The Living Death of Antiquity examines the idealization of an antiquity that exhibits, in the words of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, 'a noble simplicity and quiet grandeur'. Fitzgerald discusses the aesthetics of this strain of neoclassicism as manifested in a range of work in different mediaand periods, focusing on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In the aftermath of Winckelmann's writing, John Flaxman's engraved scenes from the Iliad and the sculptors Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen reinterpreted ancient prototypes or invented new ones. Looking with asympathetic eye on the original aspirations of the neoclassical aesthetic and its forward-looking potential, Fitzgerald describes how it can tip over into the vacancy or kitsch through which a 'remaindered' antiquity lingers in our minds and environments. This book asks how the neoclassical value ofsimplicity serves to conjure up an epiphanic antiquity, and how whiteness, in both its literal and metaphorical forms, acts as the 'logo' of neoclassical antiquity, and functions aesthetically in a variety of media. In the context of the waning of a neoclassically idealised antiquity, Fitzgeralddescribes the new contents produced by its asymptotic approach to meaninglessness, and how the antiquity that it imagined both is and isn't with us. | The Living Death Of Antiquity by William Fitzgerald, Hardcover | Indigo Chapters