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This thesis examines the roles of Queen Victoria’s children as collectors, makers and patrons of sculpture from around 1860 to 1900. To date, the royal children’s engagement with sculpture has received hardly any scholarly attention. The conventional narrative is that after Prince Albert’s death in 1861 royal patronage stagnated and lost its previous significance in the art world. However, based on major archival research and object-focused analysis, this thesis demonstrates that the royal children represented a new and distinct group of royal patrons whose artistic engagement was at the heart of Victorian sculpture. By focusing on the careers of three of Victoria and Albert’s nine children as case studies, it becomes clear that royal patronage of sculpture was highly diverse and complex. The first chapter assesses the role of Bertie, the Prince of Wales, as a collector of sculpture and highlights the ambiguousness of his encounters with the medium. The prince was a well-informed and zealous collector of sculpture; but he considered the medium to be principally for decorative purposes and personal enjoyment. The second chapter looks at Princess Louise as a maker of sculpture who had to negotiate her status as a princess and female amateur with her ambition to work like a professional sculptor in the public sphere. The third chapter focuses on Vicky, the Princess Royal and later German Empress, as a patron of sculpture in an Anglo-German context. As eldest and favourite daughter of Prince Albert, Vicky tried to continue her father’s artistic legacy by engaging with sculpture in multifarious ways and realising his vision of an exemplary patron. Yet, her fraught political position as a British liberal at the imperial court in Germany complicated her efficacy in the sphere of contemporary sculpture and resulted in her focus on the Renaissance. This thesis contributes to a revaluation of royal patronage in Victorian sculpture studies and also indicates the relevance of Queen Victoria’s children to scholarly discourses including Aestheticism, female sculptors and Anglo-German artistic relations.

This thesis explores the meanings of those Roman sarcophagi which show the Indian triumph of Dionysus. This group, found from approximately the early Antonine to just after the Severan period, shows the same mythological characters in similar positions and surroundings. They --- together with other groups --- tend to be approached from a methodology which either explicitly anticipates homogeneity of meaning or tacitly implies it through the transferral of interpretations from one piece to another. This study attempts to reconsider such actions by exposing the different effects that individual sarcophagi draw. As a group, these sarcophagi cover a period of significant change in the funerary realm. Since the group straddles important divisions between public imagery and private expression, we can more readily anticipate the latter through knowledge of the former. While studies of the triumph as ritual have begun to recognise it as a rite in flux, to be understood in its various instantiations rather than as a trans-historical event, such an analytical shift has not been applied to sarcophagi. In explicitly moving away from the assumption that we can assert genre-level meanings, this thesis undertakes an assessment sensitised to the possibility of case-by-case variation in meaning. This approach is also recommended by the intensely personal nature of the function of the sarcophagi: as the final resting places of lost loved-ones. First, a survey of prior approaches is made. Next, the group is rigorously defined with a methodology designed not with an intent to imply ancient applicability, but rather to be explicit about the generation of a working set. Subsequently, the sarcophagi are decomposed into their constituent elements and analysed, before in the next chapter being reconstituted and their effect in collusion analysed. Finally, the group is studied as a whole and the reasons behind its development, modifications and decline explored.

This thesis includes a monograph, The Sculpture of Charles Wheeler (London: Lund Humphries in association with the Henry Moore Foundation, 2012), and a catalogue essay ‘Let There Be History: Epstein’s BMA House Sculptures’, in Modern British Sculpture, ed.by Penelope Curtis and Keith Wilson (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2011). The book is the first study of Wheeler, an important but neglected sculptor who was President of the Royal Academy from 1956-66; the Epstein essay looks anew at a notorious episode in the career of one of modernism’s canonical practitioners, coming to radically different conclusions to the accepted narrative. The accompanying analytical commentary reflects on the complex research journey towards understanding and articulating hidden histories of modern British sculpture. Deploying traditional methodologies of archive exploration and making connections between divergent critical and artistic groupings has enabled the construction of new histories. Disrupting the appropriation and elision of ‘modern’ with ‘modernist’ and ‘avant-garde’ restores the work of non-canonical practitioners to the historical moment of the first half of the 20th Century, while historical analysis draws mythologised artists into the contingencies of the real world. These publications offer original insights and their impact is becoming evident in the fields of British sculptural and architectural history. Beginning in the recent past as I prepared to write this thesis, the commentary moves into the deeper history of the research journey, considering my theoretical approaches, the initial difficulties of writing against the prevailing academic fashion, the serendipities of a supportive scholarly milieu and the details of making Wheeler’s history. The value of the monograph itself is discussed. Reviewing Epstein’s modernist cause célèbre proved the transferable value of dispassionate archival research. The commentary finally comes full circle, concluding in October 2014 when I found myself, unexpectedly, implicated in the very history to which I have contributed.

The concerns of this thesis are aligned with approaches to the historical study of sexuality, gender and identity in art, society and culture which are increasingly articulate and questioning at present. However, it is distinct from these recent studies because it redirects attention toward a stimulating encounter with the past through new theoretical proposals and interpretive perspectives on the manner in which mythology asserts itself as the vehicle for expressing male same-sex erotic behaviour, gender performance and masculine identity in the visual culture of the Italian Renaissance. By following a methodological, historiographical and interdisciplinary mode of enquiry, this thesis formulates and expresses new perspectives which engage with the representation of masculine concerns relating to these historically specific matters in the visual domain of the period. Conventional historical definitions of traditional art historical models of masculinity are also called into question through reassessment of how the function of the ideal male nude body in Renaissance art was shaped by particular social and historical contexts in different regions of Italy during the sixteenth century. These interrelated themes are approached in three stages. Firstly, there is interpretation of the complex and convoluted meanings within the narrative of the mythic sources, as well as decoding and contextualising of the symbolic messages of the images in question. Secondly, I assemble and examine the textual evidence that exists about erotic and social relationships between males in the Renaissance so that their historical significance can be tracked and placed in the context of the tension which existed between Renaissance Italian judicial and religious proscription and commonplace behaviour. And thirdly, I offer comprehensive analyses and interpretive frameworks which are informed by and based upon a wide range of written as well as visual sources together with evaluation of competing theoretical perceptions. The main arguments are presented in three chapters: The central theme of Chapter One is gender performance with specific focus upon the integral and didactic role of pederasty in visual representations of myths which conflate erotic desire between males and philosophical allegory. The historical phenomenon of pederastic relationships between males is addressed through interrogation of the pictorial vocabulary of Benvenuto Cellini’s marble Apollo and Hyacinth (1545), and Giulio Romano’s drawing of Apollo and Cyparissus (1524).The arguments and theories discussed and analysed in Chapter Two deal with Michelangelo’s depiction of Ovidian mythic narratives. Here, close attention is paid to the intricate nuances and sophisticated iconography used by Michelangelo for three highly finished presentation drawings - The Rape of Ganymede (1532), The Punishment of Tityus (1532) and The Fall of Phaeton (1533) - which Michelangelo presented to Tommaso De’ Cavalieri. The chapter aims to encourage a re-evaluation of these three drawings as a meaningful and connected narrative endowed with significant cultural and personal significance relating to their creator’s anguish about physical desire and its relationship to what modernity terms as ‘sexuality’. In Chapter Three, I consider how several works featuring the theme of Apollo flaying Marsyas can be read as articulations of the imaginative and ideological structures of the formation and preservation of masculine identities. The chapter addresses the iconographic visibility of the theme of flaying and explores the philosophical and literary metaphoric significance of this myth. Primacy is given to destabilising dominant conceptualizations of the heroic male nude as a subject in art throughout all these selected case studies. Centred as they are on sexual attraction or destruction rather than idealisation of the male figure, these chapters offer a revaluation of ways of seeing the archetypal heroic nude in a myriad of ways.

This thesis examines the exhibitions of Greek architectural sculpture in ten European collections. The exhibitions used as case studies display both original sculptures and plaster copies. These displays can be found in the Acropolis Museum, Athens; the British Museum, London; the Musée du Louvre, Paris; the Archaeological Museum of Olympia, Olympia; Delphi Archaeological Museum, Delphi; the Museum of Classical Archaeology, Cambridge; the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, Oxford; the Kongelige Afstøbningssamling, Copenhagen; and the Skulpturhalle, Basel. These exhibitions are assessed using the heritagescape methodology, considering the boundaries, visibility and cohesion within the displays. This assessment is then compared with the results of a survey of visitors to the same exhibitions, asking for their responses to interpretive material within the exhibitions, specifically, tours, models, pictures, information labels and videos. It argues that while all archaeological or history museums are places of the past, the degree to which each creates a sense of the past for its visitors, rather than relying on the inherent sense of the past present in the artefacts displayed or supplied by visitors themselves, will vary according to a number of factors, including the target audience and the aims and objectives of the different institutions.

This thesis explores both the conceptual register and tropic play of sculpture as a fine art in some of the key writings of Plato, Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. It serves to show how sculpture is both shaped by and reshapes in turn philosophy's explicit register of sculpture as an art form. The central argument within this thesis is that sculpture turns its back on philosophy as soon as philosophy casts sculpture out of its mould. Registering sculpture as a fine art within philosophy reveals that whilst specific examples of sculpture may appear to confirm the conceptual meanings ascribed to it by the philosophers Kant, Herder and Hegel, can equally show its unreliability and inconsistency as an art form. The title of this thesis The Philosophy of Sculpture: The Sculpture of Philosophy serves as a heading for an engagement with an explicit reading of sculpture as a fine ati and the sculptural as a trope. Therefore, the sculpture of philosophy is read as a heading for the presentation of sculpture as an object or art form in the writings of Kant, Herder and Hegel. The philosophy of sculpture appeals to an engagement with the use of the sculptural through the tropes of casting, moulding, sculpting, carving, modelling, shaping and forming in the writing of philosophy. This will show that there is something specifically philosophical about sculpture as a practice. Furthermore, the crossovers between these two approaches highlight the effects they give place to, particularly in the context of reading sculpture through a case study. Therefore, the latter half of this thesis engages with the ways in which the sculptural appears within architectural formations and explores an alternative reading of sculpture in relation to some of the themes generated out of a collaborative project between the philosopher Jacques Derrida and the architect Peter Eisenman.

Queen Victoria (1819-1901) and Prince Albert (1819-1861) have long loomed large in Victorian sculpture studies. Numerous scholars have examined the public statues of Victoria and Albert that were erected throughout the United Kingdom and across the British Empire between the 1840s and the 1920s. Yet, to date, the couple’s own patronage of sculpture has been largely overlooked. In light of this lacuna in the scholarship, this thesis examines the formation, display and dissemination of Victoria’s and Albert’s sculpture collection; explores the public sculpture projects with which they were involved; and analyses contemporary responses to their patronage. In so doing, it reveals what sculpture meant to Victoria and Albert personally; what their patronage meant to the contemporary sculpture profession; and what impact they had on the wider history and historiography of Victorian sculpture. The thesis is organised chronologically and broadly divided into three periods, representing three distinct but interrelated trends in the formation, arrangement, dissemination and reception of Victoria’s and Albert’s collection and the changing status of royal patronage. The first is the period between Victoria’s and Albert’s marriage in 1840 and Albert’s death in 1861. In this period, the couple’s patronage was prolific, varied and widely disseminated. They commissioned and acquired an extensive amount of sculpture for the royal residences and closely involved themselves with numerous public sculpture projects such as the sculpture programme in the New Houses of Parliament. This thesis demonstrates the complex imbrication of the couple’s public and private patronage of sculpture by revealing the extent to which their involvement with public projects informed their private patronage and the degree to which this fed into their public image as patrons. The second part looks at the decade after Albert’s death, a period in which Victoria concentrated her patronage almost exclusively on memorial busts and statues of him. Her various memorial commissions have often been treated interchangeably as simple indexes of her legendary grief. This thesis restores specificity to this body of memorial sculpture and uncovers the extent and sophistication of Victoria’s patronage in this period. However, it also shows the damage done to her reputation as a patron through her seemingly relentless desire to commission posthumous portraits of Albert. The third part concentrates on the last three decades of Victoria’s life. It reveals the extent to which she remained active as a patron and the degree to which her taste for sculpture evolved in the 1880s and 1890s. Yet, Victoria’s patronage was indelibly associated with mid-century sculptors whom Edmund Gosse, chief evangelist of ‘The New Sculpture’ dismissed as representative of ‘the dark age’ in the history of British sculpture. At a time when public statues of Victoria by some of the leading sculptors of the age were being erected across the globe, her position as a leading patron of contemporary sculpture was steadily undermined by the perception that she was stuck in the past.

This thesis examines the ways in which the unique creativity brought to late Victorian applied art by the Della Robbia Pottery was a consequence of Harold Rathbone’s extended engagement with quattrocento ceramics. This was not only with the sculpture collections in the South Kensington Museum but through his experiences as he travelled in Italy. In the first sustained examination of the development of the Della Robbia Pottery within the wider histories of the Arts and Crafts Movement, the thesis makes an original contribution in three ways. Using new sources of primary documentation, I discuss the artistic response to Italianate style by Rathbone and his mentors Ford Madox Brown and William Holman Hunt, and consider how this influenced the development of the Pottery. Rathbone’s own engagement with Italy not only led to his response to the work of the quattrocento sculptor Luca della Robbia but also to the archaic sgraffito styles of Lombardia in Northern Italy. Thirdly, the thesis identifies how the Della Robbia Pottery established a commercial presence in Regent Street and beyond, demonstrating how it became, for a short time, an outstanding expression of Italianate style within the British Arts and Crafts Movement.

For many years, meanings and interpretations of artefacts that are taken to represent African culture including the Ife bronzes have been predominantly produced and fixed by a team of western curatorial experts (Ciolfi, 2012). Such museum practices have prevented visitors and the people being represented by the artefact from participating in the process of interpretation and meaning-making. In the particular case of the ‘Ife bronzes’, the previous meaning and implications of the Ife ‘bronzes’ as part of ‘the cradle of the world’, according to Yoruba oral traditions, are yet to be given the amount of attention they deserve. For a long time the interpretations and meanings produced by curators were drawn from the writings and accounts of earlier western travellers, explorers and colonial officials whose culture affected how the Ife bronzes have been perceived and interpreted (Coombes, 1997: Vogel, 1999). Today despite the impact of ‘the new museology’, strong traces of such biased interpretations and meanings are still evident in the framing of the Ife bronze head, exhibited at the British Museum Sainsbury African gallery as a ‘funerary object’ in postcolonial times. Such narratives highlight ‘relations of power and not relations of meanings’ (Foucault, 1980:114). These contemporary exhibitionary frames highlight the need for interpretations and meanings that will consider how changing roles, ownership, usage, political situations and geographical location have affected and will affect the Ife bronzes. In this thesis I carry out this work, documenting the social life of the Ife bronzes from pre-colonial Ife to postcolonial digital British Museum. I argue that there is a need for a new space that will encourage rewriting, revising and representing the Ife bronzes in a more capacious way to depict their changing meaning as they journeyed through time. This theory is in line with Hall (1997) and Foucault’s (1980) theories that meanings and interpretations are not static but are affected by time and changing context. The thesis therefore explores the multifaceted political, economical and sociocultural implications of the Ife bronzes. Despite these wider implications of Ife bronzes, they are still only too often shrouded in narratives that tend to validate the supremacy, civilisation and intellectual ‘supremacy’ of the West instead of substantiating the ingenuity, civilisation and intellectual capabilities of Africa. Digitisation is critically considered as offering a potential new space for representing Ife bronzes in a new light that might allow meanings with postcolonial ideology to emerge. Focusing on different periods involving the Ife bronzes (the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial) the thesis explores the potentials of digital representation. The thesis concludes that digital representation but only combined with a critical contextual approach, have the potentials of initiating a more thorough decolonisation of the Ife bronzes through an inclusive participatory culture.