| Sumario: | At the beginning of the nineteenth-century William Roscoe (1753-1831) was Liverpool's cultural impresario, the city's leading art collector, and an internationally known biographer of Lorenzo de Medici and Pope Leo X. He had helped establish a succession of Liverpool's exhibiting societies and learned or scientific institutions, culminating in the Liverpool Royal Institution, whose core collections of early Renaissance paintings were provided, ironically, as a result of his forced sale in September 1816, a failed attempt to stave off bankruptcy. I show in this paper how such international fame made Liverpool a destination for cultural tourism in the early 19th century, and how Roscoe's collection attracted worldwide attention from artists, authors, art historians and scientists as well as the general public.
|
|---|