Caption

William John Bankes (1786–1855) was a pioneering Egyptologist and an avid collector of art and antiquities. He was also particularly fond of tortoises, and kept several as pets. While exiled in Europe in October 1853, he commissioned the sculptor Baron Carlo Marochetti (1805–67) to make 16 bronze tortoises to support marble urns he had purchased for the garden of his country estate at Kingston Lacy. With the season of tortoise hibernation imminent, Bankes supplied one of his own pets as the model, and a mould was carefully taken at Marochetti’s studio. A letter to his sister reveals his delight at the creature’s adventure across Paris for the job. In addition to having a natural sympathy for this animal, Bankes may have chosen it as a support to allude to the mythological archetype of the ‘Cosmic Tortoise’, which bears the world on its massive shell. Sharp-eyed visitors to Kingston Lacy will find tortoises elsewhere in its interiors, including six of them as the feet of a pair of candelabra in the Saloon.

Summary

Sculpture, bronze; a tortoise; Carlo Marochetti (1805-1867); 1853-55. A series of sixteen bronze tortoises modelled by the sculptor Baron Carlo Marochetti, after a pet Greek or spur-thighed tortoise, owned by William John Bankes. They were commissioned by Bankes for use as supports for marble urns carved by Bartolomeo Barini in 1851-52 and now displayed on the terrace at Kingston Lacy.

Full description

Sixteen bronze figures of tortoises, the model cast from a live male Greek or spur-thighed tortoise (testudo graeca). The sixteen bronzes are all but identical in form, each showing the animal facing forwards, its four legs extended. They are hollow underneath, with remains of casting sprues on the underside on the tail and under the animal’s breast (sprues are extrusions on a bronze cast that are the ends of the tubular channels which, in the bronze casting process, carry molten metal into and out of the mould of the object being cast). There is a hole in the shell towards the back, to allow the tortoises to be fitted to the four Verona marble vases by Bartolomeo Barini (NT 1257624), for which William Bankes intended they should serve as feet. Across the sixteen bronze casts, which were all cast from the same basic model prepared by Carlo Marochetti, there are only minor differences in length and in finish. Some have slightly smoother and others slightly rougher surfaces, whilst one group has more visible sprues. William Bankes would have come across very many tortoises in the course of his travels in Egypt and the Levant between 1814 and 1821. He clearly had a great fondness for these animals and tortoises are known to have been kept as pets at Kingston Lacy. Bankes had tortoise feet added to various works of art at Kingston Lacy, including a bronze inkstand (NT 1255214) and two large wooden candelabra (NT 1254543). It is not known though, to what extent the animals might have held any deeper significance for William Bankes. Slow-moving but long-lived, for the ancient Greeks the tortoise was associated with death, but also with music, its shell being used for the making of lyres. In the Renaissance period, the tortoise became a symbol to promote the virtue of caution against overhastiness, notably through the motto ‘Festina Lente’ (‘Make haste slowly’). This device was especially significant for the Medici rulers of Renaissance Florence. It was one of the favourite mottoes of Grand Duke Cosimo I de’Medici (1519-1574), who illustrated it with a tortoise carrying on its back a sail. William Bankes would certainly have seen tortoises being used as base supporters in various Florentine works of art, including Andrea del Verrocchio’s tomb of Piero and Giovanni de’Medici, completed in 1472, in the church of San Lorenzo, or the pair of obelisks in Piazza Santa Maria Novella, designed by Bartolomeo Ammanati in 1570 but only erected in 1608. A set of four bronze tortoises made by the Florentine founder Zanobi Lastricati (1508-90) to serve as bases for a bronze statue of the god Mercury are now in the Robert H. Smith collection in Washington D.C. (Radcliffe and Penny 2004, no. 4). The four tall vases that are now supported by Marochetti’s tortoises were made by the Veronese sculptor Bartolomeo Barini in 1851-52, to the commission of William Bankes. Bankes made a number of design drawings for the vases incorporating the tortoises, suggesting that they were not afterthoughts, but were part of his orioginal conception for the urns. One drawing (Dorset History Centre, Bankes Papers, FA/11/8/56) has inscriptions in Italian and is dated 1852, so was probably lent to Bartolomeo Barini when he was sculpting the vases. The drawing and its inscription reflect the importance for William Bankes of the precise distance by which the bodies of the bronze tortoises should project beyond the vases. A second inscription in English at the bottom of the drawing casts further light on Bankes's concern to ensure the right position: ‘June 1852. Copy from the rough plan sent to England in the bottom of one of the marble vases […] on the section sent of the same was noted that the projecting turn over of the acanthus leaf should answer to the centre of a tortoise. But I saw by actual experiment that the effect is better placed contrariwise in the interval between tortoise and tortoise.’ Despite his realisation, the tortoises were in the end after all placed directly underneath each acanthus leaf. Bankes had a number of objects cast in Venetian foundries, mostly based on models supplied by the sculptor Angelo Giordani (see for instance NT 1255185). The problems that he experienced in getting Giordani to complete commissions may have influenced his decision not to have his tortoise feet modelled and cast locally in Venice, whiulst he may have particularly wanted one of his Kingston Lacy tortoises to serve as the model. Instead therefore he asked Carlo Marochetti, with whom he had recently renewed contact after a long gap, to design and oversee the production of the bronze tortoises in England. By 1853, when he was approached by Bankes for this job, Marochetti had become one of the most successful and sought-after sculptors in Europe. William Bankes had long admired his work, in 1840-41 playing a significant role in helping to obtain for the sculptor, then largely unknown in Britain, the commission for the bronze equestrian statue of the Duke of Wellington, to be erected in Glasgow (for this commission, see NT 1255215). As Marochetti’s reputation grew he received a steady stream of lucrative commissions from British patrons, as a consequence deciding in 1848 to settle in Britain. These commissions included the major project at Kingston Lacy for the set of life-size bronze statues of King Charles I with Sir Ralph and Lady Bankes , the heroine of the siege of Corfe Castle (NT 1255195). Marochetti wrote to Bankes on 17 October 1853, that ‘We have begun work on your tortoises and they will be ready shortly; one of my men was free, so I put him to work on it’ (‘On a mis la main à l’oeuvre pour vos tortues, ells seront faites très prochainement; un de mes hommes était libre et je l’ai mis à l’oeuvre de suite.’ Bankes Papers, HJ/1/1247). The next reference to the tortoises comes on 28th October, in a letter from Bankes in Paris to his sister Anne, Lady Falmouth: ‘Think of my carrying a live tortoise in a bag all the way from the Palais Royal! He had offered to superintend & direct the casting of these for my upright vases, I knew his hands to be too full to think much of such trifles at his return, and moreover tortoises bury themselves before the end of this month, so, the only way to make sure of having them this year in bronze, was to induce him to take one from home as his ‘compagnon du voyage’, and I actually went and fetched it myself; which perhaps you will call to mind when you see it multiplied to the number of 16; the success of the casting of the first, he writes me, has been admirable.’ (Bankes Papers, HJ/1/1358) This tells us that tortoises were kept at Kingston Lacy and that, on one of his visits to Dorset in connection with the commission for the three bronze statues, Marochetti must have taken one of the animals back to his studio in London, to use it as the basis for the wax model from which the bronze casts were made. Marochetti must have then brought the tortoise with him to Paris in October 1853, handoing it over to William Bankes when the two men met. Perhaps Bankes took the animal back to Venice with him. From the references in the correspondence, it is clear that for these routine productions, Marochetti did little more than oversee their modelling and casting at a foundry in Birmingham. By the time of William Bankes’s death in April 1855, the casting of the tortoises had been completed and the tortoises had arrived at Kingston Lacy, but they appear to have been among a number of commissions for which the sculptor had not yet received full payment. In a letter of 16 October 1855 to William’s brother George Bankes, in response to which the outstanding sums were all paid, Carlo Marochetti listed the cost of modelling and casting the tortoises as £65. In July 1992, four of the tortoises were removed from their vase and stolen from the gardens at Kingston Lacy. Nearly thirty years later, in 2021, they were identified in an auction and recovered. The vases on display in the gardens have now been equipped with replica casts of the tortoises. Jeremy Warren December 2023