Two Kinds of Collections: Sir William Hamilton's Vases, Real and Represented

Abstract

On 17 November 1764, Sir William Hamilton arrived in Naples bearing title His British Majesty's Envoy Extraordinary to Kingdom of Two Sicilies. Upon arrival, he leased a spacious villa that would serve as a home, a salon for polite gatherings he and wife Catherine hosted, and as a display space for collections. His presence in Naples and securing of a second villa located roughly between excavation sites of ancient cities Pompeii and Herculaneum soon afforded Hamilton opportunity to acquire an extensive of ancient artifacts including medallions, coins, jewelry, bronze sculptures, and, most highly praised, a great number of ancient painted pottery vases. Over course of Hamilton's life he consistently seems to have had a compulsion to report findings, to make observations and thoughts useful to others. He diligently reported discoveries regarding Mount Vesuvius to Royal Society and was equally responsible in reports to Society of Antiquaries and Society of Dilettanti regarding excavations he witnessed and collections he assembled. Perhaps spurred on by what he saw as a capricious use of print by Bourbon family of Naples, Hamilton embarked on own publishing project. While royal family, which tightly guarded access to ruins, also limited circulation of Le Antichita di Ercolano to gift volumes bestowed on important visiting dignitaries and aristocrats, Hamilton envisioned a far different circulation pattern for own publication. Two years after arrival in Naples, he wrote to one of underage king's regents that his Sicilian Majesty would do more to service arts by allowing books of Herculaneum to be sold than by giving few copies in manner they were given, and he goes on to speculate that sale of books might be used to finance continuing excavations. Unmistakably, Hamilton played a key role in both collecting and publishing, and it is their distinction and interrelation that helped separate fine arts from antiquarianism. It is widely agreed upon that Hamilton's greatly influenced eighteenthand early nineteenth-century neoclassical art and design. Indeed, pots, many of which are housed in British Museum, continue to interest classical scholars and historians of design, yet scholarship often addresses the collection ambiguously. Is it physical itself that so influenced aesthetics of period, or depictions of collection? My aim is to distinguish between two kinds of collections—the physical, or real, of pottery artifacts versus engravings bound into books—to argue that it was idea of as represented in print, and not of things, that was so important to English imagination in Romantic period.