The depth of history at Queen Anne’s Gate is unusual even in London, and few houses resonate with more memories than the extraordinary number 14. The story of the house over the centuries features political revolutionaries, occult initiations, clandestine war meetings, and a decapitated head. It begins, however, as a museum of Roman sculpture, unrivalled outside Italy, designed for connoisseur and virtuoso Charles Townley (1737–1805). Townley embodied Enlightenment values perhaps more completely than any other fi gure in the art world of 18th-century Britain – his portrait by Johann Zoff any (seen above) is one of the iconic paintings of the period – yet remarkably he has never been the subject of a major publication.