2013 Annual Report - Jesus College - University of Cambridge

A JESUS COLLECTOR I Jesus College Annual Report 2013 55
see this collection of antiquities. Petty
returned to England in 1629 and this brought
to an end his activities in Greece and Turkey,
and his attention turned to collecting
antiquities, drawings and paintings in Italy.
By the end of the 1630s the sculpture
collection is said to have numbered 37 Greek
and Roman statues, 128 busts, 250
inscriptions as well as a large number of
sarcophagi, altars and fragments.
William Petty died 23rd September 1639
and in his Will he left “To Jesus Colledge in
Cambridge £200 for the repairing thereof ”.
Unfortunately the college never received the
money. With the threatened outbreak of the
Civil War the Earl of Arundel left England in
1642 and went eventually to Padua where he
died in 1646. His collections were left in the
first instance to his wife, and after her death
in 1654, the contents of Arundel House
passed to Henry Howard, the younger son of
Henry Frederick, Lord Maltravers, who had
died in 1652. He was not at all interested in
the collection of marbles, and John Evelyn
describes them in his Diary for September
19th 1667 as being “miserably neglected &
scattered up & downe about the Gardens”.
By this time of the 250 inscriptions in the
collection 114 had perished. Evelyn managed
to persuade Henry Howard to give the
remainder to Oxford University, and they are
now in the Ashmolean Museum, where they
are known as the Arundel Marbles. In 1677
when Henry succeeded to the Dukedom of
Norfolk he obtained permission to pull down
Arundel House, and to dispose of the rest of
the marbles still in his possession. He sold a
lot of them, mainly busts, to Thomas
Herbert, later eighth Earl of Pembroke, who
took them to Wilton House near Salisbury.
The marbles he couldn’t sell were placed
under a colonnade in the garden, the roof of
which collapsed damaging the sculptures
below. Some sculptures were then buried in
the foundations of Norfolk, Arundel and
Surrey Streets. On Henry’s death in 1684 the
new Duke obtained permission from
parliament to lease the garden for residential
development. He persuaded Sir William
Fermor to take most of the remaining
marbles for £300, and they ended up at
Easton Neston, and eventually were given to
Oxford University as the Pomfret Collection.
A number of the more damaged pieces were
given to a former family servant. The residue,
including the Pergamon torso, were taken
across the Thames and dumped on a patch of
waste ground beside the river in Kennington.
Shortly afterwards this plot of land was sublet
to a timber merchant who planned to
construct a wharf here. He brought over
quantities of rubble from the old St Paul’s
and together with the remains of the Arundel
Marbles used them to shore up the bank of
the Thames. About 1712 the land was
acquired for building, and the workmen
digging foundations came across a number
of buried sculptures and put them on one
side. Lord Burlington heard of this and chose
some which he took to Chiswick House.
Lord Petre heard that other sculptures
might still be buried there, and he was
allowed to arrange for excavations to try and
locate them. After six days the diggers
found six statues , some of great size, without
heads or arms lying close together.
These torsos were sent to the Duke of
Norfolk`s Nottinghamshire seat, Worksop
Manor. Unfortunately most of these
sculptures were destroyed in the fire which
burnt down Worksop manor in 1761, but
one at least survived. At the beginning of
the twentieth century it was lying in
the garden of the local historian, Robert
White, on the outskirts of Worksop, and by
the 1920s had been mounted on the outside
wall of a nearby cottage, where it remained
until 1960.
So having been collected by William Petty
from Pergamom in 1625, shipwrecked and
sunk to the bottom of the sea, found and
brought up by divers, transported to Greece
and then to England arriving in London in
1628, being displayed at Arundel House in
the Strand, then treated ignominiously first
in the grounds of Arundel House and then
dumped beside the Thames at Kennington
and used to reinforce the river bank, being
uncovered in excavations and sent to
Worksop Manor, avoiding destruction in the
disastrous fire, and finally being built into a
cottage wall, the Gigantomachy torso had an
adventurous life before landing up in
Worksop Library.