La Collezione di antichità a Lowther Castle

This thesis is devoted to the collection of antique sculpture formerly in Lowther Castle, dispersed between 1947 and 1970.The collection was formed by the second Earl of Lonsdale in the middle of the XIX century mostly by acquiring objects from older British collections which were being dismembered in those years. The core of the collection was made up of Roman and Romano-British antiquities, but there was remarkable Greek section, and some Etruscan and Egyptian objects as well. In order to framing the collection in the social and cultural conditions which brought to its formation, the first chapters are devoted to the story of the Lowther family and their seat in Westmorland, keeping an eye on the development of antiquarian culture in Georgian and Victorian England. Involving the use of unpublished archive sources, great attention has been paid to the lines of formation of the collection by tracing the origin of each object up to its first attestations, proving how the taste for antiquity developed in XVII-XVIII century in Italy survived in the British Victorian era.Through the observation of the international market of antiquities from the mid-twentieth century to the present it has been possible to define the new locations of many of the objects formerly in Lowther Castle. In the catalog, which is the main core of the work, the objects have been individually described and archaeologically studied in order to being placed in an historical production context.