Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760

by Viccy Coltman

Overview

This is a book about classical sculptures in the early modern period, centuries after the decline and fall of Rome, when they began to be excavated, restored, and collected by British visitors in Italy in the second half of the eighteenth century. Viccy Coltman contrasts the precarious and competitive culture of eighteenth-century collecting, which integrated sculpture into the domestic interior back home in Britain, with the study and publication of individual specimens by classical archaeologists like Adolf Michaelis a century later. Her study is comprehensively illustrated with over 100 photographs.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780191609534
Publisher:	OUP Oxford
Publication date:	08/06/2009
Series:	Classical Presences
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	18 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Viccy Coltman is Senior Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Edinburgh.

Table of 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.1771-5 159

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

Editorial Reviews

"[A]nyone seriously concerned with the history of the lure of classical sculpture, to quote the subtitle of the magisterial volume on this subject by Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, will wish to delve into the materials here to examine the particular reasons for these many gentlemen to collect antiquity, thereby, as Thomas Jenkins put it, 'producing a continuation or connection with ages in which such interesting works were produced'."—David Cast, Bryn Mawr Classical Reviews

From the Publisher