Artists and the Classical Ideal: from Workshop to Academy

This symposium, organised in connection with the exhibition Drawn from the Antique at Sir John Soane’s Museum, will focus on the central role played by the Antique in artistic education during the Early Modern period. From the Renaissance to the 19^th century, classical statues offered young artists idealised models from which they could learn to represent the volumes, poses and expressions of the human figure and which, simultaneously, provided perfected examples of anatomy and proportion that they could apply in their own creations. The papers will address themes such as the theoretical background to the didactic use of the Antique, the presence of plaster casts in Renaissance workshops, the use of specific Antique and Renaissance sculptural models in workshops and academies, and the blending of the study of anatomy and the Antique in the curriculum of the 18^th– and 19^th-century academies. The symposium will be followed by a private view of selected drawings from the Courtauld collection and a tour of the exhibition at the Soane.