130DIORAMASon classical art exclusively. It is therefore this contingency, among others,
that granted classical art a lease of extended supremacy in the sculptural
field of production of western Europe during the nineteenth century. Most
importantly, this commerce was largely substantiated by the demand of
academies, through which the classical standard was repeated, imbued
with neoclassical ideological values, and thereafter reproduced and
dispersed, enacting a cycle of self-perpetuation of the style in sculpture.
Classical art was considered by traditionalists as one of the last bastions
of “good taste”—that taste linked to antiquity through a dependence on the
study of the past. Meanwhile, the artistic discourses of the modern age were
fragmenting underneath the glossy surface of institutions. The idealized
marble figures of Canova that Browne so much admired had already been
challenged by the new romantic and the political mimesis of realist
aesthetic alternatives.^81 These cultural responses were the result of the
sociocultural turmoil that stirred the political events of the late eighteenth
century, culminating in the French Revolution and the destruction fostered
by the Napoleonic campaigns.^82 New cultural tendencies opposed the sys-
tematization of training in the academies of beaux arts. But at the same
time the emergence of the art dealer, a pivotal figure in the construction of
the modern artist, and an ever-expanding network of exhibiting spaces es-
tablished the supremacy of neoclassical art in the institutional commercial
field. As sculptural practices continued to stylistically fragment during the
latter part of the nineteenth century, throughout Europe three-dimensional
representation also began to emerge in the scientific discourse as a didactic
tool, especially for the representation of the imperialistic construction of
the other in the popular setting of the Great Exhibitions.^83
Themes of visuality and the inherent power/knowledge relations that
configured the visualities of subjugation typical of imperialism began to
surface more clearly in the spatializations outlined by the world exposi-
tions. The Crystal Palace erected in London’s Hyde Park for the Great
Exhibition of 1851 was a monument to consumption, a place that synthe-
sized and summarized new and old dynamics of consumerist and ideo-
logical politics.^84 Christopher Frost, one of the most prominent modern
historians of taxidermy, argued that the exhibition at Crystal Palace
“marked an era in English taxidermy.”^85 According to Pat Morris, the
pieces exhibited in 1851 were “much admired—a spectacularly dramatic
tableau of a red deer being brought down by hounds, especially captured