Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Nichols, Kate, author.

Title Greece and Rome at the Crystal Palace : classical sculpture and modern Britain, 1854-1936 / Kate Nichols
Edition First edition
Published Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2015

Copies

Description 1 online resource (xiii, 305 pages) : illustrations (black and white)
Series Classical presences
Classical presences.
Contents Leisure and learning. A new audience for Greece and Rome ; Showing off archaeological knowledge ; Reproducing Greece and Rome -- Sculpture and the benefits of good taste. Greek sculpture and nineteenth-century commerce ; Greek sculpture, beauty, and morality -- An unattainable model? Greece, Rome, and the modern British nation
Summary This book examines the debates that arose around the presentation of classical plaster casts to a mass audience at the Sydenham Crystal Palace, in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain. It uncovers the social, political, and aesthetic role of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture in Victorian and Edwardian culture, assessing how classical art and architecture figured in debates over design reform, taste, beauty and morality, race and imperialism. A study in classical reception, it draws on diaries, autobiographies, scrapbooks, and pamphlets to analyse audience responses to classical sculpture, and to suggest how these responses figured in contemporary popular and scholarly understandings of the Greek and Roman past. It demonstrates the vital life of classical sculpture for audiences beyond the Royal Academy, high art criticism, the Country House, and the University, and suggests that other less 'academic' locations ought to be taken seriously as chapters in the history of archaeology. Focusing on the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, it provides the first in-depth analysis of this popular entertainment venue in South London. This ephemeral, now vanished edifice offers an alternative history of museums to the received vision of order, chronology, and permanence typified by the British Museum. Foregrounding the close connection between entertainment and education at the Palace demonstrates a much longer history of the commercial 'heritage industry' usually associated with the 1980s
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from home page (viewed on March 12, 2015)
Subject Crystal Palace (Sydenham, London, England) -- History
SUBJECT Crystal Palace (Sydenham, London, England) fast
Subject Sculpture, Classical -- Collectors and collecting -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
Sculpture, Classical -- Appreciation -- Great Britain -- History -- 19th century
ART -- Sculpture & Installation.
Sculpture, Classical -- Appreciation
Sculpture, Classical -- Collectors and collecting
Visual Arts.
Art, Architecture & Applied Arts.
Sculpture.
Great Britain
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
LC no. 2014946891
ISBN 9780191795770
0191795771
0199596468
9780199596461
9780191016912
0191016918
9780199578122
0199578125
9780199578
9789780199579
Other Titles Classical sculpture and modern Britain, 1854-1936