Summary

Copper alloy, The Parthenon Frieze, cast by Giovanni Nisini (active late 19th and early 20th century), after models by John Henning the elder (1771-1851), cast Rome, Italy, c. 1900 after models of 1820. A reduced-size reproduction in copper alloy of the Parthenon frieze, made by John Henning the Elder (1771-1851), in the form of six horizontal strips forming a single plaque. This set of the reliefs were made as late as c. 1900, in the Roman foundry of Giovanni Nisini. Mounted on the wall within a plaster frame.

Full description

The Parthenon is the world-famous temple on the Acropolis in Athens, Greece, dedicated to the goddess Athena. Completed in 483 BC, the Parthenon is regarded as the most important surviving building of Classical Greece, whilst the sculptures which formerly decorated it are recognised as being among the greatest works of sculpture ever made. By the post-Medieval period, Greece had become a province of the Ottoman empire, ruled from Istanbul. In 1687 the city was besieged and captured by Venetian forces under the leadership of Francesco Morosini. During the siege the temple, which was being used by the defending Ottomans as a powder store, was hit by a Venetian shell, the explosion partly destroying the building and seriously damaging the sculpted reliefs adorning it. Between 1801 and 1812 the Earl of Elgin, British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Istanbul, arranged for the removal from Athens of around half the sculptures of the Parthenon, which arrived in Britain in 1812, being sold by Lord Elgin to the British Museum in 1816. Already at the time of their removal, there were fierce arguments both against and in favour of Lord Elgin’s actions, which have continued to this day. This dispute aside, the arrival of the Parthenon marbles had an enormous impact on taste in Britain, especially the development of Neo-Classical sculpture and ornament. The Scottish sculptor John Henning hoped to benefit from the excitement that the arrival in London of the sculptures had provoked. He expected his remarkable miniature copies of the Parthenon frieze to make him a respectable income, but they were widely pirated, especially in France. The unfortunate Henning eventually died in poverty. The sculptor John Henning was born in Paisley and, as a young man working in Edinburgh, began to develop a reputation as a fine modeller of medals and small portraits in relief. In 1811 he moved to London where he fortuitously had the opportunity to see the celebrated marbles, removed with permission from the Parthenon temple in Athens by Lord Elgin, which had arrived in London and in 1811 were being stored at Burlington House (today’s Royal Academy of Arts) in Piccadilly, London. At a time when the fashionable art form was Neo-classicism, with its exaltation of the art of ancient Greece and Rome, the Parthenon sculptures were seen by many as representing the summation of artistic endeavour. Thus, like many other contemporary artists, Henning found himself astounded by the power of these great sculptures. Having obtained permission from Lord Elgin to study and draw from them, Henning made the decision to move permanently to London, where he would spend the remainder of his life. He worked day-after-day drawing the marbles, continuing to do so after they were bought for the nation and moved to the British Museum in 1816. The notion of creating small-scale images from the frieze arose from a sitting in 1812 with Princess Charlotte (1797-1817), only daughter of King George IV, who asked to see Henning’s drawings of the Parthenon frieze, and then requested the sculptor to reproduce one for her in ivory. From this arose the idea of reproducing the whole of the frieze in the form of miniature cast reliefs based on his drawings. The task was to become the great labour, and ultimately tragedy, of Henning’s life, occupying him ‘twelve long years from the morning’s dawn to the gloaming.’ The moulds for the casts were carved in intaglio into pieces of slate. In an advertisement placed in The Morning Chronicle for 3 November 1820, Henning announced that he had completed ‘his miniature bas reliefs from the Frieze of the Cella of the Parthenon, to a scale of one twentieth of the originals, being two inches high, and twenty-four feet four inches long, containing nearly 500 human figures, horses, bulls, &c.’ Henning made an all but complete reconstruction of the frieze, thus not just the marbles that had arrived in London, but also those remaining on the Parthenon and scattered in collections elsewhere. To do this he made use of the drawings commissioned by Lord Elgin from the artists working for him in Athens, but also drawings made by the French artist Jacques Carrey in Athens in 1674, a few years before the partial destruction of the temple in 1687, when Venetian forces under Francesco Morosini attacked the city. In a further advertisement, of 18 December 1820 (Malden 1977, doc. 18), Henning explained that his reliefs were being published in the form of books of small plaster reliefs, at a price of £31 10s. At the same time, he was also publishing a companion set of reliefs of the frieze from the Temple of Apollo at Bassae, which had been acquired for the British Museum in 1814, as well as bas-reliefs after Raphael’s Cartoons, the Italian Renaissance painter’s celebrated full-scale designs for tapestries. Henning explained that the Parthenon reliefs were ‘published in six parts, from forty-six to fifty-four inches long, each part framed at length separately; they form elegant ornaments for a chimney-piece; or, fitted up in emulation of volumes, are adapted to the library. Any part, or portions of a part, can be had separately.’ In 1828, John Henning and his son were to reproduce the Parthenon frieze on a larger scale, on the exterior of the Athenaeum Club in London, with a full-size representation 40 inches high. Around the same time, they also carved portions of the frieze on Decimus Burton’s arch at Hyde Park Corner. Another frieze was made for the stairwell of the Royal College of Surgeons building in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London, but was damaged during the Blitz in 1941. Henning’s hopes of securing the major part of his living through the sale of casts of his small reliefs of the Parthenon frieze were dealt a grievous blow by the lack at that time of copyright laws. His reliefs were quickly pirated by unscrupulous publishers in Britain and further afield, one French firm boasting in 1835 that it had sold 12,000 copies of pirated low relief engravings of Henning’s miniatures. When in 1841 Henning issued a new advertisement for his miniatures, he protested that ‘there being no legal protection for such property, the work has been pirated to such an extent, and sold in Rome, Paris, Munich, Vienna; all over the British dominion have imperfect impressions of this work been diffused by pirates, to the disgrace of the Artist, from their inferiority to his own Casts from the original Intaglios…’ Henning in 1847 noted that whilst ‘poor Italian and French lads’ had made imperfect casts, these had at least retained his signature, whereas the French publishers had had his name erased from their productions. By the time of his new advertisement in 1841, Henning had been forced to reduce drastically the prices he charged. He was to die a decade later in poverty. Giovanni Nisini’s foundry operated in the late 19th and early 20th century his showroom being situated at 63 via del Babuino in Rome. He won gold medals at the 1894 Antwerp exhibition and the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1900. In Baedeker’s 1909 guide to Central Italy and Rome, Nisini was recorded (pp. 160-61) as a dealer in original bronzes and as a supplier of ‘Copies of ancient bronzes and marbles’. He seems to have been the founder of choice for the South African sculptor Anton van Wouw (1862-1945). Jeremy Warren 2019