RETVRN to What? Winckelmann, the Online Right, and Whiteness by Subtraction

Matilda Craven analyses how classical statuary has become a symbol of identity across far-right and “trad” corners of the internet. Tracing the genealogy of this idea through canonical texts like Johann Joachim Wincklemann’s History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), the work of photography’s earliest pioneers and contemporary white nationalist political campaigns, she discusses the politics of abstraction, pigment restoration analysis and reactionary masculinist discourse.