William Gell

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William Gell, by Cornelius Varley, 1816 (National Portrait Gallery).
William Gell, by Cornelius Varley, 1816 (National Portrait Gallery).

Sir William Gell (1 April 1777 – 4 February 1836) was an English classical archaeologist.

Born at Hopton in Derbyshire, the son of Philip Gell and Dorothy Milnes (daughter and coheir of William Milnes of Aldercar Park), he was educated at Derby School and Emmanuel College, Cambridge. He matriculated there in 1793, took a BA degree in 1798 and an MA in 1804, and was elected a fellow of Emmanuel.[1]

From 1804 to 1806 he travelled in Greece and the neighbouring islands. He was in 1807 elected a Member of the Society of Dilettanti and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In 1811 the Society of Dilettanti commissioned him to explore Greece and Asia Minor. These travels resulted in several publications, e.g. Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca and Itinerary of Greece, with a Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo. With these publications he achieved fame in the scholarly circles as a classical topographer. He went with Princess (afterwards Queen) Caroline to Italy in 1814 as one of her chamberlains, and gave evidence in her favour at the trial in 1820. He was Knighted on May 11 1814. Gell was a close friend of Keppel Richard Craven and travelled around Italy with him. He died at Naples in 1836 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery. On his death he left all his personal belongings to Craven.

His numerous drawings of classical ruins and localities, executed with great detail and exactness, are preserved in the British Museum. Gell was a thorough dilettante, fond of society and possessed of little real scholarship. Nonetheless his topographical works became recognized text-books at a time when Greece and even Italy were but superficially known to English travellers. He was a fellow of the Royal Society and the Society of Antiquaries of London, and a member of the Institute of France and the Royal Academy in Berlin.

His best-known work is Pompeiana; the Topography, Edifices and, Ornaments of Pompeii, published between 1817 and 1832, in the first part of which he was assisted by J. P. Gandy. It was followed in 1834 by the Topography of Rome and its Vicinity. He wrote also Topography of Troy and its Vicinity (1804); Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca (1807); Itinerary of Greece, with a Commentary on Pausanias and Strabo (1810); and Itinerary of the Morea (1816). Although these works have been superseded by later publications, they continue to provide valuable information for the study of classical topography. He is, together with his friends Edward Dodwell and Keppel Richard Craven, by some modern scholars seen as the founder of the study of the historical topography of the hinterland of Rome.[2] His works and notebooks proved very valuable for the topographical studies done by Thomas Ashby at the beginning of the 20th century.

[edit] Works

  • A Tour in the Lakes Made in 1797, [Edited by W. Rollinson, published 1986]
  • The Topography of Troy and its vicinity illustrated and explained by drawings and descriptions etc.. London, 1804
  • The Geography and Antiquities of Ithaca. London, 1807
  • The Itinerary of Greece, with a commentary on Pausanias and Strabo, and an account of the Monuments of Antiquity at present existing in that country, compiled in the years 1801, 2, 5, 6 etc.. London, 1810. [2nd ed. containing a hundred routes in Attica, Boeotia, Phocis, 1827]
  • The Itinerary of the Morea, being a description of the Routes of that Peninsula. London, 1817
  • Vievs in Barbary - taken in 1813. London, 1815
  • Pompeiana. The Topography of Edifices and Ornaments of Pompeii. 2 vols. London, 1817-8. [New ed. 1824. Further edition by Gell alone incoroprating the results of latest excavations. London 1832 and 1852]
  • Narrative of a Journey in the Morea. London, 1823
  • Le Mura di Roma disegnate sa Sir W. Gell, illustrates con testo note da A. Nibby. Rome, 1820
  • Probestücke von Städtemauern des alten Griechenlands ... Aus dem Englischen übersetzt. Munich, 1831
  • The Topography of Rome and its Vicinity with Map". 2 vols. London, 1834. [Rev. and enlarged by Edward Henry Banbury. London 1846]
  • Analisi storico-topografico-antiquaria della carta de' dintorni di Roma secondo le osservazione di Sir W. Gell e del professore A. Nibby. Rome 1837 [2nd ed. 1848]

[edit] Bibliography

  • Clay, Edith (ed.) -Sir William Gell in Italy: Letters to the Society of Dilettanti, 1831-1835. London, 1976
  • Wallace-Hadrill, A. -"Roman Topography and the Prism of Sir William Gell", in Haselberger, L. & J. Humphrey (eds.) Imaging Ancient Rome: Documentation, Visualization, Imagination. Portsmouth, RI, 2006, p. 285-296

[edit] References

  1. ^ Wroth, W. W. & Thompson, J. - Gell, Sir William (1777–1836), classical archaeologist and traveller in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004)
  2. ^ * Wallace-Hadrill, A. -"Roman Topography and the Prism of Sir William Gell", in Haselberger, L. & J. Humphrey (eds.) Imaging Ancient Rome: Documentation, Visualization, Imagination. Portsmouth, RI, 2006, p. 296