Enlightenment (Room 1)
Art and civilisation
In 1824, Charles Townley’s famous collection of Greek and Roman
sculptures, acquired on his Grand Tours in Italy, came to the
British Museum. They joined the collections of prints and drawings,
gems, coins, bronzes, vases and other classical antiquities that
had come to the Museum from fellow connoisseurs such as Sir William
Hamilton and Richard Payne Knight.
These men studied each other’s collections to learn about the
‘progress’ of art, from what they saw as its ‘primitive’ beginnings
in early civilisations to what they considered to be the height of
artistic achievement – the sculpture and architecture of classical
Greece. This became the standard against which to measure all art
and led, in eighteenth century Britain, to a classical revival in
architecture and the decorative arts. Its influence can be seen
here in Wedgwood’s pottery and in the Greek Revival style of the
architecture of the room.
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