Page 32 - Beholding Liberty!

Greeks in the ruins
of the temple of Hera on Samos illustration of the publication by count de Choiseul-Gouffier
Voyage pittoresque de la Grèce,
vol. 1, Paris 1782
Library of the Hellenic Parliament
[cat. no Ι.1.2]
9. Koutsogiannis 2015, 100 ff.
10. Middleton 2004, Koutsogiannis 2012, 31, Koutsogiannis 2014, 83 cat. no 15, Koutsogiannis 2015, 102, Koutsogiannis 2018, 399.
11. Stoneman 1996, 189 ff, Soros 2006, 596 cat. nos 36-37, Koutsogiannis 2014, 86
cat. no 17, Koutsogiannis 2015, 104-106, Koutsogiannis 2018, 399.
12. Generally, see Tsigakou 1981, Stoneman 1996, Stoneman 1998, Stoneman 1998, Koutsogiannis 2012, Koutsogiannis 2014, Koutsogiannis 2015, Kouria 2016, Koutsogiannis 2018.
13. In his work “Thoughts on the imitation of Greek works in painting and sculpture” (Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Gedanken uber die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in der Malerei und Bildhauerkunst, Dresden 1755). See Winckelman 1996, 7,
Irwin 1999, 26.
14. More broadly, see Noe 1994, Konstantinou 1998, Hess - Agazzi – Decultot 2009, Harloe – Momigliano – Farnoux 2018.
15. Augustinos 2003, 212 ff.
32 BEHOLDING LIBERTY!
PIONEERING ANTIQUITY-LOVERS OF NEOCLASSICAL HELLENOMANIA
From the mid-18th century on, Grand Tour travellers turned systematically to Greece; they studied and recorded its antiquities, which they also published in monumental editions.9
In 1755, architect Julien-David Le Roy visited Attica and the Peloponnese and published several of their antiquities in a volume entitled “The ruins of the most beautiful monuments of Greece” (Les
with emphasis on ruins and their “pic- turesque” aesthetic. Correspondingly, the “sublime” aesthetic that required the ancient monuments to be rendered in clean, straight lines, dominates the monumental work of the English artists and architects James Stuart and Nicholas Revett regarding The Antiquities of Athens, the product of years of detailed work (1751-1753), but published gradually, quite a lot later (4 volumes, 1762- 1816).11 Consequently, the French and English antiquity lovers, of every specialization (antiquar- ians, travellers, intellectuals, artists, architects, collectors) were first in the rediscovery of Greek monuments, by publicizing them in illustrated printed works in the West, and their establishment
as artistic models.12
On the purely theoretical level, the primacy of Greek antiquity – compared to the Roman – was for- tunately protected by the German theoretician, Johann Joachim Winckelmann. Even though he never visited Greece, upheld as early as 1755 that “the sense of the beautiful, which constantly spreads further in the world, began to be shaped for the first time under the Greek sky”13 and preserved the imitation of the Ancients. Later, he published the “History of Art in Antiquity” (Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums, Dresden 1764), in which he laid the foundations for the periodicity of ancient art, insisting on the Greek one.
Antiquarianism played a decisive role in the art of European Neoclassicism related to the visual- ization of ancient Greek themes and, more broadly, to the visual impression of the myth of Greece during modernization.14 Toward the end of the 18th century, travellers on Greek soil would also turn to modern Greek reality. Pierre-Augustin Guys, in his “Literary voyage to Greece”15 (cat. no I.1.1),
ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce, Paris, 1758),
10