1. DRAWN FROM THE ANTIQUE:
ARTISTS AND THE CLASSICAL IDEAL
The Teylers Museum, Haarlem, 11 March – 31 May 2015
Sir John Soane’s Museum, London, 25 June – 26 September 2015
Featuring a selection of some thirty-five works - drawings, paintings and prints - from the Katrin Bellinger collection and selected loans from the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Kunsthaus, Zurich, the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Courtauld Gallery, this two-venue exhibition will explore the role of the Antique in artistic education and practice from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century.
The display will address two essential themes: one, the formal role of the Antique in the academic curriculum as the preferred learning tool to train young artists in the classical ideal. Together with the study of the live model and anatomy, the Antique played a seminal role in the formal education of the artist. Sculpture, especially the heroic nude of ancient Greece and Rome, served an essential function in inspiring artistic innovation from Renaissance workshops throughout the formalised academies of the seventeenth century and onwards. The second theme of the exhibition is the more intimate role played by the Antique in the representation of the artist, especially

2. in portraiture. This section will examine such topics as the changing status of the artist and the Antique as a tool for self-promotion.
The exhibition will include works from all periods and national schools in which artists’ workshops, academies and private study played equally important roles in the pursuit of the classical model. The display will feature celebrated images of the subject by Federico Zuccaro, Agostino Veneziano, Hendrik Goltzius, William Pether, Charles-Joseph Natoire, Henry Fuseli as well as rarely or never before exhibited works by Peter Paul Rubens, Michael Sweerts, Philippe Joseph Tassaert, Hubert Robert, William Chambers, J.M.W. Turner and William Daniels.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a substantial catalogue that will provide an overview of this multi-faceted subject and present new scholarship as well as never before seen images from works from a private collection. Included will be scholarly essays on such themes as the canonical ideal in Antiquity from Polykleitos to Vitruvius and beyond; the classical ideal in the Early Modern period from Alberti to Reynolds; and the artistic training across European academies through the centuries - from Baccio Bandinelli’s early academy to the Académie Royale in Paris and the Royal Academy in London. The importance of portraiture and self-portraiture and the role the antique played therein, will also be examined. Not since Ilaria Bignamini and Martin Postle’s The Artist's Model: Its Role in British Art from Lely to Etty (1991) or Martin Postle and William Vaughan’s The Artist and the Model: from Etty to Spencer (1999) has the general subject of formal artist education been addressed by an exhibition. This show and the accompanying catalogue will serve to complement those exhibitions while breaking new academic ground in the subject.
The exhibition will be co-curated by Adriano Aymonino and Anne Varick Lauder. Other contributors to the catalogue will include James Hall, Rachel Hapoienu, Ian Jenkins, Jerzy Kierkuć-Bieliński, Michiel Plomp and Jonathan Yarker.