Antonio Francesco Gori

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Antonio Francesco Gori
archaeologist Edit this on Wikidata
Employer
Position heldprovost (1746–1757) Edit this on Wikidata

Antonio Francesco Gori, on his titlepages Franciscus Gorius (9 December 1691 – 20 January 1757), was an

ancient Roman sculpture and antiquities formed part of the repertory on which 18th-century scholarship as well as the artistic movement of neoclassicism were based. In 1735 he was a founding member of a circle of antiquaries and connoisseurs in Florence called the Società Colombaria,[2] the predecessor of the Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere la Colombaria,[3] to foster "not only Tuscan Poetry and Eloquence, or one faculty only; but almost all the most distinguished and useful parts of human knowledge: in a word, it is what the Greeks called Encyclopedia".[4]

Gori's early career

As a young man Gori studied with

Joseph Smith of Venice, who, though not yet English consul, was already a promising collector and patron, and Sir Thomas Dereham (died 1738),[7] an English bachelor who had been educated at the court of Cosimo III de' Medici and continued to reside in the city.[8]
Another publication of 1727 was Gori's repertory of classical inscriptions, Inscriptiones graecae et latinae.

No doubt on the strength of his publication the previous year, Gori was commissioned by the Salviati to produce descriptive text for a vanity publication that described the chapel of Saint Antonino, bishop of Florence, in the church of San Marco, a vehicle of Salviati patronage and of their public figura; the preface was signed by Alamanno Salviati.[9]

Museum Florentinum

The major undertaking that gave Gori a European reputation was under way from the early 1730s, when Gori started work on the Museum Florentinum, a comprehensive visual record of the

Gian Gastone de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany
, last of the Medici Grand Dukes, whose collection dominated the publication. The third volume, in three parts, Antiqua numismata aurea et argentea praestantiora et aerea maximi moduli (1740 [I and II] and 1742 [III], with 121 plates. A fourth volume, Serie di ritratti degli eccellenti pittori simply consists of fifty portraits of well-known artists, architects, sculptors and engravers. The Museum Florentinum described for the first time many of the sculptures and antiquities in the Medici collections.

Other publications

Illustration of Acta Eruditorum, 1739 with Etruscan alphabet and review of Museum Etruscum

Gori also published ancient inscriptions found in

incunabula of Etruscan studies, and incurred the jealous criticism of his rival in incipient Etruscology, Francesco Scipione Maffei
(1675–1755); the two engaged in running skirmishes in print.

He edited Giovanni Battista Doni's collected transcriptions of ancient inscriptions (1731), and issued a publication on Late Antique and Byzantine ivory diptychs.[12] His Museum cortonense (Rome 1750) in co-operation with Ridolfino Venuti of Cortona and Francesco Valesi of Rome, described antiquities in Cortona, both in the academy and in noblemen's collections.

Gori catalogued the collection of antique

George III, the work was sumptuously printed by J.B. Pasquali in Venice, as Dactyliotheca Smithiana., 1767.[15]

Gori's other notable works include the earliest widely read published description of the first discoveries at Herculaneum, 1748.[16] Symbolae litterariae (Florence and Rome, 1748–51).[17]

Gori was also an authority on the Greek vases being found in such quantities in Etruria that they were considered to be Etruscan.[18]

In 1751, Gori published the Satire or Satires by Jacopo Soldani.[19]

Others remember Gori because of

Santa Croce, when Galileo's remains were transferred on 12 March 1737; the finger was kept in a bottle in the Bibliotheca Medicea at San Lorenzo, and shown to visitors.[21]

Gori is buried in the church of San Marco, Florence.

Notes

  1. ^ Date from Dictionary of Art Historians Archived 13 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine); in this capacity he transcribed the description of the Baptistery by senator Carlo Strozzi (1587–1670), which is otherwise lost. (Gary M Radke, and Andrew Butterfield, The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti's Renaissance Masterpiece (2007:82).
  2. ^ the organising meeting, 15 May 1735, convened in the "Colombaria" tower in the founding member Giovanni Girolamo de' Pazzi's palazzo in Borgo degli Albizi.
  3. ^ Scholarly societies: Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere la Colombaria Archived 16 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ Gori, "Prefazione," Memorie di varia erudizione della Società Colombaria Fiorentina, Florence, 1747, vol. I, pp. XI-XII, quoted by the IMSS Multimedia Catalog.
  5. ^ Date from Dictionary of Art Historians Archived 13 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine
  6. ^ (Quaritch) Gori, Monumentum sive columbarium... Archived 12 April 2008 at the Wayback Machine; the title in full, Monumentum Sive Columbarium Libertorum et Servorum Liviae Augustae et Caesarum Romae detectum in Via Appia. Anno MDCCXXVI... Descriptum, & XX. Aere incisis Tabulis illustratum Adjectis Notis Clariss. V. Antonii Mariae Salvinii.
  7. ^ Noted by Quaritch.
  8. ^ Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies, s.v. "Dereham, of West Dereham".
  9. ^ Descrizione della capella di S. Antonino Vescovo di Firenze ...dedicata al medesimo santo dalla famiglia de Salviati patrizii fiorentini..., Florence, 1728 (on-line description of the volume).
  10. ^ This survey of Museum Florentinum depends on the on-line description of the volumes at ILAB LILA[permanent dead link].
  11. National Gallery of Scotland, illustrated on-line
    .
  12. ^ John Edwin Sandys, A History of Classical Scholarship 1908:380f.
  13. ^ Modern scholarship has identified the larger part of the "antique" carved hardstones famous in the 17th and 18th centuries as Early Modern pastiches.
  14. ^ Gori, Le gemme antiche di Anton-Maria Zanetti (Venice 1750); Zanetti should not be confused with his son, also Anton Maria and also an antiquarian, who preserved record of the fading exterior frescoes of Venetian palaces in Varie pitture a fresco de' principali maestri Veneziani (1760).
  15. ^ A copy from the library of the Marquis of Rockingham and Earl Fitz-William[permanent dead link].
  16. ^ Gori, Notizie del memorabile scoprimento dell'antica città di Ercolano, (Florence, 1748).
  17. ^ For the new antiquarian humanism of the 18th century, in which Gori was an indispensable figure, see Arnaldo Momigliano, "Ancient History and the Antiquarian" Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 13.3/4 (1950:285–315)
  18. ^ Maria Emilia Masci selected from A.F. Gori's archived correspondence, Documenti per la storia del collezionismo di vasi antichi nel XVIII secolo (Naples: Liguori) 2003.
  19. ^ Google books entry.
  20. ^ "Galileo's finger"
  21. ^ "In a bottle is kept Galileo's finger, which the antiquarian Gori stole from his tomb at S. Croce" (Sir Francis Palgrave, Hand-book for travellers in northern Italy (1852:493); "now preserved in the Tribune, dedicated to Galileo, in the Museum of Natural History" (Augustus Hare, Walks in Florence: Churches, Streets and Palaces, ch. xx "Santa Croce".

External links

  • Vannini, Fabrizio (2002). "GORI, Anton Francesco".
    ISBN 978-8-81200032-6
    .
  • Portrait medallion of Gori Archived 23 January 2020 at the Wayback Machine
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