Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Acropolis now

The sculptor never made it to Athens but that didn’t stop him obsessing over the art of ancient Greece, as a dazzling new British Museum show demonstrates

issue 28 April 2018

‘My Acropolis,’ Auguste Rodin called his house at Meudon. Here, the sculptor made a Parthenon above Paris. Surrounded by statues of ‘mutilated gods’, he cast himself as the Phidias of the age. His collection was part cabinet of curiosities, part charnel house. He bought Nile crocodiles and Peking ginger jars, painted sarcophagi and chipped red-figure vases.

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