A pair of doorknockers with Neptune and Hippocamps
Italian (Venetian) School
Category
Art / Sculpture
Date
circa 1850 - 1930
Materials
Bronze
Place of origin
Italy
Order this imageCollection
Anglesey Abbey, Cambridgeshire
NT 514968
Summary
Bronze, a pair of door knockers with Neptune and Hippocampus, Italian (probably Venetian) School, c. 1850-1930. A pair of bronze doorknockers in the form of a lyre, with in the centre the standing figure of the sea god Neptune, holding his trident in his raised right hand. He is accompanied by a pair of winged hippocamps, their foreparts in the form of a horse, the middle parts in the form of acanthus leaf, whilst their tail sections, which wind sinuously in an S-shape, are those of a dolphin or fish. At the base is a concave shell, with which the knocker could be grasped. The knocker is fixed to the door at the top, through a plate in the form of a grotesque monster mask. Modern casts of one of the most popular models of Venetian doorknocker, originally designed around the period c. 1550-1600.
Full description
Elaborate bronze door-knockers to adorn the large doors of Italian palaces began to be made in significant numbers from the sixteenth century, becoming especially popular in Venice and its neighbouring cities. This lyre-shaped model is one of the best-known types, with more than fifty examples recorded. It depicts Neptune, god of the sea, between two hippocamps, mythical animals, half horse and half sea creature, that are otherwise seen in art drawing Neptune’s chariot across the waves. The subject of the god of the sea would have been regarded as especially appropriate in the maritime republic of Venice. The Neptune doorknocker is traditionally said to have been designed by Alessandro Vittoria (1525-1608), one of the leading Venetian sculptors in the second half of the sixteenth century. It is possible that the finely-modelled figure of Neptune might have originally owed something to Vittoria, but otherwise it is generally impossible to attribute bronze doorknockers, a staple product of the numerous bronze foundries that flourished in Venice from the sixteenth into the twentieth centuries. The Neptune doorknocker seems always to have been one of the most popular designs, no fewer than eleven examples being listed on Venetian houses in 1758, when the artist Giovanni Grevembroch made a visual survey of doorknockers in the city. The highly decorative Venetian doorknockers began to be actively sought by collectors in the nineteenth century, for example Charles Drury Fortnum (1820-1899), whose collections of Renaissance sculpture and decorative arts are now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Fortnum owned an example of the Neptune doorknocker (Nicholas Penny, Catalogue of European Sculpture in the Ashmolean Museum. 1540 to the Present Day, 3 vols., Oxford 1992, no. 181), the history of which he was able to trace back to around 1846, which Fortnum stated was ‘long before the modern casts were fabricated for sale.’ They were certainly being produced in Venetian foundries, and no doubt elsewhere, by the latter decades of the nineteenth century. It is likely that the majority of the many examples known today were in fact made as late as the nineteenth or even the twentieth centuries. The pair at Anglesey Abbey are certainly modern in origin. In both the figure of Neptune has been cast separately from the remainder of the knocker and fixed to it with modern screws. Examples that are more likely to be old casts include those in the British Museum (Jeremy Warren, ‘Sculpture in the Waddesdon Bequest’ in eds. Pippa Shirley and Dora Thornton, A Rothschild Renaissance: A New Look at the Waddesdon Bequest in the British Museum, London 2017, pp. 83-99, pp. 86-88, fig. 110), the Museo Correr in Venice and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna (Victoria Avery, Vulcan’s Forge in Venus’ City. The Story of Bronze in Venice 1350-1650, Oxford 2011, pp. 344-45, fig. 10.55). Jeremy Warren 2019
Provenance
Acquired by Urban Huttleston Rogers Broughton, 1st Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966), by 1932; identifiable in the Anglesey Abbey inventory of 1932, p. 28, Entrance Hall, valued at £24 the pair; identifiable in the Anglesey Abbey inventory of 1940, p. 26, Entrance Hall, valued at £24 the pair; bequeathed in 1966 to the National Trust by Lord Fairhaven (1896-1966) with the house and the rest of the contents.
Credit line
Anglesey Abbey, The Fairhaven Collection (The National Trust)
Makers and roles
Italian (Venetian) School , sculptor
References
‘Anglesey Abbey, Lode, Cambridgeshire. An Inventory and Valuation of Furniture, Pictures, Ornamental Objects, Household Effects and A Collection of Miniatures.. prepared for Insurance Purposes’, Turner, Lord and Ransom, November 1932, p. 28. 'Anglesey Abbey, Lode, Cambridgeshire. An Inventory and Valuation of Furniture, Books, Ornamental Items & Household Effects .. prepared for Insurance Purposes’, Turner, Lord and Ransom, April 1940, p. 26. Christie, Manson & Woods 1971: The National Trust, Anglesey Abbey, Cambridge. Inventory: Furniture, Textiles, Porcelain, Bronzes, Sculpture and Garden Ornaments’, 1971, p. 142.