Private Visit to Royal Academy of Arts Library, London - Paper Antique

The UK Chapter of the Society for the History of Collecting 

is pleased to invite you to a special visit of the Royal Academy of Arts Library conducted by Adriano Aymonino. 

Monday, 20th May 2024, 3.30-5.00pm (BST)

Royal Academy of Arts Library, Burlington House. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Francis Ware.

PAPER ANTIQUE

Classical statues, reliefs, frescoes and gems were frequently studied, copied and readapted by Renaissance artists from the fifteenth century onwards. Yet it was only in the following centuries that a selection of them was canonized, illustrated, and diffused in Europe through antiquarian publications. Travellers on the Grand Tour viewed antiquity through the lens of these books, while their printed illustrations offered a range of images and symbolic references for artists and architects whenever they wanted to quote the Antique in their creations. At the same time, they represented the standard reference for collectors and scholars interested in classical antiquity, and their presence is ubiquitous in the libraries of European palaces and country houses, art academies and learned societies. 

This workshop will present some of the most relevant antiquarian publications produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, focussing on their content, structure, illustrative apparatus and their materiality as books and artworks. 

BIO

Dr Adriano Aymonino is Programme Director for the MA in the Art Market and the History of Collecting at the University of Buckingham. He has curated several exhibitions, such as Drawn from the Antique: Artists and the Classical Ideal, held at the Sir John Soane's Museum in London in 2015. His book Enlightened Eclecticism was published by Yale University Press in June 2021 and has won the 2022 William MB Berger Prize for British Art History. He is currently working on a revised edition of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny's Taste and the Antique (Brepols, 3 vols, 2024); on a critical edition of Robert Adam's Grand Tour correspondence, which will be hosted on the Sir John Soane's Museum website (2025); and on a book for MIT Press: Paper Marbles: Pier Leone Ghezzi's Studio di Molte Pietre, 1726 (2025). He is also co-editor of the series Paper Worlds published by MIT Press and associate editor of the Journal of the History of Collections.