Antiques: Take a lesson from this kind emperor; Richard Edmonds believes Downing Street should buy the carved marble portrait head of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius which is coming up at auction in New York.

Byline: Richard Edmonds

Should you happen to be country house visiting this summer, you may well come across galleries filled with Greek and Roman statues - many of them marble.

There is an obvious historic connection here, linking us back to previous centuries when British collectors and connoisseurs assembled some of the finest collections of classic antiquities outside Rome at a time when collecting and displaying these things was very much the in thing.

The galleries created by a spendthrift nobility in their great houses (now mostly owned by the National Trust or English Heritage) contained spectacular collections of statuary, vases, bronzes, prints and drawings, carved gems and Roman mosaics.

Occasionally these wonderful things surface in the sale rooms in London and it is likely that nowadays they may well be rehoused in Australia or America since such is the way of today's whimsical, money-driven society where wealth is no longer the privilege of the few in Britain.

Sotheby's will be selling antiquities next week in New York, a city that is nowadays nearby on your local, friendly website and the selection of lots to be offered - 247 of them in all - is mouthwatering. They range from ancient Egyptian sarcophagi in which mummies once lay, to bronze figures of the Egyptian gods, granite sphinxes, stunningly lovely alabaster bowls with the dust of antiquity upon them, to Greek and Roman mosaics with lots of those turquoise-blue ushabtis - the tiny figures no bigger than your little finger which were once wrapped with the mummy to ensure the soul of the deceased had a safe passage to the next world.

The star of the show is the carved marble portrait head of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, adopted son of the emperor Hadrian, a rather nice, slightly introverted, man according to ancient reports, steeped in Greek philosophy and culture more than the arts of war.

Marcus Aurelius, Antoninus's adopted son, loved his father and he spoke of him as a moral and philosophical example whose teachings he was proud to follow.

A philosopher himself, Marcus Aurelius in one of his meditations said of his father: 'He was always equal to an occasion and had an ever-watchful eye to the needs of the Empire, prudently conserving its resources and putting up with the criticism that resulted.

'Before his gods he was not superstitious, and before his fellow men he never stooped to bid for popularity or to woo the masses, but pursued his own calm and steady way.'

When you realise this just and compassionate man introduced new legal rulings to protect slaves against random cruelty and indecent abuse, you realise just what lies behind this wonderful marble portrait of Antoninus Pius which Sotheby's will offer on June 12 for pounds 200,000-pounds 300,000.

To my mind, it should be purchased by the British Government and placed in a prominent position in No 10 - surely as a reminder of how political dignity once meant something.

But once upon a time - in the 18th century to be exact, you might have found just such a marvellous Roman bust on offer in Rome, a city where the antiquarian trade has always thrived and in the 18th century swallowed up innocent young men there on the Grand Tour.

The Pleasures of Antiquity by Jonathan Scott (Yale: pounds 40) is a marvellous way of going on the Grant Tour without ever leaving your armchair.

The first great collectors, as Mr Scott tells us so expertly, came into focus in earlier centuries. One of them was Henry, Prince of Wales the son of that meddling old spendthrift, James lst. Henry died in very mysterious circumstances and some suggest that James engineered it. But by the time he was 16 Henry was already acquiring fine paintings, medals, gems and coins. Few 16-year-olds today could claim to know much more beyond the text message on their mobile phones.

But people of wealth at that time also collected cameos and carved gems and Lord Arendel, who features largely in Jonathan Scott's superb book, also imported antique marble statues from Italy in a big way for his house in London.

Agents working for the aristocracy and situated in Rome or Florence would purchase antiquities on behalf of their patrons who, naturally, couldn't be bothered to shop for themselves. Such a type was the glamorous, wildly good-looking George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, who came to London in 1614, financially on his uppers. But 'wee Georgie' cut a dazzling figure at court and was soon King James's beloved bed partner, obviously accepting with a slight smirk the honours and wealth the besotted monarch poured upon him lavishly.

Georgie found it, as Scott said, 'beneath his dignity to visit Antwerp to see the goods he was buying.' It means that a package was made for him of 'paintings, antique gems and statues.' It was sent back to England.

However, as time went on Georgie's political incompetence and his general awfulness led to his assassination in 1628. One can assume that his lavish collections were absorbed eventually by the Cromwellian regime and sold off with Charles lst's goods after the King's execution.

But what Cromwell was doing here vandalising Royal collections was to some extent mirrored later in Italy when leading Italian families began to lose their competitive edge and, by the early years of the 18th century were selling off their treasures to early Grand Tourists visiting Italy from England.

Not all the antique merchandise offered was of the best. One agent, with the rather quirky name of Hamlet Winstanley wrote from Rome in 1723 alerting his clients to the copies of antique statues that were around in the marketplace noting that many of them were 'very poor'.

But many of the tourists found pleasure in merely observing statues of emperors, consuls and orators which were around in the streets and squares, and it was believed by one agent that Rome itself contained at one point in time 11,400 statues in different parts of the city.

But the collecting of prints and drawings went alongside the collection of antiquities and the assembling of a 'paper museum' was thought to be prestigious and so large quantities of rare prints, albums of drawings and so on made their way back to well-heeled British aristocratic libraries.

A main agent and dealer was the enigmatic Prussian Baron von Stosch, a serious scholar and dealer who had a strict business sense when it came to antiquities. According to the final illustration given on page 55 of this fascinating book, a copy of which should be on every collectors bookshelf, we can believe that the Baron dealt in marble statuary, books (prints or original drawings) coins, medals and gems, not to mention bronzes and all the rest of the things which appeal to grand tourists.

The Baron is dealing with a queue of clients, he is wearing a nightcap and a monocle and his pet owl (representing wisdom?) is perched on the back of his chair. How marvellous it must have been to have seen him in action coping with the greedy, the unscrupulous and those collectors who enjoyed haggling over a price.

And through the Baron and other dealers and agents the stately homes of England slowly became the graceful repositories of these tokens of grandeur pillaged from ancient Greece and Rome - the Elgin Marbles among them, of course, and they are one of the subjects dealt with here in exemplary detail.

But remember you can find an excellent choice of antiquities at the NEC Summer Antiques Fair (late July early August). Look out for Lynne Elliott who trades as Millennia. Lynn always carries Roman glass bangles (from around pounds 15) along with a selection of ancient Egyptian ushabtis from pounds 30 each. And there is always Egyptian glass and Chinese pieces. But in August she will show an ancient Egyptian beaded mummy mask from 600bc - something well worth seeing.

CAPTION(S):

The star of the show is the carved marble portrait head of the Roman emperor Antoninus Pius, adopted son of the emperor Hadrian, a rather nice, slightly introverted, man according to ancient reports, steeped in Greek philosophy and culture more than the arts of war.