Plaster Casts: Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present 9783110216875, 9783110208566

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Plaster Casts

Transformationen der Antike

Herausgegeben von Hartmut Böhme, Horst Bredekamp, Johannes Helmrath, Christoph Markschies, Ernst Osterkamp, Dominik Perler, Ulrich Schmitzer

Wissenschaftlicher Beirat: Frank Fehrenbach, Niklaus Largier, Martin Mulsow, Wolfgang Proß, Ernst A. Schmidt, Jürgen Paul Schwindt

Band 18

De Gruyter

Plaster Casts Making, Collecting and Displaying from Classical Antiquity to the Present

Edited by

Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand

De Gruyter

The publication of this volume was made possible through the generous support of the Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds, the Mortimer and Teresa Sackler Fund of Worcester College, Oxford, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (using funds provided to the Collaborative Research Centre 644 „Transformations of Antiquity“), the Elizabeth Cayzer Charitable Trust, and the following benefactors and institutions of the University of Oxford: the Craven Committee, the Fell Fund, the Classics Faculty and the History Faculty.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Plaster casts : making, collecting, and displaying from classical antiquity to the present / edited by Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand. p. cm. -- (Transformationen der Antike, ISSN 1864-5208 ; Bd. 18) Papers originating from an international conference of the same name, held at Oxford University, Sept. 23-27, 2007. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-3-11-020856-6 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Antiquities--Collection and preservation--Congresses. 2. Cultural property--Protection--Congresses. 3. Plaster casts--Congresses. 4. Sculpture, Ancient--Conservation and restoration--Congresses. 5. Art, Ancient--Conservation and restoration--Congresses. 6. Archaeology-Methodology--Congresses. I. Frederiksen, Rune. II. Marchand, Eckart. CC135.P595 2010 363.6'9--dc22 2010010470

ISBN 978-3-11-020856-6 e-ISBN 978-3-11-021687-5 ISSN 1864-5208 Bibliographic Information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de

© Copyright 2010 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin / New York. Cover Design: Martin Zech, Bremen Logo „Transformation der Antike“: Karsten Asshauer – SEQUENZ Data conversion and typesetting: Dr. Rainer Ostermann, München Printing: Hubert & Co. GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ∞ Printed on acid-free paper Printed in Germany www.degruyter.com

Table of Contents Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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RUNE FREDERIKSEN AND ECKART MARCHAND Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Antiquity RUNE FREDERIKSEN Plaster Casts in Antiquity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

13

CHRISTA LANDWEHR The Baiae Casts and the Uniqueness of Roman Copies . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

35

The Renaissance ECKART MARCHAND Plaster and Plaster Casts in Renaissance Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

49

WALTER CUPPERI “Giving away the moulds will cause no damage to his Majesty’s casts” – New Documents on the Vienna Jüngling and the Sixteenth-Century Dissemination of Casts after the Antique in the Holy Roman Empire . . . . .

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MARTIN BIDDLE “Makinge of moldes for the walles” – The Stuccoes of Nonsuch: materials, methods and origins . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Making and Distribution from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century CHARLOTTE SCHREITER “Moulded from the best originals of Rome” – Eighteenth-Century Production and Trade of Plaster Casts after Antique Sculpture in Germany . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 JAN ZAHLE Laocoön in Scandinavia – Uses and Workshops 1587 onwards . . . . . . . . 143

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PETER MALONE How the Smiths Made a Living . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163

Artists’ Academies TOMAS MACSOTAY Plaster Casts and Memory Technique: Nicolas Vleughels’ display of cast collections after the antique in the French Academy in Rome (1725–1793) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181 CLAUDIA SEDLARZ Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection from 1786 until 1815: acquisition, use and interpretation . . . . 197 ELIZABETH FUENTES ROJAS Art and Pedagogy in the Plaster Cast Collection of the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229

Artists’ Workshops LÉON E. LOCK Picturing the Use, Collecting and Display of Plaster Casts in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Artists’ Studios in Antwerp and Brussels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 JOHANNES MYSSOK Modern Sculpture in the Making: Antonio Canova and plaster casts . . . . 269 MATTHEW GREG SULLIVAN Chantrey and the Original Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 289 JEAN-FRANÇOIS CORPATAUX Live Body Moulding and Maternal Devotion in Marcello’s Studio . . . . . 307 SHARON HECKER Shattering the Mould: Medardo Rosso and the poetics of plaster . . . . . . . 319 MARIA ELENA VERSARI “Impressionism Solidified” – Umberto Boccioni’s Works in Plaster and the Definition of Modernity in Sculpture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 SUE MALVERN Outside In: the after-life of the plaster cast in contemporary culture. . . . . 351

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JANE MCADAM FREUD Inside Out: a process for production . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 359

Conservation DANIELA ARNOLD, TORSTEN ARNOLD AND ELISABETH RÜBER-SCHÜTTE The Plaster Decoration of the Choir Screens in the Church of Our Lady in Halberstadt: a current conservation project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 369 ÁNGELES SOLÍS PARRA, JUDIT GASCA MIRAMÓN, SILVIA VIANA SÁNCHEZ AND JOSÉ MARÍA LUZÓN NOGUÉ The Restoration of Two Plaster Casts Acquired by Velázquez in the Seventeenth Century: the Hercules and Flora Farnese . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 385 MARIA KLIAFA AND MICHAEL DOULGERIDIS The Contribution of Plaster Sculptures and Casts to Successful Conservation Interventions at the National Gallery of Greece, Athens . . . 403

Architectural Models and Collections after Gems VALENTIN KOCKEL Plaster Models and Plaster Casts of Classical Architecture and its Decoration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 DANIEL GRAEPLER A Dactyliotheca by James Tassie and Other Collections of Gem Impressions at the University of Göttingen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435 CLAUDIA WAGNER AND GERTRUD SEIDMANN A Munificent Gift: cast collections of gem impressions from the Sir Henry Wellcome Trust . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 451

Casting Nations: The National Museum DIANE BILBEY AND MARJORIE TRUSTED “The Question of Casts” – Collecting and Later Reassessment of the Cast Collections at South Kensington . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 465 MALCOLM BAKER The Reproductive Continuum: plaster casts, paper mosaics and photographs as complementary modes of reproduction in the nineteenth-century museum. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485

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AXEL GAMPP Plaster Casts and Postcards: the postcard edition of the Musée de Sculpture Comparée at Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 501 DANA STEHLIKOVÁ More Valuable than Originals? The Plaster Cast Collection in the National Museum of Prague (1818–2008): its history and predecessors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 519 TOBIAS BURG Building a Small Albertinum in Moscow: the correspondence between Georg Treu and Ivan Tsvetaev . . . . . . . . . . 539 STEPHEN L. DYSON Cast Collecting in the United States. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 557 IAN COOKE Colonial Contexts: the changing meanings of the cast collection of the Auckland War Memorial Museum . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 577

Display and the Future of Plaster Casts HELEN DOREY Sir John Soane’s Casts as Part of his Academy of Architecture at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 597 ALESSANDRA MENEGAZZI The Museum as a Manifesto of Taste and Ideology: the twentieth-century plaster cast collection of archaeology and art at the University of Padua . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 611 JAMES PERKINS Living with Plaster Casts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 627 BERNARD VAN DEN DRIESSCHE Le jardin des plâtres: un autre regard sur les collections de moulages The Garden of Plaster Casts: a different view on cast collections . . . . . . . 635

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List of Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 651 List of Figures. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 659 List of Colour Plates . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 685 Colour Plates. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 691 Index of Names and Places . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 727 Subject index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 745

Preface The present volume originates from the conference of the same name, held in Oxford on 23 to 27 September 2007. The idea of a major international conference on plaster casts arose after a small but enthusiastically received study day Plaster Casts: Making Collecting and Display organized by Eckart Marchand at the University of Reading in October 2005. At Oxford, the team of organizers consisted of Prof. Donna C. Kurtz, Director of the Beazley Archive at the University of Oxford and the present editors. The overwhelming response to a call for papers enabled us to bring together a strong and coherent programme. Speakers, chairs and delegates represented a wide community of scholars, curators, conservators and artists with interests in the material and technique from twelve countries across Europe and the Americas. This volume presents revised versions of the contributions, largely in the sequence in which they were presented at the event. A strong promoter of casts at Oxford, Donna Kurtz contributed decisively to the planning and conception of the conference, and we would like to thank her for those efforts. In addition, the facilities and resources of the Beazley Archive that she directs were of great help for the organization of the event, not the least Nicole Harris, the secretary of the Archive. We should also like to thank R. R. R. Smith, Lincoln Professor of Classical Archaeology at Oxford, and Curator of the Cast Gallery of the Ashmolean Museum, for being a great support at all stages of the conference. Speakers and delegates were housed in Worcester College, Oxford, and welcomed at a reception by its Provost, Mr Richard Smethurst. We would like to thank him and the College for their interest in and support of the conference. Additional events included an excursion to and generous reception at the house of James Perkins at Aynhoe Park, and visits to the Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Royal Academy of Arts’ plaster cast collection at Burlington House in London, where groups were guided by Helen Dorey and Helen Valentine respectively. All three excursions provided privileged inside views into exciting collections and we are deeply indebted to our hosts. An important aim of the conference was to act as a forum for the members of various disciplines and professional groups to exchange ideas and opinions through formal and informal discussions. If the accompanying programme supported the informal exchanges, the sessions provided ample time for structured plenary debates. The chairs contributed greatly to the success of the

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conference through their knowledgeable and inspiring steering of sessions and discussion periods. We should like to express our thanks to all of them – David Bone, Christoph Frank, Valentin Kockel, Donna Kurz, Greg Sullivan, Marjorie Trusted, Timothy Wilson, Jonathan Wood and Jan Zahle. We should also like to thank those speakers whose contributions for various reasons did not enter the present volume: Christoph Frank, Martha Gyllenhaal, John Kenworthy Brown, Donna Kurtz, Michael Neilson, Stephan Schmid, R.R.R. Smith and Marina Sokhan. We are grateful to Sabine Vogt and Manfred Link of De Gruyter and to Rainer Ostermann for all their work towards the production of this book. For her extensive contributions during all stages of the editing process we should like to thank Alison Wright, and we are grateful to Bob Cook for scientific advice and to Lena Hoff for help with the compilation of the indexes. The conference could not have been realized without the generous financial support of the Elizabeth Cayzer Charitable Trust and various benefactors and institutions of the University of Oxford, including the Craven Committee, the Fell Fund, the Classics Faculty, the History Faculty and the Mortimer and Teresa Sackler Fund of Worcester College. The publication of this volume was generously supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, Leeds, and, again, Worcester College’s Sackler Fund and the Craven Committee. Finally, we should like to express our gratitude to the authors of this volume, for their exciting contributions, constructive collaboration and for their patience during the long process of editing. Rune Frederiksen and Eckart Marchand Athens and London 2009

Introduction RUNE FREDERIKSEN AND ECKART MARCHAND

On 28 February 2006 at Sotheby’s, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, sold the remains of a plaster cast collection that was once the Museum’s pride. In the history of plaster casts the sale may be seen as the grand finale of a century of decline and rejection, during which individual casts and entire cast collections were silently moved into storage (first temporary, then permanent), left to their own devices (and discarded when finally deemed irreparable), violently attacked, or simply professionally removed and destroyed. The reasons for this development are many and they are interrelated, including the rejection of a western canon of art that these casts had come to represent and re-enforce, the twentieth-century veneration of the original and the consequent rejection of casts as worthless copies. Interest in the original’s material qualities accompanied rejection of the casts’ dull appearance, the increased availability of the originals through cheap mass travel and photography, as well as a more general decline in interest in sculpture and competition for storage space. The fate of the reproductive cast was often shared by collections of cast by individual artists, quite unjustly, as here the status of the cast was often a very different one.1 Yet, the recent sale in New York also coincided with a renewed interest in plaster casts and cast collections that has built up over the last three decades. To some extent the faithful promoters of the plaster cast as a teaching tool and means of full-scale representation of absent works have learned to make their case more forcefully, but new interests in the history of reception, the history of collecting, artists’ training and working methods, as well as a wider recognition of the appeal of these objects when dramatically staged, all contributed to the present revival of the plaster cast. The parameters have changed. Many cast collections now have different functions to those they had when originally set up and the production of new casts competes with modern reproduction technologies and meets, among other obstacles, with curatorial concern

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See in the present volume the discussion, by Greg Sullivan, of the Chantrey Collection at Oxford.

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about the surfaces of originals, for example with regard to traces of polychromy on ancient sculpture that could be eradicated when making casts from them. When it comes to the reproductive plaster cast, that still dominates the perception of what plaster casts are, the emphasis of the present revival lies in questions of use, display, conservation and research into existing and lost works rather than the building up of new collections. The last decades have seen the re-opening and/or cataloguing of cast collections of different character, including private collections in stately homes, research and teaching collections that belong to university departments and those that relate to individual artists’ workshops. The Beazley Archive in Oxford was a pioneer in publishing basic information on plaster casts on-line from 1998, in its case relative to the Ashmolean Museum’s Cast Collection. Today many more collections have their own websites, a growing number of them with complete illustrated on-line catalogues.2 In the French speaking world, the Association Internationale pour la Conservation et la Promotion des Moulages has since the 1980s convened a series of mainly francophone conferences on plaster casts, published their acts and built up a website that lists an ever-expanding number of plaster cast collections whilst offering itself as a forum for plaster cast research.3 More recently, the Fondazione Canova at Possagno initiated a series of conferences on plaster cast collections and published the proceedings of the first of these.4 The present volume is conceived as a contributor and catalyst in this development. As the edited papers of a conference that drew on a widely publicized call for papers, it is representative of the richness and range of present research interests in this area. In some cases the editors complemented this, not least through their own contributions, but generally they did not commission papers. The present intro-

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Only to mention a few: The Cast Collection at the Danish National Gallery (for the images) [accessed 1 November 2009], and the homepage of the Friends of the collection (for the catalogue information) [accessed 1 November 2009]; Georg-August-Universität Göttingen [accessed 1 November 2009]; Ashmolean Museum/University of Oxford [accessed 1 November 2009]. For a complete list of on-line cast catalogues, of which many are in the process of being re-launched with updated information and new photographs, see the website of the ‘Association’ [accessed 20 October 2009]. Le moulage. Actes du colloque international, Paris 1987 (Paris, 1990); website of the Association: [accessed 20 October 2009]. Further conference publications associated with the ‘Association Internationale’ are: C. Llinas (ed.), Moulages. Actes des rencontres internationales sur les moulages. Montpellier 14-17 février 1997 (Montpellier, 1999); H. Lavagne and F. Queyrel (eds), Les moulages de sculptures antiques et l’histoire de l’archéologie. Actes du colloque international, Paris, 24 octobre 1997 (Geneva, 2000). M. Guderzo (ed.), Gipsoteche. Realtà e Storia. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi. Possagno,19-20 maggio 2006 (Possagno, 2008).

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duction aims to sketch the wider picture, to point to areas and relevant research that have not been covered in the present volume and to position the presented articles in a wider historical and research context. Collections of reproductive plaster casts that consist of objects made to substitute absent originals have dominated and conditioned the perception of plaster casts at least for the last hundred years. These collections are, by and large, an invention of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The making of plaster casts and the use of the material for artistic and architectural ends in general, though, go back to Egyptian antiquity and beyond and have remained diverse and versatile practises throughout the history of the material. Ancient plaster casts are studied in the present volume by Rune Frederiksen and Christa Landwehr who discuss functions of the medium in the workshop, including that of life masks, and as an aid for copying of models, the latter discussed by Landwehr in relation to finds from a Roman sculpture workshop in Baiae in Italy. Frederiksen also discusses casts after sculptures that were apparently displayed in their own right in private contexts. Casting and moulding techniques in plaster and related materials were also extensively used in antiquity as decoration for built interiors, with the coffered dome of the Pantheon, cast in concrete, and the stucco decorations of the vaults of the Domus Aurea in Rome being two very prominent examples. These traditions continued in the Eastern Roman Empire and it was apparently through Byzantine craftsman that a tradition of stucco sculpture continued in Italy, France and the Holy Roman Empire throughout the Middle Ages. A particular tradition developed in lower Saxony with monuments in Hildesheim, Gernrode and Halberstadt. The article by Daniela and Torsten Arnold and Elisabeth Rüber-Schütte in the present volume introduces this group and focuses on the Choir Screens at Halberstadt (c. 1200), illuminating their technique and present conservation. During the Renaissance, in and increasingly beyond Italy, casts were made after the famous works of ancient Rome, in plaster and other, more durable and more valued media. Primaticcio’s casts made for the King of France are a particularly famous case. Their copying and distribution outside Italy is discussed by Walter Cupperi in the present book, while Eckart Marchand’s article addresses the wider artistic and architectural practices that employed the materials and techniques related to casting in plaster during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance in Italy, providing sixteenth-century artists with the skills to produce casts after the antique. Marchand also maps the spread of Renaissance stucco decorations, developed in Rome on the model of the Domus Aurea, a type of decoration that was exported from Italy by Primaticcio together with his casts to Fontainebleau. Nicholas of Modena, one of the artists working in Fontainebleau was in charge of the decoration of the court-

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yard at Nonsuch, one of the residences of Henry VIII. The remains of this palace were excavated in 1959 by Martin Biddle who presents and interprets this decoration in his article. In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, plaster casts entered the collections of artists, humanists, the rich and the noble. The Paduan Mantova Benavides Collection, built up in the middle of the sixteenth century, contained plaster casts of limbs that may have belonged to earlier artists’ collections, casts after works of art, ancient and contemporary, and casts after artists’ models. Some of these may have been displayed as heads of Famous Men, in a tradition that was to extend into the nineteenth century when, for example in Germany, the production of plaster cast busts of Famous Men such as Goethe and Beethoven would develop industrial dimensions. The operations of a London cast maker, Charles Smith, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is discussed here by Peter Malone. The wide range of different types of objects found in the Mantova Benavides Collection was typical for the Renaissance and Baroque Wunderkammer (the Bavarian Wunderkammer, for example, contained a plaster cast of the crippled hands of a peasant5), but in the seventeenth and eighteenth century the collecting of casts after ancient statuary would become increasingly a trade in its own right. As Ángeles Solís Parra, Judit Gasca Miramón, Silvia Viana Sánchez and José María Luzón Nogué discuss in this volume, in the seventeenth century the Spanish King sent his court artist, Diego Velázquez, to Rome to acquire casts of the highest quality after some of the most important Roman statues. The demands regarding the quality of these casts as indicated by the surviving contracts demonstrate the power, financial means and technical knowledge of the royal envoy. The Grand Tourists who came to Rome in the following two centuries were generally less well informed and had to rely on a network of cast makers, local and foreign artists, dealers and traders who would obtain, package and send casts to destinations overseas.6 The present contributions by Helen Dorey and Valentin Kockel refer to such collections by members of the professional classes in Britain. The situation in Germany was quite different. The majority of its tiny principalities were land-locked and comparably poor, and the transport of goods across the German territories prohibitively expensive because of con-

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J. B. Fickler, Das Inventar der Münchner herzoglichen Kunstkammer von 1598, in P. Diemer, with E. Bujok and D. Diemer (eds), Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, PhilosophischHistorische Klasse Abhandlungen, NF, Heft 125, 2004, p. 130. On the collecting of copies, including plaster casts, in the context of the Grand Tour see the most recent publication of V. Coltman, Fabricating the Antique: Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760– 1800 (Chicago and London, 2006), chapter 5 ‘“Familiar objects in an unfamiliar world” The Cachet of the Copy’, pp. 123-64.

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stant demands for duties. The mechanisms of trade in this situation are discussed by Charlotte Schreiter who looks particularly at two protagonists, the local trader and cast maker Carl Christian Heinrich Rost and the Italian travelling firm, the Ferrari brothers. Germany was of course central for the study of classical antiquity and archaeology, shaping the scholarly use of plaster cast collections in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Plaster casts played a role in the milieu of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, as is evidenced, for example, by his own comments on the medium as well as the collection of his close friend, the artist Anton Raphael Mengs. This early collection survives and has recently received a thorough examination by Moritz Kiderlen.7 The University of Göttingen with the first Chair of Archaeology anywhere in Europe and its founding professor, Christian Gottlob Heyne, are referenced in the present volume by Schreiter, Daniel Graepler and Jan Zahle, as is the collection of the Berlin Academy of Art in the article by Claudia Sedlarz. The history of the Göttingen cast collection goes back to the later 1760s. The collection has been catalogued and its history documented by Klaus Fittschen in 1990.8 Graepler’s contribution in this volume focuses particularly on the University’s casts after ancient and modern gems, the so-called Dactyliothecae. Another early German university collection, founded in 1820, is that of the University of Bonn. Still, the scholarly study of sculpture through casts was for the most part of the nineteenth century facilitated by the collections of artists’ academies and museums. Thus, outside Germany, the model of the University collection as a laboratory that facilitates the study of Classical Archaeology was not immediately emulated. This happened finally in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a consequence of the installation of Chairs in Archaeology in European countries such as England, France and Italy. The teaching collection of the Department of Archaeology at the University of Padua is comparatively small and late, it is discussed here in the context of its early twentieth-century display. Alessandra Menegazzi’s article grants insights not only into the 1920s mis-en-scène of this collection with its strong classical references, but also makes tangible the political connotations of the collection and its staging at that time. Finally, Claudia Wagner and Gertrud Seidmann’s contribution addresses a contemporary university collection, the above mentioned Beazley Archive at Oxford, with particular focus on its extensive holdings of dactyliothecae.

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M. Kiderlen, Die Sammlung der Gipsabgüsse von Anton Raphael Mengs in Dresden (Munich, 2006). K. Fittschen (ed.), Verzeichnis der Gipsabgüsse des Archäologischen Instituts der GeorgAugust-Universität Göttingen (Göttingen, 1990), pp. 9-20.

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Plaster cast collections in artists’ academies preceded even the earliest of these scholarly collections. The Florentine Academia del Disegno, founded in 1564 as the first institution of this type, met in its early years in and below the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo. The study and emulation of Michelangelo’s tombs of the Medici Dukes in this ensemble was characteristic for the work of the Florentine Academicians9 and plaster casts of its allegorical sculptures were soon distributed among artists in Italy. Two full-scale casts of Michelangelo’s Dawn and Dusk were made in 1570 by Egnazio Danti, brother of the Florentine sculptor Vincenzo Danti, and must have been obtained by the Academy in Perugia shortly after its foundation in 1573.10 But plaster cast collections were not necessarily a feature of the academies that sprang up all over Europe and its colonies. Claudia Sedlarz illuminates the humble beginnings of the collection of the Academy in Berlin and Tomas Macsotay’s contribution reveals surprisingly that at the French Academy in Rome the casts had a much more important teaching function than at the Royal Academy in Paris. The Royal Academy in London was a late comer among the European Academies. The hesitant acquisition history of its early years resembles that of the Berlin collection. In the context of the conference the Royal Academy collection was informally discussed in front of its material remains by Helen Valentine who has also published on this subject.11 The academies in Stockholm and Copenhagen, following the European eighteenth-century academy trend, possessed casts from the time of their foundations (1754 and 1768 respectively) as Jan Zahle describes in his article tracing casts of the Laocoön in Scandinavia. In the nineteenth century, the Academy in Madrid was able to provide casts for academic collections in the Spanish colonies, such as the Academia de San Carlo in Mexico City, as Elisabeth Fuentes Rojas mentions in the present volume. Beyond the academies, artists had long used plaster casts as objects of study and in the different stages of the design process including the final work. While Leon Lock’s analysis of images of Netherlandish sculptors’ workshops from the seventeenth- and eighteenth centuries questions their documentary value, there is certainly plenty of more secure evidence that plaster casts played an important role in artists’ workshops from the fifteenth

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Z. WaĨbiĔski, L’accademia medicea del disegno a Firenz nel cinquecento: Idea e istituzione, 2 vols (Florence, 1987), I, pp. 75-110, esp. 76-80. 10 D. Zikos in C. Davis and B. Paolozzi Strozzi (eds), I grandi bronzi del battistero. L’arte di Vincenzo Danti, discepolo di Michelangelo, exh. cat. Florence (Florence, 2008), pp. 324-5. 11 H. Valentine, From Reynolds to Lawrence: the first sixty years of the Royal Academy of Arts and its collections : a short catalogue of the paintings, sculptures and plaster casts shown in the private rooms and the new sculpture gallery at Burlington House, (London, 1991).

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century onward, in Italy and increasingly beyond. The section in this volume devoted to casts in artist’s workshops and artists’ practice cannot claim to be representative, but it puts a due focus on eighteenth-century neo-classicism, late nineteenth and early twentieth century French and Italian art and the diverse uses of plaster and casting techniques by modern and contemporary artists. Johannes Myssok presents the various stages of the design processes in which Antonio Canova employed plaster, traces developments in his career and relates Canova’s use of casts to wider issues such as the truthfulness to material. Greg Sullivan in his article on the slightly later British sculptor Sir Francis Chantrey, argues that Chantrey’s plaster models had the status of originals. The neo-classical aesthetic and art production had a formative impact on the use and perception of reproductive plaster casts in museums to the present day. It was in the second half of the nineteenth century that artists, mainly French and Italian, explored the unconventional qualities of the material. A major figure in this context was Rodin;12 in the present volume, Jean François Corpataux and Sharon Hecker discuss the works of his contemporaries Marcello and Medardo Rosso. Marcello’s Pythia, including a life cast of the artist’s own shoulders, provides an exciting case through which to examine the conceptual implications of the artistic process with regard to nineteenthcentury artistic stereotypes of creativity and gender. Addressing the still too little studied work of Medardo Rosso, Sharon Hecker analyses how the sculptor broke with the neo-classical uses of plaster, drawing conceptually on the material’s association with cheapness and fragility. The modernity of plaster cast as a material is further evaluated in the Futurist context by Maria Elena Versari’s contribution on Boccioni’s use of plaster. The final rejection of the plaster cast as a teaching tool after the Second World War is the starting point of Sue Malvern’s discussion of the use of plaster casts in the work of late twentieth-century and contemporary artists such as Antony Gormley and Rachel Whiteread. A contribution by a practicing artist, Jane McAdam Freud, whose work frequently employs plaster casts, closes this section. As part of her presentation, McAdam Freud made a conference medal that was displayed at the event. With the rise of nationalism throughout Europe in the nineteenth century, national museums were instituted to present, conserve and construct the notion of a national heritage, as in the case of the National Museum in Prague, discussed here by Dana Stehlikova, and to improve citizens, and/or national

___________ 12 A. Le Normand-Romain, ‘Rodin e il gesso: storia di un deposito di atelier’, in M. Guderzo (ed.), Gipsoteche. Realtà e Storia. Atti del convegno internazionale di studi. Possagno, 19-20 maggio 2006 (Possagno, 2008), p. 75-82.

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art production, as in the case of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Both museums, in Prague and London, as well as the National Gallery in Athens hold reproductive casts as well as artists’s models and final works in plaster. Reproductive casts in these museums have fulfilled a variety of functions. They preserved the appearance of endangered works (see the article by Maria Kliafa and Michael Doulgerides in relation to the National Gallery in Athens), represented the narrative of a national style in one place, as in the cases of the Museum in Prague, and filled gaps in a wider art historical narrative, as for example the Royal Cast Collection as part of the National Gallery of Denmark, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, mentioned by Stephen Dyson in his account of American plaster cast collections. They also, of course, represented works that were seen as canonical, as in the case of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, discussed by Diane Bilbey and Marjorie Trusted and by Malcolm Baker. In many cases they were integrated into the Museum display alongside originals, in other instances they were given their own museum, like the Musée de Sculpture Comparé in Paris, here discussed in terms of its intellectual conception by Axel Gampp, the Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, discussed by Tobias Burg, and many American collections, such as the Slater Museum in Norwich, Connecticut, referred to by Dyson. With Ian Cooke’s article on the Auckland War Memorial Museum the volume provides insight into the installation, motivations for and reception of a cast collection in a colonial context. Here as in the case of the Mexican academy referred to earlier, art objects by local cultures would play an important counter part in the collections, in Mexico through their influence on the academy’s training, in Auckland in terms of the display and space allocation in the museum. The papers by Malcolm Baker and Axel Gampp address a particular nineteenth-century phenomenon, aptly described by Baker as “the reproductive continuum”. Plaster casts in the Victoria and Albert Museum, we find, were displayed in concert with other reproductive media, including fictile ivories, paper mosaics and photography; Gampp directs our attention to the vast collections of postcards of plaster casts issued by the Musée de Sculpture Comparé. Issues of display are addressed in Helen Dorey’s paper on the Sir John Soane’s Museum and Alessandra Menegazzi’s contribution regarding the Museo di Scienze Archeologiche e d’Arte at the University of Padua. Both are specific cases where original architectural designs and historical displays have been meticulously reconstructed. In the case of the Paduan collection the early twentieth-century display had to be adapted to accommodate modern teaching functions of the collection, while the Sir John Soane’s Museum has to keep the requirement to function as a modern museum in mind. Entirely different, but still striking the same historical and topographical keys as the Sir John

Introduction

9

Soane’s Museum, James Perkin’s private display of plaster casts at Aynhoe Park represents a revival of the Country House tradition of displaying casts. The recent rise in popularity of casts is reflected in a number of recent rearrangements of museum displays to include these objects. Occasionally, old ideas are taken up, albeit in revised form, such as the chronological display of casts in teaching collections, or the display of casts alongside originals. In these, as in most other cases, casts are displayed according to the same principles as originals. A different principle, developed in the late 1980s and early 1990s and applied to the display of a cast collection, is that of the Royal Cast Collection in Copenhagen. The collection, spanning western sculpture uninterruptedly from Ancient Egypt to the Baroque, is arranged according to the same principal display contexts as the various periods themselves. Exhibition areas in the Copenhagen collection today, like the ‘Greek Sanctuary’, ‘Roman Villa’ or ‘Italian Gallery’, not only offer a rough chronological frame to the visitor, but also a sense of authentic visual context for the various sculptural forms. Statues and reliefs are seen together as they might have been experienced at the time the originals were made, but also sometimes as they were used later on throughout history. A number of recent exhibitions have realized another potential of the plaster cast. Thus, painted plaster casts have been used to illustrate the effects of polychromy, for educational purposes both in permanent displays, for example the polychromatic cast of the Igel Column in the Landesmuseum in Trier,13 and temporary exhibitions, principally the exhibition Gods in Colour (2003–8), that toured numerous museums all over the western world.14 Three articles address issues of conservation. The choir screens in Halberstadt (c. 1200), discussed by Daniela and Torsten Arnold and Elisabeth Rüber-Schütte, and the casts in the collections of the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid and the National Gallery in Athens, discussed by Solís Parra et al., and Kliafa and Doulgerides, respectively, are very different object types that require specific treatments. The authors address issues raised by the in situ restoration and preservation of polychrome stucco work, and heavily over-painted and stained historical plasters as well as problems encountered during the structural reconstruction of casts that had been exposed to the elements; the list could be extended. Beyond this the three papers demonstrate different approaches and schools of conservation. The

___________ 13 For the polychromy of the cast of the Igel column see H. Cüppers, ‘Die Kopie der “lgeler Säule” in neuem Gewand. An der Nachbildung des Secundinier Grabmals ist die einstige Bemalung rekonstruiert worden.’ Antike Welt 1994, Heft 1, pp. 89-94. 14 The catalogue of the first exhibition: V. Brinkmann et al., Bunte Götter. Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur (Munich, 2003).

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fragility of plaster in general, and in particular the necessity of periodic cleaning and/or surface treatment of plaster casts mean that any institution holding plaster casts must have a developed and on-going conservation programme in place to ensure appropriate care of these objects. More than with some other types of artwork the appearance of casts is dramatically affected by conservation work and practical handling. This requires close collaboration between conservators and museum curators. Our volume ends with an article by Bernard van den Driesche, Vice Chairman of the Association Internationale pour la Conservation et la Promotion des Moulages and in charge of the Association’s website. Van den Driesche develops the notion of a grand jardin du plâtre, his vision of a global garden of plaster casts and cast collections, possibly best achieved through websites and the internet, that brings together all types of plaster cast collection, including not only those that serve artistic ends, but also ethnological, medical and other requirements. Such an encyclopaedic approach represents the richness of the material. The present volume deliberately focuses on plaster casts for artistic ends. Its aim is to highlight what is specific to individual casts, types of casts and cast collections, and thus to emphasise difference and complexity in a medium that in the past has often suffered from being perceived as familiar and onedimensional. The inclusion in papers by Marchand, Biddle, Hecker and others of plaster sculpture that involves modelling techniques also serves this purpose, reminding us that the ‘pure’ cast is a rarity. It is the editors’ hope that rather than answering all our questions in the field, the present volume will raise new ones, stimulate debate and facilitate future research on plaster and plaster casts.

Antiquity

Plaster Casts in Antiquity1 RUNE FREDERIKSEN The present article discusses the use of plaster casts in antiquity through the evaluation of surviving objects as well as literary evidence.2 Many articles in this volume refer to plaster casts as a medium that is closely associated with the revival of antiquity from the early Renaissance onwards. The aim of my contribution, together with that by Christa Landwehr, is to demonstrate that artists’ use of plaster casts goes back to classical antiquity itself, and to evaluate our knowledge of the medium in this period. To analyse the functions of plaster casts in antiquity is important as it enables us to understand the uses and concepts of art in the ancient world which can then form the basis of comparisons with later periods. I wish to argue that plaster casts were of great significance in the ancient world, also beyond their basic technical functions in the production and copying of works of art.

Plaster as Material3 The materials of plastic art production and reproduction in antiquity were stone, clay, terracotta, faience, wood, metals, and various minerals.4 Plaster, or calcium sulphate, belongs to the last group; its technical properties make it

___________ 1

2

3

4

I would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for having read and improved this article at various stages of completion: Mogens Jørgensen (Copenhagen), Eckart Marchand (London), Bert Smith (Oxford) and Jan Zahle (Copenhagen). In addition I would like to thank Eckart for his very thorough and patient editing. For earlier discussions of ancient plaster casts as evidenced from physical remains and written sources, see D’Alessandro and Persegati, Scultura e calchi in gesso, 15-24; Barone, Sabratha; Landwehr, Die antiken Gipsabgüsse; see also articles in Neue Pauly and New Pauly referred to below. D’Alessandro and Persegati, Scultura e calchi in gesso, 69-73 Der Neue Pauly. Enzyklopädie der Antike, 12 vols (Stuttgart, 2001–2007), IV, s.v. ‘Gips’ (C. Hünemörder). For presentation of ancient sources about plaster and critical commentary, see Barone, Sabratha, pp. 3-8. See also this volume Arnold et al., pp. 373-76, and Solis et al. 387-88. For a sixth-century BC example of sculpture cast in melilite: A. Baltres et al., ‘Two Archaic Casts from Histria: Mineralogy, Paint Composition and Storage Products’, Ancient West & East, 3.1 (2004), pp. 87-99, fig. 1.

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particularly suitable for copying three-dimensional art-works with great accuracy; it is easily produced, easy to handle when wet, and when poured into a mould it flows easily into all corners and hardens quickly. In addition, the material seems to have been fairly easily available and hence cheap to use. This is implied in ancient comments on the sources of plaster, and can be deduced from the large quantities of the material used, for example, as wall plaster in ancient Egypt5 and for stucco decorations in the Greek and Roman periods.6 A number of details about the provenances, properties and uses of plaster can be learned from Theophrastos, writing at the turn from the fourth to the third century BC.7 His treatise On Stones has a section on Ȗ޺ȥȠȢ (64-9)8, from which we learn that gypsos existed in large quantities in Cyprus, and that in Phoenicia and Syria it was made from burning stone, for example marble. Theophrastos informs us how gypsos behaves when pulverized and mixed with water, and it is clear that what he describes is the mineral gypsum, and the process by which it can be turned into what we would call plaster and often Plaster of Paris.9 Plaster behaves as Theophrastos describes, and gypsum is indeed still found in many places around the Mediterranean, for example in Cyprus, on Melos and in Egypt.10 The ancient Greek term gypsos does, however, cover more than our plaster, or plaster of Paris, even within the writings of Theophrastos himself, so we cannot point to all ancient attestations of the term and automatically take them to mean only plaster of Paris. We are, however, able to demonstrate, that in some instances the term gypsos, or its Latin equivalent gypsum, are used to denote specifically a cast in that material. A wonderful example is a third to second-century BC cast, now in Princeton, of an earlier Hellenistic horse’s nose-piece (probably of bronze) which bears an inscription, incised into the plaster while it was still wet: ૝ıȚįઆȡȠȣ | IJઁ Ȗ޺ȥȚȞȠȞ (“the plaster [...] of Isidoros”).11

___________ 5 6

A. Lucas, Ancient Egyptian Materials and Industries, 3rd edn (London, 1948), pp. 96-8. Enciclopedia dell’arte antica, classica e orientale, 12 vols (Rome, 1958–1984), VII, 524-9 s.v. ‘Stucco’ (S. De Marinis); Op. cit. suppl., V, 458-61, s.v. ‘Stucco’ (R. J. Ling); Penny, Materials, pp. 191-2. 7 For a detailed treatment of the main evidence for the ancient view and knowledge of the technical aspects of plaster see A. Orlandos, Les matériaux de construction et la technique architecturale des anciens grecs (Paris, 1966), pp. 146-8. 8 Caley and Richards, Theophrastus. See also Barone, Sabratha, pp. 3-4. 9 The name derives from a large gypsum deposit at Montmartre in Paris, W. Morris (ed.), American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 4th edn (Boston, Mass., 2000). 10 Caley and Richards, Theophrastus, p. 213, p. 217; Penny, Materials, p. 194. 11 Inscription (and cast) probably from the 3rd-2nd centuries BC, see no. 22.

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Plaster and Sculptural Artworks in Antiquity Judging by the earliest surviving evidence of sculpture production, plaster appears to have been one of the primary materials. The Neolithic seventhmillennium BC statues from Aïn Ghazal near Amman in Jordan, frequently referred to as the “oldest statues of the world”, were made of modelled plaster over a framework of woven reed.12 The Egyptians used plaster as a primary sculptural medium as well, often in combination with other materials.13 Stone sculpture was sometimes modified with plaster modelled onto the stone and then painted. Well-known examples are the busts of the Egyptian fourthDynasty prince Ankhhaf (2520-2494 BC), found in his tomb at Giza14 (Fig. 1. 1), and now in Boston, and the eighteenth-Dynasty Nefertiti (c. 1351–1334 BC) from Thutmose’s workshop in Amarna, now in Berlin.15 The sculptural properties of plaster were thus known, and the sculptural appearance of the modelled plaster surface appreciated, from a very early point in history. This use of plaster for sculpture, modelled or cast, in combination with other materials, continued into the Greek and Roman periods.16 Plaster Casts Ancient plaster casts can be divided into three categories. Firstly, casts were used at various stages of the production of sculpture in other, arguably more durable, materials such as marble or bronze. Secondly, they were used as copies for the purpose of transferring three-dimensional images from one place to another. Finally they also served as artworks in their own right. Examples of the first category surfaced in Egypt in 1912 during the excavation of the workshop of the sculptor Thutmose at Amarna, dating to the end of the eighteenth Dynasty, between 1351 and 1334 BC.17 The find included twenty-seven objects in plaster, mostly casts of heads or faces, some of which are clearly portraits of Egyptian Royalty, for example the faces of Pharaoh

___________ 12 See e.g. C. A. Grissom, ‘Neolithic Statues from ‘Ain Ghazal: Construction and Form’, American Journal of Archaeology, 104 (2000), pp. 25-45. 13 For a recent general treatment of the use of plaster in Egyptian sculpture, see Tomoum, Sculptors’ Models, pp. 173-7. 14 Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 27.442. L. Berman et al., Arts of Ancient Egypt (Boston, 2003), pp. 78-9 (with fig.). 15 R. Anthes, Die Büste der Königin Nofretete (Berlin, 1973); C. Wedel, Nofretete und das Geheimnis von Amarna (Mainz am Rhein, 2005), with bibliography. 16 See for example V. M. Strocka, ‘Stucco additions to marble sculpture from Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 82 (1967), pp. 118-36. 17 D. Arnold, ‘The Workshop of the Sculptor Thutmose’, in Arnold, Royal Women, pp. 41-51, with bibliography.

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Fig. 1. 1: Bust of Ankhhaf. Mid third millenium BC. Stone with painted plaster, h: 50.5 cm. From Giza in Egypt. Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Akhenaten (no. 1a18, Fig. 1. 2) and his wife or consort Nefertiti (no. 1b, Fig. 1. 3) and the images of an old woman and a man, of unknown and uncertain identity (no. 1c-d, Figs 1. 4-5). Most of the Amarna casts are faces and were therefore quite simple to cast, in open one-piece moulds. The heads were mostly only cast in two separate parts, which were joined after the casting, as can be deduced, for example, from the vertical line on the neck of the Head of Nefertiti that results from the joining of the two pieces (not visible in Fig. 1. 3, but very clear in D’Alessandro and Persegati, Scultura e calchi in gesso, fig. 1). The Amarna casts seem all to have been taken from clay or wax models and served as models for final works in stone: further, they seem to be partial casts of sculptures, not of whole works, and some preserve details that show that the works they were cast from were unfinished. The casts may have been made to be sent to the commissioners, so that further progress could be discussed without them having to make their way to the workshop. Afterwards work would have continued on the clay or wax models, and, when considered finished, these were eventually carved in stone. Thus, the casts’ function differed from what in modern sculpture would be called original models in that they were not taken of models in their final stage to represent a visual idea that could later be executed in a third and more durable material.19

___________ 18 A provisional list of casts in museums and collections around the world is provided at the end of this article (pp. 26-32). 19 The term can be traced at least back to the sixteenth century. In Britain original models in this sense, used for exhibition in order to find a patron, have been in use at least since the second

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Fig. 1. 2: Head of Akhenaten. Mid fourteenth century BC. Plaster, h: 21 cm. From Amarna in Egypt. Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 1. 3: Head of Nefertiti. Mid fourteenth century BC. Plaster, h: 25.6 cm. From Amarna in Egypt. Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 1. 4: Head of an old woman. Mid fourteenth century BC. Plaster, h: 26.7 cm. From Amarna in Egypt. Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin.

Fig. 1. 5: Head of a man. Mid fourteenth century BC. Plaster, h: 27 cm. From Amarna in Egypt. Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin.

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Greece and Rome Death masks played a significant role in Egyptian art, at least since the time of the Old Kingdom,20 and continued to do so in the Greek and Roman periods. The face of a bust of the Roman period in the museum in Alexandria (no. 3a, Fig. 1. 6) is a remodelled death-mask, whereas the skull and bust are cast in two separate pieces each. A layer of plaster was added onto these five components after they had been assembled, and modelled, while the plaster was still wet. This bust, then, can be classified as partly cast and partly modelled. The tell tale signs of a death mask can be seen in a similar plaster head, in the same museum (Fig. 1. 7). The cheeks are hollow and the flesh around the neck seems to have lost its tension. Unmodified death masks, taken directly of a dead person’s face to preserve facial features, have also been found, as, for example, that from Tuna el-Gebel (no. 10b, Fig. 1. 8), in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, dating from around the birth of Christ. A plaster bust of a man from Rome (no. 24) is made in the same way as the Alexandria one (no. 3a), but is even more interesting and important because it was found, alonside fragments of two additional busts, in a tomb at Via Prenestina, and thus links plaster and plaster casts to the great Roman tradition of imagines maiorum (‘images of ancestors’).21 These seem often to have been of wax – plaster is not explicitly mentioned as a material in connection with them – and they were carried around in funerary processions and exhibited in homes and tombs. With the Via Prenestina heads, we have examples of such plaster portraits of deceased ancestors. The role of plaster casts in ancient Greek and Roman sculpture production was absolutely central. For Greek sculpture this is mainly a sound assumption, whereas for the Roman period the material and circumstantial evidence is strong. The single most important find of ancient Roman casts was made in 1954 at the Roman town of Baiae, in the bay of Naples.22 This consisted of more than 400 casts of parts of at least thirty different statues23 including some

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22 23

half of the seventeenth century, J. S. Symmons, Flaxman and Europe. The Outline Illustrations and their Influence (New York and London, 1984), pp. 57-8. D’Alessandro and Persegati, Scultura e calchi in gesso, pp. 47-9; Tomoum, Sculptor’s Models, p. 215 no. 42, pl. 31a-c. For the Roman ancestor cult see Pliny, Naturalis Historia, 35.6-7; Polybios, Historiae, 6.53; D’Alessandro and Persegati, Scultura e calchi in gesso, appendix; D. E. E. Kleiner, Roman Sculpture (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992), pp. 36-8 (basic introduction). The Roman period heads and busts from Egypt, discussed above, may derive from such Roman period tombs in Egypt. The Baiae find is published by C. Landwehr (Die antiken Gipsabgüsse) and also treated by the same author in this volume, pp. 35-46. The sides of the casts show cuts rather than fractures so the pieces are parts of casts of statues, not random fragments from smashed casts.

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Fig. 1. 6: Bust of a man. Roman first to second century AD. Plaster, h: 29 cm. Museum for Greek and Roman Art, Alexandria.

Fig. 1. 7: Portrait head of a man. Roman. Plaster, h: 29.5 cm. Museum for Greek and Roman Art, Alexandria.

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Fig. 1. 8: Death mask. Hellenistic-Roman, first century BC to first century AD. Plaster. Archaeological Museum, Cairo.

of the most well-known Classical and Hellenistic Greek works. But the Baiae find has not only deepened our knowledge of these particular masterpieces (Fig. 2. 5). The casts also constitute interesting evidence for the reconstruction of the process by which some or perhaps most of the thousands of Roman marble copies of Greek life size free-standing sculpture were actually made.24 This process, crucial for the understanding of the relationship between Greek originals and Roman copies was previously only known through written sources and the visual evidence of the Roman marbles themselves.25 The Baiae find is interpreted as a dump from a sculptor’s workshop, parts of what was once a collection of casts assembled by a workshop, serving as a library of form, from which whole figures or details could be copied to produce tailormade marble sculptures according to demand.26 It seems logical to assume that a number of such workshop collections of casts existed throughout the Roman world, and that, at least sometimes, Roman marble statues were copied from such casts rather than from other copies made in marble. Casts would have been much easier to transport than marble statues, and – provided they were

___________ 24 The first scholar to make this observation in relation to ancient cast finds was Gisela Richter. Richter knew about the important Baiae find from 1955, but only got to see parts of it in 1963. See G. M. A. Richter, ‘How Were the Roman Copies of Greek Portraits Made?’, Römische Mitteilungen, 69 (1962), pp. 52-8, pls 22-6, and ‘An Aristogeiton from Baiae’, American Journal of Archaeology, 74 (1970), pp. 296-7. 25 The first groundbreaking study identifying a number of Greek works through Roman copies was A. Furtwängler, Meisterwerke der griechischen Plastik: Kunstgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Leipzig, 1893) English trans. by E. S. Strong, Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture (Chicago, Ill., 1895). A good general introduction with selected bibliography is provided by A. Stewart, Greek Sculpture. An Exploration (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1990). 26 Landwehr, Die antiken Gipsabgüsse; C. Gasparri, ‘L’officina dei calchi di Baia’, Römische Mitteilungen, 102 (1995), pp. 173-87; Barone, Sabratha, 9.

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casts of a form taken of the original – they were more accurate copies than those of marble made by measuring points. Loukianos, writing in the second century AD, describes in passing in his Iuppiter tragoedus (33), how a statue of Hermes in the market-place of Athens was covered, on a daily basis, in pitch or resin by sculptors making moulds of it. This is an extremely interesting attestation of the practice of copying,27 in fact of mass making of moulds that would then – we may assume – have been used to make numerous copies in plaster for artists’ studios in different regions of the Roman Empire.28 According to Pliny the Elder (Naturalis historia, 35.153) copying of statues by taking casts of them was invented already in the Greek period by Lysistratos of Sikyon, brother of the famous sculptor Lysippos, who was active in the fourth century BC.29 Pliny also says that Lysistratos was the first to cast life masks. He describes how Lysistratos would cast from the face of a living person, pour wax into the plaster negative, and rework the wax afterwards. Pliny does not say what was then done to the wax; it was probably cast back into a positive in bronze via a clay or plaster negative mould. Even without the Egyptian finds that take the practice of plaster cast making at least a millennium further back in time it would be difficult to believe Pliny’s account of its ‘invention’. Considering how advanced Greek sculpture and particularly free standing bronze sculpture was at this time, the plaster casting technique must have been widely practised in the Greek world much earlier than the fourth century. It is indeed hardly surprising that, for example, research on bronze sculpture has led to the suggestion that (plaster) casting from life was practised already in the fifth century BC.30 The earliest mentioned incident of the copying of a statue, possibly by means of a plaster cast, dates from the third century BC. Plutarch, writing in the second century AD, relates how envoys

___________ 27 Examples of plaster moulds have been found, for example, in Paphos in Cyprus in a firstcentury BC bronze foundry. This mould is an instructive example in that it is part of a full size statue, i.e. the back of a male torso. Since it was found in a bronze foundry, however, it is likely to have been a cast made for a different purpose than the moulds described by Loukianos, K. Nicolaou, ‘Archaeological News from Cyprus, 1970’, American Journal of Archaeology, 76 (1972), pp. 315-16, fig. 38. 28 Richter (‘An Aristogeiton from Baiae’, American Journal of Archaeology, 74 (1970), p. 296) believed that moulds were sent from Greece more often than actual casts. Moulds do travel better, since they are less fragile, but have the disadvantage that, if damaged, (proper) repair can only happen with consultation of the original. Sculptors around the Empire could probably order moulds as well as casts from plaster cast makers employed in Athens and other centres of original Greek art. For further discussion, see Barone, Sabratha, p. 16. 29 Cf. e.g. Penny, Materials, p. 196. 30 The artist Nigel Konstam suggested after close observation of the Riacce Bronzes, particularly of the feet, that they were largely made from life casts, rather than having been modelled, N. Konstam and H. Hoffmann, ‘Casting the Riace bronzes (2): a sculptor’s discovery’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology, 23.4 (2004), pp. 397-402, figs 1-3.

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of Ptolemy I of Egypt, when visiting Sinope on the Black Sea coast, took away a statue of Pluto and left behind one of Persephone after having copied it.31 It is not explicitly stated that this copy was a cast, but it is likely that it was. Attested in much greater abundance are ancient plaster casts of Greek crafts objects, in particular of relief-decorated metal tableware. The most important finds have been made in Begram in Afghanistan, Kara-Tobe in north-west Crimea and at Memphis in Egypt. In addition to these finds, a number of similar casts exist in museums and other collections across the world (e.g. nos 3b, 19, 25). 1. 9: Relief-bust (cast from mould) of PtoThe Begram find (no. 8) consist Fig. lemy I Soter. Hellenistic, early third century of twenty casts of Greek works of a BC. Plaster, h: 8.3 cm. Roemer- und Pelizaeuswide chronological range, cast in Museum, Hildesheim. Roman times, apparently to serve as models for artisans. This function can be more securely established for the Memphis find (no. 12), that was made in a workshop context. Here more than seventy casts similar to those from Begram were found. One example is the small image of a male bust (Fig. 1. 9), believed to be a portrait of the Hellenistic King Ptolemy I, dating from the early third century BC – the same Ptolemy who sent envoys to copy the statue of Persephone mentioned above. The egg-and-dart decorative band framing the image may mean that the relief was conceived of and appreciated as a finished work of art in itself, rather than just as an intermediary model for an artisan who wanted to transfer an image from one durable medium to the other. Clay and plaster moulds found in a workshop at Chersonesos in the Crimea, and in the market place (agora) of Athens,32 shed light on how these many plaster positives of ancient metal tableware were made. Impressions of clay, or alternatively, plaster33 were taken from the decoration on the metal

___________ 31 Plutarch, Moralia, 984b. 32 Both ancient moulds and casts were found, see appendix below no. 6. 33 For the Begram moulds in particular, see Menninger, Untersuchungen, pp. 93-4; see also Penny, Materials, p. 195.

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object, the clay impression was then fired, and plaster poured into the mould. The plaster positives themselves would then have been used by artists or craftsmen as examples for commissioners, who apparently desired metal ware with decorative motifs in the proper Greek style. It is quite telling that plaster casts of metal ware, and evidence for their production, have come to light from the periphery of the Classical world, like the Crimea and Afghanistan, as these were areas of artistic adoption rather than centres of original artistic production, at least with regard to the typical media and styles of the classical world. The finds of ancient Greek and Roman plaster casts from Egypt are probably to be seen in the same way, and their greater numbers probably to be explained by the preservation conditions of the dry plaster-friendly desert. One more find of plaster casts needs to be mentioned. Whereas the casts from Baiae document part of the copying process of well-known ancient Greek works of art, the finds from Sabratha in Libya (no. 26) consisted of hundreds of fragments of plaster casts and plaster moulds of reliefs, statuettes and statues. These objects show the role of plaster in a more run-of-the-mill category of ancient art. They stem from different private and public contexts, and workshops for mass production of minor arts are also identified. We have already seen how plaster was used in Egyptian sculpture in combination with other materials, and how death masks played an interesting role from an early point. A vast amount of circumstantial evidence for the use of plaster casts could also be put forward: large numbers of scenes and individual figures in Roman reliefs, sarcophagi, gems and other media, show striking similarities to the designs of those of ancient cast finds.34 This suggests, again, that casts played a role in transmitting images from one place to the other, retaining in great detail the formal qualities of the original works. Were architectural details copied in the same way as sculpture? It seems very likely that copies of mouldings, floral motifs and other types of architectural decoration were circulating between workshops or building sites of the ancient world, to be copied accurately back into stone at various times and places. So far though, we do not have any evidence for this and concrete suggestions as to where such copying might have occurred have been disproved.35 Finally, I ought to turn to the question of whether plaster casts in antiquity were occasionally appreciated as artworks in their own right, or at least dis-

___________ 34 Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, gives a number of examples. 35 It has been suggested, for example, that the (column) capitals used in the Forum Augustum in Rome were made from casts of capitals from the fifth century BC Erechtheion temple on the Athenian Acropolis. Valentin Kockel has argued that dissimilarities between these capitals make this rather unlikely. See V. Kockel, ‘Antike Gipsabgüsse von Baugliedern’, Archäologischer Anzeiger (1991), pp. 281-5, figs 1-3.

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played as substitutes for originals, as has been the case from the Renaissance and up to our time. Juvenal criticises, in one of his satires (2.4-5) from about 100 AD, some contemporaries for trying to appear learned simply by stuffing their houses with plaster busts of the Greek stoic philosopher Chrysippos.36 The word used is gypsum, and there is no doubt that he refers to plaster casts, just as the German ‘Gips’ and the Italian ‘gesso’ can mean both ‘plaster’ as well as a ‘plaster cast of a sculpture’. The alternative reading would be that Juvenal refers to a number of individually created plaster portraits of Chrysippos in the homes of Romans, but this reading does not make sense, because we would then suddenly have original artworks that neither fit the slating remarks of Juvenal, nor what we know of what Romans exhibited in their homes.37 We know from numerous finds and references in the Roman literature that marble copies of certain original Greek portraits of Greek men of letters were standard equipment in Roman villa-libraries;38 for those to whom these marble copies were unavailable, plaster casts may have been an economically viable alternative. Plaster sculpture on display in private homes existed also in Roman Greece, as for example a statue of Dionysos seen by the Roman traveller Pausanias, writing in the second century AD (9.32.1): “Creusis, the Harbour of Thespiai, has nothing to show publicly, but at the home of a private person I found an image of Dionysos made of Gypsum and adorned with painting”.39 Given the fragility of plaster and its sensitivity towards water, we should not be surprised that hardly any such plaster casts from private Roman contexts have survived. However, at least one cast, probably of a statue of an athlete (no. 23, Fig. 1. 10), survives from such a context in Seleuceia Pieria in Turkey. The head is quite weathered, but is still an attractive find, since it may be archaeological evidence for an important phenomenon better known from the written sources. Arguably, Juvenal’s passage may be read as an implicit criticism of plaster casts. The material was cheap, and a great number of almost identical copies could be produced from the same mould, making the fabrication process inexpensive as well. Remembering that Juvenal is a single source attesting to this use of casts, and an attitude towards it, we may safely say that at least in Juvenal’s lifetime, around the middle of the second century AD, casts were

___________ 36 Brill’s New Pauly. Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World. Classical Tradition, 5 vols (Leiden, 2006–), I, s.v. ‘Cast; Cast Collections B, I’ (I. Kader). 37 The original plasters Romans could have exhibited in their homes, alongside those of wax and other materials, were unique images of their forefathers, based on death (or life) masks, as the one discussed above p. 18 and listed in the appendix, no. 24. 38 R. Neudecker, Die Skulpturenausstattung römischer Villen in Italien (Mainz am Rhein, 1988). 39 Pausanias, Description of Greece, books 1-10, translated from the Greek, W. H. S. Jones, 5 vols (Cambridge Mass., 1918–).

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Fig. 1. 10: Head from a statue of an athlete (?). Late Hellenistic-early Roman. Plaster, h: 24.9 cm. University Art Museum, Princeton.

used in this way in the city of Rome. It is tempting to develop further from the testimony of Juvenal, but while I would believe that the practice he described existed not only in Rome but elsewhere in the Empire, evidence to support this does not exist at present. Of course one could argue that since plaster as a material and casts in that material were cheap, they were, like so many other banalities of daily life, less likely to have been mentioned in our sources. And further, the material is perhaps only described by Theophrastos and Pliny precisely because these authors are dealing specifically with materials, of which gypsos-gypsum-plaster is one among many and of course had to be treated. Along the same lines, Juvenal mentioned plaster casts because, in a specific context, he could frame an attitude held by his audience, that casts were the exhibits of the ambitious middle class as opposed to the old aristocracy and upper class that owned and displayed the ‘genuine article’, namely the more frequently spoken of statues of stone and precious metals. To sum up: plaster casts were used in Antiquity both for the transmission of three-dimensional images within the artistic working process and as objects of display in their own right. In fact, all the major functions of the material plaster in plastic art as we know them from post-antique periods existed, in one form or another, already in antiquity, apart from one: the ancient world did apparently not know of cast collections in non-workshop contexts.

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Whereas it is difficult to say anything about the extent to which plaster casts were used as substitutes for originals in the ancient world, their role as transmitters of form, from Greek original artworks – reliefs, statues and architectural decoration – into Roman copies of the same categories must have been tremendous.40 There would have been no massive spread of Greek art into the Roman world without casts.

Appendix Provisional list of known surviving plaster casts from antiquity. Numbers occasionally refer to groups of related finds in the same collection, not always to individual pieces. Place names in italics indicate the original location of the find, those in regular font their present location. Egyptian No. 1 a-d. Amarna. Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin. Twenty seven heads and fragments of sculpture in plaster, Egyptian, mid fourteenth century BC. Mentioned in this article are the following heads: Akhenaten (a) inv. 21 355; Nefertiti (b) inv. 21 349; an (unknown) male (c) inv. 21 228; and an (unknown) old female (d) inv. 21 261. Arnold, Royal Women, pp. 46-51. No. 2. British Museum, London. From private collection in France. Face of a man, Egyptian fourteenth century BC (?). Cast from death or life (?), reworked, h: 13.5 cm, inv. 60.65656. I. E. S. Edwards, ‘An Egyptian Plaster Cast’, British Museum Quarterly, 22 (1960), pp. 27-9, pl. 6. Greek and Roman No. 3. Alexandria. Museum for Greek and Roman Art. a. Plaster bust, cast and modelled, Roman, first to second century AD, h: 29 cm (35 cm as restored), inv. 19120.

___________ 40 Contra: R. Neudecker, Brill’s New Pauly. Encyclopaedia of the Ancient World, 15 vols (Leiden, 2002–2009), VI, 6, at ‘Copies B’.

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L. Bacchielli, ‘Un ritratto cirenaico in gesso nel Museo greco-romano di Alessandria’, Quaderni di archeologia della Libia, 9 (1977), pp. 97-110, figs 1-3, 6. b. Ten fragments of casts of relief-decorated tableware: Inv. 22501, 22510, 24344, 24346-7, 25102, 25106-9. Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, pp. 10-11; for 24344 and 24347 see also G. Barone, ‘Due modelli di gesso del Museo Greco-Romano di Alessandria’, in Bonacasa and Di Vita (eds), Alessandria e il mondo ellenisticoromano, pp. 329-33, pl. 58.1-3. No. 4. Memphis. Museum for Greek and Roman Art, Alexandria. Ilioupersis scene with Triptolemos seated and the killing of a Trojan captive (?), Roman. H. Froning, ‘Die ikonographische Tradition der kaiserzeitlichen mythologischen Sarkophagreliefs’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 95 (1980), pp. 336-41, fig. 16. No. 5. Allard Pierson Museum, Amsterdam. a. Relief cast from a statuette of a standing Zeus, Roman, h: 9.6 cm, inv. 7082. Bought in Egypt before 1921. From Memphis (?). R. L. Scheurleer, ‘A Note on Two Casts in the Allard Pierson Museum Amsterdam’, in Bonacasa and Di Vita (eds), Alessandria e il mondo ellenisticoromano, pp. 359-62, pl. 62.4, 6. b. Relief cast from a relief of a standing Athena, Hellenistic, late third century BC, h: 11.5 cm, inv. 7085. Bought in Egypt before 1921. From Memphis (?). R. L. Scheurleer, ‘A Note on Two Casts in the Allard Pierson Museum Amsterdam’, in Bonacasa and Di Vita (eds), Alessandria e il mondo ellenisticoromano, pp. 359-62 pl. 62.3, 5. No. 6. Athens, Agora. Various fragments of casts and moulds. Example: Fragment of a relief cast in mould. Lower body, upper thighs and right arm of a standing draped figure. Classical Greek (?). E. D. Reeder Williams, ‘Ancient Clay Impressions From Greek Metalwork’, Hesperia. The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, 45 (1976), pp. 41-66, pl. 7 no. 9. No. 7. Athens, Kerameikos (at Hagia Triada). National Museum (now lost ?). ‘Face of a dead man’ (death mask ?) and right arm of a male figure. C. Curtius, ‘Der attische Friedhof vor dem Dipylon’, Archäologische Zeitung, 1872, pp. 12-35, at p. 35 (mentions left male arm of plaster with bone as well as moulds for tools (?)); L. von Sybel, Katalog der Sculpturen zu Athen (Mar-

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burg, 1881), p. 208 no. 2921 (mentions the arm but also a death-mask with ref. to Martinelli no. 216); N. F. Martinelli, Catalogue of Casts in Gypsum Taken Direct from the Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture (Athens, 1881), p. 37 no. 216 (mentions death-mask with ref. to Curtius and Sybel (?)). No. 8. Begram. Archaeological Museum, Kabul. Dozens of relief-decorated objects, mostly medallions, largely with mythological scenes and figures. Hellenistic. G. Gullini et al., L’Afghanistan. Dalla preistoria all’islam. Capolavori del museo di Kabul (Turin, 1961), pp. 95-101, pls 1-9; Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, p. 11; Menninger, Untersuchungen, pp. 93ff. Example: Begram Symplegma. The Siren and Silenos symplegma, Lexicon iconographicum mytologiae classicae (Zurich and Munich, 1974–) 8.1 (suppl.): Seirenes no. 89b (E. Hofstetter). No. 9. Ägyptisches Museum, Berlin. Cup from Athribis with Isis, Harpokrates and sacrificial scene. Hellenistic. T. Schreiber, ‘Die Alexandrinische Toreutik. Untersuchungen über die Griechische Goldschmiedekunst im Ptolemaeerreiche’, Abhandlungen der Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig. Philologisch-historische Klasse, 14.5 (1894), pp. 470-9, pl. 5; Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, p. 11; Thompson, ‘Quae saga; quis magus’, p. 315, pl. 56.8. No. 10. Archaeological Museum, Cairo. a. 24 sculptural objects in plaster of various periods and provenance in Egypt. C. C. Edgar, Catalogue générale des antiquités égyptiennes du musée du Caire (Cairo, 1906), pp. x-xii, pp. 80-6, pls 42-3. Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, p. 11 ; Tomoum, The Sculptor’s Models, nos 40, 46, 48, 90, 98, 115, 122, 157-8, 161, 166 (98, 122, 157, 161 and 166 also published in Edgar). b. Death mask, Tuna el-Gebel, inv. JdE. 46.593. Egypt, first century BC to first century AD. G. Lefebvre, Le tombeau di Petosiris (Paris, 1924), I, p. 28; A. Adriani, ‘Ritratti dell’Egitto greco-romano’, Römische Mitteilungen, 77 (1970), pp. 72109, at p. 108, pl. 35.1-2. G. Grimm, Die Römischen Mumienmasken aus Ägypten (Wiesbaden, 1974), pp. 122-3, believes that the mask was made in a mould (which was not taken from the face of a person). No. 11. Kestner-Museum, Hanover. Head from a small statue or bust of a king, h: 11.1 cm, inv. 1951.109. Hellenistic, early third century BC. Tomoum, Sculptor’s Models, p. 214 no. 39, pl. 30a, b.

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No. 12. Roemer- und Pelizaeus Museum, Hildesheim. Find from Memphis, Egypt, of more than seventy casts. Example: relief with portrait of Ptolemy I Soter, h: 8.3 cm, inv. 1120. Hellenistic, early third century BC Bianchi, Cleopatra’s Egypt, p. 146 no. 51 (ill.); Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, p. 311 cat. no. 36, figs 49-50. No. 13. Museum of Antiquities of North-Western Crimea, Kara-Tobe. Four fragments of casts of silver vessels, first century BC – first century AD. S. Y. Vnukov, S. A. Kovalenko, M. Y. Treister, ‘Plaster casts from KaraTobe’ (Russian with English abstract), Vestnik drevnej istorii, 1990.2, pp. 100-119 (figs, pls). No. 14. University of London. a. Maenad, from Egypt (?), h: 10.3 cm. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, p. 373, pl. 92 fig. 21; Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, p. 11. b. Dionysos and Satyr, from Egypt (?), h: 10.3 cm. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, p. 373, pl. 93 fig. 24. No. 15. Antikensammlung, Munich. a. Rhytonfragment with Hermes and Dionysos, h: 11 cm. J. Sieveking, ‘Erwerbungen des Antiken-Sammlungen Münchens 1914’, Archäologischer Anzeiger, 1916, pp. 66-9, fig. 25a. Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, p. 12. b. Plate fragment with birds, sfinxes and ornaments, h: 10.5 cm. J. Sieveking, ‘Erwerbungen des Antiken-Sammlungen Münchens 1914’, Archäologischer Anzeiger, 1916, pp. 66-9, fig. 25b. Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, p. 11. No. 16. Museum für Kleinkunst, Munich. From the Dattari collection, orig. from Memphis (?). a. Relief bust of a maenad with wreath in her hair, h: 12 cm, inv. 13006. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, p. 373, pl. 92 fig. 22; J. Sieveking, ‘Erwerbungen der Antiken-Sammlungen Münchens 1914’, Archäologischer Anzeiger, 1916, pp. 66-9, fig. 25c. b. Relief, sacrificial scene, h: 8.5 cm, inv. 13007. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, p. 374, pl. 94 fig. 29.

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No. 17. Staatliches Museum Ägyptischer Kunst, Munich. a. Face-fragment of a head from a statue of a king: Nectanebo I, Ptolemy IX or X, h: 28 cm, inv. ÄS 5339. Tomoum, Sculptor’s Models, p. 215 no. 42, pl. 31a-c. b. Face-fragment of a head from a statue of a king, h: 20 cm, inv. ÄS 7093. Tomoum, Sculptor’s Models, p. 215 no. 43, pl. 32a. No. 18. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. a. Relief from a mirror cover with upper part of a woman, from Egypt (?), h: 7 cm, inv. 31.11.16. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, p. 373, pl. 93 fig. 25. b. Relief with lower part of seated woman, from Egypt (?), h: 7 cm, inv. 31.11.17. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, p. 373, pl. 93 fig. 26. c. Medallion with three figures, from Egypt (?), d: 11 cm, inv. 31.11.15. Richter, Handbook of the Greek Collection, p. 129, pl. 109h. No. 19. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Cup-fragment with festive scene in front of a tree and walled city (Handley and Thompson (‘Quae saga; quis magus’) for different interpretation), h: 11 cm, inv. 1968.777. Bought in Cairo, probably from Memphis. D. B. Thompson, ‘ȆǹȃȃȊȋǿȈ’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 50 (1964), pp. 147-63, pl. 15; E. W. Handley, ‘The Poet Inspired?’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 93 (1973), pp. 104-8, pl. 1a; Thompson, ‘Quae saga; quis magus’, p. 315, pl. 56.5. No. 20. Louvre, Paris. a. Relief with Ajax and Kassandra, from Egypt (?), h: 9 cm, inv. MND 195. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, p. 372, pl. 91 fig. 17; Burkhalter, ‘Moulages en plâtre antiques et toreutique alexandrine’, pp. 33447, pl. 60.3-4. b. Relief with Herakles and the Nemean Lion, from Egypt (?), h: 13 cm, inv. MND 2049. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, p. 372, pl. 92 fig. 19. c. Relief with Aphrodite and Eros, from Egypt (?), d: 6 cm, inv. MND 273. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, p. 373, pl. 93 fig. 23; Burkhalter, ‘Moulages en plâtre antiques et toreutique alexandrine’, pp. 33447, pl. 60.3-4.

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No. 21. Musée Guimet, Paris. a. Inv. 193. From Begram. Relief medallion, Meleager (?) standing next to the boar, d: 18 cm. Burkhalter, ‘Moulages en plâtre antiques et toreutique alexandrine’, pp. 33447, pl. 61.3-4. b. Inv. 194. Relief medallion, Zeus (?) standing next to an altar holding a phiale, d: 14.6 cm. Burkhalter, ‘Moulages en plâtre antiques et toreutique alexandrine’, pp. 33447, pl. 61.5-6. c. Inv. 199. From Begram. Cast of an impression of a relief decorated skyphos (?) with standing and seated figure, d: 7.2 cm. Burkhalter, ‘Moulages en plâtre antiques et toreutique alexandrine’, pp. 33447, pl. 61.1-2. No. 22. Art Museum of the University, Princeton. A horse’s nose-piece with relief of warrior on pile of armour, Hellenistic, third to second century BC, h: 16.6 cm, acc. no. 48.52. From Egypt (?). G. M. A. Richter, ‘A Plaster Cast of a Horse’s Nose-Piece’, in Records of the Art Museum Princeton University, 18 (1959), pp. 53-9, (with fig.), with ‘A Note on the Inscription on the Plaster Cast’, by A. E. Raubitschek p. 90. No. 23. Art Museum of the University, Princeton. Head from a statue of an athlete (?), late Hellenistic – early Roman, h: 24.9 cm, no. 2000–120. From Seleuceia in Pieria, Turkey, sector 19-k, excavation 2, around the ‘Painted Floor’. J. M. Padgett, Roman Sculpture in the Art Museum, Princeton University (Princeton, 2001), pp. 211-12 (with fig.). No. 24. Rome, Antiquarium Communale. Head of balding beardless man, third century AD. Inv. 16.347. From tomb at Via Prenestina, Rome, found with two other fragmentary heads of plaster. This head is cast in three pieces. D’Alessandro and Persegati, Scultura e calchi in gesso, pp. 50-3, figs 6-7. No. 25. Library, Vatican (Rome). Relief, Amazonomachia. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, pp. 374-5, pl. 94 fig. 34, pl. 95 figs 35-7; Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, p. 12.

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No. 26. Sabratha, Libya. Museum of Sabratha. Hundreds of fragments of statues, statuettes, reliefs, plaster moulds and architectural decoration. Roman Imperial period. Barone, Sabratha. No. 27. From Egypt (?), private collection. Left side of a face (profile), fourth to second century BC, h: 25.4 cm. Bianchi, Cleopatra’s Egypt, p. 129 no. 34 (with fig.). No. 28. From Egypt (?), private collection. Face-part of a portrait head of Ptolemy X (?), c. 107-88 BC, h: 27 cm. J. A. Josephson, Egyptian Royal Sculpture of the late Period 400-246 B.C. (Mainz am Rhein, 1997), pl. 5. No. 29. From Egypt (?), private collection, USA. Plaster relief (Roman?) from a mould of a Hellenistic metal vessel, h: 5 cm. D. B. Thompson, ‘ȆǹȃȃȊȋǿȈ’, Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 50 (1964), pp. 147-63, pl. 15; Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik, p. 13. No. 30. Purchased in Alexandria, private collection. Plaster relief with head of Serapis and snake, second century AD, h: 8 cm. P. M. Fraser, ‘A Plaster Anguiform Sarapis’, in Bonacasa and Di Vita (eds), Alessandria e il mondo ellenistico-romano, pp. 348-50, pl. 62.1.

Frequently cited literature L. D’Alessandro and F. Persegati, Scultura e calchi in gesso: storia, tecnica e conservazione (Rome, 1987) D. Arnold, The Royal Women of Amarna (New York, 1996) G. Barone, Gessi del Museo di Sabratha (Rome, 1994) R. S. Bianchi, Cleopatra’s Egypt (New York, 1988) N. Bonacasa and A. Di Vita (eds), Alessandria e il mondo ellenistico-romano. Studi in onore di Achille Adriani, 3 vols (Rome, 1984) F. Burkhalter, ‘Moulages en plâtre antiques et toreutique alexandrine’, in N. Bonacasa and A. Di Vita (eds), Alessandria e il mondo ellenisticoromano. Studi in onore di Achille Adriani (Rome, 1984), II, 334-47 E. R. Caley and J. F. C. Richards, Theophrastus on Stones. Introduction, Greek Text, English Translation, and Commentary (Columbus, Ohio, 1956)

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C. Landwehr, Die antiken Gipsabgüsse aus Baiae: griechische Bronzestatuen in Abgüssen römischer Zeit (Berlin, 1985) M. Menninger, Untersuchungen zu den Gläsern und Gipsabgüssen aus dem Fund von Begram/Afghanistan (Würzburg, 1996) N. Penny, The Materials of Sculpture (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1993) C. Reinsberg, Studien zur hellenistischen Toreutik (Hildesheim, 1980) G. M. A. Richter, Handbook of the Greek Collection (Cambridge, Mass., 1953) G. M. A. Richter, ‘Ancient Plaster Casts of Greek Metalware’, American Journal of Archaeology, 62 (1958), pp. 369-77, (with pls) D. B. Thompson, ‘Quae saga; quis magus?’, in N. Bonacasa and A. Di Vita (eds), Alessandria e il mondo ellenistico-romano: studi in onore di Achille Adriani, 3 vols (Rome, 1984), II, pp. 309-17 N. S. Tomoum, The Sculptors’ Models of the Late and Ptolemaic Periods (Cairo, 2005)

The Baiae Casts and the Uniqueness of Roman Copies CHRISTA LANDWEHR

In 1954 some curious artefacts came to light during excavations in a complex of ruins which were once the luxurious baths of Baiae.1 Located on the Gulf of Naples a short distance from Puteoli, the modern town of Pozzuoli, Baiae was a flourishing resort from the first century BC. The numerous irregular and badly battered pieces of plaster evidently belonging to life-size plaster casts were found in a mass of debris used to fill a cellar room.2 Legs and hands showed signs of having been deliberately hacked apart. The reason for this may have been the lead wire and iron dowels used to reinforce the plaster;3 at some point the value of the small amounts of these materials may have exceeded that of the large statues made of plaster. According to our calculations the 400 odd fragments originate from at least twenty-four and at most thirty-three statues.4 Gisela Richter examined the fragments in the 1960s and noticed the face of Aristogeiton, which she subsequently published.5 I was able to identify fragments of eleven other statues, among them Harmodios, the Sciarra, Mattei and Sosikles Amazons, the Athena Velletri, the Aphrodite Borghese, and Eirene carrying Ploutos.6 The identifications prove beyond doubt that the Baiae plaster fragments are the remnants of casts of famous Greek bronze masterpieces of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. It is safe to assume that the casts belonged to an important atelier and that they were used to create true-to-scale marble copies. In order to provide compelling visual evidence for the identification of the Baiae fragments, I chose to have new plaster casts made from them and to have these introduced into plaster casts taken from Roman copies: the part corresponding to the Baiae fragment is simply chiseled away and the replica

___________ 1 2 3 4 5 6

Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 5-6 and pl. 1 a. Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, p. 6 and pl. 1 b and c. Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 19–22. Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 177-80. G. M. A. Richter, ‘An Aristogeiton from Baiae’, American Journal of Archeology, 74 (1970), pp. 296-7, pl. 74, figs 1–3. Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 27–111, cat. nos 1–67.

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Fig. 2. 1: Sciarra Amazon. Right: the Copenhagen copy. Second half of the first century AD. Marble, h (shoulder): 1.56 m. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen. Cast with replicas of Baiae casts inserted; upper left: close-up of inserted arm fragment; lower left: close-up of inserted breast fragment.

Fig. 2. 2: Mattei Amazon. Right: the Vatican copy. Second half of the first century AD. Marble, h (shoulder): 1.59 m. Vatican Museums, Rome. Cast with replicas of the Baiae casts inserted. Upper left: close-up of an inserted fragment with a segment of the strap of the quiver; lower left: close-up of an inserted fragment with folds of the chiton.

of the latter is then inserted. This project, carried out by the sculptor und restorer Silvano Bertolin, demonstrates the astonishing precision of the ancient copying technology. Reconstructions of this sort were carried out, for instance, on a cast of the Copenhagen copy of the Sciarra Amazon (Fig. 2. 1, right panel),7 into which replicas of the Baiae casts, for example parts of the right arm and right breast (Fig. 2. 1, left panels),8 were inserted. A cast of the Vatican copy of the Mattei Amazon was combined with a cast of the right arm of the Tivoli copy (Fig. 2. 2, right panel),9 into which

___________ 7 8 9

Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 60-4, cat. nos 29-33 and pls 26–31. Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, cat. nos 29 and 30, pl. 26 a and c and pl. 28 c. Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 64-70, at p. 65: Vatican = ‘Kopie B’; Tivoli = ‘Kopie C’; pl. 32 a.

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replicas of the Baiae casts,10 for example, two fragments of drapery (Fig. 2. 2, left panels),11 were introduced. Numerous observations made on the Baiae casts reveal the meticulous care that went into the making of the cast itself. Silvano Bertolin, who is not only a restorer but also a sculptor with training in traditional copying techniques, was kind enough to calculate the labour (in man-hours) required to make a cast of a full-sized statue such as the Sciarra Amazon. Since elastic materials such as silicon for making moulds were unknown in antiquity, this was a time-consuming process. Plaster casts of small zones of the surface of the original statue were made one by one. These fit together like a threedimensional puzzle and for the casting process they were held together by removable plaster caps.12 The casting was done in sections: the head, the arms and the column were all cast separately. The torso was cast in two parts.13 For the Amazon about 195 form pieces and thirty-eight caps would be required. About 400 man-hours would be needed for the job. Subsequently, another 100 odd hours would be required to work over the partial casts. For sculpting a true-to-scale marble copy based on the plaster replica an experienced sculptor must work about 2200 hours. In addition to the costs of the labour of two different specialized craftsmen, the expense of transportation of the plaster cast to an overseas workshop must be taken into account. On the other hand, to sculpt ‘free hand’ a marble statue of the size and shape of the Sciarra Amazon, an artist must work approximately 1400 hours. The point I want to make here is that the Roman copy, often maligned by modern art historians as an inferior product of mechanical replication, must have had a different value in the eyes of sophisticated Roman connoisseurs. The two time-consuming and laborious processes, the production of the fullsize plaster cast of the bronze original and the creation of a full-scale copy in marble via the pointing technique, made the marble copy a costly work of art, much more costly than a statue executed without the constraint of fidelity to an original. The full-size plaster casts of the bronze statues, which must have been the work of skilled specialists, were probably quite rare. The atelier in Baiae was, based on the number of casts on hand, well equipped for producing marble copies. The copies found in the vicinity of Baiae seem to reflect the activity of

___________ 10 Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 64-70, cat. nos 34-9, pls 32-40. 11 Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, cat. nos 34-5, pl. 32 a-b and pl. 34 b. 12 Landwehr, Griechische Meisterwerke in römischen Abgüssen, pp. 16-17, fig. 13; Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 16-17. 13 Landwehr, Griechische Meisterwerke in römischen Abgüssen, p. 18, figs 14-15; Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 20-3.

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Fig. 2. 3: Aphrodite Borghese. Marble statues from Baiae. Left: By Aphrodisios Athenaios, first quarter of the first century AD, h: 1.95 m. Museo Nazionale, Naples; Right: third quarter of the first century AD, h: 1.68 m. Museo Nazionale, Naples.

our atelier: a large torso of Eirene was found in Cumae,14 a head of the Sosikles Amazon in Baiae itself.15 The Aphrodite Borghese must have been very popular: two statues were found in Baiae (Fig. 2. 3),16 a large torso in Misenum,17 a smaller one in Pozzuoli.18 A fifth copy survives in Portici.19 It makes of course economic sense to use a plaster cast over and over again to create copies: the more copies that are made from a plaster cast, the better the return on the initial investment. The Aphrodite was without a doubt a hit because it could be combined with portrait heads of noble ladies.20 More intriguing is the question of who, among the wealthy owners of the

___________ 14 Naples, Museo Nazionale. E. La Rocca, ‘Eirene e Ploutos’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts 89 (1974), pp. 112-36, at p. 113, no. 2, figs 1–3; B. Vierneisel-Schlörb, Glyptothek München. Katalog der Skulpturen, II (Munich, 1979), cat. no. 25, p. 261, note 4: List of replicas, no. 2; Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 103-4; Landwehr, Skulpturen, I: Idealplastik. Weibliche Figuren. Benannt (Berlin, 1993), pp. 61-2. 15 Naples, Museo Nazionale, inv. 150 401. M. Weber, ‘Die Amazonen von Ephesos’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 91 (1976), pp. 28–96, at p. 47, no. 16, figs 15-16 (photographs of a plaster cast in Basel). 16 Statue ‘Baiae I’ (Fig. 3, left panel): Naples, Museo Nazionale, inv. 150 383. Sculptor’s signature: Aphrodisios Athenaios. Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 88-94, at p. 89 (‘Kopie A’), pl. 54 a, c; Valeri, Marmora Phlegraea, pp. 98-102, fig. 99; Statue ‘Baiae II’ (Fig. 3, right panel): Naples, Museo Nazionale, inv. 150 384. A cornucopia has been added to the left arm. Sculptor’s signature: Karos Puteanos Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 88-94, at p. 89 (‘Kopie B’), pl. 54 b, d; Valeri, Marmora Phlegraea, fig. 100. 17 Baia, Museo dei Campi Flegrei. Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 88-94, at p. 89 (‘Kopie C’), pl. 55 b; Valeri, Marmora Phlegraea, fig. 101. 18 Baia, Museo dei Campi Flegrei, inv. 292866. Valeri, Marmora Phlegraea, pp. 98-102, figs 97-8. 19 Portici, Villa Reale. P. Zancani Montuoro, ‘Repliche romane di una statua fidiaca’, Bolletino Communale, 61 (1933), pp. 25-58, no. 2, figs 4-6, pl. I; Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 8894, at p. 89, note 422 (‘Kopie H’); Valeri, Marmora Phlegraea, p. 102. 20 The right arm of the statue ‘Baiae II’ (Fig. 3, right panel; see above, note 15) held a cornucopia. The latter is not only an attribute of Aphrodite, but rather is – in many cases – carried by female mem-

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opulent villas on the Gulf of Naples, commissioned a copy of the Tyrant Slayers (Harmodios and Aristogeiton). Outside Rome and Campania full-scale copies have only been found in a few places. One of those places is the ancient city of Caesarea Mauretaniae, the present-day Cherchel in Algeria. The city was founded in 25 BC by Juba II, the newly proclaimed King.21 The Numidian prince, who had been raised and educated at the imperial court in Rome, was installed by Augustus as King of Mauretania. Augustus had also arranged the wedding of Juba II and Cleopatra Selene.22 The numerous sculptural works of exquisite quality document the keen interest of the royal couple in art, and show that they had the means to bring first-rate sculptors to Caesarea. They adorned the town and their palace with fine statuary comparable in quality to the best masterpieces of Rome and Campania. Among these works are the twin female figures referred to as ‘Demeter’.23 The workmanship of the figures is so precise that it is hard to tell the statues apart (Fig. 2. 4). The lesson to be learned here is simple: if in Juba’s time duplication had been considered inferior, he would never have commissioned this pair of statues, let alone displayed them together in his palace. The ability to create exact replicas must, on the contrary, have been considered to be a consummate artistic skill. The juxtaposition of the Baiae casts and their cognate Roman copies makes us very aware of another aspect that is equally important. In spite of the mechanical replication of the dimensions of the original, each copy is unique due to the individual treatment of details. A glance at the Roman copies of Aristogeiton is enough to convince anyone of this.24

___________

21

22

23

24

bers of the imperial family. The fact that the statue ‘Baiae I’ (Fig. 3, left panel) has a concave surface prepared for inserting a separately sculpted head is a good indicator that this was a portrait figure. M. R.-Alföldi, ‘Die Geschichte des numidischen Königreiches und seiner Nachfolger’, in H. G. Horn and C. Rüger (eds), Die Numider (Bonn, 1979), pp. 43-74; D. W. Roller, The world of Juba II and Kleopatra Selene (New York, 2003); C. Landwehr, ‘Les Portraits de Juba II, Roi de Maurétanie, et de Ptolémée, son fils et successeur’, Revue Archéologique, 43 (2007), pp. 65– 110; Landwehr, Skulpturen, IV: Porträtplastik. Fragmente von Porträt- oder Idealplastik (Mainz am Rhein, 2008), cat. nos 275–80, pls 1-11, and figs 3-7. Cleopatra Selene portrait in Cherchel: Musée inv. S 66. J. Mazard and M. Leglay, Les portraits antiques du Musée St. Gsell d’après les sculptures et les monnaies (Alger, 1958), p. 20, fig. 9; C. Sintes and Y. Rebahi, Algérie antique (Avignon, 2003), p. 53, no. 17 with fig. (Y. Rebahi); Landwehr, Skulpturen, IV: Porträtplastik. Fragmente von Porträt- oder Idealplastik (Mainz am Rhein, 2008), cat. no. 281, pl. 12. Statue I (with head): Cherchel, Musée inv. S 88. Statue II (headless, fitted with a plaster cast of the head of Statue I): Alger, Musée National des Antiquités, inv. 8; Landwehr, Skulpturen, I: Idealplastik. Weibliche Figuren benannt (Berlin, 1993), cat. nos 35-6, pls 48-53. Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, pp. 27-34, fragment of face: cat. no. 1, pls 4, 6; Roman statue copy (Capitoline Museums): pls 5 c, 7 c; separate head in Rome (Capitoline Museums): pls 5 b, 7 b.

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Fig. 2. 4: Cherchel ‘Demeters’. Marble statues. Left: statue I. 25-5 BC. H: 2.075 m. Musée Archéologique, Cherchel; right: Statue II. 25-5 BC. H: (shoulder) 1.8 m. Musée National des Antiquités, Alger.

Fig. 2. 5: Aristogeiton. Left: Baiae cast, h: 21.6 cm; middle: head of statue, c. 50 BC. Marble, h (whole statue): 1.805 m. Capitoline Museums, Rome; right: head. Marble, h: 32.5 cm. Capitoline Museums, Rome.

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Fig. 2. 6: Sciarra Amazon. Upper left: Baiae cast with the right breast and close-ups of the corresponding parts of the Roman copies; upper right: Copenhagen copy, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek; lower left: Tivoli copy, Villa Adriana, Antiquario; lower right: Berlin copy, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

The head of the statue in Rome (Fig. 2. 5 middle) is the more accurate portrayal of the features of the original (Fig. 2. 5 left). However, the full cheeks of this copy make the figure appear younger. The opposite effect is evident in the copy of the separate head in Rome (Fig. 2. 5 right): due to the sunken cheeks here Aristogeiton looks older and the expression is quite different. We can make similar comparisons for the Amazons. It is interesting to compare the Baiae cast of the right breast of the Sciarra Amazon (Fig. 2. 6, upper left panel) and the breasts of the copies in Copenhagen, Tivoli and Berlin.25 The sculp-

___________ 25 Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, Sciarra Amazon (see above, note 7), right breast: cat. no. 29, pl. 26; Copenhagen copy (Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek): pl. 27 b; Tivoli copy (Villa Adriana, Antiquario): pl. 27 d; Berlin copy (Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz): pl. 27 c.

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Fig. 2. 7: Mattei Amazon. Baiae cast with a segment of the leather strap of the quiver and close-ups of the corresponding parts of the Roman copies; upper left: Baiae cast, h: 8.8 cm; upper right: Trier copy, Landesmuseum; lower left: Capitoline copy, Capitoline Museums, Rome; lower right: Tivoli copy, Villa Adriana, Museo.

tor of the Copenhagen copy (Fig. 2. 6, upper right panel) has sensuously rendered the breast as fuller and firmer with a visible nipple. The folds of the chiton are richer and more accentuated. In contrast, the Tivoli and Berlin copies (Fig. 2. 6, lower left and lower right panels, respectively) have sagging breasts. The material of the chiton appears very thin and there are fewer folds. The copies differ significantly in the portrayal of details, as can be seen in juxtapositions of the small fragment of the cast of the Mattei Amazon with the

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corresponding parts of the copies. In the Baiae fragment some folds of the garment and the leather strap of the quiver are preserved (Fig. 2. 7, upper left panel).26 The Capitoline copy (Fig. 2. 7, lower left panel), a work of the Augustan period, authentically reports the plasticity of the drapery and the studs on the leather strap. The Tivoli (Villa Hadriana) copy (Fig. 2. 7, lower right panel) leaves out the studs and the folds of the garment are flat. The statue in Trier (Fig. 2. 7, upper right panel), the Fig. 2. 8: Tiber Apollo. Left: Tiber copy, Antolatest of the three and attributable to nine period. Marble, h: 2.04 m. Museo Naziothe Antonine period, includes the nale, Palazzo Massimo, Rome; right: Cherchel studs. They are, however, not ren- copy, Antonine period. Marble, h: 2.04 m. Mudered as knobs but rather as circles sée Archéologique, Cherchel. scratched into the surface of the marble. The garment has greater relief than the Villa Hadriana copy and the treatment of the drapery is completely different from the Capitoline copy. All of the Roman statues mentioned above are true-to-scale copies executed by taking measurements with the help of a pointing machine and all of them are sculptural works of excellent quality. Through juxtaposition and careful comparison of the copies we can obtain a reliable picture of the composition and dimensions, and gather detailed information on the original. But each of the examples has its own unique character and stylistic qualities, which allow us to date the Roman work. This is paradoxical, since the Roman craftsmen were perfectly able to imitate the style of the original had they wanted to. Let me jump once again to Cherchel and its rich collection of statuary. Fullscale copies were not just made during the era of the Numidian Kings, but well into the second century AD. The Tiber Apollo is one of these works.27 The original and the copy found in the River Tiber (Fig. 2. 8, left panel) probably

___________ 26 Landwehr, Gipsabgüsse Baiae, Mattei Amazon (see above, note 10), fragment of drapery and quiver: cat. no. 34, pl. 32 b; Roman copy (Capitoline Museums): pl. 32 c; Tivoli copy (Villa Adriana, Antiquario): pl. 33 c; Trier copy (Landesmuseum): pl. 33 d. 27 ‘Tiber Apollo’ type. Landwehr, Skulpturen, II: Idealplastik. Männliche Figuren (Mainz am Rhein, 2000), pp. 1–12; Roman copy (Museo Nazionale, Palazzo Massimo, inv. 608): suppl. 1–3, 4c, 5c, 6c, 7c and 8c; Cherchel copy (Musée, inv. S 30): cat. no. 67, pl. 1–7, suppl. 4d, 5d, 6d, 7d and 8d.

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Fig. 2. 9: Tiber Apollo. Details of Fig. 2. 8. Left: Tiber copy, Museo Nazionale, Palazzo Massimo, Rome; right: Cherchel copy, Musée Archéologique, Cherchel.

held a laurel branch in the left hand. The statue in Cherchel (Fig. 2. 8, right) is leaning on a large laurel tree. This appears to be a variant of the original. Both copies originated in the Antonine period. A conspicuous feature of the figure is the flat, boyish anatomy of the chest and abdomen that is well preserved in the Cherchel copy. The back of the statue forms a surprising contrast, the well-developed musculature is that of a mature man. For full-scale copies the rendering of the shoulder length tresses of hair in these two sculptures is remarkably different. The Tiber copy (Fig. 2. 9, left panel) has wild, tangled locks. In contrast, the tresses of the Cherchel Apollo (Fig. 2. 9, right panel) are arranged very neatly next to one another. They look as if they were extruded and their texture reminds us of the icing used to decorate a cake. The two copies share stylistic characteristics of the Antonine age. Beyond this, the Cherchel copy reveals the personal style of the Cherchel sculptor – unmistakable in the unique portrayal of the long locks. Thinking it unlikely that two sculptors of the same artistic stature worked in Caesarea at the same time, I was prompted to look for other works by the same artisan. A portrait bust of a noble lady of Cherchel may be one of them (Fig. 2. 10, left panel).28 Both the Apollo (Fig. 2. 10, right panel) and the portrait

___________ 28 Cherchel, Musée inv. S 36. C. Sintes and Y. Rebahi, Algérie antique (Avignon, 2003), p. 34, no. 31

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Fig. 2. 10: Left: Portrait bust of a noblewoman. Antonine period. Marble, h: 81 cm. Musée Archéologique, Cherchel; right: Tiber Apollo, Cherchel (detail of Fig. 2. 8).

bust are works of exceptional quality, and both originated in Caesarea in the Antonine period. Among the common features are the extruded locks – the signature of the ‘Apollo sculptor’. This is, by the way, not the only example in Cherchel of a pair of works – a copy and a portrait – executed in the same high quality by the same artisan. We have here more evidence that full-scale copies were highly esteemed. It is definitely not the case that portraits were created by accomplished and elite sculptors, while the production of copies was relegated to inferior craftsmen. By this somewhat roundabout argument I want to make a case for the place occupied by copies in the Roman scale of artistic values. On the one hand, the Roman artists used complicated and expensive techniques to make full-scale copies of Greek and – in the case of the Tiber Apollo – even Roman masterpieces. On the other hand, they made sure that their work bore the stamp of their own era. Perhaps it is just this seemingly paradoxical nature – the unification of two works of art in one statue – that made them so fascinating

___________ with fig. (F. Baratte); Landwehr, Skulpturen, IV: Porträtplastik. Fragmente von Porträt- oder Idealplastik (Mainz am Rhein, 2008), cat. no. 310, pls 46, 48 and 49.

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to the Roman connoisseur.29 We should once and for all revise our notion that the Roman copies are mere ‘second class’ reproductions.

Frequently cited literature C. Landwehr, [=Hees-Landwehr, C. von], Griechische Meisterwerke in römischen Abgüssen, exh. cat. Freiburg and Frankfurt (Frankfurt, 1982) C. Landwehr, Die antiken Gipsabgüsse aus Baiae, Archäologische Forschungen, 14 (Berlin, 1985) C. Landwehr, Die römischen Skulpturen von Caesarea Mauretaniae, 4 vols (Berlin and Mainz am Rhein, 1993–2008) C. Valeri, Marmora Phlegraea (Rome, 2005)

___________ 29 cf. Landwehr, Skulpturen, II: Idealplastik. Männliche Figuren (Mainz am Rhein, 2000), pp. 1218, cat. no. 68 (‘Omphalos’ Apollo), pl. 8; see especially pp. 13-14.

The Renaissance

Plaster and Plaster Casts in Renaissance Italy ECKART MARCHAND

The sixteenth-century casts by Primaticcio and Leone Leoni spring to one’s mind when mention is made of plaster casts from the Italian Renaissance.1 As reproductions in plaster of the most famous sculptures of ancient Rome they are the direct predecessors of millions of reproductive casts, mostly made during the last two centuries. In hundreds of collections all over Europe, America and beyond they conveyed and confirmed a western canon of art. In Renaissance Italy reproductive plaster casts of ancient works of art were a new and, especially in the fifteenth century, rare phenomenon that had developed in response to a new interest in the material remains of classical antiquity. As such they might appear as a paradigmatic ‘Renaissance’ phenomenon, that is, as a part of the wider project of the revival of classical antiquity. For Primaticcio’s casts, this assessment is certainly not wrong, but when it comes to the use of plaster and plaster casts in the Renaissance in general, it is at best highly selective. The present article aims to demonstrate that plaster cast making in the Renaissance was closely related to a wider range of practices some of which had direct medieval traditions, and some of which did not relate to the project of a classical revival. It was because of these traditions and practices that the medium and technique were available to sixteenthcentury artists as a means of reproduction. The discussion will start with an evaluation of medieval traditions of plaster sculpture. Given the variety of different types of plaster used in the period, a clarification of the terminology is needed. ‘Plaster’ in this article is used as the generic term for the material, regardless of its chemical composition. ‘Stucco’, though often employed in the secondary literature to describe plaster made of lime, will denote plasterwork in architectural contexts, where it decorates architecture or permanent furnishings, such as choir screens and pulpits. Such architectural plaster decorations are more often made of lime rather than gesso, but the term ‘stucco’, as it is used here, is not intended to indicate a material distinction.2

___________ 1 2

For Primaticcio’s casts see the contribution by Walter Cupperi in this volume, pp.81-98. I follow largely the argument of C. Gapper, ‘What is Stucco? English Interpretations of an Italian Term’, Architectural History, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, 42 (1999), pp. 333-44; cf. Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, pp. 194-6.

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Medieval Stucco Decorations Freestanding sculpture in the Middle Ages was extremely rare. Relief was the dominant mode while sculptures in the round were usually located in niches and other architectural settings, such as facades or portals, where they are largely conceived for frontal viewing. Sculpture made of plaster is no exception and therefore constitutes stucco work as defined above. Such stucco decorations can be found across Europe of the highest quality from the sixth to the fourteenth century.3 Apart from window surrounds and in courtyards,4 it usually survives on the inside of buildings – not surprisingly, given the relative vulnerability of the material when exposed to the elements. In Italy, the most striking medieval stucco relief decoration is that of the so-called Tempietto Langobardo at Cividale in Friuli (Fig 3. 1), consisting of six over-life size figures of unidentified female saints and extensive architectural decorations.5 There are no documentary sources for this group and comparative material is rare. Consequently attempts to date the ensemble fluctuate between the eighth and tenth century. Other important Italian examples include the high altar tabernacle in S. Ambrogio in Milan, that can be dated confidently around 972.6 While in Cividale (North Italy), Disentis7 and Müstair8 (both Switzerland) these stucco decorations formed complete decorative systems for architectural spaces such as chapels (Cividale, Müstair) or a courtyard (Disentis), in other cases individual stone monuments, such as choir screens (Halberstadt; Pls 20. B and C; and Hildesheim)9, tabernacles (S. Ambrogio, Milan)10 and pulpits

___________ 3

4 5 6 7

8 9

For a general introduction to medieval stucco see: A. Segagni Malacart, ‘Stucco’, in Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana (ed.), Enciclopedia dell’arte medievale, 12 vols (Rome, 1991–2002), XI (2000), pp. 1-18. For Italy: Poeschke, Skulptur des Mittelalters in Italien, I, Romanik (1998), pp. 22-7; C. Gaberscek, ‘L’Alto Medioevo’, in M. Buora (ed.), La Scultura in Friuli, I, Dall’Epoca Romana al Gotico, (Pordenone, 1983), pp. 189-259. For Germany: Grzimek, Deutsche Stuckplastik 800 bis 1300; H. Wilm, Gotische Tonplastik in Deutschland (Augsburg, 1929), pp. 3940; K. Niehr, Die mitteldeutsche Skulptur der ersten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts (Weinheim, 1992), pp. 55-75 et passim; Exner, ‘La sculpture en stuc’. For stucco window surrounds see e.g. Exner, ‘La sculpture en stuc’, p. 327. Today known as the Oratorio di Santa Maria in Valle; see Poeschke, Skulptur des Mittelalters in Italien, I, Romanik (1998), pp. 22-3. Exner, ‘La sculpture en stuc’, p. 332. For the monastery of St. Martin in Disentis see: W. Studer, ‘Technisch-Kunsthandwerkliche und Künstlerische Indikatoren der Frühbyzantinischen Ausstattung von Disentis’, in Sapin (ed.), Stucs et décors, pp. 143-65. For the church of the monastery of St. John at Müstair see: C. Sapin in idem (ed.), Le Stuc, pp. 192, 214-16. For the choir screens in the Church of Our Lady at Halberstadt see the discussion by Daniela and Thorsten Arnold and Elisabeth Rüber-Schütte in this volume, pp. 369-78, see also S. B. Hoh-

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Fig. 3. 1: Six female saints, Tempietto Langobardo at Cividale, Friuli. Stucco decoration, eighth to tenth century.

(Moscufo and Cugnoli, both southern Italy11), tomb monuments (Quedlinburg),12 and, in the case of Gernrode, a holy sepulchre, are decorated in this technique and material. The ninth-century figure of Charlemagne in Müstair forms a rare example of a freestanding, if wall mounted sculpture.13 In

___________

10 11

12

13

mann, Die Halberstädter Chorschranken: Ein Hauptwerk der niedersächsischen Kunst um 1200 (Berlin, 2000). For Gernrode see Grzimek, Deutsche Stuckplastik 800 bis 1300, pp. 47-50, for the choir screens in St. Michael at Hildesheim see e.g. K. Niehr, Die mitteldeutsche Skulptur der ersten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts (Weinheim, 1992), pp. 271-5. Poeschke, Die Skulptur des Mittelalters, p. 23. For the pulpits in the churches of St. Maria del Lago in Moscufo (1159) and S. Stefano in Cugnoli (1166) see F. Gandolfo, ‘L’uso dei modelli in una bottega di stuccatori abruzzesi alla metà del XII secolo’, in Sapin (ed.), Stucs et décors, p. 319-29. For the tomb monuments in the Collegiate Church of Quedlinburg, see: A. Middeldorf Kosegarten, ‘“Die hässlichen Äbtissinen”: Versuch über die frühen Grabmäler in Quedlinburg’, Zeitschrift des Deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissensschaft, 56-57 (2002–2003), pp. 9-47. C. Sapin in idem (ed.), Le Stuc, 217; J. Gantner and A. Reinle, Kunstgeschichte der Schweiz, I, pp. 220-3.

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northern Germany this stucco tradition can be traced into the early fifteenth century; Italian works from the thirteenth and fourteenth century on the other hand seem very thinly spread indeed.14 The choice of material can often be related to the local occurrence of the relevant raw material and/or absence of other stone and marble.15 No documentary evidence about the workshops survives, but the high quality of design and level of technical skill make it unlikely that these were entirely disconnected local traditions. Regarding Cividale and Disentis, it has been argued that these ensembles were the work of travelling workshops from Byzantium.16 The majority of the decorations appear to be modelled and/or carved by hand, rather than cast. Artists may have followed pattern books, in some cases also three-dimensional models. There is though, occasional evidence, for example, at Gernrode and Hildesheim, that moulding techniques had been used. In the fourteenth century in Germany entire figures were cast using a mould for the front and a second one for the back.17 In other cases, individual elements, such as faces or repeat patterns were cast or squeezed on the ground into moulds (made out of wood, clay, or simply sand), and then attached to the supporting wall or plastered stone uprights with the help of iron pins. Alternatively, the wet plaster may have been applied to the wall and then moulded by pressing a wooden form against it.18 In both cases, the plaster would have been re-worked afterwards, either modelled while still damp or carved when dry. As mentioned above, during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries stucco work in Italy became an increasingly rare phenomenon. At this time, from the twelfth century onwards, in the stone-less planes of the river Po (including Piedmont, the Emilia Romagna and Lombardy), a strong tradition of architectural terracotta decorations developed.19 In comparison to stucco, terracotta

___________ 14 See C. Nenci, ‘Gli stucchi italiani: Nuove ricerche su alcune opere in stucco dell’Abruzzo’, in Sapin (ed.), Stucs et décors, pp. 269-83, at 270-1. 15 A typical example is the “high-temperature” plaster local to the area of the German Oberharz; see the contribution by Arnold, Arnold and Rüber-Schütte in this volume, p. 373. 16 See e.g. C. Gaberscek, ‘L’Alto Medioevo’ in B. Buora (ed.), La Scultura in Friuli, I, Dall’epoca romana al gotico, (Pordenone, 1983), pp. 189-259; esp. pp. 203-4. For Disentis see W. Studer, ‘Technisch-Kunsthandwerkliche und Künstlerische Indikatoren der Frühbyzantinischen Ausstattung von Disentis’, in Sapin (ed.), Stucs et Décors, pp. 143-65. 17 H. Wilm, Gotische Tonplastik in Deutschland (Augsburg, 1929), p. 40; Grzimek, Deutsche Stuckplastik 800 bis 1300, p. 11; Arnold, Arnold und Rüber-Schütte in this volume, pp. 369, 376. 18 Grzimek, Deutsche Stuckplastik 800 bis 1300, pp. 11-12. 19 On Italian Renaissance terracotta see B. Boucher, ‘Italian Renaissance Terracotta: Artistic Revival or Technological Innovation?’, in B. Boucher et al. (eds), Earth and Fire: Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova, exh. cat., Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Victoria and Albert Museum, London (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2001), pp. 1-31, especially

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had two major advantages. The raw material (clay) was locally available and once fired, the resulting terracotta was resistant to the elements. Bricks were an established building material in these regions and so supply chains, technical expertise and facilities for the firing of clay were readily available. Ornamental terracotta elements could be modelled by hand before firing, repeat patterns produced, much like bricks, using wooden moulds, into which the clay was squeezed or poured. In many cases the clay was then further manipulated, both before firing, when still wet, and afterwards, when carving tools were required.20 This tradition continued well into the fifteenth century when a Renaissance repertoire of forms appeared. It was in late fifteenth-century Milan under Bramante that this technique was directly combined with allantica stucco decorations.21

Renaissance Stucco Decorations In Book Seven of his treatise On the Art of Building Leon Battista Alberti (1452) remarks on the suitability of stucco reliefs for the exterior decoration of temples which he describes as an ancient practice, and in Book Six he discusses how to make such reliefs. Here he mentions the possibility of using cast moulds for this purpose.22 Alberti’s remark followed Vitruvius, though there were also Roman remains that demonstrated the use of this technique in Antiquity. The practice was soon emulated by Renaissance architects and cast and moulded barrel vaults were designed and executed as part of domestic architecture in Rome, Florence and elsewhere; examples being the cast coffering of the barrel vault in the entrance halls of the Palazzo Venezia in Rom (towards the Piazza di Venezia, c. 1465 and occasionally attributed to Alberti; Fig. 3. 2) and Giuliano da Sangallo’s Palazzo Scala in Florence (1473–80) and Palazzo della Rovere in Savona, as well as several of the vaults of private

___________ pp. 2-5 for technique of terracotta production. For the Northern Italian tradition of architectural decoration in terracotta (with further bibliography): R. Rossi Manaresi, ‘Ornamenti architettonici: Decorazioni e sculture in terracotta’, in M. G. Vaccari (ed.), La scultura in terracotta (Florence, 1996), pp. 47-63, especially pp. 50-9 for an extensive discussion of technical issues. A rich collection of photographs of Italian terracotta work is G. Ferrari and C. Ricci, La terracotta e pavimenti in laterizio nell’arte italiana (Milan, 1928), pp. 37-83 (Romanesque terracotta decoration); pp. 85-159 (Gothic terracotta decoration), see especially pp. 93-4 for a repeat pattern (the decoration of the fourteenth-century Abbey of S. Antonio di Ranverso near Turin). 20 See note 19 above. 21 See the discussion of Renaissance stucco decoration below. 22 Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, p. 217; L. B. Alberti, On the Art of Building in Ten Books, transl. by J. Rykwert, N. Leach and R. Tavernor (Cambridge, Mass., 1988), p. 177 (Book VI, chapter 9).

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rooms, including the Cappella del Perdono in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino (c. 1475).23 Bramante’s design of the illusionistic choir of S. Maria presso San Satiro in Milan (1482–94), entirely executed in stucco may reflect these precedents, but as a mainly pictorial conceit it may also have been influenced by Mantegna who from 1465 to 1474 had been working in the Castello di San Giorgio in nearby Mantua on the decoration of the Camera Picta with its all’ antica vault and illusionist oculus. Vasari’s claim that Bramante had invented moulded stucco decoration in the context of his work at New Saint Peter’s (1503–14) is contradicted by the earlier Florentine and Roman evidence.24 The barrel vaulted entrance of the Florentine Palazzo Scala leads into a courtyard that is decorated with figurative stucco reliefs.25 While their position was certainly foreseen by the architect of the palace, Giuliano da Sangallo, the design is generally attributed to Bertoldo di Giovanni and dated in the 1490s. Nothing is known about their execution.26 They are based in design and iconography on ancient sarcophagus reliefs and may thus be seen as distant predecessors of the stucco decorations that appear, next to imitations of newly discovered grotesque paintings, in Raphael’s Vatican Loggias (1518–19). Here the stuccoes form narrative panels of low relief that are based on sarcophagi, rather than the airy designs of the recently discovered stucco decorations in the Domus Aurea.27 It is only in the Villa Madama,

___________ 23 Clarke, Roman House, pp. 254, 258, 268-9 with figs. 160-1, 170. On the ancient technique of casting and moulding vaults the author refers to J.-P. Adam, Roman Building. Materials and Techniques (London, 1994), pp. 177-91. 24 The first mention of this occurs in the Life of Bramante: “For this work [the choir of NewSt Peter’s] he invented the method of casting vaults in plaster, using wooden moulds carved with his friezes and foliage [...].” “Egli trovò in tal lavoro il modo di buttar le volte con le casse di legno, che intagliate vengano co’ suoi fregi e fogliami di mistura di calce [...].” VasariMilanesi, IV p. 162; my translation. In the context of Giovanni da Udine’s Vita, Vasari returns to Bramante’s achievement, but this time he describes a different technique, mentioning “moulds of clay [terracotta?]” [“nei cavi di terra”] Vasari-Milanesi, VI, p. 552. 25 The barrel vaults of the courtyard in the Palazzo Scala reproduced in Clarke, Roman House, fig. 171 are nineteenth-century replacements; see L. Pellecchia, review of Clarke, Roman House, in Burlington Magazine 148 (2006), pp. 420-1 with further literature. I am indebted to Georgia Clarke for this reference. 26 See Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, p. 217, n. 56; Clarke, Roman House, p. 122, fig. 58; J. D. Draper, Bertoldo di Giovanni: Sculptor of the Medici Household: Critical Reappraisal and Catalogue Raisonné, (Columbia, S. C., and London, 1992), pp. 220-53, on authorship and date: pp. 220-5; on the role of Giuliano da Sangallo, architect of the palace as inventor of the reliefs’ setting: p. 223. For an attribution of both reliefs and architecture to Giuliano da Sangallo, see A. Tönnesmann, Der Palazzo Gondi in Florence (Worms, 1983), pp. 93-8. One of the few other stucco decorations from the late fifteenth century in Florence is the Pollaiuolesque Hercules and Caecus relief in the entrance of the Florentine Palazzo Guicciardini; C. Seymour Jr., Sculpture in Italy: 1400–1500 (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 211, pl. 155 A. 27 The wide range of sources for the stuccoes in the Vatican Loggie has been discussed by Dacos in Dacos and Furlan, Giovanni da Udine, pp. 76-93.

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Fig. 3. 2: Cast vault of entrance hall towards Piazza Venezia, Palazzo Venezia, Rome, 1465.

executed after Raphael’s death by Giovanni da Udine, Giulio Romano and Perino del Vaga, that Roman stucco ceilings emulated the ancient stucco ceilings of the Domus Aurea in terms of their design and iconography.28 Following Vasari’s account, Giovanni da Udine, like Bramante a painter, is generally credited with the rediscovery of the recipe of ancient Roman stucco. The structure of the Vasarian narrative has all the elements of good story telling: confronted with the ancient stucco decorations in the Domus Aurea, Giovanni wanted to develop a similar composition and after a few attempts and gradual improvements he finally came to the “true” ancient recipe, using burned lime to which he added ground marble.29 All evidence confirms Giovanni’s central role in the introduction of grottesques and stucco decorations in the Raphael workshop and there is no reason to doubt that he indeed developed the described recipe.30 As to the consistency of ancient stucco, Giovanni may have turned rather to Vitruvius for advice. In Book Seven

___________ 28 For the stucco decoration of the Villa Madama see ibid., pp. 111-19. 29 Vasari-Milanesi, VI, pp. 552-3. 30 N. Dacos, La découverte de la Domus Aurea et la formation des grotesques à la renaissance (London and Leiden, 1969), pp. 100-1; Dacos in Dacos and Furlan, Giovanni da Udine, pp. 34-5.

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Virtruvius discusses the use of plaster made of lime and ground marble for ceiling decorations.31 The new Roman style of stucco decorations swiftly reached northern Italy, the Sack of Rome (1527) as with so many other Roman developments playing a major role in its dissemination. Perino del Vaga, who had collaborated with Giovanni da Udine at the Villa Madama went to Genoa to work for Andrea Doria and designed stucco decorations in the Palazzo Doria.32 Giulio Romano departed for Mantua and Giovanni da Udine, as well as Jacopo Sansovino, transferred themselves to Venice.33 The publication in 1537 of Sebastiano Serlio’s treatise Tutte le opere dell’architectura, made the designs of ancient and contemporary stucco ceilings accessible for those who had not been to Rome.34 In Padua, the painter and architect Giovanni Maria Falconetto (1468– 1534/5) designed stucco vaults in the new style for the Odeo Cornaro (begun in 1531) and the vault of the Chapel of St. Anthony in the Santo (1533–4). Vasari reports that Falconetto had stayed for twelve years in Rome, a claim that cannot be confirmed, but it is generally accepted that he must have spent some time in the city since he propagated its latest artistic developments.35 The artists who executed the stucco work under Falconetto in the Cappella del Santo in Padua were Tiziano Minio, nicknamed Tiziano Aspetti, and Silvio Cosini, a Florentine artist who had collaborated in Genoa with Perino del Vaga on the Palazzo Doria.36 Independently, Cosini and Minio later produced other works in stucco in Padua; Cosini a relief for the façade of the Monte di Pietà37 and Tiziano Minio, among other works, the altar of the Scuola di San Rocco (1535–36 / Fig. 3. 3). Both sculptors apparently specialized in this

___________ 31 I. D. Rowland and T. Noble Howe (transl.), Vitruvius, Ten Books on Architecture (Cambridge and New York, 1999), pp. 88-90, esp. p. 89 (book 7, chapter 3 Ceilings). 32 E. Parma Armani, Perino del Vaga, L’anello mancante. Studi sul Manierismo (Genoa, 1986), pp. 73-208. 33 For Giovanni da Udine in the Veneto see Furlan in Dacos and Furlan, Giovanni da Udine, pp. 16573. 34 S. Serlio, Tutte le opere dell’architettura (Venice, 1566), pp. 192-9. The fourth book that deals with ceiling decorations was first published in 1537; M. Vène, Bibliographia serliana: Catalogue des éditions imprimées des livres du traité d’architecture de Sebastiano Serlio (1537–1681) (Paris, 2007), pp. 14-16, 180; W. Wolters, Plastische Deckendekorationen des Cinquecento in Venedig und im Veneto (Berlin, 1968), p. 26, 54. 35 S. B. McHam, The Chapel of St. Anthony at the Santo and the Development of Venetian Renaissance Sculpture (Cambridge and New York, 1994), pp. 35, 81-3. 36 E. Parma Armani, Perino del Vaga, L’anello mancante. Studi sul Manierismo (Genoa, 1986), p. 128 with note 103. 37 M. Pizzo, ‘Cosini, Silvio’, in Allgemeines Künstler Lexikon (Munich, 1992–), XXI (1999), pp. 396-7, at p. 396 (the author gives mistakenly 1543 (instead of 1534) as the date for the Monte di Pietà relief); Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, p. 69.

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Fig. 3. 3: Altarpiece with Saints Roche, Barbara and Lucy. Tiziano Minio, 1535–6. Gilded plaster on wood armature, 4.2 x 4.1 x 0.42 m. Museo Civico, Padua (formerly Oratorio di San Rocco).

medium, but to describe them as stuccatori may still be an anachronism. They were trained sculptors, the profession of the stuccatore did not exist as such and Minio would in fact collaborate later in other media with Jacopo Sansovino.38

___________ 38 The use of the term is common in the secondary literature but not used in the sixteenth century; the account book of 1533 of the Santo, for example, only refers to “lavorar de stuccho” or “lavorar de stucchi”; B. Gonzati, La Basilica di S. Antonio di Padova descritta ed illustrata, 2 vols (Padua, 1852–3), I (1852), p. XCVIII, doc. LXXXIX. On Minio’s works in other media see e.g. Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, pp. 165-7. Minio’s other important stucco work was at the Odeo Cornaro where he worked under Falconetto as well as independently; see W. Wolters, ‘Tiziano Minio als Stukkator im Odeo Cornaro zu Padua’, Pantheon, 21 (1963), pp. 20-8, 222-9.

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Minio’s altarpiece in the Scuola di San Rocco is a large architectural ensemble of more than four by four metres with three seemingly freestanding figures of Saints Roche, Barbara and Lucy in niches, six low reliefs in a predella and an attic zone, and rich figural framework. It relates in many ways directly to the recent sculptural decoration of the Chapel of St. Anthony and bears stylistically the imprint of Jacopo Sansovino’s work in the Veneto. But in terms of its combination of architectural and sculptural grandeur and cheap medium it makes one think of ephemeral decorations, such as the facade of Florence cathedral, discussed below, that Sansovino had executed in 1515 for the entry of Leo X. Surprisingly, the choice of material, stipulated by the confraternity in their contract with Minio, has never been discussed.39 Sixteenthcentury stucco altarpieces and sculptures are relatively rare and there does not seem to be a ‘tradition’ that linked the individual examples.40 Instead, in each case the choice of material would have been the result of case specific considerations. With regard to Minio’s altarpiece there is no indication that it was intended to be temporary and, in fact, it remained in situ until 1931 when it was transferred into the local Museo Civico. In addition to the obvious financial savings entailed by the use of plaster, the choice of material could be construed as a gesture of humility, distinguishing between the seat of a confraternity and the marble decorated chapel of the second most important Franciscan saint. In fact, rather than imitating the stucco decoration of the vault of the chapel of St. Anthony the intention may have been to use a material that looked like marble and thus emulate the expensively carved marble reliefs that had recently been installed to decorate the walls of that chapel.41

___________ 39 For the most extensive discussion of the altar see the entry by M. Pizzo in Banzato et al. (eds), Dal Medioevo a Canova, pp. 126-8, no. 51. 40 See for example Alessandro Vittoria’s Zane Altar (c. mid 1560s to 1575) in the Venetian church S. Maria Gloriosa dei Frari. It consisted originally of a large stucco relief of the Assumption of the Virgin, flanked by six stucco figures of saints in increasingly high relief and was crowned by two stucco sibyls. A marble figure of St Jerome above the altar table formed the focus of this altar. The ensemble was largely modified in the middle of the eighteenth century; only two figures of saints, the sibyls and the marble sculpture survive, none in their original position; Finocchi Ghersi, Alessandro Vittoria, pp. 156-64. That these works were among the most important of his output in the 1560s and 70s is discussed by M. Leithe-Jasper, ‘Alessandro Vittoria e la scultura del suo tempo a Venezia’, in A. Bacchi, L. Camerlengo and M. Leithe-Jasper, “La bellissima maniera”: Alessandro Vittoria e la scultura veneta del Cinquecento, exh. cat. Trento 1999 (Trento, 1999), p. 29. Individual plaster sculptures can be found in the second half of the sixteenth century in Florence, Venice and elsewhere, they are usually positioned in defined architectural contexts, such as Vittoria’s Evangelists in the internal facade of S. Giorgio in Venice (1574; Finocchi Ghersi, Alessandro Vittoria, p. 161) or Giambologna’s Charity above a doorway in the retrochoir in the church of Santissima Annunziata in Florence (1578; C. Avery, Giambologna – The Complete Sculpture (Oxford, 1987), pp. 195-6, p. 275, p. 217, no. 179). 41 Technical information about the work is limited and for the purposes of the present article the present author was unable to examine it first hand, but it appears that it is entirely modelled. The

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Four high-relief putti that playfully support the entablature of Minio’s altarpiece are based on similar figures on a famous ancient Roman relief, at the time located in Piazza San Marco and now in the Museo Archeologico Nazionale in Venice.42 They appear to be modelled and are rather variations upon the classical exemplar than strict replicas, but they may nevertheless be seen as an archaeological exercise that would have appealed to the classicizing taste prevalent in the Veneto and in Padua in particular.43

Painters and Plaster While it seems unlikely that there was ever more than an intermittent stucco production in Italy during the late middle ages and early fifteenth century, the existence during this period of a highly evolved terracotta practice meant that in the north some of the required modelling and moulding techniques and skills would have been available. But when it comes to the preparation of the raw material, and its application, modelling and moulding in situ, architectural stucco work and work in plaster in general requires specialist skill that a brick maker or somebody skilled in modelling clay would not necessarily possess. Such skills were readily available, though, throughout the middle ages in painters’ workshops. Painters were well acquainted with the raw materials of different kinds of plaster. The dominant medium for late medieval panel painting, egg-tempera, required a gesso ground, that covered the wooden support. This ground, applied in numerous thin layers, would cover any unevenness of the surface of the wood and later absorb its movements. Only on top of this ground the painter was able to apply paint or gilding with its underlying layer of bole. Elaborate gothic frames formed an intrinsic part of many panel paintings and, like these, they were decorated by the painters who would not only routinely gild them, but also contribute to the architectural design, adding arches, columns and ornaments in gesso. Known as pastiglia this kind of gesso relief work could also be used to render a third dimension to the representation of haloes as well as honorary features such as crowns and sword

___________ core is formed by a substantial wooden armature that is mentioned in documents of 1536. M. Pizzo in Banzato et al., Dal Medioevo a Canova, p. 127. 42 Cf. M. Pizzo in Banzato et al., Dal Medioevo a Canova, p. 127. 43 For a brief sketch of the Paduan milieu and sculptural traditions of the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, see V. Krahn, ‘Riccio’s Formation and Early Career’, in D. Allen and P. Motture (eds), Andrea Riccio: Renaissance Master of Bronze, exh. cat, Frick Collection New York 2008–9 (New York, 2008), pp. 3-14, at pp. 3-7.

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Fig. 3. 4: The Virgin and Child with Ten Saints. Andrea di Bonaiuto da Firenze, c. 1360–70. Tempera on wood, 27.9 x 106 cm. National Gallery, London.

pommels.44 In Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Virgin and Child with Saints (c. 1365 / Fig. 3. 2), now in the National Gallery London, the arches and spandrels of the gallery of saints to either side of the Virgin Mary have been moulded, the gesso columns were then carved to give the appearance of twisted shafts.45 Similarly, the painter would have applied gesso grounds to stone and/or wooden sculpture that was brought to his workshop to be painted. On occasions this may have included the covering of flaws or an enhancement of the sculptural design through gesso application. Many Italian painters in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries also practiced fresco painting. In this technique the practitioner first covers the wall with a rough layer of plaster (arriccio) onto which he sketches his composition. He then applies in patches a layer of fine plaster (intonaco) onto which he paints while it is still wet. Here too, features in actual relief were sometimes applied.46

___________ 44 For the techniques of late medieval/early Renaissance panel painting see J. Dunkerton, S. Foister, D. Gordon and N. Penny, Giotto to Dürer: Early Renaissance Painting in the National Gallery (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1991), pp. 162-82 and 188-92; for a late fourteenthcentury description of gesso grounds and various types of pastiglia work, see Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, pp. 69-76. 45 D. Gordon, ‘Andrea di Bonaiuto’s Painting in the National Gallery and S. Maria Novella: the memory of a church’, Burlington Magazine, 151 (2009), pp. 512-18, at p. 512. 46 It may therefore be significant that one of the few survivals of thirteenth-century northern Italian stucco, a geometric band now in the Museo Civico of Pavia, originally formed the border of a fresco in the church of S. Maria del Popolo, Pavia. It is likely to have been the work of a painter; A. Peroni, Pavia: Musei Civici del Castello Visconteo (Bologna, 1975), pp. 37-8; see also C. Nenci, ‘Gli stucchi Italiani. Nuove ricerche su alcune opere in stucco dell’Abruzzo’, in Sapin (ed.), Stucs et décors, pp. 269-83, at p. 271, n. 6. Cennini discusses the application of lime based plaster for the purposes of murals (Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, pp. 42-50), as well as how to make plaster reliefs on walls, pp. 77-80. This section follows immediately on his discussion of the uses of gesso. See also Exner, ‘La sculpture en stuc’, pp. 324-37, at 327. A fifteenth-century Sienese document states that the painter Andrea di Niccolò di Giacomo was paid on 28 January 1489 for paintwork and gilded stucco in the chapel of the Compagnia della SS. Trinità in his hometown; M. Torriti, ‘Andrea di Niccolò di Giacomo’, in Allgemeines Künstler Lexikon (Munich, 1992–), III (1992), pp. 545-7, at p. 545.

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It is in fact a painter who provides us with the first extensive description of how to work with plaster and make plaster casts. Writing at the end of the fourteenth century in Padua, Cennino Cennini gives not only detailed information about the various uses of plaster in a painter’s workshop he also describes how to cast after life, and to reproduce medals in sulphur. His text also introduces the basics of the piece-mould technique.47 Cennini writes as a practitioner, and it can be safely assumed that the techniques he describes were well-known to him and generally established. Plaster casts of parts of the human body were of great use in painters’ workshops, aiding the practice of ‘life’ drawing at one remove, enhancing the rendering of volume through the subtle manipulation of light and shade, a particular concern for Italian painters since Giotto. Evidence for this use of casts in workshops survives from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards in the form of drawings after casts, workshop inventories and last wills.48 Learning through the study and emulation of exempla, that is, through the study of works by established masters, was also an important part of the training of any Italian painter or sculptor in the fifteenth-century.49 Threedimensional models played a major role – their use was encouraged by Alberti in his treatise On Painting and is documented through many surviving drawings after sculpture.50 Casts would have facilitated this process. The wellknown case of Francesco Squarcione in mid fifteenth-century Padua is too important not to be briefly mentioned. A painter of only moderate skills himself, Squarcione attracted students to his studio with reference to a teaching collection that he had built up on his travels in Italy and abroad. From the sources we can gather that it included casts after works by other masters, ancient and contemporary.51 Squarcione’s collection was outstanding in quantity and scope, but small groups of casts after other artists can be found in many workshop inventories in the Veneto and Florence from the second half of the fifteenth century onwards.52

___________ 47 Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, pp. 127-9; Stone, ‘Antico and the Development of Bronze Casting’, p. 94. 48 Cf. Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, p. 209. 49 Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, pp. 3, 14-15 et passim. 50 L. B. Alberti, On Painting and On Sculpture: The Latin Texts of De Pictura and De Statua, ed. and transl. by C. Grayson (London, 1972), pp. 100-2 (“[...] I prefer you to take as your model a mediocre sculpture rather than an excellent painting”). See L. Syson and D. Thornton, Objects of Virtue: art in Renaissance Italy (London, 2001), pp. 96-8; Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, p. 209, n. 31. 51 For Squarcione and his workshop see R. Lightbown, Mantegna (Oxford, 1986), pp. 15-25. Cf. also Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, pp. 209-10. 52 Cf. Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, p. 207; L. Syson and D. Thornton, Objects of Virtue: art in Renaissance Italy (London, 2001), pp. 95-6; F. Ames-Lewis, The Intellectual Life of the Early Renaissance Artist (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2000), pp. 76, 79-85. Jacopo Sansovino,

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Sculptors’ Use of Plaster Attractive for painters, plaster casts of human limbs were of use to sculptors, too. Indeed, the documentary record points towards the existence of these objects in the workshops of painters and sculptors alike. Their training shared the same emphasis on design and the predominance of the human figure. Additionally, there is enough evidence to suggest that by the later part of the fifteenth century some sculptors had recognized the usefulness of the technique to record their own three-dimensional designs, copying perishable clay or wax models, or completed works that were about to leave the workshop.53 In this context plaster casts could serve similar functions to drawings, or, if reproduced more than once, to prints. For Ghiberti’s workshop, Anna Jolly has argued that the vast array of motifs invented during the work on the Baptistery doors may have been ‘stored’ using plaster casts.54 This may be a compelling conjecture, but in the case of Donatello there are surviving casts after his works that, given the inaccessibility of the originals, are likely to derive from his workshop, such as the head of the Gattamelata in the Mantova Benavides Collection in Padua (Fig. 3. 5).55 Towards the middle of the sixteenth century the production of full-scale plaster casts as well as reproductions in reduced scale increased dramatically. The most frequently reproduced and most widely distributed sculptures were Michelangelo’s allegorical statues from the New Sacristy at San Lorenzo in Florence, of which full-scale plaster casts and small scale reproductions in plaster and terracotta were made early on.56

___________ 53

54 55

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discussed in this article, appears to have owned a substantial collection of casts after ancient and modern artists; Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, I, pp. 233-4, doc. 256. Vasari reports about a bronze relief by Antonio Pollaiuolo that was exported to Spain and plaster casts of which were still in Florentine workshops at his time; Vasari-Milanesi, III, pp. 296-7. For an interpretation of the passage see A. Wright, The Pollaiuolo Brothers: the arts of Florence and Rome (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2005), pp. 324-6, 537; Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, p. 197. A. Jolly, Madonnas by Donatello and his circle, Europäische Hochschulschriften, series 28, CCCXIX (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), p. 18. The provenance of this head can only be traced back to the second half of the sixteenth century, but given the difficulty of taking a cast or making a close copy of the head of the original monument with its towering plinth, it is most likely that it was made between 1447–53, that is, after the bronze was completed and before the monument was erected; M. Pizzo in Donatello e il suo tempo: il bronzetto a Padova nel quattrocento e nel cinquecento, exh. cat. Padua, Museo Civico, 2001 (Milan, 2001), pp. 52-53, no. 3. The author rightly rejects the suggestion that it might reproduce or be an early model as previously discussed by B. Candida, I calchi rinascimentali della collezione Mantova Benavides nel Museo del Liviano a Padova (Padua, 1967), p. 84. See also L. Cavazzini, in A. Bacchi and L. Giacomelli (eds), Rinascimento e passione per l’antico: Andrea Riccio e il suo tempo (Trento, 2008), pp. 228-31. For other reproductions that may relate to Donatello’s workshop see Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, pp. 200-7. See e.g. the collection of Alessandro Vittoria, V. J. Avery, ‘Alessandro Vittoria collezionista’, in A. Bacchi, L. Camerlengo and M. Leithe-Jasper (eds), “La bellissima maniera”: Alessandro

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Painters and sculptors also extended their services to clients, humanists and early collectors in order to reproduce and circulate carved gems, or satisfy the demand for authentic images of famous men from antiquity through casts after coins, medals or even heads, from the fifteenth century onwards.57 An interesting example that again situates the early use of plaster casts in the painter’s workshop is Botticelli’s Portrait of a Man holding a medal of Cosimo de’Medici (1474–5) where the medal held by the sitter of this tempera panel painting is a gilded plaster cast applied onto a raised wooden disk left by the carver of the wooden panel.58

Fig. 3. 5: Head of Gattamelata, after (and by?) Donatello, 1447–53?. Plaster cast, h: 24 cm. Mantova Benavides Collection, Museo di Scienze Archeologiche e d’Arte, University of Padua.

Donatello and the Virgin and Child Relief Another boost to the use of plaster and plaster casts in the sculptors’ workshops came in Florence towards the beginning of the fifteenth century through a new demand for devotional reliefs of the Virgin and Child for domestic interiors.59

___________ Vittoria e la scultura veneta del Cinquecento, exh. cat. Trento 1999 (Trento, 1999), pp. 141-52, at pp. 148-9. Two large scale reproductions made by Egnazio Danti in 1570 survive in the Accademia di Belle Arti in Perugia, D. Zikos, in C. Davis and B. Paolozzi Strozzi, I grandi bronzi del battistero: L’arte di Vincenzo Danti, discepolo di Michelangelo (Florence, 2008), pp. 324-235. 57 As mentioned above, already Cennino Cennini describes how to make sulphur casts of medals, using clay or plaster moulds, an example for the actual use of a plaster cast in this context see Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief’, pp. 212-13. 58 R. Lightbown, Sandro Botticelli: Life and Work (New York et al., 1989), pp. 54-7. 59 The literature on the Virgin and Child reliefs is extensive. For a substantial review of it, that also pushes the debate forward, see S. B. McHam, ‘Now and Then: Recovering a Sense of Different Values’, in Cooper and Leino (eds), Depth of Field, pp. 305-50, at 309-45.

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In the course of the century the custom also spread to parts of northern Italy.60 Donatello had a significant impact on such designs, both in terms of the naturalistic rendering of the intimate mother and child relation, but also in his development of a very shallow relief. The reliefs survive in marble, stone, bronze, terracotta, cartapesta (an early type of papier maché) and plaster, the vast majority being reproductions in the latter three media that were the materially cheapest. Some reproductions can be traced back to marble originals, but in other cases, such as the Verona Madonna (Fig. 3. 6), the prototype may have been a clay model, made solely to be reproduced.61 Fig. 3. 6: The Virgin and Child (Verona The literature on these works has Madonna). Donatello, c. 1450–75. Plaster cast, for long been troubled by issues of h: 95.3 cm. The Victoria and Albert Museum, London. attribution, which are particularly difficult, given the techniques of reproduction involved.62 While many works are casts, there are also copies, or variants that were modelled by hand. These in their turn may have been reproduced and started off new lines of cast copies. If casts can differ from their prototype, for example through deliberate changes to the mould or a reworking once the cast has been taken out of its mould, copies modelled by hand may also differ from their prototypes in size, style and individual details while still closely following the prototype. Finally, the reproductions were usually painted, fitted into frames or tabernacles and thus personalized. The record book (Ricordanze) of the painter Neri di Bicci provides us with over fifty cases of reliefs cast in plaster that passed through his workshop for these purposes and were apparently sold by him.63 In most cases

___________ 60 M. Pizzo, in Banzato et al. (eds), Dal Medioevo a Canova, p. 100, cat. no. 23; Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, I, p. 100. 61 A. Jolly, Madonnas by Donatello and his circle, Europäische Hochschulschriften, series 28, CCCXIX (Frankfurt am Main, 1998), p. 54. 62 See note 59 above. 63 G. Gentilini, ‘Desiderio in the Workshop: masters and pupils, works and clients mentioned in

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he would receive the casts from a sculptor, including Desiderio da Settignano whose workshop was across the road and with whom he collaborated regularly. In other recorded instances painters like Neri made themselves casts of works that were passing through their workshops. Neri also recorded the case of a haberdasher who bought fifteen reliefs from him, obviously to sell them on in his shop.64 The demand for these works has been debated in the literature since the 1980s.65 The mechanisms of the market, the personalization of the individual casts through paint and framing, as well as the existence of series after lost prototypes, all suggest that authorship or the recording of a specific artistic design were not the main issue. The small range of variations in the iconography of these images that mostly derive from the Byzantine type of the Glycophilousa,66 suggest rather that closeness to an effective prototype was important. In this context the reproduction in a cheap material of an established design would have been a safe modus operandi for the maker and one that, through lower prices, would have allowed him to sell to a wider market. Still, this did not stop wealthy families like the Medici from owning a good number of such works.67 In the 1492 inventory of the Medici family’s country properties, made after the death of Lorenzo (the Magnificent), many of these objects are mentioned without any indication of authorship and they

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the documentation and sources’, in M. Bormand, B. Paolozzi Strozzi and N. Penny (eds), Desiderio da Settignano: Sculptor of Renaissance Florence, exh. cat. Paris, Louvre, 2006–7 and Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2007 (Washington, 2007), pp. 25-48, at pp. 36-7; see also the extensive discussion in A. Thomas, The Painter’s Practice in Renaissance Tuscany (Cambridge and New York, 1995), pp. 59-62, esp. p. 59; and M. Holmes, ‘Copying Practices and Marketing Strategies in a Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painter’s Workshop’, in S. J. Campbell and S. J. Milner (eds), Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City (London and New York, 2004), pp. 38-74. G. Gentilini, ‘Desiderio in the Workshop: Masters and Pupils, Works and Clients Mentioned in the Documentation and Sources’, in M. Bormand, B. Paolozzi Strozzi and N. Penny (eds), Desiderio da Settignano: Sculptor of Renaissance Florence, exh. cat. Paris, Louvre, 2006–7, Washington, National Gallery of Art, 2007 (Washington, 2007), pp. 25-48, at p. 37. Among the first to discuss the function of these reliefs was G. Passavant, ‘Zu einigen toskanischen Terrakotta Madonnen’, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes in Florenz, 31 (1987), pp. 196-236. The type is otherwise known as the ‘Tender Mother’ and is characterized by the close proximity of the child’s face to that of the mother, S. B. McHam, ‘Now and Then: Recovering a Sense of Different Values’, in Cooper and Leino (eds), Depth of Field, pp. 305-50, at pp. 333-4. On the market value of the Madonna and Child reliefs sold by the workshop of Neri di Bicci, see M. Holmes, ‘Copying Practices and Marketing Strategies in a Fifteenth-Century Florentine Painter’s Workshop’, in S. J. Campbell and S. J. Milner (eds), Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City (London and New York, 2004), pp. 38-74, at p. 71, n. 57. The cheapest plaster cast relief of the Virgin and Child was sold for 1.5 Lire 8 soldi.

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are usually valued at around two to ten Lire.68 None of them, though, is mentioned in the Medici Palace itself. By contrast in Lorenzo’s bedchamber, a splendidly decorated room in which he would also receive guests, the inventory lists a marble Madonna, attributed to Donatello and estimated at a princely twenty-five florins.69 This suggests a differentiation between display of objects for primarily devotional purposes and display to signify artistic judgment and social status. Donatello’s decisive role in the development of the Virgin and Child reliefs and the techniques of their reproduction has been discussed above. His experimental approach to, and employment of, casting techniques is also apparent in the case of his freestanding bronze group of Judith and Holofernes. Here we have strong evidence that the legs of the figure of Holofernes are cast after life, while for the heroine’s veil the sculptor used actual fabric dipped in plaster, rather than modelling in wax or clay.70 But Donatello’s awareness of the issues related to the reproduction of works of art becomes especially apparent in another relief of the Virgin and Child. Donatello’s doctor, Giovanni Chellini, noted on 27 August 1456 that the sculptor had given him a bronze roundel in lieu of payment for a cure of an illness and that the back of the plate was deliberately hollow in order to allow him to reproduce the design by casting molten glass into it.71 Thus Donatello effectively licensed Chellini to reproduce his work. Glass might appear as a rather extravagant choice for a reproduction, while plaster might appear much more practical. But reliefs of the Virgin and Child in plaster were a recognizable, easily available and, more over inexpensive, genre, that also required further intervention by a painter. Casting the work in glass on the other hand would produce an unusual work in a relatively precious medium, the transparency of which could have been read as a metaphor for the immaculacy of the Virgin. The patron would have recognized this as an act of highly estimated intellectual invention (invenzione), and the value and technical skill

___________ 68 E.g., M. Spallanzani and G. Gaeta Bertelà (eds), Libro d’inventario dei beni di Lorenzo il Magnifico (Florence, 1992), p. 174 [c 83v] ‘Uno quadro di gesso con una Vergine Maria di rilievo con cornicie messe d’oro atorno f.-.10’ and ibid. 218 [c. 105v.] ‘Una Nostra Donna di gesso f.-.5’. 69 Ibid. p. 26 [c.14] ‘Uno colmo di legname intagliato e messo d’oro, alto br. 4 ½, largho br. 2 ½, entrovi una Nostra Donna di marmo f.25.’ 70 For possible casting techniques of the Judith and Holofernes group see R. E. Stone, ‘A New Interpretation of the Casting of Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes’, in D. Pincus (ed.), Small Bronzes in the Renaissance, Studies in the History of Art 62 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2001), pp. 55-70; the author also refers to texts that imply the use of indirect casting. 71 The most recent discussion of this work and its role in the relationship between Donatello and Chellini is P. Rubin, Images and Identity in Fifteenth-Century Florence (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2007), pp. 58-61.

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required by the reproductive medium would also have set the stage for discussions of Donatello’s design. Having said this, two plaster casts of the Chellini Madonna that may date from the fifteenth century survive in Italian collections while the first documented glass reproductions were made in 1976 in the Victoria and Albert Museum.72

Jacopo Sansovino and Ephemeral Sculpture The sixteenth century saw the development of new tasks such as colossal, ephemeral and garden sculpture, as well as new practices in the design process, especially the introduction of full-scale models. Among other artists, the Florentine sculptor Jacopo Sansovino deserves mention because of his inventive use of the medium in different techniques and contexts. Sansovino was also the last sculptors to make a major contribution to the genre of the Virgin and Child relief and their multiple production. While these works date from the middle of the sixteenth century and were made when he was living and working in Venice, they relate closely to the earlier Florentine tradition, and especially to Donatello.73 Jacopo trained in Florence with Andrea Sansovino whose surname he adopted. There, he would have learned carving marble and modelling. Indeed, his earliest surviving works are terracotta sculptures, including a small-scale copy of the Spinario that gives an early indication of his classical interests.74 Around 1506 he went to Rome where, one year later, he modelled a smallscale wax copy of the recently unearthed Laocoön. The model attracted high claim and was acquired by the Venetian Cardinal Domenico Grimani and cast in bronze in three sections. According to the sources, this bronze measured half a braccio (29 cm) in height; it does not survive.75 Shortly after this episode, Pietro Aretino commissioned Sansovino on behalf of the Marquis of Mantua to make another copy apparently about one braccio (58 cm) tall. Aretino refers to it as being of plaster, without any reference to the technique,

___________ 72 A. F. Radcliffe, in A. P. Darr and G. Bonsanti (eds), Donatello e i suoi: Scultura fiorentina del primo Rinascimento; exh. cat., Florence 1986 (Detroit et al., 1986), pp. 160-2. 73 One such relief in plaster on wood, from around 1550 and now in the Museo Civico in Vicenza was apparently intended as a final work. Roughly around the same time he produced several Virgin and Child reliefs in cartapesta, most of which are reproductions based on two prototypes by the artist. Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, I, pp. 100-11; II, pp. 336, cat 28 (the stucco relief); 346-51, cat. no. 44-56 (the cartapesta reliefs). 74 Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, I, p. 6; II, p. 313, cat. no. 1. 75 Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, II, p. 361, cat. no. 83.

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whether it was cast (after a second wax or clay model) or modelled.76 The sources are equally silent about the final finish of the work, whether it was left white, to resemble the appearance of the original or painted in bronze, to look like a replica in a worthy and durable medium. In 1515, for the ceremonial entry of Pope Leo X to his hometown Florence, Sansovino, who had returned there in 1510, was commissioned to produce a temporary facade for Florence Cathedral, made of wood, plaster and paint. Here the sculptor collaborated with the painter Andrea del Sarto and the architect Giuliano da Sangallo. Sansovino provided sculptures and reliefs in plaster some of which were apparently painted to look like bronzes, while, in general, the facade was painted white to look like marble.77 John PopeHennessy identified a relief of Susanna and the Elders in the Victoria and Albert Museum as part of this design, but the small size of the object seems to rule this out.78 Its medium and technique (cloth and plaster modelled on wood), though, are likely to be similar to that of the lost temporary façade. Another, much later, instance for the use of plaster for ephemeral sculpture in Florence is that of the catafalque for the exequies of Michelangelo in San Lorenzo in 1564. The elaborate structure was decorated with reliefs and allegorical sculptures, made of plaster by the city’s leading sculptors. Here, as for the entry in 1514, the temporary nature of the works, time pressure and the resemblance to marble may have been the main reasons for the choice of plaster. Again, nothing survives of the decoration of the catafalque, and in fact the sculptures were not intended to last. Instead, there had been plans to cast them in bronze. In the event, the plaster works were stored away, and having deteriorated during storage they were later given away or simply discarded.79 But when Florentine sculptors made large-scale ephemeral monuments that were freestanding they rather used clay. For the 1515 entry of Leo X Sansovino

___________ 76 In his letter, Aretino mentions that “according to the judgement of the Pope and all sculptors of Rome a better thing had never been made” (“[...] a giuditio del papa e di tutti gli scultori de Roma, non fu mai la meglio cosa ritratta [...]”), quoted after Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, I, p. 183, doc. 55. It seems likely, as Boucher argues (ibid. II, p. 361, cat. no. 84), that this was a contraction of the actual events, relating the response caused by the initial wax model to the (larger) plaster that was sent to Mantua. 77 Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, I, pp. 22-3, pp. 358-60, cat. nos 74, 81; J. Shearman, ‘The Florentine entrata of Leo X, 1515’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 38 (1975), pp. 136-54, at p. 147. 78 Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, II, pp. 358, 364, no. 94; the relief measures 55.9 x 128 cm. 79 On the sculptures of Michelangelo’s catafalque and their fate after the event, see R. and M. Wittkower, in idem (eds), The Divine Michelangelo: The Florentine academy’s homage on his death in 1564: A facsimile edition of exequie del divino Michelagnolo Buonarroti Florence 1564 (London, 1964), pp. 26-7.

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also designed a colossal equestrian monument on a brick plinth, representing a riderless horse rearing above a prostrate figure; it stood eleven metres tall in Piazza Santa Maria Novella. This monument was gilded and the choice of clay rather than plaster is significant, as clay lends itself more easily to modelling and gilding than plaster.80 An overlife-size Hercules by Baccio Bandinelli in the Loggia dei Lanzi was also made of clay, and painted to look like bronze.81 If ephemeral colossal sculpture was formed in clay, permanent large-scale sculpture in garden settings was made in plaster, using of course lime rather than gypsum. Bandinelli made two c. 4.65 m tall giants for the Giardino Rustico of the Villa Madama in Rome before 152082 and between 1543 and 1547 Montorsoli made for Andrea Doria a figure of Neptune for a niche in the park of the Palazzo Ducale in Genoa. Bandinelli’s giants survive, thus providing testimony to the durability of the medium even in outdoor settings.83 Plaster sculpture was increasingly used in the context of gardens and Villas from the second half of the sixteenth-century onwards where it would appear as an appropriate material that moreover was cheap and imitated stone and marble effectively.84

___________ 80 Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, II, p. 360, cat no. 81. 81 A. Wright, ‘The Myth of Hercules’, in G. C. Garfagnini (ed.), Lorenzo il Magnifico e il suo mondo: Convegno Internazionale di Studi (Firenze, 9-13 giugno 1992) (Florence, 1994), pp. 32339, at p. 336; see also J. Shearman, ‘The Florentine entrata of Leo X, 1515’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 38 (1975), pp. 136-54, at pp. 149-50, and note 41. D. Greve, Status and Statue: Studien zu Leben und Werk des Florentiner Bildhauers Baccio Bandinelli (Berlin, 2008), p. 68, wrongly gives the material as stucco. A large number of large-scale sculptures were made for the triumphal entry of Charles V into Florence in 1536. See V. Cazzato, ‘Vasari e Carlo V. L’ingresso trionfale a Firenze del 1536’, in C. C. Garfagnini (ed.), Giorgio Vasari. Tra Decorazione Ambientale e Storiografia Artistica. Atti del Convegno (Arezzo 1981) (Florence, 1985), pp. 179-204, at pp. 191-2. For the equestrian monument of the Emperor in Piazza S. Trinita, the artist, Tribolo, also appears to have used clay. Vasari reports that due to delays only the horse was completed in time and that the tin foil was stuck straight onto the fresh clay. “[...] a fatica si fu a tempo a coprire di stagnuolo, sopra la terra ancora fresca, il cavallo solo [...].” Vasari-Milanesi, VI, pp. 67-9, especially p. 68. It is worth noting that in all other cases Vasari does not mention the material, while commenting on the finish, whether the works were made to look like gold, silver or bronze. Vasari-Milanesi, VI, pp. 67-9, 209-10, 2167, 545, 573, 637, 673; VII, pp. 658-9. B. Laschke, Fra Giovan Angelo da Montorsoli: Ein Florentiner Bildhauer des 16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1993), 166, cat. no. 4A, describes Montorsoli’s three works for the occasion as made of plaster (“Stuck”). There is to my knowledge no historical evidence to support this and in fact in a passage that precedes the account in Montorsoli’s Life, Vasari describes how in Ferrara at a gathering of his Order, the artist produced two ephemeral life-size sculptures (Faith and Charity) in clay (Vasari-Milanesi, VI, p. 636). 82 D. Greve, Status and Statue: Studien zu Leben und Werk des Florentiner Bildhauers Baccio Bandinelli (Berlin, 2008), pp. 66-9. 83 Montorsoli’s Neptune was replaced by a colossal plaster Jupiter by Marcello Sparzi in 1586. This was still in situ in the nineteenth century, B. Laschke, Fra Giovan Angelo da Montorsoli: Ein Florentiner Bildhauer des 16. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1993), pp. 65, 167, no. 9A. 84 See e.g. the sculptures for the ninfeo in the garden of Villa Maser, G. Mariacher, La scultura del Cinquecento (Turin, 1987), p. 181. For further bibliography and against the attribution of this

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Thus it is unlikely that during the period plaster was particularly associated with ephemeral works. Rather it may have been seen as a cheap and versatile material that was more resistant to the elements than the other malleable media, wax and clay. Possibly because of the work on the Florentine façade, Sansovino seems to have been perceived as an authority in the use of plaster decorations. A recipe for “stucco dal legname cioè dal lavore [sic] a uso di legname” best translated as “carpentry-wood plaster, that is, plaster for carpentry use” was recorded and attributed to Sansovino by the clockmaker, goldsmith and carpenter Benvenuto di Lorenzo della Volpaia.85 Benvenuto’s profession suggests that he was not interested in figurative reliefs but in plaster decorations on frames and wooden furniture such as wedding chest, the so-called cassoni. The document demonstrates the wide ranging uses of plaster, and how, at least in Florence, sculptor and carpenter exchanged their expertise on this material. In the context of the present volume it might also be noteworthy that Benvenuto acted as a model maker. During the 1527 siege of Florence by Clement VII the Pope commissioned him to make a relief plan of the city and its surroundings to serve his military purposes.86

Plaster and Sculptors’ Models In his book on the design processes of Italian Renaissance sculptors, Johannes Myssok has convincingly argued that for the first models that served to find the idea, either wax or clay was used, but not plaster. This is confirmed by the surviving material evidence. But when it comes to later stages of the design process plaster was occasionally used, at least in the sixteenth century. Sansovino’s contemporary and fellow Florentine, Benvenuto Cellini, made smallscale presentation models in plaster, such as that for a fountain in Fontainebleau. He also used the material for full-scale models like the central figure of Mars for the same fountain, a colossus that, according to Cellini himself, measured forty braccia (23.36 m) in height.87 It acted as a model to be shown

___________ work to Alessandro Vittoria see L. Finocchi Ghersi, Alessandro Vittoria (Udine, 1998), pp. 107, 119; see also Vittoria’s decorations of the Villa Pisana in Montagnana (1553–4), Finocchi Ghersi, Alessandro Vittoria, pp. 97-9. 85 Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, I, p. 184, doc. 60. 86 A. Guidoni Marino, ‘L’architetto e la fortezza: qualità artistica e techniche militari nel ‘500’, in Storia dell’arte italiana, 12 vols (Turin, 1979–83), XII (1983), pp. 49-98, at p. 64; D. Trier, ‘Benvenuto di Lorenzo della Volpaia’, in Allgemeines Künstler Lexikon (Munich, 1992–), IX (1994), p. 193. 87 The final sculpture was never executed, see V. Bush, The Colossal Sculpture of the Cinquecento (New York and London, 1976), p. 132, n. 108. The author also suggests that Cellini may have

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to his patron and he may also have used it to reassess and develop his design in full-scale. In fact, Cellini also made a full-scale plaster model of his Florentine Perseus.88 These plaster works were modelled by hand on the basis of a wooden armature, but they come late in the design process, following a series of earlier small scales models in other media. In fact, when describing the earliest stages of the sculptor’s design process Cellini mentions solely wax and clay.89 In many cases clay was preferred even at the later stages; thus Michelangelo’s full-scale models were made in clay, just like Giambologna’s for the Rape of the Sabines, now in the Accademia in Florence.90 Wax and clay can maintain their malleability over a longer period of time. Plaster, regardless of whether it is made of gesso or lime, dries irreversibly. Therefore, where it was chosen, it was used as a more durable and less fragile medium, but always at a stage that was at one remove from the original conception. Jacopo Sansovino, when making models, drew on his experience with mixed media and plaster and the resulting objects are difficult to classify. An unusual and indeed puzzling work is the badly damaged freestanding group of the Virgin and Child with Angels, now in the Palazzo Sceriman in Venice, that may originate from the Sansovino workshop. It is made of gesso and canvas, partly modelled, partly cast. The cast parts are certainly the heads of the angels and possibly the face of the Virgin, but it has also been suggested that all visible body parts were cast.91 Traces of beeswax on its surface have been read as indicators that at some stage a mould may have been taken to reproduce the work itself. Bruce Boucher’s suggestion that it was a model for a sculpture project has met with opposition. On the other hand, Charles Davis’ suggestion that the Virgin and Child with Angels might be “a later compilation that utilizes objects from Sansovino’s studio” seems anachronistic in the context of sixteenth-century workshop practice and raises the question as to

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exaggerated the dimensions, knowing that his readers would be unable to check against the model. In 1546 the King gave orders to protect the model against the weather, ibid., 133. In his own writing Cellini traced the practice back to Michelangelo’s clay models for the allegorical figures in the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo; B. Cellini, I Trattati dell’oreficeria e della scultura, C. Milanesi (ed.), (Florence, 1857), pp. 197-8; Myssok, Bildhauerische Konzeption, p. 63. Myssok ibid., pp. 63-5, pp. 302-3, also discusses Cellini’s use of full-scale models. B. Cellini, ‘Disputa infra la scultura e la pittura, in P. Barocchi (ed.), Scritti d’arte del cinquecento, 3 vols (Milan and Naples, 1971–3), I (1971), pp. 594-9, at p. 597; Myssok, Bildhauerische Konzeption, p. 63. C. Avery, Giambologna – The Complete Sculpture (Oxford, 1987), p. 67, fig. 77. The heads were formed using piece-moulds, C. Davis, ‘Jacopo Sansovino?’, Burlington Magazine, 122 (1980), pp. 582-4, at p. 583. Davis also observes seams on the legs of one of the putti and suggests that all visible body parts might have been cast.

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what sort of object the work was intended to be.92 An earlier work by Sansovino, presumed to be a model, that raises similar problems is his Virgin and Child from the Szépmüvészeti-Múzeum in Budapest. While the bodies, faces and arms of the Virgin and Child are modelled in wax on wood, the drapery is made of cloth, dipped in size and thinly covered with plaster. To give a coherent appearance to the work, it was painted with gold paint. The group has been identified as Sansovino’s presentation model for the 1511 competition for a statue of the Virgin and Child in the Mercato Nuovo in Florence mentioned by Vasari. Yet this too has been challenged by Myssok, not least with reference to Vasari who described the Mercato Nuovo model as a terracotta. Instead, Myssok suggests that the Budapest work may have been intended as a model for a painter’s workshop in Florence, as was Sansovino’s wax Deposition in the Victoria and Albert Museum that was used as a purpose made three-dimensional model by the painter Perugino.93 In the absence of final works in a more traditional medium (e.g. bronze, marble or painting) that would confirm the two groups’ function as models of some sort, their status remains elusive. The unusual materials and techniques appear inappropriate for most known functions of sculpture of the period, while there are no similar works of an identified purpose to compare them with. Thus, the two Virgin and Child groups illustrate a very real research dilemma with which students of works in plaster and mixed media find themselves frequently confronted. Because of their medium, technique and, possibly function, art discourses of their time ignore such works and they survive in small numbers. Faced with these problems and often equipped with its own preoccupation with more ‘elevated’ works and questions of attribution and style, art historical research in the past has frequently overlooked or sidelined these objects, studying them with little concern for material and/or function.

Plaster and Bronze Casting While bronze casting was practiced throughout the Middle Ages, including a small number of important large-scale productions, the medium experienced a significant revival in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the re-invention

___________ 92 C. Davis, ‘Jacopo Sansovino?’, Burlington Magazine, 122 (1980), pp. 582-4, at p. 584. 93 For the Budapest Virgin and Child, see J. Balogh, Katalog der Ausländischen Bildwerke des Museums der Bildenden Künste in Budapest, 3 vols (Budapest 1975-1994), I (1975) p. 113; Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, II, pp. 319, cat. 8; Myssok, Bildhauerische Konzeption, pp. 210-15. For the wax model of the Descent from the Cross, see Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, II, p. 316, cat. no. 5.

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of a number of ancient types of art-objects, including the equestrian monument, free standing sculptures, and portrait busts. But of the two main techniques of bronze casting, direct and indirect casting, only the latter requires the use of plaster and piece moulds. Practiced in antiquity, indirect bronze casting was in use in the 1480s in northern Italy, where the Mantuan goldsmith and sculptor Antico employed it.94 Frequently also the core – to be removed after the sculpture was cast – was made of plaster. Apparently, indirect casting was unknown during the Middle Ages and there is compelling evidence that it was not used in Florence before the second half of the sixteenth-century.95 Instead, Florentine artists cast their works directly, using the lost wax method that inevitably involves the destruction of the model.96 Benvenuto Cellini cast his sculptures, including the Perseus (1554) directly. In his treatise On Sculpture he discusses the indirect method and how to use plaster for this purpose, but Richard Stone has convincingly argued that his discussion demonstrates a lack of familiarity with the material.97 In fact, Cellini advises not to use plaster as an investment material or to form the core of bronze sculpture, asserting falsely that the local Florentine plaster was not suitable for these tasks.98 It was only in the second half of the

___________ 94 Stone, ‘Antico and Development of Bronze Casting’, pp. 96-7. 95 See Stone, ‘Antico and the Development of Bronze Casting’, pp. 87-116. I am following Stone’s argument that indirect casting was not used in fifteenth-century Florence. The author explains the difference in techniques between northern Italy and Florence with reference to the technical conservatism and emphasis on artistic invention in Florence, ibid. pp. 93-4. Stone’s position has occasionally been rejected by Italian scholars and conservators, see e.g. S. Siano et al., ‘Casting the Panels of the Gates of Paradise’, in G. M. Radke (ed.), The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2007), pp. 140-55. 96 The lost wax method is already described in the treatise On divers arts by the twelfth-century German Benedictine monk and practicing goldsmith/metalworker Theophilus, J. G. Hawthorne and C. S. Smith (transl), Theophilus: On Divers Arts: the foremost medieval treatise on painting, glassmaking and metalwork (Chicago, Ill., 1963, new edn, New York, 1979), pp. 105-6. The development of the technique has been discussed by Stone, ‘Antico and the Development of Bronze Casting’, pp. 87-116. 97 Stone, ‘Antico and the Development of Bronze Casting’, pp. 108-9. 98 An episode that occurred in Ferrara in 1540 might be significant in this context. Working for Ippolito d’Este Cellini paid a moulder, Francesco dalle Nappe, “per auere formato et fatto di yesso due volte la testa de lo Ill.mo et R. mo Cardinale nostro quale resto appresso M.o Benvenuto aurifice per farne una simile di bronzo.” “for having formed and made of plaster twice the head of our Illustrious and Reverend Cardinal that rests with Maestro Benvenuto the goldsmith with the intention to make a likeness of Bronze.” J. Pope-Hennessy, Cellini (London, 1985), p. 87; G. Campori (ed.), La vita di Benvenuto Cellini scritta da lui medesimo ridotta alla lezzione originale del codice Laurenziano con note e documenti illustrativi e con un saggio delle sue rime aggiuntevi le notizie pubblicate ... intorno alle relazioni del Cellini col Cardinale Ippolito d’Este ed a’ suoi allievi Paolo Romano ed Ascanio da Tagliacozzo (Milan, 1873), pp. 407-8.

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sixteenth century that indirect casting was being used in Florence, by Giambologna and others. The great advantage of indirect casting is that it preserves the model and allows the production of multiples. Tellingly, and in contrast to Cellini, Giambologna engaged in the reproductive techniques more widely, producing multiple small-scale copies of his designs. Thus, while bronze casting in itself does not require familiarity with plaster and plaster casts, in this technique too, it is the production of multiples that requires its use. Encouraged by antiquarian interests at the Gonzaga court in Mantua, Antico produced small-scale statuettes that for the studies of humanistically trained connoisseurs emulated a classical genre. Similar works were produced in the early sixteenth century by Andrea Riccio in Padua. Another type of bronze object that flourished in Padua (and neighbouring Venice) was that of classicizing portrait heads and busts. The genre drew on the tradition of Famous Men pioneered by Petrarch at the Carrara court in Padua in the 1370s, and in consequence the busts and heads would represent men from ancient and occasional recent history. The workshops that made these heads and busts, employed indirect casting. Archival evidence, discussed below, confirms the presence of plaster models in some of these workshops. Five models for the production of bronze heads of ancient heroes survive in the Museo d’Arte e Scienze Antiche of the University of Padua, where they belong to the sixteenth-century Mantova Benavides Collection, together with a larger and incoherent group of plaster heads and other artists’ models in plaster and terracotta. Very recently they have been attributed by Victoria Avery to the Paduan bronze sculptor Agostino Zoppo (c. 1520–72).99 Rather than being casts after classical originals in marble (like other casts in the Benavides collection), the five heads were based on clay models. Some of them seem to represent animated variations of ancient marble portraits, but in

___________ 99 Published for the first time ‘as a group in B. Candida, I calchi rinascimentali della collezione Mantova Benavides nel Museo del Liviano a Padova (Padua, 1967). They have been studied extensively by Irene Favaretto who identified them as sculptors’ models in a series of tightly interrelated articles. The most relevant are: I. Favoretto, ‘Alessandro Vittoria e la collezione di Marco Mantova Benavides’, Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, lettere ed arti, Classe di scienze morali, lettere ed arti, 135 (1976-77), pp. 401-11; eadem: ‘La fortuna del ritratto antico nelle collezioni venete di antichità: Originali, copie e “invenzioni”’, Bollettino d’Arte, 70 (1993), pp. 65-72. The issues surrounding the present group of heads have been clarified by V. Avery, ‘The Production, Display and Reception of Bronze Heads and Busts’, pp. 95-103. The most recent contribution with references to the complete literature is I. Favaretto, ‘Di un torsetto femminile della raccolta Mantova Benavides e del gusto per l’antico nella cultura artistica veneta del XVI secolo’, in M. Ceriana (ed.), Tullio Lombardo: Scultore e architetto nella Venezia del Rinascimento. Atti del Convegno di Studi Venezia, Fondazione Giorgio Cini 4-6 Aprile 2006 (Venice, 2007), pp. 369-76, at pp. 372-4.

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two cases, including the so-called Augustus (Fig. 3. 7), Irene Favaretto has convincingly argued that they are three-dimensional renderings after ancient numismatic profile portraits.100 As suggested by Victoria Avery (with reference to information by Richard Stone), the plaster heads were made using a lost-moulding technique and are therefore unique casts.101 To make the final bronze head, Zoppo would have constructed a mould with piecemoulds of each head and cast inside this an inter-model in wax that would then have been lost when casting the bronze. While no multiple bronze casts of any of these heads survive, theoretically at least, the process could have been repeated until the mould was worn out, and there was always the possibility to make new moulds after the plaster prototype. Fig. 3. 7: Augustus. Agostino Zoppo (attr.), beZoppo’s probate inventory, drawn up fore 1540. Plaster cast, h: 35.5 cm. Mantova after his death in 1572, lists a large Benavides Collection, Museo di Scienze Archeonumber of heads in plaster in his logiche e d’Arte, University of Padua. possession.102 Interesting in their own right as sixteenth-century plaster models with a relatively secure provenance, these five heads can be linked to secondary and tertiary uses, and illuminate changes in the reception of such works. Already during Zoppo’s lifetime, his plaster casts

___________ 100 I. Favaretto: ‘La Fortuna del Ritratto antico nelle collezioni venete di antichità: Originali, copie e “invenzioni”’, Bollettino d’Arte, 70 (1993), pp. 65-72, at p. 70. 101 With reference to technical information by Richard Stone, Avery describes how Agostino Zoppo would have produced these heads using the waste-moulding technique, rather than making piecemoulds, which does not lend itself easily to the copying of wet clay; Avery, ‘The Production, Display and Reception of Bronze Heads and Busts’, pp. 75-112, at p. 98, n. 101. This is supported by the evidence of the heads. I should like to thank the curator of the collection, Dr. Alessandra Menegazzi, for making the sculptures available to me during the closure of the museum in 2003 and for helpful discussions and bibliographical information. 102 Avery, ‘The Production, Display and Reception of Bronze Heads and Busts’, pp. 75-112, at p. 99 and 109, docs 9 and 10.

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served other artists as models. During the transformation of the former Carrara residence in Padua into the Palace of the Venetian Capitanio around 1540 the painters Domenico Campagnola, Stefano and Gualtieri dell’Arzere replaced a badly damaged 1370s cycle of Famous Men. Two of the above mentioned heads served as models for the figures of Brutus the Younger and Augustus.103 Ten years later, in neighbouring Vicenza, the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria, a pupil of Jacopo Sansovino, would again draw on them for his stucco ceiling decoration in the octagonal Sala dei Principi in the Palazzo Thiene.104 Executed between 1551 and 1553, Vittoria’s decoration includes eight cast portrait busts that appear against stucco shells and, as a sculptural gallery of Famous Men, give the room its name. Here, as in the Sala dei Giganti, the heroes, seven ancient Roman and one modern, are labelled with inscriptions. Augustus and Marcus Brutus are based on the same models as their namesakes in the Sala dei Giganti, and Pompeius Major, Mark Anthony and Julius Caesar, are further copies of the remaining three heads that are now in the Benavides Collection.105 Zoppo, Campagnola and Vittoria used the plaster heads as models. The final works took the form, variously of bronze heads, frescoed full-length portraits and plaster cast busts that formed part of a stucco decoration. But already in Zoppo’s house plaster heads seem to have served a representational function. Zoppo’s probate inventory lists in addition to the content of his workshop seventeen “heads and figures” and another “six heads”, all in plaster, in a chamber of his house that was decorated with green and yellow wall panels.106 In this setting, the heads may have been used for display purposes, rather than simply being stored. Once they had entered the possession of the humanist and scholar of law, Marco Mantova Benavides, which may have happened between 1573 and 1582, they formed part of a large and idiosyncratic collec-

___________ 103 I. Favaretto, ‘Di un torsetto femminile della raccolta Mantova Benavides e del gusto per l’antico nella cultura artistica veneta del XVI secolo’, in M. Ceriana (ed.), Tullio Lombardo: Scultore e architetto nella Venezia del Rinascimento. Atti del Convegno di Studi Venezia, Fondazione Giorgio Cini 4-6 Aprile 2006 (Venice, 2007), pp. 369-76, at pp. 372-4. Gualtiero’s son had worked in Zoppo’s workshop, Avery, ‘The Production, Display and Reception of Bronze Heads and Busts’, p. 103. 104 L. Magagnato, Palazzo Thiene: Sede della Banca Popoloare di Vicenza (Vicenza, 1966), pp. 6376; L. Finocchi Ghersi, Alessandro Vittoria (Udine, 1998), pp. 49-80, especially pp. 72-3 on the ceiling decoration of this room. 105 I. Favaretto, ‘Alessandro Vittoria e la collezione di Marco Mantova Benavides’, Atti dell’Istituto Veneto di Scienze, lettere ed arti, Classe di scienze morali, lettere ed arti, 135 (1976–77), pp. 40111, at pp. 404-5. 106 “Camera [...] vestita di spaliere verdi dipinte di gialo [...], cited after Avery, ‘The Production, Display and Reception of Bronze Heads and Busts’, p. 107, doc. 9.

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tion.107 It included curiosities, musical instruments, works by ancient and Renaissance artists, as well as artists’ models, such as a small-scale plaster reproduction of Michelangelo’s Dawn from the New Sacristy of San Lorenzo in Florence, an object that one would rather expect in an artist’s workshop.108 Given the representational value of the plaster heads as portraits of important men from ancient antiquity, they may rather have been perceived as images of role models, like the busts in the Palazzo Thiene. Whether the Renaissance beholders read them as reproductions or as authentic objects, or whether such categories would have been irrelevant to them, cannot be answered in this paper. What seems likely is that they were intended to represent ‘authentic’ ancient portraits. In conclusion, plaster sculpture and plaster casts in the Renaissance came in a very wide range of forms. Although a malleable medium like wax and clay, the physical characteristics of plaster, especially its quick and irreversible drying, made it unattractive and impractical for the early stages of the design process. Similarly, despite the assumption by many art historians that large scale ephemeral sculpture in the Renaissance was mostly made of plaster, it seems that clay was again the preferred option. Where plaster was used for internal and external sculpture it was usually for a combination of reasons. Foremost among these were its malleability and castability when wet, its surface qualities when hardened that allowed it to be used as a cheap and swiftly produced alternative to other materials, especially marble or stone, both of which it could practically replace without further surface treatment, and finally its durability in comparison to wax or clay. Fifteenth-century coffered vaults and sixteenth-century stucco decorations were, like bronze sculpture, made in direct emulation of ancient techniques and materials, but plaster casting was also used for practical purposes responding to the demands of reproduction and/or the production of multiples as in the case of the Virgin and Child reliefs. Inventories like that of the Medici household or of Agostino Zoppo’s house and workshop in Padua show an awareness of the material, but these were documents for legal purposes. Visually, however, plaster sculpture, whether cast, squeezed or modelled would rather appear in disguise, offering a life-like

___________ 107 For the likely date of acquisition see Avery, ‘The Production, Display and Reception of Bronze Heads and Busts’, p. 100. On Benavides and his collection see I. Favaretto, Arte antica e cultura antiquaria nelle collezioni venete al tempo della serenissima (Rome, 1990), pp. 108-15. 108 On the display of the collection see the publication of the seventeenth-century inventory (I. Favaretto (ed.), Andrea Mantova Benavides Inventario delle antichità di casa Mantova Benavides 1695 (Padua, 1978)), and M. L. Bianco, ‘Saggio di lettura di un museo cinquecentesco. La raccolta di Marco Mantova Benavides’, in I. Colpo, I. Favaretto and F. Ghedini (eds), Iconografia 2001: Studi sull’imagine, Atti del Convegno 2001 (Rome, 2002), pp. 495-510.

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image (for example of the Virgin and Child) or masquerading some ‘worthier’ material, such as bronze or gold. Even in the rare cases where plaster was left white, there is an argument that it may have been intended to stand in for marble sculpture, though further research into these disparate objects and their reception is urgently needed. Renaissance plaster casts were in terms of their techniques and physical appearance then a very heterogeneous group of objects, with various direct relationships to other materials and techniques. The neat modern category ‘plaster cast’, based on the reception of galleries of white and grey reproductive casts would have been entirely alien to a Renaissance viewer.

Frequently Cited Literature V. Avery, ‘The Production, Display and Reception of Bronze Heads and Busts in Renaissance Venice and Padua: Surrogate Antiques’, in J. Kohl and R. Müller (eds), Kopf/Bild: Die Büste in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Italienische Forschungen des Kunsthistorischen Institutes Florenz, I Mandorli, 6 (Munich and Berlin, 2006), pp. 75-112 D. Banzato, F. Pellegrini and M. De Vincenti (eds), Dal Medioevo a Canova: Sculture dei Musei Civici di Padova dal Trecento all’Ottocento (Venice, 2000) B. Boucher, The Sculpture of Jacopo Sansovino, 2 vols (London, 1991) C. Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook “Il Libro dell’Arte (D. V. Thompson Jr. transl.) (New York, 1960) G. Clarke, Roman House – Renaissance Palaces: Inventing Antiquity in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Cambridge, 2003) D. Cooper and M. Leino (eds), Depth of Field: Relief Sculpture in Renaissance Italy (Oxford et al., 2007), pp. 191-221 N. Dacos and C. Furlan, Giovanni da Udine 1487–1561 (Udine and Pordenone, 1987) M. Exner, ‘La sculpture en stuc du haut Moyen Age et de l’époque romane dans les pays de langue germanique. Tradition et innovation du point de vue technique et artistique’, in C. Sapin (ed.), Stucs et Décors de la fin de l’antiquité au moyen age (V-XII siecles). Actes du colloque international tenu à Poitiers du 16 au 19 septembre 2004 (Turnhaut, 2006), pp. 324-37 L. Finocchi Ghersi, Alessandro Vittoria (Udine, 1998) W. Grzimek, Deutsche Stuckplastik 800 bis 1300 (Frankfurt am Main et al., 1975) E. Marchand, ‘Reproducing Relief: plaster casts in the Italian Renaissance’, in Cooper and Leino (eds), Depth of Field, pp. 191-221

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J. Myssok, Bildhauerische Konzeption und plastisches Model in der Renaissance (Münster, 1999) J. Poeschke, Die Skulptur des Mittelalters in Italien, 2 vols (Munich, 1998/2000) C. Sapin (ed.), Stucs et Décors de la fin de l’antiquité au moyen age (V-XII siecles). Actes du colloque international tenu à Poitiers du 16 au 19 septembre 2004 (Turnhaut, 2006) C. Sapin (ed.), Le Stuc: Visage oublié de l’art médiéval, exh. cat. Musée Sainte-Croix de Poitiers 2004–5 (Paris, 2004) R. E. Stone, ‘Antico and the Development of Bronze Casting in Italy at the End of the Quattrocento’, The Metropolitan Museum Journal, 16 (1981), pp. 87-116 G. Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori scultori ed architettori, G. Milanesi (ed.), 10 vols (Florence, 1906/reprint 1998)

“Giving away the moulds will cause no damage to his Majesty’s casts” – New Documents on the Vienna Jüngling and the Sixteenth-Century Dissemination of Casts after the Antique in the Holy Roman Empire1 WALTER CUPPERI

In 1540 Francis I of France charged Francesco Primaticcio, “painctre ordinaire” et “vallet de chambre du Roy”, to supervise the moulding of some classical and modern sculptures in Rome.2 Some of them (the Laocoön, the Vati-

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I wish to thank the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome whose post-doctoral fellowship made this research possible, and the Biblioteca Austriaca in Rome whose staff and book collections have been crucially helpful for its completion. I am especially grateful to Dorothea Diemer and Julian Kliemann, who offered their help for the revision of my transcriptions, and to Dr Karen Lloyd and Miss Adoyo Owuor for their kind linguistic revision. Krista de Jonge, Sybille Ebert-Schifferer, Margarita Estella Marcos, Adriano Prosperi and Paul Zanker also contributed to the final text with their suggestions and remarks. Cf. G. Vasari, Le vite de’ più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori nelle redazioni del 1550 e del 1568, R. Bettarini (ed.), commented by P. Barocchi, 6 vols (Florence, 1966–1987), IV (1976), p. 488; V (1984), p. 570, and VI (1987), p. 144 (this information only appeared in the 1568 edition); S. Serlio, Architecturae liber septimus, Francofurti ad Moenum: ex officina typographica Andreae Wecheli, 1575, chap. 40, (repr., L’architettura, 2 vols, F. P. Fiore (ed.), II, I libri I-VII e Extraordinario nelle prime edizioni (Cremona, 2001), p. 96); B. Cellini, La vita, book 2, chap. 37, L. Bellotto (ed.), (Parma, 1997), pp. 567-8. For the dating of the enterprise see the documents published by E. Miller, ‘Une charte concernante le Primatice’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 7 (1860), pp. 212-14; H. B. de Jouy, Les fontes du Primatice (Paris, 1860); R. Lanciani, Storia degli scavi di Roma e notizie intorno le collezioni romane di antichità, 4 vols, (Roma, 1906–1912), er I (1906), p. 157; G. Bapst, ‘Voyage de Primatice en Italie pour le compte de François I ’, Nouvelles archives de l’art français, 5 (1888), pp. 1-2; Marquis Léon de Laborde, Les comptes des bâtiments du Roi (1528–1571) (Paris, 1887–1880), I (1887), pp. 191-204; A. Venturi, ‘Una visita artistica di Francesco I re di Francia’, Archivio storico dell’arte, 2 (1889), pp. 377-8; B. Jestaz, ‘L’exportation des marbres de Rome de 1535 à 1571’, Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire, 75 (1963), pp. 415-66, at 439-43, and C. M. Brown, ‘Collecting Casts’, The Burlington Magazine, 123 (1981), pp. 239-40. Accounts of Primaticcio’s campaign are given by A. Michaelis, ‘Geschichte des Statuenhofes im vatikanischen Belvedere’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 5 (1890), pp. 5-72, at pp. 68-71; L. Dimier, Le Primatice: peintre, sculpteur et architecte des Rois de France (Paris, 1900), pp. 61-3, 328-33; É. Michon, ‘Les fontes du Primatice’, Bulletin de la Societé Nationale des Antiquaires de France (1902), pp. 351-3; R. Hallo, ‘Bronzeabgüsse antiker Statuen’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Archäologischen Instituts, 42 (1927),

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can Hercules, the Vatican Ariadne, the Vatican Tiber, the Vatican Nile, the Venus Belvedere, the Antinoüs Belvedere, the Apollo Belvedere, the Della Valle Satyrs, as well as two Sphinxes) were cast in bronze for the Royal Palace of Fontainebleau before March 1547, when the King’s death interrupted this large scale enterprise. In 1549 the Imperial Sculptor Leone Leoni met Primaticcio in Brussels, organized a trip to Paris to see the royal collection of casts, and finally explored the possibility of shipping a set of Francis’ moulds to the Low Countries. As a consequence, in 1550 Henry II of France sealed his short-lived peace with the Low Countries by providing the Governor, Mary of Habsburg (a sister of Charles V also called Mary of Hungary) with some of Primaticcio’s moulds, that the Imperial Minister Mons. Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle had formally requested for her in 1549, according to Leoni’s agreements with the painter.3 It was on this occasion that Primaticcio,

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pp. 193-220, at pp. 195-6, 199); A. von Salis, Antike und Renaissance: über Nachleben und Weiterwirken der alten in der neueren Kunst (Erlenbach-Zürich, 1947), p. 139; S. Pressouyre, ‘Les fontes de Primatice à Fontainebleau’, Bulletin Monumental, 127 (1969), pp. 223-39; J. CoxRearick, The Collection of Francis I: Royal Treasures (New York, 1996), pp. 325-61; J.-R. Gaborit, in Cuzin et al. (eds), D’après l’antique, pp. 232-3, no. 70; D. Cordellier, ‘Primatice et les antiquités esquisses, 1540–1545’, in D. Cordellier and B. Py (eds), Primatice, maître de Fontainebleau, exh. cat. Paris, Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2004), pp. 137-8. The surviving bronzes, now in the Musée National du Château in Fontainebleau, are catalogued by G. Bresc-Bautier and A. Pigeot, Sculptures des Jardins du Louvre, du Carrousel et des Tuileries, 2 vols, (Paris, 1986), II, pp. 376-80, nos 319-23. For a list of the bronze casts that have disappeared, see J. Cox-Rearick (as above) pp. 347-61, nos X1-X12). Apparently the moulds of Trajan’s Column mentioned by Vasari have never been cast in France (G. Agosti and V. Farinella, ‘Nuove ricerche sulla Colonna Traiana nel Rinascimento’, in S. Settis (ed.), La Colonna Traiana (Turin, 1988), pp. 582-3). On Primaticcio’s activity in France see now S. Frommel, ‘Primaticcio architetto in Francia’, in S. Frommel (ed.), Primaticcio architetto (Milan, 2005), pp. 74-193. The compilation of Primaticcio’s letters by F. Bardati, ibid. pp. 328-37, must be supplemented with reference to Cupperi, ‘Arredi statuari: Parte II’; W. Cupperi, ‘“Per la delettatione che delle memorie antiche generosamente suol prendere”: i calchi dall’antico, e altre antichità della collezione di Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle secondo lettere inedite di Francesco Primaticcio e altri agenti italiani’, in Römisches Jahrbuch der Bibliotheca Hertziana, forthcoming. For a selection of Primaticcio’s drawings and paintings see also D. Cordellier (ed.), Primaticcio: un bolognese alla corte di Francia, exh. cat. Bologna, Palazzo di Re Enzo e del Podestà (Milan, 2005), with further bibliography. Leoni gave his patron Ferrante Gonzaga an account of his trip to Paris in a letter dating 15 August 1549 (in A. Ronchini, ‘Leone Leoni d’Arezzo’, Atti e memorie delle Regie Deputazioni di Storia Patria per le provincie modenesi e parmensi, ser. 1, vol. 3 (1865), pp. 9-41, at p. 27, no. VI). See also C. Greppi (ed.), Lettere di artisti italiani, p. 57, no. 1 (letter of Primaticcio to the Imperial Ambassador in Paris Simone Renard, 28 October 1549): “Essendo io andato in Fiandra per certe faccende del Reverendissimo di Ferrara [cardinal Ippolito II d’Este], conobbi uno maestro Leone, scultore della Cesarea Maestà, qual, domandatomi di volere tenere proposito con la regina Maria de certe forme de figure che il Re bona et felice memoria [Francis I] m’aveva fatto portare di Roma, io gli risposi le figure essere belle e che, volendo la Serenissima [Mary of Habsburg] averne copia, io mi ci impiegarei molto volentieri”. Although many scholars have supposed that Leoni’s involvement with the French moulds included his engagement to cast them, this letter proves that in his first agreement, Primaticcio, and not Leoni, had to be

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echoing Leoni, wrote to Granvelle that, after all, “giving away the moulds will cause no damage to his Majesty’s [that is Henry II of France’s] casts”.4 Significantly this statement, one of the first concerning multiple castings from the antique, was addressed to a transalpine ruler by an Italian artist. Not only were Italians the European leaders in plaster casting and stucco decoration in the first half of the sixteenth century, but artists such as Leone Leoni and Francesco Primaticcio must have shared the opinion that introducing ancient sculpture of the highest quality in their patrons’ collections could highlight the all’antica features of their own works and increase the appreciation of their services.5 The role played by Primaticcio, Leoni, Mary of Hungary and Antoine Perrenot in the spread of multiple casting from the antique was pioneering with regard to workshops specializing in plaster casts, a phenomenon that first appeared at least as early as the seventeenth century.6 Documents first published by Robert Hedicke prove that between 1551 and 1552 a plaster cast from the Vatican Nile and another from the Vatican Ariadne (still identified as Cleopatra) were made in the southern Low Countries by a pupil of Primaticcio, Luca Lancia.7 The two statues were displayed along the walls of Mary’s secret garden in Binche. Apparently, a third plaster cast from Primaticcio’s

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charged with the casting. As a consequence the Bolognese painter sent his pupil Luca Lancia to Binche in 1550, and Leoni declined Mary’s request to have her copies cast by him (on the whole question see now W. Cupperi, ‘Arredi statuari nelle regge dei Paesi Bassi asburgici meridionali (1549–56), parte I: Maria d’Ungheria, Leone Leoni e la galleria di Binche’, Prospettiva, 113114 (2004), pp. 98-116). C. Greppi (ed.), Lettere di artisti italiani, pp. 58-9 (28 October 1549): “Non si fa torto alle figure di sua Maestà per mandarne gli molli”. Both aspects were emphasized by T. da Costa Kaufmann, Toward a Geography of Art (Chicago, Ill., and London, 2004), pp. 208-11. Some seventeenth-century workshops specializing in the production of plaster casts are studied by Charlotte Schreiter in this volume, pp. 121-42. The documents about these two statues, moulded “en plattre de fighures d’anticquaiges”, are published by Hedicke, Jacques Dubroeucq von Mons, pp. 266-7, nos 47-54. The casts of Binche were pointed out as an important episode of Mary’s art patronage by Jozef Duveger, ‘Marie de Hongrie, gouvernante des Pays-Bas, et la Renaissance’, in G. Rózsa (ed.), Évolution générale et développements régionaux en histoire de l’art, Actes du XXII Congrès International d’Histoire de l’Art, Budapest, 15-20 septembre 1969 (Budapest, 1972), pp. 715-26, at p. 722. Duveger thought that the Nile and the Cleopatra in Binche were sculptures all’antica, but was also the first to connect Lancia with Primaticcio’s workshop; B. Boucher, ‘Leone Leoni and Primaticcio’s moulds of antique sculpture’, The Burlington Magazine, 123 (1981), pp. 23-6 identified the Nile and the Cleopatra as casts from the antique made from Primaticcio’s moulds. About Luca Lancia, see also J. Debergh, ‘Luc Lange “molleur en plattre” actif en Hainaut entre 1550 et 1553’, Révue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art. Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Oudheidkunde en Kunstgeschiedenis, 59 (1990), pp. 75-89; Idem, ‘Luc Lange et Jacques du Broeucq: quatre considerations’, Révue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art. Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Oudheidkunde en Kunstgeschiedenis, 63 (1994), pp. 63-72, whose account of the events is not always reliable. For

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moulds, reproducing the Laocoön, was planned in 1553, one year before the residence was destroyed by the same King Henry II, who had supported its decoration with casts.8 Other plaster casts, among them a Venus, seem to have been made by Lancia for Mary’s hunting residence in Mariemont. They were exhibited indoors in a room called the “sallette haulte”. Unfortunately, none of the plaster casts seem to have survived, while some of the bronze casts made for Francis I are still preserved at Fontainebleau (Fig. 4. 3). A re-examination of Leoni’s correspondence has recently proved that some of Mary’s casts after the antique were also originally planned in bronze.9 These statues were cast in plaster only when Leoni refused to stay longer in Brussels and cast them in bronze himself, as he states in a letter dating 8 September 1549.10 In the sixteenth century, plaster casts were often chosen for such practical reasons, as they were easier to make and requiring more common skills and cheaper materials. For these very reasons they were normally not the first solution considered by art collectors of royal rank.11 Certainly, plaster casts of ancient busts and reliefs were already used as three-dimensional

___________ a different reconstruction in the light of new archival discoveries see Cupperi, ‘Arredi statuari: Parte II’, pp. 159-76. 8 K. de Jonge, ‘Les jardins de Jacques Du Broeucq et de Jacques Hollebecque è Binche, Mariemont et Boussu’, in C. Añón Feliú (ed.), Felipe II, el rey íntimo: jardín y naturaleza en el siglo XVI, Actas del Congreso, Aranjuez ([Madrid], 1998), pp. 191-220, at pp. 192-8; eadem, ‘L’environnement des châteaux dans les Pays-Bas méridionaux au XVIe siècle et au début du XVIIe siècle’, in J. Guillaume (ed.), Architecture, jardin, paysage: l’environnement du château et de la villa aux XVe et XVIe siècles, Actes du Colloque, Tours, 1-4 juin 1992 (Paris, 1999), pp. 185-206, at pp. 185-201; W. Cupperi, ‘Sculpture et jardins dans le palais “à la antique” de Binche …’, in B. Federinov and G. Docquier (eds), Marie de Hongrie: politique et culture sous la Renaissance aux Pays-Bas, Actes du Colloque, Morlanwelz, Musée Royal de Mariemont, 11–12 novembre 2005 (Morlanwelz, 2008), pp. 174-88. 9 The higher regard enjoyed by bronze casts in the sixteenth century is stressed by S. Settis, ‘Laocoonte di bronzo, Laocoonte di marmo’, in M. Winner, B. Andreae and C. Pietrangeli (eds), Il Cortile delle Statue. Der Statuenhof des Belvedere im Vatikan, Akten des Internationalen Kongresses zu Ehren von Richard Krautheimer, Rom, 21.-23. Oktober 1992 (Mainz am Rhein, 1998), pp. 129-60, at p. 130, now also in S. Settis et al., Laocoonte: fama e stile (Rome, 1999), p. 16: “Alla radice [of Primaticcio’s bronze casts] possiamo riconoscere l’idea, tolta dalle fonti antiche dove essa è bene in chiaro, di una gerarchia dei materiali della scultura che pone il bronzo, prezioso e d’ardua tecnica, ben prima del marmo”. In fact, Philip II’s secret garden in Aranjuez was also decorated with two bronze casts from the antique, which were displayed at its entrance sometime around 1586 (see below, note 24). 10 Letter from Leone Leoni to Ferrante Gonzaga, in G. Campori, Gli artisti italiani negli Stati Estensi: catalogo storico corredato di documenti inediti (Modena, 1855), p. 288, no. II. 11 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny remarked on the different potential of the two casting materials shown by this episode, stating that “great collections of bronze copies could not be afforded by many people, but plaster casts were less expensive, and we know at least one private collection which was formed not much later”, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1981), p. 16. Renaissance plaster casts have been studied much less than bronze casts: on this problem in general see Ladendorf, Antiken-

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models in Italian sixteenth-century artists’ workshops, although they were often reworked considerably.12 Such casts were also displayed in the collections of humanists and learned professionals, but together with looser copies of ancient types and without any distinction made between them.13 Primaticcio’s moulds, by contrast, reproduced the originals with great accuracy and were taken from full-length statues. His casts were collected as a specific art genre, being considered copies of antiquities rather than modern sculptures. As far as we know, however, only three plaster casts were made at the French court: two of them, after Michelangelo’s Vatican Pietà and his Christ for Santa Maria sopra Minerva, were destined for interior locations because of their devotional subject; the third, a copy of the Capitoline Marcus Aurelius, was exhibited under a baldachin in the Cour du Cheval Blanc, named after the plaster monument.14 Therefore, Mary’s decision to commission only plaster casts for her palaces and gardens marked a further step in the history of this material and its use in the fine arts: unlike the bronze casts made for Francis I, Mary’s casts must have been esteemed not for their medium, but because of their fidelity to famous ancient statues.

___________ studium und Antikenkopie, pp. 62-74; E. Paul, ‘Falsificazioni di antichità in Italia dal Rinascimento alla fine del XVIII secolo’, in S. Settis (ed.), Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols (Turin, 1984–85), II, I generi ritrovati (1985), pp. 413-39, at pp. 415-19, 421-3 and 431-2; F. Donati, La gipsoteca di arte antica (Pisa, 1999), pp. 57-76; B. Jestaz, ‘Les premières copies d’antiques’, in Cuzin et al. (eds), D’après l’antique, pp. 45-52. 12 See C. Franzoni, ‘“Rimembranze d’infinite cose”: le collezioni rinascimentali di antichità’, in Memoria dell’antico, I, L’uso dei classici (Turin, 1984), pp. 304-60, at pp. 338-43. 13 An overview of this phenomenon is provided by I. Favaretto, ‘L’immagine raddoppiata: calchi, copie e invenzioni “all’antica” nelle collezioni venete di antichità’, in H. Lavagne and F. Queyrel (eds), Les moulages de sculptures antiques et l’histoire de l’archéologie, Actes du Colloque international, Paris, 24 octobre 1997 (Geneva, 2000), pp. 13-21. The best example of this kind of collection, where busts were mixed with bozzetti and partial casts from statues, is provided by the set of plaster portraits formerly owned by Marco Mantova Benavides and now preserved at the Museo Universitario di Scienze Archeologiche e d’Arte in Padua (see Alessandra Menegazzi’s contribution in this volume, pp. 611-25). However, there is no evidence that Benavides’ casts were originally made for a collection rather than an artist’s studio: on this problem see especially B. Candida, I calchi rinascimentali della collezione Mantova Benavides nel Museo del Liviano a Padova (Padova, 1967), pp. 92-7, and I. Favaretto, ‘La fortuna del ritratto antico nelle collezioni venete di antichità: originali, copie e “invenzioni”’, Bollettino d’arte, 79 (1993), pp. 65-72, with bibliography. 14 A letter of Francis I to Michelangelo Buonarroti dating 9 February 1546 (first published by F. De Romanis, Alcune memorie di Michelangiolo Buonarroti da’ m(an)os(critti) per le nozze di Clemente Cardinali con Anna Bovi (Roma, 1823), p. 15; rev. edn by P. de Chennevières, Archives de l’art français: recueil de documents inédits relatifs à l’histoire des arts en France, VII (1857) = Documents, V, p. 39) proves that the French king himself requested the moulds of the two sculptures. A plaster cast of the Pietà, now lost, was located in the Chapelle Haute de la Cour du Donjon, see L. Dimier, Le Primatice: peintre, sculpteur et architecte des Rois de France (Paris, 1900), p. 333.

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As far as we know, the casts from the antique made by Primaticcio and his workshop for Francis I of Valois and Mary of Habsburg are the first that can be documented outside Italy. Moreover, they are the first known instance in which the moulds that had already been used in Fontainebleau were reemployed to produce further copies of the most celebrated ancient statues from Rome.15 On the basis of new evidence, this paper will reassess our understanding of these episodes, and more generally our view of the sixteenth-century diffusion of casting from the antique beyond the Alps, by raising two points so far underplayed, the one geographic, the other sociological. Firstly, I will highlight the privotal role played by Mary of Habsburg and her diplomacy in disseminating bronze and plaster casts from the antique not only into the Low Countries, but also within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. As a consequence, the sixteenth-century diffusion of this form of collecting will appear significantly more articulated than one might imagine. Secondly, I will argue that the role of courtiers and European allies who shared with the Valois and the Habsburgs an interest in collecting antiquities, and therefore accepted new forms of substitutive casts, should also be considered significant for the recognition of plaster as a proper medium for reproducing and collecting the sculptural masterpieces of Antiquity.16 In particular, certain Habsburg courtiers, such as the Minister Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, took the initiative of commissioning plaster casts from the antique independently and at the same time as their rulers. This activity allows us to reassess the common view of sixteenth-century cast commissions as exclusive to the patronage of royal dynasties.

___________ 15 During the sixteenth century ancient busts such as the Pseudo-Vitellius (Venice, Museo Archeologico) had already been replicated several times in marble, bronze and plaster, but in these replica series the variations from the original were usually so conspicuous that the bronze and plaster casts made by moulding the originals, and then re-working the cast, can hardly be distinguished from the other kind of copies: see B. Candida, I calchi rinascimentali della collezione Mantova Benavides nel Museo del Liviano a Padova (Padova, 1967), pp. 39-42, 93; E. Paul, ‘Zum Pseudo Vitellius’, Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, gesellschafts- und sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, 31 (1982), pp. 255-7; K. Fittschen, ‘Sul ruolo del ritratto antico nell’arte italiana’, in Memoria dell’antico, II (1985), pp. 381-412, at pp. 402-7; Idem, ‘Über einige römische Porträts in Venedig: antike Vorbilder und neuzeitliche Nachahmungen’, in I. Favaretto and G. Traversari (eds), Venezia e l’archeologia, un importante capitolo nella storia del gusto dell’antico nella cultura artistica veneziana, Congresso Internazionale, Venezia, Ca’ Dolfin (Rome, 1990), pp. 203-8; I. Favaretto, ‘La fortuna del ritratto antico nelle collezioni venete di antichità: originali, copie e “invenzioni”’, Bollettino d’arte, 79 (1993), pp. 65-72. 16 Renaissance plaster casts have first been interpreted as “stellvertretende Formerinnung” by Ladendorf, Antikenstudium und Antikenkopie, pp. 69-71.

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A Bronze Cast instead of a Bronze Original: the Vienna Jüngling Our first case study concerns an exceptional finding of the early sixteenth century, the so-called Jüngling from the Magdalensberg, a full-length bronze discovered in very good condition in 1502 and bought in 1519 by Matthäus Lang, Imperial Counsellor and Bishop of Salzburg, after Maximilian of Habsburg had shown no interest in acquiring it.17 After Lang’s death in 1520, the ancient statue passed to the heritage of his bishopric. In 1534 Petrus Apianus’ Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis, non illae quidem Romanae, sed totius fere orbis, brought the attention of the German world to the Jüngling that he reproduced in a beautiful full-page illustration together with the inscription on the right leg of the statue, that bore its donors’ names (Fig. 4. 2).18 The material of the statue and the elegance of the nude also contributed to the inclusion of the Jüngling in the canon of the most important Roman monuments north of the Alps. Not much later Ferdinand I of Habsburg, Archduke of Austria, expressed the desire to have the statue that his grandfather had declined to purchase, and asked the new Bishop of Salzburg, Ernest of Bavaria, to facilitate its donation from the Cathedral’s Chapter. Since the Habsburg and the Wittelsbach families

___________ 17 The acquisition of the ancient statue by Matthäus Lang, “antiquitatum summus cultor et admirator”, is documented by Petrus Apianus and Bartholomeus Amantius, Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis non illae quidem Romanae, sed totius fere orbis summo studio ac maximis impensis terra marique conquisitae… (Ingolstadii: in aedibus P. Apiani, 1534), p. CCXCVII. Lang’s interest in ancient marbles has been often stressed in the secondary literature (for example R. von Busch, Studien zu deutschen Antikensammlungen des. 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1973), pp. 16, 233, note 44; and p. 237, note 82): we know for example that Lang brought to Wellenburg “marmora IIII ex agro Patavino effossa”, that is four inscriptions originating from the imperial spoliation of Padua (1509): K. Peutinger, Inscriptiones vetustae Roman(ae) et earum fragmenta in Augusta Vindelicorum et eius diocesi… antea impressae, nunc denuo revisae, castigatae simul et auctae (Mainz: in aedibus Ioannis Schoeffer, 1520), fol Diir. The history of the Jüngling (usually considered a praying athlete, but also identified more recently as Mercury) has been reconstructed by R. von Schneider, ‘Die Erzstatue vom Helenenberge’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, 15 (1894), pp. 102-23. For the dating of the original statue, now disappeared, see R. Wünsche, ‘Der Jüngling vom Magdalensberg’, in J. A. Schmoll, M. Restle and H. Weiermann (eds), Festschrift Luitpold Dussler (Munich-Berlin, 1972), pp. 45-80; P. Zanker, Klassizistische Statuen: Studien zur Veränderung des Kunstgeschmacks in der römischen Kaiserzeit (Mainz am Rhein, 1974), pp. 67-8, No. 9 (with complete bibliography); W. Wohlmayr, ‘Der Jüngling vom Magdalensberg, Versuch einer stilistischen Neubestimmung’, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde, 131 (1991), pp. 7-44. 18 Apianus and Amantius (as above) p. CCCCXIIII (illustration). The inscription reads “A . POBLICIVS . D . L . ANTIOC / TI . BARBIVS . Q . PL TIBER”. Another important mention of the Jüngling is in Stephanus Wynandus Pighius, Hercules prodicius, seu Principis iuventutis vita et peregrinatio (Antverpiae: ex officina Christophori Plantini, 1587), p. 220. On the visual fortune of the statue see Ladendorf, Antikenstudium und Antikenkopie, pp. 33-5.

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Fig. 4. 1: Jüngling (Youth). Unknown artist. 1551–1552, aftercast from a first-century BC bronze statue of a praying athlete found on the Magdalensberg in Carinthia, now lost. Bronze, h: 1.895 m. Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.

were allied, and Ernest was struggling against his two elderly brothers to claim his rights as a potential successor to the Dukedom of Bavaria, Ernest, also a good entrepreneur, must have seen in Ferdinand’s demand the possibility to strengthen his own relations with the imperial family.19 Hence, on 24 January 1551, he obtained a concession from the Salzburg Chapter which let Archduke Ferdinand take the Jüngling on the condition that it was not transferred to anyone else.20 Yet for some reason the bestowal had no immediate effect, and in November 1551 Mary of Habsburg, Ferdinand’s sister, wrote to Ernest a very interesting

___________ 19 See especially F. F. Strauss, ‘Herzog Ernst von Bayern (1500–1560), ein süddeutscher fürstlicher Unternehmer des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde, 101 (1961), pp. 269-84. 20 F. Martin, ‘Zur Geschichte der “Erzstatue vom Helenenberge”’, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde, 48 (1908), p. 222.

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Fig. 4. 2: Jüngling (Youth). Unknown artist. Engraving, in: Petrus Apianus and Bartholomeus Amantius, Inscriptiones sacrosanctae vetustatis […] (Ingolstadii: in aedibus P. Apiani, 1534), p. CCXCVII.

letter, so far unpublished, which reveals that a new arrangement had been made. The Jüngling would first be moulded and cast in bronze (Fig. 4. 1), and then sent to Mary: Dear and kind cousin, since some time ago your Lordship kindly offered to satisfy our kind, dear Lord and brother [Ferdinand], King of the Romans, of Hungary and Bohemia, with an ancient image, cast in metal, on the simple condition that your Lordship could mould [abgiessen] the said image before, keep a cast of it for yourself and finally present us with the image cast in antiquity, therefore we are warmly grateful to your Lordship for such a benevolent offer. And since we still have a taste and inclination for that [sculpture] and similar artworks and antiques, and this [scil. our desire] may have been forgotten by your Lordship because of your business, we could not neglect to remind you of your benevolent offer by this message (App. 1.).

This change of plan most probably arose after the Diet of Augsburg during the summer and autumn of 1551. There Ferdinand and Ernest must have learned of Mary’s casting campaign, that had started by July of the same year, and of her “taste and inclination for that [sculpture] and similar artworks and antiques”. The new solution enabled Ernest to keep a cast after the Jüngling for the Golden Hall in the Fortress of Hohensalzburg, the former location of the original,21 and avoid the Chapter’s prohibition on presenting anyone other than

___________ 21 The Jüngling (“ain grosser gloggspeisser nackhender Mann”) is recorded by the 1587 inventory of the Fortress in the Great Hall before the Goldene Stube on the third floor: see J. C. Pillwar, ‘Hohensalzburg: seine Geschichte, Baulichkeiten und Ausrüstung’, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft

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Ferdinand with the statue.22 In Augsburg, where Mary arrived on 10 September 1551, Ferdinand must also have decided (if he had not done so before) that the original statue would go to her collection, and not to his (as it still appears in the concession of the Salzburg Chapter dating to 24 January 1551). The secret theme of the Augsburg meeting between the Habsburgs was the succession to Charles’s imperial crown, and since Ferdinand’s personal ambition to this title stood against the nomination of his nephew Philip of Spain, son of Charles,23 his renunciation of the ancient statue in favour of his sister Mary was significant indeed. Ferdinand satisfied Mary’s requests at a moment in which her endorsement of him was crucial to persuade the Emperor in his favour. What happened subsequently to the Jüngling has already been discussed by Kurt Gschwantler and Margarita Estella. An ancient bronze statue arrived in Brussels in 1552, when Mary of Hungary’s architect Jacques Dubroeucq was paid to test the authenticity of the sculpture and to have it carried to Binche;24 apparently, the Governor was not sure that she had received the original one. Set outside, high on the top of the palace’s frontal tower, the Jüngling escaped the French sack of 1554, and in 1556 it was recorded among the art objects that Mary shipped to Spain with her, when she left Brussels to

___________ für Salzburger Landeskunde, 17 (1877), pp. 1-88, at p. 52; Inventare der Salzburger Burgen und Schlösser, III, I. Froschauer and N. Schaffer (eds), Festung Hohensalzburg (Salzburg, 1992), p. 59. On the princely apartment of the Fortress see also H. Tietze, Die profanen Denkmale der Stadt Salzburg, Österreichische Kunsttopographie, 13 (Vienna, 1914), p. 120. 22 A. Lhotsky, ‘Die Geschichte der Sammlungen’, in Festschrift des Kunsthistorischen Museums zur Feier des fünfzigjährigen Bestandes, 2 vols (Vienna, 1941–1945), I, pp. 137-56; Georg Kugler, ‘Kunst und Geschichte im Leben Ferdinands I.’, in W. Seipel (ed.), Kaiser Ferdinand I. 1503–1564: das Werden der Habsburgermonarchie, exh. cat. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2003), pp. 201-13. 23 K. Brandi, Kaiser Karl V. Werden und Schicksal einer Persönlichkeit und eines Weltreiches, 6th edn (Frankfurt am Main, 1976) (1st edn, 1937), pp. 496-7. 24 T. Lejeune, ‘Le Palais de Marie de Hongrie à Binche, 1545–54’, Documents et rapports de la Société Paléontologique et Archéologique de l’Arondissement judiciaire de Charleroi, 9 (1878), pp. 415-48, at p. 431; Hedicke, Jacques Dubroeucq von Mons, p. 267, no. 55 (Dubroeucq is paid for four days spent in Brussels “à visiter si la fighure de cuivre venue de nouveau d’Allemaingne estoit anticque ou non, audit pris de IIII livres par jour […] et pour avoir esté quérir XIIe jour d’avril enssuivant, en la dicte ville de Bruxelles, avec le cherroit de Maryemont la dicte figure ensemble le Mercure de cuivre servant à mectre sur la thour de Binch”). The connection between the “fighure venue de nouveau de l’Allemagne” and the ancient Jüngling was first established by M. Estella Marcos, ‘Los Leoni, escultores entre Italia y España’, in J. Urrea (ed.), Los Leoni (1509–1608): escultores del Renacimiento italiano al servicio de la corte de España, exh. cat. Madrid, Museo del Prado (Madrid, 1994), pp. 29-62, at pp. 49-50. In Binche the Jüngling was paired with a bronze Mercury cast by Dubroeucq: see Lejeune (as above) p. 431; Hedicke, Jacques Dubroeucq von Mons, p. 263, no. 32; R. Didier, Jacques Dubroeucq, sculpteur et maître-artiste de l’Empereur (1500/10-84), with contributions by J. Debergh, P. Kurmann and C. Wilson ([Brussels], 2000), p. 18.

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take up her residence in Valladolid.25 Sometime before 1586 the Jüngling, paired with a bronze Venus moulded from the antique and re-interpreted as an Eve (now Madrid, Museo del Prado), was exhibited as an Adam in the Royal Residence of Aranjuez, at the entrance of the Jardín de la Isla.26 In 1761 the Spanish Jüngling was first connected to the Austrian version by Johann Joachim Winckelmann, without, however, drawing any conclusion about their reciprocal relation.27 The Adam finally disappeared at the end of the eighteenth century during a revolt against the Napoleonic government. In 1894 Theodor Mommsen correctly stated that the inscription found on the Austrian bronze replica, now in Vienna (Fig. 4. 2), dated back to the Renaissance, and in 1986 the statue itself was recognized on technical grounds as an aftercast from a lost ancient original that had been reproduced using piece moulds.28 In 1994 Margarita Estella proposed that the original first-century

___________ 25 The Jüngling was identified in the 1558 inventory of Mary’s movable goods by M. Estella Marcos, ‘El mecenazgo de la reina María de Hungría en el campo de la escultura’, in M. J. Redondo Cantera and M. Á. Zalama (eds), Carlos V y las artes: promoción artística y familia imperial (Valladolid, 2000), pp. 283-321, at p. 307. The later history of the statue has been reconstructed by K. Gschwantler, ‘El “Joven del Magdalensberg”’, in J. Urrea (ed.), Adán y Eva en Aranjuez: investigaciones sobre la escultura en la Casa de Austria, exh. cat. Madrid, Museo del Prado (Madrid, 1992), pp. 49-69; K. Gschwantler, ‘Der Jüngling vom Magdalensberg in Aranjuez. Die Suche nach dem verschollenen Original’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen in Wien, 89-90, N. S., 53-4 (1993–1994), pp. 311-39. G. Kugler, ‘Kunst und Geschichte im Leben Ferdinands I.’, in W. Seipel (ed.), Kaiser Ferdinand I. 1503–1564: das Werden der Habsburgermonarchie, exh. cat. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Milan, 2003), pp. 201-13, at p. 210, wrongly states that the Jüngling was sent to Spain by Ferdinand I or Maximilian II. 26 In a letter dating 29 May 1586, Federico Zuccari mentioned “due statue di bronzo antiche molto bone” at the entrance of the Jardín de la Isla in Aranjuez (J. Dominguez Bordona, ‘Federico Zúccaro en España’, Archivo Español de Arte y Arqueología, 7 (1927), pp. 5-13, at p. 8). The Eve, cast in Florence from an ancient marble Venus now in the Galleria degli Uffizi (inv. no. 155) was integrated with a sixteenth-century head by a Renaissance sculptor identified with Bartolomeo Ammannati by Herbert Keutner (‘Die Bronzevenus des Bartolomeo Ammannati: ein Beitrag zum Problem des Torso im Cinquecento’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, ser. 3, 11 (1963), pp. 79-92; see also A. Nesselrath, ‘The Venus Belvedere: an Episode in Restoration’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 50 (1987), pp. 205-14; M. Estella Marcos, ‘La Venus del Jardín de la Isla de Aranjuez’, in J. Urrea (ed.), Adán y Eva en Aranjuez: investigaciones sobre la escultura en la Casa de Austria, exh. cat. Madrid, Museo del Prado (Madrid, 1992), pp. 71-88; R. Coppel Aréizaga, Catálogo de la escultura de época moderna, siglos XVI-XVIII (Madrid, 1998), pp. 45-6, no. 1). 27 J. J. Winckelmann, Briefe, W. Rehm with H. Diepolder (eds), 4 vols (Berlin, 1952–57), II (1954), p. 189, no. 450 (letter to Anton Raphael Mengs, 18 November 1761), and p. 198, no. 460 (to the same Mengs, 16 December 1761). 28 T. Mommsen, in R. von Schneider, ‘Die Erzstatue von Helenenberge’, Jahrbuch der Kunsthistorischen Sammlungen des allerhöchsten Kaiserhauses, 15 (1894), pp. 102-23, at pp. 118-19. The Vienna version of the Jüngling has been dated thanks to technical investigation (Kurt Gschwantler et al., in Guß und Form: Bronzen aus der Antikensammlung, exh. cat. Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienna, 1986), pp. 51-8, no. 51). See also V. Freiberger, K. Gschwantler

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BC statue might have been sent from Salzburg to Mary. Now, the letter from Mary of Habsburg published here not only supports this reconstruction, but also provides it with a precise political and cultural context. The new document also gives the Vienna aftercast a precise date, confirming the doubts about its authenticity reported in the seventeenth century by Johan Steinhauser.29 Moreover, the fortune of the Austrian version, that erased the memory of its recent origin for five centuries, tells us that in this case metal was preferred to plaster for several reasons. When a bronze reproduced another original bronze in a 1:1 ratio, not only was the material precious and noble, but, if it had the right weight and an artificially-aged surface, it could also be taken for the original.30 Finally, the episode considered here demonstrates that, once the moulding techniques were applied to the reproduction of large statues and were placed at the collector’s disposal, they could also increase the tendency of the best original statues to reach the most powerful rulers. The original sculpture could be successfully replaced through a replica.

___________ and A. Pacher, ‘Beobachtungen zur Oberfläche des Jünglings vom Magdalensberg’, in K. Gschwantler and A. Bernhard-Walcher (eds), Griechische und römische Statuetten und Großbronzen, Akten der 9. Internationalen Tagung über Antike Bronzen, Vienna, 21–25 April 1986 (Vienna, 1988), pp. 28-34; E. Formigli, ‘Zur Form- und Gußtechnik des Jünglings vom Magdalensberg’, ibid., pp. 35-8; A. Vendl and B. Pichler, ‘Naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zur Authentifizierung der Bronzestatue des Jünglings vom Magdalensberg’, ibid., pp. 39-41. In Cupperi, ‘Arredi statuari: Parte II’, p. 170, note 1, I wrongly assumed that a third replica, now displayed in the Fortress of Salzburg, was also early modern, while it was actually cast in the nineteenth century, after the transfer of the Renaissance Jüngling from Salzburg to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. 29 Salzburg, Stiftsbibliothek St. Peter, MS b XIII 11, fol 77, transcribed in K. Gschwantler, ‘Der Jüngling vom Magdalensberg: ein Forschungsprojekt der Antikensammlung des Kunsthistorischen Museums Wien’, in K. Gschwantler and A. Bernhard-Walcher (eds), Griechische und römische Statuetten und Großbronzen, Akten der 9. Internationalen Tagung über Antike Bronzen, Vienna, 21–25 April 1986 (Vienna, 1988), pp. 16-27, at p. 25, note 26. According to Steinhauser the Jüngling now in Vienna was an “Abriß oder Contrafactur einer romischen Statuae oder Bildnus” which had been taken away from Salzburg. On this passage see also H. Ospald, ‘Johann Steinhauser, ein Salzburger Historiograph des beginnenden 17. Jahrhunderts’, Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landeskunde, 110-11 (1970–1971), pp. 1-124, at p. 88. 30 On this aspect of bronze casting from the antique, cf. B. Jestaz, ‘Les moulages d’antiques fondus en bronze au XVI siècle’, in H. Lavagne and F. Queyrel (eds), Les moulages de sculptures antiques et l’histoire de l’archéologie. Actes du colloque international, Paris, 24 octobre 1997 (Geneva, 2000), pp. 23-8, at p. 24. Green all’antica patinas started to be largely appreciated in this same moment, as a beautiful letter from Granvelle to Leone Leoni proves (E. Plon, Leone Leoni, sculpteur de Charles V, et Pompeo Leoni, sculpteur de Philippe II […] (Paris, 1887), p. 376, no. 52): on 2 December 1551, the minister requested Leoni to provide him with the recipe of such a patina, which “farà perdere il credito a le [teste] antiche che lo hanno naturalmente”.

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However, for the mid sixteenth century the case of the Jüngling was quite exceptional, in that a bronze cast from an important statue was made for the bishopric of a third-born prince, and not for a great European monarch. Only the interest of the Habsburgs in the original statue had made the casting of a bronze replica possible. As we shall immediately see, the greater part of the aristocracy of the time collected plaster casts, which were either acquired independently or made from the sets of moulds obtained by their lords.

Multiple Plaster Casts instead of Bronze Casts: the Granvelle and Hennin Liétard Collections Our second case study takes us back to Brussels, where in 1549 the Imperial Minister Mons. Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, outstanding collector of books and art objects, asked Primaticcio to cast an ancient statue, the Fusconi Adonis (actually the Vatican Meleager), whose moulds had been mentioned to Mons. Granvelle by Leone Leoni.31 Primaticcio replied that he had no moulds of the Adonis, but that Leoni had seen the moulds of the Antinoüs Belvedere, and that this statue could be cast for Granvelle. The latter accepted Primaticcio’s offer.32 It is likely that Primaticcio’s moulds of the Antinous, as well as the moulds shipped to Binche for the casts of the Nile and the Cleopatra, had already been used in France before. However in 1551, answering to another request from Granvelle concerning a plaster cast of the Apollo Belvedere, Primaticcio explicitly wrote that a third casting from the Apollo’s moulds could damage them, and remarked they were “weak because they had already

___________ 31 On the Vatican Meleager see W. Helbig, in B. Andreae et al., Führer durch die öffentlichen Sammlungen klassischer Altertümer in Rom, 4th edn (Tübingen, 1963), I, pp. 74-5, no. 97; F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique: the Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1981), pp. 263-6, no. 60. On Antoine Perrenot as patron of art see in general J. Brunet and G. Toscano (eds), Les Granvelles et l’Italie au XVI siècle: le mécenat d’une famille. Actes du colloque international, Besançon, Université de Franche-Comté, 2-4 octobre 1992 (Besançon, 1996), and K. De Jonge and G. Janssens (eds), Les Granvelle et les anciens Pays-Bas (Leuven, 2000), with bibliography. See also Cupperi, ‘Per la delettatione’ (forthcoming). 32 Greppi (ed.), Lettere di artisti italiani, pp. 58-9, no. 2, letter of Francesco Primaticcio to Granvelle, 28 October 1549: “Messer Leone ha preso il nome de ‘Adonis’ in iscambio, perché io gli dissi che io ho l’Antinoo tanto celebrato e non l’Adonis. Cercai bene de lo avere, ma il medico non ne volse far nulla; ma a me et al giudizio che più ne sa, l’Antinoo è infinitamente più bello. Mi duole di non poter contentare vostra reverendissima Signoria di questa figura [...]”. On 7 April 1550, the Prelate answered in a letter addressed to the Imperial Ambassador in France Simon Renard (in C. Weiss, Papiers d’État du cardinal de Granvelle, 9 vols (Paris, 1841–1852), III, pp. 421-2).

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Fig. 4. 3: Apollo. Francesco Primaticcio, 1540– 1541, aftercast from the second-century AD marble Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican Museums, Rome. Bronze, h: 2.18 m. Musée National du Château, Fontainebleau.

been used twice” (“debili per havere de già servito due volte”),33 implicitly referring to the bronze cast now in Fontainebleau (Fig. 4. 3), and to a lost, second plaster cast made for Mary of Hungary. Yet, Primaticcio also stated he was ready to cast a third replica of this statue for mons. Granvelle, and his offer seems to have been accepted: some letters from Granvelle’s secretaries Odet Viron and Maximilien Morillon reveal that in the Prelate’s Brussels palace a Venus and an Apollo were protected with a wood packing case during a wedding ceremony in 1569 (“garnir de bois et aix blancqz la Venere et Apollo, afin que l’on ny thouche”),34 and in 1607 the inventory of the goods once belonging to the Perrenot family in Besançon records “a plaster head of Apollo” “moulded from the antique” (une “teste de gy […] d’un Apollo” “mollée sur l’antique”), perhaps a fragment which had survived from the statue, or a further partial moulding of the plaster cast.35

___________ 33 Cupperi, ‘Arredi statuari: Parte II’, p. 169, appendix 3. 34 K. De Jonge, ‘Le Palais Granvelle à Bruxelles: premier exemple de Renaissance romaine dans les anciens Pays-Bas?’, in K. De Jonge and G. Janssens (eds), Les Granvelle et les anciens Pays-Bas (Leuven, 2000), pp. 341-87, at p. 372, no. 2, 23 May 1569; p. 374, no. 5, 27 July 1569; pp. 382-3, note 53, 5 October 1565. 35 A. Castan, ‘Monographie du Palais Granvelle à Besançon’, Mémoires de la Société d’Emulation du Doubs, ser. 4, 2 (1866), pp. 73-165, at p. 149.

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As a matter of fact, in 1552 Mary of Habsburg allowed another of her most influential courtiers, Jean de Hennin-Liétard, to have plaster casts made by Lancia from her own moulds.36 The act of collecting statues identical to those of the Queen attested to the status and privileges enjoyed by Antoine Perrenot and Jean de Hennin-Liétard under her rule. In this second case, Mary’s record of payment clearly distinguishes the “ancient statues” (“statues anticques”), which the “molleur en plattre” cast for her up to June 1552, and “some heads from the same antiquities” (“aulcunes testes desdictes anticquaiges”), which were cast for “Monseigneur de Boussu” from that moment. Jean de Hennin-Liétard’s plaster casts were only partial replicas made later: this difference established a clear hierarchy between the Governor’s and the courtier’s collections. However, the Habsburg Governor was not alone in being able to acquire plaster casts outside the court. Mons. Granvelle soon became an independent collector of casts after the antique: in 1568 the agent Niccolò Stroppio reported to Johan Jakob Függer an authoritative statement of the Prelate, according to which “he would rather have a perfect modern sculpture copied from the antique than an imperfect ancient one”.37 So, it is not surprising to discover from unpublished letters that already in May 1549 the Cardinal had five boxes of “plaster figures from Rome” shipped from Genoa to Cádiz (App. 1. and 2.). These plaster casts were first directed to Besançon, and later shipped to “Flanders”, perhaps in order to be displayed in Granvelle’s new palace in Brussels. It is also possible that these casts were made from ancient or modern works in Rome. What is certain is that, given the gross weight of the boxes was more than 950 kg altogether (“più di cantara quatro l’una”, that is about 190 kg, “et alchuna di magior peso”), his plaster “images” must have been quite large. Whatever the subjects of the said “plaster figures” may have been, Mons. Granvelle’s initiatives in the field of cast collecting should be regarded as highly significant in at least two respects. Firstly, they demonstrate that not only princes, but also imperial ministers and courtiers could acquire plaster casts for their collections on their own initiative. Some of Granvelle’s enterprises in this field were neither facilitated by his rulers, nor made possible by their moulds, but rather mediated by agents and artists that made the moulds available for casting in Rome or in Paris, and eventually shipped the works

___________ 36 Hedicke, Jacques Dubroeucq von Mons, p. 266, no. 52. 37 E. Weski and H. Frosien-Leinz (eds), Das Antiquarium der Münchner Residenz: Katalog der Skulpturen, 2 vols (Munich, 1987), I, p. 464, no. 120 (without date, but 1568). The letter is pointed out by Bertrand Jestaz, ‘Les premières copies d’antiques’, in Cuzin et al. (eds), D’après l’antique, p. 52, note 17.

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requested. Secondly, the entrance of aristocrats and courtiers into the world of cast collecting created favourable conditions for the spread of plaster casts from the antique and a more intense exploitation of their moulds. As a consequence, in the mid sixteenth-century multiple castings from the same moulds became less rare than one might imagine, and collecting casts from the antique became possible without commissioning new moulding campaigns after the original statues.

Appendix 1. Letter from Mary of Hungary to the Bishop of Salzburg, Brussels, 16 November 1551 (final draft, from a sixteenth-century copy book of the Secrétairererie d’État pour l’Allemagne: Brussels, Archives Générales du Royaume, inv. 74, MS No. 12, fol 72v-73r). Wir Maria von Gottes genaden zw Hungern unnd Behaim etc. Khunigin, Romischer Kay[zers] M[aies]t[a]t Stathaltterin und Gubernanndtin der Niderlannden, Embieten dem hochwirdigen, hochgeborenen fürsten, unnserm freundtlichen lieben Vettern, herrn Ernesten confirmirten zu Erzbischoven des Stiffts Salzburg etc., Pfalzgrafen bei Rhein, Hrezogen [scil. Herzogen] in obern unnd Nidern Bayern, unnser Freundtchafft mit guettem willen aller gebüer zuvor. Freundtlicher lieber Vetter, demnach E[uer] L[ieb] hiebevor verschiner Zeit auf unnsers freundtlichen geliebten herrn unnd Brueders, der Römischen zw Hungern und Behaim Khuniglichen wirde etc., ansinnen, mit ainem antiquischen von Metal gegoȕnen bildt zu wilfaren, sich freundtlich erboten, allain das Euer Lieb solich Bildt zuvor abgiessen, desselben ainen abgueȕ für sich behalten, unnd uns volgenndt das recht alt gegossen bildt zuverordnen wolten, etc., darumben wir E[urer] L[ieb] soliches ieres guettwilligen erbiethens freundtlich dannckhbar seindt. Unnd dieweil wir nun zu solichem unnd dergleichen khunstreichen stuckhen unnd antiquiteten sonndern lusst und naigung tragen, haben wir der ursahen halber, ob villeicht E[urer] L[ieb] das bey anndern ieren geschefften in vergessen khomen, nit underlassen khonden E[uer] L[ieb] diesselben Ieres guettwilligen erbietens, mit disem unnserm schreiben zuerinnern. Gannz freudtlich ansinnen unnd begeren, an E[urer] L[ieb], die wellen uns zu sonnderm Lust unnd freundtchafft ob angerüert alt gegossen bildt zu hannden gegenwerttigen briefs bringer, der es fortter herab in diese lanndt verordnen wierdet, zur anntwurtten unbeschwerdt sain, soliches wellen wir hinwider umd E[urer] L[ieb] in dergleichen unnd merern aller gebüer |73r| freundtlich geern beschulten. Geben zu Brüssel in Brabandt den Sechzehenden tag Novembris Anno im ainundfünfzigsten.

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2. Letter from Stefano De Insula to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Genoa, 29 May 1549 (Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS II-2267, fol 247r-v) Reverendissimo et illustrissimo Monsignor, mio patron osservandissimo. Non ho scritto più presto a Vostra Signoria reverendissima – per non essere mai capitato – que elle figure de gipso de Roma al presente sono da giorni quatro 38 che con una barcha arivarno qua, adrizate al signore ambasciador Figaroa. Il quale mi fece intendere como erano gionte dite figure, qual sono in casse cinque. Et per essere molto grieve et pesa[r] più di cantara quatro l’una, et alchuna di magior peso, è parso al signor Ambasciador et a me tenirle qua sino a novo avis[o] de Vostra Signoria reverendissima. Attento il signor Ambasciador dice haver comissione di mandarle a Besanson, et io gli ho mostrato una litera, ch[e] me scrivea de Burselles il signor Collonello mio fratello per ordine de Vostra Signoria reverendissima, che quando ditte casse fusseno legiere, doverle da[re] a qualche condutiero che lo conducesse per terra in Fiandr[a]; e quando fusseno tanto grieve, che non se potessino portare, man[d]arle senza disfare per mare a drittura in Fiandr[a]; et non trovando passagio mandarle in Cades con ordine che fusseno mandate in Fiandra et consignarle a Vostra Signoria reverendissima. La quale, per il desiderio ch’io tengo di servirla, mi far[à] gratia con le prime sue litere ordinarme quello ch’io have[rò] a fare, et per aricordo mio non li mancherò da dire che per terra a partito alchuno le debbia far mandare, perchè Vostra Signoria reverendissima troverà tutte le imagine fracassate [e] rote alla gionta loro. E quando quella volesse che si mand[ino] a Besanson, saria meglio mandarle per mare sino in Arli, e[t] dipoii per acqua a Lione e in Borgogna. Habbio pagat[o] per ordine del signor Ambasciador il nolo de le dite cinque cass[e] de Roma qua. Et in ogni altra cosa ch’io posso servire Vostra Signoria reverendissima, la receverò per grandissima mercede ch’ella si degni comandarme et tenirme nel numero de’ soii bo[ni] servitori. Alla cui bona gratia de Vostra Signoria illustrissima e reverendissima me offero et ricomando, et humilmente li baso le mani, pregando lo Creatore guardi e prosperi felice con crescimento de stato, como desidera Vostra Signoria illustrissima e reverendissima. D[i] Genova, alli 29 de Maggio 1549. Di Vostra Signoria illustrissima e reverendissima sempre servitor, Stefano de Insula

3. Letter from Stefano De Insula to Antoine Perrenot de Granvelle, Genoa, 24 October 1549 (original, Madrid, Biblioteca de Palacio, MS II-2267, fol 321r-v) Reverendissimo et illustrissimo Monsignor, mio patrone osservandissimo. Sono XV giorni ch’io habbio caricato le cinque cassie di gespo [scil. gepso] sopra una nave, prizata per messer G[i]oanni del Cano genovese, per portare in Cadex. In lo quale loco il signor ambasciador Figaroa scriverà ad un suo amico

___________ 38 Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, Duke of Ferrandina and Imperial Ambassador in Genoa.

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che le mandino con lo primo buono passaggio in Anversa a messer Nic[col]ò Rosso mio nipote, che vogli di esse cassie seguirne l’ordine et voluntà di Vostra Signoria reverendissima. Et con lo primo buon tempo partirà detta nave – che nostro Signore Dio la conduca a salvamento. Et se in altro posso servir Vostra Signoria reverendissima, la supplico si voglia degnar di commandarme come suo humile servitor, et io lo riceverò per grandissima mercede, basiandoli le mani, pregando lo Creator guardi et prosperi con crescimento di stato Sua reverendissima et illustrissima Signoria come desidera. Da Genova, alli XXIIII di ottobre MDXXXXVIIII […] . Di Vostra reverendissima et illustrissima Signoria servitor, Stefano de Insula

Frequently cited literature W. Cupperi, ‘Arredi statuari nelle regge dei Paesi Bassi asburgici meridionali (1549–56): Parte II: Un nuovo “Laocoonte” in gesso, i calchi dall’antico di Maria d’Ungheria e quelli della “Casa degli Omenoni” a Milano’, Prospettiva, 115-116 (2004), pp. 159-76 J. P. Cuzin, J.-R. Gaborit, and A. Pasquier (eds), D’après l’antique, exh. cat. Paris, Musée du Louvre (Paris, 2000) C. Greppi (ed.), Lettere di artisti italiani ad Antonio Perrenot di Granvelle (Madrid, 1977) R. Hedicke, Jacques Dubroeucq von Mons, ein niederländischer Meister aus der Frühzeit des italienischen Einflusses (Strassburg, 1904) H. Ladendorf, Antikenstudium und Antikenkopie: Vorarbeiten zu einer Darstellung ihrer Bedeutung in der mittelalterlichen und neueren Zeit (Berlin, 1958), pp. 62-74

“Makinge of moldes for the walles” – The Stuccoes of Nonsuch: materials, methods and origins MARTIN BIDDLE

The vast work of stucco decorating the outside walls of King Henry VIII’s Nonsuch Palace was ‘without equal’ then or since. Known from contemporary descriptions and views, but lost with the destruction of the palace in the 1680s, nothing was known to survive until excavation of the palace in 1959 recovered hundreds of fragments of the stucco and of the carved slate which surrounded each panel. The making of Nonsuch palace was the immediate result of the central event in the personal life of King Henry VIII. Edward, the long awaited legitimate male heir to the Tudor throne, was born to Jane Seymour at Hampton Court on 12 October 1537. Twelve days later his mother was dead. By the end of the year the site of a new palace had been chosen; work began on 22 April 1538, the first day of the thirtieth year of Henry VIII’s reign; in June the name ‘Nonnesuche’ first appears in the margin of the building accounts. From the start, Henry VIII’s evident intention was to build a house without equal whose decoration would celebrate the nature, and safeguard the future, of his dynasty. All Henry’s greater palaces – Whitehall, Hampton Court, Greenwich, Richmond, and most of his lesser houses, The More, for example – were renovations and enlargements, sometimes on a huge scale, of existing houses which he had inherited or acquired. Only Nonsuch was wholly new, built on a site occupied by the manor house, church, churchyard, and buildings of the Surrey village of Cuddington, but chosen for the convenience and amenity of its location and the availability of a good supply of water from rising ground to the south. Like Henry’s neighbouring palace at Oatlands, ten miles away to the west, itself a reworking of an older house, Nonsuch was to lie within a vast new hunting chase, the paling of which had begun before the end of 1537. The whole arrangement has a private air. Here was a new chase along six miles of the Surrey bank of the Thames, dependant on the great palace of Hampton Court, more convenient to London than Windsor, with two lesser, more secluded palaces, Oatlands and Nonsuch, within its limits. Immediately

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to the north of Nonsuch lay its Great Park of a thousand acres and the palace itself was surrounded by the Little Park of 671 acres, paled and stocked with deer by the end of 1538. It is as if the palace “which no equal has in art or fame”, in Horace Walpole’s translation of Nathan Chytraeus’ Latin verse (wrongly attributed to John Leland), was deliberately planned as a private retreat.

The Building of Nonsuch The foundations were laid during the summer of 1538. By mid September when the surviving books of building accounts come to an end, the masonry ground floor and timber frame of the principal floor of the Inner Court were substantially complete and work on the decorations was about to begin. It was to continue for at least four more years. By November 1545 the cost of Nonsuch amounted to £24,536, half as much again as had been spent on Henry’s vastly larger works at Hampton Court during the same period. When Henry died on 28 January 1547 the palace was still unfinished but what little remained to be done was completed by Henry FitzAlan, 12th Earl of Arundel, after his purchase of Nonsuch from the Crown in 1556.

The Appearance of Nonsuch Nonsuch was demolished between 1682 and 1690 and the decorations destroyed but the palace is known to us from two lengthy written accounts, Anthony Watson’s Brevis et vera descriptio written perhaps in 1582 and the Parliamentary Survey of 1650; from the travel diaries of foreign visitors; from the comments of Pepys and Evelyn (see below); and from four views. Joris Hoefnagel’s watercolour of 1568 (Fig. 5. 14 and Pl. 5. B) and John Speed’s engraving of 1610 (Fig. 5. 1), both show the south front; a painting of Nonsuch from the north-west of about 1620 is now in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge; and a painting of c. 1669–80 by Hendrick Danckerts showing the palace from the north-east exists in two copies, one at Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire, the other in the care of the Nonsuch Park Joint Management Committee in Epsom. The excavation of the site in 1959 recovered the ground plan (Fig. 5. 2 and Pl. 5. A) and hundreds of fragments of the moulded stucco and carved slate decorations which made Nonsuch unique (Figs 5. 3-11).

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Fig. 5. 1: The south front of Nonsuch. Jodocus Hondius (Josse de Hondt). Engraving, h: 11.4 cm, w: 11.3 cm. From John Speed’s Map of Surrey, 1610. Author’s collection.

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Fig. 5. 2: Plan of Nonsuch as recovered by excavation in 1959, the extent of the stucco decorations on the exterior walls in dashed outline (for red outline, see Pl. 5. A).

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Fig. 5. 3: Nonsuch: drawing (David Honour) of the stucco fragments of a swag of fruit and roses surrounding a Tudor Rose. The part to the right of the white division is reconstructed in mirror-image. Approx. max. w. of reconstructed swag: 99 cm.

The Decorations of the Inner Court These written, pictorial, and archaeological sources show that the outer walls of the west, south, and east ranges of the Inner Court, facing onto the Privy Garden, and the four inward-facing walls around the Inner Court, were covered by rectangular panels of stucco in high relief set within a framework of vertical and horizontal timber beams covered with running panels of carved and gilded slate (Fig. 5. 15 and Pl. 5. C). The decorative scheme was in total over 900 ft (274 m) long, with a minimum average height of 24 ft (7.5 m), covering a surface of 21,600 ft2 (2055 m2). Sheer scale was not least among the attributes of the decorations of Nonsuch. Fragments of a stucco found at the foot of the south-west tower can be reconstructed to give the measurements of what was clearly a standard panel

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measuring 4 ft 6 in (137 cm) high by 2 ft ¼ in (89 cm) wide (Figs 5. 9-12). Even supposing that half the decorated area of 21,600 ft2 (2055 m2) was occupied by borders, articulating elements such as pilasters of superimposed classical orders, doors, and windows, the whole scheme will have comprised several hundred stuccoes the size of the reconstructed panel, as well as many smaller panels with what appear to be swags of fruit and flowers and the royal badges (Figs 5. 3-4). It is an irony of the evidence for Nonsuch that the four known views all show parts of the outward-facing walls of the Inner Court, which are not described in any of the written sources so far discovered, while the decorations of the inward-facing walls are by contrast (with one small exception) known only from written descriptions. Detailed as some of these are, they do not replace a lack of visual evidence for the appearance of all but the small part of the Inner Court decorations which appears on Speed’s view of 1610 over the roof of the south front, to either side of the Inner Gatehouse (Fig. 5. 1). The only written evidence for the stuccoes on the garden walls of the Inner Court suggests that some showed scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Hoefnagel’s minutely detailed watercolour (Fig. 5. 14 and Pl. 5. B) suggests that the towers and the walls of the ranges between them carried mounted, seated, standing, confronted (perhaps fighting), and three-headed figures, with giant pedestalled terms to either side of the central bay. By contrast, the decorative scheme around the Inner Court can be reconstructed in considerable detail from the written sources. The walls of the ground floor appear to have been plain masonry with windows, broken to either side by state entrances into the king’s and queen’s apartments and by bay windows rising from the ground to light the presence and the privy chambers on both the king’s and the queen’s side. The walls of the upper floor, the piano nobile containing the state apartments 18 ft (5.5 m) high, were covered with three levels or registers of stucco panels framed by carved and gilded slate covering (and concealing) the timbers of the frame. The uppermost register carried in chronological sequence representations (busts?) of Julius Caesar and thirty-one Roman emperors, from Augustus (the first emperor) to the minor figure of Aemilianus who reigned for less than a year in 253. The two lower registers seem to have run level with the windows of state apartments at first-floor level and were divided thematically and by gender between the king’s side to the west and the queen’s to the east. The fact that the state apartments are recorded to have been 18 ft high from floor to ceiling would have allowed more than ample height for the two principal registers of decoration with the busts of the emperors above. On the king’s side the middle register (the higher of the two principal registers) carried the figures of sixteen of the gods of classical antiquity, the

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queen’s side sixteen of the goddesses. Each figure was identified by names and/or mottoes spelled out in letters of gilded lead nailed into plugs drilled in the surface of the stucco admonishing the viewer: ‘Do this’, ‘Don’t do that’. The lower register on the king’s side comprised sixteen Labours of Hercules, four more than the usual twelve and the longest series known in art. On the queen’s side the corresponding register consisted of sixteen Liberal Arts and Virtues, and their personifications. From first-floor level at the centre of the south range of the Inner Court an image of King Henry VIII, seated on a curule throne (in sella curuli) with a maned lion beneath his feet and Prince Edward by his side, looked out over the Inner Court with its images of emperors, gods, goddesses, Labours, Virtues, and Arts. For the visitor entering the Inner Court, up eight steps rather than one or two “as into the Pantheon in Rome”, as Watson wrote, the figures of king and prince among the gods and heroes will have made an instant impact. All visitors seem to have felt this without perhaps understanding the statement of dynasty and duties of a ruler, and the talismanic power with which the images themselves were imbued. It was the greatest single work of artistic intention ever erected by an English monarch. Not, indeed, a piece of propaganda, for Nonsuch was remote and essentially private, and its Inner Court secluded, but a suitable scheme for a house intended for the residence and upbringing of the new-born prince.

The Making of the Decorations The building accounts break off in mid September 1538, but there are already signs that something unusual was intended, as the first appearance of the name ‘Nonnesuche’ in mid June indicates. In July or August a special cart, “the great wain”, was made to carry “the great pieces for the towers” from the woods where suitable trees had been found. There were sixteen pieces in all, one of 55 feet, fourteen of 80 feet, and one of 89 feet, timbers of a length probably not findable today. These sixteen pieces can only have been for the angles of the two octagon towers flanking the south front of the palace (Figs 5. 1-2, 14-15 and Pls 5. A-C). Remarkable as these timbers are, they give no idea of the decorations that were to follow. Two brief entries may give further hints. In the same month sixteen “mountes” (about 24 tons) of Plaster of Paris were purchased in London and brought up the Thames and across land to Nonsuch. The next month 31 tons of “Luke” stone were delivered by the same route. The Plaster of Paris was perhaps intended for the stuccoes, the making of which may have begun before the end of the year. The “Luke” stone, probably a black fine-grained

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carboniferous limestone from the region of Liège (Luik), was perhaps stockpiled for the carving of the “slate” panels. Although detailed accounts end in mid September, a single estimate for the five-week pay period ending on 4 June 1541 survives. By this time the work in progress at Nonsuch was not only less expensive than that at Hampton Court or Oatlands but different in character. Most of the work at Nonsuch was in carpentry, carving, and other less conventional forms of decoration including: “Moden’ and his company workinge uppon slate 6 [men] ... Kendall and his company occupiede in makinge of moldes for the walles 24 [men]”. Here we are brought face to face for the first time with the reality of the remarkable decorations of Nonsuch and those who made them. The carving and gilding of the slate used to frame the stucco panels was carried out by a team who scratched on the back directions in French for where the pieces were to go, and in one case on the front the name of one of them “Pairar Besl [...] masson”. These Frenchmen worked under Nicholas Bellin of Modena (“Nicholas Modena”, or simply “Moden”, or “Mothen” in the sources) who had arrived in England in 1537 from France having worked since 1533 for Francis I on the decoration of the royal apartments in the palace of Fontainebleau. Nicholas’ work in France and England, particularly at Nonsuch is now well known (see Bibliography). Here our concern is with Kendall and his “makinge of moldes for the walles”. Kendall may perhaps be identified with William Kendall of London, carver, mentioned in 1539, who appears again in 1542 in connection with the staff of the King’s Works, and had previously been responsible for making the king’s great “bedde of walnutte tree at Yorke place”. He seems to be the same William Kendall who had entered the livery of the Wax Chandlers’ Company in 1532, was master in 1554–6, and died in 1558–9, having endowed under his will an educational charity which the Wax Chandlers administer to this day. His surname and career show that he was an Englishman and his role at Nonsuch was probably as overseer of the twenty-four men making the ‘moldes’, for the technique, style, and accomplishment of the stuccoes show that those who made them had been trained by Nicholas Bellin and had (some of them at least) worked with, or like, him at Fontainebleau. By Christmas 1544 Kendall’s role had been assumed (at least in part) by Gyles Geringes, stranger, described in May 1545 as “overseer of certain of our white works” at Nonsuch. As a ‘stranger’, a foreigner, Geringes may have been French, promoted perhaps from Kendall’s original company. His role was no more than supervisory for on 21 May 1545 the king wrote from Nonsuch complaining that Geringes had not been there more than twice since Christmas “to oversee the workemen under his chardge”. He must have explained himself, for the following September “Giles Geringe the moldemaker

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at Nonesuch” was granted an annuity of £20 and this was still being paid three years later. The making of stuccoes of the kind employed at Fontainebleau was introduced into England by Nicholas Bellin. In November 1540 Sir John Wallop, the English ambassador to France, wrote to Henry VIII describing the gallery at Fontainebleau, which “no man canne better shewe Your Majestie then Modon, who wrought there in the begynnyng of the same”, noting that “the fourthe part is all antique of suche stuff as the said Modon makith Your Majesties chemenyes”. One of these chimneys is probably to be identified with “the ffronte of [the] chemnaye ffor the prevye chamber” at Whitehall on which Frenchmen were working in 1539/40. By this time work on the stuccoes of Nonsuch had been in progress for some two years. Their oversight, as we have seen, was and remained in the hands of others, but their technique and style were ultimately due to Nicholas Bellin and the workmen were probably French, as were those who made the privy chamber chimney at Whitehall and carved the ‘slate’ at Nonsuch under Nicholas Bellin’s own direct supervision.

The Making of the Stucco This is as much as the contemporary written sources have to tell us of those who made the Nonsuch stuccoes. They do not tell us of what and how the stucco was made, how the material was worked, or how the stuccoes were installed on the walls of the Inner Court. First, the material. Apart from the mentions of Plaster of Paris and ‘Luke’ stone (as we have seen), the surviving accounts for the first five months of the work have little to show that some extraordinary decorative project was afoot. There are no contemporary descriptions of the work in progress, but forty years later in the 1580s Anthony Watson, a protégé of John Lord Lumley, the then owner of Nonsuch, and someone who knew the building inside out, wrote in his Brevis et vera descriptio that from the powdered ashes of flints (ex contritis silicum cineribus), carefully moistened, a substance was made which was suitable for taking any kind of impression, and in the natural process of drying became harder than adamant. Much skill was lavished on this material, and everywhere there are kings, caesars, sciences, gods.

Watson’s description can only be hearsay, but must represent what was believed at Nonsuch in his time, and possibly even reported by some who had seen the works in progress forty years before. Watson’s account of the process is not unlike Vasari’s description of how stucco duro was made:

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Now let us show how the stucco is mixed. Chips of marble are pounded in a stone mortar; no other lime is used for this stucco save white lime made either of marble chips or of travertine; instead of sand the pounded marble is taken and is sifted finely and kneaded with the lime, in the proportion of two thirds lime to one third pounded marble (Vasari, On Technique: Of Architec ture, 4. 30; Maclehose (transl.) and Baldwin Brown (ed.) 1907, 86).

Fig. 5. 4: Nonsuch: drawing (David Honour) of stucco fragments and reconstruction of the Garter motto. Ext. diam. of motto, 49.2 cm; diam. of central rose, 16.8 cm.

Fig. 5. 5: Nonsuch: the stucco head of a winged cherub from the decorative frame shown in Fig. 5. 6.

More precise definition of the lime and body and of the methods used in making the Nonsuch stucco must await the results of analyses now in progress. The question of how the stucco was worked and installed involves a consideration of the meaning of the word ‘molde’ and its plural ‘moldes’ to describe the stuccoes upon which Kendall and Geringes and their ‘company’ were working. Were these the moulds carved in intaglio into which the stucco was cast or with which the stucco was impressed? Or were the ‘moldes’ the things moulded by hand? And if the latter, were these moulded works produced in frames on the bench in the lodge and later put in position on the building? Or were they worked in situ on the scaffold each panel in its chosen site? The use of wooden moulds is simply dealt with. The high relief of the figures (Figs 5. 5-10) could not have been produced in negative moulds, but some of the flatter decoration, such as runs of reel-and-bobbin or egg-and-dart detail (Figs 5. 4-6)

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Fig. 5. 6: Nonsuch: drawing (David Honour) of the stucco head of the winged cherub shown in Fig. 5. 5, with adjoining fragments and reconstruction of the top of a decorative frame. The section (lower right) through the cherub’s head shows the depth of the supporting armature. Max. w. of reconstructed wingspan, 80.8 cm; ext. w. of frame: 68.8 cm; int. w. of framed area: 60.0 cm.

Fig. 5. 7: Nonsuch: drawing (David Honour) of a stucco fragment from the top of a panel with a hand grasping drapery which hangs from a ring. Max. h. of fragment: 23 cm.

and other low relief such as foliage and drapery could have been and probably were produced in this way on the scaffold by pressing the moulds into the fresh stucco, and tidying up and undercutting with the knife as needed, rather than by producing moulded items in the lodge for later fixing in position. Here the role of William Kendall may have been significant, if the Nonsuch man is correctly identified. As someone skilled in the carving of hard wood such as walnut he would be well able to supervise the production of, or

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even himself to carve, negative moulds of the kind required and as a wax chandler to procure the beeswax needed to keep them in good order. There can be no doubt that the greater part of the stucco was moulded by hand, but some doubt has arisen as to whether the panels were produced on the bench and then fixed in position on the building, or whether the work was all done on the scaffold. Sufficient fragments were found lying together at the foot of the south-west tower to allow the reconstruction of one complete panel. (Figs 5. 9-12). Marks in the stucco on the sides and back of this panel show that it was moulded into a timber frame closed at the back by vertical planks set edge to edge and nailed into position by three rows of nails hammered through from the front of the planks, leaving the marks of their square heads in the back of the stucco (Figs 5. 12-13). These nails can only have been used to fix the planks into some frame behind. It might perhaps be supposed that the marks of wood in the sides and back of the stucco were left by a casting frame with knock-down sides laid horizontally on the work bench, and that after completion the dried stucco panel was lifted up into position on the outer walls and inserted within the spaces formed by the timber framing. But in addition to the horizontal lines of nail heads visible in the back of the stucco, there is a series of scattered holes which correspond to high points in the relief (Fig. 5. 12). When examined at a break (and in some cases using silicone-rubber casts) these prove to have been made by facetted and tapering wooden pegs which must have been tapped through from the back of the planks. These project into the stucco either horizontally or angled slightly upwards and can only be explained as armatures (‘dowels’) to support the thicker areas of the stucco as it dried. These holes occur on many of the stucco fragments, always at points of relatively high relief (e.g. Figs 5. 3 and 6). In some cases, as behind the shield of the Roman soldier on the reconstructed panel (Fig. 5. 12; cf. Fig. 5. 9), larger wooden supports, straight-sided and rectangular in section could be used. These observations suggest that the stuccoes, rather than being moulded flat on the work bench, were actually moulded in position on the scaffold, each panel being set within a frame formed by, and against planks fixed to, the timbers of the building (Fig. 5. 13). This carries with it the implication that the Inner Court of Nonsuch was timber-framed rather than built of brick and stone (like the Outer Court) specifically to provide a setting for the stucco decoration, the timber framing being hidden by panels of carved and gilded ‘slate’. Figure 5. 13 gives an idea of how the timber framing of the walls provided rectangular ‘boxes’ into which the stuccoes could be set. Much remains to be worked out in detail – not least the question of how the designs for the stuccoes

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Fig. 5. 8: Nonsuch: drawings (David Honour) of stucco feet from the bottom of panels. Upper foot, seen from above, max. projection from the background of the decorated area, 16.4 cm; seen from the front of the panel, max. h. of fragment: 14 cm; the section shows both the depth of the supporting armature and (in black) the location of a wooden support for the underside of the foot as it hangs forward from the decorated area. Lower foot, seen from the side of the panel, max. h. of fragment: 13.2 cm; seen from the front of the panel, max. w: 16 cm.

were transferred to the wooden planks to guide the placing of the armatures – but the regularity of the timber work suggests that the stucco panels were of standard sizes, to fit the structure of the framing in the various parts of the walls and towers (Figs 5. 14-15 and Pls 5. B-C). Vasari’s account of the making of stucco decorations conforms to this interpretation, with the exception that the stuccoes he describes were moulded onto masonry walls rather than set within timber frames provided by the structure of a building: Then with stucco, which [...] we described as crushed marble mixed with lime from travertine, they begin to cover the [...] [backing] with the first daub of rough stucco, that is coarse and granulated, to be covered over with finer when the first stucco has set and is firm, but not thoroughly dry. The reason for this is that to work the mass of the material above a damp bed makes it unite better, therefore they keep wetting the stucco at the place where the upper coating is laid on so as to render it more easy to work. To make (enriched) mouldings or modelled leafage it is necessary to have shapes of wood carved in intaglio with those same forms that you wish to render in relief. The worker takes stucco that is not actually hard nor really soft, but in a way tenacious, and puts it on the work in the quantity needed for the detail intended to

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Fig. 5. 9: Nonsuch: drawing (David Honour) of the fragments of a panel showing a Roman soldier seated on his shield. H: 136.8 cm, w: 89 cm.

Fig. 5. 10: Nonsuch: reconstruction (David Honour) of the panel showing a Roman soldier seated on his shield. H: 136.8 cm, w: 89 cm.

be formed. He then places over it the said hollowed mould which is powdered with marble dust, striking it with a hammer so that the blows fall equally, and this leaves the stucco imprinted; he then proceeds to clean and finish it so that the work becomes true and even. But if he desire the work to have bolder relief in projection, in the spot where this is to come he fixes iron supports or nails or other armatures of a similar kind which hold the stucco suspended in the air, and by these means the stucco sets firmly [...]. Moreover, when the artificer wishes to produce a composition in bas-relief on a flat wall, he first inserts numerous nails in the wall, here projecting less, there more, according as the figures are to be arranged [...] [to] hold the coarse stucco of the first rough cast, which he afterwards goes on refining delicately and patiently till it consolidates. While it is hardening he works diligently, retouching it continually with moistened paint-brushes in such a manner as may bring it to perfection as if it were of wax or clay. [...] Nor is one to suspect work so done of being perishable; on the contrary it lasts for ever, and hardens so well as time goes on, that it becomes like marble (Vasari, On Technique: Of Sculpture, 6. 72; Maclehose (transl.) and Baldwin Brown (ed.) 1907, 170-2).

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Fig. 5. 11: Nonsuch: drawing (David Honour) of the back of the fragments of the panel showing a Roman soldier seated on his shield (cf. Fig. 5. 9). H: 136.8 cm, w: 89 cm.

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Fig. 5. 12: Nonsuch: diagram (David Honour) of the impressions of planks, nail heads, pegs, and armature holes visible in the back of the fragments of the panel showing a Roman soldier seated on his shield (cf. Fig. 5. 11). H: 136.8 cm, w. 89 cm.

Vasari is here describing the decoration with stucco of vertical walls and the underside of curved vaults. There is no hint that stuccoes were worked flat on a bench. Rather they were built up in position stage by stage, moulded by hand and tool. This is exactly how stucco decorations were made in Rome, at Mantua and at Fontainebleau, and the evidence of the stucco fragments from Nonsuch shows that there too the decorations were moulded from the scaffold.

Pepys and Evelyn at Nonsuch The fragments of the Nonsuch stuccoes reflect every aspect of Vasari’s description and have indeed lasted like marble. It was this which so attracted the attention of two acute observers in 1665–6, less than twenty years before the

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Fig. 5. 13: Nonsuch: diagram (David Honour), based on the impressions visible in the back of the panel of the Roman soldier (Fig. 5. 11; cf. Fig. 5. 12), showing how the frame for the stucco panel was provided by the timbers of the south-west tower.

Inner Court was finally demolished. The Treasury having been evacuated to Nonsuch to escape the plague then raging in London, it was to Nonsuch that business took them. On 21 September 1665, Samuel Pepys wondered at the building: [...] all the house on the outside filled with figures of story, and good painting of Rubens or Holben’s doing. And one great thing is that most of the house is covered, I mean the posts and quarters in the walls, covered with Lead and gilded.

Pepys was wrong in taking the carved and gilded ‘slate’ for lead, a mistake which others made, but he also made a distinction between “figures of story”, that is, stuccoes, and “good painting”. Pepys’ comment cannot easily be dismissed: his comparison to the work of Rubens and Holbein must mean that he saw actual figural paintings, as well as stuccoes. This should be no surprise, even if the significance of Pepys’ comment has been generally ignored, for painted panels were an integral part of the schemes of stucco decoration at Fontainebleau and its antecedents at Mantua and in Rome. Pepys’ observation is confirmed by the discovery among the stucco fragments of recessed flat panels of plain stucco surrounded by raised and decorated frames, one of which can be partly reconstructed (Figs 5. 4, 5). The presence of dowel holes in the recessed area implies that something was meant to be fixed in the recess.

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Fig. 5. 14: Nonsuch: the south-west tower from the south, detail from a watercolour by Joris Hoefnagel, 1568. The lower storey of the tower is concealed behind the 14ft-high wall of the Privy Garden. In private possession. For colour reproduction see Pl. 5. B.

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Fig. 5. 15: Nonsuch: computer reconstruction (Simon Hayfield; provisional state) of the southwest tower based on all available contemporary illustrations, and the evidence of archaeology, written sources, and the surviving fragments of stucco and slate. For colour reproduction see Pl. 5. C.

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It seems probable that this was a wooden panel, the only function of which can have been to carry painted decoration. A few months later, John Evelyn noted in his diary for 3 January 1666 that he: tooke an exact view of the Plaster Statues & Bass-relievos inserted twixt the timbers & poincons of the outside walles of the [Inner] Court, which must needs have ben the work of some excellent Italian: admire I did much how it had lasted so well & intire as since the time of Hen: 8, exposd, as they are to the aire, & pitty it is they are not taken out, & [preserved] in some dry place, a gallerie would become them: there are some Mezzo relievi as big as the life, & the storie is of the heathen Gods, Emblems, Compartments, &c.

That was not to be. In the 1680s, first the Inner Court and a few years later the Outer Court were levelled to the ground, their materials sold to builders and the stuccoes broken up and carted away, allegedly to serve as flux in the ironworks of the Sussex Weald. Some panels, Evelyn later reported, had been “translated” to Lord Berkeley’s villa at Durdans at Epsom, but they have not survived.

Select bibliography (in chronological order) L. S. Maclehose (transl.) and G. Baldwin Brown (ed.), Vasari on Technique (London, 1907); unaltered Dover paperback reprint (New York, N.Y., 1960) A. W. Clapham, ‘The Royal Palace of Nonsuch, Surrey’, in A. W. Clapham and W. H. Godfrey, Some Famous Buildings and their Story (Westminster [n.d., c 1914]) M. Biddle, ‘Nonsuch 1959–60: an Interim Report’, Surrey Archaeological Collections, 58 (1961), pp. 1-20 [initial report on the discovery and excavation of the palace] M. Biddle, ‘Nicholas Bellin of Modena, an Italian Artificer at the Courts of Francis I and Henry VIII’, Journal of the British Archaeological Association, 3rd ser., 29 (1966), pp. 106-21 J. Dent, The Quest for Nonsuch, 2nd edn (London, 1970) [an account of the discovery and excavation of Nonsuch and of the building and social history of the palace, with an analysis of the building accounts of 1538 and an appendix of select documents] M. Biddle and J. Summerson, ‘Nonsuch Palace’, in H. M. Colvin (ed.), The History of the King’s Works, 6 vols (London, 1963–1982), IV.2, pp. 179205 J. Turquet, ‘The Inner Court of Nonsuch Palace’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of London, 1983)

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M. Biddle, ‘The Stuccoes of Nonsuch’, The Burlington Magazine, 126 (1984), pp. 411-16 M. Biddle, ‘Nonsuch Palace’, The Dictionary of Art (London, 1996), XXIII, pp. 197-9 M. Biddle, ‘The Gardens of Nonsuch: Sources and Dating’, Garden History, 27.1 (Summer 1999), pp. 145-83 [critical review of the written and pictorial sources for the appearance of the palace and its gardens] M. Biddle, Nonsuch Palace: The Material Culture of a Noble Restoration Household (Oxford, 2005) [the later history and demolition of Nonsuch]

Making and Distribution from the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century

“Moulded from the best originals of Rome” – Eighteenth-Century Production and Trade of Plaster Casts after Antique Sculpture in Germany1 CHARLOTTE SCHREITER

In 1794, a catalogue was published entitled Casts of antique and modern statues, figures, busts, bas-reliefs moulded from the best originals in Rost’s art dealers shop in Leipzig (Fig. 6. 1). It listed fifty-four full-scale statues and seventy-five busts as well as numerous small-scale copies and “study pieces” – single hands, feet, monuments and reliefs among others. Fifty-six separately bound copper engravings illustrate a representative range of the most important pieces. This was the first time that the Leipzig art dealer Carl Christian Heinrich Rost (Fig. 6. 2) had published an illustrated catalogue of all the casts of antique and modern sculptures available in his shop.2 This impressive catalogue in two volumes was in turn only one part of a substantial work comprising etchings and music supplies as well as other goods such as Wedgwood ceramics or Italian cork models and dactyliothecae.3 As far as its presentation is concerned, the core of the publication – the illustrated catalogue – must be considered at the least outstanding, if not unique. This catalogue was neither the first one to be published by Rost, nor the only one in circulation in the central German cities and courts at the end of the eighteenth century, but in terms of its comprehensiveness it exceeded any

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This contribution was written in the context of the project “Brave Old World: Places, Programmes and Materials about 1800” within the Collaborative Research Centre 664 “Transformations of Antiquity” at the Humboldt University Berlin [accessed 15 July 2009]. I would like to thank Barbara Lück, Steffen Zarutzki, Daniela Stief, Per Rumberg, Deborah Cohen, Florian von Ehrenstein, Claudia Sedlarz and Marcus Becker for discussion, practical assistance and translation. [Rost], Abgüsse antiker und moderner Statuen, Figuren, Büsten, Basreliefs über die besten Originale geformt in der Rostischen Kunsthandlung zu Leipzig ([Leipzig], 1794). This subdivision was also characteristic of the two preceding catalogues. [Rost], Verzeichnis aller Kunstsachen, welche bey Carl Christian Heinrich Rost in seiner Handlung in Auerbachs Hofe zu Leipzig um die billigsten Preise zu haben sind, Leipziger Jubilatemesse (Leipzig, 1779), and [Rost], Anzeige aller Kunstwerke der Rostischen Kunsthandlung zu Leipzig, Zweyte Abtheilung (Leipzig, 1786).

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Fig. 6. 1: Carl Christian Heinrich Rost, salescatalogue, 1794: Abgüsse antiker und moderner Statuen, Figuren, Büsten, Basreliefs über die besten Originale geformt in der Rostischen Kunsthandlung zu Leipzig, Frontispiece.

Fig. 6. 2: Portrait of Carl Christian Heinrich Rost. Anton Graff, c. 1794. Museum der Bildenden Künste, Leipzig.

comparable work, including earlier catalogues by Rost himself. Even looking through the catalogue today, one is impressed by the great variety of highquality plaster casts of that epoch on offer. The most important pieces were presented in outline drawings. The reduction of the figures to outlines corresponds to Winckelmann’s belief that these constituted the essence of the statues themselves.4 Short explanatory texts specified the art historical importance of the individual antique sculptures. References to respective museum catalogues and commented catalogues – such as Casanova’s Discorso sopra gl’antichi5 – emphasize the aspiration to seriousness. The artist commissioned to carry out the drawings, Schnorr von Carolsfeld, was chosen carefully: he was engaged upon the recommendation

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C. Weissert, Reproduktionsstichwerke. Vermittlung alter und neuer Kunst im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1999), pp. 9-10. G. B. Casanova, Discorso sopra gl’antichi e vari monumenti loro per l’uso degl’alunni dell’elettoral accademia delle belle arti di Dresda (Leipzig, 1770).

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of the Director of the Leipzig Academy, Adam Friedrich Oeser.6 Not wishing to provide a mere sales catalogue, the publisher (Rost) explicitly presented himself as a patron of the fine arts: He stated that he had not spared himself any effort to obtain the casts of the best antique artefacts in order to offer them to connoisseurs of the fine arts at a reasonable price.7 The particular phrasing of the catalogue’s title with its deliberate reference to the fact that the casts were “moulded from the best originals” is the startingpoint of this paper. If Rost was able to offer such a large number of allegedly good casts at that time, he must have had very good sources. In the following I shall consider how, towards the end of the eighteenth century, plaster casts of antique statues were brought to Germany, who produced them, who sold them, how they were accepted by the public and how eventually a fiercely competitive market for such goods developed. Numerous publications have concentrated on issues such as the circulation of antique sculptures, the composition of individual collections, the establishment of new collections and their significance for European culture. They deal with a Europe-wide phenomenon and emphasize similarities rather than differences.8 Regarding the general enthusiasm for antiquity, Germany in the eighteenth century in fact differed only slightly from other countries. However, the Grand Tour and the purchasing of antique art were not easily open to German princes and aristocrats who were precisely the ones who set the trend for the establishment of collections of antique works of art and casts in Germany from the 1760s onwards.9 A depth of material knowledge of antique art comparable to England, depending on the distribution of sculptures and plaster casts, did not exist in Germany.10

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Rost, Abgüsse, pp. 3-4. Cf. Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, 54.2 (1795), announcement, p. 370. 7 C. C. H. Rost, Verzeichnis aller Kunstsachen, welche bey Carl Christian Heinrich Rost in seiner Handlung in Auerbachs Hofe zu Leipzig um die billigsten Preise zu haben sind, Leipziger Jubilatemesse (Leipzig, 1779), p. 3; Rost, Anzeige, p. 4; Rost, Abgüsse, pp. 4-5. 8 H. Beck et al. (eds), Antikensammlungen im 18. Jahrhundert, Frankfurter Forschungen zur Kunst, vol. 9 (Berlin, 1981), pp. 273-91; F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique, 5th edn (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1998); H. Ladendorf, Antikenstudium und Antikenkopie. Vorarbeiten zu einer Darstellung ihrer Bedeutung in der mittelalterlichen und neueren Zeit (Berlin, 1953), esp. pp. 51-74; O. Rossi Pinelli, ‘La pacifica invasione dei calchi delle statue antiche nella Europa del Settecento’, in S. Macchioni (ed.), Studi in onore di Giulio Carlo Argan (Rome, 1984), pp. 419–26. 9 J.-P. Haldi, ‘Die Rezeption römischer Antikensammlungen durch “Grand Touristen” im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Weiss and Dostert (eds), Schönheit weissen Marmors, pp. 17-22. 10 Cf. the situation in England: V. Coltman, Fabricating the Antique. Neoclassicism in Britain, 1760 – 1800 (Chicago, Ill., 2006), esp. pp. 123-64 (‘“Familiar objects in an unfamiliar world”. The Cachet of the Copy’); F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique, 5th edn (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1998), pp. 85-91 and passim; A. Wilton and I. Bignamini, Grand Tour. The

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As a region, central Germany – approximately the area of today’s German federal states Hessia, Saxony-Anhalt, Thuringia and Saxony – was largely cut off from the acquisition and direct reception of antique art due to its fragmentation into very small princedoms with their meagre financial assets. Only few representatives were able to purchase antique art directly from the Roman art market. As a result, this region in the heart of Germany offered a promising market for imaginative producers and distributors of cheaper plaster casts of inferior quality. In the relatively short time frame from the end of the 1760s to about 1794, this region not only experienced the sudden appearance of travelling Italian plaster cast dealers and the foundation of princely collections, galleries and museums, but also the rise of fierce competition among local dealers and manufacturers. Some collections of plaster casts had existed in Germany as early as the eighteenth century, but only from the early nineteenth century onwards – during and after the Napoleonic wars – did the number of collections increase significantly.11 It can be assumed that antique art – not only prints and small size copies – had been increasingly noticed even earlier. We know, for instance, that the Berlin Academy owned since the end of the seventeenth century a collection of plaster casts moulded from antique statues that served for study purposes.12 Although the eighteenth-century composition of the collections has been examined, and published inventories exist, many questions regarding the interrelations between different collections remain as yet unanswered. Around 1770 the small range of existing plaster casts was commonly regarded as a lack. Hence, Johann George Sulzer postulated in his Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste [...] of 1771, that all academies should have a complete collection of the best antiquities. According to him, the only reason

___________ Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996). For the ‘Grand Tour’ of German aristocrats, cf. N. Himmelmann, Utopische Vergangenheit (Berlin, 1976), pp. 46-51; C. HassSchreiter and S. Prignitz, ‘Teilabgüsse berühmter Antiken in Lauchhammer’, in Schreiter et al., Antike, Kunst und das Machbare, pp. 67-85, at pp. 68-9, note 15; cf. J. Rees and W. Siebers (eds), Erfahrungsraum Europa. Reisen politischer Funktionsträger des Alten Reiches 1750 – 1800; Ein kommentiertes Verzeichnis handschriftlicher Quellen, Aufklärung und Europa, Schriftenreihe des Forschungszentrums Europäische Aufklärung, vol. 18 (Berlin, 2005). 11 H.-U. Cain, ‘Gipsabgüsse. Zur Geschichte ihrer Wertschätzung’, in H. Maué and W. Pülhorn (eds), Anzeiger des Germanischen Nationalmuseums und Berichte aus dem Forschungsinstitut für Realienkunde (Nuremberg, 1995), pp. 200-15, esp. 207-8; J. Bauer, ‘Gipsabgußsammlungen an deutschsprachigen Universitäten’, in Jahrbuch für Universitätsgeschichte, 5 (2002), pp. 117– 32, at p. 119. 12 Cain (note above), pp. 204-5; K. Stemmer, ‘Antikenstudium nach Abgüssen an den Kunstakademien des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in A. von Specht (ed.), ‘Die Kunst hat nie ein Mensch allein besessen’, Akademie der Künste. Hochschule der Künste. Dreihundert Jahre, exh. cat. Berlin, Akademie der Künste und der Hochschule der Künste (Berlin, 1996), pp. 67–74, esp. p. 71 and p. 38, cat. I 2/14 with fig. (Th. Kirchner).

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why this had not been the case was that the permission for taking moulds was too often refused.13 Goethe’s personal reports document the alternatives available. According to him, sculptural works had been hard to find during his youth in Frankfurt. Only later did Italian plaster moulders arrive, bringing with them original casts, making new moulds and recasting them. These casts were obtainable at a fairly low price, so that he was able to build up his own small collection.14 Since 1707 the Düsseldorf Electoral Prince Johann Wilhelm had started to compile a first class collection of casts taken directly from antique originals.15 Conte Fede – himself a renowned collector – acted as his negotiator in Rome. He had access to the collections of the Medici, Borghese, Ludovisi, Odescalchi and Farnese and had permission from the pope and the Roman Senate to produce casts from statues in the Capitoline collections. The casts were made by Manelli.16 A first delivery arrived in Düsseldorf in 1710. Because of the serious difficulties in transporting the plaster casts without damaging them, the decision was taken to deliver the moulds rather than the casts to Düsseldorf. This is one of the few cases in the eighteenth century in which one can be sure that the moulds sold in Germany were taken directly from the originals in Italy.17 By 1714 the collection had grown to between eighty and onehundred pieces.18 In the middle of the century the collection was transferred to the Mannheim palace19 and then again in 1767 to the specially established Antikensaal at the Mannheim Academy (Pl. 6. A). The moulds were also finally housed there.20 This ‘Hall of Antiquities’ served not only as a classroom for art students, but also as a source of models for copies of antique statues for

___________ 13 J. G. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste. In einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1771–1774), I, p. 4; Similar Rudolf Erich Raspe to Christoph Martin Wieland in a letter from 1774: Oswald, ‘Die Anfänge’, p. 285, note 9. 14 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Aus meinem Leben. Dichtung und Wahrheit, Book 13.3 (WA I, 28, S. 188f.) cited in: Oswald, ‘Die Anfänge’, p. 283 note 2 as well as Italienische Reise, remark 14 April 1788, (ibid. note 3). 15 Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, pp. 312-14. The history of the Mannheim Antikensaal is now described in detail by Socha, ‘Der Antikensaal’, pp. 243-7. 16 ‘Fede group’ according to H. Walter, ‘Fundgeschichte und Echtheit der sog. Fede-Gruppe’, in H. Walter (ed.), Die Rezeption der Metamorphosen des Ovid in der Neuzeit. Der antike Mythos in Text und Bild, International Symposium of the Werner Reimers-Stiftung, Bad Homburg v.d. H., 22 to 25 April 1991 (Berlin, 1995), pp. 239–51, at p. 240, note 9. 17 Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, p. 364 (appendix VII.3: inventory of 1795). 18 Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, p. 312 and note 1 as well as p. 313; register in the appendix VII.2: ibid. p. 362-3; Socha, ‘Der Antikensaal’, pp. 246-7. 19 Concerning the circumstances in particular: Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, p. 314. See also Schiering, ‘Der Mannheimer Antikensaal’, p. 258; Socha, ‘Der Antikensaal’, pp. 247-8. 20 Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, p. 315.

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the park of the Schwetzingen palace. Thus, the reconstruction of the inventories reveals a representative spectrum of casts taken from antique statues, in no way ranking below that of other European and Italian collections.21 Surprisingly enough, however, only a limited number of further casts was produced from them, most of which were intended for the requirements of the Mannheim court. The Antikensaal rapidly gained wide renown and the numerous reports in various journals of the day reflect strong interest in it. Hofmann and Socha have compiled the contemporary sources on the Antikensaal.22 Among them the very first one in Meusels Miscellaneen artistischen Inhalts is important, since it lauds the just opened hall in a relatively widespread public medium.23 Goethe visited the Antikensaal in October 1769. His report of the visit, that impressed him deeply, has become famous.24 There, he was for the first time confronted with a large number of casts of complete sculptures.25 The casts left a profound impression on him, that he revised only when he came to know the originals on his journey through Italy. Before then, he had never seen Laocoön together with his sons even though he possessed a bust and had seen the single figure of the father in a cast in Leipzig.26 For a certain period, the Mannheim Antikensaal, with its restriction to plaster casts, remained a solitary case. Other princes in central Germany took antique artworks out of their ‘Kunstkammer’, supplemented them with appropriate acquisitions and completed their statue galleries – partly with plaster casts after antique sculptures. Among them, Wörlitz is one of the earliest examples and certainly the most coherently designed. Following the English Country House model and built in the Palladian style, the Wörlitz castle is one of the first neo-classical castles in Germany.27 Prince Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau had met Bartolomeo Cavaceppi in Rome in 1766.28

___________ 21 Schiering, ‘Der Mannheimer Antikensaal’, pp. 257-72; Socha, ‘Der Antikensaal’, pp. 243-57; D. Kocks, Der Antikensaal in der Mannheimer Zeichnungsakademie 1769–1803; exh. cat. Mannheim, Archäologisches Seminar, University of Mannheim (Mannheim, 1984). 22 Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, pp. 317-34; Socha, ‘Der Antikensaal’, pp. 466-75. 23 Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, p. 317. 24 Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, p. 318 (Letter from Goethe in Frankfurt to Langer from 30 November 1769), cited in Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, pp. 318-20. 25 Schiering, ‘Der Mannheimer Antikensaal’, p. 258. 26 Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, p. 319; referred to also by Socha, ‘Der Antikensaal’, pp. 249-50, notes 68-9. 27 D. Rößler, ‘Die Antikensammlung des Fürsten Leopold Friedrich Franz von Anhalt-Dessau in Wörlitz’, in H. von Hesberg and D. Boschung (eds), Antikensammlungen des europäischen Adels im 18. Jahrhundert (Mainz am Rhein, 2000), pp. 134-46. 28 T. Weiss, foreword in Weiss and Dostert (eds), Schönheit weissen Marmors, p. xi; Rößler (note above), pp. 136-9.

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Shortly afterwards Cavaceppi was commissioned to build up the collection of antiquities for Wörlitz. Not only did he have control over acquisitions, but also over supplementing, restoring, copying and providing antique sculptures.29 The reference to English models was not limited to the architectural design, but also comprised the collection of antique sculpture which included antique originals as well as copies. Cavaceppi, who had numerous clients in England, was well versed in this process.30 As a result, an overall concept could be developed which was groundbreaking for the German neo-classical style. In Mannheim and Wörlitz a single Italian representative had been responsible for the acquisition of casts and antique art. Yet not every court was able to commission a Conte Fede or a Cavaceppi. Courts such as Gotha, Kassel, Rudolstadt and Weimar had to use different sources (Pl. 6. B). The purchase of casts was generally connected with the founding of smaller academies of arts.31 Some of these ancient plaster casts have survived at these sites. The example of Gotha offers an exemplary sequence of purchases: Between 1771 and 1773 Duke Ernst II commissioned Jean-Antoine Houdon to sculpt portraits of members of the court.32 The intention of the Duke – to establish a collection of casts after his accession in 1772 – had been facilitated by the acquisition of plaster casts from the collection of Houdon. Eleven casts based on works of other artists and on antique statues belonged to this group.33 Following this acquisition of casts made by a renowned artist from abroad, further casts were commissioned directly in Rome by the Duke’s agent Reiffenstein, while others were bought from travelling Italian plaster moulders. Around 1775, some plaster casts were purchased from the Ferrari brothers – Italian plaster cast dealers operating in Germany at this time who were known to have left “a reasonable amount of this kind of statues” in the castle of Friedenstein in Gotha.34 However, a further important contribution to this

___________ 29 See esp. Weiss and Dostert (eds), Schönheit weissen Marmors. 30 S. Howard, Bartolomeo Cavaceppi, Eighteenth-Century Restorer (New York, 1982), pp. 10735, esp. pp. 113-16. 31 Cf. C. A. Mihai, ‘“Gute Regenten, errichtet gute Kunstschulen!”. Die thüringischen Kunstakademien und Zeichnungsschulen’, in Maaz et al., Antlitz des Schoenen, pp. 119-41. 32 U. D. Mathies, ‘Jean-Antoine Houdon, Ernst II. und die französische Aufklärung’, in A. Schuttwolf (ed.), Die Gothaer Residenz zur Zeit Herzog Ernsts II. von Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg (1772 – 1804), exh. cat. Gotha, Schloss Friedenstein (Gotha, 2004), pp. 71-84, at pp. 71-2. 33 A. L. Poulet, U. D. Mathies and C. Frank, ‘Etat des choses: A Recently Discovered Document by Houdon’, in A. L. Poulet and G. Scherf (eds), Jean-Antoine Houdon. Sculptor of the Enlightenment, exh. cat. Washington, Los Angeles and Versailles (Chicago, Ill., 2003), pp. 29-39, pp. 35560; See esp. Mathies (note above), pp. 72-3, notes 13-14. 34 ‘Kunstnachrichten. Aus Italien. Nachrichten von Kunsterfindungen. 1776. Mayland. Gypsabgüsse der Gebrüder Ferrari’, in Journal zur Kunstgeschichte und zur allgemeinen Litteratur, (1776), 2.T., pp. 272-3.

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collection was made by the local court artist Friedrich Wilhelm Doell in the 1770s during his stay in Rome at the behest of the Duke. He made or purchased copies after antique originals as well as plaster casts, among them central pieces like the Apollo Belvedere, Borghese Gladiator and Venus de Medici.35 When the collection of casts was founded in 1779, Doell contributed several works.36 In 1782 he returned to Gotha and became Director of the Academy. He apparently continued to produce further casts based on his own models and moulds and established a business connection with Rost in Leipzig.37 Only later was the aforementioned ‘wholesaler’ Rost commissioned to provide additional works, for which Doell had no model to draw upon. These however were based on antique sculptures in Dresden and Berlin – works such as the Dresden Vestal Virgins (Herculaneum Women) or the Berlin Knöchelspielerin (Girl Playing Knucklebones).38 Significantly, despite the wide range of sources on which the Gotha collection drew it was always assumed at the time that the casts were taken from the original statues in Italy. This last statement particularly holds true for the Ferrari brothers from Milan, who in the late 1760s travelled through Germany with their moulds and cast them on the spot. They seemed to have been able to meet the need for casts of the best antique artefacts of the highest quality. Indeed they had already gained a good reputation before they came to Gotha. Wherever they went, they sold casts of some of the best known antique statues: the Florentine Dancing Faun (Faun with Clappers), the Borghese Gladiator, the Venus de’ Medici, Laocoön without the sons, as well as some busts, primarily of Laocoön and his sons and of Niobe and her children (Figs 6. 3-4). In fact, they were not actually artists, but travelling craftsmen. Among the Italian traders of plaster casts, who, according to contemporary sources could be met in any larger city, the Ferrari brothers were particularly well known by name, since they left their mark throughout Germany and did not miss any of the prince’s palaces already mentioned.39

___________ 35 Rau, Friedrich Wilhelm Doell, p. 35 (quotation), note 115: Weimar, GSA Sign. 06/375 (letter of 5 April 1777, by Doell to Bertuch). 36 U. Wallenstein, ‘Herzog Ernst II. als Sammler von Altertümern’, in A. Schuttwolf (ed.), Die Gothaer Residenz zur Zeit Herzog Ernsts II. von Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg (1772 – 1804), exh. cat. Gotha, Schloss Friedenstein (Gotha, 2004), pp. 229-52, at p. 233 and note 18-19 as well as p. 243 cat. 16.10: Tanzender Faun (that is the Faun with the Clappers, made from the piece that had been recently excavated) by Doell. 37 Rau, Friedrich Wilhelm Doell, pp. 205-6, p. 208. 38 Rau, ‘“Unter diesen Göttern zu wandeln”’, p. 86, note 11. 39 Cf. J. G. Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der Schönen Künste. In einzeln, nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter auf einander folgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1771–1774), I,

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Fig. 6. 3: So-called Son of Laocoön. Plaster cast of the head of the subjected figure of the Wrestlers in the Uffizi, Florence (marble, h: 89 cm). Abgußsammlung, Göttingen. Acquired from the Fratelli Ferrari in 1771.

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Fig. 6. 4: So-called Son of Laocoön. Another plaster cast of the head of the subjected figure of the Wrestlers, Florence, cf. Fig. 6. 3. H: 45.5 cm. Goethe Nationalmuseum, Weimar.

The most precise description of their activities is that of Christoph Boehringer in 1981, who published parts of the archival material available in Göttingen listing the purchases of plaster casts.40 He has shown that between 1771 and 1775, the Ferrari brothers were the main suppliers of the collection of casts in Göttingen initiated by Christian Gottlob Heyne. As early as 1767 Heyne purchased two heads from the Ferrari brothers, possibly as some kind of test purchases.41 Four years later, in 1771, a further acquisition of four heads fol-

___________ p. 4: “Man findet in allen beträchtlichen Städten Italiener die Gipsbilder verkaufen, von denen man dieses lernen kann”; Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 276, comments – like many others – that these were generally travelling plaster traders, without any concrete evidence. He counts the Ferrari brothers amongst them. In fact they play a special part, as discussed below. 40 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’. 41 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 277; Cf. now: N. Plesker, ‘Das Königlich Academische Museum in Göttingen’, in Savoy (ed.), Tempel der Kunst, pp. 261-77, at p. 266, notes 47-9.

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lowed. These were listed as “Laocoön”, “Son of Laocoön”, “Apollon Pythius” and “Rotatore”. At that time, the collection contained approximately eighteen plaster casts, and Heyne proposed to add these heads and display them on consoles in the library.42 This purchase seems to have been the precondition for acquisitions in the following years, which went beyond the scope of small busts. Thus, in 1772, the first complete figures, the Florentine Dancing Faun and the Venus de’ Medici, were purchased,43 although both statues had no statuesupport and their surfaces seemed rather dull.44 At the same time, the two busts of Seneca and Cleopatra were bought. The figure of Laocoön without his sons and the Borghese Gladiator were added in 1774.45 The Laocoön presumably originated from the same moulds as the casts of the academies in Leipzig and Dresden: it is a fact that the Ferrari brothers were able to sell their Laocoön several times.46 The first doubts as to whether the plaster casts of the Ferrari brothers were taken directly from the originals were expressed by Heyne as early as 1774.47 He also considered a possible connection between their status as aftercasts and recent deliveries to the Russian Czarina of new casts from Rome that he suspected to have been copied by the Ferrari.48 Göttingen acquired a set that was rather typical for the Ferrari brothers.49 A last plaster cast was bought from the Ferrari brothers in 1775, the Apollo Belvedere, again a statue deprived of its support and with a dull surface.50 From now on Heyne tried hard to purchase original plasters casts, but he succeeded only once.51 His critical judgment concerning the Ferrari casts, however, does not seem to have had any influence on public opinion. Indeed, the year 1774 must be considered as an eminently successful one for the Ferrari brothers: not only did the academies in Leipzig and Dresden purchase casts from them, but the Leipzig Academy even awarded them a certificate emphasizing their technical

___________ 42 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 277, note 20: Universitätsarchiv Göttingen 4/VdI/22, and Hss. In the Archaeological Institute: Heyne A Blatt 4-7. Complete quotation ibid., p. 278. 43 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 279, note 25: Göttingen Arch. Inst, Hs Heyne A 8. 44 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 279. 45 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 279, note 28: Hs. Arch Inst. Göttingen Heyne A 9-11. 13. 46 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 280, note 30. 47 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 281. 48 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 280. 49 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 280. 50 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, pp. 280-1, note 33: Nds. Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen Hs. Heyne 33 c 23 (13-15). 51 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 281-2.

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skills and the high quality of their casts, especially that of Laocoön without his sons, Ganymede and the Borghese Gladiator. The Academies in Leipzig and Dresden as well as some individual collectors had purchased these and some busts from the Ferrari brothers.52 Among their other customers was Carl Christian Heinrich Rost. The Ferrari casts had been recommended to him by the Weimar merchant and entrepreneur Friedrich Justin Bertuch. He decided against the figure of Laocoön because of its size, but he purchased three busts: Socrates, Diogenes and a Madonna.53 There is evidence of two further recommendation letters in the same year by Kassel and Weimar scholars, who were compiling collections of casts. 54 On this occasion, the Ferrari brothers sold busts in Weimar. The close resemblance of the two Sons of Niobe to the casts in Göttingen (Figs 6. 3-4) reveals the vendors’ rather limited repertoire that by this time was well recognized.55 Nevertheless, the Weimar Academy of Arts purchased thirteen plaster casts in 1776, among them the Apollo Belvedere, and Ganymede as well as various busts.56 A short announcement in the Journal zur Kunstgeschichte und zur allgemeinen Litteratur (Journal on Art History and General Literature) of 1776 entitled Kunstnachrichten. Aus Italien. Nachrichten von Kunsterfindungen. 1776. Mayland. Gypsabgüsse der Gebrüder Ferrari (Art News. From Italy. News of Artistic Inventions. 1776. Milan. Plaster Casts of the Ferrari Brothers) seems to be the last clear indication of the Ferrari brothers’ activities in Germany.57 The text announces their arrival in Germany the following summer. It emphasizes the quality of their casts taken from the originals and describes them as being very exact and with sharp outlines, available at a reasonable price. Gotha, Kassel and Braunschweig are mentioned as references.

___________ 52 Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 281, note 34: Göttingen, Archäologisches Institut, Akte Heyne A 12: “Pünktliche Abschrift des Leipziger Attestats”. 53 Letter by Rost to Bertuch in the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv Weimar, Sign. GSA 06/1561 (letter 4). 54 Oswald, ‘Die Anfänge’, pp. 284-7. 55 Oswald, ‘Die Anfänge’, p. 288 figs 1 – 2 (dating c. 1770), cf. with the head of the subjected figure in the Florentine Wrestlers (so-called Niobide), Göttingen Abgußsammlung inv. A 1357 (C. Boehringer, in K. Fittschen (ed.), Die Skulpturen der Sammlung Wallmoden, exh. cat. Göttingen (Göttingen, 1979), pp. 112-13, no. 61) and head of one of Niobe’s sons (so-called Schrägstehender Niobide, “Leaning Niobid”), Göttingen Abgußsammlung inv. A 1345 (Boehringer, ibid., p. 105, no. 13). Online-Inventory Göttingen [accessed 16 July 2009]. 56 Oswald, ‘Die Anfänge’, p. 284, note 5 (Thüringisches Haupt- und Staatsarchiv Weimar, A 1059); Rudolf Erich Raspe (Kassel): Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 274 and note 4; cf. now K. Krügel, ‘“Ich freue mich auf die Pariser Abgüsse” – Ein Beitrag zur Sammlung antiker Abgüsse in der Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek’, in: H. Th. Seemann (ed.), Europa in Weimar: Visionen eines Kontinents, Jahrbuch der Klassik Stiftung Weimar, 2 (Weimar, 2008), pp. 173-197, at p. 178. 57 Journal zur Kunstgeschichte und zur allgemeinen Litteratur (1776), 2.T., pp. 272-3.

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This confirms that they stayed in Germany only temporarily, travelling from court to court, casting on the spot from the moulds they carried with them.58 Looking at the sources, the impression arises that they were recommended by letter. It seems, they went back to Milan at the end of the season, in winter and there is no further mention of their presence in Germany. However, as I shall discuss, they must have returned once more. Their reputation was based on emphasizing their Italian background that apparently offered sufficient guarantee of the quality of their casts. In this advertisement the horrendous costs of acquiring casts from Italy is the Ferrari brothers’ strongest card. The enormous logistical and financial difficulties involved in purchasing good casts directly in Italy – and, most notably, in having the casts transported to Germany undamaged – are the main reason for the efforts made in the succeeding period to produce casts directly in Germany. The market now shifted to the ambitious commercial centres, primarily to the trade fair city of Leipzig, which flourished after the Seven Years’ War, and also to Weimar, which was prominent due to its prospering local production of consumer goods.59 The clientele extended to the gentry and bourgeoisie. The reason for the disappearance of the Ferrari brothers from the German market is revealed by Carl Christian Heinrich Rost’s catalogues. By the end of the 1770s he had taken over an art dealer’s shop in Leipzig, which stocked several small scale plaster busts.60 Catalogues published by Rost are the main sources for the following events as well as some documents from the municipal archive in Leipzig and from the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv in Weimar; detailed inventories, account books or order books have, up to now, unfortunately, not been found. Yet, it seems likely that Rost delivered casts to the collections in Rudolstadt and Lauchhammer.61

___________ 58 The remark that the Ferrari brothers were resident in Leipzig seems unreasonable in the light of this. Cf. N. Plesker, ‘Das Königlich Academische Museum in Göttingen’, in Savoy (ed.), Tempel der Kunst, pp. 261-77, at p. 266. 59 On Leipzig see for example A. Schoene, ‘Die Leipziger Ökonomische Sozietät von 1764 bis 1825’, in Neues Archiv für sächsische Geschichte, 70 (1999), pp. 53-78. On Weimar see for example C. Hill, ‘“Zum Besten meines Vaterlandes” – Friedrich Justin Bertuch in Weimar: Herzoglicher Geheimsekretär und Unternehmer’, in K. Scheurmann and J. Frank (eds), Neu entdeckt. Thüringen. Land der Residenzen, exh. cat. Schloss Sondershausen, 2 vols (Mainz am Rhein, 2004), I, pp. 275-8. 60 Carl Christian Heinrich Rost in Auerbachs Hofe zu Leipzig, welcher die seit vielen Jahren etablirte Handlung des verstorbenen Herrn Johann George Oetterich Retz, für seine eigene Rechnung käuflich an sich gebracht, verkauft in und ausser Messen folgende Waaren [...] (Leipzig, [before 1779]); Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und der freyen Künste, 23.2 (1779), pp. 336-42. 61 Rudolstadt: Maaz et al., Antlitz des Schoenen, pp. 257-68, cat. 66-84; D. Winker, ‘Die Antikensammlung am Rudolstädter Hof’, in K. Scheurmann and J. Frank (eds), Neu entdeckt. Thüringen. Land der Residenzen, exh. cat. Sondershausen, 2 vols (Mainz am Rhein, 2004), II, pp. 107-11;

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Publishing a first catalogue in 1779, the art dealer Rost had already established a workshop for casts as early as 1778.62 The collection of plaster casts seems to have grown, but there is no reference to the Ferrari brothers, although he must have contacted them about that time. The moulds must have been purchased between 1779 and 1782, in order to publish a new catalogue, of which, as far as I know, no copy has survived. Its existence, however, is proven indirectly by announcements.63 Rost’s shop was situated prominently in a vault of the popular Auerbach Court, where he probably displayed a fair number of his casts to the public. Thus, compared to the travelling dealers, he had the advantage of a permanent salesroom. Rost, not doubting the high quality of the Ferrari casts, informed the readers of his 1782 catalogue that he had made a contract with the Ferrari brothers entitling him to use their moulds. It can be assumed that Rost’s view of the Ferrari brother’s casts was generally shared at that time. Nevertheless, he decided to add a specific touch to the collection beyond the too well known and limited assortment of the Ferrari brothers. His attempt to order moulds and casts in Italy cannot be verified in detail, although in 1786 he had announced the possibility of acquiring the Flora Farnese by subscription, and as early as 1794 he offered the small scale copy of this sculpture made by Doell in Rome in 1774.64 A further moulding campaign became important at that time: in 1782, Rost had called for a sale by subscription, principally of newly made casts of the collection in Dresden,65 one of the few collections from Rome that had been purchased in its entirety by a German court. The collection had been acquired for Dresden by the Saxon King August the Strong in 1773. It was never displayed adequately, since, due to lack of money, nothing became of extensive plans for a new museum of sculpture.66 From the collection of Prince Eugen in Vienna the three Herculanean Vestal Virgins (Herculaneum Women) were added. With some delay, the Dresden Collection of Antiquities

___________ 62 63 64 65

66

Schreiter et al., Antike, Kunst und das Machbare, passim, and pp. 206-9 (C. Kabitschke, M. Becker and Ch. Schreiter: ‘Inventarisierte und erfaßte Gipse im Kunstgußmuseum Lauchhammer’). Rost, Anzeige, p. 11: “Da ich schon über 8 Jahre eine ansehnliche Werkstatt für dieses Fach errichtet habe, [...]”. Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste, 27.2 (1782), p. 348-52; Rost, Anzeige, p. 5. Rost, Anzeige, p. 28; Rost, Abgüsse, p. 24, No. VII, pl. 7; Rau, Friedrich Wilhelm Doell, pp. 200-1. Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, pp. 282-3, note 39; Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste, 27.2 (1782), pp. 348-52 (advice on the ‘Verzeichnis’ of 1782). For the Dresden Collection see now: H. Boller, ‘Die Dresdner Antikensammlung’, in Savoy (ed.), Tempel der Kunst, pp. 117-44, pp. 128-31.

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received a strong reception after its restructuring and installation in the Japanisches Palais and, as a substantial collection, it was extensively reviewed in Saxony and beyond. In the eyes of contemporaries, the Dresden collection was seen as comparable to those in Rome and in Italy in general.67 Rost’s casts of twenty-five selected pieces from this collection apparently earned positive feedback. His subsequent 1786 catalogue mentions the news of the moulding campaign in Dresden first; the standard repertoire from the Ferrari moulds and other unnamed sources, primarily from Italy, are listed only subsequently.68 The Ferrari had had a monopoly position and an exclusive circle of customers, compared with the increasingly competitive environment among mercantile traders local to the region, although in the beginning there seems to have been little space beside Rost for other dealers. Some court artists made casts from their respective collections of statues and busts and sold them; few, like the aforementioned Doell, had the opportunity to draw on their own first hand copies of antique originals. At the same time, however, he was dependent on the marketing of Rost, who was able to reach a wider circle of customers and only comparatively late, around 1795, was Doell able to establish his own profitable workshop.69 Competition had developed principally in Weimar. Gottlieb Martin Klauer settled there in 1777.70 On Goethe’s suggestion and by order of the Duchess Anna Amalia he travelled to Mannheim in 1777, to study the casts of ancient sculptures, since at that period knowledge of them was considered indispensable for the development of an artist’s taste. At the same time, after the Weimar Palace had burnt down in 1774, the question arose as to how the Residence should be redecorated.71 By order of the Weimar court, Klauer was able to acquire plaster casts in Mannheim, that had been cast from the original moulds. One of these casts was the very popular Fede Group, a group of Amor and Psyche at that time interpreted by restoration as Caunus and Biblis. Thereafter, the Ildefonso Group was acquired, interpreted as Castor and Pollux, as well as several casts of heads.

___________ 67 Rost, Anzeige, p. 6 (=Rost, Abgüsse, p. 6). 68 Rost, Anzeige, pp. 19-25: “Antique Statuen. Aus der churfürstl. Antiquen Sammlung zu Dresden”; pp. 25-8: “Antique Statuen aus den Kunstsammlungen, meistens Italiens, über die Originale geformt”. 69 Rau, Friedrich Wilhelm Doell, pp. 207-10; Rau, ‘“Unter diesen Göttern zu wandeln”’, pp. 71-3. 70 W. Geese, Gottlieb Martin Klauer. Der Bildhauer Goethes (Leipzig, 1935), pp. 17-23. 71 S. König, ‘Garten, Ofen, Treppenhaus. Die Aufstellung und Nutzung der Lauchhammer Eisengüsse’, in Schreiter et al., Antike, Kunst und das Machbare, pp. 129-52, at pp. 141-2, fig. 78; R. Bothe, Dichter, Fürst und Architekten. Das Weimarer Residenzschloß vom Mittelalter bis zum Anfang des 19. Jahrhunderts (Ostfildern-Ruit, 2000), p. 80.

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Fig. 6. 5: Carl Christian Heinrich Rost, sales-catalogue, 1794: Abgüsse antiker und moderner Statuen, Figuren, Büsten, Basreliefs über die besten Originale geformt in der Rostischen Kunsthandlung zu Leipzig, pl. 20.

It has been argued that Mannheim was also the source for several mouldings for other places. However, this seems to be disproved by the body of source material that suggests that the Mannheim court artist Peter Anton von Verschaffelt and the moulder Carl Zeller had been obliged to produce casts for the electoral court. We learn that Verschaffelt’s generous passing on of plaster busts to Johann Caspar Lavater in 1774 and the sale of casts to Weimar led to the explicit instruction that the moulding activities were to be restricted to the court.72 Like the Ferrari brother’s limited, unchanging, yet widely distributed repertoire, the Fede and the Ildefonso Groups also served as disseminators of antique form in various ways. Rost sold casts from them (Fig. 6. 5), and, in Weimar, Klauer himself used them as models for copies in local limestone (Fig. 6. 6) as well as in Toreutica73 – a clay-material invented by him that is

___________ 72 Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt, pp. 336-7. 73 B. Werche, ‘Kräuters Skizze des Rokokosaales’, in H. T. Seemann (ed.), Anna Amalia, Carl August und das Ereignis Weimar, Jahrbuch der Klassik Stiftung Weimar (Göttingen, 2007), pp. 244-71, at pp. 262-3, note 50, p. 265 fig. 9.

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Fig. 6. 6: Caunus and Biblis (Fede Group). Martin Gottlieb Klauer, 1780. Local limestone, h: 1.42 m. Copy after the ancient group once in the possession of the Conte Fede (now lost). Klassik Stiftung, Anna-AmaliaBibliothek, Weimar.

comparable to Coade stone. Klauer offered the groups as casts and as Toreutica sculptures,74 but his account books in Weimar show more sales of Toreutica than casts.75 In addition, the cast iron figures on top of two stoves, produced in

___________ 74 Plaster: GSA 06/5310, undated list (c. 1791): H. Klauers Gypse; Toreutica: M. G. Klauer (ed.), Beschreibung und Verzeichnis der Toreutica-Waare der Klauerschen Kunst-Fabrik zu Weimar, 2 Hefte mit Kupfern (Weimar, 1792–1800), pl. 3. 75 GSA 96/1566 (2097) von 1796 und GSA 96/ 1567 (2096); Maaz et al., Antlitz des Schoenen, p. 270, cat. 86 and 87 (G. Oswald).

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1791 by Lauchhammer iron foundry76 for the ballroom of Weimar castle, can be traced back to the two antique groups. The marketing of Klauer’s products was taken over mainly by Friedrich Justin Bertuch, an editor and merchant in Weimar, who since 1786, had edited the popular Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Journal of Luxury and Fashion). Bertuch’s eclectic journal provided a means of influencing the market in consumer goods through the placing of advertisements and reviews.77 It was surely not a coincidence that the first issue contained a catalogue of the plaster casts available from Klauer. A little later, there is a reference to Rost’s new list.78 However, it is obvious that Klauer’s selection does not reach Rost’s wide-ranging assortment; Klauer’s list includes a few statues, the models of which possibly also came from Rost, as well as a conglomeration of heads – presumably from the old supply of the Ferrari brothers. Compared with this, Rost’s catalogue of 1786 was much more ambitious. Considering what we know so far about this line of business, Rost was the unchallenged market leader. Naturally, this entailed competition and plagiarism by smaller competitors. In fact, in his catalogue he gives a very detailed description of how many of his casts had been copied and offered relatively inexpensively.79 It was relatively easy for a skilled artist to acquire plaster casts and take moulds from them for the production of further copies. It is self-evident that the quality of details suffered from this procedure. No less than three times (in 1781, 1782 and 1786) Italian plaster moulders, who had come to the fair in Leipzig, seized the opportunity to compete with Rost. In every case he, as an old-established merchant in town, pursued the invaders adamantly and saw to it that they had to leave town.80 For Rost, the time between 1786 und 1794 seems to have been characterized not only by a continuous sale of his products, but also by stronger competition from other suppliers. Besides plaster casts, copies of antique works made of other materials like clay and iron entered the market (Pl. 6. C). They were promoted and dis-

___________ 76 See note 74; A letter by the Count of Einsiedel, owner of the Lauchhammer iron foundry to Bertuch / Klauer of December 28, 1790 in the Goethe-Schiller-Archiv in Weimar reports on the transport of the plaster casts to Lauchhammer and their return: GSA 06/426 (letter 1), Bl. 1 v. 77 D. L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance. Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore, Md., 1998); C. Macleod, ‘Skulptur als Ware. Gottlieb Martin Klauer und das ‘Journal des Luxus und der Moden’’, in A. Borchert and R. Dressel (eds), Das Journal des Luxus und der Moden: Kultur um 1800 (Heidelberg, 2004), pp. 272-8. 78 Journal der Moden, Intelligenzblatt, April 1786 (1786), pp. xxxi-xxxii. 79 Rost, Abgüsse, p. 6. 80 Stadtarchiv Leipzig, Tit. LXII G. 7a, fol. 1-8 (Stefan George from Como, 1781); Stadtarchiv Leipzig, Tit. LXII G. 7a, fol. 7-10 (Antonio Pinelli from Florence); Stadtarchiv Leipzig, II. Sect. H (F) 1034 (Peter Heinrich from Lucca).

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tributed by Bertuch and his now established trading company, the ‘IndustrieComptoir’.81 The Lauchhammer cast iron copies of antique statues had been announced already in the first volume of the Journal des Luxus und der Moden.82 Rost himself had invented a “compact material” (Feste Masse) that was resistant to weather conditions. All these undertakings would have been unthinkable without Rost’s collection of moulds, particularly from the Dresden collection,83 and initially he sold the iron castings as well as Toreutica on commission. Subsequently however, the manufacturers became independent: Klauer published his first catalogue in 1792 and presumably Lauchhammer might have published something similar.84 At about this time, direct criticism of the quality of Rost’s plaster casts accumulated and was published in journals. Critics cast doubt on the origin of the moulds of the best originals, accusing them of poor quality.85 It seems that the contrast between the casts taken from the Dresden originals and the older plaster casts was so noticable that Rost discredited himself. By producing these direct casts, exact plaster casts were circulating for the first time, clearly revealing the strong variation in quality. In 1794 Rost finally abandoned the

___________ 81 Rau, ‘“Unter diesen Göttern zu wandeln”’, pp. 59-89; M. Becker, ‘“[...] ohne Vergleich wohlfeiler und im Freyen dauerhafter [...]”. Die Kunstmanufakturen und das Material der Gartenplastiken am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Schreiter et al., Antike, Kunst und das Machbare, pp. 153–72; C. Schreiter, ‘Antike um jeden Preis. Die Rostische Kunsthandlung in Leipzig und Bertuchs Industrie-Comptoir in Weimar’, in K. Schade, D. Rößler and A. Schäfer (eds), Zentren und Wirkungsräume der Antikerezeption. Zur Bedeutung von Raum und Kommunikation für die neuzeitliche Transformation der griechisch-römischen Antike, Festschrift für Henning Wrede (Münster, 2007), pp. 159-64. 82 Friedrich Justin Bertuch, ‘Ueber die eisernen Guß=Arbeiten der Gräfl. Einsiedelschen Eisen= Fabrick zu Lauchhammer bey Mückenberg in Sachsen’, in Journal der Moden, October 1786 (1786), pp. 366–72; and (earlier) a short advertisement by the ‘Hütteninspector Christian Wilhelm Schmidt’, in Journal der Moden, Intelligenz=Blatt May 1786 (1986), pp. xlii-xliv. For the Lauchhammer Iron casts see also: C. Schreiter, ‘Lauchhammer und Berlin. Antikenkopien in Eisen und Bronze’, in C. Schreiter and A. Pyritz (eds), Berliner Eisen. Die Königliche Eisengießerei Berlin – Zur Geschichte eines preußischen Unternehmens, Berliner Klassik, 9 (Laatzen, 2007), pp. 109-26. 83 C. Schreiter, ‘Antike, Kunst und das Machbare. Früher Eisenkunstguß aus Lauchhammer’, in Schreiter et al., Antike, Kunst und das Machbare, pp. 7-32, at pp. 15-16, note 33. 84 M. G. Klauer (ed.), Beschreibung und Verzeichnis der Toreutica-Waare der Klauerschen KunstFabrik zu Weimar, 2 Hefte mit Kupfern (Weimar, 1792–1800); letter by the Count von Einsiedel to Bertuch from 28 December 1790: GSA 06/426 (Brief 1), fol. 1 v (mentions a collection of engravings of the statues in the collection of the Count von Einsiedel). 85 For example: C. C. H. Rost, ‘Antwort auf folgende Stelle über die Gipsabgüsse der Rostischen Kunsthandlung zu Leipzig’, in Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste, H. 50/2 (1793), pp. 387–94, (responding to an article in Gothaische Gelehrte Zeitschrift from 18 May 1793).

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habit of listing antique statues from Dresden and elsewhere separately, and instead integrated them all into the same list. Even though he vehemently defended himself against criticism, both in journals as well as in the preface to the 1794 catalogue86 he must have been aware of the problematic origin of the moulds made by the Ferrari. In the meantime, the famous collection of casts by the Saxon court painter Anton Raphael Mengs had been purchased for Dresden and made accessible to the public – at first provisionally in 1786 and eventually arranged in a representative manner in the Johanneum in 1794.87 For the first time since the opening of the Mannheim Antikensaal, these first-class casts of the best antique statues of Rome and Florence must have shown the high quality of antique sculptures to a large audience. Heyne’s judgment of Rost’s illustrated catalogue of 1794 shows in detail how much Rost had come under fire: […] the casts of Mr. R. may be esteemed highly however in one respect, this is with regard to those casts, that by the exceptional grace of the Elector of Saxony, he received permission to have moulded directly; and we assume these are the ones H. Rost accords the name of Original Moulds, for most of the other main pieces – such as Laocoön, Apollo, The Gladiator, etc., cast originally in Germany 20 years ago by the Ferrari Brothers, and these in turn having been cast hastily and hurriedly from the Farsetti collection in Venice with no permission by the owner, only through special favour of the custodian of the moulds – may not well be named Original Moulds. One may only compare H. R. casts to those of the 88 former Mengs collection in Dresden to notice this difference […].

___________ 86 Rost, Abgüsse, p. 8. 87 M. Kiderlen, Die Sammlung der Gipsabgüsse von Anton Raphael Mengs in Dresden: Katalog der Abgüsse, Rekonstruktionen, Nachbildungen und Modelle aus dem römischen Nachlaß des Malers in der Skulpturensammlung, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Munich, 2006), p. 23. 88 “[...] Herrn R. Abgüsse sind aber in einer Hinsicht vorzüglich schätzbar, nehmlich wegen derjenigen Abgüsse die er durch besondere Gnade des Churfürsten von Sachsen die Erlaubniß erhielt abformen zu lassen; und wir vermuthen daß es diese sind, welche H. Rost den Nahmen von Originalformen beylegt; denn die meisten übrigen Hauptstücke, als Laocoön, Apollo, Gladiator etc., die ursprünglich in Deutschland vor 20 Jahren durch die Gebrüder Ferrari, und diese wiederum flüchtig und in der Eile aus der Farsettischen Sammlung in Venedig ohne Bewilligung des Besitzers auß besonderer Gefälligkeit des Aufsehers der Formen sind gegossen worden, können nicht gut Original Formen genannt werden. Man darf nur H.R. Abgüsse mit denjenigen in der ehemaligen mengsischen Sammlung in Dresden (zu) vergleichen, um diesen Unterschied zu bemerken. [...]” (english translation by Florian von Ehrenstein). Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen’, p. 281, note 35; Göttingen, Archäologisches Institut, Heyne C 20. Cf. V. Kockel: ‘“Dhieweilen wier die Antiquen nicht haben konnen [...]” – Abgüsse, Nachbildungen und Verkleinerungen antiker Kunst und Architektur im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert’, in H. von Hesberg and D. Boschung (eds), Antikensammlungen des europäischen Adels im 18. Jahrhundert (Mainz am Rhein, 2000), pp. 31-48, p. 48, appendix.

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Heyne recognized only the moulds from the Dresden statues as original moulds, the other main pieces, originating from the Ferrari moulds, are unmasked as mould-replicas, carelessly produced in the Farsetti collection in Venice.89 In retrospect, the suspicions that increasingly accompanied the Ferrari brothers had been strengthened through Heyne’s claim that they had had access to the cast collection of the Farsetti. It is in fact hard to estimate how many intermediate stages the casts they sold in Germany had passed through. The reference to the high fidelity of the Mengs casts in Dresden establishes a standard. Rost’s trade in casts was only partly sustainable. However, it was always just one part of his comprehensive and market-dominating enterprise,90 even if over a long period it must have produced a significant proportion of his earnings, as is testified by the estimated sums in his last will.91 There is every indication that he continued to offer the existing plaster casts for sale until his death in 1798. After his death, his heirs continued selling until 1803.92 In 1799, a description of the city of Leipzig mentions his collection of casts as one of the most important art collections in town.93 But it is evident that demand must have weakened after it had become clear that ‘good plaster casts’ looked different. The general downturn in the business and the death of all the persons originally involved seems to have signified the end for the copies after antique sculpture in other materials during those final years.94 With the transport of Italian antiquities to Paris under Napoleon and the establishment of the Atelier de Moulage in the French capital, the last incentives for further trading in these poor plaster casts might have been removed.95

___________ 89 On the collection of the Farsetti: S. Androsow, ‘Die Sammlung Farsetti’, in M. F. Santi (ed.), Venezia, l’archeologia e l’Europa. Atti del Congresso Internazionale Venezia giugno 1994, Rivista di Archeologia, Suppl. 17 (Venice, 1996), pp. 312–22. 90 Cf. H. P. Thurn, Der Kunsthändler. Wandlungen eines Berufes (Munich, 1994), p. 93 and note 38; J. G. Krünitz, Ökonomisch-technologische Enzyklopädie (Berlin, 1791), LV, pp. 364-65, onlineresource of the Universitätsbibliothek Trier [accessed 16 July 2009] s.v. Kunst= Händler. 91 Stadtschreiberei Leipzig (1798), Rost, Verlassenschaft: Stadtarchiv Leipzig, Vormundschaftsstube: Rep. IV. no. 4523 No. 12, fol. 45 v. 92 ‘Herrn C.C.H. Rosts Tod und dessen Kunsthandlung zu Leipzig’, in Neue Bibliothek der schönen Wissenschaften und freyen Künste, H. 61/1 (1798), pp. 166–73, esp. p. 173; F. J. Bertuch, ‘Der achte May auf der Leipziger Ostermesse 1798’, in Journal des Luxus und der Moden, Junius 1798 (1798), p. 331; ‘Die Rostische Kunsthandlung in Leipzig’, in Journal des Luxus und der Moden, Jg. 18, Ausgabe Oktober, 1803 (1803), pp. 550–3. 93 F.-G. Leonhardi, Geschichte und Beschreibung der Kreis- und Handelsstadt Leipzig nebst der umliegenden Gegend, herausgegeben von F.G, Leonhardi, mit einem Plane und Titelkupfer (Leipzig, 1799), pp. 168-9. 94 C. Schreiter, ‘Antike, Kunst und das Machbare. Früher Eisenkunstguß aus Lauchhammer’, in Schreiter et al., Antike, Kunst und das Machbare, pp. 7-32. 95 F. Rionnet, L’ Atelier de moulage du musée du Louvre (1794–1928) (Paris, 1996), pp. xviii-xxi;

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Now however, the epoch of comprehensive academic collections of plaster casts had begun, and – at least in Berlin – moulding was centralized by instituting the Berlin Gipsformerei, the royal plaster moulding workshop. In retrospect, it seems surprising that the criticism that had already been voiced in other regions had not had any direct effect in Central Germany. 96 Looking at the overall picture, one can discern a dynamic development in the circulation of casts after antique sculptures in the region within a very short time frame. For more than twenty-five years, the wish to share in this business had evidently been much stronger than the wish to recognize the obvious. Affirming that the moulds had been taken from the originals had been enough to guarantee their perceived high quality. But, as fast as the distribution of these casts spread, as promptly had a countermovement begun. Questions had arisen as to who actually had taken moulds from antique statues and when and where this had been done. Although the increasing knowledge about antique art and the establishment of archaeology as a discipline may already have played a role, all in all, it was mostly economic interests that regulated supply and demand and that resulted in the wide distribution of casts. The restriction to a small, always constant number of exemplary sculptures, that today would seem to be a disadvantage, as well as their reproduction in different materials, allowed direct points of reference; customers apparently wanted their sculptures to be recognizable examples of a ‘canon’ and did not try to distinguish themselves from one another by owning a particularly rare piece. Compared to an exclusive acquisition of original works of art, this can be considered symptomatic of a conventional middle-class art consumption, heralding developments in the nineteenth century.

Abbreviations GSA: Goethe-Schiller-Archiv Weimar

Frequently cited literature C. Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen im 18. Jahrhundert am Beispiel der Göttinger Universitätssammlung’, in H. Beck, P.C. Bol,

___________ S. Einholz, ‘Enzyklopädie in Gips. Zur Sammlungsgeschichte der Berliner Museen’, in Der Bär von Berlin. Jahrbuch des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins, 41 (1992), pp. 75-92, at p. 78. 96 A report for the Academy in Berlin, commissioned in 1788, judged Rost’s casts as of low quality; GSTA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 234, fol. 84-87 and 95-98; cf. Sedlarz in this volume pp. 199200; p. 224 (for the archival source).

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W. Prinz and H. von Steuben (eds), Antikensammlungen im 18. Jahrhundert, Frankfurter Forschungen zur Kunst, 9 (Berlin, 1981), pp. 273-91 E. Hofmann, Peter Anton von Verschaffelt. Hofbildhauer des Kurfürsten Carl Theodor in Mannheim (Mannheim, 1982) B. Maaz et al., Antlitz des Schoenen. Klassizistische Bildhauerkunst im Umkreis Goethes, exh. cat. Rudolstadt (Rudolstadt, 2003) G. Oswald, ‘Die Anfänge klassizistischer Bildhauerkunst in Deutschland am Beispiel Weimar’, in: H. T. Seemann (ed.), Anna Amalia, Carl August und das Ereignis Weimar, Jahrbuch der Klassik Stiftung Weimar, 1 (Weimar, 2007), pp. 282-91 P. Rau, ‘“Unter diesen Göttern zu wandeln”. Kunsthandel, Kunstjournale und Kunstmanufakturen im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Maaz et al., Antlitz des Schoenen, pp. 59-89 P. Rau, Friedrich Wilhelm Doell (1750 – 1816). Leben und Werk (Cluj-Napoca, 2003) [C. C. H. Rost], Anzeige aller Kunstwerke der Rostischen Kunsthandlung zu Leipzig, Zweyte Abtheilung (Leipzig, 1786) [C. C. H. Rost], Abgüsse antiker und moderner Statuen, Figuren, Büsten, Basreliefs über die besten Originale geformt in der Rostischen Kunsthandlung zu Leipzig ([Leipzig], 1794) B. Savoy (ed.), Tempel der Kunst. Die Geburt des öffentlichen Museums in Deutschland 1701 – 1815 (Mainz am Rhein, 2006) W. Schiering, ‘Der Mannheimer Antikensaal’, in Beck et al. (eds), Antikensammlungen, pp. 257-72 C. Schreiter et al., Antike, Kunst und das Machbare. Früher Eisenkunstguss aus Lauchhammer, exh. cat. Berlin, Abguss-Sammlung Antiker Plastik, Pegasus – Berliner Beiträge zum Nachleben der Antike, 5 (Berlin, 2004) S. Socha, ‘Der Antikensaal in der Mannheimer Zeichnungsakademie’, in Savoy (ed.), Tempel der Kunst, pp. 243-57 T. Weiss and A. Dostert (eds), Von der Schönheit weissen Marmors (Mainz am Rhein, 1999)

Laocoön in Scandinavia – Uses and Workshops 1587 onwards JAN ZAHLE

The Laocoön was discovered on 14 January 1506. In the Vatican exhibition that marked the 500th anniversary of the event in 2006 to 2007, a composite plaster cast demonstrated admirably its state of preservation at the time of the discovery.1 The six pieces of marble in which the group was carved2 were slightly separated and therefore easily distinguishable as were the missing parts, of which the right arm of Laocoön and that of his younger son are of particular interest in the present paper. The original appearance of these parts has been much discussed and a series of solutions have been proposed and restorations undertaken. Accordingly, the appearance of the Laocoön has undergone changes and it can be termed a ‘dynamic’ piece of sculpture. In two studies of 1999 and 2007 Ludovico Rebaudo has illuminated its history of restoration and copying in great detail, and his main conclusions are roughly summed up in the scheme at Table 7. 1, omitting, though, the problem of the so-called marble arm of Michelangelo because it is irrelevant to the present argument. Eight successive stages can be distinguished.3 Any plaster cast, of course, reproduces its original at the time of reproduction. This explains why two different Laocoöns exist in Denmark and in the other Nordic countries. One variant consists of casts that reproduce either a plaster copy with restorations from c. 1685 (Fig. 7. 4) or the original as it appeared in 1800 to 1815 when these restorations were mounted on the marble original proper (Fig. 7. 5). The second variant reproduces the original’s wellknown appearance throughout the nineteenth century and until 1957 (Fig. 7. 6),

___________ 1 2

3

The cast, unfortunately, is not reproduced in the lavishly illustrated catalogue Buranelli et al. (eds), Laocoonte. 1. Laocoön’s body and left leg below the knee. 2. The forepart of the altar with Laocoön’s right leg and the younger son. 3. The elder son. 4. The back of the altar. 5. Laocoön’s’ right foreleg and foot. 6. The left part of the altar. The original bent right arm of Laocoön only became known in 1905 and was therefore not shown in the cast. Cf. also the precise summary of the restorations by Buranelli et al. (eds), Laocoonte, pp. 37-40.

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when Filippo Magi removed most of the restorations and attached the bent, original right (Pollak) arm of Laocoön. Date & artist

Restoration

A

1506 Ancient group discovered

B

c.1510 or 1521–22 ?Baccio Right arm of younger son Bandinelli

Figures placed frontally, on a line

1519–25 Baccio Bandinelli C

Casts

Marble copy, Florence

1532–33 / 1538 Giovann’ Angelo Montorsoli

Laocoon’s right arm

c. 1540

Restorations taken off and mounted again

(a) 1543 Primaticcio, without restorations, Fontainebleau (b) c. 1685, adaptation by François Girardon of Laocoon’s right arm. Stockholm; copy in marble, Versailles.

D

1712/1719 Agostino Cornacchini

Laocoon’s right arm + right (c) Florence, Accademia hands of both sons, etc., ‘remade’ with small changes

E

1780 c. (Pio VI), right arm of youngest son

New stretched arm of younger son

1798

Restorations taken off

F

1800 Paris

Girardon’s right arm (b) of (d) Bonn, Lyon; Kiel, Laocoon and of younger Helsinki, Stockholm, son as in B Oslo; bronze cast Copenhagen (Barbedienne)

G

1816

Cornacchini & 1775 (e) Berlin Formerei 263: restorations mounted again Odense, Copenhagen as in D and E

H

1957–1959 F. Magi

Restorations removed; Pollak’s arm, Laocoon’s original right arm, mounted.

Table 7. 1: The eight successive stages of restoration of the Laocoön according to L. Rebaudo.

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However, a cast may also be ‘dynamic’ and in its actual state embody both its own fortune and the changes of its original due to scholarship. This is splendidly seen in a plaster cast of the Laocoön in the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen dating from before 1744 (Fig. 7. 7). The group is moreover peculiar because each of the three figures was separately produced and certain changes have been made relating to the original. Thus it constitutes a third variant of the Laocoön in Scandinavia.

Laocoön and Abraham 1587 The earliest appearance of Laocoön in Denmark, though, is of a quite different kind than a plaster cast and it emphasizes the role of the Laocoön as an ultimate exemplum doloris.4 In 1587 the carved altarpiece in the church of Kronborg castle in Elsinore was completed.5 The subject of the left panel relief shows Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac (Fig. 7. 1). Father and son are placed on a two-step base. Isaac kneels on the higher part; Abraham stands with his right leg on the lower one and clutches Isaac’s back with his left hand. The sword in his raised right hand is detained by the angel and Abraham looks upwards to his left with his face twisted with pain, the eyebrows contracted and the mouth half-open. A comparison with the head of Laocoön shows remarkable similarities (Figs 7. 2 – 3): the volume of the curled hair and its relation to forehead and cheeks, certain curls of the beard (cheek and chin), the exposed upper lip and, not least, the wrinkled brow with a central furrow and the shape of the eyebrows and eyelids. The cluster of close similarities shows decisively that Laocoön served as a model for Abraham’s agony and grief. A comparison with another representation of the sacrifice in the castle of Sønderborg from c. 1560 attributed to the Flemish painter Frans Floris, confirms this conclusion.6 The general similarity of the motifs shows the Kronborg artist to be firmly rooted in the Flemish tradition, but his head of Abraham is quite different and comes, just like the posture of the right arm, very close to that of Laocoön.

___________ 4 5

6

L. D. Ettlinger, ‘Exemplum doloris – Reflections on the Laocoon Group’, in M. Meiss (ed.), De artibus opuscula XL, Essays in honor of Erwin Panofsky I-II, Published for the Institute for Advanced Study (New York, N.Y., 1961), I, pp. 121-6. Danmarks Kirker 2,1 Frederiksborg Amt (København, 1964), p. 586, figs 15, 17; Poulsen et al. (eds), Dansk Kunst Historie 2, pp. 80-4; H. Honnens de Lichtenberg, Johan Georg van der Schardt. Bildhauer bei Kaiser Maximilian II., am dänischen Hof und bei Tycho Brahe (Copenhagen, 1991), p. 191; J. Zahle, ‘Laokoon på Kronborg’, SFINX 29/3 (Århus, 2006), pp. 134-7. O. Norn, ‘Dronning Dorotheas altertavle paa Sønderborg Slot’, Nationalmuseets Arbejdsmark (Copenhagen, 1950), pp. 17-22 and Poulsen et al. (eds), Dansk Kunst Historie 2, p. 30, figs 18 and 20 with attribution to the Flemish painter Frans Floris (c. 1517–70).

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Fig. 7. 1: The Sacrifice of Isaac. Unknown artist, 1587. Oak, h: 144 cm, w: 56.5 cm. Left wing of an altarpiece in the church of the castle of Kronborg, Elsinore.

The Danish sculptor Thomas Bilthugger was in charge of the Kronborg altarpiece, but he can hardly be the author of the reliefs. They may have been imported from the Netherlands. Recently they have been attributed to the Flemish sculptor Johan Gregor van der Schardt, who studied in Italy c. 1560–71 and worked in Denmark 1577–80. Among the plaster casts that he, like other artists of the period, owned was a small-scale copy of the Laocoön Group.7

___________ 7

H. Honnens de Lichtenberg, Johan Georg van der Schardt. Bildhauer bei Kaiser Maximilian II., am dänischen Hof und bei Tycho Brahe (Copenhagen, 1991), pp. 58-9.

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Fig. 7. 2: Head of Abraham in The Sacrifice of Isaac (detail of Fig. 7. 1).

Fig. 7. 3: Head of the plaster cast of Laocoön in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (cf. Fig. 7. 7).

Whoever the artist was, the altarpiece is an early and masterly testimony to the impact of antique art and explicitly of the Laocoön in Denmark.8

___________ 8

The idea of modelling Abraham from the Laocoön is documented in Italy before 1549, but for the representation in Kronborg there is no exact model, see Buranelli et al. (eds), Laocoonte, pp. 142-3, cat. no. 29 for a drawing showing Abraham attributed to Il Sodoma, who died 1549.

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Scandinavian Laocoöns from the Seventeenth to the Nineteenth Century In the seventeenth century two Laocoön Groups are documented in Sweden. Queen Christina in 1650 acquired a marble specimen that remained in Sweden after her abdication in 1654. Presumably it was destroyed by fire in 1697.9 Already the next year another Laocoön arrived in Stockholm (Fig. 7. 4) among the total of thirty-one plaster casts that the architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger procured with a permit of Louis XIV from the Louvre.10 The Swedish envoy in Paris, though, states that because of the miserable quality of the King’s mould he had bought the Laocoön from a private owner, his cast having been moulded in Rome. Nonetheless the cast in Stockholm is equipped with the right arm of Laocoön as it was restored in Paris by François Girardon c. 1685. The importance of the Laocoön in the teaching of the Swedish Academy during the eighteenth century is revealed by the 1806 catalogue of the Academy collection. Besides the group are listed one torso of Laocoön with the head, a bust, two masks and the mask of one of the sons.11 In Denmark in the eighteenth century, the most remarkable acquisition is the group in the Academy of Fine Arts, to be discussed in detail below, but the Laocoön manifested itself in various other ways. The sculptor Andreas Weidenhaupt (Professor from 1771 to 1805) modelled a Laocoön in terracotta during his stay in Rome from 1765 to 1768. It was shown in the Academy Exhibition in 1778. A few years before, in 1772, the Academy acquired a plaster cast of Laocoön’s head. This is possibly the head shown next to the sculptor Nicolas Dajon (Professor from 1803 to 1823) in his official portrait of 1809.12 The 1737 inventory of the Royal Kunstkammer lists a “Lacon [sic] of clay, Metallized”.13 It was sold in 1811 and nothing is known about it. Most likely

___________ 9 10

11

12 13

A.-M. Leander Touati, Ancient Sculptures in the Royal Museum I. The Eighteenth-Century Collection in Stockholm (Stockholm, 1998), pp. 23-4. H. H. Brummer, ‘The Statue Court in the Vatican Belvedere’, Stockholm Studies in the History of Art, 20 (1970), p. 99 no. 2, figs 85-6; F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1981), p. 79; J. Cederlund, ‘Tessins gipser’, in S. Söderlind (ed.), Gips. Tradition i konstens form, Nationalmusei Årsbok 45 (Stockholm, 1999), pp. 96-9 (with a list of all the casts pp. 112-13); Rebaudo, Il braccio mancante, p. 97 cat. CA 4, fig. 48. I am grateful to E. Tebelius-Muren and E.-L. Bengtson, Stockholm for useful information and for photos of the Laocoön in their care. Förteckning på Kgl. Målare och Bildhuggare-Akademiens Samlinger (Stockholm, 1806), pp. 70-1. Cf. E. Göthe, Katalog öfver Gipsafgjutningssamlingen. Kungliga Akademien för de fria Konsterna (Stockholm, 1904), nos. 31b-c, 32, 57 and 95. J. Zahle, ‘Wiedewelt’, p. 164, fig. 8. B. Gundestrup, The Royal Danish Kunstkammer 1737 I-II (Copenhagen, 1981), p. 342 cat. 874/27.

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it was a small-scale copy as was probably the one owned by the sculptor Johannes Wiedewelt (Academy Professor from 1761 to 1802) which was sold at the auction after his death.14 According to the sales catalogue he also owned a head of Laocoön. At some time before 1766 a bronze statuette by Adrian de Vries of Laocoön without the children entered the Kunstkammer.15 The fact that he is shown alone and that the curl of the snake between his legs is omitted is interesting in connection with the Academy Group (see below). The complete or partial omis- Fig. 7. 4: Laocoön. Plaster cast, 1698. Academy sion of the snake also recurs in study of Fine Arts, Stockholm. prints and drawings of the seventeenth century.16 Finally, it is interesting that the heads of Laocoön and both sons figure in the sales catalogue of the cast-maker Domenico Maria Gianelli in the 1780s.17 In 1773 Gianelli was appointed cast maker at the Copenhagen Academy, and he had, to judge from his catalogue of c. 120 items, a prolific independent trade. There was certainly a market for plaster casts from the antique and in more recent times for institutions and probably also for private homes. Through the efforts of the architect Peder Malling and the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen the Academy of Fine Arts in 1815 acquired a head of one of Laocoön’s sons from Rome. It is likely to have been of the younger son because his head appears in a painting of 1841 depicting one of the ateliers of the Academy.18 In his private collection Thorvaldsen had a bust of Laocoön

___________ 14 J. Zahle, ‘Wiedewelt’, p. 155. 15 Now in The Statens Museum for Kunst, inv. SMK5494, H. Olsen, Ældre udenlandsk skulptur, Statens Museum for Kunst (Copenhagen, 1980), p. 142, fig. 147; J.-P. Cuzin et al. (eds), D’après l’antique, exh. cat. Paris, musée du Louvre (Paris, 2000), p. 251 (with fig). 16 Buranelli et al. (eds), Laocoonte, pp. 168-71, cat. nos. 65, 67; Audran 1683: Rebaudo, Il braccio mancante, figs 34-6. 17 V. P. Christensen, ‘Et Gipserkatalog fra 18. Aarhundrede’, in Fra Arkiv og Museum (Copenhagen, 1925), p. 306. 18 Zahle, ‘Antiksalen – Figursalen – Museet’, p. 158, cat. 28, fig. 53, painting by H. C. C. Nickelsen 1841.

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and the head of the elder son.19 The time of acquisition is not known, it may have been 1815, but Thorvaldsen would have had ample opportunity to acquire them because of his high standing in Rome. In the era of state and municipal museums of art in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the demand for the Laocoön is very well documented. To judge from the Nordic evidence of the group the market appears quite dominated by the Atelier de Moulage du Musée du Louvre, founded in 1794. And it was indeed very prolific. For the short period between 1802 and 1816 altogether 265 sales of the group or parts of it are recorded.20 Besides the group in toto, one could acquire the busts of Laocoön and of the sons, the torso and head of Laocoön, his legs, one of his arms, and his feet.21 The Gipsformerei der Königlichen Museen in Berlin, founded in 1819, only enters the scene very late. Plaster casts of the group were acquired from Paris for both the universities of Kiel and Helsinki in 1844,22 for Stockholm (Nationalmuseum) in 186623 and for Oslo (Skulpturmuseet) in 1880.24 In 1883, the brewer Carl Jacobsen bought a bronze cast from the firm F. Barbedienne in Paris (Fig. 7. 5).25 The latter’s likeness to the Stockholm 1698 cast (Fig. 7. 4) is obvious, the elder son in the old version, however, is slightly separated from the father, and his right foot is placed on a slightly higher level. Finally, in 1898 and 1907 respectively, two institutions bought the group from Berlin, the Royal Cast Collection in Copenhagen (Fig. 7. 6) and the Municipal Art Museum in Odense. The Municipal Art Museum in Randers acquired the head of Laocoön in 1904.26

___________ 19 L. Müller, ‘Description des Plâtres au Musée Thorvaldsen’, Musée-Thorvaldsen 4 (Copenhagen, 1850), nos. 128-9. 20 F. Rionnet, ‘L’atelier de moulage du musée Napoléon’, in Dominique-Vivant Denon: l’oeil de Napoléon (Paris, 1999), p. 188. 21 F.-H. Jacquet, Platres Antiques qui se trouvent chez Jacquet, Mouleur du Musée Royal, Cour du Louvre, façade du Pont des Arts, à Paris (Paris, [c. 1825]). 22 R. Nikula, ‘Helsingfors universitets skulptursamling – historia och bakgrund’, in H. Ragn Jensen et al. (eds), Inspirationens skatkammer. Rom og skandinaviske kunstnere i 1800–tallet (Copenhagen, 2003), p. 372, fig. 152, p. 374. I am grateful to Dr Joachim Raeder, Kiel, for information on the date of acquisition in Kiel. 23 S. Söderlind, ‘Från ädel antik till gammalt gods’, in S. Söderlind (ed.), Gips. Tradition i konstens form, Nationalmusei Årsbok 45 (Stockholm, 1999), p. 129. The Laocoön Group in the Art Museum of Tartu University, formerly Dorpat, in Estonia was also acquired from Paris in the 1860s. I am grateful to Dr Ingrid Sakh, Tartu, for this information. 24 N. Messel, ‘Skulpturmuseet i Kristiania’, in H. Ragn Jensen, S. Söderlind and E.-L. Bengtsson (eds), Inspirationens skatkammer. Rom og skandinaviske kunstnere i 1800-tallet (Copenhagen, 2003), p. 333. 25 When the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek was inaugurated in 1897 the group flanked the entrance together with Michelangelo’s Moses. 26 The workshop is not known.

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The Paris and Berlin versions differ basically in two respects. The first difference is in the right arm of the younger boy. In the Paris version this is bent over his head and the palm of the hand is horizontal with the fingers slightly bent. This restoration was made c. 1521–23, perhaps by Baccio Bandinelli. When in c. 1685 François Girardon worked on the recently acquired plaster cast in Paris he accepted this restoration. In the Berlin version the right arm is vertical and almost straight. The palm of the hand faces the spectator with the fingers slightly bent. According to Rebaudo (Table 7. 1) this arm replaced the former one about 1780, a restoration and date not recorded in the Vatican archives but convincingly deduced from a series of dated depictions and plaster casts. When the original marble Laocoön was brought to Paris to form part of the Musée Napoléon this new arm was taken off and a copy of the old arm (by Bandinelli) from the Paris cast was mounted. The second major difference between the Paris and Berlin versions is the right arm of Laocoön. In the Paris version the arm is formed by Girardon c. 1685 (Figs 7. 4-5). It is slightly bent and the forearm almost vertical. The snake’s body runs parallel to the forearm and is almost hidden by the upper arm. The clenched fist with the snake turns towards the spectator. In the Berlin version (Fig. 7. 6) the arm is slightly more stretched, the fist turned slightly to Laocoön’s right. The curve of the snake is more ample and visible all

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Fig. 7. 5: Laocoön. Bronze cast, F. Barbedienne, Paris, 1883. H: 2.27 m. Hans Tausen’s Park, Copenhagen.

Fig. 7. 6: Laocoön. Plaster cast, Gipsformerei Berlin, 1898. H: 2.42 m. Royal Cast Collection, Copenhagen.

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along the arm. This arm is attributed to Agostino Cornacchini, c. 1712–19. When the original marble Laocoön was brought to Paris this arm was also taken off and it was replaced by Girardon’s. Before the Laocoön was returned to Rome in 1816 the Bandinelli and Girardon arms were again taken off. Already in 1802, however, the Paris version had been moulded, and from this mould derive all the Laocoöns sold from Paris. Back in Rome the Cornacchini arm as well as the straight arm of the younger boy was mounted again. Until 1957 this version was on display in the Vatican and the Berlin mould was at some time made from this ‘edition’.

The Laocoön in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (before 1744) Neither the date nor workshop of the oldest Danish Laocoön is known (Fig. 7. 7). The sculptor Johannes Wiedewelt reports that in 1744 he studied the plaster casts of Laocoön and the younger son in the first Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.27 In 1754 they were exhibited in the Antiksal, the Antiquities Hall at the Charlottenborg castle, where the Academy still resides.28 They stood opposite each other and were, accordingly, separately made. In 1789 the eldest son was acquired from Rome, and from then on, presumably (see below), the three figures were exhibited together as a group. A painting of 1837 documents its position in the Antiksal.29 Since 1969 it is on permanent loan to the Antikmuseet, University of Aarhus. The group differs from the marble original and – as far as I have been able to establish – from all the other preserved casts in several respects. The three figures are separately made and they do not join up. The wooden tripartite base measures c. 1.70 × 0.45 m compared to the c. 1.65 × 0.66 m of the original. The greater length is inevitable, and the reduced depth is due to the cutting of the altar block that Laocoön is seated on (Fig. 7. 8) on both the back and the left hand side.30 The younger son rests on a separate, narrow pillar. The surfaces of the base are coated with plaster and have, together with the figures, been painted in grey

___________ 27 J. Zahle, ‘Wiedewelt’, p. 129 with full documentation. 28 Zahle, ‘Antiksalen – Figursalen – Museet’, pp. 174-5, fig. 47. 29 Zahle, ‘Antiksalen – Figursalen – Museet’, pp. 114-17, fig. 18; J. Zahle, ‘Brøndsted – the headstrong assistant in acquisitions of plaster casts for The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen’, in B. Bundgaard Rasmussen et al. (eds), Peter Oluf Brøndsted (1780–1842) – A Danish Classicist in his European Context (Copenhagen, 2008), pp. 234-7, figs 13-4. 30 Magi, ‘Il ripristino del Laocoonte’, pls 35, 42, 47,1-2.

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Fig. 7. 7: Laocoön. Plaster cast, before 1744 (eldest son added 1789). H: 2.32 m. Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen.

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Fig. 7. 8: Laocoön. Side and back view of the altar block of the plaster cast in the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (cf. Fig. 7. 7).

that is now flaking off. On the back of the altar block “1777” has been incised before it was painted. The names of three men, known to have been students in the 1870s, are written in pencil onto the block.31 The quality of the cast of the figure of Laocoön is high, but parts of both boys, especially their drapery, are sloppily done and stained with lumps of plaster, a sign of neglect during their casting or of later repairs (see below). The seams have partly been smoothed away and partly left untouched. There can hardly be any doubt as to the reasons for producing the figures one by one. This meant that they could be seen and studied from all sides, and they could also be sold and acquired individually. In the second half of the eighteenth century both the Academies in Leipzig and Dresden owned a figure of Laocoön by himself,32 while the Munich and Vienna Academies possessed Laocoön and only one of the sons.33 For technical reasons this is most

___________ 31 Kjerrman et al. (eds), Spejlinger i Gips, pp. 316-17. 32 Boehringer, ‘Gipsabgüssen Chr. G. Heyne’, p. 110; C. Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen im 18. Jahrhundert am Beispiel der Göttinger Universitätssammlung’, in H. Beck et al. (eds), Antikensammlungen im 18. Jahrhundert. Symposion Frankfurt, Liebieghaus, December 1978 (Berlin, 1981), pp. 279-80. 33 M. Meine-Schawe, ‘“alles zu leisten, was man in Kunstsachen nur verlangen kann”. Die Münchner Akademie der bildenden Künste vor 1808’, in Oberbayerisches Archiv 128 (2004), 125-81, at

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Fig. 7. 9: Plaster cast of Laocoön. Engraving, in: Carl Christian Heinrich Rost, Sales-Catalogue, 1794.

likely to have been the younger son. None of these casts are preserved. The Leipzig specimen was acquired from the Italian Ferrari brothers, who in 1774 also delivered a copy to C. G. Heyne in the University of Göttingen. The statue is illustrated in the 1794 sales catalogue of the firm Rost (Fig. 7. 9),34 who took over the Ferrari moulds, and the cast in Göttingen is depicted in a print showing the University Library some time after 1812 (Fig. 7. 10).35 The two depictions, however, differ in important respects. In the sales catalogue Laocoön appears almost naked and without the snake except for short stretches in both hands and on his right thigh. In the Göttingen Library he is shown sitting on the drapery and with the snakes as in the original. Common to both, however, is the reduced size of the altar so that it rather looks like a pillar. Fortunately, a photograph from the late nineteenth century of the Leipzig specimen is preserved. It shows a close similarity to the one illustrated

___________ p. 140, acq. 1775 from Vienna, in Vienna from 1692. I am grateful to Dr M. Meine-Schawe, Munich, and Dr Bettina Hagen, Dr Claudia Koch and Dr Cornelia Reiter, Vienna, for valuable information. 34 C. C. H. Rost, Abgüsse antiker und moderner Statuen, Figuren, Büsten, Basreliefs über die besten Originale geformt in der Rostischen Kunsthandlung zu Leipzig (Leipzig, 1794), p. 21 no. II, pl. 2; Boehringer, ‘Gipsabgüssen Chr. G. Heyne’, p. 109 fig. 28; C. Boehringer, ‘Lehrsammlungen von Gipsabgüssen im 18. Jahrhundert am Beispiel der Göttinger Universitätssammlung’, in H. Beck et al. (eds), Antikensammlungen im 18. Jahrhundert. Symposion Frankfurt, Liebieghaus, December 1978 (Berlin, 1981), p. 290 fig. 5; C. Schreiter, ‘Antike um jeden Preis. Die Rostische Kunsthandlung in Leipzig und Bertouchs Industrie-Comptoir in Weimar,’ in K. Schade et al. (eds), Zentren und Wirkungsräume der Antikenrezeption. Zur Bedeutung von Raum und Kommunikation für die neuzeitliche Transformation der griechisch-römischen Antike (Münster, 2007), p. 159, pl. 40, fig. 3. I am grateful to Dr Charlotte Schreiter, Berlin, for valuable information. 35 Boehringer, ‘Gipsabgüssen Chr. G. Heyne’, p. 102.

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in the Rost catalogue (Fig. 7. 9) and, as a consequence, casts serious doubts on the reliability of the representation of the Göttingen cast.36 It is appropriate, at this point, to have a closer look at the plaster cast owned by the Academy in Copenhagen and the rendering of the area between Laocoön’s legs. A comparison with the original (Figs 7. 11-12)37 shows that the diagonal curl of the snake has been omitted. The drapery has been completed and, in fact, represented quite differently. Above, we have noted that the curl of the snake was also omitted in the bronze statuette by Adrian de Vries and in certain prints. Fig. 7. 10: View of the plaster cast of Laocoön in Also the continuous flow of only a the University Library Göttingen. Unknown artfew folds of the drapery on Lao- ist, after 1812. Engraving. coön’s back differs from the original (cf. Fig. 7. 8), where the folds in the left and central part are very lively within an overall curve whereas the continuation is narrower and simpler.38 When did these deviations originate? When the cast was produced or when repaired after damages? We know through written sources and from the cast itself that the Copenhagen group has been repaired on several occasions. In March 1752 both Laocoön and the younger son were “repaired and completely restored” by the sculptor Johan Christoff Petzold (Professor from 1751 to 1757) who was active in Denmark from c. 1739 to 1746 and again from 1748 to 1757.39 Moreover, the younger son’s upraised, right arm shows that the Copenhagen group at some time was treated to match the revised appearance of c. 1780 of the Belvedere group proper (see, above, Table 7. 1: E). The

___________ 36 I am very grateful to Dr Charlotte Schreiter for the reference to the Leipzig plaster cast, Johannes Hofmann, ‘Die Leipziger Stadtbibliothek als Kunstkammer. Die Anfänge des Städtischen Kunstsammelns in Leipzig’, in W. Teupser (ed.), Kunst und ihre Sammlung in Leipzig (Leipzig, 1937), pp. 47-62. 37 F. Magi, ‘Il ripristino del Laocoonte’, pls 1, 41-6. 38 F. Magi, ‘Il ripristino del Laocoonte’, pl. 47.1-2; Cf. pls 18.1-2, 21.2. 39 “Repareret og i fuldkommen Stand bragt”. Rigsarkivet (Danish National Archive) 1752.

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Fig. 7. 11: Laocoön. Detail of the plaster cast in Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Copenhagen (cf. Fig. 7. 7).

Fig. 7. 12: Laocoön. Detail of the original group. Roman, c. 50 BC. Marble, h: 2.08 m, w: 1.65 m. Vatican Museums, Rome.

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painting of the Antique Hall from 1837 shows the group with the younger son’s upright arm and thus establishes the terminus ante quem. But this ‘updating’ very likely took place already between 1789 and 1790 when “The son of Laocoön the Academy lacked”, that is, the elder son, was acquired and certainly added to the group. In 1789, together with several statues, busts and reliefs “A collection of fragments consisting of antique heads, feet and other limbs” was acquired by the Academy, and in 1790 Domenico Gianelli was paid “for putting together and restoration of several plaster figures that had arrived from Italy”.40 The younger son’s new arm may well have been among them. Whatever the date, the restoration with the new forearm and hand was not done quite correctly when compared to the arrangement in the Vatican: it has been turned slightly clockwise so that the entire palm of the hand does not face the spectator. Again in 1800 something happened. In the lively description by the German painter Philipp Otto Runge of the tumultuous anniversary of the foundation of the Academy in the same year he notes that “The younger son of Laocoön has lost a finger”.41 Certainly a repair was necessary. The remarkable similarity in the rendering of the drapery of both sons moreover indicates a ‘disaster’ at some unknown point in time after 1790. In fact, their drapery partly bears a superficial similarity to the originals and partly shows no more than a rough and irregular surface treatment. Finally, an uncertainty with regard to Laocoön’s arm shall be touched upon. We know that the statue was acquired before 1744 and that Laocoön is furnished with Cornacchini’s arm of 1712/19 – a likely terminus post quem for our cast. But like the younger son’s arm it may have been added between 1789 and 1790 in which case the cast may antedate c. 1715. The unique rendering of Laocoön’s drapery and the omission of a part of the snake are of particular interest. We know neither the workshop of the two figures of the group nor enough of Petzold’s oeuvre to evaluate whether he could have modelled the drapery. It seems reasonable, however, to explain these features as a consequence of the adaptation of the figure to its isolated display. But the changes may also, at least partly, be the result of repairs in one or more workshops after damage during transport from Rome to remote Denmark. Perhaps a technical analysis of the Laocoön could answer the question.

___________ 40 J. Zahle, ‘Wiedewelt’, p. 152-3. 41 P. O. Runge, Hinterlassene Schriften von Philipp Otto Runge 2 (Hamburg, 1841), p. 51. He studied in Copenhagen 1799–1801.

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The Origin of the Copenhagen Academy’s Laocoön As we do not know which workshop(s) produced Laocoön and the younger son, we are left to speculate on the basis of what we know of the artistic milieu in Copenhagen during the first half of the eighteenth century. The first Danish Academy was founded in 1738 and was first housed in the huge workshop of the Danish court painter Hendrik Krock (1671–1738), and the casts could possibly first have been in his possession. He spent two periods in Italy, from c. 1693 to 1701 and again from 1703 to 1706. In 1701 he worked in vain for the establishment of an academy and during many years he taught pupils in his workshop.42 The court architect Nicolai Eigtved (1701– 54) travelled in 1723 to Germany and was from 1725 to 1733 employed by the Saxon building authorities and corps of engineers. In 1748 he was appointed supervisor of the first Academy, and in the year of his death, President of the re-founded Academy.43 The above-mentioned Saxon sculptor Christoph Petzold was a pupil of Balthasar Permoser in Dresden and of Georg Raphael Donner in Vienna “where he spent much time”, probably from 1735 when he was admitted to the Viennese Academy until 1739.44 Petzold worked, among other places, on the Royal Palace Christiansborg (completed 1740) to which two other German sculptors were summoned, Jacob Fortling in 1729 from Bayreuth, and, around 1731, Friedrich Hännel from Saxony.45 The close relationship may very well reflect the royal family ties between Saxony and Denmark: August II the Strong (1670–1733) was a cousin of Frederik IV (1671–1730) who, with great pomp, visited Dresden in May and June 1709. Certainly, there were close connections between Saxony and Copenhagen in the period when the Laocoön was acquired (before 1744). We have noted, moreover, the presence of a Laocoön with one son (acquired in 1692) in Vienna from where a cast was sold to Munich in 1775. In the same period, the 1770s, the Ferrari brothers conducted their trade in Germany. Subsequently the Rost firm resided in Leipzig. However, this is at least a generation after the arrival of the Laocoön in Copenhagen. At present, therefore, the problem of the place of its production remains unsolved, but Vienna might be a candidate. The court in Düsseldorf where in 1710 Count Johann Wilhelm acquired his plaster

___________ 42 Weilbach [accessed 5 July 2009]. 43 Weilbach [accessed 5 July 2009]. 44 Weilbach [accessed 5 July 2009]; Poulsen et al. (eds), Dansk Kunst Historie 2, p. 448; H. Erlandsen and K. Kryger, Johann Christoph Petzoldt. En desillusioneret, lærd billedhugger mellem rokoko og klassicisme (Copenhagen, 2009). 45 Weilbach [accessed 5 July 2009], Poulsen et al. (eds), Dansk Kunst Historie 2, p. 452.

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casts from Rome and Florence, including the Laocoön, can be excluded. The collection was in 1731 brought to Mannheim, and the Laocoön in the Antikensaal there, certainly, comprised the whole group. Our group, therefore, cannot derive from the same workshop. Nonetheless, a drawing shows the Mannheim Laocoön without the sons but with the curl of the snake and the drapery as on the original.46 With regard to the workshop that made the elder son of the Copenhagen group we know that it was acquired from Rome and that the painter Nicolai Abildgaard (Academy Professor from 1778 to 1809) was in charge of the transaction. His correspondence with the Swiss sculptor Alexander Trippel (1744–1793) reveals that Abildgaard, in 1778, acquired plaster casts of the mask and an arm of Michelangelo’s Moses from Anton Raphael Mengs.47 Among Abildgaard’s papers a sales list of casts from Mengs dates almost certainly from this period. After Mengs’ death in 1779, Trippel, among others, mediated the sale of his collection to Dresden. Several duplicates and also moulds, however, remained in Rome with the moulders Vincenzo and Lorenzo Barzotti.48 The elder son may therefore originate from them, cast from the existing mould, or it may even be the item “Un figlio di Laoconte” listed in the official list of Mengs’ effects.49

Epilogue The history of the original marble Laocoön comprises eight stages (Table 7. 1 A-H) defined by the sequence of restorations. The plaster casts of the group can be divided into two main groups; the one shaped c. 1685 (and again c. 1800) in Paris and the other that developed in the eighteenth century. These two versions were distributed, respectively from Paris and Berlin, during the nineteenth century. Both versions could sometimes be seen in the same city, as in Copenhagen from c. 1900 onwards. However, in the era before the state

___________ 46 S. Socha, ‘Der Antikensaal in der Mannheimer Zeichnungsakademie’, in B. Savoy (ed.), Tempel der Kunst. Die Entstehung des öffentlichen Museums in Deutschland 1701–1815 (Mainz am Rhein, 2006), p. 247, fig. 5. See also pp. 246-7 for a synopsis of the history of the collection. 47 V. P. Christensen, ‘Breve fra Nic. Abildgaard til Alexander Trippel’, in Vor Tid (Copenhagen, 1914), pp. 163-4. Cf. the cast preserved in Dresden, Kiderlen, Gipsabgüsse von Anton Raphael Mengs, p. 183 no. 303 (= cat. 393) and p. 188 no. 466. 48 Kiderlen, Gipsabgüsse von Anton Raphael Mengs, p. 40, p. 462. 49 Kiderlen, Gipsabgüsse von Anton Raphael Mengs, pp. 460-2 no. 90. Dr A. Negrete Plano has kindly informed me that the seams of the cast of the elder son in Copenhagen shows no similarity to the one made from the moulds of Mengs in the Fábrica de la China in Madrid. Nothing is known about the moulds in Rome.

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workshops in Paris and Berlin – not to mention the workshops in London and Brussels from 1836 and 1870 respectively – plaster casts were distributed by a more ‘accidental’ route through royal, aristocratic and artistic channels for display and for teaching in many academies of fine arts. Casts of the original works as well as secondary or ‘aftercasts’ (Zweitgüsse, surmoulages) were made, used and traded,50 but our present knowledge of these transactions is inadequate. The Copenhagen Academy group exemplifies the state of affairs. It deviates from the original and was moreover, on one or more occasions updated to comply with the current state of the original and also with the scholarly and intellectual discourse on the group. It is hardly accidental that the professors in the 1780s wanted to unite the two parts already present with the missing brother into a single group. Only then did it become meaningful in connection with the famous Winckelmann – Lessing controversy that centred around this group, a discussion in which Nicolai Abildgaard took part with his painting The wounded Philoctetes (1774–75).51 The ‘authentic’ appearance of the famous group may therefore have been of some concern to those responsible for the Academy’s cast collection. Noteworthy in this regard are the seven editions of a public catalogue in Danish published between 1791 and 1809 that presumably testify to a certain public interest in the collection. Altogether, the re-united Laocoön Group epitomizes antiquarian interest, intellectual and aesthetic interests, and a concern for education. It makes no difference that it is unlike the marble original in so many respects that it should rather be termed an intermediary between a cast and a free copy rather than a reproduction. Since the discovery of the Pollak arm in 1903 several Laocoöns have been updated with casts of the original arm and with a partial or complete removal of the earlier restorations; in 1906–07 in Dresden by Georg Treu,52 around 1950 in Rome and Pisa,53 in 1957 in Bonn,54 and in 1974 in Oxford where the Laocoön “was reconstructed to incorporate the results of recent archaeological

___________ 50 See the papers in the present volume by Walter Cupperi (pp. 81-98) and Charlotte Schreiter (pp. 121-42). 51 P. Kragelund, Abildgaard Kunstneren mellem oprørerne 1 (Copenhagen, 1999), pp. 210-24, cf. R. Rosenblum, Transformations in Late Eighteenth Century Art (Princeton, N.J., 1967), pp. 12-13. 52 I. Raumschüssel, ‘Zur Rekonstruktion des Laokoon durch Georg Treu’, in K. Knoll (ed.), Das Albertinum vor 100 Jahren – die Skulpturensammlung Georg Treus (Dresden, 1994), pp. 27780; Rebaudo, Il braccio mancante, p. 77, fig. 51. The arm was mounted on Mengs’ cast acquired in 1784. 53 M. L. Morricone, Il Museo di gessi dell’Università di Roma (Rome, 1981), p. 28, figs 48-9; F. Donati, La gipsoteca di arte antica (Pisa, 1999), pp. 202-11. 54 D. Piekarski, ‘Laokoon-Gruppe’, in J. Bauer and W. Geominy (eds), Gips Nicht Mehr. Abgüsse als letzte Zeugen antiker Kunst, exh. cat. Bonn (Bonn, 2000), pp. 193-9. The arm was mounted on a cast acquired in 1820 from Paris.

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research”.55 The scope of these interventions, however, has been strictly scientific, and no other Laocoön has had a second life as stormy as the cast in Copenhagen.

Frequently cited literature C. Boehringer, ‘Die Sammlung von Gipsabgüssen antiker Skulpturen unter Chr. G. Heyne’, in K. Fittschen (ed.), Die Skulpturen der Sammlung Wallmoden, exh.cat. Göttingen (Göttingen, 1979) F. Buranelli, P. Liverani and A. Nesselrath (eds), Laocoonte. Alle origini dei Musei Vaticani, exh. cat. Rome (Rome, 2006) M. Kiderlen, Die Sammlung der Gipsabgüsse von Anton Raphael Mengs in Dresden (Munich, 2006) P. Kjerrman, B. Nørgaard, J. Zahle and J. Bertelsen (eds), Spejlinger i gips. Kunstakademiets Billedkunstskoler, exh. cat. Copenhagen (Copenhagen, 2004) F. Magi, ‘Il ripristino del Laocoonte’, in MemPontAcc IX,1 (Vatican, 1960) V. Poulsen, E. Lassen and J. Danielsen (eds), Dansk Kunst Historie 2 Rigets mænd lader sig male 1500–1750 (Copenhagen, 1973) L. Rebaudo, Il braccio mancante. I restauri del Laocoonte (1506–1957) (Trieste, 2007) J. Zahle, ‘Antiksalen – Figursalen – Museet’, in Kjerrman et al. (eds), Spejlinger i Gips, pp. 78-211 J. Zahle, ‘Wiedewelt and plaster casts in Copenhagen 1744–1802’, in M. Nielsen and A. Rathje (eds), Johannes Wiedewelt. A Danish Artist in Search of the Past, Shaping the Future, Acta Hyperborea 11, (Copenhagen, 2009), pp. 127-173

___________ 55 D. C. Kurtz, The Reception of Classical Art in Britain. An Oxford story of plaster casts from the Antique (Oxford, 2000), p. 314.

How the Smiths Made a Living1 PETER MALONE

By the end of the nineteenth century cast making had expanded to embrace a large range of cultural and natural material. This was a response to an increasing plurality of taste and a shift of emphasis in the requirements of art education, particularly in the area of design. Casts had been used for centuries in academies of fine art and were now to be used as essential props for the drawing based design courses that were to proliferate across the industrial world. In Britain the need for design education was not officially recognized until the 1830s, by which time there were already eighty schools of art under state supervision in France.2 This had led British manufacturers to rely upon the import of French designs. Across the Channel there was less emphasis on the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art with students deciding upon further study in fine art or design only after the completion of a programme of basic drawing.3 The Royal Academicians, who were, initially, entrusted with the establishment of a system of design education in Britain, were also concerned with maintaining this distinction. In the new Government Schools of Art there would be little provision for drawing or painting from the figure or from nature and greater reliance placed on the use of ornamental casts. Charles Heath Wilson, Director of the first such school to be established at Somerset House, London, purchased over 1,500 of these; this policy came to be copied, albeit on a lesser scale, at the design schools set up in major British cities.4 Whereas French schools used casts in a fairly liberal manner, the National Course of Instruction in Drawing devised in 1852 by the newly appointed Superintendents of the Department of Practical Art of the Board of Trade, Henry Cole and Richard Redgrave, delivered a far more rigorous approach which was to survive in one form or another until the Great War.5 In twenty-three clearly

___________ 1 2 3 4 5

Thanks are due to James Sutton at the V&A Archives and the staff at the London Borough of Camden Archives for all their help and patience. Macdonald, History and Philosophy, p. 78. Macdonald, History and Philosophy, p. 79. Macdonald, History and Philosophy, pp. 88-9. Macdonald, History and Philosophy, p. 381.

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Fig. 8. 1: Mask of a drowned girl (Noyée de la Seine). c. 1900. Plaster, from gelatine mould (?), h: 30 cm. Smith cast no. 219. Author’s collection.

Fig. 8. 2: South Kensington examination drawing of the Mask of a drowned girl (Fig. 8. 1). Black chalk (?) on paper, 31 x 22 cm. Probably by S. Woodward, a schoolmaster from Leeds, c. 1873. Author’s collection.

described stages the student was required to make copies in line or tone from flat plates or casts using suggested models (Figs 8. 1 – 2). For example, Stage 8a., “Human or animal figures from the round or from nature” required either the cast of the “Panathenaic Frieze from the Parthenon, Department No. 497, British Museum 29, or the portion of British Museum 30, to be drawn 22 inches x 25 ½ inches” in outline. Although Stage 8c. permitted a tentative first encounter with the life model, it is possible that at any one time, up to half of the students were still struggling with the demands of Stage 2.6 By 1884 there were over 200 dedicated Schools of Design and classes within other institutions adhering to Cole and Redgrave’s drawing course. Add to these the art lessons conducted in the schools created by the 1870 Education Act and it is possible to see where the bulk of cast production was aimed.7

___________ 6 7

Macdonald, History and Philosophy, p. 388. Macdonald, History and Philosophy, Appendix A, pp. 383-4. This contains a full list of Government Schools of Art from 1837–1884.

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Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century the amount of cast making in London can be roughly determined by entries in Kelly’s Post Office Directories under the heading “Plaster Cast Figure Makers”. The number of firms or individuals thus engaged varied on an annual basis from four at least to fifteen at most.8 Curiously, in Paris, the trade directory, Didot-Bottin, rarely lists less than forty operators annually under the heading “Mouleurs – Figuristes”.9 There the proportion of Italians working in the trade was around 40 per cent but in London they were responsible for nearly all cast production.10 One of the main suppliers of casts to the Government Schools of Design was the firm of Domenico Brucciani. On his 1861 census entry he described himself as a “Plaster Cast Manufacturer employing 25 men and 5 boys”.11 It is not known if this workforce was predominantly Italian; in 1871 Joseph Louis Caproni was employing (and accommodating) five Italians and Onorato Regali six or seven.12 At the end of Chapman and Halls’ Catalogue of Casts, 1901, is the assurance that “nearly all casts sold by Messrs. Chapman and Hall are manufactured on their premises by expert Italian Formatori”.13 Not all the concerns mentioned in Kelly’s would have employed as many as Caproni or Regali, let alone Brucciani. Some give the impression of being solitary operators such as Francisco Bianchi of Upper Kennington Lane who gives his (mixed) occupation in the1871 census as that of “Labourer – Gasworks/Figure maker”, or Lewis Vago, operating from a teeming tenement in Grey’s Inn Lane, that of “phrenological bust maker”.14 John Pierotti and son were more specifically “doll makers” and Peter Boggi, a “wax figure maker”.15 It is quite

___________ 8

9

10 11 12 13 14 15

The Post Office London Directories were published by F. Kelly from 1840 -1879, Kelly and Co. until 1893, Kelly and Co. Ltd until 1898, thence becoming Kelly’s Directories Ltd. All commercial information regarding London cast makers in this article was taken from the Trades’ Directory section under the heading “Plaster Cast Figure Makers”, at five-year intervals from 1840–1900 and again for 1925. Rionnet, L’Atelier de moulage, Annexe 9: ‘Les mouleurs privés à Paris dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle’, pp. 376-80. The dates given here for individual mouleurs were compiled as a chronological table allowing one to ascertain the number of operators working in any one year, thereby, to an extent, reconstituting the original source, the Paris trade directory, Didot-Bottin. Rionnet, L’Atelier de moulage, Annexe 9 and The Post Office London Directories. The National Archives, Census of England and Wales, 1861, class RG 9, piece 35, f. 2, p. 1, GSU roll 542561. N.B. Brucciani is here misspelt as Brucaani. The National Archives, Census of England and Wales, 1871; Caproni: class RG10, piece 373, f. 5, p. 4, GSU roll 824615; Regali: class RG10, piece 379, f. 31, p. 55, GSU roll 824617. Chapman and Hall, Catalogue of Casts (London, 1901), back cover. The National Archives, Census of England and Wales, 1871; Bianchi: class RG10, piece 672, f. 5, p. 1, GSU roll 823328. Census of England and Wales 1861; Vago: class RG9, piece 184, f. 30, p. 1, GSU roll 542587. The National Archives, Census of England and Wales, 1841; Pierotti: class HO 107, piece 686, book 13, f. 32, p. 60, GSU roll 438802; Boggi: class HO 107, piece 659, book 7, f. 7, p. 6, GSU roll 438776.

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probable that formatori di gesso came to London, found employment as workers or even owners of firms, moved sideways into related trades, returned to Italy or went elsewhere in the world: role and status seem to have been highly flexible. Most of the Italians came from the area north of Lucca, notable for the emigration of workers skilled in cast making. One of the few English names to appear consistently in Kelly’s, Charles James Smith, was born at Pentonville, London in 1848. His father, James, was variously described as: “an ornamental stonework maker” (on Charles’ birth certificate); a “modiller” (sic) in the 1851 census; a “stonemason” in 1861 and an “artificial stone worker” on his son’s 1869 marriage certificate, upon which Charles was entered as a “moulder and figure maker”.16 It is evident that at this point Charles was illiterate: not too much of a problem if working for others but surely a disadvantage when running one’s own business.17 He is known to have worked as a moulder for the Thornycroft family of sculptors; their journal for 1871 contains a reference to “Chas. Smith [our plasterman] 15 Clarendon Square, Somers Town”.18 In 1893 there is a list of accounts paid in September: “8 [th] C. Smith 2.53; 16 [th] C. Smith 2.76”. On the facing page is a note, “Smith left Granville plaster finished”.19 It would have been Smith’s job to make moulds from clay models. The cast from these could then be refined by the sculptor and another mould be taken for casting in bronze. Another function of a sculptor’s moulder was to take casts from finished artwork for small commercial plaster editions, cheaper than those cast in bronze. Two mentions in twenty-two years indicate either that the Thornycroft journals did not record absolutely everything or that Smith was only an occasional employee, probably performing the same service for other sculptors. The Thornycrofts also employed Dick, Jim, Nixon and A. Smith, but there is no indication that any of them were related to Charles.20 Smith first appeared in Kelly’s as a “plastercast figure maker” in 1886.21 Ten years previously there had been fourteen concerns listed under this head-

___________ 16 General Register Office, England, Marriage certificate, 27 February 1869, Vol.1b, p. 176, District of Pancras, County of Middlesex, Charles Smith and Jane Griffiths. 17 Ibid., “x- mark of Charles Smith”. 18 Leeds Museums and Art Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive), Thornycroft papers, Acc. 4.86, 1871 journal, J (a) p. 250. 19 Leeds Museums and Art Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive), Thornycroft papers, 1893 journal 8, f. 132r. 20 Leeds Museums and Art Galleries (Henry Moore Institute Archive), Thornycroft papers, 1892 diary, D11 f. 46 and 1919 diary, D28 for Jim Smith; 1871 journal, J(a) p. 249 for A. Smith; Manning, Marble and Bronze, p. 53 for Dick Smith; p. 142 for Nixon Smith. 21 Kelly and Co., The Post Office London Directory, 1886, Trades’ Directory section under the heading “Plaster cast Figure Makers”.

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ing but now there were only seven.22 This decline might have afforded Smith a gap in the market of which he could take advantage. In the 1891 census, Smith and his family were living at Wybert Street, Munster Square and there was a separate workshop at Williams Mews off Stanhope Street, both just north of the Euston Road.23 Since there is no known catalogue of Smith’s casts from this period, and given the obscure position of Williams Mews (now Everton Buildings), it is possible that, despite Kelly’s listing, he was not engaged in commercial production. To set up as a cast maker it was necessary to accumulate a large collection of models. This was most effectively done by succeeding to the ownership of a firm within which one had been employed. Thus the premises, the moulds and the reputation of the business were seamlessly transferred. Instances of this can be found in entries in Didot-Bottin where one “mouleur” is sometimes described as “successeur” to whoever preceded him at that address.24 Alternatively, moulds and casts could be acquired from recently defunct businesses; in the earlier decades of the century, sales of such items at Christies were well attended by other cast makers looking to add to their stock.25 It is interesting to note that No 1 Leather Lane was consistently used from the 1830s to the early years of the twentieth century by the cast makers Marchetti, Graziani, Brucciani and Landi though it is not known if any transference of business occurred.26 There is no trace of a cast maker using Smith’s Williams Mews workshop either before or after his tenancy. It was wise to avoid too great an overlap in stock from one firm to another. Repetition at best was bad for business and at worst involved infringement of copyright law. In 1891 and again in 1894, Brucciani and Co. took a Manchester cast maker, John Alberti, to court for not only pirating their casts but also for fixing upon them the stamp of the Board of Education (the latter misdemeanour infers that Brucciani and Co., as plaintiff, were indeed responsible for the supply of casts to government art courses).27 Despite the proliferation of casts of all sorts towards the end of the century, sourcing any-

___________ 22 Ibid. 23 The National Archives, Census of England and Wales, 1881. Class: RG11; Piece: 180; Folio:73; Page: 49; GSU roll:1341039. 24 For example, on an undated invoice of Michele Gherardi at 45 Rue Monsieur le Prince, Paris, Gherardi describes himself as “Successeur de M. Barsugli”; Archives de Paris, Archives fiscals, 1852–1876; IV.33, D.IP4, 743 + 744. Further examples can be found in Rionnet, L’Atelier de moulage, Annexe 9, pp. 376-80. 25 J. Clifford, ‘The Plaster Shops of the Rococo and Neo-Classical Era in Britain’, Journal of the History of Collections, 4.1 (1992), pp. 39-65, at 52, 53, 63, 64-5. 26 The Post Office London Directories. 27 V&A Archive RP/1891/101485; RP/1894/33755; RP/1894/40393

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thing commercially fresh or immune from litigation was a perennial problem. One would have thought that cast making from nature would have circumvented this to a degree, there being no copyright issue with a leaf or a hand, but it is remarkable the extent to which the same casts of fruit, feet, animals etc. were duplicated from one firm to another (Fig. 8. 3).28 Between 1891 and 1898 Smith did not appear in the pages of Kelly’s directory. When he reappeared, it was at 15 Kentish Town Road, under Fig. 8. 3: Cast of citrus fruit and leaves. c. 1900. the heading “Sculptors”, as a “sculpPlaster, h: 23 cm, w: 25 cm. It appears to have passed from Gherardi (its original maker?) to tor’s moulder” (Fig. 8. 4).29 Gabrielli, and to Caproni in Boston. Author’s Of the sculptors for whom he collection. worked, very little is known, though this aspect of his business seems to have been at least as important to him as the figure making side of it. Between 1909 and 1922, C. Smith and Sons cast editions of a number of panels of lettering and sculptures by Eric Gill.30 With the exception of one panel of incised Roman letters,31 none of these appear in any of Smith’s catalogues, so presumably, they were limited and numbered art editions, in which Smith had no direct, commercial interest. However, these were fairly small commissions, and

___________ 28 The 1913 catalogue of the Boston cast makers, P. P. Caproni and Brother contains a large number of examples of this practice, such as No. 15508, “Blackberry Vine” which can be found in Brucciani’s 1906 Catalogue of Casts for Schools, at No. 2111. That I have a South Kensington Examination drawing of this cast from the early 1870’s is clear indication that there was nothing fresh about this particular spray of fruit by the time it fetched up in Boston. A cast of a flayed hand is currently to be found in the Catalogue of Lorenzi, Paris, at No. 1014. It also appears in Chapman and Hall’s 1901 catalogue, A Preliminary List of Casts etc, on page 4 and in a painting of 1852, Wall in the Artist’s Studio, by Adolph von Menzel, in the Nationalgalerie, Berlin. One might well ask, when was this last a living hand? An elegant example of transference is provided in Fig. 3. 29 Kelly’s Directories Ltd. Trades’ Directory, under the heading “Sculptors”. 30 J. Collins, Eric Gill: the Sculptures (London, 1998), pp. 14, 65, 79, 80, 87, 88, 105, 128. 31 C. Smith and Sons, Catalogue of casts (London, [before 1919]), no. 96c “Panel of inscription in incised Roman letters by Mr. A. E. R. Gill”. V&A Archive ED84/175. Catalogue of Plaster Casts, Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 1936), contains four panels of inscribed lettering by Gill at nos 3109, 3110, 3183 and 3184, though none of their dimensions correspond to those of the Smith cast.

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in order for him to make a decent living, there must have been more substantial clients employing him on a regular basis.32 There are three catalogues of his casts known from then until the 1920s.33 The earliest from before 1912, is “revised and enlarged” so was obviously not the first to be produced by him. His casts were inscribed “C. Smith, 15 Kentish Town Road, London”, (Fig. 8. 5) if space allowed, or more simply “C. Smith, London”, if not (Fig. 8. 6);34 it seems probable that he was able to read and write at this point. They were also inscribed with a number, making any re-organization Fig. 8. 4: 15 Kentish Town Road in 1903. The workshop was situated at the back. London of the catalogue very difficult. Within Transport Photographs Series, Camden Arthe catalogues are categories such as chives, London. “Statues”, “Reliefs”, “Busts”, etc. As the numerical sequence within each category is decidedly patchy, it seems that Smith was more concerned with the unambiguous identification of his casts than with a neatly arranged catalogue. The numbering probably occurred as each piece entered the workshop. For example, no. 231 “Mask of Keats” (Fig. 8. 7), is followed by nos 233 “Reduced Tomb of Scipio”, 234 “Virgin of Notre Dame” and 235 “Crown of a Greek Stele”, all of which are in different categories.35 The first catalogue ends at No. 549 and the last at number 701. All things considered, it is likely that there is a chronological sequence; the higher the number the later the acquisition of the cast. However if all three catalogues are combined in numerical

___________ 32 It must be pointed out that none of Smith’s papers survive. Any information about the identity of his clients will inevitably come from archival material relating to their practice as sculptors. 33 The first is held at the V&A, Department of Sculpture; for the later two see V&A Archive ED84/175 and ED84/177. 34 E.g., no. 219 “Mask of Drowned Girl (French)” and no. 236 “Panel of Architectural Foliage” carry the full inscription, whereas no. 443 “Panel of Winged Victory”, and no. 231 “Mask of Keats” carry the shorter inscription. 35 In all the three known Smith catalogues, no. 231 is under “Busts, masks, heads and animals”, no. 233 “Capitals and various”, no. 234 “Figures” and no. 235 “Panels”.

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Fig. 8. 5: Inscription from the underside of the Mask of a drowned girl (Fig. 8. 1).

sequence, two distinct sections are evident. In the first from 1 to 102, all the numbers are qualified by the letters a, b, c and d. There is then a break until number 200 whence plain numbers run, with gaps, to 701. Both sections were extended concurrently over the years. With the exception of some casts from nature and the odd piece from abroad, most of the items in the first section were taken from English medieval small-scale sculpture. The accompanying descriptions often credit the Architectural Museum, Tufton Street, Westminster as the source.36 It is not known if Smith had a professional connection to the Museum but, because of the catalogue acknowledgement, it is likely that he was copying the casts with their approval. The Museum had been established in the 1850s with the collections of largely medieval casts contributed by Gilbert Scott, Lewis Cottingham, John Ruskin, and others.37 By the 1880s there were over 3000 examples but their appeal to students of architecture had declined and in 1916 they were transferred to the Victoria and Albert Museum.38 Despite the antipathy shown by the founders of the design education system to the use of casts

___________ 36 E.g., in the pre-1919 catalogue (V&A Archive ED84/175) Nos 1c, 2c, 3c, 6b and 6c all credit the Architectural Museum as their source. 37 Summerson, Architectural Association, pp. 35-6. 38 Summerson, Architectural Association, p. 41.

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Fig. 8. 6: Panel of Winged Victory. Early twentieth century. Plaster, from gelatine mould, h: 38 cm, w: 22 cm. Smith cast no. 443. Author’s collection.

of non-classical origin, examples nevertheless found their way into the examinations that it supervised (Fig. 8. 8).39 If they were of no further use to architects, they were still adequate for courses of general drawing. It is difficult to explain the dual nature of the catalogues. Did the first section with its additional letters have a specific educational purpose or did it represent an earlier phase of production? The second section contains a more general mix of casts often to be found in the catalogues of other cast makers. The covers and title pages of the three catalogues provide clues to the sources of the casts and their intended destinations declaring them to be “specifically selected from the English and French National museums and elsewhere […]”. There are a number of French items scattered throughout the catalogues to

___________ 39 Macdonald, History and Philosophy, pp. 64, 68.

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which Smith would not have had direct access. In all probability, many of these came either from the Musée de Sculpture Comparée du Louvre or from the commercial premises of Jean Pouzadoux, the father of Charles Pouzadoux, the mouleur to the Museum.40 Smith could have bought them as casts and made piece-moulds upon them, a cast-of-cast process known as surmoulage, or simply used them as typecasts for gelatine moulds. It is not known if Smith was in the habit of travelling to Paris to buy models or if he consulted catalogues and placed an order by post. This trade would have been facilitated by him not representing any form of commercial rivalry, coming, as he did, from another country. Also to be found on the opening pages is the advice that the casts have been “specially selected for schools and for artists” and are “suitable for schools of art”.41 There is the offer to send, on a loan basis, an album of about 200 photographs of casts to secretaries and headmasters of schools throughout the United Kingdom.42 Although the casts originally recommended for Cole and Redgrave’s drawing course for Government Schools of Art are largely absent from Smith’s catalogues, there is much that would have been suitable for such courses as they developed and also for the needs of art classes in elementary schools. A memorandum of 14 September 1919 from S. Cartlidge to the Board of Education Committee set up to assess the feasibility of purchasing the firm of Brucciani and Co., gives an idea of Smith’s standing and some notion of his firm’s origins and customers:43 Schools of Art are supplied by plaster cast-makers. Of these the most important are Brucciani and Co., Chapman and Hall and C. Smith and Sons who deal with the bulk of supply. They have formed their collections mainly upon the advice of London art masters and certain sculptors for whom they have made moulds. They do not produce statues nor casts under class 2 (F), (school series for courses of study), they have a number of fine Gothic, Byzantine and Renaissance casts especially useful in the education of art craftsmen. […] C. Smith have been in operation for about 22 years.

This appears to establish their commencement as commercial cast makers as 1897, thereby contradicting the appellation of their earlier appearance in Kelly’s directories from 1886 to 1891. The memorandum prompted a visit by Richard Bedford, Assistant Keeper in the Architecture and Sculpture Section of the Victoria and Albert Museum, to the premises of Smith and Sons (Charles

___________ 40 Rionnet, L’Atelier de moulage, p. 380: “Pouzadoux (J.) 45 Rue Monsieur le Prince”, 1875–; Charles Pouzadoux, pp. XVI, 49 n. 8, 68, and 111 n. 39. 41 V&A, Department of Sculpture, Catalogue of casts, C. Smith and sons, cover and title page. 42 V&A, Department of Sculpture, Catalogue of Casts, C. Smith and sons, p. 2. The album referred to is kept by the V&A Sculpture Department and is numbered 25 by Smith. It contains small photographs of casts in varying states of legibility. 43 V&A Archive ED84/175; RP/1919/4075.

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Fig. 8. 7: Death mask of Keats. Early twentieth century. Plaster, from piece-mould, h: 27 cm. Smith cast no. 231. Private collection.

Fig. 8. 8: South Kensington examination drawing of a medieval capital. S. Woodward, a school master from Leeds, c. 1873. Black chalk (?) on paper, 24 x 28 cm. Labelled “3rd grade prize”. The cast possibly came from the Architectural Museum (cast maker unknown). Author’s collection.

James Jr. and George Henry).44 He reported to Eric MacLagan, his departmental Head: In accordance with the director’s wishes, I went yesterday to inspect the works of C. Smith and Sons, castmakers and moulders, 1 Southcote Road, Tufnell Park N. This business is of course not anything like so large as Brucciani’s but there are two things in its favour. No stock of moulds is kept; for each new order a fresh jelly mould is made from a typecast and thus a great storage space is unnecessary

___________ 44 V&A Archive ED84/175; RP/1919/6351.

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and the casts are closer to the original as there is no using of worn moulds. The majority of their typecasts were acquired in France or were made from casts in the Tufton Street museum.

Then follows a comparison of costs between Smith and Brucciani, for example, “Drowned Girl [Noyée de la Seine] – Smith 2/6d, Brucciani 4/-”. In Bedford’s opinion the quality of Smith’s casts was “distinctly good”. For the most part Smith did use gelatine moulds,45 but Bedford was wrong in his assessment of their advantages on both counts: the process requires an outer shell, thereby demanding as much storage space as a piece-mould and the cast thus produced can only be as good as its starting point, namely the typecast, which had usually been sanded smooth causing some loss of original surface. Charles Smith had died in 1918,46 leaving his sons in charge of the firm. By 1925 the commercial cast side of the business was failing. On 8 July George Smith wrote to M G Holmes, Secretary of the Board of Education: We have been established as a firm of Sculptors’ Moulders over sixty years and our name is well known in all Art circles. Our principle business has always been the reproduction of Sculptors’ original work, but in addition to this we have paid great attention to the Scholastic side of Art and we have during all these years collected a very large number of fine specimens especially selected by Sir William [Goscombe] John R. A., and other Royal Academicians. We have decided owing to the pressure of the other side of our business, to give up the Scholastic side and we thought that we should first offer to your Board the opportunity of acquiring what we call without doubt our unique collection of models. Practically all the principal Schools of Art both here and abroad are among our customers in addition to most of the well known public and private Schools and the Art 47 Schools of the London County Council.

Bedford thought the typecasts a valuable addition to their recently acquired Brucciani stock but Holmes did not want them for the Board of Education and asked MacLagan if he was interested.48 In a letter of 6 August, Smith quantified his holding as “1700 large and small casts, over 450 models and six piecemoulds […]. The catalogue price of the aforesaid casts is about £500. The moulds and piecemoulds we estimate at £650 – We think £550 would be reasonable request”.49 This was rejected by Paul Joseph Ryan, Manager of the

___________ 45 See below n. 48 the reference to the letter of 6 August 1925, giving the number of models for gelatine moulding estimated at 450. 46 General Register Office, England, Death certificate, 13/09/1918, sub-district of Tufnell, County of London, vol. 1b, p. 176. 47 V&A Archive ED84/177; RP/1925/5037. 48 V&A Archive ED84/177; RP/1925/5037; undated internal memorandum summarizing a series of exchanges between Holmes, Bedford, Maclagan and Ryan over the period from 8 July to 8 August 1925. 49 V&A Archive ED 84/177, RP/1925/5037.

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Department for the Sale of Casts at the Victoria and Albert Museum (and formerly Managing Director of Brucciani’s), who thought them worth no more than £150.50 MacLagan felt that there was too much of an overlap with existing stock. Smith thought an appeal to the Director with a reduced request for £400 worth trying, but the Museum would not be moved: MacLagan insisted on their previous offer.51 In a further letter to the Director of 6 October, Smith stated that he could no longer sell his stock elsewhere, now that the Board of Education made their own casts. Sensing the weakness of his position he thought that £250 would suffice but failing that, he would be forced to accept £150.52 The final indignity came in a letter, dated 2 December, wherein Smith was required to deliver the stock himself to the Victoria and Albert Museum.53 With neither side prepared to make any concessions, Smith insisted that the Museum collect.54 They in turn declined and on 11 December Smith wrote again, refused to deliver and considered the matter closed.55 What to do with over 2000 pieces of plaster? Apart from the Smiths there were still thirteen cast making businesses listed in Kelly’s at this time, some of whom had been operating for fifty years or more.56 Despite George Smith’s claim that he could no longer sell his stock elsewhere, was one of these firms the ultimate destination for this considerable tonnage of plaster? Although George died in 1948,57 Charles seems to have continued the business of sculptors’ moulders until 1953, by which time he was eighty (Fig. 8. 9). In 1950 he took the death mask of George Bernard Shaw and casts of the playwright’s hands (Fig. 8. 10).58 The premises at Southcote Road passed to the same firm of cabinet makers that occupy it to this day, as did their telephone number which was first used nearly a hundred years ago. Throughout the 1950s the cabinet makers occasionally received calls on this line asking if Mr Smith could come to take a death mask.59

___________ 50 Internal minute on same sheet as endnote 44. Minute of 8 August from Ryan to Maclagan states Smith is asking £550.0.0 but “I do not think these objects are worth, at the utmost, more than £150.0.0 to my Dept.”. 51 V&A Archive ED 84/177, RP/1925/6939. 52 V&A Archive ED 84/177, RP/1925/7173. 53 V&A Archive ED 84/177, RP/1925/8959. 54 V&A Archive ED 84/177, RP/1925/9234, 9 December 1925. 55 V&A Archive ED 84/177, RP/1925/9234, 11 December 1925. 56 Kelly’s Directories Ltd., 1925. 57 Death certificate, 13/11/1948, Sub-district of Pancras, County of London, vol. 5d, p. 371. 58 Collection of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London. 59 Telephone conversation, February 2003, with Mr Max Ott, cabinet maker, who took over the Smiths’ premises at No. 1 Southcote Road, No. 19, in 1954.

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Fig. 8. 9: George Henry Smith (to the right) and possibly his brother Charles James (the older man with the moustache). Late 1920s. Author’s collection.

Fig. 8. 10: Death mask of George Bernard Shaw. Charles James Smith (Jr.) 1950. Collection of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, London.

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It is difficult to know if the Smiths were a fairly typical firm of cast makers or if their origins, their ways of working and the casts they chose to reproduce set them apart in any way. With the exception of Brucciani and one or two others, little information has survived about their London contemporaries beyond entries in Kelly’s directories and the ten-yearly census. Even where these firms produced catalogues of their casts, it is by no means certain that any casts have survived. Smith’s copies of the Keats death mask are fairly well known from recent book auctions but the bulk of his output has all but vanished.60 The same is undoubtedly true of the many Italian cast makers working in London at this time.

Addendum After completion of this article a fascinating description of Charles Smith Jr. in the autobiography of the sculptor Sir Charles Wheeler PRA was brought to my attention; C. Wheeler, High Relief (London 1968) pp. 125-26. I must thank Jacob Simon at the National Portrait Gallery, London for pointing it out to me.

Frequently cited literature S. MacDonald, The History and Philosophy of Art Education (London, 1970) E. Manning, Marble and Bronze: The Art and Life of Hamo Thornycroft (London, 1982) F. Rionnet, L’Atelier de moulage du musée du Louvre (1794–1928) (Paris, 1996) J. Summerson, The Architectural Association 1847–1947 (London, 1947)

___________ 60 Sotheby’s sale, London, “English Literature and History”, 10-11 July, 1986, Lot 86, “The Death Mask of John Keats”. [Smith copy no. 231]. Christies sale, London, “Valuable MSS., Autograph Letters, Music and Printed Books”, 27 November, 1996, Lot 461, “Keats, John (1795– 1821)-Death Mask”. [Smith copy no. 231].

Artists’ Academies

Plaster Casts and Memory Technique: Nicolas Vleughels’ display of cast collections after the antique in the French Academy in Rome (1725–1793) TOMAS MACSOTAY

Introduction Since it first opened its doors in 1666, the Académie Française de Peinture, Sculpture et Architecture in Rome offered lodging and opportunities for study to visiting French painters and sculptors. Most visitors came from the Parisian Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture, that awarded royal travel pensions to winners of the yearly Grand Prix competition, admission to which was only accorded to the most advanced students attending the Academy’s life drawing school, the Ecole du Modèle. It is common knowledge that the Académie de France in Rome represented the culmination of the French artistic training of painters and sculptors with its intensification of study. Whereas in Paris attendance at the Ecole du Modèle complemented an apprentice’s workshop formation, in Rome students were required to devote themselves entirely to an academic life of practice, regularly attending the life drawing classes organized by the Academy and using most of their spare time copying ancient statues and works of old masters.1 In the course of the eighteenth century, the French Academy in Rome rose in prominence, helped on its way by the establishment of a public study gal-

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For an overview of the training programme of the Roman Academy and the differences between it and that of the Parisian drawing school in the eighteenth century see Roland-Michel, Die Französische Zeichnung, pp. 74-86. Chantal Grell offers an account of developments in Rome relating to the ‘retour à l’antique’ launched by Chales-Antoine Coypel and Lenormant de Tournehem in the 1750s. See C. Grell, Le Dix-huitième siècle et l’antiquité en France 1680– 1789 (Oxford, 1995), pp. 143-91. The key studies on the Académie de France are Henry Lapauze, Histoire de l’Académie de France à Rome I (1666–1801) (Paris, 1924) and Schiavo, Palazzo Mancini (Palermo, 1969). More recent contributions are Jean-François Méjanès, ‘Les pensionnaires de l’Académie de France à Rome et l’Antiquité’, in J.-F. Méjanès (ed.), La Fascination de l’antique 1700–1770. Rome découverte, Rome inventée, exh. cat. Lyons (Lyons, 1999), pp. 95; S. Loire, ‘I Pittori Francesi a Roma nel XVIII Secolo’, in A. Lo Bianco and A. Negro (eds), Il Settecento in Roma, exh. cat. Rome, Palazzo Venezia (Rome 2006), pp. 75-81.

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lery with plaster casts after the most famous ancient statues. The gallery extended over the greater part of the first floor of Palazzo Mancini, a spacious and well-positioned edifice that had become the site of the French Academy in 1725. Subsequent representatives of the Academy reported with pride that Spanish, British, German, Flemish and even Italian artists flocked to visit the life drawing school and to study after its collection of plaster casts, and certainly some of this enthusiasm is evinced by the visiting artists’ correspondence.2 The collection’s dissolution was as sudden as it was violent. In February 1793, a crowd of Romans, led on by hostilities directed at French representatives in the city, stormed Palazzo Mancini, ravaging and pillaging the interiors. In what is to follow, I will look at the uses of the cast collection kept in the Académie de France in Rome, highlighting the role of Nicolas Vleughels (1668–1737) who presided over the Academy between 1725 and 1737. Vleughels was responsible for a revival of the Academy’s school and the arrangement after 1725 of the cast collection in a new, public exhibition space. First in order is an account of the separation of cast collections and the drawing school activities that governed training at the Parisian Ecole du Modèle. From this perspective, the conjunction of casts and artistic training in Rome assumes new interest. I will argue that the creation of a study gallery adjacent to an Ecole du Modèle, as witnessed in Rome, found its justification in the training of memory as a pivotal instrument for artistic performance. Support for this is provided by Vleughels’ letters as well as the writings of Anne-Claude-Philippe de Tubières, Comte de Caylus (1692–1765), the well known antiquarian who in 1731 received a nomination as amateur honoraire to the Parisian artists’ Academy. In order to retrieve the discursive thread that interconnects Vleughels’ activities with Caylus’ attitudes to artistic training, it is important to establish a connection between two sets of historical evidence rarely discussed contiguously. On the one hand, in pointing to the relevance of mnemonics in artistic training, it is crucial not to overlook the evidence of textual sources. These should be complemented by our knowledge of evolving attitudes towards plaster cast collections, with special regard for the way in which artistic education and their display were expected to interact. Looking at these aspects of Vleughels’ practice, it becomes possible to develop a more precise understanding of how casts functioned in the greater part of the eighteenth century.

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On the response of visiting students and Grand Tourists, see Edgar Peters Bowron, ‘Academic Life Drawing in Rome 1750–1790’, in E. P. Bowron (ed.), Visions of Antiquity. Neoclassical Figure Drawings, exh. cat. Los Angeles, County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, Calif., 1993), pp. 75-85; see also Lapauze, (note above), p. 210.

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School and Cast Collection in the Parisian Académie Royale A problem that may arise when considering the use of plaster casts in the French Ancien Régime academies, is that the copying that went on in Rome may appear to be a mere extension of drawing en bosse, where students copied figures either whole or in fragments as a means of learning elementary drawing. For the French eighteenth century, a distinction should be made between the study of the antique, the use of casts, and the elementary training that the youngest students received. Contemporary drawing manuals do not leave any doubt that the second stage in the ideal drawing course, the exercise after a cast or en bosse, was in reality just a method to instil the basic principles of figure drawing.3 Classical statuary was not essential to it, and hence in Paris the Academy’s collection of casts after the antique was reserved for other purposes. This is not to say that study en bosse was a part of the Parisian drawing school. Contrary to what has been often suggested, the Parisian Academy did not assume the traditional tripartite progression described in contemporary drawing manuals and treatises, consisting of subsequent courses in copying drawings, copying sculptures and life drawing. Organized drawing sessions of this kind were not recorded as ever having taken place.4 As a consequence of all this, the Academy’s cast collections were found in a different room to that of the posing model, and their arrangement reflected the Academy’s representational needs. Guérin’s 1715 Description de l’Académie royale des arts de peinture et de sculpture revealed a theatrical arrangement of casts designed to fit into a programme that advanced the image of the French king and the academy directors as promoters of the arts and overseers of artistic progress everywhere.5

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4

5

See Roland-Michel, Die Französische Zeichnung. For some time, the Académie Royale housed an Ecole de Dessin adjacent to the Ecole du Modèle, reserved for students whose drawing skills were insufficient for life instruction. This class closed as early as 1686. See Antoine Schnapper, ‘L’Académie: enseignement et distinction des mérites’, in P. Rosenberg and A. Schnapper et al. (eds), Les peintres du roi 1648–1793, exh. cat. Tours et al. (Paris, 2000), pp. 61-8. See Schnapper (note above), p. 66. Until the 1980s, most accounts of the Parisian drawing school depended on manuals. This view has been corrected with novel archival research collected by Schnapper as well as Sylvain Bédard, Les Académies dans l’art français au XVIIe siècle (1630–1720) (unpublished doctoral dissertation, Paris-IV Sorbonne, 1999). Both authors refer to mémoires de maitrîse in the same university by N. Zouaq, A. Cahen, and A. Bacel. On the Salon in Guérin’s Description see Udolpho van de Sandt, ‘Note sur les collections de tableaux et leur présentation dans les salles de l’Académie’, in P. Rosenberg and A. Schnapper et al. (eds), Les peintres du roi 1648–1793, exh. cat. Tours et al. (Paris, 2000), pp. 69-76, esp. 73; C. Klingsöhr, ‘Die Kunstsammlung der “Académie royale de Peinture et de Sculpture” in Paris: Selbstverständnis und Krise der Akademie in der Programmschrift des Nicolas Guérin (1715)’, Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 49 (1986), pp. 556-78, esp. 561-4.

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No voices went up for the greater involvement of the Academy’s collection of casts with the school until the intervention of Caylus – an intervention that was moderated by a sense that only the most talented qualified for the study of the antique. In his Vie de Sarazin, delivered to the members of the Academy in 1749, Caylus admitted to feeling both surprised and angered every time he passed through the antique rooms without ever seeing pupils “continually occupied in perpetual study” of the beautiful antique. The antiquarian’s desire for greater involvement of the cast collection was counterbalanced by his perception that studying the antique was the preserve of Rome and the Académie de France. A plaster cast, Caylus confessed, was not the same as an original, but these differences should not matter, since “it preserves its masses, it indicates perfectly this grand and noble simplicity in the composition, it gives an idea of the age, the expression, in short, of all those conveniences (convenances) that a group or a statue can demand”.6 Having students draw plaster casts in Paris would at least ensure that they, having arrived in Italy, would seek out the originals with greater avidity, and that they would know how to “read” and “study” them. In 1749 the Academy, undoubtedly awake to Caylus’ complaints, instituted a new Prix that arranged for visits in groups of six to the cast gallery to draw after the antique. Such attempts continued to reflect, however, that access to the antique remained rare and that admission to the cast gallery was limited to the most distinguished visitors to the Ecole du Modèle.7 A year later, again in an address to his fellow académiciens, Caylus briefly returned to the necessity of “filling up” the schools with plaster casts. Their value was not only as models of correct proportion, but above all as sources of inspiration, evoking a quality of greatness (le grand) in artists of all specialisations.8 To Caylus, plaster casts were a necessary foil for the training of the most talented students, but they were not in themselves objects of serious study in the way that original pieces should be.

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See the manuscript in Paris, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts (ENSBA) no. 119-I, Caylus, ‘Vie de Sarrazin’. A.-N. De Montaiglon, Procès-verbaux de l’Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, 1648– 1793, 13 vols (Paris, 1875–1892), VI, pp. 160-2 (28 March 1749). See the manuscript in Paris, ENSBA (cf. note 6) no. 116-II, Caylus, ‘Vie de Poissant’: “Je ne m’étendrai point sur l’utilité de ces beaux modèles, le grand qu’ils inspirent aux artistes de tous les genres et de tous les âges, indépendamment des proportions dont ils sont la règle, seraient une raison suffisante pour en orner les écoles”.

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Vleughels’ Arrangement of Casts in the Académie de France Caylus’ claim that casts prepared students for the study of the original works made sense as part of a petition for better integration of the Parisian casts with the didactic function of the French Academy, but it may strike a curious note in reference to the Roman Academy, where the cast gallery stood only a few blocks away from many of the Roman originals. Vleughels’ efforts to create a public gallery must thus be considered not only against the background of the artistic development of French pensionnaires, but also of the diplomatic function that became ever more important in the Academy’s overall remit. Before 1734, when the Museo Capitolino opened its doors to a large public, most foreign artists would have been unable to access Roman antiquary collections unless they carried satisfactory letters of introduction. In fact, an important part of Vleughels’ responsibilities consisted in maintaining special agreements with the Vatican and other Roman galleries to allow French students free passage. Palazzo Mancini’s cast gallery would have come to the rescue of numerous foreign journeymen whose access to originals would have been far more limited than that awarded the French students. The installation of a public gallery would have belonged to the extended fabric of the diplomatic mission that the Academy’s director fulfilled in the course of the eighteenth century, thus strengthening bonds of trust among the foreign diplomats in the city. If the gallery’s advantages were greatest for individual foreign artists who lacked academic representation, the French pensionnaires, too, are likely to have used them extensively, even when originals could be seen elsewhere in Rome. Caylus’ belief that casts were not to be studied faithfully, but were best used as reminders of good models of proportion and of greatness in matters of composition, presents a marked contrast to the didactic expectations manifested in the letters between Vleughels and his Parisian supervisor, the Surintendant des Bâtiments Orry. For instance, in 1737 Orry wrote a list of instructions demanding, among other things, that the Académie de France’s casts were to be arranged “placing them in a good light, turned in such a way that various persons can look at them from different sides, in order that they be used for study rather than decoration”.9 To judge by Orry’s indications, the casts were meant to be studied individually and to serve as visual examples for copy drawings and perhaps also for clay figures. This may at first glance appear to imply a different approach to the gallery, one in which the “prepara-

___________ 9

“[…] Le Directeur les fera arranger de façon qu’elles puissent servir plustot à l’étude qu’à la décoration, en le mettant en beau jour, tournées de sorte que plusieurs personnes les puissent voir par différents faces”. The ‘Instruction’ was sent to Vleughels in August 1737. See De Montaiglon, Correspondance, IX, pp. 315-18.

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tory” function foreseen by Caylus is abandoned, and in which casts replace originals as the proper object of individual study. However, there are no indications that Vleughels and Orry meant students to use casts as ultimate models for the acquisition of knowledge of antique statuary, any less than Caylus would later. Instead, it would appear that the possibilities offered by the gathering of figures in certain combinations may itself have offered additional advantages to the pensionnaire’s curriculum. According to this rationale, the casts offered students a different register of knowledge about antique statuary, one that complemented, yet functioned independently from, the knowledge that students were to obtain by studying originals. From Vleughels’ letters, we can deduce that the collection’s particular usefulness for the pensionnaires resided not only in its reunion of individual pieces, but also in its physical proximity to the French Academy’s life drawing sessions that, even in Rome, continued to occupy the centre stage of French ideas about artistic formation. As could be expected from a collection that had been amassed by a process of haphazard accumulation, the Academy’s casts would not originally have been designed as a source of figures to study whenever Roman collections were inaccessible. Among the compulsory activities for Prix winners in Rome was the production of copies in painting and marble of important Roman monuments for the collection of the king. In order to carve the marble copies sculptors required either a faithful cast replica of the original or a very accurate copy model to serve as full size model or modèle en grand. Upon completion, the marbles were sent to France, while the plasters, sometimes faithful reproductions, sometimes improved versions, constituted the basis of the Académie de France’s cast collection. For over half a century after the opening of the Academy, the casts were kept in storage rooms, accessible only to the pensionnaires who wished to study them. This changed in 1725, with the lease of Palazzo Mancini and the creation of the study gallery on the first floor. In 1727, while nearing completion of the installation of the casts, Vleughels drafted an Etat du premier étage which, along with the 1758 inventory of the Academy’s furnishings, gives an accurate idea of the way that this rather accidental collection was made to serve the ambition of converting the Academy into a centre for artistic development.10 Aside from a series of references to the protective role of the French monarch, 11 the avowed purpose of

___________ 10 ‘Etat des Appartements’, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, pp. 333-8. 11 There were many allusions to the glory and descent of the French King. In addition to the compulsory portraits of the royal family, there were tapestries with subjects such as the Conquests of the King and the Meeting of his Majesty and the King of Spain. The solemn mood is set at the very start of the exhibition, as the visitor, ascending the staircase to the collections on the first floor, encountered casts of a Hercules and a statue of Augustus, figures which frequently appeared as classical guises of the French King. See ‘Etat des Appartements’, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, pp. 333-8.

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the exhibition was to serve as a study gallery. In this sense, a parallel can be drawn between Vleughels’ gallery of casts and Pope Clement XII’s efforts to create a new gallery of antiquities on the site of the Capitol collections. The Museo Capitolino was characterised by a cumulative arrangement of objects whose origins cut across great chronological and regional distances.12 In the new arrangement, a series of sculptures left their customary placement in niches and architectural frames to occupy prominent free standing positions, so that their interest as antique objects and artistic examples was brought to the fore.13 In a similar vein, Vleughels insisted on presenting the Academy’s casts in an arrangement that belied the grandiose and the decorative. He favoured instead a thematic arrangement that exploited the possibility of combining figures from disparate locations and establishing a new, instructive order of works. This is reflected in Vleughels’s distribution of the casts over various spaces of the gallery. In order to understand this, it is worthwhile taking a closer look at this arrangement. The promenade through the gallery described by Vleughels in 1727 starts with the stately staircase located at the back and north of Palazzo Mancini, continuing along a corridor-like sequence of five rooms adjoining the courtyard. At the end of this trajectory was the Salon, which cut through the ground and first floors and had a regular, square plan, much like a roofed courtyard. After passing this stately room the visitor walked back northwards to five rooms facing the Via del Corso. There were two longer rooms along the central axis of the building: a grande chambre with views on the courtyard, and its counterpoint facing the street side, the chambre du dais. The Salon itself mirrored the Belvedere Courtyard: like the famous room in the Vatican, it contained the Laocoön and the Apollo Belvedere, complemented by the Borghese Gladiator and Diana.14 The use of two axes and their division by the monumental Salon also established a rough division between two realms of subject-matter. The first series of rooms, facing the courtyard, generally consisted of figures familiar from classical history and geography: the Wrestlers, the group of Paetus and Arria, pairs of Slaves and Parthians, and statues of Antinoüs, Germanicus, Cincinnatus and of Emperor Commodus as Hercules. By contrast, the second

___________ 12 P. Geimer, ‘Das “Haus der Inkohärenz”. Capriccio und Sammlung im 18. Jahrhundert’, in E. Mai (ed.), Kunstform Capriccio. Von der Groteske zur Spieltheorie der Moderne (Cologne, 1998), pp. 139-53. 13 See on the intellectual foundations of the Museo Capitolino, O. Rossi Pinelli, ‘Per una storia dell’arte parlante: dal Museo Capitolino, 1734, al Pio-Clementino, 1771–91, e alcune mutazioni nella storiografia artistica’, Ricerche di storia dell’arte, 84 (2004) issue with title: Intelletuali ed eruditi tra Roma e Firenze alle fine del Settecento, pp. 5-23. 14 ‘Etat des Appartements’, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, pp. 333-8.

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section of the display, starting with the monumental Salon, was entirely populated by mythological beings. The chambre du dais contained a Faun with pipes (Flûteur), a Castor and Pollux, the Pan and Apollo (Faune qui enseigne à jouer de la flûte à un jeune homme), a Bacchus with Grapes (Bacchus qui tient une grappe de raisin), an Eleusinian Venus and the Egyptian Girl in the Borghese Collection (Egyptienne Borghese). The series of rooms are concluded with the summit of erotic figuration in classical statuary: the Villa Borghese Hermaphrodite, after the antique figure famously restored by Bernini. The visitor was enabled to examine it both from the front and the back, since it was placed in the centre of the room.15 Most revealing is the placement of the figures of Niobe and her children, which could be found not in the second series of spaces, along with the other figures from mythology, but separated and scattered over the first room and the grande chambre in the first series of spaces.16 Hence, Niobe becomes the exception that establishes the rule: the division in two main bodies of figures does not so much pertain to history versus mythology, but to the realms of the mortal and the immortal, the human and the superhuman. Such a division was familiar from works of antiquarian erudition, which tended to be composed according to the main areas of res humanae and res divinae. It was in evidence in Montfaucon’s monumental L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures, the last volume of which appeared in 1724, only a year before Vleughels began the task of arranging the Académie de France’s casts.17 By deploying the cast collections as a visual compendium of antiquity, Vleughels was exploiting the possibility of arranging casts according to a knowledge structure that collectors of original statues were less free or less well equipped to construct. Students working in Palazzo Mancini might have been introduced to the recognizable qualities and attributes of, and the stories corresponding to, the persons represented by the cast figures. The cast collection presented itself as the orderly and self-explanatory alternative to the aristocratic cabinet of antiquities. This, with its scattered and confusing accumulation of antique fragments concerned the interests of artists less consistently than it did the interests of antiquarians.

___________ 15 ‘Etat des Appartements’, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, pp. 333-8. On the addition of a cast after the Hermaphrodite in Villa Borghese see De Montaiglon, Correspondance, I, p. 130. 16 ‘Etat des Appartements’, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, pp. 333-8. 17 On Montfaucon and the division between divine and human realms in antiquary studies see Ian Jenkins, ‘Ideas of antiquity: classical and other ancient civilizations in the age of Enlightenment’, in K. Sloan (ed.), Enlightenment. Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2003), pp. 168-77.

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Cast Gallery and Study Practice But the use of casts was not exhausted by their reference to persons and deities. Vleughels’ collection simultaneously functioned as a demonstration of those qualities of “le grand” that Caylus referred to in the 1750s. This is especially evident from the way that the pensionnaires in the Roman Academy came to benefit from the collection as a store of poses readily available for application to the life model. In the Académie de France, public sessions from the life were held in the morning, afternoons were reserved for copying and in the evenings the pensionnaires met for their final exercise in a private session involving a life model. Writing to d’Antin in 1728, Vleughels asserted that he was encouraging his students to draw after the antique in order to enable them to see the human body with the eyes of the great men of the past and retrieve “all their correction and their grand manner”. Especially in the evenings, Vleughels reports in another letter, students would engage in conversation about the works they had been copying, actively trying to recall their appearance while attending life classes.18 In a similar vein, in 1751 Caylus wrote a letter to the young painter Lagrénée, shortly after the latter’s arrival in Rome, admonishing him to combine always his own “ideas” on nature with the “grande manière” of the ancients.19 Copying casts would have been not so much a way of imposing a set of standard models but rather of building a storehouse of memory, where different figures would fragment and accrue in new combinations, bringing forth a certain fluidity in “le grand” while working before a posing model. To Fréart de Chantelou, Bernini had confessed to using similar methods as a young artist, weaving together copying and inventing and moving to-and-fro between the atelier and the Vatican collections.20 The French pensionnaires in Palazzo Mancini would only have had to take the stairs.

___________ 18 “Je les encourage à dessiner d’après l’antique et d’en rechercher toute la correction et la grande manière, afin qu’ils puissent voir le naturel avec les mêmes yeux que les grands homme l’ont régardé. Cela nous sert d’entretien sur les figures mêmes qui sont sous notre vue, et puis on a le soir pour profiter de l’antique dont on a discouru et du naturel qu’on a présent”. Vleughels to d’Antin’, 4 March 1728, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, p. 399. 19 “Du reste, je vous le répète encore, suivez absolument votre goût, mais n’oubliez pas de mêler sans cesse vos idées sur la nature avec le grand de l’antique”. Caylus, ‘Lettre à Lagrénée’, in Fontaine, Vies d’artistes, p. 213. 20 “A student with a developed sense of design omits what should not be there and puts in what should be there but is missing. [Bernini] repeated that a youth is incapable of doing this, as he does not possess knowledge of the beautiful. He said that when he was very young he used to draw from the antique a great deal, and, in the first figure he undertook, resorted continually to the Antinoüs as his oracle. Every day he noticed some further excellence in this statue; certainly he would never have had that experience had he not himself taken up a chisel and started to work.

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In one spontaneous exercise that took place in 1728, six students improvised a life session whereby they kept a classical statue in mind by asking a model to pose in the same way. Even as they had finished their painted studies, the students continued to recollect the statue and compare it to the observed model and their own work.21 All along, Vleughels seems to have encouraged the pensionnaires to talk and think as they worked. A similar exercise in verbal analysis was devised by Caylus, who recommended Lagrénée to insert personal notes on his drawn copies after modern masters to complement them. They could deal with such questions as whether the procedure of the painter whom they were copying was useful, and where the painter’s shortcomings resided. Such notes would also relieve the artists’ memory. After all, Caylus adds, it would be a waste to try to remember ideas which can be written in half a page.22 Caylus reminds Lagrénée that copying is a way to force oneself to look at a work more attentively, and that its purpose is to make “deep and composite” traces in one’s mind. There is a danger however that copying will be taken to an excess where it renders the student “servile” to his example, and in order to avoid this one should always remember to take pauses simply to contemplate works.23 Nevertheless, in 1727 Vleughels ex-

___________ For this reason he always advised all his pupils, and others, never to draw and model without at the same time working either at a piece of sculpture or a picture, combining creation with imitation and thought with action, so to speak, and remarkable progress should result. For support of his contention that original work was absolutely essential I cited the case of the late Antoine Carlier, an artist known to most of the members of the Academy. He spent the greater part of his life in Rome modelling after the statues of antiquity, and his copies are incomparable: and they had to agree that, because he had begun to do original work too late, his imagination had dried up, and the slavery of copying had in the end made it impossible for him to produce anything his own”. F. de Chantelou, Diary of the cavaliere Bernini’s visit to France, Transl. A. Blunt (Princeton, N.J., 1985), p. 167 (5 September). 21 “[…] j’en trouvai six, vendredi dernier, qui s’étoient assemblés dans une petite sale, qui avoient fait dépouiller le fils de notre modèle, qui est très bien, moyennant quelque bagatelle qu’ils débourçoient chacun, ils travailloient toute la journée d’après lui ; ils l’avoient posé dans l’attitude d’une figure antique; ensuite, ils alloient comparer contre l’antique même ce qu’ils avoient peint, affin de voir la différence de la nature véritable à la nature recherchée et, pour ainsi dire, corrigé. Je les louai fort, et véritablement ce sont de très bonne études”. Vleughels to d’Antin, 15 July 1728, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, p. 439. 22 “Quoique la plume d’un artiste soit assurément le crayon ou le pinceau, je croirais qu’il ne serait pas mauvais de joindre aux copies ordinaires des réflexions par écrit sur les procédés bons ou mauvais des grands maîtres; ce serait un nouveau moyen pour soulager sa mémoire, d’autant qu’elle ne peut se charger de tout, et qu’une demi-page d’écriture conserve bien des idée de cette espèce”. Caylus, ‘Lettre à Lagrénée’, in Fontaine, Vies d’artistes, p. 212. 23 “[…] vous devez faire vos études, autant en considérant les beaux ouvrages et en vous rendant compte des raisons qui vous touchent, qu’en les copiant ; car une copie n’est bonne que par raison qu’en exigeant plus d’attention pour l’exécuter, elle imprime et fait des traces plus profondes et plus composées ; mais comme on ne peut pas toujours copier, et que même on ne le doit pas dans la crainte de se rendre servile, les méditations produisent de grandes avantages et n’ont

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plained his ambition to send painters to study the best works in the collections of Florence, Bologna, Parma, Modena and Venice by recalling that “when one copies, memory is better charged and one recalls with greater facility that which one has painted”.24 The meaning of copying went further than that of producing material drawings for later consultation in the workshop: it was rather the production of a storehouse of the mind, the idea of an arduously constructed artificial memory familiar to those educated in Cicero and the other authors of the classical orator’s art.25 As an art theoretical notion, memory had for long enjoyed pride of place,26 and one finds Roger de Piles writing in his Idée du Peintre parfait from 1707 that “genius utilizes memory as if it were a vase where it deposits all the ideas that present themselves to him; it then chooses them with the aid of judgement, and uses them in the way of a storehouse to which he resorts at will”.27 As an academic painter and gentleman, Vleughels was aware that a link was believed to exist between the activity of copying ancient authors and the establishment of an artificial memory. He seems to have translated this belief into the terms by which he has pensionnaires conduct their copies. Here, then, rises a thoroughly distinctive philosophy of the copy, disengaged from the idea of copying as a necessary component of drawing instruction. In the new constellation, casts served an auxiliary function – they complemented the originals on view in Rome and also made artists attentive to their particular attractions. In casts, students could be guaranteed better exposure and freedom from restrictive circumstances that held sway in some collections of antiquities. Casts could have enabled study of back and lateral views that otherwise

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25 26 27

aucun inconvénient”. ‘Lettre à Lagrénée’ from January 12 1751, published in Fontaine, Vies d’artistes, pp. 210-11. “Il est vrai qu’il y a beaucoup à apprendre à voir, mais lorsque l’on copie, la mémoire se charge mieux et on retient plus facilement ce qu’on a peint”. Vleughels to d’Antin, 13 February 1727, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, pp. 321-2. On the notion of artificial or trained memory see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 1966), pp. 17-41. See for instance Jeffrey M. Muller, ‘Rubens’s theory and practice of the imitation of art’, Art Bulletin, 54. 2 (June 1982), pp. 229-47, esp. 244-6. “Le Génie se sert donc de la mémoire, comme d’un vase où il met en réserve les idées qui se présentent ; il les choisit avec l’aide du jugement, & en fait un magasin dont il se sert dans l’occasion ; il en tire ce qu’ il a mis, & n’en peut tirer autre chose”. See R. De Piles, ‘L’Idée du Peintre parfait, pour servir de règle aux jugemens que l’on doit porter sur les Ouvrages des Peintres’, in A. Félibien, Entretiens sur les vies et sur les ouvrages des plus excellents peintres anciens et modernes (Paris, 1725), VI, p. 15. “Un homme qui a du Génie, peut inventer un sujet en général : mais s’il n’a fait l’étude des objets particuliers, il sera embarassé dans l’exécution de son Ouvrage, à moins qu’il n’ait recours aux études que les autres en ont fait”. See Félibien, Entretiens, VI, p. 15.

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Fig. 9. 1: Study of the Wrestlers. Edmé Bouchardon, c. 1730. Red chalk on paper, 56 x 42 cm. Louvre, Paris.

Fig. 9. 2: Study of the torso of Laocoön. Edmé Bouchardon, c. 1730. Red chalk on paper, 59 x 45 cm. Louvre, Paris.

remained hidden. It is impossible to say whether the slightly lateral view that the sculptor Edmé Bouchardon chose for his drawing of Paetus and Arria or his interest in the back view of the Wrestlers (Fig. 9. 1)28 are indebted to Vleughels’ placement of the figures in Palazzo Mancini. One may nevertheless remark that in 1727 Vleughels had the Wrestlers placed in the middle of one of his rooms, and that if Bouchardon was not satisfied with the drawing after bronze or plaster reproductions, he would have had to visit the Tribuna in Florence to draw the original.29 A more interesting possibility is that casts could have been used for conducting material investigation of individual parts of the original. Edmé Bouchardon, known as the most brilliant of Vleughels’ students, produced a series of eighteen drawings in red chalk with views of different fragments of the Laocoön, taking the torso with the head and rotating it (Fig. 9. 2).30

___________ 28 Edmé Bouchardon, Les Lutteurs, red chalk drawing, 56 x 42 cm, Louvre, inv. 24003. 29 ‘Etat des Appartements’, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, pp. 333-8. 30 Bouchardon might have gleaned the idea of drawing the Laocoön Group as a series of fragments from followers of Bernini. A red chalk drawing in Leipzig (Museum der Bildenden Künste) by Bernini reproduces the torso of the Father, with truncations at the legs, arms and head.

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There are precedents for this kind of interest in the fragment – Michelangelo and Bernini reputedly engaged, each in his own way, in similar enterprises. What is particularly striking about Bouchardon’s series is that it forges a simultaneous tour of the torso, a cinematic sequence on a single volume impossible to obtain by looking at the original in the Cortile del Belvedere. With the original, every change in the beholder’s point of view will not only change the appearance of the group, but also create obscured passages, as limbs begin to overlap torsos and thighs. Bouchardon’s series exemplifies how the original fragment that served it as an example, perhaps a cast, helped in forging a complete volumetric image of the Laocoön. The value of these drawings resides firstly in their provision of different individual views, and subsequently in the way that as a series they restore the complexity of the original work for study purposes. In this second sense, they become an instrument for committing to memory a complete image of form – one that could be gained only with difficulty from the original. The size of the Laocoön drawings may themselves be taken as an indication of their role in the exercises devised by Vleughels. The cited sheet measures forty-three centimetres wide and fifty centimetres high, with the other seventeen drawings executed in sheets of similar size. There are indications – both visual and archival – that large format copies were believed to be particularly suited for establishing a portfolio of images for the mind. When Vleughels wrote to d’Antin in 1732 about his interest in having a copy made of a figure he had recently acquired from the Cardinal of Polignac, he underscored its particular merits by adding that it would provide “une veritable étude à faire en grand [my emphasis]”.31 Similarly, in 1728 Vleughels wrote to d’Antin that his students were drawing the most beautiful classical statues “large as they are, which will teach them better to develop a figure and retain [retenir] all of its parts by heart, something from which they will greatly profit”.32 Expressions such as “developing a figure” and “retaining all the parts” are the closest one can come, in Vleughels’ correspondence, to this psychology of the copy rich in allusions to the ancient art of memory. It is tempting to conclude that the large and elaborate drawings served a very different purpose to the carnet drawings inherited from the European tradition of the journeyman. They were done in favour of an imperceptible training that

___________ 31 Vleughels to d’Antin, 27 March 1732, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VIII, p. 314. Two years before, he had announced Bouchardon’s commission for a full-sized figure portrait in the nude of the Prince of Waldeck, he deemed such work, too, would provide “une bonne étude”. Vleughels to d’Antin, 24 August 1730, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VIII, p. 136. 32 “[…] grandes comme ils sont, ce qui leur apprend à bien développer une figure et à en retenir toutes les parties par cœur, ce qui leur sera d’un grand profit”. Vleughels to d’Antin, 15 July 1728, in De Montaiglon, Correspondance, VII, p. 439.

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Fig. 9. 3: View of the Capitoline collections. Giovanni Domenico Campiglia. Engraving, in: Giovanni Bottari, Musei Capitolini (Rome, 1755), II.

depended on retaining traces and developing figures in the artists’ memory. To the material portfolio was added the advantage of artificial memory as a tool for artistic performance. Evidence for the preference for large sizes – either on paper or in clay – for executing copies can be seen in some images of drawing students working at various Roman sites. Campiglia’s famous print of a room in the newly extended collection of classical sculpture in the Capitoline collections shows five draughtsmen and two modellers at work (Fig. 9. 3).33 They are balancing what seems like an outsized drawing support on their laps, while the modellers are working on sizable model copies of the Dying Trumpeter and the Capitoline Antinoüs. Similar draughtsmen and modellers can be seen in a drawing of 1775 by Louis Chays, showing students studying after the Hercules Farnese in the courtyard of Palazzo Farnese.34 In a third drawing by Hubert Robert from 1763, a student is using the back of a chair to balance a large board while working from Domenichino’s Flagellation of St. Andrew in the church of S. Gregorio al Celio. As these drawings show, students would go out to work in situ, using a drawing board more or less foliosize, the size of Bouchardon’s drawings of the Wrestlers and the Laocoön.35 It was here,

___________ 33 Engraving in G. Bottari, Musei Capitolini (Rome, 1755), II. 34 The drawing is signed and dated Louis Chays, 1775, 41.5 x 53.4 cm, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussisches Kulturbesitz, Kunstbibliothek. 35 See a recent discussion of the drawing in E. P. Bowron and J. Rychel (eds), Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century, exh. cat. Philadelphia (Philadelphia, Pa., 2000), p. 550.

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presumably, that the plaster casts ceased to accompany students in their discoveries through Rome. Having considered the reproductions repeatedly, students were finally curious enough to roam the interiors of palaces and churches and scrutinize, this time from direct perception, the great works of the past.

Conclusion As the eighteenth century progressed, antiquarian knowledge and artistic training parted ways. To Vleughels, as to the Comte de Caylus, this had a direct bearing on the manner in which classical statues could be made available to young artists through copy practice. Rome in the time of Caylus was a meandering sequence of churches, cabinets and palaces, some of them inappropriate spaces for artists to conduct their copying activities. The newly arrived student had to go on a small journey of discovery. If a study gallery composed of casts of the best classical statues could have facilitated this task by uniting some of these works in an accessible and consultable sequence of figures, it also had an additional task of continuing to “inspire” young artists. To meet this end, the gallery was arranged in ways that had to pose challenges to the artists’ capacity to form connections and their willingness to remember statues vividly while working from the life. Disorder at the service of understanding was the central plank of Caylus’ ideas on the purpose of the Roman study journey. According to Caylus, the new arrivals in Rome are at first overwhelmed, even discouraged by the multitude of things to see. As they become accustomed to the many great examples, they find their natural preferences for a certain manner and taste, and their “genius” is developed.36 Putting classical figures in the order that best served the antiquarian would have run contrary to the purpose of the study gallery. This was to initiate a process of reflection that begins with blind admiration and is followed by a gradual development of true knowledge, as the student’s eyes become accustomed to the multitude and diversity of examples.

___________ 36 “Le nombre prodigieux de grands exemples que présente la superbe ville de Rome, soit dans l’antique, soit dans le moderne, commence par éblouir, mais il finit par faire connaître avec certitude les parties dont la nature a répandu le germe dans l’esprit du jeune artiste, elle le dénote par un secret penchant qui l’entraîne et le détermine à une manière et à un goût préférablement à tous l es autres”. See the manuscript in Paris, ENSBA (cf. note 6) no. 13, Caylus, ‘Vie de Guillain’.

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Acknowledgement This article has received the support of the De Gijselaar-Hintzenfonds in Amsterdam.

Frequently cited literature A. Fontaine, Vies d’artistes du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1910) A.-N. De Montaiglon, Correspondance des Directeurs de l’Académie de France à Rome (Paris, 1883–1912) M. Roland-Michel, Die Französische Zeichnung im 18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1987). Translated from the French, Le dessin français au XVlIIe siècle (Fribourg, 1987)

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection from 1786 until 1815: acquisition, use and interpretation1 CLAUDIA SEDLARZ

In the nineteenth century, Berlin possessed one of the most extensive collections of plaster casts in Europe.2 The plaster casts acquired by the Academy of Arts formed the basis of this collection and it is on them that this article focuses. Whereas the policies and practices of acquisition from 1815 onwards are well-researched, little is known about the state of the collection before this date.3 My analysis and evaluation of the Academy’s archival resources reconstruct its early history and fill this gap.4 Due to the Second World War, the Berlin Academy of Arts’ collection suffered considerable losses, including most of its plaster casts and the drawings after them. Only written documents pertaining to the collection have survived. These not only allow the extensive reconstruction of its history but also shed light on various intellectual traditions that had conditioned its initial establishment and on the network of individuals involved in its formation. This is of particular interest since at this time Berlin was developing into the centre for archaeology in Germany. This article will investigate how the Academy’s first plaster casts came to Berlin, the costs they incurred and how they were handled. Likewise, the rapid

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The present article was translated by Christina Oberstebrink; Berlin. S. Einholz, ‘Enzyklopädie in Gips – Zur Sammlungsgeschichte der Berliner Museen’, Der Bär von Berlin. Jahrbuch des Vereins für die Geschichte Berlins, 41 (1992), pp. 75-96; S. Einholz, ‘Orte der Kontemplation und Erziehung : zur Geschichte der Gipsabgusssammlungen’, in H. Krohm (ed.), Meisterwerke mittelalterlicher Skulptur (Berlin, 1996), pp. 11-39. G. Platz-Horster‚ ‘Zur Geschichte der Berliner Gipssammlung’, in A. Arenhoevel (ed.), Berlin und die Antike, 2 vols (Berlin, 1979), II, pp. 273-92. Research of the Academy’s plaster cast collection comprises part of my book dealing with the Academy of Arts’ impact on the development of taste on an official level. The work in progress focuses on the evaluation of extensive archival resources referring to the history of the Academy such as personal dossiers, inventories, purchase lists, etc. These have been, to a large extent, preserved in the Geheimen Staatsarchiv in Berlin-Dahlem. For their assistance in transcribing the archival resources I would like to thank Rolf H. Johannsen, Angelika Lenz, Hanne Lotte Lund, Sebastian Panwitz, Beate Schroedter, Michaela van den Driesch.

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Fig. 10. 1: Drawing class of the Royal Academy of Art Berlin. Samuel Blesendorf after Augustin Terwesten. Engraving, in: L. Beger, Thesaurus Brandenburgicus Selectus III (Berlin, 1701).

succession of different approaches to antiquity and its interpretation in the Academy will be examined, and how they were reflected in the approaches towards plaster casts. I propose to identify three phases that are not neatly separable, but overlap and develop one out of another. The approaches that characterize them may be called the canonical, the aesthetic and the systematic. The Berliner Akademie der Schönen Künste und Mechanischen Wissenschaften was founded in 1697 and generously equipped. Plaster casts for the teaching collection were shipped in from Rome, where Pope Innocent XII had permitted the Academy’s founding patron, the first Prussian King, Friedrich I, to have casts made (Fig. 10. 1).5 However, in 1743 the Academy lost its entire collection in a fire. In the following decades, the francophile King Friedrich II, uninterested in German art, provided the institution with only negligible funds, making it impossible to build up a new plaster cast collection.6 For a decade the rooms of the Academy were rented out to a coffee-house complete with a billiard room. The few students were taught in the private studios of the Academy members.

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G. Heres‚ ‘Die Anfänge der Berliner Antiken-Sammlung zur Geschichte des Antikenkabinetts 1640–1830’, Forschungen und Berichte. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Archäologische Beiträge, 18 (1977), pp. 93-130, at pp. 100-1, pls 21-8; K. Stemmer, ‘Antikenstudium nach Abgüssen an den Kunstakademien des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in A. von Specht (ed.), “Die Kunst hat nie ein Mensch allein besessen”. Dreihundert Jahre Akademie der Künste, Hochschule der Künste exh. cat. Berlin, Akademie der Künste und der Hochschule der Künste (Berlin, 1996), pp. 67-74. H. Müller, Die königliche Akademie der Künste zu Berlin. 1696–1896 (Berlin, 1896), I, pp. 124-5.

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A wave of newly founded academies and the reforming of existing ones all over Europe prompted the renewal of the Berlin Academy.7 After Friedrich II’s death in 1786, a new collection was established with the direct involvement of the new King and generous patron, Friedrich Wilhelm II. Drawing lessons using life models and casts were, according to the Academy’s Curator Baron von Heinitz, essential for such an institution, comparable to the necessity of supplying “an anatomical theatre [...] as an educational establishment for surgeons and an observatory for professors of astronomy”.8 An anatomy theatre and an observatory were, in fact, housed in the same building as the Academy. The comparison refers to locations offering specific possibilities of observation. Thus, Heinitz’ focus was on an exact, repeated and enduring observation and on comparative seeing. Therefore, the plaster casts were instrumental in learning to observe, develop and refine taste. Indeed, refinement of taste was repeatedly brought into play to justify the reform of the Academy. Heinitz was simultaneously Minister for the Department of Mining and was responsible for technical innovations and for supporting commerce and industry.9 His success in reorganising the Academy was so great that it became the most progressive educational institution in Prussia until the University was founded in Berlin in 1810. The Academy was decisive in forming the taste of the public and court, and, at the same time, promoting the development of neo-classical design principles through the establishment of drawing classes for craftsmen.

The Canon: Lütke’s collection Despite the great importance Heinitz attributed to plaster casts, the Academy hardly possessed what one could call a collection.10 However, on receiving the collection of one Academy member, the landscape painter Lütke, it grew significantly in the last years of the eighteenth century. Today Peter Ludwig Lütke is largely unknown and almost all of his works have been lost or destroyed.11

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N. Pevsner, Academies of Art. Past and Present (Cambridge, 1940), pp. 140-89. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 244, fol. 63r. W. Weber, Innovationen im frühindustriellen deutschen Bergbau und Hüttenwesen Friedrich Anton von Heynitz (Göttingen, 1976). 10 G. Schmidt, ‘“Diese Akademische Sammlung von Gemälden und sonstigen Arbeiten”’, in G. Schmidt (ed.), “Gute Partien in Zeichnung und Kolorit”. 300 Jahre Kunstsammlung der Akademie der Künste, Berlin; Stiftung Archiv der Akademie der Künste, exh. cat. Berlin (Berlin, 1996), pp. 11-28. 11 For a biography of Lütke, cf. [accessed 26 July 2009].

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The son of a wealthy merchant and shipping agent, he studied at the Berlin Art Academy after having completed a merchant’s apprenticeship. From 1786 until 1789 he resided in Rome. There Lütke pursued his studies in landscape painting, worked in Jakob Philipp Hackert’s studio and frequented the circle of German artists and scholars. Heinitz systematically assigned teaching positions in the Berlin Academy to candidates who had studied in Italy. Whilst still in Rome, Lütke was offered a professorship in landscape painting that he took up on his return to Berlin in 1788. Generously supported by his father, Lütke could not only study in Rome without any financial cares, but could also afford to accumulate a valuable plaster cast collection. Furthermore, his father’s business connections made it possible to ship the vast collection at an exceptionally low cost. Transport from Italy to Germany customarily took place by sea and inland waterways: from Ripetta harbour to the mouth of the River Tiber, then from Leghorn across the Mediteranean to the North Sea and Hamburg, and onwards via the Elbe, Havel and Spree rivers finally reaching Berlin. The permits that by royal order allowed the importation of the Lütke collection custom free have been preserved amongst the files. The extent of the Lütke Collection was comprehensively recorded. An assessment made by the Academy members Schadow and Puhlmann (1790),12 a list of items handed over upon completion of the “hiring agreement” of 179113 and information about the quality and selection of the plaster cast collection still exist today. Many further documents have also been preserved that allow a reconstruction of the whole procedure leading up to the purchase of the collection. Finally, new lists were made on completion of the purchase in 1802.14 (Fig. 10. 2). The collection comprised practically all sculptures that belonged to the canon, that is, a selection of statues unanimously considered all over Europe as indispensable to a collection. Lütke possessed six complete casts in the original size of which two, that belonged to the canon, were still stored in Rome – the Laocoön and the Torso Belvedere. He also had other complete statues that were copies in reduced dimensions. In addition, there were over one hundred casts of busts, heads, torsi and fragments. These were almost exclusively casts of antique statues, with the exception of two copies made of Houdon’s écorché in original and in reduced scale (cf. the table in the appendix). Whereas the inventories noted the poor quality of the existing Academy collection, they emphasized the precision and excellence of Lütke’s casts.

___________ 12 GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 244, fol. 4f. 13 GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 244, fol. 18 14 GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 244, fol. 97f.

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Fig. 10. 2: List of Luetke’s casts 1802. Geheimes Staatsarchiv preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin Dahlem.

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Prior to the acquisition of the Lütke Collection, the Academy had already owned several canonical works. They were, however, of poor quality: a Laocoön with an inadequately defined head, the Borghese Gladiator, the Apollino, the Apollo Belvedere (apparently very mediocre casts) and the Crouching Venus. Furthermore, it owned a considerable number of heads including three of Laocoön and two of each of his sons.15 Some of the heads stemmed from the collection of the draughtsman and engraver Johann Wilhelm Meil (1733–1805) that the Academy had bought in 1790. The most important cast in this collection was the Dancing Faun from the Tribuna of the Uffizi in Florence, again an inferior cast. Honorary members also donated casts as gifts to the Academy, but on closer inspection there Fig. 10. 3: Bust of Antoninus Pius. L. Lohr, c. 1750. Charcoal on paper. Universität der was little use for them.16 Finally, the Künste, Berlin, Archiv. Sammlung SchülerAcademy also commissioned plaster zeichnungen. casts of the most important sculptures in the Hohenzollern Collection of Antiquities, but during the period under discussion, the only cast from this provenance seems to have been the Girl Playing with Knucklebones (Knöchelspielerin). Hence, the Lütke Collection decisively formed the core of the Academy Collection for over twenty years. Immediately upon its arrival, Lütke’s collection was set up in the academy rooms and made accessible to the students. However, rather than buying it, the Academy only hired it. In return, Lütke was given free accommodation with his quarters in the academy building as well as an allowance of 100 thaler annually.17 Because the Academy’s budget had suffered greatly under the strain of many newly created positions, this solution proved satisfactory for

___________ 15 GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt III no. 244, fol. 6. 16 GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt III no. 235, fol. 45. 17 GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt III no. 77, fol. 120 r.

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 203

Fig. 10. 4: Bust of Apollo Belvedere. Heinrich Anton Dähling, c. 1800. Charcoal on paper. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett.

the following fifteen years until Heinitz finally succeeded in persuading the King that it was imperative to purchase the collection. In 1802 the King paid Lütke 2500 thaler from his private Treasury. Thus the Academy made quite a bargain, as we will see.

Friedrich Rehberg – The Academy Agent in Rome The responsibility for acquiring originals and plaster casts for the Academy in Rome fell to Friedrich Rehberg, a history painter who had studied with Mengs in Rome in the 1770s. He returned to Germany for several years and became a Member of the Academy in 1786. Being very familiar with Rome, he was appointed Agent and Director of the Roman affiliate of the Prussian Academy in 1788, a newly established office.18 Even though, unlike the French Academy, the institution did not own a building at the time, it provided four or five

___________ 18 C. Sedlarz‚ ‘Die Reform der Berliner Kunstakademie und die “spezielle Direction” Friedrich Rehbergs in Rom’, in I. D’Aprile et al. (eds), Tableau de Berlin. Beiträge zur “Berliner Klassik” (Hanover, 2005), pp. 245-67.

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Fig. 10. 5: Stocklist of plaster casts moulded by Vincenzo Barz[s]otti, 1789. Geheimes Staatsarchiv preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin Dahlem.

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 205

simultaneous scholarships for Prussian artists to study for two or three years in Rome.19 Rehberg’s duties included looking after those who received the grants, and he regularly sent to Berlin accounts of the exhibitions held at the French Academy, as well as reports of recent archaeological finds and news regarding the art market and literature on art. In the autumn of 1789 he sent a catalogue of the plaster cast maker Vincenzo Barzotti to the Academy (Fig. 10. 5).20 Barzotti had worked extensively for Mengs and, most importantly, had the very rare permission to make new moulds of the sculptures in the Belvedere court. One of the first casts of the Apollo Belvedere was priced at 40 scudi (that is 55 thalers), a cast made of “scaiola” (scagliola), a more durable, if polished marble-like material, at 60 scudi.21 However, the Academy refrained from buying any of these, because, for the time being, Lütke’s collection satisfied its needs for casts after Roman sculptures. In 1796, as Napoleon began the removal of Roman artworks to Paris, Rehberg started to buy plaster casts, carrying the costs himself. He reported to Heinitz: I have used the opportunity to collect the very first casts of the best ones amongst those statues and busts that have already been sent to Paris. Soon only those made from very worn moulds will be available, or they will no longer be for sale at all, 22 and hence this collection will double its value.

He added that he had the casts set up in his studio so that Prussians holding scholarships could utilise them for their studies. 23 In this way Rehberg’s collection served as a surrogate for the French Academy in Rome, closed in the wake of the Revolution in 1793, where German artists had attended the drawing lessons, especially those featuring study of the nude figure. Early in 1797, Rehberg sent a stocklist of his plaster casts to the Academy.24 His collection was considerably larger than Lütke’s. As the casts had been explicitly acquired for the purposes of the scholarship holders who no longer had recourse to the originals, there was, at first, no talk of shipping the collection to Berlin. Shortly before the Lütke plaster casts were bought in 1801, Heinitz had Rehberg submit a quote for comparison. In a detailed letter, Rehberg estimated the

___________ 19 Ibid. 20 Portrait of Barzotti in M. Kiderlen (ed.), Die Sammlung der Gipsabgüsse von Anton Raphael Mengs in Dresden. Katalog der Abgüsse, Rekonstruktionen, Nachbildungen und Modelle aus dem römischen Nachlaß des Malers in der Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (Munich, 2006), pp. 17-22, pl. 3. 21 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 19, fol. 30f. 22 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 20, fol. 104. 23 Ibid. 24 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 20, fol. 114f.

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Fig. 10. 6: German artists in Rome (incl. Karl Philipp Moritz, Friedrich Rehberg, Alois Hirt). Christian Ruhl, c. 1789. Pen and ink on paper. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen, Graphische Sammlung, Kassel.

costs of packaging (300 scudi) and insurance (560 scudi).25 Shipping prices alone had recently gone up considerably; the shipment, for example, of the Apollo Belvedere would have amounted to 300 scudi. All in all, he calculated the costs for the purchase of the plaster casts and transport of twenty large pieces at 15,500 thaler.26 This totalled six times the amount of the sum paid to Lütke. The basic annual wage of a professor of the Academy of Arts, to give just one comparison, was 300 thalers, and, with additional revenues, most of the successful artists had a gross yearly income of around 1000 thaler.

The Aesthetic Approach Shortly after Lütke took up his position as professor, Karl Philipp Moritz returned to Berlin (Fig. 10. 6). Heinitz regarded it as a shortcoming of the Academy’s teaching that art history and theory did not form part of the curriculum. In order to rectify this drawback, Moritz was appointed Professor of Mythology, Classics and the Theory of the Fine Arts. 27 He was, therefore, the first to hold regular art historical classes in Berlin. Moritz consistently main-

___________ 25 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 244, fol. 45 (1 Scudo was worth almost 1½ thalers) 26 Ibid. 27 A. Klingenberg, ‘Karl Philipp Moritz als Mitglied der Berliner Akademien’, in W. Griep (ed.), Moritz zu ehren. Beiträge zum Eutiner Symposium im Juni 1993 (Eutin, 1996), pp. 135-58.

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 207

tained a “course of lectures” on the subject of “mythology, history, antiquity and the classics”.28 In 1791 he organised for the lecture take place on Sunday mornings, from 11am to 1pm, so that his audience could make haste shortly after Sunday services to be enlightened by his “Götterlehre”.29 Being very popular in Berlin, Moritz’s lectures were attended not only by artists but also by citizens and members of the Court eager to be educated. His teachings on art were pronouncedly avant-garde: based on a structuralist concept of symbols, he interpreted myth as a cultural achievement.30 He regarded artworks in very much the same way as he did the mythological gods – as highly compressed copies of Creation. Also his concept of the autonomy of the aesthetic was derived from this notion: beauty was not a product of the imitation of visible nature, but the reification of the idea of nature, that thereby created its own reality. In this respect Moritz does not understand antiquity as a distant entity, but as still accessible in theory and practice. His views still strike one as modern today and not at all academic. Moritz taught at the Academy for only four years until his early death. He maintained very close relationships with artists during his stay in Rome and then in Berlin, a circumstance that was productive on both sides. This can be illustrated succinctly in the way he worked together with Asmus Jakob Carstens. Carstens was responsible for teaching drawing classes after plaster casts, for which he was to receive 150 Reichsthaler annually – an insufficient wage for daily needs. But he was not required to be continuously present and had only to call in “once daily at the Academy to correct the students’ drawings”.31 He carried out this duty until 1792, when he left Berlin for Rome and several lists of his Berlin students have survived.32 During his time at the Academy, Carstens was very much preoccupied with the practical aspects of art education. This started with the display of the plaster casts that because of a chronic lack of space had continually to be moved around the Academy. The hanging of green curtains for use in drawing lessons was also undertaken. These could be drawn and varied at will, providing a flexible backdrop for the relevant cast.33

___________ 28 Y. Pauly‚ ‘Aufgehoben im Blick. Antike und Moderne bei Karl Philipp Moritz’, in U. Goldenbaum and A. Košenina (eds), Berliner Aufklärung. Kulturwissenschaftliche Studien, 3 vols (Hanover, 1999), I, pp. 195-219. 29 K.-Ph. Moritz, Götterlehre oder mythologische Dichtungen der Alten (Berlin, 1791). 30 Among the numerous works on Moritz’ aesthetic view see T. Todorov, Théories du symbole (Paris, 1977), “La crise romatique”, pp. 179-82; for further information see Moritz bibliography: [accessed 4 June 2009]. 31 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 79, fol. 22. 32 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 79, fol. 32, 51. 33 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 244, fol. 82.

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It was also Carstens who proposed that the Academic Senate should discuss the relation between anatomy lessons and drawing from plaster casts. In the discussion the Senate was informed about the procedure adopted by the Copenhagen Academy, in which both subjects were studied concomitantly: anatomical study addressed the theoretical aspects of the body, the drawing lesson from plaster casts concentrated on the practical aspects of representing it. Drawing from plaster casts was taught by all professors in turn.34 The debate addressed a key issue in the theory of academic art instruction: should greater importance be attached to studying from nature or from the great, ideal models? Carstens once wrote that he not only taught art students to copy accurately, but also informed them that on how “beauty and correctness” were essential for the development of true art.35 Carstens’ work was much inspired by his encounter with Moritz’s aesthetics and the latter’s radical interpretation of antiquity. Together, in close cooperation, they selected the gems from Philipp Daniel Lipperts’ Dactyliotheca, and consequently Carstens drew the illustrations for two of Moritz’s books Götterlehre and Anthusa (Figs 10. 7 and 8).36 These illustrations may now seem especially schematic and far-removed from the intensifying effect of recalling antiquity, that Moritz sought in his writings and that Carstens looked for in his freehand drawings. Still, the emphasis on a reductionist use of line sets them apart from the more restrained neo-classicism of the older Academy artists. The academic plaster cast collection had now not only the function of exemplifying the canon in drawing lessons, but also acquired an aesthetic function as the embodiment of antiquity. In the same way that in his accounts of his travels in Italy Moritz described how the historic sites of ancient Rome had permanently inspired him, so too the plaster casts, made directly from the originals, were seen to guarantee authenticity and thus inspire the students. Casts functioned as a kind of umbilical cord, connecting Berlin to Rome and the present to the past. It was therefore crucial that the plaster casts were displayed in the Academy itself and nowhere else. For in the absence of a museum and university it was this institution that counted as the custodian of neo-classical ideology and thus possessed an eminently state-supporting character. The Academy was located on Unter den Linden, close to the Royal Palace in the heart of the city, accessible to the public. The plaster casts were

___________ 34 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 79, fol. 47f. 35 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt III No. 79, fol. 55. 36 K.-Ph. Moritz, Anthusa oder Roms Altertümer. Ein Buch für die Menschheit. Die heiligen Gebräuche der Römer (Berlin, 1791); U. Münter‚ ‘Gebannter Bilderrausch. Bild und Text in Karl Philipp Moritz’ ‘Götterlehre’, in U. Tintemann and C. Wingertszahn (eds), Karl Philipp Moritz in Berlin 1789 –1793 (Hanover, 2005), pp. 39-56.

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 209

Fig. 10. 7: Sacrifice to Mars (left) and Sacrifice to Minerva (right); gems from Lippert’s Daktyliotheca.

Fig. 10. 8: Sacrifice to Mars (left) and Sacrifice to Minerva (right), Asmus Jakob Carstens. Engraving, in: K. P. Moritz: Anthusa oder Roms Altertümer (Berlin, 1791).

set up in the centre of the Academy building and would be seen by approximately 10,000 visitors annually on the occasion of the Academy exhibitions. The antique originals belonging to the King, in contrast, were displayed in the “Temple of Antiquity” in Potsdam and not publicly accessible. Around 1800, therefore, the Academy’s plaster casts claimed a far greater ideological value than these originals. The plaster collection gave the Academy the authority and means to present their reading of antiquity. In this context it appears particularly significant that the core of the Academy’s collection was formed by the private collection of a merchant’s son; as a cultural force the court was losing ground to the bourgeoisie.

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The Systematic Approach As discussed above, a journey to Rome sufficed for an artist to claim substantial knowledge of classical culture and antiquities. In 1796, four years after Carstens had left Rome and three years after Moritz’s untimely death, Aloys Hirt came to Berlin. Hirt had resided in Rome for fourteen years and was considered one of the leading German experts on the city. Together with Moritz he had published the periodical Italien und Deutschland to which he contributed a number of his own art historical and archaeological articles.37 Having acted in Rome as a Cicerone for Countess Lichtenau, the mistress of King Friedrich Wilhelm II, it was due to her influence that upon his arrival in Berlin he was immediately appointed Professor of Art Theory and Archaeology, a position that had been vacant since the death of Moritz. In his first lecture at the Academy, he proposed setting up the Royal Collection in a museum in Berlin.38 Hirt significantly stimulated the study of the ancients and antiquities in Berlin in the ensuing years; in 1810 he was appointed Professor of Archaeology at the newly founded University. He made several valuable contributions, for example, he identified the Dying Gladiator as a Gaul and was the first to develop a correct interpretation of the pedimental groups from the temple of Aegina.39 He maintained close connections to the royal family and, amongst other duties, repeatedly participated in designing the decorations for court balls. It was, for instance, under his direction that Queen Luise acted the role of Minerva in a costume designed after the model of the Minerva Giustiniani in a ballet entitled Daedalus and his Statues, whilst a relative of the Queen took on the role of Daedalus dressed in a costume inspired by a bronze miniature of Vulcan from the Royal Collection.40 Hirt also played a key role when the plaster cast collection was considerably and unexpectedly expanded. In 1806, the Academy had sent to Rehberg in Rome a list of plaster casts to be acquired for the Academy. However, all such undertakings were interrupted, when in the same year Berlin was occupied by

___________ 37 J. Zimmer, ‘An H. v. G. in W. Anmerkungen zu einer wenig bekannten Berliner Kunstzeitschrift der Goethezeit’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, n.s. 40 (1998), pp. 117-29. 38 C. Vogtherr, ‘Das Königliche Museum zu Berlin. Planungen und Konzeption des ersten Berliner Kunstmuseums’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen, n.s. 39 (1997) suppl. vol; E. van Wezel, ‘Das akademische Museum. Hirts gescheiterte Museumsplanungen’, in C. Sedlarz (ed.), Berliner Klassik. Eine Großstadtkultur um 1800, vol. I: Aloys Hirt. Archäologe, Historiker, Kunstkenner (Laatzen, 2004), pp. 105-28. 39 A.-H. Borbein, ‘Aloys Hirt, der Archäologe’, in Sedlarz (note 38), pp. 173-89, at p. 182. 40 C. Sedlarz , ‘Die Hierodulen des Eros Uranios. Hirts Inszenierungen von Hoffesten’, in Sedlarz (note 38), pp. 191-216, at p. 198.

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 211

Napoleon’s forces and the King fled to Königsberg. As formerly in Rome, now in Berlin important works of art were being removed.41 In compensation, Dominique Vivant Denon promised to send to Berlin casts of the antiquities in the Musée Napoleon, which were newly made in the recently founded Atelier de Moulage. Together with over 15,000 casts of coins from the Mionnet collection these casts were ready for shipping already in 1808. Because of the war, they did not arrive in Berlin until 1815, being stored in the meantime in forty containers in Paris.42 On their arrival, they were installed not in the Academy, but due to lack of space, displayed close by in Schloß Monbijou. They constituted the first noteworthy enlargement of the Lütke Collection in 24 years. In 1842 the Berlin Academy of Arts’ plaster cast collection, comprising 1268 pieces, was handed over to the Berlin Museums. After being stored for an interim period in the Altes Museum, it was exhibited in the Neues Museum that had opened in 1855. Now including many recently added casts, the collection was intended to function as a teaching tool in the history of style.43 The heyday of the ‘aesthetic’ viewing and contemplation of plaster casts had passed, though this does not mean that this attitude no longer played a role in Academy drawing classes.44 But in advocating that the plaster casts be taken up in the museum, Hirt’s proposal prepared the way for the historical and systematic use of casts, whereby they no longer functioned as the embodiment of an ideal but served solely to represent the absent originals.

Appendix Comparative Chronological List of Plaster Casts, Owned, Acquired or Intended for Acquisition by the Berlin Academy between 1790 and 1815 The appendix presents the information pertaining to sculptures or busts mentioned in any one of the six selected lists of casts, compiled between 1790 and 1815, that survive in the files of the Academy, citing in each case the

___________ 41 B. Savoy, ‘“Die Ehre einer Trophäe”. Aloys Hirt und der französische ‘Kunstraub’’, in Sedlarz (note 38), pp. 129-52. 42 Archiv Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Hist. Abt. Bestand PAW 1700–1811, I-XV, 8a: die von dem Kaiser Napoleon geschenkten Gips-Abgüße und Abdrücke betreffend 1806–1811, fol. 5-20. 43 S. Einholz, ‘Orte der Kontemplation und Erziehung. Zur Geschichte der Gipsabgusssammlungen’, in H. Krohm (ed.), Meisterwerke mittelalterlicher Skulptur (Berlin, 1996), pp. 11-39, at p. 17. 44 F.-M. Kammel, ‘Der Gipsabguss. Vom Medium der ästhetischen Norm zur toten Konserve der Kunstgeschichte’, in A. M. Kluxen (ed.), Ästhetische Probleme der Plastik im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Nuremberg, 2001), pp. 47-67.

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full wording in the original language. The first column on the left hand side provides, where possible, names and locations of the reproduced originals according to Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, New Haven and London 1981, or according to the standards of the present volume, should these differ. The sculptures are listed according to the order in which they appear in the earliest list that makes mention of them, proceeding chronologically from the 1790 inventory to Denon’s 1808 list.45 The notes to this appendix can be found at the end of the list.

___________ 45 I am grateful for discussion and help with the identification to Charlotte Schreiter, Jan Zahle and Astrid Fendt.

Der Laocoon – sehr schön, der Kopf ist nicht scharf Der Vaticanische Apollo (ist nicht mehr zu gebrauchen) Der Apollino (muß gerade gemacht werden) Der Antinous (ist schön) Der Borghesische Fechter – (brauchbar) Die agroupierte Venus (steht zu hoch um zu sehn ob sie scharf)

Laocoön (Vatican)

Apollo Belvedere (Vatican)

Apollino (Florence, Uffizi)

Capitoline Antinoüs

Borghese Gladiator (Louvre)

Crouching Venus (Florence, Uffizi)

Laocoon (Vatican)

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Venus Medicis Discobolo Anatomie von Houdon

Discobolus (Vatican)

Ecorché

der Gladiator Borghese

der Antinous vom Campidoglio

Appollino [!]

Discobolus (Vatican)

Venere di Medici (Florenz)

Adonis (Vatican)

Apollino (Florenz)

Apollo di Belvedere Apollo de Belvedere (Vatican)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47

Venus de Medici (Florence, Uffizi)

Hebe, seated (iden- Die Hebe sizend (ist tification uncertain) scharf)

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Name / present location

die Gruppe des Laocoon

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

La Vénus accroupie

Le Gladiateur Borghese [ + additional aftercast]

L’Adonis

L’Apollino

L’Apollon du Belvedère [+ additional aftercast52]

Le groupe du Laoocoon

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

die große stehende Anatomie

Discopol (2 x) L’Ecorché [aftercast]

Venus, medicis La Vénus de Médicis (2x)

die sitzende Venus

Gladiator Borghese (2x)

Antinous di Campidoglis

Apollino

Apollo di Belvedere

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 213

Ceres (Vatican) Spinario (Capitol)

Castor e Polluxe; die Gruppe (In Spanien) des Castor u Pollux mit den Fackeln etc: Nemeses (ist noch im Vatican) Torso des Genio (Vatican) Gladiatore moribondo (Capitol)

Ceres Mattei (Vatican)

Spinario (Rome, Capitoline Museums)

Castor and Pollux / Ildefonso-Group (Madrid, Prado)

Nemesis, (Vatican)

Eros Centocelle (Vatican)

Dying Gladiator, (Capitoline Museums)

der Splitter auszieher vom Capitol

den Torso. vom Vatican

Torso (Vatican)

Torso Belvedere (Vatican)

den großen Antinous di Belvedere jetzt Meleager genannt

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Venere Accovacchiate (Vatican)

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Crouching Venus (Vatican)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47 Antinoo des Belvedere (Vatican)

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Antinoüs Belvedere/ Meleager (Vatican)

Name / present location

Gladiator moribonda

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Castor et Pollux

La Cérès

Le Torse antique dit du Belvedère

L’Antinous

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

214 Claudia Sedlarz

der alte Faun mit dem Knaben im Arme. Villa Borghese der Centaur mit dem Amor auf dem Rücken, ebendaher (Villa Borghese) die sitzende Matrone Agrippina genannt. die schönste der Minerven Statuen die Gruppe der Phädra u Hippolit von Ludovici

Centaur with Cupid (Paris, Louvre)

Seated Agrippina (Dresden)

Pallas from Velletri (Paris, Louvre)

Papirius (Rome, Museo delle Terme)

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Silenus with the Infant Bacchus (Rome, Villa Borghese)

Fauno (Florenz)

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Dancing Faun (Florence, Uffizi)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47 Amore e Psyche (Capitol)

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Cupid and Psyche (Rome, Capitoline Museums)

Name / present location

Faun mit der Zimbel

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

La Pallas de Velletri

Silène et Bacchus

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 215

wenn nicht die gantze Gruppe doch ein Theil der Gruppe der Niobe den Rotatore von Florenz einige der schönsten Musen des Vaticans eine Statue der Diana eine Amazone ein Amor

Niobe Group, (Florence, Uffizi)

Arrotino (Florence, Uffizi)

Muses (Vatican)

Diane (unidentified)

Amazon (unidentified)

Amor (unidentified)

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

die Ringer von Florenz. tribum.

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Wrestlers (Florence, Uffizi)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47 die Gruppe von Piramus u Thisbe aus Ludovici

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Paetus and Arria / Ludovisi Gauls (Rome, Museo delle Terme)

Name / present location 1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

216 Claudia Sedlarz

zwei Statuen im Museo Florentino tabula XVI u XVII angeführt als Musen mit gantz leichten Gewändern im Falle solche geformt sind53. Endimion [Gori] tab : XXI. des Museo Florentino Venus spinam e pede suo educens. Museo Fiorentino tabula XXXIII54

Muses (Florence, Uffizi)

Endymion (Florence, Uffizi)

Sitting Nymph (Florence, Uffizi)

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

die Venus aux belles fesses

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Callipygian Venus (Naples, Museo Nazionale)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47 ein Paris

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Paris (unidentified)

Name / present location 1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

La Venus callipige [aftercast]

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 217

Le Germanicus

der Faunus meditans von Giustiniani

Reclining Satyr

Germanicus (Paris, Louvre)

der Faun mit der Flöte. Villa Borghese.

Faun with Pipes, (Paris, Louvre)

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

Une autre Cérès assise

die Bacha des Capitols mit dem Rehfelle u den Festons.

Bacchante, Capitoline Museums (?)

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Ceres, seated (identification uncertain)

Dei prastitis signum ex aere. [Gori] tab. XLV.

Idolino (Florence, Archaeological Museum)

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Amor Sagittarius. [Gori] tab: XLII.

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Amor Sagittarius, (Florence, Uffizi)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47 Mercur. tabula XXXIX. ebendaher.

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Mercury (Florence, Uffizi)

Name / present location

218 Claudia Sedlarz

Hercules farnese

Fauno di Borghs.

Fauno di Firenza.

Hercules Farnese (Naples, Museo. Nazionale)

Borghese Faun, (Rome, Villa Borghese)

Satyr with Footclappper (Florence, Uffizi)

Marcus Aurelius (Rome, Capitol)

Marc Aurellius[!] zu Pferde.(ist scharf)55

L’Hercules farnese [aftercast]

Hercules Farnese (Naples, Museo. Nazionale) Kleine Figuren.

La Cléopâtre [aftercast]

Cleopatra (Vatican)

Reductions

Une Minerve [aftercast]

Minerva Giutiniani? (Vatican)

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

L’ Hermaphrodite Borghèse

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Hermaphrodite (Paris, Louvre)

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Le Génie suppliant

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Adorante (Berlin)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47 L’Appollon au Lezard

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Apollo Sauroctonos (Paris, Louvre)

Name / present location

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 219

Flora Farnese

Venus medicis Ein sitzender Hercules.Org. in London Anatomie von Houdon Büsten.

Köpfe: Der Kopf des Laocoon, 3 mahl

Laoccons Sohn, der älteste 1 x Laocoon, der jüngste Sohn, 2 x

Flora Farnese (Naples, Museo Nazionale)

Venus de Medici (Florence, Uffizi)

Seated Hercules, London (identification uncertain)

Houdon’s Ecorché

Heads/Busts

Head of Laocoön

Head of the elder son of Laocoön

Head of the younger son of Laocoön

Laocon.

il Gladiatore moribondo

Dying Gladiator (Rome, Capitoline Museums)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47 l’Antinous

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Antinoüs

Name / present location

Köpfe/Büsten

Venere di Medici (Florenz)

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

des alten Laocoon Kopf

Torso du Laocoon, fils Buste du Laocoon fils

Torso du Laocoon, père avec la tête Buste du Laocoon, père

Têtes/Bustes

kleine stehende Ecorché plus petit Anatomie

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

220 Claudia Sedlarz

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46 Die schöne Niobe, die Mutter, 2 x die älteste Tochter der Niobe, 3 x die jüngste Tochter der Niobe, 2 x Kopf einer Tochter der Niobe der Sohn der Niobe, 1 x Der Kopf des Homerus, 3x Kopf der Ariadne Kopf des Mercur Kopf eines Satyrs, 1 x Kopf eines Faunus Kopf des sterbenden Fechters

Name / present location

Head of Niobe

Head of the oldest daughter of Niobe

Head of the youngest daughter of Niobe

Head of a daughter of Niobe

Head of a son of Niobe

Head of Homer

Head of Ariadne

Head of Mercury

Head of a Satyr

Head of a Faun

Head of the Dying Gladiator (Capitoline Museums)

Ariadne

Niobe (figlia)

Niobe (madre)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47

Homer (itzt in Neapel)

Niobe, und zwey der Tochter (Florenz)

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

ein Faunus Kopf

Kopf der Ariadne

Kopf des Homer

Kopf der Niobe. Die Tochter

Kopf der Niobe. Die Mutter

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Buste d’Homère

Buste, Niobe fils + petit fils

Bustes, Niobe deux filles

Bustes, Niobe, deux petites filles

Buste, Niobe, mère

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 221

Kopf des Apollo, 2 x

Kopf des Apollino, 2 x Kopf des Antinous

Kopf der Venus, 4 x Kopf des Silenus 1 x Kopf des Hercules 1 x

Kopf des Theseus 1 x Kopf des Caracalla 2 x Kopf des Vitellius 2 x Kopf des Commodus 1 x Der Kopf des Borghesi- Gladiator Borgh. schen Fechters

Head of Apollo Belvedere

Head of Apollino (Florence, Uffizi)

Head of Antinoüs

Head of Venus (de Medici)

Head of Silenus (Borghese?)

Head of Hercules Farnese

Head of Theseus

Head of Caracalla

Head of Vitellius

Head of Commodus

Head of Borghese Gladiator (Paris, Louvre)

Venus Medici.

Antinous di Campido.

Apollo di Belvedr.

Kopf einer Muse

Head of a Muse

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Name / present location

Hercules (Büste des Farnesischen Hercules, itzt in Neapel)

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Kopf des Gladiatore borghese

Kopf der Venus Medicis

Kopf des Antinous di Campidoglio

Kopf des Apollo di Belvedere

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Gladiateur, Buste

Buste de Vitellius

Buste de Silène

Buste d’Apollino

Buste d’Apollon Belvedere

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

222 Claudia Sedlarz

Kopf des Meleager Kopf des Likurgus, 2 x

Head of Meleager (Vatican)

Head of Lycurgus

Antinous, transformato in Baco. Achilles. Jupiter.

Head of Antinoüs restored as Bacchus

Head of Achilles

Head of Jupiter

der Susanna des Fiammingo, 2 x

Head of François Duquesnoy’s Susanna (Rome, S. Maria di Loreto) Aiax.

ein alter Philosoph, 4 x

Head of an old philosopher

Licurg.

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47

Head of Aiax

Kopf des Demosthenes, 3x

Head of Demosthenes

Head of an old [man] ein alter Kopf, 2 x

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Name / present location

Aiax (Vatican)

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Kopf des Jupiter

Kopf des Achilles

Kopf des Antinous, Bacchus

Kopf des Ajax

Kopf des Lycurg

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 223

Kopf des Idole di Campidoglio

Calliope Eine Vestalin. Idol di Campo.

Sapho [sic] Ein kleiner Faun Meleager

Head of Calliope

Head of Vestal Virgin

Head of an Idol [=Spinario], Capitoline Museums

Head of Sappho

Head of small Faun

Head of Meleager

Melpomene (Vatican, Nb. die Büste von der ganzen Figur in coloßaler Größe)

Kopf einer Vestale

Isis

Head of Isis

Head of Melpomene, (Vatican)

Kopf der Calliope

Melpomene

Head of Melpomene

Kopf des Meleager

Kopf der Sapho

Kopf der Isis

Kopf der Melpomene

Kopf des Apollo coronato

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Apollo coronato.

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Head of an Apollo Coronato (Id. uncertain)

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Kopf der Roma

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47 Roma.

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Head of Roma

Name / present location

Sapho, Buste

Vestale, Buste

Isis, Buste

Le buste de Rome Colossale

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

224 Claudia Sedlarz

Bacchantin vom Vatican Hadrian (Vatican)

Head of a Bacchante (Vatican)

Head of Hadrian (Vatican)

Masquen Hercules farnese.

Medusa. Lucio vero als Mann

Mas ks

Hercules Farnese

Medusa

Lucius Verus

Head of Antinoüs Belvedere

Jupiter Serapis (Vatican)

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Head of Jupiter Serapis (Vatican)

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47 Nil (Vatican, von welchem auch die ganze Figur in colloßaler Größe da war)

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Head of the Vatican Nile (Vatican)

Name / present location 1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Méduse

Masques

[several other heads and busts]56

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

die Larve des Lucius Verus Lucio Vero als Mann

die Larve der Medusa

die Larve des Hercules farnese

Kopf des Antinous di Belvedere

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 225

Hercule farnèse 2 Muses

Hercules Farnese

Two Muses

Denon’ selection of casts after originals in the Musée Napoléon 1808, arrived in Berlin 181551

Phocion

die Larve des Lucio Vero als Jüngling

1806 inventory of casts in the Academy50

Phocion

1806 Order of casts (not followed out)49

Alexandre mourant

Collection Rehberg in Rome 179848

Dying Alexander

Lucio vero als Jüngling.

1802 list of the Lütke Collection (built up in Rome 1786–88, purchased in 1802 by the Academy47

Jupiter

1790 inventory of the Academy Collection (without Lütke Collection), including comments on state of conservation46

Jupiter

Lucius Verus, as a young man

Name / present location

226 Claudia Sedlarz

Incorporating Antiquity – The Berlin Academy of Arts’ Plaster Cast Collection 227

Notes 46 GStA PK I. HA, Rep 76 alt III, Nr. 244, fol. 6, Berlin, 24. März 1790, list by Frisch and Puhlmann: Auf der Academie sind folgende brauchbare antique Gipsabgüsse. 47 GStA PK I. HA, Rep 76 alt III, Nr. 244, fol. 97, Lütke 22.4.1802, Inventarium derer antiquen Gibs-Abgüße, welche ich der Königl. Accademie der bildenden Künste laut Contract, unter nebenstehenden Nummern überliefert. 48 GStA PK I. HA, Rep 76 alt III, Nr. 20, fol. 114f.: Rehberg, [Rom 10. Febr. 1798], Verzeichniß der bey mir befindlichen Gypsabgüße. The Collection belonged to Rehberg, there were discussions about its possible acquisition through the Academy. In 1812 Rehberg sold some of the casts to the Accademia di San Luca, cf. A. Villari, ‘Dall’Antico e dal moderno: la Gipsoteca dell’Accademia di San Luca (1804–1873)”, in P. Picardi & P. P. Racioppi (eds), Le scuole mute e le scuole parlanti, Studi e documenti sull’Accademia di San Luca nell’Ottocento (Roma, 2002) pp. 133-168, at p. 150 and 160. I am grateful to Jan Zahle, Copenhagen for this reference. 49 GSTA PK I. HA, Rep 76 alt III, Nr. 21, fol. 67, Berlin, 3. Juli 1806, Johann Gottfried Schadow to Friedrich Rehberg, Verzeichniß u[nd] Angabe von Gipsabgüssen welche die hiesige Academie der Künste annoch am nothwendigsten bedürfte. 50 Ibid., fol. 69-70. 51 Archiv Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Hist. Abt. Bestand PAW 1700–1811, I-XV, 8a, Notes des Plâtres antiques provenant de L’Atelier du Moulage du Musée Napoleon, fol. 6-7. 52 The list distinguishes between casts after originals and those after “Copies des figures antiques”. It appears also that many of the busts were aftercasts. 53 A. F. Gori, Museum florentinum Exhibens Insigniora Vetvstatis Monvmenta Qvae Florentinae Svnt […], 6 vols, Florence 1731–1742, 3 (1734). The supposed Muse on plate XVI is the Aphrodite reproduced in G. A. Mansuelli, Galleria degli Uffizi: Le Sculture, 2 vols, (Florence 1958– 1961) 1, (1958), no. 13a. 54 Cf. G. A. Mansuelli, Galleria degli Uffizi: Le Sculture, 2 vols, (Florence 1958–1961) 1, (1958), no. 52 55 Cast of a reduced bronze copy of the equestrian monument of Marcus Aurelius, from a collection of antiques in Schloß Charlottenburg, Berlin, cf. H. Nehls, ‘Mon héros, mon modèle. Der sogenannte Marc Aurel von Sanssouci’, in: Berlinische Monatsschrift, Heft 8; 1999, pp. 4-18, at p. 14. 56 “Bustes de la Pallas Velletri, de Rome, du faune, de Venus d’Arles, d’Euripide, d’Hippocrate, de Demosthènes, de Ptolomée, d’Alexandre Sevère, de la Diane, du Bacchus, du Brutus, Diane de Capitole, Discobole, Achille, Amazone, Carneades, Antinous, Minerve, Vespasien, Petit Mercure, Cicéron, Venus à la coquille, Venus Callipige, Pericles, Paris, Petite Minerve, Hercule Jeune, Mélèagre, Néron, Titus, Caracalla, Mithridate, Socrate, Séneque, Mercure grec, Diogène, Ulisse, Faustina, Caton, Ecorché, Surprise (moderne), Pythagore, Agrippa, Epicure.”

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Archival sources GStA PK = Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin-Dahlem GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt Ältere Oberbehörden für Wissenschaft, Kunst, Kirchen- und Schulsachen, III No. 19 die dem Professor Rehberg übertragene specielle Direction über die Studien […] in Rom. Vol. I, 1786–1794 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt Ältere Oberbehörden für Wissenschaft, Kunst, Kirchen- und Schulsachen, III No. 20 die dem Professor Rehberg übertragene specielle Direction über die Studien […] in Rom. Vol. II, 1794–1801 GStA PK I. HA Rep. 76 alt Ältere Oberbehörden für Wissenschaft, Kunst, Kirchen- und Schulsachen, III No. 77 Anstellung des Landschafts Mahlers Lüttke […] 1786–1806 GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt Ältere Oberbehörden für Wissenschaft, Kunst, Kirchen- und Schulsachen, III No. 79: Unterricht im Zeichnen nach GipsAbgüssen und in der Anatomie. 1790–1801 GStAPK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt Ältere Oberbehörden für Wissenschaft, Kunst, Kirchen- und Schulsachen III No. 235: Inventarium der Academie der Künste an Kupferstichen, Büsten, Gips-Modelle pp. Vol II. 1790–1794 GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 76 alt Ältere Oberbehörden für Wissenschaft, Kunst, Kirchen- und Schulsachen, III No. 244: Die vom Professor Lütke […] offerirten Sammlung von Antiquen und Kupfer Archiv Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften: Hist. Abt. Bestand PAW 1700–1811, I-XV, 8a: die von dem Kaiser Napoleon geschenkten Gips-Abgüße und Abdrücke betreffend 1806–1811

Art and Pedagogy in the Plaster Cast Collection of the Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City ELIZABETH FUENTES ROJAS

The Academia de San Carlos in Mexico City, since 1933 the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, was founded in the late eighteenth century as a colonial institution by Spanish artists following the tradition of European Art Academies in general, and the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid in particular (Fig. 11. 1).1 Early on in its history, the Mexican Academy acquired a large scale collection of plaster casts that was to serve as a teaching tool in art programmes that aimed to train students in the classical canon of European art. Beyond its didactic function this still extant collection constituted the first American museum and had civic functions far beyond the Academy’s teaching.2 The present article aims to reveal the close connections between the history of the collection and the changing approaches to the study of casts in the Academy’s programmes from its beginnings to the present day. It identifies three stages in the acquisition of plaster casts; the first beginning in 1791, ten years after the foundation of the Academy, the second in 1857, and the third in 1904. The founding figure of the Academy was Jerónimo Antonio Gil, chief engraver of the Royal Mint. Ever since his arrival in New Spain (Nueva España) in 1778 he pursued an interest in the academic training of the artists of Mexico City.3 In 1781, he created a school of art, first known as the Escuela de Dibujo Provisional (Provisional Drawing School), and since 1783 as the Real Academia

___________ 1 2

3

R. Garibay, Breve historia de la Academia de San Carlos y la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas (Mexico, 1990). The Peale Museum in Philadelphia, founded in 1786, has, in the United States of America, been considered the oldest American museum. Nevertheless the Real Academia de San Carlos from Mexico, began its exhibitions in 1781, and from that time onwards it was regularly referred to as a museum or cabinet. C. Vázquez Olvera, Felipe Lacouture Fornelly Museologo Mexicano (Mexico, 2004), pp. 90-1. See E. Báez Macías, Jerónimo Antonio Gil y su traduccion de Gerard Audran (Mexico, 2001); E. Fuentes Rojas, Gerónimo Antonio Gil y sus Contemporáneos (1784–1808). Numismática (Mexico, 1998).

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Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas

Fig. 11. 1: Facade of Mexican Fine Arts School. Manuel Buenabad, 1897. Albumin, 20 x 16 cm. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

de San Carlos. The drawing school accommodated over two hundred students, introducing Mexican artists for the first time to classical works through the use of a collection of white paste miniatures and a dozen heads and busts that were used in the courses.4 Gil became the Academy’s first Director and was instrumental in the foundation of the collection of plaster casts. Shortly before acquiring the first major group of plaster sculptures he outlined how an academy of art benefited from possessing works of such quality as a means to encourage the young to imitate earlier masters: […] in every academy of the world […] plaster casts of the admirable ancient statues from Rome […] motivate youngsters to follow the paths of those who have always been the amazement of the centuries in the pursuit of leaving their 5 names to posterity.

___________ 4 5

This collection came from the Real Academia de San Fernando de Madrid; D. Angulo, La Academia de Bellas Artes de Mejico y sus Pinturas Españolas (Seville, 1935), pp. 13-30. “[…] en todas las [Academias] del mundo […] baciados (sic) de admirables estatuas de la Antigüedad que hay en Roma […] incitan a los jóvenes a seguir las huellas de aquellos que por dejar

Art and Pedagogy in the Plaster Cast Collection of the Academia de San Carlos 231

In this way the Director justified the massive order for casts after “most famous Greek and Roman”, as well as Renaissance and Baroque works, both Spanish and Italian, that was soon to arrive, all the way from the Real Academia de San Fernando in Madrid. The collection comprised 192 pieces, including complete figures, torsos, busts, heads and reliefs. The pieces first travelled to La Habana (Cuba) on board a merchant ship, the Santa Paula, then to Veracruz on board the frigate Florida Blanca and finally by mule across the high sierras to the capital of New Spain where they arrived in 1791.6 The delivery was accompanied by Manuel Tolsá, who was to become the Academy’s second Director of Sculpture. The task of transporting such fragile cargo was a difficult one and, inevitably, caused damage to the sculptures. Tolsa involved himself in the repair of any damaged pieces and, foreseeing future accidents, he made moulds of the works. Tolsá had attended the Academia de San Carlos at Valencia and the Real Academia de San Fernando at Madrid. At the time of his arrival in New Spain he was 32 years old, “had devoted himself to learning and practicing the art of sculpture […] and [...] had earned various prizes”.7 He was therefore well qualified to lead the Sculpture Workshop at the Academia de San Carlos. Tolsá was a versatile man with profound knowledge, not only of sculpture, but also architecture, metalwork, and other arts.8 Ever since the arrival of the first set of casts after ancient sculptures at the Academia de San Carlos, its community, as well as the wider nineteenthcentury society of Mexico City, showed a great interest in, and admiration for these beautiful works.9 Before this, the works of the classical canon had only been known through prints and cameos or white paste gems that had been the property of the institution since its early days. Now, the sculpture collection became a basic teaching aid and a great challenge for teachers as well as students. During the nineteenth century it would experience two major expansions, each of them promoted by the Directors of the Academy and supported by the Directors of Sculpture. The acquisition of the sculptures greatly increased the standing of the Academy, partly because the institution was able to exhibit them to a wide

___________

6 7 8 9

sus nombres a la posteridad han sido siempre el pasmo de los siglos”. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Archivo de la Facultad de Arquitectura, Gerónimo Antonio Gil, Principal Director’s Report, Mexico, mss, 30 January 1790. Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, II, pp. 12-13. “[...] dedicado a aprender y a ejercitar el arte de la escultura […] y […] había ganado varios premios”. Archivo General de Indias, Indiferente General, Nueva España, mss, 8 March 1789, p. 103. Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, II, pp. 5-41. In several documents Manuel Tolsá, Director of Sculpture, commented on the academic community’s pride in the sculpture collection and that it was because of this collection that it could be considered a true Academy. Brown, La Academia de San Carlos, II, 12-19.

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Fig. 11. 2: Sculpture Gallery. Manuel Buenabad, 1897. Albumin, 16 x 23 cm. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

public, but much more fundamentally, because now it was finally regarded as a true academy. The impact on the training was, of course, important: a decade after its foundation San Carlos had at last outstanding teaching material. The integration of this material into the Academy’s courses became a real privilege for its students (Fig. 11. 2). The humanist and scientist Baron Alexander von Humboldt visited the Academy in 1800 and considered the sculpture collection to be more beautiful and complete than the collection in Berlin.10 He suggested that the casts of Greek and Roman works be placed next to pre-Hispanic sculptures in order to show that the latter were similar to those created by Hindus and Egyptians.11 At the time, Humboldt’s judgment helped to change the prevailing European attitude of contempt towards the pre-Hispanic world. The first half of the nineteenth century was a time of crisis and poverty for Mexico. This was partly due to the struggle of the Mexican Independence

___________ 10 For the plaster cast collection of the Academy in Berlin see the contribution by Claudia Sedlarz in this volume, pp. 197-211. 11 A. v. Humboldt, Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain transl. from the French by J. Black (London, 1811) [orig. edn idem, Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle-Espagne (Paris, 1811)].

Art and Pedagogy in the Plaster Cast Collection of the Academia de San Carlos 233

Movement that lasted from 1810 to 1821, the year in which Mexico’s independence from Spain was proclaimed by General Agustín de Iturbide, who became the first Mexican emperor in 1822. For the Academy this meant a period of neglect and inactivity; for more than two years the institution was closed. Later there was often no means to pay the professors’ salaries and the Academy had to reduce its activities to drawing classes. Only towards the middle of the century did the Academy experience a renewal. It was at this point that the plaster cast collection received its second significant expansion. Despite the sad role he played in the history of the country, president Antonio López de Santa Anna became an important factor in the Academy’s reorganization. In 1843, Santa Anna gave orders to restructure the institution and regulate once again its functions. This improved its economic situation as now it benefited from lottery revenues.12 Bernardo Couto, President of the Board, and Manuel Vilar, Principal of the Sculpture Workshop, conducted the second stage of the mid nineteenthcentury enlargement of the plaster cast collection. Vilar asked his mentor Pietro Tenerani to send sculptures representing clothed and nude figures from the Vatican and Capitoline Museums, that included the Discobolus, Demosthenes, Zeno, torsos, busts, extremities, and reliefs.13 Tenerani decided to enlist the help of European sculptors such as Pietro Ceci, Angelo Contini and Giuseppe Candiotti in order to satisfy the huge request from the Mexican Academy.14 Vilar’s commission concentrated on classical pieces as well as on works by his beloved mentor Tenerani and other renowned artists, with the aim of organizing a museum of the history of sculpture where works from different cultures, ages and styles could be admired.15 At first these sculptures were shown in the Academy classrooms, but from 1859 to 1862 special galleries were built, and existing ones adapted, to exhibit them.16 The wider public greatly appreciated classical models and the press stated that through imitation, students would turn the country into “a new Athens, a flourishing Rome, a poetic Florence”.17

___________ 12 An important military and political figure in the history of Mexico, Antonio López de Santa Anna, was eleven times President of the Mexican Republic. His political mistakes led to the loss of half Mexico’s territory from 1847 to 1848. 13 S. Moreno. Manuel Vilar (Mexico, 1965), p. 56. 14 Letter from Pietro Tenerani, 30 May 1856. Archivo de la Academia de San Carlos. Facultad de Arquitectura, UNAM, document 6658. 15 S. Moreno, M. Vilar, Copiador de Cartas y Diario Particular (Mexico, 1979), p. 181. 16 Fuentes Rojas, Historia Gráfica. 17 “[…] harán de este país, una nueva Atenas, una florida Roma, una poética Florencia […]”. I. Rodríguez, La Crítica de Arte en México en el Siglo XIX (Mexico, 1997), I , p. 217.

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Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas

Fig. 11. 3: Second Gallery of Modern Mexican Sculpture. Manuel Buenabad, 1897. Albumin, 17 x 23 cm. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

The participation of the Director of Sculpture Manuel Vilar, was key to the reorganization of the Sculpture Galleries. It was he who divided them both thematically and chronologically, and properly set the pieces on bases and pedestals. Furthermore, he gathered modern sculpture produced by his own disciples in a gallery named after him that represented new versions of classical works (Fig. 11. 3). Original works as well as student studies relating to the sculpture courses were shown in the workshops. They included the study of the antique, modelling from nature and portraits, ideal busts, inventions, works submitted by retired sculptors, works by artists outside the Academy, marble practice, etc. These works aroused such interest that they were mentioned first in the reviews of every exhibition in the museum.18 The collection grew so large that by 1879 it occupied nine rooms. However, these galleries

___________ 18 See the articles on the exhibitions at the Academia de San Carlos in M. Romero de Terreros, Catálogos de las Exposiciones de la Antigua Academia de San Carlos de México, 1850–1898 (Mexico, 1963).

Art and Pedagogy in the Plaster Cast Collection of the Academia de San Carlos 235

started deteriorating due to the humidity on the Academy’s first floor where they were located, and in the twentieth century, the works were regularly removed in order to exhibit other art pieces or to establish new classrooms.19 Finally, in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Principal of the Academy Antonio Rivas Mercado, the architect Carlos Lazo, and the Director of Sculpture Enrique Alciati selected eighteenth- and nineteenth-century French, and Renaissance Italian works for the third stage of acquisitions. From the Paris Academy came casts that included a few antique and medieval works, later ones by Donatello and Benvenuto Cellini, Michelangelo’s Moses and figures from his tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, reliefs by Luca Della Robbia as well as Jean Goujon’s Nymph reliefs from the Fontaine des Innocents. The set consisted of ninety-seven pieces including complete figures, torsos, heads and busts.20 It was a huge addition even though several rooms of the Academy had been closed to introduce a new French drawing system known as Pillet, referred to below.21 It is the Academy’s drawing collection that most clearly shows how plaster casts were used. Over 5000 drawings, from the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, are preserved. This collection had its foundation in the prints and drawings that the first European professors of the Academy had acquired or made themselves as teaching models for their courses. Later on, the number increased as prize-winning works, drawings submitted to obtain a degree and a selection of drawings from the workshops were added to it.22 The Drawing Workshop was among the institution’s main attractions, appealing not only to students pursuing a degree, but also to artisans anxious to improve their skill and obtain better jobs. Because of its great priority, this workshop was supported both by drawing correctors and by the Academy’s directors of painting, sculpture, engraving and architecture. From the first days of the Academy, as in similar institutions, drawing was regarded as the basis for all artistic disciplines such as engraving, sculpture, painting and architecture. Students would start their studies with four consecutive drawing courses. The Beginners Room was dedicated to the copying of

___________ 19 To establish Pillet, the new French drawing system, seven professors were required and ten classrooms to teach it, Fuentes Rojas, Historia Gráfica, pp. 189-207. 20 The source of this list is a document dated 1916, quoted in Bargellini and Fuentes Rojas, Guía para captar lo bello, pp. 59-98. 21 E. L. G. Charvet and J. J. Pillet, Enseignement primaire du dessin. Cours Élémentaire. (Paris, 1886); V. Darchez, Nouveaux éxercices de dessin à main levée d’après les derniers programms officiels. Cours élementaire (Paris, 1887). The Pillet System was introduced at the Academy in 1903 and practiced until 1913. See Fuentes Rojas, Historia Gráfica, pp. 189-207. 22 C. Bargellini and E. Fuentes, La Atracción de lo Clásico in Clasisismo en México (Mexico, 1990).

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parts of the face and body from prints, focusing mainly on eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hands and feet. Then sculpture and nature were drawn from prints. In the third course the student entered the Plaster Cast Copying Room and completed a series of exercises of increasing complexity. Finally, the fourth course introduced the students to drawing directly from nature and live models. This was to provide them with a deeper knowledge of the human figure and was the culmination of the programme. The role of the plaster casts as teaching aids in the Academy’s training cannot be underestimated. It is possible to explore the sculpture collection through the works of the Drawing Workshop. Research into the drawings collection by the present author and Dr Clara Bargellini analysed technical aspects of the material, such as paper pigmentation (ochre, blue or grey), the use of charcoal and sanguine, and the use of grey as highlighting, which enabled us to discern three different groups of drawings. These seem to relate to factors such as the arrival of the European professors and of new sets of plaster casts, factors that in turn depended on the economic situation of the institution.23 But while it is possible to determine these three phases, it should also be emphasized that not all professors introduced changes to the programmes upon their arrival and that some of them may not have immediately integrated newly arrived casts into their classes. The present outline of the three stages is therefore a necessary simplification of a more complex overall picture. During the first stage, from the foundation of the institution to the middle of nineteenth century, the appearance of the drawings is similar to that of engravings, and the works are usually done with the aid of fine cross hatching. This technique was widely used to model volume and to create tonal contrasts through light and shade. The institution’s Director, Gerónimo Gil, himself an engraver, surely influenced the way casts like the head of Cicero (Fig. 11. 4) were represented. There are plenty of print copy drawings representing dramatic figures and showing great command in the rendering of volume. A review of a single student’s drawings, undertaken as part of our research, revealed great advances in print copying, though in terms of the rendering of volume, the copying of figures from prints offered no challenge to the students.24 Drawings that represent the same piece from different angles corroborate the use of casts in the collection. Clearly, in these early years of the institution, drawings often display a baroque expressiveness and drama. Collaborating professors from guild workshops who were not well versed in the Academy’s neo-classical doctrines did

___________ 23 Bargellini and Fuentes Rojas, Guía para captar lo bello. 24 Bargellini and Fuentes Rojas, Guía para captar lo bello, pp. 41-50.

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also assert an influence on the drawing styles that can be found in the works from this period.25 One more significant issue of that time was the frequent attempt to use casts for the representation of living figures, whereby sculpted figures are placed in a natural context through the provision of a landscape background or at least an allusion to a horizon line. At the same time, attributes from sculptures were added to studies after life models.26 This first period is rich in drawings after a wide variety of plaster casts, including the Apollo Belvedere, Seated Mercury, Dancing Faun, Antinoüs, Ganymede, the Wrestlers, Castor and Pollux, and Cupid and Psyche. As for female sculptures like the Venus Fig. 11. 4: Head of Cicero. Jerónimo Antonio Gil (attributed), 1779. Graphite on paper, 16 x de’ Medici, Venus with Cupid, the 12 cm. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. UniMuse Thalia and Leda, these were versidad Nacional Autónoma de México. not only appreciated as canonical works, but also because they provided the only access to the female figure at this time (Fig. 11. 5). Copying from live female models did not begin until the London Academy started this practice in the eighteenth century.27 The Mexican Academy allowed it for the first time in 1867, but it was not until the late twentieth century that it was firmly established.28

___________ 25 The painting workshop of Miguel Cabrera produced the following professors: Francisco Alzibar, Francisco Vallejo, Andrés López y Francisco Clapera. Drawings Correctors included Rafael Iñoqui, N. de Gutierrez and M. García, Archivo de la Academia de San Carlos. Facultad de Arquitectura. Document 277, May 1788. 26 Examples of this practice are: unknown artist, Venus de Medici (inv. 08-644646) Mariano García, Seated Mercury (inv. 08-662301). 27 In many other academies the use of female nude models was introduced during the nineteenth century (e.g. Stockholm 1839, Naples 1870 and Berlin 1875). N. Pevsner, Academies of Art: Past and Present (Cambridge, 1940), p. 231. 28 The Director of the Academy Ramón Alcaraz allowed life drawing from female and male models in 1867 as a measure to redress imperfections in the drawings of the nude human figure by painters, engravers and sculptors alike. Benito Juárez, the President of Mexico approved it: Archivo General de la Nación, Instrucción Pública y Bellas Artes, caja 1, exp. 57. The earliest surviving drawings

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Fig. 11. 5: Venus de’ Medici. Felipe González, 1797. Graphite on paper, 16 x 42 cm. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

During the second stage, from the middle of the nineteenth century to its end, the number of drawings after plaster casts decreases and it seems that sculpture was less frequently used as a model in the courses. A few technical changes characterize this period; softer tonal contrasts and the fading of cast shadows give a more pictorial aspect to the images, while the background to the figures remains untouched.29 It is during this period that the Wrestlers became the most copied group in the collection (Fig. 11. 6). Apparently, students were now allowed to study parts of sculpture in isolation, as some drawings only represent faces or the torso of otherwise complete sculptures.30 These developments reflect changes made to the programmes by new professors. In fact, the drawing courses were now divided into three levels, the Beginners’ Room was suppressed, and instruction started with copying figures from prints.31

___________ after life models in the Academy’s Drawing Collection are by Pilar Valle (1887) and by Miguel Angel Pérez (1913). E. Fuentes Rojas. Presencia de la Mujer en la Academia. (Mexico, 1990), p. 24. 29 See, for example, Manuel Buenabad, The Discobolous, 1869, inv. 08-646530; Felix Sierra, Bust of Seneca, 1864, inv. 08-646494. 30 See, for example, Lauro Campos, The Wrestlers, 1860, inv. 08-644792. 31 S. Moreno, El Pintor Pelegrín Clavé (Mexico, 1966), p. 34.

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Fig. 11. 6. The Wrestlers. Lauro Campos, 1860. Charcoal on paper, 46 x 60 cm. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Another change that was introduced at this point was the parallel study of plaster casts and live models, where the physique of the chosen models as well as their poses echoed those of the classical sculptures. Manuel Vilar, the newly arrived Professor of Sculpture from Spain also introduced a new sculpture programme. He subdivided his course into six stages trying to balance modelling practice and plaster cast drawing. For the purposes of threedimensional modelling, he chose plaster casts, starting with those of extremities, torsos and heads, and progressing to individual statues and groups. In his drawing classes the same sections of the body were then studied with the use of live models. In addition, these exercises included relief copying that grew progressively more complicated. Finally, three-dimensional models were executed in marble, stucco or wood.32 Another important change in drawing practices marks the third stage at the beginning of the twentieth century. Once again, a wide variety of plaster casts was used and two new ways of representing sculptures emerged: in one group

___________ 32 Archivo de la Academia de San Carlos. Facultad de arquitectura, UNAM, document 6727.

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of drawings forms are barely defined and there is no tonal modelling. Here exercises focus on a single theme until the student masters it fully. The vast majority of the drawings of this period, though, show heavy contrasts of light and shade, perhaps in part a result of the introduction of electric light in classrooms (Fig. 11. 7). What both groups have in common is a lack of respect for the once honoured sculptures, that are now treated as simple objects. Small sculptures were widely used for easy manipulation and studied in rather unconventional and potentially subversive positions, for example, reclining or lying on the floor. It was in this way that the famous Mexican artist Diego Rivera copied the Venus de Milo, at a stage in his career when he no longer tried to represent a classic sculpture or even make it recognizable, but only showed the challenge of representing Fig. 11. 7: The Slave. Lauro Serrano, 1908. Charcoal on paper, 59 x 34 cm. Escuela Nacioa figure in perspective on paper (Fig. nal de Artes Plásticas. Universidad Nacional 11. 8). In other studies from this peAutónoma de México. riod, broken pieces were chosen, without any attempt to conceal their noticeable damage or poor condition.33 This new way of approaching these sculptural models that had enjoyed a privileged treatment for over a century clearly reflected the dramatic changes that took place in the teaching of drawing techniques. In fact, the Director of Painting Antonio Fabrés, freshly arrived from Spain, introduced in 1903 two remarkable novelties to the figure drawing courses: firstly, white and coloured electric light, and secondly photographs of models to be used for comparison with the drawings.34 Another change was, as mentioned earlier, the introduction

___________ 33 Diego Rivera, Study of the Venus de Milo, 1903, inv. 08-646932; M. Iturbide, Venus de’ Medici, 1908, inv. 08-646483; L. Serrano, Torso of the Hercules Farnese, 1908, inv. 08-646781. 34 ‘Plan de Estudios de la Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes’, Diario Oficial, México, Monday 2 February 1903, number 28, pp. 433-9.

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Fig. 11. 8: Venus de Milo. Diego Rivera, 1903. Charcoal on paper, 34 x 45 cm. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

of the Pillet Drawing System, also known as “Elemental Imitation Drawing”, practiced in Paris at the end of nineteenth century. This drawing system required students to copy objects, producing series of drawings of increasing complexity as well as small scale sculptural models, and mural drawings. In all three stages of the Academy’s development, the selection of newly acquired plaster casts can be explained with regard to the shape and presentation of the collection as well as the varying approaches to the casts in the different courses. The initial collection aimed to provide the students and general public with a wide and representative variety of copies of canonical sculptures, both antique and later. While the Dancing Faun was the most frequently drawn figure at that period, in the second stage newly arrived works were introduced in the courses and the Discobolus with its athletic anatomy apparently became the most attractive piece. While the admiration for classical works prevailed in this period, during the third stage small-scale reproductions of Donatello’s and Michelangelo’s works were the most appreciated figures allowing a variety of exercises facilitated by the small format of the casts. It was at this point, during the early twentieth century, that several pro-

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fessors had studied in Europe where Renaissance Florentine art was en vogue and they surely helped its diffusion upon their return to Mexico.35 A document of 1911 reveals the continuing appreciation for the sculptures. As the academy building was undergoing modifications, three professors, the painters Jose Salome Pina, Felix Parra and Tomas Cordero, expressing their concern for the dignity and public image of the Academy found that: […] except for the painting and sculpture galleries, unfortunately there is nothing in the building that in appearance can stand before the strong demands of good taste. Fortunately and thanks to the supreme government, we are in a position to lead our beloved school to occupy the rank it deserves among public buildings of this city […]. The court […] turned into a hall by the addition of the artistically decorated dome, could have multiple uses, serving as a meeting place for artists, [as a venue] for exhibitions and public acts, as a museum of contemporary works, etc. No one ignores the impact it might make […] and that could be enhanced by 36 statues placed at the most appropriate spots.

Undoubtedly, the presence of the plaster casts was still considered a means to dignify the appearance of the Academy spaces. The three authors considered building a dome over the central court to rescue the works that had been displaced to make room for the Pillet system, and to give them a place that was as privileged as the one they once had in the institution. This appears to have been the reason why, at the same time, the Conservator of Sculpture received a rise in his salary. This was officially explained by “the importance the plaster casts have gained for all the classes with the reorganization of the school”.37 The dome was built in France by the Lapeyrère Company and installed in 1913. A photograph of the Plaster Cast Drawing Workshop from around 1908– 1910 portrays a splendidly equipped room with a variety of plaster casts,

___________ 35 Many Mexican professors studied in or visited Europe in the early twentieth century, for example, Joaquin Clausel (1866–1935), Gerardo Murillo (1875–1964), Francisco Romano Guillemín (1884–1950), Francisco Goitia (1882–1962), and Alfredo Ramos Martínez (1875–1946). 36 “[…] por desgracia en el establecimiento, excepción hecha de las galerías de pintura y escultura, [no hay] nada que pueda por su aspecto responder a las exigencias imperiosas del buen gusto. Por fortuna gracias a la indicación del Supremo Gobierno nos encontramos en aptitud de hacer que nuestra querida escuela ocupe el rango que le corresponde entre los edificios públicos de la metropoli […]. El patio […] convertido en un hall por la adición de la cúpula artisticamente decorada, podrá tener aplicaciones múltiples, sirviendo de punto de reunión de los artistas, sala de certámenes y de actos públicos, de museo de obras de actualidad, etc. Nadie ignora la impresión que podrá causar […]que podrá aumentar si se colocan estatuas en los puntos mas convenientes […]”. Letter by the Commissioners José Salome Piña and Félix Parra and the Secretary Tomás Cordero to the Director of the Escuela de Bellas Artes. Archivo de la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, México, mss, 27 September 1900, 18/08712204. 37 “[…] la importancia que han tomado los modelos de yeso para todas las clases, conforme a la reorganización de la Escuela”. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas Archives, Mexico, mss, 1905–1906, 18/08712213.

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Fig. 11. 9: Plaster cast drawing class. Unknown artist, c. 1908–1910. Gelatine silver print, 27 x 34 cm. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

including several small-scale figures of the Roman goddess Venus, the Doryphoros, and Renaissance works such as Michelangelo’s David. There was also a shelf with heads of philosophers, emperors and Greco-Roman gods, as well as furnishings for the course, including easels, lamps and strong top lighting (Fig. 11. 9). In 1913, Director Jesus Galindo y Villa, suppressed the Pillet drawing system and assigned Professor Eduardo de la Concha to reorganize the Sculpture Room.38 Later on, during Gerardo Murillo’s brief period in charge in 1914, plaster cast copying was excluded and the number of rooms dedicated to the exhibition of sculpture was reduced even further.39 A few years later, Professor José de la Cruz Tovar no longer considered classical works in his decorative

___________ 38 J. Galindo y Villa, Nota informativa en el acto público de entregar la Dirección de la Academia Nacional de bellas Artes al Sr. D. Alfredo Ramos Martínez (Mexico, 1913). 39 Gerardo Murillo was known as ‘Dr. Atl’ because of the ‘Atlcolours’ he invented.

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sculpture programme and made use of Mayan and Aztec ornamental motives instead. Resistance to the use of classical sculptures as teaching tools was such that in 1927 the Free School of Sculpture and Direct Carving (Escuela Libre de Escultura y Talla Directa) was founded, that proposed to fight European influence, favour nationalism, and look for a free plastic expression through the copying of human models and nature.40 The justification appeared in a newspaper article: Sculpture in Mexico had degenerated to an excessive degree. Absurd academic methods prevailed where the artist’s particular intuition and qualities were suffocated by the despicable dictatorship […] of strict formulae. The sculptural production that was achieved under such conditions had a distinctive seal: it was a cold, inert, lifeless mass. Even worse, one gave unusual preference to copying 41 bad antique sculptures […].

The review of several study programmes from the 1920s onwards allows us to identify in basic terms the transformations that led to the eventual end of studying after plaster casts in the Academy. The 1927 programme gave professors full freedom to apply their own teaching methods, and students attended the workshop of their choice.42 The 1929 programme attempted instilling young artists with modern approaches, suppressing old designations of classes and, in an attempt to provide students with general culture, it included both language and Mexican history courses to “[…] make students and professors aware of today’s manifestations of world art so that in their difference to [Mexico’s] national art they can find their own personality”. The programmes also promoted the use of life models. (Fig. 11. 10).43

___________ 40 The Free School of Sculpture and Direct Carving (Escuela Libre de Escultura y Talla Directa) was founded in 1927 to teach artistic education to working class students. It was located in the cloister of the ex-convent de la Merced until 1929. 41 “La escultura en México había degenerado hasta un punto excesivo. Prevalecían los absurdos métodos académicos, en que la intuición y cualidades particulares del artista son ahogados por la odiosa dictadura […] de la fórmula estricta. La producción plástica obtenida bajo tales determinantes tenía un sello peculiar […] era una masa fría, inerte, sin vida. Y lo que es peor, se daba inusitada preferencia a la copia de malas esculturas antiguas”. Archivo Gráfico de la Escuela nacional de Artes Plásticas. Album del Plan de Estudios Profesionales de la Escuela de Escultura y Talla Directa (Mexico, 1927).. 42 F. E. Sánchez Arreola, Catálogo del Archivo de la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, 1857– 1968, Archivo del Centro de Estudios sobre la Universidad (Mexico, 1998). 43 “[…] hacer que los alumnos y profesores conozcan las manifestaciones actuales del arte mundial para que puedan, en la diferencia con el arte patrio hallar su personalidad propia. Los métodos […] promovieron que se usara el modelo vivo y que los alumnos desarrollaran libremente su espiritú artístico”. Escuela de Bellas Artes, letter by the Provisional Director Manuel Toussaint to the Provisional Rector of the Universidad Nacional. See also the latter’s report to the Mexican President of 13 August 1929 in: E. Fuentes Rojas, Catálogo de los Archivos Documentales de la Academia de San Carlos 1900–1929 (Mexico, 2000), pp. 230-1.

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Fig. 11. 10: José Cruz Tovar’s modelling workshop. Unknown artist, 1930. Gelatine silver print, 11 x 16 cm. Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

The 1930 programme reflects the socio-political tendencies of the Directorship of Diego Rivera and his deep knowledge of issues related to artistic training. He first stated that it was impossible to limit the learning of art since it depended on human talent and he established what he called a: […] programme of minimal knowledge required for a socially efficient exercise of the plastic artist’s profession […] [;] the school will constitute […] a huge workshop that continuously aims to establish collective artistic work[,] […] provide students with the most complete technical skills possible, so that, upon graduating, they are able to play the social role every artist must take on nowadays, and at the same time, turn them into real technical workers, skilled in the 44 crafts that are directly connected to the fine arts […].

___________ 44 “[…] programa mínimo de conocimientos necesarios para el ejercicio con eficiencia social del oficio de artista plástico […] la escuela constituirá […] un gran taller que tenderá continuamente al establecimiento del trabajo artístico colectivo […] dar a los alumnos la capacidad técnica más completa posible de manera que al salir de la escuela puedan desempeñar el papel social que el artista debe tener actualmente, al mismo tiempo hacer de ellos verdaderos obreros técnicos hábiles con los oficios que con las bellas artes se conectan directamente […]”. D. Rivera, ‘Explicación de Motivos para Organizar el Programa de Estudios de la Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas’, in D. Rivera (ed.), Arte y Política Teoría y Praxis. Selection Prologue, References and Biographical data from R. Tibol (Mexico, 1979), pp. 87-94.

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He divided studies into two cycles: a five-year superior cycle for those who had visited the junior high school, and a three year long preparatory cycle for workers. He prescribed life models for all studies of the human figure. It was not until 1935 that three professors re-integrated the use of plaster casts into the teaching programme of the Academy. The study programme of Professor Fidias Elizondo, known as the Modelled Sculpture Workshop, required study in front of the casts throughout the four-year course.45 The Professor of Sculpture Arnulfo Domínguez Bello mentioned, among the works executed by his students, several copies of dressed and nude figures based on plaster cast models, including a copy of the gladiator torso.46 Likewise, Professor Lorenzo Alvarado trained students to copy plaster cast relief heads, plaster cast copies of complete relief figures and ornamental motifs.47 The effects of the exclusion of plaster casts from the courses and their subsequent re-siting are described in a document by Eduardo de la Concha, the Conservator of the Sculpture Galleries from approximately 1913 through 1938. De la Concha complains about the damage caused to the sculptures by placing them in the court, and states that some of the works had remained in the storeroom un-exhibited, for over 25 years, “[…] and all that time I have to carry them around. Now it seems they have reached the promised land […]”.48 In fact, due to the use of the court for exhibitions, sculptures were also constantly taken from there back to the store-room, which harmed the fragile plaster. Even when in 1935 it had been decided to reopen the galleries, they were soon closed again, due to lack of funding for their proper custody. Nevertheless, the Conservator said that, although the sculptures were ignored in the courses, some of them remained on display in the court and were frequently visited by foreign tourists looking for works by Mexican artists.49 A number of professors still carried on using plaster casts in their classes in the first decades of the twentieth century, but this was less frequent and

___________ 45 Archivo de la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Fideas Elizondo, Proyecto del Programa del Plan de Estudios para la Carrera de Escultor en la Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas de la UNAM (México, 1935). 46 Archivo de la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Arnulfo Domínguez Bello. Proyecto del Programa del Plan de Estudios para la Carrera de Escultor en la Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas de la UNAM (Mexico, 1935). 47 Archivo de la Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas. Lorenzo Alvarado, Proyecto del Programa del Plan de Estudios para la Carrera de Escultor en la Escuela Central de Artes Plásticas de la UNAM (Mexico, 1935). 48 “[…] y todo ese tiempo tengo que andar con ellos de un lado para otro: ahora parece que llegan a la tierra prometida […]”. Letter by Eduardo de la Concha to the Institución de los Monumentos Artísticos, Arqueológicos e Históricos de la República, 31 August 1931, Archivo Particular de Salvador Moreno. 49 Idem.

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they were strongly criticized by professors leaning towards neo-indigenous tendencies.50 As a result the casts after European works disappeared slowly from the programmes and stayed gathering dust in the store-room. Only those pieces decorating classrooms and the court remained in decent conditions. In the second half of the twentieth century, the School’s erratic approach to the plaster cast collection led to its dispersal to other institutions, such as museums and schools. A proposal to this effect was accepted by the Academy in 1963 on the grounds of the difficulty in keeping the casts in good condition. The document states that plaster casts lack “real artistic value”, even though it admitted that “due to the origin, age and good quality of the moulds, one can say it is a unique collection, with high documentary and pedagogical value”.51 The Academy kept over a hundred pieces as didactic material. The most important ones are still exhibited in prominent locations inside the School, including the library, a few offices, and, above all, the court, thus providing the building with a very distinctive image. It is precisely the court where drawing after the casts is still occasionally practiced both by the academic community and by the general public. Although they have been removed from the Academy’s study methods and programmes, they will surely experience a revival in the near future, due to the opening of the old Sculpture Galleries of the Academy Museum. In fact, after more than two decades of closure, the old Galleries are likely to be reopened soon, as their restoration is finally reaching conclusion. This recreation of the original site of the collection has stimulated a new interest in the recuperation and display of the collection with the aim of recovering what was the first American museum.

Frequently cited literature C. Bargellini and E. Fuentes Rojas, Guía para captar lo bello. Yesos y dibujos de la Academia de San Carlos 1778–1916 (Mexico, 1989) T. A. Brown, La Academia de San Carlos de la Nueva España, 2 vols (Mexico, 1976) E. Fuentes Rojas. Historia Gráfica. Fotografías de la Academia de San Carlos1897–1940 (Mexico, 2007)

___________ 50 A Professor who took this stance was Francisco Goitia; A. Luna Arroyo, Francisco Goitia Total (Mexico, 1987), p. 227. 51 “[…] dada la procedencia, antigüedad y buena calidad de los vaciados, puede decirse que constituye una colección única, de alto valor documental y pedagógico”. Bargellini and Fuentes Rojas. Guía para captar lo Bello, p. 36.

Artists’ Workshops

Picturing the Use, Collecting and Display of Plaster Casts in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Artists’ Studios in Antwerp and Brussels LÉON E. LOCK

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a few painters in the Low Countries developed what might be termed a specific genre: the studio interior. The present paper wishes to address this phenomenon and analyse these studio views to refute or corroborate their documentary value. After the deaths of Rubens and Van Dyck, of which the latter is traditionally heralded as the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Flemish painting, several initiatives were taken to circumvent the deteriorating artistic situation. The most important one was the founding of an academy in Antwerp, established by royal decree in 1663, on the initiative of the Guild of St Luke and financed with the help of the Governor General.1 That sculpture was included in the Academy’s remit shows how much the profession of sculptors had gained in status since they joined the Guild of St Luke in 1606. Rubens’s ideas on sculpture, stressing the “community of painting and sculpture”2 certainly played a role in its emancipation. Before the official Academy was established in Antwerp, the painter Michael Sweerts had organized a private academy in Brussels in the late 1650s,3 where he also practized life drawing classes, a subject that features also in his paintings.4 Representations of life classes are otherwise rare, as are drawings after the living model by Netherlandish sculptors. Only academic studies of the male nude by the Amsterdam

___________ 1

2

3 4

F. J. Van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Academie van Antwerpen (Antwerp, 1867); L. T. Van Looij, ‘De Antwerpse Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten’, Leids Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, 5-6 (1986–87), pp. 302-19. “de ghemeynschap die onse Consten van Schildry ende Beldthouwery t’samen hebben”, quoted from Rubens’s recommendation letter for Lucas Faydherbe, published by C. De Bie, Het Gulden Cabinet vande edel vry Schilder-const inhoudende den Lof vande vermarste schilders, architecte, beeldhouwer ende plaetsnyders van dese eeuw (Antwerp, 1661), p. 501. R. Kultzen, Michael Sweerts, Brussels 1618– Goa 1664 (Doornspijk, 1996), pp. 43-8. The Drawing School, Frans Halsmuseum, Haarlem; Jensen and Sutton (eds), Michael Sweerts, p. 133.

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Fig. 12. 1: Ecorché foot. Unknown artist, eighteenth century. Terracotta, h: 17.5, l: 33 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels.

sculptor Jan van Logteren have been preserved.5 But life classes were widespread as attested for instance by Lucas Faydherbe’s statue of Christ on his monument to Archbishop Cruesen in the Cathedral of Mechelen. This cannot be imagined without such training, especially since its compositional and iconographic model was Jérôme II Duquesnoy’s monument to Bishop Triest in the cathedral of Ghent, that in turn is based on Michelangelo’s far more classical figure of Christ in S. Maria sopra Minerva in Rome. Exercises in modelling would have been performed in clay. Unless they were subsequently fired or cast in plaster, they have long since disappeared. Two rare testimonies to eighteenth-century academic practice are an anonymous écorché foot (Fig. 12. 1)6 and a male academic study (Fig. 12. 2),7 both in terracotta. These are more likely to have been teaching models than student works, as it is unlikely that student work was intended to survive.

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6 7

E.g. Brussels, Royal Library, inv. SIII.15262. A. Jacobs (ed.), Sculpter au crayon. Dessins de sculpteurs du XVIIe siècle à nos jours (Brussels, 2004), p. 68; P. M. Fischer, Ignatius en Jan van Logteren. Beeldhouwers en Stuckunstenaars in het Amsterdam van de 18de eeuw (Alphen aan den Rijn, 2005), pp. 319-25. Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, inv. 2419/854. Idem, inv. 2420.

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Fig. 12. 2: Male Academy. Unknown artist, eighteenth century. Terracotta, h: 61, w: 26.5 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels.

Among the paintings that depict studios and academies there are several that may be categorized as allegories, as most of these works celebrate the necessity of training in draughtsmanship, as drawing encouraged an immediate and informal encounter with the work being drawn. The multiplicity of intentions in the act of copying another work may be summarized by the desire to record, interpret, criticize and, especially, to learn.8 The typical stages a student

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E. Haverkamp-Begemann with C. Logan, Creative Copies. Interpretative Drawings from Michelangelo to Picasso (New York, 1988), p. 13.

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went through9 are all shown, sometimes several of them in the same picture: students copying prints and drawings, as in Jan Steen’s A Master Correcting a Pupil’s Drawing,10 students copying plaster casts and anatomical works, as in Sweerts’ and Jacob van Oost’s Painter’s Studio.11 Adriaen van der Werff’s Self-Portrait with a Plaster Cast12 stresses how much three-dimensional exercises were essential to understanding the proportions of the human body. Here a pair of compasses was useful, whereas in life classes the eye alone had to do the work. In another picture by Sweerts, An Artist’s Studio with a Woman SewFig. 12. 3: Boy in the Studio. Wallerant Vaillant (1623–1677). Mezzotint, 27.5 x 21.3 cm. Private ing,13 amongst other casts, a plaster collection. cast after a relief by François Duquesnoy is prominently displayed and in the Boy in the Studio (Fig. 12. 3),14 a mezzotint by Wallerant Vaillant, after Jan Lievens,15 a plaster cast of the Christ Child from Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna is shown. In these as well

___________ 9 The Academy at Antwerp followed largely the procedures of the Paris Academy. 10 J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, inv. 83.PB.388. J. Walsh, Jan Steen, the Drawing Lesson (Los Angeles, Calif., 1996), p. 42. See also M. L. Wurfbain et al., Catalogus van de schilderijen en tekeningen, Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal (Leiden, 1983), p. 318. 11 Brugge, Groeningemuseum, inv. O188.1. H. Friedel (ed.), Pygmalions Werkstatt, Die Erschaffung des Menschen im Atelier von der Renaissance bis zum Surrealismus (Munich, 2001), p. 154. 12 Worms, Kunsthaus Heylshof, inv. 47. W. Schenkluhn (ed.), Stiftung Kunsthaus Heyslhof. Kritischer Katalog der Gemäldesammlung (Worms, 1992), p. 170. 13 Köln, Unicef, Rau Collection. D. A. Levine and E. Mai, I Bamboccianti. Niederländische Malerrebellen im Rom des Barock, exh. cat. Cologne, Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, and Utrecht, Centraal Museum, 1991 (Milan, 1991), p. 283; Mai and Wettengl (eds), Wettstreit der Künste, p. 326. 14 E. de Jongh and G. Luijten, Mirror of everyday life. Genre prints in the Netherlands 1550–1700 (Amsterdam, 1997), p. 351. 15 Paris, Louvre, cf. B. Schnackenburg, ‘Knabe im Atelier und Bücherstilleben, zwei frühe Gemälde von Jan Lievens und ihr Leidener Kontext: Rembrandt, Jan Davidz. de Heem, Pieter Codde’, Oud Holland, 117.1-2 (2004), pp. 33-47; other versions in London, National Gallery, inv. 3591, see N. MacLaren and C. Brown, The Dutch School 1600–1900, National Gallery Catalogues (London, 1991), p. 439, and Antwerp, Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, inv. 617, see Mai and Wettengl (eds), Wettstreit der Künste, p. 330.

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Fig. 12. 4: A Brussels Drawing Academy with a Plaster Cast of the Borghese Gladiator. Philippe Joseph Tassaert, 1764. Pen and brown ink with brown wash over graphite, 33 x 40.6 cm. British Museum, London.

as in Sweerts’ Artist’s Studio,16 in Adriaen van der Werff’s The Study of Antique Sculptures17 and in Philippe Joseph Tassaert’s A Brussels Drawing Academy with a Plaster Cast of the Borghese Gladiator (Fig. 12. 4),18 it can be understood how plaster casts (like drawings) were used to learn about ancient and important contemporary Italian sculpture, knowledge enhancing both the artistic abilities and the social status of artists. This emphasis on drawing was also intimately connected with the social status that the act of drawing offered to artists, since they might also rely professionally on the prevalent practice

___________ 16 Detroit Institute of Arts; Mai and Wettengl (eds), Wettstreit der Künste, 120. 17 Private collection, see Mai and Wettengl (eds), Wettstreit der Künste, 332; other version Paris, Louvre, inv. MI 1012. 18 London, British Museum, inv. 2003.1129.1

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among the upper classes of sending their children to private drawing classes, as seen in Gabriel Metsu’s Young Lady Drawing.19 All these are useful visualizations, albeit allegorized, but how did training happen in practice and what testimonies do we have to judge the pictorial evidence against? Lacking relevant studio inventories, correspondence or other written documentation of the workshop we must take account of surviving models. Besides plaster casts after antique and contemporary sculpture, sculptors’ workshops typically contained a large number of terracotta models, representing interim stages of their own works as well as those by previous generations of sculptors.20 These modelled terracottas were avidly collected and carefully bequeathed, as they were considered an important asset in the sculptor’s workshop. They often served as motifs for new works, and allowed the artist to re-use or re-interpret a particular design at a later date. Collections of such terracotta models may be seen as the three-dimensional equivalent of sketchbooks, just as those of plaster casts may often be compared to engraved model books. One of the most spontaneous (and therefore faithful) representations of a sculptor’s studio is that of an anonymous drawing at Bremen (Fig. 12. 5),21 probably drawn in the Northern Netherlands around the middle of the seventeenth century, as suggested by the type of sculpture represented in the workshop.22 On the left and right of the door under a thermal window appear two statues and a head, each on a console. The statues are roughly two and three feet high and might be terracotta models for statues of saints or allegorical personifications. On the left, we see a reclining figure, probably a life-size gisant for a tomb monument. Further to the left, on the adjacent wall, a lifesize angel stands on a pedestal. The ledge above the left door holds, from left to right, a model of a two- or three-figure group, a half-length figure, a reclining figure (partial model of a tomb monument?), a head, a standing putto holding what might be a lance and a small bust. As to the material of these models, the drawing does not provide any information, but most of them are likely to be terracotta models by the artist who worked in this studio. With the

___________ 19 London, National Gallery, inv. 5225, see N. MacLaren and C. Brown, The Dutch School 1600– 1900, National Gallery Catalogues (London, 1991), p. 259. 20 It should be noted that not all reproductions of well-known works were necessarily in plaster; some may also have been cast in clay and fired, but none of these have survived. Similarly there is the possibility that artists may have cast their own models in plaster, rather than firing them, but, again, no such plaster models have survived. 21 Bremen, Kunsthalle, inv. 56/523. 22 This includes tomb monuments, that were the main type of sculptural commissions in the mainly Protestant Northern Netherlands, but not recognisable parts of altarpieces, confessionals, choir stalls, communion rails, etc. prevalent in the Catholic Southern Netherlands.

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Fig. 12. 5: A Sculptor’s Studio. Unknown artist, mid seventeenth century. Pen and brown ink with grey wash on blue paper, 17.4 x 25.8 cm. Kunsthalle, Bremen.

possible exception of the bust, which could be a tête d’expression,23 they do not reproduce well-known works, and are therefore unlikely to be in plaster. On the other side of the workshop, set apart from the two works on the right of the central door, a slab of stone, possibly marble, leans against the wall; a roughly blocked-out half-size figure stands on a wooden base in the corner. Then follow two objects hanging on the wall that could be models or casts of limbs that may either be after life or taken from classical sculptures, two roughly blocked-out pieces of stone or marble on the floor and a sculpture of a horseman on a wall bracket. The latter, going at a vivid pace and without saddle, resembles antique rather than contemporary representations,24 and is therefore more than likely a plaster cast reproduction rather than a fired clay model by the artist. In the niche on the right, with its curious heavy and order-

___________ 23 On têtes d’expression, see e.g. J. Montagu, The expression of the passions: the origin and influence of Charles Le Brun’s “Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière” (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1994). 24 E.g. the Equestrian Balbus, F. Haskell and N. Penny, Taste and the Antique. The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500–1900 2nd edn (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992), p. 158.

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less column (merely a shaft), half-hewn blocks of stone or marble are placed side by side, the furthest at the right possibly already carved as a high relief, of which a figure’s knee and head might tentatively be recognized. Finally, in front of the niche stands the largest sculpture in the studio: a nearly life-size figure of an undefined female personification, draped fully and slickly, but with half-uncovered breasts. The architectural setting of this workshop is certainly appropriate for the production of monumental sculpture. The space is high and large, with ample lighting from windows that are placed high up above eye level. To make the light diffuse, specially conceived blinds can be lowered at will to change the lighting effect in the room according to the sun’s movements. The walls below these windows are kept bare apart from the sculptures described above. Compared with all other sculptor’s studio views studied here, this one is unusual in that it does not show any human presence or activity. The absence of tools and machinery might be accidental to the viewpoint of the draughtsman, but it might just as well be part of the artist’s compositional intention to represent an empty studio. It is noteworthy in fact that the architecture resembles a chapel, particularly given the Palladian thermal window above the central door, the three aisle windows curiously placed at an angle and the peculiar column that subdivides the space. Apart from an absence of human activity, there is no sign of work in progress, apart from a few seemingly abandoned roughly hewn blocks, neatly arranged around the walls, like all the other sculptures. The whole atmosphere breathes monastic quietness and cleanliness, suggesting that this is an image of carefully placed inspirational material, rather than a room where members of a workshop would work under the active leadership of a master sculptor. The drawing pertains more to the tradition of architectural drawings of the Northern Netherlands à la Pieter Saenredam, Anthonie de Lorme or Isaak van Nickele.25 The question remains as to whether this interior view really represents an actual sculptor’s studio. An anonymous painting in Glasgow26 (Fig. 12. 6) does exactly the opposite: it portrays a sculptor’s workshop in action. In the foreground a seated man, most likely the sculptor himself, holds a tool towards a model of a nude Apollo, presumably in clay, on a tripod. Further back on the right another figure, presumably a workshop assistant, stands holding hammer and chisel towards an over-life-size statue. We see only one wall of the room, the back one,

___________ 25 Cf. H. Jantzen, Das niederländische Architekturbild, 2nd edn (Braunschweig, 1909/1979). 26 Glasgow, Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Miss Ina J. Smillie gift, 1963. This painting has been attributed to Jacob van Oost the Elder and more recently, but unconvincingly, to Michael Sweerts, M. Kemp and M. Wallace, Spectacular Bodies. The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now, exh. cat. London, Hayward Gallery 2000–2001 (London, 2000), p. 74.

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on which a ledge displays an array of sculptures, as well as a coat, a hat and some tools underneath the ledge. From left to right we see a life-size head (with a little of the shoulders), similar to the possible tête d’expression of the drawing at Bremen; a nearly life-size statue of an écorché figure in movement (in a similar position to Giambologna’s Mercury, but with both feet on the socle); a male head; a small seated figure, probably of Minerva; a standing statuette identical to the one being carved by the ‘assistant’ in the scene and another head, probably of a boy. Finally, 12. 6: A Sculptor’s Studio. Unknown artist, largely hidden, there is an over-life- Fig. mid seventeenth century. Oil on canvas, 65 x 56 size statue in the middle background, cm. Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, Uniprobably also of Minerva, and on the versity of Glasgow. far right a roughly hewn block of stone or marble awaiting further carving. The small Minerva is probably a terracotta model, like its neighbour, of which we see the execution being undertaken. All the others could either be read as being of plaster or terracotta, except for the écorché figure, whose broken legs reveal a wooden or metal armature, implying that it cannot have been fired and must therefore be in plaster. These figures are either casts after existing antique or later sculptures or they are the sculptor’s own models. We cannot be certain what these figures are, although on the whole the painting conveys an impression of exactitude and naturalism. As in the Bremen drawing, the light from the window can be dimmed, in this case with the window panes themselves that are in translucent glass, with only a transparent star in the middle for decoration. The window is shown open, but can easily be closed with the rope on the right. And the window is again above eye-level, thereby isolating the studio from the real world, as in the Bremen drawing. So is this workshop a more accurate representation than the drawing at Bremen? On close inspection, there are a few inexplicable incongruities. Although the window plays an important role, the light in the picture does not come from it, but from a source on the left that is not shown and that is far too harsh to be usable in the studio. It is difficult to know if this is the painter’s invention or describing an actual phenomenon. The tools hanging on the wall are few compared to the actual needs of a sculptor’s workshop: a pair of com-

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passes, a hammer and four chisels (three more are shown: one in the hands and two on the floor in front of the statue), but there are no modelling or plaster casting tools. The man working in the background seems to be using a boucharde, as he is holding this tool at right angles to the statue’s surface. If it were a chisel, it would simply chip off the edge of the fold and thus damage the sculpture. The posture of the man is also problematic. His back is bent forward, his right leg far back, as if the hammering required enormous effort. This cannot be the case, as the statue is nearly finished and only needs surface fine tuning and in this position, the sculptor would get a backache. The statue the man is presumably chiselling could represent an apostle – he is holding a book under his arm as well as part of his drapery. This feature suggests that the statue is in marble, such heavy undercutting being difficult to do in a coarser-grained stone. The colour also speaks against the possibility that it is a statue in wood, as does the way the man is chiselling (a boucharde is not usable on wood). The other man, seated on a short bench in the foreground, seems to be working on a modello, a completely finished terracotta model. A piece of sponge and two spatulas are lying on the edge of the tripod, next to the statuette to stress this. In his hands he seems to be holding a sort of set-square (rendered with a horizontal line and a vertical one that is not so clear), as if measuring a distance between the legs. But what is he measuring? Is he planning on enlarging the model to a full-size model? If so, why is that model not shown in the painting? The man in the foreground is not luxuriously dressed, but clearly more refined than the other, especially if one considers his fur-lined hat and the colours of his dress. Is the viewer meant to understand in this way that he is the master and the other the assistant? Further it should be noted that there is little of the normal detritus of sculpture production lying around: just a few chippings from two marble statues being worked on by the man on the right. All these elements suggest a painter who did not fully understand the trade of sculpture and who apparently did not make sufficient sketches while in a real sculptor’s workshop preparing his painting. But at the same time, this painter wished to convey some specific messages about the status of the sculptor compared to his assistant, and by contrasting the designing (the modelling and measuring of proportion) and the execution (the carving). The figure of the écorché is obviously also symbolic of a knowledge of anatomy.27 While the whole composition does not breathe the monastic quietness of the Bremen drawing, it does give an impression of stillness and of being too organized. There is no clutter of sculptures, as they are all neatly positioned on a

___________ 27 Kemp and Wallace (note above), p. 75.

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ledge. Conveying a sense of immobility the painting does not give an impression of ongoing work. In this respect, the composition as a whole is unlike images of painters’ studios and academies by Michael Sweerts that stress the multiplicity of inspiration in a seemingly haphazard way with the clutter of paraphernalia around the artist or a throng of figures. From this examination it is evident that while at first glance representations of sculptors’ workshops may seem particularly faithful, on closer inspection they are revealed as careful constructions that should not be taken too literally. These are images of a particular type that have their own story to tell. This may be about the status of the sculptor who boasts an impressive collection of antiquities (generally in the form of plaster casts) or about his status as a creator of new models, and not about the workshop as a place where material was gathered and where man-power was all-important. It is in this mode that we should understand the large number of paintings by Gerard Thomas (1663–1721),28 Balthasar van den Bossche (1681–1715)29 and Jan Jozef Horemans the Elder (1682–1759)30 and the Younger (1714 – c. 1790).31 They emulated Sweerts and frequently represented studio interiors. Their work might be called the swan song of this specific genre. In one of Van den Bossche’s workshop interiors (Fig. 12. 7),32 the painter shows the different stages in the production of a life-size statue and its energetic and laborious process. The master has however distanced himself from this. Luxuriously dressed, he discusses business with clients, leaving the dirty manual work to two assistants. In a pair of paintings by Gerard Thomas, representing a painter’s and a sculptor’s studio (Figs. 12. 8),33 the sculptor is holding hammer and chisel and feigning to work on a large marble group of the Rape of the Sabines (clearly after Giambologna) while showing his abilities to a couple of potential clients who are richly adorned. The scene happens not in a workshop, but in the loggia of a palace with chequerboard marble flooring and grand curtains. In the

___________ 28 Cf. Z. Z. Filipczak, Picturing Art in Antwerp 1550–1700 (Princeton, N.J., 1987), pp. 177-90, for a discussion of all three painters. 29 Cf. also his paintings of sculptors’ studios, sold in Amsterdam (Paul Brandt), November 1979; London (Christie’s) 15 December 1989 lot 124; New York (Christie’s), 31 May 1990 lot 105; London (Sotheby’s) 12 December 1990 lot 170; New York (Christie’s) 5 October 1995 lot 5; London (Christie’s) 8 December 1995 lot 228. 30 See most recently on his biography: P. Wouters, ‘De schildersfamilie Horemans en een werk uit het KMSK’, Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, 1992, pp. 187-213, esp. pp. 193-6. 31 E.g. Phillips London 15 December 1998 lot 4. 32 With Rafael Valls, London, 2009. 33 Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels, inv. 4711 (The Sculptor’s Studio) and 4712 (The Painter’s Studio).

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Fig. 12. 7: A Sculptor’s Studio. Balthasar van den Bossche (1681–1715). Oil on canvas, 66.5 x 86 cm. Art market.

foreground, a young pupil is holding a block of paper stressing that drawing is the foundation of all artistic practice. He is sitting next to a heap of plaster casts after the antique, from which he is to derive his knowledge of the human anatomy. Amongst other paraphernalia, the painter’s studio contains a life-size statue of Mercury after Giambologna. Thus taken together, the pair of paintings shows how the arts of painting and sculpture ennoble and enrich the artists. These paintings say more about the social status artists were aspiring to in Antwerp around 1700 than about the workshop practices for which an attempt has been made to find a visual representation. In that respect they are no different from David II Teniers’s Monkey Sculptor’s Studio.34 So what did sculptor’s workshops of the period look like? Erik Duverger’s transcriptions of Antwerp probate inventories which he gathered over several

___________ 34 Madrid, Museo del Prado, inv. 1806. M. Díaz Padrón, Museo del Prado. Catálogo de pinturas, I, Escuela Flamenca Siglo XVII (Madrid, 1975), p. 401.

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Fig. 12. 8: A Sculptor’s Studio. Gerard Thomas (1663–1721). Oil on canvas, 69.5 x 59 cm. Royal Museums of Fine Arts, Brussels.

decades and subsequently published, provide substantial documentation about collecting habits in that city, including that of sculpture.35 Considering the weight of sculpture and the strength of the local supply, it can be assumed that a large proportion of the sculpture collected in Antwerp was locally produced, except for French and Italian bronze statuettes (particularly by Giambologna) that were avidly collected and displayed by the wealthy, but seem not to have been cast in Antwerp at the time. Thus these seventeenth-century Antwerp inventories not only give a good picture of sculpture consumption in Antwerp, but particularly of that which was produced locally for domestic use in collectors’ reception rooms. This is important as the great majority of seventeenthand eighteenth-century sculpture in the Southern Netherlands is of religious subjects and mostly still in churches today. These inventories allow us a glimpse into the production and consumption of non-religious sculpture. Only the highest aristocracy collected tapestries and furnished their rooms with them. These typically appear at the top of the list in inventories, together with other precious textiles such as bed covers and hangings, because of their financial value.36 The inventories of individual households generally put paintings much further down the scale and rarely contained more than a couple of sculptures, despite the fact that virtually all sculptures were movable, except

___________ 35 Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen. 36 See for instance Queen Christina of Sweden’s inventories in Antwerp, Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, VII, pp. 150-3, 158-60, 164-71, 186-7, 222-30, 238-45, 252-4, 280-4, 40911; VIII, pp. 44-5.

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for fireplaces that, like any other fixtures and fittings, did not appear in inventories. Wealthy merchants, but also painters, such as Rubens,37 Hendrik van Balen,38 Jan Wildens39 and Erasmus Quellinus,40 had paintings amongst their most prized possessions. Some, though by no means all of them, also had sculpture in their collection. This was not restricted to expensive and durable materials such as bronze or marble; many collections consisted of sculptures in such diverse media as bronze, marble, alabaster, stone, terracotta, plaster and even wax.41 Similarly, the types ranged from classical sculptures42 (or imitations in stone, marble or plaster43) and the typical Renaissance table bronze epitomised by Giambologna’s works44 to contemporary works which may have had a decorative function in the home, such as a pair of stone heads on a mantlepiece45 or a pair of stone spheres for the courtyard or garden.46 It is exceptional to find a collection containing a number of sculptures “geboutcheert in potaerde” (“modelled in clay”), such as in that of alderman Jan van Meurs.47 The inventory of his collection does not provide any attributions for these terracottas. Van Meurs’ collection also contained sculptures in bronze, including a horse and a bull by Giambologna,48 the same sculptor’s self-portrait in bronze, as well as works in wax, ivory and probably stone.49 Two works in ivory are indicated twice as being by Jacques van Avont, an

___________ 37 38 39 40 41

42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, V, pp. 263-84. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, IV, pp. 200-11. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, VI, pp. 475-506. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, X, pp. 347-74. A good example is the collection of Jan Baptista Baes, merchant and rentmeester of the bishop and cathedral chapter of Ghent, Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, VI, p. 104, p. 109, containing works in bronze, black and white marble, alabaster, plaster, wax and silvered lead. Another example is that of Father Petrus Daems, former prior of the Carthusian monastery of Antwerp: works in ivory, marble, alabaster, stone, wax, amber, plaster and lead. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, VII, pp. 325-42. For instance in burgomaster Nicolaas Rockox’s collection, Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, IV, pp. 382-7. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen or “Vijff Anticque Hoofden van plaester”, Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, IV, p. 443. E.g. the collection of Nicolaas Cheeus, left by his widow in 1663, contained a stallion, a horse with bridle and a self-portrait by Giambologna, apart from a large and a small bronze crucifix, Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, VIII, pp. 308-9. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, IX, p. 148; X, p. 331. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, X, p. 332. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, VI, p. 269. “een Peerdeken ende een Stierken van Jean de Boloignie”, Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen and VI, p. 297.

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otherwise unrecorded sculptor, probably from a dynasty of sculptors at Mechelen.50 Such indications are a particularly useful means of identification, as they must have relied on inscriptions or signatures. Probate inventories generally did not mention sculptors’ names, unless referring to famous pieces by Giambologna or inscribed ones. Even well-known models, such as “Een geboutseert Cupidoken steunende op sijnen Booch” (“A little modelled Cupid supporting himself on his bow”) which must have been modelled after François Duquesnoy’s Berlin marble,51 was clearly unknown in Antwerp, even in the family of the painter Jan Wildens.52 This all stresses how far the world of sculpture was one of materials and iconographies, rather than of artists as ‘brand names’, for in those same inventories (with the exception of artists’ estates described by fellow artists rather than lawyers), the names of painters abound and the complex descriptive jargon used today by major auction houses was gradually taking shape: “Een Vastenavont van Brouwer op paneel in lyste” (“[...] by Brouwer [...]”), “De Ryne Mère van Vranckryck in lyste by Rubbens gemaeckt” (“[...] made at Rubens’s [studio]”), “Een conversatie à la mode naer Rubbens” (“[...] after Rubens”) all appear in the probate inventory drawn up in 1652 by notaris (“solicitor”) H. van Cantelbeck of the property of the surgeon Benedictus van den Walle.53 A name that we should expect to appear frequently in inventories is that of François Duquesnoy. Not only was he of Netherlandish origin, but his models were copied all over Europe. A splendidly wordy example is that of the inventory drawn up by the Kortrijk art collector Jan-Baptist van Baelen with the help of the painter Jan Baptist van Moerkercke (*1678): Two figures of more than 2 feet high of plaster in my study, the one a Mercury, the other an Apollo 3 £ gr. Moerkercke says that he has two identical ones, & that they cost him 9 guilders each; notes that these two figures come from the moulds made from the original two figures by François Duquesnoy; also notes that I have the same forms, 54 coming from master Charles Hurterel and that they are worth a lot.

___________ 50 U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols (Leipzig, 1907–1950), II, p. 282. 51 M. Boudon-Machuel, François du Quesnoy 1597–1643 (Paris, 2005), p. 273. 52 E. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, VI, p. 489. 53 Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, VI, pp. 391-2. 54 “Twee figuren van meer als 2 voeten hooghe van plaester in mijn comptoir den eenen synde eenen Mercurius den anderen eenen Apollo 3 £ gr./Moerkercke seght datter hij twee gelijcke heeft, & dat die hem costen 9 guldens het stuck, noteert dat deze twee figuren commen wt de vormen die gemaeckt & afgedruckt syn op de originele twee figuren van Franciscus Quesnoy,

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This rare account of the process of reproducing Duquesnoy bronzes can be added to the long list of versions, with and without Cupid.55 Much lower down the social scale, it should not be forgotten that apart from devotional sculptures, some households also had portraits of deceased or reigning monarchs, e.g. Cornelis Prost, bailiff of Hemiksem, who owned “the Emperor Charles [V] on horseback carved in wood”.56 This was a slightly better alternative to a framed print of such a monarch. At this same level, sculpture is not infrequently found in plaster57 or terracotta.58 These are however merely a few pieces of decoration within the home, rather than constituting a collection. Visual representations of collections can be found in a specific genre of painting in Antwerp in the seventeenth century. Developed in around 1610 by Frans II Francken (1581–1641),59 the topos was generally a symbolic illustration of Pictura, with an emphasis on the encyclopaedic trio Natura, Ars and Historia.60 An alternative reading was as an allegory of Sight. As such, these visual representations should be read with extreme caution when trying to analyse them in terms of the sculpture represented. Their intended meanings and compositional considerations may have taken precedence over the description of actually works in existing spaces, though on a general level one can assume that the works represented were not pure inventions but sculptures available in contemporary Antwerp collections and its art market. Only exceptionally were the paintings and sculptures represented in this genre actually owned by the collector whose cabinet was depicted, such as Francken’s Banquet in the House of Nicolaas Rockox61 or as in Willem van Haecht’s Picture Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest.62 Most of the sculptures

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55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

noteert oock dat ick deselven van vormen hebbe, commen[de] dan mre Charles Hurterel en[de] dat die veele weert sijn.” P. De Keyser, ‘Jan Baptist van Baelen en zijn verzameling tekeningen en schilderijen te Kortrijk in de XVIIe eeuw’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Oudheidkunde en Kunstgeschiedenis, 25 (1956), pp. 179-235, at p. 231. M. Boudon-Machuel, François du Quesnoy 1597–1643 (Paris, 2005), pp. 263-71. “Den Keyser Carolus te peerde van hout gesneden”, Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, IV, p. 375. E.g. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, V, p. 74. E.g. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen, V, p. 100. U. Härting, ‘“doctrina et pietas” über frühe Galeriebilder’, Jaarboek Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen, 1993, pp. 95-133, at p. 98. H. Vlieghe, Flemish Art and Architecture 1585–1700 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1998), pp. 202-3. Munich, Alte Pinakothek, inv. 858. U. Härting, Frans Francken der Jüngere (1581–1642). Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog (Freren, 1989), p. 374. Antwerp, Rubenshuis, cf. J. Held, Rubens and his Circle (Princeton, N.J., 1982), pp. 35-64; J. M. Muller, ‘De verzameling van Rubens in historisch perspectief’, in K. L. Belkin and F. Healy (eds), Een huis vol kunst. Rubens als verzamelaar (Antwerp, 2004), pp. 10-85, at p. 63.

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represented in such works are small-scale bronzes or plaster casts, both antique and renaissance/contemporary, displayed on one or several tables and sideboards and often on the room cornice ledge.63 In a few cases life-size statues, probably plaster casts after the antique, can be seen in a different room in the distance. In the Picture Gallery of Cornelis van der Geest these statues are even in the main room. To the left of the Apollo Belvedere stands a statue of Venus and Cupid towards which Georg Petel is pointing, as if to indicate his authorship of it.64 This statue is indeed another version of his ivory now in the Ashmolean Museum. This juxtaposition of contemporary works and classical antique sculptures puts them on a par. To conclude, this paper has presented a number of ‘studio interiors’ painted in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by various artists from the Low Countries. Although at first sight some seem highly naturalistic and therefore of documentary value concerning the use and collecting of plaster casts, in practice these views have to be taken with the same caution as contemporary illustrations of collections. Even if these views are sometimes difficult to assess, they are compositions compiled on paper or on canvas, rather than faithful representations of actual workshops. A careful analysis of the visual material contrasts sharply with the appearance of plaster casts in probate inventories, such as those recorded in Antwerp. Thus these studio interiors are similar in kind to contemporary interior views of collections and reflect an imaginary world invented by artists like Michael Sweerts, who developed their own agenda for a specific clientèle, like Dutch Grand Tourists and Pope Innocent X’s nephew Prince Camillo Pamphilj.65

Frequently cited literature E. Duverger, Antwerpse Kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, 13 vols (Brussels, 1984–2004) G. Jensen and P. C. Sutton (eds), Michael Sweerts (1618–1664) (Amsterdam et al., 2002) E. Mai and K. Wettengl (eds), Wettstreit der Künste. Malerei und Skulptur von Dürer bis Daumier (Munich and Cologne, 2002)

___________ 63 Kamerlijst in Dutch. 64 K. Feuchtmayr and A. Schädler, Georg Petel 1601/2-1634 (Berlin, 1973), p. 191. 65 Jensen and Sutton (eds), Michael Sweerts, pp. 27-31.

Modern Sculpture in the Making: Antonio Canova and plaster casts JOHANNES MYSSOK

Antonio Canova had a decisive role in the history of the making and use of plaster casts, both through his innovative working methods as well as his new approach to patronage. This essay will discuss these two issues in a chronological way, starting with Canova’s beginnings in Venice. Nobody who had judged him from these beginnings, would have been likely to suspect Canova of becoming not only one of the great innovators in the history of style but also of revolutionizing sculptural technique. After some initial training with his grandfather Pasino, Canova was apprenticed to the local sculptor Giuseppe Bernardi, who at that time worked at Pagnano, near Canova’s native Possagno.1 As far as we know, Bernardi had a sound technique, sometimes bordering on virtuosity in the treatment of marble, but did not make extensive use of models either in the planning of his sculptures or in the process of execution; in fact, it seems that he did not use full-size plaster models at all.2 Canova only came in contact with plaster casts in Venice when Bernardi, probably in 1769, took the young apprentice with him to the city. When the old master died shortly after their arrival, Canova was left with his heir Giovanni.3 Canova initially spent his time lingering in the workshop, then opening a small one of his own in 1775. It was in this crucial year that he

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2

3

For Canova’s beginnings see the entries by Giuseppe Pavanello in E. Bassi et al. (eds), Venezia nell’età di Canova 1780–1830, pp. 17, 43-5, 58-63; G. Pavanello, ‘Antonio Canovae veneto…’, in Pavanello and Romanelli (eds), Antonio Canova, pp. 45-50; G. Pavanello, ‘Canova, Antonio’, in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols (New York, N.Y., 1996), V, pp. 625-6; Stahl, Bildhauerwerkstatt; J. Myssok, ‘Gli inizi di Antonio Canova’, Atti dell Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Classe di scienze morali, lettere ed arti, 166 (2007–2008), pp. 111-54. For Bernardi see C. Semenzato, La Scultura Veneta del Seicento e del Settecento (Venice, 1966), pp. 695-6; Stahl, Bildhauerwerkstatt, pp. 14-17; J. Myssok, ‘Gli inizi di Antonio Canova’, Atti dell Istituto Veneto di Scienze Lettere ed Arti, Classe di scienze morali, lettere ed arti, 166 (2007–2008), pp. 111-54; A. Bacchi (ed.), La scultura a Venezia da Sansovino a Canova (Milan, 2000), p. 719. C. Semenzato, La Scultura Veneta del Seicento e del Settecento (Venice, 1966), pp. 67-8; Stahl, Bildhauerwerkstatt, pp. 16-17.

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studied not only at the Venetian Academy, where he may have drawn after plaster casts, but also trained at the Palazzo Farsetti, one of the most important collections of plaster casts in Europe and surely the central place for the formation of the new classicising taste in Venice.4 In the present context though, it is important to understand that the collection of plaster casts in the Palazzo Farsetti was not a ‘dead’ one, as we have mostly come to know such collections. In fact, beside the casts of the “most beautiful statues”, to cite Haskell and Penny,5 in the Palazzo Farsetti original models by the most important Roman Baroque sculptors were also displayed as well as small reductions in terracotta of the most famous antique statues and groups by Camillo Rusconi, executed earlier in the century. In this way the huge plaster casts were put into a creative context, showing the young sculptor how to implement the antique prototypes for his own sculptures. Indisputably the most prominent example for this was Bernini’s group of Apollo and Daphne, a sculpture that Canova admired most at this moment and which was present in the collection as a small cast.6 This group evidently drew directly from the type of antique prototypes, displayed alongside it, and thus provided a guiding example for the young sculptor.7 The collection thus offered a unique possibility for the young artist to study all important modern and antique sculptures in one place; it must also have aroused Canova’s curiosity to see the originals of the Farsetti

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5 6

7

For his period at the Venetian Academy see E. Bassi, La regia Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (Florence, 1941); G. Pavanello, ‘Antonio Canovae veneto…’, in Pavanello and Romanelli (eds), Antonio Canova, pp. 45-50, at p. 46; P. Del Negro, ‘Antonio Canova e la Venezia dei patrizi’, in G. Pavanello (ed.), Antonio Canova e il suo ambiente artistico fra Venezia, Roma e Parigi (Venice, 2000), pp. 121-53, at p. 127. For the Farsetti-collection and Canova’s response to it see S. Androsov, in S. O. Androsov (ed.), Alle origini di Canova. Le terracotte della collezione Farsetti, exh. cat. Rome and Venice (Venice, 1992), pp. 15-21; G. Nepi Scirè, ibid. pp. 234; G. Nepi Scirè, ‘Filippo Farsetti e la sua collezione’, in Bettagno (ed.), Studi in Onore di Elena Bassi, pp. 73-94; K. Kalveram, ‘Die Terrakotta-Sammlung des Filippo Farsetti: ein Beitrag zur frühen Wertschätzung von Barock-Bozzetti’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst, 48 (1997), pp. 135-46; S. Androsov et al., ‘Die Sammlung Farsetti’, in G. Romanelli, G. Macchi, L. Altringer (eds), Venezia! Kunst aus venezianischen Palästen, exh. cat. Bonn (Bonn, 2002), pp. 312-22; S. Androsov (ed.), “Con gli occhi di Canova”: la collezione Farsetti del Museo Ermitage, exh. cat. Massa-Carrara (Pontedera, 2005). F. Haskell and N. Penny, The most beautiful statues: the taste for antique sculpture 1500–1900, exh. cat. Oxford (Oxford, 1981). For the cast see Giuseppe Pavanello, in: Pavanello and Romanelli (eds), Antonio Canova, p. 159, no. 77, who cites the entry in the first inventory Museo della casa eccellentissima Farsetti in Venezia (Venice, 1788), p. 17. The decisive role of Bernini’s group for the young Canova has rightly been emphasized by A. Muñoz, Antonio Canova: Le opere (Rome, [1957]), p. 13 and A. Augusti, ‘L’esperienza berniniana di Antonio Canova’, Arte documento, 7 (1993), pp. 213-16. For Bernini’s own imitation of antique prototypes see the entries by Anna Coliva, in A. Coliva and S. Schütze (eds), Bernini Scultore. La nascità del Barocco in casa Borghese, exh. cat. Rome (Rome, 1998), pp. 252-75.

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casts, most of which were taken from statues in Rome. This early confrontation with plaster casts as specimens of canonical works on the other hand could also have heightened Canova’s awareness of surface texture, as apparently this was the main aspect missing from the casts and only to be found in direct confrontation with the originals in marble. The first model preserved by Canova is datable to 1775, when the young sculptor applied with it for membership in the Venetian Academy.8 The small terracotta statuette of Apollo, invented for a figure in an ensemble of garden statuary for the Villa Rezzonico at Bassano, clearly betrays its ancestry in the Roman group by Bernini, but it is also remarkable for its size and technique. Unlike Canova’s later half-size models, this one is preserved, not in plaster, but as terracotta and is highly finished. Both aspects point to the conclusion that the young sculptor at this time did not yet work with plaster as a creative or even reproductive material, sticking to clay as the traditional material used for the making of models. This is underscored by Canova himself, providing important information on his earlier sculptural technique in a handwritten biography of about 1804/5, that he corrected in his own hand.9 Regarding the masterpiece of his beginnings in Venice, the group of Dedalus and Icarus, created in 1779–1781, Canova informs us that he carved the marble guided only by a few points or measurements taken from the model.10 Additionally he hints at the fact that he was doing so, because full-scale clay or plaster models, made to guide the execution, were not in use in Venice at the time and accordingly he had to achieve the bulk of the work himself.11 These working methods underwent a radical change when he finally came to Rome, visiting the city in 1779 to 1780 first as a student, then settling there for the rest of his life from 1781 onwards.12 Again, we can rely on first-hand

___________ 8

See E. Bassi, La regia Accademia di Belle Arti di Venezia (Florence, 1941), p. 108, and H. Honour, in The Arts Council of Great Britain (ed.), The Age of Neo-Classicism, exh. cat. London (London, 1972), pp. 196-7, no. 302; Pavanello and Praz, L’opera completa, p. 90, no. 12; G. Pavanello, in E. Bassi et al. (eds), Venezia nell’età di Canova 1780–1830, p. 60, no. 77; G. Pavanello, in Pavanello and Romanelli (eds), Antonio Canova, p. 159, no. 77. 9 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), pp. 312-84, ‘Abozzo di Biografia’. 10 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), p. 297: “Le statue fin qui menzionate sgrossavansi dall’autore stesso senza l’aiuto d’alcuno. Anzi questo, lavorato questo Gruppo da lui come le altre opere anteriori con assai pochi punti non essendo nell’abbozzo in marmo, non essendo a Venezia cognita conosciuta l’arte di cavar da’ punti, come qual usavasi a Roma […]”. For the Dedalus and Icarus-group see Pavanello and Praz, L’opera completa, p. 91, no. 14; Pavanello, in E. Bassi et al. (eds), Venezia nell’età di Canova 1780–1830, p. 61, no. 78 and G. Pavanello, in Pavanello and Romanelli (eds), Antonio Canova, p. 226, no. 120, and Myssok, Antonio Canova, pp. 22-36. 11 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), p. 335. 12 For this period see Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), pp. 35-41 and H. Honour, ‘Canova’s Theseus and the Minotaur’, Victoria and Albert Museum-Yearbook, 1 (1969), pp. 1-15.

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information by Canova recorded in the diaries of his first trip to Rome, noting his visits to other sculptors’ studios.13 In the studio of Bartolomeo Cavaceppi (Fig. 13. 1) to which he returned several times, he was astonished above all by the excessive slowness with which apprentices were executing copies after antique works.14 On the other hand he marvelled at the precision and the quality of these copies.15 As we know from other evidence, the copies in this and other Roman studios of the time normally were not executed in direct confrontation with the original antique marbles, but depended on plaster casts of them.16 The extreme preFig. 13. 1: View of Cavaceppi’s Roman studio. cision of these copies, admired and Engraving, in: Raccolta d’antiche statue busti condemned by Canova at the same bassirilievi ed altre sculture restaurate da Bartolomeo Cavaceppi scultore Romano (Rotime, was only made possible by me, 1768), I, frontispiece. technical innovations developed specifically for the copying of antiques at the French Academy in Rome.17 This technique, as it is described in the article of Diderot’s Encyclopédie in 1765, represents the basic method of what later came to be known as the pointing machine.18 In fact, the procedure described permits same-scale reproduction in marble of a given three dimensional prototype as well as reductions or enlargements of a model, multiplying or dividing the measurements.

___________ 13 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), pp. 16-194 ‘Quaderni di Viaggio’. 14 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), p. 26 and pp. 60-3. 15 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), p. 63. Although he remarked “queste copie mi piacque pocco”, he admitted that these were “bene condote che sembrava impossibile poter lavorare il marmo così bene e tiratte in aria certe cose al miglior grado”, (p. 63). 16 O. Rossi Pinelli, ‘Artisti, falsari o filologhi? Da Cavaceppi a Canova, il restauro della scultura tra arte e scienza’, Ricerche di storia dell’arte, 13-14 (1981), pp. 41-56; S. Howard, ‘Cavaceppi e i suoi bozzetti’, in M. G. Barberini and C. Gasparri (eds), Bartolomeo Cavaceppi scultore romano (1717–1799), exh. cat. Rome (Rome, 1994), pp. 71-6. 17 R. Wittkower, Sculpture. Process and Principles (London, 1977), pp. 222-3. 18 ‘Sculpture in Marble’, in D. Diderot and J. le Rond d’Alembert (eds), Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 35 vols (Paris, 1765), XIV, pp. 841-2.

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Fig. 13. 2: Illustration to ‘Sculpture en marbre’. Engraving, in: D. Diderot and J. le Rond d’Alembert (eds), Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (Paris, 1765), XIV, pp. 841-2.

As described and illustrated in the Encyclopedia (Fig. 13. 2), measurements were taken with a lead point, hanging on a cord from a wooden frame, which extended above the plaster cast of the antique sculpture to be reproduced. Thus a precise description of a given point in space could be provided. Measuring in the same way while carving into the marble, this point had then to be found again on the block that was to be transformed into the shape of the prototype. In order to achieve a unified surface, the sculptor then had to connect the single points. This procedure was of course very laborious and timeconsuming and it was mainly the number of points employed that decided on the relative fidelity of the reproduction. This was crucial in the refined procedure, characterized by the employment of a high number of measuring marks on the plaster cast, that was used, in the Cavaceppi workshop, above all for the copying of busts. We do not know whether Cavaceppi or sculptors in the French Academy in Rome already used small knobs or repère points to mark the measuring points on the surface and thus allow a small distance between the top of the knob and the final surface. This distance represents a kind of correction space, a ‘skin’ that eventually would be removed by the master, who was thus applying the final touches and conveying the definitive form to the marble. Although the translation of full-size plaster models into marble sculptures is described along these lines in the Encyclopédie, it is doubtful whether any

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French sculptor of the late eighteenth century,19 not to speak of any Roman sculptor before Canova, would have used this procedure to create sculptures according to his own invention. In fact, this was going to be the decisive difference between the use of plaster casts in Italian sculpture before Canova and his own working method once he had taken the step to make plaster casts an integral part of it. As we have seen, plaster casts before Canova were used in two ways, on the one hand to reproduce antique sculpture in plaster, employing a technique of casting, and on the other hand to reproduce these very casts back into the original material, marble, by means of ‘translation’, creating thus a copy close to the original in form and material. Both procedures however served the same purpose, as they were used only to produce a precise copy of an antique marble sculpture; 20 the aim was not the creation of a new sculpture. As simple as it sounds, Canova in a revolutionary step turned the aims of this technique around and made it part of a creative process. This was not an act of will on his part, but occasioned by an extraordinary commission. After the success of his life-size Theseus and the Minotaur, Canova was assigned in 1783 to execute the tomb of Pope Clement XIV.21 Since the installation of the papal tomb of Benedict XIV in St Peter’s more than ten years before, this was the first big commission for a sculptor in Rome, and as controversial as the dead Pope himself was the choice of the young Venetian for the making of his monument. Thus, overnight, the twentysix year old was faced with the task of executing a gigantic monument including over life-size statues. Although it soon became apparent that St Peter’s would not be the church to accommodate the monument, the eventual destination of the tomb over the entrance to the sacristy in the Franciscan church of SS. Apostoli was still within a huge space. In his accustomed manner Canova first made sketched drawings of the projected monument and then started small clay models to give form to the

___________ 19 Though Falconet in his Notes sur le XXXI Livre de Pline describes this process in a similar way: É.-M. Falconet, ‘Notes sur le XXXI Livre de Pline’, in Oeuvres complètes, 3 vols, 3rd edn (Paris, 1808), I, p. 409. 20 On the proliferation of plaster casts in Europe see O. Rossi Pinelli, ‘La pacifica invasione dei calchi delle statue antiche nell’Europa del Settecento’, in S. Macchioni and B. Tavassi la Greca (eds), Studi in onore di Giulio Carlo Argan, 3 vols (Rome, 1984), I, pp. 419-30. 21 For this tomb see Pavanello and Praz, L’opera completa, pp. 92-1, no. 24; F. Licht, Canova (New York, N.Y., 1983), pp. 53-60; J. Myssok in G. Satzinger and S. Schütze (eds), St. Peter in Rom (1506–2006) (Munich, 2008); G. Pavanello in A. Nante, C. Cavalli, S. Pasquali (eds), Clemente XIII Rezzonico: un papa veneto nella Roma di metà Settecento (Cinisello Balsamo, 2008), pp. 208-21.

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single sculptures he projected.22 One of these – the one for the statue of the Pope – he elaborated further, probably for the purpose of presentation, but the other, a small model for the allegory of Meekness, is preserved in the rough and unfinished state Canova spontaneously conveyed to his model.23 As was usual among Roman sculptors of the time, and testified by several of his other surviving models, Canova would then have elaborated these small models further by the creation of a half-size model, a type of small sculpture which Roman sculptors often modelled directly in plaster.24 Following customary practice in late eighteenth-century sculpture, this half-size model in plaster would then have guided the workshop in the process of elaborating the marble, a process that would have involved taking measurements from this relatively small model and transferring these by multiplication to the marble. But Canova had no workshop and from a letter to his friend Quatremère de Quincy we learn that he loathed modelling in plaster.25 For the history of sculpture, these coincidences were fortunate, as they led the young sculptor to revert to a technique rarely used for almost a century.26 It is not exactly clear whether the employment of full-size models in clay for the realization of marble

___________ 22 For Canova’s drawings see the entries in E. Bassi (ed.), Il Museo Civico di Bassano. I Disegni di Antonio Canova (Venice, 1959), pp. 196-7, nos. 1385-6, 1405–1407, 1410; F. Rigon, in G. C. Argan, F. Barbieri and F. Rigon (eds), Disegni di Canova del Museo di Bassano, exh. cat. Milan (Milan, 1982), pp. 14-27. For the plastic models see E. Bassi, La Gipsoteca di Possagno. Sculture e Dipinti di Antonio Canova (Venice, 1957), p. 66; Pavanello and Praz, L’opera completa, pp. 92-3, nos. 24-7; O. Stefani, Antonio Canova. La statuaria (Milan, 1999), p. 44; G. Delfini Filippi, in R. Barilli (ed.), Canova e Appiani. Alle origini della contemporaneità, exh. cat. Monza – Milan (Milan, 1999), p. 110. 23 For the model of the pope see Pavanello and Praz, L’opera completa, p. 93, no. 25, and H. Honour, ‘Canova’s Work in Clay’, in B. Boucher (ed.), Earth and Fire. Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova, exh. cat. London (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2001), pp. 67-81, at pp. 71-2. 24 Canova’s models half the size of life are discussed in J. Myssok, ‘Am Ende der Tradition?’, in J. Myssok and J. Wiener (eds), Docta Manus. Studien zur Italienischen Skulptur für Joachim Poeschke (Münster, 2007), pp. 375-83. 25 Canova to Quatremère 17 January 1810: “l’aversione che ho sempre avuto al modo di lavorare in gesso o sia stucco, conoscendo dimostrativamente che il lavoro in quella materia riesce sempre duro e stentato, questo appunto mi ha fatto risolvere sino de’ miei primi anni ad attacarmi alla creta; e di fatto ho avuto la temerità d’intraprendere i modelli delle statue del monumento Ganganelli della stessa grandezza, cosa non più accostumata in Roma prima di quell’epoca, mentre tutto lavoravasi nello stucco, quando dovevano fare un modello poco più grande della metà del vero. Ho pensato alquanto anch’io, ma coll’operare ho trovato la via che conviene sia buona, subito che tutti hanno abbandonato il modellare in piccolo, e in grande con lo stucco e tutti si sono attaccati alla creta in grande”, in A.-C. Quatremère De Quincy, Canova et ses ouvrages ou Mémoires historiques sur la vie et les travaux de ce célèbre artiste (Paris, 1834), p. 371, now correctly in Giuseppe Pavanello (ed.), Il carteggio Canova-Quatremère de Quincy 1785–1822 nell’edizione di Francesco Paolo Luiso (Ponzano, 2005), pp. 118-19. 26 Compare Honour’s commentary in Canova, Scritti (Honour and Mariuz), p. 195-7 and his note 1.

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Fig. 13. 3: Canova’s studio in Via San Giacomo in Rome. Francesco Chiarottini, 1786. Pen and grey wash, heightened with white, on a blue-green prepared ground. Museo Civico, Udine.

sculptures really stalled with the death of Bernini and whether all subsequent sculptors generally took to the less demanding half-size models. Looking back twenty years later, Canova nevertheless stated his own achievement in these terms.27 His employment of huge clay models (Fig. 13. 3), made to the scale of the later marble statues, is however attested independently by an account book he kept while working on the papal tomb.28 Yet, his innovations did not stop here. Having destroyed and remodelled the gigantic clay-model for his figure of Piety on the advice of his French friend Quatremère,29 he must have noted that these huge clay-models would rapidly shrink and change form. Sculptors

___________ 27 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), p. 341: “[...] costruì il modello in grande colla creta (la quale prima di lui in Roma non usavasi che nei modelli in piccolo mentre quelli in grande facevasi collo stucco) [...]”. 28 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), pp. 195-251: ‘Libro di conti 1783–1788’. 29 The entry in the account-book Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), 219 (fol. 91v.). For Quatremère’s advice see A.-C. Quatremère De Quincy, Canova et ses ouvrages ou Mémoires historiques sur la vie et les travaux de ce célèbre artiste (Paris, 1834), p. 46.

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before Canova resolved this problem by hollowing out and firing their huge models, either entirely or in separate parts, in which case they reassembled these parts later to form the original shape.30 Canova however took the aforementioned step of adopting the techniques developed for the copying of antique statuary. As mentioned in his account book, he engaged a formatore, a specialist in taking moulds of antique sculptures.31 This specialist took plaster moulds of Canova’s huge clay models and made positives, plaster casts, of these clay models.32 The clay models were destroyed in the process and only the huge plaster casts and their moulds remained.33 Canova’s innovation in sculptural technique thus had two important technical aspects: on the one hand he reintroduced the scale model for monumental statuary in marble, and on the other hand he developed a procedure to preserve this form precisely, employing plaster casts. The use of plaster moulds and plaster casts also had further implications that we will discuss below. First it is important to note that despite the complex and time-consuming procedure used to make his plaster casts, Canova did not consider them as definitive. In the same way as he would squash small models or cancel his drawings, he often reconsidered his design when the huge plaster casts had been finished, destroying them after a few days and cancelling all traces of the long design process. Another aspect of his use of plaster casts may be noted by considering a print (Fig. 13. 4) after one of his large-scale models in plaster. Starting at some point before the commission for the papal tomb, Canova habitually published his latest sculptures by the means of prints, thus assuring a wider knowledge of his works.34 Normally these prints represent finished sculptures, but in some exceptional cases they feature plaster casts from which we can find out that these seemingly definitive representations of the future work must either have been destroyed or, as in the present case, modified in the

___________ 30 See G. Scherf, in J. D. Draper and G. Scherf (eds), Playing with fire: European terracotta models 1740 to 1840, exh. cat. Paris et al. (New Haven, Conn., et al., 2004), p. 19. 31 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), pp. 207 ff. 32 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), pp. 207: “[...] al formatore per conto della forma del modello del Papa grande”; p. 208: “Il formatore è venuto a prencipiare a lavorare per formare la statua dell’Umiltà [...]”. 33 For the process and its reconstruction in the context of Canova’s working methods see H. Honour, ‘Canova’s Studio Practice –I: The early years –II: 1792–1822’, The Burlington Magazine, 114 (1972), pp. 146-59, and pp. 214-29 and H. Honour, ‘Dal Bozzetto all’ ‘Ultima Mano’’, in Pavanello and Romanelli (eds), Antonio Canova, pp. 33-43 (repr. in S. Androsov, M. Guderzo and G. Pavanello (eds), Canova, exh. cat. Bassano del Grappa and Possagno 2003–2004 (Milan, 2003), pp. 21-9. 34 For this aspect and the topic in general see H. Honour, ‘Canova e l’incisione’, in G. Pezzini Bernini and F. Fiorani (eds), Canova e l’incisione, exh. cat. Rome and Bassano 1994 (Bassano del Grappa, 1993), pp. 11-21.

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Fig. 13. 4: Canova’s allegory of Meekness on the tomb of Clement XIV. Giovanni Tognoli and Battista Balestra, 1818. Etching. Calcografia Nazionale, Rome.

Fig. 13. 5: Tomb of Clement XIV, detail: Meekness. Antonio Canova, 1785–6?. SS. Apostoli, Rome.

further course of the design process. The print shows the huge plaster cast of Meekness as an elaboration of the small clay model we have considered before.35 Compared to the figure as it is displayed on the tomb (Fig. 13. 5), several important differences can be noted, attesting to the fact that in these early years Canova still introduced variations or amendments to the plaster cast of his full-scale model while working on the marble. This immediately raises the question of the purpose and use of plaster casts in Canova’s workshop, or, more importantly, the question of Canova’s involvement in the elaboration of his marble sculpture after he had introduced this technique. As we have argued before, Canova established the new tech-

___________ 35 G. Pezzini Bernini, in G. Pezzini Bernini and F. Fiorani (eds) (note above), p. 95. The differences between the plaster cast shown in the print and the final marble consist mainly in the elaboration of the drapery and changes in the headdress. They testify that the figure in the print really is a representation of a plaster cast after a full-scale model. Both, plaster and clay model, are now lost.

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nique as a means to cope with being faced with a giant bulk of work in marble, while having no studio-workers of his own. Theoretically, this technique permitted a complete delegation of the physically heavy work on the marble to assistants, a potential, though, that was only realized by Thorvaldsen and later sculptors in the nineteenth century.36 In fact, although Canova already employed specialists,37 in the case of his two papal tombs these were only given the limited responsibility of blocking out the statues. As the example of the figure of Meekness demonstrates, Canova remained present in the elaboration of the marbles even during intermediate steps and introduced extensive changes to the conception throughout. How far reaching Canova’s disposition to change form during the working process could be, is demonstrated by another example close in time to the papal tombs. After a complex process of invention, the Venetian conceived a large model of his famous group Amor and Psyche (Fig. 13. 7) that he was executing for his English friend and patron John Campbell.38 This model is represented in the pastel by Hugh Douglas Hamilton (Fig. 13. 6), now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, showing Canova and his British colleague, the painter Henry Tresham, contemplating the big plaster cast.39 In one of his letters to Campbell, Canova describes this painting and the model in it, pointing out to his friend, then back in England, that relative to the

___________ 36 It is important to differentiate here between Canova’s generation and that of Thorvaldsen, as Canova still intervened in the final stages of execution, working on the last layer of a marble and giving it the final touches. Thorvaldsen limited himself to work on the model and then handed over all the work on the marble to assistants; this led to surfaces often described as ‘dull’. It must be stressed, however, that Canova also delegated the roughing out of the shape and the following stages of the working process to assistants, concentrating on the conception and finish. For this see the following remarks and the literature cited in footnote 58; for Thorvaldsen’s working methods compare H. C. Tesan, entries in G. Bott and H. Spielmann (eds), Künstlerleben in Rom. Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770–1844) Der dänische Bildhauer und seine deutschen Freunde, exh. cat. Nuremberg and Schleswig (Nuremberg, 1992), pp. 571-601. 37 For these see again the entries in his account-book and Honour’s commentary in Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), pp. 201-5 and pp. 206-51. 38 For the group and its history see I. Leroy-Jay Lemaistre, Canova: Psyché ranimée par le baiser de l’Amour (Paris, 2003); Myssok, Antonio Canova, pp. 69-82. For the models and the process of invention compare H. Honour, in B. Boucher (ed.), Earth and Fire. Italian Terracotta Sculpture from Donatello to Canova, exh. cat. London (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2001), pp. 73-4; B. Boucher, ibid., p. 258, no. 75; J. D. Draper, in J. D. Draper and G. Scherf (eds), Playing with fire: European terracotta models 1740 to 1840, exh. cat. Paris et al. (New Haven, Conn., et al., 2004), pp. 36-8, no. 9; Myssok, Antonio Canova, pp. 70-3. 39 On the pastel see H. Honour, ‘A list of artists who portrayed Canova’, in Bettagno (ed.), Studi in Onore di Elena Bassi, pp. 155-72, at p. 158, no. 2, and T. Clifford, ‘Canova in context. The Sculptor, his Reputation, his British Patrons and his Visit to England’, in H. Honour and A. Weston-Lewis (eds), The three graces Antonio Canova, exh. cat. Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1995), pp. 9-17, at p. 11.

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Fig. 13. 6: Canova and Henry Tresham contemplating the model of Amor and Psyche. Hugh Douglas Hamilton, 1788–9. Pastel on paper. Private collection on loan to the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Fig. 13. 7: Amor and Psyche. Antonio Canova, 1787–1793. Marble, h: 1.55 m, w: 1.68 m. Louvre, Paris.

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plaster cast in the picture he had introduced some dramatic changes while working on the marble and that the sculpture would now be much better.40 Given this, the sculptor admits to be feeling embarrassed when looking at the awkward plaster cast displayed next to the marble in his Roman studio and that he would probably destroy the plaster cast soon to eradicate its memory.41 In his next letter some days later he then announces the fatal step of having abandoned the first version in marble of the Amor and Psyche group. Indeed, he started a new model and ordered a new block from Carrara at his own expenses.42 This demonstrates the breadth of Canova’s working methods that were not limited to the destruction of the already costly and laborious plaster casts, but could even lead to the abandonment or destruction of marble sculptures in an advanced state.43 An important feature of his plaster casts has not yet been mentioned, namely their high degree of definition even down to details, providing close guidance to the workshop and to the sculptor himself in the elaboration of the marble. In other words, the plaster casts already represented the finished marble sculptures in their appearance with the only difference that Canova’s surface finish, his sublime treatment of the skin was lacking. In fact he would soon consider this finish to be his primary contribution to the appearance of the marbles. Compared with the traditional technique of producing sculpture in marble, this meant a decisive shift of conception and accordingly the plaster casts of his huge full-scale models soon assumed a central role in Canova’s studio. In this way the work of the sculptor concentrated his contribution on two phases; the initial process of invention and the final touches, finishing the surface of the marble. It goes without saying that the use of plaster casts in Canova’s studio offered the possibility of multiplication. Once a mould was taken of the clay model, this could be reproduced in plaster over and over again, until the mould was worn out. To a certain extent Canova seems to have made use of this possibility, improving the casts with small additions or reworking his models as they were preserved in the form of the plaster casts on show in his studio. If a

___________ 40 Canova to Campbell, 17 August 1790, cited in part in H. Honour, in Bettagno (ed.), Studi in Onore di Elena Bassi, pp. 155-72, at p. 158, now fully in Myssok, Antonio Canova, p. 73 and pp. 318-19, doc. 20. 41 Myssok, Antonio Canova, p. 74. 42 Myssok, Antonio Canova, p. 74. 43 In a similar case Canova destroyed the first sculpture of the Mourning Genius on the Tomb of Clement XIII and created the ‘improved’ second version visible today. In both instances Canova paid for the new blocks of marble with his own money, incurring a considerable loss. See J. Myssok, Antonio Canova, p. 332 and now G. Pavanello, in A. Nante, C. Cavalli and S. Pasquali (eds), Clemente XIII Rezzonico: un papa veneto nella Roma di metà Settecento, exh. cat. Cinisello Balsamo (Milan, 2008), pp. 208-21.

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Fig. 13. 8: Hebe. Antonio Canova, 1796. Marble, h: 1.57 m. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Alte Nationalgalerie.

Fig. 13. 9: Hebe (second model). Antonio Canova, 1808. Plaster, h: 1.65 m. Gipsoteca, Possagno.

client wanted a marble version of a certain plaster cast in the studio, Canova could thus return to his model after years and reproduce it exactly the way it was shown. The plaster cast preserved the specific form Canova had given to an invention at a certain date, but could also receive an ‘update’ or even be improved while being translated into marble. The most significant case in this respect is surely his figure of Hebe, repeated three times after the execution of the first marble that is today in Berlin (Fig. 13. 8).44

___________ 44 For the first marble and its variations see Pavanello and Praz, L’opera completa, p. 102, no. 98; N. K. Kosareva, in Pavanello and Romanelli (eds), Antonio Canova, p. 264, no. 128.

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While this one and the first repetition at St. Petersburg are based on the plaster cast that he gave to his friend Giuseppe Bossi and that is now in Milan, the later versions where the clouds are substituted by a tree-trunk are based on the ‘improved’ model in the Gipsoteca at Possagno (Fig. 13. 9).45 Obviously, Canova did not create an entirely new model for the later versions, but modified his original conception, reacting to recent criticism.46 This process of change extended to the latest versions in Chatsworth and Forlì, where Canova added gilded jewellery as attached objects in addition to the already separate elements of cup and amphora.47 Seen together with the colouring of the skin and the lips, it becomes clear that Canova was responding in this way to the discoveries on colour in Greek sculpture by his friend Quatremère de Quincy.48 While this strategy prefigures the use of multiples in modern sculpture, Canova nonetheless stuck, in the case of some of his plaster casts to the concepts of authenticity and originality. Given that, in a certain sense, ‘authenticity’ and ‘originality’ may be regarded as concepts pertaining to Modernity, and as Canova employed his plaster casts in an absolutely modern way, we have to look closer at the specific conjunction that encouraged the emergence of plaster casts as the actual originals, as the ‘original models’ as they were called in Canova’s studio.49

___________ 45 On the model in Milan, see Pavanello and Praz, L’opera completa, p. 102, no. 99; S. Grandesso and F. Mazzocca (ed.), La Galleria d’Arte Moderna e la Villa Reale di Milano (Cinisello Balsamo, 2007), p. 52, cat. 1; S. Grandesso and F. Mazzocca, ‘La fortuna dell’Ebe canoviana in scultura come personificazione della grazia giovanile e prototipo delle statue “aeree”’, in S. Androsov, F. Mazzocca and A. Paolucci (eds), Canova l’ideale classico tra scultura e pittura, exh. cat. Forlì (Cinisello Balsamo, 2009), pp. 45-57, at p. 48. On the one in Possagno, see Pavanello and Praz, L’opera completa, p. 119, no. 214. 46 On the critique as it was articulated mainly by Karl Gustav Fernow, see H. Tausch, Entfernung der Antike. Carl Ludwig Fernow im Kontext der Kunsttheorie um 1800 (Tübingen, 2000), pp. 198229. 47 For the versions in Chatsworth and Forlì see Pavanello and Praz, L’opera completa, p. 119, no. 213 and no. 215; F. Mazzocca, in S. Androsov, F. Mazzocca and A. Paolucci (eds), Canova l’ideale classico tra scultura e pittura, exh. cat. Forlì (Cinisello Balsamo 2009), pp. 228-32, cat. IV.19 (Forlì). 48 A.-C. Quatremère de Quincy, Le Jupiter olympien; ou, L’art de la sculpture antique considéré sous un nouveau point de vue; ouvrage qui comprend un essai sur le goût de la sculpture polychrome, l’analyse explicative de la toreutique, et l’histoire de la statuaire en or et ivoire chez les Grecs et les Romains, avec la restitution des principaux monuments de cet art et la démonstration pratique ou le renouvellement de ses procédés mécaniques (Paris, 1814). 49 As Fred Licht has already tried to show, Canova’s approach to sculpture in many respects prefigures that of modern sculpture. This should not lead to a confusion of Canova’s art with Modernity, however, as the concepts mentioned here and fully developed in the twentieth century, become discernible only when looking back with the fully developed strategies in modern art in mind. As will become clear from the following remarks on Canova’s reliefs in plaster, he consciously rare-

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Fig. 13. 10: Briseis handed over to the Heralds. Antonio Canova, 1793. Plaster, h: 1.22 m, w: 2.12 m. Museo Correr, Venice.

At the time he was executing the gigantic sculptures of the two papal tombs, Canova listened to texts by Homer, Virgil, and other classical authors being read aloud to him.50 This led to his conception of a series of large reliefs (Fig. 13. 10), depicting episodes from these texts. As Canova tells us in his handwritten biography and as is confirmed by his later biographers, he modelled these reliefs in his spare time after his daily work on the tombs.51 Despite his declaration and the repeated assertion in the later literature that they should not be seen as finished works, these reliefs undoubtedly represent some of the hallmarks of Canova’s formal and intellec-

___________ fied his production of these potential ‘multiples’ by making each relief a prototype, formed only once or twice and thus gaining the status of an ‘original’. This was achieved by the conscious destruction of the means of multiplication, his forms taken from the model in clay. While first only his plaster reliefs had this status he soon adopted this procedure for all of his full-scale plasters, turning them into the only parts of his working-process that were to be considered fully authentic, genuinely by his hand only. The process is far more complex than can be outlined here, but in conclusion it challenged the concepts of the ‘original’ – previously being the finished work of art alone, the sculpture in marble – and of authenticity, as the plaster cast now took the place of the model accomplished by the hand of the master. 50 For this very peculiar aspect see M. Missirini, Della vita di Antonio Canova: libri quattro (Prato, 1824) Repr. ed. by Francesco Leone (Bassano del Grappa, 2004), pp. 75-6. 51 Canova, Scritti, (Honour and Mariuz), p. 347; A. D’Este (ed.), Memorie di Antonio Canova (Florence, 1864), repr. ed. by P. Mariuz (Bassano del Grappa, 1999), p. 305.

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tual achievement.52 Furthermore, I would argue that the series is important in relation to the end of the traditional system of patronage and the beginning of the modern conception of the independently created art work.53 This ties in neatly with Canova’s revolutionary use of the plaster cast. As mentioned before, Canova modelled his reliefs in clay and then engaged a formatore to make a plaster cast of the clay model. In the case of the present reliefs however, the plaster casts were not meant to be translated into marble, but were finished works in their own right. This becomes clear, when we look closer at the provenance and early history of the two series in Venice and Milan.54 From the correspondence with his Venetian friend, the architect Giannantonio Selva, we learn that every time Canova had finished a relief, he sent a cast to his two first supporters in Rome, the former Venetian ambassador Girolamo Zulian and the Venetian Abbondio Rezzonico, the Senator of Rome. Both received other plaster casts of his recent works as well, for example of the Grieving Genius on the Tomb of Clement XIII, the Amorino or the figure of Psyche, but the casts of the reliefs were special. When his oldest mentor and first patron Giovanni Falier asked for a copy of these first reliefs, the sculptor had to admit that he simply could not fulfil the wish, as the forms had intentionally been broken after the completion of the two casts for Zulian and Rezzonico.55 Now the only possibility remaining would have been to have

___________ 52 The unfinished status is underlined by D’Este (note above), p. 305 and by a letter of Canovas to Selva, 12 January 1793: “[…] Certo che se dovessi eseguirli in marmo probabilmente li spingerei più oltre, ma nulladimeno sono sempre modelli originali”, Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Civico Correr, Mss. P.D. 529c, published in: M. Gualandi, Dodici lettere inedite di Antonio Canova scritte a diversi. Con note ed illustrazioni di Michelangelo Gualandi (Bologna, 1868), p. 11; also cited in Pavanello, ‘Collezioni di gessi canoviani in età neoclassica: Padova’, at p. 181, note 16. 53 While earlier artists like Michelangelo or Bandinelli already created single works of art independently as gifts, it is important to note that Canova’s new conception originated in the very moment when the traditional system of patronage was breaking down as one consequence of the French revolution. Ideally, the plaster model on show in Canova’s studio was created without a patron in mind, realizing only the interests of the artist. As I have argued elsewhere, the series of reliefs still maintains a relation to the interests of Canova’s friend and former patron Girolamo Zulian, see Myssok, Antonio Canova, pp. 131-2 and passim. 54 For this see the contributions by Pavanello, ‘Collezioni di gessi canoviani in età neoclassica: Padova’, and Pavanello, ‘Collezioni di gessi canoviani in età neoclassica: Venezia’. 55 “Raporto ai bassirilievi è vero che ne ho fatti, ma di questi tanto il Senatore [= Abbondio Rezzonico, J.M.], quanto il Cavalier Zulian, che ne hanno i gessi se li sono fatti formare a bella posta, e poi hanno rotto il stampo, perchè io non ò fatto fare la forma a mio conto come fo di qualche cosa quando è finita in marmo. Quei due signori mi hanno pagato, ed hanno speso più di duecento scudi per ciascuno con le casse, poi vi è stato il trasporto: se avessi avuto la forma Ella si potrebbe lagnare”, Canova to Giuseppe Falier, 30 August 1794, quoted in Pavanello, ‘Collezioni di gessi canoviani in età neoclassica: Venezia’, p. 255, note 19. Even to his friend Selva he had to admit the same fact: “[...] io vi [= Selva, J.M.] dissi che vi avrei dato ben volentieri qualche pezzo dei bassorilievi, e quello della Psiche ma non quelli intieri, perché ho di già rotto il stampo di essi sino da quando furono fatti, e questo lo feci per fare un’attenzione al povero Cavaliere

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a new mould taken from these casts. Initially, it had not been Canova who had insisted on the destruction of the forms, but his two patrons Girolamo Zulian and Abbondio Rezzonico, who may have aimed to increase the value of the reliefs in plaster.56 Yet, regardless of however the idea may have come about, it is clear that Canova soon adopted it as standard procedure and destroyed the forms not only of every relief he finished, but of his statuary plaster casts, too. In this way the plaster casts on show in his Roman studio became ‘original models’ since they were the only testimony to the process of design, the clay models, and often even the bozzetti having been deliberately destroyed. Canova put this new procedure into context with another decision he had reached shortly before and communicated to Zulian. As we learn from the patrician’s approving reply, the sculptor had decided that he would no longer accept commissions, but prepare models himself and accept commissions for their execution in marble only from persons of his choice.57 The means that enabled him to realize this revolutionary idea was again the plaster cast, that was taken from his clay model and then served as the prototype in the studio. This separation of design and commission had several important implications for the future of sculpture in general. Most importantly, it meant that subjectmatter need no longer be directly dependent on the ideas and wishes of the patron, but rather depend on the artist, their interests, and their perception of the popularity of certain themes that would allow them to sell their work. But the separation between plaster cast and marble, as materials related solely to

___________ [= Zulian, J.M.], e al Senatore [= Rezzonico, J.M.], dunque intieri ora sarà impossibile che ve li potessi dare”, Canova to Selva, Rome, 29 March 1795, Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Civico Correr, Mss. P.D. 529c, quoted in Pavanello, ‘Collezioni di gessi canoviani in età neoclassica: Padova’, p. 183, note 38. 56 Compare the aforementioned letter to Falier of 30 August 1794, quoted in Pavanello, ‘Collezioni di gessi canoviani in età neoclassica: Venezia’, p. 255, note 19. The fact was also known to Selva, who immediately realized the exeptional value of these reliefs: “[i] gessi cavati a forma persa dei quattro bassirilievi che state modellando; sapete quanto giustamente egli [= Zulian, J.M.] preggi tutto quello che viene da voi, e questi tanto più perché saranno i soli gessi ricavati”, copy of the letter from Selva to Canova, dated 16 February 1793, in Venice, Biblioteca del Museo Civico Correr, Mss. P.D. 529c. 57 “[...] Mi ha poi non solamente piaciuto mà mi hà consolato ancora la sua risoluzione di non ricevere ordinazione da chiunque, ma di preparare de modelli per eseguire delle opere da dare [a] quei molti, che glele ne ricercano. Queste ricerche sono la miglior prova di un’ ottima riputazione solidamente stabilita. Mi farebbe un gran piacere il sapere quali siano li argomenti de modelli, che sono preparati”, Girolamo Zulian to Canova 28 April 1790, Bassano del Grappa, Biblioteca Civica, Epistolario Canoviano 1777. Pavanello has already published the similar letter by Zulian, written a month later: “[…] Peraltro credo, che meriti tutta la aprovazione il pensiere di far le opere per venderle poi a quelli alli quali piacessero. Questo pensiero non può cader in mente, che a quel Scultore, che si è acquistato tutta quella riputazione in Europa, da Lei tanto meritamente goduta […]”, cited by G. Pavanello, in Pavanello and Romanelli (eds), Antonio Canova, p. 242.

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the design process or the final execution respectively, had its own implications. On the one hand it heightened Canova’s own responsiveness to material, on the other, it allowed for the levelling amongst his successors of the differences between works made in plaster and marble. Thus with Canova’s use of plaster casts we find anticipated two opposing responses to material found in modern sculpture. Firstly, there is the conception, realized fully by Rodin, that modelling is the only truly creative aspect of the making of a sculpture and that the material of realization is secondary. Secondly, Canova’s own cult of the surface, the “living flesh” of marble statuary, as he called it in the context of the Elgin-marbles58 anticipates the concept of truth to material as it was postulated mainly by sculptors in the twentieth century as a reaction to the perceived disregard of material. With Canova’s introduction of plaster casts into the sculptor’s studio the very different strategies by which modern art addressed concepts of authenticity, originality and material are simultaneously present.

Frequently cited literature A. Canova, Scritti, ed. by H. Honour and P. Mariuz, Edizione Nazionale delle Opere di Antonio Canova, I, (1st edn, Rome 1994), 2nd edn (Rome, 2007) E. Bassi et al. (eds), Venezia nell’età di Canova 1780–1830, exh. cat. Venice (Venice, 1978) A. Bettagno (ed.), Studi in Onore di Elena Bassi (Venice, 1998) J. Myssok, Antonio Canova. Die Erneuerung der klassischen Mythen in der Kunst um 1800 (Petersberg, 2007) G. Pavanello, in E. Bassi et al. (eds), Venezia nell’età di Canova, cat. entries G. Pavanello, ‘Collezioni di gessi canoviani in età neoclassica: Padova’, Arte in Friuli, arte a Trieste, 12-13 (1993), pp. 167-190 G. Pavanello, ‘Collezioni di gessi canoviani in età neoclassica: Venezia’, Arte in Friuli, arte a Trieste, 15 (1995), pp. 225-70

___________ 58 For this conception and Canova’s response to the Elgin-marbles see M. Pavan, ‘Gli Elgin Marbles e il recupero dell’ellenico’, in Arte Neoclassica (Venice and Rome, 1964), pp. 159-210; M. Pavan, ‘Antonio Canova e la discussione sugli “Elgin Marbles”’, Rivista dell’Istituto nazionale d’archeologia e storia dell’arte, 21-22 (1974–75), pp. 219-344, now also in G. Pavanello (ed.), Scritti su Canova e il Neoclassicismo (Treviso, 2004), pp. 181-318. Compare as well J. Myssok, ‘Der vertauschte Reiter: zum Standbild Napoleons für Neapel und seinem Schicksal’, in J. Poeschke, T. Weigel and B. Kusch-Arnhold (eds), Premium Virtutis III, Reiterstandbilder von der Antike bis zum Klassizismus, Symbolische Kommunikation und gesellschaftliche Wertesysteme, 22 (Münster, 2008), pp. 293-324, and idem, ‘Canovas Theseus. Ein kolossales Mißverständnis’, in Mythos der Antike, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 11 (2009), pp. 169-85.

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G. Pavanello and M. Praz, L’opera completa del Canova (Milan, 1976) G. Pavanello and G. Romanelli (eds), Antonio Canova, exh. cat. Venice (Venice, 1992) A. Stahl, Die Bildhauerwerkstatt der Familie Torretto. Ein Weg zu Canova (Doctoral Thesis, University of Berlin 1998)

Chantrey and the Original Models1 MATTHEW GREG SULLIVAN

Introduction: dust to dust “It is gratifying”, wrote John Holland, one of the biographers of Sir Francis Chantrey, in 1851, “that the assemblage of precious objects which formed for so many years the attraction of the Sculptor’s room during his lifetime, has been preserved for the perpetual instruction of future ages. To the University Galleries, at Oxford, Lady Chantrey laudably presented, in 1842, the originals of her late husband’s monumental figures, busts and copies of the antique, on condition that they should be placed all together in a saloon, to be called ‘The Chantrey Gallery’”.2 The precious objects to which Holland referred were a collection of nearly 170 busts, statues and bas-reliefs in plaster, of which 110 busts, five reliefs and one relief fragment, two statues, and the heads of forty-three further statues survive today in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum. The sixty or so plaster copies after the antique, long separated from the Chantrey originals, have nearly all perished or disappeared.3 The museum history of the plaster models, from ‘permanent’ display to basement storage and partial demolition, is well recorded.4 The grotesque detail of the Keepers of the Ashmolean ordering the decapitation of the full-size statues in 1939 and preserving the heads for

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The research for this paper, carried out at the Ashmolean Museum, is supported by the Henry Moore Foundation, the Paul Mellon Centre, and Lincoln College, Oxford. The Chantrey Project – to research and partially redisplay the Chantrey Collection – was inaugurated in 2006 by Timothy Wilson, Keeper of Western Art in the Ashmolean Museum, who kindly read and corrected an earlier version of this article. Parts of it were delivered at a seminar at the Victoria and Albert Museum/ Royal College of Art in 2007. I am grateful to Glenn Adamson, David Crowley, and others present, for their comments on the issues involved. My thanks also to Alicia Weisberg-Roberts and Lucy Cutler for reading drafts of the text. Holland, Memorials p. 379. See D. C. Kurtz, The Reception of Classical Art in Britain: An Oxford Story of Plaster Casts from the Antique (Oxford, 2000), pp. 183-7. Penny, ‘Chantrey, Westmacott and Casts After the Antique’. The essay also appears in Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture, pp. xxvii-xxxiii.

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‘documentary’ purposes, is perhaps the most distinctive aspect of a story that will otherwise have echoes for many cast collections across Europe. The Chantrey Collection was the first monographic collection of plaster models to find a permanent home in a public gallery in Britain.5 The gift of the works to a public collection was the concern of, amongst others, the Prime Minister Sir Robert Peel, who with the Dean of Westminster, William Buckland, had attempted initially to place the works in the British Museum.6 Over the course of Chantrey’s career as a sculptor, which ran from approximately 1805 to his death in 1841, the accumulated models of a lifetime’s work had reached the status, in some people’s eyes, of a national treasure. In 1842 the full-size plaster models were placed in what is now the Ashmolean shop (Fig. 14. 1), and the busts distributed around the museum. Italy had its Possagno, Denmark its Thorvaldsen Museum, and England had “The Chantrey Gallery”. The question addressed here is not so much why the works fell out of favour as to understand how they became invested, in Chantrey’s career, with such significance. How, in other words, such a plethora of meaning accrued to works in a medium that was latterly dismissed as merely reproductive. It is a notable part of Holland’s description that the plasters are called the ‘originals’. Originality in plaster might appear to be an oxymoron. That the product of a reproductive mechanism can have an aura of original creativity was certainly a notion that was lost on the mid twentieth-century curators of the Ashmolean, who felt that Chantrey’s works were, as mere plaster casts, worthless.7 It is, however, an historical truth that when Chantrey’s works arrived in Oxford in 1842, the collection was esteemed as having originary value – a closer affinity with the creative mind and hand of the artist than the

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It was not the first to be offered (Maria Denman offered John Flaxman’s casts to the National Gallery soon after his death in 1826), but its acceptance predates the gift of plaster models by Flaxman’s heirs to University College, London in 1848, and subsequent gifts by John Gibson to the Royal Academy, and Sir Richard Westmacott to the Ashmolean. Minutes of the Committee Meeting of 9 April 1842, and letter from William Buckland to Sir Robert Peel dated 18 March 1842, British Museum Central Archives C.9/4/42 (hereafter ‘Letter Buckland to Peel). My thanks to Stephanie Clarke, Archivist and Records Manager, for locating these records for me. The models are referred to simply as ‘Chantrey casts’ in the application to the Vice-Chancellor to destroy the full-size statues and groups, signed by the Keeper E. T. Leeds, in September 1939. A copy of this letter is in the Department of Western Art Archives, Ashmolean Museum (hereafter DWAA). The question of the meaning of the word ‘original’ in the context of Lady Chantrey’s gift is raised in Selby Whittingham’s review of Penny 1991 in the Journal of The History of Collections, 5.1 (1993), p. 90. Whittingham’s suggestion that we need a historical understanding of the development of this term, is the guiding principle of this essay. For the issue of reproduction and of the ‘aura’ of art works in sculptural studies see A. Hughes and E. Ranfft (eds), Sculpture and its Reproductions (London, 1997).

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Fig. 14. 1: View in the Chantrey Gallery. Joseph Fisher. Engraving, in: Idem, Sixty Etched Reminiscences of the Models by Sir Francis Chantrey in the University Galleries, Oxford, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1850), frontispiece.

marble and bronze works that carried Chantrey’s name across Britain and the Empire. The word ‘originals’ appears not only in Holland’s description, but also in the wording of Lady Chantrey’s gift, and in Buckland and Peel’s approach to the British Museum.8 Elsewhere, Holland describes the works as ‘original autographs’, and Chantrey’s executors describe the busts as “from the hand of the artist himself”.9 Yet, the ways in which these works can be understood as ‘originals’ is not easy to summarize, as they were produced for differing purposes, at different stages of the creative process, and for differing functions. The ‘originality’ of the models carries a complex of historical meanings, in some cases specific to Chantrey’s own career and technique, and in other cases the product of a more generalized ideology of the creative artist in early nineteenth-century England. The Ashmolean Collection is, then, an index not only to the great sculptor’s career and his working practice, but also

___________ 8 9

Letter from M. A. Chantrey to the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, 6 April 1842, in ‘Letters and Papers 1839–1856, DWAA’; ‘Letter Buckland to Peel’. Holland, Memorials, p. 248, and Letter from Charles H. Turner and George Jones to the ViceChancellor, 4 September 1844, in ‘Letters and Papers 1839–1856, DWAA’.

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to a set of historically defined meanings that were subsequently lost. The origins and development of the ‘originality’ of Chantrey’s plaster casts can, however, be traced from the earliest part of his career to the years immediately after his death. This essay addresses the role of plaster in Chantrey’s career, the reasons why this medium became so meaningful in the formation of Chantrey’s reputation, and why, and in what ways, the plasters were understood as ‘the originals’.

Chantrey and the Original Plaster At the time of his death, Chantrey was probably the most successful sculptor Britain had ever seen. With a practice based almost exclusively on portraiture he had amassed a fortune said to be in excess of £200,000.10 He died a Knight of the Realm and the recipient of an honorary Doctorate in Civil Law from Oxford University.11 The obituaries were united in their praise for a sculptor whose fame, as one writer put it “reached the highest point in his own day” and “will be extended, imperishably, through all succeeding time”.12 The plasters in the Ashmolean date from almost every stage of his career, from the bust of Horne Tooke, dated 1810, to the 1841 bust of the departing Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, one of the sculptor’s last works. Although not comprehensive (Chantrey produced over 500 works in his lifetime)13 the collection includes all of the landmark works in Chantrey’s oeuvre, and gives the impression of being chosen to provide a select visual catalogue of his principal productions. His statues of three kings, several prime ministers, scientists such as James Watt, a noted monument to the Robinson children, and to a couple of woodcocks, shot with one blast of his gun, as well as famous busts of the poets Sir Walter Scott and William Wordsworth, are all part of the selection. The choice of works was almost certainly made by Lady Chantrey and her husband’s executors. Lady Chantrey said that she had received a “verbal injunction” from her husband that the works should not be “gratuitously given away” which she certainly interpreted as an instruction to have the works preserved.14 Chantrey also drew attention to the models in his will,

___________ 10 Although this figure was disputed in The Times, 11 December 1841, p. 4 by a correspondent who claimed the figure was nearer £60,000, Times Digital Archive. 11 ‘Chantrey Will’, 343v. 12 Cutting from unidentified newspaper in the Gunnis Papers, Conway Library, Courtauld Institute of Art. 13 The most recent figure is 538 works (excluding multiples of those works), see I. Roscoe et al., Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851 (New Haven, Conn., 2009). 14 ‘Letter Buckland to Peel’.

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where he instructed his executors to dispose of any plaster models that they did not deem worthy of preservation.15 Certainly it appears that Chantrey himself attached great value to these plaster works. One anecdote, published by Holland, but which presumably originates with the artist himself, has it that Chantrey’s first ever effort at sculpture was in plaster. Chantrey was, at an early stage of his training, an apprentice to a print and plaster cast dealer in Sheffield, where he resolved (the story goes) to try his hand at casting and persuaded a fellow assistant to submit to having a plaster cast taken of his face. The sculptor had followed the established method of providing airways to the mouth and nostrils, but “had forgotten or not been aware, how much the power to respire at all depended upon thoracic action”, and placed plaster across the colleagues’ chest. “Such was the constriction of the muscles by the hardening cast, that the man rolled down, and, with some difficulty, tore off the mould which, as he said, was ‘throttling him!’”. Chantrey was “taught but not foiled by this misadventure” and changed places with his shop-mate. So, with “more courage and better success” the sculptor projected instead a self-portrait and submitted himself to the “clammy effusion”. Holland concludes that “in the mould thus produced, and by a process now sufficiently common, he cast a face, and thence proceeded to form the first composition in a line of art in which his surpassing abilities ultimately achieved such unprecedented celebrity”.16 It is significant that a story should emerge that associated the origins of Chantrey’s art with plaster casting. Although the story has the structure of a myth, its strength as a tale is perhaps drawn from the importance of works in this medium to the formation of Chantrey’s reputation. Chantrey’s early career in sculpture was principally based on busts in plaster. This was no doubt, in part, determined by the difficulties of financing his developing practice in London and the relative cheapness of plaster compared to other materials, but it also carried a degree of ideological significance. The busts that made his name were a series of plasters of notable public figures, all from the radical political circles to which Chantrey was then attached: John Horne Tooke (Fig. 14. 2), Benjamin West, Francis Burdett and John Raphael Smith. The plaster busts were not made as preliminary models for marble works, but as a series of plaster multiples. Chantrey appears to have stepped into an informal role as an iconographer of radicalism in these early years of his career; a role recently left vacant by the death of Thomas Banks in 1805. Banks was a member of the Society for

___________ 15 ‘Chantrey Will’, 343v. 16 Holland, Memorials, p. 36.

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Constitutional Information, and a close associate of Horne Tooke. Amongst Banks’s works sold at his death were a series of busts of members of Tooke’s radical circle, including plasters of Felix Vaughan and Lord Daer.17 Plaster was an obvious medium for such a democratic group. Cheaper than marble, easier to reproduce, it provided an icon of membership, as well as resisting the charge of vanity connected with luxury materials. Chantrey’s early works no doubt drew on tacit associations of plaster with commonality, friendship and association. J. R. Smith ordered busts of Tooke, Burdett and West, and Burdett ordered a bust of Tooke. A host of others, many with radical sympathies, such as William Cobbett, ordered copies of these busts in Fig. 14. 2: Bust of John Horne Tooke. Sir Francis 1810 at a cost of five pounds and five Chantrey, 1810. Plaster, h: 63.5 cm. Ashmolean shillings. Most bought copies of one Museum, Oxford. or two of the busts, others, such as West’s son, ordered numerous copies of the bust of his father, presumably acting on more local family sympathies.18 A material that may once have been seen as a cheap, reproductive, alternative to marble was valued for its ability to affirm an equal connection between a limited circle of associates. Subsequently (in one case fourteen years later), these plasters were to become models for marbles that were requested by other patrons.19 The plaster busts of these subjects in the Ashmolean are difficult to place in this sequence. The inscriptions on the busts of Burdett and Tooke state that they were “mod-

___________ 17 See sale of Banks’ works, Christie 22 May 1805, also C. and D. Bewley, Gentleman Radical: A Life of John Horne Tooke, 1736–1812 (London, 1998); C. F. Bell, Annals of Thomas Banks, Sculptor, Royal Academician (Cambridge, 1938). 18 Day-Book of Sir Francis Chantrey, Derby Local Studies Library, MS 6644, unpag. 19 The bust of Benjamin West was carved in marble in 1818, that of Horne Tooke in 1819, and the J. R. Smith in 1825. The bust of Burdett does not seem to have been translated into marble. For details of these commissions, or indeed for any of the works mentioned here, see Yarrington et al., ‘An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey’.

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elled” by Chantrey and “published” in 1810 on September 1 and December 1 respectively.20 In the former case, this is scratched into the plaster very distinctly, which suggests that the inscription was added to this bust subsequent to its casting. This could, conceivably, be the first casting. No pointing marks are present, but the bust was cleaned to a plaster surface below Chantrey’s in the 1970s, and so they could have been removed. The subsequent treatment of the Horne Tooke also makes it difficult to ascertain how early or late in the sequence of events it appeared, as it is coated with several generations of whitewash. The bust of J. R. Smith seems less fresh in its modelling than the busts of his compatriots, which suggests that it is a later cast, but the surface is thick with grubby whitewash, making any conclusions difficult. This period must have seen the main development of Chantrey’s skills as an artist in plaster. Chantrey’s day-book, covering the period from 1809 to 1813, records orders and payments from the time of the purchase of his first house in Pimlico to just before he completed his first major public commission, the statue of King George III. Although sketchy and terse, it nevertheless gives an insight into the community of plaster production that existed in London at that time. It records, for instance, the names of Chantrey’s principal dealers in raw plaster: Mr Rogers, Mr Cockayne and Mr Keys all supplied sizeable quantities, although Cockayne appears to be the principal supplier.21 The day-book demonstrates that Chantrey was employed on plaster ornament production (a shell bracket and an eagle), and paid established plaster workers such as Bartholomew Papera (†1815), James Turnerelli (father of the sculptor Peter Turnerelli), as well as the young Joseph Gott (1785–1860), who was to go on to a substantial career of his own. Unfortunately, the manuscript does not record the nature of the work these men produced. At this time Chantrey was subcontracting some moulding work to a Mr Ling, although he appears also to have produced moulds of his own.22 The sheer output of plaster busts at the time must have taken Chantrey from reliance on experienced plaster workers to a pitch of personal casting ability, as the progression recorded in his ledgers is towards studio self-sufficiency in most aspects of the plaster making process. Numerous contemporary commentators identified Chantrey’s 1811 exhibition of the busts of Tooke, Smith, West and Burdett at the Royal Academy as the turning point in his career. Indeed, the busts drew the praise of Joseph

___________ 20 See ‘Plaster Casts From the Studio of Sir Francis Chantrey’, in Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture, pp. 213-14. 21 On 9 December 1810, for instance, Chantrey bought from Cockayne one and a half hundred weight of “coarse plaister” and half “of Fine”, Day-Book of Sir Francis Chantrey, Derby Local Studies Library, MS 6644, unpag. 22 Ibid. Details of the lives of Papera, Gott and James and Peter Turnerelli are in Roscoe et al., Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851.

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Nollekens, Chantrey’s principal rival, and precipitated many more orders.23 One of Chantrey’s most notable commissions at this time (1809) was a set of colossal heads of naval heroes in plaster for Greenwich Hospital.24 A large element of the public effect of Chantrey’s works, in other words, had come from his sculpture in plaster. He had produced a small number of works in marble previous to this time, including a monument to Rev. James Wilkinson, his first commission in stone,25 but ultimately, Chantrey had succeeded in creating a reputation that involved substantial patrons and feted exhibitions, without spending extensively on luxury materials. He had also insisted on the possibility that an original talent could be recognized through a reproductive technique.

The Workshop Original In 1814 Chantrey won his first significant public commission, the statue of George III for the Guildhall (Fig. 14. 3). It was the first of dozens of contracts for statues or groups, the models for which dominated the Chantrey Gallery in the 1840s. These models, now disembodied in all but two cases, constitute another category of the Ashmolean collection. They were produced as the secondary stage of a major commission and often served an important function in the management of cash flow in Chantrey’s workshop practice. The marble of George III was destroyed in the Second World War, only a few years after the original plaster model was decapitated, leaving us now with no full-size manifestation of this commission.26 It is the earliest form of a process that became typical in Chantrey’s production of large public commissions. Several of Chantrey’s contracts stipulate that payment would occur in three installments, and that the second payment would be dependent on the approval by the client of the full-size model. This was the case with the statue of George III,27 but also, explicitly, in the commission for the statue of James Anderson (1815–1819).28 The three-stage pattern of several other payments suggests that the same process was used for other

___________ 23 Holland, Memorials, p. 260; A. Potts, Sir Francis Chantrey 1781–1841 Sculptor of the Great (London, 1980), p. 16. 24 Yarrington et al., ‘An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey’, pp. 21-2. 25 Holland, Memorials, pp. 191-210. 26 Yarrington et al., ‘An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey’, pp. 31-2, fig. 11 shows the marble statue in situ prior to its destruction. 27 Ibid., p. 31, the full size model was completed on 6 May 1812, and an instalment of £732 was then paid by the client. 28 Ibid., p. 60. The same process was used for the statues of Spencer Perceval (1813–1817) and Lord Melville (1812–1818), these models are not part of the Chantrey collection in the Ashmolean.

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large-scale commissions.29 These models therefore, would allow Chantrey to raise the necessary funds to purchase the marble or bronze for the client’s work. It allowed for the management of money, but also assisted in the management of expectations. In the full-size models the clients would have seen simulacra of the intended final works, and thus known precisely what to expect. This stage also allowed for final changes to the design, and thus helped to avoid the kind of protracted disputes between indignant clients and impoverished sculptors that punctuated some eight- Fig. 14. 3: Head of George III (fragment of fullsize statue). Sir Francis Chantrey, 1811–1815. eenth-century commissions.30 Plaster, h: 38.8 cm. Ashmolean Museum, OxChantrey’s bookkeeping at this ford. time, not coincidentally, entered a new stage of diligence. His employment of Allan Cunningham – a mason, man of letters and offspring of a bookkeeping family – must have influenced the production of detailed ledgers.31 These recorded not only commissions, but materials, work carried out by assistants, and wages paid at hourly rates. The Derby Ledger, although not comprehensive and covering only the early years of Chantrey’s career from 1814 to late 1817, is perhaps the most important economic document available to historians of British workshop practice.32 It is possible, for instance, through the ledgers, to recreate the various stages of the production process of the plaster statue of Dr James Anderson (Fig. 14. 4). 33

___________ 29 For instance, the statues of General Gillespie (1816), George Washington (1819–1827) and Robert Dundas of Arniston (1820–24). 30 As for instance in the case in G. B. Locatelli’s protracted public dispute with Lord Orford over a statue group of Theseus, Hercules and Cerberus, when Orford refused to pay the final asking price of £2400 when the work was completed, see entry for Locatelli in Roscoe et al., Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851. 31 L. Stephen, ‘Cunningham, Allan (1784–1842)’, rev. by H. Whyte, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004), [accessed 2 April 2009]. 32 MS Derby Ledger. It was rediscovered by Prof. Alison Yarrington late in the project to publish the R.A. Ledger. Its contents are summarized there; Yarrington et al., ‘An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey’, pp. 5-7. 33 Illustrated here by Fisher prior to disembodiment. The surviving head is illustrated in Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture, p. 215, fig. 621.

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Chantrey did not have a single formatore, but seems to have employed several of his assistants on the casting process, even those, such as F. A. Lege, who also worked extensively on marble carving. Chantrey employed Frederick Smith to cast the head of Anderson, whose labour for one day and seven hours on the work, was paid at a wage of one shilling and nine pence. The moulding of the head appears to have been subcontracted to a ‘Cassano’ who was paid for the job, not by the hour (this is the only instance of sub-contracting during this commission). The model was packed up in May 1816 – presumably to be sent to the clients – before Lege began work on the model again Fig. 14. 4: Statue of Dr James Anderson. Sir in May 1817. Lege was probably Francis Chantrey, 1815–19. Engraving by Joseph completing the clay model of the Fisher, 1850, in: idem, (see Fig. 14. 1), fig. 41. body of Anderson, rather than just remodelling the head, as he gave over 14 days to this work. Smith cast the figure in three days, with the assistance of Cunningham and another sculptor, David Dunbar. Further casting work took four days. The cost of the raw materials is also recorded at this stage (nine hundredweight and four bags of plaster cost three pounds, thirteen shillings and six pence).34 This kind of extraordinary provenance, thanks to the Ledgers, is available for many of the early works in the Ashmolean Collection. The full-size model thus held an important economic function in the success of the workshop, and the time invested in the production of the work reflects its role as a vital cog in the management of a good sculpture business. Over time this stage of the process would, in the case of major public commissions, be considered newsworthy. The Times, on 7 January 1842, recorded the visit of members of the committee charged with erecting an equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington to Chantrey’s atelier. There they saw a fullsize plaster of the horse and a bust of the Duke that had been completed

___________ 34 MS Derby Ledger, pp. 137-8.

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shortly before the sculptor’s death, and, professing themselves satisfied, empowered his assistants to complete the commission.35

Plaster and Absence: the afterlife of the plaster model The secondary-stage plaster models may have contributed to the general sense that Chantrey was a man of technical prowess and business skill, but they were also increasingly appreciated for their unique connections to the artist. Certainly by the time of the Wellington committee’s visit, Chantrey’s plasters were understood as more than functional, and were invested with a significance which could only be understood through familiarity with the sculptural process. This familiarity is due, in part, to the very public profile of Chantrey’s plaster works, and the celebrated gallery that displayed his work. Early in his career, in late 1814, Chantrey embarked on a series of alterations (or possibly additions) to his house on Eccleston Street, Pimlico. His list of out-goings records a number of payments to decorators, a payment to a Mr Jubb for new lights, and money to his own workmen for the renovation (or creation) of a ‘gallery’. Three assistants, Whitten, Cunningham and Dunbar, spent eleven days fixing new landings, Whitten installed a gallery rail, and Frederick Smith was paid for three days spent “fixing busts in the gallery”.36 It seems likely that this was the first incarnation of Chantrey’s gallery of plaster casts, which was to grow in size and popularity over the next twenty-five years. The display of Chantrey’s works, open to the public, and focusing attention on Chantrey’s skill, added an important new layer of public significance to the plaster models, and inhered in the public presentation of Chantrey as a sculptor. There are numerous visitor accounts of Chantrey’s gallery. A Henry Woolcombe of Devon, for instance, recorded in his manuscript diary several visits to the studio in the 1820s. In May 1822 he recorded seeing Chantrey’s workshops and “beautiful specimens of his art, models etc.” before attending, the next day, the Royal Academy show. In November 1826, Woolcombe again “called at Chantrey’s, saw some beautiful specimens of sculpture, particularly a full-length of [James] Watt, face remarkably intelligent”. After this visit Woolcombe went on to see the newly-built Belgrave Square, Hyde Park, the British Museum and the National Picture Gallery.37 He was particularly

___________ 35 The Times, Friday, 7 January 1842, p. 3, col E, Times Digital Archive. 36 MS Derby Ledger, p. 107. 37 Diary of Henry Woolcombe II, Woolcombe Family of Hemerdon, Plymouth and West Devon Record Office, 710/396.

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interested in seeing a bust of a Devon worthy, the Revd Mudge, but he also appears to have viewed Chantrey’s workshops as part of an art tourist trail. In 1830, when Chantrey purchased a second, adjacent house on Belgrave Place, the gallery was relocated to a first-floor space in the new house, with an antechamber designed by Sir John Soane.38 The Quaker Bernard Barton later described a visit to the rooms as an option for any discerning tourist, looking for solace: It was worth something to steal out of the din and hubbub of crowded streets into those large, still, cathedral-like rooms of Chantrey’s, populous with phantom-like statues, or groups of statues as large or larger than life, some tinted with dust and time, others of spectral whiteness, but all silent and solemn, – to roam about among these, hearing nothing but the distant murmur of rolling carriages, and, now and then, the clink of the workman’s chisel in some of the yards or work39 shops.

Holland felt justified in referring to the rooms as “celebrated image-chambers”. He also records a more elaborate visitor account, by the Yorkshire poet, Montgomery. The poet spoke of his emotions “on being left, on one occasion in the twilight, sole companion of this pageantry of breathless forms, each and altogether so still, so cold, so white, and so silent, that they felt to him as the actual presence of so many spirits”.40 From Barton’s description and from the physical condition of Chantrey’s models it is clear that the works were varnished with transparent shellac (which discoloured over time to change their white appearance to ruddy brown41). The treatment indicates that significant care was taken over their display conditions and their preservation. Similarly the changing displays that incorporated casts after the antique, and occasionally works by Antonio Canova, also suggest a care over the space as one which communicated complex notions about Chantrey’s art and its place in history. Certainly these works were serving a function as advertisements of skill to clients of the sculptor, but the use of a plaster model as a display item created a number of other subtle effects.

___________ 38 Extensive documentation of Chantrey’s new gallery survives in the archives of Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. There are 25 drawings by Soane or assistants, a Bill Book (L96-104) with abstracts of bills from plasterers and carpenters, a bound notebook recording plastering (12/NB38), and correspondence between Soane and Chantrey on the subject. My thanks to Tim Knox, Susan Palmer and, especially, Stephen Astley for guiding me through the documents. 39 Holland, Memorials, p. 243. 40 Holland, Memorials, p. 248. 41 See Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture, p. 214 and Penny, ‘Chantrey, Westmacott and Casts After the Antique’, p. 257. A contemporary recorded the “gamboge” and “orange tawny” colour of the models on their arrival at the museum.

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The plaster models communicated a sense of process. They have marks inscribed on their surfaces that indicate two absent objects. First, they carry impressions of the original clay model that does not seem to have been preserved. The plaster records the occasional sketchiness of Chantrey’s modelling, the impressions of the fingers, or the dexterity of the rolling of clay between the fingers to form hair.42 These details Fig. 14. 5: Detail showing pointing marks on bust are to some degree lost in marble. of Anne Lucy, Baroness Nugent. Sir Francis Secondly, the pointing marks are Chantrey, 1819–20. Plaster, h. 62.6 cm. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. clearly visible on a number of works. These marks, a dot and sometimes an encircling pencil mark, mark the highest or the most complex parts of the model and are made to permit the transference of the dimensions of the model to a marble block (Fig. 14. 5). Chantrey, early in his career, invented a new pointing machine. He discussed the design in correspondence with James Watt in 1817–18, although it may have been invented several years before.43 It is mentioned as one of his achievements (albeit a lesser, mechanical achievement) in Chantrey’s obituary in the Gentleman’s Magazine. Chantrey, it was said, communicated his design to Canova, who feared that it was too technically advanced for an Italian mechanic to construct. Houdon was so impressed with the machine on a visit to Chantrey’s studio that the Englishman gave him a replica, which Houdon later passed off as his own.44 Whatever the truth of these jingoistic assertions, it is clear that Chantrey’s technical prowess was a key part of his public mythology. When Chantrey exhibited Canova’s model of John the Baptist in his London gallery in 1826 Allan Cunningham drew attention in an article to the pointing marks (“all its brass points of admeasurement”).45 This certainly alerted the viewer to the process of transfer, but possibly also was intended

___________ 42 See Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture, pp. 213-14 for a description of the techniques evident in the models. 43 Yarrington et al., ‘An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey’, p. 54. There is a reference in MS Derby Ledger, June 1815, to a “new instrument” used in the pointing of the statue to Lord President Blair, pp. 42-9. 44 Gentleman’s Magazine, 18, n.s. (London, 1842), pp. 104-5. 45 Anon [Allan Cunningham], ‘Review of Memoirs of Antonio Canova, with a Critical Analysis of his Works, and an Historical View of Modern Sculpture. By S Memes, AM, Member of the Astro-

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to show the difference between the implements used by the two men. The sense of process created by the indications of the absent clay and absent marble were evidently intended effects of the display of these plaster works.46 The finished works were the property of the client, but the plaster simulacra, with their marks of transference, were Chantrey’s and were presented in a space defined by its connection with Chantrey. The marbles are usually presented in physical sites in which the inscription and the location communicate the virtues of the sitter and the nature of the homage intended by the commissioners. Anderson’s statue, for instance, was commissioned by the East India Company and erected in Madras, where Anderson served as the company’s Physician-General. Chantrey’s gallery, on the other hand, with its display of numerous models, changed the major referent to the skill, control and career of the artist. The arrival of the models in the University Galleries in 1842, although treated with scepticism by some of the Oxford academics47 carried this presentation of the artist through his plasters into a public repository. The London display, where the artist was venerated, the surfaces of the works were treated, sensitively lit, and displayed beside plaster casts of the finest sculpture of the ancient and modern world, was effectively continued into the Chantrey Gallery. Chantrey’s widow not only ensured a clause in the gift that Chantrey’s works were always to be shown together in a gallery of sufficient size, but the executors of Chantrey’s will took time to visit the galleries and devise a suitable display “with reference to light and general effect”. A plan of this survives in the Western Art Department Archives (Fig. 14. 6).48

___________ nomical Society of London &c 1825’, in Quarterly Review, 34, June and September 1826 (London, 1826), p. 117. 46 M. Baker in ‘Shifting Materials, Shifting Values? Contemporary Responses to the Materials of Eighteenth-century Sculpture’, (forthcoming), suggests that an alertness to the processes of transferring dimensions between materials was present amongst viewers of British sculpture even earlier, in the eighteenth century, and may have constituted a facet of their ‘period eye’. My thanks to Prof. Baker for allowing me to see a copy of this essay. 47 In Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 19 June 1847, it was reported that the Public Orator, Rev. W. Jacobson, had, in the Creweian Oration, concluded by alluding to the “extensive collection” of Chantrey’s models in the University Galleries, “regretting that they had not been associated with some by Flaxman or Thorwaldsen”. The same paper had earlier carried the news of the gift, see [accessed 16 July 2009]. My thanks to Colin Harrison for alerting me to this reference. An even more scathing response, by John Burgon, a collector of antique sculpture, is quoted in Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture, xxviii. 48 Letter from C. H. Turner and G. Jones ‘execrs to the late Sir F Chantrey’ to the Vice-Chancellor and Delegates of the New University and Taylor Buildings, 4 September 1844. The plan is enclosed, ‘Letters and Papers 1839–1856, DWAA’.

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Fig. 14. 6: Plan of recommended display of statues and groups by Sir Francis Chantrey in the University Galleries, Oxford. C. H. Turner and George Jones, 1844. Pen on paper. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Chantrey and the Original Plaster II Between 1809 and 1841 Chantrey’s houses and workshops, which were in a state of constant expansion, must have become home to hundreds of plaster models and moulds. These included, as we have seen, a) works produced for multiplication in plaster, and b) full-size pointing models for busts and statues. There are, however, other categories of works. The busts of Thomas Stothard RA and of James Northcote RA (1812), both artists and friends of Chantrey, were not produced for a recorded paid commission and appear never to have been produced in multiple or translated into marble.49 They appear to be unique plaster busts. There are also oddities amongst the collection. The bust of Henry Cline is, as Nicholas Penny points out, actually a plaster cast after the finished marble

___________ 49 Many years later Chantrey was commissioned to produce a funerary statue of Northcote, although the bust was not made for this commission.

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(the carved inscription is reproduced in the plaster).50 However the Cline plaster cast also bears pointing marks. The documentation shows that Chantrey was commissioned to produce busts of Cline many years apart – the first in 1813, others in 1820 and 1825.51 Presumably having mislaid or broken the earlier model Chantrey took a cast from the existing marble and used that cast as a pointing model. The bust of Cline in the Ashmolean, therefore, is both a reproductive plaster cast, and an original pointing model. The descriptions of the works (cited above) as ‘originals’ or ‘from the hand’ of Chantrey suggest varied meanings of ‘originality’, and a curious combination of practice and ideology. The multiplication of plasters, such as those of Tooke and Burdett suggests that they are ‘original’ in the sense that all of the plasters out of Chantrey’s own mould are equally original. In other words, they are original in the sense of not being reliant on or subservient to another piece in marble. The pointing models are ‘originals’ because they predate and determine the form of the marble or bronze works (originals of). The busts of Stothard and Northcote are original in the sense that they are unique. There remains the possibility that the Tooke and Burdett are the first out of the mould, and therefore they are original in the sense of being the first of the multiples. There is also the possibility that they are the models that were used for pointing the later marbles, and therefore are originals of. The use of the term ‘original’ therefore refers us not to a precise working method, but to a number of possible working methods. Although its meaning is diffuse and difficult, it was nevertheless a term that had currency for Chantrey and his audience. Its function was rather to endorse the value of the work as having had some direct tactile contact with the artist’s hand. After Chantrey’s death his widow, Mary Ann, took considerable steps to ensure that Chantrey’s works were not devalued by reproduction or by the intervention of unsupervised hands. She destroyed her husband’s moulds in order to prevent casts being made by anyone else. She resisted the Ashmolean’s desire to allow casts to be taken from the models after they arrived in the museum (an instruction they later ignored).52 Lady Chantrey was, thus, attempting, post-

___________ 50 Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture, p. 229 51 Yarrington et al., ‘An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey’, pp. 26-7, p. 252. 52 Letter from Lady Chantrey to Rev Edward Cardwell, 1 May 1845, ‘Letters and Papers 1839–56, DWAA’: “I believed it was understood they were not to be moulded, my husband’s strict instructions to me were to that effect […] The moulds. [I] have at his desire destroyed, by doing of which I offended many friends, and acquaintances, who wished for casts, but I should not have thought myself justified in acting contrary to my husband’s wishes”. Casts of the bust of John Dalton and the statue of William Roscoe were permitted by curators in 1866 and 1893, see Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture, p. 214.

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facto, to ensure that these works, although made by a reproductive technique, should remain uniquely connected with her husband. There is no doubt that Chantrey’s public were alive to the issue of originality, and artistic control. In his will, Chantrey permitted his commissions ‘in a sufficient state of progress’ to be completed after his death by Henry Weekes, under the superintendence of Allan Cunningham.53 This part of Chantrey’s will was reported, inter alia, in The Times. There was still some interest, however, in whether this meant that Cunningham or Weekes was to be seen as the main artistic force behind their completion. Weekes responded in print by making it clear that Cunningham’s superintendence did not extend to control over artistic matters (“I have never seen Mr Cunningham engaged as an artist upon any of the works in the studio; his undoubted talents in other respects far be it from me to deny”).54 There was, then, an increasing alertness to the notion of artistic control, individuality and uniqueness, even in relation to a technique, such as plaster, that had reproduction and reproducibility as a key feature. Within a few years of Chantrey’s death the complex network of practice and ideas that informed the notion that these works were ‘original’ was starting to be lost on a new generation of Oxford curators. The works are, by the close of the century referred to simply as ‘plaster casts’, and are increasingly treated as comparable to the casts after the antique, that were felt to be of greater importance, as classical art was at that time seen in Oxford as paradigmatic of sculptural achievement.

Conclusion The collection of Chantrey’s original plaster models, when taken with the extensive surviving documentation, provides a remarkable insight into the role of plaster in the sculptor’s techniques of production, his career, and in the public presentation of his artistic persona. It also, however, supplies a key to the historical understanding of the discourse of ‘originality’ in sculpture, a notion that was produced by a number of subtle practical and ideological manoeuvres on the part of the artist, his heirs and the artistic profession. The salvaging of the physical objects needs to be accompanied by an archaeology of the processes and meanings that endowed these products of a reproductive technique with originary value.

___________ 53 ‘Chantrey Will’, f. 343r. 54 The Times, 14 January 1842, p. 4. Weekes was provoked by a letter from an unnamed correspondent on 12 January 1842. Details of the will were reported at length on 11 December 1841, p. 4, Times Digital Archive.

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Frequently cited literature Archival sources ‘Chantrey Will’ = Will of Sir Francis Chantrey, The National Archives in Kew, PROB 11/1954, ff.343-347v ‘Letter Buckland to Peel’ = Letter from William Buckland to Sir Robert Peel dated 18 March 1842, British Museum Central Archives C.9/4/42 ‘Letters and Papers 1839–56’, DWAA = Letters and Papers 1839–56, Department of Western Art Archives. The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford MS Derby Ledger = Chantrey Ledger, Derby Local Studies Library MS 3535 Printed literature J. Holland, Memorials of Sir Francis Chantrey, RA, Sculptor, in Hallamshire and Elsewhere (Sheffield, 1851) N. Penny, ‘Chantrey, Westmacott and Casts After the Antique’, Journal of the History of Collections, 3.2 (1991), pp. 255-64 N. Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum, vol. 3 (Oxford, 1992), pp. xxvii-xxxiii I. Roscoe, E. Hardy and M. G. Sullivan, Biographical Dictionary of Sculptors in Britain 1660–1851 (New Haven, Conn., 2009) A. Yarrington, I. Lieberman, A. Potts and M. Baker, ‘An Edition of the Ledger of Sir Francis Chantrey, R.A., at the Royal Academy, 1809–1841’, The Walpole Society, 56. 1991–2 (1994)

Live Body Moulding and Maternal Devotion in Marcello’s Studio1 JEAN-FRANÇOIS CORPATAUX

Adèle d’Affry, Duchess of Colonna, working under the pseudonym Marcello (1836–1879) was one of the most famous female sculptors in France during the Second Empire.2 From 1865 to 1870, she created the work she came to consider as her masterpiece: the bronze Pythia (Fig. 15. 1),3 first exhibited in the 1870 Salon and later placed in the foyer of the Palais Garnier in Paris, on the occasion of the inauguration of the opera house in 1875. In her will, Marcello left orders for the making of a bronze reproduction for her museum in Fribourg, Switzerland (Fig. 15. 2).4 Adèle’s abundant correspondence with her mother details the stages of the process leading to the Pythia’s creation, from its conception to its exhibition. One of these letters, dated 13 July 1869 deserves our full attention in the wider context of live body moulding.

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I would like to express my gratitude to Victor Stoichita for bibliographical help and pertinent comments that were instrumental for the completion of this contribution. For the English translation of the text I should like to thank Erland Möckli and Eckart Marchand. On Marcello’s biography, see: H. de Diesbach, La femme du grand monde et des Beaux-Arts. “Marcello” la Duchesse Colonna née d’Affry (Soleure, 1911); J. -J. Berthier, ‘La Duchesse Colonna d’Affry’, Fribourg artistique, 24 (1913); Comtesse d’Alcantara, Marcello. Adèle d’Affry, Duchesse Castiglione Colonna (Geneva, 1961); M. von Wistinghausen, ‘Qui est Marcello? Esquisse socio-historique de l’artiste’, in (no editor), Marcello (1836–1879). Adèle d’Affry. Duchesse de Castiglione Colonna, exh. cat. Fribourg (Fribourg, 1980), pp. 11-25; G. de Diesbach, La double vie de la Duchesse Colonna. 1836–1879. La Chimère bleue (Paris, 1988). On Marcello’s Pythie, see: J. -J. Berthier, ‘La Pythie de Mme Marcello Colonna’, Fribourg artistique, 23 (1912); J. Cordey, ‘Une œuvre d’art fribourgeoise à l’Opéra. “La Pythie” de Marcello’, Pro Arte, 6, 57 (1947), pp. 19-21; H. Bessis, Marcello sculpteur (Fribourg, 1980), pp. 157-66; A. Petrovski, ‘Marcello – La Pythie (1870/vers 1880)’, Fiches du Musée d’Art et d’Histoire Fribourg, 5 (1999), (unpaginated); C. Y. Pierre, ‘“A New Formula for High Art”: The Genesis and Reception of Marcello’s Pythia’, Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, 4 (2003), (unpaginated); A. Petrovski, ‘La Pythie, une sculpture de l’avenir par Marcello’, Art et Architecture en Suisse, 55.3 (2004), pp. 42-5. Focusing on another of Marcello’s sculptures and containing an exhaustive bibliography: A. Petrovski, ‘La Rosina (1869) ou la silhouette caractérisée: une approche de la figure féminine sculptée par “Marcello”, Adèle d’Affry (1836–1879), duchesse Castiglione Colonna’, Studiolo, 4 (2006), pp. 243-60. On the Marcello museum, see C. Y. Pierre, ‘The rise and fall of the Musée Marcello’, Journal of the History of Collections, 18 (2006), pp. 1-13.

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Fig. 15. 1: Pythia. Marcello, 1870. Bronze, h: 2.9 m. Palais Garnier, Paris.

Fig. 15. 2: Pythia. Marcello, 1875. Bronze replica, h: 1.22 m. Musée d’art et d’histoire, Fribourg.

Rome, July 13 1869 Dearest Mother […] I write with a weary paw this morning, for my arms and back have just been moulded for my statue, whose dorsal parts, I mean the shoulders, are completely enmeshed in the armature, making it very difficult to work on artistically. So I must wait for the moulding to be completed, and as I hope to escape after the moulding, I shall leave my shoulders behind in Rome, in the correct pose of the subject. A skilled modeller will then add them, and copy my back for that part. But it was a beautiful act of maternal devotion, for it is not a pleasant affair. I also had the foot and a portion of the leg moulded for further study in the absence of models who have all taken to the mountains. And after all, you built me well. I must take advantage of that while I may. I am working hard and I hope the statue will soon be ready. […] With all my love 5 Ada.

Live Body Moulding and Maternal Devotion in Marcello’s Studio

This letter, the first page of which is reproduced as Figure 15. 3, bears testimony to the problems surrounding live body moulding in the nineteenth century.6 The transgression of artistic barriers in this text must be analysed carefully in order to measure the importance of the ‘mediological’ and anthropological issues involved in the creative process it describes. Before all else, let us consider the evidence of physical exhaustion, due to the arduous stages of moulding, petrifaction and immobility endured and conveyed through Marcello’s arms to the writing and content of her letter. The scene described in the letter may have resembled, though doubtless with a much greater concern for propriety, that depicted by Edouard Dantan in his well-known painting Casting from Life of 1887 (Pl. 15. A). 7 Here two craftsmen are making the impression of a model’s leg. Set in a studio, the central action is carefully

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Fig. 15. 3: Letter of the Duchess of Colonna to her mother, the Countess of Affry, 13 July 1869. Reproduction of the first page in facsimile. Fondation Marcello, Fribourg.

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“Rome, le 13 juillet 1869 [ ] Bien aimée maman […] J’écris ce matin avec la patte fatiguée, car je viens de subir un moulage des bras et du dos pour ma statue dont les parties dorsales les épaules veux je dire, sont tout empétrées [sic] par l’armature ce qui rend le travail d’art là dessus impossible en ce moment. Il faut donc attendre que ce soit moulé, et comme alors, après le moulage, je filerai, je l’espère, je laisse mes épaules à Rome, dans la pose juste du sujet. Un habile modeleur rajoutera cela, en copiant mon dos pour cette partie là. Mais c’était un beau dévouement maternel, car l’affaire n’a rien d’agréable. J’ai aussi fait mouler le pied et un peu de jambe pour étudier à défaut des modèles qui s’en vont tous à la montagne. Et puis vous m’avez bien bâtie, il faut en profiter tant qu’il en est temps. Je travaille beaucoup et la statue sera bientôt prête, je l’espère. […] Je vous embrasse de tout cœur [ ] Ada”; Fondation Marcello, Fribourg. Letters of the Duchess Colonna to her mother, the Countess of Affry, 13 July 1869. I wish to thank Monique von Wistinghausen, President of the Marcello Foundation, for giving me access to Marcello’s correspondence. English translation: Erland Möckli. On body moulding during the nineteenth century see in particular E. Papet (ed.), A fleur de peau. Le moulage sur nature au XIXe siècle, exh. cat. Paris 2001–2002 (Paris, 2001). On this painting, see S. de Juvigny, Edouard Dantan. 1848–1897 (Paris, 2002), pp. 110-14.

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staged amidst surrounding sculptures; a Baigneuse by Falconet, one of Michelangelo’s Slaves, a bust of a Lady by Francesco Laurana to name only the three most prominent. The height of the sculptures on the left increases diagonally from the Baigneuse to the Slave and culminates in the central action, the moulding of the model, making this technical procedure the focus of the image. One aim of the work is probably to present the technique of live body moulding as an alternative to other sculptural techniques, such as modelling or cutting. To the traditional dichotomy of sculpture obtained per forza di levare (by removing matter) and per via di porre (by adding matter)8 a third type is added: the technique of live body moulding where the direct physical contact with the model results in the production of forms that are very close to the original ones.9 Similarly, in Marcello’s letter the mention of live body moulding is deliberate, particularly as Marcello writes that artistry is impossible and that a skilled modeller will copy her moulded back. Indeed, it is this technique that makes it possible to duplicate the model’s anatomy. Marcello justifies the use of it on practical and aesthetic grounds, but, as we will see later, it reveals broader issues at stake. Let us take a closer look at Marcello’s letter in which Adèle tells of the moulding of her limbs – “arms”, “back”, “foot”, “leg” – for the completion of the statue. Marcello insists on the fact that “it is not a pleasant affair”, thus revisiting the topos of the physically strained relationship between artist and model.10 Yet, in this case, the circumstances are exceptional as Adèle/Marcello is simultaneously model and artist. We are dealing with what could be considered a partial self-portrait in which the artist literally projects herself in her work by the impression of her figure in the plaster. Even more, this creation or duplication of forms through physical contact with matter is described by the artist as “an act of maternal devotion”; the artist transmits her outline to her work as a mother hands her flesh on to her children.11 Marcello describes the

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On the opposition of these two techniques see R. Wittkower, Sculpture, Processes and Principles (Harmondsworth, 1977). 9 On the process of impression see G. Didi-Huberman, L’Empreinte (Paris, 1997). 10 On the strains of modelling for the creation of an artwork see in particular N. J. Vickers, ‘The Mistress in the Masterpiece’, in N. K. Miller (ed.), The Poetics of Gender (New York, N.Y., 1986), pp. 19-41; E. Cropper, ‘Michelangelo Cerquozzi’s Self-Portrait: The Real Studio and the Suffering Model’, in V. V. Flemming and S. Schütze (eds), Ars naturam adiuvans. Festschrift für Matthias Winner (Mainz am Rhein, 1996), pp. 401-12; V. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect (Chicago, Ill., 2008), chapter III. 11 On the connections between artistic and biological creation see, e.g. U. Pfisterer, ‘Zeugung der Idee – Schwangerschaft des Geistes’, in U. Pfisterer and A. Zimmermann (eds), Animationen / Transgressionen. Das Kunstwerk als Lebewesen (Berlin, 2005), pp. 41-72; M. Weigle, Creation and Procreation. Feminist Reflections on Mythologies of Cosmogony and Parturition (Philadelphia, Pa., 1989); J. G. Turner (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Institutions,

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process of impression like that of childbirth: painful and difficult. Adèle projects her outline onto the plaster, generating “her daughters”, as she was wont to call her sculptures.12 In the nineteenth century, the topos of the merging of moulding and maternal creation is evoked in an entry from 31 July 1869 in the journal of the Goncourt brothers. It describes a scene of live body moulding for the subsequent execution of a sculpture: […] The hand of the princess emerged from that paste, which is so eager to harden and so quick to render the shape, the very skin of a hand immortal. Then comes the turn of the little ones, to have their feet grabbed and recorded by the white paste. And now that silly head of Mme de La Valette, as if intoxicated by the moulding of flesh and like a vain mother who would wish to show some of her own body in that of her children, begins to untie the knots, ribbons, brassiere, and pull down the skirt, etc. of the eldest of her little girls, exposing every detail, pointing out the budding hips of the little love who seeks to melt away, flee, lose herself in her mother with the small, almost animal prudishness of her uncon13 scious age. A maternal exhibition, which shocked us all nonetheless. […].

“Mme de La Valette, as if intoxicated by the moulding of flesh and like a vain mother who would wish to show some of her own body in that of her children…”: the fascination awakened in Mme de La Valette by the moulding of flesh stimulates her desire to be seen in the body of her children. Here, maternity, body, flesh and moulding are constantly emulating each other. With Marcello, the procedure generates a lineage. Her body acting as a matrix transmits its outline to the plaster, which will then allow the birth of the Pythia. Indeed, the final work will not be a mere double, but a transformed being whose substrate alone is derived from Adèle’s shape. Thereby, what we witness is truly a genealogical transmission of figure from Adèles’s mother –

___________ texts, images (Cambridge, 1993); C. Begemann and D. E. Wellbery (eds), Kunst – Zeugung – Geburt. Therorien und Metaphern ästhetischer Produktion in der Neuzeit (Freiburg, 2002). 12 This topos was used by a number of artists not least Michelangelo and Cellini. See among others S. S. Friedman, ‘Creativity and the Childbirth Metaphor: Gender Difference in Literary Discourse’, Feminist Studies, 13 (1987), pp. 49-82. 13 “[…] La main de la Princesse est sortie de cette pâte, si vite durcie et si rapide faiseuse de l’immortalité de la forme, de la peau même d’une main. Les petits, à leur tour, ont leurs pieds pris et saisis par la blanche pâte. Et voilà que cette tête folle de Mme de La Valette, comme un peu grisée par cette chair qu’on moule et comme une mère coquette, qui voudrait montrer un peu de son corps dans celui de ses enfants, se met à arracher à l’aînée de ses petites filles ses nœuds, ses rubans, sa brassière, lui descend ses jupons, etc. et se met à nous la montrer, à nous l’étaler, à nous la détailler, nous faisant remarquer qu’elle a déjà de petites hanches, tandis que le pauvre petit amour cherche à se couler, à se sauver, à se perdre dans sa mère, avec la petite pudeur presque animale de son âge inconscient. Une exhibition maternelle et qui pourtant nous a tous choqués. […]”, E. and J. de Goncourt, Journal. Mémoires de la vie littéraire. II – 1866– 1886 (Paris, 1989), pp. 164-5, 31 July 1868. English translation: Erland Möckli.

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this is discernible when Adèle writes: “and after all, you built me well”, touching on the creation of her own body by her mother – through Adèle/ Marcello to the Pythia. The three women (Adèle’s mother, Adèle/Marcello and the Pythia) are linked by an inseparable relationship of form and, on a metaphorical level, of flesh. In the letter, the question of flesh, moulding and maternity is apparent in the significant and paradigmatic statement “I’m leaving my shoulders in Rome” that refers to the mould of Fig. 15. 4: Body mould of Marcello’s shoulders. her shoulders.14 Through the proceUnknown artist, 1869. Plaster, h: 44 cm. Fondadure of live body moulding, that tion Marcello, Fribourg. renders a shape identical to that of the model by an indexical physical contact,15 Marcello duplicates a part of her body, of which she then speaks as if it were her own shoulders she was leaving in Rome.16 Indeed, a cast of her shoulders has been preserved and set on a pedestal (Fig. 15. 4) like a bust, thereby commemorating a portion of the model, who is also the artist. Figure 15. 5 is a photograph of Marcello, in which her shoulders are revealed. The unusual aspect of this bust strikes us as important: headless, it confounds the expected subservient function of the bust as a support for the head. So the impression, cherished as an artefact in its own right, is not only a eulogy to the beauty of the model and artist Marcello, but also to the moulding procedure. At this point we must examine the implications concerning the reversal of the stereotypical gender distinctions in the process of artistic creation. Traditionally, matter is the female component that is shaped by the male component;17 here, Adèle/Marcello seems to play with this principle. One might best

___________ 14 On the moulding of Marcello’s shoulders, see A. Pingeot, ‘Epaules’, Le corps en morceaux, exh. cat. Paris (Paris, 1990), pp. 196-7. 15 On the term “matrix image” as the negative of the mould obtained by physical contact with the original from which the positive shape is taken, see especially: G. Didi-Huberman, ‘L’imagematrice. Généalogie et vérité de la ressemblance selon Pline l’Ancien, Histoire naturelle, XXXV, 1-7’, L’Inactuel, 6 (1996), pp. 109-25. 16 For other examples of duplication in a wider context, see V. Stoichita, The Pygmalion Effect. From Ovid to Alfred Hitchcock (Chicago, Ill., 2008), chapter III. 17 On this subject, see: D. Summers, ‘Form and Gender’, New Literary History, 24 (1993), pp. 243-71.

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understand the stakes at play in the choice of her pseudonym, ‘Marcello’, adopted in 1863 when she first exhibited at the Salon.18 One of the fundamental aspects of this (pro-)creation seems to be the impossibility of disassociating ‘Adèle’ and ‘Marcello’. While together they do not amount to more than one person one might nevertheless ascribe the firstname and the pseudonym to different components of a ‘split personality’. In the process of creation ‘Adèle’ is the model where the artist is incarnate in ‘Marcello’. On a different level of biological metaphor, ‘Adèle’ represents the female principle, while the male principle of creation is incarnate Fig. 15. 5: Photograph of Marcello. Unknown in ‘Marcello’. Adèle/Marcello finds photographer. Fondation Marcello, Fribourg. her/himself at once being mother and father of Pythia. But let us return to the statue of Pythia, and more particularly its composition. When facing her chest, the viewer sees her face in profile to the right with her right arm stretched out in the same direction. For the beholder who looks straight at her face, however, the frontal part of her body appears drawn back, and the silhouette of a leg peeping through the loose drapery is revealed. Pythia’s body is clearly made up of fragments, with the left leg and foot in the lower part and the chest and arms above. All of these elements – the chest, the leg, the foot – are brought together by the drapery. It is also these fragments that Marcello moulded from her own body. We can recollect: “I also had the foot and a portion of the leg moulded […]”. Body moulding and subsequent organisation of the different fragments in a sculpture are part of a coherent compositional logic. This aspect of Marcello’s

___________ 18 On the pseudonym Marcello and its wide range of possible associations see H. de Diesbach, La femme du grand monde et des Beaux-Arts. “Marcello” la Duchesse Colonna née d’Affry (Soleure, 1911), p. 252; Comtesse d’Alcantara, Marcello. Adèle d’Affry, Duchesse Castiglione Colonna (Geneva, 1961), pp. 60-1. Further to this the Marcello expert Anita Petrovski has for the first time identified a parallel between the pseudonym Marcello and Théophile Gautier’s fantastic novel Arria Marcella (1852). Oral presentation on Pythia as an image of the inspired woman artist, Inscriptions/Transgressions, colloque en histoire de l’art et etudes genre, Lausanne, 14–15 October 2005.

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work fits into a tradition best exemplified by Donatello’s Judith and Holofernes (Fig. 15. 6).19 It is interesting to note how the legs, arms and even hands of Holofernes appear from beneath Judith’s drapery. A similarly additive sculptural conception seems to underlie the positioning of Holofernes’ legs and that of Pythia’s leg and foot; they are bodily fragments that are inserted into and held together by the drapery. The reception of Donatello’s work in the Renaissance can be considered through a passage in Vasari’s life of the sculptor: […] For the Signoria of Florence, Donatello cast a statue in metal, placed in the piazza under one arch of their Loggia, which represented Judith cutting off the head of Holofernes. This is a work of great excellence and mastery which clearly reveals, to anyone who considers the sim plicity of Judith’s appearance in her dress and her expression, the great inner courage of this woman and the assis tance of God, just as in the expres sion of Holofernes one can see the effects of wine, sleep, and death in his limbs, which look cold and limp after his bodily spirits have fled. This work was executed so well by Do natello that the casting turned out very fine and beautiful. […].20 Fig. 15. 6: Judith and Holofernes. Donatello, 1455–1460. Bronze, h: 2.36 m. Palazzo Vecchio, Florence.

Beyond “the simplicity of Judith’s appearance in her dress and her ex-

___________ 19 On this figure, see among others the monograph by J. Pope-Hennessy, Donatello, transl. to the French by J. Bouniort (Paris, 1993), pp. 280-7. 20 “[…] Fece per la Signoria di quella città un getto di metallo, che fu locato in piazza in un arco della loggia loro, et è Giudit che ad Oloferne taglia la testa, opera di grande eccellenza e magisterio, la

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pression”, Vasari rightly perceived the suggestive power of Holofernes’ limbs “which look cold and limp after his bodily spirits have fled” (Fig. 15. 7).21 In fact, his legs were almost certainly modelled after casts from a model, possibly a corpse.22 Whilst Holophernes’ legs are “cold and limp”, abandoned by life, Pythia’s limbs are animated by Apollo’s ardour (Fig. 15. 8). Thus body moulding has the power to suggest both life and death. The phenomenon of fragmentation is also apparent in a treatise on art from the beginning of the Quattrocento, Cennino Cennini’s Libro dell’Arte. The text is mainly dedicated to painting, but the last chapters are concerned with the making of casts from the live body: […] Therefore, if you want a whole nude man or woman, you must first have him stand upright in the bottom of a box, which you get built up to the height of the man’s chin […] wet up a great quantity of plaster with quite warm water; and have an assistant, so that if you fill in in front of the man the assistant will fill in in back, so as to get the bow full at the same time, up to the throat: because you can do the face separately, as I have shown you. Let the plaster stand until it has hardened thoroughly. Then open and take apart the box […] you may cast this mold or casting in any metal you please […] After this you may add the head to it; and cast everything together, including the whole person. And likewise you may cast separately, member by member, that is, an arm, a hand, a foot, a leg; 23 […].

___________ quale, a chi considera la semplicità del di fuori, nell’abito e nello aspetto di Giudit, manifestamente scuopre nel di dentro l’animo grande di quella donna e lo aiuto di Dio, sì come nell’aria di esso Oloferne il vino et il sonno, e la morte nelle sue membra, che per avere perduti gli spiriti si dimostrano fredde e cascanti. Questa fu da Donato talmente condotta, che il getto venne sottile e bellissimo […]”, G. Vasari, Le vite dei più eccellenti pittori, scultori e architettori (originally published in 1550 and 1568), G. Milanesi (ed.), 10 vols (Florence, 1906; repr. 1981), II, p. 405; English transl. J. Conaway Bondanella and P. Bondanella, G. Vasari, TheLives of the Artists (Oxford, 1998), p. 152. 21 On this question, see: C. Dempsey, ‘Donatello’s Spiritelli’, in V.V. Flemming and S. Schütze (eds), Ars naturam adiuvans: Festschrift für Matthias Winner (Mainz am Rhein, 1996), pp. 5061 and M. Cole, ‘Cellini’s Blood’, The Art Bulletin, 81 (1999), pp. 215-35. Like the Judith and Holofernes, Perseus and Medusa by Benvenuto Cellini is also overlooking the Piazza della Signoria in Florence. This work is clearly the product of a similar imagination: the Pythia’s body is comparable in form to that of the Medusa (for example the leaden, contracted limbs, the partial perception of the body as one walks around the sculpture etc.); they are nonetheless antithetical in their meaning: the Medusa (like Holofernes) loses her spiritello in death, whereas the Pythia’s body is invested by another spirit, Apollo’s. 22 See G. Didi-Huberman, note 9 above. 23 “[…] Onde di mestiero t’è, a volere un uomo tutto ignudo o donna, prima farlo stare in pie’ in sul fondo d’una cassetta, la quale farai lavorare d’altezza dell’uomo per infino al mento […] intridi del gesso abbondantemente con acqua ben tiepida ; e sia con compagnia, che se empi il dinanzi dell’uomo, che ‘l compagno empie dirieto, acciò che a un medesimo tempo la cassa vegna piena per infino coperta la gola : però che ‘l viso, siccome t’ho mostro, puoi far di per sé. Lascia posare il detto gesso tanto, che sia ben rassodo. Poi apri e scommetti la cassa, […] la

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Fig. 15. 7: Judith and Holofernes. Donatello, 1455–60 (detail of Fig. 15. 6).

Consciously or not – the similarity of the two names seems paradigmatic in this context – Donatello’s and Marcello’s technical approaches in their two works relate perfectly to the underlying theoretical concept in Cennino Cennini’s passage. Cennini’s artist is allowed to combine the strict imitation of nature, as implied in the use of a plaster imprint with the assembly into one work of separately cast limbs. In Marcello’s case this represents a return to Renaissance practice, as implied by her pseudonym that arguably resembles Donatello’s name and evokes notably those of the great canonical artists of the Renaissance, of whom most are known by their male first-names. The survival of Cennini’s words (such as: “In the same manner, you can mould limb by limb, separately: an arm, a hand, a foot, a leg…”) and aesthetic concepts in the nineteenth century is significantly testified by another letter of Marcello’s to her mother:24

___________ predetta forma o vero impronta tu la puoi buttare di ciò che metallo tu vòi […] Appresso di questo puoi aggiugnervi la testa e buttare ogni cosa insieme, e tutta la persona : e per lo simile di membro in membro spezzatamente puoi imprentare : cioè un braccio, una mano, un piè, una gamba […]”, C. d’Andrea Cennini, Il libro dell’arte, commentato e annotato da Franco Brunello (Vicenza, 1971), pp. 203-5; C. d’Andrea Cennini, The Crafsman’s Handbook “Il Libro dell’Arte”, English transl. by D. V. Thompson Jr. (New York, N.Y., 1954), pp. 127-9. 24 Written at the beginning of the fourteenth-century, Cennini’s Libro dell’Arte was first published in 1821 (G. Tambroni, Di Cennino Cennini Trattato della pittura, messo in luce la prima volta con annotazioni (Rome, 1821). A French translation by was published in the middle of the nineteenth century, Le livre de l’art ou traité de la peinture par Cennino Cennini [...] transl. to the

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Fig. 15. 8: Pythia. Marcello, 1875. Bronze replica, detail of Fig. 15. 2).

Pythia is the character in an antique subject. It is a transition [sic] and will hopefully establish my status as a sculptor of shapes, arms, legs and all the rest, as well 25 as busts. Let us hope it has succeeded.

In conclusion, I should like to draw a comparison with another famous figure of the late nineteenth century, the Countess Castiglione who put together in different settings photographs with fragmented views of, and casts after, her own body.26 A celebrated beauty, she was coveted by the court of the Second Empire. Capturing the memory of her beauty, these images reveal a practice of fragmental photography and body moulding contemporary with Marcello’s

___________ French by Victor Mottez (Paris and Lille, 1858). See D. V. Thompson Jr. ‘Preface’ in Cennino Cennini, The Craftsman’s Handbook, transl. by D. V. Thompson Jr. (New York, N.Y., 1960), p. ix. 25 “La Pythie, c’est le caractère dans un sujet antique, c’est pour transition [sic] et surtout pour me poser en sculpteur de formes, bras, jambes et le reste aussi bien que pour bustes. Espérons que cela a réussi.” Fondation Marcello, Fribourg. Letters of the Duchess of Colonna to her mother, the Countess of Affry, 22 July 1869. English translation: Erland Möckli. 26 On the staging of her limbs in partial photography or body moulding, see P. Apraxine, La Comtesse de Castiglione par elle-même, exh. cat. Paris (Paris, 1999), pp. 40-2 and 149-51. On this subject see also S. de Decker-Heftler, ‘Petit discours sur l’amour du fragment’, in S. Aubenas et al., L’Art du nu au XIXe siècle. Le photographe et son modèle, exh. cat., Paris (Paris, 1998), pp. 132-9; A. Pingeot (ed.), Le corps en morceaux, exh. cat. Paris (Paris, 1990).

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Fig. 15. 9: Leg study II. Pierre-Louis Pierson, 1861–1867/1895–1910. Photograph. Musée d’Orsay, Paris.

creation of the Pythia. In a photographic image by Pierre-Louis Pierson (Fig. 15. 9) that is reminiscent of Marcello’s Pythia, the countess is shown lifting her skirt above her knee (Fig. 15. 1). The pose emanates a strong charge of fetishism. But whereas this erotic and memorial component is the main subject matter of the photograph, the relationship of the artist’s leg is but one element of the Duchess Marcello’s historically rooted sculpture.

Shattering the Mould: Medardo Rosso and the poetics of plaster SHARON HECKER

Since ancient times, plaster has been most frequently used for two purposes: casting and copying. Although it has performed these tasks admirably over the centuries, plaster has had limited expressive autonomy as a material in its own right. In the late nineteenth century, Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) attempted to broaden plaster’s identity. In liberating it from its fixed relationship with casting and copying, Rosso opened plaster to new creative possibilities, letting it take unconventional forms and bringing it into contact with other materials. His idiosyncratic use of plaster, which has never received attention from scholars, amounted to the most radical revitalization of the material’s vocabulary since classical antiquity. From early in his career, begun in 1881 in Pavia and Milan, Rosso had a strong interest in casting. He spent a significant amount of time in foundries, casting his own work or giving directions to founders. He thus developed a connection with the physical processes of casting that not all nineteenthcentury artists possessed, given the division of labour between artist and craftsman prevalent in that period. Plaster was indispensable for Rosso in his Milan studio in the 1880s. Like many nineteenth-century sculptors, he employed plaster to make primary and sometimes secondary moulds to preserve his subjects, modelled in clay, for future casting in other materials. These moulds, although made of cheap plaster, became the artist’s most precious commodities, the matrices for his many later casts. Like his avant-garde contemporary Auguste Rodin, Rosso often considered his plasters finished works rather than just working models.1 He left some untreated (Fig. 16. 1), while others he painted in colour, sometimes to imitate wax or bronze. In addition to plaster, Rosso favoured wax and bronze as his working materials. Although it is known that he cast his bronzes using the lost-wax method,

___________ 1

See the photographic study of Rodin’s working method by A. Elsen, In Rodin’s Studio (New York, N.Y., 1980).

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Fig. 16. 1: Ecce puer (Behold the Child). Medardo Rosso, 1906. Plaster cast, h: c. 50 cm. Present whereabouts not established; out of a number of casts in existence, this is probably the one in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Milan. Original photograph by the artist. Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio.

there is a widely held notion that he hand-modelled his waxes over plaster cores. This is untrue. Plaster had many functions in their production, but the waxes were cast in flexible gelatine moulds. As Henry Lie, Director of the Straus Center for Conservation and Technical Studies at the Harvard Art Museum has confirmed in our study on Rosso’s technique, plaster mother mould sections performed the transitional stage of holding the moulds in position during the application of the wax.2 After the works were cast, Rosso added layers of plaster inside the hollow wax (Pl. 16. A), or behind it if made in the form of a mask, in order to give support and structural integrity to the fragile wax shell. Plaster also played a role in making his bronze casts. Rosso followed the traditional method of ‘investing’ the wax model inside and out with a heat-resistant plaster mixture in preparation for casting. In the 1880s, Rosso made plaster maquettes for public monuments to Garibaldi (1882 in Pavia and 1884 in Milan). He also made controversial funerary monuments, such as the one for the family chapel of industrialist Pietro Curletti entitled Gratitude (1883–85) (Fig. 16. 2) and the tombs of political journalist Vincenzo Brusco Onnis (1888) and music critic Filippo

___________ 2

H. Lie, ‘Technical Features in Rosso’s Work’, and D. Pullen ‘Gelatin Molds: Rosso’s Open Secret’, in H. Cooper and S. Hecker, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, exh. cat. Cambridge Mass. (New Haven, Conn., 2003), pp. 69-102.

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Fig. 16. 2: La riconoscenza (Gratitude). Medardo Rosso, c. 1883–85. Plaster model for work in bronze (both destroyed), h: 0.5 m, l: 1.5 m, w: 1 m. Original photograph perhaps by the artist. Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio.

Fig. 16. 3: Impression d’omnibus (Impression of an Omnibus). Medardo Rosso, 1884. Plaster (destroyed 1887). Original photograph by the artist. Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio.

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Filippi (1889).3 The bozzetti for these large works, now lost or destroyed, were first presented to official commissions in the traditional accepted form of plaster models. The photographs show a forceful, unrefined facture in these modelli. It is not certain whether the models were formed this way in clay and then cast into plaster, or if Rosso added lumps of raw plaster to the models by hand after he cast them. In 1887, Rosso sent to the national exhibition in Venice a curious ‘monument’ to modern life in plaster entitled Impression of an Omnibus (Fig. 16. 3). The strange sculpture, an attempt to translate into three dimensions Honoré Daumier’s 1864 lithograph Interior of an Omnibus, was a horizontal multifigured group of smaller than life-size busts placed on a long table. Again, the rough facture is noteworthy. One might ponder the idea that the work was cast as several separate figures and then fused together manually with extra blobs of plaster to unite them into a single sculpture. Plaster here is used also as a connective material. The work shattered in transit and never arrived at the exhibition, giving Rosso firsthand experience of plaster’s fragility. In 1889 Rosso moved to Paris. In these years he began to join the practical uses of plaster to his aesthetic ideas in unprecedented ways. For example, in some of his finished plaster casts, he left intact and exposed casting errors and elements left over from the casting process, such as flanges and indentations created from cracks and gaps in the moulds or misaligned registration points, as well as support flanges with holes for aligning the mother mould with the flexible gelatine mould. When presented upright, the support flange became a kind of frame, while in other cases it became the work’s base. Rosso continued to include casting errors and signs of process in his work even after 1906, when he stopped making new subjects, instead recasting his old ones in new forms. In the 1890s, Rosso attempted another large-scale work in plaster, the 1895–96 Impression of the Boulevard. Paris by Night (Fig. 16. 5). Even more decisively than his Impression of an Omnibus, this was intended as a life-size monument to modern life. This two by three metre work represented three barely visible figures caught from behind, hurriedly crossing a boulevard at night. Rosso asked Rodin to exhibit the work in his show at the Alma Pavilion during the Exposition Universelle of 1900. The Master of Meudon refused, so the work was never shown in public. Sold or given as a gift to the Noblet family, it was left to disintegrate in their country garden.4

___________ 3 4

S. Hecker, ‘Medardo Rosso’s first commission’, The Burlington Magazine, December 1996, pp. 817-22. Rosso also set a cast in plaster of the Aetas aurea inside the wall of the church of Saint-Pierreaux-Liens in Jessains-sur-Aube, France. See G. Lista, Medardo Rosso: Scultura e fotografia (Milan, 2003–2005), pls 116-18.

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Fig. 16. 4: Impression de boulevard. Paris la nuit (Impression of the Boulevard. Paris by Night). Medardo Rosso, c. 1895–6. Plaster, h: c. 2 m (destroyed). Original photograph by the artist. Museo Medardo Rosso, Barzio.

In the 1890s, Rosso also made another original subject transferred from clay to plaster, a small figure group entitled Conversation in the Garden. Like the Impression of the Boulevard. Paris by Night, it was never exhibited, and was cast into bronze and wax only after the artist’s death. During his two decades in Paris, Rosso copied famous works from antiquity, the Renaissance and his own time. He sold one of them, noted as a head in cement, to the South Kensington Museum, now the Victoria and Albert Museum. With rare exception, although Rosso considered his plasters to be finished works, he did not exhibit them as he did his waxes and bronzes.5 He intended to

___________ 5

The photograph of Lo Scaccino from the 1887 Esposizione Nazionale in Venice is presumed to be of a plaster cast, although the materials of Rosso’s works are not listed in the exhibition catalogue so we cannot be sure. When materials are listed in Rosso’s exhibition catalogues, one finds no other plasters mentioned during his lifetime, but not all exhibition catalogues state the materials in which his works were exhibited (see, for example, 1902 Berlin (Keller und Reiner Kunstsalon) and Leipzig (Museum der bildenden Künste); 1903 Vienna (XVI Secession); 1904

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show the two large-scale plasters I discussed earlier, but the first was destroyed in transit while the other found no public venue. Given the great dimensions of the Impression of the Boulevard. Paris by Night, one might wonder whether he considered plaster a cheap modern medium that fitted his attempts to create modern monuments. In 1907, Rosso donated a plaster version of his 1893 Impression of the Boulevard: Woman with a Veil to the French State, suggesting he intended it for display in a major Parisian museum. Considered unimportant by the French, however, the sculpture was relegated to storage and shipped out to the provincial museum of Lyon. In a more traditional vein, Rosso willed a set of his plaster moulds to his friend Mario Vianello Chiodo, along with written permission to make future casts after his death. Rosso recognized the lucrative nature of his plasters as commodities. When his son Francesco came to close his father’s Parisian studio after the artist’s death in 1928, he took back with him to Milan Medardo’s plaster models. They are in the family collection in Barzio and rarely travel outside of Italy. Rosso also brought plaster into contact with other materials. This had both practical and aesthetic purposes. Earlier I mentioned that in his wax casts, he slathered the backs, bottoms, and insides with rough blobs of plaster, manually and with a paintbrush. In doing so he gave the objects sturdiness (Pl. 16. B). Yet at the same time, this stability endowed his sculptures with a kinetic sense of the unfinished. He also wedged crude chunks of plaster as ‘bases’ under the waxes (Pl. 16. C), improvising counterweights to support the sculptures from below. In addition to buttressing the works, these weights would often tilt the works off-balance. The appearance of different types of plaster in a single work (Pl. 16. D) suggests that for Rosso this was a spontaneous, ongoing process. Rosso experimented with the relationship between plaster and bronze as well. One finds the same rough plaster masses behind and under some of his bronze sculptures. In later years, on finished bronzes, Rosso retained heavy traces of plaster investment from the mould, which would normally be chased away after casting. They function as signs of his working process, referring back to a previous stage in the object’s creation, adding a reversible, temporal element to the finished sculpture and giving a sense of the fleeting to the works. Here plaster acts as an unusual form of cosmetic ‘powder’, which softens the robustness of his bronzes, lending them a painterly impressionistic effect of mobility and ambiguity.

___________ Paris (Salon d’automne); 1905 Vienna (Kunstsalon Artraria); 1906 London (Cremetti Gallery); 1909 Paris (Salon des indépendants); 1910 Florence (Prima Mostra italiana dell’impressionismo e di Medardo Rosso); 1911 Rome (Esposizione Internazionale di Belle Arti); 1914 Venice (Esposizione internazionale d’arte); 1923 Milan (Bottega di Poesia); 1926 Milan (Prima mostra del Novecento Italiano).

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The plaster in Rosso’s sculptures is significant for another reason. In posthumous casts of his waxes, foundries applied the plaster backs and bottoms smoothly and evenly. In bronzes produced after his death, foundries chased away the plaster investment. Thus the manner in which Rosso applied plaster to his works during his lifetime functions like a signature for his mostly unsigned sculptures. It often enables scholars to distinguish between lifetime and posthumous casts, and is therefore an inextricable aspect of the artist’s identity. Why did Rosso choose to work so extensively with a material like plaster? And why might he have used it in the ways he did? Rosso was attracted to the fact that, not unlike wax and bronze, plaster is a plastic solid. It only possesses a relative solidity that can come undone. What results is a fragile stability, or a stable fragility. Rosso recognized that plaster’s mode of undoing itself is unique to this material. Unlike wax and bronze, which can become malleable and melted by heating, plaster solidifies as it comes into contact with air and dries. Plaster is more stable than wax but its hardening is the source of its weakness. It has an internal vulnerability, for when hardened, it can be shattered into shards or disintegrate into powder. That plaster evokes the double fantasy of weakness and apparent strength is evident in the metaphorical associations with the word ‘plaster’ in various languages. This occurs not in high verbal discourse but rather in slang. Like plaster, slang is a visceral, informal mode of communication. In English, ‘to be plastered’ means to get drunk, to fall apart, to wallow in one’s own fragility. In Italian, however, a person who is ‘ingessato’ is someone who is held together too rigidly, covering up his or her fragile side. And the French expression ‘battre comme plâtre’ (to fight like plaster), is a term used for a weak aggressor – a fighter who is cowardly, drunken, turning to dust.6 For his waxes, Rosso probably liked plaster because it could harden – it could give relatively stable support to the waxes and function as a counterpoint to their softness. But with plaster, this sense of stability evokes a toorigid immobility. As is fitting for a low material such as plaster, we find verbal examples of plaster’s negative stasis not in high poetry but rather in the popular world of rock music. Plaster’s stillness can also allude to an emotional state of stuckness. For example, contemporary Italian singer Enzo Jannacci’s 1994 Uomo di Gesso (Plaster Man), is a lament about a ‘plaster man’ for whom the song is always the same: he already knows everything by heart, the flame dies, the poet expires, and nothing new emerges.7 Swedish rock

___________ 6

7

G. Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, transl. from the French by K. Haltman (Dallas, Tex., 2002), p. 17. See also the novel by J. Kessel, L’homme de plâtre (Paris, 1950). E. Jannacci, L’Uomo di gesso, I soliti accordi, BMG (1994).

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group The Hives’ Love in Plaster describes the end of a love story that stands still and no longer grows: “I really thought that we had something going faster, that love in plaster […] I really thought that we had something set in motion, more that foul devotion”.8 Neil Young sings in Mr. Soul that “in a while, will the smile on my face turn to plaster / Stick around while the clown who is sick does the trick of disaster”.9 In these songs, the fixed aspect of plaster is contrasted with vivid images of motion: blades of grass flowing in the wind, flames of fire, trickling streams of water, an impending disaster, or speed itself. By working the plaster, Rosso tried to mobilize it, responding to its potential for becoming rigid. The effect is a material that seems to be handled with force. As philosopher Gaston Bachelard demonstrates in his essay on the imagination of matter, hard materials induce in the artist feelings of anger.10 Poetic metaphors associated with plaster confirm this. In Sylvia Plath’s poem, In Plaster, the anger is stifling, for she sees the material in which she is enveloped as “unbreakable”. She is resentful, but her anger is useless, for she is unable to free herself from her coffin-like, plaster prison and thus she herself eventually comes apart. She exclaims: “I shall never get out of this!”11 In contrast to Plath, rockers, rappers, and hip-hopsters lash out aggressively to combat the immobility of plaster, and by doing so create energetic lyrics such as: “crash into disaster/ smash like master-plaster”.12 Hip-hop singer LL Cool J wants to “break ya like plaster”13, even folk singer Bob Dylan gets beyond his shattered love story: “the plaster did pound. […] my mind it was mangled, I ran into the night, leaving all of love’s ashes behind me”.14 Italian pop singer Renato Zero, in his song, Depresso, fights back by angrily ranting: “faccio in pezzi pupazzi di gesso” (“I break plaster puppets to pieces”).15 Even the rhythmic speed of a song tries to combat plaster’s hardening. The 1970s rock group Kiss sings “Plaster caster, plaster caster, grab a hold of me faster, plaster, faster, caster”.16 In these angry examples, it is always the plaster that comes undone irreparably.

___________ 8 The Hives, Love in Plaster, Tyrannosaurus Hives, Polydor (2004). 9 Neil Young, Mr. Soul, Journey Through the Past, Reprise (1972). 10 G. Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, transl. by K. Haltman (Dallas, Tex., 2002), pp. 43-7. 11 Sylvia Plath, ‘In Plaster’, The Collected Poems of Sylvia Plath (New York, N.Y., 1981), p. 158. 12 Swollen Members, Breath, Monsters in the Closet, Battle Axe (2002). 13 LL Cool J., Mr. Good Bar, Mama Said Knock You Out, Def Jam (1990). 14 B. Dylan, Ballad in Plain D, Another Side of Bob Dylan, CBS (1989). 15 R. Zero, Depresso, Invenzioni, RCA BMG (1974). 16 Kiss, Plaster Caster, Love Gun, Casablanca (1977).

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When Rosso used plaster in this rough manner, he allowed the material to express an analogous emotional force. This facture fits the artist’s anger and rebelliousness against what he perceived as external rigidities, such as the sculpture of the past and that of his time. It matches his vehement antiacademic stance (he was expelled from the Brera Academy for punching a fellow student who would not sign a petition he circulated against academic practices).17 It also corresponds to his written invectives about the need to break with conventional high art. So plaster handled this way takes on a political valence for Rosso. One might draw useful connections between his use of plaster and his textual tirades against monuments as static “paperweights”, against Rodin, who he believed had stolen his ideas, and against official art commissioners who he felt had tried to thwart his career. Rosso’s anger and obstinacy, an attitude found in his behaviour and his writings, is otherwise difficult to connect to his delicate images of women, children, the poor and the destitute. Nor can it be found in the ductile nature of his wax material. Like plaster, whose rigidity never produces lasting stability because of the material’s inherently fragile nature, so Rosso’s angry verbalizations lack flexibility and are tenuously at risk. Even in his time they were easily broken apart through criticism.18 For example, Rosso often repeated that his goal was to make the viewer “forget the material” of sculpture. He also insisted that there was one viewing position for a three-dimensional object: sculpture should be looked at from the front and not walked around. Yet as Harry Cooper noted, Rosso’s project always seemed to undo itself, or, better, turn itself inside out. […] Insisting on immateriality, he made sculptures of unforgettable bulk and rawness. Insisting on the instantaneous impression, he made objects our eyes have to crawl over. Insisting on frontality, he let his hands wander over the backs of his sculptures to pro19 duce densities and opacities of material that even Rodin never dreamt of.

In Rosso’s late bronzes plaster behaves differently. Rather than peeking around the back, inside, or bottom of his works, it comes to the front (Pl. 16. E). Instead of trying to use plaster as its own support, or in order to bolster his bronzes or waxes, Rosso makes bronze sustain plaster. In doing so, he finds another way to work the material, returning plaster to its single etymological root, the Greek emplassein, to mold, to daub over, to smear on, to cover (as in

___________ 17 S. Hecker, ‘Ambivalent Bodies: Medardo Rosso’s Brera Petition’, The Burlington Magazine, December 2000, pp. 773-7. 18 See, for example, J. Meier-Graefe, Modern Art. Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics (London, 1908), p. 34; originally published as Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (Stuttgart, 1904). 19 H. Cooper, ‘Ecce Rosso!’, in H. Cooper and S. Hecker, Medardo Rosso: Second Impressions, exh. cat. Cambridge Mass. (New Haven, Conn., 2003), pp. 1-22, at. p. 21.

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a hole), with its original dual meaning of building and healing. By leaving investment on the bronzes he gives plaster yet another idiosyncratic mode of expression, in the form of chalk-like residue. Here the effect is not achieved through the rough modelling of an artist’s hand that pounds a material. Instead Rosso allows the material itself to disintegrate. In keeping with its fragile nature, plaster has dissolved, but it has done so in order to transform into something else. Plaster becomes softer and thereby softens that with which it comes into contact. While in the waxes Rosso attached plaster as a separate entity, in these bronzes the plaster integrates more fully with the work. Like a salve, it accompanies the bronze form, adheres to it and follows its contours. As powder it enters, fills, and soothes the raw, abraded bronze surfaces, giving them a buffered appearance. As such, it behaves like the plaster bandage described by Dante and Shakespeare, as curative metaphors for healing: “Thus my master caused me dismay when I saw his brow so troubled, and thus quickly came the plaster to the hurt”.20 Likewise, in his sonnet Venus and Adonis, Shakespeare describes a hound licking its wound as “the only sovereign plaster”.21 Like Dante’s and Shakespeare’s meaningful metaphors, the plastercovered bronzes are Rosso at his most poetic. Sculpture here maintains the messy, dirty appearance of his earlier heads, but now it is also more liquid and painterly. It is a sculpture, yet at the same time something more: a fleeting, ephemeral vision. Especially in the images of children, the form is caught just emerging, as a newborn baby comes out of the womb still covered in vernix before it is cleaned up and made presentable. Or perhaps it is an apparition about to disappear, enveloped in an atmospheric haze. This is what Rosso called, after Dante Gabriele Rossetti’s sonnet about poetry, “a moment’s monument”. Can we consider Rosso’s use of plaster to be beautiful in late nineteenthcentury terms? The answer is yes, if we define beauty not as a beauty of forms, but rather as did Bachelard, “a beauty intrinsic to material substances; their many hidden attractions, all that affective space concentrated in the interior of things” (Fig. 16. 5).22 Plaster’s poetry is the unfolding of its complex

___________ 20 “così mi fece sbigottir lo maestro, quand’io gli vidi sì turbar la fronte, e così tosto al mal giunse lo’mpiastro”, D. Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Inferno, Canto XXIV, transl. from the Italian by C. S. Singleton (Princeton, N.J., 1970), p. 246. Note here that the use of the word “lo’mpiastro” is itself metaphorical and therefore acquires poetic resonance, for it refers to a soothing, healing gaze. 21 W. J. Craig (ed.), ‘Venus and Adonis’, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (London, 1914) [accessed 18 June 2006]. 22 G. Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, transl. by K. Haltman (Dallas, Tex., 2002), p. 6.

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Fig. 16. 5: Bambino alle cucine economiche (Child in the Soup Kitchen). Medardo Rosso, 1882–3. Bronze with plaster investment, h: 43 cm. Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Palazzo Pitti, Florence.

personality as a material. Through Rosso’s unconventional experiments, he lowered plaster to a raw, unformed state, challenging its role as perfect replicator of form. By doing so, he made it more conceptually sophisticated, giving plaster vulnerability, stability, versatility and flexibility.

“Impressionism Solidified” – Umberto Boccioni’s Works in Plaster and the Definition of Modernity in Sculpture MARIA ELENA VERSARI

While several studies have offered re-evaluations of Umberto Boccioni’s sculptures and sculptural theories, scholars have generally failed to address systematically the specificities of the formal and technical choices that the Futurist artist made in his overall sculptural practice. This critical attitude (or lack thereof) is partly sustained by the general assumption that Boccioni’s sculptures represent a coherent projection not only of his Futurist theories of art but also of his work in painting. Challenging this belief, the present article aims to reassess the role and function of Boccioni’s use of plaster and plaster casts in the framework of his evolving sculptural practice and to highlight the contradictions and challenges that these works created within Futurist aesthetics.

Plaster as Visualized Matter: multiplicity of assembly and visual continuity We are still not sure what compelled Boccioni to write the Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture following the outrageous triumph of the Exhibition of Futurist Painting, held in Paris in February 1912. Scholars generally dwell on the potential influence of Braque’s paper constructions, hypothesizing a visit by the Futurist to the studio of his Cubist colleague at the time of the Parisian show at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery. I am more inclined, however, to believe that the conception and subsequent launch of the Manifesto was Boccioni’s and Marinetti’s tactical response to the climate of expectations surrounding modern sculpture created by the press.1 In this framework, while drafting the Mani-

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See C. Poggi, In defiance of painting: Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, Conn., and London 1992), pp. 177-8, and the brief report by André Salmon, in ParisJournal, 11 January 1912: “Modern Sculpture – the painter Picasso, without in any way throwing away his brushes, is undoubtedly going to execute some important sculptural works”, as cited in P. Karmel, Picasso and the Invention of Cubism (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2003), p. 168. For a rectification of the chronology of Boccioni’s trips to Paris in those years and

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festo in the spring and early summer of 1912, Boccioni’s visual references were still rooted in the debates surrounding sculpture at the beginning of the century and in the examples offered by the contemporaneous works of Archipenko, Agero, Duchamp-Villon and by Picasso’s Head of a Woman, then still on display in Vollard’s gallery.2 In the manifesto, Boccioni refuses the concept of stylistic imitation, the source of the many fashionable trends of archaism of the time, and points to a complete renewal of sculpture through a reorganization of its vision and conception. Pursuing an idea already present in the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting, he stresses the need for a “sculpture of the environment [emphasis Boccioni]”, so that “with it plastic art will expand, lengthening itself in space in order to model it. So, starting today, even clay will be able to model the at mospher e [emphasis Boccioni] surrounding objects”.3 In another famous passage of this text, he states: We proclaim that the environment must be a part of the plastic block as a world of its own, with its own laws; that the sidewalk may rise on your table and that your head may cross the street while between two houses your desk-lamp fastens 4 its spider-web of plaster rays.

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the repercussion on his artistic practice of the rumours spread by the Parisian press on current developments in sculpture, see M. E. Versari, ‘The Style and Status of the Modern Artist: Archipenko in the Eyes of the Italian Futurists’, in M. Bartelik et al., Alexander Archipenko Revisited: Current Scholarship. Acts of the International Symposium (New York, N.Y., 2008), pp. 13-33. Valerie Fletcher writes: “Vollard featured Head of a Woman in the front window or inside his gallery for the next several years as the public and artistic debate over cubism reached its zenith”, see V. J. Fletcher, ‘Process and Technique in Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande)’, in J. Weiss, V. J. Flechter and K. A. Tuma (eds), Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier (Princeton, N.J., 2003), pp. 165-91, at p. 181. Jeffrey Weiss has recently clarified the importance of the photographs of the head in its critical reception, pointing in particular to the ones that appeared in ‘Camera Work’ in the summer of 1912, see J. Weiss, ‘Fleeting and Fixed: Picasso’s Fernandes’, ibidem, pp. 1-49. “[...] s c u l t u r a d ’a mb i e n t e , perchè con essa la plastica si svilupperà, prolungandosi nello spazio per modellarlo. Quindi da oggi anche la creta potrà mo d e l l a r e l ’a t m o s f e r a che circonda le cose” [Emphasis Boccioni; when not indicated otherwise, all translations are mine]; Umberto Boccioni, ‘Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista’ (1912), in Esposizione di Scultura Futurista del pittore e scultore futurista U. Boccioni, exh. cat. Galleria Gonnelli, Florence, March-April 1914 (Florence, 1977), pp. 13-26, at p. 25. “Proclamiamo che l’ambiente deve far parte del blocco plastico come un mondo a sè e con leggi proprie; che il marciapiede può salire sulla vostra tavola e che la vostra testa può attraversare la strada mentre tra una casa e l’altra la vostra lampada allaccia la sua ragnatela di raggi di gesso”; ibidem, at pp. 20-1. Following the theory of the compenetration of planes, already at work in Futurist painting, sculpture will find, according to Boccioni, “a new source of emotion, and therefore of style, extending its plastic attitude to what we, blinded by our barbarian coarseness, have until now considered as disconnected, impalpable, and therefore plastically inexpressible” (“nuova sorgente di emozione, quindi di stile, estendendo la sua plastica a quello che la nostra

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While critics have largely addressed the artist’s famed definition of new sculpture as a “solidification of Impressionism”, they have generally failed to tackle the issue of how this supposed “solidification” might take place. As we see from the passage cited above, however, the metaphors at work in Boccioni’s Manifesto imply a connection between the material specificities of clay and plaster in the process of modelling and their potential to concretize, in a three-dimensional form, the artist’s own conception of infinite matter. Boccioni’s indebtedness to Henri Bergson’s theory of “extensity” and intuition is quite renowned,5 but its repercussions seem to have had a determining effect not only on the artist’s theoretical but also on his technical choices concerning sculpture. The suggestion of clay and plaster as the media capable of transmitting the conception of Bergsonian infinite matter is, in this perspective, quite telling, since, at this date, the artist had probably not yet started his sculptural experiments. What he saw, instead, was a possible metaphorical correspondence between the plasticity of the medium and his ambitions to suggest an all-encompassing rendering of figure and space. Plaster would become, therefore, the definite, structural tool of visualization for the “enveloping, invisible space [emphasis Boccioni]”6 that surrounds any figure. This peculiar status of the materiality and principles of modelling within Boccioni’s sculptural theory is highly problematic since it reveals an unsolved issue within Futurist aesthetics. Under the sway of Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature, Boccioni had conceived his (future) sculptures as a direct translation of reality’s emotional as well as visual potentialities. The artist’s famed theorization of the plastic assembly of different materials7 adheres to Marinetti’s trust in the capacity of words in themselves to

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rozzezza barbara ci ha fatto sino ad oggi considerare come suddiviso, impalpabile, quindi inesprimibile plasticamente”); ibidem, at p. 15. See, in particular, B. Petrie, ‘Boccioni and Bergson’, The Burlington Magazine, 116 (1974), pp. 140-7; M. Antliff, ‘The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space’, The Art Bulletin, 82 (2000), pp. 720-33; F. Fergonzi, ‘On the Title of the Painting Materia’, in L. Mattioli Rossi (ed.), Boccioni’s Materia: A Futurist Masterpiece and the European Avant-garde, exh. cat. New York (New York, N.Y., 2004), pp. 16-53. “S p a z i o a v v i l u p p a n t e i n v i s i b i l e [emphasis Boccioni]”, Boccioni, ‘Manifesto’, p. 20. “[We must] affirm the absolute necessity of employing any reality to come back to the essential elements of plastic sensibility. Therefore, perceiving the bodies and their parts as p l a s t i c z o n e s [emphasis Boccioni], we’ll have, in a Futurist sculptural composition, wooden or metal planes, still or mechanically mobile, for an object, spherical, furry forms for the hair, glass semicircles for a vase, iron wires and nets for an atmospheric plane, etc.” (“[...] servirsi di tutte le realtà per tornare agli elementi essenziali della sensibilità plastica. Quindi, percependo i corpi e le loro parti come z o n e p l a s t i c h e [emphasis Boccioni], avremo in una composizione scultoria futurista, piani di legno o di metallo, immobili o meccanicamente mobili, per un oggetto, forme

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Fig. 17. 1: Antigrazioso. Umberto Boccioni, 1912–1913. Plaster and mixed media. Photograph taken at the First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture, Galerie La Boëtie, Paris, June 1913.

create a complex system of analogies.8 Marinetti’s poetics is, in certain respects, a mimicry of intuition: he tries to formalize the linguistic process of intuition by bolstering the psychological potential of the minimal elements of meaning: words, disentangled from grammar. Following the same reflections, Boccioni theorizes the exploitation of the tautological use of reality in his structures in order to regain possession of the “essential elements of plastic sensibility”.9 While he theorizes the utilization of plaster as a metaphor for the continuity of matter, he also calls for the use of different materials as a means of establishing simple tautologies or analogies. Thus, “spherical, furry forms” might indicate “the hair”,

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sferiche pelose per i capelli, semicerchi di vetro per un vaso, fili di ferro e reticolati per un piano atmosferico, ecc”, Boccioni, ‘Manifesto’, p. 24. See the following passages from F. T. Marinetti’s Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature and from his Replies to the Objections to the Manifesto: “To envelop and gather all that is most shifting and unattainable within matter, we need to create t i g h t n e t s o f i ma g e s o r a n a l o g i e s [emphasis Marinetti], that we will throw in the mysterious sea of phenomena [...] Surprising through objects in liberty and capricious motors, the breathing, sensibility and instincts of the metals, the stones, the woods, etc. Substituting the psychology of man, now dwindled, with the l yr i c a l o b s e s s i o n o f ma t t e r [emphasis Marinetti] [...]. Words, free from punctuation, will irradiate one over the other, they will cross their magnetisms, according to the uninterrupted dynamism of thought.” (“Per avviluppare e cogliere ciò che vi è di più fuggevole e di più inafferrabile nella materia, bisogna formare delle s t r e t t e r e t i d ’i m ma g i n i o a n a l o g i e [emphasis Marinetti], che verranno lanciate nel mare misterioso dei fenomeni [...] Sorprendere attraverso gli oggetti in libertà e i motori capricciosi, la respirazione, la sensibilità e gli istinti dei metalli, delle pietre, del legno, ecc. Sostituire la psicologia dell’uomo, oramai esaurita, con l ’o s s e s s i o n e l i r i c a d e l l a ma t e r i a [emphasis Marinetti] [...] Le parole liberate dalla punteggiatura irradieranno le une sulle altre, incroceranno i loro diversi magnetismi, secondo il dinamismo ininterrotto del pensiero”). See F. T. Marinetti, ‘Manifesto tecnico della letteratura futurista’, 11 May 1912, in L. De Maria (ed.), Filippo Tommaso Marinetti e il Futurismo 2nd edn (Milan, 2000 [1st edn 1973]), p. 80 and 81 respectively and F. T. Marinetti, ‘Risposte alle obiezioni’, 11 August 1912, op. cit., p. 88. See note 7 above. For Boccioni’s sculptural as well as collage aesthetics, see C. Poggi, In Defiance of Painting. Cubism, Futurism, and the Invention of Collage (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1992), pp. 164-93.

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“glass semi-circles” designate “a vase”, and so on.10 At the moment of the actual realization of these premises, the clash between metaphors of continuity and tautologies of plural realities, between ‘matter’ and ‘materials’, offers a compelling technical challenge to the painter-recently-turned-sculptor.

Casting, Assemblage and Technical Dead Ends While Umberto Boccioni’s theories of sculpture are well known, we currently lack any serious analysis of his sculptural practice and of his technical choices in the use of plaster and, supposedly, clay. Of the several plaster sculptures that he created and exhibited during his lifetime, only three remain: Antigrazioso (Fig.17. 1), a head of the artist’s mother held at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna in Rome, Development of a Bottle in Space (Fig. 17. 8) and Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Fig. 17. 7), in the Museu de Arte Contemporânea da Universidade de São Paolo. And of these, at least the first two have been heavily restored and altered. All the others have been destroyed in unclear circumstances, and are now accessible only through photographs. To this disappearance of the original plasters, we must counter the fortune of posthumous bronze and metal casts of the three surviving works, currently populating public collections and textbooks. Why, then, someone might ask, are these plaster works so central to the development of modern sculpture? Paradoxically, it is their invisibleness, their incorporeity, that has given way to partial and false reconstructions and interpretations based on the conflation of the two nearest sources that could stand in place of Boccioni’s sculptures: his paintings and his writings on sculpture. Some recently published his photographs, however, together with some previously unnoticed details found in known ones, might re-open the issue. What I present here is therefore the result of a speculation in which I attempt to retrace the fate of Boccioni’s sculptures. Since no X-ray or chemical analysis has been made of Antigrazioso, the technical procedures behind its realization remain unclear: a close analysis of this quite large head of the artist’s mother has led some experts to identify it as a plaster cast, others as a plaster sculpture, varnished with a brown paint.11

___________ 10 See note 7 above. 11 I am indebted to the restorer of the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna of Rome, Rodolfo Corrias, for his suggestion on the issue and for the information regarding the lack of chemical and X-ray analysis of the work. The famous art critic and historian Roberto Longhi, who devoted a monographic study to Boccioni’s sculptures right after their exhibition in Paris, Rome and Florence between June 1913 and the Spring of 1914, insinuates the hypothesis that Antigrazioso might be a plaster sculpture, pointing to a “bony arrangement, which goads, hooked, here and

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It is certain however that the treatment of the humps and hollows of the face suggests a parallel to Picasso’s famous plaster cast Head of a Woman, rectified in Futurist terms. Like its Cubist antecedent,12 Boccioni’s plaster head has probably been reworked with a sharp knife, carving the deep eyes and the lines of the face and the hair. But the artist also conceived this sculpture as a transposition of the motif of his paintings Horizontal Construction and Materia, namely, the interpenetration of the head of the mother, sitting in front of an open window, with a building in the distance. “Sculpture”, Boccioni wrote in the Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture, “must vivify objects, offering a physical, systematic and plastic rendering of their extension into space [...]. There is not one single thing surrounding our body that doesn’t cut and section it with an arabesque of curves and straight lines”.13 Now, facing the challenge of rendering in sculpture his mother’s head, Boccioni had to confront the threedimensionality of the bust with the ‘planar’, or ‘horizontal’ construction, to use the exact term taken from the title of one of his paintings on the same subject, of the continuity of vision that unites different bodies and matter.14 Translating the impressionistic continuity of vision between subject and environment into sculpture had been the great achievement of Medardo Rosso, the only modern sculptor, in the words of Boccioni, “who tried to open a wider field to sculpture, to render plastically the influences of the environment and the atmospheric connections which bind the environment to the subject”.15 Antigrazioso testifies to Boccioni’s uncertain path on the road beyond Rosso’s Impressionism. The building behind his mother’s head is an isolated, angled surface. Significantly, the relationship between the head and the background mimics, but does not translate, the complex system of relations at work in Rosso’s sculptures. Far from the Bergsonian goals stated in his manifesto, Boccioni discards any rendering of ‘atmospheric planes’ binding distant objects. He collapses the fragment of the building onto the

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there, so as to suggest a strong understructure”. See R. Longhi, ‘La scultura futurista di Boccioni’, in idem, Scritti Giovanili. 1912–1922 (Florence, 1980), I.1, pp. 133-62, at p. 136. See V. J. Fletcher, ‘Process and Technique in Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande)’, in J. Weiss, V. J. Flechter and K. A. Tuma (eds), Picasso: The Cubist Portraits of Fernande Olivier (Princeton, N.J., 2003), pp. 175-6. “La scultura deve quindi far vivere gli oggetti rendendo sensibile, sistematico e plastico il loro prolungamento nello spazio [...] non v’è cosa che circondi il nostro corpo: bottiglia, automobile, casa, albero, strada, che non lo tagli e non lo sezioni con un arabesco di curve e di rette”, Boccioni, ‘Manifesto’, p. 16. The reference is to Boccioni’s painting Costruzione orizzontale, 1912, oil on canvas, 95 x 95 cm, Pinakothek der Moderne, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich. “[Medardo Rosso, il solo grande scultore] che abbia tentato di aprire alla scultura un campo più vasto, di rendere con la plastica le influenze d’un ambiente e i legami atmosferici che lo avvincono al soggetto”, Boccioni, ‘Manifesto’, p. 17.

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woman’s head, thus erasing the ontological difference between subject and surrounding entities. The direct fusion of these two elements adheres to other passages in his writings in which he had celebrated the conflation of objects.16 Here, the conceptual divide between the principles of Bergsonian continuity and those of tautological assembly, implicit in the artist’s theoretical writings, comes to a first, tentative merger. The building is presented as a plaster portion, modelled as an integral part of the woman’s head. Its identity as a fragment of a wider reality, however, still lingers in the general architecture of the sculpture. As opposed to the enveloping background in Rosso’s sculptures, this structure made of slanting planes still maintains its minimal referential attitude: it signifies a surface, a building. Originally, when the work was first exhibited at the La Boëtie Gallery in June 1913, Boccioni had treated the plaster surface of this element with an uneven, bubbly shell, which offered a strong visual contrast with the smooth planes of the woman’s face and bust (Fig. 17. 1).17 The plaster, now in Rome, has since been heavily repainted with a thick layer of varnish, unifying the visual impression of the entire work. The original effort of modulating the surfaces, however, testifies to Boccioni’s search for new technical tools to rework Rosso’s subtle, textural variations of plaster and wax. In Antigrazioso, then, he tries to systematize Rosso’s “sensual touch of the thumb, imitating the lightness of the Impressionist brushstroke”18 through textural and pictorial means applied to the plaster. His quest to disentangle his Bergsonian conception of matter from the formal renderings of Impressionism also pushes him to conceive an additional formal solution to the problem of the isolation of the sculptural body in space. Original photographs of Antigrazioso show two thin spears attached to the building’s top and right ridges. These are probably the first three-dimensional representations of the ‘forcelines’ proper to Futurist painting, those “sheaves of lines corresponding with all the conflicting forces”, that encircled and involved the spectator in the picture.19 In the economy of the sculptural work, these force-lines offer the long-awaited answer to the issue of the conciliation between the isolation of the sculpted head and the ambition to render its surrounding vitality of matter. In Bergsonian terms, force-lines represent the structural net of a universe conceived

___________ 16 See notes 4 and 7 above. 17 See the photographs made by Lucette Korsoff at the Parisian show, in Mattioli Rossi (ed.), Boccioni. Pittore Scultore Futurista, reproduced at p. 161, table IV. 14. 18 “[...] il tocco sensuale del pollice che imita la leggerezza della pennellata impressionista”, Boccioni, ‘Manifesto’, p. 19. 19 U. Boccioni, G. Carrà, L. Russolo, G. Balla, G. Severini, ‘The Exhibitors to the Public’, in Exhibition of the Works of the Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors (London, 1914), p. 12.

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as an interconnection of centres of energy.20 It is however symptomatic that the visual translation of the forceline into sculptural, plastic values is rather formally uncertain and embryonic. Moreover, it also results in the first inclusion of a different material, probably a blade of metal or wood,21 in the plaster form. When the art critic Roberto Longhi dismissed this formal solution a year later, calling the linear spurs “unfused environmental elements, which radiate uselessly two papery segments”,22 Boccioni probably decided to remove them altogether, bringing Antigrazioso to the Fig. 17. 2: Head + House + Light. Umberto state in which it exists today. We Boccioni, 1912–1913. Plaster and mixed media will deal later with the reasons for (work destroyed). Photograph taken at the First Longhi’s censure. In 1913, though, Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture, Galerie La the use of three-dimensional lineBoëtie, Paris, June 1913. forces as a conceptual complement to the modulation of the plastic surface becomes a more and more viable solution for Boccioni. He applies it in his subsequent portraits of his mother, Head + House + Light (Fig. 17. 2) and Fusion of a Head and a Window (Fig. 17. 5).23 In the first of these works, which

___________ 20 See B. Petrie, ‘Boccioni and Bergson’, The Burlington Magazine, 116, (1974), pp. 140-7, at p. 143 and p. 145. 21 The actual material is unknown. Longhi refers to ‘papery segments’. A careful examination of photographs of the time, though, suggests a light metal or wooden material. 22 “[All’infuori restano] alcuni accennati elementi, non fusi, di sfondo ambientale che raggia inutilmente due segmenti cartacei”, see Longhi, ‘La scultura futurista di Boccioni’, p. 137. 23 Laura Mattioli Rossi has recently suggested that Antigrazioso might be preceded chronologically by Fusion of a Head and a Window and Head + House + Light. While her interpretation is stimulating, I believe that some formal elements might suggest an earlier conception of Antigrazioso. These would include the following: the stronger derivation from the precedent of Picasso’s Head of a Woman (Fernande) and the uncertainty with which Boccioni presents his new formal solutions, such as the force-lines, the relation between head and building in the background and the assembly of different materials and objects. As for the absence of Antigrazioso in the early photos of Boccioni’s studio, where the only plaster sculpture on view is Head + House + Light, a fact presented as a supporting argument by Laura Mattioli, I believe that this might be explained by the fact that Antigrazioso, being smaller than the subsequent sculptures, had been already realized in clay in the artist’s previous home in via Adige, while the newer sculpture

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we might conceive of as real ‘sculptural assemblies’, force-lines develop from the plaster unity of the woman’s head ‘plus’ the house in its background, enlarging the motif already treated in Antigrazioso. Another force-line element springs from the side of her left arm. Significantly, this work represents the closest adherence in sculpture to Marinetti’s conceptual diktats. The woman’s body bears numerous, one-word inscriptions, overtly grafting Marinetti’s tautological system of referentiality onto the deformations offered by modulated plaster and force-lines. So, the bust opens in a flaming deformation of planes: her left arm lengthens into a flat plaster surface, codified by the stencilled word “muro” (“wall”), and ends with a wooden spike, signifying its energetic continuity into space (Fig. 17. 4). On the left shoulder, another level surface is acknowledged as a “piazza” (“square”), and is thus marked by the presence of a minuscule figurine walking in it. The structure was entirely covered in different colours, rehearsing the pictorial attempt at making visible and almost pedantic the step-by-step passages from object to object, from body to surrounding space. If Boccioni had limited himself solely to modelling white plaster in order to render this interconnection of elements, their relation would have resulted in a visual continuum, as shown in the photographs of an early stage of the work, before it was painted (Fig. 17. 3). Head + House + Light (its title itself betrays the influence of Marinetti’s new linguistic techniques) thus signifies the unstable co-presence of a twofold conception of sculpture, paradoxically supported in both cases by the choice of plaster as the principal medium. Plaster’s suppleness epitomizes the representation of what we described as the continuity of vision between object and its surrounding environment. But its whiteness also renders it particularly apt to be coloured and thereby convey additional ranges of visual demarcation within the work. In Boccioni’s theoretical conception, moreover, that same plasticity or suppleness would make it the ideal tool for materially connecting, intersecting and holding together visualized matter and actual materials, abstract planes and autonomous objects. If we look closely at his sculptural realizations, however, we find that this ideal aspiration did not match the specificities of the medium’s properties. Boccioni’s sculptures, and especially Head + House +

___________ was the first to populate his new studio, coming directly there from the plasterer’s shop. The early photos also offer no testimony of Fusion of a Head and a Window, which Laura Mattioli however indicates as Boccioni’s first. Finally, the complete lack of information surrounding the actual modeling and casting of Boccioni’s sculptures renders quite difficult any effort in dating his works, especially given the fact that the intervention of a professional plasterer inserted considerable temporal hiatuses between the first (supposed) clay models and the subsequent plaster casting and realizations. See L. Mattioli Rossi, ‘Dalla scultura d’ambiente alle forme uniche della continuità nello spazio’, in Mattioli Rossi (ed.), Boccioni. Pittore Scultore Futurista, pp. 17-81, at pp. 21-43.

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Fig. 17. 3: Umberto Boccioni in his studio, at his left the unfinished sculpture Head + House + Light, spring 1913.

Light and Fusion of a Head and a Window, represent some of the first ‘plastic assemblies’ of twentieth-century sculpture; a close analysis of the procedural characteristics of these ‘assemblies’ reveals however the problematic shift from a conception of metaphoric plasticity to its actual physical renderings. As already mentioned, in some photographs of the artist’s studio we find a first, unfinished stage of Head + House + Light (Fig. 17. 3), completely white, lacking any of the wooden spears as well as the walking figurine on the left shoulder; it already bears a wooden element, inserted into the left side of the bust. Later, the handrail of an actual iron balustrade will replace this simple rod (Fig. 17. 2). The process of this substitution is quite telling, for it reveals a technical dead end that, I hold, will prove crucial for Boccioni’s subsequent sculptural choices. The Futurist painter had in all probability conceived the insertion of this rod in the plaster construction as a temporary ploy, counting on the solidification of the plaster mass around the rod and its subsequent detachment from and substitution with the ‘real’ object. This gross overestimation of the medium’s elasticity might seem a simple ingenuity on the part of the painter-turnedsculptor. It signals however the definitive fracture in the Futurist’s belief in the role of plaster as the ideal concretization of all-encompassing matter. The

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photograph taken at the Galerie La Boëtie in the following month of June shows how the supposed insertion of the handrail into the plaster mass was actually a simple visual ruse, the wooden rail truncated with a fuzzy slash and lingering near the similarly blurry margins of the plaster hole. A close comparison of the photographs also shows how, in the process of extracting the rod, a portion of the sculpture’s side was destroyed (Figs 17. 3 and 17. 4). Moreover, the final version of the sculpture reveals the procedure by which a wooden spear on the left side was fastened to the plaster surface of the ‘wall’ (Fig. 17. 4). 17. 4: Detail of the left side of Head + Honed to a pointed extremity, in order Fig. House + Light (see Fig. 17. 2). Photograph to look as if it actually enters the mass, taken at the First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpit is attached with little nails to the thin ture, Galerie La Boëtie, Paris, June 1913. side margin of the projecting plane, creating a slightly skewing, alternative direction to the one ideally fashioned by the plaster’s prolonged borders. Far from the concrete realization of a plastic assemblage, therefore, Boccioni’s plaster works stage a complex system of visual manoeuvres, mimicking the utilization of a series of technical solutions that are finally rejected by the work’s own internal structural balance. In contrast to the definite assumption of the concept of the artist’s arbitrariness when selecting the materials of an assemblage, a notion progressively defined in those very years by Picasso and Archipenko, Boccioni seeks an ontological continuity and correspondence between the substance of the work and that of reality – a correspondence that the physical fragility of plaster cannot guarantee. I believe that this embarrassing paradox compelled Boccioni to seek a solution following two alternative strategies. Fusion of a Head and a Window (Fig. 17. 5) seems in fact to foster more blatantly the disruption of this supposed correlation between the structural forces of the work and those of the subject represented. A side view of this sculpture, recently published by Laura Mattioli Rossi and Giovanna Ginex, reveals a stunning re-conceptualization of the idea of sculpture itself (Fig. 17. 6).24

___________ 24 The photograph is published in Mattioli Rossi (ed.), Boccioni. Pittore Scultore Futurista, p. 137.

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Fig. 17. 5: Fusion of a Head and a Window. Umberto Boccioni, 1912–1913. Plaster and mixed media (work destroyed). Photograph taken at the First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture, Galerie La Boëtie, Paris, June 1913.

Fig. 17. 6: Unknown visitor posing with Umberto Boccioni’s Fusion of a Head and a Window (side view). Photograph taken at the First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture, Galerie La Boëtie, Paris, June 1913.

Translating into plaster the visual structure of his drawings25, Boccioni models the woman’s bust as a pyramidal base for the insertion of a real window into the head. The shifting plurality of the final effect is fashioned by the punctuation of the plaster structure with several, minute scraps of reality: one glass eye implanted in its plaster orbit, a wig alongside the window on top of the head, yellow-painted rays of light made of plaster, which Longhi would soon stigmatize as a charming and innocuous revival of the solidified divine rays of the doves flying in so many countryside baroque churches.26 However, it is the

___________ For these new photographic documents, see also Giovanna Ginex, Boccioni e la fotografia, in Mattioli Rossi (op. cit.), pp. 137-65. 25 The reference is to the drawing Controluce (1910, private collection) and to the series of drawings realized as studies for his sculptures (now divided among the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, the Civiche Raccolte d’Arte, Gabinetto dei Disegni, Milan and private collections). In these drawings, Boccioni conceives the visual fusion of a woman’s head with the frame of the window behind it. They are reproduced in L. Mattioli Rossi, ‘Dalla scultura d’ambiente alle forme uniche della continuità nello spazio’, in Rossi (ed.), Boccioni. Pittore Scultore Futurista, pp. 29-31, 36-37 and 61. 26 See Longhi, ‘La scultura futurista di Boccioni’, p. 138.

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side view of this sculpture that reveals the open dismantling of any pretension of visual continuity. Far from offering a “solidification of Impressionism”, Boccioni fosters finally the metaphorical diversion between the structure of the statue and the structure of reality and chooses to expose the profile of the woman’s face as a hollow silhouette created with a single iron wire. Almost imperceptible from a frontal view, and therefore until now ignored in most critical accounts of Boccioni’s sculpture, this solution reveals a more analytic attitude in rendering an “abstract reconstruction of the planes and volumes which determine the forms”.27 This choice is even more symptomatic for our inquiry because it is obtained through the exploitation of the procedural technicality proper to plaster sculpture itself. While Antigrazioso presented itself as a plaster cast by overtly reworking Picasso’s precedent, Fusion of a Head and a Window reconfigures the status of the armature, transforming the hidden workings of plastering into the sign of a new conceptual statement on the very nature of representation.

Castability and Originality The silhouette of this profile is merely the ultimate proof of Boccioni’s constant tendency to project a metaphorical signification onto the tools and substances of sculptural practice. As a painter, his position as an outsider clearly played a role in this search for the perfect ploy to translate his diverse theoretical ambitions. Faced with the final disruption of the speculative model of plaster as the guarantee of a “solidification of Impressionism”, as put forward by Fusion of a Head and a Window, however, he quickly reverted to the primacy of this medium. Both his three-dimensional still lifes (Development of a Bottle in Space through Form; Development of a Bottle in Space through Colour; Form-Forces of a Bottle) and his statues portraying male figures in movement (Muscles in Quick Motion; Synthesis of the Human Dynamism; Spiralic Expansion of Muscles in Motion; Unique Forms of Continuity in Space) are entirely made of plaster. They seem, therefore, to fit more clearly into the new codes of modern sculpture which, as Albert Elsen has illustrated, revolved around the presence of white plaster as the “intermediary by which an idea in clay could be preserved, reworked and even exhibited in the Salon so that the artist might attract a sponsor for casting or carving”.28 This dismissal of the use of diverse materials within the plaster ensemble coincides

___________ 27 “[...] [la] ricostruzione astratta dei piani e dei volumi che determinano le forme”; Boccioni, ‘Manifesto’, p. 24. 28 A. E. Elsen, Origins of Modern Sculpture: Pioneers and Premises (New York, N.Y., 1974), p. 121.

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with a new amendment in Boccioni’s theoretical ruminations over the concept of dynamism. In an essay published in the catalogue of the first exhibition of his sculptures in Paris in June 1913, he underscores his search for rendering “a mutable, evolving form which has nothing to do with all the forms conceived until now”.29 Rehearsing once again Bergsonian terminology, he defines the need for a double conception of form, considered both as “form in movement (relative movement)” and “movement of the form (absolute movement)”. Only this new attitude will permit the creation of sculptures capable of rendering “the instant of plastic life in its manifestation, without cutting it out from its living atmosphere, without stopping it in its movement, in a word, without killing it”.30 Longhi praised the progression toward this “essentially sculptural impulse of searching for a [visual] form by starting organically – and therefore dynamically – from its articulated centre”.31 Concurrently, he applauded the reduction of matter to pure sculptural material – that is, plaster – defined as “this lyrical affirmation of the single identity of substance, which is as to say the unification of organic varieties obtained through art”.32 Longhi’s idealist celebration of plaster as the medium elected to transfigure reality into form and therefore into art, matches a problematic shift in Boccioni’s own reasoning. While in his Manifesto of Futurist Sculpture he had denied any value to the self-sufficiency of the sculpted form closed in upon itself as an idol, he now points to the need for a “new abstract contour that expresses the body in its material movements”.33 “My sculptural ensemble develops in the space created by the depth of volume, showing the thickness of any outline”, he writes in 1913.34 In reality, even erasing the psychological implications not only of Marinetti’s tautological employment of reality but also of the arbitrariness implicit in the practice of assemblage, he still does not fully embrace the prospect of finding, in Elsen’s words, a sponsor for casting or

___________ 29 “[...] une forme changeante, en évolution, et qui n’a rien à faire avec toutes les formes conçues jusqu’ici”, Boccioni, [Introduction], p. 4. 30 “[Cette double conception de la forme:] forme en mouvement (mouvement relatif) et mouvement de la forme (mouvement absolu) [peut seule rendre dans la durée] l’instant de la vie plastique vécu dans sa manifestation, sans le découper en le tirant de son atmosphère vitale, sans l’arretêr dans son mouvement, en un mot sans le tuer”, Boccioni, [Introduction], p. 4. 31 “[...] impulso essenzialmente scultorio, ch’è di ricreare organicamente – e perciò dinamicamente – la forma dal suo centro articolato”, Longhi, ‘La scultura futurista di Boccioni’, p. 137. 32 “[...] questa affermazione lirica della unicità della sostanza, è quanto dire unificazione artistica delle varietà organiche”, Longhi, ‘La scultura futurista di Boccioni’, p. 141. 33 “[...] un nouveau contour abstrait qui exprime le corps dans ses mouvements matériels”, Boccioni, [Introduction], p. 6. 34 “Mon ensemble sculptural évolue dans l’espace créé par la profondeur du volume en montrant l’épaisseur de chaque profil”, Boccioni, [Introduction], p. 6.

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carving his exhibited, plaster ideas. And it is the analysis of the fate that these works met in the hands of their eventual sponsors that might clarify for us the question of their originality, or, in other words, (un)castability. While it is true that Boccioni was flattered when Apollinaire suggested that some of his works were worthy of being cast in bronze, he never actually saw any of them realized in metal or duplicated in other materials. Even the most famous and subsequently reproduced of these, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space (Fig. 17. 7), was first cast in bronze from the original plaster under Marinetti’s supervision in 1931. This cast (now at the Civico Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Milan) features an elaborate patina, which exalts some of the Fig. 17. 7: Unique Forms of Continuity in work’s formal nuances.35 But it also Space. Umberto Boccioni, 1913. Plaster, h: 116.4 cm. From: Exhibition of the Works of leaves us to wonder whether this the Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors, additional and somewhat unexpected The Doré Galleries (London, 1914), p. 18. technical characteristic would have been exploited by Boccioni himself with the same unpredictability that marked his struggle with plaster. Some excerpts from his writings offer proof of his unresolved, actually still unformulated, attitude toward this issue.36 “I aim to make the object live in its environment without turning it into the slave of artificial or fixed lights”,37 he writes in the 1913 text, accusing his Impressionist predecessors in sculpture of favouring pictorial means over architectural ones. A few lines later, however, he offers his solution to the issue of the limitation of the figure in space fatally

___________ 35 Another cast was made at this time by Chiurazzi and sold by Benedetta Marinetti to the Museum of Modern Art, New York (Lydia Winston Malbin Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: Box 18, folder 170). 36 For the importance of the artist’s original ‘intentions’ regarding the choice of the casting metal in the context of the market fortune of the posthumous fusions, see Sansone, ‘Le sculture di gesso’, p. 48. 37 “Je me propose de faire vivre l’objet dans son ambiance sans en faire l’esclave de lumières artificielles ou fixes”, U. Boccioni, [Introduction], p. 7.

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Fig. 17. 8: Development of a Bottle in Space. Umberto Boccioni, 1912–13. Plaster. From: Exhibition of the Works of the Italian Futurist Painters and Sculptors, The Doré Galleries (London, 1914), p. 24.

“determined by [the end of] matter itself (clay, plaster, marble, bronze, wood or glass)”. His response is twofold: “I colour in black or gray the extreme line of the contour, with graduations and nuances directed to a central clarity, so that the periphery of the sculptural ensemble disappears step by step and fades away into space”, he suggests, and then adds: “When I don’t consider using coloration appropriate, [...] I let live the suppleness, the interruptions, the élan of straight and curved lines in the direction suggested by the movement of the bodies”.38 Boccioni makes it clear that his break from Impressionism is not rooted in a refusal of its pictorial means in and of themselves, but in their

___________ 38 “[Les sculpteurs qui subissent le joug de la tradition et du métier me demandent d’un air épouvanté comment je pourrai arrêter la périphérie de l’ensemble sculptural, du moment que la figure s’achève dans la ligne] déterminée par la matière même (glaise, plâtre, marbre, bronze, bois ou verre) isolé dans l’espace. [La réponse est aisée:] Pour que la périphérie de l’ensemble sculptural s’évanouisse peu à peu et se perde dans l’espace je colore en noir ou en gris la ligne extrême du contour en graduant et nuançant ces couleurs jusqu’à atteindre une clarité centrale [...] Quand je ne juge pas à propos de me servir des colorations, [...] je laisse vivre les sinuosités, les interruptions, l’élan des lignes droites et des courbes, suivant la direction que leur imprime le mouvement des corps”, Boccioni, [Introduction], pp. 8-9.

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limited manipulability and control. His works, instead, should be a selfsufficient rendering of the object and its surrounding atmosphere, undisturbed by the accidents and chance occurrences posed by the sculpture’s eventual environment. Again, he relies on the potential of plaster for offering a surface of coloured progression that erases any possible accident in perception imposed by light. When left uncoloured, it is the form’s abstract outline, and not its specific visual rendering through the choice of a casting or carving material, that defines the core of the artist’s concern. Somehow then, the whiteness of the exhibited plasters coincides with the ideal visualization of a form’s full abstract potential or, in Longhi’s terms, the “visione puramente plastica” (“purely plastic vision”).39 The problematic repercussions of this interpretation are finally revealed by the paradoxical quandaries surrounding Boccioni’s plaster still life, Development of a Bottle in Space (Fig. 17. 8). While we generally know this work through its numerous posthumous casts in bronze, its original identity is rooted in a designated conceptual ambivalence. Boccioni created two versions of it, by all accounts identical in shape and dimensions: one was left in white plaster, the other coloured red with minium and textured with an “orange peel” effect.40 At the First Exhibition of Futurist Sculpture and in the subsequent shows, they were displayed together, under the titles Development of a Bottle in Space Through Form and Development of a Bottle in Space Through Colour.41 As with all other works, we have no information surrounding their realization, but it seems plausible to infer that one was actually a plaster cast (or a very similar plaster copy) of the other. Following his double interest in the potentialities of form and colour for determining the visual experience, Boccioni probably exploited the process of casting for creating a physical duplicate of his idea. Again, white plaster was

___________ 39 Longhi, ‘La scultura futurista di Boccioni’, p. 152. Longhi’s expression refers specifically to Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. 40 See the interview with Marco Bisi in Sansone, ‘Le sculture di gesso’, pp. 52-5. 41 The two versions are reported in the catalogues of the exhibitions at the Galerie La Boëtie (1re exposition de sculpture futuriste du peintre et sculpteur futuriste Boccioni. Du 20 juin au 16 juillet, Galerie La Boëtie (Paris, 1913, reprint Florence, 1977): cat. nos 6 and 11, pp. 27-8), Galleria Futurista Sprovieri (Esposizione di scultura futurista del pittore e scultore futurista Boccioni. Galleria Futurista Sprovieri, Rome 1913: cat. nos 6 and 10, pp. 25-6), and Galleria Gonnelli (Esposizione di sculture futurista del pittore e scultore futurista U. Boccioni. Marzo-aprile 1914, Galleria Gonnelli, Florence 1914: cat. nos 6 and 10, pp. 27-8). Only one version, entitled Development of a bottle in space, is reported in the catalogues of the exhibitions at the Rotterdamsche Kunstkring (Les peintres et les sculpteurs futuristes italiens. Exposition du 18 mai au 15 juin 1913, Rotterdamsche Kunstkring, Rotterdam 1913: cat. no. 2, p. 34) and at the Doré Galleries (Exhibition of the works of the Italian Futurist painters and sculptors, The Doré Galleries (London, 1914), cat. no. 2, p. 36).

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presented as necessary to elicit a visual analysis of the work’s formal qualities, whereas a complex alteration of the medium’s colour and texture guaranteed its status as the channel for an alternative visual effect and meaning. Considering the two works we might therefore wonder if they should be interpreted as a single artistic entity. The overt display of this doubled, alternative concretization of a conceptual image also challenges the traditional codes of the exhibitions of plaster works and plaster casts in the modern Salons. This choice of presentation raises the question of whether the entire process of exhibiting Boccioni’s plaster sculpture was not the modulation of a continuous aesthetic meditation, interspersed, as it was, with an array of explanatory drawings complementing each statue.42 In 1927, eleven years after his death, Boccioni’s plasters, heavily damaged, were finally thrown in a garbage pile by the non-Futurist sculptor, Piero da Verona, who was holding them in storage. Searching through the rubbish, Marco Bisi, a young admirer of Boccioni, was able to identify and collect only the red debris of Development of a Bottle in Space Through Colour, which he diligently reconstructed. When the Futurist aviator Fedele Azari decided to undertake its definitive restoration and subsequent casting, however, he had several plaster casts made, some white, others painted in red, but without the original texture of the Bottle.43 Of these different casts, only one remains, probably a copy painted “ultra red”, made for Marinetti, and from which the leader of Futurism had additional metal casts made.44 It is interesting to note that, in this series of subsequent castings and colourings, the issue of the originality of the rescued work in plaster was never addressed. Even the option between the ‘white’ and the ‘red’ plaster ‘versions’ of the Bottle, a recurring theme in the correspondence between the many personalities that took care of its castings in the 1920s and 1930s, progressively faded away. The question of originality and colour gradually disappeared, as did the multiple plaster casts, which fell into oblivion with the proliferation of bronze substitutes. Development of a Bottle in Space Through Colour was thus cast in plaster to revive Development of a Bottle in Space Through Form, the missing original from which, probably, it had been initially cast itself. In its more famous

___________ 42 Together with his sculptures, at the La Boëtie Gallery, Boccioni exhibited twenty-two drawings divided in five series, each entitled respectively: I want to synthesize the unique forms of continuity in space; I want to fix human forms in movement; I want to give the fusion of a head with its environment; I want to give the prolongation of the objects in space; I want to model light and atmosphere. See ‘Dessins’, in 1re exposition de sculpture futuriste du peintre et sculpteur futuriste Boccioni. Du 20 juin au 16 juillet, Galerie La Boëtie (Paris, 1913, reprint Florence, 1977), pp. 29-30. 43 For the entire question, see Sansone, ‘Le sculture di gesso’, pp. 24-39, and 52-4. 44 Sansone, ‘Le sculture di gesso’, p. 46.

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bronze replica, it eventually lost any reference to the initial alternative, becoming Development of a Bottle in Space.45 Finally, if we line up the three surviving plasters (Antigrazioso, Development of a Bottle in Space, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space), we are struck by an ultimate metamorphosis. The first two are now coated with a darkish, brown colouring, almost signalling an overt eagerness to assume their own fate as bronze casts.46 While camouflaging a plaster cast as a bronze was a common practice in the early twentieth-century Salons, a somewhat anxious ennoblement used to attract sponsors and buyers, Boccioni’s plaster works did not originally offer such a clear indication of castability. On the contrary, the Futurist’s struggle with the potentialities and the barriers offered by plaster led him to a diverse and at times contrasting system of technical and conceptual manoeuvres in the attempt to bring together theory and realization, vision and matter. Exploiting its very aura of provisional instability, Boccioni turned plaster into the core of his sculptural theory, inaugurating a new status for this medium within the codes of modern sculpture.

Addendum Since I wrote this essay, Zeno Birolli and Marina Pugliese (at the conference Il Futurismo nelle avanguardie, Milan, 4–6 February 2010; publication forthcoming) have announced the discovery of the photograph of a second version of Boccioni’s Development of a Bottle in Space, probably a plaster sculpture, which differs slightly from the work in the original photographs known until

___________ 45 For the titles used in the Futurist exhibitions of the 1910s, see note 41 above. 46 Of these, Antigrazioso clearly sports a thick layer of brown varnish. In the archive of the American collector Lydia Winston Malbin, who in 1956 acquired a bronze cast of this work done by Angelo Perego for Benedetta Marinetti in 1950–51, we find an undated, handwritten note, probably by Malbin herself, stating: “The plaster is in Galleria Moderna Rome painted a golden bronze by Boccioni” (Lydia Winston Malbin Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University: Box 18, folder 170). Neither the source for the attribution of the varnish to Boccioni, nor the context in which this statement was made is given. Of the two plasters bought by Francisco Matarazzo Sobrinho from Benedetta Marinetti in the early 1950s, Development of a Bottle in Space sports a patina, now appearing darkish-brown, while Unique Forms of Continuity in Space does not seem to have any. According to the museum’s records, the plasters have not been cleaned since they entered into the collection. I would like to thank Cristina Cabral of the MAC USP- São Paulo for assisting me in my research and providing me with this information. Significantly, of the three plasters, the only ones now appearing with a brownishbronze patina are the two that were originally coloured. It is possible that the original coloured texture of Antigrazioso, as well as the red pigment of the version of the Bottle given by Azari to Marinetti in the 1920s were ruined during one of the casting procedures to which the plasters where submitted and subsequently substituted with the current patina.

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now. Further research is underway to assess whether this photograph shows an early version of Development of a Bottle in Space through Colour or one of the later, posthumous casts. I thank Marina Pugliese and Zeno Birolli for their generosity in sharing and discussing their discovery with me.

Frequently cited literature U. Boccioni, [Introduction], in 1re exposition de sculpture futuriste du peintre et sculpteur futuriste Boccioni. Du 20 juin au 16 juillet, exh. cat. Galerie La Boëtie, Paris 1913 (reprint Florence, 1977) U. Boccioni, ‘Manifesto tecnico della scultura futurista (1912)’, in Esposizione di Scultura Futurista del pittore e scultore futurista U. Boccioni, exh. cat. Galleria Gonnelli, Florence, March-April 1914 (reprint Florence, 1977) R. Longhi, ‘La scultura futurista di Boccioni’, in idem, Scritti Giovanili. 1912– 1922 (Florence, 1980), I.1 L. Mattioli Rossi (ed.), Boccioni. Pittore Scultore Futurista (Milan, 2006) L. Sansone, ‘Le sculture di gesso di Umberto Boccioni: storie e documenti inediti’, in V. W. Feierabend (ed.), Umberto Boccioni. La rivoluzione della scultura (Cinisello Balsamo, 2006), pp. 24-63

Outside In: the after-life of the plaster cast in contemporary culture SUE MALVERN

In the past art students began their apprenticeship with long hours of drawing in front of the cast, carefully rendering the smooth tonal transitions of the white casts in a variety of tonal media, often laboriously finished. In the process, their drawings became material evidence of application and dedication, exemplifying moral virtue and the conscious assimilation of classical tradition. This pedagogic exercise persisted well into the 1950s, long after the plaster cast from classical examples had lost its significance in modern art. Paolozzi’s Michelangelo’s David (c. 1987) was made from a cast he acquired from a shop window at Harrods, he sawed the head into shards and bound its fragments with string and wood, apparently in homage to a riot at the Munich Academy of Art when art students broke up the art school’s cast collection in 1972.1 When the plaster cast lost its significance, after a long assault by modernist art, not only was classicism rejected but traditions involving the absorption of canons were also placed under suspicion alongside a lot of other traditional assumptions concerning imitation, verisimilitude or realism, raising questions about the nature of the creative process itself and the status of the artist as originator. Edouard Dantan’s The Casting after Life, 1887 (Pl. 15. A), exemplifies many of these issues in the demise of the cast. In a dusty studio, the appropriately idealized female nude poses while her body is cast presumably by the artist and his assistant. There are references to Renaissance prototypes, a cast of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave for example, as well as the odd body part. The tonality of the painting and its viewpoint, encompassing the foreground to the corner of the studio roof in even focus, makes it photographic – its painterly manner mimicking its subject matter. As Fox Talbot put it, photography is the pencil of nature, the photograph the index, or a trace of the real like a plaster cast. Everything in Dantan’s painting’s subject matter and demeanour down to its rather tacky and hairless female nude summarizes

___________ 1

See [accessed 28 April 2009], caption to display, 2004, Tate Collections.

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what modernism would subsequently reject. Moreover, Dantan made his painting only ten years after the furore over Rodin’s Age of Bronze and the accusation that the artist had cast it from life, basically a charge of cheating. Modernist art’s rejection of the plaster cast could be termed a symptom of a crisis in representation, or a flight from photography or any form of reproduction that, like the photograph, has an indexical relationship to the referent. One of the best known accounts of this is Rosalind Krauss’s ‘Notes on the Index’, 1977, in which she cites Marcel Duchamp as progenitor of art in the 1970s, marked by its return to the index as a form of signification. She reproduces Duchamp’s With my tongue in my cheek, 1959, in which Duchamp sketched a self-portrait in profile, a form of iconic representation, and added a plaster cast of his own chin and cheek, an indexical form of representation. For Krauss, Duchamp’s work “manifests a kind of trauma of signification”.2 What modernism would seek to repress, including the plaster cast has, of course, a tendency to return. For example, Dantan’s long forgotten Casting from Life reappeared, or rather resurfaced in 2002, first at the exhibition A fleur de peau at the Musée D’Orsay about the life-cast in the nineteenth century, and then again in the same year at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds where it was reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition Second Skin opposite a photograph of the British artist Marc Quinn casting from the body of the model Kate Moss.3 It seems, therefore, that the long exhausted tradition of plaster casts, and the issue of indexical signs, is newly relevant to the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The revival of plaster casting is sometimes attributed to American artists in the sixties, particularly Duane Hanson and George Segal who cast figures directly from the body to stage tableaux that are metaphors for the alienation and depersonalisation of consumer society. Segal used volunteers, bandaging their bodies in scrim soaked in plaster.4 However, these practices seem to mark a return to an exhausted academic tradition, in the case of Hanson and Segal, to point up the distance between high art where academic forms have been superseded and popular culture where academic forms of representation are dominant, and in the case of Quinn, mentioned earlier, because he is an academic artist with a degree in art history. More relevant to contemporary art are Antony Gormley’s casts of his own body.5 Plaster casting recurs with greater frequency amongst artists of the 90s, particularly and significantly,

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R. E. Krauss, ‘Notes on the Index: Part 1’, in eadem, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, Mass., 1986), p. 206. S. Feeke, Second Skin: Historical Life Casting and Contemporary Sculpture (Leeds, 2002). See for example Phyllis Tuchman, George Segal (New York, N.Y., 1983); K. Varnedoe, Duane Hanson, (New York, 1985). See for example, Antony Gormley’s Another Place, Crosby Beach, Liverpool, 1997, installed 2005.

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amongst women artists. Helen Chadwick produced a series of plaster casts called Piss Flowers, 1991–92, famously (or notoriously) produced by urinating in the snow with fellow artist, David Notarius, and filling the melted cavity with plaster of Paris. In effect the process turned a space into a solid, or a negative into a positive, as well as confounding distinctions between the genders, because the flowers were made alternately by both of them6. Sarah Lucas, in two works cast directly from her own body Get Hold of This, 1994–95, and You know what, 1998, stages herself as a fragmented body that is abject, casual and vulgar, highlighted by the way she did not tidy up the seams from the mould. American artist, Janine Antoni made a series of casts from her own breast alongside latex teats and a cast of the packaging for the teats, called Wean, 1990. What is presented is the negative plaster mould, not the positive cast, a procedure with important implications for how signification works. This is a work where a form is marked by its negativity or its absence, and might be said to index history. Wean both reflects on the relationship of woman artists of the 90s to feminist artists of the 70s and 80s, and makes reference to a work by Marcel Duchamp Priére de Toucher, 1947.7 Duchamp’s dead-pan objects, particularly the ready-mades, are an important reference for all three artists, Lucas, Chadwick and Antoni. Duchamp also cast from the body, as in Female Fig leaf, 1950,8 and once remarked on the space between the mould and the object in casting as infra-thin or infra-mince, what Molly Nesbit has called “those immeasurable transitions between one thing and another”. Duchamp told a friend that the infra-mince was “intentionally […] a human word, affective […]. The hollow in paper, between the front and back of a thin sheet […]”.9 All these examples are preoccupied with the body, either directly replicating the whole or parts of the body, or using its biological processes. One artist who has made casting into her signature technique is Rachel Whiteread. In contrast to the small number of examples discussed so far, Rachel Whiteread is the one artist who has almost never made a cast from the body.10 Instead

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See Mark Sladen (ed.), Helen Chadwick (London and Ostfildern-Ruit, 2004). Duchamp cast a breast for the cover of the exhibition Le Surréalisme en 1947, now in the collection of the Centre Pompidou. The most obvious antecedent to Antoni’s work is Mary Kelly’s Postpartum Document, 1973–79, the first section of which refers to weaning a child. However, where Kelly argued against picturing the female body, Antoni makes the body and its erotics explicit. 8 The fig leaf was originally cast for Duchamp’s installation Etant Données 1944–66, now in Philadelphia Museum of Art. The Tate owns a cast of Female Fig Leaf. 9 M. Nesbit, ‘Last Words (Rilke, Wittgenstein) (Duchamp)’, Art History, 21.4 (1998), pp. 546-64, at p. 547 and p. 549. 10 Whiteread once made a cast of an ear. See Charlotte Mullins, Rachel Whiteread (London, 2004), p. 11.

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Whiteread has made casting of objects and sometimes the spaces within or under objects into her hallmark. Whiteread works with some complex paradoxes of the casting process and the way original (positive) and mould (negative) fold one into another and turn each other inside out. Untitled (wardrobe) for example, casts the spaces within a simple domestic wardrobe and then removes the wardrobe itself, discarding it just as the mould is cast aside in the production of the cast. The object itself is not replicated but becomes the container or the mould; what is cast is everything that the object is not, its spaces solidified and made tomblike. Viewing Whiteread’s objects seems always to involve complicated and uncanny acts of looking. One thinks one has grasped the nature of what one sees only to find that all is not as it seems. This is made more pointedly the case in a cast such as Untitled (ten tables) 1996, where a structure or container must have been made to hold the plaster as it was cast under the tables which were then removed to leave only the spaces beneath rendered as opaque functionless obstacles. Although Whiteread’s work seems to be the one contemporary exception, in not casting from the body, her work is nonetheless preoccupied with the body, with the body’s props such as chairs, baths, cupboards, mattresses and with the spaces bodies occupy, floors and rooms. The matter of Whiteread making the outside in was to be most clearly articulated in a cast she made of an entire room in an apartment in London, known as Ghost 1990. What makes Ghost uncanny is that what she presents is the cast made from the walls of the room reassembled inside out. What were protuberances become depressions – where the fireplace was once set forward from the wall to focus the room it now recedes. The door and its door knob are not raised surfaces but indentations that do not open because there is nothing to open into. The space that the walls, with their dado and skirting board, once contained is turned inside out so the sculpture Ghost makes a container that contains no space within because its inside is all on the outside. This inversion of spaces turned inside out to produce voids that contain nothing was dramatized with House, 1993, that then led to Whiteread’s major memorial, the Vienna Holocaust Memorial 2000 (Fig. 18. 1).11 The uncanniness of Whiteread’s negative spaces was augmented in the case of the memorial because it is not a cast of a real room but of a structure made for the purpose of being cast inside out. But a double inversion is also made in the casting of the books that line the fictitious empty library. In the long years when the Vienna Holocaust Memorial was caught up in controversy, Whiteread made innumerable casts of library shelves, to produce racks that figure the

___________ 11 See S. Malvern, ‘Antibodies: Rachel Whiteread’s Water Tower’, Art History, 26 no. 3 (2003), pp. 392-405.

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Fig. 18. 1: Judenplatz-Memorial, Vienna. Rachel Whiteread, 2000. Concrete, l: 10 m, w: 7 m, h: 3.8 m.

spaces above the books in the library and the books and shelves themselves as a vacancy. The traces of colour that can still be seen on the surface of the plaster come from the dyes transferred from the books to the wet plaster in the casting process. These experiments include an entire room lined with spaces once occupied by books and shelves. However, in the case of the final Judenplatz Memorial a double inversion was effected because the books that line the shelves of the empty Vienna library are also turned back into positive forms that are then replaced on the shelves with their unseen spines facing in. These are anonymous books, forever locked from sight, like the murdered Jewish community they commemorate. Being made of concrete the Judenplatz Memorial is of course not actually a plaster cast. But a more recent work was directly concerned with plaster casts, and situated entirely appropriately in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s great Cast Courts. Room 101 was a commission from the BBC working with the V&A to celebrate George Orwell’s centenary (Fig. 18. 2). Room 101 is a motif from Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 – a place of torture where individuals are confronted with their most intimate fears. Room 101 was also the office Orwell occupied during World War II when he worked at Broadcasting House for the BBC producing propaganda material for the India Service. The room was to be demolished as part of rebuilding work at the

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Fig. 18. 2: Room 101. Rachel Whiteread. Temporary installation in the Cast Court at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, September 2003 to July 2004. Plaster, h: 3 m, w: 5 m, l: 6.43 m.

Broadcasting House and hence the occasion arose to invite Whiteread to cast its insides out. Chris Townsend, who wrote an extended analysis of this installation “Live as if someone is always watching you. George Orwell’s, Rachel Whiteread’s and the BBC’s versions of Room 101”, discusses how the BBC now broadcasts a popular programme called ‘Room 101’ in which celebrities are invited by a comedian, Paul Merton, to describe the things they most hate in the world and consign them to a dustbin known as Room 101. Guests nominate absurd and impossible things such as the skin on rice pudding, men with beards and queuing. Townsend argues that the BBC’s and other television programming is a perverse fulfilment of Orwell’s 1984 now dedicated to fulfilling Orwell’s analysis of the misuse of communication in mass broadcasting with its doublethink and newspeak. Along with so-called reality programmes, such as ‘Big Brother’ and the weekly greed spectacle that is the broadcasting of the National Lottery draw, the television programme ‘Room 101’, Townsend argues, is a debasement of Orwell’s political allegory of totalitarianism and managerial or administrative culture. Whiteread’s inversion of Room 101, her turning its outside in, is a metaphor for Townsend of the inversion of values

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and the doublethink at the BBC. Whereas Orwell’s 1984 once imagined poverty as the means for keeping the proletarians subdued, it is now the false and impossible dream of the lottery and a general dumbing down in national broadcasting that keeps the people subordinated. He writes that with ‘Room 101’, ‘Big Brother’, and the Lottery, “central motifs in Orwell’s dystopia have been inverted in a culture that simultaneously enacts its own forms of degradation upon the human subject whose celebration it so relentlessly mimes”.12 He concludes by commenting on the irony of placing Whiteread’s Room 101 in the cast room of the V&A, full, as he puts it, of “forgotten and meaningless objects” that perhaps ought to be shoved, he suggests, into the televised version of Room 101, alongside men with beards and the skin on rice pudding. But few people who wrote on Whiteread’s Room 101 noticed that the artist had also intervened in the installation of the existing casts themselves, lining up casts of Renaissance portrait busts and putting them into displays that ignored their audiences, sometimes even turning their backs to the viewer, as if they wished only to communicate with each other (Fig. 18. 3. and Fig. 26. 8.). Viewing these strangely arranged objects, it seemed that Whiteread had acted on their existing installation with its assumption of their passive presence as educative instruments for moral improvement and given the plaster casts agency, including the ability to refuse the viewer’s gaze. Whiteread’s work is commonly read into registers of trauma and commemoration, relating to the way her inverted casts represent absence or nonspace, the relationship of the cast to the death-mask and how viewing them invokes the uncanny. Lisa Saltzman has recently argued that contemporary art has taken off from the preoccupation of art in the 1970s with the index to pursue the indexical sign in order to empty it. She writes: “What we see, then, in this art of the present is the index as a form rather than a function of representation, the index as a point of reference rather than a referential structure of representation, the index as a vestige rather than a viable means of representation”. Whiteread, by inverting or negating architectural form, renounces any relationship to the real; in effect she both stages the index and refutes the index as a mark or trace of cause. Saltzman terms these stagings “the empty index, the impotent index, the index at one remove, the index that is no longer a sign but […] pure signifier”. In this way, contemporary art becomes “deeply memorial, decidedly historical”.13

___________ 12 C. Townsend, ‘Live as if Someone is Always Watching You. George Orwell’s, and Rachel Whiteread’s and the BBC’s Versions of Room 101’, in C. Townsend (ed.), The Art of Rachel Whiteread (London, 2004), p. 203. 13 L. Saltzman, Making Memory Matter: Strategies of Remembrance in Contemporary Art (Chicago, Ill., 2006), p. 13.

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Fig. 18. 3: Room 101. Rachel Whiteread (cf. Fig. 18. 2).

Sarah Lucas’s Unknown Soldier, 2003, is based on a photograph she found and recreated with plaster-cast boots and a fluorescent tube, as a phallic symbol of energy and death. The work was remade for her exhibition in New York ‘GOD IS DAD’. Boots that, when empty, signified an absent soldier, are filled and replaced with a cast, in turn emptied as an indexical referent. Made impotent, they stand for a deep and decidedly historical protest against contemporary war.

Inside Out: a process for production JANE MCADAM FREUD

On consideration, this as an artists’ paper should maintain a loyalty to the medium. My aim is to make the visual language the dominant one by showing images explained with captions, in so far as possible. My original presentation was accompanied by video footage showing the process for a work I made in plaster for the conference. I chose the medal as medium and documented both the thought process and the technical processes that gave rise to the piece. In keeping with my predilection for the commemorative, the resulting medal is my way of recording the conference. I began without pride or prejudice as we may do today, by searching variations on the title of the conference on the internet. ‘Plaster casters’, ‘plaster casting’, ‘plaster casts’. When searching ‘Plaster Casters’, the overwhelming majority of results for all seventy-four pages were for ‘Cynthia Plaster Caster’, a recovering groupie who makes plaster casts of appendages attached to rock stars, etc. and related activities. Not exactly what I expected, but an intriguing lead! I have a limited collection of plaster cast penises myself. These were not casts made by me however but were sent to me through the post by a respectable fellow sculptor whose initials can be found under the Queen’s effigy on our current coinage. My other plaster cast collection consists of casts taken from Renaissance medals. Among these is one of Matteo de’ Pasti’s elephants referred to later (Fig. 19. 2).1 For this piece 1+1, I wanted to make a sculpture which looked at and allowed for comparison between the process of casting plaster and the analytical process. Plaster is either set (hard), between states (setting) or is in a fluid state. It is the perfect material to say something interesting about the human body containing its own personal sculpture perhaps; however this is not the point.

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It originally formed the reverse of a medal for Isotta of Rimini; for similar specimens see S. K. Scher (ed.), The Currency of Fame, Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (New York, 1994), pp. 62-4.

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Fig. 19. 1: Penis group. Plaster. Owned by the author.

Fig. 19. 2: Renaissance medal group. Plaster. Owned by the author.

Inside Out: a process for production

The device of masturbation is used to symbolize the spilling of one’s guts (talking cure). In contrast to plaster, clay can be left unfired, in its raw state. I wanted to use a raw substance for this sculpture to represent a malleable, unfixed state. Once a work is cast in plaster it sets and is finalized in that sense. The therapeutic process in Freud’s work with psychoanalysis is one where old and new, random and hidden information is brought out to be made sense of and formulated into a story – the mutable story of a life. It became important that the material used was not set in stone. I decided to use raw clay as opposed to plaster for 1+1. It was shown alongside Freud’s couch at the Freud Museum during my exhibition Relative Relations. This exhibition, in triptych, travelled symbolically from Freud’s death place (now the Freud Museum, London) to the Museum Novojiþínska in Pribor (Czech Republic) which was Freud’s birth place. Finally it was shown at the Harrow Museum in the locality of my current home and studio. Interestingly the offending part was requested to be covered by viewers at the suburban Harrow Museum. The linen fig leaf was ultimately not enough. Finally the whole piece had to be covered and shown with a warning notice to advise of the adult content. Considering the piece was very much about repression it was indeed a very Victorian solution!

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Fig. 19. 3: 1+1. Jane McAdam Freud, 2006. Raw clay, life-size. Photograph from the exhibition Relative Relations, the Freud Museum, London.

Fig. 19. 4: ‘1+1 undercover’. Jane McAdam Freud, 2007. Raw clay and cloth, life-size. Photograph from the exhibition Relative Relations, the Harrow Museum, London.

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Fig. 19. 5: Our World. Bill Woodrow, 1997. Bronze, h: 5 cm, w: 3.5 cm. British Art Medal Society collection (BAMS), British Museum, London.

Fig. 19. 6a: Starting point (obverse). Plaster cast after Matteo de’ Pasti’s bronze cast medal (rev) of Isotta degli Atti of Rimini (1446). D: 8.225 cm. Owned by the author.

Medals have two sides with which to tell their story. Bill Woodrow’s “Our World” 1997 shows this process quite clearly and it also serves to illustrate my title – Inside out; a process for production. I decided to reclaim Matteo de’ Pasti’s elephant from 1446 for the obverse of my Conference Medal. The two sided form of the medal serves in uniting two ideas, in this case the history and tradition of the medium together with its use in contemporary practice. The image also utilizes the elephant’s symbolic significance in reference to memory – ‘elephants never forget’.2 My initial inspiration for the reverse was the appendages. They led me to the fig leaf. The generic fig leaf

Fig. 19. 6b: Starting point (reverse), generic leaf.

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For the symbolic significance of the elephant in the context of the original Renaissance medal see A. Luchs in S. K. Scher (ed.), The Currency of Fame, Portrait Medals of the Renaissance (New York, 1994), p. 64.

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operates as a symbol for a part hidden. In reality when the medal is lying on a surface one part is always hidden. However metaphorically, the reverse side with its fig leaf covering, leaves to the imagination the content beneath. Following the shrouding of 1+1, this project remains conceptually compliant with the rhythm of my practice. The leaf in any case serves the elephant, providing ‘food for thought’. Ultimately the vegetarian Elephant needs sustenance for survival just as the obverse and the reverse are interdependent in the form of the medal. I settled on making a limited edition of fifteen Conference Medals in plaster. Plaster is not generally used for a finished piece but rather as a stage in the process. These plaster medals were offered out at the conference to good homes. A plaster cast taken from the leaf to form a negative mould. Fig. 19. 7: Plaster cast from leaf.

A wax pressing taken from the plaster negative mould. Fig. 19. 8: Wax pressing.

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The reverse leaf wax attached to the obverse plaster showing the wax sprue welded to the now completed master medal pattern.

Fig. 19. 9a: Wax sprue (reverse).

Fig. 19. 9b: Wax sprue (obverse).

The medal pattern welded onto the base of the casting box so as to stand suspended vertically and centrally in the box with an opening to receive the rubber. The front and back of the box were subsequently sealed.

Fig. 19. 10: Casting box.

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Cold cure silicon rubber is used for filling the box around the completed medal pattern. (When set, the outer box was removed and the rubber box cut open to remove the original master medal pattern).

Fig. 19. 11: Mixing rubber.

Plaster poured into the negative space providing the first of the edition.

Fig. 19. 12: Rubber mould.

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Figures 19. 13a-b (and Pls. 19. A-B) show the obverse and reverse of the final plaster patinated with tea leaves, giving an autumnal glow to the leaf and preventing the occurrence of a white elephant.

Fig. 19. 13a: Finished Conference Medal (obverse). Jane McAdam Freud, 2007. Plaster, d: 8.1 cm.

Fig. 19. 13b: Finished Conference Medal (reverse). Cf. Fig. 19. 13a.

Conservation

The Plaster Decoration of the Choir Screens in the Church of Our Lady in Halberstadt: a current conservation project DANIELA ARNOLD, TORSTEN ARNOLD AND ELISABETH RÜBER-SCHÜTTE

Introduction: the Diocese of Halberstadt, a centre of medieval stucco work The former Diocese of Halberstadt comprised large parts of the north-east of the Harzvorland that now belongs to the German state of Saxony-Anhalt. In this region a unique abundance of medieval plaster works survives, that stands out because of the variety of working techniques and use of colour.1 The craftsmanship and artistic skill of the unknown masters were highly developed and resulted in some of the most splendid medieval sculptures, that are outstanding even in a wider European perspective. Already the earliest pieces from the Ottonian period (ninth to the end of the tenth century) were crafted to a high quality and show a sophisticated use of colour. Most of these early works decorate independent monuments, often tombs of prominent members of the nobility or clergy. An important example of an early plaster work is the decoration of the Holy Sepulchre in the Collegiate Church (Stiftskirche) of Gernrode. The monument, executed around 1090, is a combination of limestone and plaster work. The exterior walls are decorated with a figurative programme that is cast in plaster, while on the inner walls the figures are both cast and modelled in plaster (Pl. 20. A).2 The

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2

For general survey texts see F. Berndt, Stuckplastik im frühmittelalterlichen Sachsen. Ihre Bedeutung und Technik (Hannover, 1932); W. Grzimek, Deutsche Stuckplastik 800-1300 (Berlin, 1975); E. Rüber-Schütte, ‘Zum mittelalterlichen Stuck in Sachsen-Anhalt. Fragen der Bestandserfassung, Erforschung und Erhaltung’, in M. Exner (ed.), Stuck des frühen und hohen Mittelalters. Geschichte, Technologie, Konservierung, ICOMOS. Hefte des deutschen Nationalkomitees, 19 (Munich, 1996), pp. 94-106; E. Rüber-Schütte, ‘Das Bistum Halberstadt. Ein Zentrum mittelalterlicher Stuckarbeiten’, in A. Siebrecht (ed.), Geschichte und Kultur des Bistums Halberstadt 804-1648, Symposium anlässlich 1200 Jahre Bistumsgründung Halberstadt 24. bis 28. März 2004, Protokollband (Halberstadt, 2006), pp. 333-51. T. Schmidt, ‘Untersuchungen zu Abbindemechanismen mittelalterlicher Gips- und Stuckmassen’, in M. Hoernes (ed.), Hoch- und spätmittelalterlicher Stuck. Material-Technik-Stil-Restaurierung (Regensburg, 2002), p. 53.

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Fig. 20. 1: Stone capital with plaster decoration, Monastic Church of Drübeck, twelfth century. H: 59.9 cm, w: 74 cm, l: 7 cm.

polychromy seems to be executed in a fresco technique on the damp plaster surface.3 Only at a later stage was plasterwork to become an integral part of the sculptural decoration of church interiors. Numerous examples survive from the first half of the twelfth century until the middle of the thirteenth century, among the plaster decorations of the stone capitals in the monastic churches of Ilsenburg and Drübeck (Fig. 20. 1) and the plaster lion head that functions as a keystone in the vault of the Collegiate Church of Our Lady (Liebfrauenkirche) in Halberstadt. Best known is the genre of choir screens decorated with plaster ornaments of the kind found in Halberstadt and Hamersleben. Although the plaster works of Halberstadt do not relate stylistically to those of the Collegiate Church of Augustinian Canons of St. Pankratius at Hamersleben, some parallels can be found. In both cases, the pre-existing stone choir screens were decorated with

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R. Möller, ‘Zur Farbigkeit mittelalterlicher Stuckplastik’, in M. Exner (ed.), Stuckplastik des frühen und hohen Mittelalters. Geschichte, Technologie, Konservierung ICOMOS. Hefte des Deutschen Nationalkomitees, 19 (Munich, 1996), pp. 79-93, at pp. 81-5.

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plaster works on the outside.4 Of the two examples, the choir screens in the Church of Our Lady in Halberstadt are exceptional for their artistic quality. Today they are impressive not just because of the quality of the sculptural decoration but also for their almost completely preserved medieval polychromy. The third phase in the development of plaster work in the region was characterized by the integration of ornamental plasterwork into the composition of murals. Examples of this development can be found in the former Minsters of Gerbstedt, Gröningen and Hecklingen, and, again, in the Church of Our Lady in Halberstadt. They all date from the second quarter to the end of the twelfth century.

The Choir Screens in the Church of Our Lady, Halberstadt The choir screens separate the slightly raised choir area from the southern and northern transept arms (Fig. 20. 2; Pls 20. B and C). The plain stone screens that support the plaster decoration were erected before 1150 and were badly damaged by the burning of the city of Halberstadt by Heinrich der Löwe in 1179. According to recent research, the execution of the plasterwork on the outside of the north and south choir screens dates back to 1200.5 The two choir screens are each 2.20 metres high and 9.20 metres long.6 Both screens are crowned by medieval wooden arcaded superstructures that probably already formed part of the earlier stone screens.7 The sculptural programme represents in high relief a series of the apostles seated in architectural niches. The centre of each series is formed by the Virgin and Child on the south and the figure of Christ on the north screen. The apostles are identified through tituli above their heads and the books and scrolls they hold in their hands. Matthew, on the north side, is further characterized as he is shown sharpening his quill. Ornamental friezes with foliage decoration run above and below the northern arcades. On the south screen the upper frieze is further decorated, principally with mythological figures (Pl. 20. D). The

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5 6 7

A. Krohner, ‘Die stukkierten Chorschranken in der Klosterkirche zu Hamersleben’, in Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunstwerken, 1 (1982), pp. 14-19; Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt, Archive: RE 231, 232. S. Hohmann, Die Halberstädter Chorschranken. Ein Hauptwerk der niedersächsischen Kunst um 1200 (Berlin, 2000). Including the wooden arcades, the total height of the choir screens amounts to 3.70 m. According to the initial dendrochronological analysis in the area of the architrave, the oak tree from which the wood was procured was felled around 1180. This research was carried out by Dr. Thomas Eißing, University of Bamberg in 2006.

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Fig. 20. 2: Choir screen, north side, with Sts Mathias, Bartholomew, Peter, Christ, Sts Andrew, Matthew and Thomas, c. 1200. Church of Our Lady, Halberstadt. Polychrome plaster on limestone.

spandrels between the arches are on both sides decorated with painted halflength figures of angels. A conservation campaign to preserve and consolidate the endangered surviving stucco work and polychromy of these choir screens began in 2005.8 It was preceded by extensive preliminary research, starting as early as Spring 2003 and aiming at the identification of the underlying reasons for the screen’s bad state of conservation. This preliminary research was conducted by an interdisciplinary collaboration between the team of conservators, scientists and the State Department for the Conservation of Monuments of SaxonyAnhalt (Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt, LDA). Strong emphasis was placed upon the exploration of the history of the object and earlier restoration efforts in particular.

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The team of restorers since 2003 consists of Torsten Arnold (until 2007), Daniela Arnold, Stefanie Fischer, and Martina Runge (since 2007). The project is co-ordinated by Architekturbüro Hülsdell und Hallegger, Halberstadt.

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Technique and Working Procedure The reliefs of the choir screens are made of anhydrite gypsum, a material that occurs in great abundance locally. The gypsum was burned at particularly high temperatures of 700 – 1200°C. The degree of dehydration of the material depended on the temperature, which was itself determined by the size of the gypsum pieces and their distance from the heat source in the oven. The different mineralogical phases that result from this mainly consist of thermoanhydrites and calcium sulphate hemihydrates and dihydrates, respectively, each characterized by different proportions of bound water. Beyond those phases in the calcium sulphate / water system, small amounts of calcium oxide are also formed. The composition of the material of these different phases accounts for its specific physico-chemical properties.9 The hardening of the plaster would have proceeded very slowly, facilitating the handling and processing of the material and also allowing for corrections, even after some hours. When hardened, the ‘high temperature’ plaster forms a dense structure of short crystals that is less porous and more durable than the crystal structure of plasters burned at lower temperatures. The plaster’s anhydrite components can serve over decades as an additional reserve of binding material activated through hydration and desiccation. As a consequence, new crystals continue to form, further increasing the density, hardness and durability of the plaster. As a result, some of the works in this plaster burned at high temperatures survive in remarkably good condition. The qualities of the material described above were also excellently suited to the modelling of the detailed ornamental friezes in high and low relief as well as the almost life-size series of apostles in high relief. According to the scientific analysis, the stucco material used in Halberstadt shows the phases of gypsum, anhydrite and parts of calcium carbonate (c. 3%), that are typical for ‘high temperature’ gypsum which is formed exceeding temperatures over 1200°C. Detected quantities of quartz (under 3%) can be interpreted as impurities that originated during the storing of the material.10 We can therefore assume the use of a mono mineral plaster, that is, a plaster made solely of gypsum without additives, such as sand.11 The gypsum was applied to the limestone screen in several layers, varying in thickness from 0.8 cm where it forms the relief ground to 20 cm in the areas

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H. Kulke, ‘Gips, seine Entstehung, Ausbildung und Vorkommen’, in M. Hoernes (ed.), Hoch- und spätmittelalterlicher Stuck. Material-Technik-Stil-Restaurierung (Regensburg, 2002), pp. 27-42. 10 Prof. Dr. S. Laue, Untersuchungsbericht 2007, Naturwissenschaftliches Labor der Fachhochschule Potsdam, Fachbereich Restaurierung, microsection analysis. 11 Comparable chemical analyses of stucco are rare. Cf. the discussion of the stucco decoration at Nonsuch in Martin Biddle’s contribution to this volume, pp. 107-113.

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Fig. 20. 3: Choir screen, north side, upper frieze with traces of the working technique. Polychrome plaster on limestone. Church of Our Lady, Halberstadt.

of highest relief (Pl. 20. E). Our investigation revealed that, as a first step, a grey plaster mass was applied to the damaged stonewall in order to gain a level surface. It is conceivable that preliminary designs were executed at this stage, but there is no surviving evidence.12 In a second step, the upper and lower friezes were modelled onto this ground. The plaster was probably applied in several layers to build up an even strip to the dimensions of the final frieze. After the initial setting of the plaster, the detailed elaboration of the ornaments was realized in bas relief by scratching and carving. Traces deriving from this technique can be observed in raking light in the upper and lower frieze (Fig. 20. 3). Subsequently, the arcades were executed in the same technique, including the relief ground for the high-relief figures that were yet to be modelled. Almost comprising sculpture in the round, these figures were built up in several layers onto the ground and modelled in their rough outlines. The final elaboration of the design was then achieved through the application of a four

___________ 12 For the screens at Hamersleben a preliminary design consisting of incisions and charcoal is documented in A. Krohner, ‘Die stukkierten Chorschranken in der Klosterkirche zu Hamersleben’, in Beiträge zur Erhaltung von Kunstwerken, 1 (1982), pp. 14-19; Landesamt für Denkmalpflege und Archäologie Sachsen-Anhalt, Archive: RE 231, 232.

The Plaster Decoration of the Choir Screens in Halberstadt

Fig. 20. 4: Choir screen, north side with St. Thomas. Traces of working technique with layers of plaster. Polychrome plaster on limestone. Church of Our Lady, Halberstadt.

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Fig. 20. 5: Choir screen, south side, column between Sts Philip and James Major, with incisions. Polychrome plaster on limestone. Church of Our Lady, Halberstadt.

to five mm thick layer of anhydrite plaster (Fig. 20. 4). No supporting metal reinforcement or anchors relating to the original working process were found.13 After the modelling of the figures, the background was reworked by applying a thin layer of plaster, probably in order to repair small surface damages caused by the process of working the figures. Various technical aids used by the workmen could be traced, notably a plumb line and a pair of dividers and string, used to establish precisely the regular architectural structure of the arcades. The boldest incisions, visible in raking light, appear in the friezes and arcades. The incisions on the shafts of the columns relate to the working process whereby a band of plaster was applied and provided with a central vertical incision in order to establish the correct dimensions of the column, the column being then realized by cutting away the excess plaster (Fig. 20. 5).

___________ 13 Metal detection/geo radar: T. Arnold and J. Wöstmann, Bundesanstalt für Materialprüfung (BAM), Berlin; Dr. J. Meinhardt-Degen, Institut für Diagnostik und Konservierung (IDK), Halle.

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Very detailed incisions in the spandrels served as a preparatory drawing for the painted figures of angels (Pl. 20. F). Most of the incisions were executed in the damp plaster.14 Whether or not the workmen employed any cast or pre-fabricated elements has been extensively debated, yet, no evidence for either of these techniques was detected during the course of our investigation. In fact, the setting properties of the gypsum and the working methods observed allow us to rule out any use of casting or pre-fabricated ornaments in the area of the architecture and ornamental friezes. The issue may sensibly be considered only with regard to the heads of the main figures where the reoccurrence of identical types can be noted. Repairs and seams in the area of the neck could be taken as an evidence for such procedures, but the fact that no anchors or reinforcements have yet been found argues against this.

Polychromy The medieval polychromy of the reliefs survives to an impressive degree. Christ and the Virgin in the central arches of the two choir screens are depicted in purple cloaks, the cloaks of the apostles are red and green, their undergarments mostly white, while the Child on the lap of the Virgin wears a golden garment. The haloes, book covers and hems were originally gilded with oil bound gold. Flesh colours vary from light pink to a yellowish red, the colour of the hair from brown to greyish blue, with the exception of the Virgin’s light yellow ochre hair (Pl. 20. G). The background of the figures is blue, while the architectural elements depicted are mainly painted in gold, red and blue. An extensive examination of the original polychromy was conducted during the first major restoration project from 1958 to 1964 directed by Konrad Riemann. In addition to these very detailed studies, further analyses on chemical components were undertaken and published in the 1970s.15 During the latest preliminary examinations of the polychromy we undertook additional analyses concerning the stucco material and painting technique. According to these findings a protein-based gypsum ground was applied to the plaster surface, which was then used as the basis for the colour.16

___________ 14 The exception being those incisions in the relief ground that indicate the position of a green coloured band. 15 K. Riemann and H.-J. Krause, ‘Untersuchungen zur Technik und Farbigkeit mittelalterlicher Malerei und Stuckplastik’, in Denkmale in Sachsen-Anhalt, Institut für Denkmalpflege Berlin (ed.) (Weimar, 1986), pp. 353-80; K. Riemann, ‘Polychromierte Bildwerke aus Stein und Stuck’, Palette, 36 (1970), pp. 15-24. 16 Prof Dr Habil. H.-P. Schramm, Naturwissenschaftlicher Untersuchungsbericht 2006, Labor für Archäometrie, Dresden. According to the additional analysis by Prof Dr S. Laue, Fachhochschule

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The original polychromy consisted of a very thin and delicate paint layer. The paint was bound using tempera with a distinct oil component. The following pigments were used in the original polychromy: cinnabar over an underlayer of minium, azurite, copper green (verdigris) over a lead white underlayer, lead tin yellow, white lead, red lake over cinnabar, charcoal black, red ochre and gold. The pigments azurite and lead white were applied with protein-bound media, such as animal glue. Parts of the original paint layer are very well preserved, especially in the areas of the flesh, vestments and architectural elements. However, in those parts where azurite and lead white were used, that is, on the relief ground and parts of individual garments, only fragments are detectable as the proteinbased binding material employed here is less durable than the tempera medium – in addition, the coarsely-ground azurite pigment has poor adhesive qualities.

History of the Object The original polychromy dates to 1200–1210 and coincides with the date of the plaster reliefs. Evidence suggests that it was soon painted over. Three early and one relatively late colour schemes can be detected that predate the Reformation, during which the entire ensemble was whitewashed. All three colour schemes correspond to the original one, but can be clearly distinguished because of variations in the vestment patterns. The binders used for these versions are characterized by higher amounts of oil medium.17 The beginning of the seventeenth century saw dramatic changes for the choir screens, as the Reformation was introduced in Halberstadt in 1599 and in 1604 the first service celebrated according to the new rite. The Liebfrauenkirche was redecorated in a baroque style and either in 1615 or 1661 the choir screens were covered with whitewash.18 A renewed interest in the Liebfrauenkirche and its choir screen arose only in the twenties and thirties of the nineteenth century – not least as a result of the institutionalization of the preservation of historic monuments. The imme-

___________ Potsdam, the plaster used on the screens was able to set and in this respect different from the gesso ground that was commonly used, e.g. for painted wooden sculpture. 17 Prof Dr Herm, Naturwissenschaftlicher Untersuchungsbericht 2007, Achäometrisches Labor Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Dresden. 18 K. L. Zschiesche, Halberstadt einst und jetzt mit Berücksichtigung seiner Umgebung (Halberstadt, 1895), p. 115; C. Nieter, Abschiedspredigt gehalten am XXII. Sonntage nach dem Feste der Dreieinigkeit in der ehemaligen Collegiatsstiftkirche Unser Lieben Frauen zu Halberstadt (Halberstadt, 1812), p. 30.

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Daniela Arnold, Torsten Arnold and Elisabeth Rüber-Schütte

diate cause of the interest however was the travel accounts of the well-known architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the esteemed art historian Franz Kugler.19 Finally in 1830, the polychrome paint of the choir screens was rediscovered under the layers of whitewash by Friedrich Lucanus20, a pharmacist of Halberstadt. The polychromy was fully uncovered in the course of the extensive renovation and restoration of the building under the guidance of the Prussian Generalkonservator Ferdinand von Quast in the period from 1839 to 1848.21 For the next 100 years the choir screens remained without any intervention. In the Second World War, the church was badly damaged but the screens survived beneath brick walls that had been built around them as a means of protection. It was only after the rebuilding of the church that the first extensive conservation and restoration campaign of the choir screens was started in 1958, led by what was to become the State Department for the Conservation of Monuments of Saxony-Anhalt (LDA). In the course of the campaign, necessary securing consolidation work was carried out on the plaster figures including the conservation of damaged pieces of plaster and the relocation of detached pieces using metal plugs. The intervention on the plaster surface and the paint layer included the removal of thick layers of dust and dirt as well as the consolidation of plaster and flaking paint layers. Research in the LDA’s archive reveals that, despite the extended intervention, additional conservation measures had already become necessary in 1975, in 1977 and after that in increasingly frequent intervals. The reason for this was the problematic climatic conditions, especially the high relative humidity inside the church. A significant improvement in these conditions was finally reached after the complete structural renovation of the building in 1998–2002. During the restoration, the screens were sheltered from dust by a wood and plexiglass construction, in which the climate was monitored by continuous measurement.

___________ 19 “Ich sah die Liebfrauenkirche in ihrem wüsten und baufälligem Zustand [...]. Zu meiner grossen Freude entdeckte ich an den Wänden, welche die Arme des Kreuzes von dem mittlerem Raume trennen [...] sehr alte, aber schöngearbeitete grosse Reliefs [...]”. F Kugler: ‘Kunst-Bemerkungen auf einer Reise in Deutschland im Sommer 1832 (Halberstadt)’, Museum: Blätter für Bildende Kunst, 1 (1833), p. 103. 20 F. Lucanus, Die Liebfrauenkirche zu Halberstadt deren Geschichte, Architektur, Kunstwerke und Denkmale beschrieben als Andenken an die Restauration und die feierliche Einweihung derselben am Pfingstfeste 1848 (Halberstadt, 1848), p. 12. 21 F. v. Quast, ‘Die Liebfrauenkirche zu Halberstadt und die in ihr erhaltenen Kunstdenkmäler der Bildnerei und Malerei’, Kunstblatt, Beilage zum Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser, 26 (1845), and continuously published in the following numbers: 52, pp. 213-14; 53, pp. 217-18; 54, pp. 221-3; 55, pp. 225-7; 56, pp. 230-1. In: 45, p. 213: “[...] Die unter der Tünche wieder hervorgetretende, im Ganzen noch wohlerhaltende Bemalung dieser Skulpturen trägt noch dazu bei, den feierlichen Eindruck dieser Gestalten, über welche Prof. Kugler bereits (Museum 188, S. 103) ausführlicher gesprochen hat, zu erhöhen.”

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State of Conservation The pre-examinations for the most recent intervention involving several scientific institutes and laboratories started in March 2003 with a detailed analysis of the state of conservation and a fundamental examination of the causes of the dramatically progressive deterioration process.22 This revealed that a large part of the deterioration was due to physical movement. The stucco reliefs are criss-crossed by a pronounced system of cracks and, while the major part of these cracks appeared to be stable, several deeper fissures proved to be subject to tectonic movements, depending on changes of temperature. Detachments of the plaster layers from the stone support were detected within the plasterwork. These were only in a few places judged to be highly unstable. The final thin, plain layers that form the surface of the relief ground appeared to be very fragile where they were near to cracks, zones of overlap or loss, and were therefore detaching from the plaster layer below. Locally, the plaster surface showed structural deterioration and loss of cohesion. Distinctive surface damage, classified as critical, could be observed above all on the plaster work of the southern screen. In this area an alteration of the surface morphology of the plaster through the formation of small blisters was detected, a process of structural deterioration that leads to the loss of paint layers and plaster surface (Fig. 20. 6). The most prominent deterioration of the paint layer is caused by flaking and cupping; both can be observed to varying degrees. Such damage appeared particularly in areas of structural deterioration to the plaster and any areas of detached paint required an immediate intervention. Besides a visible deposit of dirt, the surface of the plaster and paint layer had shiny transparent and yellowish coatings (Pl. 20. H). These sometimes very thick layers are related to the consolidation materials used since 1958 which now show characteristic aging damage such as yellowing and micro cracks. Because of its chemical composition the coating attached to the underlying paint layer develops a physical tension over time. It then breaks up the original paint layer, which leads to the loss of original paint and plaster surface. Through archival research, chemical analysis, examinations with ultraviolet light and multi-spectral analysis it was possible to establish the types of

___________ 22 Deutsches Bergbaumuseum Bochum, Department of Information Systems (multi spectral images, photographic documentation); Engineering Office König, Potsdam (Raking light projection scan); laboratory analysis regarding binder and conservation materials: Jägers and Jägers, Bornheim; Prof Dr Schramm, Dresden; Rathgenlabor, Berlin; analysis of the plaster: Prof Dr Laue, Fach Hochschule Potsdam; microbiological analysis: Dr Petersen, University of Oldenburg; cavity detection: Bundesanstalt für Materialprüfung (BAM), Berlin; salt analysis: Institut für Diagnostik und Konservierung (IDK), Halle.

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Daniela Arnold, Torsten Arnold and Elisabeth Rüber-Schütte

Fig. 20. 6: Choir screen, south side. Figure of Judas, deteriorated plaster surface with blisters. Church of Our Lady, Halberstadt.

conservation materials that had been used in past restorations and to locate areas of their application. This demonstrated that in the earliest interventions protein binders, such as casein, had been used, while shortly afterwards the restorers had started to consolidate the paint layer and plaster surface with PVAc (polyvinyl acetate)23 and later on with acrylic resins (polymethyl methacrylate). The deterioration described above results from the interaction of several factors; despite the recent renovation of the roof, walls, and exterior water

___________ 23 This is a homo polymer and with high probability the product D 50M that had been produced since the 1950s in the state company VEB Kombinat Chemische Werke Buna; see also VEB Kombinat Chemische Werke Buna (ed.), Plaste und Elaste (Schkopau, 1972). It is possible to some extent to draw conclusions about the long-term stability of the synthetic resins commonly used in the GDR from long-term research conducted by the Canadian Conservation Institute. PVAc D 50 M is equivalent to the group of homo polymers by the Canadian researchers that when aging while exposed to light, develop a pH value below 5.5. Compared to co-polymers they show an increased tendency to become hard and brittle when aging in the light, as well as in darkness; J. Down, M. MacDonald, J. Tetreault, R. Williams, ‘Adhesive Testing at the Canadian Conservation Institute – An Evaluation of Selected Polyvinylacetate and Acrylic Adhesive’, Studies in Conservation, 41 (1996), pp. 19–44.

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distribution at the church, the climate was still causing problems. The evaluation of the climate measurements in the course of a year (2002) revealed fluctuations from 51% to 90% relative humidity and temperatures from 0°C to 23 °C.24 Under changing climate conditions in the church the expandable lime-bound preparatory ground combined with oil containing paint layers promotes the detachment of paint layers. The aging of the oil-tempera binder is indicated by specific craquelures in every paint layer. The aging process of the paint is further accelerated by the synthetic resins used in past conservation attempts, that have penetrated into the paint layer and cause further tension. In addition, the hygroscopic qualities of the consolidants (the ability of the polyvinyl acetate to absorb humidity from the air) have provoked permanent processes of dissolution in the surface of the plaster. The thick layer of different conservation materials on the surface effectively prevents any further conservation effort as the surface is virtually sealed. On the south side the plaster surface and ground are extremely destabilized by the crystallization of the gypsum underneath the yellowish resin coat and further strain is caused by the regular warming and cooling of the surface through exposure to the sun. It should be pointed out that the choice of materials used during the various conservation campaigns was made according to the highest international standards of the time.25 However, the result of 40 years of repeated application of different materials to the paint, intended to conserve the work, must today be recognized as problematic.

Conservation Procedure The results of the investigations suggest that only conservation procedures that address the causes of deterioration and not just its symptoms are advisable. As a first step, the problem of varying climate conditions was addressed. The windows of the southern side aisle were covered with a sun protection system in order to minimize the harmful influence of the direct exposure to sunlight (protection system: Verosol R Durach GmbH, with an aluminum layer for the reduction of thermal radiation and as UV protection). The former main entrance on the east side of the southern transept near the choir screens is now kept closed and a door in the southern wall of the side aisle used as main entrance

___________ 24 Institut für Diagnostik und Konservierung (IDK), Halle, climate related measurements of fissures. 25 H. Materna and K. Riemann, Beiträge zur Anwendung von Kunststoffen in der Restaurierungsund Konservierungspraxis, Institut für Denkmalpflege in der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik mit Unterstützung des Zentralvorstandes des Verbandes Bildender Künstler der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (eds), Görlitz 16 October 1969 (Görlitz, 1970).

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Daniela Arnold, Torsten Arnold and Elisabeth Rüber-Schütte

instead. The roof spaces above the transepts will be insulated through the application of layers of Geotextil on top of the wooden ceiling. An extensive removal of former conservation materials seemed absolutely necessary in order to bring the material surface to a state where conservation procedures could sustainably be undertaken. This applies principally to the synthetic resins that presently form a film on the surface. The fixing of flaking paint, the structural consolidation of the deteriorated plaster surface as well as the re-attachment of plaster lacunae, and the consolidation of detached plaster layers, were all required. Conservation work started in May 2005 on the north side. The conservation procedure and the conservation materials chosen for the removal of surface dirt and dust, for the reduction of the synthetic resins and for the consolidation of plaster and paint layer were tested on samples in our laboratory. The progress of reduction of the synthetic resins was controlled by scientific analysis (using cross sections) of selected samples.26 It soon became clear that a gradual reduction of the coatings was impossible for technical reasons and that therefore a complete removal of the coating from the surfaces was advisable. The juxtaposition of paints from different periods with various pigments and binder compositions required a specific treatment of the surfaces. For the removal of the synthetic resins we employed combinations of non-aqueous organic solvents and aqueous cleaning systems based on micro emulsions/micellar solution systems.27 The aqueous part of the cleaning system used in direct contact with the plaster surface was formed by a saturated solution of gypsum in order to exclude the undesirable dissolution of anhydrite gypsum. For the aqueous cleaning of the paint layer we used natural mineral waters (Evian) in order to avoid dissolution.28 The consolidation of flaking paint layers was realized using an acrylic dispersion29 which was developed for conservation purposes. The recourse to a synthetic resin was driven by the need for good adhesion, its stability in conditions of high humidity, its improved resistance to deterioration and, last but not least, the compatibility with the remnants of synthetic resins from previous campaigns that could not be removed. The ground was partially con-

___________ 26 Prof Dr Habil. H.-P. Schramm, Naturwissenschaftlicher Untersuchungsbericht 2006, Labor für Archäometrie Dresden. 27 E. Carretti, L. Dei et al., ‘Microemulsions and Micellar Solutions for Cleaning Wall Painting Surfaces’, Studies in Conservation, 50 (2005), pp. 128-36. Surfactants were replaced by cellulose derivatives (Methocel). 28 P.-B. Eipper, G. Frankowski, H. Opielka, J. Welzel, Ölfarben Oberflächenreinigung (Munich, 2004), p. 15 29 “Medium für Konsolidierung” Fa. Lascaux, Acrylocopolymerisat-Dispersion, source of supply: Kremer Pigmente, Aichstetten.

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solidated with sturgeon glue, while the structural consolidation of the plaster and plaster surface was executed with a mineral binder.30 These activities must be understood as an intervention into a complex system of various groups of materials whose state of conservation depends on numerous factors. Therefore the preventive conservation such as climate regulation, control of visitor numbers and movements, regular monitoring and care of the art work as well as detailed documentation of the applied materials are of particular importance. The conservation project depends on annually granted public funding and private donations and is due to be completed in 2012 (Pl. 20. I).

___________ 30 “Syton X30”, Kieselsol, Monsanto, source of supply: Deffner & Johann, Schweinfurt.

The Restoration of Two Plaster Casts Acquired by Velázquez in the Seventeenth Century: the Hercules and Flora Farnese1 ÁNGELES SOLÍS PARRA, JUDIT GASCA MIRAMÓN, SILVIA VIANA SÁNCHEZ AND JOSÉ MARÍA LUZÓN NOGUÉ

In the course of the conference that preceded this volume we were able to investigate how various European courts developed a taste for collecting antiquities during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This common interest was also shared by the Spanish court. An instructive example for this development in Spain can be found in the plaster cast collection at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid. In 1649 the Court Painter Diego Velázquez travelled to Italy under royal decree with a special command that would keep him in Rome for two years. During this period he would visit the most important art collections in the city. His charge was to acquire for King Philip IV copies of the most admired sculptures of the time. These copies would decorate the rooms of the Royal Alcázar on the site of the present Royal Palace in Madrid that had been enlarged and remodelled during the previous years. The specific function of the acquired casts meant that he was required to look for sculptures that were not only considered beautiful or famous but that would also complement the existing sculptures in the newly decorated Palace. The sources for the study of the collection Velázquez gathered in Rome are extensive. Firstly, there is a list describing the pieces acquired by the painter, published in 1724 by Antonio Palomino in his El Parnaso Español pintoresco laureado.2 Secondly, there are the various inventories of the Alcázar,

___________ 1

2

We should like to thank Eckart Marchand, Rune Frederiksen and Donna C. Kurtz for their interest in and encouragement of the study of the, often so little known, old plaster cast sculptures. We would also like to thank all participants of the conference who, in their particular ways, are fighting day by day to preserve their collections. Finally, thanks are due to Ms. María Dolores Sánchez-Jauregui for translating this article. A. Palomino, El Parnaso español pintoresco laureado [originally published in Madrid, 1724], in M. Aguilar (ed.), A. Palomino, El museo pictórico y escala óptica (Madrid, 1947), pp. 7631140 at pp. 913-7.

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like that of 16863 or the inventory known as the Testamentaría de Carlos II (the last will of Charles II) dating from 1701.4 Finally, we also have the contracts for works that Velázquez ordered to be drawn up with each foundry man and cast maker involved in the enterprise.5 On the basis of these sources we can speak of about forty-five sculptures, some of them bronzes and the majority plaster casts. The identification of all of these casts is not easily achieved as the descriptions in the sources are vague and the names of individual sculptures varied throughout the centuries, leading to mistaken identifications. For these reasons this work is still incomplete. Nevertheless, an exhibition on Velázquez’ work opened at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando on 13 December 2007 under the title Velázquez, esculturas para el Alcázar (Velázquez, Sculptures for the Alcázar).6 The provisional list (Table 21. 1) that is presented below includes important new identifications by the curator of the exhibition, Professor José María Luzón, Delegate of the Royal Academy Plaster-Cast Workshop and responsible for the research team. – – –

– – – – – – – –

V a t i c a n B e l v e d e r e : the Laocoön, the Antinoüs Belvedere, the Nile, the Sleeping Ariadne, the Apollo Belvedere C h u r c h o f S a n P i e t r o i n V i n c o l i : the head of Moses from Michelangelo’s Tomb of Julius II B o r gh e s e C o l l e c t i o n : the Borghese Gladiator, Silenus with the Infant Bacchus, the Hermaphrodite, Borghese Mars, the Vénus à la coquille, Sporus (also called Young Nero), Ceres Borghese, a Bacchus, a Dancing Faun (referred to as “Narcissus”), a Nymph C a e t a n i C o l l e c t i o n : the Resting Satyr P a l a z z o F a r n e s e : Hercules Farnese, Flora Farnese and several heads, of which only the following have been identified: Dionysos and the so-called Gallienus. Both of them now at the Museo Nazionale Archeologico, Naples Lu d o v i s i C o l l e c t i o n : Hermes Loghios, Ludovisi Mars, Dying Gaul P a l a z z o M a t t e i : Ceres Mattei and ten busts (not yet identified) V i l l a M e d i c i : the figure of Niobe, Venus de Medici, the Wrestlers, a large Lion Peretti-Montalto Collection: Germanicus (referred to as “imperatore” or “Marcellus”) Vitelleschi Collection: the Discobolus Other collections not yet identified: a Vesta, a Venus

Table 21. 1: Preliminary list of plaster casts acquired by Velazquez in Rome.

___________ 3

4 5 6

AGP (Royal Palace Archive), AG, bundle 38, exp.3, fols 85r 95v. Relación de las Estatuas, Bufetes, de Piedras y otros Adornos que ay (Ezepto los Relojes) en los Cuartos Principal, el Vajo y las Bovedas, Escaleras, Passadizo de la Encarnación, y Casa del Thesoro del Alcázar y Palacio Rl de Madrid, y son del Rey, nro señor Dn Carlos Segundo (que Dios Guarde) este año de 1686, firmado por Bernabé Ochoa el 11 de agosto de 1686. G. Fernández Bayton, Inventarios Reales: Testamentaría del Rey Carlos II (1701–1703), 3 vols (Madrid, 1975–1985). Archivio di Stato, Roma, 30, Notai Capitolini, Ufficio 32. The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue; Luzón Nogué (ed.), Velázquez, esculturas para el Alcázar.

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The present article does not allow for a discussion of all these works and the new information they provide researchers, so we have chosen to focus on the two largest surviving casts acquired by Velázquez: the Hercules and Flora Farnese. The painter probably knew these figures from the engravings in François Perrier’s Segmenta Nobilium Signorum et Statuarum. Quae Temporis Dentem Invidium Evasere compiled in Rome in 1638.7 In fact most of the sculptures that Velázquez acquired in Italy are represented in it, and he could have used it as a sort of catalogue. But, in Rome, Velázquez also enjoyed the assistance of Juan de Córdoba, Spanish agent in Rome, the Italian sculptor Giuliano Finelli and others.8 The painter went himself to the Palazzo Farnese to see the monumental sculptures, then displayed in the central courtyard, and asked for permission to copy them.9 This task was assigned to the sculptor Cesare Sebastian (a disciple of Bernini) for 180 scudi per plaster cast. Invoices of this commission are still preserved. A good example is the one made by Juan de Cordoba for Cesare Sebastian: […] The most illustrious Signor Don Giovanni di Corduba, here present to mould the below mentioned works for the below mentioned prices, that is first the Hercules Farnese, circa fifteen palmi high at a price of one-hundred-and-eighty scudi as agreed with the mentioned Don Giovanni and Signor Giuliano Finelli, also the Flora Farnese, circa fifteen palmi high, agreed as above for one-hundred-and10 eighty scudi [...].

Velázquez used standard contracts that insisted, among other requirements, on how these copies should be made (see appendix). 11 These documents stipulated that the gypsum should come from the whitest and most spotless stone and

___________ 7

F. Perrier, Segmenta Nobilium Signorum et Statuarum. Quae Temporis Dentem Invidium Evasere (Rome, 1638), figs 2, 3, 4 and 62. 8 A. Parisi, ‘“Per la total perfettione e compimento”. La misión de Velázquez y de su agente Juan de Córdoba Herrera en los documentos del Archivo del Estado de Roma’, in Luzón Nogué (ed.), Velázquez, esculturas para el Alcázar, pp. 83–111. 9 A. R. G. De Ceballos, ‘Velázquez z la escultura clássica. El segundo viaje a Italia’, in Luzón Nogué (ed.), Velázquez, esculturas para el Alcázar, pp. 31-51, at pp. 35-40. 10 ASR, 30 Notai Capitolini, Ufficio 32, vol. 157, cc. 712r-v, 719r, 20 May 1653. Transcription by Antonella Parisi. […] Ill[ustrissi]mo S[igno]r D[on] Giovanni di Corduba qui presente di formare l’Infr[ascritt]e opere p[er] l’infr[ascrit]ti prezzi cioè prima l’Hercole di Farnese alto palmi quindici in circa p[er] prezzo di scudi Cento ottanta così stabilito con d[ett]o S[igno]r D[on] Giovanni e col S[igno]r Giuliano Finelli, Item la Flora di Farnese alta p[al]mi quindici in circa stabilito come sopra p[er] scudi Cento ottanta m[one]ta.[...]. See Luzón Nogué (ed.), Velázquez, esculturas para el Alcázar, p. 363, Doc. 17 11 See, e.g., the contract of 24 December 1649 between Velázquez and the cast maker Girolamo Ferreri regarding the production of casts after works in the Borghese Collection partly transcribed and translated in the appendix below. For a more extensive transcription see Luzón Nogué (ed.), Velázquez, esculturas para el Alcázar, pp. 352-3, Doc. 2

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that it was to be strained with a very fine sieve. The plaster was to be used to cast the piece moulds that would eventually reproduce exactly the original’s surface; therefore the gypsum had to be pure and refined. This very fine gypsum was also to be used for the first layer to be poured in the mould, that is, the layer that would form the cast’s outer surface. Velázquez also required that the moulds were reinforced with wires to survive the transport. The contracts are testimony to the meticulous work of the Italian moulders and the interest the painter took in a masterly execution carried out with a high quality plaster. During the restoration work we could verify that the terms of the contract had been closely followed. Once in Spain the plaster casts of the Hercules and Flora Farnese decorated the Sala del Cierzo at the Alcázar. In 1736,12 two years after the fire at the Alcázar, the collection of antique sculptures was stored in various store rooms and riding schools at the Royal Palace. Nothing is known about them until 1744. In that year the Junta Preparatoria (Preparatory Committee) was founded as a first step to establishing what would become the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. From 1758 to the 1960s, the Academia would act as an official centre for the teaching of drawing, painting, sculpture and architecture. During its first years the institution lacked a sculpture collection relevant to its teaching. With this in mind a royal decree ordered the repair of the old plaster casts kept at the Palace, most of which were those acquired by Velázquez. From then on, the two Farnese plaster casts would always decorate the consecutive seats of the Royal Academy in Madrid. Initially the Academy was housed in the Casa de la Panadería, nowadays known as Casa del Reloj in the Plaza Mayor, before moving to its current site at number 13 in the Calle de Alcalá; here in 1783 to the design of the architect Diego de Villanueva the sculptures were placed on top of two granite pedestals inside the main entrance. From the middle of the eighteenth century to the second half of the twentieth, both plaster-casts suffered various interventions. In response to their removal first from the Alcázar and then to the current building of the Royal Academy, structural restoration was carried out, and oils and waxes were applied to their surfaces, in order to protect them from humidity. The plaster casts were also covered with layers of paint, presumably to hide the dirt they had accumulated, but such measures may also have been of a preventative nature. Finally, they suffered stains and damages when they were copied in

___________ 12 Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando Archive, 40-1-2. L Tárraga Baldó, ‘Contribución de Velázquez a la enseñanza académica’, in Velázquez y el arte de su tiempo: V Jornadas de Arte, Diego Velázquez, C.S.I.C. (Madrid, 1991), pp. 61-71.

The Restoration of Two Plaster Casts Acquired by Velázquez

Fig. 21. 1: Flora Farnese, initial state of conservation. Plaster, h: 3.42 m. Cast by Cesare Sebastiani in Rome, 1650, from the Roman second-century AD marble statue, now in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.

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Fig. 21. 2: Hercules Farnese, initial state of conservation. Plaster, h: 3.18 m. Cast by Cesare Sebastiani in Rome, 1650, from the Roman second-century AD marble statue, now in the National Archaeological Museum, Naples. Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, Madrid.

order to provide casts for the newly founded academies in Spain and abroad, such as those in Mexico and the Philippines.13 This evidence of three centuries of history remained buried under a last layer of paint that had been applied in the second half of the twentieth century and only came to light in April 2006 when the analysis and restoration work

___________ 13 For the collection of the Mexican Academy and the casts it obtained from Madrid, see the contribution by Elizabeth Fuentes Rojas in this volume, pp. 229-47, esp. 231.

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started. In October 2006 the treatment of the Hercules Farnese was completed while the work on the Flora reached its conclusion in May 2007. To proceed with the restoration the sculptures had to be lowered from their granite pedestals to the floor, an operation undertaken by a specialist firm using cranes and hydraulic jacks.14 This was a remarkable moment as the sculptures had not been moved from their pedestals for more then two centuries. After the treatment the sculptures were provided with stable platforms of stainless steel supported with brackets that make it possible to move them in future, if necessary. Layer Nº Colour

Thickness (μ)

Binding Medium

1

White brown

2

White

30

3

Translucent brown

10

4

White (2 layers)

30

5

White

6

Translucent brown

7

White

20–90

PAINTING 3: lead white and barium sulphate

Linseed oil

8

White

35

PAINTING 4: zinc white, lead white (tr.) and barium sulphate

Casein and linseed oil

9

Translucent

10

White

1000

Pigments

40–70 5

SUPPORT: gypsum, Animal glue, linseed oil, anhydrite, calcite beeswax, conifer resin (tr.), earth (tr.) PAINTING 1: lead white –

Walnut oil Oil and resinous varnish

PAINTING 1: lead white

Walnut oil

PAINTING 2: lead and zinc white

Linseed oil

–

Oil and resinous varnish

5

–

Oil and resinous varnish