Beautiful bronzes from ancient Rome

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5 April 2012

A century ago, from Moscow to Madrid and from Newcastle to Naples, the mantelpieces of middle-class Europe bore a great weight of bronze in the form of small-scale sculptures. Italian foundries published fat catalogues from which the buyer might choose a copy of the Medici Venus, the Vatican Antinous, or the erotica of Pompeii discreetly neutered in any size from six inches to six feet. French foundries offered the small bronzes of Rodin, Carpeaux, Barye and Bourdelle, and their German equivalents cast the work of Hussmann, Schmidt-Kestner and a thousand other minor sculptors now forgotten. We, in England, bought the languid nudes of Alfred Gilbert and Lord Leighton, and the mania for intimate bronzes spread to Australia, South Africa and the United States. Above the flames and embers in the grate, lions mauled antelopes, dishevelled riders explored the prairie and the veldt, gods and goddesses departed for the hunt, nude women bathed, nude boys drew swords from scabbards, and nude Nubians stood guard. The small bronze was, it seems, a genre of art in which the nude, male and female, could abandon modesty and its futile wisps of drapery and stand full frontal at eye-level on the mantelpiece. The Great War of 1914-1918 put an end to this tradition.

An ancient Roman genre, it was revived in Italy in the 15th century, tentatively at first, and these early Renaissance bronzes are extremely rare; but as the demand for them grew, so did the capacity to supply them in ever more perfect form, not only as original works of sculpture, but as miniature replicas of the great masterpieces of antiquity as more and more of these were excavated. In January 1506 Michelangelo watched the retrieval of Laocoön and his sons overwhelmed by constricting serpents; within six years the leading Roman goldsmith, Christofaro Caradosso, proposed to make a miniature replica of it in gold for his patron Isabella d‘Este — he did not, but small bronzes of it followed soon after. With such replicas, exquisitely made, every pope and prince could possess, in small, every masterpiece of sculpture — whether from antiquity or by Michelangelo and Bernini — within the confines of his drawing room. And as the centuries wore on, the range was widened to embrace whatever was then contemporary art — Lord Leighton’s Sluggard of 1885, for example, two metres tall in the original, was for the mantelpiece immediately reduced to 50 centimetres.

With the First World War, however, not only did taste change but scholarship began to die. As the mantelpieces of the world surrendered to the knick-knackery of Art Deco, so faded the old men in museums who had been the connoisseurs of the small bronze — it was out of fashion and so too was everything they knew. And then came the war of 1939-1945; only heaven knows how many precious bronzes were destroyed in the fireballs of Germany, but it is certain that this peculiarly German field of erudition was wiped out and no one cared until the summer of 1961, when the Arts Council sprang on us an exhibition of Italian Bronze Statuettes at the Victoria and Albert (Arts Councillors now please note: your predecessors cared as much for the arts of the past as for the future, and what heady days they were). For two whole months, we gloated over 203 small bronzes from the Renaissance of Donatello and Ghiberti to the Baroque of Soldani and Foggini, well into the 18th century. It was astonishing and, though much of the cataloguing was in error, it was educative and worked a miracle, for not only did it spawn collectors and a specialist market to supply them, it also brought from obscurity the collections in London of Robert Strauss, Paul Wallraf and Baron Hatvany (all since dispersed) who had quietly ignored the falling-away in fashion.

Nothing establishes a market faster than a sudden rise in unpredicted prices; a Renaissance bronze bought for £50 in 1960 could, in 1970, be sold for £5,000, and in 1980, £50,000. But 30 years on, this market is no longer fecund, the small bronze is rare again, the specialist dealers are gone or now specialise in other things as well, and Count Andrew Ciechanowiecki, their doyen, is better known as the connoisseur whose name is given to the unknown sculptor of a group of bronzes evidently by the same hand (probably a Roman of the later 16th century, they say) — the Ciechanowiecki Master.

To collect such bronzes now, one must be vigilant and filthy rich. One such collector is Peter Marino, a New York architect and designer, 29 of whose bronzes form an exhibition at the Wallace Collection until the day devoted to St James of Compostella. So few cannot compare with the 203 of 1961 as a source of inspiration and information, but the Wallace has hundreds of fine bronzes of its own, scattered hither and yon throughout its many rooms, and this exhibition is perhaps a device to make us look at them more purposefully instead of seeing them only as adjuncts to fine furniture. The pity of it is, however, that the exhibition rooms are too poky to allow much in the way of direct comparison; this is restricted to a pair of River Gods, The Tiber and The Nile, Marino’s anonymous, the Wallace’s attributed to Corneille van Clève, and an Andromeda by Robert le Lorrain, brought in from an English private collection.

It was from the River Gods that the idea of the exhibition sprang. Based on giant antique Roman sculptures more than three metres long, excavated early in the 16th century, these recumbent figure are reduced to 74cm in Marino’s pair and 70.5cm in the Wallace variants. They are therefore not necessarily connected even in date or nationality; they differ in many details and, particularly, in the refinement of their finish. The conclusion of the exhibition’s curator, Jeremy Warren, is that both pairs are French and 18th century, Marino’s the earlier and unattributable, the Wallace’s later and by van Clève. As van Clève died in 1732, aged 86, there can be very little in it. The significant difference in the casts is that the genitals of the Wallace pair are concealed by drapery, and of the Marino pair revealed with observant realism. In condition, the Wallace pair is perfectly finished in every detail (the visitor can see this easily in the wolf and Romulus and Remus embellishing the Tiber), and perfectly preserved in transparent patina, while the Marino pair are crudely chased and have the appearance of having undergone a savage scrub with wire brushes and a replacement patina of stove blacking. They compel me to question Marino’s judgment.

Other bronzes do not. There are the usual essentials of a bronze collection — a Laocoön, of course, a pair of vases almost a metre tall, fussily decorated and illustrating episodes of Roman history (triumphs of technical skill but art reduced to artefact), and assorted demure goddesses — but it is at its best with nude male figures, either singly or performing some ghastly ritual of death or torment on some other male.

Samson slaughters a Philistine with the jawbone of an ass, a wonderful cat’s cradle of limbs and violence; Hercules wrestles to the death with Antaeus, legs stationed wide apart and muscles rippling as he achieves the fatal lift, the giant screaming in agony as his ribs crack and he is parted from his strength-giving mother, Gaia the earth goddess; Mercury stands triumphant after severing the head of Argus; a chillingly sensual Apollo, peeling away the first flap of skin, flays a Marsyas in torment at more and worse to come; and the boy David, kneeling on the upturned buttock of fallen Goliath, displays his enemy’s head.

Such acts of violence offer telling opportunities for expressive body language as well as expressive faces, and in them the viewer is often struck by the compelling power of sculpture on so small a scale. It is not, however, always so, for perhaps in search of some classical ideal, too many sculptors fixed on facial expressions of such vacuity as to wholly nullify the drama. This is true particularly of female figures — the Diana, Ariadne, Amphitrite, Ceres and Iole in this collection, though by very different sculptors and from widely varying dates, share a common blank dim-wittedness — but among male figures too a flagellated Christ and the heroic boy David, together with the Mercury and an Apollo slaying the Python, border on inanity.

As an introduction to the genre, this exhibition may titillate an appetite for more, yet the opportunity of presenting a lucid major exhibition largely drawn from the Wallace Collection’s rich resources, but with Marino’s bronzes as the focal point, has been wasted. As it is, the tiny subterranean rooms seem crowded and it is impossible to inspect the further side of so many bronzes set against the walls or in wall cabinets; moreover, the inevitable but wholly unnatural top-lighting is cruelly unsuitable for standing figures conceived in daylight falling at angles from the side. I observe in passing that the flagellated Christ attributed to Hans Reichle (Augsburg, early 17th century) is intriguingly close to a Christ carrying the Cross in the Museo Estense, Modena, for many years unquestioned as by Sansovino. One exceptionally vigorous single figure, a Dancing Faun, disarming in its detail and slightly distressed gilding, at a glance convincing as old, is catalogued as "probably 19th century". We must ask why Marino bought it and why something that set out to deceive is included in an exhibition devoted to Renaissance and Baroque bronzes, unless it is a warning that even in this rarefied field of connoisseurship we must expect to encounter persuasive forgeries. Proof that it has no great age lies in its subject — the antique Roman marble on which it is closely based was excavated only in 1824, restored in the 1830s and first shown to the public in 1840. In physical type the Faun closely resembles Marino’s Resting Hercules attributed to the Ciechanowiecki Master, thought, let me remind you, to be Roman and later 16th century. Shall we in due course discover that the Faun is the key to the age of all the bronzes by this mysterious sculptor? I note that not one of the nine known versions of Marino’s Hercules has a provenance earlier than the 19th century.

Beauty and Power; Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the collection of Peter Marino is at the Wallace Collection, W1 (020 7563 9500, wallacecollection.org) until July 25. Daily 10am-5pm. Admission free.

Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes
Wallace Collection
W1

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