Originally published in James “Athenian” Stuart, 1713-1788: The Rediscovery of Antiquity, edited by Susan Weber Soros. New Haven and London: Published for the Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, New York by Yale University Press, 2006. 103-145.
When James Stuart arrived in Italy in the 1740s, evidently traveling on
foot, he did so as a humble student of decorative painting. A decade or so
later he returned to London as a Fellow of the Society of Dilettanti, with a
status that firmly associated him with leading British aristocrats of the day.
On his arrival back in England late in 1754 or early in 1755, Stuart’s standing
depended (as it does largely now) on the scholarly archaeological work he was
known to have undertaken in Greece, especially in the city of Athens from which
he was to take his sobriquet. However, it was the more fluid world of Grand
Tour Italy that had made this dramatic transformation possible, as is indicated
by the fact that his election to the Society of Dilettanti had taken place
before he even set eyes on Athens. The evidence for Stuart’s activities in
Italy is, sadly, sparse, although recent discoveries have shed significant new
light on this vital early phase of his career. One such discovery has been that
of a letter written by Stuart in Florence on March 26, 1746, from which it emerges
that he was being maintained in Tuscany in the mid-1740s by a London gentleman
named Jacob Hinde and was working as a painter of subject pictures,
reproductive engraver, and fine art expert (or “antiquary,” in
contemporary terms) for British Grand Tourists. Another hitherto
underestimated element in the pre-Grecian phase of Stuart’s life is his
involvement with the Obelisk of Pharaoh Psammetichus II in Rome, which had been
brought from Egypt in antiquity and now stands in Piazza Montecitorio in front
of the Italian Parliament building. The excavation of this monument in 1748 and
subsequent publication of a book about it in 1750, De Obelisco Caesaris Augusti, have gone largely unstudied by
historians of British antiquarianism or architecture, although Stuart’s
contribution has been recognized by modern obelisk scholars, one calling it
“in a modest way, a landmark in the history of archaeology due to the
perspicacity and the methodical instinct of James Stuart.” Stuart’s
formative years in Florence and especially in Rome, then, offer a key to our
understanding of his later and more widely recognized work on the monuments of
Athens. Moreover, after leaving Rome and prior to arriving in Greece, Stuart
and his collaborator Nicholas Revett spent some months studying the Roman
architectural remains at the town of Pola in Istria. Although the drawings and
notes they produced there were not published until 1816, well after the deaths
of both, the studies made at Pola helped establish a modus operandi for their subsequent work at Athens and thus also
merit some further examination.
Stuart’s 1746 letter to Hinde not only reveals the nature
of his activities and that he was living in Florence, but also provides a new
terminus a quo for his presence in Italy. This has previously been given as
1741 or 1742, on the basis of the preface to the first volume of his and Revett’s
Antiquities of Athens, in which
Stuart wrote that he had “first drawn up a brief account, of our motives
for undertaking this Work” toward the end of 1748 “at Rome, where we
had already employed 6 or 7 years in the study of Painting.” While the
1746 letter confirms that it was indeed painting that had preoccupied Stuart up
until 1748, it also demonstrates that, contrary to the implication of the preface,
he had not been living continuously in Rome since the early 1740s. The fact
that he was receiving regular quarterly payments from Hinde through the
merchant Haughton Wills at Leghorn indicates that Stuart was resident in
Tuscany rather than merely passing through. Perhaps, in writing what he did in
the preface, Stuart was seeking to suppress the activities he had engaged in
earlier in his Italian career, in order to suggest that he had greater
familiarity with Rome, as the undoubted capital of European antiquarianism,
than was really the case. Or perhaps the use of the plural first person pronoun
in the preface may be taken to be ambiguous, in which case the arrival date in
Rome of 1742 or 1741 could have been Revett’s rather than Stuart’s own (Revett
definitely had arrived in Rome late in 1742). Such an interpretation would
also explain Stuart’s lack of precision for a date that might otherwise be thought
to have been memorable. This dilemma notwithstanding, Stuart was surely in
Italy prior to 1746. The Irish painter-turned-antiquarian Matthew Nulty
reported, albeit much later, that he and Stuart had traveled “through a
great Variety of Scenes together” in Venice and other cities working as
fan painters. Given that Stuart had arrived in Italy with some experience
and expertise in fan decorating, this itinerant episode probably came at the
start of his Italian years, before his appearance in Florence where he was
painting on a grander scale.
If Stuart appeared in Italy prior to his presence
in Florence in the spring of 1746, then the first documented instance could be the
reference to a Briton named “Giacomo Stuard” in the 1744 annual Roman
Eastertide Stato dell’Anime census,
where he is listed as sharing accommodation in the house of one Signor Taccagni
with fellow countryman James Paston (“Giacomo Paston”). Paston is
recorded as still resident at this address in 1745, 1746, and 1747, but not Stuart,
who would have moved to Florence by 1746. In fact it is possible that Stuart
left Rome around Easter 1745, since in May of that year George Edgcumbe,
captain of HMS Kennington, reported to
Horace Mann (the British Resident in Florence) that he had carried a painter by
the name of Stuart as a passenger along the Tuscan coastline and that this
Stuart had been a friend of the Old Pretender. That Stuart was known as a
Catholic when in Italy is clear from the Roman Stato dell’Anime censuses of 1748–50 where this is recorded. If
he harbored distinct Jacobite sympathies, however, then they were not deemed
serious by Mann, whose dispatches in 1745 and 1746 comment on those upon whom
suspicion was falling and contain frequent references to a man with similar
antiquarian interests to Stuart’s, John Bouverie (later a companion of Robert Wood
and James Dawkins in their 1750 expedition to the Levant). Stuart’s
position as an artist, as opposed to a gentleman like Bouverie, meant that his
political views would have been held to be of less consequence. Moreover, his Catholicism
does not seem to have been a significant factor in his career after his return
to England, where he was certainly regarded as a Protestant after his death if
not before. It seems possible that in these early years Catholicism was
more a religion de convenance,
adopted by a man of Scottish descent with an appropriate name, and deployed in
the context of a country where the label eretico
could be an impediment to the antiquarian career that Stuart—like his initial
artistic companion, Nulty—had determined to develop.
Stuart in Florence
The letter to Hinde also shows that in 1746 Stuart had painted a subject
picture for his patron and addressee Jacob Hinde, which had led to the
commissioning of two more from John Ashburnham, second Earl of Ashburnham, a Grand
Tourist then in Florence. It emerges that Lord Ashburnham’s tutor, Edward
Clarke, had employed Stuart to travel to Bologna in order to examine some
drawings that Clarke was considering purchasing. Notwithstanding the lack of
references to him in Mann’s correspondence, it is extremely likely that Stuart
moved in the Resident’s circle when in Florence, since he had arrived with a
letter of introduction to Mann from Hinde. This connection will have given him
ready access to travelers of altogether higher social standing, such as Clarke
and Lord Ashburnham. It is possible, however, that the paths of Stuart and Ashburnham
had already crossed in Venice, since Ashburnham had been proposed for the
Society of Dilettanti the previous year by James Gray—later Stuart’s own
proposer. (Clarke had been elected to the Dilettanti much earlier, by 1736.)
From the point of view of Stuart’s later career, a more important connection
than the one he made with a traveling British aristocrat was the intimacy with
British painter and collector Ignazio Hugford, an association suggested in his
letter to Hinde. The etching of a scene showing the martyrdom of Saint Andrew,
on the margins of which Stuart wrote to Hinde, represented a drawing that was
in Hugford’s collection and has been attributed to Niccolò Circignani, called
“Il Pomarancio.”
Hugford was a key figure in the history of
Anglo-Florentine cultural relations across the middle of the eighteenth century.
Of British parentage, he had trained as a painter specializing in religious
subjects and copies, and he also collected and dealt in paintings, prints, and
drawings. In the mid-1740s Hugford was preoccupied with painting commissions at
Vallombrosa and Badia a Passignano, but his home in Florence was in Via de’
Bardi, near Mann’s Casa Ambrogi guesthouse and thus in a good position for
encounters with British visitors. This was the period when the collection
of Francesco Maria Niccolò Gabburri, a Florentine nobleman, diplomat, and
connoisseur during the Grand Dukedom of Gian Gastone de’ Medici and the following
Regency of the Lorraine Count Emanuel Richecourt, was being dispersed (after
his death in 1742). Hugford made important acquisitions from Gabburri’s collection,
which advanced his standing and skills as a dealer. That Stuart was allowed to
make prints of items in Hugford’s possession, such as the Pomarancio drawing,
for the purpose of sending to his patron as an example of his developing
technical skill, suggests a considerable degree of familiarity between the two
men. In addition, Stuart’s own commission to examine drawings on behalf of Clarke
gives evidence of his growing talent as a connoisseur of central Italian
Renaissance art, which may well be linked to the tutelage of Hugford.
What is perhaps surprising about Stuart’s time in Florence,
however, is the lack of any evidence that he participated in the common activity
of copying pictures in the Uffizi collection, an important means through which students
of painting sought to teach themselves while at the same time hoping to profit
through sale of their copies. It is possible that Stuart studied at the
Accademia del Disegno, of which Hugford had been a painter-member since 1729,
but Hugford’s rise to prominence in that institution and with it the number of
British who were elected as Accademici di
Merito did not begin until 1749 (with William Chambers being his first
nominee in 1753). It is therefore no surprise that Stuart’s name is not to
be found among the academy’s lists of members, even if his status as an artist
had been high enough in 1746. Another moot point about Stuart’s time in
Florence concerns the question of whether or not his interests in architecture had
already begun. The measured study of one piano
nobile window of Raphael’s Palazzo Pandolfini from his sketchbook may be dated
to the Florentine period of Stuart’s time in Italy because it appears to be the
work of a student at a relatively early stage of an architectural career. The
measurements are given in the Florentine unit of the braccia and its subdivisions. Later, Stuart generally measured in
the English foot, so in this case the supervisory presence of a local architect
may be inferred. The horizontal and vertical elements were ruled in while
Stuart was standing on the ground, while the ink profiles and details were
added freehand, doubtless from a position on a ladder—a common enough procedure
with both modern and ancient buildings in the middle of the eighteenth century.
However, a contemporary of Stuart’s, probably Anthony Highmore, commented in an
obituary that Stuart’s turn to architecture had occurred later, under the
influence of Revett—which might suggest, therefore, that this conversion took
place in Rome and that [study of Raphael’s Palazzo Pandolfini] belongs to a
subsequent visit to Florence. What can be said is that, when resident in Florence
in the mid-1740s, Stuart was able to paint on a scale grand enough to attract
the patronage of a Grand Tourist such as Lord Ashburnham. This development may reflect
his proximity to Hugford, as might the considerable competence Stuart showed as
a printmaker, using the soft linear technique of etching to reproduce
Renaissance drawings (a technique he is unlikely to have acquired earlier, when
studying engraving as a pupil of Joseph or Louis Goupy in London). From the
point of view of Stuart’s developing career, however, more important still were
the growing skills of connoisseurship and perhaps even of scholarship that led
a longstanding member of the Society of Dilettanti such as Edward Clarke to
lean on his judgment.
Stuart in Rome
Even if Stuart had not lived in Rome prior to his time in Florence, he
was certainly resident there by Easter 1748, living on Strada Felice. His two
co-tenants were Revett and the painter Gavin Hamilton, the three men being
still found at that address in 1749 and 1750. Stuart was already in the
city in 1747, however, since that date appears with his signature on an etching
after a drawing then thought to be by Raphael in the collection of Cardinal Silvio
Valenti Gonzaga. At that time, Stuart was probably not yet sharing
accommodation with Revett, since his later collaborator is recorded as having
been living in Via delle Carozze from 1745 to 1747.
The late 1740s in Rome were a progressive period in
the city’s history. Under the rule of Prospero Lorenzo Lambertini, Pope Benedict
XIV from 1740 to 1758, an intellectual “Catholic Enlightenment” was
in progress. The Pope himself corresponded with some of the great philosophical
and cultural men of the time: the antiquary and philosopher Lodovico Antonio
Muratori, philosopher and art connoisseur Francesco Algarotti, and antiquary
and writer Scipione Maffei—and even with Voltaire. In his celebrated, weekly or
fortnightly correspondence with the French Cardinal de Tencin, artistic as well
as theological and political matters were discussed. Upon the 1747
dismissal of the papal Camerlengo (chamberlain), Annibale Albani, Benedict chose
as his successor his trusted Secretary of State, Cardinal Valenti, who had
permitted James Stuart to copy the “Raphael” drawing from his
collection that same year. Politically conservative, the new Camerlengo was a
man of considerable culture, presiding over an administration that was
increasingly liberal when it came to accepting non-Vatican, non-Roman, non-Italian,
and even non-Catholic interventions in the antiquarian field. In this
Valenti was assisted by the Commissario delle Antichità, Ridolfino Venuti, who
was responsible for decisions on excavations, papal acquisitions, and export
licenses. Venuti had been commissioner since 1744, early in the reign of
Benedict XIV, but it was in the late 1740s and early 1750s, when Valenti was
Camerlengo, that his real assistance to foreigners—and especially to
Anglophones—commenced. These were the years when James Caulfeild, fourth
Viscount Charlemont, was in Rome and when Venuti oversaw the younger Matthew
Brettingham’s exports of sculpture for the Earl of Leicester’s Holkham Hall in
Norfolk, England, frequently attending the quayside at Ripa to sign off on shipments
in exchange for the price of his coach hire or for some wine from Brettingham.
They were also the years when the famous antiquities businesses of Gavin Hamilton
and Thomas Jenkins were begun. Quite aside from Venuti’s standing as one of the
great scholars of antiquity of the time, he was no doubt being acknowledged for
supporting British interests in the field in 1752 when he was elected a Fellow
of the Society of Antiquaries in London. Another Italian of great cultural
standing with whom that society chose to affiliate itself was Cardinal Alessandro
Albani, who may possibly have been another of Stuart’s Roman contacts. After an
absence from meetings of almost two years, Stuart reappeared at the society on
November 19, 1761, the occasion on which Albani was elected an Honorary Fellow.
Albani was no friend of Valenti’s, but until the end of the 1740s Stuart’s
standing as an artist made it easier for him to associate with men of different
political camps than would have been the case for a member of the gentry or
aristocracy.
As Secretary of State, Valenti was instrumental in implementing
Pope Benedict’s enlightened decision to establish four academies in Rome to
further the study of, respectively: councils, church history, liturgies and
rites, and ancient Roman history and antiquities. The last of these
institutions, the Accademia della Storia e Antichità Romane, like its three
siblings, had fourteen members initially nominated by the Pope. Upon the death
of individuals, new members were freely elected by the remaining academicians.
The foundation of such an academy represented a significant advance for the
study of antiquities. It provided a formal center for antiquarian scholarship outside
of the governmental structures of the Curia itself (although Venuti was a
member, having been chosen four years before he became Commissario). From the outset
the monthly meetings, which took place at the Pope’s Quirinal Palace residence,
were held in public. Reports of the papers presented appear regularly in the weekly
papal newsletter, the Diario Ordinario.
Many “persone civili, & erudite,”
attended, along with the academicians, the patron of the institution, Prince
Fabrizio Colonna (Gran Contestabile of the Kingdom of Naples in Rome), and the
ubiquitous Cardinal Duke of York. The Pope himself was often present too,
notably in 1749 (just when Stuart’s reputation as an antiquarian was growing in
Rome). Stuart’s possible association with the academy may be inferred from the
fact that, much later, its secretary, Antonio Baldani, was elected to the
Society of Antiquaries of London on the same day as Cardinal Albani, a day
when Stuart made his surprising reappearance.
Benedict’s reign further advanced scholarship
through publication of the monthly Giornale
de’ Letterati, which began its life as
Notizie letterarie Oltramontane in 1742, providing accounts and translations
of foreign developments in the arts and sciences. The publishers were the
brothers Niccolò and Marco Pagliarini, with Cardinal Valenti becoming patron of
the journal after his appointment as Camerlengo. Stuart certainly knew of
the Giornale de’ Letterati as the
leading Roman outlet for antiquarian reportage. On March 30, 1753, he and
Revett wrote to it from Athens to advertise their forthcoming Antiquities. In an exceptional
intervention, the Pagliarini brothers added a long editorial note which is
translated in full here:
For
proof of Sig. James Stuart’s great ability, understanding, excellence in
draughtsmanship and in the art of engraving one can turn to an essay in the
work printed by us in Rome in 1750 entitled Of
the Obelisk of Caesar Augustus. … He made precise measurements of all parts
of that famous obelisk for his own purposes at the time of its rediscovery when
the foundations of the new House of the Lombard Augustinians were being prepared
in the Campo Marzio. At the order of the reigning Holy Pope, it was excavated and
deposited in the nearby location where it can still be seen. Cardinal Silvio
Valenti, Chamberlain, Secretary of State and a great patron of the fine arts
and letters, having been offered a dissertation on the monument by Abbate Angelo
Bandini, wanted to publish it with appropriate illustrations that would record
it accurately. He chose for this purpose Sig. James Stuart, whose ability he
knew from having given him permission to engrave for his own studies several
drawings and for his Excellency himself an antique bas-relief. Stuart executed
these with such diligence and skill that he became known to the public, and no
less so for being well-versed in the fine arts of painting, sculpture and
architecture as well as in the sciences of geometry and astronomy and in
languages, history and classical learning. Stuart not only produced the most
precise measurements of that celebrated and singular monument, but also drew
and engraved three large copper plates. Moreover, he himself designed and
engraved the frieze that shows a view of the Campo Marzio in ancient times and
the tailpiece in which the equipment invented by the famous Niccola Zabaglia to
lift the obelisk from the earth is represented, surrounded by elegant
decoration. Stuart also designed, with great delicacy and taste, the four
initial capital letters, with scenes alluding to the monument’s history. To add
to all this, he gave thought to and analysed the solar function of the obelisk,
as described by Pliny, which had become the subject of debate among several of
Europe’s leading scholars. Stuart dedicated his essay to the Earl of Malton, a
fine art lover and one of his patrons, who was in Rome at the same time. It was
added to the commentary of Abbate Bandini and, because of its merit and
erudition, placed among the other epistles written to Bandini by Europe’s most
distinguished men of letters. We printed a few separate copies that can be
purchased with the plates, and other images drawn and engraved by the same
Stuart.
These comments carry considerable weight. Not only had
the Pagliarini brothers published, as a separate entity, Stuart’s own essay on
the Obelisk of Psammetichus II, but they also became long-standing professional
contacts and personal acquaintances, as may be seen from a letter written by
Stuart a decade after his return to England. Their description of Stuart in
the 1753 Giornale as
“well-versed in the fine arts of painting, sculpture and architecture as well
as in the sciences of geometry and astronomy and in languages, history and classical
learning” is at odds with the sour comment, made by the painter James
Russel in November 1749, that it was “the opinion of most people” that
Stuart (as also Revett and Hamilton) was “not the least vers’d, either in the
Latin or Greek languages.” The linguistic, humanistic, and scientific
skills that are mentioned by the Pagliarini were necessary for admission to papal
antiquarian circles and were surely admired within the Accademia della Storia e
Antichità Romane. However, Stuart’s initial breakthrough to this elevated
circle had come through his artistic rather than scholarly skills. Cardinal Valenti
had been impressed by Stuart as an artist and allowed him to make copies of
artworks in the Valenti collection for his own painterly or graphic education.
This is presumably the context for Stuart’s etching after a Raphaelesque
drawing. The print of an antique bas-relief that the Pagliarini brothers
describe as having subsequently been commissioned by Valenti from Stuart does
not appear to have survived, but the high degree of finish of a 1748 print made
by Stuart of the cinerary urn of Caius Cornelius Zoticus, located in Valenti’s
gardens, suggests that it was a similar commission. This larger-scale work
shows a distinct development of the etching technique he used in Florence, which,
with the innovative addition of some brown-gray aquatint, had served him well
when reproducing Valenti’s Raphaelesque drawing. To capture the depth of relief
of the sculpture on a Roman cinerary urn, something different was required. The
range of crosshatching Stuart deployed and the stippling that he added to the
surfaces of the nude human bodies shows his response and, quite conceivably,
the impact of his acquaintance with the graphic work of Giovanni Battista
Piranesi.
The Pagliarini brothers’ editorial note makes it
clear that Stuart owed his involvement with the Obelisk of Psammetichus II to
Valenti who, having been offered a scholarly treatise on the monument by Angelo
Bandini, a young Florentine antiquarian scholar from Cardinal Albani’s circle,
selected Stuart as the draftsman to produce illustrations that included the
elevations. By this time Stuart had already measured the fragments for study
purposes, but he had very likely missed the actual rediscovery of the monument,
reported in the Diario Ordinario on
April 6, 1748, probably just after he had left Rome with Revett, Brettingham,
and Hamilton for a planned expedition to Naples. The excavation continued, however,
into May and June, and the last piece of the obelisk was not trundled to its
temporary home in the vineyard behind the adjacent Palazzo Impresa until the end
of August, so Stuart must have returned to Rome to find this the city’s most exciting
on-going archaeological and antiquarian event. It is intriguing to think of
him as potentially one of the onlookers in the well-known view of the
excavation given by Giuseppe Vasi.
Although Vasi was correct in showing that the
obelisk had broken into four pieces as it toppled from its base, he depicted
the operation at an early stage when the scaffolding itself, devised by the
remarkable octogenarian carpenter Niccola Zabaglia, was in process of being
constructed. There are ladders up to the trabeated timber structure where the
carpenters are still working, and the pulleys necessary for the actual lifting
are scarcely in place. According to James Russel, who was an eyewitness and
precise chronicler of the events of early summer 1748, Zabaglia began his work
on May 10 and completed removal of the four pieces (though the base still
remained untouched at this stage) at the end of July, as the Diario Ordinario confirms. Russel’s
own drawing of the scene, as engraved and
published, shows it at a later stage and with greater technical detail than does that of Vasi. Here, there are no vertical elements. Instead
(doubled) inclined uprights are
lashed together with ropes (Russel reported
that no nails were used), propped up by additional posts and used to support a pair of cross-beams
from which four pulleys are
suspended. Each pulley was operated by its
own capstan and crew, and a bed of timber was placed under each section of the obelisk as it was raised until it was of sufficient height to be pulled
onto a track of boards and rolled
into Palazzo Impresa. In Russel’s depiction only one of the four capstan crews is visible, two being located in
narrow neighboring streets (indicated by ropes demarcated by the letter B) and
another obscured behind the scaffolding. All four capstans are shown in the
etching by Jean Barbault for Francesco Ficoroni’s Gemmae Antiquae Litteratae and Vetera
Monumenta, published in Rome in 1757. Barbault’s view appears to show a
similar system of inclined posts to that given by Russel, casting doubt on the
question of whether the vertical scaffold shown by Vasi ever existed. Barbault,
however, had turned the broken monument itself ninety degrees to increase the
dramatic effect of the scene, for Russel clearly describes the side of the
obelisk with legible hieroglyphs as being that facing the ground. Vasi also
showed that the hieroglyphs were not visible from this angle. Stuart’s contribution
to the documentation of this remarkable event lies in the image of the
machinery that appears in De Obelisco
which, thanks to the Pagliarini brothers’ editorial note, can now be securely
attributed to him. Stuart has schematized the system, to the extent that the
four capstans are shown much closer to the scaffolding than can have been the case.
The scale of the equipment has also been reduced relative to the figure of Zabaglia,
who is seen scratching his head as he contemplates his creation. However,
viewing the structure end-on as opposed to taking the angle of Vasi, Russel,
and Barbault, Stuart clearly shows the inclined uprights, props, cross braces,
and pulleys. His print adds to the likelihood that Vasi’s best-known image of
the scaffolding is incorrect in showing vertical elements and that Russel’s depiction
of the posts as being round in section may not have been correct, for both
Stuart and Barbault show the timbers as squared.
A final conclusion that emerges from the Pagliarini
brothers’ footnote is that it was in Rome that Stuart had met the dedicatee of
his essay about the obelisk, Charles Watson-Wentworth, Earl of Malton. This
implies that their encounter must have been brief. Malton arrived in Rome from
Tuscany in the autumn of 1749 and was introduced to Cardinal Albani before
passing quickly on to winter in Naples. He returned to Rome for March and April 1750, but in March Stuart himself left the city for Venice en
route to Greece. The date of April 1, 1750, given by Stuart at the end of
his very substantial essay on the obelisk was thus a forward one, and since he
and Revett were busy preparing for their Greek expedition in late 1749 and
early 1750, the research if not the writing was probably well advanced by the
time he met Malton. What was the nature of their initial connection? With the usual
degree of deference to nobility, the Pagliarini brothers called the earl
“a fine art lover and one of [Stuart’s] patrons.” Joseph Woods later
recorded that Malton (as well as Lord Charlemont and James Dawkins) had
“liberally assisted” Stuart with money while he was in Rome and
subsequently in Athens. Promising to subscribe for ten copies of “our Attica”
certainly made Malton the largest initial supporter of the Antiquities project (although he later reduced his complement to
six copies). The time frame suggests that Stuart’s dedication of his essay on
the obelisk to Malton was an act of opportunism. The printing of it as a
separate entity was probably an enterprising initiative of Stuart’s rather than
a direct result of Malton’s patronage. As the Pagliarini stated, only a
“few” copies were printed—a point confirmed by the relative rarity of
the volume today. In addition, the dual red-and-black-ink title pages of the
Bandini version are missing from Stuart’s volume, and, while the typesetting of
the text itself is identical, the placement of the images in the latter suggests
a relatively cheap production (Stuart’s print of Zabaglia, for example, is carelessly
inserted over the index on the reverse of page 33). Stuart most likely
realized that it would serve a useful purpose back in London for him to have
special copies of his erudite work printed by the Pagliarini and dedicated to
an English nobleman. Further support for this interpretation emerges from the fact
that neither the letter nor the book and its dedication were mentioned in the
correspondence Malton and his bear-leader, Colonel Forrester, sent back to his
father, the Marquess of Rockingham. Nor, when Malton’s Grand Tour acquisitions
began arriving in Yorkshire in October 1750, did Rockingham make any reference
to Stuart’s dedication of the work to his son, even though he commented to
Malton that “your books, medals & statues & little pictures etc.
are fine and well chose.”
De Obelisco Caesaris Augusti
For James Stuart, participation alongside many of Europe’s greatest
antiquarians in their interpretations of the Obelisk of Psammetichus II in Rome
represents a scholarly and social watershed. The obelisk, dated from the sixth
century B.C., had been brought to Rome from Heliopolis by Emperor Augustus in
10 B.C. In a sense it was the most significant of all Egyptian obelisks in Rome
(as well as the fourth-largest), for it was erected in the Campus Martius as
the “gnonom” or needle of a massive sundial laid out with bronze
lines in the pavement over an open area of some 7,000 square meters. The identical
inscriptions on the north and south faces of the obelisk’s (Roman) red granite
base show that Augustus intended the arrangement both as a symbol of the
subjugation of Egypt and as an act of worship of the sun. Its importance may be
judged from the fact that it became part of the emperor’s funerary complex (the
“bustum”), along with his mausoleum and the Ara Pacis (when in its original
position rather than that it occupies today). In book thirty-six of his Natural History, Pliny the Elder described
the transport of the obelisk to Rome, the gilt ball placed on top of it to reflect
the shadow from the center of the sun and the layout of the sundial below.
Owing to subsidence of the soft soil in the Campus Martius, the sundial had
already ceased working effectively by the time Natural History was dedicated in A.D. 77, and an attempt was made
to rectify its malfunctioning shortly afterwards (probably during the reign of
Domitian) by raising the obelisk on its base some 1.6 meters. The huge urban area
of the sundial was presumably built over and the granite base probably embedded
in soil by the end of the first millennium, since the base was undamaged when
the obelisk itself fell. The collapse was possibly due to the earthquake that
struck Rome in A.D. 849, or, since the shaft was found to have suffered fire
damage, it may have fallen when the city was sacked by soldiers of the Norman
duke, Robert Guiscard, in 1084.
The Obelisk of Psammetichus II had a long history of
partial rediscovery and study prior to the middle of the eighteenth century,
culminating in an investigation undertaken at the behest of Pope Alexander VII
by Athanasius Kircher in 1666. Kircher found that, although almost completely
buried, the base was still in an upright position. Houses had been built on top
of the fallen shaft, however, and these would have to be demolished if the monument
were to be excavated. Alexander died before any decision had been made on this
issue, and it was left to Benedict XIV to press ahead with the excavation in
the summer of 1748. Benedict told Cardinal de Tencin on May 15, 1748, that
Julius II and Sixtus V had both failed to excavate this obelisk because they
balked at buying out the owners of the houses that stood on top of it. After the
Lombard Augustinians paid for the acquisition and demolition of the houses in
1748, Benedict thought he should complete the excavation as a cultural act and
“so as not to appear to be a Gothic Pope.” As though to set his
seal on the project, the Pope came to inspect the site from the windows of neighboring
Palazzo Tanari on one of the first days of the excavation. The precocious Bandini,
then aged only twenty-two, was ordered to write a short report, which subsequently
appeared as an appendix in De Obelisco
Caesaris Augusti entitled “Notizie per l’obelisco.” Based on
Kircher’s seventeenth-century account, this report doubtless inspired Bandini
to begin upon the much more substantive dissertation on the monument that he
offered to Valenti for publication some two years later and which appeared
under the impress of the Pagliarini brothers.
Bandini’s substantial essay in the book, over one
hundred pages in length, was remarkable not just of and in itself but because
it was accompanied by shorter but still substantive letters dealing with a
range of issues raised by the excavation and assessment of the obelisk, written
by an international array of scholars. (Strangely, the Commissario delle Antichità, Venuti, was the only major antiquarian
figure missing.) Most of these printed letters (which date from July 1748,
when the extraction was still ongoing, to March 1749) were presumably
commissioned, and some of them were in circulation before Bandini’s book
appeared in July 1750. A letter by antiquarian Ernesto Freeman, disagreeing
with Ruggiero Boscovitch’s assessment of the astronomical uses of the obelisk,
was printed in the Giornale de’ Letterati
in May 1750 (also published by the Pagliarini). Boscovitch responded in four
parts in the Giornale in July 1750. Some
copies of Bandini’s De Obelisco,
bearing a colophon date of 175I, include Freeman’s letter and Boscovitch’s
riposte as an appendix, placed after the index. Stuart’s letter was also a late
entrant to the book—situated just after Bandini’s original “Notizie per l’obelisco”
(1748), which had clearly been intended as the last item. But as Stuart’s work
is placed before the publishing license and index and as Boscovitch referred to
Stuart’s essay in his letter, it certainly belongs with the original publication.
In fact Stuart was probably acquainted with Boscovitch, who was professor of
mathematics at the Collegio di Propaganda Fide in Rome where Stuart is thought
to have studied Latin. No doubt Stuart had volunteered his work to Bandini
and it was included, as the Pagliarini brothers later stated, because of the merit
and ingenuity shown by its author, rather than because of his prior scholarly
standing.
That Stuart was familiar with Pliny’s account of
the Roman history of the obelisk may be seen graphically from the four
capital-letter engravings that, thanks to the editorial note of the Pagliarini,
can now be assigned to Stuart’s hand. In the Bandini version of the book the
letters I and T appear on page vii, the first page of the preface, while C and A appear on page 1, the first page of Bandini’s essay. The image
associated with the letter I shows
the obelisk being transported from Egypt to Rome lying on the deck of a great
galley. The letter T has Roman
laborers using a capstan to winch the (unseen) obelisk toward the ramp that will
be used to tilt it into its vertical position. A medal of Augustus supported by
male and female figures features in letter C.
The female stands upon a crocodile and presumably represents the Nile, while
the male, placed above the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus, symbolizes
Rome. The letter A has a geometer in
Rome marking out the first of the pavement lines of the sundial. As is shown by[the
capital-letter engravings], when Stuart’s essay was republished on its own, the
letters were printed in a single sequence and were rearranged to read “CITA,”
thereby achieving a slightly more logical order, with the image of Augustus
first, followed by the chronological sequence depicting the obelisk’s history
in 10 B.C. Also, in Stuart’s publication, his view of the Campus Martius was
relocated to the title page, having been placed on the first page of Bandini’s
essay in the full version of the book.
By the time that Stuart’s essay appeared, two years
had elapsed since the excavation of the obelisk. These were critical years
during which Stuart had transformed himself from painter and graphic artist to
true antiquarian man of letters. His text runs to thirty-three pages and
amounts to some 16,000 words in each of the two languages in which it was
published: Latin and Italian. Stuart’s work could have been translated from
Latin to Italian or vice versa—but surely not from English to both Latin and Italian.
Indeed, there is little reason to doubt his proficiency in both foreign
languages. Evidence from his surviving sketchbook indicates that Stuart was
fluent in Italian, while the information that he had studied Latin at the Collegio
di Propaganda Fide, even if not verified by the college’s surviving archives,
appears to have derived from someone who knew Stuart personally. Moreover, the
Protector of the College at this time was none other than Cardinal Valenti, who
could easily have inserted a protégé into the institution’s classes.
Stuart’s letter describes his efforts to settle the
problem of the original gnomic function of the Obelisk of Psammetichus II,
whether it had been a solarium (giving the daily hours) or a horologium
(indicating seasonal variation in the hours as well). To achieve this it was
necessary to determine the exact orientation of the base prior to its removal
from the site of its excavation. Stuart assumed that the four sides of the base
would have faced the cardinal points of the compass, but his measurements showed
this was not the case and that the north face of plinth and pedestal were fifteen
degrees from the meridian line. In his illustration, the divergence is indicated
between the plan and section by an arrow with the lowercase letter l for” levante,” that is east. Stuart could not have known or guessed
the reason for this—which was to enable the tip of the obelisk’s shadow to pass
over the Ara Pacis on September 23 each year, the date of Augustus’s birth.
He inferred instead that the obelisk’s use as gnomon had postdated its
erection. He also excavated around the base and found fragments of the ancient pavement
(although none of the inlaid bronze lines). He organized methodical digging and
described the various strata he came upon, thereby demonstrating that the
entire pavement and corbeled plinth of base had been raised by about three feet
at some point to adjust the functioning of the sundial (now known to have
occurred in or around the time of Domitian). Stuart’s work has been described fairly
as heralding “a new epoch in archaeology, as one of the first efforts to
give a systematic account of a methodical excavation and an archaeological
description of a monument in situ.”
The plan of the obelisk’s base that appears as plate IV in De Obelisco Caesaris Augusti was prepared by Stuart specifically to
illustrate the points of debate in his own essay: none of the other essays in
the book make reference to it. He gave a dual scale of Roman palmi and English feet,
but the measurements had been made in feet, inches, and hundredths of an inch.
This is an early indication of the minute degree of accuracy (the “precise
measurements” described by the Pagliarini brothers) that Stuart and Revett
would later claim for the measurements that they made in Athens. It predates Robert
Wood’s work at Palmyra and Balbec, which has often been taken as setting a
standard that Stuart and Revett sought to emulate.
Stuart’s study of the obelisk showed him to be
capable of surveying and drawing out a plan, but his other surviving architectural
surveys from his time in Rome suggest that he preferred to sketch elevations
freehand rather than to draw them out geometrically. In fact, Stuart probably
never did acquire proper skills of architectural draftsmanship. In an elevation
of the three loggia-capped bays of Borromini’s Palazzo Falconieri, facing the
Tiber River, all of the elements, including the horizontal lines of the
entablature, were drawn freehand, and the scale (probably in palmi romani) was thus of use for
general reference only. Curiously, in this drawing Stuart has reduced the
height of the building by omitting the story that should appear between the
arcaded basement and the Ionic piano
nobile, making the sketch of limited utility as a record drawing. It also
shows Stuart attempting to “improve” on Borromini’s solecistic four stories
by reducing them to three, more closely in line with the rules for the
deployment of superimposed orders with which he would have been familiar from
British early eighteenth-century practice. Another of his surviving drawings
appears to show a revised “elevation” of the same part of Palazzo Falconieri,
where this time he ruled and sketched in a Doric frieze between the principal
and attic windows of the piano nobile,
as though seeking to overcome the problem of there being two stories within the
one, non-giant order. Such a rule-based approach to architectural design
would be in concordance with Stuart’s work on the Obelisk of Psammetichus and
with the way he applied his architectural understanding to his archaeological
work in Athens.
Venice and the Pola Expedition
Stuart and Revert left Rome for Venice in March 1750 but were not to set
sail for Athens until January 19, 1751. Although the nine intervening months
have sometimes been regarded as a time of hiatus and frustration for the two
men, they were in fact a formative period for Stuart in a number of respects.
His encounter (or perhaps renewed encounter) with the British Resident in
Venice, Sir James Gray, may have cemented Stuart’s rise to the status of
British gentlemanly scholar—evidenced by his nomination for election to the
Society of Dilettanti in 1751. These were also months during which, in
traveling about the terra firma, Stuart honed skills of architectural design
with an eye to English patronage. From the point of view of the present
study, however, two aspects of those months merit discussion. The first is the
development of the scholarly skills already displayed by Stuart in relation to
the Obelisk of Psammetichus II into more abstract, theoretical directions. The
second is the trip that he and Revett made for the surprisingly long period of
about three months between late July and November 1750 to study the Roman
buildings surviving at Pola in Istria. Stuart himself described the Pola
expedition as employing “vacant time” but added that he and Revert
had used the opportunity to demonstrate “the manner in which we proposed
to execute our Athenian work.”
Stuart’s activities are better documented from this
time on than they are before. However, unfortunately, of the fifty-four manuscript
books by Stuart handed to Joseph Woods by the publisher Josiah Taylor in the
early nineteenth century to aid Woods’s production of the fourth volume of Antiquities of Athens, only one appears
to have survived—a substantial notebook in the library of Edinburgh University.
There is also a pocket-size sketchbook by Stuart in the RIBA Library Drawings
Collection. Material in both of these volumes dates to 1750 (or from 1750
in the case of the Edinburgh notebook) and concerns Stuart’s time in the Veneto
and at Pola. Despite the disparity in size, these survivors give a good
impression of Stuart’s working methods and record keeping. They suggest a
wide-ranging and inquiring mind but also one that struggled to synthesize material
or to follow through with ambitious literary and philosophical projects. The Edinburgh
notebook opens with a title page: “An Exact Description of the Ancient
Edifices now existing in Pola by James Stuart Painter & Architect … begun
August 1750.” The text of this “Description” on the first folio
contains only one sentence, followed by a map of Pola on the second folio.
Notes on the Arch of the Sergii (known as the Porta Aurata in the eighteenth
century) and on the two temples at Pola follow on folios 11 and 13 to 14. This fragmentation
of the record seems fairly typical of Stuart, who struggled to separate
gathering information from shaping it into coherent narrative form. Indeed,
Taylor was to comment, as he tried to piece material together for editing in
1816: “I think the beginning of the volume on Pola is written over one way
or another at least 50 times,” while the actual editor, Woods, observed
that a “great many” of the notebooks he had studied contained memoranda on
painting as well as the beginnings of various essays on architecture, truth,
and the absurd. It was already becoming clear at Pola that the range of
Stuart’s interests was inhibiting development of that single-mindedness necessary
to draw ideas into a coherent whole. In addition his undoubted skills of
observation and acuity in technical analysis did not readily translate into narrative
skills. It might even be inferred from this that the distinction between the observational
Athenian project of Stuart and Revert and the theoretical Athenian project of their
French rival Julien-David Le Roy was established before any of them had set
foot in Greece.
Joseph Woods’s comments on the various
“essays” he found Stuart to have been attempting suggest a man
struggling to turn himself to more philosophical and abstract directions, but
the survival of a fragmentary treatise on painting in the RIBA sketchbook
perhaps demonstrates the grounds on which Stuart felt more comfortable. While this
fragment cannot be dated with certainty, the predominance of Venetian pictures
among the examples suggests a timeframe of spring and early summer 1750, when
Stuart was mainly resident in Venice. Of the various sections and drafts, only
one was worked up to a point of ready comprehension. In it Stuart discussed the
effects of light upon solid bodies, specifically architectural columns. The
analytical physics of this study was surely influenced by his recent and
intensive research on the horological function of the Obelisk of Psammetichus
II. This subject dwelled in Stuart’s mind well after his departure from Rome,
as may be seen from several comments on obelisks in the Edinburgh notebook (not
to mention substantial notes on sundials and eclipses in its early pages).
Sketches that accompany the text of Stuart’s treatise draft demonstrate his
understanding of what he defined as the three ways in which light falls upon an
architectural element. In Stuart’s analysis, “luminous rays” were
those that fell on the column direct from the light source, while
“visual” rays were those that were not direct but nonetheless
perceptible to the eye, and “reflected light” came from a lighted body
(the wall, in the example of [fol. 75v, Stuart’s sketchbook]) and then struck
an unlighted body or part of the body (in this case the section of the column marked
C to H). Stuart was also aware that the effects of these three modes of
light perception differed according to the texture of the body on which the
light was falling, a point he demonstrated by contrasting the “perfectly
polished” column of [fol. 75v, Stuart’s sketchbook] with a coarsely finished
column, thereby representing the different effects of light falling upon
“shaggy or Downy Objects.”
Stuart’s interest in the physics of light can be
seen as part of a developing mathematical inclination that would move him away
from his concern with making measurements for the sake of the survey in itself
toward an interest in analysing the results of measurements to elucidate numerical
and geometrical systems. At Pola he may have joined with Revett in the
ostensibly straightforward process of recording measurements, for in the
Edinburgh notebook there is a page of plans and notes on the Temple of Rome and
Augustus with figures that correspond reasonably closely with the plan of the
building as eventually published. By the time the two men reached Greece,
however, it seems that the decision to delegate the comprehensive collection of
measured data to Revett had been taken. Stuart’s notebook increasingly records
dimensions not as part of a total record but as the basis of complicated trigonometrical
calculations and geometrical speculations. If Revett thus consolidated his
position more as “architect-archaeologist” during the months at Pola,
then Stuart, in addition to being the scholar struggling to write erudite
treatises, increasingly took the lead as “topographer-archaeologist.”
A high proportion of the images in the RIBA sketchbook are tiny pencil or pen-and-ink
landscape drawings (there are seventeen among unfilled eighty-five folios).
There is little evidence that Stuart’s earlier career as painter and graphic
artist had involved much in the way of landscape studies. A keen interest in
the landscape was one product of his time traveling around the Veneto. At Pola
Stuart probably began to develop topographical views on sheets of paper as
large as could reasonably be held on site, using pen and ink and then heavily
applied gray wash to represent the effects of light striking or permeating
buildings that were the focus of attention. Although the image reproduced here
was not selected by Stuart for further development, it represents an
intermediate stage between his practice of pen-and-ink sketching and hatching
and the production of the celebrated gouache paintings that would become the
basis of the initial, “actual state” engraved views in Antiquities of Athens.
Why Stuart adopted gouache for his views and the question
of when he actually executed them can only be speculated upon. He may have
learned to paint in gouache when studying with Joseph or Louis Goupy in London,
but the technique appears to have lain dormant during his painterly years in
Florence and Rome. The Pola expedition, however, would have brought into focus
the issue of how the topographical views were to be executed and the evidence
of the RIBA sketchbook and his view inside the amphitheater shows that Stuart traveled
with pen, ink, and gray wash readily to hand. In this respect, his technique
corresponds with that of Robert Wood’s draftsman, Giovanni Borra. Made during Wood’s
contemporaneous Levantine expedition, Borra’s finished pen-and-ink and
blue-gray wash views of Palmyra and Balbec were perfectly suited to engraving—and
did no more than was necessary for that purpose. Stuart’s brightly colored
and slightly clumsy gouaches with their busy figurative content are, however,
of quite a different nature. The materials needed to produce them and the fact
that the opacity of gouache renders the medium more liable to chafing when
being transported must cast doubt not just on the idea that they were executed in
situ (a doubt confirmed once Stuart reached Greece), but even on the idea that
they were executed by Stuart when in the Mediterranean.
Five gouaches survive from Stuart’s work at Pola,
one of which—the Arch of the Sergii—makes a good case study of his initial
approach to the “actual state” view. Not long after Stuart and
Revett’s visit, the arch was the subject of two further studies, one made in
1782 by Louis-François Cassas, subsequently published in 1802 in Voyage pittoresque et historique de l’Istrie
et de la Dalmatie, and the other a careful survey by Francesco Monaco for Giovanni
Rinaldo Carli’s Delle Antichità Italiche
of 1788. Then, in the early nineteenth century, Pola was visited by another
British architectural student, Thomas Allason, who considered the appearance of
its monuments in the fourth volume of Antiquities
of Athens to be “imperfect and inadequate,” failing to afford
“just and accurate ideas of them,” because their “taste,
simplicity, and elegance” could only by shown by “correct
views.” As published by Allason in his Picturesque Views of the Antiquities of Pola in Istria of 1819, the
arch can be seen to have been tightly hemmed in on both sides: by dwellings to
the right and a high, garden wall to the left. Allason’s confidence in his views
as being more “correct” than Stuart’s might have derived from the use
of the relatively newly invented camera lucida. However, even allowing for
physical changes that must have taken place in the half century after 1750 (and
not least because Pola had suffered badly at the hands of Napoleonic troops),
Allason’s rendition is likely closer than Stuart’s to what Stuart must have
seen at the site. Both of these images depict the inner side of the arch, that facing
the crowded town of Pola rather than the countryside outside the walls. A plan
by Cassas (the original of which survives in the British Library) shows the
arch with its surrounding architectural contexts in the 1780s. Although Cassas
reversed the positions of the flanking dwellings and gardens (perhaps with a
view to engraving), the houses clearly stood close to the right of the arch,
much as shown by Allason rather than by Stuart. Furthermore, across the
foreground of Stuart’s view lies the low rubble course of a wall, an oddity
that might well be explained as the footprint of the high wall shown on the
left by Allason and in the plan by Cassas, visually lowered by Stuart so as to
gain the optimal angle of view on the arch. That Stuart increased the picturesque
character of the pedestal of the arch itself by showing it as more ruinous than
it was in reality emerges when his view is compared to Francesco Monaco’s
elevation (although Stuart correctly showed the substantial gash toward the top
of the second column from the left that can be seen in Monaco’s elevation and
that was carefully concealed by a tree in Allason’s view). In his view
Stuart did not show the decoration on the imposts and vault of the arch, nor
(in the printed version) the inscriptions that appear on the attic, although
these omitted elements were included in the restoration elevations.
The example of Stuart’s work at the arch at Pola,
then, might give us some reason to be wary of the status of what he later
claimed to be topographically exact views of monuments that were the focus of
study, at least at this relatively early stage of his archaeological career.
There is one other factor that might be noted in regard to Stuart’s approach to
the arch. The text describing the monument in the fourth volume of Antiquities of Athens, while written by
Joseph Woods, is a close paraphrase of Stuart’s draft as preserved in the
Edinburgh notebook. It is clear, therefore, that it was Stuart and not Woods
who completely misdated the arch (which was actually erected around 25 to 10
B.C.) to “the decline of the Empire than near the Augustan age.” While he
considered the design and workmanship of the arch to be “extremely good” (if
lacking in “that exquisite taste with which everything of that age is executed”),
he could not believe that anyone not of imperial rank could have erected a
triumphal arch early in the empire. In other words, a presupposition about
Roman architectural and patronal practice (in this case a particularly British
presupposition about the nature of the Augustan period) outweighed Stuart’s
connoisseurly analysis of the surviving fabric. This suggests an historical
approach on Stuart’s part in which certain fundamentals were beyond question,
an approach which would also affect his work in Athens. Setting these
qualifications aside for the present, however, it is clear that Stuart and
Revett returned to Venice from Pola in November 1750 with their reputations for
accuracy and scholarship enhanced. Thomas Hollis, commenting on Stuart shortly
after Stuart’s departure for Athens, wrote that he had “particularly distinguished
himself in diverse particulars, among others by a Treatise which he wrote upon
Obelisques … which was thought a very ingenious performance.” Hollis
continued that Stuart and Revett had sailed for Athens anticipating eight
months’ work “but as they are men of the greatest accuracy &
exactness, & that they may find out more matter than as yet they can be
informed of, it is probable it will take up a longer time.”
Antiquities of Athens
At the heart of Stuart and Revett’s “Proposals” for Antiquities of Athens, and in Stuart’s
preface to the first volume, lay high claims for empirical truth and accuracy—both
in terms of the visual record and of the standard of measurement of Greek ruins—as
the fundamental objectives of the work. These claims were called into question by
some of their own contemporaries, and they have formed the basis of much
subsequent deconstruction of the work. Historians, of course, have a duty to
look beyond their subjects’ statements of intent, but in the case of the
history of archaeology they also have to exercise caution in applying today’s
highly developed scientific standards to situations that occurred when the
discipline was in its infancy. In the light of this, some analysis of Stuart’s
achievements in Antiquities of Athens
against the background of his Italian years is worthwhile. In what follows an
attempt has been made to integrate such manuscript evidence as survives of
Stuart’s preliminary studies for the published book, since it is arguable that,
with a project that preoccupied its author over a period of many years, process
may be as important or as informative as final outcome.
It has frequently been suggested that the idea of
an expedition to study and record the ancient architecture of Athens was
hatched during the visit to Naples of April 1748 undertaken by Brettingham,
Hamilton, Revett, and Stuart. Their probable experience in viewing the
excavations at Herculaneum and possibly even those just commencing at Pompeii
may have been a contributory factor, although this is not likely. Revett
described the visit to Naples in a letter to his father that has landscape and painting
as its subjects (not to mention amusing anecdotes about the penchant for wine
of the party’s horse) but is silent on the matter of antiquities when one might
reasonably expect the exact opposite. If the group had actually made a
visit in 1748 to the foul-smelling and claustrophobic subterraneous passageways
of Herculaneum, it would not have been a very architectural experience, nor
particularly rewarding from an antiquarian point of view. The objets d’art
that had been discovered on the site had been removed and were jealously
guarded at the king’s Portici villa. By contrast, as we have seen, the party
had returned to Rome to find the excavation of the Obelisk of Psammetichus II
in full swing, and Stuart had soon become involved in measuring and researching
this monument. It is more plausible that the plan to make measured surveys of
Greek architecture to match those provided in Antoine Desgodetz’s Édifices antique de Rome (1682)
developed in Rome itself, the capital of the antiquarian world. It was perhaps
galvanized by the presence in the city later in 1748 of Lord Charlemont,
himself en route for Greece and Asia Minor. Further impetus was provided by the
arrival of Robert Wood in 1749 and by the plans he was laying for his
expedition to Palmyra and Balbec with James Dawkins and John Bouverie. It
was Wood who, in the preface to The Ruins
of Palmyra, was to use the term “truth” to describe “the principal
merit of works of this kind,” Stuart’s equivalent phrase being
“accuracy and fidelity.” Wood and Stuart also came to share an
understanding of the purpose of the actual-state topographical views that were
introduced to architectural surveys of ancient buildings for the first time in
their respective works—specifically that these provided “authority for our
measures” of surviving fabric and “reasons” for all elements offered
in hypothetical restorations.
The absolute nature of statements such as these
caused some of Wood’s and Stuart’s contemporaries to react with scepticism,
especially after the appearance of Julien David Le Roy’s Ruines des plus beaux monuments
de la Grèce in 1758 with its rival texts and alternative measurements, which
showed (besides much else) that there could be variation even in the recording
of supposedly objective data. Nonetheless, throughout Europe there was
acceptance of Stuart and Revett’s methods of topographical study, measured
survey, and hypothetical restoration as the optimal way of studying the
physical remains of ancient buildings. Thanks to this acceptance, their record
of Greek architecture—even if criticized in individual detail—held overall
legitimacy throughout the nineteenth century (when a number of new English,
French, German, and Italian editions and abridgements were published) and well
into the twentieth century. It is a measure of their dependability, for example,
that when writing the textbook Greek
Architecture for the Pelican History of Art series in 1957, A. W. Lawrence
found that Stuart and Revett’s surveys of the Tower of the Winds had not been
surpassed and that their study of the order of the Choragic Monument of
Lysicrates and their “reliable” surveys of the Ionic temple on the Ilissus
River were still of use (although this last monument could not be re-surveyed,
having been destroyed by the Turks around 1778). Architectural schools also
continued to use Antiquities of Athens
in teaching Greek orders to students. Only with the decline of the classical
tradition of education in the architecture schools, particularly in the
post-1945 period, and the coeval rise of academic departments of archaeology in
universities, did the process of deconstructing (as opposed to merely
modifying) the legitimacy of Antiquities
begin. A singular moment in that process came with the 1956 publication of an
article by an American scholar, Jacob Landy, who, having exposed errors in
virtually all areas of Stuart and Revett’s operations, suggested that they
“were not concerned with as complete a presentation of the facts as they
pretended.” Landy’s individual criticisms were, to varying degrees,
justifiable and merit extensive consideration, but his conclusion—that their
work was disingenuous (and primarily of use only as a record of remains
subsequently lost)—is one that judges them by the standards and methods of twentieth-century
archaeological scholarship, suggesting a failure to enter into the contexts in
which they had worked two centuries earlier.
It is appropriate to begin an appraisal of Antiquities of Athens by considering the
literary aspect of the work, not least because the text would become James
Stuart’s major contribution. Stuart’s writing, in Landy’s view, “was not objectively
descriptive of the actual condition of buildings but was burdened with literary,
mythological and historical allusions”—points that were true but that were
also entirely consistent with the mindset of a man whose antiquarian skills had
been honed in late 1740s Rome. In Rome at that time, where the ruins had
been pored over and analysed since the late Middle Ages alongside the numerous
verbal descriptions to be found in extant Latin literature, there was no culture
of making objective, quasi-scientific study of Roman architecture before
Piranesi made such an effort in Le
antichità romane (published only in 1756). Rather, to use an archaeological
analogy, ruined buildings lay under the strata of the successive textual understandings
that had accumulated upon them. This philological approach to architecture was
the way Roman buildings were analysed and understood, for example, by the
Commissario delle Antichità himself, Venuti, whose Accurata e succinta descrizione topografica delle antichità di Roma
was finally to appear the year after the first volume of Antiquities of Athens. Venuti may represent the scholar-antiquary but,
at the other end of the spectrum, even so extraordinary an architect-antiquary
as Piranesi was in reality no less encumbered by philological questions in his
understanding of ancient Rome, as may readily be seen from the texts and notes
of Le antichità romane and of his
works of the early 1760s, in particular. Stuart had entered fully and
vigorously into this world, contending not just with Pliny’s account of the
functioning of the Obelisk of Psammetichus II but also with Bandini’s
dissertation and the erudite letters of some if not all of Bandini’s fourteen other
correspondents on the subject.
Stuart planned for his work in Athens by carefully reading
and excising for further attention passages from the texts he thought would
enlighten him on questions of architectural fabric. Of foremost importance from
a topographical point of view was Pausanias, author of the mid-second-century Description of Hellas. Stuart, in fact, began
the index of his Edinburgh notebook with “Remarks on Athens from Pausanias,”
and although the extensive notes he took from this author were placed further
on in the notebook, the sudden looseness of the handwriting and ink blots where
they do occur suggest that this might have been a task undertaken or begun onboard
ship before Stuart physically even set foot in Greece. The Edinburgh notebook
also includes notes on Greek architecture taken from Pliny, Strabo, and
Thucydides. When Stuart and Revett reached Athens, they found a situation
different from that in Rome, inasmuch as there was little local culture relating
to the history of the antiquities. To have taken such a situation as a tabula rasa and to have studied the
monuments in objective isolation, however, would have meant adopting a
scientific standpoint not found before the later nineteenth century. Instead, Stuart
did what he had trained to do and set to the task of applying texts to
buildings. A good example of his working method can be found in his records of
the Tower of the Winds, in the Edinburgh notebook. Having started with a
freehand sketch plan of the building, Stuart moved directly to a quotation from
Plutarch’s life of Mark Antony: “he carried with him a Vessel full of
Water taken from a Water dial or a Dial that moved by the force of Water.”
Only then did he state that his and Revett’s excavation of the tower had
revealed the closed chamber which “might well serve for the Reservoir
mentioned by Vitruvius necessary for this kind of machine.” Stuart was
then emboldened to speculate (correctly in fact) that “I cannot but suspect
that there has been a Water clock in this building,” but in the process of
reaching this conclusion, he had depended on Plutarch’s and Vitruvius’s texts
before the physical excavation. This sequence was reversed, of course, in the
way the tower was eventually presented in the first volume of the Antiquities, so that the excavation was
described in the text, while Vitruvius was footnoted and followed by a
reference to Plutarch.
Stuart’s use of Vitruvius is particularly
informative. He succumbed to the temptation that had dogged all early modern
study of ancient classical architecture until then—relying on the veracity of
the Roman writer’s architectural history of the Greek world rather than
constructing one’s own, as his rival Le Roy was to attempt to do. Stuart’s
experience in Athens actually strengthened his dependence on Vitruvius rather
than leading to skepticism. The 1751 “Proposals” for Antiquities of Athens stated that the textual explanations of the
plates would discuss the buildings “by pointing out the relation they may have
to the Doctrine of Vitruvius,” but by the time of the 1755 “Proposals,” the
phrase “pointing out the relation they may have” had been changed to “pointing
out their conformity to” the doctrine of Vitruvius, a subtle but significant
semantic shift from a hypothetical to a canonical approach. Once the ruined
buildings of Athens lay before Stuart’s very eyes, his approach to Vitruvius was
perhaps surprisingly literary as opposed to visual: only at one point in his
surviving memoranda—when making a drawing of a Tuscan temple—does he appear to
have entered into what, by 1750, was the well-worn Renaissance tradition of
attempting to give visual form to Vitruvius’s descriptive statements about the
history and origins of classical architecture. Before quoting from Vitruvius’s
description of the Tuscan temple, Stuart selected a passage from Book 3 in
which the Roman architect had written of generic araeostyle temples, where the
intercolumniation forced architects to use timber rather than stone trabeation,
producing “splayed, top heavy, low, and sprawling” Tuscan-style
buildings. An inference that may be drawn from this is that Stuart’s
sensibility, as a man trained in the refined antiquarian atmosphere of Rome
(and who had evidently not visited Paestum), was not attuned to the primitive.
Writing much later, in the preface to the first volume of Antiquities, he commented on the “inferior Elegance” of
Tuscan moldings and ornaments and denied that Tuscan temples could have been
“noble and magnificent” even in their general appearance and effect.
Stuart’s dependence on Vitruvius created
difficulties when it came to the preparation of the text of Antiquities of Athens in the years between
his return to London in 1754/55 and the appearance of the first volume eight
years later. Once separated from the physical reality of the objects of study,
and confronted after 1758 with Le Roy’s work, Stuart’s voluminous footnotes
suggest that he had been drawn deeper and deeper into the text of Vitruvius. A
single but highly significant example of the consequences of this can be found
in Stuart’s treatment of the great Temple of Jupiter Olympius in Athens (the
Olympieion). Around 1760, Stuart discovered (from re-reading Thucydides) that
the Olympieion could not be identified with the stoa in northern Athens which
he (and Le Roy) had taken to be its remains, and which he intended to use in the
first volume of Antiquities of Athens
to exemplify the Corinthian order. Instead the so-called Columns of Hadrian
south of the Acropolis were the true remains of the Olympieion. Had he and
Revett been apprised of this when they were in Athens they would undoubtedly
have attempted fuller study of this monument, although Revett had recorded
sufficient measurements to suggest that the building had had twenty columns to
each of its flanks (as nineteenth-century excavations would later confirm). According
to Vitruvian rules, a temple of such a length should be decastyle at either end,
but Stuart knew that Vitruvius had described the Olympieion as an octastyle
dipteral temple, a type that should have no more than seventeen columns to each
flank (because the lateral colonnades of Greek temples conventionally had double
plus one the number of columns found in the end porticoes). Confronted with
this difficulty back in London and with no prospect of a verifying return to
Athens, Stuart should have had the option either of assuming error of fact on
Vitruvius’s part or of supposing that rules can sometimes have exceptions (as was,
in fact, the case with the Olympieion, which was subsequently shown to have been
an unusual octastyle temple with twenty columns to each flank). Instead, he
chose a third option and spent the remainder of his life seeking a solution to
this problem that would be in “conformity” with the Vitruvian rule. After
William Newton, in his 1771 translation of Vitruvius, suggested that the
octastyle temple mentioned by the Roman architect might have been one elsewhere
in the precinct of the Olympieion rather than being the Olympieion itself, the
possibility opened up that the great building could have been decastyle and Stuart
could then accept the hard evidence that there were indeed more than seventeen
columns to each flank. However, since the Vitruvian rule was that a decastyle temple
had to have twenty-one columns to each flank, Stuart fabricated the plan
engraved for the second volume of Antiquities.
He added an extra row of columns in red chalk to Revett’s original ink drawing
according to the editor of the third volume, Willey Reveley, through whose hands
the drawing passed. Stuart’s plan, published in the second volume was
accompanied by text arguing that both the base of the single column marked F and its position relative to the
imagined enclosure of the entire temple justified his interpretation. Reveley,
however, stated that there was “no authority whatever” among Stuart’s
papers for this reading of the evidence. His own plan duly relocated column F in the outer row, thereby removing
Stuart’s twenty-first column (though still leaving the temple as decastyle).
Once this essentially philological basis of
Stuart’s methodology is understood, and some of the consequences that flowed
from it, his responses to physical remains must be examined. This may, perhaps,
be best done in order of archaeological process, through the topographical study,
excavation, and recording of data to hypothetical restoration. As in Stuart’s
work at Pola, the topographical views introducing each monument formed one of
the most striking innovations of Antiquities
of Athens (as of its sister publications, Robert Wood’s Ruins of Palmyra and Ruins of Balbec). In his preface to the
first volume, Stuart was quite explicit in stating that “the Views were
all finished on the spot; and, in these, preferring Truth to every other consideration,
I have taken none of those Liberties with which painters are apt to indulge themselves. … Not an object is here embellished by strokes of Fancy, nor is the
situation of any one of them changed, excepting only in the View of the Doric
Portal where the Fountain on the Fore-ground is somewhat turned from its real
position.” Scholars have tended to take these claims at face value,
perhaps influenced by Stuart’s disarming honesty in admitting his single
creative intervention with the fountain at the Doric Portico. In the
context of eighteenth-century topographical study, however, it is wise to draw
a distinction between the perspectival rendition of architectural ruins in the
landscape and the painstakingly and necessarily precisely factual objectives of
cartography (a form of representation in which Stuart appears to have been
extremely proficient). The former must still be recognized as an artistic
tradition, notwithstanding Stuart’s criticism of the “liberties”
taken by painters, and it effectively remained so until the camera lucida in
the early nineteenth century introduced the notion of an objective drawing of a
building in its spatial setting. Indeed, the scientific potential of the camera
lucida, once it did appear, was by no means universally greeted with enthusiasm
by architectural students, who were still wedded to the idea that the act of
drawing a monument should be an exercise in developing “taste.”
Perhaps the most famous proponent of the camera in the upsurge in travel that
followed the Napoleonic Wars was James Hakewill, who traveled in Italy with the express intention of illustrating
John Chetwode Eustace’s Picturesque Tour
of Italy. John Soane’s pupil, George Basevi, writing from Rome in 1818,
commented that Hakewill was “a very vulgar low-bred fellow …. I should
question if his work took, certainly it will not with those who have been in
Italy … [his views] are all drawn with a lucida camera, a thing not very creditable
to a professed artist, and from its mechanism always unpleasing.”
Stuart could not have foreseen this debate, of course, but its possible effects
have already been analysed above in the comparison of his gouache with Thomas
Allason’s print of the Arch of the Sergii at Pola, where Allason claimed to
have produced the more “correct” view.
Stuart’s possible creativity with the topography of
the arch at Pola does not mean, of course, that he was equally creative when he
arrived in Greece. Between production of the views at Pola and doubtless almost
all of those executed in Greece came Stuart’s renewed encounter with Wood and
his party, which took place in Athens in May 1751. Wood was returning from the
Levant having completed his surveys of Palmyra and Balbec, and Stuart and Revett
had arrived in Athens little more than a month earlier. Given the shared objectives
of the two parties and their evident amicability, it is most likely that Wood
shared with Stuart and Revett the benefits of the experience he had accumulated
and that they discussed the merits of the “actual state” view that
was to become so strategic in their respective publications. Recent analysis of
the drawings made by Giovanni Battista Borra as the departure points for Wood’s
restorations of Palmyra suggests that his images, too, were carefully composed
so as to give grounds for full restoration, rather than standing as exact records
of what actually lay on the ground. This was, however, a far more subtle
process in Borra’s case than Stuart’s possible exclusion of an awkwardly sited
wall at Pola. Perhaps it was a lesson that Stuart learned at that early stage
of his Athenian sojourn, for the surviving evidence of Stuart’s Greek gouaches
supports his later claim not to have changed the “situation” of the
monuments under study. There is also evidence to confirm, however, that
when Stuart asserted that the views were “all finished on the spot,”
he was referring to the compositions rather than to the actual gouache
paintings. In a volume of papers related to Antiquities
of Athens, now in the British Library is a drawing by Stuart of the small
Ionic temple beside the Ilissus River. Clearly this was the onsite sketch that
formed the basis of the gouache subsequently engraved by Edward Rooker in the
first volume of Antiquities. The
sketch was executed only in pen and ink, Stuart never having got as far as
laying on the gray wash that would probably have come next based on his work at
Pola. It gives a real sense of the isolation and desolation of the site, so exposed
that no rearrangement was necessary to show the surviving elements of the Ionic
temple as incorporated into a church (although detail is missing from the left
wall of the cella). The gouache thus appears, in topographical terms, to be a
fairly faithful working up of the sketch, either carried out back in Stuart’s
lodgings in Athens or, more likely, back in London some years later.
The most striking difference between Stuart’s
sketch and his gouache of the temple on the Ilissus is his inclusion in the
view of no less a figure than the Turkish governor of Athens, the
“Vaiwode,” on a hunt with some of his attendants. This imaginary,
generic scene was introduced, as Stuart put it, “to represent the Dress
and Appearance of the present Inhabitants of Athens.” As this implies,
the figures serve as a pointer to the historical specificity of the time when
Stuart and Revett were in Athens. In a number of other cases where staffage was introduced to the gouaches,
Stuart presented even more significant subtexts. His view of the Monument of Philopappus,
for example, is accompanied by a description of how the figures silhouetted to
the left (Revett, Stuart himself, Dawkins, and Wood) were about to drink the coffee
that can be seen being made in the foreground. The drawing on which this
print was based must be one of Stuart’s earliest Greek views, and in its
precise action and moment of ephemerality, it well represents what has been
called “the attestation of presence” in the early history of archaeology,
giving evidence not merely of the “reality of the authors’ travel
experiences but also of the grounding of their architectural authority in them.”
That establishment of authority is seen most importantly in Stuart’s view of
the Erechtheion, where all the personnel are listed in the accompanying text
(except for Stuart himself, shown making the drawing at the front right) and an
account is given of what they were doing. Stuart noted that “Our labourers
… are digging to discover the Base, and the steps of the Basement under the
Caryatides,” but also pointed out that the two Turkish men looking down
into the excavation from atop the caryatid portico were part of a constant
surveillance team, set up by the commander of the garrison (the Turk with the
long pipe in the painting) “to watch our proceedings.” Thus, in
this single image and accompanying text, Stuart was able to show himself aware
of the importance of excavation in the archaeological process while also
indicating the hindrances that he and Revett had suffered in pursuit of that
objective.
Today, of course, stratified excavation to the
ground would be one of the first aims of the classical archaeologist once a
proper survey of the building in its extant condition has been conducted. The
relatively “little excavation” undertaken by Stuart and Revett was
seen pejoratively by Jacob Landy as a clear indication of “their primary
interest in surface ornament.” In the middle of the eighteenth
century, however, excavation for solely architectural purposes (as opposed to
in the quest for buried objets d’art) was still a relatively unusual procedure,
even in Rome. Almost a century earlier, Desgodetz had made excavations as part
of his seminal study of Roman buildings, but his practice can be seen to have
been inconsistent, at best, and sometimes so superficial as to have led to
publication of error. Stuart well understood the extraordinary potential
value of excavation from his study of the base of the Obelisk of Psammetichus
II, and it was probably only difficulties of access (perhaps accompanied by
shortage of funds) that prevented him from adopting this approach at all of the
monuments he and Revett studied in Greece. Stuart’s statement, in the preface to
the first volume of Antiquities, that
he and Revett had “carefully examined as low as to the Foundation of every
Building that we have copied,” with it being “generally necessary to
get a great quantity of earth and rubbish removed” may have overstated the
case. There is no reason, however, to suspect him of the degree of
disingenuousness shown by Robert Adam in exaggerating the extent of his
excavations at Split (Spalato) in Dalmatia in 1757 to reflect greater scholarly
credentials than were perhaps due. Indeed Le Roy—whose objectives little accorded
with those of Stuart and Revett—noted before he left Athens in 1755 that
“foreigners who travel here are indebted to Messieurs Stuart and Revett.
They have revealed treasures hidden underground or in thick walls.”
The consequences of the limited opportunities
Stuart and Revett had to excavate, especially on and around the Acropolis where
the Turks had a garrison, were real enough, as Stuart’s unpublished notes
reveal. In the case of the Parthenon, for example, he jotted down a reminder to
himself that “defects” of measurement were due to “the inequality
of the Ground by reason of the Rubbish & which it is difficult to allow
exactly for.” Where excavations were possible, significant advances
were undoubtedly made. At the Tower of the Winds, for example, remote in
northern Athens from the Turkish garrison, Stuart commented that “it was
necessary to make several considerable Excavations.” In fact he and
Revett were able to dig down some 15 feet, reaching the original ground level both
outside and inside the building (from where Stuart said a volume 2,700 cubic
feet of rubble was removed). They thereby established that the entrance had
been through a doorcase with fluted columns on the northwest side and that the
marble floor was channeled to aid the functioning of a water-clock in the building.
The clock’s apparatus in the floor was then “faithfully shown” in
their plan of the tower, more faithfully in fact than it was by Henry Robinson
in making his study of the building in 1943. Stuart and Revett’s
excavations also revealed sufficient fragments of the entablatures over the
doorways to enable fair restoration.
Stuart’s private admission of “defects”
in the measurements he and Revett had made at the Parthenon leads from the
matter of excavation to that of the survey or record drawings they made public
in Antiquities of Athens and that
constituted, in effect, the principal claim to fame of the work. Their model
was Desgodetz, whose authority had not yet been called into question in 1740s
Rome. Desgodetz had expressed the majority of his measurements in modular form,
equating these in some cases with Paris Royal feet, inches, and lines, or lignes (unit of measure equal to a
twelfth of an inch). Stuart and Revett, however, eschewed modules because, as
Stuart explained in the preface to Antiquities,
modules “necessarily imply a System, and perhaps too frequently incline an
author to adopt one.” On the face of it this was a perverse statement
because Stuart had an almost biblical respect for Vitruvius’s text and, as he
well knew, Vitruvius had given the Greek notion of order (taxis), in sympathy with a modular approach, as the very first
principle of architectural design. The surviving evidence suggests,
however, that the nonmodular approach was adopted by Stuart and Revett from the
outset and was not a later rationalization forced upon them by incompleteness
in their measurements. The decision to use the modern unit of the English foot—a
decision shared, significantly, with Robert Wood—should be seen as part of an
Enlightenment project to achieve absolute accuracy by any chosen standard. The
elucidation of proportional systems may have acquired greater value in Stuart’s
mind precisely because the English measurements he and Revett had taken were
commensurate with but not identical to the Attic or Roman Attic feet deployed
by the original architects of the buildings. As Stuart wrote in the preface to Antiquities, any person could “from
our Measures form whatever kind of Module, or modulary division he best fancies.”
That he himself engaged in that practice seems clear both from the numerous
calculations in his manuscript notes and from the criticisms aimed at him by
Landy, who suggested, for example, that the assumption of symmetry in the
stylobate of the Parthenon had led Stuart and Revett to force the dimensions
into a set of proportions in the ratio 4:9. Recent studies, however, refocusing
on the modular design approach of the Greeks have led to the suggestion that
4:9 was indeed the ratio of column height to stylobate width in the case of the
front of the Parthenon.
Stuart and Revett’s professed commitment to such
absolute standards of measurement can also be seen in the fact that in Antiquities of Athens they gave
dimensions in feet, inches, and decimal subdivisions of the inch: tenths,
hundredths, and even, on occasion, thousandths. Some of their contemporaries
were derisory about such minutiae.
Lord Charlemont, for example, commented on the imperceptibility to the
eye even of the “discrepancies of a few inches” Stuart and Revett had
noted with inter-columniations at the Parthenon, and Charlemont proclaimed that
the Greeks had “built for the effect, rather than with that minute
exactness on which we pride ourselves.” “This remark,” he
continued, “will also serve to show the inutility of those measurements to
a hair’s breadth upon which Stewart piques himself.” These doubts
have persisted, with at least one modern scholar stating that “the condition
of two-thousand-year-old masonry could hardly have supported such a level of
accuracy” as that claimed by Stuart. This is rather to miss the
point, however, as the minutest figures were surely produced by mathematical or
trigonometrical calculation rather than by physical measurement. Comparisons of Stuart and Revett’s dimensions with those made more recently with the
benefits of newer instrumentation and technology have pointed to an often
impressive degree of accuracy. Even Landy, their sternest critic, felt constrained
to admit that their measurements of details were “generally unimpeachable
in their accuracy,” or “comparatively accurate” in the case of
the setting out of the Ionic capital of the temple on the Ilissus River.
Stuart and Revett’s measurements were seen by Landy
less in terms of an archaeological exercise than of their ulterior purpose of
supporting a Greek Revival—”the improvement of the Art itself,” as
Stuart put it—a good reason (though not the principal one) for the use of
English feet and inches. Landy argued that they gave more emphasis to detailed
measurements of architectural decoration than they did to the elements of
buildings at large, basing his argument on the example of the Ionic temple on
the Ilissus where minimal dimensions for the building as a whole were provided
by comparison with the immensely detailed rendition of the base, capital, and entablature.
In this case, the published information was little more than a reflection of
the state in which the remains were to be found—the building in poor condition
but the order relatively well preserved. To judge from the surviving evidence
of Stuart’s papers, however, he did give almost disproportionate attention to
the setting out of Greek Ionic capitals, producing numerous drawings and hugely
complicated calculations. There are seven sheets alone in the British Library,
for example, on the capitals of the Temple of Minerva Polias (the western cellar
and portico of the Erechtheion) and three from the same set at the RIBA of the capitals
of the eastern cellar, the Temple of Erechtheus itself. These images are an
early sign of his personal aesthetic preference for the Greek Ionic order, later
reflected in his use of the orders of the Erechtheion, in particular, in his
architectural career. Significantly, the only gouache view in which Stuart chose
to include an image of himself at work is that showing the Erechtheion, while [a
sheet from the RIBA], which displays the geometry of the capital on the recto,
bears on the verso, among the numerous prosaic calculations, a moving and
romantic aphorism: “Our imagination is struck/touch’d with the same
objects, that light up the Genius of the Poets.”
To return, however, to the archaeological value of
the measured drawings, Stuart’s manuscript notes contain one small but very
significant piece of information that enlightens us about his working method in
Athens and about the consequent difficulties he encountered when preparing
measurements for publication back in London years later. In relation to the
Theseion (the Temple of Hephaestus), Stuart recorded in the Edinburgh notebook that
his measurements had been made “with a Chain,” whereas “Revett
has since measured it with a Rod which will be more accurate:” this rod
was doubtless the brass yardstick made in London for the expedition by John
Bird, of which Stuart was sufficiently proud to make mention in the preface to Antiquities. From this it can be inferred
that the separation of labors agreed upon by Stuart and Revett for their work
in Greece had led to an element of independence in their surveying activities—with
Stuart recognizing Revett’s role as the arbiter of empirical exactitude but
nevertheless making his own measurements with a chain as the basis for his mathematical
speculations. As a result, when working up the plates for publication years
later, there must have been occasions when Stuart had in hand different records
of the same dimensions, with his own figures perhaps proving inconsistent with
Revett’s.
The process of adding
measurements onto the plates was by no means a simple one of transcription.
Stuart was checking for mathematical consistencies as he worked on the book in
London in the later 1750s and early 1760s. This is clear from the fortuitous
survival among the British Library papers of the proof for the plan of Tower of
the Winds, plate VI of chapter 3 in the first volume. Apart from making additions
in red ink (to indicate figure numbers and letters needed on the final plate) Stuart
wrote along the left margin, where the radius dimension is given as 13 feet, 11
inches and 85 hundredths of an inch: “if this measure is right the whole
building is wrong for then each line AA
is only 10.8.466.” At the right foot of the sheet, Stuart continued with a
calculation, to seven decimal points, and concluded that: “according to
this calculation, 5.522 [5 inches, 522 thousandths] are to be added on each side
to the breadth of each face of the octagon—which supposing them to be at a
medium 10’.8” makes 11.7.044’.” At first reading this note gives the
impression that something had gone disastrously wrong for five-and-a-half-inch
corrections to be needed, but the plate actually amounts to a case study in the
problematics of producing a set of measurements of an existing building, a
significantly different exercise from the setting out of the building in the
first place. In this case the radius 13 feet 11.85 inches is the distance from
the center of the building to the outer extremity of the overhanging eaves in
the center point of one side of the octagon’s plan. Line AA on [the proof for the plan of Tower
of the Winds] thus shows the breadth of one side of the tower’s roof—but Stuart
had no record of the actual figure applicable to this dimension, referring
instead to the (inevitably narrower) breadth of the wall, which plate II of the
chapter on the Tower of the Winds gives as 10 feet 8 inches (in the case of the
two sides with doorways and 10 feet 9.5 inches in the case of the other six sides).
Stuart’s calculation uses the projection of the cornice from the plane of the
wall (given on plate V of the chapter as 1 foot 7 hundredths of an inch) and
also the tangent 22° 30’, which enabled him to produce the figure of 11 feet 7
inches and 44 thousandths for the breadth of each face of the roof of the
octagon. In the plate as finally published, therefore, the line marked AA is duly given as 11 feet 7 inches and
5 tenths (the thousandths having been rounded). As [David Yeomans’ drawing]
shows, Stuart would have arrived at a closely similar result by a more
conventional piece of trigonometry, multiplying the radius of 13 feet 11.85 inches
by tangent 22° 30’ (to produce the breadth of half of the roof) and doubling
the result. As this single example shows, then, it cannot be assumed that the
dimensions given on the plates in Antiquities
of Athens are those actually measured, and some—perhaps many—of the
minutest figures were produced by Stuart by calculation. Most likely he used a
table of trigonometrical ratios and worked to the maximum number of significant
figures that these gave him, so as to avoid inaccuracies that might have been introduced
by rounding figures to levels more believable in the physical contexts of the
masonry.
While the division of labors between Stuart and Revett
in regard to measuring caused difficulties later for Stuart that could only be
resolved by mathematics, the record drawings and subsequent engravings of the
sculptural detail of the Greek monuments that forms a large part of Antiquities of Athens were the sole
preserve of Stuart. Relatively little evidence survives of what Stuart actually
did in Athens in terms of on-site work in this respect, but the collections of
the British Library and of the British Museum do contain four sheets worked on
by Stuart while studying the frieze of the Monument of Lysicrates at first hand.
One of Stuart’s claims to fame is that he was first to correctly identify this
frieze, executed 335-334 B.C., as showing scenes of a tale told by Ovid of Dionysus
and deceitful sailors (the Tyrrhenian “pirates”) who, having kidnapped
the god with the intention of selling him into slavery, are subsequently
transformed into dolphins and jump into the sea as they seek to avoid his
chastisements. The sculptor of the monument introduced his own element to the
story in the form of silenes (satyrs) who attack the pirates with long flares
and other implements of violence. Stuart’s drawings show that he drew the small
figures in his bold, sweeping band and that he went to extraordinary lengths,
doubtless from a position on a ladder, to record as many coordinates as he could,
presumably so as to be able to reproduce the forms of the Greek figures
accurately. The drawing in the British Museum was the subject of a study to
evaluate Stuart’s work in this respect undertaken by Arthur Smith at the end of
the nineteenth century. Smith also compared Stuart’s drawing (now in the British
Library) of a lost relief of Athene and Marsyas with the engraved version that appears
in the second volume of Antiquities
as the tailpiece to the chapter on the Theatre of Bacchus (the Odeion of Herodes).
Smith found the drawing to be a good record of Greek figurative sculpture but
the engraving to have an “altogether unclassical” plume for Athene’s
helmet, to have removed Marsyas’s tail, to have caricatured the faces of the figures
and to have weakened their pose. Smith’s conclusion was that Stuart was a
“careful draughtsman, accurate in detail, and catching the spirit of the
originals, and that he suffered much at the hands of the engravers during his period
of infirmity and after his death.”
Smith’s observations raise two questions: first,
what processes were used to translate Stuart’s drawings into printed form; and,
second, how closely had his drawings actually related to the sculpture of the
frieze of the monument in the first place? All but two of the plates of the frieze
were engraved by James Basire, whom Stuart had probably met in Rome in 1749-50
and who ran a small workshop as one of the leading engravers of later
eighteenth-century London. In assessing Basire’s role, it is fortunate indeed
that one of his proof plates has survived and can be compared with Stuart’s
on-site work and the plate as finally published. The satyr on the left of
figure 3-31, for example, is not a full profile in Stuart’s drawing, and as a
consequence of being slightly turned away, the head is small in proportion to
the body below. The figure has a short, pointed beard and is apparently shown
wearing a cap. In Basire’s proof plate the profile has become fuller and the
hair and beard have been thickened up (the cap has disappeared). In the plate
as finally published, the hair has been made still thicker but with a hairband
introduced. The effect of this, when coupled to the progressive building up of
the musculature of the torso in the three images, is to make the head too large
for the body, while deep setting of the eyes and heavy shading on the face
serves to age the satyr.
A similar developmental sequence may be observed in
the case of the figure to the right on figure 3-31 leaning on a tree stump. Stuart’s
drawing offered no evidence of beard or facial details other than a straight,
Winckelmannian nose, yet the figure ended up with full hair, beard, crooked
nose, and grin. In fact, Stuart recorded this figure as a young faun (his text
makes it clear that he considered all Bacchus’s attendants to be fauns,
“however of different Ages”), whereas in preparing the plate it was
transformed into a fully mature satyr. Without knowing whether Basire worked
direct from Stuart’s on-site drawing, or whether Stuart had prepared
intermediate drawings of the figures, we cannot be certain who made these
changes, Stuart or his engraver. Despite his reputation, Basire was not without
critics. In 1758, for example, Robert Adam described him as a “triffling
ignorant puppyish wretch” for producing a plate that was “hard, ill drawn,
of a Bad Colour.” On the other hand James Adam reported hearing, when
in Venice in 1760, that Stuart “corrects all his own plates,” thus
explaining in part the delay in the appearance of Antiquities. Indeed, there is no reason to think that this was
not the case, since Stuart had shown himself to be an outstanding reproductive engraver
when in Rome, and he would certainly have noticed these changes had Basire
introduced them of his own volition. The likely conclusion must be that Stuart had
wider concerns in producing the first volume of Antiquities or in other areas of his career, or perhaps his aesthetic
notions, either of Greek sculpture or of the treatment of satyrs as opposed to
human figures, had changed in the years between his studies in Athens and production
of the book in London.
How well did Stuart’s on-site drawings capture the character
of the originals as he saw them in the 1750s? By the eighteenth century these
sculptures were already in poor condition. They have subsequently deteriorated
further, and casts made for Lord Elgin by 1802, together with drawings by his
draftsman Giovanni Battista Lusieri, have, since the late nineteenth century,
been taken as the best evidence of their form. Stuart’s images have been
largely discounted. In the case of the satyr on the right of figures 3-31 to
3-33, although a recent study has stated that the figure (silen 3) did have a wedge-shaped
beard, the evidence both of Lusieri’s drawing and of the casts makes this inconclusive.
The question rests on interpretation of how the crooked left arm meets the chin
and accordingly on how the angle of arm and wrist are judged. Stuart does
appear to have softened the angle of the wrist, and in reality the distance between
wrist and chin is probably too great to allow for Stuart’s depiction of the
forefinger resting against the lips. Stuart has captured the shoulder blade and
breast-bone muscle well in his drawing but missed the distinctive horizontal
fold between thorax and abdomen that is still clearly visible today on the
monument. All of these features were lost in the disproportionate profusion of
musculature of the torso in the proof and final plates. In the case of the
satyr on the left (silen 5), shadow evidence in the masonry shows that there
was a beard, subsequently broken off but present when the casts were nude. Like
Stuart, Lusieri gave the figure a hairband, but there seems little evidence for
Lusieri’s masklike treatment of the facial features. Moreover, the casts
suggest that Stuart’s drawing captured the relatively lithe legs and torso of
this figure better than did Lusieri’s. Again, these characteristics were lost
in the translation of Stuart’s drawing into printed form.
Arthur Smith was broadly correct in his 1892-93 article
in assessing Stuart as an artist who captured the character of Greek figurative
sculpture reasonably well in the 1750s, given the already poor condition of the
originals. However, it seems quite possible that Stuart played a part in the
subsequent loss of that character in the engravings of James Basire. Smith also
suggested that Stuart was not to be depended upon when it came to restoring
missing parts of Greek sculpture, taking as an example part of the north frieze
of the Parthenon that shows the figure of an apobates to the right of a seated
charioteer who is in the process of being crowned by a marshal. Stuart’s plate
suggests that when he saw this part of the frieze, the head and upper left torso
of the apobates were sheared off, while the figures of the charioteer and
marshal (with his crowning right arm uplifted), and also of the wheel of the
chariot, were more or less entire. As the sculpture survives today, the heads
of both charioteer and marshal are gone, as is most of the wheel of the
chariot. The damage to this part of the frieze had certainly occurred between
Stuart’s time in Athens and that of Jacques Carrey who, as draftsman to the
Marquis de Nointel, had drawn much of the Parthenon sculpture in 1674. In the
case of this particular scene, Carrey’s drawing shows that while the chariot
wheel was already largely lost by the late seventeenth century, all three heads
were entire at that time, as was the torso of the apobates, and that the arm of
the marshal was extended rather than crooked. On the basis of this evidence, it
can be seen that Stuart did indeed take considerable liberties in his
restoration of the scene: completing the wheel, inventing heads for the
charioteer and marshal, and hypothesizing the position of the marshal’s arm.
Stuart can, however, be exonerated from Smith’s accusation that his restoration
of the charioteer’s head was not only a fabrication but one that changed the
gender of the figure to female. Had Smith looked at Stuart’s text as well as at
his plate he would have seen that Stuart described “a youth, whom I
suppose a Victor in the Chariot race,” with a man “about to Crown
him.” In addition, the wisps of hair that can be seen projecting from
the right temple of the charioteer today, not to mention those that appeared on
a fragment with the torso and head of the apobates excavated in 1888-89, do offer
good grounds for Stuart’s rendition of a head with curly locks—and actually
cast considerable doubt on the veracity of Carrey’s drawing at this point
(which gives the charioteer close-cropped hair).
The issue of the visual restoration of Greek relief
sculpture leads, finally, to the restoration of Greek buildings themselves in Antiquities of Athens. Stuart and Revett
took a strictly academic approach to restoration, regarding it as an
orthographical art and eschewing the use of perspective that crept into Le
Roy’s work (in his plate of the Propylaea) and even into Robert Wood’s.
Stuart also claimed, in describing his and Revett’s restoration of the Monument
of Lysicrates, that they had proceeded “as far as the Remains found on the
Spot, will authorize, and no farther.” Such a statement appears fully in
line with the objective of fidelity that underpinned their work in other respects,
but perhaps Stuart’s use of the word “authorize” (with its
etymological hint of personal creativity) may be taken to denote his recognition
of the fact that any visual restoration of a ruined building requires an act of
qualified imagination.
The veracity of Stuart and Revett’s restorations
naturally depended to an extent on the degree of access they had to buildings,
especially where large portions were underground or otherwise encumbered. Thus
their restoration of the Doric portico in the Roman agora, which opens the
first volume of Antiquities, was
summarily dismissed as “incorrect” by the archaeologist Henry Robinson
in 1943, with no concession being made to the fact that Robinson had been able
to study the structure on an isolated site whereas in the 1750s it had been
partially incorporated into houses. Stuart and Revett’s plan was, in fact,
suitably tentative, showing only the part of the structure that survived (only
two thirds of the whole, it would later emerge) and indicating what was
hypothetical by use of dotted lines. The only error of which they can
reasonably be accused in this context is that of having misinterpreted the
surviving masonry of the architrave, thereby failing to appreciate where the
western wall of the Roman agora had intersected with the portico and giving the
restored lateral elevation too great a length. Robinson was able to establish
this, but he also had the advantage of being able to prove it by undertaking an
excavation.
Jacob Landy’s principal criticism of Stuart and Revett’s
restorations was that they had indulged in a process of idealization. As an
example of this he gave their north elevation of the Erechtheion, where they
regularized masonry and jointing and thus produced fifteen courses of stone
above the taller foundation row rather than the existing sixteen. Given,
however, that in the parallel case of the Ionic temple on the Ilissus they were
evidently correct, to judge from Stuart’s topographical view, in showing seven
courses of stonework above the taller foundation row, it is clear that there
was no consistent “idealization” in this aspect of their work.
Difficulties of access on the Acropolis might have caused the discrepancy in
the case of the Erechtheion alighted on by Landy. Their restoration of the
temple on the Ilissus is actually a model of presentation and reconstruction (except
for the introduction of a frieze relief from a fragment found at Athens which
they claimed might have come from this temple because its height and depth
matched the space). The overall sparseness of the plan and elevation reflects
the fact that there was not much evidence for the overall form of the building,
while greater attention was given to the (fluted) Ionic order and the antae because more fabric survived.
Furthermore, the text is explicit about what was present and what was not and,
therefore, about what they had supplied. The one element of the building that
was suppressed in the restoration was the fact that it was here, as Stuart’s text
freely admitted, that he and Revett discovered that the architrave had been
“enriched with a painted Ornament, which appears to be as ancient as the
Building itself.” There would, of course, have been no printing
mechanism available to them had they wished to illustrate the temple as a building
with colored decoration, but there is no escaping the conclusion that Stuart
held Winckelmannian views on the essential whiteness of Greek art and
architecture for he later reported to James Gandon that he liked the “bleaching
of the stone and marble to a pure white colour” in Greece, clearly
implying that he knew that this was not how the buildings had been in their
original state.
It is less clear that it was Stuart and Revett’s
sensibilities that were responsible for other oversights laid at their door by
Landy. Foremost among these was their neglect of the subtleties of Greek design
such as entasis, curvature of the stylobate, the inward inclination of columns
and cella walls, and the outward tilt of entablatures. In some of these cases,
Vitruvius had provided descriptions—he discussed entasis, for example, in book
3, chapter 3, section 13—so that Stuart either cannot have understood what
Vitruvius meant or failed to map it onto built examples. In the Theseion
(Temple of Hephaestus), however, he did comment that “the diameters of the
columns vary from 3:3:35 to 3:3:65,” but a discrepancy of a mere thirty
hundredths of an inch amounts more to a point of curiosity than to proof of a
system of a design. Their surveying instruments might simply not have been
sufficient to enable them to detect such curves and inclinations, or they were
possible inhibited by presuppositions of perpendicularity. There were also
aspects of Greek architecture that they observed while on site but which were
not subsequently incorporated in the text as published. One such area concerns
Greek construction methods, about which Stuart recorded some comments in his Edinburgh notebook. Although
these notes are based on what Vitruvius said about construction techniques (in
book 2, chapter 8, sections 5-6), two small sketches of the first method,
called “Isodamum,” show that Stuart appreciated that in the alternate courses,
comprising two stones’ thickness, the stones were “cramped” together. Landy’s
claim that Stuart and Revett showed little interest in the technicalities of
Greek building, such as dowels, clamps and anathyrosis
(close jointing while blocks’ surfaces remained rough), was thus not entirely
fair, based as it was on what Stuart eventually published rather than what he
had actually done. It seems plausible that such technicalities were left
out of Antiquities of Athens because
of a decrease of archaeological purpose, as the project moved into the 1760s,
at the expense of increasing architectural appeal. Ancient construction methods
would have been of little relevance to later eighteenth-century building
practice.
On his return to London late in 1754 or early the following year, Stuart
had been faced with the difficulties both of seeing his Greek archaeological
work through to print and of establishing a career for himself as a practical
architect and designer. In producing Antiquities,
Stuart became embroiled, after 1758, in refuting what he saw as Le Roy’s claims to primacy in the field of Greek archaeology and topography and,
after 1766, in struggling to gain access to the additional drawings made by his
former collaborator Revett during a return visit to Athens. This struggle, as
well as Stuart’s failure to bring the second volume of Antiquities of Athens to completion before his death in 1788, has
been well described in previous accounts. Aside from his continuous work on the
Athenian project, Stuart’s antiquarian and archaeological interests found a new
outlet in his fellowship of the Society of Antiquaries, to which he was
nominated for election on June 15, 1758, with the citation:
A
Testimonial was presented & read, recommending Mr James Stuart, of
Grosvenor Street, F.R.S. Painter and Architect, to be elected a Member of this
Society; of which Honour he is said to be desirous, & from the personal
knowledge of the subscribers certified to be a Gentleman exceeding well versed
in Antiquities, of which the valuable Collections made by him in his Travels
are an undoubted Proof; & they assure themselves from his great Abilities,
that he is likely to be a very useful member.
Stuart was duly elected on December 7 and “signed the Books, &
was admitted a Fellow” on January 25, 1759, when Horace Walpole and
William Stukeley were among those present.
Stuart’s involvement
with the society and the world of the London antiquary must have seemed a very
different and, indeed, distinctly less glamorous one from that he had inhabited
when in the Mediterranean. In March 1759, for example, three months after his
election, Stuart was in attendance at a meeting when fellows were shown a
drawing of an archiepiscopal crozier, “dug up by a Labourer in May 1752,
in grubbing a Hedge in the Vicarage Garden at Wesham in Kent,” a far cry
from the summer of 1748 when he had participated in the study of an obelisk
that linked present-day Rome to the historians of the Renaissance, to Pliny, to
the Augustan city, and back beyond that to the Heliopolis of Pharaoh
Psammetichus II. It was a far cry, too, from the years spent studying the
monuments of Athens with Vitruvius and Pausanias in hand. Yet in a real
sense, these experiences remained present with Stuart throughout the 1750s and,
indeed, for the rest of his life.
The process of writing the text of Antiquities of Athens and of preparing
the plates was not a static one, in which data collected in the early 1750s was
simply drawn together for publication. The work that Stuart carried on was
developmental in almost every aspect of the book. His engagement with Vitruvius
and other texts was continuous; his “actual state” views moved
through the stages of gouache painting and engraving; and his restorations of Greek
sculpture took on an aesthetic character of his own devising once no longer
before his eyes. Even the measurements, supposedly the most factual element in
the entire project, were extended and systematized by mathematical calculation—and
this can be seen as less a matter of disingenuousness than of dealing with the
problem of recording setting-out dimensions no longer measurable after the fact
of a building’s construction. Perhaps the only area of the work that Stuart and
Revett had undertaken when in Greece that could not be described as subject to
subsequent development was that of the excavations they had made. For reasons
both temporal and spatial the results of these could not be altered and the problems
they created could not be resolved. Seen in this light, Stuart’s work seems far
removed from the objectives and methodologies of modern-day archaeology. Judged
by those standards, his work would indeed be deemed to fall short. When viewed,
however, in the light of the antiquarian world of Florence and Rome of the
1740s, where Stuart’s connoisseurly and scholarly skills were acquired, a
different and more positive appraisal emerges. Stuart’s work should be situated
on the cusp of a moment in the Enlightenment when the science of archaeology
emerged from the broadly philological and artistic approach to the architecture
of the ancient world. His presentation of monuments, both in De Obelisco Caesaris Augusti and in Antiquities of Athens, remains a
singular and seminal achievement in the progress of the European archaeological
and architectural tradition.
© Bard Graduate Center, Frank Salmon.
Acknowledgments: For advice and assistance offered during preparation of this chapter, I am very grateful to the following: Catherine Arbuthnott, Kerry Bristol, Paolo Coen, Viccy Coltman, Edward Corp, Michael Erwee, Charles Hind, Tamara Griggs, Ian Jenkins, Jason Kelly, Thorsten Opper, Mark Wilson Jones, and David Yeomans. I must also record (as always) a debt of gratitude to Valerie Scott and the Library of the British School at Rome.
Stuart was elected in March 1751, proposed along with his co-worker on Antiquities of Athens, Nicholas Revett, by the British Ambassador in Venice, Sir James Gray, whose earlier nominees were almost exclusively aristocratic: the Earl of Holdernesse, the Earl of Ashburnham, Chevalier St. George, Lord Hobart (later Earl of Buckinghamshire), Sir Thomas Sebright, and Thomas Steavens; see Lionel Cust, comp., History of the Society of Dilettanti (London: Macmillan, 1898): 77. Much has been made of Stuart as one of the first “artists” the society deigned to elect, but the election might be seen as much as a reflection of Stuart’s acceptance into the class of the antiquarian explorer, then a gentlemanly pursuit, on which point see Bruce Redford, “The Measure of Ruins: Dilettanti in the Levant, 1750-1770,” Harvard Library Bulletin 13 (Spring 2002): 5-6.
Stuart to Jacob Hinde, 20 March 1746, OSB fc 144, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. See John Marciari, “Athenian Stuart in Florence,” Burlington Magazine 140 (September 1998): 612-14.
Erik Iversen, The Obelisks of Rome, vol. 1 of Obelisks in Exile (Copenhagen: Gad, 1968): 152. See also Edmund Buchner, Die Sonnenuhr des Augustus: Nachdruck aus RM 1976 und 1980 und Nachtrag über die Ausgrabung (Mainz am Rhein: Zabern, 1982): 45. Stuart’s contribution did not, however, merit mention in Cesare d’Onofrio’s standard text on Egyptian obelisks in Rome, Gli Obelischi di Roma: storia e urbanistica di una città dall’età antica al XX secolo, 3rd ed. (Rome: Romana società editrice, 1992), even though Stuart’s engraved elevation of the monument was reproduced as an illustration in the first edition of the book (Rome: Cassa di Risparmio, 1965).
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): v.
It has been suggested that Stuart may be identified with the “Mr Stewart” who was acting as “governor” to a young Grand Tourist dying of tuberculosis in Naples and Rome in 1740-41, and that this Stuart might be the person of that name who appears in the annual Roman Eastertide Stato dell’Anime census of 1741, living in Strada Condotti with a Grand Tourist named George Belsches; see Michael McCarthy, “‘The Dullest Man that Ever Travelled’?: A Re-assessment of Richard Pococke and of his Portrait by J.-E. Liotard,” Apollo 143 (May 1996): 28 and 29 n. 21. The surnames Belsches and Stuart also appear together in a list of people encountered by Joseph Spence in Rome during his third Grand Tour in 1739-41; see John Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701-1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1997): 76. The identification is, however, sufficiently problematic as to make it most unlikely.
Revett sailed from England for Leghorn on 22 September 1742 and passed straight on to Rome. Cust, Dilettanti (1898): 75-76.
A. P. Oppé, ed., “Memoirs of Thomas Jones,” Walpole Society annual, vol. 32 (1946-48): 74. It should be noted, however, that this was Jones’s 1803 recollection of a conversation with Nulty held in the 1770s, in which Nulty was recalling his life in the 1740s.
Stato dell’Anime: S. Andrea delle Fratte, left side of the Salita di San Giuseppe, Archivio Vicariato, Rome (notes in Brinsley Ford Archive, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London, and transcriptions for 1745 kindly provided by Edward Corp). The ages of both Paston and Stuart were given as the mid-thirties when Stuart would have been only thirty-one and Paston in his mid-twenties, but errors with age are common enough in the Roman censuses.
Second Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts (1871): Papers of the Rt. Hon, the Earl of Mount Edgcumbe (London, HMSO, 1874): appendix p. 23 (letter dated 8 May 1745). Three days earlier a letter from Edgcumbe to Mann shows that the Kennington was off the Italian coast near Pisa. I am grateful to Kerry Bristol for supplying this reference. The Mount Edgcumbe papers were destroyed by German incendiary bombing in 1941. In 1977 a transcript was said to have been made by the nineteenth-century inspector, Alfred Horwood; see A Companion to the Kraus Reprint of Reports I to IX of the Historical Manuscripts Commission (Nedeln: Kraus-Thomson Organization Press, 1977): 24. No trace of this can now be found in the Historical Manuscripts Commission papers.
Stato dell’Anime: S. Andrea delle Fratte, Strada Felice (modern-day Via Sistina) house of Sig. Detti, Archivio Vicariato, Rome (notes in Brinsley Ford Archive, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London). The religion of the “Stuard” recorded in Rome in 1744 was not recorded, making it likely that he was a Catholic, as known Protestants were generally denoted as such. Moreover, “Stuard’s” co-resident, Paston was later listed as a Catholic and was, indeed, paid a salary as a member of the Stuart Court in Rome by the Cardinal Duke of York; see lngamells Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers (1997): 744-45.
See SP 98/51, fol. 66r NA. It is also worth noting that both Mann and Baron Stosch, who reported his spying activities on the Jacobites to Mann, were among the first to signal their support for Antiquities of Athens; see “Names of the Gentlemen … ,” in Stuart, Sketchbook … of buildings in N. Italy, SKB/336/2 [L 3/4]: 2, RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London.
See Antiquities, vol. 4 (1816): xxviii. He is buried in the crypt of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.
Marciari, “Athenian Stuart in Florence” (1998): 612-14. The source of this drawing was identified by Kerry Bristol; it is in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, inv. no. 2450. There is another copy of the print: FC 120900, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome.
For Hugford see John Fleming, “The Hugfords of Florence–II,”Connoisseur 136 (November 1955): 197-206; Fabia Borroni Salvadori, “Ignazio Enrico Hugford, Collezionista con la vocazione del mercante,”Annali della Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, 3rd series, 13, no. 4 (1983): 1032; Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, vol. 61, ed. Mario Caravale and Giuseppe Pignatelli (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia ltaliana, 2003): 745–49.
See Fabia Borroni Salvadori, “Artisti e viaggiatori agli Uffizi nel Settecento,” pt. 1, Labyrinthos 4, no. 7/8 (1985): 15-16.
Hugford became a representative of the painters on the academy’s council in 1749, a conservadoro in 1756, a consigliero in 1757 and finally provveditore (secretary, the second most important position after the luogotenente or president) in 1762. See Frank Salmon, “British Architects and the Florentine Academy, 1753-1794,” Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz 34, no. 112 (1990): 210 n.16.
See Gentlemen’s Magazine (March 1788): 217.
Stato dell’Anime: S. Andrea delle Fratte, Strada Felice (modern-day Via Sistina) house of Sig. Detti, Archivio Vicariato, Rome (notes in Brinsley Ford Archive, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London). Stuart’s age is given as thirty to thirty-two successively, when in fact he was thirty-six to thirty-eight.
Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica, Rome, FC 67258. The unlocated drawing, thought to have been the “gem” of Valenti’s collection, is currently attributed to Giovan Francesco Penni. See Simonetta Prosperi Valenti Rodinò, “La Raccolta di grafica,” in Ritratto di una Collezione: Pannini e la Galleria del Cardinale Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, ed. Raffaella Morselli and Rossella Vodret (Milan: Skira, 2005): 271.
Stato dell’Anime: S. Lorenzo in Lucina, Strada Carozze towards the Corso, Archivio Vicariato, Rome.
For Benedict XIV the important sources are Ludwig von Pastor, The History of the Popes from the Close of the Middle Ages, ed. E. F. Peeler, vols. 35 and 36 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); Emilia Morelli, Tre Profili: Benedetto XIV, Pasquale Stanislao Mancini, Pietro Roselli, Quaderni del Risorgimento, 9 (Rome: Edizioni dell’Atteneo, 1955): 3-45; and Enciclopedia dei Papi, vol. 3 (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2000): 446-61.
Valenti was said by Horace Mann in 1746 to have been “entirely devoted to the Pretender” (SP 98/51, fol. 141v, NA).
For a concise account of Venuti’s tenure, achievements, and publications, see Ronald T. Ridley, “To Protect the Monuments: The Papal Antiquarian (1534-1870),” Xenia Antiqua 1 (1992): 138-40. In 1749 Valenti set in place the first proper system for regulating exports of objets d’art through Venuti’s office. See Paolo Coen, “Silvio Valenti Gonzaga e il mercato artistico romano del XVIII secolo,” in Ritratto de una Collezione (2005): 190.
“That Il Signior Canonico Rodolfino Venuti deputato sopra la convazione delle Antichita di Roma may become an Honorary Member of this Society; which was immediately put up to the Ballot; and was chosen n[emine] c[ontradicente]”; Minutebook, vol. 7 (14 November 1751 to 23 December 1756), fol. 9 (left), Society of Antiquaries. It should be noted that Venuti’s nominators were Walter Bowman and the prominent Fellow and Jacobite, Richard Rawlinson, both of whom had been in Italy in the 1720s and, in Bowman’s case, the 1730s too; see lngamells, Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers (1997): 113-14 and 801–3.
Minutebook, vol. 8 (13 January 1757 to 20 May 1762), fol. 357, Society of Antiquaries.
Details of the foundation are given in Notizia delle Accademie erette in Roma per Ordine della Santità di N. Sig. Papa Benedetto Decimoquarto (Rome: [Giuseppe Collini], 1740). The first twelve topics for discourses in each academy were stipulated at the outset.
Diario Ordinario 5085 (21 February 1750): 8–9.
For Valenti and the Giornale see Maria Pia Donato, “Profilo intelletuale di Silvio Valenti Gonzaga nella Roma di Benedetto XIV,” in Ritratto di una Collezione (2005): 81-89.
[29].Giornale de’ Letterati (1753): 366-67 (author’s translation). This document is new to the list of proposals hitherto recognized for Antiquities of Athens. See Dora Wiebenson, Sources of Greek Revival (London: A. Zwemmer, 1969): chap. 1 and appendix 1, to which the Giornale de’ Letterati letter should be inserted between entries G1 and H on p. 85. As stated in the letter, the plan for the three volumes differed in certain respects from Stuart’s and Revett’s 1751 “Proposals” (ibid., 82-83), especially for the second volume.
In 1766 Stuart wrote to John Nourse to say that he had received a letter from Marco Pagliarini in Rome, stating that Niccolò was shortly to visit England (Laing Mss., La.II.172, Edinburgh University Library). The implication is that Stuart intended to meet and aid his old Roman acquaintance.
Add. Ms. 41,169, fol. 40r, BL. In 1816 Joseph Woods recounted that Stuart’s (now lost) notebooks contained numerous “extracts from different ancient and modern authors relating to Greece, which Stuart had probably taken the pains to transcribe and translate, in order to make himself completely master of all that had been said concerning the country he visited”; see Antiquities, vol. 4 (1816): ii.
Stuart himself recorded that Valenti had initially asked him to draw the hieroglyphs; see Stuart, De Obelisco Caesaris Augusti e Campo Martio Nuperrime Effosso ... (Rome: Niccolò et Marco Pagliarini, 1750): lxxiii. For the Bandini version, see Angelo Maria Bandini et al., De Obelisco
Caesaris Augusti e Campi Martii Ruderibus Nuper Eruto Commentarius auctore Angelo Maria Bandinio accedunt CLL. Virorum Epistolae atque Opuscula (Rome: Pallade, 1750).
Diario Ordinario 4791 (6 April 1748): 3-4· On 2 April, Brettingham had exchanged £20 (receiving 82 scudi), doubtless in preparation for the imminent departure of the group; see John Kenworthy-Browne, “Matthew Brettingham’s Rome Account Book, 1747-1754,” Walpole Society annual, vol. 49 (1983): 54.
Diario Ordinario 4842 (3 August 1748): 9-10.
James Russel, Letters from a Young Painter Abroad to his Friends in England, vol. 2 (London: W. Russel, 1750): 131-47. Russel does not, however, mention Tomasso de Marchis, credited by Iversen with recovery of the obelisk’s base; see Iversen, Obelisks of Rome (1968): 152.
This view was reengraved in Zabaglia, Castelli e Ponti di Maestro Niccola Zabaglia con alcune ingegnose pratiche e con la descrizione del trasporto dell’ Obelisco vaticano e di altri del Cavaliere Domenico Fontana, ed. Filippo Maria Renazzi, 2nd ed. (Rome: Crispino Puccinelli, 1824): i. The operation is also described at length therein.
D’Onofrio, Obelischi (1992): 377 n. 7, states that the Barbault view corresponds less closely to the description given by de Marchis on p. 105 of De Obelisco than does that of Vasi, but d’Onofrio was unaware of the evidence provided by Russel.
Stuart, De Obelisco (1750): 33, verso; Bandini et al., De Obelisco (1750/51): facing xxi. The “elegant decoration” of this theatrical image (as it was described by the Pagliarini brothers) includes sea beasts, alluding to the transportation of the obelisk from Egypt to Rome, and a pair of herms experimenting with a capstan and pulley. A version of Stuart’s image, without the decoration, was used on the title page of Renazzi’s second edition of Zabaglia’s Castelli e Ponti.
These dates are drawn from Malton’s correspondence, M2.541, Sheffield Archives. See also Lesley Lewis, Connoisseurs and Secret Agents in Eighteenth Century Rome (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961): 174. Stuart gave March 1750 as the date of his departure from Rome in Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): vi.
Antiquities, vol. 4 (1816): xxiii; “Names of the gentlemen … ,” in Stuart, Sketchbook … of buildings in N. Italy, SKB/336/2 [L 3/4]: 2r, RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London.
Woods stated that Stuart’s De Obelisco was published at the expense of Pope Benedict himself (Antiquities, vol. 4 [1816]: iv and xxvii), to whom Stuart is said to have been presented. Given Stuart’s position in the circle of Valenti, an audience is quite possible (although it is hardly surprising that there appears to be no record of it). The Pope is not mentioned in Stuart’s publication, however, and Woods was probably confusing it with Bandini’s, for which the Pope was certainly the dedicatee. If Stuart did receive financial support from the papal court, then it is unlikely he would have mentioned this in a work aimed at creating a reputation for himself in England. Finally, given that no announcement of publication of Stuart’s book can be found in the Diario Ordinario, it was probably covered by the same papal faculty permitting its publication as Bandini ‘s.
Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments, M2.550, Sheffield Archives.
My account is indebted to that given by Iversen, Obelisks of Rome (1968): 142-60.
“Per non parere un Papa goto”; see Enulia Morelli, Le lettere di Benedetto XIV al Card. De Tencin, vol. 2 (Rome: Edizioni de storia e letteratura, 1965): 51. See also Von Pastor, History of the Popes, vol. 35 (1961): 171. The Pope was correct in stating that his predecessors Sixtus V and Julius II had both shown interest in recovering the obelisk, although he omitted to mention the even earlier involvement of Sixtus IV and more recently that of Alexander VII; see Iversen, Obelisks of Rome (1968): 145-48.
Diario Ordinario 4803 (4 May 1748): 11.
The authors and their residences were (in order of the essays after Bandini’s): Giovanni Poleni (Padua), Giovanni Alberto Colombo (Padua), Ruggiero Giuseppe Boscovitch (Rome), Ottaviano Cametti (Florence), Iacopo Marinoni (Vienna), Scipione Maffei (Verona), Lodovico Antonio Muratori (Modena), Gerardo de Bose (Wittemberg), Johann Albert (or Leonhard) Euler (Berlin), Christian Weidlich (Wittemberg), Christian L.B. de Wolff (Halle) and Heinsius (Leipzig). A mathematical dissertation by Giorgio Mulleri followed, then a letter from the Académie royale des inscriptions et Belle-Lettres in Paris, then Bandini’s original, Kircher-inspired commentary on the obelisk when first excavated in 1748.
Venuti ‘s comments on the obelisk are, in fact, preserved in a manuscript in the Vatican Library (Cod.Vat. 9024, fols. 181r-184v). These relatively brief comments, addressed as a letter to Cardinal Angelo Querini, Bishop of Brescia, include the draft text (subsequently ameliorated by Pope Benedict himself) for the inscription that still survives on a house adjacent to the site from which the obelisk was extracted.
Bandini’s book received its papal faculty on 20 June 1750, and its actual appearance was announced in the Diario Ordinario 5145 (11 July 1750): 16.
Antiquities, vol. 4 (1816): iv.
See his plan of the amphitheater at Verona annotated in Italian, in Stuart, Sketchbook … of buildings in N. Italy, SKB/336/2 [L 3/4]: fol. 22r, RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London. Stuart’s Latin studies at the Collegio are mentioned by Woods; see Antiquities, vol. 4 (1816): iv. The information evidently had derived from his friend Mr. Sheldrake; see Bristol, “Stuart and the Genesis of the Greek Revival” (1997): 23-24. The Latin instructor at the Collegio in this period was a priest from Pistoia named Andrea Nicolai.
The Ara Pacis was not systematically excavated until 1903, although fragments of it were discovered in 1859 and others were known from as early as 1568; see Lawrence Richardson, A New Topographical Dictionary of Ancient Rome (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992): 287-89.
Iversen, Obelisks of Rome (1968): 153. See also Buchner, Sonnenuhr des Augustus (1982): 45 and pls. 16 and 109/2.
Bristol, “Stuart and the Genesis of the Greek Revival” [1997]: 122. For an exception, however, see Stuart’s evidently measured elevation of the Villa Farnesina, SD 62/63, RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London.
SD 62/25 , RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London.
For the most recent account of Stuart’s development as an architect at this time, see Kerry Bristol, “A Newly-Discovered Drawing by James Stuart” Architectural History 44 (2001): 39-44.
Antiquities vol. 1 (1762): vi. According to the Pagliarini brothers writing in 1753, the thirty-four drawings of Pola listed by Stuart and Revett in their 1751 “Proposals” for Antiquities of Athens (see 111 Wiebenson, Sources of Greek Revival Architecture [1969]: 81-82) had been sent to London as a demonstration of how the “great work” on Greek antiquities was to be executed; see Giornale de’ Letterati (Rome, 1753): 367-68.
Antiquities, vol. 4 (1816): ii. The surviving notebooks are Laing Mss., La.III.581, Edinburgh University Library, and Sketchbook … of buildings in N. Italy, SKB/336/2 [L 3/4], RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London. More detailed comments on these notebooks and other Stuart papers that were given to Woods by the publisher Josiah Taylor can be found in Taylor’s list in Add. Ms. 22,152: 1r-8v, BL. Most (but not all) of these papers dated from Stuart’s time in the Mediterranean. The volume in Edinburgh is listed as item “S” in Add. Ms. 22, 152: 4v, BL, of which Taylor commented “what there is of Pola seems unmanaged.”
Laing Mss., La.III.581: (a) et seq., Edinburgh University Library. (Revett’s name has evidently been torn out of the “Pola” title page.). Add. Ms. 22, 152: 5r, BL.
Laing Mss., La.III.581: 82r and 198v, Edinburgh University Library. The former notes comprise a short disquisition on the meaning of hieroglyphs which, Stuart argued, would not have formed “memorials of the heroic actions of princes … in a Language no body understood but Priests” but must instead have related to the “mathematical or Astronomic” functions of obelisks.
Stuart, Sketchbook … of buildings in N. Italy, SKB/336/2 [L 3/4]: 73v, RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London.
Laing Mss., La.III.581: 14r, Edinburgh University Library; Antiquities, vol. 4 (1816): chap. 2, pl. III.
A similar drawing, made at the same time can be found in Add. Ms. 22,153: 176, BL. The image of the interior of the amphitheater finally selected for finishing is RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London, SD 146.5.
Borra’s drawings survive in two bound volumes in the RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London.
I owe this suggestion to Charles Hind, who feels that the uniform technique and materials, relatively large size, and probable exhibition purpose of the gouaches suggest that they were executed by Stuart after his return to London. For Stuart’s exhibition of many of these images at the Free Society of Artists from 1765 see Algernon Graves, The Society of Artists of Great Britain 1760-1791: The Free Society of Artists 1761-1783 (London: Bell and Sons and Algernon Graves, 1907): 247-49. Stuart’s on-site topographical views, such as that of Mount Parnassus (SD 93/3[3], RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London), subsequently engraved for the fourth volume of the Antiquities, appear to have been executed in pen and ink, shaded in pencil but marked up with color notes.
Thomas Allason, Picturesque Views of the Antiquities of Pola in Istria (London: J. Murray, 1819): 2-3.
This is also confirmed by two of Cassas’s views, which show the dwelling in direct line with the right side of the arch and the walled gardens to the left (Louis-François Cassas and Joseph Lavallée, Voyage pittoresque et historique de I’Istrie et de Ia Dalmatie (Paris: Vilain, 1802), pls. 20 and 21. For an alternative analysis of these views, which does not discuss Stuart’s view but which does consider Allason to have indulged in chiaroscuro and picturesque effects, see Gustavo Traversari, L’Arco dei Sergi (Padua: CEDAM, 197I): 32-33.
See Giovanni Rinaldo Carli, Delle Antichità Italiche (Milan: Nell’imperial monistero di S. Ambrogio Maggiore, 1788), pt. 1, book 3, facing p. 195.
Laing Mss., La.III.581: 11r-v, Edinburgh University Library (see Antiquities, vol. 4 [1816]: 15). Woods omitted Stuart’s comments on the “very indifferent” workmanship of the arch’s figurative and decorative sculpture.
Thomas Hollis to Professor Ward, Venice, 26 February 1751, Add. Ms. 27,576: 2r-3r, BL.
Revett’s letter was transcribed in full in Antiquities, vol. 4 (1816): xxviii-xxix.
By April 1748 architectural investigations at Herculaneum had only reached the stage where plans of the still subterraneous theater, basilica, and surrounding area could be made; see Christopher Charles Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the Excavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 47-56 and 233-41.
The date of December 1749 for Wood’s presence in Rome on his second visit is a terminus ante quem and not a terminus post quem; see Ingamells, Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers (1997): 1016. We do not know when he actually arrived.
Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart (London: the author, 1753): (a)r; Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): vii.
Wood, Ruins of Palmyra (1753): 35; Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): vi. For other accounts of the genesis of the project, see J. Mordaunt Crook, The Greek Revival: Neo-classical Attitudes in British Architecture, 1760–1870 (London: Murray, 1972): 13-17; Eileen Harris, British Architectural Books and Writers, 1556-1785, assisted by Nicholas Savage (Cambridge and New York, Cambridge University Press, 1990): 439-50; Bristol, “Stuart and the Genesis of the Greek Revival” [1997]: chaps. 2 and 3; Paul W. Nash et al., Early Printed Books, 1478-1840: Catalogue of the British Architectural Library Early Imprints Collection, vol. 4 (Munich: Saur, 2001): 1993-2005.
Arnold Walter Lawrence, Greek Architecture (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1957): respectively, pls. 133-35, 91 and 36, and p. 141. Henry Robinson, in an article of 1943, had noted that Stuart and Revett’s survey of the Tower of the Winds remained the only viable one for scholars, although he considered revision to be “sorely needed”; see Robinson, “The Tower of the Winds and the Roman Market Place,” American Journal of Archaeology 47 (1943): 291. Far more recently, however, Hermann Kienast has commented that the “illuminating drawings of [Stuart and Revett] leave us with the impression that no questions remain to be asked” (Kienast, “The Tower of the Winds in Athens: Hellenistic or Roman?,” in The Romanization of Athens, ed. Michael C. Hoff and Susan I. Rotroff [Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1997]: 53).
Landy, “Stuart and Revett: Pioneer Archaeologists,” Archaeology 9 (December 1956): 258. This article resulted from Landy’s M.A. dissertation, “Stuart and Revett and their Interpretation of Greek Architecture,” Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, 1953.
Ibid., 259.
Laing Mss., La.III.581: (a)v and 21v-31r, Edinburgh University Library.
Ibid., 77v. Stuart provided the reference “348” for this quotation and chap. 34 of Plutarch’s Antony does indeed describe its protagonist filling and carrying a vessel. However, the quotation does not seem to be accurate and, furthermore, the water Antony carries is drawn from the Clepsydra–the sacred ebbing well below the Acropolis; see Plutarch, Life of Antony, ed. Christopher Pelling (Cambridge University Press, 1988): 75, 210. Stuart had accepted an interpretation by Suidas of clepsydra as a generic term for “an astronomical Instrument, by which the Hours are measured etc.” (Antiquities, vol. 1 [1762]: 15 n. a).
Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture, trans. and ed. Ingrid D. Rowland and Thomas Noble Howe (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 117, book 9, chap. 8, section II (Stuart gives the reference as book 9, chap. 9, but there is no chapter 9 in that book).
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): 15.
Wiebenson, Sources of Greek Revival (1969): 80; Harris, British Architectural Books (1990): 442 and 447 n. 31.
Vitruvius, Ten Books of Architecture (1999): 49, book 3, chap. 3, section 5. Stuart’s placement of this quotation in chap. 2 of book 3 is careless (and was an error he repeated in Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762]: iii, n. e.). The following quotations on fig. 3-21, Vitruvius’s opening remarks on the setting out of the Tuscan temple and on the width of its cellae or alae, come from book 4, chap. 7, sections 1-2; see Vitruvius, Ten Books of Architecture (1999): 60.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): iii, n. e.
Antiquities, vol. 2 (ca. 1790): 14-15, and vol. 3 (1794): 16. See Harris, British Architectural Books (1990): 443-44, for a fuller account of this episode. Stuart’s total refusal to acknowledge the evidence for the twenty lateral columns must also be seen in the context of Le Roy’s willing acceptance of that fact; see Robin Middleton, introduction to The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece by Julien-David Le Roy, trans. David Britt (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2004): 20 and 22.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): viii.
But for a recent reappraisal see Tamara Griggs, “Drawn from Nature: Text and Image in The Antiquities of Athens (1762-1816),” forthcoming.
Edward Kaufman has commented that “if Stuart’s sense of historical relationships is ambivalent, his awareness of geographical ones is quite precise”; see Kaufman, “Architecture and Travel in the Age of British Eclecticism,” in Architecture and its Image, ed. Eve Blau and Edward Kaufman (Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 1989): 70. A proper study of Stuart as cartographer, which lies beyond the scope of the present chapter, is a desideratum.
Typescript of George Basevi’s letters (ed. Arthur Bolton): 200-201, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London.
See Frank Salmon, Building on Ruins: The Rediscovery of Rome and English Architecture (Aldershot, Eng., and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2000): 41 and figs. 21, 22.
For a study of Stuart’s Athenian views which concludes that “picturesque” elements were made “incidental to his primary purpose, fidelity to the topographical and architectural reality of the scenes depicted,” see Michael McCarthy, “The Image of Greek Architecture, 1748-1768” (1991), in Classical and Gothic: Studies in the History of Art (Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts, 2005): 83-90.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): viii. Kaufman suggests, but does not establish, that Stuart’s views were “quite carefully constructed,” with characters “systematically deployed … not so much to display the ancient monuments as to form a kind of pictorial conspectus of travel themes” (Kaufman, “Architecture and Travel [1989]: 77). For a study of ethnographic elements in Antiquities and other publications related to the Dilettanti see Jason Kelly, Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment: The Society of Dilettanti, 1732-1808 (forthcoming).
Antiquities, vol. 3 (1794): 37. The gouache of this view was not finished, and the attendants are not included in it (SD 145/10, RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London).
Kaufman, “Architecture and Travel” (1989): 65. Redford, “Measure of Ruins” (2002): 16, goes further, considering this image to represent “the primal scene of modern archaeology.”
Antiquities, vol. 2 (ca. 1790): 19.
Landy, “Stuart and Revett” (1956): 258.
See Salmon, Building on Ruins (2000): 35-36.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): vii. For Adam see Iain Gordon Brown, Monumental Reputation: Robert Adam and the Emperor’s Palace (Edinburgh: National Library of Scotland, 1992): 32-33, and Frank Salmon, “Charles Cameron and Nero’s Domus Aurea: ‘Una Piccola Esplorazione’,” Architectural History 36 (1993): 86.
Le Roy, Ruins (2004): 10 (trans. Robin Middleton).
Laing Mss., La.III.581: 84v, Edinburgh University Library.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): 14. Landy praises their work in this case (“Stuart and Revett” (1956]: 258). Redford has interpreted Stuart’s words here as an example of “the language of the Royal Society” (“Measure of Ruins” [2002]: 25).
This point is made in Joseph Veach Noble and Derek de la Solla Price, “The Water Clock in the Tower of the Winds,” American Journal of Archaeology 72 (1968): 347.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): vii.
Vitruvius, Ten Books of Architecture (1999): 24, book 1, chap. 2, sections 1-2.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): vii; Landy, “Stuart and Revett (1956): 257.
See Gene Waddell “The Principal Design Methods for Greek Doric Temples and their Modification for the Parthenon,” Architectural History 45 (2002): 23. See also Mark Wilson Jones, “Doric Measure and Architectural Design 2: A Modular Reading of the Classical Temple,” American Journal of Archaeology 105 (2001): 675-713.
Charlemont quoted by Bristol, “Stuart and the Genesis of the Greek Revival” [1997]: 142.
Kaufman, “Architecture and Travel (1989): 74.
Landy, “Stuart and Revett” (1956): 254 and 259.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): i.
SD 94/4/3, RIBA Library Drawings Collection, London. SD 94/4/1 offers a seventeen-step guide to the setting out of the Greek Ionic volute. In Antiquities vol. 1 (1762): 2, Stuart offered a long footnote on the shortcomings of the Ionic orders of celebrated Roman buildings.
Laing Mss., La.III.581: 73v, Edinburgh University Library; Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): vii. On this and the following page, Stuart publicly paid tribute to Revett’s “exactness” and, while stating that he had assisted Revett with a “considerable number” of the measurements, also indicated that there were occasions where he had “measured after him.” In 1762 John Bird, under instruction from a Parliamentary Committee established in 1758, produced the yard rule later adopted as the Imperial Standard. It may be inferred, therefore, but cannot be assumed, that the rule Bird constructed for Revett to use in Greece in the early 1750s corresponded with the Imperial Standard.
The “median” was necessary because Stuart and Revett’s plan of the building (Antiquities, vol. 1 [1762], pl. II) showed the breadth of the two sides with doorways was slightly less than that of the other six sides.
David Yeomans, to whom I own a great debt of gratitude for bringing his expertise to bear on the problem of fig. 3-29, has pointed out that this “radius” was not in itself a measurable line (it lay in space beneath the pitch of the roof and passed through the outer wall of the building) and thus would have had to have been calculated trigonometrically, probably from measuring down the ridge line of the roof and then converting the sum (based on the pitch of the ridge) to the pitch of the slope between the ridges.
The three sheets in Add. Ms. 22,153,BL, are: fol. 9r (Antiquities, vol. 1 [1762]: chap. 4, pl. XI); fol. 9v (corresponding with ibid., pl. X IV); and fol. 13r (corresponding with ibid., pl. XXV); the recto of the one sheet in the Department of Greek and Roman Antiquities, British Museum, corresponds with ibid., pl. VIII and the verso with ibid., pl. XXI.
Arthur H. Smith, “Recent Additions to the Sculptures of the Parthenon,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 13 (1892-93): 98-99. See Add. Ms. 22,153, fol. 76r, BL, upper image for the Stuart sketch of the now “long missing” Athenian relief with Athene and Marsyas and compare this with the engraved version in Antiquities, vol. 2 (ca. 1790): 27.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): 33–34.
Robert Adam to James Adam, Edinburgh, 25 June 1758, Clerk of Penicuik Mss.GD 18 4,850, National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh; cited in Bristol, “Stuart and the Genesis of the Greek Revival” [1997]: 133.
James Adam to Betty Adam, Venice, 17 September 1760, Clerk of Penicuik Mss.GD 18 4,872, National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh; cited in Bristol, “Stuart and the Genesis of the Greek Revival” [1997]: 136, n. 390.
See Wolfgang Ehrhardt, “Das Fries des Lysikratesmonuments,”Antike Plastik 22 (1993), for a recent study that contains photographs of the sculptures in their present state and that makes a comparative study of the Lusieri drawings, the Elgin casts (now belonging to the British Museum) and the casts now in the University of Cambridge Museum of Classical Archaeology.
Ibid., 14, figs. 9-11 and pl. 7b.
Ibid., figs. 12-14 and pl. 8a. Lusieri’s drawing is overly emphatic in showing the figure in profile. In fact, when the casts are viewed from an oblique angle, both of this satyr’s eyes are visible.
Antiquities, vol. 2 (ca. 1790): 12.
See Smith, “Recent Additions” (1892-93): 97, fig. 5. Carrey’s drawings had been acquired by the Bibliothèque Royale in 1770 but were misshelved until 1797. Stuart thus cannot have known them; see Theodore Bowie and Diether Timme, eds., The Carrey Drawings of the Parthenon Sculptures (Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1971): 3.
Julien-David Le Roy, Les Ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (Paris: Guerin and Delatour, 1758), pt. 2, pl. 13; for the influence of this plate, see Middleton, introduction to Ruins by Le Roy (2004): 141-42; Robert Wood, The Ruins of Balbec, otherwise Heliopolis in Coelosyria (London: n.p., 1757): pl. 41. On this subject see Frank Salmon, “Perspectival Restoration Drawings in Roman Archaeology and Architectural History,” Antiquaries Journal 83 (2003): 403.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): 31. For criticism of their restoration of the monument’s substructures, however, see Landy, “Stuart and Revett(1956): 257-58.
Robinson, “Tower of the Winds” (1943): 300.
Antiquities, vol. 2 (ca. 1790): chap. 2, pl. VIl; Landy, “Stuart and Revett” (1956): 257 and figs. 6-7. It is noteworthy that Le Roy similarly depicted only sixteen rows of masonry in total at the Erechtheion, but that, unlike Stuart and Revett, he also failed to notice the taller nature of the foundation course.
Antiquities, vol. 1 (1762): 10.
Gandon, The Life of James Gandon, Esq., ed. Thomas ]. Mulvany (Dublin: Hodges and Smith, 1846): 198–99.
Antiquities, vol. 3 (1794): 7.
Laing Mss., La.III.581: 123v-124r, Edinburgh University Library.
Landy, “Stuart and Revett (1956): 259.
Minutebook, vol. 8 (13 January 1757 to 20 May 1762): 79, Society of Antiquaries. Stuart’s sponsors were: H. Baker, J. Marsili, J. Hollis, Emanuel Mendes da Costa, J. Parsons, M. Ducane, J. Hunt and D. Wray.
Ibid., 90 and 107.
Ibid., 136–37.
