Finding Lost Wax The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso 9004434216, 9789004434219

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Finding Lost Wax

Studies in Art & Materiality Editor in Chief Ann-Sophie Lehmann, University of Groningen Editorial Board Christian Berger, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz Marjolijn Bol, Utrecht University Beate Fricke, Universität Bern Wolf-Dietrich Lohr, Freie Universität Berlin and Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz Advisory Board Sven Dupre, Utrecht University Christine Gottler, Universität Bern Tim Ingold, University of Aberdeen Robert van Langh, Rijksmuseum/Netherlands Institute for Conservation, Art, and Science, Amsterdam Monika Wagner, Universität Hamburg

volume 3

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/siam

Finding Lost Wax The Disappearance and Recovery of an Ancient Casting Technique and the Experiments of Medardo Rosso Edited by

Sharon Hecker

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hecker, Sharon, editor. Title: Finding lost wax : the disappearance and recovery of an ancient  casting technique and the experiments of Medardo Rosso / edited by  Sharon Hecker. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2021] | Series: Studies in art &  materiality, 2468-2977 ; volume 3 | Includes bibliographical references  and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020042398 (print) | LCCN 2020042399 (ebook) | ISBN  9789004434219 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004439931 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Bronze sculpture—Technique. | Precision casting. |  Precision casting—Case studies. | Rosso, Medardo, 1858-1928—Criticism  and interpretation. Classification: LCC NB1170 .F56 2021 (print) | LCC NB1170 (ebook) | DDC  731.4/56—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042398 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020042399

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2468-2977 ISBN 978-90-04-43421-9 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-43993-1 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements ix List of Figures and Plates xi Contributors xxv Introduction 1 Sharon Hecker

part 1 The Global Revival of Lost Wax Casting 1

Lost-Wax Casting 11 Francesca G. Bewer

2

Sculptor-Founders in Late Nineteenth-Century France: The Role of Lost-Wax Casting 18 Elisabeth Lebon

3

A Tale of Two Foundries: Art Bronze Casting Comes of Age in America 66 Ann Boulton

4

The Subtlety of the Surface: Thoughts on the Revival of the Lost Wax Technique in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany 93 Veronika Wiegartz

5

Enrico Cantoni: From Plasterman to Bronze Founder in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain 115 Rebecca Wade

6

From the Island of the Sun to the Empire of the Rising Sun: Vincenzo Ragusa and the Technique of Bronze Casting in Japan at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century 131 Massimiliano Marafon Pecoraro

7

Defining Modernity in Japanese Sculpture: Two Waves of Italian Impact on Casting Techniques 142 Yasuko Tsuchikane

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Contents

part 2 Medardo Rosso and the Modernity of Lost-Wax Casting Disclaimer 172

Framing Rosso: A Brief Attempt 173 Penelope Curtis

8

Medardo Rosso, the Italian Sculptor-Founder in Paris: Transforming the Multiple in Modern Sculpture 177 Sharon Hecker

9

The Unstable Act of Seeing: A Conceptual Reading of Rosso’s Serial Reproduction 213 Sharon Hecker

10

Comparative Visual Examination of Medardo Rosso’s Bambino ebreo 235 Sharon Hecker and Austin Nevin

11

Creative Inconsistencies: Compositional Analysis of Rosso’s Waxes 256 Francesca Caterina Izzo and Austin Nevin

12

Towards an Understanding of Rosso’s Casting Practice: Surface XRF of Four Bronze Casts of Bambino ebreo 269 Federico Carò and Luc Megens

13

Rethinking Uniformity: Analysis of Rosso’s Serial Casts of the Bambino ebreo through Digital Surface Comparison 275 Max Rahrig and Ronald E. Street

14

New Technologies, New Approaches: Following the Hand of the Artist in the Restoration of Medardo Rosso’s Wax Casts 303 Lluïsa Sàrries Zgonc

Contents

15

Impressions: An Artist-Founder’s Impressions of Medardo Rosso, Artist-Founder 317 Andrew Lacey

Plates 325 Index 341

vii

Acknowledgements This book would not have been possible without the ongoing, generous support for scholarly work provided by Peter Freeman and his impeccable staff, especially Sarah Alexander, as well as that of the scholars who gave their time and expertise. Peter Freeman has been a staunch supporter of new scholarship on Medardo Rosso for over two decades. It was through my ongoing conversations with him about Rosso that this research project gradually developed from a Study Day into a focused exhibition, followed by a conference and finally gathered in this book. Following our progress from start to finish, Freeman continued to help us in countless ways to ensure that this project came to fruition, motivating us not to give up on our work even in difficult moments when it seemed that we were not going to reach our goal. This is not surprising given the fact that for many years, he has encouraged the advancement of research on Rosso through numerous publications and exhibitions. During his career, he has worked tirelessly to promote Rosso’s art to the greater benefit of scholars, museums, collectors, artists, and the general public. Such intellectual and material generosity will undoubtedly be further recognized as it continues to stimulate new ways of thinking about Rosso, leaving an indelible mark on the artist’s legacy for future generations. I would like to extend a special thanks to Peter Freeman and to Pieter Coray for their generous support of the 3D scanning. Thanks also go to Francesca Bewer, who contributed immensely at every step of the project and enthusiastically shared her vast knowledge of technical art history, introducing me to colleagues who have contributed to this volume with their expertise. I am grateful to Elisabeth Lebon, who answered endless questions about casting techniques in the nineteenth century and has been an invaluable resource for the entire volume. My thanks also go to Austin Nevin, with whom I have collaborated for over a decade on Rosso, who began this project with me, and has accompanied me all the way with his advice and expertise in conservation science. My deep appreciation goes to the private collectors, many of whom wish to remain anonymous, and public collections that lent their works and allowed them to be studied by us, as well as the Center for Italian Modern Art, especially Laura Mattioli, Executive Director, Heather Ewing, former Executive Director, and Vivien Greene, Advisory Board member. CIMA’s spirit of collaborative

x

Acknowledgements

inquiry fostered interest in young scholars and created new interdisciplinary debates during its year dedicated to Medardo Rosso. We are grateful to our editor at Brill, Liesbeth Hugenholtz, to Melissa Larner for her expert editing, to Iuliia Plekhanova for the cover design, and to Danila Marsure, Director of the Museo Medardo Rosso. We dedicate this book to the memory of Ronald Street. Sharon Hecker Milan, August 2020

Figures and Plates Figures 1.1

2.1 2.2 2.3a 2.3b

2.4 2.5

2.6a and 2.6b 2.7

2.8

2.9

Diagram of the indirect lost-wax casting process based on Medardo Rosso’s Bookmaker, amended from Fig. 43 in Henry Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker (ed.), Medardo Rosso Second Impressions, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (2003), 71 14–15 Eugène Gonon, L’art de fondre en bronze à la cire perdue, manuscript dated 1876, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Ms.514 35 “Material Required,” from E. J. Parlanti, Casting a Torso in Bronze by the Cire Perdue Process, Alec Tirandi, London, 1953, 9 37 De-waxing kiln being dismantled after wax removal, Susse Foundry, around 1950, Archives of the Fonderie Susse 38 De-waxing kiln being dismantled after wax removal, Hébrard foundry, reproduced in Louis Vauxcelles, “La fonte à cire perdue,” Art et Décoration, t.9, 1905, 195 38 Medardo Rosso in his Paris studio ca. 1890, with casting oven in the foreground 39 Reconstruction of a nineteenth-century chemist’s laboratory furnace. Archaeological base from Melle, copied by the ceramicist Francois Peyrat at the request of Florian Téreygeol, in charge of research at CNRS. © Jean Dubos 39 Charles Lebourg, Main de femme (Hand of a Woman), Musée des beaux-Arts de Nantes, n.d. Lost-wax cast from a live model made by the Lebourg Process. © Eric Maison-Marcheux, 2015 42 Charles Lebourg, Moulage en cire d’une statuette par le procédé le Bourg (Wax cast of a statuette made by the Lebourg Process), figs 1 and 2, in E. Maglin, “La fonte du bronze d’art d’un seul jet,” in La Nature, revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l’industrie, no. 1269, September 25, 1897, 257 43 Charles Lebourg, extract from his patent “Perfectionnements apportés au procédé de moulage industriel pour la fonte à cire perdue”, January 23, 1894, patent no. 235724. Archives INPI 45 Anatole Marquet de Vasselot, Ung Ymagier du Roy, autoportrait en Cellini (Ung Ymagier du Roy, Self-Portrait as Cellini), life size proof, cast in Japan in 1883 © Galerie Patrice Bellanger, DR 47

xii 2.10a and 2.10b 2.11a, 2.11b and 2.11c 2.12a and 2.12b

2.13 3.1

3.2

3.3

3.4

3.5

Figures and Plates Jean-Désiré Ringel d’Illzach, Vase, 1889, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Detail. © Elisabeth Lebon 50 Jean-Désiré Ringel d’Illzach, extract from his patent for direct casting “on clay or other soft materials,” patent no. 199586, July 15, 1889, Archives de l’INPI, Paris 52 Paul Wayland Bartlett, sketch from his study notebook, reproduced in Carol P. Adil and Henry A. De Phillips Jr., Paul Wayland Bartlett and the art of patination, The Paul Wayland Bartlett Society, Wetherfield, Connecticut, 1991 55 The corner of the workshop reserved for gelatin molding, Fonderie Thinot, Châtillon, 2007. © Elisabeth Lebon 60 Charles Russell (1864-1926), Medicine Whip, modeled 1911, sand cast by August Griffoul & Bros. Co. foundry, Newark, NJ, 1912–1916. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK. The making of the sand mold for this bronze took fifteen hours and the sculpture was cast in one piece except for the base 68 Paul Wayland Bartlett (1865-1925), Bear Tamer, 1887, sand cast by SiotDecauville Perzinka, probably 1887–97. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK. A life-size plaster of this sculpture won an Honorable Mention in the Paris Salon of 1887 when Bartlett was twenty-two years old. In 1889 he signed a ten-year contract to cast the Bear Tamer with the Paris foundry Siot-Decauville Perzinka. Bartlett earned about 16%—95 francs of the 600 charged for each bronze of this size; from his sales the foundry further deducted 550 francs for the reduction process and preparation of the molds. (Lebon, 2003, 233) 69 Rembrandt Bugatti (1884-1916), Buffalo, 1907, lost-wax cast made by A. A. Hébrard, probably cast 1907 and certainly before 1916. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK. Rembrandt Bugatti, one of the Parisian founder’s first clients had become ensnared in Hébrard’s web as a minor when his father signed an exclusive contract for him in 1904. Thereafter, because Hébrard owned the rights of reproduction to all his work, once Bugatti achieved recognition and could command high prices, the profits went instead to Hébrard, who refused to renegotiate the contract. Financial difficulties probably contributed to the artist’s suicide at age thirty-one. (Lebon, 2003, 184) 70 Eugene Aucaigne with standard for main entrance to the Pennsylvania State Capitol building, on display in the studio of the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company, 1906. The Library Company of Philadelphia 72 Frederic Remington (1861-1909), The Broncho Buster, 1895, bronze, sand cast at the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas 73

Figures and Plates 3.6

xiii

Thomas Ball (1819-1911), Daniel Webster, 1852–53, sand cast by Ames Manufacturing Company, Chicopee, MA (unmarked), date of cast unknown, but probably after 1859. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK 74 3.7 Frederic Remington (1860-1909), Wicked Pony, 1898. Sand cast at the HenryBonnard Bronze Company, 1898. This is the first bronze cast made of this sculpture. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK 76 3.8 C. H. Niehaus (1855–1935) with bronze torso and head of Admiral Farragut, Roman Bronze Works foundry, Forsyth St., Manhattan, Riccardo Bertelli center, ca. 1899. In the background is a drum-shaped mold for lost-wax casting and in the loft are iron frames for sand molding. Photograph by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adolph A. Weinman papers, 1890–1959. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 78 3.9 C. H. Niehaus (1855-1935) with bronze torso and head of Admiral Farragut, Roman Bronze Works foundry, Forsyth St., Manhattan, Riccardo Bertelli center, ca. 1899. The lower coat section of the bronze is visible by the left stepstool. Photograph by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Adolph A. Weinman papers, 1890–1959. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution 79 3.10 Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), The Puritan, 1886–87 (model substantially reworked in the 1890s for reductions), lost-wax cast by Roman Bronze Works, casting date unknown. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK 80 3.11 Frederic Remington (1860–1909), The Norther, 1900, lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably cast 1900–01. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK 81 3.12 Frederic Remington (1861–1909), The Scalp, 1898 (model reworked 1904), lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably 1906–08. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK 82 3.13 The 27-ton sand mold under construction at the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company in preparation for casting in one piece George Grey Barnard’s (1863–1938) The Great God Pan, 1899. Lorado Taft, “The Casting of Pan,” Brush and Pencil, Vol. 3, no. 1 (October 1898), jstor.org 10/2/17 83 3.14 Frederic Remington (1860–1909), The Norther, 1900, detail of face showing scarf ends spread wide like a bowtie. Lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably cast 1900–01. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK 86 3.15 Frederic Remington (1860–1909), The Norther, 1900, detail of face showing scarf ends drooping down. Lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably cast 1900–01. Rees-Jones Collection 86 3.16 Frederic Remington (1860–1909), The Norther, 1900, detail of face showing scarf ends both blowing to one side. Lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably cast 1900–1901. Private collection 86

xiv

Figures and Plates

3.17

View of Investment Room, Roman Bronze Works ca. 1906, where wax models are being covered with mold material. The curved wax rods sticking out of the tops will become the metal circulation system during casting. Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America, New York: Italian American Directory, Co., 1906. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 87 View of wax room, Roman Bronze Works, 1912. The wax horse is probably for H. M. Shrady’s (1871-1922) Ulysses S. Grant Memorial (cavalry group) in Washington, DC, dedicated 1924. The model is made in several pieces with each piece full of core material for support, visible at the base of each section. The Bernard Titowsky Collection, John D. Calandra Italian American Collection (Queens College, CUNY) 88 Roman Bronze Works standard, ca. 1906. Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America, New York: Italian American Directory, Co., 1906. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 90 Georg Kolbe, Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child), 1905, bronze, height 30.5 cm, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin. Photo: Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin 94 Louis Tuaillon, Der Sieger (The Conqueror), ca. 1895–99, bronze, height 280 cm (without pedestal), Steubenplatz, Charlottenburg, Berlin. Photo: Gerhard-Marcks-Stiftung, Bremen 95 Karl Hilgers, Friedrich Wilhelm I, 1885, bronze, dimensions unknown (destroyed), Lustgarten, Potsdam. Photo: unknown, ca. 1935 (https:// www.stadtbilddeutschland.org/forum/index.php?thread/4559-der -lustgarten/) 100 Reinhold Begas, Neptun Brunnen (Neptune Fountain), 1888–91, bronze, Rathausstraße Berlin. Photo: Gerhard-Marcks-Stiftung, Bremen 101 Robert Toberentz, Fountain, 1879–87, stone and bronze, Postplatz Görlitz. Engraving after a photo: ‘Ernst Keil’s Nachfolger’, Die Gartenlaube (Leipzig) 36, no. 8 (1888): 125 104 Rudolf Siemering, Bull for the Washington Monument in Philadelphia, 1892, wax model with gate system. Anon., Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei in Eisen und Bronce, Leipzig, Berlin: Typ. Inst. Giesecke & Devrient, n. y. [1894]: 21. Photo: bpk / Kunstbibliothek, SMB / Dietmar Katz 107 Rudolf Siemering, Hl. Gertraud (St. Gertrude), 1896, bronze, height approx. 300 cm, Gertraudenbrücke, Berlin, currently stored and not on site. Photo: Manfred Brückels, 2009 (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Datei:Gertraudenbruecke_Berlin_2.jpg) 108

3.18

3.19

4.1

4.2

4.3

4.4 4.5

4.6

4.7

Figures and Plates

xv

4.8 Anon, Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei in Eisen und Bronce, Leipzig, Berlin: Typ. Inst. Giesecke & Devrient, n. y. [1894], cover. Photo: bpk / Kunstbibliothek, SMB / Dietmar Katz 109 5.1 “Casting in Plaster: A Demonstration.—Draining the Superfluous Plaster,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904), 273 119 5.2 “Casting in Plaster: A Demonstration by Mr. Cantoni. Moulder to the Royal College of Art, South Kensington,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904), 216 122 5.3 “Casting in Plaster: A Demonstration by Mr. Cantoni. The Final Operation: Removing the Mould from the Cast,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904), 270 123 5.4 “Twenty Minutes Portrait Sketch of Mr. Enrico Cantoni. By Professor Alphonse Legros,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904), 165 124 5.5 Aimé Jules Dalou, Alphonse Legros, ca. 1876, bronze, height 49.5 cm. © National Portrait Gallery, London 124 6.1 Workshop of the Fonderia Basile, photograph ca. 1896. Private Collection, Palermo 133 6.2 O’Tama Kioara, Portrait of Vincenzo Ragusa, oil on canvas, 1888. Private Collection, Rome 135 6.3 O’Tama Kioara, Painted Panel with the Works of the Ragusa Collection, tempera on cardboard, 1877–1881. Liceo Artistico, Palermo, “Vincenzo Ragusa e O’tama Kioara” 136 6.4 O’Tama Kioara, Tavola dipinta con le opere della Collezione Ragusa, tempera on cardboard 1877–81, Liceo Artistico, Palermo, “Vincenzo Ragusa e O’tama Kioara” 136 6.5 Ettore Ximenes, Portrait of O’Tama Kioara, pastel on paper, 1901. Private Collection, Palermo 137 6.6 Vincenzo Ragusa, Equestrian Monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi in the English Garden, bronze on marble, 1892, Palermo 139 6.7 Letterhead of the Fonderia Nelli, printed paper, nineteenth century. Private Collection 140 7.1 Kōtarō Takamura, Hand (Te), 1918, bronze, height 39 cm. The Collection of Asakura Museum of Sculpture, Taito, Tokyo 144 7.2 Vincenzo Ragusa, A Japanese Woman (Nihon fujin), 1880–81. Plaster, height 61.8 cm. The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts/DN Partcom 149

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Figures and Plates

7.3

Ujihiro Ōkuma, The Statue of Masujirō Ōmura (Ōmura Masujirō-zō), 1893, bronze, height 320 cm. Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo. Photographed by Morioka Jun on October 6, 1998. Provided by Japan Institute for the Survey and Conservation of Outdoor Sculpture 152 Marino Marini, Cavaliere (Cavalier), 1952, bronze, 105.5 × 87.5 × 90.5 cm. © [2019] Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/SIAE, Rome. Fukuoka City Museum/DN Partcom. The current location of the work by Marini that was displayed in Tokyo in 1961 is unknown. The bronze shown here is another in the artist’s series with the same title 160 Yoshitaka Nakamura, Revival of Quiet Forest (Namuri no mori no fukkatsu), 1999, bronze, aluminum, wood, and ivory, 180 × 90 × 400 cm. Tsukuba Museum 164 Medardo Rosso, Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette (Impression of the Boulevard. Lady with a Veil, 1892–97 ca.), installed in the gallery of the retrospective of Auguste Renoir at the Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904. Photograph by the artist. Private Collection 179 Medardo Rosso, Ecce puer (Behold the Child, 1906). Modern contact print from original glass negative, 17.9 × 13 cm. Date of photograph post-1906. Photograph by the artist. Private Collection 180 Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis, 1888–89, bronze, detail of cremation urn with the sprues used for the casting process, normally chiseled away after a cast has been made, left visible. Cimitero Monumentale, Milan. Photograph by the author 183 Medardo Rosso, Fine (La Ruffiana) (End. [The Procuress], (1883)). Professional photograph, date of photograph unknown but pre-1887. Rosso mounted this work on a broken piece of a door. Private Collection 183 Medardo Rosso, Carne altrui (Flesh of Others, 1883–84), bronze. Modern photo from original glass negative, 18 × 13 cm, date of photograph uncertain. Rosso arranged this work for display on a piece of fabric. Photograph by the artist. Private collection 184 Medardo Rosso, Enfant malade (Sick Child, 1893–95) with “halo” around the head, an artifact of the casting process resulting from a gap in the two parts of the gelatin mold that led the wax to spill out. Rather than removing it, the artist has left this artifact intact and taken it up as an aesthetic device. Modern contact print from an original glass negative, 24 × 17.2 cm. Date of photograph and print uncertain. Photograph by the artist. Private Collection 188 Medardo Rosso, Enfant malade (Sick Child, 1893–95) without “halo” around the head. Gelatin silver print, (photograph of a photograph, enlarged), 41.4 × 33.5. Date of photograph unknown. Photograph by the artist. Private Collection 188

7.4

7.5

8.1

8.2

8.3

8.4

8.5

8.6a

8.6b

Figures and Plates 8.7

8.8

8.9 8.10 8.11

8.12

8.13

8.14 9.1

9.2

9.3

9.4

9.5

xvii

Letterhead of the Fonderia Giovanni Strada, letter from Giovanni Strada to the lawyer C. Mantovani, 30 November 1883. Archivio storico civico del comune di Pavia, Archivio comunale, Ufficio tecnico comunale, busta 56, fasc. 1 192 Envelope of the Fonderia Giovanni Strada, letter from Giovanni Strada to the lawyer Griziotti, 9 April 1884. Archivio storico civico del comune di Pavia, Archivio comunale, Ufficio tecnico comunale, busta 56, fasc. 1 192 Medardo Rosso in his studio in Milan, 1883. Photographer unknown. Private collection 196 Medardo Rosso in his studio in Paris, self-portrait, post-1901. Modern contact print from original glass negative. 12 × 9 cm. Private Collection 201 Medardo Rosso in his studio in Paris with tools, post-1890. Photographer unknown, possibly self-portrait. Modern contact print from original glass negative, 19 × 14.5 cm. Private Collection 201 Medardo Rosso, Henri Rouart surrounded by tools in the artist’s studio, post-1890. Photograph by the artist. Modern print from original glass negative, 18 × 12.8 cm. Private Collection 202 Medardo Rosso, Madame Noblet with tools in the artist’s studio in Paris, post-1897. Modern print from original glass negative, 18 × 12.2 cm. Private Collection 202 Medardo Rosso, self-portrait in his studio in Paris, likely post-1900. Modern contact print, 12.7 × 13 cm. Private Collection 203 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94. Modern contact print from original glass negative, 18 × 24 cm. Date of photograph unknown. Photograph by the artist. Private collection 213 Leopold Horowitz, Full Length Portrait of Baron Oscar Ruben von Rothschild (1888–1909) at the age of ten, 1898, oil on canvas, 186 × 125.5 cm. Courtesy Galerie Boris Wilnitsky, Vienna 220 Medardo Rosso, Aetas aurea (The Golden Age), late-1885–1886. Modern contact print from original glass negative (photograph of a photograph). 29.7 × 23.4 cm. Date of photograph or re-photograph unknown. Photograph by the artist. Private collection 221 Photograph of the Viennese Rothschild family. Top left Louis Nathaniel (1882–1955), top right Oscar Ruben (1888–1909). Second row, left Valentine Noemi (1886–1969), middle Alphonse Mayer (1878–1942) and right Eugene Daniel (1884–1976). Taken ca. 1890. Reproduced with the permission of The Trustees of the Rothschild Archive 222 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94. Modern contact print from original glass negative, 18 × 24 cm. Photograph by the artist. Date of photograph uncertain. Private collection 231

xviii 9.6

10.1a 10.1b 10.1c 10.1d

10.2

10.3

10.4a

10.4b

10.5

Figures and Plates Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94. Vintage gelatin silver print, 10.2 × 6.1 cm. Date of photograph and print unknown. Photograph by the artist. Private collection 231 Detail of Black Plaster, Plate 1. Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson 241 Detail of Sussex Wax, Plate 8. Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson 241 Detail of Folkwang Bronze, Plate 24. © Museum Folkwang, Essen. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson 241 Detail of Ex-Meek Wax, Plate 7. Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. The surface detail of the Black Plaster shows clear signs of abrasion, revealing the plaster beneath the dark shiny surface. The heart-shaped detail on the upper-right contains additional material not found in the Folkwang Bronze or in the Sussex Wax, and is different from features seen in the Cologne Bronze (Plate 26). The features of the Black Plaster are similar to those seen in other casts, for example Ex-Sarfatti Wax (Plate 6), Nasher Wax (Plate 12), Ex-Brunauer Wax (Plate 5) and Timken Wax (Plate 9) 241 Detail of Folkwang Bronze, Plate 24. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photographs by Jerry Thompson. Slight raised lines on the child’s left cheek are evidence of the incisions that would have been made in the gelatin mold prior to the casting of the wax that was then used to make the bronze 242 Detail of Cologne Bronze, Plate 26. Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. The Cologne bronze has a far more finished look than the Folkwang Bronze (Plate 24): It is chased clean of investment material, the base, front and back are neatly filed, the large nails or screws used to hold the wax mold in place during casting have been removed, and the surface has been patinated to a shiny mottled brass color 244 Detail of Cologne Bronze, Plate 26. Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Raised lines that are evidence of the use of a gelatin mold to cast the wax used to make the bronze are seen below the cheek in this detail 245 Detail of Folkwang Bronze, Plate 24. The position of the nail under the child’s right ear of the Folkwang cast corresponds to the position of the hole that was left in the Cologne Bronze (Fig. 10.4a). © Museum Folkwang, Essen. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. 245 Detail of Ex-Sarfatti Wax, Plate 6. Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Rosso added plaster to stabilize the cast inside and tilt the object forward 247

Figures and Plates

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10.6a, Details of Sussex Wax, Plate 8. Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, b, c, d Inc. Photographs by Jerry Thompson. Exceptionally crisp surface features with sharp incisions and impressions on the front and back suggest that this was an early cast, and the details no longer visible on other casts suggest that it was made from a different plaster than the ones known today 250 10.7 Detail of Timken Wax, Plate 9. Jane Timken Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. An old crack in the wax is visible on the head 251 10.8 Detail of Nasher Wax, Plate 12. Nasher Sculpture Center. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. The work has been restored and varnished with a resin. Fine hairs are visible on the surface 252 10.9 Detail of Ex-Pawlowski Wax, Plate 10. Collection PCC. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. The light color of the cast is ascribed to heavy cleaning in the past 253 11.1 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo. Left to right: Plate 5, Ex-Brunauer Wax; Plate 7, Ex-Meek Wax; Plate 8, Sussex Wax; Plate 9, Timken Wax; Plate 10, Ex-Pawlowski Wax; Plate 12, Nasher Wax 256 12.1 The four Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo bronzes analyzed by pXRF. Left to right: Plate 24, Folkwang Bronze; Plate 25, Kröller Müller Bronze; Plate 26, Cologne Bronze; Plate 27, Ex-Bergamo Bronze 270 13.1 Overview of the twelve scanned Bambino ebreos. © Max Rahrig 276 13.2 Comparison of cross-sections through Ex-Meek Wax (red line) and Cologne Bronze (black). © Ronald Street 279 13.3 Quantified 3D comparison of the two sculptures. © Ronald Street 280 13.4 Deviation distribution. Calculation based on the surface comparison of Fig. 13.2. © Ronald Street 281 13.5 Cross-section comparison of five Bambino ebreos. © Ronald Street 282 13.6 Cross-section comparison of the Timken and Ex-Meek waxes. Similarities are clearly visible in the front and back, but the sculptures differ in size. © Ronald Street 283 13.7 Timken Wax. Border line of the halves of the mold is traced in orange. © Max Rahrig 285 13.8 Ex-Monti Wax with a mapping of key features (yellow) and unique characteristics (orange). © Max Rahrig 286 13.9 Ex-Pawlowski Wax with a mapping of key features (yellow). © Max Rahrig 287 13.10 3D comparison of the Ex-Monti Wax to the Nasher Wax and the Cologne, Folkwang, and Ex-Bergamo bronzes. © Max Rahrig 288

xx 13.11 13.12 13.13 13.14 13.15 13.16 13.17 13.18

14.1

14.2

14.3 and 14.4 14.5 14.6 and 14.7 14.8

14.9 14.10 14.11 14.12 and 14.13

Figures and Plates 3D comparison of Ex-Bergamo and Cologne bronzes. Visualization of the comparison is shown on the Cologne model. © Max Rahrig 289 Comparison of Cologne and Folkwang bronzes. Visualization based on Folkwang Bronze. © Max Rahrig 290 Comparison of the Ex-Pawlowski wax to the Ex-Meek, Sussex and Timken waxes. © Max Rahrig 291 Comparison of the Ex-Pawlowski wax to the Ex-Bergamo and KröllerMüller bronzes, the Ex-Meek wax and Black Plaster. © Max Rahrig 293 Comparison of the Ex-Pawlowski Wax to the Nasher and Ex-Monti waxes and the Folkwang Bronze. © Max Rahrig 293 Comparison of the Ex-Pawlowski Wax to the Timken, Ex-Brunner and Sussex waxes and the Cologne Bronze. © Max Rahrig 293 Comparison of the Bambino ebreos to Black Plaster. © Max Rahrig 296 Ex-Monti Wax with a mapping of key features (yellow), unique characteristics (orange) and the border line of the gelatin mold (pink). © Max Rahrig 298 Nine casts of Medardo Rosso’s Bambino ebreo, gathered before an exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York in 2014. The damaged cast is the first one on the right. Photograph courtesy the author 303 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo, wax over plaster, 22.9 × 15.2 × 20.3 cm. The Ex-Brunauer Cast, seen here in 2014 in its damaged condition, and in a photograph taken between 1905 and 1912 in the Brunauer family home in Chicago. Photographs courtesy the author and the Brunauer family 305 Visible damage to the Ex-Brunauer Cast (front and back). Photographs courtesy the author. Photograph courtesy Nick Knight 305 A detail of the damaged and badly restored nose of the Ex-Brunauer Cast. Photograph courtesy the author 306 The cast on the original pedestal, and a view of the tilted metal axis. Photographs courtesy the author 307 Ron Street, senior manager of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 3D Imaging, Molding, and Prototyping department, at work on analyzing scans of multiple casts of Bambino ebreo. Photograph courtesy the author 308 Superimposition of the scans of two heads. Photograph courtesy the author 308 A 3D print. Photograph courtesy Nick Knight 309 The three steps to create the individual molds for each damaged area. Photograph courtesy Nick Knight 309 Before and after the repositioning and cleaning of the metal axis, and the cleaning of the pedestal. Photograph courtesy the author 310

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14.14

UV light shone on the sculpture’s nose area reveals the wax that was applied during an earlier restoration. Photograph courtesy the author 311 14.15 The nose area after the wax of the earlier restoration had been removed. Photograph courtesy the author 312 14.16 Re-forming the neck area using a silicon mold. Photograph courtesy the author 312 14.17 Applying pillows of Klucel G and Arbocel dissolved in water to fill in the areas of lost plaster. Photograph courtesy the author 313 14.18 Wax reintegration, midway through retouching. Photograph courtesy the author 314 14.19 and Front and back views of the restored sculpture. Photograph courtesy 14.20 the author 315 15.1 Medardo Rosso, Rieuse (known as Petite rieuse), early 1890s. Photograph and print by Medardo Rosso 320 15.2 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax cast with plaster interior, detail. Private Collection. Courtesy of Clore Wyndham. Photo: Martha Ellis Leach 321

Plates 1

2

3

4

Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, plaster, 24.8 × 19.5 × 17.8 cm. Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Black Plaster 326 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, plaster, 25.3 × 14.8 × 17.3 cm. Private Collection. Photograph by Henry Lie. Known in this volume as Brown Plaster 327 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, gelatin silver print. Sculpture originally owned by Louis-Sylvain Noblet, now in the Musée de Troyes. Troyes, Musée de Beaux-Arts. Photograph by the artist. Known in this volume as Ex-Noblet Wax. (Studied but did not travel to Study Day) 327 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 41 × 36.6 × 39 cm. Originally owned by Louis-Sylvain Noblet, now in the Musée de Troyes. Work is shown in its current damaged state, in which bits of wax have been reattached to the plaster. Troyes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Inv. 9.11. Photo Carole Bell, Ville de Troyes. Known in this volume as Ex-Noblet Wax. (Studied but did not travel to Study Day) 328

xxii 5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

Figures and Plates Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 22.9 × 15.2 × 20.3 cm (9 × 6 × 8 inches). Originally owned by Erna Brunauer. Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Ex-Brunauer Wax 328 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 24.2 × 19 × 16 cm. Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Ex-Sarfatti Wax 329 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, H. 23.1 cm (9 1/8 in). Originally owned by Charles Meek. Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Ex-Meek Wax 329 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 23.5 × 18 × 16.5 cm (9 ¼ × 7 × 6 ½ in). Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Sussex Wax 330 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 25.4 × 14.9 × 1.6 cm (10 × 5 7/8 × 7 5/8 in). Jane Timken Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Timken Wax 330 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 23 × 17.5 × 15.5 cm. Inscribed “M. Rosso / Pawlowski”. Originally owned by Gaston de Pawlowski. Collection PCC, Switzerland. Photograph by Pieter Coray. Known in this volume as Ex-Pawlowksi Wax 331 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 23 × 19.5 × 15.2 cm. Signed “M. Rosso” on right. Originally owned by Romolo Monti. Collection PCC, Switzerland. Photograph by Pieter Coray. Known in this volume as Ex-Monti Wax. (Studied but did not travel to Study Day) 331 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 21.9 × 14.9 × 17.8 cm (8 5/8 × 5 7/8 × 7 in). Signed and dedicated “Tu/Terlol/ton Rosso”. Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. Photograph by David Heald. Known in this Study as Nasher Wax 332 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 22.9 × 15.9 × 19.1 cm (9 × 6 ¼ × 7 ½ in). Originally owned by Jean-Baptiste Faure. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by Mrs. R. E. Smith, 80.147 332 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 25 × 15.5 × 17.5 cm. Signed and dedicated at the right: “M Rosso / [à] Madame Chabrier”. Private collection. © MSK Ghent. Photograph by Michael Burez 333

Figures and Plates 15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

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Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 23 × 16 × 12 cm. Originally owned by Umberto Giordano. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv.-Nr. NG 42/72. Photograph by Andres Kilger. (Studied but did not travel to Study Day) 333 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, black wax with plaster interior, 24.5 × 15 × 17 cm. Signed and dedicated at the right “A mon ami Groult / Rosso”. Originally owned by Camille Groult. Private Collection. Photograph c[ourtesy Paolo Baldacci]. Photographer unknown 334 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, H 22.9 cm (without base) × W 11.4 cm. Dedicated and signed “M. Rosso / à Madame Cremetti”. Originally owned by the wife of Eugene Cremetti. Private collection. Courtesy of Clore Wyndham. Photograph by Martha Ellis Leach 334 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base. 25.4 × 17 × 21 cm, including base: 35 × 17 × 21 cm. Area of base: 16 × 12 cm. Signed and dedicated on the right “M. Rosso / à Mons. Mendl”. Collection of Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. © Belvedere, Vienna. (Studied but did not travel to Study Day) 335 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior. H. 22 cm (8 5/8 in). Signed and dedicated to Marguerite Piérard (partially lost). Originally owned by Louis Piérard. Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s 335 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 23.5 × 15.5 × 21 cm. Originally owned by Etha Fles. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Inv. 2024, 1914 336 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 22.7 × 14 × 19.7 cm (8.94 × 5.51 × 7.76 in). Inscribed and signed on shoulder: “a Madame Ravenna / l’ami Rosso”. Originally owned by Luigia (Gina) Ravenna. Private Collection. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London-Paris-Salzburg. Photograph by Stephen White 336 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, H 22.3cm (8 3/4 in). Inscribed “A Sara Sordi” and signed “Rosso.” Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s 337 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 21 × 16 × 18 cm. Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of owner 337

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24a, 24b, Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, bronze, 25 × 17.5 × 24c 16 cm. Originally owned by Karl Ernst Osthaus. Acquired in 1904 for the Museum Folkwang, Hagen, since 1922 Essen. Inv. P67. © Museum Folkwang, Essen. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photographs by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Folkwang Bronze 338 25 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), circa 1892 (cast circa 1905–1906), bronze, H 24.2 cm. Private Collection. © Courtesy Stichting Kröller-Müller Museum. Known in this volume as Kröller-Müller Bronze 339 26 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, bronze, 23.6 × 17.8 × 15.2 cm (9 3/8 × 7 × 6 in). Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Cologne Bronze 339 27 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, bronze, 21 × 16 × 18 cm. Signed “Rosso” on back. Originally owned by Luigi Bergamo. Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of owner. Known in this volume as Ex-Bergamo Bronze 340

Contributors Sharon Hecker is an art historian and curator specializing in modern and contemporary Italian sculpture. She is a leading international expert on Medardo Rosso and has authored over twenty publications about the artist. Her most recent publication is A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (University of California Press, 2017), awarded the Millard Meiss Publication Fund from the College Arts Association. She has curated numerous exhibitions on Rosso at the Harvard University Art Museums, the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, and, with Julia Peyton-Jones, Medardo Rosso: Sight Unseen and His Encounters with London (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, 2018). For her work on Rosso she has been awarded fellowships from the Mellon, Getty, and Fulbright Foundations. She has also published on other Italian artists, including Lucio Fontana, Luciano Fabro, and Francesco Lo Savio. She is currently curating an exhibition of Fontana’s ceramics at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (2024). Francesca Bewer is Research Curator for Conservation and Technical Studies Programs at the Harvard Art Museums, as well as Director of the Summer Institute for Technical Studies in Art. An expert in the technical study of bronzes and on the history of conservation, she has published extensively on European bronze sculpture of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries and is the author of A Laboratory for Art. Harvard’s Fogg Museum and the Emergence of Conservation in America, 1900– 1950. She is a founding member of the Copper Alloy Sculpture Techniques and history: International iNterdisciplinary Group (CAST:ING). She was awarded the 2012 College Art Association/Heritage Preservation Award for Distinction in Scholarship and Conservation. Ann Boulton is the former objects conservator at the Baltimore Museum of Art and has researched French bronze sculpture by Antoine-Louis Barye and Henri Matisse, as well as American bronze sculpture at the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma, where she curated the exhibition Frontier to Foundry (2014) and has been the staff objects conservator since 2009. She is part of a multinational interdisciplinary team for the publication of The Guidelines for Best Practices in the Technical Examination of Cast Bronze Sculpture to be published by the J. Paul Getty Museum.

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Contributors

Federico Carò is a member of the Department of Scientific Research at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. He specializes in the study of inorganic materials and techniques employed in artistic production. He received his Ph.D. in Earth Science from the University of Pavia, Italy, where he worked on the characterization of natural and artificial building materials. At The Metropolitan Museum, he investigates inorganic materials and techniques employed in artistic production, in close collaboration with conservators and curators. His research interests focus on the mineralogical, petrographic, and geochemical characterization of stone and other geological materials in provenance and conservation studies. Penelope Curtis has worked on Rodin, Bourdelle, Gonzalez and Hepworth and with many contemporary artists. She is the author of three thematic monographs (Oxford University Press, 1999), (Ridinghouse/Getty, 2008), (Yale University Press, 2017). She has been Director of the Henry Moore Institute, of Tate Britain and of the Gulbenkian Museum. Francesca Caterina Izzo is a professor of Chemistry at University of Venice (Ca’ Foscari). She specializes in conservation research through the organic analysis of artists’ materials and represents the working group ‘Diagnostics For Cultural Heritage’ at the Italian Chemistry Society. Andrew Lacey is a contemporary artist, archeometallurgist, founder, and independent scholar based in Devon, UK. His particular approach to making sculpture and exploring the nature of materials is influenced by historic, archeological and scientific study. Lacey’s fascination with bronze, combined with the capacity to cast everything himself—and therefore to intercept in the creative process at any stage—allows him to take an artistic approach that is spontaneous, experimental, and highly focused. Elisabeth Lebon is a leading expert on art bronze foundries and nineteenth-century casting techniques. She is the author of Dictionary of Art Bronze Founders: France 1890–1950 (Sladmore Editions, 2014). She is a member of the Cast:Ing Project Scientific Committee.

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Massimiliano Marafon Pecoraro is an art historian specializing in medieval and modern art history. He teaches at the Università degli Studi di Palermo. Luc Megens is a specialist in Science for Conservation and Restoration at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. Having studied Classics and archaeology as well as chemistry, he obtained a PhD at the University of Groningen on the age and origins of particulate organic matter in coastal waters. Since 2004 he has been working as a scientist at the laboratory of the Cultural Heritage Agency with a focus on ceramic, glass, and metal heritage objects and pigments, and architectural paint research. He is also involved in the Conservation and Restoration training program of the University of Amsterdam. Austin Nevin is the Head of the Department of Conservation at the Courtauld Institute of Art. He is a Fellow and Vice President of the International Institute for the Conservation of Artistic and Historical Works, and Associate Editor of Studies in Conservation. Max Rahrig is Research Assistant at the University of Bamberg, KDWT—Centre for Heritage Conservation Studies and Technologies. He works on 3D applications and nondestructive testing methods for cultural heritage. Lluïsa Sàrries Zgonc is a private conservator and art restorer specializing in contemporary art, classic modernist painting, sculpture, new media, installations, and exhibition support. She is an active member of Verband der Restauratoren and the American Institute for Conservation. Ronald E. Street was the Manager of 3D Imaging and Modeling at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. He supervised The Met’s molding studio for many of his more than thirty years at the Museum, and was called upon for advice and collaborations by institutions around the world. Yasuko Tsuchikane holds a PhD in Japanese art history from Columbia University and teaches at The Cooper Union and Waseda University, Tokyo, as an adjunct assistant

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Contributors

professor. Specializing in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century Japanese art, she has focused her research on the country’s intellectual and artistic discourses and the global complication and repositioning of its premodern visual culture into modern ceramics, religious architectural art, and calligraphy. Selected publications include “Picasso as Other: Koyama Fujio and Polemics of Postwar Japanese Ceramics,” Review of Japanese Culture and Society, 2014, and “Rescuing Temples and Empowering Art: Naiki Jinzaburō and the Rise of Civic Initiatives in Meiji Kyoto,” in Kyoto Visual Culture in the Early Edo and Meiji Periods: The Arts of Reinvention (Routledge, 2016). Currently, she is working on a book on Dōmoto Inshō, a modern Japanese painter, and his collaboration with patron networks to produce works for Buddhist temples. Rebecca Wade is an art historian and curator. Her research interests lie between nineteenthcentury museum and exhibition cultures, art and design education, and the production, circulation and display of plaster casts. She has held postdoctoral research fellowships with the Museum of Classical Archaeology (University of Cambridge Museums), the Henry Moore Foundation, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. She is co-editor of Art versus Industry? Visual and Industrial Cultures in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Manchester University Press, 2016), and her research monograph Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain was published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. Veronika Wiegartz is an art historian and curator at the Gerhard-Marcks-Haus in Bremen. Her research focuses on the reception of antiquity and on twentieth-century sculpture. Several of her publications address the technique and artistic possibilities of the lost-wax process.

Introduction Sharon Hecker This book began as an interdisciplinary study of a series of casts made by the sculptor Medardo Rosso (1858–1928). Rosso is known for his artistic achievements in modern sculpture, but the materials and methods he used for creating his works—casting by the lost-wax or cire perdue method—and the way he manipulated the technique, are equally important for understanding the extraordinary nature of his achievements in his time. When I began to work on Rosso in the early 1990s, it was thought that his wax sculptures had been individually hand-modeled rather than cast in molds. This assertion can still be found in publications on the artist, and the material he employed is noted as “beeswax” of the kind typically used for modeling sculptures. But a more attentive study of the artist’s materials and methods reveals that neither of these assertions is true. The investigation of Rosso’s process has its roots in an essay published twenty years ago by then-Tate Conservator Derek Pullen that first described Rosso’s technique.1 Pullen was the first to challenge the assumption that Rosso’s works were hand-modeled instead of cast in molds. His essay led me to organize an interdisciplinary study in 1999 and a subsequent exhibition with Harry Cooper at Harvard University’s Arthur M. Sackler Museum in 2003, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions. In the Harvard study, we were able to provide an expanded account of the artist’s working procedure.2 By comparing Rosso’s descriptions in his letters with material traces located on the works, we confirmed through primary documentation and material evidence Pullen’s earlier statement that Rosso’s waxes were not hand-modeled but were actually cast serially in flexible gelatin molds. The Harvard Study was a more detailed attempt to understand Rosso’s process, but we were not yet able to appreciate its subtleties.3 Because of the range of works we saw, no conclusive results emerged from the samples of wax we 1  Derek Pullen, “Rosso’s Sculpture Technique,” in Medardo Rosso, Luciano Caramel, exh. cat. (London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1994), 59–63. 2  Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, ed., Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, exh. cat. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 3  It was difficult for us at that time to make deeper comparisons between casts of the same subject because we had to rely on our memories and photographs as we traveled from place to place to see casts. More accurate technical methods, such as digital scanning, were still in their infancy, not portable, and cost prohibitive.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_002

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obtained from a few casts in order to analyze their composition. We concluded at the time that it was not beneficial to publish our wax-composition results. But the fact that Rosso was a founder who made multiple casts rather than hand-modeling each wax object uniquely changed the entire narrative about this artist, his conceptual approach to sculpture and his working methods. This led to our decision to continue researching in order to learn about his processes and their importance for the history of sculptural technique and the development of modern sculpture. A more recent development occurred due to later discussions with conservators, conservation scientists and experts in the field of the history of techniques. Lost-wax casting, still being practiced regularly in Italy, was long forgotten in France, where Rosso came to work in the 1890s. Making the connection between Rosso’s use of the technique of cire perdue and the time and place in which he was working sheds new light on the historical meaning of his enterprise. His arrival in Paris coincided with the moment in which French foundries became flooded with Italian immigrants, who, through a transnational exchange of know-how about the lost-wax technique, helped launch France to the forefront of the bronze-casting industry. Rosso’s case both fits into and stands out from this history, for he at once reclaimed the process of working in lost wax and used it in new, unorthodox ways to establish his modernity. The new understanding of Rosso’s materials and techniques in context formed the direct impetus for this book. The more we studied Rosso’s case, the more we realized we needed to see his art within the broader context of the history of lost-wax casting at the fin de siècle. We therefore decided to amplify our book and dedicate the first half to a discussion of how lost wax was brought back to France in the 1890s. As we continued to research the question, we discovered that lost wax was also introduced to other countries around the world in the same period, in many cases via Italian sculptors and founders. We decided to include essays on other countries in which a similar phenomenon occurred. The second half of the book is dedicated to the specific case of Rosso and the revolutionary way in which he used lost-wax casting during these years. The lost wax-method for casting intricate bronze sculptures dates back to over 6,000 years ago. The process, by which molten metal is poured into a mold that had been created by means of a wax model subsequently melted away or “lost” during the casting, was used around the world and was essentially unvaried until the eighteenth century. However, in the nineteenth century, lost-wax casting fell out of use in many European countries, and it was unknown or abandoned in places like the US and Japan. In France, which became the world leader in bronze casting, another process came to be used—sand casting by

Introduction

3

piece molds—and the expertise in lost-wax casting all but disappeared. One exception was in Italy, where lost-wax casting continued undisturbed. Given the rarity of lost-wax casts in late nineteenth- century France and a growing demand for sculptures made using this technique, skilled Italian craftsmen were imported into France to produce casts for a burgeoning clientele, creating an international market. While France became the unquestioned leader in the industry of bronze casting, the transfer of knowledge regarding the lost-wax technique via Italian founders extended to countries such as Great Britain, the US, Germany, and Japan in the same period. In order for the reader to understand the nature of lost-wax casting as a technique and how it differs from sand casting, this book opens with an essay by Francesca Bewer, an expert in bronze technology and the history of bronze casting at the Harvard Art Museums, which describes the steps involved in the process. Chapter 2, an essay by Elisabeth Lebon, expert on nineteenth-century French bronze founders and casting techniques, recounts the history of sculptors who were also founders and their attempts to recover the lost-wax method in late nineteenth-century France. Lebon’s research, thus far published only in French, is here made available for the first time in English and amplified to include specific case studies. As Lebon shows, in France, only a few sculptors decided to cast bronzes by themselves using lost wax during a limited period, between 1880 and 1895. She posits the close relationship between sculpture and political, technical, and artistic history in France, and the role of Italian founders in the development of the French lost-wax casting industry. A second case is of immigrant Italian founders in the US. In Chapter 3, Ann Boulton recounts the story of two important art-bronze foundries that emerged in Manhattan in the late nineteenth century. The Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company and the Roman Bronze Works attracted elite sculptors as clients in part due to the passion and business acumen of their managers, Frenchman Eugene Aucaigne and the Italian Riccardo Bertelli. In the first decade of the twentieth century they competed for large commissions of monuments and for orders of small-scale serial sculptures made either by the sand-casting process in the case of Henry-Bonnard, or by lost-wax casting at Roman Bronze Works. Boulton’s essay discusses their competition for clients, the emerging preference for lost-wax casting over sand casting among some elite sculptors and technical details of both processes, illustrated by little-known photographs of their foundries. Germany, too, derived its knowledge of lost-wax casting from Italian examples. In Chapter 4, Veronika Wiegartz quotes Hermann Luer, who in his Geschichte der Metallkunst (History of Metal Art) of 1904 outlines the European situation: “It was only in the last few decades that the well-proven

4

Hecker

wax process was almost universally reapplied in the casting of sculptures” to show that in Germany, too, the monument boom of the nineteenth century had led to an industrialization of bronze casting and the replacement of the lost-wax process by cheaper sand casts. However, artists such as Christian Daniel Rauch (1777–1857) complained about the necessary and high proportion of subsequent chasing of the bronze surface required in sand casting. As Wiegartz points out, as a result, whenever discussing sculptures in lost wax, the art journals of the late nineteenth century emphasized the successful detailing. At the same time, these contributions reflect the gradual spread of the lost-wax process in Germany. The foundries in Lauchhammer, the foundries of the Gladenbeck family in Berlin and the Königliche Erzgießerei Ferdinand von Miller in Munich played a key role. Study trips of some founders to Italy, in one case also an apprenticeship spent at the Fonderia Alessandro Nelli in Rome, suggest a transfer of know-how from the foundries there to Germany. The phenomenon of Italian founders establishing lost-wax casting in foreign countries finds a parallel in Britain. In Chapter 5, Rebecca Wade describes how Italian founders dominated the production of lost-wax casting in Britain around the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She draws a connection with Italian plaster-figure makers who, a century earlier, migrated to Britain as itinerant figurinai or “image sellers.” The production of plaster casts was important to the process of casting in bronze and the two trades operated in proximity. Wade focuses on the transition made by one maker, Enrico Cantoni (ca. 1859–1923), from casting in plaster to casting in bronze using the lost-wax process. Cantoni’s work at the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) and his teaching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art, make him an important figure in the history of British sculptural production. He operated during a crucial moment for the development of sculpture, producing bronzes for artists associated with the New Sculpture movement, including Alfred Stevens and Frederic Leighton, in addition to the emerging European modern sculpture of Ivan Meštrović. A final case, involving lost-wax casting in Japan, emerges in the two essays by Massimiliano Marafon Pecoraro and Yasuko Tsuchikane respectively on Vincenzo Ragusa, a sculptor from Palermo. In Chapter 6, Marafon Pecoraro tells the story from the Italian viewpoint, describing how, in 1854, with the Kanagawa treaty signed with the US, Japan interrupted three centuries of political and cultural isolation by opening up to the West. In the following decades, with the beginning of industrialization in Japan, the government convened foreign consultants to favor Westernization in the cultural policy established by the Tokyo School of Fine Arts. Ragusa, who from 1876 to 1882 lived in Tokyo, set up a studio in his residence and exported the Italian lost-wax casting technique to Japan.

Introduction

5

Tsuchikane’s essay (Chapter 7) tells a different story about lost wax from the Japanese viewpoint. She claims that the technique brought momentous stimuli that helped Japanese artists to reshape their modern consciousness of making bronze art objects. She believes that the technique was not well accepted in Japan when it first arrived with Ragusa between 1876 and 1882 through his position as Japan’s first foreign professor teaching European academic training in sculpture. She shows how the technique was “rediscovered” in Japan in the early 1960s, when it became seen as the mark of modernity in sculpture. The second half of the book is devoted to a case study of Rosso, who was the first to both use the lost-wax procedure and overturn its rules in many creative ways. The standard of the time was to make casts look as similar as possible to the model provided by the artist to the foundry. Despite possible variations in size, color, and medium, foundries that engaged in the process of making multiples prided themselves on guaranteeing a high level of quality characterized by consistency and homogeneity. These aspects were assured by improved methods of mechanical reproduction that developed from the 1830s in France through industrial advances.4 The uniformity of replication led serial sculpture to enjoy great market success. However, serial sculpture’s immense popularity posed new problems. For one thing, it created a tension between sculpture as High Art and sculpture as multiple mass-produced objects. The names of major French founders such as Ferdinand Barbedienne became powerful as international brands and status symbols—so much so that at times the name of the sculptor who originally created the model for the work became obscured. This led sculptors to seek new ways to disengage from the decorative/commercial aspect of their art, while still attempting to benefit from serial sculpture’s popularity. While some sculptors embraced seriality, others began to look for avenues to escape the control of foundries in order to retain artistic and market control as well as legal rights. Rosso was among the latter artists. He gave the technique a modern twist by casting in a do-it-yourself fashion, thus subverting the common practice of leaving casting to the professional foundries. Although he was not a professional founder, he had enough basic knowledge of the lost-wax technique and he capitalized on French demand by producing his casts through the method that he had learned in Italy. Claiming to reveal the secrets of the forgotten casting method, he staged casting performances in a foundry he built for himself in Paris. In other cases, he preserved the normally transitional waxes as final

4  See Jacques de Caso, “Serial Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, ed. Jeanne L. Wasserman, exh. cat. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 1–27.

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works by not turning them into bronzes, which would have involved melting away the wax. He used his technical knowledge to overturn the rules of cire perdue by varying material compositions and basic forms and leaving visible artifacts of the process on his works, rendering each cast a unique object. In order to probe the innovative experiments made by Rosso, we present the results of an art-historical and scientific study of materials, processes, and techniques used in a series of his casts. We chose to examine one series in detail, Rosso’s Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy, date of creation of subject: 1892–94), because the unexpected level of variation found in these casts pinpoints the historical moment of transition from traditional to novel uses of lost-wax casting. While utilizing methods of mechanical reproduction, Rosso made each cast different, so that Bambino ebreo became the object of ongoing artistic and technical experimentation. Such difference within similarity means that while, when seen separately, the casts may look alike, when observed side by side they reveal many variations in form, reproductive materials, surface definition, detail, size, layers of wax, and angulation. They range from models cast in plaster to a significant number of wax casts, both materially sensitive and physically unstable, some of which have also undergone, over time, color change, mechanical degradation, and physical damage. There are also a few highly crafted bronzes with markedly divergent patinas. Other variations include different ways of mounting and securing Bambino ebreo casts on an assortment of original bases. Additionally, the casts display different kinds of finish on the sculptural surface, some variations due to interventions by the artist, others a result of their physical histories, which include damage, restoration, and aging. A preface by Penelope Curtis situates Rosso’s achievements within the broader question of modern sculptural reproduction. This is followed by two essays (Chapters 8 and 9) by this author, Sharon Hecker. The first is a critical historical account of Rosso as an Italian sculptor-founder in Paris and his creative transformations of modern sculpture through the use of technique. In the second essay, I propose a new conceptual approach to examining serial sculpture by seeing Rosso’s seriality as an integral component of the artist’s unstable act of seeing and perceiving his subjects. The technical section opens with Chapter 10, a comparative visual examination of numerous casts of the Bambino ebreo by conservation scientist Austin Nevin and myself. This work is based on a Study Day held at Peter Freeman, Inc. in New York, before the opening of an exhibition on these works, in which a group of specialists was invited to examine and discuss the different casts. The participants included an international team of scholars—art historians, conservators, and conservation scientists: Bewer, Nevin and Lebon, then-Director

Introduction

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of Harvard University’s Straus Center for Conservation, Henry Lie, conservator Lluïsa Sàrries Zgonc and myself. While many loans were secured for the Study Day, some casts were considered too fragile or damaged to travel. Nevin and I therefore traveled throughout Europe and the US to examine and document selected known casts of Bambino ebreo in situ. The pre-Study Day travel provided us with a baseline in preparation for the analysis of ten casts of Bambino ebreo that arrived in New York and were placed on a long table side by side in the gallery. After the Study Day, Nevin and Francesca Caterina Izzo, an organic chemist from the University of Venice, were able to analyze an unprecedented number of micro-samples taken from Rosso’s waxes in order to determine their composition. They report on their findings in Chapter 11. The analyses of the close relationship between Rosso’s casts and plaster models address issues related to surface quality and material composition. We also invited Federico Carò, member of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Scientific Research Department, to conduct portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry of the bronzes (pXRF) in order to investigate their alloy compositions. For works that were unable to travel, we obtained pXRF analyses and scans from European specialists such as XLab and Unocad, as well as Luc Megens, Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands. Carò and Megens describe their findings in the Chapter 12, where they discuss the results of surface analysis of Rosso’s bronzes. The late Ronald Street, Manager of 3D Imaging and Modeling at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Scientific Research Department, complemented our examination with digital scans of each cast. After Street’s tragic and untimely passing, Max Rahrig of the University of Bamberg, KDWT-Centre for Heritage Conservation Studies and Technology, graciously agreed to complete and write up Street’s findings for an essay in this volume (Chapter 13). This text allows us to rethink the question of uniformity in serial casts through the results of the digital scans of Rosso’s casts. We hope that in the future, the data from this study will serve as the basis for further additions by institutions and private collectors interested in studying Rosso’s casting materials and techniques. Chapter 14 describes an example of a restoration of a Bambino ebreo cast by Sàrries Zgonc, gathering up and using the information gleaned from the Study Day and its use of new technology. It is hoped that this restoration can provide a model for future conservation and restorations of sculptures by Rosso. The book closes with the viewpoint of Andrew Lacey, a contemporary sculptor and founder, who writes about Rosso’s working methods and sculptures by sharing insights into the practicalities and choices faced by an artist-founder. Lacey discusses issues such as the engagement and struggle with materials,

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techniques, the role of chance, accidents, and economic factors, without idealizing or historicizing the technical features of sculpture previously analyzed throughout the book. Our art-historical and technical examination has allowed us to bring to light Rosso’s innovations against the backdrop of a larger story. The goal throughout has been to learn more about his experiments in relation to the history of the cire perdue technique. We wished to see Rosso—one of the most innovative sculptors of the modern era—in the context of the material technique that his countrymen helped revive and that he reinterpreted. We see our book as part of a growing body of scholarly studies on serial reproduction.5 Ultimately, we hope that the results presented here will be of interest to scholars, museum curators, conservators, collectors, and art lovers to further their understanding of the processes involved in lost-wax casting, as well as a record for future historical investigation of serial sculpture in the late nineteenth century, contributing to condition assessment and conservation treatments. The utility of this book lies in its ability to provide a model for interdisciplinary work in the field, given its basis in a combination of technical and art-historical studies and its collaborative methods. Although this study focuses on one subject, the methods and results are applicable to studies of other subjects by Rosso, as well as to other serially produced sculptures. 5  For similar studies, see Jeanne L. Wasserman, Daumier Sculpture: A Critical and Comparative Study (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1969); Wasserman, Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture; Jane Bassett et al., The Craftsman Revealed: Adriaen De Vries, Sculptor in Bronze (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2008); and Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphn. Barbour, and Shelley Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2010).

part 1 The Global Revival of Lost Wax Casting

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chapter 1

Lost-Wax Casting Francesca G. Bewer Lost-wax casting is a process by which a model made of wax is translated into metal. It has been used for millennia across the world for utilitarian and industrial objects of many kinds, as well as for fine arts such as jewelry and sculpture, and might be considered in terms of alternating positive and negative steps. In its most simple iteration, a wax model (positive) is embedded in a special fire-resistant, or refractory, material that thereby forms a mold. When the wax is melted out of this mold, the hollow impression (negative) left by the wax becomes the receptacle—and thus serves as a matrix—for the molten metal. The solidified metal replica (positive) of the model is broken free of the mold and reworked to various degrees to bring it to completion. While the tools, materials, and number of steps involved in this translation of sorts have varied, the basic principles of lost-wax casting have not changed throughout the ages. This discussion will focus on the production of sculpture—and in particular that made of bronze—which for our purposes will be used as a term that stands in for any copper-based alloy. When the sculptor or craftsperson makes a one-off wax model intended for casting and it is translated into a unique bronze, such a work is referred to as a “direct” cast. Small or slim figures can be modeled in solid wax and thereby translated into solid metal forms. Since bronze is costly—and heavy—and larger volumes of metal can shrink in unforeseen ways, thereby potentially marring the cast, most bronzes are cast hollow. To achieve this, models are created in which the wax part is merely a thin shell. The wax layer is shaped around a refractory internal mold, or “core,” that defines the hollow interior of a statue—or the reverse in the case of a relief. Throughout the centuries, the wax most commonly used has been that of bees, which was mixed with other materials such as tallow and turpentine to make it more malleable, or rosin or paraffin to make it harder. More recently, synthetic waxes have been adopted. The artist may make the wax into a malleable putty that can be shaped with fingers and modelling tools, or melt it so that it can be formed into sheets to ensure a thin, even overall thickness, and brushed or poured into a mold. Lost-wax casting is also a way of replicating in bronze a model that is made in a material unsuited for direct lost-wax casting, such as clay or plaster, as was

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_003

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most often the case with nineteenth-century models. In such instances, the product is called an “indirect” cast, since the process entails producing a wax “inter-model” that is designed for casting. This is achieved by creating a reusable mold from the original model, which not only serves as a matrix for the production of multiple casts, but also as a record of the form, and can allow for the delegation of various production steps. Before flexible molding materials such as gelatin or synthetic rubber were available, molds were often made out of multiple pieces of plaster—a piece-mold consisting of two or more sections that fit together like a three-dimensional jigsaw puzzle to work around undercuts (protruding parts or recesses) and avoid damage to either the model or mold during its disassembly. Using flexible materials simplifies the molding process because they can be peeled back in larger sections from the surface of the original model while preserving any number of complex undercuts. Since flexible molds are easier to make and use than plaster piece-molds, they have replaced the latter in modern foundries. The diagram (fig. 1.1) illustrates the indirect process, including the creation of a gelatin mold, and is based on Medardo Rosso’s Bookmaker, beginning with the artist’s fresh clay model (step 1). In order to create a more durable plaster model that can be used to make a reusable mold, the clay is covered with— and embedded in—plaster to capture the form with all of its detail in a “waste mold” (step 2). The clay is then scooped out of the plaster mold (step 3) leaving a hollow matrix, which is filled with fresh plaster (step 4). The waste mold is chipped away from (in other words, sacrificed—hence the term “waste” mold) the primary plaster model (step 5). Following this, a plaster flange is formed below the base to help anchor the subsequent parts of a piece-mold (step 6). The plaster model is coated with a layer of clay that defines the space to be filled by the flexible gelatin mold material (step 7). A plaster mother mold is formed in sections over the clay (step 8) and will serve as structural support to the gelatin mold layer. The mother mold is disassembled in order to remove the clay (step 9). Molten gelatin is poured into the reassembled plaster piecemold, filling the gap between primary plaster model and mother mold (step 10). Today, rubber molding compounds have replaced gelatin and depending on their properties may be applied directly onto the model and then backed with a mother mold. Once the gelatin has set, the mother mold is removed, and the flexible mold layer is cut and carefully removed from the plaster model to avoid ripping it (step 11). The gelatin mold is reinserted into the mother mold and liquefied wax is painted and/or poured into the matrix and built up to the thickness that is desired for the bronze (step 12). The plaster piece-mold is removed, and the gelatin layer is carefully peeled off, freeing the wax inter-model (steps 13–14). Core pins are inserted to secure the core in place in relation to the outer mold

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during casting, and the inter-model is filled with refractory core material (step 15). A network of strategically placed wax rods—or “sprues”—capped by a casting cup is joined to the wax. This sprue system will ultimately be melted out, leaving channels that ensure the efficient flow of metal and escape of gases from the refractory mold (step 16). The sprued wax is coated with—and embedded in—a refractory molding material or “investment” (step 17). The first layer of this outer mold must be very fine in order to register the details on the model; subsequent layers are coarser. The quality of the mold is crucial since it will determine that of the metal surface and the amount of finish work needed. The exact composition of the refractory material was therefore often guarded closely for the competitive edge it could give a foundry. Clay mixtures have been used for millennia. A slurry of crushed ceramic powder— or “grog”—bound with plaster was developed later as an alternative. Since the 1970s, lighter, stronger “ceramic-shell” molds made of colloidal ceramic slurry and ceramic sand have been adapted increasingly to art casting. Once the refractory mold has had a chance to dry, it is heated to melt out the wax (hence the term “lost-wax”) and drive out any moisture, lest ensuing vapors are trapped in the metal and cause flaws in the cast (step 18). The hot, hollow mold is placed with the access opening face up (often buried in sand to further reinforce it should the mold crack), and the metal, which has been liquefied in the meantime, is poured into the mold, where it flows through the channels and cavities left by the wax and sprues and quickly solidifies (step 19). The apparatuses and fuels used to melt metal have evolved over time from crucibles and furnaces stoked with charcoal—and later coke—and hand-powered by bellows to gas furnaces with electrically powered forced air. Founders have traditionally chosen their alloys because of their suitability for a particular task, their color, availability of materials, or possibly also for their symbolic associations. The term “bronze” popularly refers to a broad range mixture of copper and other metallic elements such as tin, lead and zinc combined through melting. Pure copper is very ductile, has a relatively high melting point (1,085°C), is not easily liquefied and oxidizes readily. Alloying it with other metallic elements lowers and expands the metal’s melting range, increases fluidity, and improves its working properties. For instance, bronze alloys used for sculpture in early modern Europe and subsequent centuries have contained between 5% and 10% tin, though the melting range of a bronze could be lowered significantly by adding more tin or a less expensive element such as lead or zinc, making the molten metal more fluid and thereby allowing for good reproduction of detail and workability. However, many so-called bronze sculptures are, in fact, technically made of “brass”—a copper alloy whose second greatest component is zinc. Zinc enhances an alloy’s fluidity, and affords better resistance to corrosion particularly in combination with tin

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Figure 1.1

Bewer

Diagram of the indirect lost-wax casting process based on Medardo Rosso’s Bookmaker, amended from Fig. 43 in Henry Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, ed., Medardo Rosso Second Impressions, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press (2003), 71

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Bewer

and more recently, silicon bronze (made up of ca. 96% copper and either silicon alone, or some manganese, tin, iron, or zinc) has found increased use in art foundries for its greater ductility, mechanical strength, resistance to oxidation, lower toxicity, and ease of welding. Returning to the description of the final stages of the casting process, after the cast is freed of the refractory mold, the metal sprue system and core pins are removed, and major flaws repaired (step 20). Depending on the scale and complexity of the cast, the original model may be split into component parts that would each be treated in the same manner and either joined at the wax stage or cast separately and welded or joined mechanically in the metal at this stage, which is generally referred to as “fettling.” Since it is the quality of the modeling and further textures added in the metal, combined with the coloration of the surface, that we see and respond to, the finishing processes are of great importance (step 21). In a foundry, the fine finishing of the metal, or “chasing” is often delegated to specialized metalsmiths (ciseleurs in French) who rework the metal surface of the cast as needed, often further concealing imperfections and joins, sharpening details, and adding texture and polish with a range of tools such as engravers, hammers and punches. And while the bright metallic hue of a freshly polished cast may be coated with wax or a varnish to preserve its sheen, more often than not the surface is enhanced with color through a variety of techniques such as chemical patination, gilding and other forms of plating, inlaying, and even painting. Patination (often delegated to skilled patineurs during Rosso’s time, and even today) is the process by which a surface acquires an aesthetically pleasing color that complements the forms. A great range of artificial patinas can be intentionally created with coatings or induced using chemicals in various sequences of application to create different colors and textures that help animate the metal surface. Such chemical alterations may, however, also result from natural processes over time under certain environmental conditions. In the case of bronze, the alloy tends to revert back to more stable mineral compounds similar to the ores from which it derives. Such unintentional changes do not necessarily enhance the sculptural forms, but rather tend to distract from them. Not all bronzes are cast by the lost-wax process. Alternatives consist mainly of variations in the mold-making process. The main one used in the nineteenth century, as discussed elsewhere in this volume, is sand casting. A simple form of this process had been used since the Renaissance for cast medals, small bells, and other utilitarian objects with few undercuts. It was further refined for industry during subsequent centuries and became the main method of casting

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sculpture in France during much of the nineteenth century, allowing, among other things, for the mass production of works. Sand casting is a form of piecemolding that consists in ramming special sand bonded with a small amount of clay or synthetic resin over a model placed in rigid frames. Sculptures with undercuts may require complex piece-molds and are often cast in parts to simplify the mold-making process. For hollow casts, the matrix is used to produce a replica in sand, which is pared down to create a gap that will be filled by the metal, and then suspended in the mold with spacers and wires. More complex models are often molded and cast in parts and then joined. Existing bronzes can easily be used as models, spawning new generations of casts (“aftercasts” or surmoulages). Original molds can be used by others to make casts that are not always easy to tell apart from their “original” models. And while bronzes are generally the fruit of collaboration between sculptors and other highly specialized and skilled craftspeople, the sculptor is not always the one who oversees the project. The fact that casting is an inherently reproductive process that allows for the production of multiples both during and after an artist’s lifetime poses challenges to the notion of originality and authorship of a bronze sculpture. Knowledge of the materials and processes involved in the making of bronzes contributes not only to a more nuanced appreciation of the technical feats and artistic choices that are embodied in these works, but also to the complex discourse around the nature of such wondrous objects.

chapter 2

Sculptor-Founders in Late Nineteenth-Century France: The Role of Lost-Wax Casting Elisabeth Lebon 1

Introduction

When Medardo Rosso cast his works in Paris in the 1890s and 1900s, he was subscribing to a fashionable trend. Any attempt to understand his choices and their consequences should begin by recalling that at the end of the nineteenth century, France was an international leader in the field of sculpture in general and bronze casting in particular. It is therefore necessary to bear in mind the French political context that interacted with the evolution of art and its practices. It should be borne in mind—something that the Italian Rosso did not appreciate—the extent to which French artistic polemics developed in close entanglement with the country’s history and political issues. In this complex situation the peculiarities of two different processes for casting bronzes, sand casting and lost wax, played specific propagandistic roles. 2

The Political Context

After the Great Revolution of 1789, a republican regime did not manage to establish itself permanently in France until the 1870s. In the meantime, France was governed by a succession of kings and emperors, shaken by insurrections and interrupted by short-lived republics. The fall of Napoleon III in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian War led to the establishment of the Third Republic. The new authorities capitulated and ceded the entire region of Alsace-Lorraine to the enemy. In the spring of 1871, the surrender and its conditions provoked a rebellion known as the Paris Commune among Parisians who refused it. Many artists such as the painter Gustave Courbet (1819–1977) and the sculptor Jules Dalou (1838–1902) participated. The Parisian bronze workers were some of the leaders of this episode, which ended in a bloody repression by the Republic’s new authorities.1 The massacre of thousands of Parisians left a profound mark 1  Such as chaser Zéphyrin Camélinat (1840–1932), bronze-assembler Blaise Perrachon (1829– 1878), and foundry man Emile-Victor Duval (1840–1871). © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_004

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on collective memories. The capital’s municipal counselors remained sympathetic to the extreme left, and this established a conflict with the liberal government. The new regime was also worried by the still-powerful royalist forces in the country. Instability threatened for two decades. One of the major challenges was for the new ruling circles to remain in power while at the same time providing democratic guarantees. These influential circles did not feel firmly established until the late 1890s. It was in this unstable political context, marked by strong passions and intense political resentments, that Rosso arrived in Paris. While reports in the posthumous literature of a first brief stay in 1884 remain unconfirmed, it is certain that he settled there from 1889 onwards. Surprisingly, the process of casting artistic bronzes plays a role in this history. Art in general, and sculpture in particular, which could be part of both public and private spaces, represented a major propaganda tool, especially in such a troubled period. Bronze art had enjoyed great diffusion in the previous decades, mainly thanks to the improvement of sand casting, and sculpture now penetrated even the heart of modest homes. 3

The Revival of Lost-Wax Casting: Republican Recovery of the “Process of Kings”

The history and characteristics of the two processes for casting art bronzes— sand casting and lost-wax casting—played notable roles in this story.2 Sand casting had proved unsuitable for the production of both intricate shapes and large volumes under the Ancien Régime. However, the need to cast cannons quickly and at low cost to defend la Patrie en danger (the Fatherland in peril) had inspired the 1789 revolutionaries to improve this technique to an extraordinary degree. Once peace had been restored in France, this perfection of the sand-casting process made it a sufficiently reliable technique for application to the casting of statuary, irrespective of the desired forms or dimensions. Cheaper than lost wax and adaptable to a division of labor, sand casting subsequently became the instrument of an industrial and artistic production that simultaneously enriched the country and its sculptors. During the same period, the disadvantages of lost-wax casting led to its abandonment. Less reliable in its results for statuary, the lost-wax process had not benefited from the scientific advances associated with the revolutionary 2  For details regarding the revival of lost-wax casting in the late-nineteenth century, see Elisabeth Lebon, Fonte au sable, fonte à la cire perdue: Histoire d’une rivalité (Paris: Ophrys/ INHA, 2012); and Elisabeth Lebon, Le fondeur et le sculpteur (Paris: Ophrys, 2012), https:// journals.openedition.org/inha/3243 (Accessed December 14, 2018).

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cause. It was also expensive, one factor in its cost being the high price of the primary material, the beeswax that was mostly lost with each casting. While the technique’s principal attraction lay in the fact that it was possible to cast complex volumes in a single pouring (even though this was not systematically done in the past in reality), sculptures had to be entirely recast if the results were unacceptable, thereby significantly increasing the cost. Finally, the process was particularly slow, always very risky in results, and thus unsuited to the rationale of a speedy, efficient industrial production. It should be noted that when the monarchy was twice restored, in 1814 and 1815, after the double fall of Napoleon I, lost-wax casting was officially and symbolically reinstated for royal monuments, but it was only partially used in reality. Economic considerations led to the near abandonment of the process relatively quickly, since sand casting produced more reliable and very good results at a lower cost.3 From the beginning of the century to the political hiatus of the 1870s, lostwax casting inspired nothing more than a nostalgic interest in a handful of individuals: the most fervent supporters of the Ancien Régime and its practices on the one hand, and the romantics gripped by a sentimental yearning for the past on the other. Those who were inspired by this technique were enchanted by the hazards of the process, to which they attributed an almost magical aura, provided, however, that they were sufficiently wealthy to bear its exorbitant costs. These two categories could easily overlap. The weakness of demand was matched by the paucity and characteristics of supply: from 1829 to 1871 there was only one lost-wax art foundry active in France, established by Honoré Gonon (1780–1850) in 1829. Gonon was originally a simple worker employed in a small sand-casting foundry.4 He had endeavored to “recover” the alleged forgotten secrets of lost-wax casting, working on his own and with no resources other than his remarkable talent.5 He was succeeded by his son 3  In fact, the lost-wax casting practice never totally disappeared in France during the period from the 1789 Revolution to the Restoration in 1814–15, even though sand casting was considerably favored from the reign of Napoleon I. See Lebon, Fonte au sable, 38–42. 4  Ibid., 23–29, 37–55. On Honoré Gonon’s role in the invention of sand casting for art, see Lebon, Fonte au sable, 23–29, 37–55. 5  Eugène Gonon would present his father’s beginnings in the following romantic and now questionable way: “Everything he had seen done [by sand casting] was of no use to him other than to give him the burning fever that kept him motivated by the desire to re-find this way of casting [lost wax]. Being intelligent, he understood the importance of the service he could render to statuary art.” Eugène Gonon, L’art de fondre en bronze à cire perdue, 1876, unpublished manuscript, Ms.514, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole nationale des Beaux-arts, Paris, 18, repr. in Lebon, Le fondeur et le sculpteur, https://journals.openedition.org/inha/3522 (Accessed December 14, 2018). The process is still considered as forgotten until the end of the century:

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Eugène (1814–1892). Eugène, equally talented and equally lacking in resources, introduced several improvements to his father’s process. Neither father nor son thought they would benefit from a trip to Italy, despite the fact that this was where they could have readily recovered what were widely called the “lost secrets,” since Italians had practiced lost-wax casting without interruption from the Renaissance onwards.6 This was mainly in order to supply the market for copies of antiquities adored by Grand Tour travelers.7 The mysterious knowledge sought with effort in Paris had, in reality, always been easily accessible on the other side of the Alps. But nineteenth-century France, mainly governed by kings or emperors and caught up by romanticism, took pleasure in nurturing the legend of a lost secret in order to charge this loss to the revolutionary period. By the end of the nineteenth century, outlets for lost-wax products had strengthened sufficiently to justify abandoning hazardous practices and adopting commercial good sense by attracting skilled Italian founders to Paris. The fragile Third Republic sought to embrace the opposing factions that threatened its existence by loudly and firmly proclaiming its democratic convictions, while adopting the forms and finery of royalty. Royal palaces became presidential palaces and the president a “republican monarch.” Paradoxically, “At present, broadly speaking, scant use is generally made of this process except in Japan … The ‘lost wax’ casting is a system that, logically, is not yet rationally developed, and perhaps never will be, due to the enormous cost entailed. For artists and for art founders who continue to be faithful to the technique, it will somehow remain the aristocratic system par excellence, only used to give one single casting reproduction of artworks.” “Au jour le jour: Mirabeau et le marquis de Dreux-Brézé,” Le Temps, June 3,1890. 6  Others, such as the chaser Louis Claude Ferdinand Soyer (1785–1854), saw its importance and managed to obtain a grant from the government of Charles X to research Italian foundries. His trip to Italy occupied the entire year of 1826 (La Rochefoucauld to the Duc de Luynes, letter of October 10, 1826, Archives nationales, Archives de la Direction des Musées de France, S.30-Soyer). He came back convinced that lost-wax casting was an outdated process and he set about creating a very modern sand-casting foundry in France after his return. See Soyer’s biography, “Répertoire, Soyer,” in Lebon, Le fondeur et le sculpteur; and Daniel Alcouffe et al., “Soyer, Ingé,” in Un âge d’or des arts décoratifs, 1814–1848 (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991), 532. 7  “Italy cultivated its production, generally staying with copies of bronzes from the Naples museum, but we note that their execution is often inadequate; there are numerous modern bronzes, but they have no artistic value; as for chasing work, it is done in an opposite direction.” Ministère du Commerce, de l’Industrie et des colonies, Exposition universelle internationale de 1889 à Paris: Rapports du jury international, classe 25 (bronzes d’art) (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1891), 663. “Nearly all the Italian manufacturers confined themselves to the reproduction of all the bronzes in the museums of Naples or Florence; these masterpieces, of which Italian art rightly boasts, are time-honored; but their greatly augmented editions made them less appreciated!” Ministère du Commerce, de l’Industrie, des Postes et des Télégraphes, Exposition universelle internationale de 1900 à Paris: Rapports du jury, Groupe XV, industrie, classe 97 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902), 506.

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in this historical context, the resurgence of lost-wax casting can mainly be attributed to the Communard sculptor Jules Dalou (1838–1902), who had been exiled in England. In 1880, in a provocative gesture towards the moderate Republican government, the city of Paris, which remained rebellious in spirit, commissioned Dalou to create his own Monument au Triomphe de la République (Monument to the Triumph of the Republic), to be erected on Place de la Nation, formerly Place du Trône (Place of the Throne).8 The city retained Dalou’s grandiose project after the governmental jury eliminated it. This would be the grandest bronze monument, in terms of its dimensions, to be produced in France in the nineteenth century. To this day, it remains the rallying point in the capital for large protest marches and demonstrations. Dalou fervently wished for the Republic to appear as powerful and capable as the monarchy in every respect. This included monumental art, which had hitherto been dominated by royal equestrian statues. He therefore insisted that lost-wax casting, the process of kings, be reinstated for his colossal republican work.9 His Triomphe de la République was unveiled for the first time in September 1889—that is, exactly five months after Rosso arrived in Paris— within the highly official framework of celebration of the centenary of the French Revolution. At this point, the monument was unfinished. The lost-wax process and the founder charged with the casting, Pierre Bingen, had proved unqualified for the execution of such a grandiose project. It consequently took the form of a life-size plaster model painted to look like bronze. Bingen delivered almost nothing, resulting in huge financial losses for the city of Paris, which for a long time maintained a remarkable tolerance for him. The sandcasting foundry Thiebaut eventually took over the project and completed the work; the monument then received a second inauguration, in its final form, in November 1899, an occasion marked by huge popular festivities. Without 8  The government competition was won by the Morice brothers: Léopold, sculptor (1846–1919) and François-Charles, architect (1848–1908). They had proposed the very commonplace figure of a standing draped woman brandishing a laurel branch (a monument installed in Place de la République) while Dalou invented a Republic erected on a globe mounted on a chariot, drawn by two lions symbolizing the people, enlightened and guided by the Genius of Liberty, accompanied by allegories of Work, Justice, and Peace, and children representing Education, Abundance, Equity, and Arts. 9  The feat of lost-wax casting in a single-pour equestrian monument contributed significantly to the international prestige of French royalty. Two of these monuments were the subject of famous publications detailing the achievement of their casting: Germain Boffrand et al., Description de ce qui a été pratiqué pour fondre en bronze d’un seul jet la figure équestre de Louis XIV […] (Paris: Guillaume Cavelier, 1743); and Pierre-Jean Mariette, Description des travaux qui ont précédé, accompagné et suivi la fonte en bronze d’un seul jet de la statue équestre de Louis XV, le Bien-Aimé (Paris: Imprimerie P. G. Le Mercier, 1768).

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going into the details of the monument’s history and all the improbable setbacks associated with it, it is possible to designate the 1880s as the date for the official return of lost-wax casting to France.10 This was the moment in which the Ancien Régime casting process was openly recuperated by the Republic, including its most extreme defenders, in order to affirm a political authority that was still poorly secured. 4

The Debate on the Role of Art and the Place of Sculptors

Within this turbulent political context, a lively debate about the role of sculpture and the place accorded to sculptors began when the industrialization of art-bronze production commenced. This debate continued into the final years of the nineteenth century. The mass dissemination of art bronzes and the validation of the democratic model had consequences: they allowed sculptors to abandon their status as workmen, to which they had largely been confined under the Ancien Régime. Increasingly well received in fashionable salons, sculptors assumed a degree of conceptual latitude.11 They thus began to pursue their ambitions in a world in which everyone was qualified, at least in theory, to achieve success according to their merits.12 As the century proceeded and sculptors’ material and social conditions improved, they began to resent being restricted to the role of anonymous collaborators of independent bronziers.13 Industrialization tends to reduce creative individuals to anonymous cogs in the production chain, thereby revealing the limitations of this production model. The progressive clarification of authors’ rights through an evolving 10  For more details, see Lebon, Fonte au sable, 94–114. 11  The sculptor Augustin Préault (1809–1879) is a good example. His contemporaries, such as the sculptor Jules Salmson (1823–1902) enjoyed saying that Préault was “a man of genius who had no talent.” More intellectual than purely professional, Préualt thoroughly personified these new ambitions. Salmson also placed Préault among the sculptors who made “only rough sketches and compositions.” Jules Salmson, Entre deux coups de ciseau: Souvenirs d’un sculpteur (Paris: Lemerre, 1892), 63, 61. 12  Even if the regimes that followed in France prior to 1870 were almost exclusively royal and imperial, they were tempered by a growing parliamentarianism and economic liberalism, through which personal ambitions prospered. This is perfectly illustrated by Balzac’s novels, notably La Cousine Bette, where one of the heroes is an ambitious chaser who becomes a renowned sculptor, then art critic. 13  Who remembers today the names of Frédéric-Eugène Piat (1827–1903) or Louis-Constant Sévin (1821–1888), who were the most prolific producers of models (“collaborators,” as they were termed) for the bronziers during the second half of nineteenth century? Sculptors who produced editions of their own work in bronze as “fabricants,” such as Carpeaux, Barye, Mène, Fremiet and many others, also reflect this desire for emancipation.

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jurisprudence encouraged fin-de-siècle sculptors in their aspirations.14 They now sought to affirm their preeminence in the creative process, even if this entailed withdrawing from industry and challenging the artistic legitimacy of duplication. Despite the fact that such editioned works had allowed sculptors to achieve their social standing, they were now in favor of an authenticity linked to uniqueness. This Retour aux sources (return to sources) approach flourished to such an extent that it made its mark on the modern spirit throughout the first half of the twentieth century.15

14  The Réunion des fabricants de bronze (Bronze Editors Trade Union) took on the fundamental task, since its creation in 1818, to work for a clarification of rights, as far as possible in favor of manufacturers, through legal cases. Many traces of its influential action persist in the archives of the Réunion, held at the Archives nationales -106AS—dispersed in the minutes of their monthly meetings (106AS4–106AS13); actions for the protection of artistic property (AN, 106AS48–106AS49); and various documents relating to industrial property (AN, 106AS69). Bronze fabricant and producer of editions Claude-Rosalie Gastambide, known as Gastambide Jeune, who was president of the Réunion des fabricants three times (in 1824, 1836–1840, and 1842–1848), wisely sent one of his sons, Adrien Joseph, to study law. Once a magistrate, Adrien specialized in the legislation of artworks and published two landmark books, Traité théorique et pratique des contrefaçons en tous genres, ou de la Propriété en matière de littérature, théâtre, musique, peinture (Paris: Legrand et Descauriet, 1837) and Historique et théorie de la propriété des auteurs (Paris: Cosse et Marchal, 1862). Ferdinand Pautrot, an animalier sculptor, fabricant and maker of editions, with his partner, Vallon, was in 1877 at the origin of an important ruling on the industrial character, or not, of an industrial bronze known as the “arrêt Pautrot Vallon.” The action of the bronze manufacturer Soleau allowed French producers to benefit from copyright on American soil from 1904 (Ministère du Commerce, de l’Industrie, des Postes et télégraphes, Exposition internationale de Saint-Louis, USA, 1904, section française, Rapport du Groupe 33 [Paris: Comité français des Expositions à l’Etranger, 1906], 30–32). The sculptor Auguste Clesinger (1814–1883) was one the first to dare to sue his producer of editions Barbedienne in court—and lost. See Jacques de Caso, “Serial Sculptures in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, ed. Jeanne L. Wasserman (Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1975), 23, n. 69. But James Pradier (1790–1852), then his heirs, finally won their law suits against the bronze producer of editions Susse (see numerous relations of the trial in Annales de la Propriété industrielle, artistique et littéraire in 1874–75). The Joseph Bernard Foundation archives keep numerous documents proving how hard the sculptor, and then his widow, struggled with the Hébrard foundry to get out of their contracts (Fonds Joseph Bernard, Fondation de Coubertin, Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse). When the founder Claude Valsuani opened his foundry around 1903–4, he had a deal with the artists to work directly for them, outside of any contract. These are a few examples of this movement for freedom. French law of April 9, 1910, which separated the edition rights from the sculpture property, is a kind of final success of this evolution. 15  This “Retour aux sources” is clearly illustrated by the new interest granted to the “arts premiers” (primitive arts), and by the artists using direct carving, far away from the academic

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During the same period, the new republican elites needed to resolve a paradoxical situation, which required them to create a narrative of their origins amongst the people whom they were supposed to represent, while at the same time legitimizing their long-term rule. Displays of “good taste” through the acquisition of outstanding pieces of art, as in the heyday of the French monarchy, confirmed the legitimacy of these new rulers both in real and figurative terms, while democracy was ensured by opening up access to art to the general public, particularly through mass diffusion of reproductions. In a public space marked by the recent dramas of the Commune that continued to be keenly felt, and where the weight of public opinion was beginning to play a significant role, a contemporary debate about the role of art and artists was stirring up the worlds of politics, culture, and art in France, particularly in the capital. After the troubled years that followed the 1870 war, this debate intensified throughout the 1880s, colored by the political landscape. Against this background, two apparently divergent tendencies confronted each other. On the one hand were the supporters of an Art pour l’Art (Art for Art’s Sake), a pure art detached from every utilitarian concern and exclusively devoted to producing the beautiful, the unique, and the exceptional, whether under a republican government, a monarchy, or an empire. On the other hand were the defenders of an Art pour Tous (Art for All), or Art dans Tout (Art in Everything), who repudiated every hierarchy that would oppose the fine arts to arts deemed “popular” or “applied.”16 Sculptors found themselves at the intersection of these contradictory directions. They faced a difficult choice, for if pure art was the only credible way to win them renown, it was Art pour Tous that was more certain to gain them a livelihood (and an increasingly better one), yet was more likely to leave them unknown, since it was rare to attain a successful combination of renown and mass commercial diffusion. However, even those sculptors who chose to seek prominence were required to supply their new democratic patrons with works that were both exceptional and tinged with social awareness. One solution was to assign an ostensibly crowd-pleasing element to the subject, while the object itself remained exclusive. A case in point is the Belgian sculptor Constantin Meunier (1831–1905), who remains, even today, a sculptor of great sensitivity to the world of the working class. From 1885 onwards, he enjoyed tremendous and lasting success in France thanks to his figures of rules. The painter Paul Gauguin launched this movement. Among the most famous direct carvers are Constantin Brancusi and Joseph Bernard. 16  See Rossela Froissart Pezone, L’Art dans tout: Les arts décoratifs en France et l’utopie d’un art nouveau (Paris: CNRS editions, 2004).

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workers: magnificent athletes in which it would be hard to find the slightest trace of debilitating condition or revolt, that were nevertheless characteristic of the real conditions of the era. Meunier had cast his bronzes of workers exclusively through the lost-wax method, selling them for very high prices. It was far from his intention to multiply his work for wider dissemination. On the contrary, he sought to limit his editions strictly to ten pieces, for he wrote: “I do not care for my bronzes to fall into commercial banality.”17 The craft side of art offered another direction, which was adopted, for example, by the movement that dubbed itself Art dans Tout, co-founded in 1894 by the sculptors Alexandre Charpentier (1856–1909) and Jean Dampt (1854– 1945). Its practitioners and supporters advocated the craftsman’s touch and produced objects with a utilitarian purpose, thereby giving weight to their avowal of engagement with the people. However, their primary objective was to make their products both full of beauty and uniqueness, so that individual pieces retained the singular character given to them by the careful fashioning of artists’ hands. In following this direction, sculptors such as Dampt or Jean Carriès (1855–1894) abandoned sculpture to gamble on taking utilitarian objects in a new direction, producing ceramics of great beauty, which immediately charmed major collectors. The pots or chairs they produced in their studios became sought-after objects, for these were one-off pieces created with extreme care. The sculptors’ adoption of an artisan’s guise, in which they willingly proclaimed themselves to be workmen, contradicted the actual destinations they envisaged for the objects they produced: pieces that could hold their own alongside the finest bronzes in connoisseurs’ display cases. Thus, in 1894, Charpentier declared with regard to his pewter vases: “It is quite obvious that my vases are not household utensils; the people who buy them place them on sideboards or tables where they are left in peace.”18 Within this context, lost-wax casting enjoyed certain advantages. First of all, it allowed sculptors to work directly on the wax immediately before casting. This gave freshness to each piece in an edition, as well as an individual identity, a form of authenticity or originality that set these works apart from the batches of identical reproductions boasted by sand casting in its heyday. Such editions, highly limited by the time demanded for such actions, could automatically be disqualified as industrial products. In taking up lost wax, sculptors were 17  Constantin Meunier to M. Jules Delacre, September 27, 1894, quoted in Micheline JerômeSchotsmans, Constantin Meunier: Sa vie, son œuvre (Luxemburg: Olivier Bertrand Editions, Belgian Art Research Institute, 2012), 267. 18  Alexandre Charpentier, responding to a question posed by Henri de Nocq, 1894, quoted in Alexandre Charpentier, 1856–1909: naturalisme et art nouveau (Paris: Musée d’Orsay, Nicolas Chaudun, 2008), 182.

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therefore resuming the foundry trajectory from which sand casting, which did not require any repairs between a sculptor’s delivery of the model to the foundry and its translation into bronze, had departed. Second, in addition to permitting sculptors to reintroduce themselves into the foundries to fix their waxes, the process made them more familiar with bronze work and able to feel capable of finishing and patinating their pieces themselves, provided they had mastered these relatively accessible technical skills. Finally, in an ultimate expression of commitment, sculptors could take full control of their work by undertaking their own casting. While lost wax had the potential to allow this, it was absolutely impossible for a sculptor to improvise himself as a sand caster without having spent at least a decade in a solid apprenticeship, due to the difficulty and intricacies of the process. As the fashion for lost-wax casts spread towards the end of the century, most sculptors, irrespective of their position, increasingly endorsed the process, displaying a remarkable unanimity. For supporters of a pure Art pour l’art, lost-wax casting offered the advantages of putting artists in a position of absolute control and of producing objects that were relatively unique, or at least individualized (if only in the numbering, which began to emerge in the early twentieth century), as well as very expensive. Proponents of Art dans Tout discovered an additional merit to lost-wax casting: that of profiling sculptors as workmen. However, although the factors that motivated sculptor-founders to cast in lost wax in the late-nineteenth century were sometimes at odds and reflected these divergent roots, all sculptor-founders—except for Medardo Rosso— always shared the same concern: to produce bronzes of an uncommon quality. 5

How to Cast Your Own Sculpture

How could sculptors simply take on the role of founders? French sculptors during the Third Republic barely had any examples available to them. With the sole exception of Antoine-Louis Barye (1795–1875), who experienced many problems in his casting activities, no sculptors had undertaken to cast their own work after Jean-Antoine Houdon (1741–1828), who had ceased his production in 1814.19 Sculptors who were often animalier, such as Auguste Lechesne 19  We are only discussing the situation in France. During their exile abroad, several French sculptors became known as founders in their new countries, although they contracted out this production element to specialists. For example, at a date that is unclear (before 1860), Carlo Marochetti (1805–1867), who had left France for London in 1848, established

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(1815–1888), Pierre-Jules Mène (1810–1879), Auguste Caïn (1821–1894), and Emmanuel Fremiet (1824–1910), but also a statuary artist such as Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827–1875), were all erroneously considered founders. In reality they were bronze fabricants. “Fabricant” means that they oversaw their production but only executed the finishing procedures (mounting, chasing, patinating) in their own workshop, contracting out the casting procedures to sand-casting specialists.20 This is because the casting process exceeded their technical capacities and was exceptionally dangerous due to risks of explosion and fire.21 When sculptors in the 1880s contemplated undertaking their own casting, they were perfectly aware that sand casting was not within their reach. If they knew in theory that lost-wax casting, practiced from remote times in the most basic of conditions, was much more accessible to novices, there were no practical benchmarks for them to follow. We have already stated that sand casting had radically distanced sculptors from foundries in general. Nor does it appear that sculptors who had benefited from an opportunity to travel to Italy (mainly Prix de Rome winners) visited foundries very often. At least, they do not seem to have brought back to France any practical experience.22 Conversely, Italian a large sand-casting foundry in the English capital, which essentially managed his production. However, he brought over French workmen and did not personally execute his bronze creations, being content to supply the models and serve as managing director (my thanks to Caroline Hedengren and Philip Ward-Jackson for their clarifications of this subject; personal communication, December 2015). Around 1860, during his time in Rome, Jean-Baptiste, known as “Auguste” Clesinger (1814–1883) also produced bronzes stamped “J. Clesinger fondeur”; however, there is no certainty as to whether he established his own casting workshop or sub-contracted the work to local founders, which seems considerably more plausible. Neither artist worked as a founder in France. In the case of foreign artists, Italy is a case apart, quickly touched on in this essay. There the sculptor Vincenzo Gemito (1852–1929) set up his own lost-wax foundry in Naples in the early 1880s, having already enjoyed great success in France with lost-wax bronzes (cast by Italian craftsmen). A foundry run by his descendants still operates today under Gemito’s name. 20  Barye remains an exception. In 1839, he had briefly attempted to establish his own lostwax workshop with the brother of Eugène Gonon, before the process’s lack of reliability and cost-efficiency caused him to abandon the project. He then entrusted to Gonon the prestigious lost waxes that he had been commissioned to produce. Elisabeth Lebon, Dictionnaire des fondeurs de bronze d’art (Perth: Marjon Edition, 2003), s.v. “Gonon.” 21  Conversely, numerous founders received training in sculpture (Soyez, Ravrio, Crozatier, Louis Richard, Lerolle jeune, Vittoz, Jeannest, Eugène Gonon), typically in order to create their own industrial models. Some went as far as to exhibit works at the Salon, but without any kind of artistic success. 22  Few sculptors had the means to afford such a trip. Most of the sculptors at the Académie de France in Rome were equally lacking in funds and therefore not in a position to have their works cast on the spot; they generally sent them back to France in the form of plaster models, where French founders could eventually cast the works in bronze. Once lost-wax

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sculptors were familiar with little other than lost-wax casting (sand casting was rarely undertaken in nineteenth-century Italy) and still maintained close relationships with foundries, as had been the norm in France under the Ancien Régime. Antiquities counterfeiting—a lucrative activity widely practiced in Italy to satisfy the demands of travelers—also involved close collaboration with sculptors, who supplied the models and could participate in their finishing, such as chasing and applying “special” patinas, as well as the founders who cast them. Both were jointly interested in the final appearance of the bronze, not as beautifully patinated as a modern object, but sufficiently weathered to be passed off as a recently unearthed archeological object. In France, during the period of interest to us, the lost-wax founder Eugène Gonon only had one real competitor, Pierre Bingen (1842–1908), who was also previously a sand-casting worker in the bronze industry. Bingen did not commence his lost-wax activities until 1879. Like Honoré Gonon, he had learned the craft through personal trial and error, deploying his own paltry resources but aided by an unquestionable instinctive talent and probably guided by the idea that a significant potential market would open up. In 1885 the Thiebaut foundry, an extremely large industrial business specializing in sand casting, tried to open a lost-wax workshop with a more “artistic” reputation, but soon abandoned the project because it was not cost effective. During the 1880s, Charles Gruet (1825–1890), who had cast lost-wax pieces for goldsmiths, worked for several sculptors on small-format items. His son Edmond (1863–1904) consolidated his father’s technique under Pierre Bingen and presented himself as a lost-wax caster of monumental works from 1891–92.23 Gonon’s foundry closed upon the death of Eugène, in a poor workman’s condition, in 1892. This is the limited inventory of lost-wax casters in France until the early twentieth century, when the demand from a growing clientele prompted genuine investors to call a halt to such adventurous, romantic endeavors by recruiting professional lost-wax founders who knew their craft from Italy. In 1902, Adrien-Aurélien

casting began to generate considerable demand, French sculptors residing in Italy sometimes head-hunted founders, as was the case with the foundry workman Bisceglia, spotted and dispatched to Paris by Henri Bouchard and Paul Landowski, or the Parlanti brothers, whom Alfred Gilbert met at the Nelli foundry in Rome and subsequently encouraged to set up business in London. 23  Lebon, Dictionnaire des fondeurs, s.vv. “Tableau des fondeurs proposant des fontes à cire perdue à Paris entre 1890 et 1920,” “Thiebaut,” “Gruet.” On Gruet’s attempts to use the lost-wax casting process, see Elisabeth Lebon, “Le monument équestre de Jeanne d’Arc ou les étranges rapports entre Pierre Bingen et Edmond Gruet,” in Lebon, Le fondeur et le sculpteur.

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Hébrard (1865–1937), son of a press magnate and an extremely wealthy, discerning collector, opened his own foundry. While sculptors were forming Gonon’s independent and often poor clientele, Hébrard targeted first of all major wealthy collectors,24 a category he knew well since he was one of them.25 Having failed to attract Rodin,26 in order to make his business profitable he concentrated above all on the quality of bronze allocated for the lost-wax method, rather than on the celebrity of the sculptors, since he took under contract artists who were almost unknown when he began producing their work—while still charging exorbitant prices.27 With Hébrard, the beautiful-quality aspect of bronze takes precedence over the minimal consideration given to artists, imprisoned by very strict contracts. The Hébrard foundry enjoyed rapid and astonishing success, which was due in large part to the fact that he drew on his particular social network: unlike most bronze fabricants, he was able to relate to clients from his own upper social class, knew its codes and enjoyed its support. Critics admired the sumptuous beauty of Hébrard’s bronzes, attributing this essentially to the lost-wax method as well as to the patinas. Thus, an issue of the journal Art et Décoration from July 1903 reads: 24  On the complex question of how bronzes were marketed, the different circuits, the relationship between sculptors, collectors, editors, and founders, see Elisabeth Lebon Circuits of Production and Commercialisation of Bronze Sculpture, 1850–1950 (Perth: Marjon Editions, forthcoming). 25  While lost-wax castings were generally requested by a very specific clientele during the nineteenth century, the price of bronze was included in the fee given to the sculptor, who had to negotiate on his own with the founder (generally Gonon). Accordingly, in 1833, James Pradier, referring to the first botched casting of his monument to J.-J. Rousseau by Honoré Gonon, wrote: “I would like for the devil to carry off the founder and the cast and almost all those who wanted the Rousseau to be made in bronze … the misfortune therein is to make me lose precious time and close to ten thousand Francs because this founder is insolvent.” Claude Lapaire, James Pradier (1790–1852) et la sculpture francaise de la generation romantique: Catalogue raisonné (Milan: 5 Continents Editions, 2010), 112. Pradier had the casting redone (in sand, by Crozatier) and assumed the losses, concluding in a letter dated January 10, 1934: “the Rousseau is in the works, the mold is being made. I will have spent five thousand Francs more than what they are giving me to execute the statue.” Douglas Siler, James Pradier: Correspondance (1834–1842) (Geneva: Droz, 1984), 2:7. 26  Antoinette Le Normand-Romain, Rodin et le bronze (Paris: RMN, 2007), 591; Lebon, Fonte au sable, 132–47 (regarding Rodin’s attitude towards casting processes), 141–43 (regarding his attitude towards Hébrard in particular). 27  The notable exception is Degas’ waxes, but this posthumous edition began well after the opening of the foundry; the contract was signed by right-holders in May 1918 (Degas died in September, 1917), and the first series came out in 1921. See Joseph S. Czestochowski and Anne Pingeot, Degas Sculptures: Catalogue Raisonné of the Bronzes (New York: Torch Press and International Arts, 2002), 30, 35.

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M. Adrien Hébrard has just opened, at 21 Rue Cambon, a permanent exhibition of art objects and bronzes executed in the lost-wax method, of which he is the producer, some examples of which could be admired in the two last Salons: jewelry, pewter by Desbois, statuettes by Alexandre Charpentier, Fix-Masseau, tablets by Victor Peter, etc. The enterprise is extremely interesting and, without delay, will win the approval of all true connoisseurs. In fact Monsieur Hébrard is concerned not only with producing works of true artistic value, but also with producing them with the greatest care, in a quest to revive techniques that have fallen into disuse, focusing his research particularly on those extremely delightful patinas—very exquisite, profound and charming examples of which have been handed down to us by Renaissance and Japanese art founders. The charm of these precious works is increased by the way in which Monsieur Hébrard presents them in his small exhibition hall, rather English in appearance, with great sobriety of ornamentation, forming an austere environment with beautiful bronzes, pewter, jewelry, silver statuettes, which the lovely patinas adorn like a flow of enamel.28 The sculptors whom Hébrard took under contract to build his business capital were for the most part unknown when they began working: Rembrand Bugatti (1884–1916) was not yet eighteen, still a minor, and his father had to sign for him (first contract in July 1904);29 François Pompon (1855–1933) (first contract in 1906),30 or Joseph Bernard (1866–1931) (first contract in March 1907)31 were around forty years old, but still needed to work as laborers in order to live. Hébrard drew abundantly from Rodin’s pool of workers for his artists, including Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929), Jules Desbois (1851–1935), and François Pompon. He was fully aware that the Master knew exactly how to choose very talented men, but those who had never managed to leave their subordinate condition despite their often advanced age, and that consequently they would not be very demanding. Hébrard promised his artists renown, which he actually achieved through very well-attended exhibitions, thanks to his contacts in the world of power and money. But he enslaved them through particularly avaricious and binding contracts. These drastic artists’ contracts would remain widespread at the beginning of the twentieth century among some producers 28  “La médaille d’honneur,” Art et décoration, supplement (July 1903): 1. 29  Edward Horswell, Rembrandt Bugatti: Life in Sculpture (London: Sladmore Gallery Editions, 2004), 239–42. 30  Catherine Chevillot, Liliane Colas, and Anne Pingeot, François Pompon, 1855–1933 (Paris: Gallimard/Electa and RMN, 1994), 76. 31  See “Hébrard” file, Fondation de Coubertin, Fonds Joseph Bernard.

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of sculpture editions. Dealers such as Léonce Rosenberg or Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler had contracts with sculptors like Manolo (1872–1945) or Henri Laurens (1885–1954) that would be equally if not more drastic.32 Since the late nineteenth century, sculpture, which demands high material and financial investment, has been considered a risky undertaking, and even more so with the decline of sand casting, causing the ruin of art dealers.33 Hébrard initially employed the Milanese Claude Valsuani (1876–1923) in 1902 as his main founder.34 When Valsuani opened his own foundry as early as 1904 or 1905 at the latest, he gave the sculptors much more freedom than Hébrard had, in a simple customer relationship, just as Gonon or Bingen did. With him, sculptors were assured the same exceptional quality as Hébrard. As an Italian immigrant worker, Valsuani had a network of artists, not of major collectors, and his aims and business model were necessarily quite different. But these now free actors understood the priorities of the precious Hébrard clientele: top quality and rarity. When Valsuani left, Hébrard—probably on the recommendations of the family of the Milanese decorator Carlo Bugatti (1856–1940)—employed another Milanese coming from the Strada foundry,

32  On Manuel Hugué, known as Manolo, see Pierre Assouline, L’homme de l’art: D. H. Kahnweiler (Paris: Balland, 1988), 133, 245, 248. On Henri Laurens, see correspondence and contracts, LROS5, Fonds Léonce Rosenberg, Bibliothèque Kandinsky, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; and Elisabeth Lebon, “Henri Laurens und die Bronze / Laurens and Bronze,” in Henri Laurens: Wellentöchter / Daughters of the Waves, exh. cat., ed. Arie Hartog and Ulrike Lorenz (Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2018), 92–123. 33  The complaints of Eugène Blot (a major bronze founder and Camille Claudel’s producer, among others), who preferred to give his autobiography a title that focused on his painting collection (Histoire d’une collection de tableaux modernes: 50 ans de peinture [Paris: Editions d’art, 1934]), are akin to those of Kahnweiler, who refused to repurchase Léonce Rosenberg’s collection of sculptures by Henri Laurens, with the excuse that, “Sculpture, it is the financial ruination of a company.” See Assouline, L’homme de l’art, 238. 34  Claude, born in Milan, had already arrived in France, probably employed as a simple foundry worker or molder, when Hébrard hired him. My recent genealogical discoveries allow me to assert that neither Claude’s brother, Attilio, nor Claude’s father, Carlo, was the first foundry chief employed at Hébrard, as has so far wrongly been repeated (including by me in previous publications). We can now say with certainty that it was Claude who held this position (at the time he got married), since his father Carlo was already dead by this time. After having quickly proved his great professional qualities to sculptors, Claude left Hébrard as soon as 1903 to settle on his own, at the request of the artists whose customers he ensured by granting them free relations without any contractual constraint. Claude Valsuani would also guarantee sculptors that he would keep their editions under control, with a justified numbering written on the bronzes (whereas Hébrard practiced a very theoretical limitation).

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Albino Palazzolo (1883–ca. 1975), who technically ran the foundry.35 Other Italian founders subsequently began to relocate to France to manage their own foundry businesses, charming not only the collectors with the high quality of their bronzes but also the sculptors with their abandonment of any contractual relationship.36 6

Being a Sculptor and Becoming a Founder

The first sculptors to become aware that lost-wax casting was within their capacity were perhaps Pierre Bingen’s clients. Bingen was fond of assuming a role as an equal with artists. He liked to involve spectators in the moment of pouring, enchanting them by directing the pouring to accentuate its spectacular effects. His clients were seduced by the excellent quality of his bronzes, for which he made them pay exorbitant prices in advance. Unfortunately, he consumed his revenues faster than he worked, and increasingly furious or desperate sculptors often ended up storming into his workshop to hold him accountable. At this point, the magic faded. It gave the sculptors whom Bingen had exploited an opportunity to realize that he had not been doing anything of sufficient difficulty to justify taking so much money from them, and for work that ultimately did not appear so complex. This was certainly the case with Dalou, who let it be known publicly: “Here is someone who can boast of having disturbed the world for himself and for nothing.”37 Maurice Dreyfous, 35  Carlo Bugatti, a renowned Milanese decorator and interior designer, settled in Paris in 1902. He doubtless knew the celebrated Milanese foundry Strada, where Palazzolo worked as a molder and founder until 1902. Palazzolo recounted how he felt sympathy for the young Rembrandt, molding his very first bronzes, which actually bear the trademark of the Strada foundry. See Véronique Fromanger, Rembrandt Bugatti sculpteur: Répertoire monographique (Paris: Les Editions de l’Amateur, 2014), 30–31, 266. This recommendation could also have been supported or initiated by the sculptor Paul Troubetzkoy (1866–1938), who had been trained and had worked for a long time in Milan. Regarding Palazzolo’s account of his activity at Strada, see Jean Adhémar, “Before the Degas Bronzes,” Art News, November 1955: 34. Regarding Paul Troubetzkoy’s connections to the Bugatti family, see Fromanger, Rembrandt Bugatti, 22–23. 36  Among the first Italians to open their own lost-wax foundry in France at the end of the nineteenth century in France, we can mention Angelo and Carlo Robecchi, the Valsuani brothers Claudio and Attilio (these two linked families having seen some of their members arrive in France as simple workers as early as the 1850s), Mario Bisceglia (1879–1961), the Montagutelli brothers Philippe (1873–?) and Jean (after 1873–1964), and Frédéric Carvillani (?–ca. 1925). Most of them arrived in France at the turn of the twentieth century. 37  Maurice Dreyfous, Dalou, sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Henri Laurens editeur, 1903), 133.

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friend and biographer of Dalou, wrote that Madame Dalou “succeeded in reconstructing the entire technique of large-scale lost-wax casting; apart from the knack, which Bingen possessed without doubt in the rarest degree.”38 Foundry men had themselves demonstrated that the process of lost-wax casting was relatively accessible to anyone who was prepared to take an interest in it. The first of these founders were Gonon and Bingen, who had managed to revive lost-wax casting despite their very poor workers’ conditions. In 1879, workers at the Compagnie des bronzes in Brussels also recovered the “secrets” of lost-wax casting, quickly and without outside help. Workers at the Gorham foundry in America repeated this success at the start of the twentieth century.39 Gonon wrote in his 1876 treatise (fig. 2.1): “Lost wax can be easily practiced; it is no more onerous than ordinary casting and can achieve the impossible, which, as I used to say to the Emperor, is no longer a word in the French dictionary of casting.”40 The founder Ercole Parlanti (1871–1955) wrote a book with a similar purpose. Italian by birth, he immigrated with his brother Alessandro (1862–ca. 1921) to Great Britain in 1891, at the behest of sculptor Alfred Gilbert (1854–1934). During this period, at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, France was still setting artistic standards internationally and 38  Ibid., 121. On the deterioration of the relationship between Pierre Bingen and Dalou, Carriès, and others, see also Lebon, Fonte au sable, 107–13. 39  Spurred on by two Belgian sculptors who were sensitive to the trend in France (Paul de Vigne, 1843–1901, and Charles van der Stappen, 1843–1910), the Compagnie des bronzes tried to entice Gonon to join the enterprise in the spring of 1879, but he withdrew at the last moment. Despite this setback, from July 1879 workers at this large sand-casting foundry managed, through trial and error, to produce small lost-wax objects by themselves, graduating to statuettes from November. They cast their first monumental statue in October 1881 (see Anne Carre, “La cire perdue à la Compagnie des Bronzes,” Cahiers de la Fonderie 28–29 [2003]: 197–99; and Marie Wautelet, Contribution à l’étude des pratiques sculpturales au XIXe siècle: La petite sculpture figurative en bronze à la Compagnie des Bronzes de Bruxelles entre 1854 et 1914 [Ph.D. diss., Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2013], 155–59). I thank Marie Wautelet for sharing part of her work with me. I would like to highlight her contribution, “La sculpture entre art et technique: La réhabilitation de la cire perdue en Belgique au XIXe,” Histoire de l’art (October 2010): 59–70. The Gorham foundry in America succeeded in coaxing Bingen to abandon France, where he had lost all credibility. However, on his arrival in the United States he refused to share his “secrets,” so the company sent him back. Gorham foundry workers were quick to develop applications of the process on their own. Jannis C. Connor, “Harriet Whitney Frishmuth and Her Founders,” in Captured Motion: The Sculpture of Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, Janis Connor, Leah Rosenblatt Lehmbeck, and Thayer Tolles (New York: Hohmann Holdings, 2006), 57. Thanks to Jannis Conner for providing me with a copy of the foundry’s correspondence on this subject, partially mentioned in Lebon, Font au sable, 111–13, nn. 212, 213. 40  Gonon, L’art de fondre en bronze à la cire perdue, 20.

Sculptor-Founders in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Figure 2.1

Eugène Gonon, L’art de fondre en bronze à la cire perdue, manuscript dated 1876, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris, Ms.514

35

36

Lebon

the fashion for lost-wax casting soon spread to its European neighbors. In 1953, during his twilight years, Ercole was seized by a desire to share his knowledge through a short book, a forty-page discourse addressed to a fictitious amateur apprentice founder with a view to helping him take his first steps in the lostwax process.41 Ercole was then eighty-two years old and died two years later. Alessandro and Ercole had completed their apprenticeships in the 1880s at the celebrated Nelli Foundry in Rome, where their father worked. In London, the Parlanti brothers quickly became fashionable art founders and their business continued to operate until 1940. When the elderly Ercole published his little book, he was both holder of an ancestral Italian skill and a connoisseur of the requirements of modern art. It would not be overly speculative to presume that his instructions, which greatly resemble Gonon’s prescriptions in his 1876 treatise, reflect a steadfast code of practice and therefore probably mirror the procedure adopted by contemporary sculptor-founders such as Rosso. Confirming the accessibility of the lost-wax process for amateurs, provided that the pieces they wish to cast remain of modest form and proportion, Ercole Parlanti explains his intention: “The object of this book is to give a concise and complete explanation without going into the more ambitious castings that would require a well-fitted Foundry to produce. Sufficient [information] is given of the various stages for the student to be able to carry out the casting of a small simple torso.”42 His instructions are specifically tailored to the execution of a bust whose form is as straightforward to cast as that of Rosso’s Bambino ebreo or any other simple head. The basic materials, Parlanti stipulated, were commonplace and not costly at all. His list of these materials is reproduced in the book (fig. 2.2). Parlanti does not specify everything actually required for lost-wax casting, omitting such items as structural elements for furnaces, finishing tools and products needed for patination, although he does mention these earlier in the text. Such items were equally inexpensive and easy to make or obtain. In fact, everything was within the reach of anyone possessing a workshop of sufficient size or a little courtyard to accommodate the wax burnout kiln, which is a temporary structure of bricks rebuilt for each pouring, and the melting furnace, for which

41  E  rcole J. Parlanti, Casting a Torso in Bronze by the Cire Perdue Process (London: Alec Tirandi, 1953). 42  Ibid., 5.

Sculptor-Founders in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Figure 2.2

37

“Material Required,” from E. J. Parlanti, Casting a Torso in Bronze by the Cire Perdue Process, Alec Tirandi, London, 1953, 9

a simple heating stove would suffice (fig. 2.3a and fig. 2.3b).43 A workshop photo shows a small portable furnace used by Rosso (figs 2.4 and 2.5).44 Only a small sum of money was needed to get one’s do-it-yourself casting process up and running, the chief expense probably being the cost of the workshop. Nevertheless, every mistake made in the process ran the risk of 43  A casting pit was not needed, particularly in the case of small-format pieces, which did not require the crucible containing the molten metal to be lifted very high to access the pouring hole (gate); the mold could simply be held in place in a heap of firmly tamped sand. It was little extra trouble for founders to take the precautionary measure of positioning the mold in a metal frame (chassis), filling the remaining interior space with tamped sand, to avoid fire and injury in the event of the mold exploding during pouring as the molten metal spread. 44  Rosso used other more elaborate types of furnaces; for example, we know that he had one built in a corner of the open courtyard next to his workshop at the Impasse Marie-Blanche. This furnace was later used by other sculptors who lived at this address, the last being the Uruguayan Pedro Olaizola (1909–1984). See Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 1858–1928 (Paris: L’Echoppe, 1994), 72.

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Figure 2.3A De-waxing kiln being dismantled after wax removal, Susse Foundry, around 1950, Archives of the Fonderie Susse

Figure 2.3B De-waxing kiln being dismantled after wax removal, Hébrard foundry, reproduced in Louis Vauxcelles, “La fonte à cire perdue,” Art et Décoration, t.9, 1905, 195

Sculptor-Founders in Late Nineteenth-Century France

39

Figure 2.4

Medardo Rosso in his Paris studio ca. 1890, with casting oven in the foreground

Figure 2.5

Reconstruction of a nineteenth-century chemist’s laboratory furnace. Archaeological base from Melle, copied by the ceramicist Francois Peyrat at the request of Florian Téreygeol, in charge of research at CNRS © Jean Dubos

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precipitating accidents that would at best require a new pouring and at worst the rebuilding of a studio ravaged by a fiery explosion, accidents that could cause very serious injuries.45 Mistakes and their consequent damage occurred more frequently when novices attempted the process, thereby increasing costs to a point where those who experimented with the lost-wax technique often suffered financial ruin, as we shall see in the case of Charles Lebourg. This was also the fate of the pioneering experimenters: Eugène Gonon lamented the great poverty caused by his father’s experiences and his own financial distress; Bingen ended his life miserably. However, such dangers were proportional to the volume of the pouring, which is why Parlanti advised gaining experience with a small torso. Before concluding his piece with instructions for patination, Parlanti wrote: “I have tried to keep my explanation of the method for casting a work of art into bronze as simple as possible. Once the principles of the process are grasped, the student will develop his own technique and apply his acquired knowledge to more ambitious castings, not only in bronze but in other non-ferrous alloys including precious metals.”46 7

Sculptor-Founders in France from 1880 to 1895: Who and Why?

In the early 1880s, certain French sculptors were ready to launch themselves into the lost-wax casting venture. They were few in number. Their motives were as varied as the paradoxical interests driving the process’s rehabilitation during a very brief period, from 1880 to 1895.47 This gave a unity to their experiences and a direction that one can assume was connected to the specific technical, historical, and political conditions we have described—in short, a complex context that permeated local attitudes and behavior, including those of artists and their patrons. 45  Eugène Rouart described the pouring of a bronze by Rosso (which he confused in his description with the casting of a gelatin mold, a safe operation), specifying that this occurred outdoors, “in the courtyard of our house”—undoubtedly as a precautionary measure in view of the fire risk. Eugène Rouart, “En souvenir de Medardo Rosso,” L’Archer, n.s. no. 4 (April 1930): 284. 46  Parlanti, Casting a Torso, 36. 47  In France, there was still insufficient interest in the lost-wax process in 1876 to allow Eugène Gonon to pass on his knowledge through a school or even apprenticeship. He complained bitterly of this to the State, which simply provided him with an annual stipend that allowed him to continue his activity, since business was not profitable. In return Gonon described, more or less precisely, his process in a treatise that remained a manuscript, now preserved in the library of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (see n. 5, above).

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41

Let us start by considering the sculptors Charles Lebourg (or Le Bourg, 1829– 1906)48 and Anatole Marquet de Vasselot (1840–1904). These sculptors both stand as prisoners of outdated logics, although these logics stemmed from opposite opinions. For Lebourg, industrial logic remained paramount.49 It even appears in the title of the patent he registered in 1894—the result of an approach long-tested in previous years, precisely the period we have targeted: “Improvements to the industrial molding process for lost-wax casting.”50 He had perfected his process with the support of opulent Nantes-based sugar refiners, the brothers Victor and Emile Cossé. Lebourg was known as a fervent republican and it was said that this political leaning hampered him in his career.51 He experimented with art ceramics and developed “a gelatin that did not harden and remained elastic,” thereby allowing a model to be obtained that was absolutely faithful to the original from which it had been molded.52 For Lebourg, his molding procedures “no longer require professional expertise; so no mold-makers, chasers or mounters and that is precisely one of the innovations of the process, to make a statue in bronze without the intervention of anyone currently employed from these specialized trades.”53 He invented “a process of single-pour high-temperature casting,” which entailed the making of a casting mold “with a very fine silicated paste” and use of a core box. In other words, the core was molded in 48  The most complete study on Lebourg (very brief, however) is a lecture by Isabelle Parizet, associate professor at the Ecole publique des Hautes Etudes, “Pygmalion et Galatée, une œuvre méconnue de Charles Lebourg,” Documents d’Histoire parisienne 6 (November 2006): 67–78. 49  Lebourg was awarded an honorable mention for the results he already obtained through his experiments with high-fusion lost-wax casting in a single pour at the 1889 Exhibition Universel (see Parizet, “Pygmalion et Galatée,” 72, n. 15). 50  See “Mémoire descriptif déposé à l’appui de la demande d’un Brevet d’invention de quinze ans pour Perfectionnements apportés au procédé de moulage industriel pour la fonte à cire perdue, par MM. Charles Le Bourg et Victor Marie Cossé,” patent n° 235724, January 23, 1894, Archives de l’Institut national de la Propriété artistique INPI, Paris. I thank Stéphane Lemoine (Patrimonial Restorer, Nantes) and Steeve Gallizia (Archivist, INPI) for the copy of the Lebourg patents. 51  Cyrille Scianna and Edouard Papet, ed., La sculpture au musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2014), 272. 52  He filed a patent for the invention of an enameled mosaic on March 7, 1862, for the invention of a process of sculpture and ornaments in polychrome earthenware and a second on the application of decorative reliefs in colored paste on earthenware and porcelain on August 24, 1874 (INPI Archive, Paris). 53  In reality, this was hardly an original mixture, to which glycerin and glucose had been added. The process is described in detail in E. Maglin, “La fonte du bronze d’art d’un seul jet,” La nature, revue des Sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l’industrie, no. 1269 (September 25, 1897): 257–258, and more precisely in the report produced by a technician at the Thiebaut foundry.

42

Figures 2.6a and 2.6b

Lebon

Charles Lebourg, Main de femme (Hand of a Woman), Musée des beaux-Arts de Nantes, n.d. Lost-wax cast from a live model made by the Lebourg Process © Eric Maison-Marcheux, 2015

separate pieces, and then this mold was filled as many times as required with a forcefully tamped mixture that was “free of calcareous elements and nonhumid”—a kind of foundry sand type.54 This type makes Lebourg’s process a mixed technique that recalls, in reverse, Honoré Gonon’s initial monumental sand-casting attempts.55 Fundamentally, the appeal of Lebourg’s technique lay in its capacity to allow multiple identical casts (figs 2.6a, 2.6b, 2.7a and 2.7b). 54  The plaster of the traditional lost-wax cores is responsible, according to Lebourg, for causing lime sulphate emanations at high temperatures that damage the investment mold, which means that it is only suitable for brass, melting at lower temperatures than bronze (art “bronzes” are indeed most often brass). The very high melting temperature of bronze would be the reason why Lebourg could obtain particularly beautiful patinas. 55  On the contrary, Honoré Gonon had used a plaster-based core, traditional in the lost-wax casting process, for the first monumental sand casting in 1804 (Jean-Baptiste Rondelet, Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet, and Duchesne fils, “Rapport fait à l’Athénée des arts de Paris,”

Sculptor-Founders in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Figure 2.7

43

Charles Lebourg, Moulage en cire d’une statuette par le procédé le Bourg (Wax cast of a statuette made by the Lebourg Process), figs 1 and 2, in E. Maglin, “La fonte du bronze d’art d’un seul jet,” in La Nature, revue des sciences et de leurs applications aux arts et à l’industrie, no. 1269, September 25, 1897, 257

Lebourg presented his process to several large industrial art foundries, as archives from the Thiebaut foundry reveal. In his detailed report, the Thiebaut technician who examined the validity of Lebourg’s invention stressed that the technique produced superb patinas thanks to the high temperatures it could attain without cracking or warping, because of the siliceous clay core.56 But Lebourg’s timing was too late: it was the mid-1890s and industrialization was then the antithesis of what was expected of lost-wax casting, the revival of Le Magasin encyclopédique [February 1805]: 350–68. Full text reproduced in Lebon, Le fondeur et le sculpteur). 56  Robin Langlois, “Procédé de la fonte d’un seul jet, système Le Bourg,” August 19, 1897, Thiebaut Foundry Archives. A handwritten copy of the patent is also kept in these archives, with a “complementary note.”

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which had been driven by the very drawbacks that had removed the process from industry. Despite the undeniable beauty of Lebourg’s results, his costly experiments, in which nobody was interested, only succeeded in eating up his comfortable income from a successful career as an academic sculptor (he was the sculptor of the famous Parisian Fontaines Wallace).57 Lebourg founded the short-lived Société de la Fonte d’un seul jet, which was probably intended to manage the commercial exploitation of his process. His bronzes are marked with the stamp “C.F.L.” (perhaps meaning “Charles Lebourg Fecit”). This mark appears on his own works, as well as on those of another Nantes-born figure, Sébastien de Boishéraud (1847–1927), an amateur sculptor with a modest production who had been Lebourg’s pupil, despite the fact that de Boishéraud’s political profile shares more in common with that of Anatole Marquet de Vasselot. Anatole Marquet de Vasselot, a former diplomat who had reinvented himself as an artist, painter, and sculptor, was the opposite pole to Lebourg: an aristocrat who hankered after the past. His attitude echoed that of the female sculptor Félicie de Fauveau (1801–1866), an ardent royalist to the point of her involvement in the Vendée uprisings, practitioner of a “Troubadour” style and one of the very first clients, in 1829, of the new lost-wax founder Honoré Gonon. In 1882, Marquet de Vasselot asked Pierre Bingen to outfit his workshop with a small foundry, where he personally executed one unique and very beautiful piece, although we can suppose that Bingen must have lent him a generous hand. The work was a large self-portrait in armor with a title eloquently rendered in old French, Ung Ymagier du Roy (A Portraitist of the King). Marquet de Vasselot had previously sent a life-size model to Japan to be cast using lostwax techniques employed by local craftsmen (fig. 2.8).58 Within the delicate political context described above, in which restoration of the monarchy had been narrowly averted with great difficulty, Marquet de Vasselot’s flaunting of an Ancien Régime spirit sat uneasily with France’s new authorities. Finding no purchasers for his highly expensive bronzes, he immediately halted his exotic experiments and resumed his regular activities, dividing his time between his social life and scholarly work as an art historian.59 57  He was so poor when he died that his widow could not pay for his burial (statement of aid grants to Lebourg, no register numbered, Salon des Artistes français archives). 58  In his life as a diplomat, Marquet de Vasselot had been First Secretary to the King of Siam’s deputation in Paris. Japanese lost waxes, typically promoted as products of a craft tradition of high-quality utilitarian ware, were much admired in the period. The Japanese cast of this bust bears wrongly transcribed inscriptions by local uneducated founders, endowing the piece with an additional “cabbalistic” charm. 59  To my knowledge, the work and life of Marquet de Vasselot have not been the subject of study. An idea can only be found in a few short, scattered biographical notes (mainly in

Sculptor-Founders in Late Nineteenth-Century France

Figure 2.8

45

Charles Lebourg, extract from his patent “Perfectionnements apportés au procédé de moulage industriel pour la fonte à cire perdue”, January 23, 1894, patent no. 235724. Archives INPI

Let us touch quickly on the clumsy experiments conducted by two obscure sculptors working in concert, Pezieux and Destables. These sculptors are little known today, but for the fact that in January 1889 their experiments resulted in explosions reported in the press.60 Eager to be associated with the Cellinian myth then prevailing, they brought back from Italy clays they thought had been

the Dictionnaire biographique international des écrivains, ed. Henry Carnoy [Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 1987], 1–4:156–57). He is sometimes quoted in studies about the Rose+Croix, of which he was a member, being a close friend of Joséphin Peladan. He exhibited his Autoportrait cast in Japan at the Salon des Rose+Croix in 1893. This bronze is now at Musée d’Orsay, Paris, inv. RF4728. Regarding Vasselot’s casts, see also Patrice Bellanger, “Bingen-Carries: Le renouveau de la fonte à cire perdue,” in Jean Carries (1855– 1894): La matière de l’étrange, ed. Amélie Simier (Paris: Paris musées, 2007), 61. 60  Brief item in Le Temps, January 10, 1889, anonymous press clipping preserved in the Champeaux Archives, Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, Paris.

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used by the great Florentine to make his molds, but finally only succeeded in “doing Etna at home.” The article did not specify their identity beyond their surnames, but Pezieux is very likely Jean-Alexandre Pezieux (1850–1898), son of a goldsmith and thus familiar with lost-wax casting techniques for small precious works. He was one of those working for Rodin and collaborated with the sculptor Jean Carriès, who is discussed below. In 1887 he had been impressed by a stay in Italy. It is also interesting to note that he exhibited waxes, supported the theories of Peladan, and exhibited at the Salon de la Rose+Croix, characteristics also seen in other sculptor-founders such as Marquet de Vasselot and Ringel d’Illzach. Regarding Destables, we still do not know if the article refers to the sculptor Jules Destables (1832–1897), who finally devoted himself to a career as a Beaux-Arts inspector. The article mentions a third protagonist named “Boucher,” who is impossible to identify. Given the commonly occurring surname, it is highly unlikely that it is either the already famous Alfred Boucher (1850–1934), about whom such experiments are unknown, nor Jean Boucher (1870–1939), who would have been very young then—this is the year he was admitted to the Beaux-Arts. Equally insignificant is the sculptor Alfred-Jean Foretay (1861–1944), a pupil of Alexandre Falguière (1831–1900), better known for his terracottas: a sign of his support for the craftsmanship tendency. In 1890, Foretay joined forces with the founder Nainer61 to conduct “experiments” mentioned in a brief item in the newspaper Le Temps on June 3, 1890.62 The two men had reportedly obtained “several bronze specimens of a rare perfection.” “But,” added the journalist, “it is appropriate to reserve judgment about their system—which is anyway secret—until their trials have been more numerous and more important.” They probably weren’t, because their trail ends there. Charles Laurent-Daragon (1833–1904) is almost as unknown as the preceding examples. Only the memory of his friendship with Carpeaux remains. Son of a carpenter, a student of Beaux-Arts in the late 1860s, he had likely also received extensive technical training, probably from the molder of the national museums, the occasional mediocre lost-wax founder François-Henri Jacquet, whom he designated as his master.63 Carpeaux brought his friend to Rome to 61  Nainer’s name appears on the register of employees at the Blot et Drouard foundry in 1873, although we cannot be certain that he is the same man. 62  “Mirabeau et le marquis de Dreux-Brézé,” Le Temps, June 3, 1890, 3. 63   François-Henri Jacquet was the plaster molder for France’s national museums until he was dismissed for malpractice in 1848. He had also worked occasionally as a lost-wax founder for the equestrian statue of Louis XIV in Lyon (modeled by Lemot, 1822). The cast had been of such abysmal quality that it incurred a lawsuit brought by a chaser (Lebon, Fonte au sable, 49). He had been in open conflict with a number of sand founders,

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Figure 2.9 Anatole Marquet de Vasselot, Ung Ymagier du Roy, autoportrait en Cellini (Ung Ymagier du Roy, Self-Portrait as Cellini), life-size proof, cast in Japan in 1883 © galerie Patrice Bellanger, DR

help him with his skills as molder and marble practitioner. He then trusted him to supervise on his behalf, in Paris, the casting of his Pêcheur à la coquille.64 Laurent-Daragon probably met with as little success in his trials. In a pamphlet to the glory of lost wax in a single pour published in 1880, he claims that “prudence” prevented him from describing details too precisely.65 (fig. 2.9) The especially Crozatier. Jacquet accused him of disloyal competition. See François-Henri Jacquet, handwritten letter (1827), in Lebon, Le fondeur et le sculpteur. 64  Unpublished letters from Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux to his friend Charles Laurent, reproduced in Le Figaro: Supplement littéraire du dimanche, June 16, 1906. Laurent later added Daragon to his patronymic. Carpeaux had brought Laurent to Rome to provide him with practitioner’s assistance. See also James David Draper and Édouard Papet, eds., Carpeaux, 1827–1875: Un sculpteur pour l’Empire (Paris: M’O, Gallimard, 2014), 56. 65  Le Bronze d’Art: Étude historique et pratique de la Fonte antique rétablie par la fonte d’un seul jet et du caractère de la fonte ordinaire dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle […] (Paris: Le Bailly Libraire-Editeur, [1881]).

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cult of secrecy certainly formed part of the process’s charm. Laurent-Daragon’s publication is merely a sketchy compilation of patchy information garnered from here and there, a tissue of banalities glorifying past works such as those that regularly appeared in the press of the period devoted to the resurrection of lost-wax casting. He does not question the trustworthiness of exaggerated praise, and gives no genuine practical evidence. Laurent-Daragon appears to have taken up Jacquet’s embittered claims.66 His career was rather pedestrian, with several State-commissioned busts and marbles. The archives of the Belgian foundry Compagnie des bronzes kept track of a service proposal by Laurent-Daragon at the time when the company was experimenting with lost wax in July 1879. But his skills were clearly not convincing enough for the foundry, which did not follow up.67 The final two sculptors discussed here are the most interesting cases: Jean-Désiré Ringel d’Illzach (1849–1916) and Paul Wayland Bartlett (1865–1925), an American who had settled in France. Ringel was a penniless provincial, “half Lorrain, half German.”68 His ambition rose from an adventurous and highly inventive spirit. It is helpful to mention his origins and bear in mind that the province of his birth, the Lorraine, was ceded to the enemy when France’s new republican government signed its peace treaty with Prussia in 1871. Ringel, a twenty-one-year-old at this time, had volunteered to fight against the Prussian invader from which he returned with an injured arm; after France’s defeat and the ceding of Lorraine to the enemy, he had to request naturalization as a French citizen. But he remained deeply attached to his origins, adding the name of the town of his birth, Illzach, to his surname in 1886. Ringel is described in a short story by author Jean Lorrain, L’homme aux têtes de cire (The Man with Wax Heads), as a Benvenuto Cellini-like character who was sensitive, easily offended and a little wild.69 A sculptor, medalist, engraver, and pupil of the sculptors François Jouffroy (1806–1882) and Alexandre Falguière (1831–1900), Ringel was also a talented musician (like Cellini, he was an excellent flautist), keenly interested in the esoteric and tireless in his 66  See n. 63. 67  On the other hand, the Compagnie des bronzes would accept, at the same time, the help of the Italian sculptor-founder Gemito (Wautelet, Contribution à l’étude, 156). 68  Ringel was the subject of an unpublished university study: Jean-Luc Olivié, Etat des recherches sur un sculpteur inconnu du XIXe siècle: Ringel d’Illzach, 1847–1916, Master’s thesis, Université Paris I- Panthéon Sorbonne, Bibliothèque de l’Institut national d’Histoire de l’art. Ringel himself published some booklets. 69   Jean Lorrain, “L’homme aux têtes de cire,” in Buveurs d’âmes (Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1893).

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experimentation. He first produced polychrome hard-wax reliefs, which he exhibited from 1877. In the same year, as a kind of precursor of Degas and his Little Dancer Aged Fourteen (ca. 1880), Ringel was represented at the Salon by a life-size statue entitled Perversité (Perversity), made of boiled cardboard and colored wax, whose naturalistic appearance caused a scandal. It is said that he equipped himself with a revolver and maintained an armed guard over the statue for two days to prevent it from being smashed, until the Salon’s committee members arrived to remove the work by force.70 Ringel repeated his provocation in 1878 with another colored wax entitled Négresse (Negress) exhibited at the Exposition Universelle. Such a determined man nurtured a deeply rooted ambition. The son of an erudite clergyman and archaeologist, he immersed himself, like Marquet de Vasselot, in mysticism and the Rosicrucian movement. His pronounced taste for old processes, his penchant for puzzling phenomena, and for alchemical mysteries led him to become interested in the casting and fusing of different materials, including metals.71 We know that Ringel also worked with Pierre Bingen on the completion of casts commissioned by Rodin, until a disagreement estranged them in 1886.72 Bingen was also from Lorrain by birth. He had opted, like Ringel, for naturalization as a French citizen after 1871. Most probably it was working with Bingen that inspired Ringel with such a passion for lost-wax casting that he began to consider developing his own process. In 1889, he displayed a monumental vase (figs 2.10a and 2.10b) at the Exposition Universelle, which he claimed to have cast in a single pour with a “lost-clay” process at the Brussels workshop of the Compagnie des bronzes, where he had received material and technical support.73 Ringel also alleged that he had invented a way of casting directly on “soft clay,” raising doubts in the minds of the Exposition’s jury members, who knew that molten metal could not be poured onto fresh clay, which was damp, without the risk of unleashing a terrible explosion. In the same year, he applied 70  Ibid., 129–30. 71  Ringel worked in wax, as well as every vitreous material (enamel, stoneware, glass paste), always seeking to perfect techniques. 72  Bingen did not pay the compensation he owed Ringel for helping him in finishing repairs on a Rodin bronze. See Ringel to Rodin, January 24, 1886, RIN.5281, Archives Musée Rodin. 73  In July 1889, Ringel was still looking for a lost-wax foundry, which he hoped to find in Belgium. He asked the sculptor Jean Herain about the Compagnie des bronzes (letter from Charles De Coene, director of the foundry, to Jean Herain, July 24–29, 1889, quoted in Wautelet, Contribution à l’étude, 165). Since this colossal vase had to be exhibited before the end of 1889, Ringel must have approached the Compagnie des bronzes shortly after this letter. We learn from the foundry’s archives that a similar process had been experimented with earlier by the foundry, but Ringel had appropriated it “in order to achieve new results.” Ibid., 110.

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Figures 2.10a and 2.10b Jean-Désiré Ringel d’Illzach, Vase, 1889, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Detail © Elisabeth Lebon

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for a patent in his own name that tells us that he employed a process that recalls techniques used for casting bells (figs 2.11a, 2.11b, and 2.11c).74 Ringel built his investment mold directly onto his fresh clay model that, according to observers, was supported on a core of wood.75 He added into the clay natural elements such as twists of fabric, tapestry tassels, twigs and insects, as well as other decorations modeled like small snails. The fresh composition is immediately covered with the investment mold preparation, so it does not undergo any of the deformations that always occur during the drying stage, which involves shrinking. The investment mold is quite traditional in composition, similar to that described by Parlanti: a mixture of plaster and crushed firebrick, diluted in water, that is left to dry. The model is subsequently stripped out, the wax is applied in the mold, and then the core, of a composition similar to the investment mold, is poured. The process’s major disadvantage immediately becomes apparent: employing a direct cast from the original, without an intermediate stage, entailed a total and definitive loss of the model if this failed. So the risks, including financial ones, were considerable.76 Another drawback was that while the process could be used to execute the open forms of vases, producing closed-form statuary in this way was fraught with significant complications.77 Only three medallions cast by Ringel in the same period using this method are known. They are of questionable success, possibly initial attempts that were executed at the Compagnie des bronzes.78 74  “… for a process allowing the casting in metal of all kinds of objects, directly on clay or other soft materials.” Patent n°199586, dated October 11, 1889, Institut National de la Propriété Industrielle INPI archives, Paris. 75  “We believe to know that this famous vase, when refused by the jury of fine arts, was simply made of wood covered with wax-modeled ornaments.” E. Colin (bronzes manufacturer), report, in Exposition universelle internationale de 1889: Rapports du jury international, Groupe III, mobilier et accessoires, class 35, Ministère du Commerce, de l’Industrie et des Colonies (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1891), 678. 76  “Whatever the construction method adopted by the artist, it is clear from Mr. Ringel’s own admission that, if the casting misses, the entire work is lost, every step has to be repeated; is this a practical process? We don’t think so.” E. Colin report, 678. 77  For clay casting and its application in statuary art, see Lebon, “Fonte en terre, fonte statuaire?” in Lebon, Le fondeur et le sculpteur. The Compagnie des bronzes refused the project proposed thereafter by Ringel, which it “would not see succeed without apprehension,” to cast fourteen bronze groups by the same process (letter from De Coene to Ringel, June 13, 1889, quoted in Wautelet, Contribution à l’étude, 111). 78  With his huge vase, Ringel also exhibited, in an 1889 exhibition, three medallions cast on fresh clay (“sur terre molle”) at the Compagnie des bronzes. The same year in June he asked Rodin, who did not seem to have followed up, to show him samples of bronze cast directly on fresh clay, probably one of the medallions (Ringel to Rodin, June 17, 1889, RIN.5281, Archives Musée Rodin). But a letter addressed to the foundry manager expressed his dissatisfaction with the defective appearance of these medallions, which

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Figures 2.11a, 2.11b and 2.11c Jean-Désiré Ringel d’Illzach, extract from his patent for direct casting “on clay or other soft materials,” patent no. 199586, July 15, 1889, Archives de l’INPI, Paris

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Ringel’s most original innovation was the composition of his casting wax, which was not beeswax but a vegetal wax called “carauba,”79 derived from palm leaves. Scarcely more economical than beeswax, but harder and more brittle, this exotic substance from Guinea had a melting point that was higher by some 20°C. The results that Ringel obtained are astounding in their finesse. However, the air of implausible mystery with which he enveloped his technique, making people suspect him of deception, and the overriding disadvantages of direct pouring, meant that although he astonished people, nobody became interested in this process. Among the many common points that link Ringel to Rosso is this major concern to remain as close as possible to the creative gesture, even if it means letting its concrete result disappear. This leads, at the same moment, to the same result: a relative lack of interest from the public experienced negatively by the artist. At the end of his life, Ringel became consumed by bitterness, convinced that he was the victim of a cabal, and eventually returned to the region of his birth, remaining in Lorraine for the rest of his life. There he still experimented with the casting of vitreous substances but scarcely received any recognition for these innovations.80 His magnificent monumental vase remained abandoned at the Compagnie des bronzes’s premises until 1970. In 2009 the Getty Museum in Los Angeles acquired the piece, plucking it from obscurity and subsequently displaying it in a prominent position.81 prevented him from selling them (Ringel to De Coene, Director of the Compagnie des Bronzes, November 25, 1889, C1/45 [1889], Archives of the Musée des Arts décoratifs, Paris). 79  This wax is now known as “carnauba” and is chiefly used on account of its brilliance and hardness (some 5% more than that of beeswax). It is primarily employed in the cosmetic and food industries. 80  Ringel, who presents himself as a sculptor-inventor, explained in 1910: “Nowadays in Meisenthal … the glass of which I just spoke is commonly made, glass with casts of plants, fabrics, giving the most unexpected results and creating through the novelty of their design and the extraordinary beauty of performance a new complete art. This casting material which has just been questioned is neither filed nor patented, not even written down; it has always been impossible for me to reveal the secret, even vis-à-vis my most intimate employees. It is the same with my wax processes … wax hardened and colored in its mass by my process, enamels and crystals poured into my molds by joining cast iron, bronze, brass and tin, also melted in my molds, copper and iron hammered and repoussé.” “Atelier de M. Ringel d’Illzach: Causerie du sculpteur-inventeur,” in Bulletin de la Société des Sciences, Agriculture et Arts de la Basse-Alsace, fasc. no. 1, January 1910 (Strasbourg: Imprimerie alsacienne anct G. Fischbach, 1910), 10, 12. 81  Inventory number 2010.2. Concerning this acquisition, see Didier Rykner, “A Monumental Vase by Ringel d’Illzach Joins the Getty Museum,” La Tribune de l’art, December 19, 2010, http://www.thearttribune.com/A-monumental-vase-by-Ringel-d.html (Accessed December 14, 2018).

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Paul Wayland Bartlett had another story. His father, an American sculptor and well-known art critic, moved to France when Bartlett was a child. He grew up in Paris where he studied sculpture and became a rich dandy, perfectly accepted in the most influential French circles and thoroughly cognizant of their workings. In 1891, two years after Rosso had settled in Paris, Bartlett fitted a small foundry in his studio, where he endeavored over four years to cast an entire menagerie of tiny animals that were barely larger than his hand. He was aided in this project by a man he had hired called Joseph, a former factotum for Pierre Bingen. Joseph presumably proved capable of giving Bartlett technical assistance.82 The tiny dimensions of the objects Bartlett produced reflect his amateur status. In 1895, he exhibited the results of his labor at the Salon in a large display case, which caused a great public sensation. Despite this success, Bartlett lost interest in casting the following year. Undoubtedly, his frequenting of fashionable milieus had allowed him to understand that the taste for luxury outweighed any interest in the creative process itself. Moreover, the notebooks he kept to record his experiments contain many more instructions relating to patina than passages strictly concerned with casting techniques, which are much more succinct (figs 2.12a and 2.12b).83 Having attained a thorough understanding of the lost-wax casting process, Bartlett chose to avoid its risks and rigors in order to concentrate on the patinas (surface appearance) that principally attracted the interest of bronze lovers. Here again appears the founder Pierre Bingen, who played a paradoxical role: through his dishonest ways, he unwittingly discouraged many artists who were at first fervent adepts of lost-wax casting from continuing to use the process (i.e. Dalou, who finally returned to sand casting), or even to work with bronze (as in the case of Carriès, which we will discuss below), staging himself with a magical aura. If he stubbornly refused to share his knowledge with founders, such as those of the Gorham Foundry, he liked to be propelled into the rank of artists. He probably enjoyed their company, did not see them as serious competitors, and apparently helped them to experiment. By assisting amateur artists, certainly for a fee, Bingen attracted his clientele and avoided the risk of having to restart at his own responsibility and expense a failed casting—put to the novice’s account. With the exception of Rosso, who drew his knowledge from Italian founders, and Ringel, who experimented with Belgians inspired by 82  Dreyfous, Dalou, sa vie et son œuvre, 131. Bartlett knew Bingen well enough to facilitate his hiring by the Gorham foundry in the US when the founder’s position became untenable in France (Lebon, Fonte au sable, 211–13). 83  Carol P. Adil and Dr. Henry A. DePhillips, Jr., Paul Wayland Bartlett and the Art of Patination (Wethersfield, CT: Paul Wayland Bartlett Society, 1991).

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Figures 2.12a and 2.12b

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Paul Wayland Bartlett, sketch from his study notebook, reproduced in Carol P. Adil and Henry A. De Phillips Jr., Paul Wayland Bartlett and the art of patination, The Paul Wayland Bartlett Society, Wetherfield, Connecticut, 1991

Gonon and the Italian Gemito, it is therefore Bingen’s methods that were probably adopted by most of the sculptors who cast their own bronzes in France at the end of the nineteenth century. There is unfortunately no information on what investment material Bingen used for his casting process, although it can be assumed that he was inspired by the French ways of doing things. As far as I know, no study has yet been conducted to characterize the “Italian process” in relation to the French one (and a German process that seems mixed is also recorded).84 I have found in the archives of the Thiebaut foundry a “note on lost-wax casting,” which indicates that “The Italian process differs from the French process in that it does not allow the use of bronze (90% copper and 10% tin) but a mixture that 84  “The German process, which consists, as everyone knows, in the use of a preparation of sand, clay and horse stuff, all sieved, diluted and crushed together, with which we make a kind of solid mortar that we tread on the model, much like our sand of Fontenay-aux-roses, with the difference that it has to be steamed again before treading another piece.” Rapport des délégués ouvriers parisiens: Exposition universelle de Londres 1862 (Paris: Chabaud, Wanschooten; Grandpierre, Dargent, 1862), 288.

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is similar to brass (90% copper and 10% zinc).”85 In the Lebourg patent, we find confirmation that the “Italian” process (a lost-wax/plaster core) is better suited to brass because of the emanations of the plaster, and the “French” process (a more resistant sand core) to bronze, which has a higher melting point. The Italians also seem to have imported a particular composition already described by Cellini, and familiarly called “cow dung molding,” based on animal excrement (cow, horse), horsehair, and a finely ground specific mixture that each founder kept more or less secret.86 It macerated in a pit for more than a year, until a very flexible, very fine, easily diluted and gas-permeable paste was obtained. French founders seem to have used an investment material based on plaster and crushed brick or siliceous clay easily found in the subsoil around Paris. Gonon, whose father trained with the sculptor Lemot, heir to the French traditions of the Ancien Régime, wrote that he used a pot made of plaster and sands.87 We shall conclude by considering the case of two sculptors whose decision not to become their own founders sheds further light on our subject. Firstly, there is Jean Carriès (1855–1894), whose personal history and body of work resemble those of Rosso in many respects, in particular their shared attraction to works in wax. When the ubiquitous Bingen became Carriès’ official founder in 1883, the two men began to help and support each other in their respective ambitions. At that time, Bingen had barely started as lost-wax casting founder. Both equally miserable, they worked together for several years and felt like “sentinels holding high the standard of Art for Art’s Sake in the face of all the storms.”88 The bronzes they produced together rapidly met with great success, with the splendid patinas created by their friend Jean-François, known as Jean Limet (1855–1941) playing at least as great a part in this success as the quality of their castings. The proof is that Limet would quickly be hired by Rodin, who was himself perfectly familiar with foundries and their secrets of success. Rodin knew how to delegate all kinds of operations to highly talented men. He made Limet his official quality controller and patinater. His raw casts, ordered from various sand-casting foundries that he put into competition with each other, were delivered to Limet’s workshop located more than 200 kilometers from Paris. Limet had to check their quality and accept or reject them 85  Thiebaut Foundry Archives, unpublished. 86  Cellini, Œuvres complètes, trans. Leopold Leclanché (Paris: Paulin, 1847), Vol. II, 358. 87  Gonon, L’art de fondre à cire perdue, 38. 88  Carriès to Bingen, April 23, 1893, 73J/4, Nièvre departmental archives, Fonds Carriès.

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before patinating them. But Rodin quickly lost interest in Bingen once he had tried him with several casts, as well as in the lost-wax casting process more generally. Despite the rapid success of his bronzes, Carriès abandoned sculpture as early as 1889, devoting himself to a workshop for luxury ceramics, where he pursued the success of his bronze patinas by essentially focusing on developing exceptional colored glazes. One advantage to his change of medium is that this made him the sole master of his work, from conception to final execution, and spared him recourse to complex, dangerous and costly bronzecasting techniques or dependency on a founder. His career as a producer of luxury ceramics consolidated his enormous success. At this point, he ruthlessly abandoned his former collaborator Bingen, who had helped him attain his initial celebrity.89 Let us finish with a brief consideration of the sculptor Jean Dampt. The modest son of a cabinetmaker, he traveled to Italy at his own expense to meet with his friend the Italian sculptor Vicenzo Gemito in Naples. Gemito was preparing to open his own lost-wax foundry there, and Dampt assisted him in this endeavor for two years, from 1881 to 1883. He then spent several months in the Maghreb, where he probably familiarized himself with the rudimentary techniques employed by local founders. On his return to France, Dampt became an active member of the Art dans Tout movement and worked as a blacksmith, an ivory carver, a stuccoist, a cabinetmaker and a lacquerer. In fact, he worked as almost everything but a founder of his own sculptures. This is how he enjoyed a very successful career.90 To summarize: the few sculptor-founders whom we have managed to identify in France in the late-nineteenth century quickly abandoned casting. Some, like Lebourg or Marquet de Vasselot, did so because they had embraced an outmoded position (industrialization or a rejected political ideology) that deterred clientele. Others, such as Pezieux, Destables, Foretay or Laurent-Daragon, stopped casting because their talent as casters probably did not equal their 89  See Elisabeth Lebon, “Carriès et Bingen, le couple parfait,” in Lebon, Repertoire, Carriès, Le fondeur et le sculpteur. 90  Among the passionate experimenters who could have devoted themselves to casting bronze but preferred more artisanal techniques, we could also have mentioned Henry Cros (1840–1907). Cros had attended François Jouffroy’s classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, probably at the same time as Ringel d’Illzach and Marquet de Vasselot. He first experimented extensively with wax (modeled sculpture and casting, painting), and then devoted himself to polychrome sculpture and more specifically to glass paste. He had his own glazier kiln and later worked for the Sèvres factory, where he had dedicated equipment.

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talent as sculptors. Still others, like Bartlett, Carriès, or Dampt, who did not even try to apply his knowledge, understood that interest lay elsewhere and quickly changed tack, deriving considerable benefit from this decision. Finally, Ringel, born in a country with complicated links to France, much less Parisian than his colleagues, seemed to focus on a creative approach that could endanger the final object. He attracted indifference and sunk into a state of resentment as violent as his disappointed ambition. 8

Medardo Rosso

The experiences of these sculptors within a highly restricted period culminated in their swift renunciation of casting for a variety of reasons. After 1895 and following Bartlett’s stunning success at the Salon, Rosso was the only one to persevere in his desire to cast his bronzes himself. He was a sculptor who was obviously sensitive to the role and place accorded to the artist, all the more so, one might hypothesize, because he had probably worked as a pasticheur and seems to have thought that this occupation threatened his artistic legitimacy. He fully supported the international movement that rendered sculptors the absolute masters of their work as proof of their unique talent. His previous contacts with Italian foundries, which had given him a certain knowledge of the process, facilitated his commitment to action.91 Rosso thought that a work echoes the artist as an individual and was enriched by the traces of gestation left by that artist, including scars, shortcomings, and stains. Although Rodin appears to have left similar traces on his work, in reality he always did so in a spirit of aestheticism, which is not the case with Rosso. Rodin’s bronzes are always perfectly finished and the traces of work they retain always precede that of the foundry workshop. That Rosso celebrated the act itself, and that the appearance of objects detached from their creator was not his primary concern, is confirmed by his will, in which he declared that he was a priori surprisingly indifferent to the conditions of posthumous casts.92 91  We do know that Rosso did not perfectly control the bronze-casting process, or even simple wax proof casting. In addition to the obvious casting flaws displayed by some of his bronzes, foliation has also been observed in some works in wax, indicating poor control of temperature management during the pouring of successive layers, which have failed to fuse correctly and subsequently separated. 92  See Sharon Hecker, “The Afterlife of Sculptures: Posthumous Casts and the Case of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928),” Journal of Art Historiography 16 (June 2017) https://art historiography.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/hecker.pdf (Accessed December 14, 2019).

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He shared Ringel’s preoccupation with prioritizing the preservation of the creative moment, whatever the cost. Both men rejected the demands of their era, which were that final objects should not only be uncommon but also of a manifestly superior quality. At this time in France, rare or unique bronzes were destined for wealthy, powerful clients who wished to flaunt them as tokens of their dominant position within the young and fragile Republic, which was determined, in order to attain lasting legitimacy, to mimic the sumptuous monarchy. If lost-wax casting was to retain, and increasingly win, the favor of clients and sculptors, its execution would quickly be left to professionals, who were most qualified to guarantee impeccable quality whilst managing a process that was dangerous, costly, unreliable, and tainted by the least desirable features of working life: noise, dirt, thankless and time-consuming tasks, exhausting physical activity, and danger of serious injury, to say nothing of the risk of financial ruin. Ceramics, terracotta, pewter casting or direct carving would now be preferred by sculptors who wished to continue to mark their work with the stamp of craftsmanship, thereby guaranteeing their authenticity. Rosso was a stranger to the underlying impulses of this franco-français tangle of political, social, and artistic threads, especially since he had arrived in Paris in 1889, shortly before the threads uncrossed to settle into a new configuration. Too Italian, too isolated to correctly estimate the local situation, he acted in a way that would ultimately place him as a precursor. In neglecting to use the lost-wax casting process for the qualities for which is was appreciated, however, he stubbornly persisted down a path that did not lead him very far in that time and that place. A work like Bambino ebreo retains the scars of its creation, promoting the act of that creation. Since its aim was not ultimate perfection and Rosso reproduced it without limits, such an object could not expect to be displayed in the Salons of Paris’s great and good (the circles of Antonin Proust, Georges Clemenceau, Adrien Hébrard, Juliette Adam, etc.) alongside Meunier’s sanitized and irreproachable figures of laborers, Carriès’s unique and sumptuous stoneware, Charpentier’s graciously impractical vases, Rodin’s deceptively sketchy marvels, or Hébrard’s luxurious bronzes. Several decades later, once the political regime and social positions had become firmly established, the stakes would shift, the situation would change, and the individual approach would take precedence over the object. Even modeling (and its corollary, bronze) would be dethroned, since it required knowledge and apprenticeships and demanded the involvement of many successive hands in a shared process. Rosso’s theatricalization of the artistic act had the indirect effect of conferring an artistic stamp on works by inferior

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Figure 2.13

The corner of the workshop reserved for gelatin molding, Fonderie Thinot, Châtillon, 2007 © Elisabeth Lebon

sculptors—some that appear to be devoid of all technical mastery—that dispensed with any pretense of usefulness as well as beauty. But by this time, he would no longer be alive.

Appendix: Gelatin Molding

Gelatin molding (fig. 2.13) was the only important improvement, even if indirect, available to lost-wax founders in the nineteenth century.93 Although 93   Casting-process improvements did not take place until the early 1960s, initiated by the Coubertin foundry: replacement of gelatin by elastomer (1962), refractory ceramic shell molds (1968), polyester resin and fiber screeds (1969), machine-sprayed slip bath and refractory stucco (1974), monumental sculpture molds binding elastomer and polyester (1976), filling of the casting pit with cast-iron balls (1980), vacuum casting in ceramic molds (1986), use of CO2 silicate sand for very large smooth volumes (1986), vacuum casting in cylinders for special plasters around hollow waxes (1995). Information provided to the author by Jean Dubos, workshop manager of the Coubertin foundry from 1969 to 2006, September 1, 2018.

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its application in art was probably developed by Antoine-Louis Barye and Honoré Gonon for the execution of the Surtout du Duc d’Orléans in the 1830s, it remained little-used throughout the century. The sculptor Nicolas Brenet (1770–1846) must also be counted among the first users of gelatin molding. In June 1832, he proposed to the Commission des Monnaies et Médailles, during an extraordinary meeting of its advisory committee (Comité consultatif), a reduction of the Colonne Vendôme from a “lost wax model” that he had molded, as he explained, with “gelatin made of albuminoid material from the transformation of ossein.” This work aroused among the members of this Comité a particular interest on a technical level.94 We find here a very small group that revolved around the chemist d’Arcet, Commissaire général of the Hôtel des Monnaies, and Barye, who was an engraver for La Monnaie and a prominent member of this Committee. Brenet and Barye were close friends, and this confirms that the development of gelatin molding was probably the result of experiments conducted jointly by these men, all of them in close connection with the Hôtel des Monnaies. Gonon appears to have been almost the only art founder (and even art molder) to have routinely employed gelatin molds for statuary, until the vogue for lost-wax casting rapidly emerged in the 1880s.95 Plaster modelers would not adopt gelatin molds (except for small, flat items such as medals) until lost-wax casters, mainly Italians, began to disseminate their use, and they were won over by their convenience, discovered through practical experience. The use of gelatin greatly facilitated mold-making, which remained a significantly difficult element in the lost-wax casting process as practiced until the end of the nineteenth century, demanding highly technical plaster-piece molding capabilities, on a par with those required thereafter of statuary sand casters. The operation was complex, time consuming, and therefore expensive. By contrast, gelatin molding was based on simple principles that brought it 94   Compte-rendu de séance extraordinaire du Comité consultatif de la Médaille, November 2, 1832, quoted in J.-M. Darnis, “Autour de la colonne de la Grande Armée,” Revue du Souvenir napoléonien 47 (October–November, 2008): 49–57, http://www.napoleon.org/ histoire-des-2-empires/articles/autour-de-la-colonne-de-la-grande-armee/. During the recent transition of the Hôtel des Monnaies Archives to the Finance Ministry Archives, the volume in which this account appears seems to have disappeared. 95  Experiments with the process had just been conducted in the plaster-mold-making workshop at the Musée du Louvre in 1849 and 1850, when Barye was the director. The process was subsequently used only for some casts. In 1907, an internal report of the museum underlined the warping that the process could easily cause and recommended that its use be restricted to making molds of small bas-reliefs. See Florence Rionnet, L’atelier de moulage du Musée du Louvre (Paris: Edition de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1996), 39, nn. 10, 11, 44.

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within the reach of amateurs, at least in theory. Other equally important advantages offered by gelatin were its cheapness and the fact that gelatin is partially reusable by melting. There are few variations in gelatin’s practical application. By simply playing with the proportions of several additives such as glycerin or glucose, something that is relatively easy to master, one could render the material more or less elastic or impermeable and alter its surface hardness. Precautions had to be taken when using gelatin molds concerning management of temperatures, for the melting point of gelatin is very low and fairly close to that of wax. Such precautions are necessary to ensure that the gelatin does not warp when pouring wax in a hot liquid state into a gelatin mold, or when poured into or covered with plaster, which heats as it hardens.96 The danger is that one can end up with a shapeless cast with no acuity. To avoid this problem, several tricks of the trade allow users to achieve successful pouring. Depending on conditions (essentially atmospheric ones), a gelatin mold can produce about a dozen good-quality casts.97 These casts must be made over a relatively short period, within the space of several days, after which the gelatinous envelope can no longer be used, owing to shriveling and cracking. However, if gelatin molders retain their original models and molds as business assets, they can easily produce new gelatins at any time.98 All they require is a small area of a workshop with a camping stove and a saucepan. Bibliography Adhémar, Jean. “Before the Degas bronzes.” Art News (November 1955). Adil, Carol P. and Dr. Henry A. DePhillips. Jr. Paul Wayland Bartlett and the Art of Patination. Wethersfield, CT: Paul Wayland Bartlett Society, 1991. Alcouffe, Daniel, et al. “Soyer, Ingé.” In Un âge d’or des arts décoratifs, 1814–1848. Paris: Editions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1991, 532–533. 96  The melting point of beeswax is 62–65°C; the melting point of natural gelatin is 27–32°C. 97  This would be the reason why French law, having to base itself on a rule of a minimum of legitimacy, would have fixed the number of authorized legal bronze casts at twelve. The reasoning was based on the hypothesis of waxes all drawn from the same gelatin. 98  To make a gelatin mold, an original plaster cast of the sculpture is surrounded by a layer of soft clay that is thickened to a volume that can easily be incorporated into two plaster shells, taking care to make repairs. Then the plaster is opened, the clay removed, the model put back into place in the shell and the gelatin is cast in the space freed up by the clay. The gelatin molder must keep both the model and the shell so as to recast a new gelatin whenever necessary.

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Alexandre Charpentier, 1856–1909: Naturalisme et art nouveau. Paris: Musée d’Orsay, Nicolas Chaudun, 2008. Assouline, Pierre. L’homme de l’art: D. H. Kahnweiler. Paris: Balland, 1988. Bellanger, Patrice. “Bingen-Carries: Le renouveau de la fonte à cire perdue.” In Jean Carries (1855–1894): La matière de l’étrange. Edited by Amélie Simier. Paris: Paris-Musées, 2007, 59–68. Benvenuto Cellini, œuvres completes. Translated by Leopold Leclanché. Paris: Paulin, 1847. Blot, Eugène. Histoire d’une collection de tableaux modernes: 50 ans de peinture. Paris: Editions d’art, 1934. Boffrand, Germain, et al. Description de ce qui a été pratiqué pour fondre en bronze d’un seul jet la figure équestre de Louis XIV […]. Paris: Guillaume Cavelier, 1743. Carre, Anne. “La cire perdue à la Compagnie des Bronzes.” Cahiers de la Fonderie 28–29 (2003), 197–199. Caso, Jacques de. “Serial Sculptures in Nineteenth-Century France.” In Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture. Edited by Jeanne L. Wasserman. Cambridge, MA: Fogg Art Museum, 1975. Chevillot, Catherine, Liliane Colas, and Anne Pingeot. François Pompon, 1855–1933. Paris: Gallimard/Electa—RMN, 1994. Conner, Jannis C. “Harriet Whitney Frishmuth and Her Founders.” In Captured Motion: The Sculpture of Harriet Whitney Frishmuth, Janis Connor, Leah Rosenblatt Lehmbeck, and Thayer Tolles. New York: Hohmann Holding, 2006, 53–100. Czestochowski, Joseph S., and Anne Pingeot. Degas Sculptures: Catalogue Raisonné of the Bronzes. Memphis, TN: Torch Press and International Arts, 2002. Darnis, Jean-Marie. “Autour de la colonne de la Grande Armée.” Revue du Souvenir napoléonien 47 (October–November, 2008): 49–57. Dictionnaire biographique international des écrivains. Edited by Henry Carnoy. Hildesheim, Germany: Georg Olms Verlag, 1987. Draper, James David, and Édouard Papet, ed. Carpeaux, 1827–1875: Un sculpteur pour l’Empire. Paris: M’O, Gallimard, 2014. Dreyfous, Maurice. Dalou, sa vie, son oeuvre. Paris: Henri Laurens editeur, 1903. Froissart, Pezone Rossela. L’Art dans tout: Les arts décoratifs en France et l’utopie d’un art nouveau. Paris: CNRS editions, 2004. Fromanger, Véronique. Rembrandt Bugatti sculpteur: Répertoire monographique. Paris: Les Editions de l’Amateur, 2014. Gastambide, Adrien Joseph. Historique et théorie de la propriété des auteurs. Paris: Cosse et Marchal, 1862. Gastambide, Adrien Joseph. Traité théorique et pratique des contrefaçons en tous genres, ou de la Propriété en matière de littérature, théâtre, musique, peinture. Paris: Legrand et Descauriet, 1837.

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Gonon, Eugène. L’Art de fondre en bronze à cire perdue. Unpublished manuscript, 1876. Bibliothèque de l’Ecole nationale des beaux-arts, Paris. Reproduced in Lebon, Le fondeur et le sculpteur. Hecker, Sharon. “The Afterlife of Sculptures: Posthumous Casts and the Case of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928),” Journal of Art Historiography 16 (June 2017) https:// arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/hecker.pdf (Accessed December 14, 2019). Horswell, Edward. Rembrandt Bugatti: Life in Sculpture. London: Sladmore Gallery Editions, 2004. Jerôme-Schotsmans, Micheline. Constantin Meunier: Sa vie, son œuvre. Luxemburg: Olivier Bertrand Editions, Belgian Art Research Institute, 2012. Lapaire, Claude. James Pradier (1790–1852) et la sculpture française de la génération romantique: Catalogue raisonné. Zurich: 5 continents, 2010. Laurent-Daragon, Charles. Le Bronze d’Art: Étude historique et pratique de la Fonte antique rétablie par la fonte d’un seul jet et du caractère de la fonte ordinaire dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle […]. Paris: Le Bailly Libraire-Editeur, [1881]. Le Normand-Romain, Antoinette. Rodin et le bronze. Paris: RMN, 2007. Lebon, Elisabeth. Dictionnaire des fondeurs de bronze d’art. Perth: Marjon Editions, 2003. Lebon, Elisabeth. Fonte au sable, fonte à la cire perdue: Histoire d’une rivalité. Paris: Ophrys/INHA, 2012. Lebon, Elisabeth. Le fondeur et le sculpteur. Paris: Ophrys/INHA, 2012. https://www .inha.fr/fr/ressources/publications/collections-imprimees/collection-voir-faire -lire/fonte-au-sable-fonte-a-cire-perdue.html. Lebon, Elisabeth. “Henri Laurens und die Bronze / Laurens and Bronze.” In Henri Laurens Wellentöchter / Daughters of the Waves, exh. cat. Edited by Arie Hartog and Ulrike Lorenz. Cologne: Wienand Verlag, 2018, 92–123. Lista, Giovanni. Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 1858–1928. Paris: L’Echoppe, 1994. Lorrain, Jean. “L’homme aux têtes de cire.” In Buveurs d’âmes. Paris: Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1893. Mariette, Pierre-Jean. Description des travaux qui ont précédé, accompagné et suivi la fonte en bronze d’un seul jet de la statue équestre de Louis XV, le Bien-Aimé. Paris: Imprimerie P. G. Le Mercier, 1768. Ministère du Commerce, de l’Industrie, des Postes et des Télégraphes. Exposition universelle internationale de 1900 à Paris: Rapports du jury international, Groupe XV, industrie, classe 97. Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1902. Ministère du Commerce, de l’Industrie, des Postes et des Télégraphes. Exposition internationale de Saint-Louis, USA, 1904, section française, Rapport du Groupe 33. Paris: Comité français des Expositions à l’Etranger, 1906.

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Ministère du Commerce, de l’Industrie et des colonies. Rapports du jury international: Exposition universelle internationale de 1889 à Paris, classe 25 (bronzes d’art). Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1891. Olivié, Jean-Luc. Etat des recherches sur un sculpteur inconnu du XIXe siècle, Ringel d’Illzach, 1847–1916. Paris: Master’s Thesis in Art History, Université Paris I- Panthéon Sorbonne, n.d., unpublished. Parizet, Isabelle. “Pygmalion et Galatée, une œuvre méconnue de Charles Lebourg,” Documents d’Histoire parisienne 6 (November 28, 2006): 67–78. Parlanti, Ercole J. Casting a Torso in Bronze by the Cire Perdue Process. London: Alec Tirandi, 1953. Rapport des délégués ouvriers parisiens: Exposition universelle de Londres 1862. Paris: Chabaud, Wanschooten, Grandpierre, Dargent, 1862. Ringel, d’Illzach Jean Désiré. “Atelier de M. Ringel d’Illzach: Causerie du sculpteurinventeur.” Bulletin de la Société des Sciences, Agriculture et Arts de la Basse-Alsace, fasc. no. 1, January 1910. Strasbourg: Imprimerie alsacienne anct G. Fischbach, 1910. Rionnet, Florence. L’atelier de moulage du Musée du Louvre. Paris: Edition de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 1996. Rondelet, Jean-Baptiste, Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet, and Duchesne fils. “Rapport fait à l’Athénée des arts de Paris.” Le Magasin encyclopédique (February 1805): 350–68. Full text reproduced in Lebon, Le fondeur et le sculpteur. Rouart, Eugène. “En souvenir de Medardo Rosso.” L’Archer, new series no. 4 (April 1930): 281–285. Rykner, Didier. “A Monumental Vase by Ringel d’Illzach Joins the Getty Museum.” La Tribune de l’art. December 19, 2010. http://www.thearttribune.com/A-monumental -vase-by-Ringel-d.html. Salmson, Jules. Entre deux coups de ciseau: Souvenirs d’un sculpteur. Paris: Lemerre, 1892. Scianna, Cyrille, and Edouard Papet, ed. La sculpture au musée des Beaux-arts de Nantes. Milan: Silvana Editoriale, 2014. Siler, Douglas. James Pradier: Correspondance (1834–1842). Vol. 2. Geneva: Droz, 1984. Wautelet, Marie. Contribution à l’étude des pratiques sculpturales au XIXe siècle: la petite sculpture figurative en bronze à la Compagnie des Bronzes de Bruxelles entre 1854 et 1914. Ph.D. diss., Université Libre de Bruxelles, 2013. Wautelet, Marie. “La sculpture entre art et technique: La réhabilitation de la cire perdue en Belgique au XIXe,” Histoire de l’art (October 2010): 59–70.

chapter 3

A Tale of Two Foundries: Art Bronze Casting Comes of Age in America Ann Boulton 1

Introduction

Metal was cast by Europeans for all sorts of utilitarian purposes from the earliest days of colonial America. But it was not until the mid-nineteenth century that art bronze casting was introduced to the US, initially by immigrants largely from France. American sculptors like Henry Kirke Brown and, later, Paul Wayland Bartlett, who had training and experience in Europe (primarily in Paris) with art bronze production were among the early promoters of art bronze casting in America. Their contacts with European foundries paved the way for skilled craftsmen to make the trip and fueled art bronze production in this country. The creation of sculpture by the sand-casting method had achieved an extremely high degree of perfection in nineteenth-century Paris due in part to the happy coincidence of two vital materials in the Paris region—gypsum (for making plaster of Paris) and French sand. This sand was actually a natural mixture of very fine sand and clay, which allowed for precise replication of surface detail in the mold-making process. When French founders immigrated to America in search of opportunities, French sand and their devotion to the sand-casting process came along with them. But as the nineteenth century drew to a close, Italian immigrants brought to America another way of creating bronze sculpture—the lost-wax process (often called cire perdue). This ancient method used by the Greeks and Romans had remained the method of choice in Italy. By 1900, a sculptor in New York could choose from among several skilled foundries to cast his or her work in bronze. Other art bronze foundries were located in Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts by this time. But the two most important sculpture foundries of the early twentieth century were in Manhattan: the

*  Portions of this essay previously appeared in the Gilcrease Journal, Summer 2018, copyright University of Tulsa.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_005

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Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company, founded, managed, and staffed by French émigrés, and the Italian-owned and operated Roman Bronze Works.1 Both foundries sought and received large contracts for important public monuments and large-scale architectural projects such as church doors. However, it is through their prolific production of small-scale bronze sculptures made in series that the Gilcrease Museum, and indeed most museums with collections of American sculpture, benefitted from their work. 2

Background: Developments in France

Serial sculpture emerged in Paris during the nineteenth century with the rise of a newly affluent middle class anxious to show status through artwork. Bronze sculpture sized for tabletop display that could be cost-effectively replicated fit the bill, boasting an “art cred” that dated back to the ancient Greeks, but that was more affordable than larger unique sculpture. From one artist’s original creation, dozens or even hundreds of “serial” bronzes could be cast from the same model in response to market demand. Sand casting and serial sculpture were so intertwined in Paris it is doubtful that one could have evolved without the other. Their symbiotic relationship allowed for the development of a very high level of craftsmanship hand in hand with mass production. Foundries in pre-revolutionary France had used the lost-wax technique to create royal monuments in bronze, but the urgent need for cannon during Napoleon’s reign resulted in a great leap forward in sand-casting technology. Lost-wax casting’s association with royalty further spurred sand casting as the favored and politically correct technique in postrevolutionary France. Parisian foundries seeking to retool following the war effort turned to casting artwork to pay the bills. The sand casting of sculpture in bronze, while related in many ways to the casting of cannon, required a much greater degree of skill in piece-mold making for more complex forms, in the joining of those forms in invisible ways, and in the finishing and coloration of the surface that were key to the final appearance of the work. The foundries of

1  Unless otherwise noted, the general historical outline for these two foundries is drawn from Michael Shapiro’s seminal text Bronze Casting and American Sculpture 1850–1900 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985). Internet research methods not available in 1985, especially keyword searches of the entire New York Times archive and relevant years of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, have allowed for some refinement or correction of Shapiro’s foundational research. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle seemed to be especially interested in promoting the lostwax process and published a number of articles about it.

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Figure 3.1

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Charles Russell (1864–1926), Medicine Whip, modeled 1911, sand cast by August Griffoul & Bros. Co. foundry, Newark, NJ, 1912–1916. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK. The making of the sand mold for this bronze took fifteen hours and the sculpture was cast in one piece except for the base.

Paris embraced the challenge. By 1856, no fewer than 6,000 Parisian workers were engaged in the art bronze industry.2 The lost-wax method practiced in pre-revolutionary France did not allow for easy replication and was notorious for requiring extensive repairs after casting due to porosities and blowouts. Sand casting had none of these flaws. The even porosity of the sand molds eased the venting of gases to produce sound castings. Although the creation of a multi-piece sand mold for each new sculpture was a skilled and lengthy process—fifteen hours, not including baking time was required to make the sand mold for one cast of Charles Russell’s small Medicine Whip sculpture (fig. 3.1) for example—it was far less laborious and costly than that for a pre-revolutionary lost-wax cast.3 In the first half of the 2  Alfred Busquet, “Bronzes modernes et bronziers contemporains,” L’Artiste 2 (October 12 and 26, November 9, 1856): 205. 3  E. A. Suverkrop, “The Molding of Bronze Statuary,” American Machinist 37, no. 23 (December 5, 1912): 928. Sand molds were baked to dry and harden them in preparation for receiving molten

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Figure 3.2 Paul Wayland Bartlett (1865–1925), Bear Tamer, 1887, sand cast by Siot-Decauville Perzinka, probably 1887–97. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK. A life-size plaster of this sculpture won an Honorable Mention in the Paris Salon of 1887 when Bartlett was twenty-two years old. In 1889 he signed a ten-year contract to cast the Bear Tamer with the Paris foundry Siot-Decauville Perzinka. Bartlett earned about 16%—95 francs of the 600 charged for each bronze of this size; from his sales the foundry further deducted 550 francs for the reduction process and preparation of the molds. (Lebon, 2003, 233)

century at least, sand casting was hailed as the new modern industrial process and lost-wax casting was considered a time-consuming relic. Ultimately though, sand casting in Paris for art bronze fell victim to its own success due to massive over-production of small sculptures. Artistic quality suffered and prices plummeted (fig. 3.2). Artists were often virtually enslaved under contract to large commercial foundries that paid them little and offered even less in the determination of the final size or appearance of any given work (fig. 3.3).4 The process had become a byword for oppression and artistic degradation.5 By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, an emerging cenmetal. In contrast, lost-wax molds were heated to higher temperatures to burn out the wax model inside and make room for metal. 4  Elisabeth Lebon, Dictionnaire des fondeurs de bronze d’art: France, 1890–1950 (Perth: Marjon éditions, 2003), 87. 5  Ibid., 233.

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Figure 3.3

Rembrandt Bugatti (1884–1916), Buffalo, 1907, lost-wax cast made by A. A. Hébrard, probably cast 1907 and certainly before 1916. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK. Rembrandt Bugatti, one of the Parisian founder’s first clients had become ensnared in Hébrard’s web as a minor when his father signed an exclusive contract for him in 1904. Thereafter, because Hébrard owned the rights of reproduction to all his work, once Bugatti achieved recognition and could command high prices, the profits went instead to Hébrard, who refused to renegotiate the contract. Financial difficulties probably contributed to the artist’s suicide at age thirty-one. (Lebon, 2003, 184)

tral issue for many sculptors in Paris was control of their artistic vision both in terms of technique and production. American sculptors were well aware of these developments in France, though the apex of art bronze foundry output in America would not come until significantly later, around the turn of the twentieth century. 3

The Heny-Bonnard Bronze Company

The Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company was launched in 1872 by Frenchmen Edouard Henri and Pierre A. Bonnard out of a basement at 49 Wooster Street in New York City, with only three or four men. By 1883, the foundry had

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relocated to 287 Mercer Street. A reporter from the New York Tribune was there on September 19, 1883, to observe the casting of the chest and abdomen of the Robert E. Lee statue for New Orleans by Alexander Doyle. Two thousand pounds of molten metal were required and fifty-eight workmen were poised to pour it: Silence had been requested, as heavy castings are awkward operations, and the foreman is the only one permitted to speak until the metal has ceased to flow … Jean Plachoff, the foreman, [described as stout, stalwart and wearing an odd cap by the New York Times reporter also present] raised a whistle to his lips and gave a shrill call. He then cried in French— for all the workmen are French—“Raise the metal,” and the seven crucibles went up with unanimity and precision. “Pour the metal” and the contents of each crucible were poured into the big pot. “Pour” he now shouted like a maniac. “Fire the vents” and the huge pot was tilted up, half the men raising and half depressing their bars.6 Seven other observers were present that day besides reporters, including manager-to-be Eugene F. Aucaigne, although the New York Times reported that Monsieur E. Henry remained the manager, and that “the other workmen wound clothes [sic] about their arms and hands to keep the burning bronze from coming in contact with the flesh.”7 Shortly thereafter, the foundry moved to its third Manhattan location at 430–444 West 16th Street. This move coincided with significant reorganization, new investors, and an important new hire, Eugene F. Aucaigne, who transformed the company (fig. 3.4). The foundry name was retained in the new hyphenated form, but Henri and Bonnard had been pushed out. Within ten years, the foundry employed 178 men.8 Aucaigne had immigrated to America from France at age sixteen with his father, Felix, the foreign editor of the New York Tribune, and Eugene is listed as a journalist in the 1883 New York City directory.9 By that time, he had become a naturalized US citizen.10 He excelled in recruiting skilled foundry workers from Paris, including the foreman of the famed Barbedienne foundry. Foundry historian Michael Shapiro averred that, 6  N  ew York Tribune, October 4, 1883, reprinted in New Outlook, ed. Alfred Emanuel Smith and Francis Walton, vol. 28, no. 14 (New York: Outlook Publishing, 1888), 272. 7  “Casting the Lee Statue,” New York Times, September 20, 1883. 8  “How Statues are Made,” New York Times, January 25, 1891, 14. 9  Trow City Directory, vol. 96 for year ending May 1883. 10  Aucaigne’s US passport application of 1877 lists him as twenty-three years old and a naturalized citizen. Research conducted on Ancestry.com, December 2017.

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Figure 3.4 Eugene Aucaigne with standard for main entrance to the Pennsylvania State Capitol building, on display in the studio of the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company, 1906. The Library Company of Philadelphia

“He built the firm so that it dominated the casting of American sculpture during the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, and was a strong contender for the first two decades of the twentieth.”11 When Frederic Remington created his first sculpture, Bronco Buster, in 1895, Henry-Bonnard, then at the height of its fame, was the obvious choice to create the first-ever cowboy action figure in bronze (fig. 3.5).12 Although Henry-Bonnard later worked with sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett to cast part of his design for the Clark Tomb (Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn) in lost wax, this was apparently a one-off for the foundry. Its expertise was in sand casting. Lost wax, as practiced in France at the time, where it had 11  Shapiro, Bronze Casting, 72. 12  Remington’s Bronco Buster must have held special meaning for Aucaigne, since a cast was among the several bronzes listed in a codicil to his will (August 27, 1920, 229) as a bequest to his brother. Research conducted on Ancestry.com, December 2017.

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Figure 3.5 Frederic Remington (1861–1909), The Broncho Buster, 1895, bronze, sandcast at the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company. Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth, Texas

undergone something of a revival during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, was limited to unique works. As described by Pierre Bingen, a Parisian founder, his method involved a lengthy process whereby the sculptor first brought his plaster model of a sculpture to the foundry to have a cast made of clay mixed with other heat-resistant materials such as pulverized bricks. From this clay cast the artist carefully removed a thin, even layer of the surface of the thickness desired for the bronze cast. This preserved the general proportions of the work. Next, this pared-down clay sculpture, called the “core,” was fired hard. Once it had cooled, it was covered in wax so that the sculptor could entirely remodel the surface detail (by referring to the original plaster model nearby). This wax was then covered with a heat-resistant mold material and heated to melt out the wax. Finally, molten bronze was poured into the gap where the wax had been between the core and the outer mold.13 The lengthy remodeling step, wherein the sculpture was essentially created anew, made this process impractical for the production of serial sculpture. 13  Lebon, Dictionnaire des fondeurs, 114.

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Figure 3.6 Thomas Ball (1819–1911), Daniel Webster, 1852–53, sand cast by Ames Manufacturing Company, Chicopee, MA (unmarked), date of cast unknown, but probably after 1859. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK

The close ties to the Parisian foundry industry and to the artists, like Paul Wayland Bartlett, who were embedded there, are reflected not only in HenryBonnard’s attempt to add lost-wax casting to their repertoire (as was also being sought by several sand-casting Parisian foundries), but also with their apparent interest in working closely with artists. This was a departure from serial sculpture production earlier in the nineteenth century at, for example, the Ames foundry in Chicopee, Massachusetts, where the first successful commercial art bronze production in America had been established with the help of the artist Henry Kirke Brown. As was more typical for the earlier period (and in synch with French practice at the time), Thomas Ball’s sculpture of Daniel Webster (fig. 3.6) had been produced at Ames in bronze with no input from the artist whatsoever.14 14  Ann Boulton, “The Dealer and Daniel Webster,” Gilcrease Journal 20, no. 1 (Summer/ Fall 2013): 46.

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The original model had been sold by the artist to an art dealer George Ward Nichols, who, with the foundry, made all the decisions in the final appearance of the more than 200 bronze casts of the Daniel Webster sculpture, the first mass-produced serial sculpture to be made in America in the early 1850s. In contrast, Henry-Bonnard’s close collaboration with Bartlett and Remington, among other artists such as J. Q. A. Ward, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Daniel Chester French, indicates that foundry’s engagement with the contemporary Parisian zeitgeist, whereby artists retained control of their artistic vision and production. Thus, the daring two-legged stance of the rearing horse in Remington’s Bronco Buster, considered a great technical accomplishment, had been first achieved through close collaboration with Henry-Bonnard using the sand-casting method. Unlike Thomas Ball, Remington retained ownership and control of his models and was intimately involved in the production of his bronze serial sculpture.15 The artist’s ability to control his production could not, however, be maximized using the sand-casting process. Even with foundries like Henry-Bonnard, committed to working closely with artists, there were practical limitations inherent in reproducing sculpture through sand molding. Once the model was turned over to the foundry, the artist was essentially sidelined until the bronze cast was broken out of the mold. At that stage, only a very few sculptors with special training in metal working—chasing, or surface finishing—had the necessary skill to competently remove the metal arterial network connected to the surface of the cast (a byproduct of the circulation of molten metal), repair any flaws to the cast caused by air pockets or core pins, or join pieces of the sculpture that had been cast separately, as in the case of Bronco Buster, where the base had been cast as a separate piece to be joined after casting. The famed French animalier sculptor, Antoine-Louis Barye, of whom Remington was a big fan, and who trained initially as a goldsmith, was one of the few sculptors who could take possession of a raw cast from the foundry and complete the surface finishing himself.16 Remington was not so trained. His casts were, instead, finished by specialized, highly skilled foundry workers called ciseleurs who had been trained in abundance at Paris foundries. Much earlier criticism had been directed at the mid-nineteenth century ciseleurs’ practice of completely reworking the bronze surface, in effect 15  Michael Shapiro, Cast and Recast: The Sculpture of Frederic Remington (Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1981), 46. 16  Ann Boulton, “The Art Bronze Foundry of Antoine-Louis Barye,” in Untamed: The Art of Antoine-Louis Barye, ed. William R. Johnston and Simon Kelly (Baltimore: Walters Art Museum, 2006), 68.

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Figure 3.7 Frederic Remington (1860–1909), Wicked Pony, 1898. Sand cast at the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company, 1898. This is the first bronze cast made of this sculpture. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK

removing any trace of the artist’s original modeling. This had fueled in part the revolt in Paris against mass production by sand casting. By the time of Remington’s Bronco Buster, however, only minimal chasing was being done, especially in sand-casting foundries executing the highest-quality sculpture work, as needed to repair holes or remove extraneous metal from the casting process. Surfaces modeled by the artist were being reproduced with great fidelity by way of refinements in sand-mold making that had been in the works in Paris for decades, so no wholesale creation of textures, such as fur or hair, were needed after casting.17 It is instructive to compare the surface of the Gilcrease cast of Daniel Webster by Thomas Ball, an example of extensive post-casting surface finishing by expert ciseleurs, with the Gilcrease’s Henry-Bonnard lifetime cast of Remington’s Wicked Pony (fig. 3.7), which largely retains textures created by the artist in the original model. The approximately thirty-five years that separate the creation of these two casts spans the sea-change in sandcasting technique and artists’ engagement with their production.

17  Ann Boulton, “The Making of Matisse’s Bronzes,” in Matisse: Painter as Sculptor, ed. Dorothy Kosinski, Jay McKean Fisher, and Steven Nash (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 81.

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Roman Bronze Works

Little did Remington or the Henry-Bonnard foundry suspect that in 1895, the same year that saw the creation of the smash hit Bronco Buster, an Italian engineer had arrived in New York who would profoundly change Remington’s sculpture technique and challenge Henry-Bonnard’s hegemony. The twentyfive-year-old Riccardo Bertelli of Genoa came as a tourist without any plans for art bronze casting. As reported by Jean Piper of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle: “I had just graduated from the Grand Industrial School of Turin, Italy, and received my diploma from the Academy of Venice where I had studied landscape painting, when I left my native town of Genoa to visit America,” the bronze caster said as we walked along. “I came with a friend and was well fortified with letters of introduction. I had no intention of staying when I first came, and I did considerable traveling about until I ran across a little foundry on the West Side of New York which was producing bronze castings after a very primitive method. It gave me an idea. I saw an opportunity of combining the industrial side with what I had learned at the Academy. I immediately returned to Italy and selected men to help me carry out my plan. We returned and I went into business over in New York, and fifteen years later I moved my plant to Brooklyn.”18 Suddenly, art and engineering had merged in Bertelli’s vision for an improved sculpture-casting foundry, and perhaps it seemed as if he were destined for this. He first formed a partnership with an Italian sculptor from Siena, Giuseppe Moretti, who had opened a sculpture studio in New York during the previous decade. They enlisted a wealthy Italian silk merchant as an investor and named their business the Roman Bronze Works in December 1897. One of the earliest workers that he brought from Florence, Eugene Gargani, remained the foundry foreman at the Roman Bronze Works for twenty-nine years. A seventeen-yearold named John Zappolla, skilled in the lost-wax casting method, was among the first employees.19 Moretti was designated as manager, but was evidently an inept one, since the partnership dissolved in early October 1899. By that time, 18  “Where Sculptors’ Dreams Become Bronze Statues,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 30, 1926, 8–9. The last sentence must have been misquoted because it is well documented by Shapiro and others that he moved the foundry to the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn in 1900 after less than three years in Manhattan. 19  The Roman Bronze Works Collection: An Important Grouping of Plasters and Bronzes from America’s Foremost Foundry; Seventh Regiment Armory, New York City, September 17, 1988 (New York: Guernsey’s, 1988), 10.

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Figure 3.8

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C. H. Niehaus (1855–1935) with bronze torso and head of Admiral Farragut, Roman Bronze Works foundry, Forsyth St., Manhattan, Riccardo Bertelli center, ca. 1899. In the background is a drum-shaped mold for lost-wax casting and in the loft are iron frames for sand molding. Photograph by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Adolph A. Weinman papers, 1890–1959. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

the foundry had already relocated from the small space at 152 West 38th Street, with only four workmen, to a larger space at the rear of 209 Forsyth Street that had previously housed several other art bronze foundries. It appears that prospects must have been good, even if profits, so far, were not. Photographs taken at the Forsyth Street location by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens show the artist C. H. Niehaus working on a section of his bronze cast of Admiral Farragut, made for Hackley Park in Muskegon, Michigan, and dedicated there in May 1900 (figs 3.8 and 3.9). This is perhaps the first lost-waxcast sculpture made in America.20 An account of the commission by the donor 20  Shapiro states that the Gorham foundry made the first, a bust of a Judge Carpenter by W. Granville Hastings cast in 1896 by Hippolyte Hubert, and which he describes as “unlocated” (Shapiro, Bronze Casting, 171). The Brooklyn Daily Eagle account (a reprint from the Providence Journal) “Using Old Methods,” August 22, 1896, reports that the subject is Judge George M. Carpenter, that the sculpture “will be cast” and that the photo is of the wax model (no photo appears with the Brooklyn Daily Eagle article). As there is no further follow up by this newspaper, nor any other searchable in Newpapers.com as to whether the cast was successful, and since nothing further of Mr. Hubert is ever heard, it seems

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Figure 3.9

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C. H. Niehaus (1855–1935) with bronze torso and head of Admiral Farragut, Roman Bronze Works foundry, Forsyth St., Manhattan, Riccardo Bertelli center, ca. 1899. The lower coat section of the bronze is visible by the left stepstool. Photograph by Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Adolph A. Weinman papers, 1890–1959. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

states that the full-sized clay model was seen and approved in May 1899 and the completed bronze statue was first seen at the foundry in October 1899.21 This dates the photographs to probably August or September of that year. Details in the background of one photo indicate that the foundry was certainly engaged in lost-wax casting, evidenced by the large drum-shaped form of an invested wax model, and likely sand casting as well, given the presence in a storage loft of what appear to be iron “flasks,” or frames used to hold sand molds. In the middle of the action in both photographs is a young Riccardo Bertelli. These are the only photographs discovered of him to date.

likely to have been a failure. See “Unveiling of Bronze Statues, Muskegon,” Charlotte News (Charlotte, North Carolina), May 30, 1900. 21  Charles Henry Hackley and John Patton, Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Farragut: An Account of the Gift, the Erection and the Dedication of the Bronze Statues Given by Charles H. Hackly to the City of Muskegon, Michigan, Unveiled in Hackley Square Memorial Day 1900 (Muskegon, MI: Chronicle Presses, 1900), 7. “The Week in Art,” New York Times, February 10, 1900, 18, identified the Roman Bronze Works as the foundry for the Niehaus sculptures.

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Figure 3.10 Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907), The Puritan, 1886–87 (model substantially reworked in the 1890s for reductions), lost-wax cast by Roman Bronze Works, casting date unknown. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK

Thus the question raised by foundry historian Michael Shapiro as to whether the Bertelli-Moretti partnership was using the lost-wax process is answered affirmatively: the photograph dates to two or more months prior to the partnership’s dissolution. Additionally, the name of their business from its inception was certainly Roman Bronze Works as identified by the notice in Monumental News of 1899 announcing the dissolution of the Bertelli-Moretti partnership “under the firm name of ‘Roman Bronze Works,’” and advising that Bertelli would be continuing to do business under the same name.22 The presence of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, then at the height of his fame, at the less-than-twoyear-old foundry, is a clear indication of the buzz among elite sculptors about the newly available lost-wax process for serial sculpture production (fig. 3.10). That buzz reached Frederic Remington by the next year, when he had his fifth sculpture, The Norther, cast in lost wax by the Roman Bronze Works (fig. 3.11). 22  “Advertisers Department,” Monumental News 11 (1899): 654. Shapiro was unsure whether this name had been used by the partnership.

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Figure 3.11 Frederic Remington (1860–1909), The Norther, 1900, lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably cast 1900–01. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK

Whether this preceded the foundry’s move to Brooklyn, which may have occurred as late as September 1900, is not known. The Norther is Remington’s first sculpture for which no prior sandcasts had been made at Henry-Bonnard. The discovery of the lost-wax process was a revelation for Remington and profoundly changed his sculpture practice. A comparison among the only three casts made of the sculpture during Remington’s lifetime clearly documents this change and will be detailed toward the end of this essay. Sand casting as a general process has been falsely blamed for many deficiencies in sculpture casting. It is not true that it is impossible to cast sculptures in one piece by sand casting or that lost-wax cast sculptures are always, or even usually, made in one piece. Remington’s The Scalp belies this notion (fig. 3.12). The cast in the Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa (cast number 4), made by the Roman Bronze Works during Remington’s life, had the upraised arm of the Indian made separately and joined after casting. Shapiro attributes Remington’s change in the stance of the horse as being made possible only by lost wax, since in the earlier sand-cast versions made at Henry-Bonnard it is less dramatic and wide. This seems unlikely, because the change would have been made in the plaster

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Figure 3.12 Frederic Remington (1861–1909), The Scalp, 1898 (model reworked 1904), lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably cast 1906–08. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK

foundry model, as would the new rocky base, and both could have been readily reproduced in bronze by sand casting. George Barnard’s The Great God Pan (fig. 3.13), a huge sculpture cast by the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Co., is documented as having been cast in one piece by sand casting in a mold weighing twenty-seven tons, and earned the foundry a gold medal in Paris at the 1900 Exposition Universelle.23 There are myriad other examples, including Charles Russell’s Medicine Whip (see fig. 3.1), a complex horse and rider composition that was sand cast in one piece (except that the base was cast separately) by the Griffoul foundry—a French foundry in business by 1905 in New Jersey.24 Further, it was common for the wax pattern for a lost-wax cast to have been made initially in several pieces and joined together in the wax state prior to casting. It does appear that the three lifetime casts of The Norther were cast in bronze as single pieces including the bases, however. 23  Lorado Taft, “The Casting of Pan,” Brush and Pencil 3, no. 1 (October, 1898): 50. 24  Radiographs of the Gilcrease sculpture of Medicine Whip confirm that horse and rider are cast in one piece as described in E. A. Suverkrop, “The Molding of Bronze Statuary,” 923–28.

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Figure 3.13 The 27-ton sand mold under construction at the Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company in preparation for casting in one piece George Grey Barnard’s (1863–1938) The Great God Pan, 1899. Lorado Taft, “The Casting of Pan,” Brush and Pencil, Vol. 3, no. 1 (October 1898), jstor.org 10/2/17

By contrast, the first lost-wax casts made of the Bronco Buster at the Roman Bronze Works had the bases cast separately and were joined to the sculpture after casting. That these separate bases were also made by the sand-casting process gives further weight to the premise that both processes were being used early on at the Roman Bronze Works. Another early commission for the foundry, an architectural bronze entrance for a park in Pittsburgh, could have been more efficiently made by sand casting.25 The sculpture of Admiral Farragut by Niehaus in the 1899 image taken at Forsyth Street (see figs 3.8 and 3.9) has obviously been made in several sections to be joined after casting. Was this a lost-wax cast? Newspaper accounts identify it as such, but also declare that it was cast in one piece, which is clearly not the case.26 The presence of the large drum-shaped invested sculpture mold at the rear suggests that this could be either the legs or an arm of the Farragut sculpture for which the head and torso and separately cast lower-coat section are visible in the foreground. To cast a sculpture this large in one piece would require the capacity to melt and move a large quantity of metal, perhaps lacking at the Forsyth Street location 25  “Park Contracts Approved,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, June 10, 1899, 2. A letter of January 30, 1907, from Riccardo Bertelli to Augustus Saint-Gaudens regarding the casting of his Parnell statue at the Roman Bronze Works states that, “inscription tablets, torches, flames and tripod we have already cast in bronze by the sand process.” Box 15, folder 15, Augustus Saint-Gaudens papers, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. But a letter sent to the artist Malvina Hoffman in 1928 from Bertelli announcing that they have added sand casting to their facility indicates that the process must have fallen out of use there for some years. October 29, 1928, box 25, folder 2, Malvina Hoffman papers, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. 26  “Four Bronze Statues,” Indianapolis Journal, April 17, 1900, 2.

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and the impetus for the move to Brooklyn. By 1906, the foundry employed fifty workmen.27 5

Clash of the Titans

The writing was on the wall for Henry-Bonnard. Lost-wax casting was all the rage; sand-casting had become passé. Aucaigne’s relentless promotion of the one-piece casting of the enormous Pan was no doubt part of a defensive strategy to counter the tide. The lost-wax casting by Henry-Bonnard of Paul Wayland Bartlett’s poppy surround for the door to the Clark Tomb made in 1898 must not have been a happy experience, judging by the fact that they never repeated it. In tandem with the Aucaigne-Pan juggernaut, the casting of the life-size gold statue of the actress Maud Adams was another public-relations stunt attempted in 1900, but one that backfired to the extent that it alienated the artist Bessie Potter Vonnoh and perhaps others. Much negative press in the New York Times may have influenced Remington to abandon Henry-Bonnard as well.28 In addition to countering the unjustified criticism that sculpture made by sand casting could not be cast in one piece via the Pan example, Henry-Bonnard had earlier partnered with Paul Wayland Bartlett on a high-profile project to cast two sculptures for the Library of Congress, Columbus and Michelangelo. The New York Times was invited for a viewing at the foundry after casting and responded with large, fawning articles that reported that Michelangelo was made with “few after touches required” and Columbus “as far as metal, absence of marks revealing joints and solidity of casting are concerned, nothing more was to be desired.”29 Both of these quotes have a just-as-good-as-lost wax subtext and must have been supplied by Aucaigne for that reason.

27  Luigi Aldrovandi, Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America (New York: Italian American Directory, 1906), 407–11. I am indebted to Joseph Sciorra, John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, Queens College, CUNY for sending me this entry and to Oliver Shell for translation. 28  Julie Aronson is of the opinion that reports of Henry-Bonnard’s lost-wax casting of the gold statue of the actress Maud Adams are false, based on a detailed description of the casting published by the New York Journal and Advertiser in March of 1900 that indicates a sand mold. Aronson also covers the PR disaster in great detail in Bessie Potter Vonnoh: Sculptor of Women (Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2008), 102–10. 29  Charles de Kay, “Paul Wayland Bartlett’s New Bronze Statue of Columbus. To be Placed in the Rotunda of the Library of Congress,” New York Times, November 28, 1897; and Charles de Kay, “Two Views of Paul Wayland Bartlett’s Statue of Michael Angelo. To be Placed in the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.,” New York Times, January 15, 1899.

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Further, in 1904, the New York Times reported from the Henry-Bonnard foundry, describing a portrait of Richard Wagner modeled by the artist Max Bachmann: which has been cast with a perfection as to the modeling and a thinness as to the metal which are very unusual. The sharp modeling of the hair, for instance, gives this profile head the appearance of a very careful bit produced by the “lost wax” process. But it is not the result of “cire perdue” at all, but a cast in the sand mold. It occurred to Mr. Eugene Aucaigne to ask the sculptor to make his last touches in the sand matrix instead of on the model, in other words to finish with intaglio carving rather than by going over the round, and the result justified his reasoning completely. This idea, if carried out by sculptors and bronze founders, may do much to reduce the cost and increase the perfection of bronze work.30 This speaks directly to the one undeniable advantage of lost-wax casting: that the sculptor can have access to the wax model just prior to casting in order to make improvements or last-minute changes to the sculpture. Since no wax model is produced in sand casting, the next best thing would be to allow the sculptor to work on the interior surface of the sand mold to sharpen or add detail as described above. Whether this was taken advantage of by other sculptors remains to be discovered. It is indicative of Henry-Bonnard’s long-term mission to work collaboratively with artists, yet apparently was not attractive enough to lure back Frederic Remington. A comparison of the three lifetime lost-wax casts of The Norther made by the Roman Bronze Works in 1900–1901 reveal considerable differences among them, the result of Remington’s personal touch. Once the foundry had produced a cast made of wax from the artist’s plaster model, Remington altered it by using a brush dipped in melted wax to add texture to the horse’s coat and to alter the shape of the mane and tail. He also changed the ends of the scarf that ties the cowboy’s hat to his head. This is visible in the comparison photos: the Gilcrease Museum cast shows the scarf ends spread wide like a bow tie (fig. 3.14); the Rees-Jones collection cast shows the scarf ties drooping down from the knot (fig. 3.15), while the third cast from a private collection shows the ties blowing to one side (fig. 3.16). It is not known in what order these three casts were made, but a large casting flaw in the Rees-Jones cast—a gap in the base where metal failed to completely fill the mold—was repaired after casting, and suggests that this was the first trial. The other two casts have perfect 30  New York Times, March 25, 1904, 8.

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Figure 3.14 Frederic Remington (1860–1909), The Norther, 1900, detail of face showing scarf ends spread wide like a bowtie. Lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably cast 1900–01. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK

Figure 3.15 Frederic Remington (1860–1909), The Norther, 1900, detail of face showing scarf ends drooping down. Lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably cast 1900–01. Rees-Jones Collection.

Figure 3.16 Frederic Remington (1860–1909), The Norther, 1900, detail of face showing scarf ends both blowing to one side. Lost-wax cast by the Roman Bronze Works, probably 1900–1901. Private collection.

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Figure 3.17

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View of Investment Room, Roman Bronze Works ca. 1906, where wax models are being covered with mold material. The curved wax rods sticking out of the tops will become the metal circulation system during casting. Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America, New York: Italian American Directory, Co., 1906. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

bases, perhaps due to adjustments in the gating system to direct the metal more evenly during casting. Although casts made by the Roman Bronze Works in later decades show similar flaws (for example the Gilcrease Museum small Bronco Buster, an unauthorized cast made perhaps in the late 1940s), most casts in the Gilcrease collection made during Bertelli’s early tenure are impeccably made, perhaps due to his insistence on returning imperfect casts to the crucible.

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Figure 3.18

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View of wax room, Roman Bronze Works, 1912. The wax horse is probably for H. M. Shrady’s (1871–1922) Ulysses S. Grant Memorial (cavalry group) in Washington, DC, dedicated 1924. The model is made in several pieces with each piece full of core material for support, visible at the base of each section. The Bernard Titowsky Collection, John D. Calandra Italian American Collection (Queens College, CUNY)

In contrast to the French method of lost-wax casting, which essentially involved a complete re-sculpting of the wax layer after it had been applied to a pre-formed refractory core, the Italian method introduced by Bertelli allowed molten wax to be painted onto a flexible mold made of gelatin, followed by application of liquid-core material (fig. 3.17), which hardened to support the thin wax shell so that it could be removed from the mold without damage. The sculptor could then make changes, as Remington did, to each wax. As was more common, however, many sculptors left minor wax touch-up to foundry workers (fig. 3.18).31 31  O  n 4  February, 1907, Riccardo Bertelli wrote to Augustus Saint-Gaudens regarding his Parnell statue: “Replying to your letter of Feb 1st 1907, regarding the retouching of the wax in the ‘Cire Perdue’ process. We beg to state that the same is not necessary unless the

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Gelatin was the secret to Riccardo Bertelli’s success and was seemingly overlooked or ignored by the rival Henry-Bonnard, even though it was reported by a newspaper as early as 1900 in a description of the casting of Niehaus’s Farragut bronze: “He begins by taking an impression of the figure either in a plaster, or a gelatine [sic] mold.”32 The flexible nature of the gelatin allowed the mold to be removed from the wax in one piece because it could be pulled out of recessed and deeply undercut areas of the sculpture without breaking. In contrast, sand molding was necessarily a piece-mold operation because the rammed sand was inflexible and therefore could only be removed from recesses and undercuts without breaking if the mold was made in many pieces. 6

Finale

By 1908, the battle was over. Eugene Aucaigne left Henry-Bonnard, probably due in part to clashes with the new management installed at the lavish new facility designed by him in Mount Vernon, NY. But it must also have become increasingly apparent to him that the sand-casting process was falling out of favor with elite sculptors.33 Riccardo Bertelli rode the lost-wax wave for nearly another forty years, until the 1940s, when the foundry was sold to Salvatore Schiavo (fig. 3.19).34 Both Bertelli and Aucaigne were immigrants from Europe who, although not founders themselves, foresaw the boom in art bronze production that would accompany America’s rise as a world power. Both were members of the educated elite. They had business acumen and the contacts in Italy and France to entice skilled foundrymen to come to America. It is an interesting contrast that sculptor wishes to make changes to his model and for this reason we did not communicate with you at the time the statue was in wax. You can rest assured that the work will be perfectly satisfactory in every respect and we will guarantee a reproduction of your model.” Box 15, folder 15, Augustus Saint-Gaudens papers, Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. 32  Times-Democrat (New Orleans, LA), February 9, 1900, 4. 33  Augustus Saint-Gaudens was another Henry-Bonnard client who shifted at least some of his production to the Roman Bronze Works, where in 1907 he had cast the Parnell statue for Dublin, Ireland, and the (seated) Lincoln for Grant Park, Chicago. Shapiro, Bronze Casting, 106. Not all sculptors chose lost wax over sand. Malvina Hoffman, for example, was one who continued to choose sand casting for some of her serial production. Sand casting was cheaper than lost-wax casting, undoubtedly an important consideration for some. 34  Rita Reif, “Auctions,” New York Times, September 16, 1988.

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Figure 3.19 Roman Bronze Works standard, ca. 1906. Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America, New York: Italian American Directory, Co., 1906. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

Aucaigne embraced his new country by becoming a citizen at the beginning of his career while Bertelli, seemingly ambivalent, waited until after retirement in 1946. Discrimination in America against immigrants from southern Europe that peaked in the 1920s may have played a part. Bertelli’s regular trips to and from Italy are documented in various ship passenger lists for arrival in New York City. By the early 1920s, these sometimes describe him as “southern Italian” and in one instance “blk complected” (as opposed to fair, the other choice).35 Genoa, where he was born and raised, is in the far north of Italy, near Milan, so it is clear that the “southern” designation was repeatedly inaccurately applied without his input. The Immigration Act 35  List of Alien Passengers, August 21, 1928, US Conte Grande. Research conducted on Ancestry.com, December 2017.

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of 1924 reduced the annual quota for all Italian Immigrants, whether northern or southern, from more than 42,000 to less than 4,000, and this ended what had been a common distinction between those desirables from the north, thought to be similar to Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian populations, and the undesirables from the south whose “sloping foreheads, stocky builds and olive skin” gave doubt as to whether they were part of “the white race.”36 Bertelli continued to make trips to and from Italy after 1924, so his status as a successful businessman (who was married to a famous actress) must have been enough to assure his reentry into New York. However, discrimination surely curtailed his ability to draw upon skilled workers from Italy. The malevolent undercurrent of anti-Catholic, anti-southern European hate that resulted in at least forty-six lynchings of Italian immigrants between 1886 and 1915 must have had a chilling effect on any desire to change citizenship.37 Immigrants from France were not similarly targeted. Perhaps the devastation of his home country in World War II convinced Bertelli that US citizenship might be oldage insurance. Nevertheless, he eventually returned to Italy, where he died in Rome in 1955. Bibliography “Advertisers Department.” Monumental News 11 (1899): 654. Aldrovandi, Luigi. Gli Italiani negli Stati Uniti d’America. New York: Italian American Directory, 1906. Aronson, Julie. Bessie Potter Vonnoh: Sculptor of Women. Cincinnati, OH: Cincinnati Art Museum, 2008. Aucaigne, Eugene. US Passport Application, 1877. Ancestry.com. Aucaigne, Eugene. Last Will and Testament, 27 August, 1920. Ancestry.com. Boulton, Ann. “The Art Bronze Foundry of Antoine-Louis Barye.” In Untamed: The Art of Antoine-Louis Barye. Edited by William R. Johnston and Simon Kelly. Walters Art Gallery, 2006, 66–73. Boulton, Ann. “The Making of Matisse’s Bronzes.” In Matisse: Painter as Sculptor. Edited by Dorothy Kosinski, Jay McKean Fisher, and Steven Nash. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006, 73–97.

36  Stefano Luconi, “Anti-Italian Prejudice in the United States: Between Ethnic Identity and the Racial Question,” in Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema, ed. Giuliana Muscio et al. (New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 2010), 34. 37  Sarah Vowell, “America’s Statue Wars are a Family Feud,” New York Times, November 19, 2017, 7.

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Boulton, Ann. “The Dealer and Daniel Webster.” Gilcrease Museum Journal 20, no. 1 (Summer, 2013): 46–64. Busquet, Alfred. “Bronzes modernes et bronziers contemporains.” L’Artiste 2 (October 12, 1856: 205–09, October 26, 1856: 248–51, and November 9, 1856: 269–75). “Casting the Lee Statue.” New York Times. September 20, 1883. “Four Bronze Statues.” Indianapolis Journal. April 17, 1900. Hackley, Charles Henry, and John Patton, ed. Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Farragut: An Account of the Gift, the Erection and the Dedication of the Bronze Statues Given by Charles H. Hackley to the City of Muskegon, Michigan, Unveiled in Hackley Square Memorial Day 1900. Muskegon, MI: Chronicle Presses, 1990. Hoffman, Malvina. Papers. Getty Research Institute Library, Los Angeles. “How Statues are Made.” New York Times. January 25, 1891. Lebon, Elizabeth. Dictionnaire des fondeurs de bronze d’art: France, 1890–1950. Perth: Marjon éditions, 2003. List of Alien Passengers, August 21, 1928. US Conte Grande. Ancestry.com. Luconi, Stefano. “Anti-Italian Prejudice in the United States: Between Ethnic Identity and The Racial Question.” In Mediated Ethnicity: New Italian-American Cinema. Edited by Giuliana Muscio, Joseph Sciorra, Giovanni Spagnoletti, and Anthony Julian Tamburri. New York: John D. Calandra Italian American Institute, 2010, 33–44. The Roman Bronze Works Collection: An Important Grouping of Plasters and Bronzes from America’s Foremost Foundry; Seventh Regiment Armory, New York City, September 17, 1988. New York: Guernsey’s Auction, 1988. Saint-Gaudens, Augustus. Papers. Rauner Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Shapiro, Michael. Cast and Recast: The Sculpture of Frederic Remington. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1981. Shapiro, Michael. Bronze Casting and American Sculpture 1850–1900. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985. Suverkrop, E. A. “The Molding of Bronze Statuary.” American Machinist 37, no. 23 (December 5, 1912): 923–28. Taft, Lorado. “The Casting of Pan.” Brush and Pencil 3, no. 1 (October, 1898): 50–52. Trow City Directory (New York). Vol. 96 for year ending May 1883. “Unveiling of Bronze Statues, Muskegon.” Charlotte News (NC). May 30, 1900. “Using Old Methods.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle. August 22, 1896. (Reprint from Providence Journal.) Vowell, Sarah. “America’s Statue Wars are a Family Feud.” New York Times. November 19, 2017. “The Week in Art.” New York Times. February 10, 1900.

chapter 4

The Subtlety of the Surface: Thoughts on the Revival of the Lost Wax Technique in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany Veronika Wiegartz On the cusp of the twentieth century, lost-wax casting had become reestablished in Germany, as elsewhere, as a technique for the casting of artworks in bronze, and was now considered the superior, more precise technique. The Noack foundry, which is still extant today, had been founded in Berlin in 1897. It was soon highly reputed as a foundry where artistic intention and technical realization were brought into optimal correlation, and rapidly established itself as the preferred foundry for modern German sculpture produced outside the art academies. Even before the turn of the century, the forerunners of modern sculpture such as August Gaul (1869–1921) or Fritz Klimsch (1870–1960) visited Noack to become conversant with the “art of casting: wax melting and sand molding and … chasing.”1 Younger artists like Georg Kolbe (1877–1947) urged the firm’s founder, Hermann Noack (1867–1941), to hasten progress with the lost wax technique.2 One of Kolbe’s earliest sculptures, Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child, 1905), was cast within the year using the lost wax technique at the Noack foundry (fig. 4.1).3 Kolbe viewed the lost-wax technique as an artistic skill that was “masterfully practiced” around the turn of the century, not only in France but above all in Italy.4 Evidence of Italian casting skills could certainly be admired in Berlin at the turn of the twentieth century. For example, Louis Tuaillon (1862–1919), who lived in Rome from 1885 until 1902, had his famous Amazone zu Pferde (Amazon 1  Eugen Diehl, Die Bildgießerei Noack: Zum dreißigjährigen Bestehen der Bronzegießerei Noack in Berlin-Friedenau im Jahre 1927, Veröffentlichungen des Kunstarchivs 47 (Berlin: G. E. Diehl, 1927), 12, 31 (Klimsch); Josephine Gabler, “Hundert Jahre Bildgießerei Noack, hundert Jahre Bildhauerei,” in Hundert Jahre Bildgießerei H Noack (Berlin: Georg-Kolbe-Museum, 1997), 13–18. Noack had worked both at Lauchhammer and for Gladenbeck foundries. 2  Diehl, Bildgießerei Noack, 35. 3  Mutter mit Kind (Mother with Child), 1905, bronze, height 30.5 cm, Georg-Kolbe-Museum Berlin, inv. no. P289. See Ursel Berger, Georg Kolbe: Leben und Werk (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1990), 212, no. 6. 4  Diehl, Bildgießerei Noack, 35.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_006

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Figure 4.1 Georg Kolbe, Mutter und Kind (Mother and Child), 1905, bronze, height 30.5 cm, Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin Photo: Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin

on Horseback, ca. 1890/95) cast by Giovanni Battista Bastianelli (biographical dates unknown) using the lost-wax technique. The founder’s signature on the right hind hoof reads: “G. B. Bastianelli fuse. Roma 1895.” That same year, Tuaillon sent the work to the Große Berliner Kunstausstellung (Great Berlin Art Exhibition), where it was purchased by the Nationalgalerie and installed in front of the museum in 1896/97.5 His Sieger (Conqueror, ca. 1895–99, fig. 4.2), was cast by the sculptor himself in a small foundry near the Basilica of Saint Peter in Rome that he had rented for the purpose. He constructed the model from wax, as he reported in a letter to Berlin, and feared the inflated

5  Bernhard Maaz, ed., Nationalgalerie Berlin: Das XIX. Jahrhundert. Bestandskatalog der Skulpturen (Leipzig: Seemann, 2006), 2:819–20, no. 1272.

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Figure 4.2 Louis Tuaillon, Der Sieger (The Conqueror), ca. 1895–99, bronze, height 280 cm (without pedestal), Steubenplatz, Charlottenburg, Berlin Photo: Gerhard-MarcksStiftung, Bremen

consumption of both wax and bronze that would ensue from his free modeling. The horse and rider was obviously a unique work intended for the production of a lost-wax (cire perdue) cast.6 Apart from one flaw on the neck of the horse, the cast was a success and was transported to Berlin.

6  “The horse is light and graceful … In the meantime, I already have part of the bronze— 2,000 kg—in hand but will likely need around 4,000 kg. My technique, free modeling, makes for a substantial consumption of wax and bronze. By the way, keeping the large, hollow wax horse on its feet through the summer is quite a performance. It needs feeding with 25 kg of ice every day.” Letter from Louis Tuaillon to Eduard Arnhold, August 7, 1897, in Johanna Arnhold, Eduard Arnhold: Ein Gedenkbuch ([Berlin]: 1928), 225. See Gert-Dieter Ulferts, Louis Tuaillon (1862–1919): Berliner Bildhauerei zwischen Tradition und Moderne, Bildhauer des 19. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1993), 157–62, 299.

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1

Both Kolbe’s reference to Italy as the motherland of the lost-wax technique and Tuaillon’s sojourn in Rome take up lines of tradition that can be traced back much further in time. They testify to interchange between the countries, which came about through German artists who spent time in Italy. Rome remained the most important center of artistic training throughout the nineteenth century, only being superseded by Paris towards its end.7 Meanwhile, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, a re-evaluation of bronze as a material and its use for sculptures occurred. In parallel with the wars of liberation against Napoleon, there was a growing need to honor significant personalities with monuments, and a growing realization that sculptures made from stone—at least in northern latitudes—were vulnerable to weathering and therefore less durable. The first sculptor to deal with casting techniques for larger bronzes after the Baroque, from about 1790, was Johann Gottfried Schadow (1764–1850), and vital stimuli for bronze casting were set by his student Christian Daniel Rauch (1777–1857), who designed far more bronze monuments than his teacher. Influenced by these two personalities, Berlin not only developed into a new center for sculpture, but also a center for bronze-casting techniques.8 The other main city rising to greater prominence was Munich, home to the Königliche Erzgießerei (Royal Ore Foundry), which commenced production in 1825. Its first manager, Johann Baptist Stiglmaier (1791–1844), had traveled to Naples in 1821/22, where he had learned the lostwax technique from the Rome-born founder Luigi Righetti (1790–1852) while the latter was casting the equestrian statue of King Charles III of Naples after the model by Antonio Canova (1757–1822).9 7  See Peter Springer, “Berliner Bildhauer des 19. Jahrhunderts in Rom,” in Ethos und Pathos: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786–1914, ed. Peter Bloch, Sibylle Einholz, and Jutta von Simson (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1990), 1:49–70; Friedrich Noack, Deutsches Leben in Rom 1700 bis 1900 (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1907). 8  Bernhard Maaz, “‘Das war für Bronze gedacht und wirkt als solche’: Die Entwicklung des Bronzegusses in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Bronze- und Galvanoplastik: Geschichte, Materialanalyse, Restaurierung, ed. Birgit Meißner, Anke Doktor, and Martin Mach (Dresden: Michel Sandstein, Grafischer Betrieb und Verlagsgesellschaft, 2001), 25–40. 9  On Stiglmaier, see E. F., “Nekrolog: IX. Joh. Bapt. Stiglmayer,” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände / Kunstblatt 25, no. 95 (1844): 394–96; Peter Volk, “Ferdinand von Miller: Sein Leben und Wirken,” in Erz-Zeit: Ferdinand von Miller; Zum 150. Geburtstag der Bavaria, ed. Christoph Hölz (Munich: HypoVereinsbank Kultur und Gesellschaft, 1999), 19–21. On Righetti, see Chiara Teolato, “Rhigetti,” in Dizionario biografico degli italiani, ed. Alberto M. Ghisalberti and Raffaele Romanelli (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani, 2016), http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/righetti_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/, (keyword “Righetti”). Accessed July 1, 2019.

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Examining Rauch’s relationships with the Hopfgarten founders may serve to illustrate the situation in Berlin. Rauch tried to persuade the founder Wilhelm Hopfgarten (1779–1860) to move to Berlin to cast his Blücher monument, destined for the city of Breslau (Wrocław) and designed from 1818. The two men knew one another from Rome, where Rauch resided intermittently from 1805 to 1818 and where the Berlin-born Hopfgarten ran a lost-wax foundry from 1805 onwards. Rauch’s entreaties proved futile and the monument was finally realized as a sand casting in 1820/21 by the French founder François Lequine (biographical dates unknown). The latter had been appointed to the Königliche Gießerei (Royal Foundry) in 1817 in connection with works by Schadow, and had introduced the technique to the Prussian capital. When he left the foundry in 1828, Wilhelm’s elder brother, Ludwig Johann Heinrich Hopfgarten (1777– 1844), who resided in Berlin, followed him and guided the technique to new heights of quality. One of his sons, in turn, the sculptor Emil Hopfgarten (1821– 1856), was initiated into both techniques, first by his father in Berlin and then by his uncle in Rome.10 The practical shortcomings of sand casting—the necessity for elaborate chasing that destroys the surface modeled by the artist—was lamented by Rauch until the end of his life. In 1848 he spelled out his criticism to Ernst Rietschel (1804–1861): “At Lauchhammer I found your statue of Thaer undergoing chasing, from which I in your place would have forborne, since this unchased surface used to afford me quite the greatest satisfaction.—This unscathed skin of the cast bronze gives the sculpture an allure that I have otherwise only ever felt for the first model in clay.” In 1850 he wrote to the sculptor again: “Friebel, the art founder, idles at the spa as usual while the assistants rasp away at painstakingly created art; this torment of works in bronze devastates me physically and morally.”11 The sand-casting technique adapted from France had become irreversibly established in Germany; the lost-wax technique was now a theoretical possibility only, practical mastery being confined to Italy alone. No less a writer than Johann Wolfgang von Goethe translated Das Leben des Benvenuto Cellini (The Life of Benvenuto Cellini) into German, including the famous story about the

10  Friedrich Eggers and Karl Eggers, Christian Daniel Rauch (Berlin: Duncker, 1873–91), 2:408– 11. On the Hopfgarten family, see Chiara Teolato, Hopfgarten and Jollage Rediscovered: Two Berlin Bronzists in Napoleonic and Restoration Rome (Rome: Edizioni del Borghetto, 2016); and A. Brunner, “Hopfgarten, Emil Alexander, Heinrich, Wilhelm,” in Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon, ed. Andreas Beyer et al. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 74: 449–53. 11  Eggers and Eggers, Christian Daniel Rauch, 3.2:312–13. See Hermann Lüer, Technik der Bronzeplastik (Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, [1902]), 104–5.

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casting of the sculptor’s Perseus. It was published by Cotta in 1803.12 The book became a tool of the trade for founders, on the evidence of an anonymous visitor to Munich’s Royal Ore Foundry in 1845. Its workers were then occupied with casting the monumental 18.52-metre-high Bavaria by Ludwig Schwanthaler (1802–1848). In step with the times, it was produced by the sand-casting technique, for having trained in lost-wax casting in Naples, Stiglmaier had immediately taken instruction in the sand-casting technique from Lequine in Berlin. The visitor describes the lost-wax technique with explicit reference to Goethe and Cellini, and recalls the equestrian statue by Righetti before concluding: But the disadvantages and weaknesses of this technique became ever more tangible. The preheating of the mold, which not uncommonly took months, required the consumption of an extraordinary amount of coal and magnified the costs disproportionately. Even so, there was no escaping the risk of damage to the mold’s interior during firing, while on the other hand, any failure of the casting also meant the loss of the model. These troubles and the founder’s desire to be able to review and inspect the interior of the hollow form before casting brought the idea of sectional molding [i.e. the sand-casting technique] to fruition.13 The pioneers who restored the lost-wax procedure to new glory from the last quarter of the nineteenth century also struggled with exactly the problems described.

2

One of the most important companies for the reintroduction of the lost-wax technique in Germany was the Gladenbeck firm in Berlin.14 Its establishment goes back to Hermann Gladenbeck (1827–1918), who set up in self-employment 12  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Leben des Benvenuto Cellini: Florentinischen Goldschmieds und Bildhauers von ihm selbst geschrieben, übersetzt und mit einem Anhange herausgegeben (Tübingen: F. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1803). 13  “Die Königliche Erzgiesserei zu München,” Illustrirte Zeitung 5, no. 100 (May 31, 1845): 344. 14  See Ursel Berger, “Die Bronzegießereien Gladenbeck in Berlin,” Weltkunst, no. 22 (1988): 3496–501, no. 23 (1988): 3662–6 (two parts); Claus-Dieter Sprink, Die Bronzegießereien Gladenbeck: Aufstieg und Niedergang, Friedrichshagener Hefte 20 (Berlin: Antiquariat Brandel, 1998); Inge Kießhauer and Rolf Kießhauer, Die Gladenbeckschen Bronze­gießereien in Berlin und Friedrichshagen 1851–1926, Friedrichshagener Hefte 65 (Berlin: Antiquariat Brandel, 2012).

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with a small workshop in 1851. He was patronized by Rauch, who initially entrusted him with three casts of a reduction of his monument to Frederick II, and went on to commission him in 1856 to cast the statue of Immanuel Kant for the monument in Königsberg (Kaliningrad).15 To have secured and realized this prestigious commission was a breakthrough for Gladenbeck’s firm, which became extremely successful. His four sons, Oscar (1850–1921), Alfred (1858–1912), Walter (1866–1945), and Paul (1869–1947) also completed apprenticeships as foundry craftsmen and worked in the family firm. In 1887 the company moved out of the city to Friedrichshagen and was reconstituted as an Aktiengesellschaft (private limited company) the following year. In 1892, differences of opinion within the business caused a rift with the other shareholders, as a result of which all members of the Gladenbeck family left the limited company. While the original firm continued in business under the name “Aktiengesellschaft vormals H. Gladenbeck & Sohn” (“Limited company formerly known as H. Gladenbeck & Son”), the individual family members founded new firms from 1892. One suspects that Rauch’s complaints about the disadvantages of sand casting caused by lack of technical skills of the founders also reached the ears of the young Hermann Gladenbeck. When he traveled to Monza in 1874 with his finished cast of the reduction of Rauch’s Friedrich II monument, to be presented as a gift from Crown-Prince Friedrich Wilhelm to Crown-Prince Umberto, he took advantage of the journey to see for himself the quality of Italian bronzes. A company chronicle written in 1895/96 gives this account: “Various cast works he perused there, which were fabricated by the old method of lostwax casting—practiced nowhere else except Italy by that time—captivated his attention to such an extent that he resolved to introduce and perfect this old technique in his own foundry.”16 He started by sending his son Oscar “to Rome to study this technique; later he himself made the journey to assure himself of that foundry’s achievements … The third son … Walter Gladenbeck also made a study trip to Italy and was employed practically for six months at the Nelli foundry in Rome.”17 The chronicle is silent on whether all three members of the family spent time observing proceedings at the ambitious new foundry of Alessandro Nelli (1842–after 1903) or whether they also viewed other foundries, and when exactly these trips took place. In 1885 the lost-wax 15  See Jutta von Simson, Christian Daniel Rauch: Œuvre-Katalog (Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1996), 448–50, 461–63. 16  Walter Gladenbeck, Gladenbeck’s Bronzegießerei, Inh.: Walter und Paul Gladenbeck (unpublished manuscript, privately owned copy, [1895/96]), 7. 17  Ibid.

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Figure 4.3 Karl Hilgers, Friedrich Wilhelm I, 1885, bronze, dimensions unknown (destroyed), Lustgarten, Potsdam Photo: unknown, CA. 1935 (https://www.stadtbild deutschland.org/forum/ index.php?thread/4559-der -lustgarten/)

casting technique was already being practiced with success. “At Gladenbeck’s foundry in Berlin, experiments with casting over wax have been carried out for some time, which produced excellent results and have led to more extensive use, especially for ornamental objects,” reports the Zeitschrift für Gießerei, Bronze und Galvanoplastik (Foundry, Bronze and Electroplating Journal) in May of that year.18 As an example currently in production, mention was made of the dedication plaque for the monument to Friedrich Wilhelm I by Karl Hilgers (1844–1925, fig. 4.3). The split garland surrounding the inscription field itself was ideally suited to the technique. But smaller sculptures were also part of the repertoire, as a notice in the journal Kunstwart (Art Guardian) in 1887 confirms.19 18  Anonymus, “Die Entwicklung des Bronze-Gusses in Bezug auf das Kunstgewerbe,” Zeit­ schrift für Gießerei, Bronze, Galvanoplastik 2, no. 9 (May 10, 1885): 78. 19  Ferdinand Avenarius, “Kleinplastik,” Der Kunstwart 1, no. 3 (1887/88): 32.

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Figure 4.4 Reinhold Begas, Neptun Brunnen (Neptune Fountain), 1888–91, bronze, Rathausstraße Berlin Photo: GerhardMarcks-Stiftung, Bremen

In June 1891, Hanns von Zobeltitz gave a detailed account of his visit to the foundry. At the time, the monumental Neptun Brunnen (Neptune Fountain, fig. 4.4) by Reinhold Begas (1831–1911;), cast in sections, was being assembled, the firm having received this commission at the end of February 1889. The casting of the final figures, the two female personifications of the Elbe and the Rhine, was planned for May/June 1891.20 Zobeltitz sums up: “For such complicated pieces [which have undercutting on all sides], however, today without exception the Gladenbeck foundry no longer uses sand molding at all, but rather a new, highly original technique which partly goes back to the old wax molding except that the wax models are produced mechanically: by means 20  Hanns von Zobeltitz, “Aus der Werkstätte Meister Gladenbecks,” Velhagen und Klasings neue Monatshefte 5, no. 10 (June 1891): 423–42. On the award of the commission: Sprink, Die Bronzegießereien Gladenbeck, 20; on the casting of the final works: “Personal- und Ateliernachrichten: Monumentalbrunnen,” Die Kunst für alle 6, no. 16 (May 15, 1891): 250.

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of elastic molds.”21 The new technique—which Gladenbeck himself claimed to have invented—consisted principally in introducing the gelatin compound that would later become widely used in foundries to obtain a negative mold: First the mold, the negative, is taken from the artist’s model. The molding compound in this case is not plaster or sand, however, but an elastic compound mixed from glue, gelatin and gutta-percha, and this elasticity permits easy removal of the mold from the model in one piece, even if its surface has a more complicated design or even undercutting.22 This negative form proved equally unproblematic to remove from the cooled wax model (made from a mixture of wax and rosin). Moreover, it enabled several wax models to be obtained from one negative mold with relative ease, since a gelatin mold could be brushed or rinsed out with liquid wax up to three times, albeit only within a period of a few days. While this was no help for monumental sculpture, when it came to casting editions of small sculptural works it was a definite advantage in terms of both time and money. At the Gladenbeck foundry, they were convinced of the superiority of their own technique over the method used in Italy, and of the high quality of their casts: “The casts emerge with such clarity and sharpness that every fine modeling stroke made by the artist can be recognized precisely,” the family chronicle records.23 In this connection, a lecture delivered by Hermann Gladenbeck in 1894 to the association for the Verein zur Beförderung des Gewerbefleißes in Preußen (Association for the Advancement of Industry in Prussia) is of interest. There he describes a technique practiced in Rome whereby a plaster piecemold is not rinsed with molten wax but instead “lined with wax sheets of an even thickness, which are pressed firmly against the mold in order to produce the sharpest possible impression. The wax model thus obtained will probably have quite an even wall-thickness, but the sharpness that a cast is capable of giving is not achieved using the pressing technique; on the contrary, that requires significant finishing work.”24 Hermann Gladenbeck was also aware of the lost- wax technique’s disadvantages for colossal sculptures, however. These lay in the “difficulty of fabricating such large wax models for the casting, and the weeks it took to fire large molds” so as not to jeopardize their strength.25 21  Zobeltitz, “Aus der Werkstätte,” 431. 22  Ibid., 432. 23  Gladenbeck, Gladenbeck’s Bronzegießerei, 8. 24  Hermann Gladenbeck, “Ueber Bronzeguss,” Verhandlungen des Vereins zur Beförderung des Gewerbefleißes in Preußen 73 (1894): 213. 25  Ibid., 215.

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Excessive heat was liable to cause cracks to appear in the mold. Nevertheless, the Neptune Fountain, “with its intricate-to-cast fishing nets and free-floating parts,” was mostly cast using the lost-wax technique.26 The company had worked its way ahead from the first experiments to this large-scale project in barely ten years. How much investment this necessitated is revealed by the annual reports of the private limited company for the years 1889 and 1890: “Our foundry’s expansion into lost-wax casting required us to construct two larger buildings and some sheds … the construction of some furnaces [is still] pending, on completion of which our capacity would suffice to meet the elevated demands.”27

3

In the mid-1880s the Berlin sculptor Robert Toberentz (1849–1895) is mentioned in the same breath as Gladenbeck as a driving force in the revival of the lost-wax technique; indeed, he is even credited with pioneering achievements.28 An obituary for him written in 1895 recounts that he was occupied with “the improvement of bronze casting; the ‘cast over wax’ technique, which is now almost universal practice because of its excellence, owes its introduction to him.”29 Very little is known about the sculptor’s life. Toberentz had spent the period from 1872 to 1875 in Rome and served from 1879 to 1885 as the first head of the master’s studio for sculpture at the newly founded Schlesisches Museum der Bildenden Künste (Silesian Museum of Fine Arts) in Breslau. After his journeyman years, which took him across Europe and to America, in 1891 he returned to Berlin.30 His interest in the lost-wax technique coincided with his work as head of the master’s studio in Breslau. Perhaps his first permanent position at a newly founded institute served as a catalyst, for he was evidently an experimental sculptor generally with regard to secondary techniques, and also developed a new marble-pointing machine. 26  Gladenbeck, Gladenbeck’s Bronzegießerei, 9. 27   Geschäfts-Bericht des Vorstandes der Aktien-Gesellschaft vorm. H. Gladenbeck & Sohn, Bildgiesserei, 1889 und 1890, 92 HRB 1162, Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, Berlin. I am grateful to Ursel Berger for access to her transcriptions. 28  “Die Entwicklung des Bronze-Gusses,” 78; Avenarius, “Kleinplastik,” 32. 29  “Personal- und Ateliernachrichten: Robert Toberentz,” Die Kunst für alle 10, no. 24 (September 15, 1895): 377. 30  See Sibylle Einholz, “Toberentz, Robert,” in Ethos und Pathos: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786–1914, ed. Peter Bloch, Sibylle Einholz, and Jutta von Simson (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1990), 2:322.

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Figure 4.5 Robert Toberentz, Fountain, 1879–87, stone and bronze, Postplatz Görlitz ENGRAVING AFTER A PHOTO. ‘Ernst Keil’s Nachfolger’, Die Gartenlaube (Leipzig) 36, no. 8 (1888): 125

His most important commission during this period was a fountain for the town of Görlitz, which was unveiled at the end of 1887 (fig. 4.5). The crowning figure—produced by sand casting—was cast in Lauchhammer (see below). An article about the fountain written in November 1882 indicates that he was carrying out patination experiments in his studio on newly delivered “foundry samples of the bronze parts of the monumental fountain for the town of Görlitz,” and that others in his studio, working in parallel on the fountain project, were busy “molding the final pieces intended for bronze casting in modelling wax.”31 Apart from the crowning figure, the fountain’s only other metal features to which the comment might refer were four griffin-shaped waterspouts. But at roughly the same time, Toberentz must also have been occupied with the casting of a “brass plaque presented by the Academy of Arts [Akademie der

31  M. L. “Der Zierbrunnen für die Stadt Görlitz,” Kunstchronik: Wochenschrift für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe 18, no. 3 (November 1882/83): 37.

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Künste] to the crown-princely couple to commemorate their silver marriage.”32 Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm and Princess Victoria celebrated their silverwedding anniversary on January 25, 1883. The honorable cause shows the importance that was attached to the technique and the advances made in applying it. Since Toberentz is always mentioned as the executing hand, there is much to suggest that he had set up a small bronze-casting workshop within his studio. The brief published notes make no mention of where he acquired his skills. Italy is one possible source, but another possibility is France, for he was married to one of Rodin’s English pupils, Catherine Toberentz (biographical dates unknown).33 Toberentz had an indirect influence on a further company, the Lauchhammer ironworks, which along with Gladenbeck was credited with a distinguished contribution to reviving the lost-wax technique in Germany around the turn of the twentieth century.34 Valuable guidance at the time was traced back to results achieved by the sculptor, albeit communicated only verbally and indirectly by the city architect of Görlitz, Oskar Kubale.35 For the ironworks, which had been founded in 1724, the casting of sculptures was by no means its primary line of business, which was mechanical, utility, and military casting, but probably its most effective one in terms of publicity. Initially it specialized in artistic iron casting and realized the first hollow-iron cast—using the lost-wax technique at that time—of a bacchante in 1784.36 The technique has been practiced—supposedly; the sources are contradictory—for around fifty years.37 In 1838/39, now using the sand-casting technique, the first monumental works were cast in bronze. Again, Rauch featured as the instigator; the work concerned was his sculpture of the Polish kings Mieczysław I

32  “Die Entwicklung des Bronze-Gusses,” 78. 33  Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker (Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1939; reprint 1999), 33:230–31, s.v. “Toberentz, Robert.” 34  See Lüer, Technik der Bronzeplastik, 118. 35  Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei in Eisen und Bronce (Leipzig: Typ. Inst. Giesecke & Devrient, [1894]), 20. 36  See Heinz Dieter Uhlig, “Die Grafen von Einsiedel und die montanindustrielle Entwicklung des heutigen Nordostsachsens und Südbrandenburgs im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert,” in Das Eisenwerk Lauchhammer unter den Grafen von Einsiedel: Festschrift 20 Jahre Kunstgussmuseum Lauchhammer 2013, ed. Horst Remane and Sybille Fischer (Freiberg: Drei-Birken-Verlag, 2013), 286–98. 37  Erwin Nicolaus, “Die alte Wachsformerei,” Zeitschrift für Gießerei, Bronze, Galvanoplastik 1, no. 1 (1884): 3–4; however, see Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei, 9.

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and Bolesław I Chobry for Poznań cathedral.38 They also heralded a successful career for Lauchhammer as a bronze-casting company with expertise in monuments. Efforts toward the end of the nineteenth century to trial the lostwax technique are due largely to the requests and suggestions of the Berlin sculptor Rudolf Siemering (1835–1905). Siemering can be considered an indirect student of Rauch and from 1871 he was responsible for the Rauch Museum maintained by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin.39 In 1894, the ironworks issued a most elaborately designed brochure entitled Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei in Eisen und Bronce (Lauchhammer as an Iron and Bronze Art Foundry), which can be read as publicity for its new-found success in casting large sculptures using the lost-wax technique. The brochure reports the company’s pride in the casts it has realized and its arduous road to this success: “As our first major object we undertook eight large animal figures for the Washington Monument in Philadelphia modeled by Professor Siemering in Berlin; two attempts at the first figure failed, but the third cast was faultless and the other seven figures presented no further difficulties.”40 The resting animals, which belonged to the pedestal section of the large monument commissioned from Siemering in 1881 by the Society of the Cincinnati of Pennsylvania, were cast in the summer of 1892 (fig. 4.6). They were on public display at that year’s Berlin Academy Exhibition. “Of the isolated large animals, some are executed in bronze and demonstrate the splendid modeling.”41 Indeed, Siemering had gone to great lengths to represent the American animals with maximum faithfulness to nature. He had not only diligently observed the local fauna but had also skinned and dissected dead animals in the studio.42 One can infer that he attached considerable importance to rendering the creatures’ anatomy and skin with the utmost accuracy. In the wake of this success, the lost-wax technique took off in Lauchhammer. In the course of 1894 up to the brochure’s publication date, there followed the female figure of Hannovera (1893) by Ernst Wagener (1854–1921) “in one piece” for the old town hall in Hanover, and “thereafter a great number of different larger-format reliefs and other works besides, not to mention innumerable 38  See Eggers and Eggers, Christian Daniel Rauch, 3.2:169–71; Lüer, Technik der Bronzeplastik, 105–7; Simson, Christian Daniel Rauch, 269–74. 39  See Jutta von Simson, “Bestände des ehemaligen Rauch-Museums,” in Ethos und Pathos: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786–1914, ed. Peter Bloch, Sibylle Einholz, and Jutta von Simson (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1990), 2:361–406. 40  Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei, 21. 41  Jaro Springer, “Die Akademische Kunstausstellung in Berlin II,” Die Kunst für alle 7, no. 21 (August 1, 1892): 330. 42  Berthold Daun, Siemering, Künstler-Monographien 80 (Bielefeld: Verlag von Velhagen und Klasing, 1906), 87.

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Figure 4.6

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Rudolf Siemering, Bull for the Washington Monument in Philadelphia, 1892, wax model with gate system. Anon., Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei in Eisen und Bronce, Leipzig, Berlin: Typ. Inst. Giesecke & Devrient, n. y. [1894]: 21 Photo: bpk / Kunstbibliothek, SMB / Dietmar Katz

busts.”43 Siemering crowned the foundry’s efforts in 1896 by entrusting it with the casting of his Hl. Gertraud (St. Gertrude; fig. 4.7). As the publicity material noted with pride, the model of the roughly three-meter high statue was dismantled into exceptionally few pieces for casting. The main figure was only divided below the belt and the skirt and pedestal were poured together. The artist retouched the entire surface of the wax model—and this, too, was deservedly announced in print—in his own hand and thus ensured that “all the subtleties of the sculpture’s rendering” were preserved.44 Embossed on the cover page of the foundry’s advertising brochure is the green-patinated cast of a thistle (fig. 4.8). The strange object alludes to the endeavors to find a suitable molding compound. For it was not just the wax model that had to reproduce the subtleties of the artistic original; the same applied to the molding compound that encased the wax model and became the negative form that would later receive the bronze. For the corresponding experiments the founders did not rely on wax compounds but used living plants, i.e. took casts from nature, in order to check the precision of reproduction and the 43  Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei, 21. 44  See Woldemar Kaden, “Personal- und Atelier-Nachrichten,” Die Kunst für alle 12, no. 4 (November 4, 1896): 59; Daun, Siemering, 113.

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Figure 4.7

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Rudolf Siemering, Hl. Gertraud (St. Gertrude), 1896, bronze, height approx. 300 cm, Gertraudenbrücke, Berlin, currently stored and not on site Photo: Manfred Brückels, 2009 (https:// de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datei:Gertraudenbruecke _Berlin_2.jpg)

quality of the molding compound. This is noteworthy because the Gladenbeck company also used casts from nature to advertise the high reproductive quality that could be achieved using the rediscovered technique.45 In making use of casts from nature, both were drawing on practices that were known from the Italian Renaissance. And as contemporary artefacts of the Roman foundry Nisini, such casts had been seen shortly before in Berlin.46 The exact composi45  Gladenbeck, “Ueber Bronzeguss,” 215. 46  The painter Moritz Meurer (1839–1916), who was a teacher at the Unterrichtsanstalt des Königlichen Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin, commissioned natural plant casts from the

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Figure 4.8 Anon, Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei in Eisen und Bronce, Leipzig, Berlin: Typ. Inst. Giesecke & Devrient, n. y. [1894], cover Photo: bpk / Kunstbibliothek, SMB / Dietmar Katz

tion of the molding compound, however, a mixture of plaster, brick dust, and fireclay, remained one of the foundry’s trade secrets.47 In Lauchhammer they initially “sent for Roman bricks … which were ground and mixed with other substances” before they succeeded “in fabricating a suitable material out of local minerals.”48 The complexity of importing bricks from Rome—considering that in the building boom of the Wilhelminian era, modern brickworks were certainly closer at hand—indicates that Italian recipes were followed at first. bronze foundry Giovanni and C. Nisini in Rome, which were intended as models for drawing. Some of the casts were already on display in 1891 as part of a small exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts. See Angela Nikolai, “Nach der Natur, nah der Natur?,” in Nah am Leben: 200 Jahre Gipsformerei, ed. Christina Haak, Miguel Helfrich and Veronika Tocha (Munich: Prestel, 2019), 50–55. Some of these casts have been preserved in the archive of the Universität der Künste Berlin. http://www.universitaetssammlungen.de/search/ volltext?fulltext=Nisini. Accessed March 31, 2020. 47  See also Lüer, Technik der Bronzeplastik, 119–20. 48  Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei, 20.

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4

Which factors may have favored the reintroduction of the lost-wax technique around 1880? The growth of the middle class with its cultural aspirations towards prestigious living created an increasing need for decorative objects. A market emerged for small sculptures and portrait busts, the formats of which made them a suitable testing ground for casting experiments. Unlike sand casting, the lost-wax technique was considered the more refined approach and was reserved for the more demanding works by renowned artists.49 For instance, Schäffer & Walcker, another of the large Berlin foundries, which was practicing the lost-wax technique before 1890, had works by Gustav Eberlein (1847–1926) in its range.50 But there was also an eye to France, whose bronze industry was felt to be far superior to Germany’s own in terms of both quantity and quality, even in 1889/90: “But what do these few firms amount to, compared to the many in Paris; what are a few rare accomplishments [especially application of the lost-wax technique] compared with the excellent average accomplishments of the French capital!”51 Despite the repeated discovery of indications that the technique is once again in common practice, it remains difficult to assess which and how many sculptures from German foundries before the turn of the century were actually cast using the lost-wax technique. Written materials on foundries are rare and usually found by chance. And unlike the numerous large-scale sculptures made for monuments, smaller sculptures were not a contemporary subject of discussion. Rarely do the sculptures themselves give any insight into the applied technique, since they often deny any inspection of their insides. Their plinths are usually separate and, owing to their simple form, often cast using the sand-casting technique. What Hermann Gladenbeck recommended for large-scale sculpture, namely to combine both techniques and weigh up which method is more appropriate for which parts of the work, may well apply equally to small-scale sculpture.52 Missing founders’ marks only add to the problem. In part, the revival of the lost-wax technique is attributable to the change in contemporary taste as the nineteenth century drew to a close: the opulent, voluminous forms of the neo-Baroque, on the one hand, and the need for 49  For example, the so-called “shop bronzes” (Ladenbronzen) cast in large editions by Gladenbeck. See Berger, “Die Bronzegießereien Gladenbeck,” 3501. 50  See Actiengesellschaft Schäffer & Walcker, ed., Der Zimmerschmuck für ein behagliches Heim: Anleitung für Anordnung, Ergänzung und Auswahl geeigneter Gegenstände (Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1890), 90. 51  “Über unser Bronze-Kunstgewerbe [nach einem Vortrag von Georg Buß],” Der Kunstwart 3, no. 18 (1889/90): 283. 52  Gladenbeck, “Ueber Bronzeguss,” 215.

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authentically detailed naturalism on the other. For complex forms, however, it was only the introduction of elastic negative forms that made wax casting the easier and hence more inexpensive option, because this could be less fragmentary and the final artwork did not require such extensive finishing. Successes on the technical side and sculptors’ free modeling of form may also have crossfertilized one another. In a fundamental sense, the advancing industrialization of bronze casting also contributed to the resumption of lost-wax casting. The sand-casting method was completely mature technically, which gave rise to space for entrepreneurial innovations. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that discussions were rekindled concerning the accurate realization of the surface sculpted by the artist with minimal chasing and concerning the patina. Passions were especially inflamed by the question of whether the lost-wax technique was conducive to a natural patina or whether the casting method had no influence on this whatsoever, as can be gathered from articles in the specialist journals.53 In other words, debates that had run their course in the first half of the century were resurrected—and this at a time when the reception of artists like Schadow and Rauch was reaching a new level due to the publication of books.54 In German sculpture, the desire that the artist’s hand should be preserved to the utmost extent in a bronze cast is not a phenomenon of modernism. Contrary to common preconceptions, it was the academic artists of the waning nineteenth century who found potential in the old lostwax technique to lend expression to their creative ideas. What changed was artistic taste.

Acknowledgements

I sincerely thank Ursel Berger, Yvette Deseyve, and Arie Hartog for stimulating conversations, generous access to research notes (Ursel Berger), and for turning small sculptures upside down together (Yvette Deseyve and Ursel Berger) so that we could see underneath and try to assess whether they were cast by lost wax or by sand casting. I also thank Deborah Shannon for the translation from German.

53  See Nicolaus, “Die alte Wachsformerei”; Emil Steiner, “Das Geheimnis der Patina,” Zeitschrift für Gießerei, Bronze, Galvanoplastik 1, no. 9 (1884): 67–68; and A. Hausding, “Ueber echte Bronze und Patina,” Verhandlungen des Vereins zur Beförderung des Gewerbefleißes 72 (1893): 222–29. 54  See Eggers and Eggers, Christian Daniel Rauch; Julius Friedlaender, ed., Gottfried Schadow: Aufsätze und Briefe, Neben einem Verzeichnis seiner Werke (Dusseldorf: Julius Buddeus, 1864; 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1890).

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Bibliography Actiengesellschaft Schäffer & Walcker, ed. Der Zimmerschmuck für ein behagliches Heim: Anleitung für Anordnung, Ergänzung und Auswahl geeigneter Gegenstände. Berlin: Ernst Wasmuth, 1890. Arnhold, Johanna. Eduard Arnhold: Ein Gedenkbuch. Berlin: self-published, 1928. Avenarius, Ferdinand. “Kleinplastik.” Der Kunstwart 1, no. 3 (1887/88): 32. Berger, Ursel. “Die Bronzegießereien Gladenbeck in Berlin.” Weltkunst, no. 22 (1988): 3496–501, no. 23 (1988): 3662–6. Berger, Ursel. Georg Kolbe: Leben und Werk. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1990. Brunner, A. “Hopfgarten, Emil Alexander, Heinrich, Wilhelm.” In Allgemeines Künst­ lerlexikon. Edited by Andreas Beyer et al. Vol. 74. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012, 449–53. Daun, Berthold. Siemering. Künstler-Monographien 80. Bielefeld: Verlag von Velhagen und Klasing, 1906. Diehl, Eugen. Die Bildgießerei Noack: Zum dreißigjährigen Bestehen der Bronzegießerei Noack in Berlin-Friedenau im Jahre 1927. Veröffentlichungen des Kunstarchivs 47. Berlin: G. E. Diehl, 1927. Eggers, Friedrich, and Karl Eggers. Christian Daniel Rauch. 5 vols. Berlin: Duncker, 1873–91. Einholz, Sibylle. “Toberentz, Robert.” In Ethos und Pathos: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786–1914. Edited by Peter Bloch, Sibylle Einholz, and Jutta v. Simson. Vol. 2, 322. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1990. “Die Entwicklung des Bronze-Gusses in Bezug auf das Kunstgewerbe.” Zeitschrift für Gießerei, Bronze, Galvanoplastik 2, no. 9 (May 10, 1885): 78. F., E. “Nekrolog. IX. Joh. Bapt. Stiglmayer.” Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände / Kunstblatt 25, no. 5 (1844): 394–96. Friedlaender, Julius, ed. Gottfried Schadow: Aufsätze und Briefe, Neben einem Verzeichnis seiner Werke. Dusseldorf: Julius Buddeus, 1864; 2nd ed. Stuttgart: Ebner & Seubert, 1890. Gabler, Josephine. “Hundert Jahre Bildgießerei Noack, hundert Jahre Bildhauerei.” In Hundert Jahre Bildgießerei H Noack. Berlin: Georg-Kolbe-Museum, 1997, 13–52. Geschäfts-Bericht des Vorstandes der Aktien-Gesellschaft vorm. H. Gladenbeck & Sohn, Bildgiesserei, 1889 und 1890. 92 HRB 1162. Amtsgericht Charlottenburg, Berlin. Gladenbeck, H[ermann]. “Ueber Bronzeguß.” Verhandlungen des Vereins zur Beförderung des Gewerbefleißes 73 (1894): 211–15. Gladenbeck, Walter. Gladenbeck’s Bronzegießerei, Inh.: Walter und Paul Gladenbeck (unpublished manuscript, privately owned copy, [1895/96]). Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, ed. Leben des Benvenuto Cellini, Florentinischen Goldschmieds und Bildhauers von ihm selbst geschrieben, übersetzt und mit einem Anhange herausgeben. Tübingen: F. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung, 1803.

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Hausding, A. “Ueber echte Bronze und Patina.” Verhandlungen des Vereins zur Beförderung des Gewerbefleißes 72 (1893): 222–29. Kaden, Woldemar. “Personal- und Atelier-Nachrichten.” Die Kunst für alle 12, no. 4 (November 4, 1896): 59–60. Kießhauer, Inge und Rolf. Die Gladenbeckschen Bronzegießereien in Berlin und Friedrichshagen, 1851–1926. Friedrichshagener Hefte 65. Berlin: Antiquariat Brandel, 2012. “Die Königliche Erzgiesserei zu München.” Illustrirte Zeitung 5, nos. 100, 102, 104 (May 31, June 14, June 28, 1845): 344–45, 380–81, 412–13. L., M. “Der Zierbrunnen für die Stadt Görlitz.” Kunstchronik: Wochenschrift für Kunst und Kunstgewerbe 18, no. 3 (November 1882/83): 37–40. Lauchhammer als Bildgiesserei in Eisen und Bronce. Leipzig: Typ. Inst. Giesecke & Devrient, [1894]. Lüer, Hermann. Technik der Bronzeplastik. Leipzig: Hermann Seemann Nachfolger, [1902]. Maaz, Bernhard. “‘Das war für Bronze gedacht und wirkt als solche’: Die Entwicklung des Bronzegusses in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Bronze- und Galvanoplastik: Geschichte, Materialanalyse, Restaurierung. Edited by Birgit Meißner, Anke Doktor, and Martin Mach. Dresden: Michel Sandstein, Grafischer Betrieb und Verlags­ gesellschaft, 2001, 25–40. Maaz, Bernhard, ed. Nationalgalerie Berlin: Das XIX. Jahrhundert. Bestandskatalog der Skulpturen. 2 vols. Leipzig: Seemann, 2006. Nicolaus, Erwin. “Die alte Wachsformerei.” Zeitschrift für Gießerei, Bronze, Galvanoplastik 1, no. 1 (1884): 3–4. Nikolai, Angela. “Nach der Natur, nah der Natur?” In Nah am Leben: 200 Jahre Gips­ formerei. Edited by Christina Haak, Miguel Helfrich and Veronika Tocha. Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2019, 50–55. Noack, Friedrich. Deutsches Leben in Rom 1700 bis 1900. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1907. “Personal- und Ateliernachrichten: Monumentalbrunnen.” Die Kunst für alle 6, no. 16 (May 15, 1891): 250. “Personal- und Ateliernachrichten: Robert Toberentz.” Die Kunst für alle 10, no. 24 (September 15, 1895): 377. Simson, Jutta von. “Bestände des ehemaligen Rauch-Museums.” In Ethos und Pathos: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786–1914. Edited by Peter Bloch, Sibylle Einholz, and Jutta v. Simson, Vol. 2, 361–406. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1990. Simson, Jutta von. Christian Daniel Rauch: Œuvre-Katalog. Bildhauer des 19. Jahr­ hunderts. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1996. Springer, Jaro. “Die Akademische Kunstausstellung in Berlin II.” Die Kunst für alle 7, no. 21 (August 1, 1892): 328–30.

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Springer, Peter. “Berliner Bildhauer des 19. Jahrhunderts in Rom.” In Ethos und Pathos: Die Berliner Bildhauerschule 1786–1914. Edited by Peter Bloch, Sibylle Einholz, and Jutta v. Simson, Vol. 1, 49–70. Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1990. Sprink, Claus-Dieter. Die Bronzegießereien Gladenbeck: Aufstieg und Niedergang. Friedrichshagener Hefte 20. Berlin: Antiquariat Brandel, 1998. Steiner, Emil. “Das Geheimnis der Patina.” Zeitschrift für Gießerei, Bronze, Galvanoplastik 1, no. 9 (1884): 67–68. Teolato, Chiara. Hopfgarten and Jollage Rediscovered: Two Berlin Bronzists in Napoleonic and Restoration Rome. With the assistance of Andrea Jemolo et al. Rome: Edizioni del Borghetto, 2016. Teolato, Chiara. “Rhigetti.” In Dizionario Biografico Degli Italiani. Edited by Alberto M. Ghisalberti and Raffaele Romanelli. Vol. 87. Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana fondata da Giovanni Treccani, 2016. http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ righetti_%28Dizionario-Biografico%29/. Thieme, Ulrich and Felix Becker, ed. Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. Leipzig: E. A. Seemann, 1907–50. Reprint 1999. “Über unser Bronze-Kunstgewerbe [nach einem Vortrag von Georg Buß].” Der Kunstwart 3, no. 18 (1889/90): 282–84. Uhlig, Heinz Dieter. “Die Grafen von Einsiedel und die montanindustrielle Entwicklung des heutigen Nordostsachsens und Südbrandenburgs im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert.” In Das Eisenwerk Lauchhammer unter den Grafen von Einsiedel: Festschrift 20 Jahre Kunstgussmuseum Lauchhammer 2013. Edited by Horst Remane and Sybille Fischer. Freiberg: Drei-Birken-Verl., 2013, 247–352. Ulferts, Gert-Dieter. Louis Tuaillon (1862–1919): Berliner Bildhauerei zwischen Tradition und Moderne. Bildhauer des 19. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: Gebr. Mann, 1993. Volk, Peter. “Ferdinand von Miller—Sein Leben und Wirken.” In Erz-Zeit: Ferdinand von Miller; Zum 150. Geburtstag der Bavaria. Edited by Christoph Hölz, 14–65. Munich: HypoVereinsbank Kultur und Gesellschaft, 1999. Zobeltitz, Hanns von. “Aus der Werkstätte Meister Gladenbecks.” Velhagen und Klasings neue Monatshefte 5, no. 10 (June 1891): 423–42.

chapter 5

Enrico Cantoni: From Plasterman to Bronze Founder in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain Rebecca Wade 1

Introduction

The process of lost-wax bronze casting was revived in Britain during the decades around the turn of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century by Italian founders who had trained in Rome, one of the earliest of whom was Alessandro Parlanti in the 1890s.1 They followed the Italian plaster-figure makers who began to migrate from the area around Lucca in Tuscany to Britain, first as itinerant figurinai or “image sellers” from the eighteenth century onwards. Traveling on foot through Europe, after reaching Britain some settled and established permanent workshops. The production of plaster casts was important to the process of casting in bronze and the two trades operated in dialogue and close geographical proximity. This chapter focuses on the transition made by one maker from casting in plaster to casting in bronze using the lost-wax process. The plaster-cast maker and bronze founder Enrico Cantoni (ca. 1859–1923) has not received substantial scholarly attention, but his work with the South Kensington Museum (later the Victoria and Albert Museum) over two decades and his teaching at the Central School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art make him an important figure in the history of British sculptural production. He operated during a crucial moment for the development of sculpture, producing bronzes for artists associated with the New Sculpture movement, including Aimé-Jules Dalou, Alphonse Legros, and Frederic Leighton, in addition to the emerging modern sculpture of Ivan Meštrović. In 1893, the Manchester Times reprinted the following excerpt from the Good Words periodical, which outlined the dominant processes by which sculpture was made: 1  Jacob Simon, “Bronze Sculpture Founders: A Short History,” National Portrait Gallery, London, revised February 2017, https://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/bronze-sculpture -founders-history. See also Susan Beattie, The New Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 191. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_007

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When the [plaster] cast is made, the sculptor sets to work on the final development of his idea. If he has designed it for bronze, the model is, as a rule, sent to the founders, who then cast it in metal, either by the “sand process,” which does very well for large outdoor work, where fine detail could not be seen and the surface is of less consequence, or by the old Italian method known as the “lost wax” or “cera perduta.” This latter method is by far the best for fine and delicate work, as the exact surface of the model is rendered just as it left the sculptor’s hands, he himself, as a rule, previously touching up the wax cast. By it too the work is cast in one piece; thus the necessity of joints is dispensed with, and consequent meddling with the surface by burnishing as the other method requires.2 By articulating the proximity of the results of lost-wax casting to the action of the hands of the sculptor, the author neatly illustrates the primary argument in favor of the process and the reason why artists sought to revive it for the production of their work. 2

From Plasterman to Bronze Founder

For a generation between around 1840 and 1880 the production and supply of plaster casts was dominated in Britain by the firm led by Domenico Brucciani (1815–1880). After Brucciani’s death, the business continued under his name, although opportunities were created for smaller workshops as its relative monopoly in some areas began to decline. One of the institutional relationships that Brucciani’s death opened up was with the Department of Science and Art, which provided access to the demand for plaster casts required by art galleries, museums and schools of art. Like Brucciani, Cantoni worked closely with the South Kensington Museum and the associated National Art Training School (later the Royal College of Art), being described in 1904 as their “official cast-maker.”3 It is not known exactly when or under what circumstances Cantoni traveled to Britain, though he is first recorded in the 1881 census as “Henry Cantoni,” when he was around twenty-one years old. At this point, he was boarding at 162 and 164 Grays Inn Road with the Sani family, working as a plaster-figure maker.4 The head of the household, Raffaello Sani 2  “How a Sculptor Works,” Manchester Times, December 29, 1893, 5. 3  “The Editor’s Note Book,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904): 160. 4  Census Returns of England and Wales, 1881, class RG11, piece: 341, fol. 5, p. 4, GSU roll 1341074.

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(ca. 1834–1894), was also in the plaster business alongside the Caproni family, to whom he was related by marriage. Whether the Anglicization of Cantoni’s first name was his own decision or that of the person documenting the household is open to question. If it was an attempt at cultural assimilation, it was not long-lasting since he went on to trade under his given name from around 1889 until his death. Shortly after Cantoni’s first appearance in the census in 1881, he began working for the Department of Science and Art.5 During the following years he began to establish an independent professional life, trading under his own name and moving away from the Italian enclave in Holborn towards an area of London more readily associated with prestigious painters and sculptors. The 1891 census recorded Cantoni at thirty-one years old, living with his wife Florence and son Mario in three rooms at 43 Glebe Place in Chelsea, south west London. His employment was described as “plaster moulder” at an “image studio.” His place of birth was listed as Italy, while his wife was born in Holborn, where they married in 1888.6 As Jacob Simon, former Chief Curator of the National Portrait Gallery, notes in his database of British bronze sculpture founders and plasterfigure makers, 1800–1980, Florence’s maiden name, Landi, perhaps connected her to the formatore Daniele Landi (ca. 1838–1925). Italians operating in the plaster business were highly interconnected and marriages between families working in the same trades were common. The following year, 1892, marks the first appearance of Cantoni in the nominal file held in the V&A Archive of Art and Design. This institutional record begins with an order for plaster casts of ornament from the Architectural Court to be reproduced from existing gelatin molds and sent to Edinburgh Museum, Birmingham Municipal School of Art, Liverpool Museum and Melbourne, Australia.7 The heading on his memorandum paper described his profession as “Moulder for Sculptors, also Bronzing and Colouring,” with bronzing referring not to the production of bronze casts, but to the application of pigments and other surface treatments onto a plaster substrate to replicate the appearance of patinated bronze.8 Cantoni appears to have begun actually casting in bronze, in addition to plaster, at the turn of the century. Simon notes that his earliest known sculpture in bronze dates to 1900: a bust of the chemist and 5  Diane Bilbey, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000: A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, with Marjorie Trusted (London: V&A Publications, 2002), 251. 6  Census Returns of England and Wales, 1891, class RG12, piece 64, fol. 74, p. 9, GSU roll 6095174. 7  Department of Science and Art minute paper, March 30, 1892, MA/1/C338, Enrico Cantoni nominal file, V&A Archive of Art & Design, London. 8  Memorandum from Enrico Cantoni to Mr. Skinner, December 2, 1893, MA/1/C338, Enrico Cantoni nominal file, V&A Archive of Art & Design, London.

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natural philosopher Sir Humphry Davy (1778–1829) for the Royal Institution in London.9 It is possible that Cantoni was casting in bronze slightly earlier than 1900, since a note from the Storekeeper’s Office of the Department of Science and Art, dated December 15, 1896, recorded that Cantoni had offered a “bronze head, from the antique on marble pedestal” on approval for £12 12s., which was purchased and paid for on December 30 that year. The cost was far in excess of the usual range of prices charged by Cantoni for plaster casts, which suggests that it was indeed a bronze that was brought, though the precise method of its production was not documented.10 That the pedestal was recorded as marble and not plaster lends weight to the likelihood that the bust was not a standard plaster cast. The vague nature of the description of the object has meant that it has not been possible to trace it in the present collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum. The art historian David Wilson discovered the earliest extant example of the memorandum paper on which Cantoni described his occupation as “Bronze Founder and Moulder for Sculptors” in a letter of condolence to the widow of the sculptor Edward Onslow Ford dated December 23, 1901.11 Perhaps as a result of the patronage of the Department of Science and Art, the 1901 census revealed a significant change in Cantoni family’s circumstances. Enrico had become a widower and his son, then eleven years old, had been joined by a daughter, Irene, then nine. The family remained in Chelsea, but had moved to 100 Church Street in 1893, where Cantoni lived and worked for the rest of his life. This was presumably the location for the series of photographs taken to illustrate the process of casting in plaster, published alongside Cantoni’s explanatory text in the first volume of Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home in 1904 (fig. 5.1).12 The family was joined by a housekeeper, Rebecca E. Reeves, a forty-seven-year-old widow from Brighton. The census reveals two further important details: that the family home now contained more than five rooms and that Cantoni had not become 9  Jacob Simon, “Enrico Cantoni,” in British Bronze Sculpture Founders and Plaster Figure Makers, 1800–1980, National Portrait Gallery, updated March 2019, https://www.npg.org .uk/research/programmes/british-bronze-founders-and-plaster-figure-makers-1800 -1980-1/british-bronze-founders-and-plaster-figure-makers-1800-1980-ca. See also Frank A. J. L. James, ed., “The Common Purposes of Life”: Science and Society at the Royal Institution of Great Britain (London: Routledge, 2002), 77. 10  Storekeeper’s Office, Department of Science and Art, December 15, 1896, MA/1/C338, Enrico Cantoni nominal file, V&A Archive of Art & Design, London. 11  I am very grateful to David Wilson for supplying me with his unpublished essay on Alfred Stevens’ “Lion Sejant,” written in 2015. 12  Enrico Cantoni, “Casting in Plaster: A Practical Demonstration of the Process by Mr. Enrico Cantoni, Moulder to the Royal College of Art; Illustrated with Special Photographs,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904): 216–20, 270–73.

Enrico Cantoni: From Plasterman to Bronze Founder

Figure 5.1

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“Casting in Plaster: A Demonstration.—Draining the Superfluous Plaster,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904), 273

a naturalized British subject.13 By 1911, the census showed Enrico, Mario, and Irene still living at 100 Church Street, though without a housekeeper. This was most likely a result of the two children having become adults rather than a reduction in circumstances. Mario, now twenty-one, was recorded as an assistant to his father, and Irene, nineteen, was working as a shorthand typist.14 It was in this year too that Cantoni’s invoice paper showed the extent of his activities—“Moulding and Castings of all Descriptions for Sculptors. Plaster Casts Supplied for Schools. Casting in Bronze by lost wax known as the Cera Perduta Process, and also Bronzing and Colouring.”15 The shift in Cantoni’s business from plaster to bronze was neither linear nor complete. The production of plaster casts was a crucial component of the process of casting in bronze, and sculptors continued to require them for different purposes, including for public display in order to generate sufficient interest in a bronze cast or edition of casts. Demand from individual and institutional 13  Census Returns of England and Wales, 1901, class RG13, piece 72, fol. 31, p. 54. 14  Census Returns of England and Wales, 1911, RG14PN377 RG78PN12 RD4 SD1 ED5 SN58. 15  Invoice from Enrico Cantoni to Sir Cecil Smith, June 21, 1911, MA/1/C338, Enrico Cantoni nominal file, V&A Archive of Art & Design, London.

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collections remained too. For instance, in 1911 Cantoni cast the caryatids from Alfred Stevens’ celebrated sculptural fireplace in the dining room at Dorchester House for display at the Tate Gallery. The reproduction of the fireplace was “coloured like the original,” with the green Bardiglio marble sections made from painted wood by Mr. Campenhoudt.16 3

New Sculpture and Emerging Modernism

As a maker of plaster molds and casts, Cantoni benefitted from the continued market from both established and emerging museums and art galleries in Britain in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and to a slightly lesser extent, the national network of schools of art. Administered through the Department of Science and Art, these commissions were determined by the priorities of a government body interested in the circulation of standardized ideas informed by historical exemplars. A parallel domestic market for bronze statuettes, revivified by the New Sculpture movement from the last decade of the nineteenth century, provided Cantoni with an opportunity to diversify into the production of bronze casts using the lost-wax method. As Susan Beattie demonstrated in her unmatched study of the New Sculpture, for most of the Victorian period, foundries were not set up to cast fine, small works in bronze and were generally oriented towards industry rather than art.17 Beattie described the freedom and fluidity sought by sculptors through bronze and credited Alfred Gilbert (1854–1943) with the pursuit of the lost-wax technique that he had observed in Italy in 1878: The greater the importance placed on the clay model, the more vital it was for the bronze cast to reproduce its qualities exactly. Gilbert’s first founder, Sabatino de Angelis of Naples, had introduced him to the “lost wax” process, a method of casting that had fallen into disuse in England but which, if undertaken successfully, produced a perfect reproduction of the sculptor’s wax model, however subtle the articulation of the surface and however deep the undercutting. Complex and laborious, entailing long periods of firing at very high temperatures, the technique as then developed was ideally suited to small works that could be cast in one piece.18

16  “Dorchester House: The Work of Alfred Stevens,” The Times, July 26, 1929, 8. 17  Beattie, The New Sculpture, 182. 18  Ibid., 184.

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British sculptors, including Gilbert, began to experiment with the process in the 1880s, and by the end of the decade specialist foundries were established to cater to this demand.19 Cantoni began casting in bronze when the practice of making statuettes of contemporary sculpture had been established for at least ten years. Cantoni’s involvement with the New Sculpture movement intersected with a particularly significant period for the education of sculptors at the National Art Training School, at which he worked as a molder.20 His connection centered on an important lineage of three French artists who had a substantial influence on British sculpture: Alphonse Legros (1831–1911), Aimé-Jules Dalou (1838–1902), and Édouard Lantéri (1848–1917). Legros was appointed to the National Art Training School in 1875, but according to Beattie, “Legros’s most important contribution to South Kensington […] was his introduction of the French sculptor Aimé-Jules Dalou to give demonstrations in clay modelling,” which he conducted between 1877 and 1880.21 Édouard Lantéri had been a student of Dalou in France and he too traveled to England, replacing Dalou in his teaching position, which became the first Professorship of Sculpture and Modelling in 1901. The relationship between Lantéri and Cantoni dates from at least 1896, when Cantoni was engaged with the Department of Science and Art to produce plaster casts from a plaster female figure by Lantéri, for use in schools of art.22 During his tenure, Lantéri published the landmark threevolume illustrated Modelling: A Guide for Teachers and Students (1902–11). The publisher Chapman and Hall advertised plaster casts for sale based on Lantéri’s examples and it was Cantoni who produced these casts. The clay statuette used to illustrate Cantoni’s method of casting in plaster in the first volume of Arts & Crafts: A Practical Magazine for the Studio the Workshop and the Home in 1904 (figs 5.2 and 5.3) was modeled from life by a student at the Royal College of Art, who had very clearly been taught by Lantéri. The same volume contained a portrait sketch of Cantoni by Legros, demonstrating the extent to which Cantoni was embedded in their circle (fig. 5.4). The association between Cantoni and Dalou is more difficult to substantiate in the absence of archival evidence, though Cantoni certainly held plaster casts of Dalou’s sculpture in his workshop. Simon notes that “it used to be suggested that Cantoni was the only founder used by Dalou during his stay in England 19  Ibid., 186–87. 20  Enrico Cantoni, “Casting in Plaster,” 216. 21  Beattie, The New Sculpture, 14. 22  Victoria and Albert Museum minute paper, May 14, 1896, MA/1/C338, Enrico Cantoni nominal file, V&A Archive of Art & Design, London.

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Figure 5.2

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“Casting in Plaster: A Demonstration by Mr. Cantoni. Moulder to the Royal College of Art, South Kensington,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904), 216

in the 1870s […] However, Cantoni was too young to play such a role.”23 This misapprehension extended to an unmarked bronze portrait bust of Legros by Dalou, dated ca. 1876, in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery and a number of other public and private collections (fig. 5.5). It is thought that the bust celebrated the reunion of the two French artists in Britain, though it is possible that the bronze head represents a fragment of a larger bust salvaged

23  Simon, “Enrico Cantoni.”

Enrico Cantoni: From Plasterman to Bronze Founder

Figure 5.3

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“Casting in Plaster: A Demonstration by Mr. Cantoni. The Final Operation: Removing the Mould from the Cast,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904), 270

by Lantéri.24 The art historian Suzanne G. Lindsay has suggested that “Lantéri seems to have taken charge of the salvaged fragment and had it cast and disseminated through England and France long after Dalou’s return to France, but during the sculptor’s lifetime,” making it possible that Cantoni was engaged by Lantéri to cast them in the period between his first works in bronze around 1896 and Dalou’s death in 1902.25 It is also possible that the origin of the 24  Ruth Butler and Suzanne G. Lindsay, European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2000), 108. 25  Ibid., 110.

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Figure 5.4 “Twenty Minutes Portrait Sketch of Mr. Enrico Cantoni. By Professor Alphonse Legros,” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904), 165

Figure 5.5 Aimé Jules Dalou, Alphonse Legros, ca. 1876, bronze, height 49.5 cm © National Portrait Gallery, London

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assumed working relationship between Dalou and Cantoni was the result of posthumous commissions. Arthur Banks Skinner (1861–1911), Director of the Art Museum division of the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1905–08, wrote a note to stores on December 17, 1907 asking them to send a memo to Cantoni informing him that permission had been granted to copy “the small figure of Lady Carlise by Dalou” and requesting a price for a tinted plaster and a bronze cast.26 Three days later, the minutes record that the price for the plaster would be £3 and the bronze £25.27 Skinner wrote on January 3, 1908 that he had “seen the plaster cast copy of this beautiful statuette by Dalou several times at Signor Cantoni’s studio. I knew it to represent Lady Carlise, and I was always told that the family did not wish it to be reproduced so that we might have a replica in the Museum.”28 The underlying anxiety about reproducing the statuette for display in a public collection, especially six years after Dalou’s death in 1902, was clearly related to the contested authorship and authenticity of posthumous casts. This question was taken up by the art historian Mark Jones in the publication that accompanied his exhibition Fake? The Art of Deception at the British Museum in 1990: One of these two bronzes of Mrs George Howard by Jules Dalou was delivered by the artist to his patron in 1872 and remains in the possession of his successors. It is undoubtedly the original and definitive work (which the model of course is not, being only part of the preparatory process which led to its production). There are also a number of other casts, in bronze and terracotta, made for other members of the sitter’s family, which are also authentic works by Dalou. The Victoria and Albert Museum possesses yet another cast, made by the same founder, Enrico Cantoni, working from the same original plaster as before, with the original patron’s permission, but after Dalou’s death. Is this an original bronze by Dalou or not? Would it be less original than one which, in Dalou’s lifetime, was delivered direct to the patron unseen by the artist. [sic] If not, and if we make more casts now, will they be originals too?29

26  Board of Education minute paper, December 17, 1907, MA/1/C338, Enrico Cantoni nominal file, V&A Archive of Art & Design, London. 27  Ibid. 28  Board of Education minute paper, January 3, 1908, MA/1/C338, Enrico Cantoni nominal file, V&A Archive of Art & Design, London. 29  Mark Jones, ed., Fake? The Art of Deception, with Paul Craddock and Nicholas Barker (London: British Museum Publications, 1990), 51.

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Although Cantoni would most likely have been too young to be “the same founder,” these questions remain. In his assessment, Jones left them open, but looking into the impetus for the production of this posthumous bronze cast provides another perspective. In his notes on the proposed acquisition of the bronze and plaster casts, Skinner provided crucial details of the conditions under which the family would allow these reproductions of their bronze statuette to enter the collection: Mr. Armstrong has been very much interested in this statuette: in fact, he tells me that he was present at some of the sittings which Lady Carlise gave to Dalou. He has approached Lord Carlise on the subject, and I now append two letters—one from Lord Carlise and the other from Mr. Armstrong. The former gives his consent to a reproduction being made for the Museum, on condition that the name of the lady is not placed on our label. The letter from Mr. Armstrong strongly recommends that we have not only the bronze copy, but also one in plaster. The bronze we should keep in our gallery with our collection of modern bronzes and the other would be used for Circulation purposes.30 A note at the bottom of the minute paper for the attention of the stores requested that they “ask him [Cantoni] to use fine bronze so as to obtain a good colour.”31 The Mr. Armstrong referred to by Skinner was his predecessor, Sir Thomas Armstrong (1833–1911), Director of Art in the Department of Science and Art at the South Kensington Museum between 1881 and 1898. Armstrong’s letter to Skinner, dated December 31, 1907, praised the original bronze statuette as “this kind of portraiture which can easily be placed in the rooms of ordinary houses.”32 This points towards one of the motivations for the reproductions, stated later on in the letter as follows: “if this figure by Dalou were to be well known I think our young sculptors would find work among people who would never think of ordering figures & busts of the ordinary size.”33 The casts were received on July 27, 1908 and entered into the Reproduction Register. The bronzed plaster cast for the Circulation Department was 30  Board of Education minute paper, January 3, 1908, MA/1/C338, Enrico Cantoni nominal file, V&A Archive of Art & Design, London. 31  Ibid. 32  Letter from Thomas Armstrong to Arthur Skinner, December 31, 1907, MA/1/C338, Enrico Cantoni nominal file, V&A Archive of Art & Design, London. 33  Ibid.

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de-accessioned in 1952.34 The bronze cast remains in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum, albeit currently in storage. The way in which the object is documented presents subtle but important differences from comparable works: the present inventory number, A.1–1985 (the original having been 1908–14), does not begin with the designation REPRO, although this is not universally applied to reproductions. The sculpture was held at the Bethnal Green Museum between 1968 and 1983, after which it returned to the Victoria and Albert Museum. Two years later, in 1985, the classification of the work was changed from a reproduction to an original.35 Although Cantoni’s name is recorded as the maker of the cast, the authorship remains firmly with Dalou, who is recorded as the “designer” rather than the sculptor of this particular object. Cantoni was also responsible for posthumous bronze casts of a sculpture by Frederic Leighton (1830–1896). In her article on the role of the Leicester Galleries in the promotion of modernist sculpture, Evelyn Silber noted that thirty bronze casts of statuettes of Leighton’s Athlete Wrestling with a Python were sold between 1908 and 1910. Some of these reproductions, “possibly the two large casts referred to in the gallery records,” were by Cantoni.36 Whereas a number of Cantoni’s engagements with the New Sculpture involved posthumous casting, or the production of unlimited editions long after the sculpture was first cast and displayed in public, his collaboration with the Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović (1883–1962) took place while the artist was alive and firmly established, with a growing international reputation. Tate holds an example of this working relationship in the form of a bronze bust of the conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, Bt. dated 1915.37 The sitting took place in London, during the same year that saw more than seventy of Meštrovic’s sculptures displayed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in a major solo exhibition.38 Meštrovic was in London from 9 May 1915, ahead of the opening of the exhibition on 24 June, and remained in the city until early 1916.39 Milan Ćurčin noted the artist’s preference for Italian founders:

34  Bilbey, British Sculpture 1470 to 2000, 251. 35  Ibid. 36  Evelyn Silber, “The Leicester Galleries and the Promotion of Modernist Sculpture in London, 1902–1975,” Sculpture Journal 21, no. 2 (2012): 136. 37  Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art Other Than Works by British Artists (London: Tate Gallery, 1981), 511. 38  Elizabeth Clegg, “Meštrović, England and the Great War,” The Burlington Magazine 144, no. 1197 (2002): 740. 39  Ibid., 746, 749.

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Many of Meštrovic’s sculptures are still in plaster, waiting to be cast in a permanent material. Of those in bronze or marble most have been executed in Italy, the material there being cheapest and the expert knowledge of founders and moulders the greatest. In London too, Meštrovic’s favourite moulder is an Italian, Enrico Cantoni, whose esteem and understanding for the Serbian master’s work and personality are remarkable.40 While this preference was practical from the perspectives of economy and expertise, the author suggests that the sculptor’s working relationship with Cantoni operated on a more profound level. Sympathy with both the distinctive character of Meštrovic’s sculpture and his temperament were crucial to the success of their work together. 4

Conclusion

Tracing the professional activities of a founder like Enrico Cantoni is of course dependent on the extent to which he appears in the archive; how often (and how indelibly) his labor is recorded on an object; if he is discussed in primary and secondary literature and whether, in what form and where his work survives. In these respects Cantoni occupies an interesting position because an archive of his work exists at the Victoria and Albert Museum; sculptures cast by him are held in important and accessible public collections, and his name appears in written accounts of sculptural practice. The artists with whom he was associated were significant for the development of British sculpture and European modernism, and the schools of art and museums in receipt of his plaster casts were distributed across Britain. By any measure, Cantoni’s work was important. It is also true to say that these sources are limited in both quantity and quality. As is the case with so many of his contemporaries, the extant material is weighted towards institutional records, with the corresponding records from the business having presumably been lost to history. The timing of Cantoni’s move into casting in bronze—possibly by 1896, certainly by 1900— seemed calculated to capitalize on the popularity of the lost-wax process with artists associated with the New Sculpture movement, which had begun a decade earlier through Alfred Gilbert. Since he continued to cast in plaster, this

40  Milan Ćurčin, ed., Ivan Meštrovic: A Monograph (London: Williams & Norgate, 1919), 92–93.

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move can be considered a diversification of his workshop practice rather than a transition from one process to another. Bibliography Alley, Ronald. Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art Other Than Works by British Artists. London: Tate Gallery, 1981. Beattie, Susan. The New Sculpture. New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1983. Bilbey, Diane. British Sculpture 1470 to 2000: A Concise Catalogue of the Collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum. With Marjorie Trusted. London: V&A Publications, 2002. Butler, Ruth, and Suzanne G. Lindsay. European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2000. Cantoni, Enrico. “Casting in Plaster: A practical Demonstration of the Process by Mr. Enrico Cantoni, Moulder to the Royal College of Art; Illustrated with Special Photographs.” Arts & Crafts: A Monthly Magazine for the Studio, the Workshop & the Home 1 (1904): 216–20, 270–73. Clegg, Elizabeth. “Meštrović, England and the Great War.” The Burlington Magazine 144, no. 1197 (2002): 740–51. Ćurčin, Milan, ed. Ivan Meštrovic: A Monograph. London: Williams and Norgate, 1919. “Dorchester House: The Work of Alfred Stevens.” The Times. July 26, 1929, 8. “Enrico Cantoni.” In Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland 1851–1951. University of Glasgow History of Art and HATII. Online database 2011. http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib2_1211213368. Accessed September 5, 2019. James, Duncan. A Century of Statues: A History of the Morris Singer Foundry. Basingstoke, UK: Morris Singer Foundry, 1984. James, Frank A. J. L., ed. “The Common Purposes of Life”: Science and Society at the Royal Institution of Great Britain. London: Routledge, 2002. Jones, Mark, ed. Fake? The Art of Deception. With Paul Craddock and Nicholas Barker. London: British Museum Publications, 1990. Prospectus & Time-Table of Day Classes & Day School of Art for Women, Session 1908– 1909. London: London County Council Central School of Arts and Crafts, 1908. Silber, Evelyn. “The Leicester Galleries and the Promotion of Modernist Sculpture in London, 1902–1975.” Sculpture Journal 21, no. 2 (2012): 131–44. Simon, Jacob. “Bronze Sculpture Founders: A Short History.” National Portrait Gal­ lery. Revised February 2017. https://www.npg.org.uk/research/programmes/bronze -sculpture-founders-history.

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Simon, Jacob. “Enrico Cantoni.” In British Bronze Sculpture Founders and Plaster Figure Makers, 1800–1980. National Portrait Gallery. Updated March 2019. https://www .npg.org.uk/research/programmes/british-bronze-founders-and-plaster-figure -makers-1800-1980-1/british-bronze-founders-and-plaster-figure-makers-1800 -1980-c. Wade, Rebecca. Domenico Brucciani and the Formatori of Nineteenth-Century Britain. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Wilson, David. “Lion Sejant.” Unpublished manuscript, 2015.

chapter 6

From the Island of the Sun to the Empire of the Rising Sun: Vincenzo Ragusa and the Technique of Bronze Casting in Japan at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century Massimiliano Marafon Pecoraro On January 25, 1922 Antonio Ugo (1870–1950),1 a well-known sculptor from Palermo, reported on: [the] installation in the School of Art Applied to Industry of a section for lost-wax casting, so that we can have in Palermo a group of skilled founders of sculpture and the foundry does not need any special machinery but for only four burners and a few crucibles … It is painful that, to cast their works, the artists of the whole of Sicily must resort to the foundries of the continent.2 In Sicily, as in the rest of Europe, the process of lost-wax casting had come back into vogue during the nineteenth century after having been a widespread practice in the Renaissance. Ugo’s words could deceive us into thinking that Sicily was not particularly advanced in the field of iron work, of which bronze casting was a subset, but in order to better understand the situation we must step back even further than the 1800s, and appreciate the quality of the iron works, including bronze works, that enriched Sicilian Baroque architecture between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. With the birth of the Bourbon kingdom in 1734, the aristocracy moved from the countryside to the cities of the island. This urbanization brought about a period of great building activity, particularly in Palermo, where, until the end of the eighteenth century, numerous residential buildings enriched by shelves, 1  For a biography of Antonio Ugo, see Maria Antonietta Spadaro, “Antonio Ugo,” in Dizionario degli Artisti Siciliani, Luigi Sarullo, ed. Benedetto Patera (Palermo: Novecento Edizioni, 1994), 333–35. 2  Melchiorre Di Carlo and Maria Antonietta Spadaro, Commemorare a Palermo, le medaglie di Antonio Ugo (Palermo: Kalos, 2014), 21.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_008

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grates and glowing railings appeared.3 In Giovanni Biagio Amico’s important architectural treatise, published between 1726 and 1750,4 he dedicates a chapter to the materials used entitled Dè metalli appartenenti alle fabbriche (Of the Metals Belonging to the Factories), which speaks of both wrought iron and the casting of alloys.5 This book attests to the presence of numerous artisans skilled in metalworking. These proto-industrial foundries are the link between modern-age craftsmanship and the contemporary industrial era. However, no documents have yet been found concerning the practice of casting in metal during the pre-industrial era in Sicily. According to some testimonies, it seems that the French founders were the first to modernize the activity of the Palermo artisans in the aftermath of the revolution, when, having become free citizens, they obtained permission to move from France.6 This is the thesis formulated by Gateano Basile, a journalist from Palermo and at the same time heir to an ancient foundry, who recalls visiting the foundry with his grandfather as a child in the early twentieth century and hearing the workers calling all the utensils by their French names, frequently distorted by a naturalized Sicilian pronunciation. However, arriving in Sicily from the south of France was no great thing compared to the crossing of the Atlantic. In the eighteenth century the French crown had established on the banks of the Saint Maurice river in Canada one of the most important foundries of the New World.7 Among the foundries active in Palermo during the nineteenth century, which will be discussed below, Basile seems to be the oldest. The presence of a certain Gioacchino Basile, blacksmith, head of the congregation of the church of Santa Maria della Grotta in the Palermo district of Gaudagna, and present in some inscriptions on funerary marble inside the church, testifies to its activity since the late eighteenth century on the banks of the Oreto river. It was still in full swing around the 1840s, along with the foundries of Carraffa, Di Maggio, Gallo, Panzera, Porcari, Segreto, and the Oretea.8 The latter was commissioned by the Florio family to support the numerous commercial activities 3  Massimiliano Marafon Pecoraro, “La decorazione degli spazi interni dei palazzi palermitani del XVIII secolo,” in Atlante tematico del Barocco in Italia: Residenze nobiliari/Italia meridionale, ed. Marcello Fagiolo (Rome: De Luca Editore, 2009), 317–42. 4  Giovanni Biagio Amico, L’Architetto Prattico, 2 vols. (Palermo: Stamperia G. B. Aiccardo, 1726–50). 5  Amico, L’Architetto Prattico, 1:56–57. 6  I thank Gaetano Basile, an affectionate friend, for granting me a long and detailed interview about the history of his family’s foundry, which ceased operations in the 1970s. The interview took place on July 21, 2019. 7  Luca Codognola and Luigi Bruti Liberati, Storia del Canada (Milan: Giunti, 2018), 221. 8  Giovanni Fatta and Maria Clara Ruggeri Tricoli, Palermo nell’“età del ferro”: Architettura, tecnica, rinnovamento (Palermo: Giada, 1983), 39.

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Workshop of the Fonderia Basile, photograph ca. 1896 Private Collection, Palermo

created by naval activity, and the sulphur and wine industry of the great Sicilian entrepreneurs.9 In 1851, Oretea (up until that date equipped only with rudimentary machines)10 acquired the first steam engine for lathes and planes, initiating a process of industrialization that would lead it to excel on the island; it was not by chance that this foundry would build the iron roofs of the two large theaters (Politeama and Massimo) and of the city markets in Palermo.11 The relationship between the ancient Basile foundry and the Oretea became particularly strong, sustaining for many decades. In fact, Basile realized all the ornate decorations for the Oretea foundry (many works in the field of urban furniture still existing today, for example, despite being branded “Fonderia Oretea,” are actually the work of the Fonderia Basile). A photograph taken in the early twentieth century testifies to the close link between the two foundries thanks to the presence of the young Vincenzo Florio, who was a guest of Gaetano Basile Senior in his foundry (fig. 6.1). 9  R. Romualdo Giuffrida and Rosario Lentini, L’Età dei Florio (Palermo: Sellerio, 1986), 120. 10  Although still not completely industrialized, just five years after its foundation, in 1846 the Fonderia Oretea won a gold medal on the occasion of the Exhibition of the Institute of Encouragement for a high-pressure machine of eight horsepower. Fatta and Ruggeri Tricoli, Palermo nell’“età del ferro,” 41. 11  Ibid., 148.

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The National Exposition of Palermo of 1891/92 allows us to verify the rapid growth of metalworking on the island. The documents of the exhibition attest to the contemporary national and international panorama, which however does not seem to concern casting for exclusively artistic purposes, as Antonio Ugo suggests. Once again, the testimony of the heir of the Basile Foundry helps us to understand the situation, since we find ourselves facing a topic without a bibliography, until now completely ignored by historiography: In my grandfather’s foundry it would not have been difficult to dedicate some space to bronze casting for the realization of sculptures since there are two cubicles, one for small objects and the other for large objects. However, it was the artists’ lack of economic reliability that was the problem … My father told me that his father told him that artists often wanted to cast their work at a price that was too low.12 The objects for street decorations were public commissions often obtained through competitions. Those for home furnishings (first and foremost the widespread brass bed) were paid on delivery by the customers/merchants. Nobody, however, would have guaranteed the payment of art objects commissioned by the artists themselves and not by art dealers. On the other hand, Ugo underlines the ease of casting the works, highlighting the unwillingness on the part of the foundries and not their technical backwardness. He does so by citing the Scuola d’Arte applicata all’Industria (School of Art Applied to Industry), an institution linked to the name of Vincenzo Ragusa (1841–1927), a fascinating protagonist of Palermitan sculpture in the nineteenth century (fig. 6.2). Ragusa stands out amongst his fellow sculptors in Italy both for his international experiences and for his important professional activity, not only sculptural but above all didactic. Born in 1840 to a modest family, at the age of twelve, in addition to following the school of Giovanni Patricolo (1789–1861),13 he began to attend workshops for carvers and marble workers, demonstrating early artistic talent. His was an enterprising and adventurous spirit, and after having participated in the Expedition of the Thousand, his long formative period culminated in 1870, when he received his first public appointment by the Municipality of Palermo for the construction of a monumental chimney,

12  Gaetano Basile, interview with the author, July 21, 2019. 13  Mirella Nannipieri, “Ugo Ragusa,” in Dizionario degli Artisti Siciliani, Luigi Sarullo, ed. Benedetto Patera (Palermo: Novecento edizioni, 1994), 281.

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Figure 6.2 O’Tama Kioara, Portrait of Vincenzo Ragusa, oil on canvas, 1888 Private Collection, Rome

which opened up his career.14 After some years of activity in Milan thanks to his relationships with the Accademia di Brera (Brera Art Academy), Ragusa received an extraordinary opportunity. In 1876, he left for Japan together with the painter Antonio Fontanesi and the architect Giovanni Vincenzo Cappelletti to teach in the newly established schools of the Empire of the Rising Sun (all three artists suggested by the Academy to the Japanese government). In those years, the Japanese empire was implementing a policy of openness to the West, after centuries of isolation, inaugurating the well-known Westernization process through the establishment of numerous schools to teach local artists European techniques. The six years that Ragusa spent in Japan would condition his whole life. Having left home to export Western 14  Unfortunately, the fireplace commissioned by the Municipality of Palermo for the council’s chamber in the City Palace (also called Palazzo delle Aquile) was never realized in marble. The plaster version was brought to Milan, albeit in poor shape, to the Seconda esposizione di Belle Arti, where it received great public and critical acclaim. Carmelo Bajamonte, “Precisioni su due opere pubbliche di Vincenzo Ragusa a Palermo,” in O’Tama e Vincenzo Ragusa, un ponte tra Tokyo e Palermo, ed. Maria Antonietta Spadaro (Palermo: Officine Tipografiche Aiello e Provenzano, 2017), 68.

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Figure 6.3 O’Tama Kioara, Painted Panel with the Works of the Ragusa Collection, tempera on cardboard, 1877–1881. Liceo Artistico, Palermo, “Vincenzo Ragusa e O’Tama Kioara”

Figure 6.4 O’Tama Kioara, Tavola dipinta con le opere della Collezione Ragusa, tempera on cardboard, 1877–81, Liceo Artistico, Palermo, “Vincenzo Ragusa e O’Tama Kioara”

techniques, he remained so fascinated by those from the East that he decided to return in order to set up a school to support an industrial art museum in which to exhibit his rich collection of Oriental art objects accumulated during the years of stay on the Island of the Rising Sun (figs 6.3 and 6.4).15 “The museum, inaugurated on 19 March 1883, would have provided models capable of stimulating the invention of forms and techniques, renewing the repertoires of the local artistic culture.”16 After arriving in Tokyo, Ragusa met a young Japanese painter O’Tama Kiyohara (1861–1939) whom he married in 1880. He took her back with him

15  Ragusa invested a third of his teacher’s salary in Japan (3.333 yen a year) to buy around 4,200 art objects, preserved today at the Museo Pigorini in Rome. Ibid., 54. Ibid., 46. 16  Ibid.

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Figure 6.5 Ettore Ximenes, Portrait of O’Tama Kioara, pastel on paper, 1901 Private Collection, Palermo

to Palermo, where she enjoyed a long and intense career (fig. 6.5).17 The couple opened school and museum at their own expense and with the help of O’Tama’s sister and brother-in-law, who also moved to Palermo, set up a lacquer workshop alongside other similar Italian and European companies.18 The project also included embroidery, ceramic, and bronze casting, considered a fundamental practice for Ragusa, who was impressed by the simplified Japanese bronze-casting techniques, which made it possible to realize works 17  A prolific painter, O’Tama Kiyohara converted to Catholicism and was baptized Eleonora, leaving a rich series of works, often signed with the initials of her Japanese name. Ibid., 21. 18  Oriental techniques were taught in Italy in the Italian Industrial Museum of Turin (founded in 1863), in the Industrial Artistic Museum of Rome (founded ten years later), and in one in Naples (built in 1882). In Europe, these techniques were taught in the Conservatory of Arts and Crafts of Paris, in the Kensington Museum in London (which in 1852 became the Victoria and Albert Museum), and in a school founded in a community of Japanese artists/artisans in Berlin. Ibid., 55.

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in small dimensions of very high quality. Unfortunately, the closure of the only workshop they opened, the lacquer studio, by order of the Ministry in 1887, marked the beginning of the decline of the school, which in 1898 was annexed to the other industrial schools of the Kingdom, under the control of the Italian Ministry of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce, and therefore was statutorily modified.19 Ragusa was relieved of his position as director, maintaining his role as curator of the museum until 1905, the year in which the school was closed.20 Taking a step back, among the reasons that led Ragusa to return to Palermo was the competition for the monument to war hero Giuseppe Garibaldi. Ragusa won the commission, producing one of the masterpieces of nineteenthcentury Sicilian sculpture (an art that has been little studied so far because it remains in the shadow of the better known “sister arts” of the twentieth century) (fig. 6.6). This work confirms the absence of artistic factories for metal casting in Sicily. The equestrian monument, built on a pedestal and embellished with bas-reliefs and sculptures by Mario Rutelli (1895–1941),21 after a long and difficult competition (there were two stages between 1884 and 1888), was cast in Rome at the Nelli Foundry specializing in the casting of “colossal” statues, as is stated in the company’s letterhead (fig. 6.7).22 The words of Ugo, with which I opened this essay, tell us that the situation decades later had not changed, confirming the thesis of Gaetano Basile. In conclusion, the absence of studies on the techniques of artistic casting in Sicily prevents us from gaining a clear picture about the practice of lost-wax casting between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries on the island. Thanks to some new information related to the working of iron, to the words of artists in documents of the time, and above all to the testimony of the heir of the most 19  Hinosuke Hideaki Kiyohara and O’Chiyo Kiyohara, brother-in-law and sister of O’Tama, returned definitively to Japan in 1889. To settle his debts with them, Ragusa was forced to begin the sale of his collection at the Pigorini Museum in Rome, which took place in 1888 (1,403 works for Lire 23,000) and in 1916 (2,769 works for Lire 77,334). Ibid., 48. 20  Reopened in 1908, the school was split into two in 1922: The Royal Industrial School for mechanics-electricians (now the Vittorio Emanuele Industrial Technical Institute) on one side, and the Royal School of Art Applied to Industry on the other, which after having been called for many decades the Istituto Statale d’Arte, has recently become a high school for the arts called Liceo artistico Vincezo Ragusa e O’Tama Kiyoara in honor of the original founders. Ibid., 49. 21  Rutelli is one of the protagonists of Palermitan sculpture between the 1800s and the 1900s and the author of numerous works, among which are the quadriga on the top of the Politeama Theater, the winged Victory on the commemorative monument in Piazza Vittorio Veneto, and the monumental Fountain of the Naids in Rome. 22  Ibid., 63.

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Figure 6.6 Vincenzo Ragusa, Equestrian Monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi in the English Garden, bronze on marble, 1892, Palermo

ancient foundry of Palermo, we can affirm that it was, in fact, a non-existent practice to the point of forcing artists to send their models beyond the strait, often to Rome passing through Naples, in order to have their works in bronze realized. In the era of the greatest diffusion of monumental sculpture, used by the powerful to affirm the patriotic ideals of a newly born nation, the presence of many works of high artistic level in Sicily confirms the evident contradictions on the island, which was at the forefront from the industrial point of view but at the same time, in some areas, surprisingly backward. It seems that the central government’s myopia prevented the evolution of artistic techniques on the island by not supporting the activity of the Regia Scuola superiore d’Arte applicata all’industria (Royal High School of Art Applied to Industry), founded by the sculptor Vincenzo Ragusa, a great supporter of the practice of bronze casting in the service of sculpture.

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Letterhead of the Fonderia Nelli, printed paper, nineteenth century Private Collection

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Bibliography Amico, Giovanni Biagio. L’Architetto Prattico. 2 vols. Palermo: Stamperia G. B. Aiccardo, 1726–50. Bajamonte, Carmelo. “Precisioni su due opere pubbliche di Vincenzo Ragusa a Palermo.” In O’Tama e Vincenzo Ragusa, un ponte tra Tokyo e Palermo. Edited by M. A. Spadaro. Palermo: Officine tipografiche Aiello e Provenzano, 2017, 57–77. Codognola, Luca, and Luigi Bruti Liberati. Storia del Canada. Milan: Giunti, 2018. Di Carlo, Melchiorre, and Maria Antonietta Spadaro. Commemorare a Palermo, le medaglie di Antonio Ugo. Palermo: Kalos, 2014. Fagiolo, Marcello, ed. Atlante tematico del barocco in Italia: Residenze Nobiliari/Italia Meridionale. Rome: De luca, 2009. Fatta, Giovanni, and Maria Clara Ruggeri Tricoli. Palermo nell’“età del ferro”: Architettura, Tecnica, Rinnovamento. Palermo: Giada, 1983. Giuffrida, Romualdo, and Rosario Lentini. L’Età dei Florio. Palermo: Sellerio, 1986. Grasso, Franco. Rutelli. Palermo: Arti Grafiche Siciliane, 1998. Marafon Pecoraro, Massimiliano. “La decorazione degli spazi interni dei palazzi palermitani del XVIII secolo.” In Atlante tematico del Barocco in Italia: Residenze nobiliari/Italia meridionale. Edited by Marcello Fagiolo. Rome: De Luca Editore, 2009, 317–42. Nannipieri, Mirella. “Ragusa, Vincenzo.” In Dizionario degli Artisti Siciliani, Luigi Sarullo. Edited by Benedetto Patera. Palermo: Novecento edizioni, 1994, 281–82. Spadaro, Maria Antonietta. “Antonio Ugo.” In Dizionario degli Artisti Siciliani, Luigi Sarullo. Edited by Benedetto Patera. Palermo: Novecento edizioni, 1994, 333–35. Spadaro, Maria Antonietta, ed. O’Tama e Vincenzo Ragusa, un ponte tra Tokyo e Palermo. Palermo: Officine Tipografiche Aiello e Provenzano, 2017.

chapter 7

Defining Modernity in Japanese Sculpture: Two Waves of Italian Impact on Casting Techniques Yasuko Tsuchikane 1

Introduction: Investigating Casting Techniques and Japanese Sculptural Modernity

Over the past twenty years, there has been a surge in the scholarship surrounding the importance of the casting process in Japanese sculpture. Relevant to the theme of this study, one of the points of discussion is the importation of foreign casting techniques that include the lost-wax method transmitted from Italy to Japan.1 On a larger scale, the trend reflects the recent rise of scholarly interest among modern and contemporary specialists on Japanese art in the medium of sculpture, which had been largely relegated in comparison to other more privileged disciplines, such as painting and architecture. The nation’s first modern state in the Meiji period (1868–1912) coined the term chōkoku to designate the Western-imported framework of “sculpture” as a concept applicable to fine art objects and artistic practices. However, following in the steps of studies on other artistic media, experts on the history of Japanese sculpture began to question the aptness of continuing to embrace the full meaning of this word. Importantly, it was intended to distinguish fine art from what was not considered fine art, for example, craft practices.2 Japan is one of many non-Western nations where historically, in their premodern, pre-westernized, indigenous cultural backgrounds, there was no differentiation 1  Yoshitaka Nakamura, “Itaria rōgata bijutsu chōzōhō kenkyū: kokunai juyō no keika ni tsuite no ichi kōsatsu” [Study on the Italian lost-wax fine art casting technique: considerations on the process of its domestic reception], Bulletin of Faculty of Art and Design, University of Tsukuba 25, no. 16 (1995): 127–45; Takaya Fujimagari and Shinozaki Mirai, ed., “Kindai nihon chōkoku no sozai to gihō” [The materials and techniques of modern Japanese sculpture], in Kindai nihon chōkoku shūsei, dai sankan, Shōwa zenki hen [Compendium of modern Japanese sculpture, Vol. 3, early Showa period], ed. Tanaka Shūji (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2013), 274–96; Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsukei Nakamura Yoshitaka Kenkyūshitsu [The office of Prof. Yoshitaka Nakamura, University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Art and Design], ed., Rōgata buronzu chōkoku [Bronze sculpture cast in the lost-wax technique] (Tsukuba: Ibaragi, 2019). 2  Lisa Le Feuvre, Edward Allington, and Sophie Raikes, “In Conversation,” in A Study of Modern Japanese Sculpture, exh. cat. (Leeds: The Henry Moore Institute, 2015), 6.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_009

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between “fine art” objects such as sculpture, and non-fine art objects such as decorative works. Furthermore, as in these other countries, despite the state’s modernization policies in art, Japan’s aesthetic non-fine art objects have been ever-present in society, receiving much recognition locally and abroad.3 Thus the current scholarly discussion on the use of metal as a major material of modern Japanese aesthetic objects and the related technology of casting is no longer conducted as a matter of fine art, but rather in a broader framework that includes decorative art. One of the main discourses in the studies of painting and architecture has been a set of critical investigations that question the concept of “fine art” in the local context: both the idea and the creative productions were imported from Europe by the Japanese state government in the late nineteenth century. Art historians who focus on painting have spent the past three decades making a great effort to historicize the process by which the state came to forge and implement the Japanese version of fine art through the coinage of the modern Japanese word, bijutsu. These scholars have demonstrated that, through the state-sponsored modern art program during the Meiji era, some premodern lineages of visual art practices were suppressed. Parallel to the direction that this debate took, sculpture specialists became conscious of the historical construct of the term chōkoku. They generated another major set of discussions around the necessity to free themselves from the lasting influence of the Meiji state’s equating of artistic modernity with Westernization. In this regard, recent sculpture studies often focus on redefining the modernity and contemporaneity of domestically created three-dimensional aesthetic objects according to more indigenous terms. Some of the most recent scholarship sheds new light on a number of aesthetic objects that had previously been excluded from the narrative constructed in association with the process of Japan’s modernization via Westernization. This includes the recovery of a number of decorative art works classified as “crafts,” an official modern category that the Meiji government established as distinct from sculpture as fine art.4 Among the most conspicuous points of contention addressed by sculpture experts in this respect is the problem of a casting technique imported from the West. The early twentieth-century bronze sculpture Hand (Te) (1918; fig. 7.1) by 3  For example, Stanley Abe’s ongoing study on the framework of “sculpture” in China. Stanley Abe, “Sculpture: A Comparative History,” in Comparativism in Art History, ed. Jaś Elsner (New York: Routledge, 2017). 4  Shūji Tanaka, “Sculpture,” trans. Toshiko McCallum, in Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts: 1868–2000, ed. J. Thomas Rimer (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012), 283–314; and Shūji Tanaka, Kindai nihon chōkokushi [History of modern Japanese sculpture] (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2018).

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Figure 7.1 Kōtarō Takamura, Hand (Te), 1918, bronze, height 39 cm The Collection of Asakura Museum of Sculpture, Taito, Tokyo

Kōtarō Takamura (1883–1956), is a case in point. He was motivated to produce the work as a tribute to the art and creative persona of Auguste Rodin (1840– 1917), whose works had greatly influenced him. It has been pointed out that the piece reveals Takamura’s efforts to emulate the French master’s artistry in handling the physical properties of clay to enliven the surface of the human body, in fact, a fragmented part of a full body, with which Rodin had famously experimented.5 Accordingly, studies of so-called “Rodinisme” in Japanese art history frequently juxtapose photographs of Takamura’s work with similar examples by Rodin.6 This term designates the phenomenon between the 1910s and 1920s by which Takamura and other young Japanese sculptors broke away from Japan’s academism regarding modern sculpture (which had been under the influence of European academism) that emphasized the importance of the naturalistic 5  Hirotake Kurokawa, “On Medium and Materials: Differing Ideas of Realism,” in A Study of Modern Japanese Sculpture, exh. cat. (Leeds: The Henry Moore Institute, 2015), 24. 6  Christine Guth, “Takamura Kōun and Takamura Kōtarō: On Being a Sculptor,” in The Artist as Professional in Japan, ed. Melinda Takeuchi (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 176–77; and Erin Schoneveld, Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazine, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-Garde (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 120.

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reproduction of observed human bodies. Instead, they developed the so-called cult of Rodin, through which they found in his works alternative modes of artistic expression exuding vitalism and human qualities, and which reflected the supremely avant-garde nature of their creator. Since then, the works produced under this movement have been largely considered markers of the pinnacle of Japan’s sculptural modernity according to the Western standard.7 While many art historians have given high value to these sculptors’ emulation of Rodin’s ability to utilize the tactile materiality of clay through modeling, what has recently been highlighted is the fact that the casting technique that Rodin approved for his works and that of his Japanese followers are not identical. As is well-known, the great majority of Rodin’s works were cast in either the sand technique conventional in France, or the Italian lost-wax method, also available there during his lifetime.8 On the other hand, Japanese works such as Takamura’s Hand were cast, not through the Italian method that had been transmitted to Japan, but using the country’s domestic technique adopted from its decorative art, called the mane method, with some modifications, as will be introduced shortly. In other words, what has been largely regarded as Japanese artists’ paradigmatic simulation of the art of the French master, conforming to the axiom of Japan’s official modernism, excludes the Western technique of casting, and contains instead elements of domestic non-fine-art procedures.9 It was only after the early 1960s that Japanese sculptors came to fully embrace a Western casting technique that they studied and practiced in their own works. The technique was the Italian lost-wax casting method. This study will tell the story behind the presence of the Italian lost-wax casting technique in Japan before and after this moment. It will delineate the arrival and adaptation of the Italian lost-wax casting technique in Japan in two waves: first in the late nineteenth century and second in the early post-World 7  Tanaka, “Sculpture,” 294–300. 8  Hirotake Kurokawa, “Ōgysuto Rodan saku, ‘jigoku no mon’ no buronzu to sekkō no sorezore no barieishon, soshite futatsu no chūzōsho ni tsuite” (original English title: “Bronze and Plaster Versions of Auguste Rodin’s the Gates of Hell and Two Foundries”), Tama Art University Bulletin, no. 10 (1995): 269–301. 9  Yūji Takahashi, “Ōmura Masujirōzō chūzo no haikei” [Background behind the casting of the statue of Masujirō Ōmura], Okugai chōkoku chōsa hozon kenkyūkai kaihō: sōkangō [Bulletin of the society for research on outdoor sculpture preservation], no. 1 (July 1999): 50–60; Satoru Kitagō, “Ragūsa to Rokuzan no hyōgen no henkaku” [The transformation of artistic expressions by Ragusa and Rokuzan], in Meiji no chōso: Ragūsa to Ogiwara Rokuzan [Carving and modeling in the Meiji Period: Ragusa and Rokuzan Ogiwara], dai nibu: botsugo hyakunen Ogiwara Rokuzan [Part 2: The centennial of the death of Rokuzan Ogiwara], Tōkyo Geijutsu Daigaku Bijutsukan [The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts], (Tokyo: Rokubunsha, 2010), 9; and Fujimagari, 284–87.

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War II era. Reflecting an inclusive approach beyond the framework of fine art employed by recent art-historical scholarship of modern and contemporary Japanese sculptural objects (which deals with works created after the beginning of the Meiji period in 1868), this article aims to address two objectives. The first is to introduce the fruit of some of the most recent research conducted in Japan on the reception of the Italian lost-wax casting technique between the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The second is to locate these research results within the context of the latest scholarly discourses, which will allow the historical episodes in the importation of an Italian technology to be examined against the broad background of Japan’s Westernization beyond the standard narrative of the implantation of fine art. 2

First Wave: Introduction of the Italian Lost-Wax Casting by Ragusa in the Late Nineteenth Century

The initial introduction of the Italian lost-wax casting technique to Japan has been attributed to a single figure, Vincenzo Ragusa (1841–1927), a Sicilian sculptor based in Milan and later in Palermo. Despite the seemingly simple course of the transmission of the foreign technique to the country, the immediate consequences of the arrival of the method in Japan turned out to be somewhat complex, as will be discussed below. Between 1876 and 1882, Ragusa resided in Tokyo, serving as the major instructor in the division of sculpture at the Technical Art School (Kōbu Bijutsu Gakkō), Japan’s first state-run art academy, throughout its short, six-year existence.10 It was during this period of his professorship that he presumably taught some of his students the Italian casting technique, while using a private foundry that he had set up in his home to cast his own works outside of the school.11 The detailed circumstances of his instructions on the casting technique cannot be reconstructed, due to an absence of records, but he unquestionably provided in his classroom Japan’s first lessons on how to create figurative statues in clay and plaster at the foundational level in line with the practice of the Western art academy in which he had been trained. Or, put differently, from the point of view of the recent art-historical discourse 10  I have used Yūko Kikuchi’s translation of the name of the school. Yūko Kikuchi, Japanese Modernisation and Mingei Theory: Cultural Nationalism and Oriental Orientalism (New York: Routledge, 2004), 81. 11  Densaburō Nakamura, Meiji no chōso: “Zō o tsukuru jutsu” igo [Modeled and Carved Objects of Meiji: after “How to Make a Statuary Image”] (Tokyo: Bunsaisha, 1991), 109.

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mentioned above, he was the nation’s first instructor on the art of “sculpture” in an officially academic setting. During his tenure in Japan, he trained about twenty sculptors, including the academy’s official students, represented by Bunzō Fujita (1861–1934), as well as those who received his instructions privately, such as Moriyoshi Naganuma (1857–1942) and Sōjirō Ogura (1843–1913). His most able pupil was Ujihiro Ōkuma (1856–1934), a graduate from the first year that Ragusa taught at the academy. Ōkuma was one of those who acquired the lost-wax casting technique from his Italian teacher, although, as will be discussed shortly, he subsequently abandoned it.12 Ragusa’s participation in transmitting a new casting technique to Japan can be seen as just one small part of the Japanese government’s sweeping efforts to promote modernization, which it equated with Westernization, across the country. He was one of the nearly 9,500 Meiji government employees recruited between 1868 and 1900 from Euro-American nations on a non-permanent basis.13 They served as advisors and instructors in Japan’s various sectors of culture, law, technology, science, and civic infrastructure to facilitate the Meiji government’s single-minded, speedy importation of everything Western to Japan. The Technical Art School for which Ragusa worked was committed to taking part in this national mission, and therefore its curriculum was exclusively devoted to the employment of Western art media, such as oil-based clay and plaster, largely introduced for the first time in Japan, with little regard for nurturing rich local artistic traditions.14 His instructions at the academy focused on how to create a body of plaster and bronze works with a range of technical and stylistic features adopted from those of late nineteenth-century European academic sculpture, including Neoclassicism, Romanticism and Italian Verismo. He thus paved the way for the emergence of a new genealogy of Japanese modern sculpture called the “Western mode” of sculpture (yōfū chōkoku), distinct from contemporary, but more domestic and traditional approaches to the creation of local aesthetic objects.15 On the other hand, in the early Meiji period, the great majority of object-making professionals in the 12  Tanaka, Kindai nihon chōkokushi, 132–33. 13  Ellen Conant, “Principles and Pragmatism: The Yatoi in the Field of Art,” in Foreign Employees in Nineteenth Century Japan, ed. Edward R. Beauchamp and Akira Iriye (Boulder, San Francisco: Westview Press, 1990), 137–70. 14  Asako Yoshida, “Ragūsa no kyōiku to sono eikyō” [Ragusa’s education and influences], in Meiji no chōso: Ragūsa to Ogiwara Rokuzan [Carving and modeling in the Meiji Period: Ragusa and Rokuzan Ogiwara], Dai ichibu: Ragūsa to sono deshitachi [Part 1: Ragusa and his disciples], Tokyo: Geijutsu Daigaku Bijutsukan (The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts) 2010, 62–65; Kurokawa 2015, 24. 15  Tanaka, Kindai nihon chōkokushi, 122–42.

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country employed local media, techniques and materials, largely under the historical influence of neighboring countries such as China and Korea. The major local training method was not through an institutional education, but through an apprenticeship in an artisan’s shop tailored uniquely to each occupational genre of object making and operated through a rigid system of divisions of labor. Some common examples included a wood carver for Buddhist icons, a carpenter specializing in architectural decorations, a ceramist making dolls, and a netsuke craftsman carving ivory.16 Through his works and teaching in Japan, Ragusa presented material examples that mirrored the concept of “sculpture,” a new framework of fine art objects in the Early Meiji period. It is important to note that the government had recently coined the word, without assigning it to any specific technique, material, or to any historical lineages of three-dimensional objects. In fact, this vagueness extended far beyond the single medium of sculpture and was pervasive across the entire sphere of the nation’s visual culture in the early Meiji period. The looseness of the official definition of Ragusa’s works created and displayed in Japan, along with the far-reaching reputation of his teaching at the academy, provoked a striking degree of curiosity and positive appeal among Japanese creative professionals and the general public alike. Exemplified by the huge success of his Portrait Bust of a Japanese Woman (fig. 7.2), which won a prize at the Second National Industrial Exhibition in 1881, local audiences were generally enthusiastic about his work.17 As for his use of materials and techniques, most of the works he left in Japan, including the above, are bust portraits on a modest scale, and are in plaster, not cast bronze (all of his metal statues now in Japan were cast after his departure from the country).18 To the local object makers, what distinguished his works from other contemporary aesthetic objects was their capacity to convey a sense of vivid realism, to a degree previously unseen in the country, in the depiction of the human body, face and textiles. This effect was created through the Western technique of molding that he taught, which was the step prior to the process of casting. The most basic of his instructions was to transmit the skill of modeling to create a piece of sculpture with oil-based clay, a practice and material new to Japan. 16  Ibid. 17   Densaburō Nakamura, “Naikoku kangyō hakurankai: enkaku” (History of National Industrial Exhibitions) in Meiji bijutsu kiso shiryōshū: naikoku kangyō hakurankai, naikoku kaiga kyōshinkai (daiikkai, nikai) [Compilation of fundamental resources of Meiji art: the first and second National Industrial exhibitions, National Painting Association] (Tokyo: National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, 1975), 12–13. 18  Yoshida, “Ragūsa no kyōiku to sono eikyō,” 66, n. 19.

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Figure 7.2 Vincenzo Ragusa, A Japanese Woman (Nihon fujin), 1880–81. Plaster, height 61.8 cm The University Art Museum, Tokyo University of the Arts/DN Partcom

This visual appeal of realism and liveliness in depicting living things reached beyond the limited circle of his students and followers of Western-mode sculpture, to many domestic sculptural object makers, even carvers who were not engaged in modeling.19 During Ragusa’s tenure in Japan, sculpture as a category of fine art split into two general and distinct currents: the Westernized mode that he initiated through his teaching at the academy, and the other, equally prominent, mode based on Japan’s domestic wood-carving traditions and techniques developed out of the premodern making of Buddhist icons.20 While, during the late 1870s and early 1880s, the Japanese academy exclusively taught the former 19  Tanaka, Kindai nihon chōkokushi, 142–151; 163–193. Technically, the western mode stipulates the method of shaping the form of a statue by modeling clay, as opposed to the more standard local practice of carving a wood or stone block in the early Meiji era. 20  Ryō Furuta, “Ragūsa to rokuzan: chōkoku ni okeru fukusei no mondai o chūshin ni” [Ragusa and Rokuzan: thesis on the problem of reproduction in sculpture], in Meiji no chōso: Ragūsa to Ogiwara Rokuzan [Carving and modeling in the Meiji period: Ragusa

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under Ragusa, in only three years the latter became the sole official mode of Japanese modern sculpture selected by the nation’s new academy founded in 1887, Tokyo School of Arts, before its final decision to offer training in both modes in 1899. Over the course of the changing trends of Japanese academic sculpture in the first half of the twentieth century, the strict boundary between the two modes and methods, which had assigned modeling to a Western sculptural technique and carving to a domestic one, started to blur. For example, sculptors of the local mode occasionally started with clay models from which they created final works in carved wood blocks. Or sculptors initially trained in the domestic mode turned to the Western mode. As a result, the art of Western academic modeling that Ragusa transmitted to Japan had surprisingly wide scope and lasting impact on Japanese sculptors. His influence on the development of casting methods in Japan, however, is more difficult to assess. Some scholars, such as Asako Yoshida, question whether Ragusa took casting seriously as an integral part of his instruction: his curriculum at the Technical Art School initially excluded casting and focused on modeling.21 Other scholars recognize his role as going beyond a strictly technical level, to include the development of modern sculpture in Japan. He played a significant role in encouraging his students to pay attention to any casting technique, not limited to the lost-wax casting method that he introduced from his home country, as a crucial stage of the making of Western sculpture. Or put differently, he can be positioned as one of the key figures who planted the seed of Japan’s fine-art casting (bijutsu chūzō), which is distinct from the country’s premodern casting traditions, no matter how aesthetic their orientations had been.22 The very framework of fine-art casting in Japan was conceived largely out of the necessity to create the country’s new art of sculpture, which Ragusa had introduced at its first academy, in addition to casting decorative metal art works.23

and Rokuzan Ogiwara], dai nibu: botsugo hyakunen Ogiwara Rokuzan [Part 2: Centennial of the death of Rokuzan Ogiwara], 12. 21  Yoshida, “Ragūsa no kyōiku to sono eikyō,” 63. 22  Technically, premodern Japan had cultivated the art of casting for a variety of purposes and levels of refinement since the first arrival of the technology from 4th to 3rd centuries BCE. The main items of Japan’s traditional cast objects include swords and their fittings, Buddhist icons and temple bells, artistic kettles for the tea ceremony, elaborate ornamental objects to adorn architectural spaces, metallic currency, and utilitarian parts and tools, such as nails and hoes. 23  The casting technique as a genre of decorative art (chūkin in Japanese) was institutionally established in Japan through the metal craft division at the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1889.

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Outcome of the First Wave: Dropping the Lost-Wax Method for “Bronze Statues”

The demand for casting sculpture was to increase greatly just a few years after the expiration of Ragusa’s tenure in Japan in 1882. At this time, the proliferation of public monuments throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century hit Japan, where it was to last longer: until the end of World War II.24 The genre of public monuments, as well as the custom of installing them in a public space, had been completely unprecedented in Japan until the country’s delegates (who were mostly state officials) paid visits to Euro-American nations between 1871 and 73.25 By the 1880s, the Meiji state, as a part of its program to propagate nationalism, started to encourage its subjects to erect a number of such monuments that visually enshrined those who were considered proper symbols of the nation’s history and rising power in modernity.26 Ragusa’s former students, such as Shōjirō Ogura (1843–1913) and Moriyoshi Naganuma (1857–1942), played significant roles in stimulating the rise of public monuments by receiving major early commissions, which occasionally allowed them to be involved in the process of casting their own works. It is in this light that Asako Yoshida and other scholars see Ragusa’s key contribution to the consolidation of Japan’s fine-art casting. Regarding his direct impact on the development of casting techniques in the country, however, Yoshida expresses caution against overestimating his influence, since none of the public monuments undertaken by his students was cast in the Italian lost-wax technique that he had introduced.27 One of the most conspicuous and well-studied examples that confirms Meiji Japan’s rejection of the Italian lost-wax technique comes from the episodes surrounding a monument designed by Ōkuma. One of Ragusa’s best pupils, he received a commission in 1885 to erect the statue of Masujirō Ōmura (1824–1869; fig. 7.3) at Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo. This monument, which portrays the founder of the Japanese navy, was sponsored by his former subordinates to commemorate the legacy of their deceased mentor, who had inaugurated the nation’s modern naval institution. Importantly for this study, the statue carries significance in the country’s history of modern art in two aspects. First, it was Japan’s first public monument created in the Western mode, based on 24  H. W. Janson, Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1984), 176–77. 25  Tanaka, Kindai nihon chōkokushi, 96. 26  Junko Ōtsubo, “Dōzō, kinenhi” [Public monuments and memorials], in Kindai nihon chōkoku shūsei, dai ikkan: bakumatsu, meiji hen [Compendium of modern Japanese sculpture, Vol. 1, From Late Edo to Meiji], Shūji Tanaka, ed. (Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2010), 175–79. 27  Yoshida, “Ragūsa no kyōiku to sono eikyō,” 63; Tanaka 2018, 128–31.

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Ujihiro Ōkuma, The Statue of Masujirō Ōmura (Ōmura Masujirō-zō), 1893, bronze, height 320 cm. Yasukuni Shrine, Tokyo Photographed by Morioka Jun on October 6, 1998. Provided by Japan Institute for the Survey and Conservation of Outdoor Sculpture

the plaster model that Ōkuma created in 1891. Second, the choice of its casting technique set the standard for the manner in which many of the later bronze statues in Japan created before the 1960s, including the above-mentioned works by the followers of Rodinisme in the early twentieth century were to be cast (see fig. 7.1).28 The statue of Ōmura was the first of Japan’s initial group of eight public monuments in the Western mode. All eight were cast in bronze and erected 28  Yūji Takahashi, “Ōmura Masujirōzō chūzo no haikei,” 57.

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in Tokyo over the course of the decade between 1893 and 1904. Notably, none of them, including the Ōmura statue, was cast in the lost-wax technique from Italy. Some small details of these statues, however, were cast in Japan’s local traditional lost-wax method that had been traditionally developed for casting Buddhist icons and bells with the use of domestically available materials, including the loam called mane. The domestic lost-wax method was important for the Meiji state, since the contemporary decorative works cast in the technique were among the nation’s prominent export wares to the West.29 The production and casting of these eight works at such an intensive pace helped those involved in the processes, with fluid interactions among professionals in various sectors of society, to accelerate the speed of acquiring the necessary technical methods. Since the technologies of casting Western-based monuments were brand new to Japan around the turn of the twentieth century, initial casting experiments needed to be carried out as a national project at two major locations in the capital: Tokyo Artillery Factory and the Tokyo School of Art, which had taken over the role of the Technical Art School where Ragusa had taught. Ōkuma, who was in charge of selecting the casting technique for the statue of Ōmura, exercised his supervision over the technicians at the artillery facility.30 As art-historian Shūji Tanaka has pointed out, at this point in Japanese history, knowledge of how to cast monumental fine art sculptures was extra­ ordinarily scarce, and highly desirable in Japan.31 Western-derived casting methods were considered synonymous with, and symbols of, the type of modern civilization that the Japanese government craved in its representation of a burgeoning nation that had recently joined the world community of modern states. The construction of bronze monuments that commemorated state-sanctioned heroes all around the capital and other major cities added to these technological values the aspect of an ideological campaign that the

29  Kusuyata Shimamoto, Chūkin kindai shikō [The history of the art of modern casting] (Tokyo: Chūkinka Kyōkai,1957) 6. 30  Yūji Takahashi, “Meiji 23 nen kara meiji 37 nen ni kakete no bijutsu chūzō jijō” [Situation regarding fine art casting between Meiji 23 and 37], Okugai chōkoku chōsa hozon kenkyūkai kaihō [Bulletin of the Society for Research on Outdoor Sculpture Preservation], Vol. 2, August 2001: 82–85. 31  Shūji Tanaka, Kindai nihon saisho no chōkokuka [The first sculptors in modern Japan] (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunka, 1994), 173. Japan had developed its premodern technique for casting colossal objects, best known for the colossal Buddha statue in Tōdaiji, Nara, first cast in bronze in the eighth century in a uniquely contrived, complex technique with multiple sections of a monumental mold made of soil.

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state launched to mobilize its subjects.32 The Japanese started to be so fascinated with the appearance and surface quality of monuments in cast metal that the term designating “bronze statues” (dōzō) came to be a synonym for public monuments.33 Thus Ōkuma was subject to high expectations from his countrymen with regard to being able to work out how to cast an enormous, finely executed sculpture. After having been instructed by Ragusa, he was established enough as an artist, domestically known for his artistry in Western-style sculpture, to receive the commission, while still needing to be further trained to obtain specific knowledge about the making of Western public monuments that included casting techniques. And it was only after his studies in Europe in the late 1880s that he became qualified to make any decision about the method for casting the monument. The itinerary for his one-and-a-half-year European sojourn started in 1888 at the École des Beaux-Arts, Paris, where he studied with Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguière (1831–1900). Then he moved to the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, where he was trained by Antonio Allegretti (1840–1918), Giulio Tadoline (1849–1918), and Giulio Monteverde (1837–1917), before visiting Germany and Austria. In all the European nations Ōkuma visited, he was exposed to multiple foundries that allowed him to conduct comparative examinations of various casting techniques and approaches in order to seek out the best possible version feasibly adaptable to the conditions in early Meiji Japan.34 Despite the pressure to acquire the latest monument-making methods from Europe, the final decision that he made was not a straightforward adaptation of any of the available casting techniques he had studied. Instead, his solution was to employ, for fine-art casting, the most prominent local method developed in the field of decorative art, mane casting, and to contrive to improve it by integrating it with part of the process of one of the foreign casting methods he learned from Europe. The Japanese term mane designates the specific mixture of the loam and binder readily available in Japan, and the general category of mane casting comprises variations on techniques historically developed with the use of these locally sourced sands, clay and other natural materials for creating molds. While the technique of casting metal had been transmitted to Japan from the Korean peninsula around the tenth century BC, mane casting had been largely based on the thorough utilization of these local materials, and had developed various lineages of highly specialized artisans over centuries. 32  Tamaki Maeda, “From Feudal Hero to National Icon: the Kusunoki Masashige Image, 1660–1945,” Artibus Asiae, 2012, Vol. 72, no. 2, 251–54. 33  Ōtsubo, “Dōzō, kinenhi,” 175–179. 34  Tanaka, Kindai nihon chōkokushi, 131–32.

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Significantly, it was at the moment of the country’s public-monument boom in the late nineteen century that the mane casting technique reached its highest sophistication. Many of the Meiji state’s major export items to the West were cast in the mane method. At the same time, the rise of the mane technique also created major opportunities for Japan to gain international artistic recognition through showcasing some of the most elaborate decorative metal pieces, which won multiple awards in various Euro-American World Fairs. The reason behind the great international success of the local technique lay in its labor-intensive and detail-oriented approaches to casting, resulting in a high capacity to render intricate, minute details with extreme delicacy in an object of relatively modest scale. On the other hand, the method was difficult to employ when trying to cast a monumental piece in the Western mode that Ragusa transmitted to Japan, which involved closely translating into metal the complex concave and convex surfaces of the clay model.35 The solution for Ōkuma was to look for a foreign technique that would provide some improvement on the Japanese method in these areas of weakness, and demonstrate affinity with it in terms of working procedures as a variation of the sand-casting technique. His selection was the sand method from France, which had reached its peak in prominence there in the late nineteenth century, rather than the lost-wax method, which he had observed in both France and Italy. The crucial step in the sand process that he adopted for casting the monument was the creation of multiple sections for the piece-mold, which would allow Japanese technicians to carefully translate into metal the uneven surface of a clay model crafted through the Western modeling technique. To his great advantage, Ōkuma had already gained some training under Ragusa’s tutelage in the skill of forming plaster piece molds. Another important factor was the presence of French casting technicians in Japan, who had been instructing local workers whom Ōkuma could mobilize. The French had been hired at Tokyo Artillery Factory as employees of the Japanese government, just as Ragusa had been hired at the art academy.36 The opening ceremony of the first public monument in the Western mode finally took place in 1893 after a few years of working with the casting process that Ōkuma had supervised. The hybrid technique of its casting was to set the norm for the later fine art casting in Japan. As a result, prior to the early postwar era in Japan, the process of casting ended up occupying a highly unusual position within the nation’s official framework of sculpture as fine art. Often, models created by sculptors trained in fine art institutions, including the 35  Takahashi, “Ōmura Masujirōzō chūzo no haikei,” 54. 36  Takahashi, “Meiji 23 nen kara meiji 37 nen ni kakete no bijutsu chūzō jijō,” 82–84.

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national academy, were completely entrusted to those specializing in casting, who were mostly highly regarded metal-craft artists in their own right.37 Due to his prominence as a decorative artist, Sessei Okazaki (1854–1921), a professor in the division of casting at Tokyo School of Art, was among those whose fame occasionally exceeded that of the sculptors responsible for creating the models entrusted to him to cast. Thus, prewar Japanese fine art casting crossed the official boundary between “fine art” and non-fine art, or “craft,” that the Meiji state had established through its Westernization policy.38 Did Ōkuma drop the Italian lost-wax technique that he had learned from Ragusa a decade earlier on the grounds of his undervaluation of the method? Yūji Takahashi, a conservation and restoration expert in Japanese modern bronze sculpture, has expressed skepticism about this idea. Takahashi conducted close analyses of the notes Ōkuma had taken in Europe and his recorded public lecture delivered shortly after his return to Japan, as materials indicative of Ōkuma’s rationale for deciding on the casting technique. The notes from 1889 that he took during his time at the Academy of Fine Arts, Rome, testify to his continuous and insatiable desire to learn more about the lost-wax casting method that he observed in Italy. The wide range of his interests encompass the standard technical processes, as well as the operational and business sides of operating foundries specializing in the technique, such as their running costs and protocols for a monument’s unveiling ceremony.39 This suggests that the Italian technique simply lost out to competition from Japan’s local casting technique, as well as another one from France, that were considered more immediately adaptable to Japan’s domestic situation, including the availability of materials and labor skills. In fact, there has been some speculation that Ragusa himself may have even foreseen the limitations of implementing the Italian cast method in Meiji Japan, and instead was eager to experiment with the country’s local craft techniques.40 37  Guth, 165–66. One of the most telling examples was the situation surrounding the production of a public monument, almost contemporary to Ōkuma’s navy officer monument. It was the statue of a Japanese medieval warrior, then considered to be the ultimate historical imperial loyalist, Masashige Kusunoki (1294–1336), commissioned to faculty members at the Tokyo School of Arts. While Kōun Takamura (1852–1934), a professor in the sculpture division at the academy was in charge of creating its model in wood carving in 1893, it was cast three years later by Okazaki, a faculty member in the division of casting (for decorative art) there. Mirroring Ōkuma’s motivation for his European studies, Okazaki also took a research trip abroad to search for a proper casting technique, in his case, to the Chicago World Exposition in 1893. 38  Tanaka, Kindai nihon chōkokushi, 142–46. 39  Takahashi, “Ōmura Masujirōzō chūzo no haikei,” 55–57. 40  Kitagō, “Ragūsa to rokuzan no hyōgen no henkaku,” 9.

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The Second Wave: Casting as Postwar Artistic Expression

The Italian lost-wax technique arrived again in Japan in the early post-World War II period in the form of contemporary sculptural works from Italy. As discussed, in the early twentieth century, young Japanese sculptors in the Western mode had emulated the art of Rodin, and subsequently, another French master, Antoine Bourdelle (1861–1929), occasionally by working directly under them in Paris.41 However, these Japanese sculptors did not develop new casting methods, which largely remained unchanged in Japan, where the modified mane method was predominant. But this situation started to change once the latest sculptural works from Italy, particularly, those of the figurative mode (as opposed to abstract sculpture that began to be internationally prominent after World War II), started to be shown in multiple exhibitions in Japan from the 1950s through the 1970s. The chance to closely examine the exhibits in person allowed Japanese audiences to recognize the striking difference in surface qualities between the contemporary Italian works and the domestic Western-mode sculpture. For the trained eyes of Japanese sculptors and critics, it was evident that this contrast largely came from the difference between the two casting techniques applied to the two groups of works. In comparison to the smooth and polished finish of the local sculptures cast in the domestic mane method, the Italian works impressed the Japanese audience with their characteristically much rougher and more tactile surfaces. Japanese art professionals came to acknowledge this unfamiliar effect as the result of the Italian lost-wax technique.42 Many of the local sculptors specializing in figurative works strongly preferred the Italian works over what they found to be the generally lifeless, static qualities of the domestic works. They observed that the sense of raw materiality of the metal forged by the lost-wax method was utilized to create an unmistakable impression of human qualities that Italian sculptors infused into the cold, hard surface of bronze through the representation of figurative forms. Chūryō Satō (1912–2011), one of the Japanese sculptors 41  Tanaka, Kindai nihon chōkokushi, 324–25. 42  Rokushū Mizufune, et al., “Zadankai: Itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite: yonin no chōkokuka no ōtō” [Roundtable discussion: upon viewing the exhibition of Italian contemporary sculpture: responses from four sculptors], Sansai, no. 136, 1961, 35–38; Kazuko Sotodate, “Kindai, gendai nihon ni okeru rōgata chūzō to chōkoku hyōgen no bijutsushiteki kōsatsu” [The position of lost-wax casting technique in modern and contemporary Japan, and the history of sculptural expression] in Rōgata buronzu chōkoku [Bronze sculpture cast in lost-wax technique], Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsukei Nakamura Yoshitaka Kenkyūshitsu (The Office of Prof. Yoshitaka Nakamura, University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Art and Design) ed, 2019, 61.

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exposed to the Italian works, described having felt the “blood and life” that his Italian counterparts brought to their sculptures, while his own works and those of his Japanese colleagues remained “dead.”43 There were several events between the 1950s and 1970s through which Japanese audiences were exposed, for the first time, to a substantial body of Italian contemporary sculptures in person. The initial major opportunity came with The Third International Exhibition (Tokyo Biennale), 1955, which exhibited a few pieces by Pericle Fazzini (1913–1987) and Emillo Greco (1913–1995). The most critical event, however, was The Exhibition of Italian Contemporary Sculpture, 1961, held in Takashimaya Department Store, Tokyo and featuring a selection of 112 works, which were also shown later in Italy. This time, a greater number of Italian figurative sculptors, such as Arturo Martini (1889–1947), Giacomo Manzu (1908–1991), and Marino Marini (1901–1980), were presented. Art historians have considered the impact of the exhibition to be critical since it marked not only Japan’s first comprehensive exhibition of Italian sculptures, but was also among the largest events to date in Japan that featured foreign sculptors.44 The show changed the cultural landscape of early postwar Japan by triggering the rising Italian sculpture boom among the art professionals. More generally, it generated the first serious interest among the public in the medium of sculpture. Japanese sculptors in the 1960s welcomed this new trend.45 The Japanese boom in contemporary Italian sculpture was conditioned by the concurrence of two factors, international and local. First, it was a local variation of the much greater international attention given to Italian contemporary art at the time, particularly to sculpture, of which those who had lived outside Fascist Italy had been largely ignorant during the war. Among the sculptural works from Italy, the figurative type, which most captured the attention of the Japanese audience, was widely considered by the international art scene to be more typically representative of Italy’s national artistic temperament than the abstract works.46 The second factor was the Japanese audience’s readiness to be exposed to any new current of Western art. By the early 1960s, when the Italian sculpture boom hit Japan, critics and artists had already become accustomed to the bewildering array of Euro-American modern and avant-garde 43  Chūryō Satō, “Shizen to tatakau shajitsu no kibishisa” [Difficulties in fighting against nature in achieving realism], Bijutsu Techō, 1961, no. 3, 25. 44  “Itaria gendai chōkokuten” (original English title: “Italian Contemporary Sculpture”), exh. cat. (Tokyo: Mainichi Shinbunsha, 1961); Murai, 27–28. 45  Ibid. 46  H. W. Janson, Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, 176–77.

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artworks that had arrived one after another in the country over the previous decade. In the 1950s, a series of public exhibitions had been held in Japan’s largest cities, introducing for the first time to a large number of the general public works by Picasso, Matisse, non-figurative painters from the Salon de Mai and Art Informel, Jackson Pollock, and other Western avant-garde artists. These shows were mostly sponsored by the postwar Japanese government in its drive to catch up with a fast-changing global art scene after the almost total shut-down of the nation’s cultural exchanges under its wartime totalitarian regime. They provoked fierce public discussions, both pro and con, in Japan’s art world, as well as among the public.47 Almost all the major Japanese art magazines in 1961 featured The Exhibition of Italian Contemporary Sculpture in Tokyo with a number of photographic images, including close-up pictures that allowed readers to scrutinize the sculptures’ metal surfaces. These journals also invited some of Japan’s most prominent art critics and sculptors to discuss and analyze the exhibits. The critics include Atsuo Imaizumi (1902–1984), Shūzō Takiguchi (1903–1979), Teiichi Hijikata (1904–1980) and Shin’ichi Segi (1931–2011), while some of the sculptors were Chūryō Satō, Yoshitatsu Yanagihara (1910–2004) and Ryōkichi Mukai (1918–2010), all working in the Western mode of modern Japanese sculpture. They collectively expressed a profound sense of excitement, astonishment and wonder regarding Italian sculptures endowed with artistic expressions, both empathetic and unfamiliar.48 Among the thirty-eight Italian sculptors featured in the show, Marino Marini was among the most popular, particularly through the piece from his famed “Horsemen” series (fig. 7.4), which captured the hearts of the local critics and artists.49 The Japanese art professionals greatly admired the scarred texture of Marini’s work, which the artist consciously rendered by damaging its metal surface with a chisel through a process to which he referred as

47  Shin’ichi Segi, Sengo kūhakuki no bijutsu (Original English title: The Vacuums in the Post-War Art of Japan) (Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1996), 60–78. 48  Mizufune et al., “Zadankai: Itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite,” 27–38; Teizō Hijikata, “Tenkanki ni aru gendai chōkoku: Antwerp kokusai yagai chōkokuten o mite” (“Con­ temporary Sculpture at a Turning Point: My Impression of the Antwerp International Outdoor Sculpture Exhibition”), Geijutsu Shinchō, Vol. 10, no. 9, September 1959: 221–25; Shūzō Takiguchi, “Dan’sō: itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite” [My fragmented impressions: upon viewing the exhibition of Italian contemporary sculpture], Bessatsu Mizue, no. 28, Spring 1961: 63–64. 49  Hijikata, “Tenkanki ni aru gendai chōkoku,” 222–24.

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Figure 7.4 Marino Marini, Cavaliere (Cavalier), 1952, bronze, 105.5 × 87.5 × 90.5 cm. © [2019] Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ SIAE, Rome. Fukuoka City Museum/DN Partcom. The current location of the work by Marini that was displayed in Tokyo in 1961 is unknown. The bronze shown here is another in the artist’s series with the same title

“destroying bronze” (as opposed to producing bronze).50 Beyond this new expressiveness of the cast surface of his work, Marini represented to Japanese audiences the cultural and social affinities that they found between Italy and Japan in the early postwar era. The coarse materiality of the metal that he produced in order to make anti-heroic what had once been a heroic monument— an ancient Roman equestrian statue—was understood in Japan as the artistic expression of the anxiety felt during World War II.51 This interpretation was based on both countries’ shared experience of having actively collaborated with wartime regimes that had once enshrined their respective national heroes whose images were now overthrown, and their intersecting recent histories as part of the Axis Powers during the war.52 It is highly likely that Japanese audiences still retained fresh memories about how their public monuments 50  Daisuke Matsuo, “Itariashiki rōgata chūzō o mochi’ita chōkoku hyōgen ni okeru gendsai no igi: kon’nichi no gijutsu to marino marini ni uketsugareta buronzuchōkoku no dentō ni chūmoku shite” [Contemporary meaning of sculptural expression through Italian lostwax casting method: techniques today and the tradition inherited from Marino Marini], in Rōgata buronzu chōkoku [Bronze sculpture cast in lost-Wax technique], 41, 44. 51  Ibid., 41. 52  Kinhide Tokudaiji, “Shinkotenshugi no sakkatachi” [Neoclassical artists], Bessatsu Mizue, no. 28, Spring 1961: 67.

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cast in bronze had been largely destroyed during wartime by being melted and converted into weapons (although Ōkuma’s statue of Ōmura was spared).53 In the end, however, a Japanese critic, Shin’ichi Segi, saw Marini’s work as a symbol of optimism regarding the future of both Italy and Japan. Segi declared that the artistic excellence of the Italian piece strongly indicated that Italy had fully recovered from the devastation of the war, perhaps showing the way for the Japanese art community to follow.54 More comprehensive comments made by another critic, Shūzō Takiguchi, illuminated what Japanese sculptors could learn at this moment from the latest Italian works in a manner distinct from the past course of Westernization of Japanese modern sculpture. [W]hat is at stake here is not a matter of styles, but rather, what directly concerns the ontology of sculpture itself. Considering we Japanese, in general, lack an innate sense of any sculptural objects, all the ensembles of works on display at the Exhibition of Italian Contemporary Sculpture speak to us, above all, in the following manner, namely, that paying respect to the technical treatments found in the rich qualities and quantities of the Italian sculpture tradition is more important than the perfecting of the finish of a complete piece of sculpture.55 Takiguchi’s comments can be interpreted, at least partially, as a discreet criticism of the polished and carefully stylized appearance of earlier Japanese sculptural works, cast in the modified mane technique, typical of those following the European academic style and the cult of Rodin. The criticism may not be fully justified, considering the efforts made by followers of Rodinisme to enliven the surface of the models they created in clay. On the other hand, the Japanese followers of Rodin and Bourdelle seemed more concerned with what Takiguchi refers to as “a matter of styles,” stopping short of the process of metal casting. Their pieces generally reveal their efforts to emulate stylistically what they described as the “plane, mass, movement, and model” of the French masters’ works through the act of manipulating clay models56 53  Reita Hirase, Dōzō junan no kindai (The modern period of the suffering of public monuments) (Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunkan, 2011). 54  Shin’ichi Segi, “Itaria gendai chōkoku: dentō o koeru atarashi’i kūkan no sōzō,” [Con­ temporary Italian sculpture: the creation of new space beyond tradition], Bijutsu Techō, March 1961: 23–32. 55  Takiguchi, “Dan’sō: itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite,” 35. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are by the author. 56  Kurokawa, “On Medium and Materials: Differing Ideas of Realism,” 24.

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(see fig. 7.1). Takiguchi, however, suggested the possibility of privileging sculptural techniques like the casting method, that would allow the characteristics of each material, such as the metal, to emerge as a starting point for a sculptor to conceptualize his or her work. He found the best examples of Italian sculpture to be those where the artists had used the casting method as a means to forge creative expression, as did many other contemporary art specialists in Japan.57 Takiguchi and his Japanese colleagues shared the realization that the Italian lost-wax method was not just a mechanical process for copying and transferring the shape of a sculptural model, but also a significant creative device that sculptors could use to articulate their artistic messages.58 Unlike the other methods of casting, including the modified mane technique dominant in Japan at that time, the Italian lost-wax method is unique in the sense that it facilitates sculptors’ direct intervention in the casting process that determines the final appearance of a metal sculpture. The Italian lost-wax method involves a stage of producing and inspecting a wax pattern, whose shape would exactly mirror that of the final cast work. Casting technicians pour molten wax into a mold based on an original model created by a sculptor. Then, a wax pattern is taken out from a mold before being invested, going through the burn-out process (whereby wax is removed from the mold using heat), and eventually being cast into a final piece. This stage of taking a wax pattern out of a mold is the moment when a sculptor is called in to assess and retouch, as needed, the wax form before it is sent to technicians for final casting.59 Some mid-twentieth century Italian sculptors, especially Manzu, proactively intervened in the casting process.60 Japanese art professionals also found that some Italian masters intentionally neglected to refine or complete the process of casting in order to create captivating textural effects. They participated in or controlled the process by casting their works with rough and unfinished surfaces left unpolished in a state of raw casting. Or they may have purposefully let a cut sprue runner or a casting fin, which would normally have been removed in the process of casting, remain intact. This enchantment with the textured metal surface also encouraged Italian sculptors to evoke a strong sense of the materiality of the 57  Takiguchi, “Dansō: itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite,” 63–64. 58  Mukai et al, “Zadankai: Itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite,” 35–37; Matsuo, “Itariashiki rōgata chūzō o mochi’ita chōkoku hyōgen ni okeru gendai no igi,” 42–46. 59  Tony Birks, The Alchemy of Sculpture (Chalford, UK: Marston House, 1998), 47–51. 60  Mukai et al, “Zadankai: Itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite,” 35–37; Nakamura, “Itaria rōgata bijutsu chōzōhō kenkyū,” 127–145; Yūko Takematsu, “Jacomo Manzu no shokkaku kankaku o sōki saseru boronzu hyōgen ni tsuite,” [On the expression in bronze by Giacomo Manzu evocative of tactile sensations], in Rōgata buronzu chōkoku, 50–51.

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metal by directly incising and chiseling the surface of their cast works, as in the case of Marini.61 Above all, Japanese audiences sensed Italian sculptors’ fundamental respect for the natural and accidental effects of the casting technique on the skins of their works to render organic nuance. Examples of these effects include the oxide films produced by the chemicals related to the method, and the traces of unremoved plaster or fingerprints left on the cast surface.62 5

Conclusion and Current Development

As this study has shown, the importation of the Italian art of sculpture and its casting technique to Japan greatly stimulated Japanese artists to shape and reshape their approach to making sculptural art objects at two historical moments. The initial attempts to implement Italian lost-wax casting in Japan occurred in the late nineteenth century as a part of the national government’s Westernization/modernization program. At that time, the Italian method was considered a novel, Western technology, potentially vital to carrying out an equally new and Western-derived cultural practice to produce works of fine-art sculpture. However, the technique quickly disappeared and did not have any immediate impact on the subsequent development of modern Japanese sculpture, including what has been considered the peak moment of Westernization in Japanese sculpture in the early twentieth century. It was only after the early 1960s that the Italian technique was “rediscovered” and finally embraced by Japanese art critics and sculptors, who evaluated the method as the key to enfolding a new dimension of artistic expression in sculpture that would enable the materiality of the metal to be explored. This time, the method was introduced through in-person, close inspections by large audiences in Japan’s first comprehensive exhibition of contemporary Italian sculpture in 1961. The surge of initial interest in the Italian casting method in the early 1960s in the Japanese art community resulted in new developments for better understanding and more widely practicing the technique in Japan. First, by the end of the 1960s, it became possible in Japan to cast sculpture through the Italian technique that Japanese casting technicians came to learn for the first time.63 From this time forward, a series of Japanese publications started to detail the 61  Mukai et al., “Zadankai: Itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite,” 35–37; Nakamura “Itaria rōgata bijutsu chōzōhō kenkyū,”, 127–145; Yoshitaka Nakamura 2008, 6–8. 62  Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsukei Nakamura Yoshitaka Kenkyūshitsu 2019. 63  Nakamura, “Gendai itaria rōgata bijutsu chūzō no kenkyū: rōgata chūzō no tokuchō o ikashita chōkoku ni tsuite no kōsatsu”, 27–30.

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Figure 7.5 Yoshitaka Nakamura, Revival of Quiet Forest (Namuri no mori no fukkatsu), 1999, bronze, aluminum, wood, and ivory, 180 × 90 × 400 cm Tsukuba Museum

technical procedures of the Italian method to educate a greater number of Japanese art professionals to try out the technique on their own.64 Second, during the 1970s, 80s and 90s, Japanese government funding helped many local cast specialists, who included technicians, craft artists and researchers, to be sent to foundries in Rome and Milan to be trained directly by Italian workers.65 It was also during this time that some sculptors from Japan, studying abroad in Europe, such as Yoshitaka Nakamura (1954-), gained opportunities to observe the way in which Italian sculptors were involved in the casting process at local foundries.66 As a result of direct exposure to the art of casting in the West, Japanese sculptors such as Nakamura and Hirotake Kurokawa cast their own works, based on their expertise in making metal sculptural objects67 64  Ibid., 63–64. 65  Nakamura, “Gendai itaria rōgata bijutsu chūzō no kenkyū: rōgata chūzō no tokuchō o ikashita chōkoku ni tsuite no kōsatsu,” 27–30; Yoshitaka Nakamura, “Nicchi bijutsu chūzōsho ni tsuite” [On the Nicci Foundry], in Rōgata buronzu chōkoku, 7–8. 66  Yoshitaka Nakamura, “Watashi no chōkoku seisaku” [On the production of my sculptures], Tsukuba Forum no. 53, 1999, 93–94. 67  Nakamura, “Watashi no chōkoku seisaku,” 92–97; Hirotake Kurokawa, “Buronzu no katachi o sagashi motomete” [Searching for the shapes bronze takes], Bijutsu Techō, Vol. 58, no. 877, March 2006, 53–54.

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(fig. 7.5). As one of the key advocates of the Italian technique in Japan, Nakamura presents, through his body of sculptures cast through the method, his belief in its ability to express human qualities in metal, which echoes the view shared among critics and sculptors in the early 1960s.68 Lastly, these metal sculptors, through their dual roles as practicing artists and academic researchers, started to have close communication with art historians to conduct joint research projects that have produced revised narratives of the history of modern Japanese sculptural art. They have provoked a new intellectual interest in the importation of techniques to Japan, including that of the Italian lostwax method, and challenged the narrowness of the standard studies focusing solely on the transmission of styles as the major criteria for examining Japan’s Westernization and modernization in art.69 Japanese interest in the Italian lost-wax casting method has grown in the present decade, and the current study has greatly merited from the research results produced by this trend. In 2010–14, and in 2019, the Japanese government funded two comprehensive projects devoted to the interdisciplinary analyses of the history and future of Japan’s adaptation of the Italian lost-wax casting technique. Both projects were led by Nakamura in his capacity as a fine-art professor in the Department of Carving and Modeling at University of Tsukuba near Tokyo.70 Researchers for both projects comprise practicing sculptors, art historians, conservation specialists, and curators, who strove to integrate their creative aspirations and critical and historical inquiries. Not only did the projects advance the level of historical research on Italian masters’ and Japanese adaptations of the cast technique, but they also explored the fuller potential of the method artistically and technologically. To this end, the projects encompassed creative experiments in combining cast metal and other materials that resulted in the production of new sculptural works, as well as international exchanges organized among metal sculptors in Italy and Japan to exhibit their works in both countries.71 These efforts were designed to respond to Nakamura’s questioning, and that of other sculptors, of the degree to 68  Nakamura, “Rōgata sekkō igata chūzōhō ni yoru gushō chōkoku no seisaku ni tsuite, 5,” 12–13. 69  The Japan Institute for the Survey of Conservation of Outdoor Sculpture, founded in 1997, has been one of the major venues for sculptors, scholars and conservationists to advance collaborative research. 70  Nakamura, “Research on New Sculpture Expression through Lost-Wax Casting,” Kagaku kenkyūhi joseijigyō Kenkyū seika hōkokusho [Council for Science and Technology Policy Grant Research Result Report], 2015. 71  Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsukei Nakamura Yoshitaka Kenkyūshitsu, 2019, 25–27. The Exchange exhibition traveled to two venues in both countries in 2018: the Museum Venanzo Crocetti, Rome and Tsukuba University, Tsukuba.

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which this foreign method has been truly understood and digested in Japan, despite the ready accessibility to knowledge of the technique. Kazuko Sotodate, one of the most recent project’s members, is among the art historians and curators who have been questioning the applicability of the Western-derived framework of sculpture to Japanese modern objects. Contemplating the growing consciousness among sculptors of the importance of techniques that include casting methods, she points out that this new approach has taken the more orthodox course of thinking about the teleological process of making a sculptural object with the final work in mind in a completely opposite direction. Interestingly, her suggestion corelates with Takiguchi’s advocation in 1961 of bronze sculpture’s ability to engender a strong sense of the materiality of the metal as a starting point for sculptors to conceptualize their works: Takiguchi found the clue to this approach in the surface qualities of the Italian exhibits, all cast in the lost-wax technique. Sotodate further pushes this line of thinking by proposing that the techniquesand-materials-oriented approaches to sculpture-making correspond to the most contemporary tendency in what had been historically considered the antithesis to sculpture, crafts. Japan’s modern metal craft movement freely incorporates conceptual and stylistic traits from other media without affecting its fixed, core principle: the use of the metal material and the techniques applicable to it. She argues that, for the first time, the interests of Japanese sculptors and metal-craft artists have started to merge due to a new awareness of the significance of the casting method, an interest greatly stimulated by exposure to the Italian technique in sculpture during the early 1960s.72 Thus, the historical boundary forged by the Meiji government between the Western framework of fine art and Japan’s domestic territory of decorative art in object-making has finally collapsed through the process of localizing the imported casting technique from Italy.

Acknowledgements

I owe tremendous thanks to Prof. Shūji Tanaka at Oita University and Prof. Yoshitake Kurokawa at Musashino Art University for their kind support and for sharing their deep expertise on this subject.

72  Sotodate, “Kindai, gendai nihon ni okeru rōgata chūzō to chōkoku hyōgen no bijutsushiteki kōsatsu,” 64–65.

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Kurokawa, Hirotake. “Buronzu no takachi o sagashi motomete” [Searching for the shapes bronze takes]. Bijutsu Techō 58, no. 877 (March 2006): 53–54. Kurokawa, Hirotake. “On Medium and Materials: Differing Ideas of Realism.” In A Study of Modern Japanese Sculpture. Exh. cat. Leeds: The Henry Moore Institute, 2015, 20–27. Le Feuvre, Lisa, Edward Allington, and Sophie Raikes. “In Conversation.” In A Study of Modern Japanese Sculpture. Exh. cat., Leeds: The Henry Moore Institute, 2015, 5–12. Lucie-Smith, Edward. Sculpture Since 1945. New York: Universe Books, 1987. Maeda, Tamaki. “From Feudal Hero to National Icon: the Kusunoki Masashige Image, 1660–1945.” Artibus Asiae 72, no. 2 (2012): 201–64. Matsuo, Daisuke. “Itariashiki rōgata chūzō o mochi’ita chōkoku hyōgen ni okeru gendai no igi: kon’nichi no gijutsu to marinno marini ni uketsugareta buronzuchōkoku no dentō ni chūmoku shite” [Contemporary meaning of sculptural expression through Italian lost-wax casting method: techniques today and the tradition inherited from Marino Marini]. In Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsukei Nakamura Yoshitaka Kenkyūshitsu [The Office of Prof. Yoshitaka Nakamura, University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Art and Design] ed., Rōgata buronzu chōkoku [Bronze sculpture cast in lost-wax technique], 39–46. Mizufune, Rokushū, Ryōkichi Mukai, Densaburō Nakamura, Yoshitatsu Yanagihara, and Shūsaburō Yasuda. “Zadankai: Itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite: yonin no chōkokuka no ōtō” [Roundtable discussion: upon viewing the exhibition of Italian contemporary sculpture; responses from four sculptors]. Sansai, no. 136 (1961): 27–38. Nakamura, Densaburō. “Naikoku kangyō hakurankai: enkaku” [History of National Industrial exhibitions]. In Meiji bijutsu kiso shiryōshū: naikoku kangyō hakurankai, naikoku kaiga kyōshinkai (daiikkai, nikai) [Compilation of fundamental resources of Meiji art: the first and second National Industrial exhibitions, National Painting Association], Tokyo: National Research Institute for Cultural Properties, 1975, 1–13. Nakamura, Densaburō. Meiji no chōso: “Zō o tsukuru jutsu” igo [Modeled and carved objects of Meiji: after “how to make a statuary image”]. Tokyo: Bunsaisha, 1991. Nakamura, Yoshitaka. “Rōgata sekkō igata chūzōhō ni yoru gushō chōkoku no seisaku ni tsuite, 5: buronzu to ishu sozai o kumiawaseta hyōgen” [On the production of figurative sculpture through lost-wax casting with plaster mold, no. 5: expression combining bronze and other materials]. Annual Bulletin of Research and Education of Art and Design University of Tsukuba (1993): 12–13. Nakamura, Yoshitaka. “Itaria rōgata bijutsu chōzōhō kenkyū: kokunai juyō no keika ni tsuite no ichi kōsatsu” [Study on the Italian lost-wax fine art casting technique: considerations on the process of its domestic reception]. Bulletin of Faculty of Art and Design, University of Tsukuba 25, no. 16 (1995): 127–45.

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Nakamura, Yoshitaka. “Watashi no chōkoku seisaku” [On the production of my sculptures]. Tsukuba Forum, no. 53 (1999): 92–97. Nakamura, Yoshitaka. “Gendai itaria rōgata bijutsu chūzō no kenkyū: rōgata chūzō no tokuchō o ikashita chōkoku ni tsuite no kōsatsu” [Study on the contemporary Italian lost-wax fine art casting technique: observation on the sculptural expression utilizing the characteristics of the technique]. PhD dissertation, Tsukuba University, 2008. Nakamura, Yoshitaka. “Research on New Sculpture Expression through Lost-Wax Casting (Italian Style).” Kagaku kenkyūhi joseijigyō Kenkyū seika hōkokusho [Council for Science and Technology Policy Grant Research Result Report], 2015. Nakamura, Yoshitaka. “Nicchi bijutsu chūzōsho nitsuite” [On the Nicci Foundry]. In Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsukei Nakamura Yoshitaka Kenkyūshitsu [The Office of Prof. Yoshitaka Nakamura], ed., Rōgata buronzu chōkoku [Bronze sculpture cast in lost-wax technique], 7–8. Ōtsubo, Junko. “Dōzō, kinenhi” [Public monuments and memorials]. In Kindai nihon chōkoku shūsei, dai ikkan, bakumatsu, meiji hen [Compendium of modern Japanese sculpture, Vol. 1, from late Edo to Meiji]. Edited by Shūji Tanaka, 175–79. Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2010. Satō, Chūryō. “Shizen to tatakau shajitsu no kibishisa” [Difficulties in fighting against nature in achieving realism]. Bijutsu Techō, no. 186 (March 1961): 25. Schoneveld, Erin. Shirakaba and Japanese Modernism: Art Magazine, Artistic Collectives, and the Early Avant-garde. Leiden: Brill, 2019. Segi, Shin’ichi. “Itaria gendai chōkoku: dentō o koeru atarashi’i kūkan no sōzō” [Contemporary Italian sculpture: the creation of new space beyond tradition]. Bijutsu Techō, no. 186 (March 1961): 23–32. Segi, Shin’ichi. Sengo kūhakuki no bijutsu (original English title: The Vacuums in the Post-War Art of Japan). Tokyo: Shinchōsha, 1996. Shimamoto, Kusuyata, ed. Chūkin kindai shikō [The history of the art of modern casting]. Tokyo: Chūkinka Kyōkai [Association of Cast Specialists], 1957. Sotodate, Kazuko. “Kindai, gendai nihon ni okeru rōgata chūzō to chōkoku hyōgen no bijutsushiteki kōsatsu” [The position of lost-wax casting technique in modern and contemporary Japan, and the history of sculptural expression]. In Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsukei Nakamura Yoshitaka Kenkyūshitsu [The Office of Prof. Yoshitaka Nakamura, University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Art and Design] ed., Rōgata buronzu chōkoku [Bronze sculpture cast in lost-wax technique], 60–65. Takahashi, Yūji. “Ōmura Masujirōzō chūzō no haikei” [Background behind the casting of the statue of Masujirō Ōmura]. Okugai chōkoku chōsa hozon kenkyūkai kaihō [Bulletin of the Society for Research on Outdoor Sculpture Preservation], no. 1 (July 1999): 50–60.

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Takahashi, Yūji. “Meiji 23 nen kara meiji 37 nen ni kakete no bijutsu chūzō jijō” [Situation regarding fine art casting between Meiji 23 and 37]. Okugai chōkoku chōsa hozon kenkyūkai kaihō [Bulletin of the Society for Research on Outdoor Sculpture Preservation], no. 2 (August 2001): 82–85. Takematsu, Yūko. “Jacomo Manzu no shokkaku kankaku o sōki saseru buronzu hyōgen ni tsuite” [On the expression in bronze by Giacomo Manzu evocative of tactile sensations]. In Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsukei Nakamura Yoshitaka Kenkyūshitsu [The Office of Prof. Yoshitaka Nakamura], ed., Rōgata buronzu chōkoku [Bronze sculpture cast in lost-wax technique], 39–52. Takiguchi, Shūzō. “Dan’sō: itaria gendai chōkokuten o mite” [My fragmented impressions: upon viewing the exhibition of Italian contemporary sculpture]. Bessatsu Mizue, no. 28 (Spring 1961): 63–64. Tanaka, Shūji. Kindai nihon saisho no chōkokuka [The first sculptors in modern Japan]. Tokyo: Yoshikawa Kōbunka, 1994. Tanaka, Shūji. “Sculpture.” Translated by Toshiko McCallum. In Since Meiji: Perspectives on the Japanese Visual Arts, 1868–2000. Edited by J. Thomas Rimer. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2012, 283–314. Tanaka, Shūji. Kindai nihon chōkokushi [History of modern Japanese sculpture]. Tokyo: Kokusho Kankōkai, 2018. Tokudaiji, Kinhide. “Shinkotenshugi no sakkatachi” [Neoclassical artists]. Bessatsu Mizue, no. 28, (Spring 1961): 65–68. Tsukuba Daigaku Geijutsukei Nakamura Yoshitaka Kenkyūshitsu [The Office of Prof. Yoshitaka Nakamura, University of Tsukuba, Faculty of Art and Design], ed. Rōgata buronzu chōkoku [Bronze sculpture cast in lost-wax technique]. Tsukuba: Ibaragi, 2019. Yoshida, Asako. “Ragūsa no kyōiku to sono eikyō” [Ragusa’s education and influences]. In Meiji no chōso: Ragūsa to Ogiwara Rokuzan, dai ichibu, Ragūsa to sono deshitachi [Carving and modeling in the Meiji Period: Ragusa and Rokuzan Ogiwara, Part 1, Ragusa and his disciples]. Tokyo: Geijutsu Daigaku Bijutsukan, 2010, 61–71.

part 2 Medardo Rosso and the Modernity of Lost-Wax Casting

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Disclaimer In this volume we present works that are not included the Catalogue raisonné of 2009. This study is not intended and should not be relied on as an authentication of the works presented, but rather a summary of conclusions that we draw to date, based on our research, scientific analysis and close visual examination.

Framing Rosso: A Brief Attempt Penelope Curtis Medardo Rosso did not make a lot of sculptures, but those he made have held our fascination for a long time. And they have not only fascinated experts on the period or genre. They raise questions about sculpture that allow them to resonate for art historians across a range of fields and disciplines. They also have an intimate and mysterious charm that makes them intriguing for a wide range of amateurs. Additionally, the sculptures have had a remarkably public life, because they were made in editions, and in different materials, and can exist alone, or together. Although it is still uncommon to see examples of the same sculptures together, seriality is of increasing interest to art historians and curators, and in Rosso’s case is even more varied than usual. This book is an unusual example of a concerted attempt to locate and compare different versions of one sculpture, and as such is a useful corrective to a story that is increasingly outdated. Rosso, of course, has been connected to Rodin, who has too few comparators, and whose production, like that of Rosso, is too often and too readily linked first to painting. For scholars (at least since John Rewald, and even now) held in thrall by Impressionism, Rodin and Rosso have been among the very few sculptors who could possibly enter the category. Rosso’s dates, however, are much closer to those of Antoine Bourdelle (1886–1929), who in the early twentieth century was seen as Rodin’s natural successor. Bourdelle’s curious sculptures were, at the time, lauded for having an architectonic strength lacking in Rodin. This would have been an advantage if the field of monumental sculpture had continued apace, as it had throughout the Third Republic. Instead, and especially after World War I, sculpture became increasingly private, judged on a more interior scale and alongside painting. This was strongly to the advantage of Rodin’s posthumous career, and also to that of Rosso. As a sculptor, Rosso was unusual for his time in not working on commissions for public sculpture, or on conventional portrait commissions. His subjects were anonymous (or anonymized), heads of women or children, tending towards the tête d’expression beloved of an earlier period (and enduring as typical academic exercises) or the anthropological study of “type” (again, a subject of the time). In addition, we have a few genre scenes, like the lamp-post scene or the conversation in a garden, that are relatively unusual for “ideal” sculptures in comprising more than one figure and being utterly quotidian. His subjects are indeed typical of those of a painter, and he might be compared

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to notable examples, like Munch, but equally to many far more conventional painters who sought to represent transitory states of being, subjects in sickness and in health, suffering or laughing. For sculpture, Rosso’s work is unusually private, and probably better suited to the parlor than the museum. But one could take this argument a step further and say that it is best suited to the studio and that it stills seems like work in the making. To a degree, this accounts for his currency today, a period in which we are intrigued by the life of the studio, but perhaps we have not appreciated as fully as we might the sense in which Rosso’s works remain models. And, though they are readily connected to painting and seen as ‘painterly’ (meaning, by and large, that they are loosely assembled), it is in fact more useful to think about them in relation to photography. Sculpture was photography’s first subject. The bust of Patroclus sat still for Henry Fox Talbot as early as 1840, allowing the camera’s lens to find its depth of field and to fix its features. Some decades later, Rosso used the camera similarly to fix the multiple melting profiles of his sculptures at the right distance and angle. Suddenly the amorphous quality of the sculpture is resolved, and even if the photographs are poorly preserved, they make us ask to what extent Rosso ever wanted his sculpture to be thought of as unresolved. Even if we want to use the epithet “impressionist,” we have to admit that the photograph fixes the impression. It would seem, then, that Rosso was attempting to do something more interesting than might at first sight seem obvious—something that may even have been its opposite. Far from unfixing his sculptures and making their images mobile, he is concerned to see how an apparently unstable motif can be caught in just the right way. His tendency to avoid conventional socles and to use found objects like bowls or shelves, or to incorporate, as it were, both the support and the surrounding atmosphere within the subject—as he did, for example, with the chair in Malato all’ospedale (Sick Man in the Hospital, 1889), and the bosom in Carne altrui (Flesh of Others, 1883–84; fig. 8.5) or Aetas aurea (Golden Age, late 1885–86; fig. 9.3)—might be said to have a part in this search for composition. In this sense, Rosso could be compared to Adolf von Hildebrand (1847–1921), who also believed that sculptures have one optimal viewpoint. Now however, we are largely left with an unstable legacy; the sculptures inevitably predominate, while the photographs—small, faded, torn—are unable to equal them. An important part of the historian’s work in recent years has been to attempt to restore to the photographs their part in the meaning of the work. If Rosso’s sculptures find their resolution in photography, they are perhaps to be seen in the line of artist’s models, mannequins, and lay figures. Might one

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invoke an artist as remote as Poussin (who used small sculptures as models for his paintings) in an attempt to understand better how these sculptures work? Can we see them as functional in this sense? Perhaps it is not too far-fetched, even if this would be to restore to the sculpture the sense of the non-finito that has been their undoing, resulting in a rather hackneyed and misleading stereotype. If we remember all that is largely conventional in their composition— the material, the subject, the type—then we have to ask why they have come to stand out amongst contemporary production. And they stand out because of the way they were made and the way they elude description in terms of their facture. This book is the first to really study the variations in casting and to show how deliberate this was. To understand Rosso we have to understand plurality as part of his subject; a part that has been lost to our common understanding as a result of the dispersal of the sculptures themselves. Although wax is a common enough sculptural material, it normally remains in the studio, part of the production process, rather than its result. Nonetheless, there are examples of wax sculptures in most collections, from throughout the modern period, and they are remarkably resilient. We might remember that Degas’s large series of dancer and equine sculptures was made in wax and left in wax up until the time of his death in 1917, when his heirs followed Rosso’s steps in terms of the technician they used in casting his waxes: Albino Palazzolo worked in the same foundry where Rosso had worked in Milan. Rosso uses wax as he does plaster and bronze, as a liquid material that will be cast and become definitive. These materials not only will represent the original clay motif, but also, and more particularly, they will bear the imprint of the original plaster after it is released with a knife from the gelatin mold. These knife lines, like pentimenti, are a distinctive feature of Rosso’s casts. Indeed, what is perhaps most unusual in Rosso is not the material, or the modeling, but rather the search for the outline and the treatment of the edge. His torn profiles might remind us of the edges of some of Rodin’s marbles, but they are even more analogous to the plaster cast, the central agent of the sculptor’s atelier at that time. In this, Rosso again takes his part within the rubric of the studio, and its deployment of a putatively mobile or transitional material, like wax or plaster. But, as we have learned above all from the Rodin example, plaster can be a hard and effectively permanent material. The affinity between the edge of the plaster and the edge of the wax is striking, lending to each material a sense of transience that is, in fact, entirely fictional. Rosso’s waxes and plasters are not worked, but rather cast. They can be usefully compared to photography, in their timescale and in the way in which, in both techniques, the image is cropped and annotated.

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For over twenty years, Rosso proceeded by means of replication and variation. Instead of making new works, he cast the same works in different materials and in different ways. Thus an oeuvre of around forty subjects expanded in a manner that is effectively uncountable. Whereas the casting of editions has conventionally been about stabilizing a product for commercialization, with Rosso, casting was all about destabilization, finding another opportunity for restaging the work. His casts, like Rodin’s plasters, are here to stay, and are gradually staking their claim to be part of a fuller discussion of the evolution of sculpture around 1900, and its relationship to multiplicity, replication, and reproduction, in two and three dimensions.

chapter 8

Medardo Rosso, the Italian Sculptor-Founder in Paris: Transforming the Multiple in Modern Sculpture Sharon Hecker 1

Introduction

In 1895, a journalist working under the name Santillane wrote the following in an article on Medardo Rosso in the Parisian literary journal Gil Blas: Halfway up the Montmartre hill, at the first turn of rue Caulaincourt, not far from Steinlen’s Cate’s [sic] cottage, in a completely vacant lot, one can see a shack made of boards, flanked by bizarre huts … The inhabitant is the coarse Milanese who was introduced to us by Auguste Rodin: Medardo Rosso. He lives there among his wobbly partitions in front of the huge ovens that he himself built … One must [go to] his factory on rue Caulaincourt … [and] his little museum on boulevard des Batignolles to visit his latest creations … Rosso does not sculpt the material; he polishes it, flays it, fades it, patinates it, and, as if by magic, animates it.1 In this colorful account of fin de siècle bohemian Montmartre, the journalist describes Rosso not only as an idiosyncratic sculptor but also as a craftsman who cast his own works. Indeed, Rosso’s role as a sculptor-founder, unusual for his time, was key both to his artistic identity and to his very personal 1  Santillane, “La vie parisienne: Petits salons,” Gil Blas, October 27, 1895. Steinlen’s house, which he named “Cat’s Cottage,” was at number 73. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci claim that Rosso actually bought a building (“immobile”) at rue Caulaincourt 50, where he built his own ovens, but documentation would be needed to support this claim (Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura [Milan: Skira, 2009], 371). The small “museum” noted by Santillane on Boulevard des Batignolles must have been Rosso’s atelier. In an undated letter to Rodin, likely from December 1894 or January 1895, Rosso gives his address as Boulevard des Batignolles 94. See Medardo Rosso to Auguste Rodin, n.d., fonds historiques, Ros-5401, Musée Rodin, Paris. The address on Rosso’s letters after this date is always given as 98–100 Boulevard des Batignolles, but it is not certain when he moved to this atelier. See Ville de Paris—Cadastre de 1876: Boulevard des Batignolles, Propriété no. 98, cote D1P4/78, liasse 1876, no. 168, Archives de Paris. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own.

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engagement in the production of his serial sculptures. He tended to treat each cast of a work individually, using different materials and finishes to achieve unique effects. This approach, distinct from the uniformity typically sought by the industrial foundries of the period, allowed him to attribute new meaning to the serial production of sculpture, asserting the specific value of each individual work in spite of its status as a multiple. In this chapter, I investigate the significance of this sculptural multiplicity, addressing Rosso’s deep engagement with the process of making and marketing each cast. My goal is to critically assess his project in an effort to challenge longstanding assumptions about his artistic process and methods of production. Ultimately, I use this as the basis for addressing broader questions about the nature and implications of reproduction and repetition in modern sculpture and in modern art in general. Rosso, a pivotal yet enigmatic figure in the origin and development of modern European sculpture, was born in Italy but spent three decades in Paris from 1889. During the course of his career, he created fewer than fifty original subjects in clay, providing emotionally charged glimpses of introverted, sick, laughing, anxious, or smiling heads and small figures, especially of women, children, and old people. He also sculpted various street figures and outcasts relating to social-realist themes drawn from models proposed by French modern art and literature, and often re-elaborated by Italian authors of the period. He cast most every subject numerous times in plaster, wax, and bronze. Inspired by the textural variations achieved in the work of avant-garde painters, yet articulating these ideas in his own way, Rosso transported the technique to the surfaces of his sculptures, seeking to create light, fluid effects that served to “dematerialize,” as he called it, the solid masses of the medium. By barely modeling the face in Impression de Boulevard. La Femme à la voilette (Impression of a Boulevard: Lady with a Veil, ca. 1892–97; fig. 8.1), for example, a Parisian woman whose features seem to be masked by a veil, or in his masterpiece, Ecce puer (Behold the Child, 1906; fig. 8.2), a young boy said to have been glimpsed by the artist through a sheer curtain, Rosso created subjects that appear to emerge from or be on the verge of disappearing into unformed matter.2 Serially cast sculpture’s noteworthy expansion and new popularity reflected technical developments in the casting processes, especially in France, from the 1830s. This had led to a boom in industrialized foundry production of serial

2  For in-depth discussion, see Sharon Hecker, A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017).

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Figure 8.1

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Medardo Rosso, Impression de boulevard. Femme à la voilette (Impression of the Boulevard. Lady with a Veil, 1892–97 ca.), installed in the gallery of the retrospective of Auguste Renoir at the Salon d’Automne, Paris, 1904 Photograph by the artist. Private Collection

sculpture by the second half of the nineteenth century.3 Although Rosso began his career using professional foundries and mostly exhibiting works in bronze, a few years after he moved to Paris he started to make and sell waxes and plaster casts of his sculptures as finished works, along with his bronzes. He also created his own mini-foundry in his studio and began to cast his own works. Throughout his career, Rosso produced his sculptures by means of serial reproduction, that is, casting by the indirect casting method using “intermodels” and their molds (see Chapter 1 for a detailed explanation of this process), as did all bronze sculptors of his time. Two methods for casting were available: sand casting and cire perdue, or lost wax. As art historian Elisabeth Lebon has shown in her essay in this volume, most foundries in Paris used 3  Two seminal English-language texts on this issue are Jacques de Caso, “Serial Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century France,” in Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, ed. Jean Wasserman (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 1–27; and Neil McWilliam, “Craft, Commerce and the Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism: Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffier,” in Sculpture and its Reproductions, ed. Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), 100–112.

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Figure 8.2 Medardo Rosso, Ecce puer (Behold the Child, 1906). Modern contact print from original glass negative, 17.9 × 13 cm. Date of photograph post-1906. Photograph by the artist. Private Collection

the sand-casting technique (See Chapter 2).4 Rosso used the lost-wax casting method for his works. The historical significance of this fact has gone unnoticed. This ancient technique had fallen out of use in nineteenth-century France. Consequently, cire perdue bronzes became rare and desirable in fin de siècle Paris. The technique involved pouring molten metal into a mold that was created by a wax model, which was burned out in a kiln and then drained away. When the wax is melted out of the mold, the negative hollow impression left by the wax became the receptacle for the molten metal. Rosso was able to use cire perdue due to his earlier experience in Italian foundries, where this technique was still prevalent. This autonomous mode of production liberated him from commercial Parisian foundries and gave him full control over the production and appearance of the casts. It also allowed him an opportunity to experiment with a range of styles and techniques, making his process a major 4  See also Elisabeth Lebon, “Sculptor-Founders in Late-Nineteenth Century France: The Role of Lost-Wax Casting,” in this volume, 18–65.

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aspect of his pursuit of a modern language for sculpture. Later in his career, from 1900 and even after his permanent return to Italy in 1918, Rosso continued to devise ingenious ways to remake the same subject in different forms and materials through his independent casting experiments. Rosso survived almost exclusively by making small-scale works for which there was an increasing demand even in an age of “monumentomania.” Casting serially allowed him to take advantage of the specific requirements of an expanded middle class of art collectors. The emergence of this new class of private consumer had begun, during the second half of the nineteenth century, to allow sculptors and other artists to make a living without depending on either official institutions or major public commissions. In the 1880s, while still in Italy, Rosso had found little support for his bold efforts to design public or private sculptural monuments, which were seen as too radical for the establishment. His move to Paris in 1889, however, came at a time when official entities like the Salon had begun to lose their certifying function. An increase in exhibitions for non-establishment artists allowed foreigners like Rosso to participate in the burgeoning avant-garde art scene in that city, while an expanding demand for more affordable artworks and new technologies that facilitated serial casting opened the door to wider economic opportunities. Perhaps due to a discomfort with the homogeneity typically associated with industrially produced objects, Rosso also imagined and marketed his casts as unique, individual artworks. Although other sculptors adopted this as a marketing strategy, Rosso was the only sculptor to do so by confounding, overturning, and reinventing the very language of casting. His experiments with subtle differences in form, materials, and surface treatments, as well as his use of various bases and angles of presentation, are visible on each cast. 2

Rosso, the Sculptor-Founder

While Rosso was not the only sculptor of his time to personally cast his own works, he nonetheless stands out because of the enormous significance he attributed to the gesture of casting and the ways in which he publicly proclaimed this. From his engagement with material process he came to fashion a completely original persona, making the very act of casting a key part of his artistic intention and image. Given the many talented Italian craftsmen who came to dominate the French foundry industry after 1890, Rosso, who portrayed himself as an artist-laborer, was also careful to distinguish and elevate his act of making as the work of a creative artist rather than merely of a competent manual practitioner. He further emphasized this position after he was attacked in

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the Mercure de France in 1895 by the French critic Camille Mauclair, who denigrated him as “an able founder, an expert in the various tricks of his trade … [a] malicious laborer who does not exist, artistically speaking, to any degree.”5 To establish his identity as a charismatic, mysterious sculptor-founder, from 1895 onward Rosso developed new ways of publicizing his art-making activities. For example, he made, and at times publicly circulated, carefully choreographed studio photographs showing himself, his tools, and his works in the studio, and sent personal letters to clients in which he claimed to divulge his special secret recipes for casting and patinating bronzes (see figs 8.9, 8.10, 8.12, and 8.13 below). After 1900, he would hold casting parties in his Paris studio, during which he would dramatically cast bronzes in front of his guests’ eyes using the cire perdue technique, which had fallen out of use in France by that time and was therefore seen as especially rare and desirable. He would then serve everyone champagne. Vivid descriptions of these casting parties were recorded in the personal diaries of friends and in journal articles by such important French fin de siècle literary figures as the second-generation Symbolist poet Jehan Rictus, and art critics like Camille de Sainte-Croix and Louis Vauxcelles.6 Rosso even inspired the fictional character of “Medardo Rosso,” a flamboyant Italian sculptor, in a 1908 French roman d’art titled L’Arantelle (The Spider Web), penned by anarchic journalist André Ibels and novelist Georges de Lys.7 But, most importantly, in an effort to suggest a value beyond that of mere mechanical reproduction, Rosso left material traces of the foundry on the fronts, backs, lower sections, and interiors of many of his casts, deliberately flaunting marks of process. Visible anomalies are everywhere on the surfaces of the sculptures: knife slashes from the cutting away of the molds, holes created by air-bubbles and core pins, the raised lines of mismatched molds, casts of rods and sprues, and trickles and blobs of solidified liquid matter—as well as the crusty plaster investment from the foundry process, normally chased away after casting (fig. 8.3). All this deliberate preservation of imperfections was far from the foundry practices of the day. Rosso cropped his forms in unanticipated ways, not only in the original model but also during various stages of casting. The finished casts often stand in asymmetrical, unstable positions on unusual bases of wood, marble, metal, or cloth, further enhancing their odd appearance (figs 8.4 and 8.5). These marks of the creative process, traditionally seen as undesirable defects to be avoided, assert a sense of uniqueness that 5  Camille Mauclair, “Choses d’art,” Mercure de France 16 (December 1895): 412. 6  Vauxcelles would coin the words “Fauvism” in 1905 and “Cubism” in 1908. 7  André Ibels and Georges de Lys, L’Arantelle: Roman d’art (Paris: J. Bosc et Ce., 1908).

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Medardo Rosso, Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis, 1888–89, bronze, detail of cremation urn with the sprues used for the casting process, normally chiseled away after a cast has been made, left visible. Cimitero Monumentale, Milan Photograph by the author

Figure 8.4 Medardo Rosso, Fine (La Ruffiana) (End. [The Procuress], (1883)). Rosso mounted this work on a broken piece of a door. Professional photograph, date of photograph unknown but pre-1887 Private Collection

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Figure 8.5 Medardo Rosso, Carne altrui (Flesh of Others, 1883–84), bronze. Rosso arranged this work for display on a piece of fabric. Modern photo from original glass negative, 18 × 13 cm, date of photograph uncertain Photograph by the artist. Private collection

defies the uniform conventions of mechanically reproduced art. Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci in their 2009 Catalogo ragionato have suggested that the modernity of Rosso’s work lies in the fact that his casts are of “unparalleled formal and technical quality,”8 from “the quality of the alloy[s] … [to] the substance and color of the patinas, to the compositions of the wax, to its way of reacting to time.”9 Rosso’s work is undeniably radical in its modernity, but this is due to its subversion of the formal and technical conventions of the medium, the deliberate nature of which is supported by technical analyses found elsewhere in this volume. Today, such a willful act of subversion is termed artistic “deskilling.”

8  Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 15. 9  Ibid.

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Serial Sculpture and Modernity

At a conference held in 2004 at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas called “Variable States: Intention, Appearance, and Interpretation in Modern Sculpture,” art historian Penelope Curtis called for a new appreciation of the sculptural multiple, asking what we might learn from it about the nature of artistic intention.10 She stated that the persistence of scholarly investment in the Romantic notion of the uniqueness of the act of making art is the greatest obstacle to a real understanding of reproductive sculpture. The suitability of sculpture for reproduction, and the fact that this “reproduce-ability” can generate meaning, power, and financial profit, she argued, have been overlooked by scholars in the field. Whatever the reasons for reproduction may be, sculptural reproduction embodied the same potential for a range of aesthetic choices and results as any other work of art. However, it has rarely been understood in this way. Contrasting painting with sculpture, Curtis noted that the existence of numerous versions of the same sculpture is usually seen as a source of regret or embarrassment.11 This has led to the standard practice in museums and galleries of showing only one cast of each subject or one cast in each material. The variations and their significance are commonly not considered worthy of further investigation. By contrast, scholars and critics, even over the course of generations, have reliably attached significance to certain painters’ slightly different versions of the same subject: Edgar Degas’s series of ballerinas and horse racers were seen by the Goncourt brothers and Émile Zola, for example, as representing an artistic impotence that mirrored the artist’s notorious celibacy.12 More recently, art historians like Carol Armstrong have suggested that Degas’s practice reflected an obsessive return to working out a single artistic problem in multiple solutions.13 In both cases, the creation of many works on the same subject was treated as significant in itself. Similarly, scholars like Steven Z. Levine have interpreted Claude Monet’s obsessive revisiting of the subject of haystacks as evidence of the narcissistic self-reflection that defined the struggle of the fin

10  Penelope Curtis, “A Curator’s View” (paper presented at “Variable States: Intention, Appearance and Interpretation in Modern Sculpture,” Nasher Sculpture Center, October 22–23, 2004, http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/Portals/0/Documents/ Learn/Research/ConferenceVariableStates/PDFS/Transcript.pdf) (Accessed May 1, 2020). 11  Ibid., 2. 12  For a discussion of these opinions, see Carol Armstrong, Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003), 15. 13  Ibid., 131.

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de siècle artist.14 Edvard Munch’s repeated representation of his sister’s death is read by Sue Prideaux, among other art historians, as an emotional response to psychological trauma.15 However, the variations in a work of serial sculpture tend to be ignored, and while the various iterations of a single subject in sculpture are rarely exhibited together, Monet’s haystacks and Degas’s ballerinas are frequently displayed in groups intended to encourage close examination of the artist’s development of the theme. Rosso’s process of production is exceptional for its material and conceptual experimentation and innovation. A full appreciation of his work as a serial sculptor, however, has been hampered by our investment in the notion of uniqueness and the individual gesture of the master’s hand as well as by concepts such as the “original” and the “first.” Even when the value of seriality is acknowledged, a hierarchy is often sought. There is an anxious tendency to seek originality or aura by trying to identify the “first sketch” in clay, the “original clay model,” the notionally “original” plaster, or the “first cast” in a series. In Rosso’s case, “first” and “original” are unstable terms: the clay models made by the artist’s hand have all been lost in the process of casting, and the plaster models that have survived are not necessarily the first, original, or only model from which the casts were subsequently issued. Nor is it yet clear whether Rosso made his own plasters. Indeed, despite certain assertions to the contrary, it is not always possible to securely identify an “original” plaster model (see, for example, the two plaster models of the same work by Rosso, Plate 1 and Plate 2 in this volume). Plaster models often broke or became damaged from use. Rarely would a sculptor risk the loss of his precious model by working from a single plaster. Auguste Rodin, for example, typically had six to twelve plaster models made of every work, both to be able to experiment with assembling different casts together, and so that he was prepared when one fell apart.16 Rosso never dated his casts or numbered them as parts of an edition, and he signed only some of them. He did not maintain systematic records of production and gifts, or copies of receipts from sales. While he cast many works by himself, he also had casts made for him in foundries in Milan and Turin, but never allowed them to stamp his works with their names. Complicating matters further, he gave different dates and titles to the same work over the years 14  This is the principal claim made in Steven Z. Levine, Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 15  Sue Prideaux, Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 16  There is as yet no comprehensive catalogue of Rodin’s plasters.

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and provided varying accounts of his life and career, editing and omitting key details to suit the occasion. Dates of a work’s exhibition or sale, its appearance in (often-undated) studio photographs, or even its mention in a publication cannot be used as a definitive marker of “firstness.” Rosso’s sense of privacy and his tendency to dissemble mean that, in addition, secondary sources such as journals, letters, and personal recollections (even from people who were apparently very close to him) must be examined with caution. Mola and Vittuci, in the Catalogo ragionato, have attempted to create and attach value to a “first to last sequence.” However, in my view, at the current stage of our knowledge we cannot determine such a sequence. Many casts are still missing and some previously unknown in the literature continue to surface. In serial sculpture in general, Curtis rightly argues that our obsession with the idea of originality leads us to privilege the beginning of the sculptural process, when often, in reality, the last run of casts might turn out to be the most successful because by then technical aspects have been mastered. This principle applies equally to prints, which are another form of fine-art multiple. In Rosso’s case, any cast might potentially be the best or the worst in a series, for, as with any single work of art, the result depended on the working conditions of the moment and the final outcome of the process. The artist’s individual and sometimes spontaneous approach to each of his serially produced works differed from that of many of his fellow sculptors, who generally paid foundries to achieve consistent and preestablished results. For example, a review of 1880 in the Art Journal proclaimed that the best serial sculpture of the time made by the French bronze industry was reproduced with “an accuracy that is absolutely mathematical.”17 The contrary approach seems very contemporary nowadays. A good example of the irrelevance of traditional hierarchies to Rosso’s working process can be found in his Enfant malade (Sick Child, 1893–95), a subject whose casts are often very different—with or without a “halo” around the head, and with or without a thick flange protruding from the right shoulder (figs 8.6a and 8.6b). Some casts lack a base while others incorporate the whole plaster mother mold, or part of it, as a base. But no chronological order can be established among these differences—bases, flanges, and haloes can be cut off and smoothed in any cast, and they rarely plot a temporal sequence.18 By shifting the discussion toward variability and multiplicity rather than arguing “first to last” or trying to establish hierarchies of value, we can evaluate 17  “The Reproduction of Statuary,” The Art Journal 6 (1880): 368. 18  Sharon Hecker, “An Enfant Malade by Medardo Rosso from the Collection of Louis Vauxcelles,” The Burlington Magazine 152, no. 1292 (2010): 727–35.

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Figure 8.6a Medardo Rosso, Enfant malade (Sick Child, 1893–95) with “halo” around the head, an artifact of the casting process resulting from a gap in the two parts of the gelatin mold that led the wax to spill out. Rather than removing it, the artist has left this artifact intact and taken it up as an aesthetic device. Modern contact print from an original glass negative, 24 × 17.2 cm. Date of photograph uncertain PHOTOGRAPH BY THE ARTIST. PRIVATE COLLECTION



Figure 8.6b Medardo Rosso, Enfant malade (Sick Child, 1893–95) without “halo” around the head. Gelatin silver print, (photograph of a photograph, enlarged), 41.4 × 33.5. Date of photograph unknown Photograph by the artist. Private Collection

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difference and sameness, and recognize meaningful details that are difficult to detect when viewing a single object in the series. Such an approach encourages us to consider the limitations that might have been imposed by foundry accidents, cost, temporal, and spatial constraints, as well as by location, availability of materials, tools, and technical knowledge at the time. Looking at different casts of the same sculpture can also provide the key information needed to restore a single cast. Comparison of different casts of the same subject reveals changes to the sculptural surface, allowing us to address the question of whether they were deliberate or the result of accidental damage. This information is especially relevant in the case of Rosso’s bronzes and his fragile, often damaged waxes, some of which have been atrociously restored. The object’s surface is key: we begin to ask questions about opacity vs. shininess, the artist’s love of chance vs. the careful creation of homogeneity, and the visual results of rubbing or damage. Surface also leads us to think about meaning: how might the artist have felt about accidents that occurred during the reproductive process and what was his relationship to the pure raw “ugliness” of a freshly cast bronze? What made him decide whether to patinate a surface or not? What dialogue can be established between material and perception and what might we learn from a broader understanding of the significance of the multiple? 4

Reassessing Rosso’s Beginnings at the Fonderia Giovanni Strada in Milan

We have no direct knowledge of Rosso’s training and experience with casting, but it probably began early on in his career. Born in 1858 in Turin, he moved to Milan in 1877 and began sculpting around 1880. Unlike most sculptors of his time, he was not born into a family of artisans or craftsmen. He also had more years of primary and secondary schooling than most sculptors who apprenticed early on in workshops. Apart from an eleven-month period of study at the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1882–83, in which he took no sculpture classes, Rosso’s professional educational history is not documented. He was expelled from the academy for punching a fellow student who would not sign a petition he had circulated demanding changes in the institution’s policies.19 In these years, Rosso probably acquired his first casting skills from Giovanni

19  For a full account and a transcription of the original documents, see Sharon Hecker, “Ambivalent Bodies: Medardo Rosso’s Brera Petition,” The Burlington Magazine 142, no. 1173 (December 2000): 773–77.

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Strada, the owner of a metal foundry near Brera, whom he mentioned in his letters.20 The history of nineteenth-century Italian foundries has not been studied systematically, nor has the role of these foundries been contextualized within the gradual industrialization of Italy on the eve of the modern age. Strada’s business has remained hitherto unexamined in the literature on Rosso. A better understanding of Strada’s foundry can enrich our knowledge about Rosso’s development as a sculptor-founder and provide a springboard for future studies of Italian foundries in this period. This seems important given the fact that Italian founders would soon dominate the French foundry industry after a major wave of skilled immigration in the 1890s. In Milan, foundries were considered to be part of the city’s growing economic power in the newly united Italy. Their increasing significance is evident in a survey conducted in 1893 on the conditions of industry in Milan on the eve of industrialization by Leopoldo Sabbatini, who created the new Milanese Chamber of Commerce and became the first president of the Università Bocconi, the first Italian institution of higher education to grant a degree in economics. Sabbatini noted that “foundries were very few and of very little importance until a few years ago.”21 He listed Strada as one of the four most important out of the twenty-eight Milanese artistic bronze foundries that worked in “smooth and ornate casting.”22 Sabbatini further noted that all of the artistic foundries, including Strada’s, worked on commission, relying on clients to bring models to them for casting. Many foundries such as Strada produced objects for foreign clients who brought models of ancient and Renaissance Italian sculptures to be cast there. Archival documents indicate that Strada opened his business in 1878, although this was not his first foundry, for he is also registered in the Chamber of Commerce as the successor of a foundry called G. Strada e Galbuseri T. Milano.23 Documents give the foundry’s address as via San Marco, 26. In letters from Paris to Milan, however, Rosso would note that the Strada foundry

20  I transcribed and translated the relevant passages found in Rosso’s letters, with annotations by Derek Pullen, in “Appendix: Letters on Casting,” in Cooper and Hecker, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, 137–39. 21  Leopoldo Sabbatini, Notizie sulle condizioni industriali della provincia di Milano (Milan: Hoepli, 1893), 141. 22  Ibid. 23   See “Giovanni Strada,” Camera di Commercio di Milano, Archivio Ditte, accessed January 16, 2016, http://www3.milomb.camcom.it/index.phtml?pagina=form&nome=AR CHIVIO_T_Ditte&explode=10.05&azione=UPD&Id_Ditte=51333 (Accessed May 1, 2019).

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was located at the end of via Amerigo Vespucci 11.24 Given that via Vespucci is adjacent to via San Marco, it is possible that the foundry had moved by 1889 or that it had its ovens on via Vespucci and its offices on via San Marco. By 1904, Strada’s business had closed and another foundry called Successori di Strada Giovanni e C. (Successors of Strada Giovanni and Company) is registered by Giovanni Piazza at the same via Vespucci address.25 This was a wellplaced area for a foundry because the Martesana canal (called the Naviglio) passed through it, thereby allowing for easy transport of materials and supplies by boat. Strada’s operation seems to have been large scale. I have found his name stamped on small sculptures and large monuments by Enrico Astorri (1859– 1921) and Demetrio Paernio (1851–1912) throughout Northern Italy.26 Catalogues indicate that Strada won the silver medal at the Esposizione agraria, industriale e didattica in Monza in 1879. He also exhibited his products—and received official praise—at the massive Esposizione industriale italiana held in Milan in 1881.27 His casting experience was wide ranging: he publicized his foundry as a maker of “statues, busts, bas and high reliefs, wreathes, flowers … decorator in any kind of gilded bronzes with a studio of chasers and engravers.”28 (figs 8.7 and 8.8) 24  Correspondence Medardo Rosso-Felice Cameroni (1889 June–1892), Biblioteca d’arte– Biblioteca archeological–Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive–CASVA, Commune di Milano (referred to hereafter as “Rosso-Cameroni Correspondence”), L18, January 26, 1889, in Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), ed. Luciano Caramel, exh. cat. (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 102–3. 25  It is registered in 1905 by Giovanni Piazza at Via Vespucci 11. It closed in 1920. See “Giovanni Piazza,” Camera di Commercio, Archivio Ditte, http://www3.mi.camcom.it/ index.phtml?pagina=form&nome=ARCHIVIO_T_Ditte&explode=10.05&azione=UPD& Id_Ditte=41067. (Accessed January 16, 2016). 26  For example, Astorri’s Schiavo (Bust of a Slave, 1892), bears the stamp “G. STRADA FUSE, MILANO 1892,” as does Demetrio Paernio’s Boy with a Crab, 1892, as does the Bust of Segantini by Paolo Troubetzkoy at the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco (“Bust of Giovanni Segantini,” FAMSF Search the Collections. https://art.famsf.org/paolotroubetzkoy/bust-giovanni-segantini-200816). (Accessed January 16. 2019). 27  See “5282: Strada Giovanni, Milano; Oggetti d’arte fusi; Oggetti cesellati; Medaglia d’argento, Monza, 1879,” Esposizione industriale italiana del 1881 in Milano: Catalogo Ufficiale (Milan: Sonzogno, 1881), 341. See also Esposizione industriale italiana del 1881 in Milano, Relazioni dei giurati: Le Arti usuali (Milan: Hoepli, 1883), 35. 28  See Giovanni Strada to Avv. [Attorney] C. Mantovani, November 30, 1883, busta 56, fasc. 1, Archivio storico civico del comune di Pavia, Archivio comunale, Ufficio tecnico comunale. Stationery reads: “Premiata Fonderia Artistica di Giovanni Strada, State, Busti, Basso ed altro rilievo, Corone, Fiori, ecc. Decoratore in ogni genere di Bronzi dorati con Studio di Cesellatore ed incisore, Milano, Via San Marco, n. 26.”

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Figure 8.7 Letterhead of the Fonderia Giovanni Strada, letter from Giovanni Strada to the lawyer C. Mantovani, 30 November 1883. Archivio storico civico del comune di Pavia, Archivio comunale, Ufficio tecnico comunale, busta 56, fasc. 1

Figure 8.8 .

Envelope of the Fonderia Giovanni Strada, letter from Giovanni Strada to the lawyer Griziotti, 9 April 1884. Archivio storico civico del comune di Pavia, Archivio comunale, Ufficio tecnico comunale, busta 56, fasc. 1

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Strada claimed he used the “system of Benvenuto Cellini,”29 likely meaning the cire perdue or lost-wax casting process. This was the process for which Rosso would later become known in Paris. An unpublished series of letters related to Strada’s casting of the first monument to Giuseppe Garibaldi in Pavia in 1883 gives further insight into his casting skills. In a letter written by another Milanese founder, Pietro Tocchi, Strada’s cast is praised for the homogeneity of the metals found throughout the monument, while in another related letter, the monument’s alloys are analyzed, demonstrating a typical composition for bronze sculpture.30 All this provides evidence of Strada’s range of technical capabilities and gives us an idea of what Rosso might have learned at the foundry. Rosso would continue to use the Strada foundry to cast his works even after his relocation to Paris in 1889, although he also sent works to be cast at an unidentified foundry in Turin. In fact, Strada was still casting some of Rosso’s pieces (no longer, however, at the sculptor’s request) as late as 1900.31 To date, we do not know which casts the founder made for Rosso. His casts for Rosso bear no distinguishing marks or special casting features. The connection between the two is only established by letters. No surviving works by Rosso incorporate the Strada stamp, which would establish him as the founder. In addition to Rosso’s friendship and working relationship with Strada, the sculptor maintained professional relationships with other founders, one of whom was named Mazzantini, while the other was possibly Bianchi.32 In 1886, 29  See Giovanni Strada to Avv. [lawyer] Griziotti, April 9, 1884, busta 56, fasc. 1, Archivio storico civico del comune di Pavia, Archivio comunale, Ufficio tecnico comunale. Enve­ lope reads: “Sistema Benvenuto Cellini, Cesello, Incisioni, Decorazioni in bronzo, ecc.” 30  The percentages are given as: Tin 7.78 = Zinc 3.10 = Lead 0.92 = Copper 88.20. See Prof. Tullio Brugnatelli to Prof. Dr. Luigi Gabba, February 25, 1884, and Pietro Tocchi to Profess. Galba, February 12, 1884, on stationery with letterhead “Pietro Tocchi / Fonditore Metalli / Milano – Via Vivajo, 14.” Busta 56, fasc. 1, Archivio storico civico del comune di Pavia, Archivio comunale, Ufficio tecnico comunale. 31  Alberto Grubicy to Medardo Rosso, September 26, 1900, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. 32  There are only two mentions of these founders in the primary documents. In a letter from Alberto Grubicy to Medardo Rosso, dated December 20, 1900, Grubicy asks Rosso whether he has ever worked with a certain “fonditore Bianchi” (Bianchi the founder). We do not have Rosso’s response; it is therefore impossible to know whether Rosso did indeed have casts made by Bianchi. The founder could possibly have been Cesare Bianchi e C., whose foundry is listed as being on Via Solferino, 46. “Cesare Bianchi,” Camera di Commercio di Milano, Archivio Ditte, http://www3.mi.camcom.it/index.phtml?pagi na=form&nome=ARCHIVIO_T_Ditte&explode=10.05&azione=UPD&Id_Ditte=5786. (Accessed January 16, 2016). I have found no mention of Bianchi or Mazzantini either in the Chamber of Commerce or in commercial guides to Milan. Mazzantini is mentioned in an undated letter from Rosso’s brother Michele to the artist, published in part by Mola and Vittucci. Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato, 64 n. 9, 261–62. Mola and Vittucci assert, without proof, that Rosso left a terracotta model of his Bersagliere (Italian Sharpshooter, 1882) at either Bianchi or Strada, from which the foundry later supposedly

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Rosso made a funerary monument in the Cimitero Monumentale in Milan for Carlo Carabelli, described in local papers as a “metal founder.”33 Rosso’s relationship with foundry workers is further indicated by the fact that, when he separated from his wife and child in 1888, he went to live in the home of

made unauthorized copies (ibid., 46). Mola and Vittucci further assert that the cast of Rosso’s El Locch (The Hooligan, 1881–82) in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Rome was cast from a plaster or terracotta model left by Rosso at Mazzantini’s foundry. As proof, Mola and Vittucci (ibid., 54–56, 234) cite Grubicy’s letter, which, however, never mentions this work in relation to Mazzantini. More credible, on the other hand, is Mola and Vittucci’s reference to the abovementioned letter to Rosso from his brother Michele, undated but anonymously annotated in pencil with the date “5/6–91” and preserved in the Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio, in which Michele tells Rosso that Mazzantini made five casts of Rosso’s Birichino (known as The Scamp, 1882) at Rosso’s request and that they were ready to be sent to Rosso in Paris (ibid., 64 n. 9, 261–262). Finally, Mola and Vittucci erroneously attribute to Bianchi the casting of six bronzes of Gli Innamorati sotto il lampione (Lovers Under the Lamppost, 1883) (ibid., 349). Grubicy had written to Rosso that he saw the six casts of this work being made by Strada. See Alberto Grubicy to Medardo Rosso, September 26, 1900, Archivio Medardo Rosso, published in part in ibid., 235–36. 33  A cast of the bust is kept in the Museo Medardo Rosso. A note in the Carabelli file reads: “1886, month 1 day 5, Galleria B. C. Levante, Section N. XV, Cell N. 6, exhumed from the Cimitero Maggiore. 1985 went into the common ossuary because the concession of the ossuary was not renewed.” Fascicolo Carlo Carabelli, Cimitero Monumentale. The work was reviewed by Luigi Chirtani (“Il dí dei morti,” L’Illustrazione italiana, October 31, 1886, 322). Mino Borghi claimed that Carabelli was a “plaster salesman who was a supplier for Rosso” nicknamed “El gessat” (Medardo Rosso [Milan: Il Milione, 1950], 65). However, Carabelli was actually described as a founder in civic documents and Chirtani’s review of the tomb. See Carlo Migliavacca, “Monumento funebre a Carlo Carabelli, 1886,” in Il segno della Scapigliatura: Rinnovamento tra il Canton Ticino e la Lombardia Grande nel secondo Ottocento, ed. Mariangela Agliati Ruggia and Sergio Rebora, exh. cat. (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2006), 238–39. I have further found that Carabelli had been subjected to a beating after a political demonstration against Austrian authorities in Milan’s Piazza Castello on August 23, 1849. See Carlo Tivaroni, L’Italia degli Italiani: Tomo I (1849–1859) (Turin: Roux Frassati, 1895), 9. This could provide a window onto Rosso’s political leanings and his associations with founders who had anarchic tendencies. Mola and Vittucci claim that a “Signor Trebini,” whose portrait Rosso sculpted at an unspecified date, was either “an employee or a colleague of Mazzantini’s” (Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato, 261). However, the two letters they cite as proof do not mention Trebini’s identity. Borghi called Trebini a personal friend of Rosso (ibid., 65) and Giovanni Lista believes Trebini was a Sardinian bourgeois client of Rosso (Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia [Milan: 5 Continents, 2003], 147–48). I believe that Trebini was actually Giovanni Francesco (known also as G. F.) Trebini, who was not a founder, but rather an industrialist. Trebini commercialized portable refrigerators in Milan and was a contributing member, along with Grubicy, of the Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente in Milan. See Lorenzo Benapiani and Augusto Barattani, Ars: Appunti critici illustrati alla mostra della Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente in Milano (Milan: Galli, 1886), 162.

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Francesco Lodi, the director of the Strada Foundry, at via Lazzaro Palazzi 29.34 He may well have found support among fellow founders for his anarchic political ideas, which were typical of foundry workers of the time. Strada’s name (as well as Lodi’s) appears in letters that Rosso wrote to his friend, the Milanese literary critic Felice Cameroni, dated to late 1889, after his arrival in Paris.35 Rosso had ordered several bronzes from Strada to have cast in Milan and sent back to Paris, but Strada had botched the casts. Rosso angrily relayed to Cameroni instructions for his founder about using the gelatin molds. This correspondence, together with the globs of gelatin found by Derek Pullen on Rosso’s waxes in 1999, further supported by the 2003 study I conducted with a group from Harvard University, as well as by the current study, all confirm Rosso’s knowledge and experience with mechanical reproduction using gelatin molds, a technique no longer in use today, and which was used by many sculptors who cast by the lost-wax casting technique.36 5

1890s: Casting in Paris

Rosso had a difficult start as an artist in Italy: his large-scale monument proposals were rejected, his funerary art was either criticized by the press or removed entirely, and his small works went unappreciated by all but the most advanced Italian critics. But it seems that he was able to sell his casts from the beginning. As early as 1886, a journalist in the Italian periodical L’Illustrazione italiana claimed that in four years Rosso had made “about twenty works” and cast “about sixty bronzes,” which he had sold in Vienna and Paris.37 Even if the numbers might have been exaggerated, this means that Rosso was already serializing his sculptures in the first decade of his career. His earliest studio photograph of 1883 shows two identical versions of each of two sculptures he had 34   Rosso-Cameroni Correspondence, L18, January 26, 1889, in Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 102–3. 35   Rosso-Cameroni Correspondence, L21, n.d. (likely from mid-February 1890); L22, February 12, 1890; L23, February 14, 1890. For publication history of these letters, see Sharon Hecker, “Reflections on Repetition,” in Cooper and Hecker, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, 149, n. 55. For transcription and translation of relevant passages, see n. 20, above. 36  See Henry Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” in Cooper and Hecker, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, 69–93; and Derek Pullen, “Gelatin Molds: Rosso’s Open Secret,” in ibid., 95–102. See also Elisabeth Lebon, “Appendix: Gelatin Molding,” in this volume, 60–62. Gelatin is not essential for the lost-wax process. Neither Pierre Bingen nor Paul Wayland Bartlett used it. 37  “L’Amore materno,” L’Illustrazione italiana, November 28, 1886, 406, 418.

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Medardo Rosso in his studio in Milan, 1883. Photographer unknown Private collection

made in 1882: Dopo una scappata (After a Prank), later known as Il Birichino (The Scamp), and A zonzo (Wandering Around), subsequently called El Locch (The Hooligan), although a concern with variation is already evident, for each of the four is mounted on a slightly different base (fig. 8.9).38 This photograph documents how quickly after their creation Rosso transformed his works into multiples. In later photographs of works made in Paris, however, he would be careful not to show more than one cast of the same work, although he would list the names of the owners of different casts below each work for purposes of publicity and prestige.39 Until 1895, with the exception of a few early works in baked and bronzed terracotta, Rosso’s sculptures are only listed as bronzes in exhibition catalogues, supporting Mola’s hypothesis that he did not make reproductions in waxes during his early Italian period.40 While still in Italy, Rosso aimed to extend his reputation and his market internationally. He had already exhibited bronzes in Paris at such artist-organized 38  This photograph was first published, along with its history, by Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso (New York: Doubleday, 1963), 18. 39  See, for example, the captions to illustrations throughout Eugene Cremetti, Medardo Rosso: Impressions, exh. cat. (London: Cremetti Gallery, 1906). 40  Paola Mola, Rosso: La forma instabile, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira, 2007), 19.

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exhibitions as the Salon des Indépendants of 1885 and 1886 and was encouraged by favorable press and sales there. When he arrived in Paris three years later with five more bronzes for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, he was determined to penetrate the market. He quickly approached the most important Parisian founder, Ferdinand Barbedienne, with photographs of his works and two bronzes, hoping the successful producer of serial sculptures would agree to create an edition. He arrogantly boasted in a letter to Cameroni: “I will easily strike a deal … If Barbedienne intends to get out of his bronze candelabras, this is the right time.”41 However, the apparently open and international, but entrenched Parisian art scene turned out to be far more difficult for a foreign sculptor to access than Rosso had imagined. This was especially the case for such a fiercely independent, internationally minded sculptor with radical ideas of his own, who refused to adapt to the mores of his adoptive country any more than he had done to those of his homeland. After being refused by Barbedienne, and too ambitious and self-confident to work with the numerous lesser-known Parisian foundries, Rosso, ever the resourceful entrepreneur, devised a series of original alternative survival strategies. Firstly, he relied on his technical training from Italy to create mini-foundries in his Montmartre studios from 1895 onwards, initially at rue Caulaincourt 50, and later on Boulevard des Batignolles 98 and 100, where he could cast his own works (although it is not clear whether he made his own plaster models). A recurrent claim in the posthumous Rosso literature is that from late 1889 and for several years, Rosso lived and cast works in the metallurgic factory of engineer and art collector Henri Rouart located on boulevard Voltaire 137, at which point he also made a portrait of Rouart. A recent exhibition reiterates this claim, providing an illustration of the portrait by Edgar Degas titled Henri Rouart devant son usine (Heni Rouart in Front of his Factory, 1875). While a lasting friendship between Rosso and Rouart is documented, as is the acquisition by Rouart of several works by Rosso, and while it is possible that Rouart let Rosso work at that address, there does not seem to have been metal-foundry equipment in the Boulevard Voltaire factory. Rouart’s metallurgic factory, in fact, was not in Paris, but in Montluçon.42 As art historians Rebecca DeMuth 41   Rosso-Cameroni Correspondence, L39, n.d., in Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 98–99. 42  The assertion that Rosso cast bronzes in Rouart’s factory was first made in a series of recollections written by Louis Rouart, Henri’s son, and printed by Barr (Medardo Rosso, 30). However, Barr was not convinced of the reliability of Rouart’s letter: she added five footnotes to sentences that she found either inexact or incorrect in Rouart’s recollections of his father’s relationship with Rosso. Louis Rouart would have been fourteen years old when his father met Rosso and was eighty-nine when he wrote these recollections. The letter cannot be used as a reliable document, although the information in it has seeped

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and Marilyn R. Brown have documented, Degas’s portrait actually shows Rouart in front of his ice-making factory in New Orleans (as mentioned in Degas’s letters from New Orleans) rather than in Paris. This building was one story tall with big smokestacks, while the Boulevard Voltaire building was three stories tall on a Parisian boulevard and was not located next to a railroad track, as was the New Orleans factory (on Tchoupitoulas Street, adjacent to the levee).43 In an article published after Rosso’s death, Eugène Rouart, Henri’s son, wrote that his father had given Rosso a small corner of the Boulevard Voltaire edifice as an “atelier,” likely for modeling. It is conceivable that Rosso may have installed a small “do-it-yourself” oven for casting there, or, as Rouart recalls, that the artist cast a work in the family home’s courtyard.44 By casting his own works, Rosso liberated himself from professional foundries and began to maintain full control of his production process, fashioning his reputation as a sculptor-founder while producing serial sculpture and profiting from its relative affordability and popularity. Secondly, whether as a survival strategy or for artistic reasons or both, in 1895 Rosso began to exploit the new middle-class taste for sculptural objects in materials that were relatively cheaper than marble or bronze, and started to cast works in wax and plaster, selling them as finished pieces. He thereby concealed the fact that he often could not afford bronze. Fortunately, wax would eventually become the medium with which he achieved most success. Perhaps his discomfort with the impersonal quality of the multiple inspired him to make the waxes appear hand-modeled, so much so that for years scholars considered them to be unique objects. Thirdly, Rosso cast and sold his own signed reproductions of ancient and Renaissance sculptures, producing such objects as the gilded-bronze head titled The Emperor Vitellius, which he copied from ancient busts and sold to the Victoria and Albert Museum on a visit to London in 1896. His small “Donatello,” sold as original in 1894 to Wilhelm von Bode, the founder and first curator of the Kaiser Friedrich Museum (now the Bode Museum) in Berlin, entered the sculpture collection there when the museum opened in 1904. It has only

into the Rosso literature unquestioned. For the inclusion of Degas’s portrait of Rouart in the entry on Rosso’s Henri Rouart, see Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray: Framing Sculpture, exh. cat. (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 2014), 88. 43  See Rebecca R. DeMuth, “Edgar Degas, Henri Rouart: Art and Industry” (Master’s thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1982); and Marilyn R. Brown, Degas and the Business of Art: A Cotton Office in New Orleans (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994), 123–26. 44  Eugène Rouart, “En souvenir de Medardo Rosso,” L’Archer, 4 (1930): 283.

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recently been revealed as a fake Donatello.45 Although there was a thriving market for ancient replicas, these do not seem to me to have been, as Luciano Caramel asserts, conceptual pieces used by Rosso to show the superiority of his art to that of the past.46 I agree with Mola and Vittucci that the reproductions became integral to Rosso’s overall project, expressing his personal interest in experimental processes of casting and patinating, and that they were part of his greater tendency to transfer from one form to another and from one material to another in all of his works.47 I further believe that these works show Rosso’s modern approach to reproduction, by which he appropriated and signed works of the past with his own name. His process foreshadows the conceptual gestures of Marcel Duchamp and later twentieth-century artists who claimed their authorship of historical artworks, which they reproduced and modified as a way to make a critical contemporary reference to the past. From 1895, Rosso began to promote himself as a sculptor-founder. Journals started to report on this in that year, and by 1899, critics like Yveling Rambaud described him as an “able practitioner [who] … casts his own models in metal alloys for which he has found the secret.”48 In his private correspondence with collectors like Gottfried and Hermann Eissler in Vienna, Rosso boasted about “two heads, both of them good, and two lost waxes not easy to come out without chasing afterwards and consequently without defect … The work you have here cannot be obtained by any other means without changing [or] modifying the metal. Nor can a work like this be made by anybody else.”49 He appeared to divulge special casting recipes: “I used an old gilded copper and with a combination of alloys … It is with the combination of metal and earth and mixture of metals that I risk and arrive at this … That which is totally certain [is] … that 45  Volker Krahn, “Pastiche or Fake? A ‘Donatello’ by Medardo Rosso,” Apollo 566 (2009): 40– 47. Krahn’s findings have been contested by Mola (“Vergini, fauni e senatori: Sui modelli per le copie dell’antico al Museo Rosso di Barzio,” in Abitare il museo: Le case degli scultori, ed. Mario Guderzo [Possagno: Fondazione Canova, 2014], 278–80). 46  Medardo Rosso and Luciano Caramel, Medardo Rosso: Impressions in Wax and Bronze (New York: Kent Fine Art, 1988), 39. 47  Mola and Vittucci state that privately Rosso wrote that these works were “capolavori” (masterpieces) (Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato, 335). However, the letter they cite as proof is addressed to collectors such as Gottfried Eissler and might be intended as sales pitches (Medardo Rosso to Gottfried Eissler, September 1903, unpublished transcription by Alessandro De Stefani, L10, CA14-fasc., Medardo Rosso, Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, Venice). 48  Yveling Rambaud, Silhouettes d’artistes (Paris: Société française d’editions d’art, 1899), 232. 49  Medardo Rosso to Gottfried Eissler, September 1903, unpublished transcription by Alessandro De Stefani, L11, CA14-fasc., Medardo Rosso, Archivio Storico delle Arti Contem­ poranee, Venice.

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you have a piece that came out well and good, that you can always compare it to bronzes, beautiful bronzes.”50 Appearing to shun chasing and patination in favor of the raw surface, he wrote to Gottfried in September 1903, “When I was able to obtain these gold reflections, the metal’s gray, I was content.”51 These statements are corroborated by our technical findings that Rosso did not chase his works and our discovery of the complex mixtures of nontraditional bronze alloys that we have found through pXRF analysis. We wondered whether it is plausible that, as Rosso’s patroness Etha Fles would recall, he would go to flea markets to seek out these alloys, finding them in old casseroles and other objects. The unusually high content of lead we found in his bronzes suggests that he had to use pewter pots or scrap metal that included lead roofing. One must consider the fact that the composition of alloys is very tricky, and the wrong combination would have led to an unstable melt. It is possible that he used casseroles and flea-market objects for melting. Another claim in the literature is that Rosso devised “alchemical” effects, or that he flung gold rings into the fire to create luminous gold flecks.52 This seems more folkloric than a true account of the materials Rosso used for casting. Given the high cost of gold and the large amount of it that would have been needed to create such effects, this statement is questionable, and thus far we have found no gold in our analyses. In fact, the interest of Rosso’s process lies not so much in these more fanciful fabrications but rather in the artist’s willful transgression of the accepted rules of high-quality sculpture through experimentation, a conceptual and material approach that today seems very modern in its deskilling. Rosso’s photographic self-portraits, in which he sometimes appears dressed as a workman standing proudly in his Paris studio, further show his promotion of his image as a sculptor-founder (fig. 8.10). These, too, have been interpreted as true records of the artist at work. But the photographs do not show Rosso actually casting anything. Still, they are interesting for their choreographed, performative elements. While small pieces of filing equipment such as saws and knives are visible here and in other photographs of his works, Rosso does not show the less craftsman-like objects necessary for the serial reproduction of sculpture—such as big ovens, thick gloves, large tongs, crucibles, and multiple plasters (figs 8.11, 8.12, and 8.13). In one shot (fig. 8.14), for example, he 50  Ibid. 51  Ibid. 52  This was first reported by art historian Giorgio Nicodemi, who told Margaret Scolari Barr that he remembered that “Rosso used to remove a gold ring from his finger and throw it in the molten metal because he thought some gold gave the finished bronze finer highlights” (Barr, Medardo Rosso, 70, n. 80). Nicodemi’s questionable recollection has seeped into the Rosso literature unchallenged.

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Figure 8.10 Medardo Rosso in his studio in Paris, self-portrait, post-1901. Modern contact print from original glass negative. 12 × 9 cm Private Collection

Figure 8.11 Medardo Rosso in his studio in Paris with tools, post-1890. Self-portrait. Modern contact print from original glass negative, 19 × 14.5 cm Private Collection

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Figure 8.12 Medardo Rosso, Henri Rouart surrounded by tools in the artist’s studio, post-1890. Modern print from original glass negative, 18 × 12.8 cm Photograph by the artist. private Collection

Figure 8.13 Medardo Rosso, Madame Noblet with tools in the artist’s studio in Paris, post-1897. Modern print from original glass negative, 18 × 12.2 cm PHOTOGRAPH BY THE ARTIST. Private Collection

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Figure 8.14

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Medardo Rosso, self-portrait in his studio in Paris, likely post-1900. Modern contact print, 12.7 × 13 cm Private Collection

poses against a pile of wood, often described in the literature as “the pile of wood for casting.”53 Wood was scarce by the 1800s and most foundries used coke and carbon. In June 1917, Rosso’s close friend, the poet Jehan Rictus, noted in his diary that Rosso had gone out to search for “coke and carbon for making casts.”54 How reliable, then, is Etha Fles’s statement that Rosso “prepares his oven singlehanded so that his arrangement of the logs is in itself a work of art”?55 Finally, we might smile at Rosso’s stamp, conserved in the Archivio 53  Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato, 406–7. This assertion is repeated in Brancusi, Rosso, May Ray: Framing Sculpture, 16. 54  Jehan Rictus, “Journal quotidien, 1898–1933,” May 13 to June 30, 1917, entry dated June 2, 1917, 56v–57r, NaFr 16187, Département de Manuscrits, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. The passage is partially transcribed in Giovanni Lista, ed., Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste (Paris: L’Echoppe, 1994), 64. 55  See transcription of typescripts of writings by Etha Fles preserved by Dr. V. Alphen de Veer, published by Margaret Scolari Barr, “Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,”

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Medardo Rosso: “M. Rosso/sculpteur & fondeur /cire perdue procedé Rosso/ aute [sic] reconais. Exp. Univ. 1900” (M. Rosso/sculptor and founder/lost-wax process Rosso/High Honor, Universal Exposition, 1900). Since a prize by the name did not exist in the jury’s reports and the inscription is misspelled in French, one can speculate that this stamp was handmade by Rosso. The descriptions of Rosso’s casting parties further confirm the theatricality of his relationship to his work. Of great interest is the use of the body in the process of making work, which prefigures performances that would later become a regular component of modern and contemporary art. The vision of Rosso casting his works must have been highly appealing to viewers, for it evoked ancient archetypes, aroused numerous projections, and invited associations with the artist as creator. Rictus noted the scene twice in his diary, once describing how “the large Rosso breathes, flusters, sweats … He is in a leather apron and boots and groans with fatigue.”56 Another description reads: Rosso [is] powerful and strong … In the dark atelier the oven roars. I can barely see … Rosso stokes the fire with a strong and long iron rod … He is ensconced on the edge of the oven—gas and fumes escape—he swallows, coughs, spits, and stokes. He looks like a Cyclops. The moment is solemn. Rosso orders his assistant: “Some white so-and-so.” The helper looks for the white but does not find it. Rosso plummets and finds it … There is Rosso who has again climbed up onto the edge of the well of the growling fire. More stabs with the poker. Then with a pair of tongs he pulls out a rather large crucible full of molten metal … and bright red … his helper grips the other rod of the tongs and together they transport the crucible to a mold in the sand that I did not see. There at the edge they tilt the crucible like a bowl … and the metal being cast flows with blue flames … and it is finished … I am impressed by this work while sensing the slightly theatrical and chic aspect … After all, this is Rosso the Italian … Then we rest. He is in a sweat. He drinks milk, Vichy water, etc. Then he offers us champagne.57

Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 13 (1962): 238. 56  Jehan Rictus, “Journal quotidien, 1898–1933,” July 1 to September 30, 1908, entry dated September 18, 1908, 114r, NaFr 16148, Département de Manuscrits, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 57  Jehan Rictus, “Journal quotidien, 1898–1933,” October 7, 1902 to December 18, 1902, entry dated November 5, 1902, 49v–50r, NaFr 16122, Département de Manuscrits, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.

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In the novel L’Arantelle, the same scene is sexualized: [he and a helper] transported the metal being cast up to the orifice hollowed in the ground where the mold waited passively ready to receive the bronze seed … a thread of liquid gold overflowed, ran towards the mold, in a luminous curve that lit up the night.—Turn, faster! … At this order of the master, the crucible was tilted further; the stream enlarged, swelled, swollen with fire … was swallowed into the earth … Rosso straightened up:—There it is! On the edge of the black lead crucible a long bronze tear coagulated; it remained luminous for a few seconds, sank, extinguished … On the ground now lay a red ball, like a burst of sun. It seemed like lightning had entered this atelier with the desire to die there … It is not the pontifs, the Rodins, surrounded by their praticiens, by their founders, by their students, who dare to try such work themselves. One must be Rosso! … Only he guides his work from the block of clay to its final form.58 If, in Rictus’s version, “all this is beautiful and diabolical,”59 in L’Arantelle, Rosso becomes a mythical figure: “What strength! He is surrounded by exhalations capable of suffocating ten men; but he seems to breathe in his element. He is Polyphemus, Vulcan, he is rather a giant and a monster than my friend, eh?”60 Etha Fles, Rosso’s patroness, on the other hand, would strike a religious note in her 1922 account of the sculptor’s work in the studio: “But when he again looks at his waxes, his spiritual children, he is overcome by the desire to make them into shining bronzes … Like Benvenuto Cellini, he prepares his oven singlehanded[ly] … He once wrote me that he had watched the fire for 36 hours … For him it was a sacred act.”61 We are given the image of the artist as a superhuman creator. All this indicates Rosso’s investment in the artistic element of the performance of the act of making, which would be taken up only much later in performance art after the post-World War II period. Examples range from the artful photographs and films taken by photographer Hans Namuth depicting Jackson Pollock splattering his canvases, to the photos of Lucio Fontana dramatically slashing his paintings, shot by photographer Ugo Mulas. In Fontana’s case, it is known that the images were constructed and 58  Ibels and de Lys, L’Arantelle, 166–67. 59  Jehan Rictus, “Journal quotidien, 1898–1933,” July 1 to September 30, 1908, entry dated September 18, 1908, 114r, NaFr 16148, Département de Manuscrits, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. See also Ibels and de Lys, L’Arantelle, 166–67. 60  Ibels and de Lys, L’Arantelle, 167. 61  See Barr, “Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness,” 238.

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are unreliable as true accounts of his process, although their symbolic value remains enormous and they are still considered “real.” At times, especially when reproducing historic works, Rosso was entirely pragmatic, collaborating with other founders as needed. An Italian founder in Paris, Paolo Sutto, who had also called on Rodin, advertised that he cast by the “lost wax” process and put the words “Process of the Sculptor Rosso” on his business card.62 There seems to have been some form of partnership between the two. An anonymous reviewer of the 1900 Exposition Universelle reported on reproductions of ancient works exhibited under the name “Paolo Sutto d’Acqui,” and claimed that Sutto had used Rosso’s patination methods.63 The association between Rosso and Sutto led Giovanni Lista to believe that Rosso exhibited the copies of ancient art at the Exposition under Sutto’s name. The fact that Sutto was given a silver medal at the Exposition Universelle and that Rosso, too, claimed to have won this medal might suggest collaboration.64 6

After 1900: Casting and Travels around Europe

After 1900 and as a result of these tactics, Rosso’s methods of serial production launched him beyond Paris, increasing his reputation, exhibition opportunities, and his number of clients. Through exhibitions and sales, he gained support from internationally minded critics and patrons. By now, European critics were hailing him as the founder of “Impressionist sculpture.” Back in France, some left-wing critics defined him as Rodin’s unacknowledged rival in the birth of modern sculpture and as an influence on Rodin’s 1898 monument to Honoré de Balzac. 62  Lista provides no support for his claims regarding Sutto’s life in Paris or his relationship with Rosso (Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia, 107, 298–99). Likewise, Mola does not provide any references for her claim that Rosso used Sutto as his founder upon arriving in Paris in exchange for recipes for alloys and patinas. See Mola, “Vergini, fauni e senatori,” 273–74. Sutto’s name appears nowhere in official birth or death registers in the town of Acqui. The business card found in Rosso’s scrapbook reads: “P. SUTTO / FONDEUR D’OBJETS D’ART / CIRES PERDUES / Procédé du Sculpteur ROSSO/ADRESSE A PARIS: 4, Avenue de Villiers.” A similar card is found in the archives of the Musée Rodin, suggesting that Sutto called on Rodin to offer his services as a founder in lost wax. I thank Elisabeth Lebon for bringing it to my attention. See “Corriere di Parigi,” Nuova antologia 88, no. 172 (1900): 362, which describes “the surprising reproductions by Sutto d’Acqui” at the Exposition Universelle. Sutto also exhibited at the National Exhibition in Rome in 1911. A robbery of paintings from Sutto’s atelier is reported in “Petits faits,” Le petit Parisien, June 13, 1903. 63  B. D., “A l’Exposition: Les catalogues,” L’indépendant de Paris, July 2, 1900. 64  See Rapport du jury international de l’Exposition universelle de 1900, vol. 15, Industries diverses, bk. 1, Classes 92 à 97 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), 506–7.

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As Rosso began to travel around Europe after 1900, his foundry practices evolved. It is tempting to hypothesize that the months away from his studio led him to devise mobile casting methods. On a practical level, his waxes required no ovens to produce. Gelatin, easily available, could be constituted with hot water and wax melted in a kitchen pot, making small works relatively simple to make, even in hotel rooms, providing that he travelled with a set of plaster models in his suitcase. He might also have used local foundries to cast bronzes during his travels. In a childhood recollection, Eugène Rouart, son of collector Henri Rouart, recalled that Rosso had made gelatin molds at his family’s home in Paris right before his eyes: “this founder’s operation took place in the courtyard of our home. It was wonderful: we stayed awake for a very long time without seeing the end; the lessons were not continued … the next morning, but we were delighted to have followed the artist’s creative process for a long time and to have benefited from his conversation—always funny and youthful.”65 There is no information about Rosso’s foundry practices after his permanent return to Italy in 1918, but we know that he continued to cast, exhibit, and sell his idiosyncratic works until his death in Milan in 1928. This chapter in the history of Rosso the sculptor-founder has yet to be written. He had largely been forgotten in Italy after he moved to Paris in 1889. In 1910, Italian nationalist painter and writer Ardengo Soffici organized a major exhibition in Florence in which sculptures by Rosso were shown with the works of French Impressionist painters. In 1912, the young Futurist painter and sculptor Umberto Boccioni named Rosso a forefather of Futurism in his Technical Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, hailing his art as “revolutionary.”66 Although he felt no affinity with the Futurists, Rosso eventually decided to move back to Italy permanently. The numerous sales he made there until his death in 1928 indicate that he continued to cast his works somewhere in Milan, although no primary documentation of these years has as yet emerged. 65  Rouart, “En souvenir de Medardo Rosso,” 284. 66  In the Manifesto of Futurist Painters written on February 11, 1910 in Milan, Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Giacomo Balla, and Gino Severini condemned the Italian establishment for ignoring Segantini and Rosso: “ask these priests of the true cult, these guardians of esthetic laws, where are the works of Giovanni Segantini today … ask them where the sculptures of Medardo Rosso are appreciated!” Umberto Boccioni et al., Manifesto dei Pittori Futuristi (Milan: Direzione del movimento futurista, 1910), n.p. In 1912, Boccioni hailed Rosso as genial, poetic, and revolutionary but lamented that Rosso’s artistic project was “too isolated and fragmentary, lacking a synthetic thought that affirmed a law.” Umberto Boccioni, Manifesto tecnico della Scultura Futurista (Milan: Direzione del movimento futurista, 1912), n.p. For a recent English translation of these manifestos, see Umberto Boccioni, Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism), trans. Richard Shane Agin and Maria Elena Versari (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016), 166–68, 178–84.

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Rosso’s Posthumous Reputation and the Enduring Value of Process

After his death, Rosso’s work sank into oblivion for decades; new generations of artists could not relate to his eccentric artistic vision, and the myth of Rosso, the sculptor-founder, was reduced to an anecdotal footnote in the few Italian biographies. In 1945, Arturo Martini, an officially sanctioned sculptor under Mussolini, denigrated Rosso’s art in his lectures on sculpture and his book, Scultura lingua morta (Sculpture Dead Language).67 Rosso was rediscovered in 1949 by Alfred H. Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and James T. Soby, a curator there; but neither they nor Barr’s wife, Margaret Scolari Barr, in her monograph that accompanied the first American exhibition on Rosso, held at the museum in 1963, broached the question of process and seriality in the artist’s work. Today, through scholarship as well as the interest of contemporary artists, Rosso is finally being recognized for his extraordinary approach to process, as evident in his serially produced sculpture, making his work a fascinating test case for further investigation into this neglected field. The unusual surfaces of Rosso’s works have been given new meaning today, described by contemporary artist Tony Cragg as a membrane “situated at the interface between the exterior and the interior of the body,” with the artist “working and reworking the surface to make a skin that one sees as the skin of a face,” expressing “texture, tension, muscles, nervousness.”68 Likewise, Giuseppe Penone appreciates the visceral quality of Rosso’s rough, abraded sculptural surfaces, in which he finds an echo of his own interest in the “skin” of sculptural works inspired by the surface of his body, like To Unroll One’s Skin (1970–71), Sutures (1987–1990), and Fingerprints (1995), and works that, as art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has written, excavate the epidermis of marble or even trees in a kind of “tactile blindness.”69 For Penone, Rosso’s wax surfaces act as a spatial “involucro” (shell or casing) that translates the vibrations of atmosphere:

67  Arturo Martini, La scultura lingua morta e altri scritti, ed. Elena Pontiggia (Milan: Abscondita, 2001), 66; see also the numerous references in Arturo Martini, Colloqui sulla scultura, 1944–1945, ed. Nico Stringa (Treviso: Canova, 1997). 68  “Exposition Tony Cragg à Saint-Étienne: Extraits du dossier de presse du Musée d’Art Moderne de Sainte-Étienne,” La lettre du Collège de France 37 (2013): http://lettre-cdf .revues.org/1477. (Accessed January 15, 2016). 69  Goerges Didi-Huberman, Su Penone (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2008), 22. Originally published as Être crâne. Lieu, contact, pensée, sculpture, (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2000).

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It is a direct modeling in which we can still see the fingerprints of the hand of the sculptor. It is the work of someone who really makes sculpture, who almost makes poetry out of sculpture, with respect to others who stop at rhetoric. This is the great difference, and it is for this reason that Medardo Rosso is very interesting.70 Most recently, Syrian-American Diana Al-Hadid created a two-person show entitled “Diana Al-Hadid: Regarding Medardo Rosso.” Al-Hadid adds another layer to Rosso’s process-oriented approach through her own keen interest in processes of making.71 Rosso’s once-precocious experiments with process, now perfectly consistent with contemporary art practice, directly inform younger artists working today. Bibliography

Archives Consulted



Works Cited

Archives de Paris Archivio del Cimitero Monumentale, Settore Servizi Funebri e Cimiteriali, Milan Archivio della Camera di Commercio, Industria, Artigianato, e Agricoltura, Milan Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio Archivio storico civico del comune di Pavia, Archivio comunale, Ufficio tecnico comunale Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, Venice. Biblioteca d’arte–Biblioteca archeologica–Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive–CASVA, Milan Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. Civica Biblioteca d’arte, Milan Musée Rodin, Paris

“L’Amore materno.” L’Illustrazione italiana. November 28, 1886.

70  Giovanni Lista, “La natura non è separata dall’uomo,” interview with Giuseppe Penone, 1998–1999. http://artsituation.com/new/interview-penone-par-lista. (site discontinued: accessed January 15, 2016). 71  See Sharon Hecker, “Walking Through Walls: Medardo Rosso and Diana Al-Hadid,” in Diana Al-Hadid: Regarding Medardo Rosso (New York: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 2016).

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Armstrong, Carol. Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991. Reprint, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2003. B. D., “A l’Exposition: Les catalogues.” L’indépendant de Paris, July 2, 1900. Barr, Margaret Scolari. Medardo Rosso. New York: Doubleday, 1963. Barr, Margaret Scolari. “Medardo Rosso and His Dutch Patroness.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 13 (1962): 217–51. Bassett, Jane, Peggy Fogelman, David A. Scott, and Ronald C. Schmidtling, ed. The Craftsman Revealed: Adriaen de Vries, Sculptor in Bronze. Exh. cat. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. Benapiani, Lorenzo, and Augusto Barattani. Ars: Appunti critici illustrati alla mostra della Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente in Milano. Milan: Galli, 1886. Boccioni, Umberto. Futurist Painting Sculpture (Plastic Dynamism). Translated by Richard Shane Agin and Mara Elena Versari. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2016. Boccioni, Umberto. Manifesto dei Pittori Futuristi. Milan: Direzione del movimento futurista, 1910. Boccioni, Umberto. Manifesto dei Pittori Futuristi. Manifesto tecnico della Scultura Futurista. Milan: Direzione del movimento futurista, 1912. Borghi, Mino. Medardo Rosso. Milan: Il Milione, 1950. Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray: Framing Sculpture. Exh. cat. Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, 2014. Brown, Marilyn R. Degas and the Business of Art. Pittsburgh: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993. “Bust of Giovanni Segantini.” FAMSF Search the Collections. https://art.famsf.org/ paolo-troubetzkoy/bust-giovanni-segantini-200816. Caramel, Luciano. Medardo Rosso: Impressions in Wax and Bronze. Exh. cat. New York: Kent Fine Art, 1988. Caramel, Luciano, ed. Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928). Exh. cat. Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979. Chirtani, Luigi. “Il dí dei morti.” L’Illustrazione italiana, October 31, 1886. Cooper, Harry, and Sharon Hecker, eds. Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions. Exh. cat. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. “Corriere di Parigi.” Nuova antologia 88, no. 172 (1900): 362. Cremetti, Eugene. Medardo Rosso: Impressions. Exh. cat. London: Cremetti Gallery, 1906. Curtis, Penelope. “A Curator’s View.” Paper presented at Variable States: Intention, Appearance and Interpretation in Modern Sculpture, Nasher Sculpture Center, October 22–23, 2004. http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/Portals/0/Documents/ Learn/Research/ConferenceVariableStates/PDFS/Transcript.pdf.

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de Caso, Jacques. “Serial Sculpture in Nineteenth-Century France.” In Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture. Edited by Jean Wasserman, 1–27. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979. DeMuth, Rebecca R. “Edgar Degas, Henri Rouart: Art and Industry.” Master’s thesis, University of Pittsburgh, 1982. Georges Didi-Humberman, Su Penone (Milan: Mondadori Electa, 2008). Esposizione industriale italiana del 1881 in Milano: Catalogo Ufficiale. Milan: Sonzogno, 1881. Esposizione industriale italiana del 1881 in Milano, Relazioni dei giurati: Le Arti usuali. Milan: Hoepli, 1883. “Exposition Tony Cragg à Saint-Étienne: Extraits du dossier de presse du Musée d’Art Moderne de Sainte-Étienne.” La lettre du Collège de France 37 (2013): http://lettre -cdf.revues.org/1477. Hecker, Sharon. A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Hecker, Sharon. “Ambivalent Bodies: Medardo Rosso’s Brera Petition.” The Burlington Magazine 142, no. 1173 (December 2000): 773–77. Hecker, Sharon. “An Enfant Malade by Medardo Rosso from the Collection of Louis Vauxcelles.” Burlington Magazine 152, no. 1292 (2010): 727–35. Hecker, Sharon. “Walking Through Walls: Medardo Rosso and Diana Al-Hadid.” In Diana Al-Hadid. Regarding Medardo Rosso. New York: Marianne Boesky Gallery, 2016, 18–90. Hinton, Jack, Melissa Meighan, and P. Andrew Lins, ed. Encountering Genius: Houdon’s Portraits of Benjamin Franklin. Exh. cat. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2011. Ibels, André, and Georges de Lys. L’Arantelle: Roman d’art. Paris: J. Bosc et Ce., 1908. Krahn, Volker. “Pastiche or Fake? A ‘Donatello’ by Medardo Rosso.” Apollo 566 (2009): 40–47. Lebon, Elisabeth. Fonte au sable, Fonte à cire perdue. Paris: Éditions Ophrys, 2012. Levine, Steven Z. Monet, Narcissus, and Self-Reflection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Lindsay, Suzanne Glover, Daphne Barbour, and Shelley Sturman, ed. Edgar Degas Sculpture. Exh. cat. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Lista, Giovanni, ed. Medardo Rosso: La sculpture impressionniste. Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994. Lista, Giovanni, ed. “La natura non è separata dall’uomo,” interview with Giuseppe Penone, 1998–1999. Previously available online. Lista, Giovanni, ed. Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia. Milan: 5 Continents, 2003. Martini, Arturo. Colloqui sulla scultura, 1944–1945. Edited by Nico Stringa. Treviso: Canova, 1997.

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Martini, Arturo. La scultura lingua morta e altri scritti. Edited by Elena Pontiggia. Milan: Abscondita, 2001. Mauclair, Camille. “Chose d’art.” Mercure de France 16 (December 1985): 412. Mauclair, Camille. “Expositions récentes.” Mercure de France 51 (March 1894): 266–71. McDonald, Amy Athey. “The Many Faces of Alexander Pope: Illuminating Art History through Digital Imaging.” Yale News, February 19, 2014. http://news.yale .edu/2014/02/19/many-faces-alexander-pope-illuminating-art-history-through -digital-imaging. McWilliam, Neil. “Craft, Commerce and the Contradictions of Anti-capitalism: Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffier.” In Sculpture and Its Reproductions. Edited by Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft. London: Reaktion Books, 1997, 100–112. Mola, Paola, and Fabio Vittucci. Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura. Milan: Skira, 2009. Mola, Paola. “Vergini, fauni e senatori: Sui modelli per le copie dell’antico al Museo Rosso di Barzio.” In Abitare il museo: Le case degli scultori. Edited by Mario Guderzo. Possagno: Fondazione Canova, 2014, 273–74. Mola, Paola. Rosso: La forma instabile. Exh. cat. Milan: Skira, 2007. “Petits faits.” Le petit Parisien, June 13, 1903. Prideaux, Sue. Edvard Munch: Behind the Scream. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Rambaud, Yveling. Silhouettes d’artistes. Paris: Société française d’editions d’art, 1899. Rapport du jury international de l’Exposition universelle de 1900. Vol. 15, Industries diverses. Bk. 1, Classes 92 à 97. Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902. “The Reproduction of Statuary.” The Art Journal 6 (1880): 368. Rouart, Eugène. “En souvenir de Medardo Rosso.” L’Archer 4 (1930): 281–85. Ruggia, Mariangela Agliati, and Sergio Rebora, eds. Il segno della Scapigliatura: Rinnovamento tra il Canton Ticino e la Lombardia Grande nel secondo Ottocento. Exh. cat. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale, 2006. Sabbatini, Leopoldo. Notizie sulle condizioni industriali della provincia di Milano. Milan: Hoepli, 1893. Santillane. “La vie parisienne: Petits salons.” Gil Blas, October 27, 1895. Tivaroni, Carlo. L’Italia degli Italiani: Tomo I (1849–1859). Turin: Roux Frassati, 1895.

chapter 9

The Unstable Act of Seeing: A Conceptual Reading of Rosso’s Serial Reproduction Sharon Hecker Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy, date of creation of subject 1892–94; fig. 9.1) is a seemingly straightforward sculpture cast serially by Medardo Rosso that, upon closer examination, gives rise to many questions. These questions open the door to a new reading of the modern possibilities inherent in serial sculpture. In this chapter, I shall introduce Bambino ebreo not merely as a sculptural object reproduced by mechanical means, but also as a conceptual problem marked by numerous unresolved inconsistencies. I will show that the fact that Rosso made a practice of shifting and varying the titles, dates, and identity of his subject should be considered as part of his innovative approach to making

Figure 9.1 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94. Modern contact print from original glass negative, 18 × 24 cm. Date of photograph unknown Photograph by the artist. Private collection

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_012

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serial sculpture. By examining the numerous ways in which he multiplied and distributed a single object over time and space, we can gain a new way of perceiving serial sculpture as destabilized and fleeting.1 1

Date(s) of Creation

Bambino ebreo is a sculptural representation of a young boy that bears iconographic and stylistic similarities to other children’s heads sculpted by Rosso in the early-to-mid-1890s in Paris. Despite these general similarities, which allow us to define the decade in which the work was conceived, its precise date of creation remains uncertain. No such date can be ascertained from the artist himself, nor from publications, studio photographs, or exhibitions. In the Catalogo ragionato, Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci date this subject to 1893. However, Luciano Caramel has noted that there is no documentary evidence of the subject’s exact year of creation.2 The most reliable dates, 1892, 1893, and 1894, all come from Rosso himself in publications and exhibition catalogues, where he provided these different dates for the same work.3

1  For a conceptual analysis of this idea and its development throughout modern and contemporary sculpture, see Alex Potts, The Sculptural Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 2  Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009), 140; and Luciano Caramel, ed., Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928), exh. cat. (Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979), 136. 3  Mola and Vittucci erroneously give the 1892 date as written by Rosso on a photograph on page 15 of Louis Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste: Medardo Rosso (Paris: La Société Nouvelle, 1909). However, the work does not appear on that page of Piérard’s book. The signed photograph appears in Louis Piérard, “Un sculpteur impressionniste: Medardo Rosso,” Société nouvelle 15, no. 33 (1909), n.p., reproduced in Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p. Rosso writes on the photograph the date 1892, but the caption underneath seems to correct it by giving the date as 1893. The 1892 date appears in Prima esposizione italiana dell’impressionismo francese e delle scolture di Medardo Rosso, exh. cat. (Florence: Lyceum Club, 1910), 13. For the 1893 dating, see Ardengo Soffici, Il caso Medardo Rosso (Florence: Seeber, 1909), 20; and XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 1914: Catalogo (Venice: Premiato Stabilimento Carlo Ferrari, 1914), 87 (where the work is titled Il bambino). For Rosso’s involvement in the preparation of the Florence exhibition, see Jean-Franćois Rodriguez, La réception de l’impressionnisme à Florence en 1910 (Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1994). For Rosso’s participation in preparations for the Venice exhibition see Corrispondenza tra Medardo Rosso e la Biennale di Venezia, Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, Venice (A.S.A.C.), Scatole Nere e Miscellanea. It should be noted that Rosso’s practice of shifting dates was not unique to Bambino ebreo; he also gave two different dates for another work, Enfant malade, 1893 and 1895, respectively, in the 1910 and 1914 catalogues. For Rosso’s

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The problem of dating the works is not resolved by other available arthistorical methods. Studying Rosso’s studio photographs of the work does not help us, for the photos themselves cannot be definitively dated.4 The sculpture is not mentioned in the press until 1896, and even then, we cannot be certain from the descriptions that they refer to the same subject. Rosso may well have made the work in the early 1890s but chose not to exhibit it immediately.5 We cannot be sure of the first time this subject was exhibited, either.6 The confusion over the dates might represent a lapse in Rosso’s memory or printing errors in publications. However, ample evidence points to his creative dating of numerous other works as well. In my opinion, rather than a singular lapse or error, this is a pattern that seems to reflect his conceptual understanding of his art as unstable, mobile, and temporally contingent. This conceptual approach allowed Rosso to keep alive his modern sense of the openness and fluidity of his artistic process in order to create an effect of immateriality and transience. 2

Shifting Titles

Further evidence of the same artistic approach can be gleaned from the numerous titles given by Rosso to the same work. Today, these titles have been stabilized through catalogues, books, and exhibition wall labels, but in Rosso’s time the titles of his sculptures constantly shifted, much like the dates he assigned them. The fluctuations in the Bambino ebreo’s dates are consistent with his constant shifting of his titles. Today, the piece is commonly known as Enfant juif or Bambino ebreo, or sometimes Bimbo ebreo. However, one must be careful to ascertain that each of these titles refers to the same work. The first time a work by the name Enfant juif is mentioned is by Camille de Sainte-Croix in his 1896 article in the Mercure de France. At first sight, Sainte-Croix’s description 1893–94 dating of Bambino ebreo, see label on Bambino ebreo bearing that date in an installation photograph of Salon d’Automne, 1904, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. 4  Mola and Vittucci date four photographs of Bambino ebreo by Rosso but supply no evidence for the dates. Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato, 141–45. 5  The first mention is Camille de Sainte-Croix, “Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 (March, 1896): 386. 6  Mola and Vittucci assert, without providing documentation, that a cast of Bambino ebreo was exhibited in London with Pre-Raphaelite painters at the Boussod & Valadon Gallery in London in 1896. However, neither Rosso nor the work appears in the exhibition catalogue or the press for that show. This places in question Mola’s indication, in her authentication certificate for the Sussex wax Bambino ebreo (Plate 8), that the cast in the Pre-Raphaelite show was the Sussex wax cast, based on its British provenance.

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seems to identify the Bambino ebreo. However, the rest of the description applies to a different sculpture known as Enfant au sein.7 Over the course of the next fourteen years there was no mention of a work by Rosso with the word “juif ” in the title in an exhibition catalogue, museum collection, private correspondence, or journal article. As he had done from the start, Rosso continued to use an array of other, more general, and slightly varied names for this piece each time it was exhibited: Impression d’enfant, Tête d’enfant, Bambino, Enfant, Petit enfant (Impression) …8 It was not until 1909 that this sculpture appeared under the name Bambino ebreo in an article written by Ardengo Soffici in the Italian journal La Voce.9 In 1910, at the Prima esposizione italiana dell’Impressionismo francese e delle scolture di Medardo Rosso organized by Soffici in Florence, the work was exhibited under the slightly adjusted name Bimbo ebreo.10 After this date, the work was regularly featured in Italian publications with the word ebreo in the title, perhaps suggesting that its subject had stabilized. Yet Rosso himself emphatically continued to deny this specificity by refusing this title and continuing the play on variations. All these titles remind us of various conjugations of the same verb, much like Rosso’s innovative approach to serial sculptures, born from the same model but endlessly cast and recast in slightly different iterations. 7  “The Jewish Boy: another face of a baby, all gaping, all enraptured, with a hint of solemn reverie in his fixed and thoughtful stare. In the first casting of the composition the child was held by its mother. Judging it useless, Rosso eliminated it.” Ibid. The entry on Rosso in Les Archives Biographiques Contemporaines (Paris: n.p., 1906), 69, mentions a work called Une Juive by Rosso that is unknown today, and also an Enfant juif it claims that Rosso exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1889. But this is likely an error, for an Enfant juif is not listed in the Exposition Universelle catalogue or in press reviews, nor in the list of approved works for the Exposition Universelle of 1889. See Comitato artistico lombardo, Esposizione Universale di Parigi, 1889, May 4, 1889, Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio. There is no mention of Enfant juif in the article by Charles Morice, “Les passants: Medardo Rosso,” Le Soir, September 25, 1895. Unless otherwise noted, translations are my own. 8  Articles continued to use these titles given by the artist. See, for example, Louis Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p.; and Julius Meier-Graefe, Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics, vol. 2, bk. 3 (London: W. Heinemann, 1908), 21, first published as Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1904), 30. 9  Ardengo Soffici, “Medardo Rosso,” La Voce, May 27, 1909, 100. 10  The 1910 exhibition catalogue mentions sculptures from the “Museo di Hagen” and “Museo di Troyes” as Bimbo Ebreo. See Prima esposizione italiana dell’Impressionismo francese e delle scolture di Medardo Rosso, exh. cat. (Florence: Lyceum Club, 1910), 13; and Ardengo Soffici, “L’Impressionismo a Firenze,” La Voce, May 12, 1910, 318. In one list for collector Luigi Bergamo he called it Enfant, while in another list for the same collector he titled it l’Enfant israelita. See Rosso to Luigi Bergamo, undated but thought to be before August 1923, photocopy (original lost), Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio.

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The Bambino ebreo as Unstable Subject

Rosso not only varied his titles and dates, but he also gave different accounts of the subject of the work. Yet much like the trend to stabilize the date and title, art-historical literature has shown a tendency to fix the subject around a single iconography without looking at the nuanced, meaningful variations. This trend merits unraveling because the fascinating story of how this work became attached to a Rothschild uncovers an adventure in unstable attributions. After Rosso’s death, in an article containing several errors, critic Emilio Zanzi was the first to claim that Rosso had told him that the subject was a portrait of the “little baron Rothschild.”11 This is the identification that has been attached to the work ever since. In addition, Zanzi reported that in 1919 Rosso had sent the work to an exhibition of sacred art in Venice and retitled it l’Enfant de Nasareth (The Infant of Nazareth) in order to emphasize that Jesus, too, was Jewish.12 However, my research indicates that a work by that title does not appear in the catalogue of that exhibition.13 Both of these anecdotes have seeped into the literature and have been repeated as authoritative for many years. No matter the veracity of the account, Zanzi’s anecdotes attest to Rosso’s practice of changing the title and subject of the same work. Zanzi recounted the Rothschild story to Rosso’s son, Francesco, who related it to art-historian Mino Borghi, who subsequently printed it in his 1950 monograph on Rosso. Here we have an anecdote told without documentation after the artist had died, which has been accepted unquestioningly as fact in a posthumous monograph.14 To complicate matters, Borghi was misquoted by Margaret Scolari Barr in her 1963 Rosso monograph, where she claimed that the Rothschild link represented Rosso’s own identification of the work. Barr 11  Emilio Zanzi, “Medardo torinese,” Gazzetta del Popolo, December 13, 1929. Zanzi was referring to his earlier article, Emilio Zanzi, “Una ‘facezia’ di Medardo Rosso,” Arte e Vita (Rome), December 1920, 329. 12  In 1920, Zanzi wrote, “the truly sublime wax of the Jewish Boy, a typical representation of a race that has been exasperated by 20 centuries of the ghetto, became a … Saint Louis! The prank is a bit over the top.” Zanzi reiterated this claim in a 1929 article published after Rosso’s death, but in that article, he confused the date of the Venice exhibition and the title Rosso used by saying that the Bambino ebreo had actually been renamed Enfant de Nasareth. Emilio Zanzi, “Medardo torinese,” Gazzetta del Popolo. 13  Mola and Vittucci note that a bronze S. Luigi by Rosso, which Mola believes was a Bambino ebreo, was registered in this catalogue. Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato, 140, 375. However, this work does not appear in the catalogue, nor does an Enfant de Nasareth by Rosso appear there. See Catalogo Ufficiale Illustrato: Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Sacra, Venezia 1920 (Venice: G. Zanetti, 1920). 14  Mino Borghi, Medardo Rosso (Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1950), 37.

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approached the Rothschild family, who denied there had been a commission. Nonetheless, she insisted that “Rosso simply knew that the dejected child he had in his mind’s eye was Jewish, and he named his sculpture accordingly.”15 She added that the work could have been a “Jewish” pro-Dreyfus statement in support of Émile Zola’s position on the Affaire. By 1979, Caramel referred to the uncertain and undocumented Rothschild identification as a “traditional affirmation.”16 To prove his point that the subject of Rosso’s work was Rothschild, Caramel quoted an 1890 letter from Rosso to his friend Felice Cameroni, in which Rosso had boasted: “Of course because I also have among the other deals Roschild [sic], too. Without saying any more.”17 Rosso, who was heavily in debt to Cameroni, might have used the name Rothschild simply to imply that he was getting commissions from wealthy patrons and would repay his debts. That Rosso associated the name Rothschild with wealth is confirmed by another letter, in which he again promised Cameroni to pay him back by month’s end: “I will do my duty because I know that you are not Roschild’s [sic] business partner.”18 In his 1994 Rosso monograph, Giovanni Lista dispelled the Rothschild attribution by confirming that there was no evidence of a commission. However, he further complicated the issue by asserting—without evidence—that the work was, instead, a portrait of the son of Rosso’s friend, a British journalist living in Paris named Frances Keyzer, who happened to be Jewish.19 As Barr noted, the only possible Rothschild who would have been of an age that matched the subject of this portrait would have been Oscar Ruben, born in the family’s Vienna house in 1888.20 It is not known whether Oscar had ever been in the family’s house in Paris as a young boy. My research indicates that he had a brief, unhappy life. He and his siblings were raised without their mother, Bettina, who died when Oscar was just three years old, and his father 15  Margaret Scolari Barr, Medardo Rosso (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963), 36.   Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 136. 16  Ibid. 17  Correspondence Medardo Rosso-Felice Cameroni, (1889 June–1892), Biblioteca d’arte– Biblioteca archeologica–Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive–CASVA, Comune di Milano (referred to hereafter as “Rosso-Cameroni Correspondence”). See L24, dated March 22, 1890, published in part in Caramel, Mostra di Medardo Rosso, 136, and misdated. 18   Rosso-Cameroni Correspondence, L52, not dated. 19  Giovanni Lista, Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 1858–1928 (Paris: L’Echoppe, 1994), 66. Frances Keyzer was originally from Britain but lived in Paris. She wrote several reviews on Rosso for British newspapers in 1904, and authored a book on French cooking titled French Household Cooking (London: “Country Life” & George Newnes, 1908). 20  Barr, Medardo Rosso, 70.

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provided him with little guidance.21 Oscar’s eldest brother, George Anselm Alphonse, after having studied for a brief period at Cambridge University, was institutionalized permanently for schizophrenia.22 Oscar committed suicide in 1909 at the age of twenty-one, upon learning of his father’s disapproval of his engagement to an American.23 In their catalogue raisonné, Mola and Vittucci suggest that young Oscar might have traveled on occasion to Paris as a child and that Rosso might have seen him there, although they do not specify where, when, or how this might have occurred.24 We cannot exclude the possibility that the sculptor paid a visit to the home of the Rothschild family, perhaps to discuss a commission that never materialized. While he was there, he might have caught a glimpse of the sad child, but we have no documented evidence to support this. Mola and Vittucci further suggest that Rosso might have later elaborated on a memory of something he saw during such a visit. The account of glimpsing the child sounds more mythologized than real, for normally, the child would have been required to sit before the artist who had been commissioned to paint his portrait. There are in fact known official portraits of the young Oscar such as the one by painter Leopold Horowitz (fig. 9.2). Rosso was famous for claiming that he glimpsed the subjects he represented. Perhaps, rather than being an account of something that actually happened, this idea could be part of the greater legend of Rosso “glimpsing” things that quickly appear and disappear. Another question that arises about the subject’s identity is the date 1890, the year in which Rosso mentioned to Cameroni his association with the Rothschilds. At this date Oscar was two years old, an age that would fit the image of the little boy in the sculpture. But if Rosso had made the work as a commissioned portrait in 1892, 1893, or 1894, which are the dates given by the sculptor, then the boy would have been four or five or even six years old, and therefore older than the child depicted in the sculpture. Except as reported posthumously by Zanzi, Rosso himself never actually called this work a portrait of a Rothschild. Had it been a commissioned 21  Derek Wilson, Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power (London: André Deutsch, 1998), 276; and Bettina Burr, The Story of Langau (private publication, 1998), 11. For the Rothschilds as art collectors, see Works of Art from the Collection of the Barons Nathaniel and Albert von Rothschild, Lot Rothschild–6179, Christie’s Sale, Thursday July 8, 1999, London. The author thanks Alexandra Skliris for her research at the Rothschild Archive, London. 22  Correspondence with Justin Cavernelis-Frost, Archivist, Rothschild Archive, London, June 25, 2013. 23  Oscar was engaged to Miss Olga Menn of Chicago. “Crushed by Baron’s Death,” New York Times, September 9, 1909; and Wilson, Rothschild, 276. 24  Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 140.

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Figure 9.2 Leopold Horowitz, Full Length Portrait of Baron Oscar Ruben von Rothschild (1888–1909) at the age of ten, 1898, oil on canvas, 186 × 125.5 cm Courtesy Galerie Boris Wilnitsky, Vienna

portrait, it would have made sense for Rosso to identify it as such for reasons of prestige, as he did with other portraits of distinguished subjects, such as the engineer and art collector Henri Rouart (1889–90), the cabaret-concert performer Yvette Guilbert (1895), or the wife of Parisian collector Dr. Louis-Sylvain Noblet (1897–98). At the same time, it should be noted that Rosso’s “dematerialization” and veiling of facial features and specific titles tend to detach all of his so-called “portraits” from the actual likenesses of their sitters. Aetas aurea (Golden Age, late 1885–86; fig. 9.3) is said to have been based on a portrait of his young son, Francesco, and his wife, Giuditta, but the title suggests a less personal reading. Enfant au sein (Child at the Breast/Nursing Infant, 1889–90) is documented to have been a portrait of the wife and child of French Naturalist poet Paul Alexis before it went through several radical acts of fragmentation, among them the removal of the mother’s head. But its title does not mention Madame Alexis

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Medardo Rosso, Aetas aurea (The Golden Age), late-1885– 1886. Modern contact print from original glass negative (photograph of a photograph). 29.7 × 23.4 cm. Date of photograph or re-photograph unknown Photograph by the artist. Private collection

and her daughter by name. Likewise, Ecce puer (Behold the Child), the documented commissioned portrait of Alfred William Mond, bears a Latin title given by Rosso, as well as hardly distinctive and barely visible features (see fig. 8.2). This is not unlike his most radical work, anonymously titled by Rosso as Madame X (ca. 1895), which is a near-complete abstraction of a face. One might thus hypothesize that it was Rosso himself who at once elicited and effaced his subject’s identity. This conscious process of naming and erasing could reflect his contemporaries’ practice of maintaining a sitter’s anonymity by concealing his or her identity. More importantly, the visual illegibility of sculptural portraits inaugurated by Rosso can later be found in the most experimental

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Figure 9.4 Photograph of the Viennese Rothschild family. Top left Louis Nathaniel (1882–1955), top right Oscar Ruben (1888–1909). Second row, left Valentine Noemi (1886–1969), middle Alphonse Mayer (1878–1942) and right Eugene Daniel (1884–1976) Reproduced with the permission of The Trustees of the Rothschild Archive

sculptural “portraits” of the early twentieth century by Constantin Brancusi, Pablo Picasso, and Alberto Giacometti, and could thus represent a concept that these later sculptors creatively reworked. Several new pieces of archival material support the Oscar Ruben Rothschild attribution, but none of these can stabilize the subject’s identity. Firstly, Oscar Ruben’s grandfather, Salomon Albert Anselm von Rothschild, and his brother, Louis Nathaniel von Rothschild, were both avid art collectors. Second, the known formal portrait of Oscar as a young boy from 1898 by painter Leopold Horowitz reveals general similarities between the face of the young Rothschild and that of the boy in Rosso’s sculpture, especially in the eyes, nose, and mouth. Third, photographs of the young Oscar record the child’s pensive expression (fig. 9.4). Rosso captures a similar sense of sadness in his sculpture, one that possibly references Oscar’s unhappy motherless childhood. Perhaps Rosso, much of whose work suggests a deep sensitivity to human suffering, was able to connect with the child’s emotional state.

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In Bambino ebreo, heavy, shadowy indentations substitute for the child’s downcast eyes, which contribute to its mood of brooding. Rosso’s work may well exemplify the idea that childhood, far from being completely joyful, has a large measure of sorrow, an emotion that can serve as inspiration for art, as cherished by Charles Baudelaire.25 Barr hypothesized that Rosso might have been identifying specifically with the somberness, discomfort, and sadness of the Jew, an alienated outsider in France whose status would be targeted during the political scandal of the Dreyfus Affair. In the nineteenth century, Jews were seen as prototypical transnationals—wandering, rootless, and unbound by a sense of national belonging or allegiance—desiring to fit in but remaining perennial outsiders. This is a human condition with which Rosso likely identified, given that he himself was an outsider in Paris.26 4

Shifting Objects: Bambino ebreo’s Proliferation and Variation

The variations and ambiguities that Rosso continually built into Bambino ebreo in terms of date, title, and subject can now be linked to his serialization of Bambino ebreo as a cast object existing in multiple versions. To be sure, this practice functioned for Rosso as more than a mechanical process of replication or marketing tool, although he did certainly use serialization for these reasons. All of the potential versions of the same basic cast represent Rosso’s material and conceptual efforts to vary, shift, and unfix the identity of sculpture in a modern way. The effect of this process is not merely destabilization. It can result in breaking open the singularity and unity of a sculpture’s identity. The meaning of the work becomes a study in proliferation, individualization, and identity formation, as well as in the shaping of an audience. The multiples functioned as a personal sign. By the end of his life, Rosso had cast, exhibited, sold, and given as gifts casts of the Bambino ebreo so often that it became a kind of calling card that was intertwined with his own identity. Through multiplication, Bambino ebreo would become his most popular work. Rosso’s creation of multiple casts of Bambino ebreo also allowed the artist to imagine and effectively create his audience in his mind as he envisioned the people who would receive, acquire, cherish, and promote a specific version of the work. 25  Baudelaire took from British essayist Thomas De Quincey the idea that childhood sorrow (rather than madness) is the germ of artistic genius and the work of art. See Thomas De Quincey, “The Affliction of Childhood,” in The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: Black, 1890), 1:28–54. On Baudelaire’s view, see Anna Green, French Paintings of Childhood, 1848–86 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 28. 26  Carl Levy, “Anarchism and Cosmopolitanism,” Journal of Political Ideologies 16, no. 3 (2011): 272.

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In further chapters of this book, we shall examine the visual and material differences among the many casts. In this chapter, we will study a sampling of the history of each individual cast. This process enables us to explore the human relationships and stories behind them, as well as Rosso’s role in the lives of the owners of many of these casts and the meaning the works had for them. The trajectory of various casts of the Bambino ebreo over the years provides a picture of the kind of personal contacts and friendships that Rosso developed during this time, suggested by the many gifts he gave of casts of this work. Furthermore, the fact that he distributed his casts in various countries can give us an idea of the transnational nature of his career. Rosso’s French network of collectors can be mapped through the names of Parisian owners of this work. Two of the best-known Parisian collectors, Paul-Arthur Chéramy and Comte Armand Doria, are listed as having owned casts.27 Another wax cast is cited as being owned by Parisian engineer and Impressionist art collector Henri Rouart, with whom Rosso had extended contact.28 At an unspecified date, Rosso sold a black wax cast to the French industrialist and art collector Camille Groult, listed in catalogues as “Galerie Groult.” Due to a misreading of the dedication on the cast, the literature has misattributed it as a gift from Rosso to Leipzig Museum director Richard Graul (Plate 16).29 27  The Chéramy cast is noted in Edmond Claris, De l’impressionnisme en sculpture: Auguste Rodin et Medardo Rosso (Paris: La Nouvelle Revue, 1902), facing page 76; and Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p. The Doria cast is noted only in Piérard. However, the catalogue raisonné of Cheramy’s collection published in 1908 does not mention Rosso’s works. Julius Meier-Graefe and Erich Klossowski, La Collection Cheramy (Munich: Piper, 1908). Likewise, the catalogue of the collection of Comte Armand Doria does not include Rosso’s work. See Album-Souvenir de la collection Armand Doria (Paris: Georges Petit, 1899). 28  The Rouart cast is mentioned in Claris, De l’impressionnisme en sculpture, facing page 76; Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p.; and Seidel, “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” 94. This wax cast may have been erroneously described by Ardengo Soffici as a bronze cast he saw in the Rouart collection. Soffici’s description is transcribed partially in Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 294–95. While Mola and Vittucci observe that no such work appeared in the collection of Rouart’s sons, they nonetheless give it a catalogue entry. 29  See Curt Seidel, “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” L’artista moderno (Turin), March 3, 1911, 94. The work was first exhibited in 1994. See Luciano Caramel, ed., Medardo Rosso, exh. cat. (London: The Southbank Centre, 1994), 27. The erroneous attribution to Richard Graul was first made by Caramel in 2004, who described the work as bearing the dedication “A mon ami Graul ROSSO.” See Luciano Caramel, ed., Medardo Rosso: Le origin della scultura moderna, exh. cat. (Milan: Skira, 2004), 146. Caramel noted that the work had been in the collection of Roberto Polo in Paris until 1991, as confirmed by the auction catalogue when the collection was sold. It was then sold at Sotheby’s in 1996 and was acquired by the Paolo Baldacci Gallery, New York. Mr. Baldacci does not recall to whom he sold it, nor did he retain records of the sale. The mistake has continued to appear throughout the literature, including in the Catalogo ragionato. See Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 140–42

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Several of Rosso’s French patrons were noted personalities in the medical profession. In 1904, he gave or sold a yellow-wax Impression d’enfant to the French collector Dr. Louis Sylvain Noblet, who donated it to the Musée de Troyes in 1909, where it subsequently suffered irreparable damage (Plates 3 and 4).30 My research indicates that Noblet was a well-respected meningitis expert.31 Another French collector who is listed as owning a cast is “Docteur Babinski.” I believe that this was the eminent neurologist Joseph Babinski, who is credited with discovering the Babinski Reflex.32 Given Rosso’s lifelong love of music, it is no surprise that numerous members of the Parisian music world, who were also noted collectors of Impressionist art, possessed casts of the Bambino ebreo. For example, Rosso notes a yellow-wax cast in the “Coll. J. Faure.”33 My research indicates that the and 290–91. The early bibliographic references cited by Mola and Vittucci are incorrect. For example, to support the work’s provenance, the authors cite a reference by Edmond Claris from 1902. However, Claris actually noted the owner as “Grouet,” which was most likely a typographical error for Groult. See Claris, De l’impressionnisme en sculpture, facing page 76. Another example is Mola and Vittucci’s citation of the cast as being reproduced on page 181 of an article by Ludwig Hevesi dated 1905, but no such reproduction is found on this page or anywhere else in the article. See Ludwig Hevesi, “Medardo Rosso,” Kunst und Kunsthandwerk 8 (1905): 174–82. No work is registered as having entered the Leipzig Museum, as confirmed by correspondence with Eberhard Patzig, Curator of the Library and Print Department, Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig. Nor does Rosso’s name appear in Graul’s personal diaries, as per correspondence with Juliane Hamisch, Archivist at Deutsches Kunstarchiv im Germanischen Nationalmuseum. My research confirms that the Groult cast is properly credited in Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p.; and Seidel, “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” 94. He is also properly credited as Groult in Borghi, Medardo Rosso, 66. 30  As per correspondence with Madame Chantal Rouquet, Conservateur des Musées d’Art et d’Histoire de Troyes, May 19, 1999. The date given by Mola and Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 292–93) seems plausible, although the authors’ assignment of the 1904 sale date is without reference to a source. Mola and Vittucci believe that this could have been the same Bambino ebreo exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in 1904, but this cannot be confirmed from the exhibition catalogue or photographs from the show, or based on the image reproduced by Mola and Vittucci, which might be from another venue. The cast is first listed as in belonging to the Musée de Troyes by Piérard. See Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p. Seidel lists the same cast twice—once as belonging to the Musée de Troyes and another time as owned by “Docteur Noblet.” Seidel, “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” 94. 31  See Louis Noblet, Le Méningisme, syndrome de E. Dupré: Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine (Paris: Henri Jouve, 1895). Rosso scholars have detailed the numerous other works he bought from Rosso, who also spent time in one of Noblet’s homes in Jessains-sur-Aube. See Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 293. 32  The Babinski cast is mentioned in Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p.; and Seidel, “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” 94. 33  The Faure cast is mentioned in Claris, De l’impressionnisme en sculpture, facing page 76; Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p.; and Seidel, “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” 94.

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owner was Jean-Baptiste Faure, the baritone and avid collector, a provenance that matches the work now at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston (Plate 13). A previously unknown wax—not included in the Catalogue raisonné—purchased by its current owner in the 1940s in an antique store and recently resurfaced, bears a dedication to “Madame Chabrier,” suggesting to me that Rosso gave it to Marie Alice Dejean Chabrier, the wife of composer Emmanuel Chabrier. Chabrier, like Faure, assiduously collected Impressionist art (Plate 14).34 Rosso’s lifelong but as yet un-researched passion for music extended beyond the confines of Paris, and so we find mentions of casts owned by other composers, such as the one owned by “E. Bach, Baden,” who is listed elsewhere as “baronne Eleanora Back [sic].”35 In my opinion this was Baroness Eleonore Josepha Maria Theresia Auguste Bach, the soprano singer and painter from Salzburg, who lived in Vienna and Baden. Bach was the wife of wealthy attorney and imperial court official Robert Bach and mother of the pianist, composer, and painter Maria Bach.36 In his late years in Italy, Rosso continued to seek out affinities with musical personalities. He sold or gifted a wax Bambino ebreo, which bears a dedication to the famed Italian composer Umberto Giordano. The cast is now housed at the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin (Plate 15). Author Francesco Cazzamini Mussi fondly recalled Rosso’s visits to Giordano: Maestro Giordano was at the piano, and on the keys, he hinted at Beethoven’s seventh symphony. Medardo listened. Behind him, in the room of Villa Fedora, his marvelous wax: The sick child. Medardo, while looking with amorous complacency onto this masterpiece, followed the immortal notes with a rocking of his head, then, suddenly, as if responding to a secret question:—That one over there, he’s also Beethoven! he let go with a smile, signaling to the wax.37 34  The Chabrier cast is not mentioned in the Rosso literature, but see Francis Poulenc, Emmanuel Chabrier (Geneva: La Palatine, 1961), 181. 35  The Bach cast is mentioned in Piérard as “baronne Eleanora Back [sic]” (see Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p.), while Seidel notes it as “E. Bach, Baden” (“L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” 94). 36  On Eleanora Bach, see Cecelia Hopkins Porter, Five Lives in Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), 107. 37  Francesco Cazzamini Mussi, Aneddoti milanesi (Rome: Formiggini, 1932), 2, quoted in Vittorio Grassi, “Le Muse nel Vergante tra XIX e XX secolo,” in Verbanus, 27 (2007): 268–270. Cazzamini mistakenly noted that Giordano owned a Bambino malato. It was a Bambino ebreo.

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International museum directors and dealers who showed Rosso’s works were also recipients of casts of the Bambino ebreo. In 1903 or 1904 the sculptor sold an opaque bronze covered in plaster investment left over from the process of casting, registered as Kinderköpfchen, to German art patron Karl Osthaus. In 1912 this same cast entered the avant-garde collections of the Hagen Museum (now in Folkwang in West Germany) (Plate 24a, Plate 24b, and Plate 24c).38 In 1906, on the occasion of his exhibition at the Cremetti Gallery in London, Rosso displayed a wax version of the sculpture and then gave or sold this or another wax cast to dealer Eugene Cremetti. The dedication to Cremetti’s wife in the work suggests a gift in honor of the spouse of the London dealer who had supported his career (Plate 17). A glimpse of Rosso’s guarded private life emerges in the story of the cast titled Impression d’enfant that he gave to his son as a wedding gift in 1908, mentioned by Francesco Rosso in a postcard from Paris.39 This cast is now said to be the dark painted plaster located at the Museo Medardo Rosso in Barzio (known in this study as the Black Plaster). However, the material in which this work was made—plaster, wax or bronze—is not specified in the postcard and therefore requires further investigation (Plate 1). Rosso’s circle of Viennese collectors, with whom he seemed to have noteworthy success, remains to be studied. What story might lie behind the wax cast dedicated by Rosso to a mysterious “Mons. Mendl” during his Vienna period, which entered the collections of the Galerie Belvedere in Vienna in 1921 but was only recently put on display in the museum (Plate 18)? A further glimpse is provided by another wax cast I discovered in a Los Angeles private collection, also not included in the Catalogue raisonné. It was owned by a scholar 38  The Hagen cast was frequently exhibited by Rosso in his lifetime and appears in numerous exhibition catalogues. It is also mentioned in Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p.; and Seidel, “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” 94. Information on the cast has been provided by correspondence with Dr. Mario von Lüttichau, Curator of Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Painting, Sculpture, Media Art at the Museum Folkwang, May 2013. The Osthaus collection was bought for the city of Essen and consolidated with the Municipal Art Museum in 1921 to create the Museum Folkwang. The museum is now in Essen, although the archive is still in Hagen. In 1909, Rosso exhibited a work noted as belonging to the Hagen Museum, under the title Enfant. Impression (cire) in Brussels at the IV e Salon annuel du Cercle d’art “Les Indépendants,” but I believe that the material was mistakenly given as wax rather than bronze. The other Enfant listed as a bronze owned by the Luxembourg Museum cannot be the Bambino ebreo because the French State did not possess that work. See Les Independants: Cercle d’Art; Catalogue VI Salon annuel du 12 juin au 4 juillet 1909 (Brussels: Les Independants, 1909), reprinted in Donald E. Gordon, Modern Art Exhibitions, 1900–1916: Selected Catalogue Documentation (Munich: Prestel, 1974), 341. 39  Correspondence between Francesco Rosso and Alberico Longoni, January 22, 1908, quoted in Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 293.

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named Erna Brunauer, the translator of Stephan Zweig and Rudolph Steiner, who brought it with her to the US when she left Vienna in 1905. My search of Rosso’s letters confirms that Madame Brunauer was indeed one of Rosso’s Viennese collectors.40 Did this represent an artwork too valuable to abandon, or did she have a more personal relationship to it as an important memento of her years in Vienna (Plate 5)? Other Austrian collectors of Rosso, Harald Gutherz and Hermann and Gottfried Eissler, owned casts of Bambino ebreo.41 Rosso also gave and sold Bambino ebreo casts in Belgium. Yet another version signaled his friendship for and gratitude to Louis Piérard, the Belgian author of a book on the sculptor, Un sculpteur impressionniste. Medardo Rosso (1910), to whom he gave a wax with a dedication to Piérard’s wife, Marguerite, in 1910 (Plate 19). The work is not found in the Catalogue raisonné of the artist’s works. It was auctioned at Sotheby’s and has since disappeared into a private collection. In 1912, Rosso sold a bronze cast to Belgian collector Yvan Lamberty under the title Tête d’enfant. The Lamberty bronze was auctioned in 1919 when the collector went bankrupt, but the name of the buyer was not recorded.42 Rosso shaped a new audience for his art through Bambino ebreo when he continued to make, exhibit, and sell more casts of this subject after returning to the increasingly nationalistic and ultimately fascistic climate of Italy in the second decade of the twentieth century. What might the wax cast of Bambino ebreo, bought by Jewish Florentine collector Gustavo Sforni in 1910, have meant to him, especially in this context?43 In June 1913, Rosso’s Dutch patroness, Etha Fles, had donated a wax cast of the work under the title Bambino ebreo to 40  Medardo Rosso mentions “Madame Brunauer (Wien)” in a letter to Jehan Rictus, undated, unpublished transcription by Alessandro De Stefani, 486v, NaFr24571, Papiers de Jehan Rictus, Département des Manuscripts, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. 41  Piérard notes them as “Eissler” and “Goutherstz [sic].” Piérard, Un sculpteur impressionniste, n.p. 42  In 1919, Lamberty went bankrupt and was forced to auction off his collection. This is confirmed in Catalogue de la Collection Y. Lamberty (Brussels: Galerie Georges Giroux, 1929), 21. See Sophie Fourny-Dargère, “La collection Lamberty au Musée de Vernon,” La Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France 6 (1990): 479. I thank Ingrid Goddeeris of the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium for this information. Mola and Vittucci (Medardo Rosso, 295) suggest that the Lamberty bronze could have been bought by Rosso and then resold in 1923 to Italian collector Luigi Bergamo. This hypothesis is unconfirmed. A wooden base to which the Lamberty bronze was attached is not found on the bronze owned by Bergamo. Furthermore, the bronze sold to Bergamo is significantly smaller in size (given as h. 0.26cm) than the other bronzes that Rosso cast during his Parisian period. 43  The Sforni cast is listed in Seidel, “L’arte di Medardo Rosso,” 94. For an old photograph of the cast in Sforni’s home, see Margherita d’Ayala Valva, La Collezione Sforni (Florence: Olschki, 2005), pl. IV.

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the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome (Plate 20). But the following year, in April 1914, when Rosso exhibited another cast of it as Il Bambino in his retrospective show at the Biennale in Venice, he eliminated the word “ebreo” from the title.44 We should consider here whether a special meaning about her Jewish identity lay behind Rosso’s gift, in 1915, of a wax cast of the work to his close friend Margherita Sarfatti, Benito Mussolini’s Jewish lover (Plate 6). In any case, one of the casts has remained a prized possession of the family. But Jewishness might not have been the only reason why this work attracted Italians. In March 1919, a Tuscan collector, the entrepreneur Romolo Monti, bought a wax through Rosso’s son, Francesco, demonstrating that the work had an ongoing existence as a collector’s piece decades after it was made (Plate 11).45 At the end of his life, anxious about his legacy and posthumous reputation, Rosso sold a bronze Bambino ebreo to Italian businessman Luigi Bergamo. The work is now in a private collection (Plate 27). Bergamo had promised to build Rosso a museum on Lago Maggiore that never materialized, and Rosso intended this cast to be exhibited publicly in that museum. Despite claims in the literature, Bergamo was likely not Jewish.46 Rosso also attempted to preserve his international legacy in a highly nationalistic European climate. The same year, he sold a wax to British philosopher Charles Meek, author of the 1929 study The Will to Function. It ended up, through Meek’s sister, in the St. Mary’s Priory of Princethorpe, and was bought at auction in 1964 by American playwright Edward Albee (Plate 7). The work was recently auctioned to a private collector after Albee’s death. Back in Italy, yet another cast was exhibited in Milan in 1926 at Sarfatti’s Prima Mostra del Novecento Italiano. However, by then, the work’s psychological fragility contrasted with the concerns of a younger generation of Italian artists who called for a return to stability, virility, and order in neo-classical form. Finally, a sculpture titled by Rosso simply Child at the Exhibition of Modern Italian Art in New York in the same year was likely a cast 44  The work is listed in the XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 1914: Catalogo, 87, as Il Bambino. In this case, we can be fairly certain that this is in fact Bambino ebreo, since other images that include children (Aetas aurea, Bimbo al sole, Il fanciullo presso l’asilo del Boccone di pane, Il ragazzo malato and Ecce peur) are all listed separately among the twenty works that Rosso exhibited there. The work is documented in Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 293. 45  Letter from Francesco Rosso to Romolo Monti, September 15, 1919 (cited in Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 295). For the letter to Romolo Monti see Marco Fagioli and Lucia Minunno, Medardo Rosso: Disegni e sculture; San Miniato al Tedesco, Palazzo Migliorati Piazza XX Settembre, 1993, exh. cat. (Florence: Opus Libri, 1993). 46  Mola and Vittucci, Medardo Rosso, 140.

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of the Bambino ebreo. This show planted the seeds for an interest in modern Italian art that would emerge in the US after World War II.47 The rediscovery of Rosso’s versions of the Bambino ebreo in museums as well as in the homes of descendants of his patrons and friends, has given us access to some of the stories surrounding them. The sculptor’s multiples still operate today, in spite of their inherently reproductive nature, as they did during his lifetime—as intimate objects that invite personal relationships not only with the viewer but also with the histories of individual collectors. Each multiple reminds us of the value of the single work as well as that of the individual. For this reason, Rosso’s art, especially in its serial version, can still surprise: nestled into its environment, non-hierarchical, emotionally rich, connected, and contingent. In sum, in all its sculptural iterations, Bambino ebreo points to the variability of the reproduced three-dimensional object reconceived in a modern key. This is further evidenced by the fact that Rosso did not stop there, for he continued to elaborate the unstable act of seeing in his carefully lit photographs of this work, which he printed and reprinted in different ways, distributing them to friends, patrons, and publications. In these photographs, the left and right sides are distinguished by light and dark areas, which suggest a shadow falling across the child’s face (figs 9.5 and 9.6). This gesture indicates Rosso’s efforts to fix not only the traits of a child’s face but also to grasp and represent that instant in which the face became visible to him, to create the effect of the moment of glimpsing. It becomes a way to hold a living image in a living moment, to paraphrase the words of critic Michael Brenson.48 Read as a phenomenological experiment, Bambino ebreo allows us to see how twentieth-century sculptors like Giacometti reconfigured Rosso’s ideas in philosophical terms, defining these multiplicities as the complexity of seeing subjects and sculptures not as fixed things but rather as living, unstable objects defined by perception.

47  Exhibition of Modern Italian Art (New York: Italy America Society, 1926), n.p. 48  See Michael Brenson, “Gallery Discussion,” in “Variable States: Intention, Appearance and Interpretation in Modern Sculpture,” (paper presented at Variable States: Intention, Appearance and Interpretation in Modern Sculpture, Nasher Sculpture Center, October 22–23, 2004, http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/Portals/0/Documents/ Learn/Research/ConferenceVariableStates/PDFS/Transcript.pdf, 9.)

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Figure 9.5 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94. Modern contact print from original glass negative, 18 × 24 cm. Date of photograph uncertain Photograph by the artist. Private collection

Figure 9.6 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94. Vintage gelatin silver print, 10.2 × 6.1 cm. Date of photograph and print unknown Photograph by the artist. Private collection

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Bibliography

Archives Consulted



Works Consulted

Archivio Medardo Rosso, Barzio Archivio Storico delle Arti Contemporanee, Venice Biblioteca d’arte–Biblioteca archeologica–Centro di alti studi sulle arti visive–CASVA, Milan Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris Deutsches Kunstarchiv im Germanischen Nationalmuseum, Nuremberg Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig Musées d’Art et d’Histoire de Troyes Museum Folkwang, Essen

Album-Souvenir de la collection Armand Doria. Paris: Georges Petit, 1899. Barr, Margaret Scolari. Medardo Rosso. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1963. Borghi, Mino. Medardo Rosso. Milan: Edizioni del Milione, 1950. Brenson, Michael. “Gallery Discussion.” In “Variable States. Intention, Appearance and Interpretation in Modern Sculpture.” Paper presented at Variable States: Intention, Appearance and Interpretation in Modern Sculpture, Nasher Sculpture Center, October 22–23, 2004. http://www.nashersculpturecenter.org/Portals/0/ Documents/Learn/Research/ConferenceVariableStates/PDFS/Transcript.pdf. Burr, Bettina. The Story of Langau. Private publication, 1998. Caramel, Luciano, ed. Medardo Rosso. Exh. cat. London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1994. Caramel, Luciano, ed. Medardo Rosso: Le origin della scultura moderna. Exh. cat. Milan: Skira, 2004. Caramel, Luciano, ed. Mostra di Medardo Rosso (1858–1928). Exh. cat. Milan: Società per le belle arti ed esposizione permanente, 1979. Catalogo Ufficiale Illustrato: Mostra Nazionale d’Arte Sacra, Venezia 1920. Venice: G. Zanetti, 1920. Catalogue de la Collection Y. Lamberty. Brussels: Galerie Georges Giroux, 1929. Cazzamini Mussi, Francesco. Aneddoti milanesi. Rome: Formiggini, 1932. Claris, Edmond. De l’impressionnisme en sculpture: Auguste Rodin et Medardo Rosso. Paris: La Nouvelle Revue, 1902. “Crushed by Baron’s Death.” New York Times, September 9, 1909. d’Ayala Valva, Margherita. La Collezione Sforni. Florence: Olschki, 2005. De Quincey, Thomas. “The Affliction of Childhood.” In The Collected Writings of Thomas De Quincey, edited by David Masson. Edinburgh: Black, 1890. de Sainte-Croix, Camille. “Medardo Rosso,” Mercure de France 17 (March, 1896): 378–91.

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Exhibition of Modern Italian Art. New York: Italy America Society, 1926. Fagioli, Marco, and Lucia Minunno. Medardo Rosso: Disegni e sculture: San Miniato al Tedesco, Palazzo Migliorati Piazza XX Settembre, 1993. Exh. Cat. Florence: Opus Libri, 1993. Fourny-Dargère, Sophie. “La collection Lamberty au Musée de Vernon.” La Revue du Louvre et des Musées de France 6 (1990), 479–83. Gordon, Donald E. Modern Art Exhibitions, 1900–1916: Selected Catalogue Documentation. Munich: Prestel, 1974. Grassi, Vittorio. “Le Muse nel Vergante tra xix e xx secolo.” Verbanus 27 (2007): 268–70. Green, Anna. French Paintings of Childhood, 1848–1886. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007. Hevesi, Ludwig. “Medardo Rosso.” Kunst und Kunsthandwerk 8 (1905): 174–84. Keyzer, Frances. French Household Cooking. London: “Country Life” & George Newnes, 1908. Les Archives Biographiques Contemporaines. Paris: n.p., 1906. Les Independants: Cercle d’Art: Catalogue VI Salon annuel du 12 juin au 4 juillet 1909. Brussels: Les Independants, 1909. Levy, Carl. “Anarchism and Cosmopolitanism.” Journal of Political Ideologies 16, no. 3 (2011): 265–78. Lista, Giovanni. Medardo Rosso: Destin d’un sculpteur, 1858–1928. Paris: L’Échoppe, 1994. Meier-Graefe, Julius and Erich Klossowski. La Collection Cheramy. Munich: Piper, 1908. Meier-Graefe, Julius. Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst. 3 vols. Stuttgart: Julius Hoffmann, 1904. Published in English as Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics. Translated by Florence Simmonds and George W. Chrystal. 2 vols. London: W. Heinemann, 1908. Mola, Paola, and Fabio Vittucci. Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura. Milan: Skira, 2009. Morice, Charles. “Les passants: Medardo Rosso.” Le Soir, September 25, 1895. Noblet, Louis. Le Méningisme, syndrome de E. Dupré. Thèse pour le doctorat en médecine. Paris: Henri Jouve, 1895. Piérard, Louis. “Un sculpteur impressionniste: Medardo Rosso.” Société nouvelle 15, no. 33 (1909): 57–63. Piérard, Louis. Un sculpteur impressionniste: Medardo Rosso. Paris: La Société Nouvelle, 1909. Porter, Cecelia Hopkins. Five Lives in Music. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Potts, Alex. The Sculptural Imagination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000. Poulenc, Francis. Emmanuel Chabrier. Geneva: La Palatine, 1961. Prima esposizione italiana dell’impressionismo francese e delle scolture di Medardo Rosso. Exh. cat. Florence: Lyceum Club, 1910. Rodriguez, Jean-Franćois. La réception de l’impressionnisme à Florence en 1910. Venice: Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti, 1994.

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Seidel, Curt. “L’arte di Medardo Rosso.” L’artista moderno (Turin), March 3, 1911, 94. Soffici, Ardengo. “Medardo Rosso.” La Voce, May 27, 1909. Soffici, Ardengo. “L’Impressionismo a Firenze.” La Voce, May 12, 1910. Soffici, Ardengo. Il caso Medardo Rosso. Florence: Seeber, 1909. Wilson, Derek. Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power. London: André Deutsch, 1998. Works of Art from the Collection of the Barons Nathaniel and Albert von Rothschild. Lot Rothschild–6179, Christie’s Sale. Thursday July 8, 1999, London. XI. Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte della Città di Venezia, 1914: Catalogo. Venice: Carlo Ferrari, 1914. Zanzi, Emilio. “Medardo torinese.” Gazzetta del Popolo, December 13, 1929. Zanzi, Emilio. “Una ‘facezia’ di Medardo Rosso.” Arte e Vita (Rome), December 1920.

chapter 10

Comparative Visual Examination of Medardo Rosso’s Bambino ebreo Sharon Hecker and Austin Nevin 1

Introduction

In May 2014, a group of experts from different disciplines—art history, conservation, and conservation science—gathered together at Peter Freeman, Inc. gallery in New York to examine a sampling of ten casts of Medardo Rosso’s Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy, date of creation of subject between 1892 and 1894). The casts, executed in plaster, wax, and bronze, were made and sold during different epochs of the artist’s life. They came to New York from museums and private collections around the world and were placed for the very first time on a long table side by side for experts to examine in comparative fashion. This chapter presents the results of our visual inspection.1 Close visual examinations through comparative study are the most basic tools of art history. They offer the opportunity to unite art historians, conservators, and conservation scientists and can elicit questions and new ideas about the objects. They are an indispensable foundation for research, in addition to art-historical research on the object’s provenance, and they can be complemented by further technical and scientific research. Visual assessment of the condition of each cast is important for several reasons. For one, it allows us to differentiate features that are evidence of the casting process from features that can be ascribed to handling, damage, and restoration. This information can complement conservation reports, which can assist in the assessment of condition and the understanding of past treatments, many of which strongly influence the appearance of the surface of the casts. This is particularly important for Rosso’s wax casts, which vary considerably in their color and current condition. A second reason for a visual 1  For similar studies, see Jeanne L. Wasserman, Daumier Sculpture: A Critical and Comparative Study (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1969); Jeanne L. Wasserman, Metamorpho­ ses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Jane Bassett et al., The Craftsman Revealed: Adriaen De Vries, Sculptor in Bronze (Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2008); and Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphné Barbour, and Shelley Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture (Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 2010).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_013

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understanding of the condition of each cast is that it allows us to note how greatly the passage of time affects Rosso’s waxes. The richly textured surfaces of the wax casts, not unique to Bambino ebreo but common to many Rosso works, and the tacky nature of wax itself, mean that dirt may accumulate preferentially on more exposed surfaces, altering the appearance of the works. Aging of material is a further important factor to be considered. While variation in color and tone is visible in all the casts, which can be due to different compositions of the casting waxes, it is also quite likely that the casts were originally different in color, since some materials present in the casting material are known to age differently from others. The different colors can be ascribed to small variations in the mixtures of organic materials, which include waxes of various origin, oils, and varnishes. These were found in the different casts and were determined with Pyrolysis-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry (see Chapter 11 for details). Working from photographs alone may be a useful tool for comparative visual examinations such as ours, but it is ultimately unsatisfying for side-by-side comparison. This fact highlights the need for better models for the assessment of other Bambino ebreo casts, such as those that could not travel or those found online. Visual comparisons between casts are particularly satisfying because they enable us to discover many key features that are common to some but not all works. Yet visual comparison is not sufficient on its own: we must rely on scientific data such as sampling as well as 3D scanning for an assessment of 1:1 similarities that the naked eye cannot detect. Indeed, our initial visual examination was complemented by further scientific examinations conducted after this study day. They included sampling and elemental and molecular analysis to discern the compositional make-up of each cast and the use of white-light 3D scanning to distinguish further subtle differences in the form of each cast. The results of pXRF (portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry) of bronze and sampling of wax supported and enriched our primary visual observations, while the scans provided the first concrete evidence for similarities and subtle differences in the basic form of each cast. White-light scanning takes our initial visual examination a step further. It is based on direct measurements of the dimensions of the casts, and data from scanning can be used to make comparisons of relative size, surface texture, and pitch or inclination of different casts. It can rapidly identify even slight differences between casts that might not be evident to the naked eye. These results are discussed in the following chapters of our book. Our aims in the case of Rosso’s Bambino ebreo were: (a) to study the relationship between wax and bronze casts and existing plasters from which the casts may or may not have issued; (b) to compare casts made in the same material

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with one another in order to note subtle differences; (c) to report on the presence of artifacts of the casting process found on all the casts; (d) to examine in detail the relationship between casts and their bases; (e) to study the overall condition of each cast. We hoped to find out whether technical details can support hypotheses regarding the evolution of Rosso’s working methods and to see whether casts of known provenance shared similarities with lesserdocumented works that nonetheless presented compelling visual evidence. In this and the other chapters on Rosso, the reader will notice casts that are not included the Catalogue raisonné. This study is a summary of conclusions that we can draw today based on our research. 2

History of Technical Examinations of Rosso’s Casts

The Peter Freeman Study Day was the first time a significant number of Rosso’s casts of the same subject have been brought together for side-by-side examination. However, the groundwork was laid over a decade ago, first by Derek Pullen, who gave the initial detailed description of Rosso’s procedures in 1994, and then in a milestone interdisciplinary study of Rosso’s working methods conducted by Harry Cooper, Sharon Hecker, Francesca Bewer, Pullen, and Henry Lie (noted here as the Harvard Study) in 2003. The Harvard Study diagrammed the complex processes that Rosso adopted for casting his works and described particularities noted in many casts.2 Despite these studies, many errors in understanding the artist’s working methods persist in the literature. For example, Rosso’s waxes continue to be erroneously described as hand-modeled rather than cast in serial fashion. This error has led to a misunderstanding of Rosso’s process as well as devastating and irreversible results in the conservation of his works. It seemed necessary and important for us to conduct further research in order to dispel this and other errors about Rosso’s process. It is useful to begin by summarizing the findings of the earlier research by Pullen and the Harvard Study. In these studies, the authors described in detail Rosso’s casting procedure, which was typical of the lost-wax (cire perdue) method. Rosso began with a clay model, which was then cast as a primary plaster, and which could be reproduced in wax using a multi-part piece mold or a gelatin mold as well as an auxiliary mold known as the “mother mold,” which served to hold the gelatin mold in place. Both Pullen and the Harvard Study showed that the use of gelatin molds by Rosso was key to his successful 2  Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, ed., Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003).

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reproduction of many of his works in serial sculpture because it allowed him to create multiple casts from plasters without loss of detail and the need for complex plaster molds. Physical evidence indicated specific types of plaster models used. The Harvard Study provided visual documentation of artifacts that may have been lost or developed further by Rosso in different stages of the casting process, as well as artifacts from molding and casting in wax and bronze that were visible on the surfaces of the casts. An important conclusion of this recent study was that a primary plaster served to reproduce waxes, which in some cases were used to make bronzes. Our study concluded that different primary plasters could have been reproduced to make second-generation plasters as well, challenging the currently held view that a single “original” plaster model was used to make all of Rosso’s waxes and bronzes. Indeed, other subjects by Rosso also have more than one plaster.3 The Harvard Study suggested that in the future, the complex relationships that seem to have existed among casts of the same subject could be better understood through a close visual comparison of similar casts. This further step is taken in our current study. The research presented here is based on the methodological framework utilized during the Harvard Study: close examination of the surface of works, an inspection of the backs and the insides of casts, and scientific analysis of materials used by Rosso. 3

Analytic Method

Our visual examination in New York included one of two known plasters, two bronze casts, and seven wax casts. For this reason, the technical observations presented below have been grouped by material. Each description includes a comparison between the plaster models and wax or bronze casts, where possible, and discusses the relationships between casts made of the same materials with different provenances. In this study, a distinction is made for comparative purposes between lifetime casts with established provenances, which are considered the benchmark casts, and those casts whose provenance is still under research, but which present compelling visual or technical evidence as to their lifetime status. Prior to the examination of the ten casts side-by-side, two members of the team—Hecker and Nevin—travelled to study other casts of the Bambino ebreo 3  Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci contend that there is a single “original” plaster for each subject. Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009).

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in Italian and European collections. These casts could not travel to New York for side-by-side comparison, mostly due to their fragility, but some of them did undergo 3D scanning and sampling, which is reported on in further chapters of this book. Our observations regarding the casts that could not travel added insights that have been incorporated into this study. One visual examination of a key cast that was not present in New York has been included here for reference (see Ex-Noblet Wax, below). 4

Plaster

4.1 The Black Plaster We know that there are at least two extant plasters, both of which were used to cast different versions of the Bambino ebreo. One plaster is almost black and is located in the Museo Medardo Rosso in Barzio (Plate 1). The second plaster is of a brown color (Plate 2). It was possible for us to study in detail and scan only the black-colored plaster in New York. Solely for the purposes of this study, we refer to the scanned black plaster as the Black Plaster and to the other one as the Brown Plaster, without ascribing significance to their color. It is likely that the color of both plasters is due to their use rather than to an artistic decision on the part of Rosso. To our knowledge these plasters were considered “working plasters” by the artist and were never exhibited in his lifetime. Casts in wax and bronze were made from them and, as a result, they are coated with a variety of organic materials and varnishes that would have aided the detachment of molds, including the gelatin molds. The Brown Plaster is an uneven brown, likely a result of the use of varnishes that would have aided the detachment of the molds. Other plasters, such as the Ecce puer at the Museo di Medardo Rosso in Barzio, are similarly coated with materials that were used to aid detachment of molds. Although we were not able to examine the Brown Plaster in detail and sideby-side with other casts, it had been previously examined during the Harvard Study. From verbal descriptions and photographs we were able to ascertain that it contains many raised linear marks, which were recognized by the group as coming from a cracked gelatin mold that was used to cast the plaster. This would suggest that the Brown Plaster is a second-generation plaster. The existence of two plasters challenges any notion of a single “original plaster” from which Rosso made all of his casts. A comparison of features in the photographs and written description of the Brown Plaster in the Harvard Study leads us to believe that it was used to create one of the casts in our study, the so-called Cologne Bronze (Plate 26).

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The freestanding and flat-bottomed Black Plaster is heterogeneous in appearance, with areas of different tones of dark black, brown, and lighter hues. This suggests abrasion of the surface, particularly evident at the top of the plaster, and the application of multiple layers of dark paint or varnish, as well as repair materials on the upper-right edge. No conservation history of the plaster is known, but many fine cracks and the presence of different materials on the surface strongly suggest that it may have been damaged and repaired. Hence, any close comparison between the Black Plaster and casts made in bronze and wax need to be conducted carefully, taking into account these surface imperfections from damage and repairs. Side-by-side comparison of the Black Plaster with all other casts in our study in wax and bronze suggests that it could have been used as the model for only some of the examined works, such as the Ex-Sarfatti Wax (Plate 6), the Nasher Wax (Plate 12), the Ex-Brunauer Wax (Plate 5), and the Timken Wax (Plate 9). Subtle but significant differences between the Black Plaster and the other examined casts suggest that the Black Plaster was not used as the model for the Folkwang Bronze (Plate 24), the Sussex Wax (Plate 8), and the Ex-Meek Wax (Plate 7). This suggests to us that yet another plaster model (not the Brown Plaster) could have been used as the model for these works. This model was either destroyed or has yet to be located. To give one example, the comparison of the same area for different casts is shown in figs 10.1 a, b, c, d. The pattern of the heart-shaped void at the top right of all of the casts reveals similarities between the Sussex Wax, the Folkwang Bronze and the Ex-Meek Wax, while the Black Plaster is clearly different from these casts, for in this plaster the heartshaped void appears half-filled in or partially obstructed. This finding provides further evidence that the Black Plaster was not used for all the casts, and a further reason why any comparison of casts only with a single “original plaster” model is not tenable. 5

Bronze

5.1 The Folkwang Bronze The Folkwang Bronze is documented as having been sold by Rosso to the collector and Hagen Museum director Karl Ernst Ernest Osthaus in 1902 (Plates 24a, 24b and 24c). In 1922 the museum became the Folkwang Museum, where the work still resides today. The cast presents surface features typical of lost-wax casting in the form of bubbles. Slight raised lines on the left cheek are evidence of the incisions that would have been made in the gelatin mold prior to the

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Figure 10.1a Detail of Black Plaster, Plate 1 Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

Figure 10.1c Detail of Folkwang Bronze, Plate 24 © Museum Folkwang, Essen. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

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Figure 10.1b Detail of Sussex Wax, Plate 8 Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

Figure 10.1d Detail of Ex-Meek Wax, Plate 7 Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

The surface detail of the Black Plaster shows clear signs of abrasion, revealing the plaster beneath the dark shiny surface. The heart-shaped detail on the upper-right contains additional material not found in the Folkwang Bronze or in the Sussex Wax, and is different from features seen in the Cologne Bronze (Plate 26). The features of the Black Plaster are similar to those seen in other casts, for example Ex-Sarfatti Wax (Plate 6), Nasher Wax (Plate 12), Ex-Brunauer Wax (Plate 5) and Timken Wax (Plate 9).

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Detail of Folkwang Bronze, Plate 24 Slight raised lines on the child’s left cheek are evidence of the incisions that would have been made in the gelatin mold prior to the casting of the wax that was then used to make the bronze. © Museum Folkwang, Essen. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

casting of the wax that was then used to make the bronze (fig. 10.2). It is of interest that the same fine lines are found on the Black Plaster, suggesting that these incisions may have been in a previous, earlier-generation plaster from which the Folkwang Bronze was subsequently taken. The Folkwang cast presents a striking example of Rosso’s selective removal of investment material from the surface of the cast. While the front of the face of the cast has been cleaned of white material to reveal the dark bronze, the rest of the work has been left with significant remains of investment material. It is similar in appearance to the bronze cast of other subjects, such as the Bambino alle cucine economiche in the Palazzo Pitti, which shares a rough and mottled-looking extended base that contains many traces of liquid alloy used for casting. At least five iron nails were used during casting to stabilize the core on the top of the head and underneath the proper right ear and on the left shoulder.

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The heads of the nails are visible on the surface of the cast and brown rust has accumulated in the white material. The length and size of the iron nails are also visible from an examination of the core of the bronze. The bronze has been filed down on protruding edges of the base, but no filing or other finishing on the surface of the work can be seen. The work also shows Rosso’s inclusion in the cast of a large bottom edge in bronze, which is integral to the cast and ensures its vertical stability. From figure 10.1a it is clear that there are small but significant differences between the Folkwang Bronze and the Black Plaster, for example the heart shape, but see scans in Chapter 13 for details of these differences. 5.2 The Cologne Bronze The Cologne Bronze, whose provenance is still being researched, seems very different in surface from the Folkwang Bronze (Plate 26). In striking contrast to the dark, unpatinated surface of the Folkwang Bronze, the surface of the Cologne Bronze shows many signs of careful finishing after bronze casting. All investment material has been removed, the base and areas of the front and back have been neatly filed, the large nails or screws used to hold the wax mold in place during casting have been removed, and the surface has been patinated to create a very shiny mottled brass color (10.3). The Cologne Bronze does not appear to have been cast from the Black Plaster, as can be appreciated through the marked differences in the details in both works. The Cologne Bronze could, however, have been cast from the Brown Plaster, which shows evidence of gelatin molds. Despite the high level of finish seen in the Cologne Bronze, there is strong evidence of the use of a gelatin mold to cast the wax or, alternatively, the casting from the Brown Plaster as a model for the mold, which would have resulted in the transfer of the raised lines onto the face of the bronze. It is not clear if these lines are due to the use of a different, third plaster from which the wax was cast, or if they correspond to the raised lines that were reported in the Harvard Study on the Brown Plaster. The position of some of the pins or nails used to stabilize the core during casting are very similar to those observed in the Folkwang Bronze cast (fig. 10.4). 6

Wax

6.1 The Ex-Noblet Wax (Examined, but Not Present in Study Day) A starting point for the comparative study of all the wax casts of the Bambino ebreo series is the Ex-Noblet Wax cast in the Musée de Troyes, which could not

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Figure 10.3

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Detail of Cologne Bronze, Plate 26 The Cologne bronze has a far more finished look than the Folkwang Bronze (Plate 24): It is chased clean of investment material, the base, front and back are neatly filed, the large nails or screws used to hold the wax mold in place during casting have been removed, and the surface has been patinated to a shiny mottled brass color. PRIVATE COLLECTION. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

travel to the study day in New York (Plate 4).4 The cast is extremely important, for it is documented in a photograph from the artist’s lifetime (Plate 3) and bears the name of its original owner, Rosso’s patron Dr. Louis-Sylvain Noblet. The photograph shows the cast mounted on a base and enclosed within a glass vitrine. Noblet donated the cast to the Musée de Troyes, where the work still resides. 4  For a discussion of Rosso’s constant variations of titles for the same work see Chapter 9.

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Figure 10.4a Detail of Cologne Bronze, Plate 26 Raised lines that are evidence of the use of a gelatin mold to cast the wax used to make the bronze are seen below the cheek in this detail PRIVATE COLLECTION. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

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Figure 10.4b Detail of Folkwang Bronze, Plate 24. The position of the nail under the child’s right ear of the Folkwang cast corresponds to the position of the hole that was left in the Cologne Bronze (Fig. 10.4a). © Museum Folkwang, Essen. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson.

Due to an accident, the cast has been irreparably damaged and most of the wax has fallen off the front. The vitrine has been lost and the square piece of wood that formed the bottom of the vitrine has split in two. Today, half of the large square bottom and beveled-edge base seen in the photograph are still attached to the plaster cast, which is partially covered with the original wax. Recent conservation of the work has allowed the partial reconstruction of lost areas from the back of the cast, but the work remains compromised. Nonetheless, important insights can be gleaned from an examination of the cast, the wax and the base, revealing more vital technical information about how Rosso worked. It is apparent from the examination of broken edges of the wax cast that two layers of yellow-orange wax, each a millimeter-thick, were poured into the mold to make the cast. Traces of whitish material on the surface of the wax suggest that a gelatin mold could have been used for casting, which is corroborated by the raised lines on the back of the work. The mostly smooth and shiny gypsum core of the work is solid and was probably poured into the wax shell. Small bubbles on the surface of the cast were most likely due to the presence

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of trapped air in the liquid plaster. Long drips of wax, which would have accumulated inside the gelatin mold prior to the pouring of the liquid plaster, have left impressions on the core. The core is probably solid, but we cannot be sure because it is affixed firmly to the base. However, our research has found that several other casts of this subject reveal fully solid plaster rather than a hollowed out area in the center. This seems to be the case for some works made by Rosso to be freestanding without a separate base, e.g., Plate 17 and Plate 22, as well as in other lifetime casts of the subject. The Ex-Noblet cast, in fact, is still attached to its original solid rectangular base, but an additional layer of 1–3 cm of sculpted plaster separates the bottom of the cast and the top of the base, which served to change the inclination of the work. The base was attached to the plaster through the insertion of a large screw into the wet plaster from the bottom of the wooden base. This base is similar to those of other wax casts, such as the Sussex Wax, as is the screw with which it has been connected to the cast by the artist. This shows Rosso’s interest in connecting some of his sculptures directly to their bases and gives insight into his choices of bases. 6.2 The Ex-Brunauer Wax Another wax cast that is still attached to its original base is the Ex-Brunauer Wax (Plate 5). It was originally owned by Erna Brunauer (her married name was MacArthur) and was brought with her when she left Vienna to live in the US with her American husband in 1905. It has resided in the collection of her son in Los Angeles. Although it was thought to be a posthumous cast, my research showed that its owner Erna Brunauer’s name appears in a letter written by Rosso, which suggests that he cast the work during his lifetime and sold or gifted it to her (see Chapter 9 for a full discussion of the provenance). The work was severely damaged over time and has been recently restored drawing on the research for this volume. (see Chapter 14). The presence of the original wooden base further confirms the work’s lifetime status. This base is very similar in appearance to the Noblet Wax base, with beveled edges, and is smaller at the top than at the bottom. Examination of the work prior to restoration revealed large areas of detachment or voids between the thick wax and the plaster core, and an unstable, forward lean of the cast, which led to damage of the bottom edge of the cast. The wax was covered with significant dirt on the back, and many impressions of cloth could be seen on the face of the cast. The impressions suggest that the object was wrapped in cloth at some point, and the impressions left on the work are probably a result of handling and packing. The surface of the Ex-Brunauer cast is less well defined than many other casts studied, but close observation reveals the characteristic marks of the Bambino ebreo, such as the heart-shaped void and the hexagonal impression

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on the forehead. The externally verifiable lifetime provenance assured us that this is not a poorly executed posthumous cast. The surface feature in this cast is most similar to the Black Plaster cast and resembles other casts, suggesting that the Black Plaster could have been used to cast it. 6.3 The Ex-Sarfatti Wax This work bears a dedication by Rosso to Margherita Sarfatti, who was the lover of Benito Mussolini and whose friendship with Rosso is amply documented (Plate 6). The work remained in the Sarfatti family collection until its recent sale to a private collector. Of all the works examined, this cast is most similar to the Black Plaster, with which it shares many features. The bottom-left area of the shoulder of both works is similar and more substantial than that found in other casts. There is no reason to presume that the current base (not visible in the image below) is original. Like many of the wax casts, damage and subsequent repair to the wax has occurred on the bottom-left side. In this cast, as in others, plaster was inserted by the artist to stabilize the cast (fig. 10.5), and an effort has been made to continue the contours of the wax in the plaster. Two different kinds

Figure 10.5 Detail of Ex-Sarfatti Wax, Plate 6 Rosso added plaster to stabilize the cast inside and tilt the object forward Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

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of plaster were used in two different phases: the first was applied around the interior, leaving a void, and the second was added to stabilize the base and add height to the work. This second application partially covers the central plaster void. There is significant residue of whitish material on the back of the work, which is probably from the mold used to make it. 6.4 The Ex-Meek Wax This cast was originally sold to the British philosopher Charles S. Meek in 1923 (Plate 7). The sale is documented in five letters of the same year from Meek to Ardengo Soffici. The cast was then donated by Meek’s daughter Diana to Saint Mary’s Priory in the 1930s before it was put up for auction at Sotheby’s London (1964) and bought by the noted playwright Edward Albee. The work was recently auctioned along with Albee’s collection after his death and is now in a private collection.5 The pale yellow Ex-Meek Wax cast is freestanding, without a base or signs of a previous connection to a base with a screw. It has been restored with patches of lighter colored wax, particularly evident on the right and left shoulders of the work and on the top of the head. The work has a plaster core and plaster has been applied with a spatula to the inside of the core to level the base. This suggests that Rosso did not use the same technique each time for applying the plaster, since in other cases the plaster was poured (Ex-Noblet), while in still others it was pressed in with his fingers (Sussex). The variety of techniques for the plaster application has hitherto gone unnoticed. Much of the bottom edge of the cast is not covered in wax. Here, too, damage has occurred, as with other works (including the Ex-Brunauer Wax and the Sussex Wax) on the bottom left, and a light wax was dripped over the damage (not by Rosso), which extends to the base, covering the joint between front and back on both right and left and on the top of the head. The work shares similarities with the Folkwang Bronze in terms of the pronounced heart-shaped feature seen in figure 10.1 (see fig. 10.1d). 6.5 The Sussex Wax The dark brown Sussex Wax, whose provenance is still being researched, has exceptionally crisp surface features with sharp incisions and impressions on the front and back (Plate 8). While similar to the Folkwang Bronze, the wax has additional features, suggesting that it was cast using a different gelatin mold, or that these features may have been lost during bronze casting of the Folkwang Bronze if the two were cast from the same plaster. The work differs greatly in 5  Paola Mola and Fabio Vittucci, Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura (Milan: Skira, 2009), 296.

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terms of surface detail in comparison to the damaged Black Plaster, suggesting that there may have been an earlier plaster, or another plaster, or that the Black Plaster became consumed over time through use (figs 10.6 a, b, c, d). The Sussex Wax was cast by using multiple layers of thick wax, again suggesting that Rosso did not use a homogenous technique for making his waxes. In the Sussex Wax cast, multiple layers—up to five at times—create a very thick wax surface, as can be seen from the losses of wax at the base of the work, where there are multiple superimposed layers, suggesting that this work, like the Ex-Noblet Wax, was cast by pouring wax into a mold, but in many more layers. The Ex-Noblet cast only shows two layers. This again demonstrates the great variety of processes used by Rosso when casting his waxes. The wax is heterogeneous in color, with the front of the work appearing lighter than the back and shoulder. The back of the sculpture is heavily worked and sharp features are visible on both the front and back. Noteworthy are thumb and fingermarks in the plaster and cast wax at the back of the work. Various marks, likely from pressure applied through a cloth weave on the wax, can be seen on the top of the head and the chin. It is possible that the hairline cracks that are visible on the surface are a result of the use of a fresh gelatin mold (this is corroborated by traces of proteinaceous material in the organic analysis of the cast—see Chapter 11). Additionally, traces of whitish material on the back of the work could be residues of gelatin from casting. The presence of three joints between sections is highly evident as a result of the mold. The three-part joint between the front and back right and back left is irregular, and visible particularly from the top of the work. In addition, there are numerous areas of the back of the work where clear borders are visible, indicating that Rosso used at least a three-piece mold for the front and parts of the back of the work. This yet again suggests noteworthy variations in Rosso’s working techniques from one cast to the next of the same subject, for the Harvard Study reported that a nine-part piece mold was noted as having been used for one of the casts examined, and in many other casts there is clear evidence of seam lines of a two-part mold. The back of the Sussex Wax is different from several of the other wax and bronze Bambino ebreo casts due to the obvious absence of a piece of the wax in the back of the cast. Whether intentional or not, this occurred before Rosso added the plaster and is therefore to be considered part of the process of decisions made by the artist. At least three successive applications of different kinds of plaster are visible, suggesting that, unlike the Ex-Noblet Wax, where plaster was likely poured into the wax shell, in the Sussex Wax the plaster was applied by hand to create a slightly hollow inside. The artist applied plaster in different ways from one cast to the next. The hollow inside seems to have been re-plastered with thick plaster putty with black inclusions that are not

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Figure 10.6a, b, c, d

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Details of Sussex Wax, Plate 8 Exceptionally crisp surface features with sharp incisions and impressions on the front and back suggest that this was an early cast, and the details no longer visible on other casts suggest that it was made from a different plaster model than the ones known today. PRIVATE COLLECTION. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

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seen in the plaster used in other Rosso waxes. Two nails or screws, visible through holes at the bottom of the base, fix the work directly to its base, as in the Ex-Noblet Wax. 6.6 The Timken Wax The Timken Wax, whose provenance is still under research, is attached to its triangular-shaped base and placed off-center on the base with the proper left shoulder protruding from the base (Plate 9). This cast is covered in adhered dirt, which is particularly striking on the back of the work. The work is vertical and shares common features with those observed on the Black Plaster, as seen in fig. 10.1a. In this cast, wax extends to all visible areas of the work, including to the bottom edge beneath the proper right shoulder, in contrast to other casts in wax examined. The dark-yellow colored wax can be seen beneath the dirt, and the features in the cast are well defined with sharp edges in comparison with the less crisp details of some of the other waxes. It is noted that in this work organic analysis identified traces of gelatin, which confirms the use of gelatin molds for casting. Many cracks and breaks in the wax are found both on the front and back, and these do not correspond to joints. A fine crack has formed at the top of the head and this is filled with dirt, suggesting that it is not recent damage, and an uneven-edged T-shaped crack is visible on the proper right cheek (fig. 10.7). Restoration wax has been dripped on areas of the back and on the joint between front and back.

Figure 10.7

Detail of Timken Wax, Plate 9 An old crack in the wax is visible on the head PRIVATE COLLECTION. COURTESY PETER FREEMAN, INC. PHOTOGRAPH BY JERRY THOMPSON

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6.7 The Nasher Wax The brownish-colored wax in the Nasher Sculpture Center (Plate 12), whose provenance is still under research based on a dedication “a Tu i / Terlol / ton (?) Rosso,” is in excellent physical condition and shares similar features with the Ex-Sarfatti Wax. It also shares features with the Black Plaster, suggesting that it was cast from that plaster. There are signs of careful restoration on the work, which has been varnished with a resin, as confirmed by organic analysis, and fine repairs have been carried out on the back of the work. Additional wax repairs have been added to the bottom front, and they appear to be the same color as the original wax. Noteworthy are the fine hairs visible on much of the surface, which could suggest that wax was brushed into a mold (fig. 10.8).

Figure 10.8

Detail of Nasher Wax, Plate 12 The work has been restored and varnished with a resin. Fine hairs are visible on the surface Nasher Sculpture Center. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

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The Harvard Study reported fine brush hairs on another Bambino ebreo owned by collector Emilio Jesi and now in the Pinacoteca di Brera collection in Milan; however, there is no systematic study of the brush hairs found in the wax in lifetime casts by Rosso. A hollow and smooth white plaster core provides stability, even if the work tilts slightly forward and rests on the front edge. 6.8 Ex-Pawlowski Gaston de Pawlowski was a French writer, best known for his prophetic sciencefiction novel, Voyage au pays de la quatrième dimension, first published in 1911 in the monthly review Comœdia. An article by Rosso’s friend Jehan Rictus was published in Comœdia in 1913, and this might have been the occasion for a gift of a Bambino ebreo from Rosso to Pawlowski (Plate 10). The very light color of the cast is ascribed to an over-cleaning of the work in the past—traces of more yellow-colored wax are present and dark residues on the surface have become embedded in the wax (fig. 10.9). This is the only cast that did not have detectable Venice turpentine in organic analysis, perhaps as

Figure 10.9 Detail of Ex-Pawlowski Wax, Plate 10 The light color of the cast is ascribed to heavy cleaning in the past COLLECTION PCC. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson

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a result of cleaning, or due to the wax mixture employed. Plaster has been applied around the inside wax cast, leaving a central void, but the plaster is not entirely flush at the bottom. Instead, areas around the perimeter of the wax at the bottom of the cast have been pressed into the surface of the plaster underside, which accounts for the smaller height of this work compared to the other casts. This wax is similar to others (especially the Ex-Meek Wax) but differs due to the very shiny surface. This work is not in the Catalogue raisonné. 7

Conclusions

Visual examination of Rosso’s casts reveals that despite serial casting, which produced the same basic form and subject matter, each cast is different—in size, color, definition, contrast, mounting, and in the ways in which plaster is used to change the angle of the casts. It is striking how the material composition may be similar, yet even slight variation of the wax leads to noticeably different colors, while surface patination entirely changes the appearance of a bronze. Visual examination further reveals how unconventional Rosso’s methods for casting cire perdue were. In some cases, the wax appears to have been poured, but the number of layers of wax is inconsistent from cast to cast—some are almost paper-thin while others are up to four layers thick. Our examination has led us to question, based on visual signs, whether the mold Rosso used was always a two-part gelatin mold taken from plaster, or whether at times he could have used a multi-part piece-mold. All these casts reveal traces of the artist’s working process—fingerprints in the plaster, multiple wax layers, and joins and impressions from molds. Likewise, the passage of time, or physical history, of the wax and plaster casts can be read from details—such as from marks from canvas, probably due to transport, as in the case of the Ex-Brunauer Wax. The accumulation of dirt accentuates contrasts, especially in the backs of the wax casts, while the more muted appearance of some works may be due to varnishing or cleaning. Damage and restoration work have significantly altered the appearance of several of the examined casts. As more casts of the Bambino ebreo come to light, it will be necessary to study their surfaces, backs and fronts, bases, and compositions. This model for close comparison of technical details across works can serve to better inform the understanding of Rosso’s process. Greater appreciation of the original surface and appreciation for the inevitable weathering of the wax will prevent unnecessary over-cleaning in the future.

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Bibliography Bassett, Jane, Peggy Fogelman, David A. Scott, and Ronald C. Schmidtling. The Craftsman Revealed: Adriaen De Vries, Sculptor in Bronze. Los Angeles: Getty Conservation Institute, 2008. Cooper, Harry, and Sharon Hecker, ed., Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Glover Lindsay, Suzanne, Daphné Barbour, and Shelley Sturman. Edgar Degas Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Mola, Paola and Fabio Vittucci. Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura. Milan: Skira, 2009. Wasserman, Jeanne L. Daumier Sculpture: A Critical and Comparative Study. Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society, 1969. Wasserman, Jeanne L. Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975.

chapter 11

Creative Inconsistencies: Compositional Analysis of Rosso’s Waxes Francesca Caterina Izzo and Austin Nevin 1

Introduction

This is the second time a technical study of the organic composition of a selection of Medardo Rosso’s cast waxes has been undertaken. An earlier study by the Harvard Group (2004) collected samples from Rosso’s waxes in order to identify a signature medium, but the results were not published.1 For our study, we collected wax samples from six different casts of Bambino ebreo, which we analyzed with Pyrolysis-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry. These six casts are designated here as Ex-Brunauer (Plate 5), Ex-Meek (Plate 7), Sussex (Plate 8), Timken (Plate 9), Ex-Pawlowski (Plate 10), and Nasher (Plate 12) (fig. 11.1). The goals of this investigation were (a) to discover more precisely the organic composition of these waxes; (b) to find out what other organic materials, if any, were used in the production of Rosso’s works or were present on the surfaces of the casts and why; (c) to see how the organic compositions of Rosso’s wax casts may be related to the particular visual qualities of the casts; and (d) to understand how these compositions compare to the composition of waxes by other sculptors of his time.

Figure 11.1

Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo. Left to right: Plate 5, Ex-Brunauer Wax; Plate 7, Ex-Meek Wax; Plate 8, Sussex Wax; Plate 9, Timken Wax; Plate 10, Ex-Pawlowski Wax; Plate 12, Nasher Wax

1  Narayan Khandekhar, unpublished report of GC-MS analysis, Harvard Art Museums, 2001.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_014

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In the case of Rosso, visual observation shows that sculptures attributed to him often vary in color and surface appearance. This suggests variations in the composition of different wax casts. However, little is known about the kind of wax that Rosso used for casting his works. The terms “cast” and “wax” are ambiguous, both in the nineteenth century and today.2 The term “cast” may refer to an object at different stages in the production process, which may be intermediary (for example a lost wax), a cast in wax that was not intended for bronze casting, or a bronze that is cast from a lost wax. Wax is a material typically used for the production of a bronze, for example in the lost-wax method, where it can be melted and poured, modeled and sculpted, used to seal piece molds, or delicately applied in liquid form to the surface of molds by a brush, as documented by the Fonderie Hébrard.3 Gramtorp et al., in their research on the nineteenth-century sculptor Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen, report that wax can be made up of varying chemical compositions and that different sculpting materials containing wax can be used for casting and for modeling.4 Others have written about the history and use of a variety of malleable materials, including those employed by Rodin and those used for casting Degas’ Dancer sculptures.5 It is noted that plasticine and plasticine-like materials were produced in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and adopted by artists, including the sculptor Rembrandt Bugatti. These are reported to have been a mixture of kaolin, lard, lanolin, and sulfur.6 The chemical composition of the wax-based materials that were used by sculptors is little understood by art historians, conservators, and conservation scientists. Indeed, while historically the term “wax” was used to denote beeswax, other animal, vegetal, and mineral compounds can be melted to create

2  For a general study, see Sylvie Colinart et al., Sculptures en cire de l’ancienne Egypte à l’art abstrait, Notes et documents 18, Département des Sculptures du Musée du Louvre, Laboratoire de recherche des Musées de France (Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1987). 3  Elisabeth Lebon, Dictionnaire des fondeurs de bronze d’art: France, 1890–1950 (Perth: Marjon Editions, 2003), 291. 4  Dorte Gramtorp et al., “Investigation and Conservation of Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s Wax Models,” Studies in Conservation 60, no. 2 (2015): 97–106. 5  For Rodin, see Juliet Langlois et al., “Analysis and Conservation of Modern Modeling Materials Found in Auguste Rodin’s Sculptures,” Studies in Conservation 62:5 (2015): 1–19. For Degas, see Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphne S. Barbour, and Shelley Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture, National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogues (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 6  Véronique Fromanger, R. Bugatti, répertoire monographique:Une trajectoire foudroyante (Paris: Editions de l’Amateur, 2014), 21.

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suitable material for casting (molding, melting or for lost waxes).7 During the nineteenth century, artists who sculpted and cast either in wax or bronze typically employed mixtures of waxes and resins, which were widely available at the time as preparations, or artists could prepare the mixtures themselves from raw materials. Recent technical research on wax has demonstrated that there is a great variation in composition of sculpting and casting wax, which may contain organic materials including mineral waxes (paraffin or microcrystalline wax), animal waxes, vegetal waxes, and other additives (pigment, gypsum or flour) or modifiers (turpentine, lard or tallow, drying oils, and metal soaps among others).8 Artistic waxes used in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are normally characterized by mixtures of organic (binders) and inorganic substances (fillers). In particular, the organic fraction is chemically complex and may contain numerous compounds, ranging from fatty acids, hydrocarbons, esters, terpenoid materials, polar, and apolar compounds. 2

Analytical Methodology

For the purposes of this essay, we present all the results of our analyses together, noting that two of the casts have documented provenances (Ex-Brunauer, Ex-Meek), while four others (Timken, Sussex, Ex-Pawlowski, Nasher) have provenances that are still undergoing investigation. In order to detect both natural and synthetic waxes, samples from the six works attributed to Rosso were analyzed in bulk using Thermally Assisted Hydrolysis and Methylation Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry (THM– GC–MS) in combination with pyrolysis. Wax samples were treated with a 2.5% solution of tetramethylammoniumhydroxide (TMAH) in methanol and transferred to a steel pyrolysis cup. The samples were pyrolysed at 550°C, the 7  John S. Mills and Raymond White, The Organic Chemistry of Museum Objects (New York: Butterworth Heinemann, 1987), 41–47. 8  Agnés Le Gac et al., “Challenging Wax-Cast Figurines Serial Production Unraveled by Multi-analytical Techniques,” Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry 30 (2015): 790–812; Martine Regert, Juliet Langlois, and Sylvie Colinart, “Characterisation of Wax Works of Art by Gas Chromatographic Procedures,” Journal of Chromatography A 1091 (2005): 124–36; and Martine Regert et al., “Elucidation of Molecular and Elementary Composition of Organic and Inorganic Substances Involved in 19th Century Wax Sculptures Using an Integrated Analytical Approach,” Analytica Chimica Acta 577, no. 1 (September 1, 2006): 140–52. See also Langlois et al., “Analysis and Conservation of Modern Modeling Materials,” 252, 255.

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components were separated by gas chromatography, and the separated components were identified by mass spectrometry. The pyrolysis unit used was a Frontier Lab 3030D pyrolyser, mounted on a Thermo Scientific Focus GC/ISQ mass spectrometer combination. Separation took place on an HP5 column with a length of 20 m, an internal diameter of 0.18 mm and a film thickness of 0.18 μm. Helium was used as carrier with a constant flow of 0.9 ml/min. The temperature program set was 35°C (1) – 60°C/min – 110°C – 14°C/min – 240°C – 5°C/min – 315°C (2). The column was directly coupled to the ion source of the mass spectrometer. The temperature of the interface was 240°C, and the temperature of the ion source was 220°C. Mass spectra were recorded from 40 until 600 amu with a speed of 7 scans per second. Xcalibur 2.1 software was used for collecting and processing mass spectral data. All the pyrograms acquired were compared with a reference database of natural and synthetic waxes, based on published literature and references prepared ad-hoc by the authors. Because of the small number of casts analyzed and the intrinsic limitations of the analytical technique, it is not possible for us to fully characterize the composition of Rosso’s wax casts in this essay. However, the results of our analysis can inform Rosso’s material preferences and serve as a model for future investigations into his material practices. Two significant outcomes emerged from our compositional analysis. (1) We were able to establish definitively that the waxes used by Rosso are those typically used for lost-wax casting and not those used for modeling. Our findings challenge the erroneous notion, still unfortunately held today, that Rosso preferred “soft wax” for modeling purposes.9 Our results instead support earlier technical studies such as the one by Pullen in 1994 and confirmed by the Harvard Group in 2004, which verify that Rosso did not sculpt or model in wax for the production of the Bambino ebreo.10 (2) While Pullen’s previous study of Rosso’s technique hypothesized that the wax casts were made principally of beeswax, possibly with extenders or substitutes such as paraffin, we found that Rosso’s waxes actually contain very little beeswax. We discovered that they 9  M  edardo Rosso: Pioneer of Modern Sculpture at MSK Gent, 2018, https://www.mskgent.be/ en/exhibitions/medardo-rosso, accessed July 29, 2019. 10  See Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, eds., Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003); and Derek Pullen, “Rosso’s Sculpture Technique,” in Medardo Rosso, exh. cat., Luciano Caramel (London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1994), 59–63.

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vary greatly in composition, far more than had been previously imagined by Pullen or in the Harvard Study.11 We determined that samples contain mixtures of animal and mineral waxes, with traces of gelatin from the casting molds. Additives were found, such as stearin and drying oils. Finally, we identified varnish materials including resins and turpentine, which could be present both on the surface and in the bulk of the wax cast, reflecting nineteenth-century practices of including resins in wax for casting. 3

Results

A summary of the results from the sample analysis is presented in the tables below. To reflect the semi-quantitative nature of data, we have indicated when materials are present as major components and when a material is present only in trace concentrations. Results are presented here first for casts with known provenances (group 1, table 11.1), followed by analysis of works whose provenance is still under research (group 2, table 11.2). Table 11.1 Results from Py-GC-MS analysis on waxy samples with known provenances (group 1)

Group 1 Cast

Sample description

Results from organic analysis

Ex-Brunauer

Brown and multiple layers Light-colored waxy material Light-colored waxy material

Paraffin, fatty acids, beeswax (trace) Paraffin, stearin (?), beeswax (trace), pine resin, Venice turpentine (trace) Paraffin, fatty material (animal fat?), beeswax (trace), pine resin, Venice turpentine (trace)

Ex-Meek

11  Hecker and Cooper, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions; and Pullen, “Rosso’s Sculpture Technique,” 59–63.

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Table 11.2 Results from Py-GC-MS analysis on waxy samples from casts with provenances still under research (group 2)

Group 2 Cast

Sample description

Results from organic analysis

Sussex

Quite dark waxy sample taken from under the chin

Beeswax, pine resin, Venice turpentine (trace), glycerol, drying oil, proteinaceous material (gelatin) Stearin, fatty material (animal fat?), paraffin, beeswax, Venice turpentine, proteinaceous material (gelatin) Stearin, fatty material (animal fat?), paraffin, beeswax, pine resin, Venice turpentine Stearin, fatty material (animal fat?), paraffin, beeswax (trace), Pine resin, Venice turpentine Stearin, beeswax (trace) Pine resin

Light-yellow wax sample taken from the base

Timken

Sample taken from the back of the work Waxy fragment

Ex-Pawlowski Nasher

Very light wax sample Brownish-colored material on the surface of the sculpture

Results from Py-GC-MS indicate the presence of different organic compounds in the waxy samples. As reported in tables 11.1 and 11.2, the results identify natural and mineral waxes, animal fats, and proteinaceous materials. It is significant to note that synthetic products were not detected in any of the analyzed samples. The interpretation of the analytical data was based on the identification of the main constituents and the presence of specific biomarkers.12 For example, the characterization of beeswax was based on the detection of long-chain esters, low volatile and long-chain fatty acids (C24 being the main compound), hydroxyacids (in particular 15-hydroxy stearic acid, generally considered as a marker for beeswax), and n-alkanes with odd carbon number from C23

12  Juan Peris-Vicente et al., “Characterization of Waxes Used in Pictorial Artworks According to Their Relative Amount of Fatty Acids and Hydrocarbons by Gas Chromatography,” Journal of Chromatography A 1101, no. 1–2 (January 6, 2006): 254–60.

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to C33 (C27 as one of the most abundant).13 Paraffin was recognized due to the series of odd even-numbered n-alkanes from C21 to C35, C27 being the main compound. Animal fats are generally characterized by the occurrence of longchain fatty acids, mainly stearic and palmitic acids. Stearin essentially contains stearic acid. The presence of a pine resin was identified thanks to its diterpenoid constituents and in particular the abietic acid—in the form of dehydroabietic acid (after dehydrogenation and aromatization of abietic acid), pimaric, and isopimaric acids. The identification of 7-oxo-dehydroabietic and 15-hydroxy7-oxo-dehydroabietic acid indicate that the resin was oxidized, since both molecules are formed following the oxidation of dehydroabietic acid.14 Venice turpentine, produced from the Larix Decidua (Pinaceae family), was identified by markers larixol, larixyl acetate, and epimanool, pimaric and abietic acidbased compounds. In one case (Sussex), a mixture of glycerol and a drying oil was found together with pine resin and beeswax. Gelatin was identified in two samples (Sussex and Timken). This is likely due to the fact that Rosso used gelatin molds for casting his waxes, which could have left traces of proteinaceous materials on the surface. This is also evidence that the temperature of the molten wax used during casting could have been sufficiently high to partially melt the gelatin itself. Gelatin was probably used for the other casts as well, but no trace of its presence was found in the particular micro-samples taken. 4

Analysis

Although it has been commonly thought that Rosso used beeswax, the results of semi-quantitative analysis of waxy samples show that very little beeswax is present in casts of the Bambino ebreo. In most cases, beeswax was found only in traces, while mineral wax compounds were the most abundant in all the mixtures. The samples also show a great variability in the composition, as seen in tables 11.1 and 11.2. In the six samples studied, beeswax is never present

13  Ilaria Bonaduce and Maria Perla Colombini, “Characterisation of Beeswax in Works of Art by Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry and Pyrolysis–Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry Procedures,” Journal of Chromatography A 1028, no. 2 (March 5, 2004): 297– 306; and A. P. Tulloch, “Beeswax: Composition and Analysis,” Bee World 61, no. 2 (1980): 47–62. 14  Domenico Scalarone, Massimo Lazzari, and Oscar Chiantore, “Ageing Behaviour and Pyrolytic Characterisation of Diterpenic Resins Used as Art Materials: Colophony and Venice Turpentine,” Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis 64, no. 2 (September 2002): 345–61.

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Relative Abundance

RT: 1,31‒25,14 100

10,40

60 40 20 0

1,41 2,20 2,532,82 3,88 4,30 4,90 6,15 6,60 7,46

Relative Abundance

14,89

10,92

8,90 9,66

15,66

16,48 17,33 18,20 16,16 17,00 17,87 19,09 19,99 20,89 21,79 22,69 23,59 24,54 NL: 3,58E8 Base Peak m/z= 73,5-74,5 MS MedardoRo sso_sampl e7

10,40

100

11,77

80 60 40 20 0

8,10 2,08 2,83 3,36 4,01 4,75 5,58

6,60 7,28

8,90 9,66

11,09

12,40 13,02

14,37 15,12 15,91 16,74 17,61 18,16

19,40 20,29 21,21

22,39 23,47 23,87 24,50

12,85 12,23 13,48

100

Relative Abundance

12,85 13,48 14,16

11,59 8,10

NL: 1,78E9 TIC MS MedardoRo sso_sampl e7

11,77

80

80

14,16

11,59

60

14,89

10,40

40 20

1,47 2,14 2,60 3,41 3,79 4,52 5,32 6,17 7,02 7,85 8,10 8,90 0 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Graph 11.1

10,21 10

11

15,66

16,48

17,33 18,20 19,09 19,99 20,90 16,16 17,00 17,87 18,75 19,65 21,79 22,69 23,58 24,51

10,92

12

13

14

Time (min)

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

NL: 1,18E8 Base Peak m/z= 56,5-57,5 MS MedardoRo sso_sampl e7 25

Results from chemical analysis of samples from the Ex-Meek cast are shown and are typical of the data acquired. Here, results of the Total Ion Count (TIC) and the chromatograms of two markers (at 74 m/z for the methyl esters of fatty acids and 57 m/z for alkanes) are shown, which report the abundance of different signals as a function of time.

alone, but generally mixed with paraffin, stearin, and/or animal fat (lard). Most samples include mixtures of natural and mineral waxes, animal fats, oils, and terpenoid resins. Resins are always found mixed in with wax, or on the surface (Nasher), with the exception of the very light-colored work (Pavlowski), which could have been over-cleaned. The waxy samples from group 1 (waxes with known provenances) share a similar feature: all contain a minor amount of beeswax compared to paraffin, stearin, and animal fat. Paraffin was also detected in some samples of group 2, generally added to the beeswax. It is possible that Rosso mixed paraffin and stearin (lard) to minimize the quantity of beeswax, which was considerably more expensive. Beeswax was detected in significant quantities only in one sample from the Sussex cast, which is considered to be a very early cast of Bambino ebreo. Pine-based compounds, both as resin (probably colophony) and Venice turpentine, were detected in some samples in both groups. It is likely that these ingredients were added to the wax in its molten state, which would have changed the rheological or pouring properties of the molten wax and setting properties of the casts. Rosso may well have added these ingredients in order to create a harder set and improve casting.

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More work would be necessary to understand the influence of additives on the working properties (rheology, pouring, setting temperature, for example) and the performance (hardness, durability, color, and chemical stability towards oxidation) of the casting materials. For example, in the Sussex Wax, glycerol and a drying oil were detected. Their use was likely an addition on Rosso’s part, which was done in order to modify the rheology of the waxy mixture. Our analysis shows that the resin compounds are found in the oxidized form, indicating that the original fresh terpenoid material underwent oxidation. These additives are intrinsically unstable and show signs of oxidation. The oxidized resin might in part explain why some of the works are so dark, especially the Sussex and Ex-Brunauer casts. It is likely that variations in composition were intentional—either to lower the cost of materials, change the working properties, or improve the quality of the final cast. Although some studies have suggested that Rosso’s darker waxes were made for artistic reasons, or belonged to a single period in his career, our study suggests that the darkness may derive from the instability of the resins and may not be related to a specific period in the artist’s career. It is also possible that inorganic additives or dyes may have been included in the casting mixtures that were not detected by pyrolysis In some cases, the varnish identified on the surface of wax (as for example in the Nasher cast) does not appear to have been applied over the wax by Rosso. It was part of a conservation treatment after the artist’s death in order to cover documented repairs and patches. The Nasher results illustrate a problem inherent in the analysis of any wax sculpture: the heterogeneity of samples, which may contain one material on the surface and other materials within the bulk of the mixture. This issue cannot be resolved directly with Pyrolysis-GC-MS. According to our results, there are no clear differences in terms of the organic composition in the samples from groups 1 and 2. The determination of quantitative recipes of casting materials used by Rosso for the wax sculptures is difficult to compile but would be valuable, especially if compared with published formulations. In the case of Rosso, we face the challenge of studying mixtures of some of the most chemically diverse and reactive organic materials found in works of art. Furthermore, for waxes used by any artist, the presence of fatty materials and fatty acid-derivatives is difficult to unravel because they may have different sources: from the addition of lard, the use of stearin, and/or from the hydrolysis of the fatty acids deriving from beeswax or other animal waxes. Results from analysis in this study lead to the identification of stearin, composed of palmitic and stearic acids, and animal fat, mainly composed of

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saturated acid (palmitic and stearic being the most abundant) and unsaturated acids (with high percentage of oleic, linoleic and palmitoleic). The chemical differentiation between mixtures, together with the presence of trace materials, is particularly difficult when we consider the complexity of nineteenthcentury waxy mixtures and the trace materials added to the wax mixtures. It is worth comparing and contrasting our findings with waxes used in other nineteenth-century sculptures. Here we note the compositional difference between molten wax (employed for lost-wax casting), wax paste, which would harden and embrittle, and other modeling materials like those used by Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen (1863–1945), Degas, and Rodin (modeling clay or plastiline/ pâte à modeler, each with different working properties and performance characteristics), which contain pigments or fillers like calcium carbonate and iron-based earth pigments, starch, oils, and metal soaps (for example zinc carboxylates).15 Working properties remain critical for casting and depend on ambient temperature.16 Analysis and conservation of Modern Modeling Materials (known as MMMs) found in Rodin’s waxes include these pigments or fillers.17 Rosso’s wax mixtures, however, are similar to wax casts by other artists identified in recent research by Le Gac et al. and in the seminal research of Raymond White on wax casts.18 Rosso’s use of Venice turpentine, beeswax, paraffin, and lipids is characteristic of modeling wax, while lost-wax casting could be achieved with mixtures of turpentine and beeswax.19 Le Gac et al. note that the addition of resins to wax (as noted in all but the Pavlowski Wax in the case of Rosso) would increase the melting temperature of the cast material, which would improve stability after casting.20

15  See for example Barbara H. Berrie, “The Technique of Degas’ Sculpture,” in Edgar Degas Sculpture, Lindsay, Barbour, and Sturman, 3–14; Regert et al., “Elucidation of Molecular and Elementary Composition,” 133–34; Gramtorp, “Investigation and Conservation of Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s Wax Models,” 103; and Langlois et al., “Analysis and Conservation of Modern Modeling Materials,” 258. 16  G. E. Timbers, G. D. Robertson, and T. A. Gochnauer, “Thermal Properties of Beeswax and Beeswax-Paraffin Mixtures,” Journal of Apicultural Research 16, no. 1 (1977): 49–55. 17  See Langlois et al., “Analysis and Conservation of Modern Modeling Materials,” 255–56. 18  See Le Gac et al., “Challenging wax-cast figurines serial production”; and Raymond White, “The Application of Gas-Chromatography to the Identification of Waxes,” Studies in Conservation 23 (1978): 57–68. 19  Eugène Gonon, L’art de fondre en bronze à cire perdue, 1876, unpublished manuscript, Ms.514, Bibliothèque de l’Ecole nationale des Beaux-arts, Paris, in Le fondeur et le sculpteur, Elisabeth Lebon (Paris: Ophrys/INHA, 2012), http://journals.openedition.org/inha/3522. 20  See Le Gac et al., “Challenging Wax-Cast Figurines Serial Production,” 799.

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In conclusion, additional analysis will be needed in the future to understand how Rosso’s wax mixtures may reflect the great diversity that exists between sculpting wax and casting wax, and to gain further knowledge of the compositions of his waxes. To this end, a database of reference materials and analytical results from the study of other wax casts by Rosso would be beneficial. Such a database could provide information that will help distinguish between the wax casts produced by Rosso in his lifetime and those produced posthumously from the original plaster models by the artist’s son, Francesco. Additionally, a fuller database of compositional analysis may be of central importance to the conservation of Rosso’s works, especially within the context of the variable stability of his wax casts. For example, the poor adhesion between wax and plaster or the leaching or melting of gelatin seen in his casts has had disastrous consequences, including total failure of adhesion in several casts, including the Ex-Brunauer Wax and the Noblet Wax. These factors could have led Rosso to modify his wax formulations for casting. A lack of understanding of Rosso’s materials and their sensitivity has at times produced very poor restoration results due to lack of knowledge of the artist’s materials. It is important for purposes of restoration and maintenance to understand how material composition is related to the condition of composite waxes, and the inevitable ageing or oxidation of organic materials. Although hydrocarbons and saturated fatty acids are rather stable and nonreactive, they may respectively undergo sublimation and oxidation/hydrolysis over time, and the added materials in the composite waxes are less stable.21 Overall, despite the difficulty of quantitative analysis, our qualitative study provides for the first time detailed knowledge of the materials used by Rosso. It constitutes an additional piece of a larger puzzle related to the understanding of the complex composition of nineteenth-century wax sculptures.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Henk van Keulen (RCE-The Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage, Amsterdam) for support in the organic analysis.

21  Maria Perla Colombini and Francesco Modugno, eds., Organic Mass Spectrometry in Art and Archaeology (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009), 215–35.

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Bibliography Berrie, Barbara H. “The Technique of Degas’ Sculpture.” In Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphne S. Barbour, and Shelley Sturman. Edgar Degas Sculpture, National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogues. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011, 3–14. Bonaduce, Ilaria, and Maria Perla Colombini. “Characterisation of Beeswax in Works of Art by Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry and Pyrolysis–Gas Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry Procedures.” Journal of Chromatography A 1028, no. 2 (March 5, 2004): 297–306. Colinart, Sylvie, Jean-Rene Galborit, Jack Ligot, France Drilhon, Guilhem Scherf, and Juliette Hours. Sculptures en cire de l’ancienne Egypte à l’art abstrait, Notes et documents 18. Paris: Editions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1987. Colombini, Maria Perla, and Francesco Modugno, ed. Organic Mass Spectrometry in Art and Archaeology. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2009. Cooper, Harry, and Sharon Hecker, ed. Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Fromanger, Véronique. Rembrandt Bugatti sculpteur: Répertoire monographique; une trajectoire foudroyante. Paris: Editions de l’Amateur, 2014. Glover Lindsay, Suzanne, Daphne S. Barbour, and Shelley Sturman. Edgar Degas Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Gonon, Eugène. L’art de fondre en bronze à cire perdue. Unpublished manuscript, 1876. Bibliothèque de l’Ecole nationale des beaux-arts, Paris. Reproduced in Le fondeur et le sculpteur, Elisabeth Lebon. Paris: Ophrys/INHA, 2012. http://journals.open edition.org/inha/3522. Gramtorp, Dorte, Knud Botfeldt, Jens Glastrup, and Kim Pilkjær Simonsen. “Investi­ gation and Conservation of Anne Marie Carl-Nielsen’s Wax Models.” Studies in Conservation 60, no. 2 (2015): 97–106. Khandekhar, Narayan. Unpublished report of GC-MS analysis. Harvard Art Museums, 2001. Langlois, Juliet, G. Mary, H. Bluzat, A. Cascio, N. Balcar, Y. Vandenberghe, and M. Cotte. “Analysis and Conservation of Modern Modeling Materials Found in Auguste Rodin’s Sculptures.” Studies in Conservation 62, no. 5 (2015): 1–19. Lebon, Elisabeth. Dictionnaire des fondeurs de bronze d’art: France, 1890–1950. Perth: Marjon Editions, 2003. Le Gac, Agnés, Teresa Isabel Madeira, Marco Stanojev Pereira, Joana Santos, Luis Piorro, Luis Dias, Marta Manso, Jean Bleton, Stéphane Longelin, Cátia Marques Prazeres, José Mirão, Antonio Candeias, José Gonçalves Marquesd, and Maria Luisa de Carvalho. “Challenging Wax-Cast Figurines Serial Production Unraveled by

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multi-analytical techniques,” Journal of Analytical Atomic Spectrometry (2015): 30, 790–812. “Medardo Rosso: Pioneer of Modern Sculpture.” Museum voor Schone Kunsten Gent. https://www.mskgent.be/en/exhibitions/medardo-rosso. Mills, John S., and Raymond White. The Organic Chemistry of Museum Objects. New York: Butterworth Heinemann, 1987. Peris-Vicente, Juan, Juan-Vicente Gimeno Adelantado, Marua Teresa Doménech Carbó, R. Mateo Castro, and Francesca Bosch Reig. “Characterization of Waxes Used in Pictorial Artworks According to Their Relative Amount of Fatty Acids and Hydrocarbons by Gas Chromatography.” Journal of Chromatography A 1101, no. 1–2 (January 6, 2006): 254–260. Pullen, Derek. “Rosso’s Sculpture Technique.” In Medardo Rosso. Edited by Luciano Caramel. Exh. cat. London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1994, 59–63. Regert, Martine, Juliet Langlois, Eric Laval, Anne-Solenne Le Hô, and Sandrine Pagès-Camagna. “Elucidation of Molecular and Elementary Composition of Organic and Inorganic Substances Involved in 19th Century Wax Sculptures Using an Integrated Analytical Approach.” Analytica Chimica Acta 577, no. 1 (September 1, 2006): 140–152. Regert, Martine, Juliet Langlois, and Sylvie Colinart. “Characterisation of Wax Works of Art by Gas Chromatographic Procedures.” Journal of Chromatography A 1091 (2005): 124–136. Scalarone, Domenico, Massimo Lazzari, and Oscar Chiantore. “Ageing Behaviour and Pyrolytic Characterisation of Diterpenic Resins Used as Art Materials: Colophony and Venice Turpentine.” Journal of Analytical and Applied Pyrolysis 64, no. 2 (September 2002): 345–61. Timbers, G. E., G. D. Robertson, and T. A. Gochnauer. “Thermal Properties of Beeswax and Beeswax-Paraffin Mixtures.” Journal of Apicultural Research 16, no. 1 (1977): 49–55. Tulloch, A. P. “Beeswax: Composition and Analysis.” Bee World 61, no. 2 (1980): 47–62.

chapter 12

Towards an Understanding of Rosso’s Casting Practice: Surface XRF of Four Bronze Casts of Bambino ebreo Federico Carò and Luc Megens This is the first time a technical study of the chemical composition of a selection of Medardo Rosso’s cast bronzes has been undertaken. For this study, we analyzed four metal casts of Bambino ebreo, usually referred to as bronzes.1 These casts are designated here as the Folkwang Bronze (Plates 24a and 24b), the Ex-Bergamo Bronze (Plate 27), the Kröller-Müller Bronze (Plate 25), and the Cologne Bronze (Plate 26). The goals of this investigation were (a) to begin to formulate an understanding of the particularities of Rosso’s casting materials; (b) to try to understand how the chemical composition of Rosso’s bronzes may be related to the particular visual qualities of his casts; and (c) to see how these compositions compare to the composition of bronzes by other sculptors of his time (fig. 12.1). The analysis was realized through portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (pXRF) in the US, Italy, and the Netherlands and with different calibrated instrumentation.2 Portable XRF analysis, also referred to as handheld XRF, has become a popular analytical technique in the field of museum and archaeological studies, thanks primarily to the possibility of analyzing archaeological objects and works of art in-situ, non-invasively, and at affordable cost.3 Being a surface analysis, pXRF will return a composition that is representative of the volume of metal at the surface of the analyzed object, which might include portions different from the primary bulk alloy, such as corrosion and

1  Broadly speaking, bronze is an alloy primarily constituted of copper and tin, with other minor alloying elements, such as lead, zinc, and nickel. 2  The Folkwang, Kröller-Müller, and Cologne Bambino ebreo bronzes were analyzed with a Bruker Tracer III-SD at 40kV, 12.5μA, 300µmAl+25.4µm Ti filter, and acquisition time of 60 seconds. The Ex-Bergamo bronze was analyzed by a XGLab Elio XRF at 50kV, 20μA, and acquisition time of 180 seconds. 3  e.g. Vana Orfanou and Thilo Rehren, “A (Not So) Dangerous Method: pXRF vs. EPMA-WDS Analysis of Copper Based Artefacts,” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 7 (2015): 387–97. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_015

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The four Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo bronzes analyzed by pXRF. Left to right: Plate 24, Folkwang Bronze; Plate 25, Kröller Müller Bronze; Plate 26, Cologne Bronze; Plate 27, Ex-Bergamo Bronze

oxide layers, patinas, and coatings, as well as any other material accidentally or intentionally applied to the surface.4 Given the nature of pXRF analysis, a few caveats are necessary before proceeding with the interpretation of the data. Rosso’s cast objects are difficult to analyze because they are known for their deliberately raw, as-cast finish and often-unpatinated surfaces that sometimes include remains of the investment material.5 The complexity and great variability of Rosso’s casts is evident when comparing the four analyzed Bambino ebreo casts, as shown in fig. 12.1. The surfaces are visually striking for being different in color and texture. They vary from the opaque and barely cleaned with abundant beige investment material still filling depressions and crevices in the Folkwang Bronze, to the matte and dark surface of the Ex-Bergamo Bronze, to the shiny golden-brown hue of the Kröller-Müller Bronze, to the polished and patinated surfaces of the Cologne Bronze. All these visible surface differences were expected to affect our analysis, either because they introduce elements that do not belong to the original alloy, or because they modify the relative intensities of the characteristic X-rays. The effects of these surface differences should be considered in the interpretation of the raw data and final quantified compositions. For the purposes of this essay, we present all our analyses together, noting that two of the works have 4  At 40kV, the depth of metal from which the characteristic X-rays originate varies upon the element considered, and the matrix from which they originate, and does not exceed a few microns. 5  Henry Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, eds. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 87–90.

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documented provenances (Folkwang Bronze and Ex-Bergamo Bronze) while two others have provenances that are still undergoing investigation (Cologne Bronze and Kröller-Müller Bronze). The Folkwang Bronze and the Cologne Bronze were analyzed in an upright position, since it was not possible to tilt or lay down the installed sculptures. This prevented the investigation of the bottom of the sculpture bases, which often present scratches or indentations that could reveal the bare metal, devoid of the finishing patinas or other superficial layers. In contrast, analysis of the Kröller-Müller and the Ex-Bergamo Bronze was realized on spots of bare metal at the base of the sculptures. Up to ten analyses were performed on each bronze, most of them on relatively flat areas with a variably thick layer of patina. In the case of the casts that could only be analyzed upright, areas showing thick patinas, oxidized layers, or abundant investment materials were not analyzed. For the Kröller-Müller and Ex-Bergamo casts, bare spots of metal on the base of the cast, as well as patinated surfaces, were analyzed. Comparing these XRF spectra is necessary because the bare spots are mostly too small to analyze completely without patina and can inform the nature of the patina as well. Because of the small number of casts analyzed and the limitation of the analytical technique used when applied to patinated and as-cast surfaces, it is not possible to accurately characterize the alloys or draw definitive conclusions about Rosso’s casting practices. However, the results of this analysis can inform us about his material preferences in metal casting and serve as a model for future investigations into his material practices. Two significant outcomes emerge from the comparison of the alloys found in Rosso’s works: (1) the high level of lead used in the casts; and (2) the high variability of metal composition within the studied group and within each single piece. All four analyzed pieces are cast from a quaternary alloy of copper, zinc, lead, and tin. The calculated compositions are reported in Table 12.1.6 The 6  The Cologne and Folkwang compositions were calculated through direct comparison with the certified reference standard 33X GM21. See Arlen Heginbotham et al., “The Copper CHARM Set: A New Set of Certified Reference Materials for the Standardization of Quantitative X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis of Heritage Copper Alloys,” Archaeometry 57, no. 5 (October 2015): 856–68. The Kröller-Müller composition was calculated using the Bruker SPXRF software with the factory-supplied calibration for copper alloys when concentrations were in range of those of the standards. For measurements with concentrations outside the calibration range, extrapolated values were used as an approximation. Obtained values will deviate from the true value for measurements on the patina, since these are not metallic layers and signals from the alloy underneath the patina might be detected as well. The Biella composition was calculated using a standard-less Fundamental Parameter algorithm developed by XGLab.

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alloys are overall high in lead. They range in average from 7 to 19 wt%, with relative amounts of lead up to 26 wt%. In particular, the Folkwang Bronze is cast from a high-lead, high-tin, quaternary alloy, while the other three are cast from high-lead, high-zinc quaternary alloys. The Kröller-Müller Bronze differs from the Ex-Bergamo Bronze and Cologne Bronze in being particularly high in lead (an average of 18.7 wt% of the analyses of bare metal and surfaces with patina, compared to 7.1 and 9.9 wt% of the two other pieces). Traces of antimony, bismuth, arsenic, and nickel were found above the detection limits of the instrument in at least two of the analyzed casts, as shown in Table 12.1. To put this result into perspective, high-lead quaternary alloys are not very common among late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century metal casts. Previous studies of European casts by famous sculptors that were produced by commercial foundries have shown how binary and ternary alloys of copper, tin, and zinc were preferred, and that compositions were determined and Table 12.1 Normalized compositions of the Bambino ebreo casts, compared to late nineteenth/early twentieth-century casts by Degas and Rodin. Concentrations are expressed in weight percent. nd: not determined; tr: traces

S Fe Ni Cu Zn As Pb Bi Ag Sn Sb

Museum Folkwang (n=3)

ExBergamo (n=7)

Kröller- Cologne Müller (n=3) (n=11)

Degasa

0.3 ± 0.1 0.32 ± 0.06 0.07 ± 0.00 68 ± 1 7.9 ± 0.5 0.12 ± 0.04 14±1 0.22 ± 0.03 0.04 ± 0.00 9.52 ± 0.02 0.33 ± 0.01

nd 0.9±0.1 0.43±0.04 64±9 21±6 nd 10±4 nd nd 3.8±0.5 nd

nd 1.5±0.9 nd 58±7 15±2 nd 18±7 nd nd 5.0±0.6 tr

nd nd nd 81.3±3.3 10.2±1.6 nd 0.9±0.5 nd nd 4.1±0.7 nd

0.09±0.04 0.76±0.03 0.10±0.01 73±3 14±1 0.10±0.02 7±3 0.12±0.03 0.04±0.01 5.0 ±0.1 0.13±0.02

Rodinb Bronzes Other Cu-alloys nd 0.5±0.4 tr 92±1.1 1±0.1 tr 0.5±0.3 tr tr 5.2±0.6 tr

nd 0.2±0.1 tr 88±0.5 8.2±0.1 tr 0.4±0.1 tr tr 3.1±0.5 tr

a Suzanne Glover Lindsay, Daphne Barbour, and Shelly Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 23–24. b Ruth Butler and Suzanne Glover Lindsay, European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 525.

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often maintained over time by each foundry.7 Most of the studied European metal casts have been classified as low- and high-zinc brass, and tin bronzes (see Table 12.1 for the average compositions of Degas’s posthumously-cast bronzes and Rodin’s casts). Most importantly, these studies show how lead rarely exceeds 1% in weight of the total alloy composition, and is always present as an impurity. The high variability of the calculated compositions within each cast is ascribed mostly to the analytical limitations of pXRF, particularly when applied to metals with as-cast, layered surfaces, such as those of Rosso’s Bambino ebreo, that are either patinated or still preserve the oxidized layers from the casting process. The significant lead variability can also be explained by the metal segregation within the alloy, especially when present in large amounts.8 For the cast in the Kröller-Müller Museum, the results of analysis of areas with thicker patina tend to show less lead than when analyzing thinner patinated areas or spots of bare metal. It is possible that the patina layer mainly consists of zinc and copper salts. The peculiar composition of the four Rosso Bambino ebreo casts, if confirmed by further analyses, could reflect the artist’s pursuit of an alloy with a low melting point, high fluidity at the molten state, and a low cost of materials used. The variability in the composition of each cast hints at an inconsistent alloying method and the possible use of scrap metals of different composition. In conclusion, this preliminary investigation of four of Rosso’s Bambino ebreo casts suggests that the artist used a peculiar quaternary alloy, particularly rich in lead. The collected data also demonstrate that the composition of Rosso’s metals deserves further research. It will be necessary to enlarge the number of analyzed metal casts unequivocally attributed to Rosso, and to turn to minimally invasive techniques, such as atomic emission spectroscopy (AES) or inductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy (ICP-MS), in order to characterize the bulk alloy compositions with the required accuracy. A comprehensive compositional database of Rosso’s metal casts has the potential to help us understand the artist’s creative casting process in the future.

7  See Marcus Lynn Young et al., “Matisse to Picasso: A Compositional Study of Modern Bronze Sculptures,” Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry 395 (2009): 171–84; and the data presented in the two catalogues published by the National Gallery of Art, Washington: Glover Lindsay, Barbour, and Sturman, Edgar Degas Sculpture, 23–34; and Butler and Glover Lindsay, European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century, 525. 8  Lead is not miscible in copper alloys, and it separates during solidification along grain boundaries, forming scattered globules that can reach considerable size. See David A. Scott, Ancient Metals: Microstructure and Metallurgy (Los Angeles: Conservation Science Press, 2010), 1:226.

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Bibliography Butler, Ruth, and Suzanne Glover Lindsay. European Sculpture of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Glover Lindsay, Suzanne, Daphne Barbour, and Shelly Sturman. Edgar Degas Sculpture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Heginbotham, Arlen, Jane Basset, David Bourgarit, Lisha Glinsman, Duncan Hook, Dylan Smith, Robert Speakman, Aroon Shugar, and Robert Van Langh. “The Copper CHARM Set: A New Set of Certified Reference Materials for the Standardization of Quantitative X-Ray Fluorescence Analysis of Heritage Copper Alloys.” Archaeometry 57, no. 5 (October 2015): 856–68. Lie, Henry. “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work.” In Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions. Edited by Harry Cooper, and Sharon Hecker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Orfanou, Vana, and Thilo Rehren. “A (Not So) Dangerous Method: pXRF vs. EPMAWDS Analysis of Copper Based Artefacts.” Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences 7 (2015): 387–97. Scott, David. Ancient Metals: Microstructure and Metallurgy. Vol. 1. Los Angeles: Conservation Science Press, 1991. Young, Marcus Lynn, Suzanne Schnepp, Francesca Casadio, Andrew Lins, Melissa Meighan, Joseph Lambert, and David Dunand. “Matisse to Picasso: A Compositional Study of Modern Bronze Sculptures.” Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry, 395 (2009): 171–84.

chapter 13

Rethinking Uniformity: Analysis of Rosso’s Serial Casts of the Bambino ebreo through Digital Surface Comparison Max Rahrig and Ronald E. Street 1

Introduction

To gain better knowledge of Rosso’s production technology and an understanding of his working methods, 3D documentation of twelve variants of the Bambino ebreo was carried out to enable high-resolution surface comparisons. This technology originates from mechanical manufacturing, where it is used as a tool for quality control. In this research it is applied to art objects produced in series. Rosso’s Bambino ebreo casts are excellent objects for this study. From 1892/93 onwards, during his time in Paris, he created many versions of the sculpture in different materials. Most of the Bambino ebreo casts are wax, but there are also bronze casts and plaster versions preserved.1 It is known that Rosso used gelatin molds for his serial production, but these are not easily reusable.2 After a few copies, a gelatin mold will deteriorate and lose its detail and sharpness.3 It is obvious, therefore, that Rosso needed more than a single gelatin mold for casting his Bambino ebreo casts. For this reason, the following study will compare similarities between the sculptures and identify differences in order to gain new evidence for his way of working. The following variants of the Bambino ebreo are included in this study: the Ex-Monti, Nasher, Timken, Sussex, Ex-Brunauer, Ex-Pawlowski, and Ex-Meek waxes, the Cologne, Folkwang, Ex-Bergamo, and Kröller-Müller bronzes, and a Bambino ebreo called Black Plaster (fig. 13.1).4 1  Sharon Hecker, A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017), 132–33. 2  Derek Pullen, “Gelatin Molds: Rosso’s Open Secret,” in Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, ed. Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 96–102. 3  Alfred Bohnagen, Der Stukkateur und Gipser (Munich: Callway, 1987), 129–30. First published in Leipzig, 1914. 4  The 3D scans were made by Ron Street. He also started a first processing of the data. The two sections, “Methodological Approach” and “Exploration of the Metrology,” are based on his script. Unfortunately, he passed away before he could finish his work.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_016

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Figure 13.1

2

Overview of the twelve scanned Bambino ebreos © Max Rahrig

Methodological Approach

To undertake these metrology studies, which are often referred to in industry as “deviation studies,” the geometry of each Bambino ebreo was captured with a Breuckmann smartSCAN structured light scanner (SLS).5 The captured 3D 5  Now called the Aicon SmartScan. See https://www.hexagonmi.com/products/white-light -scanner-systems/aicon-smartscan.

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datasets, which define the geometry of the sculptures, are then compared in order to determine how one sculpture differs from the other. The industrial technique of comparing CAD models to scanned as-built parts, also known as “first-part inspections,” has been developed over the last twenty years as both the accuracy of 3D imaging devices and computational power have increased significantly. Deviation studies are now a standard method of assuring that prototypes and as-built parts meet the specifications of the CAD drawings on which they are based.6 Deviation studies have been adopted by the cultural heritage, conservation, and science communities to better understand the relationship between objects of similar size and appearance. The first to use 3D comparisons for art history was Hans de Roos for the comparisons of different bronze sculptures of Rodin’s The Thinker in 2003 and 2004.7 Tonny Beentjes, Ronald Street, David Thurrowgood and François Blanchetière supplemented this study in 2013.8 For example, other studies focused on Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais and Matisse’s Reclining Nude I (Aurora).9 This method can reveal important differences between objects previously unobtainable with standard measuring techniques. The method is also used for the monitoring of conservation measures and deterioration studies in heritage conservation.10 6  See Timothy S. Newman and Anil K. Jain, “A System for 3D CAD-based Inspection Using Range Images,” Pattern Recognition 28, no. 10 (1995): 1555–74, DOI: 10.1016/0031 -3203(95)00028-X; Lie Yadong and Gu Peihua, “Automatic Localization and Comparison for Free-Form Surface Inspection,” Journal of Manufacturing Systems 25, no. 4 (2006): 251–68, DOI: 10.1016/S0278-6125(08)00007-1. 7  Hans De Roos, “The Digital Sculpture Project: Applying 3D Scanning Techniques for the Morphological Comparison of Sculptures,” Computer and Information Science 9, no. 2 (2004): 69–74. 8  Tonny P. C. Beentjes, Ronald E. Street, David Thurrowgood and François Blanchetière, “3-D imaging as a research tool for the study of bronze sculpture,” METAL 2013: Interim Meeting of the ICOM-CC Metal Working Group, Conference Proceedings, 16–20 September 2013, ed. Ewan Hyslop, Vanesa Gonzalez, Lore Troalen and Lyn Wilson (2013): paper 25. 9  Daisuke Miyazaki, Mawo Kamakura, Tomoaki Higo, Yasuhide Okamoto, Rei Kawakami, Takaaki Shiratori, Akifumi Ikari, Shintaro Ono, Yoshihiro Sato, Mina Oya, Masayuki Tanaka, Katsushi Ikeuchi, and Masanori Aoyagi, “3D Digital Archive of the Burghers of Calais,” 12th international conference on Interactive Technologies and Sociotechnical Systems, VSMM (Virtual Systems and Multimedia) (2006): 399–407. Ann Boulton, “Altered states: Henri Matisse’s sculpture Aurora,” AIC Objects Specialty Group postprints, Vol. 14, (2007): 110–129. 10   Max Rahrig, Rainer Drewello and Andrea Lazzeri, “Opto-Technical Monitoring: A Standardized Methodology to Assess the Treatment of Historical Stone Surfaces,” International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences 42–2 (2018): 945–52, DOI: 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-2-945-2018.

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An SLS such as the Breuckmann SmartScan is a scanning device for measuring the 3D shape of an object using projected light patterns and a camera system.11 Projecting a narrow band of light onto a three-dimensionally shaped surface produces a line of illumination that appears distorted when viewed from perspectives other than that of the projector, and this distortion can be used for an exact geometric reconstruction of the surface shape.12 Rosso’s Bambino ebreo casts posed a unique set of problems for this method of 3D surface capture. Black or dark surfaces, as well as surfaces that are translucent and reflective, are extremely difficult to scan. The wax sculptures are both translucent and reflective, the bronzes are almost black, and one sculpture, a blackish wax, is all three. Therefore all sculptures required extensive testing, and the system’s settings and parameters needed constant adjustment to achieve optimal results. One would perhaps have assumed that the settings would have been interchangeable across similar objects, for example, the yellowish wax sculptures, but each individual sculpture required substantially different settings to optimize the scan results. A completed digital model of a Bambino ebreo is composed of between sixty and ninety individual scans. These are aligned into a set of 3D data points called a point cloud. Each point is assigned a corresponding X-Y-Z coordinate. The point cloud is then processed to create a closed polygon mesh. For the Bambino ebreo casts, the surface models are comprised of over ten million tiny polygons. 3

Exploration of the Metrology

A comparison of the sculptures’ dimensions, as exemplified by their volumes, can give a first, rough indication of their similarities and differences. In order to calculate the volume of the objects it was necessary to remove any scanned parts of the bases and close the resulting holes. Some of the sculptures are solid and filled with plaster, while others, especially the casts, have a certain material thickness of bronze, but are mostly hollow. This process therefore provides only a relative approximation of the true volume, but it does offer a good place to begin to understand the geometric differences between the sculptures. For example, the Ex-Meek Wax has the greatest volume and the Cologne Bronze the least. On the other hand, some of the wax sculptures have added plaster 11  Borko Furht, Encyclopedia of Multimedia, 2nd ed. (New York: Springer, 2008), 222. 12  Rahrig, Drewello and Lazzeri, “Opto-Technical Monitoring,” 945–46.

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Comparison of cross-sections through Ex-Meek Wax (red line) and Cologne Bronze (black) © Ronald Street

at the bottom to change their orientation and angle of view, which also causes differences in volume. Better results come from a comparison of the surface topography of the sculptures. To compare two models, a combination of best-fitting algorithms and manual alignments was deployed to position one object onto the other. One of the techniques used is to cut sections through the aligned models to see how well they are aligned, and how far they differ from each other. In the case of the Ex-Meek Wax and the Cologne Bronze, one can see graphically how close the two objects are in profile (fig. 13.2). The perplexing problems associated with the Rosso sculptures are also visible here: while the sculptures have, to a certain extent, very similar underlying structures, the surfaces are somewhat different. As can be seen in the profiles, the surfaces are not identical and diverge in many areas of the profile sections.

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Quantified 3D comparison of the two sculptures © Ronald Street

The deviations between the objects can be further quantified by creating false color images, where the color represents the distance between one surface and the other (fig. 13.3). Profile sections can also be quantified with this method. Annotations show accurately at any location how one model deviates from the other. The 3D deviations for this model show on average a maximum of +2.62/−2.74 mm, a standard deviation13 of 3.4 mm, and a root mean square14 of 3.5 mm. Deviation distributions can also be calculated (fig. 13.4). For this model, 74% of the deviation distribution is within a +/− range of 2 mm, meaning that 74% of the surfaces deviate no more than 4 mm in any one place.15

13  Standard deviation is quantity calculated to indicate the extent of deviation for a group as a whole. 14  Root mean square is a statistical measure of the magnitude of a varying quantity. It is especially useful when variates are positive and negative. 15  Surface comparisons were processed by using Geomagic Qualify software.

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One of the noteworthy observations is that the profiles made vertically through the front of the face seemed to correspond very well from the forehead to the bottom of the chin (fig. 13.5). Starting with the Ex-Meek Wax and the Timken Wax, one can immediately see the similarities and differences between the two sculptures. The fronts of the faces are almost perfectly aligned, and although the Timken sculpture is somewhat smaller front to back, the profiles of the back side of the sculptures are almost identical. When the Sussex Wax is added to the group, one again sees that the front profiles, particularly the Sussex and Timken waxes, are almost indistinguishable. Yet the almost perfect alignment of the front portion of the sculptures is not continued throughout: the shoulder of the Sussex Wax protrudes far beyond those of the Ex-Meek and Timken. When adding the Ex-Brunauer Wax and the Cologne Bronze to the group (see fig. 13.5), the front profiles are again almost identical, with the Ex-Meek only slightly offset. The damage to the Ex-Brunauer Wax and the subsequent slumping of the wax around the neck area is evident. The Cologne Bronze corresponds well with the other four sculptures. In comparisons between the foreheads of the five sculptures, there is only a 3 mm distance between the innermost and outermost profile. In the area just below the nose, this difference is reduced to less than 2 mm.

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Figure 13.5

Cross-section comparison of five Bambino ebreos © Ronald Street

An interesting result is the obvious similarity between both the sculptures’ faces, where the models overlay each other nearly perfectly, and the backs of the heads. However, at the same time, the profiles of the backs of the heads are displaced by a distance of several millimeters. This is clearly visible in the Ex-Meek and Timken waxes (fig. 13.6). If both sculptures were made out of the same mold, they should have similar dimensions, but the Ex-Meek Wax is larger. To better understand the results of these surface comparisons, a proper investigation into Rosso’s process is needed. 4

Contextualizing the Digital Repositories

Henry Lie16 and Derek Pullen17 have already provided an overview of how Rosso produced his casts: he made the bronze casts using the lost-wax method. 16  Henry Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” in Cooper and Hecker, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, 69–93. 17  Pullen, “Gelatin Molds,” 96–102.

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Cross-section comparison of the Timken and Ex-Meek waxes. Similarities are clearly visible in the front and back, but the sculptures differ in size © Ronald Street

During this process, wax models of the sculpture are needed as an intermediate step. This is why the same working method can be postulated for producing the wax variations of the Bambino ebreo. For the creation of a new sculpture, Rosso made a first version in clay. Clay is easy to handle, sculpt, and model, but it is not durable or consistent in form and therefore unsuitable for making casting models. Thus a first model is built around the clay, and after drying, the clay must be washed out and the model filled with plaster. This results in a plaster master copy, called by Lie a “primary plaster.”18 Around this plaster sculpture the gelatin mold is applied, which is needed for serial production. The next step involves filling the gelatin mold with a wax layer and then filling the wax with plaster. The result may be a finished wax sculpture, or when supported with “core pins” and surrounded with additional plaster, it will create a model 18  Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” 70–71.

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used for bronze casting.19 Gelatin molds only have a limited durability before they dry out, and they lose detail and definition and become damaged during use. Plasters are more durable and can be used more often to produce new gelatin molds, providing a perfect basis for serial production.20 Especially for the Bambino ebreo, which Rosso cast in a bigger series, the evidence for the use of plaster models and gelatin molds is convincing. Lie used a cast of Rosso’s Bookmaker from Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome and a Bambino Malato from the Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Milan to point out artifacts (accidentally produced features) of the casting process, which are also part of Rosso’s creative process.21 In these samples, both sides of the gelatin molds were “completely out of registration, resulting in a large step or offset along the front-to-back dividing line at both sides of the figure.”22 This is another important detail about Rosso’s process: the offset may result in variations in the size and volume of the sculpture even when using the same gelatin mold for two or more casts. For a proper digital comparison of the Bambino ebreo casts, these aspects of Rosso’s process must be considered. What are the possible issues? The casts with the closest similarities may come from identical gelatin molds, although this is impossible to determine purely from the casts. Or the similarities may result from the fact that the sculptures come from different gelatin molds applied to the same plaster. This is easier to determine from defects or small irregularities on the plasters that are recorded in the gelatin molds and then transferred to the final casts. Although normally in casting only one primary plaster is produced, from which secondary casts are then taken, Rosso may have made more than one plaster to create several copies of the same sculpture, perhaps even at the same time. These multiple plasters may have been created by using existing wax casts or plaster models of the sculpture to make new gelatin molds or new plasters. Furthermore, Rosso may have combined parts or halves of different gelatin molds, leading to misalignment of the molds and subsequent differences in the volumes. It is also possible that he reworked the waxes after casting.23 Further casts were produced from Rosso’s plaster models by his son Francesco after his death.24 19  Ibid. 20  Bohnagen, Der Stukkateur und Gipser, 114–30. 21  Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” 77. 22  Ibid., 76. 23  Ibid., 71. 24  Sharon Hecker, “The Afterlife of Sculptures: Posthumous Casts and the Case of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928),” Journal of Art Historiography 16 (June 2017), 1–18, https://arthistorio graphy.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/hecker.pdf.

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Timken Wax. Border line of the halves of the mold is traced in orange © Max Rahrig

Special methods are required for processing the alignments to achieve surface comparison of the 3D models. First of all, in order to understand how many parts where used for the gelatin molds, variants with artifacts of misaligned molds are helpful. In the case of the twelve Bambino ebreo casts of this study, artifacts are found on seven sculptures: the Ex-Monti, Nasher, and Timken waxes and the Cologne, Ex-Bergamo, Folkwang, and Kröller-Müller bronzes. All of the artifacts divide the sculpture into two halves only. The borderlines run exactly between the more natural and realistically modeled faces and the rather more abstract backs of the heads (fig. 13.7). Since there are no complicated undercuts existing in the sculpture, there is no need to split the molds into more than two parts.

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Figure 13.8 Ex-Monti Wax with a mapping of key features (green) and unique characteristics (orange) © Max Rahrig

Based on this observation, it should therefore be sufficient to calculate the comparisons based on the alignment of the faces and backs separately. A detailed observation of surface details may also give a first basis for a pre-selection into possible groupings. If small irregularities and damages are found on different Bambino ebreo casts, they may work as key features indicating the use of the same plaster model from which gelatin molds were taken. Possible key features are the details on the brow, the nearly heart-shaped detail on the right side of the forehead, and the slightly protruding structure a little further up the head (fig. 13.8). (Details could result from direct modeling or touching up of the surface at an earlier stage in a version’s production, or they could be cast from features in a mold surface. If one has more than one version with fine detail, differences in the crispness of the detail can give a clue as to the relationship between the examples.) The pea-like structure in the left eye, the irregularities on the right cheek, and the shape of the left collar can also be used as key features. On the back of the head, possible key features include the fingerprint

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Figure 13.9 Ex-Pawlowski Wax with a mapping of key features (green) © Max Rahrig

on the right and the surrounding structures and the shape and details in the upper area (fig. 13.9). This fingerprint may also be a result of handling the finished wax cast. 5

Comparison of the Faces

The Ex-Monti Wax provides very sharp surface details, which may indicate that it was cast from mold that had not been used many times before. Thus this sculpture may function well as the reference model for surface comparisons of the sculptures’ fronts. For the alignment, only the area of the face (brow, eyes, nose, mouth, and cheeks) was used. Four Bambino ebreo casts have strong similarities to the Ex-Monti Wax, the faces of the Nasher Wax and the Cologne, Folkwang, and Ex-Bergamo bronzes fitting nearly perfectly. All of them have

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Figure 13.10 3D comparison of the Ex-Monti Wax to the Nasher Wax and the Cologne, Folkwang, and Ex-Bergamo bronzes © Max Rahrig

identical key features regarding the details on the brow, the dimension of the heart-shaped detail on the right side of the forehead (especially its inner part), as well as the slightly protruding structure a little further up the head. For processing all further 3D surface comparisons, GOMinspect software was used with the same color-scale for deviation mapping. The color-scale shows consistencies of +/− 1 mm in green, deviations from +1 mm up to +3 mm are yellow to red, and deviations between −1 down to −3 mm are light to dark blue. All larger deviations are shown in black and gray. The surface comparisons of the four sculptures to the Ex-Monti Wax reveal how exactly they fit together: in all four cases most of the face has a consistency of under +/− 1 mm to the Ex-Monti (fig. 13.10). The light blue and yellow areas in the faces result from deviations between +/− 1–2 mm—a range of deviation that can be caused by the flexible gelatin mold if the wax was filled in under pressure. In addition, different wax compositions and variations in the ambient and mold temperature affect the flexibility and viscosity, resulting in small deviations. The neck and bust vary more, perhaps because Rosso reworked them after wax casting, or possibly because he treated these areas less carefully than the face when he applied the wax to the mold. One can model additional detail or make changes directly in the wax after casting. Small surface cutting or scratching or stamping would be easy. However, real modeling of shapes would require a soft or warmed wax and seems less likely in Rosso’s case. Also of interest are the similar deviations between the two bronzes, Ex-Bergamo and Cologne. A direct comparison shows more clearly how accurately they fit together. The Ex-Bergamo Bronze has more highly detailed key features, so it was used as the reference model for processing the 3D comparison. There are only minor deviations in the shape and dimensions of the

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Figure 13.11 3D comparison of Ex-Bergamo and Cologne bronzes. Visualization of the comparison is shown on the Cologne model © Max Rahrig

two bronzes (fig. 13.11); some parts of the Cologne Bronze are slightly smaller, maybe because of a different shrinking behavior during the casting process. It is therefore possible that both bronzes were cast from the same plaster model. Many parts of the Folkwang Bronze look similar to the Cologne Bronze (fig. 13.12). Proportions of the head and even parts of the bust appear similar, but a closer look at the Folkwang Bronze reveals obvious differences. The Folkwang Bronze has a curved left collar instead of a straight one; furthermore, the bust is several centimeters taller and the right part of the bronze has a flange with holes for aligning a gelatin mother mold. In this case, the excess wax for creating the lost-wax form may have been applied over the edge of the mother mold, perhaps to improve it or repair an area of loss.25 25  Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” 80–81.

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Figure 13.12 Comparison of Cologne and Folkwang bronzes. Visualization based on Folkwang Bronze © Max Rahrig

It is conceivable that the two sculptures were created from the same plaster model. The wax in the area of the collar in the Cologne Bronze was not applied to the mold completely, leading to a smaller model in comparison with the other bronzes. One explanation for the differences in surface details between the Cologne and Folkwang bronzes is that the plaster model could have been damaged, perhaps the plaster model was damaged, which would suggest that the Cologne Bronze was made after the Folkwang Bronze. This might explain why the details on the forehead and the heart-shaped structure of the Cologne Bronze are more blurred. Due to the similarities in the traces of bronze casting, one might imagine that the two versions were cast in the same workshop. However, metallurgical analysis of the composition of the two bronzes revealed that they were not made out of the same melt.26 The strong deviations in some places between the two sculptures can be explained by residues of 26  See Federico Carò and Luc Megens, “Towards an Understanding of Rosso’s Casting Practice: Surface XRF of Four Bronze Casts of Bambino ebreo,” in this book, 272.

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Figure 13.13 Comparison of the Ex-Pawlowski Wax to the Ex-Meek, Sussex and Timken waxes © Max Rahrig

plaster investment left over from the casting process, which still adhere very strongly to the Folkwang Bronze. A second group is represented by the Ex-Pawlowski, Ex-Meek, Sussex, and Timken waxes (fig. 13.13). Their faces have similar proportions, and key features like the heart-shaped detail on the right side of the forehead are different from the Ex-Monti group. All four sculptures have a scratch under the left eye and two artifacts under the right eye instead of the four artifacts found in the Ex-Monti group. But there are huge differences between the objects in this group, too, especially in the shape of the busts. Perhaps Rosso created the sculptures by using the same plaster model for the faces but reworked the wax busts after casting the waxes or while filling the waxes with plaster. Two Bambino ebreo casts were impossible to compare to the others: the Ex-Brunauer Wax was in a very poor condition while scanning, and due to the deformations and degradation of the surface, no accurate comparison to the other sculptures was possible. In the case of the Kröller-Müller Bronze, another scanning device with a lower resolution was used. As a result the 3D model does not contain enough surface detail for a straight comparison with the others. But in both cases, the proportions and size of the Bambino ebreo cast are similar to the others, and therefore a casting from plaster models similar to the other sculptures is obvious.

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Comparison of the Back Sides

Regarding the more abstract shape of the back of the heads, observation of key features is more difficult. Nevertheless, there are some characteristic scratches, fingerprints, and surface details that can be found in several casts. In figure 13.9, these key features are highlighted on the Ex-Pawlowski Wax, which does not have many unique characteristics. The series comparison of the reverses of the Bambino ebreo casts can be separated into three groups. First of all there is the group with characteristic similarities to the Ex-Pawlowski Wax. Four sculptures belong to this group: the Ex-Bergamo and Kröller-Müller bronzes, the Ex-Meek Wax, and the Black Plaster (fig. 13.14). In the comparison between the Ex-Pawlowski and Ex-Meek waxes, it can be seen that the basic shape is remarkably similar, but in the Ex-Meek the bulge above the left ear is missing. In general, the Ex-Meek has some smaller features compared to the Ex-Pawlowski. The Ex-Bergamo Bronze also has a very similar basic shape to the Ex-Pawlowski, but it is noticeable that the key features are all less accentuated, probably due to the additional steps involved in going from the wax model to the finished bronze casting, and the resulting loss of sharpness of detail. The Kröller-Müller bronze matches the Ex-Pawlowski Wax very well. Some areas are larger, but these are mostly casting artifacts. The key features are partly smaller, but this can perhaps be explained by the oscillation process in bronze casting.27 The last object in this group of well-matching Bambino ebreo casts is the Black Plaster version. The proportions match well with the Ex-Pawlowski Wax, but it is noticeable that the key features are larger. This fact will be discussed in more detail below. The second group consists of the Bambino ebreo casts that do not match quite as well with the Ex-Pawlowski Wax (fig. 13.15). These are the Nasher and Ex-Monti waxes as well as the Folkwang Bronze. All three models differ from the Ex-Pawlowski in similar ways. They are generally somewhat smaller in size, which also makes the key features smaller. The third group includes all the Bambino ebreo casts that deviate substantially from Ex-Pawlowski, so that no real similarities or indications of the use of the same plaster model can be inferred. This group includes the Timken, Sussex and Ex-Brunauer waxes as well as the Cologne Bronze (fig. 13.16). Ex-Brunauer shows such striking deviations in the geometry, due to the large damaged area 27  Paul Bellendorf, Metallene Grabplatten aus Franken und Thüringen aus dem 15. bis 18. Jahrhundert: Eine interdisziplinäre Studie zum Denkmalbestand und seiner Gefährdung durch Umwelteinflüsse (Hamburg: Saarbrücken Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschul­ schriften, 2011), 29.

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Figure 13.14 Comparison of the Ex-Pawlowski Wax to the Ex-Bergamo and Kröller-Müller bronzes, the Ex-Meek Wax and Black Plaster © Max Rahrig

Figure 13.15 Comparison of the Ex-Pawlowski Wax to the Nasher and Ex-Monti waxes and the Folkwang Bronze © Max Rahrig

Figure 13.16 Comparison of the Ex-Pawlowski Wax to the Timken, Ex-Brunauer and Sussex waxes and the Cologne Bronze © Max Rahrig

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on the back, that a clear comparison of the surfaces is not possible. In many areas the Timken Wax is larger, and while the upper area shows some similarities to Ex-Pawlowski, the middle area especially, where most key-features are located, differs in size. The Cologne Bronze, on the other hand, matches Ex-Pawlowski comparably well in the middle part. What is particularly noticeable here, however, is that the fingerprint is missing, and while the upper part is clearly smaller, the lower part of the sculpture is again larger. While it is important to record this difference, something as fine as this might be lost in any of the steps for making a wax, plaster or bronze. Finding it on two casts would have meaning. Not finding it on a cast might mean it has simply been lost or not transmitted. The Sussex Wax shows the strongest deviations: it is obvious that the back does not show even the slightest similarities to the other Bambino ebreo casts. A comparison of the back sides of all these waxes apart from the Sussex and Ex-Brunauer shows that similarities can only be found in the middle area around the fingerprint, while the upper parts vary considerably. This may be due to damage to the wax casts within the last hundred years, but the deviations are also striking in the dimensionally stable bronzes. The same applies to the lower part and the base of the sculpture. It can therefore be hypothesized that Rosso either used only a partial plaster model from which he made a gelatin mold for the middle area for the design of the reverse sides, or that the reverse sides were heavily reworked by hand after casting, with portions, mounts and bases removed or added. It is hard to think of these reworkings as the careful improvements to modeling a wax that might happen with a more traditional artist/studio. Rather, they suggest cruder changes and repairs of problems. It is also possible that Rosso cast the Bambino ebreo by using only a one-sided or open gelatin mold, as Lie assumed for the Grand Rieuse sculpture.28 In this case, the similarities in the middle part may be due to ordinary processing reasons. It is possible that Rosso applied the wax into an open gelatin mold for the face. After the wax set he may have applied the plaster core of the sculpture and reworked the back side by hand before applying the wax there. The shape of the middle part strongly recalls a negative form of the palm of a left hand. If it were assumed that Rosso’s palm did not change significantly in size over the years, and if he worked in a recurring pattern due to serial production, this could also provide an answer to the strong similarities between the sculptures even without using a mold. This could also explain the fingerprint, which is always in the same place but differently accented. It could therefore be the print of Rosso’s left thumb, leaving its negative form on the wax while holding the sculpture in his warm hand during the reworking process of the face. This 28  Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” 75.

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theory is corroborated by the strong variations in the design of the back of the Sussex Wax, where Rosso may have simply deviated from his process. It is also possible that the Sussex Wax was one of the early versions of Rosso’s Bambino ebreo, at a time when his process was not yet optimized. 7

Surface Comparison to a Plaster Model

The data set of one Bambino ebreo, the Black Plaster, raises questions and possibilities that will now be examined in more detail. Unfortunately, the exact circumstances regarding the origin of the dataset cannot be traced in detail at present. But it is the only 3D scan of a Bambino ebreo plaster model in this study, representing one of the two plaster models known. The surface resolution of the 3D dataset is lower than the other Bambino ebreo sets. The dataset was probably not digitized during the workshop and a different scanning device was used.29 The key features are relatively unclear in the dataset, but there are still some recognizable characteristics, such as the two artifacts under the right eye. Nevertheless, the overall geometry of the Black Plaster in comparison with the other Bambino ebreo casts provides some interesting results (fig. 13.17).30 The Ex-Brunauer Wax shows the greatest deviations from the Black Plaster. This is due to surface loss, particularly in the area around the eyes, and is probably directly related to its poor condition. Apart from artifacts of the casting process, such as casting welds or the presence of plaster investment, it is noticeable that the faces of all the other Bambino ebreo casts made of wax and bronze are slightly smaller compared to the Black Plaster. The deviations range from 1 to 3 mm and are found under the chin as well as on the sides and at the top of the forehead. It is therefore a uniform deviation spread around the whole face. In a historical workshop book about the stuccoer’s craft, it is pointed out that wax models are subject to shrinkage. The reason for this can be found in the processing of the wax, partly mixed with additional materials and heated up for processing and application in the mold. Afterwards, the wax shrinks as it sets.31 The same can be said for the bronze casting process, where there is an obvious loss of volume between the hot molten bronze and the finished cooled one.32 29  Correspondence on the background of the dataset can probably be found in Ron Street’s documents, but they were not accessible posthumously. 30  Due to the generally very high differences between the models in the backs of the heads, the following comparisons are limited to the faces of the Bambino ebreo casts. 31  Bohnagen, Der Stukkateur und Gipser, 114. 32  Bellendorf, Metallene Grabplatten aus Franken, 29.

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Figure 13.17 Comparison of the Bambino ebreos to Black Plaster © Max Rahrig

Regarding this, a detailed consideration of Lie’s article reveals some interesting aspects regarding the reasons why Rosso and other artists made models out of plaster: as a basis for casting in wax and bronze; or to obtain a cheap reproduction of a sculpture, which, after casting, can be painted in any color, or, less likely in Rosso’s case, painted bronze as a preliminary study to check whether the arrangement of light and shadow or the general effect of the sculpture fulfills the idea of the artist before carrying out an expensive bronze cast.33 Such 33  Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” 71.

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studies are practical and useful for sculptures that are to be cast only once or in a small series, but Rosso is not known to have made preliminary studies for other works. There is another reason why a plaster model is needed: as the primary plaster in Rosso’s process, used as the basis for creating the gelatin molds.34 As Lie writes: Coming directly from the artist’s unique models, they offer the most accurate renditions of Rosso’s initial concepts for his limited number of sculptural themes. And they serve as reference points for judging the degree of detail preserved in subsequent casts. Later versions will always offer detail diminished by an amount corresponding to the number of generations removed from the primary plaster.35 A hint that the Black Plaster most likely belongs to the group of primary plasters is provided by its key features, which are exclusively those that can be found on almost all the other Bambino ebreo casts. Features like the two additional artifacts on the right cheek next to the nose found on the Ex-Monti and Nasher waxes and Cologne, Folkwang, and Ex-Bergamo bronzes are missing, and perhaps these “secondary features” are due to damages in the gelatin mold used. A second indication that this is a primary plaster is given by the dark color of its surface. In the workshop book from 1914, Bohnagen mentions that it is necessary to apply siccative (oil drying agents) made from oil or shellac onto the plaster before applying the gelatin mold. The oil layer acts as a barrier preventing the gelatin from sticking to the plaster. This layer will certainly lead to tanning or darkening of the plaster.36 An example for such tanning is given by Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker in their analysis of Rosso’s Bookmaker sculpture.37 It is known that Rosso needed more than one primary plaster of the Bambino ebreo. Due to the abrasion of the surface and a gradual loosening of the detail sharpness caused by frequent copying, several plaster models were necessary. It is also conceivable that Rosso used several primary plasters of the same sculpture at the same time in order to be able to create several copies simultaneously. In Lie, for example, another plaster or clay version of the Bambino ebreo is shown, which unfortunately could not be included in the study here.38 The uniform deviations on the forehead of the Nasher Wax and 34  Ibid., 70. 35  Ibid., 80. 36  Bohnagen, Der Stukkateur und Gipser, 114. 37  Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker, “Catalog No. 13: Medardo Rosso, Bookmaker (L’uomo alle corse), c. 1894, plaster,” in Cooper and Hecker, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions. 38  Lie, “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work,” 78.

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Figure 13.18 Ex-Monti Wax with a mapping of key features (green), unique characteristics (orange) and the border line of the gelatin mold (pink) © Max Rahrig

the Cologne and Folkwang bronzes could indicate that there was another primary plaster. A closer look at the surface comparisons of the Bambino ebreo casts with the Black Plaster suggest that the uniform deviations and similarities between the sculptures only affect the face and the area where the child’s skin is portrayed. The chest and collar look superficially similar from one sculpture to another. The 3D comparisons, however, reveal that in fact there are substantial differences. A clear line can be followed along the boundary between the areas that match well and the areas with large differences. This line runs around the face, especially on the left side of the head, and it is clearly visible on the Ex-Monti, Timken, Nasher, and Ex-Brunauer waxes and also the Cologne and Ex-Bergamo bronzes (fig. 13.18) and under the chin of the Folkwang Bronze. This finding reveals another aspect of Rosso’s process. It is to be hypothesized that only the face was cast using a gelatin mold, and either he made a rough copy of the other areas, or he reworked them considerably after casting. He seems to have taken a haphazard approach, making a few casts and then fixing them in whatever way needed if they had problems.

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Surface Comparisons as a Helpful Tool for Provenancing

For sculptures whose object history is completely known and traced back to their production, it is very easy to give a statement on whether they were actually cast by Rosso or by someone else. However, the origin of some of Rosso’s sculptures is not completely clear. This often leaves the question of the provenance unanswered. In some cases, digital surface comparison may provide helpful indications for the complex studies of provenance and connoisseurship of works of art. For example, the specific provenance of the Ex-Pawlowski Wax could not be confirmed through external documentation. The comparisons between the front of this wax and the Ex-Meek, Sussex, and Timken waxes (see fig. 13.13) demonstrate a remarkable closeness, with Ex-Pawlowski and Ex-Meek particularly similar. If it can be hypothesized that Rosso created the faces by using gelatin molds and reworked especially the back sides, the greatest deviations would be expected on the back, particularly when the sculpture was not cast by Rosso. However, the comparison shows that the back sides of the Ex-Pawlowski and Ex-Meek waxes, the Ex-Bergamo and Kröller-Müller bronzes, and the Black Plaster (see fig. 13.14) are also very similar. This suggests instead that they were cast from the same plaster model. Another sculpture with an unclear provenance, where the surface comparison may provide helpful information, is the Cologne Bronze. The distinctive similarities between the Folkwang and Cologne bronzes have already suggested that they were cast from the same plaster model. If the Cologne Bronze was cast after the Folkwang Bronze it would be smaller due to the shrinking behavior of the materials (bronze shrinks as the pour changes). This has already been shown with the Black Plaster, which is bigger than all of the wax and bronze sculptures. However, it is not possible to say definitively when the Cologne Bronze was cast. It could have been cast by Rosso himself, or later by someone else using an existing plaster model or wax version of a Bambino ebreo for a lost-wax casting. These two examples show how 3D surface comparisons between pieces with a well-known history and those with an unclear history can help to find indications for further research in provenance and connoisseurship studies because they can display linkage or the lack of linkage between the objects. While 3D surface comparisons will not solve the complex study of the provenance of a work of art on their own, they may deliver essentials for further research.

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Conclusion

This study has demonstrated that 3D comparison is an effective and useful tool for scientific observation and analysis of art objects and sculptures produced in series, verifying mathematically and analytically observations and assumptions whose statements were significantly confirmed. But the possibilities of digital surface comparisons are not only limited to the field of art history; they can also be used for comparative studies in other disciplines such as archaeology and building archaeology. It would be conceivable to use this method to compare building decorations or pottery produced in series. The method has the potential to reveal new information about the production of objects with stamped decorations from antiquity or the Roman period.39 In order to give clear statements about manufacturing techniques, however, it is necessary to consider all the information about the process. This may come from the literature and extensive studies of the objects. In the case of the Bambino ebreo casts, the knowledge that Rosso worked with misaligned molds during casting was essential in separating the surface comparisons between single parts of the mold. Without this information, the results of the surface comparison would have been misleading, because a best-fit matching calculated for the entire volume of the sculptures would try to compensate for the deviations caused by the misalignment. This study provides some new evidence regarding Rosso’s process in the creation of the Bambino ebreo. It has shown that when casting the sculptures he was focusing on keeping the shape and level of detail in the child’s face as high as possible; the deviations in this region are negligible throughout the entire series of sculptures in this study.40 The other areas are reworked, which can be seen clearly in the back of the Sussex Wax. The Bambino ebreo casts are very similar, in that they share the same basic features and proportions. Nevertheless, Rosso has attached great importance to the casting process and reworking, whereby each Bambino ebreo has its own character. Despite the fact that the Bambino ebreo casts were produced in series, there exists no one hundred percent doppelganger. Every single Bambino ebreo is characterized by Rosso’s artistic freedom and his desire to create his own unique works of art. In his creative process, and in keeping with the spirit of his time, Rosso makes use of the technical 39  See Dirk H. Rieke-Zapp and Elisabeth Trinkl, “Face to Face: Close Range Inspection of Head Vases,” International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences 42–2/W5 (2017): 601–4, DOI: 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-2-W5-601-2017. 40  Except for the differences in the Ex-Brunauer Wax, which are not due to the process of creation, but to the object’s history over the last 100 years.

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possibilities and innovations of progressive industrialization. However, his works of art, even as serial products, retain their authenticity and uniqueness, avoiding the danger considered by Benjamin in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.”41

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, my thanks go to Ronald E. Street, my co-author and the former editor of this fascinating study, who sadly passed away before the completion of the project. Ron created the 3D data sets of the Bambino ebreo casts and was already in the early stages of the comparative evaluation; he made some exciting observations and asked all the right questions. Many thanks also to Lluïsa Sarries Zgonc and Sharon Hecker, who gave me the opportunity to work on these studies. I hope Ron would be pleased with the results. I would also like to thank John Hindmarch, Ruth Tenschert and Chris Altmann from the Centre for Heritage Conservation Studies and Technologies (KDWT), University of Bamberg for their support. Bibliography Beentjes, Tonny P. C., Ronald E. Street, David Thurrowgood, and François Blanchetière. “3-D imaging as a research tool for the study of bronze sculpture.” METAL 2013: Interim Meeting of the ICOM-CC Metal Working Group, Conference Proceedings, 16–20 September 2013. Edited by Ewan Hyslop, Vanesa Gonzalez, Lore Troalen, and Lyn Wilson. Edinburgh: Historic Scotland and International Council of Museums, 2013. Bellendorf, Paul. Metallene Grabplatten aus Franken und Thüringen aus dem 15. bis 18. Jahrhundert: Eine interdisziplinäre Studie zum Denkmalbestand und seiner Gefährdung durch Umwelteinflüsse. Hamburg: Saarbrücken Südwestdeutscher Verlag für Hochschulschriften, 2011. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” In Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Edited by Hannah Arendt. Translated by Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969, 217–51. Bohnagen, Alfred. Der Stukkateur und Gipser. Munich: Callway, 1987. First published in Leipzig, 1914. 41  Walter Benjamin,“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illumina­ tions: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1969), 217–251.

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Boulton, Ann. “Altered states: Henri Matisse’s sculpture Aurora.” American Institute for Conservation of Historic & Artistic Works, Objects Specialty Group postprints, Vol. 14. Suite: 2007: 110–129. Cooper, Harry, and Sharon Hecker, eds. Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. De Roos, Hans. “The Digital Sculpture Project Applying 3D Scanning Techniques for the Morphological Comparison of Sculptures.” Computer and Information Science 9, no. 2 (2004): 1–84. Furht, Borko. Encyclopedia of Multimedia. 2nd ed. New York: Springer, 2008. Hecker, Sharon. A Moment’s Monument: Medardo Rosso and the International Origins of Modern Sculpture. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017. Hecker, Sharon. “The Afterlife of Sculptures: Posthumous Casts and the Case of Medardo Rosso (1858–1928).” Journal of Art Historiography 16 (June 2017): 1–18, https://arthistoriography.files.wordpress.com/2017/06/hecker.pdf. Lie, Henry. “Technical Features in Rosso’s Work.” In Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions. Edited by Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, 69–93. Miyazaki, Daisuke, Mawo Kamakura, Tomoaki Higo, Yasuhide Okamoto, Rei Kawakami, Takaaki Shiratori, Akifumi Ikari, Shintaro Ono, Yoshihiro Sato, Mina Oya, Masayuki Tanaka, Katsushi Ikeuchi, and Masanori Aoyagi. “3D Digital Archive of the Burghers of Calais.” 12th international conference on Interactive Technologies and Sociotech­ nical Systems, VSMM (Virtual Systems and Multimedia), October 18–20, 2006, New York: Springer, 2006: 399–407. Newman, Timothy S., and Anil K. Jain. “A System for 3D CAD-based Inspection Using Range Images.” Pattern Recognition 28, no. 10 (1995): 1555–74, DOI: 10.1016/ 0031-3203(95)00028-X. Pullen, Derek. “Gelatin Molds: Rosso’s Open Secret.” In Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions. Edited by Harry Cooper and Sharon Hecker. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003, 96–102. Rahrig, Max, Rainer Drewello, and Andrea Lazzeri. “Opto-Technical Monitoring: A Standardized Methodology to Assess the Treatment of Historical Stone Surfaces.” International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 42–2 (2018): 945–52, DOI: 10.5194/isprs-archives-XLII-2-945-2018. Rieke-Zapp, Dirk H., and Elisabeth Trinkl. “Face to Face: Close Range Inspection of Head Vases.” International Archives of Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences, 42–2/W5 (2017): 601–4, DOI: 10.5194/isprs-archives -XLII-2-W5-601-2017. Yadong, Lie, and Gu Peihua. “Automatic Localization and Comparison for Free-Form Surface Inspection.” Journal of Manufacturing Systems 25, no. 4 (2006): 251–68, DOI: 10.1016/S0278-6125(08)00007-1.

chapter 14

New Technologies, New Approaches: Following the Hand of the Artist in the Restoration of Medardo Rosso’s Wax Casts Lluïsa Sàrries Zgonc In 2016, using results from the 3D scans of casts, I restored a damaged nineteenth-century wax cast of the Bambino ebreo—known, for this project, as the “Ex-Brunauer wax” cast—and structurally reinforced it to prevent future damage (Plate 5 and fig. 14.1).1 I originally published my initial findings as

Figure 14.1

Nine casts of Medardo Rosso’s Bambino ebreo, gathered before an exhibition at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York in 2014. The damaged cast is the first one on the right Photograph courtesy the author

1  I want to thank Ron Street, who passed away in December 2016. He was an important part of this conservation, and without him it would not have been possible. We miss him.

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the proceedings from a conference held by the American Institute for Conser­ vation of Historic and Artistic Works in 2018. Over the past two years, I have reflected further on these findings, and the results of both my initial and further thinking are presented here. Having worked on other Rosso sculptures in the past, I often observe several recurring problems, such as dirt and embedded materials in the wax, or overcleaning, which can seriously compromise wax casts. After working on this cast, I have reflected further on the treatment I used, and I believe that these methods could be applied to conserve losses in other casts. However, a careful documentation of any conservation needs to be carried out. Before the restoration, scientists had taken detailed 3D scans of ten casts of this same subject from various collections in order for them, as well as art historians and conservation scientists, to learn more about how each serial sculpture varies from its peers (see Chapters 10, 11, 12, 13). In my initial consideration of the restoration, I realized that we could use these scans to determine the likely original shape and features of the Ex-Brunauer wax. I considered the question of whether or not to intervene in the sculpture at all, given the fragility of the wax and the large portions of loss. Indeed, the work was significantly damaged, and one option was to do nothing. However, the work was deemed to be at risk due to the large areas of loss and unstable connection to the base. By using 3D technology, it was possible to reconstruct the sculpture’s missing parts as faithfully to the original as possible. 1

Background

The Ex-Brunauer Bambino ebreo is made of wax over plaster. The thickness of the wax is variable across the different parts of the head; for example, in the back there are sections that are less than one millimeter thin and others that measure almost one centimeter. The Ex-Brunauer Bambino ebreo is one of the few heads that have their original wooden pedestal. We can see the same style of pedestal in a photograph of a different Bambino ebreo formerly owned by Rosso’s friend and supporter, the Dutch collector Etha Fles. The Ex-Brunauer Bambino ebreo was in very poor condition when it arrived at the Peter Freeman gallery (fig. 14.2) for Medardo Rosso: Bambino ebreo (June 5–July 25, 2014), an exhibition of nine casts of this subject. Nevertheless, by including the cast in the show, the public was able to see part of the plaster infrastructure of the piece, revealed by the areas where the wax was damaged (restoration was done after the exhibition closed in July of 2014) (figs 14.3 and 14.4).

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Figure 14.2 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo, wax over plaster, 22.9 × 15.2 × 20.3 cm. The Ex-Brunauer Cast, seen here in 2014 in its damaged condition, and in a photograph taken between 1905 and 1912 in the Brunauer family home in Chicago Photographs courtesy the author and the Brunauer family

Figures 14.3 and 14.4 Visible damage to the Ex-Brunauer Cast (front and back) Photographs courtesy the author. Photograph courtesy Nick Knight

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Figure 14.5 A detail of the damaged and badly restored nose of the Ex-Brunauer Cast Photograph courtesy the author

After studying the work, it was clear that it had suffered deformation due to exposure to incorrect temperatures. I saw that the contour of the head was not as sharp as in other Bambino ebreo casts and dirt had become embedded in the wax. When I asked where the sculpture had been displayed in the home of Mr. McArthur, I was told that it had been on a shelf behind a sun-exposed window for several years. There was also hair embedded in the surface, probably from the family’s cat. In addition to the significant losses of wax, the most disturbing damage was an earlier restoration. The wax used to restore the nose had changed color over time, becoming dark brown, so that the face looked like that of a clown (fig. 14.5). In addition, the angle of the head was wrong, which became apparent when comparing it with other, undamaged casts. Thus, the benefits of the side-byside study of the other casts when thinking about restoration became evident. The metal axis or rod on which the head was built was tilted to the front. The head had most likely fallen at some point, crushing the nose and upper lip (figs 14.6 and 14.7). The back of the head had several missing areas of wax, as did the bottom front left part of the head. Additionally, the left part of the neck was deformed and detached from the plaster. At the back of the head, the right edge of the wax was detached from the plaster. 2

Restoration

The first step was to analyze the wax, a mixture of beeswax and paraffin (see Chapter 11). The damaged parts were so extensive and important that I decided

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Figures 14.6 and 14.7 The cast on the original pedestal, and a view of the tilted metal axis Photographs courtesy the author

that the only way to approach this restoration was to make molds from the parts of the head that were damaged, based on undamaged examples of the work. Although all the Bambino ebreo casts are different, some are more similar than others. Ronald Street and I compared all the scans using the 3D scans to find the one that was closest to our damaged Ex-Brunauer Bambino ebreo. My goal in using these composites was to get as close as possible to the original condition and the artist’s own hand (figs 14.8 and 14.9). I also compared the photographs I had of all of the heads exhibited at Peter Freeman, Inc. We understood from observation that Rosso used at least two different molds to make the casts. Occasionally, he employed the back of one mold and the front of another in the same cast. After deciding which cast was the most similar, we commissioned a specialist company to make one 3D “print” in resin of that head (fig. 14.10). From this print, we made a silicon mold and from that mold we made a plaster cast. From the plaster cast we took molds of the damaged parts. These were the nose, the neck, and the back of the head (fig. 14.11). The first step in the conservation of the sculpture was to consolidate the wax on the back of the head. In some areas, the wax was very thin and flaking. The

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Figure 14.8

Ron Street, senior manager of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 3D Imaging, Molding, and Prototyping department, at work on analyzing scans of multiple casts of Bambino ebreo Photograph courtesy the author

Figure 14.9

Superimposition of the scans of two heads Photograph courtesy the author

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Figure 14.10 A 3-D print Photograph courtesy Nick Knight

Figure 14.11

The three steps to create the individual molds for each damaged area Photograph courtesy Nick Knight

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Figures 14.12 and 14.13

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Before and after the repositioning and cleaning of the metal axis, and the cleaning of the pedestal Photograph courtesy the author

consolidation was carried out with Klucel G dissolved in water. The next step was to correct the inclination of the metal rod or axis, which I did by referencing the photograph of ca. 1912 taken in the owner’s family’s Chicago home when it was still in its original condition. After positioning the head on the pedestal, it was possible to clean and consolidate the plaster and clean the inside of the wax (figs 14.12 and 14.13). The cleaning of the plaster was done with a small vacuum cleaner and brushes while consolidation of loose fragments of plaster was also done using Klucel G dissolved in water, inserted with a syringe. The cleaning of the wax on the interior was done with saliva and cotton swabs, as is the accepted optimal practice. Different levels of dirt were found on the surface of the wax. I was able to remove a thin layer of dirt with a small brush and saliva on cotton swabs. It was impossible to remove or reduce more of the dirt on the dark areas, because it was embedded in the wax and I was conscious of the risk of overcleaning the surface. This melting of wax and dirt was likely due to the sun’s heat to which the sculpture had been exposed.

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Figure 14.14 UV light shone on the sculpture’s nose area reveals the wax that was applied during an earlier restoration Photograph courtesy the author

I removed the wax that had been added to the sculpture in earlier poorly executed restorations. These areas were on the back, a small piece on the top of the left ear and the brown nose. In order not to remove any original wax, I observed the areas under UV light. The added wax fluoresced differently from the original wax (figs 14.14 and 14.15). The next step for the restoration was to restore the deformed part of the neck to the original position. Slightly warming the defined area and pushing it back with the help of the customized mold achieved this. Using this neck mold allowed the detached right edge of the back of the head to be shifted to its original position. The damaged upper lip was also repositioned by using light heat and the mold of that area. This was the only way to get a result as close to the artist’s own hand as possible (fig. 14.16). It was necessary to fill the gap in the back area where the plaster was lost to avoid future damage, like breaks in the wax. To reach the necessary volume, I filled this area with soft pillows made of Klucel G and Arbocel dissolved in water. Conservators whom I consulted reported good results with this method, and I wanted it to be easily differentiated from the original, if further work is ever done (fig. 14.17).

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Figure 14.15 The nose area after the wax of the earlier restoration had been removed Photograph courtesy the author

Figure 14.16 Re-forming the neck area using a silicon mold Photograph courtesy the author

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Figure 14.17 Applying pillows of Klucel G and Arbocel dissolved in water to fill in the areas of lost plaster Photograph courtesy the author

To make the wax for the missing areas, I mixed 50% Cosmoloid microcrystalline wax and 50% caramel-colored sticky wax. Mixing these two products resulted in a color similar to the original wax. Warming them produced slightly different shades without having to add any pigment to the wax mixture. This mix was used to reintegrate all the missing areas. To reintegrate the back, I cast small areas from the silicon mold and then applied them step by step with a hot needle and a hot mini-spatula. The decision to close this area in steps rather than using one cast for the whole area had to do with the fact that the area was too large for a single fill. Indeed, a large cast would have been more visible and difficult to integrate (fig. 14.18). The damage on the nose was also reintegrated with small quantities of different shades of this same wax mix, added little by little with a hot spatula. As I was shaping it, I frequently referenced the plaster head. In some areas, which Rosso had intentionally left wax-less, I did not replace the missing wax. In areas where the plaster was as dirty as the wax, we could tell that it had always been exposed. The nose did not need any painting to integrate it into

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Figure 14.18 Wax reintegration, midway through retouching Photograph courtesy the author

the surrounding area. The back and bottom front were retouched with the Gamblin Conservation Colors (figs 14.19 and 14.20). I hesitated to do this restoration, and several of the colleagues whom I consulted advised me not to touch it because it was too damaged and required too much intervention. My approach has been to combine necessary conservation of stabilization with thoroughly documented restoration to restore areas of disfiguring losses. It was only thanks to the scans that I could approach the Ex-Brunauer Bambino ebreo conservation. It involved researching methods and materials used by other Medardo Rosso wax conservators. I would like to thank Shirin Afra and Maria Grazia Cordua, two wonderful conservators from the Opificio delle Pietre Dure, Florence, who have been enormously generous with their experience and knowledge. Their help and motivation made this conservation possible.

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Figures 14.19 and 14.20

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Front and back views of the restored sculpture Photograph courtesy the author

Overall, two years after the fact, I am further convinced of the advantage of utilizing 3D scans as well as material composition studies to the benefit of restorations such as these in the future. Bibliography Afra, Shirin, and Filippo Tattini. “Il Grande Scheletro di Clemente Susini. Restauro e montaggio di una scultura monumentale in cera del Museo della Specola di Firenze.” OPD Restauro, no. 25 (2013): 123–30. Andreoni, Andreina, Francesca Kumar, and Laura Speranza. “I rilievi in cera di Giambologna raffiguranti gli atti di Francesci I dè Medici: restauro e studio della

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tecnica esecutiva, confronto con le matrici bronzee ed i rilievi in lamina d’orata.” OPD Restauro, no. 19 (2007): 286–302. Cooper, Harry, and Sharon Hecker, ed. Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). Cordua, Maria Grazia, Giancarlo Lanterna, Lisa Lombardi, Rosanna Moradei, Mario Scalini, and Laura Speranza. “Mirabili orrori: Cere inedite di Gaetano Zumbo dopo il restauro.” OPD Restauro, no. 21 (2009): 71–87. Gabbriellini, Chiara, Gabriella Nesi, Francesca Rossi, Raffaella Santi, and Laura Speranza. “La collezione di cere del Museo di Anatomia Patologica di Firenze: Note sulle vicende storiche, sulla tecnica esecutiva e sui restauri.” OPD Restauro, no. 21 (2009): 51–70. Hecker, Sharon. Medardo Rosso. New York: Peter Freeman, Inc., 2008. Mola, Paola, and Fabio Vittucci. Medardo Rosso: Catalogo ragionato della scultura. Milan: Skira editore, 2009. Nuzzo, Patrizia, Laura Speranza, Mattia Mercante, Filippo Tattini, and Francesca Kumar. “Ecce Puer e Bookmaker di Medardo Rosso alla Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Verona: Tomografi, Tecnica e Restauro di due opere in cera e gesso.” OPD Restauro, no. 26 (2014): 53–71.

chapter 15

Impressions: An Artist-Founder’s Impressions of Medardo Rosso, Artist-Founder Andrew Lacey

Introduction

There are few sculptors who have held my attention as powerfully as Medardo Rosso. Though we’re separated by a hundred years, he has been a constant companion throughout my career. In particular, my studio/foundry was inspired by Rosso. I must stress that I am not a ‘pilgrim’ desiring to walk in his footsteps, but a ‘fellow traveler’ excited by the possibilities found in the process of bronze casting. The hybrid of sculptor-founder is rare in the art world, probably because the act of sculpting is already difficult enough, and successfully translating that into bronze requires a whole new skill set that does not necessarily sit well with that of the artist. The artist’s desire to find expression in form through the slightest of gestures has to be balanced by the founder’s complex technical engagement, which is needed to transform the most ephemeral expression into the permanence of bronze. It would seem that it is through necessity that both Rosso and I had to become sculptor-founders, partly to survive the challenges of making a living through art, and also due to the profound sense of freedom this combination offers. To work in this dualistic fashion helps to overcome limitations, whether of money, materials, skills or time. More interestingly, being so close to the casting process means that the artist can intervene at any moment, bringing a spontaneity to the work that would not otherwise exist. This is important, especially when elements of the process go awry, as they often do. These moments that would normally be seen as negative are now serendipitous leaps in the act of making. In my own practice, I am constantly thrilled by happenstance— unexpected meanderings in the sculpture’s form that can occur between studio and foundry—and like any good magpie-artist, I will greedily incorporate them into my work. There is also only so much one’s hand can do in terms of mark-making and gesture, so the intentional or unintentional layering of elements through a mercurial casting process are of great importance.

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Another surprising parallel between Medardo Rosso and myself is our interest in classical antecedents. For Rosso, it was the marble head of The Emperor Vitellius, of which he made a version in gilded bronze, selling it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. For myself, it is the reproductions of Renaissance bronzes that, by coincidence, I was commissioned to produce for the same museum. For both of us, I feel, such works have offered a rich vocabulary of texture, patina, mystery, and magic. The poet Alice Oswald once said of my work that it “expresses time as well as form. He works with a long reach backwards into prehistory and somehow, through human effort and a certain amount of morethan-human magic, makes the ancient world contemporary.”1 This could be applied even more aptly to Rosso’s sculpture. There are, of course, points on which Rosso and I diverge. During the hundred years that separate us, the art world has been turned inside out and challenged to its core. All sense of tradition and lineage have been made redundant. The interweaving of art and process that was once so radical in Rosso’s bronzes is now commonplace. Furthermore, the industrialization of the casting process has to some extent reduced the fluency of the artist and founder. New and highly refined materials for molding and casting are so honed that the chance of any fortuitous mistakes is greatly reduced. The physical and technical qualities of these materials and processes have been refined through the influence of big industry, and where the founder was once guided by the senses, strict protocol and methodology have removed the need for such sensitivity. That said, in the relative seclusion of the small studio foundry like mine, material and magic are still at work.

Key Features in Rosso’s Sculpture

Rosso’s impressionistic modeling, coupled with his highly idiosyncratic casting methods, result in an ideal fusion of technical process and gesture—a symbiotic relationship, with each feeding back into the other. His active engagement in the act of sculpting and casting, along with the artist’s imaginative mind, is what makes his work revolutionary. The easiest way to express this is to explore some of the key features of Rosso’s bronzes.

1  Personal communication with the author.

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Surface Investment

Occasionally, the surface of a bronze appears to have a soft coating of white dust or ash (see Plate 24a and 24b). Against the darkness of the patinated metal, this makes the modeling light and ephemeral, bringing air into the sculpture. This lighter surface coating is derived from the last remnants of the plaster investment (the refractory mold in which the sculpture was cast) that was permanently damaged by the heat of the bronze (see Chapter 1). The mold is easily broken away from the freshly cast bronze and leaves only a thin layer of material that can be removed with a wire brush. When the sculpture is first broken out of its mold, the bronze will appear a soft golden color with areas of pinks and ochres formed by layers of metallic oxide, and sometimes silvergrey hues sweated out from alloys rich in tin and lead. These colors, including the overlaying dusty white investment, create a soft cloud-like effect. However, because they are so similar tonally, the surface is difficult to read, muting the gestures of the modelling. By chemically darkening the surface of the bronze through patination, the investment becomes distinct from the modeling, and the interplay of darkness and light becomes more extreme and profound. 2

The “Halo” or Flanged Surround

When making the wax intermediate model for casting into bronze, wax is either poured or brushed into a plaster or gelatin piece-mold. The layers of wax are slowly built up until the desired thickness is achieved, later becoming the thickness of the cast bronze. In any commercial foundry, the aim is to produce a wax facsimile that is an exact replica of the artist’s original model. The artist-founder, however, is free to experiment. One of the problems faced when making a wax copy is that the wax can begin to shrink away from the sides of the mold, pulling the outer edges of the wax inwards as it contracts. One way to overcome this is to paint or slush wax over the lip of the mold onto its surrounding flange, which acts as a brace against contraction. When the wax replica is pried free from the mold, it will be rimmed by a halo of excess wax with a loose delineation of the mold’s outer edge. Normally such a flange of excess material would be cut away, but Rosso seems to have appreciated its aesthetic value and how the halo imbues the sculpture with a surreal otherness (see fig. 8.6a). For me, this adaptation creates something liminal, existing between worlds, time, and space.

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Figure 15.1 Medardo Rosso, Rieuse (known as Petite rieuse), early 1890s Photograph and print by Medardo Rosso

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Open Form

In some instances, Rosso takes just one section of a sculpture—for example, the face and chest of one of his busts—either by cutting down an existing wax model or by casting wax into only one half of a mold (fig. 15.1). He thereby creates a fragmentary version of an existing sculptural model. This “edited” wax inter-model, transformed into a kind of high relief, still carries the essential narrative of the original one, but it now appears improbably thin and with no illusion of mass. Having been reduced to a shell or membrane, it seems caught in suspension and waiting to develop. Such open forms are reminiscent of modern 3D scans that generally capture only the outer topography of a work and have an equally unnerving separation from reality. 4

Variant Casts

Most artists working in bronze made more than one cast, thus maximizing the financial returns possible from one original model (see Plates section for variant casts). After Rosso’s time, these would be known as editions, consisting of a limited number of exact replicas of that original. Rosso creates variant casts based on the same model, but with visible differences, in both bronze and wax. Each variant is cast from the same mold so that they look superficially similar to each other. For instance, the face may be the same, but the reverse of the sculpture is altered either by reshaping the wax or by combining the front half with a completely new rear section of wax. Another strategy he used

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was to alter the angle or frontal presentation of each wax so that the viewer is asked to engage with the sculpture from a new perspective. The origin of these variants could be quite simply the result of subtle distortions that occur while holding wax in your warm hands. Who could resist such an opportunity for playfulness? In combining molded and free-formed wax parts, the artist would quickly have found himself in exciting new territory. 5

The Wax Model as Finished Sculpture

While there is a tradition of modelling wax for anatomical and other models as well as polychrome sculpture, it seems to have been relatively rare for wax to be employed as material for finished sculptural forms in the casting process. Rosso’s use of the material normally “lost” in the casting process is extraordinary, certainly for his time, and forms a parallel expression to the bronze casts (see Plate section, Plates 3–23 for Rosso’s wax casts). Typically, the wax variants he cast from the molds needed to be back-filled with plaster for support, either by layering it in from the back of an open form or by pouring the slurry into a hollow wax model (fig. 15.2). Choosing to produce wax variants of his models

Figure 15.2 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax cast with plaster interior, detail. Private Collection. Courtesy of Clore Wyndham Photo: Martha Ellis Leach

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also opened up the opportunity for Rosso to continue to rework the surface of the wax. This might consist in adding on new layers or altering existing features. Such endless experimentation afforded the artist a quick way to produce numerous variants of his most popular sculptures. What is most surprising here is the confidence with which he sees in wax a creative end point and not merely a material used for an intermediate stage of the casting process. There is, of course, an economic factor that all sculptors working in bronze face, namely that the production of bronze sculpture was, as it is today, very expensive. Rodin produced sculptures for both exhibition and sale in plaster in order to navigate this issue, whereas Rosso answered this same issue by creating his own studio-foundry, thus circumventing the costly art foundry route. However, even with this degree of self-empowerment, materials, time, and energy were still costly and the overall saving would possibly not be so great. Production costs were only one part of the equation, and it is worth considering that by offering sculptures in wax, Rosso was able to reach new collectors for whom bronze was out of reach. Selling work in this way was very important, both through engaging with a wider audience and balancing the books at the end of each month. In my experience, it is equally true today: an admiring audience will always collect what they can afford, especially if it is offered to them as cheaply as possible. 6

The Anatomy of the Casting Process Revealed

Rosso’s bronzes often preserve elements that are not part of the original model but are relics from the casting process and thereby reveal its anatomy. For example, core-pins—the small iron rods that connect the outer refractory mold to the refractory core in order to hold the latter in place during the pour—are sometimes left in situ rather than being removed as normal after the bronze is finished. Being of iron, they corrode easily, discoloring the surrounding area ochre/brown with rust. Contemporary art foundries would have diligently taken these pins out to avoid rust staining the patinated surface. In Rosso’s case, the staining, which may have happened over time, adds more mystery to the sculpture. Sprues and sprue stubs are also features that are usually removed after casting, either to be used as a plug, for instance when repairing core-pin holes, saved for later, or returned to the furnace for melting down (see Chapter 1). Where preserved, as in Rosso’s tomb monument for Vincenzo Brusco Onnis (1888; see fig. 8.3), the sprues protruding from the surface of the casting create a strange staccato or mechanical appearance that is discordant with the modeling.

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The numerous features discussed above exist in Rosso’s bronzes for different reasons. Some are clearly intentional, pragmatic solutions to problems, while others seem to represent moments of serendipity. And, of course, some features are linked to availability and cost of materials, limitations of the workplace or skill set of the practitioner. For example, the feature of the “flange surround” seems to be the result of an accident (see fig. 8.6a). Being forced to deal with the complications met when producing a wax inter-model allows for surprising explorations—in this case, altering the original design of the sculpture and placing it within a new context. In a similar way, seeing the fine dusting of investment on the cast surface upon breaking the cast out of the refractory mold must have revealed to Rosso how to bring a visual lightness to a material that connotes heaviness by its very nature. This effect is something that could not have been achieved by patina alone. These features, if not originally intentional, were created by a chance event that was readily exploited by the artist. Conversely, other characteristics of Rosso’s work, such as the broad compositional range of bronze alloys he used, have raised questions about his ability as a founder. It is thought that Rosso would go to markets to find pots and pans to melt down and cast. Common opinion is that the variations in the alloys resulting from such mixes would make it almost impossible to cast bronzes without leading to seriously flawed and damaged work. To some extent this is true, and we do see a great range of issues in Rosso’s bronzes that are indicative of these problems. However, using metal from such disparate sources—in other words, recycling—has been done throughout the ages, and I still practice it myself from time to time. Alloying and refining metals from disparate and unknown sources requires more attention than commercial ingots that have a known composition. There is a clear economic gain to using scrap metal, since it costs a fraction of the price of commercial ingots. The true problem faced by the founder, however, is in navigating unknown factors inherent in scrap material. For instance, too much lead or zinc, or too little tin will have a profound impact upon the physical quality of the bronze sculpture. Rosso is able to turn this negative into something of a plus by incorporating features usually associated with defects such as discoloration and pitting of the bronze surface into his new aesthetic vocabulary. This suggests his ability to be opportunistically inventive in the casting process, making the best of the material challenges imposed on him by his financial constraints. As for the frequency with which core-pins and sprues or holes are left unrepaired in the casting, we may well ask whether Rosso left these features deliberately or due to lack of skill. For me, this is a difficult question to answer. It could be argued that the removal of these features was too difficult or complicated, and that accepting them as part of the natural outcome of casting was a

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convenient solution. Conversely, the features may have excited Rosso because they extended his new aesthetic vocabulary, and he would therefore have happily adopted them. There is a case for both arguments. Lastly, it was a masterstroke to create multiple variants from one model, which speaks of great invention on Rosso’s part. Driven by the desire to explore new forms and language in his sculpture, these variants offered Rosso a near limitless scope for experimentation and most likely also a relief from the boredom of repeated editions—something from which I also suffer. There is, of course, a very clear economic value to such an approach, since the creation of so many sculptures from the same model, albeit outside of a conventional edition run, is legitimized by the nature of the variant itself. Each sculpture is both the same and, critically, different from its companions. This is a very clever solution to a difficult pragmatic problem: ‘How to make a profit?’ Ultimately, what I find most surprising and revolutionary in Rosso’s work is his perpetual invention, intervention, and adaptation of the casting process, and the way that he so brilliantly and intimately wove into it into a new sculptural aesthetic. I suspect that, frustrated by the cumbersome complexity of the process, Rosso began investigating short cuts to allow his imagination and gestures to flow unimpeded. I have a strong empathy for Rosso regarding this. I see in my own practice how a process that for centuries has been honed and refined by so many, can in fact become a mercurial, shapeshifting collaborator. This collaboration is for me a real and tangible force. Rosso seems to hold the casting process with such a light hand that it has the potential to influence, enhance and co-create his work in a profoundly compelling way. It is hard, if not impossible, to pinpoint any central axis of this collaboration between making art and casting: its concerns are fluid, materializing in many different areas simultaneously—for example, in the way the dusting of investment or the pitted raw surface of the bronze marries perfectly with the artist’s gestures captured in the modelling. In Rosso’s hands, the realization of the model does not end where the casting process starts. We can see that the gestures he made in the original clay model are extended and built upon, twisted and layered by the casting process. In my estimation, what made Rosso’s work so revolutionary in his time, and still makes it unique, is his genius fusing of a gentle and intuitive aesthetic with the mechanics of an otherworldly alchemical process.

Plates Works included in this study are marked with an asterisk (*)

Notes on Plates

The following plates are a representative sampling of casts of Bambino ebreo. The casts included here either have a documented provenance that can be traced back to the artist or compelling material evidence that is compatible with his process, or both. We hope that the criteria set for in this volume will provide a model for studying other casts at this same level of research. The appearance of further information in the future may serve to augment or modify our findings. We have intentionally decided not to include photos or descriptions of works that are currently lost or missing so as not to encourage forgeries. On the title: for the purposes of this study, we have used the same title, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy) for all casts. This is the most commonly used title today. But see Chapter 9 in this volume for a critical description of Rosso’s constant variations of the title of this work and the importance of these variations. On the date of creation of the subject: for the purposes of this study, we have used the same date range, 1892–1894, for all casts, as these are the dates given by the artist himself. But see Chapter 9 for a critical description of Rosso’s constant shifting of the dates of the work and the importance of these variations. On casting dates: no casting dates are given in these captions. Casting dates were never given in the artist’s lifetime, but have begun to appear in recent publications, auction house catalogues, museum websites and labels, as well as private collection descriptions. As yet, there is no historical or material evidence to support these dates, which seem to be given in arbitrary fashion or based on date of sale. There is not necessarily a correlation between date of sale and date of casting. On inscriptions: we have done our best to decipher inscriptions on the casts, but in some cases damage or restoration has made it difficult. On Chronology: Rosso cast Bambino ebreo throughout his career, but no chronological order can be given for these casts. We have therefore not arranged them chronologically.1 1  Technical evidence for the age of wax or casts is not available based on isotope analysis, elemental composition, organic materials identified or thermoluminescence. The best way we can date the last possible date a work was made is through provenance and dedications on

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004439931_019

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Plates

Plasters

Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, plaster, 24.8 × 19.5 × 17.8 cm. Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Black Plaster.*

the casts, or dated photographs of some casts, although even here it is not clear how dedications relate to casting dates, as a wax cast can easily be softened by heating in order to add a dedication before a sale. A chronology of casts or relationships between casts can be drawn following scanning and careful examination of specific features, but these relate mostly to a hierarchy of plaster(s) and subsequent casts in bronzes or wax, rather than evidence for the same gelatin mold used multiple times to produce a few very similar waxes. If chronology becomes critically important, all casts would need to be accounted for, and a more thorough comparison of all casts would be required.

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Plate 2



Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, plaster, 25.3 × 14.8 × 17.3 cm. Private Collection. Photograph by Henry Lie. Known in this volume as Brown Plaster.*

Waxes

Plate 3 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, gelatin silver print. Sculpture originally owned by Louis-Sylvain Noblet, now in the Musée de Troyes. Troyes, Musée de Beaux-Arts Photograph by the artist. Known in this volume as Ex-Noblet Wax.* (Studied but did not travel to Study Day)

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Plate 4

Plates

Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 41 × 36.6 × 39 cm. Originally owned by Louis-Sylvain Noblet, now in the Musée de Troyes. Work is shown in its current damaged state, in which bits of wax have been reattached to the plaster Troyes, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Inv. 9.11. Photo Carole Bell, Ville de Troyes. Known in this volume as Ex-Noblet Wax.* (Studied but did not travel to Study Day)

Plate 5 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 22.9 × 15.2 × 20.3 cm (9 × 6 × 8 inches). Originally owned by Erna Brunauer Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Ex-Brunauer Wax.*

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Plate 6 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 24.2 × 19 × 16 cm. PRIVATE COLLECTION. COURTESY OF PETER FREEMAN, INC. PHOTOGRAPH BY JERRY THOMPSON. Known in this volume as Ex-Sarfatti Wax.*

Plate 7 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, H. 23.1 cm (9 1/8 in). Originally owned by Charles Meek Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Ex-Meek Wax.*

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Plate 8 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 23.5 × 18 × 16.5 cm (9 ¼ × 7 × 6 ½ in) Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Sussex Wax.*

Plate 9 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 25.4 × 14.9 × 1.6 cm (10 × 5 7/8 × 7 5/8 in) Jane Timken Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Timken Wax.*

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Plate 10 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 23 × 17.5 × 15.5 cm. Inscribed “M. Rosso / Pawlowski”. Originally owned by Gaston de Pawlowski Collection PCC, Switzerland. Photograph by PIETER CORAY. Known in this volume as Ex-Pawlowksi Wax.*

Plate 11 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, 23 × 19.5 × 15.2 cm. Signed “M. Rosso” on right. Originally owned by Romolo Monti Collection PCC, Switzerland. Photograph by Pieter Coray. Known in this volume as Ex-Monti Wax.* (Studied but did not travel to Study Day)

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Plate 12 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 21.9 × 14.9 × 17.8 cm (8 5/8 × 5 7/8 × 7 in). Signed and dedicated “Tu/Terlol/ton Rosso” Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas. Photograph by David Heald. Known in this Study as Nasher Wax.*

Plate 13 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 22.9 × 15.9 × 19.1 cm (9 × 6 ¼ × 7 ½ in). Originally owned by Jean-Baptiste Faure. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Museum purchase funded by Mrs. R. E. Smith, 80.147

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Plate 14 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 25 × 15.5 × 17.5 cm. Signed and dedicated at the right: “M Rosso / [à] Madame Chabrier” Private collection. © MSK Ghent. Photograph by Michael Burez

Plate 15 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 23 × 16 × 12 cm. Originally owned by Umberto Giordano Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Inv.-Nr. NG 42/72 Photograph by Andres Kilger. (Studied but did not travel to Study Day)

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Plate 16 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, black wax with plaster interior, 24.5 × 15 × 17 cm. Signed and dedicated at the right “A mon ami Groult / Rosso”. Originally owned by Camille Groult Private Collection. PHOTOGRAPH Courtesy Paolo Baldacci

Plate 17 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892– 94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base, H 22.9 cm (without base) × W 11.4 cm. Dedicated and signed “M. Rosso / à Madame Cremetti”. Originally owned by the wife of Eugene Cremetti Private collection. Courtesy of Clore Wyndham. Photograph by Martha Ellis Leach

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Plate 18 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior attached to original base. 25.4 × 17 × 21 cm, including base: 35 × 17 × 21 cm. Area of base: 16 × 12 cm. Signed and dedicated on the right “M. Rosso / à Mons. Mendl”. Collection of Österreichische Galerie Belvedere. © Belvedere, Vienna. (Studied but did not travel to Study Day)

Plate 19 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior. H. 22 cm (8 5/8 in). Signed and dedicated to Marguerite Piérard (partially lost). Originally owned by Louis Piérard Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s

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Plate 20 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 23.5 × 15.5 × 21 cm. Originally owned by Etha Fles Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, Inv. 2024, 1914

Plate 21 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 22.7 × 14 × 19.7 cm (8.94 × 5.51 × 7.76 in). Inscribed and signed on shoulder: “a Madame Ravenna / l’ami Rosso”. Originally owned by Luigia (Gina) Ravenna PRIVATE COLLECTION. Courtesy Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, London-Paris-Salzburg. Photograph by Stephen White

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Plate 22 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, H 22.3cm (8 3/4 in). Inscribed “A Sara Sordi” and signed “Rosso” Private Collection. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s

Plate 23

Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, wax with plaster interior, 21 × 16 × 18 cm Private Collection, PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE OWNER

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Bronzes

Plate 24a, 24b, 24c Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, bronze, 25 × 17.5 × 16 cm. Originally owned by Karl Ernst Osthaus. Acquired in 1904 for the Museum Folkwang, Hagen, since 1922 Essen. Inv. P67 © Museum Folkwang, Essen. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photographs by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Folkwang Bronze.*

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Plate 25 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), circa 1892 (cast circa 1905–1906), bronze, H 24.2 cm Private Collection. © Courtesy Stichting Kröller-Müller Museum. Known in this volume as Kröller-Müller Bronze.*

Plate 26 Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, bronze, 23.6 × 17.8 × 15.2 cm (9 3/8 × 7 × 6 in) Private Collection. Courtesy Peter Freeman, Inc. Photograph by Jerry Thompson. Known in this volume as Cologne Bronze.*

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Plate 27

Plates

Medardo Rosso, Bambino ebreo (Jewish Boy), 1892–94, bronze, 21 × 16 × 18 cm. Signed “Rosso” on back. Originally owned by Luigi Bergamo Private Collection. PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF THE OWNER. Known in this volume as Ex-Bergamo Bronze.*

Index Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Academy of Fine Arts, Rome 154, 156 Adams, Maud 84, 84n28 Albee, Edward 229, 248 Alexis, Paul 220 Al-Hadid, Diana 209 alloys casting of 13–16, 40, 132, 319 copper 11, 13, 269n1, 273n8 Rosso’s recipes and search for 184, 199–299, 206n62, 273 See also Bambino ebreo (Rosso); brass; bronze sculpture: alloys used for America first lost-wax sculpture in 78, 78–79n20 immigration to 3, 66–67, 71, 71n10, 89–91 lost-wax casting in 66–91 American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works 304 Ames Manufacturing Company foundry 74 Amico, Giovanni Biagio 132 animaliers 24n14, 27–28, 75 Arbocel 311, 313 Arcet, Jean-Pierre-Joseph d’ 61 Art dans Tout 25, 26–27, 57 Art pour l’Art 25, 27, 56 Astorri, Enrico 191, 191n26 Aucaigne, Eugene 3, 71, 72, 85 Bronco Buster and 72, 72n12 Great God Pan and 84 as immigrant 71, 71n10, 89–90 August Griffoul & Bros. Co. foundry 68, 82 authenticity 24, 26, 59, 125, 301 authorship 17, 125, 127, 199 avant-garde 145, 158–59 Babinski, Joseph 225 Bach, Eleonore Josepha Maria Theresia Auguste 226 Bach family 226 Bachmann, Max 85 Ball, Thomas Daniel Webster 74, 74–75, 76

Balzac, Honoré de, monument to 206 Bambino ebreo (Rosso) 213, 231 serialization of 223–30 shifting dates 213–15 shifting identity of subject 217–23 shifting titles 213–14, 215–16 surface comparison of casts of 275–303 visual comparison of casts of 235–56 Bambino ebreo (Rosso), bronze casts 338–40 Cologne Bronze 243, 244, 245 Ex-Bergamo Bronze 269, 270, 270, 275, 340 Folkwang Bronze 240–43, 241, 242, 245, 338 Kröller-Müller Bronze 339 technical analysis of 269–73 Bambino ebreo (Rosso), plaster casts Black Plaster 239–40, 241, 326 Brown Plaster 239–40, 327 Bambino ebreo (Rosso), wax casts 327–37 Ex-Brunauer Wax 246–47, 328 Ex-Meek Wax 241, 248, 329 Ex-Monti Wax 331 Ex-Noblet Wax 243–46, 327 Ex-Pawlowski Wax 253–54, 253, 331 Ex-Sarfatti Wax 247–48, 247, 329 Nasher Wax 252–53, 252, 332 restoration of 303–15 Sussex Wax 215n6, 241, 248–51, 250, 330 technical analysis of 156–66 Timken Wax 251, 251, 330 Barbedienne, Ferdinand. See Barbedienne foundry Barbedienne foundry 5, 24n14, 71, 197 Barnard, George Grey Great God Pan, The 82, 83, 84 Barr, Alfred H. 208 Barr, Margaret Scolari 208, 217–18, 223 Bartlett, Paul Wayland 48, 54, 54n82, 55, 58, 66, 195n36 Bear Tamer 69, 69 Clark Tomb 72, 74, 75, 84 Columbus 84

342 Bartlett, Paul Wayland (cont.) Michelangelo 84 Barye, Antoine-Louis 23n13, 27, 28n20, 61, 61n95, 75 Surtout du Duc d’Orléans 61 Basile, Gaetano 132, 138 Basile foundry 132–34, 133 Bastianelli, Giovanni Battista 94 Baudelaire, Charles 223, 223n25 beeswax 53, 53n59, 62n96, 257 costliness of 20 Rosso’s purported use of 1, 259–65, 306 Begas, Reinhold Neptune Fountain 101, 101, 103 Bergamo, Luigi 216n10, 228n42, 229 Berlin 93–98, 137n18 See also Gladenbeck foundry; Noack foundry; Schäffer & Walcker; Siemering, Rudolf; Toberentz, Robert Bernard, Joseph 24n14, 25n15, 31 Bertelli, Riccardo 3, 77–80, 78, 79, 83n25, 87, 88–89n31, 89 as immigrant 77, 89–91 process 88–89 Bewer, Francesca 6–7, 237 Bianchi 193, 193–94n32 bijutsu 142–43 bijutsu chūzō 54, 150–51 Bingen, Pierre 29, 32, 33–34, 40, 54–56, 73, 195n36 Bartlett and 54, 54n82 Carriès and 54, 56–57 Dalou and 22, 33, 54 Gorham foundry and 34n39, 54, 54n82 Ringel and 49, 49n72 Rodin and 49, 49n72, 57 Vasselot and 44 Black Plaster. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): plaster casts Blücher, Gebhard Leberecht von, monument to 97 Boccioni, Umberto 207, 207n66 Bode, Wilhelm von 198 Bolesław I Chobry, monument to 105–6 Bonnard, Pierre A. 70–71 Borghi, Mion 194n33, 217 Bourdelle, Antoine 31, 157, 161, 173 Brancusi, Constantin 25n15, 222

Index brass 13, 42n54, 53n80, 56, 273 Brenet, Nicolas 61 Brenson, Michael 230 bronze casting Berlin as center for 96 France as leader of 2–3, 18 industrialization of 4, 23–24, 43–44, 111, 178–79, 318 plaster casts’ importance for 4, 115–16, 119–20 bronze sculpture alloys used for 13–16, 200, 323 fabricants 23n13, 24n14, 28, 30 monuments 22, 67, 96, 153–54 statuettes 120, 126 bronziers 23, 23n13 Brown, Henry Kirke 66, 74 Brown, Marilyn R. 198 Brown Plaster. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): plaster casts Brucciani, Domenico 116 Brunauer, Erna 228, 246, 328 Brussels. See Compagnie des bronzes Bugatti, Carlo 32, 33n35 Bugatti, Rembrandt 31, 33n35, 70, 257 Buffalo 70 Caïn, Auguste 28 Cameroni, Felice 195, 197, 218, 219 Canova, Antonio 96 Cantoni, Enrico 4, 115–30 Dalou and 115, 121–27 Legros’s portrait of 121, 124 Meštrović and 4, 115, 127–28 New Sculpture and 4, 115, 120–21, 127, 128 as teacher 4, 115, 116 Victoria and Albert Museum and 4, 115, 116–18, 122, 125–27, 128 Cappelletti, Giovanni Vincenzo 135 Carabelli, Carlo 194 Caramel, Luciano 199, 214, 218, 224n29 Carl-Nielsen, Anne Marie 257, 265 Carpeaux, Jean-Baptiste 23n13, 28, 46–47, 47n64 Carriès, Jean 46, 54, 56–57, 58 ceramics 26, 57, 59 carving

343

Index direct 24–25n15, 59 wood 148, 149, 149n19, 156n37 casts and casting bijutsu chūzō 150–51, 154 direct 11, 51, 52 “first cast” 186 indirect 12, 179 mane 154–55 from nature 107–8 one-piece 68, 81–84, 83, 106, 116, 120 posthumous 58, 125–26, 127, 246–47, 266, 273 sexualization of 205 variant 320–24 See also bronze casting; plaster casts; sand casting Cazzamini Mussi, Francesco 226, 226n37 Cellini, Benvenuto 45–46, 48, 56, 205 autobiography 97–98 Perseus 98 “system of” 193 ceramics 26, 41, 57, 59 Chabrier, Emmanuel 226 Chabrier, Marie Alice Dejean 226, 226n34, 333 Charles III (Naples), monument to 96 Charpentier, Alexandre 26, 31, 59 chasing 4, 16, 75, 97 Chéramy, Paul-Arthur 224, 224n27 chōkoku 142–43, 148–50 cire perdue. See lost-wax casting ciseleurs 16, 75–76 Cologne Bronze. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso), bronzes Compagnie des bronzes 34, 34n39, 48, 48n67 Ringel and 49, 49n73, 51, 51–53n78, 51n77, 53 Cooper, Harry 1, 237, 297 copper. See alloys core 11–13 Bertelli process and 88 Bingen process and 73 Lebourg process and 41–43, 42n54, 56 pins 12–13, 16, 75, 182, 283, 322, 323 Courbet, Gustave 18 craft, art and/as 26, 44n58, 142–43, 156, 166 Cragg, Tony 208

Cremetti, Eugene 227, 334 Curtis, Penelope 185, 187 Dalou, Jules 18, 33, 34, 54 Alphonse Legros 122, 124 Lady Carlisle statuette 125–27 Monument au Triomphe de la République 22–23, 22n8 New Sculpture and 115 Dampt, Jean 26, 57 Degas, Edgar 8, 30n27, 175, 185, 257, 265, 272–73 ballerinas 175, 185, 186, 257 Henri Rouart in Front of his Factory 197–98 Little Dancer Aged Fourteen 49 DeMuth, Rebecca 197–98 Desbois, Jules 31 Destables, Jules 46, 57–58 Donatello 198–99, 199n45 Doria, Armand 224, 224n27 Doyle, Alexander 71 dōzō 154 Dreyfus Affair 218, 223 Duchamp, Marcel 199 Eberlein, Gustav 110 École des Beaux-Arts 57n90, 154 editions control over or limiting of 26, 32n34 rights to 24n14 Rosso’s sculpture and/as 173, 176, 186, 197, 320, 324 unlimited 126 Eissler, Gottfried 199, 199n47, 228 Eissler, Hermann 199, 228 Ex-Bergamo Bronze. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): bronze casts Ex-Brunauer Wax. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): wax casts Exhibition of Italian Contemporary Sculpture (Tokyo, 1961) 158–63 Exhibition of Modern Italian Art (New York, 1926) 229–30 Ex-Meek Wax. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): wax casts Ex-Monti Wax. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): wax casts

344

Index

Falguière, Alexandre 46, 48, 154 Faure, Jean-Baptiste 225–26, 332 fettling 16 figurinai 4, 115 Fles, Etha 200, 203, 205, 228–29, 304, 336 Florio, Vincenzo 133 Folkwang Bronze. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): bronze casts Fonderia Alessandro Nelli. See Nelli foundry Fonderia Basile. See Basile foundry Fonderia Giovanni Strada. See Strada foundry Fonderia Oretea. See Oretea foundry Fonderie Hébrard. See Hébrard foundry Fonderie Thinot 60 Fontana, Lucio 205 Fontanesi, Antonio 135 founders and foundries. See sculptors: as founders; specific founders and foundries France Ancien Régime 19, 20, 23, 29, 44, 56 Bourbon restoration 20n3 Franco-Prussian War 18, 48 immigrants from 66, 71, 89, 91 immigrants to 2 as leader in bronze casting 2–3, 18 Paris Commune 18–19, 22, 25 revival of lost-wax casting in 19–23 Revolution of 1789 18, 20n3, 21, 22, 132 Third Republic 18, 21, 27, 173 Fremiet, Emmanuel 23n13, 28 French, Daniel Chester 75 Friebel, Ludwig 97 Friedrich II, monument to 99 Friedrich Wilhelm I, monument to 100, 100

Gargani, Eugene 77 Garibaldi, Giuseppe, monument to 138, 139, 193 Gaul, August 93 gelatin molds 12–13, 60–62, 60, 62n98, 102, 319 Bertelli process and 88–89 Gonon process and 61 Rosso and 1, 175, 188, 195, 207, 237–38, 275 See also Bambino ebreo (Rosso) Gemito, Vincenzo 28n19, 48n67, 55, 57 Germany revival of lost-wax casting in 3–4, 93–111 sand casting in 4, 97–98, 104, 105 Giacometti, Alberto 222, 230 Gilbert, Alfred 29n22, 34, 120–21, 128 Gilcrease Museum 67, 76, 81, 82n24, 85, 87 Giordano, Umberto 226, 226n37, 333 Gladenbeck, Hermann 98–99, 102, 110 Gladenbeck family 99 Gladenbeck foundry 4, 93n1, 98–100, 103, 105, 108 process 101–2 “shop bronzes” 110n49 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 97–98 Goncourt Brothers 185 Gonon, Eugène 28nn20–21, 29–30, 30n25, 32, 34 Compagnie des bronzes and 34n39 financial hardship 29, 40 treatise 34, 35, 36, 40n47, 56 Gonon, Honoré 20–21, 20n5, 29–30, 44 gelatin mold and 61 J-J. Rousseau 30n25 sand casting and 20, 42, 42n55 Gorham foundry 34, 34n39, 54, 54n82, 78–79n20 Graul, Richard 224, 224–25n29 Great Britain 3, 4, 34, 115 See also Cantoni, Enrico Groult, Camille 224, 225n29, 334 Gruet, Charles 29 Gruet, Edmond 29 Guilbert, Yvette 220 Gutherz, Harald 228

Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome  229, 284

Harvard Study 1–2, 1n3, 195, 237–39, 243, 249, 253, 256, 259–60

Ex-Noblet Wax. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): wax casts Ex-Pawlowski Wax. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): wax casts Exposition Universelle, Paris of 1878 49 of 1889 41n49, 49, 197, 216n7 of 1900 82, 206, 206n62 Ex-Sarfatti Wax. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): wax casts

Index Hastings, W. Granville 78n20 Hébrard, Adrien-Aurélien 29, 31, 59 Hébrard foundry 29–33, 32n34, 70, 257 Bernard and 24n14, 31 Bugatti and 31, 70, 70 dewaxing kiln 38 Hecker, Sharon 195, 237, 238–39, 297 Henri, Edouard 70–71 Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company 3, 67, 70–76, 72, 84–85, 84n28, 89 Bartlett and 72, 74, 75, 84 Great God Pan 82, 83, 84 Remington and 72, 72n12, 73, 75–77, 76, 81, 84, 85 Saint-Gaudens and 75, 89n33 Hijikata, Teiichi 159 Hildebrand, Adolf von 174 Hilgers, Karl Friedrich Wilhelm I 100, 100 Hoffman, Malvina 83n25, 89n33 Hopfgarten family 97 Horowitz, Leopold Full Length Portrait of Baron Oscar Ruben von Rothschild 219, 220, 222 Houdon, Jean-Antoine 27 Hubert, Hippolyte 78–79n20 Ibels, André L’Arantelle 182, 205 image sellers 4, 115 Imaizumi, Atsuo 159 immigrants and immigration 2, 32, 34, 66–67, 71, 71n10, 89–91, 190 Impressionism 173, 174, 206, 207, 216, 224, 225, 226 investment molds 13, 42n54, 51, 87, 182, 227, 322 materials used for 55–56 residues on Rosso’s sculptures 182, 227, 242, 270, 271, 291, 295, 319, 323, 324 Italy immigrants from 2, 3, 32, 34, 66, 77, 89–91, 190 lost-wax casting in 2, 3, 29, 66, 93, 96, 97, 99, 105, 155–56 Rosso’s beginnings in and later return to  178, 181, 195–97, 207, 226, 228

345 study trips to 4, 21, 21n6, 28, 45–46, 57, 89–91, 99 Izzo, Francesca Caterina 7 Jacquet, François-Henri 46, 46–47n63, 48 Japan art and/as craft 142–43, 156, 166 export of Italian lost-wax casting to 2–5, 21n5, 44–45, 44n58, 45n59, 142, 145–66 metal-craft movement 156, 166 monuments’ proliferation in 151–55 Rodinisme 144–45, 152, 157, 161 See also Ragusa, Vincenzo Kahnweiler, Daniel-Henry 32, 32n33 Kaiser Friedrich Museum 198 Kant, Immanuel, monument to 99 Keyzer, Frances 218, 218n19 Kiyohara, O’Tama 136, 136–37, 137n18, 138nn19–20 Portrait of Vincenzo Ragusa 135 Klimsch, Fritz 93 Klucel G 310–11, 313 Kolbe, Georg 93, 96 Mutter und Kind 93, 94 Königliche Erzgießerei foundry 4, 96, 97, 98 Kröller-Müller Bronze See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): bronze casts Kubale, Oskar 105 Kurokawa, Hirotake 164 Lamberty, Yvan 228 Landi, Daniele 117 Lantéri, Édouard 121–23 Lauchhammer foundry 4, 93n1, 97, 104–6, 109 brochure 106, 107, 109 Laurens, Henri 32, 32n33 Laurent-Daragon, Charles 46–48, 47, 57–58 lead 13, 200, 269n1, 271–73, 273n8, 319, 323 Lebon, Elisabeth 6–7 Lebourg, Charles 41, 57 financial hardship 40, 44, 44n57 Fontaines Wallace 44 process 41–44, 41n49, 42, 42n54, 43, 56 Lechesne, Auguste 27–28

346 Legros, Alphonse 115, 121–23, 124 portrait of Cantoni 121, 124 Leighton, Frederic 4, 115, 127 Athlete Wrestling with a Python 127 Lequine, François 97–98 Lie, Henry 7, 237, 282 Limet, Jean 56–57 Lista, Giovanni 194n33, 218 Lodi, Francesco 195 lost-wax casting 11–17 abandonment of 2, 19–20, 20n5 advantages of 26–27, 85 disadvantages of 19–20, 98, 102 French technique 55–56, 88 Italian technique 4, 55–56, 88, 145–50, 152, 155–66 royal associations of 20–22, 22n9, 67 “secrets” of 5, 20–21, 34, 34n39, 48, 53n80, 56, 182, 199 See also core; gelatin molds; sprues; specific countries and founders Lys, Georges de L’Arantelle 182, 205 manganese 16 Manzu Giacomo 158, 162 Marini, Marino 158, 159–61, 163 Cavaliere 159–60, 160 Marquet de Vasselot, Anatole 41, 44–45, 44n58, 45n59, 46, 49, 57, 57n90 Ung Ymagier du Roy 44, 45 Martini, Arturo 158, 208 Matisse, Henri 159, 277 Mauclair, Camille 182 Mazzantini 193, 193–94n32, 194n33 Meek, Charles 229, 248, 329 Megens, Luc 7 Mène, Pierre-Jules 23n13, 28 Mercure de France 182, 215–16 Meštrović, Ivan 4, 115, 127–28 metallic oxide 319 Meunier, Constantin 25–26, 59 Mieczysław I, monument to 105–6 Milan. See Strada foundry; Valsuani, Claude Mola, Paola 184, 187, 196, 199, 214, 219 molds and molding 11, 12, 307, 309, 311 ceramic shell 13

Index flexible 12, 88 investment 42n54, 51, 322 molding compound 12, 102, 107–9 mother 12, 187, 237, 289 piece 3, 12, 17, 61, 67, 89, 155, 237, 249, 254, 257 plaster 12, 46n63, 61n95, 120, 238 refractory 11, 13, 16 silicon 307, 312 waste 12 See also gelatin molds; investment molds Mond, Alfred William 221 Monet, Claude 185–86 Monti, Romolo 229, 331 monuments equestrian 22n9, 138 funerary 194, 195, 322 Lauchhammer’s expertise in 105–6 proliferation of, in Europe 4, 96, 139, 151, 173, 181 proliferation of, in Japan 151–55 royal 20, 22n9, 67 See also specific monuments Moretti, Giuseppe 77–78, 80 Mukai, Ryōkichi 159 Mulas, Ugo 205 multiples 5, 17, 185, 187, 189 Rosso and 178, 196, 198, 223, 230 Munch, Edvard 174, 186 Munich See Königliche Erzgießerei foundry Mussolini, Benito 208, 229, 247 Nainer 46, 46n61 Nakamura, Yoshitaka 164–65 Revival of Quiet Forest 164 Namuth, Hans 205 Naples 21n7, 96, 98, 120, 137n18, 139 See also Gemito, Vincenzo Napoleon I 20, 20n3, 67, 96 Napoleon III 18 Nasher Wax. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): wax casts Nationgalerie, Berlin 94, 106 Nelli foundry 4, 29n22, 36, 99, 138, 140 Nevin, Austin 6–7 New Sculpture 4, 115, 120–21, 127, 128

Index New York. See Henry-Bonnard Bronze Company; Roman Bronze Works Nichols, George Ward 75 Niehaus, C. H. Admiral Farragut 78–79, 78–79n20, 78, 79, 79n21, 83, 89 Nisini foundry 108, 108–9n46 Noack, Hermann 93, 93n1 Noack foundry 93 Noblet, Louis-Sylvain 220, 225, 225nn30– 30, 244, 327, 328 non-finito 175 Okazaki, Sessei 156n37 Ōkuma, Ujihiro 147, 154 Masujirō Ōmura 151–56, 152, 156n37, 161 Onnis, Vincenzo Brusco, monument to 183, 322 Opificio delle Pietre Dure 314 Oretea foundry 132–33, 133n10 originality 17, 26, 186, 187 Osthaus, Karl 227, 227n38, 240, 338 Oswald, Alice 318 Paernio, Demetrio 191, 191n26 Palazzolo, Albino 33, 33n35, 175 Palermo 131–34 See also Ragusa, Vincenzo paraffin 11, 258, 259–63, 265, 306 Paris artistic training in 54, 66, 96 artists’ control over creative vision in  70, 75 founders and foundries 67–68, 70, 71, 73–75, 179–80 Italian founders in 21, 28–29n22 Rosso’s foundry and studio in 5, 39, 182 Rosso’s move to 2, 19, 22, 54, 59, 178–79, 181, 193 sand casting in 66, 67–70, 74, 76, 179–80 serial sculpture in 67 See also Barbedienne foundry; Bingen, Pierre; Siot-Decauville Perzinka foundry Parlanti, Alessandro 29n22, 34, 36, 115 Parlanti, Ercole 29n22, 34, 36 treatise 34, 36–37, 37, 40, 51 patina and patination 16

347 Bartlett and 54 Carriès and 57 Hébrard foundry and 30–31 Lebourg process and 41n54, 43 Limet and 56–57 lost-wax casting and 27, 111 Parlanti on 36, 40 Rosso and 6, 177, 182, 184, 189, 199–200, 206, 206n62 Toberentz and 104 Pawlowski, Gaston de 253, 331 Penone, Giuseppe 208 Peter Freeman, Inc., study day at 6–7, 235–37, 244, 303, 304, 307, 327, 328, 331, 333, 335 Pezieux, Jean-Alexandre 45–46, 57 photography 174–75 Piazza, Giovanni 191, 191n25 Picasso, Pablo 159, 222 Piérard, Louis 228, 335 Piérard, Marguerite 228, 335 pigment 117, 258, 265, 313 plaster casts bronze casting and 4, 22, 28n22, 73, 115, 119–20, 151–52, 238 gelatin mold and 12–13, 61, 62n97 Rosso’s creation and use of 179, 186, 197, 207, 238 See also Bambino ebreo (Rosso): plaster casts; Cantoni, Enrico plaster models. See plaster casts Pollock, Jackson 159, 205 Pompon, François 31 Poussin, Nicolas 174–75 Prideaux, Sue 186 Pullen, Derek 1, 195, 237–38, 259–60, 282 pXRF (portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry) 269–70, 271n6, 273 Pyrolysis-Gas Chromatography-Mass Spectrometry 236, 256 Ragusa, Vincenzo 4–5, 134–40, 135, 146–50 chimney 134–35, 135n14 collection and museum 136–38, 136, 136n15, 138n19 Giuseppe Garibaldi 138, 139, 193 Portrait Bust of a Japanese Woman 148, 149

348 Ragusa, Vincenzo (cont.) as teacher 5, 134–38, 138n20, 146–56 Rambaud, Yveling 199 Rauch, Christian Daniel 4, 96–97, 99, 111 Friedrich II 99 Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher 97 Immanuel Kant 99 Mieczysław I and Bolesław I Chobry 105–6 Remington, Frederic 85, 88 Bronco Buster 72, 73, 75, 77, 83 Norther 80, 82, 85 Scalp, The 81–82 Wicked Pony 76 Rewald, John 173 Rictus, Jehan 182, 203, 204–5, 253 Rietschel, Ernst 97 Righetti, Luigi 96, 98 Ringel d’Illzach, Jean-Désiré 46, 48–55, 57n90, 58 monumental vase 49–51, 49n73, 50, 51n75, 51n78, 53 Négresse 49 Perversité 49 process 49–53, 51nn74–77, 53nn79–80 Rodin and 49, 49n72, 51n78 Rosso and 53, 59 Rodin, Auguste 105, 257, 265, 272–73 Bingen and 49, 49n72, 57 Burghers of Calais, The 277 Hébrard foundry and 30, 31 Monument to Honoré Balzac 206 plasters 175, 176, 186, 186n16 pool of workers 31, 46, 56–57 Ringel and 49, 49n72, 51n78 Rodinisme 144–45, 152, 157, 161 Rosso and 58, 59, 173, 175–76, 177, 186, 205–6, 322 Thinker, The 277 Roman Bronze Works 3, 67, 77–84 investment room 87 move to Brooklyn 77, 81, 84 Remington and 80–82, 85–87 Saint-Gaudens and 78–80, 83n25, 88–89n31, 89n33 standard 90 wax room 88

Index Rome artistic training in 28, 28n22, 96, 99, 115, 154, 156 foundries in 97, 164 See also Nisini foundry; Nelli foundry Rose+Croix 45n59, 46 Rosenberg, Léonce 32, 32n33 Rosso, Francesco 217, 227, 229 Rosso, Medardo 39, 196, 201, 203 casting and patination recipes 182, 199–200, 206n62, 264 casting parties 5, 182, 204–5 deskilling 184, 200 myth and persona of 177–78, 182, 205, 208 photographic self-portraits 200–203, 201, 202, 203 reception 181–82, 195, 199–200, 206 Ringel and 53, 59 Rodin and 58, 59, 173, 175–76, 177, 186, 205–6, 322 as sculptor-founder 5–6, 18, 36–37, 37n44, 39, 40n45, 54, 58–60, 58n91, 177–209, 198 serial sculpture and 1, 6, 8, 177–78, 181, 186–87, 195–96, 197, 198, 208, 237–38 shifting dates and titles 186–87, 213–16 at the Strada foundry 189–95, 193–94n32 Rosso, Medardo, works Aetas aurea 174, 220 Bambino Malato 226n37, 284 Bookmaker 12, 14, 284, 297 Carne altrui 174, 184 Dopo una scappata 196 Ecce puer 178, 180, 221, 239 El Locch 194n32, 196 Emperor Vitellius 198, 318 Enfant au sein 216, 220–21 Enfant malade 187, 188, 214n3 Fine (La Ruffiana) 183 Funerary Monument to Vincenzo Brusco Onnis 183, 322 Grand rieuse 294 Henri Rouart 202 Impression de Boulevard 178, 179 Madame Noblet 202 Madame X 221 Malato all’ospedale 174

Index Petite rieuse 320 See also Bambino ebreo (Rosso) Rothschild, Oscar Ruben 218–22, 219n23, 220, 222 Rothschild family 217–22, 222 Rouart, Eugène 207 Rouart, Henri 197, 207, 220, 224 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, monument to 30n25 Russell, Charles M. Medicine Whip 68, 68, 82, 82n24 Rutelli, Mario 138, 138n21 Sabbatini, Leopoldo 190 Sainte-Croix, Camille de 182, 215–16 Saint-Gaudens, Augustus 75, 78, 79, 80 Lincoln 89n33 Parnell 83n25, 88–89n31, 89n22 Puritan, The 80 Salon des Indépendants 197 sand casting 16–17 artists’ diminished control in 28, 75 chasing required in 4, 97 complaints about 81–82, 84, 97, 99 decline of 3, 26–27, 32, 67–70, 75–76, 84–85, 89, 110 foundries 20, 21n6, 27n19, 29, 34n39, 56, 76 in Germany 4, 97–98, 104, 105 Gonon and 20, 20n5, 42, 42n55 Henry-Bonnard and 3, 72, 73, 75, 76, 81 improvements in 16–17, 19, 66, 67, 111 in Paris 66, 67–70, 74, 76, 179–80 rise of 2–3, 4, 19–20, 67–69 serial sculpture and 3, 67 See also Compagnie des bronzes Sani, Raffaello 116–17 Santillane 177, 177n1 Sarfatti, Margherita 229, 247 Sàrries Zgonc, Lluïsa 7, 303–15 Satō, Chūryō 157–58, 159 Schadow, Johann Gottfried 96, 97, 111 Schäffer & Walcker foundry 110 Schiavo, Salvatore 89 Schwanthaler, Ludwig Bavaria 98 sculptors as founders 3, 27–33, 27n19, 40–58

349 as foundry clients 3, 30–32, 32n34, 33 lost-wax casting adopted by 3, 26–28, 33–34 role of 23–27 sand casting as beyond reach of 3, 19, 28 See also Rosso, Medardo: as sculptor-founder Segi, Shin’ichi 159, 161 serial sculpture 8, 73–75, 185–87 emergence of 67 lost-wax casting of 74, 80 popularity of 3, 5, 178 Remington and 75 Rosso and 1, 6, 8, 177–78, 181, 186–87, 195–96, 197, 198, 208, 237–38 sand casting of 3, 67 See also Bambino ebreo (Rosso): serialization of Sforni, Gustavo 228 Shapiro, Michael 71–72, 80, 81 Shrady, H. M. Ulysses S. Grant Memorial 88 Sicily 131–33, 138–39 Siemering, Rudolf 106–7 St. Gertrude 107, 108 Washington Monument 106, 107 Siot-Decauville Perzinka foundry 69, 69 Skinner, Arthur Banks 125–26 Soby, James T. 208 Soffici, Ardengo 207, 216, 224n28, 248 Sotodate, Kazuko 166 South Kensington Museum. See Victoria and Albert Museum sprues 13, 16, 162, 182, 183, 322, 323 stearin 260–65 Steiner, Rudolph 228 Steinlen, Théophile Alexandre 177, 177n1 Stevens, Alfred 4, 120 Stiglmaier, Johann Baptist 96, 98 Strada, Giovanni 189–90 Strada foundry 32, 33n35, 190–93 Rosso and 189–95, 193–94n32 Street, Ronald 7, 275n4, 277, 303, 307, 308 Study Day. See Peter Freeman, Inc. surmoulage 17 Susse foundry 24n14, 38 Sussex Wax. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): wax casts

350 Sutto, Paolo 206, 206n62 Tadoline, Giulio 154 Takamura, Kōtarō 144–45 Hand 144, 145 Takiguchi, Shūzō 159, 161–62, 166 Talbot, Henry Fox Patroclus 174 Tanaka, Shūji 153 Technical Art School, Tokyo 146–48, 150, 153 Thiebaut foundry 22, 29, 41n53, 43, 55–56 3D scans 236, 239, 275n4, 295, 303–4, 307, 315, 320 Timken Wax. See Bambino ebreo (Rosso): wax casts tin 13, 16, 271, 272 Toberentz, Robert 103–5 fountain 104, 104 Friedrich Wilhelm anniversary plaque 104–5 Tocchi, Pietro 193 Tokyo Biennale 158 Tokyo School of Art 4, 150, 150n23, 153, 156, 156n37 Tuaillon, Louis 93–95, 96 Amazon on Horseback 93–94 Conqueror, The 94–95, 95, 95n6 turpentine 11, 253–54, 258, 260–62, 263, 265 Ugo, Antonio 131, 134, 138 UV light 311, 311 Valsuani, Claude 24n14, 32, 32n34, 33n36

Index Vauxcelles, Louis 38, 182, 182n6 Venice Biennale 229 Victoria and Albert Museum 137n18, 198, 318 Cantoni and 4, 115, 116–18, 122, 125–27, 128 Vittucci, Fabio 184, 196, 199, 214, 219 Vonnoh, Bessie Potter 84 Wagener, Ernst Hannovera 106 Ward, J. Q. A. 75 Washington, George, monument to 106, 107 Western-mode sculpture. See yōfū chōkoku Ximenes, Ettore Portrait of O’Tama Kioara 137 XRF (X-ray fluorescence spectrometry). See pXRF Yanagihara, Yoshitatsu 159 yōfū chōkoku 147, 149, 149n19, 150, 155, 157, 159 Ōmura statue and 151–53, 155 Yoshida, Asako 151 Zanzi, Emilio 217, 217nn11–12, 219 Zappolla, John 77 zinc 13, 16, 271, 272 Zobeltitz, Hanns von 101–2 Zola, Emile 185, 218 Zweig, Stephan 228