The Gorham Stevens Plaster Model of the Athenian Acropolis

It’s a curious and intriguing thought that at the height of World War II, the architect Gorham P. Stevens, then in residence as acting director of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, busied himself with designing and making a plaster model of the Athenian Acropolis as it would have appeared in the first […]

Frederik Poulsen on English Aristocrats

Frederik Poulsen visited numerous English manor houses while working on his Greek and Roman Portraits in English Country Houses (1929) and scouting works to purchase for the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. He describes these visits in a more informal fashion in several of his works, including in a brief account entitled “Engelske Aristokrater” (English Aristocrats), published […]

Maussolleion Reconstructions: From Dinsmoor to Dali

I have been thinking a little about where Kühnel got his inspiration to use the “Maussolleion of Halikarnassos” as the model for his crematorium in Nordre Kirkegård. The American architect William B. Dinsmoor (1886-1973) published two papers on the Maussolleion in the 1908 volume of American Journal of Archaeology, from which the above reconstruction is […]

Open Access News: Ephesus and Millennium-Studien

The Forschungen in Ephesus volumes that publish the results of the ÖAI excavations at Ephesus are notoriously unwieldy but also uniquely valuable and important. For these reasons, it is excellent to see the news that ALL of them are now available online in open access. And unlike a lot of other e-books, they seem easy […]

Konstantinos Zachos on the Actium Victory Monument

Here’s an interesting online presentation by Konstantinos Zachos on the excavations of the Augustan victory monument at Nikopolis that revealed thousands of fragments of Pentelic marble sculpture (with some comments on deliberate destruction at around the 33-minute mark). Thanks to Carsten (Hjort Lange) for the tip.

Teaching Thursday: Contexts of Classical Sculpture

One of the fun things I’m doing this semester is teaching a new graduate seminar for our graduate students in classical archaeology on “Contexts of Classical Sculpture.” With them previously having been schooled in the basics of chronology and style, the seminar dives straight into current discussions about the meanings and uses of “context” in […]

Julius Lange at the British Museum in 1867

The art historian Julius Lange (1838-96) is likely to be among the first Danes to have seen the sculptures from the Mausoleum of Halikarnassos. The sculptures, most famously the two colossal portraits usually identified as Maussollos and Artemisia II, had been recovered by the British vice-consul Charles T. Newton in 1857 and then transported by […]

The One That Got Away: The Via Labicana Augustus

Frederik Poulsen wasn’t always successful in getting the pieces he wanted for the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. In the second volume of his memoirs, I det gæstfrie Europa (1947), he discusses some of his experiences working under the direction of Carl Jacobsen as well as his occasional failures in acquiring a number of different sculptures, including […]