BRITISH ANTIQUARIES AND DELOS

David Noy, in his essay ‘Dreams inspired by Phoebus: Western visitors to Delos from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century’, traces the history of British antiquarianism on Delos over the period of two and a half centuries.Footnote ¹³ Noy mentions the Sissinghurst altars briefly in his work, but does not single them out as being remarkable.

The cylindrical, drum-like form of the Sissinghurst altars is typical for the island. Similar altars, adorned with garlands and with bucrania and carved in the same fine-grained white marble as their Sissinghurst counterparts, may still be seen at the archaeological site. Undoubtedly some may still be in situ in their original location; for example, a number of such altars are located around the Thesmorphion and it would be tempting to think that the imagery of pomegranates and ears of wheat indicates a link to Demeter and Persephone.Footnote ¹⁴

The presence of such altars in a British collection is also not unique; neither was their display in the gardens of a significant residence.Footnote ¹⁵ The amassing of antiquities from the island of Delos by British collectors goes back to those virtuosi of the court of Charles i, as Noy explains. Agents, working there for British patrons, had been discovering choice works of the classical past since the 1620s. One of the reasons why British antiquaries were particularly drawn to Delos was due to the influence of Sir Thomas Roe (1581–1644). Roe was the British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, and, although he did not visit the island, his Greek contacts in Constantinople informed him that both Delos and neighbouring Rhenia were rich in antiquities. Moreover, both islands were deserted and thus any removal of antiquities by British virtuosi – or their agents – would not be met with the protests of the local Greek population or of the Ottoman authorities. Roe entered into the service of the two greatest collectors of the Stuart Court – George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel – providing advice to the rival virtuosi as to where to search for choice marbles. Notably, Roe suggested that Howard should dispatch his agents to Delos.Footnote ¹⁶

Delian altars, of the type in the collections at Sissinghurst Castle, were to be found in the celebrated ‘garden museum’ at Arundel House, the Strand, London – the London home of the Earl of Arundel and his wife Alatheia. There, they were most likely used as plinths for the antique figurative sculptures that were placed in the gardens of that house.Footnote ¹⁷ Indeed, during excavations of the former site of Arundel House and its gardens in 1972, two such altars, almost identical to the Sissinghurst examples, were found – remnants of the Earl of Arundel’s celebrated collection (extraordinarily, one of these altars was soon after reported to have been ‘removed’ from the site of the dig and its current location is still unknown).Footnote ¹⁸ Noy also suggests that they may might have acted as the pedestals for the collection of antique sculptures displayed in the privy garden at the Palace of Whitehall. A much later watercolour of The Sculpture Gallery of the Examination Schools, Oxford (1813), by William Westall, shows Delian altars from the Arundel collections acting as plinths – just as we suppose they did in the Thames-side gardens of Arundel House.Footnote ¹⁹ Further, five Delos-type altars were acquired in 1817/18 by Amabel [sic], Countess de Grey, and were placed within the Great Garden at Wrest Park. Noy accords this grouping of antiquities considerable attention as, he argues, their provenance connects them to ‘all three phases of Delian interest’ demonstrated by British antiquaries and collectors that concern him in his essay.Footnote ²⁰ That is, he speculates that the Wrest Park altars first came to Britain as part of the initial seventeenth-century explorations of the island, to then enter the collections of Richard Topham in the eighteenth century before finally coming to Wrest Park in the first two decades of the nineteenth century.

For Noy, the altars at Sissinghurst were not unique either in terms of their typology or in terms of the history of antiquarianism and collecting in Britain. However, one aspect of the Sissinghurst Altars does, arguably, differentiate them from the Delian antiquities covered by Noy; that is the explicitly political use they were put to when they arrived in the British Isles. This makes them unique and – dare one say – more interesting than the altars that were mere adornments to Countess de Grey’s Great Garden at Wrest Park or that were mere plinths for the sculptures that formed part of the Arundel Marbles.

THE CASTLE SHANGANAGH COLLECTION OF ANTIQUITIES

The four altars and associated Corinthian capital are first recorded in the collections of General Sir George Cockburn (1763–1847) of Shanganagh Castle, Co Wicklow, Ireland.Footnote ²¹

Cockburn’s interest in antiquities would have been piqued when he undertook the Grand Tour of Italy between 1782 and 1783, visiting Pisa, Florence, Rome and Naples.Footnote ²² His next encounter with the Mediterranean world was occasioned when he was posted to Sicily with the British Army fighting Napoleon. There he found time to also undertake a number of excursions to the classical sites of the island as well as to explore other islands in the area. This tour of the western Mediterranean he later published as A Voyage to Cadiz and Gibraltar, up the Mediterranean to Sicily and Malta in 1810 and 1811, including a description of Sicily and the Lipari Islands, and an Excursion in Portugal.Footnote ²³ Although Cockburn did not travel as far as Delos and the Aegean, his account described with interest the many classical sites of Sicily, such as the temples at Segesta and at Agrignetum. He also described specific antiquities, including statues, sarcophagi etc that he had occasion to view in various Sicilian collections such as the museum at Palermo.Footnote ²⁴ At Catania he viewed the theatre, baths and amphitheatre as well as the archaeological and numismatic collections in the museo of the Palazzo Biscari.Footnote ²⁵ Writing in his reminiscences of his travels he notes that he:

Although this description of the collections at the Palazzo Biscari is brief, it might be argued that his experience of viewing them would resonate with him at a later date.

Returning to Ireland, Cockburn settled at Shanganagh and turned his attention to politics; he was described in The Gentleman’s Magazine ‘as a violent reformer and an admirer of Cobbett’.Footnote ²⁷ In particular, he was a fervent supporter of the 1832 Reform Act. More properly termed The Representation of the People Act, it introduced major changes to the electoral system in England and Wales giving – among other things – representation to cities and extending the franchise to small landowners, tenant farmers, shopkeepers and householders who were able to pay a rent of £10 per annum or more. Cockburn’s support of the 1832 Reform Act will have a crucial bearing on our understanding of the role, within his collection, of the four marble altars and Corinthian capital from Delos.

Cockburn amassed his own collection of various antiquities, such as stele, cippi, sarcophagi and ceramics as well as Latin inscriptions.Footnote ²⁸ It is not clear exactly when Cockburn formed this collection, though Louis C Purser, in his 1925 publication of the antiquities at Shanganagh, placed the acquisition of the bulk of the collection in 1805 with additions in the 1820s.Footnote ²⁹ The inventory of the collection, as compiled by Purser, shows that the General was mainly interested in Roman antiquities that contained epigraphic material and were of a commemorative, funerary nature. Although Purser’s interest lay in these collections of inscriptions at Shanganagh, he does mention in passing the four Sissinghurst altars (it is perhaps telling that no mention is made of any classical statuary, even in passing). The exact provenance (and find spots) of the Roman antiquities is not fully recorded; a summary description was given in the catalogue listing the contents of the castle. The antiquities are not properly recorded by Cockburn in his diaries, which Purser had occasion to read.Footnote ³⁰ However, Purser states that a large number of the antiquities had belonged to ‘an excavator called Capranesi, and were carefully copied by the distinguished antiquarians Carlo Fea and Hieronymus Amati’.Footnote ³¹

Cockburn’s antiquities were grouped together and displayed in two areas of Castle Shanganagh.Footnote ³² The inscriptions, which Purser records as being eighty-seven in number and of a sepulchral character, were fixed to the walls of a passage leading to what had been a bathroom.Footnote ³³ Cockburn termed this passage his Piccolo Vaticano and evidently held great store in this collection (though by the time Purser had undertaken his visit to the castle, the Piccolo Vaticano had been turned into a pantry).Footnote ³⁴ The larger marbles, such as the stele and sarcophagi, which were also of a sepulchral nature, were installed in what Harold Nicolson named the ‘Monumental Room’ (Purser describes it as the entrance hall).Footnote ³⁵ In the garden, Purser also listed a number of cippi.Footnote ³⁶

THE DELIAN ANTIQUITIES AND THE REFORM BILL OF 1832

The four marble altars and Corinthian capital form an exception in the Shanganagh collection. They are not inscribed and are of Greek/ Hellenistic origin, which Cockburn recognised at the time (see below). We also have a good idea of their provenance, although not their exact find spot on Delos.Footnote ³⁷ The four altars (and most probably the historically associated Corinthian capital) were found on Delos by Commodore William Gawen Rowan Hamilton, who was Cockburn’s son-in-law (Hamilton was also the great-grandfather of Harold Nicolson on his mother’s side, hence the future connection to Sissinghurst). Hamilton, who had distinguished himself during the Napoleonic campaigns as a naval officer, would later play an active role during the Greek War of Independence (1821–30) and was active in the seas around the island of Delos. It was Hamilton who presented the four altars to his father-in-law.

Harold Nicolson, in The Desire to Please: a story of Hamilton Rowan and the United Irishmen, described the circumstances by which Commodore Hamilton acquired the altars:

Harold Nicolson – a fervent Hellenophile – must have delighted in this direct familial link with one of the historic ‘Liberators of Greece’.

Nicolson goes on to explain that, when the altars arrived at Shanganagh, ‘They were too large to house in the Monumental Room [entrance hall]’. Instead, the four cylindrical altars were treated like the drums of a column. A granite base, in the form of a saltire cross and executed in Wicklow granite, was positioned outside in front of the entrance hall and the altars were erected one on top of the other in the form of a column (fig 10).Footnote ³⁹ The Corinthian capital surmounted this column; the resulting (ill-proportioned) monument recalled a similar arrangement of classical antiquities that, although not mentioned directly by Cockburn, would have been seen by him on his visit to the Palazzo Biscari in Catania. In one of the ‘museum’ rooms he would have seen a classical altar: carved in high-relief, supporting the base and drum of a Corinthian column and surmounted by an unrelated Doric capital.Footnote ⁴⁰

Fig 10.

Castle Shanganagh with Cockburn’s monument to the 1832 Reform Bill visible on the far left of the photograph. Photograph: © Irish Architectural Archives.

Cockburn had the granite base inscribed with the following when it was first erected:

This inscription is telling in a number of ways. First, it is the earliest written corroboration of the four altars’ provenance: who found them and very roughly where they came from. Second, the inscription clearly shows that Cockburn, as a collector of antiquities, put some store into the fact that the altars and capital were Greek. They are prominently described as ‘ancient Greek marbles’ on the inscription and the granite base is explicitly explained as ‘modern’. Third, Cockburn is using these marbles to make a public statement regarding his support of the Reform Bill of 1832. Although located in the private grounds of his home at Shanganagh Castle, any visitor to the house would not fail to notice the striking monument with its dedicatory inscription when arriving at the castle’s entrance.

It is this use of the Sissinghurst marbles to create a visible political statement that differentiates them from the use or methods of display of other similar Delian antiquities in British antiquarian collections. Although Harold Nicolson’s account states that Cockburn was forced to construct the monument due to a lack of space in the Monumental Room at Shanganagh, there might be another reason why these particular marbles were selected to commemorate a reformist and progressive political act – the Reform Bill of 1832.Footnote ⁴¹

The visual language of classical Greece was redolent of the ideals of democracy and freedom in the British imagination during the first part of the nineteenth century. As Byron, in his poem The Isles of Greece, wrote:

In March 1832 the independent kingdom of Greece was established,Footnote ⁴³ and that same year a hoped for liberty would be sought through the Redemption of the People Act in Britain.

That the Greek Revival in architecture, sculpture and interest in identifiably Greek antiquities occurred during the 1820s and 1830s when the clamour for political reform in Britain was heightened is not a mere coincidence. The aligning of ‘liberty’ with the genius of Greek art and architecture was touched upon by a contemporary: the great architect and collector of antiquities Sir John Soane in his first Royal Academy lecture in 1810 (this lecture was repeated in 1832).Footnote ⁴⁴ As Soane explained:

Unlike the autocratic regimes of Egypt and Persia, Greece was governed by opposite political laws – those of democracy and ‘freedom’ – and this, as Soane reasoned, led to the flowering of that particular Greek ‘genius’ in art, architecture, philosophy and law. Indeed, Soane understood that the Greeks lost ‘a great degree their love for the arts’ once they lost their freedoms to Rome, thus neatly aligning their artistry with their political liberties.Footnote ⁴⁵

It is reasonable to think that Cockburn was aware of this broader association of Greek art and architecture with concepts of liberty and democracy both modern and ancient.Footnote ⁴⁶ After all, his son-in-law who gave him the marbles was dubbed ‘The Liberator of Greece’. It is arguable, then, that, for Cockburn, the use of genuine ‘Greek marbles’ would have been especially appropriate in the creation of a monument to a Bill intended to reform British politics.Footnote ⁴⁷

Unfortunately, Cockburn’s hopes for the Reform Bill of 1832 were not realised. Six years after the column with its inscription was raised at Shanganagh a second inscription was added to the base of the column commenting on his disillusionment:

It is this second inscription that inspired Vita, Harold and their children to name the altar and base of Cockburn’s monument, located in the orchard at Sissinghurst, ‘The Humbug’ a century or so later.

JOURNEY OF THE DELIAN ANTIQUITIES TO SISSINGHURST

In 1847 General Sir George Cockburn died. He left careful instructions in his will that:

It is clear that the General’s wishes were followed and moreover that the other antiquities including the column dedicated to the 1832 Reform Bill remained in situ. It was still there when Harold Nicolson, as a young boy, stayed at Shanganagh while visiting his grandmother. It was there also when Louis C Purser visited the castle in order to catalogue the collections of inscriptions and of antique ceramics in the mid-1920s for the Royal Irish Academy, although Purser stated that ‘there were five concentric circles of these marbles but the top one is now vacant’. Perhaps Purser is referring to the Corinthian capital, which surmounted the monument in its original form, rather than a fifth altar and that was no longer present when Purser came to view it.Footnote ⁴⁹

To understand how the altars came to Sissinghurst, let us once more turn to Harold’s writing. Given the political use to which the altars were put and their discovery on Delos by one of the ‘Liberators of Greece’, it is appropriate that their arrival in Kent is related in a work of political biography and the Irish struggle for liberty: the already cited The Desire to Please: a story of Hamilton Rowan and the United Irishmen. Here, Nicolson describes how the altars, capital and base found their way to Sissinghurst:

This ‘ungainly’ garden path that Nicolson referred to was the short-lived Delos Garden compartment that Vita and Harold created just before the outbreak of the Second World War. It has been rejuvenated by the National Trust and is where three of the altars and the Corinthian capital are now sited.Footnote ⁵¹

These marbles have undertaken a remarkable pilgrimage and, if shorn of their original religious function and of their secondary political symbolism that they acquired in Ireland, they stand as testament to Vita and Harold’s modern political and modernist literary philhellenism. The altars form a sculpture gallery within a seminal twentieth (or even dare one say twenty-first) century garden that was intended to explicitly evoke the antique world (fig 11). They tie Vita and Harold’s Delos Garden back to that tradition started by Thomas and Alethea Howard in the gardens at Arundel House and continued by the Countess de Grey at Wrest Park. As with so much of Vita and Harold’s life, as expressed though their writing, collecting and gardening, the display of the Delian altars and Corinthian capital at Sissinghurst today is as contemporary as it is traditional.

Fig 11.

View of the Priest’s House from the Delos Garden at Sissinghurst Castle garden, Kent. Photograph: © National Trust Images/ Eva Nemeth.

POSTSCRIPT

The final remark to be made relates to Harold Nicolson’s own political involvement with the (now) vexed question of the presence of Greek antiquities in British collections. In 1924, while serving in the Foreign Office, Harold Nicolson submitted a memorandum to the government of Ramsey McDonald calling for the return of one of the Erechtheion caryatids to Greece to mark the hundredth anniversary of the death of Lord Byron in the Greek War of Independence. Nicolson observed of Lord Elgin’s legal argument for removing sculptures from the Athenian Acropolis that ‘Even a most free and lavish translation of the Italian tongue cannot twist these words [the Ottoman Firman giving permission to remove already loose architectural elements and inscriptions] into meaning a whole shipload of sculptures, columns and caryatids’. Nicolson’s memorandum was not acted upon.