THE advance publicity for the Royal Academy's autumn sculpture
exhibition had vexed me. Hard on the heels of the Olympics, here
was a show that seemed to be aiming only at third place. But much
of the exhibition is pure gold.
Professor David Ekserdjian and the Royal Academy have brought
together an extraordinarily diverse and rich collection of some of
the world's finest bronzes, ranging from around 3700 BC to the
present day. My only two reservations are about the inclusion of
contemporary work that seems intrusively just to be about ticking
boxes; and about the omission of the Cretan bronzes that arguably
are so central to understanding how our civilisation evolved across
the Mediterranean.
Galleries are arranged thematically, with rooms of figures -
some famous, others unknown - animals, religious objects, and a
penultimate room of the gods. There is a useful room given over to
teaching us how bronze casting is done, with several documentary
films of bare-footed Indian and other bronze-smiths sinking moulds
into mounds of earth and then cracking the terracotta case before
polishing the result-ing figures or utensils. The process harnesses
all four elements, and remains difficult and dangerous today.
Little wonder that the great statue of Perseus that Benvenuto
Cellini (1500-1571) provided for the Loggia dei Lanzi in Florence
all but defied casting: it stands more than 3.2 metres tall; and we
know that Cellini had to throw in dishes and plates to make up the
volume. A striking copy was cast in Florence for the 2nd Duke of
Sutherland in 1844, a few years before Berlioz's eponymous opera
(1838) reached London.
Lorenzo Ghiberti's statue of St Stephen, one of three
commissioned by the Wool Guild for the niches of the church of
Orsanmichele in Florence in 1425, is in fact cast in brass and not
in bronze, which may have helped the casting process. Both it and
the three figures (below, right) made for the Merchants'
Guild by Giovan Francesco Rustici (1506-11) for the north porch of
the Baptistery in Florence show how Christian figures still
dominated the emerging Renaissance mercantile and capitalist
world.
Ghiberti is, of course, best-known for the two great bronze
gates on the Baptistery in Florence. By way of more than
compensating for their absence, there is the tomb slab of Fra
Leonardo Dati (c.1360-1425). Dati, the General of the
Dominicans, was buried in the Church of Santa Maria Novella;
visitors there have long trampled the low relief under foot.
Other tomb sculptures include six of the two dozen "Weepers"
cast in 1475/76 for the tomb of Isabella of Bourbon, who died ten
years earlier (St Michael's, Antwerp). Only ten figures escaped the
iconoclasm of 1566, silent witnesses to death and the outrages of
inhumane and irrational violence.
Tomb sculptures and votive offerings have provided a wealth of
wondrous pieces, including the national treasure of Denmark,
The Trundholm Sun Chariot (above, right), a
lost-wax cast of a wheeled horse pulling the sphere across the
heavens. This was recovered, with no other surrounding objects,
from a peat bog in West Zealand at the start of the 20th century,
and has never been satisfactorily explained.
Carl Nielsen's Helios overture was composed after he
had spent a year in Athens with his wife, who was a sculptress. It
was first performed in October 1903, and is always said to derive
its inspiration from seeing the sun over the Aegean. As Nielsen was
fascinated by archaeology, I rather think he celebrates the
chariot, too.
It is thought to date from 1400 BC, and the sun, which is nearly
ten inches in diameter, is inlaid with gold leaf. The reverse side
is bare bronze. One needs to remember that this dates from much the
same period as the close of the Minoan domination of the Aegean to
appreciate fully the quality of the work. Some scholars seek to
date it earlier (1800-1600 BC), which would raise questions about
when wheeled transport first became possible. Each wheel has four
spokes.
When Tate Modern opened in the Millennium year, Cool Britannia
invited Louise Bourgeois to straddle the Turbine Hall with one of
her spiders. Another (Spider IV) crawls down a wall in a
room given over to animals. It was cast when the sculptress was
more than 95 years old. Arachnophobes may not be encouraged to
learn that she saw spiders as modest animals that protect us
against all manner of evils.
Three figures by Giovan Francesco Rustici: the Pharisee, St
Johnthe Baptist, and the Levite, from The Sermon of St John
theBaptist, 1511, Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore, Florence.
Theyhave been restored with the sponsorship of the Friends
ofFlorence
Credit: ANTONIO QUATTRONE,
FLORENCE
Less terrifying, but a mark of humanity's respect for the
natural order, is the life-size Medici Riccardi horse's head, a
Hellenistic Greek work from the fourth century BC, which was
already in the ducal collections of the Medici before Columbus
sailed to America. The contemporaneous Etruscan Chimaera
(also in Florence) that was discovered in Arezzo in November 1553,
half a century after the finding in Rome of the group Laocoön
and his Sons, is a powerful tribute to the imagination of the
sculptor.
Realism and invention are the day-to-day matter for artists; but
one can only stand in awe of such portrait heads as that of the
Thracian King Seuthes III (c.331-300 BC) recently found in
Bulgaria at Golyama Kosmatka (2004). This Odrysian ruler was at
first a tributary of Alexander the Great, but he negotiated with
Macedonia to gain a degree of independence for his capital
(present-day Kazanluk).
If Seuthes is a belligerent and powerful figure, the head of a
woman with corkscrew curls, the so-called "Tolomeo Apione", from
Herculaneum (AD c.154-196), demonstrates just how clever
the Romans were as copyists. The androgynous face remains a puzzle
to archae- ologists and artists alike, but is an object of sheer
beauty.
Equally beguiling is the early-11th-century Ottonian "Krodo"
altar from Goslar in Germany. It is the only Romanesque bronze
altar to have survived, although bronze sanctuary furnishings were
something of a commonplace. Its sides are pierced (in a cruciform
shape on the long sides), possibly to hold transparent
semi-precious stones, such as agate, to allow it to be illuminated
from within.
It comes from the Collegiate Church of St Simon and St Jude in
Goslar, which once served as the Imperial chapel, and was once the
largest Romanesque basilica east of the Rhine. The altar's survival
- the chapel was sold for demolition in the 19th century - suggests
that it had a later modified use as well. It is now oddly mounted
on the back of four caryatid figures that each have a hole in the
back of their heads, which may have served as the mounting for a
very different structure (possibly a throne). As the altar itself
(for which the original mensa is still in place) stands
only 70cm high, it must have been mounted in some way, but the
kneeling figures would have got in the way of even the most
dexterous celebrant.
Cultic objects include the early votive offering depicting a
Nuragic tribal chief from Sardinia, one of several. The imposing
cloaked figure stands more than a foot and a half high, and holds a
rugged staff with his left hand. With his right, he holds a broad
sword over his shoulder. His sharp shins show that he is wearing
greaves, and a dagger is strapped to his chest over a short tunic.
Is he perhaps a sentinel in death?
The figure is reckoned to date from the early half of the first
millennium BC (possibly 800-600). Next to it is a later Etruscan
votive figurine from ancient Velathri, present-day Volterra. This
stick-like figure, called Evening Shadow by Gabriele
d'Annunzio, as it recalled the long shadows of poplar trees on late
summer evenings, is now an emblem of the city. It greatly inspired
the Swiss artist Alberto Giacometti (1901-66), who also features in
this exhibition.
The gallery given over to gods is global indeed, but this cannot
excuse the claim made on the headphone commentary for the 1607
Seated Christ (Vaduz): "From a European point of view we
may not think of Christ as a god"! Adriaen de Vries (1556-1626), in
this commission for a leading courtier in Prague who came from
Liechtenstein, modified the Low Countries tradition of Jesus
awaiting crucifixion. There is no crown of thorns, although the
overall composition is said to derive from Dürer's widely
circulated sequence of prints The Large Passion.
But to return to the first gallery space: the crowning delight
of this whole exhibition is surely the dancing satyr, brought up
from the seabed off south-western Sicily on 4 March 1998, and now
housed in a former church in Mazara del Vallo. Last shown at the
Louvre, where it illustrated the inheritance of Praxiteles, this is
one of the world's finest achievements.
"Bronze" is at the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House,
London W1, until 9 December. Phone 020 7300 8000. www.royalacademy.org.uk