Italian Grand Tour antiques

Grand Tour antiques are the objects made for travellers in Italy, above all in Rome and Florence, from the later eighteenth century into the age of the railway. Micromosaic pictures, small bronzes after the antique, marble and scagliola souvenirs, fans and cased sets of views were workshop goods. They were made to be carried home, which is why so many are small, framed and a little too complete. The phrase is not a date. A ruin on the lid can be 1790 or 1890, and the materials decide. A micromosaic of the right period has a tesserae size and a setting that later souvenir shops simplified. A bronze reduction needs a foundry reading, not a title from a famous statue. These articles explain how to place a souvenir in a workshop and a decade, using the material and the mount rather than the romance of the trip.

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