Representation, Replication and Collecting in Charles Townley's Late Eighteenth‐century Library

Abstract

This article deals with the reception of antiquity in the second half of the eighteenth century. It engages with issues of replication by focusing on the collecting from Rome and exhibition in London of Charles Townley's ancient marble sculptures. Zoffany's famous painting of Townley's library forms a locus from which to investigate replication as artistic practice in the late eighteenth century and as cultural dynamic for the workings of the classical tradition. A close reading of Zoffany's painting reveals various modes of artistic reproduction at work between the collection and its painted portrait, between Zoffany's unique canvas and its proposed engraved series and life and art. Discussion of the copying conventions around Zoffany's painting leads on to a discussion of the cultural paradigms that Townley's collection invokes – shown to be as much (if not more) indebted to the Renaissance and the early modern period as to fifthcentury bce Greece or imperial Rome. The paper thus devises a conceptual framework for the classical tradition in which replication embodies the dialectic between continuity and discontinuity, confluence and divergence and sameness and difference.

Samuel Lysons and His Circle: Art, Science and the Remains of Roman Britain

“…However, the vast libraries and collections of his wealthy acquaintances, many of whom had a particular interest in Classical antiquities, provided a wealth of additional material for him to draw on; e.g., he refers to the collection of Charles Townley (1737-1805: a wealthy antiquary whose GraecoRoman antiquities were donated to the British Museum) in a discussion of pottery from Woodchester (Lysons 1797: 10: footnote 28; see also the reference to Sir William Hamilton's collection at the British Museum (Lysons 1797: 15: footnote 36); on library collections see Coltman 1999Coltman , 2006). …”