Giampietro Campana

Giampietro Campana (1808 – 10 October 1880), created marchese di Cavelli (1849), was an Italian art collector who assembled one of the nineteenth century's greatest collection of Greek and Roman sculpture and antiquities. The part of his collection of Hellenistic and Roman gold jewellery conserved in the Musée du Louvre warranted an exhibition devoted to it in 2005-06. He was an early collector of early Italian paintings, the so-called "primitives" of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which were overlooked by his contemporaries. And like many collectors of his generation, he coveted Italian maiolica of the 15th and 16th centuries.

Campana was born in Rome into a sophisticated milieu: the family was also entrusted with the operation of the Monte di Pietà, a papal charitable trust that operated as pawnbroker to Rome; Giampietro entered as an assistant in 1831 and was so efficient he was appointed director general in 1833. In 1835 he was made a cavaliere of the Order of the Golden Spur by Pope Gregory XVI in gratitude for the loans that the reorganized Monte di Pietà had been able to make to the Vatican.

Campagna's first archaeological excavations were undertaken in 1829 at Frascati, where the family had the use of properties belonging to the Camera Apostolica.

Campana's collection ranged over bronzes and marble sculpture, the Roman architectural terracotta reliefs that are still called "Campana" reliefs, ceramics, numismatics and medals, acquired on the market and through excavations on his own properties and other sites and handsomely arranged and displayed at the Villa del Laterano. He also collected Italian paintings, forming a notable collection of the so-called "primitives" of the 14th and 15th centuries.

Thanks to his mature experience in the archaeological field— which in the mid-19th century was still a treasure hunt for works of art and curiosities, even in the hands of a sophisticated amateur— Campana was responsible for the discovery of the columbarium of Pomponius Hylas and two other columbarii near the tomb of the Scipios, of which he directed the publication, as well as publishing his own collection of the terracotta relief plaques of the Republican era that bear his name still. His obtained prominent positions with the pontifical administration and was placed in charge of the excavations at Ostia. From 1842 he published several editions of his collection of moulded terracotta tiles, under the title Antiche opere in plastica, in which he offered antiquarian essays on the mythological and iconographic representations on the moulded relief panels and tiles; this was the first work to draw attention to these neglected architectural elements, which had a long pre-Roman history in Etruscan civilization

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