This series seeks to broaden the scholarly community's understanding of the reception of classical antiquity in the visual and performing arts. A particular focus will be drawn on the 20th and 21st centuries and on media that have been traditionally neglected because considered "commercial" and/or "popular", such as comics, advertising, digital media, design, fashion, and theme parks. It challenges traditional, and still very widespread, assumptions that distinguish "high" from "popular" culture, but also demonstrates the indisputable importance that classical antiquity enjoys in the modern and postmodern world, and all across the planet, carefully looking at forms of Classical Receptions outside the "traditional" regions object of such studies. Through a consistent shift from the traditional, academic approach, the series is the product of a continuous dialogue between scholars on the one side, and "producers" of classical reception - painters, sculptors, photographs, architects, designers, etc. -on the other, who write about their mechanisms of appropriation of the Ancient world . Each book highlights the popularity of antiquity today and reveals the forms and mechanisms of its reception. The series thus explains the choice of subjects and motives, the elaboration and re-mediatization processes taking place in the creative act, as well as the complexity of the "reception chains", which make it today impossible, for instance, to visualize the ancient world without the filter of historical movies.
Art Nouveau and the Classical Tradition