An inkstand in Italian Renaissance style
possibly Italian (Florentine) School
Category
Metalwork
Date
c. 1800 - 1830
Materials
Bronze
Measurements
120 x 190 mm; 160 mm (Diameter)
Place of origin
Italy
Order this imageCollection
Ickworth, Suffolk
NT 850853
Summary
Sculpture,bronze; an inkstand; Italian, perhaps Florence; c. 1800-1830. This inkstand is a rare example of the revival of interest in the designs and forms of the Renaissance period in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The main bowl is in the full Renaissance style but it seems most likely that the entire object was manufactured as one and so dates from the early nineteenth century. There is a central chamber concealed inside the bronze bowl which would have held a glass container for ink, with a removeable lid decorated with a mask. The holes in the wider lid around the inkwell were to allow quill pens to be rested or stored.
Full description
A bronze inkwell in the form of a circular bowl with three legs in the form of armless female figures with bifurcated legs ending in scrolled balls; between the supports the sides of the bowl are decorated on the sides with three bacchic masks. Inside, the bowl is fitted with a circular chamber with a hole in the bottom of the bowl. The chamber has a small detachable circular lid with a bacchic mask, whilst around it is a detachable flat lid with six evenly-spaced holes. This utensil is an inkstand. The circular vertical chamber concealed inside the bowl would once have been fitted with a glass vessel to contain ink, whilst quill pens could have rested or been stored in the holes in the main lid, which is in full neo-classical style and must date from the decades around 1800. At first sight, it appears to be a composite object, made up from a bronze bowl from the Renaissance period to which have been added later elements to turn it into an inkstand. The main bowl is in the style of the sort of Renaissance inkwells made in large numbers in Venetian foundries in the sixteenth through to the eighteenth centuries, although rather larger than most such vessels. However, the vertical circular chamber that emerges from the floor of the bowl would appear to have been cast with it (although this could only be definitely confirmed through scientific identification of the alloys of the metals). If as seems likely the main bowl and the chamber were indeed cast as one, then the whole object must have been made at the same time, even although the separately-cast lid with its holes for the quills seems to be made from a different alloy and to have quite a different facture to the main bronze bowl. The bowl would in this case in fact be a later pastiche of Renaissance-style motifs. The supports in the form of armless female figures with mermaid-like legs are strongly reminiscent of a puzzling bronze door handle in the form of the torso of a woman, likewise without arms, in the Wallace Collection, London (Inv. S69; Warren 2016, no. 156). This was long regarded as a Renaissance work from the sixteenth century, but bears no close resemblance to any bronze figures from that period. In fact, the closest parallels to the elaborately-dressed hair of the woman would seem to lie in the work of the Anglo-Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), who had a particular obsession with women’s hair (Solkin 2022, esp. pp. 46ff.). The hair of the female supports in the Ickworth inkstand is more conventional, although the carefully-arranged double tails that snake over each woman’s shoulder before ending in two curls at the front are certainly reminiscent of Fuseli but also of the Wallace Collection figure, currently regarded as Italian work from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Another key work for the context of the Ickworth inkwell is a large triangular inkstand in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York which in the nineteenth century was quite famous, when it was in the collection of the engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59). The inkstand was lent to the 1857 Art Treasures exhibition in Manchester, when it was regarded as a masterpiece from the sixteenth-century High Renaissance. The Met’s inkstand has been recently identified, not as a nineteenth-century pastiche, but as a bronze version of a silver inkstand designed by the eighteenth-century Italian silversmith Andrea Cinelli (active 1737-64), who worked in the Vatican in Rome and also in the city of Perugia (Jeffrey Fraiman in New York 2022). The revival of enthusiasm for the arts of the Renaissance was not entirely a nineteenth-century phenomenon. Whilst interest in the greatest Renaissance sculptors such as Michelangelo and Giambologna remained constant throughout the eighteenth century, collectors such as Horace Walpole (1717-97) at Strawberry Hill were beginning to take a broader interest in the arts of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The rediscovery and publication in 1728 of Benvenuto Cellini’s autobiography, leading to many further editions and translations into English and other languages throughout the eighteenth century, would also stimulate interest in bronze sculptures, to the extent that small bronze sculptures were often indiscriminately described as the work of Cellini in the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth centuries. The inkwell at Ickworth would appear therefore to be a very interesting example of a utensil made around 1800 in the Renaissance style, but very much with an eye to modern use. If as seems likely it was made in Italy, it could have been bought by the Herveys whilst they were living in Italy between 1817-19, as part of the family’s European tour. Jeremy Warren October 2025
Provenance
Part of the Bristol Collection. Acquired by the National Trust in 1956 under the auspices of the National Land Fund, later the National Heritage Memorial Fund.
Makers and roles
possibly Italian (Florentine) School, sculptor
References
Warren 2016: Jeremy Warren, The Wallace Collection. Catalogue of Italian Sculpture, 2 vols., London 2016 New York 2022: Denise Allen at el., eds., Italian Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2022 Solkin 2022: David Solkin, ed., with Ketty Gottardo, Fuseli and the Modern Woman. Fashion, Fantasy, Fetishism, exh.cat., Courtauld Institute of Art, London 2022