Category: Modern(ish)

Rijksmuseum acquires rare restituted silver salt cellars

Modern(ish), Museums

The Rijksmuseum has acquired four silver and gilded salt cellars by 17th century Amsterdam silversmith Johannes Lutma after they were returned to the heirs of German Jewish collector Emma Budge.

They are two matched pairs, one pair made in 1639, the other in 1643. The design features a cupid sitting on a dolphin with the marine mammal’s tail draped over his shoulders. The cupid supports a shell-like bowl in his hand. Very few examples of Lutma’s oeuvre have survived, and these salt cellars are masterpieces showcasing his command of classical sculptural form and the auricular or lobate style that dominated the ornamental arts of Northern Europe in the first half of the 17th century. The other Lutma pieces in the Rijksmuseum collection are medallions and reliefs.

Johannes Lutma was born in 1587 and as a teenager was apprenticed under Baroque silversmith Paul van Vianen before opening his own shop in Amsterdam in 1621. He became the city’s premier silversmith, a significant rating seeing as 17th century Amsterdam had more than 300 silver and gold workshops. It was second only to Paris in the size of its silver and goldsmith community. London had fewer than half that number. Poets and writers sang his praises as an artist and craftsman. Rembrandt etched a portrait of him in 1656.

Despite his fame during his lifetime, few of Lutma’s silver pieces have survived the centuries. Before World War II, the salt cellars belonged to Emma and Henry Budge, a wealthy couple from Hamburg who built a large, fine art collection. Emma outlived Henry by almost a decade, and by the time of her death in 1937, Nazis were forcing Jews to sell their belongings with all profits going to the party rather than the heirs. The four salt cellars were bought in the forced sale by a German dealer. They re-emerged at auction in 1960 where they were bought by the City of Amsterdam and the Netherlands. Two went on display at the Rijksmuseum, the other two at the Amsterdam Museum.

In 2013, Amsterdam Museum researchers discovered their salt cellars had a very dubious ownership history. That triggered an investigation by the Rijksmuseum as well, and its researchers also flagged the provenance as suspicious. In 2014, restitution committees from several countries found the Emma Budge estate auction to have been a forced sale and a wide variety of works of art were returned to the Budge heirs by some of the world’s biggest museums. The Netherlands’ Restitution Committee determined the salt cellars were subject to claim in 2018, and in 2022, the committee advised that they should be returned. On May 12, 2023, the salt cellars were restituted to the heirs of Emma Budge. Also on May 12, 2023, the heirs sold all four salt cellars to the Rijksmuseum.

Starting September 6th, the salt cellars will go on display at the Rijksmuseum in a dedicated exhibition that contextualizes the history of the objects as well as the history of Emma Budge as a philanthropist and art collector. Also part of the exhibition will be a pair of portraits of Lutma and his second wife Sara de Bie painted by Jacob Adriaensz.

National Museum of Denmark returns glorious 1600s feather cape to Brazil

Modern(ish), Museums

The National Museum of Denmark has donated its most exceptional 17th century Brazilian feather cape to the new National Museum of Brazil to help rebuild the museum’s patrimony after its entire ethnographic collection of 20 million irreplaceable artifacts was destroyed in a fire in 2018. Interestingly, the iconic scarlet ibis feather cape was not among them, as the few surviving examples known were all in European museums.

Made by hand-tying scarlet ibis and macaw feathers to a woven cotton net, the cape dates to the early 1600s and was crafted by the Tupinambá people of Brazil. The Tupinambá were the first indigenous people the Portuguese encountered when they reached eastern Brazil in 1500. European chroniclers record that the Tupinambá were adept feather workers and used local bird feathers in jewelry, sashes, headbands, cloaks, even as tattoo needles. Used in important rituals and ceremonies, the scarlet ibis cloaks were revered for their beauty and religious significance.

The Tupinambá were described as taking painstaking care of their feathered items, handling them with kid gloves to prevent deterioration. They were not so gingerly handled by the Portuguese, Spanish and by the functionaries of the Dutch West India Company which occupied parts of northeast Brazil between 1624 and 1654. The striking feathered cloaks made their way into the collections of the European monarchs and other wealthy collectors, but few were able to survive the centuries.

Today only 11 Tupinambá feather capes are known to survive, several of which are also owned by the National Museum of Denmark. The recently-donated cloak is the best preserved of all of them. Compare it to the cloak at the Pinacoteca Ambrosiana in Milan to see how much denser the feather coverage is and how pristine each individual feather still looks. It even retains the small hood made of yellow macaw feathers, long since lost from the Ambrosiana example.

The Tupinambá population plummeted after their encounter with European pathogens, but the tradition of feather work never stopped. Today there are around 4,600 recognized Tupinambá in Brazil and their leaders have been working with officials from the National Museum in Rio to negotiate the return of the sacred feather cape from Copenhagen.

Upon receiving the letter from Dr. Rane Willerslev, Director of the National Museum of Denmark, chief Tupinambá Babau said: “For us, the donation of the Tupinambá mantle means the return of an ancestor! It is also the return of hope that never dies: a concrete answer for those who believe in the strength of their people and continue to fight for their culture, secrets and religion. We continue to create other mantles. But now, by a generous donation, our greatest relic will return to Brazil! The bird that symbolizes this mantle, the ibis, which no longer exists in our region, is born and grows gray. When eating crabs, their feathers turn red. It is a sign of transformation that occurs in everything, human beings and their culture. Many thanks to the National Museum of Brazil and Denmark for allowing us to hear the sacred words of our ancestors again. The Cloak is back!”

The Museu Nacional is in the process of rebuilding its ethnographic archives and physical collections in close collaboration with the country’s indigenous peoples and museums outside Brazil. The National Museum of Denmark and a number of other European museums are already supporting the reconstruction by creating digital catalogues that will make Brazilian artefacts and archive material located in European museums available. […]

“The feather cape has had a prominent place in our collection, but it has greater significance for the Brazilian population as a cultural symbol, as a material heritage of the Tupinambá and as evidence of Brazilian-European historical, colonial encounters. In Brazil, it will be available to the indigenous peoples who have a strong historical and cultural connection to it,” says Christian Sune Pedersen, head of research.

The cape will remain in Copenhagen long enough to be photographed in high resolution and analyzed to determine its age, origin and exact composition. Meanwhile, the National Museum of Brazil will focus on creating an ideal setting for the long-term conservation and display of the cape.

Area Sacra, site of cats and Caesar’s assassination, opens to public

Ancient, Modern(ish)

The site in the historic center of Rome where Republican temples and Pompey’s Theater were the backdrops to the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C. has opened to the public for the first time. The cats who have long dominated its decrepit walkways and piles of disorganized ancient stones have a much tidier, informative and navigable new setting from which to blink lazily at their fans.

Funded by luxury jewelers Bulgari, the redevelopment of the archaeological site began in 2021 with the aim of making the sunken square in the middle of one of Rome’s busiest piazzas a walkable, coherent space instead of a litter-strewn, weed-choked jumble of broken stones and unidentifiable ruins.

The promotion and press leans heavily on its being the site where Caesar was assassinated, but that’s something of a fudge. Only a tiny sliver of Pompey’s massive theater complex on the Campus Martius, completed in 55 B.C., is visible at the Largo di Torre Argentina. It’s a section of a tufa base under the edge of the Curia Pompeiana where the Roman senate temporarily held meetings after a fire in 53 B.C. devastated the senate house in the Forum. The entrance to the curia that was the actual scene of the crime lies beneath the Teatro Argentina, an 18th century opera house that overlooks the archaeological site from across the street.

The remains of the structures that give the Area Sacra its name are much older than the theater, ranging in date from the 4th to the 2nd century B.C. There are four temples, dubbed A-D because nobody is sure which deities they were dedicated to. Temple C is the most ancient and is believed to have been devoted to the fertility goddess Feronia. Temple A was next, built in the mid-3rd century B.C. Temple D dates to 2nd century B.C. and is the largest of the four. The temples were damaged by a fire that devastated the city in 111 B.C. A new floor was installed over the rubble and Temple B was built after the fire. B is the only circular temple in the Area Sacra. The travertine slab flooring you see now was installed by the emperor Domitian in 80 A.D. after yet another fire.

The temples were abandoned in the 5th century and mined for construction materials. There is evidence of large tufa blocks having been reused within the former Area Sacra in the 8th and 9th centuries, but these were likely dwellings. A church was built in the 9th century and the remains of some of its 12th century alterations, including a Cosmati pavement, still survive.

The growth of the city eventually overwhelmed even the medieval structures and the Area Sacra was forgotten. It was rediscovered in 1926 during construction of new buildings. Crammed into the middle of modern Rome’s criss-crossing streets and tram lines, the temple area has never been set up for visitors to enjoy. People have had to content themselves with looking down into the pit from the modern street level.

The redesign now makes it possible for visitors to go down into the area and explore it via an accessible elevator and walkways. There are no barriers, fences or scaffolds obscuring the view. Everything is even on one plane so people with mobility aides can maneuver easily. Two new spaces have been opened up exhibiting an array of sculptural, architectural and funerary artifacts discovered at the site during the demolitions of the 1920s. Informational panels in Italian and English recount the history of the site from antiquity to the 20th century. Two large panels created for the vision impaired and blind include Braille descriptions and two 3D printed objects made from scans of the originals — a marble fragment with a relief of a bird pecking a fruit and the colossal head of a female cult statue.

The new raised walkways, exhibition space, informational panels and lighting system will have no effect on the cats who have colonized the area since it was fully exposed in 1929. They will have the same free run of the place and their sanctuary is safe behind a wall on the Via Arenula side of the piazza.

Normandy acquires Charlotte Corday’s assassination manifesto

Modern(ish)

The manifesto written by the hand of Charlotte Corday justifying her assassination of Jacobin leader Jean-Paul Marat has been bought at auction by the region of Normandy, the city of Caen and the department of Calvados. It’s a good thing they were able to pool their resources to save this priceless historical record, because the autograph manuscript, estimated at 80,000 – 100,000 EUR ($92,000-108,000), blew past the high figure and sold for 215,000 EUR ($232,000). And that’s just the hammer price. The final cost with fees and taxes was 270,000 EUR ($292,000).

Born in Normandy to a penniless minor aristocratic family, Marie-Anne Charlotte de Corday d’Armont was sent to the convent of Abbaye-aux-Dames in Caen at age 13 to receive an education. She remained in the convent until she left for Paris ten years later, studying the great French authors, including Voltaire, Rousseau and her own great-great-great-grandfather, the tragedian Pierre Corneille, whom Voltaire declared the French equivalent of Homer.

Her intellectual ferment was stimulated by the heady philosophical debates of the French revolutionaries. She sided with the moderate Girondins and was spurred to action by the September Massacres on 1792 in which more than 1,000 prisoners, half of Paris’ prison population, were summarily executed out of fear they were in league with Prussian invaders. Corday held Marat’s incendiary rhetoric and his radical Montagnard faction responsible for this outrage.

Determined that killing Marat would end the orgies of revolutionary violence taking hold in France, Charlotte set out for Paris on July 9th, 1792. She bought a knife, wrote her three-page manifesto
Adresse aux Français amis des lois et de la paix (“Address to the French, friends of Law and Peace”) and sighted her quarry. On the evening of July 13th, she gained admission to Marat’s quarters by claiming she had information about a Girondist plot in Caen. She was shown into his room where he was in his sulfur bath. (His skin disease was so severe at this point that he basically never left the bath anymore.) She told him the names of the purported conspiracists and then stabbed him in the heart.

She had no intention of getting out of this alive. She knew she’d be arrested and executed for this crime and she came prepared: she had stashed the letter in her bodice. It was found during a search of her person after her arrest, but it was never entered into evidence at her trial because the prosecutor preferred to promote the politically expedient fiction that Corday was a royalist, nor did it square with the Montagnards’ insistence that Corday was but a tool of a vast Girondist conspiracy.

The last lines of her manifesto read:

My parents and friends should not be worried, no one knew my plans. I am attaching my baptismal certificate to this address to show what the weakest hand can do led by complete devotion. If I do not succeed in my enterprise, Frenchmen, I have shown you the way, you know your enemies, rise up, march and strike.

Charlotte Corday was tried, convicted and died four days after her victim, beheaded by guillotine. Her statement of purpose disappeared, reappearing at an auction in 1834. Since then it has been sold another seven times, passing from private collection to private collection. At first Normandy’s cultural heritage authorities tried to prevent this latest sale, fearing it could be acquired by a foreign buyer and leave the country. When they weren’t able to get it pulled from the auction, they chipped in with departmental and city authorities to bring this hugely significant manuscript back to Charlotte Corday’s beloved homeland.

Marie Antoinette’s poodle sells for 56 times pre-sale estimate

Modern(ish)

An 18th century portrait of a small dog believed to be Marie Antoinette’s toy poodle Pompon sold at auction on Friday for $279,400, 56 times the high pre-sale estimate of $5,000. This was totally unexpected, as several versions of this portrait exist and none of them have generated the kind of explosive interest that sparks an auction floor bidding war. Fifteen people were bidding against each other for this piece, inexplicably driving the price up into the stratosphere.

The painter was Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre who was active in Paris in the last quarter of the 18th century through the early 19th century. Very little is known about him. The only biographical information with a paper trail about him is that he was admitted to the Académie Saint-Luc, a Paris painters and sculptors guild, in 1777.

He made several versions of this dog portrait. There are differences in the grooming style, the backgrounds and the accessories in the room. One sitting on a red velvet bed sold for 11,875 euros, 10 times its very low estimate, at Sotheby’s in 2020. That same version sold for just a hair above estimate in Paris in 2021.

There is no evidence that Marie Antoinette commissioned the comparatively unknown Delamarre to paint her pooch. There’s no evidence that the portrait was even made in the dog’s lifetime, nor in the tragic queen’s. Not even the dog’s breed is certain. It has been billed variously as a Löwchen, a King Charles Cavalier spaniel and as a Bichon Frisé/Maltese.

If this is a portrait of one of Marie Antoinette’s many dogs, it was probably painted after her death as a souvenir for people with nostalgic feelings for the decapitated monarchs. That would explain why he cranked out several versions of the pup.

So the feeding frenzy for the one that just sold cannot really be explained by the quality or backstory of the painting itself. My theory is the dog looks so meme-like with his fluff-up-top, shaved-down-below style that bidders lost their minds a little.