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The Elegance and Virtuosity of Marble in Sculpture

Setdart is dedicating a monographic auction to the virtuosity of stone with twenty-seven lots, mostly marble, which will allow sculpture lovers to enjoy the unblemished finesse of those who mastered the chiseling of such delicate material.

The 19th century was the great century of the expositions, a hymn to industrial progress and globalization. Although London in 1851 with its first Universal Exposition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park has been recognized as the best known of these events, it was France in 1798 who inaugurated this tradition with the French Industrial Exposition.

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Written by Andrea Domenech

The Elegance and virtuosity of marble in sculpture

The Elegance and Virtuosity of Marble in Sculpture

Setdart dedicates a monographic auction to marble virtuosity

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The 19th century was the great century of the expositions, a hymn to industrial progress and globalization. Although London in 1851 with its first Universal Exposition in the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park has been recognized as the best known of these events, it was France in 1798 who inaugurated this tradition with the French Industrial Exposition.

Exhibitions of Fine Arts or Arts and Industry were the ones that brought together new sculptural works or works on canvas, spurring the creativity of artists under the mantle of competitiveness and economic benefits. Naturally, the exhibition of these works generated debates among the attendees, depending on the subject matter, such as the nudity of the female body. One of the most cited aspects of the nudes could be the effect they had on the viewer in relation to morality.

Related to this debate was the theory of the chastity of marble, that is, a condition that works of art would possess and that would exempt them from being perceived from sexual desire. In the 18th century, Wincklemann and Mengs already proposed sculpture as ideal representations of the human body with a spirit of its own that should not give rise to lewd interpretations. The pristineness of the Carrara marble was in keeping with this idea of purity. In addition, a distinction should be made between the artistic nude and the anatomical nude, the former being beautiful, tasteful, and the latter realistic, vulgar.

Lote 35268645.

Once this point is clarified, it is possible to correctly understand the sculpture of marble in the context of the 19th century and the pieces that have been auctioned.

Lot 35360165 is one of the oldest of the auctioned lots – together with the 16th century bust corresponding to lot 35340542 -, an interesting marble of Dionysus accompanied by a can, from the 18th century, partially lost, following Greco-Roman models, with an elegant contrapposto and dynamic leg crossing that creates a sinuous line at the hips. It is an excellent example of the survival of these models that enjoyed a second youth with the discovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum around 1740.

Lote 35360165.
Lote 35340542.

By Giuseppe Lazzerini, lot 35233500, is the most interesting piece of the auction, a representation of Pales, protector of the land and domestic livestock. Lazzerini is an artist supported by the market, with recent auctions of up to €35,000, so the estimate of €30,000 to €40,000 for the sculpture tendered at Setdart is not surprising.

Lote 35233500.

The partially nude goddess, with her bust uncovered, is a good example of what has been previously stated in relation to the theory of the marble chastityThe sex is subtly covered by the drapery, as is the case with the Venus of the lot 35340545, although in this case it is the foliage, chiseled with great skill, which prevents us from seeing the intimate parts of the goddess. It is a work of a markedly neoclassical character, inspired not only by Greco-Roman sculpture, but also by the work “Captive Love” by the Belgian Charles Auguste Fraikin.

But the 19th century was not only about male and female nudes, as philosophers, orators or politicians such as Demosthenes – 35248749 -, role models for nineteenth-century society, found their niche in the production of certain artists. To cite some personalities who saw in Demosthenes a source of inspiration, we have Henry Clay or Georges Clemenceau, the latter even writing a book about him.

Lote 35248749.

Finally, at the end of the 19th century and the first third of the 20th century, academicism suffered a hard setback when it lost the favor of the new generation of artists who found inspiration far from tradition, based on the principles of classicism. Although there are still some pieces that drink from these precepts, such as the lot 35340398, by the Italian Umberto Biagini, the Art Deco period finds in rationalism, monumentality and geometry the pillars on which to build its expressiveness. The lot 35268645 is a good example of this, since what a century ago was the reinterpretation of the Greco-Roman nude under the magnifying glass of academicism, now becomes an enigmatic hieratism, almost Egyptian in style, which contains the organicist movements of modernism just twenty years ago.

Lote 35340398.

We are, therefore, faced with an auction that focuses on the monumentality of the sculpture, the marble chastity and the debates that this has generated throughout the nineteenth century, with a nude that has managed to detach itself from the coercive academic canons to fly free under the firmament of the avant-garde of the twentieth century.

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Le Grand Tour: The fascination of the traveler

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.

Antichità Romane, vol. II
Antichità Romane, vol. II

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.

Lote 35254038.

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.

Lote 35253998.
Lote 35254024.
Lote 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.

Lote 35254014.
Lote 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.

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External references to Roman urns

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

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.

Lote 35216688

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.

Lote 35216688

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.

"Jirafa ardiendo" de Salvador Dalí

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.

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