Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture: 1500-1900: An Art History Classic Forty Years On by Dr Adriano Aymonino

Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture: 1500-1900, published by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny in 1981, has become an art history classic, used by students, scholars, dealers, collectors, and anyone interested in the impact of ancient statuary on European art and culture in the early modern era. Over the years, the tradition of study inaugurated by Taste and the Antique has expanded considerably, becoming one of the most fertile research topics in Western art history. The first part of the lecture will illustrate the crucial role the book has played over the last forty years, both in terms of academic research and in the field of curatorial practices. The second part of the lecture will focus on a new, expanded and revised edition of Taste and the Antique, published in three volumes in December 2024. The new features compared to the first edition, the expansion of the topics of study, and future research perspectives will be discussed.

Dr Adriano Aymonino is Director of the MA Art Market, Provenance and the History of Collecting, University of Buckingham. His publications include Drawn from the Antique (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2015); Enlightened Eclecticism (Yale University Press, 2021 – winner of the 2022 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History) and a revised and updated edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique (Brepols, 3 vols, 2024, with Eloisa Dodero). He is currently working on a critical edition of Robert and James Adam’s Grand Tour correspondence (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2025), and on a new book, Paper Marbles: Pier Leone Ghezzi’s ‘Studio di Molte Pietre’, 1726 (MIT Press 2026). He is a member of the advisory councils of the Museo del Bargello in Florence, and of the Attingham Trust.

RECORDING: Dr Adriano Aymonino, Taste and the Antique: An Art History Classic Forty Years On