Antiquization

It is a frequent device in German prose to indicate a stylization or antiquization on the part of a speaker.

Streets would not only be finely paved and perfectly clean, but beautifully adorned with two identical rows of arcades or houses of the same height in an antiquization of a medieval fabric.

Especially in the description of the Orinoco river journey through the Venezuelan rain forest Humboldt makes use of diverse classical images. The antiquization as cognitive and aesthetic strategy is thus intensified in certain places of the travel narrative, in a specific spatial-mythological and cultural-philosophical context.[…]The Relation historique du Voyage aux Régions équinoxiales du Nouveau Continent speaks of the metamorphoses of a European discourse in the struggle to grasp the geographically and culturally foreign. It may be read as a narrative about the failure of the antiquization of America and about the deconstruction of classicism.

Classical art and, correspondingly, the “antiquizations” of medieval art and classicist styles of the New Time were treated with piety.