antique, the

antique, the. The physical remains of the Greek and Roman world, or more particularly the remains of antique sculpture, which have been for later artists an inspiration, a challenge, and a canon of perfection. Such remains have never been totally forgotten or disregarded. Stone from ruined Roman buildings was often reused, and memories of classical ornament or drapery forms recur throughout the Middle Ages; occasionally a true classical dignity was attained, as in the Visitation group (c.1250) on the central portal of the west façade at Reims Cathedral. However, it was not until the Italian Renaissance that the recovery and revival of the classical past became a deliberate ideal. Ghiberti's writings, for example, testify to his admiration for antique statues and cameos, and much of Donatello's sculpture would be unthinkable without a close study of the antique (most obviously, the Marcus Aurelius is the work against which he measured himself in his Gattamelata). Lorenzo de' Medici and Pope Julius II ( Giuliano della Rovere) were among the pioneer collectors of ancient art, and Vasari attributed the attainment of perfection by the generation of Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael in no small measure to the discovery of such famous marbles as the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoön, although it was mainly the next generation, particularly visitors from northern Europe (Heemskerck for example), who systematically drew after the antique. Towards the middle of the 16th century the role of the antique in the curriculum of artists became firmly established. In De' veri precetti della pittura (1587), the painter and writer Giovanni Battista Armenini (c.1525–1609) already gives a list of ‘canonic’ antiques, including the famous Belvedere Torso, and such works were carried by means of engravings, casts, and copies into every artist's studio.

The philosophical justification for this dependence on antique models was given in Bellori's famous oration, Idea (1664), where he claimed that ancient statuary embodied a revelation of an absolute beauty that had been discovered once and for all (see ideal). To the followers of the academic doctrine, each of the great antiques, to which now were added the Farnese Hercules, the Borghese Warrior, the Medici Venus, and the Barberini Faun, represented a type of physique that could serve as a permanent standard for the artist. Nor was antique influence confined to those artists whose work was most obviously classical (such as Poussin). Bernini, for example, when he addressed the Academy in Paris in 1666, said: ‘In my early youth I drew a great deal from classical figures, and when I was in difficulties with my first statue I turned to the Antinous as to the oracle.’ Reverence for the antique was given a new lease of life when the Neoclassical movement reacted against the frivolities of the Rococo style. In opposition to earlier ideas, Winckelmann preached the belief that classical artists had deliberately avoided representing extreme passions, and he regarded the antique less as a source of expressive formulas than as a model of noble restraint. The authority of the antique declined with the onset of Romanticism, with its stress on self-expression, but its influence has still continued. Making drawings from casts of antique sculpture remained a part of most official art training into the 20th century, and Picasso, for example, often used classical art as a source of inspiration; in particular, his ‘Neoclassical’ paintings of the 1920s owed much to visits to the Archaeological Museum in Naples.