It is easy to mock the Dilettanti: their regalia, their toasts, their Tomb of Bacchus to hold their papers, their conceit that Avignon is the only French city in Italy, their long Spanish Toledo used by the Arch-Master on the introduction of new members to the Society, even their port-stained minute book. Sniggering may be morally satisfying, but it adds nothing to our stock of knowledge. Thankfully, Jason Kelly rescues the Dilettanti from such sneering condescensions in this meticulously researched and elegantly presented book. Kelly uses the Dilettanti as a cynosure through which to examine three important themes: the formation of elite identity in the British Enlightenment, the formation of classical taste in the eighteenth century, and the reshaping of archaeology.

The Dilettanti originated as an extension of the Grand Tour, and its first members wished to encourage at home the tastes they had acquired abroad. The nominal requirement for membership was to have been in Italy, although, it was said that the actual requirement was to have been drunk in Rome. The Grand Tour was a way to cultivate virtù, which was not necessarily connected to birth but was associated with a concept of cultural nobility. The Grand Tour posed risks, of course—pox, popery, even treason—since the places they visited were often pockets of Jacobitism, but, as Kelly observes, it “was the noble path to an aesthetic, a moral, and a political education” (14). The Dilettanti Society reproduced their Grand Tour experiences at home and expressed them in their toasts at the end of their meetings—Esto praeclara, perpetua, Viva la virtù—and in their Grecian Taste and Roman Spirit. Serio ludo was another of their mottoes. In their early years, they combined collecting and other pastimes for developing taste with public libertinism, a rejection of the norms of polite civility. Knapton’s famous portrait of Sir Francis Dashwood, now hanging in Brooks’s, illustrates this point: “San: Francesco di Wycombo,” dressed as a Franciscan friar, holding a goblet embossed with the inscription “Matri Sanctorum” (the mother of the saints), leering at Venus’s pudenda. It was a salute to Dashwood’s knowledge of classical antiquity as well as his libertinism, as well as an expression of his Protestant patriotism, or, as Kelly puts it, “an anti-Catholicism that was typical of the age” (288 n. 86).

In the 1760s, the Dilettanti reconstituted their public reputation by privatizing their fondness for things libertine and by stressing their connoisseurship, their collections, their patronage of arts and artists, the organization of archaeological expeditions, and the publication of the results of those expeditions. In doing so, they made claims to being the prominent institution for the scholarly study of things Greek. Its membership began to overlap with the membership of the Royal Society. This marked their commitment to public learning and the promotion of taste. Their interest in the pleasures of homosocial sexuality no longer defined their public reputation. In the nineteenth century, as another gesture toward their seriousness, they fined any member who referred to the Dilettanti as a “club” rather than a “society.” Dilettantism spanned public space, opening zones of cultural traffic between “idealized idioms of politeness and libertinism, between conspicuous consumption and polite commerce, between a status determined by birth and one determined by knowledge, between a closed elite and an egalitarian public sphere” (11).

In the reconfiguration of their public identities, the Dilettanti also reconfigured taste, turning their attention to Greece. Their travel journals and the results of the publication of their expeditions—Ruins of Palmyra (1753), Ruins of Balbec (1757), and Essay on the Original Genius of Homer (1767, 1769, 1775)—and their patronage set new aesthetic standards and shaped public taste in art and architecture. These themes were reflected in the portraits of themselves that they commissioned. Knapton’s model for his portrait of Charles Sackville, Earl of Middlesex, was Titian’s portrait of Julius Caesar.

Through their reconfiguration of public taste with the sponsoring of expeditions to Greece and their stress for empiricism, precise measurement, and representational accuracy in their publications, they assisted in the reconfiguration of archaeology, attaching it to the great achievements of British natural philosophy. Hitherto, scholarship had been practiced in the study or in cabinets of antiquities; now the Dilettanti favored actual visits to archaeological sites. Combining empiricism with the prosecution of aesthetic superiority, the Dilettanti took institutional control over the Ionian expedition and authorial control of Ionian Antiquities. As Kelly points out, the Society of Dilettanti, the Society of Antiquaries, and the Royal Society had overlapping interests in archaeology, but the Dilettanti were internationalist in their promotion of archaeology (290 n. 1). In so doing, they placed classical antiquity in the culture of Newtonianism. Therefore, the Dilettanti’s claims to cultural authority rested not only on birth, wealth, and taste but also on skill.

Kelly concludes this fine and important study by observing that the Dilettanti did not disappear at the end of the eighteenth century but, in fact, may have come to a “full flowering in the Victorian age” (266). So they did. Reginald Welby, who had been Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, examined the minute books when he was the Society’s secretary in 1913 and was astonished to find that they had in recent years expended £35,000 to sponsor archaeological research. Some of this nineteenth-century enthusiasm was motivated by a spirit of competition with Continental societies. The French and German schools in Rome, however, were sponsored by the State. The Dilettanti took pride in the fact that theirs was a private effort that allowed Britain to remain in the forefront of classical research. Their investment in research was, Welby remarked, “a remarkable amount for 40 to 50 gentlemen not incorporated for scientific inquiry, who were meeting mainly for purposes of conviviality, [who] used the opportunity thus afforded for promoting explorations of great scientific interest” (Society of Antiquaries, Minute Books of the Dilettanti Society, B10/7/f. 50, 6 April 1913). In the twentieth century, they no longer finance archaeological investigations, nor do they publish the results of such investigations, those functions having been assumed by the Hellenic and Roman Societies and the British Schools in Athens and Rome. They have reverted to being simply a dining society marked by the conviviality, if not the libertinism, of the eighteenth century.