A celebrated shield, bought by John Conyers from a London ironmonger, was sold after his death by one of his daughters to Woodward. Dr Woodward's Shield, now in the British Museum, is today recognised as a classicising French Renaissance buckler of the mid-16th century, perhaps sold from the Royal Armouries of Charles II, but was thought by Woodward and others to be an original Roman work. Woodward published in 1713 a treatise on the shield which provoked a satire by Alexander Pope, written in the same year but not printed until 1733, on the "follies of antiquarianism". He is mentioned twice in Pope's Fourth Satire of Dr. John Donne, and is one candidate for the original of "Mummius" in Pope's The Dunciad.
Read more about this topic: John Woodward (naturalist)
Famous quotes containing the words woodward and/or shield:
“The developments in the North were those loosely embraced in the term modernization and included urbanization, industrialization, and mechanization. While those changes went forward apace, the antebellum South changed comparatively little, clinging to its rural, agricultural, labor-intensive economy and its traditional folk culture.”
—C. Vann Woodward (b. 1908)
“The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her wrinkled trophy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)