Antiquity Reviews: Manacorda December 2010

Book Review

ILARIA BIGNAMINI & CLARE HORNSBY WITH IRMA DELLA GIOVAMPAOLA & JONATHAN YARKER. Digging and dealing in eighteenth-century Rome. xxiv+622 pages, numerous colour illustrations. 2010. New Haven (CT) & London: Yale University Press; 978-0-300-16043-7; 2 volumes hardback £45.

Review by Daniele Manacorda
Dipartimento di studi storico-artistici e archeologici, Università degli studi di Roma Tre, Italy
(Email: manacord@uniroma3.it)

Translated from the Italian by the Reviews Editor

These two splendid volumes are the fruit of a labour of love which Clare Hornsby and a group of friends and colleagues have dedicated to the memory of Ilaria Bignamini whose untimely death occurred in 2001. It took some time to complete the work she started in the last few years of her life. She had left the first two chapters and a huge mass of data waiting to be knocked into shape; they constitute the backbone of a complex and well-organised work.

The stage is set in Rome in the golden age of the Grand Tour, at a time when the modern nations of Europe and especially Great Britain conquered 'ancient Rome'. Indeed the dispersal of an impressive number of objets d'art from the Imperial Roman past effectively served to construct in the second half of the eighteenth century an 'empire of marble' which spread from the British Isles to the great capitals and courts of Europe and eventually further afield.

Following the two opening papers, there is a useful technical introduction which throws light on the background against which the English 'diggers and dealers' operated. It explains who the officials of the Pontifical government were, what the legislation controlled, how licences were obtained, what conditions were attached to it, what procedures for export had to be followed and what the final destinations of the objects were.

A meticulous catalogue (in alphabetical order) of sites in and near Rome follows. Edited by Della Giovampaola, it lists where excavations were carried out. Their documentation is often anecdotal (as the procedures did not require systematic documentation) and much is owed to the detailed correspondence between protagonists. Valuable lists of finds allow sites and artefacts to be linked, and when possible the location of the pieces, their measurements and bibliographic references are given.

Next (edited by Yarker) come the original biographies of the personalities involved in various aspects of excavation and dealing. First are two informative essays on Gavin Hamilton and Thomas Jenkins, two of the main protagonists (the others being Colin Morison and Robert Fagan) responsible for some 80 excavations and the sale of thousands of ancient artefacts as well as modern paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints.

The second volume contains hundreds of letters which represent the legacy of the original documentation (unfortunately without an analytical index) on which the work is based. This is invaluable not only for focusing on specific details but also for understanding the conceptual tools available to the protagonists. Their biographies show how close the relationship between collecting modern works of art and collecting antiquities was at that time. As an art historian of eighteenth-century Britain and of the Grand Tour Bignamini nobly attempts to build bridges between academic domains which, as Paolo Liverani reminds us, were gradually diverging like two worlds separating in a 'continental drift'. The attempt is successful, achieved by methodically searching for connexions between people, cultural milieus, objects and locations, thereby shedding light on the phenomenon which the constitution of collections of antiquities represented and which profoundly marked Western culture, not just the English eighteenth century

Here we shall not go into the methods used to produce a work rich in the empathy necessary for entering a world populated by dealers, aristocrats, excavators, artists and royalty. By systematically cross-checking the data, it constructs a web linking place by place the excavation permits, the provenance of the pieces, the course of their restoration and their destinations. Indeed the documents allow us to reconstruct the original context in which antiquities became the focus of this 'grand conquest'. Bignamini illustrates how, between the Renaissance and the Risorgimento and particularly in the second half of the eighteenth century, information on the provenance of collectable items added much value to objects which, despite a certain repetitiveness in iconography and style, were valued more highly precisely because there was the possibility to connect them to a specific place.

This may be a bold statement, since the recognition of the scientific value of context was certainly a later achievement (see for example Gavin Hamilton's letter reproduced on p. 202). But the thesis is interesting and it constitutes the conceptual heart of the book; it posits that the specialisation of archaeology as a discipline, involving the introduction of more careful ways of recovering objects and therefore of stricter measures controlling excavations, was created by the increased demand for objects. This paradoxically promoted illegal excavations and their attendant practices (still current today), which by definition ignore provenance and archaeological context. Whichever way this position is debated, it is stimulating to see so well illustrated this search for 'totality' — cut short in the following century — which characterises a priori the eighteenth-century antiquarian approach to the past. It paved the way for the current laborious search for a synthesis a posteriori.

The accent placed repeatedly on the historical context, i.e. the daily events taking place within the political and diplomatic climate of the time (marked by the end of the Seven Years' War and by the strengthening of British power in the Mediterranean), is a positive aspect of the work. The marbles were part of an international balancing act. Between 1764 and 1787 the frequent visits of George III's brothers to Rome created favourable conditions for the conquest of the marbles and paintings of ancient and modern Rome. London reassured the Pope as to the friendly intentions of the new world power towards Catholic Rome. The English undertook far more excavations in Rome during these decades than any other nationalities and, after the opening in 1784 of the Museo Pio-Clementino, the Pope himself (Pius VI) was amongst the most important purchasers of marbles excavated by the English. This explains why the Vatican and English collections are so similar and complementary, although it is now difficult to compare them since the latter have been largely dispersed. In the background the dramatic events in France from 1789 onwards unfolded, followed by the occupation of Rome by the French in 1798. This is also the year that Hamilton and Jenkins died, marking the end of an era.