Library Exhibits at the Lucille Caudill Little Fine Arts & Design Library: The Archaeological Revolution

This exhibition showcases a number of rare folios that were instrumental in the development of Neoclassicism. These sumptuous publications, based on an unprecedented series of archaeological expeditions extending from Greece and the eastern Mediterranean to the Near East, brought about new historical attitudes towards the past. Their lavish illustrations sparked a new fashion for the modes and motifs of ancient art that was felt in buildings, landscape gardens, and the fine and decorative arts.  

Introduction:

Since the time of the Renaissance, the ruins of ancient Rome served as an intellectual quarry for artists and architects who were eager to decipher their secrets and apply their lessons to contemporary design. Rome and its ancient architecture were viewed as the only legitimate source and reservoir of European architecture culture, its monuments venerated as a unified, single canon of Antiquity. Yet by the middle of the eighteenth century this attitude to the past had changed profoundly. Spurred on by the Enlightenment quest for knowledge, and with an eye to reforming taste, European antiquarians and artists traveled to the little-known regions of the Classical world to study the Antique directly, rather than through the eyes of Renaissance intermediaries. The unheralded variety of the architecture they uncovered in southern Italy, mainland Greece and the eastern reaches of the Roman Empire, brought about a radical questioning of received notions of an invariable Classical ideal. The expeditions to formerly inaccessible parts of the Graeco-Roman world provided material, both scholarly and artistic, for sumptuous publications that telegraphed detailed knowledge about the ancient sites across Europe. These handsome folios established their makers’ professional bona fides as artists and arbiters of taste, and fundamentally reshaped the course of architectural design.     

Central to the formation of this attitude was the institution of the Grand Tour. This was an extended trip to see the great sights of Europe taken by a well-heeled élite as a capstone to their liberal education, and which had Rome as its endpoint. In the eighteenth century, Rome, though its temporal power was much reduced, remained a goal of religious and artistic pilgrimage. As Europe’s premier artistic center, ambitious young artists and architects converged on its academies to complete their studies and secure patrons from among the members of Europe’s high society gathered there. Because of the cosmopolitan nature of the idealistic view of the Classical past as a shared European inheritance, it became the arena in which fierce personal enmities and international rivalries played out.

This period saw the beginning of the systematic archaeological recovery of Herculaneum (1738) and Pompeii (1748), ancient cities buried by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. Their excavation was followed enthusiastically by connoisseurs and cognoscenti, those who possessed a rich mental archive of Classical Antiquity fostered by study of ancient texts, art, and architecture. Rather than the piecemeal understanding of the past that had been allowed by Antiquity’s more fragmentary remains, the uncovering of entire cities presented the possibility of grasping a more complete picture of ancient culture. The unforeseen richness of the discoveries in terms of fine and decorative arts and architecture, lavishly illustrated in official publications, was immediately appropriated by wealthy European visitors on the Grand Tour. Returning home with collections of art and antiquities purchased or purloined while abroad, these aristocratic patrons set a new fashion for the modes and motifs of ancient art and brought about a revival in the arts now called Neoclassicism (a term coined in the 1880s).   

While these early excavations were more treasure-hunting enterprises than methodical exercises, this “proto-archaeology” nevertheless fostered a more systematic understanding of ancient art and architecture. When combined with more venturesome travelling to the obscure corners of the Mediterranean world and the Near East, this dissolved the notion that Classical architecture had operated in seamless continuity, and within an invariable framework of rules as set down by the Roman architectural writer Vitruvius in his treatise On Architecture (c. 27 BC). Rather, as travelers explored the far reaches of the Roman Empire, the dizzying variety of classical architecture was revealed. These studies led to a more complete systematization of ancient practice, achieved by teasing out distinctions to discern earlier or later stages, and to definitively separate Greek from Roman. In essence, this meant that the known corpus of the Classical tradition was extended outward geographically to the limits of the Roman Empire, and backward in time to the earliest monumental architecture of the Greeks.

It had long been accepted that the Romans had derived their architecture from the Greeks, since Vitruvius had said so. But in the middle of the eighteenth century it became a commonplace to disparage Roman design as florid and overwrought, and to assert that Greek art and architecture was its superior because it was pure and simple. In terms of Enlightenment ideas of progress this was a paradox but one explained by the fact that Greece was perceived as the authentic fountainhead of Western civilization, whose lessons had been corrupted by the decadent Romans. In his Essai sur l’architecture (Essay on Architecture) of 1753, Marc-Antoine Laugier asserted that “Architecture owes all that is perfect to the Greeks,” since he believed that early Greek architecture presented a Platonic ideal that hewed most closely to the simplicity and essentialism found in nature. Similar sentiments were expressed by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-68), in his manifesto Reflections on the Imitation of the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755), followed by his History of the Art of Antiquity (1764). In these works he proclaimed the “perfection” of Classical Greek art, and extolled its “noble simplicity and calm grandeur.” Laugier made his confident assertions about Greek superiority without having been to Greece or even having seen a Greek temple. For his part, Winckelmann devised his schema of the rise and decline of styles using the Papal collections in Rome, which contained few Greek originals. Nevertheless, his breathless descriptions and acute analysis of Classical art demonstrated that close observation of artifacts could compete with philology as the key to understanding Classical culture.

Guided by a belief in the didactic potential of Greek ruins, it was at this moment that the mysteries of Greek architecture began to be unraveled. The first systematic study of the architecture of ancient Greece was proposed in 1748 by the architects James Stuart (1713-1788) and Nicholas Revett (1721-1804), who had met in Rome. Travel to Ottoman-controlled Greece was fraught with difficulty and danger, but they were determined to make their mark by bringing out a series of folios containing accurate engravings of the buildings of ancient Athens. The model and standard for exquisitely illustrated antiquarian scholarship was set by Antoine Desgodetz’s Les édifices antiques de Rome dessinés et mesurés très exactement (The Ancient Buildings of Rome, 1682), whose example Stuart and Revett sought to emulate. The first volume of their work, The Antiquities of Athens, finally appeared in 1762, almost ten years after their expedition, the second [on display here], came out in 1789, and the third in 1795. The long delay between research and initial publication of Stuart and Revett’s Antiquities meant that it was a rival Frenchman, Julien-David Le Roy (1728-1803), whose Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece, 1758), first introduced to the West reasonably accurate engravings of the fifth-century buildings on the Athenian Acropolis. His impressionistic, picturesque views of the ruins stirred a new interest in Greek architecture, and were highly acclaimed in French artistic circles. The expanded second edition of this work, published in 1770, is displayed here.  

Stuart and Revett’s venture was subsidized by the Society of Dilettanti. This had been founded in 1732 as a dining club for gentlemen who had made the Grand Tour, and which fostered antiquarian enthusiasms. The society’s aim was to promote “Greek taste and Roman spirit,” and over the course of the next century its members sponsored artists to travel to the eastern Mediterranean and published the results in magnificent folios. In 1764 the Dilettanti commissioned the classical scholar Richard Chandler (1737-1810) to travel to Asia Minor along with Revett and the painter William Pars (1742-1782). This resulted in Ionian Antiquities (1769) [on display], a folio published under the auspices of the Dilettanti that achieved for the Greek architecture of the eastern shore of the Mediterranean what Stuart and Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens had for the Greek mainland.  

The immoderate claims for the superiority of Greek architecture and art that were advanced by Stuart, Le Roy, Laugier, Winckelmann and others, provoked a furious response from those who favored ancient Rome. No artist was more pugnacious in his defense of the superiority of Roman architecture than the Venetian architect Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778). In a series of stunning archaeological folios, most famously his surveys Le antichità romane (Roman Antiquities, 1756) and Della magnificenza ed architettura de’ Romani (Of the Magnificence and Architecture of the Romans, 1761), Piranesi argued that the Romans had inherited nothing from Greece. Rather, Roman architecture developed from ancient Etruscan architecture and achieved “the highest perfection” in the arts, so fuelling the so-called Greek versus Roman controversy. His opinion that ancient architecture should be a touchstone and catalyst for creative fantasy rather than an inflexible template was shared by his friend, the Scottish architect Robert Adam (1728-1792). He creatively embraced the designs recorded in his great folio, Ruins of the Palace of the Emperor Diocletian at Spalatro in Dalmatia (1764), to conjure up interiors of Roman imperial opulence for his patrons in Britain. Evidence of late Roman architectural achievements and inventiveness on the fringes of empire was provided by James Dawkins (1722-1757), a wealthy member of the Society of Dilettanti, and Robert Wood (1717-1771), who set off to explore the Near East in 1750. On their return to England they swiftly brought out The Ruins of Palmyra (1753) [on display], whose lavish plates revealed the desolate remains of the Levantine city. It was followed in 1757 by The Ruins of Balbec.

Winckelmann’s assertion in 1755 that “there is but one way for the moderns to become great, and perhaps unequalled: I mean, by imitating the Ancients,” underscored the Neoclassical movement’s concern for reforming contemporary art and taste. Yet the ways in which the physical remains of that past should be harnessed by the present engendered responses that were often in tension. On the one hand, there was an increasingly empirical attitude towards the past, in which accuracy, truth, and the “primitive” were valorized, and which was particularly associated with the imitation of Greek art and architecture. On the other hand, there was a more inventive, mediated reception of the archaeological remains, in which the buildings of Imperial Rome served as a springboard for informed, creative license and experiment. The folios gathered together in this exhibition exemplify these strongly divergent approaches towards design.  

Robert Wood (1717-71)

The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart

London, 1753

But of all the works that distinguish this age, none perhaps excel those beautiful editions of Balbec and Palmyra—not published at the command of a Louis quatorze, or at the expense of a cardinal nephew, but undertaken by private curiosity and good sense, and trusted to the taste of a polished nation.

So wrote Horace Walpole in praise of Robert Wood’s marvelous volumes of engraved plates and descriptive texts that introduced the remains of these two extinct eastern Roman cities to an awestruck West. Like James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, Wood set out to make accurate records of the ancient ruins in emulation of Antoine Desgodetz’s Les edifices antiques de Rome (The Ancient Buildings of Rome, 1682), setting his sights on the architecture of the eastern fringes of the Roman Empire rather than Greece. Having traveled in Greece and Italy, he was invited in 1749 by two Oxford graduates, John Bouverie (1723-1750), a connoisseur and collector, and James Dawkins (1722-1757) to travel to the Levant to explore its ancient architecture. In preparation for their expedition, they spent the winter of 1749-50 in Rome studying the history and geography of the sites they intended to visit. In need of a draughtsman to make accurate records of their discoveries, they hired Giovanni Battista Borra (1713-1770), a Piedmontese architect of exceptional skill. The party set sail from Naples in May 1750 equipped with all necessary supplies, including a research library “consisting chiefly of all the Greek historians and poets, some books of antiquities, and the best voyage writers” (Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra). Their voyage took them to the Greek Islands, the Hellespont, up the Bosphorus as far as the Black Sea, and to Asia Minor, Syria, Phoenicia (modern Lebanon), Palestine and Egypt. Wood had a particular interest in the Troad, the region in northwestern Turkey (Asia Minor) associated with Troy and the Homeric description of the Trojan War. He describes the group’s delight in walking in this “poetic geography,” spending two weeks “with great pleasure in making a map of the Scamandrian plain with Homer in our hands.” From the Troad the party proceeded to Magnesia-on-the-Maeander, an Ionian city not far from Ephesus, where Bouverie contracted a fatal illness. Undaunted, Wood, Dawkins and Borra continued to Egypt where they measured and drew the pyramids. They then made for Damascus where they hired a guard of mounted troops to secure their passage to Palmyra in the Syrian desert.           

Sited on an oasis in the north-central Syrian steppe, Palmyra had been an important entrepôt, standing on trade routes connecting the eastern Mediterranean to Asia. It reached its zenith under the Roman Empire when its wealth allowed for the development of a spectacular orthogonally planned city. Its vast, deserted landscape of ruined temples and colonnaded streets, forlorn yet imposing, overawed the party. They spent just five days there in feverish activity, measuring and drawing plans of the city’s remains and recording inscriptions. They then set off for Baalbek (ancient Heliopolis) where they spent a similar amount of time. They returned to England via Athens in May 1751, where they met Stuart and Revett, who were then just beginning the investigations that would lead to the celebrated The Antiquities of Athens (1762). The outcome of the expedition was two sumptuous volumes, The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor in the Desart (1753), and The Ruins of Balbec, otherwise Heliopolis in Coelosyria (1757). Both were hailed as great successes for broadening the corpus of known Roman monuments and for demonstrating the ingenuity and inventive novelties of east Roman architecture. Dawkins, who had financed much of the expedition, was elected to the Society of Dilettanti in 1755. The honor was conferred on Wood in 1763, after which he played a decisive role in steering and supporting Richard Chandler’s expedition to Ionia.       

After Giovanni Battista Borra, Panoramic View of Palmyra. From Robert Wood, The Ruins of Palmyra, otherwise Tedmor, in the Desart (London, 1753), pl. I.

This plate, the opening illustration in the book, provides a detailed and expansive view of the ancient city of Palmyra. Borra’s rendering is both sophisticated and ambitious, combining crisp topographical accuracy with a romanticized, melancholy air. The ruins of the city’s once-imposing structures—temples, colonnaded streets, and architectural fragments—span the horizon, accentuated by the dramatic setting of desert and encircling mountain. In the middle distance, sets of racing lancers, members of the party’s sizeable escort, crisscross the desert sands. The juxtaposition of forbidding landscape with the remnants of human achievement introduces a dramatic tension between civilization and its inevitable decline. In this sense, the plate serves as a record of the city’s physical state while engaging with broader themes of history, the passage of time, and ruination, intellectual currents of the era that this volume both channeled and quickened.   

In the historical essay which follows the book’s preface, “An Enquiry into the Ancient State of Palmyra,” Wood furnishes a neat summary of his desire to combine a truthful record of the city’s remains with an indication of their context:

We not only give the measures of the architecture, but also the views of the ruins from which they are taken. . . . For as the first gives an idea of the building, when it was entire, so the last shows its present state of decay, and (which is most important) what authority there is for our measures.

It was analytical, truthful representation that was paramount to Wood. Floating above the scattered remains are letters and numerals, an index to the book’s plates, that subordinate the aesthetic thrill of the panorama to the serious work of instruction. Towards the center of the three-plate panorama, the artist Borra has depicted himself sitting on a fallen block of entablature, drawing board in hand, evidence that this depiction has the authority of the eyewitness.     

Julien-David Le Roy (1728-1803)

Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce, ed. 2

Paris, 1770

An accurate account of ancient Greek monuments was first presented in two mid-eighteenth century publications on Athenian architecture, Julien-David Le Roy’s Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Gréce (The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece, 1758), and James Stuart and Nicholas Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens (vol.1, 1762). Both broke with tradition by transforming Greek architecture from a literary conception to a reality by relying on direct evidence as much as ancient textual sources. Though they both took as their subject matter the buildings of Athens, the ends to which they were aimed differed substantially. Whereas Stuart and Revett sought to provide prototypes to be copied, Le Roy intended his engravings to provide visual evidence of architectural development while integrating the analysis of sensations roused by architecture. 

It is likely that Le Roy’s project was motivated by Stuart and Revett’s. Their “Proposal” was well known in antiquarian circles, and the long delay between its issuance and the publication of the first volume of Antiquities allowed Le Roy to forestall the British architects and bring out his own publication. Le Roy had been a student at the French Royal Academy of Architecture, winning the Prix de Rome in 1750. He took up residence of the French Academy at Rome in 1751 and, encouraged by the wealthy antiquarian scholar the Comte de Caylus (1692-1765), set out for Greece in 1754. He sailed via Pola and Constantinople, arriving in Athens only weeks after Stuart and Revett had left. He stayed one year in Greece (1754-55), three months of which he spent in Athens, the rest visiting and sketching Delos, Corinth and Sparta. His time in Athens was far shorter than Stuart and Revett’s three years though longer than the incredibly brief nine days which Wood and Dawkins spent in Palmyra and Baalbek. He returned to Paris via Rome at the end of 1755, publishing Ruines only three years later. One reason for its hasty publication was the backing of Caylus who had helped Le Roy organize his expedition and, essentially, had provided all the necessary assistance for the preparation and publication of the book. Caylus had Le Roy’s rather crude sketches redrawn by Louis-Joseph Le Lorrain (1715-1759), who engraved, along with Jacques-Philippe Le Bas (1707-1783), the architectural views, plans and elevations. Consequently Ruines became the first work to present to the public reasonably accurate depictions of the buildings of ancient Greece.

When the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens finally appeared in 1762, it was filled with pages of biting criticism of Le Roy’s work, fueled by Stuart’s chagrin at being beaten to publication. Principally, Stuart criticized the lack of exactness in Le Roy’s plates, which he found to contain “imaginary representations” and embellishments. It is true that Le Roy’s drawings, while certainly not architectural capriccios, are by no means as accurate as the scales at the bottom of his plates might imply. But to focus on Stuart’s criticisms of Le Roy would be to misconstrue Le Roy’s intentions. These he clarified in 1770 in the second edition of Ruines, which was a heavily rewritten, reordered and expanded version of the first. In addition to criticizing Stuart and Revett’s sole aim of providing exact measurements, he declared that he was not interested in providing slavish reproductions of the remaining edifices, nor had exactness been his main aim. Rather, his goal was nothing less than to trace the evolutionary development of ancient architecture, proposing a close correspondence between societal organization and architectural form.        

After Julien-David Le Roy, Caryatids. From Julien-David Le Roy, Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce, ed. 2 (Paris, 1770), pl. XXXII.

In this view Le Roy has trained his attention on the Erechtheion—Le Roy, like Stuart, calls it the Temple of Minerva Polias—a building dating to the late fifth century BC, a time when Athens was embroiled in war against Sparta. Due to the irregularities of the site and the need to accommodate various cults, the ground plan is asymmetrical and highly unusual, complexities that Le Roy communicates in a separate picturesque view of the temple. The columnar north porch sheltered a mark left by Zeus’s thunderbolt, and a shrine on the west displayed a sacred olive tree given by Athena. The temple takes its name from the hero Erechtheus, the foster-child of Athena who was also worshipped here. At the time of Le Roy’s visit, the Erechtheion was used as a Turkish commander’s residence and harem.    

The most famous part of the temple is the south monumental porch, its six Caryatids supporting the superstructure. The ancient Roman architect Vitruvius writes that such female statues used as columns take their name from the Peloponnesian city of Caryae, whose citizens sided with the Persians during the Persian War. Upon their defeat by the Greek allies, the city’s men were killed and the women were enslaved. Architects of the time recorded the shameful betrayal of their fellow Greeks with Caryatids, heavy-laden stone figures of women whose treachery would be remembered across the ages. Le Roy, though well aware of Vitruvius’s history lesson, interprets these figures instead as Canephoroi (Basket Bearers), young women in the service of Athena carrying ritual baskets on their heads.

In this analytical plate, Le Roy focuses exclusively on the porch, omitting any indication of the adjoining spaces. He presents a quartet of elegant, lissome maidens caught in mid stride, seemingly on the verge of chasséing off their pedestals. Though the building appears pristine, he has recorded that the statues’ arms have been lost (as was the case, but not so uniformly). They share the plate with detailed, measured renderings of the parapet, entablature and coffered ceiling.  

James Stuart (1713-1788) and Nicholas Revett (1721-1804)

The Antiquities of Athens, vol. 2

London, 1787 (1789)

Having met in Rome in the 1740s, the architects and painters James Stuart and Nicholas Revett made a tour of Naples in 1748, possibly visiting the newly begun excavations of Pompeii, where they conceived the ambitious idea to make a full record of the monuments of ancient Athens. That same year they circulated a manuscript called “Proposals for publishing a new and accurate description of the antiquities, etc. in the province of Attica.” They wished to make the antiquities of Athens, which had “been almost entirely neglected” as well known as the monuments of Rome. It had been accepted since the Renaissance that the culture of Greece was the basis of Western civilization, but owing to the dangers and expense of travel, few had made the effort to visit the remains in situ. Stuart and Revett were interested principally in studying the ancient remains and recording them as accurately as possible, stating that they would be drawn “on the spot, measured with the greatest accuracy, and delineated with the utmost attention.” They took as their model Antoine Desgodetz’s Les edifices antiques de Rome (The Ancient Buildings of Rome, 1682), who had asserted in the preface to his work that his primary aim was to achieve accurate measurements. From the outset Stuart and Revett intended their study of the archaeological remains to have an impact on architectural and artistic practice:

We doubt not but a Work so much wanted will meet with the Approbation of all those Gentlemen who are lovers of Antiquity, or have a taste for what is excellent in these Arts, as we are assured that those Artists who aim at perfection must be infinitely more pleased, and better instructed, the nearer they can draw their examples from the fountain-head. 

While in Rome in 1750 Stuart and Revett met Robert Wood and James Dawkins, then in the midst of planning their expedition to the Levant, a pioneering journey that would result in the archaeological publication The Ruins of Palmyra (1753). This encounter had the dual advantage of securing the financial support of Dawkins and the practical advice of Wood. They left Rome for Venice in 1750, intending to sail from there to Greece. In Venice the British consul, Sir James Gray, secured their membership of the Society of Dilettanti, thus providing vital support for their endeavor. They reached Athens in March 1751 but soon realized that access to the main monuments of the Acropolis would not be straightforward. Their original plan had been to publish three volumes of antiquities, the contents of each being determined topographically: the first was to contain the monuments of the Acropolis; the second those in the city of Athens; and the third the edifices of the surrounding area. However, although they had secured the necessary firmans (permits), the working conditions in Athens were most unfavorable. Viewed with suspicion by the authorities, they were prevented from surveying some monuments on the Acropolis by the position of the Turkish garrison on its southern ridge. This meant that the monuments on the Acropolis, intended to be in the first volume by virtue of their importance, were substituted by only minor works of Hellenistic and Roman date. Forced to leave Athens in September 1753 because of rioting following the death of an Ottoman official, the pair finally returned to England in October 1754, having visited the Aegean islands, including Delos.

Dedicated to George III, the first volume of The Antiquities of Athens Measured and Delineated by James Stuart, F.R.S. and F.S.A, and Nicholas Revett, Painters and Architects, appeared in 1762, eight years after they left Athens. The delay was partly due to Stuart’s dilatory nature. He had prevaricated in writing the text for which he was responsible, causing Revett to withdraw from the partnership before the first volume’s publication. Stuart had been stung by the appearance in 1758 of Julien-David Le Roy’s Les ruines des plus beaux monuments de la Grèce (The Ruins of the Most Beautiful Monuments of Greece). Stuart felt, probably correctly, that Le Roy had caught wind of his proposal to measure the monuments of Athens, and that by being the first to publish a modern, accurate account of the ruins of ancient Athens the Frenchman had deprived him of an honor that was rightfully his. Consequently, Stuart devoted a good part of the text of the first volume of Antiquities to pointing out Le Roy’s errors.

Though celebrated as a tour-de-force of archaeological representation on its publication, the German art historian and antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) voiced his disappointment in the comparatively minor importance of the Hellenistic and Roman monuments depicted. Stuart and Revett were well aware that the monuments they reproduced in the first volume of Antiquities were not the most renowned. In order to make the best of the minor and later examples that they published Stuart announced that they showed “the different Grecian modes of decorating buildings.” The information contained in these drawings can hardly have provided sufficient impetus for the major revival that Stuart might have hoped for. Indeed, his contemporary influence was minimal, a fuller embrace awaiting the far more vigorous Greek revival of the turn of the century. Stuart received a number of commissions, both large and small, from members of the Society of Dilettanti, including for a small Greek Doric garden temple for Baron Lyttelton at Hagley Park (1758) based on the Theseion in Athens. Yet Stuart was far from being the myopic Hellenophile that his moniker “Athenian” Stuart implies. Rooms he designed for Spencer House in London (1758) show a taste for the authentically classical, rather than the exclusively Greek. 

James Stuart, View of the West end of the Temple of Minerva Polias, and of the Pandrosium. From James Stuart and Nicholas Revett, The Antiquities of Athens, vol. 2 (London, 1787[1789]), chap. 2, pl. II.

The second volume of Antiquities, which includes the major buildings of the Acropolis, appeared in 1789 (though it was backdated 1787, the year before Stuart’s death). Although Revett’s financial interest had been bought out by Stuart before the publication of the first volume, his measured sections, elevations and plans were a crucial complement to Stuart’s picturesque views. Stuart’s favored medium was colored gouache (opaque watercolor). These paintings were reproduced in the publications as black and white engravings, many of which were made by Stuart, who had acquired the skill while in Rome in the 1740s.

In this view Stuart depicts the Erechtheion, a structure which accommodated several sacred cults, including the city’s most important one to Athena Polias. The ancient author Pausanias—an important source of information for Stuart and Revett—mentions an adjoining shrine of Pandrosos, site of a sacred olive tree given to the city by its matron deity. In the right-hand corner Stuart, clothed in an approximation of local dress, depicts himself drawing the view. This gives the whole enterprise the feel of on-the-spot reportage. He clearly delighted in making colorful vignettes that would transport the armchair traveler to the site.

Stuart gives this description of the scene:

The Turkish Gentleman smoking a long pipe, is the Disdár-Agá, he leans on the shoulder of his son-in-law, Ibrahim Agá, and is looking at our labourers, who are digging to discover the Base, and the steps of the Basement under the Caryatides. He was accustomed to visit us from time to time, to see that we did no mischief to the Building; but in reality, to see that we did not carry off any treasure; for he did not conceive, any other motive could have induced us, to examine so eagerly what was under ground in his Castle. The two Turks in the Pandrosium were placed there by him to watch our proceedings; and give him an account of our discoveries.

Society of Dilettanti

Ionian Antiquities

London, 1769

In 1764, following the success of Stuart and Revett’s The Antiquities of Athens (1762), the Society of Dilettanti decided to sponsor an archaeological expedition to the coast of Asia Minor (western Turkey). This was the heartland of ancient Ionia, a place that had been part of the Greek world since the 8^th century BC, and which was famed in antiquity for the beauty of its cities and landscapes. Richard Chandler (1737-1810), an Oxford-educated classical scholar and expert in epigraphy, was chosen to lead the expedition. He was accompanied by Nicholas Revett (1721-1804), an architect and superb draughtsman, and by William Pars (1742-1782), a topographical artist. The party’s instructions were drawn up by Robert Wood, editor of The Ruins of Palmyra. They were to base themselves in Smyrna (modern Izmir), and to study the remnants of antiquity nearby, including the temple of Dionysus at Teos, the city of Priene, and the temple of Apollo Didymaeus near Miletus. Chandler was to copy the inscriptions, Revett to make exact plans, measurements and drawings of the remains, and Pars to copy bas-reliefs and record topographical views of the sites. Each was also instructed to keep detailed diaries. The party embarked in 1764, spending about a year in Asia Minor, before being forced by an outbreak of plague to leave for Athens in 1765. Whilst there, they measured and drew the Parthenon to provide illustrations for the second volume of The Antiquities of Athens (1787), thereby completing work that Stuart and Revett had left unfinished a decade earlier. The group returned to England at the end of 1766, and the Dilettanti published the valuable materials they had collected in Ionian Antiquities (1769). Wood wrote the preface, Chandler the historical text, and Revett the account of the architecture. A second volume was published in 1797.       

After William Pars, Capital of a Pilaster from the Temple of Apollo Didymaeus. From Society of Dilettanti, Ionian Antiquities (London, 1769), tailpiece.

Didyma, a Greek city in Ionia (western Asia Minor), was famous in antiquity as the site of an oracular shrine dedicated to the god Apollo. Its most impressive monument is the colossal Hellenistic Temple of Apollo (late fourth century BC), reputed to have been designed by Paeonius of Ephesus. Its Ionic columns were the tallest of any Greek temple (over 64 feet), and its dimensions, 167 by 358 feet, were only exceeded by the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus and the Olympeion at Agrigento. In Travels in Asia Minor (1775) Chandler describes encountering the awe-inspiring ruins:

The memory of the pleasure, which this spot afforded me, will not be soon or easily erased. The columns yet entire are so exquisitely fine, the marble mass so vast and noble, that it is impossible perhaps to conceive greater beauty and majesty of ruin. At evening . . . the whole mass was illuminated by the declining sun with a variety of rich tints, and cast a very strong shade. The sea, at a distance, was smooth and shining, bordered by a mountainous coast, with rocky islands. The picture was as delicious as striking.

In this image, Pars has faithfully reproduced a richly carved pilaster capital, one of a number that protruded from the inner wall of the temple’s cella (shrine). Pars depicts the capital from the front and the side, and conveys a considerable amount of information about its decorative features, including the delicate scroll of its volutes, its acanthus decoration, and the “bead and reel” motif around its edges. Plants grow on and around the fallen capital, including closely observed specimens of acanthus plants, models for the carved vegetation. Most striking are the two figures perched atop the capital, perhaps Turkish dragomans (guides and interpreters), one of whom reclines languorously as if on a divan, while the other draws from a long pipe that stretches downwards over the edge of the capital.