Classical Sculpture and the Culture of Collecting in Britain since 1760

Abstract

Coltman's text, part of a series on Classical Presences, concerns the culture surrounding the collecting of ancient statuary in eighteenth-century Britain. The book begins with an analysis of the work of the antiquarian Adolf Michaelis, suggested by newly recovered manuscript notes for his seminal text Ancient Marbles in Great Britain (1882). Coltman argues that the influential approach of Michaelis and others to the cataloguing of British sculpture collections has seriously misrepresented those collections, and led to a stripping of important historical meanings. Michaelis weeded out not only the eighteenth-century works that were exhibited alongside the antiques, but passed judgement also on the relative importance – archeologically speaking – of the classical marbles. Not surprisingly this sometimes influenced the breaking up of collections, as in the case of the Ince Blundell collection in 1959, which was scattered around Liverpool's museums according to categories of chronology and importance, without much respect for its former coherence as a collection.