Chapter 6 - Ravaged Brides

Summary

Chapter 6 builds on the tension between antiquarian aesthetics and artists’ practice by reading “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in the context of Thomas Kirk’s visual anthology of vase pictures, arguing that Keats describes an encounter with the urn as an alternative to antiquarian books that represented ancient vases. Keats, the history painter Haydon, and Landseer all had a stake in the 1816 debate between antiquarians and artists over the acquisition of the Parthenon marbles. I show how this victory for artists was overdetermined by a series of events that involved not only artists’ separation from connoisseurs but also from the literary tradition that once had served as an important source of cultural credibility.