‘Truth and Beauty’: one-day conference in honour of Nigel Spivey
Thursday 4th June 2026
Room G21, Faculty of Classics, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DA
The Faculty of Classics at Cambridge is hosting a one-day workshop on Thursday 4th June 2026 to mark the retirement of Nigel Spivey, after more than three decades of teaching at Cambridge.
The topic of ‘truth and beauty’ in Greek art takes its cue from the closing verses of Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’. But it also captures Nigel Spivey’s abiding commitment to questions of aesthetics. The title anchors the workshop in the history of Romanticism and its critical aftermath. At the same time, it taps into research rethinking the anthropology of Greek art in relation to the subjective imagination and the history of both philosophy and theology. It is no coincidence that such revisionism comes at a time when grand Enlightenment ideas, themselves classically anchored, are being radically rethought – at a moment that has been deemed a revisionary, ‘Dark Enlightenment’: on the one hand, in the face of the disinformation wars of an emerging ‘post-truth’ society; on the other, in the wake of AI and new ‘multimodal’ foundation models of deep learning (across not just textual datasets, but also imagery and audio, with their inherent challenges to ideas about the discerning aesthetic subject…).
Coffee from 10:15am
10:45am: Adriano Aymonino (Buckingham), ‘The Compass and the Flesh: Sculptural Canons and the Early Modern Body, c.1640–1834’
11:50am: Hugo Shakeshaft (CASVA, Washington DC), ‘The Beautiful and the Bad in Archaic and Classical Greece’
[Catered lunch]
2:10pm: Jaś Elsner (Oxford/Chicago) and Michael Squire (Cambridge), ‘The truth in painting: Framing the Proem of the Elder Philostratus’ “Imagines”’
[Afternoon tea]
3:45pm: Emily Clifford (Warwick), ‘Cold Pastoral! The Poetics of Classical Art, Posthumanist Perspectives’
4:45pm: Response from Nigel Spivey
5pm: Reception in the Museum of Classical Archaeology
Attendance is free and all are warmly welcome: places are limited and pre-registration is requested for catering purposes (mjs73@cam.ac.uk).
Note: this is not a Classical Association event – please contact the organisers directly with any enquiries.