Antique - Oxford Definition

The physical remains of the Greek and Roman world, especially sculpture. The antique proved an inspiration for artists through the ages and, for many, a canon of perfection. Although traces of the antique are found throughout medieval art, it was in the early Renaissance of the 15th century that there was a strong revival of interest, with artists such as the sculptors Ghiberti and Donatello attesting to their admiration of antique statuary. Famous collections of antique art were formed, such as that of Lorenzo de' Medici in the gardens of San Marco, Florence, where the young Michelangelo first encountered the antique in any quantity. Vasari claimed that the perfection achieved by Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael was due in large measure to their study of the classical statues in the Vatican collection, especially the Apollo Belvedere and the Laocoon. By the mid-16th century the study of the antique was firmly established in the curriculum of many artists. In the following century it was famously defended by G. P. Bellori, collector, theorist, and friend of Poussin, in his essay Idea in which he claimed for classical statuary the embodiment of an absolute beauty. Further statues joined the academic canon such as the Farnese Hercules and the Medici Venus. After the perceived frivolities of the Rococo in the first half of the 18th century, the antique was seen as a necessary corrective, extolled in the writings of Winckelmann and manifested in Neoclassical art. The perception of classical art was radically altered in the late 18th century by the discoveries of travellers to Greece and the growing realization that many Roman works of art were actually copies of Greek originals. By extension, ‘antique’ can generally be used to refer to anything that is vaguely old. Thus an ‘antiques shop’ can sell a whole variety of fine and decorative art that ranges in ‘antiquity’ from a few decades to (much more rarely) thousands of years.