Fireplace

Pacetti Vincenzo

Rome 1746 – Rome 1820

Cardelli Lorenzo

(Roma 1733 ca. - 1794)

De Rossi Antonio

attivo ultimo quarto del sec. XVIII

This fireplace was made during the major renovation of the interiors commissioned by Prince Marcantonio Borghese in the late eighteenth century and headed by the architect Antonio Asprucci. Made out of precious materials, it has a trabeated mantelpiece with an architrave in giallo antico marble and a front decorated with laurel festoons hung from bucrania and ribbons in burnished gilt bronze. It has a mantelshelf in Luni marble with dentils. The trabeation is supported by two fluted columns in giallo antico marble with bases in Luni marble and Doric capitals in burnished gilt bronze with acanthus leaves and ovules. The projecting opening of the hearth has a Luni marble frame with pearls and dentils. The inside is decorated with white majolica tiles decorated with plant motifs and birds. To the sides, there are two chiaroscuro cameos with classical heads wearing a helmet and crown.

Object details

Commentary

This elegant fireplace in giallo antico marble replaced an earlier, seventeenth-century one with a light grey cornice, ‘with two dragons carved on the bands and an inscription in the middle with the name of Cardinal Scipione Borghese’ (Montelatici 1700). It is part of the Neoclassical decoration commissioned by Prince Marcantonio Borghese and produced by a team of artists and artisans on designs by Antonio Asprucci. It was created by Pacetti, with bronze components by Antonio De Rossi and marble elements by Lorenzo Cardelli. The fluted Doric columns, gilt bronze capitals, bucrania and, on the front, a festoon supported by bucrania, also in gilt bronze, are the work of De Rossi. The overall design, as with the other fireplaces, is by Asprucci. Cardelli had received a rather large payment in 1782, 2,080 scudi (account book no. 388; González Palacios 1993, pp. 265–297), and since this was the busiest period of work on the room, it is likely that another payment made in 1782 (‘for the carving on the three fireplaces in statuary marble and lustri sc. 165 - f. 5394’) also included this one, along with the ones in Room X and Room XX. Antonio Canova mentioned Cardelli on 16 November 1779, describing the ‘beautiful fireplaces decorated with very tasteful carving’ that were in his workshop. As for the gilt bronze garlands, there are two related sheets depicting two of the Villa’s fireplaces, the one in Room XX and this one (González Palacios 1993, p. 228), in a group of drawings from Valadier’s workshop that resurfaced and were displayed in London in 1991. The drawing is not identical to the actual fireplace, lacking the bucrania and depicting Ionic capitals rather than Doric ones, but it does feature the two columns and the motif of garlands on the border. These slight variations aside, it would seem that the design of the fireplace derived from drawings by Valadier. The bronze decoration is the work of Antonio De Rossi (payment on 28 September 1782: ‘wrought, gilt copper capitals … 6 festoons for the architrave … 5 bull’s skulls to be embellished with the mentioned festoons … 4 rosettes with ribbons and fluttering ribbons holding the festoons with the cited skulls’). De Rossi began working at the Villa as a brass worker in 1775, when he was still called simply Rossi (he became De Rossi in 1777). No task too small, he also made hinges and handles, and he made frames for marble tables until 1784. The gilt bronze border with festoons hung from bucrania is a citation, with variants, of a famous monument: the Tripod from the Temple of Isis in Pompeii, now in the Museo Nazionale, Naples (Ferrara 1987). Visconti wrote that, on the shelf, there was a ‘reclining statuette, made of bronze and covered with singular gilding, that has been turned into a clock. The piece is drawn from Michelangelo’s famous Dusk, and is the last, precious work by Valadier’ (Visconti 1796). Luigi Valadier’s clock was sold in the 1892 auction, the catalogue for which describes it as: ‘n. 511: Très belle pendule en bronze ciselé et doré, époque Louis XV. Un homme barbu demi nu est couché sur un divan, les jambes croisées et s'appuyant sur le bras gauche. Il soutient de la main droite un cadran posé sur son corp. Socle en porphyre orientale rouge‘. Hamilton’s large painting of the Rape of Helen was hung above the fireplace. Five of the Villa’s six fireplaces still have their original metal backplates (the one in Room XI has an older one). They were supplied by De Rossi, four of them in 1783: ‘On the day 31 July 1783 … a large brass backplate, with festoons, altar in the middle, palm trunks … On the day 29 December 3 brass backplates similar to the first one, having changed the bas-relief of the oval in the middle’ (AAV, Arch. Borghese, 5342, no. 5205). These four backplates seem to be the ones in the fireplaces in Rooms IX, X, XIX and XX, since the only difference between them is the decoration in the central oval.  The tiles were made by Domenico Cialdi, a ‘Majolica maker’ based in S. Gallicano. Nibby (1832 and 1838) mentions a ‘cover’ or ‘fire screen’ for the fireplace, decorated with a ‘medallion painted in chiaroscuro by Conti that creates the illusion that is was made of stucco’. This might have been Domenico Conti, born in Mantua and active in Rome from 1770 until his death in 1817 (Ferrara 1954). The fire screen was mentioned again in 1873 in an anonymous ‘Indication’ of the art objects in the Casino of the Villa.

Paola Berardi