Materials used in opening lecture, English 156 S05 (History of Art 152): Victorians in Togas: Classicism and Empire in Victorian Literature and Art

Multiple Victorian Versions of Ancient Rome

1. The Republic — the ideal of Freedom (Macaulay)
2. The Empire (1) — model for British imperialism (and warning)
3. The Empire (2) — Britain as colony
4. The Empire (3) — Roman remains — Hardrian's Wall, roads, buldings, and archelogy
5. The Empire (4) — Nero, Caligula, and the Roman decadence — a subversive ideal
6. The Empire (5) — Apocalypse: the destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum
7. Christian Rome (1) — Early Christianity on Ancient Rome: Saints and Martyrs
8. Christian Rome (2) — the fear of Roman Catholicism

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Associates

• 1. Hard-edge quasi-photographic realism:
• John Brett's Val d"Aosta
• Augustus Egg's ravelling Companions
• 2. Hard-edge pictorial realism with Hogarthian symbolism (and satire)
• Ford Madox Brown. Work
• Augustus Egg's Past and Present
• W. Holman Hunt's The Hireling Shepherd
• W. Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience
• 3. Hard-edge pictorial realism with Biblical symbolism (typology)
• John Everett Millais's Christ in the House of His Parents
• Hunt's The Shadow of Death
• D. G. Rosetti's Passover in the Holy Family and accompanying sonnet

Aesthetic Pre-Raphaelitism — Medievalized Eroticism, Eroticized Medievealism

• Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Paolo and Francesca
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Beata Beatrix
• Edward Burne-Jones's The Beguiling of Merlin
• Edward Burne-Jones's The Heart of the Rose

The Classicists (anti-Pre-Raphaelites?)

• Classical Myth — Greek and Roman often via Ovid
• Frederick Lord Leighton's A Pastoral
• Lament for Icarus
• G. F. Watts, Orpheus and Euridice
• The Male and Female Nude
• Frederick Lord Leighton's The Bath of Venus
• Frederick Lord Leighton's The Sluggard
• Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadem's A Sculptor's Model
• Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadem's Tepidarium
• The Heroic Ideal
• Sir Edward Poynter's Faithful unto Death
• Daily Life in Ancient Rome (with lots of Marble)
• Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's An Apodyterium
• Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's Thermae Antoninanae
• Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema's A Coign of Vantage
• Sir Edward Poynter's On the Terrace

A Complicating Factor — Pre-Raphaelite Classical Subjects

• A. C. Swinburne's "Hymn to Proserpine"
• Burne-Jones's Pygmalion and Perseus series
• Simeon Solomon's figures from classical myth

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Last modified 24 January 2007