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The Mystery of the Michelangelo Bust
28 Plays6 years ago
This month, Ben and Michael speak with Jennifer Tonkovich, curator of prints and drawings at the Morgan Library and Museum. The focus is an odd bronze bust of a crying child—once believed to have been sculpted by Michelangelo—but the trio’s conversation quickly branches out, touching on subjects as diverse as the collector/connoisseur divide in the 19th century; the role of “creative restorers” in the history of antique fakery; and the intercontinental flow of fine and dec arts treasures from Europe to the collections of tycoons like Morgan, and from there into the public domain.
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Transcript
Introduction and Personal Discovery
00:00:00
Speaker
I think I was walking through maybe in Berlin and saw this crying boy in marble and thought, wait a minute, he's almost like ours.
00:00:08
Speaker
And then I did a little more research and found another marble in Copenhagen.
00:00:11
Speaker
So I realized, okay, ours is a bronze cast of this original marble.
00:00:16
Speaker
The bust was purportedly Michelangelo.
00:00:18
Speaker
But it wasn't.
Hosts Introduction and Episode Setup
00:00:29
Speaker
Hello, welcome to Curious Objects brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
00:00:32
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:34
Speaker
And I'm Michael Diaz Griffith.
00:00:36
Speaker
And how are you doing, Michael?
00:00:39
Speaker
I'm doing well.
00:00:40
Speaker
I'm healthy.
00:00:41
Speaker
I am on my sofa, which is a couple feet away from the other places I've been today.
00:00:49
Speaker
And I'm headed to my kitchen table after we chat.
00:00:52
Speaker
And that's just a few more feet to the right.
00:00:54
Speaker
So not a huge adventure in my apartment, but we're making it.
00:01:00
Speaker
Yeah, you know, I think that about describes the scope of my movement today, too.
00:01:06
Speaker
So three little rooms in a little Brooklyn apartment.
00:01:10
Speaker
And I'm sorry we can't be sitting across the table from each other like usual, but I really missed the wine in the silver cups.
00:01:19
Speaker
I mean, that's always a special part of our recording sessions.
00:01:24
Speaker
Well, you know, there's nothing stopping you from doing that right now either.
00:01:29
Speaker
That's a good point, Ben.
00:01:30
Speaker
I think I'll have to mosey over to my kitchen and pour glass.
00:01:35
Speaker
But it's a good thing that we have curious objects to talk about, even if it's over the phone.
00:01:40
Speaker
That's
Impact of Coronavirus on Antiques World
00:01:41
Speaker
right.
00:01:41
Speaker
And I have to say, you know, it's hard to talk these days about much of anything that isn't the coronavirus.
00:01:48
Speaker
And we are on Curious Objects.
00:01:51
Speaker
We're going to take a close look at that.
00:01:53
Speaker
We're actually doing a series of special episodes on
00:01:57
Speaker
involving conversations with people who are doing interesting things or reflecting in interesting ways on the effects of the virus on the antiques world.
00:02:07
Speaker
So a couple of days ago, if you didn't catch it, listeners, we published an episode.
00:02:12
Speaker
It's a conversation with the owner of the shop where I work about a series of storytelling emails that we're doing modeled after Boccaccio's Decameron.
00:02:25
Speaker
It's a
00:02:26
Speaker
a way to pass the time and to reflect on what makes our business interesting and different from other lines of work.
00:02:33
Speaker
And just to keep lines open with our clients and keep that conversation going and feel a little less isolated.
00:02:39
Speaker
And then we haven't released it yet, but in the coming days, Michael, we're going to put out a conversation that you had with the dealer, David Shorsch.
00:02:50
Speaker
Yeah, we had a great chat about the antiques world in previous times of crisis.
00:02:59
Speaker
So David, as many of our listeners know, grew up in a collecting family and had the privilege of knowing many of the great dealers of the 20th century.
00:03:09
Speaker
who endured all sorts of crises from the Great Depression through the Second World War and beyond, but managed to survive and thrive in their businesses.
00:03:21
Speaker
And David and I discussed how they did that.
00:03:23
Speaker
And I think it's inspiring to consider what the trade has been through as we think about where it's headed and what our future is in the coming months and years.
00:03:35
Speaker
Yeah, so definitely look forward to that episode in the coming days.
00:03:38
Speaker
And we have some other items on the cooker right now, including we're going to do an episode, I think, in the next week or two, Michael, where you and I are going to talk with...
00:03:53
Speaker
people around our world about the effects that the virus and its economic impacts are having on us, on our work, on our businesses, our research, our collecting.
00:04:09
Speaker
So we've actually put out a call to ask people to tell us their stories, to share their stories of how the virus is affecting their lives and their work in the antiques world.
00:04:23
Speaker
And I want to extend that call to listeners as well.
00:04:26
Speaker
So if any of you have stories about what you're doing these days, how you're staying sane, how you're filling your time, what you're able to do now that you weren't able to do before and vice versa,
00:04:41
Speaker
We'd love to hear those stories and maybe include them on the podcast in the coming weeks.
00:04:45
Speaker
So please get in touch with us.
Listener Engagement and Upcoming Content
00:04:47
Speaker
You can email us at CuriousObjectsPodcast at gmail.com or you can get us on Instagram.
00:04:53
Speaker
I'm at Objective Interest and Michael is at Michael Diaz Griffith.
Interview with Jennifer Tonkovich Setup
00:04:58
Speaker
But today we're actually diving into a conversation here that we recorded before this outbreak happened.
00:05:07
Speaker
When, Michael, you and I went down to the Morgan Library to talk with Jennifer Tonkovich, who's a curator there.
00:05:17
Speaker
And boy, it feels like a long time ago now, doesn't it?
00:05:22
Speaker
It feels like a different world.
00:05:24
Speaker
I mean, that day was snowy and particularly quiet in the city before the holidays, actually.
00:05:33
Speaker
And it was a Monday, right, Ben?
00:05:36
Speaker
And the museum... That's right.
00:05:37
Speaker
And the museum was... Yeah, they closed the museum on Monday.
00:05:39
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So we actually had the run of the place to ourselves, which is reminiscent of what the museum must look like today.
00:05:47
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:47
Speaker
Particularly special as well because of the privileged access that Jennifer gave us.
00:05:52
Speaker
We recorded this in Morgan's study, and it was a really compelling atmosphere, right?
00:06:01
Speaker
in which to have a discussion about the great collector.
00:06:05
Speaker
We might've each taken a turn at his study desk too.
00:06:08
Speaker
Oh yeah, selfies were taken and a group shot or two.
00:06:13
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We're not barbarians.
00:06:16
Speaker
No, it was great fun.
00:06:17
Speaker
And Tonkovich is a wonderful scholar.
00:06:20
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And the story that she has to tell us about this bronze bust and its long history of misidentification is a really fascinating look into the historiography of antiques collecting.
History and Mystery of the Bronze Bust
00:06:34
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And J.P.
00:06:35
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Morgan is such a central figure in that history.
00:06:38
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So, you know, I really enjoyed that conversation.
00:06:41
Speaker
And what I think I enjoyed about it most in retrospect is the fact that it has nothing whatsoever to do with COVID-19.
00:06:50
Speaker
That's absolutely correct, Ben.
00:06:55
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You know, it's escapism.
00:06:57
Speaker
Jennifer is brilliantly funny, and I think that our listeners are going to really enjoy taking a dive into the past, thinking about the Gilded Age and the context of collecting then.
00:07:09
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And by the way, that was a period full of crises, but they did manage to continue collecting.
00:07:15
Speaker
So just to risk being topical for one second...
00:07:20
Speaker
Even though there were some problematic figures in that period, we might find some solace in the fact that in the antiques trade, at least, business did boom, even during some of the banking crises, etc., that figures like Morgan were involved in.
00:07:38
Speaker
So a lot to think about, but also just a lot of fun.
00:07:44
Speaker
Yeah, and a chance to get away from it all for about an hour.
00:07:46
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So listeners, I think you'll really enjoy this conversation.
00:07:50
Speaker
Stay tuned.
00:07:51
Speaker
We will be putting out an unusual amount of Curious Objects content in the coming weeks.
00:07:56
Speaker
So I hope you'll enjoy that.
00:07:58
Speaker
I hope you'll get in touch and let us know what you think.
00:08:01
Speaker
We'll be back with Jennifer Tarkovich right after this.
00:08:04
Speaker
Today's episode is brought to you by Freeman's Auction.
00:08:07
Speaker
Since 1805, Freeman's has been part of the fabric of Philadelphia, helping generations of clients in the buying and selling of fine and decorative arts, jewelry, design, and more.
00:08:16
Speaker
They host many auctions throughout the year, including sales of single-owner collections.
00:08:21
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They are always accepting consignments of suitable works across auctions and collecting categories.
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Interested to find out what your collection would bring at auction?
00:08:29
Speaker
Visit freemansauction.com to request a complimentary auction estimate.
00:08:33
Speaker
Freeman's, Philadelphia's auction house.
00:08:36
Speaker
Sharing the world of art, design, and jewelry with you, wherever you are.
Jennifer's Journey as a Curator
00:08:40
Speaker
Welcome, Jennifer.
00:08:41
Speaker
Thank you.
00:08:42
Speaker
We are in fact sitting in the Morgan Library and not just anywhere but in JPMorgan's own study, which I have to say, if you haven't been here before, make the visit.
00:08:50
Speaker
It's a hell of a room and a hell of a museum.
00:08:53
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That it is.
00:08:54
Speaker
And Jennifer, I want to just start by asking how you came to be working here and a little bit about your background.
00:09:02
Speaker
That's a great question.
00:09:03
Speaker
I've now been here almost 22 years, so almost all my adult life.
00:09:09
Speaker
When I was an undergraduate, I grew up in Chicago, I was an undergraduate, and I had a summer internship at the Art Institute of Chicago.
00:09:18
Speaker
And I knew I wanted to go into museum work.
00:09:21
Speaker
I was thrilled by objects.
00:09:23
Speaker
And at first I thought I wanted to study Southeast Asian art.
00:09:28
Speaker
And so I went in there and they said, well, what Southeast Asian languages do you speak?
00:09:32
Speaker
And I had to confess to none of them.
00:09:36
Speaker
And at that time they said, well, you know, we have two other internships open.
00:09:41
Speaker
One is in the crate building workshop and the other is in prints and drawings.
00:09:45
Speaker
I sort of envisioned myself for the summer wearing a tool belt and thought, you know, that may not be the smartest route.
00:09:52
Speaker
I'm not the most coordinated person.
00:09:55
Speaker
So I said, you know, prints and drawings sounds intriguing.
00:09:58
Speaker
And then I went to the prints and drawings department and met with one of the curators there, Martha Tedeschi, who's now the director
00:10:06
Speaker
of Harvard University Art Museums.
00:10:08
Speaker
And it took me about 30 seconds to think, yes, this is where I want to be.
00:10:13
Speaker
This is what I want to be.
00:10:15
Speaker
And she was just the most compelling professional.
00:10:20
Speaker
I had met at that point, and then I quickly met the others in the department, which was, it was such a wonderful group, including Suzanne McCullough, who was a great drawings curator and my mentor.
00:10:31
Speaker
and Laura Giles, who is now the curator in charge of drawings at Princeton.
00:10:35
Speaker
So people who've been with me since
Unveiling the True Origin of the Bust
00:10:38
Speaker
I was 17 on this journey.
00:10:39
Speaker
And it was actually Suzanne, when I was coming out east for graduate school, I was enrolling in the PhD program at Rutgers.
00:10:46
Speaker
She said, well, if you're going to be out east, you should look up my friend, Kara Dennison at the Morgan Library and see if she needs help on projects.
00:10:55
Speaker
I think you'd really like that.
00:10:56
Speaker
And make sure when you're there to see the Thaw collection.
00:10:59
Speaker
It's the greatest private collection of drawings in America.
00:11:03
Speaker
And so I sort of filed away these two facts and dutifully wrote a note, which funnily enough, my colleague Kara has saved.
00:11:09
Speaker
She's since retired.
00:11:11
Speaker
And it's so embarrassing.
00:11:12
Speaker
It's painful.
00:11:13
Speaker
Like I looked at it, I put it in a drawer.
00:11:14
Speaker
I can't even actually read it because it's my awkward young self trying to, you know, write and, you know,
00:11:21
Speaker
obviously I selected stationery for it.
00:11:23
Speaker
I mean it's really pretty dorky but... Well she's doing her curatorial duty.
00:11:26
Speaker
Yes.
00:11:27
Speaker
And she took me on as an intern.
00:11:30
Speaker
And so while I was doing my graduate studies I would come in and work with Kara on various projects and then suddenly one day in 1998 one of the colleagues here, Stephanie Wiles, who's now the director of the Yale University Art Gallery was
00:11:48
Speaker
announced that she was leaving for another position.
00:11:52
Speaker
And at that point, she had been here, I think about 17 years.
00:11:55
Speaker
And it was a very small department of about three people.
00:11:58
Speaker
So they just lost a third of their staff.
00:12:00
Speaker
And so that's when they drafted me to come in.
00:12:03
Speaker
And they said, Oh, just just, you know, we really need to help, you know, just for a year, you know, because I was just at the point where I had
00:12:10
Speaker
I believe I had taken my PhD exams and had to work on my proposal.
00:12:15
Speaker
And my advisor was a little wary.
00:12:18
Speaker
He'd seen many people go down the route and never finish.
00:12:21
Speaker
I said, of course I will.
00:12:24
Speaker
And he said, well, and I thought the whole reason I'm pursuing this PhD is...
00:12:29
Speaker
is to work with a collection like this, is to do this work.
00:12:32
Speaker
So I just jumped at the chance.
00:12:35
Speaker
I did have the opportunity to meet Eugene Thaw, to work with him on several exhibitions of his collection, and then most importantly,
00:12:44
Speaker
when there was a lot of change of staff in the department to become sort of his primary contact here curatorially at the Morgan for the last years of his life.
00:12:54
Speaker
And so we came quite close to him.
00:12:55
Speaker
We were able to work together on the big show we did in 2017 of his collection.
00:13:00
Speaker
Which was spectacular.
00:13:04
Speaker
It's still extraordinary.
00:13:06
Speaker
So I did fulfill this, go full circle from being a 17-year-old told to go and see if they need any help and make sure you see the Thaw collection.
00:13:15
Speaker
And here I am, the Eugene and Claire Thaw curator.
00:13:17
Speaker
I mean, you couldn't have written this script.
00:13:20
Speaker
And so for me, it's just been remarkable.
00:13:23
Speaker
Well, and here we are in the midst of, as you say, a world-class museum and collection.
00:13:29
Speaker
And Morgan himself was the Ur collector in some ways.
00:13:35
Speaker
And we'll talk about him and his experience as a collector and how he helped to
00:13:40
Speaker
define the idea of collecting.
00:13:42
Speaker
But there is one particular object out of these many, many objects in this institution that we wanted to talk with you about today, Jennifer.
00:13:52
Speaker
And in fact, it's sitting right here in the room with us.
00:13:56
Speaker
And it's a small marble bust.
00:14:01
Speaker
It stands about maybe 10 inches high thereabouts.
00:14:06
Speaker
And J.B.
00:14:07
Speaker
Morgan himself purchased this, right?
00:14:10
Speaker
Yes.
00:14:11
Speaker
And when he purchased it, what did he think he was buying?
00:14:14
Speaker
So when he purchased it, he thought he was buying a bronze bus by Michelangelo.
00:14:19
Speaker
And it's quite interesting because, you know, by the time the library was finished, he got the keys in November of 1906.
00:14:29
Speaker
And then he continued to collect and he collected objects to enrich his studies.
00:14:34
Speaker
They were sitting in his study, were surrounded by many of the objects that he collected that he chose for this space.
00:14:41
Speaker
And one of them is this bronze bust.
00:14:43
Speaker
But funnily enough, he bought it in 1909.
00:14:47
Speaker
And a few years later, there was a query that passed his desk that referred to a bronze by Michelangelo, bronze of a boy by Michelangelo.
00:14:57
Speaker
And he left a note for his librarian, Belda Costa-Green, saying, where is this?
00:15:01
Speaker
And she writes back, it's on the stand right next to your desk.
00:15:07
Speaker
And I think the interesting thing about that anecdote is
00:15:12
Speaker
The way we think about how Morgan thought about his collection and the things he collected, I think there's this tendency to paint collectors as always pursuing the finest and the best, the me plus ultra, a certain type of object.
00:15:28
Speaker
But Morgan liked to make acquisitions, and especially when it was things that were adorning his private study or even the things adorning his home.
00:15:37
Speaker
So not the things bought outright for the Met in which he was wearing his cap of civic responsibility.
00:15:43
Speaker
Yes, right.
00:15:44
Speaker
you know, he's applying different standards and they weren't always this has to be the finest.
00:15:48
Speaker
An inkwell that went on his desk, you know, that was interesting, you know, bronze, it was sufficient for him to buy something that he liked without worrying about it being
00:16:00
Speaker
you know, the finest of his kind.
00:16:02
Speaker
But in this case, so the bust was purportedly Michelangelo, but it wasn't.
00:16:08
Speaker
What was it really?
00:16:09
Speaker
But it wasn't.
00:16:10
Speaker
Who actually made this?
00:16:12
Speaker
Well, it's funny because it was a long story about the journey to figuring out what this actually is.
00:16:17
Speaker
Because, you know, so during Morgan's lifetime, he buys this as Michelangelo.
00:16:21
Speaker
And it's been in this room since 1909 when he bought it.
00:16:26
Speaker
on a stand first next to his desk, now it's atop a shelf.
00:16:31
Speaker
And so for most of its time, it was sort of thought of as Michelangelo for this first chunk of time
00:16:36
Speaker
Hans Varzynski came along in the 1940s, a German art historian who specialized in decorative arts.
00:16:43
Speaker
And he, at the bequest of Belle de Costa Greene, our director, did an inventory of all the art objects.
00:16:50
Speaker
Because really everyone on staff at the time was very bookish, looking at medieval manuscripts, more so than sculpture and painting.
00:16:57
Speaker
So she had Hans Varzynski come in and do the survey.
00:17:02
Speaker
And Svrasinski looked at it and said, well, that's not Michelangelo, but it could still be Florentine because it was very popular in Florence during the Renaissance to have these busts of children and weirdly enough, busts of children crying.
00:17:18
Speaker
So it
00:17:20
Speaker
Right, and we should say that is what this is.
00:17:22
Speaker
This isn't some Roman emperor with a laurel wreath.
00:17:26
Speaker
It is a sort of chubby-faced head of a boy, you know, a toddler, probably three years old, four years old maybe.
00:17:34
Speaker
You see his shoulders and the top of his chest, his curly hair, and he is making a very unpleasant, unhappy face.
00:17:41
Speaker
And sometimes it's been called crying or bad-tempered, but it's a child having a fit.
00:17:47
Speaker
Well, at least it's realistic.
00:17:48
Speaker
It's very realistic.
Morgan Library Restoration Efforts
00:17:50
Speaker
So Sparsinski said, oh, it's probably Florentine, because it fits in with that penchant that they had in Florence for collecting busts of children.
00:18:00
Speaker
And then many years passed.
00:18:02
Speaker
This room that we're sitting in now in Morgan's study, we're now able to enter it to walk around.
00:18:07
Speaker
We have a visitor's guide, an audio guide, you can really engage.
00:18:11
Speaker
But for the majority of the Morgan Library's existence as a public institution, you could actually only walk in about 10, 12 feet from the door
00:18:19
Speaker
and look around.
00:18:20
Speaker
This used to be a closed-off room.
00:18:23
Speaker
And so part of our restoration campaign of the interior in 2010 was to make this, as well as the librarian's office, accessible so people could enter these spaces and engage with these objects, look at them more closely, read something about them, understand what's in here.
00:18:38
Speaker
And so...
00:18:39
Speaker
I think we've done that very successfully and we're very proud of that.
00:18:43
Speaker
But it also meant the challenge of, okay, we have to make a booklet and we have to say what these things are because they're not just 10 feet away and people are keen to take a look.
00:18:54
Speaker
And so I started looking and I thought, is this really Italian?
00:18:57
Speaker
Let's take a look.
00:18:59
Speaker
It seemed close to me to an artist named Hendrik de Kaiser, who is a sculptor, a Dutch sculptor,
00:19:08
Speaker
And I thought, okay.
00:19:09
Speaker
From what period?
00:19:10
Speaker
So from the 17th century.
00:19:13
Speaker
So he's, let's see, he lives from 1565 to 1621.
00:19:17
Speaker
So still old, non-Renaissance Florence, but still, you know, very much an old master.
00:19:23
Speaker
And he made a lot of tomb sculptures of crying children.
00:19:26
Speaker
Naturally, you'd find weeping putti around a tomb.
00:19:30
Speaker
And then there were some independent sculptures that it seemed similar to.
00:19:35
Speaker
So we had that association, but it was only a few years later where I was walking through, I'm trying to think, I think I was walking through, it was either in, maybe in Berlin, and
00:19:47
Speaker
saw this crying boy in marble and thought, wait a minute, he's almost like ours.
00:19:52
Speaker
And then I did a little more research and found another marble in Copenhagen that really is, I think, the match.
00:19:59
Speaker
So I realized, okay, ours is a bronze cast of this original marble.
00:20:04
Speaker
And the marble is by Hendrick de Kaiser.
00:20:08
Speaker
It's in Copenhagen.
00:20:10
Speaker
And it entered the Danish collection in 1775.
00:20:17
Speaker
So it's a bit of a puzzle.
00:20:19
Speaker
When is this bronze cast made from the marble?
00:20:22
Speaker
It very well could be a 17th or 18th century cast.
00:20:28
Speaker
Because it's unclear where the marble was.
00:20:32
Speaker
Yes, it's unclear where the marble was before, but we know that it was in this collection in Copenhagen from 1775 on.
00:20:39
Speaker
So that could be very helpful.
00:20:41
Speaker
They don't know of any other time it could have been accessed to make a cast.
00:20:45
Speaker
I see.
00:20:46
Speaker
What we're probably looking at is a cast, say from the 18th century of this earlier marble.
00:20:51
Speaker
That's a common thing.
00:20:53
Speaker
Now we replicate things all the time in so many different ways.
00:20:57
Speaker
Back then, if you had a marble bust you wanted to replicate, making a bronze cast of it.
00:21:02
Speaker
This isn't the only bronze cast after an earlier marble we have in the collection, which is interesting.
00:21:10
Speaker
We have an idea of when this cast might have been made, but then trying to
00:21:15
Speaker
trace its journey.
00:21:17
Speaker
So at some point a cast was made from a known sculpture, but then it got divorced from that context.
00:21:24
Speaker
And we don't really know much about this early journey of it.
00:21:28
Speaker
But what we do know is that eventually ends up in the hands of a very intriguing Italian named Michele Lazzaroni,
00:21:35
Speaker
or Baron Lazzaroni.
00:21:37
Speaker
He liked to adopt a rather fancy title.
00:21:41
Speaker
And he was a real bon vivant.
00:21:44
Speaker
He was a dealer.
00:21:45
Speaker
He was a collector.
00:21:46
Speaker
But most importantly, and I think recent scholarship is really uncovering this, he was what we would call a creative restorer.
00:21:56
Speaker
Well put.
00:21:56
Speaker
So we bumped into a few in our time.
00:22:00
Speaker
And it's interesting because you have these...
00:22:03
Speaker
You know, this creative restore, somebody who can create things out of whole cloth, which we would call forgeries, but who can also take things and reinvent them in a way, restore them, repair them, recontextualize them.
00:22:17
Speaker
You know, our little boy here had a spike added to him so he could be put on a pedestal.
00:22:22
Speaker
So, you know, something that you find and repurpose and then refashion.
00:22:28
Speaker
And Lacerani is known for doing that.
00:22:30
Speaker
And we know that there's...
00:22:31
Speaker
Was there a taboo during Lanzarone's lifetime?
00:22:35
Speaker
Was there a taboo against that in the way there is today?
00:22:38
Speaker
Would a work like that be considered a forgery and therefore condemned if it were known that it had been modified?
00:22:48
Speaker
Or would it just have been seen as a pretty object and you didn't really need to ask more than that about it?
00:22:56
Speaker
Well, I think some of it's accepted practice.
00:22:58
Speaker
Some of the repairing, restoring, preparing for display, for instance, you might have a bust, but then you would need a surround made for it, you need to elegantly present it, and that was certainly acceptable.
00:23:13
Speaker
But I think there's an interesting phenomenon that we see with a number of dealers during this period, which is
00:23:21
Speaker
the American market is in need of material.
00:23:26
Speaker
You do have dealers who are sourcing material from families that had things for generations and are ready to part with them, but they're pulling out everything they have.
00:23:36
Speaker
This could be somebody who had an 18th century bronze cast.
00:23:40
Speaker
This thing goes into the hands of the dealer.
00:23:43
Speaker
The thing about Lazzaroni is a lot of the things he was restoring, and he did painting, sculpture, you name it,
00:23:50
Speaker
He was really catering to contemporary taste.
00:23:52
Speaker
So even now, I think they did an exhibition of photographs and of works that he had restored and was involved with, and they all start looking the same.
00:24:01
Speaker
There's a real Lazzaroni look.
00:24:03
Speaker
And so there definitely is a degree of interpretation and involvement, but that also might be what helped these objects appeal.
00:24:11
Speaker
to the people who were purchasing them.
00:24:14
Speaker
You're speaking to this moment, I think of it as existing in the 1890s when Americans are finally beginning to collect at the level and with the scope of Europeans.
00:24:25
Speaker
And I'm thinking of Wilhelm von Boet's trip to America in that decade where he saw that collecting really isn't happening at our level yet.
00:24:35
Speaker
And he returns, I think, a decade later
00:24:37
Speaker
Berenson has hit the scene and he says, no, they're collecting now at the right level.
00:24:44
Speaker
And those two figures were obviously central in constructing ideas about connoisseurship that would have affected Morgan's collecting and all of his peers collecting.
00:24:53
Speaker
So I feel like we're going to hear a lot about Morgan's eye and his approach to connoisseurship.
00:24:58
Speaker
But could you set the scene a little bit in terms of the ideas about connoisseurship that form the background?
00:25:03
Speaker
Well, I think it's funny.
00:25:05
Speaker
Now we have a lot of technical means to examine things.
00:25:09
Speaker
We have much more information than was ever available before in terms of photographs and the history of objects.
00:25:16
Speaker
This was a time in the 1890s, around 1900, where
00:25:22
Speaker
Relationships with dealers were very much about trust because your reputation was what you had and that carried a lot of weight.
00:25:32
Speaker
Although what we're now finding is
00:25:35
Speaker
A lot of dealers certainly traded in things that were correct and what they purported to be.
00:25:42
Speaker
And then, you know, things that were also aspirational in attribution.
00:25:47
Speaker
And it's very hard to go back and think about.
00:25:51
Speaker
Well, you know, it's hard.
00:25:54
Speaker
It's so tempting to cast aspersions of people, but you also realize
00:26:00
Speaker
What's hard to grasp is the intentionality, you know, because the difference between, you know, when you really talk about a forgery, there's an effort to deceive, an attempt to deceive.
00:26:12
Speaker
And how much of this is people lacking information, making these aspirals?
00:26:17
Speaker
aspirational attributes to sell something, not being fully aware of what this object is and how much was actual intentional deception.
00:26:25
Speaker
Because even somebody like Boda also worked hand in hand with the Florentine dealer Stefano Bardini, who more and more information is coming out of that archive at his villa.
00:26:36
Speaker
But he was, you know, selling things that he actually obtained from old families, but he was also manufacturing things out back, it seems.
00:26:44
Speaker
And so there's
00:26:46
Speaker
The question of who knew what when is it's a real thriller in a sense, you know, how, you know, how savvy were they to what they were handling its authenticity or inauthenticity.
00:27:00
Speaker
Both the dealers and the clients.
00:27:01
Speaker
Yes.
00:27:01
Speaker
Because even today, we are familiar with that spectrum between a disputed attribution and wishful thinking and deception.
00:27:09
Speaker
I mean, we still deal in those questions, as Ben and I have recently discussed on one of our episodes about the Caravaggio.
00:27:16
Speaker
About the Caravaggio and also the other thing that comes to mind.
00:27:20
Speaker
vis-a-vis these 18th century productions is the alabaster vase that we discussed with Philip Hewitt Jabbour a few months ago on the podcast, which is a Roman neoclassical alabaster vase.
00:27:37
Speaker
And Philip had an interesting theory about it.
00:27:41
Speaker
And he bought this from Alessandro de Castro, a very well-respected dealer.
00:27:46
Speaker
And at this point, we think we more or less understand what it is.
00:27:50
Speaker
But one interesting theory about it is that it was actually created out of a previously existing ancient Roman piece.
00:27:57
Speaker
Mm-hmm.
00:27:57
Speaker
that in the 18th century, some Roman dealer got excited about it and carved it into a piece that was more appealing to the contemporary eye.
00:28:08
Speaker
And in that period, you know, today that would be seen as a terrible sin.
00:28:14
Speaker
But at that time, it was perhaps seen as taking something with great potential and helping it to fill that potential.
00:28:22
Speaker
And it met a particular kind of demand because of the...
00:28:26
Speaker
requirements of grand tourists to acquire mementos from their journey.
00:28:31
Speaker
And now I would much rather have a bronze bust by Michelangelo than one that was made as a cast copy of Marvel by someone named Hendrik de Kayser.
00:28:42
Speaker
Yes.
00:28:42
Speaker
Well, and you know, so much of this is, and I think you hit upon it, the idea of a memento.
00:28:47
Speaker
It's lifestyle collecting.
00:28:48
Speaker
And I think
00:28:49
Speaker
because Morgan was such an important patron at the Metropolitan Museum and 8,000 of his objects went there and at the Wadsworth Athenaeum.
00:28:55
Speaker
And so he did collect very major, very important things.
00:29:00
Speaker
But the things he lived with and the things he kept around him were sometimes collected really as ornaments to a lifestyle.
00:29:09
Speaker
And we sit in a room where you look up at the ceiling and when this room was first finished, the idea was,
00:29:14
Speaker
He's taken a ceiling from a Renaissance villa and the faded paint.
00:29:19
Speaker
The reality is there's bits of this that are actually old, but most of it's 1905.
00:29:23
Speaker
Then they brought in the painter James Wall Finn, who opened a book of book plates and was going up there and aging and distressing that ceiling to give it that patina of age.
00:29:36
Speaker
But it didn't bother Morgan.
00:29:38
Speaker
The fireplace behind us has a lintel that could be Renaissance or it could be 1905, but then the surround is concrete and bluestone, all work done in 1905.
00:29:50
Speaker
And so it is very much a hybrid.
00:29:52
Speaker
It wasn't a sort of spare no expense, but he really had a practical sense about these things.
00:29:58
Speaker
Did you need to spare no expense and go to great lengths for some of this?
00:30:02
Speaker
Not really.
00:30:03
Speaker
You know, you actually could enrich your life and have objects around you.
00:30:08
Speaker
And whether or not everyone agreed on their attribution,
00:30:13
Speaker
I think if it gave him pleasure or he enjoyed the circumstances in which he acquired it, that also was a sufficient basis.
00:30:21
Speaker
Which is part of what that personality as a collector is what makes him great.
00:30:28
Speaker
It's what makes him so perennially fascinating because he did have peers not to cast dispersions on any sort of neighbors.
00:30:36
Speaker
who collected what they were supposed to.
00:30:39
Speaker
Yes.
00:30:39
Speaker
And what they were supposed to collect might have changed from moment to moment.
00:30:44
Speaker
It was a fundamentally less creative approach to connoisseurship and collecting, right?
00:30:48
Speaker
Yeah, but Morgan also, I mean, he was the subject of a bit of, you know,
00:30:54
Speaker
scorn or derision by people who consider themselves connoisseurs, which is funny.
00:31:00
Speaker
Here he is making these decisions, collecting.
00:31:03
Speaker
But even in his obituary, the Burlington Magazine, in an unsigned obituary, he said, you know, he was a great collector.
00:31:09
Speaker
He was not a connoisseur.
00:31:10
Speaker
And there really is this pecking order, you know, between people who truly
00:31:14
Speaker
have an eye for objects.
00:31:16
Speaker
And Morgan wasn't contemplative enough.
00:31:18
Speaker
He was too busy being a financial titan and traveling the world to be the contemplative type.
00:31:24
Speaker
And even up to the end of his life, he's known as a banker and an aggressive financier.
00:31:29
Speaker
And that's his niche in contrast to certain other industrialists who turned more philanthropic.
00:31:37
Speaker
Well, not that he wasn't philanthropic, but who focused a greater portion of their time and energy on philanthropic and collecting endeavors.
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah.
00:31:45
Speaker
And here we are talking about a piece that he bought apparently thinking was by Michelangelo.
00:31:52
Speaker
Well, it's Lazzaroni who, from a photograph in Lazzaroni's archive, calling in, you know, Michelangelo, that might be where that came from.
00:32:01
Speaker
So somehow he gets his hands on it and, you know, decides he's going to sell that.
00:32:04
Speaker
And he works with the dealers Cesare and Herculet Canessa, so the Canessa brothers, who are rather fascinating themselves.
00:32:14
Speaker
They found very clever ways to get things out of Italy and sell things in France.
00:32:20
Speaker
including there was a paper recently about like prohibitions that they had to get around.
00:32:25
Speaker
Yes.
00:32:25
Speaker
And, and they would get things out, including they had, I guess, some silverware that they organized a bike race and had the people in the bike race conceal it in their clothing and I mean, it's so outrageous.
00:32:41
Speaker
You just, you know, Lance Armstrong.
00:32:43
Speaker
Yeah.
00:32:43
Speaker
I know, trying to find a good thing for an artian clothes, right?
00:32:48
Speaker
Yes, exactly, wink, wink.
00:32:51
Speaker
But these very creative ways about moving artwork and selling it in France.
00:32:56
Speaker
So he does acquire it from Canessa in Paris in 1909.
00:33:00
Speaker
But at that point, there's this Italian cabal in Lazzaroni, who then gives it to Canessa, who brings it into Paris, and it sells to Morgan in Paris.
00:33:10
Speaker
So rather a clever pipeline, but then takes the better part of a century for us to figure out what it actually is, which I think is, I mean, it's wonderful that with all of the information at our fingertips, we can pull together and make these connections and figure it out.
00:33:29
Speaker
But I also think
00:33:31
Speaker
it did not matter as much to Morgan.
00:33:33
Speaker
And I think this obsessive concern about, you know, is this object right or not right?
00:33:38
Speaker
You know, my concern now as a curator is, what is this actual thing?
00:33:42
Speaker
When is it made by whom?
00:33:43
Speaker
What do we know about it?
00:33:45
Speaker
You know, because I do think there's amazing stories behind every object
Evolution of Collecting Practices
00:33:50
Speaker
in this room.
00:33:50
Speaker
And, you know, it's rather remarkable when, you know, I look around and, you know, there's yet another sculpture in here that was thought to be a Michelangelo at some point.
00:33:58
Speaker
And he's,
00:34:01
Speaker
How often does that happen?
00:34:02
Speaker
Well...
00:34:08
Speaker
We'll be back with Jennifer Tokovich right after this.
00:34:11
Speaker
Today's episode is brought to you by Freeman's Auction.
00:34:14
Speaker
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00:34:23
Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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Speaker
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00:34:53
Speaker
Every object in this building is significant in the context of interpreting Morgan's life, right?
00:34:59
Speaker
Which is a special dynamic that not every museum enjoys.
00:35:03
Speaker
Yeah, no, it is.
00:35:04
Speaker
And it's amazing how much work there is still to be done.
00:35:06
Speaker
I mean, Gene Strauss's wonderful biography is something, and it's like our Bible here, we turn to it all the time.
00:35:12
Speaker
But there's so, he was...
00:35:15
Speaker
a collector of so many, such a vast amount of works in so many different fields.
00:35:20
Speaker
So even when you talk about Morgan in the art market, it's all these micro markets, Italian bronzes, it's one thing unto itself, not to mention the paintings market and the object for- Near Eastern antiquities.
00:35:31
Speaker
Exactly.
00:35:33
Speaker
It's fascinating.
00:35:34
Speaker
It's so rich.
00:35:34
Speaker
We have pieces of silver ex-Morgan with something hilarious.
00:35:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:35:38
Speaker
What about modern art?
00:35:40
Speaker
Hot button topic during the period when he was collecting.
00:35:43
Speaker
Well, it's very funny because I was just reading in, I think when Art News covered his death in 1913, they said, well, he didn't collect any modern art and he basically spurned the contemporary artists aside from Henryson's Mowbray who painted the mural decorations in this building we're in.
00:36:01
Speaker
That is actually not true.
00:36:03
Speaker
Morgan did collect contemporary art and he was also a patron of contemporary art.
00:36:08
Speaker
not avant-garde contemporary art.
00:36:12
Speaker
But it's funny, when we say contemporary art, we think avant-garde.
00:36:15
Speaker
Who should he be a patron of?
00:36:17
Speaker
Was he buying Picasso in 1910?
00:36:21
Speaker
No, he was not.
00:36:22
Speaker
But he was still buying contemporary art.
00:36:25
Speaker
And it's quite interesting.
00:36:26
Speaker
I've worked a bit on the paintings that Morgan had in his home.
00:36:31
Speaker
So his home used to stand right next to us.
00:36:33
Speaker
It's where our exhibition galleries are now in this 1924 building.
00:36:37
Speaker
But he used to have a brownstone there, the 1850s brownstone.
00:36:40
Speaker
He moved in in 1880, and he had paintings by contemporary Hudson River School artists.
00:36:46
Speaker
He also had paintings by so many artists you've never heard of, but they were very often prominently placed, like the head of the academy in Antwerp, the head of the academy in Madrid, these very highly placed academic painters,
00:37:05
Speaker
in these cities where he traveled.
00:37:07
Speaker
We don't know any of their names.
00:37:08
Speaker
They are so obscure.
00:37:10
Speaker
I saw them.
00:37:11
Speaker
I came in a talk on them and the reactions on people's faces were pretty amazing because there's just this whole world of academic painters who were in charge of important, the Royal Academy in Spain, the Royal Academy in Antwerp.
00:37:27
Speaker
these major organizations in their home cities, but whose names are utterly lost because they're not part of the art historical canon because they are academic painters.
00:37:36
Speaker
Yet, this is what Morgan's home was filled with.
00:37:39
Speaker
All of this, some of them sentimental, some of them beautiful women, some of them landscapes.
00:37:45
Speaker
There's a wide range, social scenes, historical scenes.
00:37:49
Speaker
He had a handful of paintings by Roman contemporary artists in watercolors.
00:37:56
Speaker
But again, these names are ones that we don't know.
00:38:01
Speaker
And the other thing is that he did commission portraits.
00:38:05
Speaker
from contemporary artists of himself and his family.
00:38:08
Speaker
And so that's another way in which he interacted with the contemporary art world.
00:38:13
Speaker
So it's sort of unfair...
00:38:16
Speaker
that he's sort of maligned as somebody who wasn't engaged in the art of his own day.
00:38:22
Speaker
He was, it just wasn't the art we'd like him to be.
00:38:25
Speaker
Yes, a different current.
00:38:26
Speaker
Because it wasn't the avant-garde art.
00:38:28
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:28
Speaker
And that material doesn't figure in our idea about what his taste was.
00:38:33
Speaker
So the institutionalization of one part of his taste
00:38:37
Speaker
Yes.
00:38:38
Speaker
What we know.
00:38:38
Speaker
I'm sure you do a lot of work to undo that.
00:38:41
Speaker
Yes, exactly.
00:38:41
Speaker
Well, you know, it's funny in the years that I've been here, I can see and I certainly myself am trying to push a much more nuanced, subtle understanding because I think, you know,
00:38:53
Speaker
When I first started, people were still using the term robber baron.
00:38:56
Speaker
That's been dropped.
00:38:56
Speaker
We don't use that anymore.
00:38:58
Speaker
Happily.
00:38:59
Speaker
Is that an offensive term now?
00:39:02
Speaker
It's not like cancel culture offense.
00:39:05
Speaker
But it is one of those that kind of makes me always think of the monopoly man.
00:39:10
Speaker
And that's the image that it calls to mind for me.
00:39:14
Speaker
And you can cast this by knowing just a few bits and pieces as a caricature personality.
00:39:20
Speaker
But in fact, as you tease it apart and learn more,
00:39:23
Speaker
it's so much more interesting.
00:39:24
Speaker
There's so much more subtlety to what he did.
00:39:30
Speaker
As with this idea of, you know, in this building, these hybrid creations in the way of his collecting and he, you know, the fact that he wasn't always concerned about everyone's opinion.
00:39:44
Speaker
He would ask opinions.
00:39:45
Speaker
He'd make his own decision.
00:39:47
Speaker
And he seems to not have had a problem being wrong about things.
00:39:50
Speaker
At the time he died, the dealer Jacques Seligman had...
00:39:53
Speaker
a handful of bronzes and Morgan's son said, oh, well, we don't want anything that hasn't been invoiced and paid for yet.
00:40:00
Speaker
And he said, well, I do have some bronzes that are paid for, but they're fake, so I can keep those.
00:40:06
Speaker
He was thinking about opening a fake museum, which is another fascinating subject.
00:40:11
Speaker
But the idea that, yeah, Morgan knew some stuff he bought, he liked, it wasn't right, he trusted the judgment, he didn't take delivery of them.
00:40:19
Speaker
But the standards that we start applying
00:40:23
Speaker
and their decisions and their judgment, but it was happening in his own time.
00:40:27
Speaker
And now I think there's a much...
00:40:33
Speaker
a much more compassionate understanding of what he was doing as a collector and that it wasn't every object has to bear up in scrutiny.
00:40:41
Speaker
Sometimes he just wanted some bronze things on his desk.
00:40:43
Speaker
Sometimes he was just a rich guy looking to decorate a pretty house.
00:40:46
Speaker
A rich guy looking to buy exactly something nice.
00:40:49
Speaker
Yes.
00:40:50
Speaker
And it's funny because with the contemporary paintings, we don't know those circumstances.
00:40:53
Speaker
And I'm really trying to investigate when he traveled, what was his relationship?
00:41:01
Speaker
How did these things come about?
00:41:03
Speaker
How were they recommended?
00:41:04
Speaker
But a lot of it has to do with your social set and...
00:41:08
Speaker
So a different sort of expectations.
00:41:10
Speaker
He didn't collect all the Barbizon paintings everyone else in New York was collecting.
00:41:14
Speaker
He was collecting something else, but I think it must have had to do with when he traveled.
00:41:18
Speaker
He was, you know, communing with heads of state.
00:41:21
Speaker
He was communing at that level.
00:41:22
Speaker
So if you were going to meet somebody in an arts establishment when you were in Madrid, you'd probably meet the head of the Royal Academy, right?
00:41:28
Speaker
And so understanding how that came about and how that shaped his personal taste, I think,
00:41:35
Speaker
adds another aspect to this story because he clearly made different decisions.
00:41:40
Speaker
What I want for myself, what I believe I should collect that will go into the Metropolitan Museum where I'm president.
00:41:46
Speaker
And I think that as he's looking at things, we can see from these long invoices, we'll get them, he would get an invoice and on it would be marked whether something was going to
00:41:58
Speaker
to the Met, to the library, to his house.
00:42:01
Speaker
So he really is collecting for so many different outlets.
00:42:04
Speaker
Yes.
00:42:05
Speaker
you can't apply the same standard to all of them.
00:42:08
Speaker
And tell us a little bit, give us a little bit of context around this idea of being a collector at the turn of the century.
00:42:16
Speaker
Because this is a time when I think collecting was a very different sort of undertaking than we think of it today.
00:42:23
Speaker
And in fact, I find in my conversations with people from outside of our world that often there's a sort of implicit idea that collecting is something that
00:42:35
Speaker
that people have always done in more or less the way that we do it today.
00:42:38
Speaker
That is, people have always appreciated old things.
00:42:42
Speaker
They've always wanted to own old things as reflective of the periods of time that they represent and that they come from and so on and so forth.
00:42:53
Speaker
And that's not necessarily entirely true.
00:42:57
Speaker
I mean, for much of human history, objects were valued, generally speaking, on aesthetic
00:43:04
Speaker
on an aesthetic basis.
00:43:06
Speaker
And the fact that it was 100 years old, 200 or 500 or 1,000 years old didn't necessarily make a whole lot of a difference.
00:43:14
Speaker
But by the time Morgan is collecting, that's been turned on its head and suddenly people want things that are associated with important historical names like Michelangelo.
00:43:23
Speaker
So how did that transition, how and when did that transition happen and how did somebody like Morgan, how were his collecting proclivities different from those of famous collectors from 50 or 100 years before him?
00:43:40
Speaker
Well, I think some interesting things happened in that latter half of the 19th century.
00:43:43
Speaker
One of them is the rise of the publishing industry.
00:43:45
Speaker
And I think book publishing and books that were illustrated with photographs of works of art help start defining personalities and bringing them to the fore.
00:43:58
Speaker
So that's why around 1900, every bronze you find is called Rossellino or Sansovino.
00:44:03
Speaker
You could really trace this to the appearance of
00:44:05
Speaker
these books, you know, that come out.
00:44:08
Speaker
And so this rise of the art historical establishment, the discipline of art history, but also the outlet for that in book publishing, I think, is an important part of how this sort of culture of names really comes to dominate.
00:44:25
Speaker
Because, you know, you start getting people...
00:44:27
Speaker
putting names to things clearly and you start having distinct ideas even if they're completely wrong and so you look back at some of those publications and you realize you know it's a very complex web that gave rise to some of these attributions but they're trying to carve out these personalities so you at least have a structure a framework to hang things on and you can look through books and compare this looks like this there so I think that plays
00:44:57
Speaker
lays a role in the kind of
00:45:02
Speaker
change this transition to a way of collecting.
00:45:07
Speaker
There also, you could collect large bodies of works at that time.
00:45:12
Speaker
And I think for somebody like Morgan, that was critical.
00:45:14
Speaker
He's very civically minded.
00:45:16
Speaker
And again, this is- And we think, I mean, today, of course, so many of the great objects are in public institutions.
00:45:22
Speaker
Whereas 150 years ago, there were, as you say, incredible.
00:45:27
Speaker
I mean, you look at the
00:45:29
Speaker
the auction records.
00:45:30
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's mind-blowing the amount of material.
00:45:33
Speaker
It's unbelievable what you could buy and at what prices.
00:45:36
Speaker
Yes, and in the case of, you know,
00:45:40
Speaker
in the U.S. and in New York, finally having museums that can receive this and our places for things to be put on public view, the novelty of that.
00:45:49
Speaker
And I think Morgan was very... Tax deductions.
00:45:51
Speaker
Yeah, tax deductions, and that's something that took a while.
00:45:54
Speaker
But Morgan was also very concerned about taxes and tariffs and importation of works of art, and that occupied a lot of...
00:46:01
Speaker
There's always this financial aspect.
00:46:05
Speaker
But the rise of museums and galleries is a place for the public to go.
00:46:12
Speaker
And he was very influenced by the Victorian Albert Museum, which was near his home.
00:46:17
Speaker
In fact, he had a lot of his collection collection.
00:46:19
Speaker
on view at the V&A before he withdrew it and brought it to the U.S. It's sort of a cruel move, but the V&A is plenty.
00:46:27
Speaker
I've been lost in their rooms I'll never find again.
00:46:31
Speaker
But that really impressed me, this idea of being able to create a narrative for the public, and especially here where the public would not
00:46:39
Speaker
necessarily be in a position to travel, to see these works, to learn this history in another way.
00:46:43
Speaker
So I think that drive, that narrative drive that comes with museums, and he was somebody who certainly supported Bode's vision of a Renaissance museum and creating this.
00:46:59
Speaker
feeling of history because he had a great historical imagination.
00:47:03
Speaker
He was somebody who comfortable in French and German.
00:47:05
Speaker
He had been educated abroad.
00:47:08
Speaker
I think he had a very vivid imagination in that sense.
00:47:12
Speaker
This time was also the rise of archaeological excavation, of course, in the 18th century, but it really
00:47:19
Speaker
gains a lot of momentum by the late 19th century.
Archaeology's Influence on Collecting
00:47:22
Speaker
When he was a young man, the discovery of Nineveh and the excavation.
00:47:27
Speaker
He had a great passion for the biblical lands and this idea of things being unearthed and seen for the first time.
00:47:35
Speaker
We have a group of manuscripts here
00:47:37
Speaker
that are sort of 9th or 10th century that had been buried in a well and then rediscover this cache in the early years of the 20th century, but they hadn't been seen in 10th centuries.
00:47:49
Speaker
And that sort of thing, I think, was incredibly powerful, the idea of recovering this history, because I think
00:48:00
Speaker
He had a very privileged upbringing to be able to learn this and pursue this, but I think he was obviously aware that that was a special privilege.
00:48:08
Speaker
And so this consciousness of museum culture.
00:48:12
Speaker
We share that excitement today when things appear.
00:48:16
Speaker
I mean, you know, we're still...
00:48:21
Speaker
full of goosebumps over the Dead Sea Scrolls.
00:48:23
Speaker
Yeah, I know.
00:48:24
Speaker
Every time they put out a new scan where they put it in there, you're like, oh my gosh, how is that possible?
00:48:30
Speaker
They've just uncovered these Indonesian cave paintings and it gives you chills.
00:48:34
Speaker
Yes.
00:48:35
Speaker
Not everything has been discovered still today.
00:48:39
Speaker
Yes, no, exactly.
00:48:40
Speaker
But it's certainly true at the time.
00:48:43
Speaker
Burial chambers in ancient Greece and Italy and Anatolia, they're being uncovered en masse and great Egyptian sites are being, I mean, what a time.
00:48:56
Speaker
It does, it makes the past feel so immediate, you know, and, and.
00:49:01
Speaker
I think for him, both the romance and the fascination of the archaeology and the biblical lands.
00:49:09
Speaker
His last journey in life before his death was through Egypt to Khartoum, and then he had to go back to Rome because of illness.
00:49:15
Speaker
But you can sense where you travel at that age is something he felt very passionate about.
00:49:23
Speaker
And how did his, if we can compare him to his own contemporaries, because there were other storied collectors of that time.
00:49:30
Speaker
You know, we think of people like Isabella Stewart Gardner and William Randolph Hearst.
00:49:40
Speaker
William Henry Walters.
00:49:42
Speaker
Walters and Frick.
00:49:43
Speaker
And Benjamin Altman.
00:49:44
Speaker
I mean, there's, you know, it's interesting because
00:49:47
Speaker
There's so many different personalities who pursued things in different ways.
00:49:52
Speaker
And Altman would get a painting and he'd study it and he'd read everything about it.
00:49:55
Speaker
And he was that sort of quiet scholar type, whereas Morgan was traveling and known for making clear decisions of his own, despite whatever advice he got.
00:50:09
Speaker
And just very instinctive.
00:50:13
Speaker
So I think there's certainly a whole range of personalities there, but I also think that the pleasure of collecting and them being in a position to collect and with the additional impetus of the civic component certainly drove a lot of those American collectors to, you know, also, we've got to put something on your wall.
00:50:34
Speaker
So there was...
00:50:36
Speaker
both private collecting for himself that Morgan did, and then also collecting with the larger sense of this is part of my legacy to enrich these institutions.
00:50:46
Speaker
I think one of the functional differences between collecting in that period and today is that these collectors were naming
00:50:53
Speaker
did buy entire collections as a mechanism for filling America with great works and not so great works.
00:51:02
Speaker
But I feel like between the 1890s and 1918,
00:51:06
Speaker
we saw this incredible sort of exponential increase, partly because people were buying in bulk.
00:51:14
Speaker
Yes, I think in bulk.
00:51:15
Speaker
It's not a fun thing to think about.
00:51:17
Speaker
The idea of having these contingents.
00:51:20
Speaker
But even I remember at one point Morgan was offered some material related to Yorktown.
00:51:25
Speaker
And I think Belle de Custer Green advised the dealer and said, oh, you
00:51:28
Speaker
He'd prefer if you put it together in a volume with all sorts of other related material, and then he would consider it, rather than just a pastel of letters.
00:51:37
Speaker
Like, actually craft this album that has the story and the depth and then can tell this narrative about Yorktown.
00:51:44
Speaker
So I think there's something about...
00:51:46
Speaker
collecting contingents of things, groups of things, something coherent was particularly appealing.
00:51:55
Speaker
And for Morgan, certainly, because the great libraries that he acquired gave him, rather than piecemeal one Caxton at a time, suddenly armfuls of Caxtons.
00:52:08
Speaker
It's something that, yes, is nearly impossible to do today simply because of the limitations of
00:52:17
Speaker
There's so little materials.
00:52:18
Speaker
Exactly, exactly.
00:52:21
Speaker
Well, Briggs, you've painted a very full picture for us, I think, of Morgan as a collector and a man of aesthetic interest.
Why Morgan Included the Bust
00:52:31
Speaker
Can you bring us back home and come back to this bust?
00:52:35
Speaker
Yes.
00:52:37
Speaker
Because now that we have a better sense of who Morgan was and what he was doing and why he was buying, just bring us back to Morgan's purchase of this piece.
00:52:49
Speaker
And...
00:52:51
Speaker
What was he doing
Reflections and Conclusion
00:52:54
Speaker
with that?
00:52:54
Speaker
What brought that into the collection and why did he put that beside his desk in a prominent treasured place?
00:53:03
Speaker
I think that, so Morgan started using this building in late 1906.
00:53:09
Speaker
And in 1907, he retires from Wall Street.
00:53:11
Speaker
And he's spending most of the time that he's in New York, actually here in this room.
00:53:16
Speaker
His house is next door.
00:53:17
Speaker
He comes over.
00:53:18
Speaker
This is where he receives visitors.
00:53:20
Speaker
He dealt with the financial panic.
00:53:23
Speaker
So this building has seen a lot.
00:53:25
Speaker
Work had continued.
00:53:27
Speaker
Not everything you see here was finished in 1907.
00:53:30
Speaker
So in 1908, 1909,
00:53:34
Speaker
you know, they're taking out all the windows and putting the stained glass in them instead of clear panes.
00:53:39
Speaker
And they're finishing some of the construction details in some of the rooms.
00:53:43
Speaker
He's still getting the furniture, you know, deliveries.
00:53:47
Speaker
So this is a period where he's really thinking about
00:53:50
Speaker
How am I going to decorate this space?
00:53:53
Speaker
So he's got agents working with him, but he's also looking himself at objects.
00:54:00
Speaker
And it's a very clearly Italianate space.
00:54:04
Speaker
You have this, you know, villa style, all the...
00:54:08
Speaker
All the examples that inform the design and decoration of it are Italian examples.
00:54:13
Speaker
We're in this beautiful room with, you know, silk wall covering, which has the Kigi and Monte, the Monte and stars of the Kigi family of Siena, great Renaissance banking family.
00:54:24
Speaker
So there's a lot of thought that's gone into creating this environment.
00:54:30
Speaker
And he decides to start collecting
00:54:33
Speaker
works that he hasn't really collected before.
00:54:35
Speaker
He was not a big buyer of Italian paintings or sculpture before this.
00:54:39
Speaker
It wasn't really a demonstrated interest.
00:54:43
Speaker
We see him more and more buying these things for his study in particular, selecting individual paintings,
00:54:49
Speaker
sculpture and so I think by the time that he sees this bust with the Knesses in Paris in 1909 he's thinking about okay well you know it's Italian, it fits, it's bronze and there was such a passion for small bronzes.
00:55:06
Speaker
It was really kind of a phenomenon you know people are learning about them through publications
00:55:11
Speaker
it's the sign of a gentleman because in the Renaissance these small bronze sculptures were what scholars kept in their study, you know, their intimate objects, beautifully crafted.
00:55:20
Speaker
And so I think the idea he wants to evoke in this room
00:55:27
Speaker
that feeling of a Renaissance study, that calm, that hush, but you know, this being surrounded by beautiful objects you could contemplate.
00:55:37
Speaker
And even going back to an early Renaissance painting by Vittorio Carpaccio, you see in the background there's little
00:55:46
Speaker
Bronzes placed around the room of St.
00:55:49
Speaker
Jerome and his study.
00:55:50
Speaker
So the idea of how a study should look and how that should have artworks in it.
00:55:55
Speaker
I think this is informing his desire for the feeling of the room.
00:56:00
Speaker
So he starts acquiring things and bringing them in here where he can appreciate them, his visitors can appreciate them.
00:56:06
Speaker
And I think that this bus, you know, clearly has, it's animated, it's beautiful in the way it takes the light, this bronze.
00:56:15
Speaker
And so he must have had a spare pedestal to put it on, you know, by his desk.
00:56:21
Speaker
And of course, at the moment he acquired it was, you know, probably like, oh, well, it's Florentine Michelangelo, you know.
00:56:28
Speaker
But then, you know, before long sort of,
00:56:33
Speaker
He sort of, in his mind, must have separated out the reality of this object with how it looked on the invoice and was like, wait, where is this?
00:56:41
Speaker
And needed to be right.
00:56:43
Speaker
Proving his connoisseurship skills.
00:56:46
Speaker
He knew it wasn't Michelangelo.
00:56:48
Speaker
He saw it on the invoice.
00:56:49
Speaker
But I think part of that was his receptiveness to bronzes during this period is...
00:56:56
Speaker
adorn this room in a way that felt appropriate to the building and to everything else he had accomplished with this building and that Italianate focus.
00:57:07
Speaker
So it works very well with the paintings.
00:57:09
Speaker
Although, of course, it does then
00:57:11
Speaker
turn out to be cast after a 17th century Dutch.
00:57:15
Speaker
But it partakes of that same genre.
00:57:17
Speaker
And you can see there's other busts in the room of a young boy, of St.
00:57:21
Speaker
John the Baptist and the Christ child.
00:57:24
Speaker
It's very much a Florentine phenomenon to have these busts of children in a domestic environment.
00:57:31
Speaker
So it's definitely...
00:57:33
Speaker
creating even more of a feel of this Renaissance interior that he's trying to evoke in this space.
00:57:42
Speaker
Well, thank you very much for introducing us to the bust and to the space and to the man and the biography and the period and the era and the philosophy and everything else.
00:57:53
Speaker
It's been a fun journey.
00:57:55
Speaker
It certainly has been.
00:57:56
Speaker
Thank you so much, Jennifer.
00:57:57
Speaker
Oh, you're welcome.
00:57:58
Speaker
This is the best way I can think of to spend an afternoon sitting in Morgan's study talking about all the beautiful objects.
00:58:03
Speaker
With the snow falling beyond the stained glass windows.
00:58:05
Speaker
With the snow falling outside, yes.
00:58:07
Speaker
It is truly lovely.
00:58:14
Speaker
That's a wrap for today's episode.
00:58:16
Speaker
I hope you're doing well, staying healthy and happy.
00:58:19
Speaker
Do keep an eye on your podcast app.
00:58:21
Speaker
As I said, we'll be putting out some more special episodes in the coming days.
00:58:25
Speaker
That's a nice diversion for me, and I hope it can be for you too.
00:58:28
Speaker
Our next regularly scheduled episode will feature Jessica Kirchhoff, a specialist in arms and armor, who actually came into that field for blacksmithing.
00:58:37
Speaker
I'm really excited to bring you that conversation.
00:58:40
Speaker
Today's episode was edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:58:43
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:58:46
Speaker
My co-host is Michael Diaz-Griffith, and I'm your host, Ben Mambo.