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 […]

Odin and Pallas Athene in Copenhagen

The highly influential architect Martin Nyrop (1849-1921) completed a renovation project of Copenhagen’s “Stormbroen” in 1918. However, already sixteen years later he had come up with a new design for the bridge that was “prototyped” but never finished. This design included two relief sculptures, one depicting the Norse god Odin, the other Pallas Athena, juxtaposing […]

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 […]

The Ephesian Artemis in early 19th-c. Denmark

I previously noted the tomb of P.C. Abildgaard that was erected in 1801 in Copenhagen’s Assistens Kirkegård. A prominent relief on this tomb depicts the Ephesian Artemis, looking somewhat out of place in a Danish cemetery. Yet the motif was certainly chosen for this context because of the powerful meaning it had acquired since the […]

The Classical Imagination of a Small Town: Aarhus 1909

I have been working on the geographies of classicism – especially the receptions of classical heritage in the context of Aarhus, a provincial, small Danish town that saw its fortune grow considerably from the late 19th century onwards. Around the turn of the century, the city’s architects occasionally (and sometimes quite fleetingly) looked back to […]

“The gate which Iskander built will be torn open”: Classical Antiquity and Heavy Metal

The other course I’m (co-)teaching this semester is very loosely based on our Classical Heritage and European Identities volume and aims to put a critical, contemporary perspective on the uses of classical heritage and to place them within the wider “democratic turn” in reception studies. Yesterday we had some fun in the (virtual) classroom with […]

More Maussollomania

I’m still digging through the layers of different Maussolleion reconstructions. Christopher Wren’s original designs for St Paul’s Cathedral (planned from 1668 onwards but not finished until 1710) included a Maussolleion-inspired lantern that is of great importance in this context. Although never realised, the designs are recorded on both paper (above) and in 3D in the […]

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 […]