Vase-mania

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss eighteenth-century ‘vase-mania’. In the second half of the century, inspired by archaeological discoveries, the Grand Tour and the founding of the British Museum, parts of the British public developed a huge enthusiasm for vases modelled on the ancient versions recently dug up in Greece. This enthusiasm amounted to a kind of ‘vase-mania’. Initially acquired by the aristocracy, Josiah Wedgwood made these vases commercially available to an emerging aspiring middle class eager to display a piece of the Classical past in their drawing rooms. In the midst of a rapidly changing Britain, these vases came to symbolise the birth of European Civilisation, the epitome of good taste and the timelessness that would later be celebrated by Jonathan Keats in his Ode on a Grecian Urn.

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Guests

• Jenny Uglow 4 episodes
  
• Professor Rosemary Sweet 4 episodes
  Professor of urban history at the University of Leicester
• Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth No other episodes
  Lecturer in the history of art at the University of Edinburgh

Reading list

• Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain 1760-1800
  Viccy Coltman (University of Chicago Press, 2006) Google Books →
• Fields of Fire: A Life of Sir William Hamilton
  David Constantine (Phoenix, 2002)
• The Radical Potter: Josiah Wedgwood and the Transformation of Britain
  Tristram Hunt (Allen Lane, 2021) Google Books →
• Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection
  Ian Jenkins and Kim Sloan (eds) (British Museum Press, 1996) Google Books →
• Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain
  Berg Maxine (Oxford University Press, 2005)
• Melancholy Wedgwood
  Iris Moon (MIT Press, 2024) Google Books →
• Grand Tour: The British in Italy, c.1690-1820
  Rosemary Sweet (Cambridge University Press, 2012) Google Books →
• The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future
  Jenny Uglow (Faber and Faber, 2003) Google Books →

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  27 Apr, 2006 940 History of Europe
• Bohemianism
  
  9 Oct, 2003 700 Arts
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• The Decadent Movement
  
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• Modern Culture
  
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• William Morris
  
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• The Romantics
  
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Programme ID: m00268hz

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00268hz

Auto-category: 940.2 (Modern history of Europe)