Giampietro Campana - Dispersal

Dispersal

His collection was sequestered by the Pontifical State. A catalogue of his collection was published in 1858 and it was put up for sale. Works from the Campana collection wound up in the great national museums, from the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, where the Tsar's curator, Stepan Gedeonov was offered the right to select items from the collection before auction, to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In hopes of finding a buyer, the antique gold was entrusted to the Castellani atelier, founded in 1814 by Fortunato Pio Castellani (1794-1865), a goldsmith, antiquarian and collector, whose atelier producing jewellery and goldsmith's work was among the first to take inspiration from the gold of Antiquity that was being recovered by Campana and others from excavations in the Roman Campagna and in Etruria. Augusto Castellani (1829-1914) studied the Campana gold and made sensitive restorations, which in some examples amount to pastiches assembled from antique fragments, and presented a catalogue. The intimate study of the rare originals suggested to Castellani new techniques of workmanship and the more extensive restorations undertaken during the period which in some cases transformed the originals. Further copies and interpretations were made by Castellani in a refined archaeological taste. The Campana collection of ancient gold, remounted and restored by Castellani was bought by the French State in 1862 and is conserved in the Louvre.

Nine galleries in the Louvre contain the Greek pottery of the Campana collection.

Among the Campana collections, only the numismatic collection of some four hundred Roman and Byzantine gold coins remained in Rome, purchased in 1873 by the administration of the Capitoline Museums, thanks to the interest of Augusto Castellani, who was a founding member of the Commissione Archeologica Comunale, and was named director of the Capitoline Museums the same year. The bequest of his own collection of over nine thousand more coins provided the nucleus of today's public collection.

Campana's "primitive" Italian paintings were purchased by the French State. In 1976 283 Campana paintings received an official home in the new Musée du Petit Palais, Avignon.

Among Campana's paintings were also a series of five frescoes transferred to canvas. The subjects, by the school of Raphael, were completed in 1523-1524 in the Villa Palatina, Rome. They went with the part of the Campana collection that the Russians acquired in 1861 and installed in the State Hermitage Museum in Saint Petersburg.