Enfilade

From Munich’s Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte:

Villa Adriana: Die kaiserliche Residenz und ihre Rezeption
Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte, Munich, 17 October 2018

17:15  Cristina Ruggero (ZI, München), Bares für Rares: Antike aus der Hadriansvilla und der römische Kunstmarkt

17:45  Clare Hornsby (London), Man of Spirit, Man of Taste, Man of Fashion: Deciphering Identities of the British Collectors of Ancient Marbles

This talk will examine some examples of motivations for collecting: art as investment, response to peer pressure or fashion, ambition to form taste or to improve national standards; rarely were the motivations clear cut. The collectors included here will range from the politically ambitious commoner Bubb Dodington and his highly-placed dealer Cardinal Albani in the late 1740s, to the archetype of the nobleman collector the Earl of Shelburne, who acquired several pieces from Hadrian’s Villa in the 1760s and 70s. Others considered are the obsessively acquisitive gentleman-scholar Charles Townley and the banker-collector Lyde Browne, their activities furnishing us with a look at the role of the secondary market and the expansion of the mania for collecting. For all of these collectors, Hadrian’s Villa was the provenance par excellence for any ancient statue; reference will be made in this talk to some of the sculptures discovered there and how the British excavators and dealers used that provenance to add even further value to the perennial glamour of the ancient work of art.

18:30  Adriano Aymonino (The University of Buckingham), The Reception of Ancient Painting in the Eighteenth Century: Theoretical Debate, Antiquarian Publications, and the Visual Arts

This talk focuses on the nature of the relationship between the reception of ancient painting and the humanistic theory of art. It argues that this relationship was twofold: on the one hand, surviving textual evidence on Greek and Roman painting provided examples, tropes and principles that were instrumental in shaping art theory, from Leon Battista Alberti to Giovanni Pietro Bellori and the theoreticians of eighteenth-century classicism. On the other hand, the almost complete lack of physical remains of these artworks contributed to an idealised vision of ancient painting that was equally influential in defining some of the essential tendencies that shaped this theoretical tradition. Specifically, my paper will investigate how the relationship between theory and object evolved in the face of those new discoveries, publications and antiquarian ideas that proliferated over the course of the eighteenth century—with a particular focus on Hadrian’s Villa.

Additional information is available here»