Description

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 appliques. 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'.