Summary

Sculpture, bronze; Portrait bust of Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321); Sabatino de Angelis foundry, after a bronze model; c. 1870-1920. The bronze bust depicts the Italian poet Dante Alighieri, considered the greatest of all Italian poets. Dante is especially celebrated for his long poem La Divina Commedia, ‘The Divine Comedy’, which tells the story of the poet’s soul after death as it travels through the three stages of afterlife - Inferno or Hell, Purgatorio and Paradiso - on its way to heaven and God. Although Dante has remained admired and loved over the centuries, there was a special surge of interest in the poet and his works in the nineteenth century, not just in Italy but also in Britain and elsewhere. The nineteenth-century owner of Sudbury Hall, George John Warren Vernon, 5th Baron Vernon (1803-1866) and his second son, the Honourable William John Borlase-Warren-Venables-Vernon (1834-1919), were both passionate scholars of Dante. Among the 5th Lord Vernon’s publications on Dante, the summit was his sumptuous edition of the Inferno (‘Hell’) in three folio volumes, which was published between 1858 and 1865 and became known as the ‘Vernon Dante'. Lord Vernon had an outstanding library at Sudbury, but which by the end of the 1920s had been completely dispersed. The presence at Sudbury of the bronze bust of Dante, given to the National Trust by Dame Joan Evans, is therefore an important reminder of this chapter in the story of the house and its owners. The bust is a modern cast, made in the Neapolitan foundry of Sabatino de Angelis, of a bronze in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples, which was probably made in the sixteenth century.

Full description

A bronze bust of the Italian poet Dante Alighieri showing him facing forwards, the shallow bust cut off at the shoulders, wearing a tunic buttoned up to the collar and a cap with a liripipe (tail) and ear-caps, at the end of which are strings. The bust has an inscribed inscription across the front, DAN / TES, and the cast-in signature of its maker, Sabatino de Angelis, is on the back. The bust has a hole in the top of the head and there are a number of small casting flaws. It is mounted on a black ebonised-wood plinth. Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321) is regarded as one of the finest poets who has ever lived, and his masterpiece ‘La Divina Commedia’ as the greatest work of Italian literature. As the poet T.S. Eliot famously wrote, ‘Dante and Shakespeare divide the world between them. There is no third.’ Dante has never ceased to be venerated as a great writer and man, including during the Renaissance period. The bust at Sudbury Hall is a reproduction of a bronze portrait bust of the poet that was probably made in the sixteenth century, in Florence or Rome. The bust, which today is in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples (La Collezione Farnese 1996, p. 90, no. 2.108), may have entered the Farnese collections in Rome soon after it was made. Until the late eighteenth century, when the Farnese collections were transferred to Naples, the portrait was one of the sights of the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. It was first recorded in the so-called ‘Room of the Philosophers’ in Palazzo Farnese in 1644, making it one of the earlier known portraits of the poet. The bust was very highly regarded by the American scholar Frank Jewett Mather who, in his study of the portraits of the poet, suggested it was most probably made in Florence and was ultimately derived from a portrait of Dante by the poet's near contemporary the Italian painter Taddeo Gaddi (c. 1290-1366), but with some elements that reflected ther early portraits of the poet. Mather described it as a ‘tragic bust’, suggesting that ‘as an imaginative conception of the poet it is incomparable, yet I doubt if it is quite a true portraiture' (Mather 1921, pp. 38-41, figs. 32-33). In the nineteenth century, when this copy was made, Dante Alighieri became the object of an unprecedented surge in interest, in Italy but also elsewhere, not least Britain. He was a potent figure for the movement known as the Risorgimento, when many Italians sought freedom from their existing rulers and dreamt and eventually fought for a united Italy. Exiled for political reasons from his native Florence in 1301 and forced to spend the remaining years of his life wandering from city to city, Dante was an emblematic figure for the many nineteenth-century Italians who found themselves at one time or another in political exile (many of them in London), and an early symbol of national unity around a shared culture. Britain too, where there was much sympathy for the Risorgimento cause, saw a surge of interest in Dante. Sudbury Hall is an especially appropriate home for the bust of Dante, given to the National Trust by Dame Joan Evans (1893-1977), since George John Warren Vernon, 5th Baron Vernon (1803-1866) and his second son the Honourable William John Borlase-Warren-Venables-Vernon (1834-1919) were both passionate scholars of Dante. Among the 5th Lord Vernon’s publications on Dante, the summit was his sumptuous edition of the Inferno (‘Hell’) in three folio volumes, published between 1858 and 1865, known as the ‘Vernon Dante.’ His son related in his memoir how, whilst living in Florence in the years around 1840 ‘I soon found out that my father was gathering into his circle a number of the most learned Dantists then living’, and he went on to how the Vernon Dante came about. His father 'worked at a great table with a semicircle of desks all round him, on which, in three tiers, lay open all the best commentaries on Dante then known to Dante students. Each page of his book had the text of the Inferno on the upper part of the page; in the middle of the page was his commentary, in which he rendered the text into literal modern Italian paraphrase; while notes occupied the bottom of the page.’ (Vernon 1917, pp. 18-19). The 5th Lord Vernon assembled a magnificent library of books and manuscripts, many of which were sold during his lifetime whilst the remainder of the library was dispersed in sales at Sotheby's in 1918, 1921 and 1928. The younger Vernon also edited and published various commentaries on Dante as a series of Readings on Divina Commedia, published in six volumes between 1889 and 1909. His main publication was an edition of an unpublished Latin commentary on the Divine Comedy by Benvenuto de Imola, a project that his father had planned but was unable to complete before his death. The younger Vernon gave his own library of books on Dante to his two clubs, the Athenaeum and the Travellers Club. The foundry operated in Naples by Sabatino de Angelis (1838– c. 1915) was established in 1840, presumably by Sabatino's father. Sabatino de Angelis and Son became, along with the Chiurazzi and Giorgio Sommer, one of the most successful and best-known of the Neapolitan foundries, which capitalised on the huge international demand in the later nineteenth century for high-quality copies of antiquities from Herculaneum, Pompeii, Rome and elsewhere. The demand for these copies increased exponentially, after the Italian government agreed in 1860 to allow the making of copies of objects in the collections of the archaeological museum in Naples. All three foundries published catalogues of the products they offered, the 1900 catalogue from Sabatino de Angelis proudly proclaiming on its cover that the firm supplied casts to various European royal houses, as well as leading museums in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Boston, Chicago, New York and elsewhere. In the 1870s, Sabatino de Angelis also entered into a joint venture with the rival Chiurazzi foundry, forming the Fonderie Artistiche Riunite, the main purpose of which was to cater for the burgeoning American market. It also published a catalogue in 1910, largely based on the 1900 de Angelis catalogue, suggesting that it was Sabatino De Angelis who provided the majority of the models for the joint venture. Although Sabatino de Angelis very largely manufactured reproductions of classical antiquities, especially from Pompeii and Herculaneum, the foundry did also reproduce a handful of more modern works, for example Giambologna’s Mercury. The bust of Dante would certainly have been made to meet the demand for images of the poet at a time of great enthusiasm for Dante and his work across Europe and America. It was available from the De Angelis foundry in two sizes, the original height of 31 cms. and a smaller version at 15 cms., and in two types of patination, the dark-brown described as ‘Herculaneum’ in the company’s catalogues, or the richer and brighter colour, called ‘moderne’. There are several other casts of the Naples portrait of Dante in UK museums, including examples in the Williamson Art Gallery in Birkenhead and the John Rylands Library in Manchester, both of these attributed to another sculptor, Salvatore Errico (1848–1934). The 5th Lord Vernon also seems to have collected medieval works of art from around the lifetime of Dante Alighieri. These have mostly been sold, but a seal matrix, for the Order of the Crociferi (or Cross-Bearers) in Bologna, probably made around 1265, survives at Sudbury (NT 653417). The young Dante was a student at the university of Bologna,in around 1287. Jeremy Warren March 2026