Michelangelo Maestri (c.1741-1812), The Clumber Maestris: A Pair of Bacchantes

Michelangelo Maestri (c.1741-1812)
The Clumber Maestris: A Pair of Bacchantes, after frescoes from the Villa of Cicero, Pompei
c.1790
Pastel on paper
23 ½ x 17 ¼

Provenance

In the collection of Henry Pelham-Clinton, seventh Duke of Newcastle (1864-1928) at Clumber House, Nottinghamshire, by 1885;
By descent within the family, Clumber House, Nottinghamshire;
Christie’s, London, Pictures by Old Masters, 4 June 1937, lot 5 (as J. E. Liotard, Two Female Models, in white drapery – a pair), where purchased for £11.11 (Christie's stencils verso);
The van Zuylen van Nijevelt van de Haar family;
Until acquired privately therefrom by Whiteman’s Fine Art, 2025.

Note

This exquisite pair of pastels by Michelangelo Maestri (c.1741-1812), as remarkable for their condition as for their provenance, depicts two full-length female figures – bacchantes, those followers of Bacchus who went about with him in song and dance. Presented poised against a black background, they move in dance, one to the left, the other to the right, their loose garments flowing about them with the rhythm of revelry.

The designs for these figures derive from two in a series of twelve frescoes uncovered in the triclinium of the so-called Villa of Cicero in Pompei on the 18th of January 1749 [1] and correspond to those now in the Museo Archelogico Nazionale di Napoli (inv. 9297). Writing about these figures in 1762, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717-1768) praised them for being ‘flüchtig wie ein Gedanke, und schön wie von der Hand der Gratien ausgeführet’ [2] – that is, as fluid as thought and as beautiful as if executed by the hands of the Graces. It was in this spirit of artistic wonderment that the discoveries made in Pompei and Herculaneum in the eighteenth century attracted painters, poets, sculptors, and scholars.[3] As Rosaria Ciardiello explains, it is Winckelmann who can largely be credited with the widespread popularisation and dissemination of the discoveries at these sites, none more so than the designs of the danzatrici – dancers – in the Villa of Cicero, which became a central motif in Neoclassical aesthetics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[4] Reproductions of these designs grew quickly in popularity, particularly among those on the Grand Tour, and artists such as Maestri worked to cater for this market.

In the present pair, Maestri captured the figures’ grace of form and refinement of line, splendidly reproducing the character of the Third Style of Pompeiian painting (c.15 B.C.-50 A.D.), a period distinguished by its figurative and ornamental elegance. The figures move lightly and deftly through space, their white dresses loose, ungirt, and billowing behind them. They are identifiable as bacchantes by their costume, though subtle differences in detail distinguish one from the other in point of character.[5] For instance, the dancer with cymbals wears the characteristic crown of ivy, while her counterpart wears one of cornstalks. Instead of cymbals, too, the latter holds a tray in her left hand and a basket in her right, perhaps performing the cernophorum, a dance in which participants held cups and other vessels.[6]

Collection labels and inventory tags on the verso of both frames reveal that the present pair was once part of what was one of the most significant collections of art in England, that of the dukes of Newcastle at Clumber House in Nottinghamshire. As Leonard Jacks put it, in his 1881 survey of the great houses of that county, ‘Perhaps no home of title in the whole country is so well known as Clumber […] a house which for size and situation can hold its own with any of those other palaces that are occupied by the wealthy of this land, and treasures the like of which the riches of England would not purchase.'[7] Indeed, among its paintings, the collection boasted great works by Titian, Van Dyck, and Andrea del Sarto. Accordingly, Jacks went on to say, ‘Among the pleasure-houses of England, very few can rival Clumber in pictorial and sculptural wealth.'[8]

It is unknown how or when the present pair came to be at Clumber. But it is possible that Henry Pelham-Clinton, fourth Duke of Newcastle (1785-1851), a contemporary of Maestri’s, purchased them while abroad between 1803-1806. This theory is, however, called somewhat into question given the Duke’s detainment at Tours for the majority of this period as a result of the collapse of the Peace of Amiens and the resumption of hostilities between Britain and France. Nevertheless, based on surviving inventories of Clumber House, the pair was certainly in the Newcastle collection by 1885. Furthermore, it is likely they hung in the Lincoln Sitting Room, forming part of a large group of pastels, all depicting similar female figures.[9] This suggestion is strengthened by descriptions of the other pictures in this room. Aside from an engraving of Charles I and a portrait of a soldier, the Lincoln Sitting Room was comprised of a pair of pastels of cupids, seven drawings of ancient buildings and landscapes, four mythological scenes, and one Roman scene.[10] This points to a broad thematic unity in the decoration of this room with most of the pictures depicting Classical subjects. In light of this, one can begin to imagine a room in which the grace and elegance of decoration found in a Pompeiian villa had been transposed into the setting of a nineteenth-century English stately home.

After the death of the seventh Duke of Newcastle in 1928, the house was closed. To cover debts, its contents were sold at various auctions in 1937, and the house was subsequently demolished the following year. The present pair was attributed erroneously to the eighteenth-century pastellist, Jean-Étienne Liotard (1702-1789).[11] The Clumber Maestris, however, are exceptional examples of Maestri working on a relatively large scale and form an important part of his extant oeuvre.

Footnotes

[1] Ottavio Antonio Baiardi, The Antiquities of Herculaneum, trans. by Thomas Martyn and John Lettice (London: S. Leacroft, 1773), p. 77

[2] Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Sendschreiben von den herculanischen Entdeckungen (Dresden: George Conrad Walther, 1762), p. 30

[3] See, for example, Antonio Canova, Dancer, 1809-1812, marble, Bode-Museum, Berlin.

[4] Rosaria Ciardiello, ‘Influenza, ricezione e fortuna delle decorazioni dalla Villa di Cicerone a Pompei’, Rivista di Studi Pompeiani, 30 (2019), pp. 79-90 (p. 82)

[5] See, for example, Euripides, The Bacchae, trans. by Gilbert Murray (London: George Allen, 1906), p. 10 – ‘[…] a band of fifteen Eastern Women, the light of the sunrise streaming upon their long white robes and ivy-bound hair. They wear fawn-skins over their robes, and carry some of them trimbels, some pipes and other instruments.’

[6] Baiardi, The Antiquities of Herculaneum, p. 99

[7] Leonard Jacks, The Great Houses of Nottinghamshire and the County Families (Nottingham: W. and A. S. Bradshaw, 1881), p. 42

[8] Ibid., p. 44

[9] Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections (MSS), Ne 6 | 1/6, ‘Inventory of the Furniture, Pictures, Plated Articles, Linen, China, Glass, Articles of Vertu, etc, contained in Clumber House…’, 1885, p. 82

[10] Ibid.

[11] Christie’s, Pictures by Old Masters: 4 June 1937, lot 5