The Dilettanti Society

William Hamilton, seated in the center, into the Society of Dilettanti, an elite gentlemen's club dedicated to connoisseurship and study of the antique. Hamilton points to a Greek vase from his renowned collection, the ostensible focus of the scholarly gathering. Membership required having been on the Grand Tour, a fashionable ritual whereby aristocratic young gentlemen traveled the Continent to cultivate taste and erudition. In reality, the club included many notorious rakes, and Horace Walpole scoffed that "the nominal qualification is having been in Italy, and the real one, being drunk." Here, the abundance of wine and a woman's garter - held up by the man standing on the left - intimate the group's other, bawdier preoccupations: drinking, whoring, and gambling.