AN ITALIAN CARRARA MARBLE MODEL OF THE NAVICELLA

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PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF PIRANESEUM (Lots 325-333)THE GRAND TOUR: A NEW LOOK AT AN ANCIENT SUBJECTThe Grand Tour was, simply, an education in the glorious landscape, history, architecture and art of Italy. In the late 17th and 18th centuries, young men of fortune and education traveled to Italy to be exposed to the cultural feast that country, and its Antique past, had to offer. And while these travels sometimes also included cities like Paris and, later in the 19th century, more exotic forays to places like the Upper Nile, Italy was always the primary destination.As Charles Thompson wrote in 1744, before embarking on a trip to Italy, he was ‘impatiently desirous of viewing a country so famous in history, which once gave laws to the world; which is at present the greatest school of music and painting, contains the noblest productions of statuary and architecture, and abounds with cabinets of rarities, and collections of all kinds of antiquities’.Possibly the most satisfying part of the Grand Tour was the ability to purchase works of art to bring home. Young aristocrats from Stockholm to West Sussex commissioned portraits of themselves surrounded by Rome’s famous monuments from Batoni and bought fantastical landscape paintings of the ruins of Ancient Rome – now inhabited by wild goats and woman hanging their laundry from former imperial palace windows -- by Panini and Robert as well as Piranesi’s wildly romantic engravings. They also commissioned table tops made of dazzling-colored marbles and sculpture based on Ancient Greek and Roman models and bought authentic Roman Antiquities. All of these objects were then brought home to their town and country houses – often designed by William Kent or Robert Adam or their many followers throughout Europe – which were intended to suggest an Italian Arcadia that was somehow transplanted to their soggy, gray landscapes of the North.The Grand Tour remains an appealing subject that has not faded with the centuries. Who is immune to the landscape, history, architecture and art of Italy? Not to mention the gelato. And who wouldn’t want to be reminded of their trip – especially after we’ve returned to our post-holiday lives, usually confined to modern buildings and cities that so often lack patina and history.And now, the Grand Tour objects resonate just as well in Manhattan, Minneapolis and Malibu. So there is no reason that the Grand Tour should refer to just 18th century aristocrats on a buying spree for their country estates. It can just as easily refer to the modern collector or decorator who can recreate the skyline of Ancient Rome on an empty table top.

AN ITALIAN CARRARA MARBLE MODEL OF THE NAVICELLA

ROME, 19TH CENTURY

細節

AN ITALIAN CARRARA MARBLE MODEL OF THE NAVICELLA
ROME, 19TH CENTURY
Modeled after the antique, raised on stepped white marble base bearing inscriptions on either side
17 in. (43.2 cm.) high, 29 ½ in. (74.9 cm.) wide

出版

SFO Museum, All Roads Lead to Rome: 17th–19th Century Architectural Souvenirs from the Collection of Piraneseum, 2017, pp. 64-65.

展覽

SFO Museum, All Roads Lead to Rome: 17th–19th Century Architectural Souvenirs from the Collection of Piraneseum, January 31 - August 17, 2017.

拍品專文

A remarkably large and well turned-out model of one of Rome’s more minor monuments, the ship-shaped
fountain fronting San Stefano Rotondo, on the Caelian Hill, this vigorously-carved marble includes the crest of Pope Leo X (1475 - 1521), as well as a Latin inscription dedicating the monument to the Egyptian goddess Isis and to the naval “fleet of Misenum”, founded by Augustus.

更多來自 The Collector: English and European 18th and 19th Century Furniture, Ceramics, Silver & Works of Art

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