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Journey Through Italy Via their Most Exceptional Design Era
Our second chapter of The Italian Collecting Journey includes art, objects and design that will take you on a grand tour of enlightenment-era Italy.
I n September of 2025, we held a sale in Milan called An Italian Collecting Journey - Chapter I. As the title suggests, there is indeed a Chapter II, to be held next week, which continues the narrative. While the first chapter presented a broad vision of Italy through the cities and landscapes celebrated by the Grand Tour, this second chapter turns a magnifying glass toward the personalities and places that shaped that experience.
At its core are the remarkable figures, Italian and international, who redefined Italy’s cultural identity during the Enlightenment. Their work reflects a new sensibility associated with the rise of the Sublime, a way of perceiving nature and antiquity that profoundly influenced both artistic practice and scientific inquiry.
Among the most emblematic of these figures is Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803), British ambassador to the court of Naples from 1764. A passionate collector, scholar and pioneering vulcanologist, Hamilton devoted himself to the study of the volcanoes of the Campi Flegrei and Vesuvius. His celebrated publications were illustrated by the painter Pietro Fabris (1740–1792), who accompanied him during eruptions of Mount Vesuvius, capturing the dramatic spectacle of nature in action, scenes that perfectly embody the emotional power and grandeur of the Sublime.
In 1766–67, Hamilton published the celebrated catalogue of his collection of Greek and Etruscan vases. A sense of this remarkable ensemble echoes in the group of black- and red-figure ceramics by Del Vecchio (lot. 401) and Giustiniani (lot. 405, 400) offered in our online sale. Goethe himself recounts visiting Hamilton in Naples, where the ambassador proudly revealed a basement filled with vases, bronzes and antiquities of every kind.
Among the remarkable figures who shaped Naples during this period was Giuseppe Beccadelli, Prince of Camporeale (Palermo, 1725–1813), a distinguished diplomat in the service of Ferdinand IV, King of the Two Sicilies. Having served as ambassador to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria in Vienna between 1770 and 1775, he was appointed Prime Minister (Segretario di Stato) in 1776 with the support of Queen Maria Carolina, strengthening the cultural and political ties between Naples and Vienna.
Beccadelli was also a central figure in the reform of the arts in the Kingdom, a vision captured in the inscription “BONARUM ARTIUM RESTIUTORI” on a biscuit sculpture dedicated to him. Under his direction, the Real Fabbrica Ferdinandea entered a new era. The archaeologist Domenico Venuti was appointed director, effectively assuming the role of Minister of Arts for the Kingdom of Naples, and in 1780 the sculptor Filippo Tagliolini, then active at the Imperial Porcelain Manufactory in Vienna, was invited to Naples. There, Venuti’s neoclassical ideals found their most refined expression through Tagliolini’s sculptural work.
This vision is represented in our sale by the bust of Prince Beccadelli (lot. 66) , one of the rare large-scale portraits by Tagliolini, offered alongside a refined selection of biscuit figures inspired by the rediscovery of the antique. He promoted and organized the transfer of the antique marble sculptures of the Farnese Collection from Rome to Naples between 1780 and 1786, with the enlightened aim of bringing together in a single museum - the Museo Borbonico - all the Royal Collections of antiquities that were, at the time, dispersed among various royal residences and locations, including Palazzo Reale di Capodimonte, Palazzo di Portici, and the Museum of Pompei.
