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A PAIR OF ITALIAN POLYCHROME MARBLE OVER-LIFESIZE BUSTS, ON PEDESTALS SECOND HALF 19TH CENTURY Modelled as pendant figures, each with a white headdress inset with variant marble and alabaster stripes and with hoop earrings suspending lapis beads, the male figure wearing a portasanta marble fez and dressed in a white marble collar and green breccia tunic mounted with red and yellow marble cabochons, the female figure with a feather in her turban, the top of her head covered with a cap decorated with a crescent moon and star, her torso secured with a red marble belt and carved in imitation of fur; both figures raised on 'S'-scroll sided socles above spreading hexagonal bardiglio Capella marble pedestals veneered with red alabaster panels and carved with breccia corallina and giallo marble drapery, respectively The male bust: 31 in. (79 cm.) high, and with pedestal: 78 in. (198 cm.) high, overall The female bust: 30 ? in. (77 cm.) high, and with pedestal: 77 ? in. (196 cm.) high, overall
These magnificent statuary busts of monumental scale are exemplary of the Lombardo–Veneto school of orientalist sculpture popularised from the 17th century.?The art and architecture of Venice, Europe’s maritime gateway to Turkey, the Levant and North Africa for more than a millennium, is imbued with an dazzling array of influences. Venetian sculptors were inspired by the merchants and different peoples, and the luxuriant and colourful materials and commodities traded – silks, spices, marbles and precious stones – to create arresting figural sculpture in multicoloured marbles and alabasters. The present examples can be distinguished by their scale, vibrant colours, clothes, jewellery and, especially, mounted as they are atop columns swathed in drapery.
Enchanted by the heady mix of Venice, visiting Grand Tourists disseminated throughout Europe these exotic depictions which demonstrated both their owner's wealth and taste, but also?the reach of their cultured and extensive travels. Decorative busts of this type were prized in the collection of Cardinal Richelieu as early as 1643 and constituted important decorative elements of the residences of?18th and 19th century connoisseurs. By the second half of the 19th century they became de rigueur decoration for the great interiors of the Gilded Age. A pair of Venetian marble busts in the collection of Baron Mayer Amschel de Rothschild at Mentmore Towers are illustrated in a watercolour of the Grand Hall by H. Brewer in 1863. In the Wallace Collection there are busts stated to be Italian, 17th/18th?century of an African King with plumed headdress and bust of an African man and Woman in marble and jasper (J.G. Mann,?Wallace Collection Catalogues, Sculpture, London, 1931, plate 4 & 5, S17 & S19). A pair of closely related busts dating to the 19th century, facially identical and presumably from the same workshop, but without the pedestals which accompany the present pair, sold Christie’s, Paris, 19 June 2018, lot 120 (122,500€).