This two-venue exhibition (Teylers Museum, Haarlem, 11 March – 31 May 2015; Sir John Soane’s Museum, 25 June – 26 September 2015) explored the role of antique sculpture in artistic education and practice from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. It featured thirty-four drawings, paintings and prints from all periods and many national schools, selected from sources that included the Katrin Bellinger Collection, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Rijksmuseum, the Teylers Museum, the Kunsthaus, Zurich, the Kunstbibliothek, Berlin, the British Museum, the Royal Academy of Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Courtauld Gallery. Among the themes addressed by the exhibition were the formal role of the Antique in the academic curriculum, the importance of the study of antique sculpture in educating young artists with the classical ideal, and the more intimate incorporation of antique sculpture within portraiture and artists’ self-portraiture.

The exhibition included many celebrated images by Federico Zuccaro, Hendrick Goltzius, Michael Sweerts, Charles-Joseph Natoire and Henry Fuseli, as well as lesser-known and in some cases unpublished works by Peter Paul Rubens, Philippe Joseph Tassaert, Hubert Robert, William Chambers, Joseph Mallord William Turner and William Daniels.

The exhibition was accompanied by a substantial catalogue which provides an overview of this multifaceted subject in a series of synoptic essays, and which also presents new scholarship about many of the works on display. The exhibition and publication were co-curated and edited by Dr. Adriano Aymonino and Dr. Anne Varick Lauder.