French kings identified strongly with the ancient Romans and saw their own realm as the New Rome; Protestant Germany looked increasingly to Greece in opposition, with a notable element to be found in Martin Luther’s desire to understand the Bible purely from the Greek text alone, that is, unencumbered by translation into and commentary in Latin. It is therefore remarkable that in this climate, Winckelmann was the only non-Italian, non-Catholic scholar appointed as the pope’s commissioner of antiquities (he converted to Catholicism to take up the post but is said to have been overheard singing Lutheran hymns at night in his rooms in the Vatican).

If ancient Greece, from this time on, became the focus of romantic, liberal, and bourgeois causes, Roman (and, more generally, Italian) antiquity suffered little for its continuing association with kings, popes, and aristocrats. Two particularly active popes, Clement XIV (r. 1769–1774) and Pius VI (r. 1775–1799), collected many new antiquities, reorganizing the Vatican galleries and creating the museum thereafter known as the Museo Pio-Clementino in their honor. Both employed Giovanni Battista Visconti, the energetic commissioner of antiquities, who made excavations both in Rome and at Tivoli, mainly in search of ancient statues. Visconti persuaded both popes to tighten conditions related to the issuance of export licenses for ancient works of art, which continued to flow out of the country. If not for these licenses, even more of the objects discovered by foreigners such as Gavin Hamilton (Scottish painter and dealer, d. 1798) would have made their way to northern Europe; Hamilton excavated at a large number of sites, including Tivoli, Rome, Gabii, and Ostia.

Focus on Pompeii and Herculaneum remained intense, especially in the second half of the century when the pace of excavation greatly increased. An interested onlooker and participant was the Englishman sir william hamilton, appointed extraordinary envoy to the court of Naples in 1764. His first collection of antiquities was published in lavishly illustrated volumes produced by the Comte d’Hancarville, a Frenchman. A number of spurious associations were used to argue for the high artistic and monetary value accorded painted pottery in antiquity. This sales pitch was certainly effective, as the British Museum bought the entire Hamilton collection (including over 700 painted vases) in 1772 for a large sum. Hamilton and d’Hancarville would perhaps be surprised to know that the ramifications of their arguments about artistic value are still ongoing in the study of Greek pottery. Taste in northern Europe was profoundly affected by the publication of these antiquities, with the influence heaviest in the decorative arts (e.g., Wedgwood’s Etruria pottery in 1769) and interiors (e.g., the first suites decorated in neoclassical style in Spencer House, London, 1759).

South Italy and Sicily were slowly opening up to topographers, excavators, and travelers. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was much influenced by the ideas of Winckelmann, toured Italy from 1786 to 1788 and visited Paestum (south of Naples) and a number of sites in Sicily that had, by the end of the century, been incorporated into the grand tour.

The years around 1800 brought considerable upheaval and activity to Italian archaeology. Napoleon’s declaration of war on the Papal States saw 100 significant antiquities taken to Paris as a result of the settlement of 1797, among which were the Laocoon and the Belvedere Apollo (most were back in Rome by 1815, following Napoleon’s fall). The short-lived republic under French occupation was overthrown in 1799, and the year 1800 saw the installation of a new pope and a new papal commissioner of antiquities, Carlo Fea, who was very active in the excavation and protection of antiquities until his death in 1836. Fea worked extensively with the French, who reoccupied Rome between 1808 and 1814 and who, in those short years, undertook an astonishingly large program of clearance, excavation, and repair. Major work was carried out in the Colosseum, Forum of Trajan, Basilica of Maxentius, Domus Aurea, and Pantheon, to name just a few. French work in the Forum Romanum, under Giuseppe Valadier and Carlo Fea, was the first systematic excavation undertaken in a zone ransacked for centuries; a new era of Roman archaeology had begun, in which Carlo Fea and Antonio Nibby