In Focus: Lowther Castle
'Beautifully situated and very fine...'
Adolf Michaelis, Ancient Marbles in Great Britain, 1882
In 1873, Adolf Michaelis, Professor of Art History at Strasbourg, visited Lowther Castle in Cumbria. The estate, which Michaelis describes in his Ancient Marbles in Great Britain as ‘beautifully situated and very fine,’ contained a collection of Greek and Roman marble sculptures, reliefs, and inscriptions formed by The Right Honourable, William Lowther, the 2nd Earl of Lonsdale, between 1848 and 1868. The collection, often overlooked in discussions of British connoisseurship and the collecting of classical antiquities, ranked among the finest in the country at the time.
Michaelis’ passion was undoubtedly for marble sculpture, and his descriptions of the Lowther Castle collection are illuminating. Although he admits to having documented the memorial epigraphs he found there for inclusion in the CIL, his own work gives them only a cursory description. The Lowther lapidarium, a passage leading from the East Gallery to the Billiards Room, contained ‘one hundred and twenty-three Roman sepulchral inscriptions’ though Michaelis offers no individual details.
What is significant is that Michaelis notes the provenance of the inscriptions. Despite his enthusiasm for classical marbles, the 2nd Earl of Lonsdale does not seem to have embarked upon a Grand Tour, instead acquiring his collection from his various British peers. The inscriptions are noted by Michaelis as coming from the famous Bessborough collection, bought by Lonsdale from the estate of The Right Honourable, Frederick Ponsonby, the 3rd Earl of Bessborough, father of Byron’s paramour, Lady Caroline Lamb. The inscriptions seem to have originally come from the excavations of Francesco Ficoroni in the Moroni vineyards on the Via Appia.
Like many other private collections, the Lowther lapidarium met its end during the second world war. Damage sustained by the castle, combined with increasing family debts, meant that in 1947, the collection was put up for auction through Sotheby’s and sold. The four Latin memorial inscriptions on display in A Study in Stone have thus been reunited for the first time since their removal from the Lowther lapidarium.