I’ve had great fun going through the Royal Academy’s Collection and picking out things with a Classical theme. It really makes a difference to see how the painters and the sculptors were talking to the ancient world, so I’m trying to make that conversation a bit more audible.

This drawing really sums up for me just how difficult it is to make any image of ‘Leda and the Swan’ actually come off. It’s the one scene that I think is always guaranteed to defeat even the best artist.

This is a plaster cast of a sculpture that is a great masterpiece, but it effectively depicts a murder. The big question that Laocoön has always raised is, how can we enjoy looking at it?

It is easy to walk through galleries and just see one Venus after the other without realising quite how interesting they are. It wasn’t until the 4th century BC that any Greek sculptor did a naked woman – the idea of displaying the naked female body was really radical.

This drawing really underlines how artists from the Renaissance on, right up to the beginning of the 20th century, had completely internalised the famous works of classical sculpture and knew them in their hearts and by heart.

This plaster cast of Hercules isn't the tough, on-top-of-it-all Hercules, this is the weary Hercules. The apples in his hand are a nice symbol of what many thought was his last labour, so we know for a fact that this is Hercules having done his job.

This is just on the brink of being a tragedy. Phaeton's attempts to have this 'Jeremy Clarkson' experience driving the chariot of the sun, the fastest car imaginable, ends with earth being saved, but Phaeton dead. It isn’t as pretty as you think.

At first sight this looks like one of those generic scenes of some semi-clad nymph sprawling about the sea, but it gets more interesting if you think about what has gone actually on here. It’s a story about the beautiful sea nymph Galatea, the giant cyclops Polyphemus, and a man called Acis...