FROM Helen of Troy and Aphrodite to Mozart and a suite of Louis XIV silver mounted furniture the London summer sales season will deliver some remarkable masterworks and classical pieces to the global market in the coming week. On the market for the first time ever is a Bust of Helen by Antonio Canova (1757-1822). Given by Canova to Robert, Viscount Castlereagh (later the 2nd Marquess of Londonderry) in recognition of his efforts to return works of art to Italy at the end of the Napoleonic Wars it will be a highlight at Christie’s Old Masters sale on July 6. Appreciation of Castlereagh, by Canova or anyone else, is out of the ordinary. The Marquess, who committed suicide in 1822, is not remembered kindly in Ireland as a result of the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion and the promotion of the Act of Union, or in England, where he supported repressive measures that linked him in public opinion to the Peterloo Massacre. Inspired by that massacre Shelley’s Masque of Anarchy begins: “I met murder on the way, he had a mask like Castlereagh…
A bust of Aphrodite, Goddess of Love at Sotheby’s sale of Master Sculpture from Four Millennia on July 4 is unusual in that the head, neck and chest are all original. It was made in the Roman Empire about the 2nd century AD. The bust rests on Italian polychrome stone draped shoulders which date to the 17th century. Lifesize Roman representations of Aphrodite carved out of dark stone are extremely rare. The only other known example is at the Vatican.
A dramatic 1782 letter by a 26 year old Mozart to his close friend Baroness von Waldstatten declares that he will need to get married within two days to save his future wife the scandal of being dragged out of his house by the police. Constanze was known to be cohabiting under the same roof in Vienna as Mozart. This prompted her mother Cacila Weber to send in the police to reclaim her daughter and save her reputation. The only solution Mozart could come up with was to marry her the same day or the next and marry they did, on August 4, 1782. It comes up at Christie’s Exceptional Sale on Thursday. A c1670 suite of Louis XIV furniture comprising a table and a pair of torcheres at Sotheby’s Treasures sale next Wednesday is thought likely to be the only surviving examples of the silver furnishings produced in the second half of the 17th century by the silversmiths of the Louvre and Gobelins workshops. The ensemble displayed in the King’s Grand Appartement at Versaille comprised 20 tons of solid silver. In 1689-90 Louis XIV decreed all silver should be sent to the Royal Mint to fund France’s fight in the Nine Years War. Nearly all but the most modest items or those that had already left France were melted down.
A carved alabaster portrait of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (1500-1558), the most famous and celebrated Hapsburg ruler of Europe, demonstrates idiosyncrasies like the huge Hapsburg underbite. Lifetime portraits of Charles V in private hands are rare, most exist in museums. The sales next week will offer a trove of numerous museum quality works from paintings and drawings by Old Masters to furniture, decorative objects, books, manuscripts and letters.