Marble statues with a veil. Masterpieces of the marble veil

Mysterious "Vestals". Raphael Monti, "Marble Veil", mid-19th century.

When looking at these amazing statues, the question involuntarily arises: how? How did the sculptor manage to turn a hard and cold stone into a light, translucent, easily enveloping one? female figure cover?

Sculptor and carbonarius

The author of these unique works of art is Italian sculptor, writer and poet Rafael Monti (1818 - 1881). He was born in Milan (according to some sources - in Switzerland, but his parents soon returned to Milan) and learned to work with stone from his father, Gaetano Matteo Monti, who taught at the Imperial Academy.

The son turned out to be a worthy student. Already at the age of 20, Raphael received a gold medal for a group sculpture called “Alexander Tames Bucephalus.” For some time he lived in Vienna, where, together with the Austrian sculptor Ludwig Schaller, he worked on a monumental pediment for National Museum in Budapest, but soon returned to Milan, and then left for England.

In 1847, a national liberation movement formed in Italy, and Monti, returning home, joined the Carbonari and became one of the leaders.

But a year later it was all over. Monty, as one of the main “criminals,” was forced to flee back to England, where he remained forever, forgetting about politics and completely immersing himself in the world of art.

It was then that his first mysterious “Vestals” appeared - sculptural portraits women covered with a stone veil.

Transparent marble

Do you want to know how the sculptor managed to create such a “veil”? In fact, it is quite simple, or rather, it sounds simple, but in reality it is a very subtle and serious process and it looks like this.

Marble, as you know, is a heterogeneous stone (in fact, like any other stone). And the sculptor chose for his work a block of marble that initially had two layers - very dense and almost transparent. Find similar stone difficult, but the master knew what he needed, and therefore very carefully chose the material for the work.

After appropriate processing with a chisel - it was necessary to strictly observe the separation of the dense and transparent sections - the master actually emerged from the dense marble with the figure of a woman, and the lighter, transparent layer turned into a mysterious veil enveloping her body. It's simple, isn't it? Then try it!

What about pure intention, thought form, consciousness interacting with the quantum structures of minerals? Not without available tools, of course.

Original taken from masterok c It's a stone!

"Marble Veil". Virgin Mary in marble by Giovanni Strazza. Mid-19th century.

At all amazing works There are a lot of old masters. Here are a couple more examples under the cut:

Statue of Chastity by Antonio Corradini. Marble. 1752 Chapel San Severo in Naples. The sculpture represents tombstone the mother of Prince Raimondo, who gave him life at the cost of her own.

Sculpture "The Rape of Proserpina". Marble. Height 295 cm. Borghese Gallery, Rome. Lorenzo Bernini created this masterpiece when he was 23 years old. In 1621. “I conquered marble and made it as flexible as wax.”

Can anyone explain how it is possible to make this net from stone?

An even more complex allegory is the monument (to the father of Prince Raimondo -Antonio de Sangro (1685 - 1757 ). Italian name this monumentDisingannooften translated into Russian as “Disappointment”, but not in the current generally accepted meaning, but inChurch Slavonic — « Getting rid of the spell» (Capella San Severo, in Naples)

"Breakthrough of the Spell" (after 1757) completed Francesco Quiroloand is the most famous of his works. The monument is valuable for its finest marble work and pumice , from which it is made net . Quirolo was the only one of the Neapolitan craftsmen who agreed to such a delicate work; the rest refused, believing that with one touch of the cutter the net would crumble into pieces.

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Original taken from sibved c It's a stone!

Similar, almost modern works(late 19th century) many. It’s amazing that many corners in the elements cannot be made with a chisel, drill or grinder. There must be a chip, defect, etc. But he's not there! The statues are made perfectly!

Bust of a Veiled Woman (Puritas) 1717 - 1725
Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca" Rezzonico, Venice, Italy
Sculpture, Marble
Done by Antonio Corradini

Veiled Woman (Puritas)

Antonio Corradini

Giuseppe Sanmartino, one of the most famous sculptor of his time, which masterpiece, Il Cristo Velato, is hosted by Sansevero Chapel, the legend says that a real veil was petrified thanks to alchemical processes.

"The Dream of Sorrow and the Joy of Dreams"
Made in London by Raffaelle Monti, 1861

The Sleep Of Sorrow And The Dream Of Joy By Raffaelle Monti

This one is sculpted as if from clay...

Giovanni Battista Lombardi (1823-1880): Veiled Woman, 1869.

Stefano Maderno 1576-1636

A few more works:

Original taken from gallika in Sideshow. Girl in the Vorontsov Palace

Have you ever seen such statues? With lively sparkling eyes and silky eyebrows?

With clothes on which not only lace is visible, but also seams and fabric texture. With a body on which there are folds and pockmarks. And they say that upon closer inspection there are pores...

This is "The Girl" by the Italian sculptor Quintillian Corbellini, early XIX century. She stands in Winter Garden Palace of Count Vorontsov in Alupka. And it truly is his treasure.

The first glance at her gives a completely different impression. Yes, not bad, a lively face, a playful pose, a frivolous dress, not appropriate for her age, lowered from her just emerging breasts.

But once you take a closer look... Lord! She's real!

And it’s not so much the filigree of the lace, but the folds and wrinkles on the knees that attract attention.

Swollen baby feet with dirty toes.

The pose is caught in motion, so unstable.

Seams on the fabric!

A gentle, childish, but at the same time playful face...

And not a childish perspective.

But the fabric!

Texture, folds, seams! How is this possible?

On the other side.

Pockmark above the elbow.

Unforgettably alive.

This is the girl in all her charm that I wanted to show you. Do you believe that this happens?

Unfortunately, I was unable to find any information about its author. Does anyone know what else he created?

What delicate work, because the veil looks so natural that it seems that at the slightest breath the fabric will begin to move.

There were several sculptors who so masterfully conveyed the impression of the finest fabric that you are amazed - how was it done?

However... The technique of veils in sculpture has been known since the times of Ancient Greece.

Terracotta head of a woman in a veil, Cyprus, 2nd - 1st century BC.

Terracotta head of a veiled woman, 4th century BC.

Ancient Greece, 4th century BC. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Ancient Greece, 3rd - 2nd century BC. e. Bronze.

"Christ under the Shroud"

Antonio Corradini (Antonio Corradini, September 6, 1668, Este, Padua - June 29, 1752, Naples) and Giuseppe Sanmartino (Giuseppe Sanmartino, 1720 - 1793) combines the 18th century, profession - they are both Italian sculptors, and the work "Christ under the Shroud", commissioned by Raimondo de Sangro (seventh prince of San Severo) for the San Severo Chapel in Naples .

Initially, the prince entrusted the work to Antonio Corradini, but he only managed to make a clay model (kept in the Certosa Museum of San Martino). After Corradini's death, Prince Raimondo entrusted the completion of the work to the young and unknown Neapolitan sculptor Giuseppe Sanmartino.

Sanmartino retained the main feature of the original design - the finest marble canvas.
Prince Raimondo intended to place “Christ under the Shroud” not in the chapel itself, but under it - in the crypt, where, according to the prince’s plan, the sculpture of Sanmartino was supposed to be illuminated with a special “eternal light” invented by him.

Antonio Corradini, "Sara"

Antonio Corradini

For the most part he worked for Venetian clients. His sculptures are in the squares and parks, cathedrals and museums of Este, Venice, Rome, Vienna, Gurkha, Dresden, Detroit, London, Prague, Naples, where he, commissioned by Raimondo de Sangro, worked on the decoration of the San Severo Chapel. The sculpture of Christ under the Shroud he began in the chapel (he only managed to make a clay model) was executed by the young and then unknown Neapolitan sculptor Giuseppe Sanmartino.

"Purity"
Antonio Corradini, Bust of a Veiled Woman (Puritas) 1717/ 1725 Marble Museo del Settecento Veneziano, Ca" Rezzonico, Venice

"Chastity", Naples, San Severo Chapel.

The statue of Chastity (Pudizia) is a funerary monument to Cecilia Gaetani del L'Aquila d'Aragona (1690 - 1710), mother of Prince Raimondo, who died shortly after giving birth.

"The Veiled Lady"

"The Veiled Girl"

Bust "The Veiled Girl"(Carrara marble) - fragment famous statue"Faith" by the sculptor Antonio Corradini (1688-1752), purchased for the collection of Peter the Great in Venice by S. Raguzinsky for "100 gold ducats." Was in Summer Garden before late XVIII century, then - in the St. George's Hall Winter Palace, where it was damaged in a fire in 1837. Top part After restoration, the statue was placed by A.I. Stackenschneider in the Inner Garden of the Tsarina Pavilion in Peterhof.

Giuseppe Sammartino

Giuseppe Sanmartino."Christ under the Shroud"

Giuseppe Sammartino (1720-1793) - Italian sculptor of the Southern Italian school. Worked in Naples. In his style, the Baroque traditions were combined with the verism of Neapolitan plastic art.

The first dated work is marble sculpture"Christ under the Shroud" (1753), originally commissioned from the sculptor Antonio Corradini, in the Chapel of San Severo.

The sculpture aroused the admiration of Antonio Canova, who, according to him, would give ten years of his life to become the author of such a work. Legend has it that the real veil was petrified.

Raffaello Monti

"The dream of sorrow and the joy of dreams." Raffaello Monti, London, 1861.

"Night", 1862

"True"

"Vestal"

The veiled marble bust of the Vestal Virgin was created by the Italian sculptor Raffaello Monti (1818-1881) in 1860.
The bust is exhibited at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and for the English estate of Chatsworth, the sculptor made the same vestal in full height.

The sculpture depicts the veiled priestess of Vesta - the Vestal Virgin. Vesta is the Roman guardian goddess of the sacred fire, symbolizing the center of life - the state, city, home. It was believed that in any fire there is a particle of the spirit of Vesta.

"Circassian Slave" (1851)

Marble Bust of a Veiled Maiden Signed By Raffaello Monti

Giovanni Strazza

"Virgin Mary" in marble by Giovanni Strazza (1818-1875), mid-19th century.

Sculptural bust "Woman in a hat and veil". Marble. Western Europe. Beginning of the 20th century

Museum d'Orsay in Paris

“In a transparent veil”, 20th century. Elizabeth Ackroyd. Bankfield Museum, UK.
The effect does not disappear at any angle and at any distance.

“Ondine Coming Out of the Water,” 1880. Chancey Bradley Eves. Yale University Gallery, USA.

Veiled Lady. Artist Rossi, Pietro. 1882

Today we will get acquainted with the works of the Italian sculptor Raphael Monti 1818-1881. He was one of the sculptors who managed to create real masterpieces of Vestal Virgins with marble veils - priestesses greek goddess Vesta. ABOUT THE ARTIST Born in Milan, he took his first steps under the guidance of his father, also a sculptor, Gaetano Matteo Monti, at the Imperial Academy. He debuted early and won a gold medal for a group called "Alexander Tames Bucephalus." He and other young sculptors belonged to the Lombard school, which dominated Italian sculpture in the first half of the nineteenth century. He worked for some time in Vienna and Milan, made his first visit to England in 1846, but returned to Italy again in 1847 and joined the People's Party, becoming one of the main officers of the National Guard. After the disastrous failure of the Risorgimento campaign of 1848, he again fled Italy for England. His career in England was very successful and fruitful. Monty's work was exhibited at the Royal Academy, and he soon earned recognition as a leading sculptor. His prize- and medal-winning Eve after the Fall was particularly good, but two other sculptures in the exhibition, Circassian Slave Trader and Vestal, the best in technique, became his trademark: the fine treatment of solid marble figures wrapped in transparent veils. "Vestal Virgin", was acquired in 1847 by the Duke of Devonshire before the exhibition began, as well as the work "The Dream of Sorrow and the Joy of Dreams", currently in the Victoria and Albert Museum. A LITTLE NOTE ABOUT THE VESTALS. I thought it was interesting. Vestals - priestesses of the goddess Vesta in Ancient Rome who enjoyed great respect and honor. Their person was inviolable. The Vestals were freed from paternal authority and had the right to own property and dispose of it at their own discretion. Anyone who insulted the Vestal Virgin in any way, for example, by trying to slip under her stretcher, was punishable by death. A lictor walked ahead of the Vestal Virgin, under certain conditions Vestals had the right to ride in chariots. If they met a criminal on their way to execution, they had the right to pardon him. The duties of the Vestals included maintaining the sacred fire in the temple of Vesta, maintaining the cleanliness of the temple, making sacrifices to Vesta and the penates, protecting the palladium and other shrines. At first there were only six of them, when a vacancy became available, they were chosen from 20 girls from 6 to 10 years of noble origin. The Vestal Virgins newly entering the community were led first of all into the atrium of the Temple of Vesta, where her hair was cut off and hung as a donation to sacred tree, which was already more than 500 years old in the era of Pliny the Elder. Then the young Vestal Virgin was dressed all in white, given the name “Beloved,” which was added to her name, and initiated into new duties. The service life was 30 years, divided equally into training, direct service and training others (mentoring). After these years, the Vestal Virgin became free and could get married. However, the latter happened extremely rarely, since there was a belief that marriage with a vestal would not lead to good, and in addition, when getting married, the former vestal lost her unique social and property status for a Roman woman and became an ordinary matron, completely dependent on her husband, which, of course, was unprofitable for her. The Vestals were very rich, mainly due to the ownership of large estates that provided a large income, in addition to which each personally received from her family a significant sum at the initiation and received generous gifts from the emperors. In 24, when Cornelia joined the ranks of the Vestals, Tiberius gave her 2 million sesterces. Throughout their service, the Vestal Virgins were required to maintain a chaste lifestyle; violation of it was strictly punished. It was believed that Rome could not take upon itself such a sin as the execution of a Vestal Virgin, so they were punished by burial alive (in a field located within the city limits at the Collin Gate on the Quirinal) with a small supply of food, which was not formally death penalty, and the seducer was flogged to death. Guilty of violating her vow, the Vestal Virgin was placed on a stretcher tightly closed and tied with belts so that even her voice could not be heard, and carried through the forum. Everyone silently made way for her and saw her off without saying a word, in deep grief. For the city there was no more terrible sight, there was no sadder day than this. When the stretcher was brought to the appointed place, the slaves untied the straps. The high priest read a mysterious prayer, raised his hands to the sky before the execution, ordered the criminal to be brought up, with a thick veil over her face, placed on the stairs leading to the dungeon, and then left along with the other priests. When the Vestal descended, the ladder was taken away, the hole was filled with a mass of earth from above, and the place of execution became as level as the rest. The institution of the Vestal Virgins lasted until approximately 391, when Emperor Theodosius banned public pagan worship. After this, the sacred fire was extinguished, the temple of Vesta was closed, and the institution of the Vestal Virgins was disbanded. MONTI'S MOST FAMOUS WORKS.

Look and...

Starting from the end of the 17th century, amazing sculptures, hitherto unseen. They are made so delicately that some contemporaries cannot even believe that they were made by ordinary, albeit very talented, craftsmen, with ordinary human hands. It's about about marble sculptures decorated with a veil. The veil, of course, is also marble.

These works are so striking in their elegance and subtlety of work that they are even seriously cited as arguments by some supporters of “non-traditional” historical theories. First of all, this concerns the works of Raphael Monti. However, he was not the pioneer on this path.

The first sculptor who managed to create that same marble veil was the Neapolitan master Antonio Corradini, born in 1668. His most famous sculpture “under the veil” is “Chastity”, 1752, now located in Naples, in the Chapel San Severo.

You may notice that in the same Chapel there is another sculpture, no less amazing - “Deliverance from Enchantment”, which Francesco Quirolo completed in 1757. Although it has nothing to do with the “marble veils”, nevertheless, it amazes the imagination no less - it is simply incomprehensible to the mind how such a masterpiece could be created manually.

However, returning to the topic of our material - the authorship of Corradini belongs to several more busts, made using the same technique " marble veil", and while creating another work of art with a similar effect, Antonio was overtaken by death.

The master had just begun to fulfill the order of Raimondo de Sangro, Prince of San Severo, but he only managed to create a clay model of the sculpture, now known as “Christ under the Shroud.” Luck smiled in such a unique way on another Neapolitan sculptor, Giuseppe Sammartino, whose name became famous thanks to this particular work. He slightly changed Corradini’s original plans, but left the essence unchanged.

The very image of Christ, the symbolism of the compositional elements and that same amazing marble veil - all this transformed this work art into an imperishable masterpiece, the greatest of those preserved by the Chapel of the Princes of San Severo. Surprisingly, Giuseppe Sammartino never created anything even approximately equal in greatness.

For almost a whole century, sculptors did not turn to the most complex and, at the same time, most spectacular technique of the “marble veil”. "Little things" in mid-19th century Giovanni Strazza distinguished himself by sculpting a bust of the Virgin Mary using the same effect. Another similar sculpture from approximately the same period is “Rebecca under the Veil”, sculpted by Giovanni Maria Benzoni. Surprisingly, others similar works no sculptors survived, and the sculptors themselves did not gain much fame.

However, another Italian sculptor, Rafael Monti, who by the will of fate ended up in England, nevertheless returned the fashion for the marble veil, so to speak. In addition, it was he who described the technological process for creating such sculptures, which, presumably, he learned in his homeland, in Italy, and later successfully applied in England.

The point turned out to be simple - Monty used special material. He selected marble with an unusual structure, two-layer. The top layer was more transparent, the bottom layer was denser. The veil effect was achieved through the finest processing, as a result of which the same “transparent” veil was obtained from the top layer of marble - such a thin layer of material remained.

Try to imagine the complexity of this technique in conditions where everything is done manually. More early masters, probably also used marble with a similar structure. The rarity of the material and the complexity of production can explain the small number of sculptures with a marble veil.

In the 20th century, sculptors such as Elizabeth Ackroyd or Kevin Francis Gray also turned to the effect of a marble veil, but modern technologies, the emerging variety of tools and access to specialized information do not allow us to put their work on a par with the works of masters of previous centuries, who created their masterpieces virtually by hand.

If you think about it, the titanic complexity of the works now peacefully gathering dust in the Capella San Severo, willy-nilly, suggests that we definitely still don’t know something about those people who created these brilliant sculptures, and the conditions in which they created. So all that remains is to enjoy their beauty and marvel at the skill with which they were created, imbued with respect for human nature and the ability to create something beautiful.