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In this volume, Pop examines how art of the mid 1700s and early 1800s - inspired by translations of Greek tragedy - reveals a view of modern Europe attempting to recognize its own historical status as one culture among many. He analyses this broad view of culture through the lens of Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli's life and work.
List of contents
- Introduction: Classicism and its Discontents
- 1: Tragedy, the Cultural Relativism of Henry Fuseli
- 2: Grave Monuments, Writing, and the Antique Present
- 3: Comedy, Dreaming, and the Sympathetic Spectator
- 4: Winckelmann's Fake and Activist Neoclassicism
- 5: The Satyr Play, or Naturalizing Human Nature
- 6: Ordinary Antiquity
- Conclusion
- Appendix I: Fuseli and Herder
- Appendix II: Fuseli and Homer
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Andrei Pop is Associate Professor in the John U. Nef Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Summary
In this volume, Pop examines how art of the mid 1700s and early 1800s - inspired by translations of Greek tragedy - reveals a view of modern Europe attempting to recognize its own historical status as one culture among many. He analyses this broad view of culture through the lens of Anglo-Swiss artist Henry Fuseli's life and work.
Additional text
In a tour de force of scrupulous research and glittering insight, Pop persuades us that Fuseli's art did not fail to exemplify virtue, it ventured a new kind of history painting. Inspired by newly discovered remnants of pagan culture, by growing knowledge of cultures around the globe and by contemporary ideas of liberal humanism, Fuseli reformulated the relations of the classical and the modern in works of art which raise the spectre of the relativity of morals. More than a new account of Fuseli, this book is a readerly adventure in the history of art, and in the political and philosophical ideas underpinning current debates in social thought and visual culture.
