Description:
Explores tensions in aesthetics and art theory between antique figural sculpture experienced in the round and its translation into two-dimensional representations. Examines the work and thought of Goethe, Winckelmann, Hegel, Walter Pater, Vernon Lee, and others.
Brief description: Sarah Betzer is Professor of Art History at the University of Virginia and the author of Ingres and the Studio: Women, Painting, History, also published by Penn State University Press.
Review Quotes:
"Like the author's previous pathbreaking and widely admired book on the relation between portrait painting in the studio of Ingres and the broader problematics of painting 'history, ' Animating the Antique is painstaking, original, and uncompromising. Weaving art history with aesthetics, the history of archaeology and of collections, and other topics, Betzer's study of the figuration of sculpture in two-dimensional representations sets a unique insight into a multifaceted framework."
--Whitney Davis, author of Replications: Archaeology, Art History, Psychoanalysis