Enfilade

Soon to be available in the UK with January distribution by Yale UP:

Adriano Aymonino, Paper Marbles: Design, Antiquarianism and Geology in Pier Leone Ghezzi’s Studio di Molte Pietre (1726) (London: Burlington Press, 2027), 384 pages, ISBN: 978-1916237872, £45 / $60.

Newly published by The Burlington Press in a hand-numbered edition of just 500 copies, Paper Marbles presents the first complete facsimile reproduction of Pier Leone Ghezzi’s Studio di Molte Pietre (1726), an extraordinary manuscript documenting the coloured marbles of ancient Rome through meticulously painted watercolours.

Pier Leone Ghezzi (1674–1755), was a polymathic artist, intellectual, draughtsman, antiquarian, and musician. For historians, his name is today largely associated with his witty caricatures of prominent figures in Roman society, as well as of French and British Grand Tourists. But at the same time he was also a stone carver and a skilled antiquarian—interests that resulted in the production of many drawings after antique sculptures, cameos, coins, and vases, of which the Studio di Molte Pietre represents just one, albeit exemplary, example.

Ghezzi, a skilled fresco painter, used the Studio di Molte Pietre whenever he needed to replicate ancient coloured marbles in paintings on the walls of palaces and villas in and around Rome. The volume, therefore, also constitutes a unique survival among similar repertoires that were used by Baroque and late-Baroque artist in their daily practice. Alongside remarkable images that have never before been reproduced in their entirety, this publication includes transcriptions and translations of Ghezzi’s annotations, as well as introductory, contextual and interpretative essays. These watercolours have never been reproduced in their entirety. A limited print run of 500 available, each hand numbered.

Adriano Aymonino is the Director of the MA in the Art Market and the History of Collecting at the University of Buckingham. His publications include Drawn from the Antique: Artists and the Classical Ideal (Sir John Soane’s Museum, 2015); Enlightened Eclecticism (PMC for Yale University Press, 2021 — winner of the 2022 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History), and a revised and updated edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and the Antique (Brepols, 3 vols, 2024). He is currently working on a critical edition of Robert Adam’s Grand Tour correspondence, which will be hosted on the Sir John Soane’s Museum website (2025). He is also an associate editor for the Journal of the History of Collections.

c o n t e n t s

Introduction
Technical Note
1  Pier Leone Ghezzi: Drawings, Gems, Studi, and Stones
2  The Stones of Rome in the Age of the Grand Tour
3  Ghezzi’s Studio di Molte Pietre (1726)
4  Paper Marbles in Ghezzi’s Circle: Gaetano Piccini, ‘Draughtsman of Antiquities’, and the Elusive Giuseppe Lucchesi
5  Coloured Marble and Sectilia in the mid-1720s: the Tradition of Antiquarian Drawings and the Domus Transitoria
6  Publication, Visual Conventions and Reliability
7  Taxonomy and Geology; Nature and Art
Conclusion
Facsimile

Appendix
Bibliography
Index