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Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical Body as National Symbol in Nineteenth-- Century England and France, by Athena S. Leoussi; pp. xxiii + 260. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998, $65.00.
Athena S. Leoussi's Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical Body as National Symbol in Nineteenth-Century England and France joins an impressive, growing list of books addressing classical culture as mediated through late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European intellectual life. Hers is one of few among such works that is self-consciously comparative, and her ambitions in this regard are to be heartily applauded.
There is no point in criticizing the title of this book since one never knows whether a title originates with the author or the publisher. Suffice it to say that Leoussi's subject is not really nationalism in any significant way but rather the portrayal of themes from ancient history and myth in nineteenth-century French and English painting and sculpture. She carefully traces the aesthetic transition from a portrayal of the Greeks based on eighteen th-century idealism that owed much to Winckelmann to a portrayal of anatomical precision owing much to positivism. Quietly eschewing the temptation to make a post-- modern examination of the body, the author carries the reader through an extensive survey of manuals relating to painting and sculpture which she then carefully relates to the contemporary literature of physical anthropology. What she has to say about anthropology itself is not particularly new, but the direct cultural relationship she establishes with artistic precept and practice is...