Society Of Dilettanti Research Articles

Rabble, Rubble, Repeat

This essay offers a short reflection on Daniel O’Quinn’s Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690–1815. It attends to the forms of historical consciousness that O’Quinn traces within the Society of Dilettanti’s sponsored voyage of William Pars, Nicholas Revett, and Richard Chandler to Asia Minor from 1764–66.

Andriake Mermerleri: Lykia-Andriake’deki bir tepe üzerinde bulunmakta olup erken 19. yüzyılda kaybolan, İ.S. 1.-2. yüzyıla ait bir Roma anıt mezarı ve seyrüsefer işaretçisi olarak “yıkılmış, beyaz mermerden küçük bir tapınak”

There is first hand record, pictorial, cartographic and in published texts of the presence of a small Roman square in plan temple-tomb in the Corinthian Order constructed of very white marble on a prominent coastal hilltop behind Hadrian’s horrea at Andriake, the port of Myra. It was a structure that from its location would also have served as a coastal navigational marker over the course of about 1600 years. All of the surviving primary evidence for it dates from the two decades between 1792 and 1812. Although reference continued to be made to this structure from these first hand sources into the latter part of the 19th c., this building no longer stood in this location. There is no primary evidence for the presence of this Roman structure on this hilltop at Andriake after 1812. Due to the absence of visible physical remains in this location today, in the recent literature, the record made of it, has been regarded as a inaccurate record of a nearby Hellenistic tower, a caprice introduced by the artist Luigi Mayer into his view of Hadrian’s horrea at the Port of Myra-Andriake of 1792, which, was then repeated by the British Admiralty hydrographer Captain Beaufort in his work, which seems inexplicable, or has been ignored.This article shows this building stood in this hilltop location at Andriake the port of Myra until 1812 and provides record to indicate that this structure was deliberately and methodically removed without Ottoman permission from its hilltop location in September-early October 1812, at the time that the Society of the Dilettanti Mission to Ionia led by William Gell was at Myra-Andriake. It also suggests a measured architectural record of this structure was certainly made, but note of these dra­wings was not published by the Society of Dilettanti in 1814. Suggestions are made as to the possible location of this building today and it seems most probably the case, in the absence of record of this reassembled Roman structure in Britain or elsewhere over the course of the past 200 years, that the vessel transporting the disassembled parts of this Roman building sank, was sunk, or to save the ship, this heavy cargo was cast into deep water, most probably in late 1812 or in 1813. The name of the vessel used by William Gell for transport, or perhaps, two vessels, if the Andriake Marbles were offloaded within the Mediterranean for transshipment, as was often the case, is unknown today, as the handwritten Journal of the Dilettanti Mission to Ionia of 1811 to 1813, the property of the Society of Dilettanti, which would have recorded this, and much else besides concerning this monument, has been lost.

Sterne’s Subscribers and the Society of Dilettanti

This article brings to light a previously overlooked part of Sterne’s social network by demonstrating that, in the 1760s, Sterne became involved with the Society of Dilettanti, an élite club of connoisseurs which at the time was becoming increasingly influential within the visual arts. The findings are based upon an analysis of Sterne’s subscribers, more than fifty of whom, it is shown, were Dilettanti members. Sterne’s connection to the Dilettanti, it is argued, became particularly close around the middle of the decade when his travels to Italy fostered friendships with particular members as well as interests shared by the society members more generally. Sterne was never a member of the Dilettanti, but the society, it is suggested, had a significant role in his social life in his last years, and it was a network he was able to make use of when gathering subscriptions.

Geography and the Classical World: Unearthing Historical Geography’s Forgotten Past by William A. Koelsch (review)

Reviewed by: Geography and the Classical World: Unearthing Historical Geography’s Forgotten Past by William A. Koelsch Ron Davidson (bio) Geography and the Classical World: Unearthing Historical Geography’s Forgotten Past William A. Koelsch London: I.B. Tauris, 2013 Too often, argues William A. Koelsch, historians of British and American geography present Halford Mackinder and William Morris Davis as the discipline’s founders. This ancestry reflects modern, professional geography’s view of itself as a natural science that emerged from the spheres of government and commerce. In reality, Koelsch argues in his eye-opening excavation of geography’s “forgotten past,” the discipline began its development far earlier, in the mid-eighteenth century, and with a less pragmatic disposition. At the time, a gentlemen’s drinking club based in London, the Society of Dilettanti, began funding expeditions to the Mediterranean. Motivated by a mix of noblesse oblige and a desire to upgrade London’s architecture, the Dilettanti commissioned travelers to make sketches and drawings of classical ruins. These would be used to cultivate the taste of Georgian-era Englishmen and furnish models to architects. But Society expeditionists went beyond their assigned tasks. From the 1740s to the 1760s, the likes of James Stewart, Nicholas Revett, Robert Wood, and Richard Chandler traveled to Constantinople, [End Page 83] Palmyra, Ionia, and other locations practicing what Koelsch terms “archaeography”—the precise measurement and study of ancient ruins in their topographical and cultural contexts (10). Before Cook’s first voyage, then, the members of the Dilettanti (“mostly hedonists by instinct and scholars, if at all, only by accident,” in JM Crook’s phrase [48]) gave accidental birth to empirical scientific geography. From these ale-lubricated beginnings until the establishment of modern academic geography departments 150 years later, the ancient Mediterranean would remain a core focus of the discipline. Koelsch’s book thus makes an astonishing point: For the entire first half of its history (as Koelsch defines it), geography was closely tied to the classical humanities. This is a connection that few geographers today appear to recognize. Humanistic geographers are no exception. They have tended to bracket their sub-discipline from its classically oriented past. Thus humanistic geography is typically presented as having arisen in the 1970s, in response to the dominance of spatial positivism, with an ancestry stretching back no further than Vidal de la Blache and the French School. The sub-discipline’s critics have likewise shown a lack of historical perspective. They have regarded it as an unwelcome intrusion—a novel, unscientific outlier among the branches of geography. Koelsch’s research offers a powerful corrective to such views. The alliance between geography and humanism is far more venerable than is usually recognized. Yet it would have been commonsense to any American or British geographer before 1900. Geography and the Classical World offers a meticulously researched, crisply written history of the sub-discipline, from rise to decline. Koelsch uncovers a vast quantity of detail—some a bit too finely detailed for this reader’s needs, but most quite interesting—on the careers and contributions of classical geographers on both sides of the Atlantic. Koelsch delves not only into their publications, ideas, and influences upon one another, but also into a good deal of institutional history, accounting for social and professional organizations, university academic departments, secondary schools, and individual courses—mostly in classical languages and history—that contained geographical content. Indeed, for most of the period, geography owed its popularity and, in some departments, its existence, to its utility in enhancing Latin and Greek history and literature. (The book hence shows that geography’s subordinate role to history in state educational standards today is nothing new.) But by the start of the twentieth century, as higher education became democratized and oriented to meet the needs of the industrial nation-state, classics programs shriveled and the demand [End Page 84] for ancient geography evaporated. Geography had lost its raison d’etre as part of a gentleman’s classical education. Geography’s twentieth-century transformation brought the discipline in line with pragmatic national goals. Interestingly, however, for a not-so-brief period, classical geography had been considered practical knowledge. In post-Revolutionary America, John Adams...

Mystifying What Matters: Erotic Antiquarianism in Erasmus Darwin’s Portland Vase

Critics from the eighteenth century to the present have largely agreed in portraying Erasmus Darwin as an apostle of sexual liberation. One of Darwin’s career-long themes, that erotic love unifies the visible universe and the invisible, reaches its apotheosis in The Botanic Garden (1792) with his account of the famous Portland Vase as reproduced by Josiah Wedgwood. According to Darwin, the vase represents the Eleusinian Mysteries, an ancient fertility ritual where the god Eros presides. Darwin’s interest in this tradition parallels the contemporary antiquarian movement, represented particularly by the Society of Dilettanti, which researched the sacramental character of sexuality in the pagan world. I argue, however, that such work more often perpetuated an ideology of sexual restraint than of freedom. The antiquarians discerned two different myths of Eros: that of the divine progenitor from the esoteric rites, and that of the impish mischief-maker from popular tradition. By valorizing the former at the expense of the latter, they sublimated the socially and ontologically disruptive qualities of sexuality itself into decorous abstractions. Reading Darwin alongside these antiquarians helps bring into relief his own anxieties about the way that raw sexuality, and raw matter in general, challenges a unitary vision of the cosmos. For Darwin, the Portland Vase ultimately becomes a fetish—a mystification of the material realities not only of sexual desire but also of industries like Wedgwood’s.

Geography and the classical world: unearthing historical geography's forgotten past

Introduction: the Search for a Source Chapter 1 - The Society of Dilettanti and Ancient Geography Chapter 2 - Classical Geography in the Colonial and Post-Revolutionary American College Chapter 3 - Classical Geography in Thomas Jefferson's University Chapter 4 - From the Age of Enlightenment to the Age of Professionalization Chapter 5 - William E. Gladstone and the Reconstruction of Bronze Age Geography Chapter 6 - British Historians, Classicists, and Classical Geography Chapter 7 - Classics, History and Geography in Nineteenth-Century Harvard Chapter 8 - Classical Geography in the Oxford School of Geography Chapter 9 - Classical Geography in the Nineteenth-Century Classroom Chapter 10 - Classical Geography in the New American Universities Epilogue - Anglo-American Classical Geography since the 1930s Index

Jason M. Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment

Jason M. Kelly, <i>The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment</i>

Susan Dixon. Review of "Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England" by Bruce Redford, "Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome" by Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, and "The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment" by Jason M. Kelly.

Susan Dixon. Review of "Dilettanti: The Antic and the Antique in Eighteenth-Century England" by Bruce Redford, "Digging and Dealing in Eighteenth-Century Rome" by Ilaria Bignamini and Clare Hornsby, and "The Society of Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment" by Jason M. Kelly.

The Pleasure of Your Company in Late‐Victorian Clubland

Come to the club with Basil and myself. We will smoke cigarettes … —Lord Henry, in Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (111) About his iconic protagonist, Jules Verne need only write, “Phileas Fogg ...

The Society of Dilettanti. Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment

The Society of Dilettanti, founded in London in 1732, began life as a dining club for rich, travelled men and later took its place at the centre of some of the key enterprises in the development in Britain of fuller understanding of the antique world through its history, architecture and artefacts. In this volume, the dual aspects of gentlemen's club and scholarly institution – which might appear to be contradictory or even mutually exclusive – are examined side by side, as indicated in the subtitle and are proposed as complementary, two sides of the same ancient coin. The writer's approach is to put into a sociological context some of the valuable archaeological discoveries made and innovative scholarship undertaken with the support of the Society throughout this period. The impression given of the Society is of a heterogeneous group of amateur enthusiasts for the antique becoming gradually more focused and professional as time passed.

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

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.

Eduard Gerhard: Founder of Classical Archaeology?

It is difficult for us to imagine that archaeology is a relatively recent discipline, whose establishment dates to the middle of the nineteenth century. Its development has been so rapid and the interest elicited by its discoveries so strong that it seems to be a science as ancient as it is canonical. We should not be misled, however: if the taste for the past, the passion for collection, the observation of the earth, are practices as ancient as the earliest humans, archaeology in the modern sense of the term was only constituted as an autonomous and recognized discipline at the moment it was able to emancipate itself from bric-a-brac, from the impossibility of dating objects and monuments with certainty, from the barrier that separated the history of man from the history of nature. The moment of that rupture, which transformed the old antiquarian quest into actual archaeology, coincides with the middle of the nineteenth century and the advent of the positive sciences. It consists in an upheaval of the first order affecting the humanist domain as well as the natural sciences, anthropology as well as geology or paleontology. It is interesting to examine the conditions under which research in Antiquity, traditionally dependent on philology, was able to elaborate its own model of development by freeing itself from the primacy of text over monument, from the cult of the work of art in favor of the history of material culture, from the centrality of universal history in favor of the diversity of regional and local histories. This work, begun in Germany with Johann Winckelmann, in France with the Comte de Caylus, in England with the “Society of Dilettanti,” took shape in a private international society founded in Rome in 1829. The “Instituto di Corrispondenza

Robert Dingley, F. R. S. (1710-1781), Merchant, Architect and Pioneering Philanthropist

Born in 1710, Robert Dingley was the eldest surviving son of Susanna and Robert Dingley, a prosperous jeweller and goldsmith of Bishopsgate Street, London. He and his brother Charles were made free of the Russia Company on 3 August 1731; Charles established himself at St Petersburg and Robert traded from Bishopsgate. In 1741, by then a court assistant, Robert helped secure an Act of Parliament enabling the Russia Company to import Persian silk, via Russia, on better terms. Robert Dingley’s early interest in the arts is shown by his active membership of the Society of Dilettanti from its inception in the 1730s and the Society of Antiquaries from December 1734. He was first introduced at the Royal Society in November 1738 by Peter Filenius (F.R.S.), Professor of Oriental Languages at Åbo (Turku) and an honorary Fellow of the Antiquaries. In 1744 he married Elizabeth, daughter of Henry Thompson of Kirby Hall, Yorkshire, at Somerset House Chapel. Martin Folkes, the President, communicated to the Royal Society in May 1747 an impressive paper by Dingley on the classical art of engraving gems. Resigning from the Society of Antiquaries on 13 June 1748, Dingley was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society on 3 November and admitted on 10 November. Five signatories of his certificate were influential members of the Antiquaries.

The German Perspective and the German Archaeological Institute

This year, two institutions whose work is exclusively devoted to archaeology are celebrating jubilees: The Archaeological Institute of America, of which I have the honor of being a Foreign Honorary Member, has been in existence for one hundred years; on this occasion I wish to extend to it my warmest congratulations and best wishes. The German Archaeological Institute, which I directed from 1960 to 1972, grew out of the original Archaeological Institute in Rome and celebrated its one hundred-fiftieth anniversary in the spring of this year. Thus, both institutions were founded during the nineteenth century, a century which saw the emergence of so many scholarly institutions of high rank. To speak only of archaeology, we mention the establishment, in Athens, of the &cole Frangaise d'Archeologie in 1846, of the German Archaeological Institute in 1874, and, not long thereafter, of the American and British Schools, also in Athens. In Rome, too, similar institutions sprang up, notably founded by the Italians themselves. The fact that archaeology found adequate representation also in the museums and universities of both the Old and New Worlds needs no elaboration. It is not hard to understand that all this development took place during the last century, most of it during its second half. It is true that even earlier achievements which may justly be called archaeological were made within the general study of antiquity. To these belong the interest which the Humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries took in Roman relics and inscriptions found in many parts of the Empire in Europe, the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum by the Bourbons in the eighteenth century, and the admirable activities of the Society of Dilettanti of London. But these, and others one might add, were enterprises of either individuals or of groups united by common goals, devoted to specific monuments or aimed at making spectacular finds. Usually they lacked perspective in that they were not concerned with broader implications. Apart from coins and inscriptions, finds were mostly taken as illustrations of history as known from other sources, hardly ever as being in themselves means for reconstructing historical events. To be sure, there were some scholars who were ahead of their times and tried to understand the whole, the larger entity, beyond the individual find. Not the least of these scholars was Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who is regarded, especially in Germany, as the founder of archaeology, at least the archaeology of art. But the decisive step toward archaeology as scholarship in the proper sense (Wissenschaft im eigentlichen Sinne) was taken only in the nineteenth century, a century which is characterized, in this field as in many others, as representative of logical order and organization. One step in this direction was the foundation, on the 21st of April, 1829, of the Instituto di Corrispondenza Archeologica on the Capitoline in Rome. It grew out of the conviction that only in a much wider framework would archaeology be able to meet the demands of true, modern scholarship. The new Institute was supported by scholars and artists from a number of nations. In the beginning it included, beside the center in Rome, a British, a French, a German and an Italian section. This was possible only at a time, the latter part of the Classic Revival Period, when the intellectual conjunction of the leading personalities of Europe was still unbroken, all of them united in the acceptance of the heritage of antiquity. More important for our theme is the program which was designed for the Instituto di Corrispondenza and which it strove to fulfill. Let me quote from a programmatic pamphlet written by Eduard Gerhard, the segretario fondatore of the Institute, and published in December 1832:

Sir William Gell in Italy, Letters to the Society of Dilettanti, 1831–1835. Edited by Edith Clay in collaboration with Martin Frederiksen. 8½ × 5½. Pp. x + 182 + 13 pls. + some engravings in text. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976. £7·50.

Sir William Gell in Italy, Letters to the Society of Dilettanti, 1831–1835. Edited by Edith Clay in collaboration with Martin Frederiksen. 8½ × 5½. Pp. x + 182 + 13 pls. + some engravings in text. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1976. £7·50.

Demeter of Cnidus

The headless statue of a seated woman swathed in a himation was first seen at Cnidus by the expedition of the Society of Dilettanti in 1812. Nearly fifty years later C. T. Newton excavated the site—identified by inscriptions as sacred to the chthonic deities—rediscovered the body, and, after shipping it off, found the head also. There is no ground for doubting the identification as Demeter. Brunn interpreted the head with understanding in 1874, and in 1900 A. H. Smith described the statue briefly but carefully: what can be added to this, mainly on the technical side, will be found in Appendix I. Other comment has been desultory, and although the date of the statue has been generally accepted as somewhere in the fourth century B.C., there has been no satisfactory attribution to a sculptor. Doubt has gradually arisen about the substance of which it is made, even about the position of the limbs and the kind of seat on which it rests: and finally, Carpenter, quietly loosing one of his ample stock of hares, has suggested that it was made in the first century B.C. Clearly, then, it is time to study the whole problem afresh, and to see whether evidence exists for more definite conclusions. That evidence does exist, and most of it has been set down in print before—though by various writers, and piecemeal: my argument is new in its pattern only, not in its components.

The Central Part of the Eastern Frieze of the Parthenon

Amongst the drawings in the Elgin Collection at the British Museum are many from the sculptures of the Parthenon made by William Pars in 1765–6. Two of the drawings representing the long middle slab of the Eastern Frieze, and the slab next to it on the left, are exceptional in not being merely pencil drawings; these are tinted with the brush in sepia and are highly finished and wonderfully delicate. They are not signed, but it may be safely assumed that they are by Pars. Pars was sent out with the Chandler expedition, organised by the Society of Dilettanti in 1764, partly for the purpose of completing the work of Stuart and Revett in Athens from 1751 to 1753. Pars was engaged for several months in drawing the sculptures of the Parthenon. This work, according to Chandler, he executed ‘with diligence, fidelity and courage.’ Courage was needed, for he drew the frieze of the cella from the stone beam of the peristyle. He recorded all of it that was then on the building, together with some slabs which had been removed from their places. At a meeting of the Society of Dilettanti on December 2, 1766, ‘A great variety of Views and Drawings of Basso relievos of the Temple of Minerva at Athens, and others, were produced by Mr. Pars, which appear'd to the Committee to be done with Taste and Accurateness.’ The original tinted view of the east front of the Temple now hanging in the Elgin Gallery shows his powers of observation and minute record. In this view the metopes have their subjects really drawn in little spaces not much more than a quarter of an inch square.

Antiquities of Ionia published by the Society of Dilettanti. Part the Fifth, being a supplement to Part III. Folio. Pp. xii + 36 and 46 Plates. London: Macmillan and Co., 1915.

Antiquities of Ionia published by the Society of Dilettanti. Part the Fifth, being a supplement to Part III. Folio. Pp. xii + 36 and 46 Plates. London: Macmillan and Co., 1915.

Excavations at Praesos. I

The excavations at Praesos undertaken by the British School in 1901 were begun on May 7th and continued until July 3rd. The Cretan Exploration Fund contributed £200, the Society of Dilettanti £50, and the Prendergast Fund of Cambridge University £40, towards the cost of the campaign. With me were two members of the School, Mr. J. H. Marshall, of King's College, Cambridge, and Mr. R. Douglas Wells, architect. Mr. Wells made a survey of the city-plateau and the adjoining ravines (Plate VII) and a large number of plans and drawings, many of which accompany this article. Mr. Marshall rendered valuable help in the work of supervision, and undertook a systematic exploration of the surrounding district. I much regret that it has been impossible for him to contribute to this report more than the section on the Megalithic House, printed below (§ 4). Soon after the close of the season he was appointed Director of the Archaeological Survey of India, and has necessarily been absorbed in the duties of that important post. I have had the use of his notes on some of the tombs.

Note on the Two Temples at Rhamnus

Plate III. is intended to show the present appearance of the two temples at Rhamnus, after their complete excavation by the Greek Archaeological Society. The plans and architectural details of the temples were published in the Antiquities of Attica (plates to chapters vi. and vii.) by the Society of Dilettanti; but the excavations made by their expedition must have been of a very slight nature, as they did not discover the sculptures now placed in the National Museum at Athens, and published in the Ἐφημερίς Ἀρχαιολογική, 1891, Plates IV, IX.