Thomas Hollis: fabricating liberty, from Rome to the Age of Revolution

The Leverhulme Emeritus Funded project will address the gap in contemporary understandings of the relationship between visual culture and political ideas from the Renaissance to Enlightenment. No study has surveyed the reception of the ancient Roman iconology of liberty in visual culture and books, for eighteenth century audiences. Studies of the making of monarchical political culture, following Peter Burke’s path-breaking The Fabrication of Louis XIV (Yale, UP. 1992) are manifold. The methodology of the latter will provide a foundation for understanding a powerful casestudy for the history of 'images of ideas' of freedom in the collections of 'that strenuous Whig', Thomas Hollis (1720-1774).

A study of images of liberty in the collection of Thomas Hollis in the C18th