Taste and the Antique offers a comprehensive and accessible overview of the reception and afterlife of the most famous ancient statues discovered in Rome and Italy from the Renaissance to the close of the nineteenth century. Before Leonardo's Mona Lisa, Botticelli's Birth of Venus or Van Gogh's Sunflowers, sculptures like the Laocoon, the Apollo Belvedere or the Medici Venus set the taste of artists, connoisseurs and the educated elites of the West for almost five centuries. Reproduced in every possible media for gardens and palaces throughout Europe, celebrated by poets and writers from...