Finding your marbles

Somewhere buried deep under the layers of rubble and Tarmac of The Strand, headless and limbless Greek and Roman statues, altars and sarcophagi lie awaiting the mechanical digger's probing claws. These fractured deities and marble tablets are the last undiscovered fragment of the collection amassed by the 14th Earl of Arundel, the first Englishman to be bitten by "Marble Mania".

During the 1620s and 1630s Arundel filled his great house on The Strand with freightloads of battered sculpture, brought back by ship from Asia Minor, Italy and Greece, and disgorged at its garden's Thames-side landing stage. Inspired by the palaces he had visited in Italy, their courtyards, loggias and gardens littered with the Roman statues and sarcophagi disinterred from Italian soil during the Renaissance, Arundel set out his finest statues in a great gallery and encrusted the walls of his garden with ancient classical inscriptions.

Like Machiavelli, Arundel was a wily politician, exploiting his ownership of such trophies to advance his career and reputation. Briefly, international visitors such as Rubens flocked to Arundel House, but by 1646 Arundel was dead, in ignominious exile.

Left unprotected, his collection was variously divided up and sold, destroyed or buried in the ruins of Arundel House.

Here begins the story told by a new exhibition at London's Sir John Soane's Museum, where some of Arundel's battered fragments have found a temporary resting place. Differing states of preservation give ample testimony to their diverse fortunes: one noseless, bearded bust was among a handful exhibited as "curiosities" in the 1700s in a Lambeth Embankment pleasure garden, where a despairing John Aubrey complained of their "very ill usage" from the vulgar populace.

Statues dumped on the river embankment at Kennington which sank from sight were rediscovered by workmen in 1712: Lord Burlington, builder of the famous villa at Chiswick, carried a few off there. A colossal Roman marble foot was excavated from the site of Arundel House in 1972.

But thanks to Arundel, Marble Mania had infected England. His finest statues went to form the nucleus of an even larger collection made by the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House near Salisbury. Here their example inspired the Augustan Whigs of the 18th century to plunder Italy for more treasures. Kensington Palace, Holkham Hall, Petworth House, Syon, Kedleston - soon all these boasted rows of hieratic marble figures standing in niches in galleries, in pillared entrance halls, or posed against the sky on parapets.

By the 1760s, the engravings of the maverick Italian artist Piranesi had kindled a fever for the discipline of archaeology, and the mania for collecting reached new heights. Popes, aristocrats and wealthy parvenus tumbled over one another for the spoils dug from ruins in the Roman Campagna and the tombs of the Appian Way. In England, most were hidden away in private houses, but, by the end of the century, the British Museum had opened its doors, and some of the finest poured in. The largest piece in this exhibition is a prodigious marble foot donated by his Britannic Majesty's Envoy to the Court of Naples, the connoisseur Sir William Hamilton, husband of the notorious Emma. It is thanks to the last and greatest of Arundel's disciples that the British Museum boasts the Elgin Marbles. To save them from almost certain destruction in Athens and bring them back to the capital in c.1804-11, Lord Elgin sacrificed his fortune, marriage, career, reputation and even his nose - lost to a skin disease contracted in Constantinople. Marble Mania was always a ruinous addiction. See its lasting legacy at the Soane Museum.

? Marble Mania: Sculpture Galleries in England, 1640-1840 is at the Sir John Soane's Museum (020 7440 4246), Lincoln's Inn Fields, until 22 December, Tuesday-Saturday 10am-5pm