Four columns decorated with festoons and bucrania

Valadier Luigi

(Rome 1726 - 1785)

The four columns with grey granite shafts are completed at the top by white marble cymatiums. Applied to these are gilded bronze friezes depicting a plant-motif festoon supported by ribbons knotted to the horns of a bucranium (ox's head) and passing through three paterae. Bronze mouldings separate the cymatium from the shaft and the latter from the base, also in white marble.

Accounting documents preserved in the Borghese archives confirm that Luigi Valadier, the family's trusted silversmith, was paid for the friezes on these and 12 other columns, all of which formed a set. The group was dismembered in 1909 following the sale of the twelve columns to Napoleon – together with the busts which they supported in Room IV – and only these four specimens have come down to us.

Object details

Commentary

The last remaining pieces of a set originally composed of sixteen elements, the four granite and white marble columns bear bronze decorative inserts made in 1780 by Luigi Valadier. These are the beautiful friezes around the upper white marble bands and the two mouldings, respectively with ovoid shapes and spiral-wrapped ribbon, bordering the granite shafts at the upper and lower ends. In the frieze, the Roman silversmith composed elements favoured by late 18th-century decorative taste, such as bucrania and patera, connecting them with plant-motif festoons and pleated ribbons knotted to the horns of the bucranium (ox's head). The decorative motif, already used with similar characteristics on two candlesticks made for the Borghese family in 1774 and today preserved at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (inv. 1994.14.1, .2; González-Palacios 2018, p. 430; 2019, p. 170) in this case, thanks to the larger size of the piece, extends and wraps around the band, with flowers and fruit in high relief, interspersed with jagged leaves and fluttering ribbons. The frieze fits perfectly into the columns, enriching the subdued colour scheme created by the different types of marble used together with the luminosity and preciousness of gilded bronze, creating an extremely elegant whole.

According to documentation in the Borghese family archives, silversmith Luigi Valadier was paid 400 scudi in 1780 for the gilded bronze decorations on sixteen granite columns (Archivio Segreto Vaticano, Archivio Borghese, f. 8254, c. 28, in González-Palacios 1993, I, pp. 219, 250, no. 13). Twelve of them had been placed by the architect Antonio Asprucci in the ground floor gallery as supports for the same number of emperors' busts arranged along the walls, for the refurbishment of the Villa rooms commissioned by Prince Marcantonio V at the turn of the century. An accurate drawing by the architect Charles Percier, dated 1786-1791 (Paris, Bibliothèque de l'Institut de France, ms. 1008, f. 32, no. 61), and the description in the volume Sculture del Palazzo della Villa Borghese detta Pinciana by Ennio Quirino Visconti and Luigi Lamberti (1796, I, p. 22) provide detailed evidence of this positioning. The same twelve columns appear to have been included in the sale of works from the collection to Napoleon in 1809 (Fabréga-Dubert 2009, p. 223, no. 447, note 157): after they arrived in Paris in 1810, when they appear to have been inventoried, all trace of them has since been lost. Evidently excluded from this are the four still-preserved columns, which do not seem to have found an immediate place in the rooms of the Villa after their execution. For this reason, it seems conceivable that they were put away in a storage room. They may have been taken out on the occasion of the 19th-century renovation of the villa.

Sonja Felici