Collecting Greece in the 19th Century: text, image, object, knowledge

Description

Free online registration via the link on the right hand side of the page.

Convenor

Dr Theodor Dunkelgrün

Summary

The explosion of the study of classical and biblical antiquity in the nineteenth century was not the work of armchair scholars alone. From Athos to Alexandria, from Sicily to Sinai, the 19th-century Mediterranean and Levant teemed with scholars and lay adventurers, archeologists and manuscript-hunters, painters and poets, robbers and forgers, missionaries, pilgrims, and spies.

The Greek language and the civilizations that spoke it provided many with a prism through which to understand numerous different layers of the pre-historical, classical and biblical past. Europeans set out on their explorations with different ideas of Greece, in the service of different empires, institutions or Churches, but the collections of books and works of art with which they returned and the libraries and museums they filled challenged established traditions of early modern philology and biblical studies, transformed the scholarly understanding of the histories of the ancient world, the past and present of Christianity and Judaism, and profoundly inspired the visual arts.

This one-day interdisciplinary conference will bring together classicists and historians of art, of scholarship and of religion, to explore the collection of textual, visual and material forms of knowledge about different layers of Greek civilization: Homeric, Attic, Hellenistic, Byzantine; pagan, Jewish, Christian.

Poster image: Corporal J. McCartney, Raising the colossal lion at Cnidus, June 1858, Salted paper print – Copyright © The British Library Board

 

This event is supported by funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ ERC grant agreement no 295463.