 |
| Ugolino and His Sons, Marble, Modeled by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Carved by Victor Bernard, Metropolitan Museum of Art |
I think it’s appropriate at this time to sing the praises of
the marble carver Victor Bernard. His presumed masterpiece, the magnificent, majestic, anguished depiction of Ugolino
and His Sons, is currently the centerpiece of a breathtaking sculpture exhibit at the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ugolino is an incredible figural
composition in marble, and for years in my former job as a part-time Information
Desk lackey for the Met I effusively praised its remarkable qualities to
visitors. How, I wondered, could one man
seamlessly carve such precise, intricate, anatomical detail for five
intertwined figures from one block of marble without any discernible slip of the
chisel?
Not much is known about Mr. Bernard, apparently. But everybody knows this sculpture
depicting Ugolino and His Sons from Dante’s Inferno. The tyrant Ugolino is condemned to eternal punishment with
his four sons and faces the agonizing choice of either starvation or
cannibalism. One reason nobody knows
much about Bernard is all the credit for carving Ugolino is usually given to
the wrong man! I’ve long thought that this
incredible masterpiece of marble carving was the work of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux
(1827-1875), whose sculptures and related artwork are on view in a spectacular
exhibit at the Met through May 26.
Carpeaux is considered the greatest 19th Century sculptor
before Rodin. And while Carpeaux did all
the critical studies and clay and plaster models for Ugolino and His Sons from 1960-61,
the marble version was carved by Bernard from 1865-67. Judging by this one incredible example, Bernard
was an extraordinary marble carver. He
is briefly referenced in the catalog accompanying the current exhibition, “The
Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux,” co-authored by James David Draper, the
Met’s curator for European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Edouard Papet, chief
curator of sculpture at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris.
There might be more information on Bernard buried in some archaic French
publication in a massive PDF file that takes forever to download, but I’m not going
to spend the rest of my life looking for it.
I did do a little Google research, but came up empty-handed.
The bronze version of Ugolino was placed in the Tuileries
Garden in Paris
in 1863. In 1865, Stephane Derville, a
Parisian marble carver, proposed creating a marble version. “The carving in an off-white marble from
Saint-Beat, a quarry in the Pyrenees that belonged to
Derville, was to be executed by Victor Bernard, as stipulated by the contract
that was drawn up in Paris on December 23, 1865,” Papet
writes. So there you have it, or as much
as you are likely to have about it. Bernard
gets a brief mention on the Met’s own website in a description of its Ugolino: “This marble version was executed by the
practitioner Bernard under Carpeaux's supervision and completed in time for the
Universal Exposition at Paris in
1867. The date inscribed on the marble [1860] refers to the original plaster
model's completion.” Derville’s family
retained possession of the marble Ugolino until 1950. The Met purchased it in 1967 from the
Wildenstein Gallery.
The Met probably doesn’t want to make too much of the fact
that its masterpiece was carved not by the great man himself but by a barely
acknowledged skilled craftsman named Victor Bernard. In fact, in promoting the Carpeaux exhibit of
150 sculptures, paintings, and drawings in nine galleries, the Met has this to
say about Carpeaux: “He strove for
anatomical realism in all media, but especially in his marble sculptures and
busts, which seem to capture flesh and blood in stone.” Well, yes they do, to an incredible degree,
despite not being carved personally by Carpeaux. The soft, off-white beauty of the marble
perfectly mimics the translucence of pulsating human flesh in a miraculous way.
I couldn’t believe the sense of life emanating from those marbles. I stared long and hard at several of the
portrait busts, including the handsome marble likeness of one of the 19th Century’s
greatest academic painters, Jean-Leon Gerome.
 |
| Jeon-Leon Gerome, Marble, Getty Museum |
Carpeaux, who died of bladder cancer when he was only 48,
was the son of a stone mason and himself a skilled carver in marble when he was young,
but after nearly going blind from an infection caused by marble dust, he
created his greatest works without actually carving another block of stone.
Having belatedly learned this startling news about the
creation of the Met’s Ugolino, I was extremely disappointed, even a bit
despondent, over the fact that Carpeaux himself had not carved what I have
always considered to be the most impressive sculpture at the Met. I was cruelly reminded that things we value in life are "seldom what they seem."
Making a clay or plaster model of Ugolino is one thing. But carving a huge block of marble to reveal
five intertwined figures to anatomical perfection always seemed one heck of a lot harder. But what do I know about hard work. I’m only an easel painter. Painting an apple seems like hard work to
me. I couldn’t contemplate the seemingly
insurmountable task of carving Ugolino and His Sons. So I did a little Internet searching and found that it’s not quite as hard as it
looks, and farming out the work to apprentices or skilled stonemasons was
common practice among most of the big name sculptors like Rodin, and dates all
the way back to the ancient Greeks. The self-hewn
marbles of the incomparable Michelangelo, however, were on
Carpeaux’s mind for nearly every one of his own figural creations.
“With the introduction of the full-sized clay or plaster
model in the Cinquecento [16th Century Italy], it had become more and more
possible for the sculptor to leave the transfer from the model to stone to his
apprentices,” wrote Chandler Rathfon Post, an associate professor of Greek and
Fine Arts at Harvard, in his 1921 book, A History of European and American Sculpture.
“The gradual perfection of methods for
such transfer, especially the invention of the pointing machine, entailed the
unwelcome result that by the nineteenth century, masters had generally
abandoned the practice of hewing their own statues and reliefs. Sculpture thus
lost that life, warmth, and vivid impression of the artist's individuality
which constitute so much of the appeal, for instance, in Michael Angelo [sic].”
In today’s digital world, stone carving can even be done
by automated milling machines controlled by computer data. Using this technology, a work in marble can
be executed in about one-third the time of more traditional methods, I read
somewhere. But many of today’s sculptors
still prefer to carve marble themselves and use the pointing device for accurate
carving of the figure. Here’s a link to a
contemporary sculptor’s marble carving process and his thoughts on the use of
surrogate carvers. http://www.jasonarkles.com/process/.
To be honest, I don’t know anything about these pointing
devices for stone carving. I’ve never
been curious enough to look into them myself and have never seen how they work. But having
a skilled carver do the work for you seems to be a form of cheating, especially
when the work is the one sculpture you are best known for. After winning first place at the French Salon
in 1863 for the bronze Ugolino, Carpeaux wrote to a friend, “The first step has
been made: Everyone in Paris knows
the name Carpeaux.”
I wonder if Victor Bernard got due credit when Carpeaux received
a first place gold medal for the marble Ugolino at the Universal Exposition in
1867? But you know, whether he did or
not, it probably wouldn’t have mattered to him.
He had steady work for a couple of years, probably got paid pretty well,
and could take symbiotic pride in having worked closely with the celebrated
sculptor. I imagine the workers on Henry
Ford’s first assembly line felt the same way about helping put together the Model
T Ford. There isn’t room for everybody
at the top.
