46 - A FRAMED COLLECTION OF GRAND TOUR INTAGLIO IMPRESSIONS

A FRAMED COLLECTION OF GRAND TOUR INTAGLIO IMPRESSIONS CIRCA 1800-1900 Comprising eleven red sulphur intaglio impressions of classical subjects, each within a gilded paper rim inscribed with an inventory number, mounted in a display frame with green fabric backing. Size/dimensions: 39.00cm x 32.00cm (frame) Some of the impressions have small chips or cracks but remain stable, and the collection is offered in good condition. From the later seventeenth century until the coming of the railways in the 1840s, a period of travel on the Continent was regarded as the essential completion of a gentleman's education. Young British aristocrats, accompanied by tutors and servants, journeyed through France and across the Alps to Italy, where Rome, Florence, Naples and Venice offered direct experience of the classical world they had studied at school. Many returned with paintings, sculpture and antiquities, and with a lasting conviction that the art of Greece and Rome represented the highest standard of taste. Engraved gems held a special place in this culture. Small, portable and often genuinely ancient, intaglios and cameos let a traveller own a work of classical art and display their learning, whether set in a ring or arranged in cabinets. Demand far exceeded the supply of originals, and workshops met it with reproductions: James Tassie in London produced casts in glass paste and sulphur of more than fifteen thousand gems, and the Paoletti family in Rome sold impressions in plaster and sulphur, mounted in trays and book-shaped boxes, to visitors to the city. Collections of these impressions became study aids and souvenirs of the Tour in their own right. Rome was also the centre of Christendom, and the same workshops and visitors that served the taste for classical antiquity also produced and bought devotional jewels. The technique of micromosaic, in which minute tesserae of coloured glass are set to create pictures of extraordinary detail, was perfected in Rome in the late eighteenth century, and its subjects ranged from classical ruins to sacred imagery. In the nineteenth century, as rail travel opened Italy to a far wider public, the Tour gave way to tourism, but intaglio rings, gem impressions and micromosaic jewels remained among the most popular reminders of a visit to The Eternal City.