Figures & Statues

Antique Prints of Classical Figures, Sculptures and Antiquities

This category brings together original antique prints depicting the sculptural and figurative art of the ancient world, produced by European engravers and publishers from the 16th through the 19th century. These works document the classical tradition — the statues, reliefs, friezes, sarcophagi and decorative arts of ancient Greece and Rome — through the lens of the print-making traditions that made antique sculpture accessible to artists, scholars and collectors who could not travel to Rome or Athens to see the originals.

The engraved record of classical sculpture has its origins in the 16th century, when the increasing availability of ancient statues through excavation and collection generated demand for printed documentation of the most celebrated works. The Apollo Belvedere, the Laocoon, the Farnese Hercules and the other great pieces of the papal and princely collections were engraved and re-engraved by successive generations of printmakers, creating a corpus of images that formed the visual education of every European artist trained in the classical tradition.

The 18th century saw the engraved documentation of antiquity reach its fullest development, driven by the intellectual priorities of the Enlightenment and the archaeological discoveries that brought new material to light at Herculaneum, Pompeii and across the Mediterranean world. Publications by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Piranesi, the Society of Dilettanti and their contemporaries produced engraved records of classical sculpture, decorative arts and architectural ornament that combined scholarly documentation with high standards of graphic production.

Decorative antiquity — the ornamental friezes, vase paintings, gem impressions, coin types and architectural details of the ancient world — generated its own tradition of engraved documentation, used by architects, designers and craftsmen as a source of motifs and ornamental precedent. These prints of classical ornament circulated widely through the 18th and 19th centuries, shaping the neoclassical movement in European art and design and remaining as evidence of the centrality of antiquity to European visual culture across the period.

Antique prints of classical figures and statues are collected for their connection to the history of classical scholarship, their documentary importance as records of objects that have since been dispersed or damaged, and their quality as works of graphic art produced at the intersection of archaeology and artistic tradition.