Research Catalog

Title

Frederic Leighton: death, mortality, resurrection / Keren Rosa Hammerschlag.

Author

Hammerschlag, Keren Rosa

Publication

Farnham, Surrey, England : Ashgate Publishing Limited, [2015]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Holdings

Details

Description

xvi, 230 pages, 12 numbered pages of plates ; illustrations (black and white, and color); 25 cm.

Summary

"Frederic Leighton: Death, Mortality, Resurrection offers a timely reexamination of the art of the late Victorian period's most institutionally powerful artist, Frederic Lord Leighton (1830-1896). As President of the Royal Academy from 1878 to 1896, Leighton was committed to the pursuit of beauty in art through the depiction of classical subjects, executed according to an academic working-method. But as this book reveals, Leighton's art and discourse were beset by the realisation that academic art would likely die with him. Rather than achieving classical perfection, Hammerschlag argues, Leighton's figures hover in transitional states between realism and idealism, flesh and marble, life and death, as gothic distortions of the classical ideal. The author undertakes close readings of key paintings, sculptures, frescos and drawings in Leighton's oeuvre, and situates them in the context of contemporaneous debates about death and resurrection in theology, archaeology and medicine. The outcome is a pleasurably macabre counter-biography that reconfigures what it meant to be not just a late-Victorian neoclassicist and royal academician, but President of the Victorian Royal Academy."--Publisher description.

Series Statement

British art : histories and interpretations since 1700

Uniform Title

British art. Histories and interpretations since 1700.

Subject

• Leighton of Stretton, Frederic Leighton, 1830-1896;, Baron)
• Leighton of Stretton, Frederic Leighton, Baron, 1830-1896 > Criticism and interpretation
• Leighton of Stretton, Frederic Leighton, Baron, 1830-1896
• Death in art
• Mortality in art
• Resurrection in art
• Death in art

Genre/Form

Criticism, interpretation, etc.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

Contents

Dead march: procession paintings -- Deathbeds and graveyards: history painting -- Beautiful death: aestheticism -- The body in pieces: the female nude -- Morbid anatomy: the male nude -- Resurrecting classicism.

ISBN

• 9781472414359
• 1472414357

LCCN

^^2015014011

OCLC

• 907061024
• SCSB-9881744

Owning Institutions

Harvard Library