Classical New York ― Discovering Greece and Rome in Gotham

During the rise of New York from the capital of an upstart nation to world-class metropolis, the visual language of classical antiquity played a formative role in the city’s art and architecture. Classical New York: Greece and Rome in New York City’s Art & Architecture, 1830–1940 examines the reception and redeployment of classical forms in the art, architecture, civic spaces, and public monuments of New York from the height of the Greek revival in the 1830s through the Gilded Age’s artistic and architectural triumphs of the early twentieth century.

Scholars from a range of disciplines—Classics, Art History,Architectural History, History, and Archaeology—focus on select examples that demonstrate how Classical art, architecture, and myth are repurposed to help shape many of New York City's most iconic buildings and works of art from this period. Pennsylvania Station derived its form from the Baths of Caracalla; Federal Hall evoked the Parthenon as an architectural and democratic model; Atlas and Prometheus of Rockefeller Center recast ancient myths in a new light during the Great Depression. The Pantheon served as a model for the creation of Libraries at New York University and Columbia University.

Classical Antiquity also influenced the construction of public space and the establishment of New York’s Museums. The new civic center planned at Foley Square was modelled after ancient civic spaces, while the newly formed collection of Classical Art at Metropolitan Museum of Art reflects the tastes of New York’s elite and how the city saw itself as a cultural mecca.

Matthew McGowan (Edited By)
Matthew McGowan is Associate Professor and Chair of Classics at Fordham University. His research focuses mainly on Roman poetry, ancient scholarship, and classical reception, in particular Neo-Latin. He has published broadly on a variety of Greek and Latin topics and is the author of?Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto?(Brill 2009). He was President of the New York Classical Club (2009–15) andis now Vice-President for Communications and Outreach for the Society for Classical Studies.

Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis (Edited By)
Elizabeth Macaulay-Lewis is Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies and the Acting Executive Officer of the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She is interested in the gardens and architecture of the Middle East and North Africa in the Classical and Islamic periods, as well as in their reception. Her books include Housing the New Romans: Architectural Reception and Classical Style in the Modern World (Oxford 2017) and Bayt Farhi and the Sephardic Palaces of Ottoman Damascus in the Late 18th and 19th Centuries (Manar al-Athar/American Schools of OrientalResearch 2017).