The birth of ancient vase collecting in Naples in the early eighteenth century: Antiquarian studies, excavations and collections

Abstract

In Naples by 1764, the year in which Sir William Hamilton arrived in the city and in which Winckelmann asserted that the so-called ‘Etruscan’ vases should be attributed to the ancient Greeks, the collecting of figured vases was already a well-established practice. This paper examines the process that led to the codification of this new typology of antiquarian collecting during the first half of the eighteenth century. The analysis of this phenomenon takes into account three key components and their mutual interaction: the tradition of antiquarian studies, the antiquarian market and original eighteenth-century Neapolitan vase collections that are here reconstructed on the basis of archival documents.