John Talman's Collections of Drawings: A Historia of Art from Antiquity to Christianity

The Paul Mellon Centre is organising this symposium in connection with the current research project, supported by the Getty Foundation Grant programme, to reconstruct the huge collection of drawings assebled by the first Director of the Society of Antiquaries, John Talman, in the decade ca. 1709-1719. The remarkable nature of this dismembered collection resides in it being an extraordinary document of the state of ancient and modern Italian monuments, as well as providing ecidence for the growing historiographical concerns that were developed by contemporary English antiquarian and academic circles closely connected with Florence and Rome.

Papers in this symposium will address the religious as well as the cultural contexts in which Talman's collecting took place, and there will also be some consideration of Talman's responses to Italian sculpture and to Baroque architecture.