Search results for ""Author Caroline Vout""

The Greeks and Romans were not shy about sex. Drinking cups, oil-lamps and walls were decorated with scenes of seduction and sexual intercourse which make the modern viewer blush; models of penises were worn around the neck or hung from doorways. In classical Greece, statues of erect penises served as boundary-stones and signposts. In Rome, marble satyrs and nymphs grappled in gardens. How are we to make sense of this abundance of sexual imagery? Were these images seductive, shocking, humorous? Were they about sex or love? And what and how do we learn from them? Sex on Show answers these questions by embracing ancient attitudes to religion, politics, sex and gender to examine how the ancient saw themselves and their world. Covering the sixth century BC to the fourth century AD, as well as some Neoclassical art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Sex on Show uses detailed visual analysis to bring new insights to Greek and Roman culture and to the meaning of erotic imagery, past and present. This is not simply a book about sexual practice or social history. It is a visual history – about what it meant and still means to stare sex in the face.

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How did the statues of ancient Greece wind up dictating art history in the West? How did the material culture of the Greeks and Romans come to be seen as "classical" and as "art"? What does "classical art" mean across time and place? In this ambitious, richly illustrated book, art historian and classicist Caroline Vout provides an original history of how classical art has been continuously redefined over the millennia as it has found itself in new contexts and cultures. All of this raises the question of classical art's future.What we call classical art did not simply appear in ancient Rome, or in the Renaissance, or in the eighteenth-century Academy. Endlessly repackaged and revered or rebuked, Greek and Roman artifacts have gathered an amazing array of values, both positive and negative, in each new historical period, even as these objects themselves have reshaped their surroundings. Vout shows how this process began in antiquity, as Greeks of the Hellenistic period transformed the art of fifth-century Greece, and continued through the Roman empire, Constantinople, European court societies, the neoclassical English country house, and the nineteenth century, up to the modern museum.A unique exploration of how each period of Western culture has transformed Greek and Roman antiquities and in turn been transformed by them, this book revolutionizes our understanding of what classical art has meant and continues to mean.

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