Listen free for 30 days

Listen with offer

Preview

£0.00 for first 30 days

Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Cultivating the Body

By: Edward Lucie-Smith
Narrated by: Stephen Floyd
Try for £0.00

£7.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £2.99

Buy Now for £2.99

Pay using card ending in
By completing your purchase, you agree to Audible's Conditions of Use and authorise Audible to charge your designated card or any other card on file. Please see our Privacy Notice, Cookies Notice and Interest-based Ads Notice.

Summary

The first thing to be said about the new exhibition at the British Museum, Defining Beauty: The Body in Ancient Greek Art, is that it is genuinely spectacular and deserves the hosannas it has already been greeted with in the press. The second thing is that it is highly political.

It is political in all sorts of ways. The most obvious of these can be found in the fact that it plucks a number of the so-called "Elgin marbles", which once formed part of the decoration of the Parthenon, from their usual setting in another part of the museum, and presents them as part of a new and sometimes fairly subversive narrative about the relationship of ancient Greek culture to the representation of the human body - nude bodies in particular. This offers a statement about the importance of Greek art, and indeed other aspects of Greek culture, to Western European culture viewed as a whole, and a more specific statement about the two-stage return to ideas and values initiated by the ancient Greeks, first during the Renaissance and, second, even more strongly, in response to the European Enlightenment.

©2014, 2017 Cv Publications (P)2018 Cv Publications
activate_Holiday_promo_in_buybox_DT_T2

Listeners also enjoyed...

Body Art and Abjection cover art
The Feud that Sparked the Renaissance cover art
World-Building from the Inside Out cover art
Out of Italy cover art
History cover art
Olmecs cover art
The Phaistos Disc and Antikythera Mechanism cover art
The Devil in the Gallery cover art
Antiques Roadshow cover art
The Key to the Da Vinci Code cover art
Polymath, Volume 1 cover art
Why We Love Middle-earth cover art
On the Map cover art
Worlds of Arthur cover art
History of Japan cover art
Aesthetics cover art

What listeners say about Cultivating the Body

Average customer ratings

Reviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.