Abstract
Abstract Four sculptures (figures 82–5) now in the collections of the J. Paul Getty Museum and Villa at Malibu may be seen to embody the problematic inherent in the historiography of ancient marbles in Great Britain as codified in the later 19th century by the German Professor of Archaeology, Adolf Michaelis. Michaelis’ pioneering research—critiqued here in Chapter 1 for the first time—exposed over 2,000 individual ancient marble specimens in 66 private collections in Britain to the latest ‘scientific’ scrutiny. They were systematically studied, numbered, measured, deciphered, and classified in a corpus of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. Michaelis’ classic work, continued by his grateful successors, including A. H. Smith, Cornelius Vermeule, and Frederik Poulsen, put ancient marbles in Britain on the academic agenda, when they had hitherto been neglected in favour of the study of painting, in an estrangement of the sister arts that has still to be properly realigned.
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