John Flaxman is the missing link between superhero movies and Homer

As you enter the forecourt of the Royal Academy, you see them. A row of artistic titans, carved in stone, peer down from their alcoves in the higher half of the gallery’s façade. Thanks to the name plaques, they’re easily identified. You can see Pheidias, the genius of the Parthenon; Leonardo and Raphael; Sir Christopher Wren. And then there’s… John Flaxman.

Who? That’s a completely legitimate question. If these guys are, so to speak, the Avengers of art history, then Flaxman is the equivalent of Hawkeye. Hell, maybe he’s Agent Coulson. Even on his plinth, he has a mildly apologetic air. Under a bald pate, his hair hangs down in curly curtains. His hand, clutching a chisel, crosses his chest self-deprecatingly.

Yet there’s a case to be made that — while being a ‘very considerable figure as a sculptor’, as the art historian and Flaxman expert David Bindman assured me on the telephone — Flaxman has also had a huge influence as a draughtsman. Not least because he is the visual missing link between superhero movies and Homer.

You can see the evidence for this unlikely sounding claim in a small but excellent free exhibition currently showing at the RA. It’s devoted to drawings from the gallery’s vaults, which the English artist executed in Rome in the 1790s as part of a commission for engravings of scenes from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Published as books, they made Flaxman famous across Europe. Goethe declared him ‘the idol of all dilettante’. Schlegel was amazed that ‘so much soul can dwell in a few delicate lines’. For Romney, his elegant etchings looked ‘as if they had been made in the age when Homer wrote’.

Which begs the question: how would he know? Neoclassicism was a dubious 18th-century movement, based on a handful of misapprehensions about classical culture.