SCULPTURE AND

ITS REPRODUCTIONS

- ' '

Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft

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 SCULPTURE
AND ITS
REPRODUCTIONS
 Critical Views
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 SCULPTURE
AND ITS
REPRODUCTIONS
Edited by
Anthony Hughes and
Erich Ranfft

, REAKTION BOOKS
 1

Published by Reaktion Books Ltd

II Rathbone Place
London wip ide, uk

First published 1997

Copyright © Reaktion Books Ltd, 1997

All rights reserved.

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Jacket and cover designed by Ron Costley
Photoset by Wilmaset, Wirral, Merseyside
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data:

Sculpture and its reproductions. — (Critical views)

1. Sculpture z. Sculpture — Reproduction
I. Ranfft, Erich II. Hughes, Anthony
730

ISBN 18 61890 OZ 8
 Contents

Photographic Acknowledgements vi

Notes on Editors and Contributors vii

Introduction Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft i

1 Roman Sculptural Reproductions or Polykleitos: The Sequel

Miranda Marvin 7

2 Authority, Authenticity and Aura: Walter Benjamin and the

Case of Michelangelo Anthony Hughes 29

3 Art for the Masses: Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and

Seventeenth Centuries Marjorie Trusted 46

4 The Ivory Multiplied: Small-scale Sculpture and its

Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century Malcolm Baker 61

5 Naked Authority? Reproducing Antique Statuary in the

English Academy, from Lely to Haydon Martin Postle 79

6 Craft, Commerce and the Contradictions of Anti-capitalism:

Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffler Neil McWilliam 100

7 Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism:

Living Objects, Theatrics of Display and Practical Options
Erich Ranfft 113

8 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth

Alexandra Parigoris 131

9 Venus a Go Go, To Go Edward Allington 152

References 168

Select Bibliography 197

Index 201
 Photographic Acknowledgements

V
The editors and publishers wish to express their thanks to the following sources
of illustrative material and/or permission to reproduce it (excluding those named
in the captions, and the individual essayists, who supplied all remaining
uncredited material):

© Edward Allington and the Lisson Gallery, London: pp. 153, 167; © 1997 ARS,
New York/AD AGP, Paris: pp. 142, 145, 150; © Alan Bowness/Hepworth Estate
(photography): p. 139; Michael Brandon-Jones: p. 107; Harvard University Art
Museums, Cambridge, MA (Edmee Busch Greenough Fund): p. 120; The Art
Institutue of Chicago (gift of Margaret Fisher in memory of her parents, Mr and
Mrs Walter Fisher): p. 137; Don Hall (courtesy the MacKenzie Art Gallery,
Regina, Canada) (photography); © Bertrand Lavier: p. 159; Robert Hashimoto
(photography): p. 137; Friedrich Hewicker: p. 124; Bill Jacobson Studio
(photography): pp. 153, 167; Michael Le Marchant (Bruton Gallery): p. 134;
G.V. Leftwich: pp. 12 (top right), 16; © Les Levine (photography): p. 134;
Courtauld Institute of Art, London: p. 85; Royal Academy of Arts, London:
p. 88; © The Board of Trustees of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London
(photography): pp. 49, 58, 70, 74, 75; Paul Mellon Centre: pp. 82, 87, 96, 97;
Museum of Modern Art, New York (acquired through the Lillie P. Bliss Bequest;
photo: © 1997 MoMA, NYC): p. 144; Photo: Alexandra Parigoris: p. 145; The
Norton Simon Art Foundation, Pasadena (photography): p. 150; and Wellesley
College Museum, Jewett Arts Centre, Wellesley (gift of Miss Hannah Parker
Kimball, M. Day Kimball Memorial): p. 12 (bottom).
 Notes on Editors and Contributors

EDWARD ALLINGTON is a sculptor based in London. His work has been

exhibited in museums and galleries including the Museum Hedendaagse Kunst,
Antwerp; the Tate Gallery, London; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art;
and the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. He has also shown in public
projects including Das Kunstprojekt Heizkraftwerk, Romerbrticken, Saarbriick-
en (1990) and Quadratura in Cambridge (1995). He was Gregory Fellow in
Sculpture at the University of Leeds, 1991-3. He currently teaches at the Slade
School of Art and is Research Fellow at the Manchester Metropolitan
University, who are publishing a collection of his essays, A Method for Sorting
Cows (forthcoming).

MALCOLM BAKER is Deputy Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert

Museum, London. He has written widely on eighteenth-century sculpture and
visual culture in many journals. He has co-written (with Anthony Radcliffe and
Michael Maek-Gerard) Renaissance and Later Sculpture in the Thyssen-
Bornemisza Collection (1991) and (with David Bindman) Roubiliac and the
Eighteenth-Century Monument: Sculpture as Theatre (1996), which was
awarded the 1996 Mitchell Prize for the History of Art. He is currently writing
a book on Roubiliac and the roles of sculptural portraiture in eighteenth-century
England.

ANTHONY HUGHES is Lecturer in the History of Art at the University of

Leeds. He has published extensively on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art in
Art History, The Burlington Magazine, The Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes and The Oxford Art Journal, and has written a book on
Michelangelo. He is currently writing a book on the theory of sculpture from the
fifteenth century to the present day.

MIRANDA MARVIN is Professor of Art and of Greek and Latin at Wellesley

College. She was educated at Bryn Mawr College, the American School of
Classical Studies in Athens and Harvard University. She has excavated at Gezer,
Israel and Idalion, Cyprus, and publishes on Roman sculpture.

NEIL McWILLIAM is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art in the School of

World Art and Museology, University of East Anglia. He has published widely
on nineteenth-century French visual culture, including A Bibliography of Salon
viii NOTES ON EDITORS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Criticism, in Paris from the July Monarchy to the Second Republic 1831-1850
(1991) and Dreams of Happiness (1993). He is completing a study of Jean Baffler
and nationalist culture in the Third Republic.

ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS, formerly Henry Moore Lecturer in the History of

Sculpture Studies at the University of York, recently completed a PhD on
Constantin Brancusi for the Courtauld Institute in London. She has published on
Brancusi, Pablo Picasso and Julio Gonzalez. Currently based in Chicago, she is
preparing a critical edition of Andre Salmon’s La jeune sculpture franpaise.

MARTIN POSTLE is Associate Professor of Artv History and Director of the

London Centre, University of Delaware. Hi« publications include (with Ilaria
Bignamini) The Artist’s Model: It’s Role in British Art from Lely to Etty
(London and Nottingham, 1991) and Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures
(Cambridge, 1995).

ERICH RANFFT is former visiting Henry Moore Scholar in Sculpture Studies at

the University of Leeds. He has published essays in Expressionism Reassessed
(1993), Visions of the Neue Frau (1995) and The Dictionary of Women Artists
(London and Chicago, 1997). He has been researching modern German arts and
cultures and the practices of women sculptors, and has a forthcoming PhD on
Expressionist sculpture from the Courtauld Institute in London.

MARJORIE TRUSTED is Deputy Curator in the Sculpture Department of the

Victoria and Albert Museum, London. She has written a number of articles and
books on sculpture; her catalogue of Spanish sculpture in the Victoria and Albert
Museum was published in 1996.
 Introduction
/

ANTHONY HUGHES AND ERICH RANFFT

Often, when the discussion of art turns to reproduction, it seems nearly

exclusively bound by two dimensions. To take only the best-known
examples, the effects of the hand-made print have been explored in
William Ivin’s Prints and Visual Communication, while Walter
Benjamin’s essay on ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’ (invoked by more than one contributor to this book) has
become the single most influential piece of writing on the subject of
reproductive photography. There are no corresponding general studies
dealing with sculpture, although, as all practitioners, curators and art
historians know, facilities for reproducing three-dimensional objects
predate by several millennia any ability to make pictures that were
‘exactly repeatable’ (to quote part of Ivins’ useful formula). Technologies
associated with casting in clay and metal have been a traditional resource
for sculptors for so long that their significance has gone largely un¬
remarked. By contrast, the relatively abrupt appearance of the first
woodblock images during the early decades of the fifteenth century in
Europe and, still more dramatically, the well-documented invention of
photography in the nineteenth, assume obvious significance, if only
because they mark the kind of sudden discontinuity that seems to cry out
for historical interpretation.
There is no doubt that exploitation of these inventions has, as Ivins
argued, transformed the dissemination of information (and misinforma¬
tion), producing profound repercussions for the perception of art.
However, the very continuity of sculptural practice should make us wary
of reducing accounts of change to the effects of technological innovation
alone. Very often, reproduction becomes an especially significant issue
because of transformations in the cultural and social fabric, as the essays
in this book clearly demonstrate. Some examples might illustrate the
point more graphically.
The first concerns the authority of antique sculpture. From the
2 ANTHONY HUGHES AND ERICH RAN FFT

Renaissance onwards, ancient sculptural fragments were collected,

restored and given currency by means of many reproductive processes.
Martin Postle’s account of the debates concerning the role played by this
exemplary art in English eighteenth-century practice marks a change in
emphasis from a period in which it was routinely assumed that all
ancient fragments were ‘authentic’ to the beginning of an age of fine
discrimination between what was properly Greek and what was a
Roman copy. Here the question of reproduction became crucial, but the
forms of a later archaeological scholarship based on the systematic
interrogation of Roman sculpture for what it could tell us about lost
Greek prototypes was not stimulated by any technological change, but
was rather symptomatic of an ideological shift observable in many types
of historical writing and theory from Voltaire to Edward Gibbon. Its
most influential voice in the field of the visual arts was that of Johann
Winckelmann, whose History of Ancient Art provided at once a
systematic method for the writing of connoisseurial history and a set
of values associated with it.
Though Winckelmann’s values were not as coherent as they may at
first have seemed and his scholarship was certainly contested, most
memorably by Gotthold Lessing, the model he constructed in principle
provided the basis for the vast library of studies that imaginatively
sought to reconstruct Greek originals from a crowd of Roman copies. It
may be claimed that the subsequent invention of photography facilitated
this archaeological project, but it is beyond doubt that the new
technology was harnessed to an enterprise already under way by the
time that photographs became a standard adjunct to scholarly argument.
In such scholarship, the Roman reproduction was simultaneously
exalted and devalued as a glass in which we may catch a glimpse of
vanished glory - more or less darkly according to the evaluation of the
copy’s quality. As Edward Allington’s contribution to this book
sardonically points out, modern commercial reproduction may multiply
the ironies attached to the ambivalent status of the copy, that odd
memorial to loss. It is often the case that in the present-day museum
facsimile the supposedly ‘real’ object of veneration exists only as a
phantom conjured up by means of a substitute for a substitute. The
facsimile’s careful fakery of surface texture simulates the appearance of
the copy, the cultural value of which is held to reside not in any intrinsic
merit but in the information it supposedly offers about a work now
irretrievably lost. Within this hall of mirrors, it is a further irony that it is
precisely this informational value that can never be substantiated.
 Introduction 3

As Postle notes, rediscovery of works that are indubitably Greek, from

the sculptures of the Parthenon to the Riace Bronzes, fostered the view of
Roman figural sculpture as an industry in large part given over to the
manufacture of reproductions. Miranda Marvin’s essay forcefully argues,
however, that the production of Roman sculpture was infinitely more
nuanced than such studies have suggested, and the manufacture of
facsimiles of Greek masterworks was merely one device in the repertory
of craftsmen who also employed reproductive practices to produce
variants and pastiches. It is the relatively modern preoccupation with
authenticity and genius that has caused a great deal of Roman material to
be misconstrued. Like much art at any time, Roman sculpture may have
thrived on subtle adjustments and qualifications to a range of
conventional types: the pleasures it offered a viewer must have been
fairly refined and totally at odds with an aesthetic that prized originality
above everything else.
Twentieth-century anxieties concerning artistic integrity and commer¬
cial exploitation provide us with a second example of the importance of
cultural ambience, this time giving a faintly sensational spin to practices
hitherto regarded as unremarkable. The making and marketing of
posthumous Rodins (in marble and in bronze) has occasioned scandal
and caused quarrels to break out between normally well-behaved writers
on art (for example, the dispute between Albert Elsen and Rosalind
Krauss on which Alexandra Parigoris comments in her essay). Similar
worries have arisen in connection with unauthorized bronzes made from
waxes by Edgar Degas, the casting of metal sculptures by Umberto
Boccioni, Julio Gonzalez, Constantin Brancusi and many others.
Informing these debates have been issues of authority and artistic
control that have recently issued in the drafting of a code of practice
concerning the production of posthumous works. Parigoris’ essay
demonstrates just how deeply debates on these matters have been
affected by specifically Modernist aesthetic preferences privileging
concepts such as ‘truth to materials’ and form over other considerations,
and hardly at all by the technologies involved, which in most cases would
have been familiar in principle to the ancient Greeks. Erich Ranfft’s
discussion of Expressionist sculpture in Germany before and after the
First World War reveals the extent to which a lingering attachment to the
values implied b^ the doctrine of ‘truth to materials’ has distorted the
writing of history to give a false sense of the priorities and practices that
actually prevailed in artists’ studios during this period.
Much discussion on Modernism has also tended to pass over in silence
 ANTHONY HUGHES AND ERICH RAN FFT
4

the role reproductive techniques have played in art since the late
nineteenth century. In part this relative neglect has been an expression of
embarrassment with processes that seem too obviously commercial to
receive open admittance among writers on art, especially during periods
and in regions in which the promotion of a proper standard of craft
practice was regarded as essential for sculpture if authorial control was
to be maintained. Oddly, these often authoritarian and elitist ideals went
hand in hand with populist ideologies, creating some curious paradoxes.
One is studied in Neil McWilliam’s essay on the production of Jean
Baffler’s ornamental tableware. Baffler, vcommitted to a medievalizing
artisanal ideal, undertook an enterprise that could only be realized by
exploiting the means of industrial reproduction.
McWilliam’s essay also explores the fuzzy borderline between
‘sculpture’ and the ‘applied’ arts where the production of multiples is
the norm rather than the exception. Malcom Baker admirably outlines
the importance of Kleinplastik and the way in which a sculptural motif
could be comfortably and almost seamlessly transmitted from the
exclusivity of the collector’s cabinet to, say, Josiah Wedgwood’s factory.
Indeed, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century statuary must often have been
more familiar in the form of porcelain, biscuit or Parian ware than it was
in monumental marble or bronze. By the turn of the twentieth century,
when sale of reduced replicas of salon pieces or favourite monuments
was commonplace, it might have been difficult to tell precisely by what
criteria a sculpture and a table ornament were to be distinguished from
one another. It is the only half-acknowledged commercial exploitation of
sculpture that sharpens the sense of ironic absurdity courted by Marcel
Duchamp’s readymades. His ‘originals’ - urinal, bicycle wheel, snow
shovel and bottle rack - were not only themselves instances of
industrially manufactured multiples, but also, as Allington reminds us,
have subsequently been ‘reproduced’ in authorized versions whose status
in relation to the parental object is parodically uncertain.
These are cases in which reproduction has been made visible within
the relatively closed worlds of scholarship and art. In larger contexts, the
reproduction of imagery has been an important resource the very
ubiquity of which has caused it to seem unremarkable. Repetition and
dissemination of a motif or figure have constituted one of the simplest
and most effective means of establishing and reinforcing political or
religious authority. The image of a Roman emperor, whether depicted on
a coin or in the form of a cult statue, became an inescapable sign of
power, though in the twentieth century there is perhaps no need to search
 Introduction 5

out historical prototypes for a practice familiar to the recent history of

Germany and Eastern Europe. In many cultures, replication of religious
cult imagery has often been a duty of sculptors and, although this is often
associated with Asian practice, it has in fact been firmly embedded within
the Catholic tradition of Western Europe for centuries. Here, as Anthony
Hughes and Marjorie Trusted'point out, replication and variation of a
cult work may entail the assumption that the copy transmits something
of the talismanic efficacy of the original. Trusted’s discussion goes
further, rightly questioning whether it is proper to assume the existence
of an ‘original’ at all in the case of some seventeenth-century Spanish
reliefs, which have probably been made from a mould in order to market
a popular type of devotional image more effectively. In this instance, the
conventional art-historical discrimination between authentic work and
(it is usually assumed) second- or even third-rate copy may be not merely
beside the point but positively misleading.
Even when identifiable ‘originals’ exist, reproductive strategies are
rarely merely passive but may have a powerful role in providing a frame
within which the primary objects are seen. Baker argues that variation
and reproduction of sculpture have had important repercussions for the
transmission of reputation and the establishment of an oeuvre. Francis
van Bossuit, a figure considered (if at all) today as ‘minor’, received the
signal recognition of having what must have been one of the first
illustrated monographs dedicated to him. Baker’s argument subtly
reveals how the engravings presented these small ivories anew as works
of monumental grandeur, through the kind of dramatic devices which
photography has now made commonplace.
As editors, we are convinced that the replication of sculptural imagery
has played a fundamental rather than a marginal role in the history of
Western art. Each of the essays brought together here reveals a different
aspect of the way in which the multiplication, placement and
displacement of that imagery affects a variety of issues that, when
analysed, importantly alter our conception of how sculptures function.
The variety of approach from one contributor to another reveals how
acknowledgement of replication, far from diminishing the interest
objects hold for us, as we might perhaps fear, enriches their fascination.
We have certainly benefited from the insights our contributors have
offered. Our thaftks go to them and to others who have supported us
before and during the period in which the book was being produced.
They include Ben Read and Adrian Rifkin at the University of Leeds and
Penelope Curtis of the Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture,
6 ANTHONY HUGHES AND ERICH RAN FFT

who convened a one-day conference at the Centre on this theme in

December 1994. Finally we would like to record our gratitude to Ben
Dhaliwal who organized an exhibition on the theme of reproduction and
sculpture to coincide with that event.
 I

Roman Sculptural Reproductions

or Polykleitos: The Sequel
MIRANDA MARVIN

In the collection of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen is a

nearly life-size Roman marble statue of a youth in the style of the fifth-
century bc Greek sculptor Polykleitos (p. 8).1 He is identified as a
‘diskophoros’, or ‘discus-holder’. His left hand has been restored to hold
something that looks suspiciously like a hand-grenade, but, less ana-
chronistically, seems likely to be a pomegranate (after which, after all,
the ‘grenade’ was named), or a misunderstood aryballos. If he held
something in his right hand, it is lost. The label that identifies the work as
a discus-holder seems, therefore, eccentric. According to the logic that
has until recently governed the identification of works of classical
sculpture, however, it is perfectly reasonable, indeed correct.
The Ny Carlsberg is a major museum with a long tradition of
scholarly curators; its labels reflect the communis opinio of scholarly
thinking.2 In the case of the ‘discus-holder’ the label reads in its entirety
(translated from the Danish): ‘diskophoros/roman/copy after
polykleitos/5TH century bc’. The work is identified, in other
words, not as a work of art but as a reproduction of one. A long-standing
scholarly consensus considers it to be a copy of a lost bronze by
Polykleitos that depicted a victorious athlete holding a discus. That the
Roman work holds no discus need not be explained on the label since its
absence says nothing about the original, and only the original matters.
The importance of the Copenhagen marble lies in what it can tell us
about Greek sculpture, not about Roman. The only date on the label is
the date of the sculptor of the presumed original; the only artist’s name is
his as well. Who made the Roman replica, when, where and for what
purpose are not questions that have seemed important to ask. Recently,
however, the consensus about this work and others like it has begun to
break down. The Copenhagen youth now seems more likely to be a
Roman creation than a copy of a Greek bronze and worthy of a label
describing what the visitor sees, not just its imagined original.
8 MIRANDA MARVIN

Figure in the manner of Polykleitos, second century ad, marble.

Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen.

Much Roman sculpture is Greek in style and subject, and most of these
Greek-seeming works have been assumed for at least a century to be
copies of lost works by Greek artists. Some, like the Copenhagen
Diskophoros (above), now appear to be Roman originals, and even those
that are reproductions are today not believed to be mechanical ones. The
theory that they were made with a pointing machine, similar to the one
invented in the eighteenth century for making mechanically exact copies,
has been discredited.3
Roman replicas were works of judgement and skill, not machine-made
repetition. Many were signed conspicuously with their maker’s name,
not the name of either the work or the artist replicated.4 The pride of the
carver was shared by the purchaser who displayed the signed work for
visitors to admire.5 The anonymous Carrara craftsmen who today
execute marbles that will be signed by the artists who modelled the
bozzetti are not a modern equivalent to Roman marble-workers.
Two anomalies must be admitted before discussing Roman sculpture
and its sources. The first is that the major centre of marble production in
the Roman empire was the eastern Mediterranean. The marble-carvers of
Greece and Asia Minor never ceded dominance to their competitors in
Italy, and in their workshops the language spoken was Greek. They are
considered to be Roman artists in that they and all their patrons were
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions 9

subjects of the Roman government and products of its multicultural

empire. In modern terms, however, few had ethnic roots in the city of
Rome. The second anomaly is the ugly reality that all the works of
Polykleitos are lost. If one of the surviving Greek bronzes in the museums
of Athens, Reggio di Calabria or Malibu is his, we do not recognize it. If
any existing Roman marble in Polykleitan style is a perfect copy of one of
his works, we do not recognize that either. There is no known original
left with which to compare existing replicas. The argument is not about
proofs but about more or less persuasive hypotheses. The hypothesis
adopted on the Copenhagen label, that the work is a copy, is simply less
persuasive today than it used to be.
The view of Roman sculpture reflected on the Copenhagen label is
usually said to have originated in the circle of Winckelmann in the
eighteenth century.6 As fully developed in German universities in the
nineteenth century, it holds that Roman sculpture can be divided into
two sharply distinct categories: historical and ‘ideal’. Historical sculpture
depicts historical persons and events.7 Public and private portraiture and
the narrative reliefs that ornamented arches, columns and buildings
throughout the Empire are its chief exponents. Historical sculpture is
thought of as the place where Roman sculptors demonstrated originality
and creativity, where they made significant contributions to the history of
Western art.
Roman ideal sculpture, on the other hand (which takes its name from
the German Idealplastik), is that which depicts deities, figures from myth,
personifications, allegorical figures — creatures of another world, not
ours. It includes everything from cult statues to lamp-stands, from
fountain figures to wall plaques. The subject, not the function, of the
work defines the genre. One of its characteristics is serial production.
Very few works in this genre are unique. Most are known in multiples
and belong to what is known as a replica series: a set composed of works
that may differ in material, size, quality and iconographic minutiae, but
that visibly relate to a common prototype. The prototypes of most
Roman replica series have been thought to be lost works by Classical or
Hellenistic Greek artists.
The Romans are thought to have developed a taste for Greek sculpture
from admiring the hundreds of ancient statues brought home as booty by
their victorious 'armies, and to have come to prefer copies of these to
originals by their own artists. The copies produced ranged from exact
replicas to free variations, but all derived from Greek originals. Since
Roman literature constantly proclaims the glory of ancient Greek artists,
IO MIRANDA MARVIN

it seemed only reasonable to believe that most Roman patrons would

prefer copies of acknowledged ancient masterpieces to inferior modern
creations. As Franz Wickhoff put it at the turn of the century:

The principal occupation of every Greek sculptor in Rome ... was to copy
famous Greek statues in marble ... The exhaustion of the imagination, by
impelling the lover of art who was no longer satisfied with contemporary
creations to seek older works of art, favoured this extensive copying.9

John Boardman at the end of the twentieth century describes the

production of Roman ideal sculpture thus:,

For those who ... preferred masterpieces, even in copies, a copying industry
soon emerged ... the result was the legion of marble copies ... which serve as a
major source for our study of lost originals by famous artists ... It was, of
course, always open to the copyist to introduce variants or create pastiches ...
but obviously no new major art form developed from these classicizing works.10

Boardman’s more nuanced but still dismissive statement reflects

twentieth-century views. Fie still believes the Roman replicas’ only
value lies in what they can tell us about lost Greek works, but his list of
copies of ancient masterpieces is substantially smaller than the list
imagined by Wickhoff and his contemporaries. Since the 1970s whole
classes of ideal works once thought to be copies of classical statuary have
been reinterpreted on formal grounds as classicizing or ‘classicistic’
creations, conscious reformations of classical prototypes by Roman
artists.11 Some, for example, have a strong homoerotic and pederastic
content - ‘sexy boys’ Elizabeth Bartman calls them.11 The bronze known
as the Idolino in Florence, for example, was considered by Adolf
Furtwangler in the 1890s to be an original of the fifth century. Its
languorous elegance and youthful androgyny, however, betray its Roman
origin and relate it unmistakably to similar figures of beautiful boys used
to hold oil lamps to light Roman dining rooms.13 Many more works have
been recognized as Roman creations, and the category of literal copies
from Greek masterpieces has shrunk dramatically.14
This is not to say, of course, that they did not exist. Both literary and
physical evidence demonstrates that the Romans made and displayed
copies of many Greek works. Casts were taken from them and replicas
made. In one instance, an overcast torso in the Metropolitan Museum in
New York retains traces of the repairs made to the original from which it
was taken.15 At Baiae fragments of actual plaster casts have been found.16
When Roman patrons wanted exact copies, Roman artists could produce
them.
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions ii

‘Idolino’, anonymous Roman artist, first century bc/ad, bronze.

Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.

The hypothesis being challenged is that such copies were the normal
preference of most purchasers of ideal sculpture. I have argued elsewhere
that such a view imputes to the Romans a post-Enlightenment notion of
genius and a familiarity with famous works of art made possible only by
modern means of exact reproduction (today, of course, extending beyond
the still camera to virtual reality in three dimensions).17 The Romans had
neither the ideology of individualism nor the technologies of reproduction
that create the modern taste for replicas of famous works. Moreover, they
had no academic discipline of art history or professional schools for
artists, no encyclopaedic museums and only a rudimentary tourism
industry. The art patron of ancient Rome had little in common with his
modern successors who pile into tour buses in order to see the canonical
works whose appearance they already know from reproductions, and
purchase other reproductions on the spot to take home for the
mantelpiece.
In discussing Roman sculpture the burden of proof should shift from
12 MIRANDA MARVIN

(top left) Doryphoros, in the manner of Polykleitos, first century bc, marble.
Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

(top right) Diadoumenos, in the manner of Polykleitos, first century bc, marble.
National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

(above) Figure in the manner of Polykleitos, first century ad(?), marble.

Wellesley College Museum (Jewett Arts Centre), MA.
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions i3

identifying which ancient work it replicates to establishing whether it

copies any specific Greek work at all.18 Is it a reproduction of a particular
original or simply a repetition of approved forms in a classical manner?
In the face of the many Roman variations on Greek styles now recog¬
nized, what defines a work as a^true copy? How safe is it to reconstruct
Greek sculpture from Roman replicas?
The recent acquisition by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts of a
magnificent replica of Polykleitos’ Doryphoros and an exhibition in
Frankfurt in 1990 devoted to Polykleitos have focused attention on works
in his style. In the publications generated by these events (including a new
and lavishly illustrated list of Polykleitan replicas compiled by Detlev
Kreikenbom), the Diskophoros type to which the Copenhagen youth
belongs is still classed as a copy of one of his lost works and used to
reconstruct his career.19
A native of Argos or Sicyon, Polykleitos was one of the leading
bronze sculptors of the fifth century bc.zo He took many pupils, and, as
was not uncommon in Greece where occupations often passed from
father to son, had more than one artist among his descendants.21 His
work is known from signatures on the bases of lost statues and from
later literary accounts of his life and works.22 The most important
source is Pliny the Elder who, in the first century ad, credited him with
major stylistic innovations and listed his best-known bronzes. The most
famous of these were the Doryphoros, or ‘spear-bearer’, and the
Diadoumenos, or ‘youth tying a fillet’ (p. 12). These have been reliably
recognized from copies. Even the name of the Diadoumenos was well-
enough known to make a pun on it. A Roman named Tiberius
Octavius Diadumenus put a little relief of the Polykleitan statue instead
of a portrait of himself on his tombstone.23 Both these Polykleitan
statues represent nude young men standing with their weight on one
leg. The displacement of weight, thrusting one hip to the side, sets up a
characteristic movement in the torso, usually referred to by the Italian
term contrapposto. Their heads are slightly turned; they share similar
facial features, an almost architectonic musculature and a distinctive
rhythm that balances relaxed and contracted muscles in an easy,
swinging stance.24 The Doryphoros poses with a spear; the Diadou¬
menos tightens a long ribbon around his hair.
Among the studies in these recent volumes, an important contribution
is that of Gregory Leftwich.25 He analysed the anatomy of the replicas of
the Doryphoros and Diadoumenos and compared them with Classical
Greek medical treatises. Both in the details of anatomical knowledge and
14 MIRANDA MARVIN

in the conceptual framework defining a healthy body, the statues and the
medical literature coincide. Leftwich argues that nothing in the
sculptures reveals either information or theory foreign to Greek
physicians of Polykleitos’ day. An analysis by Leftwich of a Diskophoros
in the collection of Wellesley College, Massachusetts (p. 12), concluded
that its anatomy matched the Doryphoros and Diadoumenos, known
Polykleitan works. Every significant feature appeared to him authenti¬
cally Polykleitan.26 In the most recently published study of Greek
medicine and sculpture, Guy Metraux endorses Leftwich’s conclusions.27
The case for identifying the Diskophptos as a copy of a work by
Polykleitos has, therefore, grown stronger in recent years, not weaker.
The impediments to believing it to be a copy come, not from any
anachronisms in the anatomy, but from the search for the original.
Evidence for an original proves to be elusive and suggests that Roman
sculptors were able to recreate styles from the past with greater
sophistication and sensitivity than they are usually deemed to possess.
Besides the approximately ten works listed by Pliny, many others by
Polykleitos are mentioned in ancient literature.zS Some may have been
made by one or more of the later sculptors named after him, but it is
clear that he was a prolific artist, with a recognizable style. Pliny
describes his works as all very much alike, paene ad unum exemplum.2'9
He is also said to have written a treatise on perfect proportions called the
canon, or ‘measuring stick’, and to have made a statue to exemplify it
(usually identified with the Doryphoros).30
Kreikenbom and the organizers of the Frankfurt exhibition believe that
in addition to the Doryphoros and the Diadoumenos, three additional
mature male nudes by Polykleitos can be recognized from Roman
replicas: a victor statue known today as the Diskophoros, a Hermes and
a Herakles.
The evidence, however, for identifying these lost works varies from one
series to the next. It is strongest for the Diadoumenos, where the
singularity of the pose, tying the fillet around the head, and the
consistency of the replicas, which almost always combine the same
head and body types, combined with Ti. Octavius Diadumenus’ punning
stela, make the identification certain.31 The type identified as the
Doryphoros also consistently associates the same head and body
types.32 Of the sixty-seven replicas listed by Kreikenbom, only twelve
show any significant variation and several of these do not properly belong
in a replica series.33 The readily identifiable figure so consistently
reproduced resembles the textual accounts of Polykleitos’ work and the
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions i5

replicas of the Diadoumenos so closely that it is difficult to imagine not

attributing it to the same sculptor.
The attributions of the Hermes, Herakles and Diskophoros are less
secure, and trying to find an original for each leads to a dizzying blur of
confused identities. The work of later restorers, who have sprinkled the
surviving heads on an assortment of ancient and modern bodies, and,
with cheerful abandon, given ancient bodies new heads, makes the task
particularly laborious. Once the Polykleitan replicas are disentangled
from later additions, however, the grounds for the attributions emerge.
More heads than bodies have been recognized, and they are grouped into
series by hairstyle. In all the hair strongly resembles the Doryphoros.
Hard and crisp, it lacks the puffy quality found in the hair of the
Diadoumenos replicas. Chiselled locks of neat curls descend in layers
from the crown of the head to frame the face in symmetrical whorls and
tendrils. Each type, however, is identified by a distinctive arrangement of
the locks around the face, which fall in recognizable patterns over the
brows and in front of the ears.
In the portraiture of the royal family at the beginning of the Roman
Empire, such distinctive hair arrangements identify particular indivi¬
duals. The men in Augustus’ family are depicted as strongly resembling
the emperor but he is distinguished by a formulaic hairstyle, found on
heads of very different style and workmanship.34 Modern scholars have
used the technique that court artists devised for identifying ruler portraits
to identify the originals of ideal sculptures. They have classified all the
young, male Polykleitan heads that share the same arrangements of locks
as replicas of a common original. Applying the principles that work for
one genre to the other, however, only points out the differences between
them.
The problem can be illustrated by comparing portraits of Augustus
with copies of the Diadoumenos. Augustus was presented to his subjects
in many guises - seated or standing, wearing a toga or a military cuirass,
with or without the attributes of divinity. Even the portrait heads could
look very different from each other. The heads were of different shapes;
sometimes the hair was modelled, sometimes it was flat. Within each type
were differences in the inclination of the head, its angle on the neck and
the direction of the gaze. The formulaic hairstyle made the subject
recognizable despite differences in presentation.
Artists reproducing a work of art faced an altogether different
problem. They needed to capture the distinctive contours, characteristic
modelling and unchanging appearance of a specific image. A representa-
16 MIRANDA MARVIN

Jl

Hermes/Mercury (?) in the manner of Polykleitos, second century ad, marble.

Staatliche Museen, Berlin.

tion of a young man who is clothed, not nude, seated, not standing,
fastening his shoe, not tying a fillet, is not a copy of the Diadoumenos.
The details of the hair contribute only marginally to the identification.
The relief on Ti. Octavius Diadumenus’ stela, for example, renders the
hair only sketchily, but no one is in any doubt about the identity of the
figure. The overall appearance of Polykleitos’ original is clearly enough
reproduced to make its identity plain, and so the copy is a success.
Among the Roman replicas of mature nude males in a Polykleitan
style, only the series based on the Doryphoros and Diadoumenos seem
likely to reproduce specific works of art. A close examination of the other
three fails to produce evidence suggesting separate replica series, but
indicates a common origin for them all.
In the Diskophoros series Kreikenbom lists eighteen heads. Most are
plain but two have wings attached above the brows that should make
them Hermes, the winged messenger god of the Greeks, identified by the
Romans with their native Mercury.35 Three heads attached to the
straight pillar bases known as herms, however, wear a celebratory
wreath wrapped in a long ribbon, an attribute of Herakles/Hercules.36
Only three Diskophoros heads were found with bodies, always with
the same one: a youth with musculature and rhythm resembling the
Doryphoros and the Diadoumenos, but feet planted firmly on the
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions 17

ground.37 This body type, however, is also used for other heads. Four
replicas listed by Kreikenbom have ideal heads of different types, three
have portrait heads and one torso-length herm holds the heavy club that
identifies him as Herakles.38
The Diskophoros torsos themselves, headless or not, show consider¬
able variation. The torso occurs nude, with a baldric, with a mantle
clasped around the neck, with a mantle bunched on the shoulder, with a
straight mantle and baldric, with the left hand holding a discus and with
the stub of a lost attribute attached to the left upper arm.39 Attached to
the tree-trunk support that strengthens the right leg are in the
Copenhagen example a sea monster, in another example, a lyre, and in
a third, a dog.40 Poulsen noticed that the sea monster attached to the
Copenhagen replica also occurs on a statue of Perseus in Ostia and
suggested that the figure in Denmark represented Perseus, who slew a sea
monster to rescue Andromeda.41 The lyre support is attached to one of
the Hermes figures with winged heads, and no one has yet suggested an
identity for the figure with the dog.4Z
Eighteen heads are also listed for the series called the Hermes. Three
have wings like the two winged examples in the Diskophoros series.43
Three others have traces of different headgear.44 One of the winged
heads sits on a not very Polykleitan torso in the Boboli Gardens,
Florence, bedecked with a mantle, a caduceus and the infant Dionysos in
a pose reminiscent of Praxiteles.45 A little classicistic bronze has an
almost intact Polykleitan head and body, but is so idiosyncratic that it
cannot be said to copy anything literally.46 Another one of the heads is
attached to a youth with a mantle draped across his hips.47 Kreikenbom
suggests that three additional headless torsos of Polykleitan musculature
and rhythm that do not quite fit into any known series might be some of
the missing bodies for this one.48
The Herakles is Kreikenbom’s smallest series. Only fourteen works
make up the main group, with eight others in a subset of miniatures. Of
the heads, ten are plain, one has wings in the hair and three herms wear
the ribboned wreath.49 Only three heads are attached to bodies. All three
torsos are the same: solid musculature, a rhythm and contrapposto
strongly resembling the Doryphoros and the Diadoumenos, and a
distinctive pose in which the left hand is held behind the back.50 No legs
and feet are preserved to suggest a stance.
Historically, the response to the mutability of these types has been to
comb the lists of Polykleitos’ lost works for three possible originals,
(required by the three hairstyles), select one replica in each series as an
i8 MIRANDA MARVIN

accurate reproduction of it and identify all the others as copyists’

variants. The hairstyles determined how many originals were required,
while the poses and attributes determined which original each one
reproduced.
The Diskophoros series was named by Carlo Anti after the example in
the Torlonia collection that has been restored holding a discus. He
hypothesized that the original was one of Polykleitos’ many statues of
athletic victors.51 Polykleitos’ Hermes (Pliny, Natural History, xxxiv,
55) was identified as the original of the type that included three heads
with wings and the Boboli Gardens’ Herrpes holding the infant Dionysos.
In the Frankfurt catalogue, Peter Bol, noting that no work in this series
has any alternative attributes, accepts Anti’s identification.52'
The series with the hand held behind the back is thought to copy
Polykleitos’ Herakles (Pliny, loc. cit.).53 Perhaps the most popular image
of Herakles in the Roman world stood in that pose, the type known as
the Herakles Farnese, believed to copy an original by the great fourth-
century bc sculptor Lysippos. Presumably the fourth-century artist is
believed to have imitated his fifth-century bc predecessor.54
The tenuousness of these identifications is readily acknowledged in
recent scholarship, particularly the Diskophoros, whose name occurs in
quotation marks in Kreikenbom’s replica list. It is not surprising,
therefore, that alternatives have been proposed. In addition to Polykleitos’
recorded works, there were others of which we are ignorant, and Ernst
Berger, observing the downward glance of the Diskophoros, believes that
the original depicted a Theseus looking at his sword.55 Berger is unable to
cite convincing parallels, however, and so the generally accepted
hypothesis remains that the Diskophoros type represents a Polykleitan
victor statue, while the others represent two of his images of gods.56
Unfortunately, of the iconographic markers used to identify the
figures, only one is familiar from the mid-fifth century bc, and that is the
discus, which may be restored. Herakles’ gesture, placing his hand
behind his back, is not known before the fourth century.57 Wings are
certainly a ubiquitous attribute of Hermes; rapid motion denoted the
traveller-god.58 In sixth- and fifth-century bc Greek art, however, the
wings that suggest his motion appear on Hermes’ sandals or his hat; they
do not sprout from his body. The motif of a winged head, not a winged
hat, seems to originate in the Attic pottery workshop of the Talos Painter
around 400 bc, too late for Polykleitos.59 The attributes and poses,
therefore, do not point directly to any works of Polykleitos.
Other anomalies suggest that these may not be straightforward copies.
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions 19

The three series are composed of different ingredients. The Diskophoros

is made up of a variably decked-out body type used with several different
heads. The Hermes is constructed from eighteen heads, only three of
which are attached to bodies, none of which is the same or believed to
reproduce Polykleitos’ lost statup, and three fragmentary bodies whose
association with the heads is only a guess. Within the Herakles group is
what looks like the remains of a small but traditional replica series
(including both miniatures and large-scale works) that depicted a
Polykleitan nude holding his hand behind his back. Most of the heads
are plain but one has wings in the hair, suggesting an identification as
Hermes. The series, however, also includes three herms wearing
ribboned wreaths, which usually indicate Herakles.60
Precisely these variations occur in the heads of the Diskophoros type —
plain, winged and ribboned wreaths. In both series herms only are
wreathed and all the wreathed herms look very much alike, although
they have been so heavily restored that it is unwise to subject them to
much formal analysis. The Hermes series so far lacks any wreathed
herms, but includes the winged heads familiar from the other two, as well
as traces of other headgear, so far not found in the others. The Hermes
and Herakles series, moreover, are represented by remarkably few bodies
compared with the surviving heads.
The Diskophoros type is distinguished from the other two in being the
most productive, in the linguistic sense. Only two identities, Hermes and
Herakles, can be reconstructed for them, while the Diskophoros body is
used with many different heads, portrait and ideal. Moreover, apart from
the marble replicas, the Diskophoros type is ubiquitous in small bronzes
where it is widely used for images of Mercury holding a money bag.61
Since the Romans identified Mercury with Hermes, the clear favourite for
the original of the series would be Polykleitos’ Hermes, were it not that
the money bag is an attribute specifically of Mercury.62 The attribute
signals a notable difference between the cults of the Greek and the
Roman gods.63 (It is also hard to understand why Polykleitos, sensitive to
implied movement, would have chosen to depict the rapid Hermes as
immobile, standing with both feet flat on the ground.)
Mercury, whose name derives from the Latin merx, or ‘goods’, was
less a messenger than the god of commerce, profit and wealth. As such he
was widely venerated, and he occurs in small bronzes more often than
any other Roman god.64 Most of these are an appropriate size for an
image in a household shrine or modest ex-voto in a sanctuary, and reflect
the piety of commercial households.
20 MIRANDA MARVIN

The usual assumption is that the devotional image of Mercury was a

replica of Polykleitos’ statue of a victorious athlete given new attributes
by Roman artists. So little of Greek sculpture has survived that
accurately tracing the changes between replicas and originals is fruitless,
and such a reworking of a Polykleitan work is entirely possible. Erika
Simon has even suggested an environment in which it might have taken
place.65 The island of Delos was home to both Greek and Italian traders
in the second and first centuries BC. The god with the money bag is a
popular terracotta figurine there, and on the prosperous island an active
group of sculptors produced innovative works with mixed Greek and
Roman roots. The transformation hypothesis holds that it was in such an
environment as this, where Romans mingled regularly with Greeks, that
an admired work by Polykleitos was first copied and then given a new
identity.
Making this argument, however, requires assuming not only that the
predictable response to admiring a work of art was to make copies of it,
but also that form and content were independent variables. To put it in
different terms, the claim must be made that what the work looked like
and what it signified were separable. In later Western art, classical forms
could sometimes be virtually emptied of content and familiar works
could be quoted without necessarily retaining much original meaning.
John Singleton Copley, for example, based Watson in his painting
Watson and the Shark on the Borghese Gladiator, without intending a
reference to the meaning of the original, believed in his day to represent a
gladiator.66 Only a vague impression of heroic nudity seems to be
intended by the reference.
It is not likely, however, that Roman art of the Republic and Early
Empire permitted so much attenuation of content. A Roman artist
reproducing a Greek work was operating within a living tradition, not
revivifying a dead monument. Adapting Greek images for Roman needs
was a familiar pattern in the development of Roman art. When works
were used in this way, however, both subjects were to be recognized at
once and a relationship established between them. Giving Mercury the
appearance of Hermes indicated the identification of the Roman with the
Greek god. Funerary images of private citizens as gods or heroes had
spiritual significance. 7 In the political realm, appropriating Greek
imagery was a conscious choice made by rulers.68 To the Romans a
famous work of art was more than an admirable formal solution; it was a
representation of something. Its identity lay in what it signified, not just
in the disposition of its limbs.69 The intellectual apparatus that led to a
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions zi

purely formal use of visual quotations was as foreign to the Romans as

the academic art curriculum that trained eighteenth-century artists to
produce them. The necessary conditions, in other words, that permitted
Watson and the Shark were absent, and it is as unlikely on conceptual
grounds that any one of these spries literally copies a famous work of
Polykleitos as it is on the evidence of their attributes and poses.
There is, of course, the theoretical possibility that the three series
copied not famous works of Polykleitos but obscure ones. The originals
would have been too little known to be recognized and copyists would
have been free to give them the identities that suited their needs. The
reasons for making replicas of well-known works of art are many.
Copying obscure ones and using them as body types for varying identities
requires explanation.
The procedure is comprehensible if certain assumptions are made
about both patrons and artists. Patrons who can distinguish a copy of a
genuine Polykleitos from a newly created work in his style must be
assumed. They must ‘prefer masterpieces, even in copies’ (to paraphrase
Boardman) to originals in the manner of the ancients. Secondly, artists
must be assumed who know that they cannot reproduce the past without
detection and who turn to copying in order to satisfy their patrons’
demand for authenticity.
All of these assumptions about what Roman patrons wanted and what
they knew are questionable. No testimony has survived from any Roman
patron wishing to purchase a replica, for example, so we do not know
what qualities they sought in them. The conspicuous signatures of
replica-makers, however, suggest that perhaps excellence in the work at
hand was as highly valued as fidelity to the original. How technical the
language of Roman art criticism was, how sensitive Romans were to the
nuances of individual artists’ styles and how closely certain manners were
associated with the names of particular artists are all debated. To assume
that they, like moderns, saw certain traits as ‘Polykleitan’ and others as
‘Praxitelean’ or ‘Lysippan’, for instance, is speculative.70
The assumptions about artists are equally dubious. Roman artists felt
no timidity about replicating earlier styles. These were thoroughly
known and intimately familiar to them. Roman workshops, after all,
were filled with clay, wax and plaster models of famous statuary used for
making replicas.7I*The serial production that characterized both bronze
and marble sculpture depended on piece moulds made from casts, and
ateliers possessed collections of heads, limbs and sections of torsos.
Unlike their patrons, Roman artists knew from experience what made up
22 MIRANDA MARVIN

Polykleitan anatomy, Polykleitan rhythm and Polykleitan hair. The same

physical evidence that shows that they made exact copies of ancient
sculpture shows that they did not need to do so in order to recreate
ancient styles.
When today we find some replicas to be authentically Polykleitan,
moreover, it is not as though we are comparing them with the real thing.
The anatomy the Diskophoros series has been shown to reproduce is that
of those Roman marbles that we believe most accurately reflect the lost
bronze Doryphoros and Diadoumenos. Our reliance on Roman copies
for our knowledge of Greek sculptors, inevitably colours our under¬
standing of their works. We are forced to reconstruct Polykleitos’ style
from the evidence currently available. Were that evidence to include any
of his originals, our reconstruction might be quite different.
To call the Diskophoros, Hermes and Herakles types accurate copies
of lost works by Polykleitos is not impossible, but it is unlikely. It entails
accepting a view of Roman patrons and Roman artists that brings them
uncomfortably close to more recent makers and purchasers of sculpture.
A product of the nineteenth century, the standard hypothesis perfectly
accommodates that century’s practices and expectations. It is less
convincing as a reflection of the habits of ancient Romans, and it fits the
physical evidence of the existing statues only awkwardly.
There is no reason to assume that three different hairstyles must
indicate derivations from three different works by Polykleitos. It is
simpler and more plausible to describe them all as creations of Roman
artists based on the Doryphoros, as has been separately suggested for the
Hermes by Dorothy Kent Hill and the Herakles by Brunilde Ridgway.7*
They were designed to remind viewers of Polykleitos but not to
reproduce specific works. They were individuated not by the details of
the hair, but by broad categories of pose and attributes. Many more
heads than bodies survive because they were originally used, not each
with only one body type but with several, including many of the
variously classified not-quite-Doryphoros or generic-brand Polykleitan
bodies known.73 The ready availability of piece moulds made
recombining replicas of separate parts tempting, and the principle was
a familiar one/4 It was, after all, how terracottas were made, and how
the ideal portrait statue had been conceptualized.
It is interesting that the hair of the newly created works more closely
echoes the Doryphoros than the Diadoumenos, and that his pose is more
often adapted to new purposes than is the unvarying Diadoumenos. In
small bronzes, for example, Annalis Leibendgut finds no replicas of the
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions 23

Doryphoros simply carrying a spear, only many adaptations of pose and

anatomy.75 Michael Koortbojian suggests that basing the hairstyles on
Polykleitos’ best-known work might have been designed to signal to the
knowledgeable an unmistakable allusion to the artist’s style/6 Whatever
the reason, these new Roman wcjirks are variations on the Doryphoros
theme.77
The large marble and small bronze replica series, although illustrating
some common principles of sculptural reproduction, occupied separate
segments of the Roman art market. Most of the large marble statuary
made in the Roman empire was commissioned for architectural settings.
Public and private buildings were adorned with statues whose subjects
and styles were suited to the purpose of the building/8 Gymnasia, for
instance, or the exercise areas in a bath were furnished with statues of
classical athletes, deities and personifications associated with athleticism,
health and fortitude.79 The Doryphoros and Diadoumenos were widely
recognized as prototypical depictions of athletes, exemplars of the manly
virtues associated with athletic competition.80 Replicas of them were
common in gymnastic settings around the Empire. Not satisfied simply to
repeat over-familiar images, designers complemented them with newly
created athletes such as the Torlonia discus-holder.
The great gods of the gymnasium were Hermes and Herakles, at least
from the fourth century bc on, and to depict them in a style associated
with well-known images of Greek athletes was singularly apt.81
Similarly, a Polykleitan manner was suited to a heroic figure from
myth. The iconography of Perseus, the hero whose attributes included
winged boots that enabled him to fly, blurs repeatedly with that of
Hermes in Roman painting.82 He is, however, a fairly rare subject in
sculpture. Infrequently called upon to depict him, a workshop needing to
produce a Perseus might choose a more familiar winged figure, Mercury/
Hermes, as the base on which to construct the hero, propping him
against a sea monster to give him individuality.
Once the associations with noble figures of athletes, gods and heroes
were made, these Polykleitan types became suitable for portrait
sculpture. Should viewers looking at the portraits be reminded of other
uses of similar bodies, the association with figures of heroic athleticism
would only enhance the nobility of the representation.
The large-scale fnarble versions of these types have neither a single
identity like the copies of the Diadoumenos, nor the unlimited range of
identities of forms emptied of content. They are used principally for the
two chief gods of the gymnasium and for portraits of men wishing to
 MIRANDA MARVIN
M

associate themselves with them. They are works that suggest how the
culture of the Greek palaestra was adapted for the Roman elite. Their
context is that mass of Roman statues often described as copies of works
by the successors of Polykleitos, or as pastiches in the manner of various
classical sculptors, which ornamented the porticos and facades of Roman
athletic complexes.83
The context of the small bronzes is quite different. These can be
divided into two classes. The smaller category consists of secular
figurines, many of which were reduced replicas of works of art. The
bronze versions of the Diadoumenos ar^ a good example.84 As with the
marble versions of Polykleitos’ original, they differ in modelling,
anatomy and handling, but pose, contour and gesture are unmistakable.
They rarely add new attributes. Had the makers of Roman bronzes
wanted to copy a Diskophoros of Polykleitos in the same way as they
copied his Diadoumenos, they could have done so. No evidence exists
today, however, to indicate that they did. Instead, the surviving
miniatures classed as replicas of the Diskophoros belong to the much
larger category of small bronzes the Romans produced as religious
objects, and demonstrate great varieties of attributes, poses and
contours. Rather than several distinct originals, they seem to echo a
general Polykleitan manner based on the Doryphoros, with modifications
appropriate for a function in cult.
Most of these small creations were made as private devotional images
to be displayed in the family lararium or left as a gift in a sanctuary. The
god most likely to appear in a Polykleitan style is Mercury. Identified
with the Etruscan Turms as well as the Greek Hermes, he had a long
iconographic tradition in Rome as a youthful but mature deity, a
vigorous, masculine presence. The four-square, muscular style of
Polykleitos suited him. It was associated by the Romans with the
values cherished by serious, responsible, god-fearing citizens and with
the gods they honoured.85 Hard-working Roman tradesmen venerated
Mercury and prized the sober virtues the rhetoricians found in
Polykleitos’ works. Whether or not most viewers attached the artist’s
name to his manner, a Mercury in Polykleitan style evoked all the right
resonances.
He was the most popular but not the only deity represented in that
manner. The associations of the style with heroic masculinity are as
apparent in devotional figurines as they are in marble statuary. Jupiter,
Hercules, Neptune and Mars frequently appear as Polykleitan figures,
whereas Bacchus and Apollo are virtually unknown.86
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions 2-5

As they never reproduce the spearbearing iconography, so the religious

images rarely reproduce the exact stance of the Doryphoros — a feature of
the work notoriously difficult to categorize.87 Neither standing nor
walking, the Spear-bearer appears poised on the brink of action,
suggesting at once tension and relaxation, movement and rest. Most of
the bronzes stand quietly with both feet on the ground, while even those
closer to the Doryphoros pose tend to reduce his movement.88
Considering the function of the works — a display of gods in a shrine —
the increased frontality and loss of movement appear reasonable
modifications for Roman artists to have made to a Polykleitan schema.
Since the large marbles were principally intended for display in a niche,
between columns or against a wall, a similar tendency towards a frontal
and stable pose is comprehensible for these too.89
The usual explanation, of course, is not a reworking of a Polykleitan
pose to suit new circumstances but copying a different model. The
Diskophoros type is thought to keep both feet on the ground because its
original was an early work by Polykleitos (around 460 bc, according to
Bol), before he had developed the bold, new ponderation of the
Doryphoros.90 The evidence of the small bronzes, however, strongly
suggests a model of adaptation from a schema rather than a copying of
separate originals.91 Every gradation of pose between stiff frontality and
a walking figure is found in them.9Z The Diskophoros solution of a
Polykleitan contrapposto in the torso but both feet on the ground,
although very popular, is only one among many. Similarly, the empty
right hand of the Doryphoros is usually given the money bag to hold, and
a caduceus often replaces the spear in the left, but there is no rule. The
bronzes differ from both suggested originals in usually having a cloak
draped over the left arm or fastened around the neck. It is a more
consistent attribute than winged boots, in fact, although not more so
than a winged hat. The picture that emerges is of workshops attempting
to reconcile a cult requirement for a frontal-Mercury-with-money-bag
with a formal requirement that the god look Polykleitan enough to
suggest suitable values.93
The makers of domestic religious images clearly followed rules unique
to their trade. Recognition of the god was their paramount concern, not
a close resemblance to a prototype. Regional styles, period styles, patron
choice, cult practise and workshop habit were significant variables.94
Although many were related to familiar cult statues, the little images did
not have to reproduce them exactly. While many consistently echoed a
single style, therefore, others were boldly eclectic. The artists imaginat-
z6 MIRANDA MARVIN

ively combined disparate styles but equipped the god with recognizable
attributes and comfortingly familiar poses.95
The large-scale marble workshops produced a smaller volume of
works than did the bronze workers, and many fewer designed for cult
purposes. Their versions of Polykleitan youths therefore reflect a creative
process that is similar but not identical. They tended to be, for example,
formally more conservative but iconographically more innovative than
bronze workshops. Nevertheless, many of the same principles of
composition are apparent, and their creations demonstrate a comparable
range of styles and manners. The Disl^ophoros, Hermes and Herakles
types represent thoughtful recreations of a single, consistent manner that
betray their late origin only in subtle touches of pose and attributes.
Attributing them to Roman marble-carvers grants those artists more
sensitivity to past styles than is usually allowed them.
The low regard in which Roman sculptors are held, however, is a
consequence of accepting their works as no more than copies. The
argument is circular: if Roman artists could produce only copies since
they lacked imagination, they could produce only copies, and so on.
What these Polykleitan figures demonstrate is that anything but the
‘exhaustion of the imagination’ regretted by Wickhoff characterized
Roman workshops. Instead they indicate an environment in which styles
were linked to values, and works designed for specific settings had to
have styles deemed appropriate to those settings. Copies of ancient works
were only one possibility. Sculptors could also create works of their own
in a single ancient manner or in an imaginative combination of several
different manners or could create completely original variations on the
antique.96 The constraints of decorum or appropriateness may have
limited choices, but they did not forbid creativity.97
It is as examples of Roman creativity that such works as the
Copenhagen Diskopboros should be studied and labelled. They are
interesting in themselves, not merely as ghosts of Greek originals. When
and where they were made, how they were used, what they represented,
who carved them, who commissioned them - all these things are worth
knowing. A surprising amount of information, moreover, is available for
most of the Roman replicas in modern collections. A combination of
archival research and scientific tests makes it possible to answer many of
these questions and place the replicas in their Roman context. Their
dates can be established by using the stylistic criteria worked out for
other categories of Roman sculpture. Christopher Hallett has pointed out
the dangers of circular reasoning in dating works by style and then using
 Roman Sculptural Reproductions 2-7

the same works to define the style of the period, but, used with skill and
caution, stylistic dating can be as effective for Roman ideal statuary as
for any other category of works of art.98 Enough replicas are signed to
make learning to recognize the products of specific workshops a not
unreasonable goal. /
Since most major Roman marble workshops clustered around the
great quarry sites, the source of marble for a statue can indicate where, in
all likelihood, it was made. A set of cheap and non-destructive laboratory
tests can determine with probability (not yet with certainty) the likely
quarry for most Roman marbles.99 The location where the work was
found can be compared with the quarry site. Was the work shipped from
a distant quarry or does it represent local production? Can regional tastes
in styles or subjects be recognized? How structured was the Roman
marble trade? If the precise site where the sculpture was excavated is
known, then the setting in which it was placed can be understood. Did
the work ornament a gymnasium, a garden, a temple, a public bath? Was
it in public or in private hands? Who might have commissioned it and for
what purpose? Even when no excavation history is available, the city or
region in which it was found can often be deduced from the earliest
collection in which it is recorded.
Most of the large-scale Roman marbles exhibited today that do not
come from excavations come from old Italian collections.100 Many of
„ these collections were made locally, of antiquities harvested from nearby
sites. Often there are inventories that may record provenances. There are
complications, of course. As treasured possessions, ancient marbles were
treated lovingly by early collectors. They were carefully cleaned and
elaborately restored by first-rate sculptors. Like antique furniture or
plate, they were mended and repaired. The consequence is that the details
of their surface treatment, on which dating and connoisseurship depend,
are often those of the restorer, not of the original artist. Many of these
marbles are the products of two separate workshops, that of their initial
manufacture, and that of their restoration. In the twentieth century, in
the search for ‘authenticity’, many have been stripped of restored limbs
and attributes, but the new surfaces, of course, remain. The work can
never return to a pristine condition.
These ancient marbles as we see them today, in fact, are unreliable
guides to lost Greek statues, but extraordinary documents for the history
of Western taste. They are witnesses to the vitality of the classical
tradition that took forms that Greek artists originated, adjusted them in
Roman ateliers to express Roman ideas and then remade them for
28 MIRANDA MARVIN

European collectors. Rather thari having no history, these Roman

replicas are palimpsests recording successive layers of the Western
world’s fascination with the classical past.
 2

Authority, Authenticity and Aura:

Walter Benjamin and the Case
of Michelangelo
ANTHONY HUGHES

In our culture, works of visual art are often especially valued as unique
objects issuing from the hand of a single, gifted author. In significant
part, this value has been created in interaction with reproduction in all its
forms from at least the sixteenth century onwards. Photography, the
predominant modern form of reproduction, has continued to maintain
and even perhaps to reinforce the reverence that we accord to the artist’s
originals.
The very opposite of this claim was advanced by Walter Benjamin in
the celebrated essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’.1 Benjamin argued that photography was a special case,
and predicted that this form of ‘mechanical reproduction’ would
eventually democratize the work of art, stripping it of ‘aura’, that
nimbus of admiration and awe that psychologically distanced it from the
spectator and made it seem an object of wonder. In this reduced form, his
thesis seems simple enough to grasp. It has indeed in many circles been
taken as self-evidently true, but interpretative difficulties lie in wait for
anyone who wants to test it seriously. For one thing, the notorious
density of Benjamin’s prose tends to inhibit reduction of argument to
such stark declaration. For another, his idiosyncratic terminology makes
for fundamental problems of understanding. What might be meant by
‘aura’ has been debated at length:2 less attention has been given to the
concept of ‘mechanical reproduction’ itself. Though Benjamin used the
phrase throughout chiefly to refer to photographic processes, he did not
explain why photography should be so dramatically separated from
previous modes of reproductive image-making. At the same time, he
bundled together some quite different practices united only by a common
technology, in a way that quickly leads to confusion.
30 ANTHONY HUGHES

As we shall see, the two points are related, though it is Benjamin’s lack
of discrimination that is the easier to demonstrate since his confusion was
in some measure abetted, if not generated, by a terminological vagueness
encountered in most of the major European languages. Even when
speaking only of art, it is oddly difficult to define what is meant by the
concept of reproduction. Is replication, for instance, simply an acceptable
synonym or a more neutral term embracing a number of varied
phenomena? By way of anticipating a reply, we may observe that not
all replicas are considered to be reproductions: fakes form an interestingly
different category, while the concept pf the multiple work of art is
significantly at variance with the idea of a facsimile. Eighteenth-century
mezzotints made after paintings, like picture postcards sold in museum
shops today, are not replicas at all, though most people would agree to
call them reproductions. Such distinctions emerge from considerations of
usage, intention and context of viewing; in short from reception, rather
than from differences between manufacturing process.
My present purpose is to put Benjamin’s thesis to the test by
examining issues raised by two- and three-dimensional versions, variants
and copies of Michelangelo’s sculpture. This may enable us, first, to see
whether it is possible to draw some working distinctions between one
type of image and another and, second, to ask questions about the
changes in perception effected by photographic reproduction. Focus on
the pre-modern should allow continuities as well as disjunctions to
emerge more clearly than they otherwise would. The reason for
discussing sculpture rather than painting is that sculpture is sometimes
taken to be an art especially resistant to reproduction, an art of which
Michelangelo is often regarded as one of the purest practitioners.
With respect to the integrity of the sculptural object, for example, it is
often maintained that Michelangelo’s work stands at the opposite pole to
Auguste Rodin’s. Michelangelo’s so-called Atlas Slave3 is without doubt
an ‘original’ whose status is enhanced by the very fact that it remains
unfinished. The figure emerges from a block which itself bears the marks
of those processes by which it was brought to this stage of semi¬
completion. Indeed, those very marks guarantee its authenticity as a
historic survival. Like the facture of a painting, they are signs that the
shaped stone is an issue from Michelangelo’s hands. In Benjamin’s terms,
those traces of the chisel constitute part of its ‘aura’. By comparison, a
Rodin marble such as La Pensee,4 although it displays similar signs of
manufacture, is a fiction. Far from being unique, it is a version of a work
originally conceived in a different medium (clay or plaster), translated
 Walter Benjamin and Michelangelo 3i

Michelangelo, Atlas Slave, after 1513, marble. Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence.

into stone, not by Rodin but by a professional carver.5 In other words, the
marks here do not show how excavation of the block was broken off (by
chance or because the sculptor was dissatisfied), but deliberately concoct
the unearned appearance of an image half-discovered in the rock.
In such judgements, aesthetics seem to become a branch of ethics. It is
a view reinforced by certain modern theories of art, according to which
Michelangelo’s statue, unlike Rodin’s, may be judged as an autonomous
object conceived from the first to take one form and not another.
Repetition or paraphrase can only weaken it, since any repetition,
however successfully it may fool the viewer, misses the whole point of
sculpture as art: its unrepeatable presence. To adapt a phrase of Philip
Larkin’s, reproduction can only mean dilution, not increase.
The trouble with the theory is that it has corresponded only rarely to
what has happened from the Renaissance up to the present day. Studio
32- ANTHONY HUGHES

practice routinely embraced procedures of reproduction in the general

sense of the word. Terracottas and small bronzes form a whole class of
artefacts designed to be produced as multiples. While it is true that
Michelangelo on the whole avoided bronze and only ever produced two
works in the medium, both unique casts, it is often forgotten that the
actual process of production by stone-carvers in a workshop has
frequently run counter to the notion of the autonomous, insular work of
art in any straightforward sense. Even Michelangelo, though his methods
were hardly those of a Rodin, was not in this respect as eccentric as is
sometimes supposed. v '
Transference of an image from one medium to another is a resource
deeply embedded within the traditions of European sculpture that
Michelangelo inherited. Long before Rodin, delegation of carving was
customary. Especially during the execution of a large-scale project,
sculptors would be employed to realize models of clay, wax or stucco in
stone. For the Medici Chapel, Montorsoli and Raffaele da Montelupo
carved Saints Cosmas and Damien after Michelangelo’s design as part of
a programme intended to be completed by a team of sculptors under the
master’s control.7 Current, certainly commercial, consensus would
probably value the models Michelangelo prepared more highly than
the completed statues and there is reason to believe that sixteenth-
century collectors were interested in similar items. A clay head of Damien
was acquired by Aretino within the artist’s lifetime. But the point brings
us to one of those essential discriminations. Aretino would not have
believed himself to be acquiring an ‘original’ of which Montorsoli’s
Medici saint was a ‘copy’ any more than a modern collector of
manuscripts would regard a holograph of an Eliot poem as somehow
more authentic than its printed counterpart.
Studio replication of certain images has also formed an integral part of
workshop practice certainly since the seventeenth century,8 and there is
some indication that the practice may have begun much earlier. In
sixteenth-century Italy, it is often difficult to know whether bronze or
clay reductions of sculpture were made in the master’s studio or
represent a widespread form of piracy. Whatever the case, there is little
doubt that we can speak quite unambiguously here of reproduction and
original. Discussion of this type of small-scale sculpture may be
postponed to the second part of this chapter. At present, it is important
to distinguish it from what we may call the carved multiple. On at least
one occasion, Michelangelo made two versions of the same work. The
Risen Christ set up in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in 1521 is
 Walter Benjamin and Michelangelo 33

the second carving of a statue first commissioned in 1514.9 The first was
abandoned when the sculptor encountered an unsightly flaw on the face
of the figure, but it was not destroyed. Although it has now disappeared,
it once stood as a ‘collector’s item’ in the courtyard of the Roman house
of Metello Vari dei Porcari, whcvhad been one of the commissioners of
the work. Though there has been a tendency to suppose that Metello
Vari’s possession must have differed radically from the version that
remains, there is no evidence to support the case beyond the presumption
that Michelangelo would not willingly have repeated himself.
Though these routine cases have presented problems for collectors,
curators and art historians, there has never been any doubt that the
images in question can in some sense or other be regarded as authentic,
or at least authorized by the master or the studio. Only when that
authority is lacking do we enter the troubling realm where ‘versions’,
‘replicas’, ‘imitations’, ‘variants’, ‘facsimiles’, ‘copies’ - and even fakes —
abound. At this point we require a test case.

11

In 1549, a marble version of Michelangelo’s Roman Pieta was installed in

a chapel of the Florentine church of Santo Spirito. It had been made as a
funerary monument by Nanni di Baccio Bigio for one of Michelangelo’s
closest friends, the banker Luigi del Riccio.10 Vasari gave the group an
admiring notice11 and the carver was himself proud enough of his
achievement to inscribe his name across the sash of the Madonna, the
place occupied in the original by Michelangelo’s signature. The
substitution did not seek to efface all thought of the inventor. Rather
the contrary: it states that Nanni (designated by his family name of Lippi)
made the work ‘ex imitatione’ (in imitation) of the original group.12
Two more texts record the installation of the work. A poem by Gian
Battista Strozzi payed homage to Nanni’s work in the form of an address
to the Virgin:

Bellezza et onestate
E doglia e pieta in vivo marmo morte,
Deh, come voi pur fate.
Non piangete si forte,
Che anzi tempo risveglisi da morte,
*E pur, mal grado suo.
Nostro Signore e tuo
Sposo, figliolo e padre
Unica sposa sua figliuola e madre.
 ANTHONY HUGHES
34

Michelangelo, Piet'a, c. 1497-1501, marble. St Peter’s, Rome.

Nanni di Baccio Bigio, Pieta, c. 1549, marble. Santo Spirito, Florence.

 Walter Benjamin and Michelangelo 35

Ah you whose beauty, chastity, grief and pity live in the dead marble, do not
continue to weep as sorely as you do in case you should prematurely and
reluctantly rouse from death Our Lord and your bridegroom, son and father, O
singular bride, his daughter and his mother.13

Less flatteringly, an anonymous ^Florentine diarist, evidently a savagely

puritan Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, contemporaneously noted
that in March 1549

a Pieta was unveiled in Sto Spirito, sent to this church by a Florentine, and they
said that the original came from Michelangelo Buonarroti, that inventor of filth
who puts his faith in art rather than devotion. All the modern painters and
sculptors imitate similar Lutheran fantasies so that now throughout the holy
churches are painted and carved nothing but figures to put faith and devotion in
the grave. But one day God I hope will send his saints to throw idolaters like
these to the ground.14

Taken together, Nanni’s inscription, Strozzi’s madrigal and the

diarist’s outburst provide fascinating indicators of intention and response
in connection with recycled sculptural imagery in mid-sixteenth-century
Italy, but before examining their implications, we should take care once
again to distinguish this type of image from the current notion of
reproduction. While most of the modern literature refers to Nanni’s Pieta
as a copy, it would actually be better to call it a variant. Though its form
leaves the derivation from the original beyond doubt, its many
divergences from Michelangelo’s model are marked and have received
some attention in the secondary literature.15 Here the inscription on the
Virgin’s sash helps to make an important point. Throughout the
sixteenth century, ‘imitation’, the term used by Nanni and, incidentally,
by the diarist, implied not mimicry but emulation, an enterprise whose
aim embraced both humility and ambition. The task of carving
Michelangelo’s group over again was the tribute paid by a younger
rival and the changes he introduced would have been judged against the
standard set by the original.
From this perspective, we may say that Nanni’s variant indicates that
Michelangelo’s work had achieved classic status. As A. J. Minnis has
shown, throughout the Middle Ages and beyond, the notions of
authority and authorship were intertwined and it was a measure of the
authority of a text to be quoted, cited and considered worthy of
imitation.16 Though at first this signal auctoritas had been confined
chiefly to the authors of sacred scripture, the fathers of the Church and
certain ancient writers, such moderns as Dante and Petrarch had
acquired comparable status long before the beginning of the sixteenth
36 ANTHONY HUGHES

Gregorio de’ Rossi, Pieta flanked by Rachel and Leah, 1616, bronze. Strozzi Chapel,
San Andrea della Valle, Rome.

century. It is not difficult to see in Nanni’s imitation the acknowl¬

edgement of Michelangelo’s supremacy as a sculptural model.
It is for this reason that the diarist’s attack has some significance for
any discussion of replication, since the anonymous writer’s criticism is
framed as though Michelangelo’s error could be read through the
medium of Nanni’s variant. The authority lent to the original by such
allusion is considered a scandal precisely because the process of imitation
mimics the authority invested in traditional replication of the divine
word. In other terms, an imitation of this kind has something of the
transparency expected from reproduction in our customary sense, a point
reinforced by Vasari’s employment of Strozzi’s madrigal, a poem he cites,
not in connection with the group in the del Riccio Chapel, but in his Life
of Michelangelo, where it is presented as a tribute to the original Pieta in
St Peter’s.17
To a certain extent, these observations may enable us to see how other,
similar objects functioned to enhance the prestige of Michelangelo’s
original image. These certainly include the version of the Pieta made for
the grave of Johann Schiitz by Lorenzetto in 153018 and perhaps may even
 Walter Benjamin and Michelangelo 37

embrace the bronze placed above the altar of the Strozzi Chapel in San
Andrea della Valle. Here the Pieta was flanked by two more bronzes after
Michelangelo, the figures of Rachel and Leah from the tomb of Julius II.
The altar is inscribed ‘gregorius de rubeis [i.e. Gregorio de’ Rossi]
1616. ex aere fudit’. This functions more as a founder’s mark than the
*

declaration of an author or disciple, and it is possible that the three figures

were manufactured directly from casts of the marble originals.19
The near-mechanical method of replication seems to indicate that the
figures in the Strozzi Chapel stand in a different relation to Michelangelo’s
originals from the marbles freely carved by Lorenzetti or Nanni, and it is
tempting to treat them as though they were reproductions of a sort much
despised by twentieth-century art historians. Criticism of this kind is
relatively easy, almost reflex: Michelangelo’s purposes have been at best
misunderstood if not downright vulgarized. Translation of marble into
bronze has profoundly affected the legibility of the figures; the
architecture is unsympathetic to Michelangelo’s inventions; the juxtaposi¬
tion of motifs from different works is crassly insensitive to their meaning —
besides which, the relative positions of Rachel and Leah have become
unnecessarily reversed. Regarded as reproduction, the common reaction
would be to treat the whole ensemble in terms of travesty or loss.
But to regard any of the variants of the Pieta like this would be to miss
an important aspect of the function of replication in such cases, one that
sixteenth- and seventeenth-century observers would have regarded as
routine. In this context, the writings associated with the installation of
Nanni’s group become crucial. Strozzi’s over-elegant compilation of
standard paradoxes may seem poles apart from the diarist’s fundamental¬
ist rage, but the two texts agree in focusing attention on the overwhelming
importance of the sculpture as a focus for devotion. For Strozzi, if Nanni’s
marble is transparent, it is because it allows access to the mysteries of the
Virgin’s nature and, as is often the case with such poetry, his verse seems
almost wilfully inattentive to the actual appearance of the work. The
Virgin weeps neither in Michelangelo’s original nor Nanni’s variant, a
discrepancy we may choose to explain by appeal to the incorrigibly
conventional nature of this form of verse, or because the icon itself is here
regarded as a trigger for meditation on the Virgin’s sorrow, rather than a
direct representation of it. Aesthetic squeamishness should not disguise
the fact that, as funerary monuments, the three versions of the Pieta work
as well as the original to remind believers of the saving grace of Christ and
of the Virgin’s role as chief intercessor for the souls of the dead.
Replication of holy images preceded by many centuries the very
38 ANTHONY HUGHES

conception of the work of art. Multiplication of an icon, far from diluting

its cultic power, rather increased its fame, and each image, however
imperfect, conventionally partook of some portion of the properties of the
original.2-0 The same would be true of the devotional image’s diabolic
counterpart. That is why the diarist objected to the replication of an
uncanonical or — as he insultingly put it — a ‘Lutheran’ prototype.21
His characterization of Michelangelo as one who preferred art to piety
also reveals a fear that the value of Michelangelo’s authorship conferred
on a work could encroach detrimentally on its status as a devotional
image. Mostly, the twofold nature of the work could be held in casual
equilibrium. In 1546, the French monarch Francois I wrote to Michel¬
angelo:

Seigneur Michelangelo, because I would very much like to have some works
made by you, I have instructed the Abbe of Saint Martin de Troyes [Francesco
Primaticcio], who is the bearer of this present letter to go abroad to collect them.
If, on his arrival, you have some fine pieces you wish to give him, I have
commanded him to pay you well for them. And furthermore, for my sake, I hope
that you are happy for him to take casts from the Christ of the Minerva and
from Our Lady della Febbre [the Roman Pieta] so that I may adorn one of my
chapels with them, as things which I am assured are the most exquisite and
excellent in your art.zz

Emphasis here slides effortlessly from the notion of ‘art works’

(quelques besognes de vostre ouvrage) to devotional images fit for a
chapel and back again to ‘chose que l’on m’a asseure estre des plus
exquises et excellentes en vostre art’. With the casts of the Risen Christ
and the Pieta, Francois was hoping to get something very like a modern
reproduction, tokens of great works that could if required take their part
in a collection alongside similar versions of ancient sculpture.
More clearly analogous to modern reproductions were the reduced
versions of Michelangelo’s figures in three and two dimensions that
began to appear during the sixteenth century and to which we have
already made passing reference. These objects and images were
importantly different from the kind of versions so far discussed since
they did not aim to be ‘imitations’ in the emulatory tradition represented
by Nanni’s variations on the Pieta. Nor were they near-facsimiles or
substitutes like casts. Rather they can only be understood as tokens, aide-
memoires, rich in information though not in any sense confusable with
the originals. In three dimensions, they included small replicas of
Michelangelo’s work in clay and bronze, which circulated throughout the
second half of the century and were themselves reproduced in second- or
 Walter Benjamin and Michelangelo 39

Bronze copy of Michelangelo’s Piet'a, Antonio Salamanca, Piet'a, 1547,

sixteenth century. engraving. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.

third-generation casts. Most were pirated or, like the small Piet'a,
probably made some time after the artist’s death. Others such as the
figurines that Daniele da Volterra made from the allegories in the Medici
Chapel around about 1557 probably had Michelangelo’s approval.2'3
Like modern reproductions these were portable objects, easy to
handle, allowing instant access to Michelangelo’s sculptural concepts on
a conveniently reduced scale. In this form, the original images were
decontextualized, cut adrift from their function within the institutional
and symbolic world for which they were devised and made available for
special, aestheticized inspection as representatives of Michelangelo’s art.
As is the case with modern photographic reproduction, loss - of surface
quality, colour texture and scale - was offset by the gain that intimate
handling could bring. Some were collected by Tintoretto, who, according
to Ridolfi, drew them from unusual angles, varying the lighting by which
he viewed them. Although this verbal testimony is relatively late,
Tintoretto’s practices are amply documented by surviving drawings.24 By
these means, the sculptures could paradoxically become more completely
known from the cbpies than they could ever be in the context of the
chapel itself, where it is impossible to see them from certain aspects, an
enhancement of the experience of art nowadays duplicated in
photographic form by the publishers of art books.
4o ANTHONY HUGHES

That process of detachment from' initial function is even more clearly

observable in engraved reproductions, more obviously because these carry
inscriptions by which we can gain some measure of what aspect of the
work was considered to be important. For example, in an engraving of the
Tomb of Julius 11 published by Salamanca it is clear that Michelangelo has
equal billing with Julius himself.25 More strikingly, the patron has
disappeared entirely from an inscription on the same publisher s image of
the Roman Pieta.z6 Though this may be an effect of the detachment of the
work itself from its original location — the Pieta was removed from San
Petronilla and its position altered several times afterwards27 — the print
goes further than might be expected by celebrating the sculptor’s technical
legerdemain. It is advertised in the statement that the two figures have
been carved from a single block of marble. An almost identical formula is
to be found in another engraving by Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri,
which was issued in February 1564 as a memorial to Michelangelo shortly
after his death.28 Such examples represent only a tiny fraction of the
printed imagery offering two-dimensional accounts of statues and
monuments. Two-dimensional reproductions were hardly as versatile as
their three-dimensional counterparts, but they were cheaper and more
widely distributed. Because they were accompanied by explanatory
inscriptions, they were perhaps even more important a means of
advertising authorship. Already by the mid-sixteenth century, the print
trade existed as one of the essential institutions for the dissemination of
art and the constructions of its canons of excellence.29

ill

All this may seem to leave Benjamin’s thesis more or less intact.
Handmade artefacts can hardly be regarded as equivalents of the modern
photograph. Benjamin’s understanding of reproduction is closely bound
to a standard of informational accuracy associated with the disinterested
camera, whereas the ‘copies’ we have so far considered are, whether by
design or default, noticeably unsatisfactory in some respect. Indeed, their
reliability may be checked precisely by setting photographs of copy and
original side by side. The standard set by this kind of ‘mechanical’
medium has had an effect on three-dimensional reproduction too.
Today’s museum facsimile, with its careful simulation of even the
smallest surface accident, aims at a kind of verisimilitude achieved first
by the photographic print. By these rigorous standards, early modern
reproductions seem to stand in the same relation to photographs as
translations of a text do to transcriptions.30
 Walter Benjamin and Michelangelo 4i

But the heart of Benjamin’s argument lies in his thesis that

photographic reproduction removes the ‘aura’ from a work of art and
it is this thesis that must now be addressed. ‘Aura’ came to signify a
number of things in Benjamin’s writing, not all of them compatible with
one another, but within the context of his essay on reproduction it has
two relatively clear and distinct meanings. The first is as an indicator of
the power an artefact would once have acquired from its function within
a cult. The point is quite easily illustrated by the case history examined
here. Michelangelo’s Roman Pieta was made for the funerary chapel of
the French Cardinal Jean Bilhere de Lagraulas where it could be
understood in many complementary ways. Most obviously, the Virgin
occupies a place in the liturgy for the dead as chief intercessor for souls,
and this fact alone would invest her figure with a special importance.
‘Aura’ is thus that nimbus of awe with which the cult surrounds the
image and which establishes a psychological distance between the
believing spectator and the statue itself.
When considering the devotional function of an object within a
religious cult, its appearance is of secondary importance and may in fact
often be a matter of indifference.31 However, the second way in which
Benjamin employs the term ‘aura’ has a more obvious application to
what we normally think of as the work of art. ‘Aura’ is here that sense of
uniqueness gained from inspection of surface marks left on an object by
its manufacture and its subsequent passage through time. Facture and
damage are interpreted as respectively signs of authorship and of
historical authenticity. Fiowever, while Benjamin seems here directly
concerned with the detailed appearance of a work, his case is not a
formalist one. It is the beholder who must actively interpret these traces
to invest the work with a reverential nimbus. For a formalist, accidental
traces left by its history would hardly matter at all.
Photographic reproduction, according to Benjamin, breaks down the
aura surrounding the object. Partly this is conceived as a process of
radical decontextualization, which brings even the most complex
artefacts inside the living room. The ubiquitous, democratizing
photograph furthermore supplies multiple substitutes for an artefact,
thus supposedly eroding any sense of its unique presence in space and
time, robbing it, we might say, of its quiddity.
The second pbint is easier to deal with immediately because
Benjamin’s argument may be neatly reversed by making the equally
plausible claim that the ‘aura’ of authority and authenticity enveloping
an original is strongly enhanced by the photographic reproduction. This
42 ANTHONY HUGHES

works in two ways. First, the very, intrusive power of the camera, its
ability to reveal surface qualities that cannot be detected under normal
viewing conditions, tends to endorse the uniqueness of the work
represented. All the peculiarities revealed in the photographic print help
to fix the exact character of an object with a precision beyond the power
of verbal description or the translation processes involved in handmade
reproduction. The power to report on surface accidents in such a way as
to enable one version of a work to be unambiguously identified from
another enables photographs to acquire the status that an expert witness
might have in court (not infallible, but^to be heard with the greatest
respect).
Contrary to Benjamin’s thesis, then, the photograph tends to empha¬
size the particularity of certain objects. Scraps of Benjamin’s argument
might still be salvaged. We could agree, for example that the ‘aura’ with
which viewers invest a work sometimes remains strikingly independent
of the object itself. However, this recognition hardly entails more than
the fairly uncontentious observation that our responses are hugely
determined by cultural make-up.
Photographers have been shaped by the same cultural forces too, which
affect the images they make and the way we understand them. Michel¬
angelo’s unfinished Atlas Slave provides a useful example of the fashion in
which photography has worked to reinforce common assumptions and
intensify the auratic effect even against the grain of historical evidence. All
the details of that unique block from which the figure emerges have been
recorded with great precision in photographs taken in varying forms of
illumination, but most strikingly by raking light that reveals the slightest
modulation of surface. The result has been a series of pictures designed to
heighten the romance of the process whereby the formless takes on
Michelangelo’s form. But the extent to which the marks of punch and
chisel are read as autograph will vary according to the knowledge and
susceptibility of the viewer. Some of these traces of labour will have been
made by those who shaped the block at the quarry; others by assistants at
work in the studio. For at least a hundred years, scholars have disagreed
about which marks represent Michelangelo’s intervention.
This argument tends to reinforce Benjamin’s contention that photo¬
graphy inaugurated a change in the way the work of art was perceived
(though he drew the wrong conclusions from the fact). In a different
sense, we ought to insist on the fact to which William Ivins memorably
drew attention: photography is a technology whose history should be
regarded as continuous with that of printmaking and some of the points
 Walter Benjamin and Michelangelo 43

already made about the handmade reproduction apply equally well to the
photograph. The ‘mechanical’ part of photography may be exaggerated.
However informative, no photograph is ever in practice regarded as a
substitute for the object itself. Like previous forms of reproductive
imagery, it is always, in the final analysis, incomplete (unless the work to
be reproduced is itself a photograph, in which case a print may, on
occasion, function exactly like a substitute or facsimile31). Photographs
are traces — indices rather than icons, in terms of Peirce’s famous
taxonomy — and only in exceptional cases do they seek the status of
facsimiles. Just as the older forms of handmade reproduction differed
from the original in colour, scale and texture, so does the photograph,
and, like those older forms, it too is a product of a number of interpreta¬
tive decisions made by photographer and printer. The incompleteness of
the photographic image is, of course, especially apparent in reproduc¬
tions of three-dimensional artefacts such as sculptures. But it is precisely
because it is an indexical sign that the photograph can never be regarded
as satisfying in itself. It points beyond itself to the original, advertises
itself as a trace, exhibiting in extreme degree that transparency we noted
earlier as a feature of the whole range of ‘reproductive’ types, but which
is especially true of indices such as casts.
Benjamin’s arguments concerning the loss of cultic context seem
equally in need of review. If it were merely a question of making adjust¬
ments to Benjamin’s case, we could argue that an engraving or small
three-dimensional version of Michelangelo’s Pieta already detached the
work from its devotional frame sufficiently to transform perception of it.
In other words, photography seems irrelevant to Benjamin’s point. All
forms of secular reproduction act as a kind of conceptual relocation of an
object, similar in effect to a spatial shift from church to museum. In the
long run, it is not the mechanism of reproduction, but countless historical
processes, small and large, that finally effect any real transformation in
the spectator’s perception. Even the most devout twentieth-century
Roman Catholic could hardly claim to have the same experience in the
face of the Pieta as a visitor to Cardinal Jean de la Bilhere’s chapel had
around 1500.
To some extent, Benjamin’s essay implicitly contains answers to such
objections. The transformation from cultic object enveloped in its halo of
mystery and power to the democratically reproducible image is not
presented as a sudden outcome of the appearance of the photograph. An
apparently long historical period is interposed between the cultic era and
that of mechanical reproduction, during which the value placed on the
44 ANTHONY HUGHES

object had to do with its status as an ‘exhibitable’ commodity. This is

rather fuzzily presented (and Benjamin’s major example contains
empirically incorrect information33), but what he seems to have in
mind is an early modern period during which the work is valued first,
primarily as a collector’s item and ultimately as the museum or gallery
piece: what we would normally think of as a work of art supposedly
admired for its formal properties or for the author’s creative power
rather than for its place within a larger ceremonial context.
One problem with Benjamin’s argument is that it creates a much
sharper division than can ever be sustained1 between the cultic object and
that made for exhibition. In addition, Benjamin’s idea of the cult is much
too exclusively religious. Throughout, his essay tends to set up a linear,
‘progressive’ movement from religion to secularization, from the cultic
object to the objet d’art and from there to envisage a further development
towards a final and definitive, liberating political apprehension of
imagery. For all Benjamin’s subtlety, the armature on which his account
is built is simplistic, strikingly similar to Auguste Comte’s positivistic
history of human culture whereby the world is understood by means of a
progressive demystification of nature: religion succeeds magical practice
and in its turn succumbs to the superior explanatory and manipulative
power of the natural sciences.34
At a crucial stage of this argument, Benjamin admitted that, towards
the end of the nineteenth century, a ‘religion of art’ began to invest the
work with a kind of substitute aura, but he appeared to believe that this
notion had already had its day by the time he wrote. In general, he is
resistant to any extension of the concept of cult beyond the strictly
sacramental. If, however, we were to understand ‘cult’ as a term
analogous to the anthropologist’s ‘ritual’, then part of Benjamin’s
argument still retains a great deal of value, though only at the expense of
his point about the effect of photography. Indeed, photographic
reproduction has intensified the cultic status of art itself by means not
dissimilar to those formerly used to promote the devotional icon. I am
thinking here of the way in which art figures largely and inescapably in
the rituals of tourism, of art-historical lectures and essays (like this one),
and in those involving civic and national self-identification with
historical figures. The presence of Michelangelo’s head on Italian
banknotes is one obvious sign of the fashion in which the Western cult
of individual genius meshes with the supra-individual ideal represented
by the nation-state. We may also note that Florence, as the birthplace of
Michelangelo, represents another kind of cult, sometimes in harmony
 Walter Benjamin and Michelangelo 45

with the national, sometimes chafing against it as the survivor of an older

regional culture. The identification of the city’s status as the origin of the
‘universal’ appeal of Michelangelo’s art is emphasized by the strategic
placement of reproductions. A marble copy of David stands outside the
Palazzo Vecchio (its original location); another David, this one bronze, is
accompanied by bronze version's of the Times of Day on the central
monument of the Piazza Michelangelo; replicas of the Slaves were
embedded in Buontalenti’s grotto in the Boboli Gardens.35 If visitors
recognise these images, it is in large part because they have been made
familiar through the medium of photography itself.
The literal replication of figures from one context so that they may
stand in another provides us with a further clue to the unsatisfactorily
thin structure of Benjamin’s positivistic view of the historical process.
Constant reproduction, rather than reducing the work or emptying the
sign, generates a multiplicity of readings, which may be carried
backwards and forwards, from original to reproduction and vice versa.
In this way older kinds of cult may subsist with the newer, one
reinforcing the authority of the other. The Piet'a, advertised through
sixteenth-century engraving as the unique product of Michelangelo’s art,
sustains today two distinct forms of devotion, one Catholic the other
secular, and it should go without saying that two forms of reverence may
co-exist now in one person in much the same way as they did for
Francois I and Metello Vari in the sixteenth century.
In other words, replication of Michelangelo’s sculpture, far from
diminishing its authority, helps to enhance, even in some cases, to create
it. Of course, reproduction does not work alone but as one factor in a
complex of others. The replication of Michelangelo’s work during the
sixteenth century itself ran in parallel to another enterprise, the cult of
antiquity in all its forms, literary, social and political. The seemingly
inexhaustible process of refashioning ancient statuary in early modern
Europe helped to constitute both that sense of the inescapable primacy of
the antique and of the attachment of the modern to it that has been at the
centre of so much Western art ever since. Both Francois I and Tintoretto
added models and casts of Michelangelo to a store of classical exemplars
and their practice was imitated by the great schools of art up to the
nineteenth century and beyond. Our canons have altered and we have
largely exchanged*the cast room for the collection of postcards and
books, but like its earlier counterparts, photographic reproduction now
occupies a place that is central to promoting and securing that elusive
cultic penumbra Benjamin called ‘aura’.
 3
Art for the Masses: Spanish Sculpture
in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries
MARJORIE TRUSTED

'V

The notion of reproduced images was prominent in Spanish sculpture

from at least the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. Not only did
sculptors produce the same subjects, such as the Virgin of Sorrows or St
Francis of Assisi, but also their interpretations of these subjects fre¬
quently exhibited the same iconographical formulae, so that they closely
paralleled one another, despite being made at different times, in different
locations and by different artists. The time of the greatest flowering of
art, particularly sculpture, in Spain (the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries) coincided with widespread, deeply held religious fervour,
creating a tremendous demand for devotional images: sculpture for the
masses in every sense. Recognizing how and why devotional sculptures
were made in Spain at this time is paradoxically perhaps the most fruitful
way of understanding them as works of art, for they were not primarily
designed to be seen as unique or original creations.1 (It is no accident that
they were only exceptionally signed by their creators.1) Nor were they
designed to be studied as works of art in a museum, for their original
contexts usually within a church or convent, or sometimes in a domestic
setting as an object of private devotion, were fundamental to the way
they were perceived. The greatest nineteenth-century commentator on
Spain, the English traveller Richard Ford (1796-1858), lamented, ‘Can it
be wondered that such works, now torn from their original shrines and
desecrated in lay galleries should loom gloomily and out of place, like
monks thrust from dim cloisters into gay daylight?’3
For these reasons many works produced in Spain do not easily accord
with a certain kind of art history, in particular attributions to great
names and monographic studies of artists. By looking at four groups of
objects illustrating four types of reproduction, this essay aims to show
what they reveal about the ways sculptors organized their workshops,
how an individual sculptor might influence contemporaries and later
artists, and finally how images functioned within a devotional context.
 Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 47

Spanish sculpture of this period was part of a strong tradition, which

was both artistic (in that sculptors followed sometimes extremely closely
both their immediate and more distant predecessors) and theological (in
that the subjects depicted had to conform to what was accepted and
approved by the Church, more especially so after the mid-sixteenth-
century Catholic Reformation). Partly because such rich archives survive
in Spain, and because of the traditions of art history going back
ultimately to Vasari (exemplified in Spain by the Dictionary of Artists
produced in 1800 by J. A. Cean Bermudez),4 most studies of post-
Renaissance Spanish sculpture tend to concentrate on named artists and
attributions; this essay will aim to approach the subject from a slightly
different angle, while nevertheless inevitably building on the large
volume of scholarship that exists to date.5 Broadly, the four types of
repetition to be discussed here are: first, the same composition (The Pieta
in terracotta by Juan de Juni) more or less exactly copied by means of a
mould; second, elements that could be adapted and re-used for different
compositions within one workshop (that of Luisa Roldan), again using
moulds; third, one image of great significance for devotional purposes
(the Virgin of Sorrows) produced in only slightly different forms by a
number of artists over a century; and fourth, the miraculous image of a
saint (St Francis of Assisi) depending from one of two prototypes by the
seventeenth-century sculptor Pedro de Mena, repeated in both painting
and sculpture for over two centuries.

TERRACOTTA: THE WORKSHOP OF JUAN DE JUNI IN

THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

Certain materials lend themselves to reproduction from moulds. In Spain

the most commonly surviving such material is terracotta. A small
polychromed terracotta relief of the Pieta was acquired in Madrid in 1863
by the Victoria and Albert Museum (then the South Kensington
Museum).6 The relief is mounted in a painted and gilt-wood frame,
decorated in gold with a Latin inscription.7 The original surface would
have been somewhat brighter than the present appearance of the relief
suggests, since the terracotta has been overpainted.
Three other close variants of this work are known: one in the Cathedral
Museum (Museo Diocesano y Catedralicio) in Valladolid, another in the
Archaeological Museum (Museo Arqueologico Provincial) in Leon and a
third in the Camon Aznar Collection (Instituto y Museo) in Zaragoza.9
With the exception of the Camon Aznar relief, they are virtually identical
in size.10 Who originated the design for these four reliefs, and how do they
48 MARJORIE TRUSTED

Juan de Juni, Pieta, c. 1540, painted terracotta in painted and gilt-wood frame.
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

relate to one another? In answer to the first question, the figurative style
points to Juan de Juni (c. 1507—77), one of the leading sculptors active in
Castile in the mid-sixteenth century, who probably came originally from
Joigny in Burgundy but who apparently spent all his working life in
Spain.11 The composition is of extraordinarily high quality, its mannerist
nerviosidad (literally ‘nervousness’, expressing the energetic movement of
his compositions) typical of Juni’s work. Comparable pieces associated
with Juni include a Pieta group attributed to him in the Museo Federico
Mares, Barcelona,12- and a polychromed stone relief of the Pieta in the
Cathedral at Salamanca forming part of the tomb of Gutierre de Castro,
dating from about 1540, and convincingly ascribed to Juni on both
circumstantial and stylistic evidence.13 These pieces display similar
features to the Pieta reliefs: elongated, contorted bodies, thick, flowing
folds of drapery and comparable facial types for Christ and the Virgin.
The date of the tomb in Salamanca also gives an approximate date of 1540
for the conception of the terracotta.
 Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 49

iF r*

Juan de Juni, Pieta, c. 1540, painted stone relief (part of the tomb of Gutierre de Castro).
Salamanca Cathedral.
5° MARJORIE TRUSTED

If the conception is Juan de Juni’s, the question of the relationship

between the four Piet'a reliefs (in London, Valladolid, Leon and
Zaragoza) remains. There are apparently two relatively early verbal
allusions to the composition. The first, in the early seventeenth century,
dates from just over seventy years after it was probably designed. This is
the 1613 inventory of the possessions of Juana Martinez, the widow of
Juan de Juni’s illegitimate son, Isaac de Juni, himself a sculptor. One of
the items listed was ‘clay image in relief of the Descent from the Cross’.14
Although this is not a certain allusion to the composition, it is likely to be
so, being a relief in the same material^ and’ of the same subject in the
possession of the next generation of Juan de Juni’s family. If it is an
allusion to the composition, it remains unclear which (if any) of the
surviving versions this was, as will be discussed below.
Almost exactly one hundred years later, the eighteenth-century
Spanish painter and writer Antonio Palomino recorded in 1714: ‘In the
church of St Martin in this city [Valladolid] there is a little scene in
terracotta of the Descent from the Cross, of which a number of sculptors
have made casts, so that it is a widely travelled image’.15
It has been noted that the example formerly in the church of St Martin
in Valladolid (as seen by Palomino) is the version now in the Cathedral
Museum in Valladolid, and that this therefore could be the version
mentioned in the inventory of Juana Martinez, who lived in Valladolid.16
For this reason it has been suggested that the version in Valladolid was
the original and the others replicas. On the basis of Palomino’s
comments that other sculptors made casts of the Valladolid relief, the
other versions have been considered early copies, which should be treated
neither as ‘original de Juni’ nor as fakes.17 It is interesting to note that
when the London relief was acquired, the curator at the South
Kensington Museum, John Charles Robinson, described it as ‘School
of Valladolid (?) - probably by a pupil of Juan de Juni’.18 These
interpretations of the surviving versions, partly based on Palomino, seem
plausible, but it is also possible that Palomino, writing over 130 years
after Juni’s death, was misinformed, or misinterpreted what he saw. The
implication of his statement is that there is one original (possibly the one
in Valladolid) modelled by Juan de Juni himself. Other versions, while
still early, dating from the sixteenth century and possibly the seventeenth
too, were cast from the original by other artists. They were not intended
to deceive but were replicas. However, it seems probable that the
composition was always intended to be reproduced in multiples. The
appearance of the known surviving pieces suggests they are likely to be
 Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 51

contemporary with one another, whereas the theory that copies were
made by other artists implies that one is earlier and that the others were
made at a slightly later date, perhaps after Juan de Juni’s death in 1577.19
Yet there is no perceptible difference in the definition of the forms in
these four versions, although the polychromy varies in quality and is
much damaged in the Valladolid, Leon and Zaragoza examples. The
Valladolid, Leon and London pieces are all of the same size; the Camon
Aznar version in Zaragoza appears to be cut down and is consequently
5cm smaller in both height and width.10 It is almost certain that all
known versions are cast and not modelled, although it seems that the
casts were not made identically, which may imply that they were not
necessarily all carried out at the same time.11 The reliefs seem to have
been made for display, rather than for study. This can be assumed from
the fact that contemporary polychromy seems to have survived on all of
them at least in part, and that wood frames are extant on all but the
Valladolid version. The wood frame of the London relief, with its gold-
painted inscription, is analogous to the frame of the version in Leon,
which also has an early inscription (although a different one), and to that
of the one in the Camon Aznar Collection, which has a wood frame
painted to imitate marble.
These features imply that the four surviving versions should be
accorded equal status, no one of them necessarily being closer to or
.further from the work of the sculptor than any of the others. Having
made an ‘original’ in clay, which was probably then fired in order to
harden it, Juan de Juni could have had made in his workshop a mould of
this, from which were cast numerous copies. These were then painted,
framed and sold. They would have been comparatively small devotional
images, suitable for a domestic setting. The relief mentioned in the 1613
inventory - if it is related to the present pieces - may be a fifth version
that has been subsequently lost, or it may be identical to any of the other
surviving examples. In addition to these four versions, there is a smaller
variant of the composition, also probably dating from the sixteenth
century, although of poor quality, and with the same composition
laterally inverted; this is in the National Museum of Sculpture in
Valladolid.12 The reduced size and lateral inversion may imply that it
was taken from an engraved version of the composition, rather than
being derived fromduni’s original mould, although no such engraving is
known to have survived, and it could have been made from a now lost
inferior copy, perhaps even pirated from Juni s workshop by a rival. As
such, it is evidence of the continuing popularity of the composition, and a
5Z MARJORIE TRUSTED

copy indirectly to be associated \yith the work of Juni, rather than a

multiple produced in his workshop.
Unfortunately no other evidence is known regarding how Juan de Juni
sold uncommissioned sculptures, for example whether he retailed them
or displayed them in his workshop. But the surviving versions of this
composition, roughly all contemporary with one another and emanating
from his workshop (with the possible exception of the inferior version
now in the National Museum of Sculpture), imply that Juni produced
multiples to sell, probably relatively cheaply, to private customers, and
that this made sense economically.
v

TERRACOTTA: THE WORKSHOP OF LUISA ROLDAN

IN THE LATE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Economic reasons also influenced the running of the workshop of a

Spanish sculptor working at the end of the seventeenth century. Luisa
Roldan (1652—1706), known as La Roldana, was the daughter of the
Sevillian sculptor Pedro Roldan (1624—99), and trained under him before
setting up her own- workshop as an independent sculptor, her husband
Luis Antonio de los Arcos (d. 1702/3) acting as polychromist.23 There
was a strong tradition of terracotta sculpture in Seville going back to the
fifteenth century, and although Luisa Roldan also worked in wood, her
terracotta pieces are most characteristic of her style, and prefigure the
Rococo porcelain groups produced in the eighteenth century. She moved
to Madrid in about 1688 to petition for the post of court sculptor, which
was finally granted in 1692. Most of her small-scale terracotta groups are
thought to date from 1688 onwards. One of these, a painted and partially
gilt terracotta figure group of the Virgin and Child Appearing to St Diego
of Alcala, is in the Victoria and Albert Museum.24 The Virgin and Child
are shown presenting the cross to a kneeling Lranciscan saint,
accompanied by two angels, one kneeling, one standing. Six cherubim
nestle around the Virgin’s feet. All the figures except the saint rest on
clouds, indicating that this is an ecstatic vision experienced by the saint.25
St Diego of Alcala stole bread from his monastery to give to the poor, but
was discovered, at which point the bread miraculously turned into
flowers; the petals can be seen in the folds of his habit.26 The group was
acquired for the Museum in Madrid in 1863, and was originally simply
called ‘Spanish, seventeenth century’;27 the reasons for the subsequent
attribution to Luisa Roldan are stylistic.
One of her signed groups in the collection of the Hispanic Society of
New York is remarkably close to the present one. This is the Mystical
 Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 53

Luisa Roldan, Virgin and Child Appearing to St Diego of Alcala, c. 1690-1700,

painted terracotta on a painted and gilt wood base. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Luisa Roldan, Mystical Marriage of St Catherine, c. 1690-1700, painted terracotta.

Hispanic Society of America, New York.
54 MARJORIE TRUSTED

Marriage of St Catherine, in which the composition and facial features of

the individual figures, notably the figures of the Virgin and the angel on
the Virgin’s right in each group, are extraordinarily close.28 Because of
these similarities and the nature of the material it is conceivable that
Roldan used moulds to repeat certain figures in her groups. In order to
test out this hypothesis, measurements of both groups and separate
elements from each (the faces of the Virgin and of the kneeling angel)
were taken. Unfortunately the results were inconclusive, as the
measurements, which were anyway done by hand and taken at different
times on both sides of the Atlantic, were close but not identical.29 In
addition, different rates of shrinkage during firing and the possibility that
the clay may have been worked up when it was still in a leather-hard
state could also account for slight discrepancies. It is, however, striking
that closely similar figures of the Virgin and Child and of the kneeling
angel recur in other Roldan groups, such as her two versions of the Rest
on the Flight into Egypt, one dated 1691 in the collection of the Condesa
de Ruisenada in San Sebastian, and another in the Hispanic Society in
New York.30 Even within the present group, the heads of the cherubim
are repeated forms. Recent examination of the underside of the New
York Mystical Marriage of St Catherine revealed that the whole group
consisted of separate elements (each usually of one figure) fitted together,
presumably before firing. Straw was also visible, almost certainly used to
bind the clay.31
Although it has not been possible to prove the theory, it seems highly
probable that Roldan’s workshop, organized around the production of
these closely similar small-scale groups, almost certainly intended for
domestic settings, depended on a high proportion of delegated work:
Roldan presumably designed the compositions of the groups and made
the initial figures; she could then multiply the images used by having
moulds made, so that they could be adapted for various groups, depicting
entirely different subjects. Even if certain elements were not actually cast
from moulds, the undeniable repetition of forms in her pieces suggests a
streamlined way of organizing her workshop. This may have been partly
for iconographic or devotional reasons; for example, it might have been
thought desirable that images of the Virgin be similar, if not identical.
But perhaps the primary reason was economic: so that she could run an
efficient workshop, which produced large numbers of such works; a
contemporary letter from the sculptor refers to a list of eighty works she
had produced over the previous ten years.32
 Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 55

IMAGES OF THE VIRGIN OF SORROWS IN THE

SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

There are other repeated images in Spanish sculpture that cannot have
been made simply because it was cheaper to do so. One of the most
widely disseminated and popular'images of the seventeenth century was
that of the Virgin of Sorrows, the Virgen Dolorosa or Virgen de la
Soledad. In sculpture the subject of the mourning Virgin could be in the
form of a bust or a half-length figure, more rarely as a full-length figure,
sometimes an imagen de vestir, an image to be dressed. Often a bust or a
half-length figure of Christ as Man of Sorrows is accompanied by a
comparable image of the Virgin, such as Pedro de Mena’s pair of busts in
the Convento de las MM. Concepcionistas, Zamora.33 The depiction in
the form of a bust may well partly derive from Netherlandish painting of
the fifteenth century, exemplified by the work of Dieric Bouts {c. 1420-
75) and his son Albert Bouts (c. 1460-1549), perhaps transmitted through
engravings.34 Towards the end of the fifteenth century Spanish paintings
of the subject appeared, such as the work of Paolo da San Leocadio
(1447-1519).35 Another probable source is the reliquary bust, the
associations of which, containing as they did physical relics of the
saints depicted, must have added to the already powerful verisimilitude
to be seen in the painted wood busts of the Virgin and Christ.
In the Victoria and Albert Museum there is a particularly fine painted
wood version of the Virgin of Sorrows, acquired in 1871, and at that date
attributed to the Sevillian sculptor Juan Martinez Montanes (1568-
1649).36 This ascription was overthrown in 1950 when Xavier de Salas,
then Director of the Spanish Institute in London, claimed that the bust
could not be by him, but was ‘possibly by Pedro de Mena who was ... a
pupil of Alonso Cano. Cano himself was ... a follower of Montanes’.37
Many sculpted versions of this subject are known, most of them from
Andalusia, in particular Granada, including works attributed to the two
brothers Jeronimo Francisco and Miguel Jeronimo Garcia (the
Hermanos Garcia),?8 and Jose Risueno (1665-1732).39 The Andalusian
sculptor Pedro de Mena (1628-88), mentioned above, who had worked
with the painter and sculptor Alonso Cano (1601—67), was the most
eminent of those artists known to have produced versions. He originated
and refined the type most commonly produced in the seventeenth and
early eighteenth centuries, and at least sixteen versions of the bust of the
Mourning Virgin attributed to him survive.40 From 1950 until recently
the London bust was associated with this sculptor. The attribution to
56 MARJORIE TRUSTED

Jose de Mora (1642-1724), Virgin of Sorrows, painted wood. Victoria and Albert Museum,
London.

Mena had been generally agreed, partly because it is understandably

always tempting to ascribe an outstanding work of art to the most
eminent name associated stylistically. Although there are clear
similarities with works by Pedro de Mena — the virtuoso carving of the
wood, the corkscrew ringlets and the naturalistically crumpled veil — the
parallels are iconographic and technical. However, other contemporary
and slightly later works by Andalusian sculptors also have some of these
characteristics, such as a bust by Jose Risueno of about 1700-30 in the
National Museum of Sculpture, Valladolid.41 Despite the high number of
surviving busts by roughly contemporary sculptors in Andalusia, stylistic
differences can be discerned. The Dolorosa in the Victoria and Albert
Museum has some distinctive features: the morose downward glance, the
aquiline nose, heavy-lidded eyes and full lips. These all suggest the work
is by Jose de Mora (1642—1724), Pedro de Mena’s younger contemporary,
and also active in Granada. An analogous example by Jose de Mora is a
Virgin and pendant bust of Christ in a private collection in Salamanca.4*
These closely similar versions of busts of the sorrowing Virgin are
highly worked images made by independent sculptors, all successfully
working in or around Granada at about the same time, the second half of
the seventeenth century and the early eighteenth century. Admittedly the
 Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 57

subjects were standard icons, but they were codified by the artists
concerned at the same time and in the same place. They are not identical,
but contemporary variants of the same type. Although it is possible to
distinguish different pieces stylistically, individual artists were producing
repeated images, such as the sixteen surviving pieces associated with
Pedro de Mena. Perhaps the considerable craftsmanship that went into
the busts — which was clearly a continuing part of a thriving vernacular
tradition of polychromed wood sculpture - was also a way of suggesting
the devotional care taken by the artist, as well as the amount of money
spent by the individual or institutional patron. The images were rich in
spiritual meaning and power. When a full-length Soledad figure by Jose
de Mora was installed in the Church of St Anne in Granada in 1671, a
contemporary chronicler recorded that it was taken there at midnight,
accompanied by a congregation of the devout holding torches, and that
on this journey to the church the image performed a miracle, bringing
back to health a woman gravely ill, as it passed by her house.43

IMAGES OF THE MIRACULOUSLY PRESERVED

ST FRANCIS OF ASSISI

A fourth type of reproduction can be distinguished in Spanish sculpture:

the repetition of a miraculous image of a saint. One of the most
renowned of such images was the figure of St Francis of Assisi in the form
of a resurrected corpse, illustrating the legend of the miraculous
preservation of his body over two centuries after his death. According
to the legend, the saint was found standing up with open eyes gazing up
to Heaven when his tomb in Assisi was opened by Nicholas V in 1449.44
The event was first depicted in paintings and sculpture in the early
seventeenth century,45 having been popularized in Spain by a number of
publications of the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century,
such as Pedro de Ribadeneira’s Flos Sanctorum o Libro de las Vidas de
los Santos (Flower of Saints or Book of the Lives of the Saints), first
published in Madrid in 1599.46 The first sculpted interpretations of the
subject seem to have been produced by Gregorio Fernandez (c. 1576-
1636); one, which had been dated to not later than i6zo, is in the Royal
Convent of the Discalced Nuns (Monasterio de las Descalzas Reales) in
Valladolid.47 This simple image, just over a metre high, is likely to have
been the first depiction of this subject, the sallow face and uplifted eyes
ringed in shadow reflecting the legend of the saint’s life in death. The
visible hands just reveal one of the stigmata, a detail that came to be
typical of the Castilian interpretations of the subject later on in the
58 MARJORIE TRUSTED

(left) Pedro de Mena, St Francis, 1663, painted wood. Toledo Cathedral.

(right) Anonymous, after Pedro de Mena, St Francis, c. 1720-40, painted wood.

Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

century. It is also an early instance of a free-standing statue of a saint as a

devotional image, rather than an element in an altarpiece; this type of
figure was to become widespread in Spain through the work of Alonso
Cano later on in the century. Fernandez’s figure almost certainly predates
the three paintings of the same subject by Francisco de Zurbaran (1598-
1664), which have been convincingly dated to about 1640-5.48 The image
of the resurrected St Francis became more widely known following the
two autograph sculptures of the subject produced by Pedro de Mena, one
 Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 59

a relief for the choir-stalls in Malaga, dating from 1658 to 1662, and the
other the figure in Toledo Cathedral, executed in 1663.49 The Toledo
figure in particular was widely influential and must itself have been partly
based on Fernandez’s figure of over forty years before, although the
hands are not visible and the cowl is deeper. Both it and the relief from
Malaga, which also came to be usfed as a model for free-standing figures
by other sculptors,50 became exceedingly popular sources, and they were
adapted for sculptures all over Castile and Andalusia for the next century
and more.
The many versions of the Toledo figure of St Francis superficially form
a coherent stylistic group and have generally been dated to the
seventeenth century, roughly contemporary with the original that
inspired them.51 However, when examined more closely, their styles
can be distinguished one from another, and it is clear that they are not
simply replicas, but must be called variants. While they can virtually all
be traced back to one of the two types created by Pedro de Mena, each
exhibits differences from the others to a greater or lesser extent, in scale,
facial expression and the fall of folds of the drapery. Few are either
inscribed or dated, but they are technically analogous to the figure in
Toledo by Pedro de Mena. Often only a patient analysis of the style
suggests a date, although sometimes this can only be approximate, owing
to lack of documentary or other evidence. Two exceptions to this are a
figure by Fernando Ortiz of Malaga in the National Museum of
Sculpture, Valladolid, signed and dated 1738,52 and an anonymous one in
the Convent of St Clare, Medina de Rioseco, Valladolid, dated 1732.53
The subject continued to be popular into the nineteenth century; at least
two versions are known to date from that time.54
One example of an eighteenth-century variant is in the Victoria and
Albert Museum;55 it is close iconographically to the autograph piece in
Toledo, although it is only half the size. It was acquired for the Museum
by the curator, John Charles Robinson, in Madrid in 1865. He believed
the figure in Toledo to be by Cano (as did many of his contemporaries),
and called the piece acquired by the Museum a ‘contemporary repetition
of a very famous statuette by Alonso Cano, preserved in the sacristy of
the Cathedral of Toledo’.56 When first acquired it was dated to the
seventeenth century and until recently this date has been accepted.
However, the style of the carving, in particular the fall of the drapery,
strongly implies it was made in the first half of the eighteenth century,
perhaps nearly a hundred years after Pedro de Mena’s image in Toledo.
That prototype image has been reduced in size to a more portable and
6o MARJORIE TRUSTED

domestic object. The same legend is being told (the miraculous

posthumous image of the saint), and the statue created by Pedro de
Mena is being deliberately evoked, although not directly copied, since
clearly avoidable changes have been made, as in the fall of the drapery.
This suggests a different meaning for the phrase ‘stylistic influence’ of an
artist, and the chosen portrayal of the saint must be seen as bound up
with the religious and miraculous nature of the image.

It is evident that there can be different motives for reproducing an image

and various gradations in the meaning of'the word ‘reproduction’ or
‘variant’. In the first group of examples, it was argued that the sixteenth-
century artist Juan de Juni’s workshop (and probably a competitor)
reproduced an image using a mould and decorated the finished versions
differently, perhaps to suit different clients who had not commissioned
these works but stipulated certain surface decoration after the terracotta
had been cast. In Luisa Roldan’s work the repeated forms and
compositions seen in different groups imply how she ran her highly
productive workshop, whether or not moulds were actually used. In the
third group, a number of more or less contemporary artists in Granada all
produced similar, although distinctive, versions of the Virgin (and of
Christ); Pedro de Mena in particular, who seems to have perfected the
type, produced a whose series of closely similar works on this theme. This
no doubt fulfilled the demand for sacred images in Spain and reflected the
piety prevalent throughout the peninsula at this time. In the last group,
two particularly striking and closely related images of the miraculously
preserved body of St Francis by Pedro de Mena, in Malaga and Toledo
respectively, as well as the earlier figure by Gregorio Fernandez, were used
and adapted by large numbers of artists for up to two hundred years after
their creation. Like the third group of examples, the nature and intensity
of religious devotion must have been one of the main reasons for these
repeated forms.
 The Ivory Multiplied: Small-scale
Sculpture and its Reproductions
in the Eighteenth Century
MALCOLM BAKER

Since the publication of Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny’s Taste and
the Antique, the role played by three-dimensional reproductions of small-
scale sculptures in disseminating the antique sculptural canon has become
a commonplace within histories of art.1 Various studies of specific
sculptors or centres of sculptural production have revealed how such
sculptural reductions or multiple reproductions served to make more
widely known both the works and the names of various Italian sculptors.1
The new attention being given to the sculptural reproduction comes at a
time when postmodern questioning of the notion of authorship has
prompted a reconsideration of the relationship between the original, the
multiple and the copy, and the very legitimacy of these terms.3 These two
developments provide a framework for the discussion here of the
reproduction of small-scale sculpture in the eighteenth century. By
examining reproductions of northern European sculpture executed on a
small scale in ivory — a class of art production that has been virtually
ignored in the mainstream of art-historical literature — this essay attempts
to investigate ways in which sculptural reproduction could sometimes
operate differently from the practices used for the copying of the antique
or Italian Renaissance sculptural canon and looks at the implications of
this for our understanding of originals, copies and authorship.
From the sixteenth century onwards the repertory of antique and
modern figure sculpture that comprised the canon for successive
generations of artists and connoissuers was disseminated not only
through prints and plaster casts but also through the small bronze.
Forming an essential component of any courtly collection, and by the
eighteenth century figuring increasingly frequently as a decorative feature
of the bourgeois interior, the bronze statuette after the Apollo Belvedere
or Giambologna’s Mercury was made widely available in casts by
6z MALCOLM BAKER

The Fitzwilliam Coin Cabinet. Early eighteenth century with late eighteenth century additions
and a bronze "Venus after Giambologna. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

Soldani around 1700 or Zoffoli some eighty years later.4 In some cases
the compositions reproduced originated as small-scale bronzes and were
from the start intended for multiple reproduction in bronze; this was
certainly the case, for example, with Giambologna’s figure of
Architecture, a version of which (translated into a Venus) is placed on
the top of the Fitzwilliam medal cabinet in the Ashmolean Museum,
Oxford.5 In many instances, however, such bronzes made available
sculptures that were originally executed in marble on a far larger scale; in
these cases, the multiple reproductions served as both reductions and
substitutes. The role that such reductions played in both providing
models for artists in northern Europe and representing a canon of
classical and Italianate visual values is a familiar one.
The Ashmolean Venus may at first sight seem to carry many of the
associations and ambiguities of the small-scale sculptural reproduction. A
version of rather later date after a composition by a major figure in
European sculpture, it is here used decoratively, though prominently, so
that we are unsure whether to view it as an independent sculpture or an
 Sculpture and its Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century 63

ornamental part of a sumptuous but nonetheless functional artefact.

Similarly ambiguous is its status in relation to its author, for, while being
highly finished, this piece is probably an early eighteenth-century cast of a
seventeenth-century invention. Nonetheless, like many sculptural repro¬
ductions in bronze, this is not a reduction of a larger composition
originally executed in another material but a replica of an invention
intended from the start to be reproduced on this scale and in this material.
While making more widely known the masterpieces of European
sculpture, and celebrating and perpetuating the reputations of those who
invented them, the small-scale sculptural reproduction also made it
possible for such images to be used decoratively and appropriated in
ways that diminished the status of both the artist and the original work.
An early eighteenth-century cast by Soldani of a Giambologna figure
could be used as an ornamental addition to a piece of furniture, as in the
(albeit rather grand) case of the Fitzwilliam cabinet or that of the models
that were taken over from the Soldani workshop by the Doccia factory
and used to reproduce the same figures in porcelain in the mid-eighteenth
century.6 Although the Doccia inventory of the models in many cases
records the names of the sculptors, these names were associated with the
porcelain versions that resulted. A similar sequence of reproduction and
adaptation, through which a highly esteemed sculpture becomes a
decorative artefact, may be seen in the multiple production, in different
sizes, of Canova’s Italian Venus that are to be found in almost every
garden centre, both subject and artist unacknowledged.
While this diminution of meaning and status by the appropriation of
sculptural compositions is sometimes discernible in the reproduction of
Italian sculpture, the dissemination of most later reductions of works by
Michelangelo or Giambologna served to sustain and reinforce their
canonical status. Unsurprisingly, the majority of studies of this process
has been concerned with the reproduction of antique sculpture or Italian
Renaissance sculpture and focused more on the dissemination and
reworking of this canon, rather than its disintegration through decorative
reappropriation. Far less well known, however, are either the works of
small-scale sculpture produced in materials other than bronze north of the
Alps or the ways in which such works were themselves appropriated by
reproduction. While perhaps a less central and less significant narrative
within histories of art, this far less familiar set of interconnections is
worth examining, not least because it throws into relief the sequence from
large-scale ‘masterpiece’ to small-scale substitute and provides an
alternative model for thinking about sculpture and its reproductions.
64 MALCOLM BAKER

During the seventeenth century, small-scale sculpture in ivory and

boxwood - since then given the generic description of Kleinplastik,
unsatisfactorily translated as ‘small-scale sculpture’ — occupied a
significant place in the Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer, or ‘cabinet of
curiosities’.7 In the collection of the Grand Duke of Tuscany in the
Palazzo Pitti, figurative works in ivory by sculptors better known for their
larger figures in marble or stone, such as Balthasar Permoser, or sculptors
specializing in ivory-carving, such as Francis van Bossuit, were placed
alongside elaborately turned standing cups, one at least turned on the
lathe by the Prince Ferdinando himself^8 In 'the north, female nudes in
boxwood by Leonhard Kern, in a distinctively ‘northern’ style, were
prized at the Habsburg court and were illustrated, along with bronzes by
Giambologna and paintings by both Italian and Flemish masters, in Franz
von Stampart and Anton von Prenner’s Podromus of 1735.9 The status
accorded to such works, and to the virtuosity that could be demonstrated
in carving ivory, is evident from the lengthy poem written in 1680 by the
Silesian poet Daniel Casper von Lohenstein about a single ivory tankard,
Matthias Rauchmiller’s elaborately carved vessel encircled by a Rape of
the Sabines, which since 1707 has been in the Liechtenstein collection.10
During the eighteenth century, however, attitudes towards ivory-
carving and Kleinplastik in general began to shift, giving them an
increasingly marginal position when academic norms increasingly
favoured antique and Italianate values and privileged marble as an
appropriate medium for sculpture. Although some ivory figures moved to
the gallery, where they were placed in the company of sculpture in these
materials, most such Kleinplastik lost its prominence with the
dismantling of the Wunderkammer. In France such a shift is registered
in the changing position of the ivory-carver in the Academie Royale de
Peinture. In the 1670s there seems to have been no difficulty in allowing
Pierre Simon Jaillot, a sculptor working exclusively in ivory, to be an
Academicien, even though a dispute with Le Brun led to his expulsion in
1673." No such carvers, however, were admitted in the eighteenth
century and the sculpture to be seen in the Academic’s own rooms, as
described by Nicolas Guerin in 1715, consisted almost exclusively of
larger-scale works in terracotta, plaster and marble.IZ
In Germany ivory-carvers continued to work for court patrons and in
England a few carvers at least enjoyed popularity for their portrait reliefs
of both noble sitters and an increasing number of bourgeois clients.
While some carvers - Antonio Leoni in Diisseldorf, for instance -
remained resident at the same court, many others had itinerant careers of
 Sculpture and its Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century 65

a familiar type. Jacob Dobbermann, for example, was probably trained

in Danzig, then spent some years in England, where he taught in Sir
Godfrey Kneller’s Academy, and eventually moved to the court of the
Landgrave Carl von Hessen in Kassel, where he produced reliefs of
mythological subjects, based on mezzotints by the English engraver John
Smith.13 A similarly varied itinerary was followed by Joachim Henne,
who moved from Amsterdam to the Danish court at Copenhagen, via
Gottorf.14 But this view of ivory-carving as a highly valued court art
should be balanced by consideration of the production of ivories by
carvers working at Dieppe. While some (such as David Le Marchand)
pursued itinerant careers of the type just described, most of the carvers
were residents, and their main output was of small decorative objects,
frequently depicting religious subjects and intended for devotional use.
Such works were luxury commodities produced for a growing market.
This development of consumerism and the strategies of marketing and
production that it involved have been much discussed recently, as has the
intersection of the history of consumer societies with the history of
culture.15 Situated in this framework the changing pattern evident in the
production of small-scale sculpture and the shifting attitudes towards
this class of sculpture may be viewed rather differently. At this point the
multiple and the reproduction become more significant.
Although the production of decorative ivory-carving from the Dieppe
workshops may be understood as a continuation of a far earlier tradition
of large-scale manufacture of relatively low-priced devotional images, it
may also be seen in terms of a growing demand for luxury objects from a
wider range of consumers with modest but increasing wealth. In this
market novelty was used to stimulate consumption. This meant not only
new designs but also new materials, including porcelain, which was to
prove highly attractive to this growing range of consumers. During the
period when sculpture in marble or bronze was increasingly privileged in
the academy and in public spaces devoted to high art that reflected
academic ideals, small-scale sculpture in ivory or boxwood was being
supplanted by the porcelain figure or group. Although not necessarily less
expensive than the carved ivory, the porcelain compositions were made
by a process that involved moulds and allowed variations to be
introduced in the assembling of the various component parts. Adore
significantly, this process of casting with moulds made the production of
multiple versions relatively easy. While of course many compositions
were new inventions by specialist modellers working only for the
porcelain factories, some at least were cast from existing figures in ivory.
66 MALCOLM BAKER

When Permoser’s figures of the Reasons were used in 1778 by the

Fiirstenberg porcelain factory, established in 1753, the ivory originals
were being used as the basis for another form of expensive luxury object,
which retained associations with court and aristocratic culture, rather
than for wares available as multiples in very large numbers to a wider
audience.16 Nonetheless, this process involved not only the erasure of the
artist’s name but also the appropriation of the ivory for decorative
purposes. At about the same date Josiah Wedgwood used wax casts
taken from the portrait reliefs by another ivory-carver, David Le

Carl Gottlieb Schubert, Summer, Fiirstenberger porcelain figurine of 1778,

after an ivory by Balthasar Permoser.
Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig.

Marchand.17 While the subjects in most (but not all) cases remained
significant, the authorship of the originals was again forgotten. More
importantly, despite Wedgwood’s strategy of marketing (and pricing) his
products so that they would seem superior to other Staffordshire
ceramics, these reliefs were manufactured as multiples for consumers ‘of
the middling sort’, even if these buyers were attracted by the much-
vaunted claims that Wedgwood produced works of high quality for the
nobility and gentry. In many ways these pieces were intended to make
reference to antique objects of the sort that had long been considered
collectable; the relationship between the white-figure relief and the
jasperware ground thus recalls the contrast between figure and ground
seen on engraved gems as well as the way in which ivories in England
 Sculpture and its Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century 67

(according to a French visitor in the 1760s) were set against black velvet.
But this relationship between figure and ground also has much in
common with that seen in cheaper, more popular forms of portrait such
as the silhouette.18
The use of ivory in reproductions during this period suggests that
small-scale sculpture suffered af loss of status and significance as it
became appropriated and adapted in other materials that could be
readily reproduced and marketed to a wider range of potential
consumers. While cheap, mass-produced replicas of devotional images
had become commonplace by the late Middle Ages, a distinctive type of
cabinet sculpture, made to be handled and examined closely, was here
being reproduced as a multiple luxury object for a consumer culture.
Implicit in the operation of such processes of reproduction and
translation between media were assumptions about both the associations
and values of particular materials and the procedures of making and
reproducing sculpture. While never cheap, ivory could be differently
valued and its associations were ambivalent. On the one hand, it might
be widely used for knife handles, snuff rasps or dials, yet, on the other,
both the courtly fashion for ivory-turning and the high esteem in which
small-scale carvings had earlier been held in courtly collections still gave
it artistocratic connotations.
Porcelain likewise had courtly associations. Already anticipated by the
isolated attempts to imitate Chinese porcelain for the Medici in the
sixteenth century, the making of porcelain in the West began with the
highly fired stoneware and soft-paste porcelain pioneered by the
alchemist Bottger for Augustus the Strong of Saxony in the second
decade of the eighteenth century. Like the Meissen factory that grew
from this, many of the factories that swiftly followed elsewhere in
Europe were established under direct court patronage and control,
among them Saint-Cloud in France and Capodimonte in Naples. The
light-reflecting qualities of porcelain, its aristocratic associations, the
closely protected secret of its manufacture and the sheer novelty of being
able to produce European compositions in a material hitherto only
imported from the East initially meant that, simply as a medium,
porcelain was especially highly regarded, almost regardless of what the
figures represented or how they were composed. Its distinctive qualities —
whether the nature of the ceramic ‘body’ or the enamelled painted
decoration — continued to be admired, but as it became more familiar
and more widely available, more attention was paid to the qualities of
composition, modelling and decoration.
68 MALCOLM BAKER

The different techniques used in the making of ivories and porcelain

figures also had different, and changing, associations. Underlying the
appeal of the ivory figure in the seventeenth century was the way in
which such carvings illustrated the relationship between the natural and
the man-made, so central a theme in the Wunderkammer. By his
virtuosity in carving the section from an ivory tusk, the carver was
transforming a natural material into art — a process vividly represented
by a carving in Vienna (and illustrated in the Podromus), which consists
of a figure of Abundance carved out of a tusk, the lower part being left
intact.19 Here the virtuosity of the carviqg was more important than the
invention involved in the composition. During the next century,
however, with the reformulation of art theory and a reconfiguration of
the hierarchies articulated in the ‘art cabinet’, this relationship was to be
reversed and the process of carving ivory became less something to be
admired and wondered at in its own right, just as the process of
modelling, as was seen in terracotta, for example, became more highly
valued, the sketch allowing a direct experience of the artist’s invention on
the part of the viewer.10
The other principal process involved in the making of sculpture, along
with modelling and carving, was casting and this was the technique most
commonly involved in the production of multiples and the reproduction
of carved or modelled figures. For early eighteenth-century viewers of
porcelain figures, the intrinsic qualities of the material were emphasized,
while the fact that their production involved casting was largely ignored,
and the status of the porcelain figures as multiples played down. Only
later in the eighteenth century was the reproductive nature of these works
more evident and the potential that casting provided for the large-scale
production of the same composition more openly acknowledged. This
outline of the changing perceptions of the relationships between the
various sculptural processes, between different materials and between the
single work and the multiple provides a framework in which one
particularly intriguing case of the ivory and its reproductions — that of
Francis van Bossuit and his Judith reliefs - may be considered.
Unlike sculptors specializing in Kleinplastik, such as Kern, Henne or
Dobbermann, Francis van Bossuit does not seem to have worked for any
particular court. According to a brief biographical account published in
Matthys Pool’s Art’s Cabinet in 1727, he was born in Brussels and then
spent many years in Italy, returning north to Amsterdam where he died in
1692.11 Although he appears to have worked alongside the young
Balthasar Permoser in the circle of artists associated with the Florentine
 Sculpture and its Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century 69

Academy in Rome in the 1670s, the works thought to have been executed
by him during this period have been attributed largely on stylistic
grounds.zz A reasonably coherent and detailed view of his later produc¬
tion, most of it probably from his Amsterdam period, may be formed
from both a substantial number of surviving pieces that correspond to
ivories shown in prints published'in Pool’s book and others that may be
associated with these through their composition and facture.
Although some of the works illustrated by Pool were in terracotta and
boxwood, the majority were executed in ivory, many of them in low
relief. Some are of biblical or mythological subjects but the largest
number consists of half-length reliefs of single figures such as David or
Cleopatra. Images of famous women figure particularly prominently.
Drawing on a long-established tradition of series of donne famosi, these
reliefs frequently employ similar formats, based on painted half-lengths
of the types produced by Guido Reni. Whereas the history subjects are
almost always unique, these half-length reliefs, though equally finely
carved, are closely related to each other, so that poses used for Cleopatra
reappear in images of, for example, Flora and Judith. Together they
suggest that Bossuit was working and reworking formulae so as to
produce a distinctive class of small-scale sculpture for which there was
apparently a continuing demand.
None of Bossuit’s female subjects seems to have been more popular
than that of Judith with the Head of Holofernes and no fewer than five
different variants may be plausibly attributed to him.Z3 Each is distinct,
indicating that, even when there was a demand for a particular subject,
Bossuit was not meeting this by producing multiple versions. A range of
reproductions and adaptations in various materials were, however, made
after one of the Judith reliefs, apparently in the early eighteenth century
and so after the sculptor’s death. The ivory reproduced in this way, now
in Edinburgh, is characteristic of Bossuit’s work not only in its
composition but also above all in the way in which the figure is carved
in low relief, with the delicately carved, fluttering draperies apparently
merging with the ground in a series of subtly judged gradations of plane.
In marked contrast with the reliefs by most of his contemporaries, with
their sharply carved edges and deep undercutting, Bossuit s work has a
softness that prompted the author of the biographical sketch in the 1728
book to note admiringly that ‘he by his Ingenious, & free manner, of
manageing the Hard Ivory, Could work upon it as if it were wax .
No fewer than five of the copies based on the Edinburgh Judith are in
ivory, two - in Schwerin and Strasbourg - bearing initials probably to be
70 MALCOLM BAKER

(right) Paul Heermann (after Francis van Bossuit), Judith with the Head of Holofernes, c. 1720,
ivory. Staatliches Museum, Schwerin.

(left) C.B. Rauschner (after Francis van Bossuit), Judith with the Head of Holof ernes, c. 1750,
wax. Herzog-Anton-Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig.

(right) Judith with the Head of Holof ernes, c. 1714, Bottger stoneware, Kunstgewerbemuseum,
Berlin.
 Sculpture and its Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century 71

identified with the Dresden sculptor Paul Heermann, who may have
carved two of the others/4 Two further versions — in Hanover and
Braunschweig — are in wax. But the largest number of replicas - six of
which are known - are in Bottger stoneware, the immediate precursor of
the porcelain produced at Meissen. Together these form an unusually
large group of reproductions. What was the relationship between them
and what can be said about the circumstances of their production, the
status of the versions in different materials and the way in which these
were viewed in the early eighteenth century?
Comparison of the Edinburgh ivory with one of the Bottger stoneware
versions establishes that the ceramic versions were produced from a
mould taken directly from this relief by Bossuit. Since the other sources
used by Bottger were available locally, it can be assumed that the
Edinburgh ivory too was in Dresden around 1712.Z5 It may also have
been accessible there to Paul Heermann, an assistant of Permoser and a
prolific ivory-carver in his own right, who probably carved four of the
other ivory versions of the Judith. Here the reproductions were not
strictly speaking multiples for they were not only individually carved,
rather than cast, but also show considerable small differences. While
copying Bossuit’s original and disseminating the image in a way that the
earlier carver did not do himself, these carved reliefs remain variants
rather multiple reproductions.
By contrast, the ceramic versions were made with moulds,
reproducing, with an overall shrinkage and the loss of subtlety in the
details, the dimensions of the original. The most prominent part of the
relief - the head - had in each case to be reworked a little. Far more of a
multiple reproduction than Heermann’s ivories, each of the Bottger
reliefs involved a loss of the original’s features through the process of
casting, rather than its alteration because it was being copied by a
different carver. This may seem unsurprising, given the role of casting in
the reproduction of sculpture, but at this point an ambiguity arises that
challenges our reading of the sequences outlined here, whether from
ivory to ivory, from ivory to ceramic or from carving to casting.
As well as varying certain features, such as the set of the head, the
pommel of the sword or the decoration of the diadem, Heermann’s ivory
versions also, and perhaps significantly, omit particular details - the
lower fold of the wihd-blown headdress, for instance - that had been lost
in the casting of the Bottger reliefs. Such details are clearly missing from
some of the apparently later ivory versions, such as that in Vienna, but
their omission in the Heermann ivories hints at the possibility that all the
72 MALCOLM BAKER

ivories were based not on Bossuit’6 original relief but on the ceramic
versions or plaster casts after the ivory, rather as paintings drew on prints
after paintings.
The same process may have been involved in the production of the two
waxes. Here, however, the technique of casting and moulds could be
employed. This is most evident in the Hanover wax, which reproduces
not only the precise details of the folds on ceramic relief but also the form
of the ledge below the figure. The casting process was probably also used
by Rauschner when he made the Braunschweig version. But in this case
Bossuit’s composition, via the ceramic v version, was embellished with
many additional decorative details and set against a painted background
and so translated into a far more pictorial composition.
Whatever the relationship between Bossuit’s reliefs, the Bottger
versions, the waxes and the various ivories by Heermann and others
may be, the process of dissemination of the image seems to have involved
a diminution, a loss of significance, at least as far as authorship of the
original was concerned. The presence of Heermann’s initials on two of
the ivories of course represent a claim to authorship (if not to invention)
and an indication that these reliefs were not intended to be regarded as
inferior reproductions because the sculptor (like numerous other artists)
had appropriated an earlier composition. (His early eighteenth-century
patrons may not indeed have been aware of this.) In the case of
Rauschner’s wax, Bossuit’s original composition has likewise been
reworked for the ends of another sculptor and given a distinctive quality.
However, despite the claim made by the presence of the artist’s initials,
Heermann’s ivories were closely similar versions based on an original
that was conceived as a single and unique work. Here, and even more so
in the Bottger versions, the dissemination of Bossuit’s relief required
abandoning a connection with his name and the use of his composition
for multiple reproduction, albeit in forms and materials that still enjoyed
high status as luxury decorative objects.
A rather different perspective on the reproduction of Bossuit’s
sculptures is, however, offered by the way in which they are were
disseminated not by sculptural but by graphic reproduction. Reproduced
in two dimensions in the book of prints by Pool, published in Amsterdam
in 1727, Bossuit’s reliefs are represented and ‘framed’ in a way that
encouraged them, as well as Bossuit’s standing as an artist, to be read in a
very different way.
The book was published with two title-pages, one in French and the
other in Dutch and English, the latter reading Statue’s or Art’s Cabinet,
 Sculpture and its Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century 73

Containing the Ivory works of that famous Statuary Francis van

Bossuit, and Curiously Ingraven in Copper, According to the draught of
Barent Graat. By Matthew Pool. Dedicated to the patrician Amsterdam
collector Jerome Tonnemans, it consists of 107 single-sided pages,
printed from engraved plates, beginning with the dedication to
Tonnemans, followed by portraits of Bossuit and Graat and short
accounts of both of them in the three languages. The rest of the volume
is made up of no fewer than 103 views of Bossuit’s sculptures, mainly
ivory figures and reliefs but with some terracottas and boxwoods. Many
of these pieces are shown from two or more different viewpoints, some
images being juxtaposed on the same page but many occupying separate
sheets. Apparently conceived by the engraver Pool who made use of the
drawings of his father-in-law, Graat, this publication, its origins and
intended audience are intriguingly ambiguous. Its production in the late
1720s, however, would appear to be linked to the esteem in which
Bossuit’s work was held in Amsterdam at this date, registered by the
descriptions in a series of auction sale catalogues as well as by the prices
they fetched. While Pool’s publication seems to celebrate Graat almost
as much as Bossuit, the reader/viewer is left in no doubt as to Bossuit’s
achievement and reputation.26
But although the distinctive qualities of Bossuit’s ivories may be
stressed in the text, the engravings prompt a rather different mode of
viewing. Reliefs inevitably lose their sculptural features and seem almost
to revert to the types of painting that formed Bossuit’s starting point.
More tellingly, single figures are placed among clouds and are shown
from below so that they resemble details of ceiling paintings in the
manner of Gerard de Lairesse, on whom Graat based his own style. The
three-dimensionality of the original is consistently denied. In this way,
Bossuit is praised in the text for his skill in modelling and carving but the
engravings that follow present his compositions in pictorial, rather than
sculptural, terms.
The reproduction of the Judith reliefs in ivory, wax and ceramics
suggests the translation of a type of sculpture that had been prominent in
the Wunderkammer into a decorative luxury commodity that could be
made available in replicas or multiple versions. In Pool’s prints, by
contrast, these small-scale reliefs are reproduced in a medium that not
only obscures - evert denies - the size of the originals but also by giving
them backgrounds transforms the composition into images that are more
pictorial than their reproduction in prints need be. Far from being made
into decorative objects, they are presented here, as the title page alone
74 MALCOLM BAKER

Engraving of a figure by Francis van Bossuit, from Matthys Pool,

Beelsnijders Kunstcabinet (Amsterdam, 172.7).

affirms, as art, with the artist’s name emphasized and celebrated. This
same trajectory may be followed if Bossuit’s works are tracked through
sale catalogues of around 1700, a few early references locating them
among rarities of various sorts within the ‘cabinet of curiosities’,
followed by sales of the late 17ZOS where they are classified along with
painting and sculpture in marble.
Perhaps ironically, Pool’s book illustrates many reliefs of half-length
female figures, including several Judiths, but the relief that was most
often reproduced in ivory, wax and ceramic forms is not shown, perhaps
because it was already in Dresden or at least not available in Amsterdam
for Graat to draw. Further evidence about the later reception of Bossuit’s
work in the mid-eighteenth century, however, involves once again this
particular composition, albeit in a modified form. This version was
evidently based ultimately on the Edinburgh relief but lacks the fluttering
drapery to the right of the head and shows Holofernes’ head turned in a
different direction. It is framed, along with other ivory reliefs, and placed
in the centre of the left door of a cabinet made for Horace Walpole about
I743- The context in which it is placed and Walpole’s own description,
Sculpture and its Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century 75

The Walpole Cabinet, with an ivory of ]udith after Francis van Bossuit, 1743.
76 MALCOLM BAKER

suggest that the reproduction of Bossuif’s Judith now enjoyed a new

interpretation.
The cabinet was made to contain Walpole’s collection of English
miniatures, including examples by Holbein and Isaac Oliver.28 Placed
centrally in the Tribuna at Strawberry Hill, it housed those works that,
for Walpole, formed an important stage in the development of art in
England, which he was later to document and celebrate in his Anecdotes
of Painting in England. The iconography of the exterior was intended to
complement the contents by representing both the canonical works of
antique sculpture and the figures of falladio, Duquesnoy and Inigo
Jones, whose works were to form a touchstone and inspiration for
English artists of his own period. The former were shown by ivory reliefs
after the antique by Pozzo and the latter by reductions by the ivory-
carver Verskovis after figures by Michael Rysbrack. In this way the
imagery of the exterior established the standards by which the
achievements of English art contained within could be judged and
would be seen to equal. But how was the reproduction of Bossuit’s Judith
to be accommodated within this narrative of art in England? As far as
Walpole was concerned, this was not a work by (or after) Bossuit but
rather an image of ‘Herodias with the head of the Baptist, by Gibbons’,
the Anglo-Flemish seventeenth-century sculptor Grinling Gibbons being
included in Anecdotes of Painting. It was thus presented here as a work
of modern English sculpture, which could be placed alongside the
reproduction of a highly esteemed work of antique sculpture, the relief
from the Capitoline that occupies the centre of the other door.
In this case a reproduction has been invested with the authority of an
original, and given an ‘author-effect’ in the way that happened when
copies were regarded as originals in the early literature of connoisseur-
ship.29 Nevertheless, although for Walpole the Judith relief was not a
reproduction, it was included as part of a sculptural ensemble that
consisted otherwise of reproductions of various types. While some of the
reliefs after the antique were identified as by Pozzo, most were for
Walpole by an unknown sculptor and significant more as reduced copies
of celebrated antique marbles. The originals on which the figures of
Jones, Rubens and Palladio were based, on the other hand, were of
course familiar to Walpole as being by Rysbrack, who was himself
following drawings by William Kent who may indeed have designed the
cabinet itself for Walpole. Far from being anonymous reductions of
works whose significance was lost, these ivory versions, by a carver
whom Walpole included in the Anecdotes, celebrate not only those artists
 Sculpture and its Reproductions in the Eighteenth Century 77

that they represent but also the sculptor who executed the large-scale
originals.
The use on the Walpole cabinet of these various types of ivory
reproduction, including a reproduction (albeit unrecognized) of an earlier
ivory, is quite unlike the way in which not only the bronze Menus but
also ivories were used as an addifion to the Fitzwilliam Coin Cabinet.
Here, probably at the same time as the bronze was added to the cabinet
proper, a stand was made to support it and this was, like the Walpole
cabinet, decorated with ivory reliefs, in this case representing heads of
the Caesars. Here, however, neither the authorship of the ivories
themselves nor the sources from which they were derived seems to have
been of any concern; the images themselves were evidently regarded not
as reproductions of antique works but rather as decorative features
appropriate for such a piece of furniture because of their subjects.
Although the sculptural reproduction (and in particular the ivory
reproduction) was being used in rather different ways in these two cases,
neither the Walpole cabinet nor the Fitzwilliam cabinet shows the small-
scale sculpture and its reproductions employed wholly decoratively or
without regard to subject or sculptural interest. By the late eighteenth
century, however, ivory reliefs were being reproduced in forms and
materials that effaced many, if not most, of the characteristics of the
originals and obscured rather than celebrated the names and reputations
of the authors of these originals. Here we see what Rosalind Krauss has
described as the ‘atomization of the author into a social ... practice in
which neither authorship nor originality have any function’.30 When in
the 1770s James Tassie developed his technique of producing glass paste
medallions, he not only made use of ivory reliefs by Le Marchand, as did
his associate Wedgwood, but also he made reliefs that, while having
many of the qualities of ivory, could be cast as multiples.31 Although
there is no evidence to suggest that the reproductions of Le Marchand’s
ivories by either Tassie or Wedgwood were produced on any large scale,
their other compositions were increasingly being made and used to
decorate furniture far less exceptional than either the Walpole or the
Fitzwilliam cabinets. A century after being a highly valued item in the
courtly Wunderkammer, the ivory had become available in a reproduced
form to a far wider audience.
The shift in the changing ways of reproducing ivories may also be seen
in the increasing marginalization of small-scale sculpture during this same
period. No longer did this class of sculpture merit a significant place
within the hierarchies or canons of art as these were being formulated to
78 MALCOLM BAKER

accord with academic norms during the eighteenth century. Since most of
these works were by northern, rather than Italian, artists, this process of
marginalization has been further encouraged by the Italianate bias of
most art historiography and the dependence of connoisseurs and
collectors on this. Despite the publication of Pool’s book and, more
importantly, the efforts of Houbraken and Van Gool - Van Mander’s
successors as biographers of Dutch artists — who discuss Graat and
Bossuit, sculptors such as Bossuit had become almost completely
forgotten by the end of the eighteenth century.31 Correspondingly,
reproductions of ivory carvings by sculptors such as Bossuit, along with
those made after other types of work by northern artists, came
increasingly to serve a largely decorative function. If the reproduction
of works by Italian sculptors often helped to celebrate their names and
enhance their reputations by disseminating their inventions, for most
northern artists, and particularly those sculptors of Kleinplastik, the
reproduction of sculpture had very different consequences.
 Naked Authority? Reproducing Antique
Statuary in the English Academy,
from Lely to Haydon
MARTIN POSTLE

The central focus of this essay is the role that the reproduction of
classical statuary played within the academy - from the first studio
academies of the 1670s to the school set up by Benjamin Robert Haydon
in 1815 in opposition to the Royal Academy of Arts. During that period
the reproduction of three-dimensional antique statuary in two-
dimensional form was regarded as the bedrock of academic training.
However, the authority of antique statuary within the academic
framework, and the various processes of reproduction, gave rise to a
series of conflicts. In the first instance, as we shall see most particularly
with the example of William Hogarth, the academic reproduction of
antique statuary resulted in arguments over the relative merits of
‘original’ antique statues and casts made from them. Second, there arose
debates over the value of the inanimate classical statue versus the living
model, and the authority of the antique as an embodiment of the ‘ideal’
as against the empirical testimony offered by anatomists. As the century
progressed further, conflicts arose concerning the relative status of
antique statuary, as the authority of more traditional models was chal¬
lenged by the appearance of new paradigms for academic reproduction -
notably the Greek sculptures from the Parthenon. Objections to the
veracity of certain antique sculptures, in turn, resulted in the re-
evaluation of methods and modes of reproduction, as artists realized that
statues that they had been taught to reproduce and to revere were
themselves mere reproductions of lost originals.

REPRODUCT I C\N OF THE ANTIQUE IN THE RENAISSANCE

During the Renaissance antique statuary recovered from the classical

ruins of Rome, Florence, Naples and elsewhere assumed a central role in
the cultural life of Western Europe. These statues included, notably, the
8o MARTIN POSTLE

Apollo Belvedere, the Venus de’ Medici, the Farnese Hercules and the
Laocodn. As their fame spread, the demand for their replication and
reproduction grew rapidly, and by the end of the sixteenth century copies
proliferated in the form of bronze and lead statuary, plaster casts,
cameos and engravings.1 However, while they proved immensely popular
as decorative features and pointers to fashionable taste, it was the role of
antique sculpture as artistic and philosophical paradigms that under¬
pinned their value as cultural icons. Indeed, from the foundation of the
earliest academies in Rome in the sixteenth century, a nucleus of antique
statues informed the study of the hum^n figure. These statues were
upheld as moral and philosophical exemplars not only for their intrinsic
artistic merits but also because they were perceived as the most absolute
physical manifestation of the abstract concept of ideal beauty/ As a
result, casts taken from these statues were increasingly made available in
academies, Giovanni Battista Armenini recommending in 1586 that art
students should draw regularly from a range of casts, including ‘the
Laocoon, the Hercules, the Apollo, the great Torso, the Venus and the
Nile’.3 However, statues were principally reproduced via prints and
drawings.

REPRODUCTION AND THE ACADEMIC IDEAL

During the seventeenth century the central role played by reproductions

of antique statues within the academic curriculum was enshrined
increasingly in theoretical texts, which sought to assert their primacy
not merely on generalized aesthetic grounds but in terms of their physical
properties. In the Conferences held by the Academie Royale de Peinture
et de Sculpture in Paris during the 1660s the most famous examples of
classical statuary were subjected to close analytical scrutiny.4 Here, the
emphasis on the guiding spirit of the antique was supplanted by precise
delineation. Classical statues were not simply reproduced in tonal
drawings designed to replicate the three-dimensional form in two-
dimensions. Instead they were deliberately reduced to ‘flat plans’, heads
and limbs anatomized and measured in order to produce definitive rules
and regulations.5 In the French academy students were no longer merely
encouraged to study the antique but to defer to its absolute authority.
Indeed, as has been observed, ‘with the ascendancy of the French
academy, the antique came to be regarded as the definitive measure, in
the literal sense of the word, of beauty and perfection’.6
It was in some measure because of the reverence reserved for antique
statuary that the transition from three-dimensional object to two-
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Hay don 81

dimensional representation within the academy became shrouded in an

increasingly elaborate procedure and a certain degree of mystique.
Indeed, from the sixteenth century onwards academic practice centred
not only upon the copying of three-dimensional statuary but also on
drawings and engravings made from them. There were two principal
reasons for copying from two-dimensional reproductions of antique
statuary: the first and most obvious was that the copying of prints
allowed artists who did not have access to statues or casts to study them;
second — and more significant in terms of the academic curriculum —
copying taught students the ‘correct’ way in which to interpret the
antique, in terms of the viewpoint, the treatment of line, tonal values and
the figure’s structure. In the sixteenth century engravings after antique
statuary, such as Antonio Lafreri’s Speculum Romanae Magnificentiae
and Giovanni Battista de’ Cavalieri’s Antiquae Statuae Urbis Romae
were intended primarily as anthologies of the most important classical
works.7 Increasingly, however, they were also incorporated into drawing
manuals, where they served as an essential component in a course of
study.8

REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUE STATUARY IN THE ENGLISH ACADEMY

Some of the earliest English academic drawings of the type promoted in

continental academies are to be found in an album of drawings belonging
to Dulwich College, which contains drawings made from living models
and antique statuary in the studio of Sir Peter Lely.9 Among drawings
after the antique are copies of the Farnese Hercules and the Apollo
Belvedere. Although it was made in the 1670s, the drawing of the Apollo
Belvedere shows the figure as it appeared before the restoration of its
hands by Giovanni Montorsoli in the early 1530s — indicating that it was
not made from the statue or a cast but from an early engraving.10
Similarly, the crude hatching technique employed in the Farnese Hercules
suggests that it replicates a two-dimensional engraving rather than a
statue. Significantly both copy-drawings reproduce the respective statues
in reverse, as is the norm with engraved images.
The replication of drawings and engravings after antique statuary
continued to play an important role in art education in England in the
eighteenth century at Sir Godfrey Kneller’s Academy in Great Queen
Street, the first St Martin’s Lane Academy and Sir James Thornhill’s Free
Academy.11 Among the most influential teachers during this period was
the French artist Louis Cheron, who, before his arrival in England in
1695, had studied at the Academie Royale in Paris and the French
8z MARTIN POSTLE

Anonymous drawing, c. 1673, of the Apollo Belvedere, red chalk on

buff paper, folio ^v. of Dulwich College Album (sketchbook MX xv).
Dulwich College, London.

Academy in Rome. As Ilaria Bignamini has shown, Cheron’s own

drawings of the human figure, which were extensively copied by artists in
the first St Martin’s Lane Academy (which ran from 17Z0 to 1724),
promoted a heroic and standardized rendering of the body, which
ultimately relied on the authority of the antique - as interpreted, notably,
by the Carracci and Raphael.12 While not everyone approved of Cheron’s
drawing style (George Vertue described it as ‘generally heavy’), by
encouraging the replication of classical patterns of authority, he was
instrumental in consolidating within the English academy the educational
framework established by the French in Paris and Rome the previous
century.13

ART VERSUS NATURE: WILLIAM HOGARTH AND THE

REPRODUCTION OF THE ANTIQUE

Cheron’s standardized, heroic representation of the human form was not

merely a stylistic preference. It related ultimately to modes of patronage
and the art market in Europe, where there was a demand for large-scale
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Hay don 83

historical and decorative schemes. The social, religious and economic

conditions in England differed from those found in Catholic France or
Italy. In England the portrait predominated; an art form which did not
require close attention to the physical ideal enshrined in the antique. It
was a reality recognized by William Hogarth, who took control of the
reins of the second St Martin’s Lane Academy in 1735. Hogarth was also
the first English artist to mount a challenge to the paradigmatic status of
the antique, and its reproduction, within the academy.
Hogarth had studied under Cheron at the first St Martin’s Lane
Academy. Yet he recoiled from Cheron’s promotion of Continental
models and patterns, and his own avowed preference for the face of a
‘blooming young girl of fifteen’ to the ‘stony features of a venus’ was in
direct opposition to prevailing tenets.14 Although he was not at heart a
xenophobe, Hogarth distrusted the high premium placed on studying in
Italy, claiming that ‘going to study abroad is an errant farce and more
likely to confound a true genious [sic] than to improve him’.15 Hogarth
was also dismissive of the need to make two-dimensional reproductions
from original antique statuary, asserting that for practical study purposes
small-scale casts were preferable to the originals upon which they were
based:

the little casts of the gladiator the Laocoon or the venus etc if true copies - are
still better than the large as the parts are exactly the same [—] the eye [can]
comprehend them with most ease and they are more handy to place and turn
about.16

Ultimately, however, he challenged the very need to make any sort of

reproduction from antique statuary, both in his theoretical writings and
in his conduct at the St Martin’s Lane Academy. In the first plate of his
Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753, Hogarth depicted the statuary
yard of John Cheere, who made a good living by supplying the English
market with casts after the antique.17 Included in Hogarth’s engraving
were casts of the Farnese Hercules, the Belvedere Antinous, the Venus de’
Medici and the Belvedere Torso. The engraving was also an allusion to
the statuary yard of the classical sculptor Clito, where Socrates was in the
habit of expounding his ideas on beauty.18 Around the central image is a
series of visual references to Hogarth’s own theories on ‘beauty’, which
cumulatively demonstrate his contempt for the dry, formulaic approach
to the figure of post-Renaissance treatises, which propounded propor¬
tional systems based on detailed analysis of antique forms. Hogarth s
antipathy towards according a pedagogical role to the antique was
84 MARTIN POSTLE

extreme. Nor was he the only English artist of his time who questioned
the educational value of making reproductions from antique statuary.
By the 1740s a number of those English artists who made the
pilgrimage to Italy produced their own copy-drawings of antique
statuary, the most notable being Richard Dalton’s series of red chalk
drawings of c. 1741—2, which followed the lead provided by Pompeo
Batoni’s ‘paper museum’ of drawings commissioned by an English
connoisseur during the late 1720s.19 However, the very act of copying
classical statues - from either full-sized figures or reduced reproductions
- caused a greater awareness of their limitations as models. Giles Hussey
(1710-88), who was in Italy between 1730 and 1737, made several
drawings from the antique, including at least one of the Apollo Belvedere
made with the aid of a camera obscura.zo In 1745, Hussey, who had a
close interest in academic theory, stated that he

found and discovered the Antient [sic] grecian Sculptors had no Rule or certain
regular proportions for human statue, parts, nor the whole-statue, this he said he
discovered at Rome and demonstrated the fact ... The Antique statue of
Herculus - the Laocoon and his two sons, and the Gladiator tho’ the most
perfect statue of all, yet he thinks faulty, in proportions and in the possition, and
muscles.2,1

The scepticism expressed by Hogarth and Hussey over the physical

shortcomings of the antique can be compared with the affirmative
approach of the sculptor Michael Rysbrack, who in 1744 set out to
create his own classical statue of Hercules for Henry Hoare’s ‘Temple
of Hercules’ at Stourhead, Wiltshire. According to Vertue, Rysbrack
selected the Farnese Hercules as ‘his rule of proportion — but to make
his Model standing but in a different attitude & the limbs otherways
disposed’. Once he had worked out the general proportions of the figure
Rysbrack ‘had the bodies of several other men stood naked before him
in order to form the body, Limbs, arms legs &c to chuse the most
beautyfull, or the most perfect parts’.zz The process adopted by
Rysbrack was a conscious emulation of the practice of Zeuxis, the
Greek artist who according to Pliny recreated the figure of Helen from
the bodies of the five most beautiful women in the city of Crotona, thus
producing a concrete affirmation of Plato’s abstract concept of the
Ideal.
Of course, Rysbrack’s Hercules does not form an exact parallel with
Zeuxis’ figure of Helen, since he was responsible merely for the
adaptation rather than the actual creation of an ideal type. Even so, it set
an important precedent in English academic circles, for although it drew
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Hay don 85

Michael Rysbrack, Hercules (study for the Hercules in the Stourhead Pantheon),
signed and dated ‘Mich. Rysbrack 1744’, terracotta.
Stourhead, Wiltshire.

inspiration from the Farnese Hercules, it was not a mere reproduction or,
indeed, an imitation reliant on a superimposed series of quasi-scientific
proportions. It deferred to the antique as a paradigm for heroic figurative
statuary, while at the same time giving rein to the individual creative
impulse of the artist. It was a balance that few artists of Rysbrack’s
generation were able to achieve. Indeed, by the end of the 1740s, with the
increasing isolation of Hogarth from his fellow members of the
Academy, the pendulum began to swing much more firmly in the
direction of the antique as artists attempted to establish a more rigorous
and didactic system of art education.

WILLIAM SHIPLEY AND THE DUKE OF RICHMOND’S

SCULPTURE GALLERY

By the mid-1750^ Hogarth was increasingly isolated from the member¬

ship of the St Martin’s Lane Academy, most of whom wished to establish
a full-blown academy along Continental lines. However, it was not from
within St Martin’s Lane that the first initiative came, but from an obscure
86 MARTIN POSTLE

Northamptonshire drawing master named1 William Shipley. In 1754

Shipley moved from Northampton to London, where he opened a
drawing school. By the mid-eighteenth century there was a plethora of
drawing masters educating sons and daughters of the gentry and
aristocracy. There was also a host of drawing manuals offering
correspondence courses in drawing, including the copying of antique
statuary.Z3 Shipley, however, was principally concerned with the
education of young people who aspired to work as professionals and
who were shortly to embark on art-related apprenticeships. His con¬
fessed aim was not to train more artist*; but to train designers and
craftsmen, to assist ‘such manufactures as require Fancy and Ornament,
and for which the knowledge of Drawing is absolutely necessary’.24
Students drew and copied from prints after the antique, after Old Master
paintings and from sculpture, beginning with details - ears, nose, mouth
— and then progressing towards the whole figure.
In addition to his own school, in 1755 Shipley also advertised the
‘Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’
through a competition for ‘the best Drawings, by Boys and Girls, under
the age of 14 years, and Proof of their abilities, on or before the 15 Jan.
1755’. The Royal Society of Arts - as it is now called - exists today,
housed in the Adelphi, to which it moved in 1774. Shipley’s own school
was closely connected to the Society of Arts, his students competing for
annual prizes in drawing offered there. From the beginning, the two-
dimensional reproduction of antique statuary formed the climax of the
curriculum at Shipley’s School, even though resources were at first
limited. However, in the spring of 1758, Shipley’s pupils were given
access to the Duke of Richmond’s sculpture gallery in Whitehall, where
they were able to make copies of full-scale casts of antique statues rather
than the reduced copies on which they had hitherto relied.
The Duke of Richmond’s sculpture gallery, by bringing artists face to
face with exact replicas of classical statues, played a crucial role in
confirming the reproduction of antique statuary as a key activity within
the English academy. Here, under the tutelage of Joseph Wilton and the
Florentine decorative painter Giovanni Battista Cipriani, students were
taught to produce refined and carefully wrought drawings, which were
then submitted for premiums offered by the Society of Arts. As Benjamin
Ralph observed in 1759, it was hoped that ‘the study of these most exact
copies from antiques may greatly contribute toward giving young
beginners of genius an early taste and idea of beauty and proportion;
which when thoroughly acquired will in time appear in their several
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Haydon 87

HM

William Parry, Borghese Gladiator, c. 1760, black chalk on paper,

premium drawing. Royal Society of Arts, London.

performances’.2-5 A number of prize-winning drawings from the antique,

made at the Duke of Richmond’s sculpture gallery during the late 1750s
and early 1760s, are preserved in the Society of Arts. They include a study
of the Borghese Gladiator by William Parry (1742-91), who was later to
study under Sir Joshua Reynolds. Parry’s drawing, which was awarded a
premium in 1760, is executed in black chalk and employs a firm, close-
knit cross-hatching, typifying the Neo-classical principles adhered to in
the Duke of Richmond’s sculpture gallery.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL ROLE OF REPRODUCTION IN THE ACADEMY

The reproduction of the antique figure within the academy was perceived
as a means of helping the artist to gain an understanding of the idealized
human physique. Reproduction of classical statuary also formed an
aspect of the philosophical investigation of the antique. In 1765 Joseph
Wright exhibited Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight.
The painting depicts three men contemplating a reduced cast of the
Borghese Gladiator, in the presence of a two-dimensional representation
of the statue. David Solkin has suggested that the image may be perceived
within a framework of Lockean epistemology — as the light shed upon the
88 MARTIN POSTLE

Joseph Wright, Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by Candlelight, exhibited

at the Society of Artists, 1765, oil on canvas. Private collection.

object allows sight, ‘and sight in its turn enables enlightenment’.16 The
Gladiator, its reduced copy and the drawing made from it generate
knowledge. Imitation, as Solkin states, ‘becomes the mechanism whereby
individuals learn to pattern themselves after models of perfection in life
and in nature, as well as the arts’.17
The moral and intellectual benefits of reproducing antique statuary,
suggested by Wright’s painting of 1765, were spelt out explicitly the
following decade by Sir Joshua Reynolds. In his third Discourse, given at
the Royal Academy of Arts in 1771, Reynolds stressed that ‘mere
imitation’, the replication of particular specimens of antique statuary, was
not enough. Nor was the Ideal encapsulated in any one classical statue. ‘It
is not’, he stated, ‘in the Hercules, nor in the Gladiator, nor in the Apollo;
but in that form which is taken from them all, and which partakes equally
of the activity of the Gladiator, of the delicacy of the Apollo, and of the
muscular strength of the Hercules’.18 In order to arrive at an under¬
standing of the Ideal - the abstracted ‘central form’ - Reynolds instructed
students that they should make copies of a variety of classical statues,
‘models of that perfect form ... which an artist would prefer as supremely
beautiful, who spent his whole life in that single contemplation’. In
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Haydon 89

Wright’s painting the emphasis had been on the ‘pleasure’ of

contemplation.19 In Reynolds’ Discourse the stress was on the pain
induced by hard labour, industry and discipline. The rewards lay less in
the process than in the results of prolonged study: significantly it was this
ethos that informed the routine of the Royal Academy schools.
'0

THE REPRODUCTION OF ANTIQUE STATUARY

IN THE ROYAL ACADEMY

The Royal Academy of Arts was founded in December 1768. Strict rules
were laid down for study in the Plaister Academy:

There shall be Weekly, set out in the Great Room, One or more Plaister Figures
by the Keeper, for the Students to draw after, and no Student shall presume to
move the said Figures out of the said Places where they have been set by the
Keeper, without his leave first obtained for that Purpose.
When any student hath taken possession of a Place in the Plaister Academy, he
shall not be removed out of it, till the Week in which he hath taken it is expired.
The Plaister Academy, shall be open every Day (Sundays and Vacation times
excepted) from Nine in the Morning till Three in the Afternoon.30

The Plaister Academy, like the Life Class, was an exclusively male
preserve, and although there was no rule forbidding the Academy’s two
female members (Angelica Kauffman and Mary Moser) from studying
there, it was tacitly accepted that they would not avail themselves of the
opportunity.31
In 1770 the Swedish artist, Elias Martin, who was then enrolled as a
student in the schools, exhibited A Picture of the Royal Plaister
Academy, the only known representation of the Cast Room of the Royal
Academy, in its first location - a dingy print warehouse in Pall Mali.31 In
Martin’s painting a small group of young students cluster around a group
of classical casts, including Meleager, the Callipygian Venus, Mercury,
the so-called Cannibal and Michelangelo’s Bacchus. Standing, above and
to the left, is an Academician (known as a ‘Visitor’) whose task it was to
supervise the quality and ‘correctness of the students copies from the
statuary before them. Just discernible to his right, in the shadows, is an
older figure, probably the Keeper of the schools, George Michael Moser.
While Moser was in overall control of the schools, it was the role of the
Visitor to ‘attend the schools by rotation, each a month, to set the figures,
to examine the performances of the students, to advise and instruct them,
to endeavour to form their taste, and turn their attention towards that
branch of the Arts for which they shall seem to have the aptest dis¬
position’.33 As one would expect, the atmosphere is one of quiet industry
90 MARTIN POSTLE

Elias Martin, A Picture of the Royal Plaister Academy, signed and dated 1770, oil on canvas.
Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Stockholm.
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Haydon 91

and obedience, the aura of reverence for the casts stressed by the
dramatic lighting and their attenuated form.
Martin’s Cast Room forms a compelling contrast with Joseph
Wright’s Academy by Lamplight (Yale Center for British Art, Paul
Mellon Collection), painted the previous year. In contrast with the
pedagogic environment of Martin’s painting, which depicts a specific
location, Wright’s imaginary Academy shows a group of young men (as
opposed to boys), unrestrained and at ease, in the presence of a semi-
draped, female classical statue - the Borghese Nymph with a Shelld4 As
Solkin has remarked, ‘this statue, both woman and aesthetic object, acts
as an agent of refinement, as a source of pleasure which elevates and
softens, channelling the passions of the young into love and social
feeling’.35 In other words, the students are not there merely to copy the
statue before them or to make a correct reproduction of it, but to
appreciate its intrinsic beauty.
In 1769 Wright had declined to join the Royal Academy, pinning his
loyalties instead to the more broadly based and ostensibly egalitarian
Society of Artists. Indeed, according to Solkin, Wright’s Academy by
Lamplight was a visual expression of his views on art education and of
his ideology on social relations. And even though Hogarth would no
doubt have disapproved heartily of Wright’s promotion of the antique
figure in the Academy, both artists shared a fundamental belief in the free
association of artists as equals, unlike the students in the Royal Academy
schools who, says Solkin, ‘submit to the discipline of an authority
personified by the teachers and enshrined in the classical masterpieces
that are being commended to their attention’.36 From an academic
viewpoint, the image is subversive, promoting an imaginative response to
the antique, where original and imaginative production is placed before
complacent and obedient reproduction.
The authority of the antique remained absolute during the decades
following the foundation of the Royal Academy. An anonymous painting
of c. 1780-3 (Royal Academy of Arts) shows exactly how the Plaister
Academy was organized following the completion of William Chambers
New Somerset House in 1780.37 Here casts are illuminated by oil-lamps
with large triple reflectors set on high standards. Student s easels are
illuminated by individual oil lamps and reflectors, their work visible to
the Visitor who presides over the activities from a lectern situated by the
entrance. A screen has been erected along the wall behind the Belvedere
Torso - a practice common in Italian academies.38 J.M.W. Turner’s
black-and-red chalk drawing, executed during the mid-i790S, is typical
 MARTIN POSTLE

J.M.W. Turner, Belvedere Torso, mid-i79os, black-and-red chalk on brown paper

heightened with white. Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Haydon 93

of the highly finished reproductions of antique casts produced by

students in supervised sessions at the Academy. Turner, who enrolled as
a student in the schools in December 1789, attended the Plaister Academy
on 137 separate occasions during his studentship.39 From these sessions
only eighteen drawings of casts are known. However, given that it could
take at least a week to produce one drawing, the relative paucity of
studies may relate to the painstaking manner in which they were made
rather than any substantial loss or destruction of material.

ANTIQUE STATUARY VERSUS THE LIVING MODEL

Students could spend as many as seven years copying antique casts in the
Plaister Academy. Inevitably it had a profound effect on the way in
which they subsequently copied the living figure. James Northcote,
himself a student at the Royal Academy Schools during the 1770s,
recalled: ‘The stillness, the artificial light, the attention to what they are
about, the publicity even, draws off any idle thoughts and they regard the
figure and point out its defects or beauties precisely as if it were clay or
marble’.40 The inadequacy of a system of art education that served to use
the antique to regulate life drawing had already been articulated by
Chardin, a student at the Academie Royale some fifty years earlier:

We begin to draw eyes, mouths, noses and ears after patterns, then feet and
hands. After having crouched over our portfolios for a long time, we’re placed in
front of the Hercules or the Torso ... Then, after having spent entire days and
even nights, by lamplight, in front of an immobile, inanimate nature, we’re
presented with living nature, and suddenly the work of all the preceding years
seems reduced to nothing.41

It is not surprising, perhaps, that Chardin’s subsequent career was

centred on still-life and genre painting.
In England, and in other European academies, the model was per¬
ceived as a piece of animated antique statuary, even when the individual
palpably failed to live up to the heroic ideal. In 1787, for example, a
former model at the Dublin Academy was hanged. According to a con¬
temporary newspaper report, although the man was a convicted
murderer, ‘the figure of this wretched culprit had been incomparable.
It was between the Hercules and the Gladiator, and perhaps for size and
symmetry in all its parts little inferior to the Apollo Belvedere’A* The
male model occasionally fell short of the antique ideal. The female
model, however, presented a more fundamental paradox.
The Venus de’ Medici was upheld by her adherents as a paradigm of
purity and female physical perfection. In 1770 Joseph Nollekens -
 MARTIN POSTLE
94

following the example set by Gerard Audran’s Les proportions du corps

bumain measurees sur les plus belles figures de l’ antiquite of 1683 — made
his own series of measured drawings of the ‘real Statue of the Venus De
Medici’ in Florence. The following decade, his fellow Academician
Benjamin West produced a highly finished drawing of the living model in
the attitude of the Venus de’ Medici, which was subsequently engraved as
an ‘Academical Study’ of Eve. In 1794 West, who had succeeded
Reynolds as President of the Royal Academy two years earlier, reaffirmed
the close links between the reproduction of classical statuary and the
copying of the human figure. ‘Were thq young artist’, he supposed, ‘to
represent the peculiar excellencies of woman would he not bestow on the
figure a general smooth, and round fullness of form, to indicate the
softness of character; bend the head gently forward, in the common
attitude of modesty; and awaken our ideas of the slow and graceful
movements peculiar to the sex, by limbs free from that masculine and
sinewy expression which is the consequence of active exercise? - and
such is the Venus de Medici’.43
In the Royal Academy female models were often placed in the attitude
of the Venus de’ Medici. In the mid-i83os Turner, then a Visitor in the
schools, brought the living model and the antique statue together in the
same room, placing ‘the Venus de’ Medici beside a female in the first
period of youthful womanhood’.44 Yet, as students were acutely aware,
the majority of living incarnations of Venus presented at the Academy
were ‘fallen’ women (it being considered by both parties that their
willingness to pose was in itself a form of prostitution).45 Only the time-
honoured authority of the antique sanctioned the representation of such
women, whose bodies students could worship in idealized attitudes but
whose minds and morals they must consider as corrupt.
Already by the 1770s doubts were creeping in over the authority of the
antique in the curriculum of the Royal Academy. Among the first to voice
dissent was the Academy’s Professor of Anatomy, William Hunter, who
raised the issue in his lectures to the assembled body. ‘In most pictures’,
he noted, ‘there appears to me to be more composure, more inactivity, in
the figure than we see in real life’. Moreover, he criticized artists for
treating the living figure in their drawings like a classical cast:

Most of the Ancient Statues which they copy and are taught to admire are figures
in the quiet way of standing, sitting or lying down. And when they study Life or
Nature itself, they see it commonly in the same inactive state ... Is it
unreasonable then to suppose that such easy and confined habits may introduce
a quiet and inactive manner in figures and composition?46
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Haydon 95

And while Hunter conceded that ‘grace’ and ‘beauty’ — the very qualities
embodied in antique statuary — were important, he stated that ‘there is
besides animation, spirit, fire, force and violence, which make a
considerable part of the most interesting scenes’.47 While the majority
of members of the Academy continued to defer to the authority of the
antique, there were moves to pursue alternatives. We can look here at
just two representative examples.

CHALLENGES TO ORTHODOX ACADEMIC PATTERNS

OF REPRODUCTION OF THE ANTIQUE

In 1800 Joseph Nollekens, a founder member of the Academy and teacher

in the schools, made a clay statue of a Seated Venus. Rather than relying
upon the repertory of classical attitudes, or even attempting to reproduce
a piece of classical statuary, Nollekens sculpted the figure directly from his
model as she sat in the studio putting on her clothes. ‘It was the opinion of
most artists’, stated his pupil J. T. Smith, ‘that many of the parts of this
figure could have been much improved; they thought the ankles unques¬
tionably too thick; and that to have given it an air of the antique, the right
thigh wanted flesh to fill up the ill-formed nature which Nollekens had
strictly copied’.48 Nollekens’ modello was admired by the Earl of Carlisle,
who intended to have a marble statue made from it for display at Castle
Howard, North Yorkshire. However, owing to the objections of his
family, it remained in Nollekens’ studio until his death, when it was
bought by the Earl of Egremont.49 While the Earl of Carlisle’s family had
qualms about Nollekens’ indelicate departure from the antique, he was
vindicated by the Earl of Egremont, who when ordering a marble statue to
be made from the clay modello, instructed the sculptor (J. C. F. Rossi)
that ‘no alterations whatever, not even an improvement upon the model,
should be attempted’.50
A second, more extreme, example involves William Blake. Around
1780 Blake, then a student in the Royal Academy schools, made an
unorthodox life drawing. The face and torso were clearly based on the
features and form of a male figure. Curiously, however, the buttocks and
legs were copied from the Venus de’ Medici. The drawing was possibly
conceived in a spirit of rebellion against the regime imposed by the Royal
Academy.51 At a deeper level, the drawing foreshadowed Blake’s own
idiosyncratic attitude towards the antique, which surfaced more
explicitly in 1809, when he argued that Greek and Roman antique
sculptures were copies of lost religious art of the Old Testament. Blake
subsequently visualized his viewpoint in an engraving of The Laocoon as
96 MARTIN POSTLE

William Blake, Naked Youth, Seen from the Side,

c. 1779-80, black chalk on paper.
British Museum, London.

Jehovah with Satan and Adam, which he had based on a copy of a cast he
had made in the Royal Academy.51 It may not have been entirely
coincidental that at the very time Blake was questioning the veracity of
ancient classical statuary, the arch-conservative, and future President of
the Royal Academy, Martin Archer Shee observed that the ‘general (and
it is to be feared) growing disregard of that purity of form and character,
of which the Greeks have supplied us with the most impressive examples,
is alarming to the interests of taste’.53 Even so, it was not Blake - then
regarded as a peripheral figure - who posed the real threat to the
established authority of antique statuary but the importation into
England by Lord Elgin of new and unfamiliar pieces of classical sculpture
recently removed from the Parthenon in Athens.

REPRODUCTION AND THE PARTHENON SCULPTURES

In 1807 the young Benjamin Robert Haydon expressed his concern at the
differences he observed when making drawings from the antique cast and
the living model:

In my model I saw the back vary according to the actions of the arms. In the
antique these variations were not so apparent. Was nature or the antique wrong?
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Haydon 97

Benjamin Robert Haydon, South Metope xxvn, 1809,

black chalk on paper. British Museum, London
(Department of Prints and Drawings).

Why did not the difference of shape from difference of action appear so palpably
in the antique as in nature? This puzzled me to death.54

For Haydon the puzzle was solved shortly afterwards when he began to
draw intensively from the Elgin Marbles, then housed inauspiciously in a
shed in Park Lane. At the time a number of connoisseurs, notably
Richard Payne Knight, dismissed the Elgin Marbles as Roman copies
from the time of Hadrian.55 To his credit, Haydon was among the first to
proclaim them as original Greek sculptures of the highest order. ‘I felt’,
he recalled, ‘as if a divine truth had blazed inwardly upon my mind, and I
knew that they would at last rouse the art of Europe from its slumber of
darkness’.56 Unlike the classical statues at the Royal Academy schools,
which Haydon dismissed as crude copies, the sculptures from the
Parthenon represented at first hand ‘the most heroic style of art combined
with all the details of actual life’.57 And while his model bore little
resemblance to the outmoded classical casts he had previously studied, he
possessed, according to Haydon, ‘that extraordinary character perceived
in the reclining figure [the Theseus] of the Elgin Marbles .5
Haydon continued to make drawings of the Elgin Marbles over the
next few years, pasting many of the studies into two enormous
98 MARTIN POSTLE

scrapbooks (now preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings,

British Museum). Initially Haydon drew from the Elgin Marbles for his
own benefit. However, by 1815 they had become a key component in an
integrated system of art education which he offered until 1823 as an
alternative to the jaded curriculum of the Royal Academy.59 At Haydon’s
school students did not begin by making studies from the antique but by
undergoing an intensive course in anatomy — including practical
dissection. From there, they progressed to life drawing. Only when
they knew the mechanics of the human figure and could draw from the
living model were they allowed to make drawings from antique statuary.
Thus, the Parthenon sculptures formed the climax of their education. In
1817 Haydon’s students, including the Landseer brothers and William
Bewick, were permitted for the first time to draw from the Elgin Marbles
- now housed in the British Museum. ‘The astonishment of the people’,
stated Haydon, ‘was extraordinary; they would not believe they were
Englishmen; they continually asked if they were Italians. Their cartoons
(drawn the full size) of the Fates, the Theseus and the lllissus literally
made a noise in Europe’.60 Indeed, so impressed was Goethe that he
ordered a set of drawings by Haydon’s students for his house in
Weimar.61
Aside from Haydon, one of greatest proponents of the Parthenon
sculptures was not a connoisseur or a professional artist but the
anatomist Charles Bell, who was already giving instruction in anatomy to
Haydon, David Wilkie and other young artists.6z Significantly, Bell, the
most brilliant anatomist of his generation, was overlooked by the Royal
Academy in 1808 when a new Professor of Anatomy was to be
appointed. Instead they selected the conservative Anthony Carlisle, who
had suggested the previous year that since the Greeks had not studied
anatomy it was of limited use to contemporary artists.63
Anatomy was feared principally because it posed a threat to the status
quo, and more especially to the hegemony of the antique over the living
model. Already in 1804 the Academy’s President, Benjamin West, had
admonished students, informing them that proficiency was ‘not to be
gained by rushing impatiently to the School of the Living Model;
correctness of form and taste was first to be sought by an attentive study
of the Grecian figures’.64 But while the Academy upheld the authority of
the antique and its opponents laid new emphasis upon the empirical
value of anatomy, few attempted to reconcile these contending
viewpoints. Among those who attempted to do so was the sculptor
John Flaxman, who compiled (but did not publish) a treatise entitled
 Antique Statuary in the English Academy, from Lely to Haydon 99

‘Motion & Equilibrium of the Human Body’. Here Flaxman, who made
copies of the Borghese Gladiator rotated through space, used antique
statuary not as a paradigm for the perfect human form but as a vehicle
for studying the body in motion. While accepting that classical sculptors
had not studied dissection, Flaxman believed, from the evidence of
statues such as the Borghese Gladiator and the Wrestlers that ‘they must
have made amends for that defect by a more diligent study of the living
figure under all its forms & circumstances as adjusted by Philosophy and
Geometry’.65

CODA

Despite the doubts cast on the authority of the antique during the early
years of the nineteenth century, the classical tradition continued to be
upheld as the bedrock of academic training in England, as students
flocked to draw from the antique in the newly built galleries of the British
Museum and elsewhere.66 Yet by the end of the century its influence was
undermined, the cast consigned increasingly to the lumber room, or
simply discarded as more adventurous students looked to the transient
values of the modern world for inspiration. The Greek revival of the
nineteenth century was, seen in retrospect, little more than a temporary
reprieve, as one pattern of classical authority was substituted for another.
And while he did not know what lay ahead, James Northcote realized, by
the late 1820s, that the future of the antique was far from secure:

We are tired of the Antique ... The world wants something new and will have it.
No matter whether it is better or worse, if there is but an infusion of new life and
spirit, it will go down to posterity.67
 6
Craft, Commerce and the Contradictions of
Anti-capitalism: Reproducing the Applied
Art of Jean Baffler
NEIL MCWILLIAM v

Some time around 1900 the Paris firm of Siot-Decauville, one of France’s
largest bronze founders and retailers, offered for sale a selection of
ornamental tableware by the sculptor Jean Baffler (1851—1920). Available
either in gilded bronze or pewter, they appear at first sight unexceptional,
if rather conservative, examples of the period’s enthusiasm for natural
forms in the applied arts, an attraction more readily associated with the
bravura organicism of Emile Galle and fin-de-siecle Art nouveau.1
Baffler’s rather solid goblets, bowls and pitchers clearly announce their
indebtedness to such floral motifs as blossoms, leaves and seed pods, a
source of inspiration exploited during the period by manufacturers such
as the silversmith Christofle, whose vases modelled on artichokes, celery
and thistles were exhibited at the Exposition Universelle of 1900.z
Yet the replicas marketed by Siot-Decauville derive from a far more
ambitious decorative project, which occupied Baffler for almost thirty
years and could be considered the fullest cultural expression of a complex
ideological programme, which made the sculptor one of the most
notorious artistic personalities associated with the nationalist right.
Indeed, these few ornamental pieces, commercially reproduced and
circulated within a well-established network of capitalist commodity
exchange, vividly expose the contradictions of a nostalgic philosophy of
craft central to Baffler’s anti-modernist myth of national tradition and
natural order. The very act of commercial multiplication, implying an
alienation of the labour process from the originating creative impulse,
undercuts Baffler’s fundamental belief in the integrity of craft, even as it
holds out the only real possibility of economies of scale capable of
fulfilling his commitment to integrate art into everyday life.
Baffler’s contemporary notoriety owed much to his self-proclaimed
status as an ouvrier-sculpteur engaged in a tireless crusade to restore
 Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffler IOI

Jean Baffler, Ornamental tableware advertised in the Siot-Decauville sales catalogue,

undated but after 1900. Mediatheque Equinoxe, Chateauroux.

Jean Baffler, Elements from the table setting, undated contemporary

photograph of plaster models. Archives du Cher, Bourges.
102 NEIL MCWILLIAM

regard for native identity within French art. His artisanal persona was
enhanced by a family background and professional training from which
sympathetic commentators embroidered a highly coloured myth,
endowing Baffler with an ethnic authenticity far removed from the
cosmopolitan values of the Paris art world.3 Born in 1851 to a family of
poor sharecroppers, Baffler grew up in a peasant community in the Berry
before training as a mason in the local town of Nevers. His
apprenticeship on the restoration of Nevers Cathedral in the early
1870s, together with his laborious and single-minded pursuit of
independent recognition while working^ as a sculptor’s assistant in
Paris, nurtured Baffler’s reputation as a maitre-imagier sustained by an
instinctive sympathy for the land. Essentially self-trained, Baffler
repudiated the protocols of the academy as inimical to France’s native
artistic temper, extolling instead a medieval craft tradition from which he
claimed to draw both creative and ideological inspiration.
Within a few years of his Salon debut in 1880, Baffler had won a
significant following for a body of work, which, his supporters argued,
pointed the way towards a vigorous alternative to the tested - and
increasingly tired — formulae of academic sculpture. Though he produced
a series of full-sized monumental figures, commemorating national
heroes as diverse as Louis XI and Jean-Paul Marat, it was his more
distinctive rural subjects that attracted greatest acclaim. In a series of
busts, low reliefs and statuettes, Baffler celebrated the community in
which he had been born, inviting critical comparisons with Gustave
Courbet and Jean-Frangois Millet with his portrayals of demure peasant
girls and rugged farm-hands redolent of ‘la vraie race frangaise’.4
Insofar as such work has attracted historians’ interest in recent years,
it has been as a conspicuous instance of late nineteenth-century
sculptural naturalism, tempered by a weakness for picturesque effect
typical of portrayals of rural life in the Salons of the Third Republic.5 Yet
this commitment to peasant themes cannot be dissociated from a militant
nationalism, which not only shaped Baffler’s entire sculptural practice
but also inspired his often controversial political interventions and his
vociferous support for the preservation of regional identity.6 From his
failed attempt to assassinate a local depute in 1886 to his unsuccessful
candidature as a nationalist for the National Assembly in 1902, Baffler
was never far from the headlines. His often provocative behaviour and
violent polemics coloured his artistic output, and encouraged him to
undertake monumental commissions carrying overtly chauvinistic or
factional implications.7 It coloured too an aesthetic philosophy
 Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffler 103

profoundly hostile to the cultural mainstream and the capitalist economy

that sustained it. Sharing a hybrid nationalist socialism with many of the
leading personalities on the radical right, Baffler advocated an artistic
practice in which a revivified guild system would re-establish the sculptor
as a vital servant to the community and its collective beliefs.
Such a vision could scarcely have been further removed from the
market for serial sculpture, which had emerged in the second half of the
nineteenth century as perhaps the most intensively capitalized area of
French artistic production. Since the introduction of new materials and
technological processes in the 1830s and 1840s, demand for reproductive
sculpture and decorative items had mushroomed, creating a highly
competitive market controlled by a small number of specialist foundries.8
Companies such as those of Barbedienne, Christofle and Siot-Decauville
had come to dominate the manufacture and sale of reproductions,
targeting a broad potential public by means of shrewd variations in scale,
materials and price. Their increasingly professional marketing techniques,
involving the development of a network for exhibition and retailing with
printed catalogues and advertising, had been emulated by a handful of
sculptors who had gone into business on their own account. Following the
early example of the animalier Antoine Barye, sculptors such as Carpeaux
and Fremiet had determined to cut out the middleman and exploit the
economic potential of their work to the full.9 Participating in events such
as industrial exhibitions and World Fairs — both regarded by Baffler as
epitomizing contemporary cultural depravity - such artists operated as
entrepreneurs, employing promotional assistants and tailoring their work
specifically to anticipated demand. For Baffler, such strategies demon¬
strated the corrupt alienation of the artist and his work in the modern
world. Though his own intervention in the decorative arts was intended in
some measure to combat such trends, the commercialization of individual
items from his repertoire demonstrates the fragile basis of his enterprise.

Potential customers leafing through the Siot-Decauville sales catalogue

may well have recognized Baffler’s wares as deriving from a monumental
table setting made of pewter and copper, elements of which had regularly
featured in the Salon of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts since 1892.
In its definitive form, the setting was to comprise seventy individual
pieces, displayed Bn a specially designed oak table sixteen metres long.
Regarded by the sculptor as a domestic evocation of the natural land¬
scape, the setting was dominated by eight candelabra, modelled on trees,
and by a series of five vases and tureens, which blended references to
104 NEIL MCWILLIAM

Vue.d'e/n5e-mi)!c del'eeuwe,
la. table,&n chhie.de 16 mehw defamy em,troi$ ha.pti.?5,
isiirtgut et sennee fit esm tent 70 pieces enetaln ct ciaire
66 fiiecK sent executed a then be tetliejje
Jean Baffler, Drawing of table setting, 1911. Musee Municipal Frederic Blandin, Nevers.

Jean Baffler, Partial display of table setting, undated contemporary photograph, location
unknown. Archives du Cher, Bourges.

traditional costume, natural forms and rural crafts, all drawn from
Baffler’s home region on the borders of the Berry, Nievre and Bourbon-
nais in central France. Smaller items, such as sugar bowls, salt cellars and
jugs, were inspired by poppy flowers, broom blossoms, rose seeds and
other plants, their plain, swelling forms often decorated with small
animals, such as frogs and lizards, or with more fanciful motifs, like the
winged fairies whose thrusting heads serve as handles for a sugar bowl.
 Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffler 105

Peasant types, such as winnowers and young girls carrying baskets to

market, populate this miniature evocation of rural France, lending the
ensemble what sympathetic critics regarded as a ‘highly refined and
sumptuous rusticity’.10
Completion of the setting was a slow and laborious process,
exacerbated after 1900 by the state’s increasing unwillingness to support
an artist whose extremist politics apparently thrived on public con¬
troversy. Though Paris city council had purchased a number of import¬
ant elements from the project between 1895 and 1903, Baffler had to rely
heavily on private patrons to pursue his plans.11 Petitioning the Under¬
secretary of State for Fine Arts for 10,000 francs to underwrite
completion of the last three elements in the setting failed in 1913, and
Baffler had to wait four more years before a private client could be found
to commission the works.11 Throughout the period, Baffler used both the
Salon and exhibitions in provincial centres such as Bourges and Nevers to
give a foretaste of the overall effect,13 but met with increasing critical
indifference to a project that wore thin through overfamiliarity.
Baffler’s recourse to organic forms and rustic themes had excited
significant interest in the 1890s and 1900s, when a number of
commentators singled out his fastidious naturalism as a solution to
what many saw as an impasse in the decorative arts. 4 Eclecticism,
together with a deterioration in craft skills, was frequently blamed by
critics for bringing about a decline in France’s former supremacy in the
applied arts.15 The rediscovery of nature was extolled not only as an
inexhaustible source of inspiration, but also as reconnecting with a native
tradition, which had reached its apogee during the Middle Ages.
Nationalist critics in particular inclined to such a decorative genealogy as
an effective counter to the alien influence and formal stylization of Art
nouveau.16 In contrast to the effetely attenuated sophistication of what
Baffler himself airily dismissed as ‘style munichois’, the stolid simplicity
of his table setting was seen to possess a moral power in which form and
material signified the unspoilt integrity of ‘la France profonde’. As the
critic Vincent Dethare commented in 1911:

Baffler expresses wonderfully the nobility and poetry of familiar things; beneath
his celebrated fingers, simple, everyday utensils take on a radiant beauty, giving
some idea of the progress that applied art could make if the lessons of such a
master were followed.17

Though Baffler attracted favourable notice for leading the revival of

pewter in the decorative arts,18 the massiveness of his forms and the
IO 6 NEIL MCWILLIAM

solidity of his materials quickly alienated critics for whom his self-
conscious rusticity, rather than offering an exciting way forward, merely
represented an anachronistic parochialism.19 By the time of the
retrospective display of decorative works mounted by the Musee Galliera
following the sculptor’s death in 1920, his tenacious regionalism and
militant resistance to more modern developments in the applied arts were
widely dismissed as ‘ancient history’.2'0 Stylistically, of course, this was
largely true: the initial expectations for Baffler’s naturalism had certainly
not been fulfilled in the paths pursued by French domestic design in the
early twentieth century.21 Yet on a more^ fundamental ideological level,
too, Baffler’s work and the more ambitious project of which it formed
part had been eclipsed by the profound renegotiation in understandings
of French national identity and the role of tradition that occurred in the
years around the First World War.
As originally conceived, the table setting was to form the centrepiece of
a specially designed dining room in which every feature recalled national
tradition and the apparently unchanging rhythms of rural life. A
monumental fireplace, first exhibited in its definitive form in 1898 under
the title ‘Pour la tradition celtique’, was to provide the focus for a low-
relief frieze extending around the room in an unfolding narrative of
agrarian tasks. The fireplace itself, modelled on fifteenth-century originals
in the Palais Jacques-Coeur in Bourges, mobilized autobiographical
references in a sequence of low reliefs centring on a scene of grape
harvesting, which sat above a portrait of the sculptor’s mother embedded
in the chimney-breast, her lower limbs apparently roasting over the flames
in the hearth below. Colossal male caryatids, modelled after Baffler’s
brother Baptiste and a local quarryman, flanked the fireplace, supporting
the imposing structure, which was surmounted by a small statuette of the
artist himself playing a hurdy-gurdy. Specially designed pieces of
furniture, including a series of oak buffets to house the table setting
and a rather bizarre coupling of a washbasin and clock, punctuated the
frieze and took up the dominant decorative motif of leaves and branches
found on the chimney-piece.Zi Finally, landscape murals by the sculptor’s
colleague Louis Boucher were planned to decorate the walls. Taken as a
whole, the project was presented as a virtual shrine, not only to the rituals
and rhythms of country life, but also to the racial identity of the French -
or, more specifically, the Berrichon — peasantry, in whom Baffler invested
an atavistic fantasy of ethnic essentiahsm. As the sculptor proclaimed in
an elaborate explanation, which accompanied the display of a reduced
version of the project in the 1898 Salon:
 Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffler 107

Jean Baffler, Tour la tradition celtique’, monumental fireplace, as shown at the SNBA Salon of
1898, reproduced in Revue des Arts Decoratifs, xxvm (1898), p. zoo.
io8 NEIL MC WILLI AM

This dining room [has been] conceived and designed to exalt the dignity of
labour in its hardships, its joys and pleasures, and to glorify the worker who
piously cultivates the fields following the precepts of aryan religion and the noble
traditions of the Celts, which command respect for ancestral achievement
[1’oeuvre ancestrale], family education, pride in tradition, the cult of heroes and
the careful and meditative study of the laws, forces and beauties of nature/3

From the smallest candle-holder to the vast fireplace, Baffler’s whole

conception was dictated by a commitment to nature as the fundamental
principle of artistic and social renewal. On a social level, he proclaimed
militant opposition to capitalist industrialization, which he vociferously
argued was the main tool in a cosmopolitan and Semitic plot to under¬
mine the nation, which depended on the reassertion of apparently time¬
less rural values for its salvation. Aesthetically, this renewal depended on
artists immersing themselves in nature, looking to the fields and hedge¬
rows of France as a corrective to the perverting influence of foreign
styles, which had ostensibly eclipsed the native spirit in the arts and crafts
since the Renaissance. As the sculptor was to claim in 1895:
To create, one must be a part of life and movement, in other words, in the midst
of everything which vibrates. One must bow one’s head before the great work of
God - Nature - adore it in its infinite grandeur, embracing both heaven and
earth; one must kneel before the tiny blade of grass and contemplate the smallest
flower lovingly and at length. If one is touched by the splendours of creation, if
one is moved by the mysterious relationship between beings and things, one can
then attempt to produce a work of art/4

This commitment was pitted against currents in the decorative arts,

particularly associated with the English Arts and Crafts Movement and
the cosmopolitanism of Art nouveau, which Baffler dismissed as a distor¬
tion of nature consequent on a pervasive moral corruption. Representing
himself as a lone crusader struggling to overcome foreign artifice with
native values rooted in the land, Baffler was contemptuous of dominant
fashion in the arts:

Attempting to make a pewter salt-cellar inspired by a tiny wild snapdragon is a

crime of intellectual treason. If, on the other hand, I had been prey to superior
intellectualism, I would have been off to the catacombs in Montrouge to fetch a
cartful of bones to scrub, polish, varnish and stick together to make anglo-
semitic furnishings, in the style of William Morris, and I would have exhibited
these inspiring objects at M. Bing’s Art Nouveau. That way I would have been
fashionable and on the path which leads to the Pantheon/5

It was in his localism that Baffler invested claims to a moral and

aesthetic integrity at odds with his competitors’ geographical and tem¬
poral rootlessness. His aggressive xenophobia, acted out politically by his
 Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffler 109

participation in a number of nationalist and anti-Semitic organizations,

fed off a fanatical devotion to his own provincial roots. This patriotic
commitment to the petit pays inspired a variety of initiatives designed to
preserve local folk culture and coloured much of Baffler’s artistic
practice. Decisive in the sculptor’s understanding of the table setting as
an essentially ethical work was its formal indebtedness to the vegetation
and traditional dress of his native Berry. In practical terms, however, the
floral motifs selected are scarcely unique to the region, while elements of
traditional dress are subsumed and neutralized in the overall decorative
conception of the scheme. Nonetheless, for the closely knit circle of
Baffler’s supporters, the sculptor’s privileged contact with the land was
credited with redefining the language of decorative art. In the words of
Edouard Achard, one of Baffler’s most faithful admirers:

He always draws his inspiration from the flowers of France, deriving new ideas
from their sustained study which renew art. He never applies motifs to current
forms. The motif is indistinguishable from the form, deriving from it and
forming a whole. Hence the superiority of his workd6

For Baffler, keeping faith with the land and keeping faith with the past
were one and the same, both aesthetically and ideologically. In this
regard the Middle Ages represented an ideal of social order and artistic
probity from which the sculptor claimed to draw strength. Explicitly
repudiating Gothic revivalism as a dereliction of the artist’s duty to
create for the present, Baffler nonetheless presented himself as uniquely
capable of achieving a renewal in French art by virtue of his privileged
understanding of the past. It was in this sense that Achard could claim of
his work that it represented ‘the art of the nineteenth century, of our
time, borrowing nothing from previous centuries while continuing the
national tradition of a truly Gallic art’.Z7 Central to such a project was
the revival of artisanal practices of cooperative labour within the arts,
ostensibly restoring the creative integrity of the craftworker and
consolidating the artist’s status as an integral member of society free
from the corrosive threat of capitalist exploitation.
It was in the guild system of workers’ corporations, suppressed by the
Revolution in 1791, that Baffler invested his hopes not only for artistic
renewal but also for a more general rediscovery of national values, which
would repudiate a b^thamentary regime founded on Jacobin centraliza¬
tion. It was this ideological programme, federalist in ambition and
profoundly reactionary in intent, that distinguishes Baffler’s vision of
labour from the socialist associationism of his bete noire William Morris
no NEIL MCWILLIAM

and aligns him more closely with the conservative disciples of the mid¬
nineteenth-century sociologist Frederic Le Play. In his artistic work, and
in his means of organizing it, Baffler set out to challenge an increasingly
pervasive consumerist economy, which he blamed for the progressive
eradication of regional tradition and for a spreading moral debility
rooted in the dilution of national identity. In the arts, as within the
economy more generally, he maintained, creeping uniformity jeopardized
the survival of racial purity and cultural distinctiveness:

Today, those who ‘control the arts’ in France, since they are of foreign origin, set
out to conceal, distort and destroy the varied characteristics of our National
Genius in order to provide a market for exotic products. And little by little we
shall see the disappearance of those noble artisans and local artists whose works
will soon be nothing more than a vague memory in minds atrophied by the
education and administrative instruction of an oligarchic State whose goal is to
create docile and compliant slaves or parasites/8

Baffler presented his own studio practice as a response to this threat.

Working with two assistants, France Briffault and Paul Orleans, the
sculptor claimed to have revived the artisanal spirit of the medieval
guilds. In producing the table setting, for example, Baffler himself
concentrated on the conception of individual pieces and the production
of a plaster model, while Briffault was responsible for chasing work on
the finished object. The completed ensemble was thus conceived as
uniting the moral uplift implicit in its rural inspiration with an integrity
of manufacture invested in its corporate production. As the artist claimed
in 1909: ‘Since the fall of our glorious Corporations in the arts and crafts,
I am the only French sculptor who has produced within the useful arts,
which are the only true arts, a series of works which share a harmonic
relationship rooted in a doctrinal base’/9
It was such a programme that inspired the sculptor’s attempts to revive
corporate forms, both in Paris and in the provinces, as a catalyst for the
rehabilitation of craft skills. As early as 1890 he sought municipal
support for an abortive attempt to re-establish faience production in
Nevers, one of its traditional centres.30 Eleven years later, Bourges and
Paris provided the setting for projects to establish corporations of
artisans and artworkers. The Bourges initiative quickly collapsed, the
victim — according to Baffler — of an alliance of local freemasons and
Jews. In Paris, however, the scheme briefly flourished, thanks in part to
the institutional support provided by one of the leading groupings on the
radical right, the Ligue de la Patrie frangaise, an organization in which
Baffler played a prominent role. The sculptor used his authority as
 Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffler hi

President of the Ligue in the Plaisance district of Paris to establish an

association, which brought together a range of local artworkers who
shared Baffler’s nationalist outlook. Not only did the grouping organize
exhibitions under the Ligue’s auspices and promote competitions for
nationalist regalia, but also it played a central role in decorating the
Maison commune, which Baffler masterminded as the Ligue’s local
headquarters and which opened in September 1900.
The Maison commune provides some indication of the ideology that
underlay the table service and the projected dining room, which Baffler
conceived as its setting. Ideally, the sculptor intended the room to
accommodate a workers’ corporation in a nation rejuvenated by its
rediscovery of racial purity, its repudiation of industrial capitalism and
its recovery of provincial freedoms. Such a model conceived of the nation
as an extended family, united organically in a decentralized federation
held together by a single, powerful leader. This anti-democratic vision
placed a premium on fraternal communion founded on rigorous racial
exclusivity, mediated by regional affiliations and identity. As the sculptor
proclaimed at the inaugural meeting of the Maison commune: ‘A nation
is an enlarged family which has undergone normal development in a
territorial area in harmony with its basic temperament’.31
The Maison commune, decorated by Baffler and his fellow artworkers,
provided the focus for a familial model combining political militancy
with forms of sociability transplanted from the sculptor’s native Berry.
Family evenings, featuring folk songs, traditional dance and country
tales, alternated with political rallies at which undying hatred was sworn
against the Republic and the Jewish conspiracy accused of conniving in
the nation’s ruin. The appeal to tradition used to underwrite this
xenophobic assertion of nationalist defiance nurtured a myth of racial
essentialism, rooted in regional particularity, which seems particularly
incongruous in an inner-city neighbourhood near Montparnasse. The
myth of community, founded in a nostalgic appeal to a France profonde
alien to most of the Ligue’s petit-bourgeois members, relies on an
evocation of organic notions of collective identity irrevocably displaced
in the complex metropolitan culture of belle epoque Paris. Baffler s
investment in the family, understood not only in terms of biological
attachment but also as a metaphor for professional, ideological, regional
and racial bonds, rests upon a fragile myth of primitive equity offering a
reactionary evasion from history buoyed up by the systematic
scapegoating of the imputed enemies of True France.
In a curious way, the few trinkets offered by Siot-Decauville, the
112 NEIL MCWILLIAM

disjecta membra of Baffler’s epic vision of a revitalizing alliance between

craft and community, embody the fundamental contradiction of the
sculptor’s fantasy of aesthetic and political renewal. Though he railed
against the department store and the international exhibition as
harbingers of a morally debilitating mass culture, Baffler could not
escape the circuits of production and consumption that they stimulated
and upon which they relied.3Z For all his talk of craft revivals, of artisanal
values salvaged from the moral fastness of the medieval guilds, of a fight
to the finish against the factitious allure of the production line, Baffler
was unable to square his commitment tq pre-industrial working methods
with a populism intent on making the fruits of such labours available to
True Frenchmen and women of every class. This was a paradox all too
evident to Baffler’s critics, for whom his grand vision of an artisanal
economy servicing a modern mass public encapsulated the contradictions
underlying the broader enthusiasm for a revival of traditional decoration.
As the critic Camille Mauclair trenchantly remarked in 1906:
Snobs in their town houses admire country furnishings, cretonne curtains,
pitchers from New Zealand and pewter soup tureens by M. Baffler, one of the
most prolix of windbags on ‘social art’, but these samples of ‘back to basics’ cost
a fortune, and there is nothing ‘social’ about this art. The tiresome expression
‘decorative art’ had led everyone to the basic error of imitating popular style
with materials and a workforce which were as expensive as each other.33

The substantial price demanded for the hand-crafted models from the
table setting kept them out of reach to all but a privileged minority of
affluent patrons, upon whom the sculptor relied to sustain his
gargantuan ambition. Yet, in a twist of irony Baffler apparently preferred
to ignore, it was the commercial foundry - itself practically an emblem of
the industrialization of art so inimical to his vision of the artisanal
tradition - whose reproductive techniques were uniquely able to translate
his work into a form that the true artisan could even begin to afford.
 7
Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism:
Living Objects, Theatrics of Display
and Practical Options
ERICH RAN FFT

Between c. 1910 and the mid-i9Zos the spectrum of progressive sculpture

in Germany was characterized by the arts and cultures of Expressionism.
One of numerous types of Expressionist sculpture was that of the wood¬
carving (the human figure predominating over abstract forms). This was
usually executed by ‘direct carving’, in which the wooden or stone object
was produced by the artist without assistance and with no recourse to
mechanical copying of a pre-existing model. In the purest approach a
model would not even have existed. Direct carving became an
increasingly esteemed aesthetic of modern sculpture internationally
between 1900 and 1940. It was equated with authenticity and the notion
of the unique, autonomous and self-referential object, and linked to the
idea of an avant-garde practice imbued with these qualities.1 Formalist
histories of modern sculpture stereotyped the figure directly carved in
wood as the quintessential image of Expressionist sculpture in Germany.
The clearest statement of this image was in the catalogue to the major
exhibition German Expressionist Sculpture, organized in 1983-4 by the
Los Angeles County Museum of Art.z The catalogue presented works by
thirty-three sculptors, revealing a diversity of sculptural media, many of
which involved reproductive processes. But ideologically the catalogue
centred on the painter-sculptors of the Briicke group (1905—13), who
were represented as the leaders of a hierarchy of artists whose sculptural
production was judged by its degree of formal distortion and its output
of direct, roughened and painted wood-carving for emotive purposes.
Heading this hierarchy was Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, a prolific producer of
mostly wood-carvhigs from about 1909 to the mid-i920s.3 Kirchner
epitomized the Expressionists’ sometimes fetishistic preoccupation with
wood-carving. In 1911 in a letter to the Hamburg collector Gustav
Schiefler, he wrote, ‘it is a sensual pleasure when the figure grows out of
114 ERICH RANFFT

the wood step by step. In every trunk is a figure, it only has to be peeled’.4
Perhaps it was no coincidence that the catalogue of a major 1992 touring
exhibition in Germany, surveying modern German sculpture from 1900
to 1945, featured a wood-carving by Kirchner on its front cover.5
Fuelling the Los Angeles mandate was the media-hyped, contemporary
international ‘movement’ known by 1980 as ‘Neo-Expressionism’. Its
central focus was on German artists who bore labels such as the
‘Barbarians’ and ‘New Wild Ones’, making obvious references to the
critical reception surrounding the Briicke and other Expressionist groups
around 1912. Particular to ‘German Neq-Expressionism’ was the close-
knit relationship between painting and sculpture in the roughly hewn and
garishly painted wood-carvings of Georg Baselitz and Jorg Immendorff.6
The German critical reception of the Los Angeles exhibition, upon its
showing in Cologne in 1984, acknowledged a formal legacy between old
and new Expressionism with review headlines such as ‘The Sculpted
Scream’ and ‘The Wild and the Penitent Ones’.7
The result has been an entrenched characterization of Expressionist
sculpture as a self-contained and autonomous, formalist ‘movement’,
whereas in fact it was pluralistic, non-hierarchical, democratized and
interdisciplinary. The Briicke carvings themselves were at the margins of
Expressionist debates and very little critical reception was offered them,
apart from an article on Kirchner’s carvings, written pseudonymously by
the artist himself in 1925.8 Research is still needed into the visionary and
economic motivations for the diversity of expressionistic sculpture and
how this diversity functioned within ideological concerns of Expression¬
ism, such as the socialist-utopian and mystical ideals, or the
Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total work of art’) and its manifestations as
‘theatrical’ public and private display.9 Pivotal for an understanding of
the social and cultural history of Expressionist sculpture is the study of
its functions within practices of reproduction in three-dimensional and
two-dimensional media. This essay will survey various historical
developments and strategies, including the decoration of architectural
settings, the interchange between three- and two-dimensional media, and
ideas concerning the animation of objects to evoke ‘life’. By looking at
the subject of reproduction, the issues of authenticity of wood-carving
versus traditional reproductive media may be integrated into specific
ideological, social and historical contexts.

Nazi destruction and the raids of Allied bombers have made it difficult to
ascertain the extent of the working practices of over half the hundred-
 Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism 115

plus German sculptors who produced expressionistic works. But we can

guess that practices and strategies of reproduction played a part in at
least ninety per cent of the production of Expressionist sculpture. There
is also evidence that the majority of sculptors frequently worked
simultaneously in a variety of three-dimensional media. Throughout the
two decades of Expressionist sculpture the predominant media were clay
and plaster, which could serve as models for carving in wood and stone
or as means for casting into permanent materials such as bronze, cement
and artificial stone. Nevertheless, sculptures in plaster and clay were
often exhibited, those in clay at times as finished works, either in their
natural state or fired as terracottas.
Casting in cement, stone and artificial stone was common by 1914; it
was especially suitable for life-sized figures and architectural decoration,
and served as an inexpensive alternative to bronze right through to the
mid-i920S. Its popularity started in 1910 with the highly successful
Cement and Concrete exhibition in Berlin and the impetus of the
Deutsche Werkbund (German Union of Work), established in 1907 to
engender communality between the fine and applied arts, the artist and
industry. Leading spokesmen ‘entered pleas for the artistic and practical
exploitation of synthetic materials’.10 Carving in marble, impractical by
comparison with these ‘imitative’ processes, was to prove an infrequent
practice. Sculptors were involved to some extent in the production of
wood-carvings, but it would seem that fewer than fifteen produced a
sizeable body of work in wood.11 Overall, even fewer engaged in pure
direct carving, as it was customary to work instead from a model or an
already finished version, for example, in artificial stone, and sometimes
by mechanical means using a pointing machine.
Until 1915 Expressionist bronzes featured regularly in private and
public collections and in yearly survey exhibitions. The comprehensive
exhibition of contemporary sculpture at the Mannheim Kunsthalle in
1914 was remarkable for its wide coverage of Expressionist bronzes, with
works by the nationally renowned sculptors Ernst Barlach, Wilhelm
Lehmbruck and Milly Steger.12 Bronze and other metals also featured in
the production of so-called avant-garde painter-sculptors. These included
wax animal sculptures by Franz Marc, of the Blaue Reiter group,
intended to be cast into bronze for gallery sales, as two were before his
death in 1916. Frcrtn the Brucke, there were Max Pechstein’s works in
bronze, three of which he exhibited in the Mannheim exhibition, and
several of Kirchner’s modelled figures cast in tin, one of which was
included in a Brucke showing in 1910 in Dresden (and ironically
II6 ERICH RANFFT

illustrated in Kirchner’s ‘manifesto^ of 1925 on the purity of carving).13

Additionally, there occurred a revival in the production of bronze medals
and plaques, wherein sculptors such as Karl Goetz and Ludwig Gies
communicated the events and effects of the First World War and its
aftermath in disturbing and satirical expressionistic images.14
Before the war the Werkbund was not as successful in offering
Expressionist sculptors opportunities in the crafts as it was in generating
close links between sculptors and architects. The Werkbund’s aim of
reviving the grandeur of architecture from the past in accordance with
modernizing concepts of design was rejected in Germany’s fascination
with monumental forms of architecture and memorials, and their
inspiration from Egyptian, Assyrian and Far Eastern styles and
decorative schemes. By 1913 the excavations in Egypt by the German
Oriental Society resulted in significant finds for the Royal Prussian art
collections in Berlin; and soon thereafter Hedwig Fechheimer published
her seminal book on Egyptian sculpture, which began by discussing the
links between modern and Egyptian art.15 A number of projects for
adorning new commercial and civic sites illustrated the extent to which
early Expressionist sculptors played a vital role in the wave of historicist
programmes. The sculptural decoration for these sites was predomin¬
antly characterized by variations in repetitive figural elements, which
echoed decorative schemes of ancient times.
The most imposing of these was the Lions’ Gate, a three-storey portal
structure with sculptures by Bernhard Hoetger and designed in
collaboration with the architect Albin Muller as the entrance to the
Mathildenhohe complex of artists’ craft workshops in Darmstadt,
completed for its summer Exposition of 1914.16 Along the top of the
portal was a row of six identical, over-life-sized male lions in cast stone,
each standing on paired Ionic columns, which recalled the Avenue in
Karnak lined by long rows of gigantic sphinxes illustrated in Fech-
heimer’s book. Spanning the bottom of the portal were ten panels in
sheet copper (approximately 1.3 metres square), each bearing the
identical relief of five men on horseback in profile, which echoed
classical Greek motifs, with the five reliefs on one side being the exact
reverse of the five on the other side. The arrangement was thus aa aa ab
bb bb, with the left- and right-side panels meeting in the centre to make
up the doorway. Hoetger repeated this layout on the reverse of the
structure, which made twenty panels in total.17
Hoetger was the Expressionist sculptor most preoccupied by the
decorative possibilities of repetition and by the reproduction of his
 Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism 117

Bernhard Hoetger and Albin Muller, Lions’ Gate, 1914, present site of Rosenhohe Park,
Darmstadt (since 1926), partially reconstructed: brick columns, original lions and eight relief
panels.

present and past work in replicas or in new variations. He was afforded

this luxury because he was virtually never without the backing of affluent
patrons.18 Among his displays for the Mathildenhohe complex, Hoetger
added four over-life-sized, stone-cast sculptures, which were enlarge¬
ments from a cycle of fifteen figurines in majolica, the Light and Shadow
series (1911-12), which drew from Oriental and Buddhist motifs and the
practices of the della Robbia family of fifteenth-century Italian
sculptors.19 His majolica series was also exhibited at the Mathildenhohe
Exposition, as had other editions throughout Germany. His work in the
public realm was unrivalled in quantity and matched only by his large
repertoire of historicizing styles.
In 1916 an industrialist from Aachen, Erich Cupper, sought to create a
museum devoted to his collection of works by Hoetger. This brought
about a storm of negative publicity: it was unthinkable to erect a museum
for a living German artist, let alone one who was ‘thoroughly eclectic ,
whose ‘experiments could be described at best as mystically perfumed’
and whose ‘quality is damaged by standing ten of his works side by
side’.zo Implicit in the criticisms of Hoetger’s seeming assembly-line
n8 ERICH RAN FFT

production were his strategies of reproduction. The idea of a Hoetger

Museum was soon laid to rest, as was the working relationship between
Hoetger and Cupper. Hoetger then sought out the patronage of the biscuit
manufacturer Hermann Bahlsen, who had a long-standing fascination for
Egyptian heritage. In 1916 Bahlsen commissioned Hoetger to build and
decorate in Hanover a new factory complex with a residential com¬
munity, the ‘TET-City’ (the ‘TET’ referring to an Egyptian hieroglyph).
This project too failed to come to fruition, but from Hoetger’s plans and
models it is evident that his Egyptian- and Babylonian-inspired sculptural
decoration would have been very expapsive and repetitive - meaning
more lions and the like - and there would have been an ‘honorary’
location set aside for displaying Bahlsen’s collection of Hoetger’s works,
or rather his copies from the Hoetger oeuvre.11

So far we have considered sculptural practices intended for the public

sphere, be it for mass public display or for a private collector. There
were, in contrast, the wood-carvings from 1909 to 1913 by Ernst Ludwig
Kirchner and Erich Heckel, the only Briicke painter-sculptors to produce
such works during the period of the group’s existence. The carvings were
meant to serve the artists’ private studio environment — first in Dresden
and then in Berlin - as an integral aspect of their synthesis of high art and
craft and decoration in order to shape the studio into a living
Gesamtkunstwerk. Even though some of the carvings were occasionally
shown at Briicke exhibits, this was all about demonstrating the
uniformity of their subject-matter across various media. Unlike the
Werkbund seeking to integrate the artist-craftsman into society, the
Briicke saw itself as anti-bourgeois, its studio providing ‘an antithetical
“other” to the life and civilization of Germany, a realm of artistic
freedom and invention, a temporary utopian retreat and counter¬
reality’.zz Their working practice, according to Kirchner, involved
an uninterrupted, logical intensification, which went hand in hand with the
painterly development of the paintings and graphics and sculptures. The first
bowl that was carved, because we could not buy one that appealed to us, offered
its plastic form to the surface-oriented form of the painting, and so through the
varied techniques the personal form was kneaded thoroughly down to the last
stroke. The love that the painter felt for the girlfriend, who was his companion
and helper, crossed over to the carved figure, ennobled itself over the
surrounding area into the painting, and in turn conveyed the specific form of
a chair or table from the life habits of the human model.13

Kirchner and Heckel executed their wood-carved figures (at least twenty
each) in statuette to near-life proportions, and directly and unmediated
 Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism 119

into unique objects. The figures, however, were not intended as

autonomous or independent works of art. Like the hand-carved furniture
and like the naked human models, they were ‘props’ for the artists’
interpretation of their communal studio life as a living Gesamtkunst-
werk. Or, like the sculptor’s clay or plaster model awaiting a
transformation, these carvings too were transformed or reproduced
into new representations.
The two artists reproduced nearly all their carvings (that we know of)
in numerous paintings, drawings and prints, sometimes repeating the
carvings in several of the media. Translations into two dimensions were
nearly always in reference to narratives of studio life and largely accord¬
ing to traditional pictorial means. But in numerous other representations
Kirchner and Heckel sought a theatrics of display that could ‘break down
the barriers between life and art practice by means of a visual conceit’.24
This was usually achieved by dissolving distinctions in scale and stylistic
differences between the carved figures and the human models in order to
evoke an animated interaction between the two. As a consequence, the
carving was reproduced not only as an index of its contextual site but
also into a ‘living’ duplicate of its inanimate original. The artists
extended this duality by conjuring up a sense that the carving and human
model had switched ‘identities’ - becoming the ‘human’ carving and the
‘sculpted’ model — to parallel the Briicke utopian praxis of art as life/life
as art.
Kirchner exploited these theatrics of display especially in his subjects
of female models in bathtubs, the low, circular tubs acting like plinths to
transform the models into sculptures. In the drawing Woman in the
Wash Tub (1911), Kirchner accentuated this idea by involving a ‘living’
carving: he depicted a bathing model in front of two loosely sketched
statuette carvings with tall plinths - a crouching figure planted on its
plinth and a standing figure off its plinth and on the studio floor.25 The
latter, with one leg out in front of the other, appears ready to stride out
of the picture, leaving the ‘sculpted’ woman as a stand-in. A similar ploy
was used by Heckel in his drawing The Black Cloth, which was
reproduced on the front cover of the May 1911 issue of the Expressionist
journal Der SturmT6 Here a female model is shown seated on a low
platform, her hands holding up behind her a black cloth, which serves to
transform the modal into a sculpture in relief. Her inanimate state is
heightened by the small carved female figure in the background looking
on curiously, as if eagerly awaiting the chance to be part of the sculptor s
business in hand.
IZO ERICH RAN FFT

Erich Heckel, Convalescence of a Woman, 1911-13, triptych, oil on canvas. Busch-Reisinger

Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

The simulation of sculpture by dancers was a pervasive contemporary

practice, which paralleled the artists’ concern with the transformative
states of human models. Especially relevant were Kirchner’s and Heckel’s
interest in popular dance — their girlfriends and the majority of their
female models were music-hall dancers. It is quite likely that they would
have known of the pre-1914 nude dances of variety performers in the
form of ‘plastic poses’, especially those of the famed Olga Desmond, who
held classicizing poses (in all-over white make-up) based on turn-of-the-
century sculptures by Reinhold Begas and Max Klinger.2-7
Both artists generally gave an air of innocence and playfulness to their
representations of carved figures in the studio setting. At times Heckel
imbued his figures’ ‘living’ qualities with a spiritual resonance, which
reflected those carvings that had obvious religious connotations, such as
Praying Man (1912), yet it seems he did not reproduce these in two-
dimensional representations.2-8 Heckel chose instead to reproduce
ordinary and non-referential carved figures, such as those for his richly
symbolic triptych Convalescence of a Woman (1912-13).2-9 In the central
panel of this oil painting Heckel has represented his companion and
future wife, Siddi Riha, who is seated facing the viewer. In the left panel
stands a carved female figure alongside a planted sapling in bloom, and
in the right panel a large bouquet of sunflowers looms over a semi-carved
crouching figure, with the contour lines of its face and body drawn on to
the block of wood. Heckel imbued his triptych with the signification of
an altarpiece, which reflected both his personal love and servitude to his
‘convalescing’ companion and a universal prayer to life. The sunflowers
were symbolic of trust in healing and the sapling was a symbol both of
 Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism 121

beauty and also of the fragility of life.30 The close proximity of the two
sculptures to the flora suggests their role as the bearers of these symbols.
In a literal sense their purpose is to watch over and care for Siddi, and in
a more ecclesiastical sense they embody angels and disciples who watch
over the holy incarnation, while Siddi signifies a Madonna-like figure.31
Consequently, the bowed head drawn on the blocklike carving depicts an
act of praying. The possibility that Heckel meant this figure as a portrait
of himself is suggested by the emphatic diagonal lines that move the
viewer’s attention up and down between Siddi’s head and that of the
carving. Meanwhile, the carved standing figure on the opposite side is
shown not looking at Siddi but out at the viewer. This holy attendant
serves to stimulate a spiritual response in the viewer, who is thus invited
to participate in Heckel’s altarpiece of personal and religious devotion.3Z
Kirchner, on the other hand, was more preoccupied with reproducing
carvings in terms of their external relations by evoking movement
through space and dynamic spatial arrangements. An important aspect of
Kirchner’s aesthetic was his use of photography, which seems to have
been unique among the Briicke members. In the process of documenting
many of his carvings from about 1910 to the mid-i92os, he reproduced a
few into ‘living’ duplicates of the original, by employing an ambiguous
sense of scale and by the staging of grouped sculptures.33 One of
Kirchner’s most lyrical images was a staged photograph from c. 1913 in
which he contrasted the emotive qualities of animation between two
near-life-sized standing female figures. In the foreground he placed the
Female Dancer (1912) in a slight profile position and made the sculpture
lean sideways towards the camera, so that she appears to be striding
forward and ready to thrust herself out of the picture frame. Behind her
and to the side Kirchner positioned the Standing Woman (1912), whom
he carved in the act of placing one foot in front of the other.
Consequently, in this photograph it is as if she is about to follow the
Female Dancer, yet her closed body stance and hunched shoulders convey
an inhibition made all the more emphatic by the contrast with her
exuberant counterpart.34 Additionally, Kirchner sometimes photo¬
graphed carvings next to female models in order to emphasize the
human form as sculpture against the animation of the object. For
example, in the image of the dancer Nina Hard in Kirchner’s Davos
home (1921), a standing Hard, posing nude and applying make-up, is
contrasted with a nearly identical-looking, 63cm-high standing figure,
Nude Girl (1912), which has been placed on the dressing-table, so that
their heads are nearly at the same height.35
122 ERICH RANFFT

It is important to recognize that,the physical and decorative nature of

one-third of Kirchner’s and Heckel’s carvings also emulated two-
dimensional representation. Heckel’s triptych figure with its face and
body drawn on to the block of wood shows how the artists sought to
imbue their carvings with a pictorial flatness that would enhance their
status as extensions of the two-dimensional conception of the studio
environment. Some figures were made with sections left uncarved to
retain the look of the squarish or rectangular block of wood, which had
the effect of signifying the two-dimensional frame and echoed the
pictorial effects of relief sculpture. Other figures, although fully carved,
had flattened frontal planes to varying degrees, and it is not difficult to
read them as thick (and pliable) cut-outs. The artists made the allusions
to two-dimensional representation, especially in terms of the woodcut,
all the more obvious by delineating parts of the face and body with dark-
coloured paint; they even emphasized slight recesses between body parts
with ‘artificial’ shadows.36 Their carvings were in general painted,
selectively or all over, and we might refer to them all as ‘sculpted’
paintings; but it is in these more flattened carvings that the artists seem
deliberately to have chosen to animate the essence of two-dimensional
representation. These ‘carved drawings’ provide another clear example
of the interweaving of artistic practices as described by Kirchner in the
Briicke concept of the living Gesamtkunstwerk.
The only other artist to be as engrossed with sculptural forms moving
between three- and two-dimensional media was the multitalented
sculptor Ernst Barlach, whose prolific graphic output from 1910 to the
mid-i920s reflected far more interpretations than translations of his
sculpture. One of his most compelling series of images was the cycle of
twenty-seven lithographs (1910-11) visualizing aspects of the first of his
seven Expressionist plays, The Dead Day (written 1907-10). The
lithographs plus the play were published in 1912 in a portfolio edition.37
Here Barlach represented an interplay of rural figures, which recreated
the stylistic forms and iconography of his sculptural oeuvre, reproducing
essentially the collective sense of his sculptures two-dimensionally. In
their graphic representation the sculptural figures were imbued with a
‘living’ presence, as if they were reproduced as theatrical performers
unfolding one of countless dramas about their existence. This play
centred around a mother’s domination over her only son, whom she
traps in the earthly and unconscious world to prevent him from reaching
his father who is Spirit and God. The only character of the play to refer
to a specific sculpture was that of the Mother, whose three-dimensional
 Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism 123

form was the table-top oak-carving, Troubled Woman (1910, from a

model in plaster), depicting a seated woman with a brooding facial
expression and hands clasped in her lap.38 Even though there is no
evidence to indicate whether the lithograph or the sculpture came first, it
seems likely that Barlach’s drawn figure inspired the sculpture, because
he would have wanted to create a physical embodiment of the Mother’s
emotionally and symbolically charged presence.

The height of Expressionist sculpture from 1918 to c. 1923 was the result
of new associations of Expressionist artists seeking to revitalize collective
artistic production based on Christian socialist ideals for the spiritual
regeneration of the individual and society. This was to be accomplished
by uniting sculpture, painting and the crafts with architecture into the
people’s Gesamtkunstwerk - the utopian ‘cathedral’, a site for worship
and communal activity.39 Bruno Taut, the leading voice among the
visionary architects, sought to channel the revolutionary and spiritual
fervour of artists by calling for ‘extensive employment of painters and
sculptors on all buildings in order to draw them away from salon art’.4°
But because of the severe post-war recession there were very few public
projects and private commissions in which Expressionist sculptors could
participate. There were, nevertheless, alternatives that served their
spiritual yearnings and economic conditions. Some produced fantastical
sculptures, others worked as independent ‘craftsmen’, while ample
opportunities were created to exhibit ‘salon art’ that conveyed visionary
motivations.
As sculptors continued to reproduce their three-dimensional works in
two-dimensional representations, the post-war recession gave rise to a
number of fantastical, monumental sculptures, which were conceived as
drawings or textual descriptions and reproduced in Expressionist publica¬
tions or by means of graphic print-runs and published portfolios.41 In
1920 in Fruhlicbt, the magazine dedicated to utopian architecture, Taut
published his designs and descriptions of his envisioned blouse of Heaven
(1919), which featured Karl Schmidt-Rottluff’s drawings of two totemic
structures with bands of carved figures and heads, entitled Pillars of
Suffering and Prayer. Standing at the entrance of the House of Heaven,
the Pillars ‘begin at ground level in gloomy black (shading into intense
blue) and terminate*above in a blaze of gold. With the exception of the
gold, all the colours are shot through with flecks and stripes of blood
red’.42
In contrast, Rudolf Belling reproduced the imaginary ‘original’ of his
124 ERICH RANFFT

Rudolf Belling, Triad, original 1919, second version in wood (elm).

Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg.

Gerhard Marcks, Horseman Candlestick, c. 1918-19, Bottger stoneware.

Gerhard Marcks Stiftung, Bremen.
 Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism 12.5

metre-high plaster Triad (1919) as if it were already a reality. Triad

presented three abstracted dance figures projecting from a central base,
which was meant to symbolize the union of the three arts, painting,
sculpture and architecture. Belling sought to acknowledge the mon-
umentality of this union when Triad was first shown with the work of
the November Group at the Berlin Art Exhibition in 1920. The catalogue
entry noted that the ‘original’ was ‘six metres high, built from brick with
coloured plasterwork’, and the exhibition guidebook proclaimed, ‘This is
religion, this is architecture’.43 Belling had the ‘original’ described again
in the catalogue of his commercial gallery exhibit in Cologne of 1921,
and by that year he let it be known that his sculptural ‘architecture’
should serve ‘as a podium for an orchestra, for performances by
Hindemith, Schonberg and Stravinsky’.44 Nobody cared that the work
did not exist physically, what mattered more was Belling disseminating
its ‘image’ as a statement of Expressionist ecstatic fervour for the living
Gesamtkunstwerk. Moreover, the conceptual physical evidence lay with
the plaster Triad and its published photographic reproductions - Triad
was, in effect, being replicated into the living duplicate of its giant
‘original’. As such, the two as one were celebrated Expressionist icons.
By the mid-i920S at least half of the Expressionist sculptors had been
involved to some extent in the production of small-scale, decorative
figures and craft objects for domestic and civic purposes. Although many
sculptors could not become the ‘exalted craftsmen’ that Walter Gropius
envisioned for the Bauhaus,45 this aspiration must have invariably
motivated their independent, entrepreneurial roles. Oriented towards
opportunities for reproduction, the sculptors worked primarily in
ceramic, stoneware and porcelain, while bronze and various metals
such as iron, tin and copper were also given prominence. Some set up
their own workshops — Margarete Scheel in Rostock (1920), Will
Lammert in Essen (1924) or Bernhard Hoetger in Worpswede (1923) and
Bremen (1927). These were often organized as co-operatives involving
locally trained artists, and Hoetger’s approach was characteristic. He
valued not only the immediacy of creativity in the initial design of a
decorative object but also the cooperative processes in bringing the object
into its final state as a reproducible commodity.46
Other sculptors were sponsored by manufacturers who undertook to
turn their designs 'into products; the Meissen porcelain factory, for
example, was particularly receptive to contemporary decorative styles.
By 1927 Meissen had produced editions of expressionistic works by such
sculptors as Gerhard Marcks, Ernst Barlach, Richard Langer and Paul
126 ERICH RANFFT

Borner.47 From 1918 to 1920 Marcks designed altogether seven models,

which were moulded for editions, and his Horseman Candlestick in
Bottger stoneware (opaque and reddish-brown in colour) was immedi¬
ately lauded for its ‘expressionistic character’, its ‘exquisite’ use of
material to ‘stimulate a highly expressive conception of form’.48 His
subjects had strong Christian religious overtones, and so too had
Barlach’s table-top model of a bearded God-figure, God, the Father
Hovering (1923), which the Meissen firm reproduced in a large edition in
Bottger stoneware.49 In an ideological sense, these expressionistic
sculptures should have served ecclesiastical functions of decoration; in
Barlach’s case, his should have been a remedy to his lament, ‘I lack the
great opportunity. Missing for my sculpture is the sacral space’ (1920).50
Yet the established Church did not, on the whole, accept Expressionist
art, or when the congregation did, they could not adequately defend it
from public protests. As a result, these editions were marketed as
precious fine-art commodities destined for the German art world, with
copies available to both private collectors and public museums.
 Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism 127

The ‘salon’ sculpture of post-war Expressionism flourished amid the new

visionary fervour that compelled sculptors to animate their objects to
evoke ‘life’. Where before 1914 the notion of the living statue was largely
at the fringes of discussion (and mainly in the Briicke studios), it was now
at the forefront of Expressionism’s romantic yearnings. In Ernst Toller’s
celebrated play The Transfiguration (1919), Friedrich is working on a
life-size statue and declares, ‘The stone resists my efforts; my hand upon
the chisel cannot bring it to life. The chisel chips marble, dead marble;
am I powerless to breathe life into it? If so I’ll do no more. I will not be
content to carve a mere memorial to life ... Life intense must stream
from my creation’.51 Moreover, the legendary Golem automaton was the
subject of three Expressionist feature films (1915, 1917 and 1920), which
immortalized the Rabbi Loew who formed the human-sized clay Golem
and then magically brought it to life.52-
Questions arose, however, about determining the most suitable or
authentic material for expressing the spiritual and mystical animation in
the living object. While most sculptors continued to use clay and exhibit
in plaster (especially in view of the post-war recession), as well as work
towards casting into more permanent materials, a strong polemical
position asserted the authenticity of wood and direct carving. It became
fashionable to romance the wood-carving, likewise to be dismissive of
the value of modelling in clay, wax and plasticine, and of their
subsequent use in relation to materials integral to reproductive processes.
Sculptor Philipp Harth called for a rejection of the slave-like submission
to these latter, while Alfred Kuhn, art historian and critic, compared
these to ‘a prostitute’ that ‘allows virtually everything to be done to it’.53
Otto Hitzberger, who taught wood-carving at the Berlin Arts and Crafts
School, asserted that wood was ‘the mother of sculpture’ and testified, ‘I
have made my work completely by myself and need no one to have my
model copied’.54 The authenticity of wood was seen in terms of its
already existing materiality and inherent rawness, which, ‘for the true
artist’, serves ‘the clarification of his spiritual and intellectual yearning
for elevated creativity’ (Georg Biermann, art historian and publisher).55
Wood was authentic because it was seen to embody the natural practices
of African and Oceanic tribal peoples and, in particular, the creation of
Gothic sublimity and rapture. Critics continually offered their most
laudatory support t» Ernst Barlach who had been chiefly preoccupied
with carving in wood since 1909. Paul Westheim’s praise, from as early as
1913, epitomized this support: the Gothic ‘is the same exalted rapture
which is found in a Barlach who manipulates the carving tool, allowing
iz8 ERICH RANFFT

him to actualize faces out of the, deep where the blood steams, and
thereby he can breathe life into them in order that they may once again
become at one with their creator’.56
Alfred Kuhn and others sought to give credence to their position by
referring back to the influential aims of the classicizing sculptor Adolf
von Hildebrand (1847—1921). In his treatise The Problem of Form in the
Fine Arts (1893, with ten editions by 1918), Hildebrand sought to
rejuvenate the process of direct carving in stone based on sculpture from
the Greek and Italian Renaissance periods.57 He argued that modelling in
clay and the like should not be practised- fob artistic reasons in the first
place, because it lacked the already given pictorial structure presented by
the block. Hildebrand felt that modelling in clay had value only if it was
used as a method of study from Nature, and that the sculptor should only
transform and not replicate the clay model into a finished carved object.
In contrast, there was a wide range of working practices that challenged
the supposed authenticity of wood and direct carving. To begin with, as a
result of the support given to the highly expressive qualities in the art of
Auguste Rodin, who was Hildebrand’s polar opposite in the art litera¬
ture,58 many artists also accepted his strategies of exploiting traditional
reproduction techniques as practices fundamental to modern sculpture.
Strange, because Rodin was widely seen to be the arch-modeller and one
who exploited traditional reproduction techniques; but for the Ex¬
pressionists, Rodin was above such criticisms because his work evoked a
kindred spirit of highly expressive emotion and symbolism. Moreover,
most sculptors were more concerned with beginning their object in clay
and plaster, exhibiting it as such, and subsequently planning to execute a
version in wood (almost as an afterthought). If they were aware of
Barlach’s working practices, they would have known that nearly all his
carvings derived from versions in plaster, up to one-third of these being
produced three or even up to six years after the original. Supposedly
Barlach did not even carve directly but used a pointing machine to
translate plaster to wood.59 His approach must have resembled product
manufacture, using a pre-existing stock of sculptural motifs as models.
Every so often Barlach (and his dealer, Paul Cassirer, in Berlin) also had
bronzes produced from the originals, as in the Mannheim exhibition of
60
1914.
Most of the sculptors active after 1918 had little training for carving in
wood, and one gets the impression that they needed to meet the demands
of the latest fashion and secure some carvings for their ‘portfolio’ of
works. It would seem that part of the pressure also emanated from the
 Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism 129

museums, whose directors were increasingly enamoured of Expressionist

wood sculptures. For Rudolf Belling’s retrospective exhibition in 1924,
the Berlin National Gallery ordered the purchase of a copy of Triad in
birch with mahogany base, stained and polished (see the illustration on
page 124 for a similar version).61 It is not surprising that the National
Gallery would want to acquire the Triad, since the object had a
celebrated iconic status and a copy in wood afforded the museum (and
Belling himself) the opportunity to have the more fashionable material
made available for posterity.
We might query whether Belling produced the copy of Triad himself.
There seems to have been a tendency among sculptors to hire someone
else to carve (completely or partially) their wood versions. The sculptor
Ewald Matare lamented in his daybook that one ‘can never arrive at a
style if [one] kneads in clay and then has it carved in wood, as is
happening now everywhere’.6z Determining the extent of this ‘unauthen-
tic’ process among Expressionist sculptors is difficult given the general
lack of records, but several cases have come to light: for example, the
Berlin sculptors Emy Roeder and her husband, Herbert Garbe, had a
certain amount of carvings (from originals in plaster and terracotta)
finished off by local craftsmen in southern Bavaria.63 We know that
Roeder had visited Oberammergau by 1921 to learn to carve in wood, and
her concerns were probably not educational but professional — to get help
in producing Expressionist carvings in order to diversify the range of her
‘portfolio’. Similarly, the Berliner Georg Kolbe, who had been producing
Expressionist sculptures in bronze (probably through the support of his
gallery dealer, Cassirer), had several original models produced in wood by
local carvers by trade.64 In effect, Kolbe’s sculptures in wood were just as
much a commodity as the bronzes.
The passion for wood-carving resulted essentially in more talk than
work (and less ‘authentic’ work at that). Conversely, there was a quiet
florescence of working in clay and materials integral to reproductive
processes, which had the same ideological aspirations as carving in wood,
but which did not need to authenticate its materiality. Even if a clay or
plaster or bronze sculpture was seen by some as a ‘violation’ and an
‘abomination’, it was still authentic because the ideal of animating the
perception of a living essence in the object remained a fundamental. In
Paul Rudolf Herring’s ‘Clay - A Manifesto’, which appeared in
publications by the Werkbund and the Berlin Working Council for Art
in 1919-20, he called for the sculptors’ devotion to ‘the richness of the
“unborn” that lies dormant in clay, waiting to be brought to life by an act
130 ERICH RAN FFT

of deliverance of the creator’.65 Seen in relation to the Golem story, it was

no coincidence that Rudolf Belling created the Golem’s Egyptianized
headdress for all three films.66 We might concede that clay or plaster
objects had the benefit of being read more easily as ‘original’ and
authentic because they stood at the beginning of the reproductive
processes, but it was no more difficult to imbue with ideological
significance the highly influential oeuvre of Wilhelm Lehmbruck (see
p. 126), which was increasingly made up of sculpture cast in cement,
artificial stone and bronze (he never carved in wood, hardly ever in
marble).67 What mattered to critical supporters was the resonance of
Lehmbruck’s figures, whose
satiated flesh is melted away by the glow of immanent life. Only the spirit
appears to exist ... In the drive upwards, in Gothic fervour the soul soars
upwards, sweeping up with it its bodily form, the skin swelling in an inexorable
vertical direction ... the Lehmbruck man and woman leave this coarse world of
harsh differences, sharp antitheses, merciless rationalities, in order that, alone in
the rhythm as the most powerful cosmic principle, they may lead an existence of
the purest spirituality.

This interpretation from 1921 was by Alfred Kuhn, marking one of a

number of exceptions to his distaste for non-wooden sculptures.68 Finally,
one may also argue that the dramatic events of Lehmbruck’s life - he
committed suicide in 1919 in the prime of his career (which undoubtedly
affected Kuhn’s perception) — took precedence over discussion of his
working practices, yet Lehmbruck’s figures had since 1912 been
constantly read as embodying a spiritual animation of living form.

There are certainly more aspects to matters of reproduction (and case

studies), which could be considered in the scope of this introductory
survey, not least fundamental issues concerning the legacy of reproducing
Expressionist sculpture over the past fifty years: be it the controversies of
posthumous bronze-casting of Expressionist ‘masters’, or the strategies
of a Rudolf Belling ensuring that ample museums own a bronze version
of Triad (and that a copy in wood, from c. 195° — see page 124 — existed
outside of the former East Germany), or the ramifications of having
four Ernst Barlach museums in the unified Germany ... ,69 German
Expressionist sculpture and its reproductions offer no quintessential
images, just essential histories.
 8
Truth to Material: Bronze, on
v _
the Reproducibility of Truth
ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

Fifteen years ago a heated debate arose between two prominent art
historians over the status of claims to authenticity for posthumous
bronze casts of works by Auguste Rodin (1840—1917), then on show in
the important Rodin Rediscovered exhibition at the National Gallery of
Art in Washington.1 Rosalind Krauss used the occasion of the exhibition
to explore from a ‘postmodernist perspective’ the mystique of originality
in the modernist discourse when it is applied to sculptural editions and to
denounce the steadfastness of the traditional evaluative categories in art
historical discourse. Her essay ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A
Post-modernist Repetition’z argued that Rodin’s approach to his
sculpture reveals an artist ‘deep in the ethos of mechanical reproduction’,
an ethos which affected not only his castings but also his very creative
process. The production of multiples was not accidental. Not only was
the concept of an original bronze cast foreign to Rodin’s thinking, Krauss
argued, but also his whole oeuvre was predicated on the production of
multiples. Albert Elsen, the organizer of the exhibition, immediately
responded to this article in the following issue of October3 by attacking
Krauss’ evidence and her concept of originality, referring readers to the
document ‘A Statement on Standards for Sculptural Reproduction and
Preventive Measures to Combat Unethical Casting in Bronze’, which he,
as President of the College Art Association, Professor of Art Flistory at
Stanford University and a Rodin specialist, had helped to draft.4 His
condemnation extended to a recent catalogue essay written by Krauss for
an exhibition of Julio Gonzalez, where she had argued in defence of
Gonzalez’s posthumous bronze casts.5 It would be fair to say that this
exchange sorely tested the advocacy of the ‘Standards’ document.
My essay will rb-examine some of the issues at the centre of this
debate, in particular the artistic and historic status of the posthumous
cast and the place of intentionality when dealing with objects. It will also
appraise bronze as a material in a period that promoted the notion of
132. ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

‘truth to material’ and ‘working direct’. Many of the questions I raise

were first brought to light in the journal ARTnews in 1974. The relevant
article, ‘Problems in the Reproduction of Sculpture’, by Sylvia Hochfield
used the pretext of reporting on a newly cast stainless-steel Cock by
Constantin Brancusi (1876—1957) to explore the question of the unethical
reproduction of sculpture in the light of the recently published ‘Statement
on Standards’.7 Quoting from Sidney Geist, a sculptor and leading
authority on Brancusi, Hochfield exposed some of the problems that
beset the sculpture of not only Brancusi but also Raymond Duchamp-
Villon (1896—1918), Umberto Boccioni (4882—1916) and Julio Gonzalez
(1876—1942), among others whose work had been cast posthumously.8
We shall return to these individual cases, but for the moment it is
important to point out that Hochfield brought out the essential problem
raised by these ‘Standards’: the philosophical, legal and ethical question
involved in defining originality. The article ends: ‘Ultimately, the CAA
hopes, a tradition, a body of customs, will be created, which, over a
period of time, will be recognized by the courts. In other words, common
law will give way to statutory law’.9
As soon became apparent, Krauss was addressing this philosophical
question using the analytical tools of semiology, structuralism and post¬
structuralism to expose the foundations of a body of customs. The
present essay shares many of Krauss’ concerns, without subscribing to its
strict semiotic perspective, and will consider the valuable questions that
emerged still unexplored from this debate. Thus, rather than pursue the
claims of the legitimacy of posthumous bronze casts (as they were aired
in the forum where Elsen and Krauss gathered), this essay considers the
contribution that these works make, in their own right, in the larger
historical and critical perspective. This might at first suggest that I side
with Elsen against Krauss, but the conventions governing the legitima¬
tion of posthumous casts are open to question without the need of
recourse to a postmodernist position. Considerable light may be shed on
the status of posthumous casts by situating the various claims in their
historical context, be they legal, ethical or linguistic.
One of the first aspects to emerge from the exchange between Rosalind
Krauss and Albert Elsen following the Rodin Rediscovered exhibition is
that the debate surrounding the posthumous casts of works by Rodin
was restricted to a rather narrow path, far narrower even than that
envisaged by the ‘Standards’: the delicate question of defining
authenticity in a field that existed by means of a form of reproductive
process. The quarrel centred on issues of legitimacy raised, for example,
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 133

by a 1980 bronze cast of a Rodin by the Musee Rodin. According to the

‘Standards’ (and to French law), the Musee Rodin, as authorized parties,
had produced an authentic Rodin since it was cast from the original
working plaster. This ‘real reproduction’, to use Krauss’ terms, or this
work from an ‘original edition’, to use Jean Chatelain’s (a delegate to the
Conseil d’Administration of the Musee Rodin),10 remains no less than a
normative product: one that fulfils the ‘Standards’ for sculptural
reproduction and is legitimate only according to those standards. But
what if those standards were not as conclusive as their advocates may
suppose, and what other questions, as a result, might be left to explore in
this context?
It must be remembered that the debate took place in the post¬
structuralist atmosphere of the late 1970s when author(ity) and quality
were questions considered long dead and buried, although the object(s)
in question might still require these issues to be clarified. In particular,
intentionality and audience might be explored by examining surface
finish in works of sculpture, just as they so often are with painting. Take,
for example, the difference in surface finish between two bronzes by
Rodin in the Musee Orsay in Paris: Age of Bronze (Age d’Airin-, c. 1877)
and Walking Man (L’Homme qui marche; 1907), both cast in Rodin’s
lifetime;11 their different patinas evidence (i) specific conditions of
production available at the time and produced by different foundries, (ii)
decision-making on the part of Rodin, as is borne out by archival
evidence — whether that decision entails his personal involvement or
referral to others does not alter the fact that he was in a position to make
that decision, and (iii) suggest that Rodin was aware of his audience and
tailored his works accordingly. The Mighty Hand (or Clenched Hand-, c.
1855) by Rodin in the Peter Stuyvesant Foundation’s collection is
evidence that this decision-making process was transferred elsewhere, in
this case to the Musee Rodin. Although only the Rodin bronzes in the
Peter Stuyvesant collection came from the Musee Rodin, all the works in
bronze were derived from posthumous casts, some from originals in
stone, and all shared a uniform, dark patination. The Musee Rodin
certainly lent its authority when the collection went on tour, in that a
Musee Rodin curator, Monique Laurent, wrote the Introduction and
entries to the catalogue.IZ
One might say tlwt in a debate about the history of an object, to focus
on judgemental conclusions (who is right? or who has the right?) is beside
the point. What might an approach to the history of sculpture from a
material standpoint achieve? It might reassert the role of evidence
i34
ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

Auguste Rodin, Jean de Fiennes nu, c. 1886, bronze (posthumous cast).

Trammell Crow Centre (formerly LTV), Dallas.

provided by the object itself, evidence too often overlooked, and position
the ensuing understanding in more secure contexts, thus dispensing with
debates that seek to displace or replace such notions as ‘work of art’
because of practices, and instead explore ‘work of art’ as situated within
these practices.13
In his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,
Walter Benjamin wrote:

The authenticity of a thing is the essence of all that is transmissible from its
beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history
which it has experienced. Since the historical testimony rests on the authenticity,
the former, too, is jeopardised by reproduction when substantive duration ceases
to matter/4

Some art historians working with this important essay have erroneously
perceived it as a commentary on cinema and modernity. They seem to
have responded to the examples described in the essay, rather than to the
philosophy of history that was being put forward through their agency.
In this light, we may be justified in questioning the testimony provided
by work such as the cast of Rodin’s Jean de Fiennes nu standing in the
lobby of the Trammell Crow Centre (formerly LTV) in Dallas, though
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 135

not to the extent of throwing out its evidence altogether. The Bruton
Gallery, which supplied the cast, working with the Musee Rodin, has
produced a legitimate work by Rodin within the strict confines of the
law. Michael Le Marchant, who runs the gallery, sees his role as one that
enables ‘rediscovery and diffusion’ of an artist’s oeuvre.15 But what
aspect of an artist’s oeuvre is being diffused? And are not other aspects
being diffused at the same time, aspects contained within the very
medium of diffusion, which could not, in principle, be the same from one
generation to another, and, because of this, carry ‘historical testimony’ in
their own right? The Jean de Fiennes nu is one of seven works by Rodin
now on view in Dallas. On the one hand, the cast attests to the survival
of the technical means that enabled it to come into existence (technical
means of varying standards, according to Chatelain); and on the other,
the cast documents all the art-historical aspects that contribute to
defining notions of quality: namely, the position of Rodin in the late
twentieth century, the nature of his public in that period, and the manner
in which the taste and collecting habits of the later public are revealed in
the copies made for them. The type of corporate culture that fills its art
niche with such a work can be read either as a safe or valuable
investment (this is an authentic bronze, by a famous sculptor, a work
that can enhance our image) or as an expression of the sclerosing effects
of committee decisions on art purchases (when people opt for the security
of an object whose message is suitably sanitized, in this case divorced
from its narrative context and thus not threatening any more).
Whichever position is taken, the Trammell Crow version of Jean de
Fiennes nu can and must be read for what it is: a work ‘from an original
edition’, yes, but one that bears testimony to the period when it was
produced as an object, and not back to the period when it was conceived.
The Musee Rodin never denied that it owed its existence and financial
upkeep to the marketing of Rodin bronzes in its collection. But Elsen
claims that this role has a pedagogical function as well.16 The museum
has not only been responsible for diffusing the larger works of Rodin
according to his testament, but also it has at its disposal the lore of small
works, parts of works, etc. left in his studio. Even though it is clear that
the small plasters are more marketable in the twentieth century, and even
though Rodin may not have commanded the sort of audience he needed
to justify casting them in his lifetime, the Musee Rodin must realize that
they are extending their role of conservation to one of rectification, not
to say manipulation, of their heritage.17 The manipulation does not arise
from what they are doing — ‘casting Rodins — but from the standpoint
136 ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

they are taking. This is less a question of ‘clinging to a culture of

originals’ as perceived by Krauss and developed in her postmodernist
discourse18 than of clinging to the few available verifiable facts. In this
case the circumstances in which Rodin was produced in the 1980s are an
essential part of the history of these Rodins. These works are as much the
product of Rodin’s creativity as the product of an institution delivering a
lesson. The problem arises because, for all its rigour, the institution
resists facing its role squarely.
What kind of history is being produced when the elements that should
be brought forward as evidence are being devalued by claims of fetishism
or aura and thus insufficient attention is paid to the information they
provide?
Let me illustrate this point with the example of Raymond Duchamp-
Villon’s The Horse of 1914. Excellent histories have been written
concerning the bronze casts of this work and its subsequent
enlargements. It was left at the sculptor’s death in 1918 in the form of
a 48-cm plaster maquette with an armature for a possible 100-cm
enlargement.19 One has to agree with the opinion of Sidney Geist, quoted
in Hochfield, that the posthumous castings and enlargements of The
Horse ‘distort the experience of sculpture in modern times’ and ‘do not
represent the sensibility of Raymond Duchamp-Villon’; indeed, in a letter
to Alfred Barr (30 August 1938), Jacques Villon, Duchamp-Villon’s
brother (1875-1963), writes that he was unable to fulfil his brother’s
wishes of casting the enlargement in polished steel, and had to make do
with bronze.zo Does this mean that these postumous casts and
enlargements represent nothing? They may not shed light on the status
of Cubist sculpture or the work of Duchamp-Villon in 1914, but they do
indicate how his work entered the history of twentieth-century sculpture.
The cast of c. 1930 that was produced by Jacques Villon does, as Geist
argued, distort ‘an entire movement’ (Cubism), but it is also,
importantly, evidence of the then perception of Cubist sculpture in the
public domain and of the form that Cubism, as a language, evolved into
when it had gained more currency and had come to exist outside the
confines of its initial avant-garde context. Marcel Duchamp’s (1887-
1968) involvement further complicates the make-up and strategies of this
group of brothers without negating their agenda. Thus, the enlarged one
metre-high version of The Horse on view at the Art Institute of Chicago,
cast in 1957 by the Galerie Louis Carre, really belongs to a later period of
the history of twentieth century sculpture - the period that consecrated
works first produced in studios more than twenty-five years before.
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 137

Raymond Duchamp-Villon, The Horse, 1957 version of a 1914 bronze.

The Art Institute of Chicago.

The correspondence between Katherine Kuh, the then Curator of

Modern Painting and Sculpture, and Louis Carre is revealing. Kuh,
acting on information supplied by Marcel Duchamp, wrote: I under¬
stand from Duchamp that the large Horse has an edition of only six casts
and that the last cast is still available but would have to be cast .
Carre’s response is even more interesting. It informed Kuh that the fifth
cast of Duchamp-Villon’s Le Grand Cheval had been requested by
Alberto Giacometti (1901—66) for exhibition at the forthcoming Milan
Triennial in the International Section.zz Thus not only Duchamp (in
ensuring that his brother’s work was diffused) but also Giacometti (in
selecting the work for a major public event) were representing a view of
Duchamp-Villon that was important, for this was a period when the
history of twentieth-century sculpture was being written or, put another
way, when early twentieth-century sculpture was entering history (long
after the dominant modernist outlines of the history of modern painting
had been well established and were in the process of entrenched
institutionalization) .Z3
i38 ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

We can thus say, without confusing questions of qualitative assessment

with aesthetic judgement, that a bronze work of sculpture is necessarily a
testimony to its period and bears the traces of the period when it was
cast. This testimony has to be allowed an independent status in historical
analysis. The remaining part of this essay will address the question of
bronze as a historically coded and significant material that was
recognized as such by artists who (i) reacted against it (Picasso,
Boccioni), (ii) aspired to its cachet but were not able to work with it for
reasons of cost (Gonzalez) or (iii) worked with it and developed new
qualities within it (Brancusi). v '
One overriding aspect that has dominated sculpture and its
historiography in the twentieth century is the close attention paid to
materials and materiality, a concern central to formal and iconographic
interpretations. This period has also witnessed the expansion of
sculpture into a wide range of new materials and new conceptions
worked out through such materials. New materials such as steel, plastic
or aluminium, found objects or refuse came to be utilized, as concerns
with time, speed and chance came to be embodied through matter. In this
light, bronze can appear ossified, a left-over from another age, an age
when sculpture was the record of an image in a given material, rather
than the image derived from the creative possibilities inherent to the
material. Bronze is an alloy, composed of about 80-5 per cent copper and
2-20 per cent tin (even up to 25 per cent) with slight percentages of
phosphorus, lead and zinc. Traditional bronze alloy consisted of 85 per
cent copper, with 5 per cent each of tin, zinc and lead.24 On their own,
the component metals were not precious but some were rare enough to
be prized: copper chiefly but also tin and lead. The prestige of bronze
goes back to Pliny and to the invention of ‘Corinthian brass’.25 It is one
of many materials used in sculpture throughout the centuries, but until
the middle of this century, bronze stood out among the materials
ascribed to that art by being man-made. Wood and stone were found in
nature, ivory was organic. Furthermore, the creation of a work in bronze
has remained a complex, time-consumming, therefore costly, process of
fabrication, which contributed to its aura. The fabrication of a bronze
requires the team effort of several highly skilled craftsmen. Right up to
the beginning of the twentieth century, a foundry comprised several
functions (metiers), of which the more specialized ones of chasers and
patinieres (specialists who applied the patina to a bronze) required
considerable expertise and were separate crafts in their own right.26 A
bronze’s patina was highly regarded and sought after, like gilding.
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 139

Barbara Hepworth in the Morris Singer Foundry, London, in 1964 in front of her Single Form,
1964, bronze. Now outside the United Nations Headquarters, New York.

Connoisseurs of bronzes looked for the crispness of outline and colour of

patina, which varied according to the alloy’s mix of metals and the skill
of the patiniere applying acid washes/7 It can therefore be argued that
what one admired in such works was the product of a workshop rather
than of a single artist/8 In this light the photo of Barbara Hepworth in
front of Single Form at the Morris Singer Foundry in London in 1964 is
deceptive because of the one-to-one focus it gives of the artist and her
creation, and because it belies the existence of a workshop needed to
create this over-life-sized bronze. The image is important as it bears
witness to what had become a conventional understanding in the
twentieth century of the sculptor working alone in close communion
with his or her material.

At the root of the controversy that accompanies attempts to legitimize

posthumous bronzes lies the only comprehensively articulated discourse
on sculpture in the twentieth century: one that was supported by the
eloquence of critics and the demonstration of accomplished works. This
140 ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

was the debate that put forward garving rather than modelling in the
practice of sculpture. Patrick Elliott was the first to suggest the
interesting link between the rise of concern with ‘direct carving’ (taille
directe) in France in the 1920s and the scandal of Rodin’s posthumous
stone sculptures that shook the art world at the time/9 Rodin’s
posthumous bronzes did not share that fate, being legitimated by the law.
The issue of direct carving or working direct, however, has considerable
bearing on my discussion of the materiality of bronze, as it had such an
impact on the critical discourse available to sculpture this century.
In the English-speaking world, Henry Mbore (1898-1986) has done
more than anyone to give coherence to the place of material in the field of
sculpture. Even though by the 1950s he would come to denounce this
‘fetish’, he never failed to stress what had been, in the 1930s when he
began to make sculptures, the ‘very necessary fight for the doctrine of
truth to material and the need for direct carving’.30 Moore also
acknowledged the impact of Roger Fry’s writings on essential form,
and of Ezra Pound’s account of direct carving in his Gaudier-Brzeska A
Memoir (1916),31 not to mention the vicinity of Adrian Stokes’ writings,
which evoked the emotive response to materials and elements. Moore
realized, in his words, ‘the intrinsic emotional significance of shapes’,
exceeding that of representation, which forced him to ‘recognise again the
importance of the material in which [the sculptor] works’,3i so that when,
in 1934, the notion of ‘truth to material’ appeared in his statements on
sculpture, it contributed with its persuasiveness to entrench carving as the
only acceptable path in sculpture.33 The impact of these ideas on the
subsequent history of sculpture is all too apparent if we consider Moore’s
own perceptive appreciation of the work of Brancusi:

Since the Gothic, European sculpture had become overgrown with moss, weeds
- all sorts of surface excrescences which completely concealed shape. It has been
Brancusi’s special mission to get rid of this overgrowth, and to make us once
more shape-conscious.34

I suggest that these concerns of truth to material and working direct

entrenched the discourse about the subject in one exclusive direction,
which privileged shape and form above all other sculptural effects. We
need look no further than to Clement Greenberg to see the effect of this
discourse on the critical appreciation of sculpture: at the root of his
notion of ‘construction-sculpture’ and ‘the liberation from the
monolithic’ lies the idea of essential form, which informs his notion of
‘the self-sufficiency of sculpture’.35
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 141

Let us now turn to consider the consequences of these views on the

understanding of the work of Julio Gonzalez and Constantin Brancusi.
The case of Gonzalez’s posthumous casts is both familiar and particular.
It is familiar in that these works are produced by his heirs, allegedly
acting according to the wishes of the artist who, in their words, would
have cast all his works including the irons if he could have afforded it. Its
particularity resides in the fact that the resulting bronzes are valid before
the law as it stands only if the forged and welded metal originals are
regarded as platres de travail (working plasters used for casting); in other
words, if their status is thus altered. Rosalind Krauss, in a catalogue
essay of a Gonzalez exhibition, which combined posthumous casts with
original sculptures in iron, sought to defend these new works. Her
forceful arguments betray the limitations of a reading that ignores
surface texturality:
In ending this discussion it might be interesting to confront, straight on, one of the
conclusions to be drawn from what I have been saying about Gonzalez s process,
his immersion in the modalities of transcription and copying, his distance from
the metaphoric conditions of assemblage. Although he used metal scrap and the
occasional found object as well, the exigencies of Gonzalez s process meant that
many of his shapes had to be obtained by reworking the scrap through forging
and certainly relegating the industrial readymade parts - bolts or springs - to
minor areas of the work. Gonzalez’s sculpture was not about the transformations
wrung by the perceptual association on the quotidian object. Therefore the
uniqueness of that object - just this colander or this bicycle seat - was irrelevant
to his work. Thus many of the issues of direct-metal working that would
theoretically prohibit its translation into bronze are also irrelevant.’6

What does it mean to say ‘although he used metal scrap and the
occasional found object as well , as though this although is a
concession? And what does it mean, for someone who approaches the
work of art as a semiotic system, to speak of Gonzalez as certainly
relegating the industrial readymade parts — bolts or springs — to minor
areas of the work?’ What are ‘minor areas of the work ? Are they
irrelevancies, aesthetic mistakes on the part of Gonzalez?
Krauss’ argument rests on a notion that because the uniqueness of the
object’ is linked to metaphor it is not a relevant concern to Gonzalez.
This is confusing enough, but her insistence on what she sees as
Gonzalez’s characteristic mode of ‘transcribing and copying is linked to
a wish to close out the possibility of a Surrealist interpretation, however
broad, of Gonzalez’s work; which results in a need to distance it from
that of Picasso whose sculpture of the 1930s cannot avoid a Surrealist
interpretation.
142 ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

Julio Gonzalez, Harlequin, c. 1929—30, bronze (posthumous cast).

Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

The metaphoric conditions of assemblage, in this passage, are those of

Surrealism, those found in such works as Bull’s Head, which emerges
from the chance encounter of a bicycle seat and handlebars. Because the
aim of Krauss’ essay is to explain and justify the casting of Gonzalez’s
work in bronze, the solution seems to be to distance him from Surrealist
concerns, gauged in terms of metaphoric assemblage. This is a very
narrow view of what is Surrealist in Picasso’s work or what might be
Surrealist in a broader poetical sphere, and excludes any consideration of
what elements of Surrealism were part of a wider context by the 1930s.
But what is at stake is whether one simply views the final image created
by Gonzalez in a work such as Harlequin or one includes the meaning
that a low-art, even decidedly non-art, material has on the work: the iron
original in the Zurich Kunsthaus or the bronze version in the Scottish
National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh.57 The problem with
Gonzalez is that his position in the avant-garde was marginal, and the
formulation of the avant-garde itself was elliptic. If we are to accept that
it is his use of materials as much as the images generated that opened up
new creative avenues, we cannot admit the posthumous cast.
Krauss is reluctant to explore fully the meaning of forged metal and its
possible affiliations with concerns of the creative possibilities of ordinary
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 143

materials, just as she is little concerned with the practical modalities of

sculpture in the period, when exploration took place in the studio. She
also positions her critique of Modernism entirely within the post-Second
World War orbit of Clement Greenberg. Yet before the First World War,
the use of ordinary materials was of great interest to Guillaume
Apollinaire’s circle and one can safely say that its use was not limited
solely to the metaphoric possibilities of assemblage as they became
entrenched under Surrealism. Ordinary, non-art materials existed outside
the system of values represented by the academy, the museum and other
institutions of authority. But what is often misunderstood is that the
aesthetic developed by Apollinaire and his friends involved negotiating
art with life and not divorcing art from life.38
It is always claimed that sculpture lagged behind painting in
revolutionary breakthroughs; however, Andre Salmon’s La Jeune
Sculpture franpaise makes clear that avant-garde sculpture, before the
First World War, shared with painting an anti-bourgeois stance: his
denigration of the (bourgeois) cult of the shelf belittles the ‘objet d’art’
fetish of the bibelot, segregating art from life.39 In this instance Picasso’s
Absinthe Glass, a series of six differently painted (one coated with a layer
of sand), as opposed to patinated, bronzes, stands out as a work in which
the material, bronze, handled in such a way as to obfuscate its quality
label, had a specific set of historical connotations, which, furthermore,
Salmon’s criticism makes clear was a condition of cultural meaning.
Probably the most famous advocates of rejection of traditional
sculpture materials were the Futurists, their stance being most notably
expressed by Umberto Boccioni in his 1912 ‘Technical Manifesto of
Futurist Sculpture’:
4. Destroy the literary and traditional ‘dignity’ of marble and bronze statues.
Refuse to accept the exclusive nature of a single material in the construction of a
sculptural whole. Insist that even twenty different types of materials can be used
in a single work of art in order to achieve plastic movement. To mention a few
examples: glass, wood, cardboard, iron, cement, hair, leather, cloth, mirrors,
electric lights, etc. (my emphasis)40

In spite of this disclaimer, Boccioni’s surviving sculptures in plaster were

cast in bronze in the late 1920s, long after his untimely death in 1916.4
The polished bronze versions of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space on
view in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Tate Gallery in
London obviously do not adhere to its creator’s published statements but
they evidence an important development in twentieth-century sculpture,
namely, the equation between sleek, polished metal surfaces and
i44 ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

modernity, which has contributed,to make Unique Forms of Continuity

in Space an icon of what is truly modern in pre-Second World War
sculpture. In this it has surpassed the works that might have held a claim
to that invention: Brancusi’s polished bronzes, viewed by many critics in
the 1920s and 1930s as an expression of modern technology.4Z For
Brancusi, however, the identification of his polished works with the
products of modernity’s manufactures was not flattering and resulted in a
court case against the US Customs in 1927 over the status of his bronze
Bird in Space of 1926, which had failed to satisfy Customs officials that it
was indeed a work of art and not an obfect'of industrial manufacture.43
It is Jacob Epstein’s testimony, in defence of Brancusi at this trial, that
reveals to what extent the case also turned around the role of the
sculptor, personally, negotiating the mechanical:

‘Why is this a work of art?’ the lawyer continued.

‘It pleases my sense of beauty [said Epstein], I find it a beautiful object.’
‘So if we had a brass rail, highly polished and harmoniously curved, it would
also be a work of art?’
‘It could become so’, said Epstein.
‘Then a mechanic could have done this thing?’ asked the lawyer triumphantly.
‘No; a mechanic could not have conceived it.’44

Umberto Boccioni, Unique Forms of Continuity in Space,

1913, bronze (cast in 1931). Museum of
Modern Art, New York.
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 145

Constantin Brancusi, Bird in Space, 192.6,

polished bronze (unique cast) on stone and wood base.
Collection Mrs Hester Diamond, New York.

It is rarely asked, however, whether, and in what sense, the discourse of

the celebration of modernity and technology is even applicable to
Brancusi’s concerns, as opposed to a Futurist philosophy. Thus one
might venture that it was indeed Boccioni and not Brancusi who held the
day, when Unique Forms of Continuity in Space was cast in bronze in the
early 1930s.45 So much more was at stake in the polished bronze surfaces
that Brancusi intentionally used.
Until now, my argument has been that posthumous reproduction
informs us about the era in which the posthumous casts are made. I now
wish to move my argument to another level in relation to Brancusi, that
is, to an explicit engagement with intentionality in Brancusi s use of
polished finish. Here my argument draws on the work of Quentin
Skinner’s application of J. L. Austin’s speech and theory to
methodological questions in historiography.46 Accordingly, we cannot
distinguish between two apparently similar cases of finish in Boccioni
and Brancusi unless we concern ourselves with the understanding of
finish. Furthermore, to ask of this ‘understanding’ is to say something
about the possibilities from which the artist chooses or makes decisions;
and the performance of a decision is an intentional activity. In other
146 ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

words, that the finish of Boccioni and Brancusi may look the same and,
even, fall within plausibly similar contexts is not sufficient to the
historical understanding of the function performed by polished finish in
either case. That two things are similar does not mean that they fall
under the same description or that further acts of differentiation are not
required, for clearly it is commonplace to lump together Brancusi and
Boccioni as examples of modernity and finish, the machine aesthetic and
the celebration of Tesprit nouveau’ (the New Spirit), etc. In this light,
those who argue that Brancusi is no less guilty than Rodin on the issue
of reproduction would point to Brancusi’s (admittedly occasional and
rare) employment of assistants. This is mistaken. Not only are the
contexts different, but also the understanding of what is at stake, of
what is being performed, is radically different. The upshot could well be
that Brancusi’s work (as the transformation of certain Symbolist
concerns) is to be, in part, defined against Rodin, but not at all in
relation to Boccioni.
First, significance should be accorded to a negative fact: not only did
Brancusi dispense with the work of the patiniere to supply the patinas of
his works, but also he dispensed with patina altogether and instead came
to produce the high polish directly from the bronze cast and in the
process redefined the relationship of sculptor to work and process.4' In
this manner, Brancusi realised something of the virtue of direct carving as
conceptualized by Moore but without the fetishization of the process that
lurks within Moore’s formulation of direct carving. Thus Brancusi stated
that

Direct cutting is the road to sculpture, but also the most dangerous for those
who don’t know how to walk. And in the end, direct or indirect, cutting means
nothing, it is the complete thing that counts.48

The work of producing high polish directly from the cast is linked to
another consideration of the highest importance for Brancusi, namely,
that although he avoids the fetish of direct carving while recognizing its
value, he practises a process of sculpture in which the bronzes are not
conceived as casts from modelled objects. This opens the possibility that
the conventional distinction of sculpture production as either carving or
modelling fails to capture what is distinctive in Brancusi’s technique, in
which illumination and the possibilities of light directly produced
(reflection, distortion, absorption, intensity and many other values of
light from a surface) define not only the object but also the possible
relations that a viewer could entertain with the object:
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 147

High polish is a necessity which certain approximately absolute forms demand

of some materials. It is not always appropriate, it is even very harmful for certain
forms.49

Epstein, too, recognized the importance of light in relation to material

in the new conception of sculpture emerging in this period. For him the
interpretation of this phenomenon was to do with form and vitality, a
form inconceivable outside the possibilities of the material:
Arnold L. haskell: I have noticed at many recent exhibitions how much
sculptors are influenced by your methods. They use the rough surface entirely
without discretion, merely to break up the light. It gives the unpleasant
impression of skin disease or the remains of an attack of smallpox.

EPSTEIN: That is because they make the work smooth and then roughen it
afterwards as an afterthought. The texture is a definite and inseparable part of
the whole. It comes from inside so to speak; it grows with the work.50

If to Brancusi we add Boccioni, then Epstein, we could, too, add Frank

Dobson in order to establish a context for this concern with high
polished finish. But what makes the statement ‘high polished finish’
unique to Brancusi is the role his studio came to play in providing a
sculptural space where his preoccupation with illumination and light
could (i) be explored, (ii) be under his direct control and (iii) be
stabilized. For this reason, the photographs of Brancusi should be
understood as an extension of the aesthetic of the sculpture of
illumination, and his instructions to his patrons for the installation of
his works should be understood as confirmation of the importance of the
setting, the ideal setting, in the imagination of his works.
Brancusi’s work and its ideology constitute an art of the studio in
terms of which the directives from the maker are indeed a means of
transfer of the maker’s scheme (this was understood by John Quinn very
well, hence his instructions for the liquidation of his collection on his
death). Within the Futurist ideology the role of high finish is exactly the
reverse of what it is for Brancusi: not precious, not a sign of spiritual
illumination, nor less a sign of the absolute, and certainly not the product
of a studio conception of art; Futurist works, even when they are
produced in studios, are understood to be blueprints for a transformed
public sphere.51
Brancusi’s photographs and the works that survive with their original
bases attest to an art in which materials are organized in a hierarchical
manner: they range from organic (wood) to mineral (stone and marble)
and man-made (stainless steel and bronze), allowing also for admixtures
of plaster and concrete. Though rough is often opposed to smooth we
148 ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS

cannot say, faced with works such as Sorceress (in the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum) or Torso of a Young Man (at the Philadelphia
Museum of Art), that the roughly hewn works are only the ones in
wood and that wood alone is used for bases. What we can say,
however, is that polish is a quality Brancusi applied to well-defined
works, and that for him the polished bronze surface was one of utmost
importance and significance. Brancusi left an extraordinary and rarified
oeuvre of simple yet immeasurably subtle forms, enshrining them in the
most obfuscating aphorisms, designed, one feels, to ensure that we the
spectators are exactly where he the artilst wants us to be. Brancusi s
absolute resides, one would think, outside his material, but his
aphorisms indicate, I believe, that the sculptor’s statement lies in his
gesture, though this may appear sublimated. It is this intimate relation
between the artist and the resulting work of art that is most important
in a work by Brancusi. He made sure that his forms were individually
polished and finished. The works stand as testimony of the high regard
and seriousness with which he held the ‘bronze-sculptor’s Art’. Hence
the careful instructions on the maintenance of his works once they had
left his studio and entered the environment of the collector; an example
of which is the letter to John Quinn dated 5 June 1918. In this
important document, Brancusi details the care that must be taken with
his bronze, A Muse (1917), and, in an often overlooked passage, demurs
from giving an opinion on the conservation of the Epstein bronzes in
the lawyer’s collection. Brancusi writes that be cannot tell Quinn what
to do because he is not familiar with Epstein’s working methods, and
because he does not know what his intentions were.52. These
instructions bear witness to the attention he brought to the finish of
his work, and more importantly to the place of intentionality in this
process.
Noguchi’s recollections of the time he acted as studio assistant in the
late 19ZOS confirm the importance of the sheen. The bronzes’ finish and
clarity were carefully thought out and brought out and not left to the
hazards of the foundry patini'eres. Clarity was essential to form as clarity
permitted the perception of the absolute in form. This thinking through,
these acts of attention to each work, even on the rare occasions when
assistants are present, is qualitatively different from, not better than, the
traditional workshop practices characteristic of Rodin’s production. The
form of attention reaches into the production of works not conceived as
multiples (for no two are identical, and never was any work conceived as
a multiple) but as objects created for the solution of sculptural problems.
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 149

These objects would soon come to take on symbolic significance, a

significance that could not obtain with multiples or with posthumous
productions, since posthumous productions for the kind of process
inaugurated by Brancusi would not permit us to say among what
possibilities decisions were being made. Thus the unease felt before the
many versions in different materials of, for example, Torso of a Young
Man or A Muse, and which has provoked responses ranging from
outright denunciation of the claims that Brancusi made for his work to
justification on the part of his heirs to cast his work posthumously,
demonstrates a failure to understand the significance of Brancusi’s kind
of production. Geist is justified in his equation of Brancusi’s absolute and
his use of materials, whose sole justification is their adaptability to
certain ends.53 This is attested by his desire to have a golden finish on the
iron Column at Tirgu Jiu, Romania, whether the technical means were
available or not.54
Brancusi’s originality resides not in the cult of uniqueness but in the
development of a conception of sculpture which, in sidestepping the
carving/modelling distinction, created a body of work that was
confronted, unintentionally, with the issue of seriality. That he did not
set out to do a series is important, and this ‘not setting out to do, but
ending up doing’, this unintentionality, is what is distinctive about his
approach and the resulting works. This is how one must understand his
calculated response to John Quinn’s request in 1917 for a cast of the
marble Muse already in Arthur B. Davies’ collection, not as a disavowal
of his philosophy.55 In this respect, if a psychoanalytic interpretation of
Brancusi’s work were at all viable, it would have to deal with this
unconscious resistance and thus could not possibly be performed in
relation to posthumously produced works, such as The Muse in the
Norton Simon Collection, for example.
The bronze-casting process with its use of fire and worked matter no
doubt added to Brancusi’s pose of the artist as creator (especially
significant here would be the emphasis he placed on the Symbolist theme
of Prometheus). Bronze was a dignified medium and a meaningful one for
Brancusi. It held a special place in his oeuvre, embodying soaring flight
and sacredness. These are no doubt traditional positions, but the practice
that accompanied them was less so. The self-portrait photograph that
Brancusi often gate to friends and critics is deceptive: in it he appears as
though working in a forge, when in fact it is just a contrived play of light
and shadow that transforms his studio environment. The link between
the fire of the forge necessary to bronze-making and the light that results
 ALEXANDRA PARIGORIS
15°

Constantin Brancusi, The Muse, 1911, bronze (posthumous edition of five, cast no. 1)
on a limestone base. Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, CA.

from a polished bronze is made explicit.56 From this light stem the
divergent possibilities of Brancusi’s practice.
Must we conclude that bronze carried no distinctive meaning in the
twentieth century? Brancusi’s self-portrait attests to an awareness of the
power and fire associated with the forge and work in metal, but I hope to
have shown that there were enough cases to prove that bronze, as a
material, was central to sculptural work and, furthermore, though one
might denigrate the term, that aura (the golden glow) and finish have a
place in the history of sculpture along with the ideology behind the set of
 Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth 151

values they support or seek to define. Far from needing to say that
reproducibility is the effective critique of finish, I have sought to discuss
the issues surrounding reproduction in ways that secure historicity and
specificity without the contrivances of uniqueness.
 I*

9
Venus a Go Go, To Go
EDWARD ALLINGTON

FIRST FLASHBACK: NE^W YORK, 1987

The taxi, yellow, decrepit and large, lurches over the potholes and steam
vents of New York’s streets. It’s uncomfortable in the back where I’m
sitting with a strange resin object cradled on my lap. It’s precious to me,
this thing which for now may be allowed to pass as a sculpture, or the
shadow of a sculpture. I’m out hunting in the urban manner, motorized,
and guided by the yellow pages. I need a practical solution, I need
reproduction, and I need it now. To me this object, which I hold in love
and hate, is a source, it is the beginning of a new sculpture. One is not
enough, I want nine and I want them quickly, cheaply. And so we drive
on, with me in the back filled with hope and the dread of wasted time. To
ride in a taxi is to wait while in motion. Only the presence of a lover
could alleviate the tortures peculiar to this mode of transport. The choice
is between watching the cost of time accumulate on the meter or seeking
diversion. But why should I worry about the meter? After all this ride is
on the gallery. Perhaps because numbers irritate me, especially in the
form of minutes equals dollars.
So I allow my eyes to wander and my mind to follow them. I glance at
the rear-view mirror. The reflection of his face, then at the card with his
ID photograph attached to the crude protective screen of pop-riveted
plexiglass and aluminium which separates me from him. The comparison
between this portrait and its bellicose owner requires quite a leap of the
imagination. Either he’s able to believe the photograph is still a
reasonable reproduction of his physiognomy or he simply can’t be
bothered to change it. Time has had different effects on the man and his
photographic representation. The image is pallid, rather too blue in
colour, while the man himself - well, he’s just got older.
We go over the Brooklyn Bridge, light flickering through the web of its
supporting cables, the East River, huge, glittering, beneath us. My mind
begins to focus on the object on my lap - what it means, what it
represents, as well as the simpler problem of finding someone who’ll make
 Venus a Go Go, To Go i53

Edward Allington, Roman from the Greek in America, 1987, painted wood and
plaster figures. Private collection.

a mould and then pull casts from it. I could do this myself, but I don’t have
the time for that kind of indulgence.
The immaculate beige Watch Tower buildings are passing on our left.
And I think of the effects of reproductive technology in our culture, of
Walter Benjamin’s famous essay, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
Mechanical Reproduction’. Within the Watch Tower buildings repro¬
duction is the basis of a religion. Those immaculate walls conceal the hub
of the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ publishing empire, where religious tracts roll
off the presses, being logged and stockpiled for worldwide distribution.
Copy after copy, the same message constantly updated, they call their
religion the truth. This is evangelism founded upon the reproductive
techniques of printing. It’s a black-and-white issue after all. Accept the
word and the rewal'd is everlasting life; refuse and it’s death. They spread
their message through little magazines and books delivered to you the
old-fashioned way by preachers disguised as door-to-door salesmen.
They tend to be a bit evasive when it comes to discussing the importance
 EDWARD ALLINGTON
i54

of these buildings, though. And \yhy not? Truth and reproduction are
uncomfortable bedfellows.
But the buildings are far behind us now, the meter’s marking time and
dollars. The taxi’s moving through the bleak edges of the city, closer to
that destination so appropriate to my quest: Coney Island, first town of
shallow dreams and fakery, opened in 1906 as an electric dreamland of
ersatz forms, a world for the reproduction of fantasy.1
This thing on my knees is an object whose exact status is very hard to
establish. Roughly speaking, it can be called a sculpture — though only by
proxy. You might say it’s a replica: that’s the word on the small fact
sheet that came with it, but I can’t help feeling that this description is
more generous than it should be for a resin cast of the Medici Venus in
imitation-marble finish.
It’s a female torso: no arms; no legs; no head. The body is bent forward
a little, making the curve of the belly prominent. The hips are square and
full, the buttocks smooth, the breasts slightly rounded domes like the
insides of wine glasses - let me tell you, it’s pretty damn sexy. All these
tactile curves are set on a base of real stone, ideal for the coffee table or
mantelpiece, its nudity presumably acceptable for the home because it has
a provenance of sorts. I paid over $300 for it at the shop in the Metro¬
politan Museum of Art. The fact sheet has their stamp on it to prove it.
Museums are our temples to authenticity. They house the real, the
actual objects that signify our cultural truths. They employ people — all
those experts - to make sure that these treasures are, and remain,
authentic. But this thing jumping about on my lap as the taxi goes over
the potholes is a fake. For sure no one is going to be fooled by it. It
corresponds to its original only in size and shape. The materials are
modern - anyone can see it’s not old. Does it contain any kind of truth,
though? Is it capable of transmitting any of the awe we are asked to feel
when in the presence of the object that formed its matrix — the object
from which the mould was taken to spawn so many plastic copies? The
problem in this particular case is acute. My fact sheet clearly states that
it’s a copy (in resin) of a Roman copy (in stone) of a presumed Greek
original (in bronze), presumed lost. In other words, a copy of a copy
from something which doesn’t exist.

CUT TO REAL TIME AND THE QUESTION:

DO PLASTIC VENUSES TELL LIES?

My Medici Venus, fake marble, and beautiful in its own peculiar way,
needs its fact sheet, that small piece of paper I still keep on file. Its short
 Menus a Go Go, To Go i55

script and museum stamp frame or qualify an object that would

otherwise be nothing but an ornament of dubious worth. The fact sheet
imbues this Venus with a moral standing, with educational value. It
enables her to transmit information about art, and the institutional
knowledge of museums. Since the Enlightenment, modern Western
concepts of artistic value have had little to do with religious patronage or
the production of icons. Even before the first public museums were
created,2- the authority of the church was being replaced with a new,
secondary code of morality based on reason, substituting for the
cultivation of virtue and vice an ethic of ‘doing good’ and ‘doing harm’ to
which art had integral importance. As Diderot’s Encyclopedic article,
‘interessant’, indicates, a work of art owes its interest to its normal social
content and the artist must therefore be both ‘philosophe et honnete
homme’. And Diderot summed up his philosophy of art in the famous
sentence: ‘To make virtue attractive, vice obvious, ridicule forceful: that
is the aim of every honest man who takes up the pen, the brush or the
chisel’.3
This moral and educative directive for art spawned divergent attitudes
to the notion of reproduction. On the one hand, by the mid-eighteenth
century, the development of the Grand Tour as an essential prerequisite to
the education of a gentleman or man of taste had accelerated the develop¬
ment of a significant trade in reproductions of antique sculpture. In
essence, this was the origin of the modern souvenir, which tourists seek so
avidly and to which museum shops - with their fact sheets - still pander.
On the other hand lay the complex and contradictory Neo-classical
attitude towards imitation. Hugh Honour explains it succinctly.
So far from having anything of the servility of the copy, the practice of
imitation was, according to Reynolds, ‘a perpetual exercise of the mind,
a continual invention’. Mengs was also careful to emphasize the
distinction between copying and imitation: ‘but he who effectively
studies and observes the productions of great men, with true desire to
imitate them, makes himself capable of producing works which resemble
them because he considers the reasons by which they are done and this
makes him an imitator without being a plagiarist’. Hence the contempt
with which Canova and other Neo-classical sculptors regarded the
practice of copying even the greatest of antique statues.4
Yet this strong moral directive against mere reproduction paradoxi¬
cally led to the manufacture of still more copies. The Neo-classicist
demanded that nature should be depicted only in its ideal, unblemished
or ‘true’ state. Since the antique represented precisely that ideal from
156 EDWARD ALLINGTON

which a new universal art would bd born, students in the academies were
rigorously trained to draw and model from casts taken from the greatest
works of antiquity.
Just as our older art schools are still inhabited by such derelict casts, so
the legacy of these contradictory attitudes remains with us. Associated
with tourism and kitsch, the reproduction is regarded as a debasement of
the essential value residing in the ideal original. However, that value is
transmitted largely through photographs and three-dimensional forms of
replication, such as my Venus. Hence the casting services and shops
associated with the great museums in Paris, London and New York.
To some extent, this question of the original and its copy is more of a
problem in the case of sculpture than it is in the apparently similar
instance of painting. In earlier periods, paintings became known through
prints and many were actually produced for dissemination in this way.
The obvious distinction, however, between the techniques of print¬
making and painting left the viewer in no doubt that the unique material
object that was the original was not to be confused with the reproduction
that propagated its image or message. As far as sculpture is concerned,
the problem was not so much that technically distinct forms of
reproduction were not available (they were), but rather that many of
the traditional techniques of sculpture were, as they remain, in
themselves essentially reproductive. As a souvenir for the aspirant
highbrow tourist, my Venus may well be a kind of fake — but then so was
its original if the fact sheet has it right. And it’s surely more: a legacy
rendered solid, as it were, one that concentrates in itself complex and
contradictory histories.
But where are these histories and the values associated with them
located? Within the object or somewhere else? Does a sculpture entirely
exist as a purely material thing or as a conceptually more complex entity?
Richard Wollheim usefully distinguished between two commonly
opposed theories: ‘the ideal theory that works of art are mental entities,
and the presentational theory ... that works of art have only immediately
perceptible properties’, rejecting both of them in any undiluted form.5
Iris Murdoch, though hardly in agreement with Wollheim’s Wittgen-
steinian argument, refutes the purely presentational theory in terms more
succinct and accessible than those used by Wollheim, usefully raising the
case of sculpture on the way.

A work of art is of course not a material object, though some works of art are
bodied forth by material objects so as to seem to inhere in them. In the case of a
statue, the relation between the material object and the art object seems close, in
 Venus a Go Go, To Go i57

the case of a picture less so. Poems and symphonies are clearly not material
objects. Works of art require material objects to keep them continually available
(our memories fade) and some require performance by secondary artists. All art
objects are ‘performed’ or imagined first by the artist and then by his clients, and
these imaginative and intellectual activities or experiences may be said to be the
point or essence of art.6

It’s interesting that Murdoch should indicate that the experience of

sculpture seems more bound to the physical object than is generally the
case with other forms of art, even though, for her, the material object is
necessary mainly to body forth an experience of a distinctly separate
mental object. Such a conceptual object would, of course, already be
informed by existing knowledge, by established ways of seeing. In the
essay ‘I Think Therefore I Art’, Thomas McEvilly describes the mental
object that constitutes the aesthetic experience as follows:

Theories, of course are things; they are what Edmund Hussel called neomantic
objects, that is, mental objects. Every thought or concept is an object, and every
object has form and aesthetic presence (what does a centaur look like? an
angel?). There is, in other words, an aesthetics of thought with its own styles and
its own formalism.7

The problem that besets sculpture, perhaps more than it does the other
arts, is to determine to what extent the material object can be said to
body forth the Husselian ‘neomantic object’. This problem applies even
to those art works that are unique material objects, for in time they
suffer, deteriorate, require restoration, they may even have decayed so
badly that in part they require to be substantially replaced. In these cases,
the term ‘restoration’ seems too loose — it would be more accurate to
speak of refabrication. As for reproductions - replicas, copies, call them
what you will - the problem seems endemic. With each impression, each
cast taken from the matrix or the original something, some small detail,
gets lost. Today we most readily assume that which is lost must be the
artist’s touch.

SECOND FLASHBACK: REGINA, 1985

We’re deep in the Canadian plains and it’s cold outside, lethally cold.
The television stations issue warnings at regular intervals: don’t walk
outside unless it’s absolutely necessary; drive in convoys. To underline
these messages th& news is filled with stories which sound like urban
myths. There is a couple whose car had broken down; they had not been
in a convoy. She was alive because she stayed in the car. He died; he froze
to death trying to make it from the car to the nearest house.
 EDWARD ALLINGTON
i5«

It’s hard to believe because it’s so deceptively beautiful out there, but
with the temperature running from minus twenty to minus forty with the
wind-chill factor, the danger’s real. It’s a world of whiteness, virtually
devoid of life, where the snow is so white and crisp it sings snow music as
you walk on it. A world where the moisture in your nostrils freezes with
a sinus crunch as you step out of the hotel, and if you start to feel warm
and comfortable out there in the whiteness, you should know that this
means your body has started to succumb to hypothermia, leaving the
mind - that site of sensory and aesthetic pleasure — right out of the loop.
It’s going to look good, and who knows, it might even feel good - but
you will be starting to die.
Here in the gallery it’s warm and safe, as if the imaginary divide that
separates the gallery from the world, a world within a world, has been
defined climatically rather than by a priori concepts of space. We’re here
within this art space, this safe space, a world within the world of ice,
cabin fever and potential death, to install a group exhibition. It’s called
Space Invaders.
My task here is relatively simple. I have a room and some works, some
material objects, to place inside it. There’s a certain ritual attached to
this task: after setting the sculptures up, I walk out of the room and try to
forget everything for a while before going back to see how the sculptures
sit together, one piece against another, how the space between them is
articulated. The aim being to make them resonate in the space, to get
them to look as if there’s simply no other place they could be, as if
they’ve always been there. To achieve this I need to clear my mind, so as
to be able to go back and see with clean eyes. These periodic excursions
from my part of the exhibition are also a good opportunity to check on
what all the other artists are doing.
On one of these walkabouts, I stop to talk to the French artist Bertrand
Lavier. Bertrand is making a new work for the show. He’s standing there
in the gallery, pipe in mouth, in front of two rear wings from an old
American car. They’re fixed, pinned to the gallery wall like a butterfly.
He’s holding a broad brush which he’s using to apply thick, even strokes
of Liquitex, which happens to be the only paint he will use. The paint is
mixed so as to match exactly the actual colour of the car wings, the only
difference being that of texture. He stops painting so we can talk for a
while. I like these works a lot and as I stand there admiring the piece;
Bertrand makes a joke, one with a serious intent, but funny nonetheless.
He says, ‘You know, today I am painting with the touch of Van Gogh,
but tomorrow? I don’t know. Perhaps the touch of Gauguin’. The point
 Venus a Go Go, To Go *59

Bertrand Lavier, Belvedere, 1985, Liquitex acrylic paint on steel. Private collection.

is, he’s doing his utmost to apply the paint so there’s no ‘touch’
whatsoever.

CUT BACK TO VENUS AND HER LIES - OR OTHERWISE

My lovely plastic Venus is also totally devoid of any evidence of her

maker’s hand. No touch of genius here, just the slightly warm surface of
resin impregnated with marble dust. Remember, it’s a copy of a copy of
an original only ‘presumed’ to have existed. Making copies was integral
to the methods of the Roman sculptor. The demand for replicas of
celebrated Greek works to decorate villas and palaces makes it seem
reasonable that there was once a Greek original of my plastic Venus but,
in any case, practice in the traditional Roman workshop celebrated
copying. Apprentices learnt from the master; artisans used casting
techniques to turn clay models into wax and then into bronze. For a long
time it was considered that some form of pointing machine was known
to the ancient world, so closely do certain types conform to a standard.
These traditional methods remained largely unchanged and untouched
even throughout &e Renaissance and beyond. But the fact was obscured
— or at least repictured — by the revolution in thought that accompanied
the rise of Romanticism in the eighteenth century, transforming the
status of the artist. Jean Chatelain puts it like this:
160 EDWARD ALLINGTON

The revolutionary upheaval which shattered the traditional workshop system

and the advent of an individualistic philosophy, followed the rise of
Romanticism, and the development of the art market and speculation destroyed
this unity and substituted a hierarchy among the arts. All these factors
contributed to the emergence of a new concept, that of the artist as an inspired,
exceptional being, endowed by providence or by nature with a gift for creating,
innovating - for doing what others had not yet done - and so personal, so
spontaneous, was this endowment that it could blossom only within the context
of total liberty, supporting neither guidance nor hindrance.8

As Chatelain explains, this new notion of the artist changed the way art
was seen and sold. In other words, it is to the Romantic vision that we
owe the idea of inspiration rendered solid by the artist’s touch. The myth
is now so deeply embedded within modern notions of art that it is taken
as given by most spectators as they mentally release the work of art from
the material object which bodies it forth. It’s even applied retrospectively
to objects quite innocent of the concept of art. There are of course some
works to which it can be applied with accuracy, but normally within the
domain of sculpture, its fragility is revealed by the continuation of
traditional techniques such as bronze casting. Here, at best, it is
compromised. In the light of much contemporary sculpture, it hardly
applies at all. Reproduction within traditional practice is represented by
the limited edition that Chatelain discusses in detail:

The basic role on which this compromise is founded is that the ‘matrix’ from
which the skilled artisans work to produce the original edition should be made
by the creating artist’s own hands and that their final completion be overseen by
some agreed authority, usually, but not always, the artist. The notion of the first
edition is simply that of all the technically possible copies from the ‘matrix’. The
first will usually be considered the most noble, beautiful and accurate, and the
first edition will usually be small in number (under ten examples). The reason for
this is usually a balance between what is economically most advantageous to
artist, artisans, agents and buyers alike. Sometimes the ‘matrix’ can only sustain
a certain number of copies before failing. Sometimes, however, the notion of the
original edition is used to fallaciously promote exclusivity which brings us to the
very opposite of the first edition, the concept of mass-produced art.9

If, in these cases, it can be said that the artist’s touch has at least been
‘mediated’ to some degree, what of the compound manifestations of
materials, found objects and the conceptual actions of contemporary
sculptural practice, Rosalind Krauss’ ‘sculpture in the expanded field’?10
If we have reservations about the romantic notion of genius’ touch in the
face of these phenomena, it is well to remember that the situation is not
entirely new. One of Rodin’s major contributions to modern sculpture
lay in his revolutionary use of the then novel technique of photography to
 Venus a Go Go, To Go 161

propagate images of his work — and, paradoxically, of himself as the very

type of creative genius who gave birth to unique objects somehow frozen
at the moment when they left the master’s hand. The image was, of
course, quite false. Methods of reproduction were essential to his
practice. Rodin used casts and moulds to build a library of parts, which
were subsequently recombined to collage new sculptures. He established
what amounted to a sculpture factory, employing pointing and enlarging
machines as well as skilled stone-carvers to produce his work. What’s
more, it has survived Rodin himself. Of course, many Rodins remain
unique, either literally or in Chatelain’s sense as a numbered cast from an
authorized edition, but thanks to the artist’s legacy to the French
Government, it is still possible to obtain new, posthumous and
completely ‘authentic’ bronzes issued by the Musee Rodin.
But back to my Venus, a carapace of resin impregnated with marble
dust. She’s a tricky little number, but maybe she contains truth after all.
Not the kind of truth that is bodied forth to constitute the neomantic
object you might identify as a work of art, but a kind of truth about the
nature of sculpture itself. More often than not, sculpture is dependent
upon processes which by their very nature deny the artist’s touch. Take
the clay model, that first rendering which is made to be immediately
destroyed, washed from the moulds, merely one among a number of
fabrications, which, though under the sculptor’s control, are not
executed by the artist. The sculptor’s vision is realized through
collaborative effort. You might say that the sculptor’s role may be
likened to that of the cinematic ‘auteur’ or a composer of music. In this
light the current liking for sculptors’ drawings becomes immediately
understandable, for in them at least the artist’s touch is guaranteed.
Perhaps, just as my Metropolitan Venus, shadow of its presumptively
lost original, product of an absent matrix, may be said to have no
verifiable singular genesis, so a great deal of sculpture may be said to
have no originating centre. It issues from a type of void, not from a set of
definable actions akin to those made by touches of a brush on canvas. If
you’re not hopelessly wedded to the romantic notion of the inspired
artist, to the touch of genius, you may be able to see that the beauty and
wonder of sculpture as an art lies precisely in its use of reproductive
techniques, of collaborative work combining the skills of more than one
person. If in someVespects the production of sculpture may be likened to
the production of music, and admittedly this is an analogy which
collapses if pushed too far, then it might be said that there is a matrix
generated and to some degree controlled by the composer, but for its
i6z EDWARD ALLINGTON

realization it assumes a base in a 'multiply skilled community, in the

existence of reproductive techniques and performances by people other
than the artist, or as we might say, as well as the artist. Perhaps the
analogy with music could be used to help us to see why sculpture today,
sculpture in the expanded field, has, like music, become so divergent in
its manifestations.
From the introduction of Minimalism and, more importantly, of
Conceptual Art in the 1960s, expression no longer seems the driving force
within art practice. The significance of Conceptual Art relies not on any
novelty of thought (art has always involved the conceptual, as Wollheim
and Murdoch recognized in their different ways), but rather on the
attempt to remove value completely from the object that bodies forth the
work of art. But, as McEvilly noted,

Prior to the 1960s, conceptual art already existed in a variety of forms which
were not regarded as comprising a separate genre. Magritte and Picabia, for
example, produced conceptual drawing in the 1920s. Duchamp and Man Ray
practised conceptual sculpture. It was the impasse of Formalist hegemony in the
early 1960s which had become virtually tyrannical in its exclusion of conceptual
elements and of social reference that caused conceptual art to be specified as a
separate genre.11

If, within the traditional practice of sculpture, reproductive technology

may be regarded as a device which not only produced objects but also
invested them with value as objects, Conceptual Art employed
reproductive techniques and other strategies that denied the value of
the artist’s touch to favour not the material object but the neomantic
entity constituted by the idea or concept. The history of the first
‘conceptual sculpture’, Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel, his original
and most important ‘readymade’, makes the differences clear, for, like
my false Venus, this is a work dependent upon reproduction; it also had a
‘presumed’ original, now lost.
This famous work, a bicycle wheel on a stool, is usually displayed in
museums or illustrated in books with the label: Bicycle Wheel 1913,
Neuilly. In one sense, this is correct: for Duchamp, it was the concept
that mattered, not the object. However, as an object, the title is always
incorrect. There have been thirteen versions of this work and there is no
way to establish the form and configuration of the first one, the one made
in 1913 at Neuilly. It is thought to have been discarded by Duchamp’s
sister when she cleared his studio following her brother’s move to New
York. The lack of evidence to verify this first version has led to
speculation concerning its actual appearance.
 Venus a Go Go, To Go 163

It would be interesting to know what the original wheel was propped upon.
Since there is no written description, nor photographs or eyewitnesses, we are
left with speculations. As Eke Bonk remarked to William Camfield, the tall
kitchen stool seen in the 1917 photograph is a typically American piece of
furniture, foreign to a European eye. It stands 29 Vin tall as opposed to the 16 Vi"
height of the usual European stool. The closest thing that comes to mind
resembling a tall stool is a three-legged sculpture easel.12'

If Bernard Brunon is right, then the original was quite different from the
subsequent replicas. The second version to which Brunon refers, that
made by Duchamp in New York in 1916, is also lost. We have only the
photographs. The first version still extant was made much later by
Duchamp and Sidney Janis (Janis bringing the wheel and fork back from
France) for a show at the Sidney Janis Gallery in 1951. This is the version
now on view at the New York Museum of Modern Art. The fourth
version was made for the Moderna Museet in Stockholm by Ulf Linde
and P. O. Ultuedt. Another replica was made by Richard Hamilton in
1963 and, finally, an edition of eight was produced under the direct
supervision of Marcel Duchamp by the Galleria Schwartz, Milan, in
1964. Duchamp took great pleasure in these reproductions, believing that
each new version released the concept from the tyranny of the object that
bodied it forth. In this entirely modern reconfiguration, reproduction
functions as a means of diminishing the value of the object and with it
what Wollheim called the presentational theory of art. In the Bicycle
Wheel, the immediately perceptible properties of the work are undercut
by the work’s dubious history, its mythical origin and the subsequent
replications whose various manifestations all differ in detail but are
usually accorded a single title and date, the date Duchamp gave for its
conceptual inception, but one quite inaccurate for any of the remaining
material objects.
This history suggests a new idea. If the mental entity, the neomantic
object, is all-important and the material object that bodies it forth no
more than a cipher or analogue serving to represent or, in Murdoch’s
terms, perform it, then there is no reason why a work of art cannot
exist in mass-produced form as an endless edition, the sculptural
equivalent to the record or compact disc. Several artists — the German
Katerina Fritsch, for example - have attempted something like this, but
to my knowledge only one has made a thorough exploration of this
means of propagating and marketing a truly mass-produced work of art
with the potential to achieve the objective completely. A real work of
art capable of being sold in supermarkets, this work or project is Les
Levine’s Disposables of 1966.
164 EDWARD ALLINGTON

Les Levine, Disposables, 1966, vacuum-formed polystyrene. Courtesy Les Levine.

In a self-conscious parody of capitalist methods of mass-production and

distribution, Levine mass-produced a line of so-called Disposables from
expandable polystyrene - better known as Styrofoam - which emerged straight
from the factory in sixty different styles and thirty colours. Levine proceeded to
distribute them in bulk packages of ten thousand units to buyers, retailing at a
volume price of $3 per unit.13

Not only did these works involve the eradication of the artist’s touch.
Levine simply had the idea, then ’phoned in his order to the plastics
manufacturer. Totally undercutting the notion of exclusivity normally
associated with the art object, the Disposables were available in bulk for
a price which actually reflected the cost of their production. Levine’s
position was admirable in its thoroughness and went beyond mere
 Venus a Go Go, To Go 165

questions of production and distribution. ‘Levine took the renegade role

still further by heretically claiming that he didn’t care what the objects
looked like. The point was for people to “use” his art for as long as they
felt like, and when they grew tired of it to chuck it.’14 As he pithily
proclaimed to Rita Reif of the blew York Times:
'*

To be disposable something must be made to be destroyed as soon as the owner

wishes ... To be truly disposable a work of art must be as available as Kleenex
and cheap enough to throw away without compunction ... in a fantasy-oriented,
consumer-oriented society, culture is just one more thing to be consumed.15

Levine’s Disposables established a position at the extreme end of what

Wollheim called the ideal theory. Without actually disappearing, the
object was reduced to its minimal form as a means to body forth the
work of art. By industrially replicating his Disposables and pegging them
at such a low price, Levine implicitly questioned the actual value of other
art objects and suggested a form for a means of art production equivalent
to the marketing of music records or compact discs.
The plastic Disposables are a structural paradox; their production and sale as art
produce a double bind. They challenge the market mechanisms that restrict the
supply of certain works of art, making it clear that this restriction is not due to
rarity or scarcity, but to economic strategy. Levine thus notes that Noland’s
stripe paintings could easily be manufactured like awning fabric, with strip
frames to match, at virtually no decrease in quality. If this is so, then the
perpetuation of high art in the midst of mass-production is nothing short of
social hallucination. By signing contracts with department stores for sales of
millions of Disposables ($1.25 each), Levine is filling a niche in the ecology of art
economics - and in the process may make as much money as Kenneth Noland.
Hence Levine, as an artist, sees little use in uniqueness or pseudouniqueness, but
only in well-considered business methods, a juxtaposition of kitsch and high art
which brings to mind the methods of Frank Zappa.1

After this, is it possible to say that a work of art — a sculpture — contains

a singular truth? Romantic thought would seem to offer the possibility of
an absolute value embodied, held captive within a solid object that sits
pregnant in the gallery waiting for you, the viewer, to release it. But the
reproductive methods of sculpture would seem to cast doubt on this
proposition. For the production and replication of art does not reproduce
an absolute value again and again. It is not a black-and-white issue like
making icons and printing Watch Tower tracts in which the message is
constantly updated but always the same. The void at the centre of the
reproductive practices of sculpture comes out of a refusal of
epistemological certainty. As McEvilly has it: ‘Those who insist on
certainty of knowledge resist recognition of the aesthetic of thought since
166 EDWARD ALLINGTON

it casts doubt on the distinction between truth and beauty ... and
especially on the category of truth in and for itself’.17
The aesthetics of thought have to do with the beauty of uncertainty,
like the uncertain experience of art. Not only do the material objects of
art change with time, but also do the neomantic objects as they are
modified by new theories and new social constructs. Sculpture is a
reproductive art: that is part of its beauty. And my reproduction Venus,
image of the Goddess of Love, presides over the act of reproduction. She
may not be telling the truth, but I’m pretty certain that she isn’t telling
lies. v

FINAL FLASHBACK: CONEY ISLAND, 1987

I’ve arrived. I’m in the shop and the taxi driver is outside waiting. He’s
just sitting there taking a long draw on a cigarette while his reproduced
self sits fading, facing an empty back seat.
This place is nothing like I’d expected. It’s a glass-fronted shop
overrun with children. There are tables in the centre of the shop covered
in plaster casts, each one being given a multicoloured going-over by a
besmocked infant. I’m standing in the middle of this mayhem talking to
the owner. He’s loquacious, he’s enthusiastic, he’s happy. Surprisingly,
so am I. This situation is pretty useful from my point of view. It’s not my
idea of fun, but it’s allowing me to see examples from virtually every
mould he has on his shelves. His idea is, why throw away all the dud
casts when they can provide this much fun? No doubt there is a
commercial angle to it as well, but all the same ...
Why am I so happy? Well, in amongst all the vivid and incomplete
casts turning technicolour before my very eyes, I’ve noticed some
miniature versions of the Nike of Samothrace. This interests me
enormously as I’m more or less certain where they originated from -
God knows how many moulds ago. You see, the Louvre produces casts
exactly this size, reductions of the massive antique figure in its collection.
I express interest; we talk numbers, we talk money. A deal is made for a
hundred-plus spares. In this Coney Island paradise I have found the
material for a new work. Soon they will arrive in my studio, and what
will I do with them when they get there? I will use them to body forth a
work of art, of course. We move on to my Medici Venus, where again we
rapidly agree on the number of casts, a date for delivery and a very
agreeable price.
Back into the taxi, and back towards New York, with me feeling very
happy, not only do I have my Venus to go, but also I’m pretty certain
 Venus a Go Go, To Go 167

Installation in the Diane Brown Gallery, New York, in 1987, showing Edward Allington’s
Victory Boxed, painted wood and plaster figures. Collection of the artist.

he’ll make a mould for himself as well. My Medici Venus, Metropolitan

Museum beauty, resin table-top delight, reproduced and reproduced
again and again, an endless love object. Venus ad infinitum.
 References

i Miranda Marvin: Roman Sculptural Reproductions or Polykleitos: The Sequel

1 Inv. no. 1801. Ancient Sculpture in the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, museum catalogue
by Frederik Poulsen (Copenhagen, 1951), no. 113, p. 101.
2 Dr Mette Moltesen, the present Curator at the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, is currently
producing new catalogues and labels for the collection. 1 should like to thank her for
her generous hospitality, and hope that no one in the museum will take my remarks
about their old labels as any reflection on that wonderful institution today.
3 Peter Rockwell, The Art of Stoneworking (Cambridge, 1993); Michael Pfanner,
‘Uber das Herstellen von Portrats’, Jahrbuch des Deutschen Arcbdologischen
Instituts, 104 (1989), pp. 157-257; Elizabeth Bartman, Ancient Sculptural Copies in
Miniature (Leiden, 1992), pp. 66-72.
4 Bartman, Ancient Sculptural Copies, pp. 13—14.
5 Visitors to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu can share the experiences of visitors
to the Roman ‘Villa of the Papyri’ in Herculaneum, restored as the home of Mr
Getty’s collection.
6 In Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique (New Haven, 1981),
they note that Jonathan Richardson Senior and Junior first pointed to the copies in
1722 (p. 99), but that the theory was widely accepted only after Anton Raphael
Mengs published it late in the century (p. 106).
7 ‘Historical’, that is, in Roman terms. Figures such as Romulus, the founder of the
city, are considered mythical or legendary today, but to the Romans they were
historical, and depictions of them are considered historical scenes.
8 Margarete Bieber, Ancient Copies (New York, 1977), pp. 1-9, reviews earlier
literature. See also Paul Zanker, Klassizistische Statuen (Mainz am Rhein, 1974),
pp. xv—xx; Christopher Hallett, ‘Kopienkritik and the Works of Polykleitos’ in
Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition, ed. Warren Moon (Madison, 1995),
pp. 121-60.
9 Franz Wickhoff, Roman Art: Some of its Principles and their Application to Early
Christian Painting, ed. and trans. Eugenie Strong (London and New York, 1900),
pp. 28-9.
10 John Boardman, The Diffusion of Classical Art in Antiquity (Princeton, 1994),
p. 286.
11 Zanker’s Klassizistische Statuen separates works that echo Polykleitos into true
copies, works based on a single, specific original (‘Umbildungen’) and works
fabricated from two or more originals (‘Neubildungen’ or ‘Neuschopfungen’),
p.xvii. Additional literature cited in Hallett, ‘Kopienkritik’, note 17, p. 157.
12 E. Bartman, ‘Sexy Boys’ in The Roman Art of Emulation, ed. E. K. Gazda (Ann
Arbor, forthcoming).
13 Adolf Furtwangler, Masterpieces of Greek Sculpture, ed. and trans. Eugenie Sellers
 References 169

[Strong] (New York, 1895), p. 286; Zanker, Klassizistische Statuen, no. 28, pp.
30-2.
14 e.g. Mary C. Sturgeon, ‘The Corinth Amazon’, American Journal of Archaeology,
99 (i995)» PP- 483-505-
15 Carol C. Mattusch, ed., The Fire of Hephaistos: Large Classical Bronzes from North
American Collections (Cambridge, MA, 1996), no. 7, pp. 198-200, figs 7a-7i.
16 Christa Landwehr, Die antiken Gipsabgusse aus Baiae (Berlin, 1985).
17 Miranda Marvin, ‘Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica Series’, Studies in the
History of Art, xx (1989), p. 39.
18 Amanda Claridge, the pioneer in this paradigm shift, is hard to cite since she largely
confines herself to the spoken word. It is a pleasure to thank her here for everything I
have learnt from her.
19 Polyklet: der Bildhauer der griechischen Klassik: Ausstellung im Liebieghaus,
Museum alter Plastik, Frankfurt am Main, exhibition catalogue: Liebieghaus,
Frankfurt (Berlin, 1985); replica list: Detlev Kreikenbom, Bildwerke nach Polyklet:
kopienkritische Untersuchungen zu den mannlichen statuarischen Typen nach
polykletischen Vorbildern (Mainz am Rhein, 1990); symposium on the Minneapolis
Doryphoros: Warren Moon, ed., Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition
(Madison, 1995). Brunilde Ridgway, ‘Paene ad Exemplum' in Polykleitos, ed. Moon,
pp. 177-99, reviews the scholarship on Polykleitos up to 1994 in lucid and judicious
terms. See also Federico Rausa, LTmmagine del Vincitore (Rome, 1994), pp. 107—08,
181-7.
20 Discussed recently in English by Andrew Stewart, Greek Sculpture: An Exploration
(New Haven, 1990), pp. 263-6, bibliography p. 266; and Brunilde Ridgway, Fifth
Century Styles in Greek Sculpture (Princeton, 1981), pp. 201-06. The differences be¬
tween Ridgway and Stewart illustrate the limits of certainty about Polykleitos’ career.
21 Andreas Linfert, ‘Die Schule des Polyklet’, Polyklet, pp. 240-97; chart on p.242
updates the standard work on the subject; Dorothea Arnold, Die Polykletnachfolge:
Untersuchungen zur Kunst von Argos und Sikyon zwischen Polyklet und Lysipp
(Berlin, 1969).
22 Norbert Kaiser, ‘Schriftquellen zu Polyklet’, Polyklet, pp. 48-78. Also Gregory V.
Leftwich, ‘Ancient Conceptions of the Body and the Canon of Polykleitos’ (diss.,
Princeton, 1987).
23 Kreikenbom, no. V, 36; p. 197, pi. 306; Polyklet, no. 73, p. 559.
24 Cf. C. H. Hallett, ‘The Origins of the Classical Style in Sculpture’, Journal of
Hellenic Studies, 106 (1986), pp. 81—2.
25 Gregory V. Leftwich, ‘Polykleitos and Hippokratic Medicine’ in Polykleitos, ed.
Moon, pp. 38-51; and diss.
26 Gregory V. Leftwich, ‘Physical Analysis’ in Style and Science: Examining a
Polykleitan Sculpture by Miranda Marvin and Gregory Leftwich (Wellesley, 1989),
n.p.
27 Guy P. R. Metraux, Sculptors and Physicians in Fifth Century Greece (Montreal and
Kingston, 1996), p. 46 and note 52, pp. 120-1.
28 Kaiser in Polyklet (above); J. J. Pollitt, The Art of Greece, 1400-31 BC: Sources and
Documents (Englewood Cliffs, 1965), pp. 88—92.
29 Pliny, Historia Naturalis [NH] xxxiv, 56-7. Cited in The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on
the History of Art, eds K. Jex-Blake and E. Sellers (New York, 1896), p.44.
30 J. J. Pollitt, ‘Ths Canon of Polykleitos and Other Canons’ in Polykleitos, ed. Moon,
p. 19 and note 5.
31 Illustrated in Kreikenbom, type no. V, pis 247-348.
32 Kreikenbom, no. Ill, pis 104-209. Not without variations, of course. See K. J.
Hartswick, ‘Head Types of the Doryphoros’ in Polykleitos, ed. Moon, pp. 161-76.
170 References

33 Following Zanker, Kreikenbom includes, for example, the Naples Antinoos (Naples
inv. 6030; Kreikenbom no. 35) in his replica list. If such an attenuated relationship
suffices to consider a work a ‘replica’, then the Prima Porta Augustus could be added
to the list (‘Neuschopfung’ of course). See Gotz Lahusen, ‘Polyklet und Augustus’ in
Polyklet, pp. 393-6; John Pollini, ‘The Augustus from the Prima Porta and the
Transformation of the Polykleitan Heroic Ideal: The Rhetoric of Art’ in Polykleitos,
ed. Moon, pp. 262.-72.
34 Paul Zanker, Die Bildnisse des Augustus (Munich, 1987) has clear diagrams on pp.
50-1. For the function of portrait types, see Paul Zanker, The Power of Images in the
Age of Augustus, trans. Alan Shapiro (Ann Arbor, 1988), pp. 99-100, 220-1.
35 Kreikenbom no. 115 p. 147, pi. 30; no. I 45 p. 155, pi. 65; Erika Simon, ‘Mercurius’ in
Lexicon Iconographicum Mythologiae Classicae [L1MC], 7.2 (Zurich, 1995), p.500.
36 Kreikenbom no. I 46 pp. 155-6, pi. 67; no. I 47 p. 156, pis 69—70; no. I 48 p. 157, pi.
71*
37 Kreikenbom no. I 1 p. 143, pi 1; no. I 2 p. 143, pi. 6; no. I 3 p. 144, pi. 7.
38 Other ideal heads: Kreikenbom no. I 12 p. 146, pi. 26a; no. 114 p. 147, pi. 28; no. 115
p. 147, pi. 30; no. I 28 p. 151, pi. 45. Portraits: no. I 10 p. 146, pi. 22; no. I 11 p. 146,
pi. 23; no. I 33 p. 153, pi. 49. Torso herm: no. I 27 p. 151, pi. 43.
39 Baldric: no. 117 p. 148, pi. 31b; Neck mantle: I 15 p. 147, pi. 30; no I 19 p. 148, pi. 19;
Shoulder mantle: no. I 10 p. 146, pi. 22; no. I 21 p. 149, pi. 38; Mantle and baldric:
no. I 32 p. 152, pi. 48; Lost attribute (spear? caduceus?) no. I 13 p. 146, pi. 26b—27a;
no. I 31 p. 152, pi. 47b.
40 Sea monster: no. I 7 p. 145, pi. 18; Lyre: no. 115 p. 147, pi. 30; Dog: no. I 6 pp. 144-5,
pi. 16. Kreikenbom reaches his total of forty-eight works in the Diskophoros type by
including ‘possible adaptations of the body type’ and ‘works associated with the
body type but of doubtful or refutable connection’.
41 See note 1 above. Also Zanker, Klassizistische Statuen, no. 3, p.6.
42 Dogs are common with figures of hunters, Meleager, for example.
43 Kreikenbom no. II 9 p. 159, pi. 184; no. II 10 p. 159, pis 86-7; no. II 12 p. 160, pi. 88.
44 Kreikenbom no. II 8 p. 158, pis 81-3, and no. II 13 p. 160, pi. 89, have traces of head
coverings usually assumed to be the remains of a petasos or pilos, one of the
traveller’s hats often worn by Hermes. Another head in the series has holes for
attaching a metal wreath: no. II 15 p. 160, pi. 94.
45 Kreikenbom no. II 9 p. 159, pi. 84. Zanker, Klassizistische Statuen, no. 40, p. 40
(‘Neubildung’).
46 Kreikenbom no. II 17 p. 161, pis 97-100.
47 Kreikenbom no. II 15 p. 160, pi. 93. Kreikenbom considers the remaining miscel¬
laneous bodies attached to Hermes heads to be restorations.
48 Kreikenbom no. II 18 p. 161, pi. 101; no. II 19 pp. 161-2, pi. 102; no. II 20 p. 162, pi.
103.
49 Wings: Kreikenbom no. IV 13 p. 184, pi. 233b; Ribboned wreath: Kreikenbom no. IV
6 p. 182, pi. 221; no. IV 7 p. 182—3, ph 2.2.5; no- IV 9 p. 183, pi. 227. Another herm
wears a slightly different wreath: no. IV 8 p.183, pi. 225.
50 Kreikenbom no. IV 1 p. 181, pi. 210; no. IVa 1 p. 185, pi. 236; no. IVa 2 p. 185, pi.
240.
51 Carlo Anti, ‘Monumenti Policletei’, Monumenti Antichi, 26 (1920), p. 550. He notes
that the discus is modern ‘except for a small segment adhering to the thigh’ (p. 558).
Whether enough is original to guarantee the accuracy of the restoration is debated.
The Torlonia collection has been unavailable for study for a generation.
52 Peter C. Bol, ‘Hermes’ in Polyklet, pp. 118-20.
53 Ibid., pp. 199-205.
 References I7I

54 As far as I know, this argument is never explicitly made. Ridgway in Polykleitos, ed.
Moon, p. 191, calls it the ‘unconscious’ rationale for the attribution.
55 Ernst Berger, Antike Kunstwerke aus der Sammlung Ludwig III (Mainz and Rhein,
1990), PP-130-1. Diagrams of replicas pp. 120-21, 127.
56 Simon in LIMC, p. 503.
57 Ridgway in Polykleitos, ed. Moon, suggests that the Herakles may be a Roman
creation, borrowing the gesture from the Herakles Farnese, p.191.
58 Gerard Siebert, ‘Hermes’ in LIMC, p.288.
59 Siebert in LIMC, p. 384. Cf. Ridgway in Polykleitos, ed. Moon, p. 190 and note 44.
60 Mercury wears such a wreath, further elaborated with a lotus-flower crown, in
bronze figurines thought to echo the Hermes Paramnon of Ptolemaic iconography.
Stephanie Boucher, Bronzes romains figures du Musee des beaux-arts de Lyon
(Lyon, 1973), nos. 136—8, pp. 84—7; Christiane Boube-Piccot, Les Bronzes antiques du
Maroc (Rabat, 1969), nos 216-17, pis 143—4, from Volubilis.
61 Annalis Leibundgut, ‘Polykletische Elemente bei spathellenistischen und romischen
Kleinbronzen: zur Wirkungsgeschichte Polyklets in der Kleinplastik’ in Polyklet,
pp. 397—427; catalogue nos 185—210.
62 Caterina Maderna-Lauter, ‘Polyklet in Rom’ in Polyklet, p.351.
63 Ibid., p.500.
64 Ibid., p. 507.
65 Ibid., p.506; Bernard Combet-Farnoux, Mercure romain (Rome, 1980), pp. 412-13,
423-4.
66 First noted by Benjamin Rowland. See Jules David Prown, John Singleton Copley in
England (Cambridge, MA, 1966), p.273, figs 373 and 379.
67 Henning Wrede, Consecratio in formam deorum: vergottlichte Privatpersonen in der
romischen Kaiserzeit (Mainz am Rhein, 1981), pp. 273-83, and Caterina Maderna
[Lauter], Iuppiter Diomedes und Merkur als Vorbilder fur romische Bildnisstatuen:
Untersuchungen zum romischen statuarischen Idealportrat (Heidelberg, 1988),
pp. 107-10, differ on the nuances of religious meaning attached.
68 Zanker, The Power of Images, pp.239 ff.
69 The adaptation of the Doryphoros as Pan, as in the colossal marble in Copenhagen -
Kreikenbom no. Ill 16, pi. 141 - is thought-provoking in this context.
70 See E. Bartman, note 12 above.
71 Hartswick in Polykleitos, ed. Moon, has identified the use of casts in some
Doryphoros replicas, p. 165.
72 Ridgway in Polykleitos, ed. Moon, p. 181; Dorothy Kent Hill, Polykleitos:
Diadoumenos, Doryphoros and Hermes’, American Journal of Archaeology, n.s.
74 (1970), pp-2.1-4.
73 In addition to the marble ‘variants’ that survive (see Kreikenbom, pis 159-63), see
the fragments of such a near-Doryphoros among the Baiae casts, Landwehr, Antiken
Gipsabgusse, p. 177, and a schist torso from the imperial villa at Castel Gandolfo.
Paolo Liverani, L’Antiquarium di Villa Barbarini a Castel Gandolfo (Vatican City,
1989), no. 22, figs 22, 1—4.
74 I would like to thank M. Koortbojian for reminding me of the relevance of this
practice.
75 Leibendgut in Polyklet, p. 412.
76 Personal communication, 13 August 1996.
77 Note the comment of Dorothy Kent Hill: ‘It is permitted to raise again the question
of whether the variant Hermes figures are not mere Roman creations on a
Polykleitan theme, the famous Doryphoros’, ‘Polykleitos’, p. 24.
78 Paul Zanker, ‘Zur Funktion und Bedeutung griechischen Skulptur in der Romerzeit’
I72 References

in Entretiens sur I’antiquite classique, 25 (Geneva, 1978), pp. 283—314; Adolf

Borbein, ‘Polyklet’, Gottingische gelebrte Anzeigen, 234 (1982), pp. 191—3.
79 Hubertus Manderscheid, Die Skulpturenausstattung der kaiserzeitlichen Tberme-
nanlagen (Berlin, 1981); Miranda Marvin, ‘Free-standing Sculptures from the Baths
of Caracalla’, American Journal of Archaeology, 87 (1983), pp. 347—84.
80 One school of thought holds that the Doryphoros represented Achilles. Cf. Andrew
Stewart, ‘Notes on the Reception of the Polykleitan Style: Diomedes to Alexander’ in
Polykleitos, ed. Moon, pp. 247-8.
81 Gerard Siebert, ‘Hermes’ in L1MC, pp.289 and 378.
82 Linda Jones Roccos, ‘Perseus’ in LIMC, 7.1 notes that Perseus ‘ ... seems to embody
the ephebic ideal of heroic, responsible behavior v . ’, pp. 347-8.
83 See Arnold and Linfert, note 21 above.
84 Leibendgut, Polyklet, pp. 400-02, figs 239, 240. Terracotta, cat. no. 160, pp. 630-1
(Metropolitan Museum, New York), 32.11.2.
85 Tonio Holscher, Rdmiscbe Bildsprache als semantisches System (Heidelberg, 1987),
pp. 55-60; Zanker, The Power of Images, pp. 245-52; Maderna-Lauter in Polyklet,
pp. 379-85.
86 Leibendgut in Polyklet, p.423; cf. pis 199-215. An exceptional Bacchus in
Polykleitan style comes from Morocco. Boube-Piccot, Bronzes antiques du Maroc,
no. 340, pp. 270-1, pi. 219.
87 In Polykleitos, ed. Moon, three authors describe the action of the Doryphoros
differently: Leftwich, p.47; Tobin, p. 55; Hurwit, pp. 11—12.
88 Cf. Polyklet, no. 201, fig. 201, p.663, and pp. 212 ff.
89 Cf. Sturgeon, ‘Corinth Amazon’, p. 487. Ellen Perry reminded me of the relevance of
Sturgeon’s comments.
90 Polyklet, p. 112.
91 The repertory of small bronzes is startlingly consistent across the Empire. Compare
types from Morocco — Boube-Piccot, Bronzes antiques du Maroc — with Switzerland
- Annalis Leibendgut, Die romiscben Bronzen der Schweiz U: Avenches (Mainz am
Rhein, 1976), nos 5-12 - or Italy — Girolamo Zampieri, Bronzetti figurati etruschi,
italici, paleoveneti e romani del Museo Civico di Padova (Rome, 1986), nos 144—5.
92 Leibendgut in Polyklet, pp. 397—424, summarizes.
93 In Polyklet Leibendgut offers an alternative explanation and a chart on p. 398
suggesting derivation from two Polykleitan originals.
94 Boucher, Bronzes romains de Lyon, p. 67; Leibendgut, Polyklet, pp. 397-8.
95 e.g. Annalis Leibendgut, Die romischen Bronzen der Schweiz 111: Westschweiz
(Mainz am Rhein, 1980), no. 14, pis 20-1, pp.24—6.
96 Whether the industry was organized into workshops specializing in one or another
type of sculpture, or into workshops capable of all sorts, remains to be investigated.
According to Kreikenbom, the replicas of the Polykleitan series date between the late
second or early first century bc and the beginning of the third century ad. It would
be unwise to assume that no changes occurred in the art world during that time, or
that a single pattern of production characterized the whole Roman Empire.
97 Ellen Perry, ‘Artistic Imitation and the Roman Patron’ (diss. Ann Arbor, 1995).
98 C. H. Hallett, ‘Kopienkritik and the Works of Polykleitos’ in Polykleitos, ed. Moon,
pp. 121-60; contra Elaine Gazda, ‘Period Styles’ in ‘Truth in Advertising: Labeling
Greco-Roman Sculpture’, College Art Association annual meeting, Boston,
24 February 1996.
99 ‘At present, most laboratory testing of marble entails two or three processes:
petrographic analysis, stable-isotope testing and, sometimes, trace-element analysis.
X-ray diffraction testing has been used for years and newer modes of evaluation,
including electron spin resonance and cathodoluminescence, are gaining acceptance.’
 References i73

Mary Hollinshead, ‘Meaning in Marble: The Value of Attribution’ (http://

www.wellesley.edu/DavisMuseum/Truth/Polymarblesupp.html), 22 February 1996.
100 Most small works still come from clandestine sources, illegally dug up and illegally
exported. Any possibility of deriving historical information from them is, of course,
non-existent.

z Anthony Hughes: Authority, Authenticity and Aura: Walter Benjamin and the Case of
Michelangelo

1 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in

Illuminations, ed. with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New
York,1969); first published in French translation in Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung,
V/i (1936). The German text, ‘Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen
Reproduzierbarkeit’, appeared in Schriften (Frankfurt am Main, 1955).
2 See, for example, Andrew Benjamin, ‘The Decline of Art: Benjamin’s Aura’, Oxford
Art Journal, 9/2 (1986), pp. 30-55. Benjamin’s historical thesis has been challenged
in Jacquelin Baas, ‘Reconsidering Walter Benjamin. “The Age of Mechanical
Reproduction” in Retrospect’ in The Documented Image: Visions in Art History, eds
Gabriel P. Weisberg and Laurinda S. Dixon (Syracuse, NY, 1987), pp. 337-47, and
implicitly in The Image Multiplied: Five Centuries of Printed Reproductions of
Paintings and Drawings, exhibition catalogue by Susan Lambert: Victoria and Albert
Museum, London (London, 1987).
3 For the history of, and related literature on, this work see Joachim Poeschke,
Michelangelo and his World (New York, 1996), pp. 103-05.
4 La Pensee, marble, Paris, Musee Rodin. For further information see Cecile
Goldscheider, Auguste Rodin: Catalogue raisonne de /’oeuvre sculpte (Paris, 1989).
5 Posthumous production of marbles and bronzes ‘by’ Rodin has caused scandal and
controversy. On Rodin, originality and related matters see Jean Chatelain, ‘An
Original in Sculpture’ in Rodin Rediscovered, exhibition catalogue ed. Albert E.
Elsen: National Gallery of Art, Washington (Washington, 1981); and the subsequent
dispute between Albert Elsen and Rosalind Krauss in October, nos 18 (Fall 1981) and
20 (Spring 1982). Krauss’ part was republished as ‘The Originality of the Avant-
Garde’ and ‘Sincerely Yours’ in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA and London, 1993).
6 Philip Larkin: ‘Why did he think adding meant increase?/To me it was dilution.’
From ‘Dockery and Son’, Collected Poems, ed. with an introduction by Anthony
Thwaite (London and Boston, 1988), pp. 152-3. The topic is human reproduction.
7 Poeschke, Michelangelo, pp. 105-14.
8 Nicholas Penny, The Materials of Sculpture (New Haven and London, 1993).
9 Poeschke, Michelangelo, pp. 99—101.
10 Giovanni Gaye, Carteggio inedito d’artisti dei secoli XIV, XV, XVI publicato ed
illustrato con documenti pure inediti, 2 vols (Florence, 1840) (facsimile reprint,
Turin, 1968), II, p. 500. For a brilliant, definitive account of the commissioning,
history and placement of Michelangelo’s original Pieta see Kathleen Weil-Garris
Brandt, ‘Michelangelo’s Pieta for the Cappella del Re di Francia’ in ‘7/ se rendit en
Italie’. Etudes offertes a Andre Chastel (Rome and Paris, 1987), pp.77—121.
11 Giorgio Vasari, Le opere di Giorgio Vasari, ed. G. Milanesi, 9 vols (Florence, 1878-
85), vii, p. 552. «
12 The inscription is difficult to read and has been left deliberately incomplete. It runs
‘[... 10 EX imitatione lippvs stat. facieba[t]’. For the significance of the
incomplete text and the employment of the imperfect tense, see Weil-Garris Brandt,
‘Michelangelo’s Pieta’.
i74 References

13 Giorgio Vasari, Le Vite de’ piu eccellenti pittori, scultori ed architettori, ed. G.
Milanesi, 9 vols (Florence, 1875-85), VII, p. 151.
14 . si scoperte in Sto. Spirito una Pieta, la quale la mando un fiorentino a detta
chiesa, e si diceva che lorigine veniva dall inventor delle porcherie, salvandogli larte
ma non devotione, Michelangelo Buonarroto. Che tutti i moderni pittori e scultori
per imitare simili caprici luterani, altro oggi per le sante chiese non si dipinge o
scarpella altro che figure da sotterar la fede e la devotione; ma spero che un giorno
Iddio mandera e sua santi a buttare per terra simile idolatre come queste’. Gaye,
Carteggio inedito, p. 500.
15 Poeschke, Michelangelo, pp. 76—7. See also Leo Steinberg, ‘The Metaphors of Love
and Birth in Michelangelo’s Pieta’ in Studies in Erotic Art, eds Theodore Bowie and
Cornelia Christenson, pp.zji—335 and Romeo De Maio, Michelangelo e la
Controriforma (Rome and Bari, 1978). Most'of the commentary on the variants
begin with the premise that Lorenzetti and Baccio deliberately introduced changes to
correct what was deemed unacceptable in Michelangelo’s original: either (Poeschke
and De Maio) the youthfulness of the Virgin or (Steinberg) the supposed erotic
implications of the sculpture. There is some indirect evidence in Condivi’s life of the
artist that contemporaries were perplexed by the apparent age of the Virgin. See
Ascanio Condivi, Vita di Michelangelo Buonarroti, ed. E. Spina Barelli (Milan, 1553,
reprinted 1964; English trans. A. S. Wohl, The Life of Michelangelo, Baton Rouge,
1976). This feature was not, however, ‘corrected’ even in prints that appeared after
the final deliberations of the Council of Trent. Steinberg’s theory seems the reflection
of a modern longing to find some (preferably scandalous) heterodoxy in the work of
an artist as an incontrovertible sign of genius.
16 A. J. Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the
Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Aldershot, 1988).
17 Vasari, Vite, vii, p. 152.
18 Ernst Steinmann, Michelangelo im Spiegel seiner Zeit (Leipzig, 1930), pp. 100—01;
and Poeschke, Michelangelo, pp. 76, pis 9 and 163. Vasari credited this work also to
Nanni di Baccio Bigio who was an assistant to Lorenzetto during the relevant period,
but there is considerable uncertainty about his participation. See Rudolf Wittkower,
‘Nanni di Baccio Bigio and Michelangelo’, Lestschrift fur Ulrich Middeldorf (Berlin,
1968).
19 Steinmann, Michelangelo, p. roi.
20 David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of
Response (Chicago and London, 1989). See especially chapter 8 and pp. 177-8.
21 The diarist’s characterization is likely to have been a confused recognition of the fact
that the motif of the Virgin with the dead Christ in her lap was of northern
European derivation, though the devotional image had, of course, a pre-
Reformation origin and was reasonably well known in Florence. See Charles de
Tolnay, Michelangelo, vol. 1, The Youth of Michelangelo (Princeton, 1947), p. 144.
22 Michelangelo, Carteggio, iv, mliv, 8 February 1546, p. 229. The French text runs as
follows: ‘Seigneur Michelangelo, pour ce que j’ay grant desir d’avoir quelques
besognes de vostre ouvrage, j’ay donne charge a l’abbe de Sainct Martin de Troyes,
present porteur que j’envoye par dela, d’en recouvrer, vous priant, si vous avez
quelques choses excellentes faictes a son arrivee, les luy voulloir bailler en les vous
bien payant ainsi que je ay donne charge. Et davantage voulloir estre contant, pour
l’amour de moy, qu’il molle le Christ de la Minerve et la Nostre Dame de la Febre,
afin que j’en piusse aorner l’une de mes chappelles, comme de chose que l’on m’a
asseure estre des plus exquises et excellentes en vostre art.’ The text, now in Lille,
Musee de 1 Art et Histoire, was composed and written out by Claude de L’Aubespine
and signed by Francis.
 References 175

23 Vasari, Vite, VII, p. 362: ‘La [i.e. in Florence] ... formo di gesso quasi tutte le figure
di marmo che did mano di Michelangnolo sono nella sagrestia nouva di San
Lorenzo.’
24 Carlo Ridolfi, Maraviglie dell’arte, ouero le vite de gl’illustri pittori veneti e dello
Stato (Venice, 1648), vol. 11. The biography of Tintoretto is translated by Catherine
and Robert Enggass as The Life of Tintoretto, and of his Children Domenico and
Marietta (Pennsylvania, 1984). For Tintoretto’s drawing practice, see Hans Tietze
and Erica Tietze-Conrat, The Drawings of the Venetian Painters in the 15th and
16th Centuries (New York, 1944).
25 Tomb of ]ulius 11, engraving, 1554, inscribed: sepvlchri marmorei ivlio ii

PONT. MAX. DIVINA MICH. ANGELI BONAROTI FLORENTINI MANV ROMAE IN

BASILICA S. PETRI AD VINCVLA FABREFACT1 GRAPHICA DEFORMATIO. ANT.

Salamanca exc. romae Lilli; Rome, Istituto Nazionale per la Grafica,

Gabinetto dei Stampi. For a discussion of prints after Michelangelo see Evelina
Borea, ‘Michelangelo e le Stampe nel suo tempo’ in La Sistina riprodotta: gli
affreschi di Michelangelo dalle stampe del cinquecento alle campagne fotografiche
Anderson, exhibition catalogue, ed. Alida Moltedo: Calcografia, Rome (Rome,
1991), pp. 17-30. The Salamanca engraving is her fig. 10. On the career of the print
publisher Salamanca, see David Landau and Peter Parshall, The Renaissance Print
1470-ijjo (New Haven and London, 1995), pp. 302-04. They also discuss the
significance of this type of inscription on pp. 167—8 and treat the rise of reproductive
imagery of statuary on pp. 305-09.
26 Nicolas Beatrizet (?). Piet'a, engraving, inscribed: ‘michelangelvs bonarotvs
FLORENT. DIVI PETRI IN VATICANO EX VNO LAPIDE MATREM AC FILIVM

DIVINE FECIT. ANTONIVS SALAMANCA QVOD POTVIT IMITATVS EXCULPSIT

1547’. It is unlikely that Salamanca himself engraved the plate.

27 Weil-Garris Brandt, ‘Michelangelo’s Piet'a’.
28 Gian Battista de’ Cavalieri, Piet'a, engraving, 1564, Rome, Istituto Nazionale per la
Grafica, Gabinetto dei Stampi. For an illustration see Borea, ‘Michelangelo’, fig. 17,
or Steinmann, Michelangelo, pi. xxv.
29 On the nature and development of the reproductive print and the problems attached
to the terminology, see Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print, chapter iv,
especially pp. 162-8. For the decontextualizing effect of prints and their role in the
creation of a sixteenth-century canon, see A. Hughes, ‘What’s the trouble with the
Farnese Gallery? An Exercise in Reading Pictures’, Art History, XI/3 (September
1988), pp. 335-48.
30 The metaphor of translation is an old one. See the characteristically sardonic
comment of ^Villiam Al. Ivins, How Prints Look: An Illustrated Guide, revised edn
(London, 1988), p. 169.
31 See, for instance, Freedberg, The Power of Images, pp. 27-8.
32 As Benjamin himself recognized.
33 The case discussed is Raphael’s Sistine Madonna where Benjamin accepts the
argument that the work was unsuitable as a cultic object because it had first been
‘exhibited’ above the bier of Julius II. The theory seems quite unfounded. For a
reliable account of the work see Roger Jones and Nicholas Penny, Raphael (New
Haven and London, 1983).
34 See, for example. Auguste Comte, Catechisme positiviste ou, Sommaire exposition
de la religion unwerselle en treize entretiens systematiques entre une femme et un
pretre de I’humanite, 2nd edn (Paris, 1874). It is possible that Benjamin s positivism
had a source in the highly regarded book by Sir James George Frazer, The Golden
Bough: A Study in Comparative Religion (London, 1890).
The marble David was removed to the Accademia and the replica set up in 1873. The
35
17 6 References

Piazza Michelangelo was also finished in 1875 in time for the celebration of the
fourth centenary of Michelangelo’s birth at which time the bronzes were installed.
See Stefano Corsi, ‘Cronaca di un centenario’ in Michelangelo nel ottocento. Il
centenario del 1875, exhibition catalogue: Casa Buonarotti, Florence, 1994 (Milan,
1994). Cronaca also gives valuable information on the Michelangelo exhibition held
at the Accademia in 1875, which exhibited the master’s sculptural works in
reproduced form. For the history of the Accademia Slaves, see Poeschke,
Michelangelo, pp. 103—05.

3 Marjorie Trusted: Art for the Masses: Spanish Sculpture in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries

1 This article developed out of an earlier study of terracottas published in 1993 (M.
Trusted, ‘Three Spanish Terracottas in the Victoria and Albert Museum’, Boletin del
Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueologia, LIX (1993), pp. 321—30), as well as the
research conducted in connection with the publication of the catalogue of Spanish
sculpture at the Victoria and Albert Museum (Spanish Sculpture: Catalogue of the
Post-Medieval Spanish Sculpture in Wood, Terracotta, Alabaster, Marble, Stone,
Lead and Jet in the Victoria and Albert Museum, museum catalogue by M. Trusted,
London, 1996).
2 One exception to this is Luisa Roldan, who signed a number of her works. The
practice of signing seems to have become more common (although it was still
relatively unusual) in the eighteenth century.
3 Review by R. Ford of E. Head, A Handbook of the History of the Spanish and
French Schools of Painting and W. Stirling, Annals of Spanish Painters, The
Quarterly Review, LXXXIII (1848), pp. 1-2.
4 J. A. Cean Bermudez, Diccionario de los mas ilustres profesores de las Bellas Artes
en Espaha, 6 vols (Madrid, 1800). This publication was also inspired by Antonio
Palomino, El Parnaso Espahol (1714).
5 Studies that have approached more general themes include F. Checa Cremades,
Carlos V y la imagen del heroe en el Renacimiento (Madrid, 1987), and Pedro de
Mena y Castilla, exhibition catalogue: Museo Nacional de Escultura (National
Museum of Sculpture), Valladolid (1989).
6 Inv. no. 91—1864. The measurements are: height (without frame), 30.5cm; width
(without frame), 40cm; height (with frame), 45cm; width (with frame), 55cm. See
Spanish Sculpture, museum catalogue by Trusted, cat. no. 14.
7 ‘o VOS OMNES QVI TRAN SITS ./PERVIAM. ATENDITE ET VIDE ESIE ST./DOLOR

SIMILIS, SICVT. DOLOR MEVS/QUINET TVAM IPSIVS ANIMAN PENERBIT

GLADivs’ (Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by? Behold, and see if there be
any sorrow like unto my sorrow. And why does not the sword pierce your very
soul?). The first half of the inscription is from the Book of Lamentations (1:12); the
second from Luke (2:35).
8 I am grateful to Richard Cook of the Sculpture Conservation Section, Josephine
Darrah of the Science Conservation Section, both at the Victoria and Albert
Museum, and Sarah Boulter, who cleaned the relief while a student in the Sculpture
Conservation Section, for their comments on this. The terracotta has been
overpainted at least twice, probably once in the seventeenth or eighteenth century
and once in the nineteenth century. The conclusions about the paint layers are based
on sections of samples of paint examined by the above conservators.
9 See J. J. Martin Gonzalez, Juan de Juni: Vida y Obra (Madrid, 1974), pp. 115-17.
10 Ibid., and Trusted, ‘Three Spanish Terracottas’, pp. 324-5, note 22. According to
Martin Gonzalez (Juan de Juni, p. 378), the relief in Leon measures 30cm in height
 References 177

and 39cm in width. He gives the same measurements (30 x 39cm) for the one in
Valladolid {ibid., p. 379). These measurements are sufficiently close to those of the
London relief to suggest the pieces are actually identical in size, and apparent
differences are due to manual errors of measuring. However the measurements of
the version in the Camon Aznar Collection are: height, 25cm; width, 35cm. The
Camon Aznar relief was also published in Museo Camon Aznar, Obra Social de la
Caja de Ahorros de Zaragoza, Aragon y Rioja (Zaragoza, 1979), unnumbered plate.
11 For Juan de Juni, see Martin Gonzalez, Juan de Juni and Spanish Sculpture, museum
catalogue by M. Trusted, cat. no. 14.
12 Martin Gonzalez, Juan de Juni, pp. 118-20, fig. 80.
13 Martin Gonzalez has pointed this out. Ibid., pp. 133-42 and fig. 101.
14 Ibid., p. 115. The inventory is quoted in J. Marti y Monso, Estudios bistoricos-
artisticos relativos principalmente a Valladolid (Valladolid, 1898-1901), p. 369.
15 ‘En la iglesia de San Martin de dicha ciudad hay una historieta de barro cocido de
Descendimiento de la Cruz, que le han vaciado algunos escultores por ser cosa tan
peregrina.’ A. Palomino, El Parnaso Espahol [1714], in Puentes Literarias para la
historia del Arte Espahol, ed. F. J. Sanchez Canton (Madrid, 1923—41), IV, p.76.
This is also cited in Martin Gonzalez, Juan de Juni, p. 115.
16 Martin Gonzalez, Juan de Juni, p.115.
17 Ibid., p. 116.
18 J. C. Robinson papers (Art Referee Reports) held at the National Art Library,
Victoria and Albert Museum.
19 Unfortunately it has not been possible to carry out any thermoluminescence tests to
try out the theory.
20 Martin Gonzalez, Juan de Juni, pp. 115-17; see also note 10.
21 I have been kindly informed by John Larson (personal communication), who has
examined the Valladolid and Leon examples, that the method of casting these two
versions differed: the clay used for the Valladolid relief was carefully and compactly
inserted, while the one in Leon was made in layers in a far cruder construction.
22 This is a painted terracotta relief in a wood frame (height, 22cm; width, 33.5cm);
inv. no. 828; unpublished. I am grateful to Luis Luna Moreno and Manuel Arias for
giving me access to this piece.
23 For Luisa Roldan, see B. Gilman Proske, ‘Luisa Roldan at Madrid’ (Parts 1-3), The
Connoisseur, CLV/624—6 (February—April 1964) and J. J. Martin Gonzalez,
Escultura Barroca en Espaha (Madrid, 1983), pp. 177—84. I am grateful to Catherine
Hall-van den Elsen for giving me the revised birth and death dates of the artist,
which are given here. These have been established through archival records; see C.
Hall-van den Elsen, The Life and Work of the Sevillian Sculptor Luisa Roldan with a
Catalogue Raisonne (unpublished doctoral thesis, La Trobe University, Melbourne,
1992).
24 Inv. no. 250-1864. Spanish Sculpture, museum catalogue by Trusted, cat. no. 27.
The group is set on a gilt-wood base, which is almost certainly original.
25 This has been suggested by C. Hall-van den Elsen, La Vida y las Obras de Luisa
Roldan (unpublished MA thesis. La Trobe University, Melbourne, 1989), p. 100.
26 See L. Reau, Iconographie de l’Art Chretien (Paris, 1958), III.i, p. 3^5> and E. Male,
L’Art Religieux apr'es Le Concile de Trente (Paris, 1932), pp.487—8.
27 J. C. Robinson papers, I, part III. See also Inventory of the Objects Forming the Art
Collection of the Museum at South Kensington. Supplement no. 1 for the Year 1864
(London, 1864), p. 20.
28 See Gilman Proske, Luisa Roldan, Part 2, fig. 6.
29 The dimensions of the Mystical Marriage are: height, 36.5cm; width, 45cm; depth,
29.5cm. This group lacks a base. The greater width and depth of the present piece
i7« References

are at least partly explained by the floor area around the figures, which is much
shallower in the Mystical Marriage group. The measurements of the face of the
Virgin in the London group are: height, 50mm; width, 38mm. Those of the Virgin in
the Mystical Marriage are: height, 42mm; width, 32mm. Those of the face of the
angel in the London group are: height, 42mm; width, 31mm; while those of the angel
in the Mystical Marriage are: height, 40mm; width, 29mm.
30 Gilman Proske, Luisa Roldan, Part 2, fig. 7, and Part 3, fig. 16.
31 I am grateful to Constancio del Alamo of the Hispanic Society for allowing me to
examine this piece.
32 I am grateful for this information to Catherine Hall-van den Elsen (personal
communication), who during the course of her research on Roldan located a letter
from Roldan to Charles II of Spain mentioning an attached list of eighty works; the
list has sadly been lost. See also note 23. ^
33 See Pedro de Mena y Castilla, pp. 36—9, nos 8 and 9.
34 Cf. M. J. Friedlander, Dieric Bouts and ]oos van Gent (Early Netherlandish Painting
111), trans. H. Norden (Leyden, 1968), pis 74-8, and The Art of Devotion in the Late
Middle Ages in Europe 1300—1500, exhibition catalogue by H. van Os and others:
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (1994), p.46, fig. 10. A Flemish terracotta bust of the
Mourning Virgin dating from 1470 to 1490 (itself probably based on a painting by a
follower of Rogier van der Weyden) is in the Thyssen Collection. Such pieces may
also have been imported to Spain; see A. Radcliffe, M. Baker and M. Maek-Gerard,
The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Renaissance and Later Sculpture (London,
1992), pp.418—23, cat. no. 83. I am grateful to Paul Williamson for drawing my
attention to this.
35 For example, his two panels of Christ and the Virgin of c. 1480-5 in the Prado,
Madrid; see El Mundo de los Osuna ca.1460-ca.1540, exhibition catalogue: Museu
Sant Pius V, Valencia (1994), pp. 118-23, cat. nos 6 and 7.
36 Victoria and Albert Museum, inv. no. 1284—1871; height, 48.5cm; width, 19cm;
depth, 29cm. Spanish Sculpture, museum catalogue by Trusted, cat. no. 46.
37 Museum records. It had first been published as a work by Pedro de Mena in 1923,
although this was not apparently widely accepted (A. L. Mayer, Spanische
Barockplastik (Munich, 1923), fig. 107), and it had not been cited in R. de Orueta
y Duarte, La Vida y la Obra de Pedro de Mena y Medrano (Madrid, 1914).
38 These sculptors, apparently twins, were active in Granada in the mid-seventeenth
century. See E. Orozco Diaz, ‘Los Hermanos Garcia Escultores del Ecce-Homo’,
Boletin de la Universidad de Granada, VI/30 (1934), PP-1-18, and La Escultura en
Andalucia Siglos XV a XVIII, exhibition catalogue: Museo Nacional de Escultura,
Valladolid (1984), pp. 92-3, where further bibliography is cited.
39 Spanish Sculpture, museum catalogue by Trusted, pp. 96-101.
40 These include two in the Convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid, one in the
Accademia de Bellas Artes in Madrid, one in the monastery of St Joachim and St
Anne in Valladolid, two in the Museo de Bellas Artes in Granada, one in Cuenca
Cathedral, one in Malaga Cathedral, one in the Dreifaltigkeitskirche in Vienna, and
one in the Iglesia de la Profesa in Mexico City. For further examples see Orueta,
Pedro de Mena-, D. Angulo Iniguez, ‘Dos Menas en Mejico’, Archivo Espahol de
Arte, XI (1935), pp. 131—52; H. Aurenhammer, ‘Zwei Werke des Pedro de Mena in
Wien , Alte und Neue Kunst, III/2 (1954), pp. 126—7; Martin Gonzalez, Escultura
Barroca, p. 219; Pedro de Mena, pp. 34, 38, 42, 46; Pedro de Mena: 111 Centenario de
su Muerte Centenario, exhibition catalogue: Malaga Cathedral; Junta de Andalucia
(April 1989), cat. nos 34—8; J- Fernandez Lopez, ‘Una Nueva Dolorosa attribuible a
Pedro de Mena’, Boletin del Seminario de Estudios de Arte y Arqueologia, LIV
(1988), pp. 428-30. Cf. also what appears to be a nineteenth-century pastiche of the
 References 179

type (present whereabouts unknown) sold in 1932.: Antiquitaten und Alte Gemalde
aus deni Nacblass des verstorbenen Freiberrn F. von Stumm, sale catalogue: G.
Deneke, Berlin (4 October 1932.), cat. no. 192.
41 Pedro de Mena, pp. 62-3, cat. no. 21.
42 Ibid., pp. 59-61, cat. nos 19 and 20. Another bust perhaps by a follower of Jose de
Mora is in the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina (Spanish
Polychrome Sculpture ijoo-i8oo in United States Collections, exhibition catalogue,
ed. S. Stratton: Spanish Institute, New York, pp. 136-7, cat. no. 29).
43 F. Hurtado de Mendoza, Fundacion y Cronica de la Sagrada Congregacion de San
Phelipe Neri de la Ciudad de Granada (Madrid, 1689), cited in A. Gallego y Burin,
Jose de Mora: su Vida y su Obra (Granada, 1925, reprinted 1988), p. 158.
44 The sixteenth-century chronicler Pedro de Ribadeneira stated that Nicholas IV
witnessed the miracle (Ribadeneira cited in text below, and see also note 46); other
sources say Nicholas V (Reau, Iconograpbie, p. 530, and W. Braunfels, ed., Lexikon
der Cbristlichen Ikonographie, 8 vols (Freiburg im Bresgau, 1974b vb P- 311)-
45 Seen in an engraving of about 1610 by Jean Le Clerc (Braunfels, Lexicon). The scene
was also depicted in Thomas de Leu’s Vida de San Francisco, published in about
1600; see J. J. Martin Gonzalez, El Escultor Gregorio Fernandez (Madrid, 1980),
p.249, and Pedro de Mena, p. 22. I have been unable to see a copy of either
publication. St Francis was of course depicted in numerous paintings prior to the
popularity of this specific legend, notably in the work of El Greco (1541-1614).
46 A second part appeared in 1601. I have been able to see a copy of the 1643 edition
only, but I am grateful to Ma Rosario Fernandez for the details of the earlier dates of
publication.
47 Height, 104cm. See Martin Gonzalez, Gregorio Fernandez, p.2.49, and Pedro de
Mena, pp. 22-3, cat. no. 1. An eighteenth-century variant after Gregorio Fernandez
is illustrated in ibid., pp. 84—5, cat. no. 32.
48 Martin Gonzalez, Gregorio Fernandez, pp.249—50. The paintings are in the Musee
des Beaux-Arts, Lyons, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Museo de Bellas
Artes de Cataluna, Barcelona, respectively. See M. Gregori, L’Opera Completa di
Zurbaran (Milan, 1973), nos 369-70 (bis), and J. Brown, Francisco de Zurbardn
(New York, 1973), p. 134, pi- 38-
49 The autograph versions are described and illustrated in Orueta, Pedro de Mena,
p.128, fig. 21, and pp.163 ff. and fig. 54, and in M. E. Gomez-Moreno, Ars
Hispaniae, XVI: Escultura del Siglo XVII (Madrid, 1963), pp. 245-6, figs 221 and

50 For example the figure by Fernando Ortiz in the National Museum of Sculpture at
Valladolid, dating from 1738. See Pedro de Mena y Castilla, pp. 64-5.
51 Examples are located in the Church of St Martin in Segovia (height, 84cm; Pedro de
Mena, pp. 50-1, cat. no. 15); the Municipal Museum, Antequera (height, 100cm; M.
E. Gomez-Moreno, ‘Un San Francisco de Mena en Antequera’, Archivo Espahol de
Arte y Castilla, XLVII (1974), pp. 68-70; see also Pedro de Mena y Castilla, p. 10);
the Ny Carlsberg Glyptothek, Copenhagen (height, 87cm; Orueta, Pedro de Mena,
p. 170, fig. 57); one formerly in the K.K. Osterreichisches Museum, Vienna (J. von
Falke, Holzschnitzereien: eine Auswahl aus der Sammlung des K.K. Osterreicb.
Museums (Vienna, 1893), pi- XXXVII, 2); the Meadows Museum and Gallery,
Southern Methodist University, Dallas (height, 74.1cm; Stratton, Spanish Poly¬
chrome SculpturS, pp. 76 and 124-5, cat. no. 23); one recently acquired by the
Louvre, Paris (height, 87cm; Musee du Louvre: Nouvelles Acquisitions du
Departement des Sculptures 1988-1991 (Pans, 1992), pp. 50-3); and a variant in
the Fray Pedro Bedon Museum, Convent of Santo Domingo, Quito (G.G. Palmer,
Sculpture in the Kingdom of Quito (Albuquerque, 1987), p.46 and fig. 20).
i8o References

52 Pedro de Mena, pp. 64-5, cat. no. 2.2.. '

53 Ibid., pp. 86-7, cat. no. 33.
54 Pedro de Mena, pp. 92-3, cat. no. 36 (version attributed to Esteban de Agreda (1759—
1842) and dated to after 1814), and Musee du Louvre: Nouvelles Acquisitions, p. 50
(marble version made in 1872 by Zacharie Astruc, exhibited in Madrid in 1877). See
also Orueta, Pedro de Mena, p. 163. Cf. one sold in the F. von Stumm sale, lot 49
(Antiquitdten, pi. XI), which also appears to be nineteenth-century.
55 Inv. no. 331—1866. Height, 50.5cm; Spanish Sculpture, museum catalogue by
Trusted, cat. no. 24.
56 Museum records held at the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum: J.
C. Robinson papers, V, part III, minute of 5 February 1867.

4 Malcolm Baker: The Ivory Multiplied: Small-scale Sculpture and its Reproductions in
the Eighteenth Century

In my work on Bossuit and ivory-carving I am especially grateful for the interest and
encouragement of Christian Theurkauff whose many publications about ivories and
Kleinplastik form the basis for the study of this subject.

1 Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical
Sculpture 1500—1900 (New Haven and London, 1980).
2 Examples include Klaus Lankheit, Die Modellsammlung der Porzellanmanufaktur
Doccia (Munich, 1992) and the introductory essays on ‘Originals, Versions,
Multiples and Casts’ in The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection: Renaissance and
Later Sculpture, by Anthony Radcliffe, Malcolm Baker and Michael Maek-Gerard
(London, 1992).
3 For a discussion of these issues see Rosalind Krauss, ‘Retaining the Original? The
State of the Question’ in Retaining the Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and
Reproductions, symposium papers: National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC,
Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, VII (Hanover and London, 1989),
pp. 1—12.
4 For changing uses of bronzes and different constructions of the ‘small bronze’ as a
discrete category of sculpture, see Malcolm Baker, ‘Collecting, Classifying and
Viewing Bronzes 1700-1850’ in Von alien Seiten schon. Nachtrage, ed. Volker Krahn
(Cologne, 1996), pp. m-23.
5 Nicholas Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum 1540
to the Present Day (Oxford, 1992), I, cat. nos 35, 40, 63, 159-61.
6 For this see Lankheit, Die Modellsammlung der Porzellanmanufaktur Doccia.
7 For these ‘cabinets of curiosities’ see (from a rapidly growing literature) Julius von
Schlosser, Die Kunst- und Wunderkammern der Spatrenaissance (Braunschweig,
1978) and Oliver Impey and Arthur MacGregor, eds. The Origins of Museums
(Oxford, 1985).
8 K. Aschengreen-Piacenti, II Museo degli Argenti a Firenze (Milan, 1968).
9 For Kern s relationship with collectors, noble owners of Wunderkammern and art
dealers see Johannes Zalten, ‘Bemerkungen zu Kunstproduktion und Sammlungs-
wesen im 17. Jahrhundert, angeregt durch die Kleinplastiken Leonhard Kerns’ in
Leonhard Kern [1588-1662], exhibition catalogue, ed. H. Sidebenmorgen (Schwa-
bisch Hall, 1988), pp. 35-50. Franz von Stampart and Anton von Prenner’s
Podromus seu preambulare lumen ... (Vienna, 1735) is discussed in ibid., cat. no. 37.
10 The imagery and the relationship between poem and tankard are discussed in the
catalogue entry by Johanna Hecht in Liechtenstein, the Princely Collections,
exhibition catalogue: Metropolitan Museum, New York (New York, 1985), cat no’
67.
 References 181

ix For Jaillot see Christian Theueurkauff, ‘Kleinplastik des Barock, Werke von Jean
Gaulette, Michel Mollart and anderen franzosischen Zeitgenossen’, Kunst und
Antiquitaten, I (1985), p. 30.
12 Nicolas Guerin, Description de I’Academie Royale des arts de peinture et sculpture
(Paris, 1715). I am grateful to Andrew McClellan for drawing my attention to this
book.
13 For Dobbermann’s work and career see Christian Theuerkauff, ‘Jacob Dobbermann
und Joachim Henne — Anmerkungen zu einigen Kleinbildwerken’, Alte und moderne
Kunst, 24 (1979), pp. i6ff.
14 For Henne’ career see ibid, and Jorg Rasmussen, ‘Joachim Henne, ein hofisher
Kleinmeister des Barock’, Jahrbucb der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen, 23 (1978).
15 Most notably in John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds, Consumption and the World of
Goods (London, 1993) and Ann Bermingham and John Brewer, The Consumption
of Culture 1600-1800 (London, 1995).
16 For Permoser and Fiirstenberg see Siegfried Asche, Balthasar Permoser (Berlin,
1976), pp. 106-09. About twenty years earlier these same ivories had been
reproduced in porcelain by Doccia and, as Asche shows, Permoser’s figures
continued to be used by various porcelain factories throughout the eighteenth
century.
17 Charles Avery, David Le Marcband 1674—1726 (London, 1996), pp. 27, 86—9.
18 Pierre-Jean Grosley, A Tour to London (London, 1772.), p.69.
19 Leonhard Kern, exhibition catalogue, cat. no. 92.
20 This process was itself made available in multiple form by the terracottas of
Clodion.
21 Matthys Pool, Beeldsnijders Kunstkabinet (Amsterdam, 1727).
22 For a thorough and detailed discussion, on which all later work must be based, see
Christian Theuerkauff, ‘Zu Francis van Bossuit (1635-1692), “Beeldsnyder in
yvoor’”, Wallraf-Richartz-]ahrbuch, 37 (1975), pp. 119-82.
23 For a more detailed analysis of the relationship between these different versions, on
which the account here is based, see Malcolm Baker, ‘Francis van Bossuit, Bottger
stoneware and the Judith reliefs’ in Festchrift Alfred Scbadler, eds R. Kahsnitz and
P. Volk (Munich, forthcoming).
24 For Heermann see Christian Theuerkauff, Elfenbein. Sammlung Reiner Winkler
(Munich, 1984), pp. 56-9.
25 For the Bottger reliefs (with references to the earlier literature) see Stefan Bursche,
Meissen. Steinzeug und Porzellan des 18. Jahrhunderts Kunstgewerbemuseum Berlin
(Berlin, 1980).
26 This discussion is based on a longer study I am preparing of Pool s book, the
circumstances in which it was produced and its place in both the history of the
Amsterdam book trade and art historiography.
27 This will be discussed in my forthcoming study of Pool’s book but some of the
relevant information, particularly about the sale of Anthony Grill in 1728, was made
available for entries in De Wereld binnen Handbereik, exhibition catalogue by Wim
de Bell and Jaap van der Veen: Historisch Museum, Amsterdam (1992).
28 Walpole’s own detailed account of both cabinet and contents is given in A
Description of the Villa of Horace Walpole ...at Strawberry-Hill (Strawberry Hill,
1774), pp.77-8. £or the cabinet’s significance see Clive Wainwright, The Romantic
Interior (New Haven and London, 1982), pp.74-6; A Grand Design, exhibition
catalogue, eds Malcolm Baker and Brenda Richardson (New York, 1997), cat. no.
134.
On this see Krauss, ‘Retaining the Original?’, pp. 10-11, and Jeffrey M. Muller,
2-9
182 References
i

‘Measures of Authenticity: the Detection of Copies in the Early Literature on

Connoisseurship’ in Retaining the Original, pp. 141-50.
30 Krauss, ‘Retaining the Original?’, p. 10.
31 For Tassie see Avery, David Le Marchand, pp. 86—7; James Holloway, James Tassie
1735-1799 (Edinburgh, 1986).
32 His name still occurs occasionally, however, in some late eighteenth-century Dutch
sale catalogues and he is mentioned in the inventory of Ploos van Amstel’s art
collection. For Houbraken see Peter Hecht, ‘Browsing in Houbraken’ in Ten Essays
for a Friend: E. de Jongh 65, Simiolus, 24 (1996), pp. 157-72; for van Gool see Lyckle
de Vries, ‘Jan van Gool als geschiedschrijver’, Oud Holland, 99 (1985), pp. 165—90.

5 Martin Postle: Naked Authority? Reproducing'Antique Statuary in the English

Academy, from Lely to Haydon

1 See Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of
Classical Sculpture 1500—1900 (New Haven and London, 1981), pp. 16—37 and 79—
98.
2 For a survey of the role of the antique in academic training see Carl Goldstein,
Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge, 1996),
PP-137-58.
3 Giovanni Battista Armenini, De’ veri precetti della pittura (Ravenna, 1587), pp. 61—
3, quoted in Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, p. 16. For a survey of the
development of academies in Italy in the sixteenth century see Nikolaus Pevsner,
Academies of Art Past and Present, 2nd edn (New York, 1973), pp. 25—66.
4 See Andre Felibien, Conferences de PAcademie Royale de peinture et de sculpture
pendant I’annee 1667 (Paris, 1668); Andre Fontaine, Conferences inedites de
PAcademie Royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris, 1903).
5 See Gerard Audran, Les proportions du corps humain mesurees sur les plus belles
figures de Pantiquite (Paris, 1683); Sebastien Bourdon, ‘Les proportions de la figure
humaine, explique sur l’antique’, 5 July 1670 (Paris, Ecole Nationale Superieure des
Beaux-Arts, MS. 143); Jennifer Montagu, The Expression of the Passions: The
Origin and Influence of Charles Le Brun’s ‘Conference sur Pexpression generale et
particuli'ere’ (New Haven and London, 1994), PP.73L
6 Goldstein, Teaching Art, p. 151.
7 Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, pp. 17-22.
8 See, for example, Jaap Bolten, Method and Practice, Dutch and Flemish Drawing
Books 1600-1730 (Landau Pfaiz, 1985), pp. 257-9.
9 See M. Kirby Talley Jr, Portrait Painting in England: Studies in the Technical
Literature before 1700 (London, 1981), pp. 308—09; Ilaria Bignamini, ‘The Artist’s
Model from Lely to Hogarth’ in The Artist’s Model: Its Role in British Art from Lely
to Etty, exhibition catalogue by Ilaria Bignamini and Martin Postle: University Art
Gallery, Nottingham, and the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (Nottingham, 1991), p. 8.
10 Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, p.148; Phyllis Pray Bober and Ruth
Rubenstein, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture (Oxford, 1986), pp.71-2;
Bignamini, ‘The Artist’s Model from Lely to Hogarth’, p. 8.
11 Ilaria Bignamini, ‘George Vertue, Art Historian, and Art Institutions in London,
1689-1768: A Study of Clubs and Academies’, Walpole Society, LIV (1988), pp.2-
148.
12 Bignamini, ‘The Artist’s Model from Lely to Hogarth’, pp. 12-13.
13 For Vertue see George Vertue, Notebooks IIP, Walpole Society, xxii (1933—4),
p. 22 and Bignamini, ‘The Artist’s Model from Lely to Hogarth’, p. 12.
 References 183

14 Michael Kitson, ‘Hogarth’s “Apology for Painters” Walpole Society, XLI (1966-
9), p. 86.
15 Ibid., pp. 85-6. Hogarth singled out William Kent as a prime example of the
worthlessness of study in Italy: ‘Mr Kent won the prize of Rome and never was there
a more wretched dauber’.
16 Ibid., p. 86.
17 For Cheere see The Man at Hyde Park Corner: Sculpture by John Cheere 1709—1787,
exhibition catalogue by Terry Friedman and Timothy Clifford: Stable Court
Exhibition Galleries, Temple Newsam, Leeds; Marble Hill House, Twickenham
(Leeds, 1974), passim.
18 See Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 2 vols (New Haven and
London, 1971), II, p. 168; The Artist’s Model, exhibition catalogue by Bignamini and
Postle, cat. no. 37, p. 62.
19 See Hugh MacAndrew, ‘A Group of Batoni Drawings at Eton College, and some
Eighteenth-Century Copyists of Classical Sculpture’, Master Drawings (1978),
pp. 131-50; The Artist’s Model, exhibition catalogue by Bignamini and Postle, cat.
no. 23, p. 54. Eight of Dalton’s drawings were published in 1770 by John Boydell as
part of A Collection of Twenty Antique Statues Drawn after the Originals in Italy by
Richard Dalton Esq.
20 The Artist’s Model, exhibition catalogue by Bignamini and Postle, cat. no. 22, p. 53.
21 Vertue, ‘Notebook IIP, pp. 127-8. See also The Artist’s Model, exhibition catalogue
by Bignamini and Postle, cat. no. 22, p. 53.
22 Vertue, ‘Notebook IIP, pp. 121-2. See also Michael Rysbrack, Sculptor 1694-1770,
exhibition catalogue by Katherine Eustace: City of Bristol Museum and Art Gallery
(Bristol, 1982), pp. 160-2.
23 Kim Sloan, ‘Drawing - A “Polite Recreation” in Eighteenth-Century England’ in
Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, ed. Harry C. Payne (Wisconsin, 1982), II,
pp.217-40.
24 D. G. C. Allan, William Shipley. Founder of the Royal Society of Arts. A Biography
with Documents, 2nd edn (London, 1979), p. 80.
25 Benjamin Ralph, The School of Raphael; or the student’s guide to expression in
historical painting (London, 1759), p. B.
26 David H. Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in
Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven and London, 1993), P-zi7-
27 Ibid., p. 220.
28 Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert R. Wark (New Haven and
London, 1975), p. 47. . . ,
29 For the suggested association between the ‘Pleasures of the Imagination, as
expounded by Joseph Addison, and Wright’s image, see Solkin, Painting for Money,
pp.217-18.
30 Royal Academy, Council Minutes, 2 January 1769, I, pp.4-6. Quoted in Sidney C.
Hutchison, The History of The Royal Academy 1768-1986, 2nd edn (London, 1986),
p. 31.
31 Early in the nineteenth century a female art student was allowed by Henry Fuseli
(1741-1825) into the Antique Academy during the Christmas vacation as a special
dispensation. However, as the room was not heated, she found that her hand was
too cold to hold her pencil. See William T. Whitley, Art in England, 1800-1810
(Cambridge, 192&), pp. 83-5.
32 The schools moved to Old Somerset House in the Strand in 1771. See Hutchison,
The History of the Royal Academy, p. 33.
33 Ibid., p. 27.
34 Haskell and Penny, Taste and the Antique, cat. no. 67, pp. 281-2.
184 References

35 Solkin, Painting for Money, p. 242.

36 Ibid., pp. 245-6.
37 There is no evidence to support the attribution of this painting to Zoffany. See Lady
Victoria Manners and G. C. Williamson, Zoffany, R.A. His Life and Works
(London, 1924), pp. 33-4.
38 See The Artist’s Model, exhibition catalogue by Bignamini and Postle, cat. no. 7,
p. 43. The same room, viewed from the opposite end, appears in Edward Francesco
Burney’s wash drawing of 1780, The Antique Room, New Somerset House (Royal
Academy of Arts).
39 A. J. Finberg, A Complete Inventory of the Drawings of the Turner Bequest, 2 vols
(London, 1909), I, p. 7.
40 William Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote, Esq., R.A. (London, 1830),
p. 102. v
41 Diderot on Art — 1. The Salon of 1765 and Notes on Painting, trans. John Goodman,
Introduction Thomas Crow (New Haven and London, 1995), p. 4.
42 Dublin Chronicle, 3 December 1787.
43 John Galt, The Life, Studies and Works of Benjamin West, Esq., 2 vols (London,
1820), II, p. 101.
44 See Richard and Samuel Redgrave, A Century of British Painters (Oxford, 1947),
p.256; The Artist’s Model, exhibition catalogue by Bignamini and Postle, pp. 58—60.
45 James Northcote stated that the prostitutes who sat in the Royal Academy Schools
were distrustful of the students’ motives, regarding the activity as ‘an additional
disgrace to what their profession imposed upon them, and as somethng unnatural,
one even wearing a mask’. Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote, p. 103.
46 Martin Kemp, ed., Dr William Hunter at the Royal Academy of Arts (Glasgow,
r975), P-43-
47 Ibid.
48 John Thomas Smith, Nollekens and his Times, 2 vols (London, 1828), II, p.64.
49 Christie’s, 5 July 1823, lot 21, ‘Cast of a sitting Venus’.
50 Smith, Nollekens and his Times, II, p.64.
51 See The Artist’s Model, exhibition catalogue by Bignamini and Postle, cat. no. 27,
pp. 56-7.
52 See William Blake, exhibition catalogue by Martin Butlin: Tate Gallery (London,
1978), cat. no. 315, pp. 145-6.
53 Martin Archer Shee, Elements of Art, A Poem: in Six Cantos, with Notes and
Preface, including Strictures on the State of the Arts, Criticism, Patronage, and
Public Taste (London, 1809), p. 63.
54 Malcolm Elwin, ed., The Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon
(London, 1950), p. 75.
55 Andrew Ballantyne, ‘Knight, Haydon and the Elgin Marbles’, Apollo Magazine,
cxxviii (September 1988), pp. 155—9.
56 Elwin, Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon, p. 78.
57 Ibid., p. 77.
58 Ibid., p. 168.
59 Frederick Cummings, ‘B. R. Haydon and his School’, Journal of the Warburg and
Courtauld Institutes, XXXVI (1963), pp. 367-80.
60 Elwin, Autobiography and Journals of Benjamin Robert Haydon, p. 311.
6r Cummings, B. R. Haydon and his School’, p. 372 and note 23.
62 See Martin Postle, ‘The Artist’s Model from Reynolds to Etty’ in The Artist’s Model,
exhibition catalogue by Bignamini and Postle, p.23.
63 See Joseph Farington, 21 July 1807, in The Diary of Joseph Farington, ed. Kathryn
 References 185

Cave (New Haven and London, 1982), VIII, p. 3094. Carlisle had first published his
remarks in an article in Tbe Artist on 4 July 1807.
64 Prince Hoare, Academic Annals of Painting (London, 1805), p. 182.
65 John Flaxman, ‘Motion & Equilibrium of the Human Body’, p. 14. The unpublished
manuscript of Flaxman’s treatise is in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. See also
The Artist’s Model, exhibition catalogue by Bignamini and Postle, cat. no. 88, p. 94.
66 For a survey of the role played in art education by the antiquities in the British
Museum in the nineteenth century see Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in
the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800—1939 (London, 1992), pp. 30-40.
67 Hazlitt, Conversations of James Northcote, p.41.

6 Neil McWilliam: Craft, Commerce and the Contradictions of Anti-capitalism:

Reproducing the Applied Art of Jean Baffler

1 Debora L. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siecle France: Politics, Psychology and

Style (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989), pp.229—42.
2 Henri Bouilhet, L’Orfevrerie franpaise au XVIlle et XIXe siecles (Paris, 1912), III,
pp. 320—1, and Gustave Soulier, ‘La Plante et ses applications ornementales’. Revue
des arts decoratifs, XX (March 1900), pp. 93—6.
3 Among the numerous contemporary biographies of the artist, see in particular
Edouard Achard, Jean Baffler (Paris, 1887); Charles Achard, he Sculpteur berrichon
Jean Baffler (Montrouge, 1911); and Jean Desthieux, L’Enfant des cathedrales (Jean
Baffler) (Paris, 1933). For more recent studies, see Gilbert Perroy, ‘Nos Artistes: Jean
Baffler, sculpteur-statuaire (1851—1920)’, Revue d’histoire du quatorzi'eme arrondis-
sement de Paris, XXV (1980-1), pp. 74-85; Oeuvres de Jean Baffler au Musee
municipal de Nevers, exhibition catalogue by B. Bringuier (Nevers, 1981); and
Gerard Coulon, ‘Jean Baffler, tailleur damages’, Berry. Une Terre a decouvrir, 1
(Spring 1987), pp. 42-50.
4 Charles Baussan, ‘Un Maitre imagier. Jean Baffler’, Le Mois litteraire et pittoresque,
XX/119 (November 1908), p. 543. On analogies with Millet, see, for example, Louis
Perie, ‘Quelques Notes sur Jean Baffler’, Le Limousin de Paris, 9 May 1920.
5 See, for example, Philippe Durey, ‘Le Realisme’ in La Sculpture franpaise au XIXe
si'ecle, exhibition catalogue by Anne Pingeot and others: Grand Palais (Paris, 1986),
pp.365-6.
6 See Christian-E. Roth, ‘Jean Baffler et le regionalisme en Berry-Bourbonnais-
Nivernais (1885-1911)’, Federation des Societes savantes du Centre de la France.
Actes du yie congres, 117-18 (July-December 1990, January-June 1991), pp. i59~77>
and Yannick Guilloux, Ethnographes et folkloristes dans le Cher (1852—1914). Petite
Histoire locale des chercheurs de traditions populates, de Venquete Fortoul a la
mission Brunot, Maitrise des lettres modernes, Universite Francis Rabelais (Tours,
i987)-
7 For an instance of this, see the discussion of Baffler’s monument to the Spanish
doctor and theologian Michael Servetus in Neil McWilliam, ‘Monuments,
Martyrdom and the Politics of Religion in the French Third Republic’, Art Bulletin,
LXXVII/2 (June 1995), pp. 186-206. This discusses the anti-Protestant polemic
underlying Baffler’s work and its relationship with French nationalist anti-
Protestantism more^ generally.
8 The best general discussion of the market remains Jacques de Caso, ‘Serial Sculpture
in Nineteenth-Century France’ in Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture,
exhibition catalogue by J. Wasserman: Fogg Art Museum (Harvard, 1979), pp. 1-27.
9 On Carpeaux’s commercialization of reproductive sculpture, see, for example, Anne
Middleton Wagner, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (New
i86 References

Haven and London, 1986), pp. 175-^207. On Fremiet, see Emmanuel Fremiet: La
Main et le multiple, exhibition catalogue by Catherine Chevillot: Musee des Beaux-
Arts (Dijon, 1988).
10 Louis de Fourcaud, ‘Les Arts decoratifs au Salon de 1899. Les Objets d art. II: La
Societe nationale’, Revue des arts decoratifs, XIX (October 1899), p. 332.
11 See the Jean Baffler dossier in the Archives de Paris 10624/72/1/7. The council
purchased nine pieces in all, which were deposited at the Musee Galliera before
being transferred to the collection of the Petit Palais. Baffler received a total of
20,000 francs for these purchases.
12 See the correspondence between Baffler and Henri Jacquier, Under-secretary of State
for Fine Arts, in Archives nationales F*1 4287, which also contains letters in support
of Baffler’s request from a number of influential public figures, such as the Garde des
sceaux, Antony Ratier. In 1917, Baffler’* long-standing patron Jacques Mariani
offered to pay for the work’s completion; see Archives departementales du Cher,
Bourges, 23 F 5, 640—41, undated letter [February 1917].
13 See, for example, Anonymous, ‘La Troisieme Exposition d’art au palais du due Jean.
L’Inauguration’, Journal du Cher (24-5 October 1910), reporting a speech by Baffler
in which he described his decorative work and its inspiration.
14 See, for example, Pierre Roche, Exposition de I’art du fer forge, du cuivre et de
I’etain au Musee Galliera (mai-septembre 1905). Rapport general presente au nom
du jury (Paris, 1905), where the elements from the table setting are extolled as ‘des
oeuvres irreductibles, profondement originales et dedaigneuses de toute concession’
(p. 9). Roche goes on to point to the benefits to be gained within the decorative arts
from the example of rural craft traditions, though he explicitly repudiates nationalist
exploitation of such sources (p. 20).
15 The theme is conveyed particularly forcefully by Marius Vachon in a series of
pamphlets and enquiries such as Pour la defense de nos industries d’art.
L’lnstruction artistique des ouvriers en France, en Angleterre et en Autriche
(Paris, 1899). On Vachon’s campaign, see Stephane Laurent, ‘Marius Vachon, un
militant pour les “industries d’art’”, Histoire de Part, 29-30 (May 1995), pp. 71-8.
16 On nature as a source of inspiration, see Gustave Soulier, ‘La Plante et ses
applications ornementales’, Revue des arts decoratifs, XX (1900), pp.93—6; on the
rejection of Art nouveau, see Charles Genuys, ‘A propos de l’Art nouveau. Soyons
Fran^ais!’, ibid., XVII (1897), pp. 1—6.
17 Vincent Dethare, ‘Les Artistes berrichons au Salon d’automne’, Journal du Cher (16-
17 October 1911).
18 Emile Molinier, ‘Notes sur l’etain’, Art et decoration, I (October 1897), p. 102.
19 See, for example, Andre Salmon, ‘La Semaine artistique [ ... ] Art et regionalisme’,
L’Europe nouvelle (3 May 1919), p.867.
20 Henri Clouzot, ‘L’Art decoratif de Jean Baffler’, La Renaissance de Part franpais et
des industries du luxe, IV/i (January 1921), p. 18.
21 See Nancy J. Troy, Modernism and the Decorative Arts in France: Art Nouveau to
Le Corbusier (London and New Haven, 1991).
22 For the decorative and symbolic importance of tree imagery in the fireplace and
accompanying furniture, see Etienne Charles, ‘A l’atelier de Jean Baffler’, Journal du
Cher (28 November 1909). Baffler’s involvement in regionally inspired furniture
design can be understood as part of a broader interest in traditional forms around
the turn of the century: see Denise Gluck, ‘Meuble regional et modernite’ in Le
Meuble regional en France, exhibition catalogue by Denise Gluck and others: Musee
national des arts et traditions populaires (Paris, 1990), pp. 170-1.
23 Catalogue of the 1898 Salon of the Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts, no. 216:
‘Maquette au quart d’execution definitive, mur de fond d’une salle a manger.’
 References 187

24 Jean Baffler, Les Marges d’un cahier d’ouvrier. Objections a Gustave Geffroy sur le
Musee du soir et la force creatrice (Chateauroux, 1895), p. 15.
25 Jean Baffler, ‘Lettre ouverte a M. Henry Hamel, Directeur du “Journal des
artistes”’, Journal des artistes, 18th year, 44 (5 November 1899), p.2898. See also
Jean Baffler to Auguste Rodin, letter dated 23 December 1901, in which he attacks
‘cet art de pacotille, qui s’intitule Art Nouveau, art issu d’un brocantage industriel
ehonte, qui remplace a l’heure actuelle les belles conceptions issues de notre art
ancestral, si precieusement et si pieusement conserve au sein des corporations’.
Dossier Jean Baffler, Archives du Musee Rodin, Paris.
26 Edouard Achard, ‘Les Nivernais aux deux Salons’, Revue du Nivernais (June 1901),
p.236.
27 Edouard Achard, ‘L’Art d’epoque’, Le Reveil de la Gaule, 40 (January 1892), p. 282.
28 Jean Baffler, Manifeste du groupe corporatif des ouvriers d’art de Bourges fonde
sous la direction de Jean Baffler, ouvrier sculpteur, pour le rel'evement de la dignite
du travail national et la moralite de I’art franpais (Chateauroux, 1901), pp.7-8.
29 Jean Baffler, ‘Petition a M. le President du Conseil municipal de Paris au sujet de mes
oeuvres sabotees honteusement au Musee Galliera’, supplement to Reveil de la
Gaule (March 1909), p. 394.
30 Baffler, Les Marges d’un cahier d’ouvrier, pp. 46, 48.
31 Speech recorded in Ligue de la patrie franpaise, section du XlVe arrondissement.
Comite de Plaisance. Proces-verbaux des assemblies, no. 18, record of 6 October
1900, n.p., Archives departementales du Cher, 23 F 9.
32 On the department store, see Jean Baffler, ‘Le Bazar de la Charite’, Le Reveil de la
Gaule, 3rd series, 8-12 (March-July 1897), p. 113: ‘le bazar, importe d’Orient par les
agioteurs juifs, est le mauvais lieu ou est en train de sombrer la dignite du travail et
toutes les vertus de Part franfais, pour ne pas dire le caractere de notre race’.
33 Camille Mauclair, ‘La Crise des arts decoratifs’ in Trois Crises de Part actuel (Paris,
1906), p. 167.

7 Erich Ranfft: Reproduced Sculpture of German Expressionism: Living Objects,

Theatrics of Display and Practical Options

1 See, for example, Gauguin to Moore: Primitivism in Modern Sculpture, exhibition

catalogue by Alan Wilkinson: Art Gallery of Ontario (Toronto, 1981); Patrick
Elliott, ‘Sculpture in France 1918—1939’ (PhD dissertation, Courtauld Institute of
Art, University of London, 1991), especially chapter IV, ‘Direct Carving’; Sculpture
en taille directe en France de 1900 a 1950, exhibition catalogue by Patrick Elliott:
Foundation de Coubertin (Saint-Remy-les-Chevreuse, 1988); and Alexandra
Parigoris’ essay in this volume.
2 German Expressionist Sculpture, exhibition catalogue by Stephanie Barron: Los
Angeles County Museum of Art; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Josef-Haubrich Kunsthalle, Cologne (Los
Angeles and Chicago, 1983; trans., revised and expanded as Skulptur des
Expressionismus, Munich, 1984).
3 The other Brticke painter-sculptors were Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max
Pechstein and Emil Nolde, while the Los Angeles project also included in this
‘category’ of sculptors Kirchner’s followers in Switzerland: the painter-sculptor
Albert Muller and' the sculptor Hermann Scherer, from 1923 to 1927; see German
Expressionist Sculpture, ibid., for essays and catalogue entries on each of the
abovenamed. Undoubtedly inspiring the Los Angeles project was the major touring
retrospective, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner 1880—1938 (Berlin, Munich, Cologne and
Zurich, 1979/80; organized by [former ^Vest-] Berlin Nationalgalerie, 1979)>
i88 References

including fifteen sculptures. For the most relevant study to date on Briicke art and
sculptures, see Jill Lloyd, German Expressionism: Primitivism and Modernity (New
Haven and London, 1991).
4 Quoted in Rose-Carol Washton Long, ed., German Expressionism: Documents from
the End of the Wilhelmine Empire to the Rise of National Socialism (New York,
1993), p. 26 (the quote uses ‘peeled out’ but this is awkward).
5 Deutsche Bildhauer 1900—194J Entartet, exhibition catalogue ed. Christian Tumpel:
two venues in the Netherlands, 1991; then Gerhard Marcks-Haus, Bremen;
Westfalisches Landesmuseum, Munster; Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg;
Stadtische Kunsthalle, Mannheim (Zwolle, 1992). This features Kirchner’s Standing
Woman (1912, Nationalgalerie, Berlin); see cat. no. 34, pp. 140-1. This catalogue
also featured as its frontispiece a wood-carving by Expressionist sculptor Milly
Steger (c. 1919); see cat. no. 29, p. 136. v
6 See Andreas Franzke, Skulpturen und Objekte von Malern des zo. Jahrhunderts
(Cologne, 1982); and for a timely survey, including sculptures: Expressions: New Art
from Germany, exhibition catalogue ed. Jack Cowart: The Saint Louis Art Museum;
Long Island City, NY; Philadelphia, Cincinnati, Chicago, Newport Beach,
Washington, DC (Saint Louis and Munich, 1983).
7 Petra Kipphoff, ‘Der skulptierte Schrei’, Die Zeit, no. 31 (27 July 1984), p. 33; and
Eduard Beaucamp, ‘Wilde und Bufier’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 155 (17
July 1984), p.23. For a later study incorporating Baselitz into research on
Expressionist sculpted heads, see Angela Ziesche, Der neue Mensch. Kopfe und
Busten deutscher Expressionisten (PhD dissertation, published Frankfurt am Main,
I993)-
8 L. de Marsalle [E. L. Kirchner], ‘Uber die plastischen Arbeiten E. L. Kirchners’, Der
Cicerone, XVII/14 (1925), pp. 695—701; translation in German Expressionist
Sculpture, exhibition catalogue by Barron, pp.43-6 (with illustrations of works
from article) and Washton Long, ed., German Expressionism: Documents, pp. 119—
21 (excerpted).
9 For introductory contextualizations of Expressionist sculpture see: German Expres¬
sionism 1915-1925: The Second Generation, exhibition catalogue ed. Stephanie
Barron, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Fort Worth Art Museum, Texas;
Kunstmuseum Diisseldorf; Staatliche Galerie Moritzburg, Halle (Munich, 1988);
Magdalena Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik und die expressionistische Kunst (Munich,
I99°)> PP- i45_9fi; and Erich Ranfft, ‘Expressionist Sculpture c. 1910-30 and the
Significance of its Dual Architectural/Ideological Frame’ in Expressionism
Reassessed, eds S. Behr, D. Fanning and D. Jarman (Manchester and New York,
1993), PP- 65-79-
10 Joan Campbell, The German Werkbund: The Politics of Reform in the Applied Arts
(Princeton, 1978), p. 50, note 63; see also Alan Windsor, Peter Behrens (London,
1981), pp. 137-8.
11 Mainly Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Max
Pechstein, Ernst Barlach, Gerhard Marcks, Ludwig Gies, Christoph Voll, Karl
Knappe, Otto Hitzberger, Milly Steger and Karl Opfermann (all but Gies,
Hitzberger and Opfermann were included in German Expressionist Sculpture,
though the coverage of Marcks was superficial).
12 //. Ausstellung von Zeichnungen und Plastiken neuzeitlicher Bildhauer, exhibition
catalogue by W. F. Storck: Kunsthalle Mannheim (Mannheim, 1914); list of works
reprinted in Hommage a Lehmbruck - Lehmbruck in seiner Zeit, exhibition
catalogue by Siegfried Salzmann and Karl-Egon Vester: Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-
Museum (Duisburg, 1981), pp. 148-9.
13 See Cornelia Wieg, ‘Animalisierung. Zu Plastiken von Franz Marc’ in Expressionist
 References 189

Sculpture, exhibition catalogue by Rintaro Terakado and others: Aichi Prefectural

Museum of Art, Nagoya; Niigata Prefectural Museum of Modern Art (Nagoya and
Niigata, 1995), pp. 181—6; and Hans Friedeberger, ‘Plastiken und neue Zeichnungen
von Max Pechstein bei Gurlitt’, Der Cicerone, V (1913), pp. 760-2.
14 See The Dance of Death: Medallic Art of the First World War, exhibition catalogue
by Mark Jones: British Museum (London, 1979); and Bernd Ernsting, ‘Ludwig Gies.
The Munich Years’, The Medal, no. 13 (Autumn 1988), pp. 58-72.
15 Hedwig Fechheimer, Die Plastik der Agypter (Berlin, 1913), especially pp. 1-8; by
1919 its 4th edition contained further examples of findings from Egypt.
16 Other projects by Expressionist sculptors included Milly Steger for the Hagen City
Theatre (1911/12); Steger and Will Lammert for the Hagen City Hall (1913/14); Paul
Henning for the Prachtel business headquarters in Berlin (1912); and Bernhard
Hoetger for the Berne Community Centre (1912).
17 On the Lions’ Gate and Hoetger’s sculptural decorations for the Mathildenhohe, see
Dieter Tino Wehner, Bernhard Floetger: Das Bildwerk 1905 bis 1914 und das
Gesamtwerk Platanenhain (Alfter, 1993), pp-93—197 and accompanying catalogue of
works.
18 See Peter van der Coelen, ‘War der Kunde Konig? Bernhard Floetger, ein deutscher
Kimstler und seine Auftraggeber 1900—1945’ in Deutsche Bildhauer, exhibition
catalogue by Tiimpel, pp. 71-82.
19 See Wehner, Bernhard Hoetger, pp. hi—13, 122—8; and Licht und Schatten.
Bernhard Hoetger. Majoliken 1910—1912, exhibition catalogue by Uta Bernsmeier:
Bremer Landesmuseum fur Kunst und Kulturgeschichte (Bremen, 1993).
20 Robert Breuer, ‘Treuhander’, Das Kunstblatt, I/i (1917), pp.27-8 (see also the
complete ‘Umschau’ section on these pages).
21 See Ranfft, ‘Expressionist Sculpture’, pp.67-8; van der Coelen, ‘War der Kunde
Konig’, pp. 72-3; and Frauke Engel, ‘Bernhard Hoetger und der Kerksfabrikant
Hermann Bahlsen’ in Bernhard Hoetger, Bildwerke 1902-1936, ed. H. Grape-Albers
(Hanover, 1994), pp. 35—55-
22 Reinhold Heller, ‘Bridge to Utopia: The Briicke as Utopian Experiment’ in
Expressionist Utopias: Paradise, Metropolis, Architectural Fantasy, exhibition
catalogue by Timothy Benson: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Los Angeles
and Seattle, 1993), pp. 62-83, especially p.71.
23 Entry from 1923 in Lothar Grisebach, E. L. Kirchners Davoser Tagebuch (Cologne,
1968), p. 78.
24 Lloyd, German Expressionism, p. 119 (in reference to Kirchner; her study fails to
treat the extent of Heckel’s practices); for general coverage see pp. 21-49, 119-23.
25 Drawing: pencil, watercolour and gouache, Buchheim Sammlung; illustrated in ibid.,
p. 122.
26 ‘Das schwarze Tuch’, Der Sturm, no. 63 (25 May 1911); also illustrated in Nell
Walden and Lothar Schreyer, eds, Der Sturm: Ein Erinnerungsbuch (Baden-Baden,
1954)) P-zo-
27 See Claudia Rieger, ‘“Lebende Bilder” und “Bewegte Plastik”’ in Ausdruckstanz,
ed. G. Oberzaucher-Schiiller (Wilhelmshaven, 1992), pp. 367-76; and Ulrich Linse,
‘Zeitbild Jahrhundertwende’ in ‘Wir sind nackt und nennen uns Du’ ... Eine
Geschichte der Freikorperkultur, eds M. Andritzky and T. Rautenberg (GiePen,
1989), pp. 10-50, especially pp.25, 32-
28 Praying Man (destroyed in 1944) and Draped Woman (1912, Briicke-Museum,
Berlin), illustrated in German Expressionist Sculpture, exhibition catalogue by
Barron, figs 2 and 6 respectively, pp.94-5.
29 For a colour illustration see Erich Heckel 1883-1970, exhibition catalogue ed.
190 References

Zdenek Felix: Museum Folkwang, Essen; Haus der Kunst, Munich (Munich, 1983),
cat. no. 33, pp. 110-11.
30 Katharina Hegewitsch, ‘Einst ein Kommender vor Kommenden — Erich Heckel in
seiner Zeit’ in ibid., p. 34.
31 It is not surprising that Heckel wanted to convey Siddi in terms of a religious icon,
for this mirrors his paintings and drawings of Madonnas and figures with halos done
in 1912—16.
32 Such a relationship to the spectator was also explored in 1912 when Heckel and
Kirchner created a ‘Madonna Chapel’ for the Sonderbund exhibition in Cologne; see
Lloyd, German Expressionism, pp. 59—61.
33 See German Expressionist Sculpture, exhibition catalogue by Barron, pp.43—6, 113—
2-9- , '
34 Photograph entitled Two Sculptures with\ Background of Paintings, illustrated in
ibid., fig. 5, p. 121.
35 Photograph entitled The Dancer Nina Hard in Kirchner’s ‘Haus in den Larchen’ in
Davos, 1921, illustrated in ibid., fig. 7, p.122.
36 An idea of these structural and painterly variations can be gleaned from ibid., pp. 45,
94-5, and Lloyd, German Expressionism, pp. 67-74.
37 Published by Barlach’s dealer, Paul Cassirer, Berlin; lithographs illustrated, for
example, in Un sculpteur-ecrivain: Ernst Barlach, exhibition catalogue by Catherine
Krahmer: Musee d’Orsay (Paris, 1988), pp. 34-8.
38 In the collection of the Ernst Barlach Haus, Hamburg; illustrated, along with
corresponding lithograph, in Naomi Jackson Groves, Ernst Barlach: Life in "Work
(Konigstein im Taunus, 1972), pp. 46—7.
39 On this period see sources in note 9.
40 From Bruno Taut, ‘Ein Architektur-Programm’, 1918, trans. in The Weimar
Republic Sourcebook, eds Anton Kaes and others (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 432-4.
41 See Stark Impressions: Graphic Production in Germany, 1918—1933, exhibition
catalogue by Reinhold Heller: Mary and Leigh Block Gallery, Northwestern
University, Evanston; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover; Archer M. Huntington Art
Gallery, Austin (Evanston, 1993); and The German Print Portfolio 1890-1930:
Serials for a Private Sphere, exhibition catalogue by Robin Reisenfeld: Detroit
Institute of Arts; Tampa Museum of Art; Katonah Museum of Art; David and
Alfred Smart Museum of Art, Chicago (Chicago and London, 1992).
42 Bruno Taut, ‘Haus des Himmels’, Fruhlicht, I/7 (April 1920), pp. 109-12 (the Pillars
are illustrated on p. 112), quoted in Expressionist Utopias, exhibition catalogue by
Benson, p.285 (with full translation pp. 283-5); and reprinted in Bruno Taut:
Fruhlicht 1920-1922, ed. Ulrich Conrads, (Berlin, 1963), pp. 33-6. One of the Pillars
is illustrated in Wolfgang Pehnt, Expressionist Architecture (London, 1973), fig. 260,
P-114-
43 See Winfried Nerdinger, Rudolf Belling und die Kunststromungen in Berlin 1918—
1923 (Berlin, 1981), pp. 24-6; and Ranfft, ‘Expressionist Sculpture’, pp.70-3, for its
architectural-ideological context.
44 Quoted in Nerdinger, Rudolf Belling, p. 24.
45 From Walter Gropius, ‘Programm des Staatlichen Bauhauses’, 1919, trans. in Kaes
and others, Weimar Republic Sourcebook, pp. 435-8.
46 See Ingo Kerls, ‘Worpsweder Kunsthutten und die Werkstatt “Zu den 7 Faulen” ’ in
Bernhard Hoetger: Sein Werk in der Bottcherstrafie Bremen, eds A. Drees-
Hiittemann and B. Kiister (Worpswede, 1994), pp. 96-123.
47 See Caren Marusch-Krohn, Meissener Porzellan 1918-1933: die Pfeifferzeit (Leipzig,
1993), especially pp. 112-18, 121-4.
48 Carl Georg Heise, ‘Zu einer Leuchterfigur von Gerhard Marcks’, Genius, V/2 (1920),
 References 191

pp. 252—4; see also Ro/? wnd Reiter in der Skulptur des XX. Jahrbunderts, exhibition
catalogue by Martina Rudloff and Albrecht Seufert: Gerhard Marcks-Haus (Bremen,
1991), PP- 39-4°. 9°“i-
49 Illustrated in German Expressionist Sculpture, exhibition catalogue by Barron, cat.
no. 18, p. 67.
50 Quoted in Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik, p. 179, note 151.
51 From Mel Gordon, ed., Expressionist Texts (New York, 1986), p. 183 (entire trans.
of play pp. 155-2.07).
52 See Golem! Danger, Deliverance and Art, exhibition catalogue by Emily D. Bilski:
Jewish Museum (New York, 1988).
53 Philipp Harth, ‘Uber Plastik und Holzplastik’, Das Kunstblatt, VIII (19Z4), pp. 164-
76, on p. 164; Alfred Kuhn, Die neuere Plastik (Munich, 19Z1), p. 15.
54 Otto Hitzberger, ‘Aus der Werkstatt eines Holzbildhauers’, Die Kunst, L/i (October
1923), pp.n—19, especially pp. 13, 19.
55 Georg Biermann, ‘Der Bildhauer Herbert Garbe’, Der Cicerone, XII/20 (1920),
PP- 737~47> especially p.742.
56 Paul Westheim, ‘Neue Malerei?’, Sozialistische Monatshefte, XIX/3 (1913), pp-170-
73, on p. 172.
57 Adolf von Hildebrand, Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg,
1893), with the 3rd revised and expanded edn (1901) as the final and ‘modern’
version, which was translated into English (abridged, New York, 1907) and French
(Paris, 1903). For a full translation of the 1893 edition, see Harry Francis Mallgrave
and Eleftherios Ikonomou, Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German
Aesthetics, 1873-1893 (Santa Monica, 1994), pp. 227-79.
58 See Rudolf Wittkower, Sculpture: Processes and Principles (Harmondsworth, 1986),
pp. 231-49; and Erich Ranfft, ‘Adolf von Hildebrand’s “Problem der Form” and His
“Front” Against Auguste Rodin’ (Master’s thesis, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1992).
59 According to Liesbeth Jans, ‘Ernst Barlach’ in Deutsche Bildhauer, exhibition
catalogue by Ttimpel, p.zoi.
60 Also: Moderne Plastik, exhibition catalogue by Galerie Ernst Arnold (Dresden,
1919), cat. no. 33; and in 1930, by then without the patronage of Cassirer, Barlach
was persuaded by the dealer Alfred Flechtheim to allow bronzes to be cast from a
number of plaster models - see Isa Lohmann-Siems, ‘Zum Problem des Materials bei
Ernst Barlach’ in Ernst Barlach: Plastik, Zeichnungen, Druckgraphik, exhibition
catalogue by Manfred Schneckenburger: Kunsthalle (Cologne, 1975), pp. 23-32.
61 See Anita Beloubek-Hammer, ‘Rudolf Belling’ in Roland Marz, Kunst in Deutsch¬
land 1903-1937 (Berlin, 1992), pp. 104-06.
62 Ewald Matare, Tagebucher, eds H. Matare and F. Muller (Cologne, 1973), p. 32- (*
August 1923).
63 According to Bushart, Der Geist der Gotik, p. 15G note 59; which works and how
many remain unknown.
64 See Ursel Berger, Georg Kolbe - Leben und Werk, 2nd edn (Berlin, 1994), cat. nos 53
(pp. 260-2) and 57 (pp. 264-5).
65 Paul Rudolf Henning, ‘Ton - Ein Aufruf’, Mitteilungen des Deutschen Werkbundes,
no. 5 (1919—20), p. 144; first published in 1917 by the Kunsthaus Zurich. For a partial
translation of the manifesto, see German Expressionist Sculpture, exhibition
catalogue by Barron, pp.41-2; but for a complete reprint of the Werkbund
publication, see Barron, Skulptur des Expressionismus, pp. 214-5.
66 Emily D. Bilski, ‘The Art of the Golem’ in Golem!, exhibition catalogue by Bilski,
pp.51—2.
67 For the most in-depth and current study on Lehmbruck, see Dietrich Schubert, Die
Kunst Lehmbrucks, znd revised and expanded edn (Dresden, 1990).
:^z References
v l’

68 Kuhn, Die neuere Plastik, pp. 114—i5;'see also Kuhn’s favourable comments on Milly
Steger’s use of artificial stone, p. 104, and on works by Belling, pp. 12.6—8.
69 See, for example, Siegfried Salzmann, ‘Jedes abgeschlagene Bein wandert seelisch
fort. Lehmbrucks Plastik und das Problem der Giisse’, Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung, no. 206 (5 September 1991), p. 35; and Ursel Berger, ‘Zum Problem der
“Originalbronzen”. Deutsche Bronzeplastiken im 19. und 2.0. Jahrhundert’,
Pantheon, III (1982), pp. 184-95. Belling had nine, bronze versions of Triad cast
between 1949 and 1972 — see Nerdinger, Rudolf Belling, cat. no. 20, p. 229, for the
locations of seven of these; the 1924 version in wood remained in relative obscurity
in the collection of the Alte Nationalgalerie in the former East Berlin (I am grateful
to Dr Gottlieb Leinz of the Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg, for bringing to
my attention Belling’s motives for the second, wooden Triad). The Barlach museums
are located in Hamburg, Giistrow, Wedel knd Ratzeburg.

8 Alexandra Parigoris: Truth to Material: Bronze, on the Reproducibility of Truth

I am indebted to the editors, Erich Ranfft and Anthony Hughes, for their careful and
critical reading of this essay. I would also like to thank Michael Stone-Richards and
Jonathan Wood for their useful comments on the early drafts.

1 Rodin Rediscovered, exhibition catalogue ed. Albert E. Elsen: National Gallery of

Art (Washington, 1981).
2 Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist
Repetition’, October, no. 18 (Fall 1981), pp. 47—66. The essay was reprinted in her
The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA,
and London, 1985), pp. 151—70.
3 Albert E. Elsen, ‘On the Question of Originality: A Letter’, October, no. 20 (Spring
1982), pp. 107-09.
4 See Art Journal, XXXIV/i (Fall 1974), pp.44—50.
5 Julio Gonzalez: Sculptures and Drawings, exhibition catalogue by Rosalind Krauss:
Pace Gallery (New York, 1981). The essay was reprinted as ‘This New Art: To Draw
in Space’ in Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde, pp. 119-31.
6 Krauss had the final word in an article that followed Elsen’s letter, where she
maintained her position in extending her critique to the essays published in the
catalogue Rodin Rediscovered. The object of her discussion was less the works of
Rodin than a critique of the conventions used to define and valorize these works. See
Rosalind E. Krauss, ‘Sincerely Yours’, October, no. 20 (Spring 1982), pp. 111-30. All
the articles were subsequently gathered in The Originality of the Avant-Garde.
7 Sylvia Hochfield, ‘Problems in the Reproduction of Sculpture’, ARTnews (New
York), LXXIII/9 (November 1974), pp.2r—9.
8 See also the exchange of letters between Alexandre Istrati and Sidney Geist in
ARTnews (New York), LXXIV/10 (December 1975), pp. 24—8.
9 Hochfield, ‘Problems in the Reproduction of Sculpture’, p. 29. For the most recent
enquiry into the market of posthumous casts see Judd Tully, ‘The Messiest Subject
Alive’, ARTnews (New York), XCIV/10 (December 1995), pp. 112—18.
10 Jean Chatelain, An Original in Sculpture’ in Rodin Rediscovered, exhibition
catalogue by Elsen, pp. 275-82.
11 This version of Age of Bronze was cast by the firm Thiebault freres, and acquired by
the French State in 1880 after its exhibition at the Paris Salon. Walking Man was cast
by the firm Alexis Rudier, and given to the French State in 1911 by a group of art
enthusiasts.
12 See the catalogue to the travelling exhibition Rodin and his Contemporaries, seen by
 References 193

the author in its venue at the London department store Selfridges, from z8 March to
2.1 April 1990.
13 This was the premise of Rudolf Wittkower’s Slade lectures in 1971, published as
Sculpture, Processes and Principles (London, 1977).
14 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
reprinted in Illuminations, trans. H. Zorn, 4th impression (London 1982), p.223.
15 Michael Le Marchant, ‘Le Role du marchand: redecouvrir et diffuser’ in Rencontres
de l’Ecole du Louvre, La Sculpture du XIXe siecle, Une Memoire retrouvee. Les
Ponds de sculpture (Paris, 1986), pp. 255-61.
16 Elsen, in his exhibition catalogue Rodin Rediscovered, p. 15, wrote: ‘Whether or not
one prefers a lifetime cast to an authorised posthumous cast on historical or ethical
grounds, there is no question but that the latter casts do perform an important
educational function’.
17 See Monique Laurent, ‘Vie posthume d’un fonds d’atelier: les editions de bronzes du
Musee Rodin’ in La Sculpture du XIXe siecle, Une Memoire retrouvee, pp. 245-55.
18 I refer the reader to Paul Wood’s review, ‘Howl of Minerva’, Art History, IX/i
(March 1986), pp. 119-31.
19 See, for example, the entry for Raymond Duchamp-Villon, The Horse, 1914, in
Angelica Zander Rudenstine, Peggy Guggenheim Collection, Venice (New York,
1985), pp. 270-81.
20 Letter in French quoted in ibid., p.273.
21 Katherine Kuh to Louis Carre, Chicago, 19 April 1957. Unpublished correspondence
from the Raymond Ducham-Villon Artist File of the Art Institute of Chicago. I am
grateful to Daniel Schulman, Assistant Curator in the Department of Twentieth
Century Painting and Sculpture, for making this information available to me.
22 Louis Carre to Katherine Kuh, Paris, 9 May 1957, ibid.
23 This important note on the historiography of avant-garde sculpture was argued
convincingly by Patrick Elliott in ‘Sculpture in France 1918—1939 (unpublished PhD
thesis, University of London, 1991), chapter V. The very detailed label that
accompanies Horse, 1955—57 version of a 1914 work. Bronze (from an edition of 7),
in the galleries of the Art Institute of Chicago lists the various versions and histories
of production, but in the final analysis maintains the title Horse for the work, rather
than Large Horse used by Duchamp and Carre to designate this work, thus stressing
1914 over 1957.
24 Oliver Andrews, Living Materials, A Sculptor s Handbook (Berkeley, Los Angeles
and London, 1983), p. 182.
25 I wish to thank Anthony Hughes for clarifying this aspect.
26 Renaissance sculptors often left accounts of their work in this material to
commemorate the retrieval and mastery of a technique that had a time-honoured
tradition, stretching back to ancient civilizations. See the account of this literature in
Richard E. Stone, ‘Antico and the Development of Bronze Casting in Italy at the End
of the Quattrocento’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, 16 (1982). I wish to thank Dr
Ian Wardropper, Eloise W. Martin Curator of European Decorative Arts and
Sculpture and Classical Art at the Art Institute of Chicago, for his advice on this
question and for referring me to this article.
27 Louis Slobodkin, Sculpture, Principles and Practices (1949i reprinted New York,
1973), offers the most accessible account of the process to the layman, pp. 161-9. h ls
significant that'although most accounts of bronze fashioning acknowledge the
artistry of the patiniere, these crafts remain anoymous. A singular exception is made
by ‘Pere and Jean Limet’, who worked for Rodin and others in this century. See
Malvina Hoffman, Heads and Tales in Many Lands (New York and London, 1937b

P-9i-
194 References

2.8 Though the make-up of a foundry has altered little since the days the workshop was
recorded in illustrative prints in such manuals as Diderot, or d’Alembert,
Encyclopaedia of Trades and Industries [c. 1751-65) or Carradori, Istruzione
Elementare per gli Studiosi della Scultura (1802.), the number of specialized artisans
has diminished.
29 Patrick Elliott, La Sculpture en taille directe en France de 1900 d J950 (Saint-Remy-
les-Chevreuse, 1988); idem, Sculpture in France 1918-1939, chapter IV.
30 See the statement in the catalogue of the Henry Moore exhibition at the Tate
Gallery, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1951. Reprinted in Philip James, ed., Henry
Moore on Sculpture (London and New York, 1966; New York, 1992), p. 113.
31 Furthermore, the publication of H. S. Ede, Savage Messiah (London, 1931) and
Horace Brodzky, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska 1891—ipij (London, 1933) must have
contributed to reviving interest in the earlier sculptor’s work. I wish to thank
Jonathan Wood for this point.
32 Henry Moore, ‘A View of Sculpture’, Architectural Association Journal (May 1930).
Reprinted in James, Henry Moore on Sculpture, pp. 62-8.
33 First published, untitled, in Unit One, ed. Herbert Read (London, 1934), pp. 29—30,
reprinted in James, Henry Moore on Sculpture, pp. 69—72: ‘Truth to material. Every
material has its own individual qualities. It is only when the sculptor works direct,
when there is an active relationship with his material, that the material can take its
part in the shaping of an idea. Stone, for example, is hard and concentrated and
should not be falsified to look like soft flesh - it should not be forced beyond its
constructive build to a point of weakness. It should keep its hard tense stoniness.’
34 Henry Moore, ‘The Sculptor Speaks’, The Listener, XVIII/449 (18 August 1937).
Reprinted in James, Henry Moore on Sculpture, pp.62—8.
35 Clement Greenberg’s ‘The New Sculpture’ was first published in 1948 and revised in
1958 for inclusion in Art and Culture (London, 1961; reprinted 1973), pp. 139—45.
For an excellent and fair critique of Greenberg’s ideas on art, mainly painting, see T.
J. Clark, ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’ in Francis Frascina, ed., Pollock and
After: The Critical Debate (London, 1985), pp. 47-63. The limiting effect of
Greenberg’s view of sculpture for Gonzalez is explored in my essay, ‘Gonzalez in the
Context of Surrealism: Plutot la vie’ in the 1995 Gonzalez Symposium papers
(Valencia, forthcoming).
36 Rosalind Krauss, ‘This New Art: To Draw in Space’ in The Originality of the Avant
Garde, p. 128. The essay first appeared in the catalogue of the Pace Gallery
exhibition Julio Gonzalez: Sculptures and Drawings in 1981.
37 The Edinburgh Harlequin (posthumous cast) was acquired in 1972 from the Galerie
de France in Paris. It is, apparently, one of four posthumous casts done by Valsuani.
I wish to thank Patrick Elliott, Assistant Keeper of European Painting and Sculpture
at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, for providing me with this
information.
38 Andre Billy’s ‘Comment je suis devenu poete (pour Guillaume Apollinaire)’,
advocated the new sources of inspiration for the modern poet to be found in
advertising texts, in Les Soirees de Paris, no. 9 (October 1912), p.276. Apollinaire
himself praised the plurality of the technical means available to painters, in the
section devoted to Picasso; see Guillaume Apollinaire, Meditations esthetiques: Les
Peintres cubistes, eds L. C. Breunig and J.-Cl. Chevalier (Paris, 1980), p. 80.
39 Andre Salmon, La Jeune Sculpture franpaise (Paris, 1919), pp. 2.5—6. Salmon states in
the preface that his manuscript was ready for publication before the war. This
important text is the first to comment on Picasso’s Cubist constructions’ assault on
the hierarchy of art categories, p. 104. See also my essay, ‘Les Constructions cubistes
 References 195

dans Les Soirees de Paris — Apollinaire, Picasso et les cliches Kahnweiler’, Revue de
I’Art, no. 82 (1988), pp. 61-75.
40 From Futurist Manifestoes, ed. Umbro Apollonio (London, 1973), p.65.
41 For the best discussion of the casting of Unique Forms of Continuity in Space of 1913
see Ronald Alley, Catalogue of the Tate Gallery’s Collection of Modern Art other
than Works by British Artists (London, 1980), entry T. 1589 compiled with the help
of Judith Cousins, pp.60-1.
42 Anna C. Chave, in Constantin Brancusi: Shifting the Bases of Art (New Haven and
London, 1993), gathers all these statements to strengthen her contention that
Brancusi’s polish was perceived as an expression of modern technologies. See also
Jack Burnham, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New York, 1966).
43 Brancusi won his case when it was decided in his favour that Bird in Space was an
‘original production by a professional sculptor’ and thus qualified as a work of art.
A facsimile of the minutes of the US Customs Court trial of Constantin Brancusi vs.
the United States 1927-8 is available in the Museum of Modern Art Library.
Commentaries on this trial abound: Aline B. Saarinen, ‘The Strange Story of
Brancusi’, New York Times Magazine (23 October 1955); Edward Steichen,
‘Brancusi vs. United States’, Art in America, no. 1 (1962); Thierry de Duve, ‘Reponse
a cote de la question “Qu’est-ce que la sculpture moderne?” ’ in Quest-ce que la
sculpture moderne?, exhibition catalogue: Musee National d’Art Moderne, Centre
Georges Pompidou (Paris, 1986), pp.274—92; Thomas L. Hartshorne, ‘Modernism
on Trial: C. Brancusi v. United States (1928)’, Journal of American Studies, XX/i
(1986), pp. 93-104. The most recent account that provides the most extracts from the
court case and contemporary press reports is Chave, Constantin Brancusi: Shifting
the Bases of Art, pp. 198-223.
44 So central was this issue to the production of bronze sculpture that it is not
surprising that Epstein included his testimony at the Brancusi trial in his
autobiography, Let There Be Sculpture (New York, 1940), pp. 123—7.
45 Of Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space, Sidney Geist in a letter to the
author writes: ‘Unique Forms was cast in bronze, then filed down, then polished.
The ex-Malbin cast (in New York) shows modelling which was erased in the Tate
copy. This erasure tells us about a lot of things, but not about Boccioni (Letter
dated 5 September 1996).
46 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ in Meaning
and Context, Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully (Princeton, 1989),
p. 61.
This is why Athena T. Spear’s analysis is still so useful: Brancusi s Birds (New York,
1969), pp. 17-27.
48 Brancusi statements in the Brummer exhibition catalogue (New York, 1926). These
statements had appeared in French the previous year; Constantin Brancusi,
‘Reponses de Brancusi sur la taille directe, le poli et la simplicite dans Part.
Quelques-uns de ses aphorismes a Irene Codreane’, This Quarter, no. 1 (1925).
49 Brancusi, ibid.
50 Jacob Epstein, The Sculptor Speaks: Jacob Epstein to Arnold L. Haskell, A Series of
Conversations on Art (London, 1931), P-7%-
This conclusion is indebted to discussions with Michael Stone-Richards about the
divergent aims and ambitions of the Futurist artist.
52 Letter from CoAstantin Brancusi to John Quinn, 5 June 1918, in the John Quinn
Memorial Collection, New York Public Library.
53 Sidney Geist, Brancusi, A Study of the Sculpture (New York, 1967, 2nd edn 1983),

54 The^totalization must be yellow’ (‘II faut que la metallisation soit jaune’), he wired
196 References

Stefan Georgescu-Gorjan, the engineer, working on the site in the fall of 1937. See
Stefan Georgescu-Gorjan, ‘The Genesis of the Column without End’, Revue
Roumaine d’Histoire de l’Art, I/z (1964), p. 290.
55 In this sense, I read the correspondence and exchange of works with Quinn from an
entirely opposite perspective to that taken by Chave. See Chave, Brancusi, Shifting
the Bases of Art, p. 206. See also the important contributions to this question made
by Friedrich Teja Bach, Brancusi, Photo Reflexion (Paris, 1991) and Jacques
Leenhardt, ‘Au-dela de la matiere: Brancusi et la photographic’ in Sculpter-
Photographier, Photographie-Sculpture, eds Michel Frizot and Dominique Paini
(Paris, 1993), pp-33-9.
56 No. 27, captioned Brancusi au travail dans I’atelier, in Brancusi Photographe,
exhibition catalogue by Marielle Tabart and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine: Musee
National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pqrripidou (Paris, 1979). It survives with
dedications to Petre Comanerscu and Stefan Georgesco-Gorjan among others.
Margherita Andreotti reads this photograph in terms of a self-portrayal as ‘mythic
creator — a kind of modern Vulcan of the studio’ in her ‘Brancusi’s Golden Bird: A
New Species of Modern Sculpture’, The Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies
(i993)j PP-135-52- and 198-2.03.

9 Edward Allington: Venus a Go Go, To Go

1 Dan Graham, Rock my Religion: Writing and Art Projects 1965—1990, ed. Brian
Wallis (Cambridge, ma, and London, 1993), p. 293: ‘Around 1900, Freud’s theory of
the “unconscious”, the cinema, and Coney Island appeared almost simultaneously’.
In his Delirious New York (New York, 1978), the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas
discusses the development of Coney Island as an unconscious dreamland set amid
the waking, rational world of New York City.
2 The first museum to be built in Europe, commencing in 1769, was the Landgrave
Frederick in Cassel, known as the Fredericianium.
3 Hugh Honour, Neo-classicism (London, 1968), p. 80.
4 Ibid., p. 107.

5 Richard Wollheim, Art and its Objects (Harmondsworth, 1978), p. 12.

6 Iris Murdock, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London, 1993), p. 2.
7 Thomas McEvilly, ‘I Think Therefore I Art’, Art Forum (Summer 1985), p. 76.
8 Jean Chatelain, ‘An Original in Sculpture’ in Rodin Rediscovered, ed. Albert E.
Elsen: National Gallery of Art, Washington; New York Graphic Society, Boston
(1981), p. 275.
9 Ibid., p. 276.

10 Rosalind E. Krauss The Originality of the Avant-Garde and other Modernist Myths
(Cambridge, ma, and London, 1985), p. 276.
11 McEvilly, ‘I Think Therefore I Art’, p. 74.
12 Bernard Brunon, The Status of Sculpture: Sezanne, Lyon: Espace Lyonnais d’art
contemporain, Ville de Lyon (1990), p. 13.
13 Stephen Fenichell, Plastic - The Making of a Synthetic Century (New York, 1996),
p. 228.
14 Ibid.
15 Les Levine, New York Times.
16 Jack Burnham, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist
Art (New York, 1974), p. 74.
17 McEvilly ‘I Think Therefore I Art’, p. 76.
 Select Bibliography

This bibliography comprises selected works cited in this volume and additional references
highlighting the wide-ranging parameters of sculpture and its reproductions.

Allington, Ed, ‘Introduction’ in Reproduction in Sculpture: Dilution or Increase?,

exhibition catalogue: Centre for the Study of Sculpture, Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
(i994)> PP- i-5-
Andrews, Oliver, Living Materials: A Sculptor’s Handbook (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London, 1983).
Baas, Jacquelynn, ‘Reconsidering Walter Benjamin. “The Age of Mechanical Reproduc¬
tion” in Retrospect’ in The Documented Image: Visions in Art History, eds Gabriel P.
Weisberg and Laurinda S. Dixon (Syracuse, 1987), pp. 337-47-
Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Walter
Benjamin: Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London, 1970; revised edn 1992), pp.
211-44.
Berger, Ursel, ‘Zum Problem der “Originalbronzen”. Deutsche Bronzeplastiken 1m r9_
und 20. Jahrhundert’, Pantheon, III (1982), pp. 184-95.
Bober, Phyllis Pray and Rubinstein, Ruth, Renaissance Artists and Antique Sculpture: A
Handbook of Sources (London, t986).
Bode, Wilhelm [von], Die italienischen Bronzestatuetten der Renaissance, 3 vols (Berlin,
1907—12); trans. as The Italian Bronze Statuettes of the Renaissance, 3 vols (Berlin,
r9o8-T2); revised and ed. by James D. Draper, 1 vol. (New York, t98o).
Buchholz, Daniel and Magnani, Gregorio, International Index of Multiples From
Duchamp to the Present (Cologne, 1992).
Burnham, Jack, Beyond Modern Sculpture (New York and London, 1968).
_, Great Western Salt Works: Essays on the Meaning of Post-Formalist Art (New
York, 1974).
Chatelain, Jean, ‘An Original in Sculpture’ in Rodin Rediscovered, exhibition catalogue
ed. Albert E. Elsen: National Gallery of Art, Washinton, DC (i98r), pp. 275-82.
Crum, Robert, ‘Degas Bronzes?’, Art Journal, LIV/i (Spring 1995), pp. 93-8 (exhibition
review).
Damaged Goods: Desire and the Economy of the Object, exhibition catalogue eds Brian
Wallis and Marcia Landsman: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York

Dhaliwal, Ben, ‘Catalogue of the Exhibition’ in Reproduction in Sculpture: Dilution or

Increase?, exhibition catalogue: Centre for the Study of Sculpture, Henry Moore
Insititute, Leeds (1994)) PP- 6-16.
Edward Allington, exhibition catalogue by Annelie Pohlen: Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn,
and Cornerhouse, Manchester (1992).
198 Select Bibliography

Edward Allington: The Pictured Bronzes, exhibition catalogue by Shin Ichi Nakazawa
and James Roberts: Kohji Ogura Gallery, Nagoya (1991).
Elsen, Albert E. and others, ‘Standards for Sculptural Reproduction and Preventive
Measures to Combat Unethical Casting’, Art Journal, XXXIV/i (Fall 1974), pp. 44—50.
-, ‘On the Question of Originality: A Letter’, October, no. zo (Spring 1982), pp. 107—
09.
Fake? The Art of Deception, exhibition catalogue ed. Mark Jones with Paul Craddock
and Nicolas Barker: British Museum (London, 1990).
Fenichell, Stephen, Plastic — The Making of a Synthetic Century (New York, 1996).
Gauricus, Pomponius, De sculptura (Florence, 1504); ed. and trans. into French by Andre
Chastel and Robert Klein (Paris and Geneva, 1969).
Geist, Sidney, Brancusi: A Study of the Sculpture (NewvYork, 1967; revised and expaned
1983). s
German Expressionist Sculpture, exhibition catalogue by Stephanie Barron: Eos Angeles
County Museum of Art (1983); revised German edn as Skulptur des Expressionismus
(Munich, 1984).
Goldsten, Carl, Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers (Cambridge,
1996).
Haskell, Francis and Penny, Nicholas, Taste and the Antique: The Lure of Classical
Sculpture, 1500—1900 (New Haven and Fondon, 1981).
Hildebrand, Adolf von, Das Problem der Form in den bildenden Kunst (Strasbourg, 1893);
ed., introduced and trans. in Harry Francis Mallgrave and Eleftherios Ikonomou,
Empathy, Form, and Space: Problems in German Aesthetics, 1873—1893 (Santa Monica,
1994)-
Hochfield, Sylivia, ‘Problems in the Reproduction of Sculpture’, ARTnews, FXXIII/9
(November 1974), pp. 20-9; with ‘Letters’ in response: LXXIV/i (January 1975), p. 22,
and LXXIV/10 (December 1975), pp. 24-8.
Hulten, Pontus, Dumitresco, Natalia and Istrati, Alexandre, Brancusi (Paris 1986);
English trans. (New York, 1986).
Ivins Jr, William, Prints and Visual Communication (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1953;
revised edn 1969).
James, Philip, ed., Henry Moore on Sculpture (London and New York, 1966; New York,
1992).
Jenkins, Ian, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British
Museum 1800-1959 (London, 1992).
Jones, Mark, ed., Why Fakes Matter: Essays on Problems of Authenticity (London, 1992).
Krauss, Rosalind E., Passages in Modern Sculpture (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1977;
revised edn 1993).
--, ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition’, October, no. 18
(Fall 1981), pp. 47-66; reprinted in R. E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde
and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1985), pp. 151-70.
-, ‘This New Art: To Draw in Space’ (1981), in R. E. Krauss, The Originality of the
Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1985), pp. 119-29.
-, ‘Sincerely Yours’, October, no. 20 (Spring 1982), pp. 111-30; reprinted, with
‘Introductory Note’, in R. E. Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other
Modernist Myths (1985), pp. 171—94.
-, ‘Retaining the Original? The State of the Question’, in Retaining the Original:
Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions, ed. Kathleen Preciado. XX of Studies
in the History of Art (Washington, 1989), pp. 7-11.
Landau, David and Parshall, Peter W., The Renaissance Print 14/0-1550 (New Haven and
London, 1994).
Larsson, Lars Olof, Von alien Seiten gleich sch'on. Studien zum Begriff der
 Select Bibliography 199

Vielansichtigkeit in der europaischen Plastik von der Renaissance biz zum Klassizismus.
Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis (Stockholm, 1974).
Laurent, Monique, ‘Vie posthume d’un fonds d’atelier: les editions de bronzes du Musee
Rodin’ in Rencontres de l’Ecole du Louvre, La Sculpture du XlX'e siecle. Une Memoire
retrouvee: Les fonds de sculpture (Paris, 1986), pp. Z45-55.
Le Marchant, Michael, ‘Le Role du marchand: redecouvrir et diffuser’ in Rencontres de
l’Ecole du Louvre, La Sculpture du XlX'e siecle. Une Memoire retrouvee: Les fonds de
sculpture (Paris, 1986), pp. 255-61.
Marvin, Miranda, ‘Copying in Roman Sculpture: The Replica Series’ in Retaining the
Original: Multiple Originals, Copies, and Reproductions, ed. Kathleen Preciado. XX of
Studies in the History of Art (Washington, 1989), pp. 29-45.
Mattusch, Carol C., ‘Two Bronze Herms. Questions of Mass Production in Antiquity’,
Art Journal, LIV/2 (Summer 1995), pp. 53-9.
Metamorphoses in Nineteenth-Century Sculpture, exhibition catalogue ed. Jeanne
Wasserman: Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University (1979).
Montagu, Jennifer, Bronzes (London, 1963).
-, Alessandro Algardi (New Haven and London, 1985).
-, Roman Baroque Sculpture: The Industry of Art (New Haven and London, 1989).
-, Gold, Silver and Bronze: Metal Sculpture of the Roman Baroque (New Haven and
London, 1996).
Owens, Craig, ‘Alan McCollum: Repetition and Difference’, Art in America, LXXI/8
(September 1983), pp. 130-2.
Penny, Nicholas, The Materials of Sculpture (New Haven and London, 1993).
Radcliffe, Anthony, European Bronze Statuettes (London, 1966).
Ranfft, Erich, Adolf von Hildebrand’s ‘Problem der Form’ and his Front against Auguste
Rodin (Master’s thesis, Ann Arbor, 1992).
Renaissance Master Bronzes from the Collection of the Kunsthistorisches Museum
Vienna, exhibition catalogue by Manfred Leithe-Jasper: Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, DC (1986).
Ridgway, Brunilde S., Roman Copies of Greek Sculptures: The Problem of the Originals
(Ann Arbor, 1984).
-, ‘The State of Research on Ancient Art’, Art Bulletin, LXVIII/r (March 1986), pp. 7-
23.
-, ‘Defining the Issue: The Greek Period’ in Retaining the Original: Multiple
Originals, Copies, and Reproductions, ed. Kathleen Preciado. XX of Studies in the
History of Art (Washington, 1989), pp. 13-26.
Rodin Rediscovered, exhibition catalogue ed. Albert E. Elsen: National Gallery of Art,
Washington, DC (1981).
The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from North American
Collections, exhibition catalogue eds Peter Fusco and H. W. Janson: Los Angeles
County Musuem of Art (New York, 1980).
Salvioni, Daniela, ‘Die Uberschreitungen der Sherrie Levine/The Transgressions of
Sherrie Levine’, Parkett, no. 32 (June 1992), pp. 76-87.
Schulz, Paul Otto and Baatz, Ulrich, Bronze Giesserei Noack (Ravensburg, 1993)-
Sculpture en taille directe en France de 1900 a 1950, exhibition catalogue by Patrick D.
Elliott: Fondation de Coubertin, Saint-Remy-les-Chevreuse (1988).
Spanish Sculpture: A Catalogue of the Collection in the Victoria and Albert Museum,
museum catalogue by Marjorie Trusted (London, 1996).
Stone, Richard E., ‘Antico and the Development of Bronze Casting in Italy at the End of
the Quattrocento’, Metropolitan Museum Journal, XVI (1982), pp. 87-116.
Wagner, Anne M., ‘Learning to Sculpt in the Nineteenth Century. An Introduction’ in
The Romantics to Rodin: French Nineteenth-Century Sculpture from North American
200 Select Bibliography

Collections, exhibition catalogue eds Peter Fusco and H. W. Janson (New York, 1980),
pp. 9-20.
-, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux: Sculptor of the Second Empire (New Haven and London,
1986).
Wittkower, Rudolf, Sculpture, Processes and Principles (Harmondsworth 1977; revised
edn 1986).
Wollheim, Richard, Art and its Objects (Cambridge, 1968; 2nd edn with six
supplementary essays, 1980 and 1996).
 Index

Abundance, ivory figure of, Vienna 68 Barcelona

Academie Royale de Peinture et de Museo Frederic Mares 48
Sculpture, Paris 64, 80, 81 Barlach, Ernst 115, 122-3, 12-b, 128, 130
conferences 80 The Dead Day 122—3
Achard, Edouard 109 God the Father Hovering 126
Allington, Edward Troubled Woman 123
Roman from the Greek in America Bartman, Elizabeth 10
i53 Barye, Antoine 103
Victory Boxed 167 Baselitz, Georg 114
anatomy 13-14, 79> 94> 98-9 baths, sculpture appropriate to 27
Anti, Carlo 18 Batoni, Pompeo 84
‘Antinous’, the 83 ‘paper museum’ 84
Apollinaire, Guillaume 143 Bauhaus 125
Apollo Belvedere 60, 80, 81, 82, 84, 93 Begas, Reinhold 120
applied arts 4, 100-12 Bell, Charles 98
Arcos, Luis Antonio de los 52 Belling, Rudolf, 125, 129, 130
Aretino, Pietro 32 Triad 124, 125, 129, 130
Armenini, Giovanni Battista 80 Belvedere Torso 80, 83, 92, 93
Art Institute of Chicago 136 Benjamin, Walter, 1, 29-30, 40-5
Art nouveau 100, 105, 108 ‘The Work of Art in the Age of
ARTnews 132 Mechanical Reproduction’ 1, 29,
Arts and Crafts Movement 108 i34> 153
Audran, Gerard Berger, Ernst 18
Les proportions du corps humain Berlin 118
measurees sur les plus belles figures Art Exhibition (1920) 125
de I’antiquite 94 Arts and Crafts School 127
Augustus, Emperor, portraits of 15 Cement and Concrete exhibition (1910)
Augustus the Strong of Saxony 67 115

aura 29, 30, 41-5, i36> I5I National Gallery 129

Austin, J. L. 145
Baffler, Baptiste 106
Baffler, Jean 4, 100-12
ornamental tableware 100, 101
‘Pour la tradition celtique’ (monumental
fireplace) 106, J07, 108
table settings 103-9, 104, in
Bahlsen, Hermann 118
Baiae plaster fragments 11
Royal Prussian Art Collections 116
Working Council for Art 130
Bermudez, Cean 47
Berry (France) 102, 104, 109, in
peasantry of 106
Bewick, William 98
Biermann, Georg 127
Bigio, Nanni di Baccio (Giovanni di Lepo)
33
Pieta after Michelangelo 33-6, 37
202 Index

biscuit ware 4 CAA see College Art Association

Blake, William 95-6 cabinet of curiosities 64, 74
Jehovah with Satan and Adam 96 Callypigian Venus, the 89
Naked Youth seen from the Side 95, 96 camera obscura 84
Blaue Reiter, der 115 Camfield, William 163
Boardman, John 10, 21 ‘Cannibal’, the 89
Boccioni, Umberto 3, 132, 138, 146, 147 Cano, Alonso 55, 58, 59
‘Technical Manifesto of Futurist Canova, Antonio 155
Sculpture’ 143 Italian Venus 63
Unique Forms of Continuity in Space Capodimonte porcelain factory 67
-,
143 5 i44 Carlisle, Anthony 98
Bol, Peter 18, 25 Carlisle, Earl of 95
Bonk, Eke 163 Cafrpeaux, Jean Baptiste 103
Borghese Nymph with a Shell 91 Carracci, the 82
Borghese Gladiator, the 20, 83, 84, 87, 88, Carrara 8
93, 99 Carre, Louis (Galerie Louis Carre) 136—7
Borner, Paul 126 Cassirer, Paul 128, 129
Bossuit, Francis van 5, 64, 68—9, 72-4, 78 Castle Howard 95
figure engraved after 74 Castro, Gutierre de 48
Judith with the Head of Holofernes casts 10, 21, 37, 38, 45, 66, 68, 71-2, 80, 81,
(Edinburgh) 69, 70, 74 86, 87, 89, 91, 93, 94, 99, 115, 152—3,
Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 154, 156, 157, 159, 161, 166-7
copies of 69-72, 70, 73, 74, 75 Cavalieri, Giovanni Battista de’ 40
Bottger, Johann Friedrich 67 Antiquae Statuae Urbis Romae 81
Bottger stoneware 71, 126 Chambers, William 91
Horseman Candlestick after Gerhard Chardin, Jean Baptiste Simeon 93
Marcks 124, 126 Chatelain, Jean 133, 135, 160, 161
Judith with the Head of Holofernes after Cheere, John 83
Bossuit 70, 71 Cheron, Louis 81-2, 83
Boucher, Louis 106 Christ as the Man of Sorrows 55
Bourges 105, no Christofle 100
Palais Jacques-Coeur 106 Cipriani, Giovanni Battista 86
Bouts, Albert 55 Clito 83
Bouts, Dieric 55 College Art Association (CAA) 131, 132
Brancusi, Constantin 132, 138, 140, 141, ‘A Statement on Standards for Sculptural
144, 146, 147-51 Reproduction and Preventive
Bird in Space 144, 143 measures to Combat Unethical
Cock 132 Casting in Bronze’ 131, 132
Column 149 Cologne 114, 125
A Muse 148, 149 Comte, Auguste 44
The Muse (posthumous cast) 149, 150 conceptual art 162
Sorceress 148 consumer culture 67
Torso of a Young Man 148, 149 Copenhagen
Briffault, Frances no Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek 7-8, 9
bronze foundries 103 Copley, John Singleton
Barbedienne 103 Watson and the Shark 20, 21
Christofle 103 Courbet, Gustave 102
Morris-Singer 139 Cubism 136
Siot-Decauville 100, 103, in—12 Cupper, Erich 117-18
Briicke, Die 113, 114, 115, 119, 122, 127
Brunon, Bernard 163 Dallas, Trammel Crow Centre 134—5
Bruton Gallery 135 Dante Alghieri 35
 Index 203

Darmstadt Fechheimer, Hedwig 116

Matildenhohe workshops 116, 117 Fernandez, Gregorio 57
Davies, Arthur B. 149 St Francis 57—8, 59, 60
Degas, Edgar Hilaire Germain 3 Fitzwilliam Coin Cabinet 62, 77
Della Robbia family 117 Flaxman, John 98—9
Delos 20 ‘Motion; Equilibrium in the Human
Desmond, Olga 120 Body’ 99
Dethare, Vincent 105 Florence 44-5
Deutsche Werkbund 115, 116, 118, 130 Boboli Gardens 17, 18, 45
Diderot, Denis 155 Medici Chapel 32, 39
Dieppe 65 Palazzo Pitti 64
Diadoumenos 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, Palazzo Vecchio 45
2-4 Piazza Michelangelo 45
Diadumenus, Tiberius Octavius, 13, 14, 16 Sto Spirito 33
direct carving 1x3, 115, 140, 146 Florentine Academy in Rome 68-9
Diskophoros 7, 8,12,13-14,15,16—17,18— Florentine diarist 35, 36, 38
19, 22, 24, 25, 26 Ford, Richard 46
Dobberman, Jacob 65, 68 Francis of Assisi 46, 47, 58, 60
Dobson, Frank 147 resurrected corpse of 57—60
Doccia factory 63 Francois I (of France) 38, 45
Dolton, Richard 84 Free Academy (London) 81
donne famosi 69 Fremiet, Emmanuel 103
Doryphoros 12, 13—14, 15, 16, 17, 22, 23, Fritsch, Katerina 163-4
24, 25 Fruhlicht 123
Dresden 115, 118 Fry, Roger 140
Dublin Academy 93 Fiirstenburg porcelain factory 66
Duchamp, Marcel 4, 136, 137, 162 Fiirtwangler, Adolf 10
Bicycle Wheel readymade 4, 162—3 Futurism 147
replicas of 162—3
Bottle Rack readymade 4 Galerie Louis Carre 136
Snow Shovel readymade 4 Galle, Emile 100
Urinal readymade 4 Galleria Schwartz (Milan) 163
Duchamp-Villon, Raymond 132, 136 Garbe, Herbert 129
The Horse {Le Grand Cbeval) 136-7, Garcia, Jeronimo Francisco 55
i37 Garcia, Miguel Jeronimo 55
Duke of Richmond’s Sculpture Gallery gardens, sculpture appropriate to 27
86-7 Gauguin, Paul 159
Dusquenoy, Francois 76 Geist, Sidney 132, 136, 149
German Expressionist sculpture 113-30
Egremont, Earl of 95
German Neo-Expressionism 114
Egypt 116
German Oriental Society 116
Elgin, Lord 96 Gesamtkunstwerk 1x4, 118, 119, 122, 123,
‘Elgin Marbles’ see Parthenon sculptures
125
Eliot, T. S. 32 Giacometti, Alberto 137
Elliott, Patrick 140 Giambologna (Jean Boulogne) 61, 62, 63,
Elsen, Albert 3, 131, 132, 135
64
Epstein, Jacob 144, 147, 148 Architecture 62
excavation history 27 s
Mercury 61
Exposition Universelle 1900, 100
Giambologna, after
Expressionism 113 Venus 62-3, 62, 77
Farnese Hercules 80, 81, 83, 84, 93 Gibbon, Edward 2
‘Fates’, the 98 Gibbons, Grinling 76
204 Index

‘Heriodas with the Head of the Baptist’ Hill, Dorothy Kent 22

Hindemith, Paul 125
76
Gies, Ludwig 116 Hitzberger, Otto 127
glass paste 77 Hoare, Henry 84
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 98 Hochfield, Sylvia 133, 136
Goetz, Karl 116 Hoetger, Bernhard 116-18, 125
Gogh, Vincent van 159 Hoetger Museum 117-18
Golem, the 127, 130 Light and Shadow series 117
Gonzales, Julio 3, 131, 132, 138, 141-2 Lions’ Gate (with Albin Muller) 116, 117
Harlequin 142 Hogarth, William 79, 82, 83, 85, 91
Gool, Jan Van 78 Analysis of Beauty 83
Graat, Barent 73, 78 Holbein,, Hans 76
Grand Tour 155 Honour, Hugh 155
Greenberg, Clement 140, 143 Houbraken, Arnold 78
Gropius, Walter 125 Hunter, William 94-5
Guerin, Nicolas 64 Husserl, Edmund 157
gymnasia, sculpture appropriate to 23-4, Hussey, Giles 84
2-7
Idealplastik 9 see also Sculpture, Roman
Hadrian, Emperor 97 ideal
Hallett, Christopher 26-7 ‘ldolino’, the 10, 11
Hamilton, Richard 163 Tllissus’, the 98
Hanover imitation 33, 35-6, 38
TET city 118 Immendorf, Jorg 114
Hard, Nina 122 intention 145—6
Harth, Philipp 127 Ivins, William 1, 42
Haskell, Arnold 147 Prints and Visual Communications 1
Haskell, Francis and Nicholas Penny
Taste and the Antique 6i
Jaillot, Pierre Simon 64
Haydon, Benjamin Robert 79, 96-8
Janis, Sidney 163
Copy of South Metope XXV// from the
Jehovah’s Witnesses 153
Parthenon 97
Joigny, Burgundy 48
school of 97
Jones, Inigo 76
Heckel, Erich 118-22
Juni, Isaac de 50
The Black Cloth 119—20
Juni, Juan de 47—8, 50-1, 60
Convalescence of a Woman 120, 120—1
Pietd (Leon) 47, 50-1
Praying Man 120
Pietd (London) 47-8, 48, 50-1
Heermann, Paul 69-70
Pieta (Salamanca) 48, 49, 50—1
Judith with the Head of Holofernes after
Pietd (Valladolid, Cathedral Museum)
Bossuit 70, 71, 72
Henne, Joachim 65, 68 47. 5°-i
Pietd (Valladolid, National Museum of
Henning, Paul Rudolf 130
Sculpture) 51—2
Hepworth, Barbara 139
Herakles see Hercules Pietd (Zaragoza) 47, 50-1
Hercules 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 24, 26,
80, 81, 83, 84, 85, 93 Karnak 116
Hermanos Garcia, the 55 Kauffman, Angelica 89
Hermes 14,15,16, 17,18,19, 21, 23, 24, 26 Kent, William 76
Hessen, Karl von 65 Kern, Leonhard 64, 68
Hildebrand, Adolf von 128 Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig 113—14, 115-16,
The Problem of Form in the Fine Arts n8—20, 121—2
128 Female Dancer 121
 Index 205

Nude Girl 12,2 Victoria and Albert Museum

Standing Woman 121 St Francis 59
Woman in the Wash Tub 119 Lorenzetto (Lorenzo di Giovanni di
Kleinplastik see also sculpture, small scale Lodovico) 36, 37
4, 64, 78 Los Angeles County Museum of Art 113
Klinger, Max 120 German Expressionist Sculpture
Kneller, Godfrey 65 exhibition 113-14
Academy of 65, 81 Louis IX (of France) 102
Knight, Richard Payne 97 Lysippos 18, 21
Kolbe, Georg 129
Koortbojian, Michael 23 McEvilly, Thomas
Krauss, Rosalind 3, 77, 131, 132, 133, 136, ‘I Think Therefore I Art’ 157, 162, 166
141-3 Magritte, Rene 162
‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Mana, Pedro de 55
Post-Modernist Repetition’ 131 Mander, Carel van 78
‘Sculpture in the Expanded Field’ 160 Mannheim Kunsthalle 115, 128
Kreigenbom, Detlev 13, 14, 16, 17, 18 Marat, Jean-Paul 102
Kuh, Katherine 137 Marc, Franz 115
Kuhn, Alfred 127, 128, 130 Marcks, Gerhard 126
Kunstkammer 64 Horseman Candlestick 124, 126
Martin, Elias 89
Lagraulas, cardinal 41, 43 The Cast Room at the Royal Academy
Lairesse, Gerard de 73 89-91, 90
Lammert, Will 125 Martinez, Juana 50
Landseer brothers 98 Matare, Ewald 129
Langer, Richard 126 Mauclair, Camille 112
Laocoon 80, 83, 84, 95 Medici, Ferdinando de’ 64
Laurent, Monique 133 Medici Venus 80, 83, 93, 154-5, 156, 159,
Lavier, Bertrand 158-9 161—2, 166-7
Belvedere 159 comparison with the living model
Le Brun, Charles 64 93-4
Le Marchand, David 65, 66, 77 Meissen porcelain factory 67, 126
Le Marchant, Michael 135 Meleager, the 89
Le Play, Frederic no Mena, Pedro de 47, 55-6, 57, 60
Leftwich, Gregory 13-14 St Francis (Malaga) 59
Lehmbruck, Wilhelm 115, 130 St Francis (Toledo) 58, 59, 60
Praying Woman 126 Mengs, Anton Raffael 155
Leibendgut, Annalis 23 Mercury 16, 19-2.0, 24, 61, 89
Lely, Sir Peter 79, 81 Metraux, Guy 14
Leocadio, Paolo da San 55 Michelangelo Buonarroti 30, 32, 35, 36, 37,
Leoni, Antonio 64 38, 39, 44, 45, 63
Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 2 Atlas Slave 30-1, 31, 42
Levine, Les 164—5 David 45
Disposables 164, 164—5 Leah 37
Ligue de la patrie franfaise 110-11 Pieta 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40, 41, 43, 45
Maison commune m Rachel 37
limited edition, concept of 160 Risen Christ 32—3, 38
St Damien, clay model for 32
Linde, Ulf 163
Locke, John 87-8 Times of Day 45
Lohenstein, Daniel Caspar von 64 Slaves 45
Tomb of Julius II 37, 40
London
New Somerset House 91 Milan Triennial Exhibition 137
zo 6 Index

Millet, Jean-Franfois 102 Oberammergau 129

Minimalism 162 October 131
Minnis, A. J. 35 Oliver, Isaac 76
Modernism 3-4, 143-5 Orleans, Paul no
Montanes, Juan Martines 55 Ortiz, Fernando
Montelupo, Raffaelo da St Francis 59
St Cosmas 32
Montorsoli, Giovanni Angiolo 81 palaestra, sculpture appropriate to 24
St Damien 32 Palladio (Andrea Pietro della Gondola)
Montrouge catacombs 108 76
Moore, Henry 140, 146 Palomino, Antonio 50
Mora, Jose de 56 Parian ware 4
Christ 56 PAris 102, 105, no, in
Virgen de la Soledad (Granada) 57 Parry, William 87
Virgin (Salamanca) 56 copy of the Borghese Warrior 8y
The Virgin of Sorrows (London) 56 Parthenon sculptures (‘Elgin Marbles’) 79,
Morris, William 108, 109 96-8
Moser, George Michael 89 patina 138-9, 146
Moser, Mary 89 patini'eres 138, 148
moulds 21, 47, 54, 60, 65, 71—2, 152—3, 161, Payne Knight, Richard see Knight, Richard
167 Payne
Muller, Albin 116; see also Hoetger, Pechstein, Max 115
Bernhard Peirce, Charles S. 43
multiples 9, 30, 32—3, 50—2, 65, 67, 68, 71, Penny, Nicholas 61
72, 73, 77, 131, 148-9, 163-5 Permoser, Balthasar 64, 68, 71
Murdoch, Iris 156—7, 162, 163 Seasons, the 66
Musee Galliera 106 Permoser, Balthasar, after
Musee Rodin 133, 135—6 Summer 66
Perseus 17, 23
Neo-classicism 155-6 Petrarch (Francesco Petrarca) 35
Neo-Expressionism 114 photography 1-2, 29, 40-3, 147, 149-50,
neomantic object 157, 163 161
‘nerviosidad’ 48 Picabia, Francis 162
Nevers 102, 105, no Picasso, Pablo 138, 141
New Wild Ones 114 Absinthe Glass 143
New York 152 Bull’s Head 142
Brooklyn Bridge 152 Pieta (Juan de Juni) 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52,
Coney Island 154 60
East River 152 Pieta (Michaelangelo) 3, 34, 35, 36, 38, 40,
Metropolitan Museum of Art 10, 154, 4G 43> 45
167 Pieta (copy after Michelangelo) 33—6, 37,
Museum of Modern Art 163 38-9)39
New Zealand 112 Pieta (engraving by Salamanca) 39, 40
Nicholas V (Pope) 57 plaster 64
Nike of Samothrace 166 platres de travail 141
and replicas 166-7 Pliny the Elder 13, 14, 84, 138
‘Nile’, the 80 Polykleitos 7, 9, 13—21
Noguchi 148 presumed copies after and works in the
Noland, Kenneth 165 manner of
Nollekins, Joseph 93-4 Diadoumenos (Athens) 12
Seated Venus 95 Diadoumenos series, 13-16, 22, 23, 24
Northcote, James 93, 99 Dionysos 17
 Index 207

Diskophoros (Berlin) 16 of Greek by ‘Roman’ sculptors 2-3, 7—

Diskophoros (Copenhagen) 7, 8, 26 28, 159
Diskophoros (Wellesley) 12, 13, 16 of lithography in sculpture 122-3
Diskophoros series 13, 14—16, 17, 18, 22, of sculpture
24, 25, 26 in cameos 80
Doryphoros (Minneapolis) iz in drawings 39, 80-4, 86—7, 89-94,
Doryphoros series 13—15, 2.2—3, 25 96-8
Herakles 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 26 in paintings 118-22
Hermes 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 21, 26 in photographs 2, 42-3, 147, 161
Perseus 17 in porcelain 4, 65—8, 12—16
Theseus 18 posthumously 3, 131—7, 139—40, 141—
pointing machines 8, 115, 128, 159 5> 149
Pool, Matthys 68, 73 in prints 40, 45, 72-4, 80, 81, 83
Beelsnijders Kunstcabinet (Art’s in reduced replicas 24, 32—3, 38—9, 61,
Cabinet) 68, 69, 72-4, 74, 78 62-3, 84, 87
portrait sculpture 9, 15, 23 terminology of 30
Poulsen, Frederik 17 Reynolds, Sir Joshua 87, 88—9, 94, 155
Pound, Ezra Discourses 88—9
Gaudier-Brzeska: A Memoir 140 Riace Bronzes 3
Pozzo 76 Ribadeneira, Pedro de 57
Praxiteles 17, 21 Flos Sanctorum o Libro de las Vidas de
Prenner, Anton von 64 los Santos 57
Primaticcio, Francesco 38 Riccio, Luigi del 33
Prometheus 149 Ridgeway, Brunilde 22
printmaking 1; see also reproduction of Ridolfi, Carlo 39
sculpture in prints Riha, Sidda 120—1
Risueno, Jose 55, 56
quarry sites 27 Robinson, John Charles 50, 59
Quinn, John 147, 148, 149 Rodin, Auguste 3, 30, 32, 128, 131, 132-3,
134-5, 136, 140, 146, 148, 161
Rabbi Loew 127 Age of Bronze 133
Ralph, Benjamin 86 Jean de Fiennes nu 134, 134—5
Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio) 82 Mighty Hand 133
Rauchmiller, Matthias La pensee 30-1
tankard with a Rape of the Sabines Walking Man (L’Homme qui marche)
64 133
Rauschner, C.B. Roeder, Emy 129
Judith with the Head of Holofernes after Roldan, Luisa 47, 52—4, 60
Bossuit 70, 72 Mystical Marriage of St Catherine 52-4,
Ray, Man 162 53
Regina, Alberta 157-8 Rest on the Flight to Egypt (New York)
Reif, Rita 165 54
Reni, Guido 69 Rest on the Flight to Egypt (San
replica series 9 Sebastian) 54
reproduction Virgin and Child Appearing to St Diego
of antique sculpture 1-2, 61, 76, 77, 79- of Alcala 52, 53
99, 154-6, 161, 166-7 Roldan, Pedro 52
and authorship 66, 72, 74, 76, 77 Rome
and the canon 35-6, 38, 40, 63, 78 French Academy 81-2
of devotional sculpture 5, 19-20, 24-6, San Andrea della Valle 37

37—8, 46—60 San Petronilla 40

Rossi, Gregorio de’ 37
ethics of 3, 131—2, 140
208 Index

Rossi, John C.F. 95 restoration of 27—8

Royal Academy of Arts 79, 88, 91, 94, 95, Roman historical 9
Roman ideal 9-10, 11, 27
96, 97
Plaister Academy 89, 91, 93 plaster 11, 21, 30, 80, 115, 123, 128, 136
Royal Academy Schools 89, 91, 93-5, 97 and politics 4—5, 20
Royal Society of Arts 86—7 scrap-metal 141—3
Rubens, Peter Paul 76 signatures on 8,13, 21, 27, 33, 35, 46, 59,
Rysbrack, Michael 76, 84 69-71, 72
Hercules 84-5 small-scale 20, 24-6, 32, 38-9, 61-78
Study for Stourhead Hercules 85 terracotta 20, 32, 47, 52, 60, 64, 68, 73,
115

Saint Cloud porcelain factory 67 vyax 21, 32, 66, 69, 72, 74, 115, 159
St Martin’s Lane Academy 81; second Vwood 55-60, 113-14, 114, 118-22, 127-
academy 83, 85 8, 129-30, 143, 148
Salamanca (Cathedral) 48 serial production 21—2, 103
Salamanca, Antonio 39, 40 Shee, Martin Archer 96
Salas, Xavier de 55 Shipley, William 86
Salmon, Andre drawing school 86
La jeune sculpture franpaise 143 Simon, Erika 20
Sansovino, Jacopo Skinner, Quentin 145
Bacccbus 89 Smith, John 65
Scheel, Margarete 125 Smith, John Thomas 95
Schiefler, Gustav 113 Societe Nationale des Beaux-Arts 103
Schmidt-Rottluff, Karl 123-5 Society of Artists 91
Pillars of Suffering and Prayer 123-5 Socrates 83
Schoenberg, Arnold 125 Soldani, Massimiliano 62, 63
Schubert, Carl Gottlieb Solkin, David 87-8, 91
Summer 66 Space Invaders (exhibition) 158
Schiitz, Johann 35 Stampart, Franz von, and Anton von
sculpture Prenner
antique 1-2, 7-28, 38, 45, 61, 76 Podromus 64, 68
and architecture 23—4, 2.7, 116-18, 125 Steger, Milly 115
boxwood 64, 65, 73 Stockholm (Moderna Museet) 163
bronze 7, 9, 13, 19, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30, 32, Stokes, Adrian 140
37, 38, 61-2, 80, 115—16, 130, 131— Stourhead 84
51, i54, 159 Stravinsky, Igor 125
cast stone 116, 130 Strawberry Hill 76
cement 115, 130, 143 Strozzi Chapel (Rome) 37
clay 30, 32, 39, 115, 129-30 Strozzi, Gian Battista 33—5, 36
Cubist 136 studio practice, see workshop practice
German Expressionist 3, 113—30 Sturm, Der 119
and Greek medicine 13-14 ‘style munichoise’ see Art nouveau
ivory 61, 64-78 Surrealism 141-2, 143
and the living model 83, 93—9, 118—22,
127-30 taille directe see direct carving
marble 7, 8, 10, 22, 23, 26, 27, 37, 62, 64, Talos Painter, the 18
115, 130, 148, 154, 161 Tassie, James 77
materials of 47, 54, 63-8, 71-2, 80, 115, Taut, Bruno 123
116, 125, 142, 80, 127-30, 138, 143, House of Heaven 123
154, 161, 164 temples, sculpture appropriate to 27
and religion 5, 19-20, 24—6, 37—8, 41, TET hieroglyph 118
43~4> 45 > 46-60, 126-7 ‘Theseus’, the 97, 98
 Index 209

Thornhill, Sir James 81 Walpole, Horace 74

Tintoretto (Jacopo Robusti) 39, 45 Anecdotes of Painting in England 76
Tirgu Jiu (Romania) 149 Walpole Cabinet 74—7, 75
Toller, Ernst Washington National Gallery of Art
The Transfiguration 127 Rodin Rediscovered exhibition 131
Tonnemans, Jerome 73 Wedgwood, Josiah 4, 66, 77
Torso Belvedere 80, 83, 92, 93 Werkbund, see Deutsches Werkbund
tourism 11, 44—5 West, Benjamin 94, 98
‘truth to materials’ 3, 140 ‘Academical study’ of Eve 94
Turner, J.M.W. 93, 94 Westheim, Paul 128
Drawing of the Belvedere Torso 91-3, 92 Wickhoff, Franz 10, 26
Wilkie, David 98
Ulteudt, P. O. 163 Wilton, Joseph 86
United States Customs 144 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 2, 9
History of Ancient Art among the
Valladolid 50 Greeks 2
Cathedral 50 Wollheim, Richard 156, 162, 163
Medina de Rioseco (Convent of Poor workshop practice 8, 21—2, 31—2, 26, 42,
Clares) 57 46, 54, 60, no 11, 146, 159-62,
St Francis 59 161—2
St Martin 50 Worpswede 125
Vari de’ Porcari, Metello 33, 45 ‘Wrestlers’, the 99
Vasari, Giorgio 33, 36, 47 Wright, Joseph 87, 91
Venus de’ Medici see Medici Venus Academy by Lamplight 91
Verskovis 76 Three Persons Viewing the Gladiator by
Vertue, George 82 Candlelight 87, 88
Villon, Jacques 136 Wunderkammer 64, 68, 73, 77
Virgen de la Soledad 56
Virgen Dolorosa 55
Virgin of Sorrows 46, 47, 55-7 Zappa, Frank 165
Voltaire (Francois-Marie Arouet) 2 Zeuxis 84
Volterra, Daniele da (Daniele Ricciarelli) Zoffoli, Giovanni 62
Zurbaran, Francisco de 58
39
’

\
•s

'
4
 Critical
Views

Sculpture and its Reproductions

edited, by Anthony Hughes and Erich Ranfft

with essays by Miranda Marvin, Anthony Hughes, Marjorie

Trusted, Malcolm Baker, Martin Postle, Neil McWilliam, Erich
Ranfft, Alexandra Parigoris arid Edward Allington

There is much more to sculpture than the art of the single

masterpiece, for reproduction has always been at the heart of
sculptural practice. The theoretical and practical consequences
of reproduction are given fresh impetus in this book, reminding
us not only that variants of an original work have always played
as important a role as have exact copies, but that in some cases
there is no ‘original’ as such to be identified.

Copies and variants can be carved in marble or cast in clay or

metals, they have been placed on plinths and applied to ceramics,
and their producers still range from skilled restorers of antique
masterpieces to craftsmen and manufacturers harnessing the
latest commercial technology.

Just as the restoration and reproduction in the Renaissance and

after of classical marbles enabled connoisseurs gradually to
distinguish Roman copies from (often lost) Greek originals, so
the attention given in these essays to topics which range from
Michelangelo to Brancusi will enable the reader better to
appreciate the implications of sculpture and its reproductions.

Anthony Hughes is a lecturer in the History of Art at the

University of Leeds and Erich Ranfft is former Henry Moore
Scholar at the University of Leeds.

With 5 6 illustrations

Cover illustration: Edward Allington ‘Myron’s Discobulos

Diminished’, 1987. Private Collection

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