"Allegoria della Pace" (Allegory of Peace) attributed to American Neoclassical sculptor Hiram Powers (1805-1873), sculpture in gesso, born Woodstock, VT, died Florence, Italy
MEASUREMENTS:
22.625" H x 18.5" W x 11.5" D
Hiram Powers was one of the protagonists of nineteenth-century art, among the major American sculptors, with Horatio Greenough and Thomas Crawford, and as the greatest part of them active for almost the whole life in Italy, still considered during the century the international center of marble sculpture. Powers had settled in Florence, not to return home, in 1837, starting a successful career in the artistic fields of the portrait but especially the invention of sculpture. Famous were the numerous ideal and allegorical female heads and some full-length statues, repeatedly replicated in his very active studio, as the Greek Schiava, the work, begun in 1841, which assured him an extraordinary worldwide fame. In this female nude the artist conjugated formal idealization with romantic naturalism according to the vision that the Florentine artistic environment and above all the teaching of Lorenzo Bartolini had imposed on the correction of the neoclassical conventions. His extraordinary success was also due to the proposal of the representation of beauty as a means of expressing sentimental and moral content. This original plaster model, which still contains the staples inserted as measuring references for the exact translation of the prototype in the marble specimen, is anonymous but appears to be attributable to the American master, I believe convincingly, based on the close iconographic similarity formal with certain and documented works of the master. Naturally, only the identification of the marble specimen, if it was signed, could eventually confirm definitively the hypothesis that is being formulated. The bust shares the drapery style with countless others from Powers. The peculiarity of the folds according to a vertical and parallel, rather than transverse, as suggested by the frequent adoption of cloaks to turn around the figures, appears typical and characteristic of his busts, possibly shared in sporadic cases by artists influenced by him. It can be compared both with numerous portraits, and with ideal heads, for example the busts of Frances Elliott Austen (fig.2, 1848, Washington, National Museum of American Art), which in the version of the original in chalk also bears the technical characteristic of the transport points positioned in the same places, by Emily Stevenson David Harris (Fig. 2, The Ricau Collection, The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk) or the ideal head of Geneva (Fig. 3, second version, 1863, Toledo, Ohio, Toledo Museum of Art). Even the style of the dress, not classic but neo-medieval, with a wide neckline around the neck and decorated on the central part above the chest, is an element that is only found in Powers, as many cases show in addition to those just mentioned. In the artist's works, the hairstyle of the wavy hair backwards of our bust and the type of idealization of the face, according to a beauty tract updated with respect to the beautiful ideal of the old, according to pre-Raphaelite figurative references. This type of modern beauty, characterized by the cut of the eyes elongated and not horizontal as in classical statuary, is found almost identical for example in the ideal head of Proserpina or in that of America (Figs 5-6, The Ricau Collection, The Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk). Even this bust could refer to a national personification, as the star would indicate, or to the allegorical representation of Peace, symbolized by the olive branch. Richard P. Wunder, Hiram Powers. Vermont sculptor, 1805-1873, 2 voll., London and Toronto1991. H. Nichols B. Clark, A marble quarry. The James H. Ricau collecrion of sculpture at the Chrysler Museum of Art, New York, 1997, pp. 65-97.
