A set of four enameled Gold and lapis figures of the Four Elements, Reinhold Vasters, Aachen, probably retailed by Frédéric Spitzer, Paris, circa 1870, the putti earlier, probably circle of Agostino Groppo of Genoa, late 16th or early 17th century

each on stepped lapis pedestal with gold band of lappets enameled in white and red, the putti with bodies enameled en ronde bosse in white, with gold hair and eyes; two with blue draperies and wings enameled in narrow bands of red and green, with attributes for Fire (torch and thunderbolt) and Air (bird ); two others with red drapery and wings enameled in wide bands of red and green, with attributes for Water (dolphin and shell with fishnet) and Earth (cornucopia and snake)

With Wartski, London, 1944

Cyril G.E. Bunt, "The Four Elements: A rare set of enamelled gold figures from Noth Italy" Connoisseur, June 1944, pp. xxvi-xxvii.
Miriam Krautwurst, Reinholt Vasters: Ein nederrheinischer Goldschmied des 19. Jahrhunderts in der Tradition alter Meister. Sein Zeichnungskonvolut im Victoria and Albert Museum, Trier (University doctoral thesis), 2003

The Mounting:
The attributes and wings on these figures are depicted in highly-finished colored drawings from the workshop of Reinhold Vasters (1827-1909), confirming his authorship of these parts.  Vasters was the son of a locksmith, and in 1853 entered his maker’s mark as a goldsmith in Aachen, near his birthplace.  The same year he was appointed restorer to the Aachen Cathedral treasury, and became known as a maker of church plate in gothic style.  However, it was his work in the Renaissance style which brought him prosperity, and later notoriety.  In association with the Vienna-born Paris dealer Frédéric Spitzer, he enhanced incomplete or damaged early works of art, or created them whole-cloth based on early examples.  Spitzer sold these on to the major collectors of the 1870s and 1880s, particularly members of the Rothschild family.  After Spitzer’s death in 1890, his collection (including remaining stock) was luxuriously published then dispersed by auction, with many pieces finding their way to American collectors such as J.P. Morgan, Benjamin Altman, and Henry Walters.

Long accepted as antiques, Vasters’ works have been recently identified through a group of drawings preserved at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  Sold at Vasters posthumous sale in Aachen in 1909, they were given to the V&A in 1919.  From these, many Vasters’creations, probably in association with Spitzer and the goldsmith Alfred André, have been identified, including thirty pieces in the Metropolitan Museum (Yvonne Hackenbroch, “Reinhold Vasters, Goldsmith” Metropolitan Museum of Art Journal 19/20 (1986), p. 164).

From his beginnings at the Cathedral Treasury, repairing and reworking genuine ancient items was one of Vasters’ specialties.  Contemporary accounts credited Spitzer with persuading clergy to sell him old liturgical items cheaply, because of damage and wear, while offering to replace them with new creations in “historical” styles that would better suit contemporary religious practice (ibid. p. 169). When Vasters loaned almost 500 pieces from his own collection to a Kunsthistorische Ausstellung in Düsseldorf in 1902, the group included fractured rock crystal vessels and orphan lids and pedestals.  These suggest less a finished “collection” than the contents of a workshop, the antique raw material around which to create a finished complete item for Spitzer's clientele.  Ms. Hackenbroch’s study of Vasters’ work distinguishes between “gold-mounted rock crystals of sixteenth and seventeenth-century origin” and those of nineteenth-century origin, and this divide is echoed in the character of the V&A drawings; there are fewer whole designs than there are small, exquisitely rendered details, suggesting enhancements to existing forms.

The drawings associated with the offered lot are a case in point.  First published by Miriam Krautwurst in her 2003 doctoral thesis, these beautifully colored designs show the attributes held by each figure, and designs for the two patterns of wings.  The figures, whose origins will be considered in the next section, were the sort of fragments with which Spitzer and Vasters excelled.  Their poses required pedestals; they were supplied in richly colored lapis lazuli, enhanced by enameled gold moldings.  Their open and outstretched hands required objects; rather than the religious emblems that they probably originally held, a secular program was developed – perhaps to better appeal to non-Catholic or Jewish collectors. 

 

The Figures:
In his 1944 article in The Connoisseur, Cyril G.E. Bunt – author of The Goldsmiths of Italy – associated these figures with the work of Niccolo Roccatagliata (Genoa, c. 1560- Venice, 1636 or before).  This sculptor is particularly known for his small bronze sculptures of putti, used on both religious and secular items.  Interestingly, Roccatagliata made a group of putti respresenting the Four Elements for Prince Johann Adam von Lichtenstein, about 1590-95 (Anthony Radcliffe and Nicholas Penny, Art of the Renaissance Bronze, 1500-1650: The Robert H. Smith Collection, no. 18, pp. 112-115).  Seated on short shaped pedestals, the figures hold a bird, a fish, a clod and a brazier; their expressions, though, have a sweetness different from the offered lot.

Roccatagliata apprenticed in 1571 with the Genoese goldsmith Agostino Groppo, and continued his study with Agostino’s son Cesare before he moved to Venice.  Even after his move, the two remained close enough that they collaborated in 1596 on a pair of large bronze candelabra, decorated with putti, for the Venetian church of S. Giorgio Maggiore.  Further, on Cesare Groppo’s death in 1606 he left his models to Roccatagliata  (C. Kryza-Gersch, “New Light on Nicolò Roccatagliata and his son Sebastian Nicolini”, Nuovi Studi, vol. 5, 1998, anno III, pp. 112 & 123, nn. 14 & 15, cited by Patricia Wengraf in her cataloging of a Roccatagliata putto).

The strong profiles and Roman noses of the figures here are closest to the earlier work of Agostino, in particular one of the surmounting angels of the“Cassa del Corpus Domini” in the Treasury of the Cathedral of San Lorenzo, Genoa.  Designed and begun in the mid 16^th century, it was enriched between 1567 and 1570 with three-dimensional figures of angels, prophets and saints by Agostino and Cesare Groppo, aided by their relatives the northern goldsmiths Frances and William Sestelle (see Franco Boggero and Farida Simonette, Argenti Genovasi da Parata, p. 224).  Unlike the softer charm of Roccatagliata, these are vigorously modelled figures with prominent features, suiting the formality of their religious role.

In 1584-85, on the same piece, the German-born goldsmith Nicholas Olestar accompanied Grosso’s figures with four angels bearing the instruments of the Passion.  Centering each side of the “Cassa”, their feel but even more their pose evokes the putti offered here: one arm upraised, the other extended below to hold something, and the eyes uplifted.  This suggests that these enameled gold figures, mounted by Vasters as the Four Elements, may have begun by holding the emblems of Christ’s Passion, on a work created in the circle of Italian and Northern goldsmiths operating around Agostino Groppo in Genoa and Venice, in the late 16^th or very early 17^th century.

A related Italian gold figure of St. Sebastian, the body enameled en ronde bosse in white with gold hair and drapery, was offered as part of Twenty-Five Renaissance Jewels and Works of Art, from the collection of Arturo Lopez-Willshaw, Sotheby’s, London, 10 June 1974, lot 25. Described as “probably Milanese, second half of the 16^th Century,” it had also been enhanced with a later mounting in hardstones and enamel.