Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Portrait Busts and Mythical Beings

François Masson
Portrait of Madame Roland
ca. 1792-93
marble
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

From 1791 to 1793  at the melodramatic pinnacle of the French Revolution  Madame Roland was one of the most politically powerful individuals in France. Furthering her husband's government career and using his position as a lever, Madame Roland became famous as figurehead, spokesperson, and decision-maker for the Girondist faction. When that faction fell and was purged by Robespierre in 1793, Madame Roland went to the guillotine. This she accomplished with a noble, fearless demeanor, dressed in a beautiful white gown, with strands of her beautiful black hair falling about her shoulders. Michelet in his once-definitive 19th-century history of the Revolution, depicted her as a tragic Roman heroine transported to the modern age.

Jean-Antoine Houdon
Portrait of Giuseppe Balsame, called Count Alessandro Cagliostro
ca. 1786
plaster
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

The Encylcopaedia Britannica lists Alessandro, Count di Cagliostro (1743-1795) under the designation Italian Charlatan. He had been an enormously fashionable conductor of seances in Paris during the mid-1780s. In 1789, just before the French Revolution occurred, Cagliostro was banished from France, after a period of imprisonment in the Bastille. He returned to Italy, where his wife "the Roman beauty Lorenza Feliciani" denounced him to the Inquistion as "a heretic, magician, conjuror and Freemason." He was promptly imprisoned again, and it was in an Italian prison a few years later that he died.

Giovanni Bandini
Portrait of Cosimo I de' Medici
ca. 1572
marble
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"Italian political leaders showed a preference for having themselves depicted in the manner of the great heroes and warriors of classical antiquity. Their intention was to exalt their authority both through their military and political deeds and through their own image." Cosimo I de' Medici seized control of the government in Florence at age seventeen, following the opportune assassination of a relative. Giovanni Bandini carved him in marble much later, after Cosimo had retired from a lifetime of satisfied power-consolidation.

Domenico Guidi
Portrait of Pope Alexander VIII
1691
gilded terracotta
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Alexander VIII was almost eighty years old when chosen as Pope in 1689. He belonged to the Ottoboni family of Venice, who were of course rich and powerful, but his election actually had been effected by agents of Louis XIV, the young French king, who expected political concessions in return. In his short reign – slightly more than a year  the new Pope apparently spent most of his time and energy enriching his own family. That was the papal tradition, and he is remembered as an ardent follower of it.    

Barthélémy Prieur
Portrait of Marie de' Medici, Queen of France
ca. 1601-1603
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Barthélémy Prieur
Portrait of Marie de' Medici, Queen of France
ca. 1601-1603
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Marie de' Medici (1575-1642) is dear to posterity as the principal patron of Rubens. She came from Florence as a young girl in 1600 to marry the French king, Henri IV (below). Many people, then and now, have believed she was involved in her husband's assassination ten years later. Certainly she took up the government with enthusiasm after he died, and proceeded to reverse many established policies.  

Barthélémy Prieur
Portrait of Henri IV, King of France
ca. 1601-1603
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Barthélémy Prieur
Portrait of Henri IV, King of France
ca. 1601-1603
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Felipe Ydalgo Buenfiglio
Bust of a female Saint
1750s
polychromed wood
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Ludovico Lombardo
Bust of Lucius Junius Brutus
ca. 1550
bronze
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Lucius Junius Brutus was "the legendary founder of the Roman Republic." His bronze representation, as venerated in modern Rome, appeared on this rolling screen here some while back. The bust above was one of many contemporary versions. A similar process of imaginary portraiture would be repeated a few centuries later in America, with idealized heads of George Washington multiplying and diversifying in widening circles after his death.  

Lansdowne Bust of Athena of Velletri
Rome
2nd century AD
marble
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
(gift of William Randolph Hearst)

Lambert Sigisbert Adam
Bust of Neptune
ca. 1725-27
terracotta
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Louis-Claude Vasse
Head of a Faun
ca. 1750
terracotta
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

imitator of Gianlorenzo Bernini
Head of Proserpina
ca. 1770-1800
marble
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

I am grateful to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for making photographs of the sculpture collection available.