Le Grand Tour: The traveller's fascination

Setdart is inviting bidders for an interesting collection of bronzes from the collections of travellers who toured the main European capitals in the 19th century. More than fifty lots will be on offer to satisfy our explorer’s cravings.

If you had been an aristocrat in the 18th or 19th centuries, you could have completed your education with a period of travel (between eight months and eight years) on the European continent. At the age of 21, accompanied by a tutor, and with Italy as a key destination, we would have learned about politics, culture and, of course, art.

On our way through France we would have gone straight to Paris, where we would have received French, horseback riding or fencing lessons, rubbing shoulders with the sophisticated Parisian society, which would have helped us greatly in refining our manners and showing off our new skills back home.

It goes without saying that in Rome we would have been victims of a Stendhal syndrome and, once recovered, we would have fallen into the irrepressible desire to acquire for our collections bronze models of all the marble wonders that had taken our breath away during our visit to the Italian peninsula. These superb pieces are the fruit of a fascination for Greco-Roman art and, with the desire to possess a piece of Western history, bronze artists put all their skill into emulating the sculpture of the past, the zenith of artistic creation.

Among the pieces to be auctioned in this auction, there are some that are directly derived from archaeological models of Greco-Roman antiquity, such as the lot of 35253998which represents the Venus CalypigiaThe original was unearthed in Herculaneum in the 18th century and now rests in the National Archaeological Museum of Naples. Another good example of these reproductions can be found in the lot 35254024this time with Diana Hunterwhose original model comes from a Greek bronze from the 4th century B.C. The pairs of busts, such as that of Diana and Apollo, were also very well received by collectors, sometimes in versions of larger and well-known pieces, such as the Apollo of Belvedere in a smaller format, which we can well see in the lot 35254004.

But the bronze artists of the 19th century did not live by sculpture alone, as the decorative arts were also providers of highly successful models. One of the most fruitful was the Warwick Tumbler, represented in our auction by lots 35254014 and 35254011.

Thanks to this type of pieces, the most distinguished travelers were able to take with them true works of art created by the best artists of the time, a souvenir of their unforgettable stay, a sort of “souvenir” of their stay. memories that, more than a century later, have an entity of their own, as they tell us about experiences that shaped the thinking of the European elites of the 18th and 19th centuries and that, today, can be acquired by any of us to continue writing their own history in contemporary collections.

Woman aflame, the last of her line. Dalí and his allegories of the unconscious.

Setdart offers a unique opportunity to acquire the monumental bronze by Salvador Dalí “Woman aflame” currently on display at the MOCO Museum in Barcelona. The piece, which has only 8 numbered copies, an exceptional event given the rare occasions on which a Dalí bronze of this size and importance is put on the market.

In Spleen II, one of his poems collected in The Flowers of Evil, Baudelaire speaks of a cabinet full of drawers that hide drawers that, in turn, hide even smaller drawers. For the French poet, this old secreter is a metaphor of a mind full of memories and secrets nested one inside the other, but also of the multiple compartments into which a single temperament is fragmented: “a large chest of drawers crammed with invoices, sweet verses, obituaries, lawsuits, romances…. With abundant hair tangled in receipts, it hides fewer secrets than my sad brain”.

For Dalí, the drawers were also metaphors for the complexity of the psyche. His inspiration, however, was not Baudelaire but Freud, who emerged as the great star of all the surrealists. In The Interpretation of Dreams, he presents the image of the chest of drawers as a transcript of the unconscious and its tendency to hide.

The genius of Empordà painted his first anthropomorphic desk in 1936, the year in which he produced one of his most celebrated works, The Venus de Milo with drawers. The following year he would paint the emblematic oil painting La jirafa en llamas, where the iconography of the Freudian motif is enriched with ominous connotations linked to the difficult political situation the country was going through.

Almost fifty years later, Dalí created a monumental sculpture in which he returned to the theme of the woman with drawers in order to establish new dialogues with his own past and, at the same time, to experiment with the technical and ideosyncratic possibilities of such a large-scale bronze: Woman Aflame (1980) is a keystone of the Dalinian surrealism of the last period.

In this subjugating sculpture, some of Dalí’s most intimate obsessions are synthesized, which, when oversized in a monumental bronze, acquire new meanings. The imposing female body curves at torso level, bending backwards and covering her eyes with her right hand, thus extending the gesture of disorientation and loss that was already present in the figure of The Giraffe in Flames. The elements of fire and drawers converge in the statue as premonitory and psychological symbols. The flame here does not come out of a giraffe but crawls like dragon’s crests up a turned leg, along the front of which the drawers of the “anthropomorphic closet”, as Dalí himself called it, follow one after the other. “Only psychoanalysis can open those secret drawers,” said Dalí following Freud.

In the Basel Museum painting the fire was linked to the Spanish Civil War and the premonition of World War II. In this monumental piece of 1980, on the other hand, it can be linked to eroticism and unsatisfied passion, in relation to the problems confessed by the artist of his sexual impotence.

Likewise, the crutches that support the muse’s back (another basic prop of the surrealist artist’s imaginary) suggest ambivalent meanings, as they are fragile anchors to reality and at the same time ways of accessing the subconscious.

In terms of technique, the bronze has a high quality finish, noticeable in the modeling and textures. The dress adheres to the body, emulating the Greek technique of wet cloths, giving sensuality to the curves and enigmatic power to the Dalinian allegory.

The auction of Woman aflame is, therefore, an event of total relevance for all those collectors passionate about the unique and incomparable universe that the genius of Figueras gave birth to.