A NEW LINE FROM ROME TO LONDON
Banner image: Cropped studio portrait of Giovanni Battista de Rossi, signed 1866, Fratelli d'Alessandri, Rome. Library of Congress LC-USZ62-122565, Lot 6633, p.5.
About the research project
Drawing of Charles Willes Wilshere by Samuel Lucas. After Gordon Longmead (ms of part of 2006 publication, Hertfordshire Archives and Local Services).
Sixty-nine letters from Charles Willes Wilshere (1814-1906) to the Italian archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822-1894) are kept in the Vatican Library, where they were read and transcribed by Susan Walker in February 2013. Wilshere was a remarkable collector, driven by his passion for the English Catholic church. His core collection included late Roman gold-glass, sarcophagi, and funerary inscriptions. De Rossi was a distinguished Christian archaeologist, best known for his work in connection with the Roman catacombs.
Most of Wilshere’s collection is today permanently displayed in the Ashmolean Museum. However, these letters have never been published in full in a critical edition. The Wilshere-de Rossi correspondence includes letters which throw new light on the archaeology and history of the early Christian inhabitants of Rome as well as adding intriguing details about the lives of the two fellow scholars.
Wilshere and de Rossi’s letters constitute a remarkable record of personal friendship and mutual support over three decades of political turmoil, ending only with de Rossi’s death in 1894. They throw light on de Rossi’s role in the antiquities market, documenting the transmission of art and inscriptions from Rome to England, and chronicling the restitution of two key pieces from the Wilshere collection to the Vatican Library, a generous act for which Wilshere was awarded a medal by Pope Leo XIII.
These letters also reveal Wilshere’s strong personal support for de Rossi’s tireless efforts to build the study of early Christian art and archaeology as a new discipline. This correspondence is therefore a significant resource for the under-researched historiography of the subject.
The letters demonstrate a sustained effort by Wilshere to acquaint English people with the early Christian art and archaeology of Rome. Railway comparisons occur in the correspondence, which demonstrate that a new cultural line from Rome to London was indeed built at this time, through the efforts of a relatively small but still very energetic network of devoted admirers of de Rossi and his scholarship.
Research aims
Excerpts from the letters were previously used to support the narrative of Saints and Salvation: the Wilshere Collection of gold-glass, sarcophagi and inscriptions from Rome and Southern Italy, edited by Susan Walker with contributions by Sean Leatherbury, David Rini, and others (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 2017).
This project builds on the 2017 publication, in which excerpts from Wilshere-de Rossi correspondence were principally used to follow the formation of Wilshere’s collection of early Christian and Jewish antiquities from Rome and southern Italy. Now their wider historical and intellectual context will be considered.
A complete, annotated, and illustrated edition of the correspondence is planned for publication, with an introduction setting the letters in their historical and intellectual context. Explanatory notes on the principal characters, places, and objects mentioned in the correspondence will also be added to the final publication.
Full publication of this correspondence from a little known, private English collector illuminates the international significance of de Rossi’s contribution to the study of early Christian antiquities and will form a fitting tribute to this great archaeologist.
Project funders
The Leverhulme Trust has awarded Susan Walker an Emeritus Fellowship for the year 2020-2021.
Project start
The project started on 1 September 2020.
It has been extended with permission from the Leverhulme Foundation to take account of delays caused by library and archive closures during the pandemic, and of the discovery in December 2021 of an archive of 237 papers relating to the Wilshere family in Pusey House Library, Oxford, many of them relevant to the project.
A further archive of 16 letters to Wilshere was found in the North Hertfordshire Museum in February 2023.
Correspondence between Wilshere and Sir Augustus Wollaston Franks, identified in the British Museum archive in December 2023, is also relevant.
Project Team
- Lead researcher: Dr Susan Walker, Honorary Curator and former Sackler Keeper of Antiquities, Ashmolean Museum and Emeritus Fellow, Wolfson College, University of Oxford
- Research Assistant: David Rini, PhD candidate, University of Reading
Outputs
Susan Walker has been invited to submit a manuscript for publication in the Vatican Library’s Studi e Testi series for publication.
Published outputs
Susan Walker and David Rini, Giovanni Battista de Rossi and the Antiquities Market in Rome: 1870, in (eds.) R. Giuliani, B. Mazzei, D. Mazzoleni, C. Salvetti, Il Secolo di Giovanni Battista de Rossi (1822-1894), La cultura archeologica dall’Italia all’Europa, Città del Vaticano 2022, pp. 445-469.
S. Walker, Wilshere Avenue: from Hertfordshire to Rome in the later 19th century in (eds.) G. J. C. Davis, J. DeLaine, Z. Kamash and C. R. Potts, From the Palatine to Pirro Ligorio: architectural, sculptural and antiquarian studies in memory of Amanda Claridge (1949-2022), Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplement no. 111, Providence, Rhode Island, pp. 202-214.
Other contributors will include Monsignor Professor Dr Stefan Heid, Director of the Pontifical Institute of Christian Archaeology, who will contribute a preface to the volume, and David Rini, co-author of a memorial issue of Studi e Testi published on the bicentenary of the death of Vatican Librarian Gaetano Marini, who will contribute to the edition of texts, indices, and sources.
