Hellenomania, the second volume in the MANIA series, presents a wide-ranging, multi-disciplinary exploration of the modern reception of ancient Greek material culture in cultural practices ranging from literature to architecture, stage and costume design, painting, sculpture, cinema, and the performing arts. It examines both canonical and less familiar responses to both real and imagined Greek antiquities from the seventeenth century to the present, across various national contexts. Encompassing examples from Inigo Jones to the contemporary art exhibition documenta 14, and from Thessaloniki and Delphi to Nashville, the contributions examine attempted reconstructions of an ‘authentic’ ancient Greece alongside imaginative and utopian efforts to revive the Greek spirit using modern technologies, new media, and experimental practices of the body. Also explored are the political resonances of Hellenomaniac fascinations, and tensions within them between the ideal and the real, the past, present, and future.
Part I examines the sources and derivations of Hellenomania from the Baroque and pre-Romantic periods to the early twentieth century. While covering more canonical material than the following sections, it also casts spotlights on less familiar figures and sets the scene for the illustrations of successive waves of Hellenomania explored in subsequent chapters. Part II focuses on responses, uses, and appropriations of ancient Greek material culture in the built environment—mostly architecture—but also extends to painting and even gymnastics; it examines in particular how a certain idealisation of ancient Greek architecture affected its modern applications. Part III explores challenges to the idealisation of ancient Greece, through the transformative power of colour, movement, and of reliving the past in the present human body, especially female. Part IV looks at how the fascination with the material culture of ancient Greece can move beyond the obsession with Greece and Greekness.
Introduction. Hellenomania: ancient and modern obsessions with the Greek past, Katherine Harloe and Nicoletta Momigliano Part 1: Hellenomanias from early modern to modernism 1. Modern Stage Design and Greek Antiquity: Inigo Jones and his Greek Models, Fiona Macintosh 2. Winckelmania: Hellenomania between ideal and experience, Katherine Harloe 3. The British Literary Reception of Greek visual culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Richard Jenkyns Part 2: Ideal and real structures of Hellenomania 4. The Ideal and the Real in British Hellenomania, 1751-1851, Frank Salmon 5. Making everyone Greek: citizens, athletes, and ideals of nationhood in nineteenth-century Britain, France, and Germany, Athena Leoussi 6. The Parthenon from the Greek Revival to Modern Architecture, Lena Lambrinou 7. The Greek spirit: current architecture and sculpture in England, David Watkin Part 3: Hellenomania comes to life - Colour, Movement, and the Body 8. From Galatea to Tanagra: Victorian translations of the controversial colours of Greek sculpture, Charlotte Ribeyrol 9. 'Grecian dances' and the transformations of corporeality in the age of moving images, Pantelis Michelakis 10. Fashioning a Modern Self in Greek Dress: the case of Eva Palmer Sikelianos, Artemis Leontis 11. From Delphi, 1927, Eleni Sikelianos 12. Aphroditê kinêmatographikê: Venus’ Varieties and Vicissitudes, Martin M. Winkler Part 4: Beyond Hellenomania? 13. Las Incantadas of Salonica: searching for 'enchantment' in a city's exiled heritage, Esther Solomon and Styliana Galiniki 13. Afterword: Hellenomanias past, present, and future, Eleana Yalouri
Katherine Harloe is Associate Professor of Classics and Intellectual History at the University of Reading. Her research specialisms are the history of classical scholarship and the reception of Greek and Roman antiquity in European (especially German) culture from the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries. In addition to numerous articles, she is author of Winckelmann and the Invention of Antiquity: history and aesthetics in the age of Altertumswissenschaft (2013) and co-editor of Thucydides and the Modern World: reception, reinterpretation and influence from the Renaissance to today (2012). Nicoletta Momigliano is Professor of Aegean Studies at the University of Bristol, specialising in Minoan archaeology and its reception. She has directed and co-directed several archaeological projects in Crete and Turkey, and has published many articles and book on Aegean subjects, including Cretomania: Modern Desires for the Minoan Past (2017, co-edited with Alexandre Farnoux) and Archaeology and European Modernity: Producing and Consuming the Minoans (2006, co-edited with Yannis Hamilakis). Alexandre Farnoux is Professor of Archaeology and History of Art at the University of Paris IV (Sorbonne) and, since 2011, has been Director of the French School in Athens. He is an expert on the archaeology of Delos and especially of Crete, where he has directed excavations at Malia and Dreros. He has published many works on Greek and Aegean topics, including Cnossos, l'archéologie d'un rêve (1993) and Homère, le prince des poètes (2010).
