Conference: Artists & the Classical Ideal

Dr Adriano Aymonino was co-organiser of a conference at the Courtauld Institute of Art on 14 September 2015: Artists & the Classical Ideal: from Workshop to Humanity.  The conference was organised in connection with the exhibition Drawn from the Antique at Sir John Soane’s Museum, and included a tour of the exhibition.

Dr Aymonino gave a paper at the conference on “The Antique and the Teaching of Art from the Workshop to the Academy”.  Here is the abstract:

Although classical statues were extensively used as teaching tools and sources of inspiration in the practice of early Renaissance workshops, it was only in the sixteenth century that their didactic role was given a theoretical importance in the art literature of the period. This paper will analyse the reasons behind this process of theorisation of the Antique and its increasing centrality in the curricula of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century academies.