London Conference Addresses Antiquity in Eighteenth-Century Britain
From the website of the Paul Mellon Centre:
Antiquity at Home
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and The British Museum, London, 28-29 January 2010
Thursday, 28 January, BP Lecture Theatre, British Museum
- 6:30 Keynote lecture by David Watkin (Professor Emeritus in the History of Architecture, Department of Art History, University of Cambridge), “From Antiquity to Enlightenment: The Origins of the British Museum” — In this wide-ranging lecture, beginning with galleries and museums in the ancient world, Professor Watkin will locate the Enlightenment origins of the British Museum in the pioneering collections of the English seventeenth-century. The Strand palaces of London are now largely forgotten but were once a prominent feature of the Thames shoreline. These royal and aristocratic houses vied with one another in flaunting their taste for art and antiquity, acquired in Rome and along the coast of the eastern Aegean, in public displays of ‘vertu’. Against such a backdrop the British Museum first opened its doors in Montagu House doors in 1759, just over 250 years ago.
Friday, 29 January, The Paul Mellon Centre, 16 Bedford Square
- 9:40 Welcome by Brian Allen (Director of Studies, the Paul Mellon Centre)
- 9:45 Tribute to Ilaria Bignamini by Andrew Wallace-Hadrill (Master of Sydney Sussex College, University of Cambridge, former Director of the British School at Rome)
Morning Session: ‘Objects’
- 9:55 Introduced and chaired by Kim Sloan (Curator of British Drawings and Watercolours before 1800, Francis Finlay Curator of the Enlightenment Gallery, British Museum)
- 10:00 Ian Jenkins (Senior Curator, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum), “The Townley Discobolus”
- 10:20 Elizabeth Angelicoussis (Independent Researcher), “The Hope Dionysus”
- 10:40 Eloisa Dodero (Dipartimento di Discipline Storiche “Ettore Lepore”, Università degli Studi di Napoli “Federico II”), “Clytie before Townley: The Gaetani d’Aragona Collection of Sculptures and Its Neapolitan Context”
- 11:00 Dolores Sánchez-Jáuregui Alpañés (Senior Research Fellow, The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art), “Sculptures onboard The Westmorland: A Cross-section of Grand Tour Collecting”
- 11:20 Coffee
- 11:50 Jonathan Yarker (PhD Candidate, University of Cambridge, research assistant for Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome), “The ‘Paper Museum’ of Charles Townley”
- 12:10 Thorsten Opper (Curator of Greek and Roman Sculpture, Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum), “Lyde Browne – The House Museum as Sales Room”
- 12:30 Lunch
Afternoon Session: ‘Collections’
- 2:00 Introduced and chaired by Edward Chaney (Professor of Fine and Decorative Arts and Chair of the History of Collecting Research Centre, Southampton Solent University)
- 2:05 Jason Kelly (Assistant Professor of History, Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis), “The Society of Dilettanti and the Planning of a Museum”
- 2:25 Anna Seidel (PhD Candidate, Humboldt University Berlin), “Display and Dispersal of the Montalto-Negroni Marbles”
- 2:45 Adriano Aymonino (University of Venice Ca’ Foscari), “A Roman Columbarium on the River Thames: The Long Gallery at Syon House”
- 3:05 Ruth Guilding (Art Historian and Curator), “Sir Richard Worsley, Connoisseur of the Parthenon”
- 3:25 Tea
- 3:55 Clare Hornsby (Research Fellow, British School at Rome, co-author of Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome), “Collecting or Accumulation? Some Thoughts on Motivation”
- 4:15 Tim Knox (Director of Sir John Soane’s Museum), “Soane and the Antique, and Some Reflections on House Museums Then and Now”
- 4:35 Panel and audience discussion chaired by Frank Salmon (Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge, and Lecturer in the History of Art, University of Cambridge)
- 5:30 Wine Reception
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