The making and marketing of the Georgian apotheosis: Carter, Strange, Rebecca, Tresham, and de Loutherbourg

In the flowering of the apotheosis as an artistic genre in Georgian England, all images had a number of characteristics in common: they show the subject being lifted up to heaven by a cast of supporters, with a skyline below that encapsulates the subject's context. As an idea it seems straightforward, even if the product can appear cloying and over-imbued with allegorical references. Samuel Johnson, in defining it as 'the rite of adding any one to the number of gods', cites Garth's translation of 'The Deification of Aeneas' from Book XIV of Ovid's Metamorphoses, a passage in which Jove 'allots the prince of his celestial line, An apotheosis, and rites divine' at the end of a conclave of the Gods. In Ovid, it is the decision of the conclave of the gods, whether or not the subject is worthy of an apotheosis. And worthiness is key: Johnson's second citation, this one from the 17th-century divine Robert South, comes from a passage on idolatry. Goodness did not spring fully formed 'as if it could be graved and painted omnipotent, or the nails and the hammer could give it an apotheosis'.