(Classical Presences) Viccy Coltman - Classical Sculpture and The Culture of Collecting in Britain Since 1760-Oxford University Press (2009) PDF

CLASSICAL SCULPTURE AND THE CULTURE OF
COLLECTING IN BRITAIN SINCE 1760
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome
have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to
authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the
assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical
Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and
practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
General Editors
Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter

Classical Sculpture
and the Culture of
Collecting in Britain
Since 1760
VICCYCOLTMAN
OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
OXPORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS
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Acknowledgments
I first began to think seriously about the historiography of classical art when,
as Henry Moore Foundation postdoctoral fellows, Sorcha Carey and I organ-
ized a one-day symposium in 2000 at the Courtauld Institute of Art entitled
'Who's Who: The historiography of classical art'. Though focused on 20th-
century scholars, including John Beazley and Bernard Ashmole, I found it
surprising that not more had been written on the pioneering 19th-century
German Professor of Archaeology, Adolf Michaelis. A research visit to the
Bibliotheque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg during my fellowship
(2000-2) revealed Michaelis' annotated copy of Ancient Marbles in Great
Britain and a cache of unpublished documents that merited further consid-
eration. At the same time, I was revising my Ph.D. manuscript for publication
and spending as much time as possible working on the Townley Archive,
which was then in the British Museum Central Archive and is now in its
Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities. A chapter on 'The cream of
antiquity: Charles Townley and his august family of ancient marbles' eventu-
ally appeared in my Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain)
1760-1800 (Chicago, 2006) and an article on 'Representation, replication
and collecting in Charles Townley's late eighteenth-century library' in Art
History, 29 (2006), 304-24, but it was always clear that the material in the
Townley Archive could sustain many books and certainly more than one
academic career; Clare Hornsby's edited volume of the extensive research
undertaken by the late Ilaria Bignamini is soon to be published by Yale
University Press. It was my pleasure to work closely on the Townley archive
with Gary Thorn, an exemplary archivist, whose resignation from the British
Museum was a matter of deep regret to many of us who worked with his
assistance on the papers. I remained determined to frame the material in the
Townley Archive with Michaelis and the historiography of classical art, which
I had begun to address in relation to Thomas Anson's sculpture collection,
formerly at Shugborough in Staffordshire: 'Thomas Anson's sculpture collec-
tion at Shugborough: "living good and pleasing" or "much taste a turn to
Roman splendour'", The Sculpture Journal, 12 (2004), 35-56; '"Providence
send us a lord": Joseph Nollekens and Bartolomeo Cavaceppi at Shugbor-
ough', The Rediscovery of Antiquity: The role of the artist, Acta Hyperborea, 10
(2003), 371-96.
During a sabbatical in the autumn of 2005,1 was awarded a Robert R. Wark
fellowship at the Huntington Library, working on Diana Wilson's
vi Acknowledgments
unpublished research into Richard and Maria Cosway, which she undertook
at the Fondazione Cosway at Lodi in the 1970s. Their deposit at the Hun-
tington was brought to my attention by my colleague Stephen Lloyd. Shelley
Bennett allowed me to consult the curatorial files pertaining to objects in the
Huntington Collection, a privilege for which I remain indebted, while
Jonathan Conlin and Colette Coleman were terrific colleagues. I also had a
visiting fellowship during this sabbatical at CRASSH (the Centre for Research
in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities) at the University of Cambridge,
whose theme 'Conversation' allowed me to focus on what has become Chap-
ter 5; thanks to the former Director of the Centre, Ludmilla Jordanova and all
the team.
A Philip Leverhulme Prize has enabled me to bring this book to completion.
I would also like to thank the advisory council of the Paul Mellon Centre for
Studies in British Art for awarding me a fellowship at the British School at
Rome from September to December 2007 and again in March 2008. At the
school, I benefited from the company of the art historians living and working
there, notably Susan Russell, Roberto Cobianchi, and Lucy Davies. Lindsay
Seers' cappuccino remains unsurpassed, and I still miss our Sunday morning
visits to the market. Maria Pia Malvezzi arranged a number of visits where
access was difficult and required her incredible negotiation skills, the Villa
Albani being the highlight. I completed the manuscript as a Paul Mellon Senior
Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the
National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. Versions of some of the chapters
were delivered as lectures at the Universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Ox-
ford, St Andrews and in Madrid and at the British School at Rome. Feedback
from Tim Barringer, Larry Klein, and Julian Luxford, among others, helped me
to tighten my arguments as I rewrote the text. Lola Sanchez shared her
inimitable knowledge of the Westmorland objects during a visit to Madrid.
The Dowager Countess Cawdor, the Trustees of the Bowood Collection, the
Trustees of the Broadlands Archive, and Lord Bessborough have kindly
allowed me to quote from their archive holdings.1 Christopher Johns read
and liked the proposal for this book at a time when my enthusiasm for it was
wearing thin, while Jas Eisner heroically read the entire text in an earlier draft
and was suitably critical of it. My Dad, Anthony Coltman, accompanied me to
Strasbourg and proved to be an excellent unpaid research assistant. Finally, I'd
like to thank my partner Stanley Wynd, who has never shown much interest in
this book, or in art history for that matter, for which I am eternally grateful.
Some of the material in Chapter 2 first appeared in 'Designs on eighteenth-
century sculpture', The Sculpture Journal, 13 (2005), 89-102.
1
A generous grant from the Henry Moore Foundation covered the illustration costs.
Contents
List of Figures viii

List of Plates xiii
Introduction: Lord Lansdowne's Wounded Amazon 1

1. 'The loving labours of a learned German':
Adolf Michaelis and the historiography of classical
sculpture in Britain 7
2. 'The spoils of Roman grandeur':
Correspondence collecting and the market in Rome 49
3. The operations of sculpture:
(Re)writing restoration 84
4. Collecting and global politics:
The export of marbles from Rome and their transport to Britain 117
5. 'The lecture on Venus's arse':
Richard Cosway's Charles Townley with a Group of
Connoisseurs, c. 177 1-5 159
6. 'Placed with propriety':
The display and viewing of ancient sculpture 191
7. 'Casting a lustful eye':
Charles Townley as collector and cataloguer 233
Conclusion:
Joseph Nollekens' The Judgement of Paris 273
Bibliography 281
Index 301
List of Figures
1. Photograph of the Lansdowne Amazon from Michaelis,

Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge, 1882). 2
2. £a fine thing of the kind': Engraving of the Lanti vase from
G. B. Piranesi, Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcophagi, tripodi
lucerne ed ornamenti antichi (Rome, 1778), I. 42. 4
3. Palmerston memorandum, 1764. 8
4. Michaelis' notes on the sculptures at Broadlands, 1877. 9
5. Joseph Nollekens, Boy on a Dolphin, 1765. 11
6. Engraving of the Broadlands Ceres. Cavaceppi, Raccolta
d'antiche statue, busti bassirilievi ed altre sculture
restaurate da Bartolomeo Cavaceppi volume I, plate 10. 13
7. Part of the Broadlands head of Juno as sketched by
Michaelis with measurements in 1877. 16
8. Sketch by Michaelis of a relief from the staircase at Ince
Blundell Hall in 1873. 18
9. The Broadlands Hygieia. 20
10. 'not at all suited for sculptures' (Michaelis): The sculpture gallery
at Brocklesby Hall, near Hull. 23
11. The British Museum's third Greco-Roman saloon, as
photographed by Roger Fenton in 1857. 25
12. Michaelis' sketch of the entrance hall and gallery
at Deepdene, 1877. 29
13. Antonio Canova, Venus, c. 1817-20, formerly in the
Hope Collection, now Leeds Art Museums and Galleries. 31
14. 'This labyrinth stuffed full of fragments' (Michaelis): view
of the corridor in Sir John Soane's house-museum. 32
15. Frederik Poulsen cataloguing busts in the pantheon
at Ince Blundell Hall, 38
16. Photographs by Bernard Ashmole showing multiple views of the Ince
Athena from his Catalogue of the Ancient Marbles at Ince
Blundell Hall (Oxford, 1929). 40
17. Ferdinando Lisandroni and Antonio d'Este, Head of Anchyrrhoe. 42
18. Antonio Canova, Psyche, c. 1790. 43
19. Reduced marble copy of the Dying Gladiator. 44
Lzsr of Figures ix
20. Boy with a Bird and Girl with a Nest by Antonio d'Este
after originals in the Villa Borghese. 45
21. Engraved view of the excavation of the obelisk of Sesostris in the
Campus Martius in 1747. From Giuseppe Vasi, Delle magnificenze
di Roma antica e moderna (Rome, 1752). 52
22. Engraving by Domenico Cunego after Gavin Hamilton,
The Anger of Achilles for the Loss of Briseis, 1769. 57
23. 'The finest thing I have ever found during the coarse of my
excavations' (Hamilton): engraving of Smith Barry's Antinous
(present location unknown) from M. le Comte de Clarac's
Musee de sculpture Antique et Moderne. 64
24. 'True Greek and of the Good or High times' (Jenkins):
Townley's Drunken Faun with its 18th-century restoration removed. 67
25. Attributed to Friedrich Anders, drawings of the Townley
sphinx, c.l 778. 69
26. Attributed to Friedrich Anders, drawing of the Endymion, 1775. 70
27. Attributed to Vincenzo Dolcibene, drawing of the
Townley caryatid, 1786. 73
28. The Townley caryatid. 74
29. 'The best monument of that kind which has ever appeared'
(Jenkins): the Townley sphinx. 75
30. 'The action is wonderfully active' (Jenkins): Acteon. By
courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum. 77
31. Diomedes 'in the stile of the Laocoon & sleeping faun of
the Barberini' sketched by Gavin Hamilton in a letter
to Townley, 28 November 1775. 79
32. 'New & quite different from any thing I [Hamilton] ever saw':
engraving of Townley's colossal Venus. 81
33. Drawing of the Lysimachus cum Achilles, here attributed
to Friedrich Anders, mid 1770s. 90
34. 'A work superior to Myro[n]' (Jenkins): engraving of
Townley's discobolus. 97
35. 'Done in the lower age with more diligence than taste'
(Hamilton): sketch of the Massimi discobolus. 99
36. 'The most Ent y & Animated Production of sculpture produced
since the revival of that art in Italy' (Jenkins): Giovanni Lorenzo
Bernini's Neptune and Triton, c.l 622. 102
37. Engraving of Bernini's Neptune and Triton from Domenico
de Rossi, Raccolta di statue di Roma (Rome, 1704). 104
X List of Figures
38. Pietro Santi Bartoli, Admiranda Romanarum antiquitatum ac veteris

sculpturae vestigial anaglyphico opera elaborata (Rome, 1693). 110
39. Henry BlundeLTs Sleeping Venus post-surgery, plate 41 of
the Engravings and Etchings. 112
40. Sketch of Blundell's hermaphrodite prior to its castration
into figure 39. 114
41. Drawing of the Barberini candelabra. 125
42. 'A most beautiful bust of Sabina preserved as when it come
from the hands of the Sculptor not even the point of the nose
broke' (Hamilton). 128
43. 'Without doubt the finest Jupiter in the world' (Hamilton):
sketch of the Villa d'Este Jupiter formerly in Smith Barry's
collection at Marbury Hall, now J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu. 130
44. Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, copy of the bust of Faustina
Minor from Henry Blundell's collection. 138
45. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Charles Townley, 1769. 143
46. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Thomas Mansel Talbot, 1773. 149
47. 'The work is so Exceedingly delicate' (Jenkins): a drawing
here attributed to Friedrich Anders of George Strickland's
Juno, late 1770s. 152
48. A comparison of the turnpike road network in 1750 and 1770,
from Eric Pawson, Transport and Economy: The turnpike roads
of eighteenth- century Britain (London, 1977). 156
49. Mezzotint engraving by Marcellus Lauron, Brothel Scene, 1690s(?). 161
50. Francois Nivelon, Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour (London 1737),
plate 2 'Standing'. 162
51. Johann Zoffany, Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons, 1764. 165
52. Richard Payne Knight, Discourse on the Worship of Priapus
(London, 1786-7), plate I, Ex-voti of wax presented in the
Church at Isernia in 1780. 172
53. Richard Payne Knight, Discourse on the Worship of Priapus
(London, 1786-7), plate XI, fragment from Elephanta
near Bombay showing a man and woman 'in an attitude which
I shall not venture to describe'. 173
54. Engraving of the Medici Venus from F. Gori,
Museum Florentinum (Florence, 1734). 177
55. Richard Cosway, preliminary sketch for a painting of Charles
Townley and a group of connoisseurs, c.1772. 183
Lzst of Figures xi
56. Simon Gribelin after Paolo de Mattheis, The Judgement of

Hercules from the Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks
(4th edn, 1727). 189
57. The Venus formerly in William Weddell's collection at
Newby Hall. 194
58. John Carr, Elevation and ground plan of the sculpture gallery
at Newby with annotations by William Chambers, before 1764. 196-7
59. 'The taste recognized as antique' (Michaelis): a view of
Robert Adam's sculpture gallery at Newby Hall, c.1767.
This 1906 photograph shows the Venus (figure 57) in the
left-hand niche and the Minerva in the niche on the right. 199
60. 'Plan of Lady Glyn's house, Whitehall' sketched by John
Towneley in July 1773. 201
61. View of the Gabinetto in the Villa Albani. 209
62. Henry Blundell's 'big-bellied' Isis. 216
63. Vincenzo Brenna, drawing of the Terracina capital. 218
64. View of the orangery at Margam Park in South Wales,
designed by Anthony Keck in the mid 1780s. 223
65. View of the garden temple at Ince Blundell Hall in Lancashire. 224
66. Exterior view of the pantheon at Ince Blundell Hall in Lancashire. 226
67. Charles Townley's sketch of a ground plan for the greenhouse
at Woburn, c.1802. 228
68. Joseph Nollekens, Castor and Pollux, 1767. 239
69. Joseph Nollekens, Marble herm bust of Charles Townley, 1807. 240
70. Sketch of the Neptune at Shugborough, here attributed to
Joseph Nollekens. 243
71. 'In very uncommon freshness' (Jenkins): Henry Blundell's statue
of Minerva from the Villa Lanti. See figure 16 for multiple, small-scale
views of the sculpture as photographed by Bernard Ashmole. 247
72. 'Fine symmetry of human body' (Blundell): engraving of
Henry Blundell's Theseus. 249
73. 'Truly Greek' (Worsley): Bacchus and Acratus from Richard
Worsley's collection engraved by W. Skelton from a drawing by
Vincenzo Dolcibene. For two views of the group in the sculpture
gallery at Brocklesby, see figure lOa and b. 252
74. 'The finest thing in the world' (Hamilton): a young marble
faun at Petworth by Apollonius Nestor. 259
xii List of Figures
75. Sculpture of Fesciale at Petworth, engraved by W. Skelton from

a drawing by Henry Howard for Society of Dilettanti,
Specimens of Antient Sculpture. 261
76. Helenus at Petworth, engraved by W. Skelton from a drawing
by Henry Howard for Society of Dilettanti, Specimens of
Antient Sculpture. 264
77. Townley 's ground plan of Weddell's sculpture gallery at Newby,
1779. 266
78. Michaelis' ground plan of Weddell's sculpture gallery at Newby,
1873. 267
79. Sketch by Charles Townley of the 2nd Earl of Egremont's
gallery at Petworth, 1791. 268
80. Exploded sections of Blundell's hall, drawing room, and
dining room as sketched by Charles Townley. 269
81. Ground plan by Michaelis of the pantheon at Ince in 1873. 272
82. Statue of Paris formerly in Lord Rockingham's collection. 276
83. Joseph Nollekens, Venus, 1773. 277
84. Joseph Nollekens, Minerva, 1775. 278
85. Joseph Nollekens, Juno, 1776. 279
List of Plates
1. Thomas Banks, Caractacus Pleading Before the Emperor Claudius,

c.l 773/4-7. The Conway Library, Courtauld Institute
of Art, London.
2. 'A sweet figure of a young man asleep' (Hamilton):
Endymion/Mercury. By courtesy of the Trustees of the
British Museum.
3. 'The sweetest body in the world': Townley's small Venus. By courtesy
of the Trustees of the British Museum.
4. 'The most Beautiful & Expressive Head of a Minerva ever yet seen'
(Jenkins). By courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.
5. So-called Supper of Tremalchio relief. By courtesy of the Trustees
of the British Museum.
6. Benigne Gagnereaux, Pius VI Accompanying Gustav III of
Sweden on a Visit to the Museo Pio-Clementino, 1786. Photo:
The National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm.
7. Sculpture of Endymion in the Swedish Royal Collection (in foreground).
Photo: The National Museum of Fine Arts, Stockholm.
8. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of George Legge, 1778. Museo del Prado.
9. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Francis Basset, 1778. Museo del Prado.
10. Attributed to Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Francis Basset,
c. 1778. Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.
11. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of John Henderson of For dell, 1777.
Museo de la Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando.
12. Anonymous, Portrait of John Henderson of For dell, c.l 778.
13. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Anton Raphael Mengs, 1778.
14. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Thomas Giffard, 1784.
Chillington Hall, Staffordshire. Photo: Neal Shaw.
15. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Thomas Giffard, 1784.
16. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Sir Thomas Gascoigne, 1779.
© Leeds Museums and Galleries (Lotherton Hall) UK/ The
Bridgeman Art Library.
xiv List of Plates
17. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Clement XIV. V&A Picture Library.

18. Richard Cosway, Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs,
1771-5. © Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Burnley,
Lancashire/The Bridgeman Art Library.
19. Arthur Devis, Mr and Mrs Hill, c. 1750-1. Yale Centre for British
Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/ The Bridgeman Art Library.
20. Johann Zoffany, The Colmore Family, c.1775. Private
Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.
21. Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley's Library at 7 Park Street,
Westminster, 1781-3/98. © Towneley Hall Art Gallery and
Museum, Burnley, Lancashire/ The Bridgeman Art Library.
22. William Chambers, The Townley Marbles in the Dining Room
at 7 Park Street, Westminster, 1794. By courtesy of the Trustees
of the British Museum.
23. William Chambers, The Townley Marbles in the Entrance
Hall at 7 Park Street, Westminster, 1794. By courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum.
24. 'A unique rococo chair' by Matthias Lock, c.1765. V&A Picture
Library.
25. Joshua Reynolds, The Society of Dilettanti, 1777-9. Reproduced
by kind permission of the Society of Dilettanti. Photograph:
Photographic Survey, Courtauld Institute of Art.
26. Joshua Reynolds, The Society of Dilettanti, 1777-9. Reproduced
by kind permission of the Society of Dilettanti. Photograph:
27. George Knapton, Sir Francis Dashwood, 1742. Reproduced by
kind permission of the Society of Dilettanti. Photograph:
28. Engraving by Philip Dawe, The Macaroni Painter, or Billy Dimple
sitting for his Picture, 1772. By courtesy of the Trustees of
the British Museum.
29. Gavin Hamilton, Rape of Helen, 1784. Roma, Museo di Roma.
30. Joseph Bonomi, unexecuted design for a sculpture rotunda at
Towneley Hall, c.1783. Private collection.
31. Joseph Wilton, Dr Antonio Cocchi, 1755. V&A Picture Library.
32. Joseph Wilton, Francis Hastings, 10th Earl of Huntingdon, 1761.
Government Art Collection, on loan to the Victoria and
Albert Museum, London. © Government Art Collection.
Introduction:
Lord Lansdowne's Wounded Amazon
At the auction of the Lansdowne collection of ancient marble sculptures in

London in March 1930, the prize lot was a Wounded Amazon (figure 1) which
sold for a then record of 28,350 guineas.1 This sculpture had been acquired by
the 2nd Earl of Shelburne, later 1st Marquis of Lansdowne, in 1773 from the
dealer Gavin Hamilton for £200, and is now in the Metropolitan Museum in
New York.2 In the century and a half that had elapsed since its excavation in Tor
Columbaro about 9 miles outside Rome on the Appian Way, its acquisition by
an aristocratic British politician and its subsequent public auction, this restored
ancient sculpture had been identified as one of the finest and best-preserved
masterpieces of the canon of Greco-Roman art. Following a passage in Pliny's
Natural History (XXXIV, 53), the Lansdowne Amazon was identified as a type of
Wounded Amazon executed by the 5th century BC Greek sculptor Polykleitos.
'It is as like the head of the Doryphoros by Polykleitos as sister to brother... an
excellent translation into marble of the characteristics of a bronze original',
expounds the Christie's sale catalogue, whose entries were founded on the
'business-like descriptions' of the British Museum curator A. H. Smith in his
Ancient Marbles at Lansdowne House (1889).3 Smith's 'thorough, trustworthy,
and unsensational' catalogue in turn acknowledges its debt to the pioneering
account of Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge, 1882) by Adolf
Michaelis, Professor of Classical Archaeology at the University of Strasbourg.4
The Amazon's archaeological celebrity is reflected in her privileged treatment by
Michaelis. For the early 1880s was a time when, to paraphrase Bernard Ashmole
writing in 1929, photography was a rudimentary and costly new technology,
and although Michaelis described thousands of pieces only a dozen or so were
reproduced, one of which was the Lansdowne Amazon (figure I). 5
1
Christie's, lot 59. Reitlinger, The Economics of Taste, II. 245.
2
32.11.4.
3
Kenyon, 'Arthur Hamilton Smith', 6. Smith's uncatalogued papers are in the Library of
Trinity College, Cambridge.
4
Kenyon, 'Arthur Hamilton Smith', 6.
5
Ashmole, Catalogue, vii. There were ten photographs in Michaelis and five woodcuts. See
Hamber, "A higher branch of the Art".
Figure 1. Photograph of the Lansdowne Amazon from Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in
Great Britain (Cambridge, 1882).
Lord Lansdowne's Wounded Amazon 3
In spite of the work's later archaeological prestige, its appearance in 18th-

century documentary sources is less spectacular. Gavin Hamilton's letters to
Lansdowne reveal the collector being 'somewhat dissatisfied' with this sculp-
ture on the basis of its repetitive subject matter: having 'already one in your
possession', wrote Hamilton, which the collector had obtained via the agency
of James Adam in Rome in July 1765.6 Hamilton's letters for May 1774
document his repeated attempts to sell the Amazon on to his other British
clients residing in Rome, or to those collectors who had entrusted him with
commissions to be realized after their grand tours. Initial hopes that George
Grenville might purchase the sculpture evidently came to nothing; Hamilton
wrote to Charles Townley in London, asking him to mention the availability
of the sculpture to a third party, Thomas Mansel Talbot.7 Two years later,
Hamilton heard that James Smith Barry had returned to England and wrote
to Lansdowne of his desire for 'him to take a look of the Amazon' in the hope
that there might be a place for the sculpture at Marbury Hall, in Cheshire.8
Evidently not: a decade later and the Amazon was still in Lansdowne's
possession. Hamilton wrote again to Lansdowne, in August 1786:
beg[ging] leave to advert one thing in regard to your Lordship's collection of antique
statues, and that is that they have no intrinsic value, but rise and fall like the stocks.
When I sent these statues to England, all Europe were fond of collecting, and the price
of consequence ran high. At present there is not one purchaser in England and money
is scarce. It therefore dont surprise me that at this time your Lordship cannot
immediately find a purchaser at the price they cost. Perhaps in another thirty years
when antique statues are not to be got, your Lordship's collection will be worth double
what they cost. There is another thing against you my Lord, which is that whatever
you offer for sale is look'd upon as your refusal which at once condemns i t . . . 9
Once rejected by Lansdowne and so already blackballed in the eyes of poten-

tial British owners, Hamilton shifted his sights away from English collectors
of sculpture back to Italy; he embarked on negotiations with the Marchese
Obizzi of Padua in a bid to exchange Lansdowne's unwanted Amazon for
paintings—another type of luxury foreign commodity which British aristo-
crats avidly collected while on their grand tours. After 13 years in Lansdowne's
possession, Hamilton quotes him being 'quite impatient to get rid of the
Amazon' and offers a part-exchange from the Italian engraver cum dealer in
antiquities Giovanni Volpato, who was willing to take the Amazon plus £400
6
1 May 1774. Smith, Catalogue, 71, letter xx. Hamilton's letters are also reproduced in the
Christie's catalogue for 5 March 1930 with six additional letters. lames Adam's bill for sculptures
and busts is Lansdowne MSS, AA2. Bowood House.
7
18 May 1774. TY7/586.
8
13 July 1776. Smith, Catalogue, 79, letter xxviii.
9
12 August 1786. Smith, Catalogue, 87, letter xxxvi.
4 Lord Lansdowne's Wounded Amazon
Figure 2. 'a fine thing of the kind': Engraving of the Lanti vase from G. B. Piranesi,
Vfcsf, candelabriy cippi, sarcophagi, tripodi lucerne ed ornamenti antichi (Rome, 1778),
1.42.
Lord Lansdowne's Wounded Amazon 5
in exchange for the Lanti vase (figure 2), so-called after its former home, the
Villa Lanti on the Janiculum Hill in Rome.10 Volpato rejected the Amazon
with the reduced sum of 500 zechines, while the sculpture was en route back
to Hamilton in Italy.11 Notwithstanding the dealer's resolve 'to dispose of it in
the best manner I can' in 1780s Rome, the piece was evidently exported back
to Britain and remained in the Lansdowne collection until the sale in 1930—
during which time this previously unwanted duplicate, which had been
systematically rejected by British and Italian collectors alike, had been
identified as an archaeological masterpiece of the corpus of Greco-Roman
sculpture.
Each age gets the Renaissance of classical antiquity it deserves, according to
Aby Warburg's famous maxim.12 The fate of the Wounded Amazon over a
century and a half, from unwanted repetition to prized Polykleitan copy,
reminds us how the material remains of antiquity can become a palimpsest
for competing intellectual art histories. This book investigates the dynamics
of these intellectual histories by exploring the diverse and often conflicting
meanings invested by British collectors, including Lord Lansdowne and
Charles Townley, and imposed by later scholars, Adolf Michaelis, A. H.
Smith, and Bernard Ashmole, onto the ancient and modern marbles collected
from Italy in the second half of the 18th century. Chapter 1 investigates the
phenomena of the British neoclassical sculpture collection through a critique
of the ways in which the predominantly ancient artefacts in these collections
have been studied and published, according to the scientific discipline of
archaeology pioneered in the late 19th century. My intention is not to
undermine the classic status of Michaelis' monumental work—what one
German reviewer called a dictionary in its Sunday best—but rather to offer
a critique of his methodology, which has provided an unquestioned basis for
later studies. Michaelis' text has never before been subject to the sort of
rigorous interrogation that he employed for the thousands of specimens of
Greek and Roman sculpture that he catalogued and classified for inclusion in
his volume.
By relying on the evidence of 18th-century archival sources, Chapters 2 to 7
turn to examine the sculptures of Lansdowne and his contemporaries,
including Charles Townley, James Smith Barry, and Thomas Mansel Talbot,
within the art historical context in which their collections were formed.
Having digested the 'business-like descriptions' of the professional archaeolo-
gists, we will get back to the precarious and competitive enterprise that was the
10
2 December 1786. Smith, Catalogue, 88, letter xxxviii.
11
21 April 1787. Christie's, 102, letter xxxix.
12
Brilliant, My Laocoon, 4.
6 Lord Lansdowne's Wounded Amazon
political, social, and economic business of sculpture-collecting in the 18th

century—which Hamilton's 1786 letter to Lansdowne equates with the Vise
and fall' of the stock market. We will focus on art historical issues already
raised in respect of Lansdowne's Wounded Amazon that were of secondary
interest to the agendas of later scholars. Issues to be addressed include the
mechanisms of the market place, from the cosmopolitan competition, or
marble mania, when 'all Europe were fond of collecting' (as Hamilton put it)
sculptures excavated and restored in Rome, to the networks of communication
and exchange between collectors back home in Britain. While the discipline of
archaeology brought objects under a newly scientific scrutiny (a methodology
that we shall scrutinize), my focus will proceed to uncover neglected aspects of
the culture of collecting that informed this process. In particular, by examining
the archival documents relating to these collections in order to unpack their
cultural and art historical, as opposed to later archaeological, meaning(s), it
will be argued that the archaeological tradition has as much misrepresented as
represented them.
1
c
The loving labours of a learned German5:
Adolf Michaelis and the historiography
of classical sculpture in Britain
'The gardener and housekeeper, [are] the usual ciceroni for English art-
collections'
Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain1
In a letter of 20 September 1877, Adolf Michaelis, Professor of Classical

Archaeology at the new Kaiser-Wilhelm-Universitat in Strasbourg, wrote
from the London home of George Scharf, Director of the National Portrait
Gallery, to the Right Honourable W. Cowper Temple at Broadlands in Hamp-
shire: 'beg[gingj your pardon for having delayed so longtime the returning
the Memorandum [figure 3] and sending my slight Notes on your Collection
[figure 4]'.2 The German academic had compiled these notes during his third
research visit to England, undertaking exhaustive, first-hand, study for a
forthcoming publication devoted to ancient sculptures in English private
collections. Michaelis explained all this in a letter dated 25 August 1877 to
the 5th Marquis of Lansdowne, whose 'matchless collection' of ancient sculp-
tures at Lansdowne House in Berkeley Square, London he had previously
examined during his second visit to Britain in 1873 and to which he wished to
gain access again 'to make notes upon the marbles, in order to give a fuller
account of them'.3
The memorandum Michaelis returned to Cowper Temple is one of the
few surviving primary documents relating to the marbles at Broadlands
1
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 40-1.
2
University of Southampton Library, archives and manuscripts, BR 101/41. Ancient Marbles
in Great Britain was dedicated to Scharf. Secondary bibliography on Michaelis is surprisingly
thin. See the articles by Siebert: 'Michaelis et 1'archeologie francaise', 261-71; 'De Michaelis a
Perdrizet', 97-101; and 'La collection de moulages de 1'Universite de Strasbourg', 215-21, and
now Simon, Adolf Michaelis.
3
Lansdowne MSS, AA3. Bowood House. Michaelis' initial findings from his 1873 visit were
published as 'Uberblick iiber Entstehung der Antikensammlungen in England', Archaologische
Zeitung(\874}y 3-70.
Figure 3. Palmerston memorandum, 1764.
Figure 4. Michaelis' notes on the sculptures at Broadlands, 1877.
10 'The loving labours of a learned German
(figure 3).4 It lists the sculptures and pictures acquired by Henry Temple, 2nd
Viscount Palmerston during a four-week visit to Rome in 1764, and records
the prices paid: from £90 for 'Two statues Ceres & Hygeia' to £5 each for busts
of cjimo a fragment damagd', ca Boys Head', and CA Term'. The memorandum
records that for the sum of £515.0.0, Palmerston bought a whole range of
sculptural goods from Rome: ancient statues, busts, sarcophagi and medal-
lions, a modern marble of the Boy on a Dolphin by the British sculptor Joseph
Nollekens (figure 5), 4Two Granite Tables' and 'Two Tables of green Porphyry
with Alabaster Borders'. Nollekens' group for Palmerston (figure 5) was a
reduced copy of a Renaissance work reportedly conceived by Raphael and
executed by his aide, Lorenzetto. Its iconographical source is classical litera-
ture, the second century AD text De natura animalium of Aelian the Sophist
(VI. 15). In a fatal tale of masculine love and devotion, the dolphin coaxes the
youth he loves from the gymnasium, to mount, ride and frolic with him in the
sea. One day, the boy falls onto the dolphin's erect spinal fin and is mortally
wounded. The remorseful dolphin carries the boy to shore, where both die.5
Viewing the work from above, we see the bloody puncture in the boy's right
torso, the boy here rendered as a chubby baby, where his skin has been pierced
by the fin of the fish who loved him and inadvertently caused both their deaths.
Michaelis' notes on the sculptures at Broadlands (figure 4), which he
enclosed with the returned memorandum, give us an indication of the
exhaustive catalogue that would characterize the work published by Cam-
bridge University Press five years later as Ancient Marbles in Great Britain.
Each of the 42 sculptures are numbered and listed according to their then
location in the country house interior, in the vestibule, the hall (with its first
and second compartments), the ante room, saloon, little drawing room, and
the dining room. Their status—as ancient, modern, restored, copy, or cast—is
classified and documented; Latin inscriptions on the cinerary urns are trans-
lated and the names of the deceased are identified. Already we see from these
notes how Michaelis is 'weeding out' (to use his own phrase) objects that were
original to the collection when it was acquired by Viscount Palmerston in
1764 and inventoried in the memorandum, but that are not 'original' in the
archaeological sense of being ancient Greek or Roman.6 Those items excluded
by Michaelis are the 13 paintings, the two pairs of tables in granite and
porphyry, and Joseph Nollekens' sculpture of the Boy on a Dolphin.
In some instances, Michaelis' notes refer to the summary descriptions of
the marbles given in the 1764 memorandum. For instance, number 13,
4
On the memorandum, see Grassinger, Antike Marmorskulpturen, 24-7, esp. 25.
5
Peters Bowron and Rishel, Art in Rome, no. 141.
6
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 101.
Figure 5. Joseph Nollekens, Boy on a Dolphin, 1765.
Michaelis' 'Terminal bust of a youth, probably in memory of a victory

obtained by him', is 'Diadumenus'; number 14, 'Trilateral Ara with bacchic
figures', corresponds to 'Altar'. Michaelis also provides truncated references to
published sources. For instance, number 17 in the second compartment of the
hall is listed as 'Draped female statue, restored as Ceres. "Ceres" Dall. no. 2
Cavaceppi .Raccolta I pi. 10 [figure 6]. Clarac Musee de sculpture III, 428, 770.'
The abbreviation 'Dall.' refers to James Dallaway's Anecdotes of the Arts in
England (London, 1800), a volume devoted to the sister arts of architecture,
sculpture, and painting.7 Raccolta d'antiche statue, busti, bassirilievi ed altre
sculture restaurate da Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (Rome, 1768-72) is an illustrated
catalogue in three volumes of the ancient marbles in elite cosmopolitan
collections restored by the Roman sculptor-restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi.
'Clarac Musee de sculpture' refers to M. le Comte de Clarac's Musee de
sculpture Antique et Moderne (Paris, 1826-53), a paper museum in 6 volumes
devoted to ancient and modern statues in European collections. Though
chronologically inclusive in representing both ancient and modern works in
sculpture, it is typologically exclusive in omitting other classes of monument
of the sort restored by Cavaceppi and bought by Palmerston, like busts,
medallions, and sarcophagi. Its author was Curator of Antiquities at the
Louvre in Paris. Outline engravings by Brotherton give what Michaelis called
'an approximate idea of the subjects represented' in some 325 statues in
British collections, including the Broadlands Ceres.8
In the text of Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, Michaelis acknowledges
James Dallaway's Anecdotes of the Arts as being 'until quite modern times...
the only means of obtaining information about the private collections
of antiques in England'.9 Notwithstanding the usefulness of Dallaway's
endeavour—'sketch[ing] the history of the introduction of antique statuary
into England in chronological order'—Michaelis is deeply critical of what he
sees as his lack of research expertise. He writes: 'The notes of the individual
collections are generally nothing more than a bare reprint of the haphazard
nomenclatures which are usually given in collections for the information of
visitors. These have been for the most part mechanically copied by Dallaway
without personal introspection, without intimate knowledge, and without
criticism/ 10 Introspection, knowledge, and criticism: these then arc the exact-
ing criteria of the 19th-century archaeologist. Though Dallaway tried to apply
order to 'the entanglement of scattered notices', for Michaelis he failed
7
Dallaway, Anecdotes of the Arts, 344-5.
8
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, ix.
9
10
Adolf Michaelis and the historiography of classical sculpture 13
Figure 6. Engraving of the Broadlands Ceres. Cavaceppi, Raccolta d'antiche statue,

bustiy bassirilievi ed altre sculture restaurate da Bartolomeo Cavaceppi volume I,
plate 10.
spectacularly to disentangle the contents of the collections, which are said to

'receive extremely unequal consideration. In the small Palmerston cabinet [at
Broadlands] more specimens are mentioned by name than in the whole
throng of marbles at Ince [Blundell Hall, Lancashire]; the Lansdowne gallery
[at Lansdowne House, Berkeley Square, London] is disposed of with striking
indifference.'11
'Dallaway's gossip is unworthy of credit: he was a twaddling old blockhead',
so the librarian at Holkham Hall, Norfolk, the Revd Alexander Napier, wrote
to Michaelis on 29 August 1878.12 'When he is right, tis by accident; when he
is wrong, he is simply revealing his inward man.'13 Unlike the 'scientific
pursuits' of Michaelis, Dallaway's Anecdotes of the Arts in England was the
product of his having, to cite Michaelis again, 'devoted his leisure to literary
pursuits'.14 Educated at Oxford and a former resident of Italy and Constan-
tinople, Dallaway was employed as secretary to Charles, Duke of Norfolk,
whose ancestor the 14th Earl of Arundel was the first collector to 'transplant
old Greece into England' in the 17th century.15 Another of Arundel's des-
cendants was Charles Townley, himself a collector of ancient sculptures, client
of Gavin Hamilton and contemporary of the 2nd Viscount Palmerston and
the 1st Marquis of Lansdowne. Townley's diary entries for May and June 1799
record that James Dallaway called at his house in Westminster, London to
examine and borrow 'my notes on the private museums in England'.16 Town-
ley's unpublished notes now form part of his archive in the British Museum. 17
On 10 June, for instance, 'Mr Dalloway called at 3, & we made lists of the
Marbles of various collections in England for his little Work.'18 Later that year,
Dallaway wrote to Townley of having 'avail [ed] myself of my present leisure to
complete the little book I have been emboldened by your very liberal assist-
ance to offer to the publick. In a week or two I shall return to Town, and shall
be again troublesome for a few hints.'19 Townley's contribution to the his-
toriography of ancient sculpture in Britain will be dealt with in detail later on,
11
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 125 and 124.
12
Bibliotheque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg (hereafter BNUS), MS 5751, 103.
13
It was as a result of Napier's intervention that Michaelis' account of 'Uberblick iiber
Entstehung der Antikensammlungen in England' was enlarged to include the public collections
at Cambridge, Oxford, and Liverpool, translated and published as Ancient Marbles in Great
Britain. His involvement is fully documented in letters to Michaelis in the BNUS, MS 5751.
14
Michaelis to Lord Lansdowne, July 1879. Lansdowne MSS, AA3. Bowood House. Michae-
lis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 124.
15
H. Peacham, Compleat Gentleman (1634), 107; quoted in Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in
Great Britain, 22 and 72.
16
TY1/11. 29 May; 30 May; 7 June; 20 June.
17
Townley's archive will be discussed in detail in Chapter 2.
18
TY1/11. 10 June.
19
19 December 1799. TY7/1753.
in Chapter 7. It is sufficient to note here that Dallaway was assisted in the

compilation of material for the sculpture section of his Anecdotes by the
London-based collector and then authority on ancient sculptures in England,
Charles Townley. In 1807, a translation of Dallaway's Anecdotes was published
in Paris as Les Beaux-Arts en Angleterre, ouvrage traduit de VAnglois de
M. Dallaway par M***, publie et augmente de notes par A. L. Millin, in
2 volumes. Michaelis thought Millin's interventions 'unimportant... [and]
written without any independent knowledge of the collections themselves or
of the specimens they contained'.20
Townley's involvement in Dallaway's project far transcended the provision
of a 'few hints'. With reference to Palmerston's collection at Broadlands, for
example, Dallaway's account has much in common with Townley's unpub-
lished notes. Dallaway's number 1, CA statue of a Muse. The attitude is the
same as that of the Melpomene, once in the Farnesina palace, now in the Mus.
Pio-Clem., stooping forward, and the left leg raise on a stone', corresponds to
Townley's description of'A small figure of a muse same attitude as the one in
the Farnesina, stooping, and left leg raised up by standing on a stone, arms
wanting.'21 These brief descriptions identify the subject matter and the com-
position of the sculpture, referring to better-known comparanda in contem-
porary Roman collections. Townley also gives a summary indication of the
size and the state of preservation. Dallaway's number 7, 'A head of Juno, nearly
perfect, but much corroded by age', is according to Townley (a head of a Juno
entire except the back of the head, which is wanting, much coroded, natural
size'. Like Lord Lansdowne's Wounded Amazon (figure 1), Palmerston's much
corroded bust with its perfectly preserved nose was subsequently afforded
high archaeological distinction when it was catalogued by Michaelis in An-
cient Marbles in Great Britain as ( a beautiful Greek head of coarse-grained
marble [figure 7], probably Parian, the surface much corroded and dotted
with calcined excrescences, but not restored, or retouched . . . The whole head
gives one the impression of grand and lofty beauty, more delicate than that of
the goddess of Melos, perhaps somewhat more severe than that of the Knidian
Aphrodite in the Vatican.'22 For Michaelis, its unrestored condition sign-
ificantly increased its archaeological value, especially as what were seen as
restored Roman copies, rather than original Greek works, proliferated in
18th-century English collections. Indeed, its archaeological value in the 19th
century is offset by its (lack of) economic value when it was acquired in the
20
21
TY15/1.
22
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 218-19. The bust is in the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston, 96.694; see Comstock and Vermeule, Sculpture in Stone, no. 158.
Figure 7. Part of the Broadlands head of /WMO as sketched by Michaelis with meas-
urements in 1877.
previous century. Via the sums contained in the memorandum, Michaelis

records that the bust was 'Purchased for £5. f>
This corroded Greek bust of Juno (figure 7) was one of 33 ancient marbles
at Broadlands to be catalogued and published by Michaelis. Broadlands was
one of 66 private collections, as well as the public collections at Oxford,
Cambridge, and Liverpool, to be incorporated into his book 'and to give in
this way [wrote Michaelis in a letter to Napier] a full account of all British
Collections of antique Sculpture, with the only exception of the British
Museum'.23 'The extent of the M.S quite staggers me! And I am afraid it will
23
This figure is cited in Oehler, Hand-list to the photographic exhibition, 58. Michaelis to
Revd Napier, 17 December 1876. BNUS, MS 5751, 24.
also course the Syndicates of the [Cambridge University] Press to fetch a deep
breath', the Revd Napier replied to Michaelis on 4 October 1878.24 Its pub-
lished version would extend to 753 pages, whose catalogue entries dealt with
over 2,000 ancient specimens. Four detailed indices were organized according
to the names of collectors and collections; drawings and engravings; subjects
represented; and epigraphical material. The 66 collections 'far and wide' were
listed alphabetically by location.25 The individual specimens were numbered
according to their display sequence in the interior, rather than each being
slotted into a wider ancient chronological schema. Geographically from
Dunrobin Castle, in Sutherlandshire, Scotland—'the most northerly of all
the antique collections in Great Britain'—to Osborne House on the Isle of
Wight, and alphabetically from St Ann's Hill to Woburn Abbey, over two
centuries of sculpture-collecting in Britain were subject to the rigorous,
scientific procedures of the German professor from Strasbourg: numbered,
measured, deciphered, delineated, and classified within the corpus of Greco-
Roman sculpture.26
A sketch by Michaelis in one of his unpublished notebooks in the Bib-
liotheque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg demonstrates these me-
ticulous 19th-century research processes at work (figure 8). It depicts what he
designates as a Greek sepulchral relief from the staircase at Ince Blundell Hall
near Liverpool. With its 413 marbles numbered by Michaelis, Ince Blundell
was the largest private collection in England, in dramatic contrast with that at
Denton Hall in Northumberland, where Michaelis was informed there may
have been a bas-relief of Niobe and her children.27 His sketch of the Ince relief
delineates the entire sculpture and includes a detail of the fold motifs of the
cloak belonging to the central figure of the beardless man that he describes as
being quite confident, perhaps aged in his 50s. The image is annotated with
working notes, and also accompanied by a series of measurements for the
height, width, and jutting-out of the marble slab on which the figures are
carved. Michaelis describes the workmanship and size of the sculpture as
unusual, but particularly carefully done. 'Class your specimens as a naturalist
classes his types: then you will be in a condition to state the characteristics of
successive styles in clear concise formularies, and to recognize them every-
where in collections of sculpture, in spite of unscientific arrangement',
24
BNUS, MS 5751, 110.
25
The Academy, 1 October 1882, 266.
26
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 296. My understanding of the 19th-century
science of archaeology has been illuminated in the writings of British Museum curator C. T.
Newton, especially his On the Method of the Study of Ancient Art, 'Remarks on the collections of
ancient art', 205-27, and his Essays on Art and Archaeology.
27
Figure 8. Sketch by Michaelis of a relief from the staircase at Ince Blundell Hall in 1873.
recommended Michaelis' colleague, the British Museum curator C. T. New-

ton. 28 Like a pathologist performing a mass autopsy, Michaelis dissected over
2,000 marble specimens into their ancient and modern component elements.
For example, the statue of Hygieia, Broadlands number 14 (figure 9), has,
according to Michaelis, a new head and neck, with some newly-restored parts
of the serpent and her right foot. The restored right arm is recognized as being
of ancient origin, as are the left hand and cup; the whole is classed as
'Decorative work' in coarse-grained Parian marble. 29 Michaelis did not con-
fine himself to catalogue one typological classification—to ancient marble
sculptures like Hygieia; as the American scholars Vermeule and von Bothmer,
who published 'Notes on a new edition of Michaelis' in the 1950s, are quick to
point out, Michaelis never hesitated to catalogue important ancient Greek
and Roman bronzes, mosaics, paintings, terracottas, gems, and vases.30 He
also mentions drawings after the antique, like those bought by George III for
the Royal Library at Windsor from the collection of the Italian antiquarian
Cardinal Albani, and to be discussed here later, in Chapter 7. Elsewhere,
Vermeule salutes Michaelis as a victorious Hercules for the cataloguing
classes, 'whose labours in describing English collections have won him ever-
lasting renown'.31
In an undated letter to Michaelis, the translator of the text of Ancient
Marbles from German into English, C. A. M. Fennell, remarked that 'students
ought to bless you for your toil in their interests'.32 Scholars who have
subsequently worked on ancient sculptures in English collections pay tribute
to 'the valuable work' (A. H. Smith), the 'excellent work' (Bernard Ashmole),
the 'meritorious work' (Frederik Poulsen) of Michaelis.33 Ancient Marbles in
Great Britain is 'a great book' (Eugenie Strong), 'a firm basis for further
research' (Ashmole again), which 'over a century later still serves as the
basic and most generally accessible handbook on collections of ancient art
in private English houses' (Elizabeth Angelicoussis). 34 Notwithstanding the
indebtedness of later scholars, parts of the text that precedes the catalogue of
28
Newton, On the Method of the Study of Ancient Art, 29.
29
30
Vermeule and von Bothmer, 'Notes on a new edition of Michaelis. Part Two', 321. See
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, vii where he describes the exclusion of Egyptian,
Oriental and Anglo-Roman objects. His book deals with 'only the relics of Greek and Roman
origin which have been imported into Great Britain from classical soil'.
31
Vermeule, Sir John Soane's Museum, I. 29.
32
BNUS, MS 5751, 159.
Smith, Catalogue, preface; Kurtz, Bernard Ashmole, 32; and Poulsen, Greek and Roman
Portraits, introduction.
Strong, Catalogue, vi; Ashmole, Catalogue, viii; and Angelicoussis, The Holkham Collec-
tion, 19.
Figure 9. The Broadlands Hygieia.
what has been described as Michaelis' most significant work have not received
sufficient critical scrutiny of the sort its author practised.35 In this introduc-
tory essay extending to 200 pages, Michaelis outlines a history of the forma-
tion of sculpture collections in Britain and identifies three distinct periods in
the development of what he terms this branch of dilettantism. From the first
'stream of classical dilettantism' with the early 17th-century collectors of the
Stuart court came what Michaelis dubs the 'Golden Age of Classic Dilettant-
ism': the heyday of 18th-century English collecting when in 'an unintermit-
ting stream the ancient marbles of Rome poured into the palaces of the
aristocracy of Britain'.36 Third and finally came the decline of 'classic dilet-
tantism' with the so-called amateur collectors of the 19th century. The 'main
current to pursue the metaphor [of the stream, writes Michaelis], has now
been turned aside into another bed, and its diverging branches trickle into
rivulets unobserved, till they are finally lost in the sand, or leave only puddles
of stagnant water to be seen.'37 If Ancient Marbles in Great Britain signals the
shift from the pursuits of leisure to those of science, from aesthetic dilettant-
ism to archaeological professionalism, we must recognize the extent to which
our understanding of what constitutes dilettantism derives from Michaelis'
teleological narrative.38 Moreover, the 19th-century archaeologist is in no
doubt as to where the several brooklets that are the private collections of
ancient marbles in Great Britain should end up:
Any one who observes the collections at country houses with unprejudiced eyes,
cannot fail to notice on how few of them the glance of the present possessor rests
with real affection, and how different are his feelings to those of the amateurs who
collected them. In one house the marbles stand in dark rooms like warehouses; in
another they are perishing in a damp summer-house; in a third they lie about
disorderly in the corners; many collections cannot be found at all... The author of
the present work would desire nothing better than that the following Catalogue
should soon be pronounced out of date, and should only remain as a kind of
sepulchral monument of the private galleries of antiques in Great Britain; that a
great part of the collections it enumerates here should vanish from its lists, while the
names of their owners should be inscribed in letters of gold on the roll of donors to
the British Museum.39
35
Siebert, 'De Michaelis a Perdrizet', 98.
36
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 2-3 and 179. Picon, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, 12,
describes Michaelis' 'Golden Age of Classic Dilettantism' as 'a phrase that has come to epitomise
this era'.
37
38
On this shift from the pursuits of leisure to science see Waywell, 'Bernard Ashmole', 24 and
Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes. This subject deserves further investigation for its ruptured,
rather than (seemingly) seamless passage.
39
Michaelis was hardly an unprejudiced observer, although it is all the more

telling that this is how he cast himself. In his account of a portion of the 17th-
century Arundel collection, for example, he finds its neglect 'inexcusable, nay
absolutely criminal... they [the marbles] were so little regarded that on the
repair of the house they were used as building material!'; proceeding to cite
the dispersal and fragmentation of the Arundel collection as 'a warning of the
insecurity which attaches to such property when in private hands'.40 He
criticizes the installation and display of some such later private collections,
including the 'plain and very damp apartment' at Brocklesby Hall near Hull
(figure lOa and b), c not at all suited for sculptures, which are injured by the
damp'; the sculpture gallery at Marbury Hall in Cheshire, which is c more like a
cellar'; and the garden temple cum 'lumber room' at Ince Blundell Hall in
Lancashire, where it was not 'easy to thread one's way through—to say
nothing of studying accurately—the stores which are crowded together and
piled one on another'.41
The professor of archaeology goes on to recommend how the ancient
sculptures in these endangered private collections in Britain should be 'safely
secured... by being placed in the shelter of a public institution'.42 Acquisitions
by the British Museum—'the grandest museum in the world'—demonstrate,
he goes on, 'the right way of rescuing costly collections, brought together with
trouble and expense, from the vicissitudes of private possession'.43 In the
transference of possession from private owner to public museum, the collec-
tions would not only be rescued from vicissitudes, but could also realize what
Michaelis refers to as the 'very essence of art'.44 That is 'to exercise a refining
and ennobling influence on the public at large', to be 'made accessible to the
British spirit of enterprise', rather than confined to individual owners who are
said to (dis)regard their property 'like other antiquated house-furniture,
40
41
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 226, 501, and 335. Michaelis' criticisms were
not confined to private displays of sculpture; see his remarks on the dark and dusty basement
rooms of Oxford University galleries, 540.
42
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 180. This point is made by Ernst, 'Adolf
Michaelis', 79.
43
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 53. For additional eulogies about the British
Museum's acquisitions and its collections, see 2: 'Since the opening of this century the British
Museum had advanced with rapid strides to the supreme position of having the finest collection
of antiques in the world'; 150: 'the most distinguished museum of antiquities in the world'; and
175: 'No other museum in Europe can boast such a succession of important additions, following
so quickly one upon the other. No other museum would have been able to show year after year
such an uninterrupted series of presents, comprising sometimes single specimens, often whole
collections, but ever bearing witness to the lively interest felt on all hands in the national
institution.'
44
Figure lOa and b. 'not at all suited for sculptures' (Michaelis): The sculpture gallery at
Brocklesby Hall, near Hull.
rather as cumbersome heirlooms and survivals of an obsolete fashion than as

a source of real artistic pleasure'.45 Ancient Marbles in Great Britain 'has
remained a classic' though over 70 years old, wrote Cornelius Vermeule in
1955.46 For those interested in 19th-century museological theory and prac-
tice, on the centralizing of works of art into the national collections and the
educational role of the public museum, parts of its 200-page introductory
essay will continue to remain a classic.47
Although advocating a transference of possession for private collections
which in his opinion were endangered, Michaelis also expresses
... regret if the well-lighted sculpture-gallery in Woburn Abbey, the Pantheon in Ince
Blundell Hall, the noble hall at Deepdene with its surrounding galleries, the cloister at
Wilton House, or the niches in the saloons of Holkham Hall and Lansdowne House,
were to be shorn of their beautiful marbles; nor should we like to think of the
comfortable rooms of Newby Hall without the attraction for the eye which is supplied
by their antiques.48
Having become acquainted with ancient marbles in Great Britain, (in his own
words) 'to a greater extent than perhaps any other living archaeologist',
Michaelis is not wholly unsympathetic to their architectural sites of display;49
provided, that is, that they are well-lit and offer comfortable working condi-
tions for the aforementioned archaeologist. The British Museum's third
Greco-Roman saloon, from the north side looking west, as photographed
by their resident photographer Roger Fenton in 1857, is the antithesis of the
damp, dusty, dark, and crowded private galleries that Michaelis berates
(figure II). 50 The ancient sculptures that include examples from Charles
Townley's collection are displayed in a vista-like arrangement, presenting an
orderly line-up against the monochrome backdrop of the wall. They are
elevated on brackets and exhibited on pedestals inscribed with information
pertinent to the sculptures. The space is top-lit with natural light. Michaelis'
45
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 181-2 and 173. On The Fall and Rise of the
Stately Home, see Mandler.
46
Vermeule, 'Notes on a new edition of Michaelis', 129.
47
See Barlow and Trodd, Governing Cultures; Black, On Exhibit, Waterfield, 'Art Galleries and
the Public: A survey of three centuries', Art Treasures of England* 13-59; Coombes, Reinventing
Africa; Macleod, 'Art collecting and Victorian middle-class taste'.
48
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 182. For these collections, see Angelicoussis,
Woburn Abbey, Vaughan, 'Henry Blundell's sculpture collection', 13-21; Waywell, Lever and
Hope Sculptures; Angelicoussis, The Holkham Collection; Stillman, 'The Gallery for Lansdowne
House', 75-80; Middleton, 'The sculpture gallery at Newby Hall', 48-60.
49
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, xi.
50
See Date, 'Photographer on the roof, 10-12 and Date and Hamber, 'The origins of
photography', 309-25. For a penetrating account of photography on archaeological research
expeditions, see the essays in Lyons, Papadopoulos, Stewart et al, Antiquity and Photography.
Figure 11. The British Museum's third Greco-Roman saloon, as photographed by

Roger Fenton in 1857.
26 'The loving labours of a learned German'
field notebooks for 1873 and 1877 and an annotated copy of Ancient Marbles,
in the Bibliotheque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg, contain sketches
of ground plans, noting the disposition of the sculptures, in the purpose-built
galleries at Newby Hall and Petworth, in the hall at Deepdene, the Pantheon at
Ince Blundell, and the gallery and dining room of Lansdowne House (to be
discussed in Chapter 7). 51 In 'tolerably motley confusion' is how Michaelis
described the arrangement of the sculptures in Henry Blundell's pantheon at
Ince Blundell Hall.52
In the preface of Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, Michaelis characterizes it
as 'my duty, putting aside for some years other tasks of a more inviting nature,
to undertake the irksome mosaic-like work of drawing up a descriptive
catalogue'.53 The conscientious Michaelis was not the first German specialist
to apply his expertise onto the study of British collections. According to an
evaluation of Michaelis' volume published in The Saturday Review.
To the loving labours of a learned German the owners of art treasures in England are
for the second time indebted for a full description of their rich possessions. Waagen
gave to the private collections of pictures the advantage of his inspection and
cultivated acquaintance with art, and now Michaelis performs the same office for
the still less known private hoards of antique sculptures for which our country is so
remarkable.54
The privileging of the study of painting over that of sculpture has persisted
since the 19th century.55 Dr Gustav Waagen was the Director of the Royal
Picture Gallery in Berlin and the author of a 3-volume survey of the Works of
Art in England (London, 1838), which was later revised, enlarged, and pub-
lished in 3 volumes as Treasures of Art in Great Britain (London, 1854).
During three research visits, in 1835, 1850, and 1851, Waagen studied 28
collections in and around London, nine in England and a further seven in
Scotland. As a foreign authority on their cultural heritage, he was consulted
by the British political establishment in all manner of matters relating to the
collecting, cataloguing, and display of their visual arts, particularly in relation
to the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum.56 For the former,
he advocated a much more systematic educational provision, in the form of
short catalogues and labels on the gallery walls, preferring a schematic hang of
51
BNUS, MS, 5747, 99e; 5742 (page 55); 5743 (page 32); 4741 (pages 26, 75, and 78).
52 Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 335.
53
54
2 December 1882, 738. BNUS, MS 5751, 307. In a letter to George Scharf (1 July 1876)
Michaelis describes his 'Handbook of classic sculpture in England' as 'a kind of supplement to
Waagen's Treasures of Art'. National Portrait Gallery Archive, London.
55
A point made by Waterfield, Palaces of Art, 24 and Strong, 'Antiques in the collection', 4.
56
See Waterfield and lilies, 'Waagen in England', 47-59.
paintings that showed the historical development and decline of the art,
rather than the episodic highlights of traditional masters. This foreign colon-
ization of the fine arts in British collections was not lost on a reviewer of
Ancient Marbles in The Athenceum, who described it as both 'mortifying ... to
our national pride' and 'humiliating... that no Englishman has compiled a
catalogue of the antiques in our country, because not one in fifty has the
slightest idea that one hundred and one distinct collections of sculpture and
inscriptions exist in Great Britain'.57 Writing to Michaelis in the 1870s, the
Revd Napier reiterates this opinion, claiming that 'the English public is very
unsympathetic about archaeology'.58
When assessing Michaelis' contribution to the historiography of sculpture
collections in Britain, we have then to be aware of the dominance of German
archaeological scholarship in the 19th century. In a letter to Michaelis of 9
November 1882, the 9th Duke of Bedford defines Teutonic learning in terms
of its 'conscientious treatment, respect for truth and sounder knowledge' than
the 'writings of other nations'.59 Not surprisingly, it is the German reviewers
of Ancient Marbles who dwell on their pioneering archaeological work—'The
great task of our time, particularly embraced by German archaeology, has
been to make an inventory of every single surviving antique artefact'—and
cite Michaelis' impeccable academic credentials: 'In Adolf Michaelis, the
English private collections have someone who has successfully worked for a
quarter of a century on the development of archaeology having been trained
in the painstakingly thorough school of Otto Jahn, he has demonstrated to all
sides his right to be heard in questions of classical scholarship.'60 H. Heyde-
mann applies Goethe's comment on the translation of his essay on Leonardo's
Last Supper to Ancient Marbles that 'Druck und Papier ist England', before
reminding readers of the Philologische Rundschau: 'The academic content,
however, is wholly German work, of which we have every reason to be
proud.'61
57
The Athenczum, 21 April 1883, 511-12.
58
23 August 1877. BNUS, MS 5751, 64.
59
BNUS, MS 5751, 218. See Marchand, Down from Olympus.
60
'Zu der grossen Aufgabe, die sich vor allem die deutsche Archaologie in unserer Zeit
gestellt hat, der Inventarisierung sammtlicher erhaltenen Antiken ist hier ein wichtiger Beitrag
geliefert', Deutsche Litteraturzeitung, 23 Februar 1884, 282; 'Die englischen Privatsammlungen
aber haben in Adolf Michaelis einen Beschreiber gefunden, der seit einem Vierteljahrhundert
erfolgreich an der Entwickelung der Archaologie mitarbeitet, der in der gewissenhaften Schule
Otto Jahns erzogen seine Berechtigung, in Fragen der Altertumswissenschaft gehort zu werden,
nach alien Seiten hin dargethan hat', Philologische Wochenschrift, 26 Mai 1883, 2. Michaelis
studied under Jahn (who was his uncle) at the University of Leipzig.
61
'Der wissenschaftliche Inhalt aber ist ganz deutsche Arbeit, auf welche wir stolz zu sein
alien Grund haben', Philologische Rundschau. BNUS, MS 5751, 297.
As important as the Germanic intellectual tradition, of which Michaelis is

characterized as an exemplary product, are the foundations—both physical
and discursive—of intellectual life in the 19th century, of its institutions like
the university and the museum, its professionalization and its specialization.62
For the 'mosaic-like' method of Michaelis is as evident in the over 2,000
ancient marbles he catalogued 'with the thoroughness and zeal characteristic
of the German scholar', according to The Times, as in those pieces excluded on
account of their not conforming to his academic specialism—of Greek and
Roman antiquity.63 We have already seen how Michaelis weeded out modern
sculptures, Joseph Nollekens' Boy on a Dolphin (figure 5), and so-called
decorative furniture, a pair of granite tables and another pair of porphyry,
in his catalogue of the Broadlands collection. This privileging of ancient
sculptures at the exclusion of modern pieces, even modern masterpieces,
characterizes the work as a whole.
Take the collection of Thomas Hope, acquired from the early 1790s into the
19th century and dispersed at auction in 1917. The ancient marbles and their
master have been exhaustively documented in a monograph by David Watkin
(1968), a catalogue by Geoffrey Waywell (1986), and now (2008) a volume of
collected essays on Hope as a Regency designer, patron, and collector accom-
panying a major exhibition in London and New York.64 In contrast with most
of the late 18th-century collectors we have encountered so far (Palmerston,
Lansdowne), Hope was not a British aristocrat or gentleman, but the son of a
merchant banker from Amsterdam. Along with the architect John Soane, he
was one of a new social breed of urban collectors. When Michaelis was
granted access to the collection it was in the possession of Thomas Hope's
daughter-in-law, Anne, whose husband, Henry Thomas Hope, had assembled
it at their country property, Deepdene in Surrey. Michaelis' unpublished 1877
notebook contains a sketch of the ground plan of the arcaded entrance hall
and gallery at Deepdene (50 feet x 45 feet), which was added by Henry
Thomas Hope from 1836 to 1841 (figure 12). Using Michaelis' account in
Ancient Marbles, Waywell found it difficult to be certain which sculpture was
placed where, but judged that ancient and modern sculptures were mixed
indiscriminately.65 For our purposes, Michaelis' plan is less of a clue to the
display of the collection after Thomas Hope's death than evidence of its post-
classical contents that were excluded from Michaelis' numbered catalogue.
62
See Brand, The Study of the Past, McClelland, The German Experience of Professionalisation;
Levine, The Amateur and the Professional; Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life.
63
10 January 1883. BNUS, MS 5751.
64
Watkin, Thomas Hope; Waywell, Lever and Hope Sculptures; Watkin and Hewat-Jaboor,
Thomas Hope.
65
Waywell, Lever and Hope Sculptures, 62.
Figure 12. Michaelis' sketch of the entrance hall and gallery at Deepdene, 1877.
Along with the noteworthy restored ancient sculptures like the Antinous, the
Dionysus and Idol, and the Apollo and Hyacinthus are the following modern
sculptural productions: Antonio Canova's Venus (figure 13), John Flaxman's
Aurora and Cephalus, and Bertel Thorvaldsen's Jason and Shepherd.66 In
addition to these ancient and modern examples, Michaelis' plan of the hall
further identifies imitations of famous classical sculptures, the originals of
which were in Italian collections: the Belvedere Antinous (Vatican), the Apollo
Belvedere (Vatican), the Medici Venus (Uffizi), and in the centre of the hall at
Deepdene stood a copy of the Florentine Boar (Uffizi). Here then is evidence
of the diversity of the sculptures in the Hope collection—ancient and modern,
originals and copies—a diversity that is overlooked by Michaelis in his
rigorous pursuit of the specialized study of antiquity. Nor is Hope's an
isolated example. In collections contemporary with Hope and catalogued by
Michaelis at Petworth, Woburn Abbey, and Sir John Soane's Museum, the
66
On these sculptures, see Honour, 'Canova's statues of Venus', 658-70; Clay, British Sculp-
ture, 9-11; Clifford, 'Thomas Hope's Shepherd boy', 12-16.
ancient marbles are scrutinized, while their modern counterparts by the likes
of Canova and Flaxman, that were original to these collections, are excluded.
In Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, Michaelis famously wrote of the
architect Sir John Soane's house-museum at 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields in
London:
Non multum sed multa appears to have been his motto in collecting; for there is
something of everything. Along with a few choice specimens of high value, or at least
of considerable interest, there is an immeasurable chaos of worthless fragments, of all
times, from all countries, of all kinds of art, originals and copies mixed together. All
this is crammed into the narrow limits of a private house, and is arranged in so
ingenious a manner that no corner, however dark, is left unoccupied. In this respect
the architect has achieved marvels; nevertheless this labyrinth stuffed full of fragments
[figure 14] is the most tasteless arrangement that can be seen; it has the same kind of
perplexing and oppressive effect on the spectator as if the whole large stock of an old-
clothes-dealer had been squeezed into a doll's house.67
No wonder Michaelis was perplexed and oppressed. With his professional

archaeological criteria, Soane's collection was seemingly chaos in its confused
chronology ('of all times'), geography ('from all countries'), and typology ('of
all kinds of art'). Many of Soane's pieces were not only in themselves worthless
fragments (at least to Michaelis' critical eye), but were also displayed rather
disarrayed, in such a manner—dark, overcrowded, and invisible—that trans-
gressed the basic principles of scientific study. In contrast, the moderate
dimensions of Robert Adam's gallery at Newby Hall (to be discussed later,
in Chapter 6) he found 'greatly conducive to quiet enjoyment of the mar-
bles'.68 Though reportedly unable to view many of the sculptures, Michaelis'
published account of the Soane museum overlooked any pieces that in his
opinion did not qualify as ancient Greek or Roman, with the exception of the
famous Egyptian alabaster sarcophagus discovered by Belzoni in 1817.69
Cornelius Vermeule took on the daunting task that was to make order out
of the bewildering chaos in Soane's labyrinth, increasing Michaelis' 1882
inventory of 39 ancient objects to 870 and counting.70 A lifetime's interdis-
ciplinary study would be required to do justice to the entire contents of 13
Lincoln's Inn Fields, which a review of Soane's Public and Private Buildings in
The Athenaeum for 15 April 1828 described as 'the very sanctum of our worthy
architect. Here he has collected his rich store of art and antiquity,—here he
revels in architectural glory, dwelling magician-like, among fairie chambers of
67
68
69
70
Vermeule, Sir John Soane's Museum.
Figure 13. Antonio Canova, Venus, c. 1817-20, formerly in the Hope Collection, now
Leeds Art Museums and Galleries.
Figure 14. 'This labyrinth stuffed full of fragments' (Michaelis): view of the corridor
in Sir John Soane's house-museum.
his own creating. In its kind it is perfect,—the ichonography of the very mind
of the architect—every where difficulties surmounted—ingenuity tri-
umphed—pictures, statues, models, and the most precious relics of antiquity,
all provided for.'71 Michaelis' bewildered critique of Soane's house-museum
echoes that of Waagen, who found in 'this arbitrary mix of heterogenous
objects, something of the unpleasantness of a feverish dream'.72
In a letter of 26 March 1822, the Duke of Bedford mentioned how he
should like to have two sculpture galleries at Woburn Abbey, with one for
antiques, and the other for modern sculpture. While Bedford 'content[ed]
myself with what I have got and "dream the rest"...', some sixty years later
Michaelis excluded all examples of modern sculpture from his definitive
catalogue, including those at Woburn.73
With its introductory essay on the influx of ancient sculptures into Britain,
Ancient Marbles was always more than a dictionary, even one in its Sunday
best, as it was lauded in a review in the Philologische Wochenschrift.74 Con-
temporary British and German reviewers concur in finding this essay 'unex-
pectedly interesting'; 'a valuable contribution to the history of archaeology';
'adding a charm to his book which its mere archaeological value would not
have created'.75 So while the catalogue presented the latest advances in the
scientific discipline of archaeology, the accompanying essay was seen as
contributing to the nascent historiography of the discipline.
However, in dealing in the essay with a timeframe of over 200 years,
Michaelis underestimates the vastly different social, economic, and intellec-
tual climates in which the 66 collections in his study were accumulated: from
the Earl of Arundel, Thomas Howard, a courtier-collector of the 1600s, to the
handful of amateurs representative of'the decay of antiquarian dilettantism'
in the late 1800s.76 By privileging ancient over modern sculptures and Greco-
Roman content over early modern context, the science of archaeology has
effectively fabricated a later 19th-century account of sculpture collections in
Britain that as much misrepresents their art historical specificity and material
diversity as represents through autopsies over 2,000 individual antique spe-
cimens.
71
From a press cutting in the Library of the Soane Museum.
72
Waagen, Treasures of Art, II. 321.
73
Quoted in Angelicoussis, Woburn Abbey, 29.
74
'Lexikon im Feiertagsgewand', Philologische Wochenschrift, 26 Mai 1883, 1.
The Athena3um, 21 April 1883, 512; 'sie ist ein wertvoller Beitrag zur Geschichte der
Archaologie', Deutsche Litteraturzeitung, 23 Februar 1884, 283; The Academy, 1 October 1882,
266.
76
Even the archaeological importance of the majority of these marbles is seen

as limited—'Roman works turned out by the gross'—with the exception of
the original Greek sculptures of the 5th century BC, the Elgin marbles or
Parthenon sculptures in the British Museum, and the odd pearl, like the
Lansdowne Amazon (figure 1) and the Broadlands head of Juno (figure 7).77
Michaelis' opinion of the Disney Collection in the Fitzwilliam Museum at
Cambridge as 'trash rather than treasure' might be extended to virtually all
the ancient marbles he encountered in Britain.78 These 'works of [the] second
or third rank... [he writes] cannot be dispensed with for filling in and
correcting our survey of the development of ancient sculpture... all the
marbles contained in private galleries belong, with unimportant exceptions,
to this class [of copies and minor works] of Graeco-Roman sculpture.'79 A
review of Ancient Marbles in TheAthenceum reminds its readers that 'from the
purely artistic point-of-view, more than half our vast collections of sculpture
are rubbish—late copies by mechanical carvers'.80 In summary, Ancient Mar-
bles in Great Britain, in Michaelis' learned and (ever)lasting opinion, were not
so much first-rate masterpieces as fillers: not artistic rarities but rubbish.81 To
borrow a metaphor from Michaelis, not grain but chaff.82
In an unpublished letter of 30 November 1889 to Herbert Smith, Lord
Lansdowne's agent, at Lansdowne House in London, Michaelis discloses
having made unsuccessful overtures to sell the collection to the Berlin Mu-
seum. Notwithstanding what he terms in Ancient Marbles its 'truly aristocratic
character' (whatever that means), Michaelis explains:83
there is an obstacle in the 'Roman' character of the Lansdowne collection (alike with
nearly all the English collections), which I am afraid will make it extremely difficult to
find out any buyer willing to offer a prize which might seem acceptable to H[is].
E[xcellency). The magnet of the directions of museums as well as of private collectors
actually veers towards the acquisition of original Greek works, the great activity
displayed in excavating our Greek and Asiatic soil giving good chances of satisfying
such wishes. Consequently all Roman marbles and Roman copies of Greek originals,
77
78
79
80
The Athcnawm, 21 April 1883, 512,
81
On the longevity of this attitude, see, most recently, Amanda Claridge's review of Jane
Fejfer's volume on the Roman male portraits in the Ince Blundell Collection: 'the archaeological
appeal of such refashioned relics is decidedly limited ... because they hardly count as ancient';
'even the modern duds have a certain horrific charm'. Apollo, 150 (1999), 58. E. Bartman's
'Imaging the Roman male: Henry Blundell's collection and the Antonine princes', Journal of
Roman Archaeology, 14 (2001), 560-6, is far more sympathetic; Bartman is working on the ideal
sculptures in the Ince collection.
82
83
which were so highly valued in the past century and in the beginning of the present,
are now rather low in course, even if they are such as compared with other similar
works of an extraordinary character as some of the Lansdowne Marbles really are.84
The later decades of the 19th century witnessed the usurping of Rome by
Greece and Asia Minor, of Roman copies by Greek originals, and of histories
of private collecting by the institutional practices of excavation. That the
market for the former collapsed would seem to support Gavin Hamilton's
claim to Lord Lansdowne in a letter of 1786 that in regard to his collection of
antique statues 'they have no intrinsic value, but rise and fall like the stocks'.85
In his author's preface in Ancient Marbles, Michaelis refers to his volume as a
'dry, but, I hope, not useless work'.86 In offering this critique of his methodology,
it has not been my intention to diminish in any way his seminal contribution to
the study of ancient marbles in Britain. The statistics speak for themselves: this
foreign academic travelled the length and breadth of Britain, gaining access to
over 60 socially exclusive, and in some cases geographically inaccessible, private
collections in order to catalogue their Greco-Roman contents. Ancient Marbles
contains a nigh-exhaustive catalogue of over 2,000 archaeological specimens in
Britain. Michaelis' introductory essay represents a survey of the history of
collecting ordered chronologically by collector that was not only pioneering
when it was published, but that still enjoys currency over a century later. For all
its many and deserved accolades, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain must be
situated as a product of the professionalization and specialization of the 19th
century, signalling a shift from the pursuits of leisure to those of science. As a
student and later a practitioner of the German scholastic tradition, Michaelis
practised first-hand, empirical study of ancient sculptures, and classified and
categorized them within existing taxonomies. Hence his weeding out of artefacts
that did not conform to his particular areas of interest, dismissing the majority
of their collected contents as second-rate Roman trash, rather than Greek
treasure. A review of Ancient Marbles in the Deutsche Litteraturzeitung for
1884 hoped that Michaelis would serve future cataloguers as a template.87 The
remainder of this chapter examines the extent to which the study of ancient
sculptures in British private collections remains indebted to his pioneering
work.
84
BNUS, MS 5747, 8d. Michaelis' arguments to Smith are echoed in Furtwangler's Meis-
terwerke, ix. Furtwangler's methodology—'eine neue feste Grundlage zu gewinnen zu dem Baue
einer Geschichte der statuarischen Skulptur bei den Greichen' based on master-sculptors
identified through references in ancient texts—is summarized in Michaelis, A Century of
Archaeological Discoveries, 307-8.
85
Smith, Catalogue, 87, letter xxxvi.
86
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, xiv.
87
BNUS MS 5751,303.
In the volumes of Michaelis' successors, the fragmentation of the content of

British collections into Greco-Roman as opposed to modern sculptures, and
the dominant application of ancient narratives over histories of early modern
collecting, is even more pronounced. For instance, when Frederik Poulsen,
Keeper of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek in Copenhagen, published his Greek
and Roman Portraits in English Country Houses (Oxford, 1923), examples of
112 portraits from nine English collections were reproduced in photographs
and arranged chronologically 'in order [writes Poulsen] to facilitate a survey
of the bearing of my work on different phases of ancient iconography, and to
arrange together portraits that are contemporaneous or related to one an-
other'.88 In consequence of his strict iconographical sequence, a Roman bust
of a man of the Antonine age (no. 84) from the Earl of Leicester's early 18th-
century aristocratic country house collection at Holkham Hall in Norfolk is
reproduced alongside a portrait head of the emperor Marcus Aurelius as a
young man (no. 85) from what we know to be a very different sort of
collection, both in terms of its heterogeneous content and kaleidoscopic
arrangement, formed almost a century later by the professional architect
John Soane. Two of the collections represented in Poulsen's study, Holkham
Hall in Norfolk and Syon in Middlesex, were never visited by Michaelis.
Another two—the Soane Museum and Lansdowne House—were not country
houses at all, but London townhouses.
Like Michaelis in the 1870s, Poulsen's catalogue refers to the obstacles
encountered in the study and photography of Greek and Roman portrait
busts, many of which 'were placed on top of lofty book-cases, or stood in high
wall-niches, or were to be found in dark corners' necessitating the construc-
tion of 'tall and shaky scaffolding with steps and boards' or the use of
reflecting mirrors 'so as to neutralize flat or partial light or deep shadows'.
The garden temple at Ince Blundell Hall remained 'a chaos of statues, busts,
beams, plinths, packing cases with decayed straw, and casts of the Elgin
marbles, a regular Sleeping Beauty idyll which has not yet found its prince'.89
The arrangement of the pantheon was more orderly, as seen in a photograph
in which Poulsen, appearing like a bust himself, diligently catalogues a bust
placed in profile before him (figure 15). Various of these sculptures and their
distinctive mode of display—in a reduced version of the pantheon—will be
fleshed out in later chapters.
88
Poulsen, Greek and Roman Portraits, introduction. The book was translated into English by
the Revd G. C. Richards, a fellow of Oriel College, Oxford.
89
Poulsen, Greek and Roman Portraits, 18.
In 1950, Poulsen published a book in Danish and Swedish with the title
Spring in Spain; Summer in England.90 In the second part of what is effectively a
travel journal, he describes his experiences as a foreign scholar working on
ancient busts in private collections in post-First World War Britain; in a nation
recovering from a war that, as he observes from his train compartment, 'had
brought destruction and many people had fallen just like the oak woods of
Scotland and Wales' that had been felled for timber for the trenches. Not-
withstanding his resolution to provide a 'thorough, impartial description, as
far removed from snobbery as from middle-class envy', Poulsen's narrative is
fundamentally coloured by his earlier exposures to the British aristocracy in
the literary fictions of Oscar Wilde and Elinor Glyn. For instance, Inchture in
Scotland he describes as can idyll out of Dickens. Every breath smells of Old
England: the smell from the garden, the clean light rooms, the furniture with
newly-washed covers, and the very sentimental pictures on the walls.' Its
resident country house, Rossie Priory, home of Lord and Lady Kinnaird, is
no less than (one of England's small paradises'—in Perthshire, Scotland!
Overall, Poulsen is charmed by the aristocracy's 'gentle pleasure in life and
happiness' and feels deeply unsympathetic towards those he characterizes as
'the dregs', 'the smelly rabble', or the uneducated proletariat. Though the war
had decimated the aristocracy's male heirs, their thoroughbreds, and their
number of servants, to Poulsen theirs is 'a life in pure smile and sunshine'. That
said he is not averse, like Michaelis before him, to criticizing the lack of
specialist knowledge about their inherited works of art.
In the introduction to Greek and Roman Portraits, Poulsen explains how his
interest in private collections in England as a 'hitherto unknown' source for
the history of ancient sculpture (what about Michaelis?) was awakened during
a visit to Ince Blundell Hall in Lancashire, home of the most prolific late 18th-
century English sculpture collector, Henry Blundell. The bulk of Blundell's
marbles were donated to the Merseyside County Museum in Liverpool in
1959, and since 1984 they have been the focus of a research project between
the national museums and galleries on Merseyside and the universities of
Liverpool and Copenhagen. The fruits of this institutional collaboration will
be five volumes, either published or forthcoming, which deal with the collec-
tion typologically: volume I is devoted to portraits, II to ash chests, III to
statuary, IV to reliefs and sarcophagi, and V to the history of the collection
and its modern pieces. These volumes represent a long-overdue revision of
the ancient pieces as published by Michaelis in 1882 (in 'eighty pages of his
90
Poulsen's book has been translated by Jane Fejfer and is forthcoming in a volume with
Edmund Southworth. I am grateful to Jane for generously supplying me with a copy of the
manuscript. For a taste, see Fejfer and Southworth, 'Summer in England', 179-82.
Figure 15. Frederik Poulsen cataloguing busts in the pantheon at Ince Blundell Hall.
volume', noted The Saturday Review), various of its Greek and Roman
portraits by Poulsen, and in a monograph entitled A Catalogue of the Ancient
Marbles at Ince Blundell Hall (Oxford, 1929) by the Professor of Archaeology
at University College London, Bernard Ashmole. In his Autobiography, Ash-
mole refers to his agenda for this volume as follows: 'My aim was to illustrate
everything with my own [my emphasis] photographs, limiting my descrip-
tions to the restorations of the piece and its exact condition, or to details
which the photographs could not make clear.'91 What Ashmole classified as
'everything' was in fact some 413 specimens (roughly three-quarters of the
collection) divided into three classes: statues, heads and busts, and reliefs. The
'descriptions have been kept as short and dry as possible', explains the preface
of his Catalogue-, the sculptures themselves are reproduced in multiple, small-
scale views (figure 16)—photography being an archaeological tool that
91
Kurtz, Bernard Ashmole, 32.
Michaelis was unable to exploit in his otherwise 'full catalogue'.92 The aim of
the photographs and descriptions, writes Ashmole, is 'of rendering the ma-
terial accessible to scholars and providing, not a substitute for autopsy—there
is none—but a means of judging which objects are worth further study'.93
A review of Ashmole's monograph in the Journal of Hellenic Studies for 1930
reckoned the text and images 'complementary rather than duplicatory', but,
echoing Michaelis, thought the collection itself'like most of those made in the
eighteenth century... a dreary one'.94
Ashmole's 'handsome volume, easy to read and handle, and useful in an
unpretentious way' has had a profound impact on the fate of the designated
'dreary' collection when it was donated to the Liverpool Corporation in
1959.95 According to unpublished contemporary correspondence, the post-
antique sculptures that had not been included in Ashmole's Catalogue on
account of being designated 'only late decorative pieces of no antiquarian
interest' were excluded from the gift to Liverpool, along with paintings,
bronzes, and books, as being thought subsidiary to a collection of ancient
marbles.96 Those few modern pieces 'which would greatly enrich the sculpture
in the Walker Art Gallery' suffered additional blows by being separated from
their ancient counterparts with which they had formed a collection, and in
one instance a sculpture of the nymph Anchyrrhoe, the daughter of the River
Nile, from the Villa d'Este at Tivoli, was decapitated. Her modern head with a
lotus flower, said to be by the Italian sculptors Ferdinando Lisandroni and
Antonio d'Este (figure 17), was earmarked for the Walker; her headless body
with its walking pose remains the property of Liverpool Museum. 97 The
modern marbles and small objets d'art, which were considered 'of no anti-
quarian interest' by Ashmole in the 1920s and following Ashmole's catalogue
into the 1950s, are now recognized as of considerable art historical import-
ance. Items remaining in the possession of Blundell's descendants include
well-known works like Antonio Canova's meditative sculpture of the nymph
Psyche contemplating a butterfly held in her hands (figure 18). In addition to
this work by the sculptor hailed by his contemporaries as the greatest in the
world, Blundell's collection included more obscure 18th-century copies of
92
Ashmole, Catalogue, vii. In Michaelis' memorable phrase, 'By such means [photography]
the mountain has come to the prophet'. A Century of Archaeological Discoveries, 303.
93
Ashmole, Catalogue, vii.
94
Journal of Hellenic Studies, 50 (1930), 156.
95
Kurtz, Bernard Ashmole, 35.
96
The correspondence cited here and below forms part of the Ince Blundell archive at
Liverpool Museum. The papers are uncatalogued.
97
On Lisandroni, see Pietrangeli, 'Ferdinando Lisandroni scultore romano', 381-8; Carloni,
'Scultori e finanzieri', 191-232. The head of Anchyrrhoe is attributed to Lisandroni and Antonio
d'Este by Sforza, 'Antonio d'Este a Roma', 269.
Figure 16. Photographs by Bernard Ashmole showing multiple views of the Ince
Athena from his Catalogue of the Ancient Marbles at Ince Blundell Hall (Oxford, 1929).
ancient marble masterpieces like the Vatican Cleopatra and the Dying Gladi-
ator (figure 19), along with bronzes, terracottas, marble pillars, and table-
tops.98 Haskell and Penny's ground-breaking study of 1981 re-evaluating the
hitherto denigrated status of the sculptural copy has particular import for
unknown modern marbles formerly at Ince, like the Boy with a Bird and the
Girl with a Nest executed in marble by Canova's pupil, Antonio d'Este (figure
20a and b).99 Charles Burney saw the ancient prototypes at the Villa Borghese
in Rome in 1770, which he recorded in his journal as being '2 little Cupids,
companions, one of which is laughing at a bird in his hand in a very pretty
and droll manner'.100
At a meeting of Liverpool's Libraries, Museums and Arts Committee on 18
December 1959, it was noted in respect of Blundell's marbles 'that classical
sculpture is to the ordinary man in the street an acquired taste'. The ancient
pieces were evaluated by the committee according to a hierarchy within which
Michaelis, Poulsen, and Ashmole operated; that is, in terms of the best pieces,
secondary pieces, and fragments. While 'the plums of this collection' would be
put on permanent exhibition (pending a new museum building), there was
talk of loaning some pieces to the Classics department of Liverpool University
and to some of the city's grammar schools. One Colonel Cotton explained,
'We teach people the Classics and here there are virtually no facilities for
getting familiar with some of the great works of the Classical period.' The
problem, as we have seen, is that when marbles from late 18th-century British
collections like that of Blundell were imposed by archaeological scrutiny into
an ancient chronological schema, not only were the collections distorted and
fragmented, but the majority of the specimens were (dis)regarded as rub-
bish—with the exception of celebrity sculptures like Lansdowne's Wounded
Amazon with its Polykleitan pedigree (figure 1).
When the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired the Lans-
downe Amazon at auction in 1930, American curators were keen to inscribe
this prized specimen of ancient Greek sculpture into their own historiograph-
ical tradition. A piece in the museum Bulletin for 1933 explains how almost
two centuries after being excavated 'she finds herself in the country which at
the time of her discovery was in the process of formation'; 101 a process, as the
article is at pains to point out, that was aided by her former owner Lord
Lansdowne, who pursued a policy of conciliation towards the American
98
Canova's Psyche is Clifford, The Three Graces, no. 20. See Johns' discussion of ' "That
Illustrious and Generous Nation": Canova and the British' in Antonio Canova and the Politics of
Patronage, 145-70; Blundell's Psyche is referred to at 151.
99
Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique.
100
Poole, Music, Men, and Manners, 208.
101
The Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 28 (1933), 5.
Figure 17. Ferdinando Lisandroni and Antonio d'Este, Head of Anchyrrhoe.

Figure 18. Antonio Canova, Psyche, c.1790.
Figure 19. Reduced marble copy of the Dying Gladiator.
Figure 20a and b. Boy with a Bird and Girl with a Nest by Antonio d'Este after
originals in the Villa Borghese.
colonies and conceded independence to them as Prime Minister in 1782.

Predictably, no mention is made of Lansdowne's resolve in 1774 to get rid of
this sculpture as an unwanted duplicate, and Gavin Hamilton's repeated
efforts over the course of over a decade to fulfil his desire. All this is relevant
to us because during the 1950s it was an American classical archaeologist,
Cornelius C. Vermeule, who shouldered the Herculean labour that Michaelis
had made his own—of cataloguing ancient marbles in Great Britain. In an
article entitled 'Classical collections in British country houses' he explained:
We are prone to think of field work in archaeology purely as the uncovering of new
material with pick and shovel. Those who have seen what the museum storerooms of
Italy and Greece have yielded in the past generation know that field work in archae-
ology can often assume the form of a second 'excavation' of material discovered and
forgotten in a previous age. Such is the case with the 'discovery' of an entire country
house filled with unrecorded classical sculptures [Cobham Hall, Kent], within an easy
hour's drive from London's West End. 102
One of the challenges for later archaeologists was to discover ancient marbles
in country house collections that were unknown to Michaelis, 'lurk[ing] here
and there in unknown hiding-places'.103 Vermeule had incorporated some
such specimens into his 1953 Ph.D. thesis, 'Studies in Roman Numismatic
art' at University College London, in which Roman coins and gems were
treated as an integral part of Roman imperial commemorative art, rather
than as chronological or subjective illustrations (to paraphrase the preface).
'Notes on a new edition of Michaelis' was published in three parts by
Vermeule and his colleague D. von Bothmer in the American Journal of
Archaeology for 1955, 1956, and 1959. An unpublished typescript in the
Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British Museum dated
June 1954 reveals that Vermeule's revised edition of Michaelis was intended
as a far greater undertaking than the published articles would suggest.
Vermeule's aim in Ancient Marbles in Great Britain: A survey of sculptures of
Greek and Roman origin which have been imported into Great Britain from
the Mediterranean countries in Renaissance and later times, in 4 volumes, was
to 'resurvey and reinventory classical antiquities in Great Britain'. For
the foreign scholar travelling and working at the end of the 19th century,
England had been characterized as 'a grave for the dead', 'a strongbox of
works of ancient sculpture' held 'there as it were spell-bound'.104 By the
middle of the following century the so-called 'grave' had been looted,
the spell irrecoverably broken by 'the non cloyed appetites and long
purses of American millionaires', bemoaned The Times.105 While Michaelis
102
Vermeule, 'Classical collections in British country houses', 12-13. On page 17, Vermeule
listed the collections that were accessible on a day trip from London, as well as those further
afield.
103
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 87. See also Michaelis' comments in
the Journal of Hellenic Studies, 5 (1884), 143: 'the hope 1 expressed in the preface [of
Ancient Marbles], that 1 should be informed of marbles existing in private collections which
might have escaped my notice by their owners or other competent persons, has completely
failed'.
104
W. Burger, Les Tresors a"Art en Angleterre (Paris, 1865), 1. Quoted in Michaelis, Ancient
Marbles in Great Britain, 1 and ('a strongbox') 70.
105
The Times, 10 January 1883, 3.
had written the (still standard) account of the formation of classical collec-
tions in Britain, Vermeule's manuscript surveys the dissolution of 25 out
of 36 collections 'liquidated' in the previous 35 years, from the Hope sale
in 1917 and including the 1948 auction of marbles from Rossie Priory
in Perthshire, Scotland. Vermeule cites the latter as a model of ill success
in its fifth-rate cataloguing for an auction that made a fraction of its
value. He writes, 'When art history records the final chapter in the migration
of antiquities from British country houses, in the case of Rossie Priory it
must be said that never was Britain's artistic heritage sold so cheaply.'
In an article published in the 1970s devoted to another collection from
Michaelis' 'Golden Age of Classic Dilettantism', Vermeule surmised that
'several chapters of ancient history could be written around the marbles at
Petworth [in Sussex], from Athens at the height of its glory to the Roman
provinces beset by barbarian inroads'.106 The question remains as to why he
should employ these sculptures to illustrate a schematic version of ancient
Greek and Roman history, when the history of art they lend themselves to is
that of the early modern period. Contextualized within the second half of the
18th century, what to the late Victorian specialist was archaeological trash
becomes art historical treasure. Its largely indiscriminating collectors (at least
by rigorous 19th-century archaeological critiques) are 'the English dilettanti',
said by the dealer Thomas Jenkins in 1774 to 'make the first figure in
Europe'.107 Fourteen years earlier (23 January 1760), Paulo Paciaudi in
Rome had fumed in a letter to Comte de Caylus, 'Je suis vraiment fache que
ces diables d'Anglais emportent dans leurs pays ces belles antiquites.'108 The
chapters that follow focus on a number of those damned Englishmen who
reportedly dominated the market for antiquities from Rome in the 1760s and
70s, where the sale of ancient sculptures in Rome a decade later was said to
make 'as much Noise... as a Pitt or a Fox in London'.109 Thus, the narrative
106
Vermeule, 'The ancient marbles at Petworth', 344. Even as recently as this, the ancient and
modern sculptures in the Petworth collection were discussed separately by specialists in their
artificially-disjointed fields, with J. Kenworthy-Browne writing on 'The third Earl of Egremont
and Neo-Classical Sculpture', Apollo, 105 (1977), 367-73.
107
22 May 1774. TY7/333.
108
Lettres de Paciaudi... au comte de Caylus (Paris, 1802), 119. For Caylus' reply, see
C. Nisard (ed.), Correspondance inedite du Comte de Caylus (Paris, 1877), I. 144. Michaelis,
Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 94 n. 249.
109
12 November 1785. Thomas Jenkins to Townley. TY7/428, referring to the purchase of the
seated sculptures of Menander and Posidippus out of the Negroni collection.
effects a shift in academic disciplines and historical periods: from classical

archaeology to art history, and from Greek and Roman antiquity to the
early modern period. At the same time, notions of modernity and diversity
will be recast into these sculpture collections—issues that are fundamental to
them but that have been consistently underplayed in the later archaeological
literature.
2
c
The spoils of Roman grandeur5:
Correspondence collecting and
the market in Rome
I believe few, if any Gent.n has a more chaste collection than your self, and
without paying you any compliments, I do not know who so well
deserves it.
Thomas Jenkins to Charles Townley, 5 August 17781
Chapter 1 opened with Adolf Michaelis' letter to the Right Honourable

W. Cowper Temple at Broadlands in Hampshire, so Chapter 2 begins with
another letter—from Cowper Temple's grandfather, Viscount Palmerston,
who acquired the sculptures whose ancient specimens were catalogued by
Michaelis in 1877 and published in Ancient Marbles in Great Britain in 1882.
Addressed to the society hostess Mrs Howe, Palmerston's letter from Venice of
22 June 1764 reads as follows:
The great remains of antiquity (at Rome) such as the Pantheon, Colosseum, etc., are
what naturally attracts one's admiration first, and their effect depends upon the
disposition of the mind and not upon any particular skill or practice in the arts. On
the contrary, a person not much versed in sculpture or painting, receives at first but a
small degree of pleasure from pictures and statues compared with what they after-
wards give him when his taste is formed and his eye has acquired by practice the
faculty of readily distinguishing beauties and defects. Sculpture, though not a more
easy art than painting, if one may judge by the very small number who have attained
any great degree of merit in it, yet is a more natural and simple one. For this reason the
ancient sculpture at Rome generally has its turn of admiration sooner than the works
of the great painters, many of whose beauties are so obscured by time and others
originally of such a nature as to be quite imperceptible to an unpracticed eye. It is a
new creation that seems to be opened and one seems to acquire a new sense to enjoy it.
But this requires more time and application than I could bestow, therefore you may
imagine that what gave me the greatest pleasure were the ancient marbles. Besides
their merit, they had the charm of novelty to recommend them. I have seen, before
1
TY7/382.
50 'The spoils of Roman grandeur'
I came to Italy, pictures almost as good as those at Rome, but I never saw a statue
worth looking at till I crossed the Alps, or which gave me the least idea of the powers
of the art.2
Palmerston's letter documents an itinerary for formulating a taste for the arts
in 1760s Rome. In the first instance, there are the surviving architectural
monuments of the ancient Romans, like the Pantheon and the Colosseum,
whose effect is said to depend upon a learned mentality, on a style of thought
inculcated by a classical education at English public school.3 Palmerston's
Roman itinerary shifts from architectural monuments to sculpture and
painting, from the cerebral to the visual, and suggests that the degree of
pleasure to be derived from these arts is, in contrast to that of ancient
architecture, acquired by practice. His letter proceeds to differentiate between
the arts of painting and sculpture: a taste for the former being a critical faculty
inculcated by study, rather than intuitive; the latter, reportedly less so. Unable
to devote himself to the more prolonged study of painting, Palmerston's
pleasure during his four-week occupancy in Rome was said to derive from
the viewing of ancient marbles.4 These new (master)pieces of art were indi-
genous and, in his mind, exclusive to Italy: C I never saw a statue worth looking
at till I crossed the Alps,' he exclaims.
A decade later, another British grand tourist in Italy, George Grenville,
wrote to W. Morton Pitt, not about the powers of the art of sculpture on the
contemporary viewer in Rome, but about ancient sculpture as testimony to
the art of Roman imperial power:
We were near four months at Rome, busy in the sights of those spots and buildings
where perhaps a Brutus raised his dagger, or a Tully [Cicero] saved his country. These
enquiries raise emotions in the mind which can be known only to those who have felt
them, at the same time that we feel ourselves debased by the reflection of our
inferiority to those conquerors, not only of the world, but (if I may be allowed the
expression) even of the laws of nature. The profusion of marbles brought from the
furthest parts of Asia, of a bulk which scarce deserves to be credited, is indeed a
secondary object; but nothing gives so adequate an idea of the Roman greatness. Such
is the famous Obelisk, first dedicated by Sesostris to the Sun, raised by Augustus in the
Circus Maximus, as the radius of a sun-dial, and now lying where it fell—a testimony
of the skill of thovse supposed barbarous nations who cut it, as well as of the art of
those who could transport to Rome a single stone of Egyptian granite, measuring
eighty-one English feet in length, and nine in diameter; think one moment with me
on such an undertaking, actually completed ... You will easily imagine that with these
2
Quoted by Connell, Portrait of a Whig Peer, 53-4.
3
On classicism as a 'style of thought', see Coltman, Fabricating the Antique.
4
Chard uses the rhetoric of pleasure and guilt as forms of language employed in travel
writing to navigate an imaginative topography of the grand tour; see Pleasure and Guilt.
feelings on the subject of virtu, I have not been insensible to the opportunities of
enriching myself and my country with the spoils of the Roman grandeur. I shall hope
to shew you a collection of marbles (I speak in the technical style of sculpture) inferior
to few north of the Alps; and when you see some figures which would not disgrace the
chisel of a Phidias, or a gem the work of a Pyrgoteles, you will not wonder at the
enthusiasm which draws on the mind to the wish of being the possessor.5
As in Palmerston's letter, Grenville locates the emotions generated by a first-

hand encounter with Roman monuments on classic ground in the mind. The
privilege of such emotions ('known only to those who have felt them') is
simultaneously, however, a reflection of the inferiority of the moderns to the
ancient Romans. Grenville refers here to the unresolved conflict for superior-
ity ongoing between the ancients and the moderns. For him, there was no
contest: the ancients not only outshone the moderns, but even nature. In
Grenville's panegyric, Roman dominion over the empire and even nature
herself is given material form in what seems a physically impossible task—
transportation from the margins of the Roman Empire of a profusion of
marbles, in particular the colossal (81 feet long by 9 feet wide) red granite
obelisk of Sesostris, This monumental structure lay in massive fragments in
the Campus Martius, not the Circus Maximus ascribed to it by Grenville,
whose obelisk had been re-erected in the Piazza del Popolo under Sixtus V in
1589.6 Its identification as the obelisk of Sesostris derives from a passage in
book 36 of Pliny's Natural History. Usually known as the obelisk of Pharaoh
Psammetichus II, it was brought to Rome from Heliopolis by Augustus in 10
BC and erected as a sundial in the Campus Martius complex. This most
famous of all the Roman obelisks was also the most damaged: its collapse may
be due to an earthquake that struck Rome in AD 849, or marauding Norman
soldiers who sacked the city in the early 11th century. Whatever the cause or
date of its collapse, when Grenville saw it in 1774, it had been excavated in
1748 and published two years later in an endeavour supervised by the British
architect James 'Athenian' Stuart. A well-known engraving of the toppled
obelisk in 1747 was published by Giuseppe Vasi in his Delle magnificenze di
Roma antica e moderna (figure 21). It shows the colossal granite blocks lying
in massive sections where they fell; that on the far left is inscribed with a
dedicatory text. The scaffolding ingeniously devised by Niccola Zabagha to
extract the obelisk is also represented, with its ladders upraised towards the
timber structure and its pulleys waiting to lift the mammoth bulks of granite.
Diminutive figures invite the external viewers into the proceedings and give
the ruinous monument a relative scale.
14 May 1774. Chatterton, Memorials, Personal and Historical, I. 97-8.

6
My account on the obelisk is based on F. Salmon, 'Stuart as antiquary and archaeologist in
Italy and Greece', in Weber Soros, James 'Athenian Stuart, 110-14.
Figure 21. Engraved view of the excavation of the obelisk of Sesostris in the Campus Martius in 1747. From Giuseppe
Vasi, Delle magnificenze di Roma antica e moderna (Rome, 1752).
In much the same way that the Romans under Augustus had conquered
Egypt, appropriated her monuments and relocated them to Rome—making
obelisks what Jeffrey Collins has termed the 'true insignia of empire'—so in
the acquisition of marble possessions in the modernity of the late 18th
century, Grenville writes to Morton Pitt of 'enriching myself and my country
with the spoils of the Roman grandeur'.7 Such imperialist aspirations of the
late 18th-century British collector of marbles as spolia are far removed from
Adolf Michaelis' derisive dismissal of the majority of ancient marbles remain-
ing in private collections in England as trash rather than treasure.8 Grenville's
reference to a Phidias or a Pyrgoteles, respectively master sculptor of mid 5th-
century BC Athens and 4th-century BC gem-cutter of the court of Alexander
the Great, is indicative of his view of the artistic excellence of the artefacts. At
the same time, his ruminations on the art of sculpture and the technical
virtuosity of the 'supposed barbarous nations' who worked the impenetrable
granite seem to unsettle preconceived notions of the civilized Roman versus
the savage barbarian.
The obelisks in Rome have been described as a collection of artefacts on an
urban scale, with Rome as a vast museum. 9 On a more domestic scale,
Palmerston's and Grenville's letters proffer an interpretative framework for
conceptualizing the collecting of ancient sculptures by British tourists in
Rome in the 1760s and 1770s, the criteria for which would include their
artistic merit, the novelty of the material of sculpture to northern travellers,
and the cultural, social, and political resonances of reappropriating the spoils
of Roman grandeur. Nevertheless, we should beware of being too prescriptive,
of imposing an art historical framework onto our study of the collections of
marbles that becomes a straitjacket. As we saw in Chapter 1, from the late 19th
century, Michaelis et al classified the ancient marble specimens in Britain
according to the pioneering science of archaeology. What characterizes the
marbles collected in the preceding century is not their taxonomical order, but
the very heterogeneity of their material contents—a heterogeneous profile
further applicable to their aristocratic and gentleman collectors. We know
that 25-year-old Viscount Palmerston spent only four weeks in Rome in 1764
and that he returned to Italy and made additional purchases thirty years later,
from 1792 to 1794 and again in 1800, from where he wrote to one Professor
Stewart, 'I never had any idea till I came here [Rome] what a good statue was,
or what effect it was capable of producing.' 10 In contrast, 21-year-old George
7
Collins, Papacy and Politics, 193. See also Collins, 'Obelisks as artefacts', 49-68.
8
9
Collins, 'Obelisks as artefacts', 49-50.
10
Quoted in Connell, Portrait of a Whig Peer, 48.
Grenville writes to Morton Pitt that his party were in Rome for nearly four
months in the spring of 1774, and during this time Gavin Hamilton canvassed
Grenville as a potential purchaser for Lord Lansdowne's unwanted sculpture
of a Wounded Amazon (figure 1), then in London. Grenville is less often
remembered as a collector of ancient marbles than as a parsimonious patron
of the sculptor Thomas Banks, from whom he ordered a bas-relief of Caract-
acus Pleading Before the Emperor Claudius (plate 1) when in Rome and
subsequently refused to pay for it. 11 He 'treats me rather with too much
Contempt both as an Artist & a Man', bemoaned Banks of the non-payment
of his £200 bill. In the light of his treatment by Grenville, Banks' relief has
been read as symbolic of the tyranny of aristocratic patronage for a British
artist in late 18th-century Rome. 12 The politics of the sculptural subject are
arguably less to do with those of patronage than with cultural identities and
visual ideologies. The subject for the rectangular relief (91.5 x 192.4 cm)
derives from an episode recounted in Tacitus' Annals (XII, 37) when Caract-
acus, who led the defence of Wales against the Roman invasion, is captured in
AD 50 and taken to Rome. Banks represents the former Celtic king semi-
naked in a coarse animal skin, and moustached, enslaved in chains. With his
weeping wife and daughter behind him, he speaks to an audience of the
Emperor Claudius and the Empress Agrippina seated on a stepped platform.
According to Tacitus' account, Caractacus spoke with such noble bearing that
his life and that of his wife, daughter, and brothers were spared. The sarcopha-
gus-like relief, which reads from right to left, is peppered with quotations from
masterpieces of antique sculpture reworked into a historical Roman episode,
but one with edifying contemporary currency to an 18th-century British
gentleman inculcated in the lessons of Roman history.
Although this chapter is concerned with the market(s) for sculpture—for
restored ancient specimens like Lansdowne's Amazon (figure 1) and modern
productions like Banks's Caractacus relief (plate 1)—this was by no means
the only category of luxury goods collected by British grand tourists in Rome
in the later 18th century.13 Having carefully enumerated in Chapter 1 the ways
in which Michaelis excludes modern specimens in his catalogue of Ancient
Marbles in Great Britain, I have no desire to carve a similarly contrived
estrangement between the sister arts of painting and sculpture. To identify
the relationship between paintings and sculpture as grand tour commodities
1!
See Bindman, 'Thomas Banks's "Caractacus before Claudius"', 769-72. The 'old' letters are
transcribed in Bell, Annals of Thomas Banks.
12
Bryant, Thomas Banks, 8 and no. 12. See also Smiles, The Image of Antiquity, 156.
13
North and Ormrod, Art Markets in Europe, Cavaciocchi, Economia e arte, Fantoni,
Matthew, and Matthews-Grieco, The Art Market in Italy; Ricerche di Storia delVArte, Promuovere
le arti.
at least in passing, if not in detail, we might refer again to the memorandum

listing the pictures and marbles acquired by Viscount Palmerston in Rome in
1764 (figure 3). The section devoted to the marbles has already been discussed
in Chapter 1 for its range of ancient and modern artefacts and furniture in a
variety of sculptural media—marble, granite, and porphyry. The brief de-
scriptions that precede the list of marbles indicate that Palmerston was
similarly acquiring and commissioning paintings, including a history paint-
ing by a contemporary British artist in Rome (Gavin Hamilton), a landscape
by a collectable master (Salvator Rosa), and copies of old master paintings—
Barocci's Holy Family by Angelica Kauffman and Guercino's Dido in the
Palazzo Spada by Giuseppe Bottari. He also bought three pairs of views of
landscapes in South Italy.
The 'Picture to be done by Hamilton' was later transformed at the artist's
request from a subject both Scottish and Shakespearean—'Scene out of
Macbeth'—to a critical episode from an ancient Greek poem composed by
Homer and recently translated into English verse by Alexander Pope, making
the subject stringently classical, and the emotional context noticeably 18th-
century. 14 The painting Hamilton executed, The Anger of Achilles for the Loss
ofBriseis (figure 22), for £150 (£25 more than the projected Macbeth canvas),
is actually the second version of this subject executed by Hamilton—that
commissioned by Francis Egerton, the 3rd Duke of Bridgewater, in 1758 is
now lost.15 The version for Palmerston forms one of six large (c.3 m x 4 m)
paintings with Iliadic themes that Hamilton produced over a 15-year period
from the late 1750s for British patrons who were on their grand tours in
Rome. Three of the paintings are now also lost, and of those that survive,
Achilles Lamenting the Death of Patroclus (National Gallery of Scotland) and
Hector's Farewell to Andromache (Hunterian Art Gallery, Glasgow), the canvas
for Palmerston is the least celebrated. Despite Hamilton's original dovetailing
of the themes of the wrath of Achilles and the loss of Briseis, the painting is
reckoned to be the least interesting composition of the group. 16 The loss of
half the original paintings in the series is partly compensated by engravings
that were produced by Domenico Cunego at Hamilton's own expense
(Hector's Farewell to Andromache was the only painting not to be engraved).
Hamilton's Iliad series and his related paintings have generated fruit-
ful discussion among art historians of the dynamic and multi-faceted rela-
tionship between poet and painter, Greece and Rome, in antiquity and
14
See Hamilton's letters to Palmerston, dated 2 August 1765 and 10 February 1766. Tran-
scribed by Grassinger, Antike Marmorskulpturen, 117-18; L. Errington, 'Gavin Hamilton's
sentimental lliad\ 13.
15
Flick, 'Missing Masterpieces', 86.
16
Wiebenson, 'Subjects from Homer's Iliad, 32.
modernity. 17 They have been viewed as part of an iconography of moral sense,

a study in human manners that is indebted to the Scottish Enlightenment
philosophies of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Adam Ferguson; for instance,
in the Anger of Achilles canvas (figure 22), where Briseis turns back to look at
Achilles, suggesting a moral relationship based on feelings of love.18 In a letter
to the authors of the Critical Review, Hume recognized the shift in ideas of
manners that had so much changed between the ancients and moderns,
writing 'though the Iliad was always among the ancients conceived to be a
panegyric on the Greeks, yet the reader is now almost always on the side of
the Trojans, and is much more interested for the[ir] humane and soft
manners... than for the severe and cruel bravery' of the Greek heroes.19
Hamilton's canvases have been read as offering a radical image of femininity,
and more recently a visual brand of Homeric heroism—a 'martial world of
well-muscled heroes'—that served as a locus for individual and collective
masculine identities.20 In 1768, Hamilton wrote to James Byres that he was 'so
immersed in worldly affairs that often my tranquillity of mind is ruffled and
my pocket emptied into the bargain'.21 These 'worldly affairs' concerned
the reproduction and dissemination of his paintings in the form of mass-
produced engravings by Domenico Cunego.
In his discussion of Gavin Hamilton and Rome in the 1760s, Martin Myrone
recognizes the many sites of consumption, public and private, urban and rural,
in which the images in Hamilton's Iliadic series had to function: as a showpiece
in the artist's Roman studio, as a finished work in a public exhibition in
London and in an aristocratic household, and as a reproducible commodity.22
This all too brief digression aims to situate Hamilton's The Anger of Achilles
canvas for Palmerston within an additional site that is the market for luxury
goods in Rome, in which the artist was both a producer of paintings and a
dealer co-ordinating the related commodities of painting and sculpture into a
grand tour package. Ellis Waterhouse has suggested that one of Hamilton's
other aristocratic British patrons commissioned a history painting from him
17
The main secondary sources on Hamilton as a painter are Waterhouse, 'The British
contribution to the neo-classical style in painting', 57-74; Ford, 'A portrait group by Gavin
Hamilton', 372-8; Irwin, 'Gavin Hamilton' 87-102; Irwin, English Neoclassical An, esp. 31-8;
Hutton, '"A Historical Painter"', 25-7; Errington, 'Gavin Hamilton's sentimental Iliad] 11-13;
Lloyd Williams, Gavin Hamilton; Cesareo, 'L'elaborazione del gusto e la diffusione del bello',
5-15; Cesareo, 'Gavin Hamilton', 211-322; Cesareo, '"The perfection of his brush and the
excellent pencil"', 173-89; Myrone, Bodybuilding, 47-74.
18
Macmillan, 'The iconography of moral sense', 46-55.
19
Quoted by Myrone, Bodybuilding, 71.
20
Macmillan, 'Woman as hero', 78-98; Myrone, Bodybuilding, 47-74, esp. 60.
21
Quoted by Lloyd Williams, Gavin Hamilton, 11.
22
Myrone, Bodybuilding, 66.
Figure 22. Engraving by Domenico Cunego after Gavin Hamilton, The Anger of Achilles for the Loss ofBriseis, 1769.
£
as a sort of douceur to secure Hamilton's services as an expert agent' in Old
Master paintings. 23 Hamilton's great coups in this field were the acquisition of
Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks from the hospital of San Caterina alia Ruota
in Milan, which he sold to Lord Lansdowne in 1786, and Raphael's Ansidei
altarpiece from the church of San Fiorenzo in Perugia for Lord Robert Spencer;
both works are now in the National Gallery in London. His pivotal role in the
lucrative business of dealing signals a shift in the patronized half (and increas-
ingly prominent half) of the patronage system. The traditional artist-patron
relationship was fragmented into a plethora of transactions ongoing between
Roman producers and British consumers that were co-ordinated and overseen
by a middleman like Gavin Hamilton. Rome was as much a marketplace as a
museum: a commercial site of buyers, agents, dealers, artists, sculptors, and
bureaucrats. In his important study of the virtual invention of a market for
paintings in England between 1680 and 1768, Iain Pears notes that dealers took
'most of the pain and difficulty out of collecting'.24 Far more than this in later
18th-century Rome, they often took the collector out of the collection, making
aesthetic decisions, formerly the patron's privilege, on his behalf and often in
his absence. Gavin Hamilton wrote to Lord Palmerston after he had returned
to England in February 1766 of the various ancient sculptures he had assem-
bled for him: £y°ur Lordship having never seen them trusts entirely to my
judgement'.25 The plethora of transactions involved a range of objects, both
specially commissioned and serially produced. The negotiations were them-
selves part of a network of wider interactions between individuals and groups
of different nations, social classes and religious persuasion.
'If anything else occurs that I can serve you in here [Rome], I beg you will
command an old correspondent', Gavin Hamilton wrote to another of his
aristocratic British clients, Lord Lansdowne, in November 1779.26 Lansdowne
reminds us that the acquisition of what Grenville termed the spoils of Roman
grandeur was not confined to those fresh out of English public school and in
their early 20s like Palmerston and Grenville; Lansdowne was 34 when he first
went to Italy after the death of his wife in 1771, and there a long-term
commission was implemented for Gavin Hamilton to furnish a gallery at
Shelburne (later Lansdowne) House in London with paintings and ancient
statues, busts and bas-reliefs, to the value of £6,050; a commission that was
later scaled down when Lansdowne's political career took off. In one of 46
edited and published letters to Lansdowne, dated over twenty years from 1771
23
Waterhouse, 'The British contribution to the neo-classical style in painting', 72.
24
Pears, The Discovery of Painting, 73.
25
Grassinger, Antike Marmorskulpturen, 118.
26
Smith, Catalogue, 86, letter xxxiv.
to 1793, Hamilton requested his patron 'should keep by you my letters, as well
as notes of directions, to be referred to upon any occasion'.27 Over a century
later, Sidney Colvin, Slade Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Cam-
bridge, referred Adolf Michaelis to these letters as relevant data for his
forthcoming study of Ancient Marbles in Great Britain:
There are some new materials, recently published, to which, if you have not seen
them, I must call your attention; these are the series of letters from Gavin Hamilton to
Lord Shelburne, giving a minute history, with prices &c. of the formation of the
Lansdowne House collection. They have been edited by Lord Edmund Fitzmaurice,
and published in four or five numbers of the Academy in the months of August and
Septr. last [1878]. If you have not seen them, and will send me word, I will have the
numbers containing them sent to you at once, as I am sure you could wish to take
some notice, both in your account of the particular collection and in your general
introduction, of these documents.28
The Hamilton letters have been inscribed into the history of the collection of
the Lansdowne sculptures — reproduced in both the Catalogue by the British
Museum curator A. H. Smith (1889) and as an appendix in the Christie's sale
catalogue (1930). Since their publication, their contents have been consist-
ently excavated by classical archaeologists for empirical evidence (what
Michaelis calls 'statements of fact') about the marbles formerly in the Lans-
downe collection.29
However, recent studies on letter writing as a form of social and discursive
practice have demonstrated how, far from being essentialist art historical data,
correspondence like that from Hamilton to Lansdowne can be variously read
and re-read as text(s) andartefact(s). 30 As epistolary texts, we have to be aware
of what Decker refers to as their diverse rhetoric and underlying typology.31 As
artefacts, Earle has highlighted their pivotal role in the creation and codifica-
tion of familial and business relations.32 Hamilton's letters to Lansdowne
codify the mechanics of a late 18th-century commission for sculptures from
Rome: mediating between dealer and collector in the precarious and competi-
tive business that was collecting luxury items from abroad in Italy and for a
perseverance collector like Lansdowne, collecting by correspondence.
27
18 January 1772. Smith, Catalogue, 54, letter v.
28
2 October. BNUS, MS 5751, 119. The Academy volumes referred to are: 10 August, 141-3;
14 August, 168-9; 24 August 192-4; 31 August, 219-20; 7 September, 243-4. Colvin read the
manuscript of Ancient Marbles in Great Britain for Cambridge University Press.
29
30
Barton and Hall, Letter Writing as a Social Practice.
31
Decker, Epistolary Practices, 4.
32
Earle, 'Introduction', 2. See too Whyman, Sociability and Power, 7 and her ' "Paper visits" ',
18; Chartier, 'Introduction', 7; Redford, The Converse of the Pen.
Rather than Lansdowne, whose dealer's correspondence or, strictly speaking,

an edited version of it has been long in the public domain, it is another
perseverance collector and his archive that will form our primary case study.
Charles Townley was a so-called 'true dilettante' whose 'very many precious bits'
were brought to Lansdowne's attention in a letter from Gavin Hamilton of 9
February 1775.33 During the first of three tours to Italy in 1767-8, Edward
Standish wrote to his brother Townley in the hope that he would yield to the
'many temptations to treat the old house [Towneley Hall in Lancashire] with
some of the marble follies'.34 Evidently, Townley could not resist the temptations
of marble; by 1805, his obituary in the Halifax Journal proclaimed 'His collec-
tion of the antique statuary [in his London house at Park Street, Westminster] is
one of the finest in this kingdom if not indeed the first in excellence.'35 That same
year, his collection of ancient marbles was purchased by Parliament for the
British Museum. Almost two centuries later, in 1992, the Museum purchased the
mass of paper materials—the letters, notebooks, account books, and diaries—
that are now catalogued and delineated as the 'Townley Archive'.36
In her biography of the 19th-century Cambridge classicist Jane Harrison,
Mary Beard exposes the polemical nature of such archival sources, arguing
that 'for all our belief in its artless neutrality, an archival collection is itself a
rhetorical construction... personal mythologies already determine (and are
determined by) the peculiar selection, preservation and classification' of the
material it contains.37 The content of letters in the Townley Archive
documents the rhetorical construction of the collector and his august marble
family, as they were designated by one of his legion of correspondents:38 in
particular, those letters from his dealers in Rome, whose 'love for old sculp-
ture was not purely platonic', to cite Michaelis' extraordinary understate-
ment.39 For example, in one of over 200 surviving letters to Townley, dated 11
December 1779, the dealer Thomas Jenkins had heard 'that Weather Cock the
Bishop of Derry has been at your House, he writes [Gavin] Hamilton that he
sells travellers Skim Milch only & sends the cream to you—he is one of those
Cunning ones, that expects to get gold for silver.'40 In this gossipy exchange of
33
Smith, Catalogue, 73, letter xxi.
34
Undated. TY7/712.
35
TY18.
36
Hill, Catalogue of the Townley Archive, vii; Cook, 'Charles Townley's collection of drawings
and papers', 125-34.
37
Beard, The Invention of Jane Harrison, 12, 131, 157.
38
TY7/1579.
39
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 74, referring to Gavin Hamilton.
40 TY7/389. On Jenkins, see Ashby, 'Thomas Jenkins in Rome', 487-511; Rowland Pierce,
'Thomas Jenkins in Rome', 200-29; Ford, 'Thomas Jenkins', 416-25; Busiri Vici, 'Thomas
Jenkins', 157-65; Vaughan, 'Thomas Jenkins and his international clientele', 20-30.
news, we see not only Derry's rivalry with Townley in the sport of collecting
(of which more later), but also the visibility of Townley's collection in
metropolitan London in the late 1770s, which Derry had recently visited.
Jenkins' letter further reveals the incestuous nature of relations between the
protagonists in the Roman marketplace, since he is citing a letter that the
Bishop of Derry wrote to his rival dealer, Gavin Hamilton. Four months later,
on 22 April 1780, Hamilton himself wrote to Townley repeating Derry and
(unwittingly) echoing Jenkins: 'the Bishop of Derry now Earl of Bristol has
seen your collection he says you have got all the cream & he onely the skim'd
milk & now begins to wish he had paid better & purchased less'.41
Elsewhere in their voluminous correspondence, Townley's dealers flatter
him as 'a model of taste' whose example of acquiring quality rather than
quantity (the cream, rather than the skimmed milk) should be adopted by his
acquaintances 'who have in the course of their Amusements expended more
money, with less satisfaction in the Pursuit and in the end have nothing but
remorse, not even those who with frenzy risk their all on the turn of a Card'.42
For Townley, as will become apparent, the collecting of ancient sculpture from
Rome was a 40-year pursuit—far removed from an ephemeral indulgence or
an economically volatile pastime, like gambling. Writing to Thomas Jenkins
in 1785, he refers to his 'great satisfaction in seeing Lord Dungannon's
purchases, as well as in shewing him my households gods, but they are seldom
visited by our young travelers, who generally think little of the virtu, after they
have passed Dover'.43 Both Viscount Palmerston and George Grenville were
what Townley designates 'young travellers', in their early 20s when they spent
four weeks and four months respectively at Rome in 1764 and 1774. Townley,
in contrast, was 30 years old during his first visit to Italy in 1767-8, which was
followed by two later visits in 1771-4 and 1777. A review of Michaelis
published in 1886 accurately described Townley as a 'veteran at the trade of
acquisition'.44 Yet Townley's long-standing sensation for sculpture cannot be
solely attributed to the generational pastime of a persistent traveller. As a
persecuted Roman Catholic, he was excluded from holding public office in
Britain, but enjoyed a far greater degree of religious freedom in Italy. Hence
his sculpture collection was his church, court, and Parliament, his pagan gods
and goddesses the object of adoration for this confessor general to all the
convents and seminaries in London, to cite fragments of the correspondence
from Townley's friend, Richard Payne Knight.45 While those young collectors
41
TY7/641.
42
TY7/411 (23 January 1782); TY7/385 (16 January 1779).
43
21 October 1785. TY7/427/2.
44
Edinburgh Review, 164 (1886), 506.
45
TY7/2079-82.
who travelled to Italy in their 20s tended to neglect the pursuits of virtu in
preference to those of politics and society on their return to Britain, Townley
paid persistent devoirs to his household gods.
One of Townley's fellow Catholics was the self-styled 'dabbler' in antiques
Henry Blundell. Blundell wrote to Townley on 5 March 1787 that the diffi-
culty in buying luxury objects from Rome was 'to find out & distinguish what
is truly good & respectable, without being misled by ye Puffs of ye sellers'.46
One of the difficulties of studying epistolary correspondence lies in being
duped all over again by their rhetorical puffs and tricks. The eulogizing of the
Townley collection by his dealers, and the reported jealousy of rival collectors
like the Bishop of Derry, mean that there is a risk of it becoming an impossible
standard by which contemporary British collections are always judged to be
inferior. By attempting to see beyond rather than through such rose-tinted
spectacles, the following narrative will cite material from Townley's archive in
order to discuss the mechanisms of the Roman marketplace and the transac-
tions at work in a foreign commission. Using Townley as representative of a
correspondence collector, it will argue that while he was not alone among
British patrons in buying in absentia from the commercial centre that was late
18th-century Rome, he should be defined as an exception rather than a rule—
although the notion that there is an archetypal late 18th-century sculpture
collector will also be shown to be problematic.
The hundreds of letters from Townley's dealers are best characterized as
artful; on the one hand, because they are loaded with the kinds of puffs of the
sellers that concerned Henry Blundell, and on the other, because they describe
works of art—for our purposes, ancient sculptures—at length and in detail.
They are also frequently accompanied by works of art in the form of drawings
on paper of the objects for sale.47 The letters document the entire process by
which ancient marbles were excavated, restored, sold, exported out of Italy,
transported by sea to Britain, and exhibited in the elite interior. As such, they
offer an intersection of issues that are pertinent to the history of art. In
representing the entirety of the commercial, competitive, and speculative
business of collecting ancient sculptures from Rome, they are also intertwined
with those of social, economic, and political history. The content of Jenkins'
and Hamilton's letters is not confined to would-be acquisitions by Townley.
The striking constancy of Townley's appetite for ancient sculpture ensured
that he was kept informed of their version of the minutiae of an entire culture
of Roman collecting, during the prolonged periods when he was not in Italy.
46
TY7/1317.
47
Jenkins had been sending drawings of ancient sculptures excavated in Rome to the Society
of Antiquaries of London, of which he was a member, since 1757. See Rowland Pierce, 'Thomas
Jenkins in Rome'.
In the spring of 1774, Gavin Hamilton provided Townley with an epistolary

account of his ongoing excavations at the port of Ostia outside Rome. Thus
far, we have encountered Hamilton as both a pittore working in a neoclassical
idiom and negoziante in sculpture and paintings for a number of British
clients, including Viscount Palmerston. A third role, related to that of dealer,
was of cavatore, when Hamilton embarked on speculative excavations for
ancient sculptures in the city of Rome and its environs.48 For this, Hamilton is
recognized as a pioneer of what would later become the discipline of archae-
ology, albeit an undisciplined one by professionalized standards. Then Dir-
ector of the British School at Rome, Thomas Ashby bemoaned in 1913: 'later
archaeologists would have been far more grateful to him [Hamilton] had he
registered more accurately the sites and circumstances of his researches, still
more had he made anything like a plan of the buildings he examined'.49
Hamilton's letter to Townley includes a preliminary inventory of the finds
he unearthed at Ostia in a building that he identifies as c a most magnificent
temple antiently washd by the sea' and from where what he exhumed includes
six granite columns and 'a very large statue of excellent sculptour without the
head & feet, from the midle downwards draped holding fruit in his drapery,
the character is young like that of an Antinous' (figure 23).50 Hamilton's letter
provides prescient information to Townley concerning the size of the excav-
ated sculpture, the extent of its preservation, its composition, and its possible
identification as Antinous, the boyfriend of the 2nd century AD Roman
emperor Hadrian. A year later, Thomas Jenkins cited the sculpture of Anti-
nous in a letter to Townley dated 6 June 1775, in what is clearly a case of
professional rivalry between dealers:
a statue of an Antinous without Head neck or feet, & part of the arms, he [Hamilton]
askd me £1000. in its present state, having now purchased from Carlo [Albagine] the
sculptor the third part of a mask he pruposes converting it into a Head for the figure,
and I believe has sold it to M. r B[arry]: for £1000. tho' I told that Gent." on his doing
me the hon. r to ask my opinion, that I thought the putting such a thing for a Head was
a most indecent imposition, & as to the price I had sent a Mercury to England for half
that sum which I woud not give for many such figures, and this sentiment I do still
maintain, and am content that the opinion of your self, and all real connoisseurs of
my judgment be decided by it. to speak of an object that you have seen, your faun last
sent, tis doubtless of the time, the highest time of the Greeks, and if I ware disposed to
48
Bignamini, 'Gli scavi archeologici a Roma nel Settecento', 13-24; Bignamini, 'British
excavators in the Papal states', 91-108. Pietrangeli's Scavi e Scoperte and Lanciani, Storia degli
scavi di Roma, VI, remain indispensable.
49
Ashby, 'Thomas Jenkins in Rome', 487.
50
18 May 1774. TY7/568.
Figure 23. 'The finest thing I have ever found during the coarse of my excavations'
(Hamilton): engraving of Smith Barry's Antinous (present location unknown) from
M. le Comte de Clarac's Musee de sculpture Antique et Moderne.
make comparisons, is as much superior to the £1000 Antinous as a Brilliant is to a

Bristol stone. 51
During extended periods of collecting by correspondence, Townley's dealers

frequently compare unfamiliar marbles recently unearthed by excavation with
those already known to him, either in his own collection, like the faun cited
above, or in the collections of his contemporaries. Elsewhere, a statue of a
Diomedes is 'about the size of Lord Shelburns Meleager'; the drapery of a
muse, 'somewhat in the stile of a consular figure that M.r Jenkins got from
Gaeta' and sold to Thomas Mansel Talbot.52 Masterpieces of classical sculp-
ture in the Papal and private collections in Rome are also (most advanta-
geously) invoked. Townley's head of Diana, for instance, is reckoned by
Hamilton to be 'the true sister' of the Apollo Belvedere.53 A similar familial
resemblance, we might recall, was read into the physiognomy of the Lans-
downe Amazon (figure 1) and Polykleitos' Doryphoros by the cataloguers at
Christie's in 1930.
Jenkins' account of the restoration and sale of the sculpture of Antinous by
rival dealer Gavin Hamilton, in his letter to Townley, indicates the partisan
nature of the social networks that constituted the antiquities market in later
18th-century Rome. The buyer James Smith Barry is said (admittedly by
Jenkins) to have canvassed his professional opinion of the sculpture prior to
the head being fully restored. The sum of £1,000 is a colossal one for an
ancient sculpture and the highest recorded price of any Roman antiquity sold
to a British collector at this period.54 Since we have seen Jenkins citing very
specific comparanda in other letters to Townley, he seems on this occasion to
be deliberately ambiguous about the provenance of the Mercury that he sent
to England for the reported sum of £500. It is plausible to identify the
sculpture as that acquired by George Grenville for Stowe in Buckinghamshire.
In one of Townley's notebooks, he describes the Mercury at Stowe as a
repetition of that in the Vatican Museum and found by Gavin Hamilton at
Tor Columbaro about 9 miles from Rome (the same provenance on the
Appian Way as Lansdowne's unwanted Amazon). 55 According to this note,
Hamilton sold the excavated fragments to Jenkins, who purchased a head
from the sculptor-restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, and having restored it,
sold the Mercury to Grenville for £450. Townley's copious notes and lists of
the ancient sculptures in his own and contemporary collections in Britain will
be discussed in detail later, in Chapter 7. For now, Townley's memorandum
incriminates Jenkins for performing the same duplicitous activities on the
Mercury as he implicates Hamilton doing to the Antinous! Such gossip and
51 52 53
TY7/346. TY7/587 and TY7/612. TY7/641.
54 55
Vaughan, 'James Hugh Smith Barry', 8. TY1/21.
intrigue is a constant feature of the commercial Roman marketplace, with its

internal politicking and competitive one-upmanship between rival dealers.
We may compare Jenkins' scathing account of the Antinous with that of
Hamilton, written one week later, as Townley undoubtedly would have done:
you desire to know something of my statue of Antinous this is reather a disagreable
tasque as I know it never can come within your plan on account of the size. I must
therefor out with it & tell you that it is the finest thing I have ever found during the
coarse of my excavations, it wants the feet with the pianta, & the greatest part of the
right arm, & the left hand, the head is a fragment w.h I found at Carlo Albagine's & of a
singular kind of fine marble that corresponds with the statue, the size & turn of the
head its own in so much that I don't in the least dowt of its beloning to it that I shall
give it the preference to any other entire head, from the midle downwards it is draped
in a great & fine stile, in his lap or drapery suported by one hand he holds fruit, as this
Antinous served to ornament a seaport or baths near it, Adrian has made his favourite
in the character of abundance.56
Excluded from Townley's collection as it existed in the mid-1770s on account

of its colossal size, Hamilton nevertheless still provides him with a detailed
description of the Antinous' state of preservation in a horizontal axis from the
feet upwards, insisting (too much) that the addition of the miscellaneous
fragment is in fact a plausible facial restoration. The identification of the
sculpture as Antinous in the character of abundance gives the piece the cachet
of having been commissioned by that 'great protectour of the fine arts and in
particular that of Sculptour', the Roman emperor Hadrian.57 Such a 2nd
century AD Roman imperial classification contrasts with the Greek proven-
ance that Jenkins imposed on Townley's faun. His pronouncement that
Townley's faun 'last sent' is as superior to Smith Barry's Antinous 'as a
Brilliant is to a Bristol stone' is pure dealer's puff—much like Hamilton
describing the latter as 'the finest thing I ever found during the coarse of
my excavations'. When Jenkins first introduced Townley to the faun, in a letter
of 17 August 1774, he described the piece as follows:
I have just got a statue of a Drunken Faun [figure 24], the size of nature, he is in the
action of just falling on his back, with one hand to his mouth the other arm up, which
latter & the feet are wanting, as soon as I get the Model made, shall send you a sketch
of it in two views, the head was never broke of, the stile of the Sculpture is true Greek
and of the Good or High times, you know what I mean by it, The hand held up must
have a cup or bunch of grapes in it, for tho' the old Gentleman has had his fill, he still
wishes for more.58
56
17 June 1775. TY7/591.
57
Smith, 'Gavin Hamilton's letters to Charles Townley', 315.
58 TY7/336.
Figure 24. 'True Greek and of the Good or High times' (Jenkins): Townley's Drunken
Faun with its 18th-century restorations removed.
'True Greek and of the Good or High times' is a stylistic categorization for the
classic Greek tradition that derives from Johann Joachim Winckelmann's
Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (Dresden, 1764). This pioneering volume
conceptualized a history of ancient art as a system of evolutionary traditions,
from archaic to classic to decadent phases, which were adopted by dealers
fairly indiscriminately.59
Jenkins' description of the Drunken Faun is noteworthy for its ideal Greek
classification via Winckelmann, and also because his letter alludes to the art
historical processes which excavated sculptures were subjected to once they
came into the dealers' possession. We need to familiarize ourselves with the
formulaic epistolary strategies in the correspondence of Townley's dealers. As
with Hamilton's description of the abundant Antinous, Jenkins provides
Townley with an account of the faun's size, pose, and state of preservation.
Unusually, no provenance is provided either here or months later when the
piece was exported.60 Jenkins' letter does however articulate the mediatory
59 60
Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 13. 7 January 1775. TY7/341.
role of models and sketches in the business of restoring and selling ancient
sculptures, so enabling us to begin to determine the sequential stages in the
passage of sculpture from excavated artefact to prize possession, or from
Roman marketplace to British drawing room.61 The contentious practice of
restoration will be discussed in detail in the next chapter. Suffice to note that
despite the widespread assumption among scholars of restoration that
sketches were taken from the sculpture after it had been restored, Jenkins'
letter suggests that sketches were actually taken from the model of the
projected restoration, rather than the finished product; the size of or material
for the model remain unknown. Equally tantalizing is what Jenkins' letter
does not articulate—about the identity of the sculptor-restorer, or the
draughtsman to be employed to produce the sketches in two views.
The sketch of the drunken faun 'in two views' that Jenkins projected
sending once the model had been made has not been identified, but in the
case of other sculptures in Townley's collection such paper trails have sur-
vived. In a letter dated 5 August 1778, Jenkins initiated negotiations with
Townley for a sculpture of a sphinx:
inclosed you have two sketches of the sphinx [figure 25a and b] which is a very
interesting Antiquity, the head has never been broke off, the tip of the Nose is a little
lograto, but not so much as to require either tassella or stucco, it has been broke in
diferent parts but almost every bit its own, excepting the Extremity of one of the
wings, even its pedestal or plinth is its own. Mr Hartopp who purchased a few things
for furniture on seeing [this] monument was struck with its elegance... [I told] him
the truth, that it was in my opinion rather an object for a Gent." who had a Collection,
and at the Price of a Hundred Pounds it was dear, the Price of it is £75.62
The enclosed drawings of the sphinx would provide Townley in London with a
privileged view—actually two complementary views—of the sculpture in
Jenkins' possession in Rome. Executed in black chalk, they represent the seated
sphinx full-length on her narrow, rectangular base in a frontal view, and a
three-quarters profile view from the left. Neither of the drawings is signed. The
letter CT' on the pedestal in both instances is a later annotation and abbrevi-
ation for Townley, which was added when the drawings were purchased in
1814 for the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the British
Museum. While the drawings show the sphinx to be a hybrid creature con-
sisting of a female head, a greyhound's body, and lion's paws and tail, Jenkins'
written description gives a condition report as to the extent of the sculpture's
preservation and restoration. Nevertheless, the information relayed in Jenkins'
epistolary account and the pair of images that accompanied it need to be seen
61
See Coltman, 'Designs on eighteenth-century sculpture', esp. 93-102.
62
TY7/382.
Figure 25a and b. Attributed to Friedrich Anders, drawings of the Townley sphinx,
c.l 778.
as complementary. This apparent parity between summary drawings and

description is precisely what Jenkins wants Townley to buy into, as a prelude
to buying the sculpture itself. Notice also how Jenkins' letter introduces a Mr
Hartopp as a rival buyer on hand in Rome, though not one afforded either the
appellation of a collection or the privilege of discounted rates like Townley.
The pair of drawings of the sphinx have been attributed to the painter and
picture restorer Friedrich Anders.63 Anders is cited in a letter of Jenkins' of
1775, three years prior to the appearance of the sphinx, as being entrusted to
sketch an ancient sculpture of Endymion sleeping on Mount Latomus for
Townley's critical appraisal (figure 26).64 Gavin Hamilton excavated the End-
ymion at Roma Vecchia about 5 miles from Rome on the road to Albano and
Frascati in 1774 (plate 2).65 At the time, he advised Townley against the
purchase of ca sweet figure of a young man asleep', in preference to other,
Figure 26. Attributed to Friedrich Anders, drawing of the Endymion, 1775.
63
Wilton and Bignamini, The Grand Tour, nos. 222 and 223.
64
11 February 1775. Wilton and Bignamini, The Grand Tour, 257-8, figure 9.
65
28 July 1774. TY7/596. Smith, 'Gavin Hamilton's letters to Charles Townley', 316.
superior sculptures.66 He described the Endymion as a former ornament to a

fountain, one of a pair of sculptures, whose companion was a sleeping nymph.
When Jenkins subsequently acquired the Endymion from Hamilton and
puffed it in a letter to Townley as a prize acquisition, Townley dispatched an
enraged letter to Hamilton demanding an explanation for these contradictory
accounts and reminding him of his tenacious desire for capital sculptures
rather than 'a Million... trifling objects... a number of nothings'.67 In an
admirable collector's coup, Jenkins was forced to reduce the price tag for the
Endymion by £200, from £500 to £300. Jenkins defends his preferential
treatment of Townley by exposing the duplicitous practices of his rival, com-
posing a reply (already quoted), in which he documents Gavin Hamilton's
random restoration and exorbitant sale of the Antinous excavated at Ostia
(figure 23) to Smith Barry.68
Jenkins' letter of 11 February 1775, in which he (unknowingly) reac-
quainted Townley with the Endymion, reveals that the artist commissioned
to delineate the sculpture on paper for Townley's delectation was Anders.69
Jenkins' letter further discloses that Anders was not copying the sculpture
itself, but was making his drawing from an existing sketch of the Endymion by
a Mr Mullen making Anders' drawing a copy of a copy. The sketch was
dispatched to Townley a week later, so allowing Jenkins to exploit the geo-
graphical distance between Rome and Britain. 70 In the contrived sequence of
collecting by correspondence, the drawings could further whet Townley's
sculptural appetite when viewed in conjunction with the descriptions that
had preceded them. The sculpture of the sphinx is an exception in this respect
since her drawings were enclosed with her description and dispatched to
Townley in London at the same time. She is not what Townley would have
thought of as a first-class acquisition (skimmed milk rather than cream), and
Jenkins actually says as much in the preamble that precedes the account of the
sphinx: 'some things will be less pleasing as well as less perfect than others, it is
impossible to avoid tis not in nature to be otherwise, nay tis occasioned by the
excellence of your best things, every first rate object by its comparison must
lessen the value of inferior things'. The delay between the dispatch of descrip-
tions and drawings varied, from as brief a period as a week to many months.
Despite this inconsistency, such drawings formed a vital part of the narrative
of negotiation in the 18th-century business of collecting by correspondence.
The attribution of the drawings of the sphinx and Endymion to Friedrich
Anders enables us to discern the extended social and artistic networks that
constituted the personnel involved in the commercial Roman marketplace.
66 67
TY7/596 and TY7/585. 3 March 1775. TY7/580.
68 69 70
6 June 1775. TY7/346. TY7/342. TY7/343.
Jenkins' correspondence with Townley reveals that commissions for such

representations were awarded to alternative artists at different periods.
While Anders is preferred in the late 1770s, a decade later the artist reported
to be able to give 'more of the character of the antique' was Vincenzo
Dolcibene. In a letter to Townley dated 20 February 1788, Jenkins was
glad Duke Bernis stile of drawing pleases in general he gives more the character of the
antique than any I have hitherto seen. You may be assured Sir, I shall not neglect to get
drawings by him, of such Monuments as may appear to be Interesting. He has lately
made a drawing of my Paris, at the request of Abbe Thorpe, I believe for Mr. Blundel
the drawing is Pretty but gives a very faint Idea of the Statue. There is a Mossa and
Animation in the Original, almost Impossible to be expressed in a drawing, indeed the
figure seems absolutely to move, notwithstanding the Action is most Placid.71
From this statement, we see that Townley responded aesthetically to the

drawings as works of art, in addition to their being paper tools in the
commercial transactions. Apparently dealers did not patent their property
by restricting reproductions of the sculptures they had for sale to the artists
they commissioned. Jenkins' letter refers to a recent commission being
assigned to Dolcibene for a drawing of his sculpture of Paris. The drawing
had been commissioned by the Abbe Thorpe, a Jesuit priest who acted as the
Roman agent for Henry Blundell, whose distrust of dealers and their chican-
ery has already been cited; hence he preferred to use Thorpe as a middleman.
In the absence of this sketch of Paris, we might consult a drawing of a
caryatid formerly in the Negroni Collection which Townley bought off Jenkins
and which has been attributed to Dolcibene (figure 27).72 It represents a
full-length view of the sculpture on her base from the front, slightly off centre.
Despite the dramatic reduction of size, from 237 cm high to 27 x 21.3 cm, and
translation of medium, from marble sculpture to chalk drawing, the image
bears a stronger correlation to its model (figure 28) than that of, for instance,
the drawings of the sphinx attributed to Friedrich Anders. If we compare the
marble sphinx (figure 29) and her paper reproduction (figure 25a and b), we
see how the human head, which Jenkins claimed was original, is executed in
both drawings much more in proportion with her body than in the sculpture.
In the frontal view, her squatting backside is far wider, and her wingspan much
more expansive.
Jenkins' account of the shortcomings of Dolcibene's drawing of the Paris is
a common complaint from dealers and collectors alike. It becomes little more
than a rhetorical trope, especially with regard to paper representations of
71
TY7/467.
72
Wilton and Bignamini, The Grand Tour, no. 176.
Figure 27. Attributed to Vincenzo Dolcibene, drawing of the Townley caryatid, 1786.
three-dimensional sculptures that were celebrated for their dynamic poses.

Here is Jenkins in a letter to Townley of October 1774:
Inclosed is a sketch of the Acteon, which will give you but a slight idea of the original,
the head is wonderfully active, is momentary, he scarse knows which way to look;
before the head was found which is amazing fine, the first idea was to restore it as
Figure 28. The Townley caryatid.

Figure 29. 'The best monument of that kind which has ever appeared' (Jenkins): the
Townley sphinx.
looking downwards, but the neck proved it had been otherwise, indeed the choice of
the action proves that superiority of the Antients, who consulted the Passions, a guide
that never fails, and those that do not discover this excellence in their Works, are
deprived of much pleasure.73
In the case of the sculpture of Acteon (figure 30), there was an extended delay
between the receipt of its description and its drawing; the latter was dis-
patched some five months after Jenkins gave an account of its excavation with
its identical pendant by Gavin Hamilton from the (supposed) site of the villa
of the emperor Antoninus Pius near Civita Lavinia.74 A cava imperiale e
vergine was the most desired provenance for 18th-century British collectors;
whether its imperial credentials were contrived or genuine must remain in
play. At the end of 1773, for instance, Hamilton had hopes that 'Antoninus
Pius will furnish me with more robba than old Adrian. I have nevertheless a
great esteem for my old friend Hadrian & have just purchased a very small
piece of ground near where the Centaurs were found.'75 On this and other
occasions, the earlier unearthing of masterpieces of ancient sculpture like the
Furietti centaurs, reputed to have been found at Hadrian's villa in 1736,
caused dealers to revisit the site of their excavation for further exploration.
In 1796, to give just one more example, Hamilton was excavating at the villa
of the emperor Lucius Verus 3 miles from Rome in the grounds of Prince
Borghese, 'where antiently were found the fine bust of Lucius Verus with the
other fine Busts at the Villa Borghese, so well known to the world'.76
For all their competitive posturing and criticism of each other's duplicitous
practices, Jenkins and Hamilton regularly co-operated and often collaborated—
the sale of the Acteon being one such occasion when a sculpture passed through
the hands of more than one dealer. Jenkins described to Townley how Hamilton
sold him the Acteon as part of a job lot, when 'according to the old trick [he]
tack'd some other things to it'.77 He cites the actual find spot of the sculpture as
being the side of Mount Cagnolo, but questions whether this was the site of
Antoninus' villa or the area below; proceeding to offer a contemporary subur-
ban equivalent in which 'the environs of London at this time, will serve to
explain what the Neighbourhood of Rome must have been like then'.
In one of the pendant sculptures excavated by Hamilton and subsequently
sold to Townley by Jenkins, Acteon the hunter becomes the hunted. He is
represented in the act of metamorphosing into a stag—note the horns on the
crown of his head—and is about to be savaged by his own hounds who bare
their teeth threateningly. This punishment was imposed on Acteon as a form
of divine retribution for transgressing beyond the realm of human beings into
73 74
19 October 1774. TY7/339. 29 June 1774. TY7/335.
75 76 77
4 November 1773. TY7/554. 24 April 1796. TY7/672. TY7/335.
Figure 30. 'The action is wonderfully active' (Jenkins): Acteon. By courtesy of the
Trustees of the British Museum.
that of the gods. Not just the head, but the whole statue is what Jenkins
termed 'momentary', since it captures in marble, that most immovable of
materials, the fleeting moment between human and animal; although the
transition is already pre-empted to some extent by Acteon's lion-skin cloak. In
this restored ancient sculpture, the metamorphosis of the hunter becomes a
metaphor for the transformative power of sculpture, creating objects that
constantly negotiate and renegotiate between the polarities of flesh and stone,
man and beast, animate and inanimate, life and art.
Jenkins' preliminary negotiations with Townley for the Acteon were pro-
longed when the sculpture's decapitated but purportedly original head was
'miraculously' presented to Jenkins by one of his workmen some two months
after the torso was uncovered.78 Jenkins explains how the restoration options
differed once the head had been found. This idea of sculpture restoration as a
partially fluid process, rather than fixed in stone, so to speak, will be expanded
in the following chapter. The price was also increased, from £150 with a new
restored head, to £200 for the (supposed) reunion of its decapitated head.
It is worth deciphering the often opaque terminology employed by dealers
for the drawings that could literally make or break a lucrative sale. As a
practising artist, Gavin Hamilton appears not to have subcontracted the
work of delineating sculptures to draftsmen like Anders or Dolcibene as
Jenkins did. He provides what is clearly a sketch of a sculpture of the Greek
hero Diomedes in a letter to Townley, dated 28 November 1775 (figure 31).
The full-length view is executed in pencil and then overdrawn in ink. It
appears in the centre of the lower half of the page, surrounded by the text
that describes it as follows:
the head is not its own tho of pantanello & a greek hero, somewhat like what Jenkins gave
you, the action quite new as follows [drawing] the lines beautifull in every view, both
knees are antique & the left leg down to the ancle, a puntello on the right knee w.h suports
the arm. I have restored the right arm holding a dagger to defend the Paladium which he
is carrying off. you will ask me why I call it a Diomed I answer because I have proved every
thing else absurd if the present insience should raise your curiosity to see a more correct
drawing I will send it to you, & woud even venture to send you the original but I am afraid
that its being in your possession & refused by you will prevent the sale to any body else,
upon the whole I woud advise you to keep your money for acquisitions of greater
consequence, what I write you is meerly out of delicacy, that you may be preferred in this
as well as in every thing else. I found this admirable torso in my first works at ostia,
comonly called by my men the gobbo. the back is fine in an extraordinary degree, but
corroded by salnitro. it is left by the artist w.h the marks of the scarpello. in the stile of the
Laocoon & sleeping faun of the Barberini the price of it I imagin will be £200.79
78 79
31 August 1774. TY7/337. TY7/599.
Figure 31. Diomedes 'in the stile of the Laocoon & sleeping faun of the Barberini' sketched by Gavin Hamilton in a letter
to Townley, 28 November 1775.
Hamilton's rhetorical strategies in this and all his letters to Townley have
much in common with those of Jenkins. Note how he designates the sculp-
ture's ancient and restored limbs, its provenance, and stylistic comparanda.
Hamilton cites the subject matter ( £ a greek hero') as being 'somewhat like
what Jenkins gave you'. The identity of this sculpture remains unknown, in
contrast with the emphatic statement which likens the style of the Diomedes
to two of the prized masterpieces of ancient sculpture in Roman collections,
the Laocoon and the Barberini Faun. Hamilton describes 'the lines [as]
beautiful in every view', and as if to reinforce this, his sketch represents the
statue of Diomedes, with his head in profile with a three-quarters view of his
twisting torso. In terms of the sequential stages involved in collecting by
correspondence, Hamilton's letter outlines a hierarchy of paper reproduc-
tions, in which a more correct drawing supersedes an initial sketch. The
images we have already looked at by Anders and Dolcibene consequently
fall into the former category. Elsewhere in his correspondence, Hamilton adds
another formulation to the paper hierarchy in the narrative of negotiation. In
a letter of 12 July 1776, he supplies Townley with a 'bad drawing' of a life-sized
sculpture of a pastoral muse, explaining that 'the original has not that violent
twist of the body, nor that abominable left leg, the head is beautifull & in fine
preservation'.80 In Townley's case, the provision of drawings—both correct
and deficient, good and bad—became standard business practice in the
prolonged paper negotiations with his dealers based in Rome.
Hamilton's letter, with its sketch of the Diomedes enveloped by text,
demonstrates how the drawings that dealers supplied to Townley were not
confined to potential purchases for his own marble family. They formed part
of Townley's paper museum of marbles in contemporary collections in Britain
and abroad which will be dealt with later, in Chapter 7. Though the purchaser
is not disclosed in Hamilton's letter to Townley, the sculpture was destined for
Lord Lansdowne's collection at Lansdowne House, London. The first mention
of this sculpture to its collector is when it is en route to Lansdowne on 25
March 1776. Hamilton writes, 'Your Lordship will excuse the liberty I have
taken [of sending the sculpture unsolicited], as my principal motive is to
increase your collection with something entirely new and uncommon.' 81
'The whole of this Venus is new & quite different from any thing I ever saw',
Hamilton echoed in a letter to Townley two days later, referring to a colossal
sculpture of Venus (figure 32) also unearthed at Ostia.82 Hamilton's letter
proceeds to describe the 7-foot sculpture as being originally made in two
80
12 July 1776. TY7/612.
81
Smith, Catalogue, 78, letter xxvii.
82
27 March 1776. TY7/607.
Figure 32. 'New & quite different from any thing I [Hamilton] ever saw': engraving of
Townley's colossal Venus.
parts, consisting of the upper naked torso with its head and the lower draped
section: 'the whole con la pelle sua of salino marble & fine colour'. In addition
to minor repairs for the tip of the nose and the underlip, her entire left arm
and right hand were missing and required restoration. Unlike Jenkins, who, in
the case of the Drunken Faun (figure 24), resolved to send Townley a sketch
once the model for the projected restoration had been made, Hamilton
proffers a drawing and a price once the upper and lower halves had been
reunited and the whole was cleaned. Four months later, Hamilton gave
Townley an update on the progress of the restorations of the sculpture with
a price tag of £800.83 The surface of the marble is said to be the same as Lord
Shelburne's statue of Meleager; the drapery like that of the mother of Lucius
Papirus, a celebrated statue group in the garden of the Ludovisi Palace in
Rome. A month later, the price is revised to £1,000 for the Venus and a
sculpture of a Muse. By the end of October 1776, some seven months after
their initial acquaintance, Hamilton sends sketches of the Venus with what he
designates as the principal restorations marked in red chalk.84 Although the
actual details of the sketches are not disclosed, they probably constituted a
front view and a three-quarters side or profile view, like Anders' drawings of
the sphinx. The annotation of the drawings with red chalk made them even
more indispensable in the prolonged paper transactions between Townley and
his dealers in Rome. In asking them to indicate the precise extent of a
sculpture's restorations, Townley sought to ensure perfect parity, rather than
wilful misrepresentation, between their epistolary description and a restored
sculpture's material presence. Hamilton's account of the Venus ends with the
dealer's (by now) familiar complaint, 'as to the inclosed sketches they will give
you a just idea of every deficiency tho not of the beauties'.
This chapter has effected a shift of historical periods and academic disciplines:
from the archaeological study of Greco-Roman art pioneered in the 19th
century and introduced in Chapter 1, we are now concerned with art historical
issues pertinent to the collecting of ancient sculptures from Rome in the early
modern period. Rather than deriving empirical data from the ancient marble
sculptures, an approach favoured by Michaelis et al, a critical reading of the
epistolary correspondence in Charles Townley's archive allows us to gauge the
measure of its art historical content and its rhetorical intent. Through a close
reading of passages in this artful correspondence, we have encountered the
incestuous nature and partisan politicking of the commercial Roman market
for ancient sculpture, in which the expatriate British dealers Thomas Jenkins and
Gavin Hamilton continuously disparage the other's business dealings with their
mutual client, Charles Townley. But at the same time, as we have seen, they are
83 84
27 July 1776. TY7/613. TY7/620.
not averse to dealing with each other and exchanging sculptures when it is in
their own interest. A prolonged foreign commission for ancient sculptures was
sustained by correspondence—in lengthy descriptions of potential purchases
and in (woefully deficient) drawings produced by draughtsmen like Friedrich
Anders and Vincenzo Dolcibene to facilitate the negotiations. Having familiar-
ized ourselves with some of the mechanisms at work in collecting by corres-
pondence, the following chapter will investigate the ways in which these dealers'
letters represent the controversial practice that was the obligatory restoration of
ancient marble sculptures.
3
The operations of sculpture:

(Re)writing restoration
I don't suppose you will be content with any statue where the subject is
not decided by its attributes & the head to be its own past a doubt.
Gavin Hamilton to Charles Townley, 12 July 17761
The restoration of the sculptures of Antinous, the faun, the sphinx, Acteon,
and Venus, referred to in passing in the correspondence cited in the previous
chapter, reminds us that in the modernity of the later 18th century, few
ancient marbles were excavated intact and in pristine condition: what Hamil-
ton refers to on one occasion as 'preserved as when... come from the hands'
of the ancient sculptor.2 The restoration of ancient sculptures in 18th-century
Rome has come to be seen as a highly controversial material and theoretical
practice.3 Thanks largely to the pioneering research of the art historian
Seymour Howard, it has been conceptualized within a historiography of
sculptor-restorers that focuses on the productions of their so-called king,
Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, and his former pupil, Carlo Albacini. Howard rightly
casts Cavaceppi as an entrepreneur in the service of expatriate British
antiquarians Thomas Jenkins and Gavin Hamilton, rather than as a trad-
itional maker of original sculpture.4 Despite this perceptive contextual char-
acterization, he fails to release his subject entirely from the shackles of
traditional sculptors' histories. In an undertaking of Michaelisean propor-
tions, and armed with a copy of the promotional Raccolta d'antiche statue,
busti, bassirilievi ed altre sculture restaurate da Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (Rome,
1
TY7/612.
2
21 March 1774. TY7/566.
3
Cavaceppi, 'Dell' arte di ben restaurare le antiche statue' in his Raccolta', Grossman, Podany,
and True, History of the Restoration of Ancient Stone Sculptures', Piva, 'La casa-bottega di
Bartolomeo Cavaceppi', 5-20; Weiss, Von der Schonheit weissen Marmors zum 200, Barberini,
Bartolomeo Cavaceppi', Gasparri, Lo studio Cavaceppi', Vaughan, 'The restoration of classical
sculpture in the eighteenth century', 41-50; Vaughan, 'Albacini and his English patrons', 183-97;
Howard, Antiquity Restored; Picon, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi; Howard, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi',
Rossi Pinelli, 'Artisti, falsari o filologhi?', 41-56.
4
Howard, 'Bartolomeo Cavaceppi's Saint Norbert', 479.
1768-72), illustrated with 60 engraved plates in each of the 3 volumes (as in

figure 6), Howard studied first-hand the sculptures in Italian, German,
Russian, and British collections in order to identify the restorative handiwork
of Cavaceppi in the completion of mutilated sculptural fragments. He inven-
toried the tell-tale traits that enabled such identification in the absence of
textual data like signatures or archival records. These traits included the
curving edges of joins that are made to look like accidental breaks, setting
the remnants of an ancient plinth into a modern base, the use of iron clamps,
employing modern bases for busts, using tree trunk supports with triangular
wedges of peeling bark, the particular rendering of hands and feet, and the
choice of certain attributes like grapes, pitchers, parchment rolls, and flutes.
Howard also demonstrated how the theoretical doctrines expounded in
Cavaceppi's essay 'Dell' arte di ben restaurare le antiche statue' in his Raccolta,
which claims to advocate the 'only true and valid' scheme of restoration, are
consistently violated in his material (mal)practices. 5 For instance, one of
Cavaceppi's essays asserts that at least two-thirds of a restored statue or bust
should be antique and that this should be the most important component—
that a surviving nose could not form the basis for a restored head, a foot
for an entire figure, or a handle for a vase. In the face of overwhelming
contradictory material evidence, the text of the Raccolta seems little more
than a series of broken promises, so causing a methodological stalemate
in restoration studies between theory and practice, text and artefact. 6 Not-
withstanding this deadlock, Cavaceppi is lauded as a master of restoration,
transforming the art from an inventive process with a decorative aim into a
pursuit guided by scientific method and historical accuracy.7 This chapter
sidelines such teleological readings in favour of studying the transformation
of unidentified and mutilated ancient sculptural fragments into pristine and
identifiable sculptures of the sort avidly consumed by later 18th-century
British collectors.
Gerard Vaughan adopted a similar methodology to Howard in his recent,
ground-breaking work on Cavaceppi's former pupil, Carlo Albacini, who is
best known to art historians as the restorer of the Farnese marbles.8 Writing to
Townley following a visit to Naples in May 1790, Henry Blundell reported that
The Neapolitans not pleased with Carlo Albacini's restores, think they have a
much superior man in that line; yet C. Albacini has here ye Flora & many
5
Howard, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, esp. 212-13.
6
See Miiller-Kaspar, 'Cavaceppi zwischen Theorie und Praxis', 93-9.
7
Podany, 'Lessons from the past'; Grossman, Podany, and True, History of the Restoration of
Ancient Stone Sculptures, 17.
8
de Franciscis, 'Restauri di Carlo Albacini', 96-110; Prisco, 'La collezione farnesiana di
sculture', 28-39.
86 The operations of sculpture
other things to restore.'9 Vaughan defined Albacini's style as representing the

mainstream in later 18th-century Rome, with a new emphasis given to
perfection and all-over whiteness and smoothness.10 Unlike Cavaceppi who,
for Howard, gave his restorations a contrived antique stamp with visible
cracks, joins, and chips, for Vaughan, Albacini represents an unprecedented
sophistication in matching and disguising additions. Vaughan has established
a chronological sequence according to which Albacini superseded his master
by being the restorer most favoured by British clients, especially in the 1770s
and 1780s. He was patronized extensively by Thomas Jenkins, and from 1776
by Gavin Hamilton. One of the limitations of this type of sculptor-centred
approach is that it tends to cast the practice of restoration in relation to
sculptures in British collections as a comparative study of Cavaceppi and
Albacini, so projecting an inevitably partial image of the restorers active in the
Roman marketplace as a two-horse race. Jenkins himself used this metaphor
in a letter to Townley of 1774 where he referred to Albacini as 'the surest Paced
Horse of our set of modern sculptors'.11 Yet it is telling that in almost all the
letters cited in the previous chapter, the identity or professional input of the
sculptor-restorer is nowhere discussed. The exception is the sculptor Carlo
Albagine, from whom Hamilton purchased a portion of a mask to complete
the head of the colossal statue of Antinous (figure 23). This lacuna in the
epistolary evidence revisits Howard's contention that restorers were not mas-
ter sculptors in the traditional, art historical sense, negotiating commissions
with patrons and collectors, but were rather a shadowy, though instrumental
cog in the commercial manufactory that was the Roman antiquities market.
As in the previous chapter, our discussion of the restoration of ancient
sculptures will be largely object-focused, rather than the artist-focused ap-
proach favoured by Howard and Vaughan. More recently, and a decade after
the publication of his seminal study of Cavaceppi, Howard has written of the
'complexities involved in attributing repairs to individual restorers and work-
shops on the basis of reported origins and a repertoire of studio devices'.12
My agenda is not to address these complexities explicitly, rather to use
documented case studies of the restoration of ancient sculptures that further
demonstrate the economically precarious and socially competitive business of
collecting in the later 18th century, and in particular, to pursue the vagaries of
collecting by correspondence that were introduced in the previous chapter.
Letters in the Townley Archive reorientate and reinvigorate ongoing academic
9
4 May 1790. TY7/1320.
10
Vaughan, 'Albacini and his English patrons', 186.
11
TY7/335.
12
Howard, 'Some eighteenth-century "restored" boxers', 253.
debates by offering detailed descriptions of the sequential processes of

restoration—from the (supposed) reunion of the decapitated body parts of
ancient sculptures, to their surface cleaning and polishing. These sculptural
operations are documented at length in the letters of the Roman dealers,
Thomas Jenkins and Gavin Hamilton, who acted as the middlemen between
Townley and the sculptor-restorers, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi and Carlo
Albacini. Their letters, I suggest, are both text and artefact, delineating the
material practice of restoration in textual form, where this polemical sculp-
tural practice is inscribed into the artful epistolary strategies of the dealers.
Take part of a letter from Thomas Jenkins, dated 6 June 1775, in which he
introduces Townley to a potential acquisition:
Last year I had a statue from Naples without a Head, with the name of the Artist on the
Trunk. I purchased a Head of Lysimachus from Cavaceppi thinking it might suit it, and
had the joining made, but the head proved too large, a few weeks since a wonderful Head
of an Achilles came from that same quarter, which proves absolutely its own, and luckily
although the neck of the statue had been touchd to joyn with the Lysimachus, it was so
little that it only wants a little stucco on one part, the Rl arm which had been restored,
must be done anew, as it does not suit the animated expression of the Head—am sorry
have not the name of the Greek Artist that made this statue with me.13
Jenkins' letter reveals that the de-restoration and re-restoration of ancient

sculptures was not confined to specimens in major museum collections of
classical sculptures in the 20th century, as when sculptures like the Lansdowne
Herakles, in the J. Paul Getty Museum at Malibu, had minor restorations
removed in the 1970s and reinstated in 1991.14 Jenkins' account of the restor-
ation of Achilles creates a problem around the assumption that 18th-century
restorations were set in stone (so to speak) until ancient purists sought to
recover the antique core of works by removing their later doctored limbs—
limbs which were subsequently re-restored in recognition of their bastardized
status in post-antique periods. The correspondence from Townley's dealers
repeatedly demonstrates the degree to which sculpture restoration in the later
18th century was in fact a fluid and piecemeal process. The restoration of the
decapitated head and dismembered right arm befitting Jenkins' marble Lysi-
machus were reportedly undone and then re-restored with its 'original' head,
also from Naples, so as to transform the statue into an Achilles (figure 33), the
metamorphosis taking place some months after its earlier incarnation. In both
its initial and subsequent restorations, the sculpture was identified as an
13
TY7/346. Jenkins was writing from his house at Castel Gandolfo, which was the former
home of the General of the Jesuits prior to their suppression in 1773.
14
Podany, 'Lessons from the past'; Grossman, Podany, and True, History of the Restoration of
Ancient Stone Sculptures, 19-21.
eminent ancient Greek hero whose exploits were preserved for posterity by
the classical tradition. Lysimachus was one of the bodyguards of Alexander the
Great, while Achilles was the greatest of all the Homeric heroes. Having 'the
name of the Artist on the Trunk' gave the sculpture the additional cachet of
having the Greek sculptor's identity inscribed onto it.
In the absence of such epigraphical evidence, Townley's dealers sometimes
couch ancient sculptures within a traditional art historical framework of
ancient masters and masterpieces. We saw in the previous chapter that
Hamilton puffed the Lansdowne Diomedes (figure 31) as being in the style
of the Laocoon and the Barberini faun. In due course, Jenkins will cite
'universal opinion in Rome' when attributing Townley's discobolus to the
same anonymous Greek sculptor responsible for the Fighting Gladiator in
the Villa Borghese; a head of a hero is 'doubtless by the same author as the
Laocoon', while the fauns on a bas-relief from the Villa of Domitian's nurse at
Roma Vecchia (part of the extended imperial family) are reckoned by
Hamilton to be 'certainly of the greek school & probably a greek artist that
has got his liberty in Room [Rome], the heads alone are sufficient proof'. 15 In
these and similar statements, we see how dealers use the excavated material
evidence to begin to construct narratives of ancient sculptors' lives, their
training, and their body of surviving works. In opposition to the idealized
productions of ancient Greek sculptors, the post-antique Italian sculptural
tradition is invoked as a negative point of reference. The hand of a sculpture
of a muse is said by Hamilton to be 'a little mannered in the stile of Bernini'.16
The cleaning in 1785 of Bernini's Neptune and Triton will in due course form
one of our case studies in the restorative operations of sculpture. But the artist
whose name carried particular weight in the arsenal of effusive evocation was
that of the Renaissance master Raphael; the work most often cited as the
'perfection of sculptural art' was the Medici Venus.17 On more than one
occasion, Renaissance master and ancient sculptural masterpiece are cited
concurrently on account of the latter's stated predilection for female repre-
sentations. A sculpture of Ariadne, for instance, is said by Townley to have
given him 'a new idea of the perfection to which sculpture was antiently
brought, the feet are finer than the foot of the Medici Venus, had Raphael seen
this lovely figure he would have adored it,' 18 Another Venus or Galatea is in
Hamilton's opinion 'less than the Venus of Medecis, taste of sculptour equal
15
3 July 1794. TY7/534. 25 January 1772. Thomas Jenkins to the Duke of Dorset. Centre for
Kentish Studies, U269 C 194 (66). 28 November 1775. TY7/599.
16
TY7/615.
17
Owen, Travels into Different Parts of Europe, I. 371. For a series of other responses to
the sculpture > see Hale, 'Art and Audience', 37-58.
18
25 June 1775. Charles Townley (draft) to Gavin Hamilton. TY7/590/2.
to any thing... the lower part drapery which comes over her head which she
holds with her right hand, the action is such that Raphael seems to have taken
a hint for his Galatea.'19 The Medici Venus, or more specifically her buttocks,
will figure in Chapter 5 in a discussion of a group portrait of gentlemen
collectors including Charles Townley by the artist Richard Cosway.
Two months after notifying Townley about the metamorphosis of Lysima-
chus into Achilles, Jenkins dispatched a sketch of the marble hero (figure 33),
which may be attributed to his favoured draughtsman of the 1770s, Friedrich
Anders. Jenkins reiterated, in the letter which accompanied the sketch, the
excellence of the sculpture and the authenticity of the inscription, while also
referring to 'one difficulty [which] will probably prevent my ever placing this
interesting statue with any Gentleman that does not first see it, as the Part of
the body of the left side on the Ribs and Hip Bone have been rubbed, tho not
sufficient to admit of any restores, this will ever be an Eye sore to all, except to
such as may pass it over on account of its other excellencies'.20 The restoration
of ancient sculptures extended beyond the surgical reunion of decapitated
heads and dismembered limbs into reworking the marble surface by cleaning
and polishing. In the case of the Achilles, invasive rubbing had not exposed
the tell-tale restorations, but had rendered the left side of the torso aesthet-
ically imperfect. Referring to the restoration of a caryatid formerly in the Villa
Negroni (figure 28), Townley entreated Jenkins 'that it may not in the least be
scraped or pomiced to make it look pretty, a kind of sacrilege the Roman
restorers are often guilty of tho I know that you have too much good taste to
allow this to be practised on objects that are of themselves agreeable'.21
Observe Townley's emotive language: his flattery of the propriety of Jenkins'
taste in opposition to the detrimental practices of the Roman sculptor-
restorers. The action of scraping or pumicing removed surface traces of
corrosion and staining to render ancient sculptures 'white & smooth';22 in
other words, in pristine, briDiant condition, with their ancient marble skins
flayed.
Having been restored and their surfaces reworked, ancient sculptures were
then covered with a patina 'to tinge restores'.23 The following recipe survives
among papers in the Townley Archive: 'mix up a marble or Portland dust to
the colour wanted, then mix up white of egg to froth and grind it in a little
unstacked lime well pounded'. 24 To maintain the homogeneity of the ancient
parts and the modern restorations, Hamilton advised Townley to 'tell your
friend M. r Price not to wash his statue, but rather take off the dust with a
19 20
5 May 1776. TY7/609. 9 August 1775. TY7/347.
21
3 February 1786. TY7/432. Charles Townley (draft) to Thomas Jenkins.
22 23 24
16 March 1775. TY7/582. TY14/1/31. TY14/1/31.
Figure 33. Drawing of the Lysimachus cum Achilles, here attributed to Friedrich
Anders, mid 1770s.
pencel or even the bellows, otherwise the modern tasselli will come too white
for the rest & remain in spots'.25 Townley's friend Mr Price must be Chase
Price, who is one of the sitters in Richard Cosway's conversation piece, which
25
18 March 1775. TY7/583.
will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5. A feather duster hanging on the right

of the fireplace in Zoffany's famous painting of Townley's collection in the
library at Park Street, Westminster must have been used for such means.
The re-restored Achilles with his new head and arm and rubbed left torso
evidently did not whet Townley's appetite for sculpture. The statue was sold to
Pierre-Gaspard-Marie Grimod, the Comte d'Orsay, who was then in Rome,
for the considerable sum of £500, and with other items from his collection it is
now in the Louvre.26 Over a decade later, in 1789, Townley acquired from
Jenkins a sculpture of one of Achilles' martial enemies, the Trojan prince
Paris. That the restoration of this sculpture proved untenable for Townley is
preserved in their surviving strained correspondence. Dealer and collector
had early agreed on a policy of sale or return and reimbursement, which,
though rarely exercised in practice, was implemented for this doctored Paris.
Townley's draft letter, dated 24 July, reveals how his agenda in collecting had
been resolutely refined into being 'determin'd to add no more marbles to my
collection, unless some very fine object in extraordinary preservation'.27 He
insists that Jenkins had repeatedly misrepresented the extent of the sculpture's
extensive restorations by saying that the head was intact, the face and body
entire, and the required restorations minor. On receipt of the statue, as far as
Townley could ascertain, it had not only been in pieces, but both jaws, the
chin, and throat of the face had been restored. This disparity between dealer's
description and object actuality is further attestation to the capricious nature
of collecting by correspondence.
Paris's damaged reputation was already in pieces prior to his arrival in
London, as a result of the eye-witness accounts of a fellow British collector,
Colonel John Campbell, who had returned from Rome the previous year and
reported to Townley having seen Paris's head and legs in detached fragments.
Here we see the social networks created between collectors at home in Britain.
The Earl of Bristol's 1779 visit to Townley's household gods was followed a
decade later by that of Colonel Campbell. Jenkins' letter seeks to deflect
Campbell's criticism as the competitive sport of possession: 'the Gent.n who
now abuses it, wished for it'; in response to Townley's invective against its
restoration, he insists that 'your Idea of Preservation & mine vary, as you
mean Void of Fractures I ever understood when it had its own parts, which by
an exact joining and never rubbed renders a statue perfect'.28 In other words,
what for Townley meant preserved intact, to Jenkins meant artfully restored
to its 'original' wholeness.
Boyer, 'La collection d'antiques du comte d'Orsay', 441.

27
TY7/490/1.
28
TY7/481 andTY7/482.
In the same way that ideas about preservation could vary (at least this is the
defence invoked by Jenkins), so ideas about the extent of acceptable restor-
ations are as fluid as we've seen the process itself to be. In another documen-
ted case study, Townley and Gavin Hamilton actually collaborated on paper
over the appropriate restoration of a sculpture known as the small Venus
(plate 3).29 Such input into the restoration process from the collector is highly
atypical and dates from December 1775: in other words, before Townley's
acquisition policy became rigorously against what he considered to be too
heavily-restored ancient sculptures. Evidently there was convivial disagree-
ment between dealer and collector as to the positioning of Venus's arms and
the inclusion of a suitable attribute. Previously Hamilton had reassured his
(reportedly) preferred client, 'I never restore any thing without antique
authority'.30 In the case of the sculpture of the diminutive goddess of love,
Hamilton writes of having experimented with a number of different attitudes,
and having dismissed the possibility of one hand covering her private parts in
the absence of any surviving physical evidence of her fingertips. In the
intervening period, he describes excavating the hands of a larger Venus
from the same cava at Ostia, which had been adopted as a model for the
proposed restoration. As regards her defining attribute, Hamilton considered
a looking glass ( not an antique thought' but a viol of oil 'could supply the
place of drapery, in which case she must be restored like the athleto's anoint-
ing & puring the oyle into the left hand'. Two weeks later, Hamilton offered a
critique of Townley's alternative restoration as delineated in a sketch:
the glass I don't think antique, the strigil undelicate & more proper for an Athleto
than a delicate Venus besides that most graceful & uncommon turn of the head loses
its expression for want of the left arm bent up to meet it, upon the whole your drawing
strikes me with an idea of a Modern Venus, more than the present restoration... I
have followed the maxim of the antient sculptor & have boldly ventured on adding a
little drapery in both hands, w.h I am sorry covers a little too much the sweetest body
in the world. I preserve for my self a cast of the whole figure restored, & a torso
without restoration in order to enjoy her thourouly. so that when we meet we may
digest our ideas better.31
Here is further epistolary evidence of the fluidity of the restoration process with
its (stereo)typical design options as regards chronology, typology, and accom-
panying attribute: ancient/modern, Venus/athlete, and looking glass/strigil.
29
TY7/600andTY7/601.
30
TY7/584. Hamilton writes of his preferential treatment of Townley in TY7/606/1, 603
and 617.
31
30 December 1775. TY7/601.
Traces of surviving attributes often assisted in identifying the subject

matter of otherwise opaque marble fragments, often in conjunction with a
library of classical reference. Gavin Hamilton named an excavated torso a
Paris, from part of a shepherd's hook preserved on the left arm of the
sculpture; according to classical mythology, the Trojan prince lived as a
herdsman on Mount Ida.32 On another occasion, Hamilton interpreted too
literally Townley's insistence that the subject of a sculpture should be clearly
expressed by its surviving attributes. This was a sleeping Mercury which he
excavated in 1774 in a cava at Roma Vecchia, about 5 miles from Rome on the
road to Albano and Frascati (plate 2). This sculpture is already familiar from
the previous chapter as the Endymion sleeping on Mount Latomus, sketched
by Friedrich Anders in a commission from Thomas Jenkins for Townley. An
initial inventory of the finds Hamilton provided to Townley included 'a sweet
figure of a young man asleep somewhat like a Mercury tho without wings or
Cauduceo'.33 At the time of its excavation, Hamilton was negotiating the sale
to Townley of a number of other sculptures. A year later, the latter would
berate these as trifling, rather than capital acquisitions, when Thomas Jenkins
had acquired the sleeping sculpture and recommended it to Townley in the
most advantageous terms. When called to account for failing to recommend
this sculpture, Hamilton cited its arbitrary appellation: 'we call it a Mercury
because we can give it no other name, the figure has no other atribute of
Mercury but the clamis w.h is common to Paris & many other figures there are
no wings to his cap none to his feet & no caduces, or purse of money. & no
ram all atributes of this deity, the antients never left their works equivocal, but
allwise determined especially their deitys'.34 Despite Hamilton's protestations,
it was not so much the ancients who left their sculptures unequivocal, as the
modern sculptors who restored them. Often the defining attribute was itself a
modern restoration, artfully contrived, rather than anciently determined, as is
certainly the case of a dagger/palladium ensemble that incriminated the
Lansdowne Diomedes (figure 31). That the dealers' frame of reference for
ancient sculptural practice is in fact the contemporary production of Roman
restorers is further indicated in one of Jenkins' letters. Attempting to account
for the discrepancy between the caryatids destined for Park Street and those of
the Roman collector Cardinal Alessandro Albani, Jenkins
cannot suppose that the sculptor who made yours, ever touched those of Albani. there
being as much difference, as between the Work of an able cabinet maker, and a
common carpenter, things that were celebrated amongst the ancients, were frequently
copied, instances of which you must have often observed, & I believe they were
32 33
28 December 1773. TY7/556. 28 July 1774. TY7/596.
34 35
12 March 1775. TY7/584. TY7/599.
frequently done in haste, to answer the impatience of such as wanted them, probably
as furniture, this will account for incorrectness and other defects.36
The demand for copies as furniture, necessitating their mass-production, is a

more accurate description of the sculpture industry in later 18th-century
Rome than in antiquity. The majority of Jenkins' and Hamilton's British
customers bought restored ancient sculptures precisely as furniture. 37 Town-
ley is a notable exception, in wanting the cream rather than the skimmed
milk, to use the Bishop of Derry's metaphor again.38 His insistence on the
superiority of his caryatids to those of Albani demonstrates that by the late
1780s he envisaged his marbles in the premier league of European collections.
Paying lip-service to Townley's ambitions, it is entirely predictable that
Jenkins would pronounce Townley's caryatids acquired from the Negroni
Collection in 1785 superior to those of Albani. In the event, Jenkins was
only granted an export licence for one of the Negroni versions (figure 28) and
sold the other to Carlo Albacini; it is now in the Braccio Nuovo.39 All four
caryatids were excavated from the same site on the estate of Herodes Atticus
on the Via Appia, only almost 200 years apart. The Negroni sculptures were
discovered in 1585-90. That later acquired by Townley is thought to have
served as a model for the arms and outstretched hand of one of Albani's
caryatids, found in 1766 and restored by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi.40 Originally
there would have been six caryatids arranged in a sequence of changing dress
and head types, weight-bearing legs and upraised arms, as seen in Piranesi's
1778 paper reconstruction, in which Townley's caryatid is shown in reverse
third from the left.41 The fact that these were architectural sculptures and part
of a group makes Jenkins' suggestion, of Townley's versions as originals and
those of Albani as hastily-produced antique copies, all the more preposterous.
In April 1775, Hamilton promised Townley 'things of a superiour class to
any thing ever yet sent to England ... nevertheless if you are very rich & in any
fears of not being able to attain real fine things I woud advise you to secure the
[sleeping] Mercury'.42 The drawing of the sleeping Mercury/Endymion that
Jenkins commissioned from Friedrich Anders (plate 2) has already been
discussed in the previous chapter, along with other sketches and models, for
36
24 February 1787. TY7/451.
37
See TY7/371: 'The Minerva in my Cava tho' really good sculpture, is not of that Portato
that you wish, tho the preservation makes it an interesting figure for any Gentleman that wants
an elegant object for a Library or for furniture, but I know what you want, it must be of the first
water or it will not do, and you may be assured if such offers, you will have the refusal of i t . . . '
38
TY7/389and641.
39
Wilton and Bignamini, Grand Tour, no. 175.
40
Bol, Forschungen zur Villa Albani, IV, nos. 431 and 440. See also volume II, no. 178.
41
Beck and Bol, Forschungen zur Villa Albani, 325.
42
6 April 1775. TY7/585.
their mediatory role in the narrative of negotiation that facilitated the busi-
ness of collecting by correspondence. Gavin Hamilton's reference to casts of
the small Venus introduces additional three-dimensional simulacra into the
repertoire of reproductive tools and techniques, the technologies of copying
common to the sculptural economy of later eighteenth-century Rome. He
writes of having preserved a cast of this sculpture pre- and post-restoration.
During negotiations for the larger than life Venus from Ostia (figure 32),
Hamilton supplied Townley with annotated drawings, claiming that 'if it was
of a less size I would send you a cast of it'.43 Restored marbles destined for
foreign export were frequently reproduced in this mode. The 'Faun sold to the
Grand Duchess will certainly be Moulded [Jenkins reassured Townley], and a
correct drawing at least of the Genius, shall be made for you. It will be
fortunate if these things produce taste & knowledge in Russia, the Latter
tho' the most Natural requires a length of time to make its Way.'44 Jenkins'
reference to the consolidation and dissemination of knowledge reminds us of
Viscount Palmerston's letter with its itinerary for formulating a taste for the
arts in Rome, quoted at the start of Chapter 2.
When Townley's head of Minerva (plate 4), excavated from the Villa
Palombara near Santa Maria Maggiore, was dispatched from Rome in January
1783, 'the fear of the Marble being Prejudiced' deterred Jenkins from having a
mould made.45 This ancient marble head of Minerva was restored with a
modern helmet and bust, both of which were executed in bronze: the latter
comprising a breastplate with an aegis snaking across the goddess's chest.
Jenkins puffed the sculpture as being 'the most Beautiful & Expressive Head of
a Minerva ever yet seen', describing in his initial communication with Town-
ley in June 1782 the foreign competition—'Concellor Reiffenstein would
gladly have catched it for his Royal Mistress'—and the enraptured aesthetic
endorsement it received from the artist Angelica Kauffman and her husband,
Antonio Zucchi.46 The dealer had recognized the lost helmet as being exe-
cuted in bronze, and announced his intention to restore it in the same
material. The introduction of the breastplate was disclosed in a letter to
Townley five months later as necessary to balance the upper part of the
sculpture; its projected execution in alabaster was abandoned when the
material could not be procured. 47 The restorations undertaken for this sculp-
ture represented a successful synthesis of ancient workmanship and modern
intervention executed in marble and bronze.
43
27 March 1776. TY7/608. 8 October 1776. TY7/618.
44
14 February 1770. TY7/301.
45
8 January 1783. TY7/418.
46
12 June 1782. TY7/414.
47
8 January 1783. TY7/417.
When the bust of Minerva arrived in London a year later, in April 1784,
Townley scrutinized the sculpture and observed that the goddess's nose had
also been restored. Jenkins reassured him that the marble for this minor nasal
surgery had been procured from the root of the neck.48 Incredibly, given
Townley's insistence on the provision of exhaustive condition reports, Jenkins
recounts his surprise that the exact state of preservation had not been
previously disclosed. Clearly the dealer was selective in the extent of the
restorative surgery being divulged to Townley. He proceeds to insist (too
much) that the sale of this prize specimen in the face of fierce competition
was evidence of his devotion to this most discriminating of collectors: 'The
Admiration exceeded Adoration it met with here [Rome], & the Anziety of
acquiring it by others on any terms, added to my opinion of it, being the first
object of its kind that I ever saw, must I suppose have occupied my Mind. The
Ultimate of my Wishes being, that of its being in your Possession, where I was
assured, it would be understood & esteemed as it ought.'
So far, then, via the correspondence of Townley's dealers, we have encoun-
tered examples of restored ancient sculptures either rejected by Townley at the
initial stage of negotiations on paper, as with the Lysimachus cum Achilles, or
at what was usually the culmination of a particular sale, when the sculpture
arrived in Britain. It was the fate of the Paris to be refused by Townley and be
returned to the dealer in Rome on the grounds that its extensive restorations
had been wilfully misrepresented. The de-restoration and re-restoration of
sculptures like the Lysimachus cum Achilles (figure 33) remind us of the
fluidity rather than the rigidity of the restoration process, in which, in the case
of the small Venus (plate 3), Townley actually collaborated with Hamilton in
devising her pose and appropriate attribute. The head of Minerva (plate 4)
demonstrates that restoration was not confined to free-standing or, in Mer-
cury/Endymion's case (plate 2), reclining sculptures, but was a routine oper-
ation for all genres of ancient sculpture in the later 18th century. It also
enables us to recognize that Townley was not averse to modern restorations in
the early 1780s provided that they were properly accounted for, rather than
being contrived as ancient work or wholly denied. The remainder of this
chapter will continue to document the fluidity of restoration as sculptural
process, and also its volatility in the context of foreign competition and Papal
prohibition. Using Townley's discobolus (figure 34) as a case study, its
polemical and political reverberations will be articulated.
The restoration of this highly-prized sculpture enables us to investigate
how what Hamilton referred to as 'antique authority' as a precedent for
restoration options was predicated on both literary and material remains.
48
TY7/422/1.
Figure 34. 'A work superior to Myro[n]' (Jenkins): engraving of Townley's

discobolus.
While the ancient literary evidence was canonical, the idea of an equivalent
canon of ancient sculptures was still being formulated and reformulated in
light of the mass excavation of new finds initiated by dealers like Gavin
Hamilton in Rome and its environs. It will also be demonstrated that the
practice of restoration was not confined to excavated marble sculptures, nor
even to ancient sculptures, since it included those purchased from existing
Roman collections, like Bernini's Neptune and Triton c.1622 from the Villa
Negroni, which was lauded by its purchaser Thomas Jenkins in 1792 as 'one of
the finest pieces of modern sculpture'.49
The discobolus (figure 34) was one of Townley's last and most important
acquisitions in the early 1790s, the culmination of a career in collecting
ancient sculptures that extended almost 40 years. It has recently been written
off as a fake—a calculated collusion between dealer and restorer, Thomas
Jenkins and Carlo Albacini, intended wilfully to deceive Townley about the
authenticity of its head.50 Undoubtedly the (mal)practice(s) of restoration
involve varying perceptions of authenticity: Gerard Vaughan advocates the
use of the term 'partial fake' for a degree of restoration that in our eyes
compromises the authenticity of a sculpture. 51 Rather than juxtaposing the
18th century with the 21st, in a 'them and us' impasse, the restoration of
Townley's discobolus must be seen as historically specific and culturally
contingent. Townley's acquaintance with this sculptural type may be iden-
tified as far back as 1781, when Jenkins and Hamilton independently
informed him in their March and July correspondence of the discovery by
the Marchese Massimi of a discobolus at the Villa Palombaro, near Santa
Maria Maggiore (figure 35). The excavation of this well-preserved statue
meant that a series of previously uncovered and more mutilated torsos of
this type had been erroneously restored as a fallen warrior (Capitoline
Museum, Rome), a Diomedes (Lansdowne Collection, London: figure 31)
and an Endymion, who was subsequently de-restored and re-restored as a
Niobid boy.52 Gavin Hamilton paraphrased a question in an ancient text, in
Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria (II. 13. 8. 10: 'What work is there which is as
distorted and elaborate as that Discobolus of Myron?'), when he described the
Massimi discobolus to Townley as 'a copy of the famous bronze of Miron &
critisezed by the ancients for the distorted action. This copy seems to be done
in the lower age with more diligence than taste.'53 The Massimi discobolus
49
8 September 1792. TY7/522.
50
Vaughan, 'The restoration of classical sculpture in the eighteenth century', 44.
51
Vaughan, 'The restoration of classical sculpture in the eighteenth century', 42.
52
Howard, 'Some eighteenth-century restorations of Myron's Discobolus', 330-4; reprinted
in Howard, Antiquity Restored, 70-7.
53
3 July 1781.TY7/647.
••••itj$te-J&*
Figure 35. 'Done in the lower age with more diligence than taste' (Hamilton): sketch
of the Massimi discobolus.
was restored by Giuseppe Angelini and identified as the best preserved of a

series of surviving Roman marble copies of a famous bronze sculpture by the
5th century BC Greek sculptor Myron.54 Though Myron's original bronze had
not survived the vagaries of the classical tradition, literary references to it were
recorded in the later Roman texts of Quintilian and also in Lucian's Philop-
seudes 18 and Pliny's Natural History 34.57.
A decade after the Massimi sculpture (figure 35) was excavated and iden-
tified from ancient literary sources as a Roman copy in marble of a Greek
bronze by Myron, Thomas Jenkins offered Townley first refusal of another
marble discobolus. For the sum of £400, Townley could be in possession of a
statue of ca Discobolus size of Nature in an action of Expression like that of
the Marchese Massimi, tho' in a stile more like that called the Gladiator in the
Villa Borghese. Its own head one hand with the Discus, the other arm home to
the wrist, & both feet. Indeed may be called in truth in great preservation
having La pelle sua, is doubtless a first rate figure.'55 Jenkins acquired the
discobolus with a statue of a young Hercules at an auction of sculptures
excavated from Hadrian's villa at Tivoli. Evidence of the co-operation between
British collectors, as well as the competition previously alluded to between
Townley and Campbell, is provided in Townley negotiating their purchase for
the Marquis of Lansdowne: the discobolus soon after falling to his lot.56 In
Jenkins' preliminary account of its excellent preservation, with its own head,
most of its limbs, a defining attribute and its own skin, the discobolus would
have been a most highly prized acquisition for Townley. In a letter dated two
months later, Jenkins informed him that the discobolus had been refused an
export licence by the Pope on the grounds that it was a superior copy to the
Massimi version and an almost exact reproduction of Myron's (lost) ori-
ginal.57 At the same time, Jenkins revised his earlier condition report: C I was
deceived in supposing this statue had its own Pelle, its stile & preservation in
other respects uncommon.' A licence was hoped to be forthcoming when
another torso of a discobolus was fortuitously unearthed at Tivoli and was
earmarked for the Papal collections at the Pio-Clementino Museum.58
Sketches were duly supplied in March 1792—(altho' they give but a faint
Idea of the Originals, they shew the action of each'—and a month later the
54
The restoration of the Massimi discobolus is attributed to Angelini in a letter dated 15
October 1791 from Father Thorpe to Henry Blundell, in a private collection. It is not referred to
in Silvan, 'Giuseppe Angelini', 57-69.
55
11 January 1792. TY7/511.
56
See Townley's letter to Lansdowne of 3 April 1792, quoted by Howard, The Lansdowne
Herakles, 13.
37
7 March 1792. TY7/512.
58
17 March 1792. TY7/513.
Hercules was dispatched to Lansdowne. His athletic companion remained with

the dealer in Rome, from where, five months later, Jenkins' first and second
accounts of its preservation had to be retracted and further revised. Jenkins
describes having a trial made on the disembodied torso of the discobolus, whose
decapitated but original head remained untouched in his possession.59 c lt was
with the utmost satisfaction I found my figure turn out much more perfect than
I thought it possible', Jenkins writes; the surgery being prompted by the recent
cleaning of the Papal discobolus 'which had the same kind of tartar or incrust-
ation was by the means of aqua forte with a brush & sand, become quite clean,
like what happened to the Neptune of Bernini'.
The cleaning in 1785 of Bernini's marble Neptune and Triton (now in the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London: figure 36) is represented in Jenkins'
correspondence with Townley as a benchmark in the experimental techniques
of sculpture restoration in later 18th-century Rome.60 Jenkins' purchase of
this group from the merchant Giuseppe Staderini, along with a cache of
ancient marbles from the celebrated Negroni Collection, was said (admittedly
by him, so hardly an objective source) to make 'as much Noise in Rome, as a
Pitt or a Fox in London, Jealously & consequent Envy have an Extensive field,
let them feed on it'.61 The larger-than-life early 17th-century sculpture is
reputed to figure in marble the 'Quos ego' episode from Book 1 of Vergil's
Aeneidy when Neptune the god of the sea quells a storm and calms the sea in
order to ensure Aeneas' safe passage from Troy.62 The monumental Neptune
stands astride a shell, naked except for a cloak whose loose ends coil behind
him, with tangled beard, and windswept hair matted above his furrowed
brow. His weight is thrown forwards as he twists his muscular torso to thrust
his trident downwards. A crouching Triton with fin-like legs emerges from
between the inverse V of Triton's legs. The dynamic composition has been
recognized as radical in its rejection of the silhouette-block-shape; for Witt-
kower, Bernini archived 'full Baroque freedom' for the first time with his
Neptune and Triton.63 Alessandro Peretti, Cardinal Montalto, who inherited
the Negroni villa from his uncle Pope Sixtus V, commissioned the group from
Bernini before his death in 1623. It was originally located as part of a system of
fountains and cascades at the upper end of a large sunken oval fishpond
59
60
On the work itself, see Avery, Bernini, 180-2; Williamson, European Sculpture, 132-3;
Wittkower, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, no. 9; Pope-Hennessy, Catalogue of Italian Sculpture, II. 596-600.
61
12 November 1785. TY7/428. See Barberini, 'Villa Peretti Montalto-Negroni-Massimo',
15-90.
62 Various readings of the sculpture proliferate. Marder, 'Bernini's Neptune and Triton
Fountain, 119-28, argues for the Aeneid as literary precedent, which was also Reynolds' reading
of the group.
63
Wittkower, 'Bernini Studies I', 75-6.
Figure 36. 'The most Ent y & Animated Production of sculpture produced since the
revival of that art in Italy' (Jenkins): Giovanni Lorenzo Bernini's Neptune and Triton,
c.1622.
(c.36 x 25 m) built by Domenico Fontana in a valley in the gardens of the

property. The conch shell on which Triton blows to the four corners of
the world would originally have emitted a jet of water as seen in figure 37.
The sculpture and its installation have been read as offering a synthesis of
watery topography and ancient Roman text, casting its early 17th-century
patron, the Cardinal, as a paragon in the mould of Aeneas.64
A century and a half later, when Jenkins acquired the group, its prolonged
exposure to water and weather led to doubts among 'the vulgar' as to the
identity of its material—whether it was actually executed in marble.65 Clearly
distinguishing himself from this faction devoid of taste, Jenkins recounts to
Townley consultations with the professionals on hand in Rome: with his
preferred sculptor-restorer Carlo Albacini, and with the Papal sculptor Gio-
vanni Pierantoni ( c lo sposino').66 The latter is characterized by Jenkins as
begging him to make a trial on some minor area of sculpture in order to
remove its encrustations and reveal its marble surface. Jenkins' letter to
Townley proceeds to describe the (divine) revelation of its unblemished
marble skin: 'the incrustation coming off, like the scales of a fish, and which
had preserved the Marble in its Original freshness, being as the sculptors term
it, from the Rasp, i:e: never having had the pumice stone on it. Tis now
universally allowed to be the most Ent y & Animated Production of sculpture
produced since the revival of that art in Italy.'67 The experimental methods
employed by the Papal sculpture are later applied to the torso of Townley's
discobolus and divulged to him as being 'aqua forte with brush & sand'.68
Jenkins describes Neptune and Triton as a signature work by Bernini, rather
than a studio production; a virtuoso sign of his technical prowess, executed in
pavonazzetto stone, which is a white marble with mauve or purple stains and
veins, principally quarried near Afyon in west central Turkey. According to
Jenkins it is 'The most tenacious of any Marble whatever for which reason
chose by Bernini for this difficult work, which is all of his own hands, and is
universally allowed to be the most chaste of all His Productions. He used to
64
Marder, 'Bernini's Neptune and Triton Fountain, 124-5.
65
TY7/437/1 and TY7/440 (22 July 1786).
66
Pierantoni became the Papal sculptor in 1782, after his predecessor, Gaspare Sibilla, died. See
Sforza, 'Gli ultimi anni della Roma di Pio VI', 28—45; Carloni, 'Lo scultore Giovanni Pierantoni',
131-48; Carloni, 'Giovanni Pierantoni', 95-144; Piva, 'Giovanni Pierantoni', 193-206.
67
TY7/440.
68
1 September 1792. TY7/521. Vaughan, 'Albacini and his English patrons', 191-2 deduces
that the innovative method of cleaning the sculpture was devised by Albacini, although much of
the work was undertaken by Pierantoni. See Piva, 'II laboratorio alia Torre de' Venti', 97-108,
esp. 104-5, which refers to the material processes of restoration—clay models, plaster casts,
polishing, 'acquaforte', and 'lustratura'—practised by Pierantoni in the workshop for restor-
ation that was the Torre de' Venti in the Vatican Palace.
L3OCL
Figure 37. Engraving of Bernini's Neptune and Triton from Domenico de Rossi,
Raccolta di statue di Roma (Rome, 1704).
Cite this Work as an example of what he could do, & lamented, that his too
Numerous Avocations prevented his Perseverance in such a stile.' Conserva-
tion of the sculpture in 1979 concurred with Jenkins on the authorship of the
work as by the sculptor, rather than his workshop, but determined the marble
as Italian, from Carrara in the Apuan Alps.69 Close scrutiny of the stone
revealed that Bernini left the surfaces above the viewer's eye level unfinished
or more crudely rendered. There was no evidence of the use of metal fixings in
bronze or iron, since these would have corroded and fractured the marble in
its watery location. Instead, there was evidence of its function as a fountain,
with a hollow lead-lined shaft some 3 cm in diameter carved through more
than a metre of solid marble in the figure of the Triton.
Jenkins' exhaustive, not to say enthusiastic, narrative in a letter to Townley
of 22 July 1786, documenting the cleaning of Bernini's Neptune and Triton,
requires further explanation. Predictably, it was necessitated less by a desire to
communicate the pioneering techniques of sculpture restoration to an inter-
ested individual than to defend his actions in the competitive marketplace
that was the Roman sculpture business. Prior to the unforeseen revelation of
its unblemished marble skin, Townley had offered Jenkins £500 for the group
on behalf of an unnamed, 'respectable' friend of his.70 Jenkins' letter is at
pains to point out that post-restoration, he was offered 2,500 crowns for the
group by one 'Prince Gaghareen, a Moscovite Gentleman ... who was remark-
able here, for his Hunting after Bargains, walked into my Gallery, in Company
with his Ciceroni, Sige Antonini, a Person I believe known to you'.71 This
account attests to the easy access to Jenkins' gallery within the commercial
topography of Rome. Bernini's group was reportedly visible at the Casa Celli
on the Corso, near the church and hospital of S. Giacomo, in the summer of
1786.72 When Jenkins saw how the sculpture had turned out, he rejected
Gaghareen's offer of 3,000 crowns (about £700) and increased its price tag to
2,000 sequins.
It is worth noting the surprise arrival of Prince Gaghareen in Jenkins'
(fictional or factual?) narrative, as well as the reference to Antonini as Town-
ley's ally or Jenkins' alibi. Dealers' letters to Townley are not averse to
introducing a (phantom?) rival purchaser to speed up the negotiations, who
is frequently a foreign collector. For instance, when Townley notified Jenkins
that Lord Lansdowne would take the sculptures of Herakles and the discob-
olus from Hadrian's villa at Tivoli, the dealer replied by return of post 'least an
69
Larson, 'The conservation of a marble group', 22-6.
70
TY7/437/1.
71
TY7/440.
72
Ashby, 'Thomas Jenkins in Rome', 493.
answer from Berlin, to a Gentleman here, who has wrote about them, might
previously arrive, and prevent these statues being placed to such advantage, as
they must be in this Nobleman's Gallery, a species of Magnificence very rare in
England'.73 The implicit threat that Townley's dealers exploited in their
negotiations with him was that ancient sculptures exported to Russia or
Germany would not only be forever lost to him and by default to Britain,
but would be as good as buried in inaccessible private collections abroad.
These sorts of statement weren't entirely what one collector dubbed dealer's
'chicanery'.74 Townley confessed to Jenkins that Bernini's group was 'really
lost to me amongst the numberless fine things at Rome', but on its arrival in
England, the sculpture 'gives me a higher idea than I ever had of modern art.
Had Bernini lived in the 80* Olympiad, in the time of pure, severe and
sublime taste he must have been the first of sculptors.'75 A sculpture lost in the
profusion of first-rate artefacts in Rome became more visually prominent
when exhibited abroad. Jenkins predicted that the Bishop of Derry's Roman
collection, for instance, would 'surprise all the World, there never having been
such things sent into Ireland before, or since'.76
When the identity of Townley's friend is disclosed as Sir Joshua Reynolds, and
Jenkins is forced to accept the much reduced sum of £500, the sale of Bernini's
group comes to be characterized by those involved as the triumph of nationalist
sentiment over mercantile profiteering. Jenkins writes to Townley of being
'Pleased at an Occasion to contribute to the justifiable Pleasure of an Artist,
who does so much Honor to our Country'.77 Reynolds, in turn, is 'happy... that
tho Mr. Jenkins has lived so long abroad he still preserves his affection for his
native country, for I am convinced that if he had been indifferent to what
country this great work was sent to, he might have had a much higher price
than that which he suffered me to pay for it, he has the satisfaction of acting
contrary to his interest'.78 The sale of Bernini's Neptune and Triton to Reynolds
was one of the ways in which Jenkins fulfilled his unofficial role as British
73
17 March 1792. TY7/513.
74
5 July 1800. TY15/11/2.
75
13 February 1787. Townley draft to Jenkins. TY7/1846. Compare Townley's letter to
Jenkins with that a year earlier from Richard Payne Knight to Townley, 17 August 1786. TY7/
2091: 'I well remember Sir Joshua's discourse [X] upon Bernini's Groupc; & entirely agree with
you that it's coming to England will be of no Advantage to the Arts. We are already too apt to
mistake Extravagance for a Spirit, & to confound greatness of size with greatness of Manner, &
Bernini is certainly not a Master likely to correct this Error—indeed from the Observations
which the President then made upon the Groupe, I fear it will be a means of extending &
confirming this false taste very much, for as he certainly possesses the talent of speech in a
much superior degree to any of his Academicians, every Error that he adopts will be popular.'
76
6 January 1779. TY7/384.
77
3 March 1787. TY7/452.
78
12 February 1787. TY7/1845.
ambassador in Rome: doing the honours of the nation, as one British visitor
put it.79 His business acumen was not completely superseded by patriotic
affect(at)ion however—he subsequently advised Townley that if Reynolds
were to sell the group on, he wanted a share of the profits.80
Jenkins' cultural politicking in Rome provides a foil to Townley's social
manoeuvrings in London. Though excluded from political institutions in
Britain on account of his Roman Catholic faith, Townley's expertise in marble
matters and the location of his sculpture collection in the capital (to be
discussed in Chapter 6) afforded him a means of social inclusion in the
cultural, rather than the political establishment. Jenkins' purchase of the
antiquities from the Negroni villa was an after-dinner topic of conversation.
This occasion of polite sociability in the metropolitan centre resulted in
Townley negotiating the purchase of the Bernini group on behalf of the
president of the Royal Academy—an occasion where his political marginal-
ization was compensated by his cultural significance. 81
Jenkins invoked the innovative cleaning of Bernini's marble group in Rome
in 1785 some seven years later.82 In a letter to Townley, he describes the same
technique being used for removing the surface incrustations of the discobolus
excavated at Hadrian's villa at Tivoli and destined for the Papal collection. Its
successful cleaning prompted Jenkins to have a trial made on the torso of his
discobolus earmarked for Townley's collection from the same site. Having
reportedly turned out more perfect than the dealer thought possible, once
head and torso were reunited, Townley's discobolus (figure 34) came to be
regarded as the superior copy in the hierarchical sequence of surviving copies.
The head of Townley's restored discobolus looked downwards away from the
discus, rather than turning back towards it as in the Massimi version, whose
head was preserved intact (figure 35). Jenkins recounts how the reputation of
the Massimi copy was diminished—'the actions being judged by all to be
forced'—while Townley's version became the prototype for the restored
modern head of the Papal discobolus.83 In this, we see how a canon of ancient
sculptures was being constantly updated, less by the raw materials unearthed
by excavation, as by those same sculptures being refined by restoration. In
79
According to James Northcote (22 December 1777), Jenkins 'is of vast use to all the English,
who fly to him as they would to an Ambassador, for the King sends none to the Pope'. Quoted in
Whitley, Artists and their Friends, II. 309. Similarly, Sir William Forbes, in his diary for 8 May
1793, describes Jenkins as 'a sort of Introductor to the British travellers residing at Rome, where
there being no British Ambassador, Mr. Jenkins may have been said to have done the honours of
the nation'. NLS, MS 1544, 339. See Rowland Pierce, 'Thomas Jenkins in Rome', 200.
80
TY7/452.
81
Undated. TY7/443.
82
83
3 July 1794. TY7/534.
November 1792, permission was finally forthcoming to export the statue to

Britain. Jenkins represents the Papal endorsement of its exportation as an act
of cultural politics—as a means for the Italians to arm themselves against the
French military threat by courting the allegiance of the English through the
strategic dispersal of their cultural patrimony.84
Once the discobolus arrived in London in June 1794, the protracted paper
discussions as to its status continued, concerning whether the work was Greek or
Roman, slavish copy or improved variant, and the precise extent of its preser-
vation and restoration. Dealer and collector concurred that the type of marble
was Greek, Cipollino, so-called from the resemblance of its green and grey bands
to the layers of an onion.85 According to Jenkins, cwe see many of the finest
works of the ancients in it. Probably occasioned by it being the produce of that
part of Greece [Euboea] where such sculptors resided'. Much like Jenkins'
(mis) identification of the tenacious marble employed by Bernini for his Neptune
and Triton, there were fledgling attempts to classify sculptures by their material.
Such classifications demonstrate an awareness of the physical properties of
different types of marbles and their geographical origin and dissemination.
Jenkins insists that the head of Townley's discobolus is a rightful reunion, rather
than a contrived mismatch, and that it derived from the same cava as the torso,
and had never been out of his possession. Citing the 'universal opinion in Rome',
he attributed the discobolus to the same anonymous Greek artist who produced
the Fighting Gladiator in the Villa Borghese.
Nine days later, annotated sketches were dispatched to Townley of the
Vatican and Massimi discoboli with dotted lines indicating the joins of their
restored limbs. Jenkins praises the extraordinary animation of the sculptural
type with its 'momentary & wonderful exertion of the human faculties'.86 Yet
despite these remedial interventions, the discrepancy between the intact head
of the Massimi version looking back to the discus and the restored head of
Townley's version looking away from the discus still had to be accounted for.
In a brilliant rhetorical manoeuvre, one of Jenkins' letters proffers the opinion
of the Papal antiquarian, Visconti, who 'thinks it most probable that the
action of the head & right foot of Myro's statue is forced, & certainly disgust-
ing to the sight, an artist of eminence might have produced a work superior to
Myro'.87 According to this view, the Greek sculptor of Townley's discobolus,
rather than producing a servile imitation of Myron's bronze, perfected the
imperfections of the original by altering the distorted angle of the head. In
addition to showing the competitive rivalry between surviving marble copies,
this thesis also had ramifications for the authority of the classical literary
84 85 86
TY7/523. 3 July 1794. TY7/534. 12 July 1794. TY7/535.
87
tradition. Townley's improved discobolus challenged the canonical status of

the original bronze preserved in the texts of Quintilian et al. 'The head of your
statue was not only found with it, but I believe you will see it is precisely the
same vein of marble, that in Rome, there never was the most remote doubt of
its authenticity', insists Jenkins, invoking an authenticity that, as we have seen,
was obfuscated as much by the art of restoration as by cultural politics and
dealers' chicanery. Thus, when Hamilton cites classical precedent—'I never
restored any thing without antique authority'—a critical reading of the
correspondence concerning Townley's discobolus reminds us how the author-
ity of the ancients, in both its material and textual incarnations, could be
undermined and then embroidered by the artful practices of restoration.88
The restoration of Townley's discobolus has been attributed to the sculptor
Carlo Albacini.89 It has been deduced that the majority of the sculptures that
Townley acquired from Jenkins from the 1770s, including the bust of Minerva
(plate 4) and the sleeping Mercury (plate 2), discussed above, were restored by
this 'surest Paced Horse of our set of modern sculptors'.90 Epistolary evidence
of Albacini's restorative interventions is explicitly provided in correspondence
between Jenkins and Townley dated spring 1788. It concerns the restoration of
an ancient bas-relief known erroneously as the Supper ofTremalchio (plate 5),
after an ancient literary source: the dinner party in Petronius' Satyricon. Like
Bernini's Neptune and Triton, the relief derived from the collection of the Villa
Negroni, where it was displayed in the portico of the lower palace.91 In a draft
letter to Jenkins, Townley explains that the reason behind his purchasing the
relief was 'the elucidation of the principles of the ancient theological myster-
ies'.92 In this statement, we see the influence of d'Hancarville's mystical
theories in interpreting ancient art in determining the content of Townley's
collection; d'Hancarville was the antiquarian whom Professor Michaelis
dubbed 'professor of the fantastic'.93 Townley wanted his dealer and restorer
to account for the discrepancies between his relief and an engraving published
as plate 43 (figure 38) by Pietro Santi Bartoli in his Admiranda Romanarum
antiquitatum ac veteris sculpturae vestigial anaglyphico opera elaborata (Rome,
1693). Enclosed with Jenkins' letter to Townley dated 30 January 1788 is an
attestation by Albacini accounting for the restorations he had undertaken,
and confirming that the relief had been in his possession from the time of its
removal from the Villa Negroni to its embarkation. 94 'It is not in my Power to
88 89
TY7/584. Vaughan, 'Albacini and his English patrons', 194-5.
91
90 TY 7/335. TY7/427/2.
92
7 March 1788. TY7/466/2.
93
94
TY7/466/1.
110 the operations of sculfture
figure 38. Pietro Santi Bartoli, Admiranda Romanarum antiuitu ac veteris

sculpturae vestigiai anaglyphico opera elaborata (Rome, 1693)
account for Santo Bartoli's variation from the Original', insists Jenkins, before
proceeding to do precisely that: suggesting firstly that Santi Bartoli may have
made mistakes on account of the inaccessibility of the objects he was copying,
and then proposing that he had taken the design from some terracotta object
of the same subject. Townley's indignant response survives as a draft, and
articulates the many 'mutilations' that he perceived between the marble relief
as restored by Albacini and as published in earlier engravings.95 He identifies
Santi Bartoli's engraving as a copy of a copy: as taken from a 16th-century
engraving of the monument published in Antonio Lafreri's Speculum Roma-
nae Magnificentiae. Townley suggests that Jenkins never examined the marble
relief for himself, suggesting that 'these alterations and additions could not
have escaped your discerning and experienced eye'.
Just as Townley's 'discerning and experienced eye' scrutinized the restored
relief and its engraved reproduction, so a close comparison of the original
(plate 5) and the copy (of a copy) (figure 38) reveals that the marble is both
reversed in the engraving and also vertically cropped at the right and left sides.
The woman reclining on her elbow beside the seated, welcoming male figure
on the bed has been entirely expunged, while the couple represented at the
end of the engraved procession have been reworked into a solitary figure. The
leafy tree in the left background of the relief is also absent from the engraving.
Besides 'the Restores of a few Heads, Legs and arms, which are proper',
Townley proposed that a bigoted master of the villa since the time of Sixtus
V had implemented such mutilations on 'account of a supposed Indecency' of
a man and woman sitting together on a couch on one side and embracing on
the other. According to Townley's fanciful hypothesis, the couplings on this
ancient bas-relief were doctored by earlier restoration in order to appease the
strict moral criteria of a former owner. His repeated request that Jenkins
dispose of the relief'to any Turk, Jew or Christian Dilettante that will give me
what I paid for it' was never realized.
The restoration of Henry Blundell's sculpture of a hermaphrodite de-restored
and re-restored as a Sleeping Venus (figure 39) provides an early 19th-century
example of the type of strategic editing of risque antique sculptures that Townley
invoked as a historical precedent for the Tremalchio relief. Like Jenkins' descrip-
tion of the demand for sculptures as furniture, the restoration of the Tremalchio
relief is another instance of contemporary sculptural innovation being
(mis)conceptualized as historical precedent. Blundell acquired the reclining
sculpture of the hermaphrodite with a number of items at the sale of the 2nd
Earl of Bessborough's collection of antiquities in London in 1801. It had been
purchased by James Adam from the Borioni Collection in Rome. Once in
95
7 March 1788. TY7/466/2.
Figure 39. Henry Blundell's Sleeping Venus post-surgery, plate 41 of the Engravings and Etchings.
BlundelTs possession, the incriminating male genitals and the three playful genii,
one suckling the hermaphrodite's ample breast, were removed. Blundell's pub-
lished catalogue describes the restoration as the 'castration' of the 'unnatural and
very disgusting' hermaphrodite into a 'pleasing' figure of a sleeping Venus.96 A
sketch of the sculpture before its restoration survives in Townley's paper mu-
seum (figure 40), whose art historical and social significance will be discussed
later on, in Chapter 7.
The restoration of the Blundell hermaphrodite has been read in Freudian
terms, as a condition of androgyny experienced in the infantile state.97 The
disarming of this sculpture with its conceptually unstable subject matter
reminds us that the commercial marketplace for such marble artefacts, and
the sculptors who restored them, were not exclusively confined to Rome. In
an attempt to document fully the sequential processes in the art of restor-
ation, we must embrace what was sometimes the final stage: the re-restoration
on arrival in Britain of restored ancient sculptures that had been damaged
during their prolonged and sometimes precarious carriage from Italy. The
logistics involved in packing and transporting sculptures by land and sea form
the focus of the next chapter. Those sculptures already familiar to us, whose
re-restorations are cited in the correspondence of Townley's dealers, include
the crouching sphinx (figure 29). Jenkins introduced her to Townley with a
detailed condition report accompanied by two sketched views (figure 25a and
b) in August 1778.98 Four years later, on receipt of the sculpture, Jenkins
wrote to Townley that now the broken wings had been re-restored, it 'will
daily improve upon you, as it is the best monument of that kind which has
ever appeared'.99
Not all ancient sculptures required re-restoration as a result of breakages in
the course of their carriage. There is written evidence of the arms of the small
Venus (plate 3) being restored again when she arrived in London. J. T. Smith, a
pupil of the sculptor Joseph Nolle kens, recounts an exchange between his master
and Townley in which the sculptor was invited to propose alternative positions
for the restoration of the arms, 'such as holding a dove, the beak of which might
touch her lips; entwining a wreath; or looking in the eye of a serpent'.100 Smith
describes posing as Nollekens' model and the seventh restoration option being
adopted. His embittered biography is notoriously subjective, but an unsigned
drawing of the Venus, with a snake coiling around her wrists towards her face,
gives his account some credibility.101 The association between Townley and
96
Howard, 'Henry Blundell's Sleeping Venus, 405-20; reprinted in Antiquity Restored, 117-29.
97
This is one of Howard's readings in Antiquity Restored, 124.
98
TY7/382.
99
1 August 1782. TY7/403.
100
Smith, Nollekens and his Times, I. 183.
101
Cook, The Townley Marbles, 52.
Figure 40. Sketch of Blundell's hermaphrodite prior to its castration into figure 39.
Nollekens, collector and sculptor, appears to date from 1773, during Townley's
second tour of Italy, when his uncle visited Nollekens' London premises to
collect a bust of Antinous that the Duke of Dorset had exchanged with Thomas
Jenkins.102 Both Jenkins and Hamilton tried to orchestrate the internal exchange
of sculptures in order to avoid the excessive cost of return transport to Rome;
Townley was acting both as recipient of sculptures like the bust of Antinous, and
as an intermediary in the negotiations between the Roman dealers and his fellow
British collectors. An example of this arose in 1774, when Hamilton asked
Townley to mention the availability of the Lansdowne Amazon (figure 1) to
Thomas Mansel Talbot.103
'Even Hercules was obliged to repose betwixt his labours... Like ruined
gamesters we must content ourselves with overlooking the cards', wrote
Townley in 1781, using the simile of gambling for collecting.104 The hundreds
of surviving letters from his dealers in the Townley Archive are thick with
instances of ancient marble sculptures being excavated and restored, admired
and acquired, rejected and returned. Those cited here and in the previous
chapter enable us to focus on the art historical issues at stake in a foreign
commission from Rome; a commission which, for a perseverance collector
like Townley, was maintained and mediated by detailed descriptions of po-
tential acquisitions, supplied and read in conjunction with sketched views of
the objects for sale. The obligatory practice of restoration has been charac-
terized as a fluid and piecemeal process that comprised, in the first instance,
making excavated fragments whole and intelligible. On one documented
occasion, it involved the de-restoration of a restored Lysimachus into a re-
restored Achilles. On another, Townley actually collaborated with Gavin
Hamilton in the restorative surgery proposed for the small Venus. In contrast,
the wilful misrepresentation of the extent of the restorations to a statue of
Paris saw the Trojan prince actually returned to Jenkins in Rome. Once we
have looked at the economic and political pitfalls of transporting heavy
sculptures from Rome to Britain in the next chapter, it will become even
more apparent what an undertaking this entailed. The restorative surgical
procedure that saw miscellaneous fragments fabricated into a cast of ancients
was followed by reworking the marble to remove unwanted surface traces and
to achieve homogeneity between ancient workmanship and modern inter-
vention. The restoration of 18th-century sculpture has been shown to be
multi-layered and multi-faceted: not simply a two-horse race between mas-
ter and pupil, Cavaceppi and Albacini. Nor was the process of restora-
tion confined to excavated sculptures, or even to ancient sculptures, as the
02 103 104
6 August 1773. TY7/815/1. TY7/586. TY6/1.
cleaning of Bernini's Neptune and Triton testifies. Though Rome was the
centre of the restoration industry, some marbles underwent re-restoration
later in the sequential passage of sculpture from excavated artefact to drawing
room, on their arrival in London; the castration of Blunders hermaphrodite
reminds us that some collectors' moral codes could invoke a more invasive
approach to restoration than the carapace of what Hamilton called 'antique
authority'. Indeed, the very notion of 'antique authority' has been shown to
have been predicted, less on the raw materials of the past unearthed by
excavation, as on a canon of works already refined by restorations.
Ever wary of the 'puffs' of the sellers, the letters from Jenkins and Hamilton
are still loaded with evidence about the manufacture of sculptures as furniture
in the Roman marketplace. In his desire for first-class sculptures preserved as
far as possible with their limbs intact and their characters not impeached,
Townley was highly atypical among his contemporaries, and should be viewed
as an exception rather than the rule. However, as we shall go on to see, when it
came to collecting sculptures in the late 18th century there were no prescribed
rules. These were written retrospectively by classical archaeologists like Adolf
Michaelis a century later.
4
Collecting and global politics:

The export of marbles from Rome
and their transport to Britain
However Idle this sort of stock may appear to many eyes they must at
least allow the advantage of having something to shew for money, which I
must own has not allways been the case with me.
Charles Townley to John Towneley, 1 June 17681
The restoration of Townley's discobolus (figure 34) featured in the previous

chapter as a compelling case study in the restorative operations of sculpture in
Rome in the second half of the 18th century, specifically in the early 1790s,
using innovative techniques implemented in the previous decade for cleaning
post-classical sculpture. Restoration was cast as an art that was both material
in its sculptural practice and rhetorical in its artful epistolary representation
by Townley's dealers. Another prosthesis that is (represented as) fundamental
to Townley's acquisition of the discobolus is the art of cultural politics. Once a
collector had been seduced by a restored sculpture, or an idea of it via
drawings and descriptions, the next stage in the business of collecting was
the export of ancient marbles out of Papal territory and their foreign and
domestic transport. On Jenkins' initial application for an export licence in
March 1792, the discobolus was refused on the grounds that it was considered
the superior version of a surviving sculptural type, and a material survival, to
the bronze discobolus preserved in ancient texts as a work of the 5th-century
BC Greek sculptor Myron.2 When auspicious excavations unearthed another
discobolus earmarked for the Papal collection, Jenkins assured Townley that a
licence would be forthcoming. Papal permission to export the version des-
tined for Park Street was not actually granted until six months later, in
November 1792. In the intervening period, the lost head of the Papal version
was restored on the basis of Townley's variant—the (thought to be) superior
prototype with its head looking downwards away from the discus. When
1 2
TY7/920. TY7/512.
118 Collecting and global politics
permission was finally granted, Jenkins explains it in a letter to Townley as a

strategic political decision by which the Papal authorities were looking to arm
themselves against the French military threat. Writing (They look up to
England as the only power that can check the extension of French principles
and conquest... in this instance there is scarce anything he [the Pope] would
not do to prove a desire to oblige the English.'3
This chapter investigates the degree to which the acquisition, exportation,
and transportation of ancient sculptures were embroiled in contemporary
politics, not just in Rome in the early 1790s at this particular historical
moment of impending French invasion, but throughout the previous three
decades.4 Our geographical focus covers the Papal territory that was the city
of Rome, Britain as a 'fiscal military state', to cite John Brewer's influential
characterization, and Britain's wider empire with reference to the American
colonies.5 The chapter is appropriately situated at the mid-point of my
narrative since it signals a point of transition—at which ancient sculptures
were dispatched from the marketplace in Rome and undertook the often
hazardous passage towards their destination in Britain. At this crucial stage in
the business of collecting, we shall observe that the narrative of negotiation
was no longer a written dialogue, an exchange of letters between dealer and
collector, as it involved transactions between numbers of specialists respon-
sible, either directly or indirectly, for this branch of commerce. So on the one
hand, for example, there was an often impenetrable level of bureaucratic
input from the key personnel in the employ of the Papal court; on the
other, anonymous professional tradesmen like carpenters were hired to over-
see the safe unloading and unpacking of the cases on their arrival. This
transitional stage was arguably the most precarious aspect of a foreign
commission. It was administrative, expensive, opportunistic, and even dan-
gerous. Economically precarious and politically vulnerable, it has been (too)
long underplayed by traditional art historical discussion.6
In keeping with the organization of earlier chapters, the sequential stages in
the passage of sculpture will be maintained. So we shall start with the political
obstructions in the acquisition and exportation of ancient sculptures, when they
were still ensconced in the hands of dealers in Rome. Having considered the fate
3
22 November 1792. TY7/523.
The politics of collecting after 1796 and the French occupation of Italy are beyond the
chronological scope of this chapter. For an example of the sequestration of a collection of
paintings and sculptures belonging to the Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry and its sale in
Rome in 1804, see Figgis, 'The Roman Property', 77-103.
5
Brewer, The Sinews of Power.
6
Johns, Antonio Canova and the Politics of Patronage, 225 n. 2: 'The disruption of trade in the
fine and decorative arts in time of war deserves more attention.'
of ancient sculptures before they were dispatched from Italy, their treatment will
be documented when they reached their destination in Britain without diplo-
matic incident; or in the case of the grand tour objects cased on board the
Westmorland vessel in January 1779, when they failed to arrive—having been
captured and countermanded by Britain's political enemies en route.
Our discussion begins long before the threat of seizure or shipwreck, with
an enormous (165 x 262 cm) ensemble portrait by the French artist Benigne
Gagnereaux. Pius VI Accompanying Gustav III of Sweden on a Visit to the
Museo Pio-Clementino, 1786, commemorates the King of Sweden's official
visit to the Pio-Clementino Museum some two years previously, on 1 January
1784 (plate 6).7 The new museum was founded and furnished during the
pontificates of Clement XIV and Pius VI. It was the largest and costliest
artistic project of the period, and involved nearly every member of Rome's
cultural elite. The establishment of the new museum has been seen as part of
the propaganda enterprise by which Pius sought to reinvigorate the Papacy's
secular and spiritual authority—in a showy display of appearance that
maximized its symbolic prestige.8 One of Pius's schemes for urban regener-
ation involved the re-erection of Egyptian obelisks, including that of Pharaoh
Psammetichus II, described by George Grenville as material testimony of
Rome's conquest over nations and nature at the beginning of Chapter 2
(figure 21). Though Pius was by no means the first pontiff to re-erect obelisks
as part of an orchestrated campaign of civic renewal, the restoration and
relocation of the obelisk into the Piazza Montecitorio in 1792 has been seen as
signalling the triumph of progressive Catholicism over the ruined material
fragments of paganism; the solar function of the monument was also re-
instated. According to Jeffrey Collins, the creation of the Pio-Clementino
museum and the re-erection of Roman obelisks were part of Pius VI's attempt
to establish Rome as an international showpiece.9
Seen in this context of collecting and megalithomania, Gagnereaux's canvas
is a piece of visual propaganda—imaging an auspicious encounter between
the head of the Roman Catholic church and a Protestant sovereign without
the usual demands of protocol.10 It is actually one of two canvases, one a copy
of the other, which was commissioned by the Pope for the Vatican after seeing
7
My reading of the image is based on that of Collins, Papacy and Politics, 53-4. Benigne
Gagnereaux (1756-1795): Un pittore francese nella Roma di Pio VI (Rome, 1983), no. 26 notes
the continuity with Raphael's The School of Athens, 1509-10 in the Stanza della Segnatura,
casting Pius VI as Plato and Gustav III as Aristotle.
8
Collins, Papacy and Politics, ch. 4, 'The Gods' Abode', 132-92.
9
Collins, Papacy and Politics, esp. 210-19.
10
Johns, 'The Entrepot of Europe: Rome in the eighteenth century', in Peters Bowron and
Rishel, Art in Rome, 44 n. 68.
the version the artist executed for the Swedish monarch. The meeting takes
place in Pius's new museum, between the Sala Rotonda and the Sala delle
Muse, which was purpose-built for the exhibition of the statues of Apollo and
the muses excavated by Domenico de Angelis at the so-called Villa of Cassius
at Tivoli. Tho they call it the Villa of Cassius, I shoud suspect it belonged to
Adrian, who its probable might have had some Buildings of the Heights for
the Benefit of the fine Air', Jenkins wrote to Townley in 1775; providing
another instance of 18th-century priorities being imposed onto those of the
ancients. 11 The triumphal arch through which the Pope and the King have
passed in the image gives the meeting the flavour of an ancient Roman
imperial adventus. In this image of sovereign power, the power balance
hangs in a delicate equilibrium between King and Pontiff in the centre
foreground of the canvas. Gustav's retinue on the right are matched in
number, if not sartorial splendour, by the Papal contingent on the opposite
side. Even the display of sculptures is implicated into the power dynamic. In
the left foreground, a statue of a warlike Amazon is installed on a pedestal; on
the right, a Ganymede with Jupiter in the form of an eagle. Pius's outstretched
arm mirrors that of the Apollo Belvedere installed behind him in the left
corner, while Gustav's hand-on-hip pose echoes that of the Belvedere Anti-
nous. The informal groupings of the Papal guards at the margins of the canvas,
and the playful romps of the two dogs at the base of the Amazon sculpture,
provide a contrast to the statuesque poses of the central protagonists. The
masterpieces of the classical canon are in attendance at this representation of a
diplomatic gathering, in which one monarch displays his cultural patrimony
to another.
The political equilibrium between King and Pontiff, as given visual form by
Gagnereaux, was also given material form in the collecting of ancient sculp-
tures. In recognition of his policy of religious tolerance of Catholics in
Protestant Sweden—Gustav wished to build a Catholic cathedral in Stock-
holm—the Pope granted permission in 1785 for the export of a famous
sculpture of Endymion (plate 7) excavated from Hadrian's villa at Tivoli.12
The provision of export licences was one of the legislative measures by which
the Papal authorities sought to regulate the dispersal of their cultural patri-
mony. They formed part of the bureaucratic territory of the Commissario
delle Antichita, a position created in 1534 for a keeper of all the classical
monuments in Rome and throughout the Papal States that survived until
11
4 March 1775. TY7/345.
12
Ridley, The Pope's Archaeologist, 112; Leander Touati, Ancient Sculptures in the Royal
Museum, 100. The archival reference is Archivio di Stato di Roma, Camerale MSS II, Antichita
e belle arti, folio 4 (14 August 1785).
1870 when the temporal power of the Papacy was overthrown. 13 While the
logistics of the process of petition and application remain undocumented, the
hundreds of surviving export licences in the former Papal archives, now part
of the Archivio di Stato di Roma, provide the necessary authorization on
paper.14 For each application, the individual making the request is named,
and an overview of the goods—sculptures and paintings, ancient and
modern—that he seeks to extract from Papal territory is given. The name of
the dispatcher/agent indicates that these items were destined for England,
France, Sweden, Germany, and Russia. Summary descriptions by the appli-
cant, such as 37 cases containing various restored marble figures, busts, vases,
animals, and chimney-pieces, are followed by more detailed descriptions by
the Camerlengo, the Papal Chamberlain. His account, signed and dated,
usually identifies, where possible, the iconography of the sculptures, their
size and material, and also the extent of their restorations and their ancient
and modern parts. An unidentified bust of mediocre and ordinary sculpture
is a familiar refrain, as are modern arms and/or legs, good sculpture but much
damaged, missing its nose. On occasion, a valuation is provided; inscriptions
on monuments are transcribed on enclosed sheets. Below, the description of
the Camerlengo is endorsed and co-signed by that of the Papal Antiquary,
Ridolfino Venuti (in office 1744-63), J. J. Winckelmann (1763-6), or Visconti,
the father (1768-84) and son (1784-99). Permission is generally sought for a
number of objects, which makes identification of particular ancient sculp-
tures especially difficult. An exception is Townley's discobolus (figure 34),
which was one of nine sculptures presented for export by Thomas Jenkins in
November 1792 and valued at 3,000 scudi.15 Visconti's text actually describes
the discobolus that was granted an export licence as being of insufficient
quality and restoration for the Pio-Clementino Museum; far inferior to that
found at the Villa Palombaro (figure 35) with which it should never be
compared by a truly intelligent professor who has the taste to appreciate the
hands of Greek antique sculpture. Although the export licences are officially
authorized documents, they are not immune from hyperbole in their insist-
ence on the mediocrity and inferiority of the sculptures being exported.
In addition to the provision of export licences, one of the other duties of
the Papal Antiquary was to oversee the progress of excavations once licences
13
Ridley, 'To protect the Monuments', 117-54 provides a list of all the Commissarii. Ridley's
discussion of exports in the 18th century is based on Bertolotti (see note 14 below), which, being
far from exhaustive, is actually quite misleading.
14
My account is based on the Camerale MSS II, Antichita e belle arti, folios 11-15 (1750-
1809), Exportazione di oggetti di antichita e belle arti. They were published in an abbreviated
form by Bertolotti as 'Esportazione di oggetti di belle arti da Roma'.
15
Camerale MSS II, Antichita e belle arti, folio 13.
to investigate particular sites had been issued by the Camerlengo.16 Gavin

Hamilton reminded Townley in a letter of 1776 that 'in all the cavas where an
estimation of the marbles is necessary, the Pope must be preferrd in every
thing that is fine'.17 The Pope was entitled to a third of the finds, or of the
value of the finds, from any excavations that were superintended by his
representative. Explorations in 1774 within the villa of Cassius, for example
had unearthed eighteen statues, including nine intact muses. 'It is past a
doubt but they will be secured for the Museum [wrote Hamilton], all the
chance we have is that there should be something bawdy amongst them.'18
Pagan sculptures with conceptually subversive subjects were evidently ex-
cluded from the collection of God's earthly representative. The creation of
the Pio-Clementino Museum meant that Pius VI was in an exceptional
position. As the protector of Rome's cultural heritage, he was seemingly
without rival in the collecting stakes. Again, this is a position that Townley's
dealers' exploit. All too often in their letters they enhance the cultural cachet
of a sculpture by representing it as a desirable acquisition for the Pio-
Clementino—that only their wily ingenuity (what Michaelis calls their 'spirit
of enterprise') had been able to deflect.19
The collecting of classical sculptures was frequently embroiled in the art of
diplomacy. In the case of the Endymion (plate 7), whose purchase was reported
in Chracas' Diario ordinario, permission to export the sculpture to Sweden was a
strategic political decision that extended the privilege of possession from one
European ruler to another.20 In much the same way, Thomas Jenkins represents
the export of the discobolus in 1792 as a timely gesture of Rome's political
friendship with Britain. Gustav is said to have been fascinated by the Endymion
during his 1784 stay in Rome, when it was displayed at the Villa Pichini outside
Porta Pinciano.21 Though the initial price was 8,000 scudi, he paid less than half,
notwithstanding competition for possession from Prince Borghese and the
Empress of Russia. The Endymion was to become the prize of the Swedish
royal collection that contained some 200 examples of ancient sculpture bought
through the agency of Francesco Piranesi. In a letter to Townley of 1788, Gavin
Hamilton cited the King of Sweden as being highly covetous of the vase (figure
2) from the Villa of the Duke of Lanti on the Janiculum Hill near the Sapienza.22
16
Bignamini, 'British excavators in the Papal States', 91-108.
17
29 August 1776. TY7/615.
18
TY7/580.
19
20
27 August 1785. Hyde Minor, 'References to artists and works of art', 271.
21
Leander Touati, Ancient Sculptures in the Royal Museum, 99.
22
26 April 1788. TY7/664. Angelicoussis, Woburn Abbey, no. 82; Carunchio and Orma, Villa
Lante al Gianicolo, 225-7.
Though 'badly engraved by Piranesi [ Vasi, candelabri, cippi, sarcophagi, tripodi

lucerne et ornamenti antichi (Rome, 1778), I, 42 and 43] it is a fine thing of the
kind', he wrote of the monumental marble vase with Dionysiac heads that was
almost as wide as it was high. Since being engraved by Piranesi, it had been
acquired by the engraver cum antiquities dealer Giovanni Volpato, and come
onto the market; Hamilton's (implicit) hope being that the reported admiration
of the King of Sweden might induce Townley to make an offer. This was the vase
that Hamilton had offered to Lord Lansdowne two years previously in part-
exchange for his unwanted sculpture of an Amazon (figure 1).
Like Michaelis, weeding out post-classical objects for his catalogue of
ancient marble sculptures in Britain, Gavin Hamilton's correspondence to
Lansdowne has been edited for publication, with the result that the letters
dealing primarily with modern marble furniture, like pedestals and chimney-
pieces, and painted furnishings for his gallery at Lansdowne House have been
excluded. Such polarizing of the so-called fine and decorative arts, of ancient
and modern marbles in 18th-century collections, is, as we have seen, a 19th-
century anachronism. In one of these unpublished letters to Lansdowne,
dated 16 June 1786, Hamilton describes the provision of a drawing of the
front and profile views of the Lanti vase, a (by now) familiar ritual in the
paper transactions between dealer and collector. He explains, 'there is a new
law which prohibits all excellent pieces of antient sculpture going out of the
Popes dominions... & the present secretary of state is the person who vigi-
lates to see this law put in execution with the greatest vigour'.23 This was the
law passed at the start of Pius VI's pontificate. It signalled the end of the
14-month interregnum which, as Hamilton confessed to Lansdowne, had
been a prescient time for exporting antiquities. 24 Hamilton's unpublished
letter continues, 'Volpato hopes some indulgence [to export the Lanti vase]
on account of a prior promise of the Pope giving him leave to dispose of it'.
Two years later, in April 1788, Jenkins informed Townley that his fellow
British collector, Colonel Campbell, had purchased the vase for 200 crowns
—a paltry sum when one considers that Volpato's initial price tag was £600.
Volpato's hoped-for promise was not immediately forthcoming: the Pope had
declined to purchase the vase and also prohibited its export from Rome—
such was the Papal monopoly on their cultural property. 25 Permission to
export the vase was finally granted by October the following year, when
Jenkins notified Campbell that it had has been shipped to Livorno in separate
23
Lansdowne MSS, Bowood House.
24
9 February 1775. Smith, Catalogue, 72, letter xxi: 'Never was a time so apropos for sending
off antiques as at present, having no Pope, nor are we likely to have one soon.'
25
26 April 1788. TY7/471.
cases on account of its having been disassembled into three sections: vase,
pedestal, and plinth.26 A space in one of the boxes had been filled with items
for Charles Townley, to be deposited for him at the Customs House in
London. 'I am certain you will be pleased at rendering a Gentleman in
every respect so deserving a civility', Jenkins wrote to Campbell. The body
of the vase contained another smaller case with an Etruscan vase Jenkins
acquired from Naples, and which he considered a valuable specimen for
Campbell's collection. Jenkins' letter closes with his good wishes for Camp-
bell's impending nuptials to Lady Caroline Howard, the daughter of the 5th
Earl of Carlisle: 'should you decide to conduct this fair Lady to Italy it will be
the means of confirming what so agreeably charmed me in England, that there
is more genuine beauty there than on all the continent of Europe. I ever
considered the beauty of ancient sculpture, as valuable in proportion, as it
represented fine nature.' The next chapter pursues the contemporary correl-
ation between the allure of women and that of ancient sculpture.
The politics of collecting—in terms of the key personnel in the employ
of the Papal court and its opposing rival factions—are vividly documented in
the correspondence concerning the Barberini candelabra. They are known
as the Barberini candelabra after the collection of which they had formed part
since (apparently) being excavated at Hadrian's villa at Tivoli in 1630. Re-
stored by Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, they are often cited as being the earliest
acquisition of the new Pio-Clementino Museum, although their procurement
was far from straightforward. Thomas Jenkins bought the candelabra from
the Barberini collection in 1766, and commenced negotiations with a number
of British collectors, including Thomas Anson of Shugborough in Stafford-
shire.27 John Dick, the English consul in Livorno and an employee of the
British state, acted as an intermediary between collector and dealer, forward-
ing drawings of the candelabra prior to restoration with a scale measurement
in English feet (figure 41). Jenkins dated the lower sections of triangular form
with figural representations in relief as being the finest time of the Greeks,
around the time of Alexander the Great, while the upper stalks he declared
'the finest ornaments that ever were done in sculpture'.28 Dick rightly pre-
dicted that Jenkins would find it difficult to obtain an export licence as his
having bought them was said to have made 'a great noise' in Rome.29 Even at
the preliminary stage of negotiations, Jenkins requested that all details of their
26
7 October 1789. Carmarthen records office, Cawdor MSS, box 129.
27
See Cassidy, 'Thomas Jenkins and the Barberini Candelabra', 99-113. On Anson's collec-
tion, see Coltman, 'Thomas Anson's sculpture collection', 35-56.
28
15 November 1766. Staffordshire Record Office, D615/P(A)/2.
29
21 November 1766. Staffordshire Record Office, D615/P(A)/2.
Figure 41. Drawing of the Barberini candelabra.
communications be kept secret from the Director of the Arts in Rome, the
collector Cardinal Alessandro Albani, who was a rival would-be possessor.
In the months that followed, an extraordinary, but ultimately futile,
sequence of discussions took place that involved key personnel in the employ
of the Papal court and beyond. Jenkins recruited the assistance of Prince
Emilio Altieri, who applied on his behalf to the Pope's nephew, the treasurer
of the Vatican, for a permit. In an (empty) gesture of goodwill, Altieri made it
known that if the Pope wanted the candelabra, they would be his once their
foreign purchaser (Anson) had been reimbursed. The Vatican's dire financial
straits ensured this could not happen. Then Albani intervened, warning
Jenkins that the candelabra could be confiscated on the grounds that he had
not applied for permission to export them prior to purchasing them; the
Papal antiquary, Winckelmann, had already capitulated and agreed to their

export. With negotiations at an impasse, Jenkins suggested to Anson another
possible avenue, that of petitioning the French ambassador to plead his case
with the Pope. At the same time, Jenkins warned Anson not to approach Sir
Horace Mann, the British envoy in Florence, who, as an ally of Albanfs, was
likely to prove their adversary. Such privileged information refutes the con-
ventional characterization of Albani and Mann as protecting British interests
in Italy and facilitating acquisitions of this kind; as in 1749, for instance, when
Matthew Brettingham needed Albani's intervention to export five statues for
Lord Leicester.30 Almost 20 years later, navigating the political minefield that
was the allegiance of members of the elite in Italy, both native and foreign, to
court Albani's support would be, Jenkins wrote to Anson, like Running into
the wolf's mouth'.31 In the event, Albani prevailed and an export licence was
refused. There were what Jenkins refers to as 'some secret machinations', plans
to sequester the candelabra so that they could not be re-sold even in Rome.32
Anson's 1,000 crown deposit was returned. Never one to miss an opportunity,
Jenkins immediately offered Anson a statue of a Hercules in distress from
having put on the centaur's skin. The sculpture had the same reported
provenance as the candelabra—excavated at Hadrian's villa at Tivoli and
formerly in the Barberini collection. Jenkins even went so far as to suggest
its esteemed ancient authorship: c it being the very same stile of sculpture, and
without doubt of the same authors or school as those who made the Laocoon
in the Belvedere'. By May 1770, he informed Townley that the Pope
has lately thought fit to imploy your Heretical servant to purchase some antiquities
for him and altho' this will prevent a few things from being sent away, it gives me a
certain superiority in gen that I can now compass many things that likewise woud be
difficult to bring about... [the Barberini candelabra] I have now repurchased for the
Pope who has placed them in the Museum in the Vatican Library where they make a
most respectable figure, and are no small mortification to those Worthys who ware the
originals means of preventing their being sent out of Rome.33
Elsewhere, the correspondence from Jenkins and Hamilton reveals the

extent to which these enterprising British dealers in Rome operated within
the legal restrictions for exporting antiquities out of Papal territory. One
option was to obtain an export licence for a sculpture immediately after it
had been excavated, when in its muddied and mutilated condition it was
impossible to make an objective judgement of its value and importance.
30
Lewis, Connoisseurs and Secret Agents, esp. 151-4 and 173.
31
3 June 1767. Staffordshire Record Office, D615/P(A)/2.
32
12 August 1767. Staffordshire Record Office, D615/P(A)/2.
33
2 May 1770. TY7/302.
Regarding a bas-relief excavated from the villa of the Emperor Domitian's

nurse, Hamilton wrote to Townley that he intended to act pointedly and
swiftly: securing a licence two hours after bringing it home with only a corner
restored and sending it off immediately once the restorations were com-
plete.34 This high-risk strategy was not guaranteed to succeed; a repeat
application had to be made to export Townley's discobolus, and even then
it could take months before it was approved. Licences could also be revoked.35
'[Giovanni Battista] Visconti has not yet seen it', Hamilton advised Townley of
the potential obstacle to his possession that was the Papal antiquarian who
took office in 1768. One of Hamilton's letters, dated 21 March 1774, contains
a protracted account of the Papal capitulation of a beautiful, intact bust of
Sabina (figure 42) that he had excavated at Monte Cagnolo and earmarked for
Townley's collection.36 Having sequestered her for over a month 'under lock
and key with holy of holy's', Hamilton describes her liberation after being
interrupted by 'a violent rap at the door'. In what amounted to a Papal raid of
his property, Hamilton recounts 'beat[ing] a retreat with my Empress' from
the kitchen where the bust was being washed into his painting room. The
charade is prolonged when Hamilton returns home to find Visconti and
Gianangelo Braschi, the Commissioner and the Treasurer (and later Pope
Pius VI), scrutinizing the bust, and the next morning the purchase is com-
pleted for the Pio-Clementino Museum for 400 crowns. Yet this occasion in
which Visconti acted as Townley's adversary in acquiring first-class objects
might be contrasted with his reported collusion over the export of the
Tremalchio relief from the Villa Negroni (plate 5). According to a letter of
Thomas Jenkins, Visconti was compliant in its export though 'afraid of losing
his Imployment if it arrived to the knowledge of the Pope, that he had given
licence for a monument so much esteemed, being sent away'.37 These epistol-
ary accounts by Townley's dealers seem to attest to the illicit favours and
protectionist deals that took place between key personnel in the Roman
antiquities market.
In a letter of July 1777, Thomas Jenkins reassured Townley of his unwaver-
ing commitment to his commission: 'I know what you want, it must be of the
first water or it will not do, and you may be assured if such offers, you will have
the refusal of it, and notwithstanding the zeal of Vis[conti]: for the Museum,
if I ever meet with such a thing as you want, I do not fear to get it out.'38
34
28 November 1775. TY7/599.
35
See 29 January 1773, Gavin Hamilton to Shelburne. Smith, Catalogue, 64, letter xiv,
referring to the licence for Hamilton's discobolus from Albano being revoked.
36
TY7/566.
37
30 January 1788. TY7/466/1.
38
23 July 1777. TY7/371.
Figure 42. 'A most beautiful bust of Sabina preserved as when it come from the hands
of the Sculptor not even the point of the nose broke' (Hamilton).
Another option available to the inventive dealer fearless of getting marbles out
of Rome was illegal carriage. £ It happens that I must smugle this as I have done
all the fine things I have sent you', pronounces one of Gavin Hamilton's letters
referring to the colossal Venus (figure 32) excavated at the port of Ostia.39 A
close reading of Hamilton's correspondence with Townley reveals that the
sculpture was not actually smuggled, but was ingeniously exported in two
separate halves, which were reunited on their arrival in London to form a first-
class sculpture. Writing to Townley in March 1776, Hamilton explained that
the sculpture had been made to join at the middle where the naked upper torso
meets the lower draped half: 'the whole con la pelle sua of salino marble & fine
colour'.40 Different attributes were proposed for the restoration of the lost left
arm and right hand—a pot of oil, an apple. 41 It was evidently Townley who
suggested the export of the sculpture in two pieces, although Hamilton cites it
as also being his intention. 42 The latter dated the style of the sculpture to the
time of Trajan on account of 'the hair not much finished, & the drapery in
large folds'.43 Having in previous letters compared its size and surface to a
sculpture of Meleager that Hamilton sold to Lord Shelburne with which
Townley was familiar, he subsequently pronounces it to be superior: an
original sculptural production, rather than a copy.44 Hamilton reminded
Townley that once the £700 sculpture of the Venus had been exported in two
seemingly unrelated, disembodied halves, she could not under any circum-
stances be returned to Rome. The same was true of other sculptures clandes-
tinely exported, like the Jupiter from the Villa d'Este at Tivoli (figure 43) that
followed three years later as a speculative acquisition, which Townley declined
to purchase.
As part-owner of the statue with Henry Tresham, Gavin Hamilton offered
Townley first refusal of the Jupiter (figure 43). Another larger-than-life sculp-
ture, it represents the bearded King of the Gods seated or enthroned, his chest
exposed, with drapery covering his left shoulder and swathed across his lap
and legs. He wears sandals on his feet and holds a thunderbolt in his
outstretched and upraised left arm. This sculpture had stood in a niche
forming a centrepiece behind the Fontana dei Draghi in the gardens of the
Villa d'Este at Tivoli since the late 16th century.45 'The greatest difficulty
[Hamilton wrote] will be to get it out of Rome, but as the Pope has been
successful of late in his excavations & as there is already a good Jupiter at
the Museum I hope for mercy.'46 The Papal prohibition on the export of
39 40 41
TY7/618. 27 March 1776. TY7/607. 27 July 1776. TY7/613.
42 43
30 August 1776. TY7/616. 30 August 1776. TY7/616.
44 45
4 October 1776. TY7/618. Ashby, 'The Villa d'Este at Tivoli; 230 and 238.
46
17 April 1779. TY7/630.
Figure 43. 'Without doubt the finest Jupiter in the world' (Hamilton): sketch of the
Villa d'Este Jupiter formerly in Smith Barry's collection at Marbury Hall, now J. Paul
Getty Museum, Malibu.
antiquities was variable according to the subject matter of marbles already

represented in their collection. Hamilton's next communication to Townley
with a condition report, a sketch (figure 43) and price tag of £600, is fulsome
in its praise: 'fortune had destined it for your collection where I am sure the
world will once more allow it to be one of the first pieces of art, there is
nothing equal to it in England & without a doubt the finest Jupiter in the
world'.47 As with the colossal Venus (figure 32), Hamilton described the rear
of the statue that was not visible in the enclosed sketch, surmising that the
back part, consisting of drapery and part of the hair, was unfinished on
account of its being tailor-made for its intended location—in a niche in
Hadrian's villa at Tivoli.48 The dealer pronounced the superiority of the d'Este
statue to the Verospi Jupiter in the Pio-Clementino Museum, and likened its
drapery to that of two statues that Townley's contemporary, Lyde Browne,
brought from Venice; the colour of the marble to Townley's Dione, as the
colossal Venus (figure 32) was sometimes known.49
The safe shipment of the Jupiter was threatened by hostilities between
Britain and some of its European neighbours during the war with the
American colonies. Hamilton wrote to Townley in May 1779 of 'hopes of a
permission from Spain to send six men of War to convoy our ships in the
Mediteranion & protect the trade', in which case the Jupiter would be encased
on board with this diplomatic trading mission.50 Unable to keep the sculpture
in Rome or to show it to anyone, he later explains how he grasped the
opportunity of stowing it on board a neutral Dutch ship bound for Ostend
in the name of an Italian.51 Though Townley had by July declined to purchase
the Jupiter, Hamilton asked that he arrange to have the case received at
Ostend and forwarded to London. 52 He also entreated Townley not to repeat
having rejected the Jupiter, and asked him to mediate in negotiations with
potential purchasers. Here we see Hamilton's belief in Townley's ability to
influence the market, and also his belief in Townley's role that was additional
to that of collector, as middleman or arbitrator among Hamilton's British
clients; as Townley had been earlier in the 1770s, when trying to dispose
of Lord Lansdowne's unwanted Amazon (figure 1). One such client of
47
Date illegible. TY7/631.
48
Townley's transcription of Gavin Hamilton's account accompanies an unpublished sketch
of the Jupiter among the Townley drawings in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities
at the British Museum.
49
The collection in the Verospi Palace in the Via del Corso was dispersed in 1771 for 1,500
ducats; see Lotti, 'Alcune note su Palazzo Verospi', 214.
50
18 May 1779. TY7/632.
51
24 July 1779. TY7/634.
52
TY7/634.
Hamilton's was Thomas Pitt, himself acting as an agent for George Grenville,
who succeeded as 3rd Earl Temple in 1779. Hamilton's letters to Pitt confirm
the re-routing of luxury goods destined for Britain via neutral territory, as
necessitated by the Franco-American alliance of 1778.53 Cases containing
paintings and sculptures were dispatched on Dutch vessels from the port of
Civita Vecchia to Ostend, with the recipients named as Italians, rather than
enemy Britons. The buyer's contacts in London would then arrange with
contacts in Ostend to have the cases forwarded to London, so mapping an
entire level of bureaucratic handling by middlemen across Europe. 'In this
manner there is no risque & the freight comes very reasonable', Hamilton
assured Pitt, prematurely as it turns out, when the expenses for his goods were
increased by a staggering £410, from £150 to £560, over three times as much.
Following Townley's rejection, the d'Este Jupiter remained temporarily in
Holland before being transported back to Italy, to a warehouse in Genoa.
When an unnamed friend of Hamilton's received a commission from the
imperial court, negotiations were re-routed and initiated with the Empress
of Russia. Hamilton's friend may be identified as the architect Charles
Cameron.54 The contact between Hamilton and Cameron provides further
evidence of the social networks between professionals on which 18th-century
patronage so much relied. Hamilton wrote to Thomas Pitt on 8 September
1780 that the Empress had refused the Jupiter at the price of £800, bemoaning
that if he had requested the sum of £2,000 he might have succeeded. No doubt
hoping that George Grenville might be persuaded into its purchase, he de-
scribed the sculpture in superlative terms, as 'the finest thing in the world, & by
much the finest statue I ever had in my possession'. It was sold the following
year to Townley's protege, the British collector James Hugh Smith Barry, for
the reduced sum of £600.55 Thomas Jenkins never saw the sculpture first-hand,
but a decade later wrote to Townley that f M r Hamilton & Tresham got it for a
song... its Merit in the Villa D'Este being totally unknown.'56
The passage of the d'Este Jupiter, purchased from a celebrated Roman
collection and then covertly shipped abroad to languish first in Belgium and
later back in Italy, indicates that Michaelis' 'Golden Age of Classic Dilettantism'
was not always quite so luminous. The notion of a 'Golden Age' is itself a
retrospective construction and a highly idealized conceptualization. It fails
adequately to account for the precarious political and economic factors that
determined the history of sculpture-collecting. Complaints in a letter from
53
Hamilton's letters to Pitt are transcribed by Cassidy, 'Gavin Hamilton, Thomas Pitt and
statues for Stowe', 813-14.
54
See Shvidkovsky, The Empress and the Architect.
55
TY7/400.
56
30 October 1790. TY7/504.
Paciaudi in 1760, and compliments from Thomas Jenkins in 1774, put the
English at the forefront of the European market in Roman antiquities.57 By
1780, however, with the knock-on effects of the American war, the 'ruinous'
situation in Britain was said by Gavin Hamilton in letters to Townley to be
having devastating effects on 'us poor Romans, who depend entirely on the
affluence in England'.58 This becomes a familiar refrain from Hamilton,
parroted in a letter to Thomas Pitt: Tf money is scarce in England what is to
become of us poor Romans! The present year [1780] is a bad one, and we have
but few English here this winter, among which no dilettante.'59 Thomas Jenkins
wrote to Townley that it was business as usual; of his good fortune 'that my
Collection Interests other Parts of Europe, the which inables me to go on in my
usual way', with clients including General Wallmoden (the illegitimate son of
George II), Landgrave Friedrich II of Cassel, and the King of Poland.60
Narrative trajectories of collecting collide with those of politics in the
capture and dispersal of the material cargo of the British commercial vessel,
the Westmorland. It was no wonder that Hamilton wanted to dispatch the
d'Este Jupiter in a safe shipment with a convoy to protect it during its
maritime passage. Only four months previously, the Westmorland was one
of three English vessels captured by frigates of the French navy while on its
regular shipping route to London from the commercial storage centre and
neutral port of Livorno.61 The French were probably instructed to intercept
the departing British vessels by their consul at Livorno, since their ships, the
Cathon and Destine, were armed to the hilt—with 64 cannons and 600 men,
and 74 cannons and 700 men respectively. When the captured Westmorland
was escorted into the port of Malaga on 8 January 1779, it was packed with
l
presa inglesd—with English grand tour booty en route from Rome to Britain.
Encased on the Westmorland were books published in English, French, and
Italian, initialled by their owners and annotated by their readers: from
etiquette manuals to novels, including Laurence Sterne's the Life and Opinions
of Tristram Shandy (1775), to city guides and foreign language aids; travel
literature of recent grand tours, as in Lalande's Voyage d'un Francais en Italic
(1769); antiquarian studies like Philip Cliiver's Sicilia Antiqua (1619) and
the Decouverte de la maison de campagna d'Horace (1767-9). The French
57
Lettres de Paciaudi... an comte de Caylus (Paris, 1802), 119; TY7/428.
58
TY7/636 and TY7/652.
59
1 January 1780. Transcribed in Cassidy, 'Gavin Hamilton, Thomas Pitt and statues for
Stowe', 813.
60
5 February 1780. TY7/391. For a discussion of Jenkins' Germany, Polish, and Russian
clients, see Vaughan, 'Thomas Jenkins and his international clientele', 20-30.
61
For an historical account of the development of Livorno as a neutral port where goods
were distributed and stored, see Saurez Huerta, 'Un barco Ingles en el Puerto de Livorno', 49-67.
See also Lazzarini, 'The trade of luxury goods', 67-76.
translation of Winckelmann's letter to the Comte de Briihl on the discoveries

at the resuscitated site of Herculaneum (1764) contained notes in both pencil
and ink by one William Sandys, the tutor of Francis Basset (of whom more
imminently). On one page describing a terracotta lamp in the Cabinet of the
College Romain, there is an elliptical reference to Townley'.62
In addition to printed matter like books, maps, dictionaries, and a copy of
Haydn's Six Symphonies, were found original and engraved works by continen-
tal artists based in Rome. These included watercolour views by John Robert
Cozens and Jacob More, a Madonna and Child by Francesco Trevisani, and oil
paintings by David Allan and Anton Raphael Mengs. Engravings of ancient
monuments by Piranesi and others were encased and dispatched, either as loose
sheets or bound in vellum folios—there were up to 40 bound copies of all the
available works of Piranesi on board the ship.63 The medium of sculpture was
represented by examples of restored ancient specimens, reduced copies in
marble and portrait busts by the emigre Irish sculptor Christopher Hewetson.
The seizure of these grand tour goods on board the Westmorland diverts
our attention from collecting as a polite cultural pursuit towards the bloody
struggles of cultural politics, when the French enemy sought to paralyse
British trade in the Mediterranean during the war over the American col-
onies.64 The interrupted passage of the ship demarcates the commercial
maritime channels that facilitated the business, rather than the art, of collect-
ing; of the export from Italy from the politically neutral port of Livorno of all
manner of consumer goods in bulk. An inventory compiled when the counter-
manded contents of the Westmorland arrived at Malaga harbour listed 23
cases of marble statues, 35 boxes of marble pieces, and 22 boxes with prints,
portraits, and books.This was alongside the staple trading products of the
English, either available at Livorno or stored there for export to the Near and
Far East: there were 8,500 kilograms of superior cod, 3,837 barrels of ancho-
vies, silk from the Orient, coral collected in Livorno, 2 cases of medical drugs,
44 barrels of pig skin, 5 cases of artificial flowers, 5 boxes of knives, 22 barrels
of salt steaks, 32 Parmesan cheeses, and one cello in its case. The voluminous
number of these crates demonstrates the many and diverse acquisitions,
consumable, material, and medical, that constituted the luxury goods
imported from Italy to Britain during the later 18th century.
The seized Westmorland cargo was valued at the princely sum of £100,000,
and it was noted that several of the confiscated boxes were destined for the
62
El Westmorland, no. 46. I owe this reference and a great debt of thanks to Lola Sanchez.
63
El Westmorland, nos. 16 and 61.
64
Stincombe, 'Americans celebrate the birth of the Dauphin', 41: 'the French alliance took
Americans and their independence movement into the maelstrom of European polities'.
Duke of Gloucester, the King of England's brother. The captured booty

included prisoners as well as consumer goods in bulk: the Westmorland had
a crew of 70 men, and its passengers included the two sons of George
Johnstone, who had been the first governor of West Florida, and their tutor.
The two other vessels countermanded with the Westmorland contained fish
from Gibraltar. Two commercial houses in the port of Malaga discussed the
sale of the inanimate contents, while there were various unsuccessful attempts
by the English ambassador in Madrid to free the prisoners. A merchants'
company, O'Brian, subsequently purchased part of the booty, and in January
1784 they were negotiating with the Royal Court on behalf of Carlos III, the
King of Spain, for the boxes containing the works of art to be purchased and
deposited as teaching tools in the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San
Fernando in Madrid. The boxes were later transported by horse carriage
from Malaga to Madrid in two deliveries. The first dispatch, consisting of
the weighty marbles and paintings of various sizes, was overseen and inven-
toried by the Spanish Prime Minister and Protector of the Real Academia de
Bellas Artes de San Fernando, the Conde de Floridablanca; the second delivery
of books and other objects, some of which were damaged by water, was
managed by a clerk, Juan Moreno. Various lists were produced between
1783 and 1784, after the boxes had been unpacked in the Academia and
while waiting for an agreement between the Royal Court and the merchant
house.65 Certain of the paintings and minor statues were dispatched to the
official residence of Floridablanca or to the Royal Hunting Lodge, El Pardo,
and are now in the Prado Museum. The books and prints remain in the
Library of the Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid. The only object not to
remain in Spain was Anton Raphael Mengs' painting of Perseus and Androm-
eda, 1778, which the dealer James Byres had commissioned a decade earlier on
behalf of Sir Watkin Williams Wynn.66 The British artist Thomas Jones
viewed the painting at a public exhibition at Mengs' studio at the Palazzo
Barberini on 2 February 1778, writing in his diary that it 'made a stir in Rome
in proportion to the celebrity of the painter'.67 A year later, having been
captured with the Westmorland cargo and valued at 10,000 pesos (making it
the most valuable object on board), it was given to the French naval minister,
de Sartine, perhaps as personal booty for the successful capture of the enemy
vessels. It was subsequently sold in France to Catherine II of Russia, whose
65
Luzon Nogue, 'Inventarios y marcas de los cajones transportados de Malaga a la corte', 88-105.
66
El Westmorland, no. 94.
67
Quoted by Waterhouse, 'The British contribution to the neo-classical style in painting', 64.
See the useful essay on the exhibition culture of later 18th-century Rome that refers to this
occasion in Meyer, ' "Una Gara Lodevole"', 91-112, esp. 103.
agents had been trying to procure it since learning of its capture by the
Spanish, and it is now in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg.68
Commissioned and purchased for the grand tour collections of British
aristocrats and gentlemen, this diplomatic maritime incident caused the rest
of the objects on board the Westmorland to become contested cultural prop-
erty, implicated into the war between France and Britain over the American
colonies. The details of the sale of the boxes and their contents were tirelessly
reconstructed in the catalogue accompanying the exhibition El Westmorland:
Recuerdos del Grand Tour that toured Spain's cultural centres from 2002 to
2003.69 The catalogue draws on a disparate collection of unpublished archival
sources, including inventories, reports, and letters, the latter between the
French and British envoys, between the Governor of Cadiz and the Spanish
Prime Minister, the Conde de Floridablanca, documenting the fate of the
English booty on Spanish soil.70 A letter from Thomas Jenkins to Charles
Townley can be added to this growing body of evidence, in which Jenkins
informs Townley of the capture of the ship and urges him to contact the British
consul in Malaga to ensure the safe return of one of his cases on board.71
The material artefacts encased on board the Westmorland and later seques-
tered into Spanish collections included two grand tour portraits by the
famous Italian portrait painter in Rome, Pompeo Batoni. The first was of
the British tourist George Legge, Viscount Lewisham, signed and dated 1778
(plate 8).72 Lewisham is resplendent in so-called 'Batoni red', and seated in a
three-quarter view on a damask chair. He looks straight out of the canvas at
the viewers, showing them a map in his possession of the Italian peninsula.
His right arm rests on a marble tabletop furnished with the accoutrements of
the learned traveller in Rome, with a pile of books, a quill and ink, and a
marble bust of Faustina Minor. The original bust of the daughter of the
Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius and Faustina the Elder, who became the
wife of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, is said to have come from Hadrian's
villa at Tivoli. When Edward Gibbon saw the sculpture in the Capitoline
Museum, he reckoned her 'sweet... She deserves all that authors have said
of her beauty', since there was little to say of her historical significance.73
A plaster copy of the bust belonging to the Academia de Bellas Artes in
Madrid may have derived from the Westmorland hoard, since not all the
68
See Frank, ' "Plus il y en aura, mieux ce sera"', 87-95, esp. 89-92. Mengs' Perseus and
Andromeda is no. 78.
69
El Westmorland.
70
Luzon Nogue, 'La captura y venta del Westmorland', 68-87.
71 TY7/386 I am indebted to Clare Hornsby for this reference.
72
El Westmorland, no. 48; Suarez Huerta, 'A Portrait of George Legge by Batoni', 252-6.
73
Bonnard, Gibbon 5 Journey from Geneva to Rome, 165.
objects have been individually identified. 74 The antique prototype was

restored by the Roman sculptor Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, who reproduced a
series of marble copies, including one in the collection of Henry Blundell
(figure 44). Versions are known in bronze, as well as plaster and marble, in
collections beyond Britain and Italy, in Stockholm and St Petersburg.75
The second Batoni painting dispatched on board the Westmorland was a
full-length portrait of Francis Basset, dated the same year as that of Legge,
1778 (plate 9).76 It is significant in Batoni's exhaustive repertoire for being the
only full-length standing portrait he painted that year.77 In it, we see the
young Englishman pausing, or posing, on one of his instructive walks
through Rome. A hat and cane in his outstretched right arm, he stands
cross-legged, leaning on a rectangular marble pedestal decorated with a relief
of Orestes and Electra from the Palazzo Altemps. In his left hand he holds a
partly unrolled map of Rome. The antique fragments displayed in the fore-
ground are balanced by the architectural monuments in the background: on
the right, the imposing dome of St Peter's; on the left, the Castel San Angelo,
offering an unusual juxtaposition of two of the edifices of pagan antiquity and
post-antique Christianity.
'Gracious heaven! why should every periwig-pated fellow, without coun-
tenance or character, insist on seeing his chubby cheeks on canvas?', opined
John Moore, referring to Batoni's prolific portrait practice in his travel
guidebook, A View of Society and Manners in Italy.78 Basset's grand tour
portrait is represented in the confiscated Westmorland cargo in both its
painted and sculpted incarnations—in the 'periwig-pated' portrait by Pom-
peo Batoni and in a terracotta bust (plate 10) attributed to the emigre Irish
sculptor, Christopher Hewetson. Hewetson was based in Rome for 33 years,
from 1765 to 1798, where he was closely associated with Thomas Jenkins;
'that villain Jenkins', as the sculptor John Deare cursed him in a letter of 1794,
when he had reportedly 'used all his interest' to secure an aristocratic com-
mission from Lord Berwick for Hewetson, rather than Deare.79 Jenkins'
protection of British artists was one of his responsibilities as unofficial British
ambassador to Rome, as with the purchase of Bernini's Neptune and Triton
(figure 36) for Reynolds. As Deare knew to his cost, Jenkins' munificence
involved promoting the interests of members of his own faction.
74
75
Peters Bowron and Rishel, Art in Rome, no. 120.
76
77
Sanchez-Jauregui, 'Two portraits of Francis Basset by Pompeo Batoni in Madrid', 421.
Sanchez-Jauregui's second portrait is a half-length studio work signed and dated 1778 in which
Basset is shown resting his left arm on a marble urn and holding his hat rather than a map.
Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy, II. 74.
79
El Westmorland, no. 52. 1 March 1794. BL Add. 36497 f 288.
Figure 44. Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, copy of the bust of Faustina Minor from Henry
Blundell's collection.
A recent sculpture exhibition, Return to Life, maintained that portrait busts

have become 'lost' as part of their architectural and domestic settings, rather
than as sculptural representations to be considered and engaged with in their
own right.80 In other words, the catalogue contends that busts have become
shadowy presences, rather than palpable portraits. One of the problems of
studying sculpted busts is that at a superficial glance they appear identical, in
being highly formulaic and conventionalized. A look at the portrait bust
immediately confirms that this is an art form with a prestigious pedigree—a
mode of representation brimming with cultural capital that harks as far back
as ancient Greece and Rome. Not only is the format of the sculptural bust
ancient, but also the associations of its preferred medium, marble. The
durability and status of marble ensured that 18th-century sculptors occupied
the same monochrome territory as their classical predecessors.81
The portrait busts encased on board the Westmorland show how, far from
being a homogeneous entity, subtle and not so subtle differentiations exist in
this classicizing mode of representation. Francis Basset's portrait bust, with
his head tilted and turned slightly to his left, lightly incised pupils and
eyeballs, a naked breastplate and long, flowing hair (plate 10), is executed
in terracotta and covered with a painted patina to simulate the more expen-
sive medium of bronze. Terracotta was cheaper than bronze and, being much
lighter, it was easier to transport. A plaster version of the Basset bust was also
encased on board the Westmorland, as was another bust in terracotta, of John
Henderson of Fordell, signed by Hewetson on the reverse shoulder, and dated
1777 (plate II). 82 In this monochrome portrait sculpture, bearing every mark
of the sculptor's modelling tools, the young male sitter looks to his right, his
lips together, slightly frowning, with a tasselled scarf tied in a bow around his
neck, and swathed in a toga-like garment. His hair sits in curls over his ears,
and behind is tied into a pony tail. The sitter was identified as Henderson
from an anonymous painting among the Westmorland cargo of c.1778 (plate
12).83 By contrast with the usual status markers and vanity vehicles that are
the grand tour portraits by Batoni, discussed above, there are no objects,
monuments, or maps in this small-size canvas (50 x 40 cm) to locate the
subject in Italy.84 Instead, we see a proximate view of Henderson's face as he
turns towards the viewer in an intimate encounter that is reiterated in his
informal dress.
80
Return to Life, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 2000.
81
Wrigley, 'Sculpture and the language of criticism', 83.
82
83
84
Johns, 'Portraiture and the making of cultural identity', 382-411.
A third bust by Hewetson that has been identified as deriving from the
Westmorland cargo is that of Anton Raphael Mengs, 1778 (plate 13), the
German artist who was responsible for the countermanded Perseus and
Andromeda canvas later bought by Catherine II of Russia.85 In this plaster
version of a bust that exists in several adaptations executed in a variety of
media, Mengs' head is turned to his left with his lips parted as if on the point
of speaking; the undulating sections of his thick hair, the creases in his neck,
and the swelling breastplate give the portrait an extraordinary impression of
animation. The shape of his naked breastplate is identical to that of the bust of
Francis Basset attributed to Hewetson (plate 10). Mengs' portrait sculpture
was commissioned by his biographer, Jose Nicolas de Azara, the Spanish
ambassador to Rome, who also had his own bust sculpted in bronze by
Hewetson the same year, 1778. Given the quality of the plaster version, it
has been suggested that it may have been the prototype for the posthumous
busts of Mengs in bronze of 1779 and the marble of 1782.86 The bronze
version was installed in the Pantheon next to the tomb of Raphael. It was
replaced by the later marble version in which Mengs' upper torso to below the
chest is sculpted; his arms truncated halfway above the elbow give him the
appearance of an unrestored classical sculpture.
Francis Basset was not the only British traveller to commission grand tour
portraits in Rome both on canvas and in marble. In 1784, Thomas Giffard sat
to both Batoni (plate 14) and Hewetson (plate 15). He commissioned a
portrait from the leading painter in Rome as his father had done 16 years
previously, outstripping his father's half-length three-quarter view with a full-
length portrait of himself standing at the foot of a staircase next to a variation
of the Medici Vase.87 With his faithful dog at his feet, who looks up towards
him directing our gaze, Giffard's lavender silk coat and buttercup yellow
waistcoat and breeches offer a striking contrast with his monochrome marble
bust by Hewetson, in which Giffard is sculpted in the antique mode, without a
wig and with a naked breastplate.88 He looks down and to his right in a
gesture that, with his curls resting on the nape of his neck, seems contrived to
recall portraits of Antinous, the boyfriend of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. 89
The Scottish traveller Sir William Forbes visited Hewetson's studio in Rome in
the spring of 1793 and wrote critically of portrait busts on account of what he
perceived as the sacrifice of individual likeness to a summary classicism: £as
the Artist generally wishes to chisel you in the form of an Antinous, a Fawn, or
85
86
See de Breffny, 'Christopher Hewetson', 52-75, nos. 18a (bronze) and 18b (marble).
87
Clark, Pompeo Batoni, nos. 450 and 320.
88
de Breffny, 'Christopher Hewetson', no. 7.
89
Curtis, Antinous.
some such Classical figure for the sake of elegance, the real likeness is most
probably totally lost, by the transformation of your person' into stone.90
A full-length portrait by Batoni of the aristocratic British tourist Sir Thomas
Gascoigne (plate 16) provides another highly distinctive example of the inter-
face between the art of portrait painting and that of sculpting busts in later
18th-century Rome.91 Gascoigne is shown slightly left of centre in front of the
shelves of a well-stocked library, richly dressed in a Batoni red topcoat and
breeches and a silk waistcoat. In his left hand he holds a tortoiseshell and gold
snuffbox with a miniature portrait of Marie Antoinette that was made in Paris
in 1773-4. On the table within Gascoigne's reach is an open case of gold medals,
thought to be part of the Petroni Collection which he purchased in Naples the
same year the portrait was finished, in 1779. The globe behind signifies his
travels, much as the bookish landscape behind the pillar indicates his learning.
But this portrait is not simply a visual discourse on travel and learning, or on
the possession of luxury goods to be acquired as a by-product of such pursuits.
Flanking the globe are a pair of busts. Imitations of ancient examples proliferate
in Batoni's portraits—that of George Legge (plate 8) includes a representation
of the Capitoline bust of Faustina Minor (figure 44). Yet the busts included in
Batoni's portrait of Gascoigne are all the more visually commanding because
they are not the generic types we have come to expect from Batoni; they are
portrait busts of Gascoigne's travelling companions, Henry and Martha Swin-
burne. The three friends all sat to Batoni—the Swinburnes for a pair of half-
length oval portraits—and also to Hewetson. In contrast with Gascoigne's
painted portrait, in which he is attired in contemporary sartorial splendour,
with a powdered wig and sumptuous dress, his sculpted bust is much more in
the antique manner, showing the sitter's balding head without a wig, and with a
naked breastplate. Batoni reproduces the Swinburne busts executed by Hewet-
son in a light brown colour, which suggests they are terracotta models or tinted
plaster versions of the surviving bronze busts. He also contrives the tilt of the
sculpted heads in his portrait of Gascoigne so that the Swinburnes are seen
to look more intimately towards each other, making Batoni's portrait of
Gascoigne actually a triple portrait that gives visual form to the sitters' friend-
ship while in Italy. It also indicates the many 'faces', so to speak, of 18th-century
portraiture, in terms of media: paintings and sculpture; material: oil paint and
terracotta; and size: from Batoni's full-size painted oil to the miniature of Marie
Antoinette in the snuffbox. The medals may also be implicated into this
reading, with their profile heads on one side. These types of painted and
sculpted portraits represent a precious component of later 18th-century
90
National Library of Scotland, MS 1544, 173-4.
91
Friedman, 'Sir Thomas Gascoigne and his friends in Italy', 16-23.
grand tour collections, being specially commissioned by their sitters, rather

than speculatively purchased. Like the other luxury goods they accompanied
en route for Britain, they were every bit as vulnerable to wider political
interference.
Painted portraits of the 18th century, like these examples by Batoni, have
been variously positioned by art historians within economies of visual repre-
sentation and collecting and within social hierarchies of class and gender.
Despite the similitude of individual likenesses, portraits are incontestably part
of a visual rhetoric that is as much about misrepresentation—about not
actuality, but ideology, to cite Marcia Pointon.92 They are also 'political' in
the sense of involving a relationship between two unequal parties—the artist
and the sitter—in a contention for power that extends to the wider body
politic. The issues about and around painted portraiture in this period are
readily applicable to portrait busts in marble and other sculptural media like
terracotta and bronze. The Batoni and Hewetson portraits commissioned by
Francis Basset, Thomas Giffard, and Sir Thomas Gascoigne are testimony to
an artistic interface between painting and sculpture on the grand tour in
Rome that has hitherto been underplayed.93 Indeed, as we shall see in due
course, the material economy of collecting—in which these works were a
distinctive feature—was not simply cross-media, but mass-media.
The three portrait busts, of Basset, Henderson, and Mengs, sculpted in
terracotta and plaster c. 1777-8 and encased on board the Westmorland,
postdate that of Charles Townley, which is signed by Hewetson and dated
1769 (figure 45). In an undated letter written during his first tour in Italy,
Townley's brother, Edward Standish, 'hope[d] you will yeald to those temp-
tations' that were the 'marble follies' up for grabs in Italy, when 'the most
agreable thing you can send to Standish, would be your owne portrate, done
by one of the eminante hands, you now have an opportunity of frequenting'.94
Townley ignored his brother's plea not to be tempted by ancient marble
follies, but followed to the letter his other suggestion by commissioning a
marble bust from Hewetson. Townley's sculpted portrait represents his half-
turned head, sporting a wide, curling wig with an informal, disordered shirt
and jacket.95 Jenkins wrote to Townley, when it was dispatched in February
1770, 'Your Plumpness seems to imply living Honestly, tho' I suppose the
chastity of Lady G will not tempt you so to do by matrimonial means
— + with your Portrait in marble comes the Model in Clay & the Mould, out
92
Pointon, Hanging the Head, 200.
93
Baker notes how the relationship between sculpture and painting has been too little explored
in his Figured in Marble, 61.
94
TY7/712.
95
Dawson, Portrait Sculpture, no. 81, with bibliography.
Figure 45. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Charles Townley, 1769.

of which you may have a number Cast to oblige your friends.'96 Jenkins' letter
provides an indication of how 18th-century portraiture gave material form to
social relations, since the clay model and the mould of the bust were enclosed
and dispatched with Townley's marble portrait for the purposes of serial
reproduction and distribution. The same was true of the busts on board the
Westmorland, which were also shipped with their moulds. Visual evidence of
the homosocial camaraderie of Townley's inner circle is provided in the group
portrait or conversation piece by Richard Cosway which will be examined in
detail in the next chapter. Townley's uncle, John Towneley, later described
how he had taken possession of his nephew's 'effigie in wax & a model of your
Bust' from his house in Whitehall.97 These objects 'adorn my room very well',
wrote Towneley. They also gave his absent nephew, who was by then on his
extended second sojourn in Italy, a palpable material presence.
In addition to the portrait busts by Christopher Hewetson, the confiscated
cargo of the Westmorland included other grand tour marbles of the sort
subsequently overlooked by classical archaeologists in their focused—some
might argue myopic—study of ancient Greek and Roman specimens. These
items included diminutive copies in Carrara marble of famed antique sculp-
tures in Roman collections, like the Mattel Amazon and the Cupid and Psyche,
whose originals are in the Capitoline Museum.98 The serial reproductions on
board the Westmorland—there were two copies of the Cupid and Psyche—have
been attributed to the studio of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, who was responsible
for the restoration of the ancient marbles. Charles Burney described the latter
group in 1770 as 'standing and kissing each other with innocent fondness his
hand delicately supports her chin 'tis charming'.99 Terracotta modelli formerly
in Cavaceppi's possession and now in the Palazzo Venezia in Rome include the
Cupid and Psyche and also another couple with interlocking arms and legs with
which they were frequently paired in 18th-century configurations: Bacchus and
Ariadne.100 There were two marble copies of the Bacchus and Ariadne on board
the Westmorland: one encased in a crate with one of the Cupid and Psyche
groups destined for the Duke of Gloucester. The repetitions are of particular
interest since the ancient marble sculpture of which these are reduced-size
marble copies was acquired by the British collector and protege of Charles
Townley, James Smith Barry. 101 'Full of tipsy Bacchic jollity' is how Michaelis
96
14 February 1770. TY7/301.
97
3 December 1771. TY7/796.
98
El Westmorland, nos. 77 and 75.
99
100
Barberini, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, nos. 21 and 23.
101
described the figures he re-identified as Dionysus and a Bacchante (as opposed

to Ariadne) and designated number 8 in the saloon at Marbury Hall in
Cheshire.102 Michaelis referred his readers to a better preserved and executed
ancient group of the same subject found in Rome and in the Berlin Museum.
Reduced-size copies of the Marbury version proliferated in the marketplace for
sculpture in later 18th-century Rome. Surviving bronzes by Francesco and
Luigi Righetti and Giuseppe Boschi, references to sculptures ordered from
Vincenzo Pacetti, and now the Westmorland duplicates are testimony to its
once favoured status as a pendant to Cupid and Psyche.1®3 Pacetti, rather than
Cavaceppi, has been proposed as the restorer of the Marbury original; he may
also be responsible for its multiple reproductions.
Another ancient sculpture in a British collection that, from its appearance
as a reduced marble copy on board the Westmorland, seems also to have been
serially reproduced in Rome is a Minerva at Newby Hall (seen in the right-
hand niche in figure 59). The restoration of this sculpture, in which the
goddess holds an owl in her outstretched right arm, achieved infamy when
it was published in 1828 by J. T. Smith as an example of a botched antique,
patchworked together by his former employer, the sculptor Joseph Nollekens,
in a duplicitous deal that saw Nollekens and Thomas Jenkins unite a mis-
matched head and torso and sell the resulting Minerva to Weddell for the
exorbitant sum of 1,000 guineas.104 I have argued elsewhere that this passage
cannot be read at face-value, as characteristic of Nollekens' sculptural practice
and related by him, which is how it was described by Michaelis in his
catalogue entry on the Minerva in Ancient Marbles.1®5 Rather than revisiting
the invectives against restoration practices following the debate over the status
of the Elgin marbles, the appearance of a marble reproduction of the Newby
Minerva among the English booty being transported by the Westmorland
attests to the continued presence of this sculpture in the form of serially
produced copies available in Rome a decade after it was bought by Weddell. In
January 1767, Nollekens wrote to one of his British clients, Thomas Anson,
who the previous year had been caught up in the debacle over the Barberini
candelabra, giving him advance notice of the forthcoming sale of the ancient
sculpture of Minerva: 'Shortly there will be to be sould a wery fine figure
representing a Menerva Size of Life. & as it is to my opinion the finest drapt
figure in the world and in grate preservation & belonging to a person who is
102
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 504. The group is identified in the Museum of
Fine Arts in Boston as Priapos and a Maenad, 68.770.
Gonzalez-Palacios, 'Souvenirs de Rome', Ricordi deWAntico, 17-19, no. 46.
104
Smith, Nollekens and his Times, I, 11-12; Boschung and von Hesberg, Newby Hall, no. 2.
105
Coltman, '"Providence send us a lord'", 377.
wery senceable of its merits, it will not be sould but at a wery Considerable
price.'106 Following its acquisition by Weddell, Thomas Jenkins wrote to
Townley in September 1768 that 'The Moscovite [General Schwoloff] has
orderd a Copy of M.r Weddells Minerva the size of the Original for the
Empress.'107 Casts have already been discussed in Chapter 3 as part of the
reproductive apparatus—the technologies of copying—of the Roman sculp-
tural marketplace. Copies mass-produced from such casts, which have too
long been reviled rather than revered, were also highly desirable acquisitions
for 18th-century collectors. The copies of the Minerva, the Mattel Amazon,
and the second of the Bacchus and Ariadne groups were packed in a crate
labelled LB, the initials of the collector Lyde Browne.108
The lucrative business of serially copying ancient sculptures in later 18th-
century Rome was closely related to that of the production of other luxury
goods like marble chimney-pieces, of which there were two ornate examples
on board the Westmorland, and tabletops inlaid with specimens of different
marbles, of which there were a pair.109 Another case contained a disembodied
head, again in Carrara marble, a copy after that of the Medici Venus in the
Tribuna in Florence, a statue which many British tourists pronounce them-
selves to be falling in love with, as we shall see in the next chapter.110 There
were two ideal female heads with diadems, one with a recognizably 'Greek-
looking' hairstyle, but they cannot be classified as copies in the absence of
specific prototypes. 111 These heads were packed in cases with rectangular,
square, and round cinerary urns, with mis-spelt Latin inscriptions and
sculpted motifs common in Piranesi's engravings, like garlands and a boar
eating fruits. 112 Their new lids of different coloured marble sit uncomfortably
on their bases and reveal themselves to be 18th-century impositions. Like the
Lanti vase (figure 2), the two pairs of candelabra on board the Westmorland
(162 cm high) were disassembled for transport into numbered separate pieces
united by iron rods—the triangular bases with their figural reliefs and their
ornate pedestals surmounted by a fluted bowl.113 In summary, the status of
the sculptures cased on board the Westmorland was as diverse as the objects
106
21 January 1767. Staffordshire Record Office, D615/P(S)l/6/4.
107
TY7/297.
108
Browne was a director of the Bank of England, with a townhouse in Foster Lane in the city
of London and a country house in Wimbledon. He began collecting in 1747. Two catalogues were
produced, the first in Latin, in 1768; the second in Italian, in 1779. Part of the collection was sold
to Catherine II for £23,000; negotiations began in 1785. See Neverov, 'The Lyde Browne
collection', 33-42 and Gorbunova, 'Classical sculpture from the Lyde Browne collection', 460-7.
109
Stillman, 'Chimney-Pieces for the English Market', 85-94.
110 m
El Westmorland, no. 78. El Westmorland, nos. 79 and 80.
112 113
El Westmorland, nos. 82, 83, 84. El Westmorland, nos. 85 and 86.
Plate i. Thomas Banks, Caractacus Pleading Before the Emperor Claudius, £.1773/4-77.
The Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art, London.
Plate 2. 'A sweet figure of a young man asleep (Hamilton): Endymion/Mercury
By courtesy of the Trustees of the British Museum.
Plate 3. 'The sweetest body in the world': Townleys small Venus.
Plate 4. The most Beautiful & Expressive Head of a Minerva ever yet seen
(Jenkins).
Plate 5. So-called Supper ofTremalchio relief.
Plate 6. Benigne Gagnereaux, Pius VI Accompanying Gustav III of Sweden on a Visit to the Museo Pio-Clementino, 1786.
Plate 7. Sculpture of Endymion in the Swedish Royal Collection (in foreground).
Plate 8. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of George Legge, 1778.
Museo del Prado.
Plate 9. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Francis Basset, 1778.
Museo del Prado.
Plate 10. Attributed to Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Francis Basset, £.1778.
Plate 11. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of John Henderson ofFordell, 1777.
Plate 12. Anonymous, Portrait of John Henderson ofFordell, 0.1778.
Plate 13. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Anton Raphael Mengs, 1778.
Plate 14. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Thomas Giffard
y 1784.
Plate 15. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Thomas Giffard, 1784.
Plate 16. Pompeo Batoni, Portrait of Sir Thomas Gascoigney 1779.
© Leeds Museums and Galleries (Lotherton Hall) UK/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Plate 17. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Clement XIV.
V&A Picture Library,
Plate 18. Richard Cosway, Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseursy 1771-5.
© Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Burnley, Lancashire/ The Bridgeman Art Library.
Plate 19. Arthur Devis, Mr and Mrs Hill, c. 1750-51.
Yale Centre for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, USA/ The Bridgeman Art Library.
Plate 20. Johann Zoffany, The Colmore Family, £.1775.
Private Collection/The Bridgeman Art Library.
Plate 21. Johann Zoffany, Charles Townley's Library at 7 Park Street, Westminster,
1781-3/98.
© Towneley Hall Art Gallery and Museum, Burnley, Lancashire/ The Bridgeman Art Library.
Plate 22. William Chambers, The Townley Marbles in the Dining Room at 7 Park Street, Westminster, 1794.
Plate 23. William Chambers, The Townley Marbles in the Entrance Hall at 7 Park Street, Westminster, 1794.
Plate 24. ' A unique rococo chair; by Matthias Lock, c.1765.
V&A Picture Library.
Plate 25. Joshua Reynolds, The Society of Dilettanti, 1777-9.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Society of Dilettanti. Photograph: Photographic Survey,
Courtauld Institute of Art.
Plate 26. Joshua Reynolds, The Society of Dilettanti, 1777-9.
Reproduced by kind permission of the Society of Dilettanti. Photograph: Photographic Survey,
Plate 27. George Knapton, Sir Francis Dashwood, 1742.
Reproduced by kind permission ot the Society of Dilettanti. Photograph: Photographic Survey,
Plate 28. Engraving by Philip Dawe, The Macaroni Painter, or Billy Dimple
sitting for his Picture, 1772.
Plate 29. Gavin Hamilton, Rape of Helen, 1784.
Roma, Museo di Roma.
Plate 30. Joseph Bonomi, unexecuted design for a sculpture rotunda at Towneley Hall, 0.1783.
Private collection.
Plate 31. Joseph Wilton, Dr Antonio Cocchi, 1755.
V&A Picture Library.
Plate 32. Joseph Wilton, Francis Hastings, loth Earl of Huntingdon, 1761.
Government Art Collection, on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
© Government Art Collection.
themselves, with examples of ancient and modern works, or a marriage of the

two, serially reproduced small-scale antique sculptures, original productions,
restorations, and portrait busts by Christopher Hewetson.
While the capture of the Westmorland vessel by the French in January 1779
dramatically recasts grand tour collecting as economically speculative and at
risk from wider political machinations, the contents of its countermanded
cases remind us of the heterogeneity of the grand tour collection, in its
emphasis on a whole range of material artefacts—some 270 items were listed
in Basset's crates alone.114 Two latterly obscure and contemporary grand tour
British collections may be seen to constitute a similar, heterogeneous profile
to those artefacts encased on board the Westmorland. Their material diversity
parallels that of the artefacts acquired by Viscount Palmerston in Rome
during the middle of the previous decade in 1764 (figure 3). The first
collection, assembled by the Welsh landowner Thomas Mansel Talbot in
Rome during 1772 and 1773, precedes the capture of the Westmorland vessel.
The second was the product of a brief correspondence between Sir George
Strickland and Thomas Jenkins shortly after Strickland had completed his
grand tour from 1778 to 1779 and returned home to Yorkshire. The passage of
Mansel Talbot's goods, and the misdirection of a case of marbles destined for
Charles Townley to Strickland in Yorkshire, represent episodes in a history of
collecting that is still political, but that is more about bookkeeping than
battles, to cite John Brewer's memorable phrase. 115 The payment of customs
duties and the building of roads are a vital part of the sinews of power that
animated the British body politic.
Thomas Mansel Talbot's list of purchases in Rome for 1772 demonstrates
the diversity of material artefacts collected in what he called 'this Queen of
Cities'.116 Along with restored ancient marble sculptures of Hercules (£500),
Tiberius (£250), a Faun (£150), and Ptolemy (£150), this Welsh landowner
purchased a mosaic chimney-piece (£200), two pairs of marble tables, vases in
porphyry and alabaster, antique rings in cameo and intaglio, and clay copies
of ancient sculptures in Roman collections.117 His notebook jottings further
reveal the acquisition of ca Putto holding a bunch of grapes in his hand
bought of Hamilton' for £300, models of ancient buildings, with a later
reference to copies of the pair of Cupids in the Villa Borghese, the Boy with
a Bird and the Girl with a Nest, that were similarly replicated in the marble
copies by Antonio d'Este formerly at Ince Blundell Hall (figure 20a & b). 118
114
Sanchez-Jauregui, 'Two portraits of Francis Basset by Pompeo Batoni in Madrid', 425.
115
Brewer, The Sinews of Power, xvi.
116
4 August 1773. Martin, The Penrice Letters, 85.
Martin, The Penrice Letters, 23.
118
The notebook is National Library of Wales, Penrice and Margam MS 4945.
An oblique reference to 'ye Groupe of Bacchus & Ariadne at Mr Jenkins' must

refer again to the sculpture bought by Smith Barry, reduced copies of
which were captured on board the Westmorland. Talbot's acquisitions for
the following year (1773) included a sarcophagus, busts of Lucius Verus and
a satyr, another chimney-piece, architectural models of the Colosseum in cork
and pumice stone, and clay copies of sculptures in the Capitoline Museum. 119
That same year, Talbot paid £68 for his marble portrait bust signed by
Christopher Hewetson (figure 46). Talbot is shown in the antique mode,
with the same tapering breastplate as in the later busts of Basset and Mengs;
he is bare-chested, facing to his right, with his hair falling behind his head.120
The marble was supplied with its mould and three plaster casts, again, for the
purposes of serial reproduction and distribution.
For the substantial sum of £140, Talbot also acquired a marble copy of
Hewetson's celebrated bust of Pope Clement XIV (plate 17), which is one of
four known versions. 121 It seems likely that Jenkins orchestrated this com-
mission as, according to Northcote, he 'was a vast favourite' of Clement XIV
and 'it was in his power to make the Pope do what he pleased'.122 In this
virtuoso portrait sculpture, Hewetson contrasts the facial features of the Pope
with the materiality of his dress. Observe the lines around his eyes and the
pouches of skin on the cheeks, the wrinkles on the surface of his satin robe,
and the ornate embroidery on the stole that is fastened with a knotted cord.
At 75 cm high including the socle, the Papal bust is significantly larger than
that of Talbot (61.5 cm), making it more physically striking on coming face-
to-face with the viewer.
In addition to Hewetson, who, as we know from the complaints of his rival
sculptor, John Deare, enjoyed the protection of Thomas Jenkins, Mansel
Talbot commissioned a major 18th-century work from a Swedish sculptor
then in Rome, Johan Tobias Sergei. His Diomedes, 1774, represents the Greek
hero naked except for a cloak over his left arm into which he rests the precious
palladium, the image of Athena, which he has just stolen from Troy.123 The
pose of the figure has been related to one of the youths in the antique
sculpture of Castor and Pollux, a full-size cast of which was in the French
Academy in Rome; two terracotta models for the under life-size (150 cm)
marble composition are in the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. In keeping
119
Martin, The Penrice Letters, 27. I am grateful to Joanna Martin for copies of her
transcription of a notebook at Penrice Castle.
120
Bilbey, British Sculpture, no. 124.
121
Bilbey, British Sculpture, no. 123. One of the other four signed and dated versions is Peters
Bowron and Rishel, Art in Rome, no. 130.
122
Ford, 'Thomas Jenkins', 421. Northcote is quoted in Whitley, Artists and their Friends, II. 308.
123
The Age ofNeo-classicism (London, 1972), no. 436; Trusted, The Return of the Gods, no. 22.
Figure 46. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Thomas Mansel Talbot, 1773.

with much neoclassical sculpture, the subject matter derives from ancient
literary sources, from Book II of Vergil's Aeneid and the Little Iliad revised by
the Comte de Caylus in his Tableaux tires de Vllliade, de VOdyssee d'Homere et
de VEneide de Vergil (1757). The evolution of this sculpture for a British
patron in the Roman marketplace in the early 1770s should surely be related
to the restoration overseen by Gavin Hamilton in 1775 of its ancient coun-
terpart for Lord Lansdowne (figure 31). Though consistently referred to in the
literature on Sergei, his Diomedes was only rediscovered at the Margam Abbey
sale in 1941; the entries in the Christie's sale catalogue for the ancient marbles
are indebted to those of Adolf Michaelis.
When Michaelis visited Mansel Talbot's property of Margam Abbey in Port
Talbot, Glamorganshire, South Wales in the autumn of 1873, Talbot's heteroge-
neous possessions acquired in Rome in the early 1770s were catalogued as a
modest collection of fifteen ancient marble sculptures, plus two painted vases.
The German professor writes, 'To the remoteness of Margam Abbey... we must
ascribe the fact that the antiques... have remained scarcely less known to the
learned world than at the time when they were still shut up in their cases.'124 The
18th-century objects in marble and other luxury materials, formerly part of
the totality of Thomas Mansel Talbot's Roman acquisitions, remain little known,
the exception being Sergei's Diomedes and Hewetson's busts of Talbot and
Clement XIV, which are now in the Victoria and Albert Museum; the former
was only re-identified as the Welsh gentleman as recently as 1977.
In correspondence with his brother and with the steward of his estate,
Talbot considered a number of options for shipping his Roman acquisitions
and commissions from Italy back home to South Wales. Demonstrating that
the safe consignment of goods was seasonal, he describes in a letter of
December 1771 his intention to send his purchases by merchant ship the
following spring, at the beginning of March, from the port of Livorno to that
of London or Bristol.125 By January the following year he had resolved to send
the goods to Dublin, on the east coast of Ireland, so as to avoid paying the
apparently 'exorbitant' import duties incurred in London or any other Eng-
lish port. 126 By shipping his cargo to Ireland, where duties were apparently
'triffling', and ideally to Cork, Talbot envisaged that his Roman purchases
would then be transferred onto one of the coal ships and carried to a port in
his Welsh homeland, so taking advantage of the commercial transport of
124
125
28 December 1771. Martin, The Penrice Letters, 65.
126
11 January 1772. Martin, The Penrice Letters, 67. For a discussion of British artists and import
duties, starting with the campaign in the late 1780s in Rome against the prohibitive cost of such duties,
see Hoock, 'Formulating and implementing policy: Customs duties', The Kings Artists, 240-5.
industrial goods between Ireland and Britain. 127 This mercantile basis for the
bulk transport of material objects in the 18th century is also true of the
contents of the Westmorland. It stands in marked contrast to the later
archaeological bias towards the minute study of individual specimens of
ancient sculpture as pioneered by Adolf Michaelis.
The vagaries of a lengthy sea passage in the commercial business of transport-
ing luxury consumer goods from Italy to Britain are further impressed upon us
in the epistolary accounts of a case of Townley's marbles that took some four
years from leaving Rome to reaching him in London. In a letter dated 22 April
1780, Gavin Hamilton congratulated Townley on being 'in possession of the
finest Erma of Homer extant... entire & workd in the highest taste of sculptor
wanting onely the tip of the nose, so as not to hurt the nostrils... there is a crack
goes across the head but don't touch the face, this is secured by a small sprango,
hardly to be seen.'128 Hamilton requested the 'rather heavy' sum of £100 for the
Homer and another £50 for a head of Diana, puffed as 'the true sister of the
Apollo of Belvedere' on account of the similar treatment of the hair, and
reckoned by Hamilton to be 'of the highest Greek taste'. The obligatory sketches
were supplied three months later ('I woud have done sooner had they been
statues of which one may form a tollerable idea from a slight sketch, but a fine
head can onely be understood by seeing the original') and the prices revised to
£80 for the Homer and £40 for the Diana.129 Hamilton's letter represents the
£120 sum as a one-off deal for a privileged client like Townley, asking him not to
mention it in the event of refusing the purchase. Four years later, in June 1784,
we learn that the case containing the heads of Homer and Diana and a faun in
red marble was shipwrecked off the coast of San Lucar in southern Spain. Having
been rescued and deposited in the King's warehouse at Cadiz for two years, it was
then misdirected on arrival in London to Boynton Hall, near Bridlington, the
East Yorkshire home of another of Thomas Jenkins' clients, Sir George Strick-
land.130 Strickland travelled in Italy from 1778 to 1779, accompanied by his wife
and two daughters. After his tour, he acquired a number of items through
Thomas Jenkins, including, according to Michaelis, about a dozen ancient
marbles of which a statue of a so-called Juno, said to have been found in 1777
on the Via Prenestina at Tor Tre Teste (figure 47), was noted for its workmanship
and its preservation.131
127
11-19 January 1772. Martin, The Penrice Letters, 68.
128
TY7/641.
129
July 1780. TY7/643.
130
28 June 1784. Townley to Strickland. Photocopies of the Strickland MSS were lent to me
by Richard Marriott. Another set are in the Brinsley Ford Archive, Paul Mellon Centre, London.
131
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 103. The sculptures were dispersed at a sale at
Boynton Hall, 21-3 November 1950 when the Juno lot 295 fetched £250—this was the price
cited by Jenkins, though he gave Strickland a 10% discount.
Figure 47. 'The work is so Exceedingly delicate' (Jenkins): a drawing here attributed
to Friedrich Anders of George Strickland's Juno, late 1770s.
Strickland's ancient sculptures merit only a passing reference in Michaelis'

definitive catalogue. In contrast, the surviving correspondence between
patron and dealer over a three-year period from 1779 reinstates the diversity
of Strickland's material acquisitions from Italy; a diversity that also charac-
terizes contemporary grand tour collections, like that of Thomas Mansel
Talbot. In addition to the ancient statue of Juno, which Michaelis admired
and which cost Strickland £225, his Roman purchases facilitated by Jenkins
and James Byres included a pedestal for the Juno, a pair of cinerary urns with
pedestals, a drawing of Cardinal Casali's mosaic pavement also unearthed on
the Via Prenestina in 1777 to be woven as a carpet, works on paper by Carlo
Labruzzi, a table inlaid with different marbles, some pastes and medals, shell
bracelets for the ladies, and some 'skins' for drawing. Like the contents of the
Westmorland) several of Strickland's boxes on board the Salerno galley were
countermanded by the French, and Jenkins was ordered to try to repurchase
them from Toulon on his behalf.132 By August 1781, when neutral vessels were
able to pass 'without Molestation', Jenkins offered Strickland a well-preserved
bust of Marius Junius Brutus. 133 Three months later, sketches of the head were
supplied in two views accompanying Jenkins' explanation of how its identity
as Brutus had been authenticated by an ancient medal.134 In another example
of how the subject matter of ancient sculptures could be conceptually inad-
missible to the agendas of certain collectors (remember the Pope's rejection of
bawdy sculptures), this bust of Brutus was one of a cache of ancient sculptures
that Jenkins had proposed to the Grand Duke and Duchess of Russia. It was
offered to Strickland after having been refused by them on the grounds that 'it
was an Improper Subject for that Country'.135 The imperial collection of an
absolutist state like Russia could apparently not stomach a representation of
Brutus, who in conspiring against the tyrant Julius Caesar came to personify
the cause of liberty. We might compare imperial Russia's rejection of this bust
of Brutus with Jenkins' panegyric to the Emperor Augustus' right-hand man
Agrippa, in a letter to the British collector, the Earl of Bessborough.
I confess the Character of the Person it [a bust of Agrippa] represents is greatly esteemed
by me, and indeed I should think my self unworthy the name of an Englishman if I had
not a respect to the memory of so great a man, who after having been the principle means
of bringing his Country to so great a height of glory, advised Augustus to restore perfect
freedom, without which no Country can ever be said to be truly great.136
132
24 September 1779. Strickland MSS.
133
15 August 1781. Strickland MSS.
134
24 November 1781. Strickland MSS.
135
15 June 1782. Strickland MSS.
136
9 July 1763. West Sussex Record Office, Bessborough MSS, F157. See too Jenkins' letter of
7 May 1763 on the bust of Agrippa: 'such a Great and Valuable Character must be esteemd in
England'.
It 'grieves one to think that fine things of art should perish & this case has
been saved most miraculously', Gavin Hamilton effused to Townley on hear-
ing that his shipwrecked case containing the busts of Homer and Diana had
been safely recovered from Spain. 137 Yet its precious contents were still in
jeopardy when a 'Blunder' was made at Cadiz and the case was misdirected to
Strickland in Yorkshire, rather than to Townley in London. We know from
letters in the Townley Archive and from the Westmorland cargo that cases
were usually numbered and marked with the recipient's initials or those of his
representative, so CT for Charles Townley, HRHDG for His Royal Highness
the Duke of Gloucester, and LB for Lyde Browne. Once a ship had embarked
for London, Townley's dealers would write to him confirming its name,
the name of the ship's captain and the date, along with an inventory of the
individual articles in each numbered case, so leaving a paper trail in the event
of a natural or man-made disaster.138 Townley wrote twice to Strickland in
June 1784, asking that his carpenter repack the busts of Homer and Diana
tightly and send the case with the heads facing upwards on a 'broad wheeled
wagon' directed to Park Street, Westminster.139 Townley's specific instructions
demonstrate the precautionary measures adopted by dealers when casing
sculptures for transportation. Delicate works, like Strickland's Juno (figure
47), were covered with sawdust and canvas.140 Smaller sculptures were also
packed in sawdust, straw, even broom from Ostia (reckoned more 'elastick'
than straw), to protect them from sudden movements—what Jenkins calls
'the Jolting of the London Pavement'—by which marbles were liable to
break. 141 The covers of wooden cases were fastened with screws, rather than
nails hammered in place, and their lids were marked accordingly so that
marbles could be inspected while supported by stays in their cases, rather
than removed for close scrutiny when they arrived at the Custom House. 142
By applying to the Treasury in advance, permission could be obtained for
goods to be inspected by the officials at their final destination, rather than
opened and potentially damaged at the Custom House. Charles Townley
advised his uncle not to discuss the representations of the sculptures in case
'fine sounding names' increased their valuation, which in turn would increase
the duties payable. The sculptures were sometimes undervalued so as to
reduce the amount of tax. Townley preferred the handling of his cases to
be entrusted to someone like George Strickland's carpenter, who unlike an
137
11 July 1784. TY7/663.
138 TY7 /920.
139
8 June and 28 June. Strickland MSS. See also TY7/1172-3.
140
2 June 1779. Strickland MSS.
141
TY7/590. Letter of Thomas Jenkins, Centre for Kentish Studies, U269 E 421.
H2 TY7/339.
unqualified porter at the Custom House, would recognize the top and bottom
covers of the cases from their thicker sides.143 Once the grand tour cargoes
had left Rome, we find ourselves dealing with specialists skilled in areas
related, sometimes quite peripherally, to sculpture. 144 When the Westmorland
crates arrived from Malaga at the Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid, for
instance, the clerk, Juan Moreno, hired 17 labourers, a carpenter and his
helpers to assist with the unloading and opening of the English booty.145 Only
one case remained unopened in the Academia for four years and is now lost:
that which contained the saints' relics donated by Pope Clement XIV to the
8th Baron Arundell of Wardour for the altar designed by Quarenghi in the
Catholic chapel being built at Wardour Castle in Wiltshire.146 The import-
ation of such contraband items was forbidden by English custom law. Hence
the satin-covered box which contained the relics was hidden in a secret
compartment in a block of Siena marble to prevent the relics being identified
and burned. Their secret transport was arranged by Father Thorpe, who after
the capture of the Westmorland unsuccessfully petitioned Jose Nicolas de
Azara, the Spanish representative to the Holy See, for its safe recovery. Despite
the precautionary measures adopted in the packaging and unloading of
sculptures that were not contraband goods, a number of Townley's purchases,
including the sphinx (figure 29) and the discobolus (figure 34), are known to
have suffered in transit from Italy, and been subsequently re-restored after
they arrived in London.
In a letter to Strickland of July 1784, Townley requested that he hire a cart
to transport the misdirected case to meet the public wagon bound for London
at the nearby town of Malton or the city of York. The final passage of the case
dispatched from Italy in 1780, shipwrecked, deposited in Cadiz for two years,
then misdirected to Yorkshire, was facilitated by the burgeoning transport
system of industrial England. 147 A comparison of the turnpike road network
in 1750 and in 1770 (figure 48) demonstrates how in this 20-year period the
key routes that represented the main arteries of England had increased
manifold, forming a complicated web of connections and inter-connections
throughout the country.148 As David Hancock, a historian of trans-Atlantic
trade in the 18th century, has noted, road building 'hardly fits with our idea of
i« TY7/923.
144
See Pears, The Discovery of Painting, 73, where he refers to specialists involved in the
transport, insurance, and export of goods.
145
Luzon Nogue, 'Inventarios y marcas de los cajones transportados de Malaga a la corte', 90.
146
Luzon Nogue, 'Un cajon con reliquias de santos', 165-71.
147
See Aldcroft and Freeman, Transport in the Industrial Revolution; Pawson, Transport and
Economy.
148
Pawson, Transport and Economy, figs. 27 and 29.
Figure 48. A comparison of the turnpike road network in 1750 and 1770, from Eric Pawson, Transport and Economy:
The turnpike roads of eighteenth-century Britain (London, 1977).
Georgian gentility'.149 The following chapter suggests that perhaps one of the
most fundamental components of Georgian gentility—propriety—has been
overstated in relation to the sub-genre of painted portraiture that was the
conversation piece.
The bustling land network of roads and canals by which ancient marbles
were transported across England similarly facilitated the social networks
being mapped out between fellow British collectors.150 Townley invited
Strickland or any of his friends when in London to visit Park Street to view
his prize collection. This invitation had already been extended to Strickland
three years previously by Thomas Jenkins: 'If you ever go near Rippon in your
own County, I hope you will visit Mr. Weddell of Newby where you will see a
Collection that does honour to the Possessor, and if in London hope you will
be well paid by waiting on Mr. Townley in Park Street, you will find him a
most amiable Gentleman, and I beg you will be so good as to mention
that I proposed you to call upon him. )151 Strickland's Yorkshire neighbour,
William Weddell of Newby Hall, was yet another of the (seemingly endless)
roll call of Thomas Jenkins' British clients. Yet his was a very different sort of
collection to that of Townley or Strickland. As this book argues contra
Michaelis' all inclusive 'Golden Age of Classic Dilettantism', Townley, Strick-
land, Weddell et al adopted different modes of acquisition and exhibition of a
whole variety of artefacts in marble and other media from Rome. Weddell will
have a more prominent role in later chapters. It is sufficient to be introduced
to him here as a Yorkshire collector.
This chapter closes with Thomas Jenkins initiating these polite social
introductions between his clients Charles Townley, William Weddell, and
George Strickland as a telling contrast to the acquisition, exportation, and
transportation of ancient sculptures which, as we have seen, was embroiled in
contemporary politics. In terms of the sequential stages that constituted the
business of collecting, there were a series of political obstacles which had to be
encountered. This started in Rome, where dealers negotiated with the per-
sonnel in the Papal Court and worked within (or in some cases, around) their
laws for controlling the dispersal of their cultural patrimony. Once a licence
had been granted, ancient sculptures were crated and dispatched from the
port of Livorno on the prolonged sea voyage to Britain, during which they
were vulnerable to natural disasters and human interference; in the case of
the contents of the Westmorland, this meant becoming contested cultural
149
Hancock, Citizens of the World, 304.
150
Blundell refers to the transport of goods by wagon and canal in a letter to Townley dated
12 August 1800. TY7/1328.
151
22 December 1781. Strickland MSS.
property in the war between Britain and France over the American colonies.
On arrival in Britain, their trials were far from over, being liable to costly
import duties and additional passage via road to their final destinations.
What we are dealing with here is the vagaries of cultural politics, of domestic
and foreign bureaucracy, the laws and legislation that made the business of
collecting in the second half of the 18th century akin to gambling at cards or
on the stock market. Once again, this makes Michaelis' characterization of the
'Golden Age of Classic Dilettantism' when the 'ancient marbles of Rome
poured into the palaces of the aristocracy of Britain' highly idealized. 152
152
5
'The lecture on Venus's arse':

Richard Cosway's Charles Townley with
a Group of Connoisseurs, c. 1771-5
We banish anatomy from the parlour of the polite gentleman.

Isaac Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture (London, 1756)'
From a cursory glance at Richard Cosway's Charles Townley with a Group of

Connoisseurs^ 1771-5 (plate 18), this group portrait appears to represent a
congenial company of gentlemen in an unspecified interior viewing a group of
ancient marble sculptures. The six full-length portraits have been identified
from left to right as Richard Oliver, Charles Townley, Dr Verdun, Chase Price
seated, and behind him, Richard Holt and Captain Wynn. Some of the marbles
have similarly been identified as deriving from Charles Townley's collection. He
bought the altar that doubles as a pedestal in the painting from the collection of
Antonio Burioni in Rome in 1768; the seated Muse playing the lyre in the top left
corner from the Palazzo Barberini; while the torso of the naked Venus on the
right of the Muse was acquired from the sculptor-restorer Bartolomeo Cava-
ceppi.2 The painting, which is in the collection at Towneley Hall Art Gallery and
Museum in Burnley, Lancashire, was recently described as 'a genial but revealing
conversation piece'.3 Notwithstanding its revelatory status, the significance and
extent of its cultural and social meanings has yet to be disclosed. Ironically, the
best documented of all Cosway's paintings in terms of unpublished primary
sources rather than secondary literature, it remains underexploited as a form of
cultural document.
In seeking to recover its historical significance by slowly undressing its
discursive layers of meaning, this chapter on Venus's arse will begin with an
overview of the existing art historical literature on the sub-genre of portrait-
ure that is the conversation piece. Its key proponents will be introduced, from
the 18th-century artistic practitioners, Arthur Devis and Johann ZofTany, to
Ware, A Complete Body of Architecture, 574. Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway, 32.
3
Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway, 13.
160 'The lecture on Venus s arse
the art historians, David Solkin, Ann Bermingham, and Marcia Pointon, who
have undertaken groundbreaking research in this area. My own exploratory
focus is two-pronged. In the first instance, it will investigate the conceptual-
ization of the conversation piece as a distinctive genre of artistic representa-
tion. In the second instance, the idea of the iconography of conversation will
be pursued—how a linguistic convention is muted and reconfigured in visual
terms. In following this line of enquiry, I want to demonstrate how the art
historical conception of the conversation piece and the deciphering of the
conversations imaged has been highly idealized. As I will argue, in the case of
Cosway's painting, they are conceptually much more subversive than has
hitherto been recognized.
The conversation piece, as represented by Cosway's Charles Townley with a
Group of Connoisseurs, was one of the sub-genres of painted portraiture that
was both formative and transformed during the long 18th century. A foreign
commodity, it was imported to England via the agency of a few immigrant
Netherlandish artists who were responsible for producing what an essay on
painting published in 1706 described as 'pictures in little, commonly called
conversation-pieces'.4 The lascivious subject matter of these early diminutive
images is preserved in engravings such as a brothel scene by Marcellus Lauron
from around the 1690s (figure 49). The conversation takes place between the
prostitute with her exposed neck, left breast, and stockinged right leg and the
customer, similarly unbuttoned, whose groin she rubs with her left hand,
which is partly obscured by the table. This is part of the exchange preceding
sexual intercourse. Immediately we are faced with the reverberations of
conversation in the 18th century beyond a genre of visual culture, as a concept
that is as applicable to commercial transactions and sexual communion as to
social intercourse. 5 David Solkin views the transformation of the conversation
piece from such lewdness to politeness, from brutish masculinity to refined
social interaction, as part of a campaign of cultural politics intended to clean
up the public sphere: his moral teleology being determined by a broader
narrative of the embourgeoisement of the fine art of painting in 18th-century
England. Other commentators eavesdropping on the conversation piece have
inventoried its defining characteristics. In addition to its small scale—Cos-
way's painting is 87.7 x 80 cm—it is said to be more intimate and informal
than the traditional portrait type, denoting a familiar discourse, rather than a
formal conference, of the type favoured by official or public images.6 The
4
Bainbrigge Buckenridge, Essay Towards an English School of Painting (1706), quoted by
Solkin, Painting for Money, 51.
5
Georgia, 'The Joys of Social Intercourse: Men, women, and conversation in the eighteenth
century', in Cook, Epistolary Bodies, 252.
6
See O'Dench, The Conversation Piece, 3 and Paulson, Emblem and Expression, 121.
Richard Cosway's Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs 161
Figure 49. Mezzotint engraving by Marcellus Lauron, Brothel Scene, 1690s(?).
striking correspondence between the gestures represented in conversation

pieces and those recommended in etiquette books has also been noted.7 In
Arthur Devis' Mr and Mrs Hill c. 1750-1 (76.2 x 63.5 cm) (plate 19), for
instance, the seated and standing poses of his married subjects are textbook
copies of those prescribed in etiquette manuals like Francois Nivelon's
7
O'Dench, The Conversation Piece, 16-17; Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology^ 21-6.
162 'The lecture on Venus 5 arse'
Figure 50. Francois Nivelon, Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour (London 1737), plate 2
'Standing'.
Rudiments of Genteel Behaviour (1737). Nivelon offers the following instruc-

tions for the pose of standing, accompanied by a graphic illustration (figure
50) to which the dancing master repeatedly refers: 'The bend at the Elbow, at
its due Distance will permit the right hand to place itself in the Waistcoat easy
and genteel, as in this figure is represented. The whole body must rest on the
right foot and the right knee, as also the Back, be kept straight, the left leg
must be foremost and only bear its own weight, and both Feet must be turn'd
outwards, as shewn by this figure, neither more or less but exactly.'8 What we
are witnessing here is a type of corporeal conversation or body language in
which a series of poses, standing, dancing, and walking, are encoded into a
network of social and class meanings.9 Nivelon's statuesque hand-in-waist-
coat pose (figure 50) is quite at odds with the exploratory hand-in-pocket-of-
breeches pose (plate 18) that two of the sitters in Cosway's conversation piece
assume. This alternative network of socially risque, rather than socially
refined, bodily behaviour will be discussed in detail in due course.
Ann Bermingham has formulated the notion of the outdoor conversation
piece, which is applicable to paintings such as the German-born artist Johann
Zoffany's The Colmore Family, c.1775 (plate 20), 100.3 x 127 cm.10 In this
image, which is contemporaneous with that by Cosway of Townley and co.,
Zoffany depicts three generations of one family—the grandmother, father and
mother, and their four children—in relationship to the landscape. The father
sits proprietorially on the left-hand side of the canvas, with his arm out-
stretched over the masculine territory of the landscape garden. On the far
right, the farmland and henhouse behind the women and children remind us
of women's responsibility for reproducing and maintaining a family. Mrs
Colmore's childbearing has an economic function like that of the hen with
her chicks in the centre foreground—in producing heirs to the estate, whose
economic value is invested in the land. The vast oak tree that unites farmland
and cultivated garden stands as a metaphor for the ancient pedigree and loyal
steadfastness of the landed family.11
Zoffany's Colmore Family provides a compelling example of Marcia Poin-
ton's account of the conversation piece as a site for the visual articulation of
social and familial propriety, where the painted canvas acts as a means of
securing and perpetuating notions of social distinction and familial coher-
ence.12 Pointon characterizes the conversation piece as a form of legal testi-
monial, which like a last will and testament provides an enduring statement of
8
Quoted in O'Dench, The Conversation Piece, 16-17.
9
Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 22.
10
Bermingham, Landscape and Ideology, 14-33.
See Daniels, 'The political iconography of woodland', 48.
12
Pointon, Hanging the Head, 159 and 161.
familial power. Her arguments can be summarized in her insightful reading of

another conversation piece by ZofTany. Unlike the Colmore family in their
outdoor conversation piece, or exterior landscape, the portraits she discusses,
like that of Mr and Mrs Hill by Arthur Devis (plate 19), depict the fertile
landscape of the domestic interior, complete with its internal fixtures and
furnishings. This privileged view of the Georgians ( at home' contributes to the
supposed intimacy, or the familiar discourse, of the conversation piece.
Zoffany's Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons, 1764 (figure 51), repre-
sents the progeny and property of the British royal family, in which, Pointon
argues, the German-born artist inscribes the German-born Queen into a
discourse of imperial and cultural supremacy. 13 Through the sumptuous
display of luxury goods, the British royal family are cast as parents to all
nations, not just their two eldest sons attired in fancy dress, the Prince of
Wales as Telemachus, Prince Frederick in Turkish dress. Note the relationship
between material culture and cultural politics in the Turkish carpet, the French
clock, the toilet service probably of German origin, and the lacquered Chinese
mandarin, even the flamingo on the outside lawn, all of which constitute an
empire of luxury goods. When conceptualizing the painting in terms of the
imperial hegemony of the British royal family, we cannot overlook the absence
of the King from Zoffany's image. This is where the Prince of Wales as
Telemachus assumes diplomatic dress—he transfuses the ancient narrative of
Homer's Odyssey into the pictorial composition. The royal heir is shown
protecting his mother, Penelope, in the absence of his father, Odysseus, making
this image one of filial devotion in which the Prince proves his suitability as
heir. Pointon's emphasis on the propriety of the conversation piece in relation
to Zoffany's royal portrait might be extended to incorporate Cixous' definition
of a masculine economy in terms of proper-property-proximity. 14 Cosway's
Charles Townley with a Group of Connoisseurs will challenge this prevailing and
idealizing, one-dimensional view of the conversation piece.
Zoffany's Charles Townley's Library at 7 Park Street, Westminster, 1781-3/98
(plate 21), succeeded Cosway's painting by a decade. Its composition highlights
the social distinction of the conversation piece, as opposed to the familial
fecundity that is so crucial to the last two examples. It is something of a celebrity
painting, in that it has been often exhibited and repeatedly reproduced.15
13
Pointon, Hanging the Head, 162-8.
14
Cixous, 'Castration or decapitation', 42 and 50.
15
Recent accounts of the painting include Coltman, 'The Cream of Antiquity: Charles
Townley and his august family of ancient marbles', Fabricating the Antique, esp. 165-8; Coltman,
'Representation, replication and collecting', 304-24; Grossman, 'Priapus in Park Street', 71-80;
Vaughan, 'The Townley Zoffany', 32-5; Wilton and Bignamini, The Grand Tour, no. 215;
Webster, 'Zoffany's painting of Charles Towneley's Library', 316-23.
Figure 51. Johann Zoffany, Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons, 1764.
It represents the top-lit library in Townley's London townhouse at 7 Park Street,

Westminster, crowded from floor to ceiling with ancient marble sculptures.
They are displayed on the carpet, on items of furniture, including inside and on
top of the bookcase, on the chimney-piece, on pillars, on brackets, and in the
case of the reliefs, hung on the walls. Seated in the very heart of the painting is
not, as one might expect, the master of the house and its collection, Charles
Townley, but the self-ennobled French antiquarian Baron d'Hancarville, author
of the Recherches sur rorigine, Vesprit et les progres des arts de la Grece (London,
1785-6). His focal position with an open book celebrates the centrality
of d'Hancarville's mystical theories about ancient art in interpreting the
sculptures in Townley's collection. His three-volume work proffered a reading
of ancient monuments based on a system of comparative mythology, according
to which the Greek god Dionysus, his Roman counterpart Bacchus, and
Brahma of the Hindus were variations of a universal creative force that d'Han-
carville identified as 'Etrer Generateur'.16 One possible reading of Zoffany's
painting is as a visual articulation of d'Hancarville's thesis.17 A vertical axis
extends from the top of the bookcase, where the oval form of the Townley vase
recalls the egg of creation as penetrated by the Etrer Generateur. According to
d'Hancarville, the creation was first expressed in visual terms by an image of a
bull striking a huge egg with its horns, where the egg signifies the primordial
chaos or matter. The Japanese worshipped the image in a form that he relates to
images found on the coins of the ancient Mediterranean countries. On either
side of the vase in Zoffany's painting, winged female Mithraic figures immolate
the phallic creative power of the bulls. Below the vase, the creative force is
incarnate in his Western guise in a sculpture of Bacchus. The vertical axis
terminates with a portrait of d'Hancarville as progenitor of this thesis, whom
Professor Michaelis dubbed 'professor of the fantastic'.18
What is striking about Zoffany's conversation piece is that the gentlemen
installed in the literary landscape of the library are themselves shown in
conversation. In Townley and d'Hancarville's case, their dialogue is mediated
by open books before them. Behind d'Hancarville, Charles Greville and
Thomas Astle appear similarly engaged. Thomas Jenkins wrote to Townley
from Rome in 1782: 'I hope you will constantly have reason to be satisfied
with having indulged your passions for the fine productions of the Ancients;
indeed the contemplation of such, seems a kind of conversing with the
celebrated Genius's of those remote times, and gives an ideal long life, as
the Immagination produces a continuation or connection with the ages in
which such interesting works were produced; but it does not become me to
declaim on a subject, which you are so much master of.'19 Jenkins' letter casts
the contemplation of collected works of ancient sculpture as a kind of
conversing with the Geniuses of the ancients, offering us a discursive frame-
work for Zoffany's painting that he immediately retracts on the basis of
Townley's superior mastery of the subject. Such genuflecting to Townley's
knowledge is by now a familiar epistolary strategy from the dealer. Known in
the 18th century as 'puffs', it was part of the rhetoric of wheeling and dealing
that previous chapters have introduced.20 Yet it was not just the viewing of
classical sculptures that effected a dialogue with the ancients, for in letters of
16
See Haskell, 'The Baron d'Hancarville', 177-91; Funnell, 'The symbolical language of
antiquity', 65-81.
Grossman, 'Priapus in Park Street', 71-80, esp. 78.
19
TY7/413.
20
SeeTY7/1317.
the sort written by Jenkins to Townley, a form of conversation was conducted

on paper between the moderns—between the collector based in London and
his dealer(s) in Rome. Studies in 18th-century letter-writing have established
its status as a form of social commerce. There are at least three typologies of
personal letters discerned by Whyman: informal to intimates, sociable to
friends and acquaintances, and contrived or artificial for the purposes of
patronage. 21 These heterogeneous epistolary conversations are all represented
in the mass of correspondence that constitutes the Townley Archive in the
British Museum. The archive includes letters to Townley from Richard Cos-
way and some of the sitters in Cosway's conversation piece.
Zoffany's painting of Townley's library (plate 21) represents the collecting of
ancient sculptures within a culture of learned conversation. In terms of class
and gender, this culture is both socially exclusive and exclusively masculine.22
One of Townley's close personal friends, Richard Payne Knight (of whom we
will hear more later), wrote to him of the limited readership of d'Hancarville's
Recherches on account of'the Persons who turn their attention to such sorts of
studies are not a thousandth part of those who read novels & pamphlets'.23
Payne Knight insists on a dichotomy between popular and esoteric reading
matter. Although women comprised a significant portion of the reading public
for novels and pamphlets, d'Hancarville's projected audience was implicitly
male; being written in French further restricted British readership of the
Recherches to members of an educated, cosmopolitan fraternity.
While Zoffany's portrait endorses a reading of social distinction in the
conversation piece, it simultaneously and playfully underscores a reading of
familial coherence. For the manner in which Zoffany visualized the objects in
the collection, and the means by which it was conceptualized in epistolary
conversations, affected a blurring between progeny and property, flesh and
stone. Seated on the right-hand side of the composition, Townley appears to be
metamorphosing into a sculpture: his profile bust mirrors that of the bust of
Homer behind him and the sphinx in front, in addition to the line-up of
imperial busts. Townley's companions are gathered in the centre of the canvas
around one of his favourite busts of the nymph Clytie metamorphosing into a
flower, which d'Hancarville identified as a bust of Isis placed on the lotus
flower, and which the unmarried Townley would jocosely refer to as his wife. 24
Writing to Clytie's husband, William Sandys l hope[d] all my acquaintance in
21
Whyman, Sociability and Power, 7. See also Whyman's "'Paper visits'", 18.
22
Masculinity in the 18th century is a hot topic; see Myrone, Bodybuilding, Carter, Men and the
Emergence of Polite Society; Haggarty, Men in Love; Hitchcock and Cohen, English Masculinities;
Barker and Chalus, Gender in Eighteenth-century England; Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity.
23
2 August 1785. TY7/2086.
24
Ellis, The Townley Gallery, I. 9.
168 'The lecture on Venus s arse'
your Museum with whom tho mute (& as Ovid says nee Vox nee Verba
Sequuntur) I have so often conversed by the expression of their countenances
are well—especially the Beautiful Clyde—I am happy in the thoughts of
stealing a peep at them soon'.25 Sandys' letter extends the languages in which
conversations were conducted with the ancients beyond the French of d'Han-
carville's published disquisition to quotations in Latin from the texts of
ancient authors like Ovid. In an undated letter to Townley, the poet Samuel
Rogers referred to 'the pleasure [I had] to travel with you this morning thro'
fairy-land, [when] I forgot to ask your permission to introduce some Lanca-
shire friends to-morrow to a sight of your august family! a family not the less
imposante for their vow of perpetual silence!'26 According to Sandys' and
Rogers' characterization, discourse with members of Townley's marble family
was less of a conversation than an interrogation: more of a monologue than a
dialogue. What we are dealing with here is the polyphony of conversations in
the 18th century: visual and textual, epistolary and linguistic, oral and mute,
each with their distinguishing contents and idioms.
'I see Zoffani has painted your Gallery. If I am not too impertinent is that
performance for you, then I have a Chance of seeing it', Townley's fellow
collector, Sir Richard Worsley, wrote to him on 10 May 1790.27 Zoffany's
painting was then on display in London at the Royal Academy's 22nd annual
exhibition. In one of the many notices about the exhibition published in The
Diary; or, WoodfalVs Register for May 1790, it was described as follows: 'From
the peculiar excellence and accuracy of this picture, its possessor, Mr. Townley
may justly say, that he has the duplicate of his collection.'28 Far from being an
accurate duplicate, it has long been recognized that Zoffany manipulated the
collection—both in terms of its content and its mode of exhibition—for the
purposes of his conversation piece. In this, Zoffany's image dispels the
uncritical notion of the conversation piece as providing unmediated access
to the Georgians at home in their drawing rooms—as if the additional painted
cups and saucers arranged on the tea table in Devis' Mr and Mrs Hill (plate
19) are for us, their anticipated guests. In many cases, the familiar discourse of
the conversation piece is every bit as contrived as a formal conference of large-
scale public portraiture. The finest of the 35 sculptures installed in Zoffany's
painted library were actually exhibited in the ground-floor rooms of Town-
ley's London townhouse. We know this from watercolours of the dining room
and hall by William Chambers (plates 22 and 23), which date from the early
25
16 October 1780. TY7/1204. Ovid, Metamorphoses, 11. 326: 'neither voice nor words followed'.
26
TY7/1579.
27
TY7/2046.
28
The Diary; or, Woodfall's Register, 1 May 1790, 3. See Hallett, 'The Business of Criticism',
65-75.
1790s.29 The evidence of these visual documents is confirmed by the boyhood

memories of J. T. Smith, who was one of a number of Royal Academy students
whom Townley employed to make drawings for his portfolios. Smith records,
'it was a portrait of the Library, though not strictly correct as to its contents,
since all the best marbles displayed in various parts of the house were brought
into the painting by the artist, who made it up into a picturesque composition
according to his own taste'.30
Zoffany's manipulated portrait of the collected contents of the painted
library may be demonstrated by examples. The highly-prized sculptures of
the discobolus (left foreground; and figure 34), the drunken faun (behind and
to the right of the discobolus; and figure 24) and the larger-than-life Venus (to
the left of the door; and figure 32) were copied from their premier positions in
Townley's dining room and painted into Zoffany's library. The seated sphinx
(right foreground; and figure 29) derived from the entrance hall, where she was
displayed on a marble wellhead decorated in high relief with fauns and
bacchants. Zoffany continued to employ the metre-high wellhead as a pedestal,
not for a modest-sized marble ornament like the sphinx, but for the colossal
statue of Venus (figure 32). It has been calculated that Zoffany reduced the size
of this sculpture by one-fifth in order to incorporate it into the painted
library.31 In reality, the Venus could never have been brought upstairs from
the dining room into Townley's first-floor library. Neither could the pendant
sculptures of the winged Victory restraining the bull be surmounted on a
wooden bookcase flanking the Townley vase as they are in Zoffany's painting.
Despite the pronouncements of the The Diary, we must recognize that
Zoffany's painting is not a transcription of Townley's collection. The painting
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1790 was itself reworked eight years later to
incorporate one of Townley's more recent and highly-prized acquisitions into
the left foreground: a discobolus (figure 34) excavated from Hadrian's villa at
Tivoli. Townley's diary for 9 July 1798 records 'Mr Zoffani continued to paint
the Discobolus and began it again for the third time.'32
The contemporary profile of Zoffany's conversation piece, exhibited at the
Royal Academy in 1790, and the notices generated about it in the press, are in
marked contrast to the obscurity of Cosway's group portrait, in a disparity
that has continued to the present. The latter was never exhibited at the Royal
Academy even though Cosway, like Zoffany, was a Royal Academician. Unlike
Zoffany's Townley, it has never been engraved. An entry in Townley's diary for
March 1801 reveals that the engravers Wetton and Stow brought a letter from
29
Wilton and Bignamini, The Grand Tour, nos. 213-14.
30
Smith, Nollekens and his Times, I. 258-9.
31
Cook, 'The Townley Marbles in Westminster and Bloomsbury', 38 and 41.
32
TY1/10.
Zoffany authorizing the removal of his painting from Park Street.33 The
following year, when Zoffany and Stow called again on Townley, Zoffany
had agreed that the engraver should alter the profile of the bust of Homer
(displayed on the pedestal behind Townley in the painting) to a three-quarters
view of the face, following a drawing by the draughtsman John Brown.34 Here
is evidence that discourse with the sculptures in Townley's collection extended
beyond the confines of the learned disquisitions in French and Latin of
educated connoisseurs, to include the artistic delineations on canvas and
paper of a cohort of artists: John Brown, J. T. Smith, Johann Zoffany, William
Chambers, and Richard Cosway. This aspect of the Townley marbles will be
revisited in Chapter 7. The roll call of names was not restricted to male artists:
Townley's diary for 3 October 1799 records that he called on Cosway's wife,
the artist Maria Cosway, who was painting a portrait of Mary Linwood.35
Linwood was shown copying Townley's bust of Minerva (plate 4) into one of
her needlework productions, or 'stitchery paintings', for which she was well
known. The previous spring, she had hired rooms in Hanover Square to
exhibit her embroidered pictures in the style of Old Master paintings, includ-
ing Carlo Dolci's Salvator Mundi in the Earl of Exeter's collection, and works
by her contemporaries, to a metropolitan audience for the entrance fee of one
shilling; a review published in The Monthly Mirror likened the needle in her
hand to 'the plastic chisel of a Praxiteles upon a block of marble'.36 According
to the catalogue of the Hanover Square exhibition, one of Linwood's needle-
work paintings was after Maria Cosway's Lodona, from Popes 'Windsor Forest'.
The original painting was commissioned by Thomas Macklin for his Poet's
Gallery in Pall Mall.37 In a union of painting and poetry, it represented the
nymph Lodona dissolving in tears into the River Thames, accompanied by
eight lines from Alexander Pope's poem, 'Windsor Forest' (1713). Cosway's
Lodona and her portrait of Linwood are both unidentified; the latter was
exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1800 (no. 548).38 The record of it in
Townley's diary demonstrates the translation of conversation with Townley's
sculptures into different media, from marble sculpture into painted canvas,
with a representation of Townley's marble and bronze bust in needlework.
How then are we to account for the disparity between Zoffany's celebrated
ensemble portrait and the largely obscure canvas by Richard Cosway which
precedes it by a decade? Both are classified as conversation pieces and both
33
19 March 1801. TY1/15.
34
21 August 1802. TY1/19.
35
TY1/12.
36
Cited in Ingram, 'Miss Mary Linwood', 145.
37Boase, 'Macklin and Bowyer', esp. 148-55.
38I am grateful to Stephen Lloyd for much of the information in this paragraph.
include portraits of the master of the collection, Charles Townley. For most of
the 20th century, the painting by Cosway was attributed to Zoffany. Zoffany's
portrait is now recognized as an evocative representation of taste and the
antique at the end of the 18th century,39 the rubric deriving from Haskell and
Penny's seminal volume, Taste and the Antique: The lure of classical sculpture,
1500-1900. I want to propose an alternative rubric for Cosway's group
portrait, which may begin to explain why its conversations have been con-
sistently muted: 'Sex and the antique: The allure of classical sculpture'. What
follows is an attempt to recover the 'darker side' of the 18th-century conver-
sation piece that revisits its initial lewdness and refuses to conform to
Pointon's insistence on its propriety. Rather, I want to celebrate, as the picture
itself does, its phallic impropriety—the risque nature of conversations with
the ancients—by discussing its significance for discourses of collecting, con-
noisseurship, sociability, and especially sexuality.40
The painting will be analysed according to its pretext, text, and subtext. This
tripartite framework is borrowed from G. S. Rousseau's essay on the Discourse on
the Worship ofPriapus (1786-7), a work of erotic erudition written by Townley's
friend, Richard Payne Knight.41 The pretext of Knight's volume, proposes
Rousseau, is the collector Sir William Hamilton's 'Account of the Remains of
the Worship of Priapus', which appeared as a prologue to Payne Knight's
Discourse when it was published and selectively distributed by the Society of
Dilettanti. While serving as British Envoy to Naples, Hamilton heard of the
existence at Isernia in Abruzzo of a cult ofPriapus, 'the obscene Divinity of the
Ancients', in all its vitality, including material evidence of an ancient festival in
reverence of St Cosmo's 'big toe', as the phallus was known locally.42 An
engraving of the wax models of male genitalia, that formed part of the ritual
offerings carried, kissed, and dedicated by women, served as the frontispiece to
Hamilton and Knight's publication (figure 52), arranged so as to suggest both
anatomical illustrations and outre still life.43 The text of Payne Knight's
Discourse is indebted to d'HancarvilJe's Recherches in seeking a connection
39
Vaughan, 'The Townley Zoffany', 32.
40
My understanding of sexuality in this period has been greatly assisted by reading Miller,
The Don Giovanni Book', Wagner, Eros Revived', Bouce, Sexuality in eighteenth-century Britain,
esp. R. Porter, 'Mixed Feelings: The Enlightenment and sexuality', 1-27 and P.-G. Bouce, 'Some
sexual beliefs and myths in eighteenth-century Britain', 28-46.
Rousseau, 'The sorrows of Priapus', 101-53. Orrells, 'A history of the cultural phallus and
approaches regarding the phallus in antiquity', 147 makes the valid point that Rousseau's
division of Payne Knight's Discourse into text and subtext is a little too straightforward,
preferring to see the discussion of the phallus as continually questioning the distinction between
what is veiled and unveiled.
42
Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, no. 142; Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus.
43
Redford, Dilettanti, 113.
Figure 52. Richard Payne Knight, Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (London,
1786-7), plate I, Ex-voti of wax presented in the Church at Isernia in 1780.
between the worship of Priapus and the mystic theology of the ancients.
According to Knight, the phallus is the product of'an age... when no prejudices
of artificial decency existed, what more just and natural image could they [the
ancients] find, by which to express their idea of the beneficial power of the great
Creator'.44 What Payne Knight is advocating is the contextual study of phallic
worship as part of a universal creation myth that had been repressed, in his
words, by 'two of the greatest curses that ever afflicted the human race, Dogma-
tical Theology, and its consequent Religious Persecution'.45 A number of ancient
artefacts from Townley's collection are enlisted and engraved to support his
contentious hypothesis, including a sculptural fragment from Elephanta near
Bombay with figures in very high relief (figure 53): 'the principal of which are a
man and woman, in an attitude which I shall not venture to describe, but only
44
Payne Knight, Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, 17.
45
Payne Knight, Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, 188.
Figure 53. Richard Payne Knight, Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (London,
1786-7), plate XI, fragment from Elephanta near Bombay showing a man and
woman 'in an attitude which I shall not venture to describe'.
174 'The lecture on Venus's arse'
observe that the action, which I have supposed to be a symbol of refreshment

and invigoration, is mutually applied by both to their respective organs of
generation, the emblems of the active and passive powers of procreation,
which mutually cherish and invigorate each other'.46 Payne Knight interprets
the sculptural group as a symbolic, rather than literal representation of a sexual
act that he refrains from unravelling. In Rousseau's reading, the goal of Payne
Knight's thesis was not the creation of a sexual underworld, but the codification
of an enlightened paganism that tolerated homosocial desire: making his sub-
text a devastating polemic against repressive Christian morality.
Cosway's conversation piece (plate 18) images the sort of homosocial cama-
raderie that would later be endorsed by Knight's Discourse. It visually configures
and prefigures by a decade Knight's campaign of pagan phallicism through a
representation of Townley and his masculine coterie indulging in illicit conver-
sation with the ancients. In their viewing of naked statues of Venus, the content
of these conversations was more lascivious than learned, erotic rather than
esoteric, there being a blurring between the boundaries of reverence and irrev-
erence. But unlike Richard Holt, whom Captain Wynn seems to be forcibly
removing from the viewing space, let's not get prematurely carried away...
One pretext of Cosway's conversation piece is that it is less a portrait of
Townley and members of his inner circle, as of a unique item of furniture in the
collection of Victoria and Albert Museum in London (plate 24). This view is
indicative of how professionals in their specialist fields converse (or not) with
visual evidence. The painting generated a great deal of excitement among
furniture historians in the 1970s when the highly ornate gilt wood armchair
executed in the French rococo style was identified as being commissioned by
Cosway as a sitter's chair from the London furniture designer Matthias Lock.47 It
appears again in his portrait of Mrs Draper, c.1775, where the crimson damask
upholstery frames her blue silk taffeta gown and quilted satin coral-coloured
underskirt.48 The myopic reading of the conversation piece as a portrait of a
chair is inevitably partial since it entirely overlooks the gentleman sitters and the
marble sculptures on which they are so animatedly focused.
In a letter of 1780, the Scottish artist David Allan wrote to one of his
aristocratic patrons of his intention to concentrate on 'the small domestic and
conversation style' of portraiture, it being the 'most useful as it is the means
of everlastingly joining frends together on the canvace'.49 The homosocial
convivium given visual form by Cosway invites comparison with the Society
46
Payne Knight, Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, 47-8.
47
Hayward, 'A unique rococo chair by Matthias Lock', 268-71.
48
49
3 December 1780. Allan to the Earl of Buchan. Edinburgh University Library, Laing MSS,
LA.IV.26.
of Dilettanti portraits, 23 of which were individual half-length oil paintings by

George Knapton, dating from 1741-9, with two later group portraits by
Joshua Reynolds, 1777-9 (plates 25 and 26). The history of the Society of
Dilettanti is well known.50 This metropolitan fraternity was founded in 1734,
its members consisting of aristocrats and gentlemen from across the political
spectrum. Horace Walpole, who never joined its esteemed ranks, reckoned
bitchily that 'The nominal qualification [for membership] is having been in
Italy, and the real one, being drunk.'51 Much more than a drinking club, the
society sponsored research and publications into aspects of classical culture.
Members who were the authors of learned theses, like Sir William Hamilton
and Richard Payne Knight, were also notable collectors of the material culture
of the ancients. Townley was elected to the Society in 1793. Chapter 7
documents his instrumental role in overseeing the engraving of ancient
objects in his own and contemporary British collections of antiquities for
the Society's last 18th-century publication project, initiated in 1799, the
Specimens ofAntient Sculpture, Egyptian, Etruscan, Greek and Roman selected
from different collections in Great Britain by the Society of Dilettanti (London,
1809-35), in 2 volumes.
The protagonists in Reynolds' ensemble portraits (who are coincidental!/
busy imbibing) have all been identified. 52 Yet the nature of their disquisitions
remains opaque in an elliptical fusion of learned sociability and lascivious
study. One of the two group portraits appears to commemorate Sir William
Hamilton's inauguration to the Society in 1777 (plate 25). Hamilton is seated
in the centre of the composition gesturing to an engraving of a vase similar to
that displayed on the table. Sir Watkin Williams Wynn on the left, in the
presidential toga, holds his wine glass and points to the ancient vessel. Notice
how Sir Richard Thompson behind Hamilton raises his empty glass in order
that Walter Spencer-Stanhope in profile might get a privileged view of its
underside; the implication being that ancient ceramic vases of the sort
collected and published by Sir William Hamilton were the precursors of
luxury drinking vessels in glass. But what are we to make of the woman's
garter held aloft by John Taylor, the only one of the group to make eye contact
with the external viewer?53 And what in the companion piece (plate 26),
30
The seminal texts are Gust, History oj the Society of Dilettanti and Harcourt-Smith, The
Society of Dilettanti', Brewer's account of'Connoisseurs and artists', ch. 6 in The Pleasures of the
Imagination, is based on the above.
51
14 April 1743. Walpole to Horace Mann. W. S. Lewis et al (eds.), Horace Walpole s
Correspondence (New Haven, 1954-83), 18. 211.
52
Penny, Reynolds, 109 and 110.
53
Redford, Dilettanti, 101 reads the garter held by Taylor and the star of the Order of the Bath
worn by Sir William Hamilton as puns on the name of the tavern, the Star and Garter, in which the
Society met and where the portraits were hung over chimney-pieces at opposite ends of the room.
where Thomas Dundas, the Earl of Seaforth, and Lord Carmarthen all hold
gems between their first fingers and thumbs forming the C O' sign simulating
female genitalia?54 Their hands are poised at successive heights—just above
the table, to eye level, to above the eye line. The material culture of the
ancients in the form of collectable vases and gems is gendered as female and
encoded as objects of masculine desire. From what we can decode of their
conversation, it equates the allure of antiquity—the pursuit, possession, and
penetration of its material culture—to that of women.35
We cannot leave the Society of Dilettanti portraits prior to viewing one of
George Knapton's earlier half-lengths. The entire series consisting of 23
images has been roughly classified according to their iconographical types,
with a Greco-Roman group, a Venetian, van Dyckian, Turkish, and libertine.56
The portrait in question falls within the latter category. Dated 1742, it depicts
Sir Francis Dashwood as St Francis attired in the habit of a Franciscan friar
and engaged in a sacrilegious version of the Communion ritual (plate 27).57
His tonsured head is surrounded by a halo with an inscription referring to his
country seat at West Wycombe Park. The gold chalice is inscribed to the
mother of saints: but the mater sanctorum that is the object of Dashwood's
sacred act of devotion, and that is illuminated by his radiating halo, is the
exposed pudendum of a partial reproduction of a famous pagan sculpture,
the Medici Venus (figure 54); making St Francis' raised chalice rather than
part of the sacred sacrament a profane toast to the genitals of the Roman
goddess of love. What Trumbach has described as the religion of 18th-century
libertinism, in contradistinction to orthodox Christianity, is here given visual
form.58 Other historians, like Sainsbury, have noted the complex connections
existing between libertinism and liberty as a form of political radicalism
inherited from the ancients and manifested in an economy of homosocial
desire rather than a political system. Sainsbury further discerns the multi-
dimensionality of libertinism with its spiritual and sexual components that
are conflated in Knapton's portrait of Dashwood in relation to the radical
politician, John Wilkes.59 Writing to Townley in Italy in March 1768, Thomas
Hervey referred to Wilkes' brand of liberty as being 'now at the height in this
Country; and I think borders too much upon Licentiousness... How happy
Simon, 'Reynolds and the double-entendre', 72.

See Bermingham, 'Elegant females and gentlemen connoisseurs', 489-514 and Benedict,
'The "curious attitude" in eighteenth-century Britain', 59-98.
56
Redford, '"Sena Ludo"', 56-67; Redford, Dilettanti, 13-43.
57
A contemporary description of the portrait is provided in a letter of John Wilkes; see
Grafton, Letters Between the Duke of Grafton, 23.
58
Trumbach, 'Erotic fantasy and male libertinism in Enlightenment England', 254.
59
Sainsbury, 'Wilkes and Libertinism', 151-74.
Figure 54. Engraving of the Medici Venus from F. Gori, Museum Florentinum
(Florence, 1734).
you must be, to escape all this Noise & Bustle; Voltaire, very rightly observes,
we are free once in seven years, & then are Mad.'60
Knapton's portrait of Dashwood has been linked to the Monks of Med-
menham Abbey, a group led by Dashwood that revived the proceedings of
earlier 18th-century British Hell Fire Clubs in their riotous pursuit of sex and
sacrilege.61 The activities of these notorious clubs are obfuscated in historical
record by a heady potation of secrecy and scandal; their appellation is itself
retrospective. Shearer West published an obscure print about Medmenham
Abbey entitled 'The Secrets of the Convent' of 1765, that is indebted to
Knapton's portrait of Dashwood.62 The text accompanying the engraving
recounts St Francis' courting of St Paul, who as no novice 'well deserve[s]
the Jewel-Office'—jewel being a euphemism for vagina—and ends with the
exultation Til be blunt, My dearest Brother here is '. As in Knapton's
portrait of Dashwood, St Frances offers a toast to the aforementioned private
parts of a representation of the Medici Venus. The communion between
contemporary sitter and classical sculpture is provocatively represented as
oscillating between religious sanctity and classical profanity, social decorum
and sexual licence.
Like Knapton's portrait of Dashwood (plate 27), Cosway's conversation
piece (plate 18) deploys fragmented copies of naked torso of marble Venuses
as the focus of its sitters' collective attention. In Knapton's image, the left
hand of the Medici Venus, that was seen as strategically concealing her
modesty, has been removed. Not only is the rendering of the sculpture
horizontally cropped, she is herself a fetishized fragment. Accounts in travel
journals of viewing the Medici Venus (figure 54) in the Tribuna of the Uffizi in
Florence repeatedly refer to the deficiency of language to communicate their
admiration; to being so enamoured of the statue as to make, in Joseph
Spence's case, 'perhaps, a hundred visits to the Venus of Medicis in person'.63
Sir Roger Newdigate was 'so astonished when I saw it, that I could not take my
eyes off to look at anything else, not even when I had seen it several times'.64
He recounts that the statue was broken into many pieces, 'they say forty', but
tellingly, none of the fragmented parts identified by Newdigate correspond
with the missing left hand depicted by Knapton in his portrait of Sir Francis
Dashwood. In their visual paralysis, Venus's suitors scrutinize her, vertically
from toe to tip: 'Nothing can be more perfectly feminine and beautiful, the
60
31 March 1768. TY7/1637.
61
Redford,'"Sena Ludo"', 64.
62
West, 'Libertinism and the ideology of male friendship', 76-104. See also Simon, 'Reynolds
and the double-entendre', 74.
63
Spence, Polymetis, 68.
64
Quoted by McCarthy, 'Art education and the grand tour', 483.
feet, the toes, the legs, the thighs, the body—breasts and face of the most
exquisite simmetry and beauty', extolled Charles Burney.65 Other viewers
observe her different passions and postures when standing before her, to the
right and the left, as if engaged in a formal dance, or seduction ritual.66 Tobias
Smollett was one of the few to describe circumambulating the Venus whose
'back parts... are executed so happily, as to excite the admiration of the most
indifferent spectator. One cannot help thinking it is the very Venus of Cnidos
by Praxiteles, which Lucian describes.'67 Smollett proceeds to quote a Latin
version of Lucian's Greek Erotes, followed by an English translation:
4
"Heavens! What a beautifull back! The loins with what exuberance they fill
the grasp! How finely are the swelling buttocks rounded, neither too thinly
cleaving to the bone, nor effused into a huge mass of flabby consistence!'"
This is part of the enthusiastic response of Callicratidas, an Athenian, to
viewing the derriere of the mid 4th-century statue of Aphrodite by Praxiteles
in the temple at Cnidus. The view of the goddess's backside so admired by the
mature Athenian, Callicratidas, a devotee of boys, is preceded and contrasted
with that of the young Corinthian Charicles, a lover of women, who on
coming face-to-face with the statue, kisses it and weeps. The binary erotics
between Callicratidas and Charicles, in a competition between heteroerotic
and homoerotic passion, is narrated by Lycinus in a series of interlocking
dialogues with Theomnestus, reminding us of the ancient origins of the
dialogic convention.68
Smollett's description of the Medici Venus demonstrates how, on occasion,
discourse with ancient objects was mediated by quotations from classical
texts. In citing the passage from Lucian (now attributed to Pseudo-Lucian
and usually dated to the 3rd century AD), the Medici Venus is inscribed into
an ancient narrative of the sexual thrill elicited when viewing a naked female
statue from the front and the rear.69 As with their classical counterparts
Charicles and Callicratidas, the 18th-century viewer's visual encounter with
Venus is quickly superseded by the desire to touch her; Thomas Orde's
unpublished journal recounts 'the doors of the Tribune open [ing], and in
three steps I had the very Venus de Medicis in my arms... why would she not
65
66
See the passages cited by Hale, 'Art and Audience', 47.
67
Smollett, Travels Through France and Italy, 221. See Wrigley's 'Sculpture and the language
of criticism in eighteenth-century France', esp. 78.
68
On Lucian's Erotes, I have looked at Eisner, 'Viewing and creativity', 113-31, esp. 115-17;
McGlathery, 'Reversals of Platonic love in Petronius' Satyricon\ 204-27; Salomon, 'Making a
world of difference', 197-219; Osborne, 'Looking on Greek style', 81-96; Halperin, 'Historicizing
the Sexual Body', 236-61; Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 211-27.
69
Jones, Culture and Society in Lucian, 22 and 104.
answer the kisses I could not help printing all over her delicate form'.70 The
Medici Venus constantly vacillated between animate/inanimate, flesh/marble,
human/divine, and woman/goddess, but her nakedness ensured that the
aesthetic tributes of her viewers cum voyeurs were coloured by a lubricious
sensuality. Tm greatly afraid that the sight of the Venus in the Florentine
Gallery will give you some yammering (according to T Booth's Phrase) after a
Tuscan Whore', one T. Assheton wrote to Charles Townley during the first of
his 'Italian perigrinations' in 1767.71 After Townley's return to London,
another of his correspondents, General Whyte, admitted: 'I should have
liked extremely to have rifled the Charms of some of the Italian Goddesses,
those of marble and canvas I should have left to your superiour judgement.' 72
These evocative epistolary descriptions of yammering after goddesses in stone
and on canvas seem an apt description of Cosway's conversation piece.
If we look again at Cosway's painting (plate 18) and more closely, we see
that in some respects the curators of furniture at the Victoria and Albert
Museum were right to excite themselves over the painting—because that is
precisely what the gentlemen sitters are doing, being sexually aroused and
physically arousing themselves at the sight of Venus's naked form. In what may
be a reference to Callicratidas and Charicles in Lucian's erotic anecdote,
Cosway represents two decapitated and truncated Venus torsos that are
exhibited side by side and at eye level—one from the front and the other
from the rear. At least two of the group, Richard Oliver and Chase Price, touch
themselves with their hands wedged deep in their pockets. Note how the edge
of Oliver's waistcoat simulates a protruding phallus, as does Verdun's dangling
watch chain, and the rounded tip of his snuffbox, not to mention Townley's
strategically-placed gloved hands. In contrast with much of the 18th-century
literature on onanism, Cosway images it as a sociable pleasure, rather than a
solipsistic vice.73 Making a further correlation between onanism and ocular-
ity, Richard Oliver steps forward to get a closer view. On the opposite side of
the canvas, Chase Price employs an optical instrument, an eyeglass, while
Captain Wynn appears to be physically removing Richard Holt, who steals a
last lingering look. This visual trope of the porous line between viewing and
voyeurism is especially associated with Thomas Rowlandson's later drawings
from the turn of the century, in which unattractive, elderly connoisseurs are
shown ogling works of art. 74 In these images, the use of magnifying glasses or
70
A copy of Orde's journal is in the Sir Brinsley Ford archive, Paul Mellon Centre, London. On
the shift from viewing to touching the Medici Venus, see Barrell, 'The Dangerous Goddess', 84.
71
5 December 1767. TY7/1545.
72
25 October 1768. TY7/1376.
73
Laqueur, Solitary Sex; Bennett and Rosario II, Solitary Pleasures.
74
Paulson, Rowlandson, 83.
spectacles signals a lascivious type of viewing that, as Harry Mount has

recently argued, symbolizes the approach of connoisseurs in the myopia of
the connoisseurial vision, and the hypocrisy of the connoisseur exercising
tastes 'in private behind the screen of a socially exclusive argot'.75
Cosway's painting is, I suggest, a sensory feast—a visual celebration of
visuality, tactility, and orality; the latter more marginalized in the sculpture of
the muse playing the lyre. As in Thomas Orde's textual description, the
privilege of viewing is quickly followed by the desire to touch. Oliver steps
forward and extends two fingers to touch the marble buttocks in his line of
vision. The enormous noses of Oliver and Verdun, which both protrude in
profile, may allude to the anatomical myth propagated in popular 18th-
century medical handbooks and sex manuals, which established a correlation
between the size of the nose and that of the penis.76 Cosway's conversation
piece provides a visual rendition of sex and the antique—of the illicit,
intimate dialogue taking place between the collector (and members of his
brotherhood) and the naked female form as sculpted in ancient marbles.
There are snippets of this salacious conversation in Zoffany's later painting
of Townley's library and the bookish culture of classical erudition (plate 21).
In an extra-marital liaison, the bust of Clytie, Townley's so-called marble wife,
is being embraced with one arm and caressed by the fingers of the other hand
of Charles Greville. Greville's advances towards Clytie are being repudiated by
the nymph in the marble encounter between satyr and nymph behind him.
Clyde's down-turned head draws the viewer's gaze to follow hers: straight into
the exposed genitals of the drunken faun (figure 24).
The text of Cosway's group portrait is an intimate discourse on homosocial
camaraderie and phallic proclivity. The subtext of the portrait as provided by
letters in the Townley Archive is much more socially risque in its unexpur-
gated account of the artist and some of the sitters' voracious sexual appetites.
Cosway wrote the following letter to Townley when he was in Italy for the
second time in February 1772. It is worth quoting at length:
I must not omit telling you how much you are regretted by every body here Dillon
swears he'l be after you as soon as the parliament breaks up, as there can be no Life
here without you. Wynne is quite envellop'd in Cunt—but, alas, tis his Wife's—I
believe you don't envy him. Oliver has been in Town a month—fuck'd himself dry, £
return'd to Bath to recomit—Chace Price cough's as much as ever, Astly is as mad as
ever—the Duke of Cumberland married, & the Princess Dowager Dead—so wags the
World—with respect to shagging—it is much the same as when you left us (your part
omitted)—but as to myself I stick as close to Radicati's Arse as a Bum Balif to Lord
75
Mount, 'The monkey with the magnifying glass', 183.
76
Bouce, 'Some sexual beliefs and myths in eighteenth-century Britain', 31.
182 'The lecture on Venuis arse'
Deloraine's—Italy for ever say I—if the Italian Woman fuck as well in Italy as they do
here, you must be happy indeed—I am such a Zealot for them, that I be damned if
ever I fuck an English woman again (if I can help it)—by the time you return I will
almost venture to pronounce you may fuck the first woman you meet let her be who
she will... a Clergyman has just publish'd openly a treatise on fucking under the title
of the Joys of Hymen—so that upon the whole you see things go on as they shou'd do.
Dillon has sent me a formal challenge for striking him off the Canvas—but it is to be
amicably adjusted by my promise of bringing him in edgeways between Olivers nose
& the Arse—so that I hope all will be well again—I shall have nothing then to dread
but Olivers resentment, which I shall find some means to alleviate—Addio—nothing
on earth (fucking Radicati always excepted) can make me so happy as hearing from
you, when you have an Hours relaxation from Virtu and fucking. 77
Cosway's letter is loaded with sexual bravado. On a literal reading, it locates the
author of the letter (Cosway), the recipient (Townley), and some of the sitters
from the painting, Wynn, Oliver, and Price, as members of a homosocial coterie
whose collegiate pastime was shagging. Cosway's letter differentiates between
the spaces of sex, its profusion in the metropolitan centre of London versus the
provincial town of Bath; its social hierarchy in his account of the sexual forays of
their male friends followed by members of the royal family; and its national
proclivities, in Cosway's preference for foreign Italian rather than native English
sex.78 His repeated invocation to Radicati refers to the itinerant Italian pantheist,
Count Radicati di Passerano. This 'pagan philosopher newly converted', whose
account of the Bible was, in his own words, as 'extravagant as impious', arrived in
England in 1730.79 He fled to the Continent after being arrested and threatened
with prosecution for his radical views, which encouraged homosexual practices.
In his letter to Townley, Cosway masquerades as a devotee of Radicati's position.
He also explicitly refers to the painting in progress. His intention of inserting a
seventh sitter, Charles Dillon, between Oliver's nose and the arse (as the left-
hand sculpture is referred to) is confirmed in a preparatory sketch.80 Like the
epistolary conversations that document the evolution of the painting, the initial
composition for the conversation piece was much more sexually explicit
(figure 55); its content closer to the caricatures that we associate with Rowland-
son than to the polite productions of painted portraiture. All seven gentlemen
are shown in an alternative lubricious line-up, some of them with what
appear to be exposed phalluses protruding towards a statuette of Venus
77
24 February 1772. TY7/2028. When Sotheby's sold the archive in 1992, their catalogue
referred to this letter as 'most amusing but totally unquotable'. 27 July 1992, lot 334.
78
On metropolitan sexuality, see Black, 'Illegitimacy, sexual relations and location', 101-18.
79
On Count Radicati di Passerano, Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment, 172-4, 216 and
Rousseau, 'The sorrows of Priapus', 104 note 4 have been especially useful.
The sketch is now lost, but Stephen Lloyd identified it from a photograph among the late
Diana Wilson's papers in the Huntington Library. Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway, 32.
Figure 55. Richard Cosway, preliminary sketch for a painting of Charles Townley and
a group of connoisseurs, c.1772.
viewed from the rear. In the painting as executed, this statuette was enlarged, and
accompanied by other sculptures to lessen the visual focus on the 'Arse', as
Cosway put it. In the sketch, Townley on the far left is animated in his
exhortations with his right foot resting on the foot of Venus's pedestal; Charles
Dillon kneels to penetrate the sculpture's posterior with his right hand; Oliver
gropes inside his trousers; while Wynn's thumb and first finger form the C O' sign
that simulates the female genitalia. In a subsequent letter, Cosway extolled
Townley, cy°u—wno prefer the shaking of a Tail to any other shake—viva
viva—long may you shake & love shaking'.81 Tail is, of course, the English
translation of the Latin, penis.82
81
20 November 1776. TY7/2029.
82
Friedman, A Mind of its Own, 81.
We hear more about the tail-shaking of members of Townley's virile,

masculine circle two years later in a letter of 1 February 1774, written by
one of the sitters, Dr Verdun, to Townley, who had by now left Italy and was
en route for London: ( M r Wynne has been marry'd these two years, long
enough not to know his wife's backside from his own, cannot be tore from it,
& stays in Wales. Col. Hervey has been ill lately; he has been so good as to
subscribe in the genteelest manner. The Jollyest of the Bande Joyeuse himself,
he has some admirable Ballads of his own composing to sing you at yr
return The Lecture on Venus's Arse will be finished for yr Arrival. I am
to sitt again for my batter'd face. Our young Appelles had a furious quarrel
last summer with a near relation of his a favourite monkey, and came off w th
the loss of half a legg a great pity he did not castrate him, as it would have
prevented an Incest he is now meditating with the young daughter of a certain
Countess whom you know, after an amour w th the mother, of who he has just
finish'd a good picture; Con Amore there is a son of fourteen just come from
Piccardy; I fear he intends going thro' the family.'83
Verdun's letter provides a collective identity for those gentlemen within and
without the canvas, 'the Bande Joyeuse', as well as an alternative title for the
painting, 'The Lecture on Venus's arse'. To the luxury erotica of visual and
material culture, that is the painting and the ancient sculptures it depicts,
Verdun also refers to more popular incarnations in the form of bawdy ballads
being composed by Thomas Hervey for Townley's much-anticipated return.
In letters to Townley while in Italy, Hervey assured him that 'Whoring,
Drinking & Gameing, the Cardinal Vices flourish here [in London] as
usual. Oliver, Chase Price & myself drank your health in the garden the
night before last.'84 The garden they habitually frequented is Covent Garden,
home of'Lucas the Pimp' with the motto 'media tutissimus Ibis' inscribed on
his door, and where a whore nicknamed Real Spring composed lewd verses, so
Hervey informed his absent friend, Townley.85 In the next chapter, Townley's
83 TY7/1788. Townley's uncle, John Towneley, refers to the incident with Cosway's monkey in
a letter of 6 August 1773, TY7/815/1. 'I have called severall times upon Cosway, but get no
performance of his Promise; I mean about finishing & putting up your Conversation Piece. The
last time I called I found him laid on a sofTa in his night gown & the calf of one of his legs
bundled up; on my enquiring the cause he acquainted me, that his monkey or baboon had tore a
great Piece out of his leg; that he was under Dr Hunter's hands for a cure; the Poor Animal has
been put out of its pain, by the same hand & the D r had the Pleasure of Disecting him, & put
him in spirits in terrors to all other Monkeys. A few days after the accident the Inclosed appeared
in the publick papers, which I take the liberty of inclosing as you are acquainted with the parties.'
Lloyd reads Cosway's distinctive pose (resting his cane on the lower belly of a plaster cast of a
Venus fragment) in Zoffany's The Royal Academicians, 1771-2 as a reference to his highly sexed
nature. Richard and Maria Cosway, 29.
84
TY7/1641. 14 July 1773.
85
TY7/1642. 11 August 1772.
uncle will boycott the notorious Hervey as a potential tenant for his nephew's
London house in preference to a more respectable Mr Burrell and his family.
In Dr Verdun's letter to Townley, the provision of lurid details of Cosway's
sexual proclivity and the sobriquet 'The Lecture on Venus's arse' introduce
additional conversations to our existing polyphony: on the one hand, gossip;
and on the other, educational discourse. There is an obvious contrast between
such informal and formal modes of conversing, and also a parodic disparity
between the pedagogic mode of presentation—the lecture—and its sexually
permissive subject matter. Cosway's designation as c Our young Apelles' refers
to the ancient Greek artist, the chosen portraitist of Alexander the Great in the
4th century BC. It situates Cosway in an esteemed painterly tradition, and his
sitters in a genealogy of royal portraiture. The monkey is a near relation of
Cosway's, on account of the artist's often-reported simian-like appearance.86
Verdun's 'batter'd face' might also be compared with the reported 'great
bloom' of Chase Price. In August 1773, General Whyte wrote to Townley
that Price had 'left of rogering above three or four times a night, & I fancy by
the good humour'd appearance of the Lady his wife does family duty more
than formerly'.87 Lest we should find the letters too reticent concerning
Townley's own sexual inclinations, Charles Greville, who is represented in
Zoffany's conversation piece (plate 21), wrote to him in November 1790:
'Some say that you are brewing ale—some say you are classing in your way
your medals, others that you are so rampant that all the Mothers have been
taking pattern of the covering of your Venus de Medicis—& with that
impenetrable Defence they will even scarce allow their Daughters to come
to the park gate. All these, or either of these occupations may keep you
employd during the winter.'88 In a similar vein, Richard Payne Knight char-
acterizes Townley as a professor of fucking, going on to 'despair of seeing you
this year & beginning] to think a Pipe, Crook &c' preferable to 'those other
symbols of the Arcadian Pan for which you are so eminent'—one of the
symbols in Pan's iconographic repertoire being an erect phallus.89
In Cosway's initial sketch for the lecture on Venus's arse (figure 55), the
professor of fucking and members of the Bande Joyeuse are shown advocating
the penetration of women, to which the letters provide graphic testimony,
and that of men. By representing Townley and company as pederasts, Cosway
images the victory of Callicratidas over Charicles in the competitive erotic
scenario of Lucian. This is a phallic victory of anal over vaginal penetration.
But it is also something of an empty victory, for Townley and company are
merely posturing over Venus's posterior—masquerading as (what Cosway
86 87
88
89
5 August 1773. TY7/1380.
TY7/1052. TY7/2082.
terms) Bum Baliffs by exploiting the social stigma of homosexual innuendo. 90

One of Hervey's letters reminds us that sodomy was a capital offence, writing
in 1772 of a Captain Jones whose execution on the morning of 11 August was
reprieved on the condition he went to live abroad.91 'I suppose you will have
him in Italy', Hervey wrote to Townley with characteristic sexual innuendo. 92
These epistolary and graphic conversations, with their riotous sexual sub-
ject matter, provide a compelling subtext to the visual dialogue in Cosway's
oil painting. The private view to which the external viewer is privy takes place
in an ambiguous space that is only accessible via a curtain on the far right. Just
as entry to the lecture on Venus's arse was restricted, so was the display of the
painting itself. Unlike Zoffany's later conversation piece, we have already seen
that Cosway's painting was never exhibited at the Royal Academy nor repro-
duced and disseminated in engravings. It was not for the consumption of
those beyond Townley's inner circle. In a letter to Townley in Italy in 1773
from his uncle, John Towneley, it was reported that 'M r Cosway has not yet
delivered the Conversation Picture, tho' he has had the Landscape over the
Chimney in the Parlour taken down before Christmas last. I shall call on him
in a day or two; & pay him for the remainder as you desire if any.'93 This was
Townley's house at the upper end of Whitehall, where he lived prior to
moving to Park Street, Westminster. The inference of his uncle's letter was
that the landscape painting was removed to accommodate Cosway's conver-
sation piece in the parlour: one of the more intimate and informal spaces of
the 18th-century London townhouse.
The same covert mode of display was adopted for particular sculptures
with risque subjects. Lord Rockingham exhibited a group identified as a 'Satyr
and satyress in amorous conjunction', executed in distinctive 'bianco e nero'
marble, in a ground floor closet of his London townhouse in Grosvenor
Square.94 Townley, Thomas Mansel Talbot, and Carlo Albacini variously
refused to purchase the group in the mid 1770s, seemingly on account of its
amorous conjunction. Henry Blundell similarly rejected a group of a satyr
and hermaphrodite due to what he described as the 'indelicacy' of its subject.
Writing to Townley in 1787, 'It stole on me every time I saw it, till I thought it
prudent to see it no more; And tho' I had a good sum for it, yet I do not wish
to have it, to keep it lock'd up & shewn only to some particular friends or
90
Gerard and Hekma, The Pursuit of Sodomy.
Jones is referred to in Goldsmith, The Worst of Crimes, 34 and 36.
92
TY7/1642.
93
30 April 1773. TY7/807.
94
Penny,
Penn 'Lord Rockingham's sculpture collection and The Judgement of Paris by Nollekens',
16 and 18.
connoisseurs/95 This was the fate of Cosway's conversation piece in its

evocation of a masculine economy of homoerotic desire. In its celebratory
impropriety, it is the antithesis of the way in which art historians have concep-
tualized the 18th century conversation piece, as surveyed in the first half of
this chapter. Later, Blundell's estranged son, Charles, wrote to Townley that he
had 'not yet seen that famous group which you was afraid would be indecent
to exhibit to your friends in Park Street. I fancy it is only for such amateurs
whose passion for virtu will make them over look the subject.'96 The group in
question has not been identified, although the fragment from Elephanta
(figure 53) referred to by Richard Payne Knight must be a contender.
By interrogating some of the long-held assumptions about the conversa-
tion piece—most notably the propriety of its subject matter—this chapter has
attempted to question the wider conceptualization of the 18th century, the
historical period in which the conversation piece came into its own as a
distinctive visual genre of representation. Cosway's Charles Townley with a
Group of Connoisseurs (plate 18) is an especially meaty case study in this
respect, since the primary sources that refer and relate to the painting have
never been previously published. On an initial viewing, what seems to be a
convivial conversation piece becomes a case study in deconstructing and
reinstating the multiplicity of conversations about and around it. The pre-
liminary sketch and the letters from the artist and some of the sitters allow
partial access to the bawdy desires of a coterie of gentlemen whose interests
comprised a Janus-like potation of learning and lasciviousness, erotics and
esoterics, and object and text. Appropriately enough, I want to close with a
final image and a passage from an epistolary text to try to summarize the
thrust (no pun intended) of my argument. When Lord Shaftesbury published
his Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (London, 1713), he
commissioned an image from Paolo de Mattheis to accompany treatise VII in
volume III, 'A notion of the historical draught or tablature of the Judgment of
Hercules'. The Judgement of Hercules is, of course, a story with an ancient
pedigree: related by Prodicus in Xenophon's Conversations of Socrates.
Shaftesbury's 1713 treatise has been enormously influential on the writing
of 18th-century cultural history, owing primarily to John Barrell's reading of
the text, which has become a kind of orthodoxy, in which he argues that the
author is advocating a discourse of civic humanism; an ideology that provides
the moral foundation for polite society.97 According to this reading, the
republic of fine arts is a political republic in which the highest function that
95
5 March 1787. TY7/1317.
96
9 October 1791. TY7/1361.
97
Barrel!, The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt, 1-69.
188 'The lecture on Venus s arse
painting could aspire to is in the promotion of public virtues. Shaftesbury's

text offers an account of how to represent the Judgement of Hercules in the
historical style. In the accompanying image by de Mattheis (figure 56),
Hercules is represented resting on his (phallic) club as he listens to the reasons
for accompanying a martial Virtue with her magisterial sword and her helmet
and bridle on the perilous path she points to, as it snakes away from them up
the distant mountain. Vice, in contrast, gazes up at the hero, offering him
immediate respite on the shady spot where they find themselves; her exposed
legs and revealing dress suggest that the pleasures of the flesh are as much on
offer as the products of the table. The figure of Vice is repeatedly equated to
that of the goddess Venus.98 Shaftesbury describes the image as ca piece of
furniture' which 'might well fit in the gallery, or Hall of exercises, where our
young Princes should learn their usual lessons. And so to see virtue in this
garb and action, might perhaps be no slight memorandum hereafter to a royal
youth, who should one day come to undergo this trial himself; on which his
own happiness, as well as the fate of Europe and of the world, would in so
great a measure depend.' As Barrell explains, the choice Hercules makes is
between civic, public virtue and private vice rather than between virtue or
pleasure in a loose and general sense. As an excluded Catholic, Townley was
not in a position to choose between a life of inactive luxuriance or one of civic
virtue. Townley's conversations with the ancients did not bifurcate into a
choice between vice and virtue at the conceptual crossroads, but as imaged in
Cosway's conversation piece, were rather conveniently overlapping. A letter
written to Townley by one Samuel Solly illustrates this with a point with
virtuoso cleverness:
As I can say nothing about you [Townley had been long absent from London], I shall
referr your Acquaintance to the 1st Vol: page 180 of Gibbon's History thus says Mastr
Gibbons of the younger Gordian whom with his father the soldiers had saluted
Imperatores in Africa His manners were less pure, but his Character was equaly
amiable with that of his father the Archbishop of Canterbury. Twenty two acknow-
ledged Concubines and a Library of sixty two thousand volumes attested the variety of
his Inclinations; and from the productions which he left behind him, it apears that
both the one and the other were designed for use, rather than ostentation. I wish now
you may be afronted and by return of the Post send me a Chalenge apointing time
place weapons &c and if you do not, I know what I shall call you ..."
In this highly rhetorical letter, Solly playfully insults Townley in the guise of
the younger Gordian, a Roman Emperor of the 3rd century AD; quoting
verbatim from Volume 1, page 180 of Edward Gibbon's The History of the
98
Barrell, 'The Dangerous Goddess', 63-87.
99
31 October 1791. TY7/1593.
Figure 56. Simon Gribelin after Paolo de Mattheis, The Judgement of Hercules from
the Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristicks (4th edn, 1727).
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, although the Archbishop of Canterbury
is Solly's preposterous appendage—Townley was from an ancient Catholic
family. Gibbon's own library contained a tenth of that of the younger Gor-
dian, between 6,000 and 7,000 volumes in 1788: the volumes, the tools of his
historical manufacture, housed in the library, his metaphorical seraglio.100
According to Solly's faux invective, Townley is characterized as a younger
Gordian in his 'imperial' appetite for the abundant contents of the library and
the seraglio: for study and sex. The historian of sexuality, G. S. Rousseau,
suggested in 1987 that reticence on the part of scholars to discuss the buoyant
sexual climate of the late 18th century may derive from their not wanting to
jeopardize their 'credibility in the republic of scholars'.101 Are we still en-
trenched in the imperial prudery of the 19th century in the 21st century?
A piece in the Edinburgh Review for 1857 characterized the end of the
previous century as a time 'of what would now be considered very licentious
merriment and very unscrupulous fun—times, when men of independent
100
On Gibbon's library, see Coltman, Fabricating the Antique, 25-7.
101
Rousseau, 'The sorrows of Priapus', 106.
means and high rank addicted themselves to pleasure and gave vent to their
full animal spirits, with a frankness that would now be deemed not only
vulgar but indecorous'.102 Such prudery is quite at odds with the lascivious
erudition expounded by Payne Knight in his Discourse on the Worship of
Priapus (1786-7) and imaged a decade earlier by Richard Cosway in the
'lecture on Venus's arse'.
102
6
'Placed with propriety':

The display and viewing of ancient sculpture
Whenever I part with an Interesting Monument or Work of Art, unless it

be placed where its Merit is properly understood, which must often
happen, it really concerns me. I have more than once said the only real
enemy I have ever felt, is Ignorance, tho' even this by time is conquered.
Thomas Jenkins to Charles Townley, 23 January 17821
In a letter from Charles Townley's uncle cited in the preceding chapter, the
projected location of Richard Cosway's conversation piece (plate 18) was
alluded to. Seemingly on account of its risque subject matter, it was not to
be hung in one of the public, formal rooms in Townley's London townhouse at
the upper end of Whitehall, rather in a prominent position over the fireplace
in the more intimate, informal space of the parlour. An awareness of the
physical location of Cosway's conversation piece temporarily suspends
the climax of the phallic camaraderie that it celebrates in visual form and
leads us to consider the related issue that is the display of sculptures in Town-
ley's collection, examples of which have been identified in Cosway's conversa-
tion piece. In discussing the disposition of the collection, a number of different
strands of intellectual enquiry will be drawn together. The significance of its
topographical location brings us into the realm of cultural geography; its built
environment is the bricks and mortar of architectural history, forming the
shell which accommodates the domestic interior and the spatial arrangement
of the sculptures therein. Through the exhibition of his marbles, it will be
demonstrated how Townley continually confronted a series of irreconcilable
tensions between metropolitan and provincial properties, between the urban
townhouse or the rural country house that was his ancestral Lancashire seat,
and between the choice of a single gallery or a suite of adjoining display spaces,
either purpose-built or remodelled to accommodate the collection. The fur-
nishing of Townley's interior brings us into the discursive territory of design
history, where the influence of ancient precedents, as well as contemporary
1
TY7/411.
192 'Placed with propriety'
schemes in Roman galleries, including the Villas Borghese and Albani, will be
fundamental to our discussion. We will also look at the architectural and
design schemes as executed, and those existing only on paper, by a number
of 18th-century British architects, including Robert and James Adam, Samuel
Wyatt, and Joseph Bonomi. In keeping with previous chapters, via the con-
tents of Townley's archive, our focus embraces his display strategies and those
of his fellow collectors in Britain. The orangery or greenhouse emerges as one
of the favoured repositories for the display of sculpture in English country
estates at Margam and Woburn Abbey. Their owners, collectors of sculpture
and patrons of architects, include Thomas Mansel Talbot, Francis Russell, the
5th Duke of Bedford, and William Weddell of Newby Hall, whom we met at
the close of Chapter 4 as another of Thomas Jenkins' British clients and a
Yorkshire neighbour of Sir George Strickland.
In a letter dated 5 June 1765, Jenkins wrote from Rome to Thomas Robinson,
Baron Grantham, describing at length a commission he had recently received
from Robinson's cousin, William Weddell. The network of extended familial
connections was one of the social mechanisms on which 18th-century patronage
was predicated, and Jenkins' letter recounts his gratitude to Robinson for his
recommendation, which had proved extremely lucrative for the dealer, when
Weddell purchased the bulk of Jenkins' existing stock of both paintings and
sculpture. Jenkins' letter recounts his dual obligations to Weddell and Robinson,
who had facilitated the introduction that was to prove so fruitful, referring to his
anxiety 'to render the collection respectable to be worthy of the Proprietor and
of you his Relation and friend who has been so essentially concernd in producing
the connection without which probably nothing woud have been done'.2 Jenkins
describes his intention to supply Robinson with two plaster casts of ancient
sculptures 'form [ing] elegant furniture': one of a statue of Brutus, the defender
of the Roman Republic, from Weddell's collection; the other of a Venus. While
the previous chapter devoted to Cosway's conversation piece (plate 18) was
concerned with a visual economy of desire, in the provision of these casts to
Robinson we see what the economic historian, Avner Offer, has characterized as
an economy of regard.3 Positioned between the gift and the market, this type of
regard gifting, Offer suggests, arises out of the intrinsic benefits of social and
personal interactions. At the same time, there is a related economy of regard at
work here that is material, rather than visual or social, in which Jenkins' esteem
for the ancient sculptures caused him to have them cast in plaster. Examples of
such three-dimensional simulacra have already been observed in the sculptural
economy of the Roman marketplace in earlier chapters.
2
West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, WYL150/6033 [12411].
3
Offer, 'Between the gift and the market', 450-76.
Though choosing to communicate his regard for Robinson in the form of

the plaster casts of ancient sculptures of Brutus and Venus, Jenkins did not go
so far as to reveal the identity of the latter's purchaser (when it was in fact
Weddell). His letter to Robinson refers to the difficulties encountered in
trying to obtain permission to export this statue. In the event, the Pope had
reportedly supplied an 'express licence... which woud never have been
obtained had it not been for the fortunate circumstance of its being a naked
female'. We have already observed similar instances of Papal prudery in
permitting the export of sculptures with indecorous subjects in Chapter 4.
Existing accounts of the discovery, restoration, and sale of the Newby Venus
(figure 57) are controversial and contradictory; tainted by competition,
jealousy, and gossip that make the isolation of concrete facts from distorted
fiction impossible. James Dallaway's explanation in Anecdotes of the Arts in
England is cited as deriving from an unnamed gentleman, likely to be Charles
Townley, who provided Dallaway with much of the data for the sculpture
section of his Anecdotes, as we shall see in Chapter 7.4 According to this
version, Gavin Hamilton purchased the fragmentary torso of the Venus from
the cellar of the Palazzo Barberini in c.1765. He exchanged it with the sculptor
Pietro Pacilli, who, having restored it with the addition of a suitable head of a
Pudicitia, sold it to Thomas Jenkins for 1,000 Roman scudi. The price
Weddell paid was not disclosed, but rumour circulated that it was between
£1,000—the unprecedented cost of Smith Barry's sculpture of Antinous
(figure 23)—and an exorbitant £6,000, with Weddell making further annual
payments for the remainder of his life. Winckelmann considered the Newby
Venus superior to the Medici Venus (figure 54), whose veritable chorus of
ardent admirers was cited in the last chapter. He attributed the sculpture to
the 4th century BC Greek master Praxiteles, and even went so far as to suggest
that 'It alone is worth the trip to Rome'—obviously prior to its relocation to
Yorkshire.5
Noting that Robinson's property, Newby Park of Newby-on-Swale, was in
the same neighbourhood as his cousin Weddell's, at Newby Hall, Jenkins'
letter continues with a discourse on taste:
it's a great satisfaction to me to hear the Good taste of a Gentleman I so much esteem
and respect so universally well spoke of as yours is, and I am perswaded it will be no
small pleasure to you in finding that all your friends are influenced by it, by this means
your example becomes of Publick benefit; how much more honourable it is for those
Gentleman who lay out their Money in cultivating their minds by making acquisitions
4
Dallaway, Anecdotes of the Arts in England, 349-50.
5
My account of the Newby Venus is based on Boschung, 'Die Antikesammlung in Newby
Hall', 363-8; Boschung and von Hesberg, Newby Hall, no. 1. The sculpture was sold at Christie's
on 13 June 2002 and its current whereabouts are unknown.
Figure 57. The Venus formerly in William Weddell's collection at Newby Hall.
of what renders them and their habitations respectable, rather than ruing themselves
at NewMarket or elsewhere.
Here, Jenkins describes what we might identify as an economy of taste, in

which material evidence of financial expenditure is contrasted with the
ephemeral pursuits that lead to financial ruin. Material acquisitions are
conceptualized as part of the furniture of the educated mind, simultaneously
furnishing gentlemen and their properties with cultural cachet in the social
sphere. We shall see in due course how Jenkins' obsequious account of
Weddell as a model of taste, whose example is of public benefit, is a (more)
apt retrospective summary of Charles Townley.
In much the same way that Weddell was introduced to the dealer Thomas
Jenkins by one relation, his cousin Thomas Robinson, so the impetus for his
collection derived from the example of another family member, the promin-
ent Whig politician Charles Watson-Wentworth, the 2nd Marquis of Rock-
ingham. For Weddell, the collecting of sculptures and paintings has been
characterized as a pursuit whose cultural cachet was closely aligned with
social improvement and political office.6 Part of Rockingham's now dispersed
sculpture collection will be discussed in the conclusion. It was deposited
between his Yorkshire property, Wentworth Woodhouse (then known as
Wentworth House), and his London townhouse in Grosvenor Square, some-
times called Rockingham House.7 William Weddell bought a London town-
house in Upper Brook Street, Grosvenor Square soon after his marriage to
Lady Rockingham's half-sister, Elizabeth Ramsden, in 1771.8 The marbles
Weddell acquired from Jenkins in Rome in 1765 were exhibited in a pur-
pose-built gallery at Newby Hall that occupies the entire south wing of the
house and is connected to the dining room.9 The execution of the gallery is
indebted to at least three successive architects, beginning before Weddell's
grand tour in 1764 with local protege John Carr, to whom the plan and
elevation of the gallery have been attributed (figure 58). Weddell also sought
advice from William Chambers, who was working for Thomas Robinson at
nearby Newby Park and at Grantham House in Whitehall, London. Chambers
annotated Carr's ground plan of the gallery and its measurements with a
number of suggested improvements (figure 58): that the central section
6
This is the argument in J. Low's 'The Art and Architectural Patronage of William Weddell'.
See also the essays in Miller and Thomas, Drawing from the Past.
1
On Rockingham's collection, see Penny, 'Lord Rockingham's sculpture collection and The
Judgement of Paris by Nollekens', 5-34.
8
Low, 'French taste in London', 2470-2.
9
Miller and Thomas, Drawing from the Past, Boschung, 'Die Antikesammlung in Newby
Hall', 362; Harris, The Genius of Robert Adam, 215-21; Middleton, 'The sculpture gallery at
Newby Hall', 48-60.
Figure 58. John Carr, Elevation and ground plan of the sculpture gallery at Newby
with annotations by William Chambers, before 1764.
should be 'fitted up rather plan [plain?] and arched' and that the upper
windows should be open. He placed the sarcophagus in the central room
opposite the south entrance, and the 'Venus life' in the terminating niche at
the right end of the long vista in the third room, for which he recommended a
flat ceiling and Corinthian columns. Additional notes made by Chambers on
the bottom left of the plan confirm that the cast of the Venus was at the
sculptor Joseph Wilton's and the Brutus at Dover Street. Chambers and
Wilton enjoyed a professional collaboration that was mutually advantageous,
most famously at Somerset House on the Strand in London, where Wilton
was responsible for much of the architectural sculpture. 10 Meeting in Rome in
1750, they both returned to London five years later, from where their careers
evolved simultaneously, and in some instances consecutively. Architect and
sculptor worked for the same patrons, both received royal appointments in
their respective professions, and both were core members of the institution
for the arts that was the Royal Academy.
Robert Adam secured the Newby commission once the architectural shell
of the gallery had been completed. He fractured the symmetry of Carr's
rectangular gallery to devise a sequence of three distinct rooms of different
shapes that are connected to each other by passageways. The most prominent
is the central rotunda, with its cupola, semicircular niches, and doors that
open via a portico onto the garden. Weddell's former travelling companion in
Italy, the Revd William Palgrave, wrote to him in 1778, as the building works
progressed 'as brisk as bottled ale, with fresh delights rising every day about
you. The Gallery, I hope, draws very near its Perfection. I look forward with
great Pleasure to the elegant breakfastings in the Portico, where M rs W[eddell]
will sit & preside like another Aspasza, high Arbitress & Sovereign of the
Beaux Arts.'11 The first and third rooms of the gallery are rectangular, but not
symmetrical; the first has four niches, while the third has two niches and
culminates in a large exedra. When Adolf Michaelis visited Newby Hall a
century later in the autumn of 1873, he described the rooms of the gallery
(figure 59) as being 'decorated in the taste recognized as antique towards the
close of the last century'—with their niches, apses, recesses, and friezes of
varying sizes covered with polychrome stucco work. 12 Townley's account of
visits in 1774 and 1779 (more on this in the next chapter) reportedly caused
Jenkins to 'see in General things are well disposed' and later to 'pity
Mr. Weddell should have been induced to over charge his Gallery with
10
Coutu, 'William Chambers and Joseph Wilton', 175-85. Coutu makes no mention of
Chambers' annotated plan with its references to Wilton.
11
20 June [c.1778]. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, WYL109/addnl/3b/20.
12
Figure 59. 'The taste recognized as antique' (Michaelis): a view of Robert Adam's
sculpture gallery at Newby Hall, c.1767. This 1906 photograph shows the Venus
(figure 57) in the left-hand niche and the Minerva in the niche on the right.
Ornaments, but the Adams's I am told have done it everywhere'.13 What

Michaelis recognized as a simulation of antique taste in the late 18th century,
Townley disparaged for its profusion of ornament. There is no specific
antique precedent for the gallery at Newby. Rather, architecture and sculpture
are synthesized so as to evoke an idea of the classical contexts in which the
latter were displayed in antiquity and from where they were disinterred: from
the interior spaces of imperial Roman villas and baths.14
At the time of Townley's first visit to Newby Hall in 1774, the location and
arrangement of his own sculpture collection had yet to be determined. He had
13
19 October 1774. TY7/339/1. 15 July 1779. TY7/387.
14
Potts, 'The classical ideal on display', 30.
recently returned from an extended three-year residence in Italy, from where

he wrote to his uncle in June 1773 of having resolved to dispose of his house at
the upper end of Whitehall, where Cosway's conversation piece was destined
for the parlour, and to purchase an alternative London property. This new
property would either be better equipped for the display of heavy sculptures,
with large rooms on the ground floor, or would be remodelled to accommo-
date an extension in the form of a large room. 15 Townley's uncle, John
Towneley, had been acting as a self-styled 'steward' at his nephew's Whitehall
house during his prolonged absence abroad. His responsibilities during his bi-
weekly visits included overseeing the removal of the carpets and their safe
storage in one of the garrets, paying the household bills, and arranging to have
the drains cleaned.16 It was in this capacity as steward that Towneley rejected
Thomas Hervey as a potential tenant for his nephew's vacant house. Hervey
was the correspondent who supplied his friend Townley with vivid and lurid
accounts of'Whoring, Drinking & Gameing' during his absence in London. 17
The Whitehall house was subsequently let in February 1773 for six months to
a Mr Burrell, the Chancellor of Worcester and a Member of Parliament for
Haslemere in Surrey.18 According to Towneley, Burrell had been a prospective
purchaser when his nephew bought the house in Whitehall for £1,100 ex-
cluding the furniture, but had considered the price too high.19 Like a large
proportion of the capital's temporary residents, Burrell rented accommoda-
tion for the Parliamentary season. Politics, business, finance, and society were
all incentives for living, either temporarily or permanently, in the capital.20
Burrell wanted to rent the house for £200 a year until Townley returned from
Italy, the agreement being that he would be given three or four months' notice
to vacate the property. His family consisted of himself, his wife, and their
extended household of three male servants and three maids. 'He is a Dilet-
tanti, and great admirer of antiquities', Towneley informed his like-minded
nephew, having canvassed the opinion of their peers.
Soon after renting the Whitehall property to Burrell, Towneley began
inspecting London townhouses available on the market that might provide
appropriate accommodation for his nephew and his ever-expanding marble
family on their return from Italy. In July 1773, he visited the neighbouring
property of Lady Glynn whose sale for £6,000 of her Whitehall home was
15
16 June 1773. TY7/811.
16
3 December 1771. TY7/796. 30 April 1773. TY7/807.
17
TY7/1641.
18
30 April 1773. TY7/807.
19
The sum of £1,100 is quoted in TY7/811.
20
Stewart, 'Scrutiny and Spectacle'. My account of the London townhouse that follows is
indebted to Stewart.
Figure 60. 'Plan of Lady Glyn's house, Whitehall' sketched by John Towneley in July
1773.
necessitated by the death of her husband, Sir Richard. In a letter to his

nephew, Towneley sketched the ground plan of the Glynn house (figure 60),
marking architectural features like the bow window, and recording the meas-
urements of the existing accommodation. 21 The Admiralty is marked on the
north side of a central inner courtyard, the east side on the street leading from
Charing Cross to Westminster Hall, with St James's Park opposite on the west
side. The parts coloured by Towneley indicate the built areas; the dotted lines
on the west and south suggest the land for potential development. Towneley
locates his nephew's statue room, passage, staircase, and parlour and hall on
the south side opposite the Admiralty, indicating how the statue room would
extend the existing space by 12 feet. He employs the keys A and B to indicate
the portions of land and their respective ground rents per annum. In the letter
which the plan accompanied, Towneley described the spaces of the interior
that he could not delineate in a sketch. Though the ground was spacious, as
indicated on the plan, he considered the rooms unsuitable, as they were low,
small, and narrow. To rebuild them as the plan proposed would be too costly a
scheme, he advised, especially when Lady Glynn wanted 5,000 guineas for her
property, which was said to have been built for Oliver Cromwell. Towneley
took the precaution of taking a surveyor with him, who valued the property at
£4,000. In the economic climate of the early 1770s, the London property
market was saturated; a series of bankruptcies had seen house prices fall,
following a building boom.22 At the same time as he was looking to buy a
house on his nephew's behalf, Towneley also had to sell his existing property,
so reminding us that the London townhouse was part of the market economy.
In the ensuing correspondence between Townley in Italy and his uncle
based at Chiswick in south-west London, Townley declined to purchase Lady
Glynn's house. Rather than buying a house which was larger than that which
he already owned, what he wanted was a smaller property with one large
room. Townley's agenda is highly specific—a room with two sides of clear wall
of at least 22 feet (almost 7 metres) and top-lit. If such a room did not already
exist, the acquisition of a house with available ground space would enable him
to build one. Townley clearly wanted a house that was 'habitable' for himself,
while also enabling him to exhibit the collection in the most advantageous
manner by taking advantage of natural light and extended space. His uncle
continued to visit potential properties in the fashionable urban centre, in-
cluding a freehold house belonging to Lord Cuningham in George Street,
Hanover Square. This house had the much sought after large room extension,
measuring 25 feet clear on one side, with a skylight. Towneley identified
21
TY7/813.
22
See Hoppit, 'Financial crises in eighteenth-century England', 45.
another room in the interior as suitable for a library and cabinet. While this
house had the advantage of its situation, there were other virtues to a large,
four-storey property at 43 Lower Grosvenor Street, on the south side of
Grosvenor Street. It had been built for Benjamin Hoadly, the Bishop of
Salisbury and later of Winchester, in 1726, and now belonged to a Mrs
Fazackerley. It was said to be sturdier than newly built houses, the implication
being that its floors would be suitable to withhold the considerable weight of
Townley's marble sculptures.
The projected display of Townley's sculptures shifts our focus away from
the Roman antiquities market that constituted the collection and onto the
London property market in the volatile economic climate of the 1770s. John
Towneley's correspondence facilitated paper access to a number of urban
residences, both freehold and leasehold, that were available to rent or buy.
Townley subsequently sold his Whitehall house to Richard Payne Knight, and
on his return to London in 1774 he lived temporarily in Crown Street,
Westminster. Letters from his dealers for October 1776 refer to an alternative
scheme for exhibiting the marbles that involved permanently relocating the
collection to Townley's ancestral home, Towneley Hall, 'a large and venerable
pile' located in oak woods in Burnley, Lancashire; it appears to have been
begun in the 15th century, although its current appearance is a result of early
19th-century interventions. 23 Unlike the market commodity that was an
individual's London townhouse, the country estate was, in Habakkuk's
phrase, a true Vehicle of family purpose'.24 While the former could be
retained or disposed of as the owner saw fit, the country house was held in
trust for the family, providing a sense of continuity between the generations.
It was, as Habakkuk puts it, c the physical expression of the standing of the
family and the tangible repository of its traditions'. In early October 1776,
Gavin Hamilton was 'sorry to hear that your antiquities goe to Lancashire'.25
Jenkins, too, was 'curious to know if you persist in your Idea of sending your
collection in Lancashire. I think your having such a Good House is a Tempt-
ing Motive, besides your things being Placed so well is an object worthy your
consideration.'26 Notwithstanding the 'Good House', as Jenkins described it,
the provincial location of the collection would have denied it a public profile
in the political, economic, and social magnet that was late 18th-century
London. Rather than visible in the urban metropolis, it would be as good as
buried in the family property in the industrial north-east, to cite a metaphor
common in the 18th century.
23
Whitaker, An History of the Original Parish ofWhalley, II. 186.
24
Habakkuk, 'England', 2.
25 26
4 October 1776. TY7/617. 23 October 1776. TY7/361.
'From my Love of sculpture painting &c I am like a child in a brilliant Toy

shop', is how the sculpture collector Sir Richard Worsley described the acqui-
sition of a London townhouse in December 1789.27 Worsley wrote to Townley
that he had been induced to move to London from Appuldurcombe Park,
'formerly a great Monkish Residence' on the Isle of Wight, 84-5 miles from
Park Street, on account of'the pleasure of being your neighbour and to have
continual access to your fine belle Arti'.28 Plans in October 1776 to relocate the
collection to Lancashire had been shelved (but were later revisited), when in
June 1778 Townley was involved in an altercation with the architects, Robert
and James Adam. It concerned unsolicited alterations they had made to the
design for a newly finished London townhouse on the corner of Portland Place
and Weymouth Street in their speculative development of 68 houses in the
parish of Marylebone. The nature of the dispute, as recorded in letters,
concerned Townley's refusal to pay the sum of £36.15.0 when negotiations
had been, in his own phrase, 'trifling', rather than part of the formal paper
negotiations and financial transactions between architect and patron that
together constituted an architectural commission.29 When Townley informed
their clerk, Mr Nasmith, that he regretted that the house in question did not
have a large room with a skylight, two rough sketches were produced, one of
which showed how a large skylit room could be added by altering the stable
and joining it to the house by a vestibule.30 Townley refused to pay for the
privilege of these impromptu sketches, and when he threatened legal action the
Adam brothers retaliated, saying that in their experience verbal direction was
sufficient to undertake the provision of designs and estimates.31 Townley had
evidently cited the differing practice of professional builders, since the letter
from the Adams pointedly made the distinction: 'We are not Builders by
profession, but Architects & Surveyors, & live by these Branches. We have
therefore allways charged and have been paid for all Designs made for building
on our own ground, & that, not only by Noblemen & Gentlemen, but even by
professional Builders who build on speculation.' Later insisting they had never
been 'tenacious of trifles', they settled for the sum of 20 guineas. 32
27 21 December 1789. TY7/2041. Compare with Edward Gibbon's account of London, to

which he moved in 1772: 'It is itself an astonishing and perpetual spectacle to the curious eye;
and each taste, each sense may be gratified by the variety of objects that will occur in the long
circuit of a morning walk.' Quoted by R. Porter, 'The Cosways' London', in Lloyd, Richard and
Maria Co sway, 98.
28
26 August 1789. TY7/2039. 10 May 1790. TY7/2046.
29
See the bill of June 1777, TY3/6 and Townley's draft letter dated 19 June 1778, TY3/7.
30
The sketches are in Sir John Soane's Museum, 27. 65 and 66. They are discussed by
Guilding, 'Robert Adam and Charles Townley', 27-32.
31
2 July 1778. TY3/8.
32
During this period of protracted wrangling with the Adam brothers, Town-
ley purchased for the sum of £4,040 a four-storey townhouse with a basement
on the north side (no. 7) of Park Street, Westminster, designed by the architect
Samuel Wyatt and built to Townley's specifications by Michael Barrett.33
Barrett leased the land on what is now known as Queen Anne's Gate from
the Court of Christ's Hospital. This was originally two separate streets, in
close proximity to the royal cockpit, that were divided by a wall which was
removed in 1873. The west end was Queen Street and the east end was Park
Street, parallel to Bird Cage Walk and opposite St James's Park. To 'have such
a Place as the Park for your Garden in such a Capitol as London now is, is a
most interesting circumstance', Jenkins wrote to Townley in October 1777,
when London was the largest city in Europe, with a population of three-
quarters of a million people.34
At the same time as Townley fixed on the Park Street property, plans for a
single large top-lit gallery were abandoned in preference to a series of exhib-
ition spaces. A 'Palace in London' is how Jenkins described the proposed
house.35 Gavin Hamilton had long been involved in the projected design of
Townley's single gallery, much as he and Jenkins had in the provision of
sculptures for that gallery. In a letter of March 1775 he described the furnish-
ing of Townley's gallery as a project dear to his heart: 'which is to me almost as
interesting as if it was for myself'.36 He objected to a skylight on the grounds
that they 'are liable to drop, & receive snow when it falls w11 is uncomfortable'.
Townley responded to Hamilton's suggestions by sending him a ground plan
of the proposed gallery. In his reply, Hamilton envisages the display of Town-
ley's collection in an esteemed Italian tradition of exhibiting classical sculp-
tures. He writes, 'with regard to the intermediate spaces between the niches
where I coud wish to see a statue or bust on its pedestal as in the Medici
gallery, & the books in the closets'.37 A month later, Hamilton wished Townley
joy 'in so fine a room w. is so perfect that after a great deal of puzling I have
not been able to alter it for the better, it is perfect, in short it is antique'.38
According to Hamilton's idealized reading, collections of books and marble
busts and statues replicate the perfect precedent that is antiquity.
When plans for the single gallery were superseded by a series of exhibitions
rooms, Hamilton was suitably compliant, writing to Townley of being
Cruickshank, 'Queen Anne's Gate', 56-67.

34
29 October 1777. TY7/376. Porter, 'The Cosways' London', in Lloyd, Richard and Maria
Cosway, 97-9.
35
29 October 1777. TY7/376.
36
TY7/583.
37
10 May 1775. TY7/588.
38
TY7/591.
now in your way of thinking with regard of disposing of your marbles, & that placing
them in different rooms is more entertaining than if you was to exhibit them in one
point of view, it is the same in every elegant feast all the nice morsels must not be
served up at once, some will like the roast beef & others prefer the macharone pie & so
unlike one another as not to bear a comparison... if all the fine things of the Villa
Borghese were to be arranged in one great room exclusive of the rest the whole would
not be so entertaining, when I have gazed to my hearts content on the Gladiator I with
pleasure repose my mind on a few inferior tho different objects near it till I am left in
upon the Lucius Verus which great head is enough for any great room.39
Hamilton's letter employs the image of the feast and the consumption of
particular foodstuffs as a metaphor for the viewing of masterpieces of ancient
sculptures in a series of rooms, as in the Villa Borghese, rather than in a single
gallery.40 The Gladiator was the undisputed superstar sculpture of the Borghese
collection, with a room named after it on the ground floor of the villa by 1650.41
'Nothing can do justice to the merit of this statue, but the silent contemplation
of its excellence', insisted John Owen, whose subsequent written account was
crammed with deafening praise: a 'prodigy of art', 'one of the most perfect
remains of Grecian sculpture'.42 Many 18th-century viewers wondered at the
extraordinary animation of the marble figure, whose 'every limb, nerve and
sinew, is in action'.43 Having considered 'one of the most animated statues in
the world', the visitor to the Villa Borghese then passed through the Room of the
Hermaphrodite and into the Gallery of the Emperors, where 'Lucius Verus
the finest portrait bust in Rome' was displayed.44 A marble copy of the bust by
Carlo Albacini was in Henry Blundell's voluminous collection.
The choice of foodstuffs on Hamilton's notional menu are situated in
diametric opposition and indicate the respective national dishes of the Eng-
lish and the Italians—roast beef and macaroni pie. Hamilton's reference to
macaroni is highly topical: by the early 1770s it had become a derogatory
appellation for young, metropolitan British men who had travelled abroad
and acquired Continental tastes in food, fashion, and fabrics.45 These tastes
39
40
For a discussion of the continuity between gastronomic and aesthetic tastes, see Chard,
'Picnic at Pompeii', 115-32.
41
On the stanza in the Villa Borghese, see Coliva and Minozzi, La Stanza del Gladiatore
ricostituita; Campitelli, Villa Borghese; Laugier, 'La salle du Gladiateur a la Villa Borghese', 144—65;
Gonzalez-Palacios, 'La Stanza del Gladiatore', 5-33. The latter article reproduces the watercolour
views of the stanza by Charles Percier, 1786-91, which are in the Institut de France in Paris.
42
Owen, Travels into Different Parts of Europe, II. 45.
43
Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy, I. 504.
44
Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy, I. 503; Poole, Music, Men, and Manners, 207.
45
On macaronis, I have looked at Myrone, Bodybuilding, esp. 112-13; Ogborn, Spaces of
Modernity, 133-42; Carabelli, In the Image of Priapus, 65-77; Cohen, 'The Grand Tour', 241-57;
Ribeiro, 'The Macaronis', 463-8.
were intensively satirized as excessive and effeminate, to the point that the
consumption of foreign food was viewed as a betrayal of nation and a
corruption of manliness. The artist responsible for the lecture on Venus's
arse (plate 18), Richard Cosway, has long been identified as the target of an
engraving by Philip Dawe entitled The Macaroni Painter, or Billy Dimple
sitting for his Picture, 1772 (plate 28); the engraving was itself a commodity
enmeshed in the very processes of conspicuous consumption—having one's
portrait painted—that it critiqued.46 Cosway was conspicuous in metropol-
itan London circles for his sartorial splendour, in particular for wearing a coat
embroidered with strawberries. In Dawe's image, the painter sports a cinna-
mon-coloured coat, blue breeches, and white stockings, the ensemble topped
off with a brushed up beehive wig adorned with curls. The sitter Billy Dimple
wears a similarly lurid palette of colours and an immense wig tied in two
bunches and topped with a ridiculous hat. In the words of one of his
contemporaries, Cosway was a 'mighty macaroni'.47
The roast beef and macaroni pie on Hamilton's notional menu are further
apt in the light of Joseph Spence's observation about the ancient marbles in
the Uffizi in Florence: 'though the statues here in the Great Duke's gallery are
something better than what we meet with at Hyde Park Corner, the Florentine
beef is not half so good as are our English'.48 Hyde Park Corner housed a
cluster of London sculpture yards specializing in ready-made objects. While
Hamilton and Spence locate Italy in diametric opposition to England via their
indigenous marbles and meat, on other occasions Townley's dealers couch the
location and arrangement of his marbles in terms of renowned collections in
Italy. For Jenkins, as we have seen, Townley's new Westminster house 'must
form a Palace in London'; its many exhibition rooms invite comparison with
the galleries of the Villa Borghese, just as the earlier great room in its initial
planning on paper had evoked the Medici gallery.
Letters from Gavin Hamilton take this idea beyond the exhibition and
display of the sculptures to the material decoration of the gallery interior. In a
letter of 20 February 1778, for instance, he offered alternative options for the
colour palette of Townley's dining room. An imitation of'giallo anticd would,
he proposed, set off Townley's porphyry columns, while a 'pea green' would
form an appropriate backdrop for the columns and statues.49 Hamilton
describes the porphyry columns as a 'rich tho sober' ornament that needed
to be enriched by gold and other colours. Again, the design precedent of a
contemporary Roman collection is evoked: 'in Cardinal Albanis Gabinetto
46
Ogborn, Spaces of Modernity, 134.
47
Henry Angelo. Cited in Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway, 31.
48
11 October 1732. Spence, Letters from the Grand Tour, 125.
49
TY7/626.
[figure 61] the porphiry vases doe well upon that grey ground because much
gold is introduced in the stucco ornaments, otherwise it woud have the same
effect as a man with a fine crimson velvet coat seen in a cottage.'50 The
Gabinetto is a small first-floor room at the eastern end of the villa built for
displaying the ancient sculptures amassed by Cardinal Alessandro Albani, the
nephew of Pope Clement XI. The actual date at which the building on the Via
Salaria in Rome commenced is unclear, although the architect Carlo March-
ionni seems to have collaborated with Albani in producing the designs. There
were a series of innovative display spaces for Albani's prized collection, which
constituted part of the fabric of the building in rooms throughout the casino,
in the portico, and in side wings in the form of galleries. Opposite the casino
stands the coffee house and a semicircular Roman portico, underneath which
is an Egyptian hall, all spaces arrayed with sculptures. Hamilton's letter to
Townley of February 1778 specifically invokes the colour palette of Albani's
Gabinetto and refers to the porphyry vases and stucco ornaments therein. The
walls of this intimate space were divided into tiers or zones. Along the left part
of the north wall (figure 61), the lowest zone contained stucco reliefs, above
which were niches containing a bronze statuette of Minerva and a small-size
bronze sculpture of the Apollo Sauroctonos.51 Further up again were circular
niches containing under-life-size Roman busts. The larger, central niche is
flanked to either side by pilasters of the Corinthian order. Like much of the
decoration in this room, they were executed in stucco and gilded. Between the
middle and lowest zones, there are marble and alabaster vases on brackets,
which are presumably the vases cited (incorrectly) by Hamilton as being of
porphyry.
Hamilton's reference to the exhibition spaces of the Villa Borghese proffers
what we might designate a phenomenology of viewing, according to which
multiple points of view (the series of exhibition galleries) are contrasted with
a Cyclopean eye (the single gallery model). His letter also suggests the
particular scopic practices whereby a prolonged visual engagement with a
sculptural masterpiece, like the Borghese Gladiator or the head of Lucius
Verus, is followed by a period of mental repose. According to Peter de Bolla,
the construction of visuality in mid 18th-century Britain was determined by
spacings, physical and discursive, literal and visual, of display and exhibition
that were regulated by two distinct regimes: the regime of the eye and of the
picture, which articulate, singly and in concert, distinct attitudes to the
50
Debenedetti, 'Villa Albani', 243-67; See Debenedetti, Alessandro Albani patrono delle arti;
Allroggen-Bedel, 'La Villa Albani', 205-21; Collier, 'The villa of Cardinal Alessandro Albani',
338-47; Beck and Bol, Forschungen zur Villa Albani.
Rottgen, 'Die Villa Albani und ihre Bauten', 98-9. The contents of the Gabinetto are
catalogued in exhaustive detail by type in Bol, Forschungen zur Villa Albani, I. 134-231.
Figure 61. View of the Gabinetto in the Villa Albani.

politics of looking.52 To de Bella's important formulation we might add the

relationship between the eye and the mind, which has been a persistent refrain
in the letters of Viscount Palmerston, George Grenville, and now Gavin
Hamilton. As early as 1755, and during a temporary visit to Scotland after
his initial two-year residence in Italy, Hamilton wrote to one of his patrons,
John Hay, 4th Marquess of Tweeddale, concerning the decoration of the
saloon at Yester House, Midlothian. When the property was being remodelled
to designs by the Scottish architect William Adam, Hamilton offered to
execute for Hay a history painting to hang on one side of the chimney-
piece 'representing some great & heroick subject so as to fix the attention of
the spectator & employ his mind after his eye is satisfied with the proportion
of the room & propriety of its ornaments, I am entirely of the Italian way of
thinking viz: that there can be no true magnificence without the assistance of
either painting or sculpture'.53 Hamilton writes to Hay of having consulted
with Matthew Brettingham, the son of the Earl of Leicester's architect, and
employed him to make drawings of the saloon, describing himself and
Brettingham as 'both young artists & more greedy of fame than riches'.
Almost twenty years later, in 1772, Hamilton's reported ambition was to
make the London-based gallery of the Earl of Shelburne (later Marquis of
Lansdowne) 'famous not only in England but all over Europe'.54 His hopes
were thwarted when the collector's ardour for virtu was overtaken by political
ambition. The gallery in his townhouse in Berkeley Square, London under-
went a series of designs on paper executed by a succession of British, Italian,
and French architects.55 When Shelburne bought the property from the Earl
of Bute, it contained a gallery built by Robert Adam consisting of a large
central rectangle flanked by two octagonal chambers, 31 metres long and 9
metres wide. During Shelburne's 1771 visit to Italy, he and Gavin Hamilton
drew up a memorandum specifying the provision of ancient sculptures and
paintings for the total cost of £6,050 to be paid in four instalments: sixteen
statues, twelve busts, and twelve bas-reliefs, with eleven historical canvases
and four landscapes relating to the Trojan War by Hamilton. Drawings for the
gallery interior were made by Franceso Pannini according to Hamilton's
specifications: designed in a 'great stile' that would reportedly contrast with
the small ornaments in the 'grotesque maner' that the Adams had previously
executed for Bute.56 This collaboration between Hamilton and Pannini, artist
and architect, is analogous to that with Brettingham in the mid 1750s for
52
See de Bolla, The Education of the Eye, 72.
53
24 September 1755. Quoted by Hutton, "CA Historical Painter'", 25.
54
18 January 1772. Smith, Catalogue, 54, letter v.
55
My account is based on Stillman, 'The gallery for Lansdowne House', 75-80.
29 February 1772. Lansdowne MSS, Bowood House.
Yester House. Pannini's drawings for the gallery have been shown to be
indebted to the Farnese Gallery, in particular to its coved ceiling. When
Shelburne abandoned the gallery scheme and suspended the commission
for sculptures from Hamilton, Charles-Louis Clerisseau produced an alter-
native design for a library dated 1774 which was replaced five years later by the
designs of another French architect in London, Francois-Joseph Belanger.
Subsequent proposals in the 1780s and 1790s by Joseph Bonomi and George
Dance the Younger never came to fruition, and the gallery was finally com-
pleted by Robert Smirke in c. 1815-19. In a letter to Shelburne during a
Parliamentary break, Hamilton c hope[d] you will find a leisure moment to
think of the fine arts and of Rome'.57 As a persecuted Roman Catholic, Charles
Townley was excluded from holding public office. Hence the fine arts as
represented by his collection became his court of sculpture sessions, with 7
Park Street, Westminster his Parliament of taste. A reviewer of Michaelis'
Ancient Marbles rightly stated in 1886: 'Townley loved collection, lived for it,
worked for it, reposed in it.'58 Townley is shown reposing in the collection in
the famous conversation piece by Zoffany (plate 21).
In a letter to Shelburne, Hamilton describes having embarked on 'My great
plan in life... those six small pictures representing the story of Paris and
Helen. I have already begun them, and could wish they fell into your Lord-
ship's hands.'59 The Paris and Helen series of paintings that Hamilton initi-
ated in March 1777, that he had envisaged in eleven canvases as early as 1772,
was finally realized in the early 1780s, not for Shelburne's London gallery, but
in Rome, in the Villa Borghese on the Pinciana. From the mid 1770s,
Marcantonio IV Borghese commissioned the architect Antonio Asprucci to
modernize and reorganize the interiors of the villa, including on the ground
floor of the casino the Stanza del Gladiatore, named after the famous statue of
the Borghese Gladiator, to which Hamilton referred in a letter to Townley of
December 1777. For an upstairs room on the first floor of the casino,
Hamilton executed a series of eight paintings and orchestrated an entire
programme of painted and sculpted decoration devoted to the story of the
Trojan prince Paris, from his boyhood on Mount Ida to his death.60
The principal painting of the series (plate 29) has not received any sus-
tained visual analysis since a lengthy notice published in the Giornale delle
Belle Arti e delle Incisione Antiquaria, Musica e Poesia for 4 December 1784.61
This notice was the last of three instalments in the Giornale for that year that
57
10 [January 1780?]. Smith, Catalogue, 86, letter xxxv.
58
59
Smith, Catalogue, 83, letter xxxi.
60
Ferrara, 'La "stanza di Elena e Paride" nella Galleria Borghese', 242-56.
61
Transcribed by Cesareo, 'Gavin Hamilton', 319-20.
described the paintings executed by Hamilton, five of which were set into a
rectangle, circles, and octagons installed in the ceiling, with three large
canvases hung on the walls. The largest (306 x 367 cm) is one of the three
canvases that were extracted from the villa when the room was dismantled in
1891 and are now in the Museo di Roma. It depicts a defining moment in the
story of Paris and Helen, the repercussions of which resulted in the war
between the Greeks and Trojans: the so-called kidnap of Helen, the wife of
Menelaus, King of Sparta by the Trojan prince Paris. The article in the
Giornale points out that the abduction taking place in the image is less one
of violence on Paris's part, as treachery on the part of Helen. It refers to the
placid sea which is in marked contrast to the momentary action and dramatic
exploits taking place in the foreground. The viewer's gaze follows the pointing
arms to the unseen figures on the far right beyond the edge of the canvas.
Three of the sailors in the boat on the far left wield their oars in anticipation
of a departure, while a fourth, with his naked back to the viewer, hauls the sail
up the mast ready to embark. The taut vertical ropes that lift the sail are
contrasted with the horizontal rope in the foreground, held taut in the hands
of the soldier seen in three-quarter view seated on the far right, his helmet
removed and lying on the ground before him. Behind him the rope snakes
untied around the bollard, where Hamilton chose to sign and date the canvas.
Above the seated soldier, two of his colleagues are active in defending the
fleeing protagonists, Paris and Helen, with a bow and a shield. Their defensive
positions heighten the passive hesitations of the Spartan soldiers, who look
behind them awaiting further instructions from an unseen master, their long
spears repeating the cross shape of the mast on the opposite side of the canvas.
Hamilton locates the figure of Helen in the centre of the canvas. The Giornale
article refers to her being dressed from head to foot, with her right hand
reaching into the belt in Paris's armoured breastplate, where a sword might be
located. She steps forward in her dress in two tones of dusty pink, while at the
same time looking back to wave at her unseen pursuer. Her upraised arm is
covered by Paris's shield, seen here from the interior with its shield straps.
While his left arm covers her back, his right invites her on board the departing
vessel. Notice how his legs are spaced out, with one foot on the boat and the
other on the quayside. There is no ambiguity as to Helen's complicity in
Hamilton's rendering of the scene; only one of her maidservants holding a
precious urn seems at all unwilling to participate. The Giornale article (pre-
dictably) extols the talent of the illustrious painter in rendering the design,
composition, scale, and colour of the noble canvas. Hamilton certainly makes
the kidnap of Helen more palatable for an 18th-century audience, imaging it
as a seduction, rather than a rape: 'II suo timore stesso la condanna che non e
tema ove non e delitto.'
The decoration of the Paris and Helen stanza was entirely consistent with
what Hamilton dubbed in 1755 'the Italian way of thinking': that is, with the
appearance of painting and sculpture to enhance the 'true magnificence' of a
room. The theme of the Trojan War, for which Paris was directly responsible,
had preoccupied Hamilton since the 1760s, in the series of canvases he
produced for a number of British patrons, including our Viscount Palmerston
(figure 22). For the Paris and Helen stanza at the Villa Borghese, painting and
sculpture had a particularly symbiotic relationship. In the first instance,
aspects of Hamilton's painted protagonists have been identified as indebted
to ancient sculptures. The folds of Helen's drapery as she flees with Paris have
been related to those of the statue of Niobe; the head of Venus in the canvas in
which the naked goddess offers Helen to Paris references the head of the
Capitoline Venus, of which there was a copy in the Borghese collection.62 In
its companion piece, the Death of Achilles, the torso of the warrior fatally
wounded by the arrow shot through his ankle quotes that of the Lansdowne
Diomedes (figure 31), the erroneously restored discobolus that Hamilton
excavated at Ostia and dispatched to Shelburne in the spring of 1776. Striking
though these comparisons are, the relationship between painting and sculp-
ture goes beyond these types of specific material quotations to a more
cohesive cross-media ensemble. To either side of the Rape of Helen canvas,
hung on the main wall opposite the windows, there were niches containing
life-size marble sculptures of Paris and Helen completed by Agostino Penna in
1784. The crossed-leg pose of the Paris is reminiscent of the Faun with Pipes
(then) in the Borghese collection; his elongated naked figure leaning against a
tree stump compares with the Marble Faun in the Capitoline Museum.63 The
statue of Ganymede in the Vatican with the same Phrygian cap and curls and
relaxed standing pose is an even more compelling ancient sculptural prece-
dent—it is included on a pedestal in the right foreground of the canvas by
Gagnereaux of Pius VI Accompanying Gustav II of Sweden on a Visit to the
Museo Pio-Clementino, 1786 (plate 6).64 The sculpture of Helen has been
related to a statue of Venus (then) in the Borghese collection. In addition to
these free-standing sculptures by Penna, there are four reliefs in yellow marble
of seated deities: Jupiter, Venus, Mars, and Apollo. Sculpted by Vincenzo
Pacetti, they were suitably elevated to a divine realm above the doors, and
showed the immortals busy manipulating the events that were represented on
canvas in the ceilings and on the walls elsewhere in the room.65 The consensus
is that Hamilton orchestrated this creative collaboration between his own
62
Leone and Pirani, // Museo di Roma racconta la citta, 46.
63
Rossi Pinelli, 'Scultori e restauratori a Villa Borghese', 262.
Guerrieri Borsoi, 'Tra invenzione e restauro', 152.
65
Ferrara Grassi, 'II Casino di Villa Borghese', 241-94.
painted productions and those of Italian sculptors for a classically-themed

interior in early 1780s Rome. He is thought to have supplied designs for the
sculptural decoration to both Pacetti and Penna and advised them on the
materials, in much the same way as he had been acting as a consultant in the
decoration of Townley's London dining room at the end of the previous
decade and in the gallery at Shelburne House since 1771. In an unpublished
part of a letter dated 8 August 1776, Hamilton wrote to Lansdowne requesting
information on the colour of all the rooms in his house: 'tak[ing] it for
granted that the intermediate spaces are to be hung with silk, pictures in
particular require something of this sort & marbles perhaps doe better with
stucco ornaments & a little guilding'.66
One of a pair of watercolours by the artist William Chambers (plate 22)
shows the interior of Townley's dining room at Park Street as it appeared in
1794-5.67 The view of the ground floor room is taken from the window that
overlooked St James's Park. Hamilton's suggestion that 'gold & other colours'
be introduced was evidently overlooked in preference to a blue background
against the porphyry-coloured Ionic columns in scagliola, which is intended
to set off the monochrome marble sculptures. The highly-prized sculpture of
the discobolus (figure 34) is exhibited on a shallow pedestal in the centre
foreground, from where it can be viewed from all angles. It 'requires the
utmost Powers', enthused Jenkins of the sculpture, 'to imagine & execute such
a momentary & wonderful exertion of the human faculties'.68 In the accom-
panying watercolour of the hall (plate 23), the discobolus is visible in the
dining-room window in the space beyond. As one of Townley's last and most
highly prized acquisitions, Chambers was commissioned to provide an ac-
curate visual record of the display of the collection once the discobolus had
been installed. Even Zoffany's conversation piece (plate 21), with its inventive
redisplay of the collection in Townley's library, was reworked in 1798 to
accommodate the discobolus in the bottom left foreground. Written evidence
of the disposition of the marbles throughout Townley's house is provided in
the many manuscript versions of the catalogue that Townley composed and
that visitors had access to, as is shown accompanying them on their visit to
Park Street in the image of the hall.
In Chambers' image of the dining room, the discobolus is flanked to either
side by sculptures of the Endymion (plate 2) on the left and the drunken faun
(figure 24) on the right. The sculptures rest on low wooden pedestals and are
paired on account of the similarity of their size and compositions: both depict
horizontal figures the size of life, one sleeping and the other falling down drunk.
66
67
Wilton and Bignamini, Grand Tour, nos. 213 (entrance hall) and 214 (dining room).
68
12 July 1794. TY7/535.
The pairing of sculptures was a familiar display strategy in 18th-century collec-

tions, for ancient examples and also modern copies, as we know from the many
matchings of Cupid and Psyche with Bacchus and Ariadne, dictated by the size
and composition of sculptures, and also their subject matter, which is as
frequently contrasted as compared. Henry Blundell wrote to Townley in April
1800 that he had previously considered acquiring one of the Negroni caryatids as
a companion to his statue of Isis, until he found he could not accommodate
them as a pair in his hall.69 In letters to Townley, he articulates his fondness for
'my big-bellied Lady' as he affectionately referred to the Mattel Isis (figure 62).70
The Mattei prefix is derived from her former provenance, the Mattei collection
on the Celian Hill in Rome, whose fragmentation dates from 1770 with the sale
of 34 antiquities to Pope Clement XIV. The dispersal of this ducal collection is
seen as having prompted the formation of the Papal museum, the Pio-Clem-
entino, but this is to ignore the earlier, turbulent acquisition of the Barberini
candelabra (figure 41 ).71 The Isis had been published in the first volume of the
Monumenta Mattheiana (Rome, 1776), plate 87 under her earlier incarnation as
'Sabina Augusta', the wife of the 2nd century AD emperor Hadrian. In Histoire
de Yart chez les anciens (Amsterdam, 1766) Winckelmann describes the sculpture
as 'La Femme grosse', or a pregnant woman with child.72 From the material
evidence of a figure on a bas-relief in the Admiranda from the Cortile in the Villa
Mattei, the Papal Antiquary, Visconti, recognized the sculpture as an Egyptian
prophet in an Isaical procession, carrying a waterpot.73 According to Blundell,
who claims he bought the sculpture as a fragment with the intention of using it
as a pedestal (!), the restorations were directed by 'that learned Visconti with his
learned dissertation on it larded with greek'. The restorations saw Sabina de-
restored and re-restored into an Egyptian prophet with the addition of a new
male head and armed with Egyptian attributes, providing further evidence of
the transformation of ancient sculptures by restorations dictated by material
comparanda and learned authority as documented in detail in Chapter 3.
Townley evidently did not share BlundelTs proprietorial affection for the Isis.
The latter writes to Townley in 1800 of his 'poor Lady, after so many years to
have her character impeached, by any crimination against her, particularly
after my having so imprudently confessed my partiality to her; Is it not tres
mal fait, in you to take away Ladies characters, as well as in Visconti?'
69
2 January 1787. TY7/1316.
70
15 and 21 April 1800. TY15/11/1.
71
Hautecoeur, 'La vente de la collection Mattel', 57-75.
Winckelmann, Histoire de Van chez les anciens, II. 161.
73
The relief is reproduced in R. Venuti and C. Amaduzzi, Monumenta Matteiana (Rome,
1776-9), III. plate 26.2.
Figure 62. Henry Blundell's 'big-bellied' Isis.

On the left side of Townley's dining room, as represented in the watercol-

our by Chambers, two large free-standing sculptures, the most proximate of
which is a statue of Thalia, the muse of comedy, are elevated on pedestals and
set back in niches. Gavin Hamilton recommended this configuration to
Lansdowne: 'half out & half in the niech in so much that the figure may be
seen to the greatest advantage'.74 A cluster of smaller items, including busts,
are arranged on top of the chimney-piece. Their counterparts opposite
project into the space of the room in a marble line-up that culminates in
the centre with the colossal pairing of the Negroni caryatid (figure 28) and the
Venus from Ostia (figure 32). To either side, the sculptures are grouped and
displayed in horizontal tiers, elevated on marble pedestals inlaid with reliefs
and brackets, or in the case of the circular and square relief sculptures, hung
on the walls. Overall, the display is formal and symmetrical; the view is
punctuated by the columns that serve to frame the different groupings of
marbles and focus the viewer's eye. At the same time, the open door invites
the viewer into the hall opposite. Engravings of Michelangelo Simonetti's
galleries in the new Pio-Clementino Museum by Vincenzo Feoli and Giovanni
Volpato offer striking correspondences with the disposition of sculptures
favoured by Townley; the sculptures, for instance in the Stanza della Muse,
are similarly elevated on pedestals and arranged into distinct groupings
divided by columns.75 During the periods when he was not in Italy, Townley's
dealers provided up-to-date reports of the sculptural furnishing of the Papal
galleries. In August 1770, Jenkins wrote of the proposed transformation of the
Palazzetto del Belvedere of Innocent VIII into the new museum: 'the Capitol
being already full... now the Publick will have the Benefit of a New Gallery,
and the Pope the Honor of Making it'.76 Just over a decade later, Hamilton
reported that 'the great circular room [the Sala Rotonda] is near finished',
with the Barberini Juno and a muse from the cortile of the Cancelleria
destined for two of its enormous series often niches.77 He went on: 'I assure
you that the Hercules & Flora woud look small in those spaces, in short
Magnificence is more considered than propriety.' Though the Farnese Hercules
and the Flora are both colossal statues, each measuring over 3 metres high, at
22 metres the Sala Rotonda is over seven times higher and topped by a cupola.
Rather than viewing Townley's interior as slavishly imitating the display of
contemporary Roman collections, albeit on a domestic rather than a palatial
scale, it has been suggested that via the Yorkshire architect Thomas Harrison,
who was a student in Rome 1769-76, the display of the Pio-Clementino
74
75
See the useful reproductions in Consoli, // Museo Pio-Clementino.
76
22 August 1770. TY7/303.
77
Museum actually derived from Robert Adam's innovations at Newby Hall.78

Since the gallery at Newby was itself a simulacrum of ancient display spaces, so
Townley's interiors represent the design productions of a creative collision of
cultures, ancient and modern, native and foreign, originals and copies.
One aspect of the scheme of Townley's dining room reproduces a specific
ancient precedent. We owe this identification to d'Hancarville, who cata-
logued the collection for Townley, and who records the column capitals as
imitations of an ancient model found at Terracina that formed part of a
building consecrated to Bacchus and Ceres.79 The capital was discovered and
drawn by the draughtsman Vincenzo Brenna, who accompanied Townley on a
journey to Naples in March 1768 during his first tour of Italy (figure 63).80
Townley incorporated an imitation of this ancient architectural embellish-
ment in the interior of his urban townhouse, offering a contemporary
reinterpretation of an ancient temple via the sculpture galleries of the
Pio-Clementino Museum that was still dedicated to the pursuits of Bacchus
and Ceres, to eating and drinking. One of Gavin Hamilton's letters of May
1776 offers a further analogy for the collection and its mode of display, in
Figure 63. Vincenzo Brenna, drawing of the Terracina capital.

78
Collins, Papacy and Politics, 158-9.
79
Wilton and Bignamini, Grand Tour, no. 214.
80
Vaughan, 'Vincenzo Brenna Romanus: Architectus et Pictor\ 37-41.
which the 0.6 m high Amorino in Parian marble is sent 'not as a fine statue
but an excellent Cameo & as such I beg you woud preserve it, by putting it in a
case lined with black velvet, so as to open on those occasions you want to enjoy
it'.81 The Amorino is here conceived as another luxury genre of sculpture
which British travellers avidly collected in Italy—a cameo.
In Chambers' pictorial representation (plate 22), the dining room at 7 Park
Street is not exclusively populated with ancient marble sculptures; 'however
they may charm your eyes, they are certainly of a cold insensible nature',
pronounced Elizabeth Hervey, the daughter of the Earl Bishop of Derry, in a
letter to Townley.82 In the left background of the image, a couple view the
marbles, while in the centre foreground, a young woman is poised on the base
of the discobolus with her drawing utensils. The man looking over her
shoulder is unlikely to be her drawing master on account of the physical
proximity with which he attends his female companion. 83 He may be instruct-
ing his wife or daughter in the fashionable, feminine pursuit of drawing. In
the previous chapter, the artist Maria Cosway was cited as painting a portrait
of Mary Linwood, who was similarly represented copying one of Townley's
sculptures—his bust of Minerva in marble and bronze (plate 4)—in one of
her celebrated needlework productions. In the following chapter, 7 Park Street
will be cast as a counterpoint to the Royal Academy, whose male students
were employed to copy Townley's sculptures. With its metropolitan London
location, Townley's townhouse was also to become one of the sights of the
urban centre. Visits by fellow collectors, the Earl of Bristol in 1779 and John
Campbell a decade later, have been cited in earlier chapters. The pages of
Townley's diaries are crammed with the names of the hundreds of visitors
who were admitted to see the collection by appointment and for free. The
entry for Saturday 12 January 1799, for example, records: 'M r Greenwood M r
Grimaldi ye miniature painter, the Rev D r Forster of Norwich & his son to see
the marbles.'84 By receiving a steady stream of British and foreign visitors to
Park Street, Townley is able to participate in the diversity of cultural and
sociable pursuits that London had to offer. On 14 November 1799 he 'went to
Drury Lane theatre and to the Antiq[uaries]. & Roy[al]. Soc[iety]' of which he
was a member. Later that week, he called on the artist J. M. W. Turner in his
lodgings at 'Harley Street N.° 64 to see the sketches he made for M r Whitaker'
which Townley commissioned for Whitaker's History of the Original Parish
of Whalley and Honor of Clitheroe, in the Counties of Lancaster and York
(Blackburn, 1801 ).85
81 82
27 May 1776. TY7/610. 12 January 1787. TY7/1698.
83 84 85
Sloan, ' "A Noble Arf \ no. 167. TY1/11. TY1/11.
Townley's religious persuasion, that excluded him from the political but not
the cultural or social diversions of the metropolis, is relevant to the display of
his marbles, when in June 1780 riots took place in Westminster against the
Roman Catholic Relief Act. Among the papers in the Townley Archive is a copy
of an anonymous note dated 17 June that warns a Mr Hart and his Westmin-
ster neighbours to vacate their properties immediately.86 Following six days of
looting, destruction, and damage, Lady Elizabeth Craven wrote to Townley,
who being Catholic was an obvious target, offering him her Charles Street
(now King Charles Street) property in Whitehall as a safe house for the statues,
which could be conveyed by boat from Westminster Bridge at an hour's
notice.87 Sir John Eliot MP made available a garret and cellar, a small guard
of a dozen soldiers, and even two dozen hand grenades from the military
academy at Woolwich.88 On this occasion, Townley's marble family remained
unscathed; Gavin Hamilton wrote to him, hoping 'the storm will blow over &
that you will once more smile on the unruly ill governed Brittons, I hope
likewise that provision will be made for to prevent for the future such horrid
outrages, & that you will continue to enjoy your select collection of elegant
Greek ideas, in the midst of fanatism & anarchy, we may say with Lucretius,
Tantum potuit Religio suadere malorum [De Rerum Natura, I. 101 ]'.89
Three years later, Townley revisited plans to display the collection away
from the religious and political upheavals of the capital—at the family seat,
Towneley Hall in Lancashire. Joseph Bonomi produced a design for a large
oval rotunda (plate 30) as a space tailored for the display of sculptures
according to the single gallery model that would terminate the suite of
existing rooms built by John Carr of York. With its trompe Vczil ceiling
ornaments and blue background colour, the projected design has been related
to the suite of ancient rooms from the Domus Augustiana, an imperial palace
also known as the Domus Flavia that was discovered in 1776 beneath the Villa
Magnani on the Palatine Hill facing the Circus Maximus in Rome.90 Bonomi
produced a measured drawing in the form of a ground plan from an original
sketch made on the spot by Charles Townley.91 Lest we should think Townley
had completely abandoned the possibility of moving the collection following
Bonomi's unexecuted design, in 1792 he was interested in a Mr Stephenson's
house in Soho Square, London, that was apparently 'more spacious and a
more secure situation 5 than that at Park Street, but the Duke of Portland was
86
TY5/5.
87
22 June 1780. TY7/1552.
88
TY7/1562 and 1563.
89
TY7/644.
90
Bristow, Architectural Colour in British Interiors, 206.
91
RIBA, SC23/15.
unwilling to extend the lease or to sell the property. 92 The architect John Nash
wrote to Townley four years later in September 1796 offering him an un-
developed site in London for the price of £700.93 Located on the west side of
South Audley Street, near the south end and opposite that part known as
South Audley Place, Townley would be able, Nash wrote, to build a house and
museum that, unlike the row of terraced properties at Park Street, would be
detached. In the event, Townley's collection remained at Park Street and
would do until his death in 1805.
In the introduction to his Greek and Roman Portraits in English Country
Houses (Oxford, 1923), Frederik Poulsen, Keeper of the Ny Carlsberg Glyp-
tothek in Copenhagen, describes the park at Wilton House, home of the Earls
of Pembroke in Wiltshire, as 'the finest in all England, where one can
understand most clearly the idea of the English country-seat as an attempt
to realize the northern dream of the South, by transferring to England the
classic sculpture and ancient art of the South and transplanting to English soil
the trees and shrubs of southern countries'.94 Poulsen, himself a northerner
from Denmark, articulates the concept of the English country seat as a
transferral and transplantation of products indigenous to southern regions
into the north. As we saw in Chapter 1, his own idea of the English country
seat was itself a construction of ideas and ideologies, as much as bricks and
mortar, since two of his supposed country houses are in fact London town-
houses. What is striking, however, is Poulsen's recognition that what he calls
the 'dream of the South' in northern countries like Britain was not confined to
sculptures (ancient and modern), but included other commodities such as
their flora and fauna. Poulsen's characterization aids our understanding of the
display of sculptures at the country seats of Thomas Mansel Talbot at Margam
Park in South Wales, Henry Blundell at Ince in Lancashire, and the Dukes of
Bedford at Woburn.
While in Rome in 1772, Thomas Mansel Talbot wrote of finding himself'in
love & deeply engaged with the handsome woman or the Beaux Artes'.95
Mansel Talbot's personification offers a further correlation between the pur-
suit and possession of works of art with that of women, in addition to
Cosway's visual rendering that was discussed in the previous chapter. Two
years later, on hearing that Mansel Talbot was to marry Lady Mary Somerset,
Thomas Jenkins reckoned that 'if put to market [she] would be more
esteemed than Master fjohnl Corbets wonderful Venus'.96 Jenkins denotes
92
Cook, The Townley Marbles, 46-7.
93
TY7/1624.
94
95
1 February 1772. Martin, The Penrice Letters, 69.
96
26 March 1774. TY7/330.
Somerset's desirability in the marriage stakes by likening her to a statue of

Venus excavated by Gavin Hamilton at Tor Colombaro and much admired in
the commercial marketplace. Mansel Talbot's letter proceeds to describe a
statue of Meleager whose discovery in 1771 by Gavin Hamilton, also at Tor
Colombaro, had temporarily threatened the canonical status of the Belvedere
Antinous, when the former was deemed the original of which the Vatican
version was a copy. This no longer being the case, Mansel Talbot recounts that
Hamilton had written to Lord Shelburne about the Meleager as a would-be
acquisition to his collection. In this, we see again the precarious reputation of
ancient sculptures that were subject to rise and fall, as well as the dissemin-
ation of information between British dealers and collectors in the incestuous
social network that was the Roman marketplace. Around the time of Mansel
Talbot's letter, Hamilton had written to Shelburne that, having procured a
licence, he wanted £600 for the Meleager.97 He insisted that 'the statue must
make its own apology, and when it is seen in England, I believe nobody will
hesitate to esteem it at a thousand pounds'.
In letters to his gardener, George Bartlett, written during the course of his
Continental travels, Mansel Talbot voices his concern for an inherited collec-
tion of orange, lemon, and citrus trees that had been established at Margam
since the beginning of the 18th century; he wrote from Nice how 'The orange
trees grow here with very little care in the corn fields and gardens' and asked
for 'as clear a description as possible' of the fate of his own back home, in the
hope that none of a particular species of orange tree had failed.98 Back at
Margam in the mid 1780s, Mansel Talbot commissioned the leading local
architect, Anthony Keck, to design a building to house his precious commod-
ities imported from the warm south—his fruit trees, marbles, models, and
vases together. The result was an orangery (figure 64), an unprecedented 100
metres long and 9 metres wide with 27 windows, the whole length heated via
underfloor flues, and terminating at either end with a pedimented pavilion.99
At least a hundred trees passed the harsh Welsh winters in the main body of
the orangery, while the west pavilion housed the library, architectural models
in cork and pumice, and marble vases, and the east pavilion held the ancient
sculptures. Their material contents can be deduced from the published
accounts of tourists passing through Wales: like the Revd Evans, who claimed
Mansel Talbot intended his artefacts 'for a cabinet of specimens representative
of ancient and modern arts';100 or the Revd Richard Warner, for whom
Margam 'may really be considered as a cabinet of curiosities, combining so
97
4 March 1773. Smith, Catalogue, 65, letter xv.
98
Martin, The Penrice Letters, 62 (26 October 1771) and 52 (20 November 1770).
99
On the orangery, see Moore, Margam Orangery and Moore, 'Penrice and Margam', 73-88.
100
Evans, Letters Written during a Tour through South Wales, 139.
Figure 64. View of the orangery at Margam Park in South Wales, designed by
Anthony Keck in the mid 1780s.
large a number of beauties, natural and artificial, as seldom fall to the lot of
any one place'.101 Compare these touristic accounts with that of Michaelis
published in 1882, for whom Mansel Talbot's 'little collection' of ancient
marbles included two or three noteworthy specimens—again, denying the
heterogeneity of the late 18th-century collection with its ancient and modern
specimens, natural and artificial curiosities.102
(
Hic ver assiduum atque alienis mensibus aestas'—this quotation from
Vergil's Georgics (II. 149) encapsulates the thinking behind Mansel Talbot's
orangery in South Wales, although it is in fact inscribed onto a frieze on a
temple designed for the display of sculpture in Henry Blundell's garden at his
home, Ince Hall in Lancashire (figure 65).103 Like his sometime Lancashire
101
Warner, A Second Tour through Wales, 86.
102
103
Vaughan, 'Henry Blundell's sculpture collection at Ince Hall', 19.
Figure 65. View of the garden temple at Ince Blundell Hall in Lancashire.
neighbour Townley, who was also his mentor in the collecting of sculpture,
Blundell was excluded from the political and courtly establishments of Britain
on account of his religious persuasion. He made four visits to Italy between
1777 and 1790 and 'perseverance collected' through the agency of the Jesuit
priest Father Thorpe. In a letter to Townley of 3 April 1796, Blundell describes
having read 'a very eloquent work' by a Liverpool acquaintance of his,
William Roscoe's The Life of Lorenzo de Medici (Liverpool and London,
1795). Blundell explains, 'He is by profession an attorney, & has numberless
avocations; He is certainly a man of great talents, but how he could collect the
variety of anecdotes for that life, having never been abroad, seems wonderful;
I think it will entertain you.'104 Blundell's letter identifies the writing of
biography with the act of collecting anecdotes. With reference to Blundell,
this metaphor can be extended from the foreign collecting of anecdotes to
actual objects in Italy, in his case constituting a form of autobiography; and
104
TY7/1326.
considering Blundell's autobiography, we have both the material remains of

the collection, and his epistolary relationship with Charles Townley. In an
earlier letter to Townley of 1787, Blundell characterizes his acquisitions from
Italy as an (anti)collection: 'The fact is, I do not intend to purchase, or make
any farther addition to my marbles, except a few cases comeing & what I have
either bo.1 or ordered for some particular purposes; for I do not aim at a
collection, or crowding my house with marbles; nor will I ever build a
Galleries; what I have bo.1 was but as it were, ye sport of a day; and shall be
obliged to dispose of many of them, at each end of my conservatory in my
Garden... They are such things as give me pleasure & suit me, for ye places,
they are intended for.'105 These emphatic statements to Townley demonstrate
that Blundell's early acquisitions in sculpture were predestined for display in
specific spaces in the interior and in buildings in the exterior landscape of his
Lancashire home.
Notwithstanding Blundell's vigorous statement against a purpose-built
gallery, by spring 1801 he describes to Townley proposals on paper and a
model in wood for a new marble room in his garden, 'about 37 feet inside
diameter, circular, lighted from the top, as the Pantheon place'd as near the
East end of my house, as well can be; The walls 6 feet thick, to get room for 4
large recesses, so as to be able to see round the principal statues'.106 As with the
garden temple (figure 65), the architect of Blundell's pantheon (figure 66) is
unknown, although a number of contenders for the position have been
proposed. They include the Liverpool sculptor and designer George Bullock,
and also Samuel Wyatt, who was responsible for the pantheon in London's
Oxford Street that opened in 1772, was destroyed by fire, and rebuilt in 1795. 107
Wyatt's secular pleasure palace accommodated 1,500 to 2,000 people for
social events like concerts, masquerades, performances, and exhibitions. The
main ballroom was covered by a coffered dome ceiling and contained statues
in niches, much like Blundell's reduced version.108 Adolf Michaelis noted the
dome-room of the so-called Pantheon at Ince, 'arranged, nowadays at least, in
tolerably motley confusion' so that it 'may well remind us, si parva licet
componere magnis [Vergil, Georgics, IV. 176], of the Rotunda of the Vatican
Museum'.109 The Rotunda is itself indebted to the Pantheon in Rome and to
the so-called Temple of Minerva Medici. Henry Blundell's version of the
reduced pantheon enables us to add simulacra of ancient Roman architecture
to Frederik Poulsen's characterization of the northern dream of the south.
105
TY7/1318.
106
23 March 1801. TY7/1330.
107
Vaughan, 'Henry Blundell's sculpture collection at Ince Hall', 20.
108
My account of Wyatt's pantheon derives from Yarrington, 'Popular and imaginary
pantheons in early nineteenth-century England', 110.
109
~~ vSE
Figure 66. Exterior view of the pantheon at Ince Blundell Hall in Lancashire.
From the examples at Ince and Margam, only the latter of which survives, it
becomes apparent that the greenhouse or conservatory was one of the
favoured repositories for the display of ancient sculpture in English country
estates. This was a space that was a free-standing extension of the interior
and an architectural feature of the exterior, where examples of sculptures
imported from Italy were exhibited alongside cultivated trees and plants,
forming an aromatic museum or sensory gallery. The greenhouse at Woburn
Abbey in Bedfordshire provides our third and final illustration, and at the
same time shifts our focus back to Charles Townley. This building formed
part of the architectural innovations and embellishments implemented by the
architect Henry Holland for his aristocratic patron Francis Russell, the 5th
Duke of Bedford. 110 The greenhouse had a nine-bay south facade, the central
bay of which was decorated with medallions of spring and summer.
110
Kenworthy-Browne, 'The sculpture gallery at Woburn Abbey', 61-71; Kenworthy-
Browne, 'The Temple of Liberty at Woburn Abbey', 27-32.
At 42 metres long it was less than half the size of its counterpart at Margam.
The interior space was heated by a hypocaust system and contained a series of
stoves at the rear, below floor level, so maintaining the temperate climate of
spring and summer throughout the year. Holland was commissioned to
design a Temple of Liberty for the east end of the greenhouse as a monument
to the liberal politics of the Whig leader, Charles James Fox, and the ideologies
of the French Revolution. He executed what has been described as a temple
within a temple, with Ionic columns 3 metres high and a cell 4 metres square,
a three-quarter copy of the Greek temple of the Ilissus, as measured and
published in James Stuart and Nicholas Revett's Antiquities of Athens
(London, 1762).
When the 5th Duke died in 1802, his successor inherited his unfinished
project, which was reconceptualized as both a monument to liberty and as a
memorial to his late brother. Henry Holland wrote to Charles Townley
recounting the 6th Duke of Bedford's desire for his view on the 'classical
proprietory' of the proposed scheme; the Duke was said to have 'a much
higher opinion of your [Townley's] judgment than of that of any other
person'.111 Rather than adhering to his brother's intention of installing a
statue of Fox in the Temple, the 6th Duke proposed that a seated sculpture
of his brother would be commissioned from the leading sculptor in Europe,
the Venetian Antonio Canova. Fox would still be present, in the form of his
bust by Joseph Nollekens, placed on a console or column. Other busts by
Nollekens of contemporary Foxites—the Duke's political supporters and
friends, in an ideal Whig cabinet—would still be displayed in the pronaos,
as the 5th Duke had intended. 112 In addition, ornaments like altars, fountains,
or furniture would be exhibited in close proximity 'as are calculated to give
the effect of an anctient Temple adopted for a modern purpose'. Holland's
explanation of the effect of antique models adopted for a modern purpose is
applicable to the display of sculptures in the greenhouse at Woburn, and in
the other schemes already discussed in this chapter, in the urban townhouse
and in the English country house.
In a letter of 23 November 1802, Townley's uncle referred to the Very useful
Hints concerning the Temple' that his nephew had offered to Holland, who
evidently wished to consult with him again, this time on site at Woburn.113
Among Townley's papers are two undated ground plans in his own hand,
showing alternative schemes for the east end of the greenhouse.114 In the more
detailed sketch (figure 67), the temple is designed and delineated with what
111 18 April 1802. TY7/963.
1 12
Penny, 'The Whig cult of Fox', 96.
113
TY7/850.
114
TY14/3/4 and TY14/6/6. Guilding, Marble Mania, no. 99.
Figure 67. Charles Townley's sketch of a ground plan for the greenhouse at Woburn,
c.l 802.
Holland called classical propriety—the area in front is designated as the Atrium,

with the cella libertatis shown behind the pronaos. At the same time the modern
functions of the building are not overlooked, in Townley's annotating the spaces
above and below the temple with 'passage to ye Dairy' and 'Terrace leading to ye
shrubbery'. The centre bay in Townley's sketch is marked by two screens of four
columns apiece, with a niche on the north side containing the full-size copy of
the Apollo Belvedere by Pietro Pacilli which the 5th Duke's father, the Marquess
of Tavistock, bought in Rome in 1762;115 'to have seen it, and not turn half
Pagan, is, I think, impossible', Tavistock wrote to the Earl of Upper Ossory,
describing the dramatic effect of viewing the original marble Apollo in the
Belvedere courtyard of the Vatican Museum. 116
Townley's plan (figure 67) locates the Lanti vase (figure 2) in front of
Pacilli's copy of the Apollo Belvedere and underneath the central dome of
the greenhouse. Like the Lansdowne Amazon, for whom it was offered in
part-exchange plus £400 in 1786, this colossal marble crater had an indeter-
minate reputation at the turn of the 18th century into the 19th. It was
purchased by Colonel John Campbell, later Lord Cawdor, in 1788 for 200
crowns, but was sequestered in Rome by Papal prohibition for a further
eighteen months. When Campbell's collection was sold at auction in London
in June 1800, the vase was purchased by Charles Heathcote Tatham, a former
assistant of Henry Holland. Henry Blundell relates in a letter to Townley of 5
July that Tatham had written to him twice about the vase: 'he assures me, that
he absolutely bo.1 it with a view for the Duke of Bedford, tho' not upon any
positive commission, and that his Grace declines having it'.117 Following the
Duke's refusal, Tatham offered the vase to Blundell for the bargain price of
700 guineas, citing anonymous rival offers of 800 guineas and valuing the
piece at 1,200 guineas. Blundell declined the purchase, replying to Tatham
'that the value of such things was all Ideal & worth no more', and writing to
Townley of being glad to have failed to procure it on account of the 'chicanery
about it'. Later, in 1823, Tatham rewrote its smooth acquisition and its artistic
significance in a letter to the 6th Duke of Bedford: 'Of the Lanti Vase, (the
Cream of all Vases) I published an Etching with some Letter press, assisted by
the late Mr. Townley, in the Gent's Mag. about 20 y.rs ago, just after
I purchased it at Lord Cawdor sale for Duke Francis. It is truly the finest
Work of Art of that Class ever discovered.'118
In much the same way that Tatham credits the publication of his engraving
of the Lanti vase to assistance from Charles Townley, so material in the
115
Debenedetti, 'Lambert Sigisbert Adam e Pietro Pacilli', 63.
1 16
27 January 1764. Whiffen, Historical Memoirs of the House of Russell, II. 543.
117
TY15/11/2.
118
5 April 1823. BEO 6th Duke Art Collection, no. 94.
Townley Archive (somewhat predictably) confirms that his designation as a

'model of taste' was more than hyperbole from Thomas Jenkins, although at
the time it was written in 1782 it was premature by a decade.119 Townley's
'profound knowledge in the polite Arts especially sculpture' was reported to
have influenced the collection, display, and publication of the ancient sculp-
tures belonging to his contemporaries, including Henry Blundell, James
Smith Barry, Sir Richard Worsley, and Colonel Campbell.120 Having resolved
in 1789 to build a house in London, Campbell envisaged seeking Townley's
advice on the exhibition of the Lanti vase (figure 2). 121 Townley's expertise in
marble matters was certainly not confined to ancient specimens; the very
notion is part of the legacy of periodization and specialization pioneered in
the 19th century. Prior to the compromise between antique form and modern
function that was the redesign of the Woburn temple in 1802, Townley had
been involved on a number of occasions in the negotiations between contem-
porary British sculptors and their patrons. In 1790, for instance, Townley was
named as a potential arbitrator in the articles of agreement between Henry
Howard of Bath and Joseph Nollekens for a £1,500 monument to Howard's
wife. Howard wrote to Townley requesting that he call 'now and then' to view
the monument at the sculptor's premises at 9 Mortimer Street and to give
'your advice and opinion' as it progressed.122 Previously in 1778, Townley had
been asked by Christopher Hewetson to intervene in the stalled negotiations
between Thomas Banks and George Grenville concerning non payment for
the Caractacus relief (plate I). 123 At the end of the 18th century, in 1798,
Townley proposed the tessera shape to John Wilkes's daughter and John
Flaxman for the tablet with the memorial inscription to her father. 124 The
following year, Flaxman invited Townley to 7 Buckingham Street to see
the model of the design that he had submitted in the competition for the
(unexecuted) Napoleonic memorial on the summit of Greenwich Hill.125
Townley produced a thumbnail sketch of the monument in his diary, in
which he mistook the height of the statue of Britannia Triumphant as 130
feet, rather than the even more colossal 230 feet.126 Flaxman's fellow sculptors,
John Bacon and Richard Westmacott, also solicited Townley's informed
119
23 January 1782. TY7/411.
120
21 September 1796. William Leavis to Charles Townley. TY7/1557. See Coltman, Fabri-
cating the Antique, 189.
121
12 September 1789. TY7/971. The following year, Campbell purchased the house of Sir
James Macpherson in Oxford Street.
122
2 April 1790. TY7/1566.
123
Bindman, ' "Caractacus before Claudius'", 769-72.
124
TY1/10 for 20 June, 12 and 15 July 1798. TY14/4/40.
125
2 November 1799. TY1/11.
126
Flaxman, A Letter to the Committee for raising the naval pillar, 8.
opinion: the former in 1791, concerning a marble portrait bust of the Revd
Mr Nicholas Bacon; the latter in 1804, over the 'Pantaloons' for a statue of an
unnamed Duke.127 Once commissions of this sort had been completed,
aristocratic patrons like Lord Carlisle still sought Townley's advice on the
display and upkeep of their marbles; in Carlisle's case, his portrait bust by
Joseph Nollekens.128 One of Bacon's letters requesting access to Park Street for
the American minister and his secretary refers to Townley's 'attention and
politeness by which you gratify so much every lover of, and Connoisseur in
the Art of Sculpture'.129 Townley's attention and politeness apparently
extended beyond the art of sculpture and the style of classicism; John Nash
wanted him to peruse his drawings of a gothicizing character that he had
produced for Mr Methuen at Corsham Court. 130 In 1791, Townley was
appointed a Trustee of the British Museum. Two years later, he was elected
to the Society of Dilettanti, of which more will be said in the next chapter. His
collection was well known in both England and Italy, according to Colonel
Campbell in an undated letter to the sculptor Antonio Canova.131 Campbell's
letter acknowledges safe receipt of Canova's Amorino sculpture with its ped-
estal that could be rotated and its aesthetic approbation by Townley, who is
said to have judged it Topera le piu bella, e nel gusto il piu puro che esiste dal
buon tempo dei Greci'.
While Chapter 5 delineated a visual economy of desire, so this chapter has
documented a material economy of taste. Thomas Jenkins' discourse on the
application and dissemination of taste quoted at the start of this chapter is,
I am suggesting, a more apt summary of Charles Townley from the early 1790s
than of Thomas Robinson's relative, William Weddell. Though Michaelis
notes in Ancient Marbles that 'more than one traveller after his return enjoyed
on the strength of the information picked up in Italy the reputation of a
distinguished connoisseur, or even of an infallible oracle in matters of good
taste and art', Weddell was neither connoisseur nor oracle following his grand
tour. 132 In 1781 his former travelling companion in Italy, William Palgrave,
wrote requesting recourse to Weddell's 'memory, that storehouse & repository
of ancient & modern tast' in the provision of a chimney-piece for his Suffolk
parsonage that was being overhauled in the fashionable, neoclassical style.133
'The Adelphi & Pantheon will turn pale with envy & sicken at the sight',
127
TY7/1557 and TY7/2000.
128 TY7/1994.
129
TY7/1559.
130
19 September 1796. TY7/1624.
131
Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappao, MSS Canoviani, 1/3/7/83. See Honour, 'Canova's
"Amorini" for John Campbell and John David La Touche', 129-39.
132
133
[18 April 1781?]. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, WYL109/addnl/3b/64.
Palgrave wrote to Weddell, referring to two major architectural projects in the

capital and proceeding to ask for the specifications of his drawing room
chimney-piece at Newby. In the event, Weddell seems to have obtained the
ornaments ready-made in London on Palgrave's behalf. There was an accident
in their transport when the griffins' tails which had been sent in three pieces
were broken and 'unfortunately multiplied to three hundred & thirty
three'.134 In contrast with this one-off commission for a friend, the consider-
able expense and effort that Townley incurred in making himself and
his house at Park Street respectable (to cite Jenkins' letter again) afforded
this excluded Catholic a privileged role in London society as a collector
and consultant in the fine arts. From the late 1770s, hundreds of British and
foreign visitors came to Park Street to view the marbles. Townley's informed
opinion was canvassed by fellow collectors, including Henry Blundell and
Colonel Campbell, aristocratic patrons like the Duke of Bedford and their
architects and sculptors, Henry Holland and Joseph Nollekens.
Since this narrative seeks to reinstate the heterogeneity of the contents of
the late 18th-century sculpture collection, with its ancient and modern
marbles, original productions and restored pieces, mass-produced copies in
plaster and marble, and portrait busts, so it is also necessary to reinstate the
diversity of their different modes of display: that is, in the English country
house or the urban townhouse; in the exterior or the interior landscape, or in
buildings in between, as in Mansel Talbot's orangery; in purpose-built galler-
ies like that at Newby Hall, or in exhibiting pieces throughout the existing or
remodelled interior as at Ince Blundell. Even within these categorizations,
there was and is room for manoeuvrability, as there was for the arrangement
and rearrangement of the sculptures they contained. The interiors of these
galleries had multiple points of reference, from the specific capital of an
ancient temple in Townley's dining room, to the more generic approximation
of ancient display spaces like imperial baths and villas from where the
sculptures had been disinterred and which the sculptural spaces of the con-
temporary Pio-Clementino Museum sought to evoke. 'To please ye world in
general is impossible in ones pursuits; nine out often people w. see no beauty
or merit in that truly fine thing', Blundell wrote to Townley in 1787.135 In the
next and final chapter, we shall see how Townley codified which ancient
sculptures were fine things and which were better discarded in the exhaustive
inventories he compiled of his own collection and those of his contemporaries
in Britain. In so doing, we shall also see how he pre-empted the laborious
cataloguing of these collections a century later by Adolf Michaelis.
134
22 September [1781?]. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds, WYL109/addnl/3b/74.
135
2 January 1787. TY7/1316.
7
'Casting a lustful eye':

Charles Townley as collector and cataloguer
Like all Professors much depends on the taste or Pallet of the Composer.
Thomas Jenkins to Sir George Strickland, 15 June 17821
As previously discussed in the Introduction, when Lord Lansdowne wanted to

dispose of his duplicate sculpture of a Wounded Amazon (figure 1), his dealer
Gavin Hamilton initially hoped that she might be a desirable acquisition for
one of his other British clients. George Grenville, Thomas Mansel Talbot, and
James Hugh Smith Barry were variously offered and rejected the opportunity
to acquire the unwanted Amazon, with Charles Townley canvassing Mansel
Talbot at Hamilton's explicit request. These potential purchasers for Lans-
downe's Amazon are testimony to the social networks of communication and
exchange between collectors of marbles in Britain, networks often orches-
trated by the dealers Gavin Hamilton and Thomas Jenkins in their corres-
pondence from Rome. Using material in the Townley Archive, this chapter
surveys similar negotiations in Townley's acquisition of a bust of Antinous
from the Duke of Dorset. This leads, via the London workshop of the sculptor
Joseph Nollekens, into a discussion of the multiple but hitherto underwritten
role of British sculptors in imported collections of ancient marbles in the
second half of the 18th century, as producers of original works, as restorers of
excavated specimens, dealers and draughtsmen. The drawings Townley com-
missioned of marbles in Italian collections and those in his own collection at
Park Street introduce a cohort of artists in the urban centres of Rome and
London who were responsible for reproducing sculpture on paper. Townley's
museo cartaceo is identified as a descendant of that of the early 17th-century
Italian scholar and diplomat Cassiano dal Pozzo, which was acquired by King
George III in 1762. A number of sheets from Townley's paper museum have
recently been re-identified as deriving from that of dal Pozzo—providing a
tangible connection between the two collections. Having looked backwards at
some of the stratified traditions of collecting in two and three dimensions that
1
Strickland MSS.
234 'Casting a lustful eye
informed Townley, the chapter closes by reinstating him as both a collector

and cataloguer of ancient marbles in Britain—producing an unpublished
version of Michaelis' classic text almost a century before the professor's
'irksome, mosaic-like work' was published.2
The correspondence of Townley's dealers, Gavin Hamilton and Thomas
Jenkins, has been repeatedly referred to for its artful content and rhetorical
intent; and for its protracted descriptions of the excavation, restoration, and
viewing of superlative examples of ancient sculptures in an attempt to whet
Townley's (seemingly insatiable) appetite for sculpture. In addition, frag-
ments of this same correspondence read as letters of introduction to their
other British clients, who are usually members of the British aristocracy and
gentry. For example, in December 1770, Thomas Jenkins mentions John
Frederick Sackville, the 3rd Duke of Dorset, one of his customers then in
Rome as ca man after your [Townley's] own heart'.3 Eight months later,
Jenkins refers again to Dorset as a kindred spirit, whose acquaintance 'will
be equally agreeable to you'.4 In the summer of 1773, when Townley was in
Italy for the second time, his uncle, John Towneley, made a visit on his behalf
to Knole in Kent to collect a bust of Antinous that Dorset had exchanged with
Thomas Jenkins. From Knole, Towneley was re-directed to the London
workshop at 9 Mortimer Street of the sculptor Joseph Nollekens, who 'says
he was at Rome the time of your first excursion', Towneley wrote to his
nephew.5 Acting as his agent during Townley's prolonged absence in Italy in
the first half of the 1770s, his uncle's responsibilities included organizing the
arrival from Italy and dispersal of unwanted sculptures in the collection.
Describing himself as a 'bad Auctioneer in the puffing stile', he recounts in
July 1773 how William Weddell's patron and mentor, the Marquis of Rock-
ingham, had made several visits to view Townley's sculpture of the Satyr and
Apollo—an early purchase from Pietro Pacilli, and a variation of a group well
known in examples in the Ludovisi and Farnese collections in Rome and
Naples.6 The sculpture was subsequently sold by another collector, Lyde
Browne, to Lord Bessborough for £150 in a commission from Thomas
Jenkins.7 At the Bessborough sale in London in 1801, the Satyr and Apollo
were purchased by Lord Egremont, and remain at Petworth House in West
Sussex. Once installed in a collection in England, a sculpture (or in this case, a
2
3
TY7/304.
4
7 August 1771.TY7/308.
5
6 August 1773. TY7/815/1.
6
TY7/813. Vaughan, 'Some observations and reflections on the restoration of antique
sculpture', 197.
7
16 July 1773. TY7/813. 6 August 1773. TY7/815/1.
group) passed between different collectors via private negotiations, and

especially around the turn of the century through the commercial channels
of the burgeoning antiquities market in London.
The English sculptor Joseph Nollekens was indeed in Rome at the time of
Townley's first visit from 1767 to 1768, spending a total of nine years abroad,
and returning in 1770 to establish his workshop in London. For a sculptor like
Nollekens, Rome held the dual allure of professional practice in a city
crammed with the masterpieces of his craft and potential patronage from
British aristocrats.8 In other words, Rome offered a dizzy potation of artistic,
social, and economic opportunities, enabling artists to infiltrate the exclusive
company of aristocrats and gentlemen that was not so accessible to them at
home. Writing to Townley in 1775, Gavin Hamilton 'hoped that the Lord will
send Providence or as Nolikins used to say that Providence will send us a
Lord'.9 Yet the plurality of the sculptor's role in 18th-century collections of
sculpture—both ancient and modern—imported to Britain remains woefully
underwritten. Often the connection between patron and sculptor was forged
while on classic ground in Italy. This was certainly the case for Joseph Wilton,
whose aristocratic British patrons included Francis, the 10th Earl of Hunting-
don. 10 Wilton acted as cicerone, escorting Huntingdon around the Ufftzi
galleries in Florence in 1755 in object lessons that complemented those of
his tutor, Dr Antonio Cocchi, who was Keeper of the Grand-Ducal collections
and the former grand tour tutor of the Earl's father. 11 We have seen in
preceding chapters that portrait busts were a characteristic feature of the
marbles acquired in the course of a grand tour. Huntingdon commissioned
two classicizing busts from Joseph Wilton (plates 31 and 32) that materially
embodied the likenesses of tutor and pupil and perpetuated their pedagogical
relationship. Cocchi is sculpted bare-headed and bare-chested (plate 31), with
every lump and crease indicated on the surface of his sagging marble flesh as
he looks slightly to his right. 12 The veristic rendering of his aged flesh has been
related to his earlier training in Paris under the sculptor Jean-Baptiste
Pigalle.13 The socle for Cocchi's bust contains a medallion encircled by a
serpent biting its tail. The medallion is inscribed with an ancient Greek
rendering of the sitter's name, his age (60), the date (1755), and 'I go on
learning as I grow old', a statement attributed to Solon, the founder of
8
Howard, Antiquity Restored, 150. Kenworthy-Browne, 'Establishing a reputation', 1844-8
and 1930-1. Lord, 'Joseph Nollekens and Lord Yarborough', 915-19.
9
10 January 1775. TY7/576. See Coltman, "'Providence send us a lord"', 371-96.
10
Hodgkinson, 'Joseph Wilton and Doctor Cocchi', 73-80.
11 On Cocchi, see Fileti Mazza and Tomasello, Antonio Cocchi; Bocci Pacini, 'Antonio Cocchi
e il "Grand Tour"', 143-7.
12
Bilbey, British Sculpture, no. 217.
13
Baker, 'An Anglo-French sculptural friendship: Pigalle and Wilton', 222.
Athenian democracy by the Roman sources Cicero and Plutarch. The serpent
is an attribute of medicine, a symbol appropriate for Cocchi's profession of
physician, which also represents infinity or perseverance, so aligning the
sculpted representation of the snake with the sentiment of the inscription it
encircles.
In the companion bust of Huntingdon (plate 32), thought to have been
completed after Wilton returned to London and dated 1761, the mature
endurance of the naked Cocchi is contrasted with the youthful idealism of
his draped pupil. 14 In an alternative rendering of the sculptural conventions
of the classicizing tradition, Huntingdon is clothed in a fringed Roman
military-style cloak; his head with its short hair is angled to face off centre
to his left and slightly raised. The ancient Greek inscription translates as 'Live!
That is the total sum of all philosophies.' Each of the accompanying inscrip-
tions devised by Cocchi and discussed in correspondence with Huntingdon
invokes the passing of time appropriate to the contrasting representations of
youth and maturity. Being executed in marble, one of the most durable of all
sculptural media, also offered the youthful Huntingdon and his elderly tutor
another form of longevity in their portrait busts.
In addition to their commission and execution, we know about the display
of this pair of portrait busts of Cocchi and Huntingdon. According to a 1788
inventory of household goods and furniture at Huntingdon's property,
Donington Park in Leicestershire, they were installed in the drawing room
with another pair of busts, by the sculptor Simon Vierpyl, of Pythagoras and
Epicurus, which were also inscribed with mottoes in Greek.15 The foursome
were displayed on 'carved and painted Termes'. Additional marble busts by
Wilton of Oliver Cromwell and Peter the Great were in the Gothick Hall, with
one of Pan in the dining room. Plaster examples of Julius Caesar and
Augustus Caesar were in the stone entrance passage. From this inventory,
we see how a number of busts of ancients and moderns, executed in marble
and plaster, were displayed throughout the interior at Donington Park, with
examples being deliberately placed, paired, or grouped in order to juxtapose
or interpose various narrative readings. With these objects dispersed, and all
too often plaster versions broken and discarded, such readings are no longer
intelligible.
In the course of this narrative, we have encountered portrait busts in a more
diverse range of media—marble, terracotta, plaster, and a bronze—that were
commissioned by British travellers in Rome from the sculptor Christopher
Hewetson. Emigre British sculptors like Hewetson, Wilton, Vierpyl, and
14
Baker, ' "No cap or wig but a thin hair upon it"', esp. 70-2.
15
Huntington Library, HA Inventories box 3 (13).
Nollekens were involved in the consolidation of grand tour collections on a

number of lucrative levels, as producers of original works in various sculp-
tural genres, as copyists, restorers of ancient sculptures, and on occasion as
agents and dealers. As already discussed in Chapter 2, one of Nollekens' own
sculptural productions that exist in several versions, the Boy on a Dolphin
(figure 5), a copy of a Renaissance work, was acquired by Viscount Palmerston
along with examples of restored ancient sculptures and modern marble
furniture in Rome in 1764 (figure 3). While reinstating modern marbles
into the heterogeneous contents of the late 18th-century sculpture collection,
so it is simultaneously worth reinstating the manifold roles of contemporary
sculptors in the urban marketplaces of Rome and London.
Highly informative in this respect is the patronage of Nollekens by Thomas
Anson of Shugborough in Staffordshire during the sculptor's Roman sojourn.
During the period 1765-7, Nollekens was preoccupied, at least so his letters to
Anson insist, in assisting in the formation of a collection of ancient and
modern marbles.16 The sculptor's surviving correspondence shows him to
be acting on Anson's behalf in the acquisition of examples of restored ancient
sculptures from notable Italian collections like the Massimi and Barberini,
and from the Villa d'Este at Tivoli. His letters contain tantalizing references to
sculptures of Aesclapius and Adonis, a bas-relief of Titus, and Roman portrait
busts, whose purchase he was negotiating, and where necessary whose restor-
ations he was implementing. A group of Bacchus and a satyr, for example, is
described as being 'wel presarv'd and wants wery little Restors & will be soon
don'. Anson's collection was dispersed at auction in 1842, and except in a few
specific cases its former ancient contents remain elliptical. Michaelis men-
tions not Thomas Anson but his brother, Lord Anson, and then only in
passing as one of a posse of collectors whose modest antique acquisitions
were not distinctive. 17
Actually, Michaelis' critique was woefully inaccurate: Thomas Anson's
collection was highly distinctive in its acquisition of marble sculptures in
their ancient and modern manifestations, with restored originals, marble
copies, and plaster casts displayed throughout the house, the garden, and in
imitation antique structures in the garden designed by the architect James
'Athenian' Stuart. Stuart's first garden building at Shugborough was an
orangery, or greenhouse, that contained examples of ancient and modern
sculptures, so the accounts of visitors confirm. Begun in 1756, it precedes the
examples at Margam, Ince, and Woburn that were discussed in the previous
16
Staffordshire Record Office, Anson MSS, D615/P(S)/1/6/1-6. This section is based on
Coltman, 'Thomas Anson's sculpture collection at Shugborough', 35-56.
17
chapter.18 In July 1765, a year after the orangery was completed, Nollekens
purchased plaster casts of the Furietti Centaurs, a pair of half-man, half-horse
sculptures whose originals were executed in black marble. Just a month
before, the ancient sculptures had been bought by the Pope from the Furietti
family and placed in the Capitoline Museum. Their transference from a
private collection saw the sculptures cast for the first time. 'There was others
who agred to go to the same price [one hundred crowns] & Casts that never
was seen in England for both the raryty and fineness I thought you would not
be against it', Nollekens wrote to his patron. As we have seen with reference to
the casts of the Newby Venus and Brutus which Jenkins was to present to
Thomas Robinson, they had a cultural cachet in the 18th century as aesthetic
objects, in addition to their formative part in the sculptural processes of
production and reproduction. Anson also commissioned from Nollekens a
marble copy of the ancient sculpture of Castor and Pollux (figure 68). The
original was in the Spanish royal palace at San Ildefonso near Madrid, so
Nollekens would have worked from a cast in Rome, making Anson's group,
strictly speaking, a copy of a copy. In a letter dated October 1765, the work has
progressed to the point that the sculptor intends to send a cast for Anson's
approbation. ( I have worked for this 7 months continuly without loss of time
upon the marble', he insists (too much). The group was finally dispatched to
the port of Livorno two years later. Like the ancient marbles carefully pack-
aged for export by Jenkins and Hamilton, and discussed in Chapter 4,
Nollekens took every precaution to ensure the safe passage of a group he
hoped would 'do some credit, after haveing the Honor of being seen in your
[Anson's] Collection'. The sculptor writes of going to the 'extraordinary
Expence of at least ten Crowns', using screws to secure the box rather than
nails 'for fear the blows of Hammers might shake it', then covering the box
with canvas and stuffing its empty spaces with straw. By March 1768, Nolle-
kens articulates his hope that the group has arrived and angles for new
commissions through Anson's recommendation: 'a wourd of yours to any
Gentliman of your Acquaintance coming out this way [Rome] will do me
honour'.
When Townley's uncle visited Nollekens' London workshop in August 1773
to collect the bust of Antinous, he facilitated an introduction between sculp-
tor and collector that was to prove mutually beneficial. We saw in Chapter 3
that Nollekens was responsible for the re-restoration of the arms of Townley's
sculpture of a small Venus (plate 3). Other marbles spared the vagaries
of piracy and politics but still broken in transit must have been similarly
18
A. Marr, 'Garden buildings', in Weber Soros, James 'Athenian Stuart, 327-8.
Figure 68. Joseph Nollekens, Castor and Pollux, 1767.
re-restored by him. In 1792, when Nollekens was selling a collection of

marbles on behalf of Charles James Fox, negotiations with Townley reveal
him as a potential purchaser. 19 Nollekens also 'chopped out a head' (to use
contemporary parlance) of Townley (figure 69).20 This posthumous marble
19
TY7/2182-2187.
20
Smith, Nollekens and his Times, I. 52, note, citing Dr Johnson. The bust was sold at
Christie's, 6 December 2007, lot 95. I am grateful to Tony Kitto for this latter reference.
Figure 69. Joseph Nollekens, marble herm bust of Charles Townley, 1807.
bust, signed and dated 1807, is one of three known versions.21 It shows far
more verisimilitude in the execution of Townley's warts, his thin lips, and
bushy eyebrows than Hewetson's bewigged youthful portrait bust of 1769
(figure 45). With his short, dishevelled hair and naked herm base (rather than
a tapering, clothed breastplate as in figure 45), Townley's posthumous bust by
Nollekens is emphatically executed in the antique mode—providing another
occasion, in addition to Zoffany's canvas (plate 21), when the collector grows
to resemble his antique portrait busts.22 The inscription at the foot of the base
in ancient Greek characters has been translated as c to know the past enables a
person to understand correctly the present'—an apt 18th-century maxim for
the classicizing tradition.
Nollekens is further represented in the Townley collection as draughtsman.
Some 3,000 mostly uncatalogued drawings formerly in Townley's possession
are now housed in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities in the
British Museum. 23 About a quarter are Old Master drawings of the 16th and
17th centuries, while the majority are of the 18th century. Of this latter
category, examples have been discussed in Chapter 2 as so-called negotiation
drawings, depicting usually two complementary views—from the front and in
three-quarter profile—of potential acquisitions like the sphinx (figure 25a
and b), Endymion (figure 26), and the Negroni caryatid (figure 27). These
drawings, it was argued, functioned as tools in the negotiations that were
conducted on paper between dealer and collector based in Rome and London
respectively. None of them is signed, although they appear to have been
executed by a coterie of artists in Rome, including Friedrich Anders in the
1770s, and a decade later Vincenzo Dolcibene. Notwithstanding the repeated
complaint of dealers, that the drawings were woefully deficient in transmit-
ting the beauties of the original sculpture, they also accrued an aesthetic
dimension as works of art in their own right. Gavin Hamilton's sketch of
the sculpture of Diomedes (figure 31) further demonstrates how the drawings
that dealers supplied to Townley were not confined to would-be desiderata for
his own collection, as they included those in collections in Italy and specimens
from other private collections in Britain and abroad. Referring to a sculpture
of Pan wearing a goatskin and accompanied by a dog, T shall soon send Mr.
Townly a drawing of it which you may see at any time', Hamilton wrote to
Lansdowne in March 1793.24 Henry Blundell's sculpture of a hermaphrodite
is shown in one such drawing prior to her 'castration' into a sleeping Venus
21
The two other versions, formerly belonging to Richard Payne Knight and John Towneley,
are now in the BM and catalogued by Dawson, Portrait Sculpture, nos. 82 and 83.
22 Paulson, Emblem and Expression, 153.
23
Ashby, 'Thomas Jenkins in Rome', Appendix I, 500-3, for the tentative beginnings of a
catalogue.
24
10 March 1793. The Celebrated Collection, 105, letter xliv.
(figure 40); the Comte d'Orsay's Lysimachus cum Achilles, in another (figure
33). A third drawing of a sculpture of a female figure with diaphanous layers
of drapery exposing her shapely legs and holding a faun under her left arm
can now be identified as George Strickland's statue of Juno formerly at
Boynton Hall (figure 47) and noted by Michaelis for its delicate workman-
ship. Annotations by Townley sometimes assist in the elusive art that is the
identification of a sculpture—its sculptural subject, provenance, and collec-
tion. Hence a head of a term adorned with a wreath of ivy is identified by
Townley as 'Bachus at Ampthill Park'; a colossal Hercules bought by Thomas
Mansel Talbot 'found in ye Campo Vaccino in 1771 ...near the temple of
Romulus and Rhemus'. At least three drawings represent ancient sculptures in
Thomas Anson's collection at Shugborough—a boy with a goose 'about 3 feet
high', a Thetis, and a Neptune (figure 70). These unsigned drawings of the
sculptures at Shugborough formerly in Townley's possession may be attrib-
uted to Joseph Nollekens.
The reproduction on paper of masterpieces of classical sculpture or casts
thereof had long formed the bedrock of artists' aesthetic education. For British
artists continuing that education on the (often not so) 'grand' tour in Italy, this
mode of artistic production potentially represented a lucrative source of income.
Hence James Northcote inveighed in a letter of 1778 against those 'cursed
antiquaries' at Rome who controlled the systems of patronage and those 'one
or two miserable wretches who are sycophants to them' who provided all the
reproductions of sculpture on paper for the English nobility at reduced prices.25
Though the antiquaries and their toadies who dominated the market in the
production of these specialized types of drawings are not identified by name,
Thomas Jenkins and his preferred draughtsman in the 1770s, Friedrich Anders,
are plausible targets. As early as 1757, Jenkins wrote from Rome to one of his
British clients of being glad to find 'the love of antiquities so much increased
amongst our gentleman in England, as I do not doubt but in time our arts, that
depend on drawing, will be very much benefited by it, it being evident that the
superior excellence of the professors in painting and sculpture, that have flour-
ished in this country, has been principally owing to the advantage of having the
antique to form themselves upon'.26 When in Italy, Townley commissioned
artists to make drawings of prized examples of classical sculptures, later extend-
ing this branch of artistic patronage to the reproduction of marbles in his own
collection. Nollekens' student and later his embittered biographer, J. T. Smith,
remembered being one of many Royal Academy students to make drawings of
Townley's sculptures for the collector's portfolios.27 The townhouse at 7 Park
25
18 April 1778. Quoted by MacAndrew, 'A group of Batoni drawings at Eton College', 133.
26
3 December 1757. Jenkins to Henry Beckingham. HMC 15th Report, Appendix, part I.
Manuscripts of the Earl of Dartmouth (London, 1896), III. 171.
27
Smith, Nollekens and his Times, I. 261.
Figure 70. Sketch of the Neptune at Shugbo rough, here attributed to Joseph Nollekens.
Street, Westminster became an unofficial counterpoint to the English arts

establishment that was the Royal Academy: as an academy of ancient sculpture,
much as Sir John Soane's London house-museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields would
become an academy of architecture in the early 19th century.28
The roll call of artists responsible for delineating Townley's sculptures
includes the Royal Academicians Joseph Nollekens, Johann Zoffany, and
Richard Cosway. Zoffany's celebrated conversation piece depicting members
of Townley's mute marble family (plate 21) and Cosway's lesser known
painting that preceded it by a decade (plate 18) have been discussed in
Chapter 5. Their contemporary, the draughtsman John Brown, demonstrates
Townley employing a British artist in London whom he had previously
commissioned to make drawings when artist and patron were in Italy.29 In
1772, Brown accompanied Townley and his travelling companion William
Young on a tour of Naples, after which Young and Brown travelled on to Sicily
and Malta. 'Shall I paint you a Sicilian Prospect?—draw the whole into one
ideal Sketch?' wrote Young in a letter to a lady in his published Journal of a
Summer's Excursion, employing a familiar rhetorical trope in travel literature,
when he had an artist on hand to paint prospects and draw such sketches.30
An artist, it seems, was an indispensable part of the adventurous tourist's
luggage—de rigueur for delineating the picturesque sights and antiquarian
sites visited en route. During Townley's first grand tour in the spring of 1768,
his diary records an excursion to the Doric temples at Paestum where
'Monsieur [Jacques] Volaire drew a view in perspective of the three temples
in flank. Signor [Vincenzo] Brenna and self took measures of the largest
temple and the middlemost, in the drawings of which it will be explained.'31
The topographical views produced by Volaire and Brown represent one
typology of grand tour drawings commissioned and collected by British
patrons; architectural sections, elevations, and details of the sort worked up
by Brenna (as in figure 63, the column capital from Terracina) constitute
another; while imitations of classical sculpture make a third. 32 John Brown
wrote to Townley on his return to London to reignite their acquaintance,
informing him that he had been forced to sell to another gentleman the
28
Soane was appointed Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy in 1806. On his
collections as an academy for his articled pupils, see M. Richardson, 'Learning in the Soane
Office', in Bingham, The Education of the Architect, 15-21 and Bingham, 'Architecture at the
Royal Academy Schools, 1768 to 1836', 5-14.
29
On Brown, see Gray, 'John Brown, the Draftsman', 310-15; Ottani Cavina, 'Inglesi in Italia
nel secolo XVIII', 59-81.
30
Young, Journal of a Summer's Excursion, 138.
31
25 March 1768. TY1/3.
32
Wilton and Bignamini, Grand Tour, no. 185. Vaughan, 'Vincenzo Brenna Romanus: Archi-
tectus et Pictor\ 37-41.
finished drawings of some of the antique heads that he had made for Townley
in Rome, on account of his 'distress'd situation at the time'.33 The longevity of
Townley's acquaintance with Brown provides evidence of the possibilities of
renewed patronage, once back home in Britain, which the grand tour offered
for members of the professional classes.
Brown subsequently produced a drawing of Townley's celebrated bust of
Homer. Such was the regard for Brown's reproduction that when Zoffany's
portrait of the collection (plate 21) came to be engraved in August 1802, an
entry in Townley's diary records how Zoffany agreed that the engraver should
alter his profile of the Homer elevated on the pedestal immediately behind
Townley to Brown's three-quarter view.34 Brown's drawing may be further
associated with a print of Homer that Townley distributed among his friends
in 1786. One of the recipients, Richard Payne Knight, judged the print 'excel-
lent—indeed much more so than I could have supposed any of our Artists
capable of producing. It gives one a perfect Idea of the original, tis the first
engraved Head of the old Bard that looks like a great Poet instead of a blind
ballad singer.'35 What we are dealing with here goes beyond the copying of
examples of Townley's sculptures in one-off drawings by various British artists
including John Brown, to their reproduction and distribution in the form of
engravings. This process was not always orchestrated by Townley exercising the
privilege of possession. In 1798, his former travelling companion William Young
wrote asking to borrow the small plate of Townley's bust of Homer by Mariano
Bovi. The plate was to be engraved as a frontispiece to an edition of Homer's
Iliad being privately published by the patronage of the Grenville family in a
limited edition of 100 copies.36 The entire print run had apparently been sold
prior to publication by subscription at a cost of 10 guineas a volume.37 Townley
later revealed his privileged rates among artists in the urban market for draw-
ings, explaining in a letter to Henry Blundell that while he paid 16 guineas for a
small print of the head of his Homer, Lady Grenville paid almost double at 30
guineas for another engraving of the same bust that she commissioned for the
aforementioned edition of Homer's Iliad.38
33 TY7/1515. 17 March 1770. The date must be incorrect as Brown returned to England in
1780.
34
21 August 1802. TY1/19. This projected engraving never appeared. The painting was later
engraved by W. H. Worthington and published in 1833 by Robert Wetten, with the bust of
Homer in profile as it is in the painting.
35
TY7/2092.
36
Townley's bust of Pericles was drawn by Bovi and engraved by Bartolozzi for publication in
volume I of Athenian Letters: or, the epistolary correspondence of an agent of the King of Persia
residing at Athens during the Peloponnesian War (London, 1798).
37
29 April 1798. TY7/1179.
38
While the majority of artists responsible for these drawings remain shad-
owy presences, the written evidence surrounding the social and cultural
significance of sculpture on paper is more forthcoming. The information in
question is communicated by Townley in letters written at the turn of the
century, when he was acting in a consultative capacity for Henry Blundell,
who had resolved to publish a catalogue of his collection illustrated with
engravings of the sculptures. Much about the print culture of this enterprise
remains sketchy, but a number of points are worth reiterating, unlike the
acrimonious relationship between Townley and Blundell, which steadily dis-
integrated as they disagreed over virtually every aspect of the catalogue. Prior
to their hostile exchange of conflicting ideas concerning the publication,
Blundell and Townley had, it would seem, regularly exchanged drawings of
sculptures for sale in the Roman marketplace, or of recent acquisitions to
their collections, either on a temporary basis or permanent loan. In March
1787, for instance, Blundell writes of having placed a drawing of Thomas
Jenkins' caryatid that he had received from Townley along with other draw-
ings 'in my private study'.39 Later these drawings 'tack'd round my bedroom
closet and gathered dust' were transferred into a book.40 In return for the
drawing of the caryatid, Blundell supplied Townley with a sketch of his
Minerva 'w.h for ye fine character & elegant simplicity, I think is a desirable
figure, tho ye drawing dos not do it justice'.
Townley was offered first refusal of the statue of Minerva (figure 71) by
Gavin Hamilton in November 1784, when the dealer Giovanni Volpato had
bought her from the Villa Lanti, the same Roman provenance as the colossal
marble vase with Dionysiac heads (figure 2). Hamilton ranked the Minerva in
a letter to Townley as being (of very good sculptur tho not of the class of that
at Villa Albani or what belongs to Lord Shelburne'.41 With its head intact and
only minor restorations required, including the point of the helmet and the
missing toes, Hamilton reckoned the sculpture to be worth the £200 that
Volpato wanted. Following Townley's rejection, Hamilton sold the Minerva to
Jenkins, who tentatively offered her for sale to Townley, aware that this was
not their first introduction. 42 By January 1786 Jenkins informed Townley that
the Minerva he had twice refused to purchase was earmarked for Henry
Blundell.43 Ironically one of the most prized ancient marbles in Blundell's
collection, the Minerva was only there as a result of Townley's repeated
refusal. 'I don't apprehend it w. be an object of y.r attention, otherwise it
39
5 March 1787. TY7/1317.
40
10 February 1799. TY15/11/1.
41
27 November 1784. TY7/664.
42
9 April 1785. TY7/425.
43
TY7/431.
Figure 71. 'In very uncommon freshness' (Jenkins): Henry Blundell's statue of
Minerva from the Villa Lanti. See figure 16 for multiple, small-scale views of the
sculpture as photographed by Bernard Ashmole.
sh.d have been much at your service', Blundell wrote to Townley in 1791,
referring on this occasion to his colossal statue of Theseus (figure 72).44
Blundell enclosed a sketch of the sculpture of Theseus for Townley's perusal,
proceeding to ask whether a cast of it then in Rome might form an acceptable
present for the Royal Academy's collection. Drawing from casts formed part
of the pedagogical curriculum of the national training centre for arts that was
the Royal Academy in London. 45 Through private donations of imported
sculptures, collectors like Blundell and Townley contributed to the promotion
of a national school of artists groomed in an 'indigenous' artistic tradition.
In a letter to Townley dated 16 January 1779, Jenkins suggested that
William Weddell might wish to see the sketches of the sculptures of the
sphinx and Juno as potential acquisitions to complete his collection at
Newby.46 Eight years later, Blundell asked Townley if when next in London
he might 'look over yr drawings of ancient marbles when you can find a
leisure hour'.47 The negotiation drawings that Townley received from his
dealers in Rome, and those he collected and commissioned for his portfolios,
constitute a paper museum of antiquities on the lines of that collected in the
first half of the 17th century in Rome by Cassiano dal Pozzo. The Italian
scholar and diplomat is said to have employed more than 30 different artists,
including Nicolas Poussin and Pietro da Cortona, to make drawings after the
antique for his illustrated encyclopaedia, consisting of more than 7,000
watercolours, sketches, and prints of works of art, archaeology, ornithology,
zoology, and botanical and geological specimens.48 This exhaustive visual
archive was acquired with dal Pozzo's library in 1714 by Pope Clement XI
for 4,000 scudi, later passing to his nephew, Cardinal Alessandro Albani. In
1762 Albani sold his voluminous collection of prints and drawings, contained
in about 200 folio volumes, including dal Pozzo's museo cartaceo, to King
George III for 14,000 scudi.49 Notices published in the London Chronicle prior
to its arrival in England in 1763 hailed the British King as the 'Master of the
best collection of Drawings in the World', while the Public Advertiser an-
nounced that tickets would be given to members of the nobility and gentry to
admit them to see it at Buckingham Palace.50 After its arrival, the bulk of the
collection was deposited in the Royal Library at Windsor, where the librarian,
44 45
18 January 1791. TY7/1322. Hoock, The Kings Artists, 54-5.
46 47
TY7/385. 2 January 1787. TY7/1316.
48
See Turner, 'Some of the copyists after the antique employed by Cassiano', 27.
49
Fleming, 'Cardinal Albani's drawings at Windsor', 164-9; McBurney, 'The "fortuna" of
Cassiano dal Pozzo's Paper Museum', 261-6.
50
Cited in McBurney, 'History and contents of the dal Pozzo collection in the Royal Library',
76-7.
Figure 72. 'Fine symmetry of human body (Blundell): engraving of Henry Blundell''
Theseus.
250 'Casting a lustful eye'
Richard Dalton, reorganized the volumes of the museo cartaceo by subject

matter, a process which involved reordering its contents, trimming the draw-
ings, and remounting them on 18th-century paper. Ground-breaking re-
search has established the existing traditions of drawing from the antique
that precede dal Pozzo's paper museum. 51 In 1654, some three years before he
died, he wrote how in forming this extraordinary paper museum he had
hoped to imitate that of the famous Neapolitan antiquary, painter, and
architect, Pirro Ligorio. Dal Pozzo acquired a number of drawings, mainly
of inscriptions, that were copied from Ligorio's 16th-century manuscripts and
works. In Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, Michaelis lauded dal Pozzo's
museo cartaceo as being 'unsurpassed in its way as a source of archaeological
knowledge' in preserving on paper examples of ancient art 'which have since
been destroyed or lost to sight'.52
Looking forwards to the 18th century from the early 17th century, rather
than backwards from the 19th, we may conceptualize dal Pozzo's paper
museum as a historical precedent for that of Charles Townley. While the
former was a virtual paper museum, consisting of objects that the collector
did not possess, Townley's version was intimately interrelated to the objects in
his collection in the form of reproductions, desiderata, and comparanda.53
There was, moreover, a tangible connection between the two paper museums.
Some 89 sheets probably acquired by Townley in 1804 from Richard Dalton's
estate have recently been reassigned to dal Pozzo's museo cartaceo.54 They
include drawings of sculptures formerly in Townley's collection and now in
the British Museum. A drawing of one end of a sarcophagus, representing a
drunken Pan being carried by a satyr and two cupids, has been identified as
deriving from a Renaissance sketchbook executed by an anonymous northern
Italian artist and dated c. 1500.55 Townley bought the sarcophagus in 1786 from
Thomas Jenkins, who acquired it with a cache of sculptures, including the
caryatid (figure 28), the Tremalchio relief (plate 5), and Bernini's Neptune and
Triton (figure 36) from the Villa Negroni collection. The drawing provides
testimony of the visibility of this ancient sculpture in Rome around 300 years
before Townley acquired it. This paper trail, or paper chase, reminds us of the
palimpsest of ancient objects prior to their reappearance in 18th-century
histories of collecting. Sometimes the trail is obfuscated by later interventions,
as in a drawing now in Florence of the Lanti vase (figure 2) attributed to
51
Claridge and Jenkins, 'Cassiano and the tradition of drawing from the antique', 13-26.
52
53
Meijers, 'The paper museum as a genre', 20-53.
54
Jenkins, 'The "Mutilated Priest"', 543-9; Jenkins, 'Newly discovered drawings from the'
Museo Cartaceo', 131-6; Meijers, 'The paper museum as a genre', 20-53.
55
Rubinstein, 'A drawing of a Bacchic sarcophagus', 66-78.
Vincenzo Leonardi (1590-1646) which was incorrectly annotated in the 19th

century as being in the 'Giardino Lancellotti Roma'.56 A pen and ink drawing
of a bronze statuette of a triple-bodied Hecate, formerly in the Chigi collec-
tion and now in the Palazzo dei Conservatori in Rome, has also been
attributed to Leonardi. 57 Townley possessed both the early 17th-century
drawing of the statuette and an ancient marble sculpture of the same subject
from the Palazzo Giustiniani, which was in turn reproduced in a drawing by
Richard Cosway.
In much the same way that fellow collectors like Henry Blundell requested
access to Townley's paper museum as a form of visual archive of sculptures, so
from 1790 Townley was himself consulted as an authority in the delineation of
sculpture on paper, recommending William Skelton as an engraver for
Richard Worsley's sculptural pairing of Bacchus and Acratus (figure 73). c lt
is so well restored that it surpasses my warmest expectations, & makes me
prefer Sculpture to the sister arts. I shall engrave it, & hope to present you
with an impression', Worsley wrote to Townley in 1789.58 The following year
he presented Townley with a proof impression, asking that if he were to see
either Skelton or the gem engraver, Nathaniel Marchant, would he ask for the
drawing of the head of Bacchus to be reduced and 'to be made a little softer &
more Greek in the finishing'.59 Worsley's emphatic Greek classification is on
account of his having found the head of Bacchus wreathed with grapes and ivy
among some ruins in the middle of Athens. This information conveyed to
Townley confirms Michaelis' prognosis that the head and neck of the Bacchus,
though antique, are too small and did not originally belong to the body.60
Michaelis went so far as to suggest that the intimate pairing was in fact an
erroneous marriage; the winged Genius with his cup gazing up at Bacchus was
a doctored sculpture of a satyr.
'There is a cunning in all artists and artificers, to draw people into expence,
as its their interest to do it', Henry Blundell complained in a letter to Townley
dated 1799.61 Blundell had previously compared the prints of his marbles that
had been engraved by William Skelton—the naked male sculptures like
Bacchus and Jupiter reproduced with the addition of fig leaves for the sake
of propriety—with drawings of his sculptures executed by an anonymous
56
Solinas, / Segreti di un Collezionista, no. 157. Solinas' account of 'II Museo Cartaceo: La
storia antica', 121-68 is extremely useful.
57
Claridge and Jenkins, The Paper Museum of Cassiano dal Pozzo, no. 30.
58
TY7/2040.
59
20 June 1790. TY7/2048. Marchant knew Townley by 1773 and copied four sculptures from
his collection, suggests Seidmann, 'Nathaniel Marchant', 1-105.
60
61
6 December 1799. TY15/11/1. See too 8 April 1800.
Figure 73. 'Truly Greek' (Worsley): Bacchus and Acratus from Richard Worsley's
collection engraved by W Skelton from a drawing by Vincenzo Dolcibene For two
views of the group in the sculpture gallery at Brocklesby, see figure lOa and b
artist in Rome, and found the former wanting in both price and finish. 6
Townley's response to the cheapness of the Roman prints was one of market
forces: citing the shoes he bought in Rome for 3 or 4 shillings as costing 10 or
12 shillings in London. 63 His draft reply to Blundell proceeds to invoke a
metropolitan superiority in matters of taste, by which the prints by Skelton
'are allowed by artists and others of experience in London to shew better tool-
work and better taste', in contrast to the heaviness and darkness in the Roman
prints commended by those judges at Ince. Notwithstanding the deficiency of
the Italian-made drawings, Townley pronounces them superior to any that
might be commissioned from local Liverpool artists.64 In addition to this
critical appraisal of the reproductive market, between the urban centres of
Rome and London and between metropolitan London and provincial Liver-
pool, one of Townley's letters also sheds light on the technical process of
reproduction, where he describes some of Blundell's Italian drawings as being
in a 'very defaced state' which necessitated their being retouched by a
draughtsman prior to engraving. As a compromise, Townley recommended
Henry Howard to Blundell as a draughtsman 'who has been at Rome' from
1791 to 1794 and whom he recently employed for a reasonable rate on behalf
of the Society of Dilettanti to make drawings 'most highly approved of of
some of the marbles at Petworth in West Sussex.65 Following his election to
the Society of Dilettanti in 1793, Townley was responsible for supervising the
engraving of marbles for a work published after his death as Specimens of
antient sculpture... selected from different collections in Great Britain by the
Society of Dilettanti (London, 1809-1835), in 2 volumes.66
In Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (Cambridge, 1882), Adolf Michaelis
eulogizes on the foundation of the Society of Dilettanti in London in 1734 as
follows:
Who, that has passed some time in Italy, but must have discovered by experience that the
deep artistic impressions there received form an invisible but firm bond by which he feels
himself united to all those who have enjoyed a similar happiness and brought home
similar recollections? Nay, the whole band of those who in successive ages have made for
art's sake the pilgrimage to Rome, form in some sort a spiritual community, tacitly knit
together by a common devotion to the beautiful. Participation in such feelings more
easily draws together people who are personally unknown to each other.67
62
24 March 1799. TY15/11/1.
63
64
11 April 1800. TY15/16.
65
11 April 1800. TY15/16.
66
See Ballantyne, 'Specimens of Antient Sculpture, 550-65 and Redford, Dilettanti, 143-71.
67
This extraordinary exegesis tells us little about the events it purports to

describe—the foundation of the Society of Dilettanti—and offers in its place
a compelling account of Victorian aestheticism: of the doctrine of travel for
art's sake; of a religious fraternity of like-minded souls on a spiritual pilgrim-
age to Rome. Like other parts of Michaelis' introduction (see Chapter 1), this
passage mythologizes the 'Golden Age of Classic Dilettantism', which is itself
an idealized appellation for the 18th century coined by Michaelis. Less his-
toriography and more autobiography, it articulates Michaelis' own desire for
an essential community, a scholastic court serving the movement of the new
aesthetics.68 Thomas Jenkins may have envisaged a euphoric fraternity of
artistic devotees when he admonished Townley 'if you do not go & visit
Pithagoras and its worthy possessor [the Duke of Dorset] at Nole, I shall say
you are become lukewarm which I think is almost impossible', but the outcome
of Townley's visits to Knole and Newby Hall was far from convivial.69 Instead
of being 'tacitly knit together by a common devotion to the beautiful', to quote
Michaelis again, Townley's response to viewing these collections was one of
possessive competition. Jenkins was quick to answer charges of misconduct on
his part towards Townley by favouring the commissions of rival collectors,
Weddell and Dorset. In a letter of 19 October 1774, he takes Townley back a
decade to 1764, when Weddell's collection was in his possession and where it
remained until 1765. Jenkins writes of that period, 'Rome was full of travellers
of the first rank & fortune, amongst them my Lord & Lady Spencer, who ware
particularly anzious for purchasing something fine.'70 When the Duke of
Dorset was in Rome in 1770-1, Townley was by then a customer of Jenkins,
but his commission, as Jenkins reminds him, was limited, which worked in
Dorset's favour when 'things fell in all at once whilst the Duke was here'.
Jenkins' letter insists (as it would) that the consolidation of Weddell's and
Dorset's collections were the random products of unpredictable market forces
rather than the outcome of preferential treatment, reminding Townley that
The safe arrival of your last Cargo will be such an addition to the Collection at
Whitehall, that I flatter myself, it will if not cure you of your Crop Sickness, at least
then your stomach. I do not mean by this to express that I am sorry that Knole &
Newby have warmd you, but desire only, that you will judge of your wife as you did of
your Mistress, which I am sensible is no easy task, but as far as possible suppose you
ware in possession of the collection of Knole or Newby, and not of that at Whitehall,
would you not cast a lustful eye after them. 71
68
Michaelis implicitly places himself as one of the 'band' who in 'successive ages' have made
the pilgrimage to Rome, so contriving an erroneous continuity between the propertied, insured
grand tourists of the 18th century and the prefessional archaeological specialist of the 19th.
69
21 May 1774. TY7/333.
70 71
TY7/339/1. 27 August 1774. TY7/336.
For the bachelor Townley, describing the collection as his wife was a particu-
larly appropriate metaphor—and one which Jenkins frequently used, espe-
cially when Townley's letters had 'been wrote at a time when other mens Wifes
run in your Head, a Crime in which even the Good david & Solomon tho after
Gods own Heart were not free from, but I flatter my self you will Gain your
ends without murdering Uriah, but you may worship the Idols as much as
you please'.72
It is in this context of competitive rivalry for marble possessions, or lusting
after other men's wives as Jenkins would have it, that we are able to begin to
make sense of a series of manuscript catalogues in the Townley Archive. These
catalogues contain inventories of the ancient marbles in British collections
that Townley started to compile in the 1770s and that he copied and corrected
in manuscript form. 73 A number of the collections whose ancient contents are
listed are by now familiar to us as they were to Michaelis in the 1870s, when he
catalogued them alphabetically by collection and systematically by their
location in the interior, like that of Worsley at Appuldurcombe (later at
Brocklesby Park), Palmerston at Broadlands, Blundell at Ince, the Duke of
Dorset at Knole, Lansdowne at Lansdowne House, Smith Barry at Marbury
Hall, Mansel Talbot at Margam, Weddell at Newby, and Egremont at Pet-
worth. Townley included his own marbles at 7 Park Street, which were
omitted by Michaelis, being by then secured for the public and posterity in
what he saw as the unrivalled collections of the British Museum. Other
marbles inventoried by Townley were dispersed during his lifetime: like
those of Lyde Browne at Wimbledon, which was sold in part to the Empress
of Russia in 1785; and Lord Bessborough's collection, formerly at Roehamp-
ton in Surrey, which was auctioned in London in 1801. Townley catalogued
Browne's collection and later valued it after it had been sold to Russia for £938—
£70 more than Joseph Nollekens' estimate.74 A brief list of the Bessborough
marbles and paintings in his hall, library, and bedroom, written in French and
in a hand other than Townley's, survives among his papers. Less well known
collections were inventoried by Townley and subsequently dispersed at auc-
tions which he attended, including Mr Beaumont's in 1776, Chase Price's in
1778, Mr Jennings' in 1778 and 1779, and Lord Vere's, formerly at Hanworth,
in 1798.75 Townley calculated that Beaumont's 22 marble lots sold for a total
72
19 October 1774. TY7/339. See also 6 June 1775, TY7/346: 'I am very glad you like Mr.
Browns Bust of L. Verus so much, but I think you are a little inclined to fornication in virtu, and
apt to see other peoples wifes with the eye of a Mistress.'
73
The papers are catalogued as TY15/1 to TY15/10.
74
2 June 1788. TY7/1503/2. Nollekens valued the statue of Caesar at £200, £70 less than
Townley.
75
Angelicoussis, 'Henry Constantine Jennings', 215-23.
256 'Casting a lustful eye'
of £216.6.6, representing a loss from their original cost of £188.3.6; he, Lyde
Browne, and Ladbrooke are recorded as the principal buyers. In a similar vein,
the sale of Chase Price's marbles fetched almost £300 less than what they cost
him to buy. The marbles belonging to the Duke of Montague at Privy Garden,
Westminster and Price Campbell, which Townley listed in 1786 and 1788, are
latterly obscure. While Ince Blundell is the largest collection, with its hun-
dreds of ancient specimens, Henry Hoare's marbles at Stourhead are in
diametric opposition—amounting to £Jimo or Ceres antique/Hercules Rhys-
brack/Some busts & heads in the house'. A memorandum dated 1799 records
Joseph Nollekens' opinion of the six best marbles of Brand Hollis' at the Hyde
in Essex as collected by the late Thomas Hollis: heads of Domitian, Minerva
and a boar, a bust of Marcus Aurelius, and two sarcophagi.76 Townley's 1790
inventory of Richard Worsley's collection at Appuldurcombe on the Isle of
Wight enumerates 65 examples of ancient sculpture exhibited in front of the
house and in the Colonnade Room. An ancient mosaic and painting from
Hadrian's villa are noted, with copies and casts of bas-reliefs and sculptures,
including 'Cast of the Apollo' and a copy of Townley's bust of Homer, but they
are excluded from the numerical sequence. In Townley's manuscript catalogue
of Appuldurcombe we witness a privileging of ancient over modern speci-
mens, and marble sculptures over paintings and mosaics, that characterizes
Michaelis' later work.
Nor are Townley's catalogues confined to the marbles of his immediate
contemporaries: the earlier 18th-century collections of the 8th Earl of Pem-
broke at Wilton House in Wiltshire and of the 4th Earl of Carlisle at Castle
Howard in Yorkshire are also represented.77 His list of the sculptures in
Thomas Hope's collection was never incorporated into the unpublished
catalogue.78 Townley visited Hope's townhouse in Duchess Street with Sam-
uel Rogers in February 1804, the year before he died, when the new first-floor
galleries were open for a special viewing by members of the Royal Academy.79
Townley would have known the Portland Place development in which Hope's
townhouse was situated from his dispute with the Adam brothers in June
1778. He would also have been acquainted with at least one of the ancient
sculptures in Hope's collection: a 6 foot high marble Venus (now in the
National Museum, Athens), which the Naples-based dealer James Clark had
offered to Townley in 1791 and which he had refused.80 In his initial letter to
76
Museum Disneianum. Part of the Disney Collection is in the Fitzwilliam Museum,
Cambridge.
77
Hiller, 'Geschichte der Antikensammlung von Castle Howard', 9-28.
78
TY14/5/7. See Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures, 48-9.
79
Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures, 43.
80
Jenkins, 'Neue Dokumente', 181-92.
Townley, Clark described how the statue had been excavated without its head in
the ruins of ancient Minternum. The lower half of the right arm having been
restored by Albacini, Clark wanted the 'bargain' price of 1,500 ducats or 246
guineas, supplying two drawings showing the Venus in three-quarter views from
the right and left. Three months later, Clark wrote again having scrutinized the
sculpture for a reported two hours with the Neapolitan sculptor Angelo Brunelli,
in an attempt to answer the litany of questions fired off by Townley concerning
the sculpture's preservation, the necessary restorations, the tint of the marble,
and whether it had been cleaned with a tool or a pumice. Townley's notes on
Hope's collection record the Venus he declined as being number 12 on the east
side of the statue gallery. A caustic couplet—'Something there is more needful
than expence, / and something previous ev'n to taste...'tis sense'—indicates
Townley's derisive view of Hope's eclectic collection and its ahistorical arrange-
ment, with its sculpture and picture galleries, sequence of four vase rooms leading
into period rooms devoted to Egypt and India, with the Flaxman or Star Room
showcasing Flaxman's sculptured group of Aurora visiting Cephalus on Mount
Ida. The visitors' route terminated in a tent-like lararium, whose stepped pyra-
mid chimney-piece contained artefacts from ancient and contemporary cultures,
classical and Christian, East and West, in a syncretist allegory of world religions.81
'Not, on the whole, what one would expect to find in a gentleman's London
drawing room!' adduces Watkin in his 1968 monograph on Thomas Hope.82
Townley has been described as indefatigable in his attempts to catalogue the
collections of ancient marbles in Britain—an adjective that has also been applied
to Michaelis.83 Though we should not underestimate the very different different
climates that determined their projects—Townley's political exclusion, in
which his competitive sportsmanship increasingly co-existed with cultural
responsibilities, as opposed to Michaelis' professional expertise—and the cen-
tury that separated them, it is nevertheless striking how far Townley's method-
ology and criteria pre-empted those of Michaelis and his successors. Take, for
instance, Townley's 'List of the marbles in Wilton House, extracted from the
13th Edition of the Aedes Pembrochianae published in the year 1798 and
observations upon each of the marbles, written opposite to them in red ink',
in which he calculated that although there were 45 marbles worthy of being
represented in a collection, some 200 others were either modern, corroded,
mutilated, or misidentified, so as to be of little or no value.84 Those few he
81
Ernst,'Frames at Work', 484.
82
Watkin, Thomas Hope, 118. This paragraph is based on Watkin's chapter on 'The Duchess
Street Mansion', 93-124; Waywell, The Lever and Hope Sculptures, 42-9; Watkin, 'Thomas
Hope's house in Duchess Street', 31-9.
83
Guilding, 'The 2nd Earl of Egremont's sculpture gallery at Petworth', 29. Penny, 'Lord
Rockingham's sculpture collection and The Judgement of Paris by Nollekens', 5-34.
84
TY15/8/1.
admired should, he noted, be engraved—in a further indication of his belief that

instead of being buried in private collections, noteworthy specimens should not
remain buried in private collections, but should be reproduced for the purposes
of dissemination and transmission. Michaelis'summary of the Wilton collection
with its 'large number of spurious pieces, the abominable restorations, and the
absurd nomenclature' concurs with Townley's red marginalia.85 Frederik Poul-
sen, too, had to admit to an unhappy disjuncture between content and context at
Wilton, where he found 'it was hard to be virtuous and study such a poor
collection of antiques in a seat so splendid and rich in historical and artistic
memorials'.86
Like Michaelis et al, Townley was primarily concerned with cataloguing
specimens of ancient marble sculpture. Noteworthy among his lists for the
amount of detail in the descriptions is his undated account of the 48 ancient
marbles in the Egremont Collection at Petworth in Sussex, which he records
as being dispersed in niches in the hall, in the first room, fourth room, gallery,
antechamber, and drawing room. The bulk of Charles Wyndham, the 2nd Earl
of Egremont's ancient marbles was acquired from Rome between 1750 and
1760 via the agency of the architect Matthew Brettingham the younger, who
was earlier involved in the provision of sculptures for Lord Leicester's collec-
tion at Holkham Hall in Norfolk.87 The majority of the sculptures were
destined for Egremont's London townhouse at 94 Piccadilly overlooking
Green Park, where Brettingham senior was employed from 1756; the property
was completed the year after the Earl died, in 1764.88 Michaelis noted the
paucity of information on the sources of the sculptures by then in the
'princely castle' at Petworth.89 This historical lacuna was corrected as recently
as 1999, when a cache of still unpublished papers listing the acquisition of
sculptures between July 1758 and August 1765, their prices, provenances, and
locations was found in a cupboard in the property.90 They confirm Gavin
Hamilton's involvement in the provision of sculptures for Egremont via the
agency of Matthew Brettingham, including in November 1760 a statue of a
young faun (figure 74) excavated at San Gregorio, which one of Hamilton's
letters describes as being 'as delicate as the little Apollo [Apollino] but
infinitely more fleshy and beautiful!'.91 An inscription on the pedestal
named Apollonius Nestor as sculptor, who was also thought to be responsible
85
86
87
See Raeder, Die antiken Skulpturen in Petworth House and Wyndham, Catalogue of the
Collection. Angelicoussis, The Holkham Collection.
88
Rowell, 'The 2nd Earl of Egremont and Egremont House', 15-21.
89
90
See Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Records Office, 10, 989-11,003.
91
Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Records Office, 10,990: extract of a letter from
Gavin Hamilton to Matthew Brettingham, 29 November 1760.
Figure 74. 'The finest thing in the world' (Hamilton): a young marble faun at Pet-
worth by Apollonius Nestor.
for the Belvedere Torso. Michaelis doubted the veracity of what he considered
the new inscription for the faun restored in the act of pouring out wine.90
When Hamilton wrote this letter to Brettingham, only the torso of the faun
had been excavated—it still wanted its head, one arm and part of another—
which were to be restored by Pietro Pacilli. The discoloration of the right knee
was on account of the insertion of a piece of iron to strengthen the join. Even
this could not detract from what Hamilton puffs as 'the finest thing in the
world & if we had the rest of it I think we may modestly value it at £5000'.
Writing to another of his aristocratic British customers, the Earl of Upper
Ossory, in 1769, Hamilton bemoaned 'the great scarcity at present of good
antiques which goe at immence prices, the statues that I used to buy for Lord
Egremont for four or five hundred crowns now sell for a thousand at least'—
once again attesting to the stock-like rise and fall of prices on the Roman
antiquities market.91 Thomas Jenkins provides a retrospective account of the
sale of two sculptures intended for the Egremont Collection in a letter to
Charles Townley dated June 1780:
the Fesciale of L.d Egermont [figure 75] was purchased by me, together with a statue
of Annius Verus, from Conte Cardelli twenty years since, by the then Influence of Car.
Albani. I was told it was impossible to have Permission to send them out of Rome,
which induced me to give them up both to Cavaceppi at the same price I paid for
them which I do not now recollect but think it was about 800, or 900, the two. the
whole business turned out to be a Scheme to trick me out of the Statue as they were
sold to M r Hamilton the very day I undid them to Cavaceppi. as far as my Memory
goes, the Annius Verus which is in a consular dress was good sculpture & in
uncommon Preservation, & the Fesciale Interesting owing to the subject, those statues
were originally in the possession of the Marse Capponi from whom they descended to
Conte Cardelli. with them I purchased that curious marble vase which the duke of
Montague has & a curious Ibis in Rosso which I forget if you or M.r Weddell is in
possession off.92
Similar epistolary narratives cited in earlier chapters have already initiated us

into the incestuous machinations of the Roman antiquities market. In this
letter, Jenkins remembers the co-operative and competitive factions at work
between, on the one hand, him and Cardinal Albani and, on the other,
between him and Hamilton as rival dealers. The latter was reportedly
90
Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain^ 600.
91
7 January 1769. National Library of Ireland, MS 8012 (iii). See also Ossory's letter to
Townley written from Petworth, TY7/1894.
92 TY7/393. Documents in the Petworth House Archives, West Sussex Records Office confirm
the accuracy of Jenkins' later account. No. 10,998 records the statues of Annius Verus and
Fesciale being acquired from Cavaceppi on 26 March 1759 for 700 crowns; no. 11,000 cites their
provenance as Cardelli and price as 700 scudi.
Figure 75. Sculpture of Fesciale at Petworth, engraved by W. Skelton from a drawing
by Henry Howard for Society of Dilettanti, Specimens of Antient Sculpture.
conspiring with the sculptor-restorer Bartolomeo Cavaceppi to stall Jenkins'

business dealings. While the endless politicking for one-upmanship between
Jenkins and Hamilton must remain in play, the letter to Townley provides a
hitherto unrecorded provenance for the statues of Fesciale and Annius Verus
(the paternal grandfather of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) as from the
Roman collection of Alessandro Gregorio Capponi, principal paymaster of
Pope Clement XII and the President of Capitoline Museum.95 Capponi was a
noted collector during the first half of the 18th century of books and all
manner of antiquities, in particular gems and medals. Entries in his diaries
record the provenance of the sculptures in his collection and also their
disposition within his house on the strada di Ripetta. Hence the so-called
Fesciale can be identified as a large statue of a young man with a pig excavated
in July 1730 at a cava in 'Colonna della piazza di San Cesareo' and restored by
Carlo Antonio Napolioni, who famously restored the Capitoline Faun in rosso
antico excavated at Hadrian's villa at Tivoli in 1736; the figure identified by
Capponi as Annius Verus as that brought to light in November 1734 at the
cava of'Gabriel dei Padri di S. Sisto'.96 On his death in 1746, Capponi's books
passed to the Vatican Library and his antiquities to the Collegio Romano,
although Jenkins' letter to Townley reveals that, at least a decade after his
death, Capponi's heir, Cardelli, was disposing of the two most highly valued
sculptures in the collection. The Fesciale represents a young male attendant,
wreathed and holding a pig outstretched ready for the sacrifice; chiselled in
the tree stem by his left leg is a box containing the sacrificial knife. It was one
of 17 busts and statues from Egremont House that Matthew Brettingham
offered for sale to Townley in 1778.97 It remained in the collection, was
transferred to Petworth presumably when the London property was sold in
1794, where it was drawn by Henry Howard, and then engraved by Skelton for
publication in the Society of Dilettanti's Specimens of Antient Sculpture. In the
plate commissioned by Townley, the sculpture is shown head-on (figure 75),
with subtle gradations of shading to give a three-dimensional impression of
the marble object and its sculpted contours in two dimensions.98 Dotted lines
indicate the restored portions as being the tip of the nose, the right hand and
arm, and the legs of the pig.
95
My account of Capponi derives from Donate, 'Un collezionista nella Roma del primo
settecento', 91-102; Papini, Palazzo Capponi at Roma, esp. 'La collezione di antichita', 114-21;
Donato, 'II vizio virtuoso', 139-60.
96
See also Barberini, ' "De Lavori ad un Fauno di rosso antico"', 23-35; Arata, 'Carlo
Antonio Napolioni', 153-232.
97
98
See C. L. Lyons, 'The art and science of antiquity in nineteenth-century photography', in
Lyons, Papadopoulos, Stewart et al, Antiquity and Photography, 62.
Iconographically speaking, one of the most interesting statues in the collec-

tion at Petworth is a representation of Helenus, the priest of Apollo (figure 76).
Townley enumerates the sculpture as being number 33 out of a total of 48
marbles displayed in the gallery, recording the figure's dress as being a knee-
length, loose-fitting Phrygian tunic; the absence of a girdle was an indication of
'divination, or a prophet'. The face he describes as 'bold and strong'; the hair as
sculpted was in round curls or masses crowned with laurel. Townley identifies
the arms, from above the elbows, and both legs as being restored, with a
surviving fragment which shows that the figure was wearing the Phrygian
boot or buskin with leather straps 'resembling ye snout bone of a sword fish'.
He also records its provenance—bought from Antonio Burioni for the price of
400 Roman scudi—and size, being life-sized." According to Michaelis' ac-
count published in 1882, the same sculpture is numbered 56 of 75 items, and
was then located in the Marble Hall (Dining Room). 100 In spite of the century
that separated Townley and Michaelis, there is a remarkable correlation in
their accounts of this sculpture. Both cataloguers provide detailed descriptions
of the physical appearance of the figure, especially of the distinctive dress that
they identify as belonging to a priest. With the exception of the head, which
Michaelis doubts is original and thinks is an unknown portrait, they concur in
their autopsies of the restored parts. Michaelis' restoration report is more
detailed in its minutiae and more technical with its reference to the hair being
deeply undercut with the drill. In the data they compiled as a result of close
critical scrutiny and its evaluative criteria, Townley is shown to be pre-empting
aspects of Michaelis' pioneering work by a century. To give one more example
of a sculpture from Petworth, both Townley and Michaelis refer to the 'soft'
quality of the workmanship for the marble faun (figure 74). 101
Back in Chapter 1, a correspondence was noted between Townley's descrip-
tions of Viscount Palmerston's ancient marbles at Broadlands and those of
James Dallaway as published in his Anecdotes of the Arts in England (London,
1800). Townley was evidently preparing a general book on ancient marbles
in England, which was never published, but which furnished Dallaway
with masses of information for the sculpture section of his Anecdotes. His
description of the statue of Helenus (figure 76) at Petworth, for example,
repeats almost word for word that of Townley's unpublished notes, even the
reference to the leather straps being shaped like the snout of a swordfish. 102
Similarly, his account of the faun (figure 74) echoes Townley's admiration for
the rustic shape and muscular character of the torso and his reservation about
99
TY15/1/2.
100
101 TY15/1/2. The faun is Townley number 34; Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 600.
102
Dallaway, Anecdotes of the Arts, 281.
Figure 76. Helenus at Petworth, engraved by W. Skelton from a drawing by Henry
Howard for Society of Dilettanti, Specimens of Antient Sculpture.
the restored limbs.103 Dallaway's hitherto unrecorded reliance on Townley's

notes situates Townley at the beginning of a tradition of classifying and
cataloguing ancient marbles that is traditionally thought of as having been
pioneered in the later 19th century by the German Professor of Archaeology,
Adolf Michaelis.
Figures 77 and 78 provide additional evidence of common ground between
Townley and Michaelis in their respective researches into ancient marbles in
British collections. During their visits to Newby Hall in 1779 and 1873, each
sketched a ground plan of Weddell's sculpture gallery and located the position
of the marbles within the interior space that Townley records as being 22 feet
wide (figure 77). 104 Michaelis' numerical system that is not in parentheses
refers to that as published in Ancient Marbles, which effectively simulates a
clockwise tour around each of the three rooms of the gallery, starting with the
statue of Silenus on the right of the entrance. Townley employs no such
numerical system in his drawing. A close comparison of the two plans reveals
that the content and arrangement of Weddell's collection was not fixed, but
shifting. In the intervening century, the collection installed in the gallery had
increased from 31 to 41 items. Two basalt busts, for instance, had been placed
on either side of the sarcophagus where the vista terminates in the centre of
the third room. Also in the third room, the modern head of Alexander
displayed on the tripod with the Victory had been replaced with William
Weddell's marble portrait bust sculpted by Joseph Nollekens in the first half of
the 1770s; this marble copy is dated 1795. Weddell's portrait by Nollekens,
swathed in toga-like drapery, is another apposite example of the 18th-century
collector growing to resemble his antique busts. In Zoffany's famous portrait
of the library at Park Street (plate 21), Townley appears to be metamorphos-
ing into a sculpture: his profile bust mirrors that of the bust of Homer behind
him and the sphinx in front, in addition to the line-up of imperial busts. The
imperial busts in Weddell's collection at Newby Hall known in the late 18th
century as Tiberius and Plotina were re-identified by Michaelis as Augustus
and Lucilla. Even in the most prominent central space, the positions of some
of the life-size sculptures, like the Muse and Minerva, have been altered.
Notwithstanding their inanimate material and considerable weight, sculp-
tures moved in a variety of ways. Like Canova's Amorino for Colonel Camp-
bell, they were sometimes fixed on rotating pedestals, relocated within the
spaces of the interior and transferred between household properties. 105 Those
103
TY15/1/2; Dallaway, Anecdotes of the Arts, 284.
104 R. Guilding, 'The sculpture gallery at Newby Hall', in Miller and Thomas, Drawing from
the Past, figure 55.
105
On rotating pedestals, see Penny, 'Lord Rockingham's sculpture collection and The
Judgement of Paris by Nollekens', 27.
Figure 77. Townley's ground plan of Weddell's sculpture gallery at Newby, 1779.
Figure 78. Michaelis' ground plan of Weddell's sculpture gallery at Newby, 1873.
Figure 79. Sketch by Charles Townley of the 2nd Earl of Egremont's gallery at
Petworth, 1791.
marbles at Egremont House in London were transported to the country seat

at Petworth when the London townhouse was sold. When Townley visited
Broadlands at Romsey in Hampshire in 1799, he was told by the housekeeper
that the ancient marbles had been removed to one of Palmerston's other
properties, Temple Grove, East Sheen in Surrey.106 Townley's diary entry
includes a sketch of the ground floor of the property that had been improved
from an existing Jacobean house by 'Capability' Brown and was later remod-
elled by Brown's son-in-law, Henry Holland, to incorporate an octagonal
tribune.
Another sketch in one of Townley's notebooks dated 1791 preserves the
only surviving view of the 2nd Earl of Egremont's sculpture gallery at Pet-
worth (figure 79).107 The gallery was enlarged by the 3rd Earl in the 1820s to
its current, recently-restored appearance. The earlier Palladian gallery as
sketched by Townley was built by the architect Matthew Brettingham in
1754-63 from an existing cloister running along the north end of the house.
It was modelled on its counterpart at Holkham Hall in Norfolk which
Brettingham constructed for the Earl of Leicester in the 1750s. Townley's
sketch records that the south wall of the gallery contained nine niches, with
two single ones at the outer ends. The central section of the north wall
106 TY1/1L
107
TY1/22/1. See Guilding, 'The 2nd Earl of Egremont's sculpture gallery at Petworth', 27-9.
Figure 80. Exploded sections of Blundell's hall, drawing room, and dining room as
sketched by Charles Townley.
consisted of a curving bay like an ancient exedra, with three windows. Town-
ley gives the dimensions of the gallery as being about 60 by 17 feet.
Though lacking the architectural credentials of Matthew Brettingham at
Petworth or Robert Adam at Newby, Townley 's exploded sections of the hall,
dining room, and drawing room of Henry Blundell's South Lancashire prop-
erty (figure 80) are no less informative of the disposition of ancient sculptures
within the gentleman's interior. They preserve the display of the sculptures
prior to the building of the pantheon in the early 1800s and the removal of
virtually the entire collection, with the exception of some reliefs inlaid into the
architectural fabric of the buildings, in 1959. In addition to Townley's manu-
script catalogues in which the marbles at Ince are always listed, his diaries and
notebooks contain three other inventories of the marbles there. In the earliest,
dated 1792, the collection is listed by the location of the sculptures, from those
fixed and not fixed on Blundell's staircase, in the hall, dining room, breakfast
parlour, drawing room, the large octagon greenhouse, the small greenhouse
and adjacent walls, in the long greenhouse, lumber room, and in front of the
large octagon room, portico, and walls.108 Townley deduced that the total
number of marbles at Ince in 1792, including 14 in transit by sea, was 325. His
outline inventory accompanied two sketches, a ground plan with dimensions
of the rooms, and a front elevation. Four years later, in October 1796, Townley
recounted the marbles at Ince, noting on this occasion the number of statues,
heads, and busts in particular spaces, but not the location of the 112 reliefs,
inscriptions, urns, vases, and sarcophagi. Townley failed to calibrate the total
number of objects at Ince in 1796 as a vast 434.
The exploded sections that Townley sketched of the domestic interior at
Ince record the profusion of objects—marble statues, heads, fragments, vases,
pedestals, bronzes, originals and copies—that lined each of the four walls of
Blundell's hall and drawing room. The dining room, by contrast, which was
23 x 28 feet, contained on the left-hand wall of Townley's plan three heads of
the ancient gods Bacchus, Jupiter, and Apollo, and two hands, in bronze and
marble. On an accompanying sheet, Townley recorded the marbles in these
rooms and on the stairs on the ground floor and on the first and second
landings. Pieces are identified as heads ( h d) or statues (s), modern ('mod')
and copies, with each item listed with the price that Blundell paid. Prices
range from £200 each for the ancient statues of Minerva and Diana in the
drawing room to £4 for a Piranesi cinerary urn installed on the stairs. This
was the Minerva formerly in the Villa Lanti (figure 71) that Townley passed
over when Gavin Hamilton offered it to him in 1784. In many instances,
Blundell is shown to have paid more for marble copies of sculptures like the
Dying Gladiator (figure 19) and the head of Lucius Verus (£70 each) in the hall
than he did for ancient specimens. The copies by Antonio d'Este of the Boy
with a Bird and Girl with a Nest (figure 20a and b) were displayed in the
drawing room with a hawk between them and heads of Venus and Julia to
108
TY1/22/1.
either side. The Roman collections represented through reproductions at Ince

included the Borghese (the Boy and Girl and the bust of Lucius Verus), the
Capitoline (the Dying Gladiator), the Vatican (a head of Jupiter Serapis in the
hall) and Albani (the head of the Albani Minerva). In the pairing of Minerva
and Diana, with heads on either side of them, in the hall we are reminded that
Blundell frequently bought marbles as companions for existing pieces in his
substantial and assorted collection, much of which, including the free-standing
sculptures of Minerva and Diana, were relocated in the early 1800s into
Blundell's newly-erected pantheon. When Michaelis visited in 1873 and
again in 1877, the majority of the collection was installed there in what he
described as 'tolerably motley confusion'.109 Michaelis' ground plan of the
pantheon (figure 81) produced during his first visit in 1873 locates the statue
of Diana centre stage, encircled by an inner ring of free-standing sculptures
including Canova's Psyche (figure 18), busts on pedestals and a pair of tables
that are themselves encircled by an outer ring of statues placed in niches that
include the Minerva (figure 71), Theseus (figure 72) and Anchyrrhoe before
her decapitation (figure 17).
In the preface of Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, Michaelis writes of being
able
to devote but a short time to the use of a mass of literary aids only available in
England. But in the case of the great majority of these collections, there is an absolute
dearth of accounts of their origination and of the sources of their component
elements. There is undoubtedly much information on such matters, either in the
form of short memoranda or complete correspondence, still preserved among the
archives of those families whose ancestors in bygone times acquired the collections. I
have had access to only a small proportion of such unprinted papers. It is to be hoped
that my book will call forth communications of such records.110
The mass of correspondence in the Townley Archive in the British Museum

more than compensates for the dearth of accounts on the formation of later
18th-century collections of marbles in Britain. For, as this narrative has
demonstrated, material in the Townley Archive is loaded with historical
evidence about the excavation, restoration, exportation, and exhibition of
ancient marbles in Townley's metropolitan collection and those of his con-
temporaries. In interrogating these and other documents in the Archive in the
form of Townley's notebooks and diaries, Townley has been recast as a cata-
loguer pre-empting the laborious work of Michaelis. He has also been shown
to be highly atypical in his single-minded, long-term pursuit of ancient marble
specimens; what the Earl of Bristol and Bishop of Derry is said enviously
109
110
Figure 81. Ground plan by Michaelis of the pantheon at Ince in 1873.
(according to both Hamilton and Jenkins in letters to Townley) to have termed

the cream, rather than the skimmed milk.] ] ] It is all very well for Townley to be
held up as the academics' darling and the curators' choice, provided that more
typologically diverse collections contemporary with his are judged on their
own terms, rather than according to the rigorous criteria of later classical
archaeologists and art historians for whom most of the unpromising collec-
tions acquired in the 18th century are, to paraphrase Michaelis again and for
the last time, archaeological trash rather than treasure.
111
TY7/389andTY7/641.
Conclusion:
Joseph Nollekens5 The Judgement of Paris
Four sculptures (figures 82-5) now in the collections of the J. Paul Getty
Museum and Villa at Malibu may be seen to embody the problematic
inherent in the historiography of ancient marbles in Great Britain as codified
in the later 19th century by the German Professor of Archaeology, Adolf
Michaelis. Michaelis' pioneering research—critiqued here in Chapter 1 for
the first time—exposed over 2,000 individual ancient marble specimens in 66
private collections in Britain to the latest 'scientific' scrutiny. They were
systematically studied, numbered, measured, deciphered, and classified in a
corpus of ancient Greek and Roman sculpture. Michaelis' classic work, con-
tinued by his grateful successors, including A. H. Smith, Cornelius Vermeule,
and Frederik Poulsen, put ancient marbles in Britain on the academic agenda,
when they had hitherto been neglected in favour of the study of painting, in
an estrangement of the sister arts that has still to be properly realigned. Yet the
strictly archaeological approaches of these scholars consistently failed to
represent the collections assembled over two centuries in Britain within
their specific art historical contexts. Their volumes reveal a privileging of
ancient content above early modern context, and of examples of the so-called
fine arts over those of the lesser (according to their hierarchies) decorative
arts. This rupture resulted in the exclusion of sculptures that did not conform
to their institutional specializations: even recognized masterpieces executed
by Antonio Canova and John Flaxman were written out of these collections.
The heterogeneous nature of the majority of later 18th-century collections
was also overlooked: how objects had many sculptural manifestations, as
statues, portrait busts, reliefs, chimney-pieces, and tabletops; and similarly
diverse status, as ancient, modern, a marriage of the two, mass produced copies,
and plaster casts. Consequently, Michaelis etal. have as much misrepresented the
collections whose largely second- and third-rate ancient objects they charac-
terize themselves as 'excavating' from the English country house.
Michaelis never visited Wentworth Woodhouse, the Yorkshire country seat
and political power base of the former owner of our sculptures, Charles
Watson-Wentworth, the 2nd Marquis of Rockingham and Whig politician,
274 Conclusion
relying instead on the published accounts of his predecessors, James Dallaway

and Gustav Waagen. * We already know Rockingham as a relative and mentor
of the Yorkshire collector William Weddell. A visit to Newby Hall in 1774
where 'several of the antique marbles are really good' combined with the
'disagreeable conjuncture of probable events in this country' inclined Rock-
ingham to 'revive a wish to once more revisit Italy'.2 Rockingham's grand tour
twenty years previously, from 1748 to 1750, had initiated a collection of
sculpture for Wentworth Woodhouse that was both materially diverse and
art historically significant. Based on close scrutiny of an inventory compiled
on Rockingham's death in 1782, Nicholas Penny has established the existence
of a profusion of sculptures displayed in Yorkshire and in Rockingham's
London townhouse in Grosvenor Square.3 The inventory lists the entirety of
the household contents of each property, room by room, including the pints
of strawberry jam in the 'sweat meats room'. Often the descriptions are not
very forthcoming: portrait busts are noted by gender, rather than identified by
sitter; descriptions are summary, rather than specific. The sculptures at Went-
worth Woodhouse included a restored ancient statue of Ariadne 7 feet high
including the base, marble copies of classical masterpieces commissioned
from British and Italian sculptors in Rome, Vincenzo Foggini's marble
group of Samson and the Philistines, 1749 (V&A), and plaster casts after the
antique, including one of Charles Townley's bust of Clytie. There were re-
duced copies of classical sculptures, including the Flora, Dying Gladiator, and
Furietti Centaurs, reliefs by Joseph Wilton, and a number of architectural
ornaments in artificial stone. Many pieces were in storage. In both Yorkshire
and London, the collection consisted of large numbers of bronzes, many of
Florentine provenance, either by or after Giambologna. The London house
also contained antique busts, marble busts, gems in wax and plaster, and
framed antique reliefs.
Rockingham acquired ancient marbles through the agency of Thomas
Jenkins. Writing to Lord Bessborough in 1770, Jenkins cited him or Rock-
ingham as potential possessors of restored ancient marbles in his possession,
of statues of Homer and Pythagoras and busts of a Greek hero, Antinous, and
a Phocian. He writes, 'if you or the Marq.s of Rockingham wish to have some
thing really worthy of your rank, I question if there ever was so favourable an
occasion'.4 Notwithstanding Jenkins' sycophantic appeal to Rockingham's
1
2
12 August 1774. Lord Rockingham to William Weddell. West Yorkshire Archive Service,
Leeds, Wyll09/addnl/2a/57.
3
Penny, 'Lord Rockingham's sculpture collection and The Judgement of Paris by Nollekens',
5-34.
4
West Sussex Records Office, Bessborough MSS.
Joseph Nollekens' The Judgement of Paris 275
aristocratic status, he had apparently resolved not to purchase antiquities that

he had not seen for himself first-hand.5 Consequently, it was through the
social networks of communication and exchange existing between collectors
in Britain and encouraged by the dealers Hamilton and Jenkins that Rock-
ingham acquired a less than life-size sculpture of the Trojan prince Paris
(figure 82) from Lyde Brown. This heavily-restored statue represents a
wavy-haired Paris in the guise of a shepherd, wearing a plain tunic, with the
shepherd's crook in one arm and an apple in the other hand; the statue is
supported by a tree-trunk. It is the apple that gives the narrative game away—
here is Paris judging the contest between the rival goddesses Juno, Venus, and
Minerva. From the 1782 inventory, Penny deduced that this Paris was dis-
played set against or a little in front of a wall in a small rectangular room on
the ground floor of Rockingham's London townhouse with three divine
female companions in different states of undress—marbles of a naked Venus
(figure 83), Minerva (figure 84), and Juno (figure 85) commissioned from the
sculptor Joseph Nollekens and dated 1773, 1775, and 1776 respectively.
Originally, our foursome were placed on revolving mahogany pedestals to
give multiple viewing possibilities, as evidenced, for instance, by the interior
of Minerva's shield with its visible handles and the oval rim of the shield over
which her drapery falls. Penny has suggested a likely arrangement for the
group in which Paris is in the centre, his gaze directed at the victor on his
right, a naked Venus looking towards Paris as she balances on one leg to
remove her remaining sandal. Minerva on his left, equipped with her military
helmet and shield, tilts back her helmet in a form of salute to Paris as she and
the other goddesses await his decision. Opposite Paris stands the matronly
Juno with her regal crown and exposed breast, pulling her heavy drapery out
in the opposite direction to her gaze. What we are witnessing is a pregnant
moment sculpted in stone when the goddesses await Paris's verdict.
Of particular interest, for our purposes, is the victory in this group, not so
much of Venus over her rival goddesses, or love over wisdom and power, but of
the collecting and commissioning of sculptures in the later 18th century over
19th-century taxonomies. Rockingham's four sculptures unite the material
productions of antiquity and modernity for a particular narrative purpose,
which their later study would see polarized by the specialization of academic
disciplines. Paris is a potential specimen for autopsy of the sort practised by
Michaelis, being what he would term a 'cobbled' ware of indeterminate status,
5
3 July 1771: 'His Grace of Devonshire and the Marq. 8 of Rockingham may be justified in
their Resolutions of not purchasing any antiquities they do not see.' West Sussex Records Office,
Bessborough MSS.
Figure 82. Statue of Paris formerly in Lord Rockingham's collection.
Figure 83. Joseph Nollekens, Venus, 1773.
Figure 84. Joseph Nollekens, Minerva, 1775.
Figure 85. Joseph Nollekens, Juno, 1776.
280 Conclusion
best left 'to the professed archaeologists to discriminate between the genuine and
the spurious, and seek after the truth with a pedantic consciousness'.6 Nollekens'
divine trio have no place in this intellectual tradition, belonging instead to an
art history and historiography of 18th-century British sculpture. At the Getty
Museum they are displayed in a gallery devoted to neoclassical sculpture, from
which their former companion Paris is excluded on account of his nebulous
status.
Within this narrative, the Judgement of Paris group functions synecdochally.
On the one hand, it represents a rich example of the later 18th-century
juxtaposition of ancient and modern marbles, unfazed by their divergent
historical status, within a suitably heterogeneous aristocratic collection of
sculptures. The objects that constituted the collection were deposited between
Rockingham's country seat and his London townhouse, offering another
mode of display, with objects distributed between Yorkshire and London, to
add to those already discussed in Chapter 6. On the other hand, the judge-
ment is not exclusively Paris's, but also that of the reader, to decide whether
there is an ultimate victor in the competing histories of archaeology and art
history for intellectual ownership of this material. The specific (art) historical
context of the later 18th century, that saw marbles excavated in Rome,
restored, sold, transported to Britain, and displayed in the elite interior, has
been repeatedly characterized by this narrative, less by its 'furore for antique
art', the defining characteristic of Michaelis' 'Golden Age of Classic Dilettant-
ism', as by its unprecedented appetite for sculpture.7 Writing to Townley on 11
April 1801, after successfully bidding for a number of items at the Bessbor-
ough sale in Roehampton, including the hermaphrodite (figure 40), Henry
Blundell 'fear[ed], I shall be thought marble mad and very extravagant;
money is better spent so, than at new markets'.8 Instead of the empirical
study of surviving material specimens, a method always thought to have been
instituted by Michaelis yet here shown to have been practised by Charles
Townley a century before, this narrative of the mania for marble has been
constituted by a mass of archival documentation that was not available to
Professor of Archaeology. The artful, evocative, gossipy, and sometimes ribald
content of these (what Michaelis calls) 'literary aids' have been shown to be
concerned as much with political, social, and economic history as with
cultural history; what Blundell refers to in his letter to Townley as money
and markets—stalwarts in the business of collecting.9
6
7
8
TY7/1333.
9
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MANUSCRIPT SOURCES
Archivio di Stato di Roma, Camerale MSS
Bibliotheque Nationale et Universitaire de Strasbourg, Michaelis papers
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Brinsley Ford Archive, Strickland MSS (photocopies)
British Library, Cumberland MSS
British Museum, Townley Archive (TY)
Carmarthen Records Office, Cawdor MSS
Huntington Library, Huntington MSS
Museo Civico, Bassano del Grappa, Canoviani MSS
National Library of Scotland, Forbes MSS
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Sheffield Archives, Wentworth Woodhouse MSS
Staffordshire Record Office, Anson MSS
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Index
Note: Bold entries refer to illustrations; italic entries refer to colour plates.
Acteon, and sculpture of 76, 77, 78 Ashby, Thomas 63

Adam, James 3, 111, 192, 204 Ashmole, Bernard 1, 5
Adam, Robert 30, 192, 204, 210, 218, 269 and Ince Blundell Hall 37-8
and Newby Hall gallery 198, 199 influence on fate of
Adam, William 210 collection 39-41
Aelian the Sophist 10 photographs at 40
Albacini, Carlo 84, 85-6, 87, 103, 109, and praise of Michaelis 19, 21
186, 206, 257 Asprucci, Antonio 211
Albagine, Carlo 86 Assheton, T 180
Albani, Cardinal Alessandro 19, 93, 94, Astle, Thomas 166
98, 125, 207-8, 248, 260 Azara, Jose Nicolas de 140, 155
Allan, David 134, 174
Altieri, Prince Emilio 125 Bacon, John 230-1
American War of Independence, and Banks, Thomas 230
impact of 131-2, 133, 134 Caractacus Pleading before
ancients vs moderns, and ancient the Emperor Claudius ], 54
superiority 50, 51 Barberini candelabra 124, 125, 126
Anders, Friedrich 70, 71, 72, 80, 83, 94, Barrett, Michael 205
241, 242 Bartlett, George 222
and Endymion sleeping 70, 93 Bartoli, Pietro Santi 109, 110, 111
and Lysimachus cum Achilles Basset, Francis 9, 10, 134, 137, 139, 140,
sculpture 89, 90 142, 147
and Strickland's Juno 152 Batoni, Pompeo 8, 9, 14, 16, 136, 137,
and Townley sphinx 69 141,142
Angelini, Giuseppe 100 Beaumont, Mr 255-6
Angelis, Domenico de 120 Bedford, 5th Duke of (Francis
Anson, Thomas 124, 126, 145 Russell) 192, 226
and collection of 237-8 Bedford, 6th Duke of 227, 229
and Nollekens 237, 238 Bedford, 9th Duke of 27, 33
Antinous, and sculpture of 63, 64, 65, 66 Belanger, Francois-Joseph 211
Apollonius Nestor, and statue of young Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo, and Neptune
fawn 258, 259, 260 and Triton 88, 98, 101, 102, 103,
archaeology, and dominance of German 104
scholarship 26 restoration of 101, 103
archives, and polemical nature of 60 sale of 105-7
Arundel collection, and Michaelis on 22 Bessborough, 2nd Earl of 111, 153, 234,
Arundell of Wardour, 8th Baron 155 255
302 Index
Blundell, Charles 187 Brown, John 170, 244-5

Blundell, Henry 26, 41, 137, 186-7 Brown, Laurence 'Capability' 268
on Albacini 85-6 Browne, Lyde 131, 146, 234, 255, 256, 275
on collecting 225 Bruhl, Comtede 134
and collection of 37-9, 41 Brunelli, Angelo 257
break-up of 39-45 Bullock, George 225
and cost of drawings 251-3 Burioni, Antonio 159, 263
on difficulties of buying from Burney, Charles 41, 144, 178-9
Rome 62 Burrell, Mr 185, 200
and display of sculptures 223-5 Byres, James 56, 135, 153
and distrust of dealers 72
and Mattei Isis 215, 216 Cameron, Charles 132
and Minerva statue 246, 247, 248 Campbell, Colonel John 91, 123, 219,
and restoration of hermaphrodite 229, 230, 231
sculpture 111-13 Canova, Antonio 41, 227, 231, 273
pre-restoration appearance 114 Psyche 43
and sculpture madness 280 Venus 29, 31
and Theseus sculpture 248, 249 Capponi, Alessandro Gregorio 262
and Townley 230, 246 Carlisle, 4th Earl of 256
see also Ince Blundell Hall Carmarthen, Lord 176
body language, and conversation Carr, John 195, 220
pieces 163 Castor and Pollux 238, 239
Bonomi, Joseph 30, 192, 211, 220 Catherine II, Empress of Russia 135-6,
Boschi, Giuseppe 145 140
Bothmer, D von 19, 46 Cavaceppi, Bartolomeo 12, 65, 87, 124,
Bottari, Giuseppe 55 137, 144, 159,260-2
Bovi, Mariano 245 and Ceres 13
Braschi, Cardinal Gianangelo 127 and restoration 84, 85, 94
see also Pius VI, Pope Chambers, William (architect) 195-8
Brenna, Vincenzo 218, 244 Chambers, William (artist) 22, 23, 168,
Brettingham, Matthew 126, 210, 258, 170
262, 268, 269 and Townley's display of
Bristol, Earl of 219,271 sculptures 214-17, 219
see also Derry, Bishop of Charles Townley with a Group of
British Museum, and display of Connoisseurs (Cosway) 18, 159,
sculptures 24-6 169-70, 187
third Graeco-Roman saloon 25 and historical significance 159
Broadlands (Hampshire) 263 and homosocial camaraderie 174-5,
and bust of Juno 15, 16, 16, 17 181
and Hygieia 20 and identity of figures in 159
and Michaelis's notes on sculptures and limited display of 186-7, 191
at 7-12 and naked torsos of Venus 178, 180
Brocklesby Hall 22 as portrait of a chair 174
and sculpture hall at 23 and preliminary sketch 183, 185
Index 303
and sensory nature of 181 and familial coherence 167-8

and sexual arousal 180 and gender 167
and sexual proclivities of and introduction of 160
group 184-5 and Lauren's Brothel Scene
and sexually explicit 160, 161
composition 182-3 and Mr and Mrs Hill (Devis) 19, 161
and sodomy 185-6 and outdoor conversation pieces 163
and voyeurism 180 and propriety 164
Charles Townley's Library at 7 Park Street, and Queen Charlotte with her Two
Westminster (Zoffany) 21, Eldest Sons (Zoffany) 164, 165
164-6, 167-9 and social and familial
and manipulation by artist 168-9 propriety 163-4
as representation of taste 171 and Society of Dilettanti portraits 25,
Chracas 122 26, 174-8
civic humanism 187-8 correspondence collecting:
Clarac, M le Comte de 12 and dealers' comparisons with familiar
Clark, James 256-7 sculptures 65
class, and conversation pieces 167 and epistolary strategies of
classical texts, and discourse with ancient dealers 67-8, 80
objects 179 and Hamilton-Lansdowne
Clement XI, Pope 248 letters 58-9
Clement XIV, Pope 119, 148, 215 and hierarchy of paper
Clerisseau, Charles-Louis 211 reproductions 80
Cocchi, Antonio, and portrait bust and inaccurate descriptions 91
of 31, 235-6 and nature of commercial Roman
The Colmore Family (Zoffany) 20, 163 marketplace 65-6
Colvin, Sidney 59 and nature of dealers' letters 62
Commissario delle Antichita 120-1 and negotiation drawings 68-83, 241
conversation pieces 159-60 Townley sphinx 68-70
and allure of women 176 see also Hamilton, Gavin; Jenkins,
and body language 163 Thomas; Townley, Charles
and Charles Townley with a Group of Cortona, Pietro da 248
Connoisseurs, see separate entry Cosway, Maria 170, 219
and Charles Townley's Library at 7 Park Cosway, Richard 89, 90, 144, 170, 244
Street, Westminster and Charles Townley with a Group of
(Zoffany) 164-6, 167-9 Connoisseurs, see separate entry
manipulation of setting 168-9 and Dawe's satirical engraving 207
as representation of taste 171 and sexual bravado 181-2
and class 167 country houses 203
and The Colmore Family (Zoffany) 163 Cowper Temple, W 7
and conversation 166-7, 168 and Michaelis's notes on sculptures at
and defining characteristics 160 Broadlands 7-12
and domestic settings 164 Cozens, John Robert 134
and etiquette books 160-3 Craven, Lady Elizabeth 220
304 Index
cultural geography, and display of and refused export licence 100

sculptures 191 and restoration of 96, 97, 107-8
cultural politics, and export of Disney Collection 34
sculptures 117, 118 display of sculptures 191-2
Cunego, Domenico 55, 56 and Albani's Gabinetto 207-8, 209
The Anger of Achilles at the Loss of and Blundell 223-5
Briseis 57 and diversity of 232
custom duties, and importation of and greenhouses 226
sculptures 154, 158 Woburn Abbey 226-9
and Lansdowne 210-11
Dallaway, James 12, 274 and Mansel Talbot 221-3
and Anecdotes of the Arts in and Newby Hall 195-8
England 12, 14-15, 193, 263 plan 196-7
and borrowings from Townley 263-5 Robert Adam's gallery 198,199
and Michaelis's criticism of 12-14 and orangeries 192, 222-3
and Townley 14-15 Margam Park 222, 223
Dalton, Richard 250 Shugborough 237-8
Dance, George, the Younger 211 and pairing of sculptures 214-15
Dashwood, Sir Frances 27, 176-8 and relationship of eye and mind 210
Dawe, Philip 28, 207 and Rockingham 275
Deare, John 137, 148 and Townley 191-2, 199-200,
Deepdene 26 217-19
and diversity of collection 29 buys Park Street townhouse 205
and Michaelis's exclusion of post- Chambers' depiction of 214-17,
classical content 28-30 219
and Michaelis's sketch of hall and considers Towneley Hall 203,
gallery 29 220-1
Denton Hall, Northumberland 17 design of gallery interior 207-8
Derry, Bishop of 60-1, 106, 271 plans for 205-6
see also Bristol, Earl of seeks suitable house 200-3
design history, and display of visitors to collection 219,232
sculptures 191-2 Woburn Abbey 227-9
Devis, Arthur 159 and Villa Borghese 213-14
and Mr and Mrs Hill 79, 161 and visuality in 18th century 208-10
Dick, John 124 and Woburn Abbey 226-9
Dillon, Charles 182, 183 Dolcibene, Vincenzo 72, 80, 83, 241
diplomacy, and collecting of classical and Bacchus and Acratus 252
sculptures 122-3 and Townley caryatid 72, 73
discobolus, Townley's: Donington Park 236
and discussions on status of 108-9 Dorset, 3rd Duke of (John Frederick
as fake 98 Sackville) 234
and Jenkins' descriptions of 100, 101 drawings and sketches:
and Jenkins offers to Townley 100 and artists' education 242
and Massimi discobolus 98-100 and cost of 251-3
Index 305
and Cassiano dal Pozzo's paper Townley Venus 129

museum 248-50 Villa d'Este Jupiter 129-32
and negotiation drawings and impact of American War of
68-83,241 Independence 131-2, 133, 134
Townley sphinx 68-70 and obtaining licence immediately
and paper museums 248 after excavation 126-7
and production in Rome 242 and Papal granting of licences 120-1
and significance of sculpture on see also transportation of sculptures
paper 246
and Theseus sculpture 248, 249 Farnese Gallery 211
and Townley: Faustina Minor bust 136-7, 138, 141
appraisal of market 253 Fennell, C A M , and praise of
collection of 241-2, 248 Michaelis 19
commissioning by 242-6 Fenton, Roger 24, 25
paper museum 250-1 Feoli, Vincenzo 217
and tradition of 250 Ferguson, Adam 56
Drunken Faun 66, 67, 67 Fesciale, statue of 260, 261, 262
Dundas, Thomas 176 Fitzwilliam Museum, and Disney
Dying Gladiator 44 Collection 34
Flaxman, John 230, 274
Egerton, Francis, 3rd Duke of Aurora and Cephalus 29
Bridgewater 55 Floridablanca, Conde de 135
Egremont, Lord 235, 258 Foggini, Vincenzo 274
Egremont Collection 258-60, 262-3, Fontana, Domenico 103
268 Forbes, Sir William 140-1
see also Petworth Fox, Charles James 227, 239
Eliot, Sir John 220 fragments, and identification of 93
Endymion sculpture 2, 7, 70-1, 93, 94 Friedrich II, Landgrave of Cassel 133
and Gustav III 122 furniture, and collecting
engravings 245 sculpture as 94
d'Este, Antonio 41, 147, 270
Boy with a Bird 45 Gabinetto, Albani 207-8, 209
Girl with a Nest 45 Gaghareen, Prince 105
and head of Anchyrrhoe 42 Gagnereaux, Benigne 6, 119, 120
etiquette, and conversation Gascoigne, Sir Thomas 16, 141, 142
pieces, 160-3 gender, and conversation pieces 167
excavations, and Papal oversight George III 233, 248
of 121-2 German scholarship, and dominance
export of sculptures: of 26-7
and Barberini candelabra 124-6 Giambologna 274
and cultural politics 117, 118 Gibbon, Edward 136, 188-9
and favours and deals over 127 Giffard, Thomas 14, 15, 140, 142
and illegal carriage 129 Gladiator, Borghese Collection 206
saints' relics 155 Gloucester, Duke of 135
306 Index
Glynn, Lady 200 and Sabina bust 127

Glynn, Sir Richard 202 andTownley 61, 84, 234
grand tour collections, and diversity Antinous sculpture 63, 66
of 147, 151-3 Diomedes sculpture 78, 79, 80
greenhouses: display of sculptures 205-6,207-8
and display of sculptures 226 Endymion sculpture 2, 70-1, 93, 94
and Woburn Abbey 226-9 Minerva statue 246
plan of 228 restoration 89-90
Grenville, George 3, 50-1, 53, 65, 132, small Venus 92
230 Venus sculpture 80, 81, 82, 129
and Banks 54 and Villa d'Este Jupiter 129, 130,
and collecting trips to Rome 50-1, 131-2
53-4 Hamilton, Sir William 171, 175
Greville, Charles 166, 181, 185 d'Hancarville, Baron 109, 165-6, 167,
Grimod, Pierre-Gaspard-Marie 91 171, 218
Gustav III, King of Sweden 6, 119 Harrison, Thomas 217-18
and Endymion sculpture 122 Hay, John 210
Helenus, statue of 263, 264
Hamilton, Gavin 29, 1, 3-5, 6, 14, 35, 45, Hell Fire Clubs 178
54 Henderson, John 77, 72, 139, 142
and Achilles Lamenting the Death of hermaphrodite sculpture, and
Patrodus 55 restoration of 111, 112, 113
and Acteon sculpture 76 pre-restoration appearance 114
as agent/dealer 58 Hermitage Museum 136
collecting for Palmerston 58 Hervey, Elizabeth 219
and Albacini 86 Hervey, Thomas 176-8, 184, 185, 186,
and The Anger of Achilles for the Loss of 200
Briseis 55, 56, 57 Hewetson, Christopher 77, 73, 75, 134,
and collaboration with Jenkins 76 137, 139-40, 142, 147, 230, 237
and excavations by 76 and bust of Clement XIV 77, 148
Ostia 63 andbustofTalbot 148, 149
and Hector's Farewell to and bust of Townley 143
Andromache 55 Hoadly, Benjamin 203
and Iliad series of paintings 55-6 Hoare, Henry 256
and impact of American War of Holkham Hall 36, 258, 268
Independence 133 Holland, Henry 226, 227, 268
and Lansdowne Amazon 233 Hollis, Thomas 256
and letters to Lansdowne 58-9, 123 Holt, Richard 159, 174
and Mercury sculpture 65 Homer 55
and Newby Venus 193 and Hamilton's Iliad series of
and Paris and Helen series of paintings 55-6
paintings 211-13 Hope, Henry Thomas 28
and restoration 87, 109 see also Deepdene
and rivalry with Jenkins 260-2 Hope, Thomas 256-7
Index 307
and collection of 28 restoration of 103

see also Deepdene sale of 105-7
Howard, Henry 230, 253, 262 and Newby Venus 193
Howard, Lady Caroline 124 and restoration 87
Howard, Seymour 84-5, 86 and rivalry with Hamilton 260-2
Hume, David 56 and Robinson 192-3
Huntingdon, Francis, 10th Earl of 235 and Rockingham 274-5
and portrait bust of 236, 32 and Strickland 147, 151-3, 157
and Townley 60-1, 234
imperialism, and sculpture collecting 53 Acteon sculpture 76-8
Ince Blundell Hall 22, 26, 37, 256 Antinous sculpture 63-5
and Ashmole 38 caryatids 93-4
photographs by 40 conversing with the ancients 166
and break-up of collection 39-41 discobolus 100-1, 107-9
and display of sculptures 223-5 Drunken Faun 66-8
Townley's catalogue 269-71 Egremont Collection 260
Townley's sketch 269 Endymion sculpture 71, 93
and garden temple 224 Hewetson's bust of 142, 143, 144
and Michaelis at 271 Lysimachus cum Achilles
sketch of pantheon 272 sculpture 87, 88, 89, 90
sketch of relief 17, 18, 19 Minerva bust 4, 95-6
and pantheon at 38, 225, 226 Minerva statue 246-8
Michaelis's sketch 272 Paris sculpture 91
and Poulsen 37-9 restoration 87
and scope of collection 41 on shortcomings of sketches 72-6
Inchture 37 sphinx sculpture 68-70, 75
intellectual life: Tremalchio relief 5, 109-11, 127
and German scholarship 26-8 Westmorland incident 136
and specialization 28 as unofficial British
ambassador 106-7, 137
Jahn, Otto 27 Jennings, Mr 255
Jenkins, Thomas 47, 49, 133 Johnstone, George 135
and Albacini 86 Jones, Thomas 135
and Barberini candelabra 124-6 Juno (Nollekens) 275, 279
and collaboration with Hamilton 76 Juno (Strickland's) 151, 152, 153
and discobolus: Jupiter, from Villa d'Este 129,
collusion with Albacini 98 130,131-2
discussions on status of 108-9
restoration of 107-8 Kauffman, Angelica 55, 95
and economy of taste 193-5, 231 Keck, Anthony 222
and employed by the Pope 126 Knapton, George 27, 175, 176
and Lanti vase 123-4
and Neptune and Triton (Bernini) 98, Labruzzi, Carlo 153
101, 103-5 Lafreri, Antonio 111
308 Index
Lansdowne, 1st Marquis of 1, 3 Mattel his 215, 216

and display of sculptures 210-11 Mattheis, Paolo de 187, 188
and Hamilton's letters to 58-9, 123 and Judgement of Hercules 189
Lansdowne, 5th Marquis of 7 Medici Venus 88, 89, 177, 178-80
Lansdowne Amazon 1, 2, 3-6, 41-5 Medmenham Abbey 178
and potential purchasers of 233 Mengs, Anton Raphael 73, 134, 135, 140,
Lansdowne House 26, 37 142
Land vase 4, 5, 123-4, 229, 230 Merseyside County Museum 37
Lauron, Marcellus, and Brothel Metropolitan Museum of Art, and
Scene 160, 161 Wounded Amazon 1,41-5
Legge, George (Viscount Lewisham) #, Michaelis, Adolf 5
136, 141 and academic credentials 27
Leicester, Lord 126 and Ancient Marbles In Great
Leonardi, Vincenzo 250-1 Britain 10
letter-writing 59 achievement of 35-6, 273
and typology of 167 exclusion of post-classical
libertinism, and liberty 176-8 work 28-30, 273
Ligorio, Pirro 250 geographic scope of 17
Linwood, Mary 170, 219 introductory essay 21, 33, 35
Lisandroni, Ferdinando 39 low opinion of most
and head of Anchyrrhoe 42 sculpture 34-5
Liverpool Museum 39 misrepresentation of collections 33,
Lock, Matthias 24, 174 273
Lucian 100, 179 organization of 17
luxury goods, market for praise of 19-21
and artist as dealer 56-8 shortcomings of 273
and Rome as marketplace 58 undertaken as duty 26
Lysimachus cum Achilles sculpture 89, use of published accounts 273-4
90,91 Vermeule's revision of 45-7
and restoration/re-restoration 87-8 and attitude towards private
collections 21-2, 24
macaroni, as derogatory term 206-7 and bust of Juno 15, 16, 16-17
Macklin, Thomas 170 and criticism of Dallaway 12-14
Mann, Sir Horace 126 and Ince Blundell Hall 271
Marbury Hall, Cheshire 22, 145 sketch of pantheon 272
Marcantonio IV Borghese 211 sketch of relief 17, 18, 19
Marchant, Nathaniel 251 and Margam Abbey 150
Marchionni, Carlo 208 and meticulous approach of 17-19
Margam Abbey 150, 192 sketch of Ince relief 18
Margam Park, and orangery 222, 223 and NewbyHaU gallery 30-3,265,267
mass-production: and notes on sculptures at
and copies of sculptures 144-6 Broadlands 7-12
and sculpture industry 94 and periodization of sculpture
Massimi discobolus 98, 99, 100 collecting 21
Index 309
on Sir John Soane's Museum 30 and attractions of Rome 235

and Society of Dilettanti 253 and Boy on a Dolphin 11, 28, 237
on transfer of collections to public and bust of Townley 239, 240, 241
collections 22-4 and Castor and Pollux 238, 239
and Victorian aestheticism 254 as copiest 238
and Wounded Amazon 1 and drawings/sketches, Neptune at
Millin, AL 15 Shugborough 243
Minerva (Nollekens) 275, 278 and Juno 275, 279
Minerva bust, and restoration of 4, 95-6 and Minerva 275, 278
Minerva statue (BlundelTs) 246, 247, as restorer 238-9
248 and Townley 113-15, 238
Monks of Medmenham Abbey 178 drawings of collection 244
Montague, Duke of 256 and Venus 275, 277
Moore, John 137 Northcote, James 148, 242
morality, and restoration 111-13
More, Jacob 134 Obizzi of Padua, Marchese 3
Moreno, Juan 135, 155 Oliver, Richard 159, 180, 181, 183
Morton Pitt, W 50, 53 onanism 180
Mr and Mrs Hill (Devis) 19,161 orangeries, and display of sculptures 192
Myron 98, 100 at Margam Park 222, 223
at Shugborough 237-8
Napier, Revd Alexander 14, 17, 27 Orde, Thomas 179-80,181
Napolioni, Carlo 262 Ostia 80
Nash, John 221, 231 and Hamilton's excavations 63
Negroni Collection 72, 94, 101, 250 Owen, John 206
Neptune and Triton (Bernini) 88, 98,
101, 102, 103, 104 Pacetti, Vincenzo 145,214
and restoration of 101, 103 Paciaudi, Paulo 47, 132-3
and sale of 105-7 Pacilli, Pietro 193, 229, 234, 260
Newby Hall 26, 145, 157, 192, 218 paganism, and Payne Knight 174
and ground plan of gallery 265 Palgrave, Revd William 198,231-2
Michaelis's sketch 267 Palmerston, 2nd Viscount (Henry
Townley's sketch 266 Temple):
and Robert Adam's gallery at 30-3, and acquisitions in Rome 10
195-8, 199 and collecting trips to Rome 49-50, 53
see also Weddell, William and paintings collected by 55
Newdigate, Sir Roger 178 on Roman antiquities 49
Newton, C T 19 on Roman sculpture 49-50
Nivelon, Francois, and Rudiments of Pannini, Francesco 210,211
Genteel Behaviour 161, 162, 163 Papacy:
Nollekens, Joseph 10, 113, 145, 227, 230, and granting of export licences 120-1
233, 234, 237 diplomatic motives 122
as agent/dealer 237, 238 and meeting of Pius VI and Gustav
and Anson's patronage 237, 238 III 119-20
310 Index
Papacy (contd.) Pope, Alexander 55, 170

and Pio-Clementino Museum 119, portrait busts 139, 140-2
120 on board the Westmorland 139-40
and re-erection of obelisks 119 and commissioning of 236-7
Papal Antiquary: and Townley 142, 143, 144
and granting of export licences 121 and Wilton 235-6
and overseeing of excavations 121-2 portrait paintings 136-7, 140, 141-2
Papal Chamberlain (Camerlengo), and and Society of Dilettanti
granting of export licences 121 portraits 174-8
Paris, acquired by Rockingham 275, 276 see also conversation pieces
Passerano, Count Radicati di 182 Poulsen, Frederik 19, 36-9, 221, 258,
Payne Knight, Richard 61, 167, 175, 185, 273
203,245 and Ince Blundell Hall 37-9
and Discourse on the Worship of Poussin, Nicolas 248
Priapus 171-4, 190 power, and portraiture 142
and enlightened paganism 174 Pozzo, Cassiano dal 233, 248
Pembroke, 8th Earl of 256 and paper museum 248-50
Penna, Agostino 213, 214 Prado Museum 135
Peretti, Alessandro 101 Praxiteles 179, 193
Petroni Collection 141 Priapus, and cult of 171-2
Petworth 26, 29, 234, 258, 262, 263, 268 Price, Chase 89-91, 159, 180, 185, 255,
and sculpture gallery 268-9 256
Townley's sketch 268 prudery 189-90
see also Egremont Collection Pyrgoteles 51, 53
phallic worship 171-2
Pharaoh Psammetichus II, obelisk 51,119 Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons
Phidias 51,53 (Zoffany) 164, 165
photography: Quintilian 98, 100, 109
and Ashmole's use of 38
and Michaelis's use of 1 Ramsden, Elizabeth 195
and Poulsen's use of 36 Raphael, and Medici Venus 88, 89
Pierantoni, Giovanni 103 regard gifting 192
Pigalle, Jean-Baptiste 235 restoration 117
Pio-Clementino Museum 119,120 and Acteon sculpture 78
and dealers' use of 122 and classical authority 108-9
Piranesi, Francesco 94, 122-3 and conflicting ideas about 91-2
Pitt, Thomas 132, 133 as controversial practice 84
Pius VI, Pope 119 and defining attributes 93
and meeting with Gustav III 6, and disagreements over, small
119-20 Venus 92
Pliny 1, 51, 100 and discobolus 96, 97, 107-8
politics, and collection of sculpture 118, discussions on status of 108-9
124-6, 157 and divergence of practice from
Polykleitos, and Wounded Amazon 1, 41 theory 85
Index 311
and extent of acceptable 92 and Townley 61, 107, 188, 189, 211,
as fluid process 78, 87, 92, 96, 115 220, 232
and hermaphrodite sculpture 111, Rome:
112, 113 and collection of sculpture, criteria
pre-restoration appearance 114 for 53
and Howard's study of 84-5, 86 and diversity of luxury goods collected
and Lysimachus cum Achilles from 54-5
sculpture 87-8, 89, 90, 91 as marketplace 58
and Minerva bust 95-6 gossip and intrigue in 65-6
and Neptune and Triton social and artistic networks 71-2
(Bernini) 101, 102, 103 and obelisks 51-3, 119
and Paris sculpture 91 obelisk of Sesostris 51,52
and processes of 86-7, 89-90 and opportunities for artists 235
and re-restoration 87, 113 and Pio-Clementino Museum 119,
as routine process 96 120
and scope of 98 and reactions to antiquities of:
and signs of 85 Grenville 50-1
and sketches 68 Palmerston 49-50
and the small Venus 92 and sculpture as testimony of
and strategic editing 111-13 power 50-1
and Tremalchio relief 5, 109-11 see also Papacy
and Vaughan's study of 85-6 Rosa, Salvator 55
Return to Life exhibition 139 Roscoe, William 224
Revett, Nicholas 227 Rossie Priory 37, 46
Reynolds, Sir Joshua 25, 26,106-7, 175 Rowlandson, Thomas 180-1
Righetti, Francesco 145 Royal Academy 248
Righetti, Luigi 145 and Townley's commissioning of
road network 155, 156, 157 artists 242-4
Robinson, Thomas (Baron Grantham),
and Jenkins 192-3 Sabina, bust of 127, 128
Rockingham, 2nd Marquis of (Charles Sackville, John Frederick, see Dorset, 3rd
Watson-Wentworth) 186, 195, Duke of
234, 273-4 Sandys, William 134,167-8
and collection of 274 Satyr and Apollo 234-5
and Jenkins 274-5 Scharf, George 7
and Judgement of Paris group 275-9 sculptors, British:
and Nollekens' Juno 275, 279 as agents/dealers, Nollekens 237,
and Nollekens' Minerva 275, 278 238
and Nollekens' Venus 275, 277 and connection with patrons 235
and Paris statue 275, 276 and consolidation of collections 237
Rockingham House 195 and portrait busts 236-7
Rogers, Samuel 168, 256 and role of 235, 237
Roman Catholicism: see also Hewetson, Christopher;
and anti-Catholic riots 220 Nollekens, Joseph
312 Index
sculpture collecting: Society of Dilettanti 25, 26, 174-8, 231,

and collecting as furniture 94 253, 262
and criteria for 53 and Michaelis on 253
and dissolution of British Solly, Samuel 188-9
collections 46-7 Somerset, Lady Mary 221-2
and imperialist aspirations 53 Somerset House 198
as madness 279 Spence, Joseph 178,207
and Michaelis's attitude toward Spencer-Stanhope, Walter 175
private collections 21-2 sphinx sculpture (Townley sphinx) 68,
and Michaelis's periodization of 21 69, 70, 75
and role of dealers 58 Staderini, Giuseppe 101
see also correspondence collecting Standish, Edward 60, 142
Sergei, Johan Tobias 148-50 Stowe, Buckinghamshire, and Mercury
Sesostris, obelisk of 50, 51, 52 at 65
Shaftesbury, Lord, and Characteristicks of Strickland, Sir George 147, 151-3, 154,
Men, Manners, Opinions, 157, 192
Times 187-8 and Juno 151, 152, 153
Shelburne, 2nd Earl of, see Lansdowne, Strong, Eugenie 21
1st Marquis of Stuart, James 'Athenian' 51, 227, 237-8
Simonetti, Michelangelo 217 Swinburne, Henry 141
Sir John Soane Museum 32, 33, 36 Swinburne, Martha 141
and Michaelis on 30 Syon 36
Sixtus V, Pope 51
Skelton, William 251, 253, 262 Tacitus 54
and Bacchus and Acratus 252 Talbot, Thomas Mansel 3, 5, 65, 115,
Sleeping Venus 112 147-50, 186, 192
and pre-restoration appearance 114 and display of sculptures 221-3
and restoration of hermaphrodite and Hewetson's bust of 148, 149
sculpture 111-13 taste, economy of 193-5, 231
Smirke, Robert 211 Tatham, Charles Heathcote 229
Smith, A H 1, 5, 59, 274 Tavistock, Marquess of 229
and praise of Michaelis 19 Taylor, John 175
Smith, Adam 56 Temple, Henry, see Palmerston, 2nd
Smith, JT 113, 145, 169, 170 Viscount
Smith Barry, James 3, 5, 65, 132, 144, Theseus, Blundell's sculpture
148,230 of 248, 249
Smollett, Tobias 179 Thompson, Sir Richard 175
smuggling 129, 155 Thorpe, Abbe 72, 224
Soane, John 28, 36 Thorvaldsen, Bertel:
see also Sir John Soane Museum Jason 29
social networks, and British Shepherd 29
collectors 91, 157, 233, 275 Towneley, John 117, 144, 186, 200, 234
social relations, and portraiture 144 Towneley Hall 30, 203, 220
Index 313
Towneley Hall Art Gallery and seeks suitable house 200-3

Museum 159 visitors to collection 219, 232
Townley, Charles 3, 5, 49, 59, 89, 117 Woburn Abbey 227-9
and advice sought from 230-1, 232, and drawings/sketches:
251 appraisal of market 253
and anti-Catholic riots 220 collection of 241-2, 248
and Antinous bust 234 commissioning of 242-6
and Blundell 230, 246 cost of 253
and bust of 142, 143, 144, 239, 240, paper museum 250-1
241 and Hamilton's letters to 84, 234
as cataloguer of ancient Antinous sculpture 63, 66
marbles 255-8, 263 Diomedes sculpture 78, 79, 89
compared with Michaelis 257-8, display of sculptures 205-6,207-8
263,265 Endymion sculpture 2,70-1,93,94
Dallaway's borrowings from 263-5 Minerva statue 246
Ince Blundell Hall 269-71 restoration 89-90
NewbyHall 265,266 small Venus 3, 92
Petworth 268-9 Venus sculpture 80, 81, 82, 129
as pioneer of tradition 265 Villa d'Este Jupiter 129, 130, 131
and competitive rivalry 254-5 and influence of 230
and Cosway's Charles Townley with a and Jenkins' letters to 234
Group of Connoisseurs Acteon sculpture 76-8
see separate entry for Antinous sculpture 63-5
and cultural significance of 107 caryatids 93-4
and Dallaway 14-15 conversing with the ancients 166
and dealers' comparisons with familiar discobolus 100-1, 107-9
sculptures 65 Drunken Faun 66-8
and dealers' flattery of 61 Egremont Collection 260
and discobolus 97 Hewetson's bust 142, 143, 144
discussions on status of 108-9 Lysimachus cum Achilles
export licence refused 100 sculpture 87, 88, 89, 90
as fake 98 Minerva bust 95-6
Jenkins' descriptions of 100, 101 Minerva statue 246
offered by Jenkins 100 Paris sculpture 91
restoration of 96, 107-8 restoration 87
and display of sculptures 191-2, on shortcomings of sketches 72-6
199-200, 217-19 sphinx sculpture 68-70, 75
buys Park Street townhouse 205 Tremalchio relief 5, 109-11, 127
Chambers' depiction of 214-17, Westmorland incident 136
219 as middleman 131, 230
considers Towneley Hall 203, and nature of dealers' letters to 62
220-1 andNollekens 113-15,238
design of gallery interior 207-8 drawings of collection 244
plans for 205-6 and reasons for collecting 61-2, 109
314 Index
Townley Charles (contd.) and display of sculptures 213-14

and restoration processes 86-7 and Paris and Helen series of
as Roman Catholic 61, 107, 188, 189, paintings 211-13
211,220,232 Visconti, Giovanni Battista 127
and sexual proclivities 185 Volaire, Jacques 244
and Society of Dilettanti 175, Volpato, Giovanni 3-5, 217, 246
231,253
and Townley Archive 60, 271 Waagen, Dr Gustav 26-7, 33, 274
and transportation of sculptures 151, Walker Art Gallery 39
154-5 Wallmoden, General 133
transportation of sculptures 118, 150-1, Walpole, Horace 175
154-5, 157-8 Ware, Isaac 159
and British road network 155, Warner, Revd Richard 222
156, 157 Weddell, William 145, 146, 157, 192,
and Westmorland incident 133-40 231-2,234
see also export of sculptures and display of sculpture 195-9
Tremalchio relief 5, 109-11, 127 and Newby Venus 193,194
Tresham, Henry 129 and reasons for collecting 195
Trevisani, Francesco 134 see also Newby Hall
Turner, J M W 219 Wentworth Woodhouse 195, 273-4
and sculptures at 274
Vasi, Giuseppe 51 Westmacott, Richard 230-1
obelisk of Sesostris 52 Westmorland 119
Venus (Canova) 29,31 and cargo carried by 133-4, 136-7,
Venus sculptures: 144_5, 146-7
Canova's Venus 29, 31 portrait busts 139-40
Medici Venus 88, 89, 177, 178-80 and disposal of seized goods
NewbyVenuses 193,194 135-6
Nollekens' Venus 275, 277 and French capture of 133
Townley Venus 3, 80, 81, 82, 129 and value of cargo 134
Venuti, Ridolfino 121 Whyte, General 180, 185
Verdun, Dr 159, 180, 181, 184, 185 Wilkes, John 176-8, 230
Vere, Lord 255 Wilton, Joseph 31, 32, 198,
Vermeule, Cornelius 19, 24, 33, 273 235-6, 274
and Ancient Marbles in Great Wilton House 221,256-7
Britain 46-7 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 67, 121,
and 'discovery' of unrecorded 126, 193, 215
sculptures 46 Woburn Abbey 29, 192
and dissolution of British and display of sculptures 226-9
collections 46-7 plan of greenhouse 228
Vierpyl, Simon 236 and Michaelis's exclusion of
Villa Borghese 41, 76, 88, 100, 108, 147, post-classical content 33
192, 206, 207,208,211 women, and allure of 176
Index 315
Worsley, Sir Richard 168,204,230, Zabagha, Niccola 51

251,256 Zoffany, Johann 159, 170, 244
Wounded Amazon 1,2,3-6,41-5 and Charles Townley's Library at 7
and potential purchasers of 233 Park Street, Westminster 21,
Wyatt, Samuel 192, 205, 225 164-6, 167-9
Wynn, Captain 159, 174, 180, 183 manipulation of setting
Wynn, Sir Watkin Williams 135, 175 168-9
as representation of taste 171
Xenophon 187 and The Colmore Family 21, 163
and Queen Charlotte with her Two
Tester House 210 Eldest Sons 164, 165
Young, William 244, 245 Zucchi, Antonio 95

(Classical Presences) Viccy Coltman - Classical Sculpture and The Culture of Collecting in Britain Since 1760-Oxford University Press (2009) PDF

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CLASSICAL SCULPTURE AND THE CULTURE OF

COLLECTING IN BRITAIN SINCE 1760

Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter

List of Figures viii

Introduction: Lord Lansdowne's Wounded Amazon 1

1. Photograph of the Lansdowne Amazon from Michaelis,

38. Pietro Santi Bartoli, Admiranda Romanarum antiquitatum ac veteris

56. Simon Gribelin after Paolo de Mattheis, The Judgement of

75. Sculpture of Fesciale at Petworth, engraved by W. Skelton from

1. Thomas Banks, Caractacus Pleading Before the Emperor Claudius,

17. Christopher Hewetson, Bust of Clement XIV. V&A Picture Library.

At the auction of the Lansdowne collection of ancient marble sculptures in

In spite of the work's later archaeological prestige, its appearance in 18th-

Once rejected by Lansdowne and so already blackballed in the eyes of poten-

political, social, and economic business of sculpture-collecting in the 18th

In a letter of 20 September 1877, Adolf Michaelis, Professor of Classical

Michaelis' 'Terminal bust of a youth, probably in memory of a victory

Figure 6. Engraving of the Broadlands Ceres. Cavaceppi, Raccolta d'antiche statue,

spectacularly to disentangle the contents of the collections, which are said to

in Chapter 7. It is sufficient to note here that Dallaway was assisted in the

previous century. Via the sums contained in the memorandum, Michaelis

recommended Michaelis' colleague, the British Museum curator C. T. New-

Michaelis was hardly an unprejudiced observer, although it is all the more

rather as cumbersome heirlooms and survivals of an obsolete fashion than as

Figure 11. The British Museum's third Greco-Roman saloon, as photographed by

As important as the Germanic intellectual tradition, of which Michaelis is

No wonder Michaelis was perplexed and oppressed. With his professional

Even the archaeological importance of the majority of these marbles is seen

In the volumes of Michaelis' successors, the fragmentation of the content of

Figure 17. Ferdinando Lisandroni and Antonio d'Este, Head of Anchyrrhoe.

colonies and conceded independence to them as Prime Minister in 1782.

effects a shift in academic disciplines and historical periods: from classical

Chapter 1 opened with Adolf Michaelis' letter to the Right Honourable

As in Palmerston's letter, Grenville locates the emotions generated by a first-

14 May 1774. Chatterton, Memorials, Personal and Historical, I. 97-8.

at least in passing, if not in detail, we might refer again to the memorandum

modernity. 17 They have been viewed as part of an iconography of moral sense,

Rather than Lansdowne, whose dealer's correspondence or, strictly speaking,

In the spring of 1774, Gavin Hamilton provided Townley with an epistolary

make comparisons, is as much superior to the £1000 Antinous as a Brilliant is to a

During extended periods of collecting by correspondence, Townley's dealers

intrigue is a constant feature of the commercial Roman marketplace, with its

Excluded from Townley's collection as it existed in the mid-1770s on account

as complementary. This apparent parity between summary drawings and

Figure 26. Attributed to Friedrich Anders, drawing of the Endymion, 1775.

superior sculptures.66 He described the Endymion as a former ornament to a

Jenkins' correspondence with Townley reveals that commissions for such

From this statement, we see that Townley responded aesthetically to the

three-dimensional sculptures that were celebrated for their dynamic poses.

Figure 28. The Townley caryatid.

The operations of sculpture:

1768-72), illustrated with 60 engraved plates in each of the 3 volumes (as in

other things to restore.'9 Vaughan defined Albacini's style as representing the

debates by offering detailed descriptions of the sequential processes of

Jenkins' letter reveals that the de-restoration and re-restoration of ancient

will be discussed in detail in Chapter 5. A feather duster hanging on the right

Boyer, 'La collection d'antiques du comte d'Orsay', 441.

Traces of surviving attributes often assisted in identifying the subject

The demand for copies as furniture, necessitating their mass-production, is a

Figure 34. 'A work superior to Myro[n]' (Jenkins): engraving of Townley's

was restored by Giuseppe Angelini and identified as the best preserved of a

Hercules was dispatched to Lansdowne. His athletic companion remained with

(c.36 x 25 m) built by Domenico Fontana in a valley in the gardens of the