FRANCIS HASKELL and NICHOLAS PENNY
TASTE AND THE ANTIQUE
The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900
Volume 1: Text
Revised and Amplified Edition by Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero
HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS
© 2024, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium.
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ISBN 978-1-909400-25-2 (SET) D/2024/0095/139
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ISBN Volume 3 978-1-915487-15-5
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Casts and Copies in Seventeenth-Century Courts
Charles I of England on his succession to the throne in 1625 ‘amply testified a Royal liking of ancient statues, by causing a whole army of Old forraine Emperours, Captaines, and Senators all at once to land on his coasts, to come and do him homage, and attend him in his palaces of Saint James, and Sommerset house’.1 A few of his statues came from Greece and the Levant where the agents of other English collectors—the Earl of Arundel, the Duke of Buckingham, and the Earl of Pembroke—had been busy for some time; more came from Mantua; but the king knew that the best statues could only be obtained in casts and copies. By 1629 ‘ingenious Master Gage’, who had been a secret agent of James I in Rome earlier in the decade, had managed to obtain moulds of Cardinal Borghese’s Gladiator. By 1630 the Gladiator was being cast in bronze and a pedestal was completed for its display in the Privy Garden at St. James’s Palace.2 In the following year the bronze-founder Hubert Le Sueur (‘Praxiteles’ Le Sueur as he sometimes styled himself) was dispatched to Italy to purchase ‘the moulds and patterns of certain figures and antiques there’.
One of the king’s secret agents, Walter Montagu, had these packed up in Rome and their transport to England was organised by Inigo Jones through an English factor in Livorno.3 By 1634 half a dozen bronze copies had been cast by Le Sueur, and others were being prepared.4 We know that these included the Antinous and the Commodus as Hercules of the Belvedere, and the Diane Chasseresse then in the Louvre, which still survive. There was also a copy of the Spinario (‘The Boy or Pickthorne’) and perhaps copies of a Venus and of Cleopatra, but these cannot be traced.5
In 1642 civil war broke out and in 1649 Charles was beheaded. All the bronze copies listed above were sold in 1650 or 1651 and were among the most valued items in the royal collection (although no statues, ancient or modern, were to be ranked with ‘that incompareable head in marble of ye late King’s, done by Cavaliere Bernino’).6 Oliver Cromwell withdrew some sculptures from the sale ‘on account of their antiquity and rarity’ and he bought back the copy of the Antinous. These statues were kept at Whitehall, where some, in the Privy Gardens, were defaced in an attack by a Quaker armed with a hammer. The fanatic was apprehended only after he had smashed down a door leading to the Volary Garden where he intended to assault the Antinous 7 After the restoration of the monarchy in the following year, the Diana and the Commodus as Hercules were reunited with the Antinous, only to be damaged by the Whitehall fires of 1691 and 1698. The Gladiator also returned to the royal collection and was set up at the end of the Long Water in St. James’s Park until 1701 when it was taken with the Whitehall bronzes to Hampton Court. The fire damage was then repaired8 (although Diana’s stag was never replaced). George IV later removed the statues to the east terrace garden of Windsor Castle,9 where they were joined by a cast of the ‘Warwick Vase’.
In addition to the full-scale bronze copies whose fortunes we have just traced, King Charles also owned a number of smaller pieces which might have been copies after the antique, and one which
certainly was: ‘Laocoön w th his two Sonns killed by the great serpents w ch my Lo: Marquess [of Hamilton] bought from Germany’. 10 But the large bronzes were much more unusual. They suggest that the English king wished to emulate the achievement of François Ier at Fontainebleau a century earlier.
The French had certainly not forgotten that achievement, and it was in order to continue François I er’s projects 11 that Roland Fréart, Sieur de Chambray, and his brother Jean, Sieur de Chantelou, were ordered in 1640 by M. de Noyers, Louis XIII’s Surintendant des Bâtiments, to secure the services of the leading French artist in Italy, Nicolas Poussin, and, in Chambray’s words, translated by Evelyn,
to get made, and collect together all that the leisure and opportunity of our Voyage could furnish us of the most excellent Antiquities , as well in Architecture as Sculpture ; the chief pieces whereof were two huge Capitals . . . from within the Rotunda
Two Medails . . . taken from the Triumphal Arch of Constantine ; threescore and ten Basreliefs moulded from Trajan’s Column , and several other of particular Histories , some of which were the next year cast in Brass 12
Among those which were cast ‘in brass’ were a relief from the Villa Medici and two from the Borghese collection, 13 but, as Chambray explains, most of the casts were used as stucco relief ornaments ‘about the Compartiment of the arched Ceiling of the Louvre great Gallery , in which M. Le Poussin most ingeniously introduc’d them’, partly it seems as an expedient prompted by his patron’s haste and economy, and partly because he was disinclined to collaborate with other painters. 14
In 1643 Chantelou returned to Italy with royal offerings to the Madonna of Loreto for the successful birth of the Dauphin (later Louis XIV), and he took advantage of his trip to order casts of ‘other medails from the same Arch of Constantine’ and also of the colossal Farnese Flora and Hercules and of the still larger ‘ Colosses of Montecavallo with their Horses , the greatest and most celebrated works of Antiquity , which M. de Noyers designed to have also cast in Copper to place them at the principal Entry of the Louvre’. Poussin, who had by now returned to Rome, seems to have helped organise the making of these casts, and the problems involved with the moulds taken from the Farnese Hercules are discussed by him in letters to Chantelou of 1645 and 1647, 15 but by then ‘all these mighty Projects’, as Chambray called them, had been abandoned, for after the death of Cardinal Richelieu in 1642 and the fall of de Noyers, and the death of the king in 1643, there were no powerful statesmen in France who supported them.
In 1650, a few years after the French had abandoned these ‘mighty Projects’, Diego Velázquez, the Spanish court painter, travelled for the second time to Italy. His visit was made in connection with the furnishing of the new apartments of the fortress of the Alcázar, recently converted by Philip IV into a palace, over which the painter had been given general charge. He returned to Spain in the following year, having secured the services of two fresco painters, Colonna and Mitelli, and with numerous sixteenth-century paintings to swell the royal collections. 16 But to contemporaries Velázquez’s most important achievement in Italy was to acquire, through the favour of the pro-Spanish Pope Innocent X, a set of plaster casts, together with some bronze copies, of the most beautiful antique statues in Rome. 17 The fact that a series of busts of the Caesars and a replica of the Spinario (presented to Philip II in 1561) already existed in Spain cannot have diminished the impact made by the arrival of these casts and copies. The palace inventory of 1666 valued the casts of the Farnese Flora and Hercules as each worth more than Velázquez’s ‘Bacchus’ and twice as much as any of his portraits, while only Velázquez’s ‘Las Meninas’ and a few Titians were more highly valued than the bronze copy of the Hermaphrodite . 18
produced of the Arrotino, the Venus de’ Medici (Fig. 54), and other figures in the Uffizi.11 There are also very crude Staffordshire salt-glazed earthenware figurines which date from the 1750s, modelled, it seems, after a distorting print of the Spinario. 12 In the 1760s Beyer modelled a rococo version of the Venus de’ Medici (supplied with a greatly inflated blue, orange, and green dolphin) for the Ludwigsburg factory,13 and there are other copies, either in rococo porcelain, such as those made at Bow, or, comic, in polychrome glazed earthenware (Fig. 55), such as those made in Staffordshire by the Wood family, dating from the following decades,14 but they are hardly what Algarotti had in mind. He would have been more appreciative of the biscuit statuettes after the antique made by the Sèvres factory between 1768 and 1770, but the fact that only a limited number were produced suggests that such an initiative was still premature.15
Fig. 55. Enoch Wood of Staffordshire, Companion figurines of Mark Anthony and Cleopatra, c. 1780, coloured creamware, 15.24 × 31.12 × 10.16 cm, Etruria Antiques Gallery
Fig. 56. Giovanni Volpato, Nile, c. 1785-95, hard-paste biscuit porcelain, 30.2 × 58.7 × 29.5 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (no. 2001.456).
One of the things Algarotti had envisaged was a ceramic equivalent to the sets of little bronzes which were to be profitably produced by Roman founders in the last decades of the century, and it was not until 1785 that Giovanni Volpato—a leading engraver, and a friend of Gavin Hamilton, Angelica Kauffman, and Canova—opened a factory in the Via Pudenziana in Rome with the intention of doing just that. He specialised in biscuit porcelain reproductions of the same size and in many cases of the same subjects as the statuettes sold by Righetti and Zoffoli (Fig. 56). Encouraged by ‘Madame Angelica’, C.H. Tatham sent a list of the firm’s products to Henry Holland in 1795 remarking that the porcelain was similar in quality to the French but ‘very superior as to design, workmanship and art’. ‘At this depot’, noted the Baron d’Uklanski, ‘you may now have the finest things of this description which interest the dilettante and do not disgrace even an elegant drawing-room’.16 Volpato also established, two years before his death in 1801, a factory at Civita Castellana producing coarser and cheaper figures, also after the antique, which continued under his grandson’s management until the mid-nineteenth century (although the factory in the Via Pudenziana closed in 1818).17 Even before Volpato opened his first factory, the Ludwigsburg porcelain factory had taken some steps in the same direction, as had the new Royal Porcelan Factory at Naples under the direction of Domenico Venuti.18 Another Neapolitan factory—that of the Giustiniani— also later produced figures of this type.19
Algarotti’s other ideas anticipated the works of the Staffordshire potter Josiah Wedgwood, who established a reputation in the 1760s with his creamware inspired by the ‘chaste simplicity’ of antique art. By the mid1770s he was imitating ‘Etruscan’ vases in a new black porcelain bisque (basaltes), producing small busts of Homer, Cicero, the Zingara and the like in the same material, and had devised a new body (jasper) which he was beginning to use for ‘intaglios, cameos, medallions, and tablets’ adorned with copies of antique reliefs and statues ranging from the Dacia to the Farnese Hercules (Fig. 57).20
Innovation and experiment in ceramic technology also coincided with neoclassical taste in the artificial stone products of Mrs. Coade’s factory at Lambeth in London, in the last third of the century. The Coade factory produced some copies of antique vases and reliefs and statues suitable for interior or exterior use21 much the same statues in fact as the earlier London lead-founders, whose business seems to have declined with the rise of this rival alternative to costly bronze and vulnerable marble. In fact, Coade stone copies were intended for the same places as copies in lead, bronze, or plaster. On the other hand, the display of copies after the antique on the dining-room table and chimneypiece was a new idea. And so too was their popularity on an even smaller and more intimate scale, on snuff boxes, and in rings, chatelains, bracelets, and necklaces (Fig. 58).
During the eighteenth century it became an increasingly popular hobby among dilettanti to collect and even to make their own paste impressions from gems. In the mid-century, Philipp Daniel Lippert, working in Dresden, invented a type of white paste for this purpose, and by 1756 he offered for sale impressions of two thousand gems.22 In Rome, where Baron Stosch’s former servant Christian Dehn sold pastes and sulphurs, German travellers on the Grand Tour were also given evening classes by Johann Friedrich Reiffenstein in matters such as making replicas of variegated cameos.23 In London at the same time James Tassie, a Scottish wax portraitist at first employed by Wedgwood, began to achieve an international reputation for his work in this field. Among the long catalogues, which he published in 1775 and 1791, of the cameos and intaglios which he cast ‘in coloured pastes, white enamel and sulphur’24 were numerous modern works by artists such as the Sirlettis or the Pichlers, and of these many were copies of antiques such as the Laocoön group, Antinous, Agrippina, Zingara, Papirius, and the Apollo Sauroctonus. Among the cameos and intaglios listed by Wedgwood in 1779 such statues also featured prominently.25 The greatest English gem-engraver, Nathaniel Marchant, during his residence in Rome (when he was also very active exporting plaster casts to England)26 specialised in reproducing antique statues on gems for wealthy travellers, and when he returned to England he sold
FRANCIS HASKELL and NICHOLAS PENNY
TASTE AND THE ANTIQUE
The Lure of Classical Sculpture 1500-1900
Volume 2: Originals
Revised and Amplified Edition by Adriano Aymonino and Eloisa Dodero
HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS
43. Borghese Gladiator
30. Diane Chasseresse
78. Spinario
24. Cleopatra
41. Farnese Flora
52. Laocoön
FRANCIS HASKELL and NICHOLAS PENNY
TASTE AND THE ANTIQUE
The
Lure of Classical Sculpture
1500-1900
Volume 3: Replicas and Adaptations
Edited by Adriano Aymonino
HARVEY MILLER PUBLISHERS
Fig. 12. After Charles Errard, The Skeleton of the Borghese Gladiator, c. 1691, engraving, 33.4 × 28 cm, Bibliothèque des Arts décoratifs, Paris (no. Album Maciet 2-4, 1)
14. Jean
after
in Anatomie du
Fig. 13. Bernardino Genga and Charles Errard, Borghese Gladiator, in Anatomia per uso et intelligenza del disegno..., Rome, 1691, plate 47, engraving, Getty Research Institute Library, Los Angeles
the
combattant, applicable aux beaux arts…, Paris, 1812, plate 6, engraving, McGill University Library, Montreal
15.
Fig.
Bosq
Jean-Galbert Salvage, Anatomy of
Borghese Gladiator,
gladiateur
Fig.
Jean-Galbert Salvage, Écorché of the Borghese Gladiator, 1804, plaster, h. 157 cm, École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (no. MU 11927)
Fig. 14. Denis Diderot and Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Proportions de la Statue d’Antinoüs, in Encyclopédie, ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des metiers. Recueil de planches…, vol. 3 (II.2), Dessin, plate XXXIV, Paris, 1763, engraving, Smithsonian Libraries, Washington, DC
Bucephalus, the Apollo Belvedere, the head of the Farnese Hercules, the head of Menelaus (from the Pasquino), and the head of one of the daughters in the Niobe Group. On the right tray is the Dying Gladiator.
Fig. 4. John Cheere (attr.), Diane Chasseresse, 1744, lead painted white, 213.5 cm, Stourhead, Wiltshire (NT 562880.1)
Fig. 5. Workshop of Michel Anguier or Martin Desjardins, Diane Chasseresse, 1775, bronze, h. 52 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (no. OA 5084)
Fig. 22. Saxone Shoes advertisement in the Daily Telegraph, 13 October 1947, p. 6, British Library, London
Fig. 23. Spinario, in Le Magasin Pittoresque, vol. 4, no. 34, Brussels, 1836, p. 269, private collection, Bonn
Fig. 24. Max Ernst, Oedipe, in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution, no. 5, Paris, May 1933, private collection, Bonn
Fig. 14. Horace Walpole and William Kent (design), James Francis Verskovis and Giovanni Battista Pozzo (ivories), The Walpole Cabinet (the ivory oval with the Farnese Flora right top centre; also left top centre the Farnese Hercules, and right centre left Caracalla), 1743, 152.4 × 91.5 cm,Victoria and Albert Museum, London (no. W.52:1, 2-1925)
Fig. 49. Anonymous French artist, Allusion aux trames ministerielles. Qui ne connoit le groupe célèbre de Laocoon?, 1790, etching, aquatint, and coloured engraving, 34.3 × 25.7 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris (no. L 489 LR/129 Recto)
Fig. 50. Honoré Daumier, Imité du groupe de Laocoon, in Le Charivari, 6 April 1868, lithograph on newsprint, second state of two, 29.8 × 28.5 cm (sheet), The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (no. 48.117.13)
52. Nixon entangled by the White House Tapes during the Watergate scandal, front cover of Newsweek, 28 January 1974, British Library, London
Fig. 51. Charles Addams, Illustration in the New Yorker, 7 April 1975, British Library, London
Fig.