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Sarcophagi and Other Reliefs. 4 volumes
, Brepols - Harvey Miller, 2022 Hardback, 4 vols, 1832 pages, Size:220 x 285 mm, Illustrations:190 b/w, 1170 col., Language(s):English, Italian, Latin. ISBN 9781912554560.
Summary The 1,055 drawings catalogued in these four volumes are mainly divided between the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and the Department of Greece and Rome of the British Museum, but are also scattered in other public and private collections across the world. They correspond most closely to Cassiano's definition of the Paper Museum as his attempt to have 'skilled young draughtsmen' draw 'everything good in marbles and bronze which can provide some information about antiquity'. He focused in the first instance on the ancient figurative reliefs which are especially abundant in the city of Rome, carved on marble sarcophagi, tombstones, altars, bases and a wide range of other monuments. The drawings depict both the public reliefs of the city - such as those on the Arch of Constantine or the Column of Marcus Aurelius - and those from the major Roman private collections of the period, including the Aldobrandini, Borghese, Medici, Farnese, Barberini and Giustiniani collections. Cassiano started the project in the 1620s with the intention of publishing the drawings as a series of prints. No printed edition ever came to pass, but the drawings collection expanded with still greater energy in the 1630s, when Pietro Testa and other young artists from the circle of Pietro da Cortona were employed. After Cassiano's death in 1657 the enterprise was carried forward by his younger brother Carlo Antonio, who continued to collect drawings of sarcophagi and reliefs well into the 1680s. Sixteenth century purchases were also made for the collection, including works by Battista Franco and Pirro Ligorio. Four introductory essays explore the context in which the project evolved and discuss the collecting history of the Paper Museum as attested by the mounts and numbering found on many of the drawings. The range of different hands at work are identified, and a detailed survey is provided of the existing albums or the past configurations of others now dismembered.
Statues and Busts
, Brepols - Harvey Miller, 2023 Hardback, 448 pages, Size:220 x 285 mm, Illustrations:60 b/w, 268 col., Language(s):English, Italian, Latin. ISBN 9781912554577.
Summary This volume comprises 207 drawings, about half of which are in the Royal Library at Windsor Castle and the rest in the Department of Greece and Rome in the British Museum and numerous public or private collections in the UK and abroad. They depict a wide variety of ancient statues of gods and humans, standing, seated or supine, large and small, whole and fragmentary, mainly of marble but also of bronze, as well as statuettes in marble and alabaster, figurines in bronze and terracotta, both Roman and Etruscan, military trophy groups and phallic sculptures. Also represented are herms, a sizeable series of portrait busts and heads, miniature busts in semi-precious stones and figurative appliqués. Some are wellknown pieces, from the Barberini, Giustiniani, Medici and Pamphilj collections in Rome, but many are unusual and otherwise unrecorded. The drawings were largely commissioned in the 1630s and 1640s from artists such as Pietro Testa and Vincenzo Leonardi, with smaller groups thereafter, the last in the mid-1680s. The assemblage was probably initially intended by Cassiano for publication as a series of prints for the benefit of antiquarian scholars and artists, complementing the larger quantity of drawings of bas-reliefs which Cassiano had begun to assemble from the early 1620s onwards (published in Part A.III) and constituting the core of the Paper Museum in Cassiano's narrower definition of it in 1654 as 'everything good in marbles and bronze which can provide some information about antiquity'.
