Antonio Francesco Gori

Antonio Francesco Gori, on his titlepages Franciscus Gorius (9 December 1691 – 20 January 1757), was a Florentine antiquarian, a priest in minor orders, provost of the Baptistery of San Giovanni from 1746, and a professor at the Liceo, whose numerous publications of ancient Roman sculpture and antiquities formed part of the repertory on which 18th-century scholarship as well as the artistic movement of neoclassicism were based. In 1735 he was a founding member of a circle of antiquaries and connoisseurs in Florence called the Società Colombaria, the predecessor of the Accademia Toscana di Scienze e Lettere la Colombaria, in order to foster "not only Tuscan Poetry and Eloquence, or one faculty only; but almost all the most distinguished and useful parts of human knowledge: in a word, it is what the Greeks called Encyclopedia".

As a young man Gori studied with Anton Maria Salvini (1653-1729) and was inspired by the Etruscan studies of Filippo Buonarroti (1661-1733). He made a dramatic discovery in 1726 on the Via Appia near Rome. It was the columbarium of the household, both free and slaves, of Livia, the consort of Emperor Augustus. The following year he published it, with notes by Salvini, in a handsome folio with 21 engraved plates, under the title Monumentum sive columbarium libertorum et servorum Liviae Augustae et Caesarum, Romae detectum in Via Appia, anno MDCCXXVI (Florence, 1727). Each of the book's plates was dedicated to an influential patron of the arts or a well-known connoisseur of antiquities, among them the English merchant banker Joseph Smith of Venice, who, though not yet English consul, was already a promising collector and patron, and Sir Thomas Dereham (died 1738), an English bachelor who had been educated at the court of Cosimo III de' Medici and continued to reside in the city. Another publication of 1727 was Gori's repertory of classical inscriptions, Inscriptiones graecae et latinae.

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