Race and Classical Art History

The systematic study of ancient material remains is often argued to have played a key role in the emergence of the modern (18th -19th century) disciplinary formation of classics as the comprehensive study of the ancient world from earlier humanist paradigms focused primarily on explicating and imitating classical literature or deriving ethical instruction from history (see e.g. Schnapp 1993; Harloe 2013).

This paper will build on analyses of eighteenth-century classical scholarship in the context of other historical and cultural sciences (Carhart 2007, Legaspi 2010), and of the development of racial thought in the eighteenth century in the spheres of aesthetics, ethnography and historical anthropology (Bindman 2002, Buck-Morss 2009, Painter 2010) to discuss how, in studying Greek and Roman monuments under the sign of "art", eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century classical scholarship attended to material antiquity in a manner that was both formed by and formative of constructions of race emerging between the "Age of Discovery" and the European "Enlightenment".

It will explore the relation of classical art history to other racialized discourses of cultural difference along three key axes:

1. "Art" as envisaged by scholars such as C.G. Heyne, J.J. Winckelmann, and G.W.F. Hegel, was a normative concept, indicating a level of intellectual and moral production that had been achieved only by certain peoples in history, superlatively the Greeks;

2. In treating "art" as metonym for "culture" and plotting its history as a development/decline narrative (adapted from canonical authors such as Pliny and Vasari and reinforced by their study of ancient and early modern ethnographic literature), writers on Greek and Roman art created schemata of historical development that characterised some peoples and cultures as "savage", others as "civilized";

3. When comparing the art of different societies and seeking to account for its variation, these authors appealed to theories of environmental determination (again, with roots in ancient sources; see Kennedy and Jones-Lewis 2015), projecting cultural difference into geographic zones and ultimately into human bodies.

It will conclude with an examination of how the case of classical art history can contribute to recent scholarship that is seeking to reconfigure understandings of how 18^th-century racial discourses relate to later "scientific" racism (Oehler-Klein 2015; Reimann 2017).