From a photograph by Cav. A. Vochieri

Damiano, the basilica of Constantine, and the Via Alessandrina.

The most memorable year in the history of the Museo Farnesiano is the first of the seventeenth century, on account of the legacy left to it by the antiquarian Fulvio Orsini. The subject of this legacy having already been described by De Nolhac in 1884 and Beltrami in 1886,1 I will limit myself to a few particulars best calculated to make my sketch more complete.

Fulvio Orsini, canon of San Giovanni in Laterano, had enjoyed for a great number of years the friendship of the Farnese, first as librarian to Ranuccio II, cardinal of Sant' Angelo, later in the same capacity with Cardinal Alessandro, lastly as curator of the museum under Cardinal Odoardo. By a will dated January 31, 1600, he left to the latter all his collections, on the condition of satisfying certain legacies to the amount of six thousand scudi. If the cardinal, for any reason whatever, were to decline to accept the trust, the collections dearer to the testator than life itselfwere to be sold, as far as possible, wholesale, to prevent their dispersion.

Odoardo followed the wishes of his old friend, and the Museo Orsiniano was annexed to the Farnesiano; the two together form the most marvellous group of masterpieces in every branch of art which has ever been seen exhibited under the roof of a private mansion. Orsini's gift included 400 cameos and intaglios mostly signed by Greek artists; 113 pictures and cartoons; 150 historical inscriptions; 58 portrait busts of poets, philosophers, historians, and statesmen, and 1500 coins, many of which are unique. All these

1 Pierre de Nolhac, "Les collections d'antiquités de Fulvio Orsini" in Mélanges de l'Ecole Française de Rome, vol. iv, a. 1884, pp. 138–231; Giovanni Beltrami, I libri di Fulvio Orsino nella biblioteca vaticana. Rome, 1886.

objects were valued by the testator at 13,569 scudi, as specified in an inventory discovered by Nolhac in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana at Milan, in which many secrets concerning the antiquarian market in the second half of the sixteenth century are revealed.

Fulvio Orsini had lived in the very centre of the trade in smaller objects, such as engraved stones and medals, a trade which was mostly in the hands of the goldsmiths and jewellers of the Via del Pellegrino. This is the reason why the names of Francesco Bianchi, Bernardino and Jacopo Passeri, and Andrea di Nello, all having their premises in the same street, occur repeatedly in the inventory, and especially that of a Messer Carlo, from whom the collector bought cameos to the value of 307 scudi. Sometimes Fulvio dealt personally with the peasants gathered in the marketplace. The shop of Biagio Stefanoni, an apothecary at the corner of the Via del Caravita, was also a great meetingplace for buyers of antiques. Fulvio had business relations with artists, too, such as the Padorano, Vincenzo and Niccolò Fiamminghi, and with the Roman noblemen, the Maffei, Alberini, Massimi, Santacroce, Capranica, Rustici, etc., in whose lands discoveries were most likely to occur.

We who have witnessed so many contemporary examples of fabulous sums offered and paid for a few square inches of canvas, or for a small object of virtu, the value of which the smallest accident could destroy, cannot read without emotion that part of the inventory relating to the pictures, cartoons, and drawings in which the names of Raphael, Titian, Daniele, Leonardo, Baldassare Peruzzi, Sebastiano dal Piombo, Baccio Bandinelli, Albrecht Dürer, and Luke Cranach occur over and over again, and in which one hundred and thirteen masterpieces are valued all together at 1789 scudi. The picture of St. Jerome, by Cranach, with

exquisite background by Valerio da Reggio, which would be worth to-day the ransom of a prince, is set down in the catalogue at ten scudi!

As I have remarked above, all these treasures were lost to us in the fourth quarter of the eighteenth century, despite the anathema pronounced in the will of their original collector upon those who should dare to remove one single object from the Palazzo Farnese. It seems as if the Bourbons of Naples must have found great satisfaction in depriving Rome even of things that were of no use whatever to them, such as fragments of inscriptions of purely local interest, or forming part of a set already exhibited in a Roman museum; architectural decorations of Roman monuments such as the temple of Victory on the Palatine, the baths of Caracalla, or the temple of Neptune; and even pieces of statues or bas-reliefs or sarcophagi; so that a student wishing to examine the scattered remains of these mutilated bodies has to travel back and forth from the land of Romulus to that of Parthenope. Men of science and men of thought who consider these questions from a higher standpoint than that of petty local jealousies and ambitions, cherished the hope that the union of Italy into one happy free nation would bring about a rational settlement in the interests of art and archæology, as well as in the interest of the several cities which clamored for a share of the spoils. We hoped to see Naples become the centre of Greek and Greco-Italic studies, Palermo of Greco-Sicilian and Siculo-Arabic art, Rome of Latin antiquities, Florence of Etruscan and Renaissance art, Bologna of pre-Roman, Milan of Lombardesque, Turin of Egyptian and Ligurian civilizations. Such a rational solution of existing difficulties has failed to come, thanks to evil influences which prevailed at the time when it was still possible to set things right.