Frederic Leighton - Death, Mortality, Resurrection

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag's Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection offers a timely reexamination of the art of the late Victorian period's most institutionally powerful artist, Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896). As President of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896, Leighton was committed to the pursuit of beauty in art through the depiction of classical subjects, executed according to an academic working-method. But as this book reveals, Leighton's art and discourse were beset by the realisation that academic art would likely die with him. Rather than achieving classical perfection, Hammerschlag argues, Leighton's figures hover in transitional states between realism and idealism, flesh and marble, life and death, as gothic distortions of the classical ideal. The author undertakes close readings of key paintings, sculptures, frescos and drawings in Leighton's oeuvre, and situates them in the context of contemporaneous debates about death and resurrection in theology, archaeology and medicine. The outcome is a pleasurably macabre counter-biography that reconfigures what it meant to be not just a late-Victorian neoclassicist and royal academician, but President of the Victorian Royal Academy.

List of contents

Table of Contents to come.

About the author

Keren Rosa Hammerschlag is a Postdoctoral Research Assistant Professor in the Department of Art and Art History and the Women's and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University in Washington DC.

Product details

• Authors: Keren Rosa Hammerschlag, KerenRosa Hammerschlag, Hammerschlag Keren Rosa
• Publisher: Routledge Academic
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.02.2018
• EAN: 9781138548350
• ISBN: 978-1-138-54835-0
• Dimensions: 175 mm x 247 mm x 18 mm
• Series: British Art: Histories and Interpretations since 1700
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Art history; ART / Individual Artists / General, SOCIAL SCIENCE / Death & Dying, ART / History / General, HISTORY / Modern / 19th Century, ART / European, History of art & design styles: c 1800 to c 1900, 19th century, c 1800 to c 1899, History of Art, HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / General, Romanticism, Individual artists, art monographs, ART / History / European / Romanticism