Category archives: Classical Reception

The “Mausoleum” of Nordre Kirkegård, III: The End

To conclude this little series on the “Mausolleion” of Nordre Kirkegård, here are some images taken in July 1946 during the demolition of the crematorium (part one, part two). The first image shows demolition in progress – with two workers on top of the pyramid – and gives some more detail of the relief decoration […]

The “Mausoleum” of Nordre Kirkegård, II: Drawings

Following up on yesterday’s post, here are Kühnel’s beautiful 1918 drawings of the crematorium that he designed for Nordre Kirkegård in Aarhus and that stood for little more than 20 years. The drawings are easily available from the municipality’s “Min Ejendom” archive (in the entry for Kirkegårdsvej 26). The image of Kühnel below is from […]

The “Mausoleum” of Nordre Kirkegård, Aarhus

The Maussolleion of Halikanassos – and especially its stepped, pyramidal roof – has inspired all sorts of public architecture in the modern world. Buildings from London to Los Angeles and Melbourne have thus been part of a global discourse of classicism rooted in this (lost) wonder of the ancient world. A well-known Danish example is […]

Cambridge and British-American Concordia

I’m writing this from the Classics Faculty Library at Cambridge, where I’ve taken up residency for the next six months, thanks to the generous support of EliteForsk. My reason to write, however, was a recent piece in The Independent that revealed the design of Tony Blair’s congressional medal, awarded in 2003 but still not presented […]

Roman Sculpture as “Hunting Trophy”

Sometimes you come across interesting things while doing research on an entirely different subject (as also recently noted by Mary Beard). For example, I quite like this rather odd case of Classical reception that I came across the other day. The small image to the right shows a Roman portrait head of a woman, datable […]

Augustus Redux in Stockholm

An excellent new book (with an accompanying exhibition) on the use of Classical architecture and motifs in my hometown Aarhus has just been published (Nørskov 2008, in Danish). Having recently read this, I was very attuned to similar examples of Classical reception on a brief trip to Stockholm (and the very hospitable Department of Archaeology […]

Classics and Civic Identity at the Old Poznan City Hall

The reception of Classical antiquity has become quite a hot topic in recent years. It helps that there are lots of examples of the use and appropriation of Classical themes and motifs in modern art and architecture that can be studied through this approach. The field of reception studies has also increasingly been accepted as […]