To the sculptures brought from Phigaleia into England in 1815, several missing fragments have been added subsequently. A peasant living near Paulizza had carried off a piece of the frieze to decorate, or to hallow, his hut. This fragment was procured by Mr. Spencer Stanhope in 1816. The Chevalier Bröndsted added other fragments in 1824. Only one entire slab of the original sculpture is wanting.
Purchase of the second Towneley Collection, 1814.
Almost contemporaneously with the accessions which came to the Museum as the result of the explorations in 1814 of Mr. Cockerell and his fellow-travellers in Arcadia, a considerable addition was made to the Towneley Gallery by the purchase of a large series of bronzes, gems, and drawings, and of a cabinet of coins and medals, both Greek and Roman, all of which had been formed by the Collector of the Marbles. These were purchased from Mr. Towneley’s representatives for the sum of eight thousand two hundred pounds. Among other conspicuous additions, made from time to time, a few claim special mention. Among these are the Cupid, acquired from the representatives of Edmund Burke; the Jupiter and Leda, in low relief, bought of Colonel de Bosset; and the Apollo, bought in Paris, at the sale of the Choiseul Collection.
Minor Antiquities of the Elgin Collection.
Among the minor Greek antiquities which came to the British Museum in 1816, along with the sculptures of the Parthenon, are the fine Caryatid figure, and the very beautiful Ionic capitals, bases, and fragments of shafts, from the double temple of the Erectheium and Pandrosos at Athens,—part of which, like the Temple of Neptune, was used by the Turks, in Lord Elgin’s time, as a powder-magazine. Acquisitions still more valuable than these were the grand fragment of the colossal Bacchus in feminine attire, which Lord Elgin brought from the Choragic monument of Thrasyllus; the statue of Icarus (identified by comparison with a well-known low-relief in rosso antico formerly preserved in the Albani Collection); and the noble series of casts from the frieze of the Theseium and from that of the Choragic monument of Lysicrates. The Collection also included many statues’ heads and fragments of great archæological interest, but of which the original localities are for the most part unknown, and a considerable series of sepulchral urns.
After the Elgin Marbles, the next important acquisition in the Department of Antiquities was that made by the purchase, in 1819, of the famous ‘Apotheosis of Homer.’ This marble had been found, almost two centuries before, at Frattocchi (the ancient ‘Bovillæ’), about ten miles from Rome on the Appian road, and had long been counted among the choicest ornaments of the Colonna Palace. It cost the Trustees one thousand pounds. Then, in 1825, came the noble bequest of Mr. Richard Payne Knight.
When the treasures of Mr. Payne Knight came to be added to the several Collections made, during the preceding fifty years, by Hamilton, Towneley, and Elgin, as well as to those which the British army had won in Egypt, or which were due, in the main, to the research and energy of our travelling fellow-countrymen, the national storehouse may fairly be said to have passed from its nonage into maturity. The Elgin Collection had, of itself, sufficed to lift the British Museum into the first rank among its peers. But the antiquarian treasures of the Museum showed many gaps. Some important additions, indeed, had been made, from time to time, to the class of Egyptian antiquities. And a small foundation had been laid of what is now the superb Assyrian Gallery. Rich in certain classes of archæology, it remained, nevertheless, poor in certain others. In 1825, it came to the front in all.
The Life, Writings, and Collections, of R. Payne Knight.
Richard Payne Knight is one of the many men who, in all probability, would have attained more eminent and enduring distinction had he been less impetuous and more concentrated in its pursuit. He went in for all the honours. He aimed to be conspicuous, at once, as archæologist and philosopher, critic and poet, politician and dictator-general in matters of art and of taste. He was ready to give judgment, at any moment, and without appeal, whether the question at issue concerned the decoration of a landscape, the summing-up of the achievement of a Homer, or a Phidias, or the system of the universe.
Mr. Knight was born in 1749, and was the son of a landed man, of good property, whose estates were chiefly in Wiltshire, and who possessed a borough ‘interest’ in Ludlow. His constitution was so weakly, and his chance of attaining manhood seemed so doubtful, that his father would not allow him to go to any school, or to be put to much study at home. It was only after his father’s death, and when he had entered his fourteenth year, that his education can be said to have begun. Within three years of his first appearance in any sort of school, he went into Italy; substituting for the university the grand tour. Only when he was approaching eighteen years of age did he fairly set to work to learn Greek. But he studied it with a will, and to good purpose.