Empires of the Imagination: Politics, War and the Arts in the British World - 0 views
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Rede Histórica - on 30 Jan 10"On the ground floor of the British Museum is one of the most important artefacts in archaeological history, the Rosetta Stone. Effectively a tax decree dating from the reign of Ptolemy V in the second century BC, it enabled scholars to crack the code of Egyptian hieroglyphics. Without it the entire field of Egyptology would be very different. But along its left-hand edge runs a painted inscription, still visible today, that testifies to a different historical agenda. "Captured in Egypt," it reads, "by the British Army 1801." And, as the historian Holger Hoock points out in this learned, engrossing book, the famous stone is just one example of the extraordinary connections between art, war, archaeology and empire in the age of Nelson and Wellington. As the colour plates in Hoock's book make clear, the arts during the reigns of George III and George IV were saturated in the rhetoric of military glory and masculine prowess. Although Napoleon quipped that Britain was a nation of shopkeepers, he would have been more accurate to call it a nation of warriors. The period opened with Britain about to fight and win the Seven Years' War, arguably the first global conflict; it ended with Britain as the world's undoubted superpower, "unsurpassed in global reach and power". And to those who built and maintained the largest empire in history, art mattered - not merely for its own sake or as an expression of civilisation, but as a way of projecting power and affirming national identity. Painters produced huge canvases celebrating great victories, sculptors chiselled poignant memorials mourning the fallen, archaeologists ransacked the deserts of the Middle East for classical antiquities, all of them contributing to a vast project to celebrate Britain's new-found glory. "
