Summary

Silver, Reduction of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, Stefano Fedeli (1794-1870), 1815-40. A reduction in silver of the Column of Marcus Aurelius in Piazza Colonna, Rome, made in the last years of the Emperor’s reign, or after his death in A.D. 180. A tall Doric column embellished with a spiralling frieze of reliefs depicting events from the Danubian military campaigns of the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-80, reigned 161-180). The spiral effect running up the column is accentuated by a length of silver wire that runs around the column, from a hole in the bottom and into one at top. The spiral leads to a rectangular platform with lattice railings at top, upon which is a cylindrical construction, with a door, surmounted by a figure of an emperor. The column rests upon a plain rectangular base, in the front side of which is a door, above it a tablet with an inscription, whilst there are further inscriptions on the other three sides. Separately-made elements held together internally with iron rod, weighted at base with section of lead. The reduction of the column was made in Rome between 1815 and 1840 by the Roman silversmith Stefano Fedeli (1794-1870). The Column is the pair to a reduced copy of Trajan’s Column (NT 516407), also by Stefano Fedeli.

Full description

The Column of Marcus Aurelius is a Roman triumphal column, similar to the better-known Column of the Emperor Trajan, to which it today forms a sort of counterpart (for the Column, see Martin Beckmann, The Column of Marcus Aurelius. The Genesis and Meaning of a Roman Monument, Chapel Hill 2011). The Column commemorates the martial deeds of one of the greatest Roman emperors, Marcus Aurelius (A.D. 121-80, ruled A.D. 161-80), who is now principally remembered as a philosopher and the author of the Meditations. However, Marcus Aurelius spent much of his reign as Emperor engaged in wars with tribes living along the northern borders of the Empire, in the Danube region in present-day Romania and in Illyria, present day Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Marcus Aurelius died on campaign in A.D. 180 in Pannonia, today’s Austria or Hungary, whilst pursuing his wars against the Marcomanni tribe. The Column may have been raised in the last years of Marcus Aurelius’s lifetime or else just after his death. It was probably completed in A.D. 193, but is first certainly recorded towards the end of the third century A.D., in a list of the monuments of the Roman capital, when it was described as ‘a snail-column, which is one hundred seventy-five and a half feet [22.6 metres] tall'. The delightful description ‘snail-column’ refers to the way in which the sculpted relief decorations wind their way up the column, creating a narrative frieze that is the second-longest in the world after that of Trajan’s Column. The frieze recounts the Danubian military campaigns undertaken by Marcus Aurelius with his armies, beginning at the bottom with the crossing of the Danube on pontoon boats. The narrative is formed from essentially two campaigns, probably that against the Marcomanni and Quadi in the years A.D. 172 and 173, in the lower half, and the Emperor’s victories over the Sarmatians in the years 174 and 175 in the upper part, the two divided by a winged figure of Victory standing by a trophy of arms. As the inscriptions on the base record, the Column was restored in 1589 during the pontificate of Pope Sixtus V, under the direction of the architect Domenico Fontana. In order to level the ground around the Column, some ten feet (three metres) of the base is now underground, whilst the base walls lost their original relief decoration, which probably consisted of piles of weapons from the vanquished enemy, as still to be seen on Trajan’s Column. The Column would originally have been surmounted by a statue of the Emperor, which had also been lost by the sixteenth century. A statue of Saint Paul was placed on the top of the Column. The 1589 inscriptions mistakenly identified the Column as that of the Emperor Antoninus Pius, whose own column is lost. Interest in reproducing the friezes and making small reproductions of the Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius began to grow from the later decades of the eighteenth century onwards. It was sparked by the publication in 1774 by Giovanni Battista Piranesi of a series of engravings of Trajan’s column. A few years later, between 1779 and 1783, the goldsmith and founder Luigi Valadier made a reduction, albeit on a monumental scale, of Trajan’s Column in gilt-bronze, designed to contain the mechanism of a clock (Munich, Residenz, Schatzkammer: Alvar Gonzalez-Palacios, Luigi Valadier, New York/London 2018, pp. 221-24, fig. 5.15). Valadier’s magnificent rendition would inspire a series of further reductions of Trajan’s column, well into the nineteenth century. One of the best-known is a gilt-bronze reduction of Trajan’s column made by the goldsmith Giovacchino Belli (1756-1822) in 1819, in the Galleria d’Arte Moderna in Palazzo Pitti, Florence, which uniquely retains its original leather case (Inv. M.P.P. 1911, no. 10679. Kirsten Aschengreen Piacenti, ed., Curiosità di una reggia. Vicende della guardaroba di Palazzo Pitti, exh. cat., Palazzo Pitti, Florence 1979, p. 167, no. 128; Giovanni Agosti, Vincenzo Farinella and Giorgio Simoncini, eds., La Colonna Traiana e gli artisti francesi da Luigi XIV a Napoleone I, exh. cat., Villa Medici, Rome 1988, pp. 112-13; Stefano Susinno, ed., Maestà di Roma. Da Napoleone all’Unità d’Italia. Universale ed Eterna Capitale delle Arti, exh. cat., Scuderie del Quirinale et al., Rome 2003, p. 96, no. I.18). Giovacchino Belli and his son Pietro (1780-1828) also made over a period of seven years from 1808-15 the superb reductions in marble and gilt-bronze of the Arches of Septimius Severus and of Titus, bought by the Prince Regent in 1816 and today in the Royal Collection (RCIN 43916 and 43917; eds. Kate Heard and Kathryn Jones, George IV. Art and Spectacle, London 2019, pp. 187-88, figs. 14.3-14.4) As well as reductions of the two columns, reductions of the most famous obelisks to be seen in Rome were also popular in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. A pair is in Palazzo Pitti, Florence (Enrico Colle, Angela Griseri and Roberto Valeriano, Bronzi decorativi in Italia. Bronzisti e fonditori italiani dal Seicento all’Ottocento, Milan 2001, p. 234). In the early decades of the nineteenth century, reductions of the two columns and of the obelisks from the Piazza di San Giovanni Laterano and the Piazza del Popolo became typical gifts for the Pope to present to members of European ruling families (Alvar Gonzalez-Palacios,Il Tempio del Gusto. Le arti decorative in Italia fra classicism e barocco. Roma e il Regno delle Due Sicilie, 2 vols., Milan 1984, I, p. 169, figs. 323-26). For example, in 1817 Pope Pius VII commissioned a pair of gilt-bronze columns from the German-born founders Wilhelm Hopfgarten (1779-1860) and Ludwig Jollage,(1781-1837), for presentation as a gift at the conclusion of the Concordat between the Bavarian state and the Holy See (Hans Ottomeyer and Peter Pröschel, Vergoldete Bronzen. Die Bronzearbeiten des Späatbarock und Klassizismus, 2 vols., Munich 1986, I, p. 310, Taf. XLII, p. 404, Abb. 5.19.8). Hopfgarten and Jollage were among the most prolific manufacturers of reproductions of the columns in Rome, their casts of the two columns and of two famous obelisks in Rome among the most sought-after pieces produced in their foundry (Chiara Teolato, Hopfgarten and Jollage rediscovered. Two Berlin Bronzists in Napoleonic and Restoration Rome, Rome 2016, pp. 12-14, figs. 5-6). The casts by Hopfgarten and Jollage are though of modest quality, simpler in detailing and inferior overall to the silver reductions at Anglesey Abbey, which are among the most important objects of this type to have survived. The reduction of Trajan’s Column at Anglesey Abbey and its companion reduction of the Column of Trajan (NT 516407) were made by the Roman silversmith Stefano Fedeli. Fedeli’s two columns are almost the same size as Giovacchino Belli’s gilt-bronze reduction of Trajan’s Column in Florence, whilst both are surmounted by very similar small figures of emperors. Fedeli’s two columns are impressive high-quality works, in which the overall forms of the columns and the complex figurative friezes are copied fairly closely. In order to give a stronger ancient Roman flavour to his reductions, Fedeli replaced the figure of Saint Paul with a generic figure of an emperor, presumably intended for Marcus Aurelius. Stefano Fedeli (Bulgari, I, p. 437; Bulgari Calissoni, p. 197; Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, XLV Farinacci-Fedrigo, Rome 1995, pp. 610-11) became a master in 1815. In 1831 he married as his second wife Anna Pichler, daughter of the celebrated gem-engraver Giuseppe Pichler. Fedeli worked in a generally neo-classical style, his workshops moving between various locations in central Rome over a career of more than fifty years. Among his major works is a large figure depicting the Return of Ulysses, formerly in the collections of the Earls of Jersey (Bulgari, I, Tav. 25). He also made various works for churches in Rome and a writing set for the city council of Spoleto. A number of his works, including a silver-gilt inkstand surmounted by a seated satyr, soup and sugar dishes and an oil lamp with the figure of a dancing woman in the style of Canova, were published by Salvatore Fornari (Gli Argenti Romani, Rome 1968, unpaginated but pp. 240-42). They give a good sense of the range of his work, within an overall Neo-classical idiom. Fedeli’s mark, S and F with the number 125 within a diamond-shaped lozenge, was used by him between 1815 and 1866. The warranty mark, with a papal mitre between crossed keys within a shield (Bulgari, I, p. 32, no. 1690, was used between 1815 and 1870 for works at the second level of fineness of silver, 10.16 ounces (889/1000). It is not known when or where Lord Fairhaven acquired the two columns. They are recorded in the undated inventory of silver at Anglesey Abbey, at a valuation of £100 for each column. Jeremy Warren 2020