Dr Stephen Bending, Department of English, University of Southampton.

This strand will consider the significance of the print and its role in the dissemination of aesthetic ideas in the eighteenth century. Attention will be directed to new and innovative forms of visual representation and the relationship to the ever refining set of cultural values applied to and associated with antiquity. This new visual language made three-dimensional objects widely available in a readable and coherent two-dimensional formula between 1700 and c1840. It equipped polite society with the critical faculties necessary to determine the associative values of modern and antique architecture and design. The importance of this and the changing relationship between text and image will also be considered, with the aim of raising questions about the relationship between the mass produced image and the original, and the implications for the aura and status of the original object in an era before Benjamin's 'age of mechanical reproduction'.

• Stephen Bending (University of Southampton) Every Man is Naturally an Antiquarian: Francis Grose and Polite Antiquities
• Maria Grazia Lolla (Independent scholar, New York) 'Monuments' and 'Texts': Antiquarianism and the Beauty of Antiquity
• Lucy Watkins (University of Leeds) Vitruvius Britannicus and Architectural Discourse 1715-1725
• Andrew Ballantyne (University of Bath) Specimens of Ancient Sculpture
• Dana Arnold (University of Leeds) The Engravings of the Temples at Paestum and the Development of Architectural Debate in Britain 1750-1800
• Frank Salmon (University of Manchester) Envisioning Antiquity Anew: British Architects' Representations of Rome and Pompeii after l815
• Abigail Moore (University of Leeds) 'Voyages': The Transference of Images of the Empire Style in Interior Design to Regency England.