Dr Adriano Aymonino shortlisted for Apollo Awards 2025
14 November 2025
We are delighted to share that Dr Adriano Aymonino, Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for the MA in the Art Market, Provenance and History of Collecting, has been shortlisted for the Apollo Magazine Awards 2025. Adriano has been shortlisted in the category ‘Book of the Year’ for his book, ‘Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture: 1500-1900’.
Apollo’s Book of the Year Award commend the best new publications of the past 12 months. Winners will be announced at a ceremony on 20 November and will be published online and in the December issue of Apollo Magazine.
Taste and the Antique was first published in 1981 by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, offering a landmark study of ninety-five ancient sculptures that shaped European artistic taste, collecting, and pedagogy from 1500 to 1900. As one of the most influential texts in the history of art history, Taste and the Antique has profoundly shaped scholarship and curatorial practice.
The new three-volume edition, edited by Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero (Chief Curator, Capitoline Museums, Rome) and published in December 2024, updates the original with recent research. It expands on the reception of the classical canon, integrates decades of scholarship, and connects ancient sculpture’s legacy to contemporary art.
Adriano’s most recent book, Enlightened Eclecticism (Yale University Press, 2021), was the winner of another very prestigious award, the 2022 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History.
Speaking of the achievement, Adriano stated:
“It is a great honour to be shortlisted for the Apollo Book of the Year, especially as the timing ties in with the three-day international conference on the subject, ‘The Future of the Antique’, that The University of Buckingham is organising in December!”
International conference
A major international conference is being organised to celebrate the publication of the new, expanded edition of Taste and the Antique by Adriano and Eloisa. The conference will be delivered in partnership with the Census of Antique Works of Art and Architecture known in the Renaissance (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin), The Warburg Institute (University of London), and the Institute of Classical Studies (University of London).