Sculpture Collections in Europe and the United States 1500–1930 - 9789004458840 Downloaded from Brill.com08/19/2021 06:01:25PM via free access Studies in the History of Collecting & Art Markets Editor in Chief Christian Huemer (Belvedere Research Center, Vienna) Editorial Board Adelaide Duarte (Universidade NOVA de Lisboa) Anne Helmreich (Getty Foundation, Los Angeles) Hans van Miegroet (Duke University, Durham) Sophie Raux (Université de Lyon) Adriana Turpin (Institut d’Études Supérieures des Arts, London) Olav Velthuis (University of Amsterdam) Filip Vermeylen (Erasmus University, Rotterdam) volume 10 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/hcam - 9789004458840 Downloaded from Brill.com08/19/2021 06:01:25PM via free access - 9789004458840 Downloaded from Brill.com08/19/2021 06:01:25PM via free access Paris – The Musée du Louvre Main Hall (Le Cour Marly) by night Photo by Jorge Royan, licensed under Wikipedia Commons, Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 3.0 - 9789004458840 Downloaded from Brill.com08/19/2021 06:01:25PM via free access Sculpture Collections in Europe and the United States 1500–1930 Variety and Ambiguity Edited by Malcolm Baker Inge Reist LEIDEN | BOSTON - 9789004458840 Downloaded from Brill.com08/19/2021 06:01:25PM via free access Published in association with The Frick Collection. Printing was supported by the Henry Moore Foundation. This book evolved from a symposium “Sculpture Collecting and Display, 1600–2000,” organized by the Center for the History of Collecting, that was held at The Frick Collection on May 19 and 20, 2017. Both the book and the symposium were made possible through the generous support of the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation. Cover illustration: The Sculpture Gallery at Chatsworth. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of Chatsworth Settlement Trustees. The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at http://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2021004809 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2352-0485 ISBN 978-90-04-45846-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-45884-0 (e-book) Copyright 2021 by Malcolm Baker and Inge Reist. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi, Brill Sense, Hotei Publishing, mentis Verlag, Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh and Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner. - 9789004458840 Downloaded from Brill.com08/19/2021 06:01:25PM via free access Contents Foreword ix List of Illustrations xii Contributors xvii Variety and Ambiguity: What Do We Mean by a “Sculpture Collection”? 1 Malcolm Baker part 1 Sculpture in the Kunstkammer: Contexts, Formation, and Dispersal 1 Sculpture Collecting and the Kunstkammer 27 Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann 2 The Collecting of Small Bronze Sculptures in Late Renaissance Italy: The Canonici Collection 46 Jeremy Warren 3 Shifting Perceptions and Changing Frameworks: The Case of Francis van Bossuit and the Place of Small-Scale Sculpture in Ivory in the Sculpture Collection 80 Malcolm Baker part 2 Garden Sculptures as Collections 4 Gentlemen Prefer Bronze: Garden Sculpture and Sculpture Gardens in Britain (1720–1860) 103 Julius Bryant 5 The Sculpture Gardens of Versailles, Marly, and Dresden: Magnificence and Its Limits 128 Betsy Rosasco - 9789004458840 Downloaded from Brill.com08/19/2021 06:01:25PM via free access viii Contents part 3 The Sculpture Gallery and Dedicated Spaces for Sculpture 6 The ‘Gallerie du S.r Girardon Sculpteur Ordinaire du Roy’ 157 Anne-Lise Desmas 7 Porcelain as Sculpture: Medium, Materiality, and the Categories of Eighteenth-Century Collecting 174 Michael Yonan 8 Art and Nature: The Country House Sculpture Gallery in the Post-Napoleonic Period 194 Alison Yarrington part 4 The Changing Place of Sculpture in the Public Museum 9 The Public Art Gallery as Arena for Modern Sculpture 223 Alex Potts 10 Displaying Deceit: Alceo Dossena’s Tomb of Maria Catharina Sabello at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston 254 Andrew McClellan and Marietta Cambareri 11 The Legacy of William Valentiner in Shaping the Display and Collecting of European Sculpture in American Museums, 1900–Present: Case Studies 276 Alan Phipps Darr Bibliography 297 Index 330 - 9789004458840 Downloaded from Brill.com08/19/2021 06:01:25PM via free access Foreword The genesis of this book can be traced over many years as several of us at the Frick Collection strove to define the very rich topic of collecting sculpture in a way that could be embraced by both specialists and a curious general pub- lic. The myriad, not always interconnected, ways sculpture has been valued by collectors and the variety of contexts in which sculpture has been viewed presented us with an embarrassment of riches as we wrestled with the goal of being inclusive while recognizing the need to bring focus to an amor- phous topic. A breakthrough came with a brainstorming session between Ian Wardropper, Malcolm Baker and Inge Reist, during which we shaped a sympo- sium involving some of the finest scholars in the field. Organized by the Center for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library, the symposium took place in May 2017.1 Initially, it was important to understand why collecting sculpture should be such a complex and challenging topic as compared to subjects the Center had addressed in earlier years, most of which had concentrated on collecting paintings of a particular period – the Italian Renaissance or the Dutch Golden Age, for example – or by a particular artist, such as El Greco.2 The answer was twofold: first, the exceptional vari- ety of media, scale, purpose and settings and secondly, the ambiguity of the reception sculpture had at different times and in different places, sometimes appreciated as fine art of the highest order, and in other contexts as merely a decorative accoutrement. The medium could indeed convey the message, as, for example, with small-scale sculptures in bronze, ivory, or porcelain, which 1 An account of the symposium was published by Julius Bryant in the Newsletter of the Public Monuments and Sculpture Association in the UK: https://3rd-dimensionpmsa.org.uk/ reviews/2017-07-06-symposium-sculpture-collecting-and-display-1600-2000. 2 The Frick Center for the History of Collecting has published numerous volumes on topics of this kind, for example, Collecting Spanish Art: Spain’s Golden Age and America’s Gilded Age, and El Greco Comes to America: The Discovery of a Modern Old Master, both eds., Inge Reist and José Luis Colomer (New York and Madrid: The Frick Collection and Centro Europa de Estudios Hispanica and Center for Spain in America, 2012 and 2017, respectively) and five volumes of the series The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Collecting in America published by The Frick Collection, New York, and Pennsylvania University Press, University Park: Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals, ed. Esmée Quodbach (2014); A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America, ed. Inge Reist (2015); Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth Century Paintings Come To America, ed. Edgar Peters Bowron (2017); The Americas Revealed: Collecting Colonial and Modern Latin American Art in the United States, ed. Edward J. Sullivan (2018); America and the Art of Flanders, ed. Esmée Quodbach (2020). - 9789004458840 Downloaded from Brill.com08/19/2021 06:01:25PM via free access x Foreword might be displayed to furnish an interior or revered as high art. Such works were essential, even fetishized, components of the Kunstkammern of Princes for which competition among collectors could reach fever-pitch as each strove to outdo the other to obtain objects that demonstrated conspicuous virtuos- ity. Garden sculpture, though not unconnected to the smaller-scale sculpture, worked rather differently and provided unique opportunities to convey propa- gandistic objectives of absolute rulers, emulating as it often did the power that had long been attributed to antique statuary. The fact that displays of sculpture – much of it being public in nature – often impacted the daily life of spectators other than collectors in a way that painting and other fine arts seldom did, obliged us to take into account collect- ing by and for a larger public. Therefore, the sculpture commissions and col- lections that were intended for public display became a necessary component of our book, whether the garden sculptures of monarchs, commemorative por- trait sculptures, or the museum collections and displays that were developed during the nineteenth century. All of these issues, and more, are addressed by the authors who contributed to this volume. Recognizing that a single volume could not do justice to collecting sculp- ture across all periods and traditions, we concluded that our focus would be confined to sculpture collections in Europe and the United States and that we would not introduce collections of ancient or non-western works. Having thus defined the geographic and chronological scope of the volume, our efforts turned to establishing an orderly approach