Style: Silver, Furniture, Ceramics

Style: Silver, Furniture, Ceramics

View full screen - View 1 of Lot 149. A PAIR OF NEOCLASSICAL BLEU TURQUIN MARBLE STANDING FIGURES OF ANTINOUS AS THE GOD OSIRIS, AFTER THE ANTIQUE.

Property from the Estate of Andrew Hartnagle

A PAIR OF NEOCLASSICAL BLEU TURQUIN MARBLE STANDING FIGURES OF ANTINOUS AS THE GOD OSIRIS, AFTER THE ANTIQUE

Lot Closed

April 22, 02:49 PM GMT

Estimate

20,000 - 30,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Property from the Estate of Andrew Hartnagle

A PAIR OF NEOCLASSICAL BLEU TURQUIN MARBLE STANDING FIGURES OF ANTINOUS AS THE GOD OSIRIS, AFTER THE ANTIQUE


on simulated marble wood pedestals

height of figures 5 ft.; height of pedestals 32 in.

152.4 cm; 81.3 cm

Sotheby's New York, 8-9 November 1985, lot 288

Christie's New York, 4 November 1992, lot 37

Egyptomania: Egypt in Western Art, 1730-1930, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musee du Louvre; Ottowa, National Gallery of Canada; Vienna, Kunsthistorischesmuseum (1994), nos.154-155, p.269-70.

Valeri Turchin, Country Estates Around Moscow (Moscow 1979)

The young favourite of the Emperor Hadrian, Antinous drowned in the Nile during an Imperial visit to Egypt in 130 AD, and the heartbroken Emperor had Antinous deified and ordered shrines to be built throughout the Empire. Due to the nature of his death, Antinous was often depicted as the Egyptian god Osiris wearing the traditional nemes headdress, and the most famous surviving example of this iconography is an over life-size statue unearthed at Hadrian's Villa in Tivoli in 1740 and displayed from 1742 in the Capitoline and from 1838 in the Vatican Museum.


The Antinous statue quickly captured the public imagination and was reproduced by both Piranesi and Hubert Robert among others, contributing to the burgeoning interest in Egyptian taste as part of the broader neoclassical revival of the later 18th century. Cardinal Albani incorporated a pair of copies of the Vatican statue in his Roman villa constructed between 1747 and 1767, and versions were recorded in the gardens of the Villa Borghese and the Palazzo Barberini.


North of the Alps, a virtually identical pair of figures flank the door of the Blue Hall at the Palace of Ostankino near Moscow (Turchin, 1979, pl.99). The palace was built between 1792 and 1798 by Count Sheremetev and his wife Princess Cherkasskaya. The majority of interior decoration was executed by Russian architect P. Argunov. In England the collector and connoisseur Thomas Hope had a version in his London house-museum in Duchess Street, visible in Plate VIII of his seminal Household Furniture and Interior Decoration (1807).


In France, the sculptor Pierre-Nicolas Beauvallet (1750-1818) produced a copy after the Vatican statue for the neo-Egyptian Fontaine du Fellah in the Rue de Sèvres in Paris, built in 1806, and a pair of bleu turquin marble Antinous figures attributed to Beauvallet and comparable to the offered lot are now in the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris.