The words “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” are now so familiar that, in the way of famous quotes, they’ve taken on an independent life. So it can come as a surprise to be reminded that they occur in Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. Greek vases are undeniably beautiful, but truth is not something one would normally ascribe to their rather stylised form of decoration, any more than to, say, the classic cartoons of Hergé. When Keats wrote the poem in 1819, however, he may have had other examples of Greek art at the back of his mind. Three years before, the Elgin Marbles had gone on show at the British Museum and their verisimilitude had astonished an English public accustomed only to Roman copies of Greek originals. The Greeks were known to have developed the concep