This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .
On the early modern Italian peninsula, familial and social relationships were not severed by relocation from one city to another. That is why there were many lasting ties in the community of Florentine marble-workers in Naples in the late sixteenth century. Michelangelo Naccherino, Pietro Bernini and Giovanni Antonio Dosio, but also Iacopo Lazzari, Dionisio Nencioni and Clemente Ciottoli - sculptors and marmorari - formed bonds not only through working together and sharing commissions but also by choosing their fellows to act as best men at their weddings and living in the same neighbourhood. Such a community of marble-workers has not yet been the object of a thorough or comprehensive study, aimed at uncovering the web of familial ties underpinning groups of artists.Neapolitan archives store not only payment records that reveal more than just the artwork paid for, but also exceptional documents known as processetti matrimoniali, drafted before a marriage and aimed at collecting testimonies about the groom from his 'friends'. Such documents provide unexpected insights into how workshops functioned, how the marble-workers married relatives of their co-workers, and how endogamy, well known to have existed among the Florentine merchant classes abroad, also characterized a lower social class, that of the artisti.
The Virgin with the Laughing Child (1460-75), one of the Victoria and Albert Museum's most celebrated sculptures, was the subject of an interdisciplinary research project in 2022 prompted by longstanding questions surrounding its origins and making. Collaborative research was undertaken by a team composed of curators, conservators and scientists at the V&A and at the Centre de Recherche et de Restauration des Mus & eacute;es de France (C2RMF) and Mus & eacute;e du Louvre. The results presented here bring together new technical analysis and art-historical investigation to illuminate the processes employed in the creation of the sculpture, its life as an object, and its relationship to other Renaissance terracotta sculptures. This article first reviews what little is known of the sculpture's provenance prior to its arrival in the V&A in 1858 and reconsiders the question of its attribution, while also exploring the object's function and iconography.Material analysis of the clay composition was carried out using petrography, X-ray diffraction and particle-induced X-ray emission. Optical analysis, Raman spectroscopy and X-ray computed tomography (CT) acquisition and data visualization enabled greater understanding of its construction. These methods revealed new and unexpected information regarding the composition of the clay, in particular that it was a mixture of two distinct sources. Through material comparison with other Renaissance terracottas, including data from over sixty studies carried out by the C2RMF, and exploration of contemporary workshop practice, we concluded that artists were regularly choosing to use mixtures of different clays for their sculptures, suggesting greater technical knowledge than has previously been assumed. CT data visualization also sheds light on the original construction methods and later repairs.
Fred (ne Fritz) Kormis's Memorial to Prisoners of War and Concentration Camp Victims is a peculiar, neglected sculpture group. Encaged in a park in north-west London, the sculpture group emerged from Kormis's own experience of internment as a German prisoner in the First World War. This article suggest that this group constitutes a Holocaust memorial and that, thanks to the fact that it was constructed in 1969, it is Britain's first. This article presses on the tension between this memorial and its environment in London: a tension that manifests itself in the awkwardness of the memorial's relationship to Britain's history of Holocaust memorials, eruptions of antisemitic violence against the memorial, and historical neglect of the memorial by the authorities that might have been charged with its upkeep.This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
This article discusses colonialism and the reuse of visuality that supports it through a comparison of nineteenth-century neoclassical sculptures and contemporary photographs of women sitting on rubble. Jerusalem in her Desolation by William Wetmore Story (1873) and Deborah by Giovanni Battista Lombardi (1873) are discussed in relation to contemporary news photographs of women in Gaza. Commissioned for the 1876 inauguration of the Frank Furness building for the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the sculptures were celebrated as the height of artistic achievement in the groundbreaking new ‘Temple of Art’. For attendees, these sculptures symbolized the imagined destiny of the United States; an ascending power rising from the ruins of ancient civilizations at the beginning of an American Empire. But tastes change, and Jerusalem and Deborah were not destined to live in the Temple forever; one was destroyed, and one was banished for thirty years before returning. The lives of these sculptures are connected to the enduring and recurring contemporary images of displaced women seated amid the ruins of their homes destroyed by war. Across continents and time – seen and unseen, banished and recalled, destroyed and rebuilt – they haunt coloniality.
Instances of modern, large-scale looting and smuggling of antiquities in West Asia are usually treated as ordinary chapters in millennia-long object biographies, or as extraordinary acts carried out by impoverished local populations. Yet the establishment of systems of large-scale looting and smuggling is a specific historical development that can be traced back to nineteenth-century colonialism and the onset of European excavations in the region. This is when the age-old habits of reusing and repurposing ancient objects were drastically transformed into transactional practices for monetary gain. Moreover, these latter practices were often initiated, committed, encouraged and sustained not by impoverished local populations but by the ostensibly most upstanding of citizens: diplomats, military officers, engineers, archaeologists, curators, museum directors, collectors, representatives of auction houses, university presidents and professors. Once we begin to regard looting and smuggling not as a side note but an integral part of our own disciplinary history, we will notice that our experience and understanding of ancient West Asian art, as scholars, students and members of the public, has fundamentally been shaped by these troubled histories. By integrating local sources into an analysis of three well-known yet surprisingly understudied cases featuring Luigi Palma di Cesnola, Wallis Budge and Edgar James Banks, this article argues for a new history of ancient West Asian archaeology - a history that does not solely enumerate celebrated excavation campaigns but critically engages with the historical intertwinement of the discipline with large-scale looting and smuggling of antiquities.
With a focus on translations and reproductions, this article explores the visual reception and aesthetic experiences of William Kent’s and Peter Scheemakers’ 1740 monument to William Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey. Part of a wider cycle of reproductions, these were essential for establishing the fame and reputation of the abbey and the sculpture displayed there, though this has been little recognized in previous scholarship. These reproductions ranged widely, and this article encompasses large-scale reproductions adorning buildings across England, as well as a range of smaller-scale plaster and ceramic figurines, prints and cameo jewellery. By uniting varied media and modes of reproduction across forms traditionally associated with high and low culture, this article gives a fuller account of the impact of the abbey monument on wider visual culture than has previously been offered, and gives new significance to the design of the original monument as being conceived for engagement and future reproductions.
How do we begin to think about the conservation of large-scale monuments and what kinds of treatments might be proposed? Via an encounter with Louis-Fran & ccedil;ois Roubiliac's monument to Lady Elizabeth and Joseph Nightingale through an interdisciplinary lens, this article aims to explore aspects of monument conservation through the Nightingale monument and its figure of Death. By reviewing the spectrum of conservation efforts that have been historically and recently applied both to the monument and in the broader context of conservation in the abbey, the article addresses the practical challenges associated with undertaking work on a memorial, using the Nightingale monument as an immediate case study. The contextual and iconographic changes produced by the level of conservation undertaken play a significant role in shaping how sculpture is perceived in the space and by those who visit it.
The memorial commemorating the naval hero Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell (Grinling Gibbons, 1708) was the first national public monument. However, it is not celebrated as such and – nestled in the south choir aisle among the jostling monuments of Westminster Abbey – it is easily overlooked entirely. Historically, it has borne the brunt of the criticisms levelled towards its sculptor. Made famous by his carvings in wood, Gibbons’s reputation as a sculptor of stone is less exalted. This article interrogates the historiographic account of the Shovell monument, focusing on the first public criticisms, penned by Joseph Addison in the Spectator, that emerged within five years of its erection. Addison’s scathing comments have shaped the subsequent scholarly debate; however, he failed to consider the monument’s dual purpose, as a commemoration of Shovell and as a physical emblem of a greater, national loss. The admiral was killed in a shipwreck in which over a thousand of his sailors also lost their lives, the worst disaster to hit the British naval fleet in the period. By reconnecting the monument with the original intentions of its creation, and with its wider national function, this article offers a new perspective on this much-lambasted work.
The monument to Sir Isaac Newton designed by William Kent and sculpted by Michael Rysbrack was installed in Westminster Abbey in 1731. This article begins with a close reading of the monument, rendering unexpected results: focusing attention on the relief panel set into the sarcophagus reveals an underlying meaning beyond the obvious pointers towards Newton's scientific achievements, including allusions to his studies in the field of alchemy. Newton's engagement with alchemy was not generally known in his lifetime, yet, presumably at the behest of John and Catherine Conduitt, who commissioned the monument, Kent and Rysbrack contrived to include this major area of Newton's output, and it has been hiding in plain sight ever since. The second part of the article develops from a reading of the monument's defining feature, the enormous celestial globe at its centre. It explores reproductions of the monument over time, and especially the globe as a recurring theme in homages to Newton, from prints and medals to the grandiose and impossible architectural propositions of Etienne-Louis Boull & eacute;e and Thomas Steele; as an inspiration to photographers, from George Washington Wilson to Helmut Gernsheim; and concluding with George Rhoads' and Creative Machines' audio-kinetic sculpture, Newton's Daydream (2005 and 2015).
Between 1814 and 1841 Sir Francis Chantrey supplied a dozen monuments for Westminster Abbey, chiefly producing monumental statues in a naturalistic vein, and helping to shift the aesthetic of the abbey away from the allegorical groups of the eighteenth century. During this period he also took on an informal but trusted role as an advisor on the conservation, cleaning and preservation of the abbey's collection of post-medieval monuments, assisting Edward Blore, the abbey's surveyor, and the Dean and Chapter in the presentation of the works to visitors. This article looks at Chantrey's works and his complex attitude to the abbey, which stressed the need for both reform and conservation, giving a voice to the notion that Westminster Abbey needed to be rescued from a century of aesthetic decline, while stressing the requirement for modern sculpture to be appropriate to the Gothic fabric.
This article uses John Flaxman's monument to the politician George Lindsay Johnstone to consider the importance of the smaller monuments in the Westminster Abbey pantheon and, more generally, the importance of the relationship between sculpture and space. It argues that the monument was originally conceived for the cloisters, where its size, iconography and epitaph accorded with a space that prioritized the local abbey community. When ultimately placed in the nave, these characteristics became deficiencies, twice encouraging the movement of the monument to other locations on the abbey floor. This article considers the monument's removal to the triforium, a space increasingly used as a convenient repository for sculptural superfluities, as an expression of a mid-nineteenth-century re-evaluation that drained the Johnstone monument of any memorializing significance and deemed it distracting clutter. The monument remained in the triforium when it was repurposed as the Queen's Diamond Jubilee Galleries in 2018. The article analyses the recontextualization of the monument as a museum piece and argues that this would not have been unfamiliar to Flaxman, who regularly exhibited similar memorials in the gallery spaces of the Royal Academy before sending them to their final destinations.
In 1933 John Flaxman's monument to William Murray, 1st Earl of Mansfield (1793-1801), was relocated from the central aisle of the north transept to the west aisle, where it now triangulates the monument to Vice-Admiral Charles Watson (1760-63), designed by James Stuart and executed by Peter Scheemakers, and John Bacon's monument to George Montagu Dunk, 2nd Earl of Halifax (1782). This article explores the impact of this relocation on interpretations of Mansfield's legacy in the Westminster Abbey pantheon. It challenges Mansfield's conventional hegemonic presentation as an abolitionist and demonstrates how this characterization can be critiqued by interrogating the monument's new surrounding contexts. Sculptural and biographical intersections between the Mansfield, Watson and Halifax monuments activate Mansfield's personal familial connections to the Caribbean and professional judicial interactions with the British enslavement and transatlantic trafficking trades, reflecting more broadly the global imperial intersections which comprised the British imperial world. Hence, this article demonstrates how contested imperial legacies in the abbey pantheon can be extracted and scrutinized by engaging with nuanced conversations between monuments which are often overlooked by conventional methodologies that focus on individual monuments in isolation.
This article analyses the joint monument to Mary Kendall and Lady Catherine Jones erected in Westminster Abbey after Kendall's death in 1710 (and before Jones's death thirty years later). The monument's inscription refers to the 'close Union and Friendship' in which they lived and Kendall's purported desire 'That even their Ashes & mldr; Might not be divided', making this a rare and emphatic public consecration of female same-sex love during the period. The monument features a life-size figure of a woman in contemporary dress, presented both in the round and - unusually - facing directly out towards the viewer. Although it appears beneath Kendall's armorial device and above words that locate Kendall within her family of origin, the figure appears independent of the signs of familial status with which women were conventionally memorialized. Instead, we are offered an image of contemporary womanhood in and of itself, one that appears to have will, agency, and the character and piety ascribed to Kendall by the inscription below. As this article argues, this emphasis on a woman's capacity for independent thought, action and moral depth is redolent of contemporary writings by the early feminist philosopher Mary Astell, whose circle included both the inscription's author and Jones, a woman to whom Astell also had an intense amorous attachment. Through a close analysis of its materiality and form as well as the historical moment in which it was made, the monument is described as both an model of female self-realization and an allied validation of female same-sex love during a period in which women and their intimate relationships with each other were the subject of both Astell's writings and the politicized panic around Queen Anne's female companions.
The name of the seventeenth-century poet Abraham Cowley (1618-67) has long fallen into obscurity. Yet following his death, an innovative and costly monument was erected in Westminster Abbey that positioned him as Chaucer's equal, with an inscription proclaiming Cowley as 'the Pindar, Horace and Virgil of England, and the delight, ornament and favourite of his age'. This article explores John Bushnell's monument to Cowley, located in the abbey's south transept, arguing for its particular importance in histories of the development of Poets' Corner. By analysing this monument alongside print and paper monuments raised to Cowley in the wake of his death, the article recovers the intended purpose of Bushnell's monument and redates it to 1667-68, making it the sculptor's earliest known work made upon his return to England from the Continent around 1667. This analysis also reveals the particular involvement of the Duke of Buckingham's chaplain, Thomas Sprat (1635-1713), in wider commemorative acts for Cowley. Sprat became Dean of Westminster in 1683, assuming control over permissions for burials and inscriptions. In post for some three decades, Sprat took an active role in demarcating a national pantheon of literary worthies that took Cowley as its literal touchstone. To understand Sprat's role and ambitions necessitates working across the hierarchical categories of value that tend to separate analysis of stone monuments from that of other commemorative objects, and to connect activity in the abbey's east cloister with that of the south transept, paying particular attention to the monuments, burials and graves of Aphra Behn (d. 1689), Thomas Shadwell (d. 1692), Charles St Evremond (d. 1703), Thomas Brown (d. 1704), John Philips (d. 1709) and John Dryden (d. 1700). This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/.
Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's Maquette for a Large Basin (previously known as Maquette for a Bird Bath) has often escaped detailed art historical attention despite its positioning at a critical moment of the artist's social and creative life within London's early twentieth-century avant-garde. This article suggests an alteration of the object's title and, in light of recent scholarship, orientates it in relation to its commissioning for the garden at Durbins, Roger Fry's home in Surrey, and Gaudier-Brzeska's anarchist and anti-imperialist circles. It argues that the Large Basin constructs a satirical mix of primitivism and classicism, drawing from an array of sources ranging from Michelangelo's 'Slaves' to seventeenth-century 'blackamoor' ornaments in the process. This satirical capacity is shared by the artist's other work from the period, such as the Red Stone Dancer, the Coffer for W.S. Blunt and the Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound. However, the Large Basin's combination of labouring bodies and formal and methodological experiment also dramatizes key realist-modernist debates between content and form. It shows Gaudier-Brzeska attempting to synthesize these positions in search of a sculptural programme that could accord with his politics of class solidarity and anti-imperial anarchism, and in this context the article demonstrates how Gaudier-Brzeska's approach to primitivism and direct carving provided an apparatus for his combination anarchist and anti-imperialist activism.
