Travels in Greece: Or an Account of a Tour Made at the Expense of the Society of the Dilettanti.

First edition of Richard Chandler's Travels in Greece: Or an Account of a Tour Made at the Expense of the Society of the Dilettanti

Travels in Greece: Or an Account of a Tour Made at the Expense of the Society of the Dilettanti.

CHANDLER, Richard.

$2,000.00

Item Number: 135804

Oxford: Printed at the Clarendon Press, 1776.

First edition of Chandler’s personal account of the first Ionian expedition of the Society of Dilettani which Chandler led between 1764 and 1766. Quarto, bound in three quarters calf over marbled boards, gilt titles and tooling to the spine in six compartments within raised gilt bands, morocco spine label lettered in gilt, illustrated with two folding and five full-page maps. In near fine condition.

In 1764, English antiquary Richard Chandler was was introduced by Robert Wood, who had produced the Ruins of Palmyra to the Society of Dilettanti and sent by them, accompanied by Nicholas Revett, an architect, and William Pars, a painter, to explore the antiquities of Ionia and Greece (1764-1766). The Society's brief, drawn up in May 1764, was that the travelers make Smyrna their headquarters, and from there "...make excursions to the several remains of antiquity in that neighborhood; to make exact plans and measurements, to make accurate drawings of the bas-reliefs and ornaments, copying all the inscriptions you shall meet with, and keeping minute diaries." Having explored numerous sites in Anatolia and Ionian Islands, they continued to Athens, where they purchased fragments of sculpture from the Parthenon: "We purchased two fine fragments of the frieze which we found inserted over the doorways in the town, and were presented with a beautiful trunk which had fallen from the metopes, and lay neglected in the garden of a Turk". The result of their labors were the Ionian Antiquities in two magnificent folios published by the Dilettanti in 1769, and, later, Chandler's record of the tour, Travels in Greece, or an Account of a Tour Made at the Expense of the Society Of Dillettanti (1776).

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