The Medici Conspiracy by Peter Watson Page A

neo-classical movement in the arts that engulfed Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century. Romantics, too, were in thrall to the classical world, not just Byron but his fellow poet John Keats, who famously wrote his “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” containing the lines:
    O Attic shape! . . . Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
    Thomas Hope, a Dutch connoisseur who settled in London in the late eighteenth century, had three rooms of his house in Duchess Street, Portland Place, filled with vases.
    This interest continued to grow in the nineteenth century, fueled by excavations further north than Pompeii and Herculaneum. George Dennis’s book Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria , first published in 1848, celebrated the “sublime” and “perfect” quality of the vases that the excavations had uncovered, and collections in other European capitals, after Paris and London, began to make their appearance—in Berlin, Basel, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg, Vienna. In Munich, the collection of Ludwig I was exhibited at the Pinakothek as a “Prologue to the Renaissance.” The finds at Vulci, many of which were discovered on the land of Lucien Bonaparte, were exhibited with the inscription “The Raphaels of Antiquity.” The discoveries initiated what has been called “the golden age of vase collecting.” The collection of Marchese Gianpietro Campana was formed at this time and, at 3,791 pieces, was probably the largest ever assembled. The United States followed toward the end of the century. E. P. Warren was responsible for the vase collection in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. He settled in Rome, one of several vase scholars resident at the end of the nineteenth century, where the Piazza Montanova became an antiquities market every Sunday. With the establishment of chairs of classical archaeology in universities across Europe and North America in the nineteenth century, many institutions acquired study collections. In 1898, Adolf Loos, the modernist designer in Vienna, wrote that “Greek vases are as beautiful as a machine, as beautiful as a bicycle.”
    In the early twentieth century, connoisseurship took another step forward when the British academic J. D. Beazley introduced so-called Morellian techniques into the appreciation of Greek vases. Beazley, an Oxford scholar, was “much involved” with the poet James Elroy Flecker. He became Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology and an honorary fellow of the Met in New York. Giovanni Morelli was an Italian art historian of
the late nineteenth century (he was a big influence on Bernard Berenson) who adapted Freudian techniques to connoisseurship. Originally involved in trying to understand early Renaissance painting, where many pictures are unsigned, he formed the view that painters betray their identity in what we might call the “unconscious” parts of their pictures—those areas such as the ears, eyebrows, or ankles, where they are perhaps not paying full attention or which do not form part of the main message of the work. These features, Morelli said, are invariably highly similar from one painting to another by the same artist. Beazley adapted this method to identifying Greek vases, and it enabled him to group them together, either by attributing them to painters who had signed a few vases or by assigning such titles as the Berlin Painter or the Villa Giulia Painter where there was no signature. In these cases the painter was named after his masterpiece. Over the years, these painters could be credited with an oeuvre, even a career, in which his painting style developed, matured, and (perhaps) declined. In providing names and identities in this way, Beazley gave new life to the market in