When Artists Saw Antiquity Firsthand

Antiquity has long been a source of inspiration for artists, past and present. The century in which an artist worked shaped how distant classical art, architecture, and design felt to them, yet what remained constant was the profound impact antiquity has had on creative minds.

For some, the influence was explicit – Nicolas Poussin and Giovanni Battista Piranesi drew directly from classical forms – while for others it manifested more abstractly, as in the work of Cy Twombly. Henri Matisse, the leading figure of Fauvism, also turned to antiquity in his early years, and Thomas Struth used classical objects embedded in public spaces as anchors for his celebrated photographic series.

How, then, were these artists, spanning creative output from the 17th to the 21st century, shaped by antiquity? Where did they encounter classical objects, if they encountered them at all? Join us on a time‑traveling journey through Europe to discover how some of the world’s most influential artists wove antiquity into their work.

How Artists Accessed Antiquity Across the Centuries

Artists were long compelled by antiquity. From the Renaissance onward, they looked back to the classical world, convinced that the arts had declined during the Middle Ages and could be restored only by studying and advancing the classical tradition.

Rome quickly became the center of artistic training, offering direct contact with the physical remains of antiquity. By engaging with these surviving works, artists hoped to revive the achievements of the ancient world.

The Grand Tour, which emerged in the 16th century, offered one route into classical antiquity. Artists and upper‑class European men traveled through France or Germany before reaching Italy, where Rome was the highlight. Guided visits to ancient sites and encounters with classical sculpture deepened their education, while the tradition also fueled illustrated guidebooks and portable souvenirs — often prints or engravings — taken home as reminders of the journey.

By the 20th century, travel had become far easier, allowing modern artists to visit the centers of antiquity with unprecedented freedom. A growing abundance of printed material meant that knowledge of the classical world circulated widely, inspiring even the most abstract practitioners.

For some, however, a brief visit was never enough. To truly immerse themselves in the classical past, they felt compelled to relocate, leading generations of artists to make Italy their home.

Case Studies

Nicolas Poussin

Born at the end of the 16th century in France, Nicolas Poussin is regarded as one of the greatest artists of his age. Guided by reason and intellect rather than emotion, his paintings distill classical antiquity into serene, tightly composed scenes where idealized figures, moral narratives, and architectural order create a world governed by clarity, balance, and timeless restraint.

In 1624, he moved to Rome, where he fully developed his mature style, shaped by his deep admiration for the ancient world. He absorbed antiquity through multiple channels: reading classical texts, sketching ancient sculptures in museums and private collections, visiting ruins, and even reconstructing classical poses in miniature to master the visual language of antiquity.

“The Triumph of Pan” (1639) clearly demonstrates Poussin’s fascination with the classical past. The muscular bodies echo ancient sculpture, while the Bacchanalian subject matter celebrates Roman pagan tradition. His biblical scene “The Adoration of the Golden Calf” (1633–34) similarly reveals how antiquity informed his visual vocabulary – refined bodies, flowing drapery, and choreographed groups of dancers all speak to his classical interest.

Giovanni Battista Piranesi

An architect, etcher, stage designer, and archaeologist, Giovanni Battista Piranesi produced an extraordinary body of prints depicting the ancient ruins of Rome, many of which became prized souvenirs for Grand Tourists. Born in Venice in 1720, he drew on his early architectural training to inform his etched views of the city. His series “Views of Rome” was published from 1745 until his death in 1778.

Piranesi encountered antiquity through an intense combination of firsthand exploration, documentation of ancient structures, study of classical texts, participation in excavations, and a vivid imaginative reconstruction of Rome’s past, resulting in dramatic prints that blur the line between archaeology and fantasy.

As an archaeologically minded draftsman, Piranesi studied ancient monuments with great care, yet he was also a master of manipulated perspective. His Rome is deliberately overwhelming: vast, towering, more monumental than reality. In “The Colosseum” (1756), for instance, he narrows the vanishing point to exaggerate its scale. For many travelers, including the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Piranesi’s larger‑than‑life representations were their first encounter with Rome – so much so that Goethe reportedly found the real city surprisingly modest by comparison.

Henri Matisse

Fast forward to the late 19th century: in 1891, a trained lawyer named Henri Matisse began his artistic career. By 1895, he was studying at the École des Beaux‑Arts, and during his early academic training, he spent long hours in the Louvre (often visiting daily) copying Old Masters such as Chardin, Poussin, and Raphael.

This rigorous foundation in classical art, and in how earlier artists engaged with antiquity shaped his visual thinking long before he embraced the bold color and expressive freedom of Fauvism. “Nymph and Satyr” (1908) and “Dance” (1909–10) are striking examples of how Matisse later channeled this influence, recalling ancient friezes, bacchantes, and classical myth.

His admiration extended beyond painting. Matisse also studied ancient sculpture – works such as the “Venus de Milo” and the “Winged Victory of Samothrace” – sketching them repeatedly to deepen his understanding of form, contour, and the human body.

In the later decades of his career, his studio became a curated world of objects that reappeared across his work. While antiquities were not the primary focus of this collection, it did include, for instance, a Roman torso, one of many props that continued to shape his artistic imagination.

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly is one of the most significant artists of the second half of the 20th century. Though American, his work is steeped in the influence of antiquity, drawing on classical themes. His art is not traditional in appearance; instead, it is charged with intense color, expressive brushwork, and graffiti‑like marks that give his work a distinctly modern presence.

As a young man, Twombly visited the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston countless times, a space rich in classical antiquities. He was an avid reader of ancient texts and a lifelong student of mythology, poetry, and philosophy, seeking out both the literary and physical remnants of the ancient world. A frequent traveler and eventual expatriate (he moved to Italy in 1957), Twombly immersed himself in centuries‑old sites, monuments, and artifacts.

From the 1960s onward, Twombly began incorporating the names and verses of ancient poets such as Sappho and Catullus into his work, as seen in “Untitled (to Sappho)” from 1976. In “Apollo” (1975), he engaged directly with the Roman and Greek god of music, healing, and the sun, translating myth into a contemporary visual language.

Twombly was also an enthusiastic collector of ancient objects, among them Roman and Greek sculptures, pottery, and fragments of marble torsos. These pieces surrounded him in his studio, shaping his understanding of materiality and meaning, and often echoing through his paintings and drawings. His series “The Four Seasons” (1993–95) carries a deeply allegorical meditation on the stages of life, a theme with clear roots in classical thought.

Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth is a German photographer whose works stage quiet encounters between people and spaces, revealing how viewers, objects, and history shape one another in the act of looking. His practice spans city streets, family interiors, industrial sites, scientific laboratories, and sacred or historic places. It is the latter, particularly museums, that matters most in relation to antiquity.

Initiated in 1989, the acclaimed “Museum Photographs” series is where antiquity becomes most visible within Struth’s oeuvre. Unlike artists inspired by the materiality of classical sculpture or the allegories of ancient painting, Struth was drawn to the architectural grandeur of these objects and, crucially, to how they are displayed and encountered within museum settings. His focus is not the classical artifact itself, but the choreography of looking: ordinary visitors – often tourists – absorbed in acts of attention, distraction, or contemplation.

The first series of “Museum Photographs” was created in five carefully selected institutions in Europe and the United States. He returned to the series in the early 2000s.

“Pantheon, Rome” (1990), one of Struth’s most iconic images of an ancient site functioning as a museum‑like space, sold for $1,049,000 at Christie’s in 2007, evidence of the growing interest in photography that navigates the layered perceptions of antiquity, modernity, and the contemporary gaze.

From French Classicism through Fauvism and Modernism, and onward to Abstract Expressionism and contemporary photography, artists across Europe have for centuries found enduring inspiration in antiquity. Whether by engaging directly with architectural ruins, studying museum collections, assembling their own selection of ancient objects, or observing how tourists encounter the classical past, each artist distinctly reinterpreted antiquity.

The connection is not always apparent, but once discovered, a deeper meaning and symbolism in their work emerges, bridging the gap between you, the observer, and the artists, the creative mind.