Height: 13.600 cm (including handles)
Width: 21.800 cm (including handles)

M&ME 1909.12-1.119

Enlightenment: Art

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Enlightenment: Art and Civilization

Classical revivals

By the mid-eighteenth century, connoisseurs and collectors throughout Europe considered the art of ancient Greece as one of the highest human achievements. From the second half of the century this thinking inspired a revival of classical forms and motifs in architecture and the decorative arts. In Britain the main promoters of this neo-classical style included the architect Robert Adam (1728-92) and the pottery manufacturer Josiah Wedgwood (1730-95).

But this was not the first time that European artists had sought inspiration from ancient Greece. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, artists in Italy and elsewhere had drawn extensively and imaginatively from the arts of Greece and Rome. Enlightenment collectors and connoisseurs also valued this earlier revival of classical style. Indeed, some objects by Italian Renaissance artists were admired and collected in the eighteenth century on the mistaken assumption that they had been made in ancient Greece.

Illustration: a pair of Greek revival vases by Wedgwood