring and enabling

The text itself is much enlarged with information, footnotes and bibliographic references, although without losing the character of the original. A fascinating new preface by Nicholas Penny is the only substantial change to the erudite historical essays that compose the first part of the publication. The 95 statues constituting the original catalogue remain the same: probably wisely, given the many candidates for inclusion suggested over the years. (A future volume of excluded works is said to be in the planning.) Penny writes that he and Haskell (who died in 2000) never defined precise criteria for inclusion among the canonical works—taste and fame, after all, are difficult to scientifically define—and acknowledges that the criteria they used could have excluded some works that, in the event, made the cut (Venus Victrix, 2nd century AD, Uffizi) and included others that did not (the late first-century BC bronze bust, Pseudo-Seneca, Museo Archaeologico Nazionale, Naples). It would have been a shame, though, to over-rationalise the list. One of the pleasures of reading Taste and the Antique comes when expectantly searching for works that are not catalogued (like reliefs on the Arch of Constantine in Rome or the Rondanini Medusa in the Glyptotek, Munich) and being forced to carry out one’s own investigations in imitation of the authors. It was always an inspiring and enabling book, even in its absences.

The present editors have made their mark in the detail of the catalogue entries, which have all expanded, sometimes tripling in size. The reception history is admirably taken back years, decades and, in one case, centuries. There are a very small number of corrections, seamlessly introduced. (“Harwood’s wretched copy” of the Uffizi’s Apollino is now “Filippo Della Valle’s wretched copy”: the attribution has changed but its wretchedness abides.) Relevant publications since 1981 have been added to create an extensive, if not exhaustive, bibliography. Many more references to copies and derivations have been added, including 20th-century borrowings from the likes of Max Ernst and Giorgio de Chirico. In the spirit of the original edition, part of the fun for the reader is interleaving more copies: that of Narcissus, which forms the centrepiece of the Narcissus Hall at Leighton House in London, for example; or a derivation made in silver by a 19th-century silversmith in Bhuj, India (described by Edward Cooke in 2014’s Sculpture Victorious).

Sense of materiality

The overwhelming change in the revised edition is the sense of materiality. A helpful and entertaining section at the end of each entry summarises modern Classicist opinion on the nature of the object and gives a full list of restorations. The photographs allow a sense of size, shape, surfaces, working, context and interventions. Objecthood is also stressed through the addition of new data on the types of marble used for the statues. Early viewing was often informed and enhanced by the study of sculptural materials (in 1819 the English sculptor Francis Chantrey trained the poet Thomas Moore to recognise different types of media in Rome), so this is appropriate and significant new information. It is a work in progress, as many statues remain simply described as “marble”, but the new data added here reflects some important shifts in knowledge with several canonical works now identified as Asiatic Dokimeion and Göktepe marble (the latter quarries in modern Turkey only investigated since 2006).

This is a glorious new edition, although future art-historian couples are unlikely to have the problem of replication. At €395, it is destined for libraries and the desks of art dealers, rather than student bookshelves. (It has morphed, as it were, from a plaster statuette into a Massimiliano Soldani bronze.) For those lucky enough to spend time with these volumes, though, it is a labour-­saving miracle, and a luxurious compendium to the rich world of antique taste and replication.

• Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, edited and revised by Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900, Harvey Miller Publishers/Brepols Publishers, 3 volumes/1684pp, 186 b/w & 1592 col. illust., €395 (hb), published 9 December 2024

• Greg Sullivan is the editor of the online Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660-1851