In 1711, builders sinking the well for a new country house outside Naples struck something other than water—they found the ornate theater of the Roman city Herculaneum, buried in 79 AD by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius.
Serious excavations began at Herculaneum in 1738 and at nearby Pompeii in 1748, reigniting popular interest in the ancient past. Archeology was a new discipline at the time, and the finds were illustrated in books with lavish engravings. The first volume of The Antiquities of Herculaneum appeared in 1757, and artists across Europe immediately began lifting details from the ancient artifacts into their own paintings, furnishings, and architectural designs. In fact, German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann, known today as the “father of art history” asserted in 1755 that “There is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled … by imitating the ancients.” Countless artists followed his advice.
Imitation has been the sincerest form of flattery since ancient times, of course. Many classical Greek sculptures, like the Doryphoros (Spear-Bearer) of Polykleitos, are known only through the copies made by ancient Roman artists. Molds taken from Greek sculptures were shipped to workshops throughout the Roman Empire, where artists would reproduce them in marble or bronze to meet an enormous public demand. Multiple copies of the Doryphorous were excavated at Pompeii and Herculaneum. Mia’s copy was found in waters off the Italian coast.
Bertel Thorvaldsen’s Ganymede and the Eagle draws style and subject from the classical tradition, featuring prominent figures from ancient mythology. Ironically, white marble became associated with the world of classical art when in ancient times many of them were in fact painted. A vase depicted on an ancient Greek tombstone now in a museum collection in Germany is white marble today, but ultraviolet light reveals traces of the original paint. The center depiction illustrates how it would have looked in its day.
Sculptors and architects had it easy—plenty of classical relics and ruins existed as models. But the work of ancient painters was known mostly through the writings of philosophers. The French “painter-philosopher” Nicolas Poussin, who worked in Rome in the 1600s, reinterpreted the principles of the ancients—harmony, reason, and moral order—in visual form and served as a model for later generations of painters.
Neoclassicism had special significance in the young United States, born of revolutionary zeal for the ideals of Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism. American Neoclassical style was expressed in the appearance of buildings as well as the furniture inside them. Someone like William Howard, an ex-slave living on his former master’s Mississippi plantation in the 1870s, knew the style well from the plantation house and its furnishings, and included neoclassical elements in his writing desk made from recycled wooden boxes.
For American nation-builders, emulating the classical past was nothing short of a recipe for building a great civilization. The neoclassical style was the obvious choice when Minneapolis’ founding families sought to create a temple to the arts in 1915. The Minneapolis Institute of Art is the result.