Edward Poynter’s Cave of the Storm Nymphs, his Israel in Egypt, and his Lesbia, along with the Roman paintings of his contemporaries John William Waterhouse and Edward John Poynter, belong to a specific Victorian sub-genre that might be called moral archaeology: the use of meticulously researched ancient settings to explore contemporary anxieties about gender, sexuality, empire, and the relationship between civilization and decadence. These paintings are not straightforwardly about Rome or Egypt or Greece. They are about Victorian England, using the distance of antiquity as a frame that permitted the examination of subjects that contemporaneity made difficult.

Frederic Leighton, Lord Leighton, President of the Royal Academy from 1878 until his death in 1896, was the dominant figure in British academic painting in the second half of the nineteenth century, and his engagement with classical antiquity — primarily Greek and Roman — was the defining subject of his career. Unlike Alma-Tadema, whose classical paintings were organized around the reconstruction of material culture, or Poynter, whose Romans served moral arguments, Leighton’s classicism was organized around a single overriding concern: beauty as an end in itself, the human figure in relation to drapery and landscape, the moment of formal perfection that painting could capture and sustain.

Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted marble better than anyone who has ever lived. The cool translucence of Pentelic and Carrara stone, the way light passes through alabaster, the specific warmth of Cipollino against the blue of the Mediterranean sky — these qualities are rendered in his canvases with a trompe l’oeil precision that makes the painted marble appear to be the thing itself. This is not a small achievement. It is also a precise description of what his paintings of ancient Rome accomplish and where their limitations lie: extraordinary on the surface, and the surface is the point.