NO RESERVE: A PAIR OF GRAND TOUR MARBLE LIONS

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NO RESERVE: A PAIR OF GRAND TOUR MARBLE LIONS Carved as reduced models after Antonio Canova's funerary lions for the tomb of Pope Clement XIII in St Peter's Basilica, the pair comprises the watchful lion, his head raised and turned outward, mane falling in deeply undercut curls about a broad ruff, and his sleeping companion, his head lowered onto crossed forepaws in an attitude of repose. Both rest on rectangular plinths of polished white marble, set in turn upon roughly hewn naturalistic bases left in the rusticated state, the contrast between the smoothed upper register and the unworked lower mass forming part of the intended composition. The musculature of the shoulders and haunches is rendered with anatomical attention, the tails curling along the flanks, the paws projecting over the front edge of the upper plinth. Surfaces retain an even patination with earthen accretions in the recesses. The two lions are conceived as a paired meditation on vigilance and rest, the open-eyed sentinel and the sleeping mourner together standing watch over the deceased. In Canova's original of 1792, executed in colossal scale in Carrara marble at either side of the papal monument, the antithesis carried explicit funerary meaning: the waking lion as guardian of the soul, the sleeping lion as figure of death itself, or of grief subdued. The motif drew on long-established sepulchral conventions reaching back to antiquity, but it was Canova's treatment, with its restrained Neoclassical handling of leonine anatomy and its psychological balance between the two beasts, that fixed the type for the nineteenth century. The pair became among the most reproduced of all post-antique sculptures, copied at every scale from monumental garden ornament to mantelpiece curio. Marble was the obligatory medium for serious reproductions of the Canova lions, since the prestige of the originals rested in part on the quality of the Carrara stone from which they were cut. Italian workshops at Rome, Florence and the Carrara quarries themselves produced reduced versions in white statuary marble throughout the nineteenth century for the Grand Tour market, where British, French, German and Russian travellers acquired them as souvenirs of their visit to St Peter's. The retention of a rusticated lower base, as seen here, is a workshop convention that economised on labour while supplying a visual foil for the polished upper figure, and is characteristic of the smaller cabinet-scale versions intended for domestic interiors rather than architectural settings. This pair exemplifies the diffusion of Canova's funerary lions into the wider visual culture of the nineteenth-century Grand Tour, where a monument conceived for the most prominent papal tomb of its age was translated into portable form for the European drawing room. The survival of both lions together, in matched proportions and matched bases, preserves the antithetical reading of vigilance and repose that was the conceptual core of the original composition. Length x Width: 30 x 10cm~ Height: 23cm

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