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Lot Essay
Until the 18th Century, English collections of antiquities had consisted mainly of small, easily portable objects such as coins, intaglios and bronzes. Only a few very wealthy and powerful patrons, most notably Charles I and Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel and Surrey (1585–1646), were able to acquire ancient sculpture. This was to change dramatically by the second half of the 18th Century. As the craze for classical art and sculpture swept over Britain and the rest of Europe, Rome established itself as the centre to which English milordi flocked in pursuit of culture and souvenirs. Adolf Michaelis, the renowned German historian of ancient art, called this period the ‘Golden Age of Classic Dilettantism,’ remarking: “In an unintermitting stream the ancient marbles of Rome poured into the palaces of the aristocracy in Britain whose wealth in some cases afforded the means of gratifying real artistic taste by these rare possessions, and in others enabled them at any rate to fall into the new fashion of dilettantism, the ‘furore’ for ancient art”. The market was largely controlled by a number of Britons residing in Rome who acted as agents between Italian families and Cardinals who wished to sell to the predominantly English clientele. These agents also undertook their own speculative excavations, which yielded vast quantities of treasures. The most enterprising and successful explorer of the day was the Scottish painter Gavin Hamilton (1730–97).In 1771, the statesman William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne and 1st Marquess of Lansdowne, visited Italy and conceived the idea of adorning his own London residence in Berkeley Square with a collection of sculpture. In so doing, Lord Shelburne was to become one of the great 18th century collectors of ancient sculpture. He was one of the many new collectors of this period inspired by the Grand Tour who were able to acquire sculptures discovered in these excavations carried out in and around Rome. In order to execute his plans, Lord Shelburne secured the help of Hamilton, who, along with Thomas Jenkins, controlled most of the supply of antiquities from Rome sold to English patrons. According to an article by A. H. Smith in the Burlington Magazine in 1905, “The method employed was curious. Gavin Hamilton, the Scottish painter, antiquary, and excavator, who was then settled in Rome, undertook to furnish the gallery by contract. The proposed terms were that he should supply sixteen fine antique statues, twelve antique busts, twelve antique basso-relievos, eleven large historical pictures, four landscapes with figures relative to the Trojan war. The whole collection was to be delivered in four years at a cost of £6,050”.Unsurprisingly, this contract was not adhered to and many more pieces were negotiated; the majority of the Roman marbles in Lansdowne House were acquired by the agency of Hamilton between the years 1771–1777. During this time he was in active correspondence with Lord Shelburne, and the letters which are extant give a vivid idea of the process of forming the collection.
WILLIAM PETTY, 1ST MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE (2 MAY 1737 – 7 MAY 1805)
Succeeding to the title of the 2nd Earl of Shelburne on his father’s death in 1761, he was created the 1st Marquess of Lansdowne in 1784. He was Home Secretary in 1782 and then Prime Minister in 1782–83 during the final months of the American War of Independence. Born in Dublin in 1737, after Oxford University he joined the army c. 1757 and rose through the ranks — becoming aide-de-camp to the new King, George III, with the rank of colonel, further promoted to major-general in 1765, lieutenant-general in 1772 and general in 1783. His political career had begun in 1761 and by March 1782 he had agreed to become Secretary of State in Lord Rockingham’s cabinet. However only fourteen weeks later Rockingham died in an influenza epidemic and Shelburne succeeded as Prime Minister. His lasting legacy was securing the agreement of peace terms which formed the basis of the Peace of Paris bringing the American War of Independence to an end.
THE SCULPTURE AT LANSDOWNE HOUSE
In 1771, when William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, undertook a trip to Italy, he was enthused by the thought of collecting antiquities. He had already purchased the unfinished Lansdowne House from Lord Bute in 1765. Designed by Robert Adam, it was a magnificent building, standing in its own extensive grounds on the south side of Berkeley Square. In the 1760s Lord Lansdowne had purchased several small scale marbles from the Adam brothers to decorate his new house, but nothing of scale. After his Grand Tour and meeting with the antiquarian Thomas Jenkins, more ancient marbles were bought in bulk and shipped back to England to fill the rooms of Lansdowne House. However, it wasn’t until he was introduced to Gavin Hamilton and under the Scotsman’s strong guidance, that a discerning and well-rounded scheme was put into place for what was to become one of the best collections of Antiquities of the 18th century. Hamilton suggested the architect and designer Francesco Panini (c. 1725–1794) to produce detailed designs for an impressive sculpture gallery. Yet the designs were not to the neo-classical taste of the time, were swept aside and the project stalled. Lansdowne’s focus turned to collecting books and manuscripts and Hamilton quickly took the initiative and instead of a sculpture gallery, suggested a library where marbles could be placed as decorative focal points amongst the books. This design was taken up by the French architect Charles-Louis Clerisseau, who had worked with both the Adam brothers and Panini. The design was certainly Adam inspired, but lacking in the inspiration and lightness of touch of their work, didn’t fit in with the rest of the building and the proposal never got off the ground. For a staggering 45 years different architects were hired and fired, proposals and plans made, but nothing was ever approved or decided on by Lord Lansdowne. Throughout all this, the relationship between agent and patron continued sometimes precariously, but mostly on good terms; Lansdowne concentrating more on large marble statues for the garden and Hamilton avoiding the subject of the Sculpture Gallery. In the years 1788–91 it was the architect George Dance that finally won the approval of Lord Lansdowne for the design for the library-sculpture gallery.
It was to have a vaulted central gallery opening up into three-quarter domed apses at either end. Some sculptures were placed in the niches of the apses, almost as an after-thought and never the focal point like the rows and rows of beautiful book shelves. In 1805 the 1st Marquess died and was succeeded by his eldest son, John Henry, the 2nd Marquess. He was crippled by his father’s debts and was forced to dispose of most of the moveable pieces from Lansdowne House — but providentially not the sculpture. He died only four years later in 1809, and was succeeded by his half-brother Lord Henry Petty, the 3rd Marquess. His interest in his father’s classical sculptures and the sale of the books to the British Museum in 1807, prompted him to employ Robert Smirke to redesign the library into an appropriate sculpture gallery. Finally the greatest 18th Century collection of marbles would have a fitting backdrop. Client and architect worked closely together to choose only the choicest pieces for the gallery where busts were set on round pedestals between the niches of the end apses. When Waagen visited Lansdowne House in 1854 he described the Sculpture Gallery in his Treasures of Art in Great Britain as being “particularly striking, it being most richly and tastefully adorned with antique sculptures, some of which are very valuable for size and workmanship. The two ends of the apartment are formed by two large apse-like recesses, which are loftier than the centre of the apartment. In these large spaces antique marble statues, some of them larger than life, are placed at proper distances, with a crimson drapery behind them, from which they are most brilliantly relieved in the evening be a very bright gas light. This light, too, was so disposed that neither the glare nor the head was troublesome. The antique sculptures of smaller size are suitably disposed on the chimney-piece and along the walls”.
THE LANSDOWNE HERMES
The god is here depicted with youthful and delicate features: the slightly parted small lips, the straight bridge of the nose joining the marked arches of the brows and the smooth forehead. The short wavy locks of hair are carved in beautiful detail and place this head within the longstanding Polykleitan tradition which was extremely popular during the 5th Century B.C. and widely copied by Roman artists. A. Linfert suggested that this head is a variation of Polykleitos’ Hermes, like another full statue of the god previously at Lansdowne House and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. No. 56.234.15).
As E. Angelicoussis notes in Reconstructing the Lansdowne Collection of Classical Marbles, Vol. II, Munich, 2017, p.161, the head is slightly tilted to the left, conveying a dreamy, almost wistful expression. The distinctive flat cap, or petasos, which characterises the god as Hermes, more recently thought to be a completely later addition, is in fact original, albeit repaired around the rim with areas of restoration. Statues of Hermes wearing a petasos are known, for example the Ludovisi Hermes in the Palazzo Altemps, Rome (inv. no. 8624), and another in the Capitoline (inv. no. 1435), both copies of a 5th Century B.C. bronze by Phidias. A head in Boston Museum of Fine Arts (98.641) is missing the petasos which would have been made separately and then attached, while another in Boston (1974.522) has been carved with the head and petasos from one piece of marble, the cap with no wings, as with the Lansdowne head.
Roman copyists freely adapted from the Greek originals, either on their own or by demand from their patrons, changing the shape of the petasos, with or without wings, or carved as one complete whole or as an attachment.
From Hamilton’s epistolary exchange with Lord Lansdowne we know that the Hermes was found, together with other sculptures, in a small marshy area near Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, colloquially called the Pantanello ‘being the lowest ground belonging to the Villa and where anciently the water that served the villa was conducted, so as to pass under ground to the river’ (A. H. Smith, “Gavin Hamilton’s letters to Charles Townley”, Journal of Hellenic Studies, XXI, 1901, pp. 306-321). In 1890, Michaelis commissioned the London firm Brucciani to create new casts of the bust, as was common practice at the time. These were then distributed all across Europe and used to create copies of what proved to be an incredibly popular and desirable design (see a marble replica sold by Christie’s: The Arundel Marbles and other Sculptures from Fawley Court and Barn Hall, 10 December 1985, lot 248). Copies of The Lansdowne Hermes can be found in Zurich, Göttingen, Dresden and Berlin to name a few, and are testament to the artistic importance of the bust and its everlasting legacy.
THE LANSDOWNE HERMES IN LONDON: A SNAPSHOT OF COLLECTING MOTIVATION AND THE CULT OF THE OBJECT
By Clare Hornsby
I am now employed in digging in the Villa Adriana where I have already found some fragments of the most exquisite taste, & I hope to find the rest soon…
These words, in a letter written in March 1770 from Gavin Hamilton to one of his clients, the Earl of Upper Ossory, represent the only mention made of his excavations on the site of Hadrian’s Villa while the dig at the Pantanello was actually in progress. One of the “fragments of exquisite taste” that he and his partners unearthed from this site was the head now known as the Lansdowne Hermes. Keeping the excavation and the finds reserved during this stage of the enterprise was essential practice at the time, when competition - from the Pope as well as other dealers and collectors - was fierce. Hadrian’s Villa, well known for hundreds of years as a source of high quality statuary, was the site for antiquities par excellence near Rome, since its identity as an imperial villa and what was known of its vast scale were the primary indicators that a dig would be fruitful in terms of quantity as well as quality. Hamilton would have known straightaway, when material started being unearthed from the water-sodden land which lay at the fringes of the main site, that he had to be careful how the finds were announced, in order to be able to gain an advantage over other dealers.
Lord Shelburne bought the head, along with other pieces in 1771, after he had returned to London from his Grand Tour which he undertook on the death of his wife. A journey of this sort had become de rigueur for someone of his birth, wealth and education and forming a collection of objects from Italy was a central part of the ritual of the Tour. From the Renaissance onwards, a collection of antiquities was a mark of the highest level of discernment and taste, one in which the objects, their origins, their provenance and their history added lustre to the owner’s name and reputation. Collectors competed for the best pieces and were prepared to lay out vast sums. Here is one passionate collector writing to his agent: “The statues you sent before I have not seen yet…Those figures of Hermes… about which you wrote, I have already fallen in love with so please send them and anything else that you think suits the place, my enthusiasm for such things, and your own taste - the more the merrier and the sooner the better.” Yet this is not a letter written by Shelburne or any of his rival collectors returned from the Grand Tour. It was written by Cicero in 66 BC (Letters to Atticus I, VIII) who was furnishing his various villas around Italy with statues, reliefs and other marbles from Greece. There, beginning in the 2nd century B.C. when it became part of the Roman empire, sculpture workshops were turning out large quantities of copies of the best works of the ‘golden age’ (5th century BC) for the ever-expanding Roman market. Thus the precedent had been established in classical times: just as Cicero was sourcing his pieces in Greece, so eighteenth century connoisseurs would buy from Rome, where excavations were turning up large quantities of ancient marbles for the increasingly international market.
Lord Shelburne would have viewed the head alongside other pieces - both from the 1769 Pantanello dig and from other sites on the fringes of Rome at which Hamilton was active at this time - at Hamilton’s store rooms and office near the Piazza di Spagna, in the English quarter of Rome. After excavation, marbles were cleaned and restored if necessary, which was almost always the case; clients preferred unbroken pieces but these were extremely rare, so the taste for “whole” objects was satisfied by work done by one of the many marble sculptor-restorers working for the market in Rome. They were then ready for sale. It was at this point that Shelburne first formed the plan for his London gallery and Hamilton enthusiastically set about providing him with the material to fill it. The Mercury, so-called by Hamilton and contemporaries, was one of these. Hamilton’s letters to Shelburne contained advice to the nobleman to select marbles that suited the gallery plan, provided variety and what the ancients called “decorum” in interior design. When the sculpture gallery was fully established, the head of Mercury found in the mud near Tivoli, newly restored and set into a marble bust, was placed amongst the most outstanding pieces (see fig.1). Hamilton often expressed the hope that Shelburne’s collection would encourage the spread of true classical taste in England. At this time there was a civilising, even educative dimension to the culture of collecting amongst the major players in the market, Shelburne and Charles Townley of Park Street being the most notable, having central London homes with very large collections. It was the Society of Dilettanti - the elite dining club to which the most significant Grand Tourists belonged - that eventually codified the mission to improve English taste, with the publication in 1809 of some of the best pieces in English collections; Specimens of Antient Sculpture… was written by scholar and collector Sir Richard Payne Knight and it is to the inclusion of the bust of Mercury in this volume that its fame is largely due.
In fact, by the mid-nineteenth century the bust was already one of the most famous ancient sculptures in the country; praise for the quality of the carving, the delicacy and charm of the expression and the ideal beauty of the facial features was a repeated theme in catalogues and descriptions of the collection. The head was copied in plaster and widely sold, including to university collections; the educative value of classical art was the motive here. But we might ask, why this Mercury ? - and not, for example, the more unusual head of Antinous as Bacchus (now Fitzwilliam Museum, seen in fig. 1) which Hamilton had to smuggle out of Rome, since the Pope would have forbidden the export of such a remarkable piece. The answer lies in “greekness”: it was the connection with Greek sculpture that lay at the root of the Mercury’s renown and this connection was based on assumptions made about the origin of newly discovered sculptures held by Roman connoisseurs and antiquarians since the Renaissance; they had read, for example, Cicero, and knew how much Greek art had been brought to Rome. Then, in the 1730s Cardinal Furetti, a landowner at the site of Hadrian’s Villa, had discovered magnificent whole marble statues - the Faun and the Centaurs (Capitoline Museums) - that bore the signatures of Greek artists. This discovery added to the already considerable allure of the Villa as a favoured provenance for sculpture; not only were the pieces from there of the highest quality, as befitting an Emperor, but here was proof that they were actually made by Greek artists. A magical aura of greekness surrounded all of the marbles that came from the Villa, whether they were obviously Greek or not and the archaeological method had not yet been invented that could date them with any accuracy.
In his ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ to Specimens, Knight set out a history of Greek art that had as its origin the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, scholar, antiquarian and author of the book that essentially created the discipline of art history, the enormously influential History of Art of the Ancients, published in 1764. Knight’s history was purely Winckelmannian; he placed his chosen Specimens into the same chronological schema of rise and fall (archaic-classical-decadent) used by Winckelmann and the Mercury head was classed by him (vol. I paragraph 83 and plate LI) as belonging with the most famous of the classical works from the post-Praxiteles phase, 400-350 BC:
“Of this period, or at least antient copies from works of this period, are probably the celebrated statues of the Venus de’ Medici, the Apollo of the Belvidere, the Mercury commonly called the Antinous [in the Vatican]”. The head of Mercury owned by his fellow Dilettante Lansdowne was thus grouped with three of the most significant and important statues, two of which were star pieces in the Pope’s collection; this was high praise indeed.
If we turn to Winckelmann’s masterwork we can trace the theoretical origins of Knight’s admiration for the Mercury. When Winckelmann discusses the ingredients essential for beauty in heads as seen in Greek art (part 1 chapter 4) he mentions specific details: the need for a straight nose, brows fine but not too arched, hairline should not be too high, this indicates youth; the eyes should be large; the lower lip full, the chin without dimple and the face shape oval. In the Mercury we see the delicately articulated locks framing the forehead, the softly pensive eyes, the beautiful lips and cheeks - close to the fullness of the Antinous type but without the indecorous sensuousness - in fact we have the full set of Winckelmannian sine qua non characteristics. Also the slightly parted lips, suggesting a tranquil expression of feeling, is another element in Winckelmann’s canon of desirability. Throughout the 19th century, the pieces from the Lansdowne collection included in Specimens continued to be admired, discussed and copied. The classical became the established standard of cultural excellence, an identity and language that was shared far beyond the elite group who first made the journey to Italy in search of marbles. Hamilton’s Mercury - now the Lansdowne Hermes - is a rare remnant in our times of two great lost collections, that of the Emperor Hadrian and that of Lord Lansdowne; and to its timeless formal and aesthetic qualities can now be added the fascination of a millennial history and the richness of accumulated distinction.
© Clare Hornsby 2022
Clare Hornsby PhD is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a member of the Centro di Studi sulla Cultura e l’Immagine di Roma and Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. In 2010, the book Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth Century Rome, co-authored with the late Ilaria Bignamini, was published by Yale University Press.
WILLIAM PETTY, 1ST MARQUESS OF LANSDOWNE (2 MAY 1737 – 7 MAY 1805)
Succeeding to the title of the 2nd Earl of Shelburne on his father’s death in 1761, he was created the 1st Marquess of Lansdowne in 1784. He was Home Secretary in 1782 and then Prime Minister in 1782–83 during the final months of the American War of Independence. Born in Dublin in 1737, after Oxford University he joined the army c. 1757 and rose through the ranks — becoming aide-de-camp to the new King, George III, with the rank of colonel, further promoted to major-general in 1765, lieutenant-general in 1772 and general in 1783. His political career had begun in 1761 and by March 1782 he had agreed to become Secretary of State in Lord Rockingham’s cabinet. However only fourteen weeks later Rockingham died in an influenza epidemic and Shelburne succeeded as Prime Minister. His lasting legacy was securing the agreement of peace terms which formed the basis of the Peace of Paris bringing the American War of Independence to an end.
THE SCULPTURE AT LANSDOWNE HOUSE
In 1771, when William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, undertook a trip to Italy, he was enthused by the thought of collecting antiquities. He had already purchased the unfinished Lansdowne House from Lord Bute in 1765. Designed by Robert Adam, it was a magnificent building, standing in its own extensive grounds on the south side of Berkeley Square. In the 1760s Lord Lansdowne had purchased several small scale marbles from the Adam brothers to decorate his new house, but nothing of scale. After his Grand Tour and meeting with the antiquarian Thomas Jenkins, more ancient marbles were bought in bulk and shipped back to England to fill the rooms of Lansdowne House. However, it wasn’t until he was introduced to Gavin Hamilton and under the Scotsman’s strong guidance, that a discerning and well-rounded scheme was put into place for what was to become one of the best collections of Antiquities of the 18th century. Hamilton suggested the architect and designer Francesco Panini (c. 1725–1794) to produce detailed designs for an impressive sculpture gallery. Yet the designs were not to the neo-classical taste of the time, were swept aside and the project stalled. Lansdowne’s focus turned to collecting books and manuscripts and Hamilton quickly took the initiative and instead of a sculpture gallery, suggested a library where marbles could be placed as decorative focal points amongst the books. This design was taken up by the French architect Charles-Louis Clerisseau, who had worked with both the Adam brothers and Panini. The design was certainly Adam inspired, but lacking in the inspiration and lightness of touch of their work, didn’t fit in with the rest of the building and the proposal never got off the ground. For a staggering 45 years different architects were hired and fired, proposals and plans made, but nothing was ever approved or decided on by Lord Lansdowne. Throughout all this, the relationship between agent and patron continued sometimes precariously, but mostly on good terms; Lansdowne concentrating more on large marble statues for the garden and Hamilton avoiding the subject of the Sculpture Gallery. In the years 1788–91 it was the architect George Dance that finally won the approval of Lord Lansdowne for the design for the library-sculpture gallery.
It was to have a vaulted central gallery opening up into three-quarter domed apses at either end. Some sculptures were placed in the niches of the apses, almost as an after-thought and never the focal point like the rows and rows of beautiful book shelves. In 1805 the 1st Marquess died and was succeeded by his eldest son, John Henry, the 2nd Marquess. He was crippled by his father’s debts and was forced to dispose of most of the moveable pieces from Lansdowne House — but providentially not the sculpture. He died only four years later in 1809, and was succeeded by his half-brother Lord Henry Petty, the 3rd Marquess. His interest in his father’s classical sculptures and the sale of the books to the British Museum in 1807, prompted him to employ Robert Smirke to redesign the library into an appropriate sculpture gallery. Finally the greatest 18th Century collection of marbles would have a fitting backdrop. Client and architect worked closely together to choose only the choicest pieces for the gallery where busts were set on round pedestals between the niches of the end apses. When Waagen visited Lansdowne House in 1854 he described the Sculpture Gallery in his Treasures of Art in Great Britain as being “particularly striking, it being most richly and tastefully adorned with antique sculptures, some of which are very valuable for size and workmanship. The two ends of the apartment are formed by two large apse-like recesses, which are loftier than the centre of the apartment. In these large spaces antique marble statues, some of them larger than life, are placed at proper distances, with a crimson drapery behind them, from which they are most brilliantly relieved in the evening be a very bright gas light. This light, too, was so disposed that neither the glare nor the head was troublesome. The antique sculptures of smaller size are suitably disposed on the chimney-piece and along the walls”.
THE LANSDOWNE HERMES
The god is here depicted with youthful and delicate features: the slightly parted small lips, the straight bridge of the nose joining the marked arches of the brows and the smooth forehead. The short wavy locks of hair are carved in beautiful detail and place this head within the longstanding Polykleitan tradition which was extremely popular during the 5th Century B.C. and widely copied by Roman artists. A. Linfert suggested that this head is a variation of Polykleitos’ Hermes, like another full statue of the god previously at Lansdowne House and now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (acc. No. 56.234.15).
As E. Angelicoussis notes in Reconstructing the Lansdowne Collection of Classical Marbles, Vol. II, Munich, 2017, p.161, the head is slightly tilted to the left, conveying a dreamy, almost wistful expression. The distinctive flat cap, or petasos, which characterises the god as Hermes, more recently thought to be a completely later addition, is in fact original, albeit repaired around the rim with areas of restoration. Statues of Hermes wearing a petasos are known, for example the Ludovisi Hermes in the Palazzo Altemps, Rome (inv. no. 8624), and another in the Capitoline (inv. no. 1435), both copies of a 5th Century B.C. bronze by Phidias. A head in Boston Museum of Fine Arts (98.641) is missing the petasos which would have been made separately and then attached, while another in Boston (1974.522) has been carved with the head and petasos from one piece of marble, the cap with no wings, as with the Lansdowne head.
Roman copyists freely adapted from the Greek originals, either on their own or by demand from their patrons, changing the shape of the petasos, with or without wings, or carved as one complete whole or as an attachment.
From Hamilton’s epistolary exchange with Lord Lansdowne we know that the Hermes was found, together with other sculptures, in a small marshy area near Hadrian’s Villa at Tivoli, colloquially called the Pantanello ‘being the lowest ground belonging to the Villa and where anciently the water that served the villa was conducted, so as to pass under ground to the river’ (A. H. Smith, “Gavin Hamilton’s letters to Charles Townley”, Journal of Hellenic Studies, XXI, 1901, pp. 306-321). In 1890, Michaelis commissioned the London firm Brucciani to create new casts of the bust, as was common practice at the time. These were then distributed all across Europe and used to create copies of what proved to be an incredibly popular and desirable design (see a marble replica sold by Christie’s: The Arundel Marbles and other Sculptures from Fawley Court and Barn Hall, 10 December 1985, lot 248). Copies of The Lansdowne Hermes can be found in Zurich, Göttingen, Dresden and Berlin to name a few, and are testament to the artistic importance of the bust and its everlasting legacy.
THE LANSDOWNE HERMES IN LONDON: A SNAPSHOT OF COLLECTING MOTIVATION AND THE CULT OF THE OBJECT
By Clare Hornsby
I am now employed in digging in the Villa Adriana where I have already found some fragments of the most exquisite taste, & I hope to find the rest soon…
These words, in a letter written in March 1770 from Gavin Hamilton to one of his clients, the Earl of Upper Ossory, represent the only mention made of his excavations on the site of Hadrian’s Villa while the dig at the Pantanello was actually in progress. One of the “fragments of exquisite taste” that he and his partners unearthed from this site was the head now known as the Lansdowne Hermes. Keeping the excavation and the finds reserved during this stage of the enterprise was essential practice at the time, when competition - from the Pope as well as other dealers and collectors - was fierce. Hadrian’s Villa, well known for hundreds of years as a source of high quality statuary, was the site for antiquities par excellence near Rome, since its identity as an imperial villa and what was known of its vast scale were the primary indicators that a dig would be fruitful in terms of quantity as well as quality. Hamilton would have known straightaway, when material started being unearthed from the water-sodden land which lay at the fringes of the main site, that he had to be careful how the finds were announced, in order to be able to gain an advantage over other dealers.
Lord Shelburne bought the head, along with other pieces in 1771, after he had returned to London from his Grand Tour which he undertook on the death of his wife. A journey of this sort had become de rigueur for someone of his birth, wealth and education and forming a collection of objects from Italy was a central part of the ritual of the Tour. From the Renaissance onwards, a collection of antiquities was a mark of the highest level of discernment and taste, one in which the objects, their origins, their provenance and their history added lustre to the owner’s name and reputation. Collectors competed for the best pieces and were prepared to lay out vast sums. Here is one passionate collector writing to his agent: “The statues you sent before I have not seen yet…Those figures of Hermes… about which you wrote, I have already fallen in love with so please send them and anything else that you think suits the place, my enthusiasm for such things, and your own taste - the more the merrier and the sooner the better.” Yet this is not a letter written by Shelburne or any of his rival collectors returned from the Grand Tour. It was written by Cicero in 66 BC (Letters to Atticus I, VIII) who was furnishing his various villas around Italy with statues, reliefs and other marbles from Greece. There, beginning in the 2nd century B.C. when it became part of the Roman empire, sculpture workshops were turning out large quantities of copies of the best works of the ‘golden age’ (5th century BC) for the ever-expanding Roman market. Thus the precedent had been established in classical times: just as Cicero was sourcing his pieces in Greece, so eighteenth century connoisseurs would buy from Rome, where excavations were turning up large quantities of ancient marbles for the increasingly international market.
Lord Shelburne would have viewed the head alongside other pieces - both from the 1769 Pantanello dig and from other sites on the fringes of Rome at which Hamilton was active at this time - at Hamilton’s store rooms and office near the Piazza di Spagna, in the English quarter of Rome. After excavation, marbles were cleaned and restored if necessary, which was almost always the case; clients preferred unbroken pieces but these were extremely rare, so the taste for “whole” objects was satisfied by work done by one of the many marble sculptor-restorers working for the market in Rome. They were then ready for sale. It was at this point that Shelburne first formed the plan for his London gallery and Hamilton enthusiastically set about providing him with the material to fill it. The Mercury, so-called by Hamilton and contemporaries, was one of these. Hamilton’s letters to Shelburne contained advice to the nobleman to select marbles that suited the gallery plan, provided variety and what the ancients called “decorum” in interior design. When the sculpture gallery was fully established, the head of Mercury found in the mud near Tivoli, newly restored and set into a marble bust, was placed amongst the most outstanding pieces (see fig.1). Hamilton often expressed the hope that Shelburne’s collection would encourage the spread of true classical taste in England. At this time there was a civilising, even educative dimension to the culture of collecting amongst the major players in the market, Shelburne and Charles Townley of Park Street being the most notable, having central London homes with very large collections. It was the Society of Dilettanti - the elite dining club to which the most significant Grand Tourists belonged - that eventually codified the mission to improve English taste, with the publication in 1809 of some of the best pieces in English collections; Specimens of Antient Sculpture… was written by scholar and collector Sir Richard Payne Knight and it is to the inclusion of the bust of Mercury in this volume that its fame is largely due.
In fact, by the mid-nineteenth century the bust was already one of the most famous ancient sculptures in the country; praise for the quality of the carving, the delicacy and charm of the expression and the ideal beauty of the facial features was a repeated theme in catalogues and descriptions of the collection. The head was copied in plaster and widely sold, including to university collections; the educative value of classical art was the motive here. But we might ask, why this Mercury ? - and not, for example, the more unusual head of Antinous as Bacchus (now Fitzwilliam Museum, seen in fig. 1) which Hamilton had to smuggle out of Rome, since the Pope would have forbidden the export of such a remarkable piece. The answer lies in “greekness”: it was the connection with Greek sculpture that lay at the root of the Mercury’s renown and this connection was based on assumptions made about the origin of newly discovered sculptures held by Roman connoisseurs and antiquarians since the Renaissance; they had read, for example, Cicero, and knew how much Greek art had been brought to Rome. Then, in the 1730s Cardinal Furetti, a landowner at the site of Hadrian’s Villa, had discovered magnificent whole marble statues - the Faun and the Centaurs (Capitoline Museums) - that bore the signatures of Greek artists. This discovery added to the already considerable allure of the Villa as a favoured provenance for sculpture; not only were the pieces from there of the highest quality, as befitting an Emperor, but here was proof that they were actually made by Greek artists. A magical aura of greekness surrounded all of the marbles that came from the Villa, whether they were obviously Greek or not and the archaeological method had not yet been invented that could date them with any accuracy.
In his ‘Preliminary Dissertation’ to Specimens, Knight set out a history of Greek art that had as its origin the work of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, scholar, antiquarian and author of the book that essentially created the discipline of art history, the enormously influential History of Art of the Ancients, published in 1764. Knight’s history was purely Winckelmannian; he placed his chosen Specimens into the same chronological schema of rise and fall (archaic-classical-decadent) used by Winckelmann and the Mercury head was classed by him (vol. I paragraph 83 and plate LI) as belonging with the most famous of the classical works from the post-Praxiteles phase, 400-350 BC:
“Of this period, or at least antient copies from works of this period, are probably the celebrated statues of the Venus de’ Medici, the Apollo of the Belvidere, the Mercury commonly called the Antinous [in the Vatican]”. The head of Mercury owned by his fellow Dilettante Lansdowne was thus grouped with three of the most significant and important statues, two of which were star pieces in the Pope’s collection; this was high praise indeed.
If we turn to Winckelmann’s masterwork we can trace the theoretical origins of Knight’s admiration for the Mercury. When Winckelmann discusses the ingredients essential for beauty in heads as seen in Greek art (part 1 chapter 4) he mentions specific details: the need for a straight nose, brows fine but not too arched, hairline should not be too high, this indicates youth; the eyes should be large; the lower lip full, the chin without dimple and the face shape oval. In the Mercury we see the delicately articulated locks framing the forehead, the softly pensive eyes, the beautiful lips and cheeks - close to the fullness of the Antinous type but without the indecorous sensuousness - in fact we have the full set of Winckelmannian sine qua non characteristics. Also the slightly parted lips, suggesting a tranquil expression of feeling, is another element in Winckelmann’s canon of desirability. Throughout the 19th century, the pieces from the Lansdowne collection included in Specimens continued to be admired, discussed and copied. The classical became the established standard of cultural excellence, an identity and language that was shared far beyond the elite group who first made the journey to Italy in search of marbles. Hamilton’s Mercury - now the Lansdowne Hermes - is a rare remnant in our times of two great lost collections, that of the Emperor Hadrian and that of Lord Lansdowne; and to its timeless formal and aesthetic qualities can now be added the fascination of a millennial history and the richness of accumulated distinction.
© Clare Hornsby 2022
Clare Hornsby PhD is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a member of the Centro di Studi sulla Cultura e l’Immagine di Roma and Research Fellow at the British School at Rome. In 2010, the book Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth Century Rome, co-authored with the late Ilaria Bignamini, was published by Yale University Press.